We are not traitors

He should have gone to a fucking hospital.

Later he'll wonder why he didn't, and he'll come to the conclusion that it was a strange, instinctive kind of self-preservation. He wouldn't have been safe there. No way. So maybe he shouldn't have, then.

A wave of shivering weakness washes through him and he almost pulls the bike over. Then he doesn't. Home is barely a mile away now and he's going to make it.

He hadn't always been so sure.

He's not certain how long ago they had him. He never saw them coming, and it was so fucking stupid because he should have, he had somehow forgotten - at just the wrong moment - that one little mistake is all it takes to get you fucking killed and not realizing how many you're dealing with counts as more than a little mistake. They had his arms behind his back, at least five of them, though he managed to take the head off a sixth. He had looked into their glowing eyes and had been sure the bite was coming, and a lot worse than just one, but it hadn't. Not then.

He had been aware of darkness. The musty smell of underground. Sounds in the black. Distant laughter. He had heard a snarl, had dragged the knife out of his boot without thinking, and then it was on him fiery agony in his throat even as he stabbed and slashed blindly.

The rest of it was a blur. All of it was a blur. Fighting for his fucking life in a way he's not sure he's done since he came here, no finesse or skill but desperate animal viciousness, and the same from whatever was with him in the dark, hissing and screeching and trying to tear him apart. He had no idea how he managed to scramble away, hands and face slick with blood. He had rolled, shoved himself up to his feet, had run in the direction of cooler air, angry shouts behind him. Had run through the dark, the splashing sounds of his footfalls echoing into something roaring and threatening just at his back.

Until the air was fresh again, and he was stumbling out into a shallow pond in the park. As it turned out, less than half a mile from where the bike was parked.

He smells like blood and rotten things and storm drain. He supposes it could be worse.

Gravel under the wheels. He pulls to a stop and almost falls in the process of getting off, stabilizing himself with one hand on the seat while he sucks in air and wills the world to stop spinning. How much blood has he lost? He's definitely lost his machete. Fuck. He can get a new one, but fuck.

Inside.

There's a light on in the kitchen and one in the living room, though he supposes it's possible that Neil simply left them on for him. He almost falls again getting in the back door, smearing blood on the doorframe and again on the counter in the kitchen. He fumbles for a towel. Something to press against his neck.

"Neil?" 911 might still be an option, he thinks vaguely. Maybe a good one. Christ, he feels sick, and he shambles toward the living room. "Neil, you... God, you up?"

The asylum is whispering.

It always does. It's the wind through bars and broken windows, shredded cloth and hanging plastic, through abandoned rooms and hallways and past decades of cracked, flaking paint. Once he had thought of it as an unfriendly sound, malevolent and worrying, and it's still malevolent, but he no longer feels threatened and he certainly feels no need to worry.

In some ways, this is the closest to home that part of himself ever gets now. He's been spending more and more time here, wandering, listening to the whispers.

And then of course there's the company. Of more than one kind.

The place is technically abandoned, but abandoned is only ever a technical term in a place like Darrow. He and Spike aren't the only things moving in the dark.

In the building's large front atrium he stops, listening. "Cheerful fucking place, isn't it?"

Sometimes being impulsive serves him well.

In fairness, it hadn't been all impulse. He'd thought about it, mulled it over, checked with Neil. But in the end, the distance between wanting and doing had been very short. And here he is.

Here they are.

It's strange, being in this room again - with the same tools, some of the same intentions, but not with Dean. For a time he had thought of this as somehow wholly their room, no matter how many other people used it: a place that existed outside of the normal rules of time and space, where all the walls could come down.

This isn't really very much like that. But that's fine. He doesn't want that kind of hellish descent right now. And Helen has plenty of her own charms.

"So," he says, opening the bag and starting to pull out the cuffs, the flogger, the cane. "I know you told me what you like, but tell me again. And tell me what's absolutely off the table."

The throne room, predictably, is like something out of a movie, all stone and sconces and heavy wooden furniture. There aren't many courtiers, fourteen or fifteen people arranged at their leisure, mostly men dressed in fur trimming and brocade but also a few women in colorful gowns with richly braided hair, all of them with ornate gems at their fingers and throats. The man up there in the chair that dominates the hall - King Mortaigne, someone said at one point - isn't tall, but he's solidly built, with a cloak of thick fur and an equally thick beard, a delicately jeweled gold band looking out of place on his head.

As he surveys the five of them - all in disarray, more than one of them bleeding - he doesn't look especially impressed. He casts glances at the knights who stand on either side of him, and the looks they give him couldn't possibly fill anyone with an abundance of confidence about their future.

"So," he says, steepling his fingers. "A fascinating selection of strangers to our realm. Making a fascinating variety of trouble. What have you all to say for yourselves?

There's a silence as they all look at each other. No one in the room looks like an executioner, but that isn't exactly reassuring.

The return from the ash didn't gift him perfect self-knowledge. There are still times when he's not altogether sure what he's thinking, what he's feeling. He's still fragmented, tangled; there will always be knots he can't completely undo. The thing is that usually it doesn't bother him. Usually it's something he notes, accepts, and moves on from.

Not so much now.

He makes the connection he needs to make, watches the man go into the little room that, for a while, housed a cathedral he built to contain the pain of Dean Winchester, and turns away. The truth is that he's glad he left his gear with them. He couldn't do any more tonight.

Like he often does, Neil is drifting through the crowd, pausing and coming to rest where he will. Mike sees him leaning against the railing and climbs the stairs, settling a hand on his shoulder.

"I need to get outta here."

This is one of the nights when he's not hunting. Or not hunting like he normally does.

Things are quieter now, those deceptive stretches when there isn't any seriously overt insanity but everything is still hard. There's the thing with Castiel, and he['s starting to worry about money again, and there's also the pull he feels sometimes - not to run, not to abandon anyone or anything, but a memory of a time when life had been at once much simpler and so much more complicated.

He'll always be fractured, just a little.

So tonight he's read to the girls and kissed them goodnight, grabbed his keys, taken off on the bike. He'd told Neil he'll be back. He knows he doesn't have to volunteer more than that.

He's not intending to go to the amusement park, but clearly some part of him is, because he's not surprised when he gets there. It's like a giant metal graveyard at night, all skeletons and dead things, and as he pulls through the gates and rolls to a stop, it feels good.

He swings his leg over the bike and lifts off his helmet, scanning everything. "Lisbeth?"

"Yeah, that might be something to look into, then." But it comes out vague, distracted, because his body's attention has been drifting elsewhere for the last ten minutes or so and now that attention is focusing. Hardening.

He arches back against the downward press of Neil's hips with a quiet sound, freshly thankful for the time.

He opens his eyes to meet a second set of huge, eerily sentient eyes staring into his, and for a moment he just lies there, trying to figure out... The world, mostly.

Close by, on the floor, he can hear Mack and Flo laughing with what sounds like delight, and the chittering language of Sprinkles, creepy fucking Sprinkles, and really he should have fucking tossed that thing in the trash the day after they'd caved and bought it, made up some kind of lie, gotten them something else to distract them...

But the chittering is coming from the floor. And the thing is on his chest.

And now that he listens, it doesn't sound like just Mack and Flo and Sprinkles down there.

Um.

He tries to sit up, shoving the thing off his chest as he does so, and that's when all five of them hurl themselves at him, cackling insanely. He hears Mack and Flo yell in surprise - "Sprinkles, no, that's Daddy!" - and then he's in a whirlwind of brightly colored fur and biting. He manages to get upright, stumbles, tears one of them off his back and slams it to the floor. It has time to get out a single indignant squawk before he crushes its head with his bare heel.

So now his foot is cut. Wonderful.

Operating on some instinct he doesn't take the time to question, the girls shrieking in the background, he stumbles into the kitchen, fumbling for the kitchen knives, managing to throw two more against the fridge. A third ends up in the sink, and he doesn't think; he stabs it into the garbage disposal with the butcher knife, the girls screaming, "Daddy, don't kill Sprinkles!" and their voices drowned out by the squeal of the disposal when he hits the switch and the angry screech of Sprinkles as it dies.

Or starts to.

Because then the power goes out.

I take one nap, he thinks, listening to Sprinkles as it groans pitifully from the garbage disposal, counterpoint to the girls' sobbing. I take just. One. Nap.

He waits until they're in their bedroom, girls sleeping next door, everything blessedly, mercifully quiet, to let himself collapse.

He doesn't make it to the bed. He goes down onto the floor in a kind of controlled slide, jacket half off, still in his boots, eyes closed because the lids literally feel too heavy. He's shaking. He might be weeping with relief and release if he had the energy. As it is he feels almost comatose, on his knees on the floor with his head tipped back, one hand bracing himself against the foot of the bed.

He just needs to stay here a few minutes. Just needs to get himself together enough to get naked and fall into bed. Enough to be here and present for Neil, because he's not the only one who watched Dean Winchester die tonight.

Just needs to try to understand what it means that this is finally over.

Who Danced Both Edges
701 words
PG-13

( So this is interesting. )