We are not traitors

He doesn't think about where he's going, in the end. He just goes.

Outside the club he pulls out his phone, practically running toward where his bike is parked. The call takes less than a minute. He doesn't have more than that to spare. Get the gun. Get the girls. Lock the door and don't answer it. Especially don't answer if it's Dean. I'll explain later.

Though how he'll do that is pretty low on his list of things to figure out.

Later he'll wonder why he didn't go to Castiel. He'll wonder and he'll sense the answer without actually wanting to get too into it. More than one answer. More than one kind of difficulty.

He needs someone like him. He needs a hunter.

He could stop in, see Neil, try to tell him just enough. But he's already heading toward Sam's. Too late to turn back now.

It always has been.

It's beyond late, and it occurs to him as he stops outside the door that he doesn't even know for sure if Sam is here, but what the fuck. He raises a fist, pounds on the door. Hard.

back in the dark

Never was dark with the ash and never was ash with the dark but now it's both the world peeling away and peeling and peeling like layers of skin with no flesh or bone but red red everywhere (take the knife cut cut cut take your time you have all of it in the world)

It can't hurt us now. also

The world smells so green. It shouldn't. It's a thing we can't make fit. Or with the water which is not water which is burning under a black sky which is all the blood ever shed in all the wars ever fought and it's lapping gently against our boots.

(you have all the time in the world yes yes minutes hours days like serrated teeth like the blade that took apart the thing in the dark when it came crashing in on you horns and teeth but you're a thing in the dark too now my dearest darling aren't you?)

Yes.

Once upon a time maybe there was something else. Or maybe we were always here. Maybe the rest of it, the ill-fitting world, world fitting like a too-small shirt like a bad shoe like cuffs on his wrists that he didn't ask to be there, maybe that world was a dream. Maybe it was a bad dream. Maybe that's why we feel like we're home.

make ropes from the guts halls from the bones fire from the heart

Did we eat the heart? There's blood on his teeth. We think maybe we did.

And that isn't light coming over the water. That's a lie.

He's tired when he finally gets home.

It makes sense; it is, in every sense of the term, the small hours, and his arm and shoulder are also aching and weary from dealing out so many heavy blows, but it's more than that. What he's seen and done tonight was draining and in a way that he didn't entirely expect.

Though he should have, probably. Part of him was let out, almost off the leash. Wrestling with it, keeping it in check at the same time that he was making use of it... It's taken a lot.

He's also floating on his own adrenaline. His own endorphins, even just sympathetic in nature. His own dark pleasure, a kind that has simultaneously nothing and everything to do with sex.

He unlocks the door and steps inside, shutting it silently after him and moving equally silently through the dim apartment toward the bedroom. All he wants to do is sleep through the rest of the week.

And he hopes Dean feels the same, now. Finally.

It comes all at once, but it's not like it's ever been before.

Unlike every other time, it's as though he really is just remembering something he already knew. At the same time it feels like a gift. Like the last gift. He can almost see his own face, hear his own voice. He can feel the words.

You're ready for this now.

So he watches it unfold, briefly blinded by a sunrise from another world.

He puts the girls to bed, kisses their foreheads before he turns out the light. They must sense that something is different, because they're quieter than usual and they don't put up any fight. He tangles his fingers in their cornsilk curls and remembers.

He's still not that man. But everything that man had is his now.

Almost everything.

Without really tracking his progress from one place to the other, he drifts back into the world to find himself on the couch, hands clasped between his knees. His cheeks are wet, though he doesn't remember crying. It feels like something is over. Maybe later it'll feel like something else is beginning.

It takes a few more moments to understand that he's mourning himself. That he has to.

Shall the Center Never Shift
780 words
NC17

( Lisbeth hisses when Mike touches her. )

There are innumerable bars in the city. Some of them, Mike is familiar with; the ones between the Dollhouse and home are well known to him by now and he to them. Some of them he hasn't met yet, simply by virtue of rarely going into the parts of the city where they are. And one of them he won't go back to, though the glass and the blood are long cleaned up and the bullet is picked out of the wall.

The one he's heading toward isn't really any of these, not entirely new to him but not close enough to be all that familiar, not exactly upscale but also not the kind of dim, smoky dive that he usually goes to when left to his own devices.

He doesn't know what this is about. He feels like he should. Because it's definitely about something.

Meet me at the corner of Haight and Beacon at 9.

It's a cold night and not as crowded as it had been in early fall, and Neil's the only one standing on the corner. Mike moves closer, not hurried, allowing himself the intervening time to just... look. Because naked or clothed, that's another thing he's not anywhere near tired of.

When he stops he looks from Neil to the bar and back again, one eyebrow slightly raised. "Hi."

I Won't Pretend to Fall Down Anymore
1363 words
NC17

well I never want to land
'cause I'm high on you beyond all sleight of hand
- The Frames

( What Spike feels like inside her is heat. )

You Know What the Sun's All About
1666 words
NC17

you can be oh so mean
I just can't see, no in between
- The Black Keys

( She's not the first one Spike fucks. She does get to watch. )

Like the Bolt Busted Loose from the Lever
736 words
R

this is beginning to feel like the long winded blues of the never
this is beginning to feel like it's curling up slowly and finding a throat to choke
- TV On The Radio

( You should watch sometime. )

He stays in the apartment long enough to change his clothes--he doesn't think that stolen hospital scrubs are exactly the thing to be wearing out on the street--and then stumbles out again. There's blood on the floor, bloodstained kitchen shears nearby, broken glass everywhere. His own apartment feels like a tomb. Outside the streets are eerily empty but a couple of store windows are broken and twice he passes what look like fights in alleyways--fights or something worse. Maybe he's a coward for not trying to help. Maybe it's just the same instincts that have kept him alive this long.

An hour ago, be broke out of quarantine. It hadn't been difficult. Pick his way past the lock on his room's door, wait until the hallway was briefly clear, grab some scrubs from a cart on the way out and change into them in a janitor's closet. No one had looked at him all the way to the lobby, and no one tried to stop him as he walked out the front doors.

They're all too distracted by the sick, he supposes.

Neil.

Twenty-four hours before he'd been put into quarantine by a pleasant doctor who nevertheless made it clear that he'd use sedatives to make Mike behave if necessary. It was as they were taking Neil away, rolling him off on a fucking gurney, and Mike had just about killed someone right there, except for the new wave of fear hitting the sides of his head.

Sir, were you exposed? You're going to have to come with us.

Sixteen hours before, a nurse wearing a facemask had come in to give him some food and he had begged her to tell him how Neil was. Begged her with fucking tears in his eyes, begged her when all the time he was trying to resist the urge to grab her and smash her head-first into the nearest wall, because anything between him and Neil needs to fucking die. Fourteen hours back and she had returned.

No change in his condition.

The fuck does that mean?

It means he's stable. They're doing everything they can.

Then,

Do I have it?

She had consulted a chart. When were you exposed?

Your blood's negative so far. You probably won't get sick, then--whatever this is, it works fast.

That had been all he needed to hear.

He's replaying the conversation over and over in his head as he wanders through the dimness in a daze, all the conversations, the parting glimpses of Neil surrounded by nurses, pale. Like he was already gone.

He doesn't mean to go to Andrea's building, but when he manages to look around him, there he is, and he isn't going to argue with it. He makes his way up the steps, hits the buzzer and half falls against the door.