Warnings for: Body horror, blood, self harm, and references to child abuse, torture, and mind-control with a sexual context (cupid brainwashing).
Dean looked himself in the eyes. Shiny, glassy black in the shiny, glassy surface of the mirror. He wanted to break it. To punch the glass and make it shatter, then keep hitting the shards until somehow it broke the other layer, the one in his eyes.
It smeared the shards with blood, though, and added to the red haze draped across his fragmented reflection. On his hands and in the mirror the red was a fine network of glowing veins, shining like the light that had burned out of his skin when Cain gave him the Mark. Underneath it, in between the veins of light that human eyes couldn’t see, Dean wasn’t sure if his skin looked faintly sooty (like the stain from Hell was finally visible, like he was crumbling into black demon smoke), or if the glow just made it look dim and smudged by comparison.
His blood looked dull against the red veins, flat and lifeless. It was lifeless, Dean reminded himself. The cuts on his knuckles had already sealed up, the dead flesh binding together without even leaving a chance at a scar.
Dean hoped someone had killed Metatron.
How many people— fifteen, twenty?— killers because he’d shown up with his promises of kindness and salvation. Jesus, he wanted to kill him. He wanted to—
Light quivered in the shards of the mirror that were still clinging to the edges of the frame like what a halo ought to look like if God had bothered to leave a warning for humanity. Dean’s hands were shaking, and the reflected shine from the lightbulb and the glow from his hands blocking it trembled in response.
He found his eyes again in the shards of mirror. Black and empty. A darkness you could fall into and drown in. Dean leaned closer, thinking bitterly, Come on in, the water’s hot.
This was what he was, all grown up. The shadows under his eyes at four had migrated up and deepened, the blood on his hands at sixteen had traced its way up his arms and lit up like neon. He hadn’t even needed Hell at twenty-nine (thirty-nine, forty-nine, fifty-nine, sixty-nine), he’d been headed down this road since the world had first taught him his life was kill or be killed, kill or watch the ones he loved die. He’d wanted to stay alive, and he’d wanted his family to stay alive, and pieces of himself got sliced away and wrenched loose in payment.
Dean leaned his forehead on the cracked glass, and— too close to focus on his reflection— closed his eyes. Now the blackness was all he could see. Maybe he could learn to stay there, he thought, drifting in the darkness. Like one of those deep sea creatures in the nature documentaries. They knew how to survive the cold, the crushing pressure. He could be a giant squid, ten arms and nothing to hold on to except for the sperm whales. Real contact only in fending off those who would chase him down to the depths, the ones who were looking to devour him.
He could live down there like it was just his world, his life, where he was meant to be.
Where he was meant to be. So many people had shoved him into what they wanted him to be, at twenty-nine, at sixteen, at four, at before his own parents had even laid cupid-roofied eyes on one another. They’d decided what they wanted from him and pushed and prodded and rearranged the world, and now maybe he had reached the endpoint of that path but that didn’t really mean he was supposed to be there. It didn’t mean he had to stay there. He was good enough to be useful: strong and smart and capable enough to make a tool worth having. He had power blazing through his veins that he hadn’t yet met a match for. He could make use of that too, and if he staked a claim on something more than bone-cracking weight, icy cold, and inky darkness, if he rose up to the surface and clung on hard, then who could make him let go?
gummygunk
kianamaiart
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
stormborns
