Torture me
I wanted you to know, I love the way you laugh. I want to hold you high and steal your pain away. I keep your photograph and I know it serves me well. I want to hold you high and steal your pain. ‘Cause I’m broken when I’m lonesome and I don’t feel right when you’ve gone away. You’ve gone away. You don’t feel me anymore.
The lights of the dark room flicking on were worse than usual. It was almost blinding and Caroline hissed as the cover of darkness was stolen from her. She heard footsteps, and she knew that he was coming back for her. He always came back for her. She retreated farther into the corner of the basement, hoping for a few more minutes of peace.
“I can hear you,” the hunter sneered, walking swiftly towards her.
“I can smell you,” Caroline taunted in return, her vampire features rapidly taking over as he got closer.
Dean finally got close enough that the blonde could see him from her hiding spot and he leaned forward and whispered, “Well, I guess it’s a good thing I’ve been bleeding you dry for weeks now, isn’t it?”
Caroline glared at the man, lunging forward in an attempt to bite him. She craved blood. She hadn’t had anything to drink in days and every cell in her was screaming from hunger. As soon as she moved forward, though, he pushed her back down. Though starving her out was making her need for blood greater than ever before, it also made her weak. For the first time in their entire relationship, Dean had the upper hand in terms of strength and he wasn’t letting her forget it.
“Why are you doing this?” she growled out through gritted teeth.
Dean shook his head slightly, a sad smile on his lips and sighed. He pushed a hand through his hair and said, “I’m doing this because I love you, Caroline.”
She scoffed, rolling her eyes at him. “In my experience, you don’t torture the people that you love.”
Dean clucked his tongue, waving a finger at her. He sat down across from her, never taking his ever watchful eyes off her broken form. His eyes, eyes that had once been full of light and hope, were darker now; sadder somehow. “I told you when you first bit someone that I would find a way to fix you.”
Caroline nodded slowly, recalling the encounter. It had been just a few days after the death of her mother, and everyone had been watching her carefully, concerned that she was going to explode at any moment. She had been the picture of calm through it all, never a harsh word, never a tear. All of her friends kept telling her that letting go wouldn’t be such a bad thing, that crying would probably ease the pain that she carried with her daily, but she hadn’t listened. Everything, all the pain and torment, had remained dormant inside of her until she couldn’t take it anymore.
Attacking Sadie had only been the beginning of her downward spiral. Dean had been there luckily, and he had pulled Caroline off her sister before the damage was irreversible. She had fled the scene after that, and when he finally found her, she wasn’t the same person. In that moment, the hunter had sworn to his vampire lover that he would find a way to make it better, find a way to fix the bloodlust. It took ten vervain laced bullets to take her down, but when she was finally unconscious, he had taken her here, to Bobby’s and locked her in the basement. She hadn’t seen the outside world in weeks.
It had started out with just denying her human blood. Vampires could survive on animal blood, but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying or as beneficial. She was weaker after a week on the inferior life force, but still strong enough to overtake Dean during his little trips into the basement. It was then that he had begun starving her out, injecting her with vervain daily in larger and larger doses so she didn’t become accustomed to it.
Nothing had worked until then, and while the hunger ruled her mind most of the time, starvation forced Caroline to look at the choices that she had made recently. The loneliness had taken its toll as well, and she was slowly becoming more and more convinced that she was going mad. If Dean hadn’t delivered such a crushing blow to her temple when she tried to feed on him, she would have sworn that he was a hallucination.
So now she sat there, staring at him as he tried to force her to remember the moments when his love for her had beat out his natural instinct to take her life. The blonde could see through his façade. Pulling out memories was a cheap shot, the way that she had tried to pull Elena’s humanity back not so long ago. “It won’t work,” she told him. “Try to make me remember the words all you want, none of it means anything anymore. You can’t still love me after everything I’ve done. I bit your brother. I almost killed my own sister. None of that can just disappear.”
The pain that swept over Dean’s face was so quickly changed back into his signature smirk that for a moment, Caroline wondered if she had imagined the whole thing. “You think I don’t love you?” he asked, leaning forward. “You think that I like watching you scream and writhe in pain? Do you think this is fun for me?” he asked, screaming the last three words.
If she had been in a normal state of mind, Caroline might have had the decency to at least be afraid of his sudden display of aggression, but she couldn’t focus on that. “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” she answered, her eyes cast downward as the first honest words to leave her lips in weeks reached the hunter’s ears.
The feeling that overtook him in that moment was indescribable. Dean leaned forward, taking the blonde’s lips in his own, and she kissed him back like he was the release that she had been searching for. His hand tore at the flimsy material of the black dress that she had been captured in, revealing her alabaster skin. Her hands tore at his t-shirt, leaving the material in scraps. Her hands ran over his muscular form and she kissed down his neck, stopping when her lips were over his jugular. Her face started to change, the veins around her eyes bulging out and she turned away from him. If there was one person in the world that she couldn’t hurt, it was him.
As soon as she retreated, Dean pulled her back. His thumb ran over the features in her face that only came out when she wanted to feed and he knew that he couldn’t hurt her anymore. At least, not right now. He needed her as much as she needed him. He would never tell her, he would bottle it up until his dying day, but watching her destroy herself had hurt him more than she would ever know. “It’s okay,” Dean whispered, a single tear falling down his cheek. He turned his head away, opening up the vein in his neck to her. “Go ahead.”
Caroline’s eyes grew wide at the offer and she shook her head. “I’ll kill you,” she whispered.
The hunter bit his lip and fought back the onslaught of tears that threatened to spill over. “No you won’t,” he assured her. “You can do this, Caroline.”
She weighed her options for a moment, debating whether to actually go through with what he was proposing. Her hunger won out eventually and she tentatively bit into his neck, letting the blood flow easily into her mouth. She swallowed the liquid in gulps, crying as she fed. Crying for him, for her mother, for herself. And when she was done, she was shaking and he was holding her tightly. He didn’t look away from her face as he laid her down on the concrete floor. He kissed her, his own blood still on her lips, but he ignored the metallic taste.
Dean kissed the vampire for what felt like hours, his hands simply getting to know her again. Slowly, gently, the stripped each other of their clothing and when Dean finally pushed into her, they were both crying. Caroline’s nails dug into his back and he kept his movements slow. She didn’t know why he had suddenly been overcome with so much passion that he needed her right that moment, but she didn’t question it. She simply kept her eyes on his, whispering a constant stream of ‘I love you’.
When he collapsed next to her, spent from both physical and emotional exhaustion, she curled into him, falling asleep easily for the first time in weeks. And when she awoke, she panicked, noticing immediately that his warm chest was no longer under her soft cheek. “Dean?” she called out questioningly into the darkness.
A light flickered on, and she was afraid for a moment that it had all been a dream. But when she saw the dress on the floor and his torso marred with scratch marks, she knew it hadn’t been. “What’s happening?” she asked, suddenly realizing that her hands were bound above her head in shackles that resembled bear traps. “What’s going on?”
Dean’s tears were glistening with tears and his voice was as unsteady as his resolve. “You drank human blood, Caroline,” he choked out.
“You told me to!” she shouted, distraught at the sudden harsh treatment.
He shook his head, turning and kicking an empty cardboard box with so much force that his foot made a gaping hole. “I know!” he shouted. “I know I did, and it was stupid, and selfish. I just…I couldn’t see you like that anymore. I couldn’t know that I was hurting you. But when it was all over, I knew I made a mistake. You can’t just jump back to human blood. You have to ease back and I fucked it up. I blew it. I…I have to protect you from yourself, don’t you get it? And now, because I let you feed from me, I have to watch you be tormented all over again.”
He paused, looking up at her and whispered, “I’m so sorry, Caroline.” He walked over to her and tightened the shackles, the teeth of the instruments cutting into her skin as a burning cut through her. Vervain on the tips. Dean had thought of everything. She screamed in pain, closing her eyes as her mind became numb to everything other than the torture that she was enduring. The screams never ended and Dean took one last look at the blonde that he cared for more than his own life before trudging up the stairs to get away from the screams.
“I’m sorry.”