cait, she/her, 20s & uk based. I've been writing for nearly 10 years and reading for much longer than that. I write for anything and everything - usually whatever my current hyperfixation is. currently working on a long series but doing one-shots alongside it.
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i typically post the fic alongside the request that way people can see what was asked for. that being said if you dont want a fic to be tied to you you can still request just let me know either via message or on the ask. i would never tag you if you didn’t want to be but you need to tell me
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characters
supernatural
marvel
harry potter & marauders
greys anatomy
rpf
chris evans
elvis presley
austin butler
queen & borhap
or everything can be found here on my ao3
another little snippet from an upcoming chapter between bobby and his girl lainey because i love writing him with all his children that grump sun bitch (also liked writing him just being like gay? sure whatever as long as they're not a dick)
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'Yeah, yeah,' he grumbled, watching her tap at the edge plate to see how warm the ceramic was before she picked it up, 'so what took you so long anyway?'
'What do you mean?' she frowned, not looking back at him as she grabbed a clean fork from the drawer.
'Well you said at the start of the month you'd be here for Christmas, but you’re cuttin' it pretty fine. Case run long or something?' he asked.
'Not really. Finished up a couple of days ago,' she said easily, though when she turned Bobby was just watching her, eyes narrowing like they always did when he thought she was hiding something. Lainey huffed, 'what?'
'Nothing,' he said.
'No come on. I know that look,' she said, stabbing a piece of mac and cheese on her fork and popping it in her mouth.
'Just wondering what his name is,' he said casually. Lainey felt her stomach drop.
'What?' she choked out, trying not to cough around the piece of pasta that had hit the back of her throat as her breath caught.
'Well last time you spent this much time away from home you were shacking up with Jimmy,' Bobby reasoned, his sharp eyes locked securely on her face.
'Shacking up? What is this the seventies?' she scoffed.
'That's not a no,' Bobby persisted.
'Ever think it's not a man?' she challenged, fork abandoned in her bowl.
'Alright woman then,' Bobby shrugged, completely unfazed. Lainey rolled her eyes, coming closer to look at him, looking just like she did when she was a teenager and he’d caught her sneaking in through her bedroom window, shotgun cocked and everything.
'I meant ever think it’s you and your delusions keeping me far from home,' she said sarcastically.
'Delusions, huh?' he asked.
She started moving toward the stairs then, which only served to confirm his suspicions as she kept her face carefully turned away from him. As if he hadn’t already seen everything there was to see in her very first reaction.
'Of grandeur,' she said, waving her fork back over her shoulder, 'you should get that checked.'
'You should get a better poker face,' he said, stopping at the threshold of the study.
'You should stop prying,' she said, pausing just short of the hallway door to shoot him one last look.
'So I'm right,' he smirked.
'None of your business,' she shrugged.
And then she disappeared swiftly up the stairs, praying he hadn’t noticed just how incredibly red and hot her cheeks felt.
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❀ link to masterpost ❀ link to ao3 ❀ request a tag ❀
i DO believe that a good writer can make mischaracterization work. oh there's a character who doesn't normally cry? figure it out!! disect the character. make the situation cryable for them. make that character cry ugly tears even if it goes against their very nature. YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK!!!
pairing: jack abbot x resident!reader
summary: After accidentally sending your attending Dr. Jack Abbot a nude, you delete it, panic-text an apology, and spend the rest of your shift waiting for a response that never comes. Jack doesn’t say a word until he gets you alone in his office—and by then, the apology texts are the least incriminating thing between you.
wc: 7.8k
a/n: shoutout to @in-ky and pinky (lol) for beta reading and confirming that yes, unfortunately, this is exactly what should happen when you send your attending a nude by accident. saw jack abbot on his phone and immediately made it everyone’s problem. enjoy the HR violation.
warnings: power imbalance, attending/resident relationship, inappropriate workplace behavior, explicit sexual content, dirty talk, accidental nude (then on purpose >:)), semi-public sex, fingering, handjob, orgasm denial-ish, praise kink, jealousy/possessiveness, hair pulling, biting/marking, cumplay/eating, clothed/semi-clothed smut, no piv, age gap dynamics, no use of y/n
MASTERLIST
You didn’t know a mistake could feel intentional until Jack Abbot stopped replying.
For almost a full minute after it happened, you couldn’t move. You just stood in the staff bathroom with your phone in your hand, the harsh white light buzzing overhead, your pulse slamming so hard behind your ears that the whole hospital seemed to muffle around it. The sink was still running because you’d forgotten to turn it off. Water rushed uselessly into the drain while you stared at the thread on your screen and tried to convince yourself that your eyes had rearranged the letters.
They hadn’t.
Jack Abbot sat at the top of the conversation in clean, merciless text.
Below it, the blank space where the photo had been.
You’d deleted it almost instantly, but instantly didn’t mean unseen. Instantly meant your thumb had moved faster than your brain, faster than your lungs, faster than the sick drop in your stomach when the picture appeared in the wrong thread. It meant you’d watched one of the most obscene photos in your camera roll land in your attending’s messages and then vanish under your panicked attempt to erase evidence.
Not erase memory.
Just evidence.
“Oh, no,” you whispered, and the words sounded too small for the scale of the disaster.
The photo had been from two nights ago. Your apartment, your bed, the lamp beside your mattress giving everything that warm, dirty glow. Not soft. Not tasteful. Not a picture you could call accidental in spirit even if the send itself had been. You’d taken it because you were alone and turned on and feeling reckless enough to admire yourself, body angled deliberately across twisted sheets, hair messy, eyes on the camera like you knew exactly what kind of thought you wanted to plant in someone’s head. There was nothing clinical about it. Nothing coy. It was the kind of photo that said look, want, imagine.
And Jack Abbot might have seen it.
Jack, who had corrected your charting that morning with a tired flick of his eyes.
Jack, who had stood behind you at the board, close enough for you to catch the smell of coffee and hospital soap, and said, “Try again,” when your answer hadn’t been specific enough.
Jack, who was older, gruffer, sharper around the edges than anyone had any right to be while still being that unfairly attractive.
Jack, who was your attending.
You turned off the sink with shaking fingers and immediately made the situation worse.
You:
oh my god
that was not meant for you
please ignore that
i deleted it
i’m so sorry
please delete it if it still shows up
i’m actually going to resign and move states
You stared at the messages, then at the empty space above them, then at the messages again. Your face burned. Your throat felt tight. Any other person might’ve replied by now. Any normal person might’ve hit you with a confused question mark, a reassurance, a threat, a joke. Something.
Jack gave you nothing.
No typing bubble. No acknowledgment. No read receipt. Just that awful, professional silence.
It was very Jack of him, which somehow made it worse.
A knock hit the bathroom door. “You dying in there?”
Mel’s voice. Thank God and also absolutely not.
You shoved your phone into your scrub pocket like you’d been caught with something you weren’t supposed to have. “No.”
“You sure? You sound weird.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re needed in three. Abbot’s looking for you.”
For one second, your entire body went cold.
Then hot.
Then somehow both.
“Great,” you said, and if Mel noticed that your voice came out like you’d just swallowed a battery, she was kind enough not to comment through the door.
You took one last look at yourself in the mirror before leaving. There you were: wrinkled scrubs, tired eyes, badge clipped slightly crooked, mouth pressed into a line that looked almost professional if no one knew you were internally preparing to fling yourself into traffic. You were a doctor. You were an adult. You could walk into a room with Jack Abbot and not immediately confess to everything like a criminal under interrogation.
Probably.
The hallway outside was too bright. Too loud. Too full of witnesses. The hospital had the particular cruelty of continuing to function during personal catastrophes, monitors chiming and carts rattling and nurses calling over their shoulders while your entire nervous system stood at attention. You passed Whitaker near the supply cart, who gave you a distracted little nod. You passed Santos at the board, half-listening to Robby. Nobody looked at you like they knew.
Then you reached trauma three, and Jack looked up.
He was standing at the foot of the bed with one hand braced on the rail, the other holding a chart, short sleeves leaving his forearms bare and his watch stark against his wrist. Stubble roughened his jaw, his hair was slightly mussed from the kind of shift that had been bad before noon and would only get worse, and his expression was exactly what it always was: tired, focused, unimpressed by the existence of chaos.
No guilt. No surprise. No flicker.
That was the first real blow. If he had reacted, you might’ve known how to feel. If he’d avoided your eyes, you could’ve built a theory around it. If he’d looked at you too long, you could’ve hated him or wanted him or both with more certainty.
Instead, he just watched you enter like you were late with labs.
“Nice of you to join us,” Jack said.
Dana, at the monitor, winced under her breath. “Damn.”
You forced your mouth to move. “Sorry.”
Jack’s eyes stayed on you a fraction too long. “Are you?”
There was no reason for it to hit the way it did. The words were ordinary. Dry. Annoyed, maybe. But you heard every unanswered text underneath them. You heard the deleted photo. You heard the question he wasn’t asking in front of Dana and a patient with a bleeding scalp.
Your stomach folded in on itself.
“What’s the situation?” you asked, because medicine was safer than silence.
Jack handed you the chart. “Fall from a ladder. Brief LOC. Walk me through what you’re ordering and why.”
You could do this. This was easy. This was normal. You’d done this a hundred times. You moved through the exam, named imaging, neuro checks, wound care, the things you needed to rule out. Your mouth worked. Your hands worked. Your brain mostly worked.
Your body, unfortunately, remembered that your phone remained unanswered in your pocket.
Every time Jack shifted near you, you became aware of him all over again. The low gravel of his voice. The way he stood close enough to take the chart back from your hands without asking. The blunt competence in his movements. The fact that he didn’t soothe, didn’t explain, didn’t give you even one quiet aside to release the pressure building under your skin.
He let you suffer.
Worse, he made you work.
For the next several hours, Jack Abbot became a masterclass in professional cruelty. Not actual cruelty. Nothing anyone could report. Nothing anyone would even notice unless they were living inside your body and could feel the way your pulse kicked every time he said your name.
He asked you questions in front of Robby.
He corrected your note beside the nurses’ station.
He handed you a printout without looking at you and said, “More specific,” in that gruff, flat tone that made you want to argue and obey at the same time.
He touched your elbow once, only to move you out of the path of a gurney, but the contact burned through your scrub sleeve because now there was a version of you in his possible memory that had nothing to do with the hospital. Not capable, not composed, not holding a chart or presenting a patient. You in bed. You in low light. You looking at the camera like you wanted someone to imagine being there.
And Jack still didn’t reply.
At some point, Santos appeared beside you at the counter while you were pretending to review labs and absolutely not refreshing your message thread.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Like you’re waiting for a disciplinary hearing.”
“I’m busy.”
She leaned closer, lowering her voice as if delivering a diagnosis. “You and Abbot have been weird all day.”
Your grip tightened around the tablet. “We have not.”
“You have. He’s doing that thing where he gets quieter when he’s mad, and you look like you’re being hunted for sport.”
“I’m not being hunted.”
“Mm.”
“Santos.”
“What? I’m observant.”
“You’re nosy.”
“That too.”
Across the department, Jack stood with Robby near the board, arms crossed, head tilted as he listened. He looked exhausted. Unmoved. Utterly unreadable. Then, as if he felt you looking, his eyes lifted and found yours.
You looked away first.
Santos made an obnoxious little sound. “Loud.”
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You thought it loudly.”
She grinned, entirely too pleased with herself, and moved off before you could throw something at her.
The shift dragged on. Or maybe it flew. Time had gone strange, measured less by the clock and more by every non-reply from Jack, every glance that might have meant something and might have meant nothing, every brush of proximity that left you a little more humiliated by your own reaction. By the end of rounds, panic had curdled into something hotter and harder to name.
You still wanted to disappear.
You also wanted to know exactly what he’d thought.
That was the unforgivable part. The part you couldn’t blame on the photo or the send button or exhaustion. Under the mortification, there was want. Ugly, bright, undeniable want. The kind that made you wonder whether he had paused when he saw it. Whether his jaw had tightened. Whether he had deleted it right away or looked long enough to regret it.
You were finishing a note when his shadow fell over your workspace.
You didn’t look up immediately. You knew.
“My office,” Jack said. “Now.”
The words were quiet. No one else would’ve heard them as anything but an attending giving an instruction. Dana barely glanced over. Robby kept talking to Mel. The world did not stop.
Yours did.
You stood carefully. “Okay.”
Jack turned without waiting to see if you followed. The walk to his office felt like a march toward sentencing, except sentencing probably wouldn’t have made your thighs feel weak. He didn’t touch you. Didn’t slow down. Didn’t look back. That made it worse, because it meant he knew you would follow.
His office was dim, cramped, and cluttered in the way all hospital offices became cluttered no matter how hard anyone tried to keep them human. A desk lamp threw warm light over a stack of charts. Half-closed blinds cut the room into narrow bars. His mug sat beside the keyboard, coffee gone cold. The air held the stale sharpness of the hospital layered with something that was just him: clean sweat, soap, coffee, fatigue.
Jack closed the door.
He left it unlocked.
That detail lodged in you. The unlocked door meant this was still a conversation. Still professional, technically. Still something you could leave.
Or something he wanted you to know you could leave.
He leaned back against the edge of the desk, arms crossed loosely, and looked at you for long enough that you started talking just to make him stop.
“I’m sorry,” you said. “I know I already said that in the texts, probably too many times, but I really am. It was an accident. Obviously. I deleted it right away, and I know that doesn’t necessarily mean anything if you saw it before then, but I swear I didn’t mean to—”
“Stop.”
You stopped.
Jack’s gaze stayed steady. “Explain.”
You blinked. “I just did.”
“No. You apologized.” His voice was calm, which was somehow worse than anger. “Explain what happened.”
Your face burned. “I sent the wrong thing to the wrong person.”
“What thing?”
“Jack.”
His expression didn’t change. “Say it.”
The floor seemed suddenly fascinating. You looked at a scuff near the leg of his desk and wondered if it was possible to die from embarrassment after all.
“A nude,” you said.
The word changed the room.
Jack didn’t move, but something in his face tightened. A small thing. Controlled. There and gone.
“I saw it,” he said.
You closed your eyes for one second. “Okay.”
For a moment, that was all there was. The confirmation. The silence after. The awful, humiliating knowledge that the image had reached him before you could take it back.
“I didn’t keep it,” he said.
Your eyes opened. “You didn’t?”
“No.”
The relief was sharp enough to hurt. It should’ve ended there. It should’ve made everything clean again, or at least survivable. He had done the right thing. He had refused to keep what hadn’t been meant for him. You could apologize one more time, leave his office, and spend the rest of your life avoiding direct eye contact.
But Jack was still looking at you.
And his voice, when it came, was lower.
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t look.”
Something low in you pulled tight, panic and arousal twisting together until you couldn’t tell which one had hit first.
He pushed off the desk, not moving closer yet. Just standing straighter. “Who was it for?”
“No one.”
“No one.”
“I took it for myself.”
Jack’s mouth twitched, not amusement exactly. More like disbelief with nowhere innocent to go. “You take pictures like that for yourself?”
There were a dozen sensible answers. Defensive answers. Clean, professional answers that would’ve made this easier to survive. Instead, you heard yourself say, “Sometimes.”
The tiredness in his face thinned, and beneath it was something intent, almost indecently awake—a look that moved over you with such slow, controlled heat that your body reacted before your pride could stop it. Like the picture had burned itself into his retinas and left him standing there with nowhere innocent to put his hands.
For the first time all day, you saw the effect. Not much. Jack wasn’t a man who gave much away for free. But there it was in the pause, the shift of his jaw, the hand he dragged briefly over his mouth before dropping it again.
“You’re not helping yourself,” he said.
“I thought I was being honest.”
“That’s the problem.”
The words should’ve embarrassed you further. They did. But they also did something else, something low and hot, because he sounded less like your attending now and more like a man trying very hard to remember he still was one.
You took a careful breath. “Why didn’t you answer?”
Jack looked at you for a long moment, and the silence wasn’t empty anymore. It had weight. The shape of all the things he’d refused to put in writing.
“Because if I answered then,” he said, voice lower now, “I would’ve said something I shouldn’t.”
Your mouth went dry. “Like what?”
“Don’t.”
“You brought me in here.”
“To handle it.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
His jaw worked once, and for the first time, his control looked less like indifference and more like effort. “I’m trying.”
“Trying to handle me?”
That did something. You saw it in the brief drop of his gaze, the pause before he pulled it back to your face.
“Trying not to,” he said.
There it was again—that small crack in the professionalism. Not a confession, not exactly, but close enough to make the room feel suddenly too small. Close enough that you felt it move through you before you had time to decide what to do with it.
Jack saw that too.
Of course he did.
He stepped closer, not quickly, not carelessly. Slow enough that you could move back if you wanted. Slow enough that the choice stayed yours.
You didn’t.
“You sent me that,” he said, voice low, “then walked around my department for the rest of the shift like I could just forget it.”
“I didn’t know if you’d seen it.”
“You knew.”
“I hoped you hadn’t.”
“No.” His gaze held yours, steady and merciless in a way that made your skin feel too tight under your scrubs. “You hoped I had, and you were scared I had. Not the same thing.”
You hated him a little for being right. You wanted him more because of it.
“That’s not fair,” you said.
“I didn’t say it was.”
He was close enough now that you could see the fatigue at the corners of his eyes, the rough shadow along his jaw, the controlled set of his mouth. Still Jack. Still gruff and older and dangerous mostly because he looked like he’d spent a lifetime refusing himself the stupid thing, the reckless thing, the filthy thing that would feel good for exactly long enough to ruin him.
“You wanted to know what I thought,” he said.
Your throat tightened. “Did I?”
His gaze dropped to your mouth for half a second before returning to your eyes. “You tell me.”
The worst part was that you couldn’t. Not honestly. Because you had wanted to know. Under the embarrassment, under the panic, under every frantic apology you’d typed too fast and regretted immediately, there had been that awful, helpless need to know what he’d seen when he looked at you afterward. If he’d been angry. If he’d been disgusted. If he’d imagined it again.
If he’d wanted to.
Jack watched the silence work through you, watched your breath catch, watched your face give away what your mouth refused to say.
Then he stepped back half a pace.
The loss of him was so immediate your body nearly followed before you could stop it.
“Tell me to forget it,” he said, “and I’ll forget it.”
“You just said you couldn’t.”
“I’ll act like I can.”
That was very Jack. Honest enough to hurt. Restrained enough to be decent. He had refused to keep the photo. He had left the door unlocked. Now he was putting distance between you, giving you a clean exit with the kind of brutal practicality that somehow made you want him worse.
You should’ve taken it.
Instead, you said, “I don’t want you to.”
The room went quiet in a new way.
Jack’s face barely changed, but your body took the look like contact, nerves flaring under your scrubs as if he’d reached across the room and found you bare. For one dizzy second, the clothes felt pointless—like he was already picturing what was underneath and remembering exactly where to look.
“Be clear,” he said.
Your throat felt tight. “I don’t want you to forget it.”
His hand moved to the door.
The lock clicked.
Small sound. Huge consequence.
Not loud. Just final. The kind of sound that doesn’t ask permission. Jack’s hand left the deadbolt, but he didn’t turn around right away. He stood there facing the door, shoulders rising once, falling once, like he was giving himself a countdown.
You were already backed up against his desk. Metal cold through your scrub pants. You watched his back. The way his scrub top pulled between his shoulder blades. The gray hair curling at his nape, damp from twelve hours of running a floor that wouldn’t stop coding.
He turned.
His eyes had changed. Not tired, not distant—fixed on you now with a hunger he’d spent the whole shift forcing down. It had been there through rounds, through the silence, through every clipped order and every time he’d looked at you and then looked away like one more second would give him away.
“Stand up.”
You did. Your thighs hit the desk edge behind you. He crossed the space in two strides and then he was there, close enough that the heat of him hit your skin before his body did, close enough that you could smell the antiseptic and coffee and something underneath—just him, just warm skin and a long shift.
His hand found your hip. Not gentle. Not rough. Just certain. His thumb pressed into the bone there and you felt it in your teeth.
“You sent me a picture,” he said.
His voice was low. Not the attending voice. Not the one that cut through chaos in the trauma bay. This one was quieter. Worse.
“I know.”
“You tried to take it back.”
“Yes.”
“I saw it anyway.” His thumb moved—just a fraction, just a small circle against your hip bone through the thin cotton. “You know I saw it.”
Your throat was dry. “I wasn’t sure.”
“Bullshit.” The word landed soft, almost kind. “You knew. You watched me not look at you for six hours and you knew exactly why.”
You couldn’t answer. He was too close. His other hand came up, slow, and his fingers found the edge of your jaw. Not gripping. Just resting there, his palm warm against the side of your throat, his thumb tracing the line of your chin like he was memorizing bone.
“Describe it,” he said.
“What?”
“The photo. Tell me what you sent me.”
Heat crawled up your neck. Your chest. Your face. He felt it—his thumb was right there on your pulse, and you watched his eyes flick down to your throat, watched him feel every beat of your heart slamming against his palm.
“I can’t.”
“You can.” His grip didn’t tighten. It didn’t have to. “You took it. You sent it. Say it.”
You swallowed. His thumb rode the movement. “It was—I was on my bed.”
“Go on.”
“On my stomach. The camera was—it was angled down. You could see my back. My shoulders.” You stopped. Breathed. He waited. “My ass. I was wearing—”
“Nothing,” he said. “You were wearing nothing.”
The word hit your stomach and clenched there. “Yes.”
“And your legs were spread.”
Not a question. He’d seen it. He’d looked at it long enough to know exactly how you were positioned, exactly what was visible, exactly what you’d offered up without saying a word.
“Yes.”
“And between them.” His thumb traced down your throat, just a whisper of pressure. “What could I see.”
“Everything.”
He exhaled. It was the first crack you’d seen—just a shiver of air through his nose, his jaw tightening, his eyes going darker. “Everything,” he repeated. “You sent your attending a photo of your pussy and you want me to believe it was an accident.”
“I panicked. I deleted it—”
“After it delivered. After I saw the notification. After I opened it in the middle of rounds and had to stand there with a patient’s chart in my hand and your pussy on my phone.”
Your knees nearly buckled. He said it so flat. So clinical. Like he was naming an anatomical structure, except his voice dropped on the word, roughened, and his grip on your hip tightened once before releasing.
“Jack—”
“Dr. Abbot.” His eyes snapped to yours. “In this hospital, I’m Dr. Abbot. You don’t get to call me Jack until I tell you to.”
Your breath stuttered. "Dr. Abbot."
"Better." He stepped closer. Your bodies touched—chest to chest, his scrub top against yours, the heat of him bleeding through the fabric. His thigh pressed between your legs and you made a sound before you could stop it, small and humiliating and honest.
"There it is," he murmured. His mouth was near your ear now, stubble scratching your temple. "That's the sound. That's what you wanted me to hear."
You grabbed his arm. You didn't mean to—your hand just found his bicep and held, fingers digging into muscle, and he let you. His arm was solid under your grip, hard from years of compressions and lifting and holding bodies together while they bled.
"I'm sorry," you said.
"Are you." He pulled back just enough to look at you. His face was close—you could see the exhaustion in the lines around his eyes, the gray threading his stubble, the way his mouth was set in something that wasn't quite a frown. "Or are you just scared I know what you look like when you want someone."
You didn't answer. Couldn't. He was right and you both knew it.
His hand left your jaw. Slid down. Found your wrist and lifted it between your bodies, his thumb pressing into your pulse point, feeling the blood hammer under your skin.
"You're shaking," he said.
"I know."
"Good."
He kissed you.
It wasn't gentle. It wasn't careful. His mouth hit yours with the same certainty as his hands—hard, demanding, his stubble scraping your lip and his tongue pushing past your teeth before you'd even registered the impact. He tasted like black coffee and something sharp, something that burned going down, and you opened for him immediately, helplessly, your whole body sagging into his grip.
His hand left your wrist and grabbed your other hip. Both hands now, fingers digging into the meat of you, pulling you against him so hard the desk edge bit into your thighs. His cock was hard already, pressing against your stomach through his scrub pants, and the knowledge of it—the fact that he'd been hard, maybe this whole time, maybe since he saw the photo, maybe since he locked the door—made you moan into his mouth.
"Quiet," he said against your lips. "The walls are thin."
You bit his lower lip. Harder than you meant to. He inhaled sharp and something flashed in his eyes—surprise, and then heat, and then his hands were moving, one sliding up your back under your scrub top, palm rough and hot on your spine, the other fisting in your hair and yanking your head back until your throat was exposed.
"You bite me again," he said against your pulse, "and I'll make you regret it."
"Maybe I want that."
His teeth found your neck. Not a kiss—a bite, real pressure, his incisors denting the skin just above your collarbone. You gasped and your hips bucked against his thigh and he held you there, teeth still clamped, tongue pressing flat against the mark he was making.
When he pulled back, his mouth was wet. His eyes were wrecked. "You want it," he said. "You want a lot of things. That's the problem."
Your hands moved. You didn't decide to—they just went, desperate, grabbing the front of his scrub top and pulling until the V-neck stretched, your knuckles brushing the sweat-damp hair on his chest. His skin was hot. He was hot, all of him, furnace-hot and solid and real against you.
"Touch me," you said. It came out wrecked. "Please."
"Please what."
"Please—fuck." You couldn't think. His thumb was rubbing circles into your spine, his other hand still fisted in your hair, his thigh a solid line of pressure between your legs. "Please touch me. Dr. Abbot."
His eyes flared. "That's right. That's my name. You remember that."
"Yes."
"And you remember who you're with. Not some resident. Not your ex. Me."
The jealousy landed like a slap. Your mind flicked back—the photo, who it might've been meant for, who he thought it was meant for—and you opened your mouth to explain, to tell him there wasn't anyone, but then his hand was sliding around to your stomach, fingertips tracing the waistband of your scrub pants front to back, and words dissolved.
"I don't share," he said quietly. "Whatever this is. Whatever you thought you were doing. You don't send something like that to more than one person. You don't get to."
"I didn't. It was only—"
"Only me." His fingers dipped under the elastic. Not far. Just the first knuckle, the rough pad of his index finger dragging through the hair below your navel. "Good. That's good. That's how it stays."
You nodded. You would've agreed to anything. His finger moved lower, just a centimeter, and your hips lifted toward his hand like a reflex.
"You're soaked," he said. Not surprised. Not smug. Just observing. "I haven't even touched you yet and you're soaked through your pants."
"I know."
"Say it."
"I'm—" Your face burned. His eyes didn't leave yours. "I'm wet. Soaked. Is that what you—"
"That's what I wanted." His finger withdrew. You nearly cried. But then both his hands were at your waistband, thumbs hooked in, and he was pulling your scrub pants and underwear down together, one sharp motion, the fabric scraping your thighs and pooling around your ankles.
He didn't look down. Not yet. He kept his eyes on your face while his hand found your knee and pushed—firm, steady—until your legs fell open, his hips slotting between them, the rough fabric of his scrub pants brushing your bare cunt.
"There," he said. "Now you're exactly where you should be."
You grabbed his shoulders. Needed to. Your fingers dug into the muscle there, the solid bulk of him, and he let you hang on while his mouth came back to yours, still brutal, still messy, teeth and tongue and the scrape of stubble that would leave your chin raw.
His hand dropped between your bodies.
First touch: his middle finger sliding through your folds, just parting you, just feeling. The sound it made—wet, obscene—filled the tiny office. He groaned into your mouth, a low vibration you felt in your chest.
"Jesus," he breathed. "You're dripping. You've been dripping all shift."
"For you."
"I know." His finger circled your clit—once, light, barely there—and your whole body jerked. "I know you have. Every time I looked at you. Every time I didn't."
He did it again. Slow circle. Then again, harder. Then his finger slid lower, found your entrance, and pressed in.
Just one. Just to the first knuckle. You clenched around him instantly, a helpless spasm, and he laughed—low, dark, right against your ear.
"Tight," he said. "Tight little pussy. And you sent me a picture of it. What'd you think would happen."
"I didn't—I wasn't—"
"You were." His finger pushed deeper. All the way in, slow, until his knuckle pressed against your entrance and his palm cupped your clit. "You wanted me to see. You wanted me to know. You wanted this."
He curled his finger.
Your vision whited. Your head fell back, throat bared again, and he took the invitation—mouth on your neck, sucking hard, his stubble a bright burn while his finger found that spot inside you and pressed.
"There," he said. "Right there. That's what you wanted me to find."
"Yes. Yes. Fuck—"
"Quiet." His voice was steel. "I said quiet. You can be quiet or I can stop."
You bit your own lip so hard you tasted copper. His finger pumped—once, twice, slow and deep, the wet sound of it filling the room. Then his thumb found your clit, pressed down, and you nearly screamed into your own mouth.
"Good girl. That's good. You can listen."
He pulled out. Your cunt clenched on nothing, empty and aching, and you made a noise of protest that he ignored. His hand came up between your faces, his finger glistening, slick coating his knuckle all the way to his palm.
"Look at this," he said. "Look at what you did."
You watched him bring his finger to his mouth. Watched his lips close around it. Watched his eyes flutter shut for just a second while he tasted you, his tongue cleaning his own skin with an obscene thoroughness that made your stomach drop.
"Sweet," he said, pulling his finger free. "I knew you'd be sweet."
"Please. Please, I need—"
"I know what you need." His hand was back between your legs before you finished, two fingers this time, sliding through your slick and then pushing in, stretching you open, filling you so fast your breath caught and held.
"Breathe," he said. "Breathe through it. You can take it."
You could. You did. His fingers were thick—surgeon's fingers, strong and precise—and they knew exactly what to do. Pumping deep, curling, finding that spot again and again while his palm ground against your clit and his mouth covered yours to swallow every sound.
The kiss was sloppy now. Desperate. You were breathing into each other, sharing air, his tongue pushing past your teeth at the same rhythm as his fingers. You could taste yourself on him—salt and musk and something sweeter underneath—and it made you wild, made your hips buck against his hand, made you ride his fingers like you'd die if you stopped.
"That's it," he growled. "Fuck my hand. Show me how bad you want it."
Your fingers clawed at his shoulders. Found his neck. Dug into the short hair at his nape and pulled, and he hissed, and his fingers drove deeper, faster, the wet slap of his palm against your clit turning filthy and loud.
"You're close," he said. "I can feel it. You're clenching—yeah, like that. You're gonna come on my fingers. Right here on my desk. And you're gonna be quiet while you do it."
"I can't—"
"You can." His lips brushed your ear. His breath was ragged now, finally losing that iron control. "You can because I'm telling you to. Because you're a good girl. Because you want to be good for me."
The words hit somewhere deep. Somewhere you didn't know existed. Your cunt spasmed around his fingers and he laughed again, dark and pleased, and then his thumb pressed hard against your clit and circled and his fingers curled and—
You came.
Silent. Or close enough—a gasp that died in your throat, your whole body locking up, your cunt milking his fingers in rhythmic pulses you couldn't control. He held you through it, hand steady, murmuring something low against your temple that you couldn't hear over the roar in your ears.
When you came down, your forehead was pressed to his shoulder. His scrub top was wet—sweat, tears, spit, you didn't know. His fingers were still inside you, still, just resting there, letting you feel the fullness.
"Good girl," he said again. Quieter now. Almost gentle. "That's my good girl."
You lifted your head. His face was inches away, dark eyes searching yours, and for a moment the mask slipped—just a second of something raw, something that looked almost tender before he blinked and it was gone.
"Now you," you said. Your voice was wrecked. "I want to—let me."
He didn't stop you. His fingers slid out of you, slow, and you felt the loss like a physical ache. Your hand dropped to his waist, found the drawstring of his scrub pants, and pulled.
His hand caught your wrist.
You froze. Waiting. His grip was tight but not painful—just stopping you, holding you still while he looked at your face like he was making a decision.
"This has to be quick," he said. "Someone's going to notice we're both gone."
"Then quick."
He held your eyes for another beat. Then his grip loosened. "Go on."
You untied the drawstring. Your fingers were shaking—from the orgasm, from the adrenaline, from the sheer impossibility of this moment—but you managed. His scrub pants sagged, and when you pushed them down his hips together with his boxers, his cock sprang free, thick and flushed and already leaking at the tip.
He was bigger than you expected. Not just long—thick, the kind of thick that would hurt in the best way, the kind that made your cunt clench just looking at it. His shaft was veined, curving slightly toward his stomach, the head a deep angry red and slick with pre-cum.
"You're staring," he said.
"I'm admiring."
"Admire faster."
You wrapped your hand around him. His breath caught—loud, sharp—and his hips jerked into your grip before he controlled himself. His cock was hot in your palm, silk-soft skin over iron-hard flesh, and when you squeezed, a bead of pre-cum welled at the tip and dripped down over your knuckle.
"Fuck," he breathed.
You stroked him. Slow at first—learning the weight, the shape, the way he twitched when your thumb pressed against the underside just below the head. His hand came up and fisted in your hair again, not pulling, just holding, like he needed an anchor.
"Faster," he said. "Come on. Faster."
You sped up. Your wrist found a rhythm, twisting on the upstroke the way you knew felt good, and his head dropped forward, forehead pressing to yours, his breath hot and uneven on your lips.
"You've done this before."
"A few times."
"Not to me." His hips were moving now, fucking into your fist, uncontrolled in a way that made heat pool low in your belly all over again. "Not—like this—"
You squeezed harder. Twisted faster. His hand in your hair tightened, the other slamming down on the desk beside your hip, and the sound of his palm hitting wood was loud enough to echo.
"Look at me," you said.
His eyes opened. Glazed. Desperate. His mouth was wet, lips parted, and he looked nothing like the cold controlled attending who'd locked the door. He looked ruined.
"I want to watch you," you said. "I want to watch you come in my hand."
"Jesus—"
"Come on." Your voice dropped, mimicking his from earlier. "Come for me. I want to see it."
His hips stuttered. His cock pulsed in your grip. And then he was coming, silent, jaw clenched so tight you could see the tendon stand out in his neck, his cum spilling hot over your fingers and dripping down your wrist in thick white ropes.
You stroked him through it. Milked every pulse, every spasm, until he was shuddering and oversensitive and his hand shot down to grip your wrist and stop you.
"Enough," he rasped. "Enough."
You stopped. Your hand was a mess—his cum coating your palm, your fingers, dripping between your knuckles. You could smell it, salt and musk and him, and without thinking, without planning, you lifted your hand to your mouth.
He watched.
Your tongue touched your palm first. The taste was sharp—bitter and salty and undeniably male. You licked a stripe up to your wrist, gathering the slickness, and then you wrapped your lips around your own index finger and sucked.
His pupils swallowed what was left of the thin blue rings.
You pulled your finger free with a lewd pop and licked your lips. "Tastes like you."
He didn't say anything. Just stared, chest heaving, cock still wet and softening against his thigh.
Then he kissed you. Not fast this time. Not punishing. His mouth dragged over yours with a filthy kind of patience, tongue sliding in like he was tasting himself there and hated how much he wanted more of it. His hand stayed at your jaw, thumb pressed beneath your chin, holding you still while he licked into your mouth again, deeper, making the kiss feel less like an ending than a promise he had no business making in his office.
When Jack finally pulled back, it wasn’t because either of you had cooled off. It was because whatever sense he had left had finally clawed its way back to the surface.
You stayed on the edge of his desk, breath wrecked, fingers still curled in his scrub top. He looked almost composed, which would’ve been insulting if his mouth weren’t swollen from yours, if his chest weren’t moving with too much effort, if his gaze didn’t keep dropping to all the places he had just touched. For a second, he only stared at you, taking in the mess he’d made: your loosened scrubs, your bare thighs, the flush crawling up your throat, the way your body still hadn’t figured out how to stop wanting him.
Then he reached for his phone.
You went still.
He saw it immediately. Of course he did. Jack caught everything.
“No,” he said, voice rough but steady. “Not unless you say so.”
The phone stayed low in his hand. He didn’t lift it. Didn’t angle it. Didn’t take anything just because he could. That was the worst part, maybe—how badly he wanted and how clearly he still made it your choice. He stood there with his scrub pants retied badly, his hair mussed, your taste still on his mouth, and waited like permission mattered more than whatever filthy thought had put the phone in his hand.
“I got rid of the first one,” he said.
“I know.”
“It wasn’t mine.”
Your throat tightened.
His gaze moved over you again, not detached, not clean, not pretending. “This one would be.”
The words went through you with a fresh, obscene little twist. The first photo had been panic and accident, a naked image thrown into the wrong hands. This one would be different. You were still open on his desk, still marked by his mouth, still shaking from what he’d done to you and what you’d done to him. This wouldn’t be a mistake sitting in a thread. This would be proof. Permission. Something given on purpose.
Jack watched your face. “Say no, and I put it away.”
You looked at the phone, then at him. “Yes.”
His jaw tightened. “Full sentence.”
Your face burned, but you didn’t look away. Not after everything. Not with his cum still barely wiped from your skin and your body still aching from his fingers.
“You can take a picture of me.”
For a second, he didn’t move.
Then he lifted the phone.
He only took one.
That made it worse somehow. Hotter. No posing you over and over. No making a show of it. Just one photo in the dim office light: you perched on the edge of his desk, wrecked and unmistakably touched, your scrubs shoved out of place, his hand visible at your thigh like a signature he had no right to leave. The first photo had been you alone in your bed, naked and deliberate. This one had him in it without showing his face—the watch at his wrist, the edge of his sleeve, the possessive press of his fingers against your skin.
Jack looked at the screen.
Whatever he saw there hit him. You watched it happen in the clench of his jaw, the pause in his breathing, the way his thumb hovered before he locked the phone like he needed to put the image away before he did something stupider than taking it.
“That one stays?” you asked.
His eyes lifted to yours.
“That one stays.”
The words settled low and dirty, right where his voice had already ruined you.
After that, he fixed you with the same practical attention he gave everything else. Scrub top straightened. Badge adjusted. Hair smoothed back into place, though his fingers lingered for half a second longer than necessary. It should’ve felt clinical. It didn’t. It felt intimate in a way that made your chest ache a little.
“You okay?” he asked.
You nodded.
His brows drew together. “Words.”
A small, breathless laugh escaped you. “I’m okay.”
He studied you for another moment, then handed you the water bottle from his desk. “Drink.”
You did, because saying no felt pointless when your legs were still unreliable and he was looking at you like he would stand there all night if that was what it took to make sure you could walk out without falling apart. When he was satisfied, he took the bottle back and set it down.
Then the mask started returning.
You watched him pull himself together piece by piece. The rough edges tucked away. The heat banked. The attending sliding back over the man who had just ruined your ability to think clearly. By the time his hand reached the lock, he almost looked like himself again.
Almost.
Before opening the door, he turned back. “No more accidents.”
Your pulse jumped. “No?”
His gaze dropped once to your mouth. “You want my attention,” he said, low enough that only you could hear, “you ask for it properly.”
Then he opened the door, and the hospital rushed back in.
The fluorescent light felt obscene after the dimness of his office. Voices, alarms, wheels, footsteps, the relentless machinery of the department grinding on like nothing had happened. Jack stepped out first. You followed a few seconds later, trying to look normal with your pulse still everywhere it shouldn’t be.
At the nurses’ station, Mel glanced up. “You good?”
You picked up a chart mostly to have something to do with your hands. “Yeah. Fine.”
Across the department, Jack didn’t look at you once, but that almost made it worse. He didn’t have to. The proof was already in his pocket, locked behind his passcode, tucked against his body while he moved through the rest of the shift like nothing had happened. You watched him speak to Robby near the board, watched him take a chart from Dana, watched him disappear behind the curtain of trauma two with that same gruff composure he’d worn all day, and all you could think was that there was a photo of you on his phone now.
Not the accidental one. Not the one he had deleted because it hadn’t belonged to him.
The other one.
The one you had given him.
That thought followed you through sign-out and the locker room and the cold shock of night air when you finally stepped outside. It sat low and warm in your stomach on the ride home, getting worse every time you remembered the way his jaw had tightened when he looked at the screen. By the time you unlocked your apartment, the silence felt different from the one he’d given you earlier. Not cruel this time. Anticipatory.
Your apartment was dark except for the lamp by your bed. The same bed from the first photo waited at the end of the room, sheets still rumpled from the morning, low light spilling over the fabric in a way that made your heart skip. Last night, that room had been private. Tonight, it felt altered, like Jack had already been invited into the idea of it.
You dropped your keys into the bowl by the door and stood there for a second, still in your scrubs, looking at the bed.
Your phone buzzed.
You turned it over.
Jack Abbot:
Home?
Your mouth went dry.
You:
Yes.
Three dots appeared, disappeared, then appeared again. You stood in the dark with your scuffed Dansko clogs still on, heart beating too hard over a text message from a man who had spent all day saying nothing. Then his reply came through.
pairing: dean winchester x female reader, jack abbot x female reader
word count: 6.3k
rating: mature
summary: you have a type. strong. brave. snark and charm in bucketfuls. but jack and dean couldn't be more different. because one is always there, the other, well, he always picks his moments
tags/ warnings: established relationship, reader and Dean are 20s/jacks 40s, set before season one, implied reader is Bobbys daughter but can just be a hunter, confirmed past relationship, injury, harm, angst, mentions of medical procedures and wounds,
notes: no because they're two sides of the same coin jack just went to therapy
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winchester wednesdays ☆ read on ao3 ☆ request a fic ☆ tag list
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you 3:24am
Meet me in the ambulance bay in 10.
Jack had read and re-read the message over ten times since you’d sent it. He didn’t know what you wanted, he wasn’t even sure why you were awake after you’d talked about having an early night since you were swapping from nights to day shift yet again. And when he’d left your place just before his shift, you’d given him his ‘lunch’ so it wasn’t that either. For a fleeting second, he wondered if you were hurt, but then he put it out of his mind. If it were that he knew you’d call or at least text and ask his opinion about coming in. Not that you couldn’t deal with much by yourself.
So naturally he was intrigued and of course, out front my minute five.
It was cold out, the wind funnelling through the concrete ambulance bay, but his adrenaline kept him warm. His curiosity even more so. He stood waiting for your car to roll in or you to come strolling up, grumbling that the staff parking garage was far too far to walk especially in the pitch black of night.
But he didn’t see any of that.
Instead, he saw a classic car peel in, black as the night just beyond the ambulance bay with headlights so blinding he was forced to step back as it came to a screeching halt in front of the doors so he didn’t get clipped. Still, as the driver’s door swung open Jack rushed to help, expecting to see a harried looking mom or a panicked teenager. Instead, he saw you. You pulled yourself out, and Jack felt a sudden surge of panic as he saw your front covered in blood.
‘Sweetheart,’ he breathed, his hands immediately reaching out and trying to assess the damage. You were up. You were breathing. And seemingly fine, at least physically, but not in the desperate way you grabbed him, your hand tight on his arm as you pulled him around to the other side as he tried to ask, ‘what is-’
But you were across the front of the car in a second, yanking the passenger side door open. There was a man there, young, around a similar age to you and absolutely bloodied. His leg was in shreds, blood oozing through torn denim, and soaking up toward his abdomen. Some of it was already dried and tacky, but fresh waves were still coming.
‘Help me,’ you said, your voice cracking.
Jack would like to say that he asked questions.
Who was he? How did you know him? What the fuck were you doing with a mangled man in a car he didn’t recognise in the middle of the night when he’d left you less than twelve hours ago ready to change into your pyjamas and head to bed?
But he didn’t do any of that. He just kicked into gear. Assessment. Questions that were relative to the man bleeding to death on the passenger seat.
‘Can we get a gurney!’ Jack shouted, clicking his fingers at a couple of EMTs standing around by the back of an empty rig just up the ramp. As they rushed to help Jack assessed. The man had his eyes open, but his mouth was clamped shut, like he wasn’t daring to make a sound in case that made the pain feel worse. He breathed heavy and he winced as Jack leaned in, scanning his eyes down him with a, ‘can you move?’
‘Maybe,’ the man grunted, reaching a sticky hand out onto the dash but grimacing as an electric wave of agony flowed through him.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Dean,’ the man replied.
‘Alright Dean, forgive me,’ Jack said as his hand went under Dean’s back the other moving his legs to dangle out the side where you rushed forward, holding the weight of them so they didn’t tug on anything and make the bleeding worse. By now the EMTs had rushed over and after some jostling and a lot of grunted, heavy breathing he was out and placed on the fresh gurney as they rolled him into the Pitt.
‘Hit me,’ Jack said, looking to you as the team ran to a bay, like he would in any case. Normally, this was the part where you’d rhyme off what you knew flawlessly and effortlessly. Only right now you didn’t look like a professional. No, you had that unmistakable, panic-stricken look of a relative. Your face was pale, your hand gripping Dean’s tightly as they wheeled him into trauma one.
‘Uh male, twenty-five, bear attack,’ you said stumbling over your words. Jack felt it instantly. The lie, clean as anything but not convincing. Like when you’d told him you liked his lasagne and hated it or when Robby had asked you if you thought motorbikes were cool.
‘Injuries from his right shin up to his abdomen,’ you forced out trying to regain your footing, ‘the wounds are pretty deep, but they missed the femoral from what I can see. I managed to patch up some, but they’re too deep, I had to…’
‘She made me… come… that’s what she’s stumblin’ over…right sweetheart?’ Dean said, forcing a smile through each pant.
‘You get mauled by a bear and don’t wanna run by the hospital?’ Jack asked, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up when you looked down, avoiding his gaze as Dean’s smile widened.
‘Eh, I hate the Jello,’ Dean said sarcastically, grunting, ‘son of a bitch,’ as he was roughly slid across to the trauma bed.
‘Let’s get a line in him. Start with fifty of fent for the pain,’ Jack said, casting his eyes over Dean’s remarkable vitals given the circumstances. It was only then you kicked into gear, like the order had landed and kicked you into a pavolvian response as you went into work mode, your hands, still covered in Dean’s blood, headed for the stacker behind you.
‘Uh, not you,’ Jack ordered. You looked like you wanted to protest, but you forced yourself to step back, retreating into the shadows of the room as the trauma team did what they did best. You watched as Dean’s layers were cut away. He even managed a weak quip about buying him dinner first when Javadi snipped through his underwear, causing the resident to blush furiously. You heard orders being shouted and saw his wounds cleaned and dressed, what could be. You saw lines started and blood hung to try and replace what was over your clothes and the front seat of Dean’s baby. You heard him in pain and tried not to let tears spill over. You heard things that worried you and things that made relief flood through you.
And then it was gone. The wave of chaos. The panic.
Dean’s vitals got better and his pain got less, thanks to each hit of painkiller he took which had dangerously been left in his control. And as the crowd thinned and the quiet came in, it allowed you to come forward and sit by his bedside. And with the pandemonium gone you quickly slipped back into that old feeling.
You stopped seeing the broken man who’d called you in the middle of the night and begged you to come down from your apartment. You didn’t see the man who’d declared ‘no hospitals’ when you panicked because you couldn’t get the blood to stop gushing out of him onto his precious car upholstery. You didn’t see the man who’d made you cry in countless fights about him going back out on the road. You didn’t see the man you’d asked not to come back because you couldn’t keep doing this. You saw Dean.
The real Dean.
Soft, quiet, and still putting on a show despite the trauma. The man who made you mix tapes and called you when he was lonely. The man whose eyes lit up like a little boy when you bought him a slice of pie. The man who laid you down and made love to you, promises whispered in your ear and eyes adoring before another call, another set of coordinates, another reason not to stay home and you were fighting and screaming and crying and asking him to stay away.
‘It won’t need surgery,’ Garcia said, poking at the deep gash on Dean’s thigh lightly and earning herself a, ‘doesn’t need your fingers in it, either.’
‘Dean,’ you whispered warningly, but Garcia just grinned, snapping her gloves off and giving back as good as she got with a, ‘hey if you don’t want to be poked maybe don’t poke a bear.’
‘I thought it was friendly. Like Yogi,’ Dean quipped. Garica rolled her eyes and you put your head in your hands knowing there was no winning with him and being stupid. You should’ve known, after all, that’s why you were here. But she didn’t carry on, maintaining some professionalism as she talked to Jack. Jack who’d been watching you the entire time. Jack who you kept your gaze away from because you didn’t have answers.
‘I’ve got a patient upstairs, but I can close if you want once I’m done,’ she offered.
‘No, it’s okay, I’ll do it,’ Jack said quietly, finally getting your attention. The declaration made you feel heady. Like words colliding in a way that set you off kilter.
‘Aren’t you busy?’ you asked finally looking at him and finding his face tight, his mouth pinched, and his eyes narrowed on your face. And the weight of Dean’s gaze on you both. He wasn’t stupid, and neither was Jack. But in all the chaos there were no questions to be asked, just buried until now.
‘Patients a patient,’ Jack shrugged, looking to Dean with a professional smile, ‘you sit tight I’m gonna get supplies.’
‘Great,’ Dean nodded, his smile tight and guarded. Jack nodded back, but as he turned toward the exit, he gestured slightly with his chin, ‘mind giving me a hand? Might need help finding everything.’
You could’ve said no. You weren’t on the clock, and he’d benched you from helping anyway. But you knew this was nothing to do with work. That the supply closet where you two stole quiet, frantic kisses and moaned about how you’d not got a minute to see each other would now become an interrogation room. You looked at Dean and then patted his arm softly before you rose, following behind Jack towards the supply room.
He let you go in first, the door shutting and locking a moment later though you pretended you didn’t hear it, going to the shelves and pulling things that he might need out and onto one of the metal carts he would work from. Jack watched and you ignored him. You pretended that you couldn’t feel his eyes on you, that you couldn’t feel the weight of a spare pair of his scrubs and the remnants of Dean’s blood clinging to your fingernails. Old and new. Jack enshrouding you. Dean embedded.
‘You want nylon or prolene?’ you asked, your hand hovering between the boxes of suture packs, the weight of Jack’s gaze on your back, ‘I doubt he’s gonna take it easy so a 3-0 prolene is probably your best bet.’
‘Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?’ Jack said, his voice flat. Commanding. You turned, the suture pack you’d grabbed a hold of tight in your hand before you dropped it on the table, avoiding his eyes. Jack didn’t let up, ‘because the last time I saw you, you were crawling into bed for an early night.’
Again, you stayed quiet.
‘Do you need me to ask as a doctor?’ he pressed, stepping closer, ‘as the attending on this night shift-’
‘He showed up,’ you whispered, looking up at him through your lashes, your gaze dropping when his jaw tightened, ‘he showed up and he was hurt, Jack…what was I supposed to do?’
‘Who even is he? You’ve never mentioned him,’ Jack pressed, you sighed, ‘is he a-’
‘He’s Dean. Just…Dean, okay?’ you said, moving away to start pulling other random items he might need onto the table. Because it was easier to say when you didn’t have to look at him. Easier to lie, ‘we’ve been friends forever, it’s not a big deal.’
You weren’t friends. And it was a massive deal.
‘He almost bled to death in a car you were driving, claiming to be attacked by a bear in the middle of a metropolitan city. You know this is reportable right? That animal control will ask questions? Prying cops will have questions. That the nurses haven’t stopped whispering about oh, what was his name on his insurance card, Dean Houdini,’ Jack ranted, valid in his concern and yet making your stomach knot with bile and anger as he carried on.
Because he was right.
This wasn’t you, not anymore. It was a life you’d chosen to leave behind and yet you slipped back into it so well. It was probably why you were one of the ERs best employees. Why you slipped into lies and deflection without issue. Why you could push through. Through pain. Through fear. Why you could drive one handed across town with you hand pressed to Dean’s shredded abdomen whilst formulating a cover story. Whilst relying on Jack to lie for you. Pulling him in like Dean would to you.
Jack waited for something, but when nothing came, he forced his voice into something low and serious, somewhere it hardly ever went even in the depths of chaos on shift, ‘if he has you wrapped up in something dangerous-’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ you snapped.
‘Then tell me!’ he snapped right back. You glared at him, the silence stretching between you like a live wire.
‘Okay, fine, don’t,’ Jack said, shaking his head, ‘you two sit in your lies and have everyone ask questions that you can’t answer. But tell me something. What happens when upstairs gets hold of this? Gloria? What happens if you lose your license?’
‘It won’t come to that,’ you said quietly. And that was the truth. Because Dean wouldn’t be around that long. He’d get patched up and he or both of you would get him out the door. Into his car, to a motel. Away from questions and curious glances. For him at least. Not that it mattered. The nurses could think what they wanted because by morning you’d have your story straight, by the time anyone from upstairs bothered to come down and verify what had gotten the floor abuzz.
Jack let out a long and exhausted sigh, ‘Doll… I just wanna understand it.’
‘I can’t explain it,’ you whispered, finally looking up at him, your lip trembling, ‘we’re…it’s like if your army buddies turned up. I’m out, of that life. I’m not going back but-’
‘He’s family,’ Jack finished for you. You nodded.
Jack sighed again, moving to pull you deep into his chest and you let him. You allowed yourself to be wrapped in his strong arms, absorbing his warmth, listening to the steady, uncomplicated rhythm of his heartbeat. Always there, like it always was. Grounded. Safe.
‘I, um…I should go check on him,’ you whispered, suddenly feeling smothered enough to force yourself back, an apologetic look on your face that he nodded at, patting your shoulder as you dipped from the room.
Dean was asleep when you went back in the room, your eyes casting over his vitals just in case and finding them fine enough to soothe your hammering heart just a little.
He stirred though, when you took your seat on the stool beside his bed, your hand resting on the mattress beside his, not touching, but close enough to feel his warmth.
Then he opened his eyes, groggily at first until he realised it was you, before he turned his head on the pillow to look at you. Neither of you said anything. You kept your eyes on his hand, your finger toying under the bracelet you’d given him years ago. It was something that you’d picked up years ago at an old curiosity shop, from a woman who was trying her absolute best to sell herself as a real witch but failing miserably. Supposedly, it was forged to bring the wearer luck, but it had never really delivered on the promise. Evidently.
Dean studied you. Your tired eyes, the worry that tugged your pretty mouth downwards, the smile you offered him when you caught him staring unapologetically. Because he always was unapologetic, just like the words that came out of him next.
‘You look good,’ he said, as if you were just old friends catching up for a coffee. Like he actually meant it and it wasn’t just something he always thought, because he always did.
‘You look like crap,’ you countered, your voice flat and hollow and followed by a gentle sniffle.
‘From the waist down, maybe. Still got the face to work with,’ he joked, nudging your wrist with his finger and flashing that dazzling smile he always did. You breathed a laugh and then silence fell. The monitors were silent now he was ranging near normal. The hum of the ER finally retreating into something steady now that the witching hour had been and gone. You looked at his leg, the half of him not covered by the gown he’d been helped into. You saw the bright white dressings and gauze pads taping him up from shin to rib. You tried not to visualize the deep, ragged gashes all clinging together beneath the bandages, save for the one that had been too wide to close without specialist intervention. Kind of like the wounds inside you. Old, healed or patched up, most of them done by the same hands that had patched Dean up. Yet there was still that one massive, festering tear—the one you had almost managed to heal until he rolled back into town tonight. Uninvited. Unapologetic. Never unwelcome.
‘How are you doing?’ you asked quietly after a moment.
‘Fine,’ Dean said, because there was no other answer he’d ever give you.
‘What was it?’ you asked, looking closely at his face.
‘Kitsune,’ Dean said, countering your fallen expression with a dismissive, ‘it was a lucky shot.’
‘For them or you?’ you challenged, your voice hollowing out when you added, ‘you could’ve died, Dean.’
‘Didn’t though,’ Dean countered, a cheeky smile tugging at the side of his lips that only made you scowl and drop your eyes back to the bed, to fiddling with that bracelet around his wrist. Dean looked away, letting you do it, trying not to get drunk on how your fingers danced across your skin, the headiest drug he’d had all night, which was saying something seeing as he was tanked up on the good stuff.
Instead, he changed the subject. To you.
Not to hunts. Not to nearly dying. To the thing that made him feel like he was, hearing about your normal life. How you were out of the life. How you were happy. Happy without him.
‘You work here?’ he asked.
‘You know I do,’ you said softly.
Exactly how was a miracle. Your dad had been fine with you not hunting, he’d encouraged it even. But it still tugged you back in here and there. A request for back up on occasion. A phone call from some hunter who couldn’t get hold of your dad and ended up with you looking up whatever they needed without thinking.
And then Dean.
College summers and spring breaks became road trips with a dose of blood, guts, and gore. You took long weekends and neglected your studies. You made him come home with you for Christmas. But eventually, real life had pulled you one way, he had pulled the other, and you’d been forced to choose. Seeing strangers at their absolute worst in an emergency room was one thing but watching the man you loved with all your heart get broken down time and time again was a weight you couldn't carry anymore.
‘Got enough on the job training huh?’ he commented, you didn’t answer and he cleared his throat, ‘they seem…cool. The staff.’
‘They are,’ you said.
‘Not so different from hunting, I guess. Case rolls in, you deal with it and send ‘em on their way,’ he said.
‘Except I don’t get hurt in the process,’ you said snarkily.
‘Don’t you?’ he asked. He was right, and you hated it. He knew you far too well. He knew that every cancer patient, every paediatric code, and every stupid, reckless accident would eat you alive from the inside out. How many hunts had you come home from where you desperately needed him to hold you together?
Only now, that job belonged to someone else. The exact someone who knocked on the glass door and opened it without waiting for an answer, forcing you to roll a couple of inches back like you hadn’t had your hand under Dean’s, his green eyes penetrating into your face, scrutinising every inch. Not just of the job. Of your life here. Your life without him.
‘Sorry, to interrupt,’ Jack lied smoothly, wheeling the cart to the other side of the bed and pulling a chair up beside it, his eyes entirely on Dean as he said, ‘you ready to get this thing sewn up?’
‘You got a bottle of whisky on that cart?’ Dean asked. Jack chuckled and started setting up and you immediately reached for the button that controlled Dean’s analgesia, handing it to him and muttering something about loading up before Jack was ready. Jack watched as you placed it in his hand, wrapping his fingers around it in a way you never would a patient. It was one of the things he’d always liked about your bedside manner. You’d do anything for anyone but boy oh boy you were determined to make them help themselves first. Push through the pain. Do what you're told, and I'll be right here to catch you if you fall. You were the absolute epitome of 'do no harm but take no shit.' But watching you now, something told Jack that boundaries were a lot easier said than done when it came to the people you called family.
After the beep echoed and the green light turned off signalling there was another five minutes before he could take his next hit Jack cleared his throat, catching both of your attention though he didn’t look up from unwrapping his equipment.
‘Lena’s asking for you by the way, something about his insurance paperwork,’ Jack said casually.
‘Don’t you need help?’ you frowned, your hand hovering protectively over the trauma pads Jack was beginning to peel away. Dean winced slightly as the medical tape yanked at his skin.
‘You know me, could do this in the dark,’ Jack said. It was easy going and the same teasing he’d normally have with you and his patients, but no one laughed. You just nodded and stood, your hand hesitating over Dean’s before you said, ‘I’ll be back soon.’
‘My uh, info is in the glovebox,’ Dean said, his eyes flicking to Jack who pretended not to hear.
‘Yeah, I know,’ you said before you trailed from the room, the door clicking softly closed after you.
Once you were gone, Dean leaned his head back, staring up at the crisp white ceiling tiles as Jack surveyed the wound. Jack forced himself to maintain his professionalism. He tried not to analyse the rugged, heavily muscled frame of the man on the table, or the deep ridge of his hip—marred by old scars but still possessing the kind of allure that usually made you stare when Jack's own scrubs rode up on shift. He tried not think the roughness of his hands; how young they looked in comparison to his. How big they’d look in comparison to you; in places he touched.
Jack shook the thoughts from his head and stared at the facts. The two smaller wounds on either side of his thigh had already been patched up, along with the deep gash just above his knee which had been glued and was now bandaged. But the main slash across his thigh was deep, down to the muscle. But it was clean. Remarkably so and not like any bear or cougar attack Jack had ever seen in his career. But it wasn’t his job to play detective.
In fact, now that he was forced to think about it, Jack realized he knew very little about your past. He knew you as you were right now. He knew you were originally from South Dakota and had moved east for college. He knew your mother was gone but that you kept in touch with your father, though you rarely went home to visit. He knew exactly how you liked your eggs, and that you barely functioned in the morning without at least one cup of black coffee. He knew you absolutely hated dressing up, preferring to live outside your hospital scrubs in a simple t-shirt and jeans, a bloody pile of which now sat abandoned at the bottom of a plastic trash bag in the corner of the room.
But you never really spoke about anything else. Not that he could blame you. He didn’t either. He didn’t talk about his army days or his wife in any way that got deeper than surface level because it hurt too much. That and he didn’t need to. You just accept everything at face value. You didn’t push each other’s boundaries; you were both just sort of there for each other in a way he’d never felt before. Easy, comfortable, and entirely undemanding.
Dean hissed as Jack anchored the needle. There was no way he could feel the sharp bite of metal, the block the team had set was not liable to falter, but the sudden pressure had taken him by surprise and the tugging was unpleasant, like there was a string connected up from the stitch to his belly button, pulling tight every time that Jack moved. Dean checked his button again and found it grey and useless and so he tilted his head across the other way, his eyes landing on Jack who was focused on working but not oblivious to being watched. If he couldn’t have a shot of morphine he needed a distraction to keep his mind off it.
Dean cleared his throat. Jack didn’t take the bait.
‘You the boyfriend?’ he asked after a moment. Jack didn’t answer straight away, pulling the thick suture smoothly through the deep tissue, drawing the edges together before looking up over the rim of his glasses, which sat on the bridge of his nose.
‘Yeah, I am,’ he said, his hands moving with practiced efficiency to tie off a neat square knot, ‘and you?’
‘Pain in her ass,’ Dean said which felt most like the truth these days.
‘Yeah, looks like it,’ Jack commented dryly. Again, the room went quiet though Dean was betrayed by another wince as Jack laid another suture. This was no good. Not painful, but not pleasant and if he was going to get through another couple dozen he needed a distraction. So, Dean went for the thing that was sure to make his mind swim.
‘You love her?’ he asked roughly.
‘Do you?’ Jack challenged, not missing a beat.
‘I asked you first,’ Dean replied.
‘Yeah, I do,’ Jack said, looking up at him.
‘Good,’ Dean said evenly, but Jack just watched him, narrowing his eyes because he knew there was an answer waiting to be given whether the other man wanted to or not. Dean swallowed, a tiny, guarded shrug rolling through his shoulders, ‘s’not about what I want.’
‘You keep coming back though,’ Jack challenged. When Dean looked shocked, given that Jack hadn’t even known about him until tonight he carried on, ‘I know the type…. I used to be one.’
Dean felt his mind whirring, trying to put together how this put together, middle aged guy was anything like him. He was smart, Dean wasn’t. He was quiet, Dean shouted at the world. He didn’t hurt people, Dean couldn’t seem to stop.
But he stopped thinking about that when his heart twinged worse than his leg.
‘Yeah? You got a checkered past I should be worried about?’ Dean levelled, ‘cause I’m trusting you with my leg here doc.’
‘Reformed,’ Jack said with a breath of amusement, ‘but let’s just say…my late wife wasn’t exactly thrilled with two tours of Afghanistan.’
Dean said nothing, the jealousy and hatred he wanted to have for the guy dying out like it did with any vet he met. Like his dad would want.
‘But I kept showing back up anyway…just enough…just when she’d got her life to something normal without me,’ Jack said, no longer looking at him, his tools working cleanly and evenly through stringy sinew.
‘This you warning me off her?’ Dean asked. Jack shrugged.
‘Like you said. It’s not about what I want.’
Dean watching him stitch for a minute, the rhythmic methodical nature of his work. Nothing like the sloppy hand he had. Whiskey as a disinfectant and his teeth to cut the strings if needed. Neat not rough. Sure, not chaotic. Good instead of good enough.
‘She make you give it up?’ Dean asked curiously, earning himself a glance, ‘your wife, I mean.’
‘Wish I could say she did but, um,’ Jack paused. He wheeled himself back and grabbed a clean piece of gauze off the table so that he could pinch the fabric of his scrub pants and pull them up. Dean leaned over just enough to see the glint of metal shine under the fluorescents and nodded softly.
‘By the time I realized there was more to life than being reckless as shit,’ Jack said, releasing the fabric and rolling back into place, ‘we didn’t have much time left together.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Dean said. Jack shrugged like a man who’d heard sentiments like that long enough to know to accept them and also that they didn’t mean anything.
Silence fell again as he went back to working and Dean flopped back looking at the ceiling again as his words echoed through his brain. They were words he didn’t need to hear because it was all stuff he knew already. They just somehow sounded worse than he’d anticipated. Because Jack didn’t even sound angry. Anyone else would be furious if some mystery guy rocked up in his girlfriend's life in the middle of the night and pulled them into something dark and dangerous, but Jack just seemed to completely understand the gravity of the pull. Only to him it wasn't a competition at all.
‘I never mean to, you know,’ Dean admitted quietly, his eyes glued to the ceiling tiles though he felt Jack look up, ‘bother her. I can go for a while…working jobs…keeping my distance. And most the time I’m totally fine…then something like this happens… and I figure, if I’m gonna die…’
‘And what happens to her if you do?’ Jack asked, his voice tightening significantly. Dean finally turned his head to look at him, his face guilty and sad.
‘Guess you’ll get to find out.’
Jack stared back at him for a tense second, then let out a heavy sigh and returned to the final surface stitches. He had the first couple of sewn up by the time you came back in, Dean’s leg now resembling something that actually looked like leg at least. Dean opened his eyes the second he heard the door handle click, a warm smile instantly breaking across his face as you shuffled back in and sat down, casting a wary eye between the two of them.
‘How’s it going?’ you asked gently, your question nothing to do with suturing.
‘Fine,’ Jack said, offering you a reassuring nod.
‘Yeah, you might’ve been demoted from my favourite stich-giver,’ Dean chimed in.
‘That’s cause you’re tryna act tough instead of whining like a bitch,’ you countered smoothly.
‘Sweetheart, if you wanted to hear me whi-’ Dean started though he stopped as Jack moved his leg roughly into a better position without looking up. You rolled your eyes but then conversation took hold. Nothing deep or serious. You asked about his dad and got the same vagueness he always hit you with. He asked about your work and proudly told you which of the nurses he’d already managed to hit on. He even struck up a conversation with Jack about the Pirates current season, though you were entirely certain Dean hadn’t watched a baseball game since he played T-ball as a kid. It was so easy, so familiar. Like it always was with him. Like it was with Jack.
Except you knew Jack would still be here tomorrow. That you could talk about work and he’d listen. That if you wanted to pry into Jack’s life, his wife, and his army days and all of the horrors you were both content on ignoring, he would. That he’d take you to a baseball game if you asked because there was nowhere else he’d rather be than with you.
You’d just been telling Dean about a broken bone you’d helped reset last week, an anecdote about that time in Tampa he reset your shoulder bubbling into the room that you could tell Jack wanted to ask more about, when he pulled back, the sound of metallic tools hitting an empty basin as he declared, ‘done.’
‘Not bad,’ Dean said, his fingers touching just above Jack’s handiwork before he placed a clean dressing over the top, ‘thanks doc.’
‘Thanks Jack,’ you said, offering him a deeply grateful smile. Jack nodded and started packing his things away.
‘So, what now?’ Dean asked looking to you before remembering it was Jack who was supposed to be creating the plan, since he was his doctor.
‘Well, standard protocol means we need to get you assessed by our on call physical therapy team. See how you tolerate weight-bearing and monitor the site for any signs of dehiscence or active bleeding. It also wouldn’t hurt to keep you on a scheduled IV pain regimen before we even consider a formal discharge. And, of course, animal control has to be formally notified, and the state troopers will likely want to conduct an interview so they can log the incident location. Since, you know... black bears aren’t exactly native to downtown Pittsburgh,’ Jack rhymed off effortlessly, like he would with any patient. To the point. Route one, best plan of action.
‘Right,’ Dean drawled, doing a terrible job of pretending that he had any intention of listening to a single word of it.
You played along too, already making a mental tally of everything you’d need to coordinate. If you could get Jack to write up his discharge now, with some good painkillers included, you could get some supplies together, grab something from the pharmacy drawer and get him out. If he would hold off on his referrals, go against the system that wanted beds as soon as possible, they’d have one because you’d have Dean out of here before he was due. Before anyone could ask any more questions.
Because you didn’t have the brainpower for it right now. Not after a night of no sleep. Not after hours of worry. You weren’t even sure the lies you’d fed to Lena about his insurance card were coherent but it was all you had until you could get out. Of the hospital, away from nurse’s gossiping and Jack’s unbelievably forgiving gaze. Back into your old life, where there was no explaining or scrutinising. Just what had to be done. Just until Dean was okay. You just needed Jack to get that.
‘But,’ Jack continued, pausing to look at the chart, ‘I suppose I could write up your discharge summary right now. Get your take-home supplies ready so that once you’ve completed your evaluations, you're cleared to go.’
‘Uh, yeah. That works,’ Dean said, exchanging a subtle look with you before you looked at Jack, eyes curious.
‘And uh, sweetheart,’ Jack said, his eyes filled with a quiet understanding, ‘I know you’re not on the clock, but I’m going to take my break right after I input this discharge. I probably won't get around to submitting those state referrals until I get back onto the floor.’
‘Right,’ you nodded, the relief washing over you in a massive wave, ‘you should take a minute. I bet your backs killing you.’
‘And don’t worry about your shift tomorrow, today, I’ll square it with Robby and Dana, so you’re covered,’ he promised softly.
‘Thank you,’ you said, offering another grateful smile.
Jack gave a quiet nod and headed for the exit but he turned back just before the door swung shut, finding the two of you already locked in each other’s orbit. The conversation was hushed but intense. Low murmurs of wheelchairs, cash-only motels, and clean gauze bounced between you in ways he didn’t want to know about officially.
So, he left you to it.
Jack knew it was probably foolish. That old age and a bad leg had softened his edges. When he’d been Dean’s age, fresh off a deployment and full of lightning, he probably would’ve fought harder, dirtier. He would’ve hurt people the way Dean seemed to do. But he didn’t need to do that anymore. He didn’t need love to be an all-consuming, blinding fire. He didn’t need to constantly prove his worth.
He proved it by staying. By showing up for the shift. By holding you when you needed it.
And he knew one day the shine would dim. One day the gaps would get longer between visits. One day Dean’s demons would catch up to him like Jack’s had to him.
But Jack also knew he’d be the one standing right there to pull you through the wreckage when it happened.
pairing: dean winchester x original female character
rating: explicit
word count: 7.2k
tags/warnings: set in all hell breaks loose, canon character death, grief, heavy angst, smut, implied p in v sex, smoking, drinking, canon divergence
notes: well they had a good run
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link to masterpost ❀ link to ao3 ❀ request a tag ❀ previous chapter
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Mid-May 2007
Lainey had never meant for it to happen.
When she’d gone with the boys she had only wanted to help - to hunt down this damn demon once and for all.
But she should’ve known it was a fruitless task. That angering it had only made them noticeable, a target. After all, that’s what had gotten her mom killed and her brother taken. And her dad’s relentlessness after that had been what killed him too.
It was why she had opted out before now, pushing the memories from her mind and chasing a dream that wasn’t meant to be. It was why she floated from hunt to hunt, never allowing it to get real because that was just asking for trouble. It was why she should’ve never agreed to come with them, never forced herself on them.
But she just couldn’t fight her draw to Dean. She couldn’t fight what giving him a second chance might mean. She told herself it was just friendship but there was always more with them, there always would be. Maybe there always had been and they’d just never noticed. John had certainly seemed to think so, to think that her presence was a threat.
Maybe it was. And maybe it was always going to end this way. Like it was their destiny somehow.
Because there had always been something in her gut telling her it wouldn’t last she just didn’t know what it was. But they hadn’t. They hadn’t made it longer than a grand total of three weeks.
Three weeks together. Three weeks of normal.
Three weeks before Sam had been wrenched from them, before they’d found him in that godforsaken ghost town.
And yet that moment had felt like three years.
They had no idea what had gone down there, but Lainey had known it wasn’t good, even as Sam hobbled towards them seemingly unscathed. She’d known it from the moment Noah appeared behind him, before she’d even seen the knife. She’d known it from the raw, jagged pain in Dean’s voice and the way her legs burned as she chased after her brother uselessly through the mud and trees as Dean’s faded away.
Afterward, it wasn’t the eeriness that got to her. It wasn’t the way her feet froze in her boots or the cold, heavy mud. It wasn’t the darkness that shrouded her, making the walk back to town a nightmare to navigate. It wasn’t even the sinister creak of the trees.
It was the silence that hit her when she stepped out of them. It was the way Dean’s frantic muttering faded to nothing once the life finally left his brother turning to ragged tears as Sam hung limp in his arms. It made her unable to speak, unable to move, her legs just stuck in the mud as she watched Dean and Bobby haul him into the house, bloody and still, his eyes closed like he was merely sleeping though she knew he wasn’t.
She couldn’t say anything because nothing she could say would fix it. Because she knew there was nothing Dean would want to hear, not from her, not from anyone. She could see it in his face.
She knew then she’d lost more than just Sam.
And it was her fault.
Because he’d been right. Not to trust Noah, not to believe him and yet still she had chased the chance of having some part of her mom back. She had hurt them by chasing some pipe-dream when she had all she needed right there. She had put Sam in harm’s way when they hadn’t told him about the journal.
It was her fault he was dead.
Sam.
Poor sweet Sam. Her little shadow, her first proper friend. The boy who’d babbled her ear off from the moment they met at Bobby’s. The kid who included her in games of tag and held his headphones between them in the backseat of the Impala so they could both listen to something other than John’s tired classic rock collection. The teenager who had been inspired by her own defiance to find his own path outside of hunting and the life. The man who’d not had long enough, in any world not just a normal one.
The boy who meant everything to his brother.
Dean.
As another round of tears slipped down her face she brushed them away, trying not to lose it. He hadn’t spoken since they’d laid him out. Hadn’t moved anything but the bottle of whiskey to his lips. She’d only been able to take so much silence before she’d fled to the other room, allowing her tears to fall where he couldn’t see.
But it didn’t matter. Because the truth was she knew there was no getting over this. That she could fuss over him or leave him be and there was nothing that would fix him. He’d never be the same.
They’d never be the same.
As the door creaked open, she brushed her face again, sniffing back whatever else was lingering as Bobby came through the door with a bucket of the colonel’s finest in hand. She moved closer, taking it from him so she had something to do as he took his coat off, the dusting of rain hitting the old wood floor in thick splodges.
‘How is he?’ he said, low enough his voice wouldn’t travel around the wall Dean was hidden behind. Lainey didn’t say anything, but her face was enough of an answer. Bobby sighed.
‘And you?’ he asked.
‘I’m gonna see if he wants something to eat,’ was all she said, placing the bucket back in his hands as she walked through to the other room. It was a fight to keep her breathing in check, the sight of Sam pale and gaunt making bile rise in her throat. Instead she focused on Dean who was leaning against the door, barely propped up due to the sag of his shoulders and the weight of the bottle of whiskey still glued to his hand like it had been since they’d been in here.
‘Dean?’ she said quietly, her hand reaching out but never landing as though it couldn’t break through the tension rolling off him the moment she spoke. Instead she tucked it under her folded arms, shifting her weight to her back foot awkwardly as she continued, ‘um, Bobby brought food.’
‘No thanks,’ he said, not looking back at her, ‘I’m fine.’
‘Honey you need to eat something,’ she said quietly.
‘I said I’m fine,’ he snapped, finally turning though he did so by pushing past her and taking a swig of whiskey.
‘Hey,’ Bobby warned, stepping closer as he watched Lainey shrink back, her hand rubbing her shoulder when she thought neither of them could see, ‘she’s right y’know.’
‘Whatever,’ Dean grunted, taking a seat and another drink. Bobby sighed, edging closer and throwing the bucket of chicken on the table, his voice as soft as the gruff old hunter could make it as he said, ‘look Dean…I hate to bring this up I really do. But don't you think maybe it's time... we bury Sam?’
He finally looked up then, his eyes cold and empty though his tone was dark, anger wrapped around one little word so tight it barely made it out as he decreed, ‘no.’
‘Dean,’ Lainey pleaded.
‘What?’ he said calmly, finally conceding to looking at her, ‘you want to what? Torch his corpse? Build a damn pyre?’
‘No, of course not,’ she said, finally moving to him, her hand clinging to his shirt collar and finding it was full of grime and blood. None of that bothered her though, the look on his face did. It made her eyes pleading, ‘but we can’t stay here forever.…come home with us. With me.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said, the anger pushing him to his feet. Lainey didn’t flinch.
‘Dean please,’ she begged.
‘Would you cut me some slack?’ he snapped, pushing her away so he could take another swig. Lainey turned away, trying to pretend like she wasn’t crying. Like if she could make herself smaller somehow it’d hurt him less.
‘Look Lainey’s right. You shouldn’t be alone. And I gotta admit, we could use your help,’ Bobby said, earning himself a scoff which he ignored, ‘something big is going down – end-of-the world big.’
‘Well, then let it end!’ Dean yelled. That was enough to make Lainey whip around, her blood like ice in her veins as she whispered, ‘you don’t mean that.’
‘You don't think so? Huh? You don't think I've given enough? You don't think I've paid enough?’ he sneered, leaning in so close his whiskey-soaked breath was hot on her face, ‘I'm done with it. All of it. And if you know what's good for you, you'd turn around and get the hell out of here.’
‘Dean,’ she whispered.
‘Go!’ he said, shoving her back and only seeming to come to his senses when she bounced against Bobby making the older man square his shoulders like he was about to do something he’d regret. Dean softened then, when he saw the hurt in her eyes, and how she went perfectly still. But he couldn’t make himself move. He couldn’t hold her like he probably should’ve. It all hurt too much. Everything hurt, everything felt broken.
‘I'm sorry,’ he whispered, his voice finally breaking, ‘I'm sorry. Please... just go.’
Lainey didn’t say anything, she just fled making the door slam shut behind her. She didn’t breathe until she was outside, the frigid air like fire in her lungs as the tears spilled over. Silent but there. It wasn’t dramatic, it wasn’t overt. If anyone were watching they wouldn’t even know she was crying but Bobby did. And he knew what to do as he held onto her tight enough to steer her into his car. He knew to leave her, the radio off and just the chug of the engine backing that never ending silence between them as she cried silent and scared like she had when she was just a kid with a skinned knee and a sprained wrist. And it still scared him just as much.
It was probably why he tried to offer his own reassurances, his voice filled with fake optimism as they passed through the gates of the salvage yard, his hand warm on her knee as he assured, ‘just give him a couple of days. He’ll come around.’
‘No,’ she whispered, her face grave and knowing, ‘he won’t.’
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Silence. That was what Bobby lived with since Lainey had been on the road. No singing coming from the kitchen as she washed dishes. No hollered conversations from wherever she was in the house when she had a question instead of just getting to her damn feet to come ask him. No teasing him for being grumpy or laughing with one of those idjit boys in a way that made him huff at her to knock it off before he saw his breakfast again. But he’d gotten used to that.
When she’d first moved out it had been worse, more dramatic of a change since he’d become accustomed to having someone else around the place. When she’d gone off hunting with that asshat of a boyfriend and then on her own it was better because she came back more than she did when she was hunting with Dean. He should’ve known that first time that there was more to them than a couple hunters working well together. He should’ve known that she was destined to follow him out that door again when they’d showed up bruised and broken like something that needed fixing.
After all, she never could resist a project. A sink full of dishes. A room needing painting. Him, when he let her though as he always told himself she only ever changed things he wanted to. Like how he wanted to take his blood pressure pills he just forgot to refill them. Or that he liked eating healthy he just didn’t always have time between damn hunters calling for him for something they could look up their damn selves. That he liked being softer, nicer. Like he had been with Karen. Like he was with her.
He’d only stopped because it hurt so damn much. Being gruffer, meaner, and a right old son of a bitch made it hurt a little less. Maybe if he hadn’t let her worm her way into his life it would hurt less now. Maybe this silence would be more palatable. Because this wasn’t just grief. It was the anticipation of what was to come. Of what she was yet to lose.
She hadn’t spoken a word since they’d gotten back. In fact he hadn’t seen her since they had, with her disappearing into her room the minute they touched down at home. He wasn't sure if she had eaten, hell, he wasn't even certain she'd gone to the bathroom. When she appeared at his study doors eyeing the windows like they owed her money he realised that she hadn’t even gotten herself washed properly. Makeup was a whole headache they’d both gone through in her early teens but by now he’d become accustomed to it. Just like he had the silence. Creams and potions that he needed to remortgage to finance now lived on his bathroom sink. Pink razors now sat on his bathtub beside his trusty old Gillette. He now had to field questions about whether he liked her new boots or what he thought of her freshly painted nails - like he knew the difference from the old ones. Fortunately being married before had skilled him in the art of agreeing and asking a vague enough question that hinted that sure, he remembered that last time they’d been pearlescent blue instead of the hot pink she’d opted for this time. But he’d take all that over a bare face.
A bare face meant she wasn’t trying, that she was too down to put on a show even for him. And that was worse than the silence.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked. It had been a moment of just watching her, trying to figure out what she was up to. She hadn’t spoken, hadn’t even looked at him like she didn’t even know or care that he was there. She’d just bounced across the room and hauled herself up on the couch, bare feet balancing precariously on the tops of the now sagging cushions as she reached for the curtain rail above her.
‘These curtains need washing,’ she muttered.
‘What?’ Bobby asked, unable to fathom how a couple of dingy drapes were a priority given that the world was after offing itself and there weren’t many players lining up to bat.
‘They’re filthy,’ she grunted as she teetered away from finial at the end of the rod as the cushion sagged against her weight.
‘So?’
‘So they need cleaning,’ she said, huffing as she finally got it off with one hand gripping tight to the dusty red fabric as the heavy wooden ball clattered onto the floor and out of reach under the couch.
‘Lainey they’re fine,’ Bobby sighed, moving from behind his desk to try and stop whatever this was. She didn’t look at him, she just kept tugging the rings further across the pole even though she couldn’t quite reach, the end of the couch not quite flush enough with the wall to give her purchase. If she kept going she’d hurt herself, though that wasn’t what he was worried about even if he said, ‘get down would ya? You’ll do yourself an injury.’
‘Then help me,’ she snapped, grunting once more when one of the rings snagged on the pole.
‘Bug,’ he said, his hand resting on her hip to steady her. She stopped then, looking down on him with tears brimming in her eyes as she said, ‘I just need to fix them.’
‘Sweetheart,’ he said sadly. Lainey shook her head.
‘I-if I can wash and fix them…they…I need-’ but her words were broken by sobs, whatever she was trying to push down flowing over anyway.
‘Okay, okay we can wash the curtains. It’s fine,’ he said, allowing her to collapse into him, her tears streaming against his neck as they stood there, unsteadily pressed together over the couch with dusty old curtains half hanging off in a waterfall of red fabric beside them.
‘I’m s-sorry,’ she sobbed.
‘Don’t be,’ Bobby said, his eyes closing as he tried to blink back his own tears though they gathered in his throat, making it slick as he mumbled, ‘I’ll get ‘em down okay? You just take a minute…’
‘Okay…’ she whispered, allowing him to decant her softly onto the sofa whilst he tried to think of how best to get the rest down.
Of course sitting still had been too much to ask for. His back was already aching by the time she’d disappeared into the kitchen, only reappearing once he was done to shove them in the laundry basket with an array of towels and throw pillow slips from the other rooms. Then she headed outside to the washing machine, hoping the rhythmic work of soaking stuff in the outside sink would distract her. And it did, for a while. The cold water and the persistent spring chill in the air at this time of the morning made her hands numb to distraction. Rain hammered on the tin roof making it hard to hear her thoughts as loud as they were.
The only thing that stopped her from the monotony of washing was when she finally got to the bottom of the laundry basket and found the thing that had kicked off the entire curtain stripping debacle.
She had tried to sleep, somewhere between crying and checking her phone, but it had been too hard because her sheets smelled like Dean. And yet being in them felt nothing like when they’d last lain there together, listening to the sounds of the house coming to life around them, his fingers leaving marks on her skin if she dared to move an inch away though she’d protested they should be getting up. Now they just felt cold. Empty and detached, just like he had been with her when he shoved her and told her to leave.
So she’d stripped them, stuffed them in her hamper and gone on the hunt for anything else she could get her hands on. Bobby's were next and then all the towels from the bathroom. She’d only stopped when she’d come to the spare room. The boys room.
Sam’s room.
It wasn’t much of anything, just a couple of twin beds and a ratty old dresser ready for whoever rolled into town needing help. They hadn’t made it their home the way she had hers, but it was still like he’d left it. Bed made and pillows straightened like John had always drummed into them. The books he’d been reading stacked neatly on his nightstand, earmarked for when they next swung by. An old flannel hung on the door handle that he’d evidently forgotten about. As she picked it up she found that it still smelled like him. Like the new detergent she’d swapped them to and the whiff the shampoo she was now sharing with him, without telling Dean because he had no self-control not to use the entire bottle even when he was the one who needed it the least.
Clean. Calm. Sam.
It had taken her ten minutes to stop crying into it and all but two seconds to abandon the idea of washing anything from in there. Instead she’d had to scour for something she could fix. Something she could clean without washing away a memory. And curtains felt more manageable especially once they’d covered up the flannel now looking up at her from the bottom of the basket.
She pulled it out and held it, her thumb tracing over the button that was hanging loose by the neck. It needed mending, she thought, her mind already trying to remember where the sewing kit was. Somewhere in the kitchen or maybe in Bobby’s study. She was contemplating the face he’d pull when she disturbed whatever he was doing once more to look for it but then the realization set it. She didn’t need to. There was no point. The shirt probably wouldn’t be used again even if she did. So she placed it back in the basket and pushed the idea away, forcing herself to put her attention back on the things she could change. By now everything else was ready for the dryer so she swapped them over and pulled the freshly washed curtains from the pile so they could air dry hung up in the study. Bobby would grumble about having to put them back up there, but he’d do it anyway if it meant no more tears. In front of him at least.
That was what she was focused on as she trudged back to the house. She rehearsed her lines in her head, trying to make sure her voice was steady for when she asked him. She was so lost in practicing that she didn’t even notice the Impala parked up around the side of the house. She didn’t even realize there was anyone else there until she opened the back door and heard Dean’s voice wafting through from the other room, low and less raw than it had been the last time she’d heard it. Lainey braced herself, shutting the door quietly behind her before she moved towards the study. But she wasn’t prepared for what met her.
‘Hey,’ Sam smiled, turning immediately as she came in.
‘Sam,’ she breathed, unable to get her brain to focus on anything other than the man in front of her. He looked peaky, pale and worn out, and he was still in the same get up he had been when they’d left yesterday with blood dousing the back of his jacket and mud clinging to his boots. But he was up. Moving around. Alive.
‘If you’re doing laundry I’ve got a couple of pieces for you,’ he smiled, gesturing to his jacket. Lainey hesitated, unable to pull her eyes off him to respond in any manner that felt natural.
‘Yeah, um…yeah I was just doing the curtains,’ she breathed, her gaze moving past him to Bobby’s solemn face and then to Dean. Dean’s expression was just as haunted as it had been before, but the flavour of it had changed. It wasn't about the loss anymore; it was about whatever stupid thing he’d done to fix it. And it was begging her to play along. To go with whatever lie or scheme he’d cooked up to convince Sam everything was alright. Or at least that was what she assumed from the way Sam was looking at her, concerned over just how quiet she was. In an effort to hide her face Lainey ditched the basket and thrust herself forward so she could hug him, her face buried in his chest as the scent she’d been chasing not five minutes ago now smushed against her nostrils although it was now interlaced with grime and grit. But he smelt the same. He was warm. Real. And taken aback, but not enough to keep him from wrapping his arms around her as he asked, ‘are you okay?’
‘Fine,’ she mumbled against his shirt, ‘you um… you look good.’
‘Yeah, thanks to yours and Bobby’s handiwork’ he said, pulling back to look at her with a soft innocent smile.
‘Always said he should’ve been a doctor,’ Lainey said, her joke weak but enough for Dean to lock onto, stealing focus from her shaky performance whether a mercy on her part or his she wasn’t sure.
‘I don’t think prescribing a fifth of whiskey and telling people to suck it up qualifies someone for a medical license,’ Dean joked, a ghost of a smirk playing on his lips until they locked eyes which made him shift, awkwardly pointing his gaze at Bobby who looked begrudging to be put on the spot when he said, ‘besides we need ya here right? He’s just been telling us about the omens he’s been seeing over in Wyoming.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, flicking a glance at Lainey before he added, ‘actually Bug, I know you’ve been busy but now the boys are here I was just wondering if you and Sam can take a look. Maybe catch something I’ve missed while Dean helps me lug some books in from the truck.’
‘Sure,’ Sam said, moving to the desk to look at what Bobby had been reading. Dean was hesitant, grumbling a yes as Bobby steered him outside. Lainey just watched them go, her heart heavy.
Something was wrong. Something was deeply and inexplicably wrong and she couldn’t even get into it because Sam called her name, snapping her from the haze with a, ‘so what do you know?’
‘What?’ she breathed, trying to get her thoughts to come into focus which was easier to do with Sam looking at her, a frown on his concerned face, ‘oh, uh, only what Bobby’s told you…he’s been looking into it, but um, I’ve not been feeling great.’
It wasn’t entirely a lie though Sam’s face didn’t look concerned anymore but bemused. It made her shift uncomfortably, nervously picking at her fingernails as she mumbled, ‘what?’
‘Only you could be up washing the curtains when you’re not feeling great,’ Sam said.
‘Oh, yeah...you know me,’ Lainey smiled weakly. She watched as he moved to sit down, perching on Bobby’s desk as she hovered by the door, like he couldn’t see every thought that flickered through her mind if she kept enough distance. But he could see everything, he wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t someone who would let something go so he pressed, gently but enough for her to know she wasn’t going to get out of it, ‘so, are you going to tell me what happened?’
‘What?’ Lainey asked.
‘I’m not stupid,’ he said, his eyes flicking to the door before he dropped his voice, ‘I know you and Dean had a fight.’
‘Right,’ Lainey breathed because of course that’s what he’d told him or he’d concluded it was the only thing that would’ve made her leave them behind and go with Bobby. Lainey moved closer, fiddling with the book on the table as she tried to ignore Sam’s worried gazed, ‘I mean we did…after Noah…he lost it. I mean, he went off the deep end, even for him…’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sam said. Lainey offered him a weak smile in return which made him hesitate, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly as he said, ‘Lainey about Noah…’
‘You don’t have to,’ she muttered, ‘I know I was wrong. He’s bad, right?’
‘Has been for a while… yellow eyes, he took him to punish your dad. He raised him,’ Sam said flatly, watching as her brown eyes, similar to the ones he’d almost choked the life out of look back at him. It was why he’d let him go, after everything he’d done. He hadn’t wanted to hurt Lainey or at least that was what he’d told himself. But when he’d had his hands on Noah’s windpipe, feeling it bruise and crunch beneath him he’d been reminded of his dad. His dad who had seen been scared of Sam becoming like these kids, like Max or Ansem or Noah. It was the fate he'd feared. But Sam wasn’t like them. He wasn’t a killer.
‘It was him Lainey,’ Sam said thickly, ‘he killed your dad…I’m sorry.’
‘I guess I should’ve known it wasn’t right. For him to just pop up now,’ she murmured, ‘but why go after me? Why even try?’
‘Honestly? I think it was me he was after. This whole pin us against one another schtick the demon had going. He saw me as competition and the easiest way-’
‘Was to play me,’ she said, cursing herself for being so needy, her mind instantly flicking to the journal pages and Dean’s desperation for Sam not to feel like a monster. If only he had been more ruthless, like John, she wondered if that would’ve changed anything.
‘It’s not your fault Lainey,’ Sam promised.
‘It was stupid for believing I could ever have anything like that,’ she said, finally looking up at him, her eyes sad.
‘It’s not,’ he promised, placing his hand on her shoulder which seemed to be the thing to break her, her chin wobbling as she tried to stuff down whatever threatened to spill out of her. Sam didn’t say anything, he just pulled her closer and wrapped his arms tight around her.
‘What’s going on?’ Dean’s voice echoed from the kitchen, forcing them to break apart. He was watching from the doorway, his eyes as red as Lainey’s but more panicked though he only looked at her for a second before he flitted them up to Sam.
‘I was just telling her about Noah,’ Sam said, his voice firm as though he was begging Dean not to start anything. Dean deflated in relief, whatever lie he’d spun about their fight evidently having left his mind as he muttered, ‘oh yeah…right.’
Lainey felt herself deflate too, the notion of reckless stupidity reinforced by his refusal to look at her and Bobby’s graveness as he came into the kitchen. The only thing that distracted her was a flash of brown hair and a familiar smile as she realised who had come in behind him.
‘Ellen,’ she breathed, rushing over to hug the woman and clinging tighter than she ought to though she supposed that was due to it being the only good piece of news she was likely to receive today. She hadn’t even delved into her grief for her friends, for Ash. For Jo living without a mother after spending most of her time pushing her away like they’d warned her not to. It was hard to find time to fit it all in. And, she had found, harder to push those feelings away like she once had. Like once she’d started to dig down and acknowledge them there was no letting them go, even if she didn’t have time to sit in it.
‘Hey kiddo,’ Ellen greeted, pushing back to hold her by her face in a motherly way that Lainey wasn’t accustomed to, which was probably why her voice shook as she said, ‘we thought you were-’
‘Honey it takes a lot more than a demon to take me down,’ Ellen promised, patting her cheek as Bobby shoved past them, grunting, ‘yeah well if it’s all the same I’d like to get on with taking them down before they have a chance to do anything else.’
They disbanded then, following him into the study in that soldier-like way hunters moved. Bobby started listing everything that had been happening, encouraging them to circle around his desk to show what he’d found with Ellen taking the helm a second later, going over what Ash had been going on about before the demons had gotten to the Roadhouse.
And Lainey tried to focus, she honestly did. But it was hard to do with Dean right beside her. She could feel him watching her, pretending that he wasn’t any time she shifted or asked a question. But she couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t meet his eye. Because when she did there’d be no hiding from it, whatever it was that he’d done. She could see it in the sad way Bobby kept looking at her. At how every time someone spoke to Sam he tensed, like whatever house of cards he’d built was likely to be blown down with one rogue word. She felt it in the way his hand danced next to hers, fingers reaching but hesitant until he shoved them in his pockets which was somehow worse.
Still she followed the gist of it. Demons flocking to one area in Wyoming and kept at bay by the world’s biggest devils trap built by Samuel Colt. She had to admit it was a work of art even if they still didn’t know what it was keeping out even as Bobby pointed out, they were trying.
‘Why?’ Ellen asked, ‘what’s inside?’
‘That’s what I’ve been looking at,’ Sam said, pointing to the dead centre of the map, ‘and, uh, there's nothing except an old cowboy cemetery right in the middle.’
‘Well what's so important about a cemetery or... what's Colt trying to protect?’ Dean asked.
‘Unless,’ Lainey said, the recurrent sinking feeling she’d become so used to rearing it’s head again.
‘Unless what?’ Bobby frowned.
‘What if he wasn’t trying to keep demons out?’ she asked, ‘what if he was trying to keep something in?’
‘Now that's a comforting thought,’ Ellen huffed.
‘Yeah, you think?’ Dean said, his voice sarcastic but warmer that she’d heard it in days. It made her break her fighting, their eyes meeting for a second before she looked away, fixing her gaze on Bobby as she asked, ‘could they do it Bobby? Could they get inside?’
‘This thing's so powerful, you'd practically need an A-bomb to destroy it,’ Bobby sighed, ‘no way a full-blood demon gets across.’
‘No,’ Sam said, his face serious as something dawned on him, ‘but I know who could.’
It was all systems go after that. Books and maps were bundled up; weapons were checked, double-checked, and loaded. Lainey kept herself moving, never settling, and circling the room like a shark because she was afraid that stopping might put her right in Dean’s path. She only stopped when she went upstairs to change, finding Sam standing at the bathroom mirror dressed in a fresh t-shirt and jeans.
‘Hey,’ he said, as he spotted her in the reflection of the bathroom mirror, hovering in the doorway.
‘Hey,’ she said quietly.
‘Are we about ready to head out?’ he asked.
‘Think so…I’m just gonna throw something more substantial on,’ she said, gesturing down to the old sweatpants and tank top she’d donned since all her clothes were buried somewhere in the Impala’s trunk.
‘You know we don’t have time for a full beat,’ he joked, trying to lighten the heavy air.
‘Oh honey there’s always time for a full beat,’ she replied. She managed a smile, but it didn't reach her eyes and the expression flickered out completely when Dean appeared. He watched as she shifted to the other side of the door frame, her eyes dropping to the floor as he cleared his throat awkwardly.
‘Trunks packed,’ Dean mumbled, his voice tight.
‘Coming,’ Sam said.
‘I’ve just gotta get changed,’ Lainey said, fixing her gaze on Sam as she said, ‘there’s a spare flannel in the laundry basket downstairs. You should use it, it’s chilly.’
‘Thanks,’ Sam said.
Lainey nodded and moved away, heading into her room. Dean watched her go and then after a silent, pointed look from his brother, he followed. She was rifling through her drawers when he entered, but she looked up for a second though she knew who it was. Dean watched as she pulled things out, throwing them angrily back inside when it wasn’t something she wanted.
‘We’re um, almost ready to roll,’ Dean started, wincing as she slammed a drawer shut, ‘are you…I mean are you ready…’
Lainey didn’t say anything, she just pulled an old t-shirt from and a pair of jeans that had seen better days from the drawers and moved away from him, her back to him as she stripped the tank top off. Dean watched as she yanked the t-shirt on, shimmying down her bottoms and underwear in one fell swoop, still not looking at him as she grabbed a pair of panties from her dresser. They were slightly tight, ones that had long since been relegated to house only status, to be used on the day before laundry day. Dean watched as she pulled them up, soft light blue cotton resting against toned tanned skin, the lacy edge dancing across the small flower tattoo she had and above the hem of her jeans as she hiked them on a second after. A few days ago that would’ve been enough to delay their departure by at least another twenty minutes. Now she wouldn’t even look at him.
‘Lainey,’ he said, his voice thick and rough, ‘baby…please look at me.’
‘Why should I?’ she snapped, finally whirling around, her jaw tight and her eyes glossy. Dean swallowed hard.
‘Are you gonna tell me you haven’t done something stupid?’ she demanded.
‘I had to,’ he breathed.
‘Yeah right,’ she huffed, moving to get past him but he blocked her path. His eyes were rueful, filled with a guilt he couldn't hide. And though he knew he had no right to ask this of her, not after what he’d just done, the words tumbled out anyway.
‘You can’t tell him,’ he said, more of a plea than a demand. Lainey gnawed on her lip, ‘baby please.’
‘You really think keeping secrets is the way to go this time?’ she asked. When he didn’t answer she sighed and huffed, ‘I’ll ride with Bobby and Ellen.’
And then before Dean could answer she was gone, leaving him alone to brush the tears that spilled over from his cheeks.
┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄
Lainey was never much of a smoker. Naturally she’d done a stint in high school, when it was that or look like a loser, but hanging out on the roof in South Dakotan winters and spraying her fingers with Victoria’s Secrets Love Spell so Bobby never caught her had gotten old quick. And sure every so often she got so drunk that she found herself flirting a smoke off of whoever was free to give it. But in the back of her mind it always reminded her of him. How her nose would wrinkle when he’d get too close, the smell of stale Marlboro Red’s baked into the leather of his jacket. How he’d tell her the only time her mother looked ugly was when she was sucking on a cigarette. How it would feel when the poker hot tip brushed against her skin, never deliberate and always packaged with a roll of his eyes and the caveat that he didn’t mean it, and that she was being dramatic.
But that first buzz? That first whoosh of nicotine hitting her system? Sometimes it was the only thing that worked.
As she blew a puff of smoke through her lips, allowing it to swirl around her in the crisp night air, she closed her eyes and let the flashes of the last twenty-four hours wash over her.
Sam. Pale, cold, and lifeless. And then… alive. Back from the dead. Warm and real.
Noah. Just as cold and lifeless now. She felt the guilt churn in her gut again, remembering how he’d thanked her for helping him take out the competition. How Sam had been too loyal to her to snuff him out, just like their dad had refused to kill him. How he was thankful Sam didn’t have the stones John did. John, who had shot her father in the head just to finish the job Noah had started at just fifteen. How he’d looked just like her father when he’d grown angry - ranting about yellow eyes and about how he should’ve been the favourite. How he’d proven his worth time and time again only for Sam to come out on top. How Sam must’ve been eviler than any of them gave him credit for. In the end she didn’t know whose bullet had taken him out, hers or Sam’s, but how cold Sam had looked when he’d kept shooting, leaving no room for error, no room for mercy, had made her feel sick.
And of course after the carnage and despair she thought about how she’d finally met him, the man who’d ruined their families. Yellow Eyes. She’d watched him confirm how he still had, even if they’d managed to kill him seeing as his offer of one year was paltry to say the least. And to her surprise she thought fondly of how she had John Winchester to thank for giving her that year, coming through for his boys one last time.
She’d given them space on the ride back given that Sam’s anger was likely to come out as a million questions that she didn’t want to digest just yet. Fortunately for her Bobby and Ellen had been quiet, murmuring to each other on occasion from the front seat at a frequency she either couldn’t hear or had deliberately tuned out.
And then she’d just hidden. Tucked herself away in the cab of her truck, nipping on a bottle of whiskey and working her way through a pack of Virginia Slims until she felt better, though she doubted that was a task not even fifty packs could combat. Still as the temperature started to dip she felt the cold sinking into her bones. She was far enough away from the house she that the rumble of the engine likely wouldn’t wake anyone, not that she expected any of them would be getting much sleep tonight, but she decided to head inside anyway. The cab door let out a loud, metallic squeak as she climbed out and she went dizzy as the nicotine and booze finally hit her system, shook up by the frigid night air. It meant she had to grip onto her side mirror when she dropped the still burning butt to the concrete, pressing it out with a fizzling hiss as it touched the damp underside of her boot.
‘You know you should put some oil on that hinge,’ Dean’s voice cut clear through the haze from behind her, hesitant but trying to sound as cocky and self-assured as always, ‘otherwise it’ll rust if it’s just sittin’ out here in all weathers.’
‘I usually have a man for that,’ she said, after taking a minute before she turned to face him. He was standing by the garage door, back lit by the low moonlight and the soft, silver glow that came from the rain as it bounced down behind him.
As he stepped in, she stepped back. She didn’t know where she was going, only that moving forward felt like it would hurt too much. When he told her the truth, when she heard it from the horse’s mouth and it made everything real. Dean looked wounded but like he understood all the same, dropping his gaze to the floor the way she used to whenever her dad would lay into her. But he was braver than her, though his words came out shaky, and with a clearing of his throat, ‘you know if you wanted out of this…us…I’d get it.’
‘What?’ she breathed, her head still foggy and her heart still aching just from hearing his voice. Dean shifted, his eyes heavy with guilt as he replied, ‘if this is…I’d get it. If you wanted to leave me, I deserve it.’
‘You really think I’d do that?’ she said, her sadness flared into sudden anger.
‘Lainey I ain’t exactly held up my end of the deal here,’ he said, making her brows knit together in confusion, ‘I promised I wouldn’t hurt you. I’m just saying I’d get it if you hated me.’
‘You think I hate you?’ she asked, disbelief pulling her forward. She searched his face, looking for the joke she knew wasn't there.
‘You’re angry,’ Dean said plainly.
‘I’m furious,’ she corrected, moving to meet him, ‘and I do hate.’
Dean’s jaw tightened as their gazes locked.
‘I hate that this happened,’ she said, her voice trembling, ‘I hate that Noah put us in this situation. I hate that after everything you said about your dad, you thought this was the only way out.’
‘Lainey,’ he breathed.
‘I hate how it makes me feel about Sam,’ she said. She was close enough now that she could touch him, her fists grabbing hold of his overshirt, ‘I know it’s not his fault but I’m so angry…’
‘I hate how much it hurts,’ she whispered, tears falling down her cheeks, ‘I hate that I can feel every single second passing…a year…it isn’t long enough…and I-’
‘I know, I know,’ Dean said, pulling her closer as her tears turned to sobs, heavy and guttural deep against his chest. She collapsed against him, her weight forcing him down until they slid to the ground together. She curled into his lap, his back pressed against the wheel of her truck, his cheek buried in her hair as he let her cry. Let himself shed the tears he’d been choking back for Sam’s sake.
‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could mumble, time and time again, with every murmur or hiccup that broke his heart in a thousand different ways. He didn’t know how long they sat there but he didn’t care. Having a frozen ass and pink cheeks was a small price to pay for everything he was putting her through.
‘What?’ he mumbled when he heard her say something against his chest. She’d stopped crying a while ago, though her breathing was still deep and uneven, but her fingers still played with his amulet signalling that she’d not worn herself out. But he’d zoned out a little, content that she was with him. That she hadn’t sent him packing like she should have.
‘I said, do you want to know what I hate the most?’ she said, her voice shaky. Dean didn’t answer, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know but he helped her move herself back, big brown eyes looking up at him as he wiped the tears from underneath them, ‘I hate that I always knew it’d be like this…if it came down to it.’
‘Lainey he’s my brother,’ Dean said, a sentiment that sounded hollower every time he offered it, ‘it’s my job I gotta-’
‘I know…I just hate that you feel that way,’ she whispered, moving her hand to his cheek and allowing him to sink into it. Her hands were cold against his skin, and he hadn’t shaved in at least a couple of days, so his stubble was rough against her fingers and yet, it felt like the softest thing he’d ever known. Pure and undeserved.
‘M’sorry,’ he whispered, ‘but it’s Sam Lainey.’
‘I know,’ she murmured, taking a shaky breath, ‘but what about you?’
‘Baby,’ he sighed, closing his eyes as if not seeing her would make her words hurt any less. It didn’t. They tore into him like little daggers, burying themselves beside the ones Bobby and Sam had thrown at him earlier. But at least they’d been angry. That was better than this. Soft and pleading. He could convince himself he wasn’t needed by them. But the way she clung to him made it feel worse.
‘You don’t deserve this,’ she said, unable to stop herself from sounding whiny, ‘it’s not fair.’
‘I had to,’ Dean said, opening his eyes to find her watching him. Even heartbroken she was still the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. He moved his hand pushing her bangs out her face to keep his focus.
‘We were just getting started,’ she whispered. Dean swallowed thickly.
‘You’re gonna be okay,’ he promised.
‘Yeah right,’ she huffed.
‘You are,’ he said, ‘both of you. You don’t need me.’
‘Dean-’
‘You don’t,’ he vowed, ‘Sammy, he’s always been his own person. He’s whip smart, better than a damn hunter that’s for sure. He could be something, a lawyer, doctor, whatever. And now Yellow Eyes is dead he could get out for good. Be normal. Find a girl so outta his league you’ll have to promise me you’ll tease him every day for the rest of his life...'
As she breathed an uneasy laugh he smiled, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear as he carried on, 'he could get married. Have a bunch of nerdy, snot-nosed rugrats running around…’
‘Oh yeah?’ she challenged, ‘and what about me? Where do I fall in the Dean Winchester master plan?’
‘You’ll take that journal and all the shit that I’ve put you through and you’ll write some damn good songs. I reckon you could write a hit album with all that,’ he said, bumping his finger along her chin as he teased her, ‘you could meet someone else. A normal guy, one who doesn’t hurt you like this…and you could have the prettiest damn babies you’ve ever seen. And they will be because they’re yours-’
‘I can’t,’ she whispered, tears brimming as she grabbed hold of his shirt once more, the way he talked so casually about not being around making a pain stab through her heart that she needed to cling on to him to breathe through. To make sure he wasn’t already gone.
‘You can,’ he promised, ‘you can because you have to. I can’t do this without knowing you two are okay.’
‘You just think we’ll get over it?’ she whispered.
‘You will.’
‘Dean there is no getting over you. For either of us,’ she said. She couldn't tell if it was the loss that hurt more, or his refusal to believe that his life meant enough to stay, ‘do you really think we don’t love you the way you love us? That Sam and I won’t do everything we can to stop this-’
‘You can’t,’ Dean said, suddenly becoming more serious.
‘I’m not gonna sit around and let you die,’ she said.
‘You have to,’ he said, cutting her off before she could protest, ‘baby if I wiggle out of this deal, Sam’s dead. You have to promise me you won’t do anything to change that.’
‘He won’t let it go,’ she said, knowing she wouldn’t either.
‘Then you have to make him,’ Dean said firmly.
‘No.’
‘Lainey.’
‘No,’ she vowed.
‘Baby please,’ he pleaded, gripping her face and boring his eyes into hers, ‘promise me?’
‘I thought we were lousy at promises,’ she said, her joke weak and trembling. Dean sighed a laugh, pulling her to him and tucking her under his chin. She was quiet for a beat before she whispered, ‘I promise.’
‘Thank you,’ Dean said, breathing a sigh of relief. Sam had already told him that he wasn’t going to make this easy, that he’d find a way to get him out of it. But there was no getting out of it, and he’d need Lainey to help him see that. Because she was stronger than them, than him. He knew it was selfish. That he was a hypocrite. But they could live without him, he was sure.
‘Did you really only get a year?’ she asked after a moment, snapping him from his thoughts.
‘Yeah,’ he said sadly.
‘It’s a damn lousy deal,’ she commented.
‘Yeah well, house always holds the cards. I didn’t have much to bargain with,’ he said. Nothing but desperation and whiskey at least.
‘It’s my fault,’ she said, so quietly he barely heard it. Dean grabbed her pushing her back so he could see her face as he asked, ‘what?’
‘If I’d have listened about Noah. If we’d have told him,’ she started.
‘Hey Sammy did pretty good on his own. And Noah had the upper hand with or without us telling Sam about the journal,’ Dean said, ‘if anything it was me who said no. It’s not on you-’
‘I wanted a brother,’ she reasoned, ‘I wanted my family so bad and it hurt yours-’
‘There is no mine and yours. Ours. Our family,’ Dean vowed, his thumb dancing along her cheek, ‘you’re not the one responsible for this.’
‘I should’ve stayed with you. I shouldn’t have left,’ she said.
‘I made you go, Lainey. Baby this isn’t your fault,’ he sighed.
‘Are we cursed?’ she whispered.
‘What?’ Dean frowned.
‘Our family. The way we keep coming together…it’s like something wants us together and for what? To hurt us this much? You said it yourself, we’ve given so much,’ she said.
‘I was talkin’ stupid,’ he said, his heart breaking at how defeated she sounded.
‘But-’
‘Lainey if something keeps bringing us together then it was because I needed something good in my life. And you are the only good thing I have ever had,’ he said, feeling the tears he thought he’d finally run dry of washing over him again, ‘and it kills me that I screwed it up. But baby…I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you. I promise.’
She watched him for a moment, quiet and thoughtful and then she leaned forward, brushing her lips against hers gently. Dean hadn’t expected it but as always, she seemed to know what he needed before he did. It was slow and melodic, like one of those songs she wrote about him but something he longed to hear again. They only broke apart when the rain stopped, encouraging the birds that had been hiding in the trees to come out and start their early morning chorus.
They both decided they should probably head inside after that. The house was quiet, everyone long since gone to bed or at least hidden away where they could have their thoughts in peace. Lainey only let go of his hand when they reached her room, to forage for pyjamas and a makeup wipe to wash away the tears and grime that had built up over the day whilst Dean kicked his jeans and his t-shirt off, climbing in and just watching her. In the end she didn’t bother finding something to wear. She just kicked off her jeans and climbed under the covers with him, nestling against his chest.
And they stayed quiet, the rhythmic beating of his heart enough for the moment until she looked up and found him watching her. Silent. Adoring.
Lainey shifted to kiss him, again just as gentle as she had been before. And then she moved, throwing her leg over the other side of him, her lips never leaving his as she rocked against him.
‘Lainey,’ he breathed as she pulled back, stripping her t-shirt off. He was going to tell her to stop, that they didn’t have to do this, but there was something in her eyes that he felt just the same. This wasn’t sex or want. This was need. Need to be close. A need to know he was there. He let her work after that, pulling him from his boxers and to her full attention within seconds. He watched how the cotton he’d not gotten the chance to marvel over this morning turned translucent before his eyes, dewy with adoration before she removed it altogether. He watched how she fit around him. How perfect she sounded when he hit that spot and made her eyes flutter closed. He marvelled at how goddamn pretty she was, sitting himself up so he could tell her just that, low and adoring as she rocked against him. He listened to the way her breath faltered when he touched her, full of encouragement and praise. How soft her lips felt against his, how she said his name like a prayer when she came. How she held him against her when he did, the slowing assured thump of her heart against his ear enough to soothe his racing one.
And he committed it to memory, because if he was going to hell, he was going to need a little memory of heaven to get him through.
┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄
If it's hellfire or streets of gold,
Don't know where I'm gonna go,
But if one thing I know, I believe,
Honey, you're the closest to Heaven,
That I'll ever be.
"hey toast you stayed up past midnight because you were working on the fic and not because you were procrastinating by making a hideous pattern for a joke cross stitch" have you never met a writer before
lowdown ☆ soldier boy spends the ride home pretending he’s not jealous. he lasts approximately three minutes after the van doors open.
ride or die ☆ soldier boy x reader ( f )
miles ☆ 4821 ride style ☆ smut !!
danger on the trail ☆ explicit sex, rough wall sex, blowjob, possessive behavior, hand over mouth, bruised knuckles, jealousy, soldier boy being demanding, unsafe levels of tension in a crowded safehouse
liv's log ☆ took us +55k words but we're finally going at it!!
𐚁 .ᐟ masterlist ☆ join the taglist ☆ listen to the playlist ☆ support my work ᢉ𐭩
the safehouse is loud before the van doors finish closing.
not the sharp, ugly kind of noise that follows somebody stumbling in with blood down their face or butcher dragging a new disaster over the threshold and calling it useful. this is different. relieved. restless. too many voices moving at once because the mission actually went well and nobody quite trusts that yet.
frenchie is talking before his shoes touch the floor, holding the black electroshock device up between two fingers with the pride of a man returning from war. “she performed beautifully,” he announces.
“you electrocuted the deep?”
hughie appears from the hallway so quickly he almost walks into annie. his hair’s messy, sweater sleeves pulled low over his wrists, eyes moving between frenchie, the duffel, you, and the very obvious red mark starting to rise across your knuckles.
“oui, petite hughie,” frenchie says.
“saw it with my own bloody eyes,” butcher confirms, entirely too pleased with himself for a man who spent the whole mission sitting inside the van at a safe distance. “fish boy’s probably still explainin’ himself to a seal.”
hughie blinks. “a seal?”
you barely have time to answer before annie catches your wrist carefully, turning your hand toward the kitchen light. “did you punch deep?”
“sadly, no,” you grin brightly. “some vought guy that was reaching for a radio. i’m saving kevin for a later time.”
annie gives you a look that says she’s too aware of your commitment to being difficult and is choosing not to rise to it. “sit down.”
“it’s fine.”
“sit.”
you sit at the edge of the couch because there’s no point pretending you’re going to win against annie when she uses that voice. the adrenaline is still buzzing beneath your skin, bright and uncomfortable, making your limbs feel lighter than they should. your knuckles throb when you flex them just enough to make the memory satisfying.
hips first. shoulder follows. fist last. clean hit. the vought employee went down hard enough that the clipboard flew out of his hand. you keep seeing it in quick, stupid flashes: the startled look on his face, frenchie’s grip closing around your arm, the two of you running while papers scattered across the dock and the deep twitched dramatically behind you.
no blood. nobody dead. nobody hurt enough that your brain has to crawl back into that warehouse and stay there for the night.
good mission.
annie disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a bag of ice wrapped inside a dish towel. you take it from her before she can press it against your hand herself. “i can manage.”
“clearly.”
hughie drops into the armchair opposite you, eyes wide with the kind of curiosity that makes him look almost boyish and innocent. “wait. go back. there was a seal?”
kimiko perches against the armrest beside him. frenchie settles near the table with the duffel, already dragging the stolen drive free while mm opens his laptop. butcher hovers behind them, cigarette tucked behind one ear, attention divided between whatever information they stole and the story he already heard through the comms but apparently intends to enjoy twice.
“the deep was giving relationship advice,” you say.
hughie’s face tightens. “to the seal?”
“yes.”
“about another seal?”
the question makes you tilt your head. “uh, i think so.”
“did it seem helpful?”
you look at frenchie. frenchie considers the question with grave seriousness. “the seal appeared emotionally resistant.”
“he brought fish to her cove after she asked for space,” you explain. “it was a boundary issue.”
annie’s mouth drops open slightly. “you’re kidding.”
“i wish i was.”
hughie stares at you for one silent second. then laughs. the sound catches you off guard badly enough that your own mouth moves before you can stop it. a small laugh slips out, then another when frenchie starts reenacting the deep’s expression with insulting accuracy, eyebrows pinched together in solemn marine concern.
the ice pack sweats against your knuckles. your shoulders loosen by a fraction.
you don’t look toward the hallway when heavier footsteps approach. soldier boy has been quiet since the van. you feel the shift in the room before you see him. the blunt weight of his attention.
frenchie is halfway through describing the snitch’s moustache in full detail when soldier boy appears near the living room entrance. he looks at you, jaw is tight enough to show beneath the rough shadow along it. his shoulders haven’t come down from the docks. something in his face still carries the same irritation he wore in the van, meaner now that there are walls around it and fewer immediate reasons to pretend it is only professional concern.
hughie follows your gaze and stops talking. annie looks over her shoulder. butcher, unfortunately, notices everything.
soldier boy grunts out a “need you.” that is it. not your name. not could i talk to you. not a glance toward the others suggesting privacy might be socially beneficial before announcing whatever this is. just need you, flat and direct, like he has already decided the rest.
you blink once. “right now?”
his eyes narrow slightly. “now.”
for one second, the room is so still you can hear the faint hum of mm’s laptop from the table. hughie looks down at his hands. frenchie turns toward the drive with sudden, passionate interest. mm doesn’t look up at all, which somehow makes his refusal to get involved more obvious. butcher’s mouth starts to curve around something deeply unhelpful.
annie takes the ice pack back from you slowly. “i’ll put this in the freezer.”
your face warms. “thank you.”
“mhm.”
soldier boy turns away before you stand. of course he does. apparently, the possibility that you might not follow has never occurred to him.
you catch butcher watching when you get up. his eyebrows lift by the smallest amount, cigarette still tucked behind his ear, expression rich with the private satisfaction of a man discovering a new form of leverage he absolutely doesn’t deserve.
you point at him as you pass. “don’t.”
“didn’t say anythin’, love.”
“your face did.”
“handsome face, that.”
“nightmare face.” he grins.
soldier boy is already halfway down the hall. he doesn’t take you to your bedroom. that would feel too familiar. too obvious after the nights he has spent there taking up your bed, complaining about your mattress, making himself at home in a place neither of you has been brave enough to call shared.
instead, he pushes open the door to the empty room near the back of the safehouse. plain walls. narrow bed. a chair shoved into one corner. a window with the blinds drawn against the afternoon light.
he steps inside. you follow. the door closes behind you with a quiet click.
you turn toward him. “well?”
soldier boy leans back against the door for half a second, eyes moving over you once. not the quick assessment from the van, searching for damage beneath the places another man touched. this is slower. your jacket. your shirt. the jeans sitting snug across your hips. your wrist where the deep grabbed you. your mouth.
“blue tide summer?” he says.
you stare at him. of all the ways this conversation could start, you should’ve known he’d choose the one most likely to make you consider violence. “are you serious?”
“dark blue wristband,” he continues, voice rough with disbelief. “little trident logo.”
you fold your arms. “you were listening very closely for someone who spent the entire mission pretending he didn’t care.”
“hard not to hear you giggling like an idiot through the comms.”
“i was distracting him.”
“you were having the time of your life.”
you laugh once, sharp and incredulous. “oh my god.”
“thirteen years ago and you still remember which fuckin’ color bracelet you wore.”
“i was fourteen.”
“fourteen-year-old you had shit taste.”
“fourteen-year-old me had limited options.”
“guy talks to seals.”
“he was helping a friend through a difficult breakup.”
soldier boy pushes away from the door. the movement is slow enough that you have time to register it. not enough time to decide what to do with your pulse when he crosses the room and stops in front of you. close but not touching. not yet.
“you think this is funny?” he asks.
you tilt your chin up. “a little.”
his mouth pulls to one side, but there is no real amusement in it. the frustration has followed him home intact, restless under his skin, searching for somewhere to go. “he had his hands all over you.”
“he touched my back.”
“grabbed your wrist.”
“for two seconds.”
“two too many.”
your chest tightens at the echo from the van. you shouldn’t enjoy this. the whole thing is absurd. the deep is not a threat to whatever strange, half-built thing exists between you and soldier boy. he’s barely a threat to himself near open water and an emotionally complicated seal.
but soldier boy looks furious anyway. not because he thinks you wanted the deep. because he hated watching someone else touch what he’s started thinking of as his before either of you have agreed to anything sensible.
you narrow your eyes. “you’re jealous.”
his stare turns flat. “of fish sticks?”
“you nearly climbed out of the van.” you breathe out through your nose, fighting a smile because smiling would only encourage him and apparently encouragement is no longer necessary. “you hated hearing me laugh with him.”
his jaw shifts. there it is. small. ugly. honest enough to be dangerous.
you wait.
he looks at your mouth when he answers. “i hated hearing him breathe near you.”
the room changes—no lightning strike, no sudden soft music—just a quiet loss of oxygen, your body reacting before your mind has the dignity to object.
soldier boy steps closer. the back of your shoulders meets the wall. the space between you disappears and leaves you with the blunt heat of his body crowded against yours. one hand’s braced beside your head, the other catches your waist. rough. familiar. possessive enough to make your stomach pull tight.
you breathe in. “you dragged me in here to complain?” his eyes stay on yours. “or are you planning to make a point?”
that does it. his mouth comes down on yours hard enough to knock the next breath out of you. you kiss him back immediately.
your fingers curl into the front of his shirt, pulling him closer even though closer has become largely theoretical. his hand tightens around your waist, dragging you flush against him. his mouth moves against yours with the same rough certainty it did the night before, except there’s nothing restrained about it now. no last-second thought. no mission waiting in the morning. no line he intends to respect simply because one of you might regret stepping over it too quickly.
the kiss turns filthy almost immediately. tongue, teeth, the rough scrape of his stubble against your skin when his mouth slips from yours and catches at the corner of your jaw. you tilt your head instinctively, giving him room, and his breath leaves him in a low sound that makes heat drag down your spine.
“fuck,” you whisper.
“getting there.”
you almost laugh. it dies when he bites lightly beneath your ear and your fingers tighten in his shirt. your bruised knuckles complain immediately.
his hand catches your wrist, dragging it away from his shoulder before you can put more weight against it. “quit using that hand.”
“i punched a man.”
“yeah.” his gaze drops briefly to your knuckles. something satisfied passes through his face. “saw.”
“and?”
his mouth finds yours again before he answers properly. “clean hit.”
the praise lands somewhere deep and embarrassingly tender beneath the heat. you don’t get time to examine it. soldier boy hooks your uninjured arm around his shoulders instead, positioning you the way he wants you, then catches both your hips and lifts.
you gasp against his mouth.
your back presses into the wall. your legs wrap around his waist on instinct, jeans pulling tight between your bodies while he settles you against him like your weight is nothing. his mouth drags down your throat. your head tips back against the plaster hard enough to make the blinds rattle faintly beside you.
“someone’s going to hear,” you whisper, though your body has apparently decided this isn’t a meaningful concern.
“then be quiet.”
his hand slides beneath the edge of your shirt. hot palm. rough fingers. skin against skin. the contact makes your whole body jolt. soldier boy’s mouth curves against your neck when he feels it, smugness finally slipping through the anger. he drags his hand upward slowly, learning the line of your waist and the soft warmth of your stomach with the same shameless entitlement he brings to everything else. his thumb presses into your side. his fingers spread wider.
“still laughing?” he asks near your ear.
“still jealous?”
his hand tightens. “careful.”
you know better than to ask. you do it anyway. “or what?”
his eyes lift to yours. green gone darker in the thin light coming through the blinds. his mouth is swollen slightly from kissing you. hair messy from your fingers. expression rough enough to make your pulse jump.
“you really need everything explained to you?” he asks.
you pull him down by the back of his neck and kiss him again instead. he makes a low, approving sound and drives his hips against you. the friction punches a moan out of your mouth before you can swallow it. soldier boy’s hand leaves your stomach and closes over your mouth. the movement is quick. firm enough to stop the sound dead against his palm while his eyes stay fixed on yours. your breath catches through your nose.
“you gonna be good for me, doll?” he murmurs, voice low and filthy near your ear.
your entire body goes hot. you glare at him.
his mouth twitches. “if only you were always this obedient.”
you bite lightly at the heel of his hand.
“brat,” he says, almost fond and not remotely soft.
his palm slips away just long enough for his mouth to take yours again, swallowing the smaller sound you make when he rolls his hips between your thighs. there’s no patience left in either of you. not after the night before. not after the dock. not after an entire van ride spent refusing to look at each other for too long because butcher was sitting close enough to weaponize eye contact.
your fingers drag beneath his shirt. muscle and warm skin, solid under your palms. his body feels unfairly built, every inch of him hard where you’re soft, heat collecting quickly beneath your touch. you push the fabric higher. he breaks the kiss only long enough to drag the shirt over his head and throw it somewhere near the bed.
then he’s back—mouth at your throat. hands at your waist. broad chest pressing into you while your fingers find his shoulders and cling there, careful of your bruised knuckles this time.
his hand moves to the button of your jeans. the button comes loose. your zipper follows. “lift,” he says against your mouth.
you do. he gets your jeans and underwear down far enough to make the entire situation feel suddenly, brutally real, fabric caught awkwardly around one ankle until you kick the rest away and nearly lose your boot with it. soldier boy laughs once under his breath, rough and mean. “smooth.”
“shut up.”
“you always this graceful?”
“you’re welcome to leave.”
“not a chance in hell.”
his hand slides between your thighs. your breath catches so sharply it almost becomes a sound. he looks at your face when his fingers find you wet already, his expression shifting into something dark and deeply satisfied.
“think fish sticks could do this to you?”
his thumb circles slowly, once, and the shape of whatever insult you meant to throw at him disappears before it reaches your mouth. “fuck,” you breathe.
“yeah,” he says, eyes fixed on your face. “thought so.”
you grip his shoulder with your good hand when his fingers press into you, the stretch immediate and sharp enough to make your legs tense around his hips. he works you open with none of the delicate patience another man might use to prove something about himself. soldier boy is rougher than that. direct. watching every change in your expression while his thumb keeps dragging over you until your breathing turns unreliable and your head tips back against the wall again.
“quiet,” he reminds you.
you bite down on your lower lip. he watches you do it and swears beneath his breath.
somewhere beyond the closed door, a cabinet shuts in the kitchen. footsteps move faintly through the hallway, then fade again. the safehouse remains full of people. mm and frenchie are probably already pulling apart the stolen drive. butcher is almost certainly standing near the table with a look on his face that makes future humiliation inevitable.
soldier boy’s fingers curl inside you. you forget all of them.
your hand catches at his wrist. “ben.”
his eyes snap to yours. the name does something to him every time. you know that now. it moves beneath his expression like a bruise pressed too hard, pain and want twisted too closely together to separate. his mouth finds yours again. slower for half a second. then harder.
he pulls his hand away, and the loss makes you breathe out something embarrassingly close to a whine.
“impatient,” he mutters.
“stop teasing.”
his eyes narrow. you have enough time to regret saying it before he sets you down just long enough to undo his belt. the metal buckle clicks loudly in the small room. your mouth goes dry.
you kick your jeans the rest of the way free while he shoves his trousers and underwear low enough to free himself. the sight of him should be unfair at minimum. thick, hard, already leaking at the tip.
you stare.
his hand closes around his cock. one slow stroke. eyes on your face. “problem?”
“unfortunately, i’m only human.”
his mouth twitches. his hands return to you. hips. thighs. lifting you back against the wall. your legs lock around his waist. his cock presses against you. both of you stop breathing properly. soldier boy looks at your face. not softly. not asking something he can’t say. just giving you the second you need.
you tighten your legs around him and pull him closer. “do it,” you whisper.
he pushes into you.
the stretch knocks every thought out of your head at once. your mouth opens around a sound that doesn’t make it far because his hand closes over it again immediately, palm warm and broad across your lips while his other arm braces hard beneath your thighs to hold you in place.
“quiet,” he says through clenched teeth, voice rougher now.
you breathe hard against his hand.
he gives you a second. barely enough for your body to adjust around him, but enough for the ache to turn into something hotter, fuller, impossible to ignore. then he draws back and thrusts into you again, deeper this time, the force driving your shoulders harder against the wall.
your fingers dig into him.
his forehead nearly drops toward yours. breath mixing hot against your face while his hips move with an unforgiving rhythm that makes your legs tighten around him and your body jolt against the wall with every thrust.
the room narrows down to pressure and heat and the rough drag of his cock inside you. the muted sounds trapped behind his hand. his breath turning harsher every time your body clenches around him. his eyes fixed on yours as if looking away would cost him something.
“fuck,” he mutters. “that’s it.”
you make another sound against his palm.
his gaze sharpens. “you like the whole goddamn house hearing you?”
you shake your head quickly.
“could’ve fooled me.”
his hand leaves your mouth only long enough to kiss you, hard and messy, catching every broken breath before it becomes too loud. you kiss him back with whatever coordination remains, nails dragging down his shoulder, body moving with his.
his hand slips between you again. your entire body tenses when his thumb finds you. “oh, ben—”
his palm covers your mouth again. “what did i say?”
you stare at him, furious and breathless and so close to losing every remaining scrap of control that it feels humiliating. soldier boy looks entirely too pleased by that.
“there she is,” he murmurs. “mouthy until it matters.”
you bite his palm again. harder this time.
his hips snap forward with enough force to make your eyes roll shut. “fuckin’ brat.” the words hit low.
so does the next thrust. and the next. each one rougher than the last as his control frays, his hand firm over your mouth, his other arm holding you against the wall like he could keep you there forever if he decided the rest of the world could wait.
the pressure builds too quickly. your body already overstimulated from his fingers, from last night, from the whole horrible day of wanting and waiting and listening to him pretend jealousy is just another form of irritation.
your thighs shake around his waist. he feels it. “look at me.”
you open your eyes.
his breathing is wrecked now. face tense. hair falling forward. jaw tight with the effort of staying quiet himself while his thumb circles harder and his cock keeps dragging deep enough to make every thought fracture apart.
“come on,” he says, voice low. “give it to me.”
your body breaks around him.
the orgasm hits hard enough to make your back arch off the wall, every muscle drawing tight at once while the sound tears against his palm and dies there. your vision blurs. your fingers clutch at his shoulders. heat rolls through you in sharp waves, knees pulling tighter around his hips while he keeps moving through it, rough and relentless, dragging the pleasure out until it tips almost painfully sensitive.
“ben,” you cry against his hand.
his forehead drops near yours for half a second. his breathing comes apart completely now, every inhale rough and uneven, his chest moving hard beneath your palms as he tries and fails to keep quiet.
you catch his wrist and pull his hand away from your mouth. “put me down.”
his eyes open properly. dark. unfocused at the edges. still hungry enough to make the words catch briefly in your throat. “what?”
“down.”
he stares at you for one second longer, like his brain has stopped cooperating with the rest of him. then his hands shift beneath your thighs and he lowers you carefully enough to be insulting after everything else. your feet meet the floor. your knees nearly fail you.
his hand catches your waist immediately. “easy,” he mutters.
you look up at him. his chest is still rising too fast. his mouth is swollen. there’s a flush climbing along his neck, disappearing beneath the line of his jaw, and the sight of it makes something hot curl low in your stomach all over again.
you keep your eyes on his as you sink to your knees.
the floor is hard under you but you don’t care. your legs are still shaking from the orgasm he dragged out of you, thighs slick, heartbeat loud in your ears.
soldier boy stares down at you. his cock is right there, thick and flushed dark, still wet from being inside you. it twitches when your breath ghosts over it.
“fuck, doll,” he mutters, voice wrecked.
you wrap your hand around the base first, giving one slow stroke just to watch his abs clench. then you lean in and lick a broad stripe up the underside, tongue pressing flat against the vein that runs along his length. he hisses through his teeth, one hand flying to the wall for balance.
you take your time at first. swirling your tongue around the head, tasting yourself on him, sucking lightly at the sensitive spot just under the tip until his hips jerk forward. a fat drop of spit slides down your chin already.
you look up at him through your lashes as you open your mouth wider and slide him inside. he’s thick enough that your jaw aches after only a few inches, but you push further anyway, cheeks hollowing.
“shit—that’s it,” he groans, low and rough. his free hand finally lands in your hair, resting heavy there. like he needs the contact.
you bob your head, taking him deeper each time, saliva coating him, dripping messily down your chin and onto your shirt. the wet sounds are obscene in the small room. you relax your throat and take him further, until your nose brushes the dark hair at his base and your eyes start to water.
you choke. a small, wet sound that makes his grip tighten in your hair.
you pull back, spit wet on your lips, and stroke him with your hand while you catch half a breath. your mouth feels swollen already. your chin is damp. his cock shines with spit under your fist, and soldier boy stares at the sight like it might kill him.
“still jealous?” you tease.
his eyes snap to yours. a mistake. a wonderful one.
his hand on your hair pulls your mouth back to him. “open.”
your pulse kicks as you obey.
he slides back across your tongue, and this time, he doesn’t let you tease. his hand guides you down, firm and filthy, until your lips stretch around him and your throat starts to resist. you gag, soft and wet, nails dragging down the hard muscle of his thigh as your eyes sting.
“there you go,” he breathes.
your hand grips the base of him, working what your mouth can’t take, spit slipping over your fingers. he holds you there for a second too long, just enough to make the room blur at the edges, then lets you pull back with a messy inhale.
a string of saliva breaks from your lower lip to the head of his cock. his control takes visible damage. “look at you,” he says, voice thick. “all that attitude, and now you’re drooling on my cock.”
you dive back down, faster now. messy. greedy. your head moves in a steady rhythm while your tongue works the underside. soldier boy’s breathing gets louder, rougher. his hand shifts in your hair, fingers tightening, starting to guide you.
“yeah… just like that. good fucking girl.”
the praise hits low in your stomach. you moan around him and his control slips another notch. his hips start moving, shallow thrusts at first, then deeper. he fucks your mouth with growing urgency, the head of his cock hitting the back of your throat over and over.
you choke again, throat convulsing around him, tears slipping down your cheeks. spit drips freely now, soaking your chin, running down your neck. you don’t care. you dig your nails into his thigh harder and take everything he gives you.
“fuck—i’m close,” he pants. his voice is completely shot. chest heaving. abs tight. “gonna come in that pretty mouth if you keep—shit—”
you look up at him and hum, eyes watering but steady.
that does it.
his hand fists tight in your hair, holding you in place as his hips stutter. he comes with a broken groan, thick and hot across your tongue. pulse after pulse, salty and warm, filling your mouth until you have to swallow around him. he keeps thrusting through it, shallow and desperate, panting your name under his breath.
when he finally stills, you keep him in your mouth a second longer, sucking gently, milking the last drops. only then do you pull off slowly, gasping, lips shiny and swollen, chin a complete mess.
soldier boy stares down at you, chest still rising and falling hard. his thumb brushes your bottom lip, smearing the spit and cum there. something soft flickers across his face for half a second—too raw, too honest—before he tucks it away again.
you stay on your knees a moment longer, looking up at him. he hauls you up by the elbows, kissing you deep and filthy even though his taste is still in your mouth. his arms wrap around you like he’s not sure he’ll let go anytime soon.
the safehouse is still noisy outside the door. voices, laughter, the faint clack of keyboards. none of it feels real right now.
you press your face into his bare chest, listening to his heart slowly calm down, and try not to think about how much you like being held by him after he’s fallen apart. how dangerous that is.
he doesn’t say anything else. just holds you tighter, nose buried in your hair, like maybe he’s thinking the same thing and doesn’t know what to do with it either.
a/n: I’m thirsty for this man and I need a good enemies-to-lovers storyline for after the finale, so here are some ideas because why not. Reader is a feminist and a leftist and basically all that Ben probably hates.
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Ben clocks you as a problem the second he hears your name. Not because you are loud, although you are, and not because you are popular, although that pisses him off too, but because you are the kind of woman who says exactly what she thinks on camera and somehow makes it sound like a threat to the system itself. You are not just anti-Vought; you are anti-everything Ben was trained to worship, and the fact that you can say all of it with perfect confidence makes him hate you on sight. Which, unfortunately for his blood pressure, turns into fascination almost immediately.
You do not flirt with him like a normal person. You humiliate him. Publicly. Repeatedly. You call him a relic, a caveman, a nepo baby with a body count, a patriotic factory defect, and you do it with the kind of clean, cutting precision that makes every room go silent for half a second. Ben is used to being feared, desired or at least respected. You offer him none of those things. You treat him like a nobody with unresolved daddy issues and a decorative jawline, and that drives him insane because he can tell, very quickly, that you are not bluffing.
The first real crack in the dynamic happens when Ben realizes you are not intimidated by him at all. Not his history, not the violence, not the myth, not the tereible and dangerous reputation. You look at Soldier Boy and see a badly socialized man with an overfed ego and no clue what to do with a woman who can gut him verbally in thirty seconds flat. That is the exact moment he starts paying attention, because he has never been able to stand a woman who sees through him and keeps talking anyway.
Ben tries to get one over on you with the usual tactics: crude compliments, obscene little comments, sexist one-liners, the whole rotten old Soldier Boy routine. You absolutely destroy him every time. You correct his language. You mock his politics. You call his flirting “male environmental damage.” And somehow the worse you make him look, the more hooked he becomes, because no woman has ever made him work this hard just to get a reaction. You do not reward his ego. You wound it, and he starts wanting you like a man who has mistaken being humiliated for being chosen.
You know exactly what you’re doing. That is the important part. You are not softening toward him because he is attractive or because he has the face of a fucking greek god. You are furious that you want him at all, because he is everything you hate in men: misogynistic, reactionary, arrogant, emotionally illiterate, violently overconfident. You always wanted a softboy with empathy and functioning morals, and instead you got Soldier Boy. So you make it everyone’s problem, especially his, because if you cannot stop yourself from wanting him, the least you can do is make him suffer for it.
Ben, for his part, does not understand at first that your contempt is foreplay with teeth. He thinks you genuinely despise him, and that makes him double down on the teasing, the posturing, the stupidly filthy remarks. Then he realizes that every time you snap back at him, your eyes linger a little too long, your breathing changes a little too fast, and your mouth keeps doing that tiny thing it does when you are trying not to smile. That is when he starts losing his mind, because he finally understands that you hate him almost as much as you want him, and that combination is apparently his personal version of heroin.
Your political arguments become a form of flirting that neither of you will name. You call out Vought, the patriarchy, the nonsense of heroic bullsjit and Ben calls you a commie, a bitch, a menace, a pain in the ass. The room always looks slightly embarrassed on your behalf because you have made his masculinity look flimsy in real time, but the thing nobody understands is that Ben deep down likes it it. He says he hates it. He says you are impossible. But he is absolutely addicted to the way you refuse to let him dominate the conversation. Every time you make him look stupid in front of other people, he wants you more. He wants to defeat you. To tame you. To make you surrender and scream his name at night.
The jealousy is immediate and violent on both sides, which is why neither of you wants to admit it. You pretend you do not care when Ben shows up with women. He pretends he does not care when you talk to men. But both of you notice every shift in the room. The second another man laughs too long at your jokes, Ben turns into a nuclear-grade asshole. The second another woman touches his arm, you get so irritated you could spit nails. Neither of you is mature enough to call it attraction, and neither of you is honest enough to call it lust, so it becomes an endless cycle of provocation, denial, and increasingly personal insults.
The first time one of you almost admits it, it is because the other one has gone too far. Ben says something filthy and territorial, you call him a misogynistic piece of shit with the emotional range of a wet cigarette, and then there is that moment where neither of you can keep pretending this is just banter. You both know what the tension is now. It is not just attraction. It is not just mutual hatred. It is the awful, humiliating realization that the person you most enjoy arguing with is also the person you most want to have under you, over you, against a wall, and preferably saying your name like they mean it.
Once the sexual tension finally tips over into actual contact, the whole dynamic gets worse before it gets better. Ben becomes even more possessive because he has finally gotten a taste of what you are like when you stop fighting him for one second, and you become even more insufferable because now you know exactly how badly he wants you. Neither of you suddenly becomes sweet. You are still a menace with a mouth like a razor, and Ben is still a toxic bastard with all the emotional subtlety of a hand grenade. But now every fight carries the threat of a kiss, every insult sounds a little too intimate, and every time he looks at you like he wants to ruin you, you look back like you already have.
