Death is a Bitch (and so am I)
Title: Death is a Bitch (and so am I)
Genre: Revision. Feminist. Gen. Femme Dean. Femme Cas
Word Count: ~3000
Warnings: Graphic violence. Mentions of rape. Cuss’n.
Rating: R (for reasons above to be safe)
Summary: The story is always different if you’re a woman.
A/N: Beta’d by the wonderful scarletjedi. Who also came up with the title, genius that she is.
Deanna Mary Winchester
1920-1976
Mary Winchester
1958-1984
Jessica Moore
1985-2007
Bella Talbot
1983-2008
***
Dean Winchester watched her intestines as they were pulled out of her stomach like tangled ropes. She heard the snap and crumble of her ribs, the gurgle of her lungs filling with blood. She felt the ripping of her flesh as it was clawed apart, the tear and yank of her organs dug out by scrabbling claws. She knew the darkness as it shuttered up out of her throat (torn open by searing teeth) and filled her eyes.
Her body was warm. Cradled and protected from the chill of the night by the warm blanket of her blood. The hell hound breathed hot and vile into her face, trailing the remains of her ligaments across her cheeks where they hung from his mouth, caught in the tight space between his fangs. Dean turned her face to the hound and grinned, showed him her own teeth behind her wet lips.
Take me home, hell-bitch.
Dean Winchester was not surprised to die bloody.
***
Deanna Winchester
1980-2008
***
Alastair was the name of the black-eyed woman who took care of Dean in Hell. She strapped Dean’s limbs wide apart, hung her from rusted chains and steel hooks like a spider caught in her own web. She came to Dean every morning and talked the nightmares into life and then stood by, her arms crossed, while Dean talked each one away again. They began each day by pulling apart Dean’s mind and ended it by pulling apart her body. Her skin and hair would grow back over night, her bones reknit so that she was brand new and unscarred when Alastair returned. Dean was flayed and whipped, cut to ribbons so that her skin and muscles hung from her like a perfectly peeled apple skin. Her ligaments were all severed by a surgical blade, leaving her limbs limp and useless. Her eyes were gouged out, her teeth pulled. Her tongue split down the middle.
Alastair stripped Dean of her dignity and her humanity and then slowly, cut by cut, she stripped Dean of her fear.
“You have less of it than the others,” she told Dean as she used a razor to separate the muscles from Dean’s naked spine. “And so much anger. You have a lot of potential, Dean. I think you might be the one.”
***
Hell was the fury of a woman scorned.
Alastair told Dean the story as she held a thread taught with her mouth and sewed Dean’s fingers and toes together, sewed Dean’s lips shut. Her hard voice was barely audible over the screaming silence. Her sweet and poison breath ghosted over the ragged and nerves of Dean’s body as she leaned close so that her stitches would be even.
God made her second of all things. He made her in the beginning, so that she could stand at His right side where everyone could see her beauty. So that she could be the example of wisdom and brilliance to all her brothers and sisters. Not even Michael was more favored. The Father named her Morning Star, light of Heaven, and she was brightest of all the angels.
Lucifer wanted a hand in the making of the world. But it was not her place, God said. He needed her to be His inspiration for the majesty of the mountains and the rippling grace of the ocean. He needed her to be flawless. Her hands unscarred. Her voice unblemished.
“Stand by me,” He said. “And let them see you.”
He made man in his image and woman in hers.
Adam and Lillith. Pitiful creatures crafted from the very dirt of the earth. Maggots and rotten foliage and sand of stones, decomposed beasts-that was what the first humans were made of.
Lucifer, who was perfection and purity itself, found she was quite repulsed by them. Her father told her to bow, but she would not. Her brothers and sisters all fell to their knees and touched their foreheads to the ground before the hideous figures of man and woman. But Lucifer would not.
In the morning on the earth, as the sun fell bright and new into the garden of Eden, Lillith would not bow to Adam either. Because she was made in Lucifer’s image, and like Lucifer she was filled with pride.
“Fuck that,” Lillith told the Lord, and she left the garden.
God made Eve from the rib of Adam, and she was proper and allowed herself to be subservient to her husband.
“As Eve bows to Adam, you must bow to man,” the Lord told his daughter. His anger shook the skies. God was not accustomed to having to ask for something twice.
“Fuck that,” Lucifer told Him, and she left Heaven.
Her brothers tried to stop her, they wanted to keep her in Heaven. “We love you,” they pleaded. “Don’t leave!” Lucifer cut them down because she didn’t want their love, it made her feel small. She made sure the blood flowed freely at the Gates and she painted herself with it. She screamed herself hoarse to frighten her brothers out of her way, so that her voice was torn and ugly. And God, repulsed by her disobedience, had Michael throw her down.
Lucifer hit the ground like a sack of bricks. But she brushed herself off and spat in her brother’s face. And when Michael had gone back to Heaven Lucifer stomped right into the garden and found Eve.
“Why the fuck are you listening to these assholes?” she asked. She gave Eve an apple filled with wisdom so that Eve might learn to defend herself with cleverness, since the Lord had not given her strength or pride.
Out in the world Lillith was being chased and beaten and scarred. She was raped by beasts. She was starved and frightened and full of hate. Lucifer found her half dead and weeping.
Lucifer took Lillith and taught her not to be afraid anymore.
***
On the first day of the thirtieth year of her rehabilitation Dean raised her head and said a stoic “Good morning,” to Alastair. Who put her hands on her hips, and smiled up at Dean. Alastair pulled the chains down, helped Dean take the hooks out of her flesh.
“Your turn, kid,” she said.
***
Dean tried to explain the way it was to the women under her care. Most of them couldn’t hear her because they were shrieking and crying and begging for mercy. But Dean knew the words would reach them later, as they slept at night and their bodies were repaired.
The world was a rigged deck of cards. Life was made with men in mind. Death was what the women were left with.
“We’re making the most of it though,” Dean assured them. She carved family trees into their skins.
***
Dean heard the whispers traveling through the fire and the dark. And Hell grew colder every day. The shadows turned from pitch black to silver gray and snow hung on the eyelashes of her women. White ice covered the old bloodstains on the floor.
She didn’t mind. The cold didn’t bother her. Dean could have carried on just the same. She loved watching the new blood spread through the snow. But the whispers came closer and closer and grew louder. And one day she realized it was her name, echoing down through the circles of Hell.
An angel came.
“It’s time to go home, Deanna,” she said.
“I am home,” said Dean.
The angel took her anyway.
***
Dean clawed her own way out of the ground.
She called Bobby and he hung up on her. When she went home he threw holy water in her face and cut her perfect skin with six different kinds of knives. It felt good to bleed again.
Sam was broken with joy to see her. He picked her up in his arms and squeezed until her ribs creaked. Dean wrapped her arms around her little brother’s neck and bore the suffocation. As soon as he let go she stepped back to give herself some distance. There were tears on Sam’s face, running over his cheeks and getting caught in his wide smile.
She could see in her brother’s face how wrecked he’d been without her. How much he’d loved her then and loved her still.
What good’s it do? she wondered.
***
Then it was life as usual for a couple of weeks. Dean and Sam, driving, killing, sleeping through their nightmares and keeping secrets from each other. Sam threw his whole heart back into everything. Headfirst into the hunt, mind buried in lore and dead languages. He smiled at strangers and apologized to grieving widows with all his gentle soul. Sam was present in every moment. He stood at Dean’s shoulder and bought them coffee every morning and let Dean shower first before bed.
And then one afternoon, Dean felt them fall back in step. She shoved the sugar across the table without thinking, because Dean hated sugar in her coffee but Sam drank what was essentially caffeinated sugar-sludge, and Sam took the sugar without even looking up from his newspaper. And Dean realized she would know every word of Sam’s before it was spoken, could anticipate every expression and emotion like they were her own. Her hand fell limp and she sat back and stared at her brother, a horribly familiar feeling pooling in her chest.
I died for you, Dean remembered. I went to hell because I couldn’t let you die.
But they still lived the same lives. Every second was still touch and go. Dean pushed up her sleeve and ran her fingers over the scabs on her forearm. She’s forgotten, for so long, what it felt like to have something to lose.
Fear crept back into her perfect bones.
***
When the angel showed her face at last, blue eyes, short dark hair and delicate cheekbones, Dean stabbed her in the heart.
***
Like a summer storm in the rearview mirror, the Apocalypse was coming.
And rather than getting her regular four to five hours, Dean’s sleep was more often than not interrupted by the coming of angels.
One angel. A soft dark shape in the night, sitting carefully on the edge of the mattress like a worried mother. Waking Dean up from her bad dreams to remind her that the end of the world was tomorrow, or the next day, or yesterday.
“You can stop it,” Castiel said gently.
“You can go fuck yourself,” Dean rasped in reply. “I didn’t ask for this.”
“I know. But it had to you be you, Dean. It was always you. You are the one.” It was destiny. And Dean was afraid again, and her little brother was living in this world. So she strapped on her big girl boots every morning and brushed her teeth and kept killing and kept swinging.
Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
***
Ellen Harvelle
1957-2009
Johanna Beth Harvelle
1988-2009
***
“My friends are dead,” Dean snarled and pinned Castiel against Bobby’s refrigerator. Castiel looked at her with sad eyes.
“You can stop it,” she said.
“NO. I can’t.” Dean was only a big sister and a crap excuse for a daughter, she wasn’t a martyr or a hero or any of that shit. Dean couldn’t save the world.
And there was a part of her that kept rolling around the bitter thought that the maybe world should save its damn self for once. The world should stand up and start giving a fuck, and maybe then Dean could die in peace and go back to the comfortable shadows of Hell.
Castiel’s eyes, searching Dean’s face, grew suddenly hard and she shoved back. Dean stumbled and fell on her back, vision swimming. The angel stood over her, hands in fists.
“Your women are dying, Dean. You must do something. Because you are the only one who can.”
***
More dead. Aunts and grandmothers and sisters. Mothers.
***
“And what is it that Heaven wants me to do?” Dean asked, her hands trembling with hangover and her head screaming with fear. Sammy was in the bedroom on the phone with Bobby, trying to find a way to stop Lillith and save the seals.
Castiel was leaning, arms crossed, against the sink while Dean lost her guts into the toilet.
“You are the vessel of the archangel Michael,” said Castiel flatly. There was no pity at all in her gaze. “You must let Michael take your body and use it to kill Lucifer. She rises soon.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then Lucifer takes over the Earth and storms Heaven and the war will turn the seas and the rivers red with blood.” Castiel’s voice trembled.
Sam knocked on the door and Castiel was gone.
“Are you alright?” Sam asked.
***
Sam didn’t like it.
“And what if Michael and Lucifer do fight?” he wanted to know. “What kind of casualties will there be then?”
Dean shrugged because it didn’t really matter, did it? She had one way to protect Sam, and it was letting Heaven have their way with her.
“Promise me you won’t do it,” Sam said. “We’ll find another way, Dean.”
Dean did not make fucking promises.
***
“I like Sam,” said Castiel one day. “He is not like many of the others.”
“Many of the other what?” Dean wanted to know. But she was already standing alone.
***
Castiel and Sam stood beside her on morning that Judgment Day came. And there were shafts of blinding light and a noise like the most horrible kind of joy and all that shit. Three figures of divine light descended. Their features were hidden by the rising sun behind them.
Dean felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Castiel staring at her with a pleading expression. “Your decision in this is the only one that matters,” she said softly. “They cannot take you by force.” She let go and bit her bottom lip, and to Dean it looked like she was nervous. “You are the one, Dean. You can stop it.”
Dean stepped forward. She felt the stripping scrutiny of the three angels before her, their eyes looking beneath her clothes and through her flesh, into that hollow place where her fear and her anger lived.
I am Michael, said the middle angel. Do you give yourself to me for the good of man? His voice was gentle and loving. Dean felt like a cradled child, small and helpless before his concern, sheltered by the reach of his wings.
The light of the sunrise made Dean’s skin red. Her hands-she flexed her fingers and her wrists-had been ruined since she was young. Like the hands of all the woman she’d known. They were coarse and worn with calluses and blisters, her knuckles were bruised and her left pinky was crooked from being broken so many times. Dean had violent hands.
In Hell Dean’s hands had been slender and graceful. And strong. In Hell Dean’s hands had been perfect.
“And that is what Heaven wants of me?” Dean asked, almost to herself. But Michael answered:
That is what Heaven needs of you.
Dean looked over her shoulder to her brother (Sam’s face was white and terrified) and her angel (Castiel’s face was white and pissed). Dean suddenly wondered why she had never bothered to ask Castiel what she wanted Dean to do?
Heaven needed Dean to sacrifice herself for the good of man.
“But my choice is the one that matters,” Dean said, still looking at Castiel. And the rage, the hate that Castiel had never allowed Dean to see before was suddenly brazen and clear. She grinned, showing her teeth.
“That’s right,” she answered. “Only you can stop it.” Your women are dying.
Dean swallowed and stomped down the fear in her gullet. She put her hands in her pockets and addressed Michael. The sun was almost over the horizon. If Dean’s arms had been long enough she would have reached out and shoved it right back down.
“Fuck you,” she said, stepping backwards. “You can’t have me.”
WOMAN-Michael began in rage. But Castiel’s hand landed on Dean’s shoulder and Dean and Sam were yanked away to some other place.
***
“You wanted me to say ‘no’ all along!” Dean accused as soon as she had the breath to do so.
“Yes,” Castiel agreed mildly. “But, as we’ve already discussed, only your decision ever mattered. It was an accident of genetics that you are a woman at all, they expected, when the time came, that you would be a man. You were the first woman Heaven ever needed.” Castiel shed her coat, sweating with the heat. “You were the first woman who could change things by refusing them.”
They were standing in a desert of red sand under an ocean of black stars. Sam breathed an exhausted sigh and sat down quickly. He pushed his hands through his hair.
“What now?” he asked.
Castiel looked down at him, not unkindly. “Now Lucifer rises,” she said, “and we go to war.”
“And the rivers run with blood, is that right?” Sam snapped. “That doesn’t seem like an ideal alternative.”
Around them the dry air was growing heavier. Dean took off her jacket and her shirt peeled off with it. The sand was sticking to her skin.
“No,” said Castiel. “But we work with the tools we have. God gave the women blood and violence. He gave them death.” Castiel was looking at Dean now. “If he had given them something else, then we would have used it.”
The stars were vanishing, one by one, behind black clouds and white lightning. The storm was gathering, it whipped up a wind and pushed moisture into the air. Soon it would rain down and lightning would light fires and hale would break the surface of the earth and out of the depths the dead would rise. The beaten. The raped. The ravaged and starved and forgotten. The silent.
Screaming. Hell would rise.
Dean breathed in and thought she could smell the sulfur already. The ash and the ice. Her hands were boney and twisted. Her body was a wreck of scars that showed white and ugly in the blue light of the storm. Castiel was delicate and beautiful and pristine.
Sam, quiet and confused, got back to his feet.
The first few drops of rain came down like bullets into the sand.