Calm the Pain
Title: Calm the Pain
Rating: PG -13
Wordcount: 2000
Disclaimer: Not my boys. Kripke broke them long before I ever got to them.
Summary: Coda to 6x16 - And Then There Were None. Dean doesn't like how much he enjoyed torturing Bobby.
Written for the Writing between the lines challengeon hoodie_time for Prompt 126 by anon, as the 'Wild Card' fill for my angst_bingo card and maybe also in a totally selfish move to get to use my new Dean&Beer icon.
Sam is still sleeping deep, so Dean goes and has his morning beer out on the front porch.
Bobby finds him sometime after the sun comes the rest of the way up. “You look like refried shit, kid,” he says, moving to stand next to him.
“Thanks,” Dean rasps, skimming a sleeve under a pink nose. “That’s very descriptive.”
“You sure you oughta be drinking that? Bad for the immune system.”
“Who are you now, Sam?” Dean says.
“Just been noticing, you’re drinkin’ an awful lot. And if I think so, that’s saying something.”
“Oh, you think so, do you?” Dean says, but he doesn’t have the fight left in him to take it any further. He shrugs. “We all drink a lot, Bobby. It’s a way of life.”
Dean probably would win this round without even trying, because there isn’t much Bobby can say to that, but Bobby isn’t Sam and Dean doesn’t feel the same abject need to pull a grin up from nowhere for him, so he finds himself saying, “I can’t sleep, Bobby. Not on my own, not for a long time now. Just trying to get by, okay?” The beer is gone without him having tasted it. Dean puts it down, starts playing with the peeling paint on the railing with a thumbnail, can’t stop even though he wants to, bad, his visibly shaking fingers making him feel small and warm with embarrassment. “Man’s gotta sleep, right?”
“Yeah, Dean,” Bobby says gently. “Man’s gotta sleep.”
It’s hard for him too, sleeping when the Winchester boys are visiting. Always has been. First it was Sammy’s nightmares. Then Dean went through a phase where he got it into his hormone-muddled head that he could have his way with whatever horny high school girl he managed to impress with his fake ID-cards without the rest of the house hearing. Now it’s just that the both of them aren’t all that good at sleeping anymore. They’ve both been through too much to really get any kind of rest when they close their eyes and leave themselves open to whatever their dreams might see fit to throw at them.
Bobby tries to be understanding, but at the end of the day he is an old man and he can’t spend his days running on nothing but alcohol and caffeine anymore, so sometimes when he hears one of them rummaging around the house in the dead of night, he heaves himself out of bed, cursing at the ever new kinks in his back and vowing to buy a new mattress the next morning to slap them back to bed.
He didn’t tonight though. Spent the entire night tossing and turning and listening to Dean grab a late night shower, rummage around the library looking for God knows what, take another shower, mumble - pray - quietly, cuss at the roaring coffee maker. The constant noise actually made for a halfway decent distraction to keep his thoughts off of Rufus and Omaha and all the things that got screwed to hell in the last 48 hours.
Sam slept through the entire thing as far as Bobby knows. Still catching up on his year of missed sleep probably.
“So what’s crawled up your ass?” Bobby asks conversationally, stuffs his hands deep into his pockets and watches Dean flinch, then tense, then ever so slightly push himself into the banister by the stairs, away from Bobby.
“Hey,” Dean shoots an apologetic glance over his shoulder. “Why’re you up anyway? Coffee maker wake you? Thing’s too damn loud. Sorry.”
Bobby studies the boy for a minute. How he’s fidgety all of a sudden and looks like he’d give a whole damn lot to just disappear into a hole and join the dozens of corpses under the scrapyard. “You think I don’t notice when you don’t answer my questions, boy?” he finally growls and Dean shrinks back in a way he sometimes did when John was still around. Bobby tries to sound more soothing - soothing. What sort of mechanic-turned-demon-hunter ever sounds soothing? - when he asks again, “You been up all night. What’s crawled up your ass?”
Dean shrugs, wets his lips, studies his stocking feet shuffle on the dusty step he’s sitting on. Makes him look like an awkward teenager, all nervous energy and uneasy in his own skin. “Dunno,” he mumbles weakly, starts playing with the soft label of his bottle until small pieces of paper get stuck under his fingernails. “Nothin’. Just didn’t feel like sleeping I guess.”
“Right,” Bobby drawls, not making the smallest effort to stifle the sarcasm in his voice. After a moment he says, “You talk, whenever you’re ready. I’ll even get you another beer if you think it’ll help.”
The kid’s eyes search Bobby’s face for a minute, like his words might be anything other than a quiet peace offering between two drunks, before he forces his face to twist into a painful looking lopsided smile. “Geez, Uncle Bobby,” he chuckles in his best southern boy drawl. “You’re gonna turn me into a downright drunkard one of these days.”
Bobby scoffs good naturedly at that. “Reckon it’s too late for me to do much about that.”
Dean’s smile looks slightly more real when he nods his agreement and focuses on twisting the empty bottle between his fingers.
“How’s your neck?” he asks ten minutes and one completely shredded label later.
“Fine,” Bobby mutters, left hand hovering over the patched up burn and Dean quickly has to avert his eyes before Bobby catches him staring. “Still not answering my question though.”
Dean shrugs. He’s too tired and the one beer on top of everything he had last night still left him slightly buzzed and it makes his stupid mouth all too happy to spill whatever painful truths it sees fit.
“You shouldn’t even be here, Bobby,” he finally sighs, letting his head drop all the way to his knees.
Bobby shakes his head impatiently. He has a feeling he knows where this is coming from and balls, if that kid got it into his head that he needs to punish himself for hurting Bobby in order to kill Eve’s newest concoction then Bobby’s gonna tear him a new one. Idjit kid. “Well I am and I ain’t going nowhere, so you might as well start talkin’.”
“What happened to whenever I’m ready?”
“Got tired of waiting.”
Dean takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and tries to get his lips to form the words that’ll probably get him chased off Bobby’s property once and for all. He’s spent a good portion of tonight trying to convince himself that won’t happen, but that tiny, persistent voice in the back of his mind won, just like it always does.
“When I uhm…the warehouse, when I was…the electrical wire, I…”
Wow, all the practicing and searching for the right words really paid off then.
“You seriously telling me you got your panties in a bunch ‘cause I got hurt?”
“What? No,” Dean sighs tiredly. This conversation is taking too damn long and it’s making his head hurt and he wonders why he doesn’t just get the hell out of Dodge and spare Bobby the effort of having to get up and find his shotgun. “No, it’s not about that, well, kinda, but not really.” Dean starts picking at the red, swollen burn on his forearm, keeps his eyes on the still delicate crust. He hasn’t let Sam do any of his first aid shebang. No antibiotic ointment, no bandage, nothing. Dean hates how much he loves studying the swollen, angry red flesh. “’s more that I…Bobby, you got no idea what I did in hell.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Bobby mutters, ignores the familiar way his throat tightens every time he thinks about what those two little boys with the missing front teeth and second-hand clothes had to go through. “I know my Revelations.”
“Oh.” Dean wrings his hands nervously, bites down on his lower lip several times in quick succession. “Righteous man, blood in hell’n all that?”
“U-huh.”
Dean nods to himself. He’s actually relieved he won’t have to explain all the dirty little details. Best just cut to the chase and get himself disowned once and for all.
“Well, here’s the kicker, Bobby,” he sighs, bright, shining eyes now trained on the dull morning sky. “All that blood shedding? I enjoyed the fuck out of it. I was good at it and damnit, I miss it.”
Miss it, his lips repeat tonelessly, like he’s remembering a long lost lover.
“I miss is so much, I can’t sleep sometimes and right now, all I can think about is how much I want to take that wire to you again and see if I can make you twitch and yell harder.” Dean meets Bobby’s eyes for a second and there’s shame there and fear and pure, unadulterated lust. “So yeah, you probably shouldn’t be sitting here with me.”
For a moment Bobby is absolutely speechless. What’s there to say to that, really? He just stares at Dean in shock, wonders if he’s even expected to say anything.
“I didn’t wanna stop, Bobby,” Dean breathes heavily. The shocked silence making him uncomfortable enough to start talking again. “I wanted to push that wire down your throat and watch you moan and cry and smell your insides burn ‘till your skin came melting off.”
There are unshed tears, shining bright in his eyes now and Bobby wonders how it’s possible to be talking like you’re getting hard at the thought of torturing your friends and family and looking like a lost five year-old at the same time.
“You did stop, though,” he says after what feels like much too long. “I’m still live ‘n kickin’, ain’t I?”
“Yeah, well no thanks to me.” Dean’s jaw is working, his eyes glossing over with emotion and why won’t you just hate me?. “Sam had to pull me back at some point, y’know? I woulda just kept going. Didn’t even know that twitching, crying mess was you anymore.”
“That’s a load of bull,” Bobby grunts. Dean shakes his head. If the kid can’t defend himself, Bobby’s gonna have to do it for him. “Not saying hell didn’t screw with your head, but I spend a whole lot of time with you and as far as I know you don’t go around torturing people just for the fun of it.”
“Oh, but I want to,” Dean nods emphatically, tips the neck of his empty bottle to his temple. “The shit that goes on in here? Not pretty.”
“So?” Bobby shrugs. “We all got some fucked ideas in our heads. Long as you keep a lid on it when I’m not possessed by a demonic worm, we’re good.” Dean looks like he wants to argue, so Bobby holds up his hand and keeps going, “That thing you said yesterday? About not needing any apologies? That road goes both ways, son.”
Dean looks up at him from under dark lashes, still uncertain. The boy is so generous with his forgiveness and still he can’t accept it coming from anyone else.
“Listen, we’re family and as long as you don’t start randomly torturing me, nobody’s gonna kick you out. Somebody else messed you up? Well, we’re here to put you back together, all right?”
Dean presses his lips together in a tight, trembling line and just as Bobby is about to reach out and put a comforting hand on the boy’s neck, he erupts in a series of barely held back giggles.
“Phew, that’s some grade A Oprah shit you got there, Bobby,” he grins. Bobby blames the alcohol. Makes it damn hard for an old man like him to keep up with the boy’s mood swings. “No, it is, listen can I paint your toenails?”
“Shut up.”
“Borrow your Miley Cyrus CD?”
Bobby glares. He isn’t sure what a 'Miley Cyrus' is supposed to be, but he knows when he’s being called a girl.
“I don’t even own a CD player,” he mutters, whacks Dean upside the head lightly. It’s an acceptable thing to do as long as he’s not angry and they both know they’re joking. “C’mon, smart-ass, let’s go inside before your brother finds us and we earn ourselves another lecture on our dangerous drinking habits.”
Rating: PG -13
Wordcount: 2000
Disclaimer: Not my boys. Kripke broke them long before I ever got to them.
Summary: Coda to 6x16 - And Then There Were None. Dean doesn't like how much he enjoyed torturing Bobby.
Written for the Writing between the lines challengeon hoodie_time for Prompt 126 by anon, as the 'Wild Card' fill for my angst_bingo card and maybe also in a totally selfish move to get to use my new Dean&Beer icon.
Sam is still sleeping deep, so Dean goes and has his morning beer out on the front porch.
Bobby finds him sometime after the sun comes the rest of the way up. “You look like refried shit, kid,” he says, moving to stand next to him.
“Thanks,” Dean rasps, skimming a sleeve under a pink nose. “That’s very descriptive.”
“You sure you oughta be drinking that? Bad for the immune system.”
“Who are you now, Sam?” Dean says.
“Just been noticing, you’re drinkin’ an awful lot. And if I think so, that’s saying something.”
“Oh, you think so, do you?” Dean says, but he doesn’t have the fight left in him to take it any further. He shrugs. “We all drink a lot, Bobby. It’s a way of life.”
Dean probably would win this round without even trying, because there isn’t much Bobby can say to that, but Bobby isn’t Sam and Dean doesn’t feel the same abject need to pull a grin up from nowhere for him, so he finds himself saying, “I can’t sleep, Bobby. Not on my own, not for a long time now. Just trying to get by, okay?” The beer is gone without him having tasted it. Dean puts it down, starts playing with the peeling paint on the railing with a thumbnail, can’t stop even though he wants to, bad, his visibly shaking fingers making him feel small and warm with embarrassment. “Man’s gotta sleep, right?”
“Yeah, Dean,” Bobby says gently. “Man’s gotta sleep.”
It’s hard for him too, sleeping when the Winchester boys are visiting. Always has been. First it was Sammy’s nightmares. Then Dean went through a phase where he got it into his hormone-muddled head that he could have his way with whatever horny high school girl he managed to impress with his fake ID-cards without the rest of the house hearing. Now it’s just that the both of them aren’t all that good at sleeping anymore. They’ve both been through too much to really get any kind of rest when they close their eyes and leave themselves open to whatever their dreams might see fit to throw at them.
Bobby tries to be understanding, but at the end of the day he is an old man and he can’t spend his days running on nothing but alcohol and caffeine anymore, so sometimes when he hears one of them rummaging around the house in the dead of night, he heaves himself out of bed, cursing at the ever new kinks in his back and vowing to buy a new mattress the next morning to slap them back to bed.
He didn’t tonight though. Spent the entire night tossing and turning and listening to Dean grab a late night shower, rummage around the library looking for God knows what, take another shower, mumble - pray - quietly, cuss at the roaring coffee maker. The constant noise actually made for a halfway decent distraction to keep his thoughts off of Rufus and Omaha and all the things that got screwed to hell in the last 48 hours.
Sam slept through the entire thing as far as Bobby knows. Still catching up on his year of missed sleep probably.
“So what’s crawled up your ass?” Bobby asks conversationally, stuffs his hands deep into his pockets and watches Dean flinch, then tense, then ever so slightly push himself into the banister by the stairs, away from Bobby.
“Hey,” Dean shoots an apologetic glance over his shoulder. “Why’re you up anyway? Coffee maker wake you? Thing’s too damn loud. Sorry.”
Bobby studies the boy for a minute. How he’s fidgety all of a sudden and looks like he’d give a whole damn lot to just disappear into a hole and join the dozens of corpses under the scrapyard. “You think I don’t notice when you don’t answer my questions, boy?” he finally growls and Dean shrinks back in a way he sometimes did when John was still around. Bobby tries to sound more soothing - soothing. What sort of mechanic-turned-demon-hunter ever sounds soothing? - when he asks again, “You been up all night. What’s crawled up your ass?”
Dean shrugs, wets his lips, studies his stocking feet shuffle on the dusty step he’s sitting on. Makes him look like an awkward teenager, all nervous energy and uneasy in his own skin. “Dunno,” he mumbles weakly, starts playing with the soft label of his bottle until small pieces of paper get stuck under his fingernails. “Nothin’. Just didn’t feel like sleeping I guess.”
“Right,” Bobby drawls, not making the smallest effort to stifle the sarcasm in his voice. After a moment he says, “You talk, whenever you’re ready. I’ll even get you another beer if you think it’ll help.”
The kid’s eyes search Bobby’s face for a minute, like his words might be anything other than a quiet peace offering between two drunks, before he forces his face to twist into a painful looking lopsided smile. “Geez, Uncle Bobby,” he chuckles in his best southern boy drawl. “You’re gonna turn me into a downright drunkard one of these days.”
Bobby scoffs good naturedly at that. “Reckon it’s too late for me to do much about that.”
Dean’s smile looks slightly more real when he nods his agreement and focuses on twisting the empty bottle between his fingers.
“How’s your neck?” he asks ten minutes and one completely shredded label later.
“Fine,” Bobby mutters, left hand hovering over the patched up burn and Dean quickly has to avert his eyes before Bobby catches him staring. “Still not answering my question though.”
Dean shrugs. He’s too tired and the one beer on top of everything he had last night still left him slightly buzzed and it makes his stupid mouth all too happy to spill whatever painful truths it sees fit.
“You shouldn’t even be here, Bobby,” he finally sighs, letting his head drop all the way to his knees.
Bobby shakes his head impatiently. He has a feeling he knows where this is coming from and balls, if that kid got it into his head that he needs to punish himself for hurting Bobby in order to kill Eve’s newest concoction then Bobby’s gonna tear him a new one. Idjit kid. “Well I am and I ain’t going nowhere, so you might as well start talkin’.”
“What happened to whenever I’m ready?”
“Got tired of waiting.”
Dean takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and tries to get his lips to form the words that’ll probably get him chased off Bobby’s property once and for all. He’s spent a good portion of tonight trying to convince himself that won’t happen, but that tiny, persistent voice in the back of his mind won, just like it always does.
“When I uhm…the warehouse, when I was…the electrical wire, I…”
Wow, all the practicing and searching for the right words really paid off then.
“You seriously telling me you got your panties in a bunch ‘cause I got hurt?”
“What? No,” Dean sighs tiredly. This conversation is taking too damn long and it’s making his head hurt and he wonders why he doesn’t just get the hell out of Dodge and spare Bobby the effort of having to get up and find his shotgun. “No, it’s not about that, well, kinda, but not really.” Dean starts picking at the red, swollen burn on his forearm, keeps his eyes on the still delicate crust. He hasn’t let Sam do any of his first aid shebang. No antibiotic ointment, no bandage, nothing. Dean hates how much he loves studying the swollen, angry red flesh. “’s more that I…Bobby, you got no idea what I did in hell.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Bobby mutters, ignores the familiar way his throat tightens every time he thinks about what those two little boys with the missing front teeth and second-hand clothes had to go through. “I know my Revelations.”
“Oh.” Dean wrings his hands nervously, bites down on his lower lip several times in quick succession. “Righteous man, blood in hell’n all that?”
“U-huh.”
Dean nods to himself. He’s actually relieved he won’t have to explain all the dirty little details. Best just cut to the chase and get himself disowned once and for all.
“Well, here’s the kicker, Bobby,” he sighs, bright, shining eyes now trained on the dull morning sky. “All that blood shedding? I enjoyed the fuck out of it. I was good at it and damnit, I miss it.”
Miss it, his lips repeat tonelessly, like he’s remembering a long lost lover.
“I miss is so much, I can’t sleep sometimes and right now, all I can think about is how much I want to take that wire to you again and see if I can make you twitch and yell harder.” Dean meets Bobby’s eyes for a second and there’s shame there and fear and pure, unadulterated lust. “So yeah, you probably shouldn’t be sitting here with me.”
For a moment Bobby is absolutely speechless. What’s there to say to that, really? He just stares at Dean in shock, wonders if he’s even expected to say anything.
“I didn’t wanna stop, Bobby,” Dean breathes heavily. The shocked silence making him uncomfortable enough to start talking again. “I wanted to push that wire down your throat and watch you moan and cry and smell your insides burn ‘till your skin came melting off.”
There are unshed tears, shining bright in his eyes now and Bobby wonders how it’s possible to be talking like you’re getting hard at the thought of torturing your friends and family and looking like a lost five year-old at the same time.
“You did stop, though,” he says after what feels like much too long. “I’m still live ‘n kickin’, ain’t I?”
“Yeah, well no thanks to me.” Dean’s jaw is working, his eyes glossing over with emotion and why won’t you just hate me?. “Sam had to pull me back at some point, y’know? I woulda just kept going. Didn’t even know that twitching, crying mess was you anymore.”
“That’s a load of bull,” Bobby grunts. Dean shakes his head. If the kid can’t defend himself, Bobby’s gonna have to do it for him. “Not saying hell didn’t screw with your head, but I spend a whole lot of time with you and as far as I know you don’t go around torturing people just for the fun of it.”
“Oh, but I want to,” Dean nods emphatically, tips the neck of his empty bottle to his temple. “The shit that goes on in here? Not pretty.”
“So?” Bobby shrugs. “We all got some fucked ideas in our heads. Long as you keep a lid on it when I’m not possessed by a demonic worm, we’re good.” Dean looks like he wants to argue, so Bobby holds up his hand and keeps going, “That thing you said yesterday? About not needing any apologies? That road goes both ways, son.”
Dean looks up at him from under dark lashes, still uncertain. The boy is so generous with his forgiveness and still he can’t accept it coming from anyone else.
“Listen, we’re family and as long as you don’t start randomly torturing me, nobody’s gonna kick you out. Somebody else messed you up? Well, we’re here to put you back together, all right?”
Dean presses his lips together in a tight, trembling line and just as Bobby is about to reach out and put a comforting hand on the boy’s neck, he erupts in a series of barely held back giggles.
“Phew, that’s some grade A Oprah shit you got there, Bobby,” he grins. Bobby blames the alcohol. Makes it damn hard for an old man like him to keep up with the boy’s mood swings. “No, it is, listen can I paint your toenails?”
“Shut up.”
“Borrow your Miley Cyrus CD?”
Bobby glares. He isn’t sure what a 'Miley Cyrus' is supposed to be, but he knows when he’s being called a girl.
“I don’t even own a CD player,” he mutters, whacks Dean upside the head lightly. It’s an acceptable thing to do as long as he’s not angry and they both know they’re joking. “C’mon, smart-ass, let’s go inside before your brother finds us and we earn ourselves another lecture on our dangerous drinking habits.”