SPN: It's in Your Eyes, Where the Shadows Lie - Chapter 2
Title: It's in Your Eyes, Where the Shadows Lie
Beta: verucasalt123
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: NC-17
Genre: It's a Terrible Life AU verse, Horror, Drama, Dark themes, Angst
Pairings: Jimmy/Dean, Castiel/Dean, mentions of Dean/'Dr.Sexy' and Dean/OMCs
Spoilers: For the AU verse in episode 4.17; none for canon
Warnings: PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE READING! Language, stalking, gore, sex, d/s themes, sex between minors (under 13, not descriptive), major character death Dean, cannibalism, necrophilia, twincest, incest, pedophilia, patricide, non-con, dub-con, suicide, mental illness (Dissociative Identity Disorder), hallucinations
Word Count: 17 000 (in total)
Summary: Jimmy Novak has been working as Dean Smith's secretary for the last two years. After two years of crushing on his employer, Jimmy and Dean finally go out on a date. However, unknown to Dean, Castiel has also taken an interest in him and Dean's stalker will stop at nothing until he gets what he wants.
A/N: Written as part of the dc-dystopia Challenge. All submissions have dark themes so I strongly suggest that you READ THE WARNINGS before reading my fic. The appearances of pedophilia and sex between minors has been intentionally kept non-descriptive in adherence to LiveJournal's Terms of Service. If even one of the warning themes disturbs you, I highly recommend you don't read this.
Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Epilogue | Art Masterpost
It was on an early Thursday morning in mid August that a bright eyed, red-headed young girl was brought into the world, kicking and screaming. To the few that remember her, they would have said she had a voice like an angel, capable of commanding power and respect but also conveying a deeply rooted sense of compassion that even her own tormented childhood couldn’t taint and twist. Seeming wiser than the small body her soul occupied, she had been born at 4:17 am and, twenty minutes later, her twin brother followed. Jimmy sometimes felt it was more like 20 years.
The first 10 years of their lives had been tough: Anna and Jimmy Novak were the only children of a mother too meek to stand up for herself and a father who often gambled, drank, and snorted their monthly income. The few times Sarah Novak had attempted to cut off Nick from his coke habit, he either drowned his frustrations in alcohol or became so irritable that he took his anger out on Sarah. What terrified Jimmy most was when their family couldn’t afford to keep up Nick’s habits and so came with it many nights that Nick would take Sarah and assault her until his fists became so tired, body drained, and he collapsed on the couch. Jimmy, too afraid to come out of the bedroom he shared with Anna, would watch from down the hall as his mother curled up on the floor and cried.
“I hate dad,” he once confessed, at the tender age of 7. Blue eyes stared wide out into the darkness, the hesitant whisper spoken with so little conviction, as if he were afraid God would strike him down for his filial disobedience.
Tears trickled down his cheeks but he didn’t sob like his mother was sobbing in the hallway. He felt a pair of comforting arms wrap around from behind him, from where he lay in the bed, as a body no bigger than his own, pressed against him. He trembled, one hand clutching onto Anna’s arm and the other dragging their thin, ratty blanket tighter around their bodies.
“It isn’t nice to hate, Jimmy,” Anna whispered, breath tickling the back of his neck. She hugged him tighter. Jimmy swore he could feel damp tears as her cheek pressed into the little exposed skin between his neck and shoulder. But, unlike him, her voice remained steady, soft. “Dad’s not well.”
It’s the same thing their mother always told them: Daddy’s not feeling good. Daddy is sick. Daddy doesn’t mean to do it. Daddy loves you.
Jimmy was getting tired of the excuses.
It was around this time that Anna found God. At first, she looked for reasons to stay away from home but soon she became very into Sunday school sessions and prayer. She brought Jimmy along with her and together, they found solace in the House of God, finding in God a father where theirs was negligent, a voice that would listen and loved them. Anna’s fascination with the church consumed other aspects of her life and by age 9, she was able to name all the prophets and angels.
“Did you know the angel of Thursday is Castiel, Jimmy?” she had once said.
Jimmy had looked at her questioningly.
“It says that he will protect anyone born on a Thursday,” Anna continued, indicating to the book she was reading. “We were born on a Thursday, Jimmy. Castiel is watching over us.”
The steady conviction in her voice filled Jimmy with hope. And he really did want to believe that outside of the pain he endured, there was something out there, greater than he could comprehend, watching over him and his sister.
*
But that all changed.
Bruised, battered, and scared, Sarah had finally run out on Nick during one of his coke-deprived and drunken stupors. Passed out on the floor, his knuckles laced with the traces of Sarah’s blood, Nick had fallen into an easy sleep, his snores echoing off of the paper-thin walls of the dirtied apartment. It was the middle of December and Jimmy could still remember how cold the air had been, curled up with Anna under a torn blanket on a soiled, worn mattress that constituted a bed. Both had watched, wide-eyed as their mother quietly stepped over Nick and limped her way towards the door.
“Mama…” Jimmy had whispered, fear betraying the dead calm, the sense of finality that seemed to settle in the room.
Anna’s fingernails dug into Jimmy’s arm, leaving little crescents. Her tight grip was the only thing reminding him that this wasn’t some twisted nightmare playing out before his eyes.
The knob on the door turned slowly, Sarah terrified to disturb Nick. Even in the dark, Jimmy and Anna could make out the dark stains on Sarah’s cream coloured sweater that soiled the garment beneath her neck. Sarah’s lips and nose still bled profusely and the skin around her left eye was puffed out and bruised.
She looked back once at her children and the betrayal was written all over her face. Those eyes, always so haunted and terrified, looked one last time upon her children. Lips slightly parted, an unspoken apology passed between them.
And then she was gone.
Later, when Anna was clutching Jimmy who sobbed silently into her shoulder, she whimpered reassurances between her trembling lips, “It’s okay, Jimmy…it’s okay…angels are watching over us…please don’t cry…angels are watching over us…”
Angels are watching over us.
“Castiel is watching over us,” is what she really meant, what she had once told him.
This became a whispered mantra that haunted Jimmy for the remainder of his short-lived childhood.
He still remembered what Anna was wearing when their father took his ire out on her. They had only been 11 years old, Anna clad in a knee-length pleated skirt and a second-hand, long-sleeve blouse that was just a tad too big for her. Both her and Jimmy had just returned from a late afternoon service at the local church. The smell that first greeted them when they entered the apartment was alcohol: its bitter stench clung to every surface, interwoven with the permanent traces of ash that clung to the walls like a second skin.
And sure enough, there was Nick, bottle in left hand and cigarette dangling precariously in the other. The tears that stained his cheeks and his red rimmed eyes failed to fill Jimmy’s heart with any compassion for his father.
Instead, Jimmy felt his stomach sink and a sense of dread poison him into stillness when every instinct told him to run.
It had been three weeks since Sarah had left.
“I gave her everything,” Nick whimpered bitterly, a choked sob causing his face to contort into something embittered and twisted. “Everything!”
The bottle dropped from his hand. Booze splashed across the floor at his feet.
Nick stood up and took a step forward. Anna and Jimmy instinctively took a step back.
“Your mother’s left us,” Nick said quietly. There had been something dangerous in his eyes, a warning that Jimmy had wished he had seen sooner. “And she’s not coming back. She left us alone…left you alone-with me.”
His chuckle sounded five kinds of wrong. Jimmy felt Anna shake beside him, a protective arm coming out in front of Jimmy as they were backed up against the wall. Jimmy felt panic rise in his chest and wanted to sink into the shadows that hugged the walls of the apartment.
Anna cried out as she was roughly shoved aside. Nick’s hand reached forward and yanked Jimmy’s tiny frame from the wall, shoving him roughly onto the wall.
“She says I’m a bad husband!”
A slap.
Jimmy had tasted blood on his lips.
“Says I’m a bad father!”
A kick. And Jimmy is curled up in a fetal position, tears slipping unbidden from his eyes.
“Daddy, stop!”
A loud CRACK from where Anna’s body hits the wall beside him and she folds over next to Jimmy, her voice breaking down into pleading sobs.
“I’ve given you EVERYTHING and this is what I get?!”
The hysterical shouting was only broken by the sound of Nick’s fists slamming into Jimmy’s small body. It had been over a year…a year since his father has last laid his hands on them and Jimmy had forgotten how much it hurt. He tried to drown out his father’s shouting with his own sobs, not wanting to hear the hate that should have been love directed at the very thing his father had helped create. But this only made his father angrier, each strike leaving its mark on Jimmy’s skin.
Suddenly, Jimmy felt a weight throw itself over his curled up body and still wishes to this day that he hadn’t let it, that he would have had the courage to keep Anna from doing what she did.
“Don’t hurt him!” she had screamed at Nick, crying out when Nick slapped the back of her head.
Jimmy had felt her tears drip into his hair. But unlike him, Anna was silent when she cried.
“Want to be a hero like your whore of a mother?!” Nick shouted, pulling Anna off of Jimmy by yanking her long, red hair. “Defending that little shit? Fine. I’ll treat you just like mommy dearest.”
Nick dragged Anna across the floor and then reached out for his forgotten cigarette, still lit in the ash tray. Pulling back Anna’s head, he shoved the burning stub into Anna’s shoulder blade as she clawed and struggled against his tight grip. From where Jimmy lay on the floor, he stared wide-eyed, his heart breaking with the look of pain on Anna’s face. Her scream was only bitten back by her teeth on her lower lips, digging in so deeply that trickles of blood dribbled down her chin.
Another tug on Anna’s hair and her head was pulled back tight against Nick’s chest. With almost cruel affection, he leaned down and rubbed his nose against her cheek, sighing as he breathed in deeply. “Just like mommy dearest.”
He placed a kiss on her temple, his free hand reaching underneath her skirt to tug down her underwear. And Jimmy watched, his mouth opened in a scream that would not come. He watched as her panties were pulled none-too-gently down her creamy, pale skin and pooled at her feet.
“Go to your room, Jimmy,” Nick warned.
Jimmy’s wide, blue eyes stared into Anna’s. His body ached all over as he stood up and stumbled, shaking as he tried to step towards Anna and his father. But Anna shook her head at him and Jimmy knew then what it was she was doing. He wanted to scream at her, ‘Don’t do it!’ but his voice had been silenced by fear since Nick took that first swing at him.
“Now, Jimmy!”
And Jimmy was afraid of Nick, terrified into a submission that has since settled into the pit of his stomach, a guilt that’s slowly eaten away at him in the years that followed. Because Jimmy turned away, turned his back on Anna when he curled up into their bed and cried.
But even his cries couldn’t drown out the strangled sobs the first time their father took Anna. Or every time after that.
*
“Why do you do it, Anna?”
It had been months since this horror had started and with time, Anna became more bruised, more broken. But even through the purple and yellow taint that mapped the once pale skin beneath her clothes, there was strength in those eyes that even their father’s abuse could never take away.
Anna had taken Jimmy’s hand, her body now more sunken and thinner than he had ever seen it. But she still squeezed it reassuringly, broken lips pulled into a smile that once had been beautiful but now looked haunted. “Because angels are watching over us, Jimmy. And they won’t let him destroy me.”
Castiel won’t let him destroy me.
They had stopped going to church, Anna doing her best to hide from the outside world, to hide the scars that would reveal the secrets behind the closed doors of their home that felt more like hell. In hell is where the demons and monsters are, as their pastor had once told them, so it only seemed fitting that Jimmy see his father for what he was: a demon whose self-created hell was threatening to consume what little Anna and Jimmy had left.
Still, Anna clutched that Bible in her free hand, a King St. James version given to her by Pastor Rick. As if it held the only answers that mattered.
“We can leave,” Jimmy had tried telling her.
“But they might separate us,” Anna had responded.
It was true. Jimmy had met students at school, foster students who had been taken from their parents and separated from their siblings. And Anna was his only friend in the world.
“I’ll make him stop, then.”
He didn’t think Anna believed him. But she pretended to believe him.
So Anna did as their father asked and most of the time, he kept his hands off of Jimmy. It didn’t always work but for the times it did, Jimmy selfishly curled up in his bed and covered his ears. It wasn’t long until Anna learned to stop screaming. Once that happened, there were times Jimmy could pretend that the sliding of skin against skin and his father’s quiet moans were something else or maybe just someone else and when Anna crawled into bed with him afterwards, body trembling, Jimmy threw an arm around her and comforted her as if she were just waking from a nightmare and could be coaxed back to sleep.
All because Jimmy didn’t want to be separated from Anna. So he let it continue.
But everyone has their breaking point and it was at the age of 12, almost a year since Nick had first put his hands on her, that Anna discovered hers. Her body had become so pale and depleted, and not just from the days her and Jimmy would go without food when their father succumbed to the drugs. She became a walking ghost and people began asking questions at school.
It wasn’t the belated intrusion into their lives, though, that broke her. It was when Nick stepped too far.
“Say ‘Hi’ to the camera, Jimmy.”
Bare-naked and shivering, Jimmy looked into the lens.
“H-hi,” he stuttered.
Beside him, Anna was also naked and shivering.
“You too, Anna. C’mon, do it for daddy.”
Where once she would have protested, the fight in her was gone.
“Now Jimmy, look at your sister. Isn’t she beautiful?”
And Jimmy did look. And he was ashamed of what happened to his body when he did, every fibre in him fighting against this taboo of desire burning beneath the surface of his skin, a boy on the verge of puberty with a dark curiosity.
He knew better than to fight against Nick. So he nodded.
“Anna, can you be a good girl for daddy? Daddy wants you to do that thing he likes to Jimmy.”
It had been months since Anna cried from these games she was forced to play with their father. But still a silent tear trickled as without any hesitation, she dropped to her knees.
Later, when Nick was finished his little home video (Jimmy would later learn it was to exchange it for a hit of heroin from this paedophile who dealt with Nick), Jimmy tried to wash away the shame from his skin. But even after 45 minutes in the shower, the water long since running cold and his skin scrubbed red, Jimmy still couldn’t fight the urge to kneel before the toilet bowl and vomit up the rest of his meagre breakfast. As he heaved and heaved until his throat became sore, eyes red-rimmed and body aching, he rested his head on the seat and wished not for the first time that this horror would be over.
But as he breathed in heavily, his gaze fell upon the open door where Anna stood. Thin, pale body covered in bruises, it wasn’t her nakedness that exposed her but the way her eyes looked into Jimmy’s and he saw a resolve that made his skin crawl; she was clutching Nick’s Ccolt.
“A-Anna…”
Jimmy stood up slowly.
“Angels are watching over us,” Anna said. She smiled.
“Anna, DON’T--!”
Jimmy still remembers the sound of the shot, followed by her body slumping to the floor. He still remembers holding her in his arms, both of them naked and her head wound bleeding all over his chest, a mixture of gore and brains that seemed to stain his skin for weeks afterwards. But most of all, he remembers the pain in his sobs as he clutched her and cried and cried until his body was incapable of producing any more tears.
Mostly Jimmy remembers crying because it was the last time Jimmy ever cried.
Chapter 3
Beta: verucasalt123
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: NC-17
Genre: It's a Terrible Life AU verse, Horror, Drama, Dark themes, Angst
Pairings: Jimmy/Dean, Castiel/Dean, mentions of Dean/'Dr.Sexy' and Dean/OMCs
Spoilers: For the AU verse in episode 4.17; none for canon
Warnings: PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE READING! Language, stalking, gore, sex, d/s themes, sex between minors (under 13, not descriptive), major character death Dean, cannibalism, necrophilia, twincest, incest, pedophilia, patricide, non-con, dub-con, suicide, mental illness (Dissociative Identity Disorder), hallucinations
Word Count: 17 000 (in total)
Summary: Jimmy Novak has been working as Dean Smith's secretary for the last two years. After two years of crushing on his employer, Jimmy and Dean finally go out on a date. However, unknown to Dean, Castiel has also taken an interest in him and Dean's stalker will stop at nothing until he gets what he wants.
A/N: Written as part of the dc-dystopia Challenge. All submissions have dark themes so I strongly suggest that you READ THE WARNINGS before reading my fic. The appearances of pedophilia and sex between minors has been intentionally kept non-descriptive in adherence to LiveJournal's Terms of Service. If even one of the warning themes disturbs you, I highly recommend you don't read this.
Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Epilogue | Art Masterpost
It was on an early Thursday morning in mid August that a bright eyed, red-headed young girl was brought into the world, kicking and screaming. To the few that remember her, they would have said she had a voice like an angel, capable of commanding power and respect but also conveying a deeply rooted sense of compassion that even her own tormented childhood couldn’t taint and twist. Seeming wiser than the small body her soul occupied, she had been born at 4:17 am and, twenty minutes later, her twin brother followed. Jimmy sometimes felt it was more like 20 years.
The first 10 years of their lives had been tough: Anna and Jimmy Novak were the only children of a mother too meek to stand up for herself and a father who often gambled, drank, and snorted their monthly income. The few times Sarah Novak had attempted to cut off Nick from his coke habit, he either drowned his frustrations in alcohol or became so irritable that he took his anger out on Sarah. What terrified Jimmy most was when their family couldn’t afford to keep up Nick’s habits and so came with it many nights that Nick would take Sarah and assault her until his fists became so tired, body drained, and he collapsed on the couch. Jimmy, too afraid to come out of the bedroom he shared with Anna, would watch from down the hall as his mother curled up on the floor and cried.
“I hate dad,” he once confessed, at the tender age of 7. Blue eyes stared wide out into the darkness, the hesitant whisper spoken with so little conviction, as if he were afraid God would strike him down for his filial disobedience.
Tears trickled down his cheeks but he didn’t sob like his mother was sobbing in the hallway. He felt a pair of comforting arms wrap around from behind him, from where he lay in the bed, as a body no bigger than his own, pressed against him. He trembled, one hand clutching onto Anna’s arm and the other dragging their thin, ratty blanket tighter around their bodies.
“It isn’t nice to hate, Jimmy,” Anna whispered, breath tickling the back of his neck. She hugged him tighter. Jimmy swore he could feel damp tears as her cheek pressed into the little exposed skin between his neck and shoulder. But, unlike him, her voice remained steady, soft. “Dad’s not well.”
It’s the same thing their mother always told them: Daddy’s not feeling good. Daddy is sick. Daddy doesn’t mean to do it. Daddy loves you.
Jimmy was getting tired of the excuses.
It was around this time that Anna found God. At first, she looked for reasons to stay away from home but soon she became very into Sunday school sessions and prayer. She brought Jimmy along with her and together, they found solace in the House of God, finding in God a father where theirs was negligent, a voice that would listen and loved them. Anna’s fascination with the church consumed other aspects of her life and by age 9, she was able to name all the prophets and angels.
“Did you know the angel of Thursday is Castiel, Jimmy?” she had once said.
Jimmy had looked at her questioningly.
“It says that he will protect anyone born on a Thursday,” Anna continued, indicating to the book she was reading. “We were born on a Thursday, Jimmy. Castiel is watching over us.”
The steady conviction in her voice filled Jimmy with hope. And he really did want to believe that outside of the pain he endured, there was something out there, greater than he could comprehend, watching over him and his sister.
*
But that all changed.
Bruised, battered, and scared, Sarah had finally run out on Nick during one of his coke-deprived and drunken stupors. Passed out on the floor, his knuckles laced with the traces of Sarah’s blood, Nick had fallen into an easy sleep, his snores echoing off of the paper-thin walls of the dirtied apartment. It was the middle of December and Jimmy could still remember how cold the air had been, curled up with Anna under a torn blanket on a soiled, worn mattress that constituted a bed. Both had watched, wide-eyed as their mother quietly stepped over Nick and limped her way towards the door.
“Mama…” Jimmy had whispered, fear betraying the dead calm, the sense of finality that seemed to settle in the room.
Anna’s fingernails dug into Jimmy’s arm, leaving little crescents. Her tight grip was the only thing reminding him that this wasn’t some twisted nightmare playing out before his eyes.
The knob on the door turned slowly, Sarah terrified to disturb Nick. Even in the dark, Jimmy and Anna could make out the dark stains on Sarah’s cream coloured sweater that soiled the garment beneath her neck. Sarah’s lips and nose still bled profusely and the skin around her left eye was puffed out and bruised.
She looked back once at her children and the betrayal was written all over her face. Those eyes, always so haunted and terrified, looked one last time upon her children. Lips slightly parted, an unspoken apology passed between them.
And then she was gone.
Later, when Anna was clutching Jimmy who sobbed silently into her shoulder, she whimpered reassurances between her trembling lips, “It’s okay, Jimmy…it’s okay…angels are watching over us…please don’t cry…angels are watching over us…”
Angels are watching over us.
“Castiel is watching over us,” is what she really meant, what she had once told him.
This became a whispered mantra that haunted Jimmy for the remainder of his short-lived childhood.
He still remembered what Anna was wearing when their father took his ire out on her. They had only been 11 years old, Anna clad in a knee-length pleated skirt and a second-hand, long-sleeve blouse that was just a tad too big for her. Both her and Jimmy had just returned from a late afternoon service at the local church. The smell that first greeted them when they entered the apartment was alcohol: its bitter stench clung to every surface, interwoven with the permanent traces of ash that clung to the walls like a second skin.
And sure enough, there was Nick, bottle in left hand and cigarette dangling precariously in the other. The tears that stained his cheeks and his red rimmed eyes failed to fill Jimmy’s heart with any compassion for his father.
Instead, Jimmy felt his stomach sink and a sense of dread poison him into stillness when every instinct told him to run.
It had been three weeks since Sarah had left.
“I gave her everything,” Nick whimpered bitterly, a choked sob causing his face to contort into something embittered and twisted. “Everything!”
The bottle dropped from his hand. Booze splashed across the floor at his feet.
Nick stood up and took a step forward. Anna and Jimmy instinctively took a step back.
“Your mother’s left us,” Nick said quietly. There had been something dangerous in his eyes, a warning that Jimmy had wished he had seen sooner. “And she’s not coming back. She left us alone…left you alone-with me.”
His chuckle sounded five kinds of wrong. Jimmy felt Anna shake beside him, a protective arm coming out in front of Jimmy as they were backed up against the wall. Jimmy felt panic rise in his chest and wanted to sink into the shadows that hugged the walls of the apartment.
Anna cried out as she was roughly shoved aside. Nick’s hand reached forward and yanked Jimmy’s tiny frame from the wall, shoving him roughly onto the wall.
“She says I’m a bad husband!”
A slap.
Jimmy had tasted blood on his lips.
“Says I’m a bad father!”
A kick. And Jimmy is curled up in a fetal position, tears slipping unbidden from his eyes.
“Daddy, stop!”
A loud CRACK from where Anna’s body hits the wall beside him and she folds over next to Jimmy, her voice breaking down into pleading sobs.
“I’ve given you EVERYTHING and this is what I get?!”
The hysterical shouting was only broken by the sound of Nick’s fists slamming into Jimmy’s small body. It had been over a year…a year since his father has last laid his hands on them and Jimmy had forgotten how much it hurt. He tried to drown out his father’s shouting with his own sobs, not wanting to hear the hate that should have been love directed at the very thing his father had helped create. But this only made his father angrier, each strike leaving its mark on Jimmy’s skin.
Suddenly, Jimmy felt a weight throw itself over his curled up body and still wishes to this day that he hadn’t let it, that he would have had the courage to keep Anna from doing what she did.
“Don’t hurt him!” she had screamed at Nick, crying out when Nick slapped the back of her head.
Jimmy had felt her tears drip into his hair. But unlike him, Anna was silent when she cried.
“Want to be a hero like your whore of a mother?!” Nick shouted, pulling Anna off of Jimmy by yanking her long, red hair. “Defending that little shit? Fine. I’ll treat you just like mommy dearest.”
Nick dragged Anna across the floor and then reached out for his forgotten cigarette, still lit in the ash tray. Pulling back Anna’s head, he shoved the burning stub into Anna’s shoulder blade as she clawed and struggled against his tight grip. From where Jimmy lay on the floor, he stared wide-eyed, his heart breaking with the look of pain on Anna’s face. Her scream was only bitten back by her teeth on her lower lips, digging in so deeply that trickles of blood dribbled down her chin.
Another tug on Anna’s hair and her head was pulled back tight against Nick’s chest. With almost cruel affection, he leaned down and rubbed his nose against her cheek, sighing as he breathed in deeply. “Just like mommy dearest.”
He placed a kiss on her temple, his free hand reaching underneath her skirt to tug down her underwear. And Jimmy watched, his mouth opened in a scream that would not come. He watched as her panties were pulled none-too-gently down her creamy, pale skin and pooled at her feet.
“Go to your room, Jimmy,” Nick warned.
Jimmy’s wide, blue eyes stared into Anna’s. His body ached all over as he stood up and stumbled, shaking as he tried to step towards Anna and his father. But Anna shook her head at him and Jimmy knew then what it was she was doing. He wanted to scream at her, ‘Don’t do it!’ but his voice had been silenced by fear since Nick took that first swing at him.
“Now, Jimmy!”
And Jimmy was afraid of Nick, terrified into a submission that has since settled into the pit of his stomach, a guilt that’s slowly eaten away at him in the years that followed. Because Jimmy turned away, turned his back on Anna when he curled up into their bed and cried.
But even his cries couldn’t drown out the strangled sobs the first time their father took Anna. Or every time after that.
*
“Why do you do it, Anna?”
It had been months since this horror had started and with time, Anna became more bruised, more broken. But even through the purple and yellow taint that mapped the once pale skin beneath her clothes, there was strength in those eyes that even their father’s abuse could never take away.
Anna had taken Jimmy’s hand, her body now more sunken and thinner than he had ever seen it. But she still squeezed it reassuringly, broken lips pulled into a smile that once had been beautiful but now looked haunted. “Because angels are watching over us, Jimmy. And they won’t let him destroy me.”
Castiel won’t let him destroy me.
They had stopped going to church, Anna doing her best to hide from the outside world, to hide the scars that would reveal the secrets behind the closed doors of their home that felt more like hell. In hell is where the demons and monsters are, as their pastor had once told them, so it only seemed fitting that Jimmy see his father for what he was: a demon whose self-created hell was threatening to consume what little Anna and Jimmy had left.
Still, Anna clutched that Bible in her free hand, a King St. James version given to her by Pastor Rick. As if it held the only answers that mattered.
“We can leave,” Jimmy had tried telling her.
“But they might separate us,” Anna had responded.
It was true. Jimmy had met students at school, foster students who had been taken from their parents and separated from their siblings. And Anna was his only friend in the world.
“I’ll make him stop, then.”
He didn’t think Anna believed him. But she pretended to believe him.
So Anna did as their father asked and most of the time, he kept his hands off of Jimmy. It didn’t always work but for the times it did, Jimmy selfishly curled up in his bed and covered his ears. It wasn’t long until Anna learned to stop screaming. Once that happened, there were times Jimmy could pretend that the sliding of skin against skin and his father’s quiet moans were something else or maybe just someone else and when Anna crawled into bed with him afterwards, body trembling, Jimmy threw an arm around her and comforted her as if she were just waking from a nightmare and could be coaxed back to sleep.
All because Jimmy didn’t want to be separated from Anna. So he let it continue.
But everyone has their breaking point and it was at the age of 12, almost a year since Nick had first put his hands on her, that Anna discovered hers. Her body had become so pale and depleted, and not just from the days her and Jimmy would go without food when their father succumbed to the drugs. She became a walking ghost and people began asking questions at school.
It wasn’t the belated intrusion into their lives, though, that broke her. It was when Nick stepped too far.
“Say ‘Hi’ to the camera, Jimmy.”
Bare-naked and shivering, Jimmy looked into the lens.
“H-hi,” he stuttered.
Beside him, Anna was also naked and shivering.
“You too, Anna. C’mon, do it for daddy.”
Where once she would have protested, the fight in her was gone.
“Now Jimmy, look at your sister. Isn’t she beautiful?”
And Jimmy did look. And he was ashamed of what happened to his body when he did, every fibre in him fighting against this taboo of desire burning beneath the surface of his skin, a boy on the verge of puberty with a dark curiosity.
He knew better than to fight against Nick. So he nodded.
“Anna, can you be a good girl for daddy? Daddy wants you to do that thing he likes to Jimmy.”
It had been months since Anna cried from these games she was forced to play with their father. But still a silent tear trickled as without any hesitation, she dropped to her knees.
Later, when Nick was finished his little home video (Jimmy would later learn it was to exchange it for a hit of heroin from this paedophile who dealt with Nick), Jimmy tried to wash away the shame from his skin. But even after 45 minutes in the shower, the water long since running cold and his skin scrubbed red, Jimmy still couldn’t fight the urge to kneel before the toilet bowl and vomit up the rest of his meagre breakfast. As he heaved and heaved until his throat became sore, eyes red-rimmed and body aching, he rested his head on the seat and wished not for the first time that this horror would be over.
But as he breathed in heavily, his gaze fell upon the open door where Anna stood. Thin, pale body covered in bruises, it wasn’t her nakedness that exposed her but the way her eyes looked into Jimmy’s and he saw a resolve that made his skin crawl; she was clutching Nick’s Ccolt.
“A-Anna…”
Jimmy stood up slowly.
“Angels are watching over us,” Anna said. She smiled.
“Anna, DON’T--!”
Jimmy still remembers the sound of the shot, followed by her body slumping to the floor. He still remembers holding her in his arms, both of them naked and her head wound bleeding all over his chest, a mixture of gore and brains that seemed to stain his skin for weeks afterwards. But most of all, he remembers the pain in his sobs as he clutched her and cried and cried until his body was incapable of producing any more tears.
Mostly Jimmy remembers crying because it was the last time Jimmy ever cried.
Chapter 3