#i'm all for toxic codependency but it tested my limits

[redmyeyes]

some kind of murder

for @wincestwednesdays

"How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?"

― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

You tilt the flask into your palm and wait, jittery, for the last drops to fall. 

There must be some left. A single drop. Just enough to tide you over. It's been days since she's come and she knows you're dry and she's not answering the phone and you even tried praying but demons don't answer prayers either.

Where is she?

A commercial for Heinz Ketchup when you were a kid—there's this girl, pretty girl in a sundress, with curly brown hair you wanted to sink your hands into, even then.  She's standing on a fire escape outside an anonymous brick apartment building, her hip leaning daringly against the iron rail.  On top of the world, and no fear of falling.  It's summer.  The breeze rustles her thin dress, revealing tantalizing glimpses of tanned thigh.

She's flirting with this blur of a guy—you don't remember this part well—some guy who wants her ketchup.  Metaphor.  

She extends the bottle over the edge of the fire escape, as though holding it hostage.  One wrong move and the bottle gets it.  And then she smiles, tilts it upside-down invitingly.  You want my ketchup?  Run and claim it.  Blurry guy runs three flights down, just in time to catch the precious falling drops on his bun at the bottom. 

Splat. 

It feels like that, this wait, though the fall is only inches.

It needs to be on your palm before you suck it down. You can't just knock the flask back like whiskey, you need to see it first, to make sure. You've long since stopped thinking of it as what it is. It's simply— necessary.

Wait.

Nanoseconds stretch into eons.  Your focus zeros in on the lip of the flask, a drop of brilliant red hanging there, suspended.

Wait.

When the drops finally fall, 

—lightning, a nine-volt battery to the tongue, an electro-charged cymbal crash, and an immediate, hollowed-out wanting, and you shut your eyes tight against the sudden cacophony of sound and sight, a world on fire—

you inhale them from the palm of your hand like a starved dog, feral and ravenous.

Breathe.

The blue-white lights in this motel parking lot scrape your retinas; the hum of the vending machine next to you amps up to a jackhammer.  And drowning out all the rest is the all-consuming, life-affirming thump of your heart:  da-DUM.  da-DUM.

The taste lingers on your tongue, spicy and dark with undertones of old copper.  You're developing a palate.

You close your eyes to feel the familiar surge of power course through you.  Making you stronger.  If he understood— if he could just understand the necessity of this—the potential—but his thinking has always been so black-and-white.  You need to be strong enough— enough to convince him, to make him see, and then he'll— 

It's her words in your head, her lithe body pressed up against you as she whispers low into your ear—it's okay, Sammy. Big brother would be so proud. 

The voice is far away when it comes, muffled and unimportant compared to the bass drum thump of blood in your veins. When the fog clears, it registers, distant: someone saying your name.  

"Sam."

You spin, wild, and— he's there, Dean, your brother, and for a suspended second, you're elated.  Nevermind that you saw him two minutes ago as you were sneaking out of the motel room (sleeping, his mouth softly parted, arm stretched towards you across the canyon between the beds), for that fraction of a second, every time is the first time. A split soul recombining like beads of mercury.

"Dean," you say, breathless, a smile tugging on your lips.

Then you catch the frown on his face, his crossed arms.  "Dean, hey, I was just—" You clutch the flask in your hand, gesturing with it, then curse your stupidity.  "A soda."

His eyes flick towards the flask then back to you.  His brow furrows.  It could be anger or— "Long time for a soda."  —it's fear.  You're a connoisseur of Dean's expressions.  It's the type of fear he's always tried to hide.  It's worry.  For you.

You're flooded with affection suddenly, and the past horrible year—years—melt away like ice-cream on August pavement. 

—he loves you he cares for you he protects you don't have to worry about a thing—

You're nine years old again, a VHS tape rewinding on triple speed undoing all your mistakes—failure after failure all the way back to—

—and he wants you—

You grin, giddy, something like a giggle escaping your mouth.  It's not anger on his face, but care.  You've always needed his attention on you and in this moment you have it, undivided.  Intoxicating.  

"It's okay, Dean.  You don't have to worry."  You move closer and he moves back, until he's pressed against the dirty concrete wall in the dark alcove between the vending machine and the stairs.  "I'm okay, don't worry."

"Sammy…" A token protest, his arms coming up to press against your chest, but you're familiar with this dance.  He'd needed convincing the first few times, in those early days.  As though he wasn't desperate for it too.

"Dean."  You pour everything into that single word, love and hate and desperation and you see the flicker in his eye as it registers.  He shudders out a breath, his eyes closing, and you move in closer, bending down to nuzzle into his neck.  His pulse beats madly against your lips.

"Dean…"

His hands slide down to grip your hips.  You press him back into the shadows, your blood rushing rushing rushing, and you nose under his chin, inhale his scent.  God, but you have missed this.

You haven't, since— before. Before, before.  Unless you count that never-ending series of Tuesdays where things got— real desperate, for a minute there, but you don't count that, you were out of your head, driven mad.  It can't be counted if only one person remembers anyway, and you thank god, thank god, thank god for that simple fact.

You've missed this, missed him.  Since he's been back he's been so— distracted.  Wary, even.  Almost like— 

It's natural.  Normal.  You've been telling yourself that since the first moment he walked through the door, alive and whole, shocking you so much you barely knew how to respond, your body awkward as it went in for a hug, muscle memory operating without your conscious input.  It's normal.  It's trauma.  Maybe even, still, thinks he's trapped there sometimes.  Of course he's going to be shying away from you, especially with the voice of the devil—hah—whispering in his ear.  You've taken Psych 101.  And you've done your own reading, when you were in college and still thought you could work your way through your own trauma just by understanding the mechanisms of it.  No way through but through.

One of your legs slot between his, easy. "Cowboy legs," Dad had once slurred out when he was drunk. "Made for riding." Dean had flushed pink. 

He's hard against your hip, and the triumph of that surges in you like the— no, better than.  If only you could bottle this…

You're struck suddenly by how much bigger you are, even since last year.  Your bodies slot together in an entirely new way.  You tower over him, encompass him.  Does he like the fact that you're bigger, that you can crush him against the wall and he has no chance of escaping?  His hands are still, not pushing away, but not encouraging either. When you pull back enough to see, his eyes are screwed tight. You nuzzle down further, try to make yourself small, and finally his hands crawl up your back.  Feels like he's hanging on to the edge of a cliff, the way his fingers dig in through the corduroy.

Your room is only two doors down, but the thought of relocating doesn't even enter your mind. To prise yourself from this spot in the shadows of the stairwell seems impossible.

You're connected in this moment, and it's been so long.  So very very long.

You're connected, blood still pulsing loud through your veins, the same that runs through him, except— no, you know you can convince him.  It's making you strong.  It's a tool, just like all the other tools in your arsenal—the guns, the salt, the holy water.  It's not like before, with your ever-increasing powers, where there was a danger of— where the purpose was controlled by— it's different this time.  It's a tool to be used, otherwise—

Otherwise, otherwise.  You can't let yourself think that the purpose has already passed, pulled like a rug out from under you the moment Dean walked—unassisted by you—out of a grave and back into your life.

To think that would be to admit the impossible.  That this is no longer a choice, but a need—

Burrow down, tuck your head up under his chin, you've missed feeling small.  Taken care of.  Didn't appreciate it at the time, of course.  You've been carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders for too long, a lifetime trying to prove yourself and you just want to set it down for a second.  Just for a second.

"Sam, stop this."  His voice is ragged, his hands a vice grip around your arms now as you paw against his chest.

Burrow down, burrow in, nose against his sternum.  Worn flannel against your cheek, smell of—leatherwhiskeygunsalt—Him.  That's how it was when this whole thing started, Dean a head taller than you, but you shot up fast.  Your shins ached for months. 

"Getting a soda," he says, echoing your words from a lifetime ago.  Sounds like he's spitting out something foul.  "Taking a phone call.  At all hours of the night.  Sammy, you think I don't know what's going on?"  Then, his hands digging in painfully and his voice dangerously low, "You think. I don't know."

Rage surges up, strangling, and you push it down down down, locked tight, but you've flattened Dean against the wall so hard you hear the breath knocked out of him.  You can't breathe—in sympathy, you think for a moment until you realize his thumbs are in your windpipe, cutting off your air supply.

You fall to your knees, mouth gaping like a fish out of water.  That's the first thing you ever watched die—consciously, anyway—Dad attempting to impart some kind of lesson when you were five or six, hauling a caught trout onto the deck and making you watch as it took its last non-breaths. A moment heavy with solemnity, you remember the proud weight of it, that you were old enough now in Dad's eyes to experience this.

The only thing remaining is that image embedded in your brain—the fish flopping on the rain-weathered wood, the way it wouldn't stop wriggling for what seemed like ages, iron hook pierced through its cheek.

You gaze up at your brother, eyes burning.  The flask goes clattering loud against the concrete—have you been holding it all this time?—as your hands come up to wrap around his wrists.  Not pulling, just— holding. His thumbs inch deeper.  Your mouth gulps for air.

You shove the voice down deeper, the one that wants to rage up against the unfairness of it all—that Dean could die, willingly, sell his soul and leave you alone to deal with the guilt of it, and you can't even— it was justified!  Everything is justified when it comes to saving one another, you thought that was part and parcel of the whole deal.  And yet he's looking at you, he's been looking at you— with disappointment.  Betrayal.  Disgust.  

And the voice you're really trying to ignore—the voice that has a hold on Dean's wrists but isn't making him pull away—is the one that agrees with him.  Your self-worth is so wrapped up in what he thinks of you, tugged on the end of a fishing line with the hook dug right through your chest, yanked between validation and disappointment—and let's be real it's mostly been disappointment—and the you from four years ago that thought you were finally free and clear, on the cusp of a new life, would look at you now and feel… pity.

Pity and disgust, same as the eyes looking down on you now and it would all be warranted because—

Because what you felt, in that instant Dean walked through the door—before the hug, before the thaw of shock, just for a split second, but real and preserved in amber way down deep where you've buried it—was not joy, or gratitude or relief, but— fury.

Because it should have been your win and it was stolen from you.  You were supposed to save him, it was the only thing that would have made things right between you, and what was all this suffering for, if not for that?  The entire summer, getting stronger and stronger, justifying away— everything, because everything was allowed if it was for That, but now—

You were preparing.  You were ready.  And then he just walked through the door.

All of that energy has to go somewhere.

Dean wrenches his hands away with a sob and collapses against the wall, sliding down until his head is buried in his knees, hands fisted in the hair at the back of his head.

You gulp in air, sitting back on your haunches as you stare unseeing at the ground.

You take a deep shuddering breath in, let it out slow.  Force your breathing back to even.  Your blood pounds in your ears.  th-THUMP. th-THUMP.

"You don't know anything," you say, but your voice is muffled under the rush of blood, like you're speaking under water.  That moment in amber, shattered and laid out finally for you to see, has sapped all your energy, your limbs heavy and sluggish.

It changes nothing.  You've already invested too much to back out now.  Sunk cost fallacy.  The term burbles up from the back of your mind, and you almost laugh.  If only you were playing with something as absurd and abstract as money.

You haul yourself to your feet, leaving Dean huddled there on the pavement.  "You don't know anything," you say again louder.

You'll make him understand, or— there is no 'or'.

Somewhere in the far distance, an ambulance wails.