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The bad day started, really, at breakfast, in the greasy-spoon diner attached to the bargain bin motel. You had a headache and were tired because Sam had been up all night puking into the toilet from a bad plate of thai food. He was sitting beside you in the restaurant booth, white as a sheet and cautiously eating a piece of dry toast.
‘Told you you shouldn’t eat that rabbit food,’ Dean said heartily, ‘you don’t see me puk—‘
‘It’s not rabbit food, it hardly even had vegetables in it,’ you said, because Sam was turning green again and looked in no shape to defend himself.
‘’You’re not one to talk, honey,’ Dean smirked back, looking meaningfully at your bowl of fruit and yogurt. ‘You should come on over here and have some real food.’ You glared at him over his plate of bacon and eggs.
‘Maybe I would, if your legs weren’t taking up the entire booth. Sure you don’t want to sprawl a little wider?’ OK, that was pushing it; but he, it seemed, was in a good mood, and changed the subject.
‘You ever hunted the ghost of a kid before, Y/N?’
You stopped eating at that, felt the gorge rise a little in your stomach. You’d met up with the brothers in this hick town because Bobby Singer had known you were in the state and had called to see if you could swing by to run backup. You hadn’t minded; you’d heard about the Winchester boys, but you’d never ended up in the same part of the country at the same time. But Bobby had just said it was a ghost job. He hadn’t said anything about a kid. You tried to keep your voice even.
‘Nope, I haven’t. What age we talking?’
Dean shook his head and pushed his plate away – towards Sam, as it happened, who made a choked sort of noise in his throat and leaned his head back on the top of the booth.
‘Dammit Dean!’
‘Dunno,’ said Dean, ignoring Sam’s glare. ‘But the camp that’s haunted was a Boy Scout joint so odds are good it’s a kid.’ He jingled the keys in his pocket. ‘Good to roll?’
You pulled on your coat and set your jaw. Nothing to do but see the thing out now.
‘Yeah, good to go. ‘
———-
The hunt itself was a disaster. There was no way around that. You had camped on the rocky beach of a lake where the evergreens came right down to the edge of the water, near to where the ghost had apparently been most often sighted. By evening Sam had finally stopped vomiting, but he still had the shakes and was taking frequent and suspiciously lengthy trips into the bush, and by unspoken consensus he had taken your smaller tent and curled up inside it before it was even dark, his feet drawn up a bit so they wouldn’t hang out the tent’s door. You and Dean had stayed up a bit longer, till the mosquitoes got insufferable, but hadn’t talked much; his small talk was about hunting and when he paused to let you share an anecdote you’d felt defensive and stupid, and then angry for feeling it, and as soon as it was decently dark you’d stubbed out your cigarette and crawled into the tent. He’d followed soon after and you’d pretended to be sleeping, but you heard every tiny move he made, his shoes shucked off and his sleeping bag unzipped, him clearing his throat and coughing a little. For a few minutes he played with his lighter, flicking it on and off and swearing under his breath when it didn’t catch. Then he rolled over and slept; but for a long time you lay there acutely conscious of him, of his scent and breathing and the way his shoulders had looked in his black tshirt at the campfire, and when you slept it was light and full of dreams.
The next morning Sam was back in fighting form and ate seven muffins and a bag of peanuts and went for a reconnoitering walk in the woods before Dean and you had even crawled blearily from the bigger tent. He asked if you wanted a muffin (‘no Sam’) or if he should make coffee (‘yes Sammy for chrissake when has the answer ever been no’) and announced that he had found the ghost. Your mouth fell open and Dean rolled his eyes.
‘You saw it?’
‘Well, no.’ Sam was leaning back against the impala, drinking black coffee and strumming on the hood of the car. ‘But the EMF readings were clear and top of the dial. I know where it’s gonna be, should be a simple stakeout and binding spell.’
It wasn’t, of course, but that was your fault. Dean took lead and he’d set you up to cover Sam, who was setting up the little fire in a place flat enough to do the binding spell, a special one for water ghosts that needed a pentagram and some herbs. You were kneeling behind a cluster of rocks near the shoreline and Sam was behind you; Dean was up at the end of the pier, ready to head trouble off if the ghost made a run for it towards the water. It should have been simple: wait for the ghost to start walking the length of the pier, as the EMF readings showed that it did every day, then you would take point while Sam prepared the binding recipe and read out the script, and would cover him him if it attacked. Cut and dried. The boys had done this kind of thing a hundred times; you were fresher at all this, but even you felt confident, no nerves.
But then the ghost walked out of the woods wearing a fucking inflatable duck.
It was one of those inflatable inner tubes that kids used to float around the lake in, a ring of yellow rubber with the slightly equine head of a duck lurching crookedly off to one side. But the ghost inside it was around 9 or 10, a blonde kid with glasses and a bowl cut; and the last time you’d seen a duck ring like that was on your kid brother, the day before they pulled him blue and limp out of a lake.
You must have screamed, and from then it was a lost cause; Sam’s spell wasn’t ready, Dean was too far away, and before you could recover your senses the ghost-kid had seen you and wailed, a terrible hollow wail, and brought the underside of the rocky cliffs above you crashing down. Sam had escaped, or just about – a jagged piece of granite had gouged down along his arm, but it didn’t go much below the skin and missed the main veins. It had still bled like a motherfucker; the blood all over him was mostly what you remembered from those first seconds. And then waking up in the tiny fishing shack.
You’d passed it on the way in, just four walls and two broken windows close to the edge of the water, but it was closer than the camp, much closer, and the boys didn’t want to move you that far, not in the shape you were in. You came to on a dirt floor with Dean kneeling beside you doing something over your legs and Sam sunk down against the other wall, his arm shaking where he was holding it against his chest and his face drawn and hard and angry. They were talking, low and fast, but you were still out of it enough that you didn’t catch the words. But the look on Sam’s face was enough to keep you quiet till Dean tried to lift your leg and you seized up and screamed and lurched up onto your elbows.
It was pretty bad: your knee had ended up caught between two rocks and grazed hard enough by another to break the bone. The first layer of skin from just above your knee to your ankle was shredded almost away, and on the inside of the knee cap a gash had cut right through to the bone. It would heal, but it was more than any of you could deal with at the moment; you’d have to get back to town and find a doctor who wouldn’t ask too many questions. In the meantime Dean used a stick as a splint and wrapped the whole thing round with the closest thing to bandages: his and Sam’s undershirts, torn into strips and wrapped round the worst of it.
Sam left to walk back to the car, then, two hours each way at least, longer while he drove out to get better first aid supplies and something to carry you out on. He left without speaking to you, still bristling a little, just after the sun set and the loons had started calling out on the lake. Pretty close to eleven, probably, this deep into summer. Chances were good he wouldn’t get back before sunrise.
———
For awhile after Sam left you just sat on the floor of the shack in a dazed sort of stupor. The dusky grey of the last of the sunset was still enough to sketch the windows as boxes of lighter blue against the blackness. You could still see Dean, just barely, sitting against the opposite wall, hands on his gun, obviously tired but still alert. He looked up at you now with an unreadable expression.
‘How you feelin’ Y/N?’
‘I should never have come on this,’ you said, not bitterly, but in a tone that was a statement of fact. ‘I didn’t know it was a kid. Or could be a kid.’
Dean’s face softened a little.
‘Kids are tough. But they’re better off once we gank ‘em, Y/N. I know it doesn’t feel like it, especially when ya get a crier, but –‘
‘My kid brother died three years ago,’ you said, again with no emotion but fast, before you could second-guess it. ‘He was ten. He drowned in a lake, wearing a fucking duck ring like that one. Stupid fucking things. But then a week later a hunter showed up and told it it’d been a water sprite.’ It was how you’d got into hunting, of course. ‘I don’t like cases with kids. I’m fine with everything else.’
Dean was silent for a minute.
‘Especially ones who drowned, hey,’ he said, and you were so grateful that he wasn’t pussy-footing around it that you smiled a little at him.
‘Yeah. Anyway, I’m sorry, I am. I thought I’d be fine. I obviously wasn’t.’
He was shaking his head at you, his mouth set firm.
‘Listen, Y/N, every hunter’s got a weak spot. No shame in it. But you shoulda told me this morning. And Sam. Gotta let us have your back, y’know?’
‘Yeah.’ It should have rubbed you the wrong way, but it didn’t. You just sat in the quiet for awhile more, this time more companionably. Dean took a pack of cigarettes from the inside pocket of his jacket and waved them in your direction.
‘Smoke?’
You shook your head.
‘Usually after a hunt yeah, but I don’t wanna aggravate my lungs.’ It already hurt a little to breathe; Dean thought you’d managed to crack a couple of ribs in addition to the damage to your leg. At very least you were going to have a killer bruise over most of your torso in a couple of days. He stopped short in the act of lighting his smoke and ground it under the heel of his boot.
‘Shit, Y/N, sorry, I didn’t –‘
‘It’s fine, really.’ But you weren’t feeling fine, were feeling actually quite a bit worse since you’d started talking. Some of it was the shock wearing off, you guessed; it had been a good hour since the attack and the adrenaline would be leaving your system. But part of it too you suspected was the slight letting down of your guard, the easier atmosphere since Sam had left. Emotional exhaustion was jostling up against the sharp pain from your leg, the kind of pain that triggered tiny spasms in all the muscles in your body and set your teeth on edge. You could feel your breathing getting fast and shallow from your hesitancy to take the deeper breaths that hurt the most. You tried to shift to a different position, but one side of your back against the unforgiving wood of the wall was no better than the other, and the movement set splintery fire to the entire side of your body. You cried out in a mixture of pain and frustration and ground the palm of your hand into the packed stony dirt of the floor. Dean looked up from across the room, the question on his face.
‘I’m fine,’ you said shortly, because it hurt and you weren’t at all sure you weren’t going to start crying soon. ‘I’m just being a baby.’
For a long moment Dean just sat there, biting on his lower lip. Then he shuffled up to his feet and walked over to your side of the cabin, unbuttoning his red flannel button up and slipping it off. With his shirt around your leg he was naked underneath and you couldn’t help but linger on the thought that those impossibly wide shoulders and the muscled, almost hairless chest had slept just a foot away from you the night before. He kept the flannel shirt in one hand and crouched down in front of you, put one hand up to your temples and brushed the hair back from your face. It was comforting and gentle and brought your sense of vulnerability so strongly to the fore that before you could steel yourself again you started crying silently, the ugly-face noiseless sort of crying that no one ever sees unless they happen to be right in front of you when it happens. But Dean was, and his jaw tightened and he took a breath.
‘Y/N,’ he said, gently, more gently than you would have thought possible from your previous experience of him, ‘I’m going to sit behind you, OK? It’ll be easier on your back and you can lean against me a bit. Scoot up.’
You couldn’t exactly scoot under present conditions, but you shuffled forward a little on your ass, grimacing, and he stepped in behind you and slid down the wall so that he was wedged up behind you, one leg on either side of you. He wiggled a bit to find some nonexistent more comfortable position and then pulled you back to lean against his chest, careful of your bandaged leg and bruised ribs, but you still gritted your teeth against the movement. He spread the flannel shirt over your chest and tucked your head under his chin. It just fit.
‘There,’ he said, still gruffly. ‘Better?’
It was; it was infinitely better, and for the second time in five minutes you thought you were going to cry. God, you thought to yourself crossly, one bad hit and you’re an emotional basketcase. Pull it together, Y/N.
‘I’m going to get blood on your shirt,’ you said, inanely, as if you hadn’t already ruined another of his shirts that evening, ‘but yes, it’s better, it’s … much better.’
He wasn’t soft by any means but he gave in all the right places, and for the first time since you’d been hurt you were able to try to relax the muscles in your back and side. They started spasming, aftershocks of the pain, and you instinctively curled into yourself but Dean took hold of your shoulders and pulled you gently back against him.
‘Just gonna make it worse in the long run, honey,’ he said, ‘ride it out and it’ll get easier.’ Your face was wet now but you nodded and tried to relax back against him. You could feel his heart beating against your back and the pulse in his neck just by your ear, a kind of beating stereo effect of soothing regularity, but your breath was still shallow and fast. Dean shrugged his shoulders closer against yours and put his hands on your waist.
‘Y/N,’ he said, ‘here, breathe like I am, you don’t wanna be having a panic attack at least till Sammy gets back, I’m shit at that stuff. C’mon, slow down.’ He paused for a second and leaned around you to peel back the edge of the closest bandage. ‘It’s OK, clotting up fine. You’ll have a fuck-ass scar.’ He settled back against the wall and you relaxed back against him again. ‘Shoulda made Sam stay, he’s better at this kind of thing. Knows what to say.’
‘If Sam was here,’ you said, ‘I don’t think he’d even be talking to me.’ Besides, you thought, Dean was doing just fine. His hands had moved now to your shoulders and he was rubbing and kneading them gently. He laughed now in his chest, a grim kind of laugh, not quite amused.
‘Aw, he’s alright, he’s not really mad at you. He been around too often when I died, and – well, you look a lot like a girl we used to know who – died and never came back.’ He paused for a long minute. ‘He’ll come round.’
You were feeling warmer now, and the pain was still constant, but if you didn’t move much and kept breathing slowly it was more bearable.
‘Wish we’d brought the whiskey from camp,’ Dean said suddenly, with feeling. ‘It’d take the edge off for ya, and I sure wouldn’t mind some either.’
‘That’d be good.’ You were feeling pretty spacey now, from shock and the particular mental blur that pain produces, like all your senses are kaleidoscoped down into a single point of focus. Still lucid, but out of it enough to put your good hand up over Dean’s and brush along his knuckles, not with any definite intention, just the instinctive pull for human touch in the wake of adrenaline. You felt his chest pause for a second in its rise and fall; then his hands fell from your shoulders to the base of your spine, below the worst of the bruising, and circled carefully round the curve of your hips.
‘There’s another way we could take the edge off for you.’
You froze for a minute, startled and second-guessing your instincts. Did he mean – was he suggesting what you thought he was? Because it seemed less awkward than asking him outright, you rocked your ass ever so slightly back against him – if you’d misread him, things might be a little weird, but it was a slight enough gesture that you could both pretend it had been innocent. But you hadn’t misread him; your motion was answered almost at once with his hard-on pressed against your ass and his fingers slipping forward just under the waistband of your jeans.
‘Is this OK?’
You groaned under your breath and nodded. It was more than OK; the combination of Dean’s chest and arms wrapped right around you, the smell of his sweat and the brush of his scruff against the back of your neck, would have been enough to get you ready to go even without his hands inside your pants. Because they were, now, one slipping back to grip your ass and the other sliding down between your legs. You jerked a little back against him, and he stopped moving.
‘OK? Did that hurt you?’
Under the circumstances, and in your current spacey frame of mind, this struck you as incredibly funny, and you started to laugh and then to yelp helplessly under your breath as the jostling of it scored painfully down your ribs.
‘No,’ you said, ‘yes, I mean, everything hurts right now, but you feel good, shit you feel fucking great.’ You took a careful breath and leaned back against his chest, glanced up at him and winked. ‘I’ve never minded a little pain anyway.’
He liked that, and you grinned; his breath had caught for a minute and his teeth had followed his tongue along his lower lip.
‘K, sweetheart, tell me if you need me to stop, and try not to move.’ He was kissing along your neck and shoulders now, wet kisses with his tongue all along your skin, up your neck to your hairline and then back down, breathing over the dampness, trailing his lips down across your upper back. Tingling arousal shot down your spine and you started to twist back towards him without thinking, stopped, swore loudly. You giggled, as well as you could without moving, and he grinned back and bent forward so that he could just catch your mouth in his. It was a hard kiss, the aftermath of adrenaline and anger, and kissing him back you felt the earlier sharp volatility between you reverse its polarity, shift into a different kind of charge. His fingers were in your underwear now, just cupping you at first and kneading a little, teasingly. His middle finger slipped into your slit and began to stroke gently along its length, not with any particular pressure yet, just touching, exploring, brushing the pads of his fingers against your lips. Your hips rose to meet him in automatic response and the uppermost bandage on your leg shifted and caught on the edge of the open gash.
‘FUCK,’ you said, hard, and bit your tongue to keep from saying more. Dean took out his hand but you shook your head violently.
‘Don’t you dare. I’ll hold still, I’ll be still.’ He hesitated, but you leaned back against him and laced your hands behind his neck as one hand slipped between your legs. The other he wrapped around your body and used it to press you back against his chest so that you were reclining a little against him.
‘Just breathe with me, Y/N. You do that and I promise I’ll make you feel good.’
You put your head back against him and tried to narrow your world down to his hands on you and the rise and fall of his chest, just two points and to block out the rest of the sensations rattling and scraping around you: the pain of your ribs and the slight panic that came from cringing away from every breath, the sharp heat of punctured flesh and the burn of the scraped abrasions running down from your knee. You put what mental focus remained on not moving, not jerking, not even breathing too hard, on quickening in a kind of perfect stillness to Dean’s fingers laid flat, at first, over the heat between your legs and moving in slow circles. When he first thumbed your clit your breath shuddered, and he pressed himself a little closer against your back and tightened his left arm around you.
‘Shh,’ he said, and his voice had shifted lower into thick arousal. ‘Don’t move, Y/N, let it happen inside you, be still for me honey.’
When he slipped two fingers inside you you managed to keep quiet but at the third one, pushing and stretching a little to fit inside, you moaned, loud, and immediately swore as the cracked ribs made themselves felt. You were panting now, hard but shallow, and Dean too had lost the rhythm of his breathing and had started to move jerkily against you — almost, you thought, without knowing it, rubbing his hard-on up against the back of your jeans and arching his back a little against the wall.
‘Dean,’ you said, and reached between you as well as you could without fucking up your leg, ‘pull my jeans down – and here – hold up – unzip yours – rub up against my ass. God I wanna take all of you, but – the jostling – I dunno – this might have to do?’
‘Oh, this’ll do,’ he said, fervently, and shifted behind you to unzip his jeans. You tried to lift your ass a bit to shuck down your own, but the movement sent white-hot pain down your leg, so sharp that you yelled and Dean clapped a hand hard over your mouth. He was shaking a little with laughter and nerves and you could smell yourself on his fingers.
‘Sorry,’ you whispered, and he bit your ear playfully.
‘I just don’t want any new creatures coming by and interrupting.’
You grinned back at him and kissed him as hard as it was possible to do without twisting the lower part of your body. He sucked your lips between his, his tongue exploring your mouth and licking along the curve of your teeth.
‘Do you have scissors?’ you said, finally, when he broke off for air. ‘Can you just… cut ‘em away?’ His eyes lit up at you, amused and aroused, and he threw his head back and laughed.
‘‘Do I have scissors? What is this, fucking home ec class? No I don’t have a pair of scissors. But what we both have are knives, you hot little idiot.’
He flipped a pocketknife once in the air (muttering still under his breath “do I have scissors”) and then your jeans were torn away and you felt the wet hardness of him flush against the indent of your ass. You gasped and arched a little back and winced, and then he was rutting up hard against you. You moaned and fought to keep your legs still and Dean reached around you, breathing heavily now, and pushed your jeans down in front – still gentle, mindful of your legs, and you tilted your head to bite the hollow of his neck. Then your crotch was free of jeans and underwear and his fingers sank back into your cleft, thumb going to your clit and two thick fingers sliding back up into you. You moaned again, long and high-pitched because it hurt less that way, tried to hold still, and he brought his left arm back up across your body and laid it lightly across your throat, his fingers stroking hard and steady into your cunt.
You were all tension, both of you, the aching knot of heat in your belly amplified by muscles trembling from hours now of steady pain and tendons pulled taut in at strange angles to keep the movement of Dean jerking against you away from the worst of your bruising and raw flesh; and Dean a frame of rough-taut muscle strained around you from behind, holding you still even while his hips jerked up against you. His thumb slowed now: not brushing your clit with light strokes but hardly moving at all, just grinding the smallest circle across it, hard and slow, and his fingers inside you clenched up against your g-spot and just held there. You screamed then (‘jesus Dean’), quietly but still a scream that stuttered into moaning, noises more than words. He dragged the hand at your throat down across your chest and held it tight against your stomach and came fast and hot against your back, but his fingers didn’t slow, just massaged inside you while his thumb ground deep, deep across your clit. You were getting desperate now, raw from pain and thick-headed with arousal, and you started breathing hard and heavy again, flinching back with pain and almost crying. Dean used his free hand to turn your head a little towards his mouth.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘s ok Y/N, it’s ok. You’re so close doll, I can feel how close you are. You’re squeezing round my fingers baby, just let it come, let me have it, fuuuuck I want you to come on me so bad but you gotta breathe, come on, long and shallow, breathe with me, there you go, come around my fingers Y/N, ride it out baby.’
You held your breath and bucked your hips up once against his thumb and came, writhing now uncontrollably because fuck it was deep and intense, the kind of orgasm that shakes you like a rag doll and leaves you unable to stand up straight, but he grabbed you as you came and held on tight to hold you still and fuck if that wasn’t the hottest part, shuddering in Dean’s arms with his cock still slick against your back and his lips kissing baby into your hair.
When you finally stopped jerking he leaned back a little, grabbed the flannel shirt where it had fallen to the floor and used it to wipe off your back and his cock. You fell back against him and giggled, still soft and warm from the afterglow.
‘You alright if I go have a look outside?’ You nodded and he scooted carefully out from behind you. He paused beside you, still sitting on his ass with his forearms up on his knees, and leaned across and kissed you wet and very French and flashed a dazzling grin.
‘Easier from the front,’ he said, and got to his feet and grabbed his gun on his way to the front door. It was full dark now and you could see a strip of moonlight edging along the corner of the room.
‘Dean,’ you said, and smiled, ‘next time I’ll try to be less out of commission.’ He grinned back at you and winked. ‘Not a problem doll, just gotta get creative. Next time we’ll just have to think up something else.’