SEASON 2, EPISODE 1
"Am I...am I dead?"
The words had come out of Dean's throat in a warbled, tangled knot. In his state of fear and perplexment, that's what he'd been diminished to: a knot. A jumble of rope and string, wrapped around each other and leaving nothing but confusion in the entrails of his mind, entrapping Dean in his own unease.
Yet, even as Mara pondered the new entanglement he'd woven for himself, she knew he'd been harboring a different sort of bondage for quite some time. One with branches, stretching out and grasping each source of his confusion, always wondering but never certain of which one it should hold on to. The first branch - the version of Mara that Dean used to know, with her abundant naivety and constant yearning for something more. The Mara that he'd seen standing by Meg. This reaper was tattered, lacerated with the scars of her own deeds. And, finally, the Mara he was standing next to now. An evolved Mara, one who'd been through hell and had come out much too different on the other side of it. He hadn't had the chance to properly meet this one yet.
As tendrils of the In-Between snaked around his limbs with every step he took, Mara watched. She'd been on edge ever since she'd discovered his disjointed form. Coma patients didn't always die soon after their inducement, but there were enough cases like Dean's - where abnormalities were present in the brain - to prove its possibility. And with the amount of reapers that were swarming around the hospital, Mara couldn't afford to ease her nerves. Dean's resistance to whoever his reaper was depended on it.
She had to protect him.
Mara's bare feet scraped across the linoleum flooring as she trudged over to where Dean stood. She'd lost her shoes in the car crash, and now that pinpricks of dirt were lodging themselves between her toes, she regretted that she hadn't at least asked one of the physician's assistants to look for them when they were wading through the wreckage.
Dean had been making circles with his footsteps, trekking over the invisible - yet prominent, judging by the fidgety way he was walking - blanket of serrated sticks that resembled the prickliness of his situation. He was wearing a pair of light blue, hospital-grade pants. They swished around his legs as he paced around the room, the noise rasping against Mara's eardrums, the echo of an insect's hind legs as they brushed across each other.
The reaper stopped in her tracks next to him, and Dean halted his fretful race, as well. Mara's eyes began to drift upwards along the outline of his body. The white shirt the hospital had given him was tight. It squeezed his torso like a viper squeezing its prey, and for some erotic, indelicate reason, Mara suddenly felt like that same viper was choking the air out of her own throat. She could see every ripple of his body, every peak of his mountainous, salacious physique. His shoulders - their highs and lows, hilltops and valleys, just like a mountain range - made Mara's larynx curl up into a ball. Even his collarbone dipped in a way that made her want to run her fingers across it for all eternity. Her stomach dropped, and her chest flipped in an array of somersaults.
His v-neck had suddenly added another mystery to her questionnaire about Dean Winchester: why did he always insist on covering his form with a jacket?
She took a step closer to him. Her knees were shaking, and the hairs on her neck stood up like they sensed the tension in the air and wanted to get a glimpse of the scenes that were about to play out in front of their eyes.
Mara raised a hand into the air, and her fingertips tingled when she let it rest on the side of Dean's face. Suddenly, her apprehension about the Winchester's predicament began to dissolve, and was gingerly replaced with the heated fervor that was coursing through her veins. Dean's features were coated with scars from the accident - one on his forehead, and one adorning the sharp curve of his cheekbone. She let her hand slide along his unusually sallow skin and down to his neck, gulping when it crept over the stubble that decorated his jaw.
His eyebrows turned in. His teeth pulled at his bottom lip, his tongue briefly running across it, and his head began to tilt downward.
Instantaneously, as if the scintillating reflection of all they were - of all they could be - had fallen from the sky, the anticipation shattered into a million broken pieces. It was now a mere copy of what it once was, each shard broadcasting a distorted reflection in place of an alluring one.
Dean had tensed up. Straightened his back to a standard posture, turned away from Mara.
Mara's hopes deflated, her brow furrowed. What had just happened? The way she'd felt, like she'd been swimming against the natural current of a river her whole life, and finally, when she'd let the waters take her where she was supposed to go, they'd led her straight to Dean What was that?
"Am I dead?" Dean repeated. His voice croaked on the first syllable, so he'd had to cough before finishing his sentence.
His back was still turned, so Mara allowed a shake of her head to try and rid herself of the remains of the sensations from moments before. Of the heat that had swelled up inside of her only to be popped by the cold needle of Dean's turned shoulder, and now, she was trying to sweep away the shreds of latex that the punctured balloon had left behind.
"No," Mara answered. "No, your spirit is just...separating itself from your physical form in case, you know, you do..." A galling tickle rose in her throat. No matter how hard she tried, the word wouldn't escape her lips. It didn't seem to occur to her that it was her job, that what she was attempting to speak of should have been second nature to her. She just couldn't bring herself to say it.
The word festered on her lips, as unpleasant and loathsome as a blister. The putrefying syllables were only soothed when Dean faced her and nodded his head like he understood. His spirit was separating itself in case he died.
But Mara wouldn't let that happen. Even if she had to pay for it with her life, she would not let Dean Winchester perish.
Dean's eyes suddenly flicked to the door of the hospital room. The tightly woven strands of worryin his face eased, and when Mara followed his gaze to see that Sam and Kat had walked in, she understood his instant relief.
"Sammy!" Dean breathed, striding over to his younger siblings. "Kat. You guys look good. Considering."
Mara's eyebrows rose. They did look good. Considering. Sam looked no worse than if he'd gotten into a brawl at school, and Kat, though her skin was paler than usual and her eyes more sunken in, appeared to be in better shape than she'd been in the last time Mara checked on her.
"Oh, no," Sam muttered. He was looking at Dean - not the breathing, talking Dean, but the one wrapped in the dreary hospital sheets.
Kat shot to her brother's side, her warm fingers grasping his cold ones. Sam was slower to get to Dean's bed, shock slowing his reflex time, and Dean followed, speaking to them as if they could hear.
"How's Dad?" he stuttered, his words tumbling over each other as he rushed to shove them out of his mouth. "Is he okay?" When he received no response, his focus narrowed from the broad portrait of both of his siblings to solely on Sam, and he added, "Come on, you're the psychic. Give me some ghost whispering or something!"
Mara stepped forward, her voice low and her tone somber. "Dean. I don't think he can hear you."
Dean shook his head. "I know. I know. I just..."
A doctor walked in the room, disrupting the spurt of conversation that had just erupted between Mara and Dean. He wore a white doctor's coat, the starkness of it contrasting with his syrupy skin, and he held a clipboard tightly between his fingers.
"Your father's awake," the doctor announced. "You can go see him if you'd like."
A variety of mutterings floated across the room - an "Oh, thank God," stood out among the rest - but Sam didn't show any signs of joy at the sound of his father's health. Rather, he looked down at his brother, grimaced, and asked, "Doc, what about my brother?"
The doctor tilted his head as if he was about to spurt out tangible facts at a decathlon. "Well, he sustained serious injury. Blood loss, contusions to his liver and kidney. But it's the head trauma I'm worried about. There's early signs of cerebral edema."
Mara's mouth hung open. Cerebral what? And why was the doctor speaking about it as if it couldn't be fixed, as if there were no way to bargain for Dean's return to consciousness? He was speaking matter-of-fact, like he was already resigned to Dean's inevitable fate and felt no emotional attachment to it. Mara had to resist the urge to punch him in the face. Did he not understand? Dean Winchester was dying, and he could offer no more consolidation than words with meaningless looks of sympathy written behind them?
Mara tuned back in to the conversation at hand, catching on to the exchange of words with ease even though she'd missed some of it while enveloped by her own thoughts.
"Most people with this degree of injury wouldn't have survived this long," the doctor chirped. At the sound of his detached perkiness, Mara had to push down her simmering anger once more. "He's fighting very hard. But you need to have realistic expectations."
No.
Dean couldn't be that close to death. No. She'd finally found something to hold on to, a person that was teaching her what it meant to matter, what it meant to have somebody matter to you, and he was leaving her behind. With every millimeter of fluid that was swelling in his ailed brain, he was drifting away from her. No. Would her reaching fingers be enough to save him? Enough to have the chance to hold him - the real Dean, not the spirit Dean - in her arms one last time?
"Come on, Sam," Dean growled. He was maintaining a tough exterior, at least. That would hold back the bulk of his fear for a while. "Go find some hoodoo priest to lay some mojo on me. I'll be fine."
Sam glanced at Katarina, whose shoulders had begun slumping more and more with every word the doctor had spoken. She was still gazing at her oldest brother, and when Sam wrapped an arm around her shoulders, Mara could've sworn her chest started to quiver with the inhaling movements of her breathing.
"Sam?" Dean asked.
Sam didn't answer. He was glancing between Kat and the comatose likeness of Dean with a sorrowful look on his face that made Mara fear he was already mourning.
Dean's head whipped around so that he was looking at Mara. At the sight of the fury that was sizzling beneath his eyes, the reaper almost stumbled back. It was so different from how he'd looked at her mere moments ago, when they'd been within seconds of reaching a barrier that Mara had never imagined she'd ever reach. But the anger behind his crystalline irises wasn't there because it was mad. It was there because he was frightened, and he didn't know how else to cope.
Or maybe it was because he was mad. Mad at the fact that, despite how he'd spent his whole life fighting the good fight, he still has to face death. Mad at Mara, maybe, for how she'd kept her forced alliance with hell a secret from them. But, perhaps most of all, mad at the entire universe because yes, it was bad enough that he was dying. But now he was having to watch his family crumble apart because of it.
"What about you? You know, can you...?" Dean's words died on his lips, evaporating into a vapor to be lost forever in the stale wind.
'Can I what? Can I bring you out of your coma?' Mara thought. 'Can I save you?'
She gazed at the trembling corner of his mouth, at the way a few stray strands of hair fell daintily across his forehead.
Oh, how I wish I could.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
I swear I'll stop bothering you guys with author's notes in every chapter, but I just had to say something about this chapter to someone, so here it goes:
Sorry for teasing you guys with that demara kiss that almost was, but it had to be done. And, while I'm on this topic, I'll go ahead and let you guys know that the first kiss is coming much sooner than you think and it is going to be *chef's kiss* if I do say so myself.
Anyway I love you guys! Have a good day!