ɢɴᴀꜱʜɪɴɢ ᴛᴇᴇᴛʜ ᴀɴᴅ ᴄʀɪᴍɪɴᴀʟ ᴛᴏᴜɴɢᴇꜱ

[tobeclosetohim]

Who: Jo Harvelle & Co.
When: March
Where: Cadens; Horizon; Nocwich; Event Locals
What: Catch-all for March
Warnings: Mark of Cain, violence, alcohol, more to come


ᴄᴏɴꜱᴘɪʀᴇ ᴀɢᴀɪɴꜱᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴏᴅᴅꜱ
ʙᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴇʏ ʜᴀᴠᴇɴ'ᴛ ꜱᴇᴇɴ
ᴛʜᴇ ʙᴇꜱᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴜꜱ ʏᴇᴛ

Comments

[righteously]

Dean can take a lot of pain and keep on trucking — he could even before the mark. He can take a knife, he can take a bullet. He can take claws and teeth and fangs, punches, slaps, cutting words, monologues about his sins. He can stiff upper lip his way through any of it, stone-faced like a god damn champ.

But when it comes to soft touches, when it comes to tenderness, it's his kryptonite. It always has been. He crumbles like wet god damn tissue paper the moment someone alights fingertips on his skin and forgives him for his mistakes.

It's the kind of pain that pierces through his heart, straight through the armor, straight through the walls, precision pinpoint deadly accuracy.

She does it now, and he feels himself faltering again. Feels that leash he's got on all the crap he's trying to maintain start to waver.

Hey, she says, I'm okay, and it's the simplest thing in the world. It's the heaviest thing in the world.

It pulls at him magnetically, and without thought or decision, he finds himself ducking down to meet her. Leaning into not just the touch, but her; dipping down the great length of their height disparity until his forehead presses against hers. He nudges gently, pressing into the contact, animalistic but utterly gentle.

There in that space, with his eyes closed and the world gone small and private, he finally whispers his hoarse, "I'm sorry."

He is. He means it with everything in him.

[tobeclosetohim]

And this is why.

This part. That makes her chest suddenly drop out, utterly hollow, and her eyes go straight past pricking up into almost watery in a way nothing, since it happened, has yet managed to overwhelm her into. The touch of his forehead. The way his eyes close, even as she stares at his face with all the space gone as he says those words.

This is so much worse. Than the blank, unseeing rage in his face. Than having no warning. All her instinctual trust of him gutted in mere seconds. Than the terror left lingering in her bones. This is why she had to be here. Today. Right now. Even though it's not fair, to either of them, and it's not. None of this is fair or good or sweet or romantic. That she has to do this. That he had to do that. None of it is what they signed up for on any of the many lines that led them here, at home or in this place. But they were not so often any of those things every day, were they.

And those two words own it all.

The action. The pain. The helpless.
The utter lack of control, and where it fell out.

The way there is no way out of him holding on to the fact he did this. Has to apologize.
His hands. Her body. Chose The Mark. Chose the fallout. For not fixing himself already.

All the things she doesn't carry for him, or this at all. Jo's hand moves. The smallest twitch first, before she can leave that hand there at her cheek alone, without her own like some guard rail, necessary and too much all at once. Shifts to his cheek, his neck. "I know." It's so soft. She knows. She knows him. She shifts. Just for a moment. Leans up, placing a kiss on his forehead. Mummurs it into his skin. "I do. I know."

"C'mere." She pulls him closer. Into her arms, hand sliding up to cradle the back of his head and pull him into her shoulder. "I've got you."

[righteously]

It's all kinds of wrong, he knows that in the back of his mind — the fact that she's the one comforting him right now. She got hurt, she got beaten down into the dirt by somebody that's supposed to be on her side, supposed to look out for her, and yet here she is turning around saying I've got you. She's the one that needs the support, she's the one that deserves to be consoled, but considering he's the one that struck her, he's the last person on the planet that ought to be the one to do it. It's messy. It's backwards, and twisted.

But all the same, he winds his arms around her waist as she drags him in. Hesitates for all of two seconds, before burying his face into her shoulder, into the place where it meets neck. There, he breathes. There, he squeezes his eyes shut and just hangs on.

For a while, for long seconds, that's all there is. Her hanging onto him, him hanging onto her, hiding in the spaces she's offering, radiating outwardly all the pain and regret and fear that's been consuming him. It comes off of him in waves, feelings so densely packed and so rarely aired, in this moment they're made palpable.

He doesn't let himself be comforted often. He doesn't deserve to be.

But god, he fucking needs it, doesn't he?

It's gonna be so hard to say goodbye to her a second time. Maybe, selfishly, he's a little glad he won't be the one left around this time to have to feel it.

Eventually, after seconds or minutes, he detaches. Pulls back abruptly, with a soft clearing of his throat, with a hand absently coming up to swipe at spilled tears beneath red eyes that roll to the ceiling, wordless. They're scrubbed away and completely unacknowledged. All he says is a rough, short, "Okay."

Okay, he has to reel himself in. Okay, he's gotta close up, or be consumed. They can't stay in that moment forever. Okay, as in they're okay — save for all the ways they're not, but he's not gonna talk about those, either.

[tobeclosetohim]

He comes in a wave, and somehow, for the first time in all of this—not just this, but maybe since she arrived, when he stood there staring at her in alarm—she knows as he moves with her hand that she had no doubt he would. Even still, it catches her in the teeth, just under hard as another hit, when what overwhelms her senses after that thought is the whole physicality of Dean's body pressed in on hers. How tall, and large, and built he is.

Arms wrapping around her drowning tight, facing pressing in hard to thin skin, and there's a frisson in whatever place her teeth attach to her jaw and her jaw to her spine, her spine to every bone, and every bone to every nerve, about whether she actively, physically can do this. If there's a limit past which she can't force her body. (But she knows there's not. She proved that. Geralt proved that. Dean proved that. She did more than this while actively dying

She's not dying right now, so she can do this too.)

That her body spikes a wave of panic it only recognizes as the familiar pressure from being covered, straddled, fully bodily, earlier, she can't stop—but she can throw that desperation, that fear into the way her hands grip onto him, pushing on her toes, pulling him closer, trying to touch, hold, as much as him as she can reach, feed fire into fire, refuse to push him away, to fear this. This utterly rare, all but not allowed to exist thing he lets her have, of himself, that she's sure could shatter and break, more than just this moment, if she let her impulses cause her to skitter back even slightly now. So she can't. So she doesn't.

She rides it. Makes it any other terror they have to live with,
side by side, night by night, in this job, this life.

If you aren't scared, you aren't doing it right.
If you let the fear run you, you aren't doing it right.

She holds on to the desperation of his hands, to the hard press of his face into her shoulder, into her neck. To the wetness on her skin there she doesn't think is her imagination. Into the way, she knows, just as deeply, that he hasn't done this. This month. Ever. Since he realized he brought The Mark back. He lets it break out of him, soundless and silent, barely there shaking, with a grip like death. Him hanging on to her by fingertips over the abyss. Full of so much need, desperation, fear, and every day making it worse. Each slip. This catastrophic one.

Maybe she is tearing up. Maybe she's past that. She can't tell. Her face crumpled, buried against his hair. Unable to make it better right this second. To save him, take it all from him right now. Jo buries herself into that grip, into hers, the refusal of her own skin and the even larger, deeper refusal to lose him. Let him go. Let this take him from them. From her. She pushes all she has into this thing louder than any of her words could be.

When Dean pulls back, it's as abrupt and suddenly empty as his crashing in was present, and it tears something she can't name or claim straight out of her, taking it with him. There's no up and down, and the first breath she hears herself grasp in is too ragged, watery, and shakes. While he looks away, and she has to, too. She's nodding to herself, and she doesn't know where any of her walls are now, everything is blurry in her vision, but repeats his word after he says it, for a moment the only rope that exists from freefall.

Quiet.
Certain. Not.
Understanding. "Okay."