Going Through the Motions

Who: Dean
Where: Osbourne house
When: Early evening

He'd stayed on the staircase all day and the shadows had come. He'd taken them out one by one, aim fire. Aim fire. Aim fire. He'd blocked the staircase off with furniture, making a bottle neck and standing above it. They were like lambs to the slaughter. Aim fire. Aim fire.

He'd not gone back upstairs as Oz had asked. He didn't want to plan with the others. He had a plan - the shadows came and he killed them. They stuck to their timing. Always more than an hour between attacks, often a couple. Sophie came down at one point between for food. Dean walked off when she did that - he didn't want to talk to her. Not right now, not after this morning. He didn't want to talk to any of them. He didn't eat. He wasn't hungry - he was never hungry and today he wasn't going to force himself, not unless his head started to swim with hunger.

By the evening, he knew the routine. He had time to reload the clips in between attacks. And he knew, when he'd finished one, that he had time. As the sun started to go down, he was growing more and more aware of the clothes he was wearing. Sitting down in cardboard-thick jeans had been harder than standing up in the first place and he'd spent most of the day standing. His t-shirt still hung in ruins from his shoulders, his chest bare and blood streaked. He'd been picking flakes of dried blood off his face and chest all afternoon and the leather of his boots were cracked with blood. Even his socks felt thick.

It was sheer stubbornness that had made him hold out for his long, even after he'd realised the timings hadn't changed. He'd told Oz that watch was more important, that they couldn't be sure. He'd been wrong on that, but he didn't want to say he was wrong.

Yet by the evening, he'd had enough. The hard clothing was biting into his skin, rubbing in places, making him sore. He needed to change, for all he would prefer to just sit there and sulk, fold inside himself and just be single minded until the next day. It wasn't happening - pain was a great distractor.

So he showered. Which hadn't been as simple as he'd thought, since getting undressed had been a challenge. Apparently dried, blood-soaked clothes didn't like coming off any more than they liked bending. In the end, Dean had ended up climbing into the shower fully dressed and allowing the water to soak into him for several minutes, running away red down the plughole until he managed to step out of them, leaving them in a heap at one end of the bath.

The shower itself didn't relax him the way that showers generally did. The most he could say was that he was clean when he stepped out. He dressed in whatever was to hand, giving his boots up for ruined like the rest of his clothes, throwing on a pair of old trainers instead. And then he returned to where he'd been, sitting on the stairs, a little further up, his eyes flitting to the blood stain further down the stairs where he'd been seated earlier, attestation to just how covered in blood he'd actually been.

It was going to be a long night.