The Runt of the Litter

let's lie, say we're happy to be here

Note: Uh... so... hey... it's saturday... 

*laughs nervously like she didn't disappear for like twenty saturdays*

Hey, loves. Sorry I, like, dropped off the map... I've been having some problems. I think maybe things are looking up a little bit? But usually I think that and then a few days later I feel like garbage again. I'm trying to enjoy the good moments I get, though, and over the course of a few bad days and one good one, I managed to write a one shot for this story (which I have sorely missed, almost as much as I've missed interacting with all of you)

I have a lot of one shots and ideas in the works for this story. I swear to you guys, it's not over. It's just been slow going as I try to get my feet on solid ground. 

Anyway, here's a one shot for you. Hopefully I'll be back with another one soon enough. Title takes some inspiration from the song "Happy to Be Here" by Julien Baker.

Anna is seventeen.

let's lie, say we're happy to be here

She rubbed her eyes and looked again. She took a sip of coffee and looked again. She dug her fingernails into her leg and kept looking.

The report in front of her said she'd deteriorated.

Anna stared at it with a numb chest, tingling fingers, and dry eyes. "Deteriorated," she mouthed. She scanned the rest of it, but it was just a summary of her visit with Ramone, and she'd been there. She knew it all. But the words at the bottom...

Condition since last visit: Deteriorated

She had. But she didn't understand how Ramone could see it. She'd made sure it all stayed inside of her. Her father's face in her head, her mother's blood in her chest, she'd made sure not to show them the world. Not to show them to the world.

But Ramone had always been good at hearing what Anna refused to say. That was why Sam and Dean kept bringing her back to him. He said things they already knew but with a matter-of-factness that made it less frightening the way Anna had deteriorated over the past month. No. Over the last year.

When she thought about it, Anna could picture herself flaking apart. And she could watch with objectivity, she thought, but not the same kind that Ramone had. She watched numbly as she picked at a layer of charred skin, peeling it away without feeling the pain.

She wasn't objective. She was just used to it.

"Hey." She turned her head to see Dean had walked in. She tried to make herself return to the world as she was supposed to exist in it. Like a teenager. Like a girl. Like a person, not a corpse.

"Hey," she murmured. "Ramone sent me the thing. I guess he wants me to come in weekly now."

"Oh yeah?" Dean asked. He dropped into a chair beside her and took a sip of black coffee before setting his cup aside and reaching for her laptop.

Anna let him take it, let him read the summary. They'd talked about John in that session, and she'd said more than she ever had before. She'd cried in front of him really hard for the first time, and she'd admitted things she'd never been willing to say out loud, because she'd finally felt like it was time. No wonder Ramone had written that word– deteriorated– she'd practically begged him to.

Thing was, she'd deteriorated long before her most recent session with him. All those reports he'd written no change, she'd really been flaking apart. She'd just been silent. And she thought that, really, he should've known that was the worst of it. Who built a shell around themself if their insides weren't soft and rotten?