Dean x Reader One Shots

Tightrope (Fluff) (Imagine Dean surprising you after a rough day)

Word Count: 1,843

You only sent him an offhand text after getting out of surgery and just prior to showering, a simple response to his inquiry as to how your day went, but you shouldn't have been surprised that he actually saw something from it.

I can be in town tonight. What does your schedule look like? (I ask with intention to ask you on a date, choose your response wisely)

While that text would normally have at least spread a small grin across your unenthusiastic cheeks, today was hardly the day; you didn't want to be awake for much longer, let alone sober or in public, so it was hard to see the humor in the text, let alone the love.

Tonight's not a good night, rough day. Tomorrow?

You didn't get a response after that, surprising considering he was never one to leave a conversation open like that. Odd, but not enough to make you catch on your way out the door of the hospital, into your car, toward your apartment.

You couldn't save everyone.

He always told you that in an attempt to comfort himself more than anyone, but you knew he didn't like the fact anymore than you did; granted his job was considerably more high-risk in regards to his own safety than yours was, there were still lives on the line in either instance. There was still literal blood on each of your hands and that took a toll on you. It took a toll on him. It took a toll on your entire relationship, and the thing that sucked was that you knew he couldn't stop; he could in that he was physically able, but he had the moral obligation in his own beautiful, selfless mind to put himself in danger in order to protect strangers.

Strangers.

You couldn't imagine doing what he did. There was an emotional roughness needed for your job, a stability of both the hands and the mind required in order to pull people back from the brink of death, most of the time with their skin split open and insides in your hands, but his job? His job was ridiculous.

You only asked him to stop once and the horror on his face was enough for you to know that you were in love with someone in love with dancing on the tightrope between life and death. The idea that you wouldn't be able to bring him back if he fell the wrong way was what terrified you.

You couldn't save everyone.

The chances were slim, anyway; car crash victims as beat up as that little boy had a smaller chance of survival than an inexperienced matador—in a blindfold—with a lion instead of a bull. You did your best, your staff did their best, you couldn't have done anything differently that might have resulted in something other than calling a TOD and informing the family. There was nothing you could have done, there was nothing you did. It was pointless to keep jumping back into past mistakes because that couldn't change them.

Man, if you had a dollar for every time they spit that out at you during your fellowship. You wouldn't even need to work, problem solved.

You couldn't save everyone.

That's what was running through your brain, a continuous loop of words you didn't want to believe when you pushed your door open and, without even looking up and into your apartment, you threw your bag onto the ground. Laundry later, sleep now.

But when you smelled food and the familiar smell of secondhand cigar smoke and cheap motel soap, you froze, slowly looked up and into the room. Your eyes locked on him immediately and were quick to find the pizza sitting on your counter, then the six-pack beside it. The apartment was clean, much cleaner than you'd left it (in your own defense, you were usually especially neat; after a few days of being a mixture of on-call and at work, however, it was easy to lose track of things. How were you supposed to find time to clean when you hardly had enough time to put things away after using them?), and it even smelled of cleaning products and ... vacuum? Does a vacuum have a distinct smell?