REVIVE ▸ d. winchester [2] ✔

Chapter 24

Dean's POV

"Jack-"

I hardly get her name out before her right fist comes flying towards my face. Catching me off guard and in a stupor of shock, I flinch. I don't block the punch, and I don't yell out in pain as her knuckles meet the side of my face. I simply look up at her in astonishment as she holds me down, not a sliver of remorse in her eyes.

It's as if she doesn't even know me.

Right as she lifts her hand for a second hit, I yell out. "Wait! Wait, Jackie!"

My pleas do nothing for me, and as her fist comes towards me again, I finally get my own arms out from underneath her knees to protect myself. The angel blade is abandoned in the snow at my side, my hopes being that a blade wouldn't be brought into this scuffle. Letting my weight be an advantage over the girl, I grab both of her upper arms and shove her off of me. Her hand that she had been using to hold me down by my chest, right under my collar bone, loosens, allowing me to take a deep breath in.

As she lands in the snow beside me, I move quickly to keep her from regaining the upper hand. I keep a tight grip on one of her wrists, and before she can escape my grasp, I take a position above her, holding her down just as she did to me moments before.

"You're alive," I say, but it comes out as no more than a whisper. With her hair sprawled out in the snow, her eyes wide open and glaring up into my own, she is almost unrecognizable to the girl who I had watched die so long ago. Her eyes appear bloodshot, the darkness underneath each of them only making the redness stand out more dramatically. Her skin is clear; there are no superficial cuts or bruises, and greatest of all, her abdomen seems perfectly in tact, with no sign of her previous impalement. But, the exhaustion inside of her is clear to me through the sickly paleness of her skin. If she weren't carrying out her best efforts to get out of my hold- if she were to lay completely still- I would have thought she were dead.

Jackie grits her teeth together, her jaw tightening as she forcefully pushes against my hands that are placed on her shoulders. It takes all of my weight to keep her down, and even then, her struggling begins to cause my hands to slip. Now, after the shock of being punched in the face by her and having to throw her off of me settles in, the realization sinks in. Looking down at her, I know that Jackie may be alive, but she is in no sense the same girl as she was before. There is no doubt in my mind that Azrael did something to her, and that she is now completely under his control. He got what he wanted. In this sense, Azrael has won.

"Jackie, come on. Snap out of it," I urge, plead. A small part of my heart holds onto the hope that these words would work, but they don't. If anything, they make the situation worse.

Jackie doesn't respond to my words verbally, but it's clear that she has heard them. She can hear me, but she doesn't have any recollection as to what I want her to do. Her emotional capacity of understanding is gone. Instead, my pleas leave her in a moment of confusion, for just the slightest second. She doesn't show it much; in fact, she probably thinks that she covers it up completely. But, as her pupils dilate with my words, her eyes failing her with an emotional give and a twitch of an eyebrow, I know she's still there. She's still somewhere inside her mind, in her heart. She may be lost, she may be being used by Azrael and she may think she's doing what's right, but I know she's still inside, fighting. Her eyes give that away. I can read her like an open book.

"Jackie, I need you to focus, alright?" She fights back, and her nails dig into the exposed skin of my wrist, surely drawing blood. She swings at me again, her elbow grazing my chin, causing me to press down on her harder than I would have liked to. "Hey, look at me!"

A cold sweat breaks out across my neck as the urgency in my voice grows. Angels and Chimeras still fight around us, but out of the corner of my eye, I can see a greater force of angels still standing. No one looks at Jackie and I. Our fight is seemingly lost in the midst of blood and grit. The need to escape this scene rushes through me, and as I look back down at the girl who I thought was dead until moments ago, I know its now or never.