Wanted Dead or Alive | 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐍 𝐖𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑

19 - IN MY TIME OF DYING

SEASON 2, EPISODE 1

"Am I...am I dead?"

The words had come out of Dean's throat in a warbled, tangled knot. In his state of fear and perplexment, that's what he'd been diminished to: a knot. A jumble of rope and string, wrapped around each other and leaving nothing but confusion in the entrails of his mind, entrapping Dean in his own unease.

Yet, even as Mara pondered the new entanglement he'd woven for himself, she knew he'd been harboring a different sort of bondage for quite some time. One with branches, stretching out and grasping each source of his confusion, always wondering but never certain of which one it should hold on to. The first branch - the version of Mara that Dean used to know, with her abundant naivety and constant yearning for something more. The Mara that he'd seen standing by Meg. This reaper was tattered, lacerated with the scars of her own deeds. And, finally, the Mara he was standing next to now. An evolved Mara, one who'd been through hell and had come out much too different on the other side of it. He hadn't had the chance to properly meet this one yet.

As tendrils of the In-Between snaked around his limbs with every step he took, Mara watched. She'd been on edge ever since she'd discovered his disjointed form. Coma patients didn't always die soon after their inducement, but there were enough cases like Dean's - where abnormalities were present in the brain - to prove its possibility. And with the amount of reapers that were swarming around the hospital, Mara couldn't afford to ease her nerves. Dean's resistance to whoever his reaper was depended on it.

She had to protect him.

Mara's bare feet scraped across the linoleum flooring as she trudged over to where Dean stood. She'd lost her shoes in the car crash, and now that pinpricks of dirt were lodging themselves between her toes, she regretted that she hadn't at least asked one of the physician's assistants to look for them when they were wading through the wreckage.

Dean had been making circles with his footsteps, trekking over the invisible - yet prominent, judging by the fidgety way he was walking - blanket of serrated sticks that resembled the prickliness of his situation. He was wearing a pair of light blue, hospital-grade pants. They swished around his legs as he paced around the room, the noise rasping against Mara's eardrums, the echo of an insect's hind legs as they brushed across each other.

The reaper stopped in her tracks next to him, and Dean halted his fretful race, as well. Mara's eyes began to drift upwards along the outline of his body. The white shirt the hospital had given him was tight. It squeezed his torso like a viper squeezing its prey, and for some erotic, indelicate reason, Mara suddenly felt like that same viper was choking the air out of her own throat. She could see every ripple of his body, every peak of his mountainous, salacious physique. His shoulders - their highs and lows, hilltops and valleys, just like a mountain range - made Mara's larynx curl up into a ball. Even his collarbone dipped in a way that made her want to run her fingers across it for all eternity. Her stomach dropped, and her chest flipped in an array of somersaults.