#tspn

After being resurrected, Eileen practically needed to shower with the lights on, the sterile brightness of the bathroom against her mostly-unbroken skin reminding her that she wasn’t in Hell anymore. She’d close her hand around a shampoo bottle, each time fearing that it would pass right through, and then she would breathe a sigh of relief as she watched the bottle be lifted from the floor. It moved because of her, because she was solid and real and could touch it now.

As far as Eileen can remember, the last time she deliberately chose to shower with the lights off, she was somewhere in her twenties, and it was because she didn’t want to look at herself. This time, she turns off the lights out of fear of who might be looking in. Chuck’s words to Sam repeat over and over again in her memories. “I couldn't see you. I needed eyes on the inside.” He needed eyes on the inside. Eyes on the inside. Her eyes. Through her, he'd seen the bunker, Sam, Dean, every plan they tried to form against him. She doesn’t know whether Chuck is still using her eyes the way he’d used her arms and legs and that scalpel—Eileen feels a slight sting against her palm, and realizes she’s been unknowingly signing “stop” over and over again. She shakes her hands out to calm down, breathes slowly and carefully until she can think again. The point is, if Chuck is still using her right now, he doesn’t get to see this. This is only for the people she has allowed to see her naked—Lillian, in the way that people who live together for a long time sometimes just do; past sexual partners (she spares a quick, rueful thought for Sam—if only); and herself.

Giving her hands one last shake, Eileen fumbles for what she thinks is the shampoo, cursing herself for not double-checking the labels beforehand, and lathers her hair. In Hell, they’d burned her hair and poured acid on it; on Earth, the hellhound that killed her had yanked on it with its teeth. She treats it with gentleness now—at least, as much gentleness as crappy motel shampoo can provide—and rinses it out.

Next, Eileen grabs her loofah and rubs a bar of soap over it. She begins to clean the rest of her body, starting with her neck, checking in via touch with her other hand on the way. Her pulse is strong, if a little quick. Her shoulders are tense, no surprise there. Her arm is a little tender, but the bruises should fade in a few days. Eileen brushes the loofah against her palms in the dark, and is suddenly reminded of tactile signing with Lillian on hunts—nothing too advanced, just modified versions of “stop” or “gun” or “vampire” against the other’s hand when it was too hard to see. Besides the one time she’s worked with someone else familiar with it, Eileen hasn’t used it since she was sixteen; she’s never partnered with anyone long enough to bother teaching them. She thinks, with her own newfound aversion to sight, that she could try using it for everyday communication, not just hunting. Then, she remembers that there’s no one here for her to talk to.

In a different world, she’d text Sam and Dean about it. She might still, one day, if she ever goes back, or if they ever come to visit, but it’s not something she can consider right now, with Chuck’s face so clear in her mind and the shower water beginning to cool around her.

Despite the temperature, after she’s scrubbed herself clean, Eileen lingers in the shower for several moments longer. She likes breathing in the residual steam. She likes the soft edges that darkness gives everything around her. She likes knowing that if she doesn't move and just lets the water fall, she can't hurt anyone else.

That’s what it was like to hug Sam, she thinks. Breathing in their shirt, feeling the warmth of their chest as she closed her eyes and stayed as perfectly still as she could through her shivers. Eileen is pretty sure Sam doesn’t like their own height; she sees it in the way they stand, shoulders hunched forward, back sloped, but Eileen finds it comforting how large they are. She had run to Sam after being released from Chuck’s control, and Sam had accepted her into their arms immediately, curling around her so she could block out everything else. She'd like to hug them again, under a different set of circumstances, and more than hug, if they’re still interested in that. She'd like to do it and trust that it’s all her choice, not Chuck deciding that she’ll make a suitable love-interest-slash-spy, and she’d like to have her old phone and laptop back before the Men of Letters bugged it, and now that she's at it, she'd like to have not been dragged to Hell or trained a hunter or made an orphan.

Eileen still speaks to her parents sometimes. Being alone for so long, you discover plenty of ways to pass the time, and in some of the quiet hours when Eileen isn’t trawling internet forums, working odd jobs, or volunteering, she directs some of her remaining thoughts at her mother and father. She thought, as a ghost, that if she ever reached Heaven, she might be able to talk to them in-person, but Dean explained that everyone in Heaven had their own locked rooms, no way to pass in between. Eileen had felt a shock of relief about that, then guilt. ("Believe me, I get it," Dean had said, and they'd left it at that.) Her parents died thinking they had saved their infant son. Eileen doesn’t know how they would react to the deaf, bisexual woman who had spent most of her life seeking revenge for their deaths pronouncing herself their child. Her one-way form of prayer is much easier.

Eileen shuts off the water and wraps a towel around herself. She’s covered now, but she still keeps the light off. This isn’t for Chuck either. She starts as usual—“Hi, mom. Hi, dad. I hope you’re both happy up there”—the automatic smile on “happy” tugging uncomfortably at her watery eyes. She pauses, not sure what to say next. The next signs come out small, hesitant. “I’m scared.”

And then, for the first time today, Eileen begins to cry, curling in on herself and sobbing until her throat feels like it’s being torn apart. Names flash through her mind—Renny—Sam—Dean—Castiel—even Lillian—and she clutches the towel harder, her fingernails digging into her palms through the thin fabric. It hurts, but it also feels like relief, like with every gasp out of her, a bad memory is expelled with it. Here’s the time Lillian abandoned her for a week, and here’s Eileen’s first breakup, and the time she had to talk an internet friend out of suicide, and oh yeah, right here is that time today when she’d been forced to stab Sam again and again and again—though that one’s staying firmly lodged in her throat. Here’s their face, twisted in pain that she caused. Here’s Chuck’s smile. But oh, here—here’s the way Sam told Eileen that she was already forgiven. She holds onto that last memory, at Sam telling her “it’s okay.” “It’s okay,” she repeats to herself, and to her parents too, she supposes. It’s okay.

Finally, after a few minutes, it’s over. Not permanently—she expects plenty of crying fits over the next few... forevers—but tonight, she's all cried out. Eileen straightens up and begins to breathe again. As she does so, she makes a resolution.

Eileen is scared, of course she is, but Eileen has been scared before, too. Fear won’t kill her. She’ll watch crappy TV shows and wonder if Chuck is there watching with her, and she’ll dream of hellfire and wake up frantic and sweating, and she’ll struggle to stomach her breakfast and flinch when she passes a butcher’s, but she will be the one doing all of those things. Her body is hers, and it is real. Her mind is hers, and it is real. She has to believe it to keep going, and thus, she will.

Eileen exhales decisively and dries her hair. She gets dressed, trying not to bump her elbows against any barely-cleaned countertops. Flannel, underwear, jeans. The clean fabric whispers against her skin like a promise.

Then, she turns on the light.

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end notes: warnings for brief mentions of cancer (Lillian’s), death, mind control + nonconsensual voyeurism via Chuck, dysphoria, sex, torture, ableism, biphobia, transphobia, child neglect, and suicide