6. Lonesome Surprise pt. 1
Dean looks up sharply from the ground when they enter, and he can feel the blood drain from his face at the sight of a stethoscope and a white coat. His stomach churns, threatening to send back the meager bites of breakfast that he’d choked down earlier.
But then the doctor – a female beta, thank God – smiles at him, and it’s warm. Not predatory or even cold, as far as he can tell. It is the exact opposite of every doctor he has ever met, and it throws him off balance.
“Good morning, Dean. I’m Dr. Barnes, but I’d like you to call me Pamela, as long as you’re comfortable with that. Can you stand up for me?”
She’s speaking to him, not over him or about him, and it shocks him enough that he finds himself on his feet a beat later. Despite his effort not to, he can’t help but stumble a little – his legs are numb from kneeling on the tile for so long. He wants to stay on the floor. But her words are as good as an order, and he’s not going to fuck this up. He’s not. Because even though the doctor isn’t his master she’s close enough, and Castiel clearly wants Dean to obey her. So he will.
“Hop up on the kitchen island for me, please.” If possible, he feels dizzier, but he does it anyway, scooting backwards until he’s seated. He feels cold and on display, like a trophy. It’s not a feeling he associates with safety. The collar is tight and hot around his neck and he just barely resists the urge to cover the sensitive spot on his nape with his palm.
He’s not supposed to. It’s disrespectful, after all, to pretend that he has any authority over who touches him and where they do it.
She smiles again. “Thank you, Dean. Excellent job.” He swallows thickly and looks down, startled to realize that her simple words make something inside of him relax a little. Praise hasn’t often come his way, and if nothing else, it’s an indication that someone who has the power to hurt him doesn’t currently want to.
He can feel Castiel looking at him and he hunches his shoulders further as he realizes that he’s hoping his master is pleased with him. There’s something deeply fucked up about that, he thinks. He knows. Jesus Christ, his brain is scrambled.
The doctor studies him for a moment, her brow furrowed. “Why do you think I’m here?”
The question startles Dean, and he stares at her for a half beat before looking back down. He shrugs, fingers twisting the strings of the hoodie the alpha gave him. What had his master said? Something about checking on him. He can’t remember, ‘cause he’d kinda been freaking out. But this is obviously a test, and he can’t refuse to answer. “To… to see if I’m okay enough to work?”
She looks at his master sharply, one eyebrow raised, and he holds his hands up in defense of himself. She’s a beta, so the alpha shouldn’t be intimidated by her – but maybe it’s just how quickly her expression has gone from doting grandma to pit viper. Dean leans away from her nervously. But when she turns back, her eyes soften again and she takes a breath. “Not exactly.”
Dean’s stomach swoops. Fuck, he’s gotten it wrong, and his master is going to be angry. He’s embarrassing the alpha in front of guests, and that’s a huge mistake. He knows that. He’s been reminded of that lesson more times than he can count.
“Sorry,” he blurts automatically. But his master doesn’t look upset when Dean turns to him to check if a slap is incoming. If anything, he looks… sad. When he does step closer, it’s only to pick up Dean’s abandoned plate and cup and set them on the counter near the sink, and then he returns to the edge of the kitchen. Dean clenches his fists – was he supposed to do that? The alpha hadn’t told him to, but…
Pamela pulls up a chair and sits, and that’s strange enough that it derails Dean’s train of thought. He looks down at her. It’s not a position he finds himself in very often, being above people. Certainly not one he’s ever held with doctors. Normally he’s on the floor so sick he can’t breathe or laid out like a slab of meat on a table while they look down at him like an insect.
“I’m here to see if you’re hurt, and to help you if you are. That’s all.”
Dean blinks at her. To see if he’s hurt? Of course he’s hurt. He can’t remember the last time he wasn’t in pain. But that shouldn’t matter. “I can… I can still work,” he repeats hesitantly.
She smiles gently at him, hands folded in her lap. The fact that he can see them makes him feel better, for some reason. “Still being capable of movement and being healthy are two different things, kiddo. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Numbly, Dean nods. He doesn’t get why else his new master would care what shape he’s in, though, so he doesn’t understand, not really. The slave doctors he’s been treated by before were only requested if he was about to kick the bucket. Alastair had told him, once – hissed it like a threat in his ear, his claws curled around the back of his neck – that he was protecting his investment.
“Dean.” The woman’s voice is gentle. He looks her in the eyes as briefly as he can, and they’re bright and crinkled at the edges like she smiles a lot. Alastair’s empty gaze fades from his mind. “I’m going to give you a check up now, with your permission. It’s probably going to be uncomfortable for you, I won’t lie. But I won’t hurt you. What I’m going to do will be based solely on medical necessity. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
People have been asking him that a lot lately, and the answer always seems to be no. But he nods anyway, swallowing around the sudden lump in his throat. She pats his leg gently, and for whatever reason the touch doesn’t scare him. Maybe it’s because she’s so different from everyone who has ever hurt him – quieter and kinder, and nothing at all like the doctors from before. Those had been, at best, indifferent; at worst, nothing more than white-coated versions of the men who paid to torment him.
“Okay,” Pamela says, and she smiles at him again. “If at any point you want me to stop, all you have to do is say so, and I promise I will.”
Dean very nearly laughs out loud at that, but he catches himself just in time. The thought that he would dare to tell her what to do is hilarious, let alone the idea that she might listen. But he nods again, because she seems to be waiting for him to.
He can do this. Castiel has ordered him to tell the truth, and he’s going to. It won’t be so bad – or at least it won’t be as bad as it'll be if he ruins this. He’s gotta hold onto that, remind himself of it, because otherwise he’s going to puss out or do something stupid and he’ll be right back where he was a week ago.
“Before we get started, I suppose I should ask. Do you want Castiel to be here?”
His eyes widen as he stares at her, glancing at his master with a nervous swallow. What kind of question is that? The alpha looks almost uncomfortable in the arched doorway of the kitchen, arms crossed and shoulders hunched. Strangely out of place in his own home.
He clears his throat. “Whatever pleases you, alpha.”
It’s a response he’d heard hundreds if not thousands of times from slaves who behave themselves, so he thinks it’s safe to use here. Instantly, though, he knows he’s fucked up, because Castiel shakes his head almost violently.
“No.” The word hits him like a rock to the temple. “No, Dean. It’s your choice.”
Choice? He’s not used to choices. Hadn’t even stopped to consider what he wanted, if he’s honest.
He does so now, and finds that he’s torn. He doesn’t want Castiel there, because even though the doctor will tell him everything he wants to know anyway, exposing weaknesses in front of a man who owns him is not something Dean wants to do. But he’s also supposed to be a good slave, and a good slave wouldn’t dare presume to send his master away. So he just sits there, stupid and quiet and stuck, and Castiel eventually relents.
“How about I stay in the room, but remain over here?” he offers, tapping the door frame. “You can tell me if you want me to leave at any point.”
Heart in his throat, Dean nods because he doesn’t know what else to do.
The doctor doesn’t get up from her chair. She peers over her glasses at him. He fidgets under her gaze, wishing they could just get this over with. “Let’s start with some basics. What have you been eating?”
He lets a long, slow breath out, willing his heartbeat to slow down. He can do this. “Uh… this morning I had… pancakes?” It had been bewildering to realize Castiel had cooked for him again, but he’d been too nervous to question it. He hadn’t been hungry in the slightest, but he’d figured it would be rude to refuse them outright, even if his stomach had been churning at the sight of so much food. He could probably survive on what his master had fed him last night for three or four days.
He’s lived for longer on less, honestly.
“He didn’t eat much,” the alpha adds, grimacing as he glances Dean’s way. “I think he was nervous.”
He can feel himself start to freeze up. God, fuck. He should have just crammed them down. He’d been nauseous when Castiel had told him about the doctor, and he’d been too busy trying to stay calm to want to eat. He had thought that because of what Castiel had told him last night it would be okay for him to stop, but it’d been so stupid to refuse his master’s food over something like that –
“Well, that’s alright.” Pamela breaks through his wall of panic with gentle words. “Understandable. Let me rephrase. What were they feeding you before, and how often?”
Dean swallows a few times and very nearly fails to cram down his urge to bolt. Castiel doesn’t look upset, but maybe… When he looks to check, the alpha's just frowning that same little frown, eyes searching as Dean’s mouth flaps like a fish that’s gasping in the air.
“Um. I don’t. Um.” He can’t get the words out – they’re tangled up, tripping over whatever is lodged in his chest.
“Deep breaths.”
Castiel’s calm, deep-voiced order cuts right through his panic even though there’s no alpha tone laced through it. “It’s alright. Deep breaths,” he repeats. “Just like you did before. Good job, Dean.”
He gasps in and out, feeling stupid, feeling weak, like a naive idiot for being soothed by the alpha’s praise. But, after a few seconds, it actually starts to help. His master frowns. “I’m not angry with you. Are you…” he looks at Pamela, and then back at Dean, something that looks remarkably like uncertainty clouding his eyes. “Are you certain I should be here?”
Dean nods quickly. It’s better than the alternative – if the alpha stays, at least he’ll see that Dean isn’t lying. That he’s doing what he was ordered to do. Going with what his master desires is usually the safest choice, and since he thinks it’s what Castiel wants, he doesn’t really have a choice.
He also won’t have to worry that his master will discover something later and take it out on him. Better to just get it over with now. Rip off the bandaid.
He closes his eyes, takes a few more deep breaths. “They,” he starts, and his voice is rough and scratchy – has it always been like that? He doesn’t remember the last time he talked this much – “They, uh, usually fed me once a day, ‘less I was… You know.” He doesn’t want to say it, because he doesn’t want his new master to think that he’s incapable of doing what he’s supposed to. But he admits it anyway because the alpha told him not to lie, and lies by omission probably count. “Unless I didn’t… earn it.”
Pamela frowns, but it’s his master who asks the obvious question, an edge to his voice that Dean hasn’t heard since he growled at the auction house. “Earn it?”
Dean looks at his hands. “When I was… when I didn’t follow orders.”
The alpha’s scent changes at that, sharpens into something new. Something Dean is intimately familiar with.
He’s angry.
Dean swallows, hurries to add, “But it won’t be like that here, alpha.” He wouldn’t dare be defiant here, not when there’s so much to lose, not when his master has told him he can earn the privilege of being safe.
“No, it will not,” the alpha snaps, and Dean flinches into himself. Before he can fall on the ground and start apologizing, though, Pamela breaks in.
“Do you know what they were feeding you?”
He worries at his lip, looking up at her. Tries to ignore the towering figure of his master in the corner of his eye. It takes him a second to process her question, but he answers as soon as he does. “Some m-mealy stuff. Um. Mushy and b-brown.”
“Oatmeal?”
Her tone is even, clinical but gentle, and it helps him get a handle on himself. His master is clearly pissed, but he’s not lunging at Dean right now, so he’ll probably wait until Pamela leaves to punish him. He doesn’t want to dig his grave any further, so he forces himself to shake his head. “I… I dunno. Didn’t taste like much. There was, um, white powder in it? Sometimes.”
Pamela nods, writing something on her clipboard. “Uh huh. Probably a vitamin mix. And you said once a day? Could you estimate how much?”
“Um.” He thinks back. “A bowl? ‘Bout yay-big.” He holds out his hands and sees that they’re shaking. Pamela seems to notice that too, because she glances at them and writes something else down.
“Right. Well, that’s not nearly enough food for someone of your build, Dean, vitamins or no,” she says simply. “You’re going to want to start increasing how much you eat.”
Like that’s up to him. Like it was ever his choice to be hungry every damn night, even when he earned his meal. He figures, though, that she’s chastising him for being this emaciated – it is, after all, his fault that he’d been starved so often. If he’d been better behaved he would have been fed more. The fact that he’d refused to eat this morning looks especially bad now.
He glances at his master, wondering if he’s going to be in trouble after all. The man is nodding, a dark look on his face. He glances at Dean, and his eyes rake over him like he’s sizing up just how pathetically skinny he is.
“You really should be more careful about what you’re cooking, at least for a while. Simpler things would be better,” Pamela says, giving the alpha a stern look. “Soups, toast, juice. Things of that nature.”
His master doesn’t look any more angry about the doctor’s suggestion that he’s feeding Dean the wrong things – as if he’d ever have complained. He just nods, his mouth a solemn line. “You’re right, of course. I didn’t even think about that.” He gives Dean a long look. “We will both need to be more careful about what you eat in the future, Dean.”
He feels a swoop of dread that makes his stomach churn, empty or not. That’s his first punishment earned for sure, now. He’ll have to learn not to miss meals. Obedience has never been his strong suit, and considering how often he’d been punished with an empty stomach in the past he’s not exactly confident in his ability to get fed more. Food was always the first thing Alastair took away, and he wonders if his new master will be the same.
Better food than the post. Not that he has any doubt that this alpha has some way of making a lesson stick that goes above amateur starvation.
Apparently ignorant to his roiling stomach, Pamela is already moving on. “Right. Okay, on to a slightly harder question, which, to be honest, I just want to get out of the way early on.”
Dean stiffens. Whatever she’s about to bring up has put a real apologetic expression on her face that he doesn’t like the look of at all. Her tone is sympathetic, at least, though it doesn’t make the blow sting any less when it lands. “Were you ever drugged?”
His mouth is suddenly very, very dry. He looks away from her, down at his hands, at the floor. Anywhere he doesn’t have to face that disgust that he knows must be in her eyes, the anger that must be in the alpha’s. She takes his silence for the answer it obviously is, and pushes, albeit gently. “How? What were the symptoms?”
He closes his eyes. Get through this. Just get through this, and you’re gonna be fine. It sounds like a lie even now, but he has to cling to something. If he doesn’t, he’s gonna end up in a whacked out ball of nerves on the ground, and he doesn’t want to freak out again.
“Um. It was. In the water, sometimes. It just made me… more obedient, I guess.” His voice is hoarse. He doesn’t want his master to think he has to drug him for him to obey, but that’s the impression he just gave. And it was the truth, at the time. “I was there, you know, but, um. Fuzzy. Slower. Kinda dizzy, didn’t really know what was happening.” His chest is tight. “Made it hard to breathe, sometimes.”
He can hear Pamela scratching at the clipboard, but he’s not brave enough to look up to see his master’s reaction. “It was probably ketamine, based on what you’re describing.”
The word is meaningless to him, but he nods anyway. He bites his cheek, considers if he wants to offer up more. He’s been ordered to tell the truth, so the truth it’s gotta be.
“Uh. A few times they just. Knocked me out.” He prays she won’t ask why, that he won’t have to tell her about his futile escape attempts early on under Alastair’s care. About the first time he woke up chained down – not in the retraining facility, where he’d expected, but back in Hell, with no memory of how he’d been caught and hauled back. About the agony of the punishments he’d suffered for his trouble.
He’d stopped running after the third time. Too much of a coward to face that pain again, and defeated enough to know that he’d never get away. Alastair had been disappointed. He’d enjoyed Dean’s pathetic attempts at freedom, in his gleeful, twisted way.
She doesn’t ask him to elaborate, thankfully. Neither does his master. He still can’t make himself look up to see the anger he can already smell coming from the alpha. Now he thinks he’s got a slave that can’t do anything without being drugged up first. It’s not the truth, not anymore. Not if he wants to stay here – and God, he does. But now isn’t the time for begging and pleading.
“What about other kinds of drugs?” Pamela’s soft question pulls him out of his thoughts. “Things that induced heats?”
Dean’s pretty sure that should be a damn obvious answer, considering where he came from. He wants to bite out something sarcastic and caustic, but the truth is that he can’t even look at her. If he opens his mouth he thinks he might be sick. The little wall he’s built up around those times in his life trembles and cracks. Arms curl around him and grip his sides, fingers dig into his ribs, and he keeps his eyes open because if he closes them all he’s gonna see is Alastair.
“A simple yes or no will do, honey,” Pamela says, and her voice is so gentle it almost makes him angry. No one is ever gentle with him.
He can feel his nails digging into his palms. “Yes.” And damn if his voice doesn’t crack.
Pamela makes a humming noise and stands up, brushing her hands off on her pants. “Often?”
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t think that the dozen or so times that it happened could be considered often – not with how long he’d been there, not with what the other slaves dealt with. He’s sure they probably had it worse. So, slowly, he shakes his head.
The trick heats – the ones triggered by drugs instead of feelings of safety and contentment, so glaringly artificial that no matter how many times he’s fucked he can’t get pregnant – had made him feel like he was on fire, like something inside him was twisting and clawing its way out. His body never seemed to be able to understand it wasn’t real, and his brain had warped till he’d known nothing except that if he didn’t get a knot in him right that instant he was going to burn to death.
Most of the clients had wanted him to struggle, he thinks, so they could make him submit – they hadn’t wanted any semblance of willingness. So Alastair had stopped drugging him that way pretty early on. Apparently he made more money if he wasn’t begging for it. More money if he was screaming no than screaming yes.
He’s wretchedly thankful for that, though he doesn’t know if he should be. All he knows is that he’s never hated himself more than he did after waking up from a feverish heat and having to face the glazed over memories of what he’d pleaded for.
She lets him get control of himself, leaves him alone until he can breathe again. But when he finally looks up at his master, the man’s eyes are distant. Glazed. Dean can smell his rage, simmering under the deceptively calm surface, his jawline hard and severe as he clenches his teeth.
He starts shaking, hard. Can’t stop his hands from sliding up and covering the back of his neck, his fingers laced together, can’t stop himself from hunching as low as he can on the cold kitchen island. He’d be on the floor right now if he hadn’t been ordered to stay here.
It’s not like he asked to have chemicals pumped into him, not like he asked to be fucked into the mattress they always chained him to while he was fading in and out of consciousness from heat sickness and dehydration. But he knows alphas don’t see it that way. He knows they will always blame him, will always punish him for being a slut or a whore or a tease.
He’s an omega. He’s asking for it, even if he’s kicking and screaming and crying the whole goddamn time.
“Sorry, alpha,” he whispers. He has to do something to abate the man’s anger, even if it’s futile.
But to his surprise, it seems to work – his master’s scent dissipates until it vanishes into nothing, and when he dares to raise his head again the alpha is looking away, jaw working. “Don’t apologize,” he finally growls, and Dean swallows. Yet another thing that his new master doesn’t have in common with his old. Alastair had loved to hear him grovel. That’s gonna be a hard habit to break.
“Thank you for your honesty, Dean.” Pamela’s voice startles him, and he snaps his attention back to her. Her words register. His shoulders relax and he breathes a slow sigh of relief, drops his hands. He’s being good after all, at least for her. That’s something.