Note: hey my loves, only one more part after this one! thank you so much for following along with this story <3

trigger warning in this chapter for disordered eating. 

i had a request for this a little while ago, and i've been working hard to do it justice. but the topic hits close to home for me, and i'm sure it does for a lot of you as well. so take care of yourselves and stop if you need to <3

Control Is a Precious Commodity (Part VI)

The bunker is calm and beautifully quiet for a few days. Anna sleeps half the time, takes her pills on a strict schedule, remembers in bits and pieces what went down in Kansas City.

It's three days after they get home that she realizes the ugly truth: She was possessed.

She wakes up in a cold sweat, breathing like she's been underwater for a lifetime. She's in her bedroom, and it's blessedly empty. Her hand is throbbing, a sure sign it's almost time for her next dose of painkillers.

Anna rolls out of bed and stands still for a second, riding out a dizzy spell. She stares at her closed bedroom door, pulling her hand in toward her chest. There's a pit in her stomach begging her not to leave the safe isolation of her room. But louder is her conscience, begging for the truth, for accountability.

She steps into the kitchen a few minutes later and relishes the warmth as it washes over her. She can smell muffins in the oven and knows Dean's making them for her benefit. Sam might like muffins, but Dean would always rather have bacon and eggs. It's one of the few boring things about him.

"Smells good," she says quietly and heads straight for the coffee pot. She can only drink one cup of coffee each morning for now, so she uses the biggest mug in the cupboard. It's probably twice the size of your standard coffee cup, which makes Anna feel proudly like she's cheating the system. What do they call it? Malicious compliance?

"Only the best for you, Rugrat," Dean teases and twists a knob on the stove. "You better eat some friggin eggs, though, too. You gotta have some protein somewhere."

Anna rolls her eyes and inhales deeply, holding her coffee near her nose.

"Alright, you little addict, sit down. I'll get you a plate."

He's already got the cupboard open when Sam steps in. He's not the last to wake, though. He's wearing his running clothes, and his hair is damp with sweat.

"I'm tellin' you, Sammy, you were switched at birth."

Sam's laugh is huffy as he opens the fridge and pops out with a bottle of water. "Shut up," he tells Dean and twists off the cap. He swallows some water and looks to Anna. "You know, you're really not supposed to mix caffeine with pain killers."

"Yeah, and you're not supposed to run with a stick up your ass either," Anna snarks. She's got a feeling she'll be able to get away with that remark, and her theory is proven true when Dean barks a laugh.

"She's got you there, man."

Sam is watching her with a disbelieving smirk. "I wasn't switched at birth," he complains. "You two are just the same friggin' person." He shakes his head and makes for the doorway again, "I'm gonna hit the showers."

"Yeah," Dean acknowledges and slides a plate of food in front of Anna. "How's the hand?"

"Still stabbed."

"Funny girl," Dean deadpans. He retrieves his coffee mug from the counter and sits across from her with a tired grunt. "Lemme see." He waves her hand toward him, and Anna complies without arguing. She's got to eat with her left hand either way.

She lifts up her fork but doesn't even touch her muffin before she pauses and sets the utensil back down. "Hey, Dean?"

"Yeah."

"Was I possessed?"

Dean's hands freeze where they're halfway through unwrapping her bandages. "Why do you ask?"

Anna shrugs one shoulder and picks her fork up again just so she can push her scrambled eggs back and forth. "I remembered something this morning. It's kinda blurry, but... I guess maybe I had a dream about it. I have this image of Cas' face in Kansas City. We were in some mini mart or something. I was holding a blade on him. He had his angel blade too, but he wouldn't hurt me. And I was talking, but it wasn't... I don't know. It felt wrong."

Dean is quiet through her explanation. And Anna's grateful, because she knows she's a clumsy talker, knows she's probably making little sense. But now she needs him to answer her. She needs him to fix it.

"Yeah, kiddo," he finally tells her. It sounds like he doesn't want to be admitting it to her. Maybe he was hoping she'd never remember. "Those demons you and Cas were after, they got the drop on you. Separated you and Cas. One of 'em took you for a ride."

Demons. She was hunting with Cas. Anna tries to remember the moment she was possessed. All she can get is the smell of barbecue, the utter lack of leads in the city. She remembers walking down the street with Cas right next to her in the dark. She was trying to text someone. Or maybe she was checking her texts?

Anna frowns. "I had no service," she realizes. "They cut us off. We couldn't find any leads, because they didn't want us to find any leads."

Dean nods patiently, cleaning her hand as he lets her think through it all.

The wound looks gnarly. Medical grade stitches always look a little startling when you're used to improvising bandages and letting things scar. But even the neat needle work can't disguise the depth of the injury. There's a dark bruise on either side of the gash on the back of her hand from where the hilt of Lucifer's knife rammed against her skin. On the other side, the skin is jagged and puckered, trying to heal and reddening around the edges.

"Someone screamed," Anna murmurs. "I went to help her, and I thought Cas was behind me, but he wasn't."

"They cut him off," Dean explains, seeing the confusion on her face. "He said he had five or six demons to fight off. He got out okay, but by the time he got to the alley, you were gone."

"And the woman who screamed?" Anna asks. She already knows the answer, but she wants to pretend she doesn't. Just for a second.

"Dead before you heard her scream."

Anna nods, turning her face to her plate and feeling shame burn in her cheeks. Her stomach is turning. She feels suddenly hollow. "Why can't I remember?"

"That's pretty typical with possession," Dean assures her. "You might get bits and pieces, but for the most part it's like blacking out."

"No, I was awake," Anna argues, refusing to look Dean in the eye.

He's focused on her wound anyway. She can feel the burn in the very center of her hand. The pain is good, she's been told. It means she hasn't lost all feeling. That was apparently a possibility at one point.

"Awake or not, Rugrat, there's nothin' you coulda done."

Anna snorts and feels suddenly wrathful. She's the fuck-up again. She's gotten people hurt again. She's the stupid kid again. And Dean won't even admit it. "Well, that's a lie."

Dean looks up in surprise at her new tone. "Excuse me?"

"Sam took control back from the friggin' devil, Dean. I might've been a kid, but I remember that." She almost misses those days. She was too little to be blamed back then. Not that she felt innocent at the time, but she was. Eighteen, and Anna knows that her innocence is no longer an objective fact. It's all subjective. Her family thinks she's just a kid. Kate thinks she's a good person. But Anna knows herself best. She's not a kid, and she's certainly not good.

She's hurt waiting to happen. But she hates herself for even believing that. She's not special enough to be a special sort of stupid. Claire was right to say that.

Anna's lost halfway between hating herself and dismissing herself when she hears her brother speak.

"Anna, that was a million-to-one," Dean scolds. His anger is unexpected, but it runs deep. "You remember Meg?" he demands. But he doesn't give her time to answer before continuing, "She possessed Sam for a week. A week, Anna. And he couldn't take control back then. Lucifer? Sam's a tough son of a bitch, and what he did was incredible. I ain't sayin' it was luck. But I am sayin' he's the only one in the history of ever to actually pull that off. Don't hold yourself to standards that are impossible to meet."

The tears in Anna's eyes aren't relieved but hurt. And she doesn't even know why. "I coulda killed Cas," she grieves.

Dean makes a sound of frustration and clenches his jaw. "You're wrong," is all he can tell her, and he says it tersely.

It occurs to Anna then that Dean has probably had this conversation several times in his life. Sam's been possessed three times that she knows of, including this Meg possession Dean just told her about.

"Anna, before Sam took back control at Stull Cemetery... You remember what happened?"

She swallows and reaches back. Stull Cemetery. It had been a gray day, but the sun peeked out from between the clouds often enough to remind them that the world wasn't over just yet. Anna can't get much back. Her minds is a mess of repressed and preserved memories. All she can remember is Dean pressed back against the Impala, his face swollen beyond recognition. She remembers crying from the ground, covered in blood. Oh. Oh, God. Bobby's blood.

"Lucifer killed Bobby," she says softly. "And Cas."

"Yeah."

"He almost killed you too."

Dean nods, voiceless this time. He's set about rewrapping her hand, but Anna barely feels it anymore. She's so lost in her head. "Rugrat, you never once blamed Sammy for those things."

"Well, it wasn't..."

"Him," Dean finishes for her. He looks at her knowingly, and she can see him longing for her to understand. "I know."

Anna hangs her head again. Her breakfast is growing cold in front of her, scrambled eggs congealing into a rubbery state. "Yeah." Her voice trembles. "Sorry."

Dean sighs, but he sounds almost relieved. "You understand?"

Anna swallows hard. "Yes," she replies. And she's not lying. She gets it. Hell, she feels it. It wasn't her fault what the demon did. But she's still got something horrible swirling in her gut, and she can't put a name to it.

"You okay?" Dean asks a minute later when Anna's hand is secure again.

Anna looks at him, looks back at her plate, and doesn't answer.

()()()

The shower is a safe haven. Anna sits with her knees to her chest and imagines a rainstorm soaking hot into her skin.

She never ate her breakfast, and she's feeling it bad right now. Her stomach is aching and growling, sending waves of hunger so strong they almost reach her chest. She got in the shower so she wouldn't eat. Anna knows that's not healthy. She knows she should feed her body.

But she needs the emptiness, much as it hurts.

Since speaking with Dean, she's been thinking. She remembers more and more. The dead cashier at that gas station, the wounded glimmer in Cas' eyes when he found her, the nightclub where her voice sang along to songs she doesn't know and her throat burned with cigarette smoke and weed. It's all terrifying.

But the worst thing she recalls is the suffocating weight of the demon's presence in her head, her chest, her gut. It was like constant pressure along every inch of her skin, her bones expanding, her blood thickening. Hours upon hours spent waiting to explode.

Anna curls forward, her face in her knees. Steam curls around her, filling the bathroom. The water is hot enough to hurt just a little, her skin turning pink beneath the spray.

She hates it, the sweat mixing with water on her forehead and in her hair. She hates the way her hair, weighed down by the water, sticks to her skin like a decal. Everything that touches her feels like another violation. She wants the water to cleanse her insides the way it does her skin. Burning, but purifying.

And this feeling is familiar. She was assaulted for the third time, but this instance feels more violating than the others. This demon got what it wanted. It felt every inch of her, read her every thought and memory, smothered her every feeling. At least Leo never fully got her clothes off. At least that man in the truck stop met his match.

Crying is hard, but Anna can feel it building in her. She scratches her nails up and down her legs, watches the marks turn white and then red.

Her stomach hurts.

()()()

The tricky thing is, Anna knows what an eating disorder is. She's familiar with the words anorexia and bulimia and binge-eating even the less common orthorexia. She knows that starving yourself can turn quickly from a habit to a sickness. Hell, maybe you have to be sick to even start. She doesn't know.

But Anna doesn't know if she cares. The truth is, she's been bad about eating since she was a little kid.

When she was seven, she was taken by some sort of monster. She should know the name of it now that she's an adult, but she doesn't. She's a bad hunter.

The important detail is, it ate children. She watched it eat another child. The monster gave them no food or water. Anna doesn't remember how long she spent down there with those other kids. But she remembers how much her stomach hurt when she got out. She remembers how hard it was to eat afterwards, how hard it was to keep track of night and day.

She started get better, she thinks, because Sam and Dean were so clever about fixing her back then. But food got harder every minute. Dad died, and she turned eight. Then Sam died, and she turned nine. Then Dean died, and she turned ten. Then Sam died, and she turned eleven. It never ended. People were always dying. Anna always had a reason to feel sick to her stomach.

But there's a difference. She knows that. When she felt sick, it was grief or fear or anger. This isn't something beyond her control. This is her making herself sick.

She should stop. She has to stop. She wants to stop.

()()()

A week later, Anna doesn't want to stop. She craves the hollow feeling that tells her she's alone in this body. It gives her control, gives her power. (She knows that's what drives people to starve themselves. She knows she's getting sick.)

She turns on her phone and opens an internet browser. Types control with no expectations.

The first thing she sees is a dictionary definition from the Merriam-Webster website. To exercise restraining or directing influence over: regulate. Anna thinks of her oldest brother and keeps reading. To have power over. She thinks of God and reads on. Rule. A single company controls the industry. She thinks of billionaires and nearly laughs out loud.

Control, she decides, is a joke.

But she keeps scrolling. There's a video game called Control, apparently. It's an action-adventure where your character has supernatural abilities. Anna swallows, feeling nauseous. She imagines being the character in a video game.

You know there's somebody out there with their thumbs on joysticks and lettered buttons. But they're invisible to everyone else. So your hands are coated in blood, and your mouth moves around witty voice lines. But none of it– not a second of it– is yours.

She shudders and feels the urge to throw up. But she hasn't eaten all day, and it's five o'clock, and she hates throwing up bile.

Masochistically, Anna edits her search. Control quotes. As she hits go, she's daring the internet to give her something that can fix demonic possession. She knows it won't be covered here.

What consumes your mind controls your life. Anna sets her phone face down on her bed and stands up with her hand over her mouth. Consume was a good word for this. The feeling of being devoured from the inside out.

She picks up her phone but can't bring herself to sit again. There are pages and pages of empty inspiration that make her feel smugly like she's right to give up.

Dean knocks on her door, and Anna tells him she'll be out later. He walks away, and she clicks on a new link. The goodreads page is instantly different.

Anna sinks onto her mattress, her right arm around her stomach. Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't.

Minutes pass as Anna thinks it over. There's no denying she craves control. But when she tries to come up with something she does have power over, she comes up short. She feels lost in her own head, like the spacce doesn't belong to her anymore. Demonic possession is a control so total and so violating that Anna isn't sure this quote applies.

Freedom is the only worthy goal in life, another line goes. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.

Anna frowns. Control and freedom are antonyms but in an abstract sort of way. She can't wrap her head around it, around the depth of this quote. She's so hungry, so tired, she wonders if her brain is dissolving from all the shit she's seen and done. She's too young, Dean always says, to be exposed to more and more violence. But violence is a language Anna knew before she could speak.

John Winchester was fluent in it. Violence was a language he commanded. Command, control. Freedom.

Anna reads more. A line from a novel, I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.

She reads more. Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself.

Ignoring the rest, Anna breathes the last line. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself.

It's the proof she needs. Pain is control. Control is pain. Controlling pain is controlling the self.

Anna lets her back hit the mattress, holding her injured hand to her chest as she gazes up at the ceiling. She can feel the wrongness of the belief even as she solidifies it. Pain is control. To control pain is to control oneself. She can get control back if she hurts enough.

She doesn't care about being wrong or being right. She just cares about being free. And Anna's got this feeling like no matter what she does, she'll be trapped in a world of pain. It's an endless cycle. She turns different directions every time she comes to a fork in the road, but somehow she still finds herself at the same destination.

It's hard to cry. But she does it anyway, because if the only way to get control is to decide where it hurts, Anna isn't sure she wants to live. Being empty doesn't feel like enough.

()()()

Anna sits in the hallway outside Sam's bedroom door. It's only four in the morning. Her brother may not be up for hours. But she has a question for him, and she refuses to lose it.

She hasn't slept all night, and it's making her body feel like an itchy coat. She wants out, she wants away, she wants to stop being held at the mercy of an unforgiving vessel. Or maybe she just wants to make it hurt so bad it dies, and her with it.

Anna can't tell the difference anymore between wanting desperately to live and wanting desperately to die.

Sam steps out of his room at 4:30 and jumps a mile when he sees her. "What the hell are you doing?" he asks, but it isn't angry so much as alarmed. "What's wrong?"

It's hard to explain, and she's too tired to do hard things. So Anna just asks the question. She figures she's been patient long enough. "Did it feel like mind-rape?" she says bluntly, her voice devoid of feeling. You have to repeat dangerous questions over and over and over again to separate them so well from their emotional aftermath when you speak them aloud. Anna's spent hours with this one. "Like everything inside your head has been smothered and groped. I mean, it's different. I know it's different. But it's not." Sam hasn't spoken, but he's frozen. "Did it feel like that for you?" Or is there something special about me? Am I a special kind of stupid? A special kind of damaged? Please say no. Please say yes.

It's a few seconds or a few minutes before Sam sits on the floor next to her. Anna remembers this. Their shoulders touch like they did after the FBI named her a victim of a serial rapist. Except Anna was the lucky one, because she wasn't raped.

This is the difference between Anna and her brothers: she gets away by the skin of her teeth, and people look at her with sympathy, let her know it wasn't her fault. Sam and Dean fight their way out of unimaginable horrors, and people look at them with fearful admiration, let them know their power is recognized.

Sam looks sick. "Yes," he says, nearly swallowing the word.

Anna nods, feeling it in the air just how desperate Sam is not to talk about this. He wants to help her, she can see it. But he can't do it.

She should have been kinder with her pain. Instead she threw it in his face right after he woke up. Someone said once, Always wake people gently, and Anna has never been good at that. In fact, she's a record breaker for midnight heart attacks.

"Sorry," she mumbles, shaking her head and looking tiredly into her lap.

"Don't be," Sam pleads. He touches her wrist, right near the end of her bandages, and the movement is slow and deliberate in its comfort. His caution helps Anna not to flinch. "You can ask me anything, alright?"

Anna nods, and her smile only wobbles a little bit. But she doesn't ask him any of the million other questions she's got locked up in her head.

She appreciates her brother– She really does. But she can't kill him for her own good.

()()()

It's another week before Anna really starts to feel how starvation is a sickness. She's weaker, wearier, and always pale. She's dizzy all the time, and it feels like there's a drill buzzing against the back of her skull.

She hates the feeling. She hates all these feelings. Even the emptiness.

"Does it hurt any more?" Dean asks her for the tenth time today.

Anna shakes her head, ducks to look at her phone while Dean finishes unwrapping her injured hand. She hasn't answered Kate's texts for three days. She's just so tired.

"It doesn't look red."

"It's not infected, Dean," she complains. "Can you just rewrap it and move on, please." Despite the polite language, she's not being very patient.

They go around and around for a few more days. Sam asks if she's sleeping, asks about nightmares. Dean mutters about fevers and hidden infections, tries to convince her to move her follow-up appointment to this week.

Anna just counts. It's not about calories, but they are a good measure, she thinks. If she eats too much in a moment of weakness, she feels it for hours. It weighs so heavily in her stomach that it makes her feel physically nauseous. She doesn't even have to stick her fingers down her throat anymore. At least not every time.

She knows, though. She knows it's bad. She knows it's wrong. She knows she is wrong. It's just that Anna's scared too. That feeling she gets now whenever she eats something substantial— she's come to associate it so strongly with possession. It feels like surrender.

But it hurts keeping this up. God, does it hurt. It hurts so completely and so deeply that Anna has no idea if there's a way to make it end. It's like there's this ugliness inside of her, a feeling hiding somewhere in her very DNA. She was born broken, maybe. Or born fragile, ready to break.

She just keeps thinking the word maybe in utter desperation. Maybe if she empties herself out completely enough. Maybe if she purges until there's nothing left inside of her.

But it's wrong. She's not thinking straight. She knows that.

And Anna realizes one night, staring at the ceiling in the oppressive darkness of her bedroom, that it's her. She's the horrible thing she can't escape.

To Be Continued