Note: hey. i know i disappeared. again. sorry. i've been having a rough go of it. i'm getting an mri next month and hopefully after that i'll be able to actually get treatment for whatever's wrong with me. in the meantime, i'm hoping to get some more writing done, but unfortunately i can't promise anything. 

i'm so sorry to everyone who's been waiting months for their requests to be written. some of you have been waiting a year, and i never intended to make you wait that long

thanks to everyone who's been so patient with me and who's supported me <3 i appreciate you so much, i can't even express it

if anyone is interested, i started a tumblr account: writer-insomniac-extraordinaire. there i'm posting mostly original stuff (mainly poetry), but i also plan to post some short scenes from the runt of the litter. some of which will be scenes from previous chapters but some will just be snippets that i didn't think were long enough to be posted here. so yeah, if anyone is ion tumblr and that sounds fun to you, feel free to follow me. 

title comes from Don't You Dare Forget the Sun by Get Scared. which is such a good song guys. like SUCH a good song.

anna is seventeen. and without further ado, a chapter that might make you sad:

you're better off looking alone

The café bustled with it's late morning crowd, the air humming with low voices and indie music and the atmosphere warm. Anna sat huddled in a booth seat with her back to the wall and her phone in her hand. She'd just finished typing out an elaborately planned text message to her... boyfriend? Friend who she sometimes went on dates with? Didn't matter what he was to her. He was late, and as badly as she wanted to deny it, she had this nagging, painful feeling that she knew why.

Her finger hovered over the little blue arrow that would send her message with one tap. She knew she should call instead, especially considering that the odds he was late on accident were low. But she couldn't bring herself to do it. She preferred to prolong the inevitable. She didn't hit send on the message either. She hit the sleep button on her phone, set it face down on the table, and rested her chin in her hand as she once again looked around the café, hoping to see a trace of him.

Her stomach clenched with nerves when she still didn't see him. She didn't know what they'd been, but she had a feeling they weren't it anymore.

That would have been hard enough, especially considering she'd taken a long time to even really try dating to begin with. But to make matters worse, she knew exactly why they weren't... a them anymore. And it was because of her.

With a dejected sigh that left her feeling empty, Anna started to get out of the boot. She turned back to pick up her phone, and when she went to get up, she startled at the sight of Ian standing in front of her.

"Hey," he said, running his fingers through his hair. He slid into the booth across from her. Anna hadn't known him all that long. Just a few months. But they'd spent a lot of time together, enough for her to recognize his nervous habits. "I know I'm late. I, uh..."

"It's fine," Anna said even though it wasn't. "I mean, I figured you were just... running late." That was the last thing she believed.

Ian tilted his head, staring at the tabletop in a way that told her he was being careful not to look her in the eye. "Yeah, actually, I was thinkin' about what you told me," he admitted.

He ran his fingers through his hair again, and Anna watched his hand move up to his head before settling back against the table. That repetitive movement was one of many tells she was seeing in him at the moment that screamed He's done with you.

"You know... the other day."

"You mean when I came out to you," Anna corrected. She hated the way her voice shook. She was his equal, nothing less, and whatever he had to say about her or about them... it didn't mean there was anything wrong with her. And even if the worst happened, which she feared it would, she would probably be fine. She made a concerted effort to sound stronger, more candid and sure of herself when she added, "So you thought about it. And you spent all that time the last two days thinkin' about it and ignoring every text I-"

"I know. I'm sorry. I just- I couldn't. Look, I didn't even know that was a thing. Asexual? It's like... it's a term you hear in chem class. It describes things, not people."

Anna's heart slid into her stomach, heavy and nauseating. She didn't have words to respond with, but the way her face fell seemed to say enough.

"I didn't- That came out wrong," Ian tried to amend. He ran his fingers through his hair again, further condemning her.

"I hope it did," Anna said. There were equal amounts of bitterness and sadness in her voice, but they didn't balance out. Instead she managed to sound strained in her bitterness and weak in her sadness. She got the feeling she was losing, but there should never have been a battle.

"It did," Ian said. "I don't want to be judgy. But... I'm not into that."

Anna swallowed hard and let the dryness of her throat silence her.

Ian gave her a minute to react, and when she didn't, he kept talking, running his fingers through his hair yet again. "I'm sorry," he said. He reached across the table and put his hand on her arm.

All Anna could do was look down at his pale fingers against her skin, feel the coldness of it. It was contact, but it wasn't connection. There'd never been any connection between them.

"Do you even know what it means?" she asked, her voice increasingly distant even from her own body, her own ears. It made her sound cold, and it made her feel cold.

"You explained it-"

"And you listened?"

"Yeah, it means you're not into... sex," Ian replied, getting defensive.

But she wasn't trying to insult his intelligence. She was trying to defend her identity.

"And, sure, fine, whatever. You want to wait or whatever... wait. But I don't wanna die a virgin."

Anna watched the best parts of Ian drain away. She stared into his blue eyes and wondered why she'd thought they were so kind. He pulled his hand away from her arm, and she felt nauseated knowing it had ever been there. "You don't understand," she said softly, not a question this time, but a matter of fact.

"Anna, I freaking listened to you explain it for twenty minutes," he snapped, seemingly baffled at her insistence that he didn't get it. "I'm not the one not understanding here."

Anna bit the inside of her lip and tried to find his eyes, hoping her own looked sharp and cold rather than young and heartbroken. "So that's it?" she asked.

Ian's eyes drifted from the tabletop to meet Anna's gaze. "I really liked you," he said consolingly, like Anna would want to be consoled or patronized rather than accepted or seen. "I just didn't see this whole thing coming. But, you know, someday if you change your mind..."

"So that's it," Anna said.

Ian looked at her again, and Anna knew her eyes looked young and heartbroken by the way his chin wobbled for just a second before his expression went stiff and awkward again. He looked away from her, placed a hand on the table, and used it to free himself from the booth seat.

He turned back to her, and she watched his chin wrinkle as he fought tears. "I'll miss you," he said, voice wavering.

Anna actually believed him.

His footsteps disappeared quickly into the bubble of sounds coming from all around her.

The second they were gone, her face crumpled, chin wobbling as her eyes welled with tears that quickly spilled over. She wrapped her arms around her stomach, hunched over until her forehead was resting against the edge of the table, and cried as quietly as she could for a few minutes.

She struggled with herself until she could get the tears to stop and then pulled out her phone. She dialed Sam, and while she listened to it ring, she sniffled and cleared her throat, occasionally wiping her nose on the sleeve of her flannel. She was getting some looks from strangers nearby, and she wanted to get out of the café almost as badly as she wanted to be the kind of girl Ian would have considered worth it.

"Hey, Ladybug. It's only ten-thirty. Something wrong?"

Anna swallowed thickly. Just hearing his voice made her chin wobble again. She wasn't sure she would be able to speak without her voice breaking, so she took a second to try to collect herself.

"Anna?"

"Sorry," she said, half-swallowing the word as she tried to force herself not to cry anymore. She blinked once, hard, and said quickly, "Can you come get me?"

"What? I mean, yeah- yeah, of course. But I thought you were going to Kate's after your date. What happened?"

"I just want to come home instead," Anna said, frustratingly aware of how small her voice sounded. She sniffled thoughtlessly and heard an instant, stunned reaction.

"Are you crying?"

"No," she defended immediately. Looking discreetly around her, she rubbed at her eyes with the thumb and forefinger of her free hand. People were looking at her, but they were trying not to make it obvious, which at least meant she wasn't making too obvious a scene. "Can you please just come get me?"

Sam was quiet for a second, and when he did speak again, his voice was almost unnecessarily gentle. "Sure, Ladybug. Where are you?"

"Café," Anna said, feeling her body start to grow tired. She'd been tense all morning-- well, she'd been tense for a couple days now, really-- and now with the strength of emotions pooling in her, the exhaustion was kicking in.

"I'll be there soon," Sam promised.

"Thanks," Anna muttered and hung up before he could ask any more questions or make any more promises.

()()()

"Just like that?" Kate asked, her jaw so far down Anna wondered how she'd ever close her mouth again.

"Just like that," Anna murmured. She smoothed the palm of her hand over the fluff of one of Kate's throw pillows, pushing it first in one direction and then back in the other.

"I'm so sorry," Kate told her. "That's beyond messed up. That's-" She seemed to hit pause on her own anger. Anna wished she had a remote for her own limbic system. She would tell the heartbreak to give her a minute. "What did you tell your brother?"

"I just said I felt really depressed. Considering what the last year has been like, it wasn't hard to believe. And it wasn't like he could call me a liar considering I was crying the whole way home." She felt a tickle of embarrassment at the memory of riding shotgun beside Sam as he tried to comfort her with a hand on her shoulder. She wished she'd been able to keep it together.

"You're not gonna tell him you guys... broke up?" Kate said the words so gently, but it didn't matter. It wasn't like hearing it spoken aloud could hurt any more than sitting across from Ian while he invalidated her.

"I can't. If I tell him, he'll tell Dean, and they'll kill Ian."

"Come on, they wouldn't really kill him. They'd just give him a talking to, and maybe he needs one. That aphobic dickbag."

"Kate, don't say that."

Her friend's jaw dropped again, seeming to even go lower this time if that was actually possible. "You're protecting him?"

Anna shrugged, running her hand over the soft fabric of that pillow again and again. She wasn't sure anymore if the movement was soothing or simply hypnotizing. Maybe if she sat in this spot ten years from now and stroked this pillow, it would bring her back to this moment in time, to her first heartbreak. "I just... I can't expect him to want to date me now. It doesn't mean he's a bad person. It just means he's not into me."

"Except he was into you until he found out you were ace. And he acted like your sexuality was a choice you made that was like some kind of personal insult to him."

"Kate, stop," Anna requested in a small voice. "I don't want to talk about this anymore. I just want to think about something else."

Kate's eyebrows pulled together in sympathy. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm just really angry."

"I know."

"If you want to talk about it any more, you can. But if you don't want to, we don't have to."

Anna's hand stopped moving against the pillow. "Thanks."

"So... how's it going? Other than..."

"Honestly, kinda shit."

"Me too. You wanna talk about that?"

Anna shrugged. She felt so tense, her whole body curling in on itself. She was hunched around that pillow, trying to draw all kinds of comfort from it though it had nothing to offer her but its soft skin. Maybe she'd had nothing more to offer Ian either. Why else would he have cared so much-

"Come on," Kate pleaded, tapping her sock clad foot against Anna's. "Let me help you with something."

Anna tried to remember what Kate had asked a second ago that she should answer. It took a second for her to find the question and another second for her to come up with a decent reply. "It hasn't been that long since I started seeing Ramone again, and I just... I'm so fuckin' sad, Kate. Especially since this thing with Ian." Suddenly angry, she punched the pillow in her lap. "I was finally starting to get to that point of being numb to all this shit, and then he had to go and break my fucking heart." She threw the pillow across the room violently, but it didn't make much of a sound when it hit the wall.

"Anna..." Kate said in that way that meant she didn't have anything else to say.

Anna shook her head and curled further in on herself, the anger already gone. "I wanna fucking die."

"I know," Kate murmured, shuffling on her knees from the other end of the bed to be beside Anna. She wrapped her arms around her, and Anna unpeeled one hand from over her own stomach to hold onto the arm Kate had around her front. "But it's gonna be okay. It always looks like it's never gonna get any better, but it always does. Always."

Anna tried to believe it. But she'd lost all capacity to believe for the moment. So she just felt instead. She felt the warmth of Kate's body wrapped around hers, her friend's breath blowing over her head. She wasn't alone, she was just without Ian.

"You know what we should do?" Kate suddenly said, her voice loud in Anna's ear. She pulled back, and Anna uncurled to look at her. Kate was opening Spotify. "We're gonna listen to Rihanna." Her stomach hurt, her head hurt, and her heart was gushing blood, but Anna found a little smile.

()()()

"Hey, Rugrat."

Anna glanced sideways at her brother as he walked into the kitchen. She was exhausted, burning eyes and limp hands, hunched over her laptop but unable to finish her assignment. She gave her brother a short nod.

She heard the fridge door close and the telltale sound of a beer bottle being uncapped. "Sam's goin' out tonight," Dean said and she listened to him take a gulp of beer and release a breath afterward. "What do you want for dinner?"

Anna shrugged.

"Pizza? Spaghetti? Chinese?"

She shrugged again.

"The heart of a virgin?"

Finally lifting her head enough to shoot her brother a deadly look, Anna grumbled, "Shut up."

"So you can hear me." Dean dropped into the chair across the table from her and set his beer down. "What's the matter with you today? You've been quiet."

"Yeah, I'm depressed," Anna snapped, irritated. "Get used to it." She watched Dean's eyebrows pop up in surprise at her tone. "Sorry," she murmured. "I'm tired."

"You look it," Dean told her. He took a swig of his drink. "Why don't you put your homework away and relax a little bit."

"It's due tonight."

"Anna, something is clearly bugging you. And before you bite my head off again, I know you feel like crap 90% of the time. But I'm not talkin' about that. I'm talkin' about this look you got in your eyes." He bumped his foot against hers under the table, and Anna curled her toes inside her socks and turned her feet in. She wanted to shrink and hide, but not from Dean. From everything else. "You don't have to talk right now, Sweetheart, but take it easy on yourself. Put the homework away."

She was so tired that she didn't even bother to lift her eyes from the table again as she weakly lifted her arm and closed the screen to her laptop. Not like she was making any progress on the assignment anyway. And not like her teachers didn't all already think she was a shitty student who didn't have a work ethic or care about school. What was one more missing paper after a year falling into a ravine of zeroes and calls home?

"Look, it's just us tonight. We can watch a movie together, for old time's sake. Something tells me you don't feel like leaving the bunker."

Anna shook her head to confirm his hunch. "Movie sounds better," she said quietly. She raised a hand to her hair and tossed a handful of curls back away from her face. They were limp and loose, and she knew she needed to take a shower and take care of her hair along with the rest of her body. She hadn't even brushed her teeth the last few days, and she had several zits forming along her hairline from all the oil buildup.

She felt gross, and she felt ugly, and she didn't want to do anything or be anyone, let alone be with anyone. But at least she could be pretty sure that Dean wasn't going to make her be anybody seeing as he knew she struggled with that lately.

"You know, if you decide you wanna tell me what's wrong, maybe I can help."

Anna looked up and noticed the scrutiny she was receiving. Dean wasn't even trying to hide the way he was searching her face for clues of what was wrong. She didn't understand how he could even tell the difference between today and any other bad days she had.

Depression sucked, and it could make it really fucking hard to wash your hair or your face or brush your teeth. It could make you feel exhausted even when you'd gotten plenty of sleep, and then it could take away your ability to sleep altogether. It could take the glint out of your eye and force feed you pessimism. And it did all of those things to Anna. So it didn't make sense to her that Dean could see all those things and know that they're root cause wasn't just the usual god-awful symptoms and side effects of her depressive disorder.

"So," Dean said and clapped his hands together. Anna found the loud noise annoying, but she managed to hide her discomfort. She knew that she was only feeling irritable because of her own issues, and it wouldn't be fair to snap at her brother. "What are we thinkin'? John Wayne? Swayze? Will Ferrell? Sandra Bullock?"

Anna's mouth quirked in the tiniest smile. "Let's watch something sad."

Dean just looked at her for a second. Then he picked up his beer and drank on it for a solid ten seconds, nearly finishing the bottle. "I'm gonna get gray hair worryin' about you, kid."

"What else am I here for?"

It seemed her question had struck differently than intended. Dean looked pained as he squinted at her, still searching for answers in her face.

She half-expected him to say something about how she used to be. You're here for smiles and sunshine. You're here for ice cream breaks on tough cases. You're here for calloused, tainted hands to touch smooth, small ones and know that there is still good in this world. But Anna wasn't little anymore, and her hands had been covered in blood and bruises countless times since the last time she'd slid them into Dean's and let herself be his sweet little girl.

Maybe Dean knew that was how she felt, even though she knew he thought of her differently than she thought of herself.

"Rugrat, you think too much," Dean told her. "You're givin' yourself gray hairs, I can see it."

"Stop," Anna said with an eye roll.

"No, really, there's one right... here," he said, and plucked a single strand of pale blonde hair from her head. "Wait... no that was the wrong one. Sorry." He gave her a little smile that dared her to try and keep a straight face. Anna could have. Easily. But instead she returned the smile. "Seriously, though. Let me do the worryin' for you today. Tell me what's wrong."

Anna looked at her own hands curled into fists on the table, pale and shaking. She hadn't eaten all day, except for half a pop-tart, and she'd been chugging caffeine like her life depended on it. She let her eyes flick to Dean's hands for a second before coming back to her own. By comparison, hers looked so cold, so weak, so... little.

"Ian and I broke up."

There was a break in time, like the universe knew neither of them had a clue what to do next and was inclined to let them stop existing even for just a few seconds.

Dean was the first to unfreeze. "I'm sorry," he said, and for once there was no attempt to make light or even to make better. And Anna realized that somehow, he'd done exactly what she needed. She nodded in acknowledgement, but her chin had already started to dimple, and her eyes were stinging with more than just fatigue now. "Come here," Dean said, walking around the table to her.

She stood up fast and buried her face in his shoulder. He was so big and strong and warm, and she was so cold and weak and small. She didn't have any words, and neither did Dean, but they didn't need any. He was holding her, and for the first time in a while, Anna was letting him.

She remembered Ian's face back at the café, and she realized painfully that he'd looked small too. She'd been confused, and she hadn't known what she was doing or what was going on, but he hadn't had a clue either. And she couldn't blame him, even though it hurt.

It all made her feel like a kid and an adult and a baby, and she didn't know what to do with any of it, so she just gave it to Dean without saying a word. He could take it. He could take her weight, and he could soak up her tears.

So Anna cried.

La Fin