Work Text:
"Dean? Would you like to tell us about your piece?"
Professor Barnes is looking at him expectantly, her soft brown eyes wide as they flit from Dean to the series of miniature paintings arranged in a neat row beside him at the front of the brightly-lit classroom. The colors adorning the small panels vary wildly, and there are twelve of them in all. One is a flat, lime green, another is deep red tinged with angry-looking black that encroaches in from the left side, another is a soft, sky blue, and still another is a deep, royal purple shot through with patches of lavender.
Dean knows the order of the six-by-six inch panels by heart, can see when he closes his eyes the abrupt shifts in their colors, the hazard-sign slashes of orange through kelly green and the yellow speckled with brown like the plump, dappled backside of a pony. Someone could rearrange them while his back was turned and Dean would be able to put them in the right sequence.
Each square represents an hour of my life, and this is an average day in it.
Dean needs to open his mouth and say it, but the words won't seem to come.
His classmates are looking at him curiously, now. Dean isn't usually the kind of person who stands slack-jawed in front of his work, sweating profusely under a black band tee. But right now, Dean has no idea what kind of person he is.
"I..." he opens his mouth, closes it, swallows around what feels like sand at the base of his throat. Now, the colors seem to change so suddenly when he turns to glance at them again. There’s no rhyme or reason to their order, and half aren't smoothly transitioned; they're sharply delineated or motley where they crash into one another.
"Do you need to sit down?" Professor Barnes asks him, her face slowly becoming concerned. Dean hates it, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t let someone look at him like that again, like—
"No, no," he murmurs, bringing a hand up to wipe away some of the sweat accumulating on his brow. He feels like he’s outside in the thick of the early spring heat, but he’s directly under an air-conditioning vent. The draft feels stale on his skin, even so.
When Dean began this project a few months ago, he thought it was a great idea. He was proud of it, even. He sat down and made a legend for all of the colors he used, carefully deciding which would represent anger, happiness, depression, anxiety, dissociation. He mapped his chosen 12 hours out carefully, keeping a journal and documenting all that he felt for a given hour and deliberating on which emotion he'd felt the most strongly for that amount of time. He mixed his paints and primed the panel pieces and told himself that he was going to bring his thoughts to life, that he was going to love himself for who he was, that he was going to make his struggle into something beautiful.
But standing here, now, all he feels is crazy.
The colors are so bright they make him sick, and the sheer variety of them makes it crystal-clear just how fucked in the head he's always known he is.
What is he supposed to say, now that he has no desire to ever see the stupid panels again?
He has a little blurb semi-memorized, and he's not the first person to present his work to the rest of the art class today. He should just say it, get it over with so he can go throw up in the nearest trashcan the way he suddenly wants to as he catches Ash's face in the group of students watching him. There are so many of them. Did more people enter the room after Jo finished and he came to the front to set up his panels?
Just say it. 'I have an emotional disorder that causes me to have pervasive mood swings throughout the day, and this is a visual representation of twelve hours of my life.'
It shouldn't be this difficult.
"I..." Dean starts again, closing his eyes briefly and swallowing a second time, finding his throat no less dry than it was a few seconds before.
He thinks of the seafoam-green pills in the orange bottle above his bathroom sink, the prescription months old since he decided he hated feeling like he was always asleep and quit taking them cold-turkey. Staring at the panels beside him on their paint-stained easels, Dean thinks maybe he should have taken the perpetual numbness over whatever the hell these paintings are supposed to show.
In that moment, Dean makes a decision.
He smiles broadly, and says with confidence he doesn’t feel, "Whew, sorry guys. I had some bad soup du jour for lunch. Thought I was gonna have to duck out for a second there." He laughs, and watches as his friends laugh, too, relief spreading clear and clean on their faces.
Dean's not the kind of person who stands slack-jawed in front of his work, and he's not the kind of person who takes three kinds of pills a day or has to obsessively question his emotional responses to everything, who flies into senseless fits of rage that make him feel like he wants to rip his own skin off or who destroys his things over stupid, petty problems. Dean Winchester is funny, and smiles often, and makes everyone laugh, and is not crazy.
"Anyway, this project is focused on color theory and blending techniques. The chaotic nature of the colors is meant to emphasize the contrast between..."