alwaysenduphere (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alwaysenduphere) wrote2011-10-04 02:29 am
alwaysenduphere) wrote2011-10-04 02:29 am
Entry tags:
fic: the world itself is the bad dream
title: the world itself is the bad dream
rating: r
characters: dean, sam, halLucifer
summary: Your hand heals. Your mind doesn't.
warning: vague implications of self-harm
notes: ~2100 words. coda for 7.02. this is not any of the fic I should be working on right now, and yet... and yet I think there will be a follow-up to this as well, at some point. Also "Leviathan" to me are a mostly singular consciousness, a bit like the Borg in my mind, which is why I don't use plural form. /grammatical explanation. Title/cut text from The Bell Jar by Slyvia Plath, but of course.
Your hand heals, the stitches Dean meticulously took care of for you fading into a barely-there scar. Your mind doesn't, despite all your attempts to remember what your hand felt like, the sharp pain of the glass cutting into you, of Dean's fingers digging into you trying to remind you what's real.
Dean shouts from the other room. "Sam, come on. We've got to get out of here before they find us again." Motel room to motel room, chased down like dogs.
You're tired of it.
"'Like dogs' is the imperative word in that thought," Lucifer says, perched on the corner of the bathtub. "Don't you get tired of your brother treating you like a widdle puppy? 'Come, Sam,' 'Speak, Sam,' 'Go lay down, Sam.' I could see why you'd be tired of it. Could see why you'd want to end it." He's wearing the same thing he always is when you see him, wrinkled over-shirt on top of an ugly brown tee, but they look dirtier somehow, like the wear and tear of being a figment of your imagination is weighing on him.
"Shut up," you growl in his direction, digging your fingernails into your mostly healed palm. It's not enough anymore. He waivers but doesn't disappear.
"Still here, Sammy."
"Sam?" Dean stands in the doorway concern in his eyes. You're tired of that look.
"I'm fine," you say, sparing one last look at the rim of the tub. You're tired of saying it.
~
Dean opens the door to the parking lot and you follow, head down, looking anywhere but to Lucifer, walking beside you. You always follow Dean, even now as he lopes along crookedly, leg still in a walking cast, still healing from the break. He stops short three steps off the sidewalk and you bump into his back, bouncing backward at the connection. He stumbles at the collision and you see him wince when his weight hits that leg the wrong way. "Dean?"
"Look," he says. Four figures emerge from the shadows as you follow Dean's gaze, and you know instantly why Dean has frozen in place.
You had to park the Impala across the parking lot when you got back from the diner last night, huge cherry-picker taking up all the spaces in front of your room. Dean had sworn at you and mumbled how you were gone too long and it was your fault, but you knew he was tired and in pain only because he'd waited until you returned to take his medicine. You'd crawled into bed and ignored him.
"There they are," the first Leviathan says, long lean body leaning against the hood. He smiles a wide human smile.
"Hiiiii," the second one says, a little girl, legs dangling off the side of the hood, kicking back and forth. Sam knows Dean will be pissed if she does any damage.
"It's okay, we're in no hurry. Take your time getting here," the third teases in a little boy's voice. He doesn't mess with appearing human, displays his hideous mouth after he speaks. You add it to the mental list you're keeping of things you see in your nightmares.
The fourth doesn't speak. She just leans against the car with the rest, regarding them predatorily. None of them move toward you. Dean turns and heads back into the room, his stilted pace even more exaggerated than normal. You stand gaping for a moment before following him, the door slamming behind you once you get inside.
"What the fuck are we supposed to do?"
"We could make a run for it, leave the Impala," you say. Lucifer echoes you, or maybe you echo him. You're not even sure most of the time anymore.
"I'd rather die," Dean says. He looks around the room, at his feet, at the clothes you've both been wearing for at least three days, still the cleanest you have. Then he looks at you.
"Funny, I'm not sure he's actually just talking about the car anymore," Lucifer comments, spread out on the bed nearest the bathroom. You don't spare him a second glance, but by the haggard look in Dean's eyes, you agree with him.
"Dean-" you start to say, but Lucifer breaks in again.
"Though on second thought, that idea might lead somewhere," he says, and you almost turn to glare at him before catching yourself.
You can’t help the "what?" that slips out, though.
Dean thinks you're talking to him. Or at least you hope he does, having tried frequently to convince him that you haven't seen Lucifer lately, that it's really just the nightmares and the occasional rattle of chains in your peripherals. You're just as tired of lying to him as he is of think you're lying to him, of that you're certain. And yet, Lucifer sometimes proves to be useful.
"So let's die," you breathe out, the words all running together.
Dean looks at you like you've sprung three heads or well, like you've flashed your gaping Leviathan mouth and are now coming to eat him. "What?" he says, tone equally as floored as yours was on the same word only moments ago. Your concept of time moves so strangely when Lucifer is around.
"Let's die."
Dean stare at you for a minute, and Lucifer says, "I don't think he's going for it."
"I'll explain in a minute. Get out your gun."
"Sam, I really don't like where you're going with this."
"Just humor me. Can you just trust me, for one second? Grab your gun," you say, reaching into your own duffel for the sharpest knife you can find that doesn't have a jagged edge or dried blood still crusted around the handle. Last thing you want is to be contaminated with any more non-human blood.
You just hope Leviathan are gullible.
~
"You can't just give up!" you yell, hoping you're loud enough for the Leviathan outside to hear you. Hoping you're not so loud that the motel manager hears you from his room at the other end of the building, only other person here as far as you know.
Dean regards you coolly, his face a solid mask of no emotion. He grips your knife with his right hand, knuckles white.
"I didn't come back from hell for you to just give up, you son of a bitch," you say, then turn and wrench the door open. The four Leviathan are still perched on and around the Impala, their grotesque mouths opening wide in full display the moment they spot you, scare tactics that unfortunately still work on your psyche as your heart beats faster and your breathing speeds up.
"It's over," Dean yells, his voice hoarse. You spin around in the doorway, wary of having your back exposed to the Leviathan. "You can't live without me," he says, and lunges.
There's a sharp pain in your side and you tumble to the ground, the Leviathan's reaction in the corner of your eye. "I can't live without you," you hear him say, and then darkness overtakes you.
~
Blood, rivers of it swallowing you up until you drown in the warm syrupy liquid. Chains, wrapped around your arms, your legs, your torso, so you can't move, can't breathe, can't struggle. The sounds of Hell, of the cage, the roar of fire, the chink-chink of chains, Lucifer laughing, a disembodied voice in the darkness.
"Sam! Sam, wake up," a voice calls out in the darkness.
"Sammy, wake up," Lucifer sings into your ear.
You open your eyes and Dean's face is so close you can feel his breath. "Did it work?"
"I can't believe those fuckers fell for that," Dean says. You're still lying in the doorway, but when you spare glance at the car, you don't see them either.
"Well let's get out of here before they realize different," you say, twisting to get up and then gasping in pain the moment you try to stand. "Fuck."
"It was your plan, dude. Come on," Dean says, helping you up as best he can, unsteady on his own feet as you are on yours. There's red all down his shirt, his last good shirt, and you can see where he cut himself right below his collarbone, where the blood leaked out from.
"You smell like ketchup," you say, wrinkling your nose. It's like all your senses are amplified with the pain in your side, opposite of what they should be. You can see clearer, see the rivulets of sweat running down into his wound, hear how heavily he's breathing from the exertion of supporting you, feel how tightly each finger grips your arms as he lays you down on the unmade bed closest to the door, smell the scent of tomato ketchup from where he smeared the leftover packets from tonight's dinner on his shirt to make his cut look bigger than it is.
"Come on, Sam," he says. "Stay with me, I gotta get you patched up and we gotta get out of here before they come back."
"You stabbed me," you groggily manage.
"Your plan," he shrugs, cutting your shirt away. It had been blue before Dean stabbed you but now it was an unnatural shade of brown around the bottom, your blood soaked up into the fibers and dried around the edges. It stings when he peels it off the dried parts.
Your original plan was pretty much seriously injure each other and hope for the best, but Dean had spotted the discarded McDonalds bag in the trash can by the door. The idea was to mask the smell enough with your actual serious injury and his minor one, hold still, and hope for the best. You can't believe it worked. "What happened?" you ask.
"I wish all Leviathan were as thick as that stupid soccer family," Dean starts. "After you hit the ground I fired off a shot then hurriedly did the whole 'slice a little, bleed a lot thing' we discussed with the help of the ketchup packets and then played dead best I could. It took them for-fucking-ever to come check and I thought maybe you were bleeding out in the damn doorway. The creepy girl was the first one to come in, and I held my breath as she stepped over you and walked up to me. Bitch kicked me in the side, lot harder than any child could kick. I'll probably have a matching bruise for your knife wound here, Sammy." He laughs, but you know it's only to break the tension in his chest. There's nothing funny about tonight.
"Anyway, she hollered back how she thought we were ‘super-dramatically dead' and I did my damndest not to breathe and hoped no one would notice you still were as they all came in. One said it smelled like ketchup and I thought I was done but the leftover burger on the table threw 'em off that pretty quick, so good thinking there." The ketchup really had been a good idea but you knew there needed to be some explanation for the smell. Dean continues, "And then they argued over who should check to see if we were still dead. No one wanted to touch us, miracle of miracle, so they left. I think one of them even took the burger with them."
Dean cleans you up as he talks; ratty motel towel soaking up your blood, his hands soft and gentle against your warm damp skin as he stitches closed the knife wound you told him to create. He pulls a little hard as he's tying off the last stitch and you wince. He freezes, but through your pain you narrow in on his hands, shaking now that the task is complete, adrenaline worn off and fear taking over. Fear that he's hurt you, again. "I'm okay," you say.
"This was stupid," he replies.
"It was," you agree, “but it worked."
"Yeah, well, I don't know how we lucked out on the bozo patrol but it definitely won't work again. Let's get cleaned up and get out of here." He wipes his hands off onto the corner of the towel, wipes your blood from his fingertips and helps you sit up as you twist yourself around in the least possible way possible. "That'll probably suck for at least a couple weeks," he says, and that's when you realize - you haven't heard so much as peep from Lucifer since waking up in pain.
Pain is the key, a voice deep inside you whispers, but it's not Lucifer's, not anything you recognize. You know it to be true, though, and for a moment you sink into the pain as Dean pulls you up and helps you out to the now-Leviathan-free Impala, letting it wash over you and savoring in the Lucifer-free existence you'll have for at least fourteen days.
Pain is the key.
rating: r
characters: dean, sam, halLucifer
summary: Your hand heals. Your mind doesn't.
warning: vague implications of self-harm
notes: ~2100 words. coda for 7.02. this is not any of the fic I should be working on right now, and yet... and yet I think there will be a follow-up to this as well, at some point. Also "Leviathan" to me are a mostly singular consciousness, a bit like the Borg in my mind, which is why I don't use plural form. /grammatical explanation. Title/cut text from The Bell Jar by Slyvia Plath, but of course.
Your hand heals, the stitches Dean meticulously took care of for you fading into a barely-there scar. Your mind doesn't, despite all your attempts to remember what your hand felt like, the sharp pain of the glass cutting into you, of Dean's fingers digging into you trying to remind you what's real.
Dean shouts from the other room. "Sam, come on. We've got to get out of here before they find us again." Motel room to motel room, chased down like dogs.
You're tired of it.
"'Like dogs' is the imperative word in that thought," Lucifer says, perched on the corner of the bathtub. "Don't you get tired of your brother treating you like a widdle puppy? 'Come, Sam,' 'Speak, Sam,' 'Go lay down, Sam.' I could see why you'd be tired of it. Could see why you'd want to end it." He's wearing the same thing he always is when you see him, wrinkled over-shirt on top of an ugly brown tee, but they look dirtier somehow, like the wear and tear of being a figment of your imagination is weighing on him.
"Shut up," you growl in his direction, digging your fingernails into your mostly healed palm. It's not enough anymore. He waivers but doesn't disappear.
"Still here, Sammy."
"Sam?" Dean stands in the doorway concern in his eyes. You're tired of that look.
"I'm fine," you say, sparing one last look at the rim of the tub. You're tired of saying it.
~
Dean opens the door to the parking lot and you follow, head down, looking anywhere but to Lucifer, walking beside you. You always follow Dean, even now as he lopes along crookedly, leg still in a walking cast, still healing from the break. He stops short three steps off the sidewalk and you bump into his back, bouncing backward at the connection. He stumbles at the collision and you see him wince when his weight hits that leg the wrong way. "Dean?"
"Look," he says. Four figures emerge from the shadows as you follow Dean's gaze, and you know instantly why Dean has frozen in place.
You had to park the Impala across the parking lot when you got back from the diner last night, huge cherry-picker taking up all the spaces in front of your room. Dean had sworn at you and mumbled how you were gone too long and it was your fault, but you knew he was tired and in pain only because he'd waited until you returned to take his medicine. You'd crawled into bed and ignored him.
"There they are," the first Leviathan says, long lean body leaning against the hood. He smiles a wide human smile.
"Hiiiii," the second one says, a little girl, legs dangling off the side of the hood, kicking back and forth. Sam knows Dean will be pissed if she does any damage.
"It's okay, we're in no hurry. Take your time getting here," the third teases in a little boy's voice. He doesn't mess with appearing human, displays his hideous mouth after he speaks. You add it to the mental list you're keeping of things you see in your nightmares.
The fourth doesn't speak. She just leans against the car with the rest, regarding them predatorily. None of them move toward you. Dean turns and heads back into the room, his stilted pace even more exaggerated than normal. You stand gaping for a moment before following him, the door slamming behind you once you get inside.
"What the fuck are we supposed to do?"
"We could make a run for it, leave the Impala," you say. Lucifer echoes you, or maybe you echo him. You're not even sure most of the time anymore.
"I'd rather die," Dean says. He looks around the room, at his feet, at the clothes you've both been wearing for at least three days, still the cleanest you have. Then he looks at you.
"Funny, I'm not sure he's actually just talking about the car anymore," Lucifer comments, spread out on the bed nearest the bathroom. You don't spare him a second glance, but by the haggard look in Dean's eyes, you agree with him.
"Dean-" you start to say, but Lucifer breaks in again.
"Though on second thought, that idea might lead somewhere," he says, and you almost turn to glare at him before catching yourself.
You can’t help the "what?" that slips out, though.
Dean thinks you're talking to him. Or at least you hope he does, having tried frequently to convince him that you haven't seen Lucifer lately, that it's really just the nightmares and the occasional rattle of chains in your peripherals. You're just as tired of lying to him as he is of think you're lying to him, of that you're certain. And yet, Lucifer sometimes proves to be useful.
"So let's die," you breathe out, the words all running together.
Dean looks at you like you've sprung three heads or well, like you've flashed your gaping Leviathan mouth and are now coming to eat him. "What?" he says, tone equally as floored as yours was on the same word only moments ago. Your concept of time moves so strangely when Lucifer is around.
"Let's die."
Dean stare at you for a minute, and Lucifer says, "I don't think he's going for it."
"I'll explain in a minute. Get out your gun."
"Sam, I really don't like where you're going with this."
"Just humor me. Can you just trust me, for one second? Grab your gun," you say, reaching into your own duffel for the sharpest knife you can find that doesn't have a jagged edge or dried blood still crusted around the handle. Last thing you want is to be contaminated with any more non-human blood.
You just hope Leviathan are gullible.
~
"You can't just give up!" you yell, hoping you're loud enough for the Leviathan outside to hear you. Hoping you're not so loud that the motel manager hears you from his room at the other end of the building, only other person here as far as you know.
Dean regards you coolly, his face a solid mask of no emotion. He grips your knife with his right hand, knuckles white.
"I didn't come back from hell for you to just give up, you son of a bitch," you say, then turn and wrench the door open. The four Leviathan are still perched on and around the Impala, their grotesque mouths opening wide in full display the moment they spot you, scare tactics that unfortunately still work on your psyche as your heart beats faster and your breathing speeds up.
"It's over," Dean yells, his voice hoarse. You spin around in the doorway, wary of having your back exposed to the Leviathan. "You can't live without me," he says, and lunges.
There's a sharp pain in your side and you tumble to the ground, the Leviathan's reaction in the corner of your eye. "I can't live without you," you hear him say, and then darkness overtakes you.
~
Blood, rivers of it swallowing you up until you drown in the warm syrupy liquid. Chains, wrapped around your arms, your legs, your torso, so you can't move, can't breathe, can't struggle. The sounds of Hell, of the cage, the roar of fire, the chink-chink of chains, Lucifer laughing, a disembodied voice in the darkness.
"Sam! Sam, wake up," a voice calls out in the darkness.
"Sammy, wake up," Lucifer sings into your ear.
You open your eyes and Dean's face is so close you can feel his breath. "Did it work?"
"I can't believe those fuckers fell for that," Dean says. You're still lying in the doorway, but when you spare glance at the car, you don't see them either.
"Well let's get out of here before they realize different," you say, twisting to get up and then gasping in pain the moment you try to stand. "Fuck."
"It was your plan, dude. Come on," Dean says, helping you up as best he can, unsteady on his own feet as you are on yours. There's red all down his shirt, his last good shirt, and you can see where he cut himself right below his collarbone, where the blood leaked out from.
"You smell like ketchup," you say, wrinkling your nose. It's like all your senses are amplified with the pain in your side, opposite of what they should be. You can see clearer, see the rivulets of sweat running down into his wound, hear how heavily he's breathing from the exertion of supporting you, feel how tightly each finger grips your arms as he lays you down on the unmade bed closest to the door, smell the scent of tomato ketchup from where he smeared the leftover packets from tonight's dinner on his shirt to make his cut look bigger than it is.
"Come on, Sam," he says. "Stay with me, I gotta get you patched up and we gotta get out of here before they come back."
"You stabbed me," you groggily manage.
"Your plan," he shrugs, cutting your shirt away. It had been blue before Dean stabbed you but now it was an unnatural shade of brown around the bottom, your blood soaked up into the fibers and dried around the edges. It stings when he peels it off the dried parts.
Your original plan was pretty much seriously injure each other and hope for the best, but Dean had spotted the discarded McDonalds bag in the trash can by the door. The idea was to mask the smell enough with your actual serious injury and his minor one, hold still, and hope for the best. You can't believe it worked. "What happened?" you ask.
"I wish all Leviathan were as thick as that stupid soccer family," Dean starts. "After you hit the ground I fired off a shot then hurriedly did the whole 'slice a little, bleed a lot thing' we discussed with the help of the ketchup packets and then played dead best I could. It took them for-fucking-ever to come check and I thought maybe you were bleeding out in the damn doorway. The creepy girl was the first one to come in, and I held my breath as she stepped over you and walked up to me. Bitch kicked me in the side, lot harder than any child could kick. I'll probably have a matching bruise for your knife wound here, Sammy." He laughs, but you know it's only to break the tension in his chest. There's nothing funny about tonight.
"Anyway, she hollered back how she thought we were ‘super-dramatically dead' and I did my damndest not to breathe and hoped no one would notice you still were as they all came in. One said it smelled like ketchup and I thought I was done but the leftover burger on the table threw 'em off that pretty quick, so good thinking there." The ketchup really had been a good idea but you knew there needed to be some explanation for the smell. Dean continues, "And then they argued over who should check to see if we were still dead. No one wanted to touch us, miracle of miracle, so they left. I think one of them even took the burger with them."
Dean cleans you up as he talks; ratty motel towel soaking up your blood, his hands soft and gentle against your warm damp skin as he stitches closed the knife wound you told him to create. He pulls a little hard as he's tying off the last stitch and you wince. He freezes, but through your pain you narrow in on his hands, shaking now that the task is complete, adrenaline worn off and fear taking over. Fear that he's hurt you, again. "I'm okay," you say.
"This was stupid," he replies.
"It was," you agree, “but it worked."
"Yeah, well, I don't know how we lucked out on the bozo patrol but it definitely won't work again. Let's get cleaned up and get out of here." He wipes his hands off onto the corner of the towel, wipes your blood from his fingertips and helps you sit up as you twist yourself around in the least possible way possible. "That'll probably suck for at least a couple weeks," he says, and that's when you realize - you haven't heard so much as peep from Lucifer since waking up in pain.
Pain is the key, a voice deep inside you whispers, but it's not Lucifer's, not anything you recognize. You know it to be true, though, and for a moment you sink into the pain as Dean pulls you up and helps you out to the now-Leviathan-free Impala, letting it wash over you and savoring in the Lucifer-free existence you'll have for at least fourteen days.
Pain is the key.