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Fic: Perish Twice (Supernatural)
Title: Perish Twice
Characters/pairing: Dean, Sam (gen).
Rating: R
Warnings/contains:Major character death , body horror, general S9 angst and doom.
Word count: ~5000
Summary: Sam and Dean check out what they think is an angel fallen to earth on a snowy mountainside. They find something else entirely.
Notes:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
spn_cinema fic, written for the movie prompt, The Thing. I started writing this a few months ago, so it takes place in a sort of early-Season-9 idea of what late Season 9 might look like. Also, it's a rather embittered Dean POV, so he's not all that nice about Sam. Sorry, Sam.
Shot in the head by morning.
That’s your baseline, now. Your foundation-stone; the one solid thing you have left beneath your feet. You’ve gotta have something to hold on to, and now—in the dark and the snow, with the rotting cabin standing empty behind you and the remains of two bodies smoking in front—this is it. Now; always. Next time the sun comes up, it’ll greet your brains spattered all over that glittering virgin snow.
This is comfort. This is it.
It’s so cold you can’t feel your face. In one gloved hand, you clutch the whiskey bottle you snagged out of the cabin earlier, to one of those looks Sammy’s been giving you lately. The kind that are either pissed-off or worried, and you can never really figure out which. Not that he has any reason to worry about your drinking anymore, but habit’s a hard thing to break.
You hold the bottle out to him—third time you’ve tried—and he eyes it like it might be poisoned. Then he gives this tiny little shrug and takes it. You watch every movement, his tiny twitch of a grimace after he swallows.
You wonder what it means, that he takes it. If it’s an olive-branch thing, or a we’re-gonna-die-anyway-so-screw-it thing, or just a warmth thing.
If it’s a thing Sam would do.
“I still think we should wait for Cas,” Sam said.
Dean scowled at him. “His cell’s dead, Sammy, and I’m pretty sure there ain’t anybody out there answering our prayers right now. We hang around, whoever this fucker is fell outta the sky, they’ll be gone before we get there.”
Sam stood his ground, arms folded. “We don’t even know for sure it is one of them,” he pointed out. Flatly sensible, like always these days.
“A freak meteor and two guys turned into human barbecue? If that ain’t an angel, what the hell is it? This is our one chance to find out what’s going on up there, Sammy.” Dean grabbed his duffel and keys, turned for the door. “You coming or what?”
Sam sighed, but unfolded himself from his chair. “Fine. Gimme ten minutes.”
Dean waited, fingers drumming the tabletop impatiently. The hunt for Abaddon was still going nowhere, but this—yeah, this was their first chance in who-knew-how-long to find some other answers. Maybe a good fight, too. He could feel the pull of it. In his veins, in the hot pulse of the Mark on his arm. Not the fight he wanted, maybe, but it was gonna have to do.
He scowled at the clock.
Twenty minutes had passed by the time Sam emerged with his duffel over his shoulder and an armful of blankets. (What? You think because you have snow chains that means we won’t get stranded? You’re getting reckless, Dean.) He flat-out refused to get in the car until Dean had gone back and grabbed real winter clothes, insisted on stopping off in town to pick up food and bottled water.
Dean thought—well, maybe he oughta be happier about that. Maybe he would’ve been, a couple weeks ago. Sammy nagging at him like that, it was—well, it was more than just business, right?
But when he tried to hang onto the thought, it felt hollow and insubstantial. Something else in him, more urgent, blotted it out. The slow build of rage at every extra second that kept them from hitting the road; the relief that washed through him when they finally got under way and Sam fell silent in the passenger seat.
Sam stayed silent. Stayed that way for hours.
Snow hit as they crossed out of Wyoming. To Dean’s right, Sam shifted in his seat, blinked sleep from his eyes and frowned out the window. “We should look for somewhere to stop.”
Dean ignored him, turned up the radio, and kept driving. Eyes on the blacktop, headlights carving a tunnel through the snow.
“You sure you don’t wanna try praying?” your brother asks you, an indefinite time later.
You shake your head. “Can’t risk it, Sammy. Even if Cas could just zap here—one of those things manages to replicate an angel? Whole damn world’s fucked.”
He nods, falls silent. Appeal to the big picture; that’s the way to get through to Sam, alright. He won’t risk it, won’t throw the whole thing away for family or loyalty or love the way you would. That’s why you won’t make it through the night either way. That’s why he might, if he’s—
If.
You know he wasn’t thinking rescue, though. Grace, the kind of power Cas has—it’s a purifier, a whole scorched-earth thing. Might be one surefire way to get rid of this—whatever this is, however far it’s gotten. If only Cas could still fly, if he could get here in time, if it didn’t manage to get to him first.
Too many variables. But if you’re honest with yourself—and hell, you may as well start now, nothing left to lose—that isn’t the reason you won’t pray. It’s more selfish than that. It’s the same reason you haven’t said a prayer in weeks.
You’ve known your expiration date’s coming up for a while. And you want someone to remember you different than this. To remember you human.
Both of you, now.
“So, I guess this is where we get out and walk.”
Dean nodded, pulled over and killed the Impala’s engine. Snow in heavy drifts blocked the road ahead, weighted down the branches of the trees. The trail up the mountain should’ve been impassable.
Only, there was an ancient red pickup pulled over at the foot of the trail, just a light dusting of snow on its roof. Couldn’t have been here more than a couple hours. And they hadn’t passed anybody on the drive up. Snow still banked up at the sides of the trail, shovelled away a few days ago for the bodies to be brought down. More had fallen since, but the surface looked disturbed, down where the trail started. Footprints.
They exchanged wary glances, and Dean reached for his handgun before climbing out of the Impala.
He motioned to Sam, rounded the old truck to scrub snow off the window and peer in. There was a dog leash folded up in the back, and the front seat was littered with papers: newspaper clippings; a notebook lying open. Dean couldn’t make out a whole lot of the writing through the glass, but it was enough: scrawled lines of notes, interspersed with doodles that only another hunter—or a monster, or an angel—would’ve recognised as sigils. They’d find weapons under the tarp in the back, no question. What were the chances the poor bastard who owned the truck had gone off armed with silver bullets and holy water and not a clue what the fuck he was up against, was lying halfway up the mountain with his eyes burned out of his head right now?
Or, poor bastards, plural, because there were two empty coffee cups wedged into the gap between the seats, and two different sets of handwriting had scrawled in the notebook. Not that sticking together would’ve done them any good on this one. Likely just meant two bodies to find instead of one.
Dean cursed, bit it back when he realised how too-loud his voice sounded in this thick silence.
“Sam,” he hissed.
Sam’s head popped up over the top of the truck. He opened his mouth—then turned his head, frowning. Held a hand up, keep it quiet, whatever he’d been about to say forgotten.
Dean heard it too, then. Something rushing down the trail towards them, a muffled crash through the trees getting louder. A dog barking. And then a shot, piercing the silence, shivering snow from the trees. Gouts of it sloughed off at the foot of the trail, and for a moment Dean thought they were gonna get fucking buried in it. He held his breath, held himself like he was already frozen to the spot, until everything went still.
Still, just for a moment—and then another shot, another shower of snow. And movement, coming down again, still making straight for them.
Something scrambled down the trail so fast it looked like it was falling, resolving itself into a big, furry shape as it approached. An enormous husky dog, and it was barrelling straight towards Sam.
Before he could react, it leapt up at him with force that would have knocked anybody not the size of a small house over on his ass—and slobbered enthusiastically all over his face.
Dean let out a sigh of relief. Took a breath, then, and caught a faint whiff of something in the air. Not sulphur, and not ozone either. Something rank and saline, out of place in the snowy mountain landscape.
He didn’t have any time to wonder what it was, though, because then something else crashed out of the trees. A grizzled, middle-aged guy with a greying beard. The guy was holding a gun, and he had it levelled straight at Sam.
“Get away from it!” the guy yelled, moving closer.
Sam raised his hands—placating, we don’t want any trouble. “Okay, okay, it’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
The guy’s aim didn’t waver. His eyes were wild, though, an incipient tremble in his stance, in the set of his shoulders. He kept staring straight at Sam, paying no attention to what else was going on around him. He didn’t seem to have noticed Dean.
Dean kept low, behind the cabin of the truck. Thumbed the safety off his gun.
“You’re one of them!” the guy was saying, now.
“Let’s just calm down,” Sam said, hands still up. The dog had sunk back to the floor now, cowering behind his legs, whining. “I’m—trust me, I’m not an angel.”
At that, the guy stared for a moment. Then his face split into a mirthless crack of a smile, and he laughed hollowly. “Angel? I wish, man, I wish.” He narrowed his eyes again, steadying his gun hand. “I’m sorry—”
Another shot, and the guy crumpled to the ground.
Sam looked at Dean over the body on the floor, expression opaque, troubled. He cleared the frown off his face with what looked like real effort, nodded.
“So,” he said, finally. “‘You’re one of them’? Shifter, you think?”
No thank you. Figured.
“Sounds like.” Dean jerked his head toward the truck. “Now we just need to find out what happened to his buddy.”
“Give me your arm,” Sam says to you.
You look at him sideways; hesitate. Out of habit, mostly. You’ve gotten enough lectures for one rapidly-diminishing lifetime, and it’s not like it matters now, anyway. But Sammy keeps on looking at you, eyes big and hopeful, and goddamnit, you’ll do what he asks.
Whatever little scrap of trust you can afford now, you’ll give. You’ll hope that you’re giving it to him.
You roll up your sleeve and it startles you, how sharp-cold the air is on the bare skin. You stopped noticing it on your face a while back, a numb solidity creeping through you, taking hold. It feels like your eyeballs have frozen solid in your head. You try to wriggle your toes in your boots and you can’t feel them.
Sam takes off his glove to run his finger over the raised red brand of the Mark. The warm touch of it is startling, alive.
(Is it?)
You blink away the snowflakes clinging to your eyelashes, squint at his face to see his frown.
“I thought maybe it would’ve gone,” he says. “If you weren’t—you know.”
He stops. You know.
It’s a thought, you guess. You don’t know exactly how these things work; how they take people over. If it’s the DNA, like with shifters, then maybe the scars, the marks—the little things that make up the evidence of a life—wouldn’t be there anymore, if you weren’t yourselves. But you have no way of knowing for sure.
Anyway, you feel like the Mark is more than that, sometimes. It ain’t cosmetic surgery, that’s for sure; it’s a new element in you. A thread of darkness woven into your genetic code, burning at the centre of you.
Like it matters. Whatever you are, however it’s changed, it isn’t getting out of here alive.
You take your arm back, pull down your sleeve to cover it. Take another drink.
Slow going up the hill. Quiet, too. Just the creak of the snow under their feet, the rasp of cold air in their lungs, and the panting of the goddamn dog, which seemed to have adopted Sam as its new human. It kept running off ahead of them, then lolloping back down to wag its tail at him and push its head into his gloved hand. Looked like it thought the whole thing was some awesome Boys’ Own adventure. Which was really starting to grate on Dean’s nerves, because this sure as hell felt like the part in the horror movie where the dog starts barking at something in the trees and runs off with its tail beneath its legs.
The silence put him on edge. A flurry of soft whumps as a branch bent and shed its load of snow had him whirling on the spot, gun cocked, taking a sharp lungful of icy air.
Nothing there. And when he turned back, he couldn’t see Sam or the stupid mutt.
A quick scramble further up the trail, over the next rise. Still nothing.
“Sam! Sammy!”
His words fell dead into the quiet, got swallowed up by it. Dean cursed under his breath, fumbled in his jacket for his cell. A reflex. No reception out here. But before he could start worrying about what the hell he was gonna do next, he rounded a corner and something loomed at him out of the trees.
A cabin. Run-down, windows boarded up, door swinging open and snow beginning to pile up on the threshold. The door looked like it had been forced, and beside it, a tail of crime scene investigation tape flapped forlornly in the wind.
Dean made his way around the cabin, gun at the ready, back to the wall. There was a snow-blurred figure standing out back, and he moved closer, squinting through the whiteness.
The figure resolved itself into recognisability. Sam. Sam, with the dog by his feet, standing over the remains of something charred and twisted on the ground.
“Let me guess,” Dean said into the silence. “You’ve found our guy’s buddy.”
Sam glanced up as he approached, looking mystified. “This is—Jesus, Dean, this is weird,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a regular shifter.”
Dean edged closer. The smell of it hit him before anything else. Burning bodies were nothing new, but this was a whole fucking symphony of gross. Alongside acrid smoke there was the slaughterhouse stink of the Pit—blood and shit and sweet rot, the meaty dark-red smell of the body’s insides. Something else underneath it all, too—organic, but not animal. Like that weird whiff of whatever-the-hell-it-was Dean had caught earlier. Dank and seaweedy, mudflats at low tide.
He covered his mouth with his sleeve, stepped in to take a look. Turned back to Sam.
“Weird,” he said. “That’s an A for understatement, Sammy.”
Because this thing was… yeah. Not a regular shifter didn’t even begin to cover it.
It looked like it had been a person once. It had arms and legs, anyway, and something that still had the features of a human face on it—but warped, fluid-slicked and stretched like plasticine. The guy had been opened up in the middle, but this wasn’t like any eviscerated corpse they’d ever seen before. Nothing was missing. Instead there was… stuff that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, stuff that wasn’t human, couldn’t ever have been human, no matter how twisted and damaged. Things like—like flowers of meat that had opened up and burst right out of the guy’s ribcage. Like threads of fleshy fiber, more plant than animal, curling vinelike out of the human wreckage. Something angled and chitinous like an insect leg. The whole thing was some Giger fantasy brought to life in blood and burned tissue. Dean hadn’t seen anything like it, not even in Hell, because at least there everything you had to work with had been human sometime.
He breathed out hard, a puff of white against the shadows of the trees. Pushed down the memory. Easier than it used to be.
“I don’t.” He broke off, shook his head. “I don’t know what the fuck this is.”
“Me either.” Sam paused, then jerked his head in the direction of the cabin. “Looks like somebody’s been in there recently, though. C’mon, let’s check it out.”
Dean nodded, fumbled for his flashlight. The dog pricked up its ears, trotted in ahead of them, like it knew where they were going. Sammy followed in through the cabin door, and that was when Dean heard it.
A sound out in the trees. An underfoot crunch, a cracking of undergrowth. Definitely not snow falling off the branches this time.
He turned on the spot, hissing for Sam to follow him; made for the sound.
Dumb as hell, probably, going after whatever this thing was without knowing exactly what they were dealing with here. Who knew if an angel blade or a silver bullet would be any use against these things?
Better that than let it pin them down inside that rotting old cabin like prey in a bear trap, though. Whatever ended up taking Dean down, he was gonna go out the hunter, not the hunted. Made that promise to himself a long time ago.
There. A shadow in the trees. Upright. Human—on the surface of it, anyway. A big guy wrapped in a shapeless coat. That was about all Dean could make out.
He doubled back, approached from the side. The damn silence, though. The way it made everything seem muffled outside of a few meters’ radius, but amplified through goes-to-11 speakers up close. Dean held his breath, took careful steps, circled. Lost sight of the guy—thing—whatever—behind a clump of snow-heavy foliage for a moment, and when Dean passed out the other side of it he was gone.
A noise behind him. He turned on his heel. And there was blood blooming in the center of the big guy’s torso, a wave of that nauseous smell, all salt and innards, and that was the last thing he knew.
You think about offering up apologies. Building bridges. The hours tick down towards dawn. Now or never, right?
Sam mostly isn’t looking at you. Given up on the conversation, not that it was much of one in the first place. He’s looking at the falling snow, or his feet, or the gun at his side.
This isn’t how you figured it would end. If it has to be the both of you, then—well, you at least thought it’d be side by side, fighting. A hail of gunfire and blood and rocksalt, not an awkward silence. Seems like the least the universe could do.
No way you could fix all the shit that’s broken, not really. No time for that now, and hell, maybe the whole situation—the two of you—is a write-off anyway.
You could say the right words, though. You could even understand them, far as it goes.
You keep quiet. You don’t think you really know what the right words are anymore, the ones Sammy would want to hear. You haven’t spoken the same language in years, or it feels that way.
You could offer up an apology, but you might just be offering up another lie, and you won’t do that. You’ll get one thing right in this fucking mess.
The snow keeps falling. Sam keeps staring at it.
“Dean. Dean!”
He came round by inches, disoriented, Sam shaking his shoulder. The dog sat behind him, a couple feet off, staring at them with its pale-blue psycho husky eyes.
“You okay?” Sam was saying. “I heard a noise—”
The guy. The thing. Why hadn’t it killed him? Dean sat up fast, grimacing when it made his insides lurch. “You see him, Sammy? Where’d he go?”
Sam shook his head. “I haven’t seen anyone. I did find something, though. In the cabin. I think you should take a look.”
Trust Sam, to be able to find research in the middle of a fucking job in the middle of fucking nowhere. They made it back inside the cabin—the dog catching wind of something and disappearing off into the trees—and Sam produced a sheaf of papers, scrawled over in shaky, semi-illegible handwriting.
There had been three rangers here in the mountains when the meteors hit. Two bodies found turned to crispy bacon, and the other guy naturally became the prime suspect. No trace of him, according to the police report—either he’d made a run for it and was across state lines by now, or he’d died somewhere out here on the mountains and wouldn’t be recovered before spring, if ever. But apparently he hadn’t gotten far. And he was an even bigger nerd than Sammy, because instead of running for his life like a sane person the moment shit got weird, he’d stuck around and he’d left notes.
Dean scowled at them. “Why the hell did the cops leave these?”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t know, Dean.” But he gestured around the cabin. “Maybe they didn’t.”
Dean followed his gaze. Place was pretty empty—not exactly five star. But there was a shovel leaning against the back wall, dripping melted snow onto the floor. An open can of beans whose contents hadn’t frozen solid. And a half-empty whiskey bottle sat on the table. He grabbed it, to a what the hell, Dean? look from Sam that he ignored. More habit than hope of making a difference, these days, Dean figured. He took a swig and leafed through the papers.
Yeah, no angels. None of the other usual suspects you might find out someplace like this—wendigoes, werewolves, fairies—either. But there was something crashed to earth out here. The rangers had gone out to take a look at it; had found… well.
The notes got a little garbled after that, but the gist of it was, the guy seemed to think this creature could turn itself into any kind of animal. Not just people—though the guy had seen his coworkers absorbed alive, turned into versions of themselves that looked just like they always had, that didn’t even know they weren’t them anymore. He’d shot one of them in the head, spent hours hiding in the trees from the other before managing to get the drop on him. No wonder he’d gone a little crazy.
Maybe it was his madness that had given him the good sense to burn the bodies. It wasn’t just a hunting thing, that. It was human instinct. Kill it with fire. Fire cleanses.
The last line of his journal, though. I don’t think I have the courage to do what needs doing. I’m ashamed of that.
Not a hard leap of logic to make.
Dean looked up from the sheaf of papers. “So,” he said. “This thing isn’t just one creature, right? It can transform anyone it finds. Take them over, whatever you wanna call it. As many as it wants.”
“Looks that way.”
“Huh.” Dean took another swig from the whiskey bottle. Set it down on the table.
The hunter, charred and twisted out of recognition on the ground. The surviving ranger, who might have been what loomed up at him out in the woods. And the hunters’ dog. The one that had slobbered all over Sam earlier, that had been following him everywhere, even when Dean lost sight of the both of them.
Again, not a hard leap of logic to make.
“Dean—” Sam was giving him that look. The someone has to say it look that was always the prelude to some shitty, awkward conversation. Not that awkward was even the best case scenario anymore.
Yeah, someone was gonna have to say it soon. But not yet.
Dean jerked his head toward the door. “Let’s check out the crash site.”
“I don’t see how that helps,” Sam said. “We already know what happened here.”
Dean shrugged. “Wasn’t a question.”
Sam looked like he was about to argue, but then he sagged a little, shook his head. Whatever was going through it, Dean didn’t ask. Wasn’t gonna help any.
“Fine,” Sam said at last, face set. “Let’s go.”
So you can’t apologise for the crap he really wants to hear it for. But you think you can at least apologize for this.
“Sammy,” you try to say. You’ve been quiet for what feels like hours, and your voice is rusted up in your throat. It doesn’t come out right, and you have to clear your throat and try again: “Sam.”
“Yeah, Dean?” He still isn’t looking at you.
“Sorry I dragged you out here,” you tell him, to silence. “It shouldn’t have been like this. I shoulda waited until we knew more.”
All true. Because if there’s one thing you suck at worse than apologies, it’s doing your one damn job. Seems like that fell by the wayside somewhere, in among the anger and the strained silences and the need to do something about the relentless shower of shit your lives have been for the past howeverfuckinglongitis, just to stop feeling like it’s all slipping through your fingers.
Somehow it slipped through anyway. Somehow you let it. And now all you have to offer is a promise, unspoken, of mutually assured destruction. He doesn’t make it, neither do you.
Sam shrugs, looking down. Then he raises his head, looks at you. Smiles faintly.
It sits weird on his face, makes you feel unsettled in a way you don’t want to be able to pin down.
“Dean, it’s okay,” he tells you. “Look, there’s a lot of stuff I could say to you, but—not about this. You couldn’t have known this would happen. I get it.”
“Like that matters.”
“What matters is—we’re together, okay? It was always gonna be this way.” He sighs, and it sounds like relief, not defeat. “You and me. We’re family. So it’s okay.”
Exactly what you’d want to hear, in this situation. That’s all it takes to make you suspicious.
You narrow your eyes at him. “You’ve changed the record.”
He keeps on smiling at you, stiff and not quite alert, like someone has hit pause on him.
“We’re family,” he repeats, like it’s easy, like it doesn’t taste of ashes in his mouth.
And that’s when you know.
The crash site wasn’t far out. Not that there was much left there. A boulder, mostly snow-covered, crumbling in among the trees. It had taken out a couple branches on the way down, by the look of things. One rotting tree, fallen last year or the one before, leaned at a crazy angle, wedged halfway upright its still-standing brothers.
Dean could smell it stronger, up here. That weird smell, like the sea, like something that was alive but not made of any flesh or blood he knew. And no angel had fallen here, just a meteor. Just an actual meteor. It made sense now, why he hadn’t been able to place that smell. It was—
“It ain’t an angel. It’s an alien.” He shook his head. “Now we really have seen everything.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess we have.” Sam’s voice was dull. He might’ve nerded out about this crap once, but yeah, it figured that he didn’t have the heart for it now.
Not that he had for a long time, really. The wonder, the curiosity—they’d been flattened out of him sometime between Hell and here. Not all at once. A slow process of deadening. Dean hadn’t realised he missed them before now.
A crack in the trees, and Dean froze where he stood. Yeah, no time to get emo right now. “You hear that?”
“I heard.”
They moved back to back, guns at the ready. Moments like this, they still knew how to act in sync, muscle memory as powerful as anything else.
The noise in the undergrowth got louder. It was coming from both sides now. And then Dean could see it, the figure that had been the big guy, lurching closer. And he could hear panting—the goddamn dog, coming for Sammy—
They fired at the same moment. Big guy and dog dropped and hit the ground, snow muffling the thuds of their bodies.
Silence again, then.
There were cans of kerosene back in the cabin. Getting the bodies lit up in the snow was a bitch, but they managed it eventually. Then they stood staring at the flames, exhaling plumes of white that mingled in with the smoke. It was starting to get dark.
“Dean,” Sam started again, eventually.
Dean kept quiet, just let him say his piece.
“We lost sight of each other for a good ten minutes back there earlier. That coulda been long enough. We don’t know.”
Dean heaved a sigh. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, Sammy, I know.”
“Well,” Sam went on, after a moment. “I guess we’re gonna find out sometime soon.” He sounded so goddamn resigned.
“Guess we are.”
Dean couldn’t think of much more to say, after that. He retrieved the whiskey bottle out the cabin, in the end, sat down on the step and held it out to Sam.
Sam shook his head, but came to sit beside him in the thick silence, staring out at the flames and the snow.
The night settled in.
You shoot.
You shoot and he falls with an inhuman, insect shriek, and there’s a bloom of blood at the center of his chest where something has started to push its way out of him. You got the headshot off before it could.
Now, you stand looking down at the body, almost dispassionate. You don’t know what you feel. Because this—it’s the end of all things, it’s a huge deadness, enveloping like night.
You didn’t hesitate. You don’t know how you could have done this.
You don’t know if you could have done this.
After a while—you don’t know how long—you notice that your hands are shaking. You’re still holding your gun in front of you, like you’re expecting the thing-that-is-no-longer-Sam on the ground to jump back up at you any second. You feel numb, disconnected, like those aren’t really your hands holding it.
That gun oughta be looking pretty friendly right about now. This oughta be the one image that gives you comfort: two bodies, not one, gathering snow on the mountainside, laying side-by-side until the snow thaws in the spring, or until it occurs to Cas to come looking. You and your brother.
It’s getting light in the east. Dawn soon. Time to say goodbye.
You struggle to move your hands. The numbness has taken hold of you now. You raise it slow, press the barrel under your chin, feel it burn cold against your skin. This is it.
Or maybe it’s something else. Something worse.
Because you hesitate.
Because you look down the mountain, at the valley and the road out of it, and it looks like an escape route. Because there’s an alien tickle of hunger at the back of your brain.
Because something in you wants to live.
Characters/pairing: Dean, Sam (gen).
Rating: R
Warnings/contains:
Word count: ~5000
Summary: Sam and Dean check out what they think is an angel fallen to earth on a snowy mountainside. They find something else entirely.
Notes:
spn_cinema fic, written for the movie prompt, The Thing. I started writing this a few months ago, so it takes place in a sort of early-Season-9 idea of what late Season 9 might look like. Also, it's a rather embittered Dean POV, so he's not all that nice about Sam. Sorry, Sam.Shot in the head by morning.
That’s your baseline, now. Your foundation-stone; the one solid thing you have left beneath your feet. You’ve gotta have something to hold on to, and now—in the dark and the snow, with the rotting cabin standing empty behind you and the remains of two bodies smoking in front—this is it. Now; always. Next time the sun comes up, it’ll greet your brains spattered all over that glittering virgin snow.
This is comfort. This is it.
It’s so cold you can’t feel your face. In one gloved hand, you clutch the whiskey bottle you snagged out of the cabin earlier, to one of those looks Sammy’s been giving you lately. The kind that are either pissed-off or worried, and you can never really figure out which. Not that he has any reason to worry about your drinking anymore, but habit’s a hard thing to break.
You hold the bottle out to him—third time you’ve tried—and he eyes it like it might be poisoned. Then he gives this tiny little shrug and takes it. You watch every movement, his tiny twitch of a grimace after he swallows.
You wonder what it means, that he takes it. If it’s an olive-branch thing, or a we’re-gonna-die-anyway-so-screw-it thing, or just a warmth thing.
If it’s a thing Sam would do.
“I still think we should wait for Cas,” Sam said.
Dean scowled at him. “His cell’s dead, Sammy, and I’m pretty sure there ain’t anybody out there answering our prayers right now. We hang around, whoever this fucker is fell outta the sky, they’ll be gone before we get there.”
Sam stood his ground, arms folded. “We don’t even know for sure it is one of them,” he pointed out. Flatly sensible, like always these days.
“A freak meteor and two guys turned into human barbecue? If that ain’t an angel, what the hell is it? This is our one chance to find out what’s going on up there, Sammy.” Dean grabbed his duffel and keys, turned for the door. “You coming or what?”
Sam sighed, but unfolded himself from his chair. “Fine. Gimme ten minutes.”
Dean waited, fingers drumming the tabletop impatiently. The hunt for Abaddon was still going nowhere, but this—yeah, this was their first chance in who-knew-how-long to find some other answers. Maybe a good fight, too. He could feel the pull of it. In his veins, in the hot pulse of the Mark on his arm. Not the fight he wanted, maybe, but it was gonna have to do.
He scowled at the clock.
Twenty minutes had passed by the time Sam emerged with his duffel over his shoulder and an armful of blankets. (What? You think because you have snow chains that means we won’t get stranded? You’re getting reckless, Dean.) He flat-out refused to get in the car until Dean had gone back and grabbed real winter clothes, insisted on stopping off in town to pick up food and bottled water.
Dean thought—well, maybe he oughta be happier about that. Maybe he would’ve been, a couple weeks ago. Sammy nagging at him like that, it was—well, it was more than just business, right?
But when he tried to hang onto the thought, it felt hollow and insubstantial. Something else in him, more urgent, blotted it out. The slow build of rage at every extra second that kept them from hitting the road; the relief that washed through him when they finally got under way and Sam fell silent in the passenger seat.
Sam stayed silent. Stayed that way for hours.
Snow hit as they crossed out of Wyoming. To Dean’s right, Sam shifted in his seat, blinked sleep from his eyes and frowned out the window. “We should look for somewhere to stop.”
Dean ignored him, turned up the radio, and kept driving. Eyes on the blacktop, headlights carving a tunnel through the snow.
“You sure you don’t wanna try praying?” your brother asks you, an indefinite time later.
You shake your head. “Can’t risk it, Sammy. Even if Cas could just zap here—one of those things manages to replicate an angel? Whole damn world’s fucked.”
He nods, falls silent. Appeal to the big picture; that’s the way to get through to Sam, alright. He won’t risk it, won’t throw the whole thing away for family or loyalty or love the way you would. That’s why you won’t make it through the night either way. That’s why he might, if he’s—
If.
You know he wasn’t thinking rescue, though. Grace, the kind of power Cas has—it’s a purifier, a whole scorched-earth thing. Might be one surefire way to get rid of this—whatever this is, however far it’s gotten. If only Cas could still fly, if he could get here in time, if it didn’t manage to get to him first.
Too many variables. But if you’re honest with yourself—and hell, you may as well start now, nothing left to lose—that isn’t the reason you won’t pray. It’s more selfish than that. It’s the same reason you haven’t said a prayer in weeks.
You’ve known your expiration date’s coming up for a while. And you want someone to remember you different than this. To remember you human.
Both of you, now.
“So, I guess this is where we get out and walk.”
Dean nodded, pulled over and killed the Impala’s engine. Snow in heavy drifts blocked the road ahead, weighted down the branches of the trees. The trail up the mountain should’ve been impassable.
Only, there was an ancient red pickup pulled over at the foot of the trail, just a light dusting of snow on its roof. Couldn’t have been here more than a couple hours. And they hadn’t passed anybody on the drive up. Snow still banked up at the sides of the trail, shovelled away a few days ago for the bodies to be brought down. More had fallen since, but the surface looked disturbed, down where the trail started. Footprints.
They exchanged wary glances, and Dean reached for his handgun before climbing out of the Impala.
He motioned to Sam, rounded the old truck to scrub snow off the window and peer in. There was a dog leash folded up in the back, and the front seat was littered with papers: newspaper clippings; a notebook lying open. Dean couldn’t make out a whole lot of the writing through the glass, but it was enough: scrawled lines of notes, interspersed with doodles that only another hunter—or a monster, or an angel—would’ve recognised as sigils. They’d find weapons under the tarp in the back, no question. What were the chances the poor bastard who owned the truck had gone off armed with silver bullets and holy water and not a clue what the fuck he was up against, was lying halfway up the mountain with his eyes burned out of his head right now?
Or, poor bastards, plural, because there were two empty coffee cups wedged into the gap between the seats, and two different sets of handwriting had scrawled in the notebook. Not that sticking together would’ve done them any good on this one. Likely just meant two bodies to find instead of one.
Dean cursed, bit it back when he realised how too-loud his voice sounded in this thick silence.
“Sam,” he hissed.
Sam’s head popped up over the top of the truck. He opened his mouth—then turned his head, frowning. Held a hand up, keep it quiet, whatever he’d been about to say forgotten.
Dean heard it too, then. Something rushing down the trail towards them, a muffled crash through the trees getting louder. A dog barking. And then a shot, piercing the silence, shivering snow from the trees. Gouts of it sloughed off at the foot of the trail, and for a moment Dean thought they were gonna get fucking buried in it. He held his breath, held himself like he was already frozen to the spot, until everything went still.
Still, just for a moment—and then another shot, another shower of snow. And movement, coming down again, still making straight for them.
Something scrambled down the trail so fast it looked like it was falling, resolving itself into a big, furry shape as it approached. An enormous husky dog, and it was barrelling straight towards Sam.
Before he could react, it leapt up at him with force that would have knocked anybody not the size of a small house over on his ass—and slobbered enthusiastically all over his face.
Dean let out a sigh of relief. Took a breath, then, and caught a faint whiff of something in the air. Not sulphur, and not ozone either. Something rank and saline, out of place in the snowy mountain landscape.
He didn’t have any time to wonder what it was, though, because then something else crashed out of the trees. A grizzled, middle-aged guy with a greying beard. The guy was holding a gun, and he had it levelled straight at Sam.
“Get away from it!” the guy yelled, moving closer.
Sam raised his hands—placating, we don’t want any trouble. “Okay, okay, it’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
The guy’s aim didn’t waver. His eyes were wild, though, an incipient tremble in his stance, in the set of his shoulders. He kept staring straight at Sam, paying no attention to what else was going on around him. He didn’t seem to have noticed Dean.
Dean kept low, behind the cabin of the truck. Thumbed the safety off his gun.
“You’re one of them!” the guy was saying, now.
“Let’s just calm down,” Sam said, hands still up. The dog had sunk back to the floor now, cowering behind his legs, whining. “I’m—trust me, I’m not an angel.”
At that, the guy stared for a moment. Then his face split into a mirthless crack of a smile, and he laughed hollowly. “Angel? I wish, man, I wish.” He narrowed his eyes again, steadying his gun hand. “I’m sorry—”
Another shot, and the guy crumpled to the ground.
Sam looked at Dean over the body on the floor, expression opaque, troubled. He cleared the frown off his face with what looked like real effort, nodded.
“So,” he said, finally. “‘You’re one of them’? Shifter, you think?”
No thank you. Figured.
“Sounds like.” Dean jerked his head toward the truck. “Now we just need to find out what happened to his buddy.”
“Give me your arm,” Sam says to you.
You look at him sideways; hesitate. Out of habit, mostly. You’ve gotten enough lectures for one rapidly-diminishing lifetime, and it’s not like it matters now, anyway. But Sammy keeps on looking at you, eyes big and hopeful, and goddamnit, you’ll do what he asks.
Whatever little scrap of trust you can afford now, you’ll give. You’ll hope that you’re giving it to him.
You roll up your sleeve and it startles you, how sharp-cold the air is on the bare skin. You stopped noticing it on your face a while back, a numb solidity creeping through you, taking hold. It feels like your eyeballs have frozen solid in your head. You try to wriggle your toes in your boots and you can’t feel them.
Sam takes off his glove to run his finger over the raised red brand of the Mark. The warm touch of it is startling, alive.
(Is it?)
You blink away the snowflakes clinging to your eyelashes, squint at his face to see his frown.
“I thought maybe it would’ve gone,” he says. “If you weren’t—you know.”
He stops. You know.
It’s a thought, you guess. You don’t know exactly how these things work; how they take people over. If it’s the DNA, like with shifters, then maybe the scars, the marks—the little things that make up the evidence of a life—wouldn’t be there anymore, if you weren’t yourselves. But you have no way of knowing for sure.
Anyway, you feel like the Mark is more than that, sometimes. It ain’t cosmetic surgery, that’s for sure; it’s a new element in you. A thread of darkness woven into your genetic code, burning at the centre of you.
Like it matters. Whatever you are, however it’s changed, it isn’t getting out of here alive.
You take your arm back, pull down your sleeve to cover it. Take another drink.
Slow going up the hill. Quiet, too. Just the creak of the snow under their feet, the rasp of cold air in their lungs, and the panting of the goddamn dog, which seemed to have adopted Sam as its new human. It kept running off ahead of them, then lolloping back down to wag its tail at him and push its head into his gloved hand. Looked like it thought the whole thing was some awesome Boys’ Own adventure. Which was really starting to grate on Dean’s nerves, because this sure as hell felt like the part in the horror movie where the dog starts barking at something in the trees and runs off with its tail beneath its legs.
The silence put him on edge. A flurry of soft whumps as a branch bent and shed its load of snow had him whirling on the spot, gun cocked, taking a sharp lungful of icy air.
Nothing there. And when he turned back, he couldn’t see Sam or the stupid mutt.
A quick scramble further up the trail, over the next rise. Still nothing.
“Sam! Sammy!”
His words fell dead into the quiet, got swallowed up by it. Dean cursed under his breath, fumbled in his jacket for his cell. A reflex. No reception out here. But before he could start worrying about what the hell he was gonna do next, he rounded a corner and something loomed at him out of the trees.
A cabin. Run-down, windows boarded up, door swinging open and snow beginning to pile up on the threshold. The door looked like it had been forced, and beside it, a tail of crime scene investigation tape flapped forlornly in the wind.
Dean made his way around the cabin, gun at the ready, back to the wall. There was a snow-blurred figure standing out back, and he moved closer, squinting through the whiteness.
The figure resolved itself into recognisability. Sam. Sam, with the dog by his feet, standing over the remains of something charred and twisted on the ground.
“Let me guess,” Dean said into the silence. “You’ve found our guy’s buddy.”
Sam glanced up as he approached, looking mystified. “This is—Jesus, Dean, this is weird,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a regular shifter.”
Dean edged closer. The smell of it hit him before anything else. Burning bodies were nothing new, but this was a whole fucking symphony of gross. Alongside acrid smoke there was the slaughterhouse stink of the Pit—blood and shit and sweet rot, the meaty dark-red smell of the body’s insides. Something else underneath it all, too—organic, but not animal. Like that weird whiff of whatever-the-hell-it-was Dean had caught earlier. Dank and seaweedy, mudflats at low tide.
He covered his mouth with his sleeve, stepped in to take a look. Turned back to Sam.
“Weird,” he said. “That’s an A for understatement, Sammy.”
Because this thing was… yeah. Not a regular shifter didn’t even begin to cover it.
It looked like it had been a person once. It had arms and legs, anyway, and something that still had the features of a human face on it—but warped, fluid-slicked and stretched like plasticine. The guy had been opened up in the middle, but this wasn’t like any eviscerated corpse they’d ever seen before. Nothing was missing. Instead there was… stuff that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, stuff that wasn’t human, couldn’t ever have been human, no matter how twisted and damaged. Things like—like flowers of meat that had opened up and burst right out of the guy’s ribcage. Like threads of fleshy fiber, more plant than animal, curling vinelike out of the human wreckage. Something angled and chitinous like an insect leg. The whole thing was some Giger fantasy brought to life in blood and burned tissue. Dean hadn’t seen anything like it, not even in Hell, because at least there everything you had to work with had been human sometime.
He breathed out hard, a puff of white against the shadows of the trees. Pushed down the memory. Easier than it used to be.
“I don’t.” He broke off, shook his head. “I don’t know what the fuck this is.”
“Me either.” Sam paused, then jerked his head in the direction of the cabin. “Looks like somebody’s been in there recently, though. C’mon, let’s check it out.”
Dean nodded, fumbled for his flashlight. The dog pricked up its ears, trotted in ahead of them, like it knew where they were going. Sammy followed in through the cabin door, and that was when Dean heard it.
A sound out in the trees. An underfoot crunch, a cracking of undergrowth. Definitely not snow falling off the branches this time.
He turned on the spot, hissing for Sam to follow him; made for the sound.
Dumb as hell, probably, going after whatever this thing was without knowing exactly what they were dealing with here. Who knew if an angel blade or a silver bullet would be any use against these things?
Better that than let it pin them down inside that rotting old cabin like prey in a bear trap, though. Whatever ended up taking Dean down, he was gonna go out the hunter, not the hunted. Made that promise to himself a long time ago.
There. A shadow in the trees. Upright. Human—on the surface of it, anyway. A big guy wrapped in a shapeless coat. That was about all Dean could make out.
He doubled back, approached from the side. The damn silence, though. The way it made everything seem muffled outside of a few meters’ radius, but amplified through goes-to-11 speakers up close. Dean held his breath, took careful steps, circled. Lost sight of the guy—thing—whatever—behind a clump of snow-heavy foliage for a moment, and when Dean passed out the other side of it he was gone.
A noise behind him. He turned on his heel. And there was blood blooming in the center of the big guy’s torso, a wave of that nauseous smell, all salt and innards, and that was the last thing he knew.
You think about offering up apologies. Building bridges. The hours tick down towards dawn. Now or never, right?
Sam mostly isn’t looking at you. Given up on the conversation, not that it was much of one in the first place. He’s looking at the falling snow, or his feet, or the gun at his side.
This isn’t how you figured it would end. If it has to be the both of you, then—well, you at least thought it’d be side by side, fighting. A hail of gunfire and blood and rocksalt, not an awkward silence. Seems like the least the universe could do.
No way you could fix all the shit that’s broken, not really. No time for that now, and hell, maybe the whole situation—the two of you—is a write-off anyway.
You could say the right words, though. You could even understand them, far as it goes.
You keep quiet. You don’t think you really know what the right words are anymore, the ones Sammy would want to hear. You haven’t spoken the same language in years, or it feels that way.
You could offer up an apology, but you might just be offering up another lie, and you won’t do that. You’ll get one thing right in this fucking mess.
The snow keeps falling. Sam keeps staring at it.
“Dean. Dean!”
He came round by inches, disoriented, Sam shaking his shoulder. The dog sat behind him, a couple feet off, staring at them with its pale-blue psycho husky eyes.
“You okay?” Sam was saying. “I heard a noise—”
The guy. The thing. Why hadn’t it killed him? Dean sat up fast, grimacing when it made his insides lurch. “You see him, Sammy? Where’d he go?”
Sam shook his head. “I haven’t seen anyone. I did find something, though. In the cabin. I think you should take a look.”
Trust Sam, to be able to find research in the middle of a fucking job in the middle of fucking nowhere. They made it back inside the cabin—the dog catching wind of something and disappearing off into the trees—and Sam produced a sheaf of papers, scrawled over in shaky, semi-illegible handwriting.
There had been three rangers here in the mountains when the meteors hit. Two bodies found turned to crispy bacon, and the other guy naturally became the prime suspect. No trace of him, according to the police report—either he’d made a run for it and was across state lines by now, or he’d died somewhere out here on the mountains and wouldn’t be recovered before spring, if ever. But apparently he hadn’t gotten far. And he was an even bigger nerd than Sammy, because instead of running for his life like a sane person the moment shit got weird, he’d stuck around and he’d left notes.
Dean scowled at them. “Why the hell did the cops leave these?”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t know, Dean.” But he gestured around the cabin. “Maybe they didn’t.”
Dean followed his gaze. Place was pretty empty—not exactly five star. But there was a shovel leaning against the back wall, dripping melted snow onto the floor. An open can of beans whose contents hadn’t frozen solid. And a half-empty whiskey bottle sat on the table. He grabbed it, to a what the hell, Dean? look from Sam that he ignored. More habit than hope of making a difference, these days, Dean figured. He took a swig and leafed through the papers.
Yeah, no angels. None of the other usual suspects you might find out someplace like this—wendigoes, werewolves, fairies—either. But there was something crashed to earth out here. The rangers had gone out to take a look at it; had found… well.
The notes got a little garbled after that, but the gist of it was, the guy seemed to think this creature could turn itself into any kind of animal. Not just people—though the guy had seen his coworkers absorbed alive, turned into versions of themselves that looked just like they always had, that didn’t even know they weren’t them anymore. He’d shot one of them in the head, spent hours hiding in the trees from the other before managing to get the drop on him. No wonder he’d gone a little crazy.
Maybe it was his madness that had given him the good sense to burn the bodies. It wasn’t just a hunting thing, that. It was human instinct. Kill it with fire. Fire cleanses.
The last line of his journal, though. I don’t think I have the courage to do what needs doing. I’m ashamed of that.
Not a hard leap of logic to make.
Dean looked up from the sheaf of papers. “So,” he said. “This thing isn’t just one creature, right? It can transform anyone it finds. Take them over, whatever you wanna call it. As many as it wants.”
“Looks that way.”
“Huh.” Dean took another swig from the whiskey bottle. Set it down on the table.
The hunter, charred and twisted out of recognition on the ground. The surviving ranger, who might have been what loomed up at him out in the woods. And the hunters’ dog. The one that had slobbered all over Sam earlier, that had been following him everywhere, even when Dean lost sight of the both of them.
Again, not a hard leap of logic to make.
“Dean—” Sam was giving him that look. The someone has to say it look that was always the prelude to some shitty, awkward conversation. Not that awkward was even the best case scenario anymore.
Yeah, someone was gonna have to say it soon. But not yet.
Dean jerked his head toward the door. “Let’s check out the crash site.”
“I don’t see how that helps,” Sam said. “We already know what happened here.”
Dean shrugged. “Wasn’t a question.”
Sam looked like he was about to argue, but then he sagged a little, shook his head. Whatever was going through it, Dean didn’t ask. Wasn’t gonna help any.
“Fine,” Sam said at last, face set. “Let’s go.”
So you can’t apologise for the crap he really wants to hear it for. But you think you can at least apologize for this.
“Sammy,” you try to say. You’ve been quiet for what feels like hours, and your voice is rusted up in your throat. It doesn’t come out right, and you have to clear your throat and try again: “Sam.”
“Yeah, Dean?” He still isn’t looking at you.
“Sorry I dragged you out here,” you tell him, to silence. “It shouldn’t have been like this. I shoulda waited until we knew more.”
All true. Because if there’s one thing you suck at worse than apologies, it’s doing your one damn job. Seems like that fell by the wayside somewhere, in among the anger and the strained silences and the need to do something about the relentless shower of shit your lives have been for the past howeverfuckinglongitis, just to stop feeling like it’s all slipping through your fingers.
Somehow it slipped through anyway. Somehow you let it. And now all you have to offer is a promise, unspoken, of mutually assured destruction. He doesn’t make it, neither do you.
Sam shrugs, looking down. Then he raises his head, looks at you. Smiles faintly.
It sits weird on his face, makes you feel unsettled in a way you don’t want to be able to pin down.
“Dean, it’s okay,” he tells you. “Look, there’s a lot of stuff I could say to you, but—not about this. You couldn’t have known this would happen. I get it.”
“Like that matters.”
“What matters is—we’re together, okay? It was always gonna be this way.” He sighs, and it sounds like relief, not defeat. “You and me. We’re family. So it’s okay.”
Exactly what you’d want to hear, in this situation. That’s all it takes to make you suspicious.
You narrow your eyes at him. “You’ve changed the record.”
He keeps on smiling at you, stiff and not quite alert, like someone has hit pause on him.
“We’re family,” he repeats, like it’s easy, like it doesn’t taste of ashes in his mouth.
And that’s when you know.
The crash site wasn’t far out. Not that there was much left there. A boulder, mostly snow-covered, crumbling in among the trees. It had taken out a couple branches on the way down, by the look of things. One rotting tree, fallen last year or the one before, leaned at a crazy angle, wedged halfway upright its still-standing brothers.
Dean could smell it stronger, up here. That weird smell, like the sea, like something that was alive but not made of any flesh or blood he knew. And no angel had fallen here, just a meteor. Just an actual meteor. It made sense now, why he hadn’t been able to place that smell. It was—
“It ain’t an angel. It’s an alien.” He shook his head. “Now we really have seen everything.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess we have.” Sam’s voice was dull. He might’ve nerded out about this crap once, but yeah, it figured that he didn’t have the heart for it now.
Not that he had for a long time, really. The wonder, the curiosity—they’d been flattened out of him sometime between Hell and here. Not all at once. A slow process of deadening. Dean hadn’t realised he missed them before now.
A crack in the trees, and Dean froze where he stood. Yeah, no time to get emo right now. “You hear that?”
“I heard.”
They moved back to back, guns at the ready. Moments like this, they still knew how to act in sync, muscle memory as powerful as anything else.
The noise in the undergrowth got louder. It was coming from both sides now. And then Dean could see it, the figure that had been the big guy, lurching closer. And he could hear panting—the goddamn dog, coming for Sammy—
They fired at the same moment. Big guy and dog dropped and hit the ground, snow muffling the thuds of their bodies.
Silence again, then.
There were cans of kerosene back in the cabin. Getting the bodies lit up in the snow was a bitch, but they managed it eventually. Then they stood staring at the flames, exhaling plumes of white that mingled in with the smoke. It was starting to get dark.
“Dean,” Sam started again, eventually.
Dean kept quiet, just let him say his piece.
“We lost sight of each other for a good ten minutes back there earlier. That coulda been long enough. We don’t know.”
Dean heaved a sigh. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, Sammy, I know.”
“Well,” Sam went on, after a moment. “I guess we’re gonna find out sometime soon.” He sounded so goddamn resigned.
“Guess we are.”
Dean couldn’t think of much more to say, after that. He retrieved the whiskey bottle out the cabin, in the end, sat down on the step and held it out to Sam.
Sam shook his head, but came to sit beside him in the thick silence, staring out at the flames and the snow.
The night settled in.
You shoot.
You shoot and he falls with an inhuman, insect shriek, and there’s a bloom of blood at the center of his chest where something has started to push its way out of him. You got the headshot off before it could.
Now, you stand looking down at the body, almost dispassionate. You don’t know what you feel. Because this—it’s the end of all things, it’s a huge deadness, enveloping like night.
You didn’t hesitate. You don’t know how you could have done this.
You don’t know if you could have done this.
After a while—you don’t know how long—you notice that your hands are shaking. You’re still holding your gun in front of you, like you’re expecting the thing-that-is-no-longer-Sam on the ground to jump back up at you any second. You feel numb, disconnected, like those aren’t really your hands holding it.
That gun oughta be looking pretty friendly right about now. This oughta be the one image that gives you comfort: two bodies, not one, gathering snow on the mountainside, laying side-by-side until the snow thaws in the spring, or until it occurs to Cas to come looking. You and your brother.
It’s getting light in the east. Dawn soon. Time to say goodbye.
You struggle to move your hands. The numbness has taken hold of you now. You raise it slow, press the barrel under your chin, feel it burn cold against your skin. This is it.
Or maybe it’s something else. Something worse.
Because you hesitate.
Because you look down the mountain, at the valley and the road out of it, and it looks like an escape route. Because there’s an alien tickle of hunger at the back of your brain.
Because something in you wants to live.
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He keeps on smiling at you, stiff and not quite alert, like someone has hit pause on him.
“We’re family,” he repeats, like it’s easy, like it doesn’t taste of ashes in his mouth.
And that’s when you know.
Right here I was shaking my head, no no no.
Not only was this creepy as hell, it also had some very interesting Dean thoughts about Sam. You got his mindspace perfectly.
Thanks for a keep-looking-behind-your-shoulder, hugely unsettling Saturday morning! :D
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Not only was this creepy as hell, it also had some very interesting Dean thoughts about Sam. You got his mindspace perfectly.
Oh, thanks! Honestly, I feel like it's a bit jumbled on that score, partly because of how things have progressed so much in canon while I've been writing it, and because I'm not really sure myself how much of what's being said/thought here is 'really' Dean & Sam. But hey, maybe that's not such a problem in a fic like this, IDK. ;)
Thanks again for reading, and for leaving such a kind comment! ♥
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This one's no exception. You've left me absolutely speechless. The time you took to tell your story, the eery, most evocative scenery, the interactions between the brothers, beautiful but always just a bit off, the way Dean always excels at feeling guilt for things he isn't really responsible for but can't quite apologise for the things that actually are his fault, and last but not least the absolutely chilling ending... all of that makes this into a truly marvellous and quite unforgettable read.
I may not always be a fan of Carver & Co., but I'm always a fan of your writing. So thanks a lot for sharing this magnificent story with us. ♥
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I don't care what happens on Tuesday night
Ahaha, I wish I could say the same. This season may have had its faults, but I'm still slightly terrified for the finale!
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Yours is written and THAT'S the difference, Stephen King not translating satisfactorily onscreen. The greatest fear is in your own imagination, and out brothers come with their own fearset.
Beautiful job! I figured The dog lick took Sam out, but the single most terrifying thing about this beautifully-crafted tale was the ending.
For Dean, the desire to live IS an alien tendril inside him. For Dean, listening to yourself is fraught with such horror that the story, at least for me, was left completely open ended.
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For Dean, the desire to live IS an alien tendril inside him.
Yes, absolutely! The idea that he could want any kind of life without Sam is so far outside his self-concept that he'd see it that way either way, I think.