Fic: De Profundis (2/2)
Part I
De Profundis: Part II
When Sam wakes up, his jeans are gone. He's down to his boxers and a bandage around his thigh. The cold air makes goosebumps rise on his skin.
He's starting to think it would have been a good idea to provoke Roy into killing him.
Walt, Roy and Josh are sitting around a small table. The two hunters are grinning at him, which is bad enough, but Josh, who's got a notebook and pencil in front of him, is studying him like he's a specimen under a microscope. Sam can't help squirming.
The tiny movement reminds him just how much pain he's in, and his humiliation is forgotten in the throbbing of his wrists and shoulders. They hurt.
They hurt, and his ribs hurt, and the bullet wound in his leg hurts. Except that hurt isn't the word for it. Hurt is what happens when an angry spirit throws you into a wall a few times and bruises your back and breaks your collarbone. This is worse. This is different. This is agony and terror and mortification rolled into one ball of something that tightens Sam's chest and sits hard and heavy in his gut -
Because Sam's scared. He's never been this scared before, not even when he jumped into Lucifer's Cage. He knew what he was doing and he knew it had to be done, and that gave him courage.
But this… Sam's going to die, and not in a good cause. He's going to die because Roy and Walt are depraved and Josh Hart is a lunatic. He's going to die, and Roy and Walt are going to watch and snicker at every whimper that escapes his lips, and Josh is going to sit there taking notes about how long it takes Sam to die from crucifixion and write a paper about whether it's asphyxiation or dehydration or pain that gets to him first.
Sam feels ill.
"What hurts more, Sam?" Josh asks, scribbling something down in his notebook. "Your shoulders or your wrists? And where would you rate each on a scale of one to ten?"
"One being stubbing your toe," Walt explains, "and ten being whatever the hell it was Lucifer did to you in the Pit."
Sam shifts, trying to pull himself up a little to relieve the pain in his arms, but he gives up when the effort just makes them hurt more.
"Do you think we should monitor his blood pressure?" Josh asks. "It might be useful information."
"Can't hurt," Roy grunts.
"If only we had an EEG machine. Or if we could run an MRI or a CAT scan on him," Josh muses, and the matter-of-fact tone is worse than all Roy's sneering. "I don't know if I can trust him to describe what he's feeling."
Sam lets his head fall forward, trying to ignore the blood pressure cuff Josh is now sliding around his bicep.
Maybe if he pretends it isn't happening, it'll all turn out to be a really horrible dream.
It's when Josh bites his lip thoughtfully and says, "Well, I suppose it isn't a valid experiment without a little scourging," that they bring out the whips.
They can't reach high enough to hit his chest, so his legs take the brunt of it. Sam bites his lip hard enough that he tastes blood, but he doesn't cry out. He won't give them that satisfaction. It's the only thing he has left, the last remaining shred of his dignity, and he's going to hold on to it if it kills him.
They finally stop when Josh remembers that he doesn't want Sam to bleed out or die of infection. They sluice him down with a bucket of water, and the pink-tinged liquid puddles on the whitewashed floor under him.
Then Josh gets on the stepladder again, lifts Sam's head with a hand under his chin, and says, "I need you to listen to me carefully and answer my questions, Sam. I want you to rate the pain in your wrists, your shoulders and your legs from lowest to highest. And you must be getting hungry and thirsty by now. Is that making you feel at all nauseous?"
Sam's defeated Lucifer, and now he's going to die at the hands of a crazy person. He would laugh at the irony if he had enough air in his lungs.
"Sam?" Josh says. "Do you understand me? Can you speak at all?"
Sam gathers enough energy to grunt, "Screw you."
Josh purses his lips, shaking his head as he climbs down. "Do you think the belligerence is normal, or is it a consequence of the pain?"
Roy laughs. "He's always been a pissy little bitch. Evil things usually are."
Sam's hungry now. And thirsty. And filthy.
And there are traitorous tears pooling in his eyes.
He doesn't even want Dean to find him anymore. He can't bear the idea of anyone, even Dean, seeing him like this. He just wants it to end.
He doesn't know how long it's been. He's stuck in Josh's godforsaken basement with no windows and the electric light pounding into his skull, giving him a headache on top of his nausea, and he's barely conscious of either because every fibre of his being is in agony.
He feels fingers on his bare chest, and he knows Josh is checking on his heartbeat. He'd pull away if he could, even though he knows it'll hurt to move, but it's all he can do to muster enough strength to glare in Josh's general direction.
Josh ignores the look, instead glancing over his shoulder to tell the two hunters, "Heartbeat's stronger than it should be. He's only human, he's not supposed to last this long." Then, after a pause, "We aresure he's human, right?"
"We could try an exorcism."
Sam hears footsteps, and feels the tip of a knife dig into his chest. It doesn't go deep, just breaking the skin.
There's an irritable exclamation from Walt. "Don't do that, idiot. There's no point carving the Devil's Trap into him. If he's possessed, it'll tether the demon to his body."
"Draw it around him, then?"
"Yeah." After a pause, "Use his blood. You've cut him anyway, might as well go with it."
Sam barely notices his own blood being used to draw a Devil's Trap on the wall around him and listens listlessly as Roy stumbles over the exorcism.
When it's over, Walt shrugs and says, "Human."
Josh makes a face. "Then why is he still so strong?"
"He's fading," Roy comments, fingers at the pulse in Sam's jaw.
"Not nearly fast enough."
"Maybe we should put some more holes in him," Walt suggests. "We can clean and bandage them, so there won't be blood loss and he won't get an infection, but the pain should make his body weaker. Ancient Roman criminals were probably half-starved to begin with. It'll even the odds."
"I suppose so. Keep it to the legs, though, and don't break the bone. I don't want him to go into traumatic shock."
Roy laughs. "Don't worry. We've got it covered."
Sam knows he's dying. The pain has faded to a muted buzz in the back of his head. He can't feel much of anything anymore. Every breath is an effort.
His hearing's still sharp, and Josh's laughter breaks over him.
"Perfect," the man's saying. "It won't be long now. It would be better if we had a doctor to call time of death, but… This will do."
There's a sudden bang. It pounds into his head like a red-hot spike. Sam flinches, and the movement wrenches his swollen shoulders.
A sob catches in his throat.
And that's when he realizes that Josh's hands aren't on him anymore. There are voices, loud and angry, speaking too fast for Sam to understand. But he recognizes the voices, Josh and Walt and Roy yelling, and he wouldn't put it past them to do it just to make him suffer a little more before the end -
But there's another voice, yelling louder than any of the others, and it can't be, it can't be, it has to be Sam's brain conjuring up a hallucination to comfort him through his final moments -
There are more bangs, more noise, and Sam can feel the reverberations through the wood behind him. He opens his eyes, but the room's a blur. He can feel the sting of tears.
He shuts his eyes to hold them back.
The noise comes to an abrupt stop.
There are hands on him, but they aren't cold and calculating and unpleasant. They're warm and gentle. One of them is on his jaw, feeling for his pulse, and the other is resting over his heart.
"I'll be right back, Sammy," Dean's voice says. "Going to get you down, just hold on a minute."
Sam decides that if this is a hallucination, he isn't going to fight it. At least he can die happy.
Something scrapes across the floor, and then he feels support under his feet. It takes a moment for him to remember the stool.
Dean - or hallucination-Dean-in-Sam's-head, Sam isn't sure yet - doesn't bother with Josh's stepladder. He gets up on the stool with Sam, and Sam wouldn't have thought it would hold both their weight but somehow it does.
Sam drops his head to Dean's shoulder.
"That's right," Dean says, encouraging. "You just let me take care of you."
The rope holding his right wrist suddenly gives way, and Sam collapses under his own weight. Dean catches him, holds him, murmurs to him for a moment before freeing Sam's other hand.
Sam has no idea how Dean keeps them from falling, supports Sam, and gets them both off the stool, but he does it.
Sam feels solid ground under his feet for the first time in - he doesn't even know how long - and that's when it strikes him. Dean's real. Dean's here.
Dean's real and Dean's here and Dean saw how Josh and Walt and Roy managed to break Sam and -
"Hey." Dean's voice is in his ear. "Hey, hey, calm down. It's OK. Calm down."
No. Dean doesn't understand. Dean doesn't understand and now he knows how weak Sam was, how scared he was when they had him, how they hurt him and took every last bit of his dignity and -
"Shhh." Dean raises his voice. "Hey! You want to give me one of those blankets?"
Oh God. Sam didn't realize there were other people seeing him like this.
There's movement, and Dean's shifting him around, and then he's wrapped in something coarse and scratchy and Dean's got one arm around him and is massaging his wrists with the other hand.
Sam hears another voice, a female voice. "They're dead."
Dean's response is a grim laugh. "They're lucky I killed them quickly. But if it makes you feel better, I'll claim I was defending myself and my brother. That's the truth, anyway." Dean shifts, settling Sam's head more comfortably on his shoulder. "The world's better without them."
"How's your brother?"
"Out of it. I don't think they gave him any food or water."
"He needs a hospital." Sam feels a hand on his forehead, and shies away from the touch that isn't Dean. "They can see if there's any damage to his muscles, and they'll probably want to put him on an IV overnight."
Sam shakes his head, trying to hide in Dean's arms. He doesn't want a hospital. They'll poke at him and ask questions he can't answer and offer him psychiatric evaluation and they'll take him away from Dean.
"Is there anywhere else we can go?" Dean asks, giving Sam a reassuring squeeze. "Maybe a discreet clinic that'll let me sit with him while they're working? They can put him on an IV and check him over. I'll take him to a hospital after that if they think he needs one. But if there's someone who might be able to help him…"
"I'll see what I can do."
Footsteps recede, and Sam lets himself sink into the comfort Dean's offering. For now, the warmth of his brother's arms is enough to make him forget. It isn't enough; he'll have to think about it at some point. He'll have to admit it, to himself and to Dean, and deal with it, but that can wait.
For now, Dean is safety and protection and the steady thudding heartbeat that's the first lullaby Sam remembers.
For now, Sam's alive.
THE END
Right. I can't entirely believe I actually wrote that. Poor Sam! I'm almost certain now I'll write a schmoopy follow-up to let Dean fuss over him.