You Will Not Die, It's Not Poison (SPN, R-ish)
Gen, R-ish. Title from Bob Dylan's "Tombstone Blues," that particular section of which has always given me the creeps, by the way.
astrid_olivia betaed this when she could have been writing report cards. There was a LOT wrong with it, too. She is a saint.
You Will Not Die, It's Not Poison
"Human beings need what they already know, even horrors."--A.S. Byatt
i.
Right after it happened, Dean called some of their contacts and asked them, desperate, what he could do now. He was pretty sure there wasn't an answer, not one he wanted to hear, but he wanted to have it confirmed. And it had been confirmed, all right, all of them saying what he already knew: he needed to get his affairs in order and get ready, because these things wanted him, bad, and weren't going to stop until they had him. He had thought it might seem real once he heard someone else say it. He'd been wrong about that.
ii.
The nights were not so bad. At night, Dean had work to do, and he had a routine. Of course he put the salt down, and put the protection charms on the doors and windows. Then he got his weapons together and waited, patrolling sometimes. The nights were long, but the possibility of a confrontation made them easier to get through. He was almost sure that what he was waiting for wouldn't happen during the day; they were evil, all right, but he thought they'd give him a fighting chance. So he drove during the days, and they were much harder than the nights.
Driving with no particular place to go had become about the worst feeling he could imagine. It gave him time to think and remember, long uninterrupted stretches of time with nothing ahead of him. Before, when he was the one doing the hunting, that would have been okay. It was awfully bitter now. The silence in the car was especially hard to take. He listened to the radio sometimes, although not as much as before, but it didn't stop him from remembering the sounds that weren't there anymore. A couple of times, especially at first, he almost broke down entirely, wanted to just pull off on the shoulder and cry. He never did, though.
At first, he drove west until there was no place further west to go. Then he headed north and east. He knew he was always followed, although they never showed themselves. That was all right; he could wait as long as they wanted him to. One thing that he missed--well, he missed a lot of things, in varying degrees, but his sense of urgency was definitely one of them.
iii.
For a while after it happened, they called him pretty regularly, sometimes threatening him, sometimes just waiting for him to talk, which he never did. So he had mostly stopped answering his phone.
Once, though, there was a message from a guy his dad had helped out a couple of years back: he'd thought their ghost was gone, but lately his wife had started to hear some strange noises at night again, maybe footsteps, and it could be just air in the pipes or something, but he'd feel better if John could call him back. Dean called instead, and after the guy babbled nervously for a minute he said, "Actually, Mr. Scourby, my dad died earlier this year." The rest of the conversation was mostly a blank. All he remembered was saying it out loud, and that he'd decided to keep the explanation as short as possible, giving the guy as few details as he could manage. He remembered, too, biting back what he'd almost said automatically in response to the condolences: "Oh, I'll see him again sometime."
After he hung up, he exhaled a long, deep breath. He was glad, at least, that it hadn't been someone who'd known Sam. He imagined that conversation: Actually, I hate to tell you, but. Yeah, both of them. Yeah, I'm sorry too.
iv.
He had this dream sometimes where he was in bed in a house he didn't know, and something was coming up the stairs to him. He heard it coming, making a slithery, bumping sound as it climbed the stairs, and he knew it was something very bad, but he couldn't move. He lay there paralyzed as it got closer, until he could hear it breathing and slavering. And then something happened to it out on the landing, something that made it give an inhuman shriek. Then he knew it was dead, and that he knew the thing that had killed it very well. He was going to meet it again now, and it terrified him far more than the slithering thing.
He woke up screaming sometimes. He often had this dream on nights when, before falling asleep, he had thought in a dispassionate way that he should really just blow his brains out, or let something else kill him if he couldn't do it himself. But then he would realize: they won't let me. They want me for themselves. They're watching over me.
v.
In Iowa, he met this girl. He'd just walked into a bar, and she seemed to have been there with her friends for a good while. She was pretty young, maybe Sam's age, and flirted with him enthusiastically. He thought she might have been less enthusiastic if she weren't tipsy, but he responded anyway. It was partly just autopilot and partly that, he realized quite suddenly, it had been a long time since he'd a real conversation with anyone.
But he talked to this girl. Her name was Katie, and she lived nearby, and told him he should stop at her place later if he felt like it. She wrote her address on a napkin, folded it and slid it into his shirt pocket. Then she waved at him and walked out, giggling with her friends. He stayed where he was for a while, drinking beer and then a couple of shots of whiskey, and some human companionship started to sound better and better. She lived in a two-flat, and when he got there, he found the front door unlocked. He knocked, then walked in, calling her name. He found her in the living room. She was lying on the couch, and she was dead. It looked as though it had taken a long time, as though she had struggled. She was impossibly pale; there seemed to be no blood left in her at all. He stood there for a long time, absorbing it. "Oh, God," he heard himself say hoarsely. "God, I'm so sorry."
vi.
And the next night, he didn't put salt down. He just waited. Although he hadn't thought it would be possible, he slept for a while. The sound of the door opening seemed part of a dream he'd been having, but as he woke up a little more, he knew. He was suddenly afraid, although not of what was going to happen, not exactly. Without turning over, he said, "Hey, Sam. You miss me?"
He heard his brother sit down at the desk. "I guess we must have," he said, "or we wouldn't have followed you all the way from Colorado. And you were covering your tracks pretty well for a while. Then you started slipping a little, and we figured you were ready for us to find you."
"You didn't have to kill that girl," Dean said.
"No," Sam said, "but we were hungry. And it got your attention, didn't it?"
Dean sat up then, and turned on the bedside lamp. He'd been afraid that Sam would look different somehow, but he seemed pretty much like always. "Where's Dad?" Dean asked.
"In theory, he's seeing if you're anywhere in town," Sam said. "In practice, I think he's giving us a minute alone." Sam was looking at him so avidly now, and Dean knew he didn't have much time left. Or maybe that he was about to have too much time--all the time in the world, and it was a scary, dizzying prospect. Dean got up and sat on the end of the bed, closer to Sam. He said abruptly, "What does it feel like?" He guessed what he wanted to know on some level was, will it hurt? But he could just imagine how Sam would rag him for that. Sam said, thoughtfully, "At first it was...weird." He laughed a little, and that sounded the way it always had too. "But after a while? You start to like it." Dean felt a little thrill of horror and tried to ignore it. "It won't be so bad. Not for you."
"Not for me, huh?" Dean understood that. There was one conversation he kept playing over in his head, one of the last conversations they'd had before they broke into the nest, before their dad had yelled at them to run and Dean had obeyed and then realized he was alone. He thought about it a lot, thought of Sam asking him if he was really okay with Dad taking over and him saying, "If that's what it takes." He'd meant it, too, because it would keep the three of them together. He'd always been a little afraid of how far he'd go if that was the end result, but he'd never imagined that it would be like this, that it would be this far.
Sam was still watching him, hadn't taken his eyes off Dean since he walked in. Now he said, "Come home, Dean." And Dean felt awake,
really alive for the first time in a long while. He said, "I'm all yours, Sammy."
END
astrid_olivia betaed this when she could have been writing report cards. There was a LOT wrong with it, too. She is a saint.
You Will Not Die, It's Not Poison
"Human beings need what they already know, even horrors."--A.S. Byatt
i.
Right after it happened, Dean called some of their contacts and asked them, desperate, what he could do now. He was pretty sure there wasn't an answer, not one he wanted to hear, but he wanted to have it confirmed. And it had been confirmed, all right, all of them saying what he already knew: he needed to get his affairs in order and get ready, because these things wanted him, bad, and weren't going to stop until they had him. He had thought it might seem real once he heard someone else say it. He'd been wrong about that.
ii.
The nights were not so bad. At night, Dean had work to do, and he had a routine. Of course he put the salt down, and put the protection charms on the doors and windows. Then he got his weapons together and waited, patrolling sometimes. The nights were long, but the possibility of a confrontation made them easier to get through. He was almost sure that what he was waiting for wouldn't happen during the day; they were evil, all right, but he thought they'd give him a fighting chance. So he drove during the days, and they were much harder than the nights.
Driving with no particular place to go had become about the worst feeling he could imagine. It gave him time to think and remember, long uninterrupted stretches of time with nothing ahead of him. Before, when he was the one doing the hunting, that would have been okay. It was awfully bitter now. The silence in the car was especially hard to take. He listened to the radio sometimes, although not as much as before, but it didn't stop him from remembering the sounds that weren't there anymore. A couple of times, especially at first, he almost broke down entirely, wanted to just pull off on the shoulder and cry. He never did, though.
At first, he drove west until there was no place further west to go. Then he headed north and east. He knew he was always followed, although they never showed themselves. That was all right; he could wait as long as they wanted him to. One thing that he missed--well, he missed a lot of things, in varying degrees, but his sense of urgency was definitely one of them.
iii.
For a while after it happened, they called him pretty regularly, sometimes threatening him, sometimes just waiting for him to talk, which he never did. So he had mostly stopped answering his phone.
Once, though, there was a message from a guy his dad had helped out a couple of years back: he'd thought their ghost was gone, but lately his wife had started to hear some strange noises at night again, maybe footsteps, and it could be just air in the pipes or something, but he'd feel better if John could call him back. Dean called instead, and after the guy babbled nervously for a minute he said, "Actually, Mr. Scourby, my dad died earlier this year." The rest of the conversation was mostly a blank. All he remembered was saying it out loud, and that he'd decided to keep the explanation as short as possible, giving the guy as few details as he could manage. He remembered, too, biting back what he'd almost said automatically in response to the condolences: "Oh, I'll see him again sometime."
After he hung up, he exhaled a long, deep breath. He was glad, at least, that it hadn't been someone who'd known Sam. He imagined that conversation: Actually, I hate to tell you, but. Yeah, both of them. Yeah, I'm sorry too.
iv.
He had this dream sometimes where he was in bed in a house he didn't know, and something was coming up the stairs to him. He heard it coming, making a slithery, bumping sound as it climbed the stairs, and he knew it was something very bad, but he couldn't move. He lay there paralyzed as it got closer, until he could hear it breathing and slavering. And then something happened to it out on the landing, something that made it give an inhuman shriek. Then he knew it was dead, and that he knew the thing that had killed it very well. He was going to meet it again now, and it terrified him far more than the slithering thing.
He woke up screaming sometimes. He often had this dream on nights when, before falling asleep, he had thought in a dispassionate way that he should really just blow his brains out, or let something else kill him if he couldn't do it himself. But then he would realize: they won't let me. They want me for themselves. They're watching over me.
v.
In Iowa, he met this girl. He'd just walked into a bar, and she seemed to have been there with her friends for a good while. She was pretty young, maybe Sam's age, and flirted with him enthusiastically. He thought she might have been less enthusiastic if she weren't tipsy, but he responded anyway. It was partly just autopilot and partly that, he realized quite suddenly, it had been a long time since he'd a real conversation with anyone.
But he talked to this girl. Her name was Katie, and she lived nearby, and told him he should stop at her place later if he felt like it. She wrote her address on a napkin, folded it and slid it into his shirt pocket. Then she waved at him and walked out, giggling with her friends. He stayed where he was for a while, drinking beer and then a couple of shots of whiskey, and some human companionship started to sound better and better. She lived in a two-flat, and when he got there, he found the front door unlocked. He knocked, then walked in, calling her name. He found her in the living room. She was lying on the couch, and she was dead. It looked as though it had taken a long time, as though she had struggled. She was impossibly pale; there seemed to be no blood left in her at all. He stood there for a long time, absorbing it. "Oh, God," he heard himself say hoarsely. "God, I'm so sorry."
vi.
And the next night, he didn't put salt down. He just waited. Although he hadn't thought it would be possible, he slept for a while. The sound of the door opening seemed part of a dream he'd been having, but as he woke up a little more, he knew. He was suddenly afraid, although not of what was going to happen, not exactly. Without turning over, he said, "Hey, Sam. You miss me?"
He heard his brother sit down at the desk. "I guess we must have," he said, "or we wouldn't have followed you all the way from Colorado. And you were covering your tracks pretty well for a while. Then you started slipping a little, and we figured you were ready for us to find you."
"You didn't have to kill that girl," Dean said.
"No," Sam said, "but we were hungry. And it got your attention, didn't it?"
Dean sat up then, and turned on the bedside lamp. He'd been afraid that Sam would look different somehow, but he seemed pretty much like always. "Where's Dad?" Dean asked.
"In theory, he's seeing if you're anywhere in town," Sam said. "In practice, I think he's giving us a minute alone." Sam was looking at him so avidly now, and Dean knew he didn't have much time left. Or maybe that he was about to have too much time--all the time in the world, and it was a scary, dizzying prospect. Dean got up and sat on the end of the bed, closer to Sam. He said abruptly, "What does it feel like?" He guessed what he wanted to know on some level was, will it hurt? But he could just imagine how Sam would rag him for that. Sam said, thoughtfully, "At first it was...weird." He laughed a little, and that sounded the way it always had too. "But after a while? You start to like it." Dean felt a little thrill of horror and tried to ignore it. "It won't be so bad. Not for you."
"Not for me, huh?" Dean understood that. There was one conversation he kept playing over in his head, one of the last conversations they'd had before they broke into the nest, before their dad had yelled at them to run and Dean had obeyed and then realized he was alone. He thought about it a lot, thought of Sam asking him if he was really okay with Dad taking over and him saying, "If that's what it takes." He'd meant it, too, because it would keep the three of them together. He'd always been a little afraid of how far he'd go if that was the end result, but he'd never imagined that it would be like this, that it would be this far.
Sam was still watching him, hadn't taken his eyes off Dean since he walked in. Now he said, "Come home, Dean." And Dean felt awake,
really alive for the first time in a long while. He said, "I'm all yours, Sammy."
END