Fic: Ecstasy of the Knife
Ecstasy of the Knife
Summary: Follows Zero. Dean came back from Hell wrong. Continuing.
Warnings: Disturbing imagery, language, torture
Spoilers: Hell plot points, s4 plot points
First fic in the series: A Hole in the World
Ecstasy of the Knife
_______
oh yes there's many a man or woman
that's been put in the insane asylum
when this has happened to them
and they're sitting there today, people think they're insane
but they saw something that's real
_______
1
_______
It’s blood and chaos in here, and a memory of thunder. Things that rattle, cascade of metal, buttons and pots and pans and long needles and razors and wire and pellets and bolts and iron.
Sam
gave
him
drugs
It’s ugly. It’s peeling skin, waves of darkness. Cloud and fury and noise. Wind without voices. Glass exploding outward, mud and water vaporizing. Bodies like torches suddenly alight. Sudden and brilliant, each alone in the dark.
Forest becoming conflagration and shards of glass raining slowly, slowly down.
“Sam,” he slurs, thick as wet flesh.
His brother’s on the other side of the room. He stinks, reek of the world, sweat and grime, burning hair and charcoal, pregnant echo of sulphur. His shoulders are blurry: lines within lines. The drugs make it harder to see his brother and make Dean clumsy, and Sam won’t let him leave the motel room.
“Sam,” he tries again, and this time his brother turns, long line of skeleton fashioned from sinew and stitched-together flesh, and Dean can see his spine twist from his head all the way to the earth. Dean rocks forward a little on the edge of the bed, as best he can, pins his gaze to Sam’s face, balloon-round and tethered to the ground. He squeezes the edge of the bed. Hears his fingers crackle.
“I wanna go outside,” he says.
“I told you no, Dean,” Sam says, voice dragged down by weariness.
Dean shakes his head. Shakes off the words. “You could do it,” he says, “If you wanted. Nobody has to know.”
“It’s not safe,” Sam insists, as he’s been insisting all along.
“Listen,” Dean gets up, with some difficulty. Makes his hands move through the mess, the screaming and human torches and the distant howl of a city falling down around itself, and ignores the way the tips of his fingers turn rapidly crimson, “You listen. This is-you can’t keep me inside for days, Sam, you can’t.” He scrubs the back of an angry hand across his mouth because sometimes it’s too soft with the drugs and he can’t control it very well and yeah, there’s still dried saliva at the corner. He wants to say, What did you do to me?
“You’ll get hurt,” Sam says simply.
In the distance, another explosion. A flash of light, or mortar shell. Or worse. Fire encroaching and the air fills with the smell of scorching mud. Alastair’s out there somewhere, Dean knows. Prowling the fields, knocking heads in with someone’s bloody femur. Putting the dead out of their misery except there’s no death and no end to it. Just those long thin legs spattered with mud and dripping gore. Pale and hairless.
Monsters live under the earth.
“You’ll get hurt,” Sam repeats, as Dean moves past him, toward the window. Pushes the curtains of tattered skin aside, looks out at the parking lot, the phosphine brilliance of dead lights like pushed-in eyes, the blaze of the sun, the chaos of light and air.
He presses his hand to the window, leaves bloody prints.
“Let me out, Sam,” he says, and Sam blows a long breath. Dean can hear it even over the wailing and susurration of bones.
_______
He watches the stain on the window as the sun goes down. The moon cuts into the room and Hell goes on around him, leaching out of the walls, away toward the impossible horizon, the eye curving in on itself. His legs sink into the mud, feet twitching arrhythmically. Somewhere Alastair laughs. A familiar noise. Dean hears him splashing through the mud and there’s another whine and crash and howling of wind and it’s amazing he’s not knocked flat on his face by the force of it.
Sam’s gone out.
He hadn’t said Stay here. Hadn’t said much of anything. Locked Dean in the bathroom, cuffed to the sink, and when Dean wouldn’t take the new drugs he stuck him, in the side of his neck, just above the shoulder.
“Sorry,” Sam whispered. “I am.”
And Dean couldn’t tell if it was true, could barely make his brother’s features into something coherent, a face instead of a mess of shapes. There’s broken glass everywhere and when he squints into the dark he can see the lit-up people, walking away, wavering with distance.
They don’t run much. There’s no place to run to.
He thinks maybe he ran, in the beginning. But things are different now.
He shifts, in the mud, rolls his head back to rest against the tiled wall. Shuts his eyes and listens and behind him is a gap, like hollowness and vacuum and starless dark, and the wall isn’t really there but the gap is real. The smear of blood and the sharpness of razor wire and tongues lolling out and pierced with iron, rivets, heavy bloody things.
“Alastair,” he says. “I know you’re there.”
Demons are monsters of memory. Threads of souls pulled thinner and thinner, wound tight around evil. Made out of memory. Into something other.
“You’ll be someone new,” Alastair had said, crouching over him, long fingers leaving muddy prints on Dean’s shoulders, on his face. “Something you never thought you’d be.”
Something warm drips from his lip. He breathes wetly. Sam’s gone and maybe he’s not coming back. Maybe it’s better that way. The cuffs rattle and his legs kick again, clattering on the tile. The wind shifts and brings new voices. The moon makes incisions in the wall.
_______
2
_______
Sam finds the door ajar, just barely. His breath breaks in his chest and he rests on his hand on the wood, stares at the splintered jamb, the ruined lock.
He shoves his way into the room, stands in the middle of devastation, breathes in the smell of the void.
_______
It happened when he blinked. Closed his eyes and opened them and Alastair was there smiling down. Human face, human teeth, skin over bone. Same as always. Big hands and breaking metal. Porcelain and water. Dean heard noises, animal and sick, guttural horror. His throat vibrated.
“Your brother’s looking for me,” Alastair grinned, and rammed his fingers in the skin at the back of Dean’s neck and into his hair and hauled him across the floor trailing shattered metal and a little blood.
“I’ve been looking for you,” the demon added, and his fingers dug deeper into Dean’s scalp.
_______
He finds chunks of hair, bloodied scalp. But Dean was in no shape to fight back.
He tears out into the night. Bloody footprints on the pavement.
_______
“I was in town for a gig,” Alastair told him, fingers deft on the heavy leather straps, the buckles. “Real special one. But for you of course I’ll change my plans around a little.”
He heard a thin high noise. Bit his tongue until white turned to red in his mouth, until the pain flared larger, until Alastair grabbed him by the jaw and shook his head, just a little, until Dean’s teeth rattled.
“None of that now,” he said. “We’re just going to calibrate, that’s all.” He smiled and there was a rattle of metal, and something long and thin glinted in his hands. “Been a while since I’ve done this with a human body, after all.”
He added, as the first needle pressed gently into the skin of Dean’s abdomen:
“I wouldn’t want to make any mistakes.”
_______
“Castiel,” Sam whispered, alone in the alley. Then louder, “Castiel!”
He’s never even seen the angel. Has only his brother and Anna’s word that he exists. That any of it is true. At the cabin it was nothing but noise and thunder, and the explosions of light during the banishment. The smell of blood.
Now there’s wind and displaced air, and a pale face above a slender body. Sam rocks back a step.
His first thought is a wild and simple No.
_______
He can’t feel his eyes, or the ends of his fingers.
He can hear his breath, slow, thin and deliberate. His skin twitches over his hands. His knuckles rattle with the strain. If he breathes or moves the needles will pull. Every inch of breath is heat and torchlight.
He remembers pain, distantly, as a thing made up of the threads of the world. Different from now is then. A time without pain, a white clear space without nerves alight and the fist of his mind screaming in its cage of bone.
But that was a long time ago.
Whenever he stops breathing he can hear blood, slowly falling. He stops breathing a lot just to listen, to hear the stillness. The demon’s stopped moving around now, and Dean thinks he’s gone someplace. Away. Or maybe just waiting quietly, in a corner.
It doesn’t really matter.
He breathes.
When the angel comes Dean doesn’t even close his eyes. Just lets the wind pass over him, and the screaming. And the needles pull out one by one, and the hand on his chest is hot as a brand, but there’s no smell of scorching skin.
He can feel his heart beat against the angel’s palm.
His heart beats slow.
The blood has stopped falling.
“Close your eyes,” Castiel the angel says, and fingers find his eyelids and for a moment, Dean sees a flare of sodium white.
Then nothing.
_______
Castiel told him to wait. To find a new motel, to go there, to wait. Sam’s been sitting in the dark by the open window, staring at his boots in the square of moonlight, his phone in his hand, thumb on the call button. Ruby’s name on the screen.
She’s still in town. He’s sure she is.
When the angel comes back with his brother he gets to his feet so fast he drops the phone.
_______
The way things burn is a kind of memory. The light shudders around him. Inhales and exhale. Some huge force and flash of motion. Light enfolding light. Skin dissolving. Bone evaporating.
A voice tells him, rest, and below him is a softness, and nothing binds him. The needles are gone.
He remembers, that the needles are gone.
_______
Sam says, “Thank you. I can’t…I. Thank you.”
Castiel doesn’t say anything.
He leaves in a rush of air and Sam doesn’t move to pick up the phone.
_______
And Dean’s eyes are open and he breathes light and empty, staring upward. Hands opening and closing weakly on the comforter, lips parted, jaw slack. The drugs never made him like this. His eyes all hollowed out. Light skitters over their surface as if it doesn’t know there’s a person behind them.
Sam sits beside the bed and puts his face in his hands, draws deep breaths. He feels his shoulders shaking. He can still taste Ruby’s blood.
He hadn’t said, Stay here. He’d said, I’m sorry.
And he had been. Sorry. So sorry.
He rests a hand on his chest, fingers curved, as if he could claw this new grief from his chest. This awful devastation blacker than guilt or shame. This abyss of self.
Behind him, Dean breathes.
_______
Castiel sits beside him, in the muddy fields, under the flash-bang sky. Dean’s lost his lower mandible somewhere and he’s scrabbling around for it, fingers raking in the earth.
“Things have changed,” the angel murmurs, staring up with his arms wrapped around his knees. He doesn’t look human at all.
Dean’s searching turns up teeth and shards of bone. His fingers are stained.
“It’s different now. I may not be allowed to return.”
Dean looks up at that. Catches the glance from eyes that see without light.
“Sam will look after you,” the angel says.
_______
Centuries later the sky splits open and something warm and wet falls on his face. He tries to open his eyes but they’re already open, and he blinks, slowly, and then again. And then more rapidly.
Air washes over his face, into his nose, mouth. He can taste it. There’s someone just there, just in front of him, long hair greasy and unwashed, face too thin and pale. Stinks of sweat and exhaustion and living. Dean’s eyes flicker and catch on his, just for a moment, and a smile breaks across the gaunt face.
“Dean,” Sam breathes. “Hey.”
From somewhere the sound wells up in Dean’s throat. Not a word but something more fundamental.
“Sammy.”
Sam reaches one long, newly-trembling hand towards him, hooks it around the back of Dean’s neck, and hauls him forward. Presses Dean’s face against his shoulder, into a shirt reeking of old sickness.
“It’s gonna be okay now,” Sam says.
And Dean believes him.
-end-
_______________________________________
Top quote is from Hung over as the Oven in Maida Vale.
Song
Also, and not that surprisingly, I was thinking about the scenes following an atomic attack at the beginning of this. I'm currently doing a WMD class and like a lot of people I did a fair amount of reading in JH and HS re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are a lot of books out there, especially children's books, and those sorts of things stay with a person for a long time.
The plot for this has been in my head for proably 6 months, but I haven't written much lately and so it came around as this sort of roundabout thing where not much gets explained. Sorry about that.
Summary: Follows Zero. Dean came back from Hell wrong. Continuing.
Warnings: Disturbing imagery, language, torture
Spoilers: Hell plot points, s4 plot points
First fic in the series: A Hole in the World
Ecstasy of the Knife
_______
oh yes there's many a man or woman
that's been put in the insane asylum
when this has happened to them
and they're sitting there today, people think they're insane
but they saw something that's real
_______
1
_______
It’s blood and chaos in here, and a memory of thunder. Things that rattle, cascade of metal, buttons and pots and pans and long needles and razors and wire and pellets and bolts and iron.
Sam
gave
him
drugs
It’s ugly. It’s peeling skin, waves of darkness. Cloud and fury and noise. Wind without voices. Glass exploding outward, mud and water vaporizing. Bodies like torches suddenly alight. Sudden and brilliant, each alone in the dark.
Forest becoming conflagration and shards of glass raining slowly, slowly down.
“Sam,” he slurs, thick as wet flesh.
His brother’s on the other side of the room. He stinks, reek of the world, sweat and grime, burning hair and charcoal, pregnant echo of sulphur. His shoulders are blurry: lines within lines. The drugs make it harder to see his brother and make Dean clumsy, and Sam won’t let him leave the motel room.
“Sam,” he tries again, and this time his brother turns, long line of skeleton fashioned from sinew and stitched-together flesh, and Dean can see his spine twist from his head all the way to the earth. Dean rocks forward a little on the edge of the bed, as best he can, pins his gaze to Sam’s face, balloon-round and tethered to the ground. He squeezes the edge of the bed. Hears his fingers crackle.
“I wanna go outside,” he says.
“I told you no, Dean,” Sam says, voice dragged down by weariness.
Dean shakes his head. Shakes off the words. “You could do it,” he says, “If you wanted. Nobody has to know.”
“It’s not safe,” Sam insists, as he’s been insisting all along.
“Listen,” Dean gets up, with some difficulty. Makes his hands move through the mess, the screaming and human torches and the distant howl of a city falling down around itself, and ignores the way the tips of his fingers turn rapidly crimson, “You listen. This is-you can’t keep me inside for days, Sam, you can’t.” He scrubs the back of an angry hand across his mouth because sometimes it’s too soft with the drugs and he can’t control it very well and yeah, there’s still dried saliva at the corner. He wants to say, What did you do to me?
“You’ll get hurt,” Sam says simply.
In the distance, another explosion. A flash of light, or mortar shell. Or worse. Fire encroaching and the air fills with the smell of scorching mud. Alastair’s out there somewhere, Dean knows. Prowling the fields, knocking heads in with someone’s bloody femur. Putting the dead out of their misery except there’s no death and no end to it. Just those long thin legs spattered with mud and dripping gore. Pale and hairless.
Monsters live under the earth.
“You’ll get hurt,” Sam repeats, as Dean moves past him, toward the window. Pushes the curtains of tattered skin aside, looks out at the parking lot, the phosphine brilliance of dead lights like pushed-in eyes, the blaze of the sun, the chaos of light and air.
He presses his hand to the window, leaves bloody prints.
“Let me out, Sam,” he says, and Sam blows a long breath. Dean can hear it even over the wailing and susurration of bones.
_______
He watches the stain on the window as the sun goes down. The moon cuts into the room and Hell goes on around him, leaching out of the walls, away toward the impossible horizon, the eye curving in on itself. His legs sink into the mud, feet twitching arrhythmically. Somewhere Alastair laughs. A familiar noise. Dean hears him splashing through the mud and there’s another whine and crash and howling of wind and it’s amazing he’s not knocked flat on his face by the force of it.
Sam’s gone out.
He hadn’t said Stay here. Hadn’t said much of anything. Locked Dean in the bathroom, cuffed to the sink, and when Dean wouldn’t take the new drugs he stuck him, in the side of his neck, just above the shoulder.
“Sorry,” Sam whispered. “I am.”
And Dean couldn’t tell if it was true, could barely make his brother’s features into something coherent, a face instead of a mess of shapes. There’s broken glass everywhere and when he squints into the dark he can see the lit-up people, walking away, wavering with distance.
They don’t run much. There’s no place to run to.
He thinks maybe he ran, in the beginning. But things are different now.
He shifts, in the mud, rolls his head back to rest against the tiled wall. Shuts his eyes and listens and behind him is a gap, like hollowness and vacuum and starless dark, and the wall isn’t really there but the gap is real. The smear of blood and the sharpness of razor wire and tongues lolling out and pierced with iron, rivets, heavy bloody things.
“Alastair,” he says. “I know you’re there.”
Demons are monsters of memory. Threads of souls pulled thinner and thinner, wound tight around evil. Made out of memory. Into something other.
“You’ll be someone new,” Alastair had said, crouching over him, long fingers leaving muddy prints on Dean’s shoulders, on his face. “Something you never thought you’d be.”
Something warm drips from his lip. He breathes wetly. Sam’s gone and maybe he’s not coming back. Maybe it’s better that way. The cuffs rattle and his legs kick again, clattering on the tile. The wind shifts and brings new voices. The moon makes incisions in the wall.
_______
2
_______
Sam finds the door ajar, just barely. His breath breaks in his chest and he rests on his hand on the wood, stares at the splintered jamb, the ruined lock.
He shoves his way into the room, stands in the middle of devastation, breathes in the smell of the void.
_______
It happened when he blinked. Closed his eyes and opened them and Alastair was there smiling down. Human face, human teeth, skin over bone. Same as always. Big hands and breaking metal. Porcelain and water. Dean heard noises, animal and sick, guttural horror. His throat vibrated.
“Your brother’s looking for me,” Alastair grinned, and rammed his fingers in the skin at the back of Dean’s neck and into his hair and hauled him across the floor trailing shattered metal and a little blood.
“I’ve been looking for you,” the demon added, and his fingers dug deeper into Dean’s scalp.
_______
He finds chunks of hair, bloodied scalp. But Dean was in no shape to fight back.
He tears out into the night. Bloody footprints on the pavement.
_______
“I was in town for a gig,” Alastair told him, fingers deft on the heavy leather straps, the buckles. “Real special one. But for you of course I’ll change my plans around a little.”
He heard a thin high noise. Bit his tongue until white turned to red in his mouth, until the pain flared larger, until Alastair grabbed him by the jaw and shook his head, just a little, until Dean’s teeth rattled.
“None of that now,” he said. “We’re just going to calibrate, that’s all.” He smiled and there was a rattle of metal, and something long and thin glinted in his hands. “Been a while since I’ve done this with a human body, after all.”
He added, as the first needle pressed gently into the skin of Dean’s abdomen:
“I wouldn’t want to make any mistakes.”
_______
“Castiel,” Sam whispered, alone in the alley. Then louder, “Castiel!”
He’s never even seen the angel. Has only his brother and Anna’s word that he exists. That any of it is true. At the cabin it was nothing but noise and thunder, and the explosions of light during the banishment. The smell of blood.
Now there’s wind and displaced air, and a pale face above a slender body. Sam rocks back a step.
His first thought is a wild and simple No.
_______
He can’t feel his eyes, or the ends of his fingers.
He can hear his breath, slow, thin and deliberate. His skin twitches over his hands. His knuckles rattle with the strain. If he breathes or moves the needles will pull. Every inch of breath is heat and torchlight.
He remembers pain, distantly, as a thing made up of the threads of the world. Different from now is then. A time without pain, a white clear space without nerves alight and the fist of his mind screaming in its cage of bone.
But that was a long time ago.
Whenever he stops breathing he can hear blood, slowly falling. He stops breathing a lot just to listen, to hear the stillness. The demon’s stopped moving around now, and Dean thinks he’s gone someplace. Away. Or maybe just waiting quietly, in a corner.
It doesn’t really matter.
He breathes.
When the angel comes Dean doesn’t even close his eyes. Just lets the wind pass over him, and the screaming. And the needles pull out one by one, and the hand on his chest is hot as a brand, but there’s no smell of scorching skin.
He can feel his heart beat against the angel’s palm.
His heart beats slow.
The blood has stopped falling.
“Close your eyes,” Castiel the angel says, and fingers find his eyelids and for a moment, Dean sees a flare of sodium white.
Then nothing.
_______
Castiel told him to wait. To find a new motel, to go there, to wait. Sam’s been sitting in the dark by the open window, staring at his boots in the square of moonlight, his phone in his hand, thumb on the call button. Ruby’s name on the screen.
She’s still in town. He’s sure she is.
When the angel comes back with his brother he gets to his feet so fast he drops the phone.
_______
The way things burn is a kind of memory. The light shudders around him. Inhales and exhale. Some huge force and flash of motion. Light enfolding light. Skin dissolving. Bone evaporating.
A voice tells him, rest, and below him is a softness, and nothing binds him. The needles are gone.
He remembers, that the needles are gone.
_______
Sam says, “Thank you. I can’t…I. Thank you.”
Castiel doesn’t say anything.
He leaves in a rush of air and Sam doesn’t move to pick up the phone.
_______
And Dean’s eyes are open and he breathes light and empty, staring upward. Hands opening and closing weakly on the comforter, lips parted, jaw slack. The drugs never made him like this. His eyes all hollowed out. Light skitters over their surface as if it doesn’t know there’s a person behind them.
Sam sits beside the bed and puts his face in his hands, draws deep breaths. He feels his shoulders shaking. He can still taste Ruby’s blood.
He hadn’t said, Stay here. He’d said, I’m sorry.
And he had been. Sorry. So sorry.
He rests a hand on his chest, fingers curved, as if he could claw this new grief from his chest. This awful devastation blacker than guilt or shame. This abyss of self.
Behind him, Dean breathes.
_______
Castiel sits beside him, in the muddy fields, under the flash-bang sky. Dean’s lost his lower mandible somewhere and he’s scrabbling around for it, fingers raking in the earth.
“Things have changed,” the angel murmurs, staring up with his arms wrapped around his knees. He doesn’t look human at all.
Dean’s searching turns up teeth and shards of bone. His fingers are stained.
“It’s different now. I may not be allowed to return.”
Dean looks up at that. Catches the glance from eyes that see without light.
“Sam will look after you,” the angel says.
_______
Centuries later the sky splits open and something warm and wet falls on his face. He tries to open his eyes but they’re already open, and he blinks, slowly, and then again. And then more rapidly.
Air washes over his face, into his nose, mouth. He can taste it. There’s someone just there, just in front of him, long hair greasy and unwashed, face too thin and pale. Stinks of sweat and exhaustion and living. Dean’s eyes flicker and catch on his, just for a moment, and a smile breaks across the gaunt face.
“Dean,” Sam breathes. “Hey.”
From somewhere the sound wells up in Dean’s throat. Not a word but something more fundamental.
“Sammy.”
Sam reaches one long, newly-trembling hand towards him, hooks it around the back of Dean’s neck, and hauls him forward. Presses Dean’s face against his shoulder, into a shirt reeking of old sickness.
“It’s gonna be okay now,” Sam says.
And Dean believes him.
-end-
_______________________________________
Top quote is from Hung over as the Oven in Maida Vale.
Song
Also, and not that surprisingly, I was thinking about the scenes following an atomic attack at the beginning of this. I'm currently doing a WMD class and like a lot of people I did a fair amount of reading in JH and HS re: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are a lot of books out there, especially children's books, and those sorts of things stay with a person for a long time.
The plot for this has been in my head for proably 6 months, but I haven't written much lately and so it came around as this sort of roundabout thing where not much gets explained. Sorry about that.