Memefic: Journey to the Underworld; PG
Journey to the Underworld
Summary: For the current H/C meme at hoodie-time for this prompt::In hell Dean spent a lot of time retreating into his mind as much as he could/separating himself from physical pain and damaging words/Alistair’s mind games. In season seven or beyond when he finally reaches his limit, he retreats back inside himself again, presenting as non-responsive/catatonic. Sam knew his brother was in trouble, but he never expected this.
Warnings: Language. Not nice-ness.
Spoilers: Vague s7 references
Journey to the Underworld
It smells of damp earth and grass and blood. Sam hauls his eyes open and ohgod his stomach is on fire, the skin across his belly a mess of blood-soaked agony.
He blinks and blinks again, staring down at his abdomen. Overhead, leaves rustle.
They were in a graveyard, he remembers.
He’s cold, the tips of his fingers tingling, and he’s propped up against something solid and warm, legs stretched out across the damp grass. He shifts and the pain in his abdomen flares, but he can feel with certainty now that someone is behind him, that he’s propped against a chest with someone’s arm draped over his shoulder, someone’s hand resting on his bicep. He moves his head and it knocks lightly against the curve of a skull.
“Dean?” he says, the word dropping loud into the dark. He blinks up at the early stars, peeking through the leaves.
There’s no answer. When he moves to push the arm away, though, it’s definitely his brother’s sleeve. It’s as if Dean dragged him from wherever he fell, manhandled him into a sitting position, held on with both hands, and then just…stopped.
“Dean,” he hisses, cold chasing down the back of his neck. “Dean.”
No answer.
“Sh-shit.” Sam pushes himself forward, with difficulty, jostling the unresponsive form behind him. The pain flares again and he thinks he feels the slow weeping of blood, but his larger concern now is his brother. He drags himself around, ignoring the way his stomach muscles complain. Flails a filthy hand through the air, grabs for the pale shape of his brother’s face in the failing light. Dean’s head doesn’t move until Sam grabs it. His eyes are open and catch the fading light, glossy and strange. His mouth is open slightly and his face is smooth and empty.
Sam tastes the fear before he feels it, electric bright in the back of his throat. He nudges Dean’s shoulder, gropes for a pulse. Dean’s face doesn’t change. His eyes remain fixed and blank.
“Okay,” Sam hears, realized distantly his mouth is moving, that the words are his. “Okay, okay. Dean. Dean.”
His brother blinks, long and slow.
The sun drops below the horizon.
--
The journey back is a nightmare of red and dark and distant stars. The house by the dried up creek is half-fallen in and too close to the cemetery for comfort, and the wind is prowling the perimeter and edging in through the cracks, knocking dust and splinters from the ceilings.
Sam sits in the light of the camp lantern and watches his brother. His brother watches nothing at all.
“See?” Sam says, skittering his fingers over the white fresh bandages on his belly. “See, Dean? I’m fine. It looked bad, but…but I’m fine. Okay? Everything’s still okay.”
He swallows the thickness in his throat. The next words come out as an ache.
“Dean, see?”
--
There’s no money or insurance, and no hospital anyway, not for miles. Sam shines the flashlight in his brother’s eyes, watches the pupils react. Pushes a hand into his brother’s short hair. Shakes him a little.
“Dean,” he pushes out, high and thin.
His brother rocks gently with the motion. His hands are open and empty where Sam placed them in his lap.
“Oh God.” Sam covers his own face, mouth open and trembling. “Don’t do this. Please don’t.”
Dean’s bed roll is in one corner. Six hours ago he’d thrown it down alongside his duffel, bitched at Sam for some minor infraction, and traded a handful of barbs when Sam snapped back. He’d been as close to himself as Sam expected these days. Later they’d sat side-by-side one the tumbledown porch, going over the case notes and working their way through a six-pack.
Sam wonders now what he missed.
--
A sudden clatter yanks Sam out of an uncomfortable doze against the wall. He jerks forward and the noise of wind is suddenly huge and all-encompassing. He claps his hands over his ears before he remembers where he is.
Dean is sitting where Sam left him, propped up in the chair with his hands in his lap.
“I don’t know what to do,” Sam says. The ceiling crackles. Something larger than a splinter breaks away, tumbles through the dark. He can’t see it but the noise is unmistakable, the crack when it hits the floor gunshot loud. Dean doesn’t react.
Sam pushes off the wall, creeps closer. Gets up on his knees and nudges Dean’s shoulder, then grabs him and hauls him off the chair, clutching as tightly as he ever has, at any moment before or after death. Dean falls into him and his breathing doesn’t change.
“You’re gonna get dehydrated,” Sam gasps, around tears that won’t come. Cold air cuts through the room, in thin tendrils. Warmth tickles his belly. He’s bleeding again.
“I didn’t die,” he says, fingers digging into the back of Dean’s neck. “I didn’t die and I need you here, goddammit.”
--
He gets Dean to drink a little bit of water. He swallows mechanically when Sam presses the glass to his lips, and some of it dribbles from the corner of his mouth, which doesn’t close properly. Sam wipes at the water helplessly with the back of his hand.
“We should go,” he says, but he has no idea where.
Sam’s still holding on to his brother. Dean’s limbs are all askew, head nodding to one side, eyes still open. It’s been a handful of hours and the wind is rising, now, as the moon sets. Sam’s starting to wonder about the soundness of their choice of refuge. Things are raining down where the holes gape widest-a shower of particles, wood and old nails, shards of plaster. He can’t see it but the noise is unmistakable. The house wasn’t built to withstand this degree of buffeting, not with the structural damage it’s already taken.
“Man,” he says, staring into the dark, rocking Dean’s unresponsive form just a little, “I think we gotta go.”
--
They don’t go, though. Not for a while. Sam can’t bring himself to move, and it’s very little to do with his belly wound. It’s only that the noise of collapse is strangely hypnotic, the moaning of the wind threaded with nearly-familiar harmonies. Sam shuts his eyes and gently rocks his brother, though he doesn’t mean to. Doesn’t understand the source of the motion, which seems to rise directly from his body. One of Dean’s hands is resting on the floor and the other is open in his lap. Sam tries, once, to shut Dean’s eyes, pawing awkwardly at his brother’s face and dragging them down. They close with the touch but pop open again almost immediately, like a dead man’s.
Some funeral homes, Sam knows, glue them shut.
Some use thread.
“You fucker,” he whispers into his brother’s ear. “You fucker. You fucker.”
He’d thought Dean was coping. Not well, not in a healthy way. But Sam could never find it in his heart to begrudge Dean the things he needed to make it through a day. Even one day.
Enough, he’d thought, to hold it together. Barely, but enough.
The whole house shudders. Something huge shears off the roof and thunders to the ground outside. Sam digs his fingers tighter into Dean’s arms.
It’s coming down around them.
--
Sam drags his brother into the night. He can’t bring himself to leave Dean alone on the grass to go back inside and fetch their lanterns and duffels. And he can’t make himself let go. He’s not even sure what he’s holding on to, if his brother is even aware. And Sam’s not crying but he can taste the tears anyway, bitter at the back of his mouth. Ugly.
“We screwed up,” he whispers, afraid to raise his voice, afraid the wind and the tossing trees will hear. “We picked the wrong place, man. We screwed up bad.”
He listens to the old slate tiles tear off the roof and crash to the earth. Away in the distance the trees roar like the ocean. His hair whips in his face until he turns his face toward Dean’s shoulder, covers his eyes with his hands. His own skin feels hot, dry and feverish. Somewhere nearby is the car they’ve stolen. Branches rattle by in the grass.
Sam pulls himself together. Gathers his brother in, strikes out in the direction of the stolen car, parked at the bottom of the hill, at the end of the long gravel driveway.
Dean walks, not smoothly but steadily, guided by Sam’s arm around his back. The wind bites at their skin and the clouds tear across the sky, sporadically revealing stars. Madness burning in the vacuum, dead light of millions of years.
He arranges Dean in the backseat, struggles to lay him down enough to let his back muscles rest. The awkward position leaves his legs dangling, feet planted on the floor, one arm trailing down and the other flopped across his belly. His head lolls, eyes still open, and Sam rests a hand momentarily across their hollowness. He leaves it long enough that he feels the slow brush of lashes as Dean blinks, once.
Away in the distance, something huge slams to the earth. Sam flinches and jerks his hand away. He curls himself into the front seat, as much as possible. Rests one hand on his own belly, idly smoothing his fingertips over the gauze under his shirt.
They ride out the wind that way, in silence.
--
In the morning, Sam goes back to the house alone. He’s expecting a pile of rubble, a blasted ruin, maybe a smoking crater. But the house is still standing, though more damaged than before. Tiles litter the ground and the gaps in the walls have widened, more slats showing through. The floors are covered in plaster and the detritus of construction.
He collects their things as quickly as possible with his stiff body. Hauls the duffels out to the porch individually, doesn’t risk shouldering them both yet.
He pauses on the porch, long enough to nudge a lone crumpled silver can with his boot. The rest have blown over the side and are lying in the grass and gravel. He doesn’t know if this was one of his, or his brother’s.
It probably doesn’t matter.
Back in the car, he shuts the door softly, turns to look at his brother, propped up now against the window.
“We’ve gotta get some fluids in you,” he says.
Insurance or no insurance, Dean needs help.
Sam can’t take a deep breath, but he fakes it as best he can.
“Okay,” he says, as the car roars to life, and he eases her onto the access road behind the graveyard. “We’re getting out of here.”
The long drive to the nearest hospital is lonely in a way Sam’s never before experienced. No one behind him, no one to call. The countryside spreads out on either side and the sky is pale and stretches far away. He’s falling from a great height, hurtling alone through the bright void. There’s nothing to sustain him. Just the rush of motion, the silence all around.
He wonders if he’s being selfish. Wanting to get Dean back.
But what else can he do?
--
“Dean,” he says. Hangs on to his brother’s arm when nobody’s looking. Sits beside him in the common room. Listens to the quiet squeak of white sneakers, the clatter of patient-appropriate items (toys), the murmur of voices. He stays through the visiting hours and it’s an echo of his own time in a locked ward. And Dean’s body is just a body, and they give him drugs.
One day Sam is sitting beside the bed where Dean has been stretched out to stare at the ceiling. The cut on Sam's belly is mostly healed. He’s forgotten about it, for the most part. He’s got one hand wrapped around his brother’s arm, and is staring absently at the wall.
“The house didn’t fall down, you know,” Sam says, hears himself say. Surprises himself with the suddenness of it. He squeezes Dean’s arm a little but doesn’t look at him. Blinks at the wall, then down at his free hand, resting on his knee.
“I thought it would,” he goes on, more quietly. “I thought it would. But it didn’t.”
He doesn’t say anything after that. It’s so quiet he can hear Dean breathing.
Two weeks later, his brother wakes up.
Because they gave him drugs.
--
end
--
Note: I looked up treatment for catatonia, and apparently certain medications are used. In this case I really wanted to do something different from the other catatonia fics out there, which I love and enjoy and didn't want to copy in any way, however small. So no happy waking up due to brotherly love here. Sorry. But Sam did the best he could.
Summary: For the current H/C meme at hoodie-time for this prompt::In hell Dean spent a lot of time retreating into his mind as much as he could/separating himself from physical pain and damaging words/Alistair’s mind games. In season seven or beyond when he finally reaches his limit, he retreats back inside himself again, presenting as non-responsive/catatonic. Sam knew his brother was in trouble, but he never expected this.
Warnings: Language. Not nice-ness.
Spoilers: Vague s7 references
Journey to the Underworld
It smells of damp earth and grass and blood. Sam hauls his eyes open and ohgod his stomach is on fire, the skin across his belly a mess of blood-soaked agony.
He blinks and blinks again, staring down at his abdomen. Overhead, leaves rustle.
They were in a graveyard, he remembers.
He’s cold, the tips of his fingers tingling, and he’s propped up against something solid and warm, legs stretched out across the damp grass. He shifts and the pain in his abdomen flares, but he can feel with certainty now that someone is behind him, that he’s propped against a chest with someone’s arm draped over his shoulder, someone’s hand resting on his bicep. He moves his head and it knocks lightly against the curve of a skull.
“Dean?” he says, the word dropping loud into the dark. He blinks up at the early stars, peeking through the leaves.
There’s no answer. When he moves to push the arm away, though, it’s definitely his brother’s sleeve. It’s as if Dean dragged him from wherever he fell, manhandled him into a sitting position, held on with both hands, and then just…stopped.
“Dean,” he hisses, cold chasing down the back of his neck. “Dean.”
No answer.
“Sh-shit.” Sam pushes himself forward, with difficulty, jostling the unresponsive form behind him. The pain flares again and he thinks he feels the slow weeping of blood, but his larger concern now is his brother. He drags himself around, ignoring the way his stomach muscles complain. Flails a filthy hand through the air, grabs for the pale shape of his brother’s face in the failing light. Dean’s head doesn’t move until Sam grabs it. His eyes are open and catch the fading light, glossy and strange. His mouth is open slightly and his face is smooth and empty.
Sam tastes the fear before he feels it, electric bright in the back of his throat. He nudges Dean’s shoulder, gropes for a pulse. Dean’s face doesn’t change. His eyes remain fixed and blank.
“Okay,” Sam hears, realized distantly his mouth is moving, that the words are his. “Okay, okay. Dean. Dean.”
His brother blinks, long and slow.
The sun drops below the horizon.
--
The journey back is a nightmare of red and dark and distant stars. The house by the dried up creek is half-fallen in and too close to the cemetery for comfort, and the wind is prowling the perimeter and edging in through the cracks, knocking dust and splinters from the ceilings.
Sam sits in the light of the camp lantern and watches his brother. His brother watches nothing at all.
“See?” Sam says, skittering his fingers over the white fresh bandages on his belly. “See, Dean? I’m fine. It looked bad, but…but I’m fine. Okay? Everything’s still okay.”
He swallows the thickness in his throat. The next words come out as an ache.
“Dean, see?”
--
There’s no money or insurance, and no hospital anyway, not for miles. Sam shines the flashlight in his brother’s eyes, watches the pupils react. Pushes a hand into his brother’s short hair. Shakes him a little.
“Dean,” he pushes out, high and thin.
His brother rocks gently with the motion. His hands are open and empty where Sam placed them in his lap.
“Oh God.” Sam covers his own face, mouth open and trembling. “Don’t do this. Please don’t.”
Dean’s bed roll is in one corner. Six hours ago he’d thrown it down alongside his duffel, bitched at Sam for some minor infraction, and traded a handful of barbs when Sam snapped back. He’d been as close to himself as Sam expected these days. Later they’d sat side-by-side one the tumbledown porch, going over the case notes and working their way through a six-pack.
Sam wonders now what he missed.
--
A sudden clatter yanks Sam out of an uncomfortable doze against the wall. He jerks forward and the noise of wind is suddenly huge and all-encompassing. He claps his hands over his ears before he remembers where he is.
Dean is sitting where Sam left him, propped up in the chair with his hands in his lap.
“I don’t know what to do,” Sam says. The ceiling crackles. Something larger than a splinter breaks away, tumbles through the dark. He can’t see it but the noise is unmistakable, the crack when it hits the floor gunshot loud. Dean doesn’t react.
Sam pushes off the wall, creeps closer. Gets up on his knees and nudges Dean’s shoulder, then grabs him and hauls him off the chair, clutching as tightly as he ever has, at any moment before or after death. Dean falls into him and his breathing doesn’t change.
“You’re gonna get dehydrated,” Sam gasps, around tears that won’t come. Cold air cuts through the room, in thin tendrils. Warmth tickles his belly. He’s bleeding again.
“I didn’t die,” he says, fingers digging into the back of Dean’s neck. “I didn’t die and I need you here, goddammit.”
--
He gets Dean to drink a little bit of water. He swallows mechanically when Sam presses the glass to his lips, and some of it dribbles from the corner of his mouth, which doesn’t close properly. Sam wipes at the water helplessly with the back of his hand.
“We should go,” he says, but he has no idea where.
Sam’s still holding on to his brother. Dean’s limbs are all askew, head nodding to one side, eyes still open. It’s been a handful of hours and the wind is rising, now, as the moon sets. Sam’s starting to wonder about the soundness of their choice of refuge. Things are raining down where the holes gape widest-a shower of particles, wood and old nails, shards of plaster. He can’t see it but the noise is unmistakable. The house wasn’t built to withstand this degree of buffeting, not with the structural damage it’s already taken.
“Man,” he says, staring into the dark, rocking Dean’s unresponsive form just a little, “I think we gotta go.”
--
They don’t go, though. Not for a while. Sam can’t bring himself to move, and it’s very little to do with his belly wound. It’s only that the noise of collapse is strangely hypnotic, the moaning of the wind threaded with nearly-familiar harmonies. Sam shuts his eyes and gently rocks his brother, though he doesn’t mean to. Doesn’t understand the source of the motion, which seems to rise directly from his body. One of Dean’s hands is resting on the floor and the other is open in his lap. Sam tries, once, to shut Dean’s eyes, pawing awkwardly at his brother’s face and dragging them down. They close with the touch but pop open again almost immediately, like a dead man’s.
Some funeral homes, Sam knows, glue them shut.
Some use thread.
“You fucker,” he whispers into his brother’s ear. “You fucker. You fucker.”
He’d thought Dean was coping. Not well, not in a healthy way. But Sam could never find it in his heart to begrudge Dean the things he needed to make it through a day. Even one day.
Enough, he’d thought, to hold it together. Barely, but enough.
The whole house shudders. Something huge shears off the roof and thunders to the ground outside. Sam digs his fingers tighter into Dean’s arms.
It’s coming down around them.
--
Sam drags his brother into the night. He can’t bring himself to leave Dean alone on the grass to go back inside and fetch their lanterns and duffels. And he can’t make himself let go. He’s not even sure what he’s holding on to, if his brother is even aware. And Sam’s not crying but he can taste the tears anyway, bitter at the back of his mouth. Ugly.
“We screwed up,” he whispers, afraid to raise his voice, afraid the wind and the tossing trees will hear. “We picked the wrong place, man. We screwed up bad.”
He listens to the old slate tiles tear off the roof and crash to the earth. Away in the distance the trees roar like the ocean. His hair whips in his face until he turns his face toward Dean’s shoulder, covers his eyes with his hands. His own skin feels hot, dry and feverish. Somewhere nearby is the car they’ve stolen. Branches rattle by in the grass.
Sam pulls himself together. Gathers his brother in, strikes out in the direction of the stolen car, parked at the bottom of the hill, at the end of the long gravel driveway.
Dean walks, not smoothly but steadily, guided by Sam’s arm around his back. The wind bites at their skin and the clouds tear across the sky, sporadically revealing stars. Madness burning in the vacuum, dead light of millions of years.
He arranges Dean in the backseat, struggles to lay him down enough to let his back muscles rest. The awkward position leaves his legs dangling, feet planted on the floor, one arm trailing down and the other flopped across his belly. His head lolls, eyes still open, and Sam rests a hand momentarily across their hollowness. He leaves it long enough that he feels the slow brush of lashes as Dean blinks, once.
Away in the distance, something huge slams to the earth. Sam flinches and jerks his hand away. He curls himself into the front seat, as much as possible. Rests one hand on his own belly, idly smoothing his fingertips over the gauze under his shirt.
They ride out the wind that way, in silence.
--
In the morning, Sam goes back to the house alone. He’s expecting a pile of rubble, a blasted ruin, maybe a smoking crater. But the house is still standing, though more damaged than before. Tiles litter the ground and the gaps in the walls have widened, more slats showing through. The floors are covered in plaster and the detritus of construction.
He collects their things as quickly as possible with his stiff body. Hauls the duffels out to the porch individually, doesn’t risk shouldering them both yet.
He pauses on the porch, long enough to nudge a lone crumpled silver can with his boot. The rest have blown over the side and are lying in the grass and gravel. He doesn’t know if this was one of his, or his brother’s.
It probably doesn’t matter.
Back in the car, he shuts the door softly, turns to look at his brother, propped up now against the window.
“We’ve gotta get some fluids in you,” he says.
Insurance or no insurance, Dean needs help.
Sam can’t take a deep breath, but he fakes it as best he can.
“Okay,” he says, as the car roars to life, and he eases her onto the access road behind the graveyard. “We’re getting out of here.”
The long drive to the nearest hospital is lonely in a way Sam’s never before experienced. No one behind him, no one to call. The countryside spreads out on either side and the sky is pale and stretches far away. He’s falling from a great height, hurtling alone through the bright void. There’s nothing to sustain him. Just the rush of motion, the silence all around.
He wonders if he’s being selfish. Wanting to get Dean back.
But what else can he do?
--
“Dean,” he says. Hangs on to his brother’s arm when nobody’s looking. Sits beside him in the common room. Listens to the quiet squeak of white sneakers, the clatter of patient-appropriate items (toys), the murmur of voices. He stays through the visiting hours and it’s an echo of his own time in a locked ward. And Dean’s body is just a body, and they give him drugs.
One day Sam is sitting beside the bed where Dean has been stretched out to stare at the ceiling. The cut on Sam's belly is mostly healed. He’s forgotten about it, for the most part. He’s got one hand wrapped around his brother’s arm, and is staring absently at the wall.
“The house didn’t fall down, you know,” Sam says, hears himself say. Surprises himself with the suddenness of it. He squeezes Dean’s arm a little but doesn’t look at him. Blinks at the wall, then down at his free hand, resting on his knee.
“I thought it would,” he goes on, more quietly. “I thought it would. But it didn’t.”
He doesn’t say anything after that. It’s so quiet he can hear Dean breathing.
Two weeks later, his brother wakes up.
Because they gave him drugs.
--
end
--
Note: I looked up treatment for catatonia, and apparently certain medications are used. In this case I really wanted to do something different from the other catatonia fics out there, which I love and enjoy and didn't want to copy in any way, however small. So no happy waking up due to brotherly love here. Sorry. But Sam did the best he could.