Memefic: Void; PG
Void
Summary: Short fic for the s7 Finale meme. Prompt: Sam raises Dean from purgatory and drags him to the nearest hospital. Unfortunately Dean's brain filter on monster talk seems to have been left behind in purgatory and he tells the hospital staff exactly how he got in the shape he's in and keeps asking for an angel named Cas.
Warning: Suggestions of violence, slight swearing
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Void
He follows the drawn-out scream to the surface but it’s still dark and tastes like blood, like desiccated skin, and he thrashes out a hand, an arm, claws at the surface under him, listens to more shrieks, inhuman noises, metal and shattering glass. Buzz and hum, the smell of ozone. Shouts like humans, like men, like women, voices and chaos, urgency without fear.
He’s alone. He’s alone and that’s wrong, but it’s usual. Typical. Hands fasten on his arms, his body, fever-bright in the dark. He gasps and someone murmurs, “It’s gonna be okay, shh,” which might be the worst thing he’s ever heard.
“Cas!” he manages, a cough more than a shout. “Castiel!”
“Shh,” someone says again, and something stabs him and turns the dark molasses-thick and hungry and he’s fighting and clawing but it opens beneath him anyway and swallows him down, down, all the way down.
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He wakes on a cold spike of adrenaline and his skin tries to slide off his body, but Dean’s alive and ready to fight and why can’t he see anything?
“Ssshit,” slurs out of the dark and maybe he’s said it, or something else, he can’t tell. He tries to touch his eyes but can’t move his hands. His arms. Tied down. Fucking typical.
“Cas!” he shouts, wrenches violently against the restraints, and spits out something thick and warm. “Castiel, where are you? Damn you to Hell, damn you…” he falls back, wheezing, clenching his jaw, and only then does he notice the softness, the feel of fabric against his bare arms and the back of his neck. He inhales and can smell it now, the reek of disinfectant, fabric softener, grease and sickness and humanity and hospital.
His hands spasm in their restraints. He twists his arms harder, doesn’t even stop when he hears someone step into the room.
“Where’s the angel?” he hisses in the direction of the approaching footsteps, and they pause, hesitate, before resuming their approach. “What did you do with him? Where is he?”
“You need to settle down,” the voice that probably belongs to the footsteps cautions, “Before you hurt yourself.”
Dean doesn’t know the voice. Can’t tell if it’s male or female. Doesn’t care. He swivels his head in what might be right direction, feels his face work itself into a snarl.
“What the hell did you do with Cas?”
“Calm down, please,” the voice murmurs, and there’s the unmistakable noise of a clipboard being lifted, fussed with. “There’s no one here by that name.”
Ice stabs through him and Dean stiffens.
“You left him? They left him there? Is he there all alone? Is he-”
“Calm down, please,” the voice murmurs, like anything it has to say matters. As if the world it lives in matters.
As if it’s real.
“Somebody has to go back,” Dean says, “Someone’s gotta get him out.”
But he can tell even without his sight that the voice doesn’t care.
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“Would you like to talk about the angel?”
It’s a new voice, this time. Younger, maybe. Smoother. Dean bares his teeth.
“You’re the ones who left him behind.”
“No one left anyone behind, Mr. Smith,” the voice demurs, without urgency. “Your brother brought you in.”
Dean’s mouth works for a moment without him, and when he finally makes a sound he doesn’t recognize himself.
“…Sam?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t come back. To…to see me?” It sounds like a question. Maybe it is. He barely remembers…but Sam wouldn’t leave him, right?
“No,” the voice says, “He did come back, several times. But we wanted to be sure nothing agitates you, until we can determine what’s happened to your eyes.”
He knows his mouth is hanging open.
“What?” he snaps. “My eyes? Who cares about that? There’s-I don’t know. Something ugly spit in them. But they’ll be fine.”
“You can’t know that for sure.”
“This is the second time it’s happened. I’m pretty damn sure. I want my brother here.”
There’s a long pause, punctuated only by the sound of scribbling, and the sharp rap of a period being jabbed onto the paper.
“What was it you said spat at you?” the voice asks, all innocence.
“I don’t know. It was dark, I couldn’t see. Some ugly thing like a snake, I guess. It had red eyes.” He pauses. “They’ve all got red eyes.”
There’s a brief, hard noise he doesn’t understand, and the voice says, “I see.”
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Sam doesn’t come. Dean tastes the air, picks up combinations of things he can’t identify. There’s no real air circulation so there’s not much information, but he guesses at perfumes, topical medicines, soaps and disinfectants. So different from what he’s used to. Different from anything that matters. No odor of mud or decay or anything familiar. There are no monsters, anywhere around. He’s pretty sure.
Cas doesn’t come. He asks, but no one knows where the angel is. Or, they’re just not telling him.
“Is that it?” he demands of the smooth voice, when it’s back in the dark space of the room. “You know where he is and you just won’t tell me?”
“No one is lying to you.”
“I want to see my brother.”
“Soon. I promise. Try to relax.”
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The day they take off the restraints, he makes a break for it.
He’s been blind before. He can still hear, and smell, and the floor here is smooth and unbroken and there are no sudden trees or roots, and if he doesn’t have Cas’s hand on his arm to guide him, well, he also doesn’t have to worry about suddenly getting turned into monster chow, either.
He forgets about the human threat. Forgets until he’s pressed against the wall, fighting and yelling his head off, and if he tried this anywhere else the monsters would be on him in a heartbeat, but here they don’t come.
He crunches someone’s nose, smashes through a cheekbone, and this time when they pull him down he knows he’s not getting out of restraints any time soon.
But it doesn’t matter.
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“We’re just going to keep you for observation,” the smooth voice says, after the bandages come off his eyes and the world is strange and translucent-bright. “For a few days.”
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He’s seen this before: the white clean rooms, the heavy doors. The woman who sits down with him, manila envelope and clipboard held between them. Efficient smile. Professional eyes. It was a long, long time ago, but he remembers.
“You mentioned an angel,” she says.
He looks up at her. Everything here is like smoke. Insubstantial. Meaningless. There’s no bite to the air, no sting, no distant cry, no smell of blood. The woman, the doctor, she’s a hollowed-out doll made of skin, light, and air.
“Castiel kept me alive,” he tells her.
She settles in the soft chair next to him. Nods her head around a bit.
“Can you tell me how?”
It’s always dark and always cold. A place without light or the possibility of light. Without the hope of warmth. Without.
Castiel is a hand up out of the mud. A presence at his back. A defense. A lightning bolt and the crack of thunder, of judgment. A scream, descending.
“He was there,” Dean says.
“Where?”
He shakes his head. “You don’t really want to know.”
“Hmm.” She taps her pen against her lips. He tracks the movement. If she happened to be a monster, he could maybe use it to slow her down some. Shove the pen right through her neck. Wouldn’t kill her, but it might buy him some time.
But she’s not. She might as well be a shadow, projected on the wall. He’s not even sure you can kill things like that.
“And what happened to your eyes?” she goes on.
“Uh, something…you know,” Dean waves a hand vaguely at his face, “Spit in ‘em.” He pauses, adds, “Again.”
“Something like…a snake?”
He nods. “Like that.”
“But…not.”
He shrugs. “I don’t know the name of every monster that exists. There’s stuff out there that’s been extinct since before I was born. Some of those things don’t even have names. Or, the angels have names for them, but I can never remember what they are. Cas doesn’t tell me half the time.”
“Where were you before this?” she asks again, peering at her notes. Conversationally, as if she doesn’t know she’s asking the same question again.
“Someplace else.”
“And you don’t want to talk about it?”
“I don’t want to scare you.”
She levels dark eyes on him. She’s probably about forty. Hair turning to grey. Not pretty, but with a strong jaw. Dean could shatter her skull without any effort.
He looks back at the pen.
“Are there any monsters here now?” she asks, still in that calm, conversational tone.
And that’s such an odd question. He takes a breath through his nose and flexes his hands, just a little, and shakes his head.
“No, of course not.”
“Any angels?” the question comes quickly. Her gaze is assessing.
“All the angels are gone,” he tells her. “Except for one.”
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Three days pass but they won’t let him go.
“Listen,” he says, “You have to let me…I have to find Cas.”
“Dean,” the doctor says, “It’s going to take a little time before you can head out, is all.”
He resists the urge to leap to his feet from his perch on the side of the bed. He presses both palms hard against the edge of the mattress.
“I want to talk to my brother,” he says, instead. “Where’s Sam?”
“You’ll be able to see your brother in a few days. We just need to get you settled.”
“No,” he says, and thinks he sounds remarkably calm, given the circumstances.
“It’s really not up to you, Dean,” she tells him, and there’s no particular emotion to the statement. Moderate professional authority, and that’s it.
He could kill her where she stands.
“How long?” he grates.
She says, “Why don’t you tell me about Castiel?”
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The day he embeds a man’s face in the drywall is the day they decide to move him to another facility.
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The big guard isn’t a guard and his face is familiar, like a hole gouged out of Dean’s head, suddenly filled. He nearly stumbles and Sam (Sam) grabs his shoulders with two big hands and hustles him along, quickly, toward the van.
“Be quiet,” he hisses, “Don’t say a word.”
So Dean is quiet, and good, and Sam disables the other guard and ties him up and rolls him into a ditch, and then they’re on the road, and Dean presses his hands together, suddenly cold all over.
“Thought you left me, Sammy,” he says, words thick in his mouth, and Sam shakes his head. Still shaggy.
“They wouldn’t let me near you.”
He nods, presses his lips together. Swallows.
“I’m sorry,” Dean says, looking at his knuckles, bruised and recently spotted with blood. “I know I…I said something wrong.”
“Well they wouldn’t have kept you so long, if you hadn’t.”
“It wasn’t really that long,” Dean says quietly. “Do you know what happened to Cas?”
Sam shakes his head. “I’ve been trying to get to you. But now that you’re out, we can…” he trails off.
“Yeah,” Dean says, “Okay.” He looks out the window at the dark treeline, the bright starry sky. Thinks about days and weeks, months, years, passing outside of time. Thinks about the simple purpose of existence. The singular mandate of Purgatory: Survive.
“I wonder if he remembers me,” Dean says.
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The end
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