Fic: Enthalpy
Title: Enthalpy
Summary: Horror, pre-series. Sam, Dean, John, and a monster in an abandoned school.
Enthalpy
But over shorter timescales we can see the emergence of evanescent
structures which survive for as long as the flow of matter and energy
continues. Indeed it is important to appreciate that a system can
only be held away from equilibrium if it is open to its environment: this
enables the entropy produced by the system to be exported to the
surroundings….
--Coveney & Highfield (The Arrow of Time)
I am nobody and always will be.
--Rainer Maria Rilke
--
U(S,V) (“internal energy”: the total energy contained by a thermodynamic system)
--
He stayed, and waited out the night. Rested with his back on the wall and ignored the twinges in his hips and spine as the hours crawled past, as the stars migrated across the sky outside. As the moon dropped out of sight.
Dawn drilled holes through the room’s single window, glass bright as fire in a world without stain. New and fragile, the morning. The clarity of light. Sunlight seared over his skin, and the floor. He stood up carefully, wincing at the ache in his back. Let his eyes scrape over the surface of the room-the white bare walls, floor like shining brass, window burning. Ignored the sad pile in the corner, the green shirt and denim, the blond-brown hair and hollowed skin. (Flaccid as a flag on a windless day.)
He stepped carefully across the floor, as quietly as possible. As if…it…might wake up. Open strange eyes, peer at him out of the dark. Accuse him.
He put a soft hand flat on the door-heavy, wooden, and old-and pushed.
It swung out without a sound.
Sunlight flooded the hallway, the space breathless and cold and lit suddenly from within, full of borrowed radiance. He cast one last look into the room, gaze skittering over the pile of fabric and flesh. Turned away. Gently pulled the door shut.
“It wasn’t anybody,” Dean murmured, and walked quietly down the hall.
--
H(S,p) = U + pV (“enthalpy": a measure of the total energy of a thermodynamic system, including the internal energy (the energy required to create a system) and the amount of energy required to make room for it by displacing its environment and establishing its volume and pressure)
--
Pushing up from the dark. (formless and without breath) He was heavy, cold, encased in silence. Something pressed against him, forcing him down, down, back into the dark. Into the earth. Clawed at his arms, its fingers like iron ….
“Can you feel your hands?”
The voice scraped across Dean’s hearing, and his head rolled on his neck. He gurgled, a little. Managed, after a second attempt, to force his eyes open, to jerk his arms weakly. Sam was practically sitting on his chest, clutching at his arms and yes, Dean could feel his hands. The creeping cold sliced through his skin and nerve endings alike and he spat out a brittle, crackling noise and yanked his arms free of his brother’s grasp.
“We’ve got to get up,” the boy hissed at him, eyes wide. “We’ve gotta go right now.”
“What-” Dean tried, but Sam was on his feet now and bodily pushing at him, as if his thirteen-year-old frame would be enough to shift his older brother’s much heavier body. Sam was tense, trembling, and Dean struggled against the weight on his arms and legs and pushed himself upright with difficulty, trying not to wince.
“Shit,” he hissed through tight-clenched teeth. The dark rolled around him. Hungry, and patient.
“Can you walk? Come on, Dean.”
He let his brother haul him, stumbling, out of a small room into a dark hallway, and sucked in a sharp breath at the flood of bright-white pain in his limbs as circulation returned. He had to concentrate to make his mouth work, and even then the words were rounded, damp, clinging to each other and sticky.
“Sam, where’re we?”
“Shh!”Sam jerked a glance up at him. “We gotta move now.”
His nerves coming online shivered up and down his legs and lashed at his arms and hands. Awareness of Sam’s hand grasping his own faded in and out as they staggered down the long hall together. Heavy walls, locker-lined and punctuated at regular intervals by doors, flanked them on both sides.
“It’s a school,” Dean realized suddenly. “We’re in a school.” Sam’s grip tightened reflexively.
“They’ll hear us,” he admonished hoarsely. “Dean.”
He managed to strangle whatever new sound he wanted to make, turning it into a thin breath of air squeezing out of his throat. Sam was leading him somewhere and that would have to be enough for now.
The school had a hollowness about it, a quality having nothing to do with the temperature or time of day. Moonlight clung to the surfaces of things. The walls were like dinosaur bones, enormous and silent, years away from the spark of light that once filled them, that chased away their dust and stillness.
The school was closed. The cool light falling on Sam’s hair and Dean’s hands flickered at the edge of an abyss.
Without warning, his legs buckled, and Sam couldn’t stop him from hitting the floor, the pain in his knees snapping up his legs and yanking a gasp out of his mouth. He shuddered.
Sam said, “They’re coming,” and hauled at his arm.
He wanted to ask, “Who?” But he drew a panting breath and got to his feet again, staggering a little. He was wearing soft shoes, he realized. Rubber-soled, lightweight, made for walking quietly. He rasped another breath and leaned on his brother.
Sam pushed them through a series of doors, flinching whenever hinges creaked or locks rattled. One heavy, overpainted door banged shut behind them with a rolling boom, and suddenly the ceiling was gone. Dean shuddered in the cold, and realized they were outside. The stars reeled above them.
They were in a concrete courtyard, blank windows staring down at them from four sides. Dean dropped his head back and stared up at the square of sky overhead, the black gap speckled with distant lights. He clenched his hands, fighting the tremble in his belly, under his skin. What was keeping him on the earth? He clutched at Sam.
“Are we,” he began, and stopped. His voice sounded thin, diluted. Like blood in water. The open sky dragged his words right out into the dark and Dean was left gaping soundlessly. His teeth clacked together when he shut his mouth.
“I’m not sure,” Sam whispered, small hand squeezing his. “I don’t know what-I thought it was D-Dad. We couldn’t find-you. We were looking and got split up. And then I f-found him again, but-” he swallowed. “Dean, something’s wrong with him.”
Dean shut his eyes.
“Dammit, Sammy,” he whispered.
--
A(T,V) = U - TS (Helmholtz free energy: a thermodynamic potential which measures the “useful” work obtainable from a closed thermodynamic system at a constant temperature and volume)
--
Dean wanted out. Out of this empty, hollowed-out ex-school. But he didn’t know where they were, or what floor they were on. The cold had gotten into his head and he was shivering randomly, eyes shutting, darkness yanking him backward. Sam pressed himself against his side, and his body was like a furnace. Almost a visible flame, whenever Dean shut his eyes. He clung to that beacon whenever he drifted too far.
He hoped to God his brother knew what the hell was going on.
They found a room with a stepped dais and stacks of tiny lockers in a corner, like cages. Sam declared it a music room. Dean wanted to stop, to sit just for a minute. Regroup. He needed to know…
“Sam,” he mumbled, “What was-”
“It-they can…they look like people,” Sam said, voice small in the empty room. “That’s why-you left, split up from Dad. And then we-we couldn’t find you and then I found Dad but, it wasn’t him.”
“Okay,” Dean tried to make his voice soothing. “Okay.”
“But then I found you. Oh God…” he trailed off, shivering, then shook himself sharply.
“We can’t stop here,” Sam went on. Dean let his eyes close, just for a moment, let them roll up in his head a little. His hands opened and shut spasmodically and Sam grabbed at him, at his arm, and that was when Dean heard the voice.
“Dean?” It called, coming down the hallway, drawing closer, “Sammy?”
Sam gasped, and made a little noise through squeezed-together lips. Dean fumbled a hand over in the dark, smoothed his brother’s hair.
“We gotta go,” he whispered.
“No,” Sam breathed. “No, it’s already too late.”
“There’s a door,” he insisted, tugging Sam across the room, toward a sliding door with a window in it. Pushing through they found themselves in a deeper dark, a windowless alcove that smelled of old dust. Sam made a small, despairing noise, and Dean turned to face the doorway. He heard the door in the other room open.
“Dean?” his father’s voice called. Dean swallowed.
“Stay close,” he whispered to his brother. “Stay behind me.”
“Dean.” Sam was trembling. A shadow shuffled into the doorway, indistinct, grainy in the poor light.
“Dean,” it said gently, sounding so much like his Dad. “Come over here, son. Walk to me.”
“Dad,” Dean murmured, in the same moment that Sam said, “It’s not. Dean, it isn’t him.”
“Dean,” the shadow in the door said, “Is that Sammy? Is he there too? I can’t see him.”
“Dean it’s not him.” Sam was pulling at his hand, voice shivering and low. “It’ll kill us both. Dad said, it’ll reach right inside. Right in-inside….”
“Walk to me, son,” his father’s voice said, and, “That’s not your brother.”
He opened his mouth but no sound came out. The cold was in his teeth and tongue; darkness unfurled in his skull. His skin shivered and he grasped Sammy’s hand more tightly.
“You’re not him,” he managed, finally, voice strange in the dark. Not what he’d been expecting. “You’re not-our Dad.”
“Son,” the…thing in the doorway blurted. “I’ve got Sam. He’s back at the car. He’s fine.”
Dean squeezed his brother’s hand. “It’s okay, Sammy,” he murmured. “I’ll get you out of here.”
Sam shuddered and drew closer as the thing in the door stepped into the room. Dean backed up, Sam clinging tightly.
“There’s no way out of here, Dean,” his father’s voice murmured. “Come on.”
And suddenly they hit the wall. Dean smelled old paint. There was nothing in the doorway, though. Nothing directly blocking their escape. He couldn’t hear anything but Sam’s short sharp breaths, and his own.
They broke for the door at the same moment, and Dean heard his father’s shout, felt strong fingers clutch at him, his arm and shoulder. He hit the doorjamb, hard, on the way through, and Sam never let go of him. Hand gripping like iron.
“God-” Sam gasped, pulling him toward the door into the hall. Dean’s arm and shoulder burned, fierce hot pain and when hard hands grasped at them he screamed.
“Dean! Come with me! It’s not your brother! Dean!”
He wrenched himself free and they ran, stumbling, into the dark. The noise of their flight echoed wide and clear all around as the walls flew away from them. It was all sky, he realized. A starless void. They ran through nothingness, feet flying across a gap, a thousand miles above the earth. A million. Dean couldn’t hear his father anymore, or Sam-just his own breath, his heart. His brother was still with him, though, hand a tiny flame burning in his grasp.
They reached the end of the hall and turned too late. Skidded into a row of lockers. The crash of metal burst around them and rolled away in waves. Sam’s hand slipped and he shrieked. Dean clutched at him and collided with something solid and it was the shadow of his father pushing him back, shoving him to the cold tiled floor, shoes squeaking and bones rattling.
“That’s not your brother!” shook the world around him. “But it doesn’t know. It thinks it’s Sam, and it’ll suck the life right out of you-”
Sam screamed wordlessly, high and scraping and endless. Dean forced air through his teeth, hard and hissing. Struggled to his feet, crashed into the lockers and into the mess of shadows, huge notDad, wrestling with tiny Sammy. Dean snarled, spat, “Get off him get off,” grabbed for his brother. Something squealed and his hands were full of little brother, both of them tumbling backward, spilling over each other. Dean yanked Sam bodily off his feet and ran. Sam’s fingers dug blunt and hard into his arm, into his ribs.
“They look like people,” Sam gasped, “They look like people.”
They tore down a flight of stairs and an unexpected door opened into the night, this time unbounded by walls or windows. Dean nearly went to his knees again and it was Sam who kept him upright, body like a furnace in the wild cold.
All the nearby houses were quiet, dark. They passed the Impala, empty on the road, one wheel hiked up onto the curb. They clung to the shadows and listened for the sound of pursuit. Once he forgot himself, gasped, “Cold, Sammy, God it’s so-” and watched his breath solidify in the air. Clamped his lips together when Sam squeezed his arm in warning.
They doubled back, like rabbits, stopping more than once to crouch frozen and breathless in alleys or the shadows of houses, waiting for a familiar, bulky figure to pass by. Slipping back inside the school they paced the long hallways, climbed endless stairs nearly to the roof. They found an office, tucked away next to what might have once been an art room. A single window looked out to the street below and Dean stared down at the white wash of streetlights on the naked asphalt.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed, and thought he might have said that already.
Sam said, “We should get away from the window.”
He nodded jerkily and slid back a half step. And when the door opened behind them, he was hardly even surprised. He turned around and flinched only slightly at the familiar grin like a slash of moonlight in the shadows.
“Found you,” it said, with Dean’s voice.
--
S = k logW (entropy: a macroscopic property of a thermodynamic system that is a measure of the microscopic disorder within the system)
--
He tried to move, to grab for Sam, push him out of harm’s way. But the air had gone ice-solid and he trembled in the cold. Sam’s fingers brushed his arm as the thing paced into the room on quiet feet. A long and ugly blade dangled from its fingers.
“I had this all ready for you,” it said. “And then you ditched me.” Sam whimpered and its eyes narrowed.
“Sammy,” it said, “Get over here.”
“No,” Dean gasped, this time managing to push his little brother behind him, “You can’t have him. He’s mine.”
It swung the blade a little, unhurriedly, head cocked slightly to one side.
“You made me chase you,” it said.
Behind him Sam breathed, “It’ll suck the life out of you. And they-”
“They look like people,” the thing said, smile broadening, “Right, Sammy?” It added, almost as an afterthought, “I found Dad.”
And here was their father, in the doorway.
“Sam,” it rumbled. “I’m sorry, son.”
Dean’s lips drew back when the blade pushed almost gently against the skin of his throat. He looked into his own eyes, bright in the moonlight.
“I’m Dean,” it whispered, out of his face. “I always have been.”
He shut his eyes. Sam was sliding away, around both of them, edging toward the door. He could feel him in the dark, a flame, a brilliant warmth. A light, an antidote to the cold and dark. (lifelifelife). Binding him to the earth, binding him. Giving him shape, meaning, reason. A name, a past.
But the earth was waiting for him, after all. Eternal, and patient.
He could see, now, with his eyes closed. See it in the doorway, and directly in front of him-a network of lights. A miniature constellation. Bonds of love, of family. Reaching out to one another. Interconnected, and real.
This time his knees gave out completely. When he hit the floor he opened his eyes. But it didn’t matter. The blade was cold and the blood that ran from the place where it pierced his skin dripped like ice water and soaked into his shirt.
“You’re not real,” he whispered, into the dark. Beyond the walls of the little room, deep down into the earth, into the cold and starless void. Where he lived. Where he came from.
What he was.
“Shh,” said the voice above him, the voice that he’d thought was his own. “Be quiet now.”
The dark opened up, and welcomed him home.
--
(“second law of thermodynamics”: the law stating that, during an irreversible process, entropy always increases. The future state of any isolated system has higher entropy than its present or past states)
--
He stayed, and waited out the night. To see if it would come back. See that it was really dead.
The moon dropped out of sight, and the sun rose. The stars winked out. The dark gave way, temporarily, to the furious light of life.
For a little while.
Dean stood up carefully, wincing at the ache in his back. Gathered up his machete, stained in the creature’s blood. His Dad had said it was some kind of shape-shifting, life-sucking thing, like a strigoi or moroi. Just another monster. He let his eyes wander around the room-the white bare walls, floor like shining brass, window burning. He ignored the sad pile in the corner, the green shirt and denim, the blond-brown hair and hollowed skin. (Flaccid as a flag on a windless day.)
He stepped carefully across the floor, as quietly as possible. As if…it…might wake up. Open strange eyes, peer at him out of the dark. Accuse him.
He put a soft hand flat on the door-heavy, wooden, and old-and pushed.
It swung out without a sound.
Sunlight flooded the hallway, the space breathless and cold and lit suddenly from within, full of borrowed radiance. He cast one last look into the room, gaze skittering over the pile of fabric and flesh. Turned away. Gently pulled the door shut.
“It wasn’t anybody,” Dean murmured, walking quietly down the hall.
“It wasn’t real.”
--
end
____________________
Huge huge thanks to hokuton_punch for previewing this and making sure it made sense. Thank you, darling!
Notes: This went in a completely different direction than what I originally intended when I started writing it. Basically, Sam was supposed to be the monster…but about halfway through the story started to twist in on itself, and suddenly I had a shell game on my hands.
The thermodynamics stuff is due mostly to the fact that I have an interest in the subject, and when I was doing the first draft, I wanted something to stick in the space between the 1st and 2nd parts, for the sake of pacing. For some reason I got stuck on the idea of wanting to use formulas rather than, say, additional verbiage, so I went looking for something that seemed to fit.
Finally, in my own defense I’d like to say that I don’t particularly care for German poetry, or for Rainer Maria Rilke. But I have a small collection of his stuff and wanted something simple to balance all the science-y stuff, so…yeah. But I’m really not that pretentious usually. Really.
Finally finally, I was mainly listening to The Flaming Lips Embryonic while doing the original draft. The story has nothing to do with the album whatsoever but…if you haven’t heard it yet, go and get it. (I don’t know that I’d necessarily recommend that you watch any of the videos though. Um.)
Summary: Horror, pre-series. Sam, Dean, John, and a monster in an abandoned school.
Enthalpy
But over shorter timescales we can see the emergence of evanescent
structures which survive for as long as the flow of matter and energy
continues. Indeed it is important to appreciate that a system can
only be held away from equilibrium if it is open to its environment: this
enables the entropy produced by the system to be exported to the
surroundings….
--Coveney & Highfield (The Arrow of Time)
I am nobody and always will be.
--Rainer Maria Rilke
--
U(S,V) (“internal energy”: the total energy contained by a thermodynamic system)
--
He stayed, and waited out the night. Rested with his back on the wall and ignored the twinges in his hips and spine as the hours crawled past, as the stars migrated across the sky outside. As the moon dropped out of sight.
Dawn drilled holes through the room’s single window, glass bright as fire in a world without stain. New and fragile, the morning. The clarity of light. Sunlight seared over his skin, and the floor. He stood up carefully, wincing at the ache in his back. Let his eyes scrape over the surface of the room-the white bare walls, floor like shining brass, window burning. Ignored the sad pile in the corner, the green shirt and denim, the blond-brown hair and hollowed skin. (Flaccid as a flag on a windless day.)
He stepped carefully across the floor, as quietly as possible. As if…it…might wake up. Open strange eyes, peer at him out of the dark. Accuse him.
He put a soft hand flat on the door-heavy, wooden, and old-and pushed.
It swung out without a sound.
Sunlight flooded the hallway, the space breathless and cold and lit suddenly from within, full of borrowed radiance. He cast one last look into the room, gaze skittering over the pile of fabric and flesh. Turned away. Gently pulled the door shut.
“It wasn’t anybody,” Dean murmured, and walked quietly down the hall.
--
H(S,p) = U + pV (“enthalpy": a measure of the total energy of a thermodynamic system, including the internal energy (the energy required to create a system) and the amount of energy required to make room for it by displacing its environment and establishing its volume and pressure)
--
Pushing up from the dark. (formless and without breath) He was heavy, cold, encased in silence. Something pressed against him, forcing him down, down, back into the dark. Into the earth. Clawed at his arms, its fingers like iron ….
“Can you feel your hands?”
The voice scraped across Dean’s hearing, and his head rolled on his neck. He gurgled, a little. Managed, after a second attempt, to force his eyes open, to jerk his arms weakly. Sam was practically sitting on his chest, clutching at his arms and yes, Dean could feel his hands. The creeping cold sliced through his skin and nerve endings alike and he spat out a brittle, crackling noise and yanked his arms free of his brother’s grasp.
“We’ve got to get up,” the boy hissed at him, eyes wide. “We’ve gotta go right now.”
“What-” Dean tried, but Sam was on his feet now and bodily pushing at him, as if his thirteen-year-old frame would be enough to shift his older brother’s much heavier body. Sam was tense, trembling, and Dean struggled against the weight on his arms and legs and pushed himself upright with difficulty, trying not to wince.
“Shit,” he hissed through tight-clenched teeth. The dark rolled around him. Hungry, and patient.
“Can you walk? Come on, Dean.”
He let his brother haul him, stumbling, out of a small room into a dark hallway, and sucked in a sharp breath at the flood of bright-white pain in his limbs as circulation returned. He had to concentrate to make his mouth work, and even then the words were rounded, damp, clinging to each other and sticky.
“Sam, where’re we?”
“Shh!”Sam jerked a glance up at him. “We gotta move now.”
His nerves coming online shivered up and down his legs and lashed at his arms and hands. Awareness of Sam’s hand grasping his own faded in and out as they staggered down the long hall together. Heavy walls, locker-lined and punctuated at regular intervals by doors, flanked them on both sides.
“It’s a school,” Dean realized suddenly. “We’re in a school.” Sam’s grip tightened reflexively.
“They’ll hear us,” he admonished hoarsely. “Dean.”
He managed to strangle whatever new sound he wanted to make, turning it into a thin breath of air squeezing out of his throat. Sam was leading him somewhere and that would have to be enough for now.
The school had a hollowness about it, a quality having nothing to do with the temperature or time of day. Moonlight clung to the surfaces of things. The walls were like dinosaur bones, enormous and silent, years away from the spark of light that once filled them, that chased away their dust and stillness.
The school was closed. The cool light falling on Sam’s hair and Dean’s hands flickered at the edge of an abyss.
Without warning, his legs buckled, and Sam couldn’t stop him from hitting the floor, the pain in his knees snapping up his legs and yanking a gasp out of his mouth. He shuddered.
Sam said, “They’re coming,” and hauled at his arm.
He wanted to ask, “Who?” But he drew a panting breath and got to his feet again, staggering a little. He was wearing soft shoes, he realized. Rubber-soled, lightweight, made for walking quietly. He rasped another breath and leaned on his brother.
Sam pushed them through a series of doors, flinching whenever hinges creaked or locks rattled. One heavy, overpainted door banged shut behind them with a rolling boom, and suddenly the ceiling was gone. Dean shuddered in the cold, and realized they were outside. The stars reeled above them.
They were in a concrete courtyard, blank windows staring down at them from four sides. Dean dropped his head back and stared up at the square of sky overhead, the black gap speckled with distant lights. He clenched his hands, fighting the tremble in his belly, under his skin. What was keeping him on the earth? He clutched at Sam.
“Are we,” he began, and stopped. His voice sounded thin, diluted. Like blood in water. The open sky dragged his words right out into the dark and Dean was left gaping soundlessly. His teeth clacked together when he shut his mouth.
“I’m not sure,” Sam whispered, small hand squeezing his. “I don’t know what-I thought it was D-Dad. We couldn’t find-you. We were looking and got split up. And then I f-found him again, but-” he swallowed. “Dean, something’s wrong with him.”
Dean shut his eyes.
“Dammit, Sammy,” he whispered.
--
A(T,V) = U - TS (Helmholtz free energy: a thermodynamic potential which measures the “useful” work obtainable from a closed thermodynamic system at a constant temperature and volume)
--
Dean wanted out. Out of this empty, hollowed-out ex-school. But he didn’t know where they were, or what floor they were on. The cold had gotten into his head and he was shivering randomly, eyes shutting, darkness yanking him backward. Sam pressed himself against his side, and his body was like a furnace. Almost a visible flame, whenever Dean shut his eyes. He clung to that beacon whenever he drifted too far.
He hoped to God his brother knew what the hell was going on.
They found a room with a stepped dais and stacks of tiny lockers in a corner, like cages. Sam declared it a music room. Dean wanted to stop, to sit just for a minute. Regroup. He needed to know…
“Sam,” he mumbled, “What was-”
“It-they can…they look like people,” Sam said, voice small in the empty room. “That’s why-you left, split up from Dad. And then we-we couldn’t find you and then I found Dad but, it wasn’t him.”
“Okay,” Dean tried to make his voice soothing. “Okay.”
“But then I found you. Oh God…” he trailed off, shivering, then shook himself sharply.
“We can’t stop here,” Sam went on. Dean let his eyes close, just for a moment, let them roll up in his head a little. His hands opened and shut spasmodically and Sam grabbed at him, at his arm, and that was when Dean heard the voice.
“Dean?” It called, coming down the hallway, drawing closer, “Sammy?”
Sam gasped, and made a little noise through squeezed-together lips. Dean fumbled a hand over in the dark, smoothed his brother’s hair.
“We gotta go,” he whispered.
“No,” Sam breathed. “No, it’s already too late.”
“There’s a door,” he insisted, tugging Sam across the room, toward a sliding door with a window in it. Pushing through they found themselves in a deeper dark, a windowless alcove that smelled of old dust. Sam made a small, despairing noise, and Dean turned to face the doorway. He heard the door in the other room open.
“Dean?” his father’s voice called. Dean swallowed.
“Stay close,” he whispered to his brother. “Stay behind me.”
“Dean.” Sam was trembling. A shadow shuffled into the doorway, indistinct, grainy in the poor light.
“Dean,” it said gently, sounding so much like his Dad. “Come over here, son. Walk to me.”
“Dad,” Dean murmured, in the same moment that Sam said, “It’s not. Dean, it isn’t him.”
“Dean,” the shadow in the door said, “Is that Sammy? Is he there too? I can’t see him.”
“Dean it’s not him.” Sam was pulling at his hand, voice shivering and low. “It’ll kill us both. Dad said, it’ll reach right inside. Right in-inside….”
“Walk to me, son,” his father’s voice said, and, “That’s not your brother.”
He opened his mouth but no sound came out. The cold was in his teeth and tongue; darkness unfurled in his skull. His skin shivered and he grasped Sammy’s hand more tightly.
“You’re not him,” he managed, finally, voice strange in the dark. Not what he’d been expecting. “You’re not-our Dad.”
“Son,” the…thing in the doorway blurted. “I’ve got Sam. He’s back at the car. He’s fine.”
Dean squeezed his brother’s hand. “It’s okay, Sammy,” he murmured. “I’ll get you out of here.”
Sam shuddered and drew closer as the thing in the door stepped into the room. Dean backed up, Sam clinging tightly.
“There’s no way out of here, Dean,” his father’s voice murmured. “Come on.”
And suddenly they hit the wall. Dean smelled old paint. There was nothing in the doorway, though. Nothing directly blocking their escape. He couldn’t hear anything but Sam’s short sharp breaths, and his own.
They broke for the door at the same moment, and Dean heard his father’s shout, felt strong fingers clutch at him, his arm and shoulder. He hit the doorjamb, hard, on the way through, and Sam never let go of him. Hand gripping like iron.
“God-” Sam gasped, pulling him toward the door into the hall. Dean’s arm and shoulder burned, fierce hot pain and when hard hands grasped at them he screamed.
“Dean! Come with me! It’s not your brother! Dean!”
He wrenched himself free and they ran, stumbling, into the dark. The noise of their flight echoed wide and clear all around as the walls flew away from them. It was all sky, he realized. A starless void. They ran through nothingness, feet flying across a gap, a thousand miles above the earth. A million. Dean couldn’t hear his father anymore, or Sam-just his own breath, his heart. His brother was still with him, though, hand a tiny flame burning in his grasp.
They reached the end of the hall and turned too late. Skidded into a row of lockers. The crash of metal burst around them and rolled away in waves. Sam’s hand slipped and he shrieked. Dean clutched at him and collided with something solid and it was the shadow of his father pushing him back, shoving him to the cold tiled floor, shoes squeaking and bones rattling.
“That’s not your brother!” shook the world around him. “But it doesn’t know. It thinks it’s Sam, and it’ll suck the life right out of you-”
Sam screamed wordlessly, high and scraping and endless. Dean forced air through his teeth, hard and hissing. Struggled to his feet, crashed into the lockers and into the mess of shadows, huge notDad, wrestling with tiny Sammy. Dean snarled, spat, “Get off him get off,” grabbed for his brother. Something squealed and his hands were full of little brother, both of them tumbling backward, spilling over each other. Dean yanked Sam bodily off his feet and ran. Sam’s fingers dug blunt and hard into his arm, into his ribs.
“They look like people,” Sam gasped, “They look like people.”
They tore down a flight of stairs and an unexpected door opened into the night, this time unbounded by walls or windows. Dean nearly went to his knees again and it was Sam who kept him upright, body like a furnace in the wild cold.
All the nearby houses were quiet, dark. They passed the Impala, empty on the road, one wheel hiked up onto the curb. They clung to the shadows and listened for the sound of pursuit. Once he forgot himself, gasped, “Cold, Sammy, God it’s so-” and watched his breath solidify in the air. Clamped his lips together when Sam squeezed his arm in warning.
They doubled back, like rabbits, stopping more than once to crouch frozen and breathless in alleys or the shadows of houses, waiting for a familiar, bulky figure to pass by. Slipping back inside the school they paced the long hallways, climbed endless stairs nearly to the roof. They found an office, tucked away next to what might have once been an art room. A single window looked out to the street below and Dean stared down at the white wash of streetlights on the naked asphalt.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed, and thought he might have said that already.
Sam said, “We should get away from the window.”
He nodded jerkily and slid back a half step. And when the door opened behind them, he was hardly even surprised. He turned around and flinched only slightly at the familiar grin like a slash of moonlight in the shadows.
“Found you,” it said, with Dean’s voice.
--
S = k logW (entropy: a macroscopic property of a thermodynamic system that is a measure of the microscopic disorder within the system)
--
He tried to move, to grab for Sam, push him out of harm’s way. But the air had gone ice-solid and he trembled in the cold. Sam’s fingers brushed his arm as the thing paced into the room on quiet feet. A long and ugly blade dangled from its fingers.
“I had this all ready for you,” it said. “And then you ditched me.” Sam whimpered and its eyes narrowed.
“Sammy,” it said, “Get over here.”
“No,” Dean gasped, this time managing to push his little brother behind him, “You can’t have him. He’s mine.”
It swung the blade a little, unhurriedly, head cocked slightly to one side.
“You made me chase you,” it said.
Behind him Sam breathed, “It’ll suck the life out of you. And they-”
“They look like people,” the thing said, smile broadening, “Right, Sammy?” It added, almost as an afterthought, “I found Dad.”
And here was their father, in the doorway.
“Sam,” it rumbled. “I’m sorry, son.”
Dean’s lips drew back when the blade pushed almost gently against the skin of his throat. He looked into his own eyes, bright in the moonlight.
“I’m Dean,” it whispered, out of his face. “I always have been.”
He shut his eyes. Sam was sliding away, around both of them, edging toward the door. He could feel him in the dark, a flame, a brilliant warmth. A light, an antidote to the cold and dark. (lifelifelife). Binding him to the earth, binding him. Giving him shape, meaning, reason. A name, a past.
But the earth was waiting for him, after all. Eternal, and patient.
He could see, now, with his eyes closed. See it in the doorway, and directly in front of him-a network of lights. A miniature constellation. Bonds of love, of family. Reaching out to one another. Interconnected, and real.
This time his knees gave out completely. When he hit the floor he opened his eyes. But it didn’t matter. The blade was cold and the blood that ran from the place where it pierced his skin dripped like ice water and soaked into his shirt.
“You’re not real,” he whispered, into the dark. Beyond the walls of the little room, deep down into the earth, into the cold and starless void. Where he lived. Where he came from.
What he was.
“Shh,” said the voice above him, the voice that he’d thought was his own. “Be quiet now.”
The dark opened up, and welcomed him home.
--
(“second law of thermodynamics”: the law stating that, during an irreversible process, entropy always increases. The future state of any isolated system has higher entropy than its present or past states)
--
He stayed, and waited out the night. To see if it would come back. See that it was really dead.
The moon dropped out of sight, and the sun rose. The stars winked out. The dark gave way, temporarily, to the furious light of life.
For a little while.
Dean stood up carefully, wincing at the ache in his back. Gathered up his machete, stained in the creature’s blood. His Dad had said it was some kind of shape-shifting, life-sucking thing, like a strigoi or moroi. Just another monster. He let his eyes wander around the room-the white bare walls, floor like shining brass, window burning. He ignored the sad pile in the corner, the green shirt and denim, the blond-brown hair and hollowed skin. (Flaccid as a flag on a windless day.)
He stepped carefully across the floor, as quietly as possible. As if…it…might wake up. Open strange eyes, peer at him out of the dark. Accuse him.
He put a soft hand flat on the door-heavy, wooden, and old-and pushed.
It swung out without a sound.
Sunlight flooded the hallway, the space breathless and cold and lit suddenly from within, full of borrowed radiance. He cast one last look into the room, gaze skittering over the pile of fabric and flesh. Turned away. Gently pulled the door shut.
“It wasn’t anybody,” Dean murmured, walking quietly down the hall.
“It wasn’t real.”
--
end
____________________
Huge huge thanks to hokuton_punch for previewing this and making sure it made sense. Thank you, darling!
Notes: This went in a completely different direction than what I originally intended when I started writing it. Basically, Sam was supposed to be the monster…but about halfway through the story started to twist in on itself, and suddenly I had a shell game on my hands.
The thermodynamics stuff is due mostly to the fact that I have an interest in the subject, and when I was doing the first draft, I wanted something to stick in the space between the 1st and 2nd parts, for the sake of pacing. For some reason I got stuck on the idea of wanting to use formulas rather than, say, additional verbiage, so I went looking for something that seemed to fit.
Finally, in my own defense I’d like to say that I don’t particularly care for German poetry, or for Rainer Maria Rilke. But I have a small collection of his stuff and wanted something simple to balance all the science-y stuff, so…yeah. But I’m really not that pretentious usually. Really.
Finally finally, I was mainly listening to The Flaming Lips Embryonic while doing the original draft. The story has nothing to do with the album whatsoever but…if you haven’t heard it yet, go and get it. (I don’t know that I’d necessarily recommend that you watch any of the videos though. Um.)