Challenge fic: Vez Tanta Luz Que no Cabe en el Aire, PG13
Vez Tanta Luz Que no Cabe en el Aire
Spoilers: No specific spoilers
Warnings: Language
Summary: For the ohsam fic Challenge, for t his prompt: Sam wakes up surrounded by doctors who tell him that he has been in a medical experiment since birth and that his entire life has been a dream.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this is probably not what the OP had in mind. But sometimes a fic has a mind of its own.
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Vez Tanta Luz Que no Cabe en el Aire
-1-
The breeze runs along his fingers, over the backs of his hands. His skin trembles of its own accord. The smell of fresh earth and new grass creeps along his nose. He should sneeze, maybe. He would, if he could remember how.
Light fades into being. Slowly, and with the noise of wind, rustling in a tree. He can’t feel his face but the light grows, expands, the heaviness lifts, and it’s vision. It’s sight, the shapes of a world shivering into being. Puddles of darkness coalescing into shadows. Corners, walls, ceiling. A framed picture. Spider web. Window, cracked open. Green tree tops. Blue sky.
Someone gasps and there’s a noise of falling flowers. A woman’s voice, he thinks, and hauls his eyes from the window toward the door. The woman there is a smear of light and dark, but the hugeness of her eyes is unmistakable.
“Oh God,” she breathes, into the air that smells like spring. “Sam? Oh God. Sam.”
His mouth opens. Or maybe it’s been open for a while.
--
He’s sitting in a chair. He thinks it should be uncomfortable, that maybe it will be, eventually, but the slow creeping awareness of his own body has barely extended beyond his lips, the tips of his fingers, the skin of his toes. He breathes in, and out, slow and shallow. The woman comes into the room and there’s a shape behind her. A man. A big man.
“Sam,” the man says, “Can you look at me?”
His head won’t turn, his neck has no muscles or bone. His breath thins further as his heart makes its presence known, fluttering and strange. The world shifts and Sam’s eyes flicker to the new man. Forty five, he thinks, and Tired.
“I’m Doctor Thorogood,” the man continues, voice a low rumble. Sam’s never seen him before.
“This must be very strange for you,” the doctor murmurs, reaching out to grasp Sam’s wrist, thinner than Sam’s seen it since childhood. “But you’re a very extraordinary young man. Your situation, your story, it’s-”
“Doctor,” the woman murmurs. She smells of tangerines.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor says, and pats Sam’s hand, strikingly dark against skin the color of milk.
Dean, Sam wants to say. Where’s Dean? Where’s my brother? Where is he?
But he doesn’t remember how to make words.
--
The room has a bed, a chair, a dresser. A bowl of fruit on a nightstand. A vase of fresh flowers, plucked carefully from where they’d fallen and reassembled into a bouquet.
The woman brings in another chair and sits across from him. Takes Sam’s hand in two of hers. Smiles when he hauls his head around, away from the window, and meets her gaze.
She’s fifty if she’s a day. Her eyes are grey.
“Hello, Sam,” she says. “It’s been a long time.”
I don’t know you, he thinks. Can’t get his mouth to say, Who are you?
“D-” his tongue makes the consonant, jaw trembling with effort. “De.”
Dean.
“Sam?” she whispers, gripping his hand tighter.
“Dn.”
“I know you don’t know me,” the woman continues, eyes soft. “You haven’t seen me for a long, long time. Not since the accident. But I…” She pauses, and Sam thinks he catches a sheen of wetness in her eyes.
“D’n.” A whisper.
“I’m your mother, Sam,” the woman says, very quietly. She takes a deep breath, exhales.
“You don’t know how good it is to have you back.”
--
It’s two doctors this time. Thorogood and another man. Smaller, thinner, but no younger.
“It really is remarkable,” the new man comments, and Dr. Thorogood looks at him sharply.
“Sam can hear you,” he says. “Please try to keep that in mind."
“Of course,” the new man says, and to Sam, “I’m Dr. Yu. A specialist. We’re part of the team that’s been well,” he hesitates. “We’ve known you for a long time, Sam. Even though you don’t know us.”
Standing together, one small and dark haired, the other big and hulking, they remind Sam of angels.
Only less terrible.
--
Like a coma, they explain, and the woman (not his mother, nothing like his mother) adds to the explanation, conversationally over a bowl of soup.
“You seemed awake,” she says, “after the accident. Only you weren’t, not really. You could stand and walk and eat, if someone fed you.” She looks down almost self-consciously at the bowl on the tray in her lap. “And sometimes it seemed like…sometimes it seemed…” she pauses, dips the spoon, guides it to Sam’s mouth. “Sometimes it seemed like you knew who I was. Like you saw me. But the doctors said that…that it didn’t work that way. That you didn’t know me. That you weren’t even really seeing me at all.” She returns with another spoonful. Pauses halfway to Sam’s mouth.
“I’ve watched you grow up that way.”
When Sam opens his mouth this time, it’s to say, “Dean.”
--
He tries praying at night, in the bed with crisp sheets that smell like him. Castiel, he chants in his head. Castiel. Castiel. Castiel.
In the morning the woman helps him get dressed. She’s surprisingly good at it. And Sam’ surprisingly skinny, and slow.
“I don’t know what you like,” she says, as she buttons him into a soft, dark blue shirt. “You’ll have to teach me what kinds of colors you like.”
I never saw you, he can’t say. Where’s my brother. Where is he?
The doctors come back while he’s sitting under the tree in a low-slung lawn chair. The breeze is crisp and the sun is bright and clear. The two men are joined by a woman, barely older than Sam.
The new doctor is petite. She smiles and says, “Hello Sam. Your mother asked me to come. I’m Dr. Callow, I’m a psychiatrist.”
He fixes his eyes on her, then looks away.
“I know you can’t say much right now,” she continues, moving forward under the shadow of the tree. “But things must be very confusing for you. Since you woke up.
He says, “Dean,” quietly, because he knows the word won’t mean anything to her, to any of them. But the doctor draws a sharp breath.
“It’s true, then,” he hears, and then the other doctors mutter at her, words like unprecedented and complete awareness. He shivers a little. His fingers twitch.
“Sam,” the psychiatrist says, drawing closer, crouching down and resting her small hands on her knees. “How old are you?”
His lips part, and the word is thick when he pushes it out of is throat. His tongue barely moves.
“Old,” he slurs, thickly, and the doctor sits back on her heels and covers her mouth with her hand.
-2-
“Tell me about…the name you said,” she says. Her name is Bianca Callow and she insists he call her Bianca. Dr. Callow, she tells him, is so formal. “About…”
“Dean,” he says. His voice is still thin, raspy. The words come with difficulty, thick and rounded, clumsy. Clear and sharp in his head, foreign in his mouth. But he knows them all. Every last one.
“Is he someone that you…that you dreamed about?”
Sam shifts a little. It’s been two weeks. Words are a little easier. Just a little.
“My brother,” he manages, “Dean. He’s my brother.”
Bianca nods. The first time Sam talked, slowly and painfully, about before, he’d expected arguments. Refutation. No, Sam. You’ve been asleep. None of that was real.
But the doctor just listens.
“It’s…different,” Sam continues, haltingly. “Everything…everyone here here…is different.”
She smiles faintly.
“Different how?”
“It’s…quiet.” He shifts a little in his chair, the tiny movement an enormous, almost unconscious victory. “People here are just…people.”
He knows what he means. Can’t begin to convey it, yet, with his still-clumsy tongue and the cobwebs of twenty-eight years of sleep clinging to his brain. How can he describe the strangeness of it? The way the fantastic has the weight of the real, and this ordinary world feels no more tangible than a dream.
He looks down at his hands.
“I don’t remember,” he says. “The woman-her name-”
“Your mother.”
“But I-I don’t remember. Her face,” nose eyes cheeks mouth skin, “It’s a stranger’s face. It hurts her, but…she’s. A stranger.”
“She’s stayed with you all this time.”
He shakes his head, with some effort.
“Dean stayed with me.”
Dr. Callow sits back. She looks away, briefly, toward the window. The sun is clear and the air is bright. Sam stitches his fingers together. Tightens them.
“Is Dean here now?” the doctor asks, and her voice is so soft that Sam can hear the finches and the bluebirds in the bushes.
--
He doesn’t dream the way he used to. The memories are there, vivid and textured-the rush of wind, the sound of wet earth, the tackiness of blood and the taste of salt-but their mark on his psyche is muted. Faded. His dreams are light, formless, quiet. He never explodes out of sleep, never wakes himself with thin ugly noises or tearing gasps. Never wakes with fists clenched or body rigid, and never ever in the wet, clawing dark.
In the morning he opens his eyes and the sun paints the walls and the silence is huge and gentle, rolling out of the sky and drifting through the room, and for long moments and long breaths, Sam can’t remember how to be afraid.
“I was….guilty,” he tells the woman, as she putters around the kitchen, and Sam isn’t sure she can hear him. “The things I did…”
And he remembers. The sick horror at himself, and the shame. The endless clanging noise of it. He remembers, but distantly. His body’s forgotten how to feel it. The solid foundation of regret has evaporated.
“I’ve done terrible things,” he whispers, and the words are thin and meaningless in this place.
The woman says, “How do you want your eggs?”
--
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” Sam asks the doctor. They’re sitting side-by-side near the back porch, on lawn chairs. Birds flit around the trees.
She lifts her eyebrows.
“Don’t you?” he presses. “That I know the things I do, understand what I do?” I should be a child in a man’s body, he doesn’t have the strength to say. Can’t make his tongue form the words developmentally disabled. But the implication is there. And the fact is that he does know the words.
“How do I know these things?”
“TV,” the doctor suggests. “Your mother, reading to you…”
“No,” he says, simply. Not in protest, or distress. Just stating the truth.
Bianca frowns, briefly. Looks down at her hands. An unusually introspective gesture, Sam thinks, for a psychiatrist to use during a session.
“Sam,” she says, finally, “I’m not in the practice of enforcing a worldview for the sake of my own emotional security or mental health.” She pauses, casts him a fleeting smile, says, “Your case is unique in all the literature I’ve been able to lay my hands on. It’s clear that you understand a great deal. Far more than would seem possible, given the circumstances of your illness and…recovery. You…everything suggests you should still be a child-” she clears her throat, “The child that you were at the time of the accident. Just over two years old, in the body of a man nearly thirty. Yet clearly, you’re not. And nothing in the world seems to account for that fact.”
She looks away from him. Out across the lawn, where the sun moves over the grass in waves.
“Does this feel like a dream to you, Sam?”
And this time it’s Sam who looks at his hands: large and skinny, prominently knuckled. Skin still far too pale. Lucid dreaming technique, he thinks, and raises his head, but he already knows the answer. Knows the difference between sleeping and waking, between delirium and truth.
“No,” he says, and the word is absolutely true. “It’s not a dream.”
She draws a long breath through her nose. Nods.
“Maybe,” the doctor says, voice so low as to be nearly inaudible, “maybe you’re being rewarded for something.”
Sam says, “I don’t want to be rewarded."
--
“Your voice is different than I imagined,” the woman says.
He blinks, slowly. Everything about him is still so slow.
The woman (her name is, her name is…) smiles at him, with fondness, but there’s a weariness there as well.
“I thought…” she rubs the skin on the back of one hand with her thumb. “I thought that maybe you’d sound…a bit more like your father.”
He pushes his lips together. Shrugs a little, and for the first time he reaches out and lays one huge soft hand over hers. The skin is rough, aging. Drawing in on itself. He can feel the shape of veins and tendons, the rasp of dry skin on her knuckles.
“Maybe I’m not your son,” he says.
Doesn’t say, Maybe your son is dead.
Her name is Marianne.
--
I have a brother, he’d said. Out there. I can’t leave him alone. I can’t.
The doctor said, Where are you going to go?
Now the sun is gone and he’s standing under the awning looking out at the lawn. His underdeveloped legs tremble with the effort. They’ve worked harder in the past nine weeks than they have in the previous twenty-seven years, and already they ache. Sam can feel every bone in his (this) body, hanging like a necklace of stones. The weight drags at him.
It’s night and the woman is asleep, the doctor long gone. The stars are out, piercingly bright, and the sky careens away from him, opening and opening. Huge and pitiless. He searches the black for familiar constellation, but it was winter before and now it’s not. It’s the wrong season for Orion.
The house behind him is dark and silent. Insects and night creatures rattle and chatter in the grass, and away above the dark trees bats swoop.
It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. It’s real.
Sam takes a step away from the house, and then another. With great care, he manages not to topple over. His body cries out at this minimal exertion, in pain and exhaustion.
But Sam understands endurance.
He crosses the lawn, slow as a man twice his age. Every step is a tiny victory wrung from soft, incomplete flesh. It hurts, distantly. He knows it’s an insurmountable kind of agony. Knows that in a world like this, the words ‘I’m tired’ and ‘it hurts’ mean the same thing as ‘stop.’
Every footstep is like that. Stop. Stop. Stop.
But it doesn’t mean anything.
Your hear stories, Dean said to him, once. Crazy fucking stories. Shit you wouldn’t believe. Guys doing things you can’t imagine. Dean, eighteen and waving his hands around, eyes bright and fierce. I mean people get shot and play dead and they get chopped up and lie in graves and they hide out in fucking swamps, you know, up to their necks in slime and blood, or belly shot and crawling through the mud, you fucking believe this shit Sammy?
No way, Sam had said, and he’d been young enough to think there was some kind of a lesson in stories like that. Come to think of it, Dean had probably thought so too.
When his legs give out he’s at the tree line, the edge of the property. He’s not surprised when his knees fold up and hit the earth at that exact moment, and he stares into the dark under the branches and breathes in the still unmoving air. It’s a little forest, really, too wide to see the end of, ground thick with undergrowth.
Sam still has a long way to go. He gets up, manages a few steps. Falls. Gets up. Repeat.
He’s not going anywhere except away.
Or maybe toward. Toward a world bleeding out, but that doesn’t matter. That’s easy. The pain is just pain. His knees ache because he’s crawling now, and his palms are tearing.
They go with pieces torn out of ‘em. Go even though they’re dyin’ on their feet. They won’t make it. Never make. Guy got cut upon and laid in a swamp. Up to his neck in it. Dead bodies all over the damn place.
Sam’s joints creak. He can barely lift his own body, barely haul himself forward. His body’s losing the physical ability to keep going. But Dean’s voice is getting clearer. Closer, maybe. There’s a phantom sensation, like fingers on his arm. It’s dark. It’s dark. He’s trying to open his eyes.
Maybe he’s getting closer.
You got your feet all fucked up. Your hands, Sammy, Jesus, what the hell did you do to yourself?
His chest barely expands. His ribs press against the ground. He knows he hasn’t gone far. His fingers are gouged into the soil, caked in dirt. Maybe bleeding.
He’s looking for his brother.
The hell have you been all this time? Been lookin’ for you for days.
His eyes are heavy, barely opening. The air shifts, still as in an enclosed space. But he’s still got so far to go. Still breathing here, heartbeat here, bones and skin and muscle and life here here here.
You’re not dyin’ on me, you little shit.
No, Sam agrees, digs his fingers deeper into the earth, and hauls himself forward.
-the end-
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…he leaves them alone,
and sometimes they must crawl on all fours
in the burning sand
to reach the first-aid station
covered with blood.
--Yehuda Amichai
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Title is from Pablo Neruda’s Sick Man in the Sun. (El Enfermo Toma el Sol) I don't speak Spanish, so apologies for any mistakes or weirdness.
Last verse is from Yehuda Amichai’s God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children
And here is some music:
Gravedigger (Willie Nelson covering Dave Mathews)