.0046 - Prodigy
Dean & Sam
761 words
Everybody Loves a Clown
Warning: You-form, Sam's POV
Teaser: It's a prodigy standing there in front of you. Prodigy or a redemption soul, you don't know. Don't know and don't want to know.
You stare at him, angry and confused by his silence, wondering if he has gone completely crazy and now only an empty shell is looking back at you. He doesn't say a single word, his expression doesn't change; there's nothing indicating that your words have even brushed his ears.
There's an ugly scratch crossing his pale forehead, a few smaller bruises on his cheeks and neck, and even darker and deeper ones low down inside of him. In a secret place that he will never let you see, safely locked away from the world.
You two don't fight. You never really have, not even growing up, beside the few altercations and pushes now and then, but for the last two weeks you've kept wishing he'd hit you. Just to show some kind of emotion. Any emotion. But there's nothing. He's like a puppet without its strings.
You desperately want to help him, but you don't know how when he's silent and there's nothing to read from. His face is a blank book with sharp-edged sheets and his eyes just a bottomless well of unspoken pain and unreasonable guilt.
He's hurting by the loss of Dad; of his leader, his burden, you can understand that. You feel the same. But there's more. There must be more, creeping underneath, hidden behind the curtains of the solid mask he's too used to putting on.
It's a prodigy standing there in front of you. Prodigy, or a redemption soul, you don't know. Don't know and don't want to know. You don't even want to think about it. About the price that was paid for his life, too happy to have him back, even though a little bit more damaged than he was before. And still you can't stop thinking about it, for your mind is probably the last thing you've got under control. You're certain he's thinking the same, because it's Dean. Always doubting miracles.
You sigh, giving it up. For now. Leaving him to stand there, under the burning sun, with the dirt upon him, inside him and all around. Just another wreck among tons of others. A wreck with a name and a broken soul. Bruised too many times.
You freeze in the middle of a step, when you sense him move and you turn back just in time to see his hands, wrapped around a crowbar, flying up and smashing the window of the nearby standing car. It shatters into a hundred small pieces, just like the walls he's built around himself, and which you can now virtually see crumbling like a castle in the air, leaving him exposed and vulnerable.
As he turns to face the Impala, the crowbar hovering maybe five inches above her, you can feel the breath hitching in your throat. You gasp with the first hard stroke that greets the trunk, writing a painful gape into the black metal. Over and over again, and you just stare at him, seeing the muscles in his back and shoulders tauten with the horrifying strength he puts into every blow, unable to understand why he's trying to hurt his baby even more than she has already been.
You want to stop him and drag him out of there. Your hands almost tremble, clenching into fists as you fight your basic instinct to walk straight over there, pull him into your arms and just hold him. But you know that it might be the last thing you would have done in your life if you even tried to. Considering the rage that is now basically rocking through his body, he would most probably smack you and kill you with the damn crowbar.
Maybe this is what he needs to do. Maybe he needs to let his desperation, and the inability to change the path that was laid in front of him without his foreknowledge pour into anger and destroy something, anything that's within his reach. Surely it's better than if he kept destroying himself from the inside.
When the crowbar slips from his fingers, lifting a cloud of dust as it lands on the ground, and he follows bare seconds later, as if he has all of a sudden stopped to fight gravity, you pretend you don't see. Pretend you're not even there, because that's what he thinks when he clutches his temples with his gloved fists, rocking back and forth, trying to keep his overwhelming emotions under control.
You walk away, breathing hard and wiping your watery eyes with the heels of your hands.
Knowledge doesn't always make things better.
761 words
Everybody Loves a Clown
Warning: You-form, Sam's POV
Teaser: It's a prodigy standing there in front of you. Prodigy or a redemption soul, you don't know. Don't know and don't want to know.
You stare at him, angry and confused by his silence, wondering if he has gone completely crazy and now only an empty shell is looking back at you. He doesn't say a single word, his expression doesn't change; there's nothing indicating that your words have even brushed his ears.
There's an ugly scratch crossing his pale forehead, a few smaller bruises on his cheeks and neck, and even darker and deeper ones low down inside of him. In a secret place that he will never let you see, safely locked away from the world.
You two don't fight. You never really have, not even growing up, beside the few altercations and pushes now and then, but for the last two weeks you've kept wishing he'd hit you. Just to show some kind of emotion. Any emotion. But there's nothing. He's like a puppet without its strings.
You desperately want to help him, but you don't know how when he's silent and there's nothing to read from. His face is a blank book with sharp-edged sheets and his eyes just a bottomless well of unspoken pain and unreasonable guilt.
He's hurting by the loss of Dad; of his leader, his burden, you can understand that. You feel the same. But there's more. There must be more, creeping underneath, hidden behind the curtains of the solid mask he's too used to putting on.
It's a prodigy standing there in front of you. Prodigy, or a redemption soul, you don't know. Don't know and don't want to know. You don't even want to think about it. About the price that was paid for his life, too happy to have him back, even though a little bit more damaged than he was before. And still you can't stop thinking about it, for your mind is probably the last thing you've got under control. You're certain he's thinking the same, because it's Dean. Always doubting miracles.
You sigh, giving it up. For now. Leaving him to stand there, under the burning sun, with the dirt upon him, inside him and all around. Just another wreck among tons of others. A wreck with a name and a broken soul. Bruised too many times.
You freeze in the middle of a step, when you sense him move and you turn back just in time to see his hands, wrapped around a crowbar, flying up and smashing the window of the nearby standing car. It shatters into a hundred small pieces, just like the walls he's built around himself, and which you can now virtually see crumbling like a castle in the air, leaving him exposed and vulnerable.
As he turns to face the Impala, the crowbar hovering maybe five inches above her, you can feel the breath hitching in your throat. You gasp with the first hard stroke that greets the trunk, writing a painful gape into the black metal. Over and over again, and you just stare at him, seeing the muscles in his back and shoulders tauten with the horrifying strength he puts into every blow, unable to understand why he's trying to hurt his baby even more than she has already been.
You want to stop him and drag him out of there. Your hands almost tremble, clenching into fists as you fight your basic instinct to walk straight over there, pull him into your arms and just hold him. But you know that it might be the last thing you would have done in your life if you even tried to. Considering the rage that is now basically rocking through his body, he would most probably smack you and kill you with the damn crowbar.
Maybe this is what he needs to do. Maybe he needs to let his desperation, and the inability to change the path that was laid in front of him without his foreknowledge pour into anger and destroy something, anything that's within his reach. Surely it's better than if he kept destroying himself from the inside.
When the crowbar slips from his fingers, lifting a cloud of dust as it lands on the ground, and he follows bare seconds later, as if he has all of a sudden stopped to fight gravity, you pretend you don't see. Pretend you're not even there, because that's what he thinks when he clutches his temples with his gloved fists, rocking back and forth, trying to keep his overwhelming emotions under control.
You walk away, breathing hard and wiping your watery eyes with the heels of your hands.
Knowledge doesn't always make things better.