(no subject)
Title: Nuclear Winter
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Dean, Crowley, Lucifer, Michael
Rating: R
Summary: Sam’s soul is still in Hell. From there, he sees everything.
Spoilers: through 6.08.
Word Count: 4,884
Disclaimer: I claim nothing.
Notes: Concept of Hell directly influenced by Dante.
Thank you to zelda_zee for betaing.
Thank you to raynemaiden for scientific consultation.
In fifth grade science (and sixth at Jefferson in Fayette), they taught about layers. First, the epidermis with its five strata, its padding of dead cells and its cells containing melanin. Then, the dermis with its two sub-layers, its blood cells and nerves, hair follicles and sweat glands. At the bottom, the subcutaneous layer, insulating, connecting the skin to the body.
Sam didn't need school to tell him about the density of these layers, how the same depth of a cut requires stitches just above the eye and a simple application of generic antibiotic on the heel of a hand. How a mercurochrome smiley face drawn on his knee by Dean would fade from the surface just like the red, raised abrasions, but the USMC tattoo on Dad's arm would stay under his skin, bleed out onto his sons and stain them in ways that couldn't be seen but would not wash away.
Sam grew up knowing that most layers remain hidden.
Above him now, layers, like floors of an impossible house, separate him from the surface. Somewhere at the top, grass ripples like hairs, roots down into the dirt. Dig as far as you wish, you'll have more luck reaching China than the next layer. But it's there. This subterranean space of green cells that hold the dead, enveloping them in a mockery of life. Beneath it, a pocket of air like heated breath, a space for crawling on hands and knees like dogs, for tumbling to the ground. But there is no ground, only another layer. A thick layer of mud that mortars nothing together. It's weightless compared to the next layer, where the wealth of the world sits heavy on empty chests. The fifth layer, with its drowners and thrashers, moats the mean from the malevolent, wets the walls with blood and tears, but will not wear them down. This structure is old, its foundation built to last. It goes down deeper to a layer of tombs that line up one by one, plot by plot. This is where you find the flames. The seventh splits off from the fire, bringing the burning out of the desert and into the trees, not stopping at the river, but boiling it. Below, a wasteland catches the filth, twists the bodies in tortures of industry, with its tar and lead and hooks and teeth. It's too far down to fight off disease. The ninth layer is the pit, the cold unfinished basement, flooded, filled with bogeymen and ice that bites. No heat reaches here. No heat in Hell.
Sam would gladly burn.
He remembers sunburns and brushburns. The blue flame of gas that blistered his skin when he tried to make chicken noodle soup for Dean. The scald of sun-heated black metal when he crawled up the car's hood to draw on the dusty windshield. The screaming pain from a flare that went off too soon, the warm blackness that followed, and the scorch of feverish hands that brought him back to the light again.
Sam remembers the moments, but there's no sense memory. No heat from within, when he's turned inside out here.
Above, the demons dance, shake the ceiling until the stalactites of ice sway like chandeliers, then break. Above them, the souls pay while more demons play with them. Above them all, a man walks around, wearing Sam's clothes, wearing Sam's skin. Layers of fiber and follicle, skin cells and blood cells, meat and marrow. But the man's an empty pocket. A sack of flesh, flayed and cleaned and stitched together.
In seventh grade, Sam read Mary Shelley. He didn't have to, to know what this man is. And what he isn't.
This dead, sloughed-off shell. This reanimated overcoat of Sam. He gets to touch the water that steams the shower. He gets to burn his tongue on stale coffee from the kwik-e-mart. He gets to shield his nose and mouth from the smoke of salted bones. He gets to sit on the sun-baked leather of the bench seat that spans passenger side to driver's side in the Impala that Dean, once again, drives.
But he doesn't feel what Sam feels.
Here, beneath layers so deep no blade can cut through, Sam sits in a cell of ice. His body here is no body at all, but a thin, threadbare patchwork of spirit pinned together by thought alone. But it's more real than the other one. It can feel the teeth of cold wind, can feel the sting of sleet when the ice shards fall and the slow seeping in when he falls too.
Lucifer laughs every time Sam loses his footing on the icy floor. He delights at slapstick. For all his superiority, his taste belies a baseness suited to the angel who fell the farthest. Or so Michael tells him. Every time. They argue in an endless loop. Some time ago, he no longer knows when, Sam stopped listening. Now they are white noise, like wind.
Sam stopped looking for Adam a while ago too. He thinks he's here, assumes he should be. But the cage is vast; he's walked for hours, maybe days, and still has not found the bars. Just more ice, just more darkness on the edges like a promise.
“I promise you, you won't find the door,” Lucifer once said. But Sam kept walking until, exhausted, he fell. And Lucifer laughed. And Michael pointed his finger at his brother. And Sam told them to leave him alone, though they never do. And he called out for his own brother.
Adam never answers.
Dean does. But he's not answering Sam, although he thinks he is.
Every time that man says, “Dean,” Sam hears his name in response. The sound slices straight through Hell, through the space of it and all the time. Sam has tried, but he can't reach that far, can't make his voice carry back up. He can only sit and listen.
And he can see. He can see everything as clear as if it was right in front of him, though there's nothing in front of him but blackness. He's tried to put his hand out to it, but it comes away cold. At first, he thought he was hallucinating. Then reliving memories. Daydreaming. But now he knows-he thinks he knows-that what he sees and hears is what's really going on, far above, far away from Hell, up there on Earth.
The first time he realized it, he cried at the sight of Dean. His brother was wiping his nose on his shirtsleeve, sneezing at the pollen he kicked up while he mowed the lawn. He was framed in leaves, a small figure in the distance. Sam knew he was watching Dean across a suburban street, through hedges. But he didn't know he was watching through his own eyes until the first time he heard his own name.
It took a while. In fact, it took way too long to understand that what he has seen, what he has seen done, has been him. Some part of him still walks and talks and touches and tastes. It takes in food and drink and expels them. It fucks and fights and bleeds. It does not sleep.
Sam wishes it would. He could use the rest. The bloodshed, the broken bones, the little girl who got caught in the crossfire, the middle-aged man who didn't run fast enough. He's seen it all. He's seen what that Earth-bound part of him has done with his own hands. He watches the world through his own eyes; it's like looking through the wrong end of a barrel of a gun. He screamed the first time an innocent died and he saw himself step over the body. He raged at the carelessness, he seethed, he yelled loud enough to shout down Hell. If you could. But Michael told him you can't, and Lucifer just grinned.
The angel of light brings lies. But they're nothing compared to the ones that Sam hears from above, spilling so easily from those lips that were his.
The sound of his own lies bullets through the darkness, a direct hit every time. This man in Sam's skin bares his teeth at Dean, and Dean takes it as a smile. Sam smiled too when the truth came out and Dean threw the first punch, then another, then another. Down here, he couldn't feel a thing, not an ounce of physical pain. But the pain of seeing that look on Dean's face wiped the smile from Sam's. He doubled over, retched up air. He coughed until he cried, and the tears froze and fell, breaking like glass at his knees. It distracted him. The splinters of ice sticking, sinking into his fingers, where they would not melt. When he looked up again, Castiel was there, reaching out, his open hand reaching toward him. The wind shifted, featherlight against him, and a dull glow pierced the darkness. Sam strode toward it, ice-cut fingers extended. He walked and walked, then ran, sliding on the glass-smooth floor. Still, he got no closer. Then the light blinked out, swallowed by black, a swift gust of wind sweeping up after. It was shrill at his ears. But he heard the pronouncement.
He didn't need Castiel to tell him about his soul. He knows where he is.
Sam knows he's missing from the physical world. But it's forever until he learns that he can still feel physical pain. Looking past a sign with a pink cartoon pig on it, he watches cars go by, rattling gravel on asphalt. When Dean carries out his lunch, Sam notices how tired his brother looks, skin too gray. Too weary to take much more, and yet he takes it all. This burden that never lifts from his shoulders, Sam would bear it for him. If the King of Hell could slice Sam up, separate him to suffer each torment of Hell-each circle, each subset-simultaneously, Sam would ask him to. He would beg for it. He would break himself apart and do it himself if he could. But he can't. And the King of Hell cares nothing for the souls he already has. The King of Hell isn't even here. But Sam turns his head, and sees him.
Crowley crowds behind Dean, a black grin emerging from his moonface like a mock Cheshire cat. With a glance, he looks straight through the sockets of Sam's eyes and down into Hell. He looks right at him. He sees what Dean can't. His sight outreaches Castiel. His touch reaches farther still.
Sam feels it, the burn on the back of his hand. Beneath Crowley's finger, Sam's skin glows hot. But beneath the Earth, in the frozen pit of Hell, Sam's soul burns cold, blasts with pain, a nuclear chill, coming on fast and unrelenting, needling him from the outside in. No pain on Earth matches it; his memory has no point of reference. It shakes him apart, splits him and empties him. It fills him with cold fear, colder than he's known, above or below. In his entire life, he's never felt such fear. It encompasses all. Fear for himself, for Dean, for Bobby and Samuel and Lisa and Ben. For Jessica wherever she is, and Mom and Dad wherever they are too. For every person, for every soul from here to Heaven.
When it's gone, when Crowley's done, Sam still feels it. He does not feel Michael's hand on his shoulder, but he offers him a smile and pretends to be reassured.
Sam looks at Lucifer and sees a small, shriveled beast, beating his flightless wings.
Here in Hell, Satan is little more than a gargoyle. For once, Sam empathizes with him, feeling impotent too. He's powerless down here. A ghost would have greater presence.
What comes out of his above-ground voice next weakens Sam even more. Of course he knew all along that they share the same memories, but he wasn't fully aware until Sam-above said so. The knowledge emerges from the shadows of Sam's mind, bright with hope and brittle with fear. He doesn't know how to get out of this cage, doesn't know if he can. But if there is a chance, he thinks it might lie in that connection. Maybe memory will make him whole again.
Or maybe it will break him.
There are memories that his soulless self cannot manage alone. Memories that might incite action. In and of themselves, the memories Sam's most afraid of are quite passive. But without any guidance, will that man above know the difference?
Sam remembers things that did not happen, never would happen. Things he wanted, things he wanted so badly he could taste them. It was almost enough. It sufficed. He stuffs them deep inside, now, hoping that will keep them safe, keep them hidden.
When it comes, he's thinking of pink elephants, trying to trick his own mind. He does not know if he failed or if the man above dug around and pulled it out on his own. All he knows is skin and heat and the rush of blood in his ears. The skin he can't touch, the heat cannot reach him. But he remembers it somehow, almost tangible. The thrill of the hunt sends adrenaline through his veins and he smells his own sweat. And he smells Dean's too, along with the onions he'd eaten at dinner, the residue of motel soap, the faint musk of his deodorant. Sam remembers this. Hunting a yenaldooshi in Clovis, Dean tripping and rolling into a ditch as it ran past him. Dean shooting it in the heel and Sam finishing it off with a bullet through the heart. He remembers bending down to pull Dean up, arm wrapped around him, fingers slotted into the spaces between his ribs. He remembers looking into Dean's face, that cocky lopsided grin crinkling up to his eyes. So close, pressed to him, and yet Sam wanted to be closer, was overwhelmed by the desire to press inside him. Dean's mouth opened. Sam doesn't remember what he said, just that he laughed, told Dean to “come on,” and the night went like any other night from there: cleaning up their mess, limping back to the car, hightailing it out of there and collapsing in their beds.
The memory fades, lingering in its exit though it came on so sudden.
Sam stares into the darkness. Somewhere up there, his body stares out into the night through a waterstained window. In its filmy reflection, Sam sees Dean asleep in bed. He sees his own face, devoid of expression. But he knows the damage is already done.
When Dean had said that he wants his brother back, how could he have known that Sam wants that too, but that it's a loaded longing, greater than loneliness? If he knew the truth, maybe he'd prefer a soulless Sam after all.
Light lifts the dark from the horizon. But it's not the dawn that's breaking, it's him. The new day promises nothing but more of the same.
Sam stopped counting the days above sometime after they hit double digits. The sun rises, the sun sets, and Sam sees them all through sleepless eyes. But they blur together, as indistinct as the repetitions of daily routine. Down here, it all expands. He watches Earth in real time, feels it in hellish suspension. It takes too long. It doesn't take long enough.
Sam's still waiting for a change. And dreading what it might be.
✧
At every school across the country, Sam’s history teachers stressed the importance of dates, hammered home the numerology of 1066, 1215, 1776, 1945. It was not until ninth grade in Bend that Sam encountered a teacher who didn't care about dates. She said she wanted them to know what happened, why it happened and what the consequences were; the dates and names would fall into line after the bigger specifics.
So it is that Sam forces himself to remember free-falling into the opening in the earth and the apocalypse that lead to it. But no matter how many times he goes over it all, he can't remember the date. 2010 sounds right, but was it April or March? He remembers the chill in the air, the gray sky. Maybe it was November. He doesn't know how much time has passed since then, but Dean hasn't aged much, besides a new set of lines between his brows when he frowns. Every time Sam hopes to catch a glimpse of the date on a newspaper or the laptop, he can't focus in, his eyes no longer under his control. It's as if that Sam has some sort of internal timepiece, never needing to consult a calendar or clock.
The fact remains that Sam needs no knowledge of date and time to measure the consequences of his actions. They're becoming more apparent every immeasurable day.
Like clockwork, Sam-above showers before Dean wakes up each morning. He only showers at night when bloodied or crusted with dirt or worse. One day, Dean comes out from his shower with a too-small towel barely wrapped around his waist, a few inches of hip and thigh showing where the terry cloth ends do not meet. He's bitching about the size, but Sam doesn't hear it. All he hears is the rush of blood through his ears and the quickened precision of his heartbeat. But it's not his own; he has no heart or blood down here.
Above, that other Sam rises from his seat at the desk and walks up behind Dean. He says, “Well, it's better than nothing, right?” And he yanks the towel off of Dean, balls it up one-handed and throws it through the open bathroom door. Before Dean says a word, Sam's back at the desk, typing away. But he's watching Dean from the corner of his eye. Sam waits for the cursing, the shoving. But Dean only stands there, spun around, gaping at Sam like he's been possessed. Dispossessed, as the case may be. Sam sees it all through the periphery: Dean's shower-pink skin, the wiry hair between his legs, his dick soft and curving down, uncovered.
He's suddenly lightheaded. But it isn't him. It isn't just him.
The next time Sam hears Dean's voice, he's asking about leads on the case. Everything goes back to normal.
✧
On the way out of town, three nights later, they stop at a bar and hustle pool. This Sam excels at it in a way Sam never did on his best night, playing up his clumsiness and smirking when he sinks every single one of his shots. But tonight he leaves Dean alone, following some frat boy into the men's room.
Sam doesn't feel anything when his counterpart walks up behind the kid and pulls his zip down for him. Instead of piss, the urinal's splattered with semen when he's done. All of it, Sam observes from a distance. It's not just because of where he is, but that Sam-above offers nothing, goes through it as mechanically as he does masturbation, a release of bodily fluid like any other.
But then the kid goes down on his knees, and Sam's overcome with the memory of Dean naked, the details sharp and hyper-real. He knows the other Sam is getting hard now, but it's secondary to other memories that tumble after. Memories of walking in on Dean fucking a waitress (Jolene her name tag had read, like the song) in the front seat of the Impala, of finding Dean getting sucked off at a truck stop behind an eighteen-wheeler (a smiling white bear and Bimbo unironically painted on its side). Memories of sleeping with Dean when they were too big to share a bed, but there was only one and Dad was passed out on the sofa. Memories of being too close, being too keyed up, seeing too much, because there was no room for modesty and shame was a luxury and too much of it was already taken up by Sam's feelings for his brother.
“Dean,” he hears from the voice that used to belong to him.
Suddenly, Sam doesn't see the frat boy, but his brother, standing in the doorway of the men's room, fist white-knuckled on the jamb. He looks hurt. Sam doesn’t know why he looks so hurt. His eyebrows pull together, not in anger, but pain. Until now, Dean has never seemed small. Sam wants to hold him, curl up under him until he remembers his true size, his hidden strength beneath the mask and the muscle. He wants to hold Dean close until he remembers who he is, his big brother. His alone.
Sam hears his name drop pin-light from Dean’s lips, and the reaction comes blasting bright.
Most of his orgasms barely reach Sam here, but this one slams into him. Shuddering, he falls against a stalagmite of ice for support. Lucifer slinks up to him, sniffing close and appraising him with squinted eyes. It distracts him from the action above, where Dean's dragging the kid off, ripping a stream of paper towels from the dispenser and thrusting them in his face where the paper sticks to Sam's come. Dean's telling Sam to zip up and get going, catching the swinging door and pushing through, already clutching the car keys.
The response to this is a grin, a wide grin that Sam feels like a slit across his face.
He shoulders Lucifer out of the way and walks off into the darkness.
✧
Sam wishes that shell of himself up there would have let Dean alone. Dean was better off thinking Sam was dead, because he's only half alive anyway. He wishes that Sam would have hunted the djinn and everything else on his own, never let Dean see his face, never showed it to Bobby either. If wishes were horses, Sam would ride a team of them straight out of Hell. And rescue Dean from himself.
All those layers Sam built up to keep things the way they should be between him and Dean keep thinning out. If they were physical things-if he was one too-he could poke a hole through them with little effort. Dean was never supposed to know. But that soulless creature wearing his skin, using his name concerns himself with no one but himself. Sam could almost feel sorry for him, knows he's only unearthing those memories to put himself back together again. But without the most important piece, it's a futile effort.
Tenaciously, he keeps at it. A hound on the hunt, fast on his own trail.
The quarry of ice where Sam sits alone reflects his face. No source of light illuminates the facets, but sight bends the rules here. Pressing his nose to the frigid floor, Sam peers into the translucence, trying to see through the ice. He wonders, if this is the bottom of Hell, what could be below. Nothing at all would be his best guess. But in a cyclical world, would Heaven come next-over Earth, yet under Hell? He thinks that if demons truly wanted to torture souls, they would open up to Heaven and show them what they can't have.
Hell, he finds out, agrees.
✧
Sam learned about shaving from his brother. He learned how to tie his shoes, tie a Windsor knot, tie up cops who might get in the way so they'd never get out until someone came and got them. Dad taught him too. But almost everything Sam learned to survive in the world, in their world, he learned from Dean. The rest he learned on his own.
His own most important survival techniques are slowly being unlearned. Sam had schooled himself to steal only the shortest, subtlest glances. But this other Sam lets his eyes linger over Dean, stares at him boldly until Dean throws pens or pillows or foil wrappers at him. He touches when Sam would never touch, where he would never dare. Stroking his thumb under Dean's collar where the sweat and dirt collect during a dig gets him an elbow to the ribs. But he's undeterred by the jab, the emergence of more sweat and the dusting of more dirt. Smelling Dean's neck when he hoists him up after a fall doesn't strike him as wrong. If it does, he shows no sign, nudging his nose indulgently into the soft, short hairs. Sam thinks he should know better, should have learned the rules by now, relearned them with Dean. But Sam almost welcomes it. The whiff of gel and sweat, gunpowder and kerosene burn clean through from there to Hell, and Sam weeps like a homesick child. He should know better too.
✧
What Michael needs to learn better is how to keep his distance. Following Sam through the black, he circles around, blocking his way. Sam turns to go back the way he came. No matter; it's all the same darkness, the same ice. Michael dashes in front of him again. Lucifer laughs, always too close by, entertained by Sam's exasperation. The sound and the movements almost distract him.
But there, up above, he catches it.
“Let me show you. Let me give you your brother back.”
Closed eyes shut out his view, but he knows who he's talking to, knows who he's touching, knows this is Dean. The smoothness of his skin, the pebbling of gooseflesh, the warmth. It's beyond his grasp, but near enough to tease. Like mist before rain. Or breath before kissing.
And they are. Or Sam-above is. And below, there's no sound of it, no wetness, no taste. Just the almost and the not quite and the knowledge that some Sam is kissing Dean. But not him.
Not him, this person with his hands on Dean's hips. Not his to have. But that man holds on, pulling Dean flush to him.
This, Sam knows, is the part where Dean fights. He's imagined this far in his fantasies and no farther. But he knows how it would go, how it would have to happen. Dean would punch him, curse him, test him for possession. He would accuse him of drinking, berate him for getting wasted while on a case.
Sam waits for it.
Under drowsy lids, he watches Dean up close, eyes closed, movement behind the thin skin. The crease of his forehead, the oil on his nose, the stubble on his cheeks, the freckles everywhere. Sam's rarely had the privilege of seeing him so close, except when they were kids and supposed to be sleeping, except when Dean was dying or dead in his arms.
Dean gasps for breath, and this must be it, the moment he ends it. But he's not moving. He stands still while this Sam touches his sides, while he spreads his hands over the halves of Dean's back, while he unhooks Dean's arm from the sleeve of the shirt he's already almost out of. And then Dean's moving, leaning back. And Sam anticipates the curl of his fist.
When Dean's hand tugs at his own collar and pulls the shirt off, Sam just stares blankly ahead. Michael stands in front of him, but he blocks nothing. Sam looks right through him, seeing not the caged angel or the dark or the ice. Seeing not the souls upon souls kneeling and writhing and moaning and screaming. Seeing only his brother reaching toward him.
And feeling nothing.
Dean kisses and touches, clings and keens, and fucks himself on Sam's hand. It's not fantasy or hallucination, but it doesn't make sense. It can't be real. Sam looks into Dean's eyes: wide open and startled bright when he comes. He watches his brother fall apart.
But he's still whole.
Sam is not. Sam is here.
“This is you?” Dean asks, fingers tentative over that other man's beating heart. His face is vulnerable with too much hope, color in his cheeks for the first time in ages. It's the kind of question that only allows one answer. But it's not the right answer. It's not true.
The nod and the kiss betray him.
“This is me,” Sam tries to say, but his voice hangs in the air, a cloud, then nothing. “Not him,” he mouths. “Not him.”
Fueled by frustration, he tries climbing a pile of ice. He never tried this before. He scrabbles up, frantic, focused on the ceiling, seeing past it, seeing only Dean. But he slips and falls and slips again. Back at the bottom, he starts once more. He tries for hours, maybe days, and Michael doesn't stop him. Lucifer stays quiet. Finally, they let him alone. He's too busy to notice when they leave.
Learning the hard way is the worst way to learn. He's too far down. There's nowhere to go. He can go sideways and, that way only, he can go as far as he wants.
It is not even close to what he wants.
Sam slumps against the ice and sits. If a spirit could sit, thin and substanceless, formless as water but frozen as ice.
This is what's left of him: a spirit, a soul. A dead thing in its single cell at the bottom of the world.
Feedback-including concrit-always welcome.
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Dean, Crowley, Lucifer, Michael
Rating: R
Summary: Sam’s soul is still in Hell. From there, he sees everything.
Spoilers: through 6.08.
Word Count: 4,884
Disclaimer: I claim nothing.
Notes: Concept of Hell directly influenced by Dante.
Thank you to zelda_zee for betaing.
Thank you to raynemaiden for scientific consultation.
In fifth grade science (and sixth at Jefferson in Fayette), they taught about layers. First, the epidermis with its five strata, its padding of dead cells and its cells containing melanin. Then, the dermis with its two sub-layers, its blood cells and nerves, hair follicles and sweat glands. At the bottom, the subcutaneous layer, insulating, connecting the skin to the body.
Sam didn't need school to tell him about the density of these layers, how the same depth of a cut requires stitches just above the eye and a simple application of generic antibiotic on the heel of a hand. How a mercurochrome smiley face drawn on his knee by Dean would fade from the surface just like the red, raised abrasions, but the USMC tattoo on Dad's arm would stay under his skin, bleed out onto his sons and stain them in ways that couldn't be seen but would not wash away.
Sam grew up knowing that most layers remain hidden.
Above him now, layers, like floors of an impossible house, separate him from the surface. Somewhere at the top, grass ripples like hairs, roots down into the dirt. Dig as far as you wish, you'll have more luck reaching China than the next layer. But it's there. This subterranean space of green cells that hold the dead, enveloping them in a mockery of life. Beneath it, a pocket of air like heated breath, a space for crawling on hands and knees like dogs, for tumbling to the ground. But there is no ground, only another layer. A thick layer of mud that mortars nothing together. It's weightless compared to the next layer, where the wealth of the world sits heavy on empty chests. The fifth layer, with its drowners and thrashers, moats the mean from the malevolent, wets the walls with blood and tears, but will not wear them down. This structure is old, its foundation built to last. It goes down deeper to a layer of tombs that line up one by one, plot by plot. This is where you find the flames. The seventh splits off from the fire, bringing the burning out of the desert and into the trees, not stopping at the river, but boiling it. Below, a wasteland catches the filth, twists the bodies in tortures of industry, with its tar and lead and hooks and teeth. It's too far down to fight off disease. The ninth layer is the pit, the cold unfinished basement, flooded, filled with bogeymen and ice that bites. No heat reaches here. No heat in Hell.
Sam would gladly burn.
He remembers sunburns and brushburns. The blue flame of gas that blistered his skin when he tried to make chicken noodle soup for Dean. The scald of sun-heated black metal when he crawled up the car's hood to draw on the dusty windshield. The screaming pain from a flare that went off too soon, the warm blackness that followed, and the scorch of feverish hands that brought him back to the light again.
Sam remembers the moments, but there's no sense memory. No heat from within, when he's turned inside out here.
Above, the demons dance, shake the ceiling until the stalactites of ice sway like chandeliers, then break. Above them, the souls pay while more demons play with them. Above them all, a man walks around, wearing Sam's clothes, wearing Sam's skin. Layers of fiber and follicle, skin cells and blood cells, meat and marrow. But the man's an empty pocket. A sack of flesh, flayed and cleaned and stitched together.
In seventh grade, Sam read Mary Shelley. He didn't have to, to know what this man is. And what he isn't.
This dead, sloughed-off shell. This reanimated overcoat of Sam. He gets to touch the water that steams the shower. He gets to burn his tongue on stale coffee from the kwik-e-mart. He gets to shield his nose and mouth from the smoke of salted bones. He gets to sit on the sun-baked leather of the bench seat that spans passenger side to driver's side in the Impala that Dean, once again, drives.
But he doesn't feel what Sam feels.
Here, beneath layers so deep no blade can cut through, Sam sits in a cell of ice. His body here is no body at all, but a thin, threadbare patchwork of spirit pinned together by thought alone. But it's more real than the other one. It can feel the teeth of cold wind, can feel the sting of sleet when the ice shards fall and the slow seeping in when he falls too.
Lucifer laughs every time Sam loses his footing on the icy floor. He delights at slapstick. For all his superiority, his taste belies a baseness suited to the angel who fell the farthest. Or so Michael tells him. Every time. They argue in an endless loop. Some time ago, he no longer knows when, Sam stopped listening. Now they are white noise, like wind.
Sam stopped looking for Adam a while ago too. He thinks he's here, assumes he should be. But the cage is vast; he's walked for hours, maybe days, and still has not found the bars. Just more ice, just more darkness on the edges like a promise.
“I promise you, you won't find the door,” Lucifer once said. But Sam kept walking until, exhausted, he fell. And Lucifer laughed. And Michael pointed his finger at his brother. And Sam told them to leave him alone, though they never do. And he called out for his own brother.
Adam never answers.
Dean does. But he's not answering Sam, although he thinks he is.
Every time that man says, “Dean,” Sam hears his name in response. The sound slices straight through Hell, through the space of it and all the time. Sam has tried, but he can't reach that far, can't make his voice carry back up. He can only sit and listen.
And he can see. He can see everything as clear as if it was right in front of him, though there's nothing in front of him but blackness. He's tried to put his hand out to it, but it comes away cold. At first, he thought he was hallucinating. Then reliving memories. Daydreaming. But now he knows-he thinks he knows-that what he sees and hears is what's really going on, far above, far away from Hell, up there on Earth.
The first time he realized it, he cried at the sight of Dean. His brother was wiping his nose on his shirtsleeve, sneezing at the pollen he kicked up while he mowed the lawn. He was framed in leaves, a small figure in the distance. Sam knew he was watching Dean across a suburban street, through hedges. But he didn't know he was watching through his own eyes until the first time he heard his own name.
It took a while. In fact, it took way too long to understand that what he has seen, what he has seen done, has been him. Some part of him still walks and talks and touches and tastes. It takes in food and drink and expels them. It fucks and fights and bleeds. It does not sleep.
Sam wishes it would. He could use the rest. The bloodshed, the broken bones, the little girl who got caught in the crossfire, the middle-aged man who didn't run fast enough. He's seen it all. He's seen what that Earth-bound part of him has done with his own hands. He watches the world through his own eyes; it's like looking through the wrong end of a barrel of a gun. He screamed the first time an innocent died and he saw himself step over the body. He raged at the carelessness, he seethed, he yelled loud enough to shout down Hell. If you could. But Michael told him you can't, and Lucifer just grinned.
The angel of light brings lies. But they're nothing compared to the ones that Sam hears from above, spilling so easily from those lips that were his.
The sound of his own lies bullets through the darkness, a direct hit every time. This man in Sam's skin bares his teeth at Dean, and Dean takes it as a smile. Sam smiled too when the truth came out and Dean threw the first punch, then another, then another. Down here, he couldn't feel a thing, not an ounce of physical pain. But the pain of seeing that look on Dean's face wiped the smile from Sam's. He doubled over, retched up air. He coughed until he cried, and the tears froze and fell, breaking like glass at his knees. It distracted him. The splinters of ice sticking, sinking into his fingers, where they would not melt. When he looked up again, Castiel was there, reaching out, his open hand reaching toward him. The wind shifted, featherlight against him, and a dull glow pierced the darkness. Sam strode toward it, ice-cut fingers extended. He walked and walked, then ran, sliding on the glass-smooth floor. Still, he got no closer. Then the light blinked out, swallowed by black, a swift gust of wind sweeping up after. It was shrill at his ears. But he heard the pronouncement.
He didn't need Castiel to tell him about his soul. He knows where he is.
Sam knows he's missing from the physical world. But it's forever until he learns that he can still feel physical pain. Looking past a sign with a pink cartoon pig on it, he watches cars go by, rattling gravel on asphalt. When Dean carries out his lunch, Sam notices how tired his brother looks, skin too gray. Too weary to take much more, and yet he takes it all. This burden that never lifts from his shoulders, Sam would bear it for him. If the King of Hell could slice Sam up, separate him to suffer each torment of Hell-each circle, each subset-simultaneously, Sam would ask him to. He would beg for it. He would break himself apart and do it himself if he could. But he can't. And the King of Hell cares nothing for the souls he already has. The King of Hell isn't even here. But Sam turns his head, and sees him.
Crowley crowds behind Dean, a black grin emerging from his moonface like a mock Cheshire cat. With a glance, he looks straight through the sockets of Sam's eyes and down into Hell. He looks right at him. He sees what Dean can't. His sight outreaches Castiel. His touch reaches farther still.
Sam feels it, the burn on the back of his hand. Beneath Crowley's finger, Sam's skin glows hot. But beneath the Earth, in the frozen pit of Hell, Sam's soul burns cold, blasts with pain, a nuclear chill, coming on fast and unrelenting, needling him from the outside in. No pain on Earth matches it; his memory has no point of reference. It shakes him apart, splits him and empties him. It fills him with cold fear, colder than he's known, above or below. In his entire life, he's never felt such fear. It encompasses all. Fear for himself, for Dean, for Bobby and Samuel and Lisa and Ben. For Jessica wherever she is, and Mom and Dad wherever they are too. For every person, for every soul from here to Heaven.
When it's gone, when Crowley's done, Sam still feels it. He does not feel Michael's hand on his shoulder, but he offers him a smile and pretends to be reassured.
Sam looks at Lucifer and sees a small, shriveled beast, beating his flightless wings.
Here in Hell, Satan is little more than a gargoyle. For once, Sam empathizes with him, feeling impotent too. He's powerless down here. A ghost would have greater presence.
What comes out of his above-ground voice next weakens Sam even more. Of course he knew all along that they share the same memories, but he wasn't fully aware until Sam-above said so. The knowledge emerges from the shadows of Sam's mind, bright with hope and brittle with fear. He doesn't know how to get out of this cage, doesn't know if he can. But if there is a chance, he thinks it might lie in that connection. Maybe memory will make him whole again.
Or maybe it will break him.
There are memories that his soulless self cannot manage alone. Memories that might incite action. In and of themselves, the memories Sam's most afraid of are quite passive. But without any guidance, will that man above know the difference?
Sam remembers things that did not happen, never would happen. Things he wanted, things he wanted so badly he could taste them. It was almost enough. It sufficed. He stuffs them deep inside, now, hoping that will keep them safe, keep them hidden.
When it comes, he's thinking of pink elephants, trying to trick his own mind. He does not know if he failed or if the man above dug around and pulled it out on his own. All he knows is skin and heat and the rush of blood in his ears. The skin he can't touch, the heat cannot reach him. But he remembers it somehow, almost tangible. The thrill of the hunt sends adrenaline through his veins and he smells his own sweat. And he smells Dean's too, along with the onions he'd eaten at dinner, the residue of motel soap, the faint musk of his deodorant. Sam remembers this. Hunting a yenaldooshi in Clovis, Dean tripping and rolling into a ditch as it ran past him. Dean shooting it in the heel and Sam finishing it off with a bullet through the heart. He remembers bending down to pull Dean up, arm wrapped around him, fingers slotted into the spaces between his ribs. He remembers looking into Dean's face, that cocky lopsided grin crinkling up to his eyes. So close, pressed to him, and yet Sam wanted to be closer, was overwhelmed by the desire to press inside him. Dean's mouth opened. Sam doesn't remember what he said, just that he laughed, told Dean to “come on,” and the night went like any other night from there: cleaning up their mess, limping back to the car, hightailing it out of there and collapsing in their beds.
The memory fades, lingering in its exit though it came on so sudden.
Sam stares into the darkness. Somewhere up there, his body stares out into the night through a waterstained window. In its filmy reflection, Sam sees Dean asleep in bed. He sees his own face, devoid of expression. But he knows the damage is already done.
When Dean had said that he wants his brother back, how could he have known that Sam wants that too, but that it's a loaded longing, greater than loneliness? If he knew the truth, maybe he'd prefer a soulless Sam after all.
Light lifts the dark from the horizon. But it's not the dawn that's breaking, it's him. The new day promises nothing but more of the same.
Sam stopped counting the days above sometime after they hit double digits. The sun rises, the sun sets, and Sam sees them all through sleepless eyes. But they blur together, as indistinct as the repetitions of daily routine. Down here, it all expands. He watches Earth in real time, feels it in hellish suspension. It takes too long. It doesn't take long enough.
Sam's still waiting for a change. And dreading what it might be.
✧
At every school across the country, Sam’s history teachers stressed the importance of dates, hammered home the numerology of 1066, 1215, 1776, 1945. It was not until ninth grade in Bend that Sam encountered a teacher who didn't care about dates. She said she wanted them to know what happened, why it happened and what the consequences were; the dates and names would fall into line after the bigger specifics.
So it is that Sam forces himself to remember free-falling into the opening in the earth and the apocalypse that lead to it. But no matter how many times he goes over it all, he can't remember the date. 2010 sounds right, but was it April or March? He remembers the chill in the air, the gray sky. Maybe it was November. He doesn't know how much time has passed since then, but Dean hasn't aged much, besides a new set of lines between his brows when he frowns. Every time Sam hopes to catch a glimpse of the date on a newspaper or the laptop, he can't focus in, his eyes no longer under his control. It's as if that Sam has some sort of internal timepiece, never needing to consult a calendar or clock.
The fact remains that Sam needs no knowledge of date and time to measure the consequences of his actions. They're becoming more apparent every immeasurable day.
Like clockwork, Sam-above showers before Dean wakes up each morning. He only showers at night when bloodied or crusted with dirt or worse. One day, Dean comes out from his shower with a too-small towel barely wrapped around his waist, a few inches of hip and thigh showing where the terry cloth ends do not meet. He's bitching about the size, but Sam doesn't hear it. All he hears is the rush of blood through his ears and the quickened precision of his heartbeat. But it's not his own; he has no heart or blood down here.
Above, that other Sam rises from his seat at the desk and walks up behind Dean. He says, “Well, it's better than nothing, right?” And he yanks the towel off of Dean, balls it up one-handed and throws it through the open bathroom door. Before Dean says a word, Sam's back at the desk, typing away. But he's watching Dean from the corner of his eye. Sam waits for the cursing, the shoving. But Dean only stands there, spun around, gaping at Sam like he's been possessed. Dispossessed, as the case may be. Sam sees it all through the periphery: Dean's shower-pink skin, the wiry hair between his legs, his dick soft and curving down, uncovered.
He's suddenly lightheaded. But it isn't him. It isn't just him.
The next time Sam hears Dean's voice, he's asking about leads on the case. Everything goes back to normal.
✧
On the way out of town, three nights later, they stop at a bar and hustle pool. This Sam excels at it in a way Sam never did on his best night, playing up his clumsiness and smirking when he sinks every single one of his shots. But tonight he leaves Dean alone, following some frat boy into the men's room.
Sam doesn't feel anything when his counterpart walks up behind the kid and pulls his zip down for him. Instead of piss, the urinal's splattered with semen when he's done. All of it, Sam observes from a distance. It's not just because of where he is, but that Sam-above offers nothing, goes through it as mechanically as he does masturbation, a release of bodily fluid like any other.
But then the kid goes down on his knees, and Sam's overcome with the memory of Dean naked, the details sharp and hyper-real. He knows the other Sam is getting hard now, but it's secondary to other memories that tumble after. Memories of walking in on Dean fucking a waitress (Jolene her name tag had read, like the song) in the front seat of the Impala, of finding Dean getting sucked off at a truck stop behind an eighteen-wheeler (a smiling white bear and Bimbo unironically painted on its side). Memories of sleeping with Dean when they were too big to share a bed, but there was only one and Dad was passed out on the sofa. Memories of being too close, being too keyed up, seeing too much, because there was no room for modesty and shame was a luxury and too much of it was already taken up by Sam's feelings for his brother.
“Dean,” he hears from the voice that used to belong to him.
Suddenly, Sam doesn't see the frat boy, but his brother, standing in the doorway of the men's room, fist white-knuckled on the jamb. He looks hurt. Sam doesn’t know why he looks so hurt. His eyebrows pull together, not in anger, but pain. Until now, Dean has never seemed small. Sam wants to hold him, curl up under him until he remembers his true size, his hidden strength beneath the mask and the muscle. He wants to hold Dean close until he remembers who he is, his big brother. His alone.
Sam hears his name drop pin-light from Dean’s lips, and the reaction comes blasting bright.
Most of his orgasms barely reach Sam here, but this one slams into him. Shuddering, he falls against a stalagmite of ice for support. Lucifer slinks up to him, sniffing close and appraising him with squinted eyes. It distracts him from the action above, where Dean's dragging the kid off, ripping a stream of paper towels from the dispenser and thrusting them in his face where the paper sticks to Sam's come. Dean's telling Sam to zip up and get going, catching the swinging door and pushing through, already clutching the car keys.
The response to this is a grin, a wide grin that Sam feels like a slit across his face.
He shoulders Lucifer out of the way and walks off into the darkness.
✧
Sam wishes that shell of himself up there would have let Dean alone. Dean was better off thinking Sam was dead, because he's only half alive anyway. He wishes that Sam would have hunted the djinn and everything else on his own, never let Dean see his face, never showed it to Bobby either. If wishes were horses, Sam would ride a team of them straight out of Hell. And rescue Dean from himself.
All those layers Sam built up to keep things the way they should be between him and Dean keep thinning out. If they were physical things-if he was one too-he could poke a hole through them with little effort. Dean was never supposed to know. But that soulless creature wearing his skin, using his name concerns himself with no one but himself. Sam could almost feel sorry for him, knows he's only unearthing those memories to put himself back together again. But without the most important piece, it's a futile effort.
Tenaciously, he keeps at it. A hound on the hunt, fast on his own trail.
The quarry of ice where Sam sits alone reflects his face. No source of light illuminates the facets, but sight bends the rules here. Pressing his nose to the frigid floor, Sam peers into the translucence, trying to see through the ice. He wonders, if this is the bottom of Hell, what could be below. Nothing at all would be his best guess. But in a cyclical world, would Heaven come next-over Earth, yet under Hell? He thinks that if demons truly wanted to torture souls, they would open up to Heaven and show them what they can't have.
Hell, he finds out, agrees.
✧
Sam learned about shaving from his brother. He learned how to tie his shoes, tie a Windsor knot, tie up cops who might get in the way so they'd never get out until someone came and got them. Dad taught him too. But almost everything Sam learned to survive in the world, in their world, he learned from Dean. The rest he learned on his own.
His own most important survival techniques are slowly being unlearned. Sam had schooled himself to steal only the shortest, subtlest glances. But this other Sam lets his eyes linger over Dean, stares at him boldly until Dean throws pens or pillows or foil wrappers at him. He touches when Sam would never touch, where he would never dare. Stroking his thumb under Dean's collar where the sweat and dirt collect during a dig gets him an elbow to the ribs. But he's undeterred by the jab, the emergence of more sweat and the dusting of more dirt. Smelling Dean's neck when he hoists him up after a fall doesn't strike him as wrong. If it does, he shows no sign, nudging his nose indulgently into the soft, short hairs. Sam thinks he should know better, should have learned the rules by now, relearned them with Dean. But Sam almost welcomes it. The whiff of gel and sweat, gunpowder and kerosene burn clean through from there to Hell, and Sam weeps like a homesick child. He should know better too.
✧
What Michael needs to learn better is how to keep his distance. Following Sam through the black, he circles around, blocking his way. Sam turns to go back the way he came. No matter; it's all the same darkness, the same ice. Michael dashes in front of him again. Lucifer laughs, always too close by, entertained by Sam's exasperation. The sound and the movements almost distract him.
But there, up above, he catches it.
“Let me show you. Let me give you your brother back.”
Closed eyes shut out his view, but he knows who he's talking to, knows who he's touching, knows this is Dean. The smoothness of his skin, the pebbling of gooseflesh, the warmth. It's beyond his grasp, but near enough to tease. Like mist before rain. Or breath before kissing.
And they are. Or Sam-above is. And below, there's no sound of it, no wetness, no taste. Just the almost and the not quite and the knowledge that some Sam is kissing Dean. But not him.
Not him, this person with his hands on Dean's hips. Not his to have. But that man holds on, pulling Dean flush to him.
This, Sam knows, is the part where Dean fights. He's imagined this far in his fantasies and no farther. But he knows how it would go, how it would have to happen. Dean would punch him, curse him, test him for possession. He would accuse him of drinking, berate him for getting wasted while on a case.
Sam waits for it.
Under drowsy lids, he watches Dean up close, eyes closed, movement behind the thin skin. The crease of his forehead, the oil on his nose, the stubble on his cheeks, the freckles everywhere. Sam's rarely had the privilege of seeing him so close, except when they were kids and supposed to be sleeping, except when Dean was dying or dead in his arms.
Dean gasps for breath, and this must be it, the moment he ends it. But he's not moving. He stands still while this Sam touches his sides, while he spreads his hands over the halves of Dean's back, while he unhooks Dean's arm from the sleeve of the shirt he's already almost out of. And then Dean's moving, leaning back. And Sam anticipates the curl of his fist.
When Dean's hand tugs at his own collar and pulls the shirt off, Sam just stares blankly ahead. Michael stands in front of him, but he blocks nothing. Sam looks right through him, seeing not the caged angel or the dark or the ice. Seeing not the souls upon souls kneeling and writhing and moaning and screaming. Seeing only his brother reaching toward him.
And feeling nothing.
Dean kisses and touches, clings and keens, and fucks himself on Sam's hand. It's not fantasy or hallucination, but it doesn't make sense. It can't be real. Sam looks into Dean's eyes: wide open and startled bright when he comes. He watches his brother fall apart.
But he's still whole.
Sam is not. Sam is here.
“This is you?” Dean asks, fingers tentative over that other man's beating heart. His face is vulnerable with too much hope, color in his cheeks for the first time in ages. It's the kind of question that only allows one answer. But it's not the right answer. It's not true.
The nod and the kiss betray him.
“This is me,” Sam tries to say, but his voice hangs in the air, a cloud, then nothing. “Not him,” he mouths. “Not him.”
Fueled by frustration, he tries climbing a pile of ice. He never tried this before. He scrabbles up, frantic, focused on the ceiling, seeing past it, seeing only Dean. But he slips and falls and slips again. Back at the bottom, he starts once more. He tries for hours, maybe days, and Michael doesn't stop him. Lucifer stays quiet. Finally, they let him alone. He's too busy to notice when they leave.
Learning the hard way is the worst way to learn. He's too far down. There's nowhere to go. He can go sideways and, that way only, he can go as far as he wants.
It is not even close to what he wants.
Sam slumps against the ice and sits. If a spirit could sit, thin and substanceless, formless as water but frozen as ice.
This is what's left of him: a spirit, a soul. A dead thing in its single cell at the bottom of the world.
Feedback-including concrit-always welcome.