[Fic] Blast Wounds
Title: Blast Wounds
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Castiel
Rating: T
Word count: 2,161
Warnings: Mild body horror
Also available on AO3
Summary: He moves his hand and is surprised when his body does the same. It doesn’t look right; it doesn’t feel like his, like him. He moves his hand and he expects it to stay still. He talks and is amazed that the words come pouring out of his mouth. He screams and the noise is so loud, so unexpected that he flinches, has to cover his ears.
He’s human again, but not completely. He’s hollow. A Dean shaped statue carved out of gristle and bone. He knows he should feel something- some relief, triumph, joy, guilt, but he doesn’t. He’s just there. He tries to muster up some happiness for Cas and Sam, because he knows that's what they want, but it won’t come. The two of them think maybe it’ll take time, that he needs to recover from his ordeal. They take care not to mention the d-word.
Dean himself isn’t sure. That’s all he feels- uncertainty and bewilderment. He knows the basics of what happened. He died, he was a demon, he attacked Sam, Cas stopped him, but that’s all he remembers. He’s not even sure he remembers that. He’s spent years dredging though witness statements and he knows how unreliable the power of recollection is. One little suggestion is enough to alter a memory; it doesn’t take much more to create one where originally there was just white noise.
Whether he remembers doing these things or whether he just assimilated what he was told, he’s struggling to deal with it all. He knows, intellectually, what he did, but there’s a disconnect. And not just with his past. He’s cut off from his present too. He’s struggling to process the now, never mind the then. It’s like he’s woken up from a coma twenty years down the line. Like he expects young, agile flesh, but instead sees creaking joints and wrinkles.
He moves his hand and is surprised when his body does the same. It doesn’t look right; it doesn’t feel like his, like him. He moves his hand and he expects it to stay still. He talks and is amazed that the words come pouring out of his mouth. He screams and the noise is so loud, so unexpected that he flinches, has to cover his ears.
It’s too much, it’s all too much. So he stops, as best he can.
*
Sam is not disappointed. He isn’t. Dean is back, and that’s what’s important. Except, well, he kind of isn’t. Yeah he’s not a raging monster anymore, but he’s still not quite Dean. This new version of his brother, who gets spooked by his own movements and who goes out of his way not to do anything or say anything, he’s just a placeholder of sorts. A cardboard cut-out of the real Dean which sits vacantly in his place while he recovers.
Except Sam knows he shouldn’t treat him like that, because that isn’t fair. This version of Dean is still Dean and he doesn’t deserve Sam’s hungry eyes roving over him, scouring his face for any hidden sign of his brother proper.
That’s why it might be said that Sam is ignoring Dean. That and maybe the little bit of anger that lurks there too, simmering away. Dean wasn’t in control when he said those things, when he tried to kill Sam, but it was Dean’s actions that led to that situation. He is at the root of the problem.
Sam had thought he was over that, until the first time Dean had flinched at his own voice, and his reaction wasn't pity or sympathy, it was irritation. San knows it won’t take much to build that into real anger, and Dean is not in a state to deal with Sam’s rage. It wouldn’t be satisfactory, cathartic even, for either of them.
So Sam stays away, but it’s only because he’s trying to do the right thing.
*
Cas feels good, but that won’t last for long. He’s like an addict now. The first hit held the magic, everything after that is diminishing returns. Each subsequent act, each repeat of the grossest form of cannibalism ever practised by a sentient being, it grants him less mojo, less time. Each new grace consumed burns him up quicker than the last.
His insides were corrupted and decayed by the first stolen grace. He used the new one to fix that, but every time he does that his body will get weaker, require more grace to mend and maintain. Burn him out faster.
His new grace is troublesome. More so than the last. That one he managed to assimilate, albeit in a slow bubbling, poisonous fashion. This one chafes against his insides, rubbing him raw. He has to keep a sliver of attention devoted to it at all times to stop it wearing holes in his skin. He doesn’t know why it’s so querulous. It might be because the angel he consumed despised him, it might be because he didn’t want to accept it. It might be neither of those reasons. What he’s done has seldom been done before, and those who did- well, what he knows of their fates he’d rather not analyse.
He didn’t want this, but now he has it, he’s going to make use of it. Dean still needs a lot of help, so does Hannah. Different kinds, maybe, but they both need him none the less. Whether he can finish his duty towards them before he expires or not, he will try. Dean and Sam have taught him that much. You try, you do what you can. Unusually it is enough. Not without pain, but enough.
*
Dean runs hot now. He holds his hand under the cold tap and he thinks he hears it sizzle. It reminds him of a moment, lifetimes ago now, when the devil told them that he had ice in his veins. He wonders if that means something. Satan runs cold but Dean runs hot. Maybe it means nothing, maybe it’s something he has in common with most demons. They come from humanity, after all, sweating, writhing, stinking humanity. Lucifer comes from different stock. He is a fragment of the angelic host fallen to ruin. He began as one of God’s own. Angels are glass and steel and ice, would it be any wonder if they stayed cold even after they had fallen.
He expected to gradually cool down, return to the human norm, but it’s been five days and still he burns. The heat in him is hot enough to boil the flesh from his bones. He thinks sometimes he can feel the chunks of fat and muscle starting to peel away from his skeleton, gristly mess only held in by his skin. He can feel it, sagging under the weight of all that cooked meat and soupy blood.
Usually when this happens he looks down at himself and it’s enough to break the illusion. This time it isn’t. He’s caught up in a need to see what’s going on under his skin, to open it up, let some of the heat out.
He takes up a knife, carves a join the dot line from one freckle to another- the back of his hand to his elbow- and peels back the skin to examine what’s underneath. He expects a slow drip of liquid fat, thinks he’ll be able to reach in and pull out stewing chunks of meat. All that comes out is blood, sluggish at first and then a cascade. He doesn’t understand. The pain is making him woozy, making it hard to process. Cooked meat doesn’t bleed, so what’s all this red stuff pouring out of his arm?
*
There’s a lot of blood by the time Cas finds him, but not enough to put him in any permanent danger. Which is lucky, because Dean won’t let him close enough to heal him.
“Get Sam.”
“Sam’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s out drinking. Again.”
“Huh. Should’ve seen that one coming.”
“Dean, please. Give me your hand.”
Cas darts forwards, makes to grab at Dean but he jerks out of the way too quickly.
“I don’t want you to heal me.”
Cas tries not to flinch at that.
“Dean, you’re bleeding.”
“If Sam’s not here I’ll bandage myself up.”
“I can heal you in a few seconds.”
“No.”
“I’m powered up again. I can do this for you. Let me.”
“I don’t want to be healed.”
“Dean.”
“Cas.”
“Dean you’re being unreasonable.”
“I haven’t felt this, haven’t felt pain in a long time.”
Cas stops, notices the knife on Dean’s bed and the little puddle of red soaking into the fabric around it.
“Dean, why did you cut your arm?”
“I forgot it would hurt. I forgot it wouldn’t heal. I just wanted to let some of the heat out, before it burned me alive.”
“If you didn’t mean to hurt yourself why don’t you want me to heal you?”
“I didn’t mean to do it, I promise, but now that I have I need it to stay. It’s a reminder. I can feel that pain and I know it’s okay. I’m me again. Demons don’t have wounds like this. They heal. I don’t want to heal like a demon. I want to heal like a human.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it, okay?”
“I understand. I won’t heal you against your will. At least let me put a bandage on it, though.”
“How do I know you aren’t going to try and heal me anyway?”
“Dean.”
Dean gives in, stops dodging Cas’ grip and sits down. Cas bandages him up, examining him carefully under the guise of checking his wound. Dean’s eyes are wide and his hands are shaking. Cas thinks it’s probably from the pain- he remembers the overwhelming nature of human pain. How sometimes it has the power to reduce you down to a mindless creature with only one desire, the cessation of that pain.
It’s one of the things he doesn’t miss about humanity. Before he fell he didn’t know how they could stand it, that constant buzz of low level pain. The aching fingers, the random twinges in their joints. Now he does. They stand it because they get used to it, and because it’s only small. The big pain is what gets to them, the once or twice in a lifetime pain of utter heartbreak, slipped discs or broken bones. Even those they can usually recover from, as long as they don’t happen too often. Each human has a finite reservoir of tolerance for pain, and once it’s empty, it’s empty.
That idea is not his own, he realises, and it irks him. Although the words aren’t Metatron’s, he’s the one who put them in Cas’ head. It’s a sign that his thinking is being shaped, and it worries and angers him. A human is the sum of all the ideas they’ve heard and absorbed, maybe angels are the same.
He realises he’s been drifting when Dean snaps his fingers in front of his face. That shouldn’t be happening, but then again he’s been toeing the line between angel and human for a long time. Is it any wonder there’s some humanity rubbing off on him.
Dean coughs and he realises he’d gone away again, just been sitting there, frowning at the wall.
“Sorry. I’ll, I’ll leave you to rest.”
He backs out of the room, leaving behind a confused and tired Dean. He needs to check on Hannah. She’s not happy about being constrained to the bunker while they wait for Dean to be okay, but she refuses to go on without Cas, and he refuses to leave until he’s certain Dean isn’t going to hurt himself- more than he already has.
*
Every time they ask him, Dean tells them that he doesn’t remember his time as a demon. He’s lying, after a fashion. It comes back in snatches. Riots of colour and sensation that move too fast for his shell-shocked human brain to process. If it was just that, he’d tell them, describe the colours and shapes in intricate detail. Anything to stop them moaning at him about how unhealthy it is to keep on suppressing things and how he clearly needs more time to heal.
But of course it’s not just that, because that would be easy, and when has his life ever been easy. Most of the memories drag emotions along with them too. Snarls of rage and bloodlust that ignite below his skin and take root in his flesh, filling up all that hollow space. He hasn’t lashed out yet but he can feel the gnawing, frustrating, directionless anger building. It doesn’t fade over time, it settles, layer upon layer. He feels like a balloon, each new puff inflating him up and up until he’s stretched to bursting.
He needs to do something, go somewhere, find something to take this anger out on. More than that, though. If it was just a punching bag he needed he’d use one. He might not be a demon anymore, but those urges don’t just go away, not when the mark of Cain is burned into your arm. He needs to hunt, needs to feel something quiver and die under his hands. He’d rather it was a monster, but the longer he stays cooped up here, the less likely that’s going to be.
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Castiel
Rating: T
Word count: 2,161
Warnings: Mild body horror
Also available on AO3
Summary: He moves his hand and is surprised when his body does the same. It doesn’t look right; it doesn’t feel like his, like him. He moves his hand and he expects it to stay still. He talks and is amazed that the words come pouring out of his mouth. He screams and the noise is so loud, so unexpected that he flinches, has to cover his ears.
He’s human again, but not completely. He’s hollow. A Dean shaped statue carved out of gristle and bone. He knows he should feel something- some relief, triumph, joy, guilt, but he doesn’t. He’s just there. He tries to muster up some happiness for Cas and Sam, because he knows that's what they want, but it won’t come. The two of them think maybe it’ll take time, that he needs to recover from his ordeal. They take care not to mention the d-word.
Dean himself isn’t sure. That’s all he feels- uncertainty and bewilderment. He knows the basics of what happened. He died, he was a demon, he attacked Sam, Cas stopped him, but that’s all he remembers. He’s not even sure he remembers that. He’s spent years dredging though witness statements and he knows how unreliable the power of recollection is. One little suggestion is enough to alter a memory; it doesn’t take much more to create one where originally there was just white noise.
Whether he remembers doing these things or whether he just assimilated what he was told, he’s struggling to deal with it all. He knows, intellectually, what he did, but there’s a disconnect. And not just with his past. He’s cut off from his present too. He’s struggling to process the now, never mind the then. It’s like he’s woken up from a coma twenty years down the line. Like he expects young, agile flesh, but instead sees creaking joints and wrinkles.
He moves his hand and is surprised when his body does the same. It doesn’t look right; it doesn’t feel like his, like him. He moves his hand and he expects it to stay still. He talks and is amazed that the words come pouring out of his mouth. He screams and the noise is so loud, so unexpected that he flinches, has to cover his ears.
It’s too much, it’s all too much. So he stops, as best he can.
*
Sam is not disappointed. He isn’t. Dean is back, and that’s what’s important. Except, well, he kind of isn’t. Yeah he’s not a raging monster anymore, but he’s still not quite Dean. This new version of his brother, who gets spooked by his own movements and who goes out of his way not to do anything or say anything, he’s just a placeholder of sorts. A cardboard cut-out of the real Dean which sits vacantly in his place while he recovers.
Except Sam knows he shouldn’t treat him like that, because that isn’t fair. This version of Dean is still Dean and he doesn’t deserve Sam’s hungry eyes roving over him, scouring his face for any hidden sign of his brother proper.
That’s why it might be said that Sam is ignoring Dean. That and maybe the little bit of anger that lurks there too, simmering away. Dean wasn’t in control when he said those things, when he tried to kill Sam, but it was Dean’s actions that led to that situation. He is at the root of the problem.
Sam had thought he was over that, until the first time Dean had flinched at his own voice, and his reaction wasn't pity or sympathy, it was irritation. San knows it won’t take much to build that into real anger, and Dean is not in a state to deal with Sam’s rage. It wouldn’t be satisfactory, cathartic even, for either of them.
So Sam stays away, but it’s only because he’s trying to do the right thing.
*
Cas feels good, but that won’t last for long. He’s like an addict now. The first hit held the magic, everything after that is diminishing returns. Each subsequent act, each repeat of the grossest form of cannibalism ever practised by a sentient being, it grants him less mojo, less time. Each new grace consumed burns him up quicker than the last.
His insides were corrupted and decayed by the first stolen grace. He used the new one to fix that, but every time he does that his body will get weaker, require more grace to mend and maintain. Burn him out faster.
His new grace is troublesome. More so than the last. That one he managed to assimilate, albeit in a slow bubbling, poisonous fashion. This one chafes against his insides, rubbing him raw. He has to keep a sliver of attention devoted to it at all times to stop it wearing holes in his skin. He doesn’t know why it’s so querulous. It might be because the angel he consumed despised him, it might be because he didn’t want to accept it. It might be neither of those reasons. What he’s done has seldom been done before, and those who did- well, what he knows of their fates he’d rather not analyse.
He didn’t want this, but now he has it, he’s going to make use of it. Dean still needs a lot of help, so does Hannah. Different kinds, maybe, but they both need him none the less. Whether he can finish his duty towards them before he expires or not, he will try. Dean and Sam have taught him that much. You try, you do what you can. Unusually it is enough. Not without pain, but enough.
*
Dean runs hot now. He holds his hand under the cold tap and he thinks he hears it sizzle. It reminds him of a moment, lifetimes ago now, when the devil told them that he had ice in his veins. He wonders if that means something. Satan runs cold but Dean runs hot. Maybe it means nothing, maybe it’s something he has in common with most demons. They come from humanity, after all, sweating, writhing, stinking humanity. Lucifer comes from different stock. He is a fragment of the angelic host fallen to ruin. He began as one of God’s own. Angels are glass and steel and ice, would it be any wonder if they stayed cold even after they had fallen.
He expected to gradually cool down, return to the human norm, but it’s been five days and still he burns. The heat in him is hot enough to boil the flesh from his bones. He thinks sometimes he can feel the chunks of fat and muscle starting to peel away from his skeleton, gristly mess only held in by his skin. He can feel it, sagging under the weight of all that cooked meat and soupy blood.
Usually when this happens he looks down at himself and it’s enough to break the illusion. This time it isn’t. He’s caught up in a need to see what’s going on under his skin, to open it up, let some of the heat out.
He takes up a knife, carves a join the dot line from one freckle to another- the back of his hand to his elbow- and peels back the skin to examine what’s underneath. He expects a slow drip of liquid fat, thinks he’ll be able to reach in and pull out stewing chunks of meat. All that comes out is blood, sluggish at first and then a cascade. He doesn’t understand. The pain is making him woozy, making it hard to process. Cooked meat doesn’t bleed, so what’s all this red stuff pouring out of his arm?
*
There’s a lot of blood by the time Cas finds him, but not enough to put him in any permanent danger. Which is lucky, because Dean won’t let him close enough to heal him.
“Get Sam.”
“Sam’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s out drinking. Again.”
“Huh. Should’ve seen that one coming.”
“Dean, please. Give me your hand.”
Cas darts forwards, makes to grab at Dean but he jerks out of the way too quickly.
“I don’t want you to heal me.”
Cas tries not to flinch at that.
“Dean, you’re bleeding.”
“If Sam’s not here I’ll bandage myself up.”
“I can heal you in a few seconds.”
“No.”
“I’m powered up again. I can do this for you. Let me.”
“I don’t want to be healed.”
“Dean.”
“Cas.”
“Dean you’re being unreasonable.”
“I haven’t felt this, haven’t felt pain in a long time.”
Cas stops, notices the knife on Dean’s bed and the little puddle of red soaking into the fabric around it.
“Dean, why did you cut your arm?”
“I forgot it would hurt. I forgot it wouldn’t heal. I just wanted to let some of the heat out, before it burned me alive.”
“If you didn’t mean to hurt yourself why don’t you want me to heal you?”
“I didn’t mean to do it, I promise, but now that I have I need it to stay. It’s a reminder. I can feel that pain and I know it’s okay. I’m me again. Demons don’t have wounds like this. They heal. I don’t want to heal like a demon. I want to heal like a human.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it, okay?”
“I understand. I won’t heal you against your will. At least let me put a bandage on it, though.”
“How do I know you aren’t going to try and heal me anyway?”
“Dean.”
Dean gives in, stops dodging Cas’ grip and sits down. Cas bandages him up, examining him carefully under the guise of checking his wound. Dean’s eyes are wide and his hands are shaking. Cas thinks it’s probably from the pain- he remembers the overwhelming nature of human pain. How sometimes it has the power to reduce you down to a mindless creature with only one desire, the cessation of that pain.
It’s one of the things he doesn’t miss about humanity. Before he fell he didn’t know how they could stand it, that constant buzz of low level pain. The aching fingers, the random twinges in their joints. Now he does. They stand it because they get used to it, and because it’s only small. The big pain is what gets to them, the once or twice in a lifetime pain of utter heartbreak, slipped discs or broken bones. Even those they can usually recover from, as long as they don’t happen too often. Each human has a finite reservoir of tolerance for pain, and once it’s empty, it’s empty.
That idea is not his own, he realises, and it irks him. Although the words aren’t Metatron’s, he’s the one who put them in Cas’ head. It’s a sign that his thinking is being shaped, and it worries and angers him. A human is the sum of all the ideas they’ve heard and absorbed, maybe angels are the same.
He realises he’s been drifting when Dean snaps his fingers in front of his face. That shouldn’t be happening, but then again he’s been toeing the line between angel and human for a long time. Is it any wonder there’s some humanity rubbing off on him.
Dean coughs and he realises he’d gone away again, just been sitting there, frowning at the wall.
“Sorry. I’ll, I’ll leave you to rest.”
He backs out of the room, leaving behind a confused and tired Dean. He needs to check on Hannah. She’s not happy about being constrained to the bunker while they wait for Dean to be okay, but she refuses to go on without Cas, and he refuses to leave until he’s certain Dean isn’t going to hurt himself- more than he already has.
*
Every time they ask him, Dean tells them that he doesn’t remember his time as a demon. He’s lying, after a fashion. It comes back in snatches. Riots of colour and sensation that move too fast for his shell-shocked human brain to process. If it was just that, he’d tell them, describe the colours and shapes in intricate detail. Anything to stop them moaning at him about how unhealthy it is to keep on suppressing things and how he clearly needs more time to heal.
But of course it’s not just that, because that would be easy, and when has his life ever been easy. Most of the memories drag emotions along with them too. Snarls of rage and bloodlust that ignite below his skin and take root in his flesh, filling up all that hollow space. He hasn’t lashed out yet but he can feel the gnawing, frustrating, directionless anger building. It doesn’t fade over time, it settles, layer upon layer. He feels like a balloon, each new puff inflating him up and up until he’s stretched to bursting.
He needs to do something, go somewhere, find something to take this anger out on. More than that, though. If it was just a punching bag he needed he’d use one. He might not be a demon anymore, but those urges don’t just go away, not when the mark of Cain is burned into your arm. He needs to hunt, needs to feel something quiver and die under his hands. He’d rather it was a monster, but the longer he stays cooped up here, the less likely that’s going to be.