Voi ch'entrate
From the multi-fandom horror comment-fic meme going on over at sharp_teeth.
Title: Voi ch'entrate
Prompt: From a prompt by the lovely and talented roque_clasique: Dean, Sam, whoever -- horror retelling of the Labyrinth myth. (not the Henson movie *g*). Original prompt can be found here.
Spoilers: None. Maybe a couple of really vague spoilers for Seasons 4-5, but if you blink you'll miss 'em.
Word Count: 2,924
Warnings: Gore, violence, creepy shit, bad language. The usual.
Disclaimer: Apparently leather restraints can be chewed through. Who knew? Next time I'll invest in metal. Maybe chain link.
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer: Uh, God. I don't even know how to explain this. I saw the prompt and I liked it?
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer #2: This doesn't bear much resemblance to the classic myth, except that there's a labyrinth and a monster, and there were sort of 14 victims except I never bother mentioning that in the story, so, uh, yeah. It's not exactly a minotaur. Sorry.
Random Author's Note: Title is taken from "The Inferno."
Sam is getting really tired of waking up in pain, alone and in the dark. At least this time he isn't tied up. He lies still, gingerly tests his limbs, finds everything working, if painful. He's not entirely sure his wrist isn't broken, but he can still mostly move his fingers, and that means he can work with it. He bites his lip as he hauls himself to his feet, using the wall as support, tastes copper as his head throbs with the movement. The light is dim enough that he can't see much further than half a foot in front of his face. The wall is rough beneath his fingers, as though it's been hewn out of stone, and he leans against it with all his weight, breathing hard, waiting for his heart rate to return to normal. He's deeper now than he was before, is all he can think.
Sooner or later, you'll come to me.
He ignores the whisper. Easy. First things first. Find Dean, then find his guide. Maybe not in that order. He drops back to all fours, wincing, and begins feeling around carefully, shuddering a bit as his fingers brush against dry, brittle things that feel like twigs and that he knows are nothing of the kind. The room he's in is small, ten feet by ten feet, and it smells of decay and decades of dust and disuse. He coughs as he stirs up a cloud of mouldy dust, and finally his fingers bump against a familiar-feeling cylinder. He snatches it up, shoves it in the pocket of his jacket, then keeps feeling around for his flashlight. Predictably enough, he doesn't find it.
You don't need the light. Follow me, instead.
There's no point in following the guide back now. Dean can't find his way out without it, and he's not leaving him behind. He sticks to the wall, shuffles slowly ahead, one step at a time, until he finds a crude doorway, and slides out into a passageway that's only slightly less dark than the room he was in before. Shadows flit along the edges of his vision, and every so often something scuttles furtively past him along the far wall. He finds himself praying that it's rats.
“Dean?” he yells, when he thinks he's far enough along. “Dean!”
There's no answer, but he didn't expect one. He's leaning against the wall with one shoulder, cradling his injured wrist in his good hand, pressing it against his chest for support. He pauses every so often to wipe away the blood that keeps trickling into his eyes. There's no way out, not unless he uses the guide, and he knows it's a one-time deal: once he uses it, there's no coming back, not if he wants to live, and he knows Dean will want to end this before they get out.
Come this way.
He thinks he can hear a faint answer the next time he yells Dean's name, and he forces his aching limbs to move faster. It's not far now.
He's read before that all mazes have a key. There's a trick to finding your way out, and as a kid he used to drive Dean and Dad nuts, begging them to go into every single hedge maze and fun house they'd come across, just to see how fast he could find the exit. Most of the time it's simple: the trick is just to keep turning left or keep turning right, and suddenly you're at the exit. This time there's no easy out. He decides to keep turning right anyway, just on principle. That way he can backtrack if he has to. Then again, the way his luck is going, the maze is probably shifting behind him, like an Escher come to life.
“Dean!”
This time he's sure he hears an answering “Sam!” from further away, but it feels as though the labyrinth is working against him. The floor begins to slope crazily, the walls closing in, and he has to close his eyes against a rush of nausea and lightheadedness. The shadows pulse and chitter at him, and he presses a hand to his eyes.
“Notrealnotrealnotreal,” he mumbles. It's an illusion, designed to make victims lose their minds. He knows this, knew it going in.
Of course it's real.
*
He keeps going for what feels like hours. It could be minutes or days -time doesn't seem to mean the same thing in here. He stumbles on a patch of rough floor, goes down hard, can't bite back a scream of pain as he lands on his hands. He lies still for a few moments, breathing hard, gags when his hand brushes up against something soft and sticky and still warm. He can feel it cooling beneath his fingers, and a putrid smell of vomit and sweat and fear and excrement fills his nose and mouth. He scrabbles backward, saliva filling his mouth, swallows hard several times. He's suddenly grateful for the darkness, doesn't want to see who that was, doesn't want to know what features he would recognize beneath the flayed skin, the exposed bone, under the rictus of fear and death stretched across the lifeless skull. This isn't an illusion, but he wishes it was. A shadow reaches for him, and he bites back a yell, rolls away from it as fast as he can manage, and it retreats, sinking back into the inky darkness.
I have all the time in the world to wait.
He struggles to his knees, then to his feet. No choice but to keep going. He yells his brother's name, stumbles drunkenly toward the sound of his voice, what he hopes is his voice. It could just be another trap -he knows the thing can imitate human voices- but hope won't let him believe it. He stops short as Dean's voice comes from just below him.
“Sam! Be careful!”
There are traps everywhere. He doesn't know how he managed to forget that, but now that he remembers -snapping bones and ripping of tendons- his knees buckle and he has to cling to the wall, shuddering convulsively.
“Where are you?” he asks the darkness.
“Down here, jackass. Quit asking stupid questions and help me!”
Dean's voice brings him back to reality with a jolt. He swallows his mouthful of bile, inches forward until he finds a hole in the wall, almost like a sewer grate, he thinks with a kind of mirthless glee. A sewer within a sewer within an underground labyrinth.
There's no way, except through me.
He bites down hard on his tongue so as not to give into the hysterics which are threatening to overwhelm him at any moment.
“Dean?”
“No, I'm Ariadne. Of course it's me, moron. Help me up!”
He laughs, still a little hysterical, but he's calmer now. “How far down are you?”
“Not far. I just can't climb out. Think my leg's broken. The whole situation's jacked, Sammy.”
Okay, he's got something constructive to do now. It's not so bad. Get Dean out of the hole, find the monster, kill the monster, get out of the labyrinth. Easy. Compared to the apocalypse, this is child's play. He flinches as the scuttling, scurrying sounds come closer, tries not to look as the shadows around him lengthen and flicker again, in and out, like tongues.
I can taste you already.
“Put out your hand. Can you climb if I help you?”
“Uh, sure.”
Dean's always been a terrible liar, at least where Sam is concerned. Still, there's nothing to be done except try. He reaches down with his good hand, half-expecting to feel claws gouge into his forearm, or the dry rustle of bone and shrivelled sinew against his hand. But Dean's hand is warm in his, and very much alive, and his cursing as Sam hauls him up is the most beautiful thing Sam has ever heard in his life. They land in a tangled heap of arms and legs, and for a few seconds Sam lets himself cling to his brother like a half-drowned cat, until Dean shoves him off.
“Jesus, Sam!”
He laughs. “I can't believe you remembered the myth. Ariadne?”
Dean snorts. “What? You wouldn't stop yammering on about it in the car. Shut up.” He groans and shifts to the side. “Fucker hit me in the head. Why d'they always go for the head? Gonna have fucking brain damage before I'm thirty-five.”
Sam hauls them both to their feet, swallowing his own groan of pain as Dean leans hard on him, clutching at his broken arm to keep his balance. “You know monsters. They can always sense your vulnerable spots. Good thing you've got a thick skull to go with it.”
His brother drives an elbow into his ribs in retaliation, but doesn't let go, and Sam almost bites through his lip. “You're... vulnerable. Whatever.”
“Fantastic comeback. You should take your act on the road.”
“Fuck you.”
“You first.”
“You got your flashlight?”
Sam shakes his head, then realizes Dean can't see him. “No. Must have lost it when the thing attacked us. You seen any of the others?”
I have tasted the marrow of their bones.
“No. Don't have my flashlight, either. Sometimes I don't know why we bother having them at all, you know? I mean, we either lose them or they stop working ten minutes in. And they're not cheap, either.”
“Dean... let go of my arm.”
“What?”
“That thing broke my wrist, and you're seriously hurting me.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Thank you,” Sam breathes a sigh of relief. “I think I found one of the victims back there. Hard to tell in the dark, but the corpse was pretty fresh. Couldn't see who it was.”
“Small mercies,” Dean mutters, but he pats Sam's shoulder. “Your other arm good?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Between the two of us we've got six working limbs. Not too shabby. You still got the thing?”
“The guide? Yeah.”
“Okay. Plan B. Torch the sucker, and then get the hell out.”
“Wasn't that Plan A?”
“Plan A was: Don't get hurt, torch the sucker, save the sacrificial victims, then get the hell out of here. Plan B is simpler.”
“Right. So... how fucked are we?” Sam swallows hard again, his arm throbbing.
A beat. “Pretty fucked.”
*
They're going in circles, and Dean is fading fast, although he's trying to keep his game face on. If it's not a hairline fracture in his leg, then it's a really bad sprain. The leg won't take any weight at all, and it's all he can do to just lean on Sam and shuffle forward, wincing and swearing under his breath every time his foot so much as brushes against the ground. After what feels like hours of creeping along in the darkness, Sam stops, and Dean sinks gratefully to the ground, breathing hard.
Almost immediately the shadows -which have been mercifully still as long as they keep moving- begin to writhe and flicker around them again. The scuttling, scuffling sounds start again, like thousands of tiny nails scraping against the stone. Sam can't tell where they're coming from, whether it's above or below or all around them. His throat is burning, he can't remember the last time he had anything to drink. Dean's breathing hard, must be even more dehydrated than he is, and when Sam reaches up to brush his hand against his brother's face his skin is clammy to the touch. Time to move.
Further down. Always further down.
“Time to move,” he repeats aloud, hauling on Dean's arm. “You're going shocky on me. Come on, get up.”
“Are those rats?” Dean doesn't move, his eyes slipping shut. “I hate rats.”
“Yeah, I know. They're the rats of the world. Get up!”
“Never said that,” Dean mutters, wincing and choking back a noise of pain as Sam drags him to his feet. “Useless douchebag ghost buster whatsits...”
“Ghost Facers. I know,” he pats Dean's shoulder reassuringly, and Dean just clings harder to him, fingers digging into the fabric of his jacket.
“Hate rats. Fuckin' unsanitary.”
“You're giving me the creeps. Shut up and just lean on me, okay?” Sam's heart is thudding painfully against his ribs. “I'm going to get us out of here, now. This has gone on long enough.”
“No!” Dean's hand snakes out and grabs him by the arm, and Sam gasps as stars spark behind his eyelids. “Dammit, Sam! Once we're out, there's no way back in, and then that thing is free to keep killing for the rest of eternity. You really want to live with that on our conscience?”
If it means saving you, Sam thinks, but he knows it's useless. “Okay. Okay, fine. But we have to keep going.”
“Fuck,” Dean breathes into his shoulder, then nods imperceptibly, and pulls himself up. “Okay, let's go. Waste the fucker, then get out.”
“Uh-huh.”
Sam shoves them both forward, the sound of nails scraping along the stone coming closer. He tells himself he's imagining the eyes staring out at him from the darkness, doesn't say anything to Dean, just hurries them along, heedless of where they're going. At the rate they're going, either he or Dean are going to trigger one of the hidden traps, and then they'll really be screwed. His feet scuff along the uneven ground, kicking aside debris, trying not to picture just what it is that he's shoving out of their way, cloth and something brittle, and chunks of something that slides, slip-slip-sluck, along the rough-hewn ground.
They cannot satiate me. I will siphon the blood from your veins.
“You got a plan?”
“Workin' on it.”
Dean's not working on anything. He's too busy trying to stay conscious, and losing the fight with every step. It would be simple enough to pull the guide from his pocket, to just get them out, but Sam is done lying to his brother, done with trying to protect Dean from himself, because every time he thinks he's doing the right thing they both end up losing. The scratching gets louder, filling his ears, the noise echoing in his skull, and the shadows lengthen around them, reach for them, coiling around him, cutting off what little light is left. The next thing he knows Dean is stumbling, or maybe he's just lost his footing, and the ground disappears out from under his feet and they're falling, tumbling down a slope, and his vision greys out long before they come to a stop.
Mine!
He comes awake to the sound of Dean screaming. Tendrils of darkness are wrapped around them both, and he's being pulled apart, and the sound of Dean's screaming is filling his head. He's choking on bile and darkness, and the whispering is a deafening shriek, all bloodlust and mine-mine-mine!
He throws himself at it, trying to pry it away, but there's no fighting a shadow, nothing to hold onto. The things slips through his fingers, slippery and insubstantial, sinks razor-sharp fingers into his chest, and he can taste his own blood on its tongue, heat and copper and beautiful and mine, and this is it, it doesn't matter, none of it matters because he's going to die with the taste of his own tainted blood flowing out and soaking the already desecrated ground.
You've always been mine. Marked from the first.
There's a certain peace in death. The darkness is different, quieter. It's easy, now, to let himself slide.
“Sammy!”
Mine!
The voice is a thin, desperate wail, but it's enough, just enough. He pulls back. “No! You can't have him!”
His hand is in his pocket, clenched around the tiny cylinder, and the thing shrieks again, the bloodlust replaced by agony. White flares around them, brilliant and blinding and burning, and he hears himself screaming as the creature's claws tear at his insides, scrabbling at his heart, digging in as it clings to life. Red and black explode behind his eyelids, fighting with the white trying to engulf them all, and then there's nothing.
*
“Sammy?”
He can't move, manages a low whimper.
“Sammy, you awake?”
He finds his tongue. “'m 'wake.”
He hears Dean expel a sigh of relief. “Thank God. What'd you do?”
“Dunno, exactly. Used the guide. 's it gone?”
“I think so. You fried it, that's for sure.”
“Good.”
He feels Dean prying at the fingers of his hand, still clenched around the cylinder, and whimpers again.
“Sorry, I know it hurts. Uh... you think they meant it when they said this thing was a one-time deal?”
“Prob'ly.”
“Maybe they only meant it for the getting-out-of-Dodge part.”
He can still hear the soft sounds of scuttling, chittering, scrabbling just behind his head, in the walls. “Maybe.”
“So maybe I can still use this to get us out, since you didn't use it for that.”
His mouth is filling with blood, and he chokes and swallows, doesn't manage to answer.
“Okay, Sammy. Hang in there, okay? I'm going to get us out.”
Sam nods, but doesn't hold his breath.
*
Title: Voi ch'entrate
Prompt: From a prompt by the lovely and talented roque_clasique: Dean, Sam, whoever -- horror retelling of the Labyrinth myth. (not the Henson movie *g*). Original prompt can be found here.
Spoilers: None. Maybe a couple of really vague spoilers for Seasons 4-5, but if you blink you'll miss 'em.
Word Count: 2,924
Warnings: Gore, violence, creepy shit, bad language. The usual.
Disclaimer: Apparently leather restraints can be chewed through. Who knew? Next time I'll invest in metal. Maybe chain link.
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer: Uh, God. I don't even know how to explain this. I saw the prompt and I liked it?
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer #2: This doesn't bear much resemblance to the classic myth, except that there's a labyrinth and a monster, and there were sort of 14 victims except I never bother mentioning that in the story, so, uh, yeah. It's not exactly a minotaur. Sorry.
Random Author's Note: Title is taken from "The Inferno."
Sam is getting really tired of waking up in pain, alone and in the dark. At least this time he isn't tied up. He lies still, gingerly tests his limbs, finds everything working, if painful. He's not entirely sure his wrist isn't broken, but he can still mostly move his fingers, and that means he can work with it. He bites his lip as he hauls himself to his feet, using the wall as support, tastes copper as his head throbs with the movement. The light is dim enough that he can't see much further than half a foot in front of his face. The wall is rough beneath his fingers, as though it's been hewn out of stone, and he leans against it with all his weight, breathing hard, waiting for his heart rate to return to normal. He's deeper now than he was before, is all he can think.
Sooner or later, you'll come to me.
He ignores the whisper. Easy. First things first. Find Dean, then find his guide. Maybe not in that order. He drops back to all fours, wincing, and begins feeling around carefully, shuddering a bit as his fingers brush against dry, brittle things that feel like twigs and that he knows are nothing of the kind. The room he's in is small, ten feet by ten feet, and it smells of decay and decades of dust and disuse. He coughs as he stirs up a cloud of mouldy dust, and finally his fingers bump against a familiar-feeling cylinder. He snatches it up, shoves it in the pocket of his jacket, then keeps feeling around for his flashlight. Predictably enough, he doesn't find it.
You don't need the light. Follow me, instead.
There's no point in following the guide back now. Dean can't find his way out without it, and he's not leaving him behind. He sticks to the wall, shuffles slowly ahead, one step at a time, until he finds a crude doorway, and slides out into a passageway that's only slightly less dark than the room he was in before. Shadows flit along the edges of his vision, and every so often something scuttles furtively past him along the far wall. He finds himself praying that it's rats.
“Dean?” he yells, when he thinks he's far enough along. “Dean!”
There's no answer, but he didn't expect one. He's leaning against the wall with one shoulder, cradling his injured wrist in his good hand, pressing it against his chest for support. He pauses every so often to wipe away the blood that keeps trickling into his eyes. There's no way out, not unless he uses the guide, and he knows it's a one-time deal: once he uses it, there's no coming back, not if he wants to live, and he knows Dean will want to end this before they get out.
Come this way.
He thinks he can hear a faint answer the next time he yells Dean's name, and he forces his aching limbs to move faster. It's not far now.
He's read before that all mazes have a key. There's a trick to finding your way out, and as a kid he used to drive Dean and Dad nuts, begging them to go into every single hedge maze and fun house they'd come across, just to see how fast he could find the exit. Most of the time it's simple: the trick is just to keep turning left or keep turning right, and suddenly you're at the exit. This time there's no easy out. He decides to keep turning right anyway, just on principle. That way he can backtrack if he has to. Then again, the way his luck is going, the maze is probably shifting behind him, like an Escher come to life.
“Dean!”
This time he's sure he hears an answering “Sam!” from further away, but it feels as though the labyrinth is working against him. The floor begins to slope crazily, the walls closing in, and he has to close his eyes against a rush of nausea and lightheadedness. The shadows pulse and chitter at him, and he presses a hand to his eyes.
“Notrealnotrealnotreal,” he mumbles. It's an illusion, designed to make victims lose their minds. He knows this, knew it going in.
Of course it's real.
*
He keeps going for what feels like hours. It could be minutes or days -time doesn't seem to mean the same thing in here. He stumbles on a patch of rough floor, goes down hard, can't bite back a scream of pain as he lands on his hands. He lies still for a few moments, breathing hard, gags when his hand brushes up against something soft and sticky and still warm. He can feel it cooling beneath his fingers, and a putrid smell of vomit and sweat and fear and excrement fills his nose and mouth. He scrabbles backward, saliva filling his mouth, swallows hard several times. He's suddenly grateful for the darkness, doesn't want to see who that was, doesn't want to know what features he would recognize beneath the flayed skin, the exposed bone, under the rictus of fear and death stretched across the lifeless skull. This isn't an illusion, but he wishes it was. A shadow reaches for him, and he bites back a yell, rolls away from it as fast as he can manage, and it retreats, sinking back into the inky darkness.
I have all the time in the world to wait.
He struggles to his knees, then to his feet. No choice but to keep going. He yells his brother's name, stumbles drunkenly toward the sound of his voice, what he hopes is his voice. It could just be another trap -he knows the thing can imitate human voices- but hope won't let him believe it. He stops short as Dean's voice comes from just below him.
“Sam! Be careful!”
There are traps everywhere. He doesn't know how he managed to forget that, but now that he remembers -snapping bones and ripping of tendons- his knees buckle and he has to cling to the wall, shuddering convulsively.
“Where are you?” he asks the darkness.
“Down here, jackass. Quit asking stupid questions and help me!”
Dean's voice brings him back to reality with a jolt. He swallows his mouthful of bile, inches forward until he finds a hole in the wall, almost like a sewer grate, he thinks with a kind of mirthless glee. A sewer within a sewer within an underground labyrinth.
There's no way, except through me.
He bites down hard on his tongue so as not to give into the hysterics which are threatening to overwhelm him at any moment.
“Dean?”
“No, I'm Ariadne. Of course it's me, moron. Help me up!”
He laughs, still a little hysterical, but he's calmer now. “How far down are you?”
“Not far. I just can't climb out. Think my leg's broken. The whole situation's jacked, Sammy.”
Okay, he's got something constructive to do now. It's not so bad. Get Dean out of the hole, find the monster, kill the monster, get out of the labyrinth. Easy. Compared to the apocalypse, this is child's play. He flinches as the scuttling, scurrying sounds come closer, tries not to look as the shadows around him lengthen and flicker again, in and out, like tongues.
I can taste you already.
“Put out your hand. Can you climb if I help you?”
“Uh, sure.”
Dean's always been a terrible liar, at least where Sam is concerned. Still, there's nothing to be done except try. He reaches down with his good hand, half-expecting to feel claws gouge into his forearm, or the dry rustle of bone and shrivelled sinew against his hand. But Dean's hand is warm in his, and very much alive, and his cursing as Sam hauls him up is the most beautiful thing Sam has ever heard in his life. They land in a tangled heap of arms and legs, and for a few seconds Sam lets himself cling to his brother like a half-drowned cat, until Dean shoves him off.
“Jesus, Sam!”
He laughs. “I can't believe you remembered the myth. Ariadne?”
Dean snorts. “What? You wouldn't stop yammering on about it in the car. Shut up.” He groans and shifts to the side. “Fucker hit me in the head. Why d'they always go for the head? Gonna have fucking brain damage before I'm thirty-five.”
Sam hauls them both to their feet, swallowing his own groan of pain as Dean leans hard on him, clutching at his broken arm to keep his balance. “You know monsters. They can always sense your vulnerable spots. Good thing you've got a thick skull to go with it.”
His brother drives an elbow into his ribs in retaliation, but doesn't let go, and Sam almost bites through his lip. “You're... vulnerable. Whatever.”
“Fantastic comeback. You should take your act on the road.”
“Fuck you.”
“You first.”
“You got your flashlight?”
Sam shakes his head, then realizes Dean can't see him. “No. Must have lost it when the thing attacked us. You seen any of the others?”
I have tasted the marrow of their bones.
“No. Don't have my flashlight, either. Sometimes I don't know why we bother having them at all, you know? I mean, we either lose them or they stop working ten minutes in. And they're not cheap, either.”
“Dean... let go of my arm.”
“What?”
“That thing broke my wrist, and you're seriously hurting me.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Thank you,” Sam breathes a sigh of relief. “I think I found one of the victims back there. Hard to tell in the dark, but the corpse was pretty fresh. Couldn't see who it was.”
“Small mercies,” Dean mutters, but he pats Sam's shoulder. “Your other arm good?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Between the two of us we've got six working limbs. Not too shabby. You still got the thing?”
“The guide? Yeah.”
“Okay. Plan B. Torch the sucker, and then get the hell out.”
“Wasn't that Plan A?”
“Plan A was: Don't get hurt, torch the sucker, save the sacrificial victims, then get the hell out of here. Plan B is simpler.”
“Right. So... how fucked are we?” Sam swallows hard again, his arm throbbing.
A beat. “Pretty fucked.”
*
They're going in circles, and Dean is fading fast, although he's trying to keep his game face on. If it's not a hairline fracture in his leg, then it's a really bad sprain. The leg won't take any weight at all, and it's all he can do to just lean on Sam and shuffle forward, wincing and swearing under his breath every time his foot so much as brushes against the ground. After what feels like hours of creeping along in the darkness, Sam stops, and Dean sinks gratefully to the ground, breathing hard.
Almost immediately the shadows -which have been mercifully still as long as they keep moving- begin to writhe and flicker around them again. The scuttling, scuffling sounds start again, like thousands of tiny nails scraping against the stone. Sam can't tell where they're coming from, whether it's above or below or all around them. His throat is burning, he can't remember the last time he had anything to drink. Dean's breathing hard, must be even more dehydrated than he is, and when Sam reaches up to brush his hand against his brother's face his skin is clammy to the touch. Time to move.
Further down. Always further down.
“Time to move,” he repeats aloud, hauling on Dean's arm. “You're going shocky on me. Come on, get up.”
“Are those rats?” Dean doesn't move, his eyes slipping shut. “I hate rats.”
“Yeah, I know. They're the rats of the world. Get up!”
“Never said that,” Dean mutters, wincing and choking back a noise of pain as Sam drags him to his feet. “Useless douchebag ghost buster whatsits...”
“Ghost Facers. I know,” he pats Dean's shoulder reassuringly, and Dean just clings harder to him, fingers digging into the fabric of his jacket.
“Hate rats. Fuckin' unsanitary.”
“You're giving me the creeps. Shut up and just lean on me, okay?” Sam's heart is thudding painfully against his ribs. “I'm going to get us out of here, now. This has gone on long enough.”
“No!” Dean's hand snakes out and grabs him by the arm, and Sam gasps as stars spark behind his eyelids. “Dammit, Sam! Once we're out, there's no way back in, and then that thing is free to keep killing for the rest of eternity. You really want to live with that on our conscience?”
If it means saving you, Sam thinks, but he knows it's useless. “Okay. Okay, fine. But we have to keep going.”
“Fuck,” Dean breathes into his shoulder, then nods imperceptibly, and pulls himself up. “Okay, let's go. Waste the fucker, then get out.”
“Uh-huh.”
Sam shoves them both forward, the sound of nails scraping along the stone coming closer. He tells himself he's imagining the eyes staring out at him from the darkness, doesn't say anything to Dean, just hurries them along, heedless of where they're going. At the rate they're going, either he or Dean are going to trigger one of the hidden traps, and then they'll really be screwed. His feet scuff along the uneven ground, kicking aside debris, trying not to picture just what it is that he's shoving out of their way, cloth and something brittle, and chunks of something that slides, slip-slip-sluck, along the rough-hewn ground.
They cannot satiate me. I will siphon the blood from your veins.
“You got a plan?”
“Workin' on it.”
Dean's not working on anything. He's too busy trying to stay conscious, and losing the fight with every step. It would be simple enough to pull the guide from his pocket, to just get them out, but Sam is done lying to his brother, done with trying to protect Dean from himself, because every time he thinks he's doing the right thing they both end up losing. The scratching gets louder, filling his ears, the noise echoing in his skull, and the shadows lengthen around them, reach for them, coiling around him, cutting off what little light is left. The next thing he knows Dean is stumbling, or maybe he's just lost his footing, and the ground disappears out from under his feet and they're falling, tumbling down a slope, and his vision greys out long before they come to a stop.
Mine!
He comes awake to the sound of Dean screaming. Tendrils of darkness are wrapped around them both, and he's being pulled apart, and the sound of Dean's screaming is filling his head. He's choking on bile and darkness, and the whispering is a deafening shriek, all bloodlust and mine-mine-mine!
He throws himself at it, trying to pry it away, but there's no fighting a shadow, nothing to hold onto. The things slips through his fingers, slippery and insubstantial, sinks razor-sharp fingers into his chest, and he can taste his own blood on its tongue, heat and copper and beautiful and mine, and this is it, it doesn't matter, none of it matters because he's going to die with the taste of his own tainted blood flowing out and soaking the already desecrated ground.
You've always been mine. Marked from the first.
There's a certain peace in death. The darkness is different, quieter. It's easy, now, to let himself slide.
“Sammy!”
Mine!
The voice is a thin, desperate wail, but it's enough, just enough. He pulls back. “No! You can't have him!”
His hand is in his pocket, clenched around the tiny cylinder, and the thing shrieks again, the bloodlust replaced by agony. White flares around them, brilliant and blinding and burning, and he hears himself screaming as the creature's claws tear at his insides, scrabbling at his heart, digging in as it clings to life. Red and black explode behind his eyelids, fighting with the white trying to engulf them all, and then there's nothing.
*
“Sammy?”
He can't move, manages a low whimper.
“Sammy, you awake?”
He finds his tongue. “'m 'wake.”
He hears Dean expel a sigh of relief. “Thank God. What'd you do?”
“Dunno, exactly. Used the guide. 's it gone?”
“I think so. You fried it, that's for sure.”
“Good.”
He feels Dean prying at the fingers of his hand, still clenched around the cylinder, and whimpers again.
“Sorry, I know it hurts. Uh... you think they meant it when they said this thing was a one-time deal?”
“Prob'ly.”
“Maybe they only meant it for the getting-out-of-Dodge part.”
He can still hear the soft sounds of scuttling, chittering, scrabbling just behind his head, in the walls. “Maybe.”
“So maybe I can still use this to get us out, since you didn't use it for that.”
His mouth is filling with blood, and he chokes and swallows, doesn't manage to answer.
“Okay, Sammy. Hang in there, okay? I'm going to get us out.”
Sam nods, but doesn't hold his breath.
*