FIC - Tell Me That the Lights Won't Change (Gen or pre-Dean/Cas)
Title: Tell Me That the Lights Won't Change
Author: earzwideopen
Rating: R to be on the safe side
Pairing/Genre: Gen or pre-Destiel, depending on your mood (I wrote it thinking it would be gen, but readers have officially confirmed they thought it worked as both, which is great with me!) ;)
Spoilers: Season 8 (Purgatory flashbacks)
Warnings: Language, general Purgatory horror and darkness, extreme angst
Genre: H/c
Summary: Dean, battered and sleepless in Purgatory, has forgotten how to search for the light at the end of the tunnel. His angel helps him remember. Hurt!Insomniac!Dean, Protective!Cas.
Note: Written for saltedshotgun's Dean-centric h/c wishlist at hoodie_time. So happy to help make your wish come true! I hope it's everything you wanted. :)
Disclaimers: Title borrowed from Flight Facilities's beautiful "Clair de Lune." Go listen to it. Also heavily influential in the writing of this fic was Clint Mansell's "Moon" score, particularly the track "Memories (Someone We'll Never Know)." Oh... and Dean and Cas sadly are not mine.
(Characterization Note: Benny fans out there: I sincerely did not intend to bash Benny in the making of this piece. He does what he does for his own justifiable reasons. And that's all I'll say on the matter, lest I spoil my own fic). ;)
Archived: on AO3
LiveJournal: Read it after the cut!
I'm just as fucked up as they say
I can't fake the daytime
Found an entrance to escape into the dark
Got false lights for the sun
It's an artificial nocturne
It's an outsider's escape from a broken heart
We hide out in the back
Like shadows in a stranger's dream
Hiding out in the back together
Hiding out in the back forever
Metric, "Artificial Nocturne"
Tell Me That the Lights Won't Change
There was something wrong with Dean.
His heart skittered and flickered inside its brittle bony cage. It twitched at his ribs like a dying animal in its death throes. When it pumped he felt his carotid quivering in his neck, the dribble of blood through the veins on the underside of his arms. His pulse shot globs of red into the whites of his eyes, which strained against the muscles in their sockets like a death row inmate straining against the leather straps of the electric chair.
His eyes strained so hard that they had started... seeing things, and not in the way that eyes were supposed to see things. Shadows circled like vultures in the corners of his vision. Little blood-red flecks flared in front of him. The white whispers of ghosts danced when he blinked.
Dean had forgotten long ago how to separate these ticks - these non-visions - from the tangible monsters.
These days, he slashed first and asked questions later, even if the slashing cut through empty air and left him in a boneless, dizzied pile of nerves.
That was how Purgatory worked, generally.
Another way Purgatory worked was that when Dean was successful enough to slash into something solid, the something-solid slashed back. And the something-solid typically had home turf advantage. If Dean came away from a fight unscathed, it usually meant that he had been hallucinating the fight all along.
Even though the hallucinations were happening more frequently now, the real injuries far outweighed them.
Sometimes Dean's body forced him to take stock of his own impairments. He would go down, usually after a tough fight, against the trunk of a black tree, nerves screaming, limbs quaking, brain spluttering like the victim of a slow and steady drowning.
Here he was now in one of those moments - in one of those weak and wretched times where he would see the faces of the people he loved written hazily on the backs of his eyelids until the pain chased them away. He lacked the tears to cry for them and the voice to cry out for them. His new friends were his injuries, the aches in muscle and bone that told him he was still, at the very least, human.
Dean felt them all, all the different kinds of pain. The sick stabs in his left ribs and the awkward tugging of torn muscle around them; the foul throbs in his banged-up skull; the nasty twinges in a wrist that had wielded a knife too many times to count; the endless searing of what he assumed was constant heartburn, charring its way down through his guts and up into his parched throat; the tenderness of bruises and the sting of abrasions. He felt like a poorly assembled jigsaw puzzle, like his entire body had been grafted on and his nerves were rejecting it like a botched organ transplant.
He was at a point where he imagined sleep like a desert wanderer imagines an oasis. Sleep was soft and cool and clear, and all of his pain could vanish into it, into the black hole. Sleep was a beautiful nothing, ad inifitum, a tide that never stopped coming in.
It never stopped coming in because as long as he was in Purgatory - as long as Dean saw the red flashes in the black shadows - the sleep-tide could never completely come in, could never finish its journey up the beach, could never... never quite...
Hell hadn't been like this. Hell had been constant jarring immediacy, constant burning and bleeding and scraping through flames, tearing through wrecked bodies and spitting in the faces of demons who instantly spat back. Hell hadn't been like Purgatory. There was a paranoia in Purgatory, a malignant psychosis. The landscape was a symphony in the key of neuroticism. Living in Purgatory was like having your pet peeves magnified to an almost intolerable level: you almost heard the nails scrape down the chalkboard, but then again it could have been your imagination.
The difference between Hell and Purgatory was that in Hell, Dean never expected anything to take the proverbial edge off. In Purgatory, Dean was never sure whether the edge was even real, or just a product of the monsters' breath hanging in the air. Pain taunted and jabbed, sleep was futile, and the sound of your own voice was the only thing keeping your thoughts from spiraling into a singularity.
Dean had one talisman in his back pocket, though. He had one way to drag his mind out of the black gunk of sleeplessness. Every time he killed something, some thing, whether it was a real monster or a projection of his own fraying synapses, he would rasp into its face, heavy and ragged, the worn-in mantra, the password to his remaining sanity:
"Where is the angel?"
The river where they found Castiel was gray as a dead man's knuckles, but to Dean it looked as blue as the Caribbean.
Fragments of bits of pieces of images. A sandy, sooty trench coat. A mop of dark hair, spilling down onto a pale neck and face. White hospital scrubs that weren't white anymore. Eyes like faded denim, ringed with sweet dark shadows and lashes.
Dean suddenly knew what it felt like for his heart to beat steadily, healthily. The leaves on the dirty ground crunched under him and his mouth quivered and then Castiel's chest was pressed against his. It was all so warm and so real. It was beyond belief, an answer to a prayer Dean had lost the words to. Dean's lips remembered how to smile. Dean's arms remembered how to hold. Dean's eyes remembered the salt of tears.
"Cas," he'd said.
"Dean."
"Cas," he'd said.
Dean couldn't hear the nails on the chalkboard any more. Dean couldn't see the red flecks in the darkness anymore.
Dean held his angel.
A little over an hour after the reunion at the river, Dean collapsed. He felt it coming like clockwork and made sure to list sideways against a tree like he'd practiced. He miscalculated the distance, met the bark of the tree with his sprained wrist, hissed in pain, and let gravity drag his knees the rest of the way.
Even though he was only feet from Dean to begin with, Castiel zapped to his side. It was quicker than running.
Dean was struggling to hoist himself up against the tree trunk when he felt Cas's palm against his trembling back.
"Dean," Castiel said, gruff as sandpaper and soft as down, sounding warbly to Dean's jumbled mind, "lie back."
Dean blinked hard. Tiny lights sparkled in his peripheral vision. His busted ribs hitched. He furrowed his brow and bared his teeth and did as he was told with painstaking care. He was only a little surprised to find that his back made contact with Castiel's lap instead of the bare earth.
"Oh, this is just peachy." Benny's voice, low and thick. "Let's all take a little cat nap, give the nice monsters a fair chance to catch up with us. We didn't deserve a damn head start, anyhow..."
"He needs rest," Castiel's gravelly bass snapped. "It doesn't matter where we stop; we stand an equal chance of being hunted anywhere."
"Sure thing we do," Benny countered, "with your feathery ass in tow..."
"If you want to leave us, that's your call. But it would be a foolish one." Dean felt Castiel's legs tense with anger underneath him. "Dean is resting here. With me. That's final."
"And since when is he yours," asked Benny, "to do whatever you damn well please with-"
Dean heard his own voice drift up weakly out of a weird, pained grogginess:
"Shut the fuck up, Benny," he said. It came out half slurred, half barked.
Even though his own eyes were closed, Dean could feel the ice-blue burn of Castiel's stare drilling holes in Benny's face.
"What Dean said," growled Cas. "You are not unwelcome among us. Not yet. You don't want to know what I'll do to you if that changes."
A brief period of silence followed. Steady, leaden throbs were slowly marching in to replace the adrenaline seeping out of Dean.
After a minute, Benny said, "I s'pose I'll be takin' first watch."
Dean heard the vampire walk several steps to the edge of the clearing the three of them occupied. Dean's ears had started buzzing like a rabid swarm of bees by now. He searched for the urge to put on a brave face, to try to sit up and tell Cas he was alright, to show the angel that he hadn't really changed, not that much... not that much...
"Dean," said Castiel, "tell me where you're hurting."
"Mojo time?" Dean's voice sounded stuffy and slack. His mouth tasted awful.
"I'm not sure," Cas replied. "I'm just... concerned. Maybe I could help if I... if I knew what to help with. Please tell me."
"...Everywhere, man," Dean said. "Hurts everywhere."
"You were protecting your ribs on your left side when you went down."
"Well... they hurt."
"Do you think any are broken?"
"Tough call to make..." Dean figured now was as good a time as any to stop beating around the bush. "But yeah... Yeah I think they are."
"What else?"
"Cas, I'll be fine..." And there it was - the mask. Dean marveled to himself at how easy it was to put it back on, the one he was used to wearing around angels, around Cas - even when his body was screaming for sleep and help.
Dean pried his twitching eyes open to find that Castiel was leaning his stubbled face over the hunter's. Cas's irises were sharp blue beggars; his dark brows etched fault lines of concern into his forehead.
"Dean..." Castiel said, his voice as close to breaking as Dean had ever heard it. "I know that I ran away before. I would be lying if I said there was no part of me that was afraid then. But I swear to you now... If I let anything happen to you in this place before you can leave it... I don't know what I'll do with myself." Castiel swallowed. The action looked so mystifyingly human. "Please," he said, "please help me help you, Dean."
Dean allowed himself the shadow of a smile. "Okay, Jerry Maguire," he said.
Castiel tilted his head at the reference. It was one of the most welcome and beautiful sights Dean had ever seen.
"If you really... wanna know..." said the hunter, struggling a little to breathe now, feeling the edges of his consciousness blur, "it's mainly my ribs on the one side... and my head... and my right wrist. Everything else just kinda... kinda aches in the background..."
"I understand," said Cas. And with a voice weighed down by all the sediment of an angel's sorrows, he said, "I am so sorry, Dean."
Dean couldn't find the words for forgiveness; they were too precious to be spoken in a place like this. He hoped Cas understood. He hoped...
Castiel took the sides of Dean's worn head in his careful hands. Dean relaxed into the touch, bracing himself for what he thought was going to be a sweeping rush of grace straight to the brain. The rush never came, though. All Dean could feel was the warmth of Cas's palms, the rise and fall of the angel's belly against the top of his head, the steady presence of Cas's legs under his back.
It occurred to Dean that Castiel wasn't using any grace at all - which was incredible, because all of his twinges and aches and cramps and throbs were melting from his haggard frame regardless.
Dean closed his eyes. Castiel's hands on the sides of his skull were reeling the cool blue tide in. His angel was meeting him at the edge of the oasis, blowing all the desert sand away with the beating of his wings.
Dean slept.
Author: earzwideopen
Rating: R to be on the safe side
Pairing/Genre: Gen or pre-Destiel, depending on your mood (I wrote it thinking it would be gen, but readers have officially confirmed they thought it worked as both, which is great with me!) ;)
Spoilers: Season 8 (Purgatory flashbacks)
Warnings: Language, general Purgatory horror and darkness, extreme angst
Genre: H/c
Summary: Dean, battered and sleepless in Purgatory, has forgotten how to search for the light at the end of the tunnel. His angel helps him remember. Hurt!Insomniac!Dean, Protective!Cas.
Note: Written for saltedshotgun's Dean-centric h/c wishlist at hoodie_time. So happy to help make your wish come true! I hope it's everything you wanted. :)
Disclaimers: Title borrowed from Flight Facilities's beautiful "Clair de Lune." Go listen to it. Also heavily influential in the writing of this fic was Clint Mansell's "Moon" score, particularly the track "Memories (Someone We'll Never Know)." Oh... and Dean and Cas sadly are not mine.
(Characterization Note: Benny fans out there: I sincerely did not intend to bash Benny in the making of this piece. He does what he does for his own justifiable reasons. And that's all I'll say on the matter, lest I spoil my own fic). ;)
Archived: on AO3
LiveJournal: Read it after the cut!
I'm just as fucked up as they say
I can't fake the daytime
Found an entrance to escape into the dark
Got false lights for the sun
It's an artificial nocturne
It's an outsider's escape from a broken heart
We hide out in the back
Like shadows in a stranger's dream
Hiding out in the back together
Hiding out in the back forever
Metric, "Artificial Nocturne"
Tell Me That the Lights Won't Change
There was something wrong with Dean.
His heart skittered and flickered inside its brittle bony cage. It twitched at his ribs like a dying animal in its death throes. When it pumped he felt his carotid quivering in his neck, the dribble of blood through the veins on the underside of his arms. His pulse shot globs of red into the whites of his eyes, which strained against the muscles in their sockets like a death row inmate straining against the leather straps of the electric chair.
His eyes strained so hard that they had started... seeing things, and not in the way that eyes were supposed to see things. Shadows circled like vultures in the corners of his vision. Little blood-red flecks flared in front of him. The white whispers of ghosts danced when he blinked.
Dean had forgotten long ago how to separate these ticks - these non-visions - from the tangible monsters.
These days, he slashed first and asked questions later, even if the slashing cut through empty air and left him in a boneless, dizzied pile of nerves.
That was how Purgatory worked, generally.
Another way Purgatory worked was that when Dean was successful enough to slash into something solid, the something-solid slashed back. And the something-solid typically had home turf advantage. If Dean came away from a fight unscathed, it usually meant that he had been hallucinating the fight all along.
Even though the hallucinations were happening more frequently now, the real injuries far outweighed them.
Sometimes Dean's body forced him to take stock of his own impairments. He would go down, usually after a tough fight, against the trunk of a black tree, nerves screaming, limbs quaking, brain spluttering like the victim of a slow and steady drowning.
Here he was now in one of those moments - in one of those weak and wretched times where he would see the faces of the people he loved written hazily on the backs of his eyelids until the pain chased them away. He lacked the tears to cry for them and the voice to cry out for them. His new friends were his injuries, the aches in muscle and bone that told him he was still, at the very least, human.
Dean felt them all, all the different kinds of pain. The sick stabs in his left ribs and the awkward tugging of torn muscle around them; the foul throbs in his banged-up skull; the nasty twinges in a wrist that had wielded a knife too many times to count; the endless searing of what he assumed was constant heartburn, charring its way down through his guts and up into his parched throat; the tenderness of bruises and the sting of abrasions. He felt like a poorly assembled jigsaw puzzle, like his entire body had been grafted on and his nerves were rejecting it like a botched organ transplant.
He was at a point where he imagined sleep like a desert wanderer imagines an oasis. Sleep was soft and cool and clear, and all of his pain could vanish into it, into the black hole. Sleep was a beautiful nothing, ad inifitum, a tide that never stopped coming in.
It never stopped coming in because as long as he was in Purgatory - as long as Dean saw the red flashes in the black shadows - the sleep-tide could never completely come in, could never finish its journey up the beach, could never... never quite...
Hell hadn't been like this. Hell had been constant jarring immediacy, constant burning and bleeding and scraping through flames, tearing through wrecked bodies and spitting in the faces of demons who instantly spat back. Hell hadn't been like Purgatory. There was a paranoia in Purgatory, a malignant psychosis. The landscape was a symphony in the key of neuroticism. Living in Purgatory was like having your pet peeves magnified to an almost intolerable level: you almost heard the nails scrape down the chalkboard, but then again it could have been your imagination.
The difference between Hell and Purgatory was that in Hell, Dean never expected anything to take the proverbial edge off. In Purgatory, Dean was never sure whether the edge was even real, or just a product of the monsters' breath hanging in the air. Pain taunted and jabbed, sleep was futile, and the sound of your own voice was the only thing keeping your thoughts from spiraling into a singularity.
Dean had one talisman in his back pocket, though. He had one way to drag his mind out of the black gunk of sleeplessness. Every time he killed something, some thing, whether it was a real monster or a projection of his own fraying synapses, he would rasp into its face, heavy and ragged, the worn-in mantra, the password to his remaining sanity:
"Where is the angel?"
The river where they found Castiel was gray as a dead man's knuckles, but to Dean it looked as blue as the Caribbean.
Fragments of bits of pieces of images. A sandy, sooty trench coat. A mop of dark hair, spilling down onto a pale neck and face. White hospital scrubs that weren't white anymore. Eyes like faded denim, ringed with sweet dark shadows and lashes.
Dean suddenly knew what it felt like for his heart to beat steadily, healthily. The leaves on the dirty ground crunched under him and his mouth quivered and then Castiel's chest was pressed against his. It was all so warm and so real. It was beyond belief, an answer to a prayer Dean had lost the words to. Dean's lips remembered how to smile. Dean's arms remembered how to hold. Dean's eyes remembered the salt of tears.
"Cas," he'd said.
"Dean."
"Cas," he'd said.
Dean couldn't hear the nails on the chalkboard any more. Dean couldn't see the red flecks in the darkness anymore.
Dean held his angel.
A little over an hour after the reunion at the river, Dean collapsed. He felt it coming like clockwork and made sure to list sideways against a tree like he'd practiced. He miscalculated the distance, met the bark of the tree with his sprained wrist, hissed in pain, and let gravity drag his knees the rest of the way.
Even though he was only feet from Dean to begin with, Castiel zapped to his side. It was quicker than running.
Dean was struggling to hoist himself up against the tree trunk when he felt Cas's palm against his trembling back.
"Dean," Castiel said, gruff as sandpaper and soft as down, sounding warbly to Dean's jumbled mind, "lie back."
Dean blinked hard. Tiny lights sparkled in his peripheral vision. His busted ribs hitched. He furrowed his brow and bared his teeth and did as he was told with painstaking care. He was only a little surprised to find that his back made contact with Castiel's lap instead of the bare earth.
"Oh, this is just peachy." Benny's voice, low and thick. "Let's all take a little cat nap, give the nice monsters a fair chance to catch up with us. We didn't deserve a damn head start, anyhow..."
"He needs rest," Castiel's gravelly bass snapped. "It doesn't matter where we stop; we stand an equal chance of being hunted anywhere."
"Sure thing we do," Benny countered, "with your feathery ass in tow..."
"If you want to leave us, that's your call. But it would be a foolish one." Dean felt Castiel's legs tense with anger underneath him. "Dean is resting here. With me. That's final."
"And since when is he yours," asked Benny, "to do whatever you damn well please with-"
Dean heard his own voice drift up weakly out of a weird, pained grogginess:
"Shut the fuck up, Benny," he said. It came out half slurred, half barked.
Even though his own eyes were closed, Dean could feel the ice-blue burn of Castiel's stare drilling holes in Benny's face.
"What Dean said," growled Cas. "You are not unwelcome among us. Not yet. You don't want to know what I'll do to you if that changes."
A brief period of silence followed. Steady, leaden throbs were slowly marching in to replace the adrenaline seeping out of Dean.
After a minute, Benny said, "I s'pose I'll be takin' first watch."
Dean heard the vampire walk several steps to the edge of the clearing the three of them occupied. Dean's ears had started buzzing like a rabid swarm of bees by now. He searched for the urge to put on a brave face, to try to sit up and tell Cas he was alright, to show the angel that he hadn't really changed, not that much... not that much...
"Dean," said Castiel, "tell me where you're hurting."
"Mojo time?" Dean's voice sounded stuffy and slack. His mouth tasted awful.
"I'm not sure," Cas replied. "I'm just... concerned. Maybe I could help if I... if I knew what to help with. Please tell me."
"...Everywhere, man," Dean said. "Hurts everywhere."
"You were protecting your ribs on your left side when you went down."
"Well... they hurt."
"Do you think any are broken?"
"Tough call to make..." Dean figured now was as good a time as any to stop beating around the bush. "But yeah... Yeah I think they are."
"What else?"
"Cas, I'll be fine..." And there it was - the mask. Dean marveled to himself at how easy it was to put it back on, the one he was used to wearing around angels, around Cas - even when his body was screaming for sleep and help.
Dean pried his twitching eyes open to find that Castiel was leaning his stubbled face over the hunter's. Cas's irises were sharp blue beggars; his dark brows etched fault lines of concern into his forehead.
"Dean..." Castiel said, his voice as close to breaking as Dean had ever heard it. "I know that I ran away before. I would be lying if I said there was no part of me that was afraid then. But I swear to you now... If I let anything happen to you in this place before you can leave it... I don't know what I'll do with myself." Castiel swallowed. The action looked so mystifyingly human. "Please," he said, "please help me help you, Dean."
Dean allowed himself the shadow of a smile. "Okay, Jerry Maguire," he said.
Castiel tilted his head at the reference. It was one of the most welcome and beautiful sights Dean had ever seen.
"If you really... wanna know..." said the hunter, struggling a little to breathe now, feeling the edges of his consciousness blur, "it's mainly my ribs on the one side... and my head... and my right wrist. Everything else just kinda... kinda aches in the background..."
"I understand," said Cas. And with a voice weighed down by all the sediment of an angel's sorrows, he said, "I am so sorry, Dean."
Dean couldn't find the words for forgiveness; they were too precious to be spoken in a place like this. He hoped Cas understood. He hoped...
Castiel took the sides of Dean's worn head in his careful hands. Dean relaxed into the touch, bracing himself for what he thought was going to be a sweeping rush of grace straight to the brain. The rush never came, though. All Dean could feel was the warmth of Cas's palms, the rise and fall of the angel's belly against the top of his head, the steady presence of Cas's legs under his back.
It occurred to Dean that Castiel wasn't using any grace at all - which was incredible, because all of his twinges and aches and cramps and throbs were melting from his haggard frame regardless.
Dean closed his eyes. Castiel's hands on the sides of his skull were reeling the cool blue tide in. His angel was meeting him at the edge of the oasis, blowing all the desert sand away with the beating of his wings.
Dean slept.