[fic] prufrock_26: Muscle Memory
[ Gen ]
Title: Muscle Memory
Writer: prufrock_26
Status of work: complete
Characters and/or pairings: Dean, Sam, Benny
Rating: PG-13
Warnings, kinks & contents: [Click to view]hurt!Dean (PTSD, asphyxiation), spoilers for early S8 (Purgatory)
Length: ~4,300
Summary: Sam and Dean hunt a mysterious spirit in an abandoned house, and Dean tries to remember what reality feels like.
Reccer's notes: If you missed Dean in S8, here he is. I don't think there's anything else that could possibly convey how much this fic meant to me in that respect. But if for you, that's not a Drop Everything reason to read this fic, then know that the sensory detail of this fic is aesthetically splendid, particularly in the olfactory realm. This is compounded by the way the degree and nature of these details dovetails with Dean's experience of Purgatory, the spinning dissonance as Purgatory is at once too far removed and too close at hand to grapple with.
This fic also accentuates the reasons that even though the Winchesters have killed things as high up on the food chain as Eve, the Leviathans, etc., ghosts will never be things to take lightly. (A pet pleasure of mine. :P)
[Short excerpt]They wander through the upper floor as dusk closes in on the house, warping the rooms from the inside out with deep, swelling shadows. Nobody knows of any violent deaths in this place-not the neighbors who reported repeated episodes of nighttime screaming over the past five months, not the boxes of ancient newspapers Sam rooted through at the county records office or the folder of residence records he’s got laid out on the kitchen table-so they try everywhere, waiting for a sound or a cold spot or a sign that something less than natural’s lingering here along with a century and a half of fine grey dust and enough pre-Civil War furniture to fill half a dozen antique shops.
They move slowly, tentatively, partly because there’s nothing to hurry but partly because it’s been a year for both of them, and the one thing Texas and Purgatory have in common is a shortage of ghosts. Muscle memory’s a great thing, but it only gets you so far, and Dean still feels unsteady, like everything’s been tilted a single degree to one side and he’s constantly having to compensate as he walks down the shadowy hallway, heavy boots silenced in the soft lilac-grey carpet covering the hard wood floors.
He can hear Sam moving around in the master bedroom, gently opening and closing musty drawers and shuffling across the hand-woven rug. It’s surprising how distinct the auditory imprint of his movements is; after all this time, it registers firmly in some sensory input center in Dean’s brain. He remembers a program he saw on TV once when he was little, a rerun of some 60s spy show where the scientists recited a pass code into a machine that scanned their voices like fingerprints and let them into the secret government bunker. He wonders if that machine could recognize Sam the way he does, just by the sound of him rummaging through the closet on the other side of the wall.
At the end of the hallway, he finds a room a little smaller than the rest, painted what looks like a pale blue in the fading light. The room’s practically empty-no bed, no tables, just a huge wicker rocking chair by the single clear window and something in the corner that he can’t make out through the shadows. He steps inside, shivering a little in the evening air, and moves closer, squinting through the darkness at whatever it is. It takes a minute for the vague outline to resolve itself into an old-fashioned crib, a clean sets of blankets folded neatly behind its wooden bars.
“Sam,” he calls cautiously, but before the irrational stirrings of uneasiness can resolve themselves in his mind, the cold surrounds him, sucking at the centers of his bones and drawing the walls tighter around the darkened room.