Gift for jalu2
Title: Just for a Year
Gifter: blindswandive
Pairing/Characters: Sam + Dean or Sam/Dean as you like, intimate and obsessive but not explicit
Word count/Medium: Digital art (with ficlet)
Rating: Adult for explicit gore/blood
Warnings: Blood, gore, implied violence, severed limb, scars, field surgery
Summary: Canon-divergent - What if they used Doc Benton's book after all? And what if the hellhounds kept coming anyway?
(Click below or at AO3 for full art and ficlet)
They would try it for a year. Just long enough to find some other solution; no murder or organ theft allowed, only a scrap of skin here or there from someone who wouldn't miss it. Sam had to undergo the immortality treatment, too, or the deal would have killed him outright, so Dean made him promise to spend at least as much time figuring out a cure for the "Benton curse" (as they were calling it, for perspective) as for the deal, and at first he even did.
But the hellhounds kept coming, year after year, on the anniversary, and lifting the curse drifted to an indefinite backburner.
The hounds never came away with Dean's soul, but they made their mark on the flesh.
--
"Where did you get thoz glashes?" Dean couldn't help asking, even though Sam stabbed him a little harder with the needle than was necessary.
"They're readers," Sam muttered, "just a little magnification."
"Izh Shammy getting old?" Dean razzed, though the effect was somewhat defeated by the gouge out of his face that had opened one corner of his mouth almost to the cheekbone. "Izh my baby brother getting old?" he crooned anyway. "Get you a Mishter Roger's sweater, some loafersh..."
"Could you not talk til we get your face back on?" Sam asked acidly, lacing up another of the gouges out of Dean's side with careful, neat stitches. "And if you want me to work on your pretty little face without the close-up, just say the word-" He made to reach for the glasses with one warning hand.
Dean rolled his eyes and desisted, sighing.
Awkwardly, he propped himself up on one elbow to get a better look. "You're getting better at that," he admitted judiciously.
"I'd better be, after batting cleanup on hellhounds this long. Oh, and all the other times you've decided you could just throw yourself in front of a monster because, quote, 'Sammy can just put me back together.'" Another unnecessarily deep jab of the suture needle.
"Well," Dean said, "you can."
Sam rolled his eyes, snipped the suture thread just past his exceptionally precise little knot, and paused to stretch, groaning when something popped.
"You need a break?"
"Nah. I'll pause before the face since that's-"
"-Tha's the money-maker," Dean finished, attempting to throw a Blue Steel up at Sam but he didn't want to know what it actually looked like.
Sam rolled his eyes again and started unwrapping the temporary bandage from the stump below Dean's left shoulder. "Shut up and pass me your arm."
Dean lies comfortably on his side on a severe looking steel table with his head propped on one hand, watching calmly as Sam performs surgery to put him back together. The room is dark and featureless, the light coming yellow from a hanging lamp above. Dean is shirtless, jeans undone for access to his badly bruised hip, and he is bloody all along his left side. His left arm, messily severed, lies nearby in a bizarrely comfortable drape, the stump wrapped in gauze while Sam, perched on a stool, stitches a set of claw gouges in his side. His right cheek has been torn out from the edge of his mouth to the back of his jaw, and his teeth are visible through the bloody, fleshy gap. Dean is covered in scars from various injuries of various ages--claw marks across his belly suggesting a gutting have healed white with their stitch marks visible; his throat has likely been ripped out and repaired with over-tightly stretched skin; his right arm has the dark, crisp scar lines of the deep patchwork remaining after his hand was chewed off at the wrist; the hand is scarred and the wrist is patched with mismatched or badly stretched skin. A fresher, pink scar over his ribs might be a stab wound, a puffy white scar on his shoulder might be an ugly graze or a burn, a few small lacerations mark his right shoulder and left forearm (which is bruising from the day's damages), and his face has a few nicks, including a Y shaped scar that divides his right eyebrow. The patchwork has begun on his severed arm, stitching flaps and flesh together, in preparation for reattachment; a bloody handprint suggests Dean carried away his own arm. Sam appears studiously intent on the tears in Dean's side as he stitches, left-handed at this moment, holding the flesh carefully with his right. He wears no gloves, and his hands are stained with blood, but he wears a white butcher's apron with a pair of scissors peeking from a pocket. The apron is covered in blood, and a few smears are on Sam's forehead and cheek where he has presumably pushed hair from his face or adjusted the rectangular glasses he wears. He, too, has a few scars visible, but not nearly as many as Dean. The knees of his faded jeans are visible below the table and stained with blood from where he gathered pieces of Dean from the ground. The stitches he has made run in neat, parallel lines. His expression is faintly ironic. Dean still wears the amulet Sam gave him as a child; it is unclear how many years have passed, but these vessels are no longer suitable for the angels.
Also posted on AO3