Osiris Rising, for desertport
Title: Osiris Rising
Recipient: desertport
Rating: R
Warnings: set in Hell, so gore and torture are part of the story, though not in detail
Word Count: ~1,800
Summary: Sam is going to get Dean out of Hell. That’s all that matters. That’s all that matters. Sam needs to keep on believing that.
The thing with Hell is…
No, fuck, that's the wrong place to start. There is no one thing about Hell that is more… more than the basic point that it is Hell. The noise. The smell. The other smells. The sounds. The people. The demons. The pain in the air, the hopelessness, the dark, the… the Hell of it. That's all the thing with Hell.
The thing with finding Dean in Hell is that Hell is a fuck of a large place with a fuck of a large number of people in it and many more demons, and it isn't organised according to any logical plan, so when a guy not from around these parts (Sam hopes, devoutly, that he never will be) is trying to find his brother, who should absolutely not be here, it's not what you might call easy.
Hell has no time, and Sam's watch shows EE:EE when it cares to show anything at all, but he's pretty sure he's been down here a few days now. He has slept, because it's not as hard as you'd think to sneak around Hell. Demons have charges and duties and missions, and Sam is no one's charge, and Ruby taught him a few tricks that help with cloaking too.
He wasn't actually sure that Ruby was playing for the good guys, but he's more confident now. She saved his life a few times, she taught him how to drink demons out of living humans, she cut a hole in normality which allowed Sam to ride a team of captive hellhounds all the way down here, and her camouflage advice has helped him survive since, and so- Well, Sam doesn't actually trust the demon, but she's the only help he has right now. The only one who believes, or pretends to believe, that Sam can do this. And he can. And he will. There’s no other option.
He walks forever, because forever is meaningless, and in the end, he finds his brother. What was his brother.
It’s not hard to recognise Dean in the screaming rags on the rack. He looks just like Sam remembers him, that last time, those last minutes, that went on forever and flashed by in a nanosecond and are relived in Sam’s nightmares every night. Except, is it a nightmare if it’s the truth?
Sam has slept, maybe, but he hasn’t slept well in Hell. Nobody does. It’s possible he’s a little insane by now. He doesn’t know how to check.
He’s here to rescue Dean, but he looks at the lump of nerves and flesh and knows there’s nothing here to save. Till one eye - the remaining eye - opens, and a ruined mouth gapes, and something that isn’t “Sammy” but is trying to be breaks through the screams of Hell. Because if Dean knows him, there’s something to save.
Dean says, “Wait,” and Sam does. It’s forever and no time again, and then Dean is back and whole, screaming on the rack, but himself again. Sam thinks of Prometheus, Sisyphus, the endless punishments of old. Apparently those alleged myths were more like factual reportage, and Dean gets flayed into dog meat every- every whatever cycle Hell uses to mark the passage of time. Sam wants to giggle, because he can’t live without time, but there’s no time here, and no time to talk, and he needs-
“Sammy,” Dean rasps, and it’s as raw as though his vocal chords are the one thing that isn’t healed each time he works through this transformation. Like he’s been screaming for decades. “Not much time. They’ll come-“
“Nobody knows I’m here,” says Sam, and Dean makes a face, impatiently.
“Come for me,” he says. Like, duh, Sammy, you think I flay myself? This isn’t that kind of self-service joint, dude. Sam almost wants to laugh again, a better laugh, because that’s still his brother. Then Dean adds, “You don’t want to be here for that,” and that’s true, but Sam knows he will be. He stops wanting to laugh.
“I came to get you out,” he says. “You seen any vulnerable spots?”
Dean shrugs, as best he can, strung with Hell’s own barbed wire on some kind of electric grid, and Sam knows they probably have other words for what this stuff is, and it’s probably older than humanity’s discovery of these tortures, but that’s what it looks like to him right now, and if he’s going to plan he can’t be all up in amazement at Hell’s tricks. Dean is wired down, that’s problem one. Problem two will be ‘them’ when ‘they’ arrive. Whatever ‘they’ are.
Dean says, “They’re coming. I haven’t been much for research hereabouts, Sammy, so I’m kind of relying on you for that. Two demons. Alastair and Lamech. They’re my guys. Don’t watch.” He pauses. Sam doesn’t move. Suddenly urgent, Dean screams, “Go,” and Sam goes.
But not far. He watches Lamech, who’s a standard torturer, and Alastair, who’s a pretty standard tempter, and he watches them try to break Dean down. Till he screams, which isn’t hard. And till he joins them, which- Sam wants to say it’s impossible, but he watches them unman Dean in minutes (if there were minutes) and then play with the remnants for days (if there were days) and he knows if he were Dean he’d be a token fragment of sanity from saying yes to anything they offered the whole time.
When it’s over, they get another chance to speak. “Just two, huh?” Sam says, and Dean huffs out a laugh, almost, and it’s normality for a precious breath.
“Yep, I don’t rate a full soccer team,” he says. “But I can’t get off this, Sammy, and you can’t kill them. Don’t think I haven’t tried. Both.”
He pauses. Sam nods. And then, “They’re coming,” says Dean, and begins his journey back to rags and bone.
Sam watches. He watches four times. He watches others, on other racks, with other demons. Time passes forever.
“You have to say yes,” Sam says, in the end (if there was an end). “It’s the only way.”
“What?” says Dean, and it’s like it never even occurred to him.
“You have to say yes, when you’re still whole,” says Sam, “And then they’ll give you weapons. I have Ruby’s knife, too, so we-“
“You’re not serious,” says Dean.
“Will they expect it?” Sam asks, and it makes his brother pause.
“Maybe not. But I can’t give in too easy, Sammy.”
So Sam watches another time, and another, and Dean starts to crack. Like the words from Alastair are acid dripping on the last tendons of his will, and they snap, and snap, and in the end. “Okay,” says the raw lump of nothing on the rack. “Enough. I will- I’ll do it.”
This wasn’t the plan, Sam thinks, but he sees Dean was right. This way, they think he’s broken.
So they make him whole. They scream with joy, and reform Dean as Dean, and take him off the rack, and there’s a thunderclap in Hell. “The righteous man,” says Lamech, like it means a thing.
“The First Seal,” says Alastair, and you can hear the capital letters, but that doesn’t mean Sam knows what the actual fuck is happening, except that it clearly pleases Hell - and, more importantly, distracts the hell out of Hell.
Dean swings his blade, and catches Lamech in the neck as the demon gasps, and Sam follows up, demon-killing blade doing what all the implements of Hell weren’t designed to do and actually ending someone permanently. Alastair almost doesn’t notice, he thinks, but before they can run he has turned on them. Sam thinks of him as him because of the name, but what he’s seeing now is a juddering of nightmares, of black suckers and mucous-laden hands, and- He stops looking. He learned that pretty early on in Hell. If only he could drink the demon out of this, but this is the demon, and that’s all they have, here.
Well, they also have weapons, but they need the demon not to be making the noise he’s clearly aiming to, and when Dean slashes him across the throat Sam picks up some of the bonds that held Dean to the rack. They spit and burn on him, whipping bloody marks across his palms, and-
And then there is noise. Lots of noise. The demons start to howl, and Sam starts to remember what he told Ruby topside: if he goes down to get Dean, he’s not coming back without him. Which looks likely, just now.
Hell starts to twitch and freeze and burn and morph, and the demons are coming for the Winchesters. A knife or two won’t make a bit of difference. They’re both going to be on the rack, and nobody will be coming for them. But at least they’ll be together, right?
Sam thought he was ready for this, but he’s screaming now, amid the demons, because he saw Dean on the rack and he can’t take them both being that way forever. What the hell did he think he was doing? He catches Dean’s eye, and knows his fear is showing, by the panic on Dean’s face.
Ruby. What are the chances she can help them? She said-
Yeah. She said, and now is the time Ruby chooses to cut a second hole into Hell. Sam recognises the purple-green edges just a fraction before the demons do, and he’s moving, Dean’s upper arm tight-gripped in Sam’s right hand, as he leaps for their escape route before the demons can get there. Dean has to stab two on the way out, but only another pair come through with them before Ruby’s knitting reality back into place. And they’re in the same crappy-ass motel Sam left an eternity or five minutes back, or both. With a couple demons, that between the three of them they can kill pretty fast.
Dean ends lying on the cigarette-burned carpet, complaining about his lack of recent training, but Sam thinks he looks pretty good for a guy that’s been eviscerated as much as Dean has since he died. He’s back. They’re back. It worked.
Ruby’s looking at them and it’s- it’s a little off, honestly. Sam contemplates it all through explaining to Dean that yes, this is also Ruby, and no, they aren’t killing her, they can trust her (sorta), she helped to get him out…
What is it? Ruby asks the right questions (how’d you get him out?) and gives the right answers (smart moves, tricking them like that), and then, “So, you really did pick up the instruments of torture, Dean? And shed some blood? In Hell itself?”
When Dean says yes, Ruby nods. And smiles. Sam’s gut twinges, like-
Hell, he doesn’t know what his gut’s trying to tell him. They got Dean out of Hell. How much worse could the next thing be?
***
Recipient: desertport
Rating: R
Warnings: set in Hell, so gore and torture are part of the story, though not in detail
Word Count: ~1,800
Summary: Sam is going to get Dean out of Hell. That’s all that matters. That’s all that matters. Sam needs to keep on believing that.
The thing with Hell is…
No, fuck, that's the wrong place to start. There is no one thing about Hell that is more… more than the basic point that it is Hell. The noise. The smell. The other smells. The sounds. The people. The demons. The pain in the air, the hopelessness, the dark, the… the Hell of it. That's all the thing with Hell.
The thing with finding Dean in Hell is that Hell is a fuck of a large place with a fuck of a large number of people in it and many more demons, and it isn't organised according to any logical plan, so when a guy not from around these parts (Sam hopes, devoutly, that he never will be) is trying to find his brother, who should absolutely not be here, it's not what you might call easy.
Hell has no time, and Sam's watch shows EE:EE when it cares to show anything at all, but he's pretty sure he's been down here a few days now. He has slept, because it's not as hard as you'd think to sneak around Hell. Demons have charges and duties and missions, and Sam is no one's charge, and Ruby taught him a few tricks that help with cloaking too.
He wasn't actually sure that Ruby was playing for the good guys, but he's more confident now. She saved his life a few times, she taught him how to drink demons out of living humans, she cut a hole in normality which allowed Sam to ride a team of captive hellhounds all the way down here, and her camouflage advice has helped him survive since, and so- Well, Sam doesn't actually trust the demon, but she's the only help he has right now. The only one who believes, or pretends to believe, that Sam can do this. And he can. And he will. There’s no other option.
He walks forever, because forever is meaningless, and in the end, he finds his brother. What was his brother.
It’s not hard to recognise Dean in the screaming rags on the rack. He looks just like Sam remembers him, that last time, those last minutes, that went on forever and flashed by in a nanosecond and are relived in Sam’s nightmares every night. Except, is it a nightmare if it’s the truth?
Sam has slept, maybe, but he hasn’t slept well in Hell. Nobody does. It’s possible he’s a little insane by now. He doesn’t know how to check.
He’s here to rescue Dean, but he looks at the lump of nerves and flesh and knows there’s nothing here to save. Till one eye - the remaining eye - opens, and a ruined mouth gapes, and something that isn’t “Sammy” but is trying to be breaks through the screams of Hell. Because if Dean knows him, there’s something to save.
Dean says, “Wait,” and Sam does. It’s forever and no time again, and then Dean is back and whole, screaming on the rack, but himself again. Sam thinks of Prometheus, Sisyphus, the endless punishments of old. Apparently those alleged myths were more like factual reportage, and Dean gets flayed into dog meat every- every whatever cycle Hell uses to mark the passage of time. Sam wants to giggle, because he can’t live without time, but there’s no time here, and no time to talk, and he needs-
“Sammy,” Dean rasps, and it’s as raw as though his vocal chords are the one thing that isn’t healed each time he works through this transformation. Like he’s been screaming for decades. “Not much time. They’ll come-“
“Nobody knows I’m here,” says Sam, and Dean makes a face, impatiently.
“Come for me,” he says. Like, duh, Sammy, you think I flay myself? This isn’t that kind of self-service joint, dude. Sam almost wants to laugh again, a better laugh, because that’s still his brother. Then Dean adds, “You don’t want to be here for that,” and that’s true, but Sam knows he will be. He stops wanting to laugh.
“I came to get you out,” he says. “You seen any vulnerable spots?”
Dean shrugs, as best he can, strung with Hell’s own barbed wire on some kind of electric grid, and Sam knows they probably have other words for what this stuff is, and it’s probably older than humanity’s discovery of these tortures, but that’s what it looks like to him right now, and if he’s going to plan he can’t be all up in amazement at Hell’s tricks. Dean is wired down, that’s problem one. Problem two will be ‘them’ when ‘they’ arrive. Whatever ‘they’ are.
Dean says, “They’re coming. I haven’t been much for research hereabouts, Sammy, so I’m kind of relying on you for that. Two demons. Alastair and Lamech. They’re my guys. Don’t watch.” He pauses. Sam doesn’t move. Suddenly urgent, Dean screams, “Go,” and Sam goes.
But not far. He watches Lamech, who’s a standard torturer, and Alastair, who’s a pretty standard tempter, and he watches them try to break Dean down. Till he screams, which isn’t hard. And till he joins them, which- Sam wants to say it’s impossible, but he watches them unman Dean in minutes (if there were minutes) and then play with the remnants for days (if there were days) and he knows if he were Dean he’d be a token fragment of sanity from saying yes to anything they offered the whole time.
When it’s over, they get another chance to speak. “Just two, huh?” Sam says, and Dean huffs out a laugh, almost, and it’s normality for a precious breath.
“Yep, I don’t rate a full soccer team,” he says. “But I can’t get off this, Sammy, and you can’t kill them. Don’t think I haven’t tried. Both.”
He pauses. Sam nods. And then, “They’re coming,” says Dean, and begins his journey back to rags and bone.
Sam watches. He watches four times. He watches others, on other racks, with other demons. Time passes forever.
“You have to say yes,” Sam says, in the end (if there was an end). “It’s the only way.”
“What?” says Dean, and it’s like it never even occurred to him.
“You have to say yes, when you’re still whole,” says Sam, “And then they’ll give you weapons. I have Ruby’s knife, too, so we-“
“You’re not serious,” says Dean.
“Will they expect it?” Sam asks, and it makes his brother pause.
“Maybe not. But I can’t give in too easy, Sammy.”
So Sam watches another time, and another, and Dean starts to crack. Like the words from Alastair are acid dripping on the last tendons of his will, and they snap, and snap, and in the end. “Okay,” says the raw lump of nothing on the rack. “Enough. I will- I’ll do it.”
This wasn’t the plan, Sam thinks, but he sees Dean was right. This way, they think he’s broken.
So they make him whole. They scream with joy, and reform Dean as Dean, and take him off the rack, and there’s a thunderclap in Hell. “The righteous man,” says Lamech, like it means a thing.
“The First Seal,” says Alastair, and you can hear the capital letters, but that doesn’t mean Sam knows what the actual fuck is happening, except that it clearly pleases Hell - and, more importantly, distracts the hell out of Hell.
Dean swings his blade, and catches Lamech in the neck as the demon gasps, and Sam follows up, demon-killing blade doing what all the implements of Hell weren’t designed to do and actually ending someone permanently. Alastair almost doesn’t notice, he thinks, but before they can run he has turned on them. Sam thinks of him as him because of the name, but what he’s seeing now is a juddering of nightmares, of black suckers and mucous-laden hands, and- He stops looking. He learned that pretty early on in Hell. If only he could drink the demon out of this, but this is the demon, and that’s all they have, here.
Well, they also have weapons, but they need the demon not to be making the noise he’s clearly aiming to, and when Dean slashes him across the throat Sam picks up some of the bonds that held Dean to the rack. They spit and burn on him, whipping bloody marks across his palms, and-
And then there is noise. Lots of noise. The demons start to howl, and Sam starts to remember what he told Ruby topside: if he goes down to get Dean, he’s not coming back without him. Which looks likely, just now.
Hell starts to twitch and freeze and burn and morph, and the demons are coming for the Winchesters. A knife or two won’t make a bit of difference. They’re both going to be on the rack, and nobody will be coming for them. But at least they’ll be together, right?
Sam thought he was ready for this, but he’s screaming now, amid the demons, because he saw Dean on the rack and he can’t take them both being that way forever. What the hell did he think he was doing? He catches Dean’s eye, and knows his fear is showing, by the panic on Dean’s face.
Ruby. What are the chances she can help them? She said-
Yeah. She said, and now is the time Ruby chooses to cut a second hole into Hell. Sam recognises the purple-green edges just a fraction before the demons do, and he’s moving, Dean’s upper arm tight-gripped in Sam’s right hand, as he leaps for their escape route before the demons can get there. Dean has to stab two on the way out, but only another pair come through with them before Ruby’s knitting reality back into place. And they’re in the same crappy-ass motel Sam left an eternity or five minutes back, or both. With a couple demons, that between the three of them they can kill pretty fast.
Dean ends lying on the cigarette-burned carpet, complaining about his lack of recent training, but Sam thinks he looks pretty good for a guy that’s been eviscerated as much as Dean has since he died. He’s back. They’re back. It worked.
Ruby’s looking at them and it’s- it’s a little off, honestly. Sam contemplates it all through explaining to Dean that yes, this is also Ruby, and no, they aren’t killing her, they can trust her (sorta), she helped to get him out…
What is it? Ruby asks the right questions (how’d you get him out?) and gives the right answers (smart moves, tricking them like that), and then, “So, you really did pick up the instruments of torture, Dean? And shed some blood? In Hell itself?”
When Dean says yes, Ruby nods. And smiles. Sam’s gut twinges, like-
Hell, he doesn’t know what his gut’s trying to tell him. They got Dean out of Hell. How much worse could the next thing be?
***