Speaking Silence, for indiachick
Title: Speaking Silence
Recipient: indiachick
Rating: T
Word Count or Media: 7324
Warnings: Depersonalisation, post-soullessness issues (reference to dub-con sex)
Author's Notes: This fic really did not want to get written. Thanks to B for being an encouraging voice and the mods for their understanding! indiachick asked for ‘the boys cooped up somewhere for a case’; also, horror. I did my best.
Summary: Sam’s got his soul back. Time to go hunt a wendigo.
Sam’s pretty sure that Dean hasn’t stopped talking for more than ten seconds since they left the car this morning. The babble is driving him crazy. Right now, his brother is explaining in elaborate detail the finer points of some game called Angry Birds, which apparently got big while Sam was otherwise engaged.
“I swear to God, Sammy,” Dean says. “The hours I’ve spent.”
Sam gave up responding about two miles back, grappling a headache, focused on navigating the roots underfoot. But Dean still won’t shut up, rattling relentless through his inventory of trivia until Sam can feel the irritation itching under his skin. He understands what Dean’s doing, of course. He’s trying to keep Sam’s mind off the mystery of the past eighteen months, to keep him focused on the case. He’s trying to stop him scratching the wall.
It was the same the last time they hunted a wendigo; Dean scrambling to accommodate a brother unexpectedly restored. That time, Sam had been sodden with grief, fibres of his clothes still clogged and smoky with the atoms of Jessica’s flesh. No wonder Dean had found him difficult to handle. He’d been erratic, out of control; careening wildly from anger to terror to despair, simultaneously deeply furious and deeply relieved to be back beside Dean in the routine he’d worked so hard to escape. The hunt had helped him, a little, providing a temporary vent for the rage building inside his skull. But later, back at the motel, after they’d got drunk and Sam had fallen at last into sleep, his dreams had blazed with bodies alight. He’d watched as the wendigo’s tall corpse flared up and burned down into Jessica’s soft white limbs. When he’d woken he’d been choking on imaginary fumes and Dean had been sitting upright in the next bed, fists clenched in his blankets, staring hard at Sam.
Christ, Dean was a kid back then. Thinking about it twists something in Sam’s chest. He pictures his older brother, so young, wrapped in Dad’s big leather jacket like it was a comfort blanket. They were both of them babies. No wonder Dean had floundered, hit with Sam’s explosive emotional mess. But Sam remembers clearly how his brother worked to figure it out; how Dean tried to make space for Sam to talk about Jessica, how he offered Sam his car keys like they had the power to heal. He remembers Dean, wide-eyed and terrified when Sam’s powers started showing, insisting that nothing had changed. Whatever lurching recovery Sam made from his grief that year, Dean helped him through it. That mattered.
It mattered; it still matters, and Sam should be just as grateful now. Dean’s only trying to keep him safe. But it’s difficult. Honestly, Sam’s struggling to be glad about his reappearance topside. Sure, he’d been terrified when it came to the point, gulping down demon blood in an alleyway in Detroit. But before it happened - before he jumped - he’d spent long, wakeful nights running over and over the reasons for what he’d chosen to do. It was an atonement, a rebalancing of the scales. He was making the decision to give his life in exchange for his sins. And now?
When Sam woke up in the panic room at Bobby’s house, there was a long, disorientated moment when he thought that maybe he was still detoxing; that the whole long year since he let Lucifer go free had been just another fever dream, that he hadn’t killed Lilith at all. For that brief interval he’d been so fucking relieved, limp with gratitude, giddy with the thought that he could stop it all in its tracks. Some hope. As it happens, things turned out more or less exactly the other way around. Disinterred, he’s labouring under a brand-new burden of guilt, made heavier by everybody’s insistence that he leave it uninspected. If it was just Dean telling him to let the missing months go, Sam would likely have ignored him. Suffering that seizure in Rhode Island might have given him pause. But really it’s Castiel’s solemn insistence that he not do anything to jeopardise his mental stability that has scared Sam most. Cas isn’t good at lying; he doesn’t have any reason to do it. And according to Castiel, the current state of Sam’s soul ought properly to see him paralysed, vegetative, dead. Dead, Sam could deal with. The other stuff, he’s not so sure. He’s never liked his body anyway, still less now it’s solid with these muscles that Sam never sweated for. The idea of being trapped half-alive inside the shell is so horrible he can’t let himself think about it for any length of time.
As it is, edging this close to considering his soul sets off an uncomfortable chitinous scratching at the back of Sam’s mind. The sensation shivers out into goosebumps, crawling over his skin, and a building pressure in his temples. His headache intensifies.
Dean, meanwhile, is midway through recounting some anecdote that Sam’s pretty sure he’s heard at least twice before.
“… and I said to the guy, figures you’d have no game at all with a ride like yours.” When Sam looks up Dean’s looking at him expectantly, so he puts on what he hopes is an appropriate smile.
“Huh,” he says. “No game.”
Dean’s eyebrow shoots up, sceptical. “What are you thinking about, Sammy?” he says.
“Nothing,” Sam says. And then, “It’s Sam.” He kicks his toe against a particularly tangled clump of branches, gets caught and almost trips. Dean’s laughter is inevitable, reasonable even, but Sam’s just not in the mood for it. He tugs his foot free, then brushes past Dean on the inside of the path.
“Come on,” he says. “I don’t want to dick around waiting in the dark for a wendigo to come take us home.”
“Dude, it’s barely lunchtime,” says Dean, “thanks to your bright idea that we get up at the fucking ass-crack of dawn,”; but he obeys, so that Sam’s steady forward progress is soundtracked now by a back-beat of twigs snapping underneath the soles of Dean’s boots. It doesn’t take long for Dean to clear his throat and start talking again. Apparently it’s necessary to catch Sam up with the entire baseball season that took place in the year he missed. Sam barely follows baseball (neither does Dean), but at least this doesn’t require too much response.
They’ve been walking upwards of six hours by the time that they reach the cave and despite his best efforts, Sam’s still feeling snappy and sour. Several spears have detached from the biting thorns lining the pathway and burrowed into the fabric of his jeans, scratching painful over his thighs with every step. The map, which offers little enough information anyway, is too large and unwieldy, flapping loose and losing their location every few hundred yards. And Dean’s monologue is still in full flow, securing Sam’s attention just enough to annoy. The words keep catching in his ears, preventing him from tuning out the discomfort of his surroundings, trapping him in his sore feet and his stinging skin and the constant thrumming imperative not to think about everything that he most wants to know. “Shut up,” Sam wants to say. “Shut up shut up shut up.” He wants to fling himself down into a tantrum. He holds back.
Still. Still, they get there at last, and “here we are,” Sam says with relief. He looks over to see Dean staring doubtfully at the narrow, dark crevasse that forms the mouth of the caves. It digs into the side of an overgrown rockface, not particularly high; but the cave heads downward from this point, deep into the belly of the earth. It’s one of the largest systems in the United States, part of it emerging maybe seventy-five miles north and run by the National Park Service complete with bat tours and uniformed guides. Down this way, though, there are unexplored portions, tunnels which narrow away into nothingness, huge tracts of it unmapped. He hasn’t gone into detail about this with Dean, who tends towards claustrophobia; that’s part of the reason he doesn’t like planes. But Dean doesn’t think (doesn’t let himself think) Sam knows about it, so Sam tries to play along.
Even so, looking at Dean as he sets his jaw and prepares to head in, Sam feels cruel. “You don’t have to come in with me,” he offers; although honestly, he doesn’t feel much like tackling a wendigo alone. “I can go in and try to drive it out and then you can torch it when it hits daylight. It might be useful, having somebody manning the exit, y’know? So that it doesn’t just get away.”
Dean narrows his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure. I’m just gonna send you into the... “ and he gestures, loose-limbed, towards the cave, “... into the fricking vulva of death by yourself.”
Despite the irritated anxiety that’s been clawing at his stomach all day, Sam feels a laugh bubble up at the back of his throat. “The what now?” he says.
Dean gestures again, more pointed, and Sam tips his head on one side to regard the dark crack of the cave entrance with its garland of uneven greenery. “Fucking hell, Dean,” he says, and lets the laugh escape. When he looks back, Dean’s beaming, pleased with himself and largely restored to the swagger he’s been missing.
“I know, Sammy,” Dean says. “Bit of a foreign sight for you. Let me know if you need me to draw you a diagram.” He pauses. “Although, I guess.”
“What?” says Sam, not getting it, and then just as Dean says “Nothing,” he remembers that of course, the soulless guy couldn’t keep it in his pants. This is one of the parts of last year that Sam would actually rather not think about. His body, doing things he wouldn’t, with people Sam doesn’t even remember. It makes him not want to touch anybody ever again.
Some of Sam’s discomfort must show through on his face, because Dean’s air of self-satisfaction dissipates almost immediately. “Hey,” he says. “Sorry. I didn’t.”
“It’s fine,” says Sam. He hoists his rucksack a little higher on his back. “Let’s go.”
Ten minutes in, the daylight’s long faded and the cave is dark. Okay, big news. But this is, like, really fucking dark. The flashlights they’re both carrying only seem to make it heavier, their wavering yellow beams showing up the thick, velvety solidity of the blackness all around. When Sam shines his directly ahead, he can’t see anything but the dust dancing in the small patch of light, an bug or a tiny moth occasionally flickering across the span. Downward, and he catches a bleach-lit earthen path, scattered with pebbles that ping out from under his feet and ricochet off the rock walls that stretch up on either side. The passageway is narrow, barely more than shoulder-breadth. Dean can’t be enjoying it much.
“Okay?” Sam says, half-whispered.
“Yeah,” breathes Dean. “Let’s just get in and get fuckin’ out, okay?”
“Good by me,” Sam says. He’s hoping that the wendigo’s gonna show pretty soon; that it’ll have made its lair somewhere in the upper reaches of the caves, not too far from the forest with its convenient camper buffet. The guy whose disappearance brought them here was a spelunker, though, which means that potentially the thing could be hiding down amongst the system’s furthest reaches. Reading the ‘missing’ notice as he was browsing his usual sites, Sam tracked back almost automatically for a recurring pattern. It was pretty unmistakeable - groups of four or five hikers or campers gone missing in this same small area of forest, fifteen-year intervals between each round of attacks. This guy is a little early, as it happens. Nobody was due to disappear from here for another two years. But Sam figures that if he was actually down in the caves, maybe he stumbled directly into the wendigo’s larder. Even the most frugal monster might find it hard to resist that temptation.
Anyway, after their disastrous last couple of hunts, both Sam and Dean were keen to jump on the chance of an easy win. If they can get this thing while it’s still more or less in hibernation, they can save all the people it would target in two years’ time; and in a further fifteen years, thirty, forty-five. Maximum efficiency. Minimum mess.
That was the theory, anyway, but it felt a good deal more sure when they were back in the motel room. Out here in the caves’ black maze, Sam’s starting to regret their cavalier confidence in pitching out to kill this thing with no real idea where it lives. As they walk, he runs the hand not holding the flashlight along the bumpy surface of the wall. More than once, he finds his fingers falling into open space; the path fissuring repeatedly into burrows and caverns, boltholes tucked away beside or below the main track. There must be hundreds of miles of caves out here. Who’s to say they’ll find this thing? Who’s to say what might find them?
He’s grappling with this rising anxiety when suddenly, behind him, Dean stumbles and cries out. From the blackness out in front of them, the sound comes back, distorted and empty and huge. Sam shifts his beam sideways, along the floor, to find that the passage has opened out. This is something different to the cubbyholes they’ve been checking in along the way. As he slides the light forward he sees stalagmites climbing, stalactites dropping, ringed like teeth around a gaping black mouth. Beyond, there’s only blackness; but the echo is evidence enough of the size of the chamber they’ve entered.
Daunted, Sam stops short. Dean runs into the back of him, and his noise of surprise ripples out and back again, returned by the echoing walls.
“Huh,” Dean says. There’s a pause, a breath, and then he yells out, full volume, “Sam Winchester runs like a girl!”
The void sends the words back. “Ha,” says Dean. “Ha ha ha ha ha,” says the cave.
“Stop it,” Sam says, shortly. He should be relieved that Dean’s relaxed enough to kid around. But he can’t laugh at his brother’s voice, returned out of the mouth of stone. It makes him feel like reality’s jolted sideways: the familiar tones become alien, soundwaves stretched into something strange. Sam’s had quite enough of doppelgangers for the moment, thanks.
Breaking the tension, keen to keep moving, Sam walks up to the line of fanged stone teeth and shines his flashlight into the emptiness beyond; but the ground falls away behind the row of stalagmites and he has no stomach for the scrambling climb down into nothingness. He just hopes the wendigo isn’t hiding out down there.
“I think carry on this way,” he says eventually, and even though he’s speaking softly the cave gives his words back to him, a whisper sussurating softly into his ear. “This way, thisss way. I think, I think, I think.” Despite Dean’s kidding around, his brother’s face is solemn in the dim yellow glow; and he nods silently, following Sam across the front of the open space to rejoin the narrow passage they’ve been following until now.
It takes another twenty minutes of walking before they find the wendigo; enough time for Sam to start wondering how long they should give it before they turn around and head back. This was a fucking crazy plan to start off with, going blind into the cave. He’d hoped that the whole thing would somehow more accessible; that the wendigo’s route would be obvious, that the hiker might have left some clearly evident trail. Instead all they have are these unpromising grey walls of rock, the lowering sense of the earth pressing down on them, the forbidding empty doorways opening out on either side.
Eventually, though, Sam’s mechanical waving of the light into every niche they pass is repaid with the sight of a neatly stacked pile of bones. A skull gazes out blank-eyed from a nest of femurs, scapulae, daintily curving ribs. Sam stops, holding his hand out behind him to touch Dean’s chest in a gesture, wait. He jerks his head sideways and they peer into the cutaway, cautious, flashlights low.
Neither of them is expecting what they see.
The wendigo’s long body is stretched out along the cavern floor, surrounded by bones and by motheaten hiking paraphernalia. A single walking shoe lies near his spindly feet, unlaced. But the creature is obviously dead. There are cobwebs canopied from his limbs; beetles scurrying busily over his torso; and the flesh on his arms and legs is shrivelled, leaving him still more skeletal than he would have been in life. There is no evidence, anywhere in the cave, of the man whose disappearance has brought them to this place. The earth is smooth on the hard stone floor. It looks like nothing in here has been disturbed for years.
“What the fuck,” Dean says, quietly, warm against Sam’s ear; and Sam shakes his head. This hunt just got a whole bunch weirder and he’s not sure he can cope with trying to understand the implications right now.
“We should burn it anyway,” says Dean, moving forward into the centre of the space.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Sam begins, thinking fuzzily about oxygen levels and canaries and the chance of their stifling down here, but Dean’s already fished the Zippo from his jeans’ back pocket and is sloshing lighter fluid liberally over the corpse. The thing’s been so thoroughly leached of its water that when Dean lights it, it goes up almost instantaneously in a gasping whoosh of dry flesh. Sam’s eyes start to water. There’s a fetid sweetness in the smoke which cloys at the back of his throat, setting him coughing as the flames begin to dance and blur over his vision. The darkness and the rotten smell and the bright orange light act in unfortunate combination, sending him skittering back towards the memory of the seizure two weeks before; the feeling of his own body burning, fat crisping and flames licking fast along the hair of his arms.
He’s vaguely conscious of dropping his flashlight. It hits the floor with a hard, plastic crack and he folds over at the waist, bending towards it, crouching on shaking legs. A hand falls firm onto his shoulder.
“Hey,” Dean says. “Hey.”
Sam looks up at him, into the sickly light of the beam. “Sorry,” he says. “The fire.”
He can’t see Dean’s expression, but he hears his brother clear his throat. “Let’s get out of here, okay?”
Dean leads now as they head back out of the cave, but before long Sam starts to worry if they are going the right way. In the dark, it would be easy to miss a turning, to wander accidentally off the path that they took coming in. How easy it would have been to have left a trail. Sam’s really not with it at the moment. He’d never usually have made such an amateur mistake. He bets the other guy, the other Sam, wouldn’t have made that kind of error. “Efficient,” that was how Dean had described him. Also, “a dick”.
“Don’t worry,” Dean says, low. “Took a while to get here, remember?”
Sam’s brother can be outrageously fucking annoying but sometimes he understands exactly what Sam needs him to say. It’s just a shame that Sam’s so embarrassingly, predictably weak. Dean’s the one with the claustrophobia; Sam should be reassuring him.
“Yeah,” Sam says, embarrassed, louder than he maybe intends to. “I know, Dean. It’s cool.”
“It’s cool,” the cave says back to him. “Cool, cool, cool.”
This time, the sound comes as a relief. They must be at the mouth-cavern already, a good portion of the way back towards the woods and the light. But when Sam shines his flashlight off to the left of him, where the cave should be, he’s shocked to find nothing but closely packed chunks of rock. He checks again, more thoroughly, front and back, side to side. Just the long narrow corridor, entombing the both of them close.
“You alright?” Dean says.
Something is starting to compress in Sam’s chest; the light of the flashlight stretching long and distorted, improbable. Its yellow is tingeing sickly into acid green. “Did you hear that echo?” he says.
He doesn’t get to hear Dean’s answer. As he turns to look backward for a third time, he catches his foot in the uneven floor, stumbles forward uncoordinated and lands his hand on the wall. The rocks are disparate here, not the solid stone slabs that they have seen elsewhere, and something shifts, dislodges, and rattles to the floor.
“Dean?” Sam says.
There’s a longer clatter, more stones falling, which becomes a roar; and suddenly Sam’s flashlight is knocked out of his hand as a heavy rock strikes him hard on the wrist. He’s scrabbling, bent to grope for it when another slams hard into his shoulder, his back, and then they’re on him, each one like the punch of a fist, beating him relentlessly down into the ground.
~~~
It’s dark and Sam’s choking on dust, the thick coating of it lining his mouth, drying it out. He coughs, feels the particles puff gritty over his lips. “Dean,” he says, but the word is barely audible, a strained croak filtering through the gunk that’s clogging his throat. He swallows, coughs again, gasps a desperate breath. “Dean,” he says, louder. Oh God. Oh God. Sam tugs at his arm, scraping it along the rough underside of the rock that’s wedged just above it.
“Dean!” says Sam again, and his voice is hoarse, and he probably shouldn’t shout in case the rest of the roof comes crashing down on them but fuck, if Dean’s already dead and bruised and broken underneath the rockfall then Sam doesn’t care. “Dean!”
“Sam.” The sound of Dean’s voice is soft but it’s closer than Sam had been expecting, sending a shiver of shock across the top of his spine. It sounds like Dean’s maybe a few metres away, somewhere over to Sam’s right. “Hey.” He sounds tired, a little choked. He’s hurt, Sam thinks.
“How bad is it?”
There’s a pause, a dragging noise of stone on stone. “I’m OK, I think,” Dean says. “But, Sammy, I’m stuck pretty good.”
Sam’s stomach sinks. That makes two of them.
“You?” says Dean, and there’s a hopeful quaver in his voice that Sam feels sick at squashing. But there’s no point telling a lie.
“Yeah,” Sam says ruefully. “Yeah, I’m stuck.”
Dean huffs out a rueful laugh. “Nice,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” Sam tells him. If he’d never noticed that hiker. If he hadn’t thought there was something apposite about a freaking wendigo hunt. And now they’re going to die, trapped together in the endless darkness with nobody knowing they’re here.
“It’s not your fault,” Dean says. There are more scraping sounds, grunts of effort. Dean is trying to get free. Sam tugs his own thigh experimentally upward but it’s caught vice-tight between the stones. He can’t move his right arm, either, and there’s a throbbing ache in his elbow sending red pulses across his vision. In the dark, the pain starts to take on shapes; stars and spirals whirling sideways like a galaxy. Sam looks straight down into the heart of it. His chest swoops. He’s falling forward, towards them, floating in the deep black sea; is going under. For several long, twisting minutes, he sinks.
“Sam,” says Dean again, low, and Sam surfaces with a shuddering gasp. “About this year. About… about Robo-you.”
The topic catches Sam unawares, dazzling him into confusion like a bright light might. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about that,” he says. “I thought you were worried it would fuck up my brain.”
“If we’re going to die here anyway,” Dean says flatly, “then you might as well know. I thought you wanted to know?”
Sam swallows, licks his lips. Yes. Yes, he wants to know. He thinks he wants to know about it.
While Dean is thinking, something skitters over the back of Sam’s neck. He can feel the patter of its individual feet. Not one of the tiny bugs they saw earlier, then, but something larger; maybe the size of a walnut. He breathes carefully: in, out. He closes his eyes. When he opens them it’s exactly the same. Unbroken blank blackness. Dean’s voice.
“You scared me,” Dean says, “when you came back.”
Well, that makes sense. It terrifies Sam, the idea that there was this half-him human walking around, wearing his face, behaving in ways Sam can’t even recognise as being fed by his own desires.
“You gotta realise, Sammy,” says Dean, “for a long time we didn’t know what was wrong. You know?”
“Yeah,” Sam says.
“I thought it was just you.”
“Yeah.” Makes sense. But the implications are scary. What if it had just been Sam, post-Hell? Dean came back spiky and scary and aggressive, loaded double with rage and guilt. What if Sam had been traumatised by Lucifer into something sociopathic? What if Cas had stuck his arm into Sam’s belly and found his soul, beaten-up, but there? What would Dean have done, then?
“I’d have shot you through the head,” Dean says. Sam doesn’t… he must be spacing worse than he thought, because he doesn’t remember saying that stuff out loud.
Dean would have shot him. Sam spent almost a straight year, not so long ago, trying to convince Dean to do that.
“Things change. You did some bad shit, Sammy.” Dean’s tone is apologetic.
“But I,” says Sam. “I.” His heart thuds painfully in his constricted chest. It wasn’t him. Dean said before, when Sam apologised, that it wasn’t him. Dean has to believe that. Sam depends on it. Like that whole year after Dad died, when Sam was certain he was gonna go darkside; when he woke up every morning afraid that he might not be himself when he opened his eyes. Sometimes, Dean’s insistence that Sam didn’t have that in him was the only thing that helped him to crawl out of bed.
“Stuff happened,” Dean says heavily, “since then.”
“Right,” says Sam. Of course. He thought that they had worked through this, before he jumped. He’d thought that that was one of the reasons he was doing it: that he was earning the right to have Dean trust him again. He made the right choice. He made the right choice and he died. It figures that the first thing the other guy did would be to sabotage all of that.
“It wasn’t me, though, Dean,” he says.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dean says, unconvincing. “I know you’ve got a handle on all that stuff.”
“Um,” says Sam. He doesn’t ‘have a handle’ on it. He doesn’t want it. It’s not just that he’s got too much social decorum to turn Dean over to every vampire they meet. He’s not restraining himself from dangling innocent citizens as bait, or from banging married women in every bathroom he happens to pass, just because it’s not the done thing.
Dean’s voice is relentless. “It’s gotta be somewhere inside you. He’s gotta.” A pause. “He was you with a missing bit. Not you with extras. You know?”
“Yes.”
“Soul or no soul, you did some fucked-up shit.” Sam doesn’t even know what Dean is talking about now; whether he’s picturing more horrors from the past Sam can’t remember or whether he’s just back on the litany of Sam’s lifelong list of sins. It all gets mixed up anyway, lately, in the images that assault Sam every night in his broken dreams. He sees stuff that makes him shiver, makes him sick, and he can’t tell if he did it or if he made it up. Sometimes, he wonders if some of it happened to him, if Lucifer did these nightmare things to him when he was down in the Cage. He doesn’t know. How could he know?
“I’m sorry,” Dean says. “All of it. All the bad stuff. It’s real.”
Sam lets that settle.
"You know,” Dean says. “I’ll save you, I had to save you. Had that drilled into me my whole life, you know? But I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know if I can look at you and not see what’s inside you, not see what you did.”
It's like there's a weight in the back of Sam’s skull, something pressing on the bricks and the mortar of his mind. He can feel the wall swell inward, feel the crumbling plaster start to shiver away.
“That’s the thing with monsters,” Dean says. “You never know when they’re going to turn.” And the whole thing splits, splintering top to bottom, great billows of flame roiling out, licking hot tongues around Sam's body. Sam clutches his fingertips into the cold damp rock that is trapping him; but his limbs are stiffening and he spirals steep and fast out of consciousness and back down into the pit.
~~~
"Sammy!!" There are warm fingers on his face, a light so blinding it lances pain across Sam's temples. He closes his eyes and tries to turn away; but he’s trapped, his body wedged stiff and awkward between unyielding slabs of stone.
“Shit,” says Dean quietly, under his breath, and the light moves away. When Sam opens his eyes again it’s blurry, the lantern a golden yellow halo dissolving into the dark. There’s a scraping sound and a gust of cool air against his leg. Dean is moving the rocks.
Sam should try to help him. He should get up and help his brother. He can’t get up, though, because he’s trapped. That’s right. His leg is heavy. His head is heavy and his neck feels loose, a stem folding floppy under the weight of a bloom. He gives in and lets it fall, lolling awkwardly sideways, straining the tendons down into his shoulder.
Dean is still working at the rocks. The pressure on Sam’s hand lifts, eases, and then suddenly the great cold bulk against his right flank is shifted away. He tips sideways, unresisting.
“Sam,” says Dean sharply. “You with me?”
Sam swallows, opens his mouth. “Uh,” he says.
“You need to slide out,” Dean says. “I think you can slide out now, feet first, okay?” There’s a tugging at Sam’s foot, but his ankle is as loose as the rest of him and his boot slips off. “Come on, Sam,” Dean says, and there’s an edge of panic in his voice.
“Okay,” Sam says, although it comes out mumbled, like he’s talking through a layer of cloth. He shifts his hand and finds it dead numb, hand of a corpse somehow stitched onto his living limb. He drags the dead hand sideways over the stone, until a brutal shot of pins and needles branches up into his bicep and shocks him into a whimper.
“You okay?” Dean says.
“Yeah,” says Sam. He’s not sure he can manage anything more complicated right now. Dean’s hand is on his foot again, gripping tightly over his ankle and under the back of his heel. Sam gives into the pressure, makes himself as small as he can, and slips down into the gap that Dean has created.
For a moment as his shoulders hit the sides he’s wedged - feels wedged - and a thick rusty fear rises up at the back of his throat. He starts to breathe faster, colours blossoming across his vision; but then Dean tugs hard with a hand around his shin and he slips out, skin scraped across the rough surface of the stone but he’s free, curled gasping on the earth at Dean’s feet.
The light of the lantern swoops in closer, making Sam’s eyes water, and Dean’s hand pats down over his forehead, across the side of his face. The skin around Sam’s mouth is wet, and Dean’s fingertips brush over it.
“Did you have another seizure, Sam?” Dean says, hurried and harsh.
“Iyunno,” Sam says. He can’t remember. He can’t think.
“Shit,” Dean says again, and puts the lantern on the ground; slides his arm under Sam’s and tugs him upright with an effortful breath. “We’re gonna walk now, Sammy, okay?”
Sam’s legs are soft and his mouth is full of gravel. He licks his lips, swallows, feels the particles swill over his tongue. He’s putting too much weight on Dean, but he can’t quite help it; his legs feel like the tendons have been stretched too long, like they’re hanging loose at the joints, like he’s a puppet on a worn-out string.
“It’s okay,” Dean says again, “it’s okay,” and he tugs Sam forward, hurrying now, tripping over the stones. Sam’s hip bashes painfully into the wall.
He tries to say, “It’s too narrow,” but the words come out jumbled, a hurry of slurred consonants and misshapen vowels. Dean’s shoulder stiffens for a moment underneath him, but his brother’s pace doesn’t let up.
“Just up here,” Dean says, and flashes his light on a notch chiselled fresh into the wall. Huh. Thank fuck that Dean at least was on his game today.
“It’s gonna get kind of tight.” Dean’s voice is tight, too, thrumming with anxious concern. “You go first, okay, but I’m gonna be right behind you.” He settles his hand warm on the back of Sam’s neck. “Hold onto the walls if you need to, right?”
Sam lurches forward two steps unsupported before succumbing to the inevitable and propping himself up with his hands.
“That’s it,” Dean says. “Okay.” His flashlight shines from behind, illuminating the passage around Sam’s obstructive body, but Sam presses onward, his brother at his back. At one point the wall to the left of him drops away into nothing and he lurches, almost falls, gasping in a shuddering breath. Dean’s grip doesn’t falter, but the flashlight shifts as he brings his other arm around Sam’s waist, holding him steady. When Sam rights himself, he’s shaky, but he keeps on moving and at last he sees it, a pale grey patch of light ahead.
“There we go,” Dean says, relief warm in his voice. “See?”
The climb up to the exit takes an age, but Sam tries to focus on lifting one foot at a time and finally, finally, they’re spilling out into the tangled undergrowth, under the trees. Sam staggers a few footsteps forward and bends over to throw up, the sunlight wheeling white in his eyes.
“Okay,” Dean says, nudging him over towards a tree. Sam sits with his back against the bark, closes his eyes and waits for the world to right itself. He breathes deeply. Now they’re out, he kind of doesn’t want to look at Dean. All those things that his brother said to him in the dark. He splays his hands out flat, digs his fingertips down into the ground. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe he should still be down there.
“Always with the pulling me out of holes,” he says, and opens his eyes to the daylight and squints at Dean. He’s scared that his brother is going to say something cutting, something regretful.
Dean looks shaken. “Yeah, enough of that maybe,” he says.
Sam nods. The forest smells green. He closes his eyes again.
“You, uh,” says Dean after a while. “You up for camping tonight? I think it’s gonna get dark way before we make it back to the car.”
Sam would like to be back at the Impala right now, ideally, even if Dean does wish he were dead. “Can we,” he says. “Can we just go back? Is that okay?”
“Sure, Sammy.” Dean doesn’t look sure.
Sam smiles, big as he can. “I’m up for the walk,” he says. “Be nice to stretch my legs, after that.”
“Yeah,” Dean says drily. “Fucking tower of strength, you are.” But he extends a hand and hauls Sam upright, steadying him with a palm between his shoulderblades and mercifully not mentioning the way Sam staggers as he gets to his feet. “After you, Bambi.”
Of course, they have only one flashlight now - Sam’s was lost to the rockfall, like everything else in his bag - and as the sun starts to lower through the trees, Dean takes the lead. Sam stumbles along behind him, muscles aching, eyes fixed on the white skin of Dean’s neck above his jacket collar. Every few minutes, Dean flicks a suspicious glance behind him, checking on Sam. He’s just making sure Sam’s keeping up. He is. Or maybe he’s worried about a knife in the back, Sam’s teeth in his shoulder, a blow to the base of his skull.
Sam shouldn’t be thinking about this. He mustn’t. He’s not stupid. He’s already had one seizure today. But the weight of it, of Dean’s lost confidence, hangs choking in his chest. It makes his breath catch and his head swim. It makes his jaw ache, rigid with effortful self-control.
Sam’s focused so closely on keeping it together, so exhausted in his body and so woozy with the trace effects of the seizure that soon he’s half-conscious on his feet. The trees blur dark at the edges of his vision. Dean’s face flashes occasional in his line of sight. His feet move forward on the carpet of twigs and soil, stumble over rocks and roots, keep walking into the night. As Sam dozes, images of the day just past start to slip through his mind. The hiking shoes, half-chewed and half-decayed, lying by the wendigo’s body. The swoop of his stomach as his hand slipped into holes in the rock. The whisper of the echoes hissing at him from across the cave.
Dean turns around and puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder, jarring him out of his contemplation, making him jump.
“Jeez,” Dean says. Sam blinks at him, heart stuttering. The flashlight is illuminating Dean’s face from the bottom, a yellow glow under his chin, shining red-orange through his nostrils and the lobes of his ears. “What’s eating you, Sam?”
“Nothing,” Sam says. And then, inadvertent, angry, regretting the words as he says them: “are we just not going to talk about it, then?”
Dean looks up at the dark sky, purses his lips together, looks back down. “Do you mean your seizure?” he says. “Because I have plenty to say about what you did to bring that shit on.”
Sam’s swaying, maybe. Maybe it’s the trees. “No. What you said to me,” he says.
Dean looks at him, blank. “When?”
Sam huffs a breath, curls his hands into fists, fights down the water stinging in his eyes. “Come on, dude. When we were trapped in the rocks. About… about the soullessness and, you know.”
Dean’s eyebrows draw together dangerously. “I don’t want to talk about that stuff,” he says. “Shit, Sam, do you want to scramble your brain any worse than it is?”
“But you brought it up!” Sam says, embarrassingly reedy and high.
“I seriously have no clue what you are talking about,” Dean says. “Far as I’m concerned we were walking along, you kind of spaced out and started grabbing at the wall, then a shit-ton of rock fell on your head.” He rubs a hand over his face. “It was fucking scary, so I’d appreciate you not doing that ever again.”
Sam is reeling. “You… what are you… come on, Dean, this is fucked-up. You were trapped too. You were talking to me.”
Dean shakes his head. “I don’t know what to say, dude. I wasn’t. I just… I wasn’t. I spent a while, uh, considering the situation. And a lot more of a while trying to get through the massive fucking pile of rocks which - did I mention? - fell on your head. No deep conversations.” He licks his lips a little and his eyes glance sideways, just for a fraction of a second. Sam’s stomach sinks. A lie. “No sound from you at all, actually, which didn’t help my blood pressure any. Thanks for asking.”
“You didn’t,” Sam says, but the sentence tails off into nothing. You didn’t, his mind says to him, and Sam has a sudden vision of his own mouth turned to stone, teeth ragged and uneven, gasping secrets into the air.
“The echoes,” he says to Dean. “I think. That cave.”
Lit deep by the flashlight, the tiny muscles around Dean’s eyes tense up. He doesn’t say anything.
“The cave,” Sam says again. “And the echoes. The wendigo didn’t kill that hiker, right?”
“Yes…” says Dean, slowly.
“It was,” Sam says, “Just before the rock fall, did you hear? There was an echo and we were in a passage, Dean, there was nowhere for it to come from. But the echoes.” He’s jittery, trying to make himself understood but his words are still coming out more garbled than he’d like. If he could only get his brain to behave. “The cave was alive, it was speaking, or something in the cave. Something that was in the echoes. It wasn’t… there was a monster, a creature, a spirit. Something. That was speaking to us.” Dean’s eyes are narrowed but he still hasn’t spoken, so Sam corrects himself. “To me.”
Dean’s eyebrows lower, just a little. “You saying that you had a conversation with the cave?”
“I thought it was you,” Sam says.
“What did I say to you?” Dean asks. “What did you think I said?” His hand closes around Sam’s shoulder, fingers digging tight into the biceps the other guy built.
Sam’s lips are dry. He licks them, catches the bottom one in his teeth and bites it just hard enough to focus his mind. He should be relieved, right? He should be relieved. It wasn’t Dean. It was the echo. It was the cave.
Thing about an echo, though. It needs something to kick it off.
There are two ways this can go. Sam can list all the things that Dean said to him, words that make his throat hurt just to think of pronouncing them, and he can listen to Dean splutter in outraged indignation. He can hear Dean say to him, “Sam, dude, Sammy, come on. Come on. How can you think for a second that I’d think that way about you?” He can feel Dean punch him on the shoulder, firm like a hug. He can know that Dean isn’t frightened, all of the time, that Sam might go bad.
Or.
Or Sam can list all the things that Dean said to him inside the cave, and he can look, because he knows his brother, and he can see Dean’s eyes flick guiltily sideways and watch the tension shimmer across his face. He can watch Dean swallow down the fact that his secret thoughts got through and then see him shake it off and run with the big, loud lie; can hear Dean say to him, “Come on, man,” bright and false, and know that Dean thought - is thinking - all of that; that he’s thinking it strongly enough that the cave caught it out of his mind.
Not so long ago, not really, Dean called Sam up and told him that he didn’t recognise Sam any more. He told Sam that he was a monster and Dean would have to put him down.
Dean never killed him. Sam raised the devil instead. They haven’t talked about that message since.
Sam could clear this up. He could clear it up. It’s fifty-fifty, right? Either the cave caught his thoughts, or Dean’s. Maybe it’s a trick, making people think the worst, getting them to give up on everything. Maybe it’s a truth-teller. Fifty-fifty. Heads or tails.
Sam looks at Dean, tense with some untold truth.
“Nothing,” Sam says. “You’re right. I’m just… I just panicked down there.”
Recipient: indiachick
Rating: T
Word Count or Media: 7324
Warnings: Depersonalisation, post-soullessness issues (reference to dub-con sex)
Author's Notes: This fic really did not want to get written. Thanks to B for being an encouraging voice and the mods for their understanding! indiachick asked for ‘the boys cooped up somewhere for a case’; also, horror. I did my best.
Summary: Sam’s got his soul back. Time to go hunt a wendigo.
Sam’s pretty sure that Dean hasn’t stopped talking for more than ten seconds since they left the car this morning. The babble is driving him crazy. Right now, his brother is explaining in elaborate detail the finer points of some game called Angry Birds, which apparently got big while Sam was otherwise engaged.
“I swear to God, Sammy,” Dean says. “The hours I’ve spent.”
Sam gave up responding about two miles back, grappling a headache, focused on navigating the roots underfoot. But Dean still won’t shut up, rattling relentless through his inventory of trivia until Sam can feel the irritation itching under his skin. He understands what Dean’s doing, of course. He’s trying to keep Sam’s mind off the mystery of the past eighteen months, to keep him focused on the case. He’s trying to stop him scratching the wall.
It was the same the last time they hunted a wendigo; Dean scrambling to accommodate a brother unexpectedly restored. That time, Sam had been sodden with grief, fibres of his clothes still clogged and smoky with the atoms of Jessica’s flesh. No wonder Dean had found him difficult to handle. He’d been erratic, out of control; careening wildly from anger to terror to despair, simultaneously deeply furious and deeply relieved to be back beside Dean in the routine he’d worked so hard to escape. The hunt had helped him, a little, providing a temporary vent for the rage building inside his skull. But later, back at the motel, after they’d got drunk and Sam had fallen at last into sleep, his dreams had blazed with bodies alight. He’d watched as the wendigo’s tall corpse flared up and burned down into Jessica’s soft white limbs. When he’d woken he’d been choking on imaginary fumes and Dean had been sitting upright in the next bed, fists clenched in his blankets, staring hard at Sam.
Christ, Dean was a kid back then. Thinking about it twists something in Sam’s chest. He pictures his older brother, so young, wrapped in Dad’s big leather jacket like it was a comfort blanket. They were both of them babies. No wonder Dean had floundered, hit with Sam’s explosive emotional mess. But Sam remembers clearly how his brother worked to figure it out; how Dean tried to make space for Sam to talk about Jessica, how he offered Sam his car keys like they had the power to heal. He remembers Dean, wide-eyed and terrified when Sam’s powers started showing, insisting that nothing had changed. Whatever lurching recovery Sam made from his grief that year, Dean helped him through it. That mattered.
It mattered; it still matters, and Sam should be just as grateful now. Dean’s only trying to keep him safe. But it’s difficult. Honestly, Sam’s struggling to be glad about his reappearance topside. Sure, he’d been terrified when it came to the point, gulping down demon blood in an alleyway in Detroit. But before it happened - before he jumped - he’d spent long, wakeful nights running over and over the reasons for what he’d chosen to do. It was an atonement, a rebalancing of the scales. He was making the decision to give his life in exchange for his sins. And now?
When Sam woke up in the panic room at Bobby’s house, there was a long, disorientated moment when he thought that maybe he was still detoxing; that the whole long year since he let Lucifer go free had been just another fever dream, that he hadn’t killed Lilith at all. For that brief interval he’d been so fucking relieved, limp with gratitude, giddy with the thought that he could stop it all in its tracks. Some hope. As it happens, things turned out more or less exactly the other way around. Disinterred, he’s labouring under a brand-new burden of guilt, made heavier by everybody’s insistence that he leave it uninspected. If it was just Dean telling him to let the missing months go, Sam would likely have ignored him. Suffering that seizure in Rhode Island might have given him pause. But really it’s Castiel’s solemn insistence that he not do anything to jeopardise his mental stability that has scared Sam most. Cas isn’t good at lying; he doesn’t have any reason to do it. And according to Castiel, the current state of Sam’s soul ought properly to see him paralysed, vegetative, dead. Dead, Sam could deal with. The other stuff, he’s not so sure. He’s never liked his body anyway, still less now it’s solid with these muscles that Sam never sweated for. The idea of being trapped half-alive inside the shell is so horrible he can’t let himself think about it for any length of time.
As it is, edging this close to considering his soul sets off an uncomfortable chitinous scratching at the back of Sam’s mind. The sensation shivers out into goosebumps, crawling over his skin, and a building pressure in his temples. His headache intensifies.
Dean, meanwhile, is midway through recounting some anecdote that Sam’s pretty sure he’s heard at least twice before.
“… and I said to the guy, figures you’d have no game at all with a ride like yours.” When Sam looks up Dean’s looking at him expectantly, so he puts on what he hopes is an appropriate smile.
“Huh,” he says. “No game.”
Dean’s eyebrow shoots up, sceptical. “What are you thinking about, Sammy?” he says.
“Nothing,” Sam says. And then, “It’s Sam.” He kicks his toe against a particularly tangled clump of branches, gets caught and almost trips. Dean’s laughter is inevitable, reasonable even, but Sam’s just not in the mood for it. He tugs his foot free, then brushes past Dean on the inside of the path.
“Come on,” he says. “I don’t want to dick around waiting in the dark for a wendigo to come take us home.”
“Dude, it’s barely lunchtime,” says Dean, “thanks to your bright idea that we get up at the fucking ass-crack of dawn,”; but he obeys, so that Sam’s steady forward progress is soundtracked now by a back-beat of twigs snapping underneath the soles of Dean’s boots. It doesn’t take long for Dean to clear his throat and start talking again. Apparently it’s necessary to catch Sam up with the entire baseball season that took place in the year he missed. Sam barely follows baseball (neither does Dean), but at least this doesn’t require too much response.
They’ve been walking upwards of six hours by the time that they reach the cave and despite his best efforts, Sam’s still feeling snappy and sour. Several spears have detached from the biting thorns lining the pathway and burrowed into the fabric of his jeans, scratching painful over his thighs with every step. The map, which offers little enough information anyway, is too large and unwieldy, flapping loose and losing their location every few hundred yards. And Dean’s monologue is still in full flow, securing Sam’s attention just enough to annoy. The words keep catching in his ears, preventing him from tuning out the discomfort of his surroundings, trapping him in his sore feet and his stinging skin and the constant thrumming imperative not to think about everything that he most wants to know. “Shut up,” Sam wants to say. “Shut up shut up shut up.” He wants to fling himself down into a tantrum. He holds back.
Still. Still, they get there at last, and “here we are,” Sam says with relief. He looks over to see Dean staring doubtfully at the narrow, dark crevasse that forms the mouth of the caves. It digs into the side of an overgrown rockface, not particularly high; but the cave heads downward from this point, deep into the belly of the earth. It’s one of the largest systems in the United States, part of it emerging maybe seventy-five miles north and run by the National Park Service complete with bat tours and uniformed guides. Down this way, though, there are unexplored portions, tunnels which narrow away into nothingness, huge tracts of it unmapped. He hasn’t gone into detail about this with Dean, who tends towards claustrophobia; that’s part of the reason he doesn’t like planes. But Dean doesn’t think (doesn’t let himself think) Sam knows about it, so Sam tries to play along.
Even so, looking at Dean as he sets his jaw and prepares to head in, Sam feels cruel. “You don’t have to come in with me,” he offers; although honestly, he doesn’t feel much like tackling a wendigo alone. “I can go in and try to drive it out and then you can torch it when it hits daylight. It might be useful, having somebody manning the exit, y’know? So that it doesn’t just get away.”
Dean narrows his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure. I’m just gonna send you into the... “ and he gestures, loose-limbed, towards the cave, “... into the fricking vulva of death by yourself.”
Despite the irritated anxiety that’s been clawing at his stomach all day, Sam feels a laugh bubble up at the back of his throat. “The what now?” he says.
Dean gestures again, more pointed, and Sam tips his head on one side to regard the dark crack of the cave entrance with its garland of uneven greenery. “Fucking hell, Dean,” he says, and lets the laugh escape. When he looks back, Dean’s beaming, pleased with himself and largely restored to the swagger he’s been missing.
“I know, Sammy,” Dean says. “Bit of a foreign sight for you. Let me know if you need me to draw you a diagram.” He pauses. “Although, I guess.”
“What?” says Sam, not getting it, and then just as Dean says “Nothing,” he remembers that of course, the soulless guy couldn’t keep it in his pants. This is one of the parts of last year that Sam would actually rather not think about. His body, doing things he wouldn’t, with people Sam doesn’t even remember. It makes him not want to touch anybody ever again.
Some of Sam’s discomfort must show through on his face, because Dean’s air of self-satisfaction dissipates almost immediately. “Hey,” he says. “Sorry. I didn’t.”
“It’s fine,” says Sam. He hoists his rucksack a little higher on his back. “Let’s go.”
Ten minutes in, the daylight’s long faded and the cave is dark. Okay, big news. But this is, like, really fucking dark. The flashlights they’re both carrying only seem to make it heavier, their wavering yellow beams showing up the thick, velvety solidity of the blackness all around. When Sam shines his directly ahead, he can’t see anything but the dust dancing in the small patch of light, an bug or a tiny moth occasionally flickering across the span. Downward, and he catches a bleach-lit earthen path, scattered with pebbles that ping out from under his feet and ricochet off the rock walls that stretch up on either side. The passageway is narrow, barely more than shoulder-breadth. Dean can’t be enjoying it much.
“Okay?” Sam says, half-whispered.
“Yeah,” breathes Dean. “Let’s just get in and get fuckin’ out, okay?”
“Good by me,” Sam says. He’s hoping that the wendigo’s gonna show pretty soon; that it’ll have made its lair somewhere in the upper reaches of the caves, not too far from the forest with its convenient camper buffet. The guy whose disappearance brought them here was a spelunker, though, which means that potentially the thing could be hiding down amongst the system’s furthest reaches. Reading the ‘missing’ notice as he was browsing his usual sites, Sam tracked back almost automatically for a recurring pattern. It was pretty unmistakeable - groups of four or five hikers or campers gone missing in this same small area of forest, fifteen-year intervals between each round of attacks. This guy is a little early, as it happens. Nobody was due to disappear from here for another two years. But Sam figures that if he was actually down in the caves, maybe he stumbled directly into the wendigo’s larder. Even the most frugal monster might find it hard to resist that temptation.
Anyway, after their disastrous last couple of hunts, both Sam and Dean were keen to jump on the chance of an easy win. If they can get this thing while it’s still more or less in hibernation, they can save all the people it would target in two years’ time; and in a further fifteen years, thirty, forty-five. Maximum efficiency. Minimum mess.
That was the theory, anyway, but it felt a good deal more sure when they were back in the motel room. Out here in the caves’ black maze, Sam’s starting to regret their cavalier confidence in pitching out to kill this thing with no real idea where it lives. As they walk, he runs the hand not holding the flashlight along the bumpy surface of the wall. More than once, he finds his fingers falling into open space; the path fissuring repeatedly into burrows and caverns, boltholes tucked away beside or below the main track. There must be hundreds of miles of caves out here. Who’s to say they’ll find this thing? Who’s to say what might find them?
He’s grappling with this rising anxiety when suddenly, behind him, Dean stumbles and cries out. From the blackness out in front of them, the sound comes back, distorted and empty and huge. Sam shifts his beam sideways, along the floor, to find that the passage has opened out. This is something different to the cubbyholes they’ve been checking in along the way. As he slides the light forward he sees stalagmites climbing, stalactites dropping, ringed like teeth around a gaping black mouth. Beyond, there’s only blackness; but the echo is evidence enough of the size of the chamber they’ve entered.
Daunted, Sam stops short. Dean runs into the back of him, and his noise of surprise ripples out and back again, returned by the echoing walls.
“Huh,” Dean says. There’s a pause, a breath, and then he yells out, full volume, “Sam Winchester runs like a girl!”
The void sends the words back. “Ha,” says Dean. “Ha ha ha ha ha,” says the cave.
“Stop it,” Sam says, shortly. He should be relieved that Dean’s relaxed enough to kid around. But he can’t laugh at his brother’s voice, returned out of the mouth of stone. It makes him feel like reality’s jolted sideways: the familiar tones become alien, soundwaves stretched into something strange. Sam’s had quite enough of doppelgangers for the moment, thanks.
Breaking the tension, keen to keep moving, Sam walks up to the line of fanged stone teeth and shines his flashlight into the emptiness beyond; but the ground falls away behind the row of stalagmites and he has no stomach for the scrambling climb down into nothingness. He just hopes the wendigo isn’t hiding out down there.
“I think carry on this way,” he says eventually, and even though he’s speaking softly the cave gives his words back to him, a whisper sussurating softly into his ear. “This way, thisss way. I think, I think, I think.” Despite Dean’s kidding around, his brother’s face is solemn in the dim yellow glow; and he nods silently, following Sam across the front of the open space to rejoin the narrow passage they’ve been following until now.
It takes another twenty minutes of walking before they find the wendigo; enough time for Sam to start wondering how long they should give it before they turn around and head back. This was a fucking crazy plan to start off with, going blind into the cave. He’d hoped that the whole thing would somehow more accessible; that the wendigo’s route would be obvious, that the hiker might have left some clearly evident trail. Instead all they have are these unpromising grey walls of rock, the lowering sense of the earth pressing down on them, the forbidding empty doorways opening out on either side.
Eventually, though, Sam’s mechanical waving of the light into every niche they pass is repaid with the sight of a neatly stacked pile of bones. A skull gazes out blank-eyed from a nest of femurs, scapulae, daintily curving ribs. Sam stops, holding his hand out behind him to touch Dean’s chest in a gesture, wait. He jerks his head sideways and they peer into the cutaway, cautious, flashlights low.
Neither of them is expecting what they see.
The wendigo’s long body is stretched out along the cavern floor, surrounded by bones and by motheaten hiking paraphernalia. A single walking shoe lies near his spindly feet, unlaced. But the creature is obviously dead. There are cobwebs canopied from his limbs; beetles scurrying busily over his torso; and the flesh on his arms and legs is shrivelled, leaving him still more skeletal than he would have been in life. There is no evidence, anywhere in the cave, of the man whose disappearance has brought them to this place. The earth is smooth on the hard stone floor. It looks like nothing in here has been disturbed for years.
“What the fuck,” Dean says, quietly, warm against Sam’s ear; and Sam shakes his head. This hunt just got a whole bunch weirder and he’s not sure he can cope with trying to understand the implications right now.
“We should burn it anyway,” says Dean, moving forward into the centre of the space.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Sam begins, thinking fuzzily about oxygen levels and canaries and the chance of their stifling down here, but Dean’s already fished the Zippo from his jeans’ back pocket and is sloshing lighter fluid liberally over the corpse. The thing’s been so thoroughly leached of its water that when Dean lights it, it goes up almost instantaneously in a gasping whoosh of dry flesh. Sam’s eyes start to water. There’s a fetid sweetness in the smoke which cloys at the back of his throat, setting him coughing as the flames begin to dance and blur over his vision. The darkness and the rotten smell and the bright orange light act in unfortunate combination, sending him skittering back towards the memory of the seizure two weeks before; the feeling of his own body burning, fat crisping and flames licking fast along the hair of his arms.
He’s vaguely conscious of dropping his flashlight. It hits the floor with a hard, plastic crack and he folds over at the waist, bending towards it, crouching on shaking legs. A hand falls firm onto his shoulder.
“Hey,” Dean says. “Hey.”
Sam looks up at him, into the sickly light of the beam. “Sorry,” he says. “The fire.”
He can’t see Dean’s expression, but he hears his brother clear his throat. “Let’s get out of here, okay?”
Dean leads now as they head back out of the cave, but before long Sam starts to worry if they are going the right way. In the dark, it would be easy to miss a turning, to wander accidentally off the path that they took coming in. How easy it would have been to have left a trail. Sam’s really not with it at the moment. He’d never usually have made such an amateur mistake. He bets the other guy, the other Sam, wouldn’t have made that kind of error. “Efficient,” that was how Dean had described him. Also, “a dick”.
“Don’t worry,” Dean says, low. “Took a while to get here, remember?”
Sam’s brother can be outrageously fucking annoying but sometimes he understands exactly what Sam needs him to say. It’s just a shame that Sam’s so embarrassingly, predictably weak. Dean’s the one with the claustrophobia; Sam should be reassuring him.
“Yeah,” Sam says, embarrassed, louder than he maybe intends to. “I know, Dean. It’s cool.”
“It’s cool,” the cave says back to him. “Cool, cool, cool.”
This time, the sound comes as a relief. They must be at the mouth-cavern already, a good portion of the way back towards the woods and the light. But when Sam shines his flashlight off to the left of him, where the cave should be, he’s shocked to find nothing but closely packed chunks of rock. He checks again, more thoroughly, front and back, side to side. Just the long narrow corridor, entombing the both of them close.
“You alright?” Dean says.
Something is starting to compress in Sam’s chest; the light of the flashlight stretching long and distorted, improbable. Its yellow is tingeing sickly into acid green. “Did you hear that echo?” he says.
He doesn’t get to hear Dean’s answer. As he turns to look backward for a third time, he catches his foot in the uneven floor, stumbles forward uncoordinated and lands his hand on the wall. The rocks are disparate here, not the solid stone slabs that they have seen elsewhere, and something shifts, dislodges, and rattles to the floor.
“Dean?” Sam says.
There’s a longer clatter, more stones falling, which becomes a roar; and suddenly Sam’s flashlight is knocked out of his hand as a heavy rock strikes him hard on the wrist. He’s scrabbling, bent to grope for it when another slams hard into his shoulder, his back, and then they’re on him, each one like the punch of a fist, beating him relentlessly down into the ground.
~~~
It’s dark and Sam’s choking on dust, the thick coating of it lining his mouth, drying it out. He coughs, feels the particles puff gritty over his lips. “Dean,” he says, but the word is barely audible, a strained croak filtering through the gunk that’s clogging his throat. He swallows, coughs again, gasps a desperate breath. “Dean,” he says, louder. Oh God. Oh God. Sam tugs at his arm, scraping it along the rough underside of the rock that’s wedged just above it.
“Dean!” says Sam again, and his voice is hoarse, and he probably shouldn’t shout in case the rest of the roof comes crashing down on them but fuck, if Dean’s already dead and bruised and broken underneath the rockfall then Sam doesn’t care. “Dean!”
“Sam.” The sound of Dean’s voice is soft but it’s closer than Sam had been expecting, sending a shiver of shock across the top of his spine. It sounds like Dean’s maybe a few metres away, somewhere over to Sam’s right. “Hey.” He sounds tired, a little choked. He’s hurt, Sam thinks.
“How bad is it?”
There’s a pause, a dragging noise of stone on stone. “I’m OK, I think,” Dean says. “But, Sammy, I’m stuck pretty good.”
Sam’s stomach sinks. That makes two of them.
“You?” says Dean, and there’s a hopeful quaver in his voice that Sam feels sick at squashing. But there’s no point telling a lie.
“Yeah,” Sam says ruefully. “Yeah, I’m stuck.”
Dean huffs out a rueful laugh. “Nice,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” Sam tells him. If he’d never noticed that hiker. If he hadn’t thought there was something apposite about a freaking wendigo hunt. And now they’re going to die, trapped together in the endless darkness with nobody knowing they’re here.
“It’s not your fault,” Dean says. There are more scraping sounds, grunts of effort. Dean is trying to get free. Sam tugs his own thigh experimentally upward but it’s caught vice-tight between the stones. He can’t move his right arm, either, and there’s a throbbing ache in his elbow sending red pulses across his vision. In the dark, the pain starts to take on shapes; stars and spirals whirling sideways like a galaxy. Sam looks straight down into the heart of it. His chest swoops. He’s falling forward, towards them, floating in the deep black sea; is going under. For several long, twisting minutes, he sinks.
“Sam,” says Dean again, low, and Sam surfaces with a shuddering gasp. “About this year. About… about Robo-you.”
The topic catches Sam unawares, dazzling him into confusion like a bright light might. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about that,” he says. “I thought you were worried it would fuck up my brain.”
“If we’re going to die here anyway,” Dean says flatly, “then you might as well know. I thought you wanted to know?”
Sam swallows, licks his lips. Yes. Yes, he wants to know. He thinks he wants to know about it.
While Dean is thinking, something skitters over the back of Sam’s neck. He can feel the patter of its individual feet. Not one of the tiny bugs they saw earlier, then, but something larger; maybe the size of a walnut. He breathes carefully: in, out. He closes his eyes. When he opens them it’s exactly the same. Unbroken blank blackness. Dean’s voice.
“You scared me,” Dean says, “when you came back.”
Well, that makes sense. It terrifies Sam, the idea that there was this half-him human walking around, wearing his face, behaving in ways Sam can’t even recognise as being fed by his own desires.
“You gotta realise, Sammy,” says Dean, “for a long time we didn’t know what was wrong. You know?”
“Yeah,” Sam says.
“I thought it was just you.”
“Yeah.” Makes sense. But the implications are scary. What if it had just been Sam, post-Hell? Dean came back spiky and scary and aggressive, loaded double with rage and guilt. What if Sam had been traumatised by Lucifer into something sociopathic? What if Cas had stuck his arm into Sam’s belly and found his soul, beaten-up, but there? What would Dean have done, then?
“I’d have shot you through the head,” Dean says. Sam doesn’t… he must be spacing worse than he thought, because he doesn’t remember saying that stuff out loud.
Dean would have shot him. Sam spent almost a straight year, not so long ago, trying to convince Dean to do that.
“Things change. You did some bad shit, Sammy.” Dean’s tone is apologetic.
“But I,” says Sam. “I.” His heart thuds painfully in his constricted chest. It wasn’t him. Dean said before, when Sam apologised, that it wasn’t him. Dean has to believe that. Sam depends on it. Like that whole year after Dad died, when Sam was certain he was gonna go darkside; when he woke up every morning afraid that he might not be himself when he opened his eyes. Sometimes, Dean’s insistence that Sam didn’t have that in him was the only thing that helped him to crawl out of bed.
“Stuff happened,” Dean says heavily, “since then.”
“Right,” says Sam. Of course. He thought that they had worked through this, before he jumped. He’d thought that that was one of the reasons he was doing it: that he was earning the right to have Dean trust him again. He made the right choice. He made the right choice and he died. It figures that the first thing the other guy did would be to sabotage all of that.
“It wasn’t me, though, Dean,” he says.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Dean says, unconvincing. “I know you’ve got a handle on all that stuff.”
“Um,” says Sam. He doesn’t ‘have a handle’ on it. He doesn’t want it. It’s not just that he’s got too much social decorum to turn Dean over to every vampire they meet. He’s not restraining himself from dangling innocent citizens as bait, or from banging married women in every bathroom he happens to pass, just because it’s not the done thing.
Dean’s voice is relentless. “It’s gotta be somewhere inside you. He’s gotta.” A pause. “He was you with a missing bit. Not you with extras. You know?”
“Yes.”
“Soul or no soul, you did some fucked-up shit.” Sam doesn’t even know what Dean is talking about now; whether he’s picturing more horrors from the past Sam can’t remember or whether he’s just back on the litany of Sam’s lifelong list of sins. It all gets mixed up anyway, lately, in the images that assault Sam every night in his broken dreams. He sees stuff that makes him shiver, makes him sick, and he can’t tell if he did it or if he made it up. Sometimes, he wonders if some of it happened to him, if Lucifer did these nightmare things to him when he was down in the Cage. He doesn’t know. How could he know?
“I’m sorry,” Dean says. “All of it. All the bad stuff. It’s real.”
Sam lets that settle.
"You know,” Dean says. “I’ll save you, I had to save you. Had that drilled into me my whole life, you know? But I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know if I can look at you and not see what’s inside you, not see what you did.”
It's like there's a weight in the back of Sam’s skull, something pressing on the bricks and the mortar of his mind. He can feel the wall swell inward, feel the crumbling plaster start to shiver away.
“That’s the thing with monsters,” Dean says. “You never know when they’re going to turn.” And the whole thing splits, splintering top to bottom, great billows of flame roiling out, licking hot tongues around Sam's body. Sam clutches his fingertips into the cold damp rock that is trapping him; but his limbs are stiffening and he spirals steep and fast out of consciousness and back down into the pit.
~~~
"Sammy!!" There are warm fingers on his face, a light so blinding it lances pain across Sam's temples. He closes his eyes and tries to turn away; but he’s trapped, his body wedged stiff and awkward between unyielding slabs of stone.
“Shit,” says Dean quietly, under his breath, and the light moves away. When Sam opens his eyes again it’s blurry, the lantern a golden yellow halo dissolving into the dark. There’s a scraping sound and a gust of cool air against his leg. Dean is moving the rocks.
Sam should try to help him. He should get up and help his brother. He can’t get up, though, because he’s trapped. That’s right. His leg is heavy. His head is heavy and his neck feels loose, a stem folding floppy under the weight of a bloom. He gives in and lets it fall, lolling awkwardly sideways, straining the tendons down into his shoulder.
Dean is still working at the rocks. The pressure on Sam’s hand lifts, eases, and then suddenly the great cold bulk against his right flank is shifted away. He tips sideways, unresisting.
“Sam,” says Dean sharply. “You with me?”
Sam swallows, opens his mouth. “Uh,” he says.
“You need to slide out,” Dean says. “I think you can slide out now, feet first, okay?” There’s a tugging at Sam’s foot, but his ankle is as loose as the rest of him and his boot slips off. “Come on, Sam,” Dean says, and there’s an edge of panic in his voice.
“Okay,” Sam says, although it comes out mumbled, like he’s talking through a layer of cloth. He shifts his hand and finds it dead numb, hand of a corpse somehow stitched onto his living limb. He drags the dead hand sideways over the stone, until a brutal shot of pins and needles branches up into his bicep and shocks him into a whimper.
“You okay?” Dean says.
“Yeah,” says Sam. He’s not sure he can manage anything more complicated right now. Dean’s hand is on his foot again, gripping tightly over his ankle and under the back of his heel. Sam gives into the pressure, makes himself as small as he can, and slips down into the gap that Dean has created.
For a moment as his shoulders hit the sides he’s wedged - feels wedged - and a thick rusty fear rises up at the back of his throat. He starts to breathe faster, colours blossoming across his vision; but then Dean tugs hard with a hand around his shin and he slips out, skin scraped across the rough surface of the stone but he’s free, curled gasping on the earth at Dean’s feet.
The light of the lantern swoops in closer, making Sam’s eyes water, and Dean’s hand pats down over his forehead, across the side of his face. The skin around Sam’s mouth is wet, and Dean’s fingertips brush over it.
“Did you have another seizure, Sam?” Dean says, hurried and harsh.
“Iyunno,” Sam says. He can’t remember. He can’t think.
“Shit,” Dean says again, and puts the lantern on the ground; slides his arm under Sam’s and tugs him upright with an effortful breath. “We’re gonna walk now, Sammy, okay?”
Sam’s legs are soft and his mouth is full of gravel. He licks his lips, swallows, feels the particles swill over his tongue. He’s putting too much weight on Dean, but he can’t quite help it; his legs feel like the tendons have been stretched too long, like they’re hanging loose at the joints, like he’s a puppet on a worn-out string.
“It’s okay,” Dean says again, “it’s okay,” and he tugs Sam forward, hurrying now, tripping over the stones. Sam’s hip bashes painfully into the wall.
He tries to say, “It’s too narrow,” but the words come out jumbled, a hurry of slurred consonants and misshapen vowels. Dean’s shoulder stiffens for a moment underneath him, but his brother’s pace doesn’t let up.
“Just up here,” Dean says, and flashes his light on a notch chiselled fresh into the wall. Huh. Thank fuck that Dean at least was on his game today.
“It’s gonna get kind of tight.” Dean’s voice is tight, too, thrumming with anxious concern. “You go first, okay, but I’m gonna be right behind you.” He settles his hand warm on the back of Sam’s neck. “Hold onto the walls if you need to, right?”
Sam lurches forward two steps unsupported before succumbing to the inevitable and propping himself up with his hands.
“That’s it,” Dean says. “Okay.” His flashlight shines from behind, illuminating the passage around Sam’s obstructive body, but Sam presses onward, his brother at his back. At one point the wall to the left of him drops away into nothing and he lurches, almost falls, gasping in a shuddering breath. Dean’s grip doesn’t falter, but the flashlight shifts as he brings his other arm around Sam’s waist, holding him steady. When Sam rights himself, he’s shaky, but he keeps on moving and at last he sees it, a pale grey patch of light ahead.
“There we go,” Dean says, relief warm in his voice. “See?”
The climb up to the exit takes an age, but Sam tries to focus on lifting one foot at a time and finally, finally, they’re spilling out into the tangled undergrowth, under the trees. Sam staggers a few footsteps forward and bends over to throw up, the sunlight wheeling white in his eyes.
“Okay,” Dean says, nudging him over towards a tree. Sam sits with his back against the bark, closes his eyes and waits for the world to right itself. He breathes deeply. Now they’re out, he kind of doesn’t want to look at Dean. All those things that his brother said to him in the dark. He splays his hands out flat, digs his fingertips down into the ground. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe he should still be down there.
“Always with the pulling me out of holes,” he says, and opens his eyes to the daylight and squints at Dean. He’s scared that his brother is going to say something cutting, something regretful.
Dean looks shaken. “Yeah, enough of that maybe,” he says.
Sam nods. The forest smells green. He closes his eyes again.
“You, uh,” says Dean after a while. “You up for camping tonight? I think it’s gonna get dark way before we make it back to the car.”
Sam would like to be back at the Impala right now, ideally, even if Dean does wish he were dead. “Can we,” he says. “Can we just go back? Is that okay?”
“Sure, Sammy.” Dean doesn’t look sure.
Sam smiles, big as he can. “I’m up for the walk,” he says. “Be nice to stretch my legs, after that.”
“Yeah,” Dean says drily. “Fucking tower of strength, you are.” But he extends a hand and hauls Sam upright, steadying him with a palm between his shoulderblades and mercifully not mentioning the way Sam staggers as he gets to his feet. “After you, Bambi.”
Of course, they have only one flashlight now - Sam’s was lost to the rockfall, like everything else in his bag - and as the sun starts to lower through the trees, Dean takes the lead. Sam stumbles along behind him, muscles aching, eyes fixed on the white skin of Dean’s neck above his jacket collar. Every few minutes, Dean flicks a suspicious glance behind him, checking on Sam. He’s just making sure Sam’s keeping up. He is. Or maybe he’s worried about a knife in the back, Sam’s teeth in his shoulder, a blow to the base of his skull.
Sam shouldn’t be thinking about this. He mustn’t. He’s not stupid. He’s already had one seizure today. But the weight of it, of Dean’s lost confidence, hangs choking in his chest. It makes his breath catch and his head swim. It makes his jaw ache, rigid with effortful self-control.
Sam’s focused so closely on keeping it together, so exhausted in his body and so woozy with the trace effects of the seizure that soon he’s half-conscious on his feet. The trees blur dark at the edges of his vision. Dean’s face flashes occasional in his line of sight. His feet move forward on the carpet of twigs and soil, stumble over rocks and roots, keep walking into the night. As Sam dozes, images of the day just past start to slip through his mind. The hiking shoes, half-chewed and half-decayed, lying by the wendigo’s body. The swoop of his stomach as his hand slipped into holes in the rock. The whisper of the echoes hissing at him from across the cave.
Dean turns around and puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder, jarring him out of his contemplation, making him jump.
“Jeez,” Dean says. Sam blinks at him, heart stuttering. The flashlight is illuminating Dean’s face from the bottom, a yellow glow under his chin, shining red-orange through his nostrils and the lobes of his ears. “What’s eating you, Sam?”
“Nothing,” Sam says. And then, inadvertent, angry, regretting the words as he says them: “are we just not going to talk about it, then?”
Dean looks up at the dark sky, purses his lips together, looks back down. “Do you mean your seizure?” he says. “Because I have plenty to say about what you did to bring that shit on.”
Sam’s swaying, maybe. Maybe it’s the trees. “No. What you said to me,” he says.
Dean looks at him, blank. “When?”
Sam huffs a breath, curls his hands into fists, fights down the water stinging in his eyes. “Come on, dude. When we were trapped in the rocks. About… about the soullessness and, you know.”
Dean’s eyebrows draw together dangerously. “I don’t want to talk about that stuff,” he says. “Shit, Sam, do you want to scramble your brain any worse than it is?”
“But you brought it up!” Sam says, embarrassingly reedy and high.
“I seriously have no clue what you are talking about,” Dean says. “Far as I’m concerned we were walking along, you kind of spaced out and started grabbing at the wall, then a shit-ton of rock fell on your head.” He rubs a hand over his face. “It was fucking scary, so I’d appreciate you not doing that ever again.”
Sam is reeling. “You… what are you… come on, Dean, this is fucked-up. You were trapped too. You were talking to me.”
Dean shakes his head. “I don’t know what to say, dude. I wasn’t. I just… I wasn’t. I spent a while, uh, considering the situation. And a lot more of a while trying to get through the massive fucking pile of rocks which - did I mention? - fell on your head. No deep conversations.” He licks his lips a little and his eyes glance sideways, just for a fraction of a second. Sam’s stomach sinks. A lie. “No sound from you at all, actually, which didn’t help my blood pressure any. Thanks for asking.”
“You didn’t,” Sam says, but the sentence tails off into nothing. You didn’t, his mind says to him, and Sam has a sudden vision of his own mouth turned to stone, teeth ragged and uneven, gasping secrets into the air.
“The echoes,” he says to Dean. “I think. That cave.”
Lit deep by the flashlight, the tiny muscles around Dean’s eyes tense up. He doesn’t say anything.
“The cave,” Sam says again. “And the echoes. The wendigo didn’t kill that hiker, right?”
“Yes…” says Dean, slowly.
“It was,” Sam says, “Just before the rock fall, did you hear? There was an echo and we were in a passage, Dean, there was nowhere for it to come from. But the echoes.” He’s jittery, trying to make himself understood but his words are still coming out more garbled than he’d like. If he could only get his brain to behave. “The cave was alive, it was speaking, or something in the cave. Something that was in the echoes. It wasn’t… there was a monster, a creature, a spirit. Something. That was speaking to us.” Dean’s eyes are narrowed but he still hasn’t spoken, so Sam corrects himself. “To me.”
Dean’s eyebrows lower, just a little. “You saying that you had a conversation with the cave?”
“I thought it was you,” Sam says.
“What did I say to you?” Dean asks. “What did you think I said?” His hand closes around Sam’s shoulder, fingers digging tight into the biceps the other guy built.
Sam’s lips are dry. He licks them, catches the bottom one in his teeth and bites it just hard enough to focus his mind. He should be relieved, right? He should be relieved. It wasn’t Dean. It was the echo. It was the cave.
Thing about an echo, though. It needs something to kick it off.
There are two ways this can go. Sam can list all the things that Dean said to him, words that make his throat hurt just to think of pronouncing them, and he can listen to Dean splutter in outraged indignation. He can hear Dean say to him, “Sam, dude, Sammy, come on. Come on. How can you think for a second that I’d think that way about you?” He can feel Dean punch him on the shoulder, firm like a hug. He can know that Dean isn’t frightened, all of the time, that Sam might go bad.
Or.
Or Sam can list all the things that Dean said to him inside the cave, and he can look, because he knows his brother, and he can see Dean’s eyes flick guiltily sideways and watch the tension shimmer across his face. He can watch Dean swallow down the fact that his secret thoughts got through and then see him shake it off and run with the big, loud lie; can hear Dean say to him, “Come on, man,” bright and false, and know that Dean thought - is thinking - all of that; that he’s thinking it strongly enough that the cave caught it out of his mind.
Not so long ago, not really, Dean called Sam up and told him that he didn’t recognise Sam any more. He told Sam that he was a monster and Dean would have to put him down.
Dean never killed him. Sam raised the devil instead. They haven’t talked about that message since.
Sam could clear this up. He could clear it up. It’s fifty-fifty, right? Either the cave caught his thoughts, or Dean’s. Maybe it’s a trick, making people think the worst, getting them to give up on everything. Maybe it’s a truth-teller. Fifty-fifty. Heads or tails.
Sam looks at Dean, tense with some untold truth.
“Nothing,” Sam says. “You’re right. I’m just… I just panicked down there.”