Fic :: Supernatural :: The Roaring of Lions, the Howling of Wolves
The Roaring of Lions, the Howling of Wolves
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Warning: Disturbing themes and imagery.
Summary: Post 4x22 AU. Sam gets a reward.
Title from William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
For fleshflutter, with thanks to rudhampaiel and raggedann for the cheerleading ♥
Thrice - The Lion and the Wolf
Shearwater - White Waves
*
And everything is goodness, and everything is light.
*
Our father who art not in Heaven.
Our father who art the grinding shatter-crunch of bones and blood and shit, who art teeth wrenched from tender jaws and peeling peeling folds of newborn skin and writhing rutting senseless limbs, semen and pus and the taste of maggot-filled babies, the ooze of their ancient eyeballs, stench of rot and sulphur and rot. Our father who art the short, sharp crack of a finger snapping, in darkness, in darkness, in fire and darkness.
Our father who art bathed in glorious shadow.
Our father who art the most gentle breath.
Hallowed be thy name.
Amen.
*
Here is your reward.
*
Mom’s calling “honey wake up or you’re gonna be late,” and so you wake up and you open your eyes and you stare up at the ceiling, the grey-white sunlight leaking through the gaps.
Mom’s calling “it’s time to get up.”
You get up.
Breakfast is already waiting for you and it’s already going cold but you eat half of it as mom runs her fingers through your hair and whispers morning prayers into your ear, the Lord is so proud of you, baby, the Lord is so proud.
“Amen,” you whisper back.
*
Something in the sky breaks halfway through your lecture and it pulls the clouds apart behind it, and the rain comes down in heavy, grey drops. It thunders against the windows like it wants to come inside and the wind howls like it wants to come with it.
Your term paper is on Milton, on the Devil’s role as the sympathetic hero, and also on the sticky red fingerprint Jess leaves on the corner of your desk as she gets up to go.
“Paper cut,” she whispers with a smile. You want to kiss it off her face.
Your professor calls you out of the crowd as it passes by her, end of lecture, heading for the door. “Sam,” she calls. “Sam, this is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” you say, “of course.”
She smiles at you. “We’re all so proud of you,” she says, with red lipstick caked in the corner of her mouth, with her fingers resting on your arm.
Her hand is cold.
“I look forward to reading your paper,” she says.
Outside, the rain is screaming.
Let me in, let me in.
*
Jess gives you free coffee when the shop is quiet, which is always and doubly so when it rains. Nobody goes outside when it rains. It’s a grey curtain against the window, a wall, like every gap in the universe has been filled with liquid, and rivulets run down the glass and merge together into trees and hands and twisting faces.
Jess says, “Just the way you like it,” as she dumps the mug in front of you, drags her cloth through the overspill.
You say “thank you” and take a sip and it’s not hot enough. She never makes it hot enough.
You drink it anyway.
Outside, beyond the curtain of rain, beyond the cracking sidewalk and the iron railing and the grey beach, the sea is perfectly still, smooth as a mirror and black as an eye, and as you watch, a raven glides through the air and down down down beneath the water’s surface.
It doesn’t come back up again.
“That’s what I hate about this time of year,” Jess says. “Everything always dies.”
*
That night, you dream.
The ceiling is on fire and where the burned out, gaping wounds crack open, the ceiling bleeds, and then the blood drops are snowflakes, which you catch on your blistering tongue.
This is what you wanted, your professor says from overhead, this is what you wanted, isn’t it? and then she closes her eyes and she opens her mouth and smoke pours out of her.
You say, “I don’t know,” and you wake up.
*
Your breakfast is already on the table when you get up in the morning and it’s as cold as the kiss your mom presses to your forehead as she recites the morning prayers.
“Forgive us our trespasses,” she whispers, staring out the window at the sea.
Once you push your bowl away, you grab your bag and touch mom’s motionless shoulder as you pass her by and when you step out the front door, there’s a dead cat waiting on the porch steps for you. It’s split open down the middle in a spill of rot and gut and wriggling things and when you touch a hand to its sticky head, shattered skull shifts beneath the matted fur beneath your fingertips.
“Jesus,” you mutter, and then, because you are alone, “Christo.”
You leave the corpse down on the shoreline, next to the pair of picked-clean crow wings washed up onto the sand. The sea is always hungry.
It’s just that time of year.
*
There’s a new guy in your class today.
Everything fades out to the drone of a swarm of bees - low and constant and incomprehensible - as your class discusses yesterday’s lecture and you stare across the room at him. He’s sat directly opposite you and he stares right back.
“Take a picture, Sam,” Jess murmurs, next to you, “it’ll last longer,” but her gorgeous, shining hair and that smile you always want to kiss have faded away too. The world has turned to grey around him.
You grab hold of his elbow on the way out and you say, “Look, do I know you?”
He looks up at you and he doesn’t look surprised and he rubs a hand across the back of his neck. People part around you both like waves breaking on a rock.
“I don’t know,” he says, at last. He says it how you feel it - as if something in the universe is telling him he should.
“What’s your name?” you say.
“Dean,” he says.
You should have known that, too.
*
Jess dumps the mug down in front of you and you both watch in silence as its contents spill over the edge and trickle down the sides.
“I don’t think you should talk to him again,” she says, as she trails her fingers up the side of the mug, catching stray drops and licking them off of her fingertips. Her nails are blue.
“Dean?” you ask.
“Dean,” she says. She looks out the window, towards the sea, and she shivers and she says, “There’s something wrong with him. He doesn’t feel right.”
You look out the window too. The sea is at high tide, rippling and shivering like it can feel you watching, and you know the cat’s corpse will be long gone by now and washed away. Nothing feels right.
So you turn back to Jess and you say “okay,” and she smiles so prettily and so perfectly. You want to kiss it. You want to kiss her.
She presses her hand against your knee as she leans forward towards you and the movement of it sends her head lolling sideways and her mouth falls open helplessly with the motion, lips peeling grey and blue, and inside she’s black with rot, glistening sickly right down to her throat where things wriggle and shift and worm, and you push your chair away so hard it tips over behind you.
“Christo,” you say.
Jess blinks up at you, with her gorgeous eyes and her shining hair, and then she glances down at her hand where it’s still stretched out in front of her, over the ghost of your knee, blue-nailed and bloody fingered.
“For God’s sake, Sam,” she says, “it’s just a paper cut.”
*
Mom’s silent when you get home and dinner has gone cold. You’re not hungry, anyway. A fly crawls across the table between the pair of you and you sit and watch it die.
“There’s a new guy at school,” you say.
“I think Jess might be sick,” you say.
“I wish Dad were here,” you say.
Your mom blinks at that and she looks up at you. There are dark circles under her eyes, blue and purple like a bruise. She looks like death.
“Oh honey,” she says. She reaches across the table and grips your hand between her clammy fingers. “Don’t worry. He’s coming soon, I promise. He’s coming real soon.”
She drops her head and whispers grace.
Outside, an albatross cuts across the sky, dragging the storm clouds behind it, and as its wings stretch wide it swoops over the shore. Go back, you think, go back, but it glides down low anyway and its wings skim across the surface of the water and that’s all it takes to wake them up.
“Deliver us from evil,” Mom says, as the skeleton hands break through the water, reaching up up up until the tips of their bone-fingers brush against the albatross’ feathers and then they grab hold and drag it down into the sea.
“Amen,” Mom whispers.
The bird screams until it disappears completely and then you let yourself look away again.
“Amen,” you whisper back.
*
You dream.
You dream that there is a door and you break the lock and you’re dragging it open as it drips with blood. Someone is calling for you on the other side, but when you pull it open at last, all that spills out is bright, white, burning light.
It envelops you.
You wake up.
*
You keep away from Jess, and from school, and from your mom and they are all so easy to avoid, but Dean is not and nor is the sea. The tide is creeping higher every day, whispering with every tiny, mirror-smooth wave as the rain begs to be let in.
Dean is not smooth at all and anything but a whisper.
You’re sat on the steps of the old library, listening to the town creak and shiver in time with the wind, when he drops down next to you and he says, “Look, I think you might be the only person in this whole damn town who isn’t completely insane and I feel like I shouldn’t really be here.”
“Me neither,” you admit.
He rests his arms on his legs and rests his chin on his arms and he frowns out at the storm clouds wrapped around the horizon and he may be almost a complete stranger, but when you look at him you know him, so absolutely that everything else becomes uncertain.
“I don’t even know who I am,” Dean says.
You know how that one feels, too.
The wind blows, and you shiver with it.
*
“They’re trying to get in,” Mom says, from where she’s standing by the window with her white hands pressed against the glass and her white face turned towards the sky and although it’s dusk, light shines through the window like a fluorescent bulb, turning everything cold and dead beneath it.
The tablecloth is bloody.
You focus on the spoon in your hand and the bowl in front of you and you take another mouthful of it, close your eyes at the cloying taste of iron as it coats your teeth and tongue. This is blood, you realise, and you’re eating it. It’s cold and clotted and so dark it’s rotted, and everything in the room is coated in a fine film of it, including your hands.
You drop the spoon, breathe in deeply through your nose and push the bowl away.
“They’re trying to get in,” Mom says again, her forehead pressed against the window glass, and as she speaks blood seeps through the gash in her stomach and slick, white maggots slide out of her mouth with every word, splitting fatly on her teeth, and “the angels,” she says, “the angels want to come inside.”
“Mom,” you say, and then, “you’re not my mom, are you.”
She says nothing.
A centipede crawls down the side of her face and through her gaping lips and it disappears inside and dies there.
*
You lock the door behind you, for all the good it will do when the house is cracking and crumbling and sliding in on itself like a house of cards, with the plaster peeling from the walls to expose its gutted skeleton insides. The key snaps in the lock when you twist it.
Outside, it is raining. The air smells like sulphur but it does not burn, and overhead the clouds have been torn apart, a bright gash down the centre of the sky through which bright light is streaming and the town is screaming as it dies in ash and dust.
Jess is waiting for you as you pass by the coffee shop. Its roof has caved in and so has her skull, her beautiful hair sagging inwards as it shines with blood, and her black eyes roll in their exposed sockets as she presses herself against the window separating her from you.
“This was your reward,” she says, wet lolling tongue and blood on her teeth. “You set Him free and He repaid you and this is how you repay Him?”
“Christo,” you say and she flinches away with a hiss. She isn’t Jess either.
The glass is slowly cracking where her fingers touch it.
“He’s coming,” she screams after you. “He’s coming.”
You begin to run.
*
Down on the beach, Dean is waiting for you, alive and whole and shining in the light of the wound in the sky of this dying world.
You can stop running now, and you say “I know you” as you walk towards him, and you do, somehow you do. You know his face as it turns towards you, four years old and twenty-six years old and thirty years old all at the same time.
“Something’s happening,” he says.
“It’s a war,” you say.
“Huh,” Dean says. He rubs his hand across the back of his head, and you know it, you know it. “Who we rooting for?”
“Us, I think,” you say. “Just us.”
The sea is lapping at your toes, and beneath your feet you can feel the ground shaking as one million tiny earthquakes echo through it. Overhead, the clouds are cracking, gaping, and beyond the rain you can see the light and beyond the light you can see the battle raging and beyond the battle you can see something whisper.
You reach out blindly and take hold of Dean’s wrist and his hand twists around so he’s gripping you back and together you watch as the world crumbles around you.
Up above, an angel cries out in an ancient, wordless language that is filled with pain, a casualty of battle, and he tumbles through the sky, through the clouds and rain, in a trail of blood and feathers and shining light, slow motion and as glorious as a comet as he falls.
Suddenly the sky is too big and suddenly the world is too small.
“He’s coming,” you say.
“Who?” Dean says.
“Everything.”
The angel falls, and down below one million skeleton hands rise up out of the water to receive him.
*
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R
Warning: Disturbing themes and imagery.
Summary: Post 4x22 AU. Sam gets a reward.
Title from William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
For fleshflutter, with thanks to rudhampaiel and raggedann for the cheerleading ♥
Thrice - The Lion and the Wolf
Shearwater - White Waves
*
And everything is goodness, and everything is light.
*
Our father who art not in Heaven.
Our father who art the grinding shatter-crunch of bones and blood and shit, who art teeth wrenched from tender jaws and peeling peeling folds of newborn skin and writhing rutting senseless limbs, semen and pus and the taste of maggot-filled babies, the ooze of their ancient eyeballs, stench of rot and sulphur and rot. Our father who art the short, sharp crack of a finger snapping, in darkness, in darkness, in fire and darkness.
Our father who art bathed in glorious shadow.
Our father who art the most gentle breath.
Hallowed be thy name.
Amen.
*
Here is your reward.
*
Mom’s calling “honey wake up or you’re gonna be late,” and so you wake up and you open your eyes and you stare up at the ceiling, the grey-white sunlight leaking through the gaps.
Mom’s calling “it’s time to get up.”
You get up.
Breakfast is already waiting for you and it’s already going cold but you eat half of it as mom runs her fingers through your hair and whispers morning prayers into your ear, the Lord is so proud of you, baby, the Lord is so proud.
“Amen,” you whisper back.
*
Something in the sky breaks halfway through your lecture and it pulls the clouds apart behind it, and the rain comes down in heavy, grey drops. It thunders against the windows like it wants to come inside and the wind howls like it wants to come with it.
Your term paper is on Milton, on the Devil’s role as the sympathetic hero, and also on the sticky red fingerprint Jess leaves on the corner of your desk as she gets up to go.
“Paper cut,” she whispers with a smile. You want to kiss it off her face.
Your professor calls you out of the crowd as it passes by her, end of lecture, heading for the door. “Sam,” she calls. “Sam, this is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” you say, “of course.”
She smiles at you. “We’re all so proud of you,” she says, with red lipstick caked in the corner of her mouth, with her fingers resting on your arm.
Her hand is cold.
“I look forward to reading your paper,” she says.
Outside, the rain is screaming.
Let me in, let me in.
*
Jess gives you free coffee when the shop is quiet, which is always and doubly so when it rains. Nobody goes outside when it rains. It’s a grey curtain against the window, a wall, like every gap in the universe has been filled with liquid, and rivulets run down the glass and merge together into trees and hands and twisting faces.
Jess says, “Just the way you like it,” as she dumps the mug in front of you, drags her cloth through the overspill.
You say “thank you” and take a sip and it’s not hot enough. She never makes it hot enough.
You drink it anyway.
Outside, beyond the curtain of rain, beyond the cracking sidewalk and the iron railing and the grey beach, the sea is perfectly still, smooth as a mirror and black as an eye, and as you watch, a raven glides through the air and down down down beneath the water’s surface.
It doesn’t come back up again.
“That’s what I hate about this time of year,” Jess says. “Everything always dies.”
*
That night, you dream.
The ceiling is on fire and where the burned out, gaping wounds crack open, the ceiling bleeds, and then the blood drops are snowflakes, which you catch on your blistering tongue.
This is what you wanted, your professor says from overhead, this is what you wanted, isn’t it? and then she closes her eyes and she opens her mouth and smoke pours out of her.
You say, “I don’t know,” and you wake up.
*
Your breakfast is already on the table when you get up in the morning and it’s as cold as the kiss your mom presses to your forehead as she recites the morning prayers.
“Forgive us our trespasses,” she whispers, staring out the window at the sea.
Once you push your bowl away, you grab your bag and touch mom’s motionless shoulder as you pass her by and when you step out the front door, there’s a dead cat waiting on the porch steps for you. It’s split open down the middle in a spill of rot and gut and wriggling things and when you touch a hand to its sticky head, shattered skull shifts beneath the matted fur beneath your fingertips.
“Jesus,” you mutter, and then, because you are alone, “Christo.”
You leave the corpse down on the shoreline, next to the pair of picked-clean crow wings washed up onto the sand. The sea is always hungry.
It’s just that time of year.
*
There’s a new guy in your class today.
Everything fades out to the drone of a swarm of bees - low and constant and incomprehensible - as your class discusses yesterday’s lecture and you stare across the room at him. He’s sat directly opposite you and he stares right back.
“Take a picture, Sam,” Jess murmurs, next to you, “it’ll last longer,” but her gorgeous, shining hair and that smile you always want to kiss have faded away too. The world has turned to grey around him.
You grab hold of his elbow on the way out and you say, “Look, do I know you?”
He looks up at you and he doesn’t look surprised and he rubs a hand across the back of his neck. People part around you both like waves breaking on a rock.
“I don’t know,” he says, at last. He says it how you feel it - as if something in the universe is telling him he should.
“What’s your name?” you say.
“Dean,” he says.
You should have known that, too.
*
Jess dumps the mug down in front of you and you both watch in silence as its contents spill over the edge and trickle down the sides.
“I don’t think you should talk to him again,” she says, as she trails her fingers up the side of the mug, catching stray drops and licking them off of her fingertips. Her nails are blue.
“Dean?” you ask.
“Dean,” she says. She looks out the window, towards the sea, and she shivers and she says, “There’s something wrong with him. He doesn’t feel right.”
You look out the window too. The sea is at high tide, rippling and shivering like it can feel you watching, and you know the cat’s corpse will be long gone by now and washed away. Nothing feels right.
So you turn back to Jess and you say “okay,” and she smiles so prettily and so perfectly. You want to kiss it. You want to kiss her.
She presses her hand against your knee as she leans forward towards you and the movement of it sends her head lolling sideways and her mouth falls open helplessly with the motion, lips peeling grey and blue, and inside she’s black with rot, glistening sickly right down to her throat where things wriggle and shift and worm, and you push your chair away so hard it tips over behind you.
“Christo,” you say.
Jess blinks up at you, with her gorgeous eyes and her shining hair, and then she glances down at her hand where it’s still stretched out in front of her, over the ghost of your knee, blue-nailed and bloody fingered.
“For God’s sake, Sam,” she says, “it’s just a paper cut.”
*
Mom’s silent when you get home and dinner has gone cold. You’re not hungry, anyway. A fly crawls across the table between the pair of you and you sit and watch it die.
“There’s a new guy at school,” you say.
“I think Jess might be sick,” you say.
“I wish Dad were here,” you say.
Your mom blinks at that and she looks up at you. There are dark circles under her eyes, blue and purple like a bruise. She looks like death.
“Oh honey,” she says. She reaches across the table and grips your hand between her clammy fingers. “Don’t worry. He’s coming soon, I promise. He’s coming real soon.”
She drops her head and whispers grace.
Outside, an albatross cuts across the sky, dragging the storm clouds behind it, and as its wings stretch wide it swoops over the shore. Go back, you think, go back, but it glides down low anyway and its wings skim across the surface of the water and that’s all it takes to wake them up.
“Deliver us from evil,” Mom says, as the skeleton hands break through the water, reaching up up up until the tips of their bone-fingers brush against the albatross’ feathers and then they grab hold and drag it down into the sea.
“Amen,” Mom whispers.
The bird screams until it disappears completely and then you let yourself look away again.
“Amen,” you whisper back.
*
You dream.
You dream that there is a door and you break the lock and you’re dragging it open as it drips with blood. Someone is calling for you on the other side, but when you pull it open at last, all that spills out is bright, white, burning light.
It envelops you.
You wake up.
*
You keep away from Jess, and from school, and from your mom and they are all so easy to avoid, but Dean is not and nor is the sea. The tide is creeping higher every day, whispering with every tiny, mirror-smooth wave as the rain begs to be let in.
Dean is not smooth at all and anything but a whisper.
You’re sat on the steps of the old library, listening to the town creak and shiver in time with the wind, when he drops down next to you and he says, “Look, I think you might be the only person in this whole damn town who isn’t completely insane and I feel like I shouldn’t really be here.”
“Me neither,” you admit.
He rests his arms on his legs and rests his chin on his arms and he frowns out at the storm clouds wrapped around the horizon and he may be almost a complete stranger, but when you look at him you know him, so absolutely that everything else becomes uncertain.
“I don’t even know who I am,” Dean says.
You know how that one feels, too.
The wind blows, and you shiver with it.
*
“They’re trying to get in,” Mom says, from where she’s standing by the window with her white hands pressed against the glass and her white face turned towards the sky and although it’s dusk, light shines through the window like a fluorescent bulb, turning everything cold and dead beneath it.
The tablecloth is bloody.
You focus on the spoon in your hand and the bowl in front of you and you take another mouthful of it, close your eyes at the cloying taste of iron as it coats your teeth and tongue. This is blood, you realise, and you’re eating it. It’s cold and clotted and so dark it’s rotted, and everything in the room is coated in a fine film of it, including your hands.
You drop the spoon, breathe in deeply through your nose and push the bowl away.
“They’re trying to get in,” Mom says again, her forehead pressed against the window glass, and as she speaks blood seeps through the gash in her stomach and slick, white maggots slide out of her mouth with every word, splitting fatly on her teeth, and “the angels,” she says, “the angels want to come inside.”
“Mom,” you say, and then, “you’re not my mom, are you.”
She says nothing.
A centipede crawls down the side of her face and through her gaping lips and it disappears inside and dies there.
*
You lock the door behind you, for all the good it will do when the house is cracking and crumbling and sliding in on itself like a house of cards, with the plaster peeling from the walls to expose its gutted skeleton insides. The key snaps in the lock when you twist it.
Outside, it is raining. The air smells like sulphur but it does not burn, and overhead the clouds have been torn apart, a bright gash down the centre of the sky through which bright light is streaming and the town is screaming as it dies in ash and dust.
Jess is waiting for you as you pass by the coffee shop. Its roof has caved in and so has her skull, her beautiful hair sagging inwards as it shines with blood, and her black eyes roll in their exposed sockets as she presses herself against the window separating her from you.
“This was your reward,” she says, wet lolling tongue and blood on her teeth. “You set Him free and He repaid you and this is how you repay Him?”
“Christo,” you say and she flinches away with a hiss. She isn’t Jess either.
The glass is slowly cracking where her fingers touch it.
“He’s coming,” she screams after you. “He’s coming.”
You begin to run.
*
Down on the beach, Dean is waiting for you, alive and whole and shining in the light of the wound in the sky of this dying world.
You can stop running now, and you say “I know you” as you walk towards him, and you do, somehow you do. You know his face as it turns towards you, four years old and twenty-six years old and thirty years old all at the same time.
“Something’s happening,” he says.
“It’s a war,” you say.
“Huh,” Dean says. He rubs his hand across the back of his head, and you know it, you know it. “Who we rooting for?”
“Us, I think,” you say. “Just us.”
The sea is lapping at your toes, and beneath your feet you can feel the ground shaking as one million tiny earthquakes echo through it. Overhead, the clouds are cracking, gaping, and beyond the rain you can see the light and beyond the light you can see the battle raging and beyond the battle you can see something whisper.
You reach out blindly and take hold of Dean’s wrist and his hand twists around so he’s gripping you back and together you watch as the world crumbles around you.
Up above, an angel cries out in an ancient, wordless language that is filled with pain, a casualty of battle, and he tumbles through the sky, through the clouds and rain, in a trail of blood and feathers and shining light, slow motion and as glorious as a comet as he falls.
Suddenly the sky is too big and suddenly the world is too small.
“He’s coming,” you say.
“Who?” Dean says.
“Everything.”
The angel falls, and down below one million skeleton hands rise up out of the water to receive him.
*