"Misery (the Bad Medicine remix)"
“Misery (the Bad Medicine remix)”
Prompt: (from neonchica) So, wave_obscura and I were just talking, and we decided we really, really, REALLY! need a Dean version of Stephen King's "Misery." We want fic! and we want a photo manip! Cause really - that's just the epitome of a hurt!Dean moment. Someone? Anyone? :D
A/N: This had me written all over it. Props as always go to my Jedi Master, Mr. King. Title is from the song by Bon Jovi. Set sometime after 5.13, “The Song Remains the Same,” but before 5.14.
Part of the Cujo 'verse [an AU in which all things King and SPN collide], which can be found here.
Wordcount: around 2000
**ETA:** Now with outtake ( "Needful Things") and LOVELY art by caluk!
If anything’s more fucked up than what’s currently going on, Dean thinks that it might be that he was more worried about his car than he was about himself, right after it happened.
Even now, he’s wondering if maybe somehow Sam will find the Impala, like maybe it can send out some sort of homing beacon. Hell knows it was more of a home to them than anything else ever was.
~~~~~
“It’s you!” she’s exclaiming, her mittened hands flying to her cheeks in excitement.
Dean’s blinking around at everything slowly, snow catching in his eyelashes, and then it washes over him like there’s been a prolonged lunar eclipse, and the tides have waited years to come in.
He almost thinks he’s gone back to Hell, the pain is that bad.
“I just can’t believe it’s YOU!” The words drag him back into consciousness: a piece of driftwood flung against a rotting pier.
“Just who do you think I am?” he pushes the words out of his mouth like he’s setting free a nest of hornets, one by one.
Her eyes light up, and she blushes. Dean can see this through the one eye he has cracked open against the pain.
“You’re… Dean Winchester.”
Dean grits his teeth, inwardly cursing icy Wisconsin backroads. Dean’s heard people say that there is Hell on Earth. Dean’s been to the downstairs version, the unfinished basement of the company, but apparently they’ve expanded since they last did business.
~~~~~
She says that she’s a nurse. That she’ll make him better. That she’ll take him to a hospital as soon as he’s well enough.
Dean gambles with the best of them, and he’s not putting his money down on any of the words she’s laying out like they’re playing roulette.
All he hopes is that Sam will find him, soon.
~~~~~
The first few days are a haze of painkillers and pain and Hell-both dreaming of it and being in it.
“My name is Kathy,” she tells him.
Dean feels like he’s living in a Dali painting, except that would make too much sense.
His legs are completely shattered. Kathy tells him this conspiratorially, as though Dean wouldn’t have guessed. She’s doing a large jigsaw puzzle on a table she’s pulled over to his bedside, humming as she works and occasionally leaning over to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
Dean watches the puzzle form in chunks during his short periods of being awake and comparatively lucid. It’s only after she’s almost done with it when he realizes that it’s a large picture of him and Sam looking like Fabio, from the covers of one of the Supernatural books.
That’s when he gets scared.
~~~~~
“So, Kathy,” he starts out one morning after she’s given him his first dose of painkillers. “How did it happen.”
He phrases it like a statement, like he’s encouraging her, making her think that he believes anything she tells him.
“Well,” she says, looking strangely shy for a woman who has to be at least in her forties. She plays with the charm on her necklace. [It’s a miniature Colt, Dean had asked. He’d wished he hadn’t.]
“Well,” she repeats. “I was driving home from the grocery store when I saw tire tracks going off the side of the road- and then you, poor thing, all mangled in that deathtrap old car you had.”
Kathy drove a Buick. Dean had asked. [He’d wished he hadn’t.] It had a heated steering wheel, and was ranked highly in Consumer Reports. If Dean had had a car like that, he wouldn’t be where he is today.
“And then,” Kathy sounds jubilant, “I rescued you! And brought you back here to be my little patient.”
It’s a Swiss cheese story, but the painkillers make Dean strangely sleepy, and he drops off again before he can make the holes bigger.
~~~~~
He loses a lot of time, like he’s playing poker with Chronos and losing, badly. Kathy’s dealing. Dean suspects her of stacking the deck.
~~~~~
The pain is omnipresent, but Dean can tell that he’s healing, somewhat. He has no idea how long it’s been, besides adding the word ‘too,’ and maybe throwing the adjective ‘far’ into the mix.
One day, Kathy comes in to his room, looking like she’s just single-handedly cured cancer, had sex with Brad Pitt, and gotten a triple Yahtzee.
“THEY’RE HERE,” she tells Dean.
Dean can only guess who or what ‘they’ are, but she doesn’t give him time.
“IT’S THEM! THEY CAME!!” she clasps her hands together in wordless joy, then goes out into the hallway, returning with a large cardboard box.
Dean squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t think he’s quite up to leather and whipping just yet, and God forbid there be a foldable stripper pole in there.
He opens his eyes again with a jolt as Kathy sits heavily on the side of his bed, almost bouncing with anticipation. He winces, and she looks chagrined slightly, reaching out to smooth his forehead. Dean flinches slightly, but he doesn’t think she notices. She pulls something out from behind her back, and then brandishes it in Dean’s face.
Dean doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that the word ‘fuck’ rhymes with his favorite prophet’s name.
~~~~~
They’re all there: Sympathy for the Devil, The End, and Changing Channels, among others. Dean wonders whether he could ever really succeed in killing Chuck, or if he would always see it ahead of time.
It takes Kathy a few days to work through all of the new books. She comes in to chat with Dean after every particularly thrilling scene. She cries when she finishes the last book, The Song Remains the Same.
Dean’s not sure why he asks anymore; he never, ever wants to know.
“I can’t talk to you today,” Kathy tells him after she turns the last page. She’s taken to reading aloud to Dean, as though living through it once wasn’t enough. She likes to think of herself as a dramatic reader. Dean kind of perversely wishes that Sam could hear her do her “Castiel voice.”
“I just… I just can’t do it,” she says to Dean. “I’m sorry, but I have to get away from here. You’re too…”
“Real?” Dean supplies sardonically.
Kathy slaps him across the face, and then looks crestfallen. “I-I’m sorry, Dean, but I have to go.”
Dean watches her as she leaves the room, the sound of the lock clicking like dice in a bag, dice with one’s on every side.
~~~~~
She’s gone for three days. Dean makes the journey across the landscape of the floor, only to become a permanent fixture next to the door, a mountain range with an awakening volcano.
The withdrawal symptoms set in midway through the second day, as though the full-blown pain wasn’t enough misery.
His teeth are chattering, he’s so cold, and the single clear thought in his head is that maybe he finally understands one more puzzle piece of his brother.
When she gets back, she fawns over him, apologetic to a fault. She gives him his painkillers and she makes him soup and she tsks over his fever and the rattly cough that’s settled in his chest.
Immune system, down, Dean thinks. Just one more part of him wasting away. A lost piece of the jigsaw that is his being.
~~~~~
Once he’s somewhat recovered, -beyond the blooming head cold he’s managed to catch- Kathy says that she needs to have a serious discussion with him.
“Fuck, lady,” Dean says congestedly. “You ever see my middle name in those books? Well, get out your pen so you can annotate, because here it is: SERIOUS.”
Kathy remains unperturbed, though there’s a concerned look creasing her forehead.
“My, Dean, what language!”
“Yeah, I guess they probably took that out for the mass market, huh?” Dean coughs into his fist, grimaces when it jostles his legs, which are healing at about the same rate that the glaciers moved across the Midwest, making that godforsaken dropoff his baby’s currently resting in.
“Dean.” Kathy’s patting the blankets. “I want you to listen to me.”
“I suppose,” Dean says. “Seeing as I have nothing better to do.”
He sneezes painfully, and Kathy thrusts a box of Kleenex at him.
“Dean,” she repeats. “You remember Zachariah?”
By golly, Dean does. [And it seems almost ironic that she’s bringing him up, now- Dean’s been thinking, and he’s almost got himself convinced that this is another of Zachariah’s alternate universes- he’s sure that the bastard wouldn’t be able to resist a name-check.]
“Anyway,” Kathy continues. “I see that you’ve been having a teensy little problem with him.”
This is akin to saying something like: War and Peace was a short book. Mount Everest? Yeah, I’ve seen taller. The Shawshank Redemption- it was okay. Morgan Freeman’s role could’ve been better cast.
“… and I think that you should just put aside your differences and come to an agreement. You should say yes.”
Kathy primly places her hands in her lap. To her, there’s only one way to solve the equation. The math always works out, and there are no exceptions. There are only rules, and the world is governed by them, no matter how illogical they are.
Dean takes a long pause to cough and snuffle into a tissue.
“No.”
“Pardon?” Kathy’s playing innocent. It’s not a flattering look.
“I said no. I said it then, and I’ll say it again now: no.”
Kathy stands up abruptly, knocking over Dean’s tissue box.
“Better get out your blowtorch,” Dean calls as she’s going out the door.
~~~~~
She comes back later that night to tell Dean that she loves him. It’s stark contrast from her blind anger before, but Dean can see the dark glimmer in her eyes. He recognizes it from Hell.
She doesn’t bring a blowtorch. Dean’s sure that the hellfire will do a good enough job at cauterization.
It’s almost poetic. Alastair would approve.
“Your love,” Dean pants in between fiery sips. “It’s like bad medicine.”
She doesn’t seem like a Bon Jovi kind of woman, but Dean figures it’s worth saying. Maybe, if he’d known, he’d have picked something a little more poetic, for his last words.
~~~~~
It’s like she thought she could literally bleach the words right out of him. Press the reset button, hand him back to the angels, a slate so white they’d need coal to write on it.
If only Sam had been a few hours earlier in finding him. Dean sighs- timing had never been one of their strong suits.
Sam pours the rest of the bleach over everything they’ve touched [as though the police would come out here, now], asks Dean if he’s ready.
Dean nods gingerly. Poking people with crutches might be fun.
Besides, he can almost thank Kathy. In preventing him from saying no, she’s also eliminated his ability to say yes.
~~~~~
You can’t win with a losing hand, Bob Dylan sang.
Dean begs to differ.
Prompt: (from neonchica) So, wave_obscura and I were just talking, and we decided we really, really, REALLY! need a Dean version of Stephen King's "Misery." We want fic! and we want a photo manip! Cause really - that's just the epitome of a hurt!Dean moment. Someone? Anyone? :D
A/N: This had me written all over it. Props as always go to my Jedi Master, Mr. King. Title is from the song by Bon Jovi. Set sometime after 5.13, “The Song Remains the Same,” but before 5.14.
Part of the Cujo 'verse [an AU in which all things King and SPN collide], which can be found here.
Wordcount: around 2000
**ETA:** Now with outtake ( "Needful Things") and LOVELY art by caluk!
If anything’s more fucked up than what’s currently going on, Dean thinks that it might be that he was more worried about his car than he was about himself, right after it happened.
Even now, he’s wondering if maybe somehow Sam will find the Impala, like maybe it can send out some sort of homing beacon. Hell knows it was more of a home to them than anything else ever was.
~~~~~
“It’s you!” she’s exclaiming, her mittened hands flying to her cheeks in excitement.
Dean’s blinking around at everything slowly, snow catching in his eyelashes, and then it washes over him like there’s been a prolonged lunar eclipse, and the tides have waited years to come in.
He almost thinks he’s gone back to Hell, the pain is that bad.
“I just can’t believe it’s YOU!” The words drag him back into consciousness: a piece of driftwood flung against a rotting pier.
“Just who do you think I am?” he pushes the words out of his mouth like he’s setting free a nest of hornets, one by one.
Her eyes light up, and she blushes. Dean can see this through the one eye he has cracked open against the pain.
“You’re… Dean Winchester.”
Dean grits his teeth, inwardly cursing icy Wisconsin backroads. Dean’s heard people say that there is Hell on Earth. Dean’s been to the downstairs version, the unfinished basement of the company, but apparently they’ve expanded since they last did business.
~~~~~
She says that she’s a nurse. That she’ll make him better. That she’ll take him to a hospital as soon as he’s well enough.
Dean gambles with the best of them, and he’s not putting his money down on any of the words she’s laying out like they’re playing roulette.
All he hopes is that Sam will find him, soon.
~~~~~
The first few days are a haze of painkillers and pain and Hell-both dreaming of it and being in it.
“My name is Kathy,” she tells him.
Dean feels like he’s living in a Dali painting, except that would make too much sense.
His legs are completely shattered. Kathy tells him this conspiratorially, as though Dean wouldn’t have guessed. She’s doing a large jigsaw puzzle on a table she’s pulled over to his bedside, humming as she works and occasionally leaning over to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
Dean watches the puzzle form in chunks during his short periods of being awake and comparatively lucid. It’s only after she’s almost done with it when he realizes that it’s a large picture of him and Sam looking like Fabio, from the covers of one of the Supernatural books.
That’s when he gets scared.
~~~~~
“So, Kathy,” he starts out one morning after she’s given him his first dose of painkillers. “How did it happen.”
He phrases it like a statement, like he’s encouraging her, making her think that he believes anything she tells him.
“Well,” she says, looking strangely shy for a woman who has to be at least in her forties. She plays with the charm on her necklace. [It’s a miniature Colt, Dean had asked. He’d wished he hadn’t.]
“Well,” she repeats. “I was driving home from the grocery store when I saw tire tracks going off the side of the road- and then you, poor thing, all mangled in that deathtrap old car you had.”
Kathy drove a Buick. Dean had asked. [He’d wished he hadn’t.] It had a heated steering wheel, and was ranked highly in Consumer Reports. If Dean had had a car like that, he wouldn’t be where he is today.
“And then,” Kathy sounds jubilant, “I rescued you! And brought you back here to be my little patient.”
It’s a Swiss cheese story, but the painkillers make Dean strangely sleepy, and he drops off again before he can make the holes bigger.
~~~~~
He loses a lot of time, like he’s playing poker with Chronos and losing, badly. Kathy’s dealing. Dean suspects her of stacking the deck.
~~~~~
The pain is omnipresent, but Dean can tell that he’s healing, somewhat. He has no idea how long it’s been, besides adding the word ‘too,’ and maybe throwing the adjective ‘far’ into the mix.
One day, Kathy comes in to his room, looking like she’s just single-handedly cured cancer, had sex with Brad Pitt, and gotten a triple Yahtzee.
“THEY’RE HERE,” she tells Dean.
Dean can only guess who or what ‘they’ are, but she doesn’t give him time.
“IT’S THEM! THEY CAME!!” she clasps her hands together in wordless joy, then goes out into the hallway, returning with a large cardboard box.
Dean squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t think he’s quite up to leather and whipping just yet, and God forbid there be a foldable stripper pole in there.
He opens his eyes again with a jolt as Kathy sits heavily on the side of his bed, almost bouncing with anticipation. He winces, and she looks chagrined slightly, reaching out to smooth his forehead. Dean flinches slightly, but he doesn’t think she notices. She pulls something out from behind her back, and then brandishes it in Dean’s face.
Dean doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that the word ‘fuck’ rhymes with his favorite prophet’s name.
~~~~~
They’re all there: Sympathy for the Devil, The End, and Changing Channels, among others. Dean wonders whether he could ever really succeed in killing Chuck, or if he would always see it ahead of time.
It takes Kathy a few days to work through all of the new books. She comes in to chat with Dean after every particularly thrilling scene. She cries when she finishes the last book, The Song Remains the Same.
Dean’s not sure why he asks anymore; he never, ever wants to know.
“I can’t talk to you today,” Kathy tells him after she turns the last page. She’s taken to reading aloud to Dean, as though living through it once wasn’t enough. She likes to think of herself as a dramatic reader. Dean kind of perversely wishes that Sam could hear her do her “Castiel voice.”
“I just… I just can’t do it,” she says to Dean. “I’m sorry, but I have to get away from here. You’re too…”
“Real?” Dean supplies sardonically.
Kathy slaps him across the face, and then looks crestfallen. “I-I’m sorry, Dean, but I have to go.”
Dean watches her as she leaves the room, the sound of the lock clicking like dice in a bag, dice with one’s on every side.
~~~~~
She’s gone for three days. Dean makes the journey across the landscape of the floor, only to become a permanent fixture next to the door, a mountain range with an awakening volcano.
The withdrawal symptoms set in midway through the second day, as though the full-blown pain wasn’t enough misery.
His teeth are chattering, he’s so cold, and the single clear thought in his head is that maybe he finally understands one more puzzle piece of his brother.
When she gets back, she fawns over him, apologetic to a fault. She gives him his painkillers and she makes him soup and she tsks over his fever and the rattly cough that’s settled in his chest.
Immune system, down, Dean thinks. Just one more part of him wasting away. A lost piece of the jigsaw that is his being.
~~~~~
Once he’s somewhat recovered, -beyond the blooming head cold he’s managed to catch- Kathy says that she needs to have a serious discussion with him.
“Fuck, lady,” Dean says congestedly. “You ever see my middle name in those books? Well, get out your pen so you can annotate, because here it is: SERIOUS.”
Kathy remains unperturbed, though there’s a concerned look creasing her forehead.
“My, Dean, what language!”
“Yeah, I guess they probably took that out for the mass market, huh?” Dean coughs into his fist, grimaces when it jostles his legs, which are healing at about the same rate that the glaciers moved across the Midwest, making that godforsaken dropoff his baby’s currently resting in.
“Dean.” Kathy’s patting the blankets. “I want you to listen to me.”
“I suppose,” Dean says. “Seeing as I have nothing better to do.”
He sneezes painfully, and Kathy thrusts a box of Kleenex at him.
“Dean,” she repeats. “You remember Zachariah?”
By golly, Dean does. [And it seems almost ironic that she’s bringing him up, now- Dean’s been thinking, and he’s almost got himself convinced that this is another of Zachariah’s alternate universes- he’s sure that the bastard wouldn’t be able to resist a name-check.]
“Anyway,” Kathy continues. “I see that you’ve been having a teensy little problem with him.”
This is akin to saying something like: War and Peace was a short book. Mount Everest? Yeah, I’ve seen taller. The Shawshank Redemption- it was okay. Morgan Freeman’s role could’ve been better cast.
“… and I think that you should just put aside your differences and come to an agreement. You should say yes.”
Kathy primly places her hands in her lap. To her, there’s only one way to solve the equation. The math always works out, and there are no exceptions. There are only rules, and the world is governed by them, no matter how illogical they are.
Dean takes a long pause to cough and snuffle into a tissue.
“No.”
“Pardon?” Kathy’s playing innocent. It’s not a flattering look.
“I said no. I said it then, and I’ll say it again now: no.”
Kathy stands up abruptly, knocking over Dean’s tissue box.
“Better get out your blowtorch,” Dean calls as she’s going out the door.
~~~~~
She comes back later that night to tell Dean that she loves him. It’s stark contrast from her blind anger before, but Dean can see the dark glimmer in her eyes. He recognizes it from Hell.
She doesn’t bring a blowtorch. Dean’s sure that the hellfire will do a good enough job at cauterization.
It’s almost poetic. Alastair would approve.
“Your love,” Dean pants in between fiery sips. “It’s like bad medicine.”
She doesn’t seem like a Bon Jovi kind of woman, but Dean figures it’s worth saying. Maybe, if he’d known, he’d have picked something a little more poetic, for his last words.
~~~~~
It’s like she thought she could literally bleach the words right out of him. Press the reset button, hand him back to the angels, a slate so white they’d need coal to write on it.
If only Sam had been a few hours earlier in finding him. Dean sighs- timing had never been one of their strong suits.
Sam pours the rest of the bleach over everything they’ve touched [as though the police would come out here, now], asks Dean if he’s ready.
Dean nods gingerly. Poking people with crutches might be fun.
Besides, he can almost thank Kathy. In preventing him from saying no, she’s also eliminated his ability to say yes.
~~~~~
You can’t win with a losing hand, Bob Dylan sang.
Dean begs to differ.