Twelve days of Christmas
Original promp by nwspaprtaxis who said: It's the first Christmas since Dean's come back from Hell and he's not having a good time of it - there's nightmares and flashbacks and Hell's just too REAL. Sam notices and tries to give Dean a Christmas, somehow. But the little things Sam's set up in their room as a surprise - like candles and drippy wax and Christmas trees trigger Dean and launches Dean into a flashback. There is freaking out and tears and Sam bringing Dean back down and grounding him and just otherwise being THERE.
As always, my deepest thanks to jackfan2 for cleaning up this mess of words. Warnings for language and a really, really mangled Christmas carol.
Twelve Days of Christmas
It all started with the wrong radio station. Or maybe it was the time of the year and seeing everyone so fucking happy and carefree.
Or maybe it was just Dean’s mind that was that fucked up.
Twelve Days of Christmas started coming out of the Impala’s speakers and Dean nearly crashed the car in his haste to turn the radio off. The car skittered across the melting snow, first right, then left until the central line became straight again and not a brain wave on the ground.
It was already too late. The damn jiggle got stuck fast.
Alastair had a thing for music. He was always with a song on his lipless mouth, known lyrics murdered to please his taste, ears pierced with the volume of his tone-deaf growls.
One year, ’12 Days of Christmas’ was all he sang. Not because it was actually Christmas, or because a demon would celebrate it even if it were. Just because it was an inspiring song.
Of course, the doves and the French hens and all the crap that the real song was about weren’t to Alastair’s liking. Too mushy; no excitement, he would say.
He had replaced the twelve items in the song for body parts. Dean’s body parts, for most of that year.
On the twelfth day of Christmas
My pet soul gave to me
Twelve ribs dripping
Eleven fingers twitching
Ten pounds of meat sizzling
The year after that, he’d let Dean take over and make his own song. Dean still ended supplying the ‘parts’.
Dean’s fingers were still shaking, grasping the steering wheel of the car as if his life depended on it, when he took the final turn to the motel parking lot. Alastair was down below, and Dean was out.
The lines separating Hell and reality were so blurry these days that the notion needed to be reiterated once in a while.
Alastair below; Dean back with the living.
Dean waited in his seat, pizza ridding shotgun getting colder by the minute. The world outside was still too red, too dripping with blood, too filled with screams for him to venture out. His lips curled around the bottle of whiskey, sucking on it like it was mother’s milk. He kept it under the seat, for emergencies.
Once the alcohol made breathing possible, Dean breathed in and out, sucking in through his nose the familiar smells of the Impala.
Leather.
Sweat.
Gunpowder.
Iron.
Pepperoni pizza.
All the smells that screamed ‘Home. Sam. Dad. Safety.’ instead of ‘Maim. Cut. Slash. Good pet!’
There was a microwave in the room; they could heat up the pizza later.
They’d picked the sleaziest joint in town to spend the night, everything else filled to the attics on account of the season. Dean had left a room with brown, leafless tree-covered wallpaper and red-wine carpets that would match the covers on the bed were it not for the fact that the color had faded to an almost pink-like hue.
He couldn’t take the damn song out of his head.
Nine teeth jiggling
Eight toes shriveling
Seven feet of bowels stinking
Six muscles pulling
Five bones a-breaking
That was not the room Dean arrived to. There was red everywhere. “Sam!”
The cold pizza fell to the ground, lid popping up on impact, slices of pepperoni sliding off track across the cheese.
Flashing lights made the world jump and start, dizzying effect that allowed for nothing but glimpses of his surroundings.
There were teeth hanging from the ceiling, strapped on strings and crisscrossing the lamps.
A bowl of bloody fingers rested on top of the table, red dripping to stain the plastic cover. “Sam?”
He couldn’t see his brother anywhere. The room was filled with bloody tokens and his brother was nowhere to be seen. God... what if Alastair wasn’t in Hell? What if this was his greeting card? “SAM?”
His eyes landed on the tree and Dean bent over, a surge of bile, lunch, breakfast and everything he’d eaten over the last couple of weeks, all bursting through his mouth.
Four limbs a-burning
Three stripes of skin pulling
Two eyeballs dangling
And a cock hanging from a tree!
God!
It was a small tree, the fake kind people bought in supermarkets at half price. It was decorated with long stripes of bowels and... and...
“HEY! HEY!”
The loud words were too close, blowing breath hitting Dean’s ear lobe. A pair of big hands grabbed his shoulders and Dean’s legs lost all strength at the physical contact. He couldn’t... he couldn’t take it anymore...
Dean crashed to the ground, dragging the hands with him. He could never escape the hands.
“Dean... Dean, please, snap out of it.”
The voice was kind, reassuring him rather than mocking. The hands were still on his shoulders and not pressing a blade into Dean’s hands. Or into Dean’s gut.
“God... please, Dean... I’m so sorry... please come back. You’re safe now. I’m here.”
Sam.
Dean blinked, surprised to find his eyelashes weighted down by heavy tears. His throat felt eroded, scratched clean, like he’d been screaming.
With a growing sense of shame, Dean realized that he had. And that he was currently sitting on the floor, all but on Sam’s lap, who had his arms around him. Dean was shaking hard enough to make them both jingle.
“Get off me,” Dean growled. His voice broke pathetically, barely a whisper.
It was enough for Sam. “God... I’m so sorry, Dean,” he rushed the words out, fingers coming up to clean the tear tracks on Dean’s cheeks. “I had no idea... I just... I just wanted to-“
He had merely wanted to give him a nice Christmas, Dean realized. Looking around, he stared in awe, wondering how he could’ve failed to recognize what Sam had done to the room.
There were strings with popcorns hanging in the ceiling. A bunch of candy canes on a bowl on the table. And the tree... Jesus Christ...
It was just a Christmas tree; complete with sparkling red strings and shiny blue balls.
It was his first Christmas after Hell and Sam had done all of that for him. Because of him.
Dean felt like such a dick.
“I never should’ve... I’m really sorry, Dean,” Sam went on. His voice sounded as broken and teary as Dean’s felt.
“Stop saying you’re sorry,” Dean blurted out. His eyes landed on the pile of puke, right next to the derailed remains of their pizza. “I’m the one who fed our dinner to the floor, you know?” he said with a forced smile. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
It was his fucked up head, his messed up memories. Sam was just trying to be... normal.
The red floor was giving him shivers and at a distance, Alastair was still singing.
“You know what?” Dean said, springing to his feet with energy that he really didn’t have. “It’s Christmas, and I’m hungry, and this room smells. What do you say we get out of here, hum? Dinner’s on me.”
Sam was looking at him with that expression that made Dean feel like he was made of cracked glass. He hated that look. “Dean, you really don’t have to-look, I’ll just take this shit down and we-“
“Steak! I could really go for a nice, juicy, dripping, steak.”
And never before was Dean more grateful for Sam’s habit of rolling his eyes at Dean’s antics. Because if he’d been looking at him, Sam would have seen just how disgusted Dean was at the mere thought of red meat right at that moment.
So they left. The next person to rent that room would have bonus Christmas decorations to either use or take down. A Winchester gift to lousy motels.
And in Dean’s head, Alastair sang on.