Chapter 3
HE-MAN
There’s a shimmering light above his face. Sam can see it even though his eyes are still closed.
He’s lying on the floor, on top of something slightly softer than solid ground, warmer than stone. From the numb feeling in his back, Sam figures he’s been there for awhile.
The hush voices echoes in the space around him, fainter and sharper as the sound bounces around. The cadence is wrong for it to be English and even though he can’t recognize the language, Sam knows he’s hearing a middle-eastern dialect.
Bobby’s voice is easily recognizable, a voice that Sam has been hearing all of his life, as familiar to him as dad’s or Dean’s. Even if he can’t understand the words being said, the worried tone at least is easy to get. The man Bobby’s talking to, that one is a complete stranger.
Sam’s mind is foggy and his brain feels raw, like someone grabbed it and dragged it across a gravel road. He’s been under enough anesthetics to recognize the after effects of a drugged sleep. His tongue, like a dry piece of cotton, tickles inside his mouth and Sam runs it sluggishly over his fuzzy feeling teeth.
It takes him a couple of minutes, but Sam finally remembers why the hell he feels like death warmed over. He was dead... sort of.
When Sam does open his eyes, it feels like he’s still asleep, dreaming. Possibly hallucinating. Because, for someone who had figured he’d wake up inside a coffin or not at all, the sight that greats him is unbelievably better. Surreal, but better.
The air is filled with tiny lights. Floating candles that shimmer and swing gently like frozen stars. The effect is mesmerizing and it takes Sam a while to see beyond the multiple dots of orange glow and glinting glass to catch the almost invisible strings that connect the illuminated glass globes with the high ceiling.
The unfamiliar letters painted above, in circular forms that speak of tradition and veneration, are Sam’s first clue that he’s not, in fact, in Kansas anymore.
“Here, drink this,” the hand, holding a glass of water, materializes in front of Sam. Sam takes it out of habit of doing what Bobby asks him to do.
There’s another hand, one with calloused fingertips, touching the base of Sam’s neck, holding him up. Bobby’s hands are weathered, but it’s the wear and tear of a scholar and a hunter. Dean’s hands used to be hard-edged and thick with calluses from gun triggers and shovel handling; now, Dean’s fingers are smooth and gentle, erroneously the hands of someone who’s never done a hard day’s work his whole life.
The hand holding Sam up is neither of those; it can only belong to the stranger.
“Small sips, Sam... your throat hasn’t worked in a while,” Bobby instructs, still holding the glass to compensate for the trembling of Sam’s hands. It’s been a while since Sam has felt this way, like a newborn colt, barely able to keep his head up.
The feeling of fresh water going down his sandpaper covered throat is one of the most wondrous that Sam can remember feeling. It washes away the sense of dust inside him, smoothing everything from his mouth to his thoughts.
“We’re here?” Sam whispers, reluctantly returning the empty glass to Bobby. The last thing Sam can remember is blue sky and a silver plane, flying over them.
The place where they are now feels warmer than South Dakota. It smells differently too. Earthly and dry.
There are no windows around, but still Sam can hear the sounds coming from outside. Chickens, a goat and children, laughing nearby. The engine of the car that drives by coughs dryly, like it an old man with dust in his lungs.
“We’re here,” Bobby confirms, sounding not too pleased with that fact. “Can you keep an eye on this one?”
Sam looks up, confused with Bobby’s request. Bobby, however, is looking over Sam’s head, towards the man, he realizes, who is holding him up. Receiving some kind of confirmation, Bobby grabs the wheel-handles of his chair and rolls away.
It finally sinks in for Sam that there is, in fact, a body connected to his neck, even if it’s one that weighs a ton and feels impossible to move at this point. He tries anyway, elbows pressing into the carpeted ground as he pulls himself up, fast enough to get himself somewhat dizzy from sitting. Sam’s hand flies to his mouth, trying to keep the bile at bay.
“Please... no getting sick on carpet... it is family heirloom,” the man instructs, a comforting hand patting Sam’s back.
A couple of deep breaths after, Sam figures it’s safe enough to open his eyes without losing his stomach in the process, and leans away from the stranger. There’s a rustle of clothes, as the man shuffles from behind him to Sam’s side.
Now that the stranger is finally in Sam’s line of sight, he can see that he’s wearing what looks like a long, blue dress and has a white scarf rolled up around his head. The straight nose and the tanned skin are almost expected after seeing the man’s outfit and knowing where he is; the olive eyes and wisps of blondish beard, however, look out of place from the rest. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes are deep and weathered and there’s wisps of white hair on the man’s sideburns. If Sam were to take a guess, he’d say that the man was around fifty.
“Who are you?” Sam asks, mainly to cover up for the fact that he’s been staring at the man for the past minute.
The man smiles, apparently unperturbed by the staring, and extends his right hand invitingly.
“I am Emam-Ali Habib, a friend,” he introduces himself. “Robert and I have known each other for... many long years.”
Sam shakes the man’s hand, his eyes roaming around the dimly lit room. A small mosque, from what Sam remembers seeing in photos and TV. He’d never stepped foot inside one, but he can easily recognize the presence of a central dome and the absence of any furniture or religious figures. Instead, there is writing, Arabic letters he guesses, decorating the walls and ceiling.
The carpet under him is red, well worn but not threadbare and it too, bears Arabic motifs.
Bobby, metal chair reflecting the candlelight, is parked near the wall to the left of Sam. Beyond him, lying on the floor, Sam can see a pair of legs and Dean’s boots.
“Your brother, yes?” the man, Emam, asks as he follows Sam’s gaze. “Robert is worried about him... you two have taken too long to wake up.”
Sam is on his feet even before the man stops talking. He can see that Dean isn’t moving and as for the worry, he had noticed that long before in Bobby’s eyes and voice. He should’ve known that things wouldn’t go as smoothly as he had hoped for.
“What’s wrong, Bobby?” Sam asks as soon as he reaches them, legs steady enough to get him there in a more or less straight line. The second the words come out of his mouth, Sam sees that they are pointless. He can see perfectly well what’s wrong.
Dean’s face is blotchy looking, with dark bruises under his eyes. He looks exactly the same as he’s looked for far too long these past months, except for the fact that he’s not moving. “Why isn’t he waking up?”
Sam knows that the panic in his voice is doing nothing to help the older man, but he can’t help it. Bobby’s adjusting the bag with clear fluid that hangs above Sam’s brother, a long plastic tube connecting it to Dean’s arm. The vision awakes an annoying itch in Sam’s own arm and he looks down. There is a telltale band-aid in the crook of his arm too.
“Lets just give him some more time,” Bobby says reassuringly. Sam’s pretty sure the older man isn’t as much talking to him as he is trying to convince himself. “I used a smaller dose of the drugs on him... figured that with the difference in body surface and all that... guess I should’ve--”
The older man can’t bring himself to finish, guilt shadowing his eyes. Bobby looks wrecked, like he hasn’t slept in a week. Sam has no idea what day it is, but from the prickly feeling of sprouting beard in his jaw and neck, Sam can make a good guess that more than a day has gone by. He’s also sure that Bobby hasn’t shut his eyes for one minute since they left his house in South Dakota.
“How long has it been?” Sam asks, moving around Bobby’s chair to get a better look. Dean’s facial hair, which has always grown faster than Sam -much to the younger brother’s chagrin- and rumpled clothes make him look more like a drunk on a bender than a heavily drugged man passing for a corpse.
Bobby looks at his watch, crossing his eyes as he tries to focus on the small numbers. “It’s around four a.m. for us which makes it... eleven a.m. here? Noon?” Bobby ventures, looking in the direction of the Egyptian man.
As if on cue, the chanting sounds of a man’s voice float through the walls, a litany of short sentences sang in a melodic tone, coming from the speakers outside.
“It is time of the Dhuhur. What you are hearing is the midday Adhan, the call to pray,” Emam explains, his head nodding towards the sound of the chanting man.
“Damn!” Bobby lets out, the confirmation of what time it is bringing home the evidence that, by all calculations, Dean should be alert by now. “Stubborn kid, always doing things the damn hard way...” the hunter mumbles to himself.
“What’s in the drip?” Sam asks. At first sight, it looks like nothing but tap water, but he knows better. He also has no idea where Bobby dug up all the medical stuff even though -given that the labels are all in Arabic- Sam can take a pretty good guess. But for now he just wants to know what they’re doing to get Dean awake.
“Just water and sugar, to flush out the rest of the drugs out of him,” Bobby explains. “That’s the second bag I put him on... he’s gonna be pissing like a horse when he wakes up.”
Now that Bobby mentions the fact, Sam realizes that the weight in his gut he’s been ignoring since he got vertical, might be his full bladder. Maybe he should-
“I think I’d prefer being... hung like a horse... instead of pissing like one,” Dean’s voice, more or less slurred, interrupts in a whisper.
“Dean!” Sam lets out, his bladder forgotten for now.
Bobby is quieter in his relief, but Sam can see some of the weight lifting from the older man’s shoulders. They all knew that there were risks to what they were trying to do, that the odds of something in Bobby’s mixture killing them for real, rather than have the desired effect, were small but not impossible. This... this had come too close for comfort.
Now that Dean is awake and already pulling wise assed remarks on them, it seems like those odds hadn’t been that bad after all.
“You two old ladies jabbering like a couple of parrots... it’s killing my head,” Dean complains, hand free of IV reaching for his forehead. His fingers linger above his eyes like a shield as he opens them carefully, afraid of the intensity of light. “Are we there yet?”
Bobby allows for a smile to grace his lips as Sam sits back on the floor next to his brother.
Central pieces in the fight for the end of times or bickering kids... Bobby’s never really sure which one he’ll be dealing with next with the Winchesters. For now, he’s just happy that they’ve dodged yet another bullet.
Dean’s hand, the one closest to his brother, wanders aimlessly for a moment before finding Sam’s knee and connecting with it with a gentle pat. Bobby, who was about to wheel himself into some soft bed and finally sleep for a couple of hours, stops dead in his tracks. Dean’s eyes are open, and Bobby could swear that he’d been checking out the lay out of the room before...
“What’s with the light-saving fever, anyway? It’s dark as the other side of the moon in here... did we land directly inside one of the pyramids?” Dean asks with a chuckle.
He is the only one laughing.
Sam and Bobby exchange a worried look before looking back at the man lying on the floor. They can see in Dean’s face that already their silence is stretching for too long.
“Let me get the lights on for you, princess” Bobby voices, his eyes finding Emam, the light-hearted and joking tone scratching the sides of his throat like barbed wire.
The Egyptian man wordlessly flicks on a switch and two more lamps, heavy and with elaborate metal frames hanging from the ceiling, add their light to the dozens of lit candles in the room.
“Better?” Sam asks, hopeful. They both can see in Dean’s face that there is no change at all.
Dean swallows, two fingers pressing against his eyes, rubbing. He can read perfectly fine the worry and anxiety in Sam’s voice, the same way he could hear the lie in Bobby’s before.
“The lights were already on, weren’t they?”
Sam nods, realizing the futility of the gesture even before its done. Somehow, that makes the reality of what’s going on hit all the harder. Dean can’t see. How the hell can Dean not be able to see?
“Do you see anything at all?”
It’s a crass question, but panic is making Sam crass. The pointed look that Dean manages to send in the general direction of his voice doesn’t make Sam feel all that much better.
“Help me up,” Dean says instead, hand free of IV line extended in the direction of no one in particular, even though Sam knows that it’s intended for him. Dean’s palm is sweaty where it touches Sam’s.
There is no way that Dean is going to discuss his freaking blindness while lying on his back. And the bed’s not even all that comfortable.
There is a dizzying moment when Dean, expecting the floor to be at least a couple of inches away, slams his feet on the carpet sooner than he was expecting. The impact jars his knees and makes his head pound even harder. He couldn’t even tell that he was on the floor instead of a bed...
The panic that menaces to take over him is nearly devastating and Dean squeezes his brother’s hand until he’s sure bone will crack. If Sam lets him go in that very moment, Dean is certain that he will be swallowed by the bottomless pit that he feels stretching below him.
“Slower Dean,” Sam’s voice fills the void of images. It takes Dean a moment to realize that his brother is talking about his breathing rather than his moving. They haven’t moved anywhere yet, just gone from sitting to standing and even that seems impossibly hard to repeat. Moving, as in taking actual steps and use his trembling legs... Dean is pretty sure he won’t be able to do that just yet.
“Slower, Dean. In... and out...” Sam’s steady voice coaches him. “You’re gonna pass out if you keep that up.”
Dean tries to comply, the fast breathing leaving him dizz-... dizzier already. But it’s hard to make himself relax when every turn of his eyes is met with more darkness and sense of unfamiliar ground, with more reminders of feeling lost and left afloat in a sea of nothingness that leaves him more breathless than if he were standing at the bottom of the ocean.
“Try to calm down,” Sam calls out again, even as he lets go of his brother’s hand. The fingers on Dean’s face are familiar, touching his cheeks lightly until they stop near his left eye. “Lemme take a look.”
Dean forces himself to hold still, feeling Sam’s face draw near. The tips of his brother’s thumb and index finger press above and below his eye, keeping it open, Sam’s breathing sending small puffs of hot air against his skin. “Can you bring me one of those candles?”
Hands drawn into tight fists, Dean bites his lip, waiting for some sign that this isn’t happening, that everything is going to be okay. His eyes move from side to side, searching for the light of the candle that Sam asked for, but Dean can’t find it anywhere. The heat grows closer and flickers in front of Dean’s face, but that’s the only indication he has that there is a candle there.
The sigh that escapes Sam’s mouth is the most terrifying sound that Dean has ever heard. “So?” Dean forces himself to ask, even though he already knows the answer.
“I can’t see anything wrong with your eyes, Dean,” his brother says. “They react normally to the light and they look okay, but-“
But Dean can’t see a frigging thing in front of him. He runs a hand over his face, wanting nothing more than to grab the veil of darkness that surrounds him and peel it away. He settles for grabbing on to Sam’s wrists again, relying on that feeling to stop himself from slipping off the edge of sanity.
“Maybe you should lie back again,” Bobby’s voice suggests from the left. “Let the IV run for a couple more hours, try to flush the rest of the drugs out.”
Bobby sounds kind of broken to Dean’s ears. Has the older man always sounded like that or...
“You think this is because of the drugs?” Dean asks. It's not an accusation, but he knows that is how it will sound to Bobby’s ears.
“What else can it be, boy?” Bobby says, his words leaving him like air out off a spent balloon. “I’m--”
Bobby stops himself and the rest of the room is left guessing what he was about to say. He’s sorry... he can’t deal with this... he’s sure it’s temporary...
Odds are, not even Bobby knows.
“I’m sure this is some sort of weird temporary effect of the drugs,” Sam jumps in, his tone lighter now that he has a theory and can see this as something other than a dead end. “You were always kind of freaky in your reactions to anesthetics... remember that time you got out of the hospital room and walked the whole corridor before realizing that the gown they’d put you in had a flapping backside?”
Sam laughs remembers the sad sight of his eighteen year-old, bare-assed brother, running down the hall of the hospital infirmary, yelling for all who wanted to hear, that the poodles had to be fluff, whatever that meant. He laughs now, but at the time he’d been scared shitless, not knowing if he’d ever see his brother breathing again. There’s something deeply disturbing and unforgettable about trying to stop an arterial bleed with nothing but your hands, specially if the one trying hard as hell to give you a blood bath is your own brother.
Now, under the yellow lights of candles and light bulbs, Dean’s grey and clammy face looks so similar to how he looked back then that Sam is almost tempted to look for a bleeding.
“We’ll just wait... I’m sure that in a couple of hours you’ll be as good as new,” Sam goes on. God! He wants to stop the shit that is coming out of his mouth, but it seems like fear has broken all the filters between his brain and his mouth and everything is coming through. Even the stuff that he knows for certain sounds stupid.
“Cas doesn’t have a couple of hours,” Dean offers back. His voice is calmer now, the past few minutes enough for him to get some sort of feeble hold on his emotions. “We need to get going now.”
Consciously, Dean lets go of Sam’s hand and tries to get a feel of the world on his own. It’s like being born all over again, specially in the sense that he feels as prepared to face the world as a newborn baby.
“It is the middle of the day... Abu Simbel will be crawling with tourists,” a man’s voice, heavy accented, offers. “We must wait for nigh-“
“Who the hell is that?” Dean gasps, hand instinctively searching Sam’s anchoring touch again. All of his life, Dean has always prided himself for being attuned to his surroundings, for knowing things that others took longer to realize, to find the oddities where others saw only normal. The fact that, for all the time he’s been awake, he hadn’t even realize that there is a third man inside the room with them, drives home the point that Dean is, undoubtedly and undeniably, screwed.
“Forgive me, friend. That was inconsiderate of me,” the man says. The English words sound different in his tongue, like he is testing and experimenting most of them. “I am Emam-Ali Habib... the place you are now used to be a old mosque, even though it is no longer used for worship purposes. My family has been taking care of it for some time now.”
“Bobby?” Dean voices. The name is laden with everything Dean cannot risk to ask out loud. Is he trustworthy? Does he know what we do? Does he know what we came here to do?
“Emam works in the business... he has been a friend for a very long time, Dean” Bobby reassures him. He’s been around Dean long enough to know everything that he’s asking. “He wants to help.”
“Well... He-man,” Dean says, giving the unfamiliar name a try. In his head, he can’t help but to remember early morning cartoons about Barbarian warriors with bad haircuts. “I don’t know how much Bobby told you, but our friend’s time is running out and we can’t afford to be waiting on any tourists.”
There’s a rustle of fabric and then the added warmth of a third body near Dean. He recoils unconsciously, the unexpected movement too fast for him to track, the proximity too intimate for someone he can’t put a face to.
“I am sorry for your friend, but this is not a public garden where you can just march in,” the man says, his tone stern and yet understanding. “There is heavy military guard during the day, as well as numerous checkpoints that will be hard to bypass in broad day light. Trust me... we will not be wasting your friend’s time by being cautious about our actions.”
Dean stares daggers in the direction he assumes the man is. His arguments sound kind of solid and any other time, Dean would even agree with him. But now, in that very instant, he needs to be moving, he needs action and development. If he stops and sits long enough to think about what’s happening, he might crumble irreversibly. And that won’t help Castiel at all.
“Emam is right,” Bobby voices, recognizing the fire in Dean’s eyes. It feels like a stab in his heart to look into those green orbs and see nothing but a vacant gaze that isn’t really focused anywhere.
The mirrors that so often could be used to translate so much of Dean’s heart are obscured now, but the emotions remain as are still clear as ever. Maybe more so now, that Dean seems to have forgotten about how much his eyes usually betray. Bobby is the first to look away, a staring contest that doesn’t really work since Dean is not aware he’s in one. “We have some planning to do before we hit the road anyways.”
There is a silent beat, in which everyone waits for Dean’s sure protest. The anger has yet to leave his face and his free hand is clench into a fist by his side. When he remains silent, Sam moves his hand from Dean’s and places it across his shoulders instead, ready to steer him away from the room, like he is some sort of unsteady boat.
Dean wants nothing more than to shrug off the contact and do what his gut tells him to do. Just grab his shit and go find Castiel himself, before its too late. He can’t though. Neither one nor the other. Because he is in a country he where doesn’t understand the language and he can’t see. And the sense of lost independence hurts a lot more than the prospect of eternal darkness.
“Come... Ebé has prepared food and drinks for us... you must be very hungry.”
Master Post
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