Fic: Nyth
Title: Nyth
Author:
crowroad3
Genre: gen, brotherfeels, h/c, alternate rock-paper-scissors for 11 x 16
Warnings/Spoilers: 11 x 16!
Summary: Sam, in the walls.
On AO3
Nyth: Welsh, nest
The little ghost-birds are eating sugar from your hands. Your hands are as broad as ever, broad as barns in which there are owls, with rafters and shadows, with rats and hay, death and spines. Death comes in daylight. Daylight comes.
That’s what you think when you’re slipped between, out of time, place, when your dark-addled, hell-shaken
sink of a brain goes through a wall, yet another, and finds there another
consumer of souls.
*
You want eggs, Dean’s saying, Sammy?
Just coffee.
Black, no, gimme some sugar.
You can turn pages and eat with one hand. Journal. Manual. Old old book.
Amara, Dean says, apropos of-
well, eating of things.
I don’t think you can be eaten,um, in that way. I don’t think she can--
you know, do that to you.
A soul wants a mate, though, even the dark does.
Or more than one.
It’s hungry.
*
Michigan, and memory:
You lose. This case, with its hooks, its faux-ghosts. These lost.
Step through yet another veil, this one beetle-waft drywall, someone’s idea--
Of comfort, you guess. Keep your back to the wall. There’s a daughter in here, somewhere, and all the children you never were, and all the houses you ever sterno-stove-squat-haunted.
Some kind of life.
You see yourself; that's your nightmare. Alone, bodies strewn round.
A world without god, no hope of him, her, them-no hope at all.
The soulsicks in here have birds on their shoulders, scraped-up scapulae. Your brother’s one of them, dark-mouthed, will never speak again, not to you, mouth smooth-zipped as a shell, round as a world.
Forgets your name, goes back to the beginning, before you born, unknows the way only blood can.
Your father, surrogate, looks at you, turns away.
*
This ain’t a youth hostel, John, Bobby said back then, no heat in it.
Upstairs was moth, down was mildew, out was Dakotas, out was road.
You had a cold. There was a rip in your green-sage surplus grandfather-sweater.
You sneezed your way through fairy-tale teeth, shivered at talons,brother- swans, a giant that ate--
That ate. The whole world.
You swallowed shards of it, seemed like.
Bobby made wonder-toast, cupped yolks, called ‘em like, hunter’s eyeballs, or something.
Look at that boys, eat up.
Dean forked it all in. You tried.
Afters, Bobby ruffed up your hair, put you in a circle of good afghan.
Whaddya say we look around for some, you know, reading that won’t make nightmares.
More of ‘em, anyway.
He did.
*
Case: soul-eater. Claws. Lamp-eyed dream-eater.
You get up a pink-nosed blink for your body, and here you are again, this side of the veil.
This is a house. This is a room in time. This is a room seen through
membranous monster-eyes; this is haunt-sight.
Sammy! Dean says, you gotta fight it.
The sigil’s like fog-fire in the blood (where all those
infections are-- demonish, rabid, antigenic stew-soup of the
freaking damned, Dean said, is saying.)
Probably clocks you.
Afterwards lays a hand on.
Paints in blood.
*
Case: woman in white.
Case: soul-eater.
Case: shtriga.
Case: soul-eater.
You remember. You always will.
*
The curb shakes you loose, rattles you home, like lungs to a breath, stolen,
to your brother's old guilts.
What did you see, Dean says, drives like a dream, you know, in there.
It’s easier to say now, having looked over the breaks of more than one world.
Easier to say, number of times you’ve been cracked wide, born.
You.
*
Your brother will gather you up.
Your maker will gather you up, if you have one.
Your devil would tell you: you were hatched in the wrong nest, cuckoo-child, this one’s mine.
You got to claw it out of yourself.
Evil in the yolk that grew you, made you tall and strong--
As a sun-eyed farm boy. You know, hostrace, heartland.
Killdeer in the grass.
*
Sammy! Dean’s saying.
The sigil is fire.
You might dream, later, in origins, vitelline, orphic-
Chronos, nix, brahmanda. Time.
*
Tomorrow will be a good breakfast. Sleep-in.
Bunker and burnt ends. Singing on the prairie, in latitudes again.
Things that would kill it,the Dark, if they could. Home.
Dean’ll kiss the cook, which is himself, smack you sweet on the shoulder, sorry you for a jarred bruise.
Give you joe, sweet; nurse you up.
Set down your plate.
*
In the walls, you thought:
This is a holy house, this nest.
Death comes in the morning. Or joy.