Please Exit Hell Quietly Through the Rear Doors (1/6)
Title: Please Exit Hell Quietly Through the Rear Doors (1/6)
Author: Innocent Culprit
Characters: Dean, Sam, Bobby, OMCs, no pairing
Genre: Gen, h/c
Rating: PG-13 for much bad language, alcohol abuse
Spoilers: It’s two weeks post 4X10
Disclaimer: Nothing to do with Kripke’s awesome show belongs to me except my fangirly obsession with it.
Summary: Dean’s shell-shocked like you wouldn’t believe, Bobby’s worrying himself into a peptic ulcer, and Sam ... well Sam’s feeling a little dark. Too bad that war won’t wait.
A/N: Takes place following events of Heaven and Hell, but keeping angel/demon stuff at arm’s length. You know, the gang were all in here in the first draft, Castiel, Ruby, blah blah, but then I wrote them out. What? I’m a coward. So it’s now mostly falling-apart brothers. Heh.
Dean didn’t think he’d ever called out for Sam in such a wussy way before, not here on earth anyhow.
That’s not me. It’s not.
Fuck, it is. That’s me!
He managed to fix that he was alone, lying stiff and diagonal on a motel bed, his left arm was stretching out towards the night-stand, and the Glock - damnandfuckitalltocrap - wasn’t quite within reach.
Dean just wanted to die.
But then he changed his mind.
Yeah, so dying ... not really an option - he’d already done that. Except for the fact that he didn’t know what made sense in any damn dimension, he was pretty sure that if he blew his brains out all over this sweaty motel pillow, apart from majorly pissing off Sam and the janitor, he’d only catapult himself back downstairs.
Dean actually suspected that when everything was done, pass or fail, he’d be thrown over the precipice anyway. Yeah, that’d work. He’d tumble to the dark-red sky below and there would be no reason to save him ever again.
Blunt Instrument Needed for Celestial Duties ... remind me again who got that gig?
Correct! The screw-up with the demon brother!
Are you dicks even serious?
He lay on the bed looking at his arm, becoming aware that something, somewhere was flickering.
Remembering the inarticulate pleas he’d heard himself utter, Dean felt an unexpected wash of relief that Sam was absent. Withdrawing the arm and using it to lever himself up, he flumped off the bed and barged his way into the bathroom to throw water on his face. When he worried at the light switch there was a crack! which made him jump, a buzz of electricity through his fingertips, and then the flickering was replaced by semi-darkness.
Electricity and water. You’d think he’d have that covered.
A heady, red hangover hammered just out of sight behind his eyeballs. Dean could taste ashes in the stale-liquor skank on his tongue and his ear-drums were tender from the screaming. He placed a palm over one, leant his head into it. Nausea wound like an eel around his belly, crept stealthily up his throat.
Come on, Dean, keep control ... it’s all in the mind, son, you just keep control.
He so used to hate it when Dad did the mind-over-matter number on him, and he hated it even more that the years had made him such a fucking expert.
When the room door squeaked open he’d gotten a steady grip on both sides of the basin, head bent, eyes squeezed tight shut.
Make it. All. Go away.
“Dean?” asked a cautious voice.
The relief Dean felt was painful. Painful because he knew he wouldn’t be able to run with it. His inner voice babbled.
I don’t care what you’ve been doing, Sammy ... ganking demons with your mind, humping in the back of an alley ... whatever ... just .... in real trouble here, man.
“Here,” is all he actually got out.
He was aware that Sam - tall but solid, radiating anxiety like a convective heater - was suddenly at his shoulder, not hovering, just staring with that new, detached scrutiny of his.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
Dean forced open his lids and coughed nervously. “You ... you’re back early.”
He saw Sam’s eyes dart to the death-grip that he still had on the basin and thought wildly that Sammy’s face looked kind of beautiful whenever that light-bulb thing flashed on inside his head. Beautiful, like when he was a little kid, but downright scary, too, scary in a this-shouldn’t-be way that was really beginning to get on Dean’s nerves.
“I thought you were asleep,” Sam said slowly and clearly, as if dealing with a half-wit.
Dean felt a dizzying rush of paranoia. He was well aware that Sam didn’t always talk to him as if he was on the same intellectual plain, but since two weeks ago in Kentucky, he seemed reluctant to talk to him at all. He’d become so hands-off that he was practically in another country.
“Let me see,” Dean said, hoping that being ornery might help with the mind over matter thing, “Oh yeah, I was a-asleep. Dreaming that my little brother f-fucked a demon.”
When he realized what trouble he’d had getting out some of the words, Dean screwed up his face in total disgust. Not much point having a smart mouth unless you can bring it off inch perfect.
“Listen ...” began Sam.
Dean unscrewed his face, unlocked his grip, shook his head slightly to try and dislodge the last twitches of memory. He still desperately wanted Sam to hold him steady somehow, stop him falling on the ground and mewling, but that wasn’t going to happen unless he asked, and he wasn’t going to ask this side of Armageddon. Perhaps not even on the other side.
“I’m good.”
“The hell, Dean.”
“The hell!” Dean repeated, launching himself off the basin and managing to walk past Sam without his legs giving way. “Did you actually just say that? The hell ....” A slightly hysterical laugh bubbled up. “The horror ....” No, he couldn’t stop it, the stupid laugh squawked out and the silence that followed was huge.
And this ... this is exactly how you act when you’re terrified.
“Heart of Darkness,” Sam said, as if everything - all of it - made perfect sense to him.
He sounded so damn wordly that Dean practically winced.
“Heart of who-dy?”
A quirk of amusement caught the corner of Sam’s mouth. It traveled, lightning-fast, right up to his eyes and Dean basked for just a short moment in what seemed long-lost.
“Joseph Conrad.”
“Right, right.” Dean wasn’t really sure. He’d actually thought it was Marlon Brando and he’d never even heard of the other guy.
“Aren’t you going to ask me where I’ve been?” Sam questioned hopefully.
Dean shook his head again, steadfast.
“OK, let me tell you where I’ve been.”
Dean waved him away.
Nope. You don’t know how to explain. You’re done with it anyway, you said so.
“I couldn’t sleep, you jerk. I couldn’t sleep and I went out for some air.”
Air. Sweet, fresh, earthly air. Dean hoped Sammy had filled his lungs with it. He wished he could explain how precious it was. He wished he believed him.
“I got you this.” Sam held up his hands. He was balancing one grande on top of another. Perhaps that was why he didn’t reach out and prize Dean off the basin.
Dean sat on the bed and took the top cup. The liquid was way too hot to drink but he poured some down his throat anyway.
Well, you see, Sammy, when I was in Hell I also learnt a lot of really great stuff.
It pooled in his stomach, but there was a flare of caffeine across his frontal lobes that felt more than good. He wished that his hands were not shaking so bad. Sam came to sit on the other bed and now they were knee to knee.
“You’re not doing so good,” Sam said with conviction. He seemed cool, watchful, and he put his own cup on the floor between his feet.
Dean longed for the acceptability of the retreat he’d made as a four year-old. Safety in silence. It had been involuntary, of course, and he hadn’t appreciated the protection it gave him at the time. Now his default was this mind over matter shit, because he believed (he really believed, right down to the toes of his boots) that talking wouldn’t help. The reinforced safety-doors that Alastair had blown right off in Kentucky, leaving Dean nearly blubbing his guts out, had been slammed shut again before it got too bad. Dean’s first gambit to keep it that way was to increase the booze, and so far it was doing a job, but what the .... Sam was trying to take the coffee from him and he didn’t know why.
“Dean, give it me, you’re going to burn yourself.”
“Mumokay,” Dean protested, but hot coffee jumped out of the goddamn cup on to his wrist. He felt it scald his skin but he didn’t react.
“Dean!”
That’s when it dropped. He didn’t drop it - why would he when he wanted to inhale the rest of the damn stuff so bad - it just kind of dropped itself, sliding out of his grip and splatting on to the floor between them. Sam leapt up but Dean stayed where he was.
He looked at his little brother’s giant frame lolloping around the room, getting a cloth, patting the carpet with it, then throwing it straight through the open bathroom door.
“Uh, so the DT’s?” Sam said pointedly, and he seemed to be holding on to something with difficulty. His temper, perhaps. His patience for sure. “That’s ... you having some half-assed flashback ... or whatever?”
Now that his brother was actually here, sounding wretched and fearful, Dean decided to take more care than ever not to offload. There was too much going on with Sam already, what with the demon-blood fuckery and all. Dean hated that fuckery. It was the kind of fuckery invented just to screw with them, even more than decisions made by Winchesters past and present had screwed with them already.
So yeah. Geekboy might have to cope with some wake-up-screaming nightmares and scraping-the-barrel bad behavior of the shit-faced variety, but not detailed knowledge of the egregious agonies that Perdition had handed out. Not even second-hand.
No way. You’re not getting anymore of the turning inside-out for forty fucking years crap. Forget it, Sammy, don’t come near me with that.
He selected a huge, ton-weight lie instead, and handed it to Sam like it was a gift.
“Nothing heavy,” he said, and fuck if he didn’t almost believe it himself.
“Don’t tell me, howler monkeys wearing little skirts?”
Dean was so grateful to him for picking up the tattered thread of a bad taste joke that he could have cried.
He huffed a laugh that hurt his head. “Mangy hell-hound messing on the carpet.”
“But nothing from after?”
Jesus, Sammy, always with the pokey stick questions.
“Nothing after the crunchy bones, nah.”
Sam nodded and nodded, an action that his brother knew meant he was pretending to agree but didn’t really. “Hungry? You gonna take a shower? Change your clothes?”
Dean groaned. Really. Too many options. He weighed up his thumping head, the damp coffee blotches, his seasick guts.
“Let’s go eat,” he said in the end. “South Dakota’s gotta be what .. twenty hours away? I can live with myself until then.”
Sam wrinkled his nose, then shrugged. He reached down for his coffee and Dean queasily watched him gulp it down. His own rebellious stomach was already anticipating that breakfast today would be like breakfast yesterday, and breakfast everyday since he got back. It would taste burnt when it wasn’t. Even the orange juice that Sam would almost certainly insist on ordering would taste burnt.
Still, breakfast was a good, important normal-life thing to do. They were good at breakfast, could track one another’s state of mind and body by what was ordered and how it went down. And they didn’t have to chat over breakfast, he knew that. Best of all, it might stave off that moment when his thoughts drifted, as he knew they would, to the half-bottle of Jack Daniels, which he hadn’t even been enjoying that much, but which he had wedged between the mattress and the wall when Sam’s back was turned. Dean was all about hiding-places.
“You coming?” Sam asked, brisk.
Dean wound himself up to make standing again. Rising from the bed, a wave of terror - his and what felt like everyone else’s - broke silently over his shoulders, trickled down his limbs and away. It left the hair on the back of his neck standing up in icy little stalagmites.
One nanosecond more of screaming from the other side slapped him smartly upside the head, and then it was gone.
Dean reached a little blindly for his jacket, squared his shoulders and led them from the room.
ch 2: innocentculprit.livejournal.com/2110.html#cutid1
Author: Innocent Culprit
Characters: Dean, Sam, Bobby, OMCs, no pairing
Genre: Gen, h/c
Rating: PG-13 for much bad language, alcohol abuse
Spoilers: It’s two weeks post 4X10
Disclaimer: Nothing to do with Kripke’s awesome show belongs to me except my fangirly obsession with it.
Summary: Dean’s shell-shocked like you wouldn’t believe, Bobby’s worrying himself into a peptic ulcer, and Sam ... well Sam’s feeling a little dark. Too bad that war won’t wait.
A/N: Takes place following events of Heaven and Hell, but keeping angel/demon stuff at arm’s length. You know, the gang were all in here in the first draft, Castiel, Ruby, blah blah, but then I wrote them out. What? I’m a coward. So it’s now mostly falling-apart brothers. Heh.
Dean didn’t think he’d ever called out for Sam in such a wussy way before, not here on earth anyhow.
That’s not me. It’s not.
Fuck, it is. That’s me!
He managed to fix that he was alone, lying stiff and diagonal on a motel bed, his left arm was stretching out towards the night-stand, and the Glock - damnandfuckitalltocrap - wasn’t quite within reach.
Dean just wanted to die.
But then he changed his mind.
Yeah, so dying ... not really an option - he’d already done that. Except for the fact that he didn’t know what made sense in any damn dimension, he was pretty sure that if he blew his brains out all over this sweaty motel pillow, apart from majorly pissing off Sam and the janitor, he’d only catapult himself back downstairs.
Dean actually suspected that when everything was done, pass or fail, he’d be thrown over the precipice anyway. Yeah, that’d work. He’d tumble to the dark-red sky below and there would be no reason to save him ever again.
Blunt Instrument Needed for Celestial Duties ... remind me again who got that gig?
Correct! The screw-up with the demon brother!
Are you dicks even serious?
He lay on the bed looking at his arm, becoming aware that something, somewhere was flickering.
Remembering the inarticulate pleas he’d heard himself utter, Dean felt an unexpected wash of relief that Sam was absent. Withdrawing the arm and using it to lever himself up, he flumped off the bed and barged his way into the bathroom to throw water on his face. When he worried at the light switch there was a crack! which made him jump, a buzz of electricity through his fingertips, and then the flickering was replaced by semi-darkness.
Electricity and water. You’d think he’d have that covered.
A heady, red hangover hammered just out of sight behind his eyeballs. Dean could taste ashes in the stale-liquor skank on his tongue and his ear-drums were tender from the screaming. He placed a palm over one, leant his head into it. Nausea wound like an eel around his belly, crept stealthily up his throat.
Come on, Dean, keep control ... it’s all in the mind, son, you just keep control.
He so used to hate it when Dad did the mind-over-matter number on him, and he hated it even more that the years had made him such a fucking expert.
When the room door squeaked open he’d gotten a steady grip on both sides of the basin, head bent, eyes squeezed tight shut.
Make it. All. Go away.
“Dean?” asked a cautious voice.
The relief Dean felt was painful. Painful because he knew he wouldn’t be able to run with it. His inner voice babbled.
I don’t care what you’ve been doing, Sammy ... ganking demons with your mind, humping in the back of an alley ... whatever ... just .... in real trouble here, man.
“Here,” is all he actually got out.
He was aware that Sam - tall but solid, radiating anxiety like a convective heater - was suddenly at his shoulder, not hovering, just staring with that new, detached scrutiny of his.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
Dean forced open his lids and coughed nervously. “You ... you’re back early.”
He saw Sam’s eyes dart to the death-grip that he still had on the basin and thought wildly that Sammy’s face looked kind of beautiful whenever that light-bulb thing flashed on inside his head. Beautiful, like when he was a little kid, but downright scary, too, scary in a this-shouldn’t-be way that was really beginning to get on Dean’s nerves.
“I thought you were asleep,” Sam said slowly and clearly, as if dealing with a half-wit.
Dean felt a dizzying rush of paranoia. He was well aware that Sam didn’t always talk to him as if he was on the same intellectual plain, but since two weeks ago in Kentucky, he seemed reluctant to talk to him at all. He’d become so hands-off that he was practically in another country.
“Let me see,” Dean said, hoping that being ornery might help with the mind over matter thing, “Oh yeah, I was a-asleep. Dreaming that my little brother f-fucked a demon.”
When he realized what trouble he’d had getting out some of the words, Dean screwed up his face in total disgust. Not much point having a smart mouth unless you can bring it off inch perfect.
“Listen ...” began Sam.
Dean unscrewed his face, unlocked his grip, shook his head slightly to try and dislodge the last twitches of memory. He still desperately wanted Sam to hold him steady somehow, stop him falling on the ground and mewling, but that wasn’t going to happen unless he asked, and he wasn’t going to ask this side of Armageddon. Perhaps not even on the other side.
“I’m good.”
“The hell, Dean.”
“The hell!” Dean repeated, launching himself off the basin and managing to walk past Sam without his legs giving way. “Did you actually just say that? The hell ....” A slightly hysterical laugh bubbled up. “The horror ....” No, he couldn’t stop it, the stupid laugh squawked out and the silence that followed was huge.
And this ... this is exactly how you act when you’re terrified.
“Heart of Darkness,” Sam said, as if everything - all of it - made perfect sense to him.
He sounded so damn wordly that Dean practically winced.
“Heart of who-dy?”
A quirk of amusement caught the corner of Sam’s mouth. It traveled, lightning-fast, right up to his eyes and Dean basked for just a short moment in what seemed long-lost.
“Joseph Conrad.”
“Right, right.” Dean wasn’t really sure. He’d actually thought it was Marlon Brando and he’d never even heard of the other guy.
“Aren’t you going to ask me where I’ve been?” Sam questioned hopefully.
Dean shook his head again, steadfast.
“OK, let me tell you where I’ve been.”
Dean waved him away.
Nope. You don’t know how to explain. You’re done with it anyway, you said so.
“I couldn’t sleep, you jerk. I couldn’t sleep and I went out for some air.”
Air. Sweet, fresh, earthly air. Dean hoped Sammy had filled his lungs with it. He wished he could explain how precious it was. He wished he believed him.
“I got you this.” Sam held up his hands. He was balancing one grande on top of another. Perhaps that was why he didn’t reach out and prize Dean off the basin.
Dean sat on the bed and took the top cup. The liquid was way too hot to drink but he poured some down his throat anyway.
Well, you see, Sammy, when I was in Hell I also learnt a lot of really great stuff.
It pooled in his stomach, but there was a flare of caffeine across his frontal lobes that felt more than good. He wished that his hands were not shaking so bad. Sam came to sit on the other bed and now they were knee to knee.
“You’re not doing so good,” Sam said with conviction. He seemed cool, watchful, and he put his own cup on the floor between his feet.
Dean longed for the acceptability of the retreat he’d made as a four year-old. Safety in silence. It had been involuntary, of course, and he hadn’t appreciated the protection it gave him at the time. Now his default was this mind over matter shit, because he believed (he really believed, right down to the toes of his boots) that talking wouldn’t help. The reinforced safety-doors that Alastair had blown right off in Kentucky, leaving Dean nearly blubbing his guts out, had been slammed shut again before it got too bad. Dean’s first gambit to keep it that way was to increase the booze, and so far it was doing a job, but what the .... Sam was trying to take the coffee from him and he didn’t know why.
“Dean, give it me, you’re going to burn yourself.”
“Mumokay,” Dean protested, but hot coffee jumped out of the goddamn cup on to his wrist. He felt it scald his skin but he didn’t react.
“Dean!”
That’s when it dropped. He didn’t drop it - why would he when he wanted to inhale the rest of the damn stuff so bad - it just kind of dropped itself, sliding out of his grip and splatting on to the floor between them. Sam leapt up but Dean stayed where he was.
He looked at his little brother’s giant frame lolloping around the room, getting a cloth, patting the carpet with it, then throwing it straight through the open bathroom door.
“Uh, so the DT’s?” Sam said pointedly, and he seemed to be holding on to something with difficulty. His temper, perhaps. His patience for sure. “That’s ... you having some half-assed flashback ... or whatever?”
Now that his brother was actually here, sounding wretched and fearful, Dean decided to take more care than ever not to offload. There was too much going on with Sam already, what with the demon-blood fuckery and all. Dean hated that fuckery. It was the kind of fuckery invented just to screw with them, even more than decisions made by Winchesters past and present had screwed with them already.
So yeah. Geekboy might have to cope with some wake-up-screaming nightmares and scraping-the-barrel bad behavior of the shit-faced variety, but not detailed knowledge of the egregious agonies that Perdition had handed out. Not even second-hand.
No way. You’re not getting anymore of the turning inside-out for forty fucking years crap. Forget it, Sammy, don’t come near me with that.
He selected a huge, ton-weight lie instead, and handed it to Sam like it was a gift.
“Nothing heavy,” he said, and fuck if he didn’t almost believe it himself.
“Don’t tell me, howler monkeys wearing little skirts?”
Dean was so grateful to him for picking up the tattered thread of a bad taste joke that he could have cried.
He huffed a laugh that hurt his head. “Mangy hell-hound messing on the carpet.”
“But nothing from after?”
Jesus, Sammy, always with the pokey stick questions.
“Nothing after the crunchy bones, nah.”
Sam nodded and nodded, an action that his brother knew meant he was pretending to agree but didn’t really. “Hungry? You gonna take a shower? Change your clothes?”
Dean groaned. Really. Too many options. He weighed up his thumping head, the damp coffee blotches, his seasick guts.
“Let’s go eat,” he said in the end. “South Dakota’s gotta be what .. twenty hours away? I can live with myself until then.”
Sam wrinkled his nose, then shrugged. He reached down for his coffee and Dean queasily watched him gulp it down. His own rebellious stomach was already anticipating that breakfast today would be like breakfast yesterday, and breakfast everyday since he got back. It would taste burnt when it wasn’t. Even the orange juice that Sam would almost certainly insist on ordering would taste burnt.
Still, breakfast was a good, important normal-life thing to do. They were good at breakfast, could track one another’s state of mind and body by what was ordered and how it went down. And they didn’t have to chat over breakfast, he knew that. Best of all, it might stave off that moment when his thoughts drifted, as he knew they would, to the half-bottle of Jack Daniels, which he hadn’t even been enjoying that much, but which he had wedged between the mattress and the wall when Sam’s back was turned. Dean was all about hiding-places.
“You coming?” Sam asked, brisk.
Dean wound himself up to make standing again. Rising from the bed, a wave of terror - his and what felt like everyone else’s - broke silently over his shoulders, trickled down his limbs and away. It left the hair on the back of his neck standing up in icy little stalagmites.
One nanosecond more of screaming from the other side slapped him smartly upside the head, and then it was gone.
Dean reached a little blindly for his jacket, squared his shoulders and led them from the room.
ch 2: innocentculprit.livejournal.com/2110.html#cutid1