Whitewash (Gen, R)
Title: Whitewash
Rating: R (mainly for language)
Category: AU gen oneshot
Word Count: 7167
Characters: Dean, Sam with assorted OCs and canon characters
Spoilers: Heavy S3 and vague for S1 and S2
Summary: “People with schizophrenia sometimes hear voices others don’t hear, believe that others are broadcasting their thoughts to the world, or become convinced that others are plotting to harm them. These experiences can make them fearful and withdrawn and cause difficulties when they try to have relationships with others” (NIMH, 2008).
Warnings: None
Author’s Notes: Written for the lovely mellaithwen’s birthday. (Happy, happy birthday!) She asked for something regarding the conversation in “Ghostfacers,” where the brothers said the following: Sam, “You know what you get when you show the word the truth?” and Dean responded, “A straitjacket or a punch in the face. Sometimes both.” She continued on to say, “There are so many crazy!Sam stories or people thinking Sam’s crazy and really not that many with Dean…” Well. This is kind of something like that. I hope.
Thank you to equinox_blue who brainstormed with me even before her big departure. Always appreciated, sweetie. Huge thanks has to go to both legoline and tru_faith_lost who braved this fic in the early stages, cracked the needed whip, and answered all my rambling emails. These two were the best pair of betas a girl could ask for, and this story would not be what it is right now without their help. Ladies, thank you so very much.
I’ve added a bit since the original beta, so any remaining mistakes are mine alone and are not the reflection of anyone else. Cross-posted around.
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.
- - - - -
He opens his eyes, and he sees white.
He blinks, tries again, and still sees only white. White ceiling, white walls and door, white blankets on his body, dressed in a white gown.
He shifts and tries to remember where he laid his head last night, but his mind is fuzzy and forgetful. When he hears the murmur of voices behind him, he cranes his neck in that direction, fighting to see more beyond the white. There’s a prick into his upper arm-sharp and biting. Warmth pulls him under into blackness.
- - - - -
When he wakes, a man in a white lab coat sits in the chair next to his bed.
“Hello, Dean,” the man says. “I’m glad to see you’re finally awake.”
Dean flinches and tries to rise from the bed. But, his muscles snap when the leather restraints on his wrists and ankles hold him fast. Escape is going to require more than a reflexive tug; he’s going to have to think his way out of this.
“We can take those off,” the doctor says with a nod towards the restraints. “You’ve just got to promise us that you’re not going to repeat that little stunt again.”
“Stunt?” Dean narrows his eyes. “What are you talking about?” He flexes, tests the strength of the leather. The silver buckle clinks loudly against the metal bars of his bed. “Where am I? Where the hell am I?”
The doctor sighs, disappointed. “You’re in Schneider Hospital.”
“Hospital? What? What’s going on? Am I sick or something?” Dean shoots back. He’s looking towards the door, trying to gauge how far away it is. How hard he’ll need to pull for the bars on the bed to break.
“Yes, Dean,” the doctor says, “you’re actually quite sick, I’m afraid.”
“Bullshit. Where’s Sam?” he suddenly asks, realizing. If he’s been kidnapped and put here, then they may have gotten Sam as well. “Where’s my car? Where’s the motel? Where’s-”
“Dean,” the doctor says, soft and placating as he rises to his feet.
“No. No. Where is Sam? Where the fuck is Sam?!” He slams his hands against his mattress, and the metal clangs. “Where is Sam?” His heartbeat is erratic, and sweat forms on his forehead. His anger escalates. He worries he’s slipping far too quickly into mindless terror.
“It’s a hallucination. He is just a hallucination-one of your many, I’m afraid. Dean,” the doctor tells him, “Sam doesn’t exist.”
- - - - -
He refuses to believe what the doctors tell him because he’s met hundreds of doctors, and he knows well enough by now that they all lie in one way or another. They find their theories right and his theories wrong, and there’s no convincing them otherwise.
He knows his demands for Sam are frantic, but he doesn’t care. He needs his brother beside him to know that they can make it through this nightmare. He needs to see Sam to reassure himself that he’s not as crazy as the hospital’s staff wants him to believe. Sam isn’t a “hallucination.”
Dean.
He lifts his head and looks around the room. “Hello?” he calls out.
Dean.
The voice is quiet, barely audible. It’s a whisper at the back of his mind.
He’s not crazy, he knows he’s not. But there’s someone saying his name, and out of all the weird things that have ever happened to him before, this isn’t one of them.
Dean. This time, the voice is softer still, and it fades away, leaving him alone to think.
After a few hours of spinning wheels in his own head, his door opens, and the doctor returns.
“Dean,” he says, “your parents are here to see you.”
He glares at the doctor, this patronizing fuck who wants him to believe Sam’s gone, that he’s gone sick in the head, and Dean snarls, “Bullshit. My parents are dead. Try the mind games on somebody else, Doc.” If they can bring him some fake parents, then they should bring him a fake brother while they’re at it, and he’s about to say as much, spit it at them like venom, but his words die when he sees the people who come into the room.
John and Mary Winchester look at him and smile sad, scared smiles.
Dad and Mom, for the first time in over twenty-some odd years, smile together at their son.
- - - - -
Mary-Mom-comes to him first and sits down in the chair he’s only ever seen the doctor in beside his bed.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
There are lines around her eyes and mouth, gray strands in her hair, and she’s somehow so much older than he remembers her being. If he’s dreaming, he’s got to admit he’s doing one hell of a good job.
He doesn’t answer. He glances from her to the doctor, to his dad, and then back to her again.
“You’re not my mom,” he finally says into the silent room.
“Dean-” John starts, voice a warning. His tone is the first familiar thing about these supposed parents, the first thing that feels like more than a charade or hallucination. It’s the warning he used before a fight with Sam that said Dad wasn’t in the mood for such things. But, Mary raises her hand, stops him; she’s the only one who ever could.
“I know this must be hard for you to accept,” she says, “but Dr. Harvey has explained to us about your hallucinations.” She swallows, and her next words are softer. “You think I’m dead, don’t you?”
She looks so much like the woman who left him behind as a scared four-year-old that he wants so badly to believe her. Wants to love her and her to love him, but he knows she can’t-she…No.
“You have a very severe case of schizophrenia,” she continues. “You go into these catatonic states where we think you get lost in, well, your own head for days, and when you wake up, you never remember anything.”
He swallows down the vomit in his throat. This is too damn much-even for him.
Dean.
“So,” he says with tongue thick, ignoring the voice, “you’re telling me that this is my reality? And I just, what? I just black out for a few days and wake up not remembering anything?”
Mary nods, face lined with pain.
They sit in silence for a long while, and he remembers the smoke. He remembers Sammy crying in his crib, remembers the fire and the wet grass beneath his bare feet as he ran with his baby brother in his arms. He remembers the heat on his back when Dad scooped him up and ran across the lawn. He remembers the pain. It never really healed after they put Mom beneath the ground.
“You died,” he spits out suddenly. “In a fire. The demon killed you.”
John sighs impatiently like they’ve done this a hundred times, but Mary replies only to Dean. “There was a house fire when you were a little boy, and I was very badly burned. We think that may have triggered something, started the hallucinations. Like a sort of post traumatic stress.”
He stays quiet, lets this sink into him for a moment. Could his whole life of hunting and demons-Sam-the Impala, really be nothing more than faulty recordings from his mind? Are they simply delusions so strong they strip him of his awareness for the present?
He looks back to his parents and sighs. He’ll listen to them talk, let them tell him their stories, and maybe, just maybe, he’ll be able to find the truth in all this. It doesn’t mean he has to trust them.
- - - - -
In the small circle of people, he watches the way their eyes dart from him and away, as if they’re afraid to look at him for too long. What kind of reputation already precedes him in this place?
Here, at group therapy-the first one he’s attended that he can remember-Harvey asks them how they’re feeling and if there’s anything they’d like to share.
Cheryl talks first. Her voice wavers and bumps, starts and stops in nervous fits. She wants to get out of the hospital and find a job again, or so she says. She doesn’t sound too sure, tracing the bright red lines on the insides of her arms, eyes flitting above faded, dark circles.
“Would you want to go back to your old job again?” Harvey asks, as if grief from the loss of her own miscarried baby will ever excuse her from the murder of five others, could ever be overlooked enough for her to work in a hospital again, nursing shortage or none.
Cheryl glances up then quickly looks back down. Dean studies her. She was probably pretty before she came here. He imagines her with hair combed and pulled back, a bit of make-up on her much too pale skin. It’s not a totally bad image.
“And what about you, Dean?” Harvey says suddenly, his voice breaking through Dean’s rambling daydreams.
“What about me, what?” Dean asks. The other group members are staring at him now, waiting for his answer to the question he doesn’t know he’s just been asked.
“What are your hopes for the future?” Harvey asks.
“Oh,” Dean says with a shrug. He doesn’t say that first, he’d like to figure out if this mindfuck is real and everything he’s ever known is a lie, or if yeah, it really is just a mindfuck, then how the hell does he escape? “I’d like to see Sam again.”
It’s the wrong answer for a question with no right answer, and he’d have to be blind not to see the way Harvey’s face shifts and the other patients twitch.
Harvey starts to say something, but he’s interrupted by Pete who blurts out, “Is Sam your imaginary friend?”
Dean.
Dean glances over at Pete, who’s wearing fuzzy blue slippers and a faded plaid bathrobe. A fellow schizophrenic, Dean knows, but that doesn’t mean they’re fighting the same battle in this place.
Dean, where?
“He’s not imaginary,” Dean replies.
“Guess the doctors haven’t gotten him out of your head yet.” Pete looks to Harvey, who’s perched on the edge of his seat and watching the two of them carefully, ready to intervene if necessary. “They’ll do that, though. I lost all my friends that way.” He smiles, crazy at the edges. “My best friends are gone. Sam will be too. Pretty soon you won’t even know where the hell you are.”
“Shut up,” Dean shoots back under his breath.
“All right, all right,” Harvey interrupts. “Enough about that. We’re here to be healthy. It’s about being healthy and happy, okay?”
Pete snorts, picks at a loose thread on his bathrobe. “Happy, my ass,” he grumbles. “I haven’t seen Stephen in years.”
“Okay,” Harvey says, “let’s call it a day then, shall we?”
- - - - -
The patients have their daily smoke breaks outside. He stands off to the side, watching them and observing their movements, how slow, how sluggish, how drugged they are. The sky is overcast; it looks like rain. There’s a small court for basketball, but the net’s rotting and nobody cares to play. Around the perimeter of the yard, a wall runs, and it’s higher than he is, higher than Sam, higher than both of them combined.
Some days, he stands at this wall and digs his fingers into the rock and mortar. He’s unable to see past it and he wonders if this, face resting against the cool cement, is the closest to escaping he’ll ever come.
With their hunched shoulders and shuffling feet, the other patients watch him warily. He can tell they don’t quite know what to say to him. He’s not like them. Not as patient and willing or as violent and crazy. He doesn’t fit into any of their predetermined slots.
He’s standing at that wall one day, no different than the rest, when Phil-a sufferer of bipolar disorder who’s tried to kill himself multiple times-approaches.
“You looking for something?” Phil asks, taking a long drag of his cigarette. It’s skinny and stupid looking between his too-fat fingers.
Dean lifts his head. He’s not used to having other patients talk to him. It takes him a moment before he asks, “What’s behind this wall?”
“Oh,” Phil says, lifts his eyes to the gray sky with fat-bellied clouds. “Oh, that you don’t want to know.” He flicks his cigarette, and ashes float softly to the ground. His smile is bitter as he turns away.
- - - - -
He attempts to escape once in those first several days after the removal of his restraints. His window with its blinds drawn tight is locked and barred, and it’d take one hell of a saw he doesn’t have to cut those bars apart. His plan is to go for the doors where he’s watched his supposed parents enter and leave.
He picks a quiet time of the day, early afternoon, when most of the patients are sleeping with their bellies full from lunch and the doctors are holed away in their offices. He won’t stay here forever. He can’t. This isn’t right. This isn’t real.
He creeps out of his room, tries to act casual going down the hall, thanks to the ever-vigilant surveillance cameras. But, the closer he gets to the exit doors, the faster he starts moving until he hears someone yell, “Hey! You! Stop right there!” and then he’s running.
Security personnel burst from seemingly random doors. The drugs in his system have slowed him down, but not enough, and he takes down one guard, two, and he’s almost at the doors, almost out of here, so close-
Until someone grabs him from behind.
Dean twists and turns, but his arms are crossed at his chest and the guy behind him is strong and unrelenting. “Goddammit!” Dean screams. “Let me go! Let me go!”
He tries kicking the guy in the shin or stomping on his feet, but Dean’s bare feet are pathetic against steel-toed boots. “I don’t belong here! I need to get out!”
The longer he’s held fast, the more guards and hospital staff appear. He’s making a scene, but he’s so fucking close to the door. He yells again, but it doesn’t take much, just a few too-strong, too-trained guards to get him down on the floor.
A few of the patients have poked their heads from their rooms, and they stare at him with wide, frightened eyes and nervous fists brought to their mouths.
He spits and swears when they force him into a straitjacket. His arms are tied too tight in front of him, and he can’t do anything but kick his legs like a duck out of water.
“Sam’s out there!” he screams. “I need to get to Sam! Fuck! Where’s Sam?! Let me out of here!”
The security personnel talk behind his back about how crazy he really must be and how this one’s going to need a long cool down by himself.
They lead him to a room where the walls and the floors are white and soft. Where he can’t hurt himself no matter how hard he tries. They’re not gentle or professional when they shove him over the threshold, and he falls, face first, onto the padded floor.
“Enjoy that for a bit,” one of the meathead guards sneers.
Dean scrambles to his feet as best he can with his torso wrapped up tight. He slams himself into the closing door. “Listen to me, you fuckers! Listen to me! This isn’t real! This isn’t real!”
He throws himself against the door again. He’s strong enough, he knows he is. He can kick doors right off their hinges, he knows he can. He’s gotten out of worse situations. He’s gotten free before. Why can’t he now? Why can’t he?
“Sam!” he screams. “Sam!” He kicks at the door, but with the straitjacket holding him tight, he can’t get enough leverage to kick the door hard enough. “I don’t belong here! I need to get out! I need to get out!”
He yells, and he fights. Finally, when his muscles quiver from exhaustion and his throat burns dry, he collapses and says no more.
- - - - -
“What’d he do to himself?” Harvey’s voice, distant and blurry.
Dean moans. He’s groggy and disoriented, and there are probably enough drugs in his system to knock down a horse. He can see their shadows surrounding him as they talk above him.
“Started heading for the main exit doors. Don’t know what came over him. He got violent with us when he was approached.”
Harvey murmurs unintelligibly. “Didn’t expect him to go down without a fight, but I’m still surprised all the same.”
“Doctor?”
“Keep an eye on him,” Harvey replies. “Keep a close eye on this one. We’re going to have our hands full.”
- - - - -
“I’m going to try increasing the dosage of your medication,” Dr. Harvey says a few days later. They’re twenty minutes into a session, and nothing has been said about the attempted escape earlier in the week. Dean isn’t going to bring it up; he’s not sure if Harvey will either.
Harvey clicks his pen and scribbles something illegible on his steno. “I think it will help eliminate-or at least, dull-your hallucinations.”
Dean, where?
Dean grimaces, gives no verbal indication he’s heard the voice again when he replies, “You want me to forget about Sam.”
Harvey looks up from his accumulated notes over the tops of his glasses and settles on Dean’s pinched face. Behind him, a breeze moves the curtains covering his opened window. The air smells dirty, of decay and sickness.
Harvey licks his bottom lip and folds his hands in his lap. “After what happened previously this week, I think it is in your best interest to accept that Sam does not exist. Not like you or I exist. This hallucination you refer to as ‘Sam’ is harmful to your health. It’s preventing you from moving forward with your life.”
“And what life is that?” Dean snaps back. “Those people you keep calling my parents are dead. I don’t have my car. I don’t have my clothes. I don’t have any of the people I recognize. This isn’t my life.”
Harvey sighs sadly like he recognizes this argument all too well and knows there’s no placating answer. “Yes, Dean, this is your life. The only one you have, and if you want to get out of this hospital, go on to do bigger and better things, then you need to understand that all of these things that supposedly happened aren’t real. You have a life here and now. You have parents who love you more than anything. They want you to come and be with them, be the son that you were before the sickness. And you need to accept that if you ever want to get out of here.”
- - - - -
If a person kills himself in a dream, then he will wake up in the real world. This is the lesson Dean remembers all too well from when the djinn stole him away to a world not so dissimilar from this one now. However, he realizes as he lies in bed and stares at the ceiling, a psychiatric hospital is the worst place to commit suicide.
But, he vows to leave. One way or another.
Much later that night with a concocted plan in his head, Dean creeps from his room. After his first attempted escape, he is now more careful where he steps and where the cameras scan. Fortunately, he arrives at the room where the medications are stored without a problem.
He picks the lock with a paperclip he slipped from a stack of unguarded papers on a psychiatrist’s desk. The door gives at last, a soft click of victory, and he slips inside, closing it behind him.
Even though the lighting coming through the small pane in the door is weak, he can see well enough for his job nonetheless. In the shadows, his eyes adjust to see the walls lined with shelves and the shelves filled with bottles. The bottles hold the very thing he’s depending on to end this nightmare: Pills.
He isn’t choosy as he grabs the nearest bottle and pops the lid. He shakes a dozen or so pills into his hand as casual as he would with chocolate candies or salted peanuts. Now, though, he pauses and stares for a moment.
If this plan does not work and if he does not leave this dream, then he will die here. Here, where there’s no Dad to make a deal to save his soul and no reaper with yellow eyes to pull him back from the brink. There will be no more life whatsoever.
Here, though, here in this hospital and world, there is no Sam. There is Mom and Dad and the promise of them, but not Sam. There is no Sam, there is no hope of ever finding Sam, and Dean will not stay here with that knowledge in him.
He swallows the pills.
He gags, choking down the pills because they’re dry and he has no water. They’re too many, too big, but he forces himself to swallow them anyway. When they’re gone, he moves onto the next bottle. And the next. And the next.
Not long after he loses count of the pills and the containers, the room begins to spin madly. He collapses on trembling hands and knees to the ground where he vomits, back arching, onto the tiled floor. His head whirls, and he feels strangely disconnected from his body. The entire hospital must hear the frantic beating of his struggling heart.
Gasping, panting, he tries to claw his way back into a standing position. When he staggers up, white-knuckled hands clutching the shelves, his knees buckle, and he tumbles to the floor. Vomit again spews from his mouth; it splatters onto his shirt and hands.
He can’t breathe, and the world whips around him in a crazed blur. His body shakes violently, and his toes are overtaken by a strange numbness that snakes its way up his spine.
Let it end, he thinks, please, please, let it end. Let me go home. Let me go home.
His breathing is pinched, a high-pitched wheeze from between his lips, and at last, the room collapses down around him.
- - - - -
Upon waking, he has a brief moment where his heart leaps in happiness and he thinks that he succeeded. That he’s back in the motel with his car parked outside the door and Sam sleeping in the bed next to him.
“Good to see you awake, Dean.”
His heart drops.
He shifts and looks up to see Harvey standing above with a clipboard in hand.
“Gave us quite the scare,” he says. “We thought we were going to lose you for a moment there.” The mattress sinks beneath him when he sits down on the end of the bed beside Dean’s feet. “You seemed to be making progress in our sessions. What happened?”
Dean frowns, upset. The knowledge that he failed at escape and is now truly trapped here makes him feel hollow and worthless.
“Sam,” he croaks after a moment. His throat burns upon speaking, and he winces, swallowing painfully.
“They had to put a tube down your throat to pump your stomach. It’ll probably be sore for a couple days.” Harvey sighs, shakes his head, and when he speaks again, his words are slow, chosen carefully. “Don’t you think this Sam thing has gone on long enough? Dean, your mother is in my office right now, crying because her son tried to kill himself tonight. Do you want to be the one to explain to her that it was over a silly hallucination?” He pauses and meets Dean’s eyes. “Do you?”
Slowly, Dean shakes his head.
“All right,” Harvey replies, “then we need to focus on you getting better. I’ve increased the strength of your medication, so when you take your meds tomorrow evening, they’ll help to alleviate these schizophrenic symptoms faster. For now, though,” he continues with a pat on Dean’s blanketed leg, “I want you to rest. I’ll talk to your parents. Don’t worry about that.”
Once Harvey has left, Dean rolls onto his back. He stares at the shadowed ceiling. His tongue tastes of bile, and his body aches.
He wishes so much that the pills had ended this madness once and for all.
Dean, where?
“No,” he whispers aloud.
He lies, staring and silent, and he begins to shut down.
- - - - -
The pills are white. Of course they are. Different shapes and sizes, but white all the same.
“Glass of water?” the technician chirps as Dean holds the array of drugs in his palm.
“Nah,” he says morosely. “I’m fine, sweetheart.” He tosses the pills in his mouth, tasting their powdery bitterness until he throws his head back and swallows them dry.
The technician, a young girl no more than twenty, gives him a wary smile. “Have a good night, sir.”
“I’ll try,” he says as she exits his room, onto the next patient. His stomach twists, something hot and heavy in its pit. “I’ll at least try.”
- - - - -
The shower room is empty when he arrives. A faucet drip-drops, a steady plinking sound in the emptiness. He sighs. The silence is both welcomed and hated.
He strips of his clothing, hangs the white shirt and pants on the hook at the end of the shower stall. He steps inside and pulls the flimsy plastic curtain behind him.
The floor is hard, wet, and cold against his bare feet. He turns on the water. It’s too hot and too forceful, smells of sulfur, and he knows he should turn it down, but he doesn’t. He stands there for a long moment, letting the crushing water beat him and warm him.
He can’t feel the pills yet, but they’re working all the same. They’re strong drugs, better than anything he could scam off the streets for an undercover gig, and he knows that when he wakes tomorrow with the powerful drugs in his system, he won’t remember a thing. He won’t remember Sam.
In his mind, the only place left untouched by this place and his monsters, he hears Sam talking to him. Their conversations over midnight miles and long lunches. The words, Sam’s voice, it’s all comforting. Comfort he will soon be losing to the medication creeping its way through his blood.
The tears come, hard and fast, and it’s the first he’s cried since he woke here one too many days ago. He’s breaking down, breaking apart with the knowledge that by tomorrow when the sun rises, he’ll have nothing once again.
He sags against the wall of the shower, and in here, the water and his tears feel one in the same, so it’s that much easier to deny now. That much easier to lie now.
Dean, Sam says, and his voice is soft. It’s warm and gentle. Dean.
“You’re not real,” Dean spits, water in his throat, water in his eyes, burning and stinging. “You’re not real,” he repeats because he wants to get out of here, he wants to see what waits beyond the wall in the courtyard, he wants to wear more than white. “You’re not real,” he says because he wants his mind back.
- - - - -
He wakes the next morning and dresses in the clothes laid out for him. His head spins, and he wobbles for a moment at the end of his bed. But he can’t remember what happened last night well enough to know if he simply ate something funny at dinner to explain away his dizziness.
He dresses, and he takes the medication the pretty young technician offers him.
She smiles. “Did you have a good night?” she asks like she’s referring to something they shared.
He pauses, can’t remember last night, but decides that’s okay, so he says, “I think I did.”
She smiles again, nods a small nod. “Glad to hear it.”
Dr. Harvey’s office is the one at the end of the hall, turn left, and up the stairs to the third door on the right. The door’s opened when Dean arrives, and Harvey looks up in surprise as Dean enters and sits down.
“I didn’t expect to see you so early,” Harvey says. “Your session’s not for another hour.”
“Thought I’d get a jumpstart on it. You’ve got a second or two?”
“Sure do. Make yourself comfortable.”
Dean crosses his legs. He likes Harvey’s office better than the other doctors’. It’s comforting and familiar. In a hospital as large as this one, it’s easy to feel lost, but here in Harvey’s office, he knows right where he is.
“How’re you feeling today, Dean?”
Dean nods, short and curt. “Good, good. Best I have in a while.”
“That’s great to hear.” Harvey looks down at his notes. His desk is a bit on the messy side, so he has to slide some papers around to find the one he’s looking for. “Have you had any hallucinations today?”
Dean frowns, confused. “Hallucinations?”
“Seeing things, hearing things. People who might not really exist?”
Dean shrugs. He doesn’t quite know why the doctor’s asking him all this. He’d just like to get out of the hospital to be at home with his parents. “Nothing out the ordinary, Doc.”
- - - - -
They don’t release him from the hospital just yet. Not as soon as Dean had hoped anyway. Harvey says they want to make sure his schizophrenia is really under control to avoid any future relapses.
“We’ll give you a week or so,” Harvey tells him. “And see how you feel. I don’t want to risk any side effects cropping up while you’re with your parents. Wouldn’t be fair to them to have to handle such things.”
Dean nods, agrees, even though he wishes he could leave here already. But, he’ll wait if he has to. He’ll wait if the doctor tells him to.
- - - - -
Late at night, when the rest of the hospital is silent and sleeping, save for the steady creaking of the old furnace, he hears a voice.
Dean, it says. It’s male, soft and pleading. Dean.
He lurches up in bed. Is this one of the hallucinations Harvey was telling him about? He swallows dryly. “You’re not real,” he whispers into the darkness, voice scratchy. “Go away.”
Dean, it says again.
He lies back down and decides to ignore the voice. As he’s drifting back into sleep, he hears quick footsteps hurrying down the hall past his room.
Curiously, as no one is supposed to be awake at this time of the night, he creeps from his bed, careful not to make the mattress squeak like he knows it can, and he goes to the door. Maybe one of the other patients is having a nightmare. Maybe they’re admitting someone new. Slowly, ever so carefully, he opens his door just enough to peek into the hallway.
A door at the end is wide open and spewing bright light down the corridor. Doctors stand in front of it, gesticulating and murmuring, and he sees Harvey among them.
Dean. It’s more forceful now. Dean.
He closes his eyes, hating this voice inside of him. He wishes it would go away. He’ll have to tell Harvey he’s hearing things again.
Dean, where are you?
- - - - -
“What was going on last night?” Dean asks.
Harvey looks taken aback. “Oh?”
“Last night. You and all the other doctors. What was going on?”
Something flickers past Harvey’s face before his features relax. “We had some electrical issues. Lights wouldn’t turn off in that room. The patients were getting upset.”
Dean grunts in understanding.
Harvey sighs. “But enough about me. We’re here to talk about you, right?” He pats his notepad as proof of this. “Everything still good? Any hallucinations or other troubling symptoms we should be discussing?”
He thinks of the voice from last night, and how much he hated it. But now, in the daylight reflection, he thinks of how sad it was. How it seemed to be begging him. It wasn’t a bad voice. No need for Harvey to know, he figures. Not like anything’s going to happen because of it.
“Everything’s great,” Dean replies, and Harvey smiles like this is the perfect answer.
- - - - -
He wakes during the night, as Harvey’s promise of “just one more week” turns into “well, let’s wait a few more days-just in case.”
The doctors gather nightly around the brightly lit door. One by one, they go inside and close the door behind them. Time passes, sometimes an hour and sometimes longer, and then, one by one, out they come.
He crouches in his cracked doorway, watching them and wondering where he can find the truth in all this. But he’s never alone on these nightly stakeouts.
Dean.
He closes his eyes.
Dean, where are you?
He closes his eyes. He listens.
Dean, where are you? I’ll find you.
He closes his eyes. He tries to remember.
- - - - -
The sunlight is melting from purple to salmon when he goes to that door at the end of the hallway early the next morning. The halls are silent and the doctors have left the room over two hours ago, so he figures he’s safe. Once he reaches it, he sees how the light still creeps out from the gap at the bottom of the door.
He glances behind him before he grabs the doorknob to try and open the door. An electric jolt passes through him, and he recoils instantly, gulping down the pain. His heart skips frantically, pulse upset. He swears and licks his lips, but he tries it again anyway. He feels electricity zing through his skin, but he concentrates on counting to five, huffing angry curses beneath his breath.
When he reaches five, he tumbles away, hand smoking and heart racing.
Mom died in the house fire when the demon came and burned everything away. Dad died when he sold his soul to save Dean’s life. Sam died when Jake put a knife in his back and left him to fall in the mud. Dean brought Sam back with a demon’s deal.
Dean died when the hounds came for him, and Lilith laughed, and Sam cried, and after that, there was-
Dean, where are you? I’ll find you.
He remembers. He remembers the before. He remembers the after. He remembers it all.
I’m in Hell, Sammy. I’m in Hell, and I think I’ve found the doorway out.
- - - - -
He can’t open the door because it’s locked. He can’t pick the lock because there’s no hole to be picked. There’s the possible method of breaking the door off its hinges, but he decides against that, knowing that he’s not that strong with all the drugs in his system. So, he begins to formulate a plan, and he’s pretty sure he’ll get himself killed for it. Then again, he figures he’s already dead, so what’s the difference?
“So, anything you want to talk about today?” Harvey asks later at the usual session, folding his hands in his lap.
“Yeah, actually, there is.”
“Oh?”
“Your window. Why are the blinds always closed? Why can’t we see what’s outside?”
Harvey’s smile wavers, and then he’s as calm and composed as before. “Come now, Dean, we’re here to talk about you. Not about the status of my window.”
Dean grunts. “Just weird, y’know. Can’t see past the wall, can’t see out your friggin’ window. Like you guys are trying to hide something.”
“Just trying to minimize any and all distractions for our patients so they can make the best recovery.”
Dean chuckles, can’t help himself now that he knows the truth of the matter. Fire and brimstone sure aren’t Prozac and lithium, last time he checked.
“Something funny, Dean?” Harvey asks skeptically.
“Nah. So, Doc, how ‘bout that schizophrenia? What a bitch, right?”
- - - - -
He knows he has to act soon. They’ll be onto him sooner or later, and now that he knows, he’s not going to stay here any longer than he has to.
Late at night, when the doctors go to their door, he waits in his room for the right time. He has to move fast while their backs are turned. Soon as the last doctor steps up to the door, Dean flies from his room.
He runs down the corridor, bare feet soundless on the carpeting. The last doctor steps up to the opened room spilling out its brilliant light, and Dean leaps in. The door swings shut behind him.
Inside, the light is so bright he instinctively closes his eyes against it. When he does open them, ever so slowly, his stomach drops, and the hair on the back of his neck stands up.
Thousands upon thousands of miles of endless twists and turns, the hellish barbed wire goes on. A person here, a person there, caught like flies in a web with hooks in their flesh and under their tendons to hold them fast. Electricity zips and zaps down the lines, and he can hear thunder rolling in the distance. Small black clouds hover over the people before moving on elsewhere, and the people scream, wail against the pain. They call out the names of their loved ones and their pleas to God, but no one hears them here. No one cares.
He’s in that nightmare. He-his body, him-is in there.
He looks behind him, back to where the hospital once stood and a wall rises, high and dark, into the blood red sky. It goes on for as far as he can see, blocking the hospital from this outside abomination and tricking the souls that remain trapped on the inside.
Dean, where are you? I’ll find you.
He swallows, sick to his stomach.
Gotta find myself first Sammy. Gotta find me before you can.
- - - - -
He doesn’t know how long he searches. Time in this place is futile and meaningless. Eventually, though, eventually, after climbing through barbed wire loops and slipping down electrified tunnels of darkness, when he’s bleeding and bruised, he finds his body dangling above an endless pit in the ground.
He stares at himself, at his barely-breathing, not-quite corpse. The eyes are closed, the entirety of it crusted with blood. The muscles have blackened around the holes where hooks hold him tight. He hardly recognizes his own features through the bruises and the swelling.
He reaches out to his body, to grab hold and lift it from the hooks. He reaches out, and his hand passes through its bloody wrist. Confused, he tries again, but he holds only the rank air of Hell in his palm. This is his body, he should be able to-He stops, stares, and realizes that this is not his body.
His body was left behind. Left in the room after the hounds brought his soul here and his flesh remained for Sam to care for. What hangs in front of him now with its torn shirt and mangled bare feet must be the part of his soul that stayed here after the demons split him in two so they could have his conscious part in the hospital.
Swallowing, he focuses on the body. If this is part of him, he should be able to touch it. Maybe he only has to try harder. He holds his hand out, prickling as the thunder rolls in the distance, and touches the body’s arm. Pain instantly passes through him, and in that brief moment before he retracts his hand, he can feel the blood crusted dry over his face and the hooks curving into his muscles. The sensation tears the air from his lungs.
Yet, he tries again, this time touching the body’s face. His fingers pass through the bruised cheek, and the pain returns, nearly blinding him from its intensity, and he grits his teeth.
The body opens its eyes.
“Dean.”
He whips around, breathless and shaking, hand clutched to his chest.
Harvey stands in front of him, but he wears his demon face. The one of rotting flesh and cracked bones, where his eyes are blackened and cold.
“Couldn’t keep a secret from you, after all,” Harvey sneers.
“Thought I’d be happier in a psych ward than out here?”
“Not exactly. We knew how to hurt you the most. Drive you to the brink of madness. Take away the very thing you cared about.” Sam’s name remains unspoken but understood.
Dean.
“I’m getting out.”
“Oh?” Harvey says.
Dean, where are you?
“Going back to my hallucinations,” Dean answers, reaching again for the image of his body. His hand passes through the arm futilely.
“You’ll die on the way out.”
“Watch me.”
Dean, where are you? I’ll find you.
“I’ve got a brother up there waiting for me, Doc.”
Harvey sneers and grabs Dean by the wrist. His fingers are acid, and they leave welts where they burn Dean’s skin. “You’re not getting away so easily,” Harvey growls.
With Harvey still holding him, Dean moves for the other half of his soul one more time. He grabs it.
Madly, he lurches forward, wrapping himself around the body that stares at him with wide eyes. Before Harvey can tug him back, Dean leaps off the cracked earth, pulling the body off the hooks, and Harvey screams. Dean falls, body in his arms, falls faster and faster. Faster and faster with the wind whipping past him and the wails rising, faster and faster-
Dean, where are you? I’ll find you-
-until-
Dean,
-until-
“Dean. Dean, oh God, oh God…Oh Dean.”
- - - - -
Dean opens his eyes, and he sees only black.
The pain rips through him and forces him to close his eyes. He groans, tries to move his hand to his head, but he’s wet and sticky, and he knows he’s covered in blood again. His body is screaming, burning in every fiber, and he worries he may never be able to move properly again. Walk, run, drive-
“Dean?”
It’s real, that voice. It’s real, and it’s wonderful, and oh, God, it’s-
“Sammy,” he rasps, tastes blood on his tongue, the sweet warmth rising up from his throat.
Sam’s hand is on his face, large fingers cupping his ruined cheekbone. “I looked for you,” Sam says, and Dean, eyes closed, can hear the tears in his voice. “I looked and I called, and I-I was trying to scour ever part of Hell that I could with the spell Bobby gave me, but I-I couldn’t find you. Where-where were you?”
Dean tries to smile, but it’s too painful, and his face simply twists awkwardly. He knows Sam sees the smile underneath the damage. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
Sam breathes, grief choking his relieved laughter. “Yeah,” he whispers, hand on Dean’s shoulder, hand that will heal him, hand that searched for him. “Yeah, you are."
End
City of Angels soundtrack
Rating: R (mainly for language)
Category: AU gen oneshot
Word Count: 7167
Characters: Dean, Sam with assorted OCs and canon characters
Spoilers: Heavy S3 and vague for S1 and S2
Summary: “People with schizophrenia sometimes hear voices others don’t hear, believe that others are broadcasting their thoughts to the world, or become convinced that others are plotting to harm them. These experiences can make them fearful and withdrawn and cause difficulties when they try to have relationships with others” (NIMH, 2008).
Warnings: None
Author’s Notes: Written for the lovely mellaithwen’s birthday. (Happy, happy birthday!) She asked for something regarding the conversation in “Ghostfacers,” where the brothers said the following: Sam, “You know what you get when you show the word the truth?” and Dean responded, “A straitjacket or a punch in the face. Sometimes both.” She continued on to say, “There are so many crazy!Sam stories or people thinking Sam’s crazy and really not that many with Dean…” Well. This is kind of something like that. I hope.
Thank you to equinox_blue who brainstormed with me even before her big departure. Always appreciated, sweetie. Huge thanks has to go to both legoline and tru_faith_lost who braved this fic in the early stages, cracked the needed whip, and answered all my rambling emails. These two were the best pair of betas a girl could ask for, and this story would not be what it is right now without their help. Ladies, thank you so very much.
I’ve added a bit since the original beta, so any remaining mistakes are mine alone and are not the reflection of anyone else. Cross-posted around.
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.
- - - - -
He opens his eyes, and he sees white.
He blinks, tries again, and still sees only white. White ceiling, white walls and door, white blankets on his body, dressed in a white gown.
He shifts and tries to remember where he laid his head last night, but his mind is fuzzy and forgetful. When he hears the murmur of voices behind him, he cranes his neck in that direction, fighting to see more beyond the white. There’s a prick into his upper arm-sharp and biting. Warmth pulls him under into blackness.
- - - - -
When he wakes, a man in a white lab coat sits in the chair next to his bed.
“Hello, Dean,” the man says. “I’m glad to see you’re finally awake.”
Dean flinches and tries to rise from the bed. But, his muscles snap when the leather restraints on his wrists and ankles hold him fast. Escape is going to require more than a reflexive tug; he’s going to have to think his way out of this.
“We can take those off,” the doctor says with a nod towards the restraints. “You’ve just got to promise us that you’re not going to repeat that little stunt again.”
“Stunt?” Dean narrows his eyes. “What are you talking about?” He flexes, tests the strength of the leather. The silver buckle clinks loudly against the metal bars of his bed. “Where am I? Where the hell am I?”
The doctor sighs, disappointed. “You’re in Schneider Hospital.”
“Hospital? What? What’s going on? Am I sick or something?” Dean shoots back. He’s looking towards the door, trying to gauge how far away it is. How hard he’ll need to pull for the bars on the bed to break.
“Yes, Dean,” the doctor says, “you’re actually quite sick, I’m afraid.”
“Bullshit. Where’s Sam?” he suddenly asks, realizing. If he’s been kidnapped and put here, then they may have gotten Sam as well. “Where’s my car? Where’s the motel? Where’s-”
“Dean,” the doctor says, soft and placating as he rises to his feet.
“No. No. Where is Sam? Where the fuck is Sam?!” He slams his hands against his mattress, and the metal clangs. “Where is Sam?” His heartbeat is erratic, and sweat forms on his forehead. His anger escalates. He worries he’s slipping far too quickly into mindless terror.
“It’s a hallucination. He is just a hallucination-one of your many, I’m afraid. Dean,” the doctor tells him, “Sam doesn’t exist.”
- - - - -
He refuses to believe what the doctors tell him because he’s met hundreds of doctors, and he knows well enough by now that they all lie in one way or another. They find their theories right and his theories wrong, and there’s no convincing them otherwise.
He knows his demands for Sam are frantic, but he doesn’t care. He needs his brother beside him to know that they can make it through this nightmare. He needs to see Sam to reassure himself that he’s not as crazy as the hospital’s staff wants him to believe. Sam isn’t a “hallucination.”
Dean.
He lifts his head and looks around the room. “Hello?” he calls out.
Dean.
The voice is quiet, barely audible. It’s a whisper at the back of his mind.
He’s not crazy, he knows he’s not. But there’s someone saying his name, and out of all the weird things that have ever happened to him before, this isn’t one of them.
Dean. This time, the voice is softer still, and it fades away, leaving him alone to think.
After a few hours of spinning wheels in his own head, his door opens, and the doctor returns.
“Dean,” he says, “your parents are here to see you.”
He glares at the doctor, this patronizing fuck who wants him to believe Sam’s gone, that he’s gone sick in the head, and Dean snarls, “Bullshit. My parents are dead. Try the mind games on somebody else, Doc.” If they can bring him some fake parents, then they should bring him a fake brother while they’re at it, and he’s about to say as much, spit it at them like venom, but his words die when he sees the people who come into the room.
John and Mary Winchester look at him and smile sad, scared smiles.
Dad and Mom, for the first time in over twenty-some odd years, smile together at their son.
- - - - -
Mary-Mom-comes to him first and sits down in the chair he’s only ever seen the doctor in beside his bed.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
There are lines around her eyes and mouth, gray strands in her hair, and she’s somehow so much older than he remembers her being. If he’s dreaming, he’s got to admit he’s doing one hell of a good job.
He doesn’t answer. He glances from her to the doctor, to his dad, and then back to her again.
“You’re not my mom,” he finally says into the silent room.
“Dean-” John starts, voice a warning. His tone is the first familiar thing about these supposed parents, the first thing that feels like more than a charade or hallucination. It’s the warning he used before a fight with Sam that said Dad wasn’t in the mood for such things. But, Mary raises her hand, stops him; she’s the only one who ever could.
“I know this must be hard for you to accept,” she says, “but Dr. Harvey has explained to us about your hallucinations.” She swallows, and her next words are softer. “You think I’m dead, don’t you?”
She looks so much like the woman who left him behind as a scared four-year-old that he wants so badly to believe her. Wants to love her and her to love him, but he knows she can’t-she…No.
“You have a very severe case of schizophrenia,” she continues. “You go into these catatonic states where we think you get lost in, well, your own head for days, and when you wake up, you never remember anything.”
He swallows down the vomit in his throat. This is too damn much-even for him.
Dean.
“So,” he says with tongue thick, ignoring the voice, “you’re telling me that this is my reality? And I just, what? I just black out for a few days and wake up not remembering anything?”
Mary nods, face lined with pain.
They sit in silence for a long while, and he remembers the smoke. He remembers Sammy crying in his crib, remembers the fire and the wet grass beneath his bare feet as he ran with his baby brother in his arms. He remembers the heat on his back when Dad scooped him up and ran across the lawn. He remembers the pain. It never really healed after they put Mom beneath the ground.
“You died,” he spits out suddenly. “In a fire. The demon killed you.”
John sighs impatiently like they’ve done this a hundred times, but Mary replies only to Dean. “There was a house fire when you were a little boy, and I was very badly burned. We think that may have triggered something, started the hallucinations. Like a sort of post traumatic stress.”
He stays quiet, lets this sink into him for a moment. Could his whole life of hunting and demons-Sam-the Impala, really be nothing more than faulty recordings from his mind? Are they simply delusions so strong they strip him of his awareness for the present?
He looks back to his parents and sighs. He’ll listen to them talk, let them tell him their stories, and maybe, just maybe, he’ll be able to find the truth in all this. It doesn’t mean he has to trust them.
- - - - -
In the small circle of people, he watches the way their eyes dart from him and away, as if they’re afraid to look at him for too long. What kind of reputation already precedes him in this place?
Here, at group therapy-the first one he’s attended that he can remember-Harvey asks them how they’re feeling and if there’s anything they’d like to share.
Cheryl talks first. Her voice wavers and bumps, starts and stops in nervous fits. She wants to get out of the hospital and find a job again, or so she says. She doesn’t sound too sure, tracing the bright red lines on the insides of her arms, eyes flitting above faded, dark circles.
“Would you want to go back to your old job again?” Harvey asks, as if grief from the loss of her own miscarried baby will ever excuse her from the murder of five others, could ever be overlooked enough for her to work in a hospital again, nursing shortage or none.
Cheryl glances up then quickly looks back down. Dean studies her. She was probably pretty before she came here. He imagines her with hair combed and pulled back, a bit of make-up on her much too pale skin. It’s not a totally bad image.
“And what about you, Dean?” Harvey says suddenly, his voice breaking through Dean’s rambling daydreams.
“What about me, what?” Dean asks. The other group members are staring at him now, waiting for his answer to the question he doesn’t know he’s just been asked.
“What are your hopes for the future?” Harvey asks.
“Oh,” Dean says with a shrug. He doesn’t say that first, he’d like to figure out if this mindfuck is real and everything he’s ever known is a lie, or if yeah, it really is just a mindfuck, then how the hell does he escape? “I’d like to see Sam again.”
It’s the wrong answer for a question with no right answer, and he’d have to be blind not to see the way Harvey’s face shifts and the other patients twitch.
Harvey starts to say something, but he’s interrupted by Pete who blurts out, “Is Sam your imaginary friend?”
Dean.
Dean glances over at Pete, who’s wearing fuzzy blue slippers and a faded plaid bathrobe. A fellow schizophrenic, Dean knows, but that doesn’t mean they’re fighting the same battle in this place.
Dean, where?
“He’s not imaginary,” Dean replies.
“Guess the doctors haven’t gotten him out of your head yet.” Pete looks to Harvey, who’s perched on the edge of his seat and watching the two of them carefully, ready to intervene if necessary. “They’ll do that, though. I lost all my friends that way.” He smiles, crazy at the edges. “My best friends are gone. Sam will be too. Pretty soon you won’t even know where the hell you are.”
“Shut up,” Dean shoots back under his breath.
“All right, all right,” Harvey interrupts. “Enough about that. We’re here to be healthy. It’s about being healthy and happy, okay?”
Pete snorts, picks at a loose thread on his bathrobe. “Happy, my ass,” he grumbles. “I haven’t seen Stephen in years.”
“Okay,” Harvey says, “let’s call it a day then, shall we?”
- - - - -
The patients have their daily smoke breaks outside. He stands off to the side, watching them and observing their movements, how slow, how sluggish, how drugged they are. The sky is overcast; it looks like rain. There’s a small court for basketball, but the net’s rotting and nobody cares to play. Around the perimeter of the yard, a wall runs, and it’s higher than he is, higher than Sam, higher than both of them combined.
Some days, he stands at this wall and digs his fingers into the rock and mortar. He’s unable to see past it and he wonders if this, face resting against the cool cement, is the closest to escaping he’ll ever come.
With their hunched shoulders and shuffling feet, the other patients watch him warily. He can tell they don’t quite know what to say to him. He’s not like them. Not as patient and willing or as violent and crazy. He doesn’t fit into any of their predetermined slots.
He’s standing at that wall one day, no different than the rest, when Phil-a sufferer of bipolar disorder who’s tried to kill himself multiple times-approaches.
“You looking for something?” Phil asks, taking a long drag of his cigarette. It’s skinny and stupid looking between his too-fat fingers.
Dean lifts his head. He’s not used to having other patients talk to him. It takes him a moment before he asks, “What’s behind this wall?”
“Oh,” Phil says, lifts his eyes to the gray sky with fat-bellied clouds. “Oh, that you don’t want to know.” He flicks his cigarette, and ashes float softly to the ground. His smile is bitter as he turns away.
- - - - -
He attempts to escape once in those first several days after the removal of his restraints. His window with its blinds drawn tight is locked and barred, and it’d take one hell of a saw he doesn’t have to cut those bars apart. His plan is to go for the doors where he’s watched his supposed parents enter and leave.
He picks a quiet time of the day, early afternoon, when most of the patients are sleeping with their bellies full from lunch and the doctors are holed away in their offices. He won’t stay here forever. He can’t. This isn’t right. This isn’t real.
He creeps out of his room, tries to act casual going down the hall, thanks to the ever-vigilant surveillance cameras. But, the closer he gets to the exit doors, the faster he starts moving until he hears someone yell, “Hey! You! Stop right there!” and then he’s running.
Security personnel burst from seemingly random doors. The drugs in his system have slowed him down, but not enough, and he takes down one guard, two, and he’s almost at the doors, almost out of here, so close-
Until someone grabs him from behind.
Dean twists and turns, but his arms are crossed at his chest and the guy behind him is strong and unrelenting. “Goddammit!” Dean screams. “Let me go! Let me go!”
He tries kicking the guy in the shin or stomping on his feet, but Dean’s bare feet are pathetic against steel-toed boots. “I don’t belong here! I need to get out!”
The longer he’s held fast, the more guards and hospital staff appear. He’s making a scene, but he’s so fucking close to the door. He yells again, but it doesn’t take much, just a few too-strong, too-trained guards to get him down on the floor.
A few of the patients have poked their heads from their rooms, and they stare at him with wide, frightened eyes and nervous fists brought to their mouths.
He spits and swears when they force him into a straitjacket. His arms are tied too tight in front of him, and he can’t do anything but kick his legs like a duck out of water.
“Sam’s out there!” he screams. “I need to get to Sam! Fuck! Where’s Sam?! Let me out of here!”
The security personnel talk behind his back about how crazy he really must be and how this one’s going to need a long cool down by himself.
They lead him to a room where the walls and the floors are white and soft. Where he can’t hurt himself no matter how hard he tries. They’re not gentle or professional when they shove him over the threshold, and he falls, face first, onto the padded floor.
“Enjoy that for a bit,” one of the meathead guards sneers.
Dean scrambles to his feet as best he can with his torso wrapped up tight. He slams himself into the closing door. “Listen to me, you fuckers! Listen to me! This isn’t real! This isn’t real!”
He throws himself against the door again. He’s strong enough, he knows he is. He can kick doors right off their hinges, he knows he can. He’s gotten out of worse situations. He’s gotten free before. Why can’t he now? Why can’t he?
“Sam!” he screams. “Sam!” He kicks at the door, but with the straitjacket holding him tight, he can’t get enough leverage to kick the door hard enough. “I don’t belong here! I need to get out! I need to get out!”
He yells, and he fights. Finally, when his muscles quiver from exhaustion and his throat burns dry, he collapses and says no more.
- - - - -
“What’d he do to himself?” Harvey’s voice, distant and blurry.
Dean moans. He’s groggy and disoriented, and there are probably enough drugs in his system to knock down a horse. He can see their shadows surrounding him as they talk above him.
“Started heading for the main exit doors. Don’t know what came over him. He got violent with us when he was approached.”
Harvey murmurs unintelligibly. “Didn’t expect him to go down without a fight, but I’m still surprised all the same.”
“Doctor?”
“Keep an eye on him,” Harvey replies. “Keep a close eye on this one. We’re going to have our hands full.”
- - - - -
“I’m going to try increasing the dosage of your medication,” Dr. Harvey says a few days later. They’re twenty minutes into a session, and nothing has been said about the attempted escape earlier in the week. Dean isn’t going to bring it up; he’s not sure if Harvey will either.
Harvey clicks his pen and scribbles something illegible on his steno. “I think it will help eliminate-or at least, dull-your hallucinations.”
Dean, where?
Dean grimaces, gives no verbal indication he’s heard the voice again when he replies, “You want me to forget about Sam.”
Harvey looks up from his accumulated notes over the tops of his glasses and settles on Dean’s pinched face. Behind him, a breeze moves the curtains covering his opened window. The air smells dirty, of decay and sickness.
Harvey licks his bottom lip and folds his hands in his lap. “After what happened previously this week, I think it is in your best interest to accept that Sam does not exist. Not like you or I exist. This hallucination you refer to as ‘Sam’ is harmful to your health. It’s preventing you from moving forward with your life.”
“And what life is that?” Dean snaps back. “Those people you keep calling my parents are dead. I don’t have my car. I don’t have my clothes. I don’t have any of the people I recognize. This isn’t my life.”
Harvey sighs sadly like he recognizes this argument all too well and knows there’s no placating answer. “Yes, Dean, this is your life. The only one you have, and if you want to get out of this hospital, go on to do bigger and better things, then you need to understand that all of these things that supposedly happened aren’t real. You have a life here and now. You have parents who love you more than anything. They want you to come and be with them, be the son that you were before the sickness. And you need to accept that if you ever want to get out of here.”
- - - - -
If a person kills himself in a dream, then he will wake up in the real world. This is the lesson Dean remembers all too well from when the djinn stole him away to a world not so dissimilar from this one now. However, he realizes as he lies in bed and stares at the ceiling, a psychiatric hospital is the worst place to commit suicide.
But, he vows to leave. One way or another.
Much later that night with a concocted plan in his head, Dean creeps from his room. After his first attempted escape, he is now more careful where he steps and where the cameras scan. Fortunately, he arrives at the room where the medications are stored without a problem.
He picks the lock with a paperclip he slipped from a stack of unguarded papers on a psychiatrist’s desk. The door gives at last, a soft click of victory, and he slips inside, closing it behind him.
Even though the lighting coming through the small pane in the door is weak, he can see well enough for his job nonetheless. In the shadows, his eyes adjust to see the walls lined with shelves and the shelves filled with bottles. The bottles hold the very thing he’s depending on to end this nightmare: Pills.
He isn’t choosy as he grabs the nearest bottle and pops the lid. He shakes a dozen or so pills into his hand as casual as he would with chocolate candies or salted peanuts. Now, though, he pauses and stares for a moment.
If this plan does not work and if he does not leave this dream, then he will die here. Here, where there’s no Dad to make a deal to save his soul and no reaper with yellow eyes to pull him back from the brink. There will be no more life whatsoever.
Here, though, here in this hospital and world, there is no Sam. There is Mom and Dad and the promise of them, but not Sam. There is no Sam, there is no hope of ever finding Sam, and Dean will not stay here with that knowledge in him.
He swallows the pills.
He gags, choking down the pills because they’re dry and he has no water. They’re too many, too big, but he forces himself to swallow them anyway. When they’re gone, he moves onto the next bottle. And the next. And the next.
Not long after he loses count of the pills and the containers, the room begins to spin madly. He collapses on trembling hands and knees to the ground where he vomits, back arching, onto the tiled floor. His head whirls, and he feels strangely disconnected from his body. The entire hospital must hear the frantic beating of his struggling heart.
Gasping, panting, he tries to claw his way back into a standing position. When he staggers up, white-knuckled hands clutching the shelves, his knees buckle, and he tumbles to the floor. Vomit again spews from his mouth; it splatters onto his shirt and hands.
He can’t breathe, and the world whips around him in a crazed blur. His body shakes violently, and his toes are overtaken by a strange numbness that snakes its way up his spine.
Let it end, he thinks, please, please, let it end. Let me go home. Let me go home.
His breathing is pinched, a high-pitched wheeze from between his lips, and at last, the room collapses down around him.
- - - - -
Upon waking, he has a brief moment where his heart leaps in happiness and he thinks that he succeeded. That he’s back in the motel with his car parked outside the door and Sam sleeping in the bed next to him.
“Good to see you awake, Dean.”
His heart drops.
He shifts and looks up to see Harvey standing above with a clipboard in hand.
“Gave us quite the scare,” he says. “We thought we were going to lose you for a moment there.” The mattress sinks beneath him when he sits down on the end of the bed beside Dean’s feet. “You seemed to be making progress in our sessions. What happened?”
Dean frowns, upset. The knowledge that he failed at escape and is now truly trapped here makes him feel hollow and worthless.
“Sam,” he croaks after a moment. His throat burns upon speaking, and he winces, swallowing painfully.
“They had to put a tube down your throat to pump your stomach. It’ll probably be sore for a couple days.” Harvey sighs, shakes his head, and when he speaks again, his words are slow, chosen carefully. “Don’t you think this Sam thing has gone on long enough? Dean, your mother is in my office right now, crying because her son tried to kill himself tonight. Do you want to be the one to explain to her that it was over a silly hallucination?” He pauses and meets Dean’s eyes. “Do you?”
Slowly, Dean shakes his head.
“All right,” Harvey replies, “then we need to focus on you getting better. I’ve increased the strength of your medication, so when you take your meds tomorrow evening, they’ll help to alleviate these schizophrenic symptoms faster. For now, though,” he continues with a pat on Dean’s blanketed leg, “I want you to rest. I’ll talk to your parents. Don’t worry about that.”
Once Harvey has left, Dean rolls onto his back. He stares at the shadowed ceiling. His tongue tastes of bile, and his body aches.
He wishes so much that the pills had ended this madness once and for all.
Dean, where?
“No,” he whispers aloud.
He lies, staring and silent, and he begins to shut down.
- - - - -
The pills are white. Of course they are. Different shapes and sizes, but white all the same.
“Glass of water?” the technician chirps as Dean holds the array of drugs in his palm.
“Nah,” he says morosely. “I’m fine, sweetheart.” He tosses the pills in his mouth, tasting their powdery bitterness until he throws his head back and swallows them dry.
The technician, a young girl no more than twenty, gives him a wary smile. “Have a good night, sir.”
“I’ll try,” he says as she exits his room, onto the next patient. His stomach twists, something hot and heavy in its pit. “I’ll at least try.”
- - - - -
The shower room is empty when he arrives. A faucet drip-drops, a steady plinking sound in the emptiness. He sighs. The silence is both welcomed and hated.
He strips of his clothing, hangs the white shirt and pants on the hook at the end of the shower stall. He steps inside and pulls the flimsy plastic curtain behind him.
The floor is hard, wet, and cold against his bare feet. He turns on the water. It’s too hot and too forceful, smells of sulfur, and he knows he should turn it down, but he doesn’t. He stands there for a long moment, letting the crushing water beat him and warm him.
He can’t feel the pills yet, but they’re working all the same. They’re strong drugs, better than anything he could scam off the streets for an undercover gig, and he knows that when he wakes tomorrow with the powerful drugs in his system, he won’t remember a thing. He won’t remember Sam.
In his mind, the only place left untouched by this place and his monsters, he hears Sam talking to him. Their conversations over midnight miles and long lunches. The words, Sam’s voice, it’s all comforting. Comfort he will soon be losing to the medication creeping its way through his blood.
The tears come, hard and fast, and it’s the first he’s cried since he woke here one too many days ago. He’s breaking down, breaking apart with the knowledge that by tomorrow when the sun rises, he’ll have nothing once again.
He sags against the wall of the shower, and in here, the water and his tears feel one in the same, so it’s that much easier to deny now. That much easier to lie now.
Dean, Sam says, and his voice is soft. It’s warm and gentle. Dean.
“You’re not real,” Dean spits, water in his throat, water in his eyes, burning and stinging. “You’re not real,” he repeats because he wants to get out of here, he wants to see what waits beyond the wall in the courtyard, he wants to wear more than white. “You’re not real,” he says because he wants his mind back.
- - - - -
He wakes the next morning and dresses in the clothes laid out for him. His head spins, and he wobbles for a moment at the end of his bed. But he can’t remember what happened last night well enough to know if he simply ate something funny at dinner to explain away his dizziness.
He dresses, and he takes the medication the pretty young technician offers him.
She smiles. “Did you have a good night?” she asks like she’s referring to something they shared.
He pauses, can’t remember last night, but decides that’s okay, so he says, “I think I did.”
She smiles again, nods a small nod. “Glad to hear it.”
Dr. Harvey’s office is the one at the end of the hall, turn left, and up the stairs to the third door on the right. The door’s opened when Dean arrives, and Harvey looks up in surprise as Dean enters and sits down.
“I didn’t expect to see you so early,” Harvey says. “Your session’s not for another hour.”
“Thought I’d get a jumpstart on it. You’ve got a second or two?”
“Sure do. Make yourself comfortable.”
Dean crosses his legs. He likes Harvey’s office better than the other doctors’. It’s comforting and familiar. In a hospital as large as this one, it’s easy to feel lost, but here in Harvey’s office, he knows right where he is.
“How’re you feeling today, Dean?”
Dean nods, short and curt. “Good, good. Best I have in a while.”
“That’s great to hear.” Harvey looks down at his notes. His desk is a bit on the messy side, so he has to slide some papers around to find the one he’s looking for. “Have you had any hallucinations today?”
Dean frowns, confused. “Hallucinations?”
“Seeing things, hearing things. People who might not really exist?”
Dean shrugs. He doesn’t quite know why the doctor’s asking him all this. He’d just like to get out of the hospital to be at home with his parents. “Nothing out the ordinary, Doc.”
- - - - -
They don’t release him from the hospital just yet. Not as soon as Dean had hoped anyway. Harvey says they want to make sure his schizophrenia is really under control to avoid any future relapses.
“We’ll give you a week or so,” Harvey tells him. “And see how you feel. I don’t want to risk any side effects cropping up while you’re with your parents. Wouldn’t be fair to them to have to handle such things.”
Dean nods, agrees, even though he wishes he could leave here already. But, he’ll wait if he has to. He’ll wait if the doctor tells him to.
- - - - -
Late at night, when the rest of the hospital is silent and sleeping, save for the steady creaking of the old furnace, he hears a voice.
Dean, it says. It’s male, soft and pleading. Dean.
He lurches up in bed. Is this one of the hallucinations Harvey was telling him about? He swallows dryly. “You’re not real,” he whispers into the darkness, voice scratchy. “Go away.”
Dean, it says again.
He lies back down and decides to ignore the voice. As he’s drifting back into sleep, he hears quick footsteps hurrying down the hall past his room.
Curiously, as no one is supposed to be awake at this time of the night, he creeps from his bed, careful not to make the mattress squeak like he knows it can, and he goes to the door. Maybe one of the other patients is having a nightmare. Maybe they’re admitting someone new. Slowly, ever so carefully, he opens his door just enough to peek into the hallway.
A door at the end is wide open and spewing bright light down the corridor. Doctors stand in front of it, gesticulating and murmuring, and he sees Harvey among them.
Dean. It’s more forceful now. Dean.
He closes his eyes, hating this voice inside of him. He wishes it would go away. He’ll have to tell Harvey he’s hearing things again.
Dean, where are you?
- - - - -
“What was going on last night?” Dean asks.
Harvey looks taken aback. “Oh?”
“Last night. You and all the other doctors. What was going on?”
Something flickers past Harvey’s face before his features relax. “We had some electrical issues. Lights wouldn’t turn off in that room. The patients were getting upset.”
Dean grunts in understanding.
Harvey sighs. “But enough about me. We’re here to talk about you, right?” He pats his notepad as proof of this. “Everything still good? Any hallucinations or other troubling symptoms we should be discussing?”
He thinks of the voice from last night, and how much he hated it. But now, in the daylight reflection, he thinks of how sad it was. How it seemed to be begging him. It wasn’t a bad voice. No need for Harvey to know, he figures. Not like anything’s going to happen because of it.
“Everything’s great,” Dean replies, and Harvey smiles like this is the perfect answer.
- - - - -
He wakes during the night, as Harvey’s promise of “just one more week” turns into “well, let’s wait a few more days-just in case.”
The doctors gather nightly around the brightly lit door. One by one, they go inside and close the door behind them. Time passes, sometimes an hour and sometimes longer, and then, one by one, out they come.
He crouches in his cracked doorway, watching them and wondering where he can find the truth in all this. But he’s never alone on these nightly stakeouts.
Dean.
He closes his eyes.
Dean, where are you?
He closes his eyes. He listens.
Dean, where are you? I’ll find you.
He closes his eyes. He tries to remember.
- - - - -
The sunlight is melting from purple to salmon when he goes to that door at the end of the hallway early the next morning. The halls are silent and the doctors have left the room over two hours ago, so he figures he’s safe. Once he reaches it, he sees how the light still creeps out from the gap at the bottom of the door.
He glances behind him before he grabs the doorknob to try and open the door. An electric jolt passes through him, and he recoils instantly, gulping down the pain. His heart skips frantically, pulse upset. He swears and licks his lips, but he tries it again anyway. He feels electricity zing through his skin, but he concentrates on counting to five, huffing angry curses beneath his breath.
When he reaches five, he tumbles away, hand smoking and heart racing.
Mom died in the house fire when the demon came and burned everything away. Dad died when he sold his soul to save Dean’s life. Sam died when Jake put a knife in his back and left him to fall in the mud. Dean brought Sam back with a demon’s deal.
Dean died when the hounds came for him, and Lilith laughed, and Sam cried, and after that, there was-
Dean, where are you? I’ll find you.
He remembers. He remembers the before. He remembers the after. He remembers it all.
I’m in Hell, Sammy. I’m in Hell, and I think I’ve found the doorway out.
- - - - -
He can’t open the door because it’s locked. He can’t pick the lock because there’s no hole to be picked. There’s the possible method of breaking the door off its hinges, but he decides against that, knowing that he’s not that strong with all the drugs in his system. So, he begins to formulate a plan, and he’s pretty sure he’ll get himself killed for it. Then again, he figures he’s already dead, so what’s the difference?
“So, anything you want to talk about today?” Harvey asks later at the usual session, folding his hands in his lap.
“Yeah, actually, there is.”
“Oh?”
“Your window. Why are the blinds always closed? Why can’t we see what’s outside?”
Harvey’s smile wavers, and then he’s as calm and composed as before. “Come now, Dean, we’re here to talk about you. Not about the status of my window.”
Dean grunts. “Just weird, y’know. Can’t see past the wall, can’t see out your friggin’ window. Like you guys are trying to hide something.”
“Just trying to minimize any and all distractions for our patients so they can make the best recovery.”
Dean chuckles, can’t help himself now that he knows the truth of the matter. Fire and brimstone sure aren’t Prozac and lithium, last time he checked.
“Something funny, Dean?” Harvey asks skeptically.
“Nah. So, Doc, how ‘bout that schizophrenia? What a bitch, right?”
- - - - -
He knows he has to act soon. They’ll be onto him sooner or later, and now that he knows, he’s not going to stay here any longer than he has to.
Late at night, when the doctors go to their door, he waits in his room for the right time. He has to move fast while their backs are turned. Soon as the last doctor steps up to the door, Dean flies from his room.
He runs down the corridor, bare feet soundless on the carpeting. The last doctor steps up to the opened room spilling out its brilliant light, and Dean leaps in. The door swings shut behind him.
Inside, the light is so bright he instinctively closes his eyes against it. When he does open them, ever so slowly, his stomach drops, and the hair on the back of his neck stands up.
Thousands upon thousands of miles of endless twists and turns, the hellish barbed wire goes on. A person here, a person there, caught like flies in a web with hooks in their flesh and under their tendons to hold them fast. Electricity zips and zaps down the lines, and he can hear thunder rolling in the distance. Small black clouds hover over the people before moving on elsewhere, and the people scream, wail against the pain. They call out the names of their loved ones and their pleas to God, but no one hears them here. No one cares.
He’s in that nightmare. He-his body, him-is in there.
He looks behind him, back to where the hospital once stood and a wall rises, high and dark, into the blood red sky. It goes on for as far as he can see, blocking the hospital from this outside abomination and tricking the souls that remain trapped on the inside.
Dean, where are you? I’ll find you.
He swallows, sick to his stomach.
Gotta find myself first Sammy. Gotta find me before you can.
- - - - -
He doesn’t know how long he searches. Time in this place is futile and meaningless. Eventually, though, eventually, after climbing through barbed wire loops and slipping down electrified tunnels of darkness, when he’s bleeding and bruised, he finds his body dangling above an endless pit in the ground.
He stares at himself, at his barely-breathing, not-quite corpse. The eyes are closed, the entirety of it crusted with blood. The muscles have blackened around the holes where hooks hold him tight. He hardly recognizes his own features through the bruises and the swelling.
He reaches out to his body, to grab hold and lift it from the hooks. He reaches out, and his hand passes through its bloody wrist. Confused, he tries again, but he holds only the rank air of Hell in his palm. This is his body, he should be able to-He stops, stares, and realizes that this is not his body.
His body was left behind. Left in the room after the hounds brought his soul here and his flesh remained for Sam to care for. What hangs in front of him now with its torn shirt and mangled bare feet must be the part of his soul that stayed here after the demons split him in two so they could have his conscious part in the hospital.
Swallowing, he focuses on the body. If this is part of him, he should be able to touch it. Maybe he only has to try harder. He holds his hand out, prickling as the thunder rolls in the distance, and touches the body’s arm. Pain instantly passes through him, and in that brief moment before he retracts his hand, he can feel the blood crusted dry over his face and the hooks curving into his muscles. The sensation tears the air from his lungs.
Yet, he tries again, this time touching the body’s face. His fingers pass through the bruised cheek, and the pain returns, nearly blinding him from its intensity, and he grits his teeth.
The body opens its eyes.
“Dean.”
He whips around, breathless and shaking, hand clutched to his chest.
Harvey stands in front of him, but he wears his demon face. The one of rotting flesh and cracked bones, where his eyes are blackened and cold.
“Couldn’t keep a secret from you, after all,” Harvey sneers.
“Thought I’d be happier in a psych ward than out here?”
“Not exactly. We knew how to hurt you the most. Drive you to the brink of madness. Take away the very thing you cared about.” Sam’s name remains unspoken but understood.
Dean.
“I’m getting out.”
“Oh?” Harvey says.
Dean, where are you?
“Going back to my hallucinations,” Dean answers, reaching again for the image of his body. His hand passes through the arm futilely.
“You’ll die on the way out.”
“Watch me.”
Dean, where are you? I’ll find you.
“I’ve got a brother up there waiting for me, Doc.”
Harvey sneers and grabs Dean by the wrist. His fingers are acid, and they leave welts where they burn Dean’s skin. “You’re not getting away so easily,” Harvey growls.
With Harvey still holding him, Dean moves for the other half of his soul one more time. He grabs it.
Madly, he lurches forward, wrapping himself around the body that stares at him with wide eyes. Before Harvey can tug him back, Dean leaps off the cracked earth, pulling the body off the hooks, and Harvey screams. Dean falls, body in his arms, falls faster and faster. Faster and faster with the wind whipping past him and the wails rising, faster and faster-
Dean, where are you? I’ll find you-
-until-
Dean,
-until-
“Dean. Dean, oh God, oh God…Oh Dean.”
- - - - -
Dean opens his eyes, and he sees only black.
The pain rips through him and forces him to close his eyes. He groans, tries to move his hand to his head, but he’s wet and sticky, and he knows he’s covered in blood again. His body is screaming, burning in every fiber, and he worries he may never be able to move properly again. Walk, run, drive-
“Dean?”
It’s real, that voice. It’s real, and it’s wonderful, and oh, God, it’s-
“Sammy,” he rasps, tastes blood on his tongue, the sweet warmth rising up from his throat.
Sam’s hand is on his face, large fingers cupping his ruined cheekbone. “I looked for you,” Sam says, and Dean, eyes closed, can hear the tears in his voice. “I looked and I called, and I-I was trying to scour ever part of Hell that I could with the spell Bobby gave me, but I-I couldn’t find you. Where-where were you?”
Dean tries to smile, but it’s too painful, and his face simply twists awkwardly. He knows Sam sees the smile underneath the damage. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
Sam breathes, grief choking his relieved laughter. “Yeah,” he whispers, hand on Dean’s shoulder, hand that will heal him, hand that searched for him. “Yeah, you are."
End
City of Angels soundtrack