A Proslogium to the Fields of Perdition, for kalliel
Title: A Proslogium to the Fields of Perdition
Recipient: kalliel
Wordcount: ~8000
Rating: thematic R
Warnings:[Spoiler (click to open)]
suicidal ideation, total and utter non-linearity, tropes related to S9 finale, language, horror, BUGS. Some smoking as well.
Author's Notes: Um. I mutilated your prompts beyond all recognition, dear kalliel, but the shadow of multiple prompts are scattered throughout this fic. There's some total darkness, some entomology, a bit in future tense and some amount of water. I did what you said and challenged myself a bit. Let's hope it worked at least a little! This fic is a jigsaw-fic of sorts, so will probably only make sense by the end.
Summary: So maybe this is about memory. Or what happens post-memory. Or just the dismantling of thought. Let’s say you’re trying to save your demon brother. Let’s define “save”.
The original fields of perdition are red with poppies and not grey with asphodels like Homer and Ovid might lead you to believe.
The farther banks of Lethe are crowded with these flowers, and it's their potent poison that makes it the River of Forgetfulness. Where the river ends is the House of Hypnos, that strange and ephemeral God of Sleep, whose roof hangs with thousands of black-eyed poppies.
In the Second Battle of Ypres, which lasted just three days short of a month in 1916, thousands of soldiers fell bleeding into the poppy fields of Belgium. Those that didn't bleed burned inside out from the chlorine-gas attacks, blinded and shuddering from asphyxia.
The Germans carried the gas in canisters and four of their own set it loose outside their trenches, where it would waft towards the other side. Resistance didn't do much good against wind. You can't use mortars and bayonets against poison. You could try running, but Lady Luck doles out in miserly portions.
Poison knows no sides, being blind and belligerent. And so those being attacked choked on it, but so did the ones on the other side who let the devil out.
But, well, someone has to let it out.
Hey, it's a war. You pick four of yours every day, leave them to breathe in fumes that burn right through their tissues, and you justify that all is fair in war. It's your country you're fighting for. It's your nation's pride. What's four casualties for four hundred on the other side? If ye break faith-we shall not sleep, and all that.
You pick four of yours to let out the gas and tell them, time's up, today's the day you die.
The least you can do is save their souls.
#
If Charlotte Baines is an asphodel, pallid and ghostly, her sister Nora is a bright red poppy, standing solitary in a sepia garden. Her eyes glitter black beneath dark red bangs, and the silver rings looped through her ears jingles as she scrawls on the motel register.
Charlotte's smoking a pack of Dunhills- she'd offered one at his arrival and Sam had shaken his head. No. She's got nicotine stains on the fingers that she's using to turn the pages of a manga novel, and a cigarette between her lips. Sam's too far gone to actually smell the smoke. There are plumes of ghostly grey dancing in the air, but it's hard to tell if that's just the fog stealing in.
His lungs constrict. The room spins.
Charlotte asks, "Where are you coming from?"
Sam doesn't know. He leans against the counter and just peers at her till she sighs.
"Check out's at three pm, sharp."
Sam leans against the counter and watches his fingers push the rent of a single room towards the girls. His fingers beat Morse code on the table. He can't help it, and he can't help miserably twisting his head slowly this way and that, trying to find an orientation at which it feels more like a human head and less like a sack to hold in a drooping cannonball. He blinks and it feels as if he's looking at the world through a silk screen. Light dervishes spin in his vision. There's a mildly malevolent looking red lamp on the table, and the windows of the motel are dewy with condensation.
Sam breathes.
Outside, the motel sign flashes wearily, half its bulbs gone with no one to bother replacing them. Tonight's muggy in Pennsylvania.
"Do you want any hot water?"
Sam sneezes in reply. It's jarring, and sends a splinter of ice shivering down his spine. When he's blinked the water from his eyes, there's a space to sign his name in a shaky hand. The pen stays in the air for a minute while he tries to remember. Sluggish panic, another sneeze, and bless you, in Dean's imagined voice. (He's not here.) And then the pen shudders on the paper-a squiggle of blue, a hieroglyph. Interpret as you will.
Heaven's Curious rests on the table beside his arm, its muzzle and barrel the matte blue of a storm-cloud. An efflorescence of vines and the maker's symbol on its stock. If Sam was capable of thoughts that are more than just a random jumble of images, he'd wonder why a giant rifle in plain sight isn't freaking these girls out. But he isn't, and so he focuses on the Pepsi-Cola clock ticking behind the girls, grounds himself by counting the seconds 'til Nora hands him a key.
The girls are still hopped up on hospitality. "You want some NyQuil?"
"No." Sam's voice is going, and it comes out as little more than air. He takes the key and his relief is so profound that he could cry, but the girls are looking at him, possibly evaluating his chances of surviving the night, so try again, Sam. "I'll be fine."
He sounds like shit. He wouldn't believe himself. He shivers, alternately too cold and too hot.
"Booze?" Charlotte asks.
Are they bullshitting him? But no, she's serious. He wonders if booze and that squiggly line between her eyebrows is code for hard drugs, because maybe he could use those. He breathes in air that doesn't quite reach his lungs, and reassures her: "I'll be fine."
"You have to eat something."
The girls still don't look at the gun. Sam grabs it and forces a smile in their direction, and then walks out into the misty night. The fog's so thick; Sam can barely see two feet in front of him, and what little he does is shrouded like an overzealous bride. He stumbles along a gravel path lined with bright, red flowers in earthen vases and comes to a bizarrely complicated door. It fights him. He fights back. When it finally surrenders and clicks open, the dark maw of the motel room blooms before him, some sad necrotic flower, and Sam blinks into the gloom and nearly falls inside.
He grabs the frame. His vision strips to a monochrome grey.
Then everything goes dark and he's in the desert.
The air is cold as ice. The stars are enormous, terrifying, white pin-pricks in a gluey sludge of swirling clouds. The moon's full, huge, the kind that you serenade with howls, and Sam's looking at it through his fingers. Then he looks down at the hard, packed ground.
A scarab beetle scuttles by, and Dean pins it down with a finger. Dean's kneeling opposite Sam, and he's grinning.
(It's been sixteen days since Dean disappeared. He can't be here.)
"Look," he says, and the beetle's wings open on either side of its body. They whir like blades. Dean's eyes are the same black as the beetle, and his expression is genuine delight.
(He can't be here.)
The beetle whirs harder, terror in its tiny brain.
"Awesome, huh?"
(This didn't happen.)
#
Heaven's Curious isn't actually called that.
Its original name is long and German, hard name with too many f's that doesn't sit easy on the tongue. It translates to a slippery Our Souls will be Saved. This is written carefully in a Men of Letters' journal, along with the name of the maker and his mark: a poppy flower.
Jost Rachlin of Frankfurt au Main was a thief first, then a priest, and then a man who made exotic fire-arms. He grew up shooting specters with flaming muskets and helping his grandfather translate runes, but later fell out of the family business, until a heist took his eye out and he found Faith as he lay on a hospital bed. While the Canadians were still complaining about slow-action Ross rifles and dying in trenches suffused with chlorine-gas, Rachlin was crafting a gun from metal and magic and sigils in Enochian-a gun to save the souls of his brothers.
During the First World War, this gun killed exactly twenty-eight soldiers.
Like all things magic, the gun shape-shifts in fixed origami parameters. Sometimes it's a pistol, light coruscating along the short stock. Sometimes it's a rifle, long and sleek and dangerous. In the Second Battle of Ypres, the soldiers that it killed fell into dark red fields of hypnotic Belgian poppies.
It was mercy: the chlorine in their system would have killed them anyway.
Every soldier's last word was Amen. All of them were German.
#
(Dear Sam is how every email starts-which seems oddly formal and one word too patient for Dean. Maybe Sam, if he'd stayed past Jessica and done law school, would have written plain, achromatic cards that started that way for Christmas. Dear Dean. A Sam from a parallel-world, some other non-deterministic universe; where not every little thing leads to the same final state.
Dear Sam, do you remember-)
Sam remembers the flaming pants incident.
He must have been thirteen, fourteen-that age when two Sams seemed to be battling for his body.
One tried to curl into a short, stunted chrysalis. The other tugged and pulled, ruthless in its desire to grow. At night the first Sam seemed to run screaming through his nerves and bones, hurt and surprised at the changes.
The night of the flaming pants, he and Dean sat in the Impala in some random city street, and midnight gleamed neon all around them. There was a tree above, dropping tiny yellow flowers on the wet windshield with every breeze. They stuck to the glass and it wasn't beautiful but dirty, somehow, the way sludgy flowers are. Raindrops plinked on the hot metal with a hiss of steam. Dean smoked cheap cigarettes, but batted Sam away when he tried to reach for the pack.
"Never smoke," he said. Dean was only doing it because there were still three claw marks running parallel and unhealed on his back, and he wanted to do something to stop the itching. He said.
There was Eric Burdon on the radio, and Sam was mourning his jeans.
"'Least the wolf didn't get you, Sam."
"They already think I'm a punk at school with all your stupid shirts, how'm I supposed to show up in shredded jeans?"
Dean blew a puff of smoke in his face. "So wear something else tomorrow."
"Like what? You remember the banshee, genius? She drowned my duffel."
(Or maybe it was a selkie, or a danaid. Was it a danaid? Sam's thirty, not thirteen, and maybe all of this didn't happen this way. But Dean says it did. In his e-mail, Dean's very clear. Banshee. Dean says.)
Dean looked at him long and hard, and then got out of the car. "Yeah, wait here."
Sam waited. He watched a dirty yellow moon course slowly through shreds of clouds. Eric and the Animals was replaced by the Beatles, and then Johnny Cash, before Dean came back-couple of beers and a lumpy package in his arms. There was a black bruise showing along his cheek, curiously shaped almost like a tiny, fey hand.
"Try it on."
Sam caught the brown paper package that Dean tossed him. "Really? Here?"
Dean shrugged. "What's the backseat for?"
It took a while. Sam was newly skinny, but the jeans were still kind of small. He tugged it on as high as it would go, then climbed out and rocked gently on his toes, getting it to stay on his hips. And then he looked down.
"Jesus, Dean."
Dean lit up brighter than the tip of his cigarette. "Christ, they actually fit you." He laughed. "Punk's pretty cool, okay? I read this somewhere: once is a faux pas, twice is a statement. Go make a statement, bitch."
No one outdid Dean on the wank.
"Is this what you do all day, Dean? Read Seventeen?" Sam struck a pose that only made Dean laugh harder."Marie Claire?"
"You wish you could read what I read, Jughead."
"You're such a jerk, Dean," Sam climbed back in the car, twisting the flesh of Dean's forearm in a hard pinch. Sam hoped the bruise would match the one on his stupid face. He shook his head, said it with greater emphasis: "You're such a jerk."
"Fuck you! You wanted pants. Now you have pants. Stop manhandling me. "
Sam had sat in that car and looked at Dean, and Dean's eyes had been like stains of ink in the near-dark.
Sam had known, right then, that someday he'll need to remember this; that he'll look up at this from wherever he's on the slide and think of how everything has slipped sideways since.
The flaming pants only fit him for two months, but Sam remembers the weird graphic neon of the fire-design. Because, secretly? Sam kind of liked them. Not so much the unfortunate design as the fact that Dean bought it on a whim, at midnight, just because he felt like it. And because Sam had no one else in the entire world like he had Dean.
Do you remember?
("Do you remember" is how this event is framed in the e-mail.
'You know that time when' is Dean-speak for something that Sam will remember. 'Do you remember' is for the things Sam might not recognize. There's probably something for events that didn't actually happen, things that Dean is probably making up without even realizing it, but Sam couldn't pick them out if he tried-his memory has to follow Dean.
Everything that Dean says happened must have happened, because Dean never went anywhere that Sam didn't follow, sooner or later.
Not even Hell.)
#
Fifteen e-mails, one for each day, each one long and winding and unfocused, and it's as if Dean's just throwing whole paragraphs at the screen, like paintball globs.
Sam prints them out and keeps them in the glove compartment, all of them coffee-stained and smeared with his fingerprints, creased and un-creased so many times that the paper is permanently marked.
Dear Sam, do you remember-and, Dear Sam, you know that time when-and, Dear Sam, don't say I told you so but this demon thing is-and, Dear Sam, you're really not going to get anywhere with that haircut-
Sam doesn't write back. What's he going to say? That he's got a gun that sends the souls of those it kills straight to Heaven? Don't pass Go, don't collect 200, just breeze right on past the pearly gates like you never had a stain on your resume? Heaven's Curious, and he's supposed to shoot Dean's head off with the thing, if he wants for it to save Dean's soul.
(Dear Sam, sometimes I think of sticking my Blade in your stomach and twisting it right up to your neck, but I won't do it because I love-)
The e-mails are Dean screwing with him as Dean has always screwed with him. Sam reads. Sam ignores. Sam re-reads. All these days on the road, and he pretends that he doesn't catch glimpses of Dean. He walks through nights that get colder, and sometimes leaves the car keys in the ignition when he goes out. If Dean wants her, he can have her. Maybe Sam will feel better on foot, knowing that Dean has enough of himself in him to still miss her. Sam's blinked his eyes open in the car a few times and thought he'd seen Dean's silhouette leaning against the hood before his mind wandered further into the realms of sleep.
(Dear Sam, I know you're not sleeping anymore-)
(Dear Sam, There's a monster called love. It smiles bloody.)
That's what happens when your brother dies and gets resurrected as Hell's Most Enigmatic of the Year. You drive around trying to figure out what you're supposed to figure out (Save him? Kill him? Save him by killing him?) and he flickers in and out of your field like a rare constellation, or a deadly bright beetle.
You can't catch him.
He won't catch you.
Several times during nights, Dean blinks into sight somewhere: in Sam's motel room doorway, the edge of his bed, the hood of the car, under that lamp-post. Sam wishes, unfairly and without much conviction, that Dean would just let him grieve a while, just let him deal with this with his head screwed on right. But all his versions of Dean always has that soft, scathing look that Dean seldom gets and Sam hates; which means Dean's waiting for him to catch up, man up, come on, Sam-take the leap, do something.
Once upon a time, Sam thought he could go on. That he could stitch together the space where Dean used to be and hope the frayed ends stayed on the strength of those stitches.
Now he's too tired to be brave.
#
James Carlton isn't a very well-known artist, although he did get his following among members of the Fortean circle.
Those that loved the darkness, those that could read Charles Fort and spend hundreds of hours dissecting and analyzing the true meaning of occult and metaphysics, those rare variants of people who didn't squirm from mutilation artists and celebrated murder as a form of liberation from earthly evils-those were Carlton's fans. Sounds like a horror movie pastiche, but who the fuck cares.
In his later years, he turned to photography and photo-manipulation-producing fetish photographs for high-brow clients, artful and implausible pornography, his studio a grotesquerie that catered to strange appetites.
But Carlton's most famous work is a rendering of Rodin's Gates of Hell. The original version itself has a couple of bronze casts, one of which is at Stanford's Cantor Center of Arts, but Carlton's version, on display at a much lesser Central California museum, is a tall, intimidating painting that deviates greatly from the source material.
For example, every figure of near-human attribute is dressed in a shroud of bugs. Beetles; each one gold, pink, hard and shiny and vastly different from the normal beetles. The center of the painting, where the Gates are typically closed in Rodin's version, is open just a crack in Carlton's. The inside is a writhing mass of black and purple acrylic, because Hell isn't always bright and infernal.
Mostly, it's dark. And cold.
James Carlton spent seven months travelling the brutally cold peninsulas of China, battling winds and ice and ancient magic. When he came back to his Joaquin Valley home, he wrote in his diary: I've been to Hell-which has been wondered about in dark circles since. Could it be metaphor? Hyperbole? Or, depending on who you are discussing this with, literal?
Maybe Carlton picked up the Chinese characters that line the side of the painting during his travel, and thought it an interesting addition to the mystique of it.
Or maybe the Chinese is an invitation to someplace mostly dark. And cold.
#
Sam burns.
It's still okay his first day at the motel in Pennsylvania, which he spends face-down in bed, breathing in the mildewed scent of the sheets and sneezing his way through the day. He curls up as the day gets colder, uncomfortable from the chills, his head too heavy to lift off the pillow. The heater seems busted, and he watches as cold stills the air in the room, forms wispy white clouds. He tries reciting The Charge of the Light Brigade to try and lull himself to sleep-old trick, old story-but somehow, he just can't.
There's a model of a Ferris Wheel sitting in a glass enclosure on the table. It's got no reason to be there. At the corner of Sam's vision, it turns and turns. It shouldn't be doing that.
Sam coughs, wet and hard. He listens to the radio. There's no rock station, but there's classical music. Sam drifts uneasily to Yo-Yo Ma's sweeping cello notes that crash and fall in his ears. He watches the open window. The sunlight's almost gone, and an oily sort of evening is setting in out there. There's a semi in the lot, gleaming like an insect carapace.
A gold and pink beetle sits on the window.
Sam frowns and burrows deeper into the uncomfortably small bed.
There are pills in the trunk, he knows that. Sweat sticks his hair into clumps on his forehead and the base of his neck. He breathes in and the air rattles in his chest-too little air, too much fluid-and he knows there are pills in the trunk. Pills. Thermometer. Syrup. Something. Whatever you need to survive until you can drop your ass on a seat across a doctor. Sam can even see the car in the parking lot, glittering red under that unhappy flickering sign, but he makes no move.
The beetle traces a slow path down the sill and goes to sit near the baseboard.
The Ferris Wheel turns.
Someone knocks. Sam ignores them, but when the knocking continues well past thirty minutes, he drags himself off the bed and manages to stumble to the door. He doesn't recognize the girls for a few minutes, sees them in pointillized fractals that don't reconstitute into normal human shape. The fractals confer among themselves, shifting on their feet. Sam's eyes water and he wants the world to stop spinning, but you can't have everything. He holds onto the door frame and thinks of how much it hurts to swallow.
And then Charlotte steps into the light, squint-eyed and looking him up and down, holding out a can of re-heated soup.
"Guess you aren't checking out today."
Guess not.
Sam doesn't drink the soup. He sits on the bed with his legs drawn up and watches Breakfast at Tiffany's without once registering a line. He wishes fervently that Audrey hadn't found the cat at the end. He shivers and hallucinates that there are hordes of beetles on the ceiling, that they are watching him, and that they will drop on him any moment now. Sam thinks, he's not dead yet. He's not food for the chthonic critters, yet.
The beetles are too early.
They carry the Night, do beetles. Across the sky.
They carry the Night till the Sun rises. Or so said the Egyptians.
They carry the Night like Dean did, all loudness and rhythm and wanderlust.
There's a black horse outside the window, with a mouthful of embers. It whinnies and snorts against the glass. The rider tugs it gently away, but a piece of ember falls onto the sill, and Sam breathes in brimstone.
(What is this, what IS this?)
The beetles fall like rain. They land on the sheets, on his jeans. Shiny gold coleoptera swim over his lap, latches onto his arms. One jumps onto his neck, and Sam stays exceedingly still. He listens to the sounds around him as if they hold the secret to the universe. The whir of beetle wings like razorblades. The neigh of the horse like chainsaws. Everything like something to rip you with.
Sam doesn't breathe.
He trembles and watches the tangle of the bed-sheet around his feet disappear under an onslaught of bugs. One climbs over a toe, and the sight of it there, gleaming toxically iridescent, does something to Sam.
He yells, pushes himself off the bed, rolls confusedly on the floor and then sits up. He pats himself down frantically. He grabs the edge of the sheet and tosses it to the floor, kicking at it to dislodge the bugs. Which are not there. Which were never there. He kicks it just the same, tosses the pillow to the floor and kicks that too, and he can't find a single beetle. There aren't any.
There weren't any.
His nails lock into his scalp, but there's no pain.
(Interesting.)
Sam sits on the floor, sipping air in shallow mouthfuls. He sees Dean everywhere. At the window, at the edge of the bed, kneeling in front of him.
Dean says: helter-skelter.
#
Three days after Dean disappeared, Sam went and got a tattoo.
Cas hadn't figured out what he was going to do with Heaven, though he'd figured out how to use the bunker's ancient steam-powered oven. Sam ate one half of a cupcake that had crumpled in on itself like the later years of many a Disney starlet. He told Cas what he wanted. Cas reckoned it was a terrible idea. Sam nodded and told him good, do you want to come? Castiel came.
He let Cas drive, keeping his eyes on the sky. It was clear and darker than black, and the stars scattered light across the firmament stitched and unstitched each day by the passing of jets. Sam's fingers clenched around the piece of paper that had the tattoo's design, incorporated from an obscure little diary in the archives, and he thought of opening his fists, un-creasing that paper to make it easy on the artist, but he had to have something to hold on to.
"Are you coming back?" Castiel asked, hesitantly.
Sam did what Dean would have done. He turned the volume knob a quarter turn, and let the Ramones pound out. Static and riffs and the rumble of the engine: close his eyes and Sam could pretend nothing had changed.
"Are you-" Cas tried, again. It was kind of awkward for him, to talk to Sam like a normal person, without Dean as a filter to make it easier. Even after all these years, he was transmitting at a frequency that Sam didn't work with. There was no resonance, not even artful dissonance. There was only white noise on the best of days, and flat spectral densities otherwise.
Maybe it was Sam's fault; maybe he wasn't trying at all.
Maybe he couldn't.
"Sam, are you sleeping?"
"Will you just-" Sam said, waving hopelessly at the road, too tired for kindness. The stretch of asphalt shone wetly in the Impala's headlights, a glittering onyx bridge, cindered path forever running towards something.
The road was a riddle. Sam had no solution. He'd looked back at the inconclusive sky instead.
Cas didn't stay too long at the tattoo parlor. It'd take all night, and he had other things to do. Sam told him that Cas had other things to do, after an hour of Cas staring at his bare back. It was kind of like being under the scrutiny of a pathologically disinterested laser, and Sam kept squirming, to the chagrin of the tattoo artist.
After Cas left, Sam lay under the glaring eye of the projector, imagining the maze of constellations spilling over his skin.
In ancient Chinese astrology the Milky Way is tiangjen, a silver river that flows through the sky, and the entire firmament is divided into five celestial palaces. In the center is the Purple Imperial Palace, where the novae are most exalted of all. Surrounding this are the Four Great Beasts of the Four Celestial Palaces- the Blue Dragon of the East, the Red Bird of the South, the White Tiger of the West, and the Black Tortoise of the North.
Together in their separate mansions, they hold the constellations. Their names mean mysterious things not simplified by mythology or random shape.
Emptiness, Heart, Wall, Ghosts, Wings. And some of these together constitute Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell.
The tattoo artist was a girl in her twenties. She wore a gauzy shift dress, and had blonde hair and severely made-up eyes. She moved like she was underwater. "Do you want something for the pain?"
Sam shrugged. He'd already taken something, and pain knifed but soft and ghostly at his back. In his eyes was an industrial-white light so bright that it swallowed the true shape of everything in the room. Sam closed his eyes firmly against it.
He drifted, uneasy and dreaming of deserts, of walking on smooth sintered sand towards a stained-glass horizon, and he was looking for Dean, and he was thinking oh Dean, come home, just come home, though maybe that made about as much sense as the rest of this dream. His water ran out. There were beetles on the ground, and the sky was curved like Sam was looking at it through the window of a plane. A map of Chinese constellations stretched against the stars, foreign and limitless. In the centre was a writhing space, and he ran toward it.
((The tattoo artist hummed. The projector hummed. Dean hummed- a song. Dean said: make sure you encircle this one, that's important. His fingers pushed between Sam's shoulder-blades, holding him still.
The tattoo artist asked: who was the other guy?))
The sand had Sam. It was in his eyes, and itched on his skin. It slot itself into the crevices beneath his fingernails that he would never reach. The desert took him apart, bit by bit. The desert was a demon that tore at him like he was gelatin. The sand tasted like rust.
Sam tried to find Orion, and was surprised that he was so lost.
He was tired, but Dean stood under that far off writhing space in the sky, grinning and black-eyed.
((Guy in the trench-coat? said Dean. Sam's friend. Maybe. And then: I have to watch him, make sure this tattoo goes on right.
The tattoo artist hummed. The projector whirred. Sam felt the vague heat of its light move somewhere a little farther to the side.
The tattoo artist asked Dean: who are you?))
In his dream, the desert had Sam. Maybe he was wrong, Sam thought, blinking sand away from his lashes. Maybe Sam was wrong and Dean wasn't afraid to be alone. Maybe Dean just liked to always walk ahead and make the way easy; maybe it's just that Dean wanted to wait for Sam to catch up to him rather than the other way around.
((I'm his brother, said Dean. He sounded wrong, like he had too many teeth to speak around. As if he had a smile sharp as a shark or a wolf.
Q. How come you have so many teeth, grandmother?
A. The better to eat you with, my dear.
Sam heard the door squeal open and close, felt a draft of warm air from outside reduce the chill of the air-conditioner. He heard the clop of the tattoo artist's leather boots wander outside. Then it was just Sam and Dean. Or just Sam. Or maybe-
Hear that, Sam? Dean said. I'm still your brother. Don't let prejudice affect you, man. And: is this a spell, Sammy? A spell to save me? Touched.))
It was a spell. A spell paid for in blood and ink and skin. The idea was to get into Hell. Get into Hell, and get Dean out, because Crowley had taken him. Sure, Sam had skidded to a halt at the doorway just in time to see the bleed of black in Dean's eyes and his wide grin, but since then, Crowley had been difficult to summon. He was pretty deep down in Hell where even Sam's summons didn't quite reach, and why else would he stay so far down unless it had something to do with Dean? This was the most interesting development to happen to Crowley since Twitter.
If he couldn't summon them, Sam would find them.
Sam stayed in the desert, letting it pull him into desiccated pieces. He lay on the sand and the beetles ran over him like the shrouds of the beings in the James Carlton painting. He didn't wake up until the tattoo artist was sticking the last piece of gauze to the completed masterpiece, telling him to give it two weeks to fully heal.
Sam didn't ask her if Dean had been by. Maybe the nervous energy of the girl betrayed the answer.
#
In the morning, Nora brings Sam a bottle of water and a whole lot of white pills, and a choice of soup or candy bar. Hunger gnaws at his stomach, grows new teeth and acts so potently against him that he gags. You have to eat something, Nora says, all her words far-off and puffy-light like clouds. Sam can't actually remember when he last ate without throwing everything up. He falters at his door, sleepless and too ill to stand straight, and holds onto the soup-can only long enough for her to decide to leave him alone and for him to close the door. Then he drops it and the lid comes off, and the stain that spreads on the rug is the color of new blood.
Sam looks at it in vague devastation, his mouth dry, a feeling like fuzzy cotton balls had been stashed down his throat. When he looks away, the color stays, as if his irises has drank it down.
He sits on the edge of his bed and pulls his shirt off, taking pieces of gauze with it. He twists his head till he can see the mirror on the dresser at the corner, then bites his lip and leans forward till all he can see is the floor.
The fucking spell is not healing very well.
Heaven's Curious, the gun that saves the souls of its victims, is only Plan B. Maybe it's awful of him, but it's not Dean's soul that Sam wants to save.
It's Dean.
Sam reaches for the gun-a rifle today, and brown-under his pillow. He hesitates, and then takes the safety off. There's a harsh bark of a laugh from somewhere outside.
Sam's vision blurs and cuts. He fights a losing battle trying to pull on a fresh T-shirt, gives up and just drags his arms through the sleeves of a shirt. He manages to walk to the bathroom, but only holds onto the sink dizzily for a few minutes, watching his reflection swim in and out of focus on the mirror. His hair sticks to his skin and his eyes are bright like liquidized stars. His color is high, flushed.
The cold water on his skin is torture.
Charlotte brings him the first-aid box from the trunk, rolls up the tomato-souped rug and takes it away. She brings him crackers and water, and repeats what her sister's said already: you have to eat something.
Sam curls up beneath the covers and dreams of Dean saying it too, through a padlocked mouth-you have to eat something. And then Dean comes apart in bright dots like an Ishihara test, so much for that.
Somewhere in Pennsylvania is a forgotten museum that holds James Carlton's painting.
(You were in Pennsylvania six days ago.)
Some say it's a doorway to Hell. That you can climb in and reach the deepest places, the kind from where demons like Grendel rose. Those of Cain's clan. Monsters unlike any other, from those uncanny places where the water burns. Hell so old and so strong that the newer versions were built right over it. Humans don't survive there. So the Winchesters are the human equivalent of xerophytes, so what? Everything's got its limits.
This is not worse than the Trials. Sam shivers, and his teeth gnash together, but this is not worse than the Trials. Or anything that came before it, actually. This is not his deconstruction.
(This is not Pennsylvania.)
Sam burns from the inside out. He holds himself tight so that his insides don't scatter like ashes in the wind. The fire eats at his chest. Ice eats at his tongue.
"You know," Dean says. "This is so not how you save a person."
#
What Sam did, before he did anything at all, was to make contingency plans.
A gun that saved your soul sounded good. An ancient Chinese spell that let you into Hell through an artist's construction of a gateway sounded suspiciously like the plot of a Japanese anime-but stranger things have happened. See, given resources, Sam can come up with plans. A lot of plans. Not that anything told him where and what and who he'd end up with, but he had to try. This time. There was a time before when he didn't, too bright to take out of its padlocked locker box at the back of his mind.
So this time he had a lot of plans.
He tells this to Dean. How Heaven's Curious was made by a German hunter to save the tainted souls of his brethren. How James Carlton cobbled together a gateway to Hell from spells learned in China and a labor of love. How these are all plans that are disparate and unruly, and doesn't even have to exist in order for the universe to do what it finally, ultimately does.
(We stay together. We look out for each other.)
"And here we are again."
The world flits by in motion blur animation. The fog is phosphorescent, and clings to smeary fingerprints on the window. The fingerprints are not recognizable. Neither is the window, really, which leads to some other, pertinent question that escapes Sam entirely.
It's cold in this car. Sam's freezing. Look, there's even a rime of ice on the window.
Sam says, "I was trying to find you-"
"So here I am."
"What were you doing back there?"
"Where? The motel?"
"No-not just the motel-but, yeah, good place to start."
Dean grins. His eyes are green. Sam documents that, because it serves important occasionally. Soap-green, leaf-green, beryl-green. Something. And then Dean looks back at the road and Sam's left to guess again.
"I was looking out for you. If you didn't notice, Sam, you're not doing good."
"I'm fine."
Dean snorts. "Oh yeah, you look peachy."
"Where are we going?"
Sam can't see much except for the fog. The lights don't part it, just whisk it sideways like so much cotton fluff. He taps Heaven's Curious on his knee. The thing's a pistol today.
"If it were Heaven," mutters Dean, "there'd have been fireworks."
Sam turns his head to look at Dean. "Maybe not this time," he says. "Heaven's not a carousel."
You don't see the same sights every time, Sam means. He hopes.
"We could find out," Dean says. He eyes the gun. There's a star of light in his eyes, something like a camera-reflection trick. It looks dangerous. "How many bullets are in it?"
"I'm not telling you," Sam tells him. Dean blows up his hurt expression to levels of hyper-real exaggeration. He looks like a badly drawn cartoon. He keeps driving. His knuckles rise tight against his skin like he's visibly repressing too much energy.
Sam's just sapped.
"Where are we going, Dean?"
A line appears between Dean's eyebrows. He turns the volume knob and there's only white noise. It doesn't seem to matter. "Up there is worse than down here, you know that, right, Sammy? Heaven's like Survivor All-Stars, or something. Everything eats everything else in weird, meta-fucking-physical ways. You know, right?"
Sam knows. He levels the eye of the pistol at himself. Gunshots are white-hot and blinding. Binding. You don't take back a gunshot. Heaven's not a carousel. Heaven's not even nice.
"How did we get here, huh?" says Dean, pleasantly. He grins, and there's that curious effect again. The Grandmother-Wolf effect. Better to deceive you with, my dear. Sam blinks it away. This is Dean. Dean's not safe, not by any definition of the word, but that's something that Sam's always been exempt from: Dean's relative not-safeness. Sam's Dean is safe as houses. Bricks and mortar, and no one's going to huff and puff and blow it away. Sam's Dean is loud and bright and (not) this person next to him and it's as simple as A, B, C. But this Dean is binary. You either have him, or you don't. If you make the second choice, then the rest is a matter of selective perception. You either see the monster or you don't, and who's the expert at doing that here?
Sam asks, "Where are we going?"
(You're staying right here.)
#
You know how it's worse when you don't know something's a dream or not? Things are skewed sideways, but you can't tell which things are skewed, because what if their skewness was right all along, and you were just looking at the world wrong?
So maybe this is about memory. Or what happens post-memory. Or just the dismantlement of thought.
You'll wake up from the dream and then go back in your mind, to find the place where reality ended and the dream began. So where could it have begun? Assume you're too far gone that reality and dream-land has already amalgamated.
You go back.
(Back to where?)
Back to where Dean found Sam just now, at a motel in Pennsylvania? Or further back in time, to the first time he came in here, sick and shivering and barely counting the change he was paying the girls? Or further back even, to that tiny, dust-ridden museum he barely remembers?
Let's pick the museum.
Say here's the Carlton installation. The Gateway to Hell. And if you step closer, with your key of ink and skin, the shroud of beetles will flap their wings. It will sound like rain. It will sound like the rasp of wind through blades. If Hell has a prelude, a proslogium-this is what it will sound like.
And you walk through it into the dark. Into fire and ice and the realms of eternal torment.
But you know what the catch is? It doesn't have to look that way.
#
Outside the window, the darkness is absolute.
Sam tries to open the passenger door and can't. The blackness is physical, pressing hard against the side of the car. He reaches out for Dean and can't find him. The door rattles as Sam tries to get it to open, and then it's so dark that the sound actually seems to disassociate from it. Sam closes his eyes against the rattle, a second cover to protect him from the blackness.
Something slams into the windshield.
Sam runs. (There's no door; of course there's no door, what's the use of logic here again?)
Darkness swirls around him in various striations of black. From somewhere there's a neigh and a flitting image of a horse with a mouth of embers, and then Sam bangs into another body.
"Dean?"
Sam's hands find shoulders, and shoulders higher up. Doesn't make any sense. He pushes past, feet striking hard ground, the dark around him teeming with spots of colors like celestial fingerprints. He keeps Heaven's Curious tight in his grasp, and watches tessarae of charcoal-black and diamond-black and graphite-black slot together in front of him.
He trips and falls, and there's no floor that comes to meet him. He just falls.
And then it's like his whole perspective plane gets tilted in one dimension, and he blinks water out of his eyes, coughs and sputters-there's so much water, so much, and where did it all come from?
It's the motel. The bathtub is like a flashback of sorts. Remember, before Metatron? And then Sam had said: I can take you to him.
(I can take you to him-the one who will kill you.)
Charlotte and Nora are wearing curious black dresses. They look like something out of a gothy musical. "You're burning up," they say. This time is literal. This is actual. Neither dreaming or delusion, nor dreaming delusion. There's a corridor and a desert, a road and a car, a motel and these two pallid girls and all this water, miraculous like loaves and fishes or manna from the sky or stigmata or the million recursive Winchester deaths, because-
(This is Hell. You checked into Hell.)
-where even water burns, and he watches it leap in flames from his skin. Between heartbeats the bathtub becomes a hallucinatory reef of swaying poppies. There's a river in the distance, colored the potent grey of oblivion. Dean's sitting down next to him, crunching on tortillas. He offers the bag to Sam.
"You have to eat something," Dean says. His eyes are black but it sounds sincere. "You found the way down, now you have to-"
"I don't want to-" Sam snaps, and then stops himself. He turns on his foot, and there's nothing but crimson fields in all directions. "I-I want to help you."
Dean grins. He spreads his arms. "Do I look like I need any help?"
"I need to save you," Sam says. That's the purpose after all. The lines of him break. Falter, like he's made of chalk. Sam sags; drops till he's sitting down too.
Dean says, "Let's define save."
"You define save."
Dean crushes the chips packet with easy violence. "Okay. You asked me this question: are you saving me for me, or are you saving me for you?"
"That's a shitty question."
"It's your shitty question," Dean counters. Sam watches his eyes narrow darkly at the river. "Anyway, if you're saving me for me, that gun'll do you good. You know. Stairway to Heaven and all. Purify my soul and Heaven'll roll out a nice red carpet."
Dean looks at him like it's a challenge.
Sam exercises sloppy caution. Heaven's Curious pushes against the bottom of Dean's jaw. The black slides sideways from Dean's eyes and are replaced by normal-green. Wave-tumbled green. Whatever green. They dilate, just a little, and then goes flat.
Sam breathes hard. Shifts his grip. Dean steadies him, like, blow my head off pretty, Sam.
A gunshot is binding. Blinding.
Sam draws a shuddering breath. He feels like he's holding iron inside, breathing through ribs of lead, disks of chrome, all of him a heavy mechanical contraption, and somewhere in there is a love he doesn't want to touch. Because categories are easy. Neatness is easy. A equals to B, and A equals to C, implies B fucking equals to C- that's easy. Dean's never been easy, no matter how hard Sam tries to make out that he is. No matter how hard Sam tries to put him in a box and label him. And Sam pretends.
Sam pretends that he gets this, this dangerous this- the monster they share. Sam pretends that he can control it, that he can bury it, when it's already clawed its way through every tissue of him, every atom. This monster.
(Dear Sam,
There's a monster called love. It smiles bloody.)
Sam pretends so hard that he could make Dean believe it, but in the end he is just as terrible. Just as fucking vulnerable.
And this is not how Sam defines 'save'.
"Well?" asks Dean. He sneers, makes a pistol sound.
"Fuck you."
Sam throws the gun into the field. The poppies swallow it instantly. The glint of silver is lost in the fields of red, and Sam's reward is the way Dean grins. Like a Cheshire Cat. Let me lead you wayward, why not? Why not?
And then (tick tock) the drowning again. Hell trying to burn and drown him at the same time because in the end he's still human after all.
Beetles spill everywhere. The water's teeming with them. Charlotte and Nora are tall now, white-faced, their clothes an eroded grey. Their voices come from the surface, and the surface distorts them into swaying valkyries. Maybe they are. Sam has no voice to call out. The beetles razor past him in streams. They're diving beetles. When they dive, they carry a precious cargo in their hearts so they can breathe below: a single bubble of oxygen.
(What's your precious cargo, Sammy?)
I'm saving you for us, he thinks. Unspoken, awful, damaging secret. Because there ain't no me if there ain't no you.
Define 'you' as you will.
Brother. Partner. Soulmate. Human/In-human.
Sam struggles for the surface. Breathes over the lip of the bathtub or wherever it is, sputters and spits ice. The sky is grey and the fields are red. The water sinks into the ground and beetles scurry through holes in the ground. The landscape shifts like slides in a cinemascope toy. Sam looks up and imagines that the Four Great Beasts are cavorting in the sky. Maybe the sky in Hell is different for everyone, and shifts on a flimsy scale of prerogatives.
When he looks down again, Dean's standing there on hard packed ground. He's still wearing the same shredded clothes. He holds out a hand, like an invitation to stay.
(You have to eat something.)
Always an invitation. Like Persephone, tricked into staying by a handful of pomegranate seeds.
(You have to eat something.)
Sam looks at Dean. His eyes are green. His smile is red. "Maybe there'll be fireworks in Hell," Dean says. "Seems more likely, huh?"
(There's a monster called love. It smiles bloody.)
Blood drips from the tips of Dean's fingers. Demon blood. Sam follows the trajectory. Where it hits the ground, the beetles congregate in shiny black clouds.
Dean holds out his hand.
- fin.