[fic] arm
Title: arm
Genre: Horror
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Dean (background); Sam, Dean, mentions of Cas and Cole
Rating: M
Word Count: 4200
Warnings: Gore; mentions of self-harm.
Summary: Something is happening to Dean's arm.
Notes: Canon divergence between 10.03 and 10.04. Second-person (Sam) POV. Holy shit, I haven't written a oneshot since June. Hi, wow, I'm still writing!
I.
Two AM. You've been pulling lights out in a tighter and tighter circle around the library desks for hours as if hoping to keep Dean in their circumference, somehow, for some reason. He's half-asleep, nodding over an open bottle of beer. Your head's still in a fog; you can't decide whether to send him to bed or to keep him up, conscious, breathing in the same room as you.
“Hey,” he says, jerking his lolling head up as you come back into the room with another pair of bottles. His eyes half-closed, his lips pressed together. He's drunk or exhausted or maybe both, and you should really send him to bed. You've both been through hell today, more literally than you'd like to admit.
“Hey,” you say, putting down the bottles. He doesn't reach for either of them.
“Jesus,” he says, sliding an arm across the table until his watch face comes into some kind of focus. You keep a close gaze on his eyes, alert for any hint of blackness, though you know it's safe, he's safe, today was a victory. “What time is it?”
“Late,” you say. You should really send him away to sleep off the day but you can't shake this deep need to be in the same room with him, just to make sure he doesn't melt into the darkness on the walls. Maybe he'd let you sleep with him. Or on the floor. Or in the hall, against the door, on the hard concrete.
“How are you feeling?” you ask him, for the sixteenth time since the sun went down. Dean props himself up on his elbows, lets his forehead rest against the precarious mouth of his empty bottle. He yawns, scrunches up his face.
“Good,” he says. “Tired. Fuck. Good, though.”
You watch him, feeling a strain on the back of your eyes from how hard you are looking. His movements are familiar. The clench of his teeth in his jaw, the lay of his lashes, the way he splays his legs beneath the table, hell, even the inward turn of the sides of his feet. Alcohol burns down your throat but it's hardly changing anything inside you-not your weariness, your pointless unease, how insanely and incredibly happy you are to see him in this room with you. It's been three months. You can still hardly believe it.
Dean clears his throat, sits back. “Is it hot?” He starts to pull at his long sleeves, fumbling them into rolls. “It's hot.”
“I guess.”
His sleeve comes up, and immediately your eyes go to it-the angry red burn on the inside of his elbow. You swallow.
“Hey,” Dean says, and then pauses, trying to unbutton the top button of his shirt, failing, stopping. His left arm comes across the table; he leans onto it, reaches for you with his right. “Hey. Sammy.” No slur to his voice-not drunk-just tired. His eyelids are drooping. “Sam. Hey, thanks. Thank you.”
He grasps your wrist. You don't expect to flinch in the way that you do. Your bottle falls out of your hand, topples on the table, your arm comes out of his grip, you yank it to your chest, resting over the strap of your sling.
He looks confused, a little hurt.
“What?” he says, hand still hovering in midair, half-reaching for you.
His fingers were so cold. In the encroaching shadows in the library the tips of his fingers looks black, as if frostbitten-right below the edges of his fingernails.
“I-um.” You grab at words. “Sorry-hand's cold.”
Dean looks at you for a moment, pulls his hand back. It disappears into his lap. “O-kay,” he says.
It's two AM. You're exhausted, and so is he. You look at the shadows pooling all over, in the puddle of spilled beer, crevices in the table. You both need to go to bed, and that's all. You've been seeing things all day, all week.
“I'm going to bed,” Dean says, speaking your thoughts in his usual way. He scoots his chair back and stands. There's nothing wrong with his hand when you see it now. You pull a breath into your gut.
He turns-pauses, reaches back for the chair. “You coming?”
It's been more than three months since you shared a bed with your brother, since you felt his body mold to the back of yours. It just hasn't felt right. It almost still doesn't, but after the day you've had, how hard you've fought-he always ends up holding your throat in his sleep, and you've never been able to figure out why-once it annoyed you, feeling your Adam's apple sliding against his fingers; now it's all you want in the world.
You walk back into the blackness where his room sits, ready to be occupied for the first time in ages, sticking as close to him as you can. His legs, his arms brush against you, tiny slashes of warmth, cloth, familiarity, little bright spots in the dark.
II.
He sleeps until the evening, and you don't have the heart to wake him. Instead you set up in the kitchen, balancing folders and archives over the toaster, wishing you had three or four eyes more to watch all the things cooking on the stove. Everything you could think of that Dean might crave after three months of nothing but booze and bar food: grilled cheese, bacon, chicken noodle soup. You hope he won't notice that the banana crème pie sitting in the freezer is store-bought.
When he wanders in, lured by the smell of frying butter and popping bacon, he sits down at the rickety kitchen table in his boxers and a T-shirt, running his hands through his hair. You swallow down the leap of warm stupid happiness that has been jumping into your throat since yesterday afternoon. Smile at him instead: “Morning.”
It's 7 PM. He doesn't get the joke. “What are you doing?”
“You hungry?”
“Fuck, yes.”
You smile into the sizzling griddle. The bread is a little burned when you flip the sandwich over but he won't care. It's these little things you missed so fucking much. That Dean eats charred grilled cheese.
You can feel him watching you, a gentle benevolent pressure on your neck. When you turn around with a plate in one hand and a ladle in the other, he's smiling in an absent way, eyes focused somewhere between your face and the food. He pulls his arms up, reaches out for the plate heavy with gooey overflowing blackened sandwiches, wiggling his fingers like a greedy toddler, shit-eating grin. You slide him the plate and sit down across from him. His smile is infectious.
“God, I love you,” he mumbles, through a mouthful of cheese. “Holy shit.”
After the year you've had-hell, the last two, three, six, ten years-you haven't felt this happy in as long as you can remember. The fact that you have a place in which to sit and watch your brother stuff his face, no huge worries hanging over your brain, beyond-well, the slick red obvious-
It's popping in and out of view as Dean sucks butter from his fingers, one by one, butter and char. Your heart stills when you look at it. Mark of Cain. Somehow in all your long nights of staring hard at Genesis you never pictured it to look like this, and certainly not on your brother's right arm. You pictured it more like a scar, a moon-shaped thing, maybe.
The kitchen smells like bacon and broth but your stomach feels queasy.
“Eat something.” Dean shoves the last sandwich across the table to you. He lets his arm, the marked one, rest open on the table.
His fingertips are resting below the ridge of the plate.
You don't say anything. You pick up the sandwich and smile at him, pick a piece of char from the top slice of bread. You don't mention the black callouses that are creeping down Dean's fingers from the nail bed. There's an open sore on his index finger. You don't mention any of it. You eat with your brother.
III.
He won't let you move much. Says he's afraid of hurting your shoulder. Real fuckin' tired of getting you hurt , he mutters. Lay back.
You do. Not necessarily because you have missed the sex so much as you have missed seeing him, in any way-nodding off over a bottle, devouring a sandwich, naked and undoing the strap over your shoulder. He lays out your arm on the bed with a gentleness you can't remember feeling in years. You try not to think about how cold the fingers of his right hand are.
All you want is to look at him for hours. You need to make up for the last three months. You've forgiven him for Gadreel, or almost have. It doesn't matter. Your head has been swimming for days; he wants to touch you; you want to let him. He shifts in and out of focus over you.
“You okay?” he says, from kind of far away. You nod, humming down your throat. His left hand is splayed out steady on your hip. “Hey.” He snaps his fingers near your eye. You blink. He comes back into focus, looking concerned. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” you say. He goes double, and then comes back again. Maybe you need to close your eyes after all. That's alright. You can still feel him, at least.
“You sure?”
You feel upward for him in the dark behind your eyelids. Find the softness of his hips with your good hand and grab a handful of flesh, pull him forward. He leans down to kiss your cheek.
“Okay. Alright.”
You're dizzy. Not sure how it's possible, when you're lying down.
His mouth on your chest. Your stomach. Your hipbone. His warm hand on your thigh, pressing and pulling the skin. His blunt fingernails. His left hand.
He breathes your name. You can feel his eyelashes centimeters over the place where the thatch of your pubic hair begins. You feel a shoulder shift. An icy cold handprint down flat and shocking on your chest.
You shoot upright, immediately hating yourself for the swathe of hot pain that shoots through your injured shoulder. Dean falls backwards off of you. “What? What?” he says, sounding panicky, scared that he's hurt you-that's obvious. He reaches out toward your shoulder with his blackened right hand, his greenish, warping fingernails, the trypophobic rot leaching up his wrist.
“Stop!” you shout, and the both of you freeze. You can feel the frost coming off his hand where it hovers between you.
He sees you staring, sees where you're staring. “What?” he says again. He turns his hand over, looks at it, puts it down. “Dude. Talk.”
The Mark is red and horrific in the crook of his arm, bleeding south in long angry veins.
“Your-” You don't know how to say it. How is he not aware of what's happening to his own arm? You'd thought it was bruising-or maybe he was embarrassed-you've been looking away from it for the past two days.
Oh. You're dizzy again. You lean back hard against the headboard and close your eyes. Colours whirl behind your eyelids.
“Sam? What's the matter?”
His voice sounds strange in your ears. You open your eyes. His arm isn't rotting-it's propping him up, as strong and firm as ever.
Did he ask you something? Why are you sitting up? He was just kissing you, a moment ago.
“What?”
“Okay,” Dean says, eyeing you sideways, “maybe we should just-call it a night.”
No, you want to groan, but I waited so long.
“You feeling okay?” He reaches up-left hand-feels your forehead. You let him. It's way too bright in here. You wish he'd turn off the lamp.
“Yeah. A little dizzy.”
You clear your throat. He pulls away-no fever, you assume. He kneels there between your legs looking more like a worried mother than the brother who was intent on fucking you two minutes ago.
“I'm-gonna get you something to drink,” he says, reaching past you for his discarded boxers. “You should put your sling back on, yeah?”
“What?”
“Your sling. Arm. Here.” He hands it to you. Watches you from a weird distance as you put it back on.
“Can you get the light?”
He turns it off. Rolls off the bed and vanishes into the hallway.
In the dim light from out there, you look down at your chest, where his cold hand had rested. You almost expect to see his handprint, burned in black frost on your skin. There's nothing there.
IV.
You have a theory, and it's this: it's not his arm. Something happened, something went wrong, when he was out of your sight. It was replaced. The Mark is taking it over. It isn't a real part of him. It's the only way you can explain why he can't see what's happening to it. Can't feel it, can't sense it.
You know how it feels. Your own arm rests in a sling fourteen hours of the day. Sometimes you forget it's there.
The Mark stands out on Dean like something burning in the charcoal-black gangrenous flesh of his arm. Weeping sores from elbow to wrist. He's lost a nail. You stare at it when he isn't looking and try to think of how to break the subject when he is. More than all of this you are confused as to why it keeps disappearing in the way that it does. Gone for an hour. Festering for six.
You're in the kitchen. You're making grilled cheese, bacon, chicken noodle soup. Dean is leaning in the doorway, watching you, the imposter arm crossed over the real one.
“What are you doing?”
“You hungry?” you say. He must be starving. He slept the whole day, after all.
“Um,” he says. “Not really. We just ate.”
Confused, you turn to look at him. “No, we didn't.”
“We made burgers. An hour ago.”
You can smell the grilled cheese burning. You look past it to the sink where the broiler pan is resting in soap and water, steel wool nearby for scrubbing off what's left of the ground beef he pushed into patties.
“Dude!” Dean shoots past you, shunts off the gas with the black hand. The sandwich in the skillet is a black brick, smoking into your face.
You slide your spatula under it and flip it over. Flakes of char come off. The pot in which the soup should have been boiling is cold. You never turned on the gas.
“Oh,” you say. His arm is still braced on the stove. You can't stop looking at it. You're just waiting at this point for a finger to break off, for a sore to get infected.
“What's up with you?” Dean asks, pulling the skillet away from you, dropping the burned mess of the sandwich into the trash can. “You're starting to freak me out.”
You don't say anything. You stand, confused, in front of the stove, holding the spatula in your hand.
“Hey,” Dean says. His voice is echoing in on itself. “Dude? Look at me. Jesus, your eyes are all fucked up.”
He reaches up to grasp your face in both hands. You flinch, startled by the coldness, the utter coldness of the black right hand. You flinch out of his grip, drop the spatula on the floor.
“Hey,” Dean says, louder, increasingly flustered. “Sam. Can you see me?”
You can't, not clearly, but you don't know how to say that. You make a noise, but it's slurred. Then, everything snaps back into place, so perfect that it shocks you nearly off your feet.
“I'm calling Cas,” Dean says, and leaves the room.
The kitchen smells like burning cheese and tin. You blink a few times. Your cheek where he touched you feels itchy and raw.
“Dean?” you call. No answer. “Dean? I'm okay-I think-”
Dean doesn't answer. He's probably in his room, calling Cas down. There's no point. You feel fine-you were just tired, you want to call out. It's been a long few days, and you're worried about him. It's stress.
You push the back of your hand against your cheek where he touched you. It's tingling. A sudden jab of fear down your spine. You feel contaminated. You look to the steel wool on the sink.
V.
Cas is AWOL, and Dean insists that you take a day off your feet. Get some rest. You don't think he's buying that it was stress. He won't ask about the scrapes on your cheek where you gouged at your skin with the steel wool until it felt clean again, free of the gangrene eating Dean's fingers. But he sees them, he knows what you did.
He hovers, even while you're sleeping, and you are very tired after all. You have a headache to beat the band. Even the light under the door is too much. You can feel the rotting arm ringing out in the dark room like a siren.
He has to know something's wrong with it. You have to do something about it.
VI.
He's skeptical that you feel better, but he lets you up. You spend the day in the library staring at the same page of the same book for hours, hoping he won't notice. Every time he passes by, the limp black arm swinging at his side, you feel a jolt of nausea, a rising sense of urgency.
You hear him on the phone. It's Cas, trying to get back to the Bunker from somewhere far away. That asshole-that kid, you think he fucked him up? you hear. You suppose he means Cole. (You have trouble recalling Cole's face, or what, exactly, he wanted from you.) Ain't right, man. His head ain't right.
He brings you food. You're too nauseous to eat it; you let it go cold. Besides, you can't be sure his awful skin hasn't come off on the edge of the plate, on the spoon in the soup.
He comes, he sits with you, you talk for a while. About how you're feeling, about other things. Your brain is fuzzy. In the moments when his image blurs out, the dead arm, the imposter arm, stands out like a spot cut out of the universe.
You've got to do something about it.
Dean makes you tea, and it's bad tea, but you can hold it down. You feel calmer. When he leans down over you to adjust the strap of your sling with his good hand, his real hand, you kiss the closest part of him, his neck.
“Okay,” he says, laughing. “Guess you are feeling better, huh.”
Of course you are, now that you know what you have to do.
VII.
Two AM. You know when he wakes up because of the shift in the room, though it's almost too dark to see him. He's frozen at first-you can almost imagine the cogs turning in his brain. Feeling the situation. Understanding it. He's face-down on his bed. His right arm is handcuffed to the bedpost, stretched away. It took all you had not to gag from the smell of the dead flesh while you snapped the cuff closed.
“Sam,” he says, voice raspy from sleep. He tugs on his arm and the cuff jangles; you tense, hoping the hand won't break off at the wrist. “Sam. The fuck.”
You're sitting at the end of the bed. The hatchet you found in a far back room is limp between your knees. You need more light, though it'll hurt your eyes.
“Sam. Hey. I know you're in here.” He's more awake now. You have to do it fast, minimise the pain. “The fuck are you doing? Get this thing off me. What time is it?”
“Two,” you say.
“The fuck are you doing?”
You stand up. The door creaks when you pull it open, just enough to let a long swathe of light illuminate the low end of his body. His eyes are glinting in it.
“Sam, I swear to God.”
“It's okay. I'm gonna get it off.”
In the next second of silence Dean gets it.
“The fuck-”
“Look, it's a solution.” You come around to his right side. Your head feels heavy. The hatchet by contrast is as light as air. “You'll feel better, and I'll feel better.”
“You're not-Sam, hold up a second, okay, hold on.”
“You hungry?” you say, blinking, trying to gather your thoughts back to the forefront of your brain. “I can make something.” You find the edge of the dead arm on the mattress, straightened out nice and flat on the bed, the Mark of Cain almost glowing faintly in the dark. It smells like death. “After, I can make something.”
Dean doesn't bother asking after what.
“Cas is coming. Hear me? That guy, he fucked you up, Sammy, that Cole guy. He hit you in the head, didn't he? We thought-”
“I'm fine,” you say. The hatchet feels heavier now. Your head is getting lighter. Swimming, dizzy. You might faint-you have to do it soon. “Just give me a second.”
“I can't understand you,” Dean says, voice pitching up, sounding panicked. “Dude, I can't understand a word you're saying, you're slurring-”
“I'm fine,” you say again.
“Let me out of these cuffs, man-”
“Hold on, okay? It'll only take a second.”
It'll only take a second, and then you can get his real arm back, from wherever it went. You'll celebrate with booze and junk food. You'll stay up late until he starts nodding off, and maybe you can sleep with him. Or on the floor. Or in the hall, against the door, on the hard concrete. Is he hungry? You know what he likes-charred grilled cheese.
He's talking, but you can't understand him. Doesn't matter. The hatchet is up in front of your face for a spare three seconds and then you bring it down, right where you wanted it, at the point where the gangrene has slowed in its march up his arm.
Dean screams like nothing you've ever heard. The hatchet is lodged in the bone. He's trying to roll away, but there's only so far he can move, cuffed the way he is.
Is he hungry? You should ask.
“You hungry?” You can't get the hatchet out. You lift a foot, brace it against the imposter arm, yank the hatchet with your good hand. It comes out.
Dean is sobbing, awful ragged breathing, face sideways on his pillow, staring towards the wound on his upper arm. He's begging- please, Sammy, please, hold on- the sharp edge is not going to do it. It's too small to get through bone.
You turn it over. The blunt hard edge. You've got the shatter it. It'll make it easier.
You bring it down. Once. Three times. Each time Dean's howl of pain gets hoarser, more raw, until the bone splinters under the back of the hatchet, and he doesn't make a noise, and you feel a dizzying feeling of relief. Or just plain vertigo. One more blow and the rest of the flesh should come apart-rotting flesh comes undone easy-and sure enough-
You drop the hatchet onto the floor, step back, take a deep breath. Everything's clear again. No double vision, no headache. You let out a long breath, run your hand back through your hair to pull it out of your eyes. There's a ragged, angry break between Dean's bleeding shoulder and the limp dead arm on the mattress, still cuffed to the bedpost. A ragged, angry separation-just what you wanted.
“Dean,” you say, leaning down to shake him. “Look. How easy was that? Why didn't we try that before?”
He doesn't respond. The fingers of the arm are twitching in the corner of your eye. You grab a handful of his hair, tug gently. He still doesn't move.
He's unconscious. You feel a stab of fear. Of course he is. You have to cover up the wound. It won't heal otherwise. It'll get infected. And you have to get rid of the arm. Burn it. Something. Destroy the Mark as much as you possibly can.
Your eyes go strange again. You reach down half-blindly for the arm, for the cuffs. You feel for the cold dead icy flesh. He'll want to eat when he wakes up. Grilled cheese-he likes it, when it's charred a little bit.
You touch flesh that's cooling, not cold. Smooth and unblemished and uncalloused. Confused, you look down-peer closer-holding your breath, waiting for the smell, but there is no smell.
It's just an arm. Dean's arm. Healthy, smooth, all its fingernails and bones and skin intact. The pinkish scar flesh of the Mark of Cain sitting quietly, unassuming, above the dying twitching pulse in the elbow.
Never gangrenous or swollen or split or infected.
“Dean?” you say. But he's out cold. Bleeding in spurts from the wound of his severed arm in deep puddles on the sheets. “Dean?” But you were so sure. You knew what to do. It was the only thing you could have done.
Your head is throbbing, you can't see. You were so sure. And it's just an arm.
Genre: Horror
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Dean (background); Sam, Dean, mentions of Cas and Cole
Rating: M
Word Count: 4200
Warnings: Gore; mentions of self-harm.
Summary: Something is happening to Dean's arm.
Notes: Canon divergence between 10.03 and 10.04. Second-person (Sam) POV. Holy shit, I haven't written a oneshot since June. Hi, wow, I'm still writing!
I.
Two AM. You've been pulling lights out in a tighter and tighter circle around the library desks for hours as if hoping to keep Dean in their circumference, somehow, for some reason. He's half-asleep, nodding over an open bottle of beer. Your head's still in a fog; you can't decide whether to send him to bed or to keep him up, conscious, breathing in the same room as you.
“Hey,” he says, jerking his lolling head up as you come back into the room with another pair of bottles. His eyes half-closed, his lips pressed together. He's drunk or exhausted or maybe both, and you should really send him to bed. You've both been through hell today, more literally than you'd like to admit.
“Hey,” you say, putting down the bottles. He doesn't reach for either of them.
“Jesus,” he says, sliding an arm across the table until his watch face comes into some kind of focus. You keep a close gaze on his eyes, alert for any hint of blackness, though you know it's safe, he's safe, today was a victory. “What time is it?”
“Late,” you say. You should really send him away to sleep off the day but you can't shake this deep need to be in the same room with him, just to make sure he doesn't melt into the darkness on the walls. Maybe he'd let you sleep with him. Or on the floor. Or in the hall, against the door, on the hard concrete.
“How are you feeling?” you ask him, for the sixteenth time since the sun went down. Dean props himself up on his elbows, lets his forehead rest against the precarious mouth of his empty bottle. He yawns, scrunches up his face.
“Good,” he says. “Tired. Fuck. Good, though.”
You watch him, feeling a strain on the back of your eyes from how hard you are looking. His movements are familiar. The clench of his teeth in his jaw, the lay of his lashes, the way he splays his legs beneath the table, hell, even the inward turn of the sides of his feet. Alcohol burns down your throat but it's hardly changing anything inside you-not your weariness, your pointless unease, how insanely and incredibly happy you are to see him in this room with you. It's been three months. You can still hardly believe it.
Dean clears his throat, sits back. “Is it hot?” He starts to pull at his long sleeves, fumbling them into rolls. “It's hot.”
“I guess.”
His sleeve comes up, and immediately your eyes go to it-the angry red burn on the inside of his elbow. You swallow.
“Hey,” Dean says, and then pauses, trying to unbutton the top button of his shirt, failing, stopping. His left arm comes across the table; he leans onto it, reaches for you with his right. “Hey. Sammy.” No slur to his voice-not drunk-just tired. His eyelids are drooping. “Sam. Hey, thanks. Thank you.”
He grasps your wrist. You don't expect to flinch in the way that you do. Your bottle falls out of your hand, topples on the table, your arm comes out of his grip, you yank it to your chest, resting over the strap of your sling.
He looks confused, a little hurt.
“What?” he says, hand still hovering in midair, half-reaching for you.
His fingers were so cold. In the encroaching shadows in the library the tips of his fingers looks black, as if frostbitten-right below the edges of his fingernails.
“I-um.” You grab at words. “Sorry-hand's cold.”
Dean looks at you for a moment, pulls his hand back. It disappears into his lap. “O-kay,” he says.
It's two AM. You're exhausted, and so is he. You look at the shadows pooling all over, in the puddle of spilled beer, crevices in the table. You both need to go to bed, and that's all. You've been seeing things all day, all week.
“I'm going to bed,” Dean says, speaking your thoughts in his usual way. He scoots his chair back and stands. There's nothing wrong with his hand when you see it now. You pull a breath into your gut.
He turns-pauses, reaches back for the chair. “You coming?”
It's been more than three months since you shared a bed with your brother, since you felt his body mold to the back of yours. It just hasn't felt right. It almost still doesn't, but after the day you've had, how hard you've fought-he always ends up holding your throat in his sleep, and you've never been able to figure out why-once it annoyed you, feeling your Adam's apple sliding against his fingers; now it's all you want in the world.
You walk back into the blackness where his room sits, ready to be occupied for the first time in ages, sticking as close to him as you can. His legs, his arms brush against you, tiny slashes of warmth, cloth, familiarity, little bright spots in the dark.
II.
He sleeps until the evening, and you don't have the heart to wake him. Instead you set up in the kitchen, balancing folders and archives over the toaster, wishing you had three or four eyes more to watch all the things cooking on the stove. Everything you could think of that Dean might crave after three months of nothing but booze and bar food: grilled cheese, bacon, chicken noodle soup. You hope he won't notice that the banana crème pie sitting in the freezer is store-bought.
When he wanders in, lured by the smell of frying butter and popping bacon, he sits down at the rickety kitchen table in his boxers and a T-shirt, running his hands through his hair. You swallow down the leap of warm stupid happiness that has been jumping into your throat since yesterday afternoon. Smile at him instead: “Morning.”
It's 7 PM. He doesn't get the joke. “What are you doing?”
“You hungry?”
“Fuck, yes.”
You smile into the sizzling griddle. The bread is a little burned when you flip the sandwich over but he won't care. It's these little things you missed so fucking much. That Dean eats charred grilled cheese.
You can feel him watching you, a gentle benevolent pressure on your neck. When you turn around with a plate in one hand and a ladle in the other, he's smiling in an absent way, eyes focused somewhere between your face and the food. He pulls his arms up, reaches out for the plate heavy with gooey overflowing blackened sandwiches, wiggling his fingers like a greedy toddler, shit-eating grin. You slide him the plate and sit down across from him. His smile is infectious.
“God, I love you,” he mumbles, through a mouthful of cheese. “Holy shit.”
After the year you've had-hell, the last two, three, six, ten years-you haven't felt this happy in as long as you can remember. The fact that you have a place in which to sit and watch your brother stuff his face, no huge worries hanging over your brain, beyond-well, the slick red obvious-
It's popping in and out of view as Dean sucks butter from his fingers, one by one, butter and char. Your heart stills when you look at it. Mark of Cain. Somehow in all your long nights of staring hard at Genesis you never pictured it to look like this, and certainly not on your brother's right arm. You pictured it more like a scar, a moon-shaped thing, maybe.
The kitchen smells like bacon and broth but your stomach feels queasy.
“Eat something.” Dean shoves the last sandwich across the table to you. He lets his arm, the marked one, rest open on the table.
His fingertips are resting below the ridge of the plate.
You don't say anything. You pick up the sandwich and smile at him, pick a piece of char from the top slice of bread. You don't mention the black callouses that are creeping down Dean's fingers from the nail bed. There's an open sore on his index finger. You don't mention any of it. You eat with your brother.
III.
He won't let you move much. Says he's afraid of hurting your shoulder. Real fuckin' tired of getting you hurt , he mutters. Lay back.
You do. Not necessarily because you have missed the sex so much as you have missed seeing him, in any way-nodding off over a bottle, devouring a sandwich, naked and undoing the strap over your shoulder. He lays out your arm on the bed with a gentleness you can't remember feeling in years. You try not to think about how cold the fingers of his right hand are.
All you want is to look at him for hours. You need to make up for the last three months. You've forgiven him for Gadreel, or almost have. It doesn't matter. Your head has been swimming for days; he wants to touch you; you want to let him. He shifts in and out of focus over you.
“You okay?” he says, from kind of far away. You nod, humming down your throat. His left hand is splayed out steady on your hip. “Hey.” He snaps his fingers near your eye. You blink. He comes back into focus, looking concerned. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” you say. He goes double, and then comes back again. Maybe you need to close your eyes after all. That's alright. You can still feel him, at least.
“You sure?”
You feel upward for him in the dark behind your eyelids. Find the softness of his hips with your good hand and grab a handful of flesh, pull him forward. He leans down to kiss your cheek.
“Okay. Alright.”
You're dizzy. Not sure how it's possible, when you're lying down.
His mouth on your chest. Your stomach. Your hipbone. His warm hand on your thigh, pressing and pulling the skin. His blunt fingernails. His left hand.
He breathes your name. You can feel his eyelashes centimeters over the place where the thatch of your pubic hair begins. You feel a shoulder shift. An icy cold handprint down flat and shocking on your chest.
You shoot upright, immediately hating yourself for the swathe of hot pain that shoots through your injured shoulder. Dean falls backwards off of you. “What? What?” he says, sounding panicky, scared that he's hurt you-that's obvious. He reaches out toward your shoulder with his blackened right hand, his greenish, warping fingernails, the trypophobic rot leaching up his wrist.
“Stop!” you shout, and the both of you freeze. You can feel the frost coming off his hand where it hovers between you.
He sees you staring, sees where you're staring. “What?” he says again. He turns his hand over, looks at it, puts it down. “Dude. Talk.”
The Mark is red and horrific in the crook of his arm, bleeding south in long angry veins.
“Your-” You don't know how to say it. How is he not aware of what's happening to his own arm? You'd thought it was bruising-or maybe he was embarrassed-you've been looking away from it for the past two days.
Oh. You're dizzy again. You lean back hard against the headboard and close your eyes. Colours whirl behind your eyelids.
“Sam? What's the matter?”
His voice sounds strange in your ears. You open your eyes. His arm isn't rotting-it's propping him up, as strong and firm as ever.
Did he ask you something? Why are you sitting up? He was just kissing you, a moment ago.
“What?”
“Okay,” Dean says, eyeing you sideways, “maybe we should just-call it a night.”
No, you want to groan, but I waited so long.
“You feeling okay?” He reaches up-left hand-feels your forehead. You let him. It's way too bright in here. You wish he'd turn off the lamp.
“Yeah. A little dizzy.”
You clear your throat. He pulls away-no fever, you assume. He kneels there between your legs looking more like a worried mother than the brother who was intent on fucking you two minutes ago.
“I'm-gonna get you something to drink,” he says, reaching past you for his discarded boxers. “You should put your sling back on, yeah?”
“What?”
“Your sling. Arm. Here.” He hands it to you. Watches you from a weird distance as you put it back on.
“Can you get the light?”
He turns it off. Rolls off the bed and vanishes into the hallway.
In the dim light from out there, you look down at your chest, where his cold hand had rested. You almost expect to see his handprint, burned in black frost on your skin. There's nothing there.
IV.
You have a theory, and it's this: it's not his arm. Something happened, something went wrong, when he was out of your sight. It was replaced. The Mark is taking it over. It isn't a real part of him. It's the only way you can explain why he can't see what's happening to it. Can't feel it, can't sense it.
You know how it feels. Your own arm rests in a sling fourteen hours of the day. Sometimes you forget it's there.
The Mark stands out on Dean like something burning in the charcoal-black gangrenous flesh of his arm. Weeping sores from elbow to wrist. He's lost a nail. You stare at it when he isn't looking and try to think of how to break the subject when he is. More than all of this you are confused as to why it keeps disappearing in the way that it does. Gone for an hour. Festering for six.
You're in the kitchen. You're making grilled cheese, bacon, chicken noodle soup. Dean is leaning in the doorway, watching you, the imposter arm crossed over the real one.
“What are you doing?”
“You hungry?” you say. He must be starving. He slept the whole day, after all.
“Um,” he says. “Not really. We just ate.”
Confused, you turn to look at him. “No, we didn't.”
“We made burgers. An hour ago.”
You can smell the grilled cheese burning. You look past it to the sink where the broiler pan is resting in soap and water, steel wool nearby for scrubbing off what's left of the ground beef he pushed into patties.
“Dude!” Dean shoots past you, shunts off the gas with the black hand. The sandwich in the skillet is a black brick, smoking into your face.
You slide your spatula under it and flip it over. Flakes of char come off. The pot in which the soup should have been boiling is cold. You never turned on the gas.
“Oh,” you say. His arm is still braced on the stove. You can't stop looking at it. You're just waiting at this point for a finger to break off, for a sore to get infected.
“What's up with you?” Dean asks, pulling the skillet away from you, dropping the burned mess of the sandwich into the trash can. “You're starting to freak me out.”
You don't say anything. You stand, confused, in front of the stove, holding the spatula in your hand.
“Hey,” Dean says. His voice is echoing in on itself. “Dude? Look at me. Jesus, your eyes are all fucked up.”
He reaches up to grasp your face in both hands. You flinch, startled by the coldness, the utter coldness of the black right hand. You flinch out of his grip, drop the spatula on the floor.
“Hey,” Dean says, louder, increasingly flustered. “Sam. Can you see me?”
You can't, not clearly, but you don't know how to say that. You make a noise, but it's slurred. Then, everything snaps back into place, so perfect that it shocks you nearly off your feet.
“I'm calling Cas,” Dean says, and leaves the room.
The kitchen smells like burning cheese and tin. You blink a few times. Your cheek where he touched you feels itchy and raw.
“Dean?” you call. No answer. “Dean? I'm okay-I think-”
Dean doesn't answer. He's probably in his room, calling Cas down. There's no point. You feel fine-you were just tired, you want to call out. It's been a long few days, and you're worried about him. It's stress.
You push the back of your hand against your cheek where he touched you. It's tingling. A sudden jab of fear down your spine. You feel contaminated. You look to the steel wool on the sink.
V.
Cas is AWOL, and Dean insists that you take a day off your feet. Get some rest. You don't think he's buying that it was stress. He won't ask about the scrapes on your cheek where you gouged at your skin with the steel wool until it felt clean again, free of the gangrene eating Dean's fingers. But he sees them, he knows what you did.
He hovers, even while you're sleeping, and you are very tired after all. You have a headache to beat the band. Even the light under the door is too much. You can feel the rotting arm ringing out in the dark room like a siren.
He has to know something's wrong with it. You have to do something about it.
VI.
He's skeptical that you feel better, but he lets you up. You spend the day in the library staring at the same page of the same book for hours, hoping he won't notice. Every time he passes by, the limp black arm swinging at his side, you feel a jolt of nausea, a rising sense of urgency.
You hear him on the phone. It's Cas, trying to get back to the Bunker from somewhere far away. That asshole-that kid, you think he fucked him up? you hear. You suppose he means Cole. (You have trouble recalling Cole's face, or what, exactly, he wanted from you.) Ain't right, man. His head ain't right.
He brings you food. You're too nauseous to eat it; you let it go cold. Besides, you can't be sure his awful skin hasn't come off on the edge of the plate, on the spoon in the soup.
He comes, he sits with you, you talk for a while. About how you're feeling, about other things. Your brain is fuzzy. In the moments when his image blurs out, the dead arm, the imposter arm, stands out like a spot cut out of the universe.
You've got to do something about it.
Dean makes you tea, and it's bad tea, but you can hold it down. You feel calmer. When he leans down over you to adjust the strap of your sling with his good hand, his real hand, you kiss the closest part of him, his neck.
“Okay,” he says, laughing. “Guess you are feeling better, huh.”
Of course you are, now that you know what you have to do.
VII.
Two AM. You know when he wakes up because of the shift in the room, though it's almost too dark to see him. He's frozen at first-you can almost imagine the cogs turning in his brain. Feeling the situation. Understanding it. He's face-down on his bed. His right arm is handcuffed to the bedpost, stretched away. It took all you had not to gag from the smell of the dead flesh while you snapped the cuff closed.
“Sam,” he says, voice raspy from sleep. He tugs on his arm and the cuff jangles; you tense, hoping the hand won't break off at the wrist. “Sam. The fuck.”
You're sitting at the end of the bed. The hatchet you found in a far back room is limp between your knees. You need more light, though it'll hurt your eyes.
“Sam. Hey. I know you're in here.” He's more awake now. You have to do it fast, minimise the pain. “The fuck are you doing? Get this thing off me. What time is it?”
“Two,” you say.
“The fuck are you doing?”
You stand up. The door creaks when you pull it open, just enough to let a long swathe of light illuminate the low end of his body. His eyes are glinting in it.
“Sam, I swear to God.”
“It's okay. I'm gonna get it off.”
In the next second of silence Dean gets it.
“The fuck-”
“Look, it's a solution.” You come around to his right side. Your head feels heavy. The hatchet by contrast is as light as air. “You'll feel better, and I'll feel better.”
“You're not-Sam, hold up a second, okay, hold on.”
“You hungry?” you say, blinking, trying to gather your thoughts back to the forefront of your brain. “I can make something.” You find the edge of the dead arm on the mattress, straightened out nice and flat on the bed, the Mark of Cain almost glowing faintly in the dark. It smells like death. “After, I can make something.”
Dean doesn't bother asking after what.
“Cas is coming. Hear me? That guy, he fucked you up, Sammy, that Cole guy. He hit you in the head, didn't he? We thought-”
“I'm fine,” you say. The hatchet feels heavier now. Your head is getting lighter. Swimming, dizzy. You might faint-you have to do it soon. “Just give me a second.”
“I can't understand you,” Dean says, voice pitching up, sounding panicked. “Dude, I can't understand a word you're saying, you're slurring-”
“I'm fine,” you say again.
“Let me out of these cuffs, man-”
“Hold on, okay? It'll only take a second.”
It'll only take a second, and then you can get his real arm back, from wherever it went. You'll celebrate with booze and junk food. You'll stay up late until he starts nodding off, and maybe you can sleep with him. Or on the floor. Or in the hall, against the door, on the hard concrete. Is he hungry? You know what he likes-charred grilled cheese.
He's talking, but you can't understand him. Doesn't matter. The hatchet is up in front of your face for a spare three seconds and then you bring it down, right where you wanted it, at the point where the gangrene has slowed in its march up his arm.
Dean screams like nothing you've ever heard. The hatchet is lodged in the bone. He's trying to roll away, but there's only so far he can move, cuffed the way he is.
Is he hungry? You should ask.
“You hungry?” You can't get the hatchet out. You lift a foot, brace it against the imposter arm, yank the hatchet with your good hand. It comes out.
Dean is sobbing, awful ragged breathing, face sideways on his pillow, staring towards the wound on his upper arm. He's begging- please, Sammy, please, hold on- the sharp edge is not going to do it. It's too small to get through bone.
You turn it over. The blunt hard edge. You've got the shatter it. It'll make it easier.
You bring it down. Once. Three times. Each time Dean's howl of pain gets hoarser, more raw, until the bone splinters under the back of the hatchet, and he doesn't make a noise, and you feel a dizzying feeling of relief. Or just plain vertigo. One more blow and the rest of the flesh should come apart-rotting flesh comes undone easy-and sure enough-
You drop the hatchet onto the floor, step back, take a deep breath. Everything's clear again. No double vision, no headache. You let out a long breath, run your hand back through your hair to pull it out of your eyes. There's a ragged, angry break between Dean's bleeding shoulder and the limp dead arm on the mattress, still cuffed to the bedpost. A ragged, angry separation-just what you wanted.
“Dean,” you say, leaning down to shake him. “Look. How easy was that? Why didn't we try that before?”
He doesn't respond. The fingers of the arm are twitching in the corner of your eye. You grab a handful of his hair, tug gently. He still doesn't move.
He's unconscious. You feel a stab of fear. Of course he is. You have to cover up the wound. It won't heal otherwise. It'll get infected. And you have to get rid of the arm. Burn it. Something. Destroy the Mark as much as you possibly can.
Your eyes go strange again. You reach down half-blindly for the arm, for the cuffs. You feel for the cold dead icy flesh. He'll want to eat when he wakes up. Grilled cheese-he likes it, when it's charred a little bit.
You touch flesh that's cooling, not cold. Smooth and unblemished and uncalloused. Confused, you look down-peer closer-holding your breath, waiting for the smell, but there is no smell.
It's just an arm. Dean's arm. Healthy, smooth, all its fingernails and bones and skin intact. The pinkish scar flesh of the Mark of Cain sitting quietly, unassuming, above the dying twitching pulse in the elbow.
Never gangrenous or swollen or split or infected.
“Dean?” you say. But he's out cold. Bleeding in spurts from the wound of his severed arm in deep puddles on the sheets. “Dean?” But you were so sure. You knew what to do. It was the only thing you could have done.
Your head is throbbing, you can't see. You were so sure. And it's just an arm.