Fic: Love and Crocodiles
I was supposed to be studying pharmacology, and look what happened instead. A while back, the lovely counteragent made a donation to the typhoon relief fund, and for that she gets a fic. Your prompts were very cool and sneaky, and you really did know how to push my writing limits. You should've seen the Great Wall of China of a block that I smacked against while trying to write Sam and Dean talking about their feelings. So this happened. I hope nobody expires from the cheesy metaphor of Dean Winchester's love.
I know this deviates from your prompts about Hell and love, and I really hope that you like it anyway.
This is a companion piece to Moonless, Starless, in which it's Dean's turn to descend into Hell after Sam. (Because there can never be enough Hell rescue fics.) There is a guy who can get him in, but in return he wants to eat Dean's love all up.
Disclaimer: I don't know who wrote that Campbell soup commercial with a magical door to Mom Cave, but I'm sure he was a lovely person and not at all a crocodile. I'm sure he was compensated for it, too.
Love and Crocodiles [Sam/Dean, 2K, PG-13]
The son of a goddess lived on the sixth floor of a Bronx apartment building, behind the eighth door on the left. His door was clean, and unscratched, and free of graffiti, painted a deep shade of purple. Dean double-checked the address from a folded sticky note and knocked. A sudden explosion of canine barking from the apartment next door made him jump. Behind the purple door, everything was quiet. Dean pounded on the door and kicked it for good measure.
“He ain’t home!” A small woman with a rat face stuck her head out into the hallway and waved her hands at Dean. “He ain’t never home! Crack is up on the seventh floor.” And she pointed at the ceiling.
Dean flipped her off and continued beating on the door. It opened suddenly, and the small woman disappeared back into her own apartment with a squeak.
The son of a goddess was a short, thin man with a stringy neck, glasses and receding blond hair that was almost the same shade as his scalp. He wore a bathrobe, which cut just below the knees, revealing a pair of thin legs with unevenly growing hair. He was barefoot, in the middle of winter.
“What?” he said. “What, man, what, fucking what?”
“Sergio? My name is Dean. We spoke on the phone a few days ago.”
Sergio smacked his lips. They had a blue tinge to them, which Dean blamed on the lighting at first but which he now realized was genuine. “You didn’t like my price.”
“I changed my mind.”
The rat-faced woman poked her head out into the hallway again. “Hey. Hey, watcha selling there, Sergio? How much you selling for? Wanna blowjob for a little taste?”
Sergio bared his teeth at her silently. “Why don’t you come in, Dean?”
The apartment was barely more than a room with an open kitchen tucked away in the corner, a single window and a wood panel wall to hide the bed. The son of a goddess slept in a twin bed, like a teenager. There was a thick carpet on the floor, with images of long-jawed lizards, or perhaps crocodiles. Probably crocodiles, Dean decided. The place was neat but poorly lit, stifled with mismatched boxes stacked by every wall almost to the ceiling. In the middle of the room was a round table with two chairs by it. Sergio took one and offered the other to Dean with a gesture.
Sergio said, “So.” He put his legs up on the table and immediately started cleaning under a toenail. His toes were rounded and wide, like his fingers, and blue. “So, you’re looking to buy yourself a passage down.”
“I have to make sure you can provide first.”
Sergio smacked his lips again - a habit that was starting to get on Dean’s nerves. “But you’re willing to pay my price?”
“If you’re good for it.”
Sergio walked over to an old-fashioned wardrobe and kneeled down, gesturing for Dean to do the same. Pushing aside the pants and the shirts with a Safeway logo on them, he revealed a door in the back, large enough for a man to crawl through.
“A door to Mom’s living room. Have you seen that Campbell soup commercial? I wrote it. Then the bastards stiffed me for the payment.” Dean heard him opening the lock, but he missed where Sergio got the key from, and that key must’ve been small enough to hide between his fingers. “There.”
A rush of hot air hit Dean’s face when the door opened, and with it came a pungent smell of wild animal. Dean resisted the urge to press a hand over his nose because Sergio was watching, licking his lips. Behind the door was a long twisted tunnel with rough walls, sloping downward, and somewhere far down below burned a fire. That was all Dean had a chance to see before Sergio slammed the door shut.
“You are not stiffing me for the payment. You think I don’t see you snooping around? I see. You’re never gonna find that key by yourself.” He shook a clubbed finger in Dean’s face.
Dean raised his hands up in surrender. “No tricks. You let me use that key for a day and a night, and my love is yours to eat.”
“Deal.” Sergio went back to the table, rubbing his hands. “Come here, Dean. I’m going to eat your love all up.”
Dean sat down, too. He had a strange feeling in him, as though his love was a physical thing in him, a part of him like a bone or an organ. Last thing he wanted was to give it to this blue-tinged lip-smacking freak. But Sam was his brother before he was his anything else. Sam was in Hell, and Dean knew Hell. He could always grow a new love.
“Will it hurt?”
Sergio puffed out his chest and adjusted his glasses. “I am the son of Ammit the Heart-Eater. I have the heart of a crocodile and an appetite to match. Of course it’ll hurt.”
Dean shrugged off his jacket and tugged on the collar of his shirt. Sergio was licking his fingertips, and his tongue was thin and pointed. Dean looked at the closet again, inside of which hid the door to one of Hell’s waiting rooms. He wondered if, after the sort of love he had for Sam was removed and eaten, his heart would still be nasty enough to earn him a passage down.
Something was fluttering in his chest, a non-physical thing. “Do it,” he said. “Do it, man.”
It did hurt. When Sergio’s hand touched his chest, it felt like something blunt was pushing in between his ribs, which was in the end tolerable. Dean thought that he could probably take it and in the next moment saw stars when something squeezed and pulled, and suddenly he couldn’t take a breath. He had no heartbeat anymore; his heart was a piece of contracted muscle, frozen solid and twisted in on itself, and it was never going to beat again. The hand in his chest was not a hand but a scaled appendage of a crocodile. His breathing stopped, his throat closed up. The pain was overwhelming.
When Dean could breathe again, he was on the floor next to an overturned chair. His heart was hammering in his chest. He blinked the tears out of his eyes and saw, up above, the towering figure of the son of Ammit the Heart-Eater. He didn’t look like a sickly momma’s boy anymore. He was smiling down at Dean with the lips that lost their blue tinge, and from his mouth protruded the sharp teeth of a crocodile.
In his hand was a dirty, dirty thing dripping black sludge. Dean recognized it without having seen it once. He made a lunge for it out of instinct, but Sergio pulled it out of his reach.
“A deal is a deal, Dean,” said Sergio.
“Fine.” Dean’s throat hurt. He took a couple of deep breaths and tried again. “Fine. It’s yours in exchange for a passage for a night and a day.”
He looked at the horrible thing in Sergio’s hand and thought of the way Sam smiled like the sun. He thought of kisses in the dark - of hard ones and the slow ones that melted him from the toes to the top of his head. He thought of driving through the night with the radio playing softly, something swelling and swelling in his chest until it almost burst him open.
In the room gone dim, there seemed to be something crocodilian in Sergio’s face. He pulled a Kleenex from somewhere and started wiping the sludge off Dean’s love.
“What’s that?”
“Sin and damnation.” Sergio made a face at him. “That would be incest.”
Moving slowly, Dean picked up his chair and sat down at the table again. The dirty thing in Sergio’s claws looked like the spot behind Sam’s ear that Dean secretly loved, which he’d never admit out loud. Dean bit the inside of his cheek. Underneath the dirt, Dean’s love turned out to be a tiny green apple, barely larger than a quarter. Sergio turned it this way and that, making satisfied noises.
“That’s a nice one. A deal is a deal.” He set a key on the table in front of Dean. It looked brittle and sharp, made out of a fish spinal column. Dean covered it with his palm quickly. “Say hi to my mom down there. Yummy.” And he closed his eyes and took the daintiest little bite of Dean’s love.
Dean took a sharp breath in and held it, so he wouldn’t punch the freak in the nose right there. It felt intimate. A feeling came and went, too brief for him to fully register and too bizarre to describe. It was like being in a darkened motel room with the curtains tightly drawn, like being stretched out on a bed. It was as if Sam had his mouth pressed to Dean’s stomach, only his tongue was cold and pointy and sharp.
Sergio held the tiny piece of Dean’s love in his mouth for a moment longer, eyes closed like he was some ridiculous wine-taster. He swallowed. A few more seconds passed in silence. Sergio’s blissful expression quivered.
“I bet it tastes like shit,” Dean said.
Sergio frowned and opened his eyes. His face twisted. He pulled at the collar of his robe. He coughed weakly and tried to take a breath, and Dean heard a loud wheeze.
“What?” Dean said. “What’s the matter with you?” He pocketed the key, just in case Sergio changed his mind.
But Sergio wasn’t paying any attention to him. The wheezing was persistent now, and his neck muscles were visibly straining from the effort to breathe. He dropped the little green apple that was Dean’s love, and Dean caught it before it rolled off the table. The light was returning back into the room. In it, Sergio didn’t look like a crocodile anymore but like a sickly man with his throat rapidly closing up. He shoved away from the table. Dean grabbed him before he could crash to the floor, and Sergio grabbed at his sleeve and pulled until he was almost strangling Dean with his shirt.
“Sergio! Where’s your fucking EpiPen? Where is it?”
Dean looked around the room, at the boxes by the wall that almost spilled mismatched junk on the carpet, at the old-fashioned cabinet and the wardrobe. The blue tinge was back in Sergio’s lips and fingers, only now his tongue was turning blue as well, swollen so large it didn’t fit in his mouth anymore. The look on his face was, if anything, hateful.
Dean pried his hands off and ran to the cabinet, pulling open drawers and throwing out handfuls of junk - ribbons, cutlery, cheap jewelry, empty Pez dispensers with the heads of Elvis and the Star Wars characters, plastic boxes of buttons that opened and spilled on the carpet. Dean crushed them on his way to the kitchen. He yanked open the fridge, empty except for a carton of chocolate milk and stacks of frozen dinners in the freezer. There was no epinephrine anywhere.
There was no sound coming from behind him - no wheezing and no movement. Dean turned around. The son of Ammit the Heart-Eater - a small man in boxers and a t-shirt under a bathrobe - lay curled up on his crocodile carpet. His face was blue, and he wasn’t breathing, wasn’t moving. Dean kneeled down next to him and put two fingers on his carotid. He didn’t feel a pulse. There was a medical bracelet on his wrist, which said Tetralogy of Fallot. Dean had no idea what that meant. If that was Dean’s bracelet, he would’ve written, Epi in the first top drawer.
Dean closed Sergio’s eyes and, after a moment’s consideration, placed two quarters over the eyelids. In one pocket, he still had the tiny fishbone key. The other was empty, but Dean could feel now that the love was back inside of him, small and green and poisonous, covered in the black sludge of incest, with a tiny bite missing. He could always grow it back.
“I guess I should’ve known,” he told the dead man on the floor. That thing, that love had killed him in the past, too.
He called 911 from Sergio’s phone and hung up without leaving his name.
The small square door hadn’t disappeared like he was afraid it would. The fishbone key fit perfectly. Dean pushed it open, and hot air smelling like wild animal came from inside. The tunnel twisted down and down, making his head spin just from looking at it. From somewhere on the street came the sound of sirens. Dean climbed into the wardrobe and pulled the door closed behind him, cutting off the real world. The red light in the tunnel was pulsating, and he could hear voices now, speaking in something that only sounded half-way like a language. Dean had a gun under his jacket, a stack of quarters in his pocket, a piece of bread and a pinch of salt, and plenty of non-physical things, to bargain and fight his way through Hell.
If the bastards down there decided to eat him, may they choke on the love.
Somebody was pounding on the apartment’s door. It was a sweet sound of the real world, and it wasn’t for him anymore. Dean climbed into the tunnel. The voices cried out in triumph.
Notes:
Crocodilian heart is almost but not quite four-chambered. They have an incomplete separation between the ventricles, which contributes to their ability to dive for long periods of time. If I recall correctly, it's because the shunt between the ventricles allows them to reuse their partially oxygenated blood. Errr, I think. Tetralogy of Fallot (pronounced "fal-LO") is a congenital heart defect characterized, among other things, by a ventricular septal defect, like in the heart of a crocodile.
I know this deviates from your prompts about Hell and love, and I really hope that you like it anyway.
This is a companion piece to Moonless, Starless, in which it's Dean's turn to descend into Hell after Sam. (Because there can never be enough Hell rescue fics.) There is a guy who can get him in, but in return he wants to eat Dean's love all up.
Disclaimer: I don't know who wrote that Campbell soup commercial with a magical door to Mom Cave, but I'm sure he was a lovely person and not at all a crocodile. I'm sure he was compensated for it, too.
Love and Crocodiles [Sam/Dean, 2K, PG-13]
The son of a goddess lived on the sixth floor of a Bronx apartment building, behind the eighth door on the left. His door was clean, and unscratched, and free of graffiti, painted a deep shade of purple. Dean double-checked the address from a folded sticky note and knocked. A sudden explosion of canine barking from the apartment next door made him jump. Behind the purple door, everything was quiet. Dean pounded on the door and kicked it for good measure.
“He ain’t home!” A small woman with a rat face stuck her head out into the hallway and waved her hands at Dean. “He ain’t never home! Crack is up on the seventh floor.” And she pointed at the ceiling.
Dean flipped her off and continued beating on the door. It opened suddenly, and the small woman disappeared back into her own apartment with a squeak.
The son of a goddess was a short, thin man with a stringy neck, glasses and receding blond hair that was almost the same shade as his scalp. He wore a bathrobe, which cut just below the knees, revealing a pair of thin legs with unevenly growing hair. He was barefoot, in the middle of winter.
“What?” he said. “What, man, what, fucking what?”
“Sergio? My name is Dean. We spoke on the phone a few days ago.”
Sergio smacked his lips. They had a blue tinge to them, which Dean blamed on the lighting at first but which he now realized was genuine. “You didn’t like my price.”
“I changed my mind.”
The rat-faced woman poked her head out into the hallway again. “Hey. Hey, watcha selling there, Sergio? How much you selling for? Wanna blowjob for a little taste?”
Sergio bared his teeth at her silently. “Why don’t you come in, Dean?”
The apartment was barely more than a room with an open kitchen tucked away in the corner, a single window and a wood panel wall to hide the bed. The son of a goddess slept in a twin bed, like a teenager. There was a thick carpet on the floor, with images of long-jawed lizards, or perhaps crocodiles. Probably crocodiles, Dean decided. The place was neat but poorly lit, stifled with mismatched boxes stacked by every wall almost to the ceiling. In the middle of the room was a round table with two chairs by it. Sergio took one and offered the other to Dean with a gesture.
Sergio said, “So.” He put his legs up on the table and immediately started cleaning under a toenail. His toes were rounded and wide, like his fingers, and blue. “So, you’re looking to buy yourself a passage down.”
“I have to make sure you can provide first.”
Sergio smacked his lips again - a habit that was starting to get on Dean’s nerves. “But you’re willing to pay my price?”
“If you’re good for it.”
Sergio walked over to an old-fashioned wardrobe and kneeled down, gesturing for Dean to do the same. Pushing aside the pants and the shirts with a Safeway logo on them, he revealed a door in the back, large enough for a man to crawl through.
“A door to Mom’s living room. Have you seen that Campbell soup commercial? I wrote it. Then the bastards stiffed me for the payment.” Dean heard him opening the lock, but he missed where Sergio got the key from, and that key must’ve been small enough to hide between his fingers. “There.”
A rush of hot air hit Dean’s face when the door opened, and with it came a pungent smell of wild animal. Dean resisted the urge to press a hand over his nose because Sergio was watching, licking his lips. Behind the door was a long twisted tunnel with rough walls, sloping downward, and somewhere far down below burned a fire. That was all Dean had a chance to see before Sergio slammed the door shut.
“You are not stiffing me for the payment. You think I don’t see you snooping around? I see. You’re never gonna find that key by yourself.” He shook a clubbed finger in Dean’s face.
Dean raised his hands up in surrender. “No tricks. You let me use that key for a day and a night, and my love is yours to eat.”
“Deal.” Sergio went back to the table, rubbing his hands. “Come here, Dean. I’m going to eat your love all up.”
Dean sat down, too. He had a strange feeling in him, as though his love was a physical thing in him, a part of him like a bone or an organ. Last thing he wanted was to give it to this blue-tinged lip-smacking freak. But Sam was his brother before he was his anything else. Sam was in Hell, and Dean knew Hell. He could always grow a new love.
“Will it hurt?”
Sergio puffed out his chest and adjusted his glasses. “I am the son of Ammit the Heart-Eater. I have the heart of a crocodile and an appetite to match. Of course it’ll hurt.”
Dean shrugged off his jacket and tugged on the collar of his shirt. Sergio was licking his fingertips, and his tongue was thin and pointed. Dean looked at the closet again, inside of which hid the door to one of Hell’s waiting rooms. He wondered if, after the sort of love he had for Sam was removed and eaten, his heart would still be nasty enough to earn him a passage down.
Something was fluttering in his chest, a non-physical thing. “Do it,” he said. “Do it, man.”
It did hurt. When Sergio’s hand touched his chest, it felt like something blunt was pushing in between his ribs, which was in the end tolerable. Dean thought that he could probably take it and in the next moment saw stars when something squeezed and pulled, and suddenly he couldn’t take a breath. He had no heartbeat anymore; his heart was a piece of contracted muscle, frozen solid and twisted in on itself, and it was never going to beat again. The hand in his chest was not a hand but a scaled appendage of a crocodile. His breathing stopped, his throat closed up. The pain was overwhelming.
When Dean could breathe again, he was on the floor next to an overturned chair. His heart was hammering in his chest. He blinked the tears out of his eyes and saw, up above, the towering figure of the son of Ammit the Heart-Eater. He didn’t look like a sickly momma’s boy anymore. He was smiling down at Dean with the lips that lost their blue tinge, and from his mouth protruded the sharp teeth of a crocodile.
In his hand was a dirty, dirty thing dripping black sludge. Dean recognized it without having seen it once. He made a lunge for it out of instinct, but Sergio pulled it out of his reach.
“A deal is a deal, Dean,” said Sergio.
“Fine.” Dean’s throat hurt. He took a couple of deep breaths and tried again. “Fine. It’s yours in exchange for a passage for a night and a day.”
He looked at the horrible thing in Sergio’s hand and thought of the way Sam smiled like the sun. He thought of kisses in the dark - of hard ones and the slow ones that melted him from the toes to the top of his head. He thought of driving through the night with the radio playing softly, something swelling and swelling in his chest until it almost burst him open.
In the room gone dim, there seemed to be something crocodilian in Sergio’s face. He pulled a Kleenex from somewhere and started wiping the sludge off Dean’s love.
“What’s that?”
“Sin and damnation.” Sergio made a face at him. “That would be incest.”
Moving slowly, Dean picked up his chair and sat down at the table again. The dirty thing in Sergio’s claws looked like the spot behind Sam’s ear that Dean secretly loved, which he’d never admit out loud. Dean bit the inside of his cheek. Underneath the dirt, Dean’s love turned out to be a tiny green apple, barely larger than a quarter. Sergio turned it this way and that, making satisfied noises.
“That’s a nice one. A deal is a deal.” He set a key on the table in front of Dean. It looked brittle and sharp, made out of a fish spinal column. Dean covered it with his palm quickly. “Say hi to my mom down there. Yummy.” And he closed his eyes and took the daintiest little bite of Dean’s love.
Dean took a sharp breath in and held it, so he wouldn’t punch the freak in the nose right there. It felt intimate. A feeling came and went, too brief for him to fully register and too bizarre to describe. It was like being in a darkened motel room with the curtains tightly drawn, like being stretched out on a bed. It was as if Sam had his mouth pressed to Dean’s stomach, only his tongue was cold and pointy and sharp.
Sergio held the tiny piece of Dean’s love in his mouth for a moment longer, eyes closed like he was some ridiculous wine-taster. He swallowed. A few more seconds passed in silence. Sergio’s blissful expression quivered.
“I bet it tastes like shit,” Dean said.
Sergio frowned and opened his eyes. His face twisted. He pulled at the collar of his robe. He coughed weakly and tried to take a breath, and Dean heard a loud wheeze.
“What?” Dean said. “What’s the matter with you?” He pocketed the key, just in case Sergio changed his mind.
But Sergio wasn’t paying any attention to him. The wheezing was persistent now, and his neck muscles were visibly straining from the effort to breathe. He dropped the little green apple that was Dean’s love, and Dean caught it before it rolled off the table. The light was returning back into the room. In it, Sergio didn’t look like a crocodile anymore but like a sickly man with his throat rapidly closing up. He shoved away from the table. Dean grabbed him before he could crash to the floor, and Sergio grabbed at his sleeve and pulled until he was almost strangling Dean with his shirt.
“Sergio! Where’s your fucking EpiPen? Where is it?”
Dean looked around the room, at the boxes by the wall that almost spilled mismatched junk on the carpet, at the old-fashioned cabinet and the wardrobe. The blue tinge was back in Sergio’s lips and fingers, only now his tongue was turning blue as well, swollen so large it didn’t fit in his mouth anymore. The look on his face was, if anything, hateful.
Dean pried his hands off and ran to the cabinet, pulling open drawers and throwing out handfuls of junk - ribbons, cutlery, cheap jewelry, empty Pez dispensers with the heads of Elvis and the Star Wars characters, plastic boxes of buttons that opened and spilled on the carpet. Dean crushed them on his way to the kitchen. He yanked open the fridge, empty except for a carton of chocolate milk and stacks of frozen dinners in the freezer. There was no epinephrine anywhere.
There was no sound coming from behind him - no wheezing and no movement. Dean turned around. The son of Ammit the Heart-Eater - a small man in boxers and a t-shirt under a bathrobe - lay curled up on his crocodile carpet. His face was blue, and he wasn’t breathing, wasn’t moving. Dean kneeled down next to him and put two fingers on his carotid. He didn’t feel a pulse. There was a medical bracelet on his wrist, which said Tetralogy of Fallot. Dean had no idea what that meant. If that was Dean’s bracelet, he would’ve written, Epi in the first top drawer.
Dean closed Sergio’s eyes and, after a moment’s consideration, placed two quarters over the eyelids. In one pocket, he still had the tiny fishbone key. The other was empty, but Dean could feel now that the love was back inside of him, small and green and poisonous, covered in the black sludge of incest, with a tiny bite missing. He could always grow it back.
“I guess I should’ve known,” he told the dead man on the floor. That thing, that love had killed him in the past, too.
He called 911 from Sergio’s phone and hung up without leaving his name.
The small square door hadn’t disappeared like he was afraid it would. The fishbone key fit perfectly. Dean pushed it open, and hot air smelling like wild animal came from inside. The tunnel twisted down and down, making his head spin just from looking at it. From somewhere on the street came the sound of sirens. Dean climbed into the wardrobe and pulled the door closed behind him, cutting off the real world. The red light in the tunnel was pulsating, and he could hear voices now, speaking in something that only sounded half-way like a language. Dean had a gun under his jacket, a stack of quarters in his pocket, a piece of bread and a pinch of salt, and plenty of non-physical things, to bargain and fight his way through Hell.
If the bastards down there decided to eat him, may they choke on the love.
Somebody was pounding on the apartment’s door. It was a sweet sound of the real world, and it wasn’t for him anymore. Dean climbed into the tunnel. The voices cried out in triumph.
Notes:
Crocodilian heart is almost but not quite four-chambered. They have an incomplete separation between the ventricles, which contributes to their ability to dive for long periods of time. If I recall correctly, it's because the shunt between the ventricles allows them to reuse their partially oxygenated blood. Errr, I think. Tetralogy of Fallot (pronounced "fal-LO") is a congenital heart defect characterized, among other things, by a ventricular septal defect, like in the heart of a crocodile.