Fic: Whatever It Takes
The 2016 spnspringfling reveals are up! This is my contribution, which went to frozen_delight.
More of a character study than anything, really, but there are spoilers for s9 and s10.
Warnings: Blood, gore, weirdness.
Whatever It Takes
Sam Winchester is-
-porous. He is sure that he was sure, once, a long, long time ago; and even in the dark, dark hours when he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be, he was at least sure of what he wanted to be. But he has died-
-and lived and died again and lived again-
-dragged, kicking and screaming, through so many planes of existence that he has left traces of him everywhere like psychic signatures: SAM WINCHESTER WAS HERE at first, then just SAM then nothing at all, blood smears and the scrape of fingernails against unrelenting concrete-
-fragmented, peeled apart viciously at the most fundamental, inviolable level of existence, and forced to live as just mind, just body, just soul, and then as a being put together with something ineffable filling the cracks that’s part angel, part demon, and all Sam-
-and so when Sam dreams, he doesn’t just dream: he dissects. He is a spectator to his own mind, picking apart his own thoughts, analysing the things he sees, making science out of unreality, equations out of the arcane. After all, his dreams have been visions, portents, markers (worthless) for as long as he can remember. It is his only resource that’s uniquely his to help him survive in a world that he’s drowning in.
This time, he dreams of a man.
He is a man insofar as he is shaped like one: tall, long-limbed, naked, painfully thin. His skin is a kind of unhealthy white, burned and then bleached by radiation, hairless; it ripples over his bones as though the muscle and fat underneath have long since melted away. He sits bowed, spider-like hands clasped in between his legs, still but for the slightest of movements that allow air in and out of that hollow chest. He is at once something pathetic, bowed underneath some unimaginable weight, and something quietly intimidating, like rock carved by rivers over hundreds and hundreds of years.
The man looks up, and the man smiles.
Blue-white eyes are set in hollows so deep they look abyssal; with no eyebrows, anguish is contempt is sorrow is contemplation is fear. Until the man’s bloodless lips peel apart to reveal two rows of long, narrow teeth, and then he is just-alien.
Then Sam notices the sigil high on his chest, the sigil to prevent demonic possession-
-notices the eerie softness of the light in which the man sits in, the glimpse of wooden benches and endless bookshelves-
-and hears a low groaning in the distance, a voice twisting and folding on itself in the throes of unimaginable agony (incomprehensible anger), but it’s a voice that’s familiar to Sam as his own-
-and Sam says no and the man says no with him, dessicated tongue scraping across yellowed teeth-
-looking at once every second of his two hundred years and waiting to live two hundred more-
Sam wakes up. The man unspools behind his eyelids. He lies quietly for a few minutes; he should be quaking with terror but his heart beats a steady cadence. Sam Winchester is porous and he is everywhere and nowhere all at once, but there is one thing he can count on in his universe: what he sees is what he gets. Once he has crossed the line between knowing and not knowing, there is only one thing left to do: to decide.
So he decides.
He is not that man. He will not be that man.
Whatever it takes.
-
Dean Winchester is on fire (in the only way that matters, furnace heat where there’s been dead ashes for far too long, except each time it takes more and more power, something more and more cosmic to strike a spark to kindling); he doesn’t need weapons (the weapon is a lie that funnels rather than transforms, and he is bigger than that now, beyond that, he always has been), and someday he won’t need the anger, too (and he won’t, death rage revenge redemption all in a big tangled up cycle and he’s off the rack, isn’t he, he’s off the rack)
And each time purpose and reason become smaller and smaller things, specks on a rapidly disappearing horizon on his rearview mirror as he cruises over smooth blacktop, the hum of something powerful under him, within him, around him. He has earned this, for every piece of his soul that he’s cut out and freely given for family; for every time that piece has been thrown back in his face, somehow both unwanted and not enough. His entire life has been building up to this (to nothing, nothing at all): Dean Winchester, collapsing under the weight of his own ideals, one gnarled hand reaching from the ashes to grasp at what remains of
(family)
In free will there is change and in family there is dissidence and in sacrifice there is guilt but in death there is the clear simple choice: to suffer, or to make others suffer.
Dean misses the clarity of that death, sometimes.
Dean dreams of standing alone, up to his elbows in spattered blood, walking on corpses piled on corpses piled on corpses until it’s a fortress he’s made of them, a city, a universe. And yet he is unable to distil any kind of truth from all that blood: only that pain is infinite, and that he can continue letting the world deal it to him, or he can continue dealing it back. In giving up, he’s only letting go.
Dean wakes up, and he burns. He will not stop searching for that truth.
Whatever it takes.