Blindfold (mild Sam/Dean, 6k, pg-13)
This could be horror gen-fic, or it could be a look at Dean and Sam's post season-five incestuous angst. Who knows? All that matters, is that it's fic, and I wrote it, and it's done.
This came from a vague idea I already had, plus a drabble prompt left by lazy_daze - beware, this is not the schmoop you are looking for. Still, like I said, it's fic and I wrote it. I hope you all like it.
Blindfold
(mild Sam/Dean, 6k, pg-13)
After the engine had gone quiet, Dean waited in the passenger seat for Sam to come and get him. There was the creak of the driver's door. That was the car rocking as Sam climbed out. That was Sam's boots biting gravel underfoot.
It took Sam twelve steps to get around to the other side of the car, and while Dean waited, he studied the parts of his blindfold where there was no fold in the material, where the light could get through. Only the light. It could be anything out there, but only the light could get through.
There was another creak at his side. Cool air touched his face. Dean stretched out a hand, and instantly lost it in Sam's. He curled his fingers around Sam's thumb, crawled his other hand up Sam's arm to his shoulder. When Sam pulled him from the car, a shadow moved on the other side of Dean's blindfold.
Sam lived in the light that didn't reach Dean, and in Dean's fingertips when he felt out the sculpture of Sam's face and body. Sam lived in the words he said, even the stupid, shapeless ones Dean only heard him draw breath to say.
"This way," said Sam. He turned Dean, then laid Dean's hand on his own forearm, so that Dean would have something to hold on to as they walked.
They left the road, and the ground was soft beneath their feet. Damp grass soaked the legs of Dean's jeans. Silence whistled like an untuned radio. The air smelled wet and sharp, and it settled on the back of Dean's neck, in the creases of his elbows and thighs.
There was no grace in the way Dean walked now, but he didn't mind when his hips bumped into Sam's. He missed a step, the ground not where it should be, and Sam's arm snaked around his waist.
"Sorry," Sam muttered. "Ground's not even. Damn rabbits."
Dean laughed, and Sam's arm flexed tighter around him, just for a moment, before letting him go.
"Just passing the barn now," said Sam, and Dean felt the tide of its shadow rise up over him and fall away, the impression of its existence instantly sinking into the nothingness that surrounded him.
Sam stopped him, and said, "Okay. Hang on."
Dean waited, patient - he was always patient now, always trusting Sam - while Sam moved behind him. Sam's fingers tugged at the back of the blindfold, a second of deeper darkness as the fabric strained over his eyes, and then Dean could see.
He blinked against the morning, his heart cowering behind his ribs as his vision cleared.
After a second, he jerked his head, as if pointing a finger might be getting too close. "There," he said. "Just to the left of the dead cherry tree. Dig there."
"You sure?" said Sam.
Dean didn't look around at him, just nodded.
Where Dean pointed, the earth churned and seethed, and the skin-stripped, rotted limbs of the corpse thrashed through it. Each time the corpse struggled to the surface, clawing at the grass with its fingers like pulpy, black splinters, the ground swallowed it down, drowned it in dirt. Again, the corpse broke through, chunks of soggy earth falling away from its shoulders, and it twisted, writhed, like a nailed down snake.
Its gaping, jawless face turned towards Dean, and its eye sockets were rotted empty, but it saw Dean. Just like Dean saw it.
"I'm sure," said Dean.
The blindfold went swiftly back over his eyes, and Sam knotted it tight at the back of his head. His fingers ruffled through Dean's hair.
"I'm gonna fetch a shovel from the trunk. Wait right here," said Sam.
He left Dean there.
Dean listened hard, but there was no sound of the corpse, no tongueless moaning or squelching dirt. Just birdsong and the distant creak of the trunk.
There were only a few feet between Dean and the grave. Sam was much farther away. The corpse could have crawled out already, could be slithering through the grass on its sunken belly, could be drawing itself up in front of Dean's face already. Dean could push the blindfold off like blinking, and the corpse would be right there, grinning back at him.
It was the breeze on his face, not the breath of something standing just inches away.
His hands came up to his blindfold, fingertips running along the material to where it stretched over the bridge of his nose.
"Don't ever take it off," Sam had said, tying the blindfold like the knots of a promise. "You must only ever let me do it. Only me."
Dean had touched the blindfold, felt out the dips of his eyes beneath it. Blinked and felt his eyelashes crushed under the material.
Sam had taken Dean's hands in his own and eased them away from his face.
"You have to let me be the one to do it," Sam had said, pleading. He'd smoothed his thumb over the back of Dean's hand, curiously tender, and Dean's breath had caught in his throat, and he'd only nodded.
The car trunk slammed shut. Gravel crunched and then nothing, Sam's footsteps muffled in the grass as he came back.
Dean's hands dropped to his sides.
:::
It had happened in Portland, Maine, in a house that overlooked the bay and where five people had died.
The house smelled of the sea, and was full of sunshine and dust. Walls were falling down, carpets had been torn up, and the floors were lined with old plaster and crumbling brick.
In the nursery, there was a frieze of sailing ships around the walls. One end of it was torn down, as though the line of ships drifted into sudden, ragged fog, and disappeared.
There was no pane in the window, and Dean leaned on the sill to breathe in bitterly fresh air. Downstairs, Sam scuffed through the kitchen, rattling old knives and kicking aside broken glass, like he'd never shared a cage with archangels. Like he'd never left Dean's side.
Dean grinned, and turned around to go back to him.
A shadow unfolded itself from the corner, traveled across the wall, and came to stand in the doorway. Its long, thin back was to Dean, and it had the proportions of a human that had been put together from a half-erased sketch.
It stood in the doorway, wavering, staring out at the empty hallway, and didn't move.
Then its head turned. It moved in slow jerks, as though time didn’t run smoothly, and came blurting through in fat dollops instead.
It seemed to take forever for it to face Dean. It twisted in the doorway until it was looking at him, and its eyes -
Its eyes were milky-green glass marbles.
Then it was six weeks later, and all Dean ever saw were nightmares.
He saw humans with all humanity pared from the bone, until they were only hideously deformed representations of their worst parts. They were so warped out of shape with the ugliness of their existence that Dean couldn't find faces when he looked at them, couldn't find anything he could make sense of. Every horror of their lives was right there for him to see.
He saw it all with the detached eye of a disgusted observer. All twisted, and all true.
And then Sam - Sam who was lost to him, Sam who forever stood behind him - tied the blindfold over Dean's eyes, and Dean didn't have to see anything anymore.
:::
While he read Dean the diner's breakfast menu, Sam hooked his leg around Dean's under the table. The heel of his boot pressed lightly into Dean's calf. In turn, Dean's grip on the edge of the table loosened.
"Coffee. And the griddle hash. Side of sausage," said Dean, when Sam was done with the recital.
"Sausage, or sausage patty?"
Dean didn't hesitate. "Sausage."
He tried not to spend too long thinking about the food he ate. His sense of taste was undamaged, but he didn't want to get to imagining what the food would look like if he were to push his blindfold up. He'd have given up meat if he didn't know his screwed up sight would find a way to somehow make waffles drizzled in chocolate sauce just as stomach-churningly horrible.
The coffee's arrival was the clink-and-thud of a cup being set down on the table. Dean smelled it, felt the heat of it rise up to him.
Sam's foot shifted, and Dean imagined him straightening slightly over his side of the booth as he leaned in to take his own coffee.
"The diner's called Susannah's. There was a big basket of flowers hanging on the wall just by the door," said Sam. "The waitress is pretty, you'd like her. She smiled at us when we came in. There are six pale blue booths, and then a row of tables, and they're pale blue too. We're in the booth closest to the door. There's nobody in the next one, but behind us, there's a couple, and they're holding hands."
Sam kept his voice low as he talked, and beneath the blindfold, Dean put the scene together on the back of his eyelids, like a child arranging dolls.
"Tell me more about the waitress."
Sam laughed, because he'd known Dean would ask. "She's, uh, late twenties. And she's tall, and, uh, she's got this band holding back her hair -" Dean mentally took the waitress's hair down from the ponytail he'd put it in, added a hairband instead - "And the band's got these little sparkles on it, and they put rainbows on the wall when the light catches it."
Dean thought about that.
Pale blue booths, flowers by the door, a cute waitress with rainbows in her hair: Sam always told him such pretty stories.
:::
If he woke before Sam in the morning, Dean knew to just lie there and wait. No matter how tightly Sam tied it on, or how tidily Dean tried to sleep, his blindfold always got a little rumpled, and Dean had to wait until Sam could make sure it was properly over his eyes before he was allowed to open them.
Once Dean was good and blind again, Sam would take him to the bathroom, and they were getting brave enough now to make stupid jokes to each other while Sam helped him piss. Sam would put him in the shower under the water, and then, a little while later, Sam would collect him, and shave him, and press Dean's toothbrush into his hand, all ready with a blob of toothpaste.
Dean picked his clothes by smell and touch, sniffing it to see how dirty it was, feeling out the rip in the pocket that told him he had his green jacket, not his blue one. Sometimes, Sam would carefully take it out of Dean's hands, saying, "It's got chili stains on it, man. Wear this one instead."
And Dean'd say something like, "This one of your flowery pink shirts? You know I'm not as pretty as you, Sammy. I can't pull that kinda shit off like you do."
And Sam would laugh, and say, "True. I think your color's more of a sweet lavender shade."
Dean would put the shirt on anyway, and he'd know that it wasn't pink or flowery.
He never had to open his eyes to check.
The one time Sam caught him breaking his promise, Sam stopped speaking for hours, and it terrified Dean. Dean couldn't find him in the silence, couldn’t be certain that the hands that manhandled him out of his clothes and put him down on the bed really belonged to Sam.
They'd stopped at a motel, and Sam stood Dean in the room, saying, "Wait here. I'll bring our bags in."
Dean didn't know why he did it. Maybe some part of him was hoping that the curse on his sight had lifted at some unnoticed point. Maybe he could look at the world now and not see horrors.
It was quiet, aside from next-door's TV sounding through the walls. It was just an empty motel room.
Dean put his fingertips to the bottom of his blindfold, and pushed. It wasn't like when Sam untied it, when they needed Dean's fucked up vision for hunting. It didn't feel safe without the heat and thickness of Sam at his back.
Dean blinked. The motel room flickered.
Something was on the bed. Struggling. It was gray and shapeless and shiny, and it was fighting the stretch of its own skin. Limbs twisted and strained beneath the membrane, dragging its shape into torturous contortions. The print of a face burst out, all mouth and bone, and then the skin ruthlessly smoothed it away, and the screaming face was gone.
A hand clamped over Dean's eyes. "Jesus, Dean, no," Sam snarled.
He put Dean in the darkness, and it was hours before he came back for him.
Dean lay in his bed and wondered whether the bed Sam had picked for him was the one with the thing on it. And it wasn't better if it wasn't, because that meant Sam was sharing a bed with that stretching, straining, gray-veined skin. And if the skin burst, what would come crawling out?
There was nothing for a long while, so long that Dean wondered if he'd missed the click of the door as Sam left. Then, after hours, Sam drew breath.
"Don't ever take the blindfold off unless I'm there to do it for you. I don't want you seeing-" Sam's voice choked off. "You have to trust me, Dean. You don't wanna see."
Dean wanted to know what there was for him to see that Sam thought was so much worse than what he already knew was out there. And then he thought that maybe he didn't.
:::
The bathroom smelled a little funky, a slap of cleaning fluid over something darker and more lingering, but the water pressure in the shower was awesome. Dean had rinsed the shampoo from his hair a while ago and was now simply enjoying the heat. Water sluiced over his body, and molded the blindfold to his face, like a second layer of skin.
Dean patted along the slippery tiles until he found the soap rack. Sniffed it, and decided he could live with his body smelling the same, even if the smell was definitely a pink smell. Maybe a soft peach.
As he was working up a lather of soapy bubbles, a moment of uneasy curiosity hit him, like it did sometimes when he was without Sam. If he pushed up his blindfold, there'd be something terrible in the bathroom. Maybe in the shower with him. Maybe he was stepping over some misshapen, twitching thing in the bottom of the tub.
Maybe it was watching him. He hated it when they watched him.
His breath slipped out of him in a light shiver, and Dean defiantly slapped the soapy pink bubbles onto his body and started to sing.
He liked the way his voice filled up the room. He liked putting something good and familiar, like Black Sabbath, in the bathroom with him. Nothing could be too weird when there was a soundtrack of Black Sabbath.
Gradually, the atmosphere dissipated, and Dean could be comfortable again. He reached the chorus and raised his voice, head bobbing in time to the beat in his head. The water thundered around him, painting him with mist wherever there wasn't soap. His hands skimmed through the lather on his body - over his shoulders, under his arms, his belly, between his thighs.
And he stopped.
It was back. There was something in the shower with him. It wasn't a feeling, it was a certainty, as though Dean had caught it in his peripheral vision.
He turned sharply, his feet squeaking on the wet tub. One hand braced against the tile to steady himself, while the other reached slowly out into the space in front of him. He swiped his hand through the air again, and still found nothing.
The water drummed down on him. He should never have started singing because there was plenty of empty space in the bathroom where the song had been, and something was filling it up. His skin prickled. Instinct made him look back over his shoulder, even though the blindfold kept him from seeing what he knew was there.
Dean didn't want to look, but it was too close. He couldn't have it so close and not look. He couldn't stand there, blind and wet and naked, and not look at what was standing just a couple of inches away from him.
Belly shrinking with fear, he reached up to his blindfold.
The bathroom door clicked close.
And Dean stood there under the water, shaking in the heat, and knew that it had been Sam.
:::
"The car in front's got a bumper sticker that says Programmers are tools for converting caffeine into code," said Sam. "It's a black Honda, and there's a dog in the back. Nope, couple of dogs. Think the car needs a mechanic to look at it though, one side of it's listing a little. Could be the axel's bent."
Normally, Dean liked to listen to Sam's running commentary. Sam told him about the weather and the scenery and little details about the people they passed, and Dean could listen to it for hours, but today he could only think about how Sam never told him about himself. Sam was missing from all the photographs made of words that he gave to Dean. Sam never told him if he had crazy-hair today, or if he'd nicked himself shaving, or if he smiled when he saw all the nice stuff he told Dean about. All things Dean could know in a single glance.
"I miss being able to look at you," Dean said suddenly.
Sam's mouth worked. Dean could hear the wetness of it. He remembered the tight little purse of Sam's lips when he wasn't happy, and he put it in the silence where he imagined Sam's face to be.
"I'm here," Sam said. "Isn't that enough? I'm here and I'm not gonna leave you. Please, Dean. It's enough."
:::
There were times when Dean didn't mind the quiet. Like tonight. He was on the bed with Sam, his arm hooked around Sam's knee and his head pillowed on Sam's hip, while Sam's fingers combed unhurriedly through Dean's hair.
Sam had talked himself out a while ago. Dean knew all about the desk in the room, and exactly where the lamp, which was decorated with old seashells, was positioned on the desk, and what the covers on the beds were like, and how ugly the wallpaper was.
The silence was all right when Sam was so undeniably present.
Whenever Dean got to brooding on his shit luck, he always had to remind himself that at least he got to see Sam again before it happened. He'd had two months of knowing that Sam wasn't trapped at the bottom of the world with Lucifer anymore. He'd had chance to see that Sam wasn't scarred or hurt, still looked the same, still moved the same, still had the same tells for Dean to figure out when Sam was hungry or pissed or upset.
There must have been a moment, during those six weeks that Dean lost after the shadow in Portland had looked at him, that he had seen Sam. It must have happened. But the memory of whatever it was Dean had seen wasn't there.
And Sam insisted that he was the only one to take Dean's blindfold off. And he always stood behind Dean when he did.
The sweep of Sam's hand lifted Dean's hair away from his neck. Gooseflesh spread over his skin, and Dean shivered. He pressed his face to Sam's thigh.
"Why's it so fucking cold?" he said.
Sam's fingers paused at the back of his neck. Dean could feel them there, just resting. "Window's open," Sam said finally.
He eased himself out from Dean, left him in the dent where his body used to be. Dean listened attentively. There was a small bump, which could have been the window being pulled shut. Could have been, but didn't have to be. Then the bed dipped, and Dean was hauled back against Sam's chest. Dean had figured out a while ago that it was easier to let Sam manhandle him; his attempts to help occasionally wound up with him accidentally elbowing Sam in the face. So he went light and limp, and let Sam arrange him.
Sam's hand went back into Dean's hair, fingers easily cradling the back of Dean's skull where Dean's head was propped against his shoulder. He rubbed his thumb over the blindfold's knot.
"I was thinking, maybe we should go to a concert. It's summer, there are a couple around you might like. We'll take a couple of days off hunting, drive out somewhere. I don't know, maybe max out a card staying somewhere a little nicer." Sam's voice was quiet and warm, and Dean got the idea he'd put a lot of thought into this already.
He tilted his face up in the direction of Sam's voice, grinning easily. "Who's playing?"
"Some 80's cock-rock bands. Don't ask me to remember names right now, man. It's all spandex and big hair to me."
Dean put his head back on Sam's shoulder. "You love it," he told him contentedly.
Sam's laugh was a rumble in his chest. "Yeah, sure I do, Dean."
There was a hypnotic quality to the motion of his fingers through Dean's hair, unrelentingly soothing. His other arm was slung over Dean's waist, with one finger snagged through the belt loop of Dean's jeans. None of this touching was ever allowed until Dean was blindfolded. Now, Dean relied upon it. He was pretty sure Sam did too.
He liked to listen to the beating of Sam's heart, the watery thrum of it vibrating through his own body when they were close enough. He liked it when he caught a hint of soap on Sam's skin, and realized it was the same one he'd used. He liked the flex of Sam's muscle when he'd been lying in one position too long and needed to get comfortable again.
"Dude, stop," he mumbled, swatting at Sam's hand clumsily. "I'm gonna go to sleep if you keep petting me."
Sam's fingers didn't stop their steady sweep through Dean's hair. "S'okay," he said. "Go to sleep. I'm right here."
:::
That night, Dean dreamed of a room in Detroit, where Nick breathed frost on the window and drew in the Devil's mark.
:::
Dean's Eyesight of the Damned could fuck up just about anything.
The sun was a massive pit of aching, hungry fire, hanging just over Dean's shoulder, while birds like shrieking spiders swooped and dived. The ground heaved as its layers of dead and decomposing things were picked over by the senseless scavenging of insects, buried under crumbling concrete.
If you couldn't see all of that, it was probably a nice morning, dawn just settling over the motel.
Dean held his blindfold in his hand, loose at his side, and listened to Sam come up behind him.
"What are you doing?" Sam said. It was a calm and measured response, not like the last time Dean had taken his blindfold off without Sam.
"Just taking in the scenery," said Dean.
"Don't. Put your blindfold back on."
Someone had died out there in the parking lot. Or suffered, at least. Dean could see them turning themselves inside out, shambling drunkenly as they picked the ribs out of their raw, red flesh like troublesome splinters.
"Dean, I don't want you seeing-"
"What?" Dean cut in. "What don't you want me seeing?"
With the decisive flick of ripping open an envelope, his gaze dropped to the ground.
Sam's shadow was right there next to his. It didn't matter what Dean saw when he looked at Sam, because all that mattered was that Sam was there. There wasn't anything his vision could show him that would make him leave Sam.
It didn't matter that Sam's shadow was amorphous and shifting. Didn't matter that it was taller than it should be, blacker than it should be. Didn’t matter that there were two huge bladed shadows beside him like-
Like wings.
Didn't matter that Sam's shadow wasn't human at all.
The weight of Sam's hand came down on his shoulder, and if Dean turned his head just a little, he'd see whether it was flesh touching him, or something else, if the hands that had stroked him and directed him and held him while he slept were even human.
"I don't want you to see," said Sam. "Please. Close your eyes."
Dean closed his eyes.
:::
They found a kid on the eighth floor of the old hospital. From his voice, he sounded young, fifteen or sixteen maybe, but it could have just been the tears and panic that Dean was hearing. Fear made everyone sound younger than they were.
"It was a story! It wasn't real! It wasn't s'posed to be real!"
In another room, something banged.
"Oh god," the kid breathed out. "Oh god, it's coming back. It's coming back."
"Shh," said Dean irritably, because it was hard enough on Sam to have to hunt with a blind man in tow, without throwing in a hysterical teen.
Mostly it was dark the other side of Dean's blindfold, but there was the occasional flash of light when the electric crackled through. There was something chemical in the air that was sharp in Dean's mouth and scoured the back of his throat. His anchor was the rusted metal bar on the side of the hospital bed, and Dean flexed his fingers around it, never quite letting go of it.
The second bang was closer. The far end of the ward.
"What is it?" Dean whispered.
"Can't see," said Sam.
Another bang, closer still, then a loud, skittering creak as something raced across the floor, and Dean recognized the sound of hospital bed wheels.
"It's behind the bed," said Sam. Dean felt him move, training the shotgun on whatever it was coming for them.
On the next bang, sudden and shocking enough to jar Dean's teeth together, the kid shrieked beside him, and Dean was jerked backwards. He stumbled clumsily, his legs tangling like ribbons, until he realized it was Sam's hand gripping the nape of his neck.
There was no hospital bed to hold on to. Couldn't hold on to Sam when he might need to shoot. Dean was suspended, hung there in his own blindness, while the bangs clattered up and down the length of the ward, getting angrier and nastier.
"Down!" Sam shouted, and something knocked into Dean, barreled him into Sam's chest.
"Please don't let it get me!" the kid gibbered. It was the kid's hands clinging to the front of Dean's shirt, the kid's hot, too-sweet breath on Dean's face. Dean wanted to shake him off because it was messing with his head, being clung to by something he couldn't see - because maybe it was a kid, or maybe it was some skinless, swollen-eyed bastard putting its hands all over Dean, while it let that high, terrified kid's voice spill out of its gaping mouth.
"Would you shut up?" Dean hissed. "It's gonna be okay if you'd just-"
The banging stopped.
Dean listened to the chorus of their own breathing: Sam hanging onto Dean and the shotgun, while the kid cowered against Dean.
Something wet and thick ripped. Hit the floor.
"Is that blood?" the kid said, his voice rising and wavering at the end. "Is that blood? Whose blood is that? Whose fucking blood is that?"
He was still screaming when the banging came back. Hospital bed wheels screeched against the floor, their bars jangling as they slammed into each other like a pile-up on the freeway, then pulled away to do it vindictively again. It was too much noise for Dean to pick out any auditory landmarks to ground himself. Sam kept twisting and turning him while he scanned their surroundings, until Dean didn't know where the door was, where they'd come in, how they were going to get out.
Then Sam's hand grabbed his, pressed another hand into it, smaller and sweaty.
"You two get outta here," said Sam. "Whatever happens, kid, you do not let go of his hand, you hear me? Now go! Run!"
And Dean was pulled away from Sam, lost him under the sea of noise he couldn't pluck him back out of.
The kid wasn't careful, not like Sam always was. The kid didn't tell him where they were going or when there was something underfoot that Dean might trip on, and the kid dropped the fucking door on him. But he didn't let go of Dean's hand either.
They were leaving the noise behind, though Dean still clearly heard the one-two-three blast of Sam's shotgun through the clamoring.
"Stairs," the kid said breathlessly.
Dean just had time to throw out a hand to find the railing before the kid was dragging him down. He took the stairs in a barely controlled fall, tumbling from one step and only being caught by the next. His arm ached wrist to shoulder from the constant tugging of the kid's hand in his. In front of him, the kid panted and his sneakers squeaked, and running, bumping into the railing and cursing and praying: a little hurricane of panicked noise for Dean to follow.
There was no more noise behind them, no more shotgun. Sam would be behind them soon. It didn't register with the kid, too intent on getting the hell out of the hospital.
From a little way below them, something banged.
The kid skidded to a halt, and Dean's knee drove into his back. His heartbeat was painful in his chest. The sound of his own breathing was eaten up by the kid's gurgling moan.
"Is it down there?" said Dean.
Another bang, a single thud on the stairs further down. Followed by silence.
It was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.
"Can you see it?" said Dean. But the kid's hand in his was trembling, cold with fear. "Sam? You there?" Dean tried again.
His breathing was tight. His own grip on the stairwell's railing was slick and sweaty. There was a knife tucked into his boot, but to reach it, Dean would have to let go of the kid or the railing.
"Kid, listen to me," said Dean. "In a moment, I want you to let go of my hand-"
The kid gripped Dean's hand harder. "No way. That other guy said-"
There was a rush of metal clattering - click-click-click - and Dean got the distinct impression of something dragging bony fingers along the stairwell's railing.
"Just listen! Let go of my hand, but grab onto my arm instead. Okay? Can you do that?" Silence, and Dean rolled his blinded eyes, and said, "The right answer is 'yes', kid."
The kid's hand slipped from his, cold and clammy like corpse-flesh.
"Okay," said Dean. "Good. Now grab onto my arm."
He waited. Another two bangs, each a little farther up the stairs.
"Kid?" said Dean. "Kid! Grab my arm!"
Dean was left there, alone. Light flashed on and off in the stairwell, while Dean gripped the railing, frozen and hunched, and held out his empty hand. He was all alone. That realization was closely followed by the stubborn refusal to simply wait to get killed.
He sank to a crouch, felt out the handle of the knife in his boot. And then, very carefully, he pushed his blindfold up.
In the intermittent flashes of buzzing electrical light, Dean could see the man at the bottom of the stairwell, his skin lacerated by hundreds of tiny, oozing red slices, and the bloody marks his body was leaving as he crawled up the stairs, palms slapping wet against each step.
Just a few feet in front of Dean was the kid. He looked maggoty and raw, full of cancerous potential.
"Kid," Dean barked shakily. "Get back over here."
"I thought I saw something," said the kid. He turned to look at Dean. "There was something when the lights-"
Dean was just thinking that the kid was even uglier face-on, featureless and wet as though he'd had his face bashed in with a shovel, when the kid started screaming again.
"Hey, hey!" said Dean, reaching out to him. "Calm down! Take it easy!"
But the kid scrambled backwards, away from him, and Dean got it then.
Somewhere up above him, Sam was shouting Dean's name, telling him to get down. But Dean couldn't stop looking at the kid, who was looking right back at him, and screaming.
:::
The thrum of the Impala's engine filled the silence between them for a while, but couldn't take the place of talking about it.
"Look, it's over," said Sam, as though Dean's muteness had been its own form of arguing and he'd had enough already. "The kid's fine. He's back with his parents, and by tomorrow morning, he'll already be doubting a whole lot of what happened tonight. And I took care of the ghost. Everything's fine."
Dean nodded. Heard Sam sigh.
"Dean. C'mon, man." That was softer, not coaxing so much as quietly begging.
Dean swallowed. If he could forget about it, he would, for Sam's sake if not his own. But the kid's screaming got caught between his ears, like a ball bouncing frantically between walls, and Dean was still hearing it.
"Everything's not fine," said Dean. "I'm not fine. That kid, whatever he saw when he looked at me-"
"He was freaking out," Sam cut in firmly. "He's a kid, and he'd been in a haunted hospital for three hours. Hannah Montana would'a probably set him off screaming again."
Dean laughed dully. "Oh, so I'm Hannah Montana now, huh? Nice." He took a deep breath. "What's wrong with me, Sam?"
Sam's hands slammed against the steering wheel. The car swerved in a small, sickening lurch. "Nothing's wrong with you! You… you're perfect. You're fine, okay? You're beautiful."
"Beautiful like Angelina Jolie in a swimsuit? Or beautiful like Freddy Krueger wearing make-up? 'Cause I gotta tell you, I'm not feeling so beautiful right now, Sam."
The car picked up speed.
"What does it even matter?" Sam said. "You've got me, and I'm not going anywhere. And so long as you keep the blindfold on, you don't ever have to worry about-"
"About what the hell is wrong with me?" Dean barked back at him.
Nothing had ever felt different in Dean. His body was the same, his skin, his hair, all as he remembered it. Sometimes Sam touched his face, making sure the blindfold was comfortable over his eyes, or simply to touch him, and nothing had ever felt out of place or tender or wrong.
But why shouldn't he be ugly in his own eyes? By all rights, he should be every bit as fucked up and deformed as all the other guys out there. He had a long list of crimes to his name, and Hell had gone a long way to twisting him out of shape.
Maybe he'd been walking around, seeing nightmares, while all this time he'd been the ugliest one.
After a long silence, Sam said, "I told you, nothing is wrong with you." It sounded like that was it for Sam. Maybe it was.
In the end, Dean had decided that he didn't need to look at Sam. He loved him enough. Despite anything Dean might have seen if he'd looked at him, it would still have been Sam. And it turned out that, while Dean had been making that choice, Sam had been deciding that he didn't care about whatever was wrong with Dean.
"We'll stop to get some gas, then head back to the motel," said Sam, more conciliatory. "You wanna stop for pizza on the way? Burger?"
Dean didn't care about the shadow of wings Sam shouldn't have. Sam would probably have accepted Dean if he'd come crawling out of the Pit, black-eyed and bloodthirsty.
They were a matched pair. Nobody in the world was as damaged as they were. They were so twisted up together that they'd even accept each other as monsters.
Dean could be a monster and Sam would never tell him.
Dean shoved the blindfold off his eyes. Blinking against the pulsing glare of the roadside lights, he leaned down to stare at his own reflection in the side-view mirror.
He ignored the car's sudden swerve, Sam's big hand tugging at his shoulder, Sam's voice shouting, "Dean, no! Don't look!"
Dean looked.
His heartbeat fluttered, and died. From the narrow slant of the side-view mirror, Dean's unchanged reflection looked steadily back at him. There were no warped features or exposed bone, no blood or spasming muscle. Everything was as he remembered, down to a single freckle, except -
In the black hollows where his own eyes used to be, were two milky-green glass marbles.
~end
This came from a vague idea I already had, plus a drabble prompt left by lazy_daze - beware, this is not the schmoop you are looking for. Still, like I said, it's fic and I wrote it. I hope you all like it.
Blindfold
(mild Sam/Dean, 6k, pg-13)
After the engine had gone quiet, Dean waited in the passenger seat for Sam to come and get him. There was the creak of the driver's door. That was the car rocking as Sam climbed out. That was Sam's boots biting gravel underfoot.
It took Sam twelve steps to get around to the other side of the car, and while Dean waited, he studied the parts of his blindfold where there was no fold in the material, where the light could get through. Only the light. It could be anything out there, but only the light could get through.
There was another creak at his side. Cool air touched his face. Dean stretched out a hand, and instantly lost it in Sam's. He curled his fingers around Sam's thumb, crawled his other hand up Sam's arm to his shoulder. When Sam pulled him from the car, a shadow moved on the other side of Dean's blindfold.
Sam lived in the light that didn't reach Dean, and in Dean's fingertips when he felt out the sculpture of Sam's face and body. Sam lived in the words he said, even the stupid, shapeless ones Dean only heard him draw breath to say.
"This way," said Sam. He turned Dean, then laid Dean's hand on his own forearm, so that Dean would have something to hold on to as they walked.
They left the road, and the ground was soft beneath their feet. Damp grass soaked the legs of Dean's jeans. Silence whistled like an untuned radio. The air smelled wet and sharp, and it settled on the back of Dean's neck, in the creases of his elbows and thighs.
There was no grace in the way Dean walked now, but he didn't mind when his hips bumped into Sam's. He missed a step, the ground not where it should be, and Sam's arm snaked around his waist.
"Sorry," Sam muttered. "Ground's not even. Damn rabbits."
Dean laughed, and Sam's arm flexed tighter around him, just for a moment, before letting him go.
"Just passing the barn now," said Sam, and Dean felt the tide of its shadow rise up over him and fall away, the impression of its existence instantly sinking into the nothingness that surrounded him.
Sam stopped him, and said, "Okay. Hang on."
Dean waited, patient - he was always patient now, always trusting Sam - while Sam moved behind him. Sam's fingers tugged at the back of the blindfold, a second of deeper darkness as the fabric strained over his eyes, and then Dean could see.
He blinked against the morning, his heart cowering behind his ribs as his vision cleared.
After a second, he jerked his head, as if pointing a finger might be getting too close. "There," he said. "Just to the left of the dead cherry tree. Dig there."
"You sure?" said Sam.
Dean didn't look around at him, just nodded.
Where Dean pointed, the earth churned and seethed, and the skin-stripped, rotted limbs of the corpse thrashed through it. Each time the corpse struggled to the surface, clawing at the grass with its fingers like pulpy, black splinters, the ground swallowed it down, drowned it in dirt. Again, the corpse broke through, chunks of soggy earth falling away from its shoulders, and it twisted, writhed, like a nailed down snake.
Its gaping, jawless face turned towards Dean, and its eye sockets were rotted empty, but it saw Dean. Just like Dean saw it.
"I'm sure," said Dean.
The blindfold went swiftly back over his eyes, and Sam knotted it tight at the back of his head. His fingers ruffled through Dean's hair.
"I'm gonna fetch a shovel from the trunk. Wait right here," said Sam.
He left Dean there.
Dean listened hard, but there was no sound of the corpse, no tongueless moaning or squelching dirt. Just birdsong and the distant creak of the trunk.
There were only a few feet between Dean and the grave. Sam was much farther away. The corpse could have crawled out already, could be slithering through the grass on its sunken belly, could be drawing itself up in front of Dean's face already. Dean could push the blindfold off like blinking, and the corpse would be right there, grinning back at him.
It was the breeze on his face, not the breath of something standing just inches away.
His hands came up to his blindfold, fingertips running along the material to where it stretched over the bridge of his nose.
"Don't ever take it off," Sam had said, tying the blindfold like the knots of a promise. "You must only ever let me do it. Only me."
Dean had touched the blindfold, felt out the dips of his eyes beneath it. Blinked and felt his eyelashes crushed under the material.
Sam had taken Dean's hands in his own and eased them away from his face.
"You have to let me be the one to do it," Sam had said, pleading. He'd smoothed his thumb over the back of Dean's hand, curiously tender, and Dean's breath had caught in his throat, and he'd only nodded.
The car trunk slammed shut. Gravel crunched and then nothing, Sam's footsteps muffled in the grass as he came back.
Dean's hands dropped to his sides.
:::
It had happened in Portland, Maine, in a house that overlooked the bay and where five people had died.
The house smelled of the sea, and was full of sunshine and dust. Walls were falling down, carpets had been torn up, and the floors were lined with old plaster and crumbling brick.
In the nursery, there was a frieze of sailing ships around the walls. One end of it was torn down, as though the line of ships drifted into sudden, ragged fog, and disappeared.
There was no pane in the window, and Dean leaned on the sill to breathe in bitterly fresh air. Downstairs, Sam scuffed through the kitchen, rattling old knives and kicking aside broken glass, like he'd never shared a cage with archangels. Like he'd never left Dean's side.
Dean grinned, and turned around to go back to him.
A shadow unfolded itself from the corner, traveled across the wall, and came to stand in the doorway. Its long, thin back was to Dean, and it had the proportions of a human that had been put together from a half-erased sketch.
It stood in the doorway, wavering, staring out at the empty hallway, and didn't move.
Then its head turned. It moved in slow jerks, as though time didn’t run smoothly, and came blurting through in fat dollops instead.
It seemed to take forever for it to face Dean. It twisted in the doorway until it was looking at him, and its eyes -
Its eyes were milky-green glass marbles.
Then it was six weeks later, and all Dean ever saw were nightmares.
He saw humans with all humanity pared from the bone, until they were only hideously deformed representations of their worst parts. They were so warped out of shape with the ugliness of their existence that Dean couldn't find faces when he looked at them, couldn't find anything he could make sense of. Every horror of their lives was right there for him to see.
He saw it all with the detached eye of a disgusted observer. All twisted, and all true.
And then Sam - Sam who was lost to him, Sam who forever stood behind him - tied the blindfold over Dean's eyes, and Dean didn't have to see anything anymore.
:::
While he read Dean the diner's breakfast menu, Sam hooked his leg around Dean's under the table. The heel of his boot pressed lightly into Dean's calf. In turn, Dean's grip on the edge of the table loosened.
"Coffee. And the griddle hash. Side of sausage," said Dean, when Sam was done with the recital.
"Sausage, or sausage patty?"
Dean didn't hesitate. "Sausage."
He tried not to spend too long thinking about the food he ate. His sense of taste was undamaged, but he didn't want to get to imagining what the food would look like if he were to push his blindfold up. He'd have given up meat if he didn't know his screwed up sight would find a way to somehow make waffles drizzled in chocolate sauce just as stomach-churningly horrible.
The coffee's arrival was the clink-and-thud of a cup being set down on the table. Dean smelled it, felt the heat of it rise up to him.
Sam's foot shifted, and Dean imagined him straightening slightly over his side of the booth as he leaned in to take his own coffee.
"The diner's called Susannah's. There was a big basket of flowers hanging on the wall just by the door," said Sam. "The waitress is pretty, you'd like her. She smiled at us when we came in. There are six pale blue booths, and then a row of tables, and they're pale blue too. We're in the booth closest to the door. There's nobody in the next one, but behind us, there's a couple, and they're holding hands."
Sam kept his voice low as he talked, and beneath the blindfold, Dean put the scene together on the back of his eyelids, like a child arranging dolls.
"Tell me more about the waitress."
Sam laughed, because he'd known Dean would ask. "She's, uh, late twenties. And she's tall, and, uh, she's got this band holding back her hair -" Dean mentally took the waitress's hair down from the ponytail he'd put it in, added a hairband instead - "And the band's got these little sparkles on it, and they put rainbows on the wall when the light catches it."
Dean thought about that.
Pale blue booths, flowers by the door, a cute waitress with rainbows in her hair: Sam always told him such pretty stories.
:::
If he woke before Sam in the morning, Dean knew to just lie there and wait. No matter how tightly Sam tied it on, or how tidily Dean tried to sleep, his blindfold always got a little rumpled, and Dean had to wait until Sam could make sure it was properly over his eyes before he was allowed to open them.
Once Dean was good and blind again, Sam would take him to the bathroom, and they were getting brave enough now to make stupid jokes to each other while Sam helped him piss. Sam would put him in the shower under the water, and then, a little while later, Sam would collect him, and shave him, and press Dean's toothbrush into his hand, all ready with a blob of toothpaste.
Dean picked his clothes by smell and touch, sniffing it to see how dirty it was, feeling out the rip in the pocket that told him he had his green jacket, not his blue one. Sometimes, Sam would carefully take it out of Dean's hands, saying, "It's got chili stains on it, man. Wear this one instead."
And Dean'd say something like, "This one of your flowery pink shirts? You know I'm not as pretty as you, Sammy. I can't pull that kinda shit off like you do."
And Sam would laugh, and say, "True. I think your color's more of a sweet lavender shade."
Dean would put the shirt on anyway, and he'd know that it wasn't pink or flowery.
He never had to open his eyes to check.
The one time Sam caught him breaking his promise, Sam stopped speaking for hours, and it terrified Dean. Dean couldn't find him in the silence, couldn’t be certain that the hands that manhandled him out of his clothes and put him down on the bed really belonged to Sam.
They'd stopped at a motel, and Sam stood Dean in the room, saying, "Wait here. I'll bring our bags in."
Dean didn't know why he did it. Maybe some part of him was hoping that the curse on his sight had lifted at some unnoticed point. Maybe he could look at the world now and not see horrors.
It was quiet, aside from next-door's TV sounding through the walls. It was just an empty motel room.
Dean put his fingertips to the bottom of his blindfold, and pushed. It wasn't like when Sam untied it, when they needed Dean's fucked up vision for hunting. It didn't feel safe without the heat and thickness of Sam at his back.
Dean blinked. The motel room flickered.
Something was on the bed. Struggling. It was gray and shapeless and shiny, and it was fighting the stretch of its own skin. Limbs twisted and strained beneath the membrane, dragging its shape into torturous contortions. The print of a face burst out, all mouth and bone, and then the skin ruthlessly smoothed it away, and the screaming face was gone.
A hand clamped over Dean's eyes. "Jesus, Dean, no," Sam snarled.
He put Dean in the darkness, and it was hours before he came back for him.
Dean lay in his bed and wondered whether the bed Sam had picked for him was the one with the thing on it. And it wasn't better if it wasn't, because that meant Sam was sharing a bed with that stretching, straining, gray-veined skin. And if the skin burst, what would come crawling out?
There was nothing for a long while, so long that Dean wondered if he'd missed the click of the door as Sam left. Then, after hours, Sam drew breath.
"Don't ever take the blindfold off unless I'm there to do it for you. I don't want you seeing-" Sam's voice choked off. "You have to trust me, Dean. You don't wanna see."
Dean wanted to know what there was for him to see that Sam thought was so much worse than what he already knew was out there. And then he thought that maybe he didn't.
:::
The bathroom smelled a little funky, a slap of cleaning fluid over something darker and more lingering, but the water pressure in the shower was awesome. Dean had rinsed the shampoo from his hair a while ago and was now simply enjoying the heat. Water sluiced over his body, and molded the blindfold to his face, like a second layer of skin.
Dean patted along the slippery tiles until he found the soap rack. Sniffed it, and decided he could live with his body smelling the same, even if the smell was definitely a pink smell. Maybe a soft peach.
As he was working up a lather of soapy bubbles, a moment of uneasy curiosity hit him, like it did sometimes when he was without Sam. If he pushed up his blindfold, there'd be something terrible in the bathroom. Maybe in the shower with him. Maybe he was stepping over some misshapen, twitching thing in the bottom of the tub.
Maybe it was watching him. He hated it when they watched him.
His breath slipped out of him in a light shiver, and Dean defiantly slapped the soapy pink bubbles onto his body and started to sing.
He liked the way his voice filled up the room. He liked putting something good and familiar, like Black Sabbath, in the bathroom with him. Nothing could be too weird when there was a soundtrack of Black Sabbath.
Gradually, the atmosphere dissipated, and Dean could be comfortable again. He reached the chorus and raised his voice, head bobbing in time to the beat in his head. The water thundered around him, painting him with mist wherever there wasn't soap. His hands skimmed through the lather on his body - over his shoulders, under his arms, his belly, between his thighs.
And he stopped.
It was back. There was something in the shower with him. It wasn't a feeling, it was a certainty, as though Dean had caught it in his peripheral vision.
He turned sharply, his feet squeaking on the wet tub. One hand braced against the tile to steady himself, while the other reached slowly out into the space in front of him. He swiped his hand through the air again, and still found nothing.
The water drummed down on him. He should never have started singing because there was plenty of empty space in the bathroom where the song had been, and something was filling it up. His skin prickled. Instinct made him look back over his shoulder, even though the blindfold kept him from seeing what he knew was there.
Dean didn't want to look, but it was too close. He couldn't have it so close and not look. He couldn't stand there, blind and wet and naked, and not look at what was standing just a couple of inches away from him.
Belly shrinking with fear, he reached up to his blindfold.
The bathroom door clicked close.
And Dean stood there under the water, shaking in the heat, and knew that it had been Sam.
:::
"The car in front's got a bumper sticker that says Programmers are tools for converting caffeine into code," said Sam. "It's a black Honda, and there's a dog in the back. Nope, couple of dogs. Think the car needs a mechanic to look at it though, one side of it's listing a little. Could be the axel's bent."
Normally, Dean liked to listen to Sam's running commentary. Sam told him about the weather and the scenery and little details about the people they passed, and Dean could listen to it for hours, but today he could only think about how Sam never told him about himself. Sam was missing from all the photographs made of words that he gave to Dean. Sam never told him if he had crazy-hair today, or if he'd nicked himself shaving, or if he smiled when he saw all the nice stuff he told Dean about. All things Dean could know in a single glance.
"I miss being able to look at you," Dean said suddenly.
Sam's mouth worked. Dean could hear the wetness of it. He remembered the tight little purse of Sam's lips when he wasn't happy, and he put it in the silence where he imagined Sam's face to be.
"I'm here," Sam said. "Isn't that enough? I'm here and I'm not gonna leave you. Please, Dean. It's enough."
:::
There were times when Dean didn't mind the quiet. Like tonight. He was on the bed with Sam, his arm hooked around Sam's knee and his head pillowed on Sam's hip, while Sam's fingers combed unhurriedly through Dean's hair.
Sam had talked himself out a while ago. Dean knew all about the desk in the room, and exactly where the lamp, which was decorated with old seashells, was positioned on the desk, and what the covers on the beds were like, and how ugly the wallpaper was.
The silence was all right when Sam was so undeniably present.
Whenever Dean got to brooding on his shit luck, he always had to remind himself that at least he got to see Sam again before it happened. He'd had two months of knowing that Sam wasn't trapped at the bottom of the world with Lucifer anymore. He'd had chance to see that Sam wasn't scarred or hurt, still looked the same, still moved the same, still had the same tells for Dean to figure out when Sam was hungry or pissed or upset.
There must have been a moment, during those six weeks that Dean lost after the shadow in Portland had looked at him, that he had seen Sam. It must have happened. But the memory of whatever it was Dean had seen wasn't there.
And Sam insisted that he was the only one to take Dean's blindfold off. And he always stood behind Dean when he did.
The sweep of Sam's hand lifted Dean's hair away from his neck. Gooseflesh spread over his skin, and Dean shivered. He pressed his face to Sam's thigh.
"Why's it so fucking cold?" he said.
Sam's fingers paused at the back of his neck. Dean could feel them there, just resting. "Window's open," Sam said finally.
He eased himself out from Dean, left him in the dent where his body used to be. Dean listened attentively. There was a small bump, which could have been the window being pulled shut. Could have been, but didn't have to be. Then the bed dipped, and Dean was hauled back against Sam's chest. Dean had figured out a while ago that it was easier to let Sam manhandle him; his attempts to help occasionally wound up with him accidentally elbowing Sam in the face. So he went light and limp, and let Sam arrange him.
Sam's hand went back into Dean's hair, fingers easily cradling the back of Dean's skull where Dean's head was propped against his shoulder. He rubbed his thumb over the blindfold's knot.
"I was thinking, maybe we should go to a concert. It's summer, there are a couple around you might like. We'll take a couple of days off hunting, drive out somewhere. I don't know, maybe max out a card staying somewhere a little nicer." Sam's voice was quiet and warm, and Dean got the idea he'd put a lot of thought into this already.
He tilted his face up in the direction of Sam's voice, grinning easily. "Who's playing?"
"Some 80's cock-rock bands. Don't ask me to remember names right now, man. It's all spandex and big hair to me."
Dean put his head back on Sam's shoulder. "You love it," he told him contentedly.
Sam's laugh was a rumble in his chest. "Yeah, sure I do, Dean."
There was a hypnotic quality to the motion of his fingers through Dean's hair, unrelentingly soothing. His other arm was slung over Dean's waist, with one finger snagged through the belt loop of Dean's jeans. None of this touching was ever allowed until Dean was blindfolded. Now, Dean relied upon it. He was pretty sure Sam did too.
He liked to listen to the beating of Sam's heart, the watery thrum of it vibrating through his own body when they were close enough. He liked it when he caught a hint of soap on Sam's skin, and realized it was the same one he'd used. He liked the flex of Sam's muscle when he'd been lying in one position too long and needed to get comfortable again.
"Dude, stop," he mumbled, swatting at Sam's hand clumsily. "I'm gonna go to sleep if you keep petting me."
Sam's fingers didn't stop their steady sweep through Dean's hair. "S'okay," he said. "Go to sleep. I'm right here."
:::
That night, Dean dreamed of a room in Detroit, where Nick breathed frost on the window and drew in the Devil's mark.
:::
Dean's Eyesight of the Damned could fuck up just about anything.
The sun was a massive pit of aching, hungry fire, hanging just over Dean's shoulder, while birds like shrieking spiders swooped and dived. The ground heaved as its layers of dead and decomposing things were picked over by the senseless scavenging of insects, buried under crumbling concrete.
If you couldn't see all of that, it was probably a nice morning, dawn just settling over the motel.
Dean held his blindfold in his hand, loose at his side, and listened to Sam come up behind him.
"What are you doing?" Sam said. It was a calm and measured response, not like the last time Dean had taken his blindfold off without Sam.
"Just taking in the scenery," said Dean.
"Don't. Put your blindfold back on."
Someone had died out there in the parking lot. Or suffered, at least. Dean could see them turning themselves inside out, shambling drunkenly as they picked the ribs out of their raw, red flesh like troublesome splinters.
"Dean, I don't want you seeing-"
"What?" Dean cut in. "What don't you want me seeing?"
With the decisive flick of ripping open an envelope, his gaze dropped to the ground.
Sam's shadow was right there next to his. It didn't matter what Dean saw when he looked at Sam, because all that mattered was that Sam was there. There wasn't anything his vision could show him that would make him leave Sam.
It didn't matter that Sam's shadow was amorphous and shifting. Didn't matter that it was taller than it should be, blacker than it should be. Didn’t matter that there were two huge bladed shadows beside him like-
Like wings.
Didn't matter that Sam's shadow wasn't human at all.
The weight of Sam's hand came down on his shoulder, and if Dean turned his head just a little, he'd see whether it was flesh touching him, or something else, if the hands that had stroked him and directed him and held him while he slept were even human.
"I don't want you to see," said Sam. "Please. Close your eyes."
Dean closed his eyes.
:::
They found a kid on the eighth floor of the old hospital. From his voice, he sounded young, fifteen or sixteen maybe, but it could have just been the tears and panic that Dean was hearing. Fear made everyone sound younger than they were.
"It was a story! It wasn't real! It wasn't s'posed to be real!"
In another room, something banged.
"Oh god," the kid breathed out. "Oh god, it's coming back. It's coming back."
"Shh," said Dean irritably, because it was hard enough on Sam to have to hunt with a blind man in tow, without throwing in a hysterical teen.
Mostly it was dark the other side of Dean's blindfold, but there was the occasional flash of light when the electric crackled through. There was something chemical in the air that was sharp in Dean's mouth and scoured the back of his throat. His anchor was the rusted metal bar on the side of the hospital bed, and Dean flexed his fingers around it, never quite letting go of it.
The second bang was closer. The far end of the ward.
"What is it?" Dean whispered.
"Can't see," said Sam.
Another bang, closer still, then a loud, skittering creak as something raced across the floor, and Dean recognized the sound of hospital bed wheels.
"It's behind the bed," said Sam. Dean felt him move, training the shotgun on whatever it was coming for them.
On the next bang, sudden and shocking enough to jar Dean's teeth together, the kid shrieked beside him, and Dean was jerked backwards. He stumbled clumsily, his legs tangling like ribbons, until he realized it was Sam's hand gripping the nape of his neck.
There was no hospital bed to hold on to. Couldn't hold on to Sam when he might need to shoot. Dean was suspended, hung there in his own blindness, while the bangs clattered up and down the length of the ward, getting angrier and nastier.
"Down!" Sam shouted, and something knocked into Dean, barreled him into Sam's chest.
"Please don't let it get me!" the kid gibbered. It was the kid's hands clinging to the front of Dean's shirt, the kid's hot, too-sweet breath on Dean's face. Dean wanted to shake him off because it was messing with his head, being clung to by something he couldn't see - because maybe it was a kid, or maybe it was some skinless, swollen-eyed bastard putting its hands all over Dean, while it let that high, terrified kid's voice spill out of its gaping mouth.
"Would you shut up?" Dean hissed. "It's gonna be okay if you'd just-"
The banging stopped.
Dean listened to the chorus of their own breathing: Sam hanging onto Dean and the shotgun, while the kid cowered against Dean.
Something wet and thick ripped. Hit the floor.
"Is that blood?" the kid said, his voice rising and wavering at the end. "Is that blood? Whose blood is that? Whose fucking blood is that?"
He was still screaming when the banging came back. Hospital bed wheels screeched against the floor, their bars jangling as they slammed into each other like a pile-up on the freeway, then pulled away to do it vindictively again. It was too much noise for Dean to pick out any auditory landmarks to ground himself. Sam kept twisting and turning him while he scanned their surroundings, until Dean didn't know where the door was, where they'd come in, how they were going to get out.
Then Sam's hand grabbed his, pressed another hand into it, smaller and sweaty.
"You two get outta here," said Sam. "Whatever happens, kid, you do not let go of his hand, you hear me? Now go! Run!"
And Dean was pulled away from Sam, lost him under the sea of noise he couldn't pluck him back out of.
The kid wasn't careful, not like Sam always was. The kid didn't tell him where they were going or when there was something underfoot that Dean might trip on, and the kid dropped the fucking door on him. But he didn't let go of Dean's hand either.
They were leaving the noise behind, though Dean still clearly heard the one-two-three blast of Sam's shotgun through the clamoring.
"Stairs," the kid said breathlessly.
Dean just had time to throw out a hand to find the railing before the kid was dragging him down. He took the stairs in a barely controlled fall, tumbling from one step and only being caught by the next. His arm ached wrist to shoulder from the constant tugging of the kid's hand in his. In front of him, the kid panted and his sneakers squeaked, and running, bumping into the railing and cursing and praying: a little hurricane of panicked noise for Dean to follow.
There was no more noise behind them, no more shotgun. Sam would be behind them soon. It didn't register with the kid, too intent on getting the hell out of the hospital.
From a little way below them, something banged.
The kid skidded to a halt, and Dean's knee drove into his back. His heartbeat was painful in his chest. The sound of his own breathing was eaten up by the kid's gurgling moan.
"Is it down there?" said Dean.
Another bang, a single thud on the stairs further down. Followed by silence.
It was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.
"Can you see it?" said Dean. But the kid's hand in his was trembling, cold with fear. "Sam? You there?" Dean tried again.
His breathing was tight. His own grip on the stairwell's railing was slick and sweaty. There was a knife tucked into his boot, but to reach it, Dean would have to let go of the kid or the railing.
"Kid, listen to me," said Dean. "In a moment, I want you to let go of my hand-"
The kid gripped Dean's hand harder. "No way. That other guy said-"
There was a rush of metal clattering - click-click-click - and Dean got the distinct impression of something dragging bony fingers along the stairwell's railing.
"Just listen! Let go of my hand, but grab onto my arm instead. Okay? Can you do that?" Silence, and Dean rolled his blinded eyes, and said, "The right answer is 'yes', kid."
The kid's hand slipped from his, cold and clammy like corpse-flesh.
"Okay," said Dean. "Good. Now grab onto my arm."
He waited. Another two bangs, each a little farther up the stairs.
"Kid?" said Dean. "Kid! Grab my arm!"
Dean was left there, alone. Light flashed on and off in the stairwell, while Dean gripped the railing, frozen and hunched, and held out his empty hand. He was all alone. That realization was closely followed by the stubborn refusal to simply wait to get killed.
He sank to a crouch, felt out the handle of the knife in his boot. And then, very carefully, he pushed his blindfold up.
In the intermittent flashes of buzzing electrical light, Dean could see the man at the bottom of the stairwell, his skin lacerated by hundreds of tiny, oozing red slices, and the bloody marks his body was leaving as he crawled up the stairs, palms slapping wet against each step.
Just a few feet in front of Dean was the kid. He looked maggoty and raw, full of cancerous potential.
"Kid," Dean barked shakily. "Get back over here."
"I thought I saw something," said the kid. He turned to look at Dean. "There was something when the lights-"
Dean was just thinking that the kid was even uglier face-on, featureless and wet as though he'd had his face bashed in with a shovel, when the kid started screaming again.
"Hey, hey!" said Dean, reaching out to him. "Calm down! Take it easy!"
But the kid scrambled backwards, away from him, and Dean got it then.
Somewhere up above him, Sam was shouting Dean's name, telling him to get down. But Dean couldn't stop looking at the kid, who was looking right back at him, and screaming.
:::
The thrum of the Impala's engine filled the silence between them for a while, but couldn't take the place of talking about it.
"Look, it's over," said Sam, as though Dean's muteness had been its own form of arguing and he'd had enough already. "The kid's fine. He's back with his parents, and by tomorrow morning, he'll already be doubting a whole lot of what happened tonight. And I took care of the ghost. Everything's fine."
Dean nodded. Heard Sam sigh.
"Dean. C'mon, man." That was softer, not coaxing so much as quietly begging.
Dean swallowed. If he could forget about it, he would, for Sam's sake if not his own. But the kid's screaming got caught between his ears, like a ball bouncing frantically between walls, and Dean was still hearing it.
"Everything's not fine," said Dean. "I'm not fine. That kid, whatever he saw when he looked at me-"
"He was freaking out," Sam cut in firmly. "He's a kid, and he'd been in a haunted hospital for three hours. Hannah Montana would'a probably set him off screaming again."
Dean laughed dully. "Oh, so I'm Hannah Montana now, huh? Nice." He took a deep breath. "What's wrong with me, Sam?"
Sam's hands slammed against the steering wheel. The car swerved in a small, sickening lurch. "Nothing's wrong with you! You… you're perfect. You're fine, okay? You're beautiful."
"Beautiful like Angelina Jolie in a swimsuit? Or beautiful like Freddy Krueger wearing make-up? 'Cause I gotta tell you, I'm not feeling so beautiful right now, Sam."
The car picked up speed.
"What does it even matter?" Sam said. "You've got me, and I'm not going anywhere. And so long as you keep the blindfold on, you don't ever have to worry about-"
"About what the hell is wrong with me?" Dean barked back at him.
Nothing had ever felt different in Dean. His body was the same, his skin, his hair, all as he remembered it. Sometimes Sam touched his face, making sure the blindfold was comfortable over his eyes, or simply to touch him, and nothing had ever felt out of place or tender or wrong.
But why shouldn't he be ugly in his own eyes? By all rights, he should be every bit as fucked up and deformed as all the other guys out there. He had a long list of crimes to his name, and Hell had gone a long way to twisting him out of shape.
Maybe he'd been walking around, seeing nightmares, while all this time he'd been the ugliest one.
After a long silence, Sam said, "I told you, nothing is wrong with you." It sounded like that was it for Sam. Maybe it was.
In the end, Dean had decided that he didn't need to look at Sam. He loved him enough. Despite anything Dean might have seen if he'd looked at him, it would still have been Sam. And it turned out that, while Dean had been making that choice, Sam had been deciding that he didn't care about whatever was wrong with Dean.
"We'll stop to get some gas, then head back to the motel," said Sam, more conciliatory. "You wanna stop for pizza on the way? Burger?"
Dean didn't care about the shadow of wings Sam shouldn't have. Sam would probably have accepted Dean if he'd come crawling out of the Pit, black-eyed and bloodthirsty.
They were a matched pair. Nobody in the world was as damaged as they were. They were so twisted up together that they'd even accept each other as monsters.
Dean could be a monster and Sam would never tell him.
Dean shoved the blindfold off his eyes. Blinking against the pulsing glare of the roadside lights, he leaned down to stare at his own reflection in the side-view mirror.
He ignored the car's sudden swerve, Sam's big hand tugging at his shoulder, Sam's voice shouting, "Dean, no! Don't look!"
Dean looked.
His heartbeat fluttered, and died. From the narrow slant of the side-view mirror, Dean's unchanged reflection looked steadily back at him. There were no warped features or exposed bone, no blood or spasming muscle. Everything was as he remembered, down to a single freckle, except -
In the black hollows where his own eyes used to be, were two milky-green glass marbles.
~end