Tales of origin and apocalypse (genfic, r-rated, 1800 words)
I've been kicking this around for a while, and thought I'd post now and be rid of it.
Tales of origin and apocalypse
(Dean gen-fic, some disturbing imagery, r-rated, 1800 words)
A short piece of horror. Notes/commentary at the end.
At dawn, they gather on the banks of the river. The sky is low and heavy, and ashen sunlight slips over the grey, bloated corpses bobbing on the surface of the water.
Wordlessly, they move forward as one, and the water whispers as they creep into it. The ground squelches beneath Dean's bare feet, mud slithering between his toes and the smell of wet, rotting meat thick in his throat and nose.
The water isn't cold, isn't warm. It's cool and slightly greasy. It slicks Dean's pants to his legs, slips over his skin and touches him, illicit and unwanted, at the back of his knees, the crease of his thigh, the dip of his spine.
Around him, the others are dealing with the corpses, the river mingling around them like a nosy bystander. The first body Dean reaches is face down, fat with gas and too long in the water to distinguish gender or age. When he touches it, the flesh is soggy, disintegrating, and his fingers sink in and in. There's a hollow rush of water as he rolls the body over.
The face is swollen and green, deformed by decomposition into something only barely recognisable as human. Dean stares down at it. It stares back at him with fat, frog-like eyes that glisten in the thin sunlight. Beneath the water, something moves, and Dean tightens his grip on his knife. His eyes are drawn to the dull glint of gold on the corpse's wrist.
Carefully lifting the arm, ignoring the decaying matter that squelches up under his fingernails, Dean examines the watch on the corpse's arm. Must have been expensive.
He turns to look at the woman beside him. She's already got down to dismembering the corpse in front of her, holding it steady as best she can while she saws through the shoulder. The knife grates wetly over the bone and with each backwards-forwards movement of her wrist, the gold watch she's wearing flashes in the light.
And then she stops, her knife still wedged in mouldering bone and corpse-flesh, and she looks at Dean. Her expression is pinched and ugly. She holds his gaze until Dean breaks and looks away. The sound of her sawing starts up again, distinct over the sounds of the others at work.
Dean looks back at the corpse shifting and swaying on the water's surface. He clenches his jaw, works his fingers into the flesh until they can grip bone, and starts cutting.
~
The clock on the wall says it's 4:15. Dean doesn't know if it's 4:15 am or pm. There are no windows in the corridor, just the raw glare of the overhead light.
He shifts in the cheap plastic chair and then winces at the squeak it makes. He glances around but no one comes rushing to see who's causing a disturbance or to ask him to please wait quietly.
There's no one at all. So he sighs and goes back to tracking the path of the cracks in the lime-washed wall opposite.
Distractedly, he scratches at his chest.
~
It's like they've taken every colour, every smell, every taste and crushed them into the fairground. Dean doesn't know where to look first, where to go. He drifts through the crowd - red-black and gold and so brilliant it holds back the night.
He's been grinning so long and so broad that his face aches with it, but he can’t stop, because there are fire-eaters and fortune-tellers and dancers and knife-throwers. There's singing and shrieking laughter and wild music grinding out from old concert organs. He's all pounding blood and heat because it's crazy and exciting and he's dizzy with it.
A girl brushes up close, hair tousled and sweat shining in the narrow valley of her breasts, and presses a cup into his hands, and Dean smiles, drinks, tastes chocolate and rum and desire at midnight. He tries to thank her but she's gone already, swallowed up in firelight flashing off the carousel, and fluttering feathers and patchwork.
The music swims about inside his skull and Dean grins and bobs his head along in time to it while he stops to watch a man who's turning nickels into spiders. He tosses each shining coin into the air, and when it lands, it scurries away into the crowd on thin, crooked legs.
A flourish of colour and heat, and then Dean is ducking his head beneath mouldering drapes of fabric, and entering the too-hot, too-humid confines of a tent. There's a low, round table between him and an old woman. Something scuttles across the tabletop - one of the nickel-man's spiders? - no. Her hands. Bent and bony.
Dean sinks down into the seat. There's a tarot spread before him but the cards are all facedown, and the old woman shakes her head when Dean reaches for the closest. Instead, she holds her hands out, and Dean offers her his, palms up. Her fingers curl about his wrists - her hands are spiders - and she peers down at his hands.
And then she looks up at him, smiling quizzically at him. And Dean looks down and realises his palms are blank. The skin is smooth as plastic. His hands are a book full of empty pages. He owns nothing of the past and there is nothing of his in the future. This moment right now is all he has. And it's such a tiny little speck of time, a flickering of the hands on the clock. A second and he'll be gone, blinked out of existence.
Dean lets out a shivering gasp of breath.
"Please," he whispers.
The woman's smile is gentle, benevolent. Her grip on Dean's wrist tightens, while, with the other hand, she scores her thick, cracked fingernail over the void of Dean's palm. Dean watches, childishly grateful, as she carves out lines for him.
Her nail skates through his blood.
~
It's 9:18 and Dean is still waiting. And his chest is still itching. It itches so much he can't stop moving with it, shoulders rolling, squirming in his seat. He scratches himself through his shirt, but it's not enough, doesn't reach it.
Rubbing the heel of his palm over his sternum, he glances around, but the corridor is still deserted. Dean sighs in relief, short and hard, and tugs his shirt and t-shirt up, and gouges his blunt fingernails over his chest.
The satisfaction is immense, but short-lived. What's itching are the lumps beneath his skin. One on his chest, another on his belly, one more on his ribs, and as Dean watches, another forms just above the waistband of his jeans. They're not big or discoloured or wrong in any way except for the fact they shouldn't be there.
Dean looks around again, a little helpless and a little scared, but still no one's coming.
Tentatively, he presses his fingertip to the lump on his chest. It's fleshy but firm. It doesn't hurt to be touched. Doesn't hurt but - Dean presses down harder - it moves.
~
On the way out of the restroom, Dean stops by the mirror to check his hair. The bartender's smoking hot and Dean's got no intention of passing up a girl like that. Sammy can hole up at the motel and watch cheesy porn and research local ghost stories. The guy'll probably enjoy an evening to himself after the last four days solid spent with Dean.
He checks himself in the mirror, grins at what he sees. There's a bruise on his cheekbone left over from the mean right-hook he took off that vampire chick from last week. Most of the colour's gone from it, and now it just looks kinda cool. Takes the edge off being too pretty.
Running his fingers through his hair, Dean works with what's left of his hair gel, and then nods, satisfied with the result. He leans in, pulls his top lip back, and checks his teeth. Clean, white, even - Dean frowns. There's something caught there. He leans in closer, trying to get a better look in the cracked, silvering glass. His breath fogs over his reflection, warm and wet, and Dean wipes it away with the cuff of his jacket.
Nothing. There's nothing there. His teeth are fine.
He's about to go but something makes him stop, makes him turn back to the mirror to check again. His teeth are fine. He runs a fingertip along the line of them and then stops. There is something there, but not in his teeth - in his gum.
His gum is red and swollen. It feels hot, the sickly heat of infection. The longer he stares at it, the nastier the swelling becomes. He can feel the roots of his teeth being squeezed but there's no pain. Just numbness and movement.
Panting and wide-eyed, Dean touches one of his teeth, and it comes loose, clinks as it hits the sink. And as he watches, something crawls from the hole, bloody and white and alive. It hits his tongue as it falls and he spits it out, examines it where it lands besides his lost tooth.
It's a maggot, and a second is coming out after the first.
Another tooth is worked free by their squirming, and it's not just one maggot now or two, but a mouthful. And Dean tries to draw breath to call for help, but they roll down his throat, choke him. He clings to the side of the sink, his shoulder pressed to the mirror, and gags.
Inexplicably, his gaze is drawn to the bloodless press of his fingertips against the enamel. There's something black beneath his fingernail, and the endless surge of maggots in his mouth - so many they're packing his throat, dropping into the sink - won't let him scream. The fingernail bulges, snaps. A fat black fly emerges from the raw red skin, another close behind it. Its wings shiver and then it rises up into the air, the precursor of the coming swarm.
The droning buzz of the flies comes like thick black smoke in the bathroom. Through the thickening fog of them, Dean can barely make out the reflection of his toothless gums, bloated with maggots. And as the first of the worms slithers free from his eye-socket, he can barely make himself out at all.
~
There's a line running down the centre of each lump. Like they're sealed shut. And when Dean touches them, they flicker beneath the skin. They roll and shiver. Not like they're alive, but like they respond.
It's 1:03, and someone must be coming for him soon.
The lumps itch, not the damn near painful craziness of earlier, but a persistent, mild irritation. Slowly, Dean rubs the pad of his thumb over one of them, trying to soothe it. And as he rubs, a thin fringe of hair grows along the sealed line. The hair sprouts on each lump, short and fine, emerging from his skin painlessly like cornstalks from the ground.
Footsteps echo in the distance. Someone's coming for him.
The lumps open, the sealed line parting, blinking.
Dean stares at them. And each black eye stares back at him.
~end
Commentary: You don't have to read this. These are just my thoroughly pretentious notes on this piece. And just because this is my take on what I've written, doesn't mean it has to be yours. What I write is not going to be identical to what you read, and I'm okay with that. There's been a huge spate of 'Dean-in-Hell' fic and this is my one. It's about Dean stopping being Dean and becoming a demon.
So the first section is the Damned going down to dismember their own corpses, the last remnant of their physical human selves. I was going to include Dean finding his own corpse in the water, but it didn't fit easily and I preferred to leave it implied rather than explicit.
The second section, the scene that runs throughout the whole piece, is Dean in limbo. It's Dean passing time in Hell, which oddly enough I've written as waiting for a medical appointment in a rundown hospital. Am I thinking of the NHS? Quite possibly. By the end of this scene, when demon eyes sprout all over Dean's body and look at him, this is the new demon within him, the new inner-self.
The third section, at the carnival/fairground/whatever, is Dean as the blank canvas. There's the guy turning nickels into spiders - ie, something of worth becoming something icky. This section is Dean as nothingness. He's no longer human, but he's not demonic yet either.
And the bug section, this is the emerging horror taking Dean over from the inside out. Teeth-things bother me, bugs bother me, the two together seemed like a good idea.
Thanks for reading!
Tales of origin and apocalypse
(Dean gen-fic, some disturbing imagery, r-rated, 1800 words)
A short piece of horror. Notes/commentary at the end.
At dawn, they gather on the banks of the river. The sky is low and heavy, and ashen sunlight slips over the grey, bloated corpses bobbing on the surface of the water.
Wordlessly, they move forward as one, and the water whispers as they creep into it. The ground squelches beneath Dean's bare feet, mud slithering between his toes and the smell of wet, rotting meat thick in his throat and nose.
The water isn't cold, isn't warm. It's cool and slightly greasy. It slicks Dean's pants to his legs, slips over his skin and touches him, illicit and unwanted, at the back of his knees, the crease of his thigh, the dip of his spine.
Around him, the others are dealing with the corpses, the river mingling around them like a nosy bystander. The first body Dean reaches is face down, fat with gas and too long in the water to distinguish gender or age. When he touches it, the flesh is soggy, disintegrating, and his fingers sink in and in. There's a hollow rush of water as he rolls the body over.
The face is swollen and green, deformed by decomposition into something only barely recognisable as human. Dean stares down at it. It stares back at him with fat, frog-like eyes that glisten in the thin sunlight. Beneath the water, something moves, and Dean tightens his grip on his knife. His eyes are drawn to the dull glint of gold on the corpse's wrist.
Carefully lifting the arm, ignoring the decaying matter that squelches up under his fingernails, Dean examines the watch on the corpse's arm. Must have been expensive.
He turns to look at the woman beside him. She's already got down to dismembering the corpse in front of her, holding it steady as best she can while she saws through the shoulder. The knife grates wetly over the bone and with each backwards-forwards movement of her wrist, the gold watch she's wearing flashes in the light.
And then she stops, her knife still wedged in mouldering bone and corpse-flesh, and she looks at Dean. Her expression is pinched and ugly. She holds his gaze until Dean breaks and looks away. The sound of her sawing starts up again, distinct over the sounds of the others at work.
Dean looks back at the corpse shifting and swaying on the water's surface. He clenches his jaw, works his fingers into the flesh until they can grip bone, and starts cutting.
~
The clock on the wall says it's 4:15. Dean doesn't know if it's 4:15 am or pm. There are no windows in the corridor, just the raw glare of the overhead light.
He shifts in the cheap plastic chair and then winces at the squeak it makes. He glances around but no one comes rushing to see who's causing a disturbance or to ask him to please wait quietly.
There's no one at all. So he sighs and goes back to tracking the path of the cracks in the lime-washed wall opposite.
Distractedly, he scratches at his chest.
~
It's like they've taken every colour, every smell, every taste and crushed them into the fairground. Dean doesn't know where to look first, where to go. He drifts through the crowd - red-black and gold and so brilliant it holds back the night.
He's been grinning so long and so broad that his face aches with it, but he can’t stop, because there are fire-eaters and fortune-tellers and dancers and knife-throwers. There's singing and shrieking laughter and wild music grinding out from old concert organs. He's all pounding blood and heat because it's crazy and exciting and he's dizzy with it.
A girl brushes up close, hair tousled and sweat shining in the narrow valley of her breasts, and presses a cup into his hands, and Dean smiles, drinks, tastes chocolate and rum and desire at midnight. He tries to thank her but she's gone already, swallowed up in firelight flashing off the carousel, and fluttering feathers and patchwork.
The music swims about inside his skull and Dean grins and bobs his head along in time to it while he stops to watch a man who's turning nickels into spiders. He tosses each shining coin into the air, and when it lands, it scurries away into the crowd on thin, crooked legs.
A flourish of colour and heat, and then Dean is ducking his head beneath mouldering drapes of fabric, and entering the too-hot, too-humid confines of a tent. There's a low, round table between him and an old woman. Something scuttles across the tabletop - one of the nickel-man's spiders? - no. Her hands. Bent and bony.
Dean sinks down into the seat. There's a tarot spread before him but the cards are all facedown, and the old woman shakes her head when Dean reaches for the closest. Instead, she holds her hands out, and Dean offers her his, palms up. Her fingers curl about his wrists - her hands are spiders - and she peers down at his hands.
And then she looks up at him, smiling quizzically at him. And Dean looks down and realises his palms are blank. The skin is smooth as plastic. His hands are a book full of empty pages. He owns nothing of the past and there is nothing of his in the future. This moment right now is all he has. And it's such a tiny little speck of time, a flickering of the hands on the clock. A second and he'll be gone, blinked out of existence.
Dean lets out a shivering gasp of breath.
"Please," he whispers.
The woman's smile is gentle, benevolent. Her grip on Dean's wrist tightens, while, with the other hand, she scores her thick, cracked fingernail over the void of Dean's palm. Dean watches, childishly grateful, as she carves out lines for him.
Her nail skates through his blood.
~
It's 9:18 and Dean is still waiting. And his chest is still itching. It itches so much he can't stop moving with it, shoulders rolling, squirming in his seat. He scratches himself through his shirt, but it's not enough, doesn't reach it.
Rubbing the heel of his palm over his sternum, he glances around, but the corridor is still deserted. Dean sighs in relief, short and hard, and tugs his shirt and t-shirt up, and gouges his blunt fingernails over his chest.
The satisfaction is immense, but short-lived. What's itching are the lumps beneath his skin. One on his chest, another on his belly, one more on his ribs, and as Dean watches, another forms just above the waistband of his jeans. They're not big or discoloured or wrong in any way except for the fact they shouldn't be there.
Dean looks around again, a little helpless and a little scared, but still no one's coming.
Tentatively, he presses his fingertip to the lump on his chest. It's fleshy but firm. It doesn't hurt to be touched. Doesn't hurt but - Dean presses down harder - it moves.
~
On the way out of the restroom, Dean stops by the mirror to check his hair. The bartender's smoking hot and Dean's got no intention of passing up a girl like that. Sammy can hole up at the motel and watch cheesy porn and research local ghost stories. The guy'll probably enjoy an evening to himself after the last four days solid spent with Dean.
He checks himself in the mirror, grins at what he sees. There's a bruise on his cheekbone left over from the mean right-hook he took off that vampire chick from last week. Most of the colour's gone from it, and now it just looks kinda cool. Takes the edge off being too pretty.
Running his fingers through his hair, Dean works with what's left of his hair gel, and then nods, satisfied with the result. He leans in, pulls his top lip back, and checks his teeth. Clean, white, even - Dean frowns. There's something caught there. He leans in closer, trying to get a better look in the cracked, silvering glass. His breath fogs over his reflection, warm and wet, and Dean wipes it away with the cuff of his jacket.
Nothing. There's nothing there. His teeth are fine.
He's about to go but something makes him stop, makes him turn back to the mirror to check again. His teeth are fine. He runs a fingertip along the line of them and then stops. There is something there, but not in his teeth - in his gum.
His gum is red and swollen. It feels hot, the sickly heat of infection. The longer he stares at it, the nastier the swelling becomes. He can feel the roots of his teeth being squeezed but there's no pain. Just numbness and movement.
Panting and wide-eyed, Dean touches one of his teeth, and it comes loose, clinks as it hits the sink. And as he watches, something crawls from the hole, bloody and white and alive. It hits his tongue as it falls and he spits it out, examines it where it lands besides his lost tooth.
It's a maggot, and a second is coming out after the first.
Another tooth is worked free by their squirming, and it's not just one maggot now or two, but a mouthful. And Dean tries to draw breath to call for help, but they roll down his throat, choke him. He clings to the side of the sink, his shoulder pressed to the mirror, and gags.
Inexplicably, his gaze is drawn to the bloodless press of his fingertips against the enamel. There's something black beneath his fingernail, and the endless surge of maggots in his mouth - so many they're packing his throat, dropping into the sink - won't let him scream. The fingernail bulges, snaps. A fat black fly emerges from the raw red skin, another close behind it. Its wings shiver and then it rises up into the air, the precursor of the coming swarm.
The droning buzz of the flies comes like thick black smoke in the bathroom. Through the thickening fog of them, Dean can barely make out the reflection of his toothless gums, bloated with maggots. And as the first of the worms slithers free from his eye-socket, he can barely make himself out at all.
~
There's a line running down the centre of each lump. Like they're sealed shut. And when Dean touches them, they flicker beneath the skin. They roll and shiver. Not like they're alive, but like they respond.
It's 1:03, and someone must be coming for him soon.
The lumps itch, not the damn near painful craziness of earlier, but a persistent, mild irritation. Slowly, Dean rubs the pad of his thumb over one of them, trying to soothe it. And as he rubs, a thin fringe of hair grows along the sealed line. The hair sprouts on each lump, short and fine, emerging from his skin painlessly like cornstalks from the ground.
Footsteps echo in the distance. Someone's coming for him.
The lumps open, the sealed line parting, blinking.
Dean stares at them. And each black eye stares back at him.
~end
Commentary: You don't have to read this. These are just my thoroughly pretentious notes on this piece. And just because this is my take on what I've written, doesn't mean it has to be yours. What I write is not going to be identical to what you read, and I'm okay with that. There's been a huge spate of 'Dean-in-Hell' fic and this is my one. It's about Dean stopping being Dean and becoming a demon.
So the first section is the Damned going down to dismember their own corpses, the last remnant of their physical human selves. I was going to include Dean finding his own corpse in the water, but it didn't fit easily and I preferred to leave it implied rather than explicit.
The second section, the scene that runs throughout the whole piece, is Dean in limbo. It's Dean passing time in Hell, which oddly enough I've written as waiting for a medical appointment in a rundown hospital. Am I thinking of the NHS? Quite possibly. By the end of this scene, when demon eyes sprout all over Dean's body and look at him, this is the new demon within him, the new inner-self.
The third section, at the carnival/fairground/whatever, is Dean as the blank canvas. There's the guy turning nickels into spiders - ie, something of worth becoming something icky. This section is Dean as nothingness. He's no longer human, but he's not demonic yet either.
And the bug section, this is the emerging horror taking Dean over from the inside out. Teeth-things bother me, bugs bother me, the two together seemed like a good idea.
Thanks for reading!