Fic: Or Some Kind of Shadows; PG13, Sam, Dean, Impala
Title: Or Some Kind of Shadows
Warnings: Disturbing imagery, emergency surgery/mutilation, gore, language
Summary: Summergen fic.
For the prompt: Somehow Dean and the Impala become linked in some supernatural way. How does this manifest itself and how does it endanger Sam and Dean?
Recipient: nwhepcat
Notes: Set at some indeterminate point in season 7, after they put the car in dry-dock. Beta'd by the incomparable prufrock-26. All mistakes are mine!
Or Some Kind of Shadows
“We’re lost,” Sam said, and Dean made a face and actually growled.
“No, we’re not lost, Sam, you’re lost. I know exactly where I am.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, I’m with my idiot brother on the side of the highway to nowhere, eight miles from a stolen car with a dead freakin’ battery, that’s where I am. Where the hell are you, Sam?”
Sam shoved his hands in his pockets. “Douche.”
“Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the marines.”
Their bickering had the feel of the familiar, but there was an ugly, foreign undertone to Dean’s words that had Sam casting sidelong glances at his brother. Looking for what, he didn’t know. Evidence of something out of whack? And it was true that Dean’s face was a little ruddier than usual, and shiny with sweat, but that was almost certainly the result of nearly three hours of walking alongside a deserted highway with no cover in eighty-degree weather. It was so hot Sam had stripped down to only an undershirt and T-shirt. He’d caught himself wishing just one car would go by, not so they could catch a ride but just so they could enjoy the breeze it would generate.
Well, Sam could enjoy it, anyway. Dean could wallow in bitter, sunstroked misery for all Sam cared.
Really.
Dean started muttering under his breath again, something he’d been doing on and off since they started walking. Sam had given up trying to explain about moisture retention hours ago and left his brother to his insane homeless-person ramblings. Now, though, he was catching certain words that were familiar enough to cause his metaphorical ears to perk up, and he found himself doing his own version of the crazy-person mumble, to the tune of a countdown.
“Three,” Sam whispered to himself, “two, one…”
“I miss the Impala.”
Sam heaved a sigh. A deep, soul-weary sigh. It made him feel two inches shorter.
“We both do, man.”
Dean, instead of going off on some bitter tirade that would carry them through the next twenty-minute leg of the journey, only gave a morose little nod and looked down at his shoes. He might have wibbled a little but Sam was too tall to see his face.
He thumped a hand down on his shorter brother’s shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. “C’mon man, we’re seven miles from the next town. We’ll make it before dark.”
Dean covered his eyes and groaned.
#
The motel smelled of mildew and Dean was squatting in the half-full bathtub with his clothes on, clutching a bucket of ice.
Sam leaned in the doorway.
“Dude,” he said, “You look like shit.”
“It’s not fucking heatstroke,” Dean snarled. “Get out.”
Maybe it wasn’t heatstroke, it wasn’t as if Sam was a doctor or anything. But his brother’s face was pasty and shading to grey in places and Sam was pretty sure that wasn’t normal. And he was still sweating, or oozing, and that seemed pretty much impossible considering how far they’d walked and how the water had run out two hours ago.
“Dude,” Sam tried again, and Dean half-surged up out of the tub in a whoosh of cascading water, snarling.
“Get out! Dammit!”
Sam fled.
#
Stealing another car would be child’s play, fortunately, but it could wait until tomorrow. Sam wasn’t suffering too much, at least, and had made do with a nap and a cold washcloth. When he woke up the clock beside the bed burned an accusing number into his retinas, telling him he’d been out cold for three hours. The dusty curtains were still wide open and the bathroom door was still shut.
“Shit,” he muttered, flailing his way to verticality out of the suddenly clinging bedspread and the vapors of sleep.
“Dean!” he banged on the door.
No answer.
Motherfuck- “Dean!” Rattling the doorknob didn’t produce an answer either. He smacked the palm of his hand on the door.
“I’m comin’ in, asshole, you better not be dead!”
The door wasn’t even locked. Sam almost broke his neck slipping on the bathroom floor because there was water freaking everywhere, and an empty ice bucket abandoned in a puddle, and the window was open and the curtains blew in the night breeze and Dean was gone.
“Well,” Sam said, “Goddammit.”
He took off into the night.
#
Human bodies are built for long distances. Sam was big, and didn’t have a lot of fat on him, which was both a blessing and a curse when it came to this kind of demanding activity. But in an emergency he really could go for hours, if not at a full run then at least at a kind of steady loping jog.
It was the middle of the night and it wasn’t as if his brother had left much of a trail. They were in a city, or a town anyway, and it was all concrete and blowing trash and breathless, stifling heat. Sam spent twenty minutes hunting through back alleys and scrambling over fences before he decided to hotwire a car and hunt for his brother that way.
This decision was in no way influenced by his vaulting a fence and nearly landing in a dead pigeon.
He prowled through the deserted town’s silent streets and selected a clapped-out rustbucket appropriate for his purposes. He was halfway through folding himself into the front seat, door propped open to let some of the night air blow through, when a familiar noise interrupted him. He froze in place, wires still pinched in his fingers, and narrowed his eyes.
It sounded like the faint growl of an engine. A very familiar engine. One that had been left behind in a very specific vehicle miles away in a long-term parking lot.
“Shit,” he muttered, “I’m gonna kill you, Dean.”
He slammed the door and peeled off in the direction of the sound of the Impala.
#
Three days later and Sam had elevated Dean from ‘potential murder victim’ to ‘brother most likely to suffer a well-deserved fate worse than death.’ Sam had chased the unsettlingly familiar noise out of the city and into the surrounding suburbs and on into the more rural countryside, and then deeper into a near-wilderness empty of people and any animal larger than a coyote. He was well into a population dead-zone, one of several left behind after the failed apocalypse. His pursuit of the phantom noise of the only home he’d ever really known had led him here and then faded out into nothingness, forcing him to drift to a halt in the newly-minted ghost town and hope that his brother was somewhere nearby.
Past this place was a stretch of desert scrub and Sam was relieved that he wouldn’t be keeping company with gophers and hares (yet). He steered the car along the silent road and parked beneath a cracked, dead tree. Without people there was no irrigation, and non-native species were doomed in this dry country.
Getting out of the driver’s seat was an exercise in agony. Sam’s body almost refused to unfold. He would have sworn he could hear his joints creaking. He was hungry, tired, running on fumes. Scorched out of himself, burned to a cinder. Touched down in a semi-apocalyptic ruin of a town, low on gas and out of ideas. He staggered forward a few steps through the dust and shielded his eyes. A flock of birds erupted from a caved-in roof and wheeled out of sight. The silence was creepy, overwhelming, familiar. This wasn’t a classic ghost town-the buildings were too new, most of them ugly industrial structures. Smashed-out windows, overgrown greenery, and the cacophony of birds signaled the length of time the area had been abandoned.
Empty ruins were a somewhat common sight these days. More than before the rise of Lucifer, anyway, as people fled sites of serious destruction and in some cases, for whatever reasons, failed to return. Walking through town was a painful necessity. It didn’t matter that his feet hurt, legs ached, or his throat was caked in dust. If Dean was here, Sam had to canvass the area. And if he wasn't here Sam would chase his brother into the dry wilderness, until the car ran out of fuel, or Sam did.
He rattled doorknobs and peered in windows, scanned the empty roads and parking lots. Looking for a car. The car. Evidence that his brother had travelled here under his own power. Yet he saw nothing, not a glint of chrome or a flash of black. But the noise had been unmistakable. Impossible to resist. Like a siren.
It was a puzzle. An irritating one, and maybe a reason to be concerned, but Sam was past the point of feeling much beside dull fury and the hollow space in the world that was his brother’s absence. Everything else, everything, was irrelevant. He’d find his brother.
And then he’d kick his ass.
#
Rats, mice, squirrels, pigeons-the place was overrun. Sam caught glimpses of feral cats and heard once or twice the howling of dogs that suggested packs. Animal noises, though, all organic. Nothing inorganic about them and not at all what he’d been following for miles.
He almost cried when he found the bloody footprints, crossing a cracked and empty parking lot. Two parts relief, one part horror.
Sam drew his weapon, held it too tight in dry and nearly trembling hands. He was ready for a monster, for a demon, a ghost, an angel, a god.
He wasn’t ready to find his brother standing alone in a ransacked office supplies store, skin the color of bad milk and eyes wide, blind and unseeing. Sam hesitated in the doorway, sweeping the big warehouse-sized space with a glance, but even the mice had deserted the place. There was nothing alive in the room but Dean.
His brother had lost his outer shirt and his shoes. His feet were definitely bleeding. His arms were marked from the backs of his hands to the edge of his sleeve with strange, ugly shapes, like runes or sigla. Sam sprang forward, reaching for his brother before he was even in range to grab him.
“Dean!” he hissed, and his brother twitched, just slightly.
“Dammit, Dean!” Close enough now, he latched onto a shoulder, and Dean made a low noise, a kind of moan. Sam ignored the way the hair on the back of his neck tried to stand up.
“Sammy,” Dean said, faintly, without turning his head. He was staring into the middle distance and Sam was pretty sure whatever he was seeing, it wasn’t a rack of out-of-date combination printer-fax machines. Sam hissed through his teeth and gripped his brother a little tighter.
“You got cursed, you freakin' jerk. It took three days for me to track you down. Come on!” He yanked Dean toward the door. His brother made a strange little noise of protest, but followed.
#
Sam was exhausted and his brother was cursed. Today was not being a good day.
The marks on Dean’s arms looked were black and shiny and slightly swollen, as if with pus. Sam investigated them back at the car, but didn’t dare touch them. He was betting it was witchcraft, of a type-something old and nasty, bones-of-the-earth blood-of-the-innocent Baba Yaga type stuff.
Sam kept his foot hard on the gas all the way back to civilization, and Dean sat in the passengers' seat and stared out the window, shivering.
#
He tried giving Dean water, but he vomited it back up, all over his shirt and his jeans. Dean didn’t try to stop it, didn’t even make a move to clean himself after. Sam flailed a hand at the water on his brother’s chin but gave it up as a lost cause. Dean’s breathing was shallow.
Sam got a room at the first motel he saw and physically hauled his brother inside, depositing him on the bed where he curled in on himself, panting and blank-eyed, racked with intermittent shivers. Sam squatted by the bed and risked putting a hand on Dean’s forehead. He wasn’t hot, but he was definitely damp, and not in a normal way. His forehead felt greasy. In the sun and the heat he should have been dry as old bones.
“I’m gonna cut your shirt off,” Sam informed him grimly. “I need to know what we’re dealing with.”
The marks extended up Dean’s arms and across his chest and down his belly, like brands. Sam risked poking at them and found them slightly warm. The distended skin moved under the pressure, as if there was some kind of fluid underneath.
Dean let out a thin moan and Sam snatched his fingers away.
“Well…shit,” Sam muttered. His brother curled in tighter on himself. Sam grabbed for the bedside lamp and brought it closer, risked passing his free hand over the marks. They weren’t random. They had the look of something arcane and deliberate. He bit his lip and after a moment’s consideration, pressed a thumbnail into the mark below Dean’s collarbone. The skin depressed and his brother’s eyes rolled up his head.
His mouth opened and something black and oily spilled out past his teeth. Sam sprang back, nearly dropping the lamp.
“Jesus!” he squawked. Dean gurgled. More sludge was spilling from his nose. Sam ran to grab a towel.
Witches’ curses kill, he berated himself. Fast or slow, but they always kill.
He mopped at his brother’s face. Ooze began to leak from Dean’s eyes.
“Sam,” his brother moaned, “Fuck, Sam.” The noise was horrible, thick and wet.
“Okay,” Sam said softly, “I…I’ll be more careful next time.”
#
It didn’t get better. It got worse. Dean stopped spitting black goo (oil? Sam really didn’t want to think it was oil) and clawed at his body, at his marked arms.
Sam sank down onto his haunches, rested his forehead on the edge of the mattress. Felt nausea welling up in his throat, and a sob. He swallowed them both.
“’mmy…” his brother rasped.
Away in the distance, a noise kicked up. A distant engine, a familiar noise. The sound of home, of travel, of flight.
The sound of going away.
It was old magic. Old magic.
“Sam.”
Sam got up. Dean’s eyes were open, his fingers twitching into the ooze-soaked blanket. But when the noise came, familiar and and...beckoning, his eyes flickered, and he started to struggle. Tried to push himself up off the bed.
Sam tried to stop him, at first. Put a hand on his shoulder, lightly. He didn't press down. He stared out the window, then looked at the door.
Dean tried to get up again.
Sam dropped to his knees, shoved both hands under his brother’s shoulders, in spite of the marks, the grease, the ooze. Dean hissed and arched his back, legs kicking feebly. Sam ignored it. Set his jaw and began hauling his brother toward the car.
“We just left the Impala behind. That’s just so fucking stupid. God. We’re so stupid.”
He got Dean bundled into the car. They were never going to make it in time. But Sam had to try.
#
That was the thing about magic. It didn’t take much. A lock of hair, a bit of property. Somebody’s name. Something that belonged, really belonged to a person. And for someone like Dean, who owned so little, well, leaving behind a piece of himself had really not been a very bright idea.
As they tore through the night, Sam wished to God he’d thought of that three days ago.
#
“You’re not gonna die, you hear me you asshole?” Sam’s arm tightened around his brother’s shoulders where he was holding him propped against his side. In the lot, the Impala gleamed, sleek and black.
The noise of the engine here was a steady throb under the earth. A puls, like memory. Sam could hear it, Dean certainly was hearing it, but there was no one else around. Which helped confirm Sam’s belief: whatever was happening to his brother had been tailored specifically for him. Made out of a part of him.
Sam nearly rolled his brother out of their stolen car. He couldn’t afford to leave him behind, for all that Dean could barely stand, much less walk. Sam supported him as best he could with a hand around his back, even as Dean’s knees buckled. His brother leaned forward and blackness dribbled out of his mouth, spattering on the pavement. More seeped from his eyes.
“Come on,” Sam urged, not even sure if Dean could hear him, “You gotta keep it together, man. We’re almost there.”
A handful of yards. Step after agonizing step. And Sam could see now that the car was too clean, too glossy. Not a mark on it. Not a speck of dust. Someone had been here. Recently. The noise of the car hummed at the back of Sam's consciousness. Not loud but continuous and muffled.
“…hurts…” Dean breathed.
Sam said, “I know man. I know.”
“…think ‘m…sick…”
“Shh.” Sam rested a hand on the back of Dean’s head, and stared at the Impala. “I’m gonna fix this.”
Magic is about knowledge, about knowing the right tricks to reach into the world and change it in an impossible way. The right key for the right lock, the right collection of actions, and sometimes words, and the right circumstances and ingredients to change the shape of reality.
Magic is against nature. And iron…iron is against magic.
A car is made of steel.
Sam propped his brother against the front wheel, yanked open the doors. There was no key in the ignition, no evidence of hotwiring-the thing wasn't even on. No vibrations, no smell of exhaust, but the rumble of the engine was very real.
Sam crawled inside the front seat and ran his hands over every non-metal portion of the vehicle. He muttered to himself-to his brother-as he went.
“A car’s just a thing…but Dean, you rebuilt it, put your heart into it. Your blood and sweat. Made yourself part of it. Of course we shouldn’t have left it.” His fingers scrabbled at the seats, seeking any evidence of brokenness, suggestions of hidden trinkets. Markings. Anything. “They took a part of your heart and made it into a weapon.”
His brother made a noise of gurgling distress. Sam clambered backward, slid out of the seat and squatted on the pavement. He pushed a hand through his sweaty hair. Dean’s eyes were fixed on some distant point, his face pale and still unnaturally damp. The marks were creeping up his throat, full of fluid. Sickness.
"Jesus." He put a hand on Dean's shoulder and stared helplessly at the vehicles around them. All of them silent, inert. His thumb rested lightly against his brother's neck, where it joined the shoulder. Faintly, he felt the rhythm of Dean's pulse. Present but...strange.
"Shit," Sam muttered. Got back in the car and popped the hood. The engine wasn't running. The noise wasn't coming from the car. It wasn't coming from the earth, either, or the air. Not from any place external, as far as he could tell. It seemed to occupy the space around his brother. A memory of something, an impression. Like fingerprints in the clay of reality.
He went back to his brother and pressed his fingers more firmly against his pulse. Closed his eyes and shook his head. Wrong, as if Dean's very biological processes have been hijacked. It wasn't the purr of a rebuilt muscle car engine but also wasn't the steady throb of a living heart. It stuttered, uneven, like it wanted to be the former, but was inhibited by the fact that it was necessarily the latter.
And in a flash of sudden, brutal clarity, Sam understood.
Transposition, Sam realized. It’s inorganic. It’s not alive. Nothing in it was ever alive.
What happens when you take something that’s not alive…and force it into a living thing?
Dean shuddered, full-body. Sam gripped his shoulder a little tighter, ignoring the softness of the infected flesh under the material of his shirt. He grabbed the side of Dean's face and turned it, almost forcibly, until it was at least pointed in the direction of Sam's, though Dean's eyes were focused on some horizon only he could see. A thin line of black fluid ran from the corner of his mouth.
“Listen,” Sam said, “Listen man, it’s bad. It’s so bad.” He wiped at the stream of black drool and grimaced. “Whoever did this…they did some nasty witchcraft. They took the car’s, its kind of essence I guess, and, and you know, it doesn’t matter,” he went on, as Dean started listing to the side, eyes rolling up. “I can fix it. A cleansing and a countercurse, but before that...man, I’m gonna have to do something that sucks. Okay?” He grabbed his brother, stopped him from drifting down to the pavement, hauled him up and back to the stolen car. Dean wasn’t conscious anymore and Sam was glad, so glad, that he wasn’t going to hear the next words that came out of Sam's mouth.
“Dean, I’m going to have to cut it out of you.”
#
He had a penknife and a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a whole bunch of towels, and that was it. The motel bathroom was the farthest thing from sterile. Sam got Dean situated in the bathtub and hauled his clothes off, grimacing again at the marks on his skin. In the bad bathroom light the blackened skin was shading to purple, glistening and damp. Necrosis.
Sam went and got the lamp out of the main room and set it up. The extra light didn't help much but it was the best he was going to get.
He didn’t have much space to work with. He propped Dean up in a sitting position, head lolling against his chest. Started swabbing his back and chest with alcohol, and prayed to every deity he’d ever heard of that his brother didn’t wake up when he started cutting.
Sam set his jaw and with as much care as he’d ever done anything, sliced into the mark above Dean’s left shoulder blade. Dark fluid spilled out immediately, like pus from a burn. It was grotesque, and it had no smell. None, because it wasn’t alive.
The way the car wasn’t alive.
He gritted his teeth and kept slicing. In very short order Dean’s back was ribboned and then drenched in black, the color of oil, asphalt, rubber. The color of paint. The color of an idea of a thing, the thing Dean built, constructed, made.
Turned into poison. Used against him.
When all the marks on Dean’s back were flowing freely, Sam slowly maneuvered his brother backward, until he was lying on the towels piled into the tub. He started cutting into Dean's chest.
#
Later (after Dean was situated in the hospital) Sam went back to the car and performed the countercurse, a handful of cleansing rituals, and for good measure warded it with the most powerful magic he’d ever managed to dig up. His fingertips were still black and he’d had to stop scrubbing for fear the skin would bleed. He’d try again later.
After he visited Dean.
#
His brother was going to have a latticework of shiny new scars. He wasn’t all that upset about it. He was pissed as hell about the Impala, despite Sam’s efforts to reassure him.
“I swear hand to God, man, I took care of it. Of…uh, of her. Okay? All the wards you could dream of. Seriously. No more long-distance curses, I promise.”
Dean sneered. “How do you ward the essence of something, huh? I mean what the hell?”
Sam sighed. He flumped down in the chair by the bed. “It’s not as stupid as you make it sound, okay? And you’re lucky all you got was, like, the spirit of the car, or whatever, and not actual pieces of hardware embedded in your body, because that’s what the spell was supposed to do. I looked it up, after. It’s a, like a curse for property-owners, greedy landlords, stuff like that. You know, back when a cow dying was a sign of witchcraft? It would target the thing you’d got all attached to and like send it back to you, like a boomerang. I mean I don’t think people were using it for carts or…uh, coaches, or whatever. But imagine if suddenly stones and soil from your land were transposed into your body. Or pieces of a weapon-a hilt of bone, maybe. Copper wire. Bronze-anything bronze. It’s...a sickening, a really hard-core curse, and the only way to counteract it is to cut it out. All of it.”
Dean moved a hand to his bandaged arms, apparently unaware he’d done so. Sam saw the tiny shiver Dean tried to suppress. He cut his eyes away.
“Any idea who was behind it?” Dean asked, and then added, “Or what?”
Sam shrugged. “Best guess? Someone who’s got access to really, really old-school magic. And has the resources to work around the whole magic vs. iron thing, creatively. Maybe Leviathans, or maybe…”
“Crowley,” Dean growled, face darkening.
“Maybe. I don’t know. One of our enemies had a bright idea, and the mojo to act on it. We need to keep track of all the parts of ourselves we leave behind. Make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Dean scratched at the bandages on his arm, almost absently. Sam grimaced and looked down. His hands still weren’t clean. He was starting to worry that they never would be.
“It’s still the same car though,” Sam said, and Dean looked at him like he’d lost his mind.
“Of course she is. She’s my baby. She’d never do anything to hurt me.”
In spite of himself, Sam felt a little smile creep around the edges of his lips.
“Yeah man, okay,” he said. “Absolutely.”
Outside on the street, a car rumbled by.
Sam didn't recognize the engine.
The End
_________________________________________
“Are those real mountains or some kind of shadows?”
YES.
--Terry Pratchett
_________________________________________
(All told, exactly half of the comments on this fic used the word ‘creepy.’ I feel like that’s a pleasantly consistent result.)
Warnings: Disturbing imagery, emergency surgery/mutilation, gore, language
Summary: Summergen fic.
For the prompt: Somehow Dean and the Impala become linked in some supernatural way. How does this manifest itself and how does it endanger Sam and Dean?
Recipient: nwhepcat
Notes: Set at some indeterminate point in season 7, after they put the car in dry-dock. Beta'd by the incomparable prufrock-26. All mistakes are mine!
Or Some Kind of Shadows
“We’re lost,” Sam said, and Dean made a face and actually growled.
“No, we’re not lost, Sam, you’re lost. I know exactly where I am.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, I’m with my idiot brother on the side of the highway to nowhere, eight miles from a stolen car with a dead freakin’ battery, that’s where I am. Where the hell are you, Sam?”
Sam shoved his hands in his pockets. “Douche.”
“Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the marines.”
Their bickering had the feel of the familiar, but there was an ugly, foreign undertone to Dean’s words that had Sam casting sidelong glances at his brother. Looking for what, he didn’t know. Evidence of something out of whack? And it was true that Dean’s face was a little ruddier than usual, and shiny with sweat, but that was almost certainly the result of nearly three hours of walking alongside a deserted highway with no cover in eighty-degree weather. It was so hot Sam had stripped down to only an undershirt and T-shirt. He’d caught himself wishing just one car would go by, not so they could catch a ride but just so they could enjoy the breeze it would generate.
Well, Sam could enjoy it, anyway. Dean could wallow in bitter, sunstroked misery for all Sam cared.
Really.
Dean started muttering under his breath again, something he’d been doing on and off since they started walking. Sam had given up trying to explain about moisture retention hours ago and left his brother to his insane homeless-person ramblings. Now, though, he was catching certain words that were familiar enough to cause his metaphorical ears to perk up, and he found himself doing his own version of the crazy-person mumble, to the tune of a countdown.
“Three,” Sam whispered to himself, “two, one…”
“I miss the Impala.”
Sam heaved a sigh. A deep, soul-weary sigh. It made him feel two inches shorter.
“We both do, man.”
Dean, instead of going off on some bitter tirade that would carry them through the next twenty-minute leg of the journey, only gave a morose little nod and looked down at his shoes. He might have wibbled a little but Sam was too tall to see his face.
He thumped a hand down on his shorter brother’s shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. “C’mon man, we’re seven miles from the next town. We’ll make it before dark.”
Dean covered his eyes and groaned.
#
The motel smelled of mildew and Dean was squatting in the half-full bathtub with his clothes on, clutching a bucket of ice.
Sam leaned in the doorway.
“Dude,” he said, “You look like shit.”
“It’s not fucking heatstroke,” Dean snarled. “Get out.”
Maybe it wasn’t heatstroke, it wasn’t as if Sam was a doctor or anything. But his brother’s face was pasty and shading to grey in places and Sam was pretty sure that wasn’t normal. And he was still sweating, or oozing, and that seemed pretty much impossible considering how far they’d walked and how the water had run out two hours ago.
“Dude,” Sam tried again, and Dean half-surged up out of the tub in a whoosh of cascading water, snarling.
“Get out! Dammit!”
Sam fled.
#
Stealing another car would be child’s play, fortunately, but it could wait until tomorrow. Sam wasn’t suffering too much, at least, and had made do with a nap and a cold washcloth. When he woke up the clock beside the bed burned an accusing number into his retinas, telling him he’d been out cold for three hours. The dusty curtains were still wide open and the bathroom door was still shut.
“Shit,” he muttered, flailing his way to verticality out of the suddenly clinging bedspread and the vapors of sleep.
“Dean!” he banged on the door.
No answer.
Motherfuck- “Dean!” Rattling the doorknob didn’t produce an answer either. He smacked the palm of his hand on the door.
“I’m comin’ in, asshole, you better not be dead!”
The door wasn’t even locked. Sam almost broke his neck slipping on the bathroom floor because there was water freaking everywhere, and an empty ice bucket abandoned in a puddle, and the window was open and the curtains blew in the night breeze and Dean was gone.
“Well,” Sam said, “Goddammit.”
He took off into the night.
#
Human bodies are built for long distances. Sam was big, and didn’t have a lot of fat on him, which was both a blessing and a curse when it came to this kind of demanding activity. But in an emergency he really could go for hours, if not at a full run then at least at a kind of steady loping jog.
It was the middle of the night and it wasn’t as if his brother had left much of a trail. They were in a city, or a town anyway, and it was all concrete and blowing trash and breathless, stifling heat. Sam spent twenty minutes hunting through back alleys and scrambling over fences before he decided to hotwire a car and hunt for his brother that way.
This decision was in no way influenced by his vaulting a fence and nearly landing in a dead pigeon.
He prowled through the deserted town’s silent streets and selected a clapped-out rustbucket appropriate for his purposes. He was halfway through folding himself into the front seat, door propped open to let some of the night air blow through, when a familiar noise interrupted him. He froze in place, wires still pinched in his fingers, and narrowed his eyes.
It sounded like the faint growl of an engine. A very familiar engine. One that had been left behind in a very specific vehicle miles away in a long-term parking lot.
“Shit,” he muttered, “I’m gonna kill you, Dean.”
He slammed the door and peeled off in the direction of the sound of the Impala.
#
Three days later and Sam had elevated Dean from ‘potential murder victim’ to ‘brother most likely to suffer a well-deserved fate worse than death.’ Sam had chased the unsettlingly familiar noise out of the city and into the surrounding suburbs and on into the more rural countryside, and then deeper into a near-wilderness empty of people and any animal larger than a coyote. He was well into a population dead-zone, one of several left behind after the failed apocalypse. His pursuit of the phantom noise of the only home he’d ever really known had led him here and then faded out into nothingness, forcing him to drift to a halt in the newly-minted ghost town and hope that his brother was somewhere nearby.
Past this place was a stretch of desert scrub and Sam was relieved that he wouldn’t be keeping company with gophers and hares (yet). He steered the car along the silent road and parked beneath a cracked, dead tree. Without people there was no irrigation, and non-native species were doomed in this dry country.
Getting out of the driver’s seat was an exercise in agony. Sam’s body almost refused to unfold. He would have sworn he could hear his joints creaking. He was hungry, tired, running on fumes. Scorched out of himself, burned to a cinder. Touched down in a semi-apocalyptic ruin of a town, low on gas and out of ideas. He staggered forward a few steps through the dust and shielded his eyes. A flock of birds erupted from a caved-in roof and wheeled out of sight. The silence was creepy, overwhelming, familiar. This wasn’t a classic ghost town-the buildings were too new, most of them ugly industrial structures. Smashed-out windows, overgrown greenery, and the cacophony of birds signaled the length of time the area had been abandoned.
Empty ruins were a somewhat common sight these days. More than before the rise of Lucifer, anyway, as people fled sites of serious destruction and in some cases, for whatever reasons, failed to return. Walking through town was a painful necessity. It didn’t matter that his feet hurt, legs ached, or his throat was caked in dust. If Dean was here, Sam had to canvass the area. And if he wasn't here Sam would chase his brother into the dry wilderness, until the car ran out of fuel, or Sam did.
He rattled doorknobs and peered in windows, scanned the empty roads and parking lots. Looking for a car. The car. Evidence that his brother had travelled here under his own power. Yet he saw nothing, not a glint of chrome or a flash of black. But the noise had been unmistakable. Impossible to resist. Like a siren.
It was a puzzle. An irritating one, and maybe a reason to be concerned, but Sam was past the point of feeling much beside dull fury and the hollow space in the world that was his brother’s absence. Everything else, everything, was irrelevant. He’d find his brother.
And then he’d kick his ass.
#
Rats, mice, squirrels, pigeons-the place was overrun. Sam caught glimpses of feral cats and heard once or twice the howling of dogs that suggested packs. Animal noises, though, all organic. Nothing inorganic about them and not at all what he’d been following for miles.
He almost cried when he found the bloody footprints, crossing a cracked and empty parking lot. Two parts relief, one part horror.
Sam drew his weapon, held it too tight in dry and nearly trembling hands. He was ready for a monster, for a demon, a ghost, an angel, a god.
He wasn’t ready to find his brother standing alone in a ransacked office supplies store, skin the color of bad milk and eyes wide, blind and unseeing. Sam hesitated in the doorway, sweeping the big warehouse-sized space with a glance, but even the mice had deserted the place. There was nothing alive in the room but Dean.
His brother had lost his outer shirt and his shoes. His feet were definitely bleeding. His arms were marked from the backs of his hands to the edge of his sleeve with strange, ugly shapes, like runes or sigla. Sam sprang forward, reaching for his brother before he was even in range to grab him.
“Dean!” he hissed, and his brother twitched, just slightly.
“Dammit, Dean!” Close enough now, he latched onto a shoulder, and Dean made a low noise, a kind of moan. Sam ignored the way the hair on the back of his neck tried to stand up.
“Sammy,” Dean said, faintly, without turning his head. He was staring into the middle distance and Sam was pretty sure whatever he was seeing, it wasn’t a rack of out-of-date combination printer-fax machines. Sam hissed through his teeth and gripped his brother a little tighter.
“You got cursed, you freakin' jerk. It took three days for me to track you down. Come on!” He yanked Dean toward the door. His brother made a strange little noise of protest, but followed.
#
Sam was exhausted and his brother was cursed. Today was not being a good day.
The marks on Dean’s arms looked were black and shiny and slightly swollen, as if with pus. Sam investigated them back at the car, but didn’t dare touch them. He was betting it was witchcraft, of a type-something old and nasty, bones-of-the-earth blood-of-the-innocent Baba Yaga type stuff.
Sam kept his foot hard on the gas all the way back to civilization, and Dean sat in the passengers' seat and stared out the window, shivering.
#
He tried giving Dean water, but he vomited it back up, all over his shirt and his jeans. Dean didn’t try to stop it, didn’t even make a move to clean himself after. Sam flailed a hand at the water on his brother’s chin but gave it up as a lost cause. Dean’s breathing was shallow.
Sam got a room at the first motel he saw and physically hauled his brother inside, depositing him on the bed where he curled in on himself, panting and blank-eyed, racked with intermittent shivers. Sam squatted by the bed and risked putting a hand on Dean’s forehead. He wasn’t hot, but he was definitely damp, and not in a normal way. His forehead felt greasy. In the sun and the heat he should have been dry as old bones.
“I’m gonna cut your shirt off,” Sam informed him grimly. “I need to know what we’re dealing with.”
The marks extended up Dean’s arms and across his chest and down his belly, like brands. Sam risked poking at them and found them slightly warm. The distended skin moved under the pressure, as if there was some kind of fluid underneath.
Dean let out a thin moan and Sam snatched his fingers away.
“Well…shit,” Sam muttered. His brother curled in tighter on himself. Sam grabbed for the bedside lamp and brought it closer, risked passing his free hand over the marks. They weren’t random. They had the look of something arcane and deliberate. He bit his lip and after a moment’s consideration, pressed a thumbnail into the mark below Dean’s collarbone. The skin depressed and his brother’s eyes rolled up his head.
His mouth opened and something black and oily spilled out past his teeth. Sam sprang back, nearly dropping the lamp.
“Jesus!” he squawked. Dean gurgled. More sludge was spilling from his nose. Sam ran to grab a towel.
Witches’ curses kill, he berated himself. Fast or slow, but they always kill.
He mopped at his brother’s face. Ooze began to leak from Dean’s eyes.
“Sam,” his brother moaned, “Fuck, Sam.” The noise was horrible, thick and wet.
“Okay,” Sam said softly, “I…I’ll be more careful next time.”
#
It didn’t get better. It got worse. Dean stopped spitting black goo (oil? Sam really didn’t want to think it was oil) and clawed at his body, at his marked arms.
Sam sank down onto his haunches, rested his forehead on the edge of the mattress. Felt nausea welling up in his throat, and a sob. He swallowed them both.
“’mmy…” his brother rasped.
Away in the distance, a noise kicked up. A distant engine, a familiar noise. The sound of home, of travel, of flight.
The sound of going away.
It was old magic. Old magic.
“Sam.”
Sam got up. Dean’s eyes were open, his fingers twitching into the ooze-soaked blanket. But when the noise came, familiar and and...beckoning, his eyes flickered, and he started to struggle. Tried to push himself up off the bed.
Sam tried to stop him, at first. Put a hand on his shoulder, lightly. He didn't press down. He stared out the window, then looked at the door.
Dean tried to get up again.
Sam dropped to his knees, shoved both hands under his brother’s shoulders, in spite of the marks, the grease, the ooze. Dean hissed and arched his back, legs kicking feebly. Sam ignored it. Set his jaw and began hauling his brother toward the car.
“We just left the Impala behind. That’s just so fucking stupid. God. We’re so stupid.”
He got Dean bundled into the car. They were never going to make it in time. But Sam had to try.
#
That was the thing about magic. It didn’t take much. A lock of hair, a bit of property. Somebody’s name. Something that belonged, really belonged to a person. And for someone like Dean, who owned so little, well, leaving behind a piece of himself had really not been a very bright idea.
As they tore through the night, Sam wished to God he’d thought of that three days ago.
#
“You’re not gonna die, you hear me you asshole?” Sam’s arm tightened around his brother’s shoulders where he was holding him propped against his side. In the lot, the Impala gleamed, sleek and black.
The noise of the engine here was a steady throb under the earth. A puls, like memory. Sam could hear it, Dean certainly was hearing it, but there was no one else around. Which helped confirm Sam’s belief: whatever was happening to his brother had been tailored specifically for him. Made out of a part of him.
Sam nearly rolled his brother out of their stolen car. He couldn’t afford to leave him behind, for all that Dean could barely stand, much less walk. Sam supported him as best he could with a hand around his back, even as Dean’s knees buckled. His brother leaned forward and blackness dribbled out of his mouth, spattering on the pavement. More seeped from his eyes.
“Come on,” Sam urged, not even sure if Dean could hear him, “You gotta keep it together, man. We’re almost there.”
A handful of yards. Step after agonizing step. And Sam could see now that the car was too clean, too glossy. Not a mark on it. Not a speck of dust. Someone had been here. Recently. The noise of the car hummed at the back of Sam's consciousness. Not loud but continuous and muffled.
“…hurts…” Dean breathed.
Sam said, “I know man. I know.”
“…think ‘m…sick…”
“Shh.” Sam rested a hand on the back of Dean’s head, and stared at the Impala. “I’m gonna fix this.”
Magic is about knowledge, about knowing the right tricks to reach into the world and change it in an impossible way. The right key for the right lock, the right collection of actions, and sometimes words, and the right circumstances and ingredients to change the shape of reality.
Magic is against nature. And iron…iron is against magic.
A car is made of steel.
Sam propped his brother against the front wheel, yanked open the doors. There was no key in the ignition, no evidence of hotwiring-the thing wasn't even on. No vibrations, no smell of exhaust, but the rumble of the engine was very real.
Sam crawled inside the front seat and ran his hands over every non-metal portion of the vehicle. He muttered to himself-to his brother-as he went.
“A car’s just a thing…but Dean, you rebuilt it, put your heart into it. Your blood and sweat. Made yourself part of it. Of course we shouldn’t have left it.” His fingers scrabbled at the seats, seeking any evidence of brokenness, suggestions of hidden trinkets. Markings. Anything. “They took a part of your heart and made it into a weapon.”
His brother made a noise of gurgling distress. Sam clambered backward, slid out of the seat and squatted on the pavement. He pushed a hand through his sweaty hair. Dean’s eyes were fixed on some distant point, his face pale and still unnaturally damp. The marks were creeping up his throat, full of fluid. Sickness.
"Jesus." He put a hand on Dean's shoulder and stared helplessly at the vehicles around them. All of them silent, inert. His thumb rested lightly against his brother's neck, where it joined the shoulder. Faintly, he felt the rhythm of Dean's pulse. Present but...strange.
"Shit," Sam muttered. Got back in the car and popped the hood. The engine wasn't running. The noise wasn't coming from the car. It wasn't coming from the earth, either, or the air. Not from any place external, as far as he could tell. It seemed to occupy the space around his brother. A memory of something, an impression. Like fingerprints in the clay of reality.
He went back to his brother and pressed his fingers more firmly against his pulse. Closed his eyes and shook his head. Wrong, as if Dean's very biological processes have been hijacked. It wasn't the purr of a rebuilt muscle car engine but also wasn't the steady throb of a living heart. It stuttered, uneven, like it wanted to be the former, but was inhibited by the fact that it was necessarily the latter.
And in a flash of sudden, brutal clarity, Sam understood.
Transposition, Sam realized. It’s inorganic. It’s not alive. Nothing in it was ever alive.
What happens when you take something that’s not alive…and force it into a living thing?
Dean shuddered, full-body. Sam gripped his shoulder a little tighter, ignoring the softness of the infected flesh under the material of his shirt. He grabbed the side of Dean's face and turned it, almost forcibly, until it was at least pointed in the direction of Sam's, though Dean's eyes were focused on some horizon only he could see. A thin line of black fluid ran from the corner of his mouth.
“Listen,” Sam said, “Listen man, it’s bad. It’s so bad.” He wiped at the stream of black drool and grimaced. “Whoever did this…they did some nasty witchcraft. They took the car’s, its kind of essence I guess, and, and you know, it doesn’t matter,” he went on, as Dean started listing to the side, eyes rolling up. “I can fix it. A cleansing and a countercurse, but before that...man, I’m gonna have to do something that sucks. Okay?” He grabbed his brother, stopped him from drifting down to the pavement, hauled him up and back to the stolen car. Dean wasn’t conscious anymore and Sam was glad, so glad, that he wasn’t going to hear the next words that came out of Sam's mouth.
“Dean, I’m going to have to cut it out of you.”
#
He had a penknife and a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a whole bunch of towels, and that was it. The motel bathroom was the farthest thing from sterile. Sam got Dean situated in the bathtub and hauled his clothes off, grimacing again at the marks on his skin. In the bad bathroom light the blackened skin was shading to purple, glistening and damp. Necrosis.
Sam went and got the lamp out of the main room and set it up. The extra light didn't help much but it was the best he was going to get.
He didn’t have much space to work with. He propped Dean up in a sitting position, head lolling against his chest. Started swabbing his back and chest with alcohol, and prayed to every deity he’d ever heard of that his brother didn’t wake up when he started cutting.
Sam set his jaw and with as much care as he’d ever done anything, sliced into the mark above Dean’s left shoulder blade. Dark fluid spilled out immediately, like pus from a burn. It was grotesque, and it had no smell. None, because it wasn’t alive.
The way the car wasn’t alive.
He gritted his teeth and kept slicing. In very short order Dean’s back was ribboned and then drenched in black, the color of oil, asphalt, rubber. The color of paint. The color of an idea of a thing, the thing Dean built, constructed, made.
Turned into poison. Used against him.
When all the marks on Dean’s back were flowing freely, Sam slowly maneuvered his brother backward, until he was lying on the towels piled into the tub. He started cutting into Dean's chest.
#
Later (after Dean was situated in the hospital) Sam went back to the car and performed the countercurse, a handful of cleansing rituals, and for good measure warded it with the most powerful magic he’d ever managed to dig up. His fingertips were still black and he’d had to stop scrubbing for fear the skin would bleed. He’d try again later.
After he visited Dean.
#
His brother was going to have a latticework of shiny new scars. He wasn’t all that upset about it. He was pissed as hell about the Impala, despite Sam’s efforts to reassure him.
“I swear hand to God, man, I took care of it. Of…uh, of her. Okay? All the wards you could dream of. Seriously. No more long-distance curses, I promise.”
Dean sneered. “How do you ward the essence of something, huh? I mean what the hell?”
Sam sighed. He flumped down in the chair by the bed. “It’s not as stupid as you make it sound, okay? And you’re lucky all you got was, like, the spirit of the car, or whatever, and not actual pieces of hardware embedded in your body, because that’s what the spell was supposed to do. I looked it up, after. It’s a, like a curse for property-owners, greedy landlords, stuff like that. You know, back when a cow dying was a sign of witchcraft? It would target the thing you’d got all attached to and like send it back to you, like a boomerang. I mean I don’t think people were using it for carts or…uh, coaches, or whatever. But imagine if suddenly stones and soil from your land were transposed into your body. Or pieces of a weapon-a hilt of bone, maybe. Copper wire. Bronze-anything bronze. It’s...a sickening, a really hard-core curse, and the only way to counteract it is to cut it out. All of it.”
Dean moved a hand to his bandaged arms, apparently unaware he’d done so. Sam saw the tiny shiver Dean tried to suppress. He cut his eyes away.
“Any idea who was behind it?” Dean asked, and then added, “Or what?”
Sam shrugged. “Best guess? Someone who’s got access to really, really old-school magic. And has the resources to work around the whole magic vs. iron thing, creatively. Maybe Leviathans, or maybe…”
“Crowley,” Dean growled, face darkening.
“Maybe. I don’t know. One of our enemies had a bright idea, and the mojo to act on it. We need to keep track of all the parts of ourselves we leave behind. Make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Dean scratched at the bandages on his arm, almost absently. Sam grimaced and looked down. His hands still weren’t clean. He was starting to worry that they never would be.
“It’s still the same car though,” Sam said, and Dean looked at him like he’d lost his mind.
“Of course she is. She’s my baby. She’d never do anything to hurt me.”
In spite of himself, Sam felt a little smile creep around the edges of his lips.
“Yeah man, okay,” he said. “Absolutely.”
Outside on the street, a car rumbled by.
Sam didn't recognize the engine.
The End
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“Are those real mountains or some kind of shadows?”
YES.
--Terry Pratchett
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(All told, exactly half of the comments on this fic used the word ‘creepy.’ I feel like that’s a pleasantly consistent result.)