Fic: Extinguish
Extinguish
Summary: “Everything has to die sometime, Sam."
Written for the hoodie_time Writing Between the Lines Challenge, for the prompt by wynefred.
Warnings: Nature
Note: To me this has a season 4-ish vibe to it, but it could conceivably be set at some later point. Feel free to make your own determination.
Extinguish
__________________
In the autumn the leaves come blowing, yellow and brown.
They rustle in the ditches, they tug and hang on the hedge.
Where are you going leaves? Far, far away
Into the earth we go, with the rain and the berries.
__________________
He's lying on the ground. A soft bed of autumn leaves crunch and crackle underneath him. The sweet, musty scent of wet leaves tickles his nose. Bird songs fill the air. A pleasant breeze rustles through the trees. He opens his eyes to a glorious tangle of limbs and blue sky. A few stubborn leaves wave lazily in the cool breeze. Lethargy envelops him, peaceful and enticing. He feels no urge to move. He thinks he could lie here forever, content under the trees. His chest feels light.
He can hear a distant rustling. Something moving through the leaves. Far away, and stepping lightly. Deer, maybe.
He’s been here for a while.
Sunlight falls on his face, on his chest, on the skin of his hands. Sunlight, and the shadow of branches and leaves. Sycamore, he thinks, Maple. Hickory. Walnut and Oak. They whisper to each other in the breeze. The branches move slowly, like the limbs of some vast thing.
He moves his fingers, just slightly. Can feel the sunlight shifting along his skin. His chest is warm and light. Parts of him are sinking into the earth. It smells of leaves and damp and soil. Falling apart. Falling to pieces. Deep deep down.
He shuts his eyes.
He hasn’t been this warm in a long time.
Something moves in the forest. Far away.
__________________
Sam slither-slides down another incline and narrowly avoids getting whacked in the face by a trailing wild rose. Thorny branches bob inches from his nose and he goes cross-eyed for a moment, until his depth perception adjusts. There are no flowers, of course, just glossy thorns.
He’s in a narrow valley, boots inches from the nearly-dry bed of one of the multitude of little creeks and streams running through the forest like thin veins. Most of the water is gone, now, but a thin trickle works its way through the mud and catches flashes of light from the sun, punching down through the leafless canopy. Fallen leaves lie in wet clumps. Around him, the forest rustles.
Something’s out there. Sam knows.
He ducks under the rose and squelches along the creek bed. It’s impossible to move quietly at this time of year. Even the squirrels and deer can’t manage it, picking their way through layers of dry leaves as they forage.
The light stabs down in shafts, golden and filled with late season bugs and dust. A tangle of honeysuckle runs rampant up the side of the incline to Sam’s right, dense and chaotic. Deep woods trees tower over everything, huge and straight and silent. The spaces between them fill with the rustle of animals foraging, woodpeckers hammering at tree trunks, and crows cawing and flapping in the distance.
Sam nearly steps in a pile of intestines, and a crowd of flies surges up into the air. He wrinkles his nose at the purple and black pile of offal. The flies buzz. His gaze catches on something bright red in the mud. He blinks at it, waving away the flies. It’s a skull, an animal skull, from something like a raccoon or a groundhog. The bone is coated in vivid red and a black eye gleams wetly from the socket.
He curls his lip and picks his way carefully around it. Waves a hand at the flies, who have no interest in him anyway.
Coyotes, his mind supplies. Hawks. Owls. There might not be any big predators left in most of the forested areas, but there are plenty that could disembowel and strip the skin from a small mammal without much difficulty.
He’s more careful where he puts his feet after that.
__________________
When Dean opens his eyes again the light has changed, and the air is different. He blinks heavily up at the sky. The air tastes cooler, heavier. The first tendrils of evening are slipping low across the ground, and the tone of the breeze has changed. Has acquired an edge.
He thinks it’s about four o’clock. A couple hours until sunset, less than that before twilight. It should be noticeably colder but a heavy warmth still lingers, and the sun rests on his face, his hands, his chest and throat. He moves his fingers again. He came here with a knife, he thinks. He came because he was looking.
Whatever he was looking for, it probably wasn’t that important.
In an hour or so, the first stars will start to show, tiny and white as the blue sky fades, as the light withdraws. It’ll probably be cold, but Dean can’t bring himself to believe it.
__________________
Sam finds a knife in the grass.
He’s in a little meadow, framed on every side by trees, long grass swaying in the afternoon light. Warm as butter, but dry, edged by a promise of cooler winds and earth frozen hard enough to cut.
It’s a little after four. Two months ago the meadow would have been full of noise, birds and cicadas and crickets. Now the grass waves silently and Sam picks up his brother’s knife and clenches a hand on the grip. The blade is clean.
There are bare thorn apple trees dotted around the meadow, squat and grey and tangled. Sam turns the knife over and over in one hand, contemplating its balance. Beautiful and sleek and smooth, a perfect example of craft. A tool, and a weapon.
He can’t use it to cut through branches and thorns and tangles of growth. But it’s bright and sharp and nothing about it is organic. It catches the light when he turns it again, and flashes like a star.
Somewhere far away, something moves. Sam’s head whips in the direction of the noise, muffled by distance but impossible to ignore. He stops flipping the knife around. Glances in the direction of the sun, already well below the tops of the tallest trees.
This time, he runs.
__________________
It’s warm. There’s a light behind his eyes. He doesn’t need to open them to see. Light. It fills up his head, rests against the planes of his skull. And it doesn’t hurt. And it doesn’t hurt. His hands are around somewhere, he thinks, in some open space but not really connected to him anymore. And his arms and chest and belly too. They’re all somewhere. In some bright emptiness. Hips and guts and legs and the bones of his feet.
He could move them if he wanted to, but he’d have to reach out for them to do it. Have to hold on. Have to remember.
But it’s quiet here, and it doesn’t hurt.
__________________
There’s something in the forest and it’s bigger than Sam.
He knows it’s hunting him. Hasn’t seen it but he’s heard, noises like deer rustling, but too far away. Something heavier, bulkier, pushing through the tangles and the leaves. Something whose shadow catches in the corner of Sam’s eyes, shifting between the trees and then down, away out of sight, hidden by the slope of dry streambeds.
It’s big. He thinks if it stood up it would blot out the sky.
There’s blood on the ground, drops like red wax or crab apples. It’s the dying season. For everything.
It was stupid of them to come. Hunting little monsters. There’s something bigger out there, something tangled and vast and terrifying and old, older than demons and gods, older than things that have names. It isn’t evil, but it’s ruthless. Inexorable. It is what it is.
Sam skirts a boulder and nearly trips over a fallen log, crashes through a cluster of birches and narrowly avoids stepping on the green walnut husks and hedge apples scattered across the leaves. Oak leaves, maple leaves, walnut and sycamore. Sycamores grow near water, Sam thinks randomly. Everybody knows that.
Naked white branches arc overhead. There’s no sound of water and his breathing is loud. Too loud. He can’t hear.
It’s past five o’clock. The sun slants horizontally through the trees. The blue overhead is fading, evaporating like vapor. The stars will be out soon.
He fetches up against the thick bole of an oak. Old and huge, its roots fist in the earth and its spreading branches have forced out any smaller trees that might have struggled to survive in its shadow. It’s too big.
He’s standing looking down another small hill. A muddy, leaf-choked track meanders along in the evening sunlight, glittering where naked water flashes. Sam lifts his eyes and on the other side he sees his brother, lying in the leaves.
It’s like being punched in the chest.
__________________
Someone’s yelling, somewhere. It’s stupid. Stupid. It’s a weird hollow noise, somebody screaming his damnfool head off but it’s not real, not here, so he doesn’t reach out for it. Doesn’t care.
There’s sunlight and he’s warm.
He can’t feel his hands.
__________________
Dean’s not lying in the leaves. He’s half buried in places and when Sam shoves aside a dry rustling pile he sees a glistening membrane connecting Dean to the earth. It shines like snail track and clings to his arm and hip and legs, and it looks like the byproduct of decay, like skin when everything under it has melted away.
Sam doesn’t throw up because that wouldn’t help at all.
He gets a better grip on the knife and starts cutting.
It takes a long time.
The sun is low when Dean opens his eyes and the noise he makes is thick and wet and awful and it goes on too long, far too long. Sam drops the knife somewhere and gets a hand over his brother’s mouth and Dean lashes out, one hand wild and violent and his whole body jerks and his eyes roll up and saliva drools from the corner of his mouth all over Sam’s hand.
“Dean, Jesus,” he bites out, low and urgent and desperate. The first stars burn in the gaps between black branches. The sky is opening up, huge and old and merciless. Everything’s dying. Folding up, drawing down. Seeking shelter. The birds are gone.
He grabs his brother’s shoulders and wrenches him from the earth. Dean flops forward and his head lolls, hands spasming. Another wet noise comes from his mouth and Sam fumbles for his face and wipes at it, at whatever is warm and leaking there, viscous and frothy.
He’s really, really not going to throw up.
He fishes Dean’s lighter out of his pocket and waves the flame around his face. Peels back his eyelids and uses his sleeve to wipe white foam off his brother’s lips. Clicks the flame off and clutches at him, at his shoulders and the back of his neck. He thinks his fingernails are digging into Dean’s skin.
“Come on, man” he whispers into the night. “Jesus Christ come on.”
There’s still something out there. Sam hasn’t eaten since this morning and the temperature is dropping rapidly. It’s mid-October and the sky is far away and dizzying.
“We can’t stay,” he hisses in he is brother’s ear. “We gotta go. Dean, wake up. Dean, wake up.”
But he doesn’t. And he doesn’t.
And then he does.
__________________
The sky blisters and runs, pus and blood. Somewhere someone is screaming, someone is screaming but it isn’t him, he’s years past screaming, years. But someone else is and it’s loud and it hurts, grates right over his skin, down his spine. God. Oh God.
“Dean! Dean!”
Someone’s shaking him and he lashes out. Smack of skin and bone and muscle. Wet and damaged. A curse. The sky is bleeding, everything’s bleeding, and someone’s taken a steel file to his bones. He breathes because he can’t remember not to and it hurts.
“Dean stop! It’s going to find us! Stop, please!”
There’s something on his skin. There’s something in his skin. He’s lying on the ground. He’s-no.
Something soft and warm.
Someone is holding on.
Someone.
__________________
Sam’s just glad his nose isn’t bleeding. His lip throbs, though, and Dean’s fingers raked a nice gouge down the side of his neck before he went still and shivering and collapsed again. Only this time his muscles are tense and his breathing short and shallow. Sam knows his eyes are open. He can’t see them, but he knows.
“Dean,” he says cautiously. “Hey.”
Dean gulps, and makes a small noise, like a sigh. He’s propped across Sam’s knees, face turned away. He exhales, a tiny quiet breath.
“…hurts,” he breathes out, the word hardly leaving his mouth, and Sam knows he wasn’t supposed to hear.
Sam murmurs his name again, pushes himself to his knees and grabs hold of his brother by the back of his jacket. Dean’s feet move strangely, in a kind of staggering figure eight. Sam hauls him in closer.
“We can’t go anywhere in the dark,” Dean mumbles into the side of Sam’s coat.
“We have to,” Sam says. “We-this isn’t a place for us. We have to go.”
They stumble together through the falling dark. It’s stupid. Sam knows it is. Once, an owl calls repeatedly from somewhere far away. Sam wants to hear a train, and the noise of cars on the highway. He wants to hear human voices. His ears strain for the sound of movement, but other than the owl he hears nothing but the trees moving slowly in the night breeze. He clutches Dean’s lighter in his hand and follows the streambed, sloshing through water and mud, tripping over roots. Some small animal explodes away from him in the leaves and they both freeze, Sam’s hands squeezing so hard his knuckles creak.
“Sam,” Dean breathes, “Sam.”
There’s something in the forest. The last rays of the sun cut straight across the land, illuminating nothing, but limning the leaves and trees in gold. The stars are clear and Sam hears a noise, like the footsteps of deer, pushing through the dry leaves. And something exhales, a sound like distant thunder.
“Sam.”
Dean’s voice is urgent and Sam clutches him harder, pulls him back and turns a half-circle in the leaves, seeking the source of the noise. It’s close. It’s there, it’s just out of sight in the dark, and the weight of its presence is huge. He looks for eyes but there are no eyes, looks for teeth but there are no teeth. Just the stars and the black branches and the smell of the earth, the damp leaves and the sound of something breathing.
“Everything has to die sometime, Sam,” Dean murmurs. He’s listing heavily, leaning into Sam and his fingers are slack and his breathing light and shallow.
“I don’t care,” Sam snarls, at his brother and at the dark. “I don’t care.”
“My head hurts. Sam.”
Sam’s hand is shaking when he flicks open Dean’s lighter, and the tiny flame washes his hand in orange light.
“Shh,” he says, though he’s not sure Dean can hear him.
It’s the end of the day. Sam holds his breath and waits for the moment when the sun drops completely and the light goes out.
The tiny flame burns in his hand.
The sunlight vanishes.
The night yawns. The stars clamor overhead. Sam stands there clutching his brother, and waits for the light to go out.
But it doesn’t.
They go on standing there for a long time, until Sam realizes that they’re alone. The wind whispers across the ground and he breathes the empty, cold air.
He stuffs Dean’s lighter in his pocket, takes a firmer hold on his brother, and guides him as best he can through the dark.
-end-
__________________
Notes: Anyone who does not recognize the quote at the top, please see me in my office immediately.
No, seriously, it’s from Watership Down. Because apparently I am revisiting that book this week, for some reason.
Other things: I spend a lot of time running around the parks and so of course occasionally come across reminders that nature is not all fluffy bunnies and swans trying to break your arm and whatnot. The skull-and-intestines thing really happened, and yes, was about as ‘eeeew gross!’ as it sounds. And I was very, very careful about where I was walking for the rest of that particular jaunt. The point in this case was simply that, yes, nature is beautiful and awesome and amazing, but it’s also ruthless and terrifying and moves to rhythms that are older than humanity and which has no interest in, or time for, us and our needs. Sometimes the cost of survival is terrible. But that’s the way it is.
As far as the owl thing goes, it may be a cliché, but there is a reason it’s a cliché. ;)
Summary: “Everything has to die sometime, Sam."
Written for the hoodie_time Writing Between the Lines Challenge, for the prompt by wynefred.
Warnings: Nature
Note: To me this has a season 4-ish vibe to it, but it could conceivably be set at some later point. Feel free to make your own determination.
Extinguish
__________________
In the autumn the leaves come blowing, yellow and brown.
They rustle in the ditches, they tug and hang on the hedge.
Where are you going leaves? Far, far away
Into the earth we go, with the rain and the berries.
__________________
He's lying on the ground. A soft bed of autumn leaves crunch and crackle underneath him. The sweet, musty scent of wet leaves tickles his nose. Bird songs fill the air. A pleasant breeze rustles through the trees. He opens his eyes to a glorious tangle of limbs and blue sky. A few stubborn leaves wave lazily in the cool breeze. Lethargy envelops him, peaceful and enticing. He feels no urge to move. He thinks he could lie here forever, content under the trees. His chest feels light.
He can hear a distant rustling. Something moving through the leaves. Far away, and stepping lightly. Deer, maybe.
He’s been here for a while.
Sunlight falls on his face, on his chest, on the skin of his hands. Sunlight, and the shadow of branches and leaves. Sycamore, he thinks, Maple. Hickory. Walnut and Oak. They whisper to each other in the breeze. The branches move slowly, like the limbs of some vast thing.
He moves his fingers, just slightly. Can feel the sunlight shifting along his skin. His chest is warm and light. Parts of him are sinking into the earth. It smells of leaves and damp and soil. Falling apart. Falling to pieces. Deep deep down.
He shuts his eyes.
He hasn’t been this warm in a long time.
Something moves in the forest. Far away.
__________________
Sam slither-slides down another incline and narrowly avoids getting whacked in the face by a trailing wild rose. Thorny branches bob inches from his nose and he goes cross-eyed for a moment, until his depth perception adjusts. There are no flowers, of course, just glossy thorns.
He’s in a narrow valley, boots inches from the nearly-dry bed of one of the multitude of little creeks and streams running through the forest like thin veins. Most of the water is gone, now, but a thin trickle works its way through the mud and catches flashes of light from the sun, punching down through the leafless canopy. Fallen leaves lie in wet clumps. Around him, the forest rustles.
Something’s out there. Sam knows.
He ducks under the rose and squelches along the creek bed. It’s impossible to move quietly at this time of year. Even the squirrels and deer can’t manage it, picking their way through layers of dry leaves as they forage.
The light stabs down in shafts, golden and filled with late season bugs and dust. A tangle of honeysuckle runs rampant up the side of the incline to Sam’s right, dense and chaotic. Deep woods trees tower over everything, huge and straight and silent. The spaces between them fill with the rustle of animals foraging, woodpeckers hammering at tree trunks, and crows cawing and flapping in the distance.
Sam nearly steps in a pile of intestines, and a crowd of flies surges up into the air. He wrinkles his nose at the purple and black pile of offal. The flies buzz. His gaze catches on something bright red in the mud. He blinks at it, waving away the flies. It’s a skull, an animal skull, from something like a raccoon or a groundhog. The bone is coated in vivid red and a black eye gleams wetly from the socket.
He curls his lip and picks his way carefully around it. Waves a hand at the flies, who have no interest in him anyway.
Coyotes, his mind supplies. Hawks. Owls. There might not be any big predators left in most of the forested areas, but there are plenty that could disembowel and strip the skin from a small mammal without much difficulty.
He’s more careful where he puts his feet after that.
__________________
When Dean opens his eyes again the light has changed, and the air is different. He blinks heavily up at the sky. The air tastes cooler, heavier. The first tendrils of evening are slipping low across the ground, and the tone of the breeze has changed. Has acquired an edge.
He thinks it’s about four o’clock. A couple hours until sunset, less than that before twilight. It should be noticeably colder but a heavy warmth still lingers, and the sun rests on his face, his hands, his chest and throat. He moves his fingers again. He came here with a knife, he thinks. He came because he was looking.
Whatever he was looking for, it probably wasn’t that important.
In an hour or so, the first stars will start to show, tiny and white as the blue sky fades, as the light withdraws. It’ll probably be cold, but Dean can’t bring himself to believe it.
__________________
Sam finds a knife in the grass.
He’s in a little meadow, framed on every side by trees, long grass swaying in the afternoon light. Warm as butter, but dry, edged by a promise of cooler winds and earth frozen hard enough to cut.
It’s a little after four. Two months ago the meadow would have been full of noise, birds and cicadas and crickets. Now the grass waves silently and Sam picks up his brother’s knife and clenches a hand on the grip. The blade is clean.
There are bare thorn apple trees dotted around the meadow, squat and grey and tangled. Sam turns the knife over and over in one hand, contemplating its balance. Beautiful and sleek and smooth, a perfect example of craft. A tool, and a weapon.
He can’t use it to cut through branches and thorns and tangles of growth. But it’s bright and sharp and nothing about it is organic. It catches the light when he turns it again, and flashes like a star.
Somewhere far away, something moves. Sam’s head whips in the direction of the noise, muffled by distance but impossible to ignore. He stops flipping the knife around. Glances in the direction of the sun, already well below the tops of the tallest trees.
This time, he runs.
__________________
It’s warm. There’s a light behind his eyes. He doesn’t need to open them to see. Light. It fills up his head, rests against the planes of his skull. And it doesn’t hurt. And it doesn’t hurt. His hands are around somewhere, he thinks, in some open space but not really connected to him anymore. And his arms and chest and belly too. They’re all somewhere. In some bright emptiness. Hips and guts and legs and the bones of his feet.
He could move them if he wanted to, but he’d have to reach out for them to do it. Have to hold on. Have to remember.
But it’s quiet here, and it doesn’t hurt.
__________________
There’s something in the forest and it’s bigger than Sam.
He knows it’s hunting him. Hasn’t seen it but he’s heard, noises like deer rustling, but too far away. Something heavier, bulkier, pushing through the tangles and the leaves. Something whose shadow catches in the corner of Sam’s eyes, shifting between the trees and then down, away out of sight, hidden by the slope of dry streambeds.
It’s big. He thinks if it stood up it would blot out the sky.
There’s blood on the ground, drops like red wax or crab apples. It’s the dying season. For everything.
It was stupid of them to come. Hunting little monsters. There’s something bigger out there, something tangled and vast and terrifying and old, older than demons and gods, older than things that have names. It isn’t evil, but it’s ruthless. Inexorable. It is what it is.
Sam skirts a boulder and nearly trips over a fallen log, crashes through a cluster of birches and narrowly avoids stepping on the green walnut husks and hedge apples scattered across the leaves. Oak leaves, maple leaves, walnut and sycamore. Sycamores grow near water, Sam thinks randomly. Everybody knows that.
Naked white branches arc overhead. There’s no sound of water and his breathing is loud. Too loud. He can’t hear.
It’s past five o’clock. The sun slants horizontally through the trees. The blue overhead is fading, evaporating like vapor. The stars will be out soon.
He fetches up against the thick bole of an oak. Old and huge, its roots fist in the earth and its spreading branches have forced out any smaller trees that might have struggled to survive in its shadow. It’s too big.
He’s standing looking down another small hill. A muddy, leaf-choked track meanders along in the evening sunlight, glittering where naked water flashes. Sam lifts his eyes and on the other side he sees his brother, lying in the leaves.
It’s like being punched in the chest.
__________________
Someone’s yelling, somewhere. It’s stupid. Stupid. It’s a weird hollow noise, somebody screaming his damnfool head off but it’s not real, not here, so he doesn’t reach out for it. Doesn’t care.
There’s sunlight and he’s warm.
He can’t feel his hands.
__________________
Dean’s not lying in the leaves. He’s half buried in places and when Sam shoves aside a dry rustling pile he sees a glistening membrane connecting Dean to the earth. It shines like snail track and clings to his arm and hip and legs, and it looks like the byproduct of decay, like skin when everything under it has melted away.
Sam doesn’t throw up because that wouldn’t help at all.
He gets a better grip on the knife and starts cutting.
It takes a long time.
The sun is low when Dean opens his eyes and the noise he makes is thick and wet and awful and it goes on too long, far too long. Sam drops the knife somewhere and gets a hand over his brother’s mouth and Dean lashes out, one hand wild and violent and his whole body jerks and his eyes roll up and saliva drools from the corner of his mouth all over Sam’s hand.
“Dean, Jesus,” he bites out, low and urgent and desperate. The first stars burn in the gaps between black branches. The sky is opening up, huge and old and merciless. Everything’s dying. Folding up, drawing down. Seeking shelter. The birds are gone.
He grabs his brother’s shoulders and wrenches him from the earth. Dean flops forward and his head lolls, hands spasming. Another wet noise comes from his mouth and Sam fumbles for his face and wipes at it, at whatever is warm and leaking there, viscous and frothy.
He’s really, really not going to throw up.
He fishes Dean’s lighter out of his pocket and waves the flame around his face. Peels back his eyelids and uses his sleeve to wipe white foam off his brother’s lips. Clicks the flame off and clutches at him, at his shoulders and the back of his neck. He thinks his fingernails are digging into Dean’s skin.
“Come on, man” he whispers into the night. “Jesus Christ come on.”
There’s still something out there. Sam hasn’t eaten since this morning and the temperature is dropping rapidly. It’s mid-October and the sky is far away and dizzying.
“We can’t stay,” he hisses in he is brother’s ear. “We gotta go. Dean, wake up. Dean, wake up.”
But he doesn’t. And he doesn’t.
And then he does.
__________________
The sky blisters and runs, pus and blood. Somewhere someone is screaming, someone is screaming but it isn’t him, he’s years past screaming, years. But someone else is and it’s loud and it hurts, grates right over his skin, down his spine. God. Oh God.
“Dean! Dean!”
Someone’s shaking him and he lashes out. Smack of skin and bone and muscle. Wet and damaged. A curse. The sky is bleeding, everything’s bleeding, and someone’s taken a steel file to his bones. He breathes because he can’t remember not to and it hurts.
“Dean stop! It’s going to find us! Stop, please!”
There’s something on his skin. There’s something in his skin. He’s lying on the ground. He’s-no.
Something soft and warm.
Someone is holding on.
Someone.
__________________
Sam’s just glad his nose isn’t bleeding. His lip throbs, though, and Dean’s fingers raked a nice gouge down the side of his neck before he went still and shivering and collapsed again. Only this time his muscles are tense and his breathing short and shallow. Sam knows his eyes are open. He can’t see them, but he knows.
“Dean,” he says cautiously. “Hey.”
Dean gulps, and makes a small noise, like a sigh. He’s propped across Sam’s knees, face turned away. He exhales, a tiny quiet breath.
“…hurts,” he breathes out, the word hardly leaving his mouth, and Sam knows he wasn’t supposed to hear.
Sam murmurs his name again, pushes himself to his knees and grabs hold of his brother by the back of his jacket. Dean’s feet move strangely, in a kind of staggering figure eight. Sam hauls him in closer.
“We can’t go anywhere in the dark,” Dean mumbles into the side of Sam’s coat.
“We have to,” Sam says. “We-this isn’t a place for us. We have to go.”
They stumble together through the falling dark. It’s stupid. Sam knows it is. Once, an owl calls repeatedly from somewhere far away. Sam wants to hear a train, and the noise of cars on the highway. He wants to hear human voices. His ears strain for the sound of movement, but other than the owl he hears nothing but the trees moving slowly in the night breeze. He clutches Dean’s lighter in his hand and follows the streambed, sloshing through water and mud, tripping over roots. Some small animal explodes away from him in the leaves and they both freeze, Sam’s hands squeezing so hard his knuckles creak.
“Sam,” Dean breathes, “Sam.”
There’s something in the forest. The last rays of the sun cut straight across the land, illuminating nothing, but limning the leaves and trees in gold. The stars are clear and Sam hears a noise, like the footsteps of deer, pushing through the dry leaves. And something exhales, a sound like distant thunder.
“Sam.”
Dean’s voice is urgent and Sam clutches him harder, pulls him back and turns a half-circle in the leaves, seeking the source of the noise. It’s close. It’s there, it’s just out of sight in the dark, and the weight of its presence is huge. He looks for eyes but there are no eyes, looks for teeth but there are no teeth. Just the stars and the black branches and the smell of the earth, the damp leaves and the sound of something breathing.
“Everything has to die sometime, Sam,” Dean murmurs. He’s listing heavily, leaning into Sam and his fingers are slack and his breathing light and shallow.
“I don’t care,” Sam snarls, at his brother and at the dark. “I don’t care.”
“My head hurts. Sam.”
Sam’s hand is shaking when he flicks open Dean’s lighter, and the tiny flame washes his hand in orange light.
“Shh,” he says, though he’s not sure Dean can hear him.
It’s the end of the day. Sam holds his breath and waits for the moment when the sun drops completely and the light goes out.
The tiny flame burns in his hand.
The sunlight vanishes.
The night yawns. The stars clamor overhead. Sam stands there clutching his brother, and waits for the light to go out.
But it doesn’t.
They go on standing there for a long time, until Sam realizes that they’re alone. The wind whispers across the ground and he breathes the empty, cold air.
He stuffs Dean’s lighter in his pocket, takes a firmer hold on his brother, and guides him as best he can through the dark.
-end-
__________________
Notes: Anyone who does not recognize the quote at the top, please see me in my office immediately.
No, seriously, it’s from Watership Down. Because apparently I am revisiting that book this week, for some reason.
Other things: I spend a lot of time running around the parks and so of course occasionally come across reminders that nature is not all fluffy bunnies and swans trying to break your arm and whatnot. The skull-and-intestines thing really happened, and yes, was about as ‘eeeew gross!’ as it sounds. And I was very, very careful about where I was walking for the rest of that particular jaunt. The point in this case was simply that, yes, nature is beautiful and awesome and amazing, but it’s also ruthless and terrifying and moves to rhythms that are older than humanity and which has no interest in, or time for, us and our needs. Sometimes the cost of survival is terrible. But that’s the way it is.
As far as the owl thing goes, it may be a cliché, but there is a reason it’s a cliché. ;)