Fic: Prairie Wind, PG13
Prairie Wind
Warnings: Self harm, slight violence, language
Summary: For the hoodie-time Comment-fic meme. Prompt: Sam and Dean have been on high-alert and in a high-stress position for years now. When the war is over, Sam insists they take a vacation/consider stopping hunting altogether. They’re both having issues, but while for Sam the quiet-time is used for reflecting/rediscovering himself, for Dean with his life-long avoidance issues, not being in the high-alert state is initially nothing less than terrifying. When he suddenly has free time to kill, he crashes, gets sick and can’t shake it. (I’m thinking like a cold/flu that turns into pneumonia or something, but whatever you want would work.) Lots of feverish!Dean, of course, angst, and I’d love me some PTSD!Dean or mental-illness!Dean too.
I looked at this prompt and said to myself, "Self," I said, "Do you really want to get involved with another PTSD fic?"
Apparently the answer to that question was, "Yes."
_______________________________________________________________________
Prairie Wind
The wind is in the long grass. It gets in there and whispers all day and all night. Dean can hear it when he shuts the windows. He can hear it from inside the farmhouse’s little bathroom, even if he shuts the door and puts his hands over his ears. Sam doesn’t seem to mind, or even really notice, and he walks around outside watching the clouds scud across the sky, sun and shadows passing over his upturned face.
Dean hovers at the edge of the porch and watches him. Inside the house smells of old dust, lemonade, sunlight. The air outside is sweet, breathless with the weight of summer. He’s left his beer somewhere and he can’t remember where. The sky is dizzying. He peers at it from under the porch roof, inhales the cold shadows lying across the wood. The smell of rot, of dry and splintering wood.
It’s a paradise. They’ve been here four days and it’s a fucking paradise, sky as soft as chalk dust and air like warm cotton. It presses in. Dean leans against the railing and watches Sam drifting out across the grass, bobbing like a little boat on the sea. The wind lifts his hair.
There are splinters under Dean’s palm. He’s glad for that, at least.
When the cicadas start up he squeezes his hand and lets the tiny sharpness bite at his callouses. They can’t pierce the skin. They won’t. But it’s still a relief.
--
Sam wanders around the property, cataloguing the names of things, making notes in a new journal: herbs and grasses and wildflowers, birds that swoop and cling to the grass, insects swarming in the air and flashing across the ground. Once he sees a rabbit and spends a whole afternoon smiling about it to himself, and Dean watches him and rubs at his eyes. They burn. He wishes to God they didn’t but they burn.
Sam comes back in the evening and clomps up the porch steps, and Dean squeezes to the side to let him. The noise is huge and hollow. All the hairs on the back of Dean’s neck stand up, and Sam goes inside. He says something about getting dinner together, over his shoulder, and Dean thinks about going to look for his beer, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t.
Nighttime slides across the sky and throws shadows across the big, empty fields. Birds call and bats flicker in the corners of Dean’s eyes. His vision goes grainy with twilight.
It’s hard to swallow, has been for a while now. There’s something in his throat, something thickening the cords and muscles and tendons. He has to concentrate just to swallow his own spit. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just not right. Something crooked is in there. Something sharp and swollen, and hard. He puts his thumb and fingers on either side of his Adam’s Apple, shifts is a little from side to side. He can hear it grind against something else. Bone, maybe.
Once he’d been an expert on those parts of the anatomy. The thought screams bright and sharp and fast and he shifts away from it, but it leaves scalding trails across his insides as it passes.
“Dean,” Sam says from the door. He’s got the lights on and it spills out all over the porch. Dean twists, looks down at the flood of gold, and when he looks up Sam’ worked his mouth into some sort of weird knot.
“You’re not staying out here,” Sam says, like making it a statement will have an impact on what Dean does.
He turns away, to the darkening fields. Says, “It’s early.”
The first stars are out. He waits, but Sam doesn’t say anything else. The door closes quietly.
Dean shivers a little. He’s sweating, but doesn’t know why. He wipes at the film on his face, folds his arms across his knees and stares out into the distance. He can’t see an end to the fields, only the blurry line of the horizon, fading in the dark.
He’s cold. It’s crawling up his throat. He puts his head on his knees for a little while, but can’t bring himself to close his eyes.
--
Sam says, “I thought you didn’t mind the sofa?”
He blinks slowly, with dry eyes.
“What?”
“Why,” Sam enunciates, “Are you spending all night sitting outside?”
He follows Sam’s waving hand. It’s hot. It’s hot in here. Tension quivers under his skin. He doesn’t know why. He didn’t do anything. He hasn’t done anything.
“Is it a problem for you, Sam?” He demands, in a cracked snarl, “Is it a problem?”
Sam leans back a little.
“No. Not for me.”
Dean waits, but Sam doesn’t say anything else. His skin prickles. A shiver collects in his chest and tries to spread outward and he suppresses it, viciously. They’ve been happening a lot, these violent shivers that come out of nowhere like sudden earthquakes and shake him from the center to the tips of his fingers. He doesn’t understand it. He’s got no intention of letting Sam see.
“This whole thing was your idea, Sam,” he pushes out, when the silence has become unpleasant. “You didn’t tell me there were gonna be rules about what I do!”
Sam shakes his head, half-flings his arms to the side in a gesture of surrender, and stomps off with hunched shoulders toward the back of the house. Dean listens to the sound of his boots on the old dry floors and when they fade out the noise of the wind rushes in to fill all the cracks. He shoves out the front door onto the porch and he stands bathed in the baking sun and shuts his eyes and shivers all over, once and then again.
He’s cold and he’s hot and the world is like a clenched fist and everything he knows is pushing out needle-sharp through his muscles and viscera and skin.
(This is how you gut a man.)
(This is what your brother looks like when he dies.)
(This is what hundreds of thousands of screaming voices sound like.)
(This is what your blood tastes like.)
(This is.)
(This is.)
(This is.)
He opens his eyes and the world is thick and soft and quiet but everything inside is bright and clear and sharp and it pushes against the inside of his skin and he laughs, suddenly, because it’s right. It’s clean, and it hurts, and it’s good.
--
Sam’s in the kitchen reading Raymond Chandler when Dean passes through on his way from the front porch to the back porch.
“Eat something,” Sam says, without looking up.
The screen door bangs shut behind Dean. There’s nothing back here, either. Just grass that goes on forever, a big wide prairie of wildflowers and beetles and tiny birds and the wind. The wind that doesn’t go anywhere, that just gets into things and rushes around and around, hollowing them out. Hollowing out the world.
But there are better things, he knows. Things that are real. Just beyond the horizon. Huge dark things and small thin things. Things that eat and bite and claw. The wind doesn’t know, and the grass, but that’s okay.
He shuts his eyes and can hear them, the chorus of Hell, the screaming voices. It sounds like the wind. Just like the wind.
There has to be a way out of here.
He walks down the steps for the first time since coming here. His boots are loud. When the cicadas start rattling he ducks his head a little and grins, a huge grin that pulls at his skin until it hurts.
He walks through the grass. Sam has made paths. They wander and loop and Dean pushes through them, past them, cuts like a knife, clean and bright. Grass rushes against his thighs and tugs at the skin of his hands. He’s hot again. His shirt is soaked.
He walks far enough he damn well thinks there should be some trees, but there’s nothing. Just more birds, more grass, more bugs. Once he steps in something that squelches, and doesn’t look down. Sam’s rabbit, maybe. It doesn’t matter.
He finds the fence when the sun is getting low. The wind blows along it and Dean can smell the rust. Old barbed wire wound around dried out posts, strung like threads, trailing on the ground in places.
He turns and looks back.
The wind is in the grass. There’s nowhere for it to go.
He’ll see what he can do.
The wire bites into his skin, much more deeply than the splinters on the porch. Cuts deep and he feels blood, slick and cold. (This is what it feels like. Dean.) He pulls, arms straining. Shuts his eyes, lets them do that thing where they half-open and he still can’t see. It doesn’t hurt. His hands spasm and he redoubles his grip and pulls again, and again, and the metal tears slowly away from the posts with a wet noise.
Well, something’s tearing, anyway.
He can’t hear the wind because of the cicadas and he doesn’t hear his brother, either, until suddenly he’s on his ass and Sam’s in his face and screaming.
“Goddammit Dean, what the hell are you trying to do?”
He hasn’t seen Sam this angry in a long time.
“Sam-” the word comes out thin and dry. He’s pushing his feet against the ground, hands behind him, wet and (hurting? Do they hurt?) “What are-Jesus-”
Sam’s on his knees and grabbing at Dean’s arms, yanking him forward, and Christ, his hands are really a mess, aren’t they? He looks away, says, “No, Sam, it’s okay.”
Sam slaps him across the face.
A slap. Not a punch, an honest-to-God full-hand slap. Dean’s mouth drops open and he tastes blood.
“Idiot!” Sam hollers, “Fucking-fuckin’ idiot, look at this!” His voices catches. Dean whips his head around. Sam’s eyes are bright. He chokes out, “What did you do, Dean? Why?”
He looks down at his hands, both of them resting palm up in Sam’s larger ones. The skin’s shredded and blood is pooling and running steadily down the sides and dripping onto the denim of Sam’s jeans. There’s black bits and rust and Dean bets if you cleaned up all the blood you’d be able to see bone.
There’s pain, but it doesn’t hurt. His hands are on fire, his skin, everything at the ends of his arms burns in ways that are familiar, but it isn’t uncomfortable. He could keep going like this. He could go forever.
He looks up, meets Sam’s eyes. He doesn’t want to get hit again, but he kind of does.
“Sam.” His voice is wrong. It comes from the center of his chest, where there are earthquakes. “Sam.”
His brother makes some incoherent noise and hauls him in, clumsily, and Dean lists to the side and he’s leaning across his brother’s legs and hanging on to his arm with both ruined hands, staring past him into the grass on the other side of the wire. It nods and whispers at him, and he swallows with difficulty. He blinks but he can’t cry. He used to be pretty good at it, but he can’t do it anymore.
-end-
Warnings: Self harm, slight violence, language
Summary: For the hoodie-time Comment-fic meme. Prompt: Sam and Dean have been on high-alert and in a high-stress position for years now. When the war is over, Sam insists they take a vacation/consider stopping hunting altogether. They’re both having issues, but while for Sam the quiet-time is used for reflecting/rediscovering himself, for Dean with his life-long avoidance issues, not being in the high-alert state is initially nothing less than terrifying. When he suddenly has free time to kill, he crashes, gets sick and can’t shake it. (I’m thinking like a cold/flu that turns into pneumonia or something, but whatever you want would work.) Lots of feverish!Dean, of course, angst, and I’d love me some PTSD!Dean or mental-illness!Dean too.
I looked at this prompt and said to myself, "Self," I said, "Do you really want to get involved with another PTSD fic?"
Apparently the answer to that question was, "Yes."
_______________________________________________________________________
Prairie Wind
The wind is in the long grass. It gets in there and whispers all day and all night. Dean can hear it when he shuts the windows. He can hear it from inside the farmhouse’s little bathroom, even if he shuts the door and puts his hands over his ears. Sam doesn’t seem to mind, or even really notice, and he walks around outside watching the clouds scud across the sky, sun and shadows passing over his upturned face.
Dean hovers at the edge of the porch and watches him. Inside the house smells of old dust, lemonade, sunlight. The air outside is sweet, breathless with the weight of summer. He’s left his beer somewhere and he can’t remember where. The sky is dizzying. He peers at it from under the porch roof, inhales the cold shadows lying across the wood. The smell of rot, of dry and splintering wood.
It’s a paradise. They’ve been here four days and it’s a fucking paradise, sky as soft as chalk dust and air like warm cotton. It presses in. Dean leans against the railing and watches Sam drifting out across the grass, bobbing like a little boat on the sea. The wind lifts his hair.
There are splinters under Dean’s palm. He’s glad for that, at least.
When the cicadas start up he squeezes his hand and lets the tiny sharpness bite at his callouses. They can’t pierce the skin. They won’t. But it’s still a relief.
--
Sam wanders around the property, cataloguing the names of things, making notes in a new journal: herbs and grasses and wildflowers, birds that swoop and cling to the grass, insects swarming in the air and flashing across the ground. Once he sees a rabbit and spends a whole afternoon smiling about it to himself, and Dean watches him and rubs at his eyes. They burn. He wishes to God they didn’t but they burn.
Sam comes back in the evening and clomps up the porch steps, and Dean squeezes to the side to let him. The noise is huge and hollow. All the hairs on the back of Dean’s neck stand up, and Sam goes inside. He says something about getting dinner together, over his shoulder, and Dean thinks about going to look for his beer, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t.
Nighttime slides across the sky and throws shadows across the big, empty fields. Birds call and bats flicker in the corners of Dean’s eyes. His vision goes grainy with twilight.
It’s hard to swallow, has been for a while now. There’s something in his throat, something thickening the cords and muscles and tendons. He has to concentrate just to swallow his own spit. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just not right. Something crooked is in there. Something sharp and swollen, and hard. He puts his thumb and fingers on either side of his Adam’s Apple, shifts is a little from side to side. He can hear it grind against something else. Bone, maybe.
Once he’d been an expert on those parts of the anatomy. The thought screams bright and sharp and fast and he shifts away from it, but it leaves scalding trails across his insides as it passes.
“Dean,” Sam says from the door. He’s got the lights on and it spills out all over the porch. Dean twists, looks down at the flood of gold, and when he looks up Sam’ worked his mouth into some sort of weird knot.
“You’re not staying out here,” Sam says, like making it a statement will have an impact on what Dean does.
He turns away, to the darkening fields. Says, “It’s early.”
The first stars are out. He waits, but Sam doesn’t say anything else. The door closes quietly.
Dean shivers a little. He’s sweating, but doesn’t know why. He wipes at the film on his face, folds his arms across his knees and stares out into the distance. He can’t see an end to the fields, only the blurry line of the horizon, fading in the dark.
He’s cold. It’s crawling up his throat. He puts his head on his knees for a little while, but can’t bring himself to close his eyes.
--
Sam says, “I thought you didn’t mind the sofa?”
He blinks slowly, with dry eyes.
“What?”
“Why,” Sam enunciates, “Are you spending all night sitting outside?”
He follows Sam’s waving hand. It’s hot. It’s hot in here. Tension quivers under his skin. He doesn’t know why. He didn’t do anything. He hasn’t done anything.
“Is it a problem for you, Sam?” He demands, in a cracked snarl, “Is it a problem?”
Sam leans back a little.
“No. Not for me.”
Dean waits, but Sam doesn’t say anything else. His skin prickles. A shiver collects in his chest and tries to spread outward and he suppresses it, viciously. They’ve been happening a lot, these violent shivers that come out of nowhere like sudden earthquakes and shake him from the center to the tips of his fingers. He doesn’t understand it. He’s got no intention of letting Sam see.
“This whole thing was your idea, Sam,” he pushes out, when the silence has become unpleasant. “You didn’t tell me there were gonna be rules about what I do!”
Sam shakes his head, half-flings his arms to the side in a gesture of surrender, and stomps off with hunched shoulders toward the back of the house. Dean listens to the sound of his boots on the old dry floors and when they fade out the noise of the wind rushes in to fill all the cracks. He shoves out the front door onto the porch and he stands bathed in the baking sun and shuts his eyes and shivers all over, once and then again.
He’s cold and he’s hot and the world is like a clenched fist and everything he knows is pushing out needle-sharp through his muscles and viscera and skin.
(This is how you gut a man.)
(This is what your brother looks like when he dies.)
(This is what hundreds of thousands of screaming voices sound like.)
(This is what your blood tastes like.)
(This is.)
(This is.)
(This is.)
He opens his eyes and the world is thick and soft and quiet but everything inside is bright and clear and sharp and it pushes against the inside of his skin and he laughs, suddenly, because it’s right. It’s clean, and it hurts, and it’s good.
--
Sam’s in the kitchen reading Raymond Chandler when Dean passes through on his way from the front porch to the back porch.
“Eat something,” Sam says, without looking up.
The screen door bangs shut behind Dean. There’s nothing back here, either. Just grass that goes on forever, a big wide prairie of wildflowers and beetles and tiny birds and the wind. The wind that doesn’t go anywhere, that just gets into things and rushes around and around, hollowing them out. Hollowing out the world.
But there are better things, he knows. Things that are real. Just beyond the horizon. Huge dark things and small thin things. Things that eat and bite and claw. The wind doesn’t know, and the grass, but that’s okay.
He shuts his eyes and can hear them, the chorus of Hell, the screaming voices. It sounds like the wind. Just like the wind.
There has to be a way out of here.
He walks down the steps for the first time since coming here. His boots are loud. When the cicadas start rattling he ducks his head a little and grins, a huge grin that pulls at his skin until it hurts.
He walks through the grass. Sam has made paths. They wander and loop and Dean pushes through them, past them, cuts like a knife, clean and bright. Grass rushes against his thighs and tugs at the skin of his hands. He’s hot again. His shirt is soaked.
He walks far enough he damn well thinks there should be some trees, but there’s nothing. Just more birds, more grass, more bugs. Once he steps in something that squelches, and doesn’t look down. Sam’s rabbit, maybe. It doesn’t matter.
He finds the fence when the sun is getting low. The wind blows along it and Dean can smell the rust. Old barbed wire wound around dried out posts, strung like threads, trailing on the ground in places.
He turns and looks back.
The wind is in the grass. There’s nowhere for it to go.
He’ll see what he can do.
The wire bites into his skin, much more deeply than the splinters on the porch. Cuts deep and he feels blood, slick and cold. (This is what it feels like. Dean.) He pulls, arms straining. Shuts his eyes, lets them do that thing where they half-open and he still can’t see. It doesn’t hurt. His hands spasm and he redoubles his grip and pulls again, and again, and the metal tears slowly away from the posts with a wet noise.
Well, something’s tearing, anyway.
He can’t hear the wind because of the cicadas and he doesn’t hear his brother, either, until suddenly he’s on his ass and Sam’s in his face and screaming.
“Goddammit Dean, what the hell are you trying to do?”
He hasn’t seen Sam this angry in a long time.
“Sam-” the word comes out thin and dry. He’s pushing his feet against the ground, hands behind him, wet and (hurting? Do they hurt?) “What are-Jesus-”
Sam’s on his knees and grabbing at Dean’s arms, yanking him forward, and Christ, his hands are really a mess, aren’t they? He looks away, says, “No, Sam, it’s okay.”
Sam slaps him across the face.
A slap. Not a punch, an honest-to-God full-hand slap. Dean’s mouth drops open and he tastes blood.
“Idiot!” Sam hollers, “Fucking-fuckin’ idiot, look at this!” His voices catches. Dean whips his head around. Sam’s eyes are bright. He chokes out, “What did you do, Dean? Why?”
He looks down at his hands, both of them resting palm up in Sam’s larger ones. The skin’s shredded and blood is pooling and running steadily down the sides and dripping onto the denim of Sam’s jeans. There’s black bits and rust and Dean bets if you cleaned up all the blood you’d be able to see bone.
There’s pain, but it doesn’t hurt. His hands are on fire, his skin, everything at the ends of his arms burns in ways that are familiar, but it isn’t uncomfortable. He could keep going like this. He could go forever.
He looks up, meets Sam’s eyes. He doesn’t want to get hit again, but he kind of does.
“Sam.” His voice is wrong. It comes from the center of his chest, where there are earthquakes. “Sam.”
His brother makes some incoherent noise and hauls him in, clumsily, and Dean lists to the side and he’s leaning across his brother’s legs and hanging on to his arm with both ruined hands, staring past him into the grass on the other side of the wire. It nods and whispers at him, and he swallows with difficulty. He blinks but he can’t cry. He used to be pretty good at it, but he can’t do it anymore.
-end-