Challenge Fic: This Is What Becomes of Us
This Is What Becomes of Us
Warnings: Creepiness/vague horror
Spoilers: Early s2
Summary: They make the corpses walk.
Note:Created for the Dean-focused h/c tags challenge. I was (seriously) given the prompt 'spooning.' CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. (There is no fluffy cuddling of any kind going on in here. I just wanted to see if 'evil spooning' was something that could be written. Apparently it can, though it probably shouldn't be.)
This Is What Becomes of Us
They make the corpses walk. That’s what Sam remembers. He doesn’t know where he read it, has only the vaguest sense of dry paper, dust and bad lighting. A library, maybe, or someone’s home. Someplace he visited a long time ago.
This place is full of blowing ashes. It’s my fault, Sam thinks vaguely, as a grey eddy curls by in the dark. Should have made sure. Done it right away. Not waited.
But he did wait, curled up in Bobby’s truck with his own tears. He didn’t collect their Dad’s ashes right away and now they’re everywhere, blowing through the clearing, and if Sam didn’t know better he’d say they were multiplying.
Jesus, he hears, thinks it might be his own mind. The smell of burning fills the air, permeates everything.
In the corner of the clearing, where the ash is thickest, a pale light glows. Thin, unpleasant radiance, that takes from the eye and gives back nothing. Like a flare, dying over the sea. Sam picks his way through the ash-covered ground, breathing shallowly. With every breath ash settles in his throat, delicate and foul.
He finds Dean in the corner of the clearing, face turned halfway toward the sky, blank and helpless in the ugly light.
“Dean,” he breathes. Gets down on his knees in the soft grey sea. There are dark smudges on Dean’s shoulder, the imprint of fingers . As if something had grabbed him, dragged him to the earth, and held on. He’s curled up on his side, arm loose across his belly, hand open and fingers curving inward.
It’s so dry. Sam touches Dean’s face.
Dry.
He gets one hand under Dean’s shoulder, the other under his arm, and pulls. Dean’s body shifts, barely, head lolling around as if his spine’s disappeared. Sam’s grip slips, a little, and for a moment something shifts in the ashes behind Dean. A shape, an impression of a human body…
He grits his teeth, redoubles his grip, and heaves, hauling his brother’s dead weight off the ash-soaked ground. Dean’s feet drag and the ashes swirl up behind him. The pattern is strange. More than what the wind should be generating.
Dean’s head rolls. Sam hoists him into a fireman’s carry and staggers under his weight back through the clearing (the burning ground) to the borrowed truck. He manages to pile Dean in the passenger’s seat, where more shreds of ash dribble off of his boots, to lie on the floor in swirls and whorls that make Sam’s eyes ache when he glances at them. He looks away.
Please, he thinks, God, not this. Not now.
But God’s never paid a whole lot of attention to Sam Winchester’s prayers.
They make it back to the house (because Bobby’s a lot of things, but excited at the prospect of burning a corpse within less than ten miles of his property isn’t one of them) and it’s empty. And Sam wishes to God it wasn’t, when he flicks on the lights and turns to go back to the truck and Dean’s standing directly behind him, unsteady on his feet. He fixes Sam with a wide, hollow gaze and opens his mouth.
“Sam?” he breathes, and an echo catches the word and throws it back.
Sam.
Sam skitters backward, into the house, and Dean follows, head turning from side to side, joints loose. The smell of immolation trails him, and more ashes.
And footprints.
Sam stares down at the imprint of bare feet, the five perfect toes. Snaps his head up to Dean’s face. Says, “Get inside, Dean, Christ, get inside.”
But he’s already inside. Sam watches as Dean’s knees buckle slowly and Dean sinks down to the floor. The material of his jacket wrinkles at the shoulders. Something’s holding him.
“No.” Sam grabs huge handfuls of Dean’s jacket and shirt and hauls him upright, gets a shoulder under his arm and drags him across the floor. He can feel, now, something pulling on Dean, pulling him back, and down.
Dean mutters something, and jerks away, falling heavily on his ass and sending Sam reeling back with the sudden shift in weight. Dean’s eyes roll, enough to show white, and behind him some vague impression in the air draws closer. Arms steal around his brother’s chest, faint and grey, shadows of shadows. An echo of something with muscles, tendons, skin. Dean tips sideways as the thing curls around him and Sam lunges forward, snarling.
“Let him go! Give him back!”
But his hands close on air and his brother’s either melted through the floor, or been removed from the house entirely.
--
He isn’t at the cremation site. No strange light glows there and the grey piles have more or less dissipated, leaving behind very little for the wind to pick at. Sam bites his lip and drives frantically back to Bobby’s, hits the property like a whirlwind, tearing through rooms and up and down stairs, scouring every inch of the house before turning his attention to the huge lot, the long rows of dust and metal and rust.
Not ashes, but maybe it’s enough. A place where things go to die. Where they’re taken, and left.
He paces through the lot, though he wants to run. Listens to the sound of his own footsteps crunching through gravel and dust.
When he finds them it’s at the curving edge of a pool of artificial light. Outside the light, in that luminous space where the dark hasn’t quite taken hold. Dean’s positioned neatly on his side, the thing behind him holding on to his shoulders, curled around him in a grotesque, intimate display. His eyes are still open, half-rolled up in his head, enough that Sam can see the lower curve of the iris and a whole lot of white.
Sam’s lip curls. He scurries across the dry ground into the puddle of light, hits his knees and slides forward, grabbing at his brother, latching on with long fingers-
Or not. Something hisses, slaps at his hand and he jerks backward at the sudden sting. It runs from the tips of his fingers to his elbow, hot nerve pain. His fingers twitch uselessly.
“Dammit-” he begins, and doesn’t get any further, because that’s when Dean stands up. Or rather, is hauled to his feet, puppet-like, eyes still at half-mast and fully blank. Sam springs up and back, further into the light.
“Ssssam,” Dean’s voice rolls out, and the echoes behind it thrum in the air. “Sammyyyy.”
All the hair on Sam’s arms stands up.
They make the corpses walk, he remembers, And possess the living. Demons and walking ghosts, twilight things. Sam isn’t sure what it is that has a hold on his brother. Doesn’t really care.
He doesn’t have a knife, isn’t armed in any way.
He doesn’t care about that, either.
“That’s my brother,” he hisses. Quiet, soft as the dust under their feet.
Dean steps back. Away from the light. And again. Tottering on his feet, each step awkward and barely landing flat on the ground.
Sam surges forward and grabs for him, but he’s farther away now than Sam thought, farther than he should be. Another step, maybe two…
Sammy, he hears.
He grabs at air. It hurts, coming up empty, grasping at nothing. Sam moves more smoothly than his brother but somehow Dean stays out of reach. Going forward is the only option. The ground is softer here, deep drifts in places, fragile but heavy. He’s leaving footprints behind, he knows.
The light is behind them now, very far away. He doesn’t need to look back to see. The shadows are in the air, humming, and the light is a memory, a tiny oasis in a vast formless dark.
Sam knows he’ll follow his brother forever.
He calls and his voice doesn’t echo. “Dean! Dean!”
He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t have to. Sam knows he’s out there. Can see, barely, the shape of his face, the flicker of a hand, pale in the dark.
Hunters always go this way, Sam thinks distantly. Burning grounds and twilight country. But it’s not time. Not for Dean. Not yet.
He goes on reaching out, in the poor light, though Dean is miles away now. Too far even to see, but still there.
When a heavy, unfamiliar hand drops onto his shoulder, he jerks, startled by the unexpected human touch.
“Sam,” says a voice, and he recognizes it, though it isn’t his own and isn’t Dean’s. Older but still familiar. Trustworthy. He sags under the sudden weight, but his gaze never leaves the horizon.
Words spill into the dark, flowing around Sam as smooth and clean as water. He can’t grasp them as they run past, cleaving the dust and rushing out across the ground, over the dry land. A soft cleansing and a noise of distant anguish, something torn out of the world.
The darkness dissipates and Bobby’s standing over him. Sam drops the rest of the way, knees crashing into the dust under the electric light, eyes fixed on the ground at the very edge of the pool. Not light, not shadow. Dean’s sprawled just where he was, at the edge of the circle of light, limbs splayed and eyes wide and face blank.
Sam’s across the space between them in an instant, grabbing Dean’s head, his shoulders.
“Help me, Bobby,” Sam gasps, and together they manhandle Dean upright and lurch their way inside. Dean’s skin is warm. Sam’s got his hand splayed across his brother’s chest and he can feel his heart still beating inside. Slow. So slow.
But there.
“You stay with him,” Bobby’s saying, as they stagger up the steps, though the front door and into the living room. “You stay, Sam, understand?”
Sam doesn’t answer, his tongue’s gone numb, whole body buzzing with near-loss. Dean’s a close heavy weight that Sam’s never been gladder to bear up under. He gets them both as far as the sofa and then their knees buckle simultaneously, not to the threadbare cushions but directly to the floor, and Sam’s dizzy with the sudden impact.
“Hear me, boy?” Bobby’s saying, somewhere nearby, and Sam’s ears are ringing but he thinks he catches something about ‘staying’ and ‘not letting go’ and Sam manages to nod, repeatedly, and unstick his tongue and say, “Okay, okay, okay.”
It’s not right. Nothing’s right, yet, Dean’s heartbeat is too slow, his eyes still empty, hands loose and resting on the floor. Dean’s not there, not completely, but Sam hopes that, if he waits a little bit, his brother will come back.
“Come back,” Sam hears, and realizes it’s his own voice, cracked around the edges. He puts his forehead on the top of Dean’s skull, breathes and shudders and inhales the smell of ashes.
Come back. Come back. Come back.
-end-
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Note: In this case the thing in question is some kind of Pishacha, or Vetal/Vetala. Creepily, I was writing some original fiction that includes something very much like this, without actually knowing what it was. But for some reason burning-grounds seem to sneak into my writing, so…yeah. I'm annoyed at this fic, that it's mostly rehashing stuff I've already written elsewhere, but sometimes that's the way it goes. Unfortunately. :(
Title from the lyric:
Ashes to ashes, rust to dust
This is what becomes of us
-Annie Lennox, Primitive