SPN fic: Falls the Shadow
Title: Falls the Shadow
Category: Gen, au
Warnings: Disturbing imagery. Language. References to suicide. Unbeta'd, too.
Summary: Dean brought Sam back, after Jake Talley murdered him, but he didn't give any thought at all to where he was pulling Sam back from. 2.22 AU
A/N: Written for a prompt on ohsam's most recent comment-fic meme.
--
The thing about Heaven is that it’s supposed to be forever. An everlasting rest, soft of touch and filled with airy kisses from his golden-haired soulmate; peanut butter crackers and hot cocoa from the mother he should have always had. Damp grass and fairy tales and quiet years (decades, seconds) of filling his whole being with eternity and learning the perfect silence of Knowing.
At first, he asks after his father, who burns and should not have to, but the angels just say Soon with the tolling deep of truth, and so they wait, all together.
He doesn’t talk again for an age, and neither do the others. They have forever to get to that, after all. Maybe when Dean and John come home to them. Maybe.
--
A second and forever before he tells her hello again, for the first and last time, an anchor spears his gut and he’s falling, the startled blue of Heaven and her eyes the only goodbye he gets, the instant before he slams onto a thick plank of nauseating filth, into a corpse that should have burned days ago, and then he’s trapped (screaming to get out) inside what used to be himself and utterly alone.
There’s dirt weighing down the insides of Sam’s lungs when he coughs himself upright, and he can’t breathe, just can’t pull the air in (he shouldn’t need to panic, not anymore) so he coughs and tries to throw the weight out of his chest but he can’t. He just coughs and can’t breathe and wants her like he thought he’d never have to again.
Hands squeezing, pinching at shoulders folded in flesh that burst teeny fragile veins at the small pressure. And that’s what he is now, a great heap of pressure, pounding in his ears and through his chest and banding across his leaden lungs, punching on his shoulder., but he can’t stop the punching (pulling, again and again) with arms so heavy with bone and blood--he can’t move, he’s locked away inside rotting flesh that has yet to remember what it means to house a soul.
“Sam?!” (Not her, he’s not hearing her and then he can’t stop crying.)
“It’s okay, Sammy. It’s okay--I got you.” (Does his brother even know he’s lied at least twice there?) “I’m not leaving you again. I got you back.”
Sam keeps crying, and he keeps crying, and he won’t ever stop.
--
It isn’t until he’s back that Sam remembers that for such a brief forever, he couldn’t feel her flesh dripping onto his forehead anymore, sloughed from her bones, or smell the smoke smouldering off damp corpses, out of exhumed graves, pouring off her in waves. He lived his whole life with heady, horrid smoke etched on his upper lip (so he could never forget what death smelled like) and now he will have to live it all out again. Unless...
Unless.
(This is the first time Sam thinks it, and it won’t be the last until he’s home again. This he knows.)
--
“I gave up Heaven so that you can go to Hell? Fuck that, Dean.”
“What, Sam, you think I could just let you stay dead? At least you’re breathing again, and I least I know for sure you’re not burning down below.”
“No. No, you don’t get to take the high road here.”
“I’m you’re big brother. That’s my damn job. I’m not gonna fuck it up again.”
But you already have, Dean. (Can’t you see and why can’t you see?)
“You were just scared of being alone for the first time in your life. That’s why you did it.”
“Sam, that’s not fair, and you know it.”
But it is, and they both know that.
--
Engine smoke rubs Sam’s lungs and coils through his stomach as they eat the countryside under the Impala’s tires. First to Bobby’s, then so fast and far away (but close--everything on Earth is so desperately, horrifyingly close, and especially the skin wrapped so tight across his flesh; the flesh around his soul).
The horizon pulls the sun down from his perch and Sam aches.
--
He wants to kill Jake (a vestigial need for revenge begging its way through his veins) and he wants to get on his knees and thank him--for her, for sending him home to her--until the stars themselves explode their way out of the sky. But then Jake shoves the key in the lock and Hell pours forth (thick and quick and sly, ready to take him and twist him and hold him forever away) so fast Sam can’t do much else but shoot and kill.
Thou shalt not kill, Sam. Now you’re never going back.
Sam burns so many bullets on the face of the man who ruined everything (except not really--that would be Dean, dear older brother, now wouldn’t it) that Jake Talley is more a John Doe.
From behind him, Dean watches and watches but doesn’t really see--Why can’t you see and why didn’t you before?--only watches what he wreaked and wrought and dares to wonder what he did so wrong.
(Just let me go home.)
--
“I was happy there.” What should be screamed, so quiet.
“You’ll go back, Sammy.” The instant reassurance from a brother blind with fear more than love. Fear of being alone? Fear of failure? (And isn’t that funny, ‘cause he’s failed already.) Sam is laughing, and the galloping weight of it startles him quiet again. “Just... You can be happy here, Sammy. Can’t you?”
Sam watches demons rise like the smoke that baptised him and tempered him again twenty odd years later, not saying a word. He tries to trace out John Winchester amongst the stars and thinks They’re almost a whole family up there.
“Mom and Dad will never see you again, and I’ll have to go back alone,” Sam says. “You did this, you selfish prick.”
“We still have time. We’ll... figure something. And you can be happy again, with me.”
Dean doesn’t even phrase that one like a question. Deep inside his rotten, rotting, leaden dead and earthly brain, Sam remembers loving the man standing before him. He remembers it, and the memory tastes so different. See, Dean pulled him down from Heaven, straight into the arms of Hell, and yet…
Sam stares and stares straight at the bridge of Dean’s nose, dusted with freckles and more familiar to Sam than any part of himself. He loves Dean, and that love is mingled with so much hate. It wasn’t that way before.
It wasn’t anything like that way before.
--
But maybe Sam can still go home--His Son set out to save the sinners, murderers so chief among them, that’s what Is Written and it must be true, oh it has to be true. He will spend the rest of his (please, let them be short) days on his knees in penance. He will never again raise himself up, nor lift his head from its prostrations. Latin will fall in endless waves from his lips, and he will never cease his search for forgiveness.
(Here, Jess is burning everyday, and there, she never burned at all.)
There is one thing Sam wants, and it is worlds away. He spends two weeks prostrated on the floor beside his bed (Dean, Bobby circling like snakes to tempt him, but they can’t--they can’t stop him) even as his knees soften under him and bruise and splinter, but the flesh is not what matters here. He will be ready for Heaven when it comes for him again. Even if Heaven is to be forever without Dean, he will be ready.
(Why do you have to go to Hell, Dean, with Sam so set on Heaven?)
--
Sam will find a way--he’s always been able to get to places he shouldn’t (like Stanford, a heaven in its own right, and Wyoming’s Hell Gate as the walking miracle man, still half-dead) and this will be no different.
He knows this much--that he can’t follow the slow and even beat of time to his end so far away.
(Dean watches him, and watches his fall into an obsession focused so high up, and resigns himself to the Pit in the darkest corners of his heart.)
--
Here’s the thing: Suicides don’t go to Heaven. Sam’s almost (yet not quite) certain of that one fact.
(But that just means he has to get creative.)
Category: Gen, au
Warnings: Disturbing imagery. Language. References to suicide. Unbeta'd, too.
Summary: Dean brought Sam back, after Jake Talley murdered him, but he didn't give any thought at all to where he was pulling Sam back from. 2.22 AU
A/N: Written for a prompt on ohsam's most recent comment-fic meme.
--
The thing about Heaven is that it’s supposed to be forever. An everlasting rest, soft of touch and filled with airy kisses from his golden-haired soulmate; peanut butter crackers and hot cocoa from the mother he should have always had. Damp grass and fairy tales and quiet years (decades, seconds) of filling his whole being with eternity and learning the perfect silence of Knowing.
At first, he asks after his father, who burns and should not have to, but the angels just say Soon with the tolling deep of truth, and so they wait, all together.
He doesn’t talk again for an age, and neither do the others. They have forever to get to that, after all. Maybe when Dean and John come home to them. Maybe.
--
A second and forever before he tells her hello again, for the first and last time, an anchor spears his gut and he’s falling, the startled blue of Heaven and her eyes the only goodbye he gets, the instant before he slams onto a thick plank of nauseating filth, into a corpse that should have burned days ago, and then he’s trapped (screaming to get out) inside what used to be himself and utterly alone.
There’s dirt weighing down the insides of Sam’s lungs when he coughs himself upright, and he can’t breathe, just can’t pull the air in (he shouldn’t need to panic, not anymore) so he coughs and tries to throw the weight out of his chest but he can’t. He just coughs and can’t breathe and wants her like he thought he’d never have to again.
Hands squeezing, pinching at shoulders folded in flesh that burst teeny fragile veins at the small pressure. And that’s what he is now, a great heap of pressure, pounding in his ears and through his chest and banding across his leaden lungs, punching on his shoulder., but he can’t stop the punching (pulling, again and again) with arms so heavy with bone and blood--he can’t move, he’s locked away inside rotting flesh that has yet to remember what it means to house a soul.
“Sam?!” (Not her, he’s not hearing her and then he can’t stop crying.)
“It’s okay, Sammy. It’s okay--I got you.” (Does his brother even know he’s lied at least twice there?) “I’m not leaving you again. I got you back.”
Sam keeps crying, and he keeps crying, and he won’t ever stop.
--
It isn’t until he’s back that Sam remembers that for such a brief forever, he couldn’t feel her flesh dripping onto his forehead anymore, sloughed from her bones, or smell the smoke smouldering off damp corpses, out of exhumed graves, pouring off her in waves. He lived his whole life with heady, horrid smoke etched on his upper lip (so he could never forget what death smelled like) and now he will have to live it all out again. Unless...
Unless.
(This is the first time Sam thinks it, and it won’t be the last until he’s home again. This he knows.)
--
“I gave up Heaven so that you can go to Hell? Fuck that, Dean.”
“What, Sam, you think I could just let you stay dead? At least you’re breathing again, and I least I know for sure you’re not burning down below.”
“No. No, you don’t get to take the high road here.”
“I’m you’re big brother. That’s my damn job. I’m not gonna fuck it up again.”
But you already have, Dean. (Can’t you see and why can’t you see?)
“You were just scared of being alone for the first time in your life. That’s why you did it.”
“Sam, that’s not fair, and you know it.”
But it is, and they both know that.
--
Engine smoke rubs Sam’s lungs and coils through his stomach as they eat the countryside under the Impala’s tires. First to Bobby’s, then so fast and far away (but close--everything on Earth is so desperately, horrifyingly close, and especially the skin wrapped so tight across his flesh; the flesh around his soul).
The horizon pulls the sun down from his perch and Sam aches.
--
He wants to kill Jake (a vestigial need for revenge begging its way through his veins) and he wants to get on his knees and thank him--for her, for sending him home to her--until the stars themselves explode their way out of the sky. But then Jake shoves the key in the lock and Hell pours forth (thick and quick and sly, ready to take him and twist him and hold him forever away) so fast Sam can’t do much else but shoot and kill.
Thou shalt not kill, Sam. Now you’re never going back.
Sam burns so many bullets on the face of the man who ruined everything (except not really--that would be Dean, dear older brother, now wouldn’t it) that Jake Talley is more a John Doe.
From behind him, Dean watches and watches but doesn’t really see--Why can’t you see and why didn’t you before?--only watches what he wreaked and wrought and dares to wonder what he did so wrong.
(Just let me go home.)
--
“I was happy there.” What should be screamed, so quiet.
“You’ll go back, Sammy.” The instant reassurance from a brother blind with fear more than love. Fear of being alone? Fear of failure? (And isn’t that funny, ‘cause he’s failed already.) Sam is laughing, and the galloping weight of it startles him quiet again. “Just... You can be happy here, Sammy. Can’t you?”
Sam watches demons rise like the smoke that baptised him and tempered him again twenty odd years later, not saying a word. He tries to trace out John Winchester amongst the stars and thinks They’re almost a whole family up there.
“Mom and Dad will never see you again, and I’ll have to go back alone,” Sam says. “You did this, you selfish prick.”
“We still have time. We’ll... figure something. And you can be happy again, with me.”
Dean doesn’t even phrase that one like a question. Deep inside his rotten, rotting, leaden dead and earthly brain, Sam remembers loving the man standing before him. He remembers it, and the memory tastes so different. See, Dean pulled him down from Heaven, straight into the arms of Hell, and yet…
Sam stares and stares straight at the bridge of Dean’s nose, dusted with freckles and more familiar to Sam than any part of himself. He loves Dean, and that love is mingled with so much hate. It wasn’t that way before.
It wasn’t anything like that way before.
--
But maybe Sam can still go home--His Son set out to save the sinners, murderers so chief among them, that’s what Is Written and it must be true, oh it has to be true. He will spend the rest of his (please, let them be short) days on his knees in penance. He will never again raise himself up, nor lift his head from its prostrations. Latin will fall in endless waves from his lips, and he will never cease his search for forgiveness.
(Here, Jess is burning everyday, and there, she never burned at all.)
There is one thing Sam wants, and it is worlds away. He spends two weeks prostrated on the floor beside his bed (Dean, Bobby circling like snakes to tempt him, but they can’t--they can’t stop him) even as his knees soften under him and bruise and splinter, but the flesh is not what matters here. He will be ready for Heaven when it comes for him again. Even if Heaven is to be forever without Dean, he will be ready.
(Why do you have to go to Hell, Dean, with Sam so set on Heaven?)
--
Sam will find a way--he’s always been able to get to places he shouldn’t (like Stanford, a heaven in its own right, and Wyoming’s Hell Gate as the walking miracle man, still half-dead) and this will be no different.
He knows this much--that he can’t follow the slow and even beat of time to his end so far away.
(Dean watches him, and watches his fall into an obsession focused so high up, and resigns himself to the Pit in the darkest corners of his heart.)
--
Here’s the thing: Suicides don’t go to Heaven. Sam’s almost (yet not quite) certain of that one fact.
(But that just means he has to get creative.)