SPN FIC: The Hours
Title: The Hours
Characters: Sam, Dean, mentions of Hallucifer
Word Count: 3,572
Warnings: Dean drops some F-bombs
Spoiler Alert: Takes place vaguely in S7, after "Death's Door" but before "Repo Men."
Summary: Written for ladybastet92's prompt over at the ohsam comment meme.
A/N: Unbeta'd because I told myself I was too busy to fic and then did it anyway.
Mineshafts, even those in impeccable condition, can collapse at the slightest structural compromise. Dean knows this, but he nods politely as the state trooper with the wad of chew tucked between his cheek and his jaw spits into the mess of snow and mud churned by the digging equipment rolled in about an hour ago, explains it to him like he hasn’t spent half his life stomping around similarly neglected corners of America just like this.
“Hell, I dunno what you’d want to be caught in these mines,” the officer, barely visible save for the shiny red of his nose between the wide brim of his hat and the high collar of his bulky parka, continued, “Township oughta just fill the damn things in, at least the entrances a’ the shafts. We had too many damn problems since the comp’ny closed up shop here. Kid’s e’nat.”
Dean knows all about the kids. Nine in all-- four dead, the rest dazed, spanning the months since a retrieval crew started digging out the old Monarch No. 3 mine.
The cop nods, “That was, oh, back in ’72, I guess. I was fresh out ‘the academy, been here ‘baht three months when they had the accident. There was a-“
“Cave-in,” Dean finishes, hopping from foot to foot and wincing. His left ankle took a beating on the way out, but he keeps his mouth shut to avoid getting shoved in one of the ambulances waiting out by the road.
“That’s right!” the trooper nodded, “They was blastin’ an’ they hit the river. They was workin’ offa outdated maps. Found out the miners had complained about bein’ given the wrong maps before but no one done a’thing about it. Comp’ny got accused of bein’ neglectful. Drove ‘em outta business it did.”
“Yeah,” Dean knows. He also knows about the three bodies, interred in the rubble for all those years, not minding anything, peaceful as can be, all things considered. Stupid kids threw stupid Halloween parties in the tunnels and morbid sightseers went on morbid adventures in hopes of seeing a femur sticking out of the rubble or something and they all came back alive. It was fine. It was sad, but it was fine, for thirty years.
Then somebody decided the bodies deserved to be dug up, brought to the surface, given a proper burial. And Dean doesn’t begrudge them that. He doesn’t. It was one of the kids, one of the seven kids who lost a father that day, who pushed the issue and raised the funds and got the whole town on the bandwagon and Dean understands, really, but he’d understand a whole lot more if his brother wasn’t missing.
The cop, Trooper D. Stahl, Dean reads on bronze bar beneath his badge, spits again and lights a flare, waves a monster of a truck down the same path a small caravan of similarly appointed vehicles rumbled down earlier. Dean takes a moment to hit speed dial on his phone. Again. He listens to Sam’s voicemail. Again. He watches the truck lurch and crawl, painfully slow, into the sloping meadow behind the mouth of Monarch No. 3. It’s a mess of mud, snow, and spotlights, shouts and drills. Behind Dean, the portal of the mine is lit up with strings of emergency lamps, red and blue lights reflecting off of the icicles along the arching entrance, the shiny minerals in the rock. There’s a tent where a sextet of engineers mark up page after page of old blueprints and maps. Dean knows them all by heart. Mostly. He wonders if it’s the “mostly” that landed them here, remembers Sam pausing to pull something out of his pack after they torched the corpses, the ominous rumble from the damaged end of the old mine sending them running.
He’d grabbed Sam, a handful of damp jacket, Sam calling out the directions back to the surface as they tripped over the rails running all through the narrow tunnels. There was a fork and Sam paused. Dean glanced up the right fork and saw moonlit snow, said, “This w-“before the rumble turned into a roar and the ceiling fell.
Dean covered his head and kept running.
Then there was only silence.
“Why aren’t you digging here,” Dean asks, “We were almost out. Sammy can’t be trapped too far-“
“Engineers say the mouth ain’t stable.” D. Stahl says, “We’ll have ‘em drill from behind so’s not to disturb the place where your friend’s at. If he’s lucky enough to be in a air pocket, the last thing he wants is some asshole with a drill come bringin’ the roof down on his head.”
“My brother,” Dean absently corrects, “He’s my brother.”
Dean takes careful steps down the slight hill into the mine’s portal. The lights run along both sides of the wall, weakly illuminating the wall of rock and ice. One of the EMTs gave Dean a fleece blanket and he tugs it tighter around his shoulders, stares at the impasse and hits Sam’s number.
Voicemail. Dean catches himself before he leaves a message, kills the call, and squeezes the phone until the plastic creaks. His gaze travels over the broken rock and timber and he calls, cautiously, “Sammy?” listens to it echo, “Shit, Sam.”
He looks for something, anything. Sam had a dark blue parka over jeans, brown boots, two pairs of socks because he hates when his feet get cold. He tries to remember if Sam had gloves, doesn’t think so. It’s hard to find a good fit for such large hands. Sam had their supply pack, with the matches and the lighter fluid, the salt and the extra iron rounds. Dean wonders if there’s anything actually useful in there now and he doesn’t think so. He runs his hands along the jutting ruins looking for torn fabric, an out of place thread, a soggy matchbook. A rock, slimy with ice and mud, a rock slightly bigger than a softball, slides free of its neighbors. Dean reaches into the hole. He has to kneel and the water seeps into his jeans and his knees will hate him in the morning, but he’s not thinking about that because the space behind the slimy rock is hollow. Dean pulls out bits of coal, reaches deeper and clears a path, willing the mountain of debris not to fall on his head mostly because he needs to find Sam but partially because he doesn’t want to hear the engineers and Trooper D. Stahl tell him, “We told you so.”
He pulls another handful of coal and wood out of the tiny tunnel but this handful looks cut with something else, something silver and matte and clearly unnatural. Then there’s the cracked screen of Sam’s iPhone giving him a dead stare, the lithium ion battery, hopelessly waterlogged, a ragged navy blue drawstring, a business card from the diner they’d had lunch in only twelve hours earlier, an inedible starlight mint, and finally, nothing. Dean’s arm is fully extended, his cheek pressed against the cold rock in a vain attempt to stretch just a little further, to explore the open air his hand is suddenly swimming in.
He yelps when something cold grabs his hand-something wet and soft and trembling. It doesn’t let go.
*
D. Stahl and another cop, a short chick with chunky thighs and spiky hair and a little name pin that says T. Antoinette, one of the drillers sweating despite the freezing temperatures, all of the engineers, and two EMTs tell Dean the same thing-they can’t dig through the debris. It’s too unstable. It can collapse on their heads, on Sam’s head. The engineers say that the passages around Sam are clear, that the back door is still a viable option. The lead driller says they can get there by morning, barring complications.
They tell Dean like he has some kind of decision to make, a say in things. He just tells them to hurry the fuck up.
They pass supplies through Dean’s tunnel: hand warmers, bottles of water, protein bars. They send a cell phone, Dean thinks it belongs to one of the EMTs, because they can’t talk to Sam with Dean’s arm in the hole and Sam won’t let him NOT have it in the hole. They shine a flashlight through the tiny tunnel to try and assess Sam’s damage, but Sam can’t lift his head and all they can make out is a shock of blood-matted hair, a lily-white hand with dirt crusted beneath the nails.
Sam refuses the flashlight they try to send through to his end, “He’s plenty bright,” he says, tinny cell-phone voice slurring like a drunk.
“Who?” Dean asks, even though he knows.
There’s a pause, then, “Morningstar.”
*
When he’s lucid, Sam is helpful. He tells Dean that he’s pinned on his stomach, his right arm stuck beneath him and his head wedged beneath Dean’s tunnel. It hurts to breathe. He can’t move, except for his left arm. He’s pretty sure he can wiggle his toes. He’s pretty sure he can feel his whole body because it throbs like a giant bruise and there’s something sharp digging into the back of his right thigh. He’s cold. He’s tired. He wants to sleep. Dean says, “No sleeping, talk to me, bro,” with his face pressed against the icy wall and Sam’s waxy fingers tangled in his.
Sam makes a noise like a kicked dog and Dean asks, “What? What’s wrong, Sammy?”
There’s an EMT within reach of him at all times. He’s not sure what the hell she’s supposed to do in the event Sam stops breathing or bleeds out, but the fact that she’s on her feet as soon as his tone starts to sound panicked is something Dean can appreciate. He waves her off. She says something into her radio.
“How you holding up, Sam? You’re doing awesome. Just a few more hours, okay? That’s what they’re telling me on my side of the mountain, okay? Just a few more-“
“He’s here,” Sam’s voice is breathy and thin. There are muffled noises, like a struggle, and Sam’s hand slips out of Dean’s. Dean strains and his fingers brush sticky hair and cold skin. Sam makes that noise again, “He left for awhile but he’s back again.”
“He’s not real, Sammy.”
“He’s cold. Burns cold. It’s cold.”
“It’s not him, bro. Listen to me,” Dean winces at the sounds of restrained struggle travelling across the cell phone connection. It reminds him of an animal in a trap, of the mangy stray dog he and Sam found in a hunter’s snare in the woods in Minnesota when they were tracking a mammoth spider-hearty fuckers, those are-when they were in high school. Sam was thirteen and gave the dying dog a few sips from his canteen before Dean fingered the pistol tucked in the waist of his jeans and sent him back to the Impala.
“What are you going to do?” Sam’s voice cracked. Dean couldn’t tell if it was puberty or sorrow. When he and John got back to the car later, Sam was curled beneath a blanket in the back seat with his face hidden behind a book. He wouldn’t acknowledge either of them, so Dean grabbed the battered paperback out of his hands and sat on it. Sam kicked the seat and called him an “assface.” John reached back to smack him, landed an awkward slap to the side of Sam’s head and told him to knock it off, told Dean to give the damn book back. Dean opened it to the same page Sam had left off and quietly passed it back, quietly ignoring the puffiness around Sam’s eyes, the smear of dried snot beneath his nose.
“Sammy?” Dean presses the cell phone harder against his ear as though he can will himself closer to Sam through the plastic and circuits and electricity that connects them, “You gotta stop moving around in there, bro. You’re gonna hurt yourself.” His other hand strains, “Take my hand, Sammy. C’mon.”
Sam’s fingers are shaking so hard he can’t grip Dean’s hand. Dean curls his fingers tight. He doesn’t let go.
*
It’s a little after three in the morning when the lead driller tells them that the bit broke, “We’re calling in a replacement from Monessen,” he says, as though Dean has any idea where the hell Monessen is, “’bout an hour or two away.”
“So what does that mean for Sam?”
It means Sam is stuck for at least an hour or two longer than he would have been if the bit hadn’t broken, and that’s being optimistic. Sam whines when Dean pulls his arm out of the little tunnel so they can pass more supplies through: more hand warmers, more water. They try to roll a blanket up and send it through, but it gets stuck. Dean is on the cell phone the entire time, soothing Sam as he frets, slurs, forgets what he’s talking about mid-sentence. Dean asks the lady EMT about hypothermia and she says that they were hoping the small chamber that Sam wound up in would help conserve his body heat, but it’s definitely a concern of theirs, especially with the delay, especially if he’s laying in water.
Sam coughs and something rattles in his chest. When Dean is touching his fingers again, they’re sticky. Dean asks him if everything is okay and he says he’s cold, that he can’t see because it’s too bright, that the devil’s sitting on his chest and touching his face.
Dean says, “Hey man, it’s better to be cold than hot, right?” He forces a laugh, “I mean, you can always add more layers but you can only take off so many clothes, right, Sammy?”
“T-too cold.”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Sammy. When we get out of here, we’ll head south. Key West. How’s Key West sound?”
“H-hunt?”
“Yeah, we’ll find something. Bermuda Triangle, Sammy, there’s always weird shit down there.”
“Y-yeah.”
“Hey Sammy, remember that chick with the zombie husband?”
“No.”
“Seriously? Dude it was like, one of the first times Dad and I let you come with us.”
“I don’t.”
“Seriously? No, Sam, you have to remember. Remember? The zombie husband, with the rose garden, and the dog and the spoon collection. You know those souvenir spoons you can get at like, every tourist trap ever? The lady had a fuckin’ roomful of them. And the zombie husband polished them for her. I actually felt kinda bad about blowing his brains out.”
“Stop,” Sam moans and Dean doesn’t know if he’s talking to him or Lucifer.
Dean switches tactics because he figures Sam doesn’t want to hear about anyone blowing anything’s head off and because he doesn’t think Troopers D. Stahl and T. Antoinette need to overhear his Greatest Hits of Zombie Slaying either.
“Hey Sammy, you ever see that movie Fido about the kid with the pet zombie? That was pretty funny.”
“Hey Sammy, who do you think would win in a fight between Batman and Chuck Norris?”
Hey Sammy. Hey Sammy. Hey Sammy.
*
It’s after nine. Sam’s been trapped for almost twelve hours. The batteries in the cell phones go dead and T. Antoinette gives them a set of 2-way radios, but Sam is too uncoordinated to use his handset. Dean reluctantly tears himself away from the wall and sprints to the Impala parked by the road. His bad ankle is numb. He thinks he should have taken his boot off or had someone wrap it, but feared being shuttled off to the hospital for X-rays. He fumbles in the glove compartment, in the box of different cell phones they keep for different aliases, grabs two and makes sure they’re charged. He slides in the mud on the way back to the mine and in the crisp morning light, sees the progress of the drill team in the field. There’s a mountain of dirt and coal and old, twisted mining equipment. There’s a large pulley looming over where Dean supposes the hole is, a handful of rescue workers in yellow helmets, an ambulance waiting off to the side. D. Stahl said they’re going to bring Sam out that way, get a backboard on him and just pull him up. The lead driller said by early afternoon. The engineers said there wasn’t as much flooding in the open shafts as they feared and it made up some of the time lost by the broken drill bit all those hours ago.
Dean passes one of the phones through the hole and has to repeat Sam’s name several times before he takes it. The fingertips that brush against Dean’s wrist feel like ice. They aren’t shaking anymore, but Dean knows that’s not a good thing, “Pretty sure he’s hypothermic,” Dean says to the EMT next to him, the chick who sat there all night, Rosalie.
“Pretty sure your ankle’s busted,” she counters.
Dean lets her wrap it as long as he doesn’t have to move. She doesn’t think it’s broken, just very badly sprained. She says they’ll pass some more warm gear through the hole to Sam, but there’s not much they can do until they get to him, “Just a little longer,” she says, pats Dean’s arm awkwardly.
“Hey Sammy, they’re gonna have you out real soon. Hear that? Hear the drill?”
“No.”
Dean swallows, “Okay. It’s okay. They’re coming for you. Just a little longer. Just hold on a little longer, you hear me?”
“Okay.”
The muted roar of the drill grows louder. Sam says he can hear it and that’s the last thing he says to Dean, his hand slipping out of Dean’s grasp. The only thing keeping Dean from screaming is the labored breathing he can hear over the tinny cell phone speakers, punctuated with the occasional raspy cough. Dean strains, manages to brush his fingers against Sam’s hair, stiff with only God knows what, and stays like that, rubbing small circles into Sam’s scalp and repeating a constant litany of reassurances.
He stays like that until there’s a commotion outside and a burst of noise on the other side of the wall. Rosalie’s radio crackles to life and a man’s voice says, “We’re through. Go ahead and let the brother know we’re through.”
“Is he…?” Dean pulls his arm back and peers into the cave, illuminated with fresh sunlight and workmen’s lamps strapped to the rescuer’s helmets, “Is he alive?” Dean shouts through the passage. He can see a blue clad knee, the corner of an orange backboard. He can’t see Sam.
The knee shifts and a face appears, “He’s alive. His arm’s pinned. Looks like he took a hit to the head, been bleedin’ like a stuck pig. We just gotta get that arm free and we’ll bring him out the top. Aight?”
“Yeah,” Dean says, “Yeah, alright.”
Rosalie helps him up and out. It’s after one, sunny, warmer than yesterday, with the snow melting off of the trees near the road. He slips in the mud going up the hill and Rosalie steers him to the waiting ambulance. He protests, wants to be at the top of the hill, at the edge of the hole. Rosalie says, “They’re gonna bring him straight here. I’ll make sure they let you ride with him.”
They do and she does. Sam is cocooned in soft blankets, except for the arm that was pinned. Now it’s immobilized by a split, painfully swollen beneath the stiff dressing, but, Dean is relieved to see, whole. There’s in a neck brace, an oxygen mask that they swap for a nasal cannula once he’s in the bus. Rosalie starts an IV line to pump him full of warm saline and antibiotics. His face is filthy with coal dust and dried blood, but pale where someone, maybe one of the rescuers, maybe Sam himself, wiped the filth away.
The tension of the past sixteen hours is leaving Dean like sand escaping a cut bag. He can feel it piling on the floor of the ambulance, next to his feet. He leans over while Rosalie and the others pull the blanket back, cut through Sam’s rancid clothes and shove the rags in a trash bag. Dean rubs at a smear of dried blood on Sam’s forehead and watches his eyes flutter. Dean holds his breath, watches Sam swim awkwardly to consciousness and wonders who he’ll see when he wakes up.
Bloodshot eyes roll in bruised sockets before settling on Dean. Sam smiles. His lips are blue, but the medics are wrapping a thermal blanket around his core and he’s already starting to shiver, ever so slightly, “Hey…Dean.” He coughs and spits up black phlegm. Dean wipes his lips, shoots a look at Rosalie.
"They'll do X-rays," she says, "It's black because of the coal dust. Bet it tastes awesome, right Sam?" Rosalie shines a penlight in Sam’s eyes and he flinches. She says, “Pupils are sluggish,” and tells the driver to radio ahead, let Uniontown know they were getting the cave-in victim.
Dean takes advantage of the distraction to lean close to Sam’s ear and ask, “Is he still here?”
Sam does a tired sweep of the ambulance interior, focuses on something in the corner, next to the door, and trembles. He doesn’t even have to say anything. Dean reluctantly follows his gaze and sighs.
“Okay,” Dean says, “It’s okay.”
He reaches into the folds of Sam’s cocoon and finds Sam’s hand, squeezing tight. Sam squeezes back. Neither of them lets go.
Characters: Sam, Dean, mentions of Hallucifer
Word Count: 3,572
Warnings: Dean drops some F-bombs
Spoiler Alert: Takes place vaguely in S7, after "Death's Door" but before "Repo Men."
Summary: Written for ladybastet92's prompt over at the ohsam comment meme.
A/N: Unbeta'd because I told myself I was too busy to fic and then did it anyway.
Mineshafts, even those in impeccable condition, can collapse at the slightest structural compromise. Dean knows this, but he nods politely as the state trooper with the wad of chew tucked between his cheek and his jaw spits into the mess of snow and mud churned by the digging equipment rolled in about an hour ago, explains it to him like he hasn’t spent half his life stomping around similarly neglected corners of America just like this.
“Hell, I dunno what you’d want to be caught in these mines,” the officer, barely visible save for the shiny red of his nose between the wide brim of his hat and the high collar of his bulky parka, continued, “Township oughta just fill the damn things in, at least the entrances a’ the shafts. We had too many damn problems since the comp’ny closed up shop here. Kid’s e’nat.”
Dean knows all about the kids. Nine in all-- four dead, the rest dazed, spanning the months since a retrieval crew started digging out the old Monarch No. 3 mine.
The cop nods, “That was, oh, back in ’72, I guess. I was fresh out ‘the academy, been here ‘baht three months when they had the accident. There was a-“
“Cave-in,” Dean finishes, hopping from foot to foot and wincing. His left ankle took a beating on the way out, but he keeps his mouth shut to avoid getting shoved in one of the ambulances waiting out by the road.
“That’s right!” the trooper nodded, “They was blastin’ an’ they hit the river. They was workin’ offa outdated maps. Found out the miners had complained about bein’ given the wrong maps before but no one done a’thing about it. Comp’ny got accused of bein’ neglectful. Drove ‘em outta business it did.”
“Yeah,” Dean knows. He also knows about the three bodies, interred in the rubble for all those years, not minding anything, peaceful as can be, all things considered. Stupid kids threw stupid Halloween parties in the tunnels and morbid sightseers went on morbid adventures in hopes of seeing a femur sticking out of the rubble or something and they all came back alive. It was fine. It was sad, but it was fine, for thirty years.
Then somebody decided the bodies deserved to be dug up, brought to the surface, given a proper burial. And Dean doesn’t begrudge them that. He doesn’t. It was one of the kids, one of the seven kids who lost a father that day, who pushed the issue and raised the funds and got the whole town on the bandwagon and Dean understands, really, but he’d understand a whole lot more if his brother wasn’t missing.
The cop, Trooper D. Stahl, Dean reads on bronze bar beneath his badge, spits again and lights a flare, waves a monster of a truck down the same path a small caravan of similarly appointed vehicles rumbled down earlier. Dean takes a moment to hit speed dial on his phone. Again. He listens to Sam’s voicemail. Again. He watches the truck lurch and crawl, painfully slow, into the sloping meadow behind the mouth of Monarch No. 3. It’s a mess of mud, snow, and spotlights, shouts and drills. Behind Dean, the portal of the mine is lit up with strings of emergency lamps, red and blue lights reflecting off of the icicles along the arching entrance, the shiny minerals in the rock. There’s a tent where a sextet of engineers mark up page after page of old blueprints and maps. Dean knows them all by heart. Mostly. He wonders if it’s the “mostly” that landed them here, remembers Sam pausing to pull something out of his pack after they torched the corpses, the ominous rumble from the damaged end of the old mine sending them running.
He’d grabbed Sam, a handful of damp jacket, Sam calling out the directions back to the surface as they tripped over the rails running all through the narrow tunnels. There was a fork and Sam paused. Dean glanced up the right fork and saw moonlit snow, said, “This w-“before the rumble turned into a roar and the ceiling fell.
Dean covered his head and kept running.
Then there was only silence.
“Why aren’t you digging here,” Dean asks, “We were almost out. Sammy can’t be trapped too far-“
“Engineers say the mouth ain’t stable.” D. Stahl says, “We’ll have ‘em drill from behind so’s not to disturb the place where your friend’s at. If he’s lucky enough to be in a air pocket, the last thing he wants is some asshole with a drill come bringin’ the roof down on his head.”
“My brother,” Dean absently corrects, “He’s my brother.”
Dean takes careful steps down the slight hill into the mine’s portal. The lights run along both sides of the wall, weakly illuminating the wall of rock and ice. One of the EMTs gave Dean a fleece blanket and he tugs it tighter around his shoulders, stares at the impasse and hits Sam’s number.
Voicemail. Dean catches himself before he leaves a message, kills the call, and squeezes the phone until the plastic creaks. His gaze travels over the broken rock and timber and he calls, cautiously, “Sammy?” listens to it echo, “Shit, Sam.”
He looks for something, anything. Sam had a dark blue parka over jeans, brown boots, two pairs of socks because he hates when his feet get cold. He tries to remember if Sam had gloves, doesn’t think so. It’s hard to find a good fit for such large hands. Sam had their supply pack, with the matches and the lighter fluid, the salt and the extra iron rounds. Dean wonders if there’s anything actually useful in there now and he doesn’t think so. He runs his hands along the jutting ruins looking for torn fabric, an out of place thread, a soggy matchbook. A rock, slimy with ice and mud, a rock slightly bigger than a softball, slides free of its neighbors. Dean reaches into the hole. He has to kneel and the water seeps into his jeans and his knees will hate him in the morning, but he’s not thinking about that because the space behind the slimy rock is hollow. Dean pulls out bits of coal, reaches deeper and clears a path, willing the mountain of debris not to fall on his head mostly because he needs to find Sam but partially because he doesn’t want to hear the engineers and Trooper D. Stahl tell him, “We told you so.”
He pulls another handful of coal and wood out of the tiny tunnel but this handful looks cut with something else, something silver and matte and clearly unnatural. Then there’s the cracked screen of Sam’s iPhone giving him a dead stare, the lithium ion battery, hopelessly waterlogged, a ragged navy blue drawstring, a business card from the diner they’d had lunch in only twelve hours earlier, an inedible starlight mint, and finally, nothing. Dean’s arm is fully extended, his cheek pressed against the cold rock in a vain attempt to stretch just a little further, to explore the open air his hand is suddenly swimming in.
He yelps when something cold grabs his hand-something wet and soft and trembling. It doesn’t let go.
*
D. Stahl and another cop, a short chick with chunky thighs and spiky hair and a little name pin that says T. Antoinette, one of the drillers sweating despite the freezing temperatures, all of the engineers, and two EMTs tell Dean the same thing-they can’t dig through the debris. It’s too unstable. It can collapse on their heads, on Sam’s head. The engineers say that the passages around Sam are clear, that the back door is still a viable option. The lead driller says they can get there by morning, barring complications.
They tell Dean like he has some kind of decision to make, a say in things. He just tells them to hurry the fuck up.
They pass supplies through Dean’s tunnel: hand warmers, bottles of water, protein bars. They send a cell phone, Dean thinks it belongs to one of the EMTs, because they can’t talk to Sam with Dean’s arm in the hole and Sam won’t let him NOT have it in the hole. They shine a flashlight through the tiny tunnel to try and assess Sam’s damage, but Sam can’t lift his head and all they can make out is a shock of blood-matted hair, a lily-white hand with dirt crusted beneath the nails.
Sam refuses the flashlight they try to send through to his end, “He’s plenty bright,” he says, tinny cell-phone voice slurring like a drunk.
“Who?” Dean asks, even though he knows.
There’s a pause, then, “Morningstar.”
*
When he’s lucid, Sam is helpful. He tells Dean that he’s pinned on his stomach, his right arm stuck beneath him and his head wedged beneath Dean’s tunnel. It hurts to breathe. He can’t move, except for his left arm. He’s pretty sure he can wiggle his toes. He’s pretty sure he can feel his whole body because it throbs like a giant bruise and there’s something sharp digging into the back of his right thigh. He’s cold. He’s tired. He wants to sleep. Dean says, “No sleeping, talk to me, bro,” with his face pressed against the icy wall and Sam’s waxy fingers tangled in his.
Sam makes a noise like a kicked dog and Dean asks, “What? What’s wrong, Sammy?”
There’s an EMT within reach of him at all times. He’s not sure what the hell she’s supposed to do in the event Sam stops breathing or bleeds out, but the fact that she’s on her feet as soon as his tone starts to sound panicked is something Dean can appreciate. He waves her off. She says something into her radio.
“How you holding up, Sam? You’re doing awesome. Just a few more hours, okay? That’s what they’re telling me on my side of the mountain, okay? Just a few more-“
“He’s here,” Sam’s voice is breathy and thin. There are muffled noises, like a struggle, and Sam’s hand slips out of Dean’s. Dean strains and his fingers brush sticky hair and cold skin. Sam makes that noise again, “He left for awhile but he’s back again.”
“He’s not real, Sammy.”
“He’s cold. Burns cold. It’s cold.”
“It’s not him, bro. Listen to me,” Dean winces at the sounds of restrained struggle travelling across the cell phone connection. It reminds him of an animal in a trap, of the mangy stray dog he and Sam found in a hunter’s snare in the woods in Minnesota when they were tracking a mammoth spider-hearty fuckers, those are-when they were in high school. Sam was thirteen and gave the dying dog a few sips from his canteen before Dean fingered the pistol tucked in the waist of his jeans and sent him back to the Impala.
“What are you going to do?” Sam’s voice cracked. Dean couldn’t tell if it was puberty or sorrow. When he and John got back to the car later, Sam was curled beneath a blanket in the back seat with his face hidden behind a book. He wouldn’t acknowledge either of them, so Dean grabbed the battered paperback out of his hands and sat on it. Sam kicked the seat and called him an “assface.” John reached back to smack him, landed an awkward slap to the side of Sam’s head and told him to knock it off, told Dean to give the damn book back. Dean opened it to the same page Sam had left off and quietly passed it back, quietly ignoring the puffiness around Sam’s eyes, the smear of dried snot beneath his nose.
“Sammy?” Dean presses the cell phone harder against his ear as though he can will himself closer to Sam through the plastic and circuits and electricity that connects them, “You gotta stop moving around in there, bro. You’re gonna hurt yourself.” His other hand strains, “Take my hand, Sammy. C’mon.”
Sam’s fingers are shaking so hard he can’t grip Dean’s hand. Dean curls his fingers tight. He doesn’t let go.
*
It’s a little after three in the morning when the lead driller tells them that the bit broke, “We’re calling in a replacement from Monessen,” he says, as though Dean has any idea where the hell Monessen is, “’bout an hour or two away.”
“So what does that mean for Sam?”
It means Sam is stuck for at least an hour or two longer than he would have been if the bit hadn’t broken, and that’s being optimistic. Sam whines when Dean pulls his arm out of the little tunnel so they can pass more supplies through: more hand warmers, more water. They try to roll a blanket up and send it through, but it gets stuck. Dean is on the cell phone the entire time, soothing Sam as he frets, slurs, forgets what he’s talking about mid-sentence. Dean asks the lady EMT about hypothermia and she says that they were hoping the small chamber that Sam wound up in would help conserve his body heat, but it’s definitely a concern of theirs, especially with the delay, especially if he’s laying in water.
Sam coughs and something rattles in his chest. When Dean is touching his fingers again, they’re sticky. Dean asks him if everything is okay and he says he’s cold, that he can’t see because it’s too bright, that the devil’s sitting on his chest and touching his face.
Dean says, “Hey man, it’s better to be cold than hot, right?” He forces a laugh, “I mean, you can always add more layers but you can only take off so many clothes, right, Sammy?”
“T-too cold.”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you what, Sammy. When we get out of here, we’ll head south. Key West. How’s Key West sound?”
“H-hunt?”
“Yeah, we’ll find something. Bermuda Triangle, Sammy, there’s always weird shit down there.”
“Y-yeah.”
“Hey Sammy, remember that chick with the zombie husband?”
“No.”
“Seriously? Dude it was like, one of the first times Dad and I let you come with us.”
“I don’t.”
“Seriously? No, Sam, you have to remember. Remember? The zombie husband, with the rose garden, and the dog and the spoon collection. You know those souvenir spoons you can get at like, every tourist trap ever? The lady had a fuckin’ roomful of them. And the zombie husband polished them for her. I actually felt kinda bad about blowing his brains out.”
“Stop,” Sam moans and Dean doesn’t know if he’s talking to him or Lucifer.
Dean switches tactics because he figures Sam doesn’t want to hear about anyone blowing anything’s head off and because he doesn’t think Troopers D. Stahl and T. Antoinette need to overhear his Greatest Hits of Zombie Slaying either.
“Hey Sammy, you ever see that movie Fido about the kid with the pet zombie? That was pretty funny.”
“Hey Sammy, who do you think would win in a fight between Batman and Chuck Norris?”
Hey Sammy. Hey Sammy. Hey Sammy.
*
It’s after nine. Sam’s been trapped for almost twelve hours. The batteries in the cell phones go dead and T. Antoinette gives them a set of 2-way radios, but Sam is too uncoordinated to use his handset. Dean reluctantly tears himself away from the wall and sprints to the Impala parked by the road. His bad ankle is numb. He thinks he should have taken his boot off or had someone wrap it, but feared being shuttled off to the hospital for X-rays. He fumbles in the glove compartment, in the box of different cell phones they keep for different aliases, grabs two and makes sure they’re charged. He slides in the mud on the way back to the mine and in the crisp morning light, sees the progress of the drill team in the field. There’s a mountain of dirt and coal and old, twisted mining equipment. There’s a large pulley looming over where Dean supposes the hole is, a handful of rescue workers in yellow helmets, an ambulance waiting off to the side. D. Stahl said they’re going to bring Sam out that way, get a backboard on him and just pull him up. The lead driller said by early afternoon. The engineers said there wasn’t as much flooding in the open shafts as they feared and it made up some of the time lost by the broken drill bit all those hours ago.
Dean passes one of the phones through the hole and has to repeat Sam’s name several times before he takes it. The fingertips that brush against Dean’s wrist feel like ice. They aren’t shaking anymore, but Dean knows that’s not a good thing, “Pretty sure he’s hypothermic,” Dean says to the EMT next to him, the chick who sat there all night, Rosalie.
“Pretty sure your ankle’s busted,” she counters.
Dean lets her wrap it as long as he doesn’t have to move. She doesn’t think it’s broken, just very badly sprained. She says they’ll pass some more warm gear through the hole to Sam, but there’s not much they can do until they get to him, “Just a little longer,” she says, pats Dean’s arm awkwardly.
“Hey Sammy, they’re gonna have you out real soon. Hear that? Hear the drill?”
“No.”
Dean swallows, “Okay. It’s okay. They’re coming for you. Just a little longer. Just hold on a little longer, you hear me?”
“Okay.”
The muted roar of the drill grows louder. Sam says he can hear it and that’s the last thing he says to Dean, his hand slipping out of Dean’s grasp. The only thing keeping Dean from screaming is the labored breathing he can hear over the tinny cell phone speakers, punctuated with the occasional raspy cough. Dean strains, manages to brush his fingers against Sam’s hair, stiff with only God knows what, and stays like that, rubbing small circles into Sam’s scalp and repeating a constant litany of reassurances.
He stays like that until there’s a commotion outside and a burst of noise on the other side of the wall. Rosalie’s radio crackles to life and a man’s voice says, “We’re through. Go ahead and let the brother know we’re through.”
“Is he…?” Dean pulls his arm back and peers into the cave, illuminated with fresh sunlight and workmen’s lamps strapped to the rescuer’s helmets, “Is he alive?” Dean shouts through the passage. He can see a blue clad knee, the corner of an orange backboard. He can’t see Sam.
The knee shifts and a face appears, “He’s alive. His arm’s pinned. Looks like he took a hit to the head, been bleedin’ like a stuck pig. We just gotta get that arm free and we’ll bring him out the top. Aight?”
“Yeah,” Dean says, “Yeah, alright.”
Rosalie helps him up and out. It’s after one, sunny, warmer than yesterday, with the snow melting off of the trees near the road. He slips in the mud going up the hill and Rosalie steers him to the waiting ambulance. He protests, wants to be at the top of the hill, at the edge of the hole. Rosalie says, “They’re gonna bring him straight here. I’ll make sure they let you ride with him.”
They do and she does. Sam is cocooned in soft blankets, except for the arm that was pinned. Now it’s immobilized by a split, painfully swollen beneath the stiff dressing, but, Dean is relieved to see, whole. There’s in a neck brace, an oxygen mask that they swap for a nasal cannula once he’s in the bus. Rosalie starts an IV line to pump him full of warm saline and antibiotics. His face is filthy with coal dust and dried blood, but pale where someone, maybe one of the rescuers, maybe Sam himself, wiped the filth away.
The tension of the past sixteen hours is leaving Dean like sand escaping a cut bag. He can feel it piling on the floor of the ambulance, next to his feet. He leans over while Rosalie and the others pull the blanket back, cut through Sam’s rancid clothes and shove the rags in a trash bag. Dean rubs at a smear of dried blood on Sam’s forehead and watches his eyes flutter. Dean holds his breath, watches Sam swim awkwardly to consciousness and wonders who he’ll see when he wakes up.
Bloodshot eyes roll in bruised sockets before settling on Dean. Sam smiles. His lips are blue, but the medics are wrapping a thermal blanket around his core and he’s already starting to shiver, ever so slightly, “Hey…Dean.” He coughs and spits up black phlegm. Dean wipes his lips, shoots a look at Rosalie.
"They'll do X-rays," she says, "It's black because of the coal dust. Bet it tastes awesome, right Sam?" Rosalie shines a penlight in Sam’s eyes and he flinches. She says, “Pupils are sluggish,” and tells the driver to radio ahead, let Uniontown know they were getting the cave-in victim.
Dean takes advantage of the distraction to lean close to Sam’s ear and ask, “Is he still here?”
Sam does a tired sweep of the ambulance interior, focuses on something in the corner, next to the door, and trembles. He doesn’t even have to say anything. Dean reluctantly follows his gaze and sighs.
“Okay,” Dean says, “It’s okay.”
He reaches into the folds of Sam’s cocoon and finds Sam’s hand, squeezing tight. Sam squeezes back. Neither of them lets go.