SPN fic: The Parable of the Rats in the Oubliette
Title: The Parable of the Rats in the Oubliette
Characters: Lucy, Mikey, their vessels
Pairing: none
Rating: T
Length: 1.5K
Warnings: animal abuse (here's hoping this never gets traced back to me)
Disclaimer: This is not an original fiction. The characters belong to the CW network and to John Milton.
Note: Drum-roll, please. It's time for . . . EXTREME PRETENTIOUSNESS!!!
It's a parable in second-person present tense. What's wrong with me? Don't I have last year's comment fics to work on?
Imagine this.
Imagine a room without doors or windows. The walls are three-foot-thick slabs of poured reinforced concrete. A daily supply of complete nutrition bars is available from a small hopper beside a simple sink and toilet. The floor is littered with bits of scrap lumber. There is no furniture. You've lived here before and didn't like it.
Imagine you're trapped in this room.
No one is watching and no one is coming. You are trapped here with your patronizing and self-righteous older brother who hurt you.
Each of you has a rat.
Imagine you are not a nice person.
Locked in here with your brother, you fight. You're angry, but it hurts when he hits you, and you hurt to see him hurt. The two of you break off your fight and you look around the room for your rat.
It was this rat that lured you here. You know it can't be blamed for your predicament; it's only a rat.
It's small and frightened. It flees from you, and you work off your frustrations in chasing it around the room.
You and your brother are not talking to each-other, each trying to burn the other in the chill of your silence. Bored, you break off a corner of one of the nutrition bars to lure one of the rats. It ignores the bait.
You sit in your corner, crumbs resting on slack fingers, and wait for your rat to give in. It fears you after the hour you spent chasing it, but it is only a rat, and you control the only source of food. The damage you did in making it afraid of you only adds to the challenge and distracts you from the growing urge to break your silence and cave to your brother's will.
The rat approaches.
You hold absolutely still.
After the rat takes the bait for the first time, you keep working to gain its trust, shunning your brother as you become completely absorbed in your pet. You turn your back on him and invite the rat onto the platform of your crossed legs. You wield kindness like a chisel. It takes months, but the rat learns to come when you call it, scramble up onto your shoulder, walk in a circle on its hind legs, and raise its cheeks to be stroked. The rat no longer sees you as a predator, but as a friend.
Your brother remains on the opposite side of the room; his back is still set against you. He has his own private games, and you have nothing but a tame rat nuzzling your fingers.
You are disappointed, and, again, bored.
You try to chase your rat. It stares up at you, trusting, and you catch it and hurt it until it remembers its fear and flees again.
As you chase your rat around the room, your brother grows angry at your noise and strikes you. You smile. You fight again.
No one wins the fight. You rail and scream about old wrongs, but your brother does not listen. Even if he did listen, even if you did persuade him to your side, nothing would change: no one is listening, so no one would know. You and he are the proverbial cat in a box. What is not observed has no reality. You are no longer real.
In despair, you cling to him and he weeps with you. He has lost his family just as surely as you have.
The pair of you put aside your anger and talk for a long time about all the years between you. You forget about the rats, until the conversation turns touchy and the rats become a necessary diversion.
Your rat no longer comes to humans. It could take years to rebuild its trust. Your brother offers his own rat, safe in a small enclosure of scrap wood, to lure yours back.
You and he amuse yourselves watching the two rats interact. They play. They fight. They huddle together. They compete for food. They respond to the other's cries of pleasure or distress.
You test the rats, building mazes from the litter of scrap wood on the floor. You leave food on barely accessible ledges and watch the rats climb for it. You make them jump. You make them run.
You exhaust your interest in the rats' athleticism and intelligence, and slump unhappily against a wall. Eventually you catch your rat, put it in a small dark box of piled lumber, and leave it undisturbed for months. Your curiosity and impatience swells pleasantly in your chest, distracting you from the unchanging inescapable four walls. This new game is a waiting game.
Imagine nothing dies in this room.
The rat is alive when you take it from the improvised isolation cage. It's blind and disoriented, covered with self-inflicted bites. Its behavior toward you, your brother, and your brother's rat has profoundly changed.
Your brother is intrigued enough at the changes to repeat your experiment with his own pet. You smile to yourself at your elder following your lead.
It's your brother's idea to train the rats to fight. You hesitate to take his instructions, but since he just finished imitating you, you swallow your pride and listen. You console yourself in the thought that you had had the idea first, but had never imagined your brother would cooperate.
The two of you condition the rats to fear each-other by holding them side-by-side and hurting them. You do this until their fights satisfy you. They grapple and tumble together in a blur of fur and teeth and naked tails, leaving blood where they roll. Across the small arena of plywood and string, you bare your teeth at your brother and imagine biting his throat out, like your rat is doing to his rat.
Your brother remarks that it's now impossible for you to win back your rat's trust. You spend the next three years proving him wrong.
You relish the look on his face when your rat rides on your shoulder again. Your brother remarks that if you had put your talent for reconciliation to proper use when you'd had the chance, you might never have seen this room.
You club your brother with a piece of lumber because he tricked you into spending three years apologizing to a rat.
Remember that nothing dies in this room.
You make your rat go mad again. You tear it open and watch it cry and struggle as its intestines dry. You figure out what makes it live and move by tearing out parts of it and watching to see if it compensates for the loss. You let your rat heal. You make it love you. You make it fear you. You are human, and your patience and cunning are beyond the rat's comprehension.
Your brother watches you with resignation and you watch him with defiance, but your defiance is hollow because the trust that you mold and destroy in your rat as ceaselessly and idly as a child making pots in modeling clay is not even an echo of the acceptance you long for from your brother, which you might never have for as long as the two of you remain in this room. He is torture to you. He is your equal and you cannot mold him. He is sure in his convictions and you cannot persuade him; even if you could, his acceptance would be as meaningless as the rat's bewildered trust.
No one is watching or listening anyway.
Sam never watches reality TV, and one night when he stumbled on a streaming video of animals being used in behavioral research, he left the unsold house he and Dean were squatting in to run alone in the dark until blisters burned on his heels, and limped back inside at one in the morning.
End Note: I find that the best way to imagine what someone is going to do is to start with why they're doing it. The best way to understand things outside human experience, like multi-dimensional objects, a triune God, or quantum, is through analogies. This is my attempt to get a handle on what sort of things happened to Sam in the Cage. The way to do that, I think, is through Lucifer.
In no way do I condone cruelty to rats unless it is necessary in the pursuit of clear and legitimate benefits to human or animal welfare.