SPN Fic: run
Title: run
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Sam (Dean)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: very abstract, weird spacing, insanity (?)
Spoilers: Up to 7.11
Words: 2056
Summary: He has to find Dean.
Note: Written for a prompt by rainylemons at the most recent ohsam commentfic-meme.
Sam stumbles. He manages to catch himself at the last moment, his palm scrapping along the leftovers of colorless wallpaper. His heartbeat is pounding loudly between his ears, filling his head. It’s so quiet.
He has to find Dean.
He tried to call for his brother, but his tongue is lying dry and useless in his mouth, his throat made of sandpaper. So he listens for Dean’s call for him but the silence has swallowed every sound but his heart that hurts him with every step. Like a knife stabbing his insides in a perfectly healthy rhythm.
Sometimes he hears his breathing, harsh and ragged as he drags himself down the corridor. Light is falling in through the windows. It’s warm and friendly and the windows are not broken. Sam tired to break them at one point but he couldn’t. There are no doors leading outside - he’s too high up, third or fourth floor. The doors to the rooms are sometimes broken but the rooms are always empty. Someone lived here once now they’re not.
He doesn’t remember why he tried to break the windows.
Near a door that reads “Thera y” in faded letters, his leg gives out. He thinks a might have cried out when he fell but maybe that sound exists only in his memory. His throat hurts worse now. He knows he needs to drink. He knows he needs to find Dean.
Something falls over a story below him or two. Sam clenches his teeth and moves on. The doors say things like “304”, “306”, “Dr. E erl ”, “Restroom” and “ru ”.
The corridor is divided, but all the doors are open. Those that were not have been broken as if something moved through here that could not be stopped. It leads away from the windows, but the shadows are moving. Somewhere in there is something that must be Dean. It disappears deeper into the shadows just as Sam spots it and his call dies in his throat, eaten by the dryness and the pain. Dean hasn’t seen him, is walking in the wrong direction. Sam hurries after him as fast he can, but his leg won’t carry him fast enough.
Somewhere far away and below, there might be a sound like a heavy body being dragged up a flight of stairs.
In the maze of corridors, Sam would have gotten lost if he had ever known where he was to begin with. (Dean must know.) He looks around in desperation at yet another junction and catches Dean out of the corner of his eyes, just his silhouette or maybe only an impression of movement against the bright backdrop of a window. He stumbles and falls and thinks Dean must have heard, but Dean doesn’t come back for him.
It’s Sam who has to find him. That’s how it works.
Once upon a time there was a boy called Sam who fell into a hole and died. Then a kind man came along and tried to help him out of the hole, but the opening had gotten so small that he had to take Sam apart and carry all the pieces outside one by one. When he set them back together he saw that he had forgotten a few pieces but the hole was gone and he could no longer find them.
There was nothing he could do, so the send the thing that should have been Sam on its way and said, “I did good today.”
Sam notices that he’s crying when he’s in the light again and everything is blurred. He thinks it must be the pain in his leg (Dean will know how he hurt it) and that it’s strange that his body can still produce so much liquid when everything else is so dry.
He can’t look behind him but he thinks he might be bleeding. Dean’s outline is shrinking behind a dusty glass door. The door is still intact. It opens when he pushes. Dean is already gone but there is only one direction he could have taken. Sam needs to be faster but he leg is like a lead weight holding him back. Keeping him from Dean.
The glass door says, “Minim m secu ty ard” on one side and “behind you” on the other. Sam looks into every room. Some have beds in them, some have the skeletons of beds. He needs to sit down. At the end of the corridor is a staircase and behind it one last room at the end of the corridor. If Sam looks there and Dean isn’t inside, Sam won’t be able to get back to the stairs without moving in the wrong direction. He drags himself up the steps one by one until he reaches the top floor. Somewhere below him something is dragging itself through the labyrinth of doors and down the corridor he just walked.
The floor is dirty, covered in flakes of paint and mortar. At some point, Sam’s dragging foot catches on wires lying bare and dead on the floor. There are no more signs on the doors here and many of the doorways are empty. The rooms behind are all too dark to see more than shadows inside. Sam stops to stare inside until he’s sure Dean is not there. Every time he stops, he hears it below him. It never picks up speed and it never slows down. It’s almost at the stairs and the corridor is long and straight. He needs to be around a corner before the dragging sound reaches the top floor.
Any room would be a trap.
He has to find Dean.
Sam has this dream sometimes, in which everyone disappears. As dreams do, it follows no logic. He’s with Dean and Cas and Bobby and then Cas is gone and Bobby is gone and so is Ellen, Rufus, Jess, Dad. He doesn’t see them in the dream, but he knows, because it is a dream.
The worst about the dream is not the grief but the knowledge that Dean will be gone too in the end. It’s dream-knowledge. Sam knows because it is so and he cannot stop it no matter what he does. Because it is a dream in which he knows the outcome he starts hoping, even as he cries with the desperate grief he knows he will soon be feeling, that it will happen soon. Something in the dream always makes him reach out to the inevitable thing he dreads most.
He often dreams about Hell now. The disappearing dream he had before Hell because it’s just a normal dream that no Wall could keep away. But when he dreams it these days Cas and Bobby are no longer there in the beginning since they are already gone. One day he will dream of being alone in an empty space that never contained anything but him,
Sometimes he dreams that monsters don’t exist and all hunters are insane.
Around the corner is daylight again, the same as before, as if no time at all had passed or he was in the shadows for twenty-four hours every time. His sense of time is lost or never existed. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here, he only knows one thing.
On one side of the floor he’s walking there are windows, floor the ceiling. On the other side there are doors, empty doorways, empty pin boards. Dried leaves are lying on the floor as if the wind carried them here but the windows can’t be opened. (They are unbroken.) It looks like the ground floor probably looks, Sam thinks. He doesn’t remember the ground floor. It is lost to him now.
There is a dark doorway far ahead and there’s something inside and when Sam blinks it’s gone. So it moved. So it’s Dean. He wishes he could move faster but his leg and the pounding in his head slow him down more and more. Nothing slows down but him. Further behind. Barely ahead.
Outside the windows, the top of a very high tree is moved by a storm. Sam doesn’t hear the wind. The tree is bare.
Sam opens his eyes. He doesn’t know why he’s lying on the floor. The light outside is warm. Afternoon sunshine. Nearby, a door falls shut.
When he jumps up, he falls down again. The floor is dusty and perhaps a little slick with blood. Sam doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter. He’s dusty, too, now. Why did he lie down?
The world is spinning. Another door falls shut, closer. Maybe one room behind him, or two. Maybe something is sliding with a sound like scales over concrete. There’s another door ahead, whole, solid. Maybe Dean is behind it. Sam can’t look through it but Dean has to be somewhere.
Behind him, the sound of a door again; not closing but opening. Sam tries to swallow. He moves on, dragging his leg behind him. Leaving a trail in the dust.
One day, a carpenter came along and found the Sam-thing wandering around without aim. He dug in the earth where the hole had been and after a long time he found the parts that the kind man had missed when he tried to put the Sam-person back together. But the pieces were rotten and fragile from the long time in the earth and didn’t fit right. The kind man saw this, and regarding the attempt to fix the Sam-thing as criticism on his work, he said, “Leave those parts off. They look ugly and he works better without them.” But the carpenter did not like leftover pieces. He put them where he thought they belonged and after a while the rot spread to the working pieces and the whole Sam-person-thing broke down.
Dean isn’t behind the next door.
He’s in an attic. There’s no other way but the one he can’t go. He thinks he might be dying. Dean isn’t here but Sam has to find him. He has to and he can’t and it makes no sense.
Maybe he’s crying again.
The steps up to the attic are taken one by one. Floorboards creaking under a great weight and maybe something wet dripping to the floor. Five steps left. It’s very slow. It’s not Dean.
Sam wants to sleep. He doesn’t want to be here when it gets him.
(There’s a story in Japan, about an apartment in which no tenant stayed for even a week but for one who was later found dead. The apartment was located at the end of a staircase. The staircase had seven steps.)
The sound of dripping water gets louder as it comes closer. Maybe Dean was in the room behind the stairs. Maybe he’s waiting for Sam. Sam can’t leave him waiting. He needs to get out.
(One day, a new tenant moved in. In the first night, he heard a child say outside of his door, “One step I have climbed.”)
Two steps left.
The attic has a window.
Maybe Sam tried breaking a window before. He’s not sure. But he’s surprised when the glass shatters, as if he hadn’t expected it.
One step.
The window is big enough. But it’s already here and suddenly very fast.
Sam finds his voice when something freezing like Hell grabs him from behind.
“Sammy,” it says. “Damn, Sammy, I thought I’d never find you. What where you thinking? You fucking scared me to death, you asshole!”
He tries to run, tries to make it out the window. While its fingers (pointy, sharp, digging right to the bone) claw at his arms and chest, his own fingers claw at the window frame, catch on the broken glass. It’s all slippery with blood and he looses his hold, is dragged back into the room, away from the world outside, the small rectangle of light that makes his eyes hurt. It won’t let him go. He would scream if he could. Its claws pierce him like meat hooks.
“Don’t do that to me again,” it says (hisses, growls). It doesn’t make sense. It wants to kill him slowly, eat him up from the inside as they do. Sam knows he has lost, is lost. He keeps struggling and it tells him to stop and hurts him worse.
He has to find Dean.
January 22, 2012
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Sam (Dean)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: very abstract, weird spacing, insanity (?)
Spoilers: Up to 7.11
Words: 2056
Summary: He has to find Dean.
Note: Written for a prompt by rainylemons at the most recent ohsam commentfic-meme.
Sam stumbles. He manages to catch himself at the last moment, his palm scrapping along the leftovers of colorless wallpaper. His heartbeat is pounding loudly between his ears, filling his head. It’s so quiet.
He has to find Dean.
He tried to call for his brother, but his tongue is lying dry and useless in his mouth, his throat made of sandpaper. So he listens for Dean’s call for him but the silence has swallowed every sound but his heart that hurts him with every step. Like a knife stabbing his insides in a perfectly healthy rhythm.
Sometimes he hears his breathing, harsh and ragged as he drags himself down the corridor. Light is falling in through the windows. It’s warm and friendly and the windows are not broken. Sam tired to break them at one point but he couldn’t. There are no doors leading outside - he’s too high up, third or fourth floor. The doors to the rooms are sometimes broken but the rooms are always empty. Someone lived here once now they’re not.
He doesn’t remember why he tried to break the windows.
Near a door that reads “Thera y” in faded letters, his leg gives out. He thinks a might have cried out when he fell but maybe that sound exists only in his memory. His throat hurts worse now. He knows he needs to drink. He knows he needs to find Dean.
Something falls over a story below him or two. Sam clenches his teeth and moves on. The doors say things like “304”, “306”, “Dr. E erl ”, “Restroom” and “ru ”.
The corridor is divided, but all the doors are open. Those that were not have been broken as if something moved through here that could not be stopped. It leads away from the windows, but the shadows are moving. Somewhere in there is something that must be Dean. It disappears deeper into the shadows just as Sam spots it and his call dies in his throat, eaten by the dryness and the pain. Dean hasn’t seen him, is walking in the wrong direction. Sam hurries after him as fast he can, but his leg won’t carry him fast enough.
Somewhere far away and below, there might be a sound like a heavy body being dragged up a flight of stairs.
In the maze of corridors, Sam would have gotten lost if he had ever known where he was to begin with. (Dean must know.) He looks around in desperation at yet another junction and catches Dean out of the corner of his eyes, just his silhouette or maybe only an impression of movement against the bright backdrop of a window. He stumbles and falls and thinks Dean must have heard, but Dean doesn’t come back for him.
It’s Sam who has to find him. That’s how it works.
Once upon a time there was a boy called Sam who fell into a hole and died. Then a kind man came along and tried to help him out of the hole, but the opening had gotten so small that he had to take Sam apart and carry all the pieces outside one by one. When he set them back together he saw that he had forgotten a few pieces but the hole was gone and he could no longer find them.
There was nothing he could do, so the send the thing that should have been Sam on its way and said, “I did good today.”
Sam notices that he’s crying when he’s in the light again and everything is blurred. He thinks it must be the pain in his leg (Dean will know how he hurt it) and that it’s strange that his body can still produce so much liquid when everything else is so dry.
He can’t look behind him but he thinks he might be bleeding. Dean’s outline is shrinking behind a dusty glass door. The door is still intact. It opens when he pushes. Dean is already gone but there is only one direction he could have taken. Sam needs to be faster but he leg is like a lead weight holding him back. Keeping him from Dean.
The glass door says, “Minim m secu ty ard” on one side and “behind you” on the other. Sam looks into every room. Some have beds in them, some have the skeletons of beds. He needs to sit down. At the end of the corridor is a staircase and behind it one last room at the end of the corridor. If Sam looks there and Dean isn’t inside, Sam won’t be able to get back to the stairs without moving in the wrong direction. He drags himself up the steps one by one until he reaches the top floor. Somewhere below him something is dragging itself through the labyrinth of doors and down the corridor he just walked.
The floor is dirty, covered in flakes of paint and mortar. At some point, Sam’s dragging foot catches on wires lying bare and dead on the floor. There are no more signs on the doors here and many of the doorways are empty. The rooms behind are all too dark to see more than shadows inside. Sam stops to stare inside until he’s sure Dean is not there. Every time he stops, he hears it below him. It never picks up speed and it never slows down. It’s almost at the stairs and the corridor is long and straight. He needs to be around a corner before the dragging sound reaches the top floor.
Any room would be a trap.
He has to find Dean.
Sam has this dream sometimes, in which everyone disappears. As dreams do, it follows no logic. He’s with Dean and Cas and Bobby and then Cas is gone and Bobby is gone and so is Ellen, Rufus, Jess, Dad. He doesn’t see them in the dream, but he knows, because it is a dream.
The worst about the dream is not the grief but the knowledge that Dean will be gone too in the end. It’s dream-knowledge. Sam knows because it is so and he cannot stop it no matter what he does. Because it is a dream in which he knows the outcome he starts hoping, even as he cries with the desperate grief he knows he will soon be feeling, that it will happen soon. Something in the dream always makes him reach out to the inevitable thing he dreads most.
He often dreams about Hell now. The disappearing dream he had before Hell because it’s just a normal dream that no Wall could keep away. But when he dreams it these days Cas and Bobby are no longer there in the beginning since they are already gone. One day he will dream of being alone in an empty space that never contained anything but him,
Sometimes he dreams that monsters don’t exist and all hunters are insane.
Around the corner is daylight again, the same as before, as if no time at all had passed or he was in the shadows for twenty-four hours every time. His sense of time is lost or never existed. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here, he only knows one thing.
On one side of the floor he’s walking there are windows, floor the ceiling. On the other side there are doors, empty doorways, empty pin boards. Dried leaves are lying on the floor as if the wind carried them here but the windows can’t be opened. (They are unbroken.) It looks like the ground floor probably looks, Sam thinks. He doesn’t remember the ground floor. It is lost to him now.
There is a dark doorway far ahead and there’s something inside and when Sam blinks it’s gone. So it moved. So it’s Dean. He wishes he could move faster but his leg and the pounding in his head slow him down more and more. Nothing slows down but him. Further behind. Barely ahead.
Outside the windows, the top of a very high tree is moved by a storm. Sam doesn’t hear the wind. The tree is bare.
Sam opens his eyes. He doesn’t know why he’s lying on the floor. The light outside is warm. Afternoon sunshine. Nearby, a door falls shut.
When he jumps up, he falls down again. The floor is dusty and perhaps a little slick with blood. Sam doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter. He’s dusty, too, now. Why did he lie down?
The world is spinning. Another door falls shut, closer. Maybe one room behind him, or two. Maybe something is sliding with a sound like scales over concrete. There’s another door ahead, whole, solid. Maybe Dean is behind it. Sam can’t look through it but Dean has to be somewhere.
Behind him, the sound of a door again; not closing but opening. Sam tries to swallow. He moves on, dragging his leg behind him. Leaving a trail in the dust.
One day, a carpenter came along and found the Sam-thing wandering around without aim. He dug in the earth where the hole had been and after a long time he found the parts that the kind man had missed when he tried to put the Sam-person back together. But the pieces were rotten and fragile from the long time in the earth and didn’t fit right. The kind man saw this, and regarding the attempt to fix the Sam-thing as criticism on his work, he said, “Leave those parts off. They look ugly and he works better without them.” But the carpenter did not like leftover pieces. He put them where he thought they belonged and after a while the rot spread to the working pieces and the whole Sam-person-thing broke down.
Dean isn’t behind the next door.
He’s in an attic. There’s no other way but the one he can’t go. He thinks he might be dying. Dean isn’t here but Sam has to find him. He has to and he can’t and it makes no sense.
Maybe he’s crying again.
The steps up to the attic are taken one by one. Floorboards creaking under a great weight and maybe something wet dripping to the floor. Five steps left. It’s very slow. It’s not Dean.
Sam wants to sleep. He doesn’t want to be here when it gets him.
(There’s a story in Japan, about an apartment in which no tenant stayed for even a week but for one who was later found dead. The apartment was located at the end of a staircase. The staircase had seven steps.)
The sound of dripping water gets louder as it comes closer. Maybe Dean was in the room behind the stairs. Maybe he’s waiting for Sam. Sam can’t leave him waiting. He needs to get out.
(One day, a new tenant moved in. In the first night, he heard a child say outside of his door, “One step I have climbed.”)
Two steps left.
The attic has a window.
Maybe Sam tried breaking a window before. He’s not sure. But he’s surprised when the glass shatters, as if he hadn’t expected it.
One step.
The window is big enough. But it’s already here and suddenly very fast.
Sam finds his voice when something freezing like Hell grabs him from behind.
“Sammy,” it says. “Damn, Sammy, I thought I’d never find you. What where you thinking? You fucking scared me to death, you asshole!”
He tries to run, tries to make it out the window. While its fingers (pointy, sharp, digging right to the bone) claw at his arms and chest, his own fingers claw at the window frame, catch on the broken glass. It’s all slippery with blood and he looses his hold, is dragged back into the room, away from the world outside, the small rectangle of light that makes his eyes hurt. It won’t let him go. He would scream if he could. Its claws pierce him like meat hooks.
“Don’t do that to me again,” it says (hisses, growls). It doesn’t make sense. It wants to kill him slowly, eat him up from the inside as they do. Sam knows he has lost, is lost. He keeps struggling and it tells him to stop and hurts him worse.
He has to find Dean.
January 22, 2012