FIC - Going Under
Title: Going Under
Author: verucasalt123
Rating: R for violent imagery
Warnings: Spoilers for season six, especially Unforgiven and beyond.
Disclaimer: No, no, don't be silly, the boys aren't mine.
Recipient: leilance
Word Count: ~2500
A/N: By undying gratitude for my beta reader and my artist. You both rock the entire free world.
Summary: Sam knows not to scratch the wall. But what if the Wall starts scratching him?
Art: By the lovely and talented yaya_wr8t3r
“Would you believe that I don’t remember anything?” Sam asked from behind the bars, already knowing the answer to his ridiculous question.
“No”, replied the deputy, “but good luck selling it to the judge”.
Sam knew it then. He really was dumber than a sack of hair. He should have told Dean the first time that he realized he’d been there before. Of course, now Dean knew, and there was nothing either of them could do to change what had happened.
He was trying to rest, his head fitfully turning back and forth on the pillow in the motel room after he and Dean had safely crossed the state line and had stopped for the night Don’t scratch. Don’t scratch the wall. Don’t Don’t Don’t.. And he wasn’t. But now the wall was scratching him. Sam did everything he could think of to do. He counted backwards from a hundred, then he started doing the multiplication tables in his head, anything to keep it away, to keep away what he wasn’t supposed to know. That one moment on the floor of the abandoned house when he felt himself engulfed in flames was more than enough to make Sam determined to do whatever it took to avoid it happening again.
He was still shaken from the earlier incident, but told Dean he was okay, and was just hungry and needed to relax, so Dean had taken him at his word and gone out to get them some food.
“Half an hour, Sammy. Maybe less. Just be still. I’ll be right back”, he’d said, pushing Sam’s hair back from his forehead “Half an hour, Sammy. Maybe less. Just be still. I’ll be right back”, he’d said, pushing the hair back from Sam’s forehead. It’s the kind of thing Dean had done a thousand times when they were kids, trying to comfort him when he was scared or sad, and it told Sam more than words could how freaked out his brother really was by what had happened in the past few days, by the glimpse into the part of Sam’s life that he Dean hadn’t known about until now.
No matter what Sam did to try and keep it away, bits and pieces of his memory of the past year had come filtering back while they were in Bristol. The women, skirts hiked up around their waists, against walls or bathroom sinks or living room sofas, his hands all over them, not caring if they wanted him, or if they were intimidated by his fake law enforcement credentials, or if they were married or single, or if they were just afraid to say no to him because he knew, now, that when it had happened, he’d looked like the guy that you didn’t say no to. His lack of hesitation to look a man who’d trusted him right in the eyes and shoot him to death. Regardless of what Dean said or thought, Sam couldn’t live with the “it wasn’t really me” excuse. It was him. That guy wasn’t making the same decisions Sam would have made under different circumstances (if he’d had, for instance, a soul). But it was still him.
He moved on from the multiplication tables. Sam started naming all the states and their capitols in alphabetical order, and when he ran out, he began mentally conjugating Latin verbs, trying to hold that pressure in his head at bay.
It didn’t work.
And then there was the crash.
No, it wasn’t the wall coming down. Sam didn’t even want to think about what it would be like if the wall went down, because this was one little brick, hitting the imaginary ground inside his brain, opening a little hole and letting through unimaginable horror. The light around him slowly got dimmer and dimmer as he faded away into a place he did not want to even know existed.
**************************************************************
Twenty-five minutes later, Dean opened the door to their room, immediately dropping the takeout bags onto the floor before slamming it shut with the back of his boot. Sam’s eyes were wide open, but he was staring at some non-existent point in space above him, and he was curled up in a ball and shaking like he was naked outside in a Minnesota winter. He knelt beside Sam’s bed, one hand on his shoulder and another on his hip, trying to keep him still. The shivering didn’t cease, didn’t even falter for a moment, but Sam’s eyes suddenly closed tight, so Dean pulled out his next move.
“Sam. Sam! Wake up, man, come on, it’s me, it’s Dean, it’s okay, everything’s okay, it’s me, it’s Dean, it’s fine, everything is all right now, you need to snap out of this, you hear me? Do you freaking hear me?” pleading and ordering at the same time.
And Sam’s eyes opened.
Yes. Okay. Now Dean could talk and maybe Sam could understand.
Oh, no. No no no. There was no “understand”. As soon as he opened his eyes, tears were flooding down his face. Not silent tears, not tears that were trying to be held back, which was what Dean was used to with his brother. Sam had broken. He was sobbing. There were loud hitches of breath as he tried to control himself, but Sam was beyond that now. He’d thought there was no worse feeling than his remorse, his recall of feeling nothing, his futile desire to change the things he’d done when he’d been there with Samuel, his memory of knocking the shit out of that deputy like it was nothing. But he was wrong.
************************************************
It was all there, in Sam’s head. The women, their husbands…he’d almost shot Dean. Again. And now he was back in Hell. He was caught in the web, he could hear his brother, telling him everything was ok, but it wasn’t ok. It wasn’t. The web. He was stuck. He shook and shook against it but he couldn’t move. He could feel the heat, the pain, the absolute resignation of being tortured for eternity. There was no way to distinguish the horror of his earthly memories from the torment of his time in the Cage, burning, being torn apart over and over again. It was all running together and there was no way out. The agony was unbearable and he had no means of escape from the flames, the blades, the blood.
Dean had no precedent for this, but he had something better than that. He had his instinct, he had knowing his brother better than he had known even his father, better than he had known anyone else in his life, almost better than he knew his own self. So he relied on that, followed that instinct, and crawled into bed next to Sam, shoving one arm underneath his bulky frame and one across the top of his left shoulder, reaching around to his chest and holding on to him like he was going to float away if he wasn’t anchored. Dean didn’t know what was going to happen, but his gut told him that an anchor was what Sam needed right at that minute, and he was damn well going to be whatever Sam needed if it was going to keep him from slipping away, from reverting back to NotSam, or from something even worse, losing his grip on reality altogether, no longer able to function, stuck in his memories of the Cage.
The sobbing stopped abruptly, only to be replaced by an agonizing scream. Sam was barely aware of it, but the sound was like a knife in Dean’s heart. He couldn’t stand the feeling of helplessness. He had to keep thinking, trying, anything to get this situation under control.
Dean held on tighter. He put his mouth right next to Sam’s ear. He dredged up the most bossy, low-pitched gravelly voice he could muster and spoke. “It’s gone, Sam. Gone. We’re trying to fix it now, we’re trying to fix what we can but you can’t erase things that already happened, we tried that before, remember?” he said, trying to put a little chuckle into his voice. “And it didn’t work. We have to keep going, we have to keep moving, we’re doing what we can do, baby boy, don’t check out on me now, please, please, don’t you check out on me, we can only do this together, you know that, listen to me, you bastard, you know we can only do it together, so wake the hell up, Jesus, don’t make me dump a motel room ice bucket on your head, Princess!”
To Dean’s amazement, he looked down again at his brother’s face and saw hazel eyes, open, pupils shifting around to gauge his surroundings.
”Dean. Help me. Please. Please, Dean, help…” Sam’s words fell off, back into weeping and there was nothing, not even being dragged into Hell, that could break Dean’s heart like the feeling that he couldn’t help his baby brother. There had to be something.
He started talking. Random stream of consciousness, whispering stories into his brother’s ear about playing with little plastic Army men in the back seat of the Impala. How long it took for Sam to learn how to tie his shoes. That time they snuck into the movie theater to see Jurassic Park. Dean’s hand superglued to a beer bottle. He laughed softly and kept talking, kept throwing out bits and pieces of reality hoping that Sam would be able to grab on to one of them and let it pull him back.
As the minutes ticked by, the shaking and crying lessened just a tiny little bit at a time, almost too slowly to notice at first. After a while, Sam was trying to catch his breath, his eyes were open again, and he moved to sit up. Dean loosened his grip and helped Sam get into a sitting position, still right next to him in case he started to slip away again.
************************************************
“We shouldn’t talk about it”, Sam said, his voice raw and still shaky. “Don’t ask me to talk about it.” For once, there would be no argument between them on that point. He knew there was no way Dean was going to risk another chip in the wall by asking questions. “But we have to talk about what to do the next time,” he mumbled, sounding completely defeated.
“Damn it, Sam, let’s not go looking for a ‘next time’, all right? Maybe there won’t be one. Maybe being back in that town triggered something, and it won’t happen again”, Dean replied, and Sam knew that tone. This was his brother trying to sound confident and hopeful but knowing he might be telling lies that were like band-aids.
Sam looked over at his brother and managed to form half of a crooked grin on his tear-streaked face. “Come on, Dean, we both know how unlikely that is. I know it was you that brought me back earlier, and again just now, but you can’t watch over me 24/7, and you can’t know for sure that at some point, I won’t be able to come out of it. If that happens, if I…” he searched for some words to describe it without actually describing it, “if I fall back in like that and can’t get out, you’re going to have to leave me.” his voice breaking on those last words.
****************************************************
Dean couldn’t bear the thought of his brother being stuck forever like he’d been half an hour ago, and tried to come up with a strong enough reply to cover his fear of that even being a possibility, but Sam cut him off. “I don’t mean, like, leave me on the side of a road or something. But you and Bobby, you can take me somewhere, a hospital, someplace safe. You can’t just take turns sitting and waiting for me to wake up for the rest of your lives.” Sam could feel Dean physically tense up at the idea of it, knew he wouldn't accept the possibility easily.
He didn’t say what he really wanted to say, because he knew it would do no good and Dean surely already knew what he really wanted to say, which was that they should just feed him one last bullet from his Taurus and let him go so he didn’t have to suffer like that for whatever was left of his natural life. Dean wouldn’t have done it, if for no other reason that no matter how bad things had ever gotten for them, he’d never given up hope. Sam could be trapped in his mind for a year and Dean would still be thinking tomorrow’s going to be the day his baby brother woke up. Even if Dean or Bobby was willing kill him, what was there to say that once he was dead, he wasn’t just going to end up right back in Hell anyway? So what was the difference? Real Hell and Memory Hell were both still Hell. For a man like Sam Winchester, who’d suffered more than most humans could even fathom, it was almost a shock to realize that he’d never felt so utterly hopeless and weak in his life.
***********************************************
Dean got this hysterical vision of sitting in a waiting room with a clipboard, checking his brother into a nuthouse, filling out a form, “Went to Hell, lost his soul, got it back, it made him into a crazy person” but he didn’t say anything, it would do no good to tell Sam that he’d never leave him no matter what. An unspoken request was in the air, a contingency plan that his brother wouldn’t spell out because he probably knew Dean would never do it, no matter what, but he knew exactly what Sam was thinking. He’d want Bobby or even Dean himself take him out back and put him out of his misery like Old Yeller. Sam wasn’t going to listen to reason at that moment and there was no point wasting the effort on having an argument when all he wanted to do was try to pick Sam up from this agonizing despondence that radiated off him like a fever. He only knew that he had to find a way to protect him, to make sure that the lone brick that had tumbled today would be the only one lost as long as he could help it. They were going to fix this.
They weren’t in it alone, anyway. They had Castiel in their corner. Maybe he couldn’t make Sam good as new, but he was still an angel, and he was their friend. He’d never let Sam suffer like this. Castiel would help them.
Author: verucasalt123
Rating: R for violent imagery
Warnings: Spoilers for season six, especially Unforgiven and beyond.
Disclaimer: No, no, don't be silly, the boys aren't mine.
Recipient: leilance
Word Count: ~2500
A/N: By undying gratitude for my beta reader and my artist. You both rock the entire free world.
Summary: Sam knows not to scratch the wall. But what if the Wall starts scratching him?
Art: By the lovely and talented yaya_wr8t3r
“Would you believe that I don’t remember anything?” Sam asked from behind the bars, already knowing the answer to his ridiculous question.
“No”, replied the deputy, “but good luck selling it to the judge”.
Sam knew it then. He really was dumber than a sack of hair. He should have told Dean the first time that he realized he’d been there before. Of course, now Dean knew, and there was nothing either of them could do to change what had happened.
He was trying to rest, his head fitfully turning back and forth on the pillow in the motel room after he and Dean had safely crossed the state line and had stopped for the night Don’t scratch. Don’t scratch the wall. Don’t Don’t Don’t.. And he wasn’t. But now the wall was scratching him. Sam did everything he could think of to do. He counted backwards from a hundred, then he started doing the multiplication tables in his head, anything to keep it away, to keep away what he wasn’t supposed to know. That one moment on the floor of the abandoned house when he felt himself engulfed in flames was more than enough to make Sam determined to do whatever it took to avoid it happening again.
He was still shaken from the earlier incident, but told Dean he was okay, and was just hungry and needed to relax, so Dean had taken him at his word and gone out to get them some food.
“Half an hour, Sammy. Maybe less. Just be still. I’ll be right back”, he’d said, pushing Sam’s hair back from his forehead “Half an hour, Sammy. Maybe less. Just be still. I’ll be right back”, he’d said, pushing the hair back from Sam’s forehead. It’s the kind of thing Dean had done a thousand times when they were kids, trying to comfort him when he was scared or sad, and it told Sam more than words could how freaked out his brother really was by what had happened in the past few days, by the glimpse into the part of Sam’s life that he Dean hadn’t known about until now.
No matter what Sam did to try and keep it away, bits and pieces of his memory of the past year had come filtering back while they were in Bristol. The women, skirts hiked up around their waists, against walls or bathroom sinks or living room sofas, his hands all over them, not caring if they wanted him, or if they were intimidated by his fake law enforcement credentials, or if they were married or single, or if they were just afraid to say no to him because he knew, now, that when it had happened, he’d looked like the guy that you didn’t say no to. His lack of hesitation to look a man who’d trusted him right in the eyes and shoot him to death. Regardless of what Dean said or thought, Sam couldn’t live with the “it wasn’t really me” excuse. It was him. That guy wasn’t making the same decisions Sam would have made under different circumstances (if he’d had, for instance, a soul). But it was still him.
He moved on from the multiplication tables. Sam started naming all the states and their capitols in alphabetical order, and when he ran out, he began mentally conjugating Latin verbs, trying to hold that pressure in his head at bay.
It didn’t work.
And then there was the crash.
No, it wasn’t the wall coming down. Sam didn’t even want to think about what it would be like if the wall went down, because this was one little brick, hitting the imaginary ground inside his brain, opening a little hole and letting through unimaginable horror. The light around him slowly got dimmer and dimmer as he faded away into a place he did not want to even know existed.
**************************************************************
Twenty-five minutes later, Dean opened the door to their room, immediately dropping the takeout bags onto the floor before slamming it shut with the back of his boot. Sam’s eyes were wide open, but he was staring at some non-existent point in space above him, and he was curled up in a ball and shaking like he was naked outside in a Minnesota winter. He knelt beside Sam’s bed, one hand on his shoulder and another on his hip, trying to keep him still. The shivering didn’t cease, didn’t even falter for a moment, but Sam’s eyes suddenly closed tight, so Dean pulled out his next move.
“Sam. Sam! Wake up, man, come on, it’s me, it’s Dean, it’s okay, everything’s okay, it’s me, it’s Dean, it’s fine, everything is all right now, you need to snap out of this, you hear me? Do you freaking hear me?” pleading and ordering at the same time.
And Sam’s eyes opened.
Yes. Okay. Now Dean could talk and maybe Sam could understand.
Oh, no. No no no. There was no “understand”. As soon as he opened his eyes, tears were flooding down his face. Not silent tears, not tears that were trying to be held back, which was what Dean was used to with his brother. Sam had broken. He was sobbing. There were loud hitches of breath as he tried to control himself, but Sam was beyond that now. He’d thought there was no worse feeling than his remorse, his recall of feeling nothing, his futile desire to change the things he’d done when he’d been there with Samuel, his memory of knocking the shit out of that deputy like it was nothing. But he was wrong.
************************************************
It was all there, in Sam’s head. The women, their husbands…he’d almost shot Dean. Again. And now he was back in Hell. He was caught in the web, he could hear his brother, telling him everything was ok, but it wasn’t ok. It wasn’t. The web. He was stuck. He shook and shook against it but he couldn’t move. He could feel the heat, the pain, the absolute resignation of being tortured for eternity. There was no way to distinguish the horror of his earthly memories from the torment of his time in the Cage, burning, being torn apart over and over again. It was all running together and there was no way out. The agony was unbearable and he had no means of escape from the flames, the blades, the blood.
Dean had no precedent for this, but he had something better than that. He had his instinct, he had knowing his brother better than he had known even his father, better than he had known anyone else in his life, almost better than he knew his own self. So he relied on that, followed that instinct, and crawled into bed next to Sam, shoving one arm underneath his bulky frame and one across the top of his left shoulder, reaching around to his chest and holding on to him like he was going to float away if he wasn’t anchored. Dean didn’t know what was going to happen, but his gut told him that an anchor was what Sam needed right at that minute, and he was damn well going to be whatever Sam needed if it was going to keep him from slipping away, from reverting back to NotSam, or from something even worse, losing his grip on reality altogether, no longer able to function, stuck in his memories of the Cage.
The sobbing stopped abruptly, only to be replaced by an agonizing scream. Sam was barely aware of it, but the sound was like a knife in Dean’s heart. He couldn’t stand the feeling of helplessness. He had to keep thinking, trying, anything to get this situation under control.
Dean held on tighter. He put his mouth right next to Sam’s ear. He dredged up the most bossy, low-pitched gravelly voice he could muster and spoke. “It’s gone, Sam. Gone. We’re trying to fix it now, we’re trying to fix what we can but you can’t erase things that already happened, we tried that before, remember?” he said, trying to put a little chuckle into his voice. “And it didn’t work. We have to keep going, we have to keep moving, we’re doing what we can do, baby boy, don’t check out on me now, please, please, don’t you check out on me, we can only do this together, you know that, listen to me, you bastard, you know we can only do it together, so wake the hell up, Jesus, don’t make me dump a motel room ice bucket on your head, Princess!”
To Dean’s amazement, he looked down again at his brother’s face and saw hazel eyes, open, pupils shifting around to gauge his surroundings.
”Dean. Help me. Please. Please, Dean, help…” Sam’s words fell off, back into weeping and there was nothing, not even being dragged into Hell, that could break Dean’s heart like the feeling that he couldn’t help his baby brother. There had to be something.
He started talking. Random stream of consciousness, whispering stories into his brother’s ear about playing with little plastic Army men in the back seat of the Impala. How long it took for Sam to learn how to tie his shoes. That time they snuck into the movie theater to see Jurassic Park. Dean’s hand superglued to a beer bottle. He laughed softly and kept talking, kept throwing out bits and pieces of reality hoping that Sam would be able to grab on to one of them and let it pull him back.
As the minutes ticked by, the shaking and crying lessened just a tiny little bit at a time, almost too slowly to notice at first. After a while, Sam was trying to catch his breath, his eyes were open again, and he moved to sit up. Dean loosened his grip and helped Sam get into a sitting position, still right next to him in case he started to slip away again.
************************************************
“We shouldn’t talk about it”, Sam said, his voice raw and still shaky. “Don’t ask me to talk about it.” For once, there would be no argument between them on that point. He knew there was no way Dean was going to risk another chip in the wall by asking questions. “But we have to talk about what to do the next time,” he mumbled, sounding completely defeated.
“Damn it, Sam, let’s not go looking for a ‘next time’, all right? Maybe there won’t be one. Maybe being back in that town triggered something, and it won’t happen again”, Dean replied, and Sam knew that tone. This was his brother trying to sound confident and hopeful but knowing he might be telling lies that were like band-aids.
Sam looked over at his brother and managed to form half of a crooked grin on his tear-streaked face. “Come on, Dean, we both know how unlikely that is. I know it was you that brought me back earlier, and again just now, but you can’t watch over me 24/7, and you can’t know for sure that at some point, I won’t be able to come out of it. If that happens, if I…” he searched for some words to describe it without actually describing it, “if I fall back in like that and can’t get out, you’re going to have to leave me.” his voice breaking on those last words.
****************************************************
Dean couldn’t bear the thought of his brother being stuck forever like he’d been half an hour ago, and tried to come up with a strong enough reply to cover his fear of that even being a possibility, but Sam cut him off. “I don’t mean, like, leave me on the side of a road or something. But you and Bobby, you can take me somewhere, a hospital, someplace safe. You can’t just take turns sitting and waiting for me to wake up for the rest of your lives.” Sam could feel Dean physically tense up at the idea of it, knew he wouldn't accept the possibility easily.
He didn’t say what he really wanted to say, because he knew it would do no good and Dean surely already knew what he really wanted to say, which was that they should just feed him one last bullet from his Taurus and let him go so he didn’t have to suffer like that for whatever was left of his natural life. Dean wouldn’t have done it, if for no other reason that no matter how bad things had ever gotten for them, he’d never given up hope. Sam could be trapped in his mind for a year and Dean would still be thinking tomorrow’s going to be the day his baby brother woke up. Even if Dean or Bobby was willing kill him, what was there to say that once he was dead, he wasn’t just going to end up right back in Hell anyway? So what was the difference? Real Hell and Memory Hell were both still Hell. For a man like Sam Winchester, who’d suffered more than most humans could even fathom, it was almost a shock to realize that he’d never felt so utterly hopeless and weak in his life.
***********************************************
Dean got this hysterical vision of sitting in a waiting room with a clipboard, checking his brother into a nuthouse, filling out a form, “Went to Hell, lost his soul, got it back, it made him into a crazy person” but he didn’t say anything, it would do no good to tell Sam that he’d never leave him no matter what. An unspoken request was in the air, a contingency plan that his brother wouldn’t spell out because he probably knew Dean would never do it, no matter what, but he knew exactly what Sam was thinking. He’d want Bobby or even Dean himself take him out back and put him out of his misery like Old Yeller. Sam wasn’t going to listen to reason at that moment and there was no point wasting the effort on having an argument when all he wanted to do was try to pick Sam up from this agonizing despondence that radiated off him like a fever. He only knew that he had to find a way to protect him, to make sure that the lone brick that had tumbled today would be the only one lost as long as he could help it. They were going to fix this.
They weren’t in it alone, anyway. They had Castiel in their corner. Maybe he couldn’t make Sam good as new, but he was still an angel, and he was their friend. He’d never let Sam suffer like this. Castiel would help them.