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sam/dean, the only way to get there is to go strai

The Only Way To Get There (Is To Go Straight Down)
Title: The Only Way To Get There (Is To Go Straight Down)
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rated: PG-13 (I think)
Warnings: AU (as of last season), hints of incest, a few naughty words.
Word Count: 1,800 (I know, I’m stunned by this myself)
Disclaimer: Do not own, blah, blah, blah…
Summary: Sam is awakened by demons in the middle of the night. They’re excited about a certain visitor.
Notes: This was written in a kind of writing exercise/challenge between myself and cerberus_sky. We exchanged quotes as prompts and challenged each other to write something inspired by them. We do this a lot, but a lot of the time it doesn’t work out. Or it works too well and 50,000 words later we’re going “How the hell did this happen??” I think this time, for me anyway, it worked like I wanted. There’s a nice little ficlet done and I have no real urge to carry it on. Hope you like it all the same. I’ve put the quote at the bottom of the story if you’re interested. Oh yeah, and this is not beta edited.

The Only Way To Get There (Is To Go Straight Down)


The sounds of howling, hissing, screeching demons woke Sam and brought him down from his bedroom tower. He walked through the creatures gathered there in his courtyard, stalking through them, eyes bright as lantern fires as he drew, in ever tighter circles, toward the center of their group, where it seemed that all the fun was being had.

They were like pit vipers, interlocking and interchangeable, writhing and squirming, with oily black skins liked crinkled, ripped leather. There was no more of that black smoke vomiting bullshit hidden within a human crust; these were the faces of the damned in all of their naked, shameless, horrifying glory. These were the faces children saw peeking at them from their closets and madmen sensed hiding over their shoulders or twisted up in their hair.

These were demons and they were up to something.

They parted before Sam’s footsteps like a tide, without obvious courtesy or care, as though it was what they had intended all along before he decided to walk there. His boot heels clacked on the stone and as he moved to the middle of the crowd, the howling and gibbering grew silent and the clacking echoed.

Sam smelled human blood as he stepped into the center of his circling way. Then the last demon slithered from his sight and Sam just stared.

He instantly recognized the slumped figure, curled in upon himself as though to defend against the demons who, miraculously, had not harmed him. He knew that bent head, that curve of spine defined like little pearls against the wet, filthy material of a once-white t-shirt. Kneeling there at Sam’s feet, he knew his own brother even before he turned his face up to him and smiled.

Sam cursed and took a step back, that insane look laid bare on Dean’s face, in the way his lips curled just a little too much to be considered natural, in the way his eyes gleamed fever-bright and yet maintained a far away, haunted glaze. It sent a chill of dread down to his belly to mold into leaded ice.

“Sammy?” Dean asked, and his voice was raw and paper sharp. He sounded like he’d been chewing on glass to the point where he’d almost cut off his tongue.

Sam had never heard him sound like that. He sounded… crazy. “Dean?” Sam said. “Dean, what the fuck are you doing here and--”

“Sammy?” Dean repeated more forcefully, like Sam hadn’t spoken. Like Dean couldn’t see or hear him. “I have to show you something, Sammy.”

“Dean… my god,” Sam muttered, talking to himself under his breath.

“They chose me, Sammy,” Dean said, that same tearing rubber strain to his voice. “I can show you how they chose me. Do you want me to show you?”

“Sure, Dean,” Sam said, because what else was he going to say?

Dean unclasped his hands from where he’d been holding them tight against his abdomen where he could lean over them. Protective, like what he held was a prize of great worth. Now he reached them out to Sam, more like a supplicant than ever, and held them out. He held his hands cupped at first, so all Sam could see was the blood filling the bowl of his hands. Then he opened his fingers, let the blood spatter on the stone at Sam’s feet, trailing delicate little lines like vines down his arms to drip scarlet from his elbows.

“They chose me,” Dean said again, whispering it. Full of mad glee and shaking with adrenalin. “Look, Sammy, it’s a stigmata.”

Sam looked and felt his ice-weighted stomach flip over at the sight. There were cuts there, alright. Deep and dark as little caverns right through the middle of Dean’s palms. They looked grotesquely like bleeding vaginas and as Dean spread his fingers, the lips of the wounds moved to part farther and blood flowed, slow as oil, down his arms. They were horrible and disgusting, but they weren’t inflicted by God, Sam saw that in an instant. The wounds were raggedly cut and there were tiny shards of yellow-green bottle glass still caught in the flesh. They glittered through the syrup of blood like dirty, faded emeralds.

Sam’s hand shot out and he grabbed Dean’s wrist, his shock giving way to a combination of anger and sorrow. “What did you do?” he whispered, pulling Dean’s hand toward him. When Dean refused to get up at Sam’s insistent tugging and just knelt there, holding out his hand, fingers shaking with the wire-hard tension in his hands, Sam went to his knees with him.

“Sammy,” Dean said, speaking his name like Sam had only that moment been revealed to him. There was aching loss and not-quite-daring-to-hope joy in the word and it hurt Sam’s heart to hear his own name spoken that way.

“Dean, what did you do?” Sam repeated. He took Dean’s other bleeding hand and held them, cupping the backs of his hands in his own as they once more began to fill with blood and overflow between them. “What happened?”

“Missed you…” Dean whispered, leaning toward him to peer up at Sam through Sam’s bed-disheveled hair. “I told them no, but you see what happens? You can’t say no to angels, Sammy, not when there’s no one else to take you in. See? They chose me. This is what they do to make me see… there’s no other way.”

“No other way than what?” Sam asked, not really sure what Dean was talking about.

“Than this,” Dean said. He clenched his hands tight on top of Sam’s palms, blood leaking through his fingers with a sick squelching sound. “Than this,” he repeated and lifted his fists to beat them back down on Sam’s hands, sending blood spattering their shirts and faces.

Sam briefly considered the possibility that Dean had in fact been held down and mutilated by enraged angels. Then he dismissed the idea completely. Some things went too far, even for them, and Dean, he was sure, was more than capable of inflicting every kind of depravity imaginable upon himself.

“Dean,” Sam said, trying for calm. He’d watched suns burn out and die and stood by passively as the greatest humanity had to offer were crushed beneath the feet of his demons. He was evil, he accepted that, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have regrets. He had endured that; he could endure this. “Dean,” he repeated, drawing Dean’s attention.

Dean looked at him and blinked. For a moment his eyes were almost clear. “What, Sammy?”

“What are you doing here?” Sam asked. He looked around them at the courtyard where demons still lurked in the rose bushes and wild grass. “You don’t belong here.”

Dean shook his head tiredly and laughed. “I can’t kill you, Sammy,” he murmured. He suddenly lunged forward and twisted his fingers in the front of Sam’s shirt, holding him tight with his face mere inches from Sam’s own. “Don’t make me kill you, Sammy,” he pleaded.

Sam stared into his face, felt the warmth of Dean’s breath on his lips, and thought he finally understood. “Dean, why are you here?” he hissed, leaning toward him to press his mouth to Dean’s and speak with his teeth crushed against his brother’s mouth. “Why? Tell me.”

“Asylum,” Dean said, voice barely a whisper, the words caught on their lips as he moved his mouth to speak. He ran his tongue out and licked between them, over Sam’s top lip, then his bottom one. Sam tasted sweat and sickness in his saliva, but he didn’t pull away. “In ancient times… churches were sanctuaries. Not anymore.”

No, there weren’t any churches anymore.

“I need…” Dean stopped and swallowed, his throat working as he tried to form the words he wanted to say. “I want to come home,” he finished after a minute. “They gave me a sword,” he said, leaning back to look at Sam and gauge his reaction to this confession. “A magic sword. Demon killing sword. For you, Sammy.”

Sam nodded and studied his face, his eyes narrowed in thought. “What do you mean by ‘home’?” he asked. He thought he had a pretty good idea. Some people were pretty good at making their own homes, fashioning them around themselves out of the pieces of their own bodies and histories, but Dean had never learned how to do that. Still, Sam wanted to hear him say the words.

“I mean you,” Dean said. His eyelids fluttered and he lowered his head, his chest heaving with deep breaths of restraint. “I can’t do this anymore. I won’t. And… I brought you a sword.”

Sam lifted a hand, coated with drying sticky blood, and took Dean’s chin to lift his face up. “Asylum?” he asked.

Dean nodded and shivered, eyes darting away from Sam’s face to some point over his shoulder.

Sam squeezed lightly with his thumb and finger, bringing Dean’s reluctant gaze back to him. “Sanctuary?” he whispered.

Dean ran his tongue out over his cracked bottom lip. “Yes.”

Sam suddenly smiled and saw Dean relax at the sight. He lifted Dean’s sore and bloody hands and lowered his head to press his lips in a light kiss over the wounds. Dean tensed at the faint touch, but he didn’t take them away, even when Sam slid his tongue out and stroked it into the wounds, licking between the creases of flesh until Dean was shuddering uncontrollably and his fingers were twitching.

When Sam lifted his head, he plucked a sliver of bottle glass from the tip of his tongue, then leaned in and caught Dean’s mouth in a kiss. He pushed his tongue into Dean’s mouth and Dean yielded into the kiss with a soft moan of gratitude and longing, his body swaying into Sam’s with exhaustion.

When Sam broke the kiss, Dean lay his head down on his lap and sighed, his eyes slipping closed. Sam watched him as he drifted to sleep and ran his fingers through Dean’s dirty hair.

He was calm, but there was a deep, abiding wrath kindling to flame somewhere near his weathered soul. These angels that had sent his brother to murder him had allowed their prejudices and their bloated esteem of themselves to make them forget one very important fact: all demons had been born as angels. They shared the same origins, so what could kill a demon could kill an angel and now he had the weapon to do it with sleeping in his lap like a tired old dog.

Sam growled softly under his breath and ducked his head down to nuzzle Dean as he slept. If there was a sword and it was made of more than Dean’s madness, Sam would take it and use it, for better or worse, to finish this.


XXX



Quote:
'Cause you are broken and beautiful
And you’re so damn cynical
But I’m drawn in by the darkness in your eyes
And it’s beautiful
Broken and beautiful

Talkin’ you down from ledges to stay with me
I’ll touch your sharpest edges
I’ll be the one that holds your hand when you bleed
Falling off in pieces like you do
I would hand them back to you

-Suzie McNeil