Chapter Text
He feels
Light and color flash across his vision, changing from vague shapes to clearly defined memories too quickly to place.
After enough time it becomes a senseless barrage, nonsensical clutter that doesn't leave room for him to think.
He feels like
Something is keeping him in place. A pressure, not one that builds but one that becomes steadily more unbearable now that he's aware of it. It weighs him down from all directions, compresses the space in his head, the range of his movements.
He scrapes back the ability to think, to understand and consider, not just to experience. Cohesion comes slowly, painstakingly.
He remembers how scared he is. He panics.
Jerking, he tries to untangle himself out of the darkness and cold with awkward, damaged limbs. Fighting the pressure is like fighting water. The dark is all there is.
There's an absence of sound so powerful he can't hear his own hopeless wail. He tries to see. His eyes face a yawning, vast nothing. His existence mutes along with all his senses.
The terror builds, claustrophobia overwhelming him, and he loses the grip over his thoughts again.
For a long time, he just exists, feeling nothing real.
A door opens. He sees light.
Unreal and desperation-driven, he blurs into it, becoming another hue of brightness. Suddenly he's somewhere free of that pressure and reels with how weightless existence is and always has been.
Fear sinks into unimportant depths as he sings and screams with freedom. It lasts for a brilliant moment of euphoria before something goes wrong where it can't possibly have gone wrong, and his wings lock up and he's falling.
His stomach twists into stone hard knots, eyes water, and the distant idea of an non-consensual landing makes him go into a blind panic again, trashing to stop before he hits the ground and shatters like glass into a million little pieces--
He's floating.
There's no lurch, no transition, and it's as jarring as the impact would have been.
He's pulling up into something, and he feels more lucid and more real than before. He can hear faraway voices, rasping, whispering. Their foreign emotions touch his senses, panic and concern and fear, and he could almost reach out to them.
His fingers twitch.
Who's speaking? He tries to shake free of the sludge weighing him down, a cumbersome weight on his chest and limbs that pushes him back under and away from the fragile lucidity. Heavy.
A face sharpens into focus in front of him, peeling away from the rest of the dream. It's the first face he has seen, angry contours standing out under the harsh light. It's familiar, a sight that he has seen every day in the tiny mirrors of other people's eyes.
His mouth opens and he speaks, involuntarily; his words are unintelligible and muffled, like there's a barrier between his ears and his voice. Emotions he doesn't understand flit past his mind again; fear and hopelessness, meshed together with satisfaction and a confused sense of rapture.
He backs away as soon as his legs listen to him, turns to run, but stumbles down into the dark again. The skin of his hands splits open, cries red. He's so afraid he can't breathe, can't scream, can't move.
Pain blooms in his stomach, in his limbs, in his chest. He's hurting himself. He tries to plead for the pain to stop. Blood trickles into his eyes and mouth.
He feels like
Like a thousand needles rattling around in a pouch full of tiny holes. It's a sudden, strange mental image he can feel more than see, misplaced. Everything stings, aches, grinds and clinks when he moves. Something is pushing against the backs of his eyes like they'll be popped out.
He sees jumbled colours and sounds, disconnected from time and space, places he's forgotten. His coherent mind is swallowed by the torrent of sensefeelsee until there are no more thoughts.
Everything hurts.
He calls out to someone, or he doesn't.
He might have moved, or maybe his body was locked in place with tension.
Something else touches him, a person this time. So real and solid it's almost separate from the dream around him, and unlike everything else here it causes him no discomfort.
There's softness wrapping around him and he relaxes, the static in his head draining away little by little. The person caresses the lids over his regrown eyes with a careful, gentle touch, and the images cease being unbearable.
He soaks up the warmth and comfort and the assurance of protection. The darkness is a long gone dream. His rage and sadness feel like distant clouds slowly passing over a blue sky.
Whiteness fills his periphery, fogging up his vision and swallowing details. The inevitability of it pulls on his limbs, but he ignores it, choosing to hold on for as long as he can.
His grip on his brother starts slipping and he grabs at him, one last futile attempt before he's dragged into the nothingness.
* * *
It's cold, here.
The air feels slightly stale, dust tickling his nostrils. Something soft is supporting him where he lays. His clothes are abrasive against his skin, and his steadily speeding heartbeat is a distant drum in his ears, accompanied by the clangs of metal and water dripping inside the walls. His eyes feel crusted over.
He can take in the sensations, but analyzing them is too cumbersome. His mind is still too slow to form sentences, too slow to remember, so all that comes out of him is a low whine that sounds wrong even to his own ears. Uncontrolled, it sounds pitiful and infantile.
The last of the air he'd had stored is wasted by the noise, and by some instinct, he pulls in his first breath of air. His lungs ache when he does so, and as he becomes aware of the ribs encasing them, he briefly feels trapped by his skeleton.
The movement awakens the brokenness he wasn't aware of moments before, and he feels a deep, ugly ache of something twisted up inside. The pain spreads from his chest to his head in a wave and fuzzes out into a distant sensation of wrongness.
He tries to move, and his hand fists rough fabric. His bones make an odd noise and his nails hurt like they'll ease off their beds from the gentle friction. Someone moves towards him and touches the surface he lies on. It doesn't dip, but the person leans closer. They're breathing shakily, heartbeat faster than his, the faint smell of fear in the air, along with sweat-soaked clothes and gun oil.
The sense of familiarity is so strong he scrambles to place its origin, and panics when it goes nowhere. His joints crack as his body jerks upwards like a puppet pulled on strings, uncoordinated. It doesn't feel like he's a part of it, the sensations he feels are all detached and separated as if he's merely a passenger. He doesn't dwell on it, the gun-oil person is more important.
His eyes snap open with an audible smack, spilling in a world of color and light, intense and painfully detailed. For a moment after they focus, he's captivated by the tiny motes of dust floating in the air, the golden glow making them visible, before he even registers the two faces by his side. He doesn't remember the second person being there, and the sudden appearance is startling.
His eyes dart between them, unsure who he's supposed to look at first. They both seem incredibly important, like a memory he can't grasp whispering of trust and family, but he can't help but feel unease.
It's a lot to deal with for his addled brain, the conflicting feelings only confusing him further, so he briefly turns his attention to the room behind them. It's vaguely familiar, with drab walls and simple decor. His eyes run over the space before looking down at the bed he's sitting on and eventually stopping on his legs.
He didn't know he had them, but then he's suddenly aware of his entire body, not only the parts that hurt.
He decides that the long limbs, clad in denim, do not belong to him. They don't look very alien, he just doesn't feel as if they're his. The toes wiggle, and he can feel the nerves shooting signals through the body's system.
He lets go of the sheet he was clutching in his hand and looks at it, feeling the earlier alarm rise again, twisting his expression without his consent into something grotesquely wide-eyed. His hands are the first sight that doesn't feel right at all, a sight that doesn't belong among the previous things he's seen.
He stares at the pale, smooth skin, free of scars and calluses he somehow knows should be there. They look young, unblemished. They don't fit.
A lock of chestnut hair falls on his face to obscure a part of his vision, so he raises a hand to brush it back. It's a tangled mess, spilling down his neck and tickling his back. It's a slight comfort, the assumption that his hair should be long. He wasn't expecting short hair-
“Sam?”
He flinches and snaps his head towards the man on his right, noting his expression for the first time. Green eyes opened so far he could see the bloodshot sclera all around the iris, open in fear and brows scrunched in worry. He knows with all his Light he's seen this man before, but his mind is still moving sluggishly, the memories evading him. He stares hard at the contours of his face, the short, spiky hair, trying to get a hold of something, anything.
The person on his left moves closer as well. They look like a man, but some automatic response rejects the idea before he can properly dub them as a he. Before him, the sight of them unravels, the blue-eyed shell they wear filled with colourful light, bubbling and spinning in murky tones, infinitely familiar.
They move closer, which confuses him more than it causes another bout of panic. Shouldn't they be backing away? But that's not right either, they are his friend-
“Sam, do you... know what happened?” They ask in a tentative, gravelly voice, tripping over that word. The word has a distinct shape, 'Sam', and he feels ill hearing it.
He blinks, looking down at his hands. Of course there's a reason they don't belong. He casts back with his thoughts, trying to recall something, and his mind slips over the jagged edges of recent memories. He's stubborn though, assumes he always has been, so he wraps them up and pulls them closer, insisting to see what they have to show him.
His mind erupts. Snippets of memories and imprints explode behind his eyes, ones that feel recent pulling up random events from long ago, all of them mixing into a deafening cacophony.
He sees a calloused hand extending towards him, eyes holding a bottomless lake of love, close enough to tap into if he would just reach out- A desire to please makes his Light gleam wildly, a want to be someone worth that affection, that apology, even a glance of almost forgotten kindness out of those blue eyes soothing the dark, aching pit in his chest and his tilted, scarred self.
Redemption, a tricky word. It held so much meaning he didn't understand. Whatever it entailed, it seemed largely unimportant at the time. All that mattered was the chance for attention, for love, right there. Son, somebody's child, someone deserving, someone he wanted to be again because it is all he has ever wanted.
He sees himself, with long legs, clad in denim, and hands that fit, standing in a library, hair gluing onto his neck with sweat.
He can taste beer and ash on his tongue and feel phantom pain ghosting over his limbs. He can feel sweat clinging to his skin like drying blood and bile rise at the back of his throat.
The memories are too much, too intense. He looks at rooms from more than one perspective, looks at himself like he's been stretched into two directions and it all feels wrong.
There's something terrible and great pressing at him somewhere in the back of his mind, something sorrowful and screeching and furious, that has been sitting alone in the dark for so long it's lost everything that made it shine with brightness until it's hard to tell where the nothing begins and they end.
He's on the brink of something, either a realisation, or a horrid memory, or maybe on the verge of throwing up and turning inside out.
He's terrified.
He wanted to understand, before, but now he just wants to escape into the sky. He doesn't understand. What did he do? What happened to him?
Nausea spreads through his body, making his panic worse. His reactions shouldn't be this violent, but he can't help screwing his eyes shut at the rushing images and scrambling away from them.
His back presses against a wall, but he still feels unsteady, so he grips the sheets to get some semblance of balance. The air in the room seems thicker as it refuses to flow down his closing throat, making breathing into a laborious task.
He's drowning; in the memories, the voices, the senses-
Someone firmly grips his shoulders, steadying him. He looks up at the man, so much closer now than before. Every freckle on his face stands out, and if he wanted, he could count the hazel flecks mixed into the green of his eyes.
“Sam, hey, calm down.” His voice is gentle, but grounding. “Listen Sammy, you're alright. Calm down for me. Can you do that?”
Sammy. He nods at the directions and forces himself to breathe slower, inhaling through his nose and shakily letting the air out. The man, his brother, he realises again, smiles at him. “That's great. You're doin' good,” his brother says. He's so close to something, something very important and he closes his eyes while he finds it.
“Dean,” he breathes. The feeling of safety slots back into place, fresh from his delirium not long ago, the memories flowing past his eyes like rewinding a tape, wrapped in blankets on a ratty couch in a motel room. He tilts freely forward towards Dean, catching the way his eyes widen in panic, but his hands already lift and reach around his back to embrace him.
He feels blessed relief when Dean tentatively hugs back. The skin underneath Dean's clothes is very warm, and it's nice.
He feels a pang of something wildly off, barging into the comfortable mood like a great, stumbling beast, and winces. Dean shifts slightly at his movement. The vague, smiling image of Dean in his head morphs into a snarling version, devoid of love and defined by fury and vengeance. His welcoming hand now holds a gun, and while he doesn't fear the weapon, this Dean is a terror for different reasons. His lips don't stretch gently around the soft words like Sammy. They spit something far more threatening, far more aggressive.
This Dean doesn't love him. This Dean feels nothing but contempt for him.
His insides twist painfully. The thought is horrible, stabs somewhere beyond the physical pain and carves into something fragile and impossibly strong he's been cradling close his entire life.
His raw new eyes water and his throat burns. Dean starts pulling away and he could swear he feels his lungs collapsing.
He grips the striped flannel his brother wears and pulls him close again, trying to keep him there as long as he can, get as much of the feeling before it perishes. He can't control his facial expressions, the noises he makes, his jerky movements. If Dean looked at him, he'd realize he hates him, even if he clearly can't recognize him now, and he feels like his hateful glare would drill into him, that his skin would sizzle at Dean's scathing words.
Dean jerks in surprise, but he doesn't push him off. He mutters that name again and he glances over his shoulder at the other person. He doesn't know what sort of look they share, he doesn't particularly want to. He exhales into his brother's neck and watches as his short hair stands on end.
His eyes sting like this is the first time they've been filled with tears.
There's so much he feels, separate from the shirt sliding over his muscles or Dean's hair tickling his face. A tension that's distinctly bad simmers somewhere beyond his current limited awareness, ready to morph into wrath or cruelty or violence. It's stayed behind now, most of his thoughts preoccupied by intense puzzlement and a strange sense of shame.
His confusion breeds blind panic only Dean is keeping back right now.
He doesn't understand anything.
The tension in Dean's shoulders rises, and he fears that it's revulsion that prompts him to push him back, albeit gently. Carefully.
He doesn't look up to check what his expression is like. His head drops down and his back bends to hunch forward, so that he isn't taller than Dean anymore. He blinks to clear his swimming sight, and tears drop from his eyes to land on the faded fabric of his jeans and loudly splatter on the bedspread.
He's hopeless, caught in a situation he can't possibly tackle, not when he's this overwhelmed. He doesn't know what to do, who he is. A choked off sob tears itself from his throat before he starts openly crying.
It's a blow to his pride, others seeing him so broken, but he can't care right now. This is too much to deal with.
Dean hesitantly touches his arm. “Sam? Can you tell us what's wrong?” Dean's voice is just as panic-ridden and directionless as his would probably be.
Yes. Everything is wrong.
Dean's swallow is audible, but he still doesn't look up, hiding behind curtains of brown locks and unraveling.
“Can you talk?”
It was them who spoke now, moving closer from where they were before, long clothing brushing the wooden frame of his bed. Some part of his mind recognizes it as a trench coat.
He doesn't shake his head. It would be a lie - he has said something before, he knows he could speak if he tried. But he doesn't want to hear what his voice sounds like. Even the breathed name before had sounded horribly out of place, the pitch of it wrong.
Dean squeezes his arm. “Sam.”
Why do you call me that?
His breath hitches in a humiliating way and he clenches his jaws to stop. Dean's face is twisted in worry when he finally looks up. He doesn't feel like he deserves that worry. He looks away towards the other person. The concern on their face is less prominent, as wariness seems to be the main emotion they show, brows lowered over their striking blue eyes. They both hold expectation, as if he's the one who will explain and clarify things.
He can't. He really can't.
Their stares feel like they're peeling away his layers, leaving him raw and exposed. He shrinks under the scrutiny. It doesn't help that they look at him as if he's a wild animal about to claw at them.
His shame and his fear are open to them like words of a book, and he wants to bundle them up and understand, but his memories are shredded, disgusting things whispering of bloodshed and guilt.
He doesn't look at their eyes anymore. His gaze rakes over the room, looking for an escape from this nightmare, and fixates on the open door, a hallway visible beyond it. It's dark, and far more unfamiliar than where he is now, but at least there are no questioning, staring eyes.
His body jolts when he tries to bolt off the bed and towards the door, and he lands on the floor in a tangle of limbs and loose clothes. He can hear Dean's surprised yell, and they both jump away from him. Despite the embarrassment of it, it works in his favor, giving him a moment to scramble to his legs and dart through the door before they can chase after him.
His body's legs feel like someone shattered and then reassembled them, as does his torso and arms. As if they're lagging behind his commands, still somewhat alienated from his mind, and he bumps into the walls when his balance makes the hallway spin.
There's a yell behind him and he feels Dean running after him. He doesn't want to face him again, so he sprints towards an open door and throws himself through it, slamming the door behind himself and stumbling over the dark bathroom tiles.
Dean skids to a stop before it, but he doesn't barge in.
He sinks down on the floor and pulls his knees up. It's dark, empty, and rather cold. He doesn't like it, but at least he's alone. He has the privacy to break without condemnation, and there's no need to address the past if he's the only one looking for it.
He pushes the memories away for now. He can figure it all out later.
They're in front of the door, and their stares drill invisible holes into the wood.