Work Text:
Dean groaned, letting his forehead fall against the back of his hand where it was leant against the floor before glancing back up, looking down the twist of crumbling dirt that disappeared into the darkness, even with his flashlight. He’d already had to climb through the vents back at Adam’s house, and the slight pang of claustrophobia was still itching at his nerves and jittering his senses.
Nevertheless, after one final glance of the ominous half-moon glaring at him through the cracks in the mausoleum door, he grit his teeth and pushed himself through the crawl-space and into the earth.
Please don’t cave, please don’t cave, please don’t cave.
He forced himself to remember to breathe. His shoulder blades scraped the roof of the tunnel, each time dropping more dirt on top of him that made his heart crawl into his throat. He could barely see; the beam from his flashlight bounced off the walls as he crawled, and about a minute of crawling, a minute that passed as slow as it would have in Hell, he finally started to see the glimpses of a room at the end.
Air, bittersweetly stale, rushed into his crushed lungs when the tunnel widened slightly before breaking into the other room. From his position, he was in about the middle, looking down from about two meters from the cracked stone floor, each crack sprouting with dead weeds. Dean flickered his flashlight around, ignoring the crawling vines that enclosed each crumbling casket and the ominous statues that seemed to follow the beam with cold eyes. Once he deemed his immediate area free of any monsters or particularly large spiders, he clenched the butt of the flashlight between his teeth and twisted his body. He grunted as he shifted into his back, grabbing the wall by two gaps that seemed relatively stable and pulling himself out, holding himself painfully in midair for a second before his feet found the roof of a casket, and he let go with a sigh.
The roof crumbled beneath his weight, and his leg up to his knee disappeared into it. Dean yelped, both palms slapping the wall to keep his balance. The smell that erupted from the casket was enough of a surprise to make him gag and his eyes water. His other foot found the floor and, once stable, Dean removed his leg with a groan of pain and disgust.
His ankle ached and his shin and calf were both scratched from the stone. Despite only slightly bleeding, Dean knew that having open cuts, no matter how small, being mingled with a decaying corpse probably wasn’t great for the ol’ immune system.
Unfortunately he didn’t have anything on him, not so much as a water bottle, on him to help with that, so he’d just have to deal with it later.
The sound of grinding stones echoed through the chamber, and for a second Dean got horrifying flashes of zombies climbing from their stone prisons, but that nightmare was immediately trumped by the sound coming from the end of the tunnel above him.
Careful to stand on the edges of the casket and not the top, Dean shone his light back down the tunnel, where he could clearly see the other end, which was currently having the heavy stones being shifted in front of its entrance by Adam who was definitely not Adam.
“Hey!” Dean yelled, yanking his gun from his back pocket and emptying the clip into the tunnel, wincing at how he was bringing sections down through wayward bullets. That wincing turned into pure panic as the tunnel came down, shifting the stones and sending a shockwave that spread cracks through the already unstable roof.
Dean didn’t have time to say “Son of a bitch!” before the roof gave way and his body was pushed into darkness, dragging his mind with it.
-----
Someone stabbed him in the back and yanked him back to reality with a strangled cry. Whoever they were, they were heavy, and sat on his entire body below his shoulders, save his right arm, which was stretched in front of him. The only part of his body that wasn’t screaming at him was this right arm, whose hand was limp above the discarded, flickering flashlight.
Dean coughed, groaning as blood scraped through his sandpaper throat and filled his mouth, dribbling out into the puddle on the floor, which half his face, also numb, was dunked in.
His other temple ached, and the other half of his face was sticky and stiff.
“Sammy!” It was weak, admittedly desperate, and completely instinctual, even if entirely pointless.
He shifted his head, ignoring the protests off his neck.
Oh. He didn’t have a gigantic guy sitting on top of him, stabbing him in the back.
His brain seemed to finally sort of kick in, and he remembered the roof of the chamber collapsing, which would explain the endless pile of rubble pinning him down from his shoulders. It would also explain the rusted support beam embedded in his back.
If he shifted, he could feel its sturdiness. If he focused past the haze of pain that spun the room and sparked his vision, he could tell it had impaled him, somewhere to the right of his spine, a little below his ribcage.
All of this was fucking wonderful.
Before he could even make the conscious thought of stopping it, a strangled sort of sob crawled from his throat, pushing more blood down his chin. The sight was dizzying, and fucking terrifying, and for the first time in a while he hadn’t the foggiest what to do about it. He couldn’t reach his phone from here, not that he expected it to have survived the rockslide, or him to find a signal from down here. No one would hear him shout and Sammy didn’t know where he was.
Oh fuck, Sammy. He didn’t know about Adam being definitely one hundred percent not Adam.
So, in that moment, he allowed his gut to boil, to push past the pain and the will to just give up and let it be over. He allowed the fear for his brother to push out of his chest in one cry that probably fell on deaf ears.
“Cas!”
He choked, coughed up more crimson, and tried again, and again. Each cry was forced through the blood because he needed the angel, desperately, to hear him, to save his brother. To take his role and save his brother where he was too weak to do so himself.
And then his voice failed him, coated with a thick layer of blood that clogged his throat, cutting off what little oxygen he was scraping in. His chest ached from the deprivation, yearned for the sweet release of death with childish need. The corners of his vision clouded, flickered in the dimness of the flashlight, and for a second he was convinced he was going to die here, alone, and his brother would do the same, because the angel would not come. The angel was too good, too needed, to waste its time with a begging man.
A brilliant light blinded the room, harsh in contrast to the dim, but Dean barely noticed, too busy trying to force through the dark and keep afloat above the waves, despite the force on his back keeping him stubbornly under.
A pressure at his forehead, light, feathery, and the force was lifted. The begging man came up for air as the pain was washed away by the waves, and then he was flying, flying, flying away…
The world around him continued to spin as he flew. At least, he thought he was flying, but the pressure behind his knees and across his shoulder blades told him he was being carried. Either way, Dean didn’t care. The pain, the crushing pressure he was sure was going to be the frankly pathetic end of him was gone. He was free.
He was alive.