Work Text:
The cool dark of the night. The chirping of crickets filtered in through the open window, and the curtains rustled gently in the soft breeze. A soft, plush mattress beneath his back and warm blankets keeping him snuggled up tight while he slept. His breathing was steady, slow and deep.
Quiet music tinkled from a music box. Soft lights spun slowly over his head. His eyes opened a slit, still blurry from sleep. Long curls of blonde hair fell around his face. They tickled his nose, but he didn’t sneeze. He just scrunched his nose up and made himself comfortable again. A flash of white fabric passed him as the woman walked past him. Her hand trailed over his shoulder, so tender and full of love.
Despite the open window, despite the cool breeze drifting lazily in, the room was warm and cozy. He yawned deeply, so wide it felt like his jaw was unhinging. His eyes squeezed shut with the movement.
When he opened them again, it was bright. Too bright. The room was warm. Too warm.
Flames licked hungrily up the walls, devouring everything in their path. The lacy curtains – no, they were thick and dark blue. The plush queen-size bed – or was it a crib? The walls, those with the light green paint and with the pale blue and yellow wallpaper, cracked and crumbled into ash, smearing black across the edges of his vision.
The fire grew higher. The heat licked his skin until it blistered, red-raw and boiling. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. His lungs filled with the smoke, with the ash, and burned him from the inside out.
Blood. Dark red, hot, metallic, dripping – into his mouth, on his face, over his body, until he drowned in it. He turned his eyes desperately upwards. Blonde hair. White fabric. His mother. His beloved. Her stomach cut open, her eyes hollow and vacant. Despite that, she spoke with two voices at once:
“You did this to me.”
A flash, and she was gone. The room was gone. All that was left was the flames, raging in the blackness. He fell to his knees, gasping for breath, his face wet with tears. He looked up again. Another face, just as scared and tear-stained as his own, but filled with a grief and a rage that he would never understand. Blood ran down the side of his face, oozing out of the bullet wound in his temple.
He gasped and backed away, scrabbling backwards on all fours away from that walking corpse. His back hit something behind him. He spun around, afraid. Always so afraid.
It was another young man. No, it was two young men. No, it was one man with two faces, right side-by-side on the same head, looking in two different directions. One smiled, though it also had tear tracks glistening on its cheeks, and its eyes were terrified. The other smiled, though its grin was rictus and filled with fangs, and its eyes were hard. The two-men-one-man spoke with both one and two voices:
“We’re all killers. It’s all we know.”
He cried out, in fear and grief and pain and rage. He wrapped his arms over his head and tucked it in; he curled in on himself like the babe he was, like he had been ever since he was six months old. He cried, and he raged, and he wailed. For himself, for everyone else that suffered in the way that he did. For the blood and bones left behind in the wake of their ascension.
His tears dried, his screams quieted. He looked up once more. In the heart of the flames, a pillar of darkness stood. It radiated cold and horror in a way that no earthly thing ever could.
Two piercing yellow eyes peered out from the darkness.
Sam jolted upright, his scream dying in his throat as he woke. He panted, trembling in the dark of the motel room. He wiped the cooling sweat from his face and glanced over at the clock on the table between his and Dean’s beds.
2:27. At least he’d gotten a couple of hours.
He slipped out of bed as quietly as he could and padded over to the bathroom. He eased the door shut, being as careful as he could so as not to wake Dean up. The light flickered on, yellow-orange and stuttering. He turned the sink on; he braced himself against the porcelain as the water ran, staring down into the basin without actually seeing. His stomach churned, but he fought down the urge to vomit.
He heaved a sigh. With an effort that felt Herculean, he forced his exhausted arms forward to cup his hands under the water and splash it on his face.
Sam clicked the light off and eased the door back open again. His heart sank as he saw Dean sitting up in his bed, scrubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” he mumbled. He shouldn’t have been embarrassed about it, but he was, like a little kid that needed to run to his parents when he had a nightmare.
Dean snorted. “How many times do I gotta tell you – it’s my job to look after you. You really think you could hide this from me.” Sam flushed, both from further shame and from anger, but Dean kept right on talking. “You were thrashing around like crazy, man. Not to mention the moaning. Thought you were having an epic wet dream for a moment there.”
Sam huffed an utterly humourless laugh. “I wish; it would’ve been a hell of a lot better than that.”
Even that slight concession was more than he’d ever said to Dean about his nightmares in the light of day. What was it about the night, the comforting blanket of darkness, that made it possible for him to be honest?
He was pulled from his thoughts by a soft sound. He glanced up to see that Dean had flipped the corner of his covers back and was patting the mattress beside him. Any other night, he might have put up a fight, might have made some token protest about there not being enough room for both of them, or that he wasn’t a little kid and didn’t need to cuddle his big brother when he had a nightmare.
Tonight, he was too tired to fight. Too tired from waking in the middle of the night. Too tired from constantly acting like he was okay and handling everything just fine. Too tired to pretend that his brother’s arms around him wasn’t exactly what he needed. He shuffled across the room and eased himself down on Dean’s bed. Dean’s arm snaked around his waist and pulled him down, pulled him close.
When they laid together like that, it was the one time where Dean still felt like his big brother, and not just his older brother. Their legs tangled together, Dean’s solid arms wrapped around him, his own face tucked into the crook of Dean’s neck, like he could hide from the world in the comfort of his skin. He felt Dean tangle his fingers in the hair at the base of his neck, just gently tugging at it to ground him. Already, his eyes grew heavy again and the tension started draining from his body like poison from a wound.
Dean pressed a kiss to his forehead, and another to his cheek, and one more on the corner of his mouth.
“Go back to sleep, Sammy. You’ll be okay. I’ve got you.”