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Sam falls down into the Pit and wakes up in hell.
Except he doesn’t know where his hands are, in hell, and right now, he can count each fingernail burrowing into his palms. Ten crimson crescent moons—sailors everywhere squint at the sunrise and cower. Cuticles, too; nothing stripped or scorched or extracted, as far as he can tell. He might even still have fingerprints.
Concern for the poor sack of flesh who’s gotten plucked up as host, sure. But Sam’s never wondered until now how the demons feel.
Now, though, he can feel each point of the devil’s trap like a crucifixion nail. He’s choking on something burning and unbearable like he’s swallowed the sea. Odysseus bleeding out his ears, sticky as all hell.
Sam’s started carrying naloxone in the glovebox. Seems only fair, all things considered.
He tries to remember how many fingers he has. How they feel extending from his knuckles like a collection of shells—nautilus or shrapnel. The slope of a nail—no, not that kind, it’s like—
He feels like his vocal cords and vertebrae are being held up for comparison. Stretched from a towel rack, un/natural accordions. That must be the reason for all the fucking shrieking. Kill me, he thinks, and then begs, howls, prays, and neither angel nor demon nor family member answers. It’s been hours since a shotgun started sounding like a miracle.
He doesn’t tell Dean for the same reasons he picked the vial and syringes up to begin with.
He tries swallowing. It doesn’t taste like salt.
Bobby doesn’t list part-demon, second-favored godson freaks among the terrors this place is meant to hold, but Sam knows he’s a practical guy. John Winchester can’t have been the only one with a contingency plan.
He’s thinking about that, right now, the needle some smiling volunteer had taught him how to handle, how they’d said somebody waking up after having it used on them would be a trauma in and of itself and he’d nodded blankly without really understanding, like he was trying to connect two dots but every time he looked at his hands they only held an eraser. It’s still somewhere millimeters or miles beyond his wingspan, magnetized but never getting further than the tug.
He thinks he’s crying, at first, but when he swipes at his eyes, there’s blood on his hands, and he’s pretty sure it isn’t a metaphor.
KILL ME KILL ME PLEASE GOD DAMN YOU
/// five hundred nails on twenty chalkboards // total engine failure
at eight miles up all / shrapnel & counting that air mask
ain’t gonna do you any good kid /////
/////////////////////////////////
Eventually, his traitorous facial muscles force him to blink, and there isn’t anybody around during the brief downward flash of his eyelids, either.
About five percent of the fluid volume of the muddy water of his thoughts dares to whirlpool down a drain labeled You Don’t Deserve This. It’s roughly the equivalent of French kissing a wall socket, swan diving into boiling water: it burns so exponentially worse that he immediately averts his eyes.
there is no - - longer such thing as oxygen - - -
He can sit up; no cuffs. Must have finished with the flinging him between walls like a ping-pong ball earlier, then.
If he doesn’t have lungs then that can’t be him screaming
blood = oil = staining all clumped in
those feathers he isn’t supposed to have
He’s hungry; that’s never happened before. Usually it takes weeks for hell to loosen its hold on his appetite.
Maybe it should be a relief, but the deviation from what little he knows to expect is unsettling, makes the roots of each of his teeth run cold.
When he hits the ceiling, the salt lick of his skeleton shudders and crumbles like Lot’s wife returning to dust.
The door is open, which might be the cruelest trick. But he’ll endure it, won’t fail them again; if they’d left the cuffs, he’d latch his wrists himself. If that’s the only way to prove he’s got a modicum of self-control clinging to the backs of his ribs, so be it.
please says - - sam give me whatever flavor
of bullet you’ve got i’ll / swallow it & the Devil says
none of them will stick - / - / - / / / /////
If it weren’t for the fact that hell is fucking demon-proof, he’d summon one and drain it for the strength to bash his head in.
But Dean would bring him back.
That thing about how resurrection itself can leave you choking— okay, Sam thinks, and flexes his fingers.