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“Whatever Sam did, it is bad mojo.” Dean shakes his head, shuts Bobby up before he can object. “You should have seen the grave site. It was like a nuke went off.” He swallows. Looks down. “And there was… this force, this presence, I don't know, but it blew past me at a fill-up joint.” Just the memory has him shuddering. Unconsciously he starts to lift a hand to his shoulder, to cover up the brand even though it’s under his shirt. Bobby stares at him with curdling horror.
“And you think…?”
“Some demon yanked me out,” he lies.
-
Pale, weightless strands brush against him. A white haze, but physical. Soft. clinging to his skin. His limbs sink into the ground. The ground all around him, behind him, wrapped around his shoulders, encircling his feet. When he tries to move, it’s slow, but not just slow. Constricting. The very air itself curling around him, binding him.
His legs are caught. When he tries to walk he just works himself deeper into the white softness. Like sucking mud, or memory foam. He’s up to his knees in it, or up to his waist - what does that mean when it’s all around him? Is he up to his neck in it or is it over his head? He thrashes, full body, but it only seems to pull him in.
He can feel the stuff against his skin. He’s naked and surrounded, the substance touching him on every side. He reaches out around him, and his arms move but they are useless, nothing is different as far as he can reach.
Everything is in white. Brighter than standing on the sun. He is naked yet he digs in his pocket, desperate for his lighter. The world may be all the same in every direction but this he can still grasp. Except when he flicks it, there is no light. Everything around him is already blinding. He is in the grave and yet there is light everywhere, he can feel it touching him, curling around him, constricting, he can’t breathe-
Dean bolts awake, tangled in motel sheets. The scar on his shoulder throbs.
-
“You really don’t remember.”
Sam blows smoke out Baby’s window. Just another taste of the new Sammy. Dean can smell the residue working its way into her vinyl seats. Dad’s old brand. He’s gonna have to detail her himself. Get in there with a toothbrush. He’ll do it when he takes the iPod jack out.
“Nope.”
He feels white strands clinging to his ankles.
-
“Who’s Jesse?”
“Well, it wasn’t forever.”
“His loss,” Dean says, feels the old smile crawl across his face like an insect. His mouth is a gash.
“Might be your gain.” Pamela winks at him, and he swallows nausea down his throat. Can feel Alastair’s hand hooked in his stomach, twisting, gently working its way deeper, splitting him open all the way to the lungs, even as he plays the role for Sam.
When she asks to touch something the creature touched, he pulls up his sleeve. Feels naked through his clothes as everyone in the world stares at his shoulder.
The mark isn’t painful, just new pink skin over wounds that were never there. Pamela flinches back, but she still puts a hand up to touch. Covers it over with her fingers. He feels the contact through his whole body, like a string being pulled in the tips of his toes and cutting through whatever’s in between.
“I invoke, conjure, and command you, appear unto me before this circle.” Closed eyes allow the dizziness to take him as the air grows tight and tingling with power. All of this was a mistake. He can feel the thing trying to intimidate Pamela and he hopes it works. But she just says I don’t scare easy and keeps on, and he-
is standing, alone on the ground, single in a void. He can’t feel his body, this nothing is so empty that it can’t even be touched. He holds out his arms, flaps around. Spins, trying to get his bearings any way he can, even by losing them. But his eyes are opened, and he sees it. Emptiness off to his left, yes, but to his right… blazing white. A tower higher than the sun, but there is no sun.
“I conjure and command you, show me your face.”
The haze twines around him, swallowing him, he is the only thing in this emptiness that it has not already consumed. Half the world is in shining white. There is no sun, but light is everywhere, the clinging mist blinds him with its brilliance. Soft tendrils crush in around him, the mist is made of cloth, no, the mist is made of feathers.
“I conjure and command you, show me your face.”
Feathers are the wrong word to describe the things around him. These are not organic. Nothing biological grew these, wet and pressed together in an egg’s shell. These have always existed, they are eternal, a thing, not a creature. There is no sun but the brightness blinds him. His skin crawls, and he feels his flesh try to shrink away from the featherstuff around him.
“I command you, show me your face, now!”
He is blinded, there is no sun, but still he looks up.
The sun looks down at him.
-
It’s easy, slapping the girl’s face. He can still see the shapes under her skin, the rotting black oil under her cheekbones. Finally something he can recognize. It’s the first time his body has felt in alignment with himself since he’s been back. The feel of flesh on flesh, the flinch, her fear. All is right with the world.
Sammy’s looking at him bug-eyed. Who cares.
-
The round beak cracks. It opens, a thousand times his size, mechanical and smooth, sharpened by purpose. The sound that comes from it is a shriek, but not an animal noise. Something of gears and engines, deep inside. Dean almost expects to be scalded by a jet of steam.
He is already burned on every face by the inescapable light, but the sound reaches into him, puts a fishhook of brilliance in his guts. He covers his ears, but he can't feel his hands, the brightness remains even as he curls in on himself, he tries to become smaller to escape-
Even when he wakes, the scream remains. He watches in slow motion as cracks spiderweb the mirrored ceiling. Sees himself shatter. The first piece of razor dust falls just below the corner of his eye.
-
Bobby’s got an armful of xeroxes. He offers to drive but Dean tells him to fuck off.
They went through every book in Bobby’s library, or at least the ones he brought to Illinois in the trunk. Dean’s looked at ugly sons of bitches today that he didn't even know you could make up. But none of them felt right. There were creatures that made bugs crawl up your spine when you looked at them, and creatures whose gaze you felt compelled to avoid even in pictures, but Dean knows this thing. Nothing in the books reached out and touched him. Nothing burned.
Now they're headed to an old barn. Somewhere empty. Somewhere they can ruin.
According to Bobby, some of the sigils shouldn’t be too close together. They contradict. At one point, Dean forgets which is which. Tries to paint one next to its opposite on the rotting wood paneling, but they’re like wrong-way magnets. His spraycan repels from the wall. Bobby shakes his head, hands Dean a stack of oldstyle Devil’s Traps instead. No one could mess those up.
But even looking at them gives Dean a headache. With his eyes closed, he can feel their presence, sticky and bright in his consciousness. He digs nails into his palms to keep Bobby from seeing his flinch. When he bites his lip and actually raises can to wood, the world goes black.
Dean can smell home. It’s all around him. His body melts into the environment, flesh becoming part of flesh again. The rack calls to him. The soul on it begs. He slices down its chest and its cries harmonize with the cacophony around him. He lets the intestines slop out. This one is losing form, too beleaguered to fully retain the human body shape, but it still has guts. Dean’s found that the insides are usually the last to go.
He hooks a hand in. Helps the slippery mass along on its journey to the ground. The soul is just moaning now, all gurgly. It’s barely even afraid of him at this point, he needs to shake things up.
Dean feels Alastair’s skeletal hand on his shoulder. A wordless indication. Use vermin.
He shouldn’t have needed the prompting, and shame wells up. But as he lifts his pot of ants, the look of terror on the gutless soul’s barely-a-face soothes him.
He spoons the insects into the hole where its middle used to be, and watches them get to work, mandibles slicing through meat a gram at a time. The soul writhes, twitching with more than muscle. That’s the wonderful thing about the Pit. The things here can go on suffering far longer than a mere body.
Except that the soul’s terror has not found its relief in pain. Its face is only more twisted by fear. It gazes at him, through him. Above him into the dark, sunless sky.
-
Bobby won’t meet his eyes when he wakes up. Probably doesn't want to know why exactly the Traps put him under. Dean can't blame him. They wouldn't have worked anyway. Whatever this thing is, it's bigger than any demon. Dean should know.
They wait in silence. He props his shotgun on his knee.
He knows an instant before it comes. Can feel it brushing against him. Remembers in his gut clinging desperately to Alastair as the thing took him in his claws.
The doors bang open, and he sees it. Just for a moment he sees it, before the thing resolves into a man. For one blistering second he is back staring into that black sun, the vast, hungry, open eye.