Title: Through My Eyes (The Hell On Earth Remix)
Author: Mad Server
Characters: Sam and Dean, and peripherally Ruby and Alastair
Genre/pairing: Gen
Rating: What comes between PG13 and R? Because, that.
Word-count: 1200
Spoilers: Up to 6.09
Warnings: Blood, torture, PTSD, puke
Original story: "Through My Eyes" by jennytork
Summary: After Andy sends Dean the vision in AHBL, it's Dean who's the clairvoyant one, not Sam. He gets a foretaste of hell and of what comes after. It doesn't agree with him.
A/N: This was beta'd by the lovely and talented i_speak_tongue, who always has cool shit to add in.
Disclaimer: Not so much with the owning.
:::
Her wrist. Sam's staring at her wrist. Whisky, dust, rotting wood. A step on creaky floorboards.
Flash of a blade. White light glints into Dean's eyes and he can't see.
Tongue. Blood. Sam licking her arm. Soap and perfume and sulfur. Biting.
Sam.
Standing. He raises an arm like fucking Gandalf. A cloud smokes up. Dark liquid from Sam's nose.
Beside Sam is the woman, the woman with the wrist. She rubs circles in his ribcage. Her eyes are black.
:::
Ceiling, window. Dean groans and buries his face in the pillow.
Sam snickers from across the room. "Ready for that triathlon?"
"Gnngh." Dean curls into a ball, easing the strain on his stomach.
"Oh, that's right. First we have that pie eating contest."
He breathes carefully and concentrates on not barfing.
"'Beer before liquor, never been sicker.'"
"Sam." He licks his lips. His head feels like a microwaved tomato about to burst. "Coffee."
:::
A corpse in a white dress. Blood flows out of her, out in a garden hose trickle and then impossibly back around. Light comes up out of the ground and drives itself into Dean's eyes.
:::
Hands on his shoulders, on the back of his neck. "Hey!" Piercing blue sky and a snarl in Sam's voice. "Dean!"
"Mmm." Dean presses his face into the smell of Sam's shirt, his cheap-ass deodorant.
"I don't know," Sam calls to someone. "Just a second! Dean. God. Are you OK?"
Shivering, Dean grimaces at the taste in his mouth. He can feel air coming in through a tear in his new suit.
"Easy. Hey, whoa, easy. Slow down."
Dizzily upright on his ass, Dean spits on the sidewalk.
"You know what day it is? How many fingers?"
He palms his eyes and snuffles. "It's fine. I'm good."
"Good?" Sam huffs. "What was that?"
Dean notes the flush in Sam's cheeks and shrugs. "Acid flashback?"
Sam narrows his eyes. "No ambulance," he announces. "Thanks."
:::
Sulfur.
Straps across a heaving chest. A table slick with blood.
Oh. Oh.
That's him lying there, and his legs have no skin.
A man with a scalpel waves to a crowd.
The Dean on the table whimpers. A tear slips into his ear. Glare off it blinds him.
:::
"Wake up." Sam's jiggling him by the biceps. There's a warm bed around him. "Hey, hey. C'mon."
Dean gulps down a glass of water. It tastes like sulfur.
"Wow. Refill?" Sam holds out his hand for the cup, hair frizzed from sleep.
Rolling his tongue around in his mouth, Dean shakes his head and makes for the bathroom on shaky legs. As the toothpaste foams in his mouth, Sam settles against the doorframe and crosses his arms over his T-shirt. "What'd you dream about?"
Dean grunts and rinses.
"You don't look so hot."
"Sam."
"Yeah?"
Dean scratches his collarbone. "When's the last time you had a vision?"
:::
"Do you really think...?"
Dean paces along the salt-stained carpet, bits of gravel bouncing beside his bare feet. "I don't know, do you have a better idea?"
"Have any of them come true?"
A tiny rock wedges itself up into his heel. "No."
"Then what makes you think they're not just dreams?"
Dean bends down to swipe at the stone, but it makes the room spin. "Mmh. You of all people..." He thuds onto the bed opposite his brother and picks at the sole of his foot, blinking through spots. "You know. It's not the same."
"You've been getting headaches."
"It's not just that." Dean tosses the bit of gravel at the dresser. He sighs, stilling. "You can see and hear and smell, but you can't touch or taste."
Sam sits up straighter on the other bed. "Yeah."
"And you just... you know it's real. And you need to stop it from happening."
"Uh huh." Sam tilts his head back a little, brows drawing in. "What do you need to stop from happening?"
:::
Static from a radio. A smell like all the meat in the world's gone off. A man with crazy eyes eating another man's arm.
Sam. Sam in white. Sam in white, and the white fills up Dean's eyes.
:::
Dean rolls down the passenger window and pukes into the wind.
"Oh! Uh." Sam screeches the brakes, pulls them onto the dirt shoulder. "Crap. Hey. You OK?"
Dean grips his forehead and blows out an unsteady breath. "Yeah."
"You see anything?" Sam's fishing over the backseat. He comes up with a huge bottle of water and holds it out. "Or was I right about that burger?"
Dean just rests his cheek on the leather seat, drinks in Sam's striped flannel.
Sam hesitates, container still in hand. "What?"
"Sam..." Dean's throat hurts. "Green's a really good color on you."
His face is wet. Sam's tugging down a cuff to brush at him.
:::
A huge knife. Chop-chop, like a cooking show. There go his fingers, one knuckle at a time. He watches himself shout until they cut out his tongue.
:::
"I got you. Sh-shh, I got you."
Sam rubs his back up and down. Dean stares at his own hands in the glare from the harvest yellow lampshade until Sam climbs into his bed with him and shuts off the light.
:::
He's running through a field, away from light. Rumble, swish-swish-swish. He shouts into a phone.
A bar. Clinking glasses. Sam asks, "They still after you?"
:::
"It's her again." Sam looks up from the display on his ringing cell. "I don't know, maybe we should hear her out."
Dean studies Sam across his plate of fries. "No."
"If she's got a way to keep it from happening..."
He shakes the ketchup bottle like it's a rattlesnake. "There's no way to keep my trip downstairs from happening. I go, I come back. End of story."
The phone goes quiet. Sam blows out a breath. "I'm not talking about trusting her. I'm talking about using her."
Red sauce sloshes onto Dean's food. "That." He sets down the jar and rounds up a clutch of fries, points them at Sam. "That's the new you talking." He shovels the food into his mouth, looks Sam over while he chews. "I sold my soul to save you, Sam. Know what those visions have shown me? I didn't save you. Not yet. 'Cause you're gonna change. You're not gonna be my kid brother anymore, or the guy who went off to college. You're gonna get hard, Sam. You always wanted to do things right. But soon you're gonna decide that you can't anymore. You want to team up with a demon? Really?" Dean shakes his head and takes a swig of Coke. "You should want to send her straight back to hell, where she can't touch us." He rubs his mouth. "I get that this isn't easy for you, believe me. But Sam, this Ruby chick is not the answer."
Sam sits back. "OK," he says after awhile. He slides the phone back into his pocket and picks up his fork. "OK."
:::
He's leaning against the Impala when they come. Oily black dogs, all teeth and foamy slobber.
He looks across the roof at Sam. "Don't be a stranger."