Spiral 2
Sam made a habit of frowning over at him during the next few days. The muppet, fixed face, frown. Not like he was disappointed or annoyed, but like Dean was a jigsaw puzzle he hadn't made his mind up about putting together.
The shoulders were better. The scratches were healing normally. The small tears in his neck and side were on the mend.
It was nothing. Dean shrugged it all away.
And when a random bruise popped out on his thigh that he couldn't remember getting, he figured he must have walked into a table somewhere, or that he'd gotten it back with the poltergeist and it'd just been building below the surface.
He poked at it, flattened his hand over it while he stood in the shower, and tried to remember.
It felt like he should know where it came from. It felt like déjà vu and like it'd already been there.
The bathroom door opened with a rasp.
"You about done in here?" Sam called loudly.
Dean took his hand off the bruise and turned his body into the spray, letting it peel the remaining suds from his skin and beat a little more heat into his back. "Yeah."
"Good, Bobby's on the line."
"Your brother tells me your last hunt threw you for a loop."
Dean grimaced. "No, not really."
"That right?"
"Yep. Just your average angry spirit."
"Sam says it attacked you, and that it didn't exactly follow the MO. You sure you didn't miss something?"
Dean glared at Sam, who sat on the other side of the room pretending to look at his computer and not listen in. "Even if we did miss something, Bobby, it doesn't matter now. We've hung around, and the house is quiet. No trace of EMF. It's finished. We got it."
Bobby grunted, an aggravatingly doubtful sound.
Dean sniffed, reached into his open bag, and threw a pair of balled up socks at Sam's head. "Really, Bobby, we're fine."
And they were, for another few days at least.
There were a few things, a random cut on Dean's toe, a bruise on his knee.
He tried to convince himself that maybe he'd started sleepwalking.
Pain crashed onto him, rolling in hard and fast, squeezing down on more than just his head.
It was like everything inside him was trying to escape his body by pushing through his eyeballs. His lungs seized and he bit down on the inside skin of his lower lip. A moan slithered backwards over the roof of his mouth, rising high and humming out his nose.
"Dean?"
He sat up, shoving the blankets off his legs, stumbled to his feet and hit the ground between the beds on his knees.
"Hey!" Heavy hands wound over his ribs from behind, taut over his t-shirt. "What's going on?"
Dean's eyes ran wet. He couldn't talk. The pressure built and he tipped forward onto his elbows with a shattered grunt.
"Hey," Sam repeated, fingertips digging cloth into Dean's skin.
Then, just like that, it was over. Pressure winking away.
Dean panted, scraped himself away from Sam and staggered to the bathroom, shoving the door shut before he turned on the light.
"Dean." Sam banged, rattling the knob. "Open the door."
The washed out yellow in the room punched into Dean's eyes and he clenched them closed, groping blindly for the faucet.
Another fist from outside shook the plastic wood on its frame.
The water ran too hot. Dean cupped it onto his face anyway. When he tipped his chin up and squinted into the mirror, traces of dark running to watery copper streaked down from his lashes.
One more hard knock beat next to him.
Dean wasn't quick enough, and in the next second, Sam had the door open anyway.
They stood, staring wide at each other, eidetic expressions crystal sharp in the match of their eyes.
Sam swept the room for EMF and found nothing.
He took the mirror down from the bathroom and checked the back.
"Dude, I didn't say Bloody Mary three times, and I was asleep when it happened," Dean carped. His eyes pulsed with a lingering sting that was making him snappish.
"Then what? Dude, this doesn't just happen." Sam waved his hands in the air, fingers looking long and brittle, like the stringy ends of broken peanut shells.
"I don't know," Dean bit, rubbing his temples. "Would you stop yelling at me?"
Sam dropped his hands, going from aggravated to superable with a toneless thud, eyes stretched and a little panicked. "Could the djinn have something to do with this?"
"Why would it?"
"Before the poltergeist, the djinn is the most recent hunt we've been on. Maybe the… supernatural acid it gave you has side effects."
"When has that ever happened, Sam? The djinn is dead. When they're dead, they're done. It has nothing to do with this."
Sam stared. "Are you sure?"
No. "It's not the djinn, Sammy."
Sam rubbed restless fingers through his hair. "You don't know what it is, you just said. People's eyes don't just bleed, Dean."
"It's not the djinn."
Bobby knew of nothing, immediately off hand, that could make someone's eyes bleed spontaneously, beyond Bloody Mary and an invisible type of gremlin that fed on people's irises while they slept, but were thought to be extinct since the days of Samuel Colt.
Sam assured him Dean's irises were intact, and Bobby began asking all the other expected questions about where they'd been and what they'd been doing, then told them to come back to the salvage yard, since they were close, so they could figure it out from there.
Dean snagged the phone from Sam. "Bobby, this is stupid. It's nothing."
"You feel okay?"
"I feel fine."
"Best be sure," Bobby said calmly.
Sam yanked the phone back. "We're on our way."
Damn it.
Dean resigned himself to it, because this was weird enough now not to ignore, until Sam hung up and told Dean he wanted him to see a doctor, just in case.
"No way." Dean's want for answers didn't go that far. His eyes hadn't started bleeding again, and the sting and heaviness that surfaced every time he blinked was nearly gone. In fact, the whole thing had lasted about as long as the actual Bloody Mary thing.
It was starting to feel like that should mean something.
Sam didn't push the doctor visit, but as they chucked their things in the car, he segued back to the poltergeist. "Maybe it did something more to you than we know. Something internal?"
"That's not it."
"How do you know? It jacked up your shoulders, scratched you up, and we still don't know how it did that."
"I don't think that was the ghost," Dean said.
Sam missed a step coming out of the room, rebalanced, and stared. "What? What do you mean?"
"Oh, god," Dean pleaded under his breath, to any deity that might hear. "Nothing. I didn't mean anything." He grabbed Sam's bag, thunked it into the trunk and snapped it closed, jangling keys out of his pocket as he headed to the driver's door.
Sam rounded the car's other side, folded his arms, dropped his eyes, eyebrows, chin and head, all forward in a dangerously patient stance.
Dean glanced, felt the fire, and darted his gaze skyward. "Fine. You're right. It was probably the ghost."
"The ghost is dead, you said so yourself. When they're dead, they're done." Sam leaned into the car, templed his hands on the roof. "So, what did you mean?"
Dean scratched the back of his neck, rolled his eyes, sucked his cheek in, and relented. "I mean, I don't think the ghost did it. It started while the ghost was there, but, even after I shot the thing, it didn't let up. Then you killed it, and it…" Dean made a rolling gesture with his hand, "…kept going."
"Crap, Dean." Sam ran a frustrated hand over his head as he pushed away from the car. "How about giving me a little freakin' information once in a while! I mean, dude, would it kill you?"
The blast of aggravation rocked Dean back a step, bunched his nerves and got him giving in to the defensive. "No, but it might make you freakin' walk off in the middle of the night."
Sam snapped his mouth closed, lips turning white, eyes lit bright with surprise.
Dean folded immediately, spreading a palm out. "I'm sorry."
A muscle trembled in Sam's neck, eyes woeful, and Dean deflated further.
"Really," he insisted. "I didn't mean that."
Sam dropped his gaze, shook his head, kicking at the ground. "Dean," he exhaled. It was a plea, and it sounded delicate, like fluttering hummingbirds, thin glass wind chimes, and exhaustion.
"I'm sorry," Dean said again.
Sam's jacket wrinkles smoothed as his chest filled, reappeared when he breathed out. But this sigh was deeper, more forgiving than the first. He rested his woeful eyes on Dean and stepped closer. "Anything else you're ready to spill?"
Dean thought about the fading bruise on his thigh, the soreness when he bent his elbow.
He thought about the long slender cut under his chin, spread at the end like a fan, a cut he didn't remember giving himself in the last few days, but one that felt and looked an awful lot like the one he gave himself last year, shaving with Sam's razor when his own electric one broke.
Maybe this was something left over from the djinn, some old stretch of life coming back at him in a condensed alternative.
Maybe none of it was real.
Maybe a gaping wound in his chest would show up, where he'd stabbed himself with a knife soaked in lamb's blood.
tbc