Fragment – chpt 8.
by: sifi.
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Oh man… can't breathe… can't breathe… what the hell's going on? Did I just shoot Sammy? his eyes opened in the darkness and he knew he was indoors. No… we were outside when I shot him… bone-yard maybe? Hard to say… Why'd I shoot him?... an image of shifting yellow eyes in Sam's face came to him, breathe Dean! I can't feel my lips… slowly his chest began to expand, filling his head with sparkling cotton as oxygen nourished him once more.
An image of a battered, bloody red-head came to him as pain stabbed through his lower abdomen stopping his breath in his throat for its intensity. A shadow moved, black on black, more of a sense of motion rather than anything visual and though he wanted to call out, wanted to feel the strong pull of Sammy's hand in his he couldn't. That shadow might not be Sam, it might be something else. Holding in a whimper as a ripping-rending tried to burrow its way out of him, he gasped and pulled his knees to his chest with one hand, the other reaching out into darkness, Not the rats…please not the rats… someone, anyone? Please… help me…
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Shivering woke him with a snap of his jaw and he tasted tangy from the inside of his cheek. Sam?... something happened… there was light… it was so pretty… oh man my guts!... oh man the rats! Stabbing… stabbing something… OH MY GOD! "Sam!" he barked waking fully with the image of his brother laying on the bathroom floor, his bright red blood seeping up from the edges of HIS knife sticking in his gut. Some of that blood ran from the corner of his mouth as his eyes cried tears and he begged Dean to leave him.
His heart squeezed into his throat while his hands scrubbed his face. It's so dark… how could I leave him? Sam!… I'm coming Sammy… he levered himself, however stiffly, to his feet, a variation in shadow guiding him out of the stairwell and into the open air of evening.
Under a streetlamp he saw a memory of blood matted copper hair and leaned heavily, gasping for breath as though he were the one who had an eight inch bowie knife sticking into his guts. He looked at his hands noting just a hint of dirty rust on a couple of his fingers, At least it's not the red-head's guts… or Laura's… he gasped feeling that gnawing again, it was odd and grotesquely dull with moments of sharpness. It feels like the rats…oh God Sammy said he'd keep them away… he said they didn't get in… oh man, snap OUT of this Dean! That was sixteen years ago! they bit… yes, they bit but they didn't get inside but a part of him was insisting they were there, they'd been there all along and were just now trying to bite and claw their way out of him, …and God help me I think they really are! Gotta get to Sammy… his blood… the redhead's… no she walked past me as I killed her… Laura? Did I kill her too? Sammy never told me… I remember showering bits of her off my body…she was stuck to me, on the side… he ran his hand down his right side with the memory, we made love… we broke up… but we were back together… at least for the night… a flick of steel against skin made his stomach lurch and it was all he could do to keep himself on his feet. No... not Sammy… my GOD not Sammy! he found the strength to push himself away from the streetlight, to move forward even though he felt like his intestines had taken on a life of their own and were trying to break free of him. He had to get to Sam.
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"... his prints were all over the knife…"
"That's because it's his knife… he was sharpening it…" Sam explained drowsily.
"And you just happened to run onto it? You were feeling a little… what? Self destructive? Suicidal?" the no-nonsense agent mocked.
"Superman…" Sam smiled, "I thought I was Superman for a sec… oops…" he chuckled, "Guess I was wrong…"
"Mr. Winchester do you realize I could have you arrested for aiding and abetting an escaped felon?" he asked.
Sam nodded, "Accused… not proven… but go for it… y'know why? 'Cause he didn't do it…he didn't kill anyone…" he blinked hard and shook his head feeling as if there was a rock sitting on his belly then yawned hard and missed the look that passed between his two visitors.
"…Cops know that…" he muttered and whipped his eyes back open, "Y'know… you could do your friggin' jobs and clear him once and for all if you just freakin' exhumed the body of the damned doppleganger in St. Louis… looks just like him… easy mistake to make… but why the hell would you want to clear an innocent man? Huh? Freakin' Federal Bureau of Insanity… ass holes… get out of my room…" he grumbled feeling a wave of muted, cottony fury trying to come to a point within himself, thankfully the drugs in his system weren't letting that happen.
One of them, he wasn't sure which one really, leaned over him, eyes boring into his with such a wooden seriousness it made Sam want to laugh, "Mr. Winchester… your brother stabbed you with an eight inch Bowie Knife… then he fled and left you to die! Why are you trying to protect him?"
Sam wobbled his head, "Eff You…" he slurred, "My mistake… I made a dumb mistake… Sammy Dumbass Winchester… that's m'name don't wear it out… he he he, and I told him to leave cause I knew you shitheads would show up… that's why I'm the smart one!" he nodded starting to feel pretty good despite the weight in his belly.
"How are you going to hook up later?" he asked.
Sam rolled his head back and forth again and felt a small wistful smile playing on his lips as he thought of Sarah, the memory of kissing her so hungrily, of their weekend together and how they'd learned each other so thoroughly.
"Hook up with Dean?... not happenin'… he's gone… told him go… he listens to me… I'm his psychic friend don't cha know…" he grinned, yawned, and sighed as his head rolled to the side and drug induced sleep ended the questioning session.
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"Sammy!... SAMmy!... SAMMY!" Dean called as he thrashed on the quilted floor under him, "NO! Not my boy! He's MINE! YOU CAN'T HAVE HIM!... Oh God… Gah… SamMY!" he howled. His eyes were open but there wasn't a hint of his mind in the present. "Somebody HELP me! Why won't anybody HELP ME! Sammy!"
John swallowed, his forehead pressing against the glass window to his son's room while his boy rolled kicking, bucking and screaming, bound tightly in that horrible canvas contraption that kept him from tearing himself apart with his bare hands. I'm losing him, moment by moment… every second of every day pulls him further from me…I can't watch this… this… my son's hell… my son's hell is my hell… please God… help my boy… I don't care about myself, just help my boy…
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"Sammy!" he barked and gasped, breathing hard for a long moment as light and color came back to his vision, and feeling returned to his face.
"What?" he looked up from the computer screen and caught sight of the near panic on his brother's face, "Dean?"
The elder Winchester shook his head and met his brother's eyes, he was at a complete loss. "Nothing…" he groaned as a feeling of pain shot through his lower belly, intense enough to double him over in his chair, Not the rats… he thought fleetingly and shook his head as the feeling retreated to a dull ache speckled with moments of sharpness.
"You alright?" he asked, his brows furrowing as his big brother clutched his abdomen for a minute then seemed to breathe through it.
"Yeah…" he gasped and nodded.
"Dean what the hell is going on? You're starting to scare me man… how's your head?" he asked, "You seein' double or anything?"
He'd been half joking but the wary huff that came out of his big brother gave him pause, "Dude don't tell me you need another CT, I swear to God you're gonna start mutating in front of my eyes…seriously… what's going on? Are you okay?"
Dean shook his head, his eyes wide and his expression once again telling more of the story than his words would, "I don't know… I keep seeing… hearing… things… awful things man…" his brows furrowed and his mouth frowned deeply, "… I could've swore I shot you… or… something…" he chugged from his water bottle as an image of his blade slicing through a heavily bandaged and unconscious Sam's neck rocked him. His hand squeezed reflexively and if the fear that came afterward hadn't been so startling, Sam actually would've laughed as half the bottle emptied into his face.
Barely seeming to notice a fountain of water up his nose Dean jack-in-the-boxed to his feet, the chair clattering to the floor behind him, his eyes fixed on his little brother as his hand pulled his lock-back from his back pocket. He opened the blade and looked at it, it wasn't the one he saw in his mind's eye, it wasn't his bowie knife, but with an image like that in his head he wasn't about to take any chances.
A moment of blankness passed through Dean's eyes and Sam felt icy fingers wrap around the base of his brain as he rose to his feet, his expression wary, "Dean?" he asked. Since they'd arrived in town Dean had been a little off. Sam first thought it was because he wasn't sleeping well, but a few weeks worth of crap sleep, under normal circumstances, would never have given Sam cause to feel wariness around his brother. Unfortunately, the last couple months, since John's death, coupled with something Dean was keeping locked down deep inside, Laura's frighteningly thorough disappearance, added to the multiple weeks worth of crappy sleep, the moments of pure strangeness Dean had been experiencing since they'd arrived in this tiny little 'burg, and now this question about whether or not he'd ever shot him? Needless to say, Sam wasn't about to take any chances, not considering what they'd come here to investigate anyway.
"What 'cha doin?" he asked.
"Relax Sam…" Dean snapped back to himself, folded the knife closed and pushed it across the table to his little brother then grabbed his jacket and slid into it meeting Sam's eyes pointedly, "I'm gonna take a walk… do us both a favor…" he tossed him the keys to the car, "…whatever weapons we've got in our bags… put 'em somewhere…" he nodded and turned.
"Dean?" Sam asked just as his hand clasped the doorknob.
"Just do it Sam… okay?"
"…your gun," Sam instructed with his hand out.
Dean smiled and dropped his head, he'd completely forgotten about the gun in his jacket. He pulled it, dropped the mag, emptied the chamber and handed it all over to his younger brother.
"I'll be back in a while…"
"Where're you going?" Sam asked.
"Well, we came here to look into some unexplained incidents of sleepwalk-psychosis right?"
"I thought you had it figured out as toxins in the water or a natural gas leak or something…" Sam joked though he was relieved that Dean wasn't willing to take any chances. Maybe he's going to be okay after all… I hope.
Dean Shrugged, "I might have been…"
"Wrong?" Sam smirked.
"It does happen… not very often… after all I am the big brother," he smirked nodding.
"Which means you're always right…" Sam finished.
"Damned straight… even if I'm…mistaken once in a while… I'm still right about it," he smiled then shrugged with his mouth and placed the piece for his EMF meter into his ear, "I'm gonna go see if I can find anything that points to anything supernatural."
"Dean… aren't you worried that… maybe I could…" Sam started to ask.
Dean took a moment to consider Sam's question, unwilling to brush aside his younger sibling's concerns as immaterial no matter what John might have discovered about him, "No… " he smiled in a way Sam hadn't seen in years. An open, complete and absolutely unguarded smile that spoke of nothing but certainty, the manifestation of it touched Sam's heart in a way that told him that somehow nothing else mattered but his big brothers' faith in him. Something that told him because Dean believed it, it MUST be so, and for the first time in a long time, Sam started to feel good.
"Why not? I mean I AM the psychic freak here…" he asked curiously.
Dean shrugged, "I don't know Sam… but the way I figure it… I started getting these flashes… glimpses… whatever you want to call 'em… pretty much when we got to town… you… you still got nuthin'… maybe your abilities protect you from whatever's going on here, or maybe your exercises with Kaitlyn helped… I don't know but…" he speculated.
Sam shrugged, It's not implausible… I hope you're right Dean… I won't let anything happen to you… long as I'm in MY right mind… "I'll ditch the weapons then hit the Sheriff's station if you want to check the history of the town."
Dean nodded, "We'll meet up at that park we passed coming in… around 3? Well have some beers, shoot some pool at the bar across the street… see what we came up with?" he suggested.
Sam nodded, "Be careful Dean… whatever's going on here… I don't like the feel of it."
"Dude you're not feeling it…" Dean reminded him.
"Exactly," Sam nodded.
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tbc.
Please R&R…
Thanks. sifi
