It was with a shudder that Sam realized that he was the monster that had been hiding deep in a closet somewhere in his mind, that he was himself the thing he'd feared the most. It wasn't until he was levitating, the blood dripping from icy fingers that he realized it. He was the pages ripped out of the end of a book. A nightmare to himself and the world that he was born to destroy and to save.
"We're getting close..." Sam leaned around a cold, stone wall. The church was tucked back deep in the backcountry, at the edge of where an old vineyard and an orchard met. The smell of grapes had mingled with the wine-tinged rottenness of this sickly, hollow place, the wind was cold. Sam felt Dean's breath close to his cheek as he leaned around his shoulder, as near now as breathing. Neither brother had ever been particularly conscious of the fact that, when they were together, they stood just inches apart. Both always felt much safer as close together as they could physically be without interfering with their aim.
"The EMF is off the chart, dude..."Dean slipped the reader into his pocket. Sam took a chance to peep at it.
"Did you make that out of an old Walkman?" Sam's brow curled. Dean grinned, bashful, biting his lip around the little mischievous smirk he was giving his brother. Sam could never understand how Dean could look like a little boy in his expressions but be at least a few centuries older than God in the heavy burden of his eyes.
Bobby's voice cut through whatever snarky little quip Sam was about to make about Dean's affinity to transforming old junk into new things.
"I can't see a damn thing...How do you know we're getting close?" Bobby shivered there in the dark. It was verging on the night, and this place was misty from the old well house somewhere over the hill and behind the church.
"Because I can hear the spirits...They're not happy I've come back." Sam closed his eyes as he could practically feel Dean's heart stop at that statement.
The chains wrapped around Sam's feet as he levitated higher, sailing for the roof. It wasn't until he was up there that he realized his body was on fire. His shadow spread over the whole church like the wings of a great bat. Sam felt his eyes billowing and rolling black smoke. His head felt like Vesuvius boiling over, he dreamed of doom and dragons.
Dean was on the floor. The bones lay scattered about his feet. His eyes were wide, and his hair stood up like omens burden the shoulders of cats. The blood dripped on his face, down his cheeks, as he saw the death of his mother personified in this transformation of Sam.
Bobby still lay knocked unconscious in the corner. Dean cut him an anxious look and failed to call his name. Then, he looked back at Sam. Sam felt as if he was looking inside Dean's mind. Suddenly, this psychic projection echoed through him, ricocheting as a gunshot, and he could hear Dean's thoughts.
"Not him, not him...My little brother! I will kill you for what you've done to him, you bastard!" Dean's spirit screamed at Yellow Eyes. Sam wasn't aware until now that Yellow Eyes spirit was also in the room, speaking from the blasphemous baptismal.
"We have to find a way to get past her..." Sam nodded. There, standing by the well...A woman in white. Her hair flowed in the wind. She was crying as she held the chain that Sam had been hauled in on. Linked into that agonizing chain were the bones of all her children she had drowned in the well over the years.
"I can deal with her, Sammy...You and Bobby get inside." So absence hadn't changed Dean's shoot first, ask questions later ways. Sam felt his eyes roll in the heat of his head. That would be his brother...
"Sammy...I know you're still in there! Whatever this is, you can fight this!" Dean held up a hand.
Sam breathed in the smoke. He felt the blood shriek and scream and all his bones were vibrating, buzzing, and whirring like gears in a machine. He heard his throat crack. The pain of his extended arms was astronomical. It was a whole new state of being, this pain.
But then, somehow, he heard Dean cut through the static. Dean who had forced his way forward and caught his chains by the end like someone holding on to the wispy string of a dollar store kite.
"Sam..."
The voice rebounded in his oblivion. His brother. The purest, strongest bond that he had ever known. The boy who had hauled him free of a fire at the dawn of his life.
Sam woke up on the ground. He was drenched in blood and his whole body was weak like a newborn chick pushed free from an egg. Plus, he was sore everywhere, from the inside out of his bones, as if his body was the egg he'd forced free of a hot minute, and his marrow was the yolk.
He was laying on Dean's lap. Dean was talking to him in a meandering, endeared meaningless disjointed jabber, trying to get him to come back to earth. By now, Bobby had sat up.
"What...What happened?" Sam bit his lip.
"Shhh! Shh, we'll explain everything when we get the Hell outta here!" Dean begged.
"Think you can walk, Dean?" Bobby begged, dabbing at the blood dripping down his face from a wound to his head.
"Mmhm, yeah. I'm gonna have to carry him. Can you get the gear, and whatever that thing was that he dropped?" Dean's eyes darted around the room.
Bobby hopped to do what he'd been asked.
"What happened?" Sam begged.
"Shh, we gotta go...Come on...We gotta go..."Dean hauled Sam up onto his shoulders, carrying him fireman style out the door of the church, Bobby at his heels.