Written for the August Prompt Exchange Challenge organized by Unattainable Dreams. Prompt for this month was: "He'll take your heart and you must pay the price." -Angel Eyes (ABBA). I must admit right off the bat: the prompt line is not directly inserted into the story. Instead, I wrote a story that I hope conveys the idea of that line...if that makes sense. Set in early season 4 with spoilers for the season 3 finale.
Keeper of Wishes
He's been here before.
It's a rerun of the same crap, but waking up with a throbbing headache and his arms tied behind his back and already aching is still scary. That's the funny part about this job: the fear never really leaves. Doesn't even really lessen all that much, whether you're killing your eighteenth vampire or your eight-hundredth. It's always the same and it's always different and it's always scary.
Dean doesn't say this stuff out loud, because part of how he's always dealt with fear is by pretending it isn't there. Part of how he's kept himself and Sammy alive all these years is with the cocky grins and the wisecracks and the solitary wink that says "I got this," even when his heart is beating so hard and loud outside his chest and the monsters are coming from everywhere, bursting up through the floorboards and scrabbling along the rooftops and falling from the goddamn sky.
The monster comes then, the way the monster always does. He struggles against the ropes then, the way he always does. The ugliest monsters are always the ones that could've been human, once. This is one of those. It's almost a man, but not quite. It has a long neck that's been permanently tilted to one side, like it's contemplating how best to go about peeling Dean's skin off. Its own skin is a sickly yellow, scabbed over and rotting in places. Long silver hair, thinning at the top, hangs over its mottled face like discarded birthday streamers from a party that was supposed to have ended weeks ago. It wears a long, gray robe, shapeless and torn and ugly. The eyes, though. The eyes are beautiful.
Dean sees them clearly when the creature drifts to the metal post he is involuntarily attached to and bends down to swipe long, gray fingernails along his cheek. Its smile is filled with black, rotted teeth and its lips are cracked and white, but the eyes are a brilliant and somewhat disarming green, and Dean recoils from them a little bit, smacks his head against the metal pole and tries to readjust his position, sitting on the floor with his hands tied useless behind him. The monster snickers and stops stroking his cheek but leaves its hand there, pressed gently against his skin.
"Didn't your mother ever teach you it's not nice to play with your food?" Dean asks whilst trying not to vomit, because remember that thing about fear and wisecracks? The monster licks its lips, and Dean wonders if it's actually planning on eating him (come on, that was clearly a joke), but then it smiles again and speaks without opening its mouth. The words echo up inside Dean's already pounding skull; a resounding and ageless kind of voice.
I can give you everything, it says. I can see the things you want, and I am glad to give it.
"Great. I want to be untied, please. Thanks," Dean quips, half expecting the long-fingered hand still resting against his cheek to start tearing at his face or gouging out his eyes. He'd almost prefer it at this point. The hand doesn't move. The creature blinks its incongruous, green eyes at him.
You harbor far greater wishes than that. Speak them, and they will become truth.
"Yeah? And why would you do that for me?" Dean asks, jerking his face away from the creature's fingers. It drops its hand without protest and speaks without speaking again.
I am the Keeper of Wishes, and you have a wish inside of you, the voice insists. I can hear your heart, Dean Winchester. It calls louder than most. Filled to the brim with what you do not say.
Dean's pretty tired of monsters thinking they're on a first-name basis with him. Dean's pretty tired of monsters, period. Dean's pretty tired. Also confused, because usually when he finds himself tied up in a basement, the knives or pliers or, if he's really lucky, teeth, come out pretty quick upon waking. He rarely gets offered anything besides pain and more of it. It would be a welcome change if it didn't so obviously come with strings attached.
Ah, yes. Strings. Strings make the puppets dance and the fish flop along the shore. Strings command orchestras, Dean Winchester. They hold the stars up inside a black sky.
Dean rolls his eyes. He's also pretty done with the whole mind-reading gag. Goddamn reruns. "So. You're saying there are definitely strings then? What are we talking here- you want my first born child? Hope you're a patient guy."
Patience is for those who cannot simply take what they want, the creature says. The ask is a formality. If you refuse to speak your wish, I will simply pluck it from your heart.
The monster's hand reaches out again, this time swiping a gray fingernail over Dean's chest. There is one second of pause, and then suddenly Dean's heart fills with fire, his entire body seizing against the onslaught of it.
Dean gasps, squirming against the ropes and the pain. "Okay, okay, wait," he pleads. The Wish Keeper pulls its hand away, and the burning stops immediately.
Your wish, Dean Winchester?
"I...I don't know," Dean flounders, still reeling. The bent neck of the Keeper of Wishes seems to bend even further until it almost touches the thing's shoulder, creaking and groaning as its fingers reach once more towards the center of Dean's chest.
"Wait, please. I...I need to think," Dean insists, pressing himself as far back as possible against the metal post, his boots scrabbling along the cold cement floor. "You said my heart was full, right? Fuller than most? Just give me a second to choose which wish. Please."
The Keeper of Wishes smiles an ugly, blackened smile, but the hand falls away again. Dean exhales in relief. This doesn't feel much like a rerun anymore. He's not sure which lines to say next, which words will save him and which will kill him. The memory of how he got here is muddy at best, but Sam has to know he's missing. Has to be looking for him.
Sam always comes, even now that his eyes are darker and deeper than Dean remembers them being and his mouth is tighter at the edges, always clamped around a secret he won't speak aloud. Sometimes Dean looks at the rigid back and bunched shoulders of his little brother and can only picture the scar that has spread out against the base of his spine; the shape of a knife that cut clean through. Sometimes Sam will catch Dean looking, and those eyes will grow impossibly darker.
But Sam will come. He'll still come. Dean just needs to buy himself some time.
"I...what happens?" he asks the creature hovering in front of him. "What will I owe you once my wish has been granted?"
You are not to know until it is done. Those strings you spoke of? They will attach themselves. You will not see them, but they will wrap themselves around your wrists. Twist at your ankles. Or perhaps they will slide around your throat. It is different for everyone. Even I do not yet know where the pieces will land. Decide, Dean Winchester. Speak your wish.
"Look, this is a big decision, okay? Lots of variables to consider. If I could just get a pen and paper... "
Dean thought that was a pretty solid line, but the Keeper doesn't so much as snort. Its ancient voice comes quick and low, a bit irritated in the way a mountain is affected by a small cloud passing in front of it. You think your brother can best a Thing like me? He cannot. The creature says, reading his mind again. It begins to pace the basement, and Dean notices long, gray toes to match its hideous fingers peeking out from beneath the battered robes as he shifts against the robes, feeling for any give.
And in any case, you do not need saving, the Keeper continues. I am giving you a gift. Take what is yours. You have earned this small favor.
Dean shakes his head. "But see, it's not a favor. It's an exchange. I've made deals before, and they haven't ended well for me." He adjusts his back against the cold metal behind him, overly conscious of the alignment of his neck while he stares up at the misshapen angle of the creature's. "Can't I refuse? Can't you just give my wish to someone who wants it?"
You do want it, Dean Winchester. Speak it, and it will be so.
Dean thinks for a moment. If this were real and without consequence, he wonders what he would say. There are too many safely-harbored pleas curled deep inside his belly to sort through, and they seem to change and twist and reshape themselves with the passing days. The first and most obvious is Mom. Bring Mary Winchester back, and suddenly their lives look nothing like his blood-splattered memories. Bring Mary back, and there's no need to wish for Dad's return, because he would still be here, too. But Dean wonders how long the Apple-Pie Winchesters would be able to live inside this new world before Yellow Eyes or another unseen threat ended it. Djinn-induced or Wish-Keeper granted, Dean already knows how that one pans out.
But what of the other longings that swim inside his head, floating to the surface due to blood-loss or whiskey or too much open road? What of the dreams that have yet to become another of Hell's nightmares?
It hits him, then, a stone-on-the-chest realization of the exact wish that's been pulling at his subconscious since he dug himself out of his own grave a little over a month ago. "I...I can't," he says immediately. The Wish Keeper licks its deadened lips.
Do not fear the wantings of your heart. Simply give in.
"I...It wouldn't be real," Dean argues, trying to unthink the thought pulsing so clearly and suddenly at the forefront of his exhausted mind. Trying to find the reasons not to say it aloud and make it reality. "If you gave me what I asked for, it still wouldn't be what I wanted."
And why is that? The creature asks. Simple. Unaffected.
"If you can read my mind, then you already know," Dean answers, and immediately regrets it. The monster is inches from his face on the next blink, those piercing eyes burrowing into his own, digging trenches into the backwaters of thoughts that nobody but Dean has ever known. It should stay that way, Dean thinks. No one else should have this crap floating around inside their skull. The Keeper of Wishes already knows what he's going to say before he says it, but Dean still has to speak the words. Because they're true, and maybe someone should hear them aloud, even if that someone is a monster.
"I want my brother back," Dean whispers, the words stilted in the cool, damp air of the basement. "I want Sam to be who he was before I went to Hell."
Good. The Keeper straightens up and steps away from Dean again.
"But it can't be undone," Dean says quickly, watching the monster begin its pacing again. "I'm not who I was before, either. I'm different and he's different, and it's my fault because I left him. So it wouldn't matter. Even if you change him back, it won't mean anything. I'll still have lost him."
The Keeper of Wishes stops pacing. Hell, then. Would you like me to take away Hell?
"What?" Dean's tongue somehow stutters over the lone syllable.
The screaming of your insides. It sounds like nothing I've heard in all my endless years here, The Keeper says. Perhaps you wish for me to quiet the sounds. Take you back to the before.
"You could do that? You could...turn back time?"
I am the Keeper of Wishes.
"Yeah, so you mentioned." Dean says. He thinks for a moment, tilting his head to echo the creature's bent neck. "What about you, huh? What would you wish for?"
Something close to a chuckle echoes inside Dean's head. You are a fascinating one, Dean Winchester, The Wish Keeper says. It's the only reason I have not simply pulled your wish from between your ribs. I grant wishes. I do not hold onto any of my own.
The hunter shakes his head. There's a window to open here, if he could just find the latch. "See I don't believe that. We're all motivated by something. Even a thing like you. You want something, but maybe you just can't name it. Or maybe you could name it, but you could never have it. Kind of like me."
I want nothing. The creature growls, but Dean's words seem like more than a passing cloud this time. There is something unraveling beneath the creature's paper-thin skin, an uncoiling of untouched nerves suddenly being prodded and examined.
"Nothing like nothing, or nothing like...you'd rather be done with it all?" Dean presses as the Keeper begins to pace again, its long-nailed toes slapping against the cement. Encouraged, Dean keeps talking. "It's gotta get tiring, right? Granting peoples' wishes all the time. Enslaved by the things they want. You can see all the ugly stuff inside of us, inside of me. And yet you can't punish. No, you have to do the opposite. You have to give us exactly what we want and just hope that the universe gives us our karma. I get it, man. That must really suck for you."
You understand nothing.
The creature bends down in front of him again, and Dean waits until those horrifyingly green eyes latch onto his own before he speaks. "I understand enough. You're ready to die, aren't you? Ready to let it all go after all these long years?"
Tell me your wish, Dean Winchester, comes the voice, loud and sharp inside Dean's head. The monster is staring straight at him, neck still forever bent at that sickening angle, the physical manifestation of its endless inquiry: What is it you wish for?
"Okay, okay," Dean relents, wincing against the intensity of the Keeper's voice rattling around inside his skull. He exhales a long breath. "I wish...I wish you were dead."
The Wish Keeper's white lips curl around a snarl. It thrusts a hand out and slams it against Dean's rapidly beating heart. Dean feels the fire screaming through his veins again, knows he's screaming, too. And then the Keeper's hand falls away and those green eyes grow impossibly wide, the skin around them thinning out into nothing and peeling from its face, pieces of it fluttering onto the ground and landing at Dean's feet. As Dean watches, the creature's body spasms and jerks as if it's been electrocuted, its bent neck bending even further until a resounding crack echoes throughout the moldy basement. In the next moment, the Keeper of Wishes shimmers in the air and crackles apart in an explosion as insignificant and delicate as the brush of a dragonfly's wing over a pond. Dean has two thoughts in rapid succession before his brain catches up to everything that's in front of him. The first is that he can't believe that worked. The second is that he's still got no way of untying himself and getting out of this basement.
And then he notices Sam.
Standing right where the monster used to be, a golden blade Dean's never seen before covered in black blood clenched tight in his hand. He smiles at Dean, but it's not the old smile. It's almost a grimace. Sam wipes the blade clean along the leg of his jeans.
"You okay?" he asks, bending to inspect his older brother. When Dean doesn't answer right away, Sam makes his own hasty assessment, nods an affirmation to himself, and crab-walks around the metal post until he's behind Dean. Dean feels a bit of stickiness still left on the blade as it slices through his ropes. He lets his arms fall to his sides, the joints protesting loudly.
"Thanks, Sammy," Dean says, rubbing at his swollen wrists. How long were you waiting in the shadows? The darkened thought slides along the edges of Dean's mind like the voice of the now-dead Wish Keeper, and he brushes it quickly away. How much of that did you hear? the voice insists. Sam helps him up, and he bites down hard on his lip when his shoulder is jostled and looped around his brother's.
"Easy," Sam says, adjusting to Dean's weight as he finds his own feet. Nothing easy here, Dean thinks, though it still sounds like the Keeper's voice inside his mind. Not anymore.
Sam guides Dean slowly toward the stairway leading out of the basement, still supporting his weight. But the stairs are too narrow for both of them, so Dean slides his arm out from around his little brother and tells him to go first. Sam grimaces again and begins to climb.
Dean follows, keeping his eyes down so he doesn't have to stare at Sam's back and trace the exact placement of the scar that killed them.
That's all, folks.