Chapter Fourteen ; The Reign of Agony
When Sam didn't find himself magically transported back in time to his Stanford, California apartment building on November 22, 2005 he thought that the gears of time travel had gotten a little rusty, that it would be taking a few extra seconds to get him there. When Sam didn't fall back onto he and Jessica's bed, listening to the beating drum of the shower going at full blast he assumed that he was walking slower than usual and would at any moment decide to plop down on the bed with a smirk on his face and a pleasant sigh. But when Sam didn't feel any blood droplets fall onto his cheek, when he didn't open his eyes to find Jess plastered to the ceiling with that clearly dead deer-in-headlights look to her face, and when he didn't watch her erupt into flame above his head… well, that's when he started to get a little anxious.
The chances of him having a new dream were slimmer than Lara Flynn Boyle in that pink tutu at the Golden Globes. He might be having that most welcomed change, sure, but Sam highly doubted it. If he was suddenly going to be playing a lively game of soccer with David Beckham, he certainly wouldn't be doing it with his eyes closed and unable to move.
Maybe because he had screwed with time, with the powers of fate that might or might not be real, Sam was stuck in a waiting station between bed and dream, dream and bed. It was a subway strike, and Sam was not only left holding the ball but stuck in his usual cab halfway between there past and there future. Oh, how peachy.
Opening one eye and then the other, with the intention of talking with his other subway passengers about what was going on – bitch and moan at the driver if there were no other commuters – Sam found himself more confused than he'd been when he was awake and looking over Dean's joke of a note.
Empty room. Concrete walls. Concrete floor. Some kind of slimy substance all over said walls and floor that looked far too much like ectoplasm for even the remotest sense of comfort. One moldy looking door straight across from him.
Sam had seen this room once before, had been here in one of his annoyingly (not to neglect terrifyingly) accurate preminissions. He felt bile rise up to the back of his mouth, along with the realization that he might be in store for another one.
"I get no breaks, no breaks," he thought sourly. "Who do I get to see die tonight?"
A noise burst into life from somewhere off to Sam's left, a kind of stunted shuffling that came progressively nearer until the little Winchester boy was able to see decently enough who or what was making that racket.
It was none other than Jonathan Meyers himself, carrying with him a decreped wooden chair slung through his left forearm. Somehow Sam wasn't all that surprised.
He watched as Meyers – who was so short he had to lean very far to the right in order to keep the chair legs from snagging on the ground and in effect shoot the doctor forward like a pint-sized rocket – weaved like a drunkard over to a favorable spot of floor in front of Sam.
"Oh, I'm sure it'll be very much a surprise to you, Samuel," Meyers said calmly. He plunked the chair down so that it faced Sam, but didn't yet sit down in it.
&&&
Dean had not recieved nearly enough courage to drive any farther than the Rainbow Brite infected gas station. He was pondering whether or not the caloric intake of a Twinkie would be worth it, if he'd be charmed by the notion of having some extra ass cushioning, when he unintentionally dropped the greasy log of joy and reached out to the whirling candy display in front of him.
There was no rosy guarantee that without the white plastic covered metal stand Dean would be able to keep on his feet, more likely he'd meet the dingy linoleum floor with his face than stand upright straighter than the barrel of a shotgun. If he couldn't see past the roaring beast of white hot pain running around behind his eyes, there was no way in hell he'd be able to last three seconds without collapsing.
Dean knew this feeling, but more on an informal basis; kind of like talking daily to the guy at the magazine stand without ever having the story of his life in your back pocket. This feeling, however, wasn't the type to beam a wrinkly smile, wave and ask, "Ha ya do-in?" in a thick New York accent. It was more likely to take a lead pipe to the back of your head. It was the kind of thing that, during the few times it decided to stop by, it wanted to make its presence known. This latest visit made three "Hey, remember me?" meetings.
The first time he had been playing with a box of Legos in his bedroom – the actual box, not the colorful plastic bricks. He had been just about ready to land on Pluto and battle the space aliens there with his ray gun when an evil little man had clawed his way out of the five-year-old Dean's abdomen. That had been the night his mother had incinerated above Sammy's bed, terrifying the baby and coming close to giving him a nasty heat burn.
The second time he had been scavenging through his old box of cassette tapes, trying to choose which Black Sabbath tape to listen to, when he doubled so far over in pain he had smacked his head against the dash of the Impala. That evil man had come back, grown because Dean had done so as well. That had been the night Jessica died, the night Sam was so pummeled by loss and disbelief he might have been cremated along with her if Dean hadn't gotten there in time.
But this time the pain was worse by far, surpassing the last two harrowing events even when combined. It was intense enough to bring Dean within an inch of passing out, of filling him with a want to dig into his body with his own fingers and rip that prick of a man out of there for good, of bringing him to the sad stage of ending himself because certainly if he didn't the pain would kill him anyway.
As the pain seemed to all but die down, as Rainbow Brite got bit in the neck by empathy and came rushing over to Dean to see "what's the matter with you, Cracker Jack?", and as gravity seemed to up in strength and send him toppling to the floor – smashing the Twinkie to a pulp – Dean didn't want to have to face what the monsters burrowing out from every last millimeter of his body were telling him.
His Sammy was locked in a trunk with holes drilled into the sides, thrown over the pier to sink to the bottom of the harbor. Sammy was holding his breath again, only this time not because he wanted to, this time the kid had to. And Dean might as well have been on the other side of the world.
&&&
Meyers seemed to be bursting at the seams with happiness. He didn't show it on him yet, still stood beside his rotting chair with a possible conviction that he'd break the thing if he sat down in it, but Sam could sense the emotion pulsing through the Chihuahua of a mad doctor.
Though he knew from the word go that his meddling with time and space had caused him to be slightly paralyzed in his dreams, Sam hooked an eyebrow and made to act like he was dumber than a post.
"Stealing some of our patients medications, are we?"
The doctor clapped his hands, rubbed them together. "No, son, just excited."
"If you don't mind my asking, excited about what?"
Meyers jumped once on his toes. "Oh, you'll find out soon enough, my boy."
"I only play these kind of games with my brother, Meyers, so if you'll just cut the–"
"Curmudgeon, yes?" Meyers leaned toward his company, though his feet didn't move an inch in any direction. "To tell you the truth, Samuel, I was quite shocked to learned that your brother even knew that word. Every now and again he seems to have a flicker of intelligence in him, but then–" he clapped his hands again, louder this time "–it's gone. Must be very frustrating for you."
Sam said nothing, tossed over in his mind how long Meyers had been tailing his brother when the doctor started to speak again.
"I know with my wife, sometimes I want to scream. I love the girl dearly, you know, but her accent is so thick. I imagine that must be what it's like for you, only in Emily's position. You stand there for ten minutes, trying to tell your brother were the Thorozine is but it just doesn't get through his skull. Your intelligence, my boy, is much like Emily's Germanic accent. It's so dense, you might as well resort to keeping your mouth shut and conversing through the children's picture cards that teach them a new word."
"My brother understands me just fine, Meyers."
He stomped his foot, pointed at Sam with a wide smile. "Oh, of course he does, Samuel! Because you don't tell him much more than a hare tells a fox where it lives." The man's grin said it all: the hare will give the fox a false address, but the wolf watching from a nearby thicket will follow the hare to its real home and have a ten course meal.
It hit Sam like a grand piano. Standing there – yet leaning back far enough to make his neck strain from having to hold his head up to see somewhat normally – he had the epiphany that should have hit him a couple of hours earlier.
The dream in which Dean was about to become Meyers's next guinea pig had never led to blood. It had been interrupted by the Doc's comment about hurrying up, tick tock, much like a missing scene in a movie reel. Sam had never actually seen his brother die, just kind of assumed it and went on from there.
But it hadn't been Dean who was meant to die on that gurney, not ever. It had been Sam. All along, right from the get-go, it had been Sam.
The dream he had had been the nice, juicy steak in the bear trap. Meyers had planted the seed in Sam's mind to lure him to the most dismal act in the play. He had known that the minute Sam had that dream he would have thought it another one of his preminisions. He had known that it would snow on the mountains of hell before Sam let this one slide, ignored it like he had done with Jessica. That bastard had known Sam would devise a way to get Dean away from Arrowsic Island, leaving Samuel Winchester helpless with an oozing wound in front of a very hungry cougar.
&&&
Rainbow Brite, every strand of her hair now an electric blue, hadn't gotten the answer she wanted. She didn't get any, actually, just a series of hissing grunts as Dean had struggled to his feet. Though it was obvious Cracker Jack had other, more important things weighing on his mind, Gweneth Weiss's granddaughter had thrown question after question at him anyway.
"Do I need to call an ambulance?", "Is it your heart, your liver, your prostate gland?" (that one had gotten very close to getting a "what the – my prostate? I'm only twenty-seven!" look), "If you're going to die, could you do it outside in the parking lot? I just washed the floor", "Can you talk? Because if you can it would be nice to be able to tell the 9-1-1 operator what's wrong with you", and Dean's favorite: "You're going to pay for the Twinkie, right?"
He did pay for that Twinkie, telling himself through the finally subsiding pain (though it was still there like a nail through the eye) that he'd deal with the yellow and white gunk on his back some other time, and stumbled out of the mini-mart doors like the hunchback of Notre Dame.
Somehow he managed to make it into Georgetown without killing anything, had been able to speed to the Driftwood Motel without wrapping the Impala around a street lamp.
Making another mental note to thank his lucky starts sometime in the future along with cleaning off his jacket, Dean ran to his brother's motel room without being consciously aware that his legs were even pumping like well oiled pistons. He skidded to a stop in front of the appropriate door and, not wanting to waste any time in opening it the traditional way, Dean simply kicked the damned thing in. He plowed into the room, half delirious from the pain shooting all the way to his fingertips, and felt the floor blink out beneath his feet.
Sammy was lying on the bed, asleep, when by every rule in the book of a man prone to early waking by nightmares and strange noises, Dean's little brother should have shot out of bed at the sound of the door breaking open like a cannon – with steely, suspicious eyes and dagger poised and ready.
"SAM?"
&&&
"Congratulations, Samuel, you've figured out the Rubik's Cube." Meyers smiled, finally settling himself into the chair in front of the up-tilted gurney his patient was strapped to. "Your father would be proud."
"This isn't real," Sam said forcefully. "I'm dreaming all of this, all of it, and it's not real."
Meyers was no longer able to keep the giddiness he was feeling away from his face. "You'll think otherwise soon enough, what with that pliable mind of yours, and when you do…. Say hello to your gal Jessica for me."
Sam had enough slack in his binds to slam his fist against the gurney. "Don't you mention her, don't you dare mention her."
"Touchy, aren't we?" Meyers's smile was starchy now, but otherwise he was still gayer than a rainbow. "My apologies, Samuel. I will keep your lady friend out of this."
Losing his cool, well, wasn't. Sam needed to remain calm throughout this whole appointment with the devil because if he didn't something bad might happen. If he got himself too worked up, his brain might start reconsidering the dream factor in all of this.
"Thank you," Sam replied politely. He willed his muscles to relax, became like mush in leather straps.
Meyers was starting to realize how tough an egg Sam was going to be to crack – unless he already knew, which the gleam in his black eyes said far too clearly. "I suppose you aren't wondering why you're here and not your ragamuffin brother?"
"You'd be correct."
The doctor's smile gained new life. "But you're lying, Samuel, and it's not very polite to lie. All you've been doing for the past three minutes now is ask why over and over again. Really, it's quite annoying. If you don't mind stopping, I'm getting a pounding headache."
"SAM?"
Those words seemed to rattle the very foundation of the world. Everything seemed to shake, to ring like church bells. There was a lengthy pause before the voice acted up again, just as rich in emotion as before.
"Sammy! Fuck, I knew I shouldn't have left. Sam!"
An uncontrollable reaction to hearing his brother, Sam savagely tugged and pulled at his binds, looking up at the ceiling and around at all the walls. "DEAN!"
Meyers laughed. "Really, now, Samuel, don't be silly. Your brother can't hear you. To him you're like Sleeping Beauty, forever to rest until the handsome prince comes bouncing along on his valiant steed."
"Then why's he yelling at me to wake up if he thinks I'm just taking a nap?"
"And why can't you wake up? First, you're already starting to bleed there – your nail is bend back from when you were struggling. Dean is quite observant for a man obsessed with women, I'll give him that."
But in truth, Meyers didn't know what made Dean come charging back into the picture. He was well aware of how special Sam was, but Dean was nothing more or less than a fool. There was nothing in the boy's head other than a few scraps of lint and a piece of string, so what made him come back?
"Secondly, you can't wake up because your brain thinks that you're already awake."
Sam shook his head, but it was getting hard to deny how real everything appeared to be. "No, I'm dreaming. I'll wake up. Dean'll wake me up, toss me in a cold shower or someth–"
"Samuel, it is not wise for your brother to wake you while you stand there positive that you're already risen. I've had it happen once, dear boy. You'll go daft, have to be put into a home and be lost to your brother forever. Lose, lose situation as they say."
"You're bluffing. I've had night terrors before, would have bet my life that I was awake, but…."
Doc's face couldn't hold his grin. "But?"
Closing his eyes, Sam pressed his head against the gurney.
"Yes, Samuel. Unless you wake yourself, just like you've done with those other night terrors – and I'm afraid there is no category for what you're in right this moment – you'll be walking through concrete for the rest of your life."