Dean didn't bother with closing the door, making sure that a vast amount of attention was drawn away from room twelve and not to it. On any other day he would have, but not with his little brother lying there on that bed with such a troubled look on his face.
Running over to the farthest bed, to his brother who other than that bothered expression seemed utterly paralyzed, Dean lunged himself onto the ocean blue clothed mattress. Planting his knees on either side on his brother's thighs, forgoing any thoughts revolving around what someone walking by and looking into the room might gather seeing Dean straddling his kid brother, he started shaking Sammy's shoulders. Swimming through his head, zinging to and fro, was the fact that everyone who had died by the ghost of Jonathan Meyers had been asleep.
"Sammy!"
Nothing, the brunette continued lying there beneath his older brother like he, Sam, had fallen victim to a coma. And then a terrible thought crept into the back of Dean's mind, one relentless and too stocky to be pushed away: what if Sam was in a coma? What if all the victim's had lapsed into one, explaining why they never had any marks on them other than the surgical kind, why not a single person had ever heard anything?
"Fuck, I knew I shouldn't have left. Sam!"
If he was in a coma, could he even hear anything going on around him? Was it possible he was in a state akin to some stroke victims, able to see and hear and think but not communicate, or was all hope truly lost?
It was best not to think about things like that, to not dwell on such dark things, but how could Dean not? He didn't know what else he could possibly think of – somehow, preoccupying himself with the latest Bradjolina gossip seemed a little too sick and wrong for the current state of the world – he didn't know how to stop the spreading cloak of darkness in his mind.
Looking down at his younger brother, whose eyes were moving around beneath their lids as if he was in the middle of R.E.M sleep, whose body lay like a mass of rubber on the bed, Dean couldn't not think of how Sam might be waiting for the final out. That inevitable final out, the one everyone was hoping to hold up by hitting foul ball after foul ball, but poor Sam had always been a lousy baseball player and time was running against him.
"It's going to be all right, Sammy," Dean tried to shakily comfort himself more that his brother. "It's going to be okay. I don't know if you can hear me or not, but if you can just know that Dean's going to get you out of this. Sammy, I'm here. Your brother's here and I'm not going to walk away from you this time."
Though Dean had said those words, he didn't even know if they were true. Was everything going to be all right? Was he going to be able to pull Sam out of the clutches of a demonic man with a pension for death?
The chances of that happening seemed bleak, so far away that they were nothing less than a faintly glowing speck off in the horizon.
&&&
Meyers was sitting calmly in his seat, though stiffly. It was like he knew that if he put too much weight on that decayed wooden chair he would shatter it and send his ghostly ass to the concrete floor. With his fingers entwined, hands in lap, he acknowledged Sam like a restaurant manager interviewing a possible dish washer.
"I can tell, Samuel, that you're rather upset by this news," Meyers said evenly.
"No shit."
The doctor clicked his tongue. "I expect that language coming from your brother, boy, by not from you."
Sam unsuccessfully tried to shrug his shoulders. "You know what they say, great expectations…."
Narrowing his eyes, Meyers seemed to do what he had done in the church: grow to a bigger size. It wasn't visible, not in any real sense of the word, but Sam could have sworn the kook had puffed himself up right before his very eyes anyway – like in the cartoons, the guy'll put his thumb in his mouth and blow himself up like a balloon.
"And what are your great expectations, Samuel, other than your electric shock brother coming to your rescue?" The doctor smirked at the words electric shock, of that Sam was sure, like those two innocent enough words when separated were a joke Sam wasn't yet in on.
Cocking his head to the side and casting a dreamy look up at the ceiling, Sam let out a gentle sigh. "Finally being able to drive the Impala again for a distance greater than two blocks." He looked back at Meyers, grinned like a little boy at the sight of the zoo's reptile house.
"Tell me, boy, how long do you think I'll sit here and swallow your petty antics?"
"Well, Meyers, it is my brain that you've gone and invaded, so I'm sure quite a while."
Sam looked behind Jonathan Meyers and at the door that was green with mold. There was a feeling running to his toes that that door might be the only way he'd be able to wake up. In the Matrix there were the rods jammed up the back of everyone's head, but here Sam had a door that would most likely bring in a tsunami of dirt when it was opened. Right. If his one of his heads weren't chopped off, leaving him to bleed to death, he'd be crushed under the weight of earth. Goody, goody gumdrops.
From the ceiling, the one that would surely be kissing dirt and worms and rock if the one door in the room was opened, Dean was promising that he wouldn't be abandoning Sam again. That was all fine and dandy, but right now all Sam needed was a promise from the lunatic across from him that he wouldn't fillet him like some kind of freaky human cod fish.
Meyers chuckled, a cold shallow sound that aided in lowering the room ten more feet below the land of fire and brimstone.
Brimstone. That reminded Sam that he had checked that book out from the library way back when in California. God, what his fine must be by now. He could have joined in with Meyers's amusement: here he was, strapped to a table about to die sometime in the near future, and he was worried about a book fine?
"I won't be killing you as soon as you might think, Samuel. I'd like to have a talk with you first, as I'm sure you would be fond of as well, and then we shall get down to the slicing and dicing."
"For your bouquet of thanks, do you want lilies or roses?"
Shaking his head, Meyers smiled. "Bleeding hearts, if you'd be so kind."
"Bleeding hearts. Right, I'll try my best to remember that. Might be a little hard, having the frontal lobes of my brain destroyed, but it's the thought that counts."
"Dean is far more talented with wit than you are, boy, so I would leave that to him. But you aren't lagging that far behind him."
Sam rolled his head against the gurney, making to throw his right hand out into the air before he remembered that he couldn't. "Oh, well, a compliment like that deserves a card! Pity, I don't know where to send the damn thing, but I'll figure something out. 'Care of: your mother's cunt' might do, don't you think?"
Flames licked at the glossy black orbs set into Meyers's rotting skull.
&&&
Some nagging sensation kept telling Dean that, as much as he might like to, pouring ice cubes down Sam's shirt or giving him a swift kick in a place that would wake a statue (to save the kid's life, of course) that would be a very bad idea. Coma or not trying to wake Sam when he had Doctor Meyers crammed in his brain, raking his rancid breath in his face could do a lot more harm than good.
So no freezing showers, no firing a gun right beside an ear, no body slams, no lies revolving around Jessica reincarnated and walking through the front door, nothing of the sort. Try to help the kid along, maybe, by telling him to wake his own ass up but definitely stay away from any measures that might destroy a mind.
Crushing his brother's chest might fall into that evil category, but Dean couldn't just sit back and do nothing. He was sprawled out on top of Sam like they were in a depraved carnival act, with the grand finale being a brunette with a pulverized rib cage – sure, Dean was the shorter of the two brothers by three or four inches, but Lord knew he wasn't light as a feather. Currently, whomever thought himself with enough stomach to step beyond the tent curtains and into the very pit of hell would find himself in a thick fog of ugliness.
The man on the soapbox outside of the tent, swimming in his white pinstriped red jacket and straw hat, waved his cane around extravagantly as the carnie goers wandered around the fair grounds. They were eating their popcorn and pretzels, their ice cream sandwiches and cotton candy, and some of them stopped by the tent as the soapbox man painted for them images of great, awe inspiring things.
While they stood before the carnival talker – blind to the fact that the rich were marked with white chalk, to be squeezed dry of their money by the night's end – some tried to steal glances inside the tent as others carefully studied the cloth poster hanging behind dear ol' Soapbox Man. Their eyes still wide from their ride on the ferris wheel, they watched as the two men on the canvas poster began to move in response to the carnival talker's bright words.
The image was a dark one, a story of an impending loss that might as well throw the earth into the great star that is the sun. Soapbox Man would, for a costly dime, take these starry eyed carnival visitors "into the very bowels of hell, ladies and gentlemen! To see whether or not one young man can save another from the wordless terror of la mort, whether or not he may save himself from a fate worse than death!"
Here he would tap the edge of his soapbox with his maple syrup colored cane. "The precipice, ladies and gentlemen, you've heard of it, but these young men are on it! One is even falling into it!" Nodding at the shocked gasps from his growing audience, Soapbox Man would continue on. "One of our heroes is falling into that black crater of death and our other – far too filled with hope for being as only one man – is leaning so far into it–" here he would stomp his cane loudly on the large, over turned wooden box "–that he need only one false move to send him rolling heel-over-head into that bleary and lonely chasm!"
The women in the audience, with their depression era dresses and heeled shoes, covered their mouthes with their hands. The men, some with a glowing target on their backs, put a protective arm around the shoulders of their wives, secretly wondering where the cooch tent happened to be set up. The children, sliding beneath arms and legs to see the carnival talker better or try their luck at peeking into the small gap between the tent sections (at these two heroes drawn out before them on the tapestry), smiled and laughed with grim fascination.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the story to end all stories! Do not doubt the power within this tent, the power of agony and despair, and do not doubt that this, this, is the product of all our nightmares finally come true – finally rolled into one black moment on a stage for all to see!"
The small group of children, having placed their noses to the gap in the tent wings, recoiled at the snapping sound of the cane being brought down on the crate right close to their heads. They looked up, slowly in the manner of a whipped dog, to see Soapbox Man leaning toward them. Though the straw hat was brought down low on his head, bringing his eyes into shadow, the smile on his face brought a shiver to the small children's hearts.
"Beyond that cloth barrier lies something that not even Homer could have brought to writing, something that no mortal man can comprehend. A sinister play the likes of Shakespeare has never seen." Quickly, fast enough to scare the children into tree stump legs, Soapbox Man stood up to his full height with his arms thrown back like wings. "Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you the death of innocence!"
Soapbox Man threw his cane toward the children again, to the gap in the tent wings that grew wider as if on cue. Light the color of honey spilled out onto the many faces crowded around the tent, young and old, fascinated and terrified. Beyond them, at the far side of the tent on a stage behind the many poles holding the ceiling up, displayed for all eyes in a twisted stance of beauty and sickness, was indeed the bloody death of innocence.
"Not if I can help it, Sammy, not if I can help it," Dean whispered into his brother's ear, as if the beloved child trapped with ugliness beyond words would be able to hear the oath better, as if the softly spoken words would somehow be able to bring that child back unharmed.
&&&
The fire was extinguished almost without Sam noticing that it had even begun. "Do you believe your brother, Samuel?" Meyers asked humanely, seeming to be dumb to the comment his patient had made earlier.
His legs were getting heavy with the sharp discomfort of strain, seizing up with pins being driven into muscle. But it wasn't real, it wasn't real, it was not real. "I'm not sure I follow you, Meyers."
"When he says things like that, just now. Granted, I don't know what he was talking about, but I ask if you believe him," the doctor poorly elaborated. "Say, when he tells you that he loves you." He smiled when Sam said nothing, simply looked down at the floor. "He doesn't tell you any such thing, does he?"
"He doesn't need to," Sam replied harshly.
Meyers shifted in his chair, not out of nervousness or fear, but out of amusement. "And you hold that against him, don't you, boy?"
"What, are you deaf now?" Sam spat. "I said that Dean doesn't need to, tell me that he loves me. It's apparent enough as it is!"
"Is it?"
The room and everything in it appeared to be getting more and more vivid each and every time Sam blinked. From the moisture in the air to his sleeping feet, the moment was becoming less and less like a movie and more like real life, real waking life.
Meyers crossed one leg over the other, put his steepled hands over his knee. "See, Samuel, I don't think it is. In your way of thinking, if Dean loved you like he should then he wouldn't have turned you down after the incident in Illinois. What did he say to you exactly, when you implied that you and he should converse about what happened in Ellicott's operating room?"
"You already know, so why are you asking?"
The doctor's face changed with the hint of a smile. "You're right, I do, but I'd like to hear it in your own spoken word. The way you say it to me might be different than the way you recite it in your thoughts. I highly doubt that, but one never knows."
Sighing, perturbed, Sam looked away from his captor. "He said that he wanted to sleep. I wanted to talk to him about what had happened in there, and he just wanted to go to sleep. Sleep, like it wasn't important at all that I had been possessed and tried to kill him. But now he wants to talk about it, now he starts telling me that what I did made him upset."
"You're holding your brother's delayed reaction against him," Meyers said blankly. "Not only that, over the past year on the road with him you've realized how much you hate him. More than you ever thought you did, more than you knew you could ever hate someone."
"No."
"Yes," the doctor replied reproachfully. "Your brother ruined your life, he's the one who prevented you from saving your one and only love, and he's the one that got you stuck in this disgusting basement with yours truly."
Sam began tugging at his wrist binds again, head down. "I told you not to mention her."
"I know I did. But I had to bring her up because that's what you think of your brother, isn't it?"
Pain shot up Sam's right arm as he tugged savagely at his binds, screaming at the top of his lungs a single, very angry "No!"
The dream was washing away like freshly applied house paint in a thunderstorm.
Meyers shrugged his right shoulder, a motion that might have let Sam know (if he had been looking) that the doctor felt for Sam's most definitely dislocated arm. "Then I suppose you'll be glad to know that one of the reasons I've picked you, Samuel, is that it wouldn't have been at all prudent to go after your brother. He's diseased, but in more ways than one."
Absolutely livid and now confused, Sam set his eyes on Meyers – sitting in that fucking chair so smartly with that stupid smirk on his face.
"Oh, he didn't tell you? Yes, Dean is quite ill and it wouldn't have been at all prudent of me to kill him when he'll be clocking out in the next month or so anyway. There's nothing anyone can do for him, I'm afraid – not even that quack Ellicott could have helped him – except maybe a money hungry faith healer. Frankly, I'm quite surprised you didn't know. You see, he's been aware of his condition for a long time now."
"Electric shock."
Those words echoed in Sam's skull cavern, and he felt as though he had finally been let in on that joke. If he was on a children's cartoon Sam's face would have gone redder than a maraschino cherry and stream would have erupted from his ears.
"Yes, Samuel, I have to agree with you. Dean doesn't need to tell you, it's already evident that he loves you very much," the doctor replied sarcastically, unfazed with his victim's attitude.
&&&
Dean just didn't know what to do, plain and simple. He had been watching his little brother slide further and further down the mouth of the lioness and he just couldn't do a damned thing to stop it.
Suddenly, as if that realization had flipped a switch in his mind, all the walls came down, every last bulwark that kept the world out. Twenty-two years of anger, resentment and pride broke through the bearing walls and unleashed a torrent of tears and ragged breathing.
"Sammy!" Caring about how understandable he was was now at the bottom of the Things to Worry About list. "Please, Sammy!"
Getting off his brother, nervously walking around the room as his cried, Dean wandered to the door and absently closed it. Naturally, because he had kicked it in, the door didn't rest in the jamb as it should have, but as long as it prevented anyone from coming across a blubbering stud muffin….
The motel walls might have been paper thin, but Dean nevertheless let an animalistic, high-pitched moan build up within his core and come spewing out of his mouth. He was starting to hyperventilate, unable to breathe like he was outside again with the shrink wrap glued to his face, but this time there was no way of peeling it off or running to safety.
Humming when he wasn't making noisy, shallow yet heaving gasps for air, Dean paced around Sam's bed. He put his hands to his throat, limply, and felt the freezing cold skin send blades of ice down and through his spine.
Dean's worst nightmare was coming true ten fold and he was helpless to stop it. Sam was in trouble, deep trouble and the only person to get him out of it was Sammy himself. Yelling at him wasn't doing anything, Sam might not even be able to hear anything Dean was saying, but in his current state of panic trying again might trigger something, anything.
"Sam, you need to wake up, buddy. You've gotta wake up!"
Falling to his knees beside the bed, Dean put a violently shaking hand to his brother's chest. Touch was good, a beating muscle below that touch was even better, and it proved that Sam was still alive – but for how long?
That question made the crying rise several octaves; rise to a pathetic, incessant screeching sound resembling a whine. Entire body racked with tremors, Dean bowed his head to form the stance of a bastard's prayer.
"You can't die on me, Sammy. You've gotta fight, you've gotta come out of this thing alive. I don't know what I'm ever gonna do without you. I can't make it through these dark days without you!"
By now the time had passed for sensible thought and action, by now all one freak show hero had left in him was an endless pit of sorrow. No longer was Dean Winchester simply trying to wake his brother, his poor little brother stuck in the vice grip of a coma-like state of being, he was now trying to cleanse what little bit of soul Dean might have had (somewhere buried underneath yards of bravado and arrogance).
"I'm sorry, Sam. I'm so sorry for everything I've ever said and done to you to make you hurt. I love you, but I'm so envious of you that it comes off as hate or, worse, passiveness. I take back everything, Sammy, everything I've said over the years – I love you, kid, so much it's gotta be on the cusp of wrong – but you've gotta wake up. Sammy – my Sammy – you have to wake up!"
The words didn't come out right, not from Dean's thoughtlessly blank mind to his mouth, but he was deaf to that fact. All Dean now knew was a burning soul and a brother slowly dying – but with a strong and still beating heart. To Dean his words weren't coming out as a jumbled mass of sobs and whistling, wavering inhalations – they weren't coming out as anything, for he wasn't even aware that he was speaking.
"I know you want to be with Jessica again – God, I'm sorry I had to look at her chest like that when I first met her – and I know how badly you wanna know Mom without having to go through pictures or Dad and mine's stories. But I'm a hard ass, Sammy. I'm a hard ass and I won't let you leave me here all alone! Please. Please, God, you've gotta wake up. Don't do this to me. My sweet little Sammy, don't do this to me. Don't leave me here alone, don't go where I can't follow!"
He was now at the point where he was the most desperate he'd ever been in his life, reduced to doing whatever flashed into his mind – right then thwomping Sam on the chest with weakly formed fists.
"Sooner or later everyone is going to leave me." But the sentence his sleeping brother heard was only something like a song on a horrifically scratched vinyl record. "Please, Sammy, don't make that be true. Don't make that be true!"
&&&
"I'll tell you something now, Samuel." Meyers leaned back in his chair, making it creak slightly with the dispersed weight.
Sam didn't like the feel of the rusted gurney against the palms of his hands. "What, are you a hermaphrodite now? You don't need to show me, but it would better explain why you're so fruity about sex and sex organs. You're ashamed of yourself, dusgusted with yourself, so you take it out on everyone else."
"I thought I told you to leave the witty remarks to your brother?"
Sneering, Sam raised his eyebrows. "Oh, did I hit a nerve?"
Meyers's face became like stone, like a very vexed stone. His tone didn't express that emotion, but the way he hitched his thumb to the area of basement wall behind him did. "If you can walk out of that door, Samuel, I'll back away from you and your brother. I will stop pestering you and let you move on to the next stop on your Save the World list."
Disbelief and suspicion clouded Sam's eyes, but he looked longing to the basement door anyway. Monstrous wave of dirt or no, he'd like it very much to open that moldy slab of wood and get as far away from that basement room and that insane doctor as his legs would be able to take him.
"There aren't any tricks, boy. The binds holding your body to that table will be separated from you, and all you'd have to do is walk through that door. Simple as that."
Nothing in Meyers's face, nothing in his body language or tone of voice suggested that there was a catch. He might have still been upset about the whole zwitter insult Sam had shot at him, but the anger present in him wasn't the kind to bring about rash actions. Okay, maybe rash wasn't the right word in dealing with a loopy surgeon for the criminally insane, but there really was nothing to be seen in him that convinced Sam that he shouldn't make a try for that exit.
"What do I have to do, apart from run my skinny white ass over to that door?"
Meyers raised his hands briefly before settling them back onto his left knee, the gesture a kind of a half sincere "I hadn't really thought of that". After a short pause, one in which he clicked his tongue for the second time so far, Meyers looked hard at his patient. "I suppose you could ask me what you've been meaning to ask for the longest time now, before it makes your heart explode."
Sam shook his head. "I don't–"
"But you do."
Thinking about it, watching as the slime on the walls grew more vibrant and shiny, feeling how the muscles about his right shoulder blade became more rock-like every second, Sam frowned. "You want me to ask you what my brother wants, don't you? What he'd give up his life for."
Meyers nodded. "Actually, that's what you want. I'm simply bringing it up, since you mention doing something for the ability to leave this place behind you."
For the longest time Sam remained quiet, staring down at his dirty tennis shoes, but eventually he lifted his head to meet the doctor's quizzical gaze. "What does Dean want so much? What is it that he'd sell his soul to the devil for? What is it he'd leave me behind for?"
Rising to his feet, Meyers took from the left hip pocket of his dingy, dried blood stained coat a scalpel badly in need of a cleaning. He walked over to Sam, waving the instrument of terror around like an evil fairy and her wand, and even though the scalpel was old and rusty it still caught enough light to make the moment a bit more unsettling.
"Oh, he only wants someone to love him like Jessica loved you, like your mother loved your father. Heck, the boy would be happy settling for you to love him like most brothers love their siblings. That's what he'd let me cut him open for," Meyers explained, leering at the scalpel he waved about the air in front of Samuel Winchester's chest. "Well!" He pocketed the scalpel again, smiling his teeth rot smile that finally showed something lurking just below the surface. "Are you ready to try for that door now?"
Sam felt like gum stuck to the bottom of someone's shoe, like absolute crap. "Yes, I'm ready," he said sadly.
Meyers clapped him on the shoulder, the one not popped from its socket. " That's a good boy."