Eight
Following the attack, Sam appointed himself as the sole caretaker of Dean in a vain attempt to assuage the guilt that rose from not saving Dean during the initial assault. Sam dribbled water into Dean's mouth and spooned him soft foods that his older brother somehow swallowed despite his outward state of being dead to the world. In careful tenderness, he changed Dean's bandages when they grew crusted with blood from the weeping sores, and he used a sponge soaked in disinfectant to wipe at the wounds.
Sam refused to sleep out of fear that Dean would awake in the darkness, scared and disorientated, so Sam dozed in fitful little moments when he nodded off accidentally while cleaning Dean's bandages or reading a newspaper at the table. Showering, getting food from a restaurant rather than the quickie-mart next door, researching at the library, and anything that involved leaving the motel room for extended periods of time were all out of the question. There were simply too many risks involved in Sam's absence from Dean's side. Dean could wake up, suffering from an unimaginable brain trauma, perhaps, which could result in anything from mild confusion to outright amnesia. Perhaps even a permanent vegetative condition. The reptiles could return for Dean, if they had planned on killing him the first time and had thus failed in their fatal task.
At the very worst of all the possibilities, Dean could die.
This was the idea that Sam fretted over, transforming him into a pacing insomniac at all hours of the day. He chewed on his nails until their cuticles were pink and wrinkled, and every time Dean moved or breathed differently, Sam would rush to his bedside, waiting for a conscious response. Empty coffee cups began to pile up on the table as Sam forced the bitter caffeine down his throat even though his hands jittered and his words blurred together when he spoke too fast. He continued to talk to Dean in a futile hope that Dean would open his eyes and tell him to shut his mouth, because that was what Dean always did when Sam talked too much.
When Dean didn't open his eyes or tell Sam to be quiet, Sam began to worry that his older brother truly was gone from his grasp.
It was during the afternoon of the second day that Dean had been unconscious, and Sam was reapplying a folded square of cotton gauze to cover one of Dean's puncture wounds when a familiar hand reached up and took him by the wrist. The grasp was cold and frail, and the fingers against his wrist were light and dry, but as weak as the touch may have been, the voice blasted Sam to his core with its strength. "Sammy?"
The roll of adhesive tape fell from his fingers, nearly hitting Dean in the head, but landing safely on the bed sheets, where it rolled with a defeated bounce onto the floor. Immediately, Sam grabbed Dean's hands in his own, trying to control his nervous shaking. Below him, Dean's swollen, red eyes were pinched open to reveal filmy slivers of green, and he smacked his dried lips together slowly as he attempted to move his sore body.
Sam had the exact words planned out for Dean to hear when he awoke, but such formal sentences scattered when Dean's eyes met his. Dean's voice, a voice that Sam was afraid he would never hear again, uttered that despised nickname and removed the rest of Sam's rational thinking. Sam sputtered uselessly before he choked out, "Dammit, Dean."
"Sam? What…" Dean's voice faded to a hoarse rasp, and he swallowed dryly, causing Sam to scramble to the nightstand and offer him a cup of water where a plastic straw bobbed in the cool liquid. Dean squinted dubiously at the straw, but nevertheless accepted it and drank slowly, before pulling his lips away in a sign that he was finished. When Sam had set the cup back on the nightstand, pressing himself into a seated position by Dean's hip, Dean opened his eyes slightly wider, still not moving his body. One of his eyes was unable to fully open and squinted at Sam through bloated black rings. "What the 'ell happened?" His speech was slurred, as if he had simply drank one too many shots at the local bar instead of having the majority of his chest torn away by demonic creatures.
"What do you remember?"
"I—" Dean winced and paused before making an effort to speak again while Sam gazed on with eager eyes. "Those things. They came into our room, and you…I thought you…"
Sam smiled through the hot tears blurring his vision. "Yeah, well," he joked and his voice cracked, causing him to try to fight for bravado he could not feel, "I'm tougher than I look, what can I say?"
"There was…and this…" Dean's pitch wavered, and he lifted one of his limp hands flimsily to his chest, an array of bandages and gauze, twisted stitching and mangled flesh. Groggily, his bruised fingers caressed the thick cotton patches taped over his sore muscles. "They…did this?"
"Yeah," Sam replied in a hoarse whisper. "You've been out for about two days. I found you in the desert like this. They got you good."
"They left me in the desert?"
"I don't know. I just, that's where I found you. You'd been out there for awhile, and I…" Sam looked away to where the late afternoon sun nibbled on the edge of the bed and warmed his skin. "I carried you back here."
"You carried me?" Dean's broken face, a collage of bruises and dried sores, tried to convey shock, but the muscles were too hurt to move properly just yet. The most he could manage was a low raise of one of his less damaged eyebrows.
"Yeah, it happened. Get over yourself. I wasn't going to leave you out there like a piece of steak."
Dean nodded slowly and a thick silence fell over the room. Sam wanted to ask Dean what had happened, but he was afraid that if he pushed too hard, Dean would break. Sam didn't know if he could put his broken brother together again.
After a pause, Dean began to struggle to push himself to a seated position. Instantly, Sam scrambled for his shoulders to help him move, while issuing warnings of his own. "Dean, in your condition—"
"Sam, in my condition, I've got to piss."
"Let me help you…"
"Help me? What? Don't tell me they ate that part of my body? Dammit…"
"What?" Sam responded incredulously. "No, no, Dean, that's just…You really think they'd want that?"
Dean forced a feeble, caustic laugh and clambered to his feet. Even though Sam hovered about him protectively, Dean eventually went into the bathroom by himself and locked the door despite Sam's concerned protests.
Stiff-legged and clutching his abdomen, Dean hobbled to the toilet where he pulled his pants down like a woman and sat on the cold seat, too weak to stand long enough to urinate. His head swayed and swirled causing him to clutch it in his hands, praying that he wouldn't be forced to turn around and vomit as nothing remained in his stomach to expel.
After he was finished, he pulled his pants back up and eased down on the cool tiled floor with his back resting against the bathtub. He stretched his legs out in front of him and bent his head down until his chin touched his chest, breathing in shallow, painful gasps. Outside the door, he could hear Sam's anxious, clipped footsteps, and he smiled faintly at his younger brother's defensive ways.
Dean barely remembered what had happened to him since he was torn from his room by the creatures for which he had no name. The sensations were distant, dream-like in their fog, the noises muffled and echoed, and the images blurred and hazy. There had been frenzied screams, sounding similar to the crazed voodoo chanting of witch gatherings in the southern bayous. But this time, it was no human language he heard rolling through his head. No, it was a foreign tongue of a different species entirely.
They had ripped into his flesh, and he had felt their teeth every time they slipped amongst the fibers of his muscles. With lapping mouths, they fed off him as his blood dribbled off his body and onto waiting, purple tongues. When they dug their hooked black nails into him, they had whispered their alien words, and with every flash of pain that slithered through his body, he began to understand.
He had been chosen, for he was marked amidst the men with whom he walked the earth. He was chosen by them for ones who were greater than they. These were the words they hissed through fangs dripping of his blood. He was to be raised to power among humans, for he was chosen with such pristine care. These were the promises they slurred with their mouths full of his skin.
Somewhere, he had lost consciousness, slipping into blessed blackness. When he awoke, he was lying, naked, on the cool ground covered in a thin, sticky film of his own blood and liquids. His eyes, burning and bloody, opened to see a huge shadow rising over him, and in the distance, he could hear the frenzied wails crying for his sacrifice. The shape moved, swelled to twice its size, and lunged.
It had been then, trapped amongst those monsters, that he had finally screamed.
Suddenly, Sam burst into the bathroom, having picked the lock on the door, and he stood in the doorway for a brief moment of shock. "Dean?" When he saw Dean sprawled on the floor, not responding, he looped his long arms underneath his older brother's and helped him out of the room. "Dean, you okay? Talk to me."
He had been chosen. Because in some way, he was different from Sam in a way that made him special enough for them to drink his blood and rip to his heart. His attack had been no accident.
"Yeah, I'm all right."
Words of a liar.
"C'mon, lay down," Sam said, "you're never going to recover in the bathroom."
Several days later, Dean's bruises had faded to a light blue from their monstrous purple tinge, and he was able to walk around the room without having to sit down. With his brother looking better, Sam, having just returned from doing a load of laundry, decided they should go to the library to do research on the creatures.
"We have to see why it came after you," Sam said.
"Yeah, I guess," Dean answered, even though he already knew the answer. He rubbed his forehead and felt the rough lines of peeling scabs, then looked over at Sam, who was pulling a fresh shirt over his head. "Don't tell me you haven't already gone on your own to do research."
"I wasn't going to leave the room long enough."
"So you've just been going to get food and that's it?"
"Yeah. I mean, dude, I wasn't going to come back to find you passed out in the bathtub. You drowned or something because you fainted?"
"Nice," Dean shot back.
"I'm being serious. But, you're well enough now, and I think you can go out in public without scaring half the population."
"Yeah, you don't want anybody to think we're having a 'domestic dispute' huh?" Dean leered through lips that still wore tender bruises.
"Just go do whatever it is you have to do. Hurry up, though."
Dean laughed, then shook his head and went to use the bathroom, closing the door behind him. After he had finished shaving, he brushed his teeth until he was sure that he would not be able to taste blood on his tongue during the day. He had spit for the last time in the sink, toothbrush in one hand, when he casually looked down at the other hand that twisted on the water faucet to wash toothpaste suds down the drain.
His toothbrush fell to the ground in a horrified silence, where it clattered once in a sharp rap against the tiles and lay still.
On the back of his hand, small in size and slate blue in color, clustered patches of scales had formed on his rough skin. They were no larger than the pad of his thumb, but they stared back at him with glittering eyes of threat. Frantically, feeling his breath catch painfully in his throat, he scratched at the scales with his torn fingernails, willing them to flake off. Doing so, however, proved futile as it was like peeling his own skin off with his fingers.
From his front pocket, he produced a pocket knife that he flipped open to reveal a carefully cleaned and malicious blade. Taking a deep breath and biting his lower lip, he pressed the tip of the knife to the scales and began to methodically slice them out of his skin. After he was finished and the scales had been discarded in a wrapped bundle of toilet paper, he held his hand over the sink, allowing the cool water to slurp against the ceramic edges and catch his blood on its way down the drain.
"Dean?" There was a sharp rap of knuckles against the door. "What are you doing in there? Don't make me come in there. C'mon, let's get going," Sam's muffled voice called.
"I'll be out in a minute." With his good hand, he grabbed a thick clutch of toilet paper and pressed it to the back of his bleeding hand. When he had finally gotten the majority of the blood to ebb, he applied a new batch of band-aids to his self-mutilations and looked up at himself in the mirror.
A stranger, a chosen stranger, stared back.
Above all, he could not tell Sam. This would be something he would have to deal with on his own, as Sam had already dealt with his problems enough in the past few days. Besides, he did not know how he could look Sam in the eye and tell his younger brother that he was growing scales like the lizards who had not only almost killed him, but had also chosen him for a reason he did not yet understand.
No, he could not tell Sam.
He flushed the toilet, expelling the balls of bloody tissues down the gaping black underwater mouth and exited the bathroom nonchalantly. Sam stood up from the bed in one swift movement, eyes pinched in question and worry.
"Bad pancakes this morning," Dean said with a forced smile. Grabbing the car keys from the table, he walked to the door, trying to position his hand out of Sam's line of vision. However, he was not quick enough to do so, as Sam spoke from behind him when he reached for the door handle.
"Hey, what's up with your hand? I didn't know you had marks there. Are those new ones?"
Mentally, Dean cursed his brother's acute observation skills and shook his head. "Naw, just some of the scabs came off. Bled more than I thought. Don't worry 'bout it." He looked back over his shoulder at Sam, who had risen in his eyebrows in doubt, and he twirled the car keys around his index finger. They jangled in their tight spinning whirl. "You comin' or you just gonna stand there?"
"You sure they were old marks?"
"Sam, I'm sure. I'm fine, all right?" He smirked again, the smile he had used on hundreds of people throughout his years to convince them that his words were true, and he was to be trusted. Yet, he felt the lick of tongues on the back of his arms and knew that his words to Sam were the furthest from the truth they had ever been.
