CHAPTER
SEVEN
Deal
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Dean was tired. Scratch that, he was beyond tired, but he wasn't entirely sure he was awake enough to be tired in the first place. Everything felt unreal. If time was passing, he wasn't aware of it. He couldn't move, and he couldn't see. He just felt...he felt wrong.
Memories slipped by him but did not linger. The motel, the pen, Sam's vision, the diner...the diner, something had happened there. Something bad. Broken glass, lying on the cold floor, that awful screaming... Panic rose in Dean's chest when he remembered that sound, but not what it related to.
"Sam?" he found himself calling. If he was hurting, maybe Sammy was hurt too.
"I'm right here, Dean."
Dean relaxed at the sound of Sam's voice, and tried to concentrate on getting his senses to relay information to him. Blurred images started to bleed through his vision, but they were moving too fast to make out. He could hear the background drone of an engine and realised he was in the Impala. It soothed him to be somewhere familiar.
"Don't worry, we're almost at the hospital."
"No hospital," Dean heard himself say, his own voice sounding distant.
"What happened back there?" Sam asked, ignoring the plea.
"I'm going to take my time, Dean. I'm going to make this last."
The memory of the words attacked Dean like a punch to the gut, waking him up. The Braken had found him. He remembered it now, the horrible screaming, the overwhelming pain of the attack. The Braken had ripped a part of his soul from his body, and at that moment he realised he could feel the empty void that had been left in its wake.
"I'll be seeing you again."
It was going to come back, and the next time would be worse. Dean didn't know if he could go through that again. All he knew was that the situation was not something that would just go away. He was in serious trouble and terrified of facing the Braken again. The thought of sharing the burden and letting Sam in was truly tempting.
"Dean? You with me?"
"Yeah, I'm with you." I'm getting there.
"The Braken found you, didn't it?" Sam asked, fury and fear battling for pride of place in his voice. "What did it do to you?"
Dean didn't know what to say. He knew how selfish it would be to put Sam at risk, but God, he wanted nothing more than to spill it all and have Sam right there with him. He'd even take some of that Hallmark crap he had been so dismissive of. Sam seemed eager to regain his trust, so maybe this was an opportunity. Maybe they really could handle it together. But the wounds from recent events ran deep, deeper than Sam knew. It wasn't as simple as just telling him what was going on.
"I don't know. I think...I think it fed on me," Dean told him, hoping in vain to somehow soften the statement by claiming he wasn't sure.
There was silence while the words sank in."Fed on you...on your soul?" Sam breathed in horror. "But...I mean, you're still...you're alright, aren't you?"
"Yeah," Dean answered weakly. He wanted to add something, to mention that the Braken hadn't taken it all, that it had said it would be back, and that it would make it last, and that he was scared shitless right now But he didn't. "I'm fine." It slipped out before he could stop it. He had fallen back on his default defence of denying anything was wrong even though everything was.
"Fine?" Sam repeated incredulously. "How can you be fine?"
"I don't know. I just am." Dean didn't know why he was lying, but he couldn't seem to stop. Maybe it was because there were no words to describe the way he was feeling. Before Sam could respond, he added; "Find a motel. I don't need a hospital."
"Dean, you're not fine. We're going to the hospital," Sam asserted. "I should have taken you before."
"Look," Dean replied. "I can tell you right now no doctor is going to be able to do a damn thing for me. I don't need a hospital," Dean told him, annoyance slipping wantonly into his tone.
Sam returned it in abundance. "No, you look. Youscared the crap out of me. You leave to go to the bathroom and five minutes later you're screaming the place down, catatonic on the floor after having your soul sucked out by a demon that marked you and oh, that I had a vision about. All of which could have been prevented if you had just told me what the hell was going on from the get go." Sam paused only for a brief second intake of breath. "So don't tell me what to do, because your decisions lately have SUCKED. We're going to the hospital because I'm driving and I'm calling the shots."
Dean stared at Sam for a while, processing the outburst. He wanted to ask Sam what he meant about him screaming. Dean remembered the awful sound, but had it really come from his own throat? The possibility that he could have lost control like that scared him. As for the rest of the speech that had turned Sam a bright shade of red and made the veins in his neck pop out, Dean was actually impressed. Proud, even. He still wasn't happy about the idea about going to the hospital, but he supposed he did need time to think about what to do.
"Thanks, for coming in when you did," Dean said, an onset of guilt surfacing. "And sorry I'm such a pain in the ass sometimes."
Sam's grip on the steering wheel loosened a little and his white knuckles started to get some colour back. He looked back at Dean. "Sometimes?"
Dean smirked. They had called an unspoken truce. For the time being.
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"Hi, my name is Sam Connor, this is my brother Dean," Sam told the elderly receptionist when they finally made it to the hospital. "We were hitchhiking and he fell off the back of a moving truck."
It was the only explanation Sam could think of that was even remotely plausible and vaguely consistent with Dean's physical injuries. He'd thought of it in the car earlier, when Dean had been out of it.
The woman behind the desk, a short, plump brunette with glasses, smiled at them. "Someone will see you in just a moment," she said, gesturing to the chairs opposite her desk.
"Hitchhiking?" Dean repeated with disdain. "Dude, do I look like a hitchhiker?"
"No, you look like a junkie who's been beaten up and deprived of sleep for a week, so quit complaining," Sam shot back. "Besides, would you rather I told them the truth?" He knew the air between them was volatile but he figured if he acted like nothing was wrong, maybe it would feel like that was the case.
Dean said nothing, just went back to brooding.
A short while later, a doctor appeared. He took Dean to an exam room, but not before calling another doctor to look at Sam's numerous cuts and scrapes from the broken glass. Sam wasn't happy about letting Dean out of sight again so soon, but the other doctor had told him it was necessary for exams to take place privately. It made him feel like a kid again, the way the doctor spoke to him. He half expected a lollipop for finally cooperating. Sam could have sworn he'd caught Dean smirking at him throughout the brief argument.
"So, hitchhiking, huh?" the female doctor asked Sam when they were alone in the suture room. Presumably she was trying and put him at ease while she sewed up a few of the deeper cuts Sam had acquired. "Not the safest of pastimes, is it?"
"Guess not," Sam muttered, aware that he was being brusque. There were more important things on his mind than being polite to someone he would never see again.
Dean was still keeping things from him, and it was driving Sam crazy, not to mention upping his stress levels. Sure, Dean had told him that it was the Braken, but that was it. Some details might have been helpful, like, if it took some of his soul, why didn't it take it all? Was the Braken going to come back? Sam's mind kept coming back to those words in dad's journal; 'Soul Eater'. He shuddered. How could Dean claim he was 'fine' after something like that happened to him?
Sam wished, like he tended to on the odd occasion, that he could worry about things normal people worried about. What to wear on a fancy restaurant, or who to invite to a party, or whatever the hell it was normal people his age were spending their time caring about. But no. Sam Winchester was worrying about a soul sucking demon and what exactly it had against his brother.
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"You appear to have more than a few older injuries that are still healing. Some scarring too," Doctor Thorne said to Dean, finishing up his examination.
It had been more a statement of fact, but Dean knew the doc wanted an explanation. They always wanted to know everything about what was none of their business. "Yeah, well me and my brother go hitchhiking a lot. Gets rough sometimes." The hitchhiking idea was actually a pretty good one, Dean had to admit.
"Between the two of you, or between the two of you and other people?" the Doc asked.
Dean laughed a little at his tact, or lack thereof. "Usually the latter."
"And the former?" Thorne pushed, but not too hard. "I notice he wasn't quite as beat up as you are."
Dean stared at the man, not wanting to let his guard down. "I fell off a truck."
"Sure you did," the Doctor agreed, in a way that left it open for debate.
"Trust me, doc, the only thing me and my brother trade is verbal daggers every now and then,"Dean assured. "And those little Pogs, remember those? Of course, that was a while back." There was that humour defence mechanism rearing its head again. Dean had been wondering where it had got to.
"Alright," Thorne submitted, smiling. "As long as you know anything you say here will be held in the strictest confidence. I'm not trying to get anyone into trouble."
"Thanks." Dean didn't know what it was, but he kind of liked this guy. "But I'm fine."
"Okay, well you've got some cracked ribs and bruised kidneys. Unfortunately there's not a lot I can do about that except prescribe some painkillers for you. As for the knock to the head..."
"It's nothing, really, I'm fine. Just tell my brother that, would ya?"
"Let me guess. You're the type who hates hospitals and doctors, and you won't stick around for any tests that take longer than an hour to wait for. Am I right?"
Dean raised his eyebrows. "One hundred percent." Yep, he definitely liked this guy. So maybe it was ninety-nine percent after all.
"I'd like to put a couple of stiches in just to be..." the Doctor trailed off when the lights in the room flickered, then shut off completely. "Hmm, must be an power outage. We have emergency generators, nothing to worry about."
Dean wasn't so calm. Power cuts in the world of the Winchester family tended to be ample reason to not only worry, but board up the windows and get a shotgun. As it turned out, this time was no exception. Dean shuddered as the room grew colder, and his skin began to crawl.
"What's the matter, Dean?" Thorne asked, but his voice was no longer his own. "You aren't afraid of the dark, are you?"
Dean looked into Thorne's eyes and saw the familiar grey shroud of the Braken writhing in them. "You..."
"You know, this guy really isn't my type," Thorne said with the Braken inside him. "He's got a good job, loves his wife, has a good home. He's not nearly as interesting as you are."
"So is this a business trip or are you just coming onto me?" Dean said with little humour. His voice was the only thing under his control; the rest of his body was paralysed.
Thorne laughed. "You really are something else. Even after what I took, you're still fighting. I don't think that's very fair. You promised me your soul and in exchange I did what you asked of me."
"Yeah," Dean admitted. "But I didn't say anything about liking it."
The Braken was not amused. "I held up my end of the bargain, and you cheapen our deal with notions of defiance? I'm not impressed."
"If you didn't want a fight, you picked the wrong guy," Dean informed the Braken, but he had the feeling he didn't sound very tough, what with being paralysed and at the demon's complete mercy.
"Funny you should say that."A hint of a smile flickered of the corner of Thorne's mouth. "I was thinking the same thing."
"What do you mean?" Dean asked, fear brewing inside him.
Thorne stood up and paced the room. "I've been watching you since my messenger marked you. You exceeded my expectations. I mean, I was happy with you eight-hundred days ago, but the development since then is more than I could have hoped for..." He stopped pacing and turned towards Dean. "Then I noticed your brother."
Dean swore he felt his heart stop.
Thorne grinned unnaturally at the reaction he had surely been hoping for. "Now he's interesting."
"You stay the hell away from my brother," Dean warned, his words a mixture of fury and fear.
"You know I was thinking of making him the same deal I made with you," the Braken inquired, knowing full well he had complete power over the situation. "A father for a son, a brother for a brother. I mean, it's almost poetic..."
"Don't," Dean whispered, tears building up in his eyes at the terror of the threat.
"Dean, my boy. What are you going to do to stop me?"
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End
of Chapter Seven
Next
Chapter: Something to Someone