badbastion (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
badbastion) wrote2013-10-31 10:21 am
badbastion) wrote2013-10-31 10:21 am
In the Earth [SPN fanfic, Dean-centric horror]
Title: In the Earth
Artist:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
badbastion
Pairing: none. Dean-centric gen
Spoilers: none
Wordcount: ~1800
Rating: PG-13 for horror
Warnings/Content: horror, mental images that make me uncomfortable, lol
Misc: I only found out about this meme last night, oh woe! This fic was written last night and given a lazy edit this morning.
Summary: Written for a prompt at the Something Wicked 2013 Horror Fanwork Meme for this prompt:
There's something under the ground, Dean can feel it. It had almost reached him when he pulled himself from his grave and now it's following him everywhere, just waiting for its chance to pull him back under the cold, dark earth and bury him forever.
In the Earth
Dry, crumbling dirt coats his tongue and he strains upward, tearing at the loose-packed earth with his hands. Is this Hell? There was something, a light, a searing pain, and then this, a new kind of torture. Shaking off claustrophobia for the more practical concern of suffocation, he takes measured breaths and claws his way up.
Everything is muffled here, but the sound of something scraping against wood is unmistakeable. It comes again, and now he can feel the vibration under his boots, where he's crouched in his coffin under feet of dirt.
A hard thump shakes dirt loose in a coarse shower on his face, and suddenly he's cold, cold. There are more sounds down there, wet, throaty syllables. His measured breaths turn hot and shaky, his movements frantic. The muscles in his arms burn.
Another thump, hard enough that he hears wood splinter. Now the claustrophobia comes; he's trapped in the dark of a grave, running low on air and almost at the mercy of this thing that he'd probably be able to take down any other time.
He hisses when two of his fingernails bend back, snapping off, and he hears the thing again. Its voice is low and thick and guttural, and it speaks in words he can't understand.
There's pressure against the toe of his boot, and it rasps, "Dean."
With a final, adrenaline-shaky rush he forces through, grave dirt sloughing down around him as he finds the sun, gasping for breath.
Then he runs.
---
He dreams of it sometimes, of being trapped in the earth with that voice, that thing. The touch on his boot. He wakes in motel rooms sweating, arms shaking and throat tight. It's nothing, he tells himself. He was dead, he was in Hell, and you don't just wake up from that without a little jet lag. So maybe he hallucinated a little bit. So what.
Telling himself that doesn't so anything for the dreams, though.
---
They're shin-deep in a swampy Tennessee forest stalking a werewolf. The air is close and damp, stifling, and he swats away a mosquito buzzing around his face. The full moon doesn't penetrate the thick cover of the trees, and their flashlight beams are hazy cones of light. Sam's about twenty yards to the right, sloshing along as quietly as he can.
Dean pulls his boot loose of a sticky patch of mud with a sick sucking sound, and he catches a near echo of the sound before he's assaulted by another mosquito. He freezes in place for a moment, kicking his high-alert senses up another notch, but he hears nothing out of place. His other boot comes free with another wet suck, and this time he does hear it, a second later and about five yards behind him.
Heart hammering, he turns at the waist, aiming the cool beam of his flashlight behind him. Nothing's there but his messy tracks.
Then the ground heaves, and he's running in slow motion through the muck, not fast enough, not fast enough, and "Sam!" he yells and Sam's coming his way, loud and calling his name, and Dean almost falls full-body into the mud before he catches himself on a tree.
Sam plants himself in front of Dean, rifle up alongside his flashlight. "What is it?" he pants, scanning the swamp.
Dean's name comes back to him again, not from Sam, but in that fever-dream voice. "Dean," it whispers, and bubbles rise from the swamp.
"Did you hear that?" Dean asks, as cool as he can manage.
"Hear what?" Sam asks.
A roar shakes the forest, and the werewolf leaps into view.
---
It finds him again in a graveyard in Missouri. They're shoveling earth to put the finishing touches on a standard salt and burn when he hears soil shift behind him. His hands shake on the shovel.
The sound comes louder and Dean inches around to Sam's side, attacks that pile of earth with his shovel, squinting out into the gloom to where he'd heard the sound.
"Come back... " he hears, in that wet, inhuman voice. Dean glances at Sam as it spits a few unintelligible words into the air, and seeing Sam's lack of reaction he squints back across the open grave. "I'll take you," it says.
A shiver runs through Dean's entire body and he shovels faster. In his peripheral vision he catches subtle movement and shoots his head up, scanning. The flat dirt of a grave two stones down is mounding up incrementally, and Dean hears a moist laugh.
Suddenly angry, Dean wrenches the lantern out of the dirt beside them and holds it up.
"Dean," it whispers, fingers like long, pale worms curling out of the unpacked earth, just as Sam asks, "What are you doing?"
It shouldn't be a surprise that when Dean glances at Sam and then back, the grave is flat, no disturbed dirt, no squirming fingers.
"Nothing," Dean sighs, anger deflating. "Let's just get this over with. I'm ready for a beer."
---
Kansas is a nightmare. They're after a djinn that's been sucking people dry here for years, and Sam's managed to get himself separated from Dean. They've been reduced to chasing the thing on foot, and it's led them through streets into the crumpled edges of the town, and into the dark, wooded countryside beyond. Sam had sprinted into a crop of trees hoping to flush it out and Dean had followed several yards behind.
Since then he hasn't seen either of them. He's chasing his own tail in the middle of a field, cursing his broken phone and his brother's too long, too fast legs.
"Dean," he hears, and of course, of course that's exactly what he needs right now. The thing is chuckling, and Dean feels a kind of exasperated, exhausted horror at the sound.
"What?" he challenges, turning a circle in the tall grass. "What do you want?"
"I want you back. With me." The sound comes from below, muffled by only his boots. He leaps back, heart a tight fist in his chest, and turns to run.
It's right behind him. He hears it moving, burrowing through the dry, loose dirt, hears the tall stalks of grass rustle as they fall aside. He's not going to outrun it, he realizes, so instead he turns, skidding to a halt, and raises his shotgun. The sharp, biting smell of burnt powder fills the air and dirt explodes from the moving mound. It slows.
With the crazy thought that the trail left by the thing looks like something from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, Dean fires his second shot, then digs into his jacket pocket for fresh shells. He doesn't have time to reload before the thing is racing forward again, shoving under him and tripping him up.
He lands on his ass, dust puffing up around him, and tries to scramble backwards. Long white fingers, their nails ragged and caked with dirt, burst from the ground and grab his ankle, their grip iron-hard through his boot. His other leg is pinned just as easily, and as he reaches for his knife, dusty fingers clamp down on his wrist.
With growing horror, Dean watches more fingers burst through the dry shell of the earth and fall upon his legs. Dozens of them, all long and dirty and many-knuckled, encasing him from ankle to knee.
Cursing and spitting the dust out of his mouth, he struggles. The fingers on his wrists grow tighter, and more reach up to join them, crawling up his arms and pulling him inexorably down until he's flat on his back.
If one of those things touches my skin, I might scream, he thinks, and as if it heard the thought, a finger comes up to brush at the back of his neck.
"No!" he yells, and then "No!" again, because he feels the shift and grind of the dirt, and he knows what it means.
They're pulling him under. These fingers, are gripping the entire permiter of his body, and this thing is burrowing down back into the earth, and it's taking him with it.
"Back where you belong," it rasps, right under his ear, and he coughs out mud and tries not to vomit as fingers twine and tug in his hair. There's cool pressure along his legs, almost up to the cap of his knees, and his elbows are entirely submerged.
"Sam!" he yells.
"So easy," it gurgles, then other words meant to soothe, but all he can hear is the sussurating hisses and solid clunks of soil shifting.
"Sam!" he yells again, his voice cracking on it. His hearing is down to nearly nothing, his ears blocked up with earth.
But he hears. Hears and feels the vibrations, the steady thud of big feet tearing across the field.
"Dean!" he hears, and it's too quiet, but it's not too late.
"Dean!"
Dean shakes his head. The sound is clear now and Sam's standing over him, one sleeve torn and blood smeared across the side of his face. Dean frowns and sits up.
Everything is normal. There are no hundreds of fingers poking out of the ground, no mound to indicate that the thing had been there, only the split in the tall grass caused by his own flight and the trampling of the ground around him.
"What happened?" Sam asks, offering a hand up. Dean takes it, and lets Sam help brush the worst of the dust off of him.
"There was... you know what, I'll tell you about it later. You get the djinn?"
"Yeah," Sam says, giving him the look that meant he'll be telling Sam later whether he wants to or not. Sometimes Sam knows when to back off, though, so Dean gets the reprieve he needs to pull himself back together.
"Let's get out of here, then," Dean says, and in a smooth motion he grabs his shotgun from the ground and hefts it onto his shoulder.
As they leave, Dean casts one last glance over his shoulder at the dusty field.
He knows it will find him again.
--end
Happy Halloween to all of you!
Artist:
badbastionPairing: none. Dean-centric gen
Spoilers: none
Wordcount: ~1800
Rating: PG-13 for horror
Warnings/Content: horror, mental images that make me uncomfortable, lol
Misc: I only found out about this meme last night, oh woe! This fic was written last night and given a lazy edit this morning.
Summary: Written for a prompt at the Something Wicked 2013 Horror Fanwork Meme for this prompt:
There's something under the ground, Dean can feel it. It had almost reached him when he pulled himself from his grave and now it's following him everywhere, just waiting for its chance to pull him back under the cold, dark earth and bury him forever.
In the Earth
Dry, crumbling dirt coats his tongue and he strains upward, tearing at the loose-packed earth with his hands. Is this Hell? There was something, a light, a searing pain, and then this, a new kind of torture. Shaking off claustrophobia for the more practical concern of suffocation, he takes measured breaths and claws his way up.
Everything is muffled here, but the sound of something scraping against wood is unmistakeable. It comes again, and now he can feel the vibration under his boots, where he's crouched in his coffin under feet of dirt.
A hard thump shakes dirt loose in a coarse shower on his face, and suddenly he's cold, cold. There are more sounds down there, wet, throaty syllables. His measured breaths turn hot and shaky, his movements frantic. The muscles in his arms burn.
Another thump, hard enough that he hears wood splinter. Now the claustrophobia comes; he's trapped in the dark of a grave, running low on air and almost at the mercy of this thing that he'd probably be able to take down any other time.
He hisses when two of his fingernails bend back, snapping off, and he hears the thing again. Its voice is low and thick and guttural, and it speaks in words he can't understand.
There's pressure against the toe of his boot, and it rasps, "Dean."
With a final, adrenaline-shaky rush he forces through, grave dirt sloughing down around him as he finds the sun, gasping for breath.
Then he runs.
---
He dreams of it sometimes, of being trapped in the earth with that voice, that thing. The touch on his boot. He wakes in motel rooms sweating, arms shaking and throat tight. It's nothing, he tells himself. He was dead, he was in Hell, and you don't just wake up from that without a little jet lag. So maybe he hallucinated a little bit. So what.
Telling himself that doesn't so anything for the dreams, though.
---
They're shin-deep in a swampy Tennessee forest stalking a werewolf. The air is close and damp, stifling, and he swats away a mosquito buzzing around his face. The full moon doesn't penetrate the thick cover of the trees, and their flashlight beams are hazy cones of light. Sam's about twenty yards to the right, sloshing along as quietly as he can.
Dean pulls his boot loose of a sticky patch of mud with a sick sucking sound, and he catches a near echo of the sound before he's assaulted by another mosquito. He freezes in place for a moment, kicking his high-alert senses up another notch, but he hears nothing out of place. His other boot comes free with another wet suck, and this time he does hear it, a second later and about five yards behind him.
Heart hammering, he turns at the waist, aiming the cool beam of his flashlight behind him. Nothing's there but his messy tracks.
Then the ground heaves, and he's running in slow motion through the muck, not fast enough, not fast enough, and "Sam!" he yells and Sam's coming his way, loud and calling his name, and Dean almost falls full-body into the mud before he catches himself on a tree.
Sam plants himself in front of Dean, rifle up alongside his flashlight. "What is it?" he pants, scanning the swamp.
Dean's name comes back to him again, not from Sam, but in that fever-dream voice. "Dean," it whispers, and bubbles rise from the swamp.
"Did you hear that?" Dean asks, as cool as he can manage.
"Hear what?" Sam asks.
A roar shakes the forest, and the werewolf leaps into view.
---
It finds him again in a graveyard in Missouri. They're shoveling earth to put the finishing touches on a standard salt and burn when he hears soil shift behind him. His hands shake on the shovel.
The sound comes louder and Dean inches around to Sam's side, attacks that pile of earth with his shovel, squinting out into the gloom to where he'd heard the sound.
"Come back... " he hears, in that wet, inhuman voice. Dean glances at Sam as it spits a few unintelligible words into the air, and seeing Sam's lack of reaction he squints back across the open grave. "I'll take you," it says.
A shiver runs through Dean's entire body and he shovels faster. In his peripheral vision he catches subtle movement and shoots his head up, scanning. The flat dirt of a grave two stones down is mounding up incrementally, and Dean hears a moist laugh.
Suddenly angry, Dean wrenches the lantern out of the dirt beside them and holds it up.
"Dean," it whispers, fingers like long, pale worms curling out of the unpacked earth, just as Sam asks, "What are you doing?"
It shouldn't be a surprise that when Dean glances at Sam and then back, the grave is flat, no disturbed dirt, no squirming fingers.
"Nothing," Dean sighs, anger deflating. "Let's just get this over with. I'm ready for a beer."
---
Kansas is a nightmare. They're after a djinn that's been sucking people dry here for years, and Sam's managed to get himself separated from Dean. They've been reduced to chasing the thing on foot, and it's led them through streets into the crumpled edges of the town, and into the dark, wooded countryside beyond. Sam had sprinted into a crop of trees hoping to flush it out and Dean had followed several yards behind.
Since then he hasn't seen either of them. He's chasing his own tail in the middle of a field, cursing his broken phone and his brother's too long, too fast legs.
"Dean," he hears, and of course, of course that's exactly what he needs right now. The thing is chuckling, and Dean feels a kind of exasperated, exhausted horror at the sound.
"What?" he challenges, turning a circle in the tall grass. "What do you want?"
"I want you back. With me." The sound comes from below, muffled by only his boots. He leaps back, heart a tight fist in his chest, and turns to run.
It's right behind him. He hears it moving, burrowing through the dry, loose dirt, hears the tall stalks of grass rustle as they fall aside. He's not going to outrun it, he realizes, so instead he turns, skidding to a halt, and raises his shotgun. The sharp, biting smell of burnt powder fills the air and dirt explodes from the moving mound. It slows.
With the crazy thought that the trail left by the thing looks like something from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, Dean fires his second shot, then digs into his jacket pocket for fresh shells. He doesn't have time to reload before the thing is racing forward again, shoving under him and tripping him up.
He lands on his ass, dust puffing up around him, and tries to scramble backwards. Long white fingers, their nails ragged and caked with dirt, burst from the ground and grab his ankle, their grip iron-hard through his boot. His other leg is pinned just as easily, and as he reaches for his knife, dusty fingers clamp down on his wrist.
With growing horror, Dean watches more fingers burst through the dry shell of the earth and fall upon his legs. Dozens of them, all long and dirty and many-knuckled, encasing him from ankle to knee.
Cursing and spitting the dust out of his mouth, he struggles. The fingers on his wrists grow tighter, and more reach up to join them, crawling up his arms and pulling him inexorably down until he's flat on his back.
If one of those things touches my skin, I might scream, he thinks, and as if it heard the thought, a finger comes up to brush at the back of his neck.
"No!" he yells, and then "No!" again, because he feels the shift and grind of the dirt, and he knows what it means.
They're pulling him under. These fingers, are gripping the entire permiter of his body, and this thing is burrowing down back into the earth, and it's taking him with it.
"Back where you belong," it rasps, right under his ear, and he coughs out mud and tries not to vomit as fingers twine and tug in his hair. There's cool pressure along his legs, almost up to the cap of his knees, and his elbows are entirely submerged.
"Sam!" he yells.
"So easy," it gurgles, then other words meant to soothe, but all he can hear is the sussurating hisses and solid clunks of soil shifting.
"Sam!" he yells again, his voice cracking on it. His hearing is down to nearly nothing, his ears blocked up with earth.
But he hears. Hears and feels the vibrations, the steady thud of big feet tearing across the field.
"Dean!" he hears, and it's too quiet, but it's not too late.
"Dean!"
Dean shakes his head. The sound is clear now and Sam's standing over him, one sleeve torn and blood smeared across the side of his face. Dean frowns and sits up.
Everything is normal. There are no hundreds of fingers poking out of the ground, no mound to indicate that the thing had been there, only the split in the tall grass caused by his own flight and the trampling of the ground around him.
"What happened?" Sam asks, offering a hand up. Dean takes it, and lets Sam help brush the worst of the dust off of him.
"There was... you know what, I'll tell you about it later. You get the djinn?"
"Yeah," Sam says, giving him the look that meant he'll be telling Sam later whether he wants to or not. Sometimes Sam knows when to back off, though, so Dean gets the reprieve he needs to pull himself back together.
"Let's get out of here, then," Dean says, and in a smooth motion he grabs his shotgun from the ground and hefts it onto his shoulder.
As they leave, Dean casts one last glance over his shoulder at the dusty field.
He knows it will find him again.
--end
Happy Halloween to all of you!