Sat, May. 2nd, 2009, 09:10 pm
SPN: Visceral

Hi, can you tell school is out?

Visceral
Spoilers through 4x20, The Rapture, but not the previews.
Sequel to Sanguine, and a fair bit darker. R; is it bloodplay if there’s no sex?
Thanks to Thuvia and [info]giandujakiss for beta.


Dean knows Bobby had time to strip down the panic room, but no Winchester ever met a setting incapable of providing him a weapon and Sam’s a Winchester yet. Dean sags down into the chair next to Bobby and they watch Sam through the camera feed Bobby set up.

Sam curses; he shakes (Bobby turns his face away from Dean, but Dean knows it’s to spare him the sight of Bobby’s pity); he drinks a couple of the bottles of water Bobby left, then twists them apart, though the plastic is too soft to make even a crappy knife. He curses again; he searches for a weakness in the room, which he must know was never designed to hold anything in. He lies down on the thin mattress and stares up at the devil’s trap in the ceiling. The lights pattern his face like bruises. He curls himself up and shakes some more.

Bobby eventually goes to take a nap—he worked through the night to turn the panic room into a holding cell, and he ain’t gettin’ any younger. Dean wants to ask him: is anyone? But Bobby doesn’t deserve his anger so he keeps his fool mouth shut for once.

Sometime in the dead hours, Sam groans and raises his arm to his mouth.

Dean forgot: Sam brought his own weapons inside.

Moving as fast as he can without making a noise that might wake Bobby, Dean grabs a first aid kit and hauls ass down to the basement. He throws the locks without checking the window and charges in.

Sam hasn’t managed to hit a deep vein yet—teeth aren’t precision cutters—and by the look of him his own blood isn’t giving him the hit he needs. Dean takes a moment to bar the door, which will slow Sam down some in case he manages to get past Dean, and then drops to his knees by the bed.

Sam’s eyes are red and swollen. He doesn’t fight Dean when Dean pulls his arm away to inspect it. He just lies there on the cheap mattress, not like a corpse—Dean knows that for sure—but maybe like he’s dying.

Dean starts to fix what he can.

He doesn’t think Sam needs stitches, but the cut from the ghouls is barely healed and Sam’s ripped it apart, making it the worst wound by far. Dean gets out the surgical glue and presses the edges together. It’s not easy. He has to line the skin up just right, fast enough so that the glue can do its job. It’s messy and the light sucks and his head hurts, throbbing with his heartbeat like he just got another concussion even though the only thing that happened was that he found out just how far Sam was willing to go for his powers.

When the knife wound is closed again, he works on the bites: antibiotic ointment (the human mouth is filthy; he hears Sam’s bitter ‘so what?’ in his head, but Sam’s still not talking in reality so he ignores it), butterfly bandages, his fingers wiping away blood like it was just another kind of dirt.

“What are you doing, Sam?” he asks, without meaning to. He’s heard of guys in the desert drinking their own piss to survive, but it can’t be the same.

“You know what I was doing,” Sam says.

“You’re not possessed,” he says back, like that’s the flaw in Sam’s logic.

Sam smiles, his lips and chin dotted with his own blood. “It’s still in me. I can taste it. It’s just not enough to do anything.”

Dean’s supposed to roll his eyes, deny, yell.

He wasn’t lying all the way when he told Sam that he was tired. So instead of doing any of the things Dean Winchester (gripped tight and raised from perdition) is supposed to do, he brings up his bloody thumb and swipes his tongue across it, slow.

Dean knows this taste. It’s the flavor souls bleed in Hell their last time on his rack, just as their eyes start reflecting Hellfire in all its glory. The sense memory puts him there again, screams of the damned hot in his ears, stoking the rage inside him—their whining and their useless pain so much like his own; Alastair never said outright but maybe if Dean showed enough of them the error of their ways his own shredded insides would re-knit, seamless and shining like the damned were when they left him.

It’s not sulfur, this taste. It’s more like fire. Dean should know. He’s had his tongue burned out of his mouth enough times to recognize it.

“Dean,” Sam says, shock and something else ringing in his voice. He sits up, putting himself on the edge of the mattress so his legs bracket Dean, down there on the cold concrete.

“You tasted my blood,” Sam says, each word heavier now, swelling near to bursting. “Look at me, Dean.”

Direct order like that, and Dean wants to disobey more than he wants to keep breathing, but wanting never did shit for him, so he lifts his head. Sam’s shoulders are shaking, his eyes bright as summer stars out in the middle of nowhere.

“You have to let me, now. It’s only fair.”

Dean just stares. He stares until Sam grabs his left arm, Sam’s thumb pressing down on the skin of his inner forearm, his fingers like steel cables. Sam holds Dean’s arm between them like it’s a precious artifact, like it’s a gun full of silver bullets and a werewolf’s at the door.

Dean doesn’t struggle as Sam tugs him into a crouch, enough that Sam can grab the knife out of his back pocket. Sam flicks it open, and Dean thinks for half a second that it was stupid to come in armed, but Sam isn’t trying to go anywhere. All his attention is on Dean.

Sam slices high, near the inner elbow, like he knows just where he wants to get the best angle. Before the pain hits, before a single drop has time to hit the floor, he’s got his mouth on Dean’s skin, sealed around the cut.

The sound Sam makes is like—it’s a sound from the bowels of Hell; it’s orgasmic. He sucks like he’s two minutes away from dying of thirst. He sucks like he needs Dean the way he needed him twenty-six years ago.

He pulls off just long enough to raise astonished eyes to Dean’s. “You—it’s not demon. I think—I think maybe it’s angel.”

And then his mouth is on Dean again. He’s making thrilled, desperate little noises. Dean’s balance is bad like this. He leans into Sam because he’ll topple otherwise.

Dean remembers Castiel and the little Novak girl, the one whose blood made her a host, and then he thinks about the scar on his shoulder. Sam got fed demon, and it changed him; Dean got angel burned into him, and it was the same. Angels are dicks and demons lie and Winchesters, they just have to take it.

Of course Sam figured it out first. Nobody ever claimed that Dean was the brains of the operation.

Sam pulls him onto the mattress. He’s straddling Sam’s lap, Sam’s arm wrapped around his back to keep him in place, pressed as close as possible. Dean doesn’t mean to flinch, but Sam feels it, and it’s even enough to make Sam stop. His face flushes obscenely pink, shocking contrast to his red-smeared mouth. “Sorry,” he says, his eyes still on Dean’s arm. “It’s just physical.” He bends again, and Dean lets him, says nothing back, because he seriously does not have the first idea why Sam would think that it was better that it’s the blood that makes Sam hard.

His tongue is hot and strong, chasing each spurt; he’s only just under Dean’s skin but it feels like he’s stuck his hands under Dean’s ribcage, arrowing towards his heart. Dean kind of wants to throw up and then he kind of wants to pass out, but he’s not that lucky. Would Sam stop if Dean’s eyes rolled back in his head and Dean went as limp as wet laundry? Probably, he thinks. Almost for sure. Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Or maybe it should be, don’t buy a cow when you can get the milk for free. Fairytales are true, so no surprise about proverbs. Dean realizes that this is blood loss, fucking with his head, but it feels like revelation.

The suction slows. How much blood fits in a stomach, anyway? Sam would know, and Dean bites down hard on his lip (not hard enough to draw blood, not that hard) to keep from laughter.

Sam pulls off, presses his hand to the cut, fresh salt pain like another slice across Dean’s arm. Sam should go for the kit, more bandages for more scars, but instead he leans into Dean, tugging him close, hot palm pressing damply through Dean’s shirt and into his spine. His chin digs into Dean’s chest, and he’s shaking or Dean is.

“This, this is amazing,” he says. He sounds like Dean just gave him the best present ever, back when the best present ever was some dictionary the size of a spare tire or a full year in the same place. “I don’t need Ruby if I—I missed you,” Sam says, and Dean brings his free hand around to cup the back of Sam’s neck, tangling in the sweaty curls there. Sam smells of the road, sweat and blood and exhaust, things left over after the fire.

“You and me, not gonna let you leave me again,” Sam tells him, completely convincing. Dean’s cut throbs in time with Sam’s pulse. Sam curls even closer, strong and solid. Together they are an eight-limbed monster, like some giant deformed spider. Castiel would recoil in horror. Even Ruby might shut her fucking mouth and back away. “You and me,” Sam says again, “take care of each other, just like we’re supposed to,” and the worst of it, the thing that shuts the door of the torture chamber that is Dean’s life, is this:

The tears running down Dean’s cheeks are tears of joy.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 01:33 am (UTC)
[info]logovo1

Aw sheesh, Dean :(

Thank you, I really wanted to read about this inbetween time.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:16 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

I'm glad you liked it!

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 01:44 am (UTC)
[info]deadlychameleon

Beautiful! I love the incongruity of the monstrous and angelic, of orgasmic pleasure, and men on the rack. It's a study in extremes.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:17 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you! Winchesters are at their most interesting at the extremes

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 01:57 am (UTC)
[info]scribblinlenore

Wow, that's amazingly intense, beautifully written, and just the story I wanted to read after having watched this last episode. Thank you!

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:17 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

I'm glad you liked it!

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 02:12 am (UTC)
[info]counteragent

Oh, this is so messed up. Yay!

Would Sam stop if Dean’s eyes rolled back in his head and Dean went as limp as wet laundry? Probably, he thinks. Almost for sure.

*shudders*

You say this is darker than Sanguine, and I suppose that objectively the act is worse than the thought, but I found Sam's head such a disturbing place to be that seeing the same situation from Dean's POV is less evil and more just totally fucked up. Which the Winchesters do so very well. I guess I'm the eternal optimist, but I still have the tiniest bit of hope that angel blood could do Sam some good here. Poor Dean appears to be a bit of a lost cause.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:26 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you! It's true, it may not be darker insofar as Dean is not a demon in this one. Poor Dean the enabler; if Sam is saved, won't that drag him along too?

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 02:12 am (UTC)
[info]serrico

Oh, Dean. *Dean.* *No.*

That boy wants too much for his own--or anybody's--good, sometimes. (And this story explored that in a wonderfully twisted way! *g*)

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:27 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

This is like the Dean flipside of "any plan that involves drinking demon blood can't be a good plan!" Still, a plan that involves becoming his brother's walking transfusion is better than no plan at all, right?

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 02:27 am (UTC)
[info]erda_3

That was incredibly erotic and intense.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:27 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you!

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 02:38 am (UTC)
[info]catdancerz: oh dean..

oh dear...

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:28 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat: Re: oh dean..

Yep.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 02:42 am (UTC)
[info]valkyrie4clex

It is dark - wonderful but dark -and I want to cry for Dean-

Thanks for sharing

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:28 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

I'm glad you liked it! Poor Dean.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 04:25 am (UTC)
[info]moodswingers

Oh damn. I'm speechless and completely in love with this.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:28 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you!

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 04:35 am (UTC)
[info]velvetine01

Wow, this is intense and so damn good. *applauds*
God, those boys are so cracked, it's ridiculous!

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:28 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you! Poor boys.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 05:41 am (UTC)
[info]norwich36

Angels are dicks and demons lie and Winchesters, they just have to take it.

Oh, DEAN.

I loved Dean remembering the taste of blood of the souls he tortured. And the last two lines just about killed me.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:29 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

He's one fucked-up puppy, that's for sure. I'm glad you liked it!

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 06:29 am (UTC)
[info]machinistm

Woah. Disturbing concept, but you made it perfectly intense.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:29 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you! Funny thing is, I'm fairly sure Dean would prefer this to what's likely to happen in the show.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 07:47 am (UTC)
[info]svmadelyn

Aigh, this was awesome.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:30 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you!

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 08:33 am (UTC)
[info]syllic

--and the worst of it, the thing that shuts the door of the torture chamber that is Dean’s life, is this:

The tears running down Dean’s cheeks are tears of joy.


These two little stories are beautiful--in the last one, the thought of Ruby choosing her name in advance chased around in my head for a couple of days; this, returning to depending only on each other but in the most messed up of ways, is amazing.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:30 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you! The Winchesters: giving codependence a bad name.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 11:36 am (UTC)
[info]oschun

*whew* great sequel! I love how disturbing this image is: "Together they are an eight-limbed monster, like some giant deformed spider." It's really apt.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 12:30 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you! I'm glad you liked the image.

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 05:35 pm (UTC)
[info]frelling_tralk

Awesome sequel!

Sun, May. 3rd, 2009 05:42 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you!

Mon, May. 4th, 2009 12:33 am (UTC)
[info]devin_chain

You are brilliant.

Mon, May. 4th, 2009 12:40 am (UTC)
[info]rivkat

You are very sweet!

Mon, May. 4th, 2009 07:12 am (UTC)
[info]whereupon

This is devastatingly beautiful, haunting and vivid and so intense. Dark, yes, and absolutely perfect. Thank you for writing it!

Mon, May. 4th, 2009 12:25 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

I'm glad you liked it! Poor boys.

Tue, May. 5th, 2009 05:57 am (UTC)
[info]minim_calibre

This is so beautifully, horribly twisted and plausible.

Tue, May. 5th, 2009 11:45 am (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you!

Tue, May. 5th, 2009 12:54 pm (UTC)
[info]callistosh65

Wow, visceral is right. This was stunning - intense, hypnotic, unsettling, erotic, and just heart-breakingly good.

Tue, May. 5th, 2009 05:29 pm (UTC)
[info]rivkat

I'm glad you liked it!

Tue, May. 5th, 2009 02:46 pm (UTC)
[info]pingback_bot: SPN: Fic recs sangrientos :)

User [info]logovo1 referenced to your post from SPN: Fic recs sangrientos :) saying: [...] a ver los temas de 4.20 repetidos en varios fics. ::hace changuitos:: ¡Ojala! di colpo de y Visceral de [...]

Wed, May. 6th, 2009 12:13 am (UTC)
[info]theoret

This is just awesome. I don't even have words. That last line. *flaily incoherent hands*

Wed, May. 6th, 2009 01:12 am (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Thank you! Poor boys.

Wed, May. 6th, 2009 07:39 am (UTC)
[info]labseraph

Dude. This has got to be scariest fic I've read thus far post The Rapture. Seriously.

*hides under blankie, trembling*

Wed, May. 6th, 2009 11:17 am (UTC)
[info]rivkat

Heh. I'm glad it had such an effect! If only they'd go there on the show.

Sun, Jun. 21st, 2009 01:20 am (UTC)
[info]sentineljandb: I hope you write more in this universe!

I love these two stories, Sanguine and the sequel Visceral.

The raw need the brothers feel for each other, is so intense I think it repels and attracts at the same time.

I was wondering if Bobby got an eye full of Dean and Sam. Will he lock them together? Or will Bobby try to save Dean from Sam? What if Ruby or Castile tried to keep the brothers apart? If that happens, what will the brothers do, will they unite? Does that mean Dean turns bad, or will drinking angel blood turn Sam good?

It was such a powerful story. I hope you write more in this universe!

Sun, Jun. 21st, 2009 02:27 am (UTC)
[info]rivkat: Re: I hope you write more in this universe!

Thank you! I have trouble going back once canon has moved on, but I think Winchester blood has a lot of potential. I'm glad you got that repulsion/attraction feeling--it's really what I was going for.

I don't think Bobby saw them, but if he got in their way Sam would hurt him if necessary and Dean would let him; in this version, Dean's made his choice to stick with Sam. And Sam wouldn't let any angel or demon get in their way. I don't know if he'd release Lucifer.

Thu, Sep. 10th, 2009 09:28 am (UTC)
[info]lotsayaoi

I have no words.

First of all, this is a concept I have thought about endlessly since finding out Sam's secret, so I was excited to read because of that.

Second, this was BRILLIANTLY reasoned and written. The decription of what Dean tasted in Sam's blood is awesome, and comparing it to his time in Hell was nothing short of genius. And the way you wrote all of it made it almost feel like an actual episode. I'm retarded, so I don't know if you're usually a Wincest writer, but regardless you managed to get that kind of brotherly romance between Sam and Dean that makes the show so compelling.

I'm probably not making sense anymore, and I'm sorry, but suffice it to say that this was brilliant and you're awesome.

~Jay

Thu, Sep. 10th, 2009 11:29 am (UTC)
[info]rivkat

I'm so glad you liked it! I really wanted Sam to drink Dean's blood to further their codependency. I write mainly but not exclusively Sam/Dean; I didn't think this required that label, though one of my betas disagreed. Either way, they're more bound up in each other than anyone should even be able to be.