Hands, Eyes, Hearts - A Collection of Supernatural Drabbles

1 // Dean

He's been walking this road for miles, the sun beating down on his ripped-shirt shoulders in a heated shout that screams up the soles of his feet. Fire soaks through his limbs from the shout-baked asphalt. From the air. He's delirious, swatting at nothing around his head, little biting flies made of smoke and ash. He feels as though he's been walking for years, but it can only have been hours. Days, at most. He was whole this time last Wednesday, he's sure of it.

No time, nor energy, to bother himself with the existential questioning that so often pesters the suffering. He has no mind with which to form such questions, not of which he's aware; and anyway, whose idea was it to make such ponderings an integral part of the trudge for survival? Why am I here, what have I done to deserve this, who can I blame, and so forth. None of that helps in any situation, and certainly not one like this. He could die in the next five minutes and none of those answers would save him.

He shakes his head to chase them away, and invites his headache right back in.

More's the pity. Now, he's curious.

His feet slog a little through some deeper sand on the shoulder, and he blinks down at them. Sweat skirts his eyes and stings in the tiny cuts on his face. The sand beneath his feet is trickling through the cracks in the seams of his boots, worn down as they are by his trudging, and other things. Paper-thin. Leather, and sanity. The discomfort forces itself between his toes, and with the pain stabs in a bit of memory. Almost a razor's blade of a tease.

He sees a face; pale, but not wan. Dark hair, darker stubble. A clenched fist, held up? Pinned down? Beside that face. Long, dark lashes, fluttering open and closed, over--

Eyes, as blue as the sky over a storm-tossed sea.

He strikes out further, one foot in front of the other, fire and smoke and it's all in his mind. Pretty sure, he tells himself in a blood-soaked whisper, that pretty eyes won't save you now.