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Captured by the Game
Rating/warnings: NC-17 for dirty deeds glancingly described. Sam/Dean. Impure wish-fulfillment.
Summary: AU. Azazel has given his favorite son a task: worm his way into the confidence of a hunter. It sounds simple, but Dean Winchester just might be more than Sam can handle.
Thanks:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
giandujakiss and coffeeandink, for kicks in the pants above and beyond the call of beta; Mary Ellen Curtin and cathexys for beta.
ETA: Full story at the AO3 if you want to read the whole thing at once.
Father gave him the assignment just after his twenty-second birthday. “This is your test,” he said with the jocular tone that so often promised a bloodletting. “Screw this up and you’re out of the running. Pull it off, and you might just be the heir apparent.
“And get a haircut,” he added, as if it were an afterthought. “You wouldn’t want the hunter mistaking you for Bigfoot.”
Sam only kept himself from hunching down and pushing his hair out of his eyes by locking every muscle tight. If Father had really objected to the bangs, he would have told one of the others, and Sam would have woken up one morning with lye in his hair, or worse.
The real problem was Father’s threat and promise. He had never been so blatant before. He was probably lying—that was one of the basic lessons, never to believe anything you hadn’t confirmed through your own means—but he was more likely to be lying about the benefits of success than the costs of failure. Now that they were all adults, Father was separating the wheat from the chaff with everything but an actual flail. In the past six months, seven of Sam’s siblings had shuffled off this mortal coil, and Sam had only taken out two of them.
“What’s to stop Ava from coming after me while I’m off doing your dirty work?” Sam asked.
Father smiled. “That’s part of the challenge.”
Forced back out into the mundane world, unable to study, and told to win the trust of some random hunter whose importance Father wouldn’t even explain. It was enough to make him wonder whether Father wasn’t setting him up for elimination. Of course Sam was the pick of the litter, but that wasn’t an unmixed blessing for the current leader of the pack.
Father gestured, indicating an end to the audience. He turned to leave.
“Samael.”
He froze. When he counted up his grievances against Father, the first was always that stupid, pretentious name. “Yes, Father,” he said, forcing his body to stillness.
“Don’t get dumb. Just because you won’t see me doesn’t mean I won’t see you.”
He nodded woodenly.
Father could throw anything he wanted in Sam’s path. Sam wasn’t going to stumble. If this was a real opportunity, he was going to squeeze it until it burst. If it was a diversion, he was going to use the chance to hone his powers far from prying eyes.
****
“I’m looking for Dean Winchester,” he told the bartender, a pretty-enough blonde with a scowl that didn’t quite hide the way her eyes lingered on his arms and his chest. Even slumped down in his college-kid sweatshirt and jeans, he knew he stood out, so he didn’t blame her for looking.
“Dean?” she asked, halfway between suspicious and surprised. “Over there,” she gestured, “but –”
He followed her pointing finger to the emptiest recess of the bar and stopped in his tracks.
There is a God was probably the most inappropriate thing he could have thought. Far from the broken-down redneck Sam had been expecting, Winchester was gorgeous. It was impossible to tell the color of his eyes in the bad light, but they were framed by lashes that wouldn’t have been out of place on a fashion model. His lips were plump and pink as if anticipating what kisses would do to them, and his heavy stubble made Sam’s thighs itch to feel those cheeks against his own skin.
Get his trust, right. Sam could do that.
As he approached, Sam saw the spray of freckles across Winchester’s nose. This couldn’t be a gift from Father, but it certainly was wrapped nicely.
Winchester brought his gaze up from his beer when Sam was a few paces away, his eyes unerringly finding Sam’s as if he’d heard Sam coming through all the ambient noise of the bar. They were green.
“Yeah?” Winchester asked, breaking Sam’s inexplicable paralysis.
“Dean Winchester?” he asked, putting extra hesitation into his voice and bringing his shoulders in tight. “My name is Sam Marshall. Can I talk to you?”
Winchester tilted his head. “Don’t stop now.”
Even though he hadn’t been invited, Sam grabbed a chair from a nearby table and pulled it up to Winchester’s. When he sat, their knees nearly touched.
“You might be wondering how I know your name,” he began.
Winchester shook his head. “Saw you talking to Jo.”
Sam stopped again. Pretty or not, this man was a member of a dying breed, deluded into thinking that what a loner did might somehow matter in the great wars between angels and demons. His intransigience should not be derailing Sam’s plans.
Up close, the green of his irises was ringed with a darker color, almost black.
“I dream about you,” he blurted out, and then wanted to smash his forehead into the table. He might have done it if Winchester’s empty beer glass hadn’t been in the way.
Surprisingly, Winchester didn’t laugh at him. The wariness was not much better, even if it was accompanied by a slight flush.
Okay, Sam could still get his basic cover out, even if it had started like a bad pick-up line. “A couple months back, I started having these—dreams. I thought they were dreams, just imaginary. But then I saw a story in the paper and I found out—the things I’d seen had been happening. All of them. After I dreamed them.”
Winchester examined him like he was a rattlesnake. “And this is connected to me how?”
“You were in them. You were fighting—you were hunting ghosts.”
Winchester leaned over and gestured towards the bar, not looking at Sam. “Dude, I don’t know what your problems are, but they aren’t mine.”
Time to play the concerned ingenue. “You’re in danger,” Sam said, widening his eyes as he leaned forward to put his hand on Winchester’s wrist. It was like touching Lily, back before Sam figured out how to shut her down, except that this shock was warm and golden. They both stared down at his hand. Winchester was a big enough man that his wrist didn’t disappear into Sam’s grip, but Sam could still have closed his fingers around Winchester’s arm like a cuff.
They were interrupted by the bartender, Jo, whose reason for failing to delegate the task to a waitress was immediately apparent: she put two bottles of domestic on the table, then settled into Winchester’s lap, forcing Sam to drop Winchester’s hand. Winchester grimaced, half in pleasure and half in embarrassment.
“I’m off in ten,” Jo said into his ear, loud enough for Sam to hear.
Winchester’s hands fluttered around Jo’s body, struggling to find a place to touch her that wouldn’t count as hitting a double or a triple. “Jo,” he said, in the strained tone of a man with a diamond-edged hardon, “you know I promised your momma I’d leave you alone—”
“You were seventeen,” she whined. “And if—” Sam didn’t know whether she was going to say ‘if you really cared’ or ‘if you asked her permission,’ but it was obvious that Winchester didn’t and wasn’t going to, and Jo had the minimum of self-respect necessary to shut her up. She bit her lip and wriggled once more as she began to stand up, just to show him what he was missing.
If a girl had tried that with Sam, she would have found herself getting pounded right on the creaky little bar table. Winchester was either the evangelical brand of hunter or some other kind of crazy, because he just sucked in a breath and let her pull away. “I gotta talk to this guy,” he said conciliatorily, indicating Sam.
Sam gave her a little wave, barely triumphant at all. He got the hairy eyeball anyway.
She did have a fine ass, snug in nice tight jeans and framed by the cutest little bar apron. When Sam turned back, Winchester was looking at him with mild disapproval.
“Talk,” he said.
And now Sam was in a bit of a pickle. Father and his goddamned prohibition on letting Sam do any scrying in advance. (“The problems you’ll be having, some of them you won’t have any intel on. You’ve got to learn to react, my boy, get your instincts working for you.”) The internet had proved unhelpful in determining Winchester’s current activities, no shock there.
He fucking hated what using his powers to see the future did to him, and years of experience counseled against making himself so vulnerable in the presence of others, but there wasn’t much choice here. He concentrated, pretending that it didn’t make his face scrunch up in a truly ridiculous manner, and opened the window in his mind.
“A woman, a ghost,” he said. “You’re sitting in a car with her. She’s in the passenger seat. She’s wearing—a white nightgown?”
“What does she look like?” Winchester asked, hoarse, and Sam wished that he was good enough to open his eyes and still keep the vision.
“She’s beautiful—mid-twenties maybe, dark hair, olive skin—she’s, she’s attacking you—” He snapped back into the now, needing to see Winchester’s face whole and not writhing in desperate agony as the woman ripped the life out of him.
The intrigue on Winchester’s face was fading into disquiet; Winchester offered him a napkin from one of the beers, then pulled his hand back as he realized that it was already sodden with condensation. He dug around in his pockets and came up with an honest-to-god handkerchief, shoving it at Sam. Sam looked at him, uncomprehending, and only then realized that his nose was bleeding.
“Head back,” Winchester said, scooting closer and putting his hand on Sam’s shoulder, right at the junction of his neck. “Here.” He tugged, easing Sam’s head so that his nose pointed up at the smoke-blackened wood of the ceiling, and brought Sam’s hand up to pinch his nose closed. His fingers lingered over Sam’s until Sam had a good grip, and then Winchester backed off, though Sam could still feel the heat rising off his body.
“That happen every time you get a vision?” Winchester asked. The headache and dizziness was worth it, because Winchester was a believer now.
Sam tried to nod without moving his head. “Preddy much,” he got out. He could feel that the blood had stopped flowing, but he held on, just to work the sympathy angle. After a couple of minutes, he tilted his head back down. Winchester was examining him as if he were a complicated series of runes. Sam wiped off the last of the blood, looked down at the ruined handkerchief, and decided not to hand it over. Any one of his siblings would have used the stained cotton to fuck him up badly. Winchester was unlikely to perform blood magic with it, but Sam had the feeling he didn’t want it back anyway.
“Okay,” Winchester said, nodding and pushing back from the table and standing; he was only a few inches shorter than Sam. “I got a lead I need to track down.” He paused. “So, you coming?”
Sam stood, hunching to make himself look less threatening and more threatened, and followed.
****
Winchester didn’t explain why they drove halfway across the country, or why they stopped at the ugliest, orangest motel imaginable, but once they were in California they found exactly what Sam had seen.
“A woman in white, hunh,” Sam said as they leaned back against their seats, afterwards. His distant curiosity was honest: his demonology was as advanced as any mortal’s since Al-Hazan, but he’d never bothered with the minor beasts and haunts.
“Yep,” Winchester said.
Constance had been reunited with her children. That hadn’t gone all that well for her. Sam wondered if his human mother had feared him, would fear him now. He had a picture of her, dark-haired and dark-eyed. When he’d been a kid, before Father had explained, Sam had sometimes imagined his mother coming for him, saying she loved him and always had. But he hadn’t ever needed a mother to tell him that he was special, and even Father’s divided attention was pretty intense.
“What now?” Winchester asked.
“You still need my help,” Sam told him, a flat fact. Saying it like that was taking a risk, but Winchester had seemed grateful to have a partner on this—well, Sam guessed it had been a hunt. He was a hunter now. “I can pay my own way, I’ve got some money saved up.”
Winchester chuffed and rolled his shoulders. “You don’t have anywhere to be?”
It wasn’t enough of a direct question to justify trotting out a life story, and Sam wanted more time observing Winchester to see what would work best. “Nowhere but here,” he said, daring a shy quick grin, and settled back into the old leather of the car.
****
Sam didn’t want to push too soon, so he let Winchester take them to Colorado without much question.
That was before Winchester showed him the records of the repeated disapperances, mostly attributed to bear attacks. He hadn’t signed on for bears, or things that looked like bears, or things that did the kind of damage that got mistaken for bears.
He was also disturbed by how cavalier Winchester was about making up a cover story. Winchester just walked into the ranger station, staring at the wall rather than meeting the ranger’s eyes, and started asking about the not-quite-missing group of hikers. When his first bullshit story didn’t go over he just switched to the next one, visibly forcing himself to keep talking. Sam thought the ranger helped him out in the end because he was just so obviously desperate for the information.
On the one hand, his indifference to plausibility suggested that Sam didn’t have to worry overmuch about his own excuses. But Sam didn’t want to get arrested for impersonating a federal officer, or any of the other people Winchester seemed prepared to impersonate. He didn’t even have a fake badge for Sam.
Nonetheless, it was true that, when Winchester showed his own fake ID, Hailey Collins didn’t bother to ask to see Sam’s. Which was good, because the one Sam was holding also had a picture of Winchester, only this time he was a member of the U.S. Geological Survey. Given how Winchester lit up a room just by walking into it, Sam could see how an average person’s trust could get him through a lot of these situations, though more confidence would have helped.
The survivor from the 1982 attack was even easier than Hailey, not even slightly suspicious. Winchester was awkward with him at first, too rough and accusing, until Sam stepped in and started asking the questions. But Roger Shaw was beyond the niceties. He’d been carrying around the truth about the thing that had killed his parents for decades, and he only wanted to admit it.
The sight of those three claw marks distorting Shaw’s chest made Sam nervous. He could repel anything he saw first, but that might take a lot of explaining, and, even with his abilities, going into the forest to be hunted seemed horror-movie stupid to him.
When Winchester started pulling weapons out of his trunk and stuffing them into two bags, Sam tried to balk. “You don’t even know what it is. How do you know guns will stop it?”
Winchester stopped, looked back over his shoulder, and raised his eyebrow skeptically. “Your visions aren’t telling you?”
“I’m not some 24-hour news channel,” he snapped, because yes, he’d tried to look ahead, and there was nothing useful. Just blurry trunks and rushing darkness and then a bright flash: all that at the price of a migraine. He’d never spent a lot of time trying to sharpen the visions, mostly because they were incapacitating enough that they made him a great target for his brothers and sisters. He’d expended more effort staving them off than bringing them on.
Winchester already had his back to Sam, examining a semiautomatic, then returning it to its place in the car. “It had a physical effect on Shaw, right? Physical effect means physical vulnerability.” Sam knew that wasn’t entirely true, and opened his mouth to say so before he realized that he couldn’t reveal that much expertise. His heart rate jumped when Winchester continued: “Unless it’s some kind of demon, but a demon would’ve left the bodies to be found. Better scare value. So we’re lookin’ for something that can hit and be hit.”
“Fine,” Sam bit out. “Let’s get this over with.”
****
They hooked up with the Collins siblings and their guide, which Sam wanted to find reassuring. But Winchester’s continued fumbling attempts to feign an obviously lacking woodscraft expertise cancelled out most of the confidence Sam otherwise would have felt.
Winchester handed him one of the weapons bags at the beginning of the trek. After a couple of hours, when it became apparent that neither Sam’s shoes nor the feet in them were well-equipped for hiking, Winchester waited for him to catch up and then just transferred the bag to his free shoulder.
Sam glared at Winchester’s definitely not-hiking boots. Winchester just started walking again, so there was nothing for it but to follow him.
They were far enough away from the others that, once he could breathe without panting again, he figured that conversation might be possible. “How’d you get this job, anyway?” he asked.
“Found some coordinates,” Winchester said.
Well, wasn’t he a Chatty Cathy. “Found where?”
Winchester sped up. Sam refrained from reaching out mentally to hold him in place. “My dad’s journal,” Winchester answered after another half a minute, when Sam failed to fall back.
This sounded important. “Where’s your dad now? Is he here? Are we meeting him?”
The pain that washed over Winchester’s face made Sam think, at first, that his father must be recently dead. But: “I don’t know. I thought maybe—but if he’d’ve been here, there would’ve been a sign.” With that, Winchester increased his pace yet again, crunching over leaves and branches with no evidence that he was even paying attention to where his feet went.
Winchester didn’t have any plans that required Sam, he reminded himself, which meant that Sam had to be the one to bend. “Look,” he said, forcing his aching legs to move faster. “I know I just crashed into your life. But listen, it’s the same for me. I didn’t ask to wake up screaming five nights out of seven, watching you nearly get your guts torn out. I don’t know what I’m doing, I admit that. You’re so hot to help people, then help me. And maybe I can do something for you.”
Winchester wouldn’t meet his eyes for the next hour. But when they stopped for a break, Winchester handed him the open bag of peanut M&Ms, then a canteen to wash the stickiness away. “Wake up screaming, hunh?” he asked while Sam’s mouth was still full. “Guess my life’s pretty scary.”
Sam swallowed, thinking about the empty beds back home. “At least you’re alive and fighting,” he said.
****
Fear wasn’t anything special, or even shameful if it was justified. He’d spent most of his pre-puberty life terrified—mostly of the teachers; the bodies changed but the black eyes always glittered the same—and then slowly pushed out as much of the fear as possible with anger, like water displacing oil.
When he was twelve, Father had started sending them out into the world: shopping trips, museum expeditions, library visits. Always with goals, like the time they’d each been ordered to come back with a leather jacket without stealing it. Jake had produced a wad of cash whose provenance he’d never explained; Andy had ordered a woman to open her wallet for him—she’d collapsed after, but they hadn’t stuck around to see what happened next; Sam had done what he’d needed to do. Lily had taken nearly three days to return, and she was different afterwards, but they’d all passed.
Later, there had been more diffuse assignments, and more individualized ones. In the summer of his sixteenth year, Sam had been tasked with getting the daughter of a local politician into a compromising position. She’d been nineteen, a spectacular beauty, and he’d been just starting another growth spurt, all bones and stumbles, so it had been a significant challenge. He’d finally approached her at the local pool.
“You’re from that funky boarding school,” she’d said, smiling condescendingly in her blue-and-teal-striped bikini.
“The Xavier Institute for Higher Learning,” he’d said, and then, when she frowned: “Sorry, private joke.”
He’d gotten the job done. Afterwards, the girl (Amy, her name was Amy, except maybe it had been spelled differently; he wasn’t sure) had drowned in the pool despite the presence of three lifeguards. It was the local tragedy of the year.
Sam had only found out about her death when Father had called him into the study to read out the eulogy delivered by the girl’s pastor. “I hope you enjoyed that X-Men reference,” Father had said, merry as ever. “It’s a good thing she wasn’t a comics fan, don’t you think?”
Sam had swallowed and nodded, because there was nothing else to do.
So yeah, he knew more about fear than Winchester thought.
****
Sam felt it the moment Winchester was taken by the wendigo. That instantaneous knowledge was troubling in and of itself, but it was subsumed by the immediate fear. Father would crucify him if he lost Winchester to a mindless killer. Whether or not Father was lying about his presence at Golgotha, Sam believed that he could make it last for days.
Then he had to lead Ben Collins through the woods, even though he didn’t know what they were going to find and he was cold and dirty and a new blister seemed to pop with every step he took. It had been easy enough to be confident among his siblings; they’d known him all his life and had reason to respect his power. Ben was just a scared guy out in the woods, with no reason to believe Sam other than the force of his will and the sight of a few peanut M&Ms, marking a trail.
At last, they found a tunnel. There was a warning sign: “Danger! Do not enter. Extremely toxic material.” Sam stared at it, almost disbelieving. If it wasn’t a coincidence, something that had been put up while the wendigo was quiescent, then there were people out in the world who had Father’s sense of humor.
The wendigo’s lair smelled like a latrine stuffed with rotten meat. Ben had to stop in the tunnel to gag, but Sam breathed through his mouth and pressed on.
The ground under their feet was soft and unpleasantly squishy. They were fifty feet in when they heard the growl.
Ben froze like prey. Sam knew that if the wendigo saw him, it would find them both, so he grabbed Ben and shoved him against the wall, where his silhouette wouldn’t stand out. The wendigo hesitated. Ben trembled. Sam wanted to snap his neck, even as he could feel his own muscles starting to shake.
It loped towards them. Ben’s mouth opened; Sam pressed his hand over nose and mouth together, suppressing all sound.
Less than a dozen yards from them, the wendigo swerved and disappeared down a side tunnel.
Sam released Ben, but neither of them moved from the wall at first.
After that, falling through the floor into a pile of skeletons seemed almost relaxing, even if Sam ended up with sliced hands and a cut on his cheek.
The skeletons were evidence that they were near the wendigo’s feeding grounds. Sam stood, shaking off the bones trying to cling to him, and tried to find his way in the near-darkness.
There was a sort of electric humming at the back of his mind, a tremble like a compass needle near an iron bar. He found his flashlight and switched it on, pointing it in the direction his instinct demanded.
Winchester and Hailey were hung up like chickens in the window of a Chinatown restaurant. Sam hobble-skipped over to them, Ben following. The boy was a rabbit, but he loved his sister, Sam thought. It was hard to imagine what that felt like.
Sam scrabbled with the ropes—he hoped they were ropes and not the braided intestines of earlier victims—and Winchester twisted slowly. The motion started to rouse him.
“Wake up!” Sam urged, as loud as he dared.
Winchester’s head turned slowly towards Sam. He blinked and his eyes widened. Sam realized that the ropes were just looped around Winchester, pulled tight by his own weight; he gritted his teeth, bent, and hoisted Winchester over his shoulder, ignoring the white-hot pain of his feet as he picked the ropes free.
“Thanks,” Winchester said when he was back on his feet, seeming more surprised than pleased. Sam understood that: relying on somebody else’s performance was a good route to a short, sharp shock.
“Help me!” Hailey said. He turned and saw her pushing at yet another trussed victim: the missing Tommy. Winchester tapped his arm, then put a large folding knife into his hand and jerked his chin at Hailey.
Sam dutifully went over to the Collins huddle and, grateful for his height, sawed through Tommy’s ropes, no fucking around with unwrapping this time.
What was Winchester up to?
He cast around in the dimness, his pulse doubling.
“Hey, check it out.”
Sam spun, nearly tripping over his own feet. Winchester was in a corner, holding up a bulky pistol.
“Flare guns,” Winchester explained. It must have been part of the equipment Tommy and his group brought along, Sam realized. Winchester twirled a gun around each index finger, then looked up and grinned at the expression on Sam’s face. “C’mon,” he said. Sam would have sworn this was the first time Winchester had actually been happy since they’d met.
Sam found that he had absolutely no hesitation in following Winchester’s lead. It was possible that he was a little bit in shock.
Ben and Hailey wrapped themselves around Tommy, who was barely conscious, and they headed back out of the tunnels.
The wendigo’s growl boomed out from the depths of the tunnel. In the darkness, there was no way to tell how close it was.
“Suppertime,” Winchester mumbled to himself.
“We’ll never outrun it,” Hailey said calmly.
“All right, listen to me,” Winchester said. “Sam is going to get you out of here.” He pressed one of the flare guns into Sam’s hand, then pulled away.
“What are you gonna do?” Hailey asked.
Winchester was already moving down the tunnel. “Hey, sweetheart!” he yelled. “You wanna dance?”
Sam hovered for a second. This was Winchester’s specialty. But he’d already been captured once. But—
“Come on,” Hailey hissed. They stumbled down the crumbling corridor.
The next growl couldn’t have come from more than ten feet away.
Sam pushed the others ahead without thinking. “Go!” They were on their own now; he turned towards the inevitable attack.
The wendigo rushed him faster than one of Ava’s ifrits. He pulled the flare gun trigger almost by accident, pushing out with his mind at the same time to keep the wendigo away. Then he ran.
The Collins siblings were just reaching the tunnel entrance when he rejoined them. He turned back, and the wendigo was leaping towards them again. He cried out in warning, then put himself in its path, so the others wouldn’t see the cursed creature move so inexplicably when he knocked it back.
“Hey!”
Sam and the wendigo both stopped at Winchester’s yell. Then the creature’s torso lit up from the inside, and Sam blinked as the wendigo broke into flames from the flare Winchester had fired into it. He saw it clearly for the first time: a wizened brown thing like a man half-melted into a bat shape. After only a few seconds, it crisped into ash and sparks.
****
The hike back out to a place the ambulance could reach offered plenty of opportunity to review his own performance, the way Father always demanded. He was cold and sore and he smelled nasty. Something squishy had gotten caught between the back of his T-shirt and the collar of his overshirt when he’d fallen down, and he already knew he’d be sorry when he saw what it was. It was almost a relief to think about the larger lessons, including that he needed to figure out how to guide a gun with his mind.
More disturbing than his poor aim were the other aspects of the attack. Winchester had run towards the wendigo like a kid running towards a carnival. Sam was good, but he’d have trouble winning the confidence of a dead man.
And then, when the Collins siblings had looked at him, after, there had been this light in their eyes. Sam didn’t get it. Hailey and her brothers had been stupid and they’d nearly paid with their lives. They were pathetic normals, ignorant even beyond the minimal understanding of hunters. It didn’t matter what they said, or thought.
Still, Winchester walked a little taller, swaggering almost on those bow legs of his, on their way out of the forest. Sam eyed him and wondered how long it would take to get this job done. Yes, he itched to spread Winchester open and fuck him raw, and he could have done that with or without Winchester’s agreement at any time, but Father had specified real trust, accomplished without unnatural influences.
So far, all Winchester had revealed about himself was a fondness for cock rock and a strange shyness around ordinary people.
That was fine: reserve like that hid deep insecurity, meaning that when Sam got inside him—and he did intend to do that, in every possible way—Winchester would be his entirely. But it meant slow going in the beginning, and patience had never been a virtue Sam pursued.
As he was contemplating his next move, Winchester dropped back to match his pace. “You did good.” He looked like the words had tasted funny coming out, almost like he expected to get told to shut up.
“What?” Sam asked, automatically.
“You protected the civilians.”
Sam knew better than to confess weakness. But this was so obviously a screw-up that bravado didn’t seem worthwhile. “I missed the wendigo completely! From four feet away!”
Winchester shrugged. “Ever fire a gun before?”
Before Sam could control his expression, Winchester was already smirking, not meanly but with a kind of indulgence.
“Nobody gives points for style in this gig,” he said. “C’mon, step it up. Once we get cleaned up, the beer’s on me tonight.”
****
It was oddly relaxing to sit in the passenger seat while Winchester drove and finally, unprompted, started lecturing on the supernatural. His discussions came complete with comparisons of reality to the myths propounded by TV and movies. Sam pretended to be surprised and occasionally disbelieving, just to make Winchester emphasize to him that Sam was the one with the freaky visions. He laughed a lot, and soon he didn’t even have to remind himself to do so, and soon after that Winchester started laughing with him, as if he saw for the first time how ridiculous and implausible his life was.
****
Winchester pulled over by a deserted field, rolling the car until it was hidden by brush and cursing about the undercarriage the entire time. He made Sam take a shotgun and try to hit targets at increasing distances.
With Winchester watching beside him, like some sort of cartoon sun beaming over Sam’s shoulder, Sam couldn’t very well just make the shot go where he wanted. “Isn’t the point of a shotgun that you don’t have to aim?” Sam yelled.
“Can’t hear you!” Winchester yelled cheerfully back. “Anyhow, you graze a ghost, it’s not gonna stay back long. You need to get the center!”
After he pronounced himself almost convinced that Sam wouldn’t accidentally shoot him, Winchester returned the weapons to the trunk of his car and they continued on.
For some reason, Sam was reminded of being eight years old and screwing up a minor incantation. Father had made him repeat it until his fingers bled, and given what blood did to that spell, it was a lesson he didn’t soon forget.
****
That night, they stopped at a motel decorated entirely in diamond patterns: the fabrics on the furniture in the lobby, the wallpaper, even the counter of the front desk. “How do you even find these places?” Sam demanded as they headed towards their rooms, because it had been like this every night since they’d left the Roadhouse together: Winchester seemed determined to avoid anything remotely like a chain in favor of unimaginably strange and often depressing little places.
Winchester gave a little smirk that brought out his dimples. “Kind of a hobby. Keeps you from forgetting where you are, y’know?”
Sam shook his head, uncomprehending, and Winchester’s smile disappeared as if it had been cut off with a knife. The diamond pattern on the walls made the corridor feel like a cage, ready to close in on them until they choked.
“Anyway,” Winchester continued grimly, “it’s cheaper.” Sam had never thought about that, but clearly hunting wasn’t a job that paid in the six figures. He stopped, and Sam realized that they’d reached his door; Sam’s room was the next one down the hall.
“I didn’t mean—” he began. “It’s certainly—educational. I don’t mind, or anything.” He ducked his head, using his bangs to get some cover, because he didn’t know how to fix this. “I never—my family’s not big on travel.”
Winchester tapped his fist against Sam’s forearm, gently, brushing his knuckles on the gray sleeve of Sam’s sweatshirt. “Get some rest,” he said, just as softly.
Sam nodded and made his feet move him away, to his room.
He was used to having his own space. Once they’d hit puberty, none of his siblings had been fit company and Father hadn’t wanted too much energy wasted on proximity-based squabbles. But the mansion-cum-barracks where they’d all lived necessarily hummed with their energies; you could never assume you were alone or unobserved. And then when he’d been away at college, there was always someone dropping by for homework or beer or videogames or something else trivial. He’d had to play his gentle, shy role full-time to avoid complications.
People’s opinions were formed like stones skipping across a pond, hitting only the surface. Father had taught him how to use that inattention by smiling and looking bashful. Winchester was buying Sam’s story unhesitatingly, and that should have just confirmed that Winchester was no better than the rest of them. He wanted to yell at Winchester: Don’t be so stupid! Yet Winchester was obviously not stupid.
The whole puzzle made his stomach twist up and set his skin to itching. He would have gone out and found some anonymous fuck, but Winchester might hear him leave and wonder.
He listened for the sounds that signalled Winchester was getting ready for the night. He imagined the layout of Winchester’s room, a mirror image of his own. When he laid down, he twisted onto his stomach and put a hand up to the quilted, diamond-patterned headboard, right across from where Winchester’s head might be.
Right across from where he was sure it was.
He would have suspected that Father had put a geas on him, but this felt like it had always been part of him.
Part 2.
Rating/warnings: NC-17 for dirty deeds glancingly described. Sam/Dean. Impure wish-fulfillment.
Summary: AU. Azazel has given his favorite son a task: worm his way into the confidence of a hunter. It sounds simple, but Dean Winchester just might be more than Sam can handle.
Thanks:
giandujakiss and coffeeandink, for kicks in the pants above and beyond the call of beta; Mary Ellen Curtin and cathexys for beta.ETA: Full story at the AO3 if you want to read the whole thing at once.
Father gave him the assignment just after his twenty-second birthday. “This is your test,” he said with the jocular tone that so often promised a bloodletting. “Screw this up and you’re out of the running. Pull it off, and you might just be the heir apparent.
“And get a haircut,” he added, as if it were an afterthought. “You wouldn’t want the hunter mistaking you for Bigfoot.”
Sam only kept himself from hunching down and pushing his hair out of his eyes by locking every muscle tight. If Father had really objected to the bangs, he would have told one of the others, and Sam would have woken up one morning with lye in his hair, or worse.
The real problem was Father’s threat and promise. He had never been so blatant before. He was probably lying—that was one of the basic lessons, never to believe anything you hadn’t confirmed through your own means—but he was more likely to be lying about the benefits of success than the costs of failure. Now that they were all adults, Father was separating the wheat from the chaff with everything but an actual flail. In the past six months, seven of Sam’s siblings had shuffled off this mortal coil, and Sam had only taken out two of them.
“What’s to stop Ava from coming after me while I’m off doing your dirty work?” Sam asked.
Father smiled. “That’s part of the challenge.”
Forced back out into the mundane world, unable to study, and told to win the trust of some random hunter whose importance Father wouldn’t even explain. It was enough to make him wonder whether Father wasn’t setting him up for elimination. Of course Sam was the pick of the litter, but that wasn’t an unmixed blessing for the current leader of the pack.
Father gestured, indicating an end to the audience. He turned to leave.
“Samael.”
He froze. When he counted up his grievances against Father, the first was always that stupid, pretentious name. “Yes, Father,” he said, forcing his body to stillness.
“Don’t get dumb. Just because you won’t see me doesn’t mean I won’t see you.”
He nodded woodenly.
Father could throw anything he wanted in Sam’s path. Sam wasn’t going to stumble. If this was a real opportunity, he was going to squeeze it until it burst. If it was a diversion, he was going to use the chance to hone his powers far from prying eyes.
****
“I’m looking for Dean Winchester,” he told the bartender, a pretty-enough blonde with a scowl that didn’t quite hide the way her eyes lingered on his arms and his chest. Even slumped down in his college-kid sweatshirt and jeans, he knew he stood out, so he didn’t blame her for looking.
“Dean?” she asked, halfway between suspicious and surprised. “Over there,” she gestured, “but –”
He followed her pointing finger to the emptiest recess of the bar and stopped in his tracks.
There is a God was probably the most inappropriate thing he could have thought. Far from the broken-down redneck Sam had been expecting, Winchester was gorgeous. It was impossible to tell the color of his eyes in the bad light, but they were framed by lashes that wouldn’t have been out of place on a fashion model. His lips were plump and pink as if anticipating what kisses would do to them, and his heavy stubble made Sam’s thighs itch to feel those cheeks against his own skin.
Get his trust, right. Sam could do that.
As he approached, Sam saw the spray of freckles across Winchester’s nose. This couldn’t be a gift from Father, but it certainly was wrapped nicely.
Winchester brought his gaze up from his beer when Sam was a few paces away, his eyes unerringly finding Sam’s as if he’d heard Sam coming through all the ambient noise of the bar. They were green.
“Yeah?” Winchester asked, breaking Sam’s inexplicable paralysis.
“Dean Winchester?” he asked, putting extra hesitation into his voice and bringing his shoulders in tight. “My name is Sam Marshall. Can I talk to you?”
Winchester tilted his head. “Don’t stop now.”
Even though he hadn’t been invited, Sam grabbed a chair from a nearby table and pulled it up to Winchester’s. When he sat, their knees nearly touched.
“You might be wondering how I know your name,” he began.
Winchester shook his head. “Saw you talking to Jo.”
Sam stopped again. Pretty or not, this man was a member of a dying breed, deluded into thinking that what a loner did might somehow matter in the great wars between angels and demons. His intransigience should not be derailing Sam’s plans.
Up close, the green of his irises was ringed with a darker color, almost black.
“I dream about you,” he blurted out, and then wanted to smash his forehead into the table. He might have done it if Winchester’s empty beer glass hadn’t been in the way.
Surprisingly, Winchester didn’t laugh at him. The wariness was not much better, even if it was accompanied by a slight flush.
Okay, Sam could still get his basic cover out, even if it had started like a bad pick-up line. “A couple months back, I started having these—dreams. I thought they were dreams, just imaginary. But then I saw a story in the paper and I found out—the things I’d seen had been happening. All of them. After I dreamed them.”
Winchester examined him like he was a rattlesnake. “And this is connected to me how?”
“You were in them. You were fighting—you were hunting ghosts.”
Winchester leaned over and gestured towards the bar, not looking at Sam. “Dude, I don’t know what your problems are, but they aren’t mine.”
Time to play the concerned ingenue. “You’re in danger,” Sam said, widening his eyes as he leaned forward to put his hand on Winchester’s wrist. It was like touching Lily, back before Sam figured out how to shut her down, except that this shock was warm and golden. They both stared down at his hand. Winchester was a big enough man that his wrist didn’t disappear into Sam’s grip, but Sam could still have closed his fingers around Winchester’s arm like a cuff.
They were interrupted by the bartender, Jo, whose reason for failing to delegate the task to a waitress was immediately apparent: she put two bottles of domestic on the table, then settled into Winchester’s lap, forcing Sam to drop Winchester’s hand. Winchester grimaced, half in pleasure and half in embarrassment.
“I’m off in ten,” Jo said into his ear, loud enough for Sam to hear.
Winchester’s hands fluttered around Jo’s body, struggling to find a place to touch her that wouldn’t count as hitting a double or a triple. “Jo,” he said, in the strained tone of a man with a diamond-edged hardon, “you know I promised your momma I’d leave you alone—”
“You were seventeen,” she whined. “And if—” Sam didn’t know whether she was going to say ‘if you really cared’ or ‘if you asked her permission,’ but it was obvious that Winchester didn’t and wasn’t going to, and Jo had the minimum of self-respect necessary to shut her up. She bit her lip and wriggled once more as she began to stand up, just to show him what he was missing.
If a girl had tried that with Sam, she would have found herself getting pounded right on the creaky little bar table. Winchester was either the evangelical brand of hunter or some other kind of crazy, because he just sucked in a breath and let her pull away. “I gotta talk to this guy,” he said conciliatorily, indicating Sam.
Sam gave her a little wave, barely triumphant at all. He got the hairy eyeball anyway.
She did have a fine ass, snug in nice tight jeans and framed by the cutest little bar apron. When Sam turned back, Winchester was looking at him with mild disapproval.
“Talk,” he said.
And now Sam was in a bit of a pickle. Father and his goddamned prohibition on letting Sam do any scrying in advance. (“The problems you’ll be having, some of them you won’t have any intel on. You’ve got to learn to react, my boy, get your instincts working for you.”) The internet had proved unhelpful in determining Winchester’s current activities, no shock there.
He fucking hated what using his powers to see the future did to him, and years of experience counseled against making himself so vulnerable in the presence of others, but there wasn’t much choice here. He concentrated, pretending that it didn’t make his face scrunch up in a truly ridiculous manner, and opened the window in his mind.
“A woman, a ghost,” he said. “You’re sitting in a car with her. She’s in the passenger seat. She’s wearing—a white nightgown?”
“What does she look like?” Winchester asked, hoarse, and Sam wished that he was good enough to open his eyes and still keep the vision.
“She’s beautiful—mid-twenties maybe, dark hair, olive skin—she’s, she’s attacking you—” He snapped back into the now, needing to see Winchester’s face whole and not writhing in desperate agony as the woman ripped the life out of him.
The intrigue on Winchester’s face was fading into disquiet; Winchester offered him a napkin from one of the beers, then pulled his hand back as he realized that it was already sodden with condensation. He dug around in his pockets and came up with an honest-to-god handkerchief, shoving it at Sam. Sam looked at him, uncomprehending, and only then realized that his nose was bleeding.
“Head back,” Winchester said, scooting closer and putting his hand on Sam’s shoulder, right at the junction of his neck. “Here.” He tugged, easing Sam’s head so that his nose pointed up at the smoke-blackened wood of the ceiling, and brought Sam’s hand up to pinch his nose closed. His fingers lingered over Sam’s until Sam had a good grip, and then Winchester backed off, though Sam could still feel the heat rising off his body.
“That happen every time you get a vision?” Winchester asked. The headache and dizziness was worth it, because Winchester was a believer now.
Sam tried to nod without moving his head. “Preddy much,” he got out. He could feel that the blood had stopped flowing, but he held on, just to work the sympathy angle. After a couple of minutes, he tilted his head back down. Winchester was examining him as if he were a complicated series of runes. Sam wiped off the last of the blood, looked down at the ruined handkerchief, and decided not to hand it over. Any one of his siblings would have used the stained cotton to fuck him up badly. Winchester was unlikely to perform blood magic with it, but Sam had the feeling he didn’t want it back anyway.
“Okay,” Winchester said, nodding and pushing back from the table and standing; he was only a few inches shorter than Sam. “I got a lead I need to track down.” He paused. “So, you coming?”
Sam stood, hunching to make himself look less threatening and more threatened, and followed.
****
Winchester didn’t explain why they drove halfway across the country, or why they stopped at the ugliest, orangest motel imaginable, but once they were in California they found exactly what Sam had seen.
“A woman in white, hunh,” Sam said as they leaned back against their seats, afterwards. His distant curiosity was honest: his demonology was as advanced as any mortal’s since Al-Hazan, but he’d never bothered with the minor beasts and haunts.
“Yep,” Winchester said.
Constance had been reunited with her children. That hadn’t gone all that well for her. Sam wondered if his human mother had feared him, would fear him now. He had a picture of her, dark-haired and dark-eyed. When he’d been a kid, before Father had explained, Sam had sometimes imagined his mother coming for him, saying she loved him and always had. But he hadn’t ever needed a mother to tell him that he was special, and even Father’s divided attention was pretty intense.
“What now?” Winchester asked.
“You still need my help,” Sam told him, a flat fact. Saying it like that was taking a risk, but Winchester had seemed grateful to have a partner on this—well, Sam guessed it had been a hunt. He was a hunter now. “I can pay my own way, I’ve got some money saved up.”
Winchester chuffed and rolled his shoulders. “You don’t have anywhere to be?”
It wasn’t enough of a direct question to justify trotting out a life story, and Sam wanted more time observing Winchester to see what would work best. “Nowhere but here,” he said, daring a shy quick grin, and settled back into the old leather of the car.
****
Sam didn’t want to push too soon, so he let Winchester take them to Colorado without much question.
That was before Winchester showed him the records of the repeated disapperances, mostly attributed to bear attacks. He hadn’t signed on for bears, or things that looked like bears, or things that did the kind of damage that got mistaken for bears.
He was also disturbed by how cavalier Winchester was about making up a cover story. Winchester just walked into the ranger station, staring at the wall rather than meeting the ranger’s eyes, and started asking about the not-quite-missing group of hikers. When his first bullshit story didn’t go over he just switched to the next one, visibly forcing himself to keep talking. Sam thought the ranger helped him out in the end because he was just so obviously desperate for the information.
On the one hand, his indifference to plausibility suggested that Sam didn’t have to worry overmuch about his own excuses. But Sam didn’t want to get arrested for impersonating a federal officer, or any of the other people Winchester seemed prepared to impersonate. He didn’t even have a fake badge for Sam.
Nonetheless, it was true that, when Winchester showed his own fake ID, Hailey Collins didn’t bother to ask to see Sam’s. Which was good, because the one Sam was holding also had a picture of Winchester, only this time he was a member of the U.S. Geological Survey. Given how Winchester lit up a room just by walking into it, Sam could see how an average person’s trust could get him through a lot of these situations, though more confidence would have helped.
The survivor from the 1982 attack was even easier than Hailey, not even slightly suspicious. Winchester was awkward with him at first, too rough and accusing, until Sam stepped in and started asking the questions. But Roger Shaw was beyond the niceties. He’d been carrying around the truth about the thing that had killed his parents for decades, and he only wanted to admit it.
The sight of those three claw marks distorting Shaw’s chest made Sam nervous. He could repel anything he saw first, but that might take a lot of explaining, and, even with his abilities, going into the forest to be hunted seemed horror-movie stupid to him.
When Winchester started pulling weapons out of his trunk and stuffing them into two bags, Sam tried to balk. “You don’t even know what it is. How do you know guns will stop it?”
Winchester stopped, looked back over his shoulder, and raised his eyebrow skeptically. “Your visions aren’t telling you?”
“I’m not some 24-hour news channel,” he snapped, because yes, he’d tried to look ahead, and there was nothing useful. Just blurry trunks and rushing darkness and then a bright flash: all that at the price of a migraine. He’d never spent a lot of time trying to sharpen the visions, mostly because they were incapacitating enough that they made him a great target for his brothers and sisters. He’d expended more effort staving them off than bringing them on.
Winchester already had his back to Sam, examining a semiautomatic, then returning it to its place in the car. “It had a physical effect on Shaw, right? Physical effect means physical vulnerability.” Sam knew that wasn’t entirely true, and opened his mouth to say so before he realized that he couldn’t reveal that much expertise. His heart rate jumped when Winchester continued: “Unless it’s some kind of demon, but a demon would’ve left the bodies to be found. Better scare value. So we’re lookin’ for something that can hit and be hit.”
“Fine,” Sam bit out. “Let’s get this over with.”
****
They hooked up with the Collins siblings and their guide, which Sam wanted to find reassuring. But Winchester’s continued fumbling attempts to feign an obviously lacking woodscraft expertise cancelled out most of the confidence Sam otherwise would have felt.
Winchester handed him one of the weapons bags at the beginning of the trek. After a couple of hours, when it became apparent that neither Sam’s shoes nor the feet in them were well-equipped for hiking, Winchester waited for him to catch up and then just transferred the bag to his free shoulder.
Sam glared at Winchester’s definitely not-hiking boots. Winchester just started walking again, so there was nothing for it but to follow him.
They were far enough away from the others that, once he could breathe without panting again, he figured that conversation might be possible. “How’d you get this job, anyway?” he asked.
“Found some coordinates,” Winchester said.
Well, wasn’t he a Chatty Cathy. “Found where?”
Winchester sped up. Sam refrained from reaching out mentally to hold him in place. “My dad’s journal,” Winchester answered after another half a minute, when Sam failed to fall back.
This sounded important. “Where’s your dad now? Is he here? Are we meeting him?”
The pain that washed over Winchester’s face made Sam think, at first, that his father must be recently dead. But: “I don’t know. I thought maybe—but if he’d’ve been here, there would’ve been a sign.” With that, Winchester increased his pace yet again, crunching over leaves and branches with no evidence that he was even paying attention to where his feet went.
Winchester didn’t have any plans that required Sam, he reminded himself, which meant that Sam had to be the one to bend. “Look,” he said, forcing his aching legs to move faster. “I know I just crashed into your life. But listen, it’s the same for me. I didn’t ask to wake up screaming five nights out of seven, watching you nearly get your guts torn out. I don’t know what I’m doing, I admit that. You’re so hot to help people, then help me. And maybe I can do something for you.”
Winchester wouldn’t meet his eyes for the next hour. But when they stopped for a break, Winchester handed him the open bag of peanut M&Ms, then a canteen to wash the stickiness away. “Wake up screaming, hunh?” he asked while Sam’s mouth was still full. “Guess my life’s pretty scary.”
Sam swallowed, thinking about the empty beds back home. “At least you’re alive and fighting,” he said.
****
Fear wasn’t anything special, or even shameful if it was justified. He’d spent most of his pre-puberty life terrified—mostly of the teachers; the bodies changed but the black eyes always glittered the same—and then slowly pushed out as much of the fear as possible with anger, like water displacing oil.
When he was twelve, Father had started sending them out into the world: shopping trips, museum expeditions, library visits. Always with goals, like the time they’d each been ordered to come back with a leather jacket without stealing it. Jake had produced a wad of cash whose provenance he’d never explained; Andy had ordered a woman to open her wallet for him—she’d collapsed after, but they hadn’t stuck around to see what happened next; Sam had done what he’d needed to do. Lily had taken nearly three days to return, and she was different afterwards, but they’d all passed.
Later, there had been more diffuse assignments, and more individualized ones. In the summer of his sixteenth year, Sam had been tasked with getting the daughter of a local politician into a compromising position. She’d been nineteen, a spectacular beauty, and he’d been just starting another growth spurt, all bones and stumbles, so it had been a significant challenge. He’d finally approached her at the local pool.
“You’re from that funky boarding school,” she’d said, smiling condescendingly in her blue-and-teal-striped bikini.
“The Xavier Institute for Higher Learning,” he’d said, and then, when she frowned: “Sorry, private joke.”
He’d gotten the job done. Afterwards, the girl (Amy, her name was Amy, except maybe it had been spelled differently; he wasn’t sure) had drowned in the pool despite the presence of three lifeguards. It was the local tragedy of the year.
Sam had only found out about her death when Father had called him into the study to read out the eulogy delivered by the girl’s pastor. “I hope you enjoyed that X-Men reference,” Father had said, merry as ever. “It’s a good thing she wasn’t a comics fan, don’t you think?”
Sam had swallowed and nodded, because there was nothing else to do.
So yeah, he knew more about fear than Winchester thought.
****
Sam felt it the moment Winchester was taken by the wendigo. That instantaneous knowledge was troubling in and of itself, but it was subsumed by the immediate fear. Father would crucify him if he lost Winchester to a mindless killer. Whether or not Father was lying about his presence at Golgotha, Sam believed that he could make it last for days.
Then he had to lead Ben Collins through the woods, even though he didn’t know what they were going to find and he was cold and dirty and a new blister seemed to pop with every step he took. It had been easy enough to be confident among his siblings; they’d known him all his life and had reason to respect his power. Ben was just a scared guy out in the woods, with no reason to believe Sam other than the force of his will and the sight of a few peanut M&Ms, marking a trail.
At last, they found a tunnel. There was a warning sign: “Danger! Do not enter. Extremely toxic material.” Sam stared at it, almost disbelieving. If it wasn’t a coincidence, something that had been put up while the wendigo was quiescent, then there were people out in the world who had Father’s sense of humor.
The wendigo’s lair smelled like a latrine stuffed with rotten meat. Ben had to stop in the tunnel to gag, but Sam breathed through his mouth and pressed on.
The ground under their feet was soft and unpleasantly squishy. They were fifty feet in when they heard the growl.
Ben froze like prey. Sam knew that if the wendigo saw him, it would find them both, so he grabbed Ben and shoved him against the wall, where his silhouette wouldn’t stand out. The wendigo hesitated. Ben trembled. Sam wanted to snap his neck, even as he could feel his own muscles starting to shake.
It loped towards them. Ben’s mouth opened; Sam pressed his hand over nose and mouth together, suppressing all sound.
Less than a dozen yards from them, the wendigo swerved and disappeared down a side tunnel.
Sam released Ben, but neither of them moved from the wall at first.
After that, falling through the floor into a pile of skeletons seemed almost relaxing, even if Sam ended up with sliced hands and a cut on his cheek.
The skeletons were evidence that they were near the wendigo’s feeding grounds. Sam stood, shaking off the bones trying to cling to him, and tried to find his way in the near-darkness.
There was a sort of electric humming at the back of his mind, a tremble like a compass needle near an iron bar. He found his flashlight and switched it on, pointing it in the direction his instinct demanded.
Winchester and Hailey were hung up like chickens in the window of a Chinatown restaurant. Sam hobble-skipped over to them, Ben following. The boy was a rabbit, but he loved his sister, Sam thought. It was hard to imagine what that felt like.
Sam scrabbled with the ropes—he hoped they were ropes and not the braided intestines of earlier victims—and Winchester twisted slowly. The motion started to rouse him.
“Wake up!” Sam urged, as loud as he dared.
Winchester’s head turned slowly towards Sam. He blinked and his eyes widened. Sam realized that the ropes were just looped around Winchester, pulled tight by his own weight; he gritted his teeth, bent, and hoisted Winchester over his shoulder, ignoring the white-hot pain of his feet as he picked the ropes free.
“Thanks,” Winchester said when he was back on his feet, seeming more surprised than pleased. Sam understood that: relying on somebody else’s performance was a good route to a short, sharp shock.
“Help me!” Hailey said. He turned and saw her pushing at yet another trussed victim: the missing Tommy. Winchester tapped his arm, then put a large folding knife into his hand and jerked his chin at Hailey.
Sam dutifully went over to the Collins huddle and, grateful for his height, sawed through Tommy’s ropes, no fucking around with unwrapping this time.
What was Winchester up to?
He cast around in the dimness, his pulse doubling.
“Hey, check it out.”
Sam spun, nearly tripping over his own feet. Winchester was in a corner, holding up a bulky pistol.
“Flare guns,” Winchester explained. It must have been part of the equipment Tommy and his group brought along, Sam realized. Winchester twirled a gun around each index finger, then looked up and grinned at the expression on Sam’s face. “C’mon,” he said. Sam would have sworn this was the first time Winchester had actually been happy since they’d met.
Sam found that he had absolutely no hesitation in following Winchester’s lead. It was possible that he was a little bit in shock.
Ben and Hailey wrapped themselves around Tommy, who was barely conscious, and they headed back out of the tunnels.
The wendigo’s growl boomed out from the depths of the tunnel. In the darkness, there was no way to tell how close it was.
“Suppertime,” Winchester mumbled to himself.
“We’ll never outrun it,” Hailey said calmly.
“All right, listen to me,” Winchester said. “Sam is going to get you out of here.” He pressed one of the flare guns into Sam’s hand, then pulled away.
“What are you gonna do?” Hailey asked.
Winchester was already moving down the tunnel. “Hey, sweetheart!” he yelled. “You wanna dance?”
Sam hovered for a second. This was Winchester’s specialty. But he’d already been captured once. But—
“Come on,” Hailey hissed. They stumbled down the crumbling corridor.
The next growl couldn’t have come from more than ten feet away.
Sam pushed the others ahead without thinking. “Go!” They were on their own now; he turned towards the inevitable attack.
The wendigo rushed him faster than one of Ava’s ifrits. He pulled the flare gun trigger almost by accident, pushing out with his mind at the same time to keep the wendigo away. Then he ran.
The Collins siblings were just reaching the tunnel entrance when he rejoined them. He turned back, and the wendigo was leaping towards them again. He cried out in warning, then put himself in its path, so the others wouldn’t see the cursed creature move so inexplicably when he knocked it back.
“Hey!”
Sam and the wendigo both stopped at Winchester’s yell. Then the creature’s torso lit up from the inside, and Sam blinked as the wendigo broke into flames from the flare Winchester had fired into it. He saw it clearly for the first time: a wizened brown thing like a man half-melted into a bat shape. After only a few seconds, it crisped into ash and sparks.
****
The hike back out to a place the ambulance could reach offered plenty of opportunity to review his own performance, the way Father always demanded. He was cold and sore and he smelled nasty. Something squishy had gotten caught between the back of his T-shirt and the collar of his overshirt when he’d fallen down, and he already knew he’d be sorry when he saw what it was. It was almost a relief to think about the larger lessons, including that he needed to figure out how to guide a gun with his mind.
More disturbing than his poor aim were the other aspects of the attack. Winchester had run towards the wendigo like a kid running towards a carnival. Sam was good, but he’d have trouble winning the confidence of a dead man.
And then, when the Collins siblings had looked at him, after, there had been this light in their eyes. Sam didn’t get it. Hailey and her brothers had been stupid and they’d nearly paid with their lives. They were pathetic normals, ignorant even beyond the minimal understanding of hunters. It didn’t matter what they said, or thought.
Still, Winchester walked a little taller, swaggering almost on those bow legs of his, on their way out of the forest. Sam eyed him and wondered how long it would take to get this job done. Yes, he itched to spread Winchester open and fuck him raw, and he could have done that with or without Winchester’s agreement at any time, but Father had specified real trust, accomplished without unnatural influences.
So far, all Winchester had revealed about himself was a fondness for cock rock and a strange shyness around ordinary people.
That was fine: reserve like that hid deep insecurity, meaning that when Sam got inside him—and he did intend to do that, in every possible way—Winchester would be his entirely. But it meant slow going in the beginning, and patience had never been a virtue Sam pursued.
As he was contemplating his next move, Winchester dropped back to match his pace. “You did good.” He looked like the words had tasted funny coming out, almost like he expected to get told to shut up.
“What?” Sam asked, automatically.
“You protected the civilians.”
Sam knew better than to confess weakness. But this was so obviously a screw-up that bravado didn’t seem worthwhile. “I missed the wendigo completely! From four feet away!”
Winchester shrugged. “Ever fire a gun before?”
Before Sam could control his expression, Winchester was already smirking, not meanly but with a kind of indulgence.
“Nobody gives points for style in this gig,” he said. “C’mon, step it up. Once we get cleaned up, the beer’s on me tonight.”
****
It was oddly relaxing to sit in the passenger seat while Winchester drove and finally, unprompted, started lecturing on the supernatural. His discussions came complete with comparisons of reality to the myths propounded by TV and movies. Sam pretended to be surprised and occasionally disbelieving, just to make Winchester emphasize to him that Sam was the one with the freaky visions. He laughed a lot, and soon he didn’t even have to remind himself to do so, and soon after that Winchester started laughing with him, as if he saw for the first time how ridiculous and implausible his life was.
****
Winchester pulled over by a deserted field, rolling the car until it was hidden by brush and cursing about the undercarriage the entire time. He made Sam take a shotgun and try to hit targets at increasing distances.
With Winchester watching beside him, like some sort of cartoon sun beaming over Sam’s shoulder, Sam couldn’t very well just make the shot go where he wanted. “Isn’t the point of a shotgun that you don’t have to aim?” Sam yelled.
“Can’t hear you!” Winchester yelled cheerfully back. “Anyhow, you graze a ghost, it’s not gonna stay back long. You need to get the center!”
After he pronounced himself almost convinced that Sam wouldn’t accidentally shoot him, Winchester returned the weapons to the trunk of his car and they continued on.
For some reason, Sam was reminded of being eight years old and screwing up a minor incantation. Father had made him repeat it until his fingers bled, and given what blood did to that spell, it was a lesson he didn’t soon forget.
****
That night, they stopped at a motel decorated entirely in diamond patterns: the fabrics on the furniture in the lobby, the wallpaper, even the counter of the front desk. “How do you even find these places?” Sam demanded as they headed towards their rooms, because it had been like this every night since they’d left the Roadhouse together: Winchester seemed determined to avoid anything remotely like a chain in favor of unimaginably strange and often depressing little places.
Winchester gave a little smirk that brought out his dimples. “Kind of a hobby. Keeps you from forgetting where you are, y’know?”
Sam shook his head, uncomprehending, and Winchester’s smile disappeared as if it had been cut off with a knife. The diamond pattern on the walls made the corridor feel like a cage, ready to close in on them until they choked.
“Anyway,” Winchester continued grimly, “it’s cheaper.” Sam had never thought about that, but clearly hunting wasn’t a job that paid in the six figures. He stopped, and Sam realized that they’d reached his door; Sam’s room was the next one down the hall.
“I didn’t mean—” he began. “It’s certainly—educational. I don’t mind, or anything.” He ducked his head, using his bangs to get some cover, because he didn’t know how to fix this. “I never—my family’s not big on travel.”
Winchester tapped his fist against Sam’s forearm, gently, brushing his knuckles on the gray sleeve of Sam’s sweatshirt. “Get some rest,” he said, just as softly.
Sam nodded and made his feet move him away, to his room.
He was used to having his own space. Once they’d hit puberty, none of his siblings had been fit company and Father hadn’t wanted too much energy wasted on proximity-based squabbles. But the mansion-cum-barracks where they’d all lived necessarily hummed with their energies; you could never assume you were alone or unobserved. And then when he’d been away at college, there was always someone dropping by for homework or beer or videogames or something else trivial. He’d had to play his gentle, shy role full-time to avoid complications.
People’s opinions were formed like stones skipping across a pond, hitting only the surface. Father had taught him how to use that inattention by smiling and looking bashful. Winchester was buying Sam’s story unhesitatingly, and that should have just confirmed that Winchester was no better than the rest of them. He wanted to yell at Winchester: Don’t be so stupid! Yet Winchester was obviously not stupid.
The whole puzzle made his stomach twist up and set his skin to itching. He would have gone out and found some anonymous fuck, but Winchester might hear him leave and wonder.
He listened for the sounds that signalled Winchester was getting ready for the night. He imagined the layout of Winchester’s room, a mirror image of his own. When he laid down, he twisted onto his stomach and put a hand up to the quilted, diamond-patterned headboard, right across from where Winchester’s head might be.
Right across from where he was sure it was.
He would have suspected that Father had put a geas on him, but this felt like it had always been part of him.
Part 2.
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very interesting beginning...
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Re: very interesting beginning...