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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
They were on a two-lane highway in West Virginia when the tape deck and the engine went out together, like the whole system had been fried by an EMP. Dean cursed as if invective alone might power the car and guided it gently off the road, bumping over gravel until they came to a stop just in front of a stand of trees.
They were both out of their seats, headed to the weapons in the trunk, as soon as the car gave its final jolt. “Did you lose any time?” Sam joked as he checked his clip.
“Time’s a universal invariant,” Dean said right back, scanning the road.
Freaky electrical phenomena might be a sign of alien abduction on The X-Files, but they weren’t that lucky.
“Listen,” Dean said, turning his head slowly back and forth. His gun was at his side, his finger tight on the trigger, barrel aimed at the ground.
Sam didn’t hear anything, not even leaves rustling, the air heavy and dead around them. In the distance, he saw a black swarm of birds, winging away from them.
Step by step, they backed up until their shoulderblades touched. “In a minute,” Dean said, the vibration of his voice running through their bodies, “I’m gonna pop the hood. You gotta—”
Between one blink and the next, Ava was there, standing in the road, strands of hair whipping across her face even though there was no wind. Her hands were hidden in the pockets of her dark blue denim jacket.
Dean felt him stiffening and swiveled, so they were shoulder to shoulder facing her.
She looked fabulous. As the phantom wind died down, her brown, shoulder-length hair curved around her face like a scimitar; her light eyes shone under eyebrows that were perfect arcs; her softly rounded cheeks were slightly pinked with exertion; and her plump mouth was a dusky rose that made her look, even with all Sam knew, just a little bit vulnerable. Along with the jacket, nipped in to highlight her waist, she was wearing tight jeans and low-heeled boots. He remembered a couple of weeks when the second most powerful urge in his life was the one to fuck her.
“Sam!” she said, chipper as ever.
“Ava.” He tucked his gun into the back of his jeans. Any bullet she saw coming wasn’t going to be the one to kill her.
Dean didn’t lower his gun, but he jerked his eyes over towards Sam. “Who the fuck are you?” he asked.
She smiled, soft and a little secretive. “Didn’t he tell you?”
“Be careful,” Sam warned Dean, urgently.
She raised her hand. The gun ripped itself from Dean’s hand; Sam caught it before it hit the ground and sent it under the car, where Ava would have a harder time grabbing it to use against Dean.
Dean shook out his no-doubt stinging fingers. Abruptly, Latin began spewing from him like soda from a shaken can.
Ava giggled. “That’s sweet, but I’m not a demon.”
Dean stumbled to a halt. There was a moment of perfect silence, during which Sam realized that a battle to the death right now would impose an unacceptable risk to Dean. Therefore, Ava was going to do it. There was no more leeway for lies. “Dean, Ava and I grew up together. She’s another psychic, like me.” Dean was stone beside him, and he didn’t dare look.
“Ooh, did I make it in time for true confessions?” She examined Dean as if she was imagining whether he’d clash with her decor. “What Sammy means, I think, is that he and I and all the others spent our young lives like scorpions in a bottle, crawling all over each other. Until for some reason our father sent him to recruit you, which, by the way, how’s that going?”
“Your father,” Dean repeated, arrowing in on the key term.
Ava shrugged prettily. “Our father, the father of lies, the Angel of Death, the Impudent One. Epithets can be so cruel.”
Even with his eyes fixed to Ava, Sam could tell that Dean was connecting the dots: Sam had warned him that there might be other demon-targeted psychics out there, carefully laid the groundwork for it.
“Dean, I will explain everything, I swear to you. The important thing right now is that Ava is here to kill us, okay?” He’d opened up a whole new vein of weakness for her to exploit; there was no way around that. But it was too tasty for her not to spend some time gloating about.
Sam backed up a few steps, giving himself a better range of motion and making it easier for him to see both Dean and Ava.
Ava shifted, spreading her legs and settling into a fighting stance. Her hands left her pockets, apparently empty. He remembered how he’d been able to wrap both of them in one of his. She’d seemed so vulnerable then, such a contrast to his size.
“Am I the last one left?” he asked her.
She tossed her head. “You’ve gotta know the answer to that.” She glanced over at Dean. “But, for those of you who are just joining us: Yeah, I killed Jake last week. Now it’s two little Indians, out in the sun.”
Sam raised his eyebrows, letting her see his surprise. “I was pretty sure you’d let Claudia live,” he told her. “If only to have someone to lord it over.”
She pushed her hair back behind one ear. “There’s six billion people on this stinking planet. For now, anyway. I’m sure I can find someone to gossip with.”
“You--” Dean interrupted, his voice rusty. “You’ve been killing the other psychic kids?”
She turned her head to focus on him. “Well, not just me. But yes, I do hold the world record. I’m guessing Sam didn’t tell you how he was the first of all of us to start cutting down on the competition.”
Dean blinked slowly, like he’d been concussed.
Before Ava could decide to start the fight, Sam did. With one mental push, he shoved Dean back, sending him skidding over the hood of the car, out of sight. Then, taking advantage of Ava’s surprise, he used the TK like a giant fist, hammering her straight down.
Ava cried out in fear and shock, but an invisible shield snapped up before he’d done more than startle her. Sam felt the rebound from the blow in his own hands; he hadn’t known that was possible. Ava brought her hands up to her temples. Sam recognized the tell and prepared to fend off her shadow-demons.
The one she brought up this time was a hell of a lot bigger than the poppet-sized pit bull he remembered. It tore at him with smoky fingers like knives, and he spent a bad ten seconds pushing it away, the thing sliding around his mental jabs like it was made of snakes, before a better solution occurred to him.
He wasn’t as fast as Dean, who could rap out the Rituale Romanum at three hundred words a minute, but the demon cringed back as soon as he began, and fled as he advanced on Ava.
Who threw up her hands and emitted a fucking fireball at him. He ducked and rolled, catching only the edge of its heat on one leg, bouncing back to his feet. Now they were both on the empty road, twenty feet from the stalled-out car.
“Good one,” he called out, struggling not to pant visibly.
“You missed a lot.”
If he could distract her long enough to throw a knife—
The gunshot made them both flinch, just as the bullet splashed into her shield and flared like a flower as it disintegrated. “Stay back, Dean!” he yelled. He couldn’t protect them both. He was an idiot for not thinking of shields before, relying too much on Dean’s offensive measures rather than his own potential.
Then he was busy dodging a stream of fireballs, smaller than the first but hot enough to crisp his hair even when they missed him by a couple of feet. After the first few it was like the drills he’d done with tennis balls, pushing them off course with his mind, except that this time he had to turn every one in the opposite direction, making sure that none of them went behind him towards where Dean was.
Something about shields—
The heavier boom of Dean’s shotgun startled Ava into flinching. The rock salt spattered against the invisible barrier six feet from her chest, flaring into black holes with yellow edges. It was actually working, eating through the psychic wall that curved around her. Ava yelped as Dean fired again. Sam’s knife was already in the air, heading straight for the largest collection of holes.
It came to a halt two feet in front of Ava’s face, twisting slowly before she let it drop. Then Dean yelled in surprise, his voice coming closer as he was dragged past Sam. Sam grabbed at him, imagining his will as a mountain blocking the path.
Dean screamed, twisting against the grip of Ava’s power, a rope wrapping around his chest and shoulders. His muscles were twisting, tearing in her grasp, and Ava didn’t care whether they ripped him apart between them like two dogs fighting over a scrap of meat.
Helpless, Sam let go, and Dean tumbled forward, into the protection of Ava’s already-healing shields. He lay at her feet, his limbs tangled, his feet twitching uselessly.
“So it’s true,” she said, kicking Dean casually over onto his back with one pointed boot. “You finally found something to care about other than defying Father. I guess I just wanted to see for myself.”
Dean’s nose was bleeding, and there was something funny about the way his left arm was lying on the concrete.
“Well, it’s been fun, but you’re really out of practice.” Ava raised her hands again, safe against counterattack behind her shield.
And then he saw it: Ava had spent the greater part of a year perfecting her skills. But she hadn’t spent that time hunting things that mostly came out of the ground.
He sent his power down, below his feet and through the dirt beneath the road, punching back up behind her and slamming her forward like a cue ball hit on the break. She flew through the air, fetching up against him with a force that rocked him. He was ready, grabbing at her neck even as he took an involuntary step back.
The shock had dissipated her psychic barrier, and now unless she could reform it right around her skin, he—
She burned, like holding a live coal. He fought off the illusion, but his fingers relaxed involuntarily, cringing away.
Now she had her hands on his chest, pushing her own TK into him. He could feel her squeezing at his lungs. He tightened his grip on her shoulders, imagining her heart swelling, exploding in her chest.
Dean popped up behind her like a target in a shooting game, sending a shock of terror into Sam, and then Dean’s whole body lurched forward, pressing Ava between them.
Ava made a gurgling noise. Sam felt a tearing pain in his abdomen. Ava sagged against him but didn’t fall, her mouth going slack. He felt wetness, blood, soaking into his shirt, running down his waist into his jeans. Her hands scrabbled at his arms, her nails catching on his shirtsleeves. Her soft mouth, her soft face, blurring as if they were disappearing underwater.
With his last strength, he pushed her away. The pain increased.
She fell, landing oddly, toppling over to one side. Because of the hilt, the knife hilt embedded in her back, he realized. Sam’s knife—Dean had stabbed her, except that the blade had gone all the way straight through and out her stomach, into Sam. The razor tip of it poked through her shirt, as red and gleaming as a shark’s guts.
Her arms were flung out. He could see the inside of her right wrist, blue-veined, where the blood was still probably moving feebly, the cells striving to get more oxygen.
He looked up. Dean’s eyes were blazing, lacking only a lighter to set him on fire.
Dean knew to the millimeter how long that knife was. Sam pressed his hand to his middle, trying to staunch the flow enough to let himself think.
When had he gone to his knees?
He’d imagined being the last one left so many times. Mostly it was Ava on the ground in front of him, Ava or Jake. She’d never looked quite so awkward in his fantasies.
He closed his eyes and let the black cloud of unconsciousness take him.
****
Stinging pain brought him awake. He was lying on thin grass, clods of dirt and pebbles pressing against his back. Dean was tying off a stitch on his stomach, working one-handed. Dean’s fingers were bloody and his face was swelling with bruises.
Sam turned his head. At the foot of the trees in front of the car, he saw a pile of leaves and branches that hadn’t been there before, big enough to conceal a body.
“Can you get up?” Dean asked, whiskey-rough.
Sam nodded, then regretted it. He pushed himself up to sit, then, after a minute, struggled to his feet. Dean stood only a few feet away, but his arms were folded tight across his chest.
“Your shoulder?”
“Popped it back in,” Dean said. He’d had to do it for Sam, once, and the pain had been so excruciating that Sam had made Dean swear to knock him out first if it ever became necessary again.
“I would’ve—”
“I got the car fixed from what that bitch did,” Dean interrupted, turning his head away. “Can you give it a jump?”
He saw the logic in getting away from the corpse right off the road. They’d already had more luck they deserved, bloody and helpless like this. He nodded.
The cut (stab wound, Dean had stabbed him) in his stomach didn’t pull that much. The crumpled, sodden feeling in his lungs was more worrisome. If Ava had done enough damage, she could get her revenge from beyond the grave without coming back as a ghost.
Dean stayed well away from the car while Sam put his hands on the ignition. Generating electricity wasn’t that much harder than moving physical objects; it was all the same ultimately, at the atomic level. The car rumbled to life underneath him and he surrendered the driver’s seat to Dean. Dean waited until he was all the way over to the passenger side, and didn’t help him fumble the seatbelt on.
But Dean didn’t shove him out of the car either. While he’d been out, the sun had passed midday and started heading for the horizon, and they were driving west now, forcing him to squint and look out the side window while he tried to work out what to say to Dean. Dean unclipped a pair of sunglasses from the visor and put them on, making his eyes as blank as the rest of his expression.
“Tell me you didn’t kill my brother,” Dean said at last, his voice as shredded as if he’d been dragged along the highway for miles.
Oh God. He hadn’t even considered that.
“I swear to you,” Sam said immediately. “Dean, I found the records. Andy and Max—they were, they—” They weren’t Samuel Winchester, but what stopped his mouth was the thought that they’d been just like baby Sam, only unlucky enough to survive for Father’s training. When they’d been little kids, Andy had been the closest thing Sam knew to a friend. He remembered playing leapfrog with Andy, and then a year ago Sam had walked up and just—
And maybe Andy would have done the same to him. Maybe he could have explained to Dean how none of them were innocent, none worth saving. “They were somebody else’s family,” he said, bowing his head and waiting.
“Okay,” Dean said at last. “Okay.” He punched the steering wheel with his fist and didn’t even wince. “The only thing I want is to kill that fucking demon. You help me out there and we’re golden.”
“D—”
“Don’t you say my name like you know me. You know the demon, you know somethin’ about what it wants. So fucking tell me what you know.”
“He never told us,” Sam said, hopelessly. “He always said the last one standing would find out. It’s big though, Hell on earth big. He was always talking about ruling, crushing the world. But I don’t know how.”
Dean snorted. “More,” he said. “Details.”
Sam began. “His name is Azazel,” he said, wondering if the name alone might be enough to summon Father. He told Dean about who he’d been, about Arba and the likelihood that she had a different agenda, talking until his voice was hoarse and past, until there was nothing left.
They stopped for gas. Dean left him in the car. Where would he run? Leaving now would just invite Father to swoop in and grab Dean as a hostage for Sam’s bad behavior. Father would probably tie Dean to real railroad tracks, just for the show-off value.
When Dean returned from paying, he threw a bottle of Coke and a packet of almonds into Sam’s lap. The soda was cold against his thighs. He picked it up to have something to do, turning it in his hands.
“You do like Coke, right?” Dean asked as he turned the key in the ignition. “Or was that another lie, ‘cause it’s what I drink?”
Sam scraped at the label with his thumbnail, remembering the taste of it from Dean’s mouth, caramel and the bitterness of caffeine.
Dean laughed to himself.
Dully, Sam twisted the cap off, waiting for the foam to settle. He had to be ready for what came next. Assuming that Ava had been telling the truth, he’d just become the linchpin in Father’s grand design.
“Saving people, that was no lie,” he said. “I changed my mind, you showed me—”
He didn’t see Dean’s hand move, but the cool circle of a pistol barrel pressed into the skin of his temple. The car wobbled a little with only Dean’s sore left arm to guide it. “Don’t even,” Dean warned.
Dean hated him; Dean was still going to hate him when this was over.
“Do it,” he said, closing his eyes. “Fuck up his plan, it’s the only way to be sure.”
Dean’s trembling breath was louder than the thrum of the engine. The gun dragged along Sam’s skin, hard enough to leave a mark.
“Fuck,” Dean snarled, pulling the gun away and shoving it behind his back. “He’d just start again, wouldn’t he? No fucking way.”
That was all he’d say. The car seemed huge, Dean telescoping away from him, a leather and iron cage built just for him.
****
Dean got them a single room at a Best Western: cream walls, square headboards, faded bedspreads.
Sam wasn’t just going to follow him around like some abandoned puppy. He had his pride. He was going to do the right thing, but he didn’t have to grovel the entire time.
Except that when Dean casually shoved him down onto the bed, so hard that he felt a stitch pop on his abdomen in a warm rush, he didn’t even raise a hand. Dean growled, climbed onto the bed on his knees, and ripped at Sam’s belt, thumbing open the button on his jeans and jerking them down over his hips with a strength that just forced the zipper to give.
For all of that, Dean’s hand on his cock was gentle, slow and knowing. Sam gasped and closed his eyes.
He expected Dean to stop, turn him over and fuck him maybe. He didn’t bottom often, but Dean always liked it well enough. But Dean just kept going, steady pressure rolling through him, getting him past the pain of his injuries.
When Sam opened his eyes again, trying not to come, Dean had propped himself on one elbow, on his side next to Sam as if nothing were wrong. His head dipped down, his nose brushing the curve of Sam’s ear while Sam mindlessly raised his hips into Dean’s touch.
“You want my mouth?” Dean whispered. “Was it the cocksucking lips you liked best? Or maybe you switched sides ‘cause of the magical power of my ass.”
Sam didn’t try to hide how he flinched at each sentence.
“It was you,” he said helplessly.
“Bullshit,” Dean said, and ran his thumb up the center of Sam’s dick, pressing down at the rim of the head. Sam gasped and his eyes fluttered closed. Dean continued, not even breathing hard. “You think I wasn’t listening all this afternoon, you and your awful childhood? You hate your father—hell, you hate my dad on principle. You were lookin’ for a way out. But you couldn’t tell me the truth. You had to keep your options open, right?”
Sam forced his eyes open, raising his head and flailing at Dean, grabbing for his shoulder until Dean pulled his upper body away, still without loosening his hold on Sam’s cock. “I was going to tell you,” Sam begged.
Dean smiled, beautiful and dead-eyed. “Yeah, well, I was gonna kill the demon and live happily ever after. Guess we both suck at predicting the future.”
He twisted his wrist just right, and Sam came all over Dean’s hand and his own stomach. Blood and come stained the bandage over the stab wound, but he didn’t have the energy to clean up.
Dean rolled off the bed and went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him deliberately. The water went on and stayed on for a long time.
****
Sam came awake screaming, the pain in his lungs quickly overwhelming the boxing match going on in his head.
When he pulled himself together, he saw Dean crouched by his bed, gun in hand, mouth pursed grimly. He blinked feebly and swiped at his nose, clearing off some of the blood.
“Ears too,” Dean said tonelessly.
“I saw—I don’t—you told me vampires were extinct,” was all he could think to say.
“The fuck you talkin’ about?” Dean rubbed at his eyes with his free hand.
“Vampires, Dean, I saw these things come through a skylight in this cabin, they practically tore him apart. They ripped his throat out and drank his blood, the teeth--”
“Hold on,” Dean ordered. “Go get cleaned up.”
Sam’s head was still ringing like he’d been the pinball in a high-scoring game. He forced himself to his feet and shuffled into the bathroom. It was perfectly anonymous, not a hint of character, and the unrelieved white—counter, tiles, towels, shower curtain--pounded on his aching eyes and aching head until he turned off the light and washed up in the minimal glow from the illuminated light switch plate.
When he returned to the main room, Dean was sitting in a chair by the window, one leg slung over the opposite knee, the gun in his lap and his hands on the thin square arms of the chair. He turned his head from the view of the parking lot and examined Sam.
“Do the visions come from him? Azazel,” he clarified.
“I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “The power does, but that’s not—I don’t think it’s the same thing.” He thought about it as his head began to clear. “I’m pretty sure the visions are truth, just like the other powers really work. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise, what would he need with you,” Dean agreed. “So, this thing you saw, with the vampires, it’s gonna happen soon?”
Sam scratched at a line of blood drying under his earlobe. “I think—maybe it already has. The vision felt—different.”
“Talk,” Dean said, and Sam did: the multiple vampires, the fierceness of their attack, the gun they’d stolen so deliberately, the scratches the man had left on the floor in his last moments.
****
Before they went for breakfast, Sam went online and found the report of the inexplicable mauling of Daniel Elkins in Colorado. Dean flipped through his father’s journal until he found the same name, and they were off. He was so focused on the hunt that he kept forgetting and talking to Sam like they were still partners. It made the moments when he remembered and shut himself off even more painful.
Once they had identified Elkins, it wasn’t hard to figure out that the message he’d left was a post office box with a combination. And then, moments later it seemed, they were in Colorado, sitting in the car in the post office parking lot and holding a letter for John Winchester.
Dean stared at it for several minutes, then decisively flipped it over and stuck his thumbnail under the edge of the flap.
The knock on the driver’s side window made them both jump.
John Winchester grinned at them. Sam swallowed his curse as Dean rolled down the window.
“Dad?” Dean said, and Sam could finally hear the joy in it, as well as the desperate hope, the fear that he wouldn’t be good enough once again.
“Dean.” He opened the back door and slung himself inside. “Sam.”
“John,” Sam managed without choking, which he considered a victory of sorts.
“What’s going on?” Dean asked, twisting in his seat to see his father even though Sam knew that had to be extremely painful, just as it was for Sam to turn enough towards the back for conversation. “You knew this guy, right?”
“Yeah,” John acknowledged. “He was … he was a good man. Taught me a hell of a lot about hunting.”
Dean frowned. “I don’t remember him.”
John reached out, getting halfway to Dean before he pulled his hand back. “You were—it was real early on. We had kind of a falling out. I haven’t seen him in years.”
Sam wondered whether the ‘falling out’ had anything to do with John’s willingness to take a little kid on hunts.
“Let me see that,” John ordered, and Dean of course handed the letter right over.
“‘If you’re reading this, I’m already dead,’” he began. “Son of a—”
“What?” Dean asked.
“He had it the entire time,” John muttered.
“Had what?”
John ignored him. “I have to go up to the cabin,” he said. “There’s something—there should be something there I need.”
“You mean the old revolver?” Dean asked, glaring at Sam.
John looked at Dean like he’d just burst into song. “How do you--?”
“Sam here sees things, sometimes.” Dean’s mouth snapped shut, his jawbone standing out beneath his stubble.
“Sees things,” John repeated.
“He’s a psychic. Like Missouri, only … more active.”
Sam was pretty sure that the only reason John didn’t pull a gun on him right then was that he didn’t get that things had changed between Dean and Sam. He tried to maintain his attitude in the face of John’s suspicious inspection, but found himself dropping his eyes.
“The gun, Dad,” Dean prodded.
“We’ve got to get it,” John said, startled back to business. “Did he … see anything that lets us pick up their trail?”
“Us?” Sam blurted. “Now you want company?”
He swallowed and looked past both Winchester frowns.
John spoke as if every word was being pushed past a mouthful of bullets. “If Elkins was telling the truth, we need this gun.”
“Why?” Sam asked, because there was no point in trying to placate either of them right now.
“Because it’s important, that’s why,” John said.
“Yessir,” Dean said before Sam could get further into it with John. So it was fine for the sainted John Winchester to withhold any information he liked. Sam swallowed his protest—it wasn’t really hypocrisy, no matter what it felt like—as Dean pumped his father for information about vampires. In his eager tone, Sam could hear the kid Dean had been, terrified of not being good enough. John, though, just answered with short declarative sentences: no cross, no stakes, no sunlight, just beheading by raw force.
****
So it was the same as before. John gave the orders, Dean jumped, and Sam seethed. He knew he was digging himself deeper away from Dean, but he couldn’t seem to stop. The bastard had the gall to criticize how Dean treated the Impala, and all Dean did was duck his head and nod.
While John was off talking to the policemen investigating the disappearance of a young couple, presumably vampire victims, Dean leaned toward Sam and poked him in the shoulder, hard. “Do you want me to put a bullet in you? Because you’re headin’ there at eighty miles an hour.”
Sam turned his head deliberately away, staring out at the police cruiser parked sixty feet away.
“Jesus,” Dean cursed. “I don’t need this.”
“Maybe you can just turn off how you feel,” Sam snapped, “but I can’t, okay, and how he treats you, it’s bullshit. You’re not a kid, you’re the best goddamned hunter there is, and keeping information from you is gonna get you killed, and I—”
He buried his head in his hands so that he didn’t have to see Dean’s face. His palms were slippery-wet, his chest hurt like a bulldozer had run over it, and even the cut in his stomach was protesting how he was curling up into himself.
He’d gotten the sobs down to little hiccups when he felt Dean’s fingers, tentative, on his upper arm. “Hey,” Dean said, softly, and the shell of control Sam had managed to build up cracked all over again.
“Hey,” Dean repeated, and shoved his handkerchief into Sam’s hands. Sam wiped his fingers and his palms dry, then blew his nose.
Dean flexed and released his fingers on the steering wheel. “I’ll ask him,” he said when Sam finally managed to meet his eyes. “But not with you around.” He snorted then, unhappily. “Jesus, how do I—how can I trust you around him?”
Sam opened his mouth to point out that Dean had put his own life in Sam’s hands—but Dean put a different value on his father’s life, and Sam just couldn’t hear that right now. So instead he looked out the window, away from Dean, and listened to Dean sigh and shift in the seat until John returned.
****
In the end, John did give Dean the details on the gun—the Colt, which Sam would never have known just by looking at it. Why Samuel Colt would have been able to make a gun that could kill any supernatural thing remained unclear to Sam, but John’s hope had transmitted itself to Dean.
Sam was impressed with John’s courage when John gave them the plan of just walking into the lair. Courage, not brains, but burning the whole place down would likely melt the Colt as well, so he understood the decision.
Despite what John had told them about vampire habits, he hadn’t expected there to be human captives. Dean got to work on the cage while Sam went for the woman who was tied to the bed. She stirred as Dean popped the hinge on the cage.
“Shh,” Sam warned, leaning over her. “We’re here to help you.”
She opened her eyes. Then she started to scream, and Sam saw the extra row of teeth.
He raised his machete, prepared to do battle. The thud from the next room brought Dean’s head up, and then John was screaming at them to run.
Sam couldn’t hold all the vampires back with the TK, especially not the ones he couldn’t see, so he hauled ass out into the sunlight.
****
“They have our scent for life?” he repeated disbelievingly when they’d retreated to John’s motel room. “Why was that not a part of the initial lecture?”
John lowered his brows and shrugged, as if suggesting that caring about being targeted for death by superstrong vampires was a mark of cowardice. Dean looked like he wanted to imitate John, but couldn’t quite deny the justice of the complaint.
“We need dead man’s blood,” John said, as if that were the end of it.
****
Dean had never shown Sam how to use a crossbow, so he was the bait. It was a damned good thing John wanted that gun so badly; otherwise Sam never would have gotten next to something John was planning to shoot.
When they captured two of the vampires by shooting them with arrows tipped in dead man’s blood, John pronounced them lucky. One was the leader’s mate, which meant they now had something to trade for the Colt. He decapitated the other one while Dean and Sam watched.
Sam was beginning to get the feeling that John Winchester just might make a serious opponent for Father.
And then he had to go and ruin it with his moronic fucking plan of making the trade on his own. “I’m trying to keep you safe,” he explained to Dean, ignoring Sam.
Sam drew in a breath, prepared to risk Dean’s wrath, but: “All due respect, that’s crap, Dad.”
“Excuse me?” John said, and for once he and Sam were in perfect agreement.
“You know what I’ve been hunting. You sent us on hunts. You can’t be that worried about keeping me safe.”
John blinked. “This demon, it’s different. I can’t—I can’t do what I have to if I’m worried about keeping you alive.”
Dean stood like an oak, brutal and strong. “You mean, you can’t just go in expectin’ to die if I’m with you.”
John turned, so that he didn’t have to see Dean’s face any more. “Dean—your mother, Sam’s death—that almost killed me. I can’t watch you die too. I won’t.”
“But it’s okay for me,” Dean said. “It’s okay for you to walk off and leave me alone, when I could help.”
John shook his head. “You’re not alone any more.” The words rolled into the clearing like a grenade with its pin pulled.
Dean only snorted and crossed his arms over his chest. “We’re stronger together, Dad. You know it.”
John turned away. “We’re running out of time. You do your job, you save those people, and you get out of the area. That’s an order.” He started to walk.
Dean and Sam looked at each other, alone in the clearing with the decapitated corpse.
“I don’t know what the hell to do with you,” Dean said. “But I know one thing.”
“We’re going after him.”
Dean didn’t comment on the plural.
****
With everything so precarious, the hunt was somehow better than ever. He slotted into place effortlessly: guarding Dean’s back as he freed the captives, swinging the knife in perfect arcs to dispatch the vampires, running to the car to make it to the place John was negotiating with the vampire leader.
Shockingly, the trade hadn’t gone as John had expected; his hostage had knocked him over and was advancing on him just as they arrived.
Dean managed to shoot a couple of vampires from cover, but then they had to go in.
In the melee, Sam lost his machete, but he saw the Colt on the ground, ignored.
He heard the vampire leader yell and felt Dean stop flat. Whipping his head around, Sam saw that the leader had John by the neck. “I’ll break his neck,” the vampire warned.
“Put the crossbow down,” he continued when Dean didn’t move. After a moment, the vampire tightened his grip on John’s throat.
Dean slowly knelt, his eyes locked on his father.
Sam remembered himself and called the gun over. It sailed into his palm with a soft slap. No one was even watching, too caught up in the more dramatic standoff.
“You people,” the vampire said bitterly. “Why can’t you just leave us alone? We have as much right to live as you do.”
“I call logical fallacy,” Sam said.
The leader swiveled, dragging his hostage with him as if John were as light as a raincoat. Sam shot the vampire in the head. The results were extremely dramatic: yellow crackling lightning, enveloping his head and then moving down to his body, eating inwards rapidly until he was a blackened, twisting corpse. Sam reached out with his senses: the vampire dwindled into nothing, not Hell-bound, just dead.
He had it now, confirmation that the Colt would do what was promised.
The leader’s mate screamed and lunged for Sam, but another one of the remaining vampires grabbed her and pulled her away.
****
“So, you ignored a direct order,” John said, walking in to their room while Dean was still messing with his bag.
“Yes, sir,” Dean said. He spent a moment tugging at the zipper, making sure the duffel was completely closed. “And we saved your ass.”
John sighed. “You’re right.”
Dean nearly fell over. “I am?”
“I don’t like it, but—Dean, you’re a grown man. I’m ready to go after this thing. Together.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean said, fervently.
John turned to Sam. “That includes you.” It was almost not even grudging; Sam tried not to look surprised, but doubted he pulled it off.
“Of course,” he agreed.
“Now,” John said, stepping over to the dresser so that he could stand where he could see them both, “tell me about these visions Sam has. The ones you didn’t mention when I met him.”
Sam looked at Dean. Even if things weren’t destroyed between them, telling John the full truth was going to get Sam extremely dead, extremely fast. But he couldn’t lie, not in front of Dean.
Dean surprised him again: “Wasn’t sure you cared to know. ‘Til recently, they were just about our hunts, not the demon.”
“If it affects you, I need to know.”
Dean snorted.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” John’s voice was ocean-deep, impatient.
“Come on, Dad, you didn’t answer your phone for a year! I called you from Lawrence, Sam called and begged you to come when I was dying--” Sam gaped at him; he hadn’t known that Dean was even aware of that—“and there was nothing. Demons you got time for, but visions about me? You didn’t want the live version, why would you care about the instant replay?”
John flinched and crossed the room towards them. Dean stood to meet him, his back a tight line. Sam couldn’t see his face, but John’s was angry. “Dean—” He stopped, rubbed a hand over his face. “I’m sorry if I made you think that. I should have been there for you.”
About half of the tension drained out of Dean. Sam wanted Dean to stay angry, but mostly he wanted to be able to stay angry at John himself. But that was a dead end—it wouldn’t help him use his rage to get anything he wanted.
“The visions don’t happen on command,” Dean said, conciliatory. “They just—they’ve helped us find hunts, like with Elkins.”
John shifted his focus to Sam with nearly palpable relief. “Have you seen anything, anything about the demon?”
If Dean didn’t get his wide-eyed liar look under control quickly, John was going to know that something was very wrong. But John only had eyes for Sam right now. Sam swallowed. “Its name is Azazel,” he said. “I don’t—can you use that?”
Like that, John was off, mumbling something about research. “We’ll stay here tonight,” he announced on his way out. “Uh—you boys have a good night.”
The door slammed behind him. Dean’s befuddled expression was probably close to Sam’s own.
“I guess I’ll go pay for another night,” Sam said after a moment.
“We’re not okay,” Dean said when Sam had his hand on the doorknob. Sam stiffened, but didn’t turn, couldn’t force himself to look at Dean’s face. Dean blew out a loud breath. “Fuck, I should’ve known, all that shit about bein’ a team. You must have been laughing at that, right?”
“I never laughed,” Sam said thickly. “Dean, I never—”
“I can’t do this now,” Dean said, like a jail door swinging shut. “If you’re on my side, then you’ll shut up and go along ‘til we’ve iced Azazel.”
“You know you’re part of his plan,” Sam said, still facing the emergency exit map. It had a little red X: you are here. “He sent me to you.”
“If I believed that I’d put a bullet in my own head.”
He flinched, but there was an easy answer to that, and it was even true. “Sacrificing yourself, that might be what he needs. He’d love that.”
“That’s not how I plan it. But I don’t care who walks away at the end, long as it’s not him.”
Sam put his forehead on the hollow plastic motel door and just leaned into it until he could see again.
Part 8.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
They were on a two-lane highway in West Virginia when the tape deck and the engine went out together, like the whole system had been fried by an EMP. Dean cursed as if invective alone might power the car and guided it gently off the road, bumping over gravel until they came to a stop just in front of a stand of trees.
They were both out of their seats, headed to the weapons in the trunk, as soon as the car gave its final jolt. “Did you lose any time?” Sam joked as he checked his clip.
“Time’s a universal invariant,” Dean said right back, scanning the road.
Freaky electrical phenomena might be a sign of alien abduction on The X-Files, but they weren’t that lucky.
“Listen,” Dean said, turning his head slowly back and forth. His gun was at his side, his finger tight on the trigger, barrel aimed at the ground.
Sam didn’t hear anything, not even leaves rustling, the air heavy and dead around them. In the distance, he saw a black swarm of birds, winging away from them.
Step by step, they backed up until their shoulderblades touched. “In a minute,” Dean said, the vibration of his voice running through their bodies, “I’m gonna pop the hood. You gotta—”
Between one blink and the next, Ava was there, standing in the road, strands of hair whipping across her face even though there was no wind. Her hands were hidden in the pockets of her dark blue denim jacket.
Dean felt him stiffening and swiveled, so they were shoulder to shoulder facing her.
She looked fabulous. As the phantom wind died down, her brown, shoulder-length hair curved around her face like a scimitar; her light eyes shone under eyebrows that were perfect arcs; her softly rounded cheeks were slightly pinked with exertion; and her plump mouth was a dusky rose that made her look, even with all Sam knew, just a little bit vulnerable. Along with the jacket, nipped in to highlight her waist, she was wearing tight jeans and low-heeled boots. He remembered a couple of weeks when the second most powerful urge in his life was the one to fuck her.
“Sam!” she said, chipper as ever.
“Ava.” He tucked his gun into the back of his jeans. Any bullet she saw coming wasn’t going to be the one to kill her.
Dean didn’t lower his gun, but he jerked his eyes over towards Sam. “Who the fuck are you?” he asked.
She smiled, soft and a little secretive. “Didn’t he tell you?”
“Be careful,” Sam warned Dean, urgently.
She raised her hand. The gun ripped itself from Dean’s hand; Sam caught it before it hit the ground and sent it under the car, where Ava would have a harder time grabbing it to use against Dean.
Dean shook out his no-doubt stinging fingers. Abruptly, Latin began spewing from him like soda from a shaken can.
Ava giggled. “That’s sweet, but I’m not a demon.”
Dean stumbled to a halt. There was a moment of perfect silence, during which Sam realized that a battle to the death right now would impose an unacceptable risk to Dean. Therefore, Ava was going to do it. There was no more leeway for lies. “Dean, Ava and I grew up together. She’s another psychic, like me.” Dean was stone beside him, and he didn’t dare look.
“Ooh, did I make it in time for true confessions?” She examined Dean as if she was imagining whether he’d clash with her decor. “What Sammy means, I think, is that he and I and all the others spent our young lives like scorpions in a bottle, crawling all over each other. Until for some reason our father sent him to recruit you, which, by the way, how’s that going?”
“Your father,” Dean repeated, arrowing in on the key term.
Ava shrugged prettily. “Our father, the father of lies, the Angel of Death, the Impudent One. Epithets can be so cruel.”
Even with his eyes fixed to Ava, Sam could tell that Dean was connecting the dots: Sam had warned him that there might be other demon-targeted psychics out there, carefully laid the groundwork for it.
“Dean, I will explain everything, I swear to you. The important thing right now is that Ava is here to kill us, okay?” He’d opened up a whole new vein of weakness for her to exploit; there was no way around that. But it was too tasty for her not to spend some time gloating about.
Sam backed up a few steps, giving himself a better range of motion and making it easier for him to see both Dean and Ava.
Ava shifted, spreading her legs and settling into a fighting stance. Her hands left her pockets, apparently empty. He remembered how he’d been able to wrap both of them in one of his. She’d seemed so vulnerable then, such a contrast to his size.
“Am I the last one left?” he asked her.
She tossed her head. “You’ve gotta know the answer to that.” She glanced over at Dean. “But, for those of you who are just joining us: Yeah, I killed Jake last week. Now it’s two little Indians, out in the sun.”
Sam raised his eyebrows, letting her see his surprise. “I was pretty sure you’d let Claudia live,” he told her. “If only to have someone to lord it over.”
She pushed her hair back behind one ear. “There’s six billion people on this stinking planet. For now, anyway. I’m sure I can find someone to gossip with.”
“You--” Dean interrupted, his voice rusty. “You’ve been killing the other psychic kids?”
She turned her head to focus on him. “Well, not just me. But yes, I do hold the world record. I’m guessing Sam didn’t tell you how he was the first of all of us to start cutting down on the competition.”
Dean blinked slowly, like he’d been concussed.
Before Ava could decide to start the fight, Sam did. With one mental push, he shoved Dean back, sending him skidding over the hood of the car, out of sight. Then, taking advantage of Ava’s surprise, he used the TK like a giant fist, hammering her straight down.
Ava cried out in fear and shock, but an invisible shield snapped up before he’d done more than startle her. Sam felt the rebound from the blow in his own hands; he hadn’t known that was possible. Ava brought her hands up to her temples. Sam recognized the tell and prepared to fend off her shadow-demons.
The one she brought up this time was a hell of a lot bigger than the poppet-sized pit bull he remembered. It tore at him with smoky fingers like knives, and he spent a bad ten seconds pushing it away, the thing sliding around his mental jabs like it was made of snakes, before a better solution occurred to him.
He wasn’t as fast as Dean, who could rap out the Rituale Romanum at three hundred words a minute, but the demon cringed back as soon as he began, and fled as he advanced on Ava.
Who threw up her hands and emitted a fucking fireball at him. He ducked and rolled, catching only the edge of its heat on one leg, bouncing back to his feet. Now they were both on the empty road, twenty feet from the stalled-out car.
“Good one,” he called out, struggling not to pant visibly.
“You missed a lot.”
If he could distract her long enough to throw a knife—
The gunshot made them both flinch, just as the bullet splashed into her shield and flared like a flower as it disintegrated. “Stay back, Dean!” he yelled. He couldn’t protect them both. He was an idiot for not thinking of shields before, relying too much on Dean’s offensive measures rather than his own potential.
Then he was busy dodging a stream of fireballs, smaller than the first but hot enough to crisp his hair even when they missed him by a couple of feet. After the first few it was like the drills he’d done with tennis balls, pushing them off course with his mind, except that this time he had to turn every one in the opposite direction, making sure that none of them went behind him towards where Dean was.
Something about shields—
The heavier boom of Dean’s shotgun startled Ava into flinching. The rock salt spattered against the invisible barrier six feet from her chest, flaring into black holes with yellow edges. It was actually working, eating through the psychic wall that curved around her. Ava yelped as Dean fired again. Sam’s knife was already in the air, heading straight for the largest collection of holes.
It came to a halt two feet in front of Ava’s face, twisting slowly before she let it drop. Then Dean yelled in surprise, his voice coming closer as he was dragged past Sam. Sam grabbed at him, imagining his will as a mountain blocking the path.
Dean screamed, twisting against the grip of Ava’s power, a rope wrapping around his chest and shoulders. His muscles were twisting, tearing in her grasp, and Ava didn’t care whether they ripped him apart between them like two dogs fighting over a scrap of meat.
Helpless, Sam let go, and Dean tumbled forward, into the protection of Ava’s already-healing shields. He lay at her feet, his limbs tangled, his feet twitching uselessly.
“So it’s true,” she said, kicking Dean casually over onto his back with one pointed boot. “You finally found something to care about other than defying Father. I guess I just wanted to see for myself.”
Dean’s nose was bleeding, and there was something funny about the way his left arm was lying on the concrete.
“Well, it’s been fun, but you’re really out of practice.” Ava raised her hands again, safe against counterattack behind her shield.
And then he saw it: Ava had spent the greater part of a year perfecting her skills. But she hadn’t spent that time hunting things that mostly came out of the ground.
He sent his power down, below his feet and through the dirt beneath the road, punching back up behind her and slamming her forward like a cue ball hit on the break. She flew through the air, fetching up against him with a force that rocked him. He was ready, grabbing at her neck even as he took an involuntary step back.
The shock had dissipated her psychic barrier, and now unless she could reform it right around her skin, he—
She burned, like holding a live coal. He fought off the illusion, but his fingers relaxed involuntarily, cringing away.
Now she had her hands on his chest, pushing her own TK into him. He could feel her squeezing at his lungs. He tightened his grip on her shoulders, imagining her heart swelling, exploding in her chest.
Dean popped up behind her like a target in a shooting game, sending a shock of terror into Sam, and then Dean’s whole body lurched forward, pressing Ava between them.
Ava made a gurgling noise. Sam felt a tearing pain in his abdomen. Ava sagged against him but didn’t fall, her mouth going slack. He felt wetness, blood, soaking into his shirt, running down his waist into his jeans. Her hands scrabbled at his arms, her nails catching on his shirtsleeves. Her soft mouth, her soft face, blurring as if they were disappearing underwater.
With his last strength, he pushed her away. The pain increased.
She fell, landing oddly, toppling over to one side. Because of the hilt, the knife hilt embedded in her back, he realized. Sam’s knife—Dean had stabbed her, except that the blade had gone all the way straight through and out her stomach, into Sam. The razor tip of it poked through her shirt, as red and gleaming as a shark’s guts.
Her arms were flung out. He could see the inside of her right wrist, blue-veined, where the blood was still probably moving feebly, the cells striving to get more oxygen.
He looked up. Dean’s eyes were blazing, lacking only a lighter to set him on fire.
Dean knew to the millimeter how long that knife was. Sam pressed his hand to his middle, trying to staunch the flow enough to let himself think.
When had he gone to his knees?
He’d imagined being the last one left so many times. Mostly it was Ava on the ground in front of him, Ava or Jake. She’d never looked quite so awkward in his fantasies.
He closed his eyes and let the black cloud of unconsciousness take him.
****
Stinging pain brought him awake. He was lying on thin grass, clods of dirt and pebbles pressing against his back. Dean was tying off a stitch on his stomach, working one-handed. Dean’s fingers were bloody and his face was swelling with bruises.
Sam turned his head. At the foot of the trees in front of the car, he saw a pile of leaves and branches that hadn’t been there before, big enough to conceal a body.
“Can you get up?” Dean asked, whiskey-rough.
Sam nodded, then regretted it. He pushed himself up to sit, then, after a minute, struggled to his feet. Dean stood only a few feet away, but his arms were folded tight across his chest.
“Your shoulder?”
“Popped it back in,” Dean said. He’d had to do it for Sam, once, and the pain had been so excruciating that Sam had made Dean swear to knock him out first if it ever became necessary again.
“I would’ve—”
“I got the car fixed from what that bitch did,” Dean interrupted, turning his head away. “Can you give it a jump?”
He saw the logic in getting away from the corpse right off the road. They’d already had more luck they deserved, bloody and helpless like this. He nodded.
The cut (stab wound, Dean had stabbed him) in his stomach didn’t pull that much. The crumpled, sodden feeling in his lungs was more worrisome. If Ava had done enough damage, she could get her revenge from beyond the grave without coming back as a ghost.
Dean stayed well away from the car while Sam put his hands on the ignition. Generating electricity wasn’t that much harder than moving physical objects; it was all the same ultimately, at the atomic level. The car rumbled to life underneath him and he surrendered the driver’s seat to Dean. Dean waited until he was all the way over to the passenger side, and didn’t help him fumble the seatbelt on.
But Dean didn’t shove him out of the car either. While he’d been out, the sun had passed midday and started heading for the horizon, and they were driving west now, forcing him to squint and look out the side window while he tried to work out what to say to Dean. Dean unclipped a pair of sunglasses from the visor and put them on, making his eyes as blank as the rest of his expression.
“Tell me you didn’t kill my brother,” Dean said at last, his voice as shredded as if he’d been dragged along the highway for miles.
Oh God. He hadn’t even considered that.
“I swear to you,” Sam said immediately. “Dean, I found the records. Andy and Max—they were, they—” They weren’t Samuel Winchester, but what stopped his mouth was the thought that they’d been just like baby Sam, only unlucky enough to survive for Father’s training. When they’d been little kids, Andy had been the closest thing Sam knew to a friend. He remembered playing leapfrog with Andy, and then a year ago Sam had walked up and just—
And maybe Andy would have done the same to him. Maybe he could have explained to Dean how none of them were innocent, none worth saving. “They were somebody else’s family,” he said, bowing his head and waiting.
“Okay,” Dean said at last. “Okay.” He punched the steering wheel with his fist and didn’t even wince. “The only thing I want is to kill that fucking demon. You help me out there and we’re golden.”
“D—”
“Don’t you say my name like you know me. You know the demon, you know somethin’ about what it wants. So fucking tell me what you know.”
“He never told us,” Sam said, hopelessly. “He always said the last one standing would find out. It’s big though, Hell on earth big. He was always talking about ruling, crushing the world. But I don’t know how.”
Dean snorted. “More,” he said. “Details.”
Sam began. “His name is Azazel,” he said, wondering if the name alone might be enough to summon Father. He told Dean about who he’d been, about Arba and the likelihood that she had a different agenda, talking until his voice was hoarse and past, until there was nothing left.
They stopped for gas. Dean left him in the car. Where would he run? Leaving now would just invite Father to swoop in and grab Dean as a hostage for Sam’s bad behavior. Father would probably tie Dean to real railroad tracks, just for the show-off value.
When Dean returned from paying, he threw a bottle of Coke and a packet of almonds into Sam’s lap. The soda was cold against his thighs. He picked it up to have something to do, turning it in his hands.
“You do like Coke, right?” Dean asked as he turned the key in the ignition. “Or was that another lie, ‘cause it’s what I drink?”
Sam scraped at the label with his thumbnail, remembering the taste of it from Dean’s mouth, caramel and the bitterness of caffeine.
Dean laughed to himself.
Dully, Sam twisted the cap off, waiting for the foam to settle. He had to be ready for what came next. Assuming that Ava had been telling the truth, he’d just become the linchpin in Father’s grand design.
“Saving people, that was no lie,” he said. “I changed my mind, you showed me—”
He didn’t see Dean’s hand move, but the cool circle of a pistol barrel pressed into the skin of his temple. The car wobbled a little with only Dean’s sore left arm to guide it. “Don’t even,” Dean warned.
Dean hated him; Dean was still going to hate him when this was over.
“Do it,” he said, closing his eyes. “Fuck up his plan, it’s the only way to be sure.”
Dean’s trembling breath was louder than the thrum of the engine. The gun dragged along Sam’s skin, hard enough to leave a mark.
“Fuck,” Dean snarled, pulling the gun away and shoving it behind his back. “He’d just start again, wouldn’t he? No fucking way.”
That was all he’d say. The car seemed huge, Dean telescoping away from him, a leather and iron cage built just for him.
****
Dean got them a single room at a Best Western: cream walls, square headboards, faded bedspreads.
Sam wasn’t just going to follow him around like some abandoned puppy. He had his pride. He was going to do the right thing, but he didn’t have to grovel the entire time.
Except that when Dean casually shoved him down onto the bed, so hard that he felt a stitch pop on his abdomen in a warm rush, he didn’t even raise a hand. Dean growled, climbed onto the bed on his knees, and ripped at Sam’s belt, thumbing open the button on his jeans and jerking them down over his hips with a strength that just forced the zipper to give.
For all of that, Dean’s hand on his cock was gentle, slow and knowing. Sam gasped and closed his eyes.
He expected Dean to stop, turn him over and fuck him maybe. He didn’t bottom often, but Dean always liked it well enough. But Dean just kept going, steady pressure rolling through him, getting him past the pain of his injuries.
When Sam opened his eyes again, trying not to come, Dean had propped himself on one elbow, on his side next to Sam as if nothing were wrong. His head dipped down, his nose brushing the curve of Sam’s ear while Sam mindlessly raised his hips into Dean’s touch.
“You want my mouth?” Dean whispered. “Was it the cocksucking lips you liked best? Or maybe you switched sides ‘cause of the magical power of my ass.”
Sam didn’t try to hide how he flinched at each sentence.
“It was you,” he said helplessly.
“Bullshit,” Dean said, and ran his thumb up the center of Sam’s dick, pressing down at the rim of the head. Sam gasped and his eyes fluttered closed. Dean continued, not even breathing hard. “You think I wasn’t listening all this afternoon, you and your awful childhood? You hate your father—hell, you hate my dad on principle. You were lookin’ for a way out. But you couldn’t tell me the truth. You had to keep your options open, right?”
Sam forced his eyes open, raising his head and flailing at Dean, grabbing for his shoulder until Dean pulled his upper body away, still without loosening his hold on Sam’s cock. “I was going to tell you,” Sam begged.
Dean smiled, beautiful and dead-eyed. “Yeah, well, I was gonna kill the demon and live happily ever after. Guess we both suck at predicting the future.”
He twisted his wrist just right, and Sam came all over Dean’s hand and his own stomach. Blood and come stained the bandage over the stab wound, but he didn’t have the energy to clean up.
Dean rolled off the bed and went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him deliberately. The water went on and stayed on for a long time.
****
Sam came awake screaming, the pain in his lungs quickly overwhelming the boxing match going on in his head.
When he pulled himself together, he saw Dean crouched by his bed, gun in hand, mouth pursed grimly. He blinked feebly and swiped at his nose, clearing off some of the blood.
“Ears too,” Dean said tonelessly.
“I saw—I don’t—you told me vampires were extinct,” was all he could think to say.
“The fuck you talkin’ about?” Dean rubbed at his eyes with his free hand.
“Vampires, Dean, I saw these things come through a skylight in this cabin, they practically tore him apart. They ripped his throat out and drank his blood, the teeth--”
“Hold on,” Dean ordered. “Go get cleaned up.”
Sam’s head was still ringing like he’d been the pinball in a high-scoring game. He forced himself to his feet and shuffled into the bathroom. It was perfectly anonymous, not a hint of character, and the unrelieved white—counter, tiles, towels, shower curtain--pounded on his aching eyes and aching head until he turned off the light and washed up in the minimal glow from the illuminated light switch plate.
When he returned to the main room, Dean was sitting in a chair by the window, one leg slung over the opposite knee, the gun in his lap and his hands on the thin square arms of the chair. He turned his head from the view of the parking lot and examined Sam.
“Do the visions come from him? Azazel,” he clarified.
“I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “The power does, but that’s not—I don’t think it’s the same thing.” He thought about it as his head began to clear. “I’m pretty sure the visions are truth, just like the other powers really work. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise, what would he need with you,” Dean agreed. “So, this thing you saw, with the vampires, it’s gonna happen soon?”
Sam scratched at a line of blood drying under his earlobe. “I think—maybe it already has. The vision felt—different.”
“Talk,” Dean said, and Sam did: the multiple vampires, the fierceness of their attack, the gun they’d stolen so deliberately, the scratches the man had left on the floor in his last moments.
****
Before they went for breakfast, Sam went online and found the report of the inexplicable mauling of Daniel Elkins in Colorado. Dean flipped through his father’s journal until he found the same name, and they were off. He was so focused on the hunt that he kept forgetting and talking to Sam like they were still partners. It made the moments when he remembered and shut himself off even more painful.
Once they had identified Elkins, it wasn’t hard to figure out that the message he’d left was a post office box with a combination. And then, moments later it seemed, they were in Colorado, sitting in the car in the post office parking lot and holding a letter for John Winchester.
Dean stared at it for several minutes, then decisively flipped it over and stuck his thumbnail under the edge of the flap.
The knock on the driver’s side window made them both jump.
John Winchester grinned at them. Sam swallowed his curse as Dean rolled down the window.
“Dad?” Dean said, and Sam could finally hear the joy in it, as well as the desperate hope, the fear that he wouldn’t be good enough once again.
“Dean.” He opened the back door and slung himself inside. “Sam.”
“John,” Sam managed without choking, which he considered a victory of sorts.
“What’s going on?” Dean asked, twisting in his seat to see his father even though Sam knew that had to be extremely painful, just as it was for Sam to turn enough towards the back for conversation. “You knew this guy, right?”
“Yeah,” John acknowledged. “He was … he was a good man. Taught me a hell of a lot about hunting.”
Dean frowned. “I don’t remember him.”
John reached out, getting halfway to Dean before he pulled his hand back. “You were—it was real early on. We had kind of a falling out. I haven’t seen him in years.”
Sam wondered whether the ‘falling out’ had anything to do with John’s willingness to take a little kid on hunts.
“Let me see that,” John ordered, and Dean of course handed the letter right over.
“‘If you’re reading this, I’m already dead,’” he began. “Son of a—”
“What?” Dean asked.
“He had it the entire time,” John muttered.
“Had what?”
John ignored him. “I have to go up to the cabin,” he said. “There’s something—there should be something there I need.”
“You mean the old revolver?” Dean asked, glaring at Sam.
John looked at Dean like he’d just burst into song. “How do you--?”
“Sam here sees things, sometimes.” Dean’s mouth snapped shut, his jawbone standing out beneath his stubble.
“Sees things,” John repeated.
“He’s a psychic. Like Missouri, only … more active.”
Sam was pretty sure that the only reason John didn’t pull a gun on him right then was that he didn’t get that things had changed between Dean and Sam. He tried to maintain his attitude in the face of John’s suspicious inspection, but found himself dropping his eyes.
“The gun, Dad,” Dean prodded.
“We’ve got to get it,” John said, startled back to business. “Did he … see anything that lets us pick up their trail?”
“Us?” Sam blurted. “Now you want company?”
He swallowed and looked past both Winchester frowns.
John spoke as if every word was being pushed past a mouthful of bullets. “If Elkins was telling the truth, we need this gun.”
“Why?” Sam asked, because there was no point in trying to placate either of them right now.
“Because it’s important, that’s why,” John said.
“Yessir,” Dean said before Sam could get further into it with John. So it was fine for the sainted John Winchester to withhold any information he liked. Sam swallowed his protest—it wasn’t really hypocrisy, no matter what it felt like—as Dean pumped his father for information about vampires. In his eager tone, Sam could hear the kid Dean had been, terrified of not being good enough. John, though, just answered with short declarative sentences: no cross, no stakes, no sunlight, just beheading by raw force.
****
So it was the same as before. John gave the orders, Dean jumped, and Sam seethed. He knew he was digging himself deeper away from Dean, but he couldn’t seem to stop. The bastard had the gall to criticize how Dean treated the Impala, and all Dean did was duck his head and nod.
While John was off talking to the policemen investigating the disappearance of a young couple, presumably vampire victims, Dean leaned toward Sam and poked him in the shoulder, hard. “Do you want me to put a bullet in you? Because you’re headin’ there at eighty miles an hour.”
Sam turned his head deliberately away, staring out at the police cruiser parked sixty feet away.
“Jesus,” Dean cursed. “I don’t need this.”
“Maybe you can just turn off how you feel,” Sam snapped, “but I can’t, okay, and how he treats you, it’s bullshit. You’re not a kid, you’re the best goddamned hunter there is, and keeping information from you is gonna get you killed, and I—”
He buried his head in his hands so that he didn’t have to see Dean’s face. His palms were slippery-wet, his chest hurt like a bulldozer had run over it, and even the cut in his stomach was protesting how he was curling up into himself.
He’d gotten the sobs down to little hiccups when he felt Dean’s fingers, tentative, on his upper arm. “Hey,” Dean said, softly, and the shell of control Sam had managed to build up cracked all over again.
“Hey,” Dean repeated, and shoved his handkerchief into Sam’s hands. Sam wiped his fingers and his palms dry, then blew his nose.
Dean flexed and released his fingers on the steering wheel. “I’ll ask him,” he said when Sam finally managed to meet his eyes. “But not with you around.” He snorted then, unhappily. “Jesus, how do I—how can I trust you around him?”
Sam opened his mouth to point out that Dean had put his own life in Sam’s hands—but Dean put a different value on his father’s life, and Sam just couldn’t hear that right now. So instead he looked out the window, away from Dean, and listened to Dean sigh and shift in the seat until John returned.
****
In the end, John did give Dean the details on the gun—the Colt, which Sam would never have known just by looking at it. Why Samuel Colt would have been able to make a gun that could kill any supernatural thing remained unclear to Sam, but John’s hope had transmitted itself to Dean.
Sam was impressed with John’s courage when John gave them the plan of just walking into the lair. Courage, not brains, but burning the whole place down would likely melt the Colt as well, so he understood the decision.
Despite what John had told them about vampire habits, he hadn’t expected there to be human captives. Dean got to work on the cage while Sam went for the woman who was tied to the bed. She stirred as Dean popped the hinge on the cage.
“Shh,” Sam warned, leaning over her. “We’re here to help you.”
She opened her eyes. Then she started to scream, and Sam saw the extra row of teeth.
He raised his machete, prepared to do battle. The thud from the next room brought Dean’s head up, and then John was screaming at them to run.
Sam couldn’t hold all the vampires back with the TK, especially not the ones he couldn’t see, so he hauled ass out into the sunlight.
****
“They have our scent for life?” he repeated disbelievingly when they’d retreated to John’s motel room. “Why was that not a part of the initial lecture?”
John lowered his brows and shrugged, as if suggesting that caring about being targeted for death by superstrong vampires was a mark of cowardice. Dean looked like he wanted to imitate John, but couldn’t quite deny the justice of the complaint.
“We need dead man’s blood,” John said, as if that were the end of it.
****
Dean had never shown Sam how to use a crossbow, so he was the bait. It was a damned good thing John wanted that gun so badly; otherwise Sam never would have gotten next to something John was planning to shoot.
When they captured two of the vampires by shooting them with arrows tipped in dead man’s blood, John pronounced them lucky. One was the leader’s mate, which meant they now had something to trade for the Colt. He decapitated the other one while Dean and Sam watched.
Sam was beginning to get the feeling that John Winchester just might make a serious opponent for Father.
And then he had to go and ruin it with his moronic fucking plan of making the trade on his own. “I’m trying to keep you safe,” he explained to Dean, ignoring Sam.
Sam drew in a breath, prepared to risk Dean’s wrath, but: “All due respect, that’s crap, Dad.”
“Excuse me?” John said, and for once he and Sam were in perfect agreement.
“You know what I’ve been hunting. You sent us on hunts. You can’t be that worried about keeping me safe.”
John blinked. “This demon, it’s different. I can’t—I can’t do what I have to if I’m worried about keeping you alive.”
Dean stood like an oak, brutal and strong. “You mean, you can’t just go in expectin’ to die if I’m with you.”
John turned, so that he didn’t have to see Dean’s face any more. “Dean—your mother, Sam’s death—that almost killed me. I can’t watch you die too. I won’t.”
“But it’s okay for me,” Dean said. “It’s okay for you to walk off and leave me alone, when I could help.”
John shook his head. “You’re not alone any more.” The words rolled into the clearing like a grenade with its pin pulled.
Dean only snorted and crossed his arms over his chest. “We’re stronger together, Dad. You know it.”
John turned away. “We’re running out of time. You do your job, you save those people, and you get out of the area. That’s an order.” He started to walk.
Dean and Sam looked at each other, alone in the clearing with the decapitated corpse.
“I don’t know what the hell to do with you,” Dean said. “But I know one thing.”
“We’re going after him.”
Dean didn’t comment on the plural.
****
With everything so precarious, the hunt was somehow better than ever. He slotted into place effortlessly: guarding Dean’s back as he freed the captives, swinging the knife in perfect arcs to dispatch the vampires, running to the car to make it to the place John was negotiating with the vampire leader.
Shockingly, the trade hadn’t gone as John had expected; his hostage had knocked him over and was advancing on him just as they arrived.
Dean managed to shoot a couple of vampires from cover, but then they had to go in.
In the melee, Sam lost his machete, but he saw the Colt on the ground, ignored.
He heard the vampire leader yell and felt Dean stop flat. Whipping his head around, Sam saw that the leader had John by the neck. “I’ll break his neck,” the vampire warned.
“Put the crossbow down,” he continued when Dean didn’t move. After a moment, the vampire tightened his grip on John’s throat.
Dean slowly knelt, his eyes locked on his father.
Sam remembered himself and called the gun over. It sailed into his palm with a soft slap. No one was even watching, too caught up in the more dramatic standoff.
“You people,” the vampire said bitterly. “Why can’t you just leave us alone? We have as much right to live as you do.”
“I call logical fallacy,” Sam said.
The leader swiveled, dragging his hostage with him as if John were as light as a raincoat. Sam shot the vampire in the head. The results were extremely dramatic: yellow crackling lightning, enveloping his head and then moving down to his body, eating inwards rapidly until he was a blackened, twisting corpse. Sam reached out with his senses: the vampire dwindled into nothing, not Hell-bound, just dead.
He had it now, confirmation that the Colt would do what was promised.
The leader’s mate screamed and lunged for Sam, but another one of the remaining vampires grabbed her and pulled her away.
****
“So, you ignored a direct order,” John said, walking in to their room while Dean was still messing with his bag.
“Yes, sir,” Dean said. He spent a moment tugging at the zipper, making sure the duffel was completely closed. “And we saved your ass.”
John sighed. “You’re right.”
Dean nearly fell over. “I am?”
“I don’t like it, but—Dean, you’re a grown man. I’m ready to go after this thing. Together.”
“Yes, sir,” Dean said, fervently.
John turned to Sam. “That includes you.” It was almost not even grudging; Sam tried not to look surprised, but doubted he pulled it off.
“Of course,” he agreed.
“Now,” John said, stepping over to the dresser so that he could stand where he could see them both, “tell me about these visions Sam has. The ones you didn’t mention when I met him.”
Sam looked at Dean. Even if things weren’t destroyed between them, telling John the full truth was going to get Sam extremely dead, extremely fast. But he couldn’t lie, not in front of Dean.
Dean surprised him again: “Wasn’t sure you cared to know. ‘Til recently, they were just about our hunts, not the demon.”
“If it affects you, I need to know.”
Dean snorted.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” John’s voice was ocean-deep, impatient.
“Come on, Dad, you didn’t answer your phone for a year! I called you from Lawrence, Sam called and begged you to come when I was dying--” Sam gaped at him; he hadn’t known that Dean was even aware of that—“and there was nothing. Demons you got time for, but visions about me? You didn’t want the live version, why would you care about the instant replay?”
John flinched and crossed the room towards them. Dean stood to meet him, his back a tight line. Sam couldn’t see his face, but John’s was angry. “Dean—” He stopped, rubbed a hand over his face. “I’m sorry if I made you think that. I should have been there for you.”
About half of the tension drained out of Dean. Sam wanted Dean to stay angry, but mostly he wanted to be able to stay angry at John himself. But that was a dead end—it wouldn’t help him use his rage to get anything he wanted.
“The visions don’t happen on command,” Dean said, conciliatory. “They just—they’ve helped us find hunts, like with Elkins.”
John shifted his focus to Sam with nearly palpable relief. “Have you seen anything, anything about the demon?”
If Dean didn’t get his wide-eyed liar look under control quickly, John was going to know that something was very wrong. But John only had eyes for Sam right now. Sam swallowed. “Its name is Azazel,” he said. “I don’t—can you use that?”
Like that, John was off, mumbling something about research. “We’ll stay here tonight,” he announced on his way out. “Uh—you boys have a good night.”
The door slammed behind him. Dean’s befuddled expression was probably close to Sam’s own.
“I guess I’ll go pay for another night,” Sam said after a moment.
“We’re not okay,” Dean said when Sam had his hand on the doorknob. Sam stiffened, but didn’t turn, couldn’t force himself to look at Dean’s face. Dean blew out a loud breath. “Fuck, I should’ve known, all that shit about bein’ a team. You must have been laughing at that, right?”
“I never laughed,” Sam said thickly. “Dean, I never—”
“I can’t do this now,” Dean said, like a jail door swinging shut. “If you’re on my side, then you’ll shut up and go along ‘til we’ve iced Azazel.”
“You know you’re part of his plan,” Sam said, still facing the emergency exit map. It had a little red X: you are here. “He sent me to you.”
“If I believed that I’d put a bullet in my own head.”
He flinched, but there was an easy answer to that, and it was even true. “Sacrificing yourself, that might be what he needs. He’d love that.”
“That’s not how I plan it. But I don’t care who walks away at the end, long as it’s not him.”
Sam put his forehead on the hollow plastic motel door and just leaned into it until he could see again.
Part 8.
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![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Exquisite line! I'm loving this story! :)
ETA - Great twist on the end Cold Oak fight scene in the season 2 finale!
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I love the whole idea of Azazel sending Sam to Dean, how they fall for each other etc. The first chapter reminded me of the XFiles (I' ve read some of your Mulder/Krycek), couldn't help but compare a yougn Krycek sent to get yougn Mulder's trust... Just could't help but draw the parallels.
And oh, last but not least - you write sizzling hot sex between Sam and Dean without turnign it into a manual for dummies (long, detailed, boring).
So, can't wait to read how you wrap this up.
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you capture sam's desolation and desperation so well
this is really gripping, i really am drawn so much along here...and want for all of them a happy ending :/ not sure there's any way they can get it...but...you make me care for them, how they are NOW as people...and that's what matters...
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Re: you capture sam's desolation and desperation so well
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hugs
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The "Sam called and begged you to come when I was dying--” Sam gaped at him; he hadn’t known that Dean was even aware of that" part gives me a glimmer of hope. :)
In short, I am continuing to bite my nails.
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Not much longer now.
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Also, the not-very-hateful Dean version of hate sex continues to be my favorite thing ever.
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This Dean really doesn't have much of a clue how hate sex is done. I actually think canon Dean is unlikely to be much different on that score.
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I also love how Sam is so pissy about Dean being nice to his father that he (Sam) doesn't really seem to get that Dean keeping quiet on the subject is actually a fairly big deal.
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And yeah, Sam's pretty irrational on the subject of fathers.
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http://pics.livejournal.com/meret/pic/0014bfep
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And the hate sex! The best thing may be that it does hurt Sam, fiercely, so that (again) it wasn't until reading aloud that I put together just how innocuous the sex itself was. Hold still while I viciously say stuff to you and gently jerk you off, traitor scum!
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In short--awesome.
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“I was going to tell you,” Sam begged.
that sounds like clark *g*.
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well, i had rather
and yup, in the case of evilness, Jor El , Jonathan , Lionel are all up to par to each other :D
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Killing. Me.
Just....
*hands*
Love it, and you make it hurt *so good*.
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