SPN: Bonds of Trust 1/5
Title: Bonds of Trust
Author: Ada
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Angst, Action
Spoilers: Mild for AHBL and BDABR
Characters: John, Jim, Bobby, Daniel Elkins, wee!Sam, wee!Dean, OCs, no pairings
Disclaimer: I owe too much money to student loan companies to buy Supernatural.
Summary: Preseries. When the boys go missing, salt lines intact and barely any trail to follow, Jim brings a group of hunters together to find them. Unfortunately hunters do not always see eye to eye and John is forced to recognize that hunters can be just as dangerous as their prey.
Chapter 1
The boys had already been missing for 24 hours when John stormed in to Pastor Jim’s house, desperate for help. He hadn’t been hunting all that long, really. Sam was only five after all, and he hadn’t really gotten started until Sam had been about three. Two years was not enough time to figure all of it out, definitely not enough experience to figure out what took his boys.
Jim assured him on the phone that he would call in some more seasoned hunters to help, and though normally John would have balked at getting more people involved this time he knew he had no choice.
He was a little surprised by the people Jim called in though.
As he entered the small kitchen his eyes immediately darted to Daniel Elkins, sitting at the table with that look he got when he just wanted someone to tell him what to shoot. John got to know Daniel quite well, he was the first hunter he studied under, excellent marksman and able to improvise at a moment’s notice, he taught him a hell of a lot. Daniel was a good hunter, but he focused mainly on vampires, though he knew about all sorts of other creatures, researching other beings, finding patterns, really was not his forte. Of course for every ten or so general hunters there were one or two specialists who could whip up a pattern and way to destroy their supernatural being of choice with a second’s notice.
That thought inevitably had him turning to where Bobby Singer stood in the corner of the room, holding a paper in front of him. John knew Bobby to be a demon expert, one of the best, as Jim had said when he sent John to him six months ago for help figuring out what killed his wife. So the sight of him standing there in his baseball cap with a shotgun under his arm should have allayed John’s fears, but instead made him more worried. If Jim had called Bobby here then that meant he must have been relatively sure they were after a demon. And demons were scary shit, so much more difficult to hunt and destroy than a spirit or a wendigo.
Bobby was in deep conversation with someone John had never seen before. A woman, roughly Bobby’s age, with curly black hair pulled back, wearing a hip holster with two pistols on her belt. She was pointing at the paper in Bobby’s hand, frowning and explaining something.
In the other corner, leaning against the counter were Joshua Carey and Timothy Johnson. John knew both in passing, and could not help but be a little surprised at the large turnout to Jim’s summons.
“Oh John, good,” Jim said from the table, standing up to greet him. The other hunters had known he was there from the moment he walked in and glanced at him in greeting. The woman in the corner’s eyes shot up as she surveyed him, as if sizing him up. John returned her gaze until her dark eyes dropped back to the paper.
John sat down beside Jim, exhausted but needing to know what was happening to his boys. “You call enough people, Jim?” John sighed, glancing at the crowd.
“Hopefully, John. I thought it best that we be prepared for anything. I called Daniel first, and from what he pulled together we thought it could possibly be a demon, so I brought in Bobby and Teresa - between the two of them they can figure out any demonic pattern. Joshua and Tim just happened to be here when your call came in, decided to stick around and help.”
John briefly thought of too many hands stirring the pot but kept his mouth shut.
“Have you found anything?” John asked, looking up at Bobby.
“Considering you haven’t gotten any ransom notes and anyone who’s been watching you lately would know you don’t have two buttons to rub together let alone pennies, we looked into some different theories,” Jim introduced the subject, John barely glanced at him, waiting for Bobby to speak up.
“Teresa and I checked out the motel on our way here,” Bobby offered. “Like you said, no sulfur, and no tracks, even the salt lines were undisturbed. Which means we’re dealing a person - and someone who knows their stuff. This area has quite a number of missing person’s reports, all children, and all in sets of two.” John raised his eyebrows and then the woman - Teresa - stepped forward and placed a map on the table before him.
“This area’s disappearances are most likely linked to a form of sacrifice. What we’re looking at here is a very specific type of demon. The demon will be relatively lower-level, unable to possess for long periods of time. It takes the form of a woman, and usually resides in the forest. These demons makes deals with the neighboring populations, agreeing to remain in the forest and do them no harm so long as each year it is offered a human sacrifice of two children - usually siblings,” she said in a formal, clipped tone. “The agreement binds the demon to a tract of forest and every year two children ‘disappear’. We’ve traced the patterns of demonic activity in the area your sons disappeared from and have ascertained the demon to be in these woods,” she pointed to the part of the map where someone had drawn a large ‘X’ “That’s approximately forty minutes north from here.”
“When does… are they… is…” John was at a loss for words, trying to process the information he had just been delivered.
“Midnight during the first new moon of November, John,” Bobby spoke up. “Which is tomorrow by the way. This all means that we need to work fast.” John rested his head in his hands for a moment.
“But when you say sacrifice…”
“I brought down one of these demons six years ago. Usually the children are left in a certain location, a cave, a clearing, that’s been designated in the past. They won’t be hurt before the demon comes out to take them, there’s no ritual or anything that you need to worry about. They’re okay for now,” Teresa explained, and John thought her voice sounded gentle.
“How do we kill it?” John asked, looking around the room.
“You can’t exactly kill a demon, John,” Bobby said. “What you have to do is perform a ritual exorcism to cast it back into Hell.”
“If it was that easy then why would the people have made a deal with this demon?” John asked.
“No one said it was easy,” Bobby countered. “These kind of demons don’t possess, they’re just smoke and shadow, damn near impossible to pin down, let alone exorcise.”
“Then what the hell is the plan?”
“To get your boys out of there before the thing shows itself,” Bobby responded. Teresa and I are going to try and capture it in a salt circle if we can, so we can send it to Hell, but if not then we’re all just gonna get away from those woods.”
“Then wouldn’t the demon be free to roam?” John asked. Bobby sort of shrugged like it wasn’t all that important. “Then you have to exorcise it.” He swung his eyes to Teresa. “You said you got rid of one before. How’d you manage that?”
“Two kids were set to be sacrificed. I got there just as the first one was dying. I salt-circled the demon while it was ‘eating’; it didn’t notice me until it was too late,” her tone had softened considerably.
“And the kid?”
“Dead by the time I got there anyway,” she said tonelessly, the gentleness in her voice having evaporated. That more than anything reminded him once again why hunters made him wary. Though he might be afflicted with the same condition, the way they could all look passed terrible things, became immune to the horror that would have struck others down bothered him. The child Teresa allowed to be ‘finished off’ while she spread her salt circle could have been his child, was special to someone, but unimportant in the scope of ‘getting the job done’. But then John noticed that her eyes were now averted, and wondered for a moment if he had pegged her wrong.
“So what do we need to do?” John asked.
“Question,” Timothy said, speaking for the first time, brushing his longish blonde hair out of his eyes. “How can we be sure that John’s sons are really in that forest? It seems you’re placing a lot of certainty on that, what if you’re wrong?”
Bobby glared at Timothy. “Somehow skipper, I think Tressy and I know a little bit more about demons than you.” Teresa mouthed ‘skipper’ at Bobby while stifling a laugh.
“I’m just trying to make sure all our bases are covered, Bobby,” Timothy muttered.
“He has a point,” Joshua said. “We don’t want to all be running around the woods while Sam and Dean are really elsewhere.”
“Bobby,” John sighed. “How sure are you?”
“99 percent,” Bobby responded.
“What needs to be done?” Jim questioned.
“We need to find the right ritual to use on the demon, if we manage to catch it. We should also plan how we’re going to split up and search the forest for the boys,” Teresa explained.
“It wouldn’t hurt to look into who might’ve snatched them either,” Daniel pointed out. “If the locals are sacrificing kids to protect themselves then there’s a good chance they won’t be too pleased with us trying to stop them. “
“How did we never notice this was going on?” Joshua piped in. “I mean come on, this close to Blue Earth, where we’ve all visited countless times? I mean disappearing children never caught our eye at the annual 4th of July barbeque?”
“The locals who set this up are really careful, Josh. If we hadn’t been looking for it we might have never noticed it. They go for transients, homeless kids, vacationers, people who can’t afford to call the cops, sometimes they even use their own kids,” Teresa said.
“Well that’s just sick,” Timothy whispered.
“But not surprising,” Bobby sighed. Teresa left the room and Bobby waited for her to return, carrying a stack of battered leather-bound notebooks with color-coded stripes on the spine and dumping them unceremoniously on the table. Bobby pushed them away from his workspace, and then began to draw lines on the map, dividing it into sections and labeling them A, B, C. “Jim would you mind staying behind and looking for that exorcism?”
“Of course not.”
“I think it’s in the blue journal, Jim,” Tressy said, staring at the stack thoughtfully. “Yeah… because it was after the crossroads demon but before that poltergeist in Rocky Cragg.”
“I’ll get on it then,” Jim sighed, pulling the blue journal out of the stack.
“Okay people let’s get a move on. I think our best bet is to split into teams and comb the woods,” Bobby suggested.
“I’ll take section ‘B’ Bobby,” Timothy volunteered. “And I don’t really need a partner, I’m a tracker after all.”
Bobby glared at him for a moment before shrugging, “Your choice I guess. Course that leaves one man out.”
“I’m going to look into some other possibilities, I’ll stay here,” Joshua said.
“Alright then, me and… Daniel will take section ‘A’. Tressy and John can cover ‘C’.” Bobby’s pause before choosing his own partner was not lost on anyone in the room. “Now the boys probably won’t be out there yet, so we’ll be looking for a place that looks like the drop-off point. Everyone take a copy of the map, check the area carefully and mark anything you think might be interesting, okay?”
“Sounds good Robert,” Tressy said while mock-saluting. “Can we get a move on now or will there be a pep talk?”
“Get going,” Bobby huffed.
“Sir, yes sir!” Teresa nabbed a map off of the table and turned to John. “Alright John, let’s move out.” As they made to leave the room Bobby caught Teresa’s eye and mouthed ‘watch him’ while pointing at John. Teresa nodded, and John, who witnessed the exchange, rolled his eyes.
Author: Ada
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Angst, Action
Spoilers: Mild for AHBL and BDABR
Characters: John, Jim, Bobby, Daniel Elkins, wee!Sam, wee!Dean, OCs, no pairings
Disclaimer: I owe too much money to student loan companies to buy Supernatural.
Summary: Preseries. When the boys go missing, salt lines intact and barely any trail to follow, Jim brings a group of hunters together to find them. Unfortunately hunters do not always see eye to eye and John is forced to recognize that hunters can be just as dangerous as their prey.
Chapter 1
The boys had already been missing for 24 hours when John stormed in to Pastor Jim’s house, desperate for help. He hadn’t been hunting all that long, really. Sam was only five after all, and he hadn’t really gotten started until Sam had been about three. Two years was not enough time to figure all of it out, definitely not enough experience to figure out what took his boys.
Jim assured him on the phone that he would call in some more seasoned hunters to help, and though normally John would have balked at getting more people involved this time he knew he had no choice.
He was a little surprised by the people Jim called in though.
As he entered the small kitchen his eyes immediately darted to Daniel Elkins, sitting at the table with that look he got when he just wanted someone to tell him what to shoot. John got to know Daniel quite well, he was the first hunter he studied under, excellent marksman and able to improvise at a moment’s notice, he taught him a hell of a lot. Daniel was a good hunter, but he focused mainly on vampires, though he knew about all sorts of other creatures, researching other beings, finding patterns, really was not his forte. Of course for every ten or so general hunters there were one or two specialists who could whip up a pattern and way to destroy their supernatural being of choice with a second’s notice.
That thought inevitably had him turning to where Bobby Singer stood in the corner of the room, holding a paper in front of him. John knew Bobby to be a demon expert, one of the best, as Jim had said when he sent John to him six months ago for help figuring out what killed his wife. So the sight of him standing there in his baseball cap with a shotgun under his arm should have allayed John’s fears, but instead made him more worried. If Jim had called Bobby here then that meant he must have been relatively sure they were after a demon. And demons were scary shit, so much more difficult to hunt and destroy than a spirit or a wendigo.
Bobby was in deep conversation with someone John had never seen before. A woman, roughly Bobby’s age, with curly black hair pulled back, wearing a hip holster with two pistols on her belt. She was pointing at the paper in Bobby’s hand, frowning and explaining something.
In the other corner, leaning against the counter were Joshua Carey and Timothy Johnson. John knew both in passing, and could not help but be a little surprised at the large turnout to Jim’s summons.
“Oh John, good,” Jim said from the table, standing up to greet him. The other hunters had known he was there from the moment he walked in and glanced at him in greeting. The woman in the corner’s eyes shot up as she surveyed him, as if sizing him up. John returned her gaze until her dark eyes dropped back to the paper.
John sat down beside Jim, exhausted but needing to know what was happening to his boys. “You call enough people, Jim?” John sighed, glancing at the crowd.
“Hopefully, John. I thought it best that we be prepared for anything. I called Daniel first, and from what he pulled together we thought it could possibly be a demon, so I brought in Bobby and Teresa - between the two of them they can figure out any demonic pattern. Joshua and Tim just happened to be here when your call came in, decided to stick around and help.”
John briefly thought of too many hands stirring the pot but kept his mouth shut.
“Have you found anything?” John asked, looking up at Bobby.
“Considering you haven’t gotten any ransom notes and anyone who’s been watching you lately would know you don’t have two buttons to rub together let alone pennies, we looked into some different theories,” Jim introduced the subject, John barely glanced at him, waiting for Bobby to speak up.
“Teresa and I checked out the motel on our way here,” Bobby offered. “Like you said, no sulfur, and no tracks, even the salt lines were undisturbed. Which means we’re dealing a person - and someone who knows their stuff. This area has quite a number of missing person’s reports, all children, and all in sets of two.” John raised his eyebrows and then the woman - Teresa - stepped forward and placed a map on the table before him.
“This area’s disappearances are most likely linked to a form of sacrifice. What we’re looking at here is a very specific type of demon. The demon will be relatively lower-level, unable to possess for long periods of time. It takes the form of a woman, and usually resides in the forest. These demons makes deals with the neighboring populations, agreeing to remain in the forest and do them no harm so long as each year it is offered a human sacrifice of two children - usually siblings,” she said in a formal, clipped tone. “The agreement binds the demon to a tract of forest and every year two children ‘disappear’. We’ve traced the patterns of demonic activity in the area your sons disappeared from and have ascertained the demon to be in these woods,” she pointed to the part of the map where someone had drawn a large ‘X’ “That’s approximately forty minutes north from here.”
“When does… are they… is…” John was at a loss for words, trying to process the information he had just been delivered.
“Midnight during the first new moon of November, John,” Bobby spoke up. “Which is tomorrow by the way. This all means that we need to work fast.” John rested his head in his hands for a moment.
“But when you say sacrifice…”
“I brought down one of these demons six years ago. Usually the children are left in a certain location, a cave, a clearing, that’s been designated in the past. They won’t be hurt before the demon comes out to take them, there’s no ritual or anything that you need to worry about. They’re okay for now,” Teresa explained, and John thought her voice sounded gentle.
“How do we kill it?” John asked, looking around the room.
“You can’t exactly kill a demon, John,” Bobby said. “What you have to do is perform a ritual exorcism to cast it back into Hell.”
“If it was that easy then why would the people have made a deal with this demon?” John asked.
“No one said it was easy,” Bobby countered. “These kind of demons don’t possess, they’re just smoke and shadow, damn near impossible to pin down, let alone exorcise.”
“Then what the hell is the plan?”
“To get your boys out of there before the thing shows itself,” Bobby responded. Teresa and I are going to try and capture it in a salt circle if we can, so we can send it to Hell, but if not then we’re all just gonna get away from those woods.”
“Then wouldn’t the demon be free to roam?” John asked. Bobby sort of shrugged like it wasn’t all that important. “Then you have to exorcise it.” He swung his eyes to Teresa. “You said you got rid of one before. How’d you manage that?”
“Two kids were set to be sacrificed. I got there just as the first one was dying. I salt-circled the demon while it was ‘eating’; it didn’t notice me until it was too late,” her tone had softened considerably.
“And the kid?”
“Dead by the time I got there anyway,” she said tonelessly, the gentleness in her voice having evaporated. That more than anything reminded him once again why hunters made him wary. Though he might be afflicted with the same condition, the way they could all look passed terrible things, became immune to the horror that would have struck others down bothered him. The child Teresa allowed to be ‘finished off’ while she spread her salt circle could have been his child, was special to someone, but unimportant in the scope of ‘getting the job done’. But then John noticed that her eyes were now averted, and wondered for a moment if he had pegged her wrong.
“So what do we need to do?” John asked.
“Question,” Timothy said, speaking for the first time, brushing his longish blonde hair out of his eyes. “How can we be sure that John’s sons are really in that forest? It seems you’re placing a lot of certainty on that, what if you’re wrong?”
Bobby glared at Timothy. “Somehow skipper, I think Tressy and I know a little bit more about demons than you.” Teresa mouthed ‘skipper’ at Bobby while stifling a laugh.
“I’m just trying to make sure all our bases are covered, Bobby,” Timothy muttered.
“He has a point,” Joshua said. “We don’t want to all be running around the woods while Sam and Dean are really elsewhere.”
“Bobby,” John sighed. “How sure are you?”
“99 percent,” Bobby responded.
“What needs to be done?” Jim questioned.
“We need to find the right ritual to use on the demon, if we manage to catch it. We should also plan how we’re going to split up and search the forest for the boys,” Teresa explained.
“It wouldn’t hurt to look into who might’ve snatched them either,” Daniel pointed out. “If the locals are sacrificing kids to protect themselves then there’s a good chance they won’t be too pleased with us trying to stop them. “
“How did we never notice this was going on?” Joshua piped in. “I mean come on, this close to Blue Earth, where we’ve all visited countless times? I mean disappearing children never caught our eye at the annual 4th of July barbeque?”
“The locals who set this up are really careful, Josh. If we hadn’t been looking for it we might have never noticed it. They go for transients, homeless kids, vacationers, people who can’t afford to call the cops, sometimes they even use their own kids,” Teresa said.
“Well that’s just sick,” Timothy whispered.
“But not surprising,” Bobby sighed. Teresa left the room and Bobby waited for her to return, carrying a stack of battered leather-bound notebooks with color-coded stripes on the spine and dumping them unceremoniously on the table. Bobby pushed them away from his workspace, and then began to draw lines on the map, dividing it into sections and labeling them A, B, C. “Jim would you mind staying behind and looking for that exorcism?”
“Of course not.”
“I think it’s in the blue journal, Jim,” Tressy said, staring at the stack thoughtfully. “Yeah… because it was after the crossroads demon but before that poltergeist in Rocky Cragg.”
“I’ll get on it then,” Jim sighed, pulling the blue journal out of the stack.
“Okay people let’s get a move on. I think our best bet is to split into teams and comb the woods,” Bobby suggested.
“I’ll take section ‘B’ Bobby,” Timothy volunteered. “And I don’t really need a partner, I’m a tracker after all.”
Bobby glared at him for a moment before shrugging, “Your choice I guess. Course that leaves one man out.”
“I’m going to look into some other possibilities, I’ll stay here,” Joshua said.
“Alright then, me and… Daniel will take section ‘A’. Tressy and John can cover ‘C’.” Bobby’s pause before choosing his own partner was not lost on anyone in the room. “Now the boys probably won’t be out there yet, so we’ll be looking for a place that looks like the drop-off point. Everyone take a copy of the map, check the area carefully and mark anything you think might be interesting, okay?”
“Sounds good Robert,” Tressy said while mock-saluting. “Can we get a move on now or will there be a pep talk?”
“Get going,” Bobby huffed.
“Sir, yes sir!” Teresa nabbed a map off of the table and turned to John. “Alright John, let’s move out.” As they made to leave the room Bobby caught Teresa’s eye and mouthed ‘watch him’ while pointing at John. Teresa nodded, and John, who witnessed the exchange, rolled his eyes.