SPN Fic: There’s a voice in my head that drives my heel (1/2)

[deirdre_c]

Title: There’s a voice in my head that drives my heel
Movie Prompt: Tron: Legacy
Author: deirdre_c
Pairings: Sam/Dean
Rating: R
Word Count: ~15,400
Warnings: several minor character deaths

A/N: Written for the super-disney challenge, an SPN fusion with Tron: Legacy. (Wow, this fic was a long, long time in the making.) Heartfelt thanks to dreamlittleyo and girlguidejones for their stellar beta-duties and patient cheerleading on this project. And to ignited for the magnificent artwork to go with it. Title from a lyric by Golden Earring.

***

When Dean Winchester was three years old, his mother was killed by a virus. It was a computer virus.

***

SamIam: Hey. Aren’t you likethegun from the perl rfc documentation boards?
HeCTorAfram1an: who wants to know?
SamIam: Sorry. Didn’t mean to come across all stalkery. I just thought I recognized you. Thought maybe I could pick your brain about some programming questions. I’m kinda new around here.
HeCTorAfram1an: new to the usenet or new to the internet?
SamIam: So if I laugh at your lame jokes, will you be willing to chat? Cause I’m game.
HeCTorAfram1an: bitch
SamIam: jerk

Dean woke with his face mashed against the keyboard, mouth sour, odor ripe. He pondered whether he’d showered in a couple of days, then hauled himself up off the desk, only to slump back into his chair.

Dad had been gone about a week. His radio silence was nothing new-he’d been growing more and more distant and secretive in the past year-but it bothered Dean nonetheless. A worm the size of the one Dad was hunting probably had some pretty serious firepower behind it, and Dean always worried when he went up against something big without backup.

But Dean had his own target to track down, alone, so he tapped the laptop to wake it and dove back into the sea of code onscreen, looking for a way to pick the lock on a particularly tricky backdoor.

***

NTufnel11: you seen the new transformers movie?
SamIam: Not yet. I don’t get out much.
NTufnel11: hey, pipsqueak,“homeschooled” doesnt have to equal “no social life”

John and Dean Winchester wore the white hats. Out there were hoards of malicious crackers, pirates, cypherpunks and phone phreaks and, as well-meaning as the loose affiliation of samurai teenagers in their parents’ basements were, sometimes someone needed to bring in some big guns. John Winchester was a man with a mission, and he’d trained his only son up to fight alongside him. Bit by bit, line of code by line of code, John worked anonymously, stealthily, to build up and maintain what others would tear apart. From what Dean could remember, it started as a search for some particular foe, a faceless enemy that had something to do with Dean’s mom’s death when Dean was little. But, even as Dean grew up and came to realize this was just some bizarre delusion of Dad’s- It just took her, Dean. One minute she was there, the next she was gone. Sucked her right into the screen.- he also knew that there were too few fighting on the side of cyber-right and so many more toiling away to ruin, steal, destroy.

So Dean quit high school -- What for? You could teach the class in your sleep.-and skipped college-all you need to know is at your fingertips, son-and followed his dad from place to place- Can’t set up permanent shop. It makes it too easy for Them to track us down.-fingers nimble and skin pale from long nights in front of computer screens.

Ten days since last hearing from Dad, and Dean was about ready to start tracking him down himself (yeah, good luck with that), when the front-desk clerk at his extended-stay motel knocked on his door. Dean opened the door to her-after carefully closing out the most incriminating windows and clearing his cache- and saw that in her hand was an honest-to-god postcard. He accepted it with a murmured, “Thanks,” and checked to see that it was Dad’s handwriting, noting that the postmark was five days previous. It read: Stay put and head down. Memorize this and burn it. Share it with NO ONE. I’ll contact you soon.

Below the message was twelve simple lines of code.

“Head down.” Not good. That meant he wanted Dean 100% dark, jacked out, offline. What the hell was Dad up to?

Dean shuffled backward to sit down on the bed and immediately sought to decipher what the code was intended to do, but it appeared to be a standard UNIX sweep-remove process for a background daemon called yed. He flipped the card over, searching for additional information, a secret message, anything. But try as he might, he couldn’t figure out why John would think this might be worth going lights out.

Dean crumpled up the postcard, grabbed the remote, and turned to the Food Network, slouching back onto the headboard. It was going to be a long wait.

***

**Space Paranoids Player SamIam Logged in**
Br00seCampbe11: got yourself a microphone yet? gamings more fun when you talk and play. plus theres phone sex nudgenudgewinkwink
SamIam: Nope. Stuck with typing. Hey. Heads up. Recognizer on your left. Better take it out.
Br00seCampbe11: watch the master. I’ll show you how it’s done sammy.
SamIam: Fuck you, I could play this game with my eyes closed.
Br00seCampbe11: you gotta back off him
wait ‘til he’s ranged and-
-yahatzee!
SamIam: Amazing.
Br00seCampbe11: its all in the wrist
SamIam: I wish sarcasm translated better over the internet.

When Dean woke the next morning, there was a text on his phone. 123 Pine Street. Lawrence, Kansas. Go in person to check out lead. Meet me at Caleb’s when you’re done.

On the one hand, his inexplicable down time was a lot shorter than Dean had feared. On the other… Lawrence. Just the name alone made his belly feel made of lead weight. Dean had once sworn to himself he’d never go back there.

But despite his trepidations, he quickly started dismantling his set up, unplugging his portable server and carrying it out to the trunk of the Impala.

***

AngusJung: wanna help me set up this honeynet? im about to catch some sonsofbitches trying to launch a trojan from an ip in maryland
SamIam: Sure. Hook me up.
AngusJung: and youve gotta see this new chicks blowjob vid at BAB.net
SamIam: Yeah. Well. Don’t bother sending me that.
SamIam: I’m not actually all that into girls just so you know.
AngusJung: k. no prob sammich. im an equal opportunity player myself. plenty of gay porn on my harddrive too. try this…
SamIam: Whatever man.
SamIam: I have to admit I was worried about telling you.
AngusJung: naw. im down with that

It’s not like all Dean’s skills were virtual. Sometimes a job called for sneaking into an office to get a peek at a password or making a mirror of a hard drive on a stand-alone computer, and over the years Dean had become fairly expert at B&E.

So getting into the mild-mannered suburban house Dad had sent him to was a cinch. But once in, Dean couldn’t find a thing out of the ordinary. The house was deserted, last family cleared out-pretty recently, judging by the continued power and running water-and no one new moved in. He started in the attic and worked his way down, checking rooms and closets, tapping walls and searching for crawl spaces, wondering what Dad was looking for in such a mundane place.

It wasn’t until he reached the basement that he found something. A door behind a door with an old-fashioned but seriously out-of-place card-reader lock set into it. Dean pulled out a small device from the pocket of his jacket (made by some clever bastard, if he did say so himself, out of an old Walkman) and bent over the lock. There was a hum followed by a soft click and the door swung open as if by an invisible hand.

Dean moved in eagerly, like a cat slipping out of the house for the night.

Sepia light filtered in from glassblock windows set into the house’s foundation. The dead, stale air was thick in his throat as he looked around at the tiny closet-sized room made smaller by a jumbled fire hazard of prehistoric computer components and wires and sharp-edged metal housings piled high up every wall. Some of the equipment was standard-issue 80s Radio Shack: boxy, beige and black museum-quality antiques that harkened back to names like Commodore and Compaq, actual CP/M devices with cathode-ray tube monitors. Others appeared to be pretty rarified, including big, cabinet-sized beasts with labels containing VAX and PDP covered with messy heaps of cannibalized chips, lenses, stripped copper wire and other gear. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, and he saw papers and pictures pinned to the wall on top of a map of some circuit board labeled “The Grid.”

Dean heard the door close behind him. He didn’t look back. Instead, he rubbed his hands together and sat down in a desk chair in front of what looked like some main keyboard controls. He reached down to flip the switch on a power strip bristling with a Gordian knot of cabling, and, fantastically, components began to hum to life.

“Like the man says, there’s no problems, only solutions.” Dean wiped his hand across the screen to clear it of dust and wriggled into a more comfortable position, cracking his knuckles in anticipation and summoning up his hacking muse. He drew a breath and began entering code, spinning out ASCII and Prolog like an historian would apply Latin or Aramaic, looking for openings into the ancient programming.

He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, turned to scan the shelves behind him for what it could have been. Just nerves, though, because everything remained still as a tomb beyond the softly pulsing lights of the newly-juiced equipment. Nonetheless, his fingers twitched to open up a window and chat with his old sidekick geekboy. Even after months- no, nearly two years- of radio silence, he missed sharing his adventures with Sam, the snarky comments, the insightful advice. Even though they’d met years before, practically grown up together online, he’d never even met the guy; heck, he could’ve been a girl or a dirty old man for all Dean knew beyond what little Sam said about his real life. But goddamn if every day Dean’s didn’t miss Sam having his back on operations like this. For a guy who spent 95% of his time alone, he wished he were better at being lonely.

Dean shook off the maudlin hanky-weeping and turned back to the task at hand, ignoring everything but the lines of code that flowed over the monitor’s screen. This was a contest he relished; it was an article of faith with him that no machine or program was a match for Dean Winchester’s badass programming skills.

Dean set to work and quiet minutes ticked by until, without warning, something struck him in the back. A blast of pain and burning radiated from a quarter-sized circle between his shoulder blades. Dean struggled to flinch or to flee, but was rocked in the chair by spasms of his own outstretched arms and legs. The whole room flashed monochromatic, except his shining body. He looked down at his hands, saw them blur, separate into pixels, the rest of him quickly becoming indistinct, evanescing.

It seemed to Dean that the computer screen rose up to meet him, to swallow him. He swam, for a time, in complete blackness. Then came a speck of light, a pinpoint of brilliance, and his mind seized on it. Soon it was a globe, becoming clearer and clearer, a gridded orb crisscrossed with currents of light, hinting at exhaustive detail. Dean circled it, or it rotated before him.

Closer and closer, the landscape before him became one of angular towers, banded powerlines, hulking, mountain-like topography with rivers of white radiance, and murky, blasted places suggesting wastelands. Dean plummeted down a tunnel that appeared as if he were dropping through an infinite series of hoops of energy. He fell and fell, completely disoriented, and at last the tunnel ended. He shot from its mouth, and something resembling ground flew up at him.

***

SamIam: Hey Dean, you’ve got to check out this new workaround I rigged up for double encryption defenses.
JaunBonham: dude. how’d you know it was me? this is a brand new username.
SamIam: …
JaunBonham: sam?
SamIam: IDK. Guess I just recognized your style of code. Gotta go now, mom calling.

He came to. He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious, lying there in what looked like the middle of an empty street. The first thing he noticed was the cold; it wasn’t a wintertime cold, but a someone-turned-the-air conditioning-too-low cold. Then he realized he was clad in some strange sort of tight-fitting bodysuit with gear that encased his shoulders and forearms. He rolled over, raised his hands for a better look, which turned into an abrupt, unexpected jerk of surprise.

Incandescent tracks, resembling nothing so much as circuitry, ran over his arms and legs and chest. They glowed a cold whitish-blue in the dark, the color of deep-undersea creatures. As he peered closer, it was almost as if he could make out, not with his regular eyesight but with some other sense, that the glowing tracks, his clothes, the pavement that he knelt on, all were made up of programming code. Infinitesimal ones and zeros locked together like DNA to create solid mass. Dean shook his head, trying to clear it.

As he struggled to his feet, a narrow spotlight, abrupt and blinding, locked down on him. He shielded his eyes, sharp gusts of air swirling around him as he squinted up at the source. Impossible. A Recognizer. Not some simulation from a game on a screen, though, but something concrete and three-dimensional, floating unspeakably above him, huge and monstrous. “Oh, man,” he whispered to himself. “This isn’t happening.”

He turned to run, but the ground he stood on thrust upward like a branchless tree trunk, rising to meet the platform descending from the ship. He swayed, nearly fell, and swung around to see, a few yards away, a number of … men? Big, rough-looking uglies in black armor, scarlet lines accentuating their breadth and bulk.

The group of figures moved toward him, the tall staffs they carried glowing dully, menacingly. Two stepped forward while the others fanned out around Dean. “Another stray,” the first commented to his comrade, then grabbed Dean roughly by the arm, shoving him toward their craft. Dean looked into his face and saw that his eyes were solid black. “Get inside, program.”

This was too much to absorb. Several possible explanations flitted through his mind: this had to be some kind of dream or hallucination, maybe a coma? Had he fallen and hit his head? Had someone slipped something into his drink at a bar? Because this was a pretty fucked up acid trip.

Real or not, Dean wasn’t going down without a fight. He tore himself out of the guy’s grip and shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, not much of a fist-fighter, but ready to defend himself. In the blink of an eye, one of the sentries reversed his staff and struck Dean in the thigh. There was a crack of light, and an agonizing shock of pain rocketed up and down from Dean’s hip to his foot. He fell to one knee with a cry, and found himself hauled back up again.

“Fuck! Stop. Wait! I’m not a… a program,” Dean panted as they crowded him, but he stumbled painfully forward. Maybe he was lying in intensive care someplace with a brain tumor, but even in a dream, Dean didn’t feel like tasting the business end of one of those staffs again.

“You will come with us.”

***

j0nb0nj0v1: Sam. Fuck, where have you been? Haven’t seen you in ages.
SamIam: What?
j0nb0nj0v1: It’s Dean, bitch.
SamIam: I think you’ve got the wrong person.
j0nb0nj0v1: Quit fooling around.
SamIam: No really. I don’t know any Dean. Just opened this account a few weeks ago.
j0nb0nj0v1: Oh. Sorry. An old friend had that same username.
**j0nb0nj0v1 logged off**

The cell was small, empty, a low, cramped space shaped by smooth, confining planes. He leaned against the wall, looking down at his forearms. The whitish-blue tracks lining them continued to glow and pulse. Exploring the little room, Dean found there was no way to sit or lie down comfortably, no space to stretch. The ceiling was solid but transparent, diffuse light from above casting no shadows, and he could glimpse the soles of the feet of a guard on patrol overhead.

On opposite walls were narrow, curved openings a single hand-span wide that allowed him a view into the cells on either side, and when he glanced through the one on the left, he was just in time to see the far blank wall appear to thin and disappear, a large figure slipping silently through the slim opening.

Dean found himself looking into the worried face of a stranger, taller than Dean, but not one of the guards, his face bare, features human and young. He was wearing armor like Dean’s, stretched tight over shoulders as broad as a linebacker, limned too like Dean’s with bright, circuit-like lines from neck to heel.

Dean moved closer to the slit.

The guy flashed a quick, dimpled smile of greeting, but then his brow furrowed again, his eyes so soft and concerned Dean almost felt he should be the one doing the reassuring. Before Dean could say anything, though, words rushed out of the stranger, low and hurried, “Hey, you okay? I’m sorry I couldn’t find you sooner, but I didn’t think you could-How did you-? Never mind. We’ll get to that later. First, we have to get you out of here, but there’s a lot of layers of security. I can’t-“ The guy flinched and glanced around with a look of surprise at the sound of boots tramping closer. He swung back to focus on Dean. “Listen. They’ll put you in the arena and I’ll find you again there. You can use your disc, but protect it, and don’t get yourself derezzed before then, okay?”

Dean’s head spun, he felt like he’d only caught one word in three. “Wait! What am I supposed to do?”

He smiled again, this time reassuringly, then stepped back. “Survive,” was his response.

“What is this place? Who are you?”

The guy pressed his hand to the wall of his cell, which dissolved in front of him, the sudden exit opening up to a corridor bathed in dim light. “This is the Grid. And I’m Sam, of course.” Then he slipped out of sight.

***

He said he was Sam. The Sam who Dean had first run into online as a teenager? Sam who had popped up here and there and everywhere: on message boards, on listservs, when Dean was digging up underground servers, who’d played with him in RPGs and on Halo squadrons over years and stayed with him even as the internet grew broader and deeper? Sam, who figured prominently in Dean’s secret fantasies, to whom every random bar or club hookup was compared. Sam who, two years ago, had sent a cryptic email to one of Dean’s most clandestine addresses, telling Dean he had to go offline for awhile, and was never heard from again?

Sam.

That was enough to fully convince Dean that all of this was quite simply the most lucid dream in the history of human neurobiology. So he decided to stop trying to make sense of things and just go along for the ride.

A door in the wall of his own cell materialized and two of the burly stormtroopers from before entered. The darkness of their cowls and the dangerous energy of their quarterstaffs made it difficult not to be intimidated, but Dean hadn’t practiced a lifetime of bravado in the face of authority to shrink back now. “Look, if this is about those parking tickets, I can explain everything.”

“It’s time for the arena, program.”

Sam had said something about an arena, too. Well, online Dean was a gamer fucking second-to-none, so if this whole loony setup hinged on an ability to play videogames, Dean figured he might be good to go.

They walked though a length of chill, colorless corridors, and no matter what he said to the guards they didn’t respond to his comments or questions. But throwing out some cocky insults at least made him feel more like himself. That is, until they herded him down a dim tunnel and he emerged onto the floor of an enormous stadium. Hallucination or no, this place was fucking intimidating.

He could think of no other structure this huge; it was as if the Superdome and the Grand Canyon had been fused together in strange contours of geometric shapes and light. He could only catch glimpses of the arena at first: the flat, polished surface, the high walls lined with a mass of shouting, faceless spectators. One of the guards shoved him to join a file of prisoners marching past another group, armored and gleaming in red, who wore discs affixed to their backs. Dean reached over his shoulder to find a disc secured between his shoulder blades as well.

Protect your disc, Sam had said. Okay then. At least he knew what that meant now. Sort of.

A shadow fell over the complex. For the first time, Dean looked up, and his mouth hung open.

The sky of this world was a fantastic vision, varying between pitch black and flashes of color like heat lightning, strung with remarkable shapes and clouds of unfathomable patterns. Above the arena was a colossal craft, larger than the largest blimp or plane Dean could imagine, menacing in a sterile, impervious way. On a screen on the side of the craft an image appeared. What appeared to be a man, dressed in armor like the guards but without a cowl, his bare face middle aged and nondescript, but with inhuman, bilious yellow eyes.

He spoke.

“Greetings, Programs,” the voice rolled out, silencing the rumble of the crowd. “Until the last of the Special Children emerges victorious, you will fight in their place. Win, and take your post in my armies. Lose… and die.”

Even as Dean scanned the arena, additional screens flashed open, displaying varying angles of the fighters themselves. Robotic cameras hovered around the space, the fist-sized spheres gleaming as they swooped into the arena proper. He couldn’t make out what the crowd was chanting, but its steady drumbeat made Dean’s heart skip and jump uncomfortably in counterpoint.

A woman’s voice rang out, calmly announcing match after match, Dean struggling to take in the scene as dozens of pairs of figures hurled their discs at break-neck speeds. At the first direct hit in one fight, Dean flinched, disbelieving, as the losing figure didn’t just fall but shattered, a shower of bright pixilation bouncing across the court. Over and over the vivid discs spun and ricocheted, destroying competitor after competitor, until it there was no one left of the challengers but Dean.

He walked cautiously forward onto the proving-ground, the rim of his disc flaring to life as he reached back to unsheathe it. You can play this, he assured himself. Think of it as Wii Frisbee.

“Combatant Three vs. Winchester,” the announcer intoned.

His opponent appeared at the end opposite him, his back to turned, looking up at the screen, the crowd’s screams hiking up in pitch as they wildly chanted the name “Win-Chest-Er! Win-Chest-Er!” But, what the hell? They sure weren’t cheering for Dean.

Unlike the other programs in the games who wore black and white, this guy’s dark armor was outlined blood-red- like the guards’, like the uniform worn by the yellow-eyed man on the screen above-and sat thick over his shoulders and the gauntlets bracing his arms. As he moved, turned, something tickled in the back of Dean’s brain, a sense of familiarity, recognition. Then the figure strode forward, and Dean gasped when light illuminated his face.

“Dad?”

But it wasn’t Dad- the face was blank, smooth, something slightly, creepily off- and there was no response but the sharp flick of the wrist that sent a flash of scarlet tearing towards Dean. He had to throw himself to the right, rolling over on the slick floor, to avoid getting struck by the man’s -no, the program’s- disc.

He clambered to his feet and threw up his disc like a shield to scarcely block another projectile. This Dad look-alike had a second disk. “Fuck you,” Dean muttered. “Is that even legal?”

As if he could have heard Dean from across the platform, his opponent caught Dean’s gaze and grinned, a nasty, dead-eyed smile like a snake preparing to swallow a mouse. Then its eyes flashed, darkened, coated flat-black and inhuman, and if Dean had had any lingering fear or hope that this was somehow John Winchester dragged to this world with him, it was instantly snuffed out.

Dean realized he couldn’t play defense forever, and sent his own disc flying, trying to aim low and hard, but not even coming close to a strike on his adversary. The contest went on and on, Dean barely making his feet again before flinging himself clumsily out of the way each time as sickeningly near misses brushed past. Dean was barely holding his own, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for much longer. His heart was beating a painful, panicked rhythm as he leaped to catch his returning disc. It hummed as his hand gripped it, white-knuckled.

All he wanted was to wake up, but the longer he fought, the more tired and sore he grew, the less he could convince himself that this was just a nightmare and not some real world.

As he blocked a particularly wicked ricochet, he heard his opponent make a low, pleased sound. Dean had thought he’d been doing well, but in that instant realized he was being toyed with. The fact that it laughed with his dad’s voice made bile rise in his throat.

Dean’s concentration slipped, and his opponent’s disc grazed his arm, slicing through the thick fabric suit with ease. Dean cried out, step-stuttering backward into the wall of the arena, a thin line of blood dripping from his biceps and the crowd’s unearthly roar thundering in his ears.

His opponent approached, the look of disdain and triumph on its face nothing like Dean had ever seen on Dad’s. Dean tried to lunge sideways and found he couldn’t escape, couldn’t even move, as though he was pinned in place by unseen shackles.

“I could’ve killed you a hundred times today,” it growled at him, “but this was worth the wait, User.”

Dean clenched his jaw, not willing to give the thing the pleasure of asking for mercy, but he couldn’t help the howl that burst from him as pain exploded across his gut as the thing drew its disc across Dean’s abdomen, carving a line of fire across skin and muscle, and then another. Dean writhed, head thrown back, nearly blacking out from the burning agony.

It leaned closer, Dad’s features twisted in a rictus of sadistic pleasure. Dean couldn’t deny the reality of its breath hot in his face. Another slow, burning cut sliced low across Dean’s belly; it felt like he was being filleted alive.

“Dad. No,” he pled. He knew it wasn’t his father, but he couldn’t help himself. Dad would help him, would stop this.

And for a moment the program faltered, focused on him sharply, something like puzzlement drifting across its face.

In that moment’s hesitation, Dean caught a flash of white from the corner of his eye, and suddenly another disc slammed into Dad’s doppelganger, ripping through its leg and dropping it to the ground. The invisible bonds holding Dean vanished and he too slid down the wall and fell, hard, onto his side.

“Illegal combatant on the grid,” the mechanized voice called out impassively overhead.

Dean couldn’t muster the strength to sit up, but he managed to open his eyes to see a figure rushing toward him, kicking his opponent’s disc to the far end of the concourse and kneeling down. Urgent hands checked Dean’s wounds, gripped his shoulders. The touch felt like cool rushing water, like the sharp tingle of a sleeping limb awakening.

“Illegal combatant on the grid.”

“Can you get up?” Sam asked, low and frantic. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

Dean nodded and heaved himself up on one elbow, Sam reaching around to pull him up with an arm over his shoulders. The outraged shrieks of the crowd were deafening, and Dean didn’t think he was going to make it very far, but he didn’t have to. Steps away was… was Dean’s very own car. He blinked stupidly. No, not quite the Impala, this vehicle was sleeker, narrower, its tires huge and boundaries traced in radiant light like everything here, but still. The resemblance was undeniable.

“I don’t remember telling you about my baby,” he muttered.

“Get in. Hurry,” Sam retorted, and Dean had to bite his lip to keep from screaming in pain as Sam bundled him roughly into the passenger seat.

Sam slid behind the steering controls and the vehicle jetted forward out of the arena, quickly followed by a pack of what looked like glowing motorcycles, dragging luminous trails behind them.

Dean turned gingerly to look behind them and realized their car was leaving a trail as well, solid and lethal from the looks of it, as Sam zagged across the Grid lines, making one of their opponents strike the barrier they left behind and derez into a shower of bouncing glasslike cubes.

The cycles were faster than Sam’s car, blowing by them and leaving a pair of neon light walls in their wake. They closed in, trying to sandwich the car in between them.

There was silence in the car as Sam swept them through fantastic evasive maneuvers and Dean simply tried to hang on. This definitely wasn’t the Impala. It wove and swerved, Sam leading their followers into a series of complex traps.

Another cycle flipped over and derezzed, but still more pursuers drove through the jagged shards of their comrade. Others were coming, but Dean realized they were facing a more dangerous threat. Sam was driving them on a collision course with the Grid’s boundary wall.

“Slow down!” Dean said. “You can’t-“

At the last possible second, Sam punched another button on the control panel. Two electric blue missiles fired from somewhere underneath the chassis, and they blew a massive hole in the wall rising up to meet them. A split second later, the car slipped through the opening.

Sam looked over at him and smirked. “I’m Batman,” he said. Then the brightness of the city and the arena faded behind them until the car was the lone glimmer in a vast wasteland.

For some unknown amount of time, Dean leaned his head against the vehicle’s window and focused on breathing shallow and quick against terrific pain, the lights of the car illuminating only a few meters of terrain ahead, the rest of the world in blackness. He was shivering. He couldn’t stop shivering.

Then Sam pulled to a stop. “You gonna make it?”

Dean thought about it for a moment, pretty sure he didn’t want to die before finding out what the hell this was all about. “I’ll make it.”

“Good,” Sam sighed. “Good. I’m going to try something that might help. Just… don’t move.”

Dean nodded, curious despite the waves of red still washing through him. Sam held his hand a few inches above Dean’s stomach, closing his eyes in concentration. And although Sam didn’t touch them, the cuts on Dean’s belly and chest begin to prickle and itch, then the pain began to subside, dwindling, soothing, a sense of ease flowing slowly as if Sam was pouring honey over the wounds. Minutes passed, sweat beading on Sam’s brow in the chill of the car’s interior, his hand starting to shake, until he finally sat back with a gasp. The lines of light on Sam’s suit had dulled to a faint grey, and a thin column of blood trickled from his nose, which he absently wiped away.

“Are you okay?” Dean asked, concerned. Then he looked down at himself, found that his clothing was repaired and his wounds gone. “What the hell was that?”

Sam ignored him, closed his eyes, lolled back against the headrest with a huge grin on his face. He murmured under his breath, something like, “Didn’t know if that would work.” Suddenly he sat up, fumbling in a compartment in the car’s console. “Here. Drink this.” He produced a small flask and placed it in Dean’s hand.

Dean raised his eyebrows, then took a sip. It felt like he was drinking sunlight. Three big gulps and he was warm for the first time since he got here. Wherever here was. The stuff was better than a shot of whiskey or Red Bull or fucking liquid ecstasy. Sam snatched the flask back and chugged from it himself. Dean’s gaze traveled over Sam’s lips wrapped around the rim, his head thrown back to reveal his long, corded neck as he drank, and Dean recalled late nights of chatting with this boy-- no, man-online. Shy confidences and innuendo, adolescent sex advice and teasing and what passed for Dean as flirting. Even in Dean’s most absurd fantasies over the years, he never imaged Sam would be like this: gorgeous, strong, heroic.

Sam finished drinking and licked his lips, and Dean felt a pulse of heat in his groin.

What does that even mean here?, Dean wondered, and figured he could blame the strange wanderings of his brain on delirium from his sudden liberation from pain.

Sam turned to look at him, glance roaming across Dean’s face, and Dean couldn’t wait any longer. “So who are you? Where did you come from?”

“It’s complicated, Dean.”

“Well, talk slow and use small words, I’ll try to keep up.”

Sam snorted, and started the vehicle moving forward again, flying out into the black expanse before them, rough landscape morphing from boulder-ridden foothills to mountains. “I was born here on the Grid.”

“But you’re not a program? You’re human, like me? I don’t understand. Smaller words. Miniscule.”

He sighed. “Let’s get to the safe house and we’ll explain everything there. There’s a lot we need to tell you, and I know she’ll be freaking out until we get there.”

“Who?”

Sam looked at him sidelong. “Mom.”

***

| Part 2 |