Fic: Punishment Comes Limping
Summary: SPN/The Originals crossover. Rebekah Mikaelson, on the run with her baby niece, meets Sam Winchester in trying circumstances. Things somehow go even more downhill from there.
Warnings: Set after s1 of The Originals and s9 of Supernatural, so SPOILERS for the same. Disordered storytelling. Pretentiousness. Mild cursing, violence, gore, references to suicidal thoughts.
A birthday present for the wonderful pocochina <3
Punishment Comes Limping
1.
They meet at a diner a few miles outside of downtown Memphis, Tennessee.
12.
Hope touches his face with cold, chubby fingers and gurgles happily. There’s blood on his teeth when he smiles back at her; he says, “Dean won’t like it if you sing that,” to the potted plant in the corner, and giggles. A little.
Rebekah blows out a long sigh. “I don’t suppose Dean likes a lot of things.”
“Like’s not like love,” Sam muses, unsteadily. “And Dean lo-loves a lot.”
“I bet he does,” Rebekah says. “And I bet he has one of those handy little aphorisms, too, like always and forever and you touch my easel again I’m going to cut your hands off.”
Sam blinks at her slowly, and she wonders-again-why exactly she’s indulging this mad man; she’s torn through the throats of enough hunters to know that most of them are ill-informed, reactionary gun-toters without enough common sense to fill a thimble. Sam appears to know a little more than most-certainly he’s more talented at witchcraft than she is-but then again, he’s only mortal, and that’s quite a lot of his lifeblood that’s already soaked into the carpet.
“you and me against the world,” Sam says suddenly. He grins. “That’s what he’d say. Never quite figured out what that means.” His slashed arm jerks suddenly, and he looks at it like it’s separate from his body. “Been trying so hard for so long to understand it.”
“Me too,” Rebekah says.
8.
When Sam says, “let’s make a deal,” Rebekah feels as though the world has shifted back onto its axis; a thousand years of making and breaking negotiations with more powerful creatures than she can count (or really, just-dealing with Klaus for all that time) has left her with a fairly accurate sense of who’s holding the right cards at any given time-and right now? She’s pretty sure she’s holding all of them.
“Go on,” she says. Hope shifts uneasily where she is dozing against Rebekah’s chest, drooling into her shirt.
“I’ve been tracking this nest for weeks,” Sam says. “I know where they meet, where they rest, why they’re here. I can take you to them.”
“And?” Rebekah asks, after a couple of moments of silence. “You do realise a deal has two parts?”
“I have-a spell,” he says, jerkily pushing a hand through his ridiculous hair. “It’s a kind of scrying. I thought I could do it alone, but it requires a rather, uh, significant amount of blood loss and I need somebody to monitor and tell me when to-”
Rebekah can’t help herself. “You want a vampire to watch over you while you’re defenceless and bleeding out for some spell. A vampire.”
“No.” He looks at her quickly before his gaze skitters away. “An original.”
“I’m not-” she starts, then frowns.
“I know more than you think,” he says, and he smiles, this overgrown hunter with the sunken eyes who can barely meet her gaze (but of course he’s doing that on purpose, of fucking course) actually smiles, and Rebekah fights the urge to sigh.
Well, now, this is definitely familiar.
10.
Sam makes faces at Hope while holding his slashed wrist over a large wooden bowl. The sound of her delighted laughter drowns out the steady trickle of his blood; she reaches curious hands towards his face while he blows his cheeks and crosses his eyes.
“Awfully cavalier about death by exsanguination for a human, aren’t we?” Rebekah remarks.
“Been around the block a few times,” he says. “And I don’t plan on dying. Not again, anyway.”
There’s a story there. She thinks Kol may be interested; he’d always found hunters hilarious. “It seems to me,” she says, reclining in her chair and drawing a protesting Hope firmly onto her lap, “that being unable to die only increases your fear of mortality.”
“There are different kinds of death,” Sam mutters, but he doesn’t elaborate. Rebekah figures it’s just the blood loss.
2.
In the time that it takes Rebekah to secure Hope to her baby-seat, she’s sussed out at least five different threats in that tiny, mostly-empty diner: she can hear the tell-tale escalation in heart-beat, smell the sharp odour of fearful anticipation, and underneath all of that, something else-the scent of another vampire, but not one like her or her brethren. Ur-vampires, Elijah would call them: cousins that had somehow, impossibly, evolved differently, able to survive sunlight without rings, enter houses without permission and survive stakings; they can only be killed by decapitation. They are also, however, famously stupid, and she’s pretty sure that she and her family killed every last of them that had lived in New Orleans.
It is, however, a large country, and they multiply like parasites.
Rebekah gets Hope settled with a bottle, then stands and stretches theatrically, her joints popping. “Well, then,” she says, “shall we get this over with?”
Two of them attack her at the same time, from behind and in front. She ducks slightly, grabs one of them by the throat and throws him at the other. While they tumble like ninepins, she breaks off one of the limbs of the nearest chair, and, in the same smooth motion, skewers the third vampire that comes charging at her.
“Time to get serious, I think,” she tells the dazed creature, and breaks his neck with a quick, violent twist of her hands.
Suddenly, Hope’s cries rend the air; Rebekah curses viciously and turns around. There’s a dull, wet sound, and she watches as the vampire that was reaching for Hope collapses to the floor, its head sliding clean off its shoulders. Its killer is a tall man with a bloody machete in his hands, chest heaving, his eyes glittering with some manic energy.
He looks at her and tells her, panting, “Sam Winchester.”
“Rebekah Mikaelson.” The vampire whose neck she’d broken is already beginning to stir; she presses her boot against its throat and feels its larynx snap and grind beneath her foot. “You don’t happen to have another one of those on you, do you?”
He tosses a machete to her. She grabs it, turns around, and brings it down upon the ruined, gurgling neck of that poor fucking sod.
6.
“So-a vampire with a baby,” Sam ventures as she struggles with the key to her new motel room. “Seems like there’s quite a story there.”
“I think I’ve done fairly well in restraining myself from killing you and draining you dry,” Rebekah tells him pleasantly. “Questions about the baby will not help that restraint.”
Sam puts his hands up in a show of surrender.
13.
When Sam sinks completely to the floor, his breathing alarmingly slow and the bowl’s starting to overflow, Rebekah’s had quite enough. She grabs his hand and clamps one of hers on his oozing wound and casts around with the other for something to use as a tourniquet.
Sam struggles weakly. “Not enough yet,” he mutters. “Not yet.”
“You give any more blood for that fucking spell, even I won’t be able to heal you,” she says, tying a handkerchief tightly around his wrist and waiting for the bleeding to settle. She’s had hundreds of years’ practice with restraint, but she still does not trust her self-control over a freshly-bleeding wound.
“All right, heal me,” Sam says, a miserable kind of hope in his sunken eyes, “then I can reopen and give more blood. ‘ll show me where Dean is. Gotta know where he is.”
“I think Dean’ll be okay until you can find a spell that’s not you committing suicide,” she says, finally unwinding the cloth and tentatively lowering her mouth to the clotting wound.
He laughs; it is a terrible, grating sound. “Hypocrite,” he says. “Hypocrite!”
“So be it,” she says, and closes her mouth over the wound.
4.
“I’m looking for my brother, Dean,” Sam says.
She sticks her bloody hands under a running tap in the diner’s mercifully-empty kitchen. Hope is settled on the counter next to her, nibbling peacefully at a plushie. “Oh,” she says, uninterested. “I suppose you’ve tried calling him?”
“Dean died a few months ago,” he says evenly.
She pauses. “You do realise that while I’m immortal, I’m not actually a necromancer, right?”
“No. I mean, no,” he shakes his head. “I know that. I just-I need your help. For another-just, um. Please.”
She sighs. This man’s clearly a hunter, but he did save Hope’s life. And she’s had hardly anybody to talk to in months of lonely, nomadic vigilance; maybe she’ll give him a listen. Just for a bit. “Before coming with me, you gotta clean all the,” she waves her hand at his mop, “vampire brain bits out of your hair.”
He touches his scalp with bloody fingers, as though noticing that for the first time. “Oh,” he says.
9.
There’s something different about his blood.
It was a vague, lingering scent before that she’d unconsciously attributed to weird body odour; but the moment his blade splits open his skin it hits her: the sharp, pungent smell of sulphur. It’s so startling that she takes a few steps back without realising what she’s doing.
He looks up at her and smiles, a little bitterly. “You’ll get used to it eventually,” he says. “I know I did.”
Not for the first time, Rebekah finds herself wishing desperately to talk to Elijah.
3.
Sam keeps hacking at the neck of the last vampire, grinding his blade against thick, resistant sinew and bone. The poor creature’s still hissing and gurgling, and there’s a fine spray of blood over Sam’s face, and, really, it’s all getting a bit pathetic to watch. Plus, although Hope’s justgrasped the concept of object permanence, Rebekah’s pretty sure she doesn’t want her niece to witness any more gore than she absolutely has to.
“Allow me,” she says, grabs the machete from him and severs what’s remaining of the neck in one clean stroke. The blade embeds itself in the wooden floor.
Sam’s breathing noisily; he collapses into the nearest chair, shaggy head hanging between his shoulders. “Thanks,” he breathes.
“Anytime,” she says, and laughs. And if it sounds just a bit hysterical, there’s nobody that matters to judge her.
11.
“What’s her name?” Sam asks. He’s slumped against the legs of the table behind him now; he blinks sweat out of his eyes.
Rebekah hesitates, then says, “Hope.”
“Hope,” Sam repeats. There’s something both wistful and dreadfully melancholy about the way he says it. “That’s a beautiful name.” He closes his eyes and smiles serenely.
5.
When Sam emerges from the washroom, his hands are wet, but there’s still blood under his fingernails and the glimmer of bone in his hair. Rebekah doesn’t say anything.
7.
“You’re running,” Sam says as they enter the room.
She doesn’t suppose there’s a point in pretending that’s a secret anymore. “I guess,” she says.
“From what?”
“From family. For family.” She shrugs. “I don’t suppose there’s even a difference anymore.”
Sam smiles faintly. “There probably isn’t,” he says.
Finis