This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race - Part One
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters: Sam, Dean, John, Bobby, YED, various Special Children
Disclaimer: Supernatural is not mine.
Warnings: kidnapping, emotional and physical trauma, profanity, twisting of canonical events, very little happy parts, minor character death
ONE
Lawrence, Kansas, 1983
So, you think you know the ending to this story, do you?
Well, maybe you do, I certainly won't argue the point, but do you know the beginning too? It's a simple enough story, really, when you get right down to the heart of it. In 1973, a boy dies because of something he can't control. That same night, a girl makes a deal and that boy returns to life. Still following me? I know, you can't bring those you love back to life ... but stick with me, okay?
Now, you say, I know what happens next. The thing the girl made the deal with returns in ten years' time, and it wants to collect her debt. The girl, who's really now a woman with two cute little boys and a doting husband - her husband being the same boy she saved ten years ago, of course - doesn't remember the mysterious stranger who told - no, he begged her - that on a certain day in 1983, she would not get out of bed. An angel of the lord wiped it clean from her mind. On November 2, 1983, Mary Winchester would always get out of bed because that was her destiny, and it was an important one, so it followed that the powers that be always made sure it came to pass.
Mary Winchester did, and always would, die on the ceiling of her baby boy's burning nursery, watching as the yellow-eyed bastard that brought John back to life bled from its wrist into little Sammy's open mouth, because that was his destiny and destiny usually likes to kick the Winchesters when they're already down.
Then the demon goes away, right? Just as John Winchester bursts into the room. And he leaves Sammy Winchester almost completely alone for another twenty-two years. Right? Right.
But what if the yellow-eyed demon had been a bit smarter, a bit more cunning, and events had unfolded a little bit differently? What if he’d had another plan? One more risky, sure, maybe; but if he succeeded, the rewards would be far greater too.
Now back to November 2, 1983. A setting we’ve seen one too many times before. It’s the early hours of the morning and Mary hears her baby crying through the monitor on the table and gets out of bed. A familiar shadow is standing over the crib and who else could it be, if not John? She asks if the baby’s hungry but he shushes her and she leaves, walking along the dim hallway to where she is stopped by a flickering wall lamp. She doesn’t think much of it; she’s been out of hunting for so long that sometimes that period of her life feels like nothing more than a vivid, terrifying dream. But then she hears another noise, this one not coming from the nursery but from below. She rushes downstairs to see her husband asleep before the TV, where he’s been all along, and not where she’d believed him to be.
She runs back and while she hadn’t before, now she remembers the date. She remembers ten years before and the feeling that if she didn’t have John, if he was really gone, than she would rather die. The shadow is still above the crib but this time it turns, his yellow eyes glow in the darkness of the room, and she says, It’s you.
She realizes her deal was never about her, not at all. Never about John, or her parents, and definitely not about her. It was something worse she sold; so much, much worse, but at the time, she hadn’t stopped to consider what could possibly be worse than losing John.
And then she’s watching from the ceiling as her infant son is fed the red juice from the bastard’s wrist before he carefully picks Sammy up, cradling him like a loving father, and disappears into the night with her baby - her baby! - just as she hears John screaming her name from too far away and the whole new life that she’s built for herself going up in flames around her and her eldest son wailing as he grows up in the blink of an eye. Her last sight is of the now empty crib where her youngest should be.
Sammy. It had always been all about him.
Seventeen Years Later
"Hey, Max, that the best you can do?"
Sam glanced up from his spot in the corner and turned his attention to the fight that was taking place in the center of the large room. Two boys, one tall and as dark as night, the other one wiry and just as fair, circled each other slowly as they sized each other up. As Sam watched, unnoticed by the crowd that had formed around the brawl, the one named Max shot out his right fist only for the other boy to dodge it and land a quick foot to Max’s gut instead. Max folded in on himself with nothing more than a cry, flying nearly half a dozen feet through the air before he slammed against the far wall with a crash and crumpled to the floor.
"Damn it, Jake," he muttered, using the wall to slowly push himself back to his feet, "If I can’t use my powers, neither can you!"
Jake chuckled, his teeth startling white against the chocolate brown of his skin. "You know you’ve gotta be the whiniest baby I ever met, Miller? Get on over here and finish what you started like a man."
"Oh, you’ll get what you started, Talley," he grumbled.
Jake cracked his knuckles expectantly while the crowd jeered. "Some of us have powers that aren’t so easily ... tamed as yours," he taunted.
"Is that so?"
"Yeah, it is."
With a sigh, Sam turned his head away. He closed his eyes, hoping to block some of the ongoing sounds of attack from his mind; but they were still there. Really, he shouldn’t have expected any different. These fights were a normal occurrence. Sam had even partaken in a few of them himself, although he usually preferred to keep a much lower profile. Just another day in the neighbourhood, he reminded himself bitterly.
Rationally, he knew that the fighting didn’t mean anything; there were so many of them here, so many overlapping emotions threatening each other that some of them had to leak out somehow or they would all go mad. Realistically, he still hated to see it. The anger, the blood, the pain and the guilt ... it could be so overwhelming, pretending like it didn’t cut him a little more every time he had to watch Jake prove his strength; Max his quickness; Ava her cleverness ... The list went on.
He had been here for as long as he remembered - they all had - and it was the only home they knew.
"Moping again, Sam?"
Sam looked next to him, and blinked. While he had been lost in his thoughts, somebody else had slid down beside him to join in his refuge. Such a thing might not have been so strange had it been anybody else who did it. As it was, with her long dirty blonde hair, heavily-lidded eyes, and tight frown, she was the last person on earth Sam expected to just strike up a conversation with him seemingly out of nowhere.
"Hey, Lily."
Most of the kids here would have rolled their eyes at his sarcastic tone too, or at least have come back with a witty retort. But Lily wasn’t most girls, and she didn’t joke easily. She was quiet, irritable, and even more withdrawn than Sam. She kept her arms crossed protectively against her chest at all times, her hands shoved firmly into the folds of her armpits: Sam had only ever seen those deadly weapons removed from their safe haven once, and it was not a memory he cared to repeat.
"Well, that’s a yes." She caught his eyes drifting over to rest on the fight, which apparently had only escalated while Sam hadn’t been paying attention, and watched him sadly. "It doesn’t mean anything, Sam."
I know," he whispered, looking away.
"But that doesn’t make it any easier," she added as if reading his thoughts. She looked down at her hands, today covered in a pair of light brown leather gloves, and pulled them tighter into herself. "It doesn’t make it any harder either," she said, and now Sam suspected that she had almost forgotten that he was there and listening to every word she said. "Y’know," her tone became suddenly thoughtful, "I’m glad we’re the only ones that are immune to us. I wouldn’t want to be in the middle of a sparring match with Ava and have to be careful not to touch her; that would just suck all the fun out of it."
Despite himself, Sam smiled. "Lily Bedford having fun?"
"Yeah, yeah, I know, strange concept. Don’t rub it in." Her eyes sparkled in the poor light, the closest she ever came to full out laughter.
"I guess I shouldn’t dwell on it, huh?” said Sam. “They’d never hurt each other, they’re brothers. They take care of each other."
Lily nudged her slim shoulder against his broader one. He was big for seventeen, tall, although he had only recently finally outgrown some of the irksome lankiness that had plagued him all of his early teenage years, and sometimes even Jake had trouble taking him down the rare times Sam was involved in the fights. "Now you’ve got it."
They sat in comfortable silence for a long while, only broken by the occasional shout or crash from Jake and Max’s match. Sam noticed Ava and Scott in the crowd, doling out rounds of supportive encouragement and jibes in equal measure. Paul, Lucas and Britney were there too, as were twenty others. The only ones removed from the commotion like he and Lily were the twins, Ansem and Andy. They sat on one of the old ragged couches in the lounge part of the room, their identical faces hunched together and holding a silent conversation the way that only they two could.
"What do you think they’re planning now?" Lily asked.
Nothing good, Sam thought, and by the look on Lily’s face he knew she was thinking the same thing. The twins were not known for their maturity, after all. Get one twin alone and you had chaos; get the two of them together, and you could find yourself smack in the middle of a nuclear war zone.
Suddenly there was a chorus of loud cheers and the crowd of onlookers exploded, whooping and swapping handfuls of bets with glee. Max had put up a good fight for as long as any of them could, but at last he had fallen, under a combination of brute strength and well-placed hits, and Jake now had him pinned to the ground, victorious.
"And the undefeated Heavyweight Champion gets another notch in his belt," Sam smirked.
Lily’s eyes brightened again. At the new level of noise, Ansem and Andy put a hold to their plotting long enough to look over from their corner of the room, but when they saw who the winner was, lowered their heads again with an expression of mutual boredom. Over by the stairs leading up to the exit of their underground accommodations, someone began to clap.
The cheering and celebrations stopped almost immediately and silence ensued. Sam and Lily shot quick, startled looks at each other before standing up and joining in the long line of seventeen-year-olds now rearranging themselves to face the clapper in a routine as natural and old as breathing. The man before them sneered from behind black eyes but refrained from making any comment. Instead, it took a folded sheet of paper from the back pocket of its jeans and gave it a cursory once over before storing it back away.
Sam knew what name the thing would call before it opened its mouth - nobody ever deviated from the schedule - but he still wasn’t prepared for it when it came.
"Bedford," it said, "Your turn."
With barely a pause, Lily stepped obediently out of the line and looked back over her shoulder at Sam one last time before following the demon up the stairs and out the usually locked door at the top. "My turn, I guess," she mimicked. "See ya, Sam."
-
After the demon and Lily left they all dispersed pretty quickly, going back to whatever activities they had been doing before the interruption. Sam found himself wandering over to Ansem and Andy where they stood by the cluster of threadbare couches, where Sam suspected that they were sending pictures to each other nobody else could see, planning their next in a long line of attempts to liven up the mood.
"Sam!" Andy cried when he saw him approaching, and waved him over. He opened up his and his brother's previously closed circle and let Sam inside. Sam had always like Andy best, him and Ava, and he smiled as he joined his friend.
"Room for one more?" he asked.
But Ansem snarled, his stance beside his brother much more hostile. "We were having a private conversation here."
Andy shot him a vicious glare. "Shut up, Ansem," he said. "Sam's more than welcome." Ansem huffed angrily and flopped down onto the nearest couch, spreading a mushroom plume of dust particles up into the already stale air.
"I didn't mean to interrupt."
"Sam, you shut up too. Ansem's just being his usual jackass self." Andy swatted his hand as if beating away an irksome fly and grinned.
Not many people could tell the two young mind controllers apart; they were the only real siblings in the whole group, connected by blood other than just by shared circumstance. But while they might share a face, Ansem and Andy were in reality two very different individuals. Ansem had a bitterness in him that Andy entirely lacked, preferring to always search on the bright side, and it was this difference that distinguished them so easily in Sam's eyes.
"I'm sitting right here. And I'm your brother, but you shove me aside in favour of the boy king! Why am I even surprised?"
"Well, if you weren't so damn -"
"I can leave," Sam interjected cautiously.
"No, you won't," said Andy, turning back to face him. "We were just discussing our ... situation down here."
Ansem hissed angrily. "Andy!"
"Shut up," Andy snapped again. "Sam deserves to know just as much as the rest of them do!"
"And if he squeals," asked Ansem, "What then?"
"I wouldn't squeal," Sam said. He didn't understand a word that the other two boys were saying and hoped that they would get to their point sooner rather than later.
"A likely story," Ansem huffed, but he left the argument at that.
"He's just worried," Andy apologized. "We've been thinking up something lately that's a bit more ... serious. I said we should let everybody else in on it, but he..."
"Doesn't trust me," Sam finished tersely, "I know."
"You understand, right?" whispered Andy anxiously. "You're Old Boss's favourite, the diamond in his rock collection. He'll listen to whatever you say about the other kids. But you can trust us, Sam." Sam nodded. "The rest of us," he looked around the room, "We know you want what we all want, that it wasn't your choice, because the rest of it, it wasn't ours either. You're our brother, Sam."
"Thanks, Andy. Really."
Andy nodded, sitting down, and Sam joined him. "Good because this is serious business, Sam." Seeming to change tracks completely, he asked, "What do you know about why we're here?"
"Nothing more than anybody else," Sam answered truthfully as Andy leaned forward in his chair. He kept his voice low so their muttered conversation wouldn't draw any unwanted attention: what he was saying now had always been a sensitive topic. "We have a destiny, we're meant for something ... all of us. We have powers that nobody can explain, and it scared our parents so much that they gave us away. We know it's not natural to have them because of what the demons say. Boss is training us for some big war because there are people out their trying to end the world. And he likes me - more than any of the other kids - he says that I'm to be the leader of his new army in a few years."
Andy had been nodding along with Sam as he spoke and Ansem had even put away his customary frown for the moment as he listened closely. "And we follow him, because what else can we do? The say it's right; that it's what we're made for; but their words are the only ones we have to go on. You said it yourself! But, Sam," he whispered, "If training and pushing our powers is the right thing to do, if the demons are right, why have we never heard any news from the outside world? Why are we kept down here like we're their dirty little secret, no even allowed outdoors?"
"So we aren't hurt by the enemies before we can win the war," Sam answered slowly.
"That's not true," said Ansem suddenly. "You know it, and we all know it. We're their weapons and they've been honing our blades for our entire lives! I, for one, am sick of being their lapdog."
"You can't prove that."
"You can't disprove it either."
"So what are you saying?" asked Sam.
Ansem leaned forward until his position matched Sam's and Andy's exactly, so they were three heads bowed together in a small triangle of fear and wondering and doubt. "We're going to escape from here," he said.
North Platte, Nebraska
"That all of it?"
Dean nodded as he felt more than heard the gruff voice of his father hiss quietly into the shell of his ear. He could sense him standing just behind his left shoulder in the darkened graveyard that held the bones of the long-abused housewife who'd finally had enough before going off the deep end and murdering her family before she did in herself. Nearly a dozen innocent husbands had fallen victim to her ghost before John and Dean had gotten to her.
John gave his silent approval and stepped back, allowing Dean to finish shoveling the last of the dirt from the coffin top before he whipped out the card of matches from the pocket of his jacket and lit one. He dropped it, watching the dancing flames race along Cora Lynn Littleton's remains, and grinned. "Okay," he said, "now let's blow this popsicle stand."
There was a strangled cry behind him and Dean turned, cocking his shotgun to where Cora Lynn's transparent fingers were suddenly wrapped around his father's throat. She let go and John flew six feet through the air, cracking his head against a nearby tombstone, before she rounded on Dean next, and he quickly pulled the trigger, blasting a round of rock salt clean through her chest.
"Dean!" shouted John from the ground. "You have to find what's holding her here!"
Cora Lyn reappeared, and Dean let out another shot. Before she had even stopped screaming, he was throwing himself on the ground around her grave and frantically rooting through the dirt for anything - a damn fingernail, for Christ's sake - that has escaped the burning. But there was nothing. The ghost was back again and there was nowhere else to look. She was standing behind the stone marker, long and skinny fingers curled into deadly claws; and then Dean looked up, his eye catching on a small glass oval attached beneath the date of her death. Inside was a dark black curl - a lock of hair. Without wasting any more time, he smashed the butt of the sawed-off into the glass case, grabbed the lock of her hair, and threw it into the fire.
Exhausted, Dean slumped onto his back in the grass. Cora Lynn screamed one final time before bursting into flames. There, he thought, Easy as pie.
"Dad?" he called once he'd caught his breath. He hadn't heard a single word from John since his last order, and while his father wasn't a talkative guy by any stretch of the imagination, it was still too long. "Hey, Dad!"
To his right, John let out a low moan and rolled onto his back. Great, so much for a clean hunt.
"Dad? You okay?"
"I'm fine, Dean," he grumbled, sitting up. "Just landed wrong."
"Are you sure?" He offered John a hand and helped him to his feet. "Because you know -"
"Who's the father in this outfit?" John snapped, cutting him off. "I told you I'm fine. Come on. If we're gonna meet Ash we need to get moving." He moved towards the car, folding into the passenger's side and slamming the door shut louder than Dean thought was strictly necessary. He tossed Dean the keys as the younger man slid into the driver's seat. Dean breathed easier as he started the car, reveling in the feeling of the impacted dirt beneath the tires, the purr of the engine under the black hood as he flexed his aching, dirt-smeared fingers against the steering wheel, and pulled out onto the open road that laid itself unto him.
They were only a few hours out from the Roadhouse so he picked a tape from the box at random and hummed along quietly to the opening chords of Metallica blasting through the speakers while his dad grimaced beside him.
"Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole," he sang, drumming his hands on the leather.
"Smartass," John replied, but Dean saw the nealy fond smile cross his dad's face before he could put it away.
"Always," he laughed.
The rest of the drive passed in silence. The sun had just risen when Dean at last turned onto the side road that would lead them to their destination and saw above the treetops bordering the lane a pillar of dark smoke that rose high above the otherwise clear sky. "What is that?" he asked.
John could only shake his head wordlessly.
When they cleared the cover of the trees, the answer was immediately obvious, and they both gasped out loud as their eyes feasted upon the sight in front of them. The sun shone brightly from its peak, the grass all around the lot was lush and green, but the blackened, empty husk of the old saloon lay deserted and exposed in the Nebraska wilderness. Harvelle's Roadhouse had burned to the ground.
Dean slammed the car to a stop and they leapt out, running across the parking lot to the wreckage. No other living humans were in sight.
"Shit!" yelled John, spinning in place.
"How did this ..." Dean whispered in horror. "God, did ... what - what did Ash say to you, when you talked to him on the phone?"
"Nothing. Just that he'd come across some information..." John ran one hand roughly through his thinning hair. "But he wouldn't say what; he was acting skittish about the whole thing. But nothing that - thank god Ellen and Jo are on a hunt this week."
"Do you think he's even alive?"
They spent the better part of the afternoon picking through what was left of one of the few places Dean had once considered the closest he'd ever come to a home, stepping carefully over the broken boards and upturned chairs and tables. The smell of burnt wood and flesh stood heavy in the air, and Dean's dread just increased the longer that they searched. Everything was completely destroyed. Then, when he was just getting close to giving up, a glare caught the edge of his vision. The sun had risen high enough overhead so that it was now reflecting off of the glass cover of a watch pokiing out from the debris. Dean knelt down, gripping the wrist of the poor bastard that had gotten caught under this crap, and turned it so he could see the face of the watch. He stared dumbly at it for what felt like a lifetime before he dropped it in shock - the watch was unmistakable; he would know it anywhere. It was Ash's ... Ash was dead.
His dad came up behind him and looked solemnly down at the watch and the wrist for a long time. Then he sighed, seeming to regain a small bit of compuse as he did. "Better call Bobby then. Tell him we're coming to him."
-
Bobby was waiting for them outside when they pulled into Singer's Salvage Yard a few hours later, Rumsfeld at his heel. The old hound barked noisily at the sound of the loud engine rumbling up the drive, tugging against the chain that tethered him to the house's wrap-around porch. Dean parked the car and they got out, making their way slowly across the yard.
"You boys alright?" Bobby asked, eyeing them soberly.
There was an awful silence, the memories of Ash and the Roadhouse lingering in the dusty air between them. "What have you got for us, Bobby?" Dean said instead.
"Might as well come inside." He jerked his head in the direction of the house and then led Dean and John into the study. The desk in the center of the room was littered with open ancient texts, papers and partially-emptied Jim Beam's. Dean picked up a bottle and waved it in the air questioningly; Bobby just shrugged, mumbled something unintelligible under his breath, and started pulling papers from different piles towards him.
"Like I told ya over the phone, Ash called me too before he -" Bobby paused, grief passing darkly over his face, before he continued. "...Y'know. The same as he told you: that he'd put together some intel that was strange - stranger than the usual - and wanted me to take a second look at it. And he found something all right, but I'm not sure what the hell it means. He sent me everything he had hours ago but I haven't been able to make much of it."
"What's going on, Bobby?" asked John.
"Demonic omens ... a whole lot of 'em. Cattle deaths, lightning storms, they skyrocketed from out of nowhere, popping up like wildfire all across the state, except for one place. And there've been a lot of possessions, too, more than a dozen in the past two months alone. Normally, I'd hear of three, maybe four per year tops. But I've never seen a gathering like this."
"So, what?" The demons are climbing free and now it's all party in the U.S.A.?" said Dean.
Bobby shook his head. "I don't know, but look at this." He pulled out a folded map, spreading it open on the desk. Five crosses were marked in red ink across it. "It took a while but I finally managed to pinpoint the pattern. The X's are all old abandoned frontier churches, in towns where Ash mentioned demonic activity's highest," he said, pointing to each of them in turn, "all mid-nineteenth century and - get this - all of them built by Samuel Colt."
John sat up straighter in his chair. "Samuel Colt? The demon-killing, cowboy Samuel Colt, who made that special gun?"
"That's him," said Bobby. "Why, you know something?"
"Just that it's rumoured that gun can kill anything ... can kill whatever thing murdered my wife and son." He paused, then said, "I've tried to track it down, to see if..." He cleared his throat, hung his head. "Anyway, I never found it."
Dean looked at his father in shock. "You never told me."
"It doesn't matter," John sighed. "The thing's a folk's tale. Go on, Bobby."
Bobby gazed at him for a long minute then cleared his throat. "Well ... Colt, see, he also built private railway lines connecting church to church that just happen to be laid out like..." He took the same marker used for the crosses and drew five straight lines on the paper. Dean's breath caught in his throat when he saw the shape that had appeared.
"A devil's trap," he exclaimed, "A hundred square mile devil's trap! That's brilliant. Iron lines demons can't cross. And after all these years, none of the lines are broken; it all still works?"
"Must be," Bobby agreed. "Because here, in the middle, that old boneyard right there ... that's the only spot that's clear ... empty; no omens at all. It's almost like they're circling it. But what I can't figure out is what's so important Colt had to protect."
"Well unless -" said Dean, as a very unwelcome thought began to form.
Bobby looked up at him across the table. "Unless what?"
"What if Colt wasn't trying to keep the demons out, what if he was trying to keep something in?"
"That's a comforting thought."
"Ya think?" said Dean.
"This thing's so powerful you'd practically need an A-bomb to destroy it," said Bobby. "No way a full blood demon gets across."
"Then what could? What are they waiting for?"
The three men stared silently at each other. Finally, Bobby whispered, "Son, I wish I knew."
"Bobby, you said the demons are circling this trap. Where?" John asked. He bent over the desk, examining the map more closely.
Bobby peered at them gravely underneath the frayed brim of his hat. "Wyoming."
Somewhere in the Wastelands of Southern Wyoming
Lily returned over an hour after she had left, stumbling down the narrow staircase, her eyes droopy with fatigue and a white towel pressed to her bleeding nose. Sam had never seen her in worst shape; but she seemed happy about something and only accepted Ava's guiding hand to put the other girl's concern to ease.
They led her over to an armchair in front of the warm furnace and sat her down. It was times like these in which they all truly banded together - when one of their own was in need. Sam knelt down beside her and squeezed her hand, but that only made her flinch. Kelly brought over a damp cloth and Ava started to wipe her clammy forehead calmly as the rest of them waited for her to speak.
"He said he was pleased." Lily's voice was weak, and she looked up at them, gazing around at her gathered entourage as she forced the words out. "Really pleased, he said. Expects me to be ready soon ... for all of us to be ready."
"Good, that's good," said Ava, but she turned her head to catch the twins' eyes and Sam thought that she looked worried.
"Did he say anything else?" asked Jake, standing behind her. A few others asked hesitant questions, all variations on the same theme, but the bigger boy was the loudest and they quickly grew silent to allow him to be heard for all of them.
"Just that it's Sam's turn tomorrow, and he's pleased," Lily whispered, her eyes fluttering in an effort to keep them open.
Everybody looked toward Sam, still kneeling quietly on the ground. While their gazes were fixed on him, Lily's breath evened, her eyelids closed for good, and when they finally turned back around, she was fast asleep.
They stayed there, watching over her, the rest of the night.
Part Two