A Skill Hell Hath Trained | Part 2
Title: A Skill Hell Hath Trained
By: revenant_scribe
Rating: R
Word Count: 10,589
Pairing: Sam/Dean
[ Part Two ]
“What do you know about werewolves?”
“That’s a heck of a greeting, kid,” Bobby’s gruff voice echoed down the line and Sam was surprised to find himself smiling despite everything he’d just been through. “Why’re you askin’?”
“Because I sort of ran into one.”
There was a pause. “You ran into one.”
Sam shrugged, the action shifting the cellphone that he held to his ear. He glanced back toward the door of his motel room and then turned his back on it. “I might be traveling with one. Sort of.”
If he’d been talking to his dad, Sam would have been more confident about the reaction he should prepare for. John Winchester would have had a word or two to say, at a high volume, interspersed undoubtedly with heavy profanity. There would be nothing Sam could say to justify the fact that there was a werewolf laying in his motel room; especially nothing that started with ‘My gut told me it was safe’.
Despite Sam’s anxiety, Bobby’s only reply was, “Travelling? You picking-up hitchhikers or something?”
Sam huffed a shamefully relieved laugh. “You have no idea.”
“Sam,” Bobby paused, his voice low and rough in that way he got when he was considering getting angry but wanted to make sure he had all the right information first before he made the effort. “You taking part in the trade now?”
“I didn’t buy him,” Sam defended. “More like I stole him off a hunter named Gordon Walker. Or maybe we’re both running in the same direction, it’s kind of hard to tell.”
“Yer not making a lick of sense,” Bobby huffed. “But I get that it’s complicated. Come on out to the house, I’ll get you both sorted.”
“It’s just…” Sam trailed off, glanced back at the motel room and lowered his voice, even if he was mostly confident that there was no way the wolf could hear him. “Am I crazy?”
“You’re damned right yer crazy,” Bobby said. “Gordon’s a piece of work on a good day, and you just took a stick to a hornet’s nest.”
“No.” Sam sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I mean, what are the odds I’ll be alive long enough to care about Gordon? Bobby, I remember what dad used to say about werewolves. Hell, I remember how he looked when he got back from hunting one.” And, the more he thought about it, the more Sam felt amazed he hadn’t been mauled in his own car as they’d driven out of Montana.
“Easy now,” Bobby said. “Take a breath. If he hasn’t eaten ya yet, then he’s likely not gonna.”
“Oh,” Sam said. “That’s reassuring.” Which, oddly enough, it was.
He hadn’t thought twice when he’d requested a single room with two queen-sized beds. It was only on his way back to the Impala, when he caught-sight of the other occupant of his car that he began to slow his pace, took a second glance at the single set of keys in his hand and wondered if maybe it hadn’t been the smartest choice.
Really, it had been the only choice, he thought, justifying his decision to himself. Leaving the thing in the car would no doubt draw attention, and he didn’t want to get involved with animal services. Putting a werewolf in a room all on its own meant that it might get loose and hurt someone before Sam even knew it was wandering around. If they shared a room, Sam could make sure the wolf wasn’t doing anything untoward.
The truth, though, was that the decision had been entirely instinctual, and since he’d slammed his door in Red Lodge and started the engine with the wolf sharing the front bench with him, he had been taking little to no precautions, because it just hadn’t felt like he’d needed any.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, and trying to push the knot of guilt over being so quick to trust a thing his dad would have shot in an instant, Sam changed the subject, “Gordon mentioned it was tagged or something?”
Bobby’s grunt echoed down the line. “No way to tell what spells have been worked on him. Don’t take the collar off until we can figure it out. Is he talking much?”
“He’s a wolf,” Sam said, and then wondered if that hadn’t been evident in how he had been speaking. “Like, he’s an actual wolf.”
“Yeah.” Bobby didn’t sound like he understood why that should be a problem.
Sam’s brows pinched together. He took the phone from his ear and frowned at it, then held it back to his ear and said, “So he can’t say much of anything.” Bobby chuckled and told him to get his butt in gear and get over to South Dakota.
Inside the motel room, Sam was confronted with a very large wolf sprawled casually across the second queen-sized bed he had requested. The television he had left on was playing an episode of Doctor Sexy M.D and the damned thing actually seemed to be watching it. Up close, without vampires or angry hunters as distraction, Sam could finally take a moment to really look at the werewolf. It didn’t look like much.
It was a wolf, undoubtedly and obviously. Perhaps a little bit larger than average, but Sam was not so familiar with wolves to judge properly. It was lean, with long, slender legs and big paws and nails that had tapped against the tile in the motel room as they’d entered. Grey fur shot-through with brown ran from the top of its snout down its back to the tail, but its legs, underbelly and chest were cream-white. As he crossed in front of the television to settle awkwardly onto his own bed, Sam could see its eyes were hazel green, with a keen awareness that he did not think was natural in an animal’s eyes.
“What do I call you?” Sam found himself asking, immediately wanting to kick himself for voicing the question. He was talking to a wolf; did he seriously expect it to answer?
The wolf lifted its head and stared blandly at Sam for a moment, then turned back to the television. “Well,” Sam said, more or less to cover how abysmally awkward it felt to be sharing a motel room with an animal he had been raised to believe would kill him without a moment’s hesitation or remorse while it watched a shitty soap opera. “I can’t just call you ‘wolf’.”
The green-hazel eyes shifted over to him again, but the wolf did not move its head from where it was resting on its outstretched front paws. Sam had the sudden thought that Gordon likely had no qualms doing just that.
“How about Sirius?” he wondered, thinking of the wolf star but reconsidering as soon as he said it at the recollection of the popular book series that had made memorable use of the name. The wolf looked unimpressed. “Remus?” he said, mostly as a tease. “Romulus?” The wolf turned back to the television with a sigh. “Lassie?”
“Dean.” Sam jerked and glanced around the room as the statement echoed through his mind, clear as a ringing bell. The wolf lifted its head and turned to look at him properly. “My name,” it said.
“You talked.” It blinked at his statement, and then turned back to the television. Sam frowned. “Did Gordon know you could do that?”
“What do you think?” the wolf, Dean, said. Then added, “Genius.”
Sam found himself smiling, amused by the animal’s- human’s? - unexpected personality. Then the ramifications slid home. “You retain your mind in that form.” If a werewolf retained its human mind when they transformed then what did that mean when they killed humans? Either werewolves were a far more dangerous and twisted kind of creature than Sam had previously believed or, he thought, looking at the wolf sprawled lazily on the bed, hunters were gravely mistaken in their ideas about them.
Dean was looking at him in amusement, and Sam didn’t even want to start trying to analyze how he understood the wolf was amused. “You don’t know much about werewolves, do you?”
Feeling oddly ignorant and defensive, Sam’s answer was, “I know how to kill them.”
“Not much mystery in that.”
Dean was disturbingly silent when he wished to be and Sam found himself waking the next morning and experiencing a sudden rush of terrifying surprise to notice the second bed was occupied by a hulking great werewolf who was sprawled casually atop the blanket, seemingly fast asleep. Sam stared until, without any indication of waking, one green eye slitted open and stared back.
“We should go,” Sam said, breaking the awkward silence. It occurred to him after a moment that while he had to get up and get dressed, wash and use the bathroom, not to mention shove what few things he had withdrawn from his duffel back into place, the wolf had only to slink off the side of the bed to be ready. Its unblinking stare suggested it was thinking along similar lines.
Sam sighed and began shifting to the edge of the bed, mumbling, “Give me a minute.”
It wasn’t a minute, but Sam was well used to packing-up and moving along. He couldn’t be certain if Gordon would be on their trail but he preferred to assume the worst and be prepared. There wasn’t any reason to delay.
He found Dean walking a slow circle around the Impala as he returned from dropping the room key in the motel office. The wolf was sniffing, nose ghosting over wheel-wells and glinting chrome, his tail twitching left and right as he concentrated. Sam held back, watching.
After a moment, the wolf lifted a leg to the front driver’s side wheel. “Oh come on!” Sam said. Dean whuffed, sounding completely unashamed and entirely canine, and then sat expectantly by the door, waiting for it to be opened for him. “That was gross.” The wolf didn’t care, simply hopped up onto the bench, making its way to the front passenger side and settling down.
For all that Dean was a stranger, and a werewolf to boot, Sam found himself relaxing during the drive, contented and at ease in a way he hadn’t felt since over a month ago when he’d spent much of his time ghosting the Impala in the trail of his dad’s hulking beast of a pick-up truck. He hadn’t realized that outside of his anger and his regret and the overwhelming sense of loss that had plagued him since his dad’s death, Sam simply felt alone.
He ended-up driving straight through to Sioux Falls, pulling into Singer Salvage before the sun had a chance to rise, the sky grey and the air thick with damp as dew settled on the rusted cars stacked in listing towers around the lot.
Beside him, Dean jolted upward from where he had been dozing, and pressed his nose to the glass of the passenger window where there were already dried smears. He huffed and his breath fogged the glass.
“This place belongs to a friend of mind,” Sam explained, though he had already mentioned that he was heading to the safest place he knew. “Keep your teeth to yourself.”
The wolf lifted a paw to the glass, rubbing it against the fogged spot and peering intently through. Sam pulled the Impala to a stop and turned off the motor, stepping out of the car into the crisp morning air with a certain amount of relief to finally be able to stretch his legs. There had been no reason to drive through the night, except that Sam had gotten lost in thought and hadn’t felt ready to pull over. Dean hadn’t seemed to care, and for all that Sam knew, was perfectly happy to nap curled in the front seat when staring out the window at the passing scenery had grown dull.
Outside of the brief exchange in the motel, Dean had not volunteered any further conversation. Sam was certain whether that was because the wolf was naturally quiet, or simply in response to the remark Sam had made the other day, and the implied threat it had carried.
“Bobby?” Sam called, slamming the car door closed and taking another moment to stretch. An old Rottweiler sprawled on the hood of Bobby’s blue Ford tow-truck lifted its head and gazed curiously back at him. After a moment of close scrutiny, it dropped its head back to rest between its paws.
It was early, but Sam had no desire to take his friend by surprise and get a stomach full of buckshot for his trouble. He crossed to the passenger door and opened it wide before heading toward the front steps.
The house’ door kicked open before he’d gotten very far and Bobby stepped out, shotgun slung over one arm as the other finished tugging on a red-checkered flannel shirt. “Heya, kid,” he greeted, his voice gruff but warm. Then added, “Easy, Rumsfeld,” as the dog’s hackles raised and it let out a low growl as Dean stepped down from the car. “I said, easy!” Rumsfeld jerked his head to look at his master as if he were strongly advising Bobby to rethink the order, then obediently dropped his rear-end down, sitting reluctantly but no longer rumbling with displeasure. He kept a mistrusting gaze fixed on the wolf.
“So,” Sam said, with a bit of a shrug. “Here we are.”
Bobby shook his head as he came down from the porch, meeting Sam halfway and giving him a brief one-armed hug. “About time too, y’idjit.” He glanced to where Dean was sitting and nodded his head, expression oddly somber. “Already got word that Walker’s on the move and more than pissed, but as near as I can tell he’s heading in the other direction.”
Sam sighed. “That’s something I guess.” He grabbed his duffel from the trunk at his friend’s order and slammed the door of the Impala closed, before following Bobby and the wolf up the stairs and into the house.
In the front hall, Bobby jerked his head toward the upper level and said, “Room’s upstairs, you know the drill.”
Sam hesitated, watched as Bobby passed into the front room, undoubtedly heading for his books. “You gonna be okay down here?” he asked, glancing from the old hunter to the wolf that was trotting in the man’s wake.
Bobby glared at the insinuation that he might not be able to takedown one wolf in his own home if the occasion called for it. Sam ducked his head in apology and took the stairs quickly.
Bobby’s was the closest thing to a home that Sam had ever known, and the man kept a room set up for when he stopped by, but there was only so much settling-in that Sam could ever manage and still feel comfortable. Too settled, and a kind of itch would strike him, niggling and persistent, like he was exposed and unprepared. Bobby had layer after layer of protections on every level of his house, covering just about any supernatural thing that might have an interest in attacking. There was even a panic room in the basement that, Sam was certain, could survive the apocalypse.
Even at Bobby’s, though, Sam never unpacked his bag completely. It was partially a matter of habit, and partially common sense. Even when he was too old to care if he lived or died, with bones too creaky to move, Sam was certain he would have a duffel bag stuffed with the essentials just in case. If there was one thing every hunter knew, it was that life was unpredictable, and it was impossible to know when a bounced credit card, a supernatural creature or the police, might catch up to you.
With a certain sense of relief, Sam let himself collapse onto the wooden mission-style bed that occupied the far corner of the room. He might have found himself enjoying the sensation of no longer being on his own, but he certainly hadn’t managed to let his guard down entirely, which meant he’d been sleeping with one eye open since he’d driven out of Red Lodge. It might have been easy to dismiss, running on cheap roadside coffee and circling thoughts and maybe a bit of adrenaline, but he was exhausted, and Sam found himself falling into sleep before his head even touched down on the pillow.
By the time he came down the stairs there was sun sneaking through the grime on the front windows, filling the main room with a bright yellowy haze, just enough light to draw attention to the dust floating aimlessly in the air. Sam stopped on the bottom step and listened, trying to see where Bobby had gone.
The sound of a book thumping closed, provided him with a direction, and Sam made his way through the front room to the back. “What’s up?”
“Trying to figure out his tag,” Bobby said, and jerked his head toward the kitchen where the wolf was standing with his head bowed, lapping at a bowl filled with water.
Sam watched it carefully for a moment before he turned back to Bobby and asked, voice low, “He give you any trouble?”
Bobby looked entirely unimpressed with the question and flipped another book closed, settling back in his chair as he said, “Just what do you think yer dealing with?”
“I dunno, I just,” he paused as the wolf stepped back into the room. Undoubtedly sensing the tense atmosphere, Dean hesitated, as if considering whether he should slink out before he got drawn into whatever argument was brewing, or stand his ground.
Sam stared back at the wolf’s green eyes and sighed. When he answered, he was speaking as much to Dean as to Bobby. “Whenever dad told me about werewolves, it was always about how dangerous they were, how unpredictable. They changed into a wolf form for three nights of the month at the full moon, and they killed when they changed. They didn’t retain any human thoughts in wolf shape, and they never remembered what they had done when they changed back.” He glanced quickly at the wolf, who rolled his eyes so fiercely his head made a small circular movement; clearly Sam wasn’t saying anything it hadn’t heard a thousand times. Sam shrugged, feeling a little lost as he explained, “They were supernatural and dangerous, and he hunted them.”
Bobby observed him, nonplussed. “You believe that, do ya?”
“Well…” Sam trailed off, couldn’t quite figure how to explain that everything he had been taught since he was a kid was warring with everything he had been seeing in the passed few days. If he had believed all of that, then he should have been driving with one hand on the wheel and one hand on the trigger of a cocked gun. He should never have even considered bringing Dean into his motel room, let alone giving him a bed of his own without making some effort to secure him. Everything Sam had done since Red Lodge was ten kinds of crazy, and reckless to boot.
“Y’know,” Bobby said. “There’s a lot of bullshit lore when it comes to werewolves. Most hunters refuse to believe it, because when they ask around and do their own research what they’re really asking is ‘what’s the most common story told about the thing I’m hunting’. And ye see, that doesn’t work with weres’.”
Sam dropped into one of the empty chairs, setting the stack of books that had previously been occupying it down on the floor and startling slightly as a warm rush of soft fur passed inches from his head as the wolf crept slowly and carefully, half hunched and entirely tentative, over to Bobby’s side.
Bobby smiled and settled a hand on the Dean’s head. “Anyone who bothered to do some research would find that the source of the legends was a massive attack in a German village sometime in the 1500s. The story goes that a pack of wolves, too big to be natural wolves, and too savage, tore apart the village and the farmers in the surrounding fields. It was over the course of three days during the full moon, and the carnage was apparently horrifying.”
Bobby paused and, with a final scratch, removed his hand from the wolf’s head, leaning forward across the desk. “There were three survivors and they told their story as they travelled west; eventually they recounted it to some hunters who took off to try and kill whatever had attacked the village.”
“And?” Sam prompted.
“And it was a pack of wolves, alright,” Bobby said. “But not just wolves, men who could turn into wolves. Their bones creaked and shifted and they peeled off their human skin, leaving it hanging from the trees. By the time the hunters found them and figured a way to kill them, the pack had destroyed another village, left nothing behind but scraps of flesh and splashes of blood. They were weak to silver, though, and the hunters killed them before they could destroy another settlement. Silver blades stabbed right through the heart and none of the pack was ever heard from again.”
“But,” Sam said, frowning. “That doesn’t sound like werewolves.”
“Doesn’t it,” Bobby said, with a bit of a smirk. “Because that’s what everyone thinks they are. Everyone who hasn’t actually bothered to read any of the accounts.”
“So,” Sam trailed off, his mind running through the various creatures he knew of. “A skinwalker? Or,” he sat up a little straighter as the comment about the skin hanging from the trees fell into place. “Shapeshifters. A pack of them?”
“Seems the most likely,” Bobby said. “It’s what the hunters figured they were, anyway.”
“I don’t understand how it went from an attack of shapeshifters in the 1500s to such a solid belief that werewolves are evil.”
Bobby sighed. “Wolves were common predators in Europe. There was a long-held fear of them, with stories told about them for centuries. Mostly, though, it was politics. Werewolves have a pack mentality, and that wasn’t limited to other weres’. Their village became their turf, and they were fiercely protective. There was more than just that one pack of shapeshifters. There were a number of attacks, some shifters, some skinwalkers, all of them posing as men who could become wolves. It started a widespread persecution of werewolves but most people don’t know about that, because they got lost in among all the witch trials.”
“It was a territorial thing?” Sam wondered. “Because the werewolves would run the other creatures out of town, if they didn’t kill them first?”
“There are trial records of accused werewolves claiming they would regularly do war with devils in order to protect their village. Even at the height of the witch trials, when paranoia and fear was at a peak, villages had a hard time convicting and killing people accused as werewolves.”
“Still,” Sam said, when he had taken a moment to let it all sink in. “Hunters do their research. I can’t see how they would consistently be fooled by a bunch of shifters and skinwalkers living off a centuries old vendetta.”
“You know yourself how the references get tangled up with names sometimes. Calling one thing something else. It’s like a game of broken telephone. The references are all there, but most hunters don’t much read ancient manuscripts from the sixteenth century.”
“Besides,” Bobby added. “All it takes is one. Werewolves might be natural protectors, but isolated and alone, in big cities without any close friends or family to consider pack, a werewolf can be just as savage as the lore tells it.” He shrugged. “Anyway, that’s how you get to killing werewolves.”
Sam couldn’t help thinking of the small but persistent trade among hunters. His own dad had hated it, but Sam also knew his father had no difficulty hunting and killing a werewolf if he ever came across one. If those werewolves weren’t actually killing people, if it was all just some big mistake then…
“Get yerself something to eat. You look like yer gonna be sick. Might as well have something to bring up.”
“Right,” Sam said. “Thanks.” The slow wave of horror that had been building subsided at Bobby’s gentle tease, but when Sam stood up the wolf held him with a steady gaze and he remembered with a flash of shame how close he himself had come to shooting it. “Right.”
While Sam was sitting in the kitchen, helping himself to a toasted turkey sandwich and trying not to let the past week overwhelm him, Bobby came through with an open book balanced in one hand, the other scratching his cheek idly, the wolf trailing behind. A part of Sam -the small, guilty part- still wondered if maybe the werewolf was behaving the way he was because of a spell worked into the tag.
“I think I’ve got everything to remove the tag. None of the spells worked into it are very complex.”
What Bobby Singer considered complex was a sight different from what Sam thought might pass for ‘complex’ to most people. There were a collection of herbs and tinctures to burn and plenty of archaic recitations, and Sam spent the better part of an hour standing more than a little uselessly off to the side, ready to make a move if something seemed to be going wrong, or to remove the collar when Bobby said it was alright. The wolf, for his part, sat in the middle of a red chalked circle in Bobby’s front room and tried not to appear too bored.
After about seventy-five minutes, as Sam was leaning subtly against an old wooden table, Bobby paused in his incantations and glanced up from his book. “Okay,” he said. “You ready for the big one?” The wolf turned his full focus on Bobby and looked appropriately solemn. Sam stood up from his casual lean and nodded.
There were another few sentences that Sam didn’t pretend to understand, and in between one sentence and the next, Bobby nodded and Sam stepped forward, carefully undoing the wide buckle that kept the leather of the collar fastened about the wolf’s neck.
Immediately, the shape of the wolf began to ripple and blur. It growled and then whimpered, and Sam turned startled eyes to Bobby, only for the man to shake his head. Apparently, he had been expecting that kind of reaction.
Backing-up hastily, Sam watched, more than a little horrified, at the obvious agony of the transformation. There was no creaking or snapping of bones, no ripping of flesh, but the transition was slower than he had expected, and it did not look pleasant.
The wolf’s front paws scrabbled and jerked spasmodically, nails cutting in to the wood of the floor as paws stretched and elongated until fingers, tense and shaking, became recognizable.
Along forearms and up to his shoulders, across his back and hips and legs, fur stood-up on end, the color eking out as it thinned and shrunk inward, leaving strikingly pallid skin in its wake. Dean’s growling and whimpering continued until it became a deep, hiccupping sob as all the while his body twitched and jerked.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.
In the center of the chalk circle was a man, curled in on himself, his legs tucked close to his chest. His dark blond hair hung long with soft waves curling passed his ears to his bearded chin. His skin was pale and dusted with freckles, and his body was whipcord lean with the rounded shape of muscles hinting beneath the flesh, though his bones were perhaps more pronounced than might have been considered strictly healthy.
For all that Sam had been wrapped up in thoughts of his new traveling companion, he had always thought of the wolf, and it had never once occurred to him to wonder about the man.
Dean blinked open his bright green eyes and brought himself cautiously to a sitting position, his legs drawn-up to preserve some sense of modesty. “Well,” he said, his voice rough and more than a little hoarse. “This is awkward.”
Dean didn’t seem at all ashamed by his nudity, but he accepted the clothes Sam brought down from his duffel in silence, ducking his head a little and holding the folded stack somewhat uncomfortably. Bobby and Sam retreated to the kitchen to give him a bit of privacy.
Sam let out a long whoosh of breath. “What the hell,” he said. He wasn’t even entirely certain what he was encompassing in his statement. Maybe all of it, maybe his shock at witnessing the shift from wolf to man; maybe the naked form that had been left in place of the wolf.
“Did you know it was going to be like that?” Sam cleared his throat because he had been wondering mostly about the nudity, which he should have been expecting but hadn’t. Somehow asking Bobby about that seemed ridiculous, when Sam knew it shouldn’t matter to him. “Painful, I mean?”
Bobby shrugged; his hands stuffed in his pockets, looking a little wide-eyed himself.
“Of course it would hurt,” a new voice interrupted, roughened and low from lack of use. “It’s like sitting still for three years and then getting up and running a marathon. It’s not gonna be pretty.”
“Three years?” Sam said, directed to the wolf, to Dean, who was standing awkwardly in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Around that, yeah.” Dean shrugged, “Once I get back in the habit of shifting, it’ll be quicker and … less of a production.” He turned to Bobby. “Thanks, by the way, for…” he waved his hand a little as he trailed off.
“Don’t worry about it,” Bobby said. “You’re welcome to stay here, long as you need to get things in order.”
“Oh,” Dean said, suddenly dazed, like it hadn’t occurred to him that he was a person again and had all of those so very human concerns to worry about: clothes, money, a place to stay, an identity, the list carried on. “Well, that’s very kind but I…”
“Bullshit,” Sam said, cutting the man off before he could come up with an excuse to rush away into the night. “No one’s missing you, or else they would have found you by now. You were completely naked all of three minutes ago, there’s no way you have a wallet with money and I.D. stowed away, if you have any I.D. at all. You won’t last a day out there.”
Bobby shot him a scolding look. “Easy.”
Dean opened his mouth like he was about to argue, but Sam saw the quick-flash of green-eyes over to Bobby, who was still staring reproachfully at Sam. Dean said, “Yeah, alright. If it’s not too much trouble. Just for a little while.”
“No trouble at all,” Bobby assured. “Least I can do, seeing as you managed to keep this idjit here from getting himself killed.”
Catching the quirk on Dean’s lips made Sam bristle even more. “The vampires weren’t killing people,” he defended.
“You’re a magnet for trouble, kid,” Bobby said. “You’d have found a way to convince ‘em to make an exception, I’m sure. ‘Sides,” he added. “I was talkin’ about Walker.” Sam couldn’t really disagree there.
“I can pull a few strings, get your I.D. sorted out, if you need,” Bobby continued.
“Uh, yeah,” Dean said, his head ducking down again. Sam noticed that he had the collar gripped in his left hand, his fist curled tight around it. After a moment, the other man nodded again, to himself, and took a step back.
“Dean,” Sam said.
“I know,” Dean said, waving a dismissive hand. “If I make a move to hurt anyone, you’ll put a piece of silver in me.”
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Sam said, feeling the hot-slide of guilt wash through him. “Just…” but there was no way to explain himself. Dean did not seem the sort of person to place much stalk in words, anyway. Flashing a small smile he said, “You’ll be safe here.”
There was no reason for Sam to stay at Bobby’s, but he couldn’t quite make himself go. A tight curl of conflicting emotions reared and writhed in his belly whenever he considered getting back on the road. The emotions were too knotted for Sam to make much sense of, but he knew enough to pinpoint the curl of guilt he felt, for his mistrust of Dean and for his part in the whole mess between hunters and werewolves. He wasn’t foolish enough to think that just because he had never physically pulled the trigger, he hadn’t contributed in other ways. For one thing, he had always blindly followed his father’s word about them, and never once thought to look deeper into the lore.
It made the idea of leaving the salvage yard a fleeting one, barely considered before it was dismissed. Bobby had always been like a second father to him, and Dean was an intriguing mystery. An infuriatingly quiet mystery, which had spent most of the day sacked out on Bobby’s couch.
With Sam occupying the guest room, Bobby had brought down some bedding and some towels, and slid the doors to the front room closed so Dean could have a bit of privacy. After sleeping through most of the day, the man had snatched up the towels and a pair of scissors Bobby had presented when asked, and disappeared into the washroom.
He emerged, about an hour later, in a cloud of steam, freshly washed and still damp from his shower. His hair that had been hanging almost to his shoulders was trimmed short and mussed, his beard gone except for a faint trace of shadow along his chin.
Bobby had made a few calls and set the wheels in motion to get Dean settled with everything he might need, though it would take some time to come through. Sam wondered, as he watched this all with his nose buried in a book, about that expanding part of himself could not let this strange detour his life had taken since Red Lodge to come to an end.
On his way up to bed, Sam found his steps slowing until he came to a stop by the wooden sliding doors that blocked-off the front room. The heavy oak doors hadn’t been closed properly, leaving a thin crack, which allowed him to see where Dean was seated on the couch, the thick brown leather collar he had worn for three years as a wolf held in one hand.
Sam tapped twice on the side of the door and smiled as Dean glanced up at him. He slid the right oak panel further to the side as he asked, “You okay?”
“What?” Dean asked, then followed Sam’s pointed look down to the collar in his hand. “Oh, yeah.” He waved the strip of brown leather a little. “The other pendant,” he said, “it belonged to my grandmother. Sort of a family heirloom, I never took it off.” He cast a wry glance at Sam as he added, “It was supposed to be a good luck charm.”
Sam remembered the strange horned face that hung from the collar alongside the circular disc that featured the howling wolf. “You were close to your grandmother?” It was difficult to imagine what it would be like to have an extended family to fuss over and annoy him, but Sam thought he might have liked it.
“She lived with us,” Dean said. “My parents and me.” The collar shifted in his hand and he gave a quiet hiss and then chuckled at himself. When he caught Sam’s look, he smiled wryly. “Silver,” he explained. “Wouldn’t do if a wolf could somehow get free of his collar.”
One of the spells worked into the tag, Sam knew, had been a pretty nastily debilitating curse that would kick-in if the collar were removed without the appropriate incantation being spoken. A pretty sure-fire way to make certain the werewolf wouldn’t break free. He watched as Dean dropped the collar with false casualness onto Bobby’s desk. “Good night,” he said, a little pointedly.
Sam stepped back, reminded suddenly that he had only just met Dean, and that the other man had been mistreated by hunters for over three years and had no reason to expect any different from Sam, especially given Sam’s comments over the course of their road trip. “Right,” he said. “Good night.”
Sam found himself lying awake in the middle of the night, his thoughts whirling with memories of his father after another of their no-holds-barred fights had left them both red in the face. “Family’s everything, Sammy,” John had said, half-turned away so Sam could see only a peak of his father’s profile. He could remember that even seeing that much of his father had made Sam want to snarl. “Nothing else, none of it, matters. Sooner or later, you’re going to realize that.”
He thought about the werewolves his dad had hunted; there hadn’t been many, mostly when Sam had been a gangly, awkward youth, but even if his dad had killed only one, it would have been too many.
If it had been him, Sam imagined he would have been furious and bitter, and undoubtedly less than eager to entertain the idea of help from a hunter, no matter how badly he needed it. Yet Dean had looked only slightly awkward and maybe, if it had been anyone else, embarrassed, at Bobby’s offer. His only memento from his family was stuck on a collar that had symbolized his enslavement, surrounded by silver that rendered it impossible for him to reach, but he hadn’t snarled at Sam or sneered. He hadn’t asked for help, either.
Sam shifted beneath the thin cover of his sheet, turning to lie on his other side, his mind preoccupied with circling thoughts and nowhere nearer to falling into sleep. There was so much in the situation that was beyond messed-up that Sam barely knew where to begin sorting through it all. He no longer questioned whether or not he wanted to, he tried not to think about his reasons, either.
Sighing, Sam pulled himself from beneath the blankets, rolling to his feet and moving to rummage through his duffel. After a moment, he withdrew a round golden amulet, the markings on its circular face rubbed almost smooth but no less effective. Carefully, he unknotted the black leather slip cord and let the round disc drop back to his bag.
Barefoot, in his boxers and the T-shirt he had gone to bed in, Sam crept down the stairs, confident enough in his ability to move silently that he didn’t bother to dress. Just as carefully, he pushed aside the heavy sliding door and found his way in the faint light drifting in from the front windows, to the table where Dean’s collar still sat, resting beside the book he had apparently been reading.
It was difficult in the dark, to free the small pendant from the collar, but Sam was familiar enough with knots that it didn’t take him long to thread the little bronze elongated face onto the leather cord, tying it off before he set it back down, far enough from the collar so Dean would have no trouble reaching for it.
It wasn’t anything, not really. A gesture, barely enough to hold any weight to it, but Sam felt a little more at ease for having done it, one small thing that was in his power to correct. When he turned back toward the door he felt a prickling awareness, and squinted through the darkness toward the couch where Dean was lying, his green eyes opened and focused keenly despite the dark.
Sam should have known better than to attempt to sneak passed a wolf. “I was just,” he said, and paused, at a loss to explain what he had been doing. Painfully aware that, depending on when Dean had awoken, it might simply look as if Sam had broken into the front room to loom over the man as he slept. “Your necklace,” he blurted. “Or, the pendant,” he corrected, gesturing toward the table, oddly relieved when Dean’s eyes released their hold on him and focused on the necklace.
“It’s not much,” he said, pleased that he no longer sounded like a stuttering fool. “Just temporary, until you get a chain or something.” Dean’s eyes shifted back to him, and Sam started stepping backward, toward the door. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. Good-night.” He slid the door closed and dropped his head forward, releasing a long breath, more than aware that he had acted like an idiot, but equally certain that the gesture, however ill-timed, had been the right thing to do.
It didn’t mean sleep came any easier, but at least while he waited for it, his thoughts weren’t pivoting on twisted guilt and remorse.
Bobby had breakfast going when Sam staggered down the stairs. Usually it was an ‘every man for himself’ sort of affair, but every so often Bobby was in the sort of mood that lent itself to big spreads of bacon and eggs and waffles and strong coffee. Sam dropped into a chair gratefully and breathed in. “Smell’s good.”
Bobby turned around, a towel thrown over one shoulder with a pan full of sizzling bacon and scraped a little pile onto the edge of Sam’s plate. “Bacon,” a sleep-roughened voice purred as Dean stepped into the kitchen, dropping, boneless, into a chair. He groaned in pleasure as he picked up a full strip of bacon and dropped it into his mouth, head tipped back. Sam stared. “This is amazing,” Dean said, still chewing.
Bobby smiled in amusement as Dean leaned across the table and snagged a piece of toast, and Sam sat there for a moment, feeling frozen and thinking ‘oh’, in a sort of dawning realization. His mind stuck on that image of Dean, his head tipped back, throat long and exposed, and his eyes closed in bliss.
Sam had noted before that Dean was attractive. It was impossible to ignore and not much of a revelation, Sam had noticed it almost in passing, like he had the color of Dean’s eyes and hair. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to him that Dean was not only attractive, but also attractive to Sam.
He was startled out of his thoughts by a hand waving back and forth in front of his face. “What’s wrong with you?” Dean asked, his mouth full and his brows pinched with concern.
Sam felt more than a little dazed. His eyes dropped away from Dean’s face and he found himself focusing on the little bronze head hanging from the leather cord. “You’re wearing it,” he said, mostly to himself. Dean’s frown increased, but Sam was already pushing back his chair. “I almost forgot,” he said, rushing out of the room to the front hall where he had hung his jacket. He came back and thrust three rectangular pieces of plastic in Dean’s direction. “Bobby’s getting your real I.D. sorted, but I thought you could use these in the interim. Or maybe if you decide to keep-up hunting.”
Dean wiped his hand on his jeans before he accepted the fake I.D.s glancing at the names carefully. “These are all old, dead guys,” he noted.
Sam pursed his lips. “They’re novelists,” he corrected, perhaps a bit primly. “And they’re fake I.D.s, anyway. It’s not like flashing a card claiming you were Han Solo would be at all convincing.”
“That would be sweet,” Dean said, then pocketed the cards. “For future reference, you could at least go for something cool, like John Bonham.” He grabbed at his mug of coffee, still watching Sam out of the corner of his eye. “But thanks,” he added, and then took a large sip from his mug. “Hey, Bobby. You got any more of that bacon?”
Sam stepped back as Bobby turned and started scolding Dean for eating the whole plateful of bacon. He dropped back into his chair and pushed around his scrambled eggs with his fork for a minute, before settling back into eating. Smirking to himself when Bobby gave-in and emptied the rest of the pack of bacon into a pan.
“You’re going to give yourself a heart-attack,” he murmured.
Dean scoffed. “Dude, three years, that’s just too long to go without a good breakfast.” He leaned forward and pointedly eyed the waffle on Sam’s plate. “You gonna eat that?” Sam sighed and surrendered his waffle. He decided not to look too deeply into his earlier reaction to Dean. With any luck, the man would eat Bobby out of his entire supply of bacon in one morning, and Sam wouldn’t have to witness his almost obscene enjoyment of it again.
Sam figured that he might as well take advantage of being at Bobby’s and give his car a bit of attention. He was halfway beneath her hood when a bright streak of fur raced passed in his peripheral vision and made him jump, his head thunking solidly against the cool metal of the Impala. He stood up, rubbing the bruised part of his head, cursing as he pivoted, trying to figure if he were under attack.
Dean, in his wolf form, was messing with the old Rottweiler that Bobby kept chained at the front of the house, the poor dog yapping and bouncing and raising all kinds of hell as Dean sat paused just out of reach. He flicked his tail and then, in a smooth bound, took off again, disappearing behind a stack of old cars.
In the evening, after Bobby had already retired to his room and most of the main floor was left to darkness, Sam stopped by the front room on his way up the stairs. He didn’t knock, just leaned there casually and waited until Dean looked up from the book he’d been idly flipping through. “What was up today?”
Dean frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Running around the yard in wolf form,” Sam elaborated. “I was surprised to see you like that. Don’t you need a break from it?”
Dean shrugged. “It’s what I said, dude. I’ve been in one shape for three years, and shifting is like a muscle. I’m just trying to get back in shape.”
“Any luck?”
Dean grinned. “Yeah, some. Hurts less, now.”
“I wondered,” Sam said, and then paused, considered dismissing the question that had been circling in his head since Red Lodge. “The tag. How come you were able to turn on Gordon? Shouldn’t one the spells have prevented that?”
“The tags,” Dean snorted derisively. “There’s no magic that can make a wolf something it’s not, all those tags can do is keep it down for a while. Hunters think that because so few of their slave dogs attack their masters it must be something impressive in the spell work.”
“But it’s not.”
Dean quirked an eyebrow, and then admitted, “It’s not all bullshit. The spells keep us stuck and they keep us tethered. They don’t make us tame. The most they manage is a crushing weight on our free will; it keeps us in line, makes it easier to submit and a hell of a lot harder to disobey.”
“You can, though,” Sam said. “Disobey, I mean. Why don’t more wolves turn against their masters?”
Dean turned away, his eyes focusing on something far away, like he was lost in a memory that Sam couldn’t see. “If you feel strongly enough about something, you can overtake the spell. Most hunters,” Dean continued. “They’re not all that bad. A warm place to sleep, food to eat, relatively protected and some semblance of company,” he shrugged; Sam caught a brief flickering of green as Dean glanced toward him. “I guess most weres’ just stop caring about other things too much after a while.”
Sam let the silence hang, struggling to find something to say even if there didn’t seem to be anything appropriate. Dean had already turned back to the book he had been holding closed with one finger, apparently neither expecting nor wanting to hear whatever Sam might come-up with.
He moved to leave, but found himself stopping before he reached the door. “I just,” Sam paused. “You can totally ignore me, if I’m overstepping or whatever. But, how did you become a werewolf?”
Dean smirked, his eyes flickering-up from his book. “I didn’t,” he shrugged. “People don’t become werewolves. You are or you’re not.”
“So, you were just born that way.”
“Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it takes a while, you don’t just pop out in wolf form or something.” Sam grimaced at the unpleasant mental image. “My whole family were wolves, and the little town we lived in, well, most of them were all part of a wolf pack. To the rest of the villagers, we were like a secret everybody knew.”
Sam smiled at the thought. “What was it like? Growing up in the pack?”
“I didn’t.” Dean looked away. “My family died when I was a kid. The alpha took me in and raised me, but there wasn’t much of a pack by then.”
Sam wanted to ask how it had happened, but he already knew: hunters. One of them, or maybe a group, but they must have stumbled on that ‘secret everyone knew’. “My parents are dead, too,” Sam found himself saying, though he wasn’t sure why. “My mom died when I was just a baby, but my dad…” It flashed through his mind, then, in horrible detail.
“We were hunting the thing that killed her. It was a demon, and he was powerful and he knew we were after him. There was a fight, and,” he paused, remembering the deep-seated satisfaction as the stuttering bright electric shocks zinged around the figure who toppled to the ground. “He was possessing someone and I shot him with this gun that can destroy demons. I killed some guy who probably had no idea that demons were real, but not before … not before it killed my dad.”
The moment he finished speaking, Sam felt foolish, suddenly painfully conscious of how little he knew Dean. Undoubtedly the other man would consider the story more than over-share, and Sam suddenly wondered if he should apologize. It had felt natural, just a minute ago. Felt like talking to Dean about his family had been the most normal thing. Sam felt his cheeks flush and wished he had bitten his tongue.
The silence stretched, tense and heavy, like it was holding its breath, and after a moment Sam snuck a quick glance to Dean’s face, hoping to read something of the other man’s reaction in his usually expressive eyes. There was no clue for Sam to find in Dean’s expression, though, and he looked away again.
“You think,” Dean said into the quiet. “That if you hadn’t been so hung up on killing an innocent human you might have shot sooner, and your dad might have lived?” Sam did think that, couldn’t help but think it. He turned and headed back toward the hall.
“Hey, Sam?” Dean said. Sam paused and half-turned so he could face the other man. Dean’s eyes were bright and glinting in a reflection of moonlight, half of his face in shadow. “That instinct,” he said, and then corrected, “that hesitation. You did it with Lenore, and you did it with me, too. Sometimes, there is another way.” He tipped his head to the side and suddenly the shadows were gone, and his green eyes lit with something more than moonlight, the corners of his mouth quirking just slightly upward as he said, “Of course, if you’d been a werewolf, you wouldn’t have needed some weird-ass gun to take-down the demon. In fact, you probably could have found the thing a hell of a lot sooner.” He flashed a cheeky smirk Sam’s way as he shrugged, “I guess not everyone can be perfect.”
Sam huffed a startled laugh. “Perfectly ridiculous,” he said, as he watched the exaggerated way Dean started to settle down into the sofa, punching at the pillow to fluff it and then turning his head back-and-forth as he nuzzled into it, creating an indentation in the middle that completely defeated the efforts to fluff the thing.
“Perfectly awesome,” Dean muttered, his eyes closed. “Now shut up, I’m trying to sleep.”
“Still need your beauty rest?” Sam said, fighting-back the urge to smile. “Apparently perfection is remarkably high-maintenance.” Dean gave a noncommittal grunt, his body completely lost in shadow as the back of the couch shielded him from the errant strands of light from the moon.
When Sam turned back toward the stairs, it felt like some part of him that had been restless and weighted with guilt and worry was suddenly cut-free and in danger of drifting up and away. The feeling made him smile as he headed toward his bed.
The next morning, as Sam came down the stairs in pursuit of the lilting smell of fresh coffee, he was more asleep than awake. Last night, Dean’s words, along with a merciless barrage of dark memories had circled in his head until he had more or less fallen asleep from emotional exhaustion.
He pulled a mug from the cupboard and poured the coffee, holding it for a moment and just inhaling before he managed to wake up enough to raise the mug to his lips and take a gulp. That was about the same moment that a giant wolf trotted up the steps of the back porch and through the opened screen door. “Jesus Christ!” Sam said, and was in the process of scrambling for a knife when it occurred to him that in fact, he was aware of a wolf in the neighborhood and it had yet to do anything particularly threatening.
Dean’s bright green eyes blazed as the wolf watched him, nonplussed. Sam felt impossibly foolish. After a moment, the wolf trotted past him and down the hall. Sam was halfway through his mug of coffee when Dean, now in his human form and clad in some of the new clothes he’d picked up when he’d gone into town the other day, stepped into the kitchen and grabbed a mug down from the cupboard. “Jumpy much?”
“Dude,” Sam said. “I don’t care how soft and cuddly werewolves are supposed to be, there is just no way a giant wolf trotting through your home at some ungodly hour is a calming sight, okay?”
Dean wrinkled his nose as he poured himself a mug of coffee. “Soft and cuddly?” He cast a narrow-eyed glance toward Sam, as he leaned back against the counter, steaming mug in his hands as he said, “I once took down an entire pack of gwyllion by myself! How’s that for soft and cuddly?” He flashed a sharp-toothed grin and took a large mouthful of coffee.
Sam waited for the moment just before Dean swallowed the hot brew to say, “Was your tactic to overpower them with your personal odor? Because I’d believe that.” It was somewhat of a triumph when Dean almost spat-out his mouthful.
“Dude,” Dean said, when he’d managed to swallow the coffee and choke-down the cough that Sam’s comment had startled out of him. “Was that a wet dog joke? Because I’ve heard them all!” He rolled his shoulders and squared off with Sam, every ounce of his expression and body language clearly communicating ‘let’s do this’.
A sharp lance of heat flashed through him, strong enough to almost make Sam shudder, the reaction so surprising that he found himself choking on the light-hearted tease he had been about to deliver. Dean’s eyes glinted with humor and defiance, more open and clear in that moment than Sam had seen them, and he wanted to reach out, the need to touch instinctual and natural in a way that made him reel-back from the inclination.
He barely knew Dean; it was too much, too soon. There was no reason why the banter should make his blood run hot with something that was more than simple lust. Dean was attractive, Sam could acknowledge that easily. He was also enjoyable company, but that was no excuse for the startlingly visceral response Sam had just experienced.
“Sam?” Dean asked, the teasing ebbing out of his expression and a frown moving in to take its place.
Sam forced himself to smile and roll his eyes. “I bet I could come-up with a few you haven’t heard yet,” he said, only barely remembering what they had been talking about just a minute ago, his mind preoccupied with sorting through his latest response to the werewolf. “Unfortunately, I have to head into town to pick-up a few things, so you’ll just have to wait to hear them,” he lied, careful to leave a wide birth between him and Dean as he stepped away from the counter and left the kitchen.
“Sure,” Dean’s scoffing voice followed him through the hall. “You say that, but I know you’re just buying time to figure-out some dog-jokes. You can’t fool me.”
Sam paused with his hand on the front door, unable to stop a smile from spreading. The hot-rush of want that had caused him to panic a moment before overtaken by a surge of fondness that somehow made his previous urge to pull Dean into a devouring kiss less startling. “Hey Dean,” he called. “What’s a dog’s favorite hobby?”
Dean stepped into the hallway, leaning against the doorframe. “Collecting fleas,” he answered blandly, taking a sip of coffee from his mug. “Ha, ha.”
Sam grinned again, and pulled open the door. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”
It took a little over two weeks, but eventually Dean got everything he needed, including new clothes and a wallet full of the essentials. Sam found himself stepping into the main room, the darkness from outside making it somehow easier to ask, “Where are you going to go?”
“I have no clue,” Dean said. He let out a slow breath. “But that’s nothing new.”
Sam watched from the doorway as Dean packed his belongings into the duffel bag he had bought in town. Bobby had dropped a few subtle hints, and a few not-so subtle ones in the hope that Dean might decide to hang around a bit longer. Dean seemed to be determined to move-on.
“How did you get caught?” Sam asked, after the silence hung between them. “I mean, Gordon mentioned that you were with some hunter named Steve Wandell? How did he find you?” Sam had almost asked, ‘how did he end up buying you’, and had to choke back the words. No matter how accurate they were, he could not bring himself to say it; the reality had been growing steadily more disturbing as he became more used to Dean’s presence.
“Just happened. Bad luck, I guess,” Dean dismissed, his easy posture and dismissive air making Sam suddenly remember what Bobby had told him about werewolves: fiercely protective and surprisingly social, the werewolves who killed were the ones isolated and alone.
All at once Sam connected Dean’s quiet admittance that there was no one he knew looking for him with the way he had just simply seemed to understand how lost and alone Sam had been feeling since his father had died. The thought began to take root, more convincing the more he thought about it, gaining momentum with little flashes of memory, like the way Dean had taken so quickly to Bobby, practically preening under the older mans attention. Steve Wandell had not captured Dean; Dean had surrendered. Anything was better than being driven slowly mad with loneliness, and Dean had no family, no pack, no place where he belonged.
“You know,” Sam said. “You’re more than welcome to come with me tomorrow. I mean, I’ve had about enough of being on my own, and if you’re not sick of hunting, I dunno …”
“I knew there was gonna be a price for all this,” Dean said, his voice oddly flat. “No one’s that helpful without wanting something in return.”
Sam watched the shift in the other man’s posture, the drop in the shoulders as Dean turned his head away, and found himself snapping, “Screw you, man.” Maybe it was harsh or hasty, but they’d been talking, Sam thought they were actually maybe friendly at this point. “You know what I’m saying, don’t pretend you don’t. You want to say ‘no’, that’s fine, but don’t lay it on that Bobby and I are trying to get something from you. That’s bullshit and you know it.” Sam shook his head. “You know what, forget it. It was a stupid thought.”
But when Sam came down the front steps with his duffel slung over his shoulder the next day, Dean was leaning against the Impala, his own bag lying at his feet, talking to Bobby. They fell silent as Sam came to a halt.
Dean raised his eyebrows and said, somewhat impatiently, “Dude, what’s taking so long? Come on, day’s a wastin’.”
Bobby was stifling an amused grin as Sam forced himself down the steps. “Why do I have a growing sense that I’m going to regret this?” Sam muttered as he carted his bag to the trunk.
“I heard that, Sammy!”
Sam glowered at Bobby as the man snickered. “What?” Bobby asked, innocently. “I like him.”
“I love this car,” Dean was saying, hauling his own duffel to the trunk and slinging it casually inside. “You’re going to have to let me drive it sometime, man. Seriously. In fact,” he said, and then stepped right up to Sam and stuck his hand into the pocket of his jacket.
Sam squawked. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Ah ha!” Dean said, yanking the keys from Sam’s pocket and holding them up, jingling them happily. “I’m gonna drive!
“No you’re not!”
“Sammy, this is a beautiful car. She deserves to stretch her legs on the open road, and you drive like an old lady who can barely see over the steering wheel. It’s tragic, really.”
Sam sputtered. “I don’t drive like that! Gimme my keys back!”
Dean raised his eyebrows, and kept the car keys in his fist. “Seriously, your driving was so pathetic it made me ill.” It was Sam’s turn to raise his eyebrows, but Dean pushed on. “Do you have any idea how shitty it is to feel carsick as a wolf? I didn’t even have any damned hands to roll down the window. It was horrible; I might still suffer from residual trauma from the whole experience. Do you want me to vomit on the rugs? Because I will.”
“Fine,” Sam said, releasing a heavy, exasperated sigh. “Whatever.” Dean grinned, wide and bright and triumphant, and tossed the keys in the air, catching them happily again as he pivoted and headed toward the driver’s side of the Impala.
“Residual trauma my ass,” Sam muttered to himself. He paused, one hand on the lid to trunk as he looked down, his duffel making a crooked ‘T’ with Dean’s, it felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. With a grin, Sam closed the trunk.
___________________________________________________
|<< END PART TWO >>|
MASTERPOST
By: revenant_scribe
Rating: R
Word Count: 10,589
Pairing: Sam/Dean
[ Part Two ]
“What do you know about werewolves?”
“That’s a heck of a greeting, kid,” Bobby’s gruff voice echoed down the line and Sam was surprised to find himself smiling despite everything he’d just been through. “Why’re you askin’?”
“Because I sort of ran into one.”
There was a pause. “You ran into one.”
Sam shrugged, the action shifting the cellphone that he held to his ear. He glanced back toward the door of his motel room and then turned his back on it. “I might be traveling with one. Sort of.”
If he’d been talking to his dad, Sam would have been more confident about the reaction he should prepare for. John Winchester would have had a word or two to say, at a high volume, interspersed undoubtedly with heavy profanity. There would be nothing Sam could say to justify the fact that there was a werewolf laying in his motel room; especially nothing that started with ‘My gut told me it was safe’.
Despite Sam’s anxiety, Bobby’s only reply was, “Travelling? You picking-up hitchhikers or something?”
Sam huffed a shamefully relieved laugh. “You have no idea.”
“Sam,” Bobby paused, his voice low and rough in that way he got when he was considering getting angry but wanted to make sure he had all the right information first before he made the effort. “You taking part in the trade now?”
“I didn’t buy him,” Sam defended. “More like I stole him off a hunter named Gordon Walker. Or maybe we’re both running in the same direction, it’s kind of hard to tell.”
“Yer not making a lick of sense,” Bobby huffed. “But I get that it’s complicated. Come on out to the house, I’ll get you both sorted.”
“It’s just…” Sam trailed off, glanced back at the motel room and lowered his voice, even if he was mostly confident that there was no way the wolf could hear him. “Am I crazy?”
“You’re damned right yer crazy,” Bobby said. “Gordon’s a piece of work on a good day, and you just took a stick to a hornet’s nest.”
“No.” Sam sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I mean, what are the odds I’ll be alive long enough to care about Gordon? Bobby, I remember what dad used to say about werewolves. Hell, I remember how he looked when he got back from hunting one.” And, the more he thought about it, the more Sam felt amazed he hadn’t been mauled in his own car as they’d driven out of Montana.
“Easy now,” Bobby said. “Take a breath. If he hasn’t eaten ya yet, then he’s likely not gonna.”
“Oh,” Sam said. “That’s reassuring.” Which, oddly enough, it was.
He hadn’t thought twice when he’d requested a single room with two queen-sized beds. It was only on his way back to the Impala, when he caught-sight of the other occupant of his car that he began to slow his pace, took a second glance at the single set of keys in his hand and wondered if maybe it hadn’t been the smartest choice.
Really, it had been the only choice, he thought, justifying his decision to himself. Leaving the thing in the car would no doubt draw attention, and he didn’t want to get involved with animal services. Putting a werewolf in a room all on its own meant that it might get loose and hurt someone before Sam even knew it was wandering around. If they shared a room, Sam could make sure the wolf wasn’t doing anything untoward.
The truth, though, was that the decision had been entirely instinctual, and since he’d slammed his door in Red Lodge and started the engine with the wolf sharing the front bench with him, he had been taking little to no precautions, because it just hadn’t felt like he’d needed any.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, and trying to push the knot of guilt over being so quick to trust a thing his dad would have shot in an instant, Sam changed the subject, “Gordon mentioned it was tagged or something?”
Bobby’s grunt echoed down the line. “No way to tell what spells have been worked on him. Don’t take the collar off until we can figure it out. Is he talking much?”
“He’s a wolf,” Sam said, and then wondered if that hadn’t been evident in how he had been speaking. “Like, he’s an actual wolf.”
“Yeah.” Bobby didn’t sound like he understood why that should be a problem.
Sam’s brows pinched together. He took the phone from his ear and frowned at it, then held it back to his ear and said, “So he can’t say much of anything.” Bobby chuckled and told him to get his butt in gear and get over to South Dakota.
Inside the motel room, Sam was confronted with a very large wolf sprawled casually across the second queen-sized bed he had requested. The television he had left on was playing an episode of Doctor Sexy M.D and the damned thing actually seemed to be watching it. Up close, without vampires or angry hunters as distraction, Sam could finally take a moment to really look at the werewolf. It didn’t look like much.
It was a wolf, undoubtedly and obviously. Perhaps a little bit larger than average, but Sam was not so familiar with wolves to judge properly. It was lean, with long, slender legs and big paws and nails that had tapped against the tile in the motel room as they’d entered. Grey fur shot-through with brown ran from the top of its snout down its back to the tail, but its legs, underbelly and chest were cream-white. As he crossed in front of the television to settle awkwardly onto his own bed, Sam could see its eyes were hazel green, with a keen awareness that he did not think was natural in an animal’s eyes.
“What do I call you?” Sam found himself asking, immediately wanting to kick himself for voicing the question. He was talking to a wolf; did he seriously expect it to answer?
The wolf lifted its head and stared blandly at Sam for a moment, then turned back to the television. “Well,” Sam said, more or less to cover how abysmally awkward it felt to be sharing a motel room with an animal he had been raised to believe would kill him without a moment’s hesitation or remorse while it watched a shitty soap opera. “I can’t just call you ‘wolf’.”
The green-hazel eyes shifted over to him again, but the wolf did not move its head from where it was resting on its outstretched front paws. Sam had the sudden thought that Gordon likely had no qualms doing just that.
“How about Sirius?” he wondered, thinking of the wolf star but reconsidering as soon as he said it at the recollection of the popular book series that had made memorable use of the name. The wolf looked unimpressed. “Remus?” he said, mostly as a tease. “Romulus?” The wolf turned back to the television with a sigh. “Lassie?”
“Dean.” Sam jerked and glanced around the room as the statement echoed through his mind, clear as a ringing bell. The wolf lifted its head and turned to look at him properly. “My name,” it said.
“You talked.” It blinked at his statement, and then turned back to the television. Sam frowned. “Did Gordon know you could do that?”
“What do you think?” the wolf, Dean, said. Then added, “Genius.”
Sam found himself smiling, amused by the animal’s- human’s? - unexpected personality. Then the ramifications slid home. “You retain your mind in that form.” If a werewolf retained its human mind when they transformed then what did that mean when they killed humans? Either werewolves were a far more dangerous and twisted kind of creature than Sam had previously believed or, he thought, looking at the wolf sprawled lazily on the bed, hunters were gravely mistaken in their ideas about them.
Dean was looking at him in amusement, and Sam didn’t even want to start trying to analyze how he understood the wolf was amused. “You don’t know much about werewolves, do you?”
Feeling oddly ignorant and defensive, Sam’s answer was, “I know how to kill them.”
“Not much mystery in that.”
Dean was disturbingly silent when he wished to be and Sam found himself waking the next morning and experiencing a sudden rush of terrifying surprise to notice the second bed was occupied by a hulking great werewolf who was sprawled casually atop the blanket, seemingly fast asleep. Sam stared until, without any indication of waking, one green eye slitted open and stared back.
“We should go,” Sam said, breaking the awkward silence. It occurred to him after a moment that while he had to get up and get dressed, wash and use the bathroom, not to mention shove what few things he had withdrawn from his duffel back into place, the wolf had only to slink off the side of the bed to be ready. Its unblinking stare suggested it was thinking along similar lines.
Sam sighed and began shifting to the edge of the bed, mumbling, “Give me a minute.”
It wasn’t a minute, but Sam was well used to packing-up and moving along. He couldn’t be certain if Gordon would be on their trail but he preferred to assume the worst and be prepared. There wasn’t any reason to delay.
He found Dean walking a slow circle around the Impala as he returned from dropping the room key in the motel office. The wolf was sniffing, nose ghosting over wheel-wells and glinting chrome, his tail twitching left and right as he concentrated. Sam held back, watching.
After a moment, the wolf lifted a leg to the front driver’s side wheel. “Oh come on!” Sam said. Dean whuffed, sounding completely unashamed and entirely canine, and then sat expectantly by the door, waiting for it to be opened for him. “That was gross.” The wolf didn’t care, simply hopped up onto the bench, making its way to the front passenger side and settling down.
For all that Dean was a stranger, and a werewolf to boot, Sam found himself relaxing during the drive, contented and at ease in a way he hadn’t felt since over a month ago when he’d spent much of his time ghosting the Impala in the trail of his dad’s hulking beast of a pick-up truck. He hadn’t realized that outside of his anger and his regret and the overwhelming sense of loss that had plagued him since his dad’s death, Sam simply felt alone.
He ended-up driving straight through to Sioux Falls, pulling into Singer Salvage before the sun had a chance to rise, the sky grey and the air thick with damp as dew settled on the rusted cars stacked in listing towers around the lot.
Beside him, Dean jolted upward from where he had been dozing, and pressed his nose to the glass of the passenger window where there were already dried smears. He huffed and his breath fogged the glass.
“This place belongs to a friend of mind,” Sam explained, though he had already mentioned that he was heading to the safest place he knew. “Keep your teeth to yourself.”
The wolf lifted a paw to the glass, rubbing it against the fogged spot and peering intently through. Sam pulled the Impala to a stop and turned off the motor, stepping out of the car into the crisp morning air with a certain amount of relief to finally be able to stretch his legs. There had been no reason to drive through the night, except that Sam had gotten lost in thought and hadn’t felt ready to pull over. Dean hadn’t seemed to care, and for all that Sam knew, was perfectly happy to nap curled in the front seat when staring out the window at the passing scenery had grown dull.
Outside of the brief exchange in the motel, Dean had not volunteered any further conversation. Sam was certain whether that was because the wolf was naturally quiet, or simply in response to the remark Sam had made the other day, and the implied threat it had carried.
“Bobby?” Sam called, slamming the car door closed and taking another moment to stretch. An old Rottweiler sprawled on the hood of Bobby’s blue Ford tow-truck lifted its head and gazed curiously back at him. After a moment of close scrutiny, it dropped its head back to rest between its paws.
It was early, but Sam had no desire to take his friend by surprise and get a stomach full of buckshot for his trouble. He crossed to the passenger door and opened it wide before heading toward the front steps.
The house’ door kicked open before he’d gotten very far and Bobby stepped out, shotgun slung over one arm as the other finished tugging on a red-checkered flannel shirt. “Heya, kid,” he greeted, his voice gruff but warm. Then added, “Easy, Rumsfeld,” as the dog’s hackles raised and it let out a low growl as Dean stepped down from the car. “I said, easy!” Rumsfeld jerked his head to look at his master as if he were strongly advising Bobby to rethink the order, then obediently dropped his rear-end down, sitting reluctantly but no longer rumbling with displeasure. He kept a mistrusting gaze fixed on the wolf.
“So,” Sam said, with a bit of a shrug. “Here we are.”
Bobby shook his head as he came down from the porch, meeting Sam halfway and giving him a brief one-armed hug. “About time too, y’idjit.” He glanced to where Dean was sitting and nodded his head, expression oddly somber. “Already got word that Walker’s on the move and more than pissed, but as near as I can tell he’s heading in the other direction.”
Sam sighed. “That’s something I guess.” He grabbed his duffel from the trunk at his friend’s order and slammed the door of the Impala closed, before following Bobby and the wolf up the stairs and into the house.
In the front hall, Bobby jerked his head toward the upper level and said, “Room’s upstairs, you know the drill.”
Sam hesitated, watched as Bobby passed into the front room, undoubtedly heading for his books. “You gonna be okay down here?” he asked, glancing from the old hunter to the wolf that was trotting in the man’s wake.
Bobby glared at the insinuation that he might not be able to takedown one wolf in his own home if the occasion called for it. Sam ducked his head in apology and took the stairs quickly.
Bobby’s was the closest thing to a home that Sam had ever known, and the man kept a room set up for when he stopped by, but there was only so much settling-in that Sam could ever manage and still feel comfortable. Too settled, and a kind of itch would strike him, niggling and persistent, like he was exposed and unprepared. Bobby had layer after layer of protections on every level of his house, covering just about any supernatural thing that might have an interest in attacking. There was even a panic room in the basement that, Sam was certain, could survive the apocalypse.
Even at Bobby’s, though, Sam never unpacked his bag completely. It was partially a matter of habit, and partially common sense. Even when he was too old to care if he lived or died, with bones too creaky to move, Sam was certain he would have a duffel bag stuffed with the essentials just in case. If there was one thing every hunter knew, it was that life was unpredictable, and it was impossible to know when a bounced credit card, a supernatural creature or the police, might catch up to you.
With a certain sense of relief, Sam let himself collapse onto the wooden mission-style bed that occupied the far corner of the room. He might have found himself enjoying the sensation of no longer being on his own, but he certainly hadn’t managed to let his guard down entirely, which meant he’d been sleeping with one eye open since he’d driven out of Red Lodge. It might have been easy to dismiss, running on cheap roadside coffee and circling thoughts and maybe a bit of adrenaline, but he was exhausted, and Sam found himself falling into sleep before his head even touched down on the pillow.
By the time he came down the stairs there was sun sneaking through the grime on the front windows, filling the main room with a bright yellowy haze, just enough light to draw attention to the dust floating aimlessly in the air. Sam stopped on the bottom step and listened, trying to see where Bobby had gone.
The sound of a book thumping closed, provided him with a direction, and Sam made his way through the front room to the back. “What’s up?”
“Trying to figure out his tag,” Bobby said, and jerked his head toward the kitchen where the wolf was standing with his head bowed, lapping at a bowl filled with water.
Sam watched it carefully for a moment before he turned back to Bobby and asked, voice low, “He give you any trouble?”
Bobby looked entirely unimpressed with the question and flipped another book closed, settling back in his chair as he said, “Just what do you think yer dealing with?”
“I dunno, I just,” he paused as the wolf stepped back into the room. Undoubtedly sensing the tense atmosphere, Dean hesitated, as if considering whether he should slink out before he got drawn into whatever argument was brewing, or stand his ground.
Sam stared back at the wolf’s green eyes and sighed. When he answered, he was speaking as much to Dean as to Bobby. “Whenever dad told me about werewolves, it was always about how dangerous they were, how unpredictable. They changed into a wolf form for three nights of the month at the full moon, and they killed when they changed. They didn’t retain any human thoughts in wolf shape, and they never remembered what they had done when they changed back.” He glanced quickly at the wolf, who rolled his eyes so fiercely his head made a small circular movement; clearly Sam wasn’t saying anything it hadn’t heard a thousand times. Sam shrugged, feeling a little lost as he explained, “They were supernatural and dangerous, and he hunted them.”
Bobby observed him, nonplussed. “You believe that, do ya?”
“Well…” Sam trailed off, couldn’t quite figure how to explain that everything he had been taught since he was a kid was warring with everything he had been seeing in the passed few days. If he had believed all of that, then he should have been driving with one hand on the wheel and one hand on the trigger of a cocked gun. He should never have even considered bringing Dean into his motel room, let alone giving him a bed of his own without making some effort to secure him. Everything Sam had done since Red Lodge was ten kinds of crazy, and reckless to boot.
“Y’know,” Bobby said. “There’s a lot of bullshit lore when it comes to werewolves. Most hunters refuse to believe it, because when they ask around and do their own research what they’re really asking is ‘what’s the most common story told about the thing I’m hunting’. And ye see, that doesn’t work with weres’.”
Sam dropped into one of the empty chairs, setting the stack of books that had previously been occupying it down on the floor and startling slightly as a warm rush of soft fur passed inches from his head as the wolf crept slowly and carefully, half hunched and entirely tentative, over to Bobby’s side.
Bobby smiled and settled a hand on the Dean’s head. “Anyone who bothered to do some research would find that the source of the legends was a massive attack in a German village sometime in the 1500s. The story goes that a pack of wolves, too big to be natural wolves, and too savage, tore apart the village and the farmers in the surrounding fields. It was over the course of three days during the full moon, and the carnage was apparently horrifying.”
Bobby paused and, with a final scratch, removed his hand from the wolf’s head, leaning forward across the desk. “There were three survivors and they told their story as they travelled west; eventually they recounted it to some hunters who took off to try and kill whatever had attacked the village.”
“And?” Sam prompted.
“And it was a pack of wolves, alright,” Bobby said. “But not just wolves, men who could turn into wolves. Their bones creaked and shifted and they peeled off their human skin, leaving it hanging from the trees. By the time the hunters found them and figured a way to kill them, the pack had destroyed another village, left nothing behind but scraps of flesh and splashes of blood. They were weak to silver, though, and the hunters killed them before they could destroy another settlement. Silver blades stabbed right through the heart and none of the pack was ever heard from again.”
“But,” Sam said, frowning. “That doesn’t sound like werewolves.”
“Doesn’t it,” Bobby said, with a bit of a smirk. “Because that’s what everyone thinks they are. Everyone who hasn’t actually bothered to read any of the accounts.”
“So,” Sam trailed off, his mind running through the various creatures he knew of. “A skinwalker? Or,” he sat up a little straighter as the comment about the skin hanging from the trees fell into place. “Shapeshifters. A pack of them?”
“Seems the most likely,” Bobby said. “It’s what the hunters figured they were, anyway.”
“I don’t understand how it went from an attack of shapeshifters in the 1500s to such a solid belief that werewolves are evil.”
Bobby sighed. “Wolves were common predators in Europe. There was a long-held fear of them, with stories told about them for centuries. Mostly, though, it was politics. Werewolves have a pack mentality, and that wasn’t limited to other weres’. Their village became their turf, and they were fiercely protective. There was more than just that one pack of shapeshifters. There were a number of attacks, some shifters, some skinwalkers, all of them posing as men who could become wolves. It started a widespread persecution of werewolves but most people don’t know about that, because they got lost in among all the witch trials.”
“It was a territorial thing?” Sam wondered. “Because the werewolves would run the other creatures out of town, if they didn’t kill them first?”
“There are trial records of accused werewolves claiming they would regularly do war with devils in order to protect their village. Even at the height of the witch trials, when paranoia and fear was at a peak, villages had a hard time convicting and killing people accused as werewolves.”
“Still,” Sam said, when he had taken a moment to let it all sink in. “Hunters do their research. I can’t see how they would consistently be fooled by a bunch of shifters and skinwalkers living off a centuries old vendetta.”
“You know yourself how the references get tangled up with names sometimes. Calling one thing something else. It’s like a game of broken telephone. The references are all there, but most hunters don’t much read ancient manuscripts from the sixteenth century.”
“Besides,” Bobby added. “All it takes is one. Werewolves might be natural protectors, but isolated and alone, in big cities without any close friends or family to consider pack, a werewolf can be just as savage as the lore tells it.” He shrugged. “Anyway, that’s how you get to killing werewolves.”
Sam couldn’t help thinking of the small but persistent trade among hunters. His own dad had hated it, but Sam also knew his father had no difficulty hunting and killing a werewolf if he ever came across one. If those werewolves weren’t actually killing people, if it was all just some big mistake then…
“Get yerself something to eat. You look like yer gonna be sick. Might as well have something to bring up.”
“Right,” Sam said. “Thanks.” The slow wave of horror that had been building subsided at Bobby’s gentle tease, but when Sam stood up the wolf held him with a steady gaze and he remembered with a flash of shame how close he himself had come to shooting it. “Right.”
While Sam was sitting in the kitchen, helping himself to a toasted turkey sandwich and trying not to let the past week overwhelm him, Bobby came through with an open book balanced in one hand, the other scratching his cheek idly, the wolf trailing behind. A part of Sam -the small, guilty part- still wondered if maybe the werewolf was behaving the way he was because of a spell worked into the tag.
“I think I’ve got everything to remove the tag. None of the spells worked into it are very complex.”
What Bobby Singer considered complex was a sight different from what Sam thought might pass for ‘complex’ to most people. There were a collection of herbs and tinctures to burn and plenty of archaic recitations, and Sam spent the better part of an hour standing more than a little uselessly off to the side, ready to make a move if something seemed to be going wrong, or to remove the collar when Bobby said it was alright. The wolf, for his part, sat in the middle of a red chalked circle in Bobby’s front room and tried not to appear too bored.
After about seventy-five minutes, as Sam was leaning subtly against an old wooden table, Bobby paused in his incantations and glanced up from his book. “Okay,” he said. “You ready for the big one?” The wolf turned his full focus on Bobby and looked appropriately solemn. Sam stood up from his casual lean and nodded.
There were another few sentences that Sam didn’t pretend to understand, and in between one sentence and the next, Bobby nodded and Sam stepped forward, carefully undoing the wide buckle that kept the leather of the collar fastened about the wolf’s neck.
Immediately, the shape of the wolf began to ripple and blur. It growled and then whimpered, and Sam turned startled eyes to Bobby, only for the man to shake his head. Apparently, he had been expecting that kind of reaction.
Backing-up hastily, Sam watched, more than a little horrified, at the obvious agony of the transformation. There was no creaking or snapping of bones, no ripping of flesh, but the transition was slower than he had expected, and it did not look pleasant.
The wolf’s front paws scrabbled and jerked spasmodically, nails cutting in to the wood of the floor as paws stretched and elongated until fingers, tense and shaking, became recognizable.
Along forearms and up to his shoulders, across his back and hips and legs, fur stood-up on end, the color eking out as it thinned and shrunk inward, leaving strikingly pallid skin in its wake. Dean’s growling and whimpering continued until it became a deep, hiccupping sob as all the while his body twitched and jerked.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.
In the center of the chalk circle was a man, curled in on himself, his legs tucked close to his chest. His dark blond hair hung long with soft waves curling passed his ears to his bearded chin. His skin was pale and dusted with freckles, and his body was whipcord lean with the rounded shape of muscles hinting beneath the flesh, though his bones were perhaps more pronounced than might have been considered strictly healthy.
For all that Sam had been wrapped up in thoughts of his new traveling companion, he had always thought of the wolf, and it had never once occurred to him to wonder about the man.
Dean blinked open his bright green eyes and brought himself cautiously to a sitting position, his legs drawn-up to preserve some sense of modesty. “Well,” he said, his voice rough and more than a little hoarse. “This is awkward.”
Dean didn’t seem at all ashamed by his nudity, but he accepted the clothes Sam brought down from his duffel in silence, ducking his head a little and holding the folded stack somewhat uncomfortably. Bobby and Sam retreated to the kitchen to give him a bit of privacy.
Sam let out a long whoosh of breath. “What the hell,” he said. He wasn’t even entirely certain what he was encompassing in his statement. Maybe all of it, maybe his shock at witnessing the shift from wolf to man; maybe the naked form that had been left in place of the wolf.
“Did you know it was going to be like that?” Sam cleared his throat because he had been wondering mostly about the nudity, which he should have been expecting but hadn’t. Somehow asking Bobby about that seemed ridiculous, when Sam knew it shouldn’t matter to him. “Painful, I mean?”
Bobby shrugged; his hands stuffed in his pockets, looking a little wide-eyed himself.
“Of course it would hurt,” a new voice interrupted, roughened and low from lack of use. “It’s like sitting still for three years and then getting up and running a marathon. It’s not gonna be pretty.”
“Three years?” Sam said, directed to the wolf, to Dean, who was standing awkwardly in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Around that, yeah.” Dean shrugged, “Once I get back in the habit of shifting, it’ll be quicker and … less of a production.” He turned to Bobby. “Thanks, by the way, for…” he waved his hand a little as he trailed off.
“Don’t worry about it,” Bobby said. “You’re welcome to stay here, long as you need to get things in order.”
“Oh,” Dean said, suddenly dazed, like it hadn’t occurred to him that he was a person again and had all of those so very human concerns to worry about: clothes, money, a place to stay, an identity, the list carried on. “Well, that’s very kind but I…”
“Bullshit,” Sam said, cutting the man off before he could come up with an excuse to rush away into the night. “No one’s missing you, or else they would have found you by now. You were completely naked all of three minutes ago, there’s no way you have a wallet with money and I.D. stowed away, if you have any I.D. at all. You won’t last a day out there.”
Bobby shot him a scolding look. “Easy.”
Dean opened his mouth like he was about to argue, but Sam saw the quick-flash of green-eyes over to Bobby, who was still staring reproachfully at Sam. Dean said, “Yeah, alright. If it’s not too much trouble. Just for a little while.”
“No trouble at all,” Bobby assured. “Least I can do, seeing as you managed to keep this idjit here from getting himself killed.”
Catching the quirk on Dean’s lips made Sam bristle even more. “The vampires weren’t killing people,” he defended.
“You’re a magnet for trouble, kid,” Bobby said. “You’d have found a way to convince ‘em to make an exception, I’m sure. ‘Sides,” he added. “I was talkin’ about Walker.” Sam couldn’t really disagree there.
“I can pull a few strings, get your I.D. sorted out, if you need,” Bobby continued.
“Uh, yeah,” Dean said, his head ducking down again. Sam noticed that he had the collar gripped in his left hand, his fist curled tight around it. After a moment, the other man nodded again, to himself, and took a step back.
“Dean,” Sam said.
“I know,” Dean said, waving a dismissive hand. “If I make a move to hurt anyone, you’ll put a piece of silver in me.”
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Sam said, feeling the hot-slide of guilt wash through him. “Just…” but there was no way to explain himself. Dean did not seem the sort of person to place much stalk in words, anyway. Flashing a small smile he said, “You’ll be safe here.”
There was no reason for Sam to stay at Bobby’s, but he couldn’t quite make himself go. A tight curl of conflicting emotions reared and writhed in his belly whenever he considered getting back on the road. The emotions were too knotted for Sam to make much sense of, but he knew enough to pinpoint the curl of guilt he felt, for his mistrust of Dean and for his part in the whole mess between hunters and werewolves. He wasn’t foolish enough to think that just because he had never physically pulled the trigger, he hadn’t contributed in other ways. For one thing, he had always blindly followed his father’s word about them, and never once thought to look deeper into the lore.
It made the idea of leaving the salvage yard a fleeting one, barely considered before it was dismissed. Bobby had always been like a second father to him, and Dean was an intriguing mystery. An infuriatingly quiet mystery, which had spent most of the day sacked out on Bobby’s couch.
With Sam occupying the guest room, Bobby had brought down some bedding and some towels, and slid the doors to the front room closed so Dean could have a bit of privacy. After sleeping through most of the day, the man had snatched up the towels and a pair of scissors Bobby had presented when asked, and disappeared into the washroom.
He emerged, about an hour later, in a cloud of steam, freshly washed and still damp from his shower. His hair that had been hanging almost to his shoulders was trimmed short and mussed, his beard gone except for a faint trace of shadow along his chin.
Bobby had made a few calls and set the wheels in motion to get Dean settled with everything he might need, though it would take some time to come through. Sam wondered, as he watched this all with his nose buried in a book, about that expanding part of himself could not let this strange detour his life had taken since Red Lodge to come to an end.
On his way up to bed, Sam found his steps slowing until he came to a stop by the wooden sliding doors that blocked-off the front room. The heavy oak doors hadn’t been closed properly, leaving a thin crack, which allowed him to see where Dean was seated on the couch, the thick brown leather collar he had worn for three years as a wolf held in one hand.
Sam tapped twice on the side of the door and smiled as Dean glanced up at him. He slid the right oak panel further to the side as he asked, “You okay?”
“What?” Dean asked, then followed Sam’s pointed look down to the collar in his hand. “Oh, yeah.” He waved the strip of brown leather a little. “The other pendant,” he said, “it belonged to my grandmother. Sort of a family heirloom, I never took it off.” He cast a wry glance at Sam as he added, “It was supposed to be a good luck charm.”
Sam remembered the strange horned face that hung from the collar alongside the circular disc that featured the howling wolf. “You were close to your grandmother?” It was difficult to imagine what it would be like to have an extended family to fuss over and annoy him, but Sam thought he might have liked it.
“She lived with us,” Dean said. “My parents and me.” The collar shifted in his hand and he gave a quiet hiss and then chuckled at himself. When he caught Sam’s look, he smiled wryly. “Silver,” he explained. “Wouldn’t do if a wolf could somehow get free of his collar.”
One of the spells worked into the tag, Sam knew, had been a pretty nastily debilitating curse that would kick-in if the collar were removed without the appropriate incantation being spoken. A pretty sure-fire way to make certain the werewolf wouldn’t break free. He watched as Dean dropped the collar with false casualness onto Bobby’s desk. “Good night,” he said, a little pointedly.
Sam stepped back, reminded suddenly that he had only just met Dean, and that the other man had been mistreated by hunters for over three years and had no reason to expect any different from Sam, especially given Sam’s comments over the course of their road trip. “Right,” he said. “Good night.”
Sam found himself lying awake in the middle of the night, his thoughts whirling with memories of his father after another of their no-holds-barred fights had left them both red in the face. “Family’s everything, Sammy,” John had said, half-turned away so Sam could see only a peak of his father’s profile. He could remember that even seeing that much of his father had made Sam want to snarl. “Nothing else, none of it, matters. Sooner or later, you’re going to realize that.”
He thought about the werewolves his dad had hunted; there hadn’t been many, mostly when Sam had been a gangly, awkward youth, but even if his dad had killed only one, it would have been too many.
If it had been him, Sam imagined he would have been furious and bitter, and undoubtedly less than eager to entertain the idea of help from a hunter, no matter how badly he needed it. Yet Dean had looked only slightly awkward and maybe, if it had been anyone else, embarrassed, at Bobby’s offer. His only memento from his family was stuck on a collar that had symbolized his enslavement, surrounded by silver that rendered it impossible for him to reach, but he hadn’t snarled at Sam or sneered. He hadn’t asked for help, either.
Sam shifted beneath the thin cover of his sheet, turning to lie on his other side, his mind preoccupied with circling thoughts and nowhere nearer to falling into sleep. There was so much in the situation that was beyond messed-up that Sam barely knew where to begin sorting through it all. He no longer questioned whether or not he wanted to, he tried not to think about his reasons, either.
Sighing, Sam pulled himself from beneath the blankets, rolling to his feet and moving to rummage through his duffel. After a moment, he withdrew a round golden amulet, the markings on its circular face rubbed almost smooth but no less effective. Carefully, he unknotted the black leather slip cord and let the round disc drop back to his bag.
Barefoot, in his boxers and the T-shirt he had gone to bed in, Sam crept down the stairs, confident enough in his ability to move silently that he didn’t bother to dress. Just as carefully, he pushed aside the heavy sliding door and found his way in the faint light drifting in from the front windows, to the table where Dean’s collar still sat, resting beside the book he had apparently been reading.
It was difficult in the dark, to free the small pendant from the collar, but Sam was familiar enough with knots that it didn’t take him long to thread the little bronze elongated face onto the leather cord, tying it off before he set it back down, far enough from the collar so Dean would have no trouble reaching for it.
It wasn’t anything, not really. A gesture, barely enough to hold any weight to it, but Sam felt a little more at ease for having done it, one small thing that was in his power to correct. When he turned back toward the door he felt a prickling awareness, and squinted through the darkness toward the couch where Dean was lying, his green eyes opened and focused keenly despite the dark.
Sam should have known better than to attempt to sneak passed a wolf. “I was just,” he said, and paused, at a loss to explain what he had been doing. Painfully aware that, depending on when Dean had awoken, it might simply look as if Sam had broken into the front room to loom over the man as he slept. “Your necklace,” he blurted. “Or, the pendant,” he corrected, gesturing toward the table, oddly relieved when Dean’s eyes released their hold on him and focused on the necklace.
“It’s not much,” he said, pleased that he no longer sounded like a stuttering fool. “Just temporary, until you get a chain or something.” Dean’s eyes shifted back to him, and Sam started stepping backward, toward the door. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. Good-night.” He slid the door closed and dropped his head forward, releasing a long breath, more than aware that he had acted like an idiot, but equally certain that the gesture, however ill-timed, had been the right thing to do.
It didn’t mean sleep came any easier, but at least while he waited for it, his thoughts weren’t pivoting on twisted guilt and remorse.
Bobby had breakfast going when Sam staggered down the stairs. Usually it was an ‘every man for himself’ sort of affair, but every so often Bobby was in the sort of mood that lent itself to big spreads of bacon and eggs and waffles and strong coffee. Sam dropped into a chair gratefully and breathed in. “Smell’s good.”
Bobby turned around, a towel thrown over one shoulder with a pan full of sizzling bacon and scraped a little pile onto the edge of Sam’s plate. “Bacon,” a sleep-roughened voice purred as Dean stepped into the kitchen, dropping, boneless, into a chair. He groaned in pleasure as he picked up a full strip of bacon and dropped it into his mouth, head tipped back. Sam stared. “This is amazing,” Dean said, still chewing.
Bobby smiled in amusement as Dean leaned across the table and snagged a piece of toast, and Sam sat there for a moment, feeling frozen and thinking ‘oh’, in a sort of dawning realization. His mind stuck on that image of Dean, his head tipped back, throat long and exposed, and his eyes closed in bliss.
Sam had noted before that Dean was attractive. It was impossible to ignore and not much of a revelation, Sam had noticed it almost in passing, like he had the color of Dean’s eyes and hair. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to him that Dean was not only attractive, but also attractive to Sam.
He was startled out of his thoughts by a hand waving back and forth in front of his face. “What’s wrong with you?” Dean asked, his mouth full and his brows pinched with concern.
Sam felt more than a little dazed. His eyes dropped away from Dean’s face and he found himself focusing on the little bronze head hanging from the leather cord. “You’re wearing it,” he said, mostly to himself. Dean’s frown increased, but Sam was already pushing back his chair. “I almost forgot,” he said, rushing out of the room to the front hall where he had hung his jacket. He came back and thrust three rectangular pieces of plastic in Dean’s direction. “Bobby’s getting your real I.D. sorted, but I thought you could use these in the interim. Or maybe if you decide to keep-up hunting.”
Dean wiped his hand on his jeans before he accepted the fake I.D.s glancing at the names carefully. “These are all old, dead guys,” he noted.
Sam pursed his lips. “They’re novelists,” he corrected, perhaps a bit primly. “And they’re fake I.D.s, anyway. It’s not like flashing a card claiming you were Han Solo would be at all convincing.”
“That would be sweet,” Dean said, then pocketed the cards. “For future reference, you could at least go for something cool, like John Bonham.” He grabbed at his mug of coffee, still watching Sam out of the corner of his eye. “But thanks,” he added, and then took a large sip from his mug. “Hey, Bobby. You got any more of that bacon?”
Sam stepped back as Bobby turned and started scolding Dean for eating the whole plateful of bacon. He dropped back into his chair and pushed around his scrambled eggs with his fork for a minute, before settling back into eating. Smirking to himself when Bobby gave-in and emptied the rest of the pack of bacon into a pan.
“You’re going to give yourself a heart-attack,” he murmured.
Dean scoffed. “Dude, three years, that’s just too long to go without a good breakfast.” He leaned forward and pointedly eyed the waffle on Sam’s plate. “You gonna eat that?” Sam sighed and surrendered his waffle. He decided not to look too deeply into his earlier reaction to Dean. With any luck, the man would eat Bobby out of his entire supply of bacon in one morning, and Sam wouldn’t have to witness his almost obscene enjoyment of it again.
Sam figured that he might as well take advantage of being at Bobby’s and give his car a bit of attention. He was halfway beneath her hood when a bright streak of fur raced passed in his peripheral vision and made him jump, his head thunking solidly against the cool metal of the Impala. He stood up, rubbing the bruised part of his head, cursing as he pivoted, trying to figure if he were under attack.
Dean, in his wolf form, was messing with the old Rottweiler that Bobby kept chained at the front of the house, the poor dog yapping and bouncing and raising all kinds of hell as Dean sat paused just out of reach. He flicked his tail and then, in a smooth bound, took off again, disappearing behind a stack of old cars.
In the evening, after Bobby had already retired to his room and most of the main floor was left to darkness, Sam stopped by the front room on his way up the stairs. He didn’t knock, just leaned there casually and waited until Dean looked up from the book he’d been idly flipping through. “What was up today?”
Dean frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Running around the yard in wolf form,” Sam elaborated. “I was surprised to see you like that. Don’t you need a break from it?”
Dean shrugged. “It’s what I said, dude. I’ve been in one shape for three years, and shifting is like a muscle. I’m just trying to get back in shape.”
“Any luck?”
Dean grinned. “Yeah, some. Hurts less, now.”
“I wondered,” Sam said, and then paused, considered dismissing the question that had been circling in his head since Red Lodge. “The tag. How come you were able to turn on Gordon? Shouldn’t one the spells have prevented that?”
“The tags,” Dean snorted derisively. “There’s no magic that can make a wolf something it’s not, all those tags can do is keep it down for a while. Hunters think that because so few of their slave dogs attack their masters it must be something impressive in the spell work.”
“But it’s not.”
Dean quirked an eyebrow, and then admitted, “It’s not all bullshit. The spells keep us stuck and they keep us tethered. They don’t make us tame. The most they manage is a crushing weight on our free will; it keeps us in line, makes it easier to submit and a hell of a lot harder to disobey.”
“You can, though,” Sam said. “Disobey, I mean. Why don’t more wolves turn against their masters?”
Dean turned away, his eyes focusing on something far away, like he was lost in a memory that Sam couldn’t see. “If you feel strongly enough about something, you can overtake the spell. Most hunters,” Dean continued. “They’re not all that bad. A warm place to sleep, food to eat, relatively protected and some semblance of company,” he shrugged; Sam caught a brief flickering of green as Dean glanced toward him. “I guess most weres’ just stop caring about other things too much after a while.”
Sam let the silence hang, struggling to find something to say even if there didn’t seem to be anything appropriate. Dean had already turned back to the book he had been holding closed with one finger, apparently neither expecting nor wanting to hear whatever Sam might come-up with.
He moved to leave, but found himself stopping before he reached the door. “I just,” Sam paused. “You can totally ignore me, if I’m overstepping or whatever. But, how did you become a werewolf?”
Dean smirked, his eyes flickering-up from his book. “I didn’t,” he shrugged. “People don’t become werewolves. You are or you’re not.”
“So, you were just born that way.”
“Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it takes a while, you don’t just pop out in wolf form or something.” Sam grimaced at the unpleasant mental image. “My whole family were wolves, and the little town we lived in, well, most of them were all part of a wolf pack. To the rest of the villagers, we were like a secret everybody knew.”
Sam smiled at the thought. “What was it like? Growing up in the pack?”
“I didn’t.” Dean looked away. “My family died when I was a kid. The alpha took me in and raised me, but there wasn’t much of a pack by then.”
Sam wanted to ask how it had happened, but he already knew: hunters. One of them, or maybe a group, but they must have stumbled on that ‘secret everyone knew’. “My parents are dead, too,” Sam found himself saying, though he wasn’t sure why. “My mom died when I was just a baby, but my dad…” It flashed through his mind, then, in horrible detail.
“We were hunting the thing that killed her. It was a demon, and he was powerful and he knew we were after him. There was a fight, and,” he paused, remembering the deep-seated satisfaction as the stuttering bright electric shocks zinged around the figure who toppled to the ground. “He was possessing someone and I shot him with this gun that can destroy demons. I killed some guy who probably had no idea that demons were real, but not before … not before it killed my dad.”
The moment he finished speaking, Sam felt foolish, suddenly painfully conscious of how little he knew Dean. Undoubtedly the other man would consider the story more than over-share, and Sam suddenly wondered if he should apologize. It had felt natural, just a minute ago. Felt like talking to Dean about his family had been the most normal thing. Sam felt his cheeks flush and wished he had bitten his tongue.
The silence stretched, tense and heavy, like it was holding its breath, and after a moment Sam snuck a quick glance to Dean’s face, hoping to read something of the other man’s reaction in his usually expressive eyes. There was no clue for Sam to find in Dean’s expression, though, and he looked away again.
“You think,” Dean said into the quiet. “That if you hadn’t been so hung up on killing an innocent human you might have shot sooner, and your dad might have lived?” Sam did think that, couldn’t help but think it. He turned and headed back toward the hall.
“Hey, Sam?” Dean said. Sam paused and half-turned so he could face the other man. Dean’s eyes were bright and glinting in a reflection of moonlight, half of his face in shadow. “That instinct,” he said, and then corrected, “that hesitation. You did it with Lenore, and you did it with me, too. Sometimes, there is another way.” He tipped his head to the side and suddenly the shadows were gone, and his green eyes lit with something more than moonlight, the corners of his mouth quirking just slightly upward as he said, “Of course, if you’d been a werewolf, you wouldn’t have needed some weird-ass gun to take-down the demon. In fact, you probably could have found the thing a hell of a lot sooner.” He flashed a cheeky smirk Sam’s way as he shrugged, “I guess not everyone can be perfect.”
Sam huffed a startled laugh. “Perfectly ridiculous,” he said, as he watched the exaggerated way Dean started to settle down into the sofa, punching at the pillow to fluff it and then turning his head back-and-forth as he nuzzled into it, creating an indentation in the middle that completely defeated the efforts to fluff the thing.
“Perfectly awesome,” Dean muttered, his eyes closed. “Now shut up, I’m trying to sleep.”
“Still need your beauty rest?” Sam said, fighting-back the urge to smile. “Apparently perfection is remarkably high-maintenance.” Dean gave a noncommittal grunt, his body completely lost in shadow as the back of the couch shielded him from the errant strands of light from the moon.
When Sam turned back toward the stairs, it felt like some part of him that had been restless and weighted with guilt and worry was suddenly cut-free and in danger of drifting up and away. The feeling made him smile as he headed toward his bed.
The next morning, as Sam came down the stairs in pursuit of the lilting smell of fresh coffee, he was more asleep than awake. Last night, Dean’s words, along with a merciless barrage of dark memories had circled in his head until he had more or less fallen asleep from emotional exhaustion.
He pulled a mug from the cupboard and poured the coffee, holding it for a moment and just inhaling before he managed to wake up enough to raise the mug to his lips and take a gulp. That was about the same moment that a giant wolf trotted up the steps of the back porch and through the opened screen door. “Jesus Christ!” Sam said, and was in the process of scrambling for a knife when it occurred to him that in fact, he was aware of a wolf in the neighborhood and it had yet to do anything particularly threatening.
Dean’s bright green eyes blazed as the wolf watched him, nonplussed. Sam felt impossibly foolish. After a moment, the wolf trotted past him and down the hall. Sam was halfway through his mug of coffee when Dean, now in his human form and clad in some of the new clothes he’d picked up when he’d gone into town the other day, stepped into the kitchen and grabbed a mug down from the cupboard. “Jumpy much?”
“Dude,” Sam said. “I don’t care how soft and cuddly werewolves are supposed to be, there is just no way a giant wolf trotting through your home at some ungodly hour is a calming sight, okay?”
Dean wrinkled his nose as he poured himself a mug of coffee. “Soft and cuddly?” He cast a narrow-eyed glance toward Sam, as he leaned back against the counter, steaming mug in his hands as he said, “I once took down an entire pack of gwyllion by myself! How’s that for soft and cuddly?” He flashed a sharp-toothed grin and took a large mouthful of coffee.
Sam waited for the moment just before Dean swallowed the hot brew to say, “Was your tactic to overpower them with your personal odor? Because I’d believe that.” It was somewhat of a triumph when Dean almost spat-out his mouthful.
“Dude,” Dean said, when he’d managed to swallow the coffee and choke-down the cough that Sam’s comment had startled out of him. “Was that a wet dog joke? Because I’ve heard them all!” He rolled his shoulders and squared off with Sam, every ounce of his expression and body language clearly communicating ‘let’s do this’.
A sharp lance of heat flashed through him, strong enough to almost make Sam shudder, the reaction so surprising that he found himself choking on the light-hearted tease he had been about to deliver. Dean’s eyes glinted with humor and defiance, more open and clear in that moment than Sam had seen them, and he wanted to reach out, the need to touch instinctual and natural in a way that made him reel-back from the inclination.
He barely knew Dean; it was too much, too soon. There was no reason why the banter should make his blood run hot with something that was more than simple lust. Dean was attractive, Sam could acknowledge that easily. He was also enjoyable company, but that was no excuse for the startlingly visceral response Sam had just experienced.
“Sam?” Dean asked, the teasing ebbing out of his expression and a frown moving in to take its place.
Sam forced himself to smile and roll his eyes. “I bet I could come-up with a few you haven’t heard yet,” he said, only barely remembering what they had been talking about just a minute ago, his mind preoccupied with sorting through his latest response to the werewolf. “Unfortunately, I have to head into town to pick-up a few things, so you’ll just have to wait to hear them,” he lied, careful to leave a wide birth between him and Dean as he stepped away from the counter and left the kitchen.
“Sure,” Dean’s scoffing voice followed him through the hall. “You say that, but I know you’re just buying time to figure-out some dog-jokes. You can’t fool me.”
Sam paused with his hand on the front door, unable to stop a smile from spreading. The hot-rush of want that had caused him to panic a moment before overtaken by a surge of fondness that somehow made his previous urge to pull Dean into a devouring kiss less startling. “Hey Dean,” he called. “What’s a dog’s favorite hobby?”
Dean stepped into the hallway, leaning against the doorframe. “Collecting fleas,” he answered blandly, taking a sip of coffee from his mug. “Ha, ha.”
Sam grinned again, and pulled open the door. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”
It took a little over two weeks, but eventually Dean got everything he needed, including new clothes and a wallet full of the essentials. Sam found himself stepping into the main room, the darkness from outside making it somehow easier to ask, “Where are you going to go?”
“I have no clue,” Dean said. He let out a slow breath. “But that’s nothing new.”
Sam watched from the doorway as Dean packed his belongings into the duffel bag he had bought in town. Bobby had dropped a few subtle hints, and a few not-so subtle ones in the hope that Dean might decide to hang around a bit longer. Dean seemed to be determined to move-on.
“How did you get caught?” Sam asked, after the silence hung between them. “I mean, Gordon mentioned that you were with some hunter named Steve Wandell? How did he find you?” Sam had almost asked, ‘how did he end up buying you’, and had to choke back the words. No matter how accurate they were, he could not bring himself to say it; the reality had been growing steadily more disturbing as he became more used to Dean’s presence.
“Just happened. Bad luck, I guess,” Dean dismissed, his easy posture and dismissive air making Sam suddenly remember what Bobby had told him about werewolves: fiercely protective and surprisingly social, the werewolves who killed were the ones isolated and alone.
All at once Sam connected Dean’s quiet admittance that there was no one he knew looking for him with the way he had just simply seemed to understand how lost and alone Sam had been feeling since his father had died. The thought began to take root, more convincing the more he thought about it, gaining momentum with little flashes of memory, like the way Dean had taken so quickly to Bobby, practically preening under the older mans attention. Steve Wandell had not captured Dean; Dean had surrendered. Anything was better than being driven slowly mad with loneliness, and Dean had no family, no pack, no place where he belonged.
“You know,” Sam said. “You’re more than welcome to come with me tomorrow. I mean, I’ve had about enough of being on my own, and if you’re not sick of hunting, I dunno …”
“I knew there was gonna be a price for all this,” Dean said, his voice oddly flat. “No one’s that helpful without wanting something in return.”
Sam watched the shift in the other man’s posture, the drop in the shoulders as Dean turned his head away, and found himself snapping, “Screw you, man.” Maybe it was harsh or hasty, but they’d been talking, Sam thought they were actually maybe friendly at this point. “You know what I’m saying, don’t pretend you don’t. You want to say ‘no’, that’s fine, but don’t lay it on that Bobby and I are trying to get something from you. That’s bullshit and you know it.” Sam shook his head. “You know what, forget it. It was a stupid thought.”
But when Sam came down the front steps with his duffel slung over his shoulder the next day, Dean was leaning against the Impala, his own bag lying at his feet, talking to Bobby. They fell silent as Sam came to a halt.
Dean raised his eyebrows and said, somewhat impatiently, “Dude, what’s taking so long? Come on, day’s a wastin’.”
Bobby was stifling an amused grin as Sam forced himself down the steps. “Why do I have a growing sense that I’m going to regret this?” Sam muttered as he carted his bag to the trunk.
“I heard that, Sammy!”
Sam glowered at Bobby as the man snickered. “What?” Bobby asked, innocently. “I like him.”
“I love this car,” Dean was saying, hauling his own duffel to the trunk and slinging it casually inside. “You’re going to have to let me drive it sometime, man. Seriously. In fact,” he said, and then stepped right up to Sam and stuck his hand into the pocket of his jacket.
Sam squawked. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Ah ha!” Dean said, yanking the keys from Sam’s pocket and holding them up, jingling them happily. “I’m gonna drive!
“No you’re not!”
“Sammy, this is a beautiful car. She deserves to stretch her legs on the open road, and you drive like an old lady who can barely see over the steering wheel. It’s tragic, really.”
Sam sputtered. “I don’t drive like that! Gimme my keys back!”
Dean raised his eyebrows, and kept the car keys in his fist. “Seriously, your driving was so pathetic it made me ill.” It was Sam’s turn to raise his eyebrows, but Dean pushed on. “Do you have any idea how shitty it is to feel carsick as a wolf? I didn’t even have any damned hands to roll down the window. It was horrible; I might still suffer from residual trauma from the whole experience. Do you want me to vomit on the rugs? Because I will.”
“Fine,” Sam said, releasing a heavy, exasperated sigh. “Whatever.” Dean grinned, wide and bright and triumphant, and tossed the keys in the air, catching them happily again as he pivoted and headed toward the driver’s side of the Impala.
“Residual trauma my ass,” Sam muttered to himself. He paused, one hand on the lid to trunk as he looked down, his duffel making a crooked ‘T’ with Dean’s, it felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. With a grin, Sam closed the trunk.
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|<< END PART TWO >>|
MASTERPOST