SPN fic: Homeward Bound By Proxy
Done for ratherastory's comment meme, here, for the prompt below from shangrilada:
So Sam is having a really bad time with post-concussion crap and hallucinations and basically feeling overwhelmed and everything, and there's this little stray puppy that keeps crying at the door of Rufus's cabin. Naturally Sam starts leaving it food, but he discovers slowly how much the little guy is helping him feel grounded and needed and capable, and taking care of the puppy is something he can do well and reliably, and it gives him a reason to get up.
Dean really does not like (or is allergic to????) freaking dogs. It doesn't help that the last ones he knew were the ones who chewed him up and dragged him down to hell.
DISCUSS.
I got maybe a little of Sam's post-concussion crap--more like healing by distraction and neglect than actual H/C. And maybe a tiny bit of Dean's Hellhound issues. And the puppy--he's pushing the age range.
But dammit, I met this dog. And I don't know if he got his happy ending in real life, so I had to write this.
Title: Homeward Bound By Proxy
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Dean, Bobby. Gen.
Warnings: Self-harm (never thought I'd have to write that)
Spoilers: 7.3
Word Count: 4000
Genre: Puppy!fic
Disclaimer: I disclaim!
Summary: Sam makes friends with a dog who lives in the woods around Rufus' cabin.
Sam was trying very hard not to freak out again.
He'd had his one freak-out, and Dean had taken care of it -- fortunately, that was a few hours before the concussion started eating into his memories and everything became a blur of burnt timber and twisted metal. Now that Dean had taught him how to at least keep a toe-hold on reality, it was up to Sam to figure out the long term, and that meant research. He got online with his wifi card and looked at research articles and support for rape survivors and prisoners-of-war. Some of it was familiar from when Dean had come back from Hell, but it made a whole lot more sense now.
Inevitably, he'd notice Lucifer reading over his shoulder, and then he'd be reading about recovering from abuse with his abuser mocking him just inches from his ear, and then he'd force himself to remember that Lucifer was all in his head, which lead him to the horrifying conclusion that part of his subconscious had turned into Lucifer and Lucifer was now a permanent part of him. Research wasn't helping.
"Sammy!" Dean called from the couch, startling him. Sam's head throbbed and his vision blacked out for a moment when he turned too fast. It felt a little like flying off a merry-go-round, and for some reason his cheeks wanted to grin spontaneously, even as his stomach contemplated crawling up his throat. The part of his subconscious that was Lucifer became distracted by the battle to keep his lunch down and forgot to exist.
"I need my tunes!" Dean whined.
Sam scowled at him.
"And my Walkman!"
Sam caught himself before he snapped something stupid like, "I'm not your freaking butler," and instead eased himself to his feet and shuffled out the door. It was mid-morning, still cold, and the sunbeams hurt his eyes, ricocheted around his skull, and lodged in his teeth. Having a real body was unmistakeably weird.
The birds and squirrels were silent. Sam managed not to pass out as he leaned into the Impala, retrieving the box of tapes from under the front seat and the Walkman from a surplus M-16 ammo crate in the depths of the trunk, and as he stacked his burdens and turned back toward the house, he spotted a dark shape watching from the woods. He shifted the box to one arm and reached for his gun.
Wind tossed the shadowing trees aside, and in a flicker of sunlight, Sam saw glossy black fur, two eyes, four legs, and a slowly wagging tail on a rangy frame no higher than his knee. A long tongue lolled out between the usual number of teeth. Sam slipped his hand out from under the back of his shirt, and knelt in the gravel. He licked his lips, and the dog cocked its head, tail stilling. "Here, bud --"
The dog hunched and dashed into the woods, the crash and swish of shaken bracken faint and fading fast.
--
That evening, Sam took the heels out of the bags of sandwich bread and left them on the cabin's front porch. They were gone by morning. He supposed it could have been raccoons or birds that'd eaten them, but he saw the dog watching the place again. It patrolled methodically, loping through the woods on straight paths, more like a coyote than a house pet running loose. Maybe it was a farm dog. Looked like a Labrador.
He left more bread out for the dog, and Dean and Bobby never seemed to miss it, but he knew Dean knew he was up to something by the way Dean would focus extra hard on PBS or Lifetime or whatever saccharine drivel had caught his imagination, whenever Sam headed toward the door. Like Sam was a stray dog who wouldn't eat when he was being stared at. Speaking of which, Sam needed a book, a blanket, and a deck chair, because if he wanted to get a good look at the dog, he'd need to pull a stake-out.
Dusk found him parked in the driveway with a couple pieces of bread and a book on forest ecology, straining his eyes in the dim light and watching the bats crawl out from under the eaves. Dean texted him every fifteen minutes griping about how lame whatever TV show that had suckered him in was. Sam swallowed his pride and texted back, pretending to make fun of him so Dean would know he was still conscious, then got back to squinting at the tiny print to see if the label on that graph on ecological succession said 37 +/- 12 or 87 +/- 12 and speculating that an archeology book might be a lot more useful for figuring out how to locate hundred-year-old graves. A bat dived at his head, and he froze, his whole body knotted and stupid with terror -- and how was he going to hunt now, when he sees something coming for him and he freezes so as not to make it mad?
He caught his breath and looked around, then sent the book and his phone flying when he spotted glowing green eyes in the dark and jumped out of the chair.
The dog fled again, and he swore.
His head pounded at the sudden movement. He pawed around blindly for the chair back, then braced himself, hunching in dull pain, until he could see and stand on his own. When his eyes cleared, he saw the dog again, just five feet away, licking bread crumbs off its lips. The dog's ears flicked back, and Sam cut his eyes away, holding very still.
It sniffed his hand.
Sam looked down, and the dog looked up with its limpid fathomless eyes, and a switch had flipped somewhere, because it was no longer the wary self-possessed prowler of the forest that Sam had been stalking: its floppy ears bunched forward, its large jaws parted, its front paws splayed, and its tail began to wag in earnest, harder and harder the longer Sam watched, until its whole hind end was swinging from side to side. Sam eased his fingers behind its ears, and the dog leaned into his leg as he began to scratch, gazing up at him adoringly. He grinned back.
--
The dog wasn't there the next morning when Sam checked out the windows. He walked around the cabin to be sure. Lucifer was leaning against the front door when he got back. "Dean just doesn't do it for you anymore, does he?" The other vessel's brow furrowed in sympathy. "It's been way too long since Alistair had a crack at him. I get it. But no run-of-the-mill stray dog's gonna fill your hole, Sammy. You'll have to string 'im up in a tree and beat 'im with a stick for a few months, maybe shoot his nose off with a shotgun, if you wanna pretend the thing's half as broken as you."
Sam squeezed his temples. "Dean?" he called.
"Yeah?" Dean shot up as well as he could, head whipping around over the couch arm. He'd been reading the forty-year-old manual for Rufus' generator during the commercial breaks for Cartoon Network.
"I need you to multiply two two-digit prime numbers. Don't tell me what they are, just tell me the answer." Sam shook his head at Dean's bewildered look.
"Cryptography?" Dean and Lucifer chorused.
"Just? Please."
Dean rolled his eyes up to the ceiling for a few moments and wiggled his fingers in the air distractedly. "Fifteen-seventy-three," he said at last. "What's the deal?"
Sam pursed his lips, jerking his head at Lucifer, then glared at Lucifer, raising an eyebrow in challenge.
"I already admitted I'm not real," Lucifer drawled. He swaggered forward, and Sam sucked in a breath, imagining his feet rooted to the floor. "And even if I was -- if I'm me? And not you? I don't have to show myself just 'cause you threw me a puzzle." He widened his eyes as though a thought had come to him. "Do you miss me?"
Sam grabbed his bad hand until warm blood slicked the inside of the bandage. Dean was staring at him, twisted almost all the way around on the couch, fingers digging into the arm. "Stop listening to that bastard," Dean growled. "Don't play games with him, just concentrate on what's real."
"He's just in my head, Dean, he's not gonna outwit me," Sam sighed.
Dean grimaced. "Well, if anyone could outwit himself, it's you. Make me a sandwich, bitch. Side order of Percocet."
Sam did, looking out the kitchen window for the dog.
--
The dog showed back up when Bobby did. Sam couldn't look at the TV for an hour straight, much less the road, so Bobby was the only one who could head out for the so-called town (lumber yard, main street, and gas station) for provisions. When Bobby's car pulled in, Sam headed out to help carry in grocery bags, and as they both stomped back in the door, the dog rattled up the steps and slipped right past Sam's knees and into the house.
Dean yelped. Bobby tossed his bags onto the nearby table and charged over, Sam following unsteadily. Dean was bolt upright, struggling to swing his leg casted leg down to the floor with his nerves fogged by opiates as he windmilled his arms at the dog, which was licking his toes. As Bobby circled around, the dog left off Dean's foot, and darted back to investigate Dean's crotch, then his face. Dean let out another undignified noise, and flailed at the dog until he managed to catch it by the neck, holding it at arm's length while it bowed and wriggled, whining happily and licking his elbows.
Dean's face was a mask of horror, just like that time he'd had ghost sickness, and like then, it was pretty hilarious until Sam realized why it wasn't funny at all. For an instant, Sam's vision of the skinny black dog narrowed to white teeth and saliva, and he almost went for his gun, could have, except the dog bounced away from Dean to jump up on the table and try to steal the frankfurters. Sam lunged for it, and the dog darted aside with a wary look. It lifted its leg to piss on a cabinet on the way into the kitchen, then clawed wildly at the floor when Sam followed it in and tried to corner it, slipped back out into the living room, pissed on the back of the couch, and at last bolted back outside when Bobby herded it toward the wide-open door.
Dean finally got his twisted walking stick in hand and levered himself upright. He looked down at his spit-covered hands and the yellow stain half-way up the back of the couch, and swore energetically.
Sam felt himself trying to disappear. “I'll get the . . . um.” Exactly how did they get piss out of fabric upholstery? “Towels?” He looked sideways at Bobby. “Bleach?”
Bobby huffed, and rubbed his hip with his palm. “Start with water. Then, I don't know, whatever's under the kitchen sink, do I look like Martha Stewart to you? Just don't bleach the woodwork.”
Sam nodded and lowered himself slowly to the floor in the kitchen. Dean's unsteady thumping sounded behind him. “Sit down, man,” Sam told him. Dean looked like he wanted a shot or three, but he'd have to make do with Swiss Miss. Like this one kid Sam had met in twelfth grade who threw small parties every time his parents left on business, Bobby knew where Rufus stashed all his liquor, but he'd hid it. It was probably a good idea.
“He pissed on my couch,” Dean exclaimed, incredulous. “Right behind my head!”
“Sorry.” Sam grabbed a bottle of dish soap and a couple of kitchen towels. The cabin had spares, but no washing machine. Bobby bustled around behind him, putting cans in cupboards. “I'll clean it up --”
“And I swear he was tryin' to eat my face,” Dean continued, going a little pale and swaying as he clung to his stick. “Damn dog.” He clumped to one of the dining chairs and settled into it awkwardly. “You and your friends, Sammy.”
Bobby scowled at Sam as he stood up. “So that's where the bread all got to.”
“Hey, Sam,” Lucifer exclaimed, perching on the counter and waving the carving knife under Bobby's nose. “Wanna see me kill 'em?”
Sam rammed his funny bone into a nearby wall, then counted to a hundred while he sank back to his knees to clean up dog piss.
--
The next day, Sam sat out in the sun and read oral tradition collected from the Lakota Sioux, a frankfurter on the gravel under his chair. The dog came back after a few hours, and after gulping down the meat in two bites, jumped up on his lap and did its best to clean out the inside of his nostrils, tail swinging its hips back and forth.
Sam pulled his head away and fended him off. His fingers hooked in something thin, tight around the dog's neck: a chain, one of those snare chains that slip on over a dog's head, able to tighten down hard, but mostly supposed to hang loose. This one was far too small. As though sensing he was caught, the dog stopped wagging, and flattened his ears against his neck. Sam shushed him as he began to pull away, and slid the chain up his neck with one hand while he scratched the dog's throat and under his chin with the other.
The chain wouldn't come off.
With the dog half in his lap, in the daylight, Sam got a good look. His spine jutted up, his waist was tucked and angular, and his ribs all stuck out. His legs and neck were muscled, and the dog moved well, fast and confident as it crept under bushes and leapt over logs, but his neck was scrawny. He was young, obviously not too young what with all the pissing, but still had the elastic whole-body wriggle of a puppy.
Sam found two tags dangling from the chain: a stainless steel rabies tag, and a weathered anodized aluminum tab reading, “Blue.”
--
The next afternoon, Sam watched Blue out the window as he lay in front of Bobby's Charger, methodically tearing a squirrel into bits and pieces. He'd already horked all the guts down, and was working on gnawing the head off. Sam was morbidly curious how he'd swallow the rest of it.
Dean was watching Sam from the couch, a muted smile flickering on his face. “Find any Amber Alerts on him?”
Sam looked down at his IPad. “They're not that organized,” he grumbled. “According to this, the only way to find the owner with just the rabies tag is through the clinic that gave him the shots, and even then, they could get him confused with some other dog, or they might've tossed out the owner's contact information. You know, 'cause they probably think he's dead.” Sam rubbed his eyes. “He's probably been on his own since he was half this size.”
“Sam, take a break,” Dean grunted, settling back into his nest.
Sam glared at the back of his head. “I don't need you telling me to take a nap anymore, it's been a week.”
“You're all grouchy. Go play with the slobbery flea-ridden bag-of-bones. Buck's waiting for you.”
Sam glanced out the window, and saw the dog wrestling with the squirrel carcass, its head in his mouth and his paw on its torso, an eyeball popping out between his teeth every time he chewed. “It's Blue,” Sam corrected.
“Don't tell me you never read Call of the Wild.”
After Blue finished his squirrel, Sam went outside and threw a stick for him. Blue watched the stick, then stared at him as though waiting for the punchline of a joke. “You're supposed to --” Sam sighed and leaned down to scratch his head. Blue sat on his boots, panting up at him. “Never mind.”
Sam lured him over to the Impala and cut his chain off with the bolt cutters. The chain drizzled to the ground and Blue stared down at it, startled, before shaking himself and scratching his neck, revealing a white ring of broken hair where the chain had been. Sam saved the tags, trudged back up to the front door, and blocked Blue with his legs when he tried to sneak inside. “You need some finishing school, Buddy,” he remarked.
Behind him, Lucifer clucked his tongue, then dug his thumbs deep into Blue's eyes. Sam had to stop himself from clawing at thin air while Blue screamed. “You know he's never gonna adjust to civilian life, don't you?” Lucifer grinned down. Sam could see the scratch marks Blue's scrabbling claws left in the porch boards. “He'll have to rough it up here, all alone . . . or he could spend years in a tiny cage begging for lethal injection. Oh, the parallels.”
Sam squeezed Blue's tags until the edges bit into his palm, slipped inside, and sat down with his phone and a pad of paper.
--
“Bobby, I need a favor,” Sam announced over scrambled eggs the next morning.
Bobby muttered something that sounded like “when don't you?” into his coffee, but he seemed tolerant when he met Sam's eyes. “As long as it don't involve driving that dog around in my car, sure, Sam.”
Sam swallowed.
--
Dean saw them off. Blue had been hanging around the house a lot the last few days, and once Sam got part of an old belt around his neck for a collar, he was allowed to poke his nose into the cabin and sniff Dean's fist. Dean gave Blue and Sam a grimace that was trying its best to act like a smile. “Yeah, you're a good dog,” Dean muttered. “A good, black, mangy, feral, rabbit-killing dog -- Sam, just take him home. And pick yourself up some flea shampoo while you're out.”
Bobby made Sam cover the Charger's back seat in an old blanket before they picked Blue up and stuffed him in. Blue wouldn't stay in the back seat. They drove an hour to Blue's old vet clinic with Blue sitting on Sam's lap, digging his paws into his crotch and whacking his tail back and forth between the seat back and the gear shift. When they finally arrived and got out of the car, Blue nearly strangled himself trying to run away with his makeshift leash, then pissed happily on Sam's leg. Sam glared at him. Blue licked his hand.
The vet clinic was a small cinderblock building on the outskirts of the nearest town with a Kmart. Its lobby was decorated with framed watercolor Gary Larson cartoons, and staffed by a chubby young blonde woman. Blue pissed on the door frame as they came in, then he took aim at one of the chairs and would have soaked the seat if Sam hadn't pulled him off balance in the nick of time. He nailed the front desk twice while Sam and Bobby filled out forms and handed over his tags. All the while, his tail wagged in powerful sweeping arcs that bent his whole body like a fish.
“You found the owners?” Sam asked for the third time as he invented contact information to fill the hungry lines on the form. Each false letter felt like threads fraying from a rope. He ignored Bobby's bemused glance and the receptionist's sigh. “I mean, you contacted them -- somebody contacted them, so you know they want him back? I mean, he's not really -- he's not house-trained. At all. And if they don't . . .” Sam cut himself off, blinking at the form containing Graham Greene's contact information and the phone number for an apartment Sam had lived at in 1998. Blue gnawed on the molding of the reception desk, tail whacking against the back of Bobby's leg. “If he can't --”
“Here,” Bobby interrupted, handing the woman a business card. “If Graham here can't be reached at home, call this number and I'll get the message to him. Boy's developed a personal interest in that dog.”
The receptionist nodded, her eyes softening. “ I'll make a note to let you both know how Blue settles in.”
Sam handed over Blue's leash. She pulled him into the back of the clinic, one hand on the improvised collar and the other behind his ears, and then all Sam had left of Blue was half a chain collar in the kitchen trash can and a drying stain on his jeans.
Bobby picked up a bottle of flea shampoo from a nearby shelf and showed it to Sam with a dry smirk.
Sam shook his head sourly. “I'll chance it.”
--
Dean found Homeward Bound on TV that night and made Sam watch with him. Sam compared Blue to the improbably sarcastic dogs and cat onscreen (free from CGI puppetry, small mercy) and decided Blue had done relatively well for himself out there, since he didn't have half a porcupine embedded in his face. Blue probably didn't have some heartbroken child actor waiting for him to come home, though. Sam wondered how he'd react to his first chain-link fence, if he'd walk right into it or dig his way out, and if he'd feel an itch under his fur for the woods and wilds, if he'd vanish in the night to hunt coyotes, if he'd eat people's cats. He was, likely as not, doomed between scraping by alone and getting thrown out on his furry rear end. Like Dean, you'd never know it to look at him.
Dean snickered at the TV, oblivious to Lucifer petting his hair.
Bobby got a call the next afternoon while he was throwing together a pot of chili. “Speaking,” he grumbled after rinsing onion off his hands. “M-hm. Yes, I can. Go ahead, ma'am.” Sam, busy carving up a bright red shank of unidentified mammal recovered from Rufus' freezer, slowed his work and listened in. A faint voice slipped past Bobby's ear from the speaker, and Bobby mm'ed and m-hm'ed at appropriate intervals. As the caller continued, Bobby's mustache bristled and his eyes widened. Sam caught the phrase “a bit bloody” and “a bit of a mess” and then it was bloodbath and a bit of a massacre, and when he bent back down to his work, shaking his head hard, the shank on the carving board was round and pale-skinned, gushing blood that slithered and spread up his knife, over his hand; in the time it took to gasp, it was coating him, blinding him with red, teasing his throat and nostrils with sulfur, suffocating his skin in wet heat. He couldn't move. The blood was already stinging the corners of his eyes, trying to burrow its way in, and if he opened his mouth --
A stinging slap struck his cheek. He blinked down dumbly at Bobby, who hissed, “Breathe, dammit.”
Sam breathed. Bobby picked his phone back up and apologized. The voice on the other end finished its story, and Bobby hung up. “That was the vet's,” Bobby reported.
Sam set the knife down and tried to compose himself. “Yeah?”
“Dog's owners came and picked him up.”
Sam let out a rush of breath and waited for Bobby to continue.
“It's a family out in the back-country. The son was over the moon to get his dog back.”
“Good,” Sam replied. A dog like that needed a kid, and a kid would throw a fit if anyone tried to get rid of him for pissing on furniture. “That's excellent. Thanks, Bobby.”
“Apparently,” Bobby added, watching Sam as though bearing bad news, “the dog didn't do so well in the kennels overnight. Wagged its tail against the wall so hard it broke the skin and bled all over the clinic. Dog's fine,” he assured Sam, like the delicate flower Sam had become. “Just left a mess.”
“Bloodbath,” Sam muttered to himself.
Bobby patted his shoulder. “Dog's fine.”
--
After dinner, Sam joined Dean with a printout from Rufus' Kaballa database and a beer, flicking on a floor lamp and settling into a nearby armchair. Dean turned the volume down on what looked like a god-awful MTV reality show so Sam could concentrate.
“So how's Chance?”
Sam looked up from the sheaf of paper and the Hebrew dictionary balanced on his knees, and took his pen out of his mouth. “Huh?”
Dean studiously avoided eye contact, watching a half-dozen moneyed twenty-somethings mingle in a hot tub. One had her chest blurred out in post-production. “Your furry friend.”
“Blue.” Sam winced, wondering why everyone was being so solicitous about the dog, after it had tried to pee on every vertical surface in the house and Sam had sneaked it a third of their food. It was like they thought he was some sort of post-trauma therapy dog, sent by Fate that Sam might remain vertical, not a seriously unlucky pup with no social skills who needed all the help he could get. “Blue's fine. He's with his family. He's good.”
“You?” Dean asked hesitantly.
Sam cut him off. “Can't complain.” He put the pen back in his mouth and flipped aimlessly through the dictionary.
“I woulda liked a dog like that,” Dean murmured, a still silhouette in the corner of Sam's eye. “Before.”
Sam huddled in the too-small easy chair, poring over the baffling text and watching Dean watch MTV, until the moon rose, and Dean began to snore.
Silently, Sam got up to turn off the TV and the lights. When he turned around, Lucifer had stolen his seat. “Mm, nice and warm,” Lucifer purred.
Sam bared his teeth and backed away, the backs of his knees banging into the coffee table.
“I got the question to your answer, Sam,” said Lucifer mildly, sitting up and leaning his elbows on his knees. “Of course you'll be consumed with curiosity until you figure out how I did it. Maybe the number Dean gave you came from me instead. Maybe I possessed you for an hour to use a calculator and some prime number tables, then gave you amnesia.”
“Shut up,” Sam hissed. Lucifer wasn't yet verging on pain-bringing territory, except Sam could feel his own terrified curiosity sucking him in. He clasped his hands.
“Twenty-nine times fifty-three makes fifteen-thirty-seven,” Lucifer announced. “I solved your riddle. I am a champion code cracker -- and now, bitch boy, you have three options: you're just that crazy, we're just that smart -- and seriously, you were never as smart as you think you are -- or, my favorite --” He rose from the chair and hooked Sam's neck under his arm, strangling the blood from Sam's head as his breath ruffled Sam's hair. “I'm actually here. With you. Full circle.”
Sam crushed his bad palm with his thumb and gasped in the silence. Dean slept on, muzzy and incautious with opiates. Pain was different here; thanks to Dean, he knew he was back. As for the rest --
“I'm outwitting myself,” Sam whispered in the dark. “I'm just outwitting myself. Like Dean said.”
As he trudged up to bed, Sam caught himself wondering if Lucifer knew anything helpful about Leviathans.
So Sam is having a really bad time with post-concussion crap and hallucinations and basically feeling overwhelmed and everything, and there's this little stray puppy that keeps crying at the door of Rufus's cabin. Naturally Sam starts leaving it food, but he discovers slowly how much the little guy is helping him feel grounded and needed and capable, and taking care of the puppy is something he can do well and reliably, and it gives him a reason to get up.
Dean really does not like (or is allergic to????) freaking dogs. It doesn't help that the last ones he knew were the ones who chewed him up and dragged him down to hell.
DISCUSS.
I got maybe a little of Sam's post-concussion crap--more like healing by distraction and neglect than actual H/C. And maybe a tiny bit of Dean's Hellhound issues. And the puppy--he's pushing the age range.
But dammit, I met this dog. And I don't know if he got his happy ending in real life, so I had to write this.
Title: Homeward Bound By Proxy
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Dean, Bobby. Gen.
Warnings: Self-harm (never thought I'd have to write that)
Spoilers: 7.3
Word Count: 4000
Genre: Puppy!fic
Disclaimer: I disclaim!
Summary: Sam makes friends with a dog who lives in the woods around Rufus' cabin.
Sam was trying very hard not to freak out again.
He'd had his one freak-out, and Dean had taken care of it -- fortunately, that was a few hours before the concussion started eating into his memories and everything became a blur of burnt timber and twisted metal. Now that Dean had taught him how to at least keep a toe-hold on reality, it was up to Sam to figure out the long term, and that meant research. He got online with his wifi card and looked at research articles and support for rape survivors and prisoners-of-war. Some of it was familiar from when Dean had come back from Hell, but it made a whole lot more sense now.
Inevitably, he'd notice Lucifer reading over his shoulder, and then he'd be reading about recovering from abuse with his abuser mocking him just inches from his ear, and then he'd force himself to remember that Lucifer was all in his head, which lead him to the horrifying conclusion that part of his subconscious had turned into Lucifer and Lucifer was now a permanent part of him. Research wasn't helping.
"Sammy!" Dean called from the couch, startling him. Sam's head throbbed and his vision blacked out for a moment when he turned too fast. It felt a little like flying off a merry-go-round, and for some reason his cheeks wanted to grin spontaneously, even as his stomach contemplated crawling up his throat. The part of his subconscious that was Lucifer became distracted by the battle to keep his lunch down and forgot to exist.
"I need my tunes!" Dean whined.
Sam scowled at him.
"And my Walkman!"
Sam caught himself before he snapped something stupid like, "I'm not your freaking butler," and instead eased himself to his feet and shuffled out the door. It was mid-morning, still cold, and the sunbeams hurt his eyes, ricocheted around his skull, and lodged in his teeth. Having a real body was unmistakeably weird.
The birds and squirrels were silent. Sam managed not to pass out as he leaned into the Impala, retrieving the box of tapes from under the front seat and the Walkman from a surplus M-16 ammo crate in the depths of the trunk, and as he stacked his burdens and turned back toward the house, he spotted a dark shape watching from the woods. He shifted the box to one arm and reached for his gun.
Wind tossed the shadowing trees aside, and in a flicker of sunlight, Sam saw glossy black fur, two eyes, four legs, and a slowly wagging tail on a rangy frame no higher than his knee. A long tongue lolled out between the usual number of teeth. Sam slipped his hand out from under the back of his shirt, and knelt in the gravel. He licked his lips, and the dog cocked its head, tail stilling. "Here, bud --"
The dog hunched and dashed into the woods, the crash and swish of shaken bracken faint and fading fast.
--
That evening, Sam took the heels out of the bags of sandwich bread and left them on the cabin's front porch. They were gone by morning. He supposed it could have been raccoons or birds that'd eaten them, but he saw the dog watching the place again. It patrolled methodically, loping through the woods on straight paths, more like a coyote than a house pet running loose. Maybe it was a farm dog. Looked like a Labrador.
He left more bread out for the dog, and Dean and Bobby never seemed to miss it, but he knew Dean knew he was up to something by the way Dean would focus extra hard on PBS or Lifetime or whatever saccharine drivel had caught his imagination, whenever Sam headed toward the door. Like Sam was a stray dog who wouldn't eat when he was being stared at. Speaking of which, Sam needed a book, a blanket, and a deck chair, because if he wanted to get a good look at the dog, he'd need to pull a stake-out.
Dusk found him parked in the driveway with a couple pieces of bread and a book on forest ecology, straining his eyes in the dim light and watching the bats crawl out from under the eaves. Dean texted him every fifteen minutes griping about how lame whatever TV show that had suckered him in was. Sam swallowed his pride and texted back, pretending to make fun of him so Dean would know he was still conscious, then got back to squinting at the tiny print to see if the label on that graph on ecological succession said 37 +/- 12 or 87 +/- 12 and speculating that an archeology book might be a lot more useful for figuring out how to locate hundred-year-old graves. A bat dived at his head, and he froze, his whole body knotted and stupid with terror -- and how was he going to hunt now, when he sees something coming for him and he freezes so as not to make it mad?
He caught his breath and looked around, then sent the book and his phone flying when he spotted glowing green eyes in the dark and jumped out of the chair.
The dog fled again, and he swore.
His head pounded at the sudden movement. He pawed around blindly for the chair back, then braced himself, hunching in dull pain, until he could see and stand on his own. When his eyes cleared, he saw the dog again, just five feet away, licking bread crumbs off its lips. The dog's ears flicked back, and Sam cut his eyes away, holding very still.
It sniffed his hand.
Sam looked down, and the dog looked up with its limpid fathomless eyes, and a switch had flipped somewhere, because it was no longer the wary self-possessed prowler of the forest that Sam had been stalking: its floppy ears bunched forward, its large jaws parted, its front paws splayed, and its tail began to wag in earnest, harder and harder the longer Sam watched, until its whole hind end was swinging from side to side. Sam eased his fingers behind its ears, and the dog leaned into his leg as he began to scratch, gazing up at him adoringly. He grinned back.
--
The dog wasn't there the next morning when Sam checked out the windows. He walked around the cabin to be sure. Lucifer was leaning against the front door when he got back. "Dean just doesn't do it for you anymore, does he?" The other vessel's brow furrowed in sympathy. "It's been way too long since Alistair had a crack at him. I get it. But no run-of-the-mill stray dog's gonna fill your hole, Sammy. You'll have to string 'im up in a tree and beat 'im with a stick for a few months, maybe shoot his nose off with a shotgun, if you wanna pretend the thing's half as broken as you."
Sam squeezed his temples. "Dean?" he called.
"Yeah?" Dean shot up as well as he could, head whipping around over the couch arm. He'd been reading the forty-year-old manual for Rufus' generator during the commercial breaks for Cartoon Network.
"I need you to multiply two two-digit prime numbers. Don't tell me what they are, just tell me the answer." Sam shook his head at Dean's bewildered look.
"Cryptography?" Dean and Lucifer chorused.
"Just? Please."
Dean rolled his eyes up to the ceiling for a few moments and wiggled his fingers in the air distractedly. "Fifteen-seventy-three," he said at last. "What's the deal?"
Sam pursed his lips, jerking his head at Lucifer, then glared at Lucifer, raising an eyebrow in challenge.
"I already admitted I'm not real," Lucifer drawled. He swaggered forward, and Sam sucked in a breath, imagining his feet rooted to the floor. "And even if I was -- if I'm me? And not you? I don't have to show myself just 'cause you threw me a puzzle." He widened his eyes as though a thought had come to him. "Do you miss me?"
Sam grabbed his bad hand until warm blood slicked the inside of the bandage. Dean was staring at him, twisted almost all the way around on the couch, fingers digging into the arm. "Stop listening to that bastard," Dean growled. "Don't play games with him, just concentrate on what's real."
"He's just in my head, Dean, he's not gonna outwit me," Sam sighed.
Dean grimaced. "Well, if anyone could outwit himself, it's you. Make me a sandwich, bitch. Side order of Percocet."
Sam did, looking out the kitchen window for the dog.
--
The dog showed back up when Bobby did. Sam couldn't look at the TV for an hour straight, much less the road, so Bobby was the only one who could head out for the so-called town (lumber yard, main street, and gas station) for provisions. When Bobby's car pulled in, Sam headed out to help carry in grocery bags, and as they both stomped back in the door, the dog rattled up the steps and slipped right past Sam's knees and into the house.
Dean yelped. Bobby tossed his bags onto the nearby table and charged over, Sam following unsteadily. Dean was bolt upright, struggling to swing his leg casted leg down to the floor with his nerves fogged by opiates as he windmilled his arms at the dog, which was licking his toes. As Bobby circled around, the dog left off Dean's foot, and darted back to investigate Dean's crotch, then his face. Dean let out another undignified noise, and flailed at the dog until he managed to catch it by the neck, holding it at arm's length while it bowed and wriggled, whining happily and licking his elbows.
Dean's face was a mask of horror, just like that time he'd had ghost sickness, and like then, it was pretty hilarious until Sam realized why it wasn't funny at all. For an instant, Sam's vision of the skinny black dog narrowed to white teeth and saliva, and he almost went for his gun, could have, except the dog bounced away from Dean to jump up on the table and try to steal the frankfurters. Sam lunged for it, and the dog darted aside with a wary look. It lifted its leg to piss on a cabinet on the way into the kitchen, then clawed wildly at the floor when Sam followed it in and tried to corner it, slipped back out into the living room, pissed on the back of the couch, and at last bolted back outside when Bobby herded it toward the wide-open door.
Dean finally got his twisted walking stick in hand and levered himself upright. He looked down at his spit-covered hands and the yellow stain half-way up the back of the couch, and swore energetically.
Sam felt himself trying to disappear. “I'll get the . . . um.” Exactly how did they get piss out of fabric upholstery? “Towels?” He looked sideways at Bobby. “Bleach?”
Bobby huffed, and rubbed his hip with his palm. “Start with water. Then, I don't know, whatever's under the kitchen sink, do I look like Martha Stewart to you? Just don't bleach the woodwork.”
Sam nodded and lowered himself slowly to the floor in the kitchen. Dean's unsteady thumping sounded behind him. “Sit down, man,” Sam told him. Dean looked like he wanted a shot or three, but he'd have to make do with Swiss Miss. Like this one kid Sam had met in twelfth grade who threw small parties every time his parents left on business, Bobby knew where Rufus stashed all his liquor, but he'd hid it. It was probably a good idea.
“He pissed on my couch,” Dean exclaimed, incredulous. “Right behind my head!”
“Sorry.” Sam grabbed a bottle of dish soap and a couple of kitchen towels. The cabin had spares, but no washing machine. Bobby bustled around behind him, putting cans in cupboards. “I'll clean it up --”
“And I swear he was tryin' to eat my face,” Dean continued, going a little pale and swaying as he clung to his stick. “Damn dog.” He clumped to one of the dining chairs and settled into it awkwardly. “You and your friends, Sammy.”
Bobby scowled at Sam as he stood up. “So that's where the bread all got to.”
“Hey, Sam,” Lucifer exclaimed, perching on the counter and waving the carving knife under Bobby's nose. “Wanna see me kill 'em?”
Sam rammed his funny bone into a nearby wall, then counted to a hundred while he sank back to his knees to clean up dog piss.
--
The next day, Sam sat out in the sun and read oral tradition collected from the Lakota Sioux, a frankfurter on the gravel under his chair. The dog came back after a few hours, and after gulping down the meat in two bites, jumped up on his lap and did its best to clean out the inside of his nostrils, tail swinging its hips back and forth.
Sam pulled his head away and fended him off. His fingers hooked in something thin, tight around the dog's neck: a chain, one of those snare chains that slip on over a dog's head, able to tighten down hard, but mostly supposed to hang loose. This one was far too small. As though sensing he was caught, the dog stopped wagging, and flattened his ears against his neck. Sam shushed him as he began to pull away, and slid the chain up his neck with one hand while he scratched the dog's throat and under his chin with the other.
The chain wouldn't come off.
With the dog half in his lap, in the daylight, Sam got a good look. His spine jutted up, his waist was tucked and angular, and his ribs all stuck out. His legs and neck were muscled, and the dog moved well, fast and confident as it crept under bushes and leapt over logs, but his neck was scrawny. He was young, obviously not too young what with all the pissing, but still had the elastic whole-body wriggle of a puppy.
Sam found two tags dangling from the chain: a stainless steel rabies tag, and a weathered anodized aluminum tab reading, “Blue.”
--
The next afternoon, Sam watched Blue out the window as he lay in front of Bobby's Charger, methodically tearing a squirrel into bits and pieces. He'd already horked all the guts down, and was working on gnawing the head off. Sam was morbidly curious how he'd swallow the rest of it.
Dean was watching Sam from the couch, a muted smile flickering on his face. “Find any Amber Alerts on him?”
Sam looked down at his IPad. “They're not that organized,” he grumbled. “According to this, the only way to find the owner with just the rabies tag is through the clinic that gave him the shots, and even then, they could get him confused with some other dog, or they might've tossed out the owner's contact information. You know, 'cause they probably think he's dead.” Sam rubbed his eyes. “He's probably been on his own since he was half this size.”
“Sam, take a break,” Dean grunted, settling back into his nest.
Sam glared at the back of his head. “I don't need you telling me to take a nap anymore, it's been a week.”
“You're all grouchy. Go play with the slobbery flea-ridden bag-of-bones. Buck's waiting for you.”
Sam glanced out the window, and saw the dog wrestling with the squirrel carcass, its head in his mouth and his paw on its torso, an eyeball popping out between his teeth every time he chewed. “It's Blue,” Sam corrected.
“Don't tell me you never read Call of the Wild.”
After Blue finished his squirrel, Sam went outside and threw a stick for him. Blue watched the stick, then stared at him as though waiting for the punchline of a joke. “You're supposed to --” Sam sighed and leaned down to scratch his head. Blue sat on his boots, panting up at him. “Never mind.”
Sam lured him over to the Impala and cut his chain off with the bolt cutters. The chain drizzled to the ground and Blue stared down at it, startled, before shaking himself and scratching his neck, revealing a white ring of broken hair where the chain had been. Sam saved the tags, trudged back up to the front door, and blocked Blue with his legs when he tried to sneak inside. “You need some finishing school, Buddy,” he remarked.
Behind him, Lucifer clucked his tongue, then dug his thumbs deep into Blue's eyes. Sam had to stop himself from clawing at thin air while Blue screamed. “You know he's never gonna adjust to civilian life, don't you?” Lucifer grinned down. Sam could see the scratch marks Blue's scrabbling claws left in the porch boards. “He'll have to rough it up here, all alone . . . or he could spend years in a tiny cage begging for lethal injection. Oh, the parallels.”
Sam squeezed Blue's tags until the edges bit into his palm, slipped inside, and sat down with his phone and a pad of paper.
--
“Bobby, I need a favor,” Sam announced over scrambled eggs the next morning.
Bobby muttered something that sounded like “when don't you?” into his coffee, but he seemed tolerant when he met Sam's eyes. “As long as it don't involve driving that dog around in my car, sure, Sam.”
Sam swallowed.
--
Dean saw them off. Blue had been hanging around the house a lot the last few days, and once Sam got part of an old belt around his neck for a collar, he was allowed to poke his nose into the cabin and sniff Dean's fist. Dean gave Blue and Sam a grimace that was trying its best to act like a smile. “Yeah, you're a good dog,” Dean muttered. “A good, black, mangy, feral, rabbit-killing dog -- Sam, just take him home. And pick yourself up some flea shampoo while you're out.”
Bobby made Sam cover the Charger's back seat in an old blanket before they picked Blue up and stuffed him in. Blue wouldn't stay in the back seat. They drove an hour to Blue's old vet clinic with Blue sitting on Sam's lap, digging his paws into his crotch and whacking his tail back and forth between the seat back and the gear shift. When they finally arrived and got out of the car, Blue nearly strangled himself trying to run away with his makeshift leash, then pissed happily on Sam's leg. Sam glared at him. Blue licked his hand.
The vet clinic was a small cinderblock building on the outskirts of the nearest town with a Kmart. Its lobby was decorated with framed watercolor Gary Larson cartoons, and staffed by a chubby young blonde woman. Blue pissed on the door frame as they came in, then he took aim at one of the chairs and would have soaked the seat if Sam hadn't pulled him off balance in the nick of time. He nailed the front desk twice while Sam and Bobby filled out forms and handed over his tags. All the while, his tail wagged in powerful sweeping arcs that bent his whole body like a fish.
“You found the owners?” Sam asked for the third time as he invented contact information to fill the hungry lines on the form. Each false letter felt like threads fraying from a rope. He ignored Bobby's bemused glance and the receptionist's sigh. “I mean, you contacted them -- somebody contacted them, so you know they want him back? I mean, he's not really -- he's not house-trained. At all. And if they don't . . .” Sam cut himself off, blinking at the form containing Graham Greene's contact information and the phone number for an apartment Sam had lived at in 1998. Blue gnawed on the molding of the reception desk, tail whacking against the back of Bobby's leg. “If he can't --”
“Here,” Bobby interrupted, handing the woman a business card. “If Graham here can't be reached at home, call this number and I'll get the message to him. Boy's developed a personal interest in that dog.”
The receptionist nodded, her eyes softening. “ I'll make a note to let you both know how Blue settles in.”
Sam handed over Blue's leash. She pulled him into the back of the clinic, one hand on the improvised collar and the other behind his ears, and then all Sam had left of Blue was half a chain collar in the kitchen trash can and a drying stain on his jeans.
Bobby picked up a bottle of flea shampoo from a nearby shelf and showed it to Sam with a dry smirk.
Sam shook his head sourly. “I'll chance it.”
--
Dean found Homeward Bound on TV that night and made Sam watch with him. Sam compared Blue to the improbably sarcastic dogs and cat onscreen (free from CGI puppetry, small mercy) and decided Blue had done relatively well for himself out there, since he didn't have half a porcupine embedded in his face. Blue probably didn't have some heartbroken child actor waiting for him to come home, though. Sam wondered how he'd react to his first chain-link fence, if he'd walk right into it or dig his way out, and if he'd feel an itch under his fur for the woods and wilds, if he'd vanish in the night to hunt coyotes, if he'd eat people's cats. He was, likely as not, doomed between scraping by alone and getting thrown out on his furry rear end. Like Dean, you'd never know it to look at him.
Dean snickered at the TV, oblivious to Lucifer petting his hair.
Bobby got a call the next afternoon while he was throwing together a pot of chili. “Speaking,” he grumbled after rinsing onion off his hands. “M-hm. Yes, I can. Go ahead, ma'am.” Sam, busy carving up a bright red shank of unidentified mammal recovered from Rufus' freezer, slowed his work and listened in. A faint voice slipped past Bobby's ear from the speaker, and Bobby mm'ed and m-hm'ed at appropriate intervals. As the caller continued, Bobby's mustache bristled and his eyes widened. Sam caught the phrase “a bit bloody” and “a bit of a mess” and then it was bloodbath and a bit of a massacre, and when he bent back down to his work, shaking his head hard, the shank on the carving board was round and pale-skinned, gushing blood that slithered and spread up his knife, over his hand; in the time it took to gasp, it was coating him, blinding him with red, teasing his throat and nostrils with sulfur, suffocating his skin in wet heat. He couldn't move. The blood was already stinging the corners of his eyes, trying to burrow its way in, and if he opened his mouth --
A stinging slap struck his cheek. He blinked down dumbly at Bobby, who hissed, “Breathe, dammit.”
Sam breathed. Bobby picked his phone back up and apologized. The voice on the other end finished its story, and Bobby hung up. “That was the vet's,” Bobby reported.
Sam set the knife down and tried to compose himself. “Yeah?”
“Dog's owners came and picked him up.”
Sam let out a rush of breath and waited for Bobby to continue.
“It's a family out in the back-country. The son was over the moon to get his dog back.”
“Good,” Sam replied. A dog like that needed a kid, and a kid would throw a fit if anyone tried to get rid of him for pissing on furniture. “That's excellent. Thanks, Bobby.”
“Apparently,” Bobby added, watching Sam as though bearing bad news, “the dog didn't do so well in the kennels overnight. Wagged its tail against the wall so hard it broke the skin and bled all over the clinic. Dog's fine,” he assured Sam, like the delicate flower Sam had become. “Just left a mess.”
“Bloodbath,” Sam muttered to himself.
Bobby patted his shoulder. “Dog's fine.”
--
After dinner, Sam joined Dean with a printout from Rufus' Kaballa database and a beer, flicking on a floor lamp and settling into a nearby armchair. Dean turned the volume down on what looked like a god-awful MTV reality show so Sam could concentrate.
“So how's Chance?”
Sam looked up from the sheaf of paper and the Hebrew dictionary balanced on his knees, and took his pen out of his mouth. “Huh?”
Dean studiously avoided eye contact, watching a half-dozen moneyed twenty-somethings mingle in a hot tub. One had her chest blurred out in post-production. “Your furry friend.”
“Blue.” Sam winced, wondering why everyone was being so solicitous about the dog, after it had tried to pee on every vertical surface in the house and Sam had sneaked it a third of their food. It was like they thought he was some sort of post-trauma therapy dog, sent by Fate that Sam might remain vertical, not a seriously unlucky pup with no social skills who needed all the help he could get. “Blue's fine. He's with his family. He's good.”
“You?” Dean asked hesitantly.
Sam cut him off. “Can't complain.” He put the pen back in his mouth and flipped aimlessly through the dictionary.
“I woulda liked a dog like that,” Dean murmured, a still silhouette in the corner of Sam's eye. “Before.”
Sam huddled in the too-small easy chair, poring over the baffling text and watching Dean watch MTV, until the moon rose, and Dean began to snore.
Silently, Sam got up to turn off the TV and the lights. When he turned around, Lucifer had stolen his seat. “Mm, nice and warm,” Lucifer purred.
Sam bared his teeth and backed away, the backs of his knees banging into the coffee table.
“I got the question to your answer, Sam,” said Lucifer mildly, sitting up and leaning his elbows on his knees. “Of course you'll be consumed with curiosity until you figure out how I did it. Maybe the number Dean gave you came from me instead. Maybe I possessed you for an hour to use a calculator and some prime number tables, then gave you amnesia.”
“Shut up,” Sam hissed. Lucifer wasn't yet verging on pain-bringing territory, except Sam could feel his own terrified curiosity sucking him in. He clasped his hands.
“Twenty-nine times fifty-three makes fifteen-thirty-seven,” Lucifer announced. “I solved your riddle. I am a champion code cracker -- and now, bitch boy, you have three options: you're just that crazy, we're just that smart -- and seriously, you were never as smart as you think you are -- or, my favorite --” He rose from the chair and hooked Sam's neck under his arm, strangling the blood from Sam's head as his breath ruffled Sam's hair. “I'm actually here. With you. Full circle.”
Sam crushed his bad palm with his thumb and gasped in the silence. Dean slept on, muzzy and incautious with opiates. Pain was different here; thanks to Dean, he knew he was back. As for the rest --
“I'm outwitting myself,” Sam whispered in the dark. “I'm just outwitting myself. Like Dean said.”
As he trudged up to bed, Sam caught himself wondering if Lucifer knew anything helpful about Leviathans.