SPN fic: Stop Hitting Yourself 3/3
Title: Stop Hitting Yourself
Chapter: 3/3, The Hunt At The Mine
Characters: John, Dean, and Sammy Winchester; Sam Grisham
Pairing: none
Rating: T
Length: 20k
Warnings: Shamelessly ripping off Sam Raimi movies, bad taste
Disclaimer: Fanfic! It's a fanfic!
Saturday, they headed north at dawn to plant the hex bags around the perimeter of the mine in Wyoming. Dad was driving, Dean had shotgun, and Sam was in the back, which he didn't mind today because if Dean hadn't ridden in the Impala with him and Dad, he'd be in Grisham's Subaru grinning like a puppy while Grisham taught him about automatic weapons and curse-breaking and Sandanista interrogation techniques, or whatever it was big badass action villains like Grisham got their degrees in.
Of course, it'd be a cold day in Phoenix before Dad trusted another hunter alone with one of his sons, no matter how well they clicked. (Dad was clicking. Sam felt ill.) And Dean wouldn't be caught dead touching Grisham's yuppie car.
Road reflectors on eight-foot steel poles metered the miles as they whipped along the highway, flashing in and out of tree-shadow, climbing. The morning sun sliced in.
Four two-way radios sat beside Sam on the bench seat, along with flares, canisters of salt, and circular iron chains just long enough for a lost hunter to curl up in to wait for rescue or daylight. Dad's idea. Sam appreciated the paranoia, but it didn't change the fact that they'd always be safer far away from the cursed uranium mine.
Sam got that Dad had a hero complex. He got that Dean had his own. But statistically, if they didn't seek out the horrors of the shadow world to show them who's boss, Dean and Dad would have 18 fewer broken bones between them, and five or so fewer concussions. It wasn't like Dad would let Dean take up motocross or bullriding. Hunting shouldn't be an exception.
Mile 23 slipped past. They side-wound up hills and forged through woods, past Keep Out, No Trespassing, and Danger Radiation Area. They stopped at a chainlink fence with a padlocked gate, just long enough for Dean to hop out of shotgun and grab the bolt cutters, then rumbled on, the sun slanting through the restless aspens to dapple the road in gold, Grisham's white hatchback creeping behind.
The mine's processing building was a broad cinderblock structure with a corrugated steel roof and three loading ramps off one end. Sam thought he could see the office where Richard Shear's mistress had shot herself, a broad window on the second story, but the glass was broken and boarded up. Smaller buildings, likely part of the leaching operation, dotted the weedy gravel lot it squatted in, like monopoly houses clustered beside a hotel. Everything was padlocked and boarded, and no pipes or machinery remained. Woods and hills pressed in on all sides.
"Dean, with me," Dad ordered when they parked in the shadow of one of the outbuildings, out of view from the driveway. "Sam-"
Sam's pulse jumped as he watched Grisham unfold from the Subaru. Dad wouldn't put Sam on a hunt with a stranger, never anywhere he couldn't watch for his inevitable screwups. Sam knew this. He tightened his fist around the door handle.
"Any law enforcement wants to tow the cars," Dad ordered, "stop them."
Sam nodded and relaxed. Dad reached across the seat, and Sam passed him the gear.
"Everyone check your radios," Dad called out, tossing one to Grisham over the back of the Impala. Grisham caught his neatly and grinned down at it, like it was familiar. Maybe he was some kind of ex-military action-villain, Sam mused. Sam dutifully clicked his own radio in his turn, in a long-practiced chorale of "testing" and "received" that Grisham inserted himself seamlessly into. The hunters divvied up the rest of the gear, then tromped off into the woods, Dad and Dean to the north, and Grisham to the south, leaving Sam alone in the cooling car and the silence.
Sam crawled over the front seat, hefted his backpack and his radio after himself, jammed his feet against the dashboard, and thumbed open The Fountainhead. He liked Ayn Rand; he figured he and she would have similar things to say to Alfred Lord Tennyson.
The shadow of the roof was perched at the very crest of the steering wheel. Sam watched until the strip of sunlight contracted into a hot white ribbon and disappeared.
The radio crackled. "Sammy, report!" Dad commanded.
Sam hit talk, cutting out the static. "Car's still here, Sir," he drawled into his mike. The radio buzzed back for a bit, and Sam could imagine Dad's finger absently smashing the talk button as he tried to decide if Sam's tone was really that snotty, or if it was an artifact of the static. A nervous thrill ran down his spine and he gnawed on the side of his finger.
"Copy," Dad replied at last, slow with warning. "Grisham, report!"
There was another pause, before Grisham's voice filled the Impala, brisk and light, too brisk and too light. "Placed the South bag on the fence at thirteen-hundred. There's some topography in the way, so I'll be delayed getting back."
The radio stilled, and Sam realized he was waiting anxiously for Dad's voice in the car again. "Copy," Dad replied, mildly, and no-Sam was waiting for Dad's anger, Dad's furious roar that said no one lied to him and got away with it, no one looked at his sons without his permission, and he'd spent six months in Hell-on-Earth in '72 and wasn't above bringing that place back to US soil. Grisham's voice was a liar's voice. It had none of the tells Sam knew to look for, knew to hide, but hearing his report felt like hearing a lie-felt like telling a lie himself.
"We placed the North bag at twelve-fifteen," Dad reported, and Sam hugged his chest as Grisham replied, "Copy," and the airwaves went dead.
Sam picked up The Fountainhead again and got sweat from his fingers on the pages.
Grisham emerged from the woods just half an hour later.
Sam snatched up his radio, then froze. Dad and Dean were still a ways out, and Grisham was right there, stalking through the weeds and gravel, his huge chest heaving with each breath, like he was an engine or a mad bull. Sam could see Grisham's radio swinging from his belt.
The Impala's keys were with Dad, had stayed with him or Dean ever since Sam's disappearing stunt in Flagstaff, and Grisham was looming tall outside, his eyes dark under his heavy brow and his wind-blown hair screening his face.
Sam locked his door. He locked the right rear door, and as Grisham broke into a sprint to round the Impala, Sam dove across to the driver's side and locked both left-hand doors. Panting in the driver's seat, Sam watched Grisham's prowling bulk and pawed in the footwell for the Glock taped underneath.
He gripped ridged plastic, ripped it free, and tucked the gun between his knees, flipping off the safety by touch. Beyond the glass, Grisham stroked the chrome seal of the Impala's window, his face all in shadow as the sun beat down.
Sam aimed the gun slightly up into the door, where he figured Grisham's thigh might be, and rolled the window down a quarter inch. "What do you want?" he demanded. His voice was shrill.
Grisham slid his hand gently over the window frame again, and rubbed away a bit of dried mud with his thumb, his thumb that was half the width of Sam's own wrist. His breathing was deep and loud and fast. "You can relax, kid," Grisham promised, low and soft, sincere but for the cloying phantom taste in Sam's mouth, kind but for the electric claws latched in the back of Sam's neck. "I just want to talk," Grisham continued. Sam twisted sideways in the driver's seat, and felt behind him for the radio. Grisham shifted and bent to peer through the window. "You don't want your Dad and Dean to hear what I'm gonna say." Sam stilled. "You like keeping secrets," Grisham mused. "Might as well start your collection."
Sam worked spit into his mouth and kept his voice steady. "What did you want to talk about?"
Grisham fidgeted outside, the hand that caressed the car rising to card his hair away from his face. The silence dragged. Thoughts slotted together behind his eyes, heavy and jagged.
"Tennyson," Grisham said at last.
"The-my essay? The poem?" Sam tightened his right hand around the gun and found the radio with his left. If he clicked it, Grisham would hear on his own set; he'd be angry and smash through the windows.
"'Course, you think of the essay first; everything revolves around you," Grisham sneered. "That essay, that 'metacritical dialectic' crap. Where you said-you wrote about duty." Grisham leaned close again, resting one big palm against the glass of the back seat and the other on the windshield.
Sam met his shadowed eyes. The glass looked very, very thin.
"You said devotion to duty is betraying your own humanity. It's-it's prostituting one's own agency, that's what you said." Grisham's voice rose and shivered as the veins of his wrists rose and the car leaned away from his weight and the strength of his arms. "You thought of Dean when you wrote that. And you think Dad's some dumbass British general who can't give a crap to get his facts straight before he sends his soldiers off to die. But it's not true!" Grisham snarled, baring his white teeth like an animal. "You think like it's some great noble enterprise to break away, you think you can write your own game plan." It was a statement, Sam observed, not a question. Grisham bent his head and gave the car a shove that swayed the frame on the shocks. "Well, it can't work!" he roared. His shoulders heaved with each breath, and they spanned the side window. The glass before his face was growing fogged. "You can't write your own story, kid. A soldier might have to suffer some dumbass general's mistakes, but he knows who he's following. You go off on your own, you're just a puppet. You're an animal. Duty's what separates people from monsters, and you just want to throw it away like trash. Like you know better."
Sam backed across the seat, clutching his gun and his radio. Grisham pushed off the car with a sneer of disgust, sending it rocking again, and prowled around the hood to the opposite window.
"You're a real smart kid," Grisham breathed, his voice muffled through the glass. "You know that. Anyone'd think you got some bright future. Mr. Wannabe New Yorker Correspondent Schwartz sure does. Deep down, you know there's something wrong with that picture, but you wanna believe 'em, 'cause you can just believe whatever you want. You're normal. Dean's the freak. Dad's dragging the two of you on some quixotic revenge quest on a whim. A new American fairy tale."
Sam held the radio and, again, contemplated pushing the talk button. If he provoked Grisham, and then shot him, he'd need a headshot. If Grisham were even human. He imagined Grisham charging him, his chin smeared red with bloody froth and his reaching hand slick with it, ferocious and undeterred.
Grisham slapped his hand against the windshield, and Sam's thumb tightened reflexively on the button, silencing the faint fuzz of static that it received from the air, and clicking sharply on every other radio. Grisham didn't seem to notice. "Repeat what I just told you!" he demanded, bent over and pinning Sam with his sharp eyes.
"Fairy tale," Sam echoed, his lips fumbling. "You're saying . . . I . . ." He clutched the radio and rolled his shoulders, drawing a deep breath. "I'm a smartass bitch and I should be grateful Dean and Dad let me bask in their presence, that's what you're saying."
Grisham shuddered in rage, one fist rocking back as if of its own accord, before relaxing shakily to rest against the windshield. Frustration boiled off him, his lip curling and his hands clenching and stretching as he gazed through the glass at his prey. Grisham was gentle with the car, Sam realized. Sam took another deep breath and rechecked the locks.
"Yeah, that's actually pretty close," Grisham gritted out when he had himself under control. "You gotta start pulling your weight. Stop whining. Stop buying all those pity pep talks from Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Wyatt. You're never gonna get out."
Mr. Wyatt-Sam hadn't thought of him in over a year, though he remembered the essay he'd written him: honest to God my family killed a werewolf on my summer vacation, what do you make of that, and he recalled the man who'd mistaken jaded honesty for genius. But college-escape-had bounced around in Sam's skull ever since, faster and faster like a flubber ball.
The clip in the Glock just had lead bullets. If Grisham were some thing that could read minds, read pasts-some psychic vampire if there was such a thing-lead wasn't going to cut it. Sam studied Grisham's face-his eyes so thin with rage the whites and irises were shadowed, his skin unshaven but clear, his neck corded with muscle. Like human, but better: like a top-bloodline, performance show human, like a thing in a custom human chassis.
"The Hunt's for you," Grisham hissed. "Your dad's hunt, it's all 'cause of you. Little Sammy, gotta watch out for little Sammy before the dark things get him. Your dad could get out if it weren't for you. Dean-Dean could get out, Dean could be happy, but he's flushing his life down the toilet for you! Into the goddamn mouth of Hell-and you-" He broke off and took a heaving breath that sent his shoulders rolling. "You're not even human! You're only human in the ways that count, and the joke is? That's the worst part of you!"
Sam watched him, his blood pounding in his ears. Grisham knew indisputable things, facts, and dim shameful things, feelings. But he'd never thought that he-he knew he had to get out, that the underworld of blood and secrets delighted and nurtured all the parts of himself that he feared the most, but to think that he belonged to it, that he might be drawing it to him- "No," Sam protested. "No."
"Trust me," Grisham snarled.
Sam crept toward the window, his hands shaking. "You don't know that." He panted, his lungs burning. "Dad's a good hunter. He's hard-core. He'd know if I was a-something else. I touch salt and iron and silver, every freaking week I'm sharpening the silver knives, so I can't be. You don't know anything. You don't know anything about me, or how I-so you can just-"
"Humans can't tell holy water from tap water," Grisham interrupted, his cheek almost touching the glass.
Sam's mouth shut.
"You don't know how your mom died yet, do you?" Grisham's gaze steadied and his head tipped, a big cat cocking its ears, or something colder. His nostrils flared and his lips curled. "No, you're still thinking it was an ifrit or a salamander or freaking arson, broad daylight maybe."
Sam shook his head, slow and helpless.
"She died in your nursery." Grisham splayed his hand against the window, his head low, eyes burning. "On your six-month birthday, she died because of you. Like a lamb on a goddamn altar."
Dad's voice roared outside the car-muffled, but so clear and so welcome- "Back away from my son, now!"
Grisham flinched. Sam spun on the front seat and saw Dad advancing from the treeline, his service pistol cocked and trained, his stride steady and swift. "I was just talking," Grisham lied, the lie thick in his voice, thick like bile in Sam's throat. This time, Dad heard the lie. Dad rounded the car and herded Grisham toward the white hatchback.
"I trusted you, you sonofabitch," Dad snarled, as Grisham planted himself feet from his car. "I told you not to mess with my son-"
Grisham flung his arms wide and lowered his head like a bull. "We were just-"
"Hey, asshole!" Dean shouted from another quarter of the woods, his own Colt drawn. He shot.
Sam and Grisham jumped. It was a warning shot. Grisham deflated, wary. "Next one goes in your forehead," Dad warned him, deadly soft.
Grisham opened his mouth and lifted a foot, as if to advance or argue again, but at whatever he saw on Dad's face, he retreated stiffly, slipping into his car. As he looked out the windshield, away from Dad, his face lost its fury and twisted in distress.
Grisham's hatchback reversed, and Dad watched until it disappeared down the access road.
Sam unlocked the passenger door of the Impala. Dad opened it and leaned in, bracing his arm against the roof. "You hurt?" Dad demanded. "Did he ask you anything?"
Sam took a deep breath and shook his head.
"Asshole stole our radio," Dean groused in the silence.
Dad was pacing in the shade, fifty yards off. Dean was in the driver's seat, his arm flung over the seat back, and Sam still huddled in the passenger seat, his elbows on his knees and the Glock beside him.
"Good thinking with the talk button," Dean continued. "At first we thought you'd just clicked it by accident, but then we figured you were either sitting on it or doing it on purpose."
"I know how to use a freaking short-wave, Dean," Sam snapped.
"Geez, you're touchy." Dean took his arm off the seat back, and chewed on his lip. "Sammy, he didn't, uh-"
"It's Sam. There's no one around to confuse me with."
Dean groaned. "Sam. You were safe in the car the whole time, right? Like, he didn't-"
"No, he didn't try to touch me in a bad place. He just talked. He was mad and talking crazy, but he couldn't do anything."
"Yeah, that's good," Dean muttered. "Good." He picked at a scab on the back of his hand. "I'm sorry, man."
Sam waited, his fingers wrapped around his own face. He could imagine Grisham grabbing him like that, and squeezing until his bones broke and his eyeballs popped out.
"I can't believe I liked the guy," Dean said. "He just-he was cool, and he asked me stuff, like, he'd find things for me to do whenever him and Dad were working. But really-"
"So you didn't pick up on the raging psycho vibes," Sam grumbled.
Dean shook his head, staring out the window, dazed.
"He fooled Dad, too," Sam consoled him.
"Yeah." Dean turned aside to watch Dad where he strode back and forth in the woods, thinking loud enough to shake the hillside. "Holy shit. He did fool Dad, didn't he?"
"He hates me," Sam murmured. "He likes you and Dad, but he hates me."
"Must be from Bizarro-World, huh, Sammy?" Dean ruffled Sam's hair, until Sam shoved him off and slid to the edge of the seat, one leg raised in warning. "Freaking teacher's pet-ow! You bitch, you can't kick me in the face!"
Dad stalked back to the car and opened the driver's side door. Dean sat at attention, like a retriever or-like he was prostituting his human agency for social approval. No. "We finish the hunt," Dad announced, and Sam held his tongue.
"Yessir."
"Sam, you're coming with us. Dean, move the car into reserved parking; that might buy us some time if any security comes around. We got two more bags to place, and we got to check Grisham's work."
"What if he comes back?" Sam asked softly. "Sabotages the car, follows us out?"
"He has a gun with him," Dad said. "If he was going to-Dean, you see him again, you shoot to kill, understand? He knows better than to come around, but if he does, don't let him get close."
He'd had a gun, Sam thought. He'd been so angry he'd rocked the car with an unconscious shove, and he'd had a gun the whole time.
"Radios?" Dean asked.
"Leave 'em."
Sam got to see a real life hex bag planted for the first time. Dean scuffed a hole in the dirt at the fenceline with the toe of his boot, dropped the bag in, and kicked leaves and twigs on top. Later, on the way to the South end of the mine property, they startled a rattlesnake, which Dad didn't let Dean shoot. Sam startled at every rustle and snap of leaves. Sometimes he would turn toward a noise, and when he turned back, would find Dad facing the same direction.
The sun dropped low.
Walking the South fence, they discovered Grisham's hex bag tied to the base of the chain link. Dean checked the binding, but the seal looked intact, same as when he'd knotted it. Without breaking it open and in the process breaking its power, that was as sure as they'd get that Grisham hadn't sabotaged the entire hunt.
The West end, the site of the last bag, was exposed to the brightest of the twilight, though Dad and Dean still waved their flashlights over the low-hanging branches and Sam peered peevishly into the gloom, wishing for his own. The old pit mine was in the way, from before the industry had switched to leach extraction, so they had to skirt it-and maybe Sam was some kind of hybrid freak, because he felt more than cold in the breeze that stirred with nightfall. Before the chill could sink past his skin and into his mind, they broke through the edge of the woods and Sam caught his first real view of the old excavations.
He'd thought the environmental impact reports he'd read had exaggerated the scale of the dig; he'd seen a few gravel quarries as he'd cris-crossed the US, and while their fifty-foot cliffs would hurt to take a dive from, they had nothing on nature for grandeur. They were just gouges, like road cuts in the Rockies, a few weeks' work with dynamite and backhoes. But this mine was the work of years. The pit gaped as deep and wide as the hills around were high, its walls solid gray rock. Truck-wide terraces spiraled into its shadowed depths, ten yards down at a time, marking its growth like the rings of a tree. The destruction was incredible-the mass of a hill, the volume of a lake, all crumbled into granite boulders and trucked away, year by year, the walls warping and twisting to chase veins of ore, leaving nothing of the old landscape but cracked bare rock and harsh right angles-but it was beautiful, too, in a way, like a moonscape or a temple. The long ramp that made up the shelf below led down and down. The madly-warped walls had begun to crumble in spots, sprouting weeds and saplings and strewing the old spiral path with mounds of jagged stone. The weak slanting gold of dusk petered out far above the bottom of the pit, leaving a deep black mystery that could have touched the center of the Earth.
Dean, already familiar with the mines, ranged ahead, scrambling around the edge where tree roots and thin soil gave way to blasted rock face, scouting for obstacles. Sam and Dad followed slower, taking the shortcuts Dean found for them. Sam wondered if it was Dad's knees or his worry for his youngest that made him let Dean take point.
"Look sharp," Dad had murmured in Dean's ear before letting him run ahead. "Just because the job's three-fourths done doesn't mean the curse is three-fourths broken."
Some dumbass British general who couldn't be bothered to get his facts straight-no. Sam never thought that, but why was he surprised when Dad's grip had lingered too long on Dean's shoulder, and now when half the time Dad's flashlight was on Dean instead of his and Sam's own path?
"Dad?" Sam asked softly. "Are there . . . monsters that can read your mind just by looking at you?"
"A few," Dad said, surprised. "Crocattas, changelings, Korrigans . . . Things that need to keep a human alive to feed have ways to keep us from running, and sometimes that means knowing what we think."
"Are there monsters that know the future?" Sam continued, glad to have caught Dad in a revelatory mood.
Dad's jaw twitched. "Not that I know."
"What about psychics?" Sam asked. A low continuous rustle of leaves sounded to their left, and the wind crawled down his collar. "Are there any that aren't just cold-readers? Seers, mind-readers?"
"What's got into you?" Dad asked, grabbing his arm.
Sam listened to the leaves. He didn't want Dad fighting his battles for him, didn't want Dad interrogating him, but Dad had already scared off Grisham and maybe the interrogation could go two ways. "Grisham knew things," Sam said vaguely. "About me."
Dad hissed through his teeth. "What?" Dad rumbled, his hand tightening.
"He said . . ." Sam took an instant to calculate his angle. Dad was quick-any waffling and he'd wise to the game. "He told me I'd never get out," Sam confided, listening to Dad's breath and feeling the twitch of his tense fingers. "He said . . . Mom died 'cause of me."
It was as if Dad died for the instant the words hung on the air; his grip slipped and his breath halted. He swayed on his feet, and Sam's heart raced at Dad's weakness and the confirmation of Grisham's words.
Then Dad shook him. Dad shook him once, twice, and dropped his hands as though Sam's jacket burned him. "What else did he say?" Dad growled. "Tell me! What else-"
"So you knew," Sam challenged, stepping back. His throat was hot and tight. "All this time, there's something-about me, you knew?"
"It wasn't your problem."
"It's me!" Sam snapped. "I'm my problem."
"Tell me what that bastard said to you!"
"Why, so you can keep your story straight?"
"Sam!" Dad barked, looming over him. "You don't want to go there. Everything I do, I do to keep you boys safe-"
"Well, I've finally got a reason to believe that," Sam snarled.
Dad broke away. "Son, you can't believe everything you hear."
"That's been pretty clear so far, sir," Sam hissed.
"No!" Dad snapped. "Listen! For once! There are things out there, that will lie to you. They might mix in some truth, but there's always a lie; you can't listen to them!"
"So what was Grisham, Dad?" Sam demanded. "If he's one of those things?"
"I don't know!" Dad scowled into the dark. "I don't know. But if you'd told me soon enough, I would've killed him when I had the shot."
Sam dropped his head. "'Cause he's a monster?" he asked softly.
"Because he's a threat to you."
Dad's flashlight had dropped to his side, splashing against loam and gravel, lighting the sides of their faces as they stared away into the dim woods. The continuous crackling hiss of leaves grew louder and nearer, and Dad flicked the light at it, expecting, perhaps, a maple bent sideways in a draft of wind funneled by the topography.
It wasn't a tree. The light struck a tall ribbon of motion swaying between two pine trees, built of flickering horizontal bands and perhaps three feet wide at its narrowest. A plume of leaves and dirt rose from its base. It shimmied, advancing a yard, then Dad's full weight slammed Sam to the ground. The rattling noise ceased and Sam heard a spatter of impacts-rock striking trees, dirt, boulders, leather and denim and bone. Dad grunted. A rock struck Sam's shoulder and he yelped.
A dust-devil of gravel. By the time Sam had begun to wrap his mind around the thing, Dad had his arm clamped in his grip and was hauling him up. "Dean, get away from the pit!"
"Dean?" Sam yelled.
"Yessir!" Dean shouted back, his voice wary and puzzled. Dad burst into a limping jog, taking the light with him, and Sam followed, wishing he knew whether the splash of dark on the back of Dad's thigh were shadow or blood.
They heard a rumble, and Dean shouting, "Holy shit!"
"Dean!" Dad roared.
"I'm okay!" Dean yelled back. "Just-rocks're a little-goddammit-unstable-"
"Get away from the rocks, now!" Dad bellowed, lurching into a sprint on his dark-splotched leg. They saw the winking of Dean's light among the boulders as they drew near the edge, and heard a crack like muffled gunfire to their left from the base of a spreading pine. Dad jagged toward the noise. "Sam, run!"
Sam, already running, twisted after him until he looked up at the black canopy that clawed the air beneath the fading dusk, saw the devouring sway, and bolted away from the tree. Dad twisted midstride, stagger-sprinting to Sam, and yanked him back. "This way!" he insisted, still running, but hampered by the hand he had wrapped in Sam's sleeve, and they charged toward the trunk, the canopy looming larger and larger overhead, until the tree began to tilt in earnest, crashed against the ground, and Sam and Dad were long out of its path, looking back on the sky-reaching roots, still shaking and dripping fresh dirt, and the massive trunk behind them.
"Dean!" Dad bellowed, taking off toward the pit again. "Something's here!"
Dean replied, as they closed on the pit and finally spotted him, perched on a peninsula flanked by two gouges of fresh scree and clinging to a spindly dogwood, "I know. It's coming toward you."
"What?" Dad panted, so soft that only Sam heard him.
Dean's little tree shivered, and the craggy stone peninsula wrinkled and crumbled, the whole bulk of it slumping intact before great cracks splintered it, gouging out terraces of raw stone that Dean vaulted over, his light jumping, legs springing, losing ground as the rockslide accelerated, staggering over plate-sized shards of granite, and finally stumbling, falling, and drifting down into the dark of the pit as the stones swallowed him up.
The rocks stopped. There was a jagged pile of boulders leaning against the wall of the pit, obliterating the rocky shelves. Dad's light rested on the place they'd seen Dean last.
"Dean!" Sam shrieked, and from behind him, like an echo but much deeper, he heard, "Dean!"
A human shape bounded out of the woods and down the fresh rubble, slip-sliding down the loose-packed rocks to the flashlight beam. It latched hold of a stone and flung it away, digging desperately.
Dad tugged Sam's arm, and they scrambled down the torn slope, slipping and wobbling, listening to the harsh pants and the clatter of rock from the man in the dark digging for Dean. Sam Grisham.
Grisham's hands were bleeding by the time they reached him. Dad aimed his light in his face. "Look at me!" he bellowed, and as Grisham looked away from his work, his eyes wide and wounded, Dad shouted, "Christo!"
Sam dropped to his knees and began to tug at the heavy rocks that hid Dean. "Give me your weapon," he heard Dad bark.
"There's a poltergeist," Grisham panted as he passed Dad a massive semiautomatic. "Went after me when I tried to leave. The curse, or the suicide or the murder, attracted a poltergeist, and now its reacting to the bags. It'll just get worse until we get 'em all planted."
Dad grabbed Sam again, pulling him away from the rocks, and handed him Grisham's pistol. "Check it." Sam opened the slide, ejected the clip, and found eleven rounds. "Keep it." Sam secured the gun in his inner jacket pocket, and Dad passed him his flashlight and the last hex bag. "Plant this. Keep yourself safe." He man-handled Sam around to face up the slope, and shoved him. "Go, Sam!"
A poltergeist, Sam thought dully. An intelligence, reacting in self-defense to the incomplete cleansing spell. He ran up the slope, the flashlight slick in his palm. He would reach the fence. He'd plant the bag. Dad and Grisham would stay back and dig, and he'd pray Dad and Dean were alive by the time he killed the thing.
The trees were moving.
The trees bowed their branches toward him like supplicants at a faith healing, and Dean could be dead, and as the dusk faded, Sam turned to the stars to find his way West. He ran, flashlight bobbing crazily. The width of the pit had forced him off-course, and he drove himself over the loam and roots, punishing his shredding lungs and rubber-weak legs. It felt like the last leg of a five-mile when Dad was pacing him with the car. It felt like training. Dean could be dead, and Sam's stupid legs thought they were just running for training.
Something screamed off to his left, and Sam just ducked in time for a flailing raccoon to fly through the air over his head, white teeth and green eyes flashing in the edge of his light. It struck something deeper in the woods and was silent. Sam kept running, and saplings bowed to meet him.
Vines unspooled from tree trunks, reaching like tentacles.
Dean could be dead. Sam coaxed more speed from his legs, and the mesh of the fence glimmered ahead of him, in a clearing just beyond the shadow of the tree-trunks.
A soft gasp of triumph escaped him, and he found sprint in him he hadn't known was there. He checked his jacket pocket and felt the last bag, Air, soft under his fingers, light in his hand. A vine shot out like a harpoon, the slender green growth at the tip crumpling against his jeans, and as Sam leapt away forward, it recurved like a snake and snapped out again, stabbing old wood and bark through Sam's shin.
It yanked Sam down with a savage shredding tear. The flashlight fell from his hand, and the hex bag flew into the dark.
With a snarl, Sam squirmed forward, fear and fury steaming through him. More vines latched onto him by his legs, his arm, his chest, binding and crushing his waist. Sam yanked at a vine fingering along his shoulder with his free arm, just as another looped over his head.
Bark tightened coarse and cable-strong about his forearm and the nape of his neck, sawing at his skin as it advanced probing leaves around his throat, tickling under his clothes. Sam's thin muscles burned against his outsized bones, and his body began to lift off the ground with the vines' tension.
The poltergeist was going to draw-and-quarter him.
"Stop!" Sam gasped. "Stop! Please! I'll destroy the bag!"
The vines stopped lifting. Sam heaved a breath. His left arm was numb from the elbow and his impaled shin was burning, lightening flaring from it with each throb of his pulse. "You kill me, and my family's gonna finish the job," Sam panted. "My dad and my brother. They're tough, and they're real good on revenge. Let me go-" let go, let go- "and I'll break the spell. I'll tell 'em the job's done, and if you keep quiet 'till they leave, they'll never know. I'll say I did it. Please."
The vines tightened again, the one around Sam's throat cutting off his air, and he bucked like a dying animal, rage and panic stealing his body and smothering his mind. They relaxed after a minute that felt like an hour, and Sam gasped, dragging air in through his half-closed throat. His face felt hot and fat with trapped blood. "I know you can hear me, you sonofabitch!" he rasped. "I swear-I promise you, I'll do it! Just let me get the bag before my dad finds me gone-cause he's smart, he's a great hunter. He'll find a way to kill you! You won't stop him!"
Another tornado of rocks bloomed under Sam's nose, a scale model of the first one, dim and half-seen in the glow of the flashlight that the woods threw back. It drilled a little hole in the dirt, and its rocks were just pebbles and grit. It was a witness, Sam thought, not a weapon. The vines were the weapon.
"I swear," Sam repeated. The vines lowered him six inches, until his knees and hips just brushed the ground, but no further. The little rock dust-devil wriggled. "I said I swear," Sam insisted, hope revving up his heart and sending more blood to his strangled head. "I swear on my life. I swear before God-before the Great Spirit. I swear by the All-Maker. I swear by my dad. I swear by my brother. I swear on my brother's life. Let me go and I'll break open the bag, on my brother's life, and you'll never hear from us again!"
The little tornado contracted, then exploded, bruising Sam's face with a splatter of rock like a ricochet of buckshot. The vines unwound, scraping Sam's skin and grating against the bone. A dribble of blood joined the pins and needles flaring in his limbs.
Sam gasped a few breaths, lying on the dirt and feeling his limbs come back online. He'd need them . . . the thought of things that could read minds flashed past, and he cleared his. Had to get the bag. Everything was going to be okay. He'd sworn on Dean's life.
Sam struggled to his feet, and his shin screamed at him. He gritted his teeth and bounced on the leg, punishing it into submission until his entire body was electrified with ceaseless, featureless pain, then stepped firmly to the flashlight. He found the hex bag at the base of a vine-wrapped aspen, and retrieved it with a wary eye on the foliage.
He began to fiddle with the ties as he backed away from the trees, away from the vines, toward the western fence. "Damn, Dean got these on tight," he muttered, staggering backward and letting his limp explain the four or five steps it took him to catch his balance. Dean could be dead. "I can't," he whimpered. "I don't have my pocket knife-I'll get it open, I just gotta-"
He bolted toward the fence, and heard the the woods hiss behind him.
The trees thinned. The poltergeist had less to throw at him here in the clearing, but Sam heard a rumble as he closed on the fence, pain stabbing up from his shin at each step to jolt his heart and stop his breath. The rumble behind him built as he neared his goal, ten yards, five yards, three-Sam took a last leap from his good leg and dove at it, flinging himself blindly through the air and crashing to the ground, just as a clammy weight of earth and grass pounced on him from behind, flattening him. Coughing dirt, Sam gouged out a hole with the handle of his flashlight and stuffed the bag in.
The night went still.
Sam sat up from under a foot-deep blanket of dirt and wobbled to his good leg, steadying himself against the nearby chainlink. A broad strip of sod had been disturbed, doubled up at Sam's end and dragged forward six feet from the unbroken turf at the other, exactly following his path from the treeline. The bag was in place, but Dean could be dead.
It was a long miserable stagger-trot back to the pit. Sam's shin stiffened by the minute, until he'd had to use a shoelace to suspend the toe of his boot by a hole in his jeans to keep from dragging it on the ground. When he saw the bluish light of Grisham's flash rising over the rim, he ripped out the whole assembly as he lurched to the edge.
Grisham was kneeling in the light, his hands clasped and resting on top of his head, making a piteous face. Dad was a black silhouette. To the side, in the dim fringe of the lamp beam, Dean lay on the rocks, his head propped up on Grisham's jacket, his left leg splinted to the knee with a pine branch and his right arm bound to his chest. Sam's breath left him in a long wheeze and his vision blurred. "Dean," he choked as he picked his way down the debris slope. "Dad-Dean?"
Dean turned his head and twitched his unbound leg. "Hey, Sammy," he croaked.
Dad twitched, and his shoulders swayed in a great sigh. "Job done?"
"'Course," Sam replied, rattling down the slope.
"Can you help carry your brother?" Dad continued, counting up his assets.
Sam stepped wrong on his bloody shin and nearly lost his balance. "No, sir," he grunted through his teeth. Not that he could carry Dean anyway-maybe with a travois-but even misplaced confidence was nice for a change.
"Lucky you," Dad said to Grisham. "You get to walk us out of here."
Sam finally limped over the rocks to Dean, and examined his bruised, mottled, bloody face.
"You look like you lost a fight with the Lawn and Garden department," Dean remarked with a nearly hidden wince. He squinted off to the side of Sam's head, and Sam wondered if his vision was rattled. "That poison ivy?"
Sam checked his hair and ripped out a fine three-bladed leaf, then cursed, phantom itches flaring all along his throat and wrists.
"Language!" Dad barked.
Sam hissed something that maybe sort of resembled "sorry, sir," as he tied up his toe to his jeans again.
"Sam, you know not to walk into terrain you can't run out of," Dad scolded.
"I can't run, period," Sam grumbled.
"How bad?"
"I got stabbed, a little," Sam admitted. "But it's not really bleeding anymore. Can still feel my foot."
"Mm," Dad replied. "Sam, come put this chain around Grisham's neck."
It was a surreal moment as Sam took one of the ghost-proof iron chains Dad handed him from their gear, and looped it tight under Grisham's chin, his fingers brushing his stubble and the tips of his hair as he braced himself against his massive shuddering shoulder. Dad's gun gleamed reassuringly in the edge of the flashlight beam, and Grisham's gun, heavy in Sam's inner pocket, bumped his elbow as he secured the chain with several heavy knots in a piece of Dean's shoelace left over from his splint.
Dad loaded a protesting Dean into Grisham's arms, his splinted leg sticking skyward and his good arm locked around his neck. Sam trained Grisham's gun and propped up Dad's injured side where the rock from the gravel-devil had torn his thigh, and Dad held Grisham's chain.
"This is so wrong on so many levels," Grisham muttered.
"Shut up and climb," Dad growled.
They reached the parking lot at 2030, Sam and Dad buckling against each-other, their wounds swollen into immobility, Grisham trembling under Dean's 190 solid pounds, Dean nauseous from the pain and the blow to his head. The evening security lamps had kicked on, buzzing blue soup cans on telephone poles throwing the gravel parking lot into harsh relief. Dad switched off his flashlight.
"Take him to my Chevy," Dad ordered Grisham. The chain jingled, he and Sam hobbled after him, and Sam raised Grisham's gun. "Set him down by the back wheel."
Grisham obeyed, choking a bit before Dad caught up to him with the chain. He crouched on the pavement, shuddering with exhaustion, and gently propped Dean up against the car, avoiding his bound arm and lowering his splinted leg slowly to the ground. His eyes never left Dean's tense white face.
"Good," Dad said coldly. "Now back away."
Grisham crept back from Dean until Sam's line of fire was clear. Dad drew his own gun and unlatched his arm from Sam's shoulders, staggering a step as he moved away. "Sam, help your brother into the car. Grisham, with me."
Sam stared disbelieving down at Dean, who sprawled against the Impala, white with pain. Dean scowled up at him and hissed, "Oh, this is such bullshit."
"Dad," Sam protested, hobbling to the car to sag against the trunk, "I can't just lift him in with the splint-I can't lift Dean, period-"
"I want Dean safe in the car when I get back," Dad barked. He dug in his jacket pocket and tossed something small and jingling through the air-keys. Sam caught them and held the Impala's keys in his hand for the first time since Dean had taught him to pull donuts in a Sears parking lot the shortly before Sam had run away to live alone in a vacant shack for a week and used up all his driving privileges for the rest of time.
"Dad?" Sam asked, his gut lurching, but Dad just limped out into the dark, toward the corner of the mine office, guiding Grisham with his service pistol and the chain. Sam had the keys and the car and a gun, everything he needed to keep Dean safe, according to Dad.
Dean smacked him in the stomach with his good arm. "You wanna gimme a leg up, bitch?"
Sam nodded, still watching as Dad marched the larger man across the lot toward the corner of the office. Another ten yards and they'd be out of view. "Watch your head," he warned, and swung open the creaky back door. Dad's pace picked up a bit and his shoulders straightened.
"Sammy, don't," Dean murmured. Sam froze and looked him over, but Dean didn't seem to be in any more pain than when Grisham had first set him down. "Whatever you're thinking of doing, brainiac," Dean clarified. "Dad'll go postal if we're not waiting in the car; can't you see he's spooked?"
Sam snorted.
"I'm serious."
"You're the one who said this was bullshit," Sam retorted.
Dean gaped. "I meant you lifting me, twig boy. I'm not that crippled."
"Whatever. Arm." Dean slung his good arm around Sam's bony shoulders, and Sam planted his feet and shoved upward.
He got about a foot before his legs gave out. "Shit," Dean gasped as his splinted leg jostled against the ground, and Sam hissed, "Sorry! Sorry! Shit!" and repositioned his feet to try again. He set his legs at ninety degrees and braced his and Dean's backs against the car, then pushed again.
"You're scratchin' the paint!" Dean whined.
"More worried about your leg," Sam grunted. He chanced a glance backward and just caught the last of Dad's shadow disappearing around the corner of the building. Dean slipped, and Sam clutched his arm tighter and cursed.
Dean did something with his good leg-hopped on it, scuffling against the gravel, trying to pull it in close enough to stand on-and Sam's own legs wobbled and slipped, sending them skidding to the ground again. Dean yelped, then sat very, very still, his eyes unblinking and very wide.
"This isn't working," Sam muttered, pushing himself shakily to his feet. Dean's good hand pawed at his jacket, but Sam shoved it away, sticking Grisham's gun into it as an afterthought. "Just sit tight. Dad can kill me later."
"You suck so very much," Dean hissed.
"Like that's news." Sam staggered away and limped across the parking lot as fast as he could go without flexing his bad foot, hugging the wall of the mine office. He slowed as he reached the corner. Worst case scenario, Dad would spot him on the way back. Best case, and Sam could-what, run screaming out of the dark to stop Dad from shooting Grisham?
Holy shit, he was expecting Dad to shoot Grisham. Murder him, and leave him nameless and un-mourned in the middle of the woods for the vultures to clean up. Dad always said the job was about saving people, but Grisham was another hunter-and apparently hunters didn't count. Not even when they'd helped save Dean.
Sam reached the corner of the office and leaned against the cinderblock wall, creeping toward the edge until he could just make out low voices beyond: Grisham whispering, "Yessir."
"Write it down," Dad ordered. Sam's ears perked; Dad had obviously just said something critical. He cursed himself for not arriving five seconds sooner.
There was a nerve-wracking pause, a rustle, and the click of a retractable pen.
"I'll contact you," Dad ground out. I'll contact you. "Cross your arms and get down on your stomach."
Sam heard the crunch of gravel and the jingle of chains. He used the sound to cover his movements, and before he peered around the corner, he knelt awkwardly on the sharp rocks to keep his face below Dad's line of sight. Dad stood beside Grisham's squirming dark bulk, sharp-shadowed in the harsh beam of a security lamp, the chain swaying from his left hand and his gun steady in his right. When Grisham was flat on the ground, Dad planted his bad foot between his shoulderblades and leaned down.
"I want your intel," Dad murmured, as Sam held his breath to catch the words. "Hell, there may be times I'll want your advice. But you don't come near my sons-you don't meet them, you don't contact them, you don't track them, you don't tell a goddamn soul about-" Dad cut himself off and took a breath. "About anything that don't concern the here-and-now. And I'll know. I'll find someone-I'll let someone live so they can track you down and make you pay if anything happens to my boys. Make you pay in ways you can't run from, understand?"
Grisham lifted his face from the gravel, the shadows masking his features, and Sam dodged back behind the wall.
Dad snarled. "Do you understand?"
"Yessir," Grisham replied, softly.
Dad dug his boot into Grisham's back and pulled on the chain, forcing a choked noise from the larger man. "If stopping this costs me my boys, I don't give a good goddamn about your doomsday story."
There was a long pause, and both dark figures were still. "Oh," said Grisham.
"Yeah. Oh." Dad scrubbed his jaw against his shoulder, the pistol fixed above Grisham's head. "I knew a guy in seventy-two, reminded me of you," Dad remarked. "In-country, some guys got delicate. Other guys, this guy, took to it; he took to it real well. Word was, he carried a three-foot wampum belt made of Viet Cong ears. Every engagement, he'd sniff out a corpse and cut a new one. He'd kill anything you pointed him at. The VC had women and children armed-if they didn't kill us outright, the guilt was enough to kill you anyway-but none of 'em got past Private Clark. Cutter Clark. Every day in-country we thought he was our savior. Every day on base, or when the VC stopped breathing down our necks, we'd change our tune and call him a monster, but that never changed the fact that he'd saved good kids by killing kids or that back home we'd've shot him down in the street." When Dad leaned down, the shadows took his face and the light gleamed on his gun. "We let Cutter live because he was under control."
Dad tossed the chain aside, and drew his boot knife with his left hand, keeping the pistol trained. He reached down toward Grisham's face, the big blade flashing until it disappeared behind Grisham's hair, and jerked his hand back. Dad's fingers were choked up high on the blade. Grisham flinched and gasped, grinding his face on the gravel.
With his right hand, Dad uncocked his pistol and struck Grisham across the skull with the barrel. He prodded his slack face experimentally with his boot, then holstered the gun. From between the blade and his left thumb, he took something small, held it up to the light, and tucked it into an inner coat pocket. He wiped off the knife and his fingers on Grisham's jacket, then stood, pain creeping into his stance.
Sam shook himself out of his daze and scurried back toward the car, Dad's words about making Grisham pay sliding into a macabre sort of sense. Witchcraft could work in several ways, he'd been taught: they could plant a hex bag near the victim, taking the spell to them, but on the other hand, with access to part of the victim's body-even dead parts like hair or nails-they could target the victim without ever knowing where he or she was. Some curses, like in voodoo, found their target through a handmade model of the victim. Cursing Grisham through a piece of his ear would be no challenge to a competent witch.
Sam felt ill. What happened to "magic is an enemy in itself"? What happened to "we don't trust monsters, we don't need their information, we don't use their methods"?
What did Grisham know that was so critical that Dad was breaking all those rules to keep him alive and under control?
"Do as I say, not as I do" still held, at least.
Sam prayed he was limping faster than Dad was. He lurched toward the glimmer of the Impala's chrome, crashing onto his good leg and yanking his bad leg toward his butt, crunch...crunch-ow, crunch...crunch-ow, and between his steps he heard Dad crunching along behind the building, faintly, swinging his own bad leg rigidly from the hip.
When he rounded the car, Dean wasn't there. His breath stopped.
A bruised fist knocked against one of the back windows from inside, and Sam let himself into the driver's seat, his heart racing dizzily. Dean was sprawled, shivering, across the back bench, leaning against the passenger-side door. He passed Grisham's gun to Sam, arm shaking. Sam stuck the keys into the ignition and slid into the passenger seat. He opened his mouth.
"Can it," Dean cut him off.
"Are you-"
"Sam." Dean's voice was low and harsh through his clenched teeth.
Sam huddled against the passenger door, looking at the floorboards. He felt sick, and he knew better than to blame the pain of his swelling shin. "I di-"
Dad swung open the driver's door and Sam fell silent. Dad just leaned in, supporting himself with a hand on the roof, grabbed the keys, and lurched back toward the trunk. Sam stared over the back seat at Dean, and Dean stared out the side window, clenching his jaw.
"Pills," Dad announced when he returned from rummaging around in the trunk. Sam and Dean each held out their hands: Tylenol all around, and a Vicodin for Dean. Dad eased himself into the seat, a little cockeyed so he could work the gas pedal with his good foot, and peeled them out of the lot in a scrape of gravel.
Sam didn't manage to catch Dean's eye until they were out of the mountains and almost to the hospital. Dean was starting to look dopey and pale instead of pissed and pale. I'm sorry, Sam mouthed over the back of the seat.
Dean lifted one hand and mimed cracking a whip, then pointed to his leg. You're my slave until I'm back on my feet.
Sam nodded, relief flooding in.
Dean chomped on an invisible sandwich and knocked back an invisible beer, picked at a fold of his shirt, and pretended to ball it up and throw it away. Meals and laundry. Sam nodded again. Anything.
Dean zipped his lips, made an O with his hand, and held up four fingers. No whining for four months.
Sam's mouth turned down at the corners. Don't push it. Dean smirked, and Sam turned back to look out the windshield.
The next morning, while Sam was in the hospital for monitoring after getting the hole in his shin flushed out and Dean was unconscious with a plate in his leg, Dad crammed all their belongings into their duffels and a few trash bags, loaded up the Impala, bought a vacuum cleaner suck any stray hairs and fingernails out of their apartment's carpet, and bailed on their lease to move them to a motel in another town, all while limping around on a thigh that was mostly bruise and forgoing prescription painkillers.
Sam, hobbling despite a full dose of his own opioids, was grudgingly impressed.
It was two months before they heard from Grisham again.
Pastor Jim had a dinner of left-over church-lady casseroles and cookies waiting from them when they stopped over on the way to a new school and new hunting grounds in Indiana, and after dinner, a brown paper package for Dad. Dad's face went cold at the handwriting on the wrapper.
Inside was a recent hardback novel, John Grisham's The Firm, bookmarked somewhere toward the end, and a thick three-hole binder of typed gibberish spaced to look like words-cipher, with a line from the novel as the concordance. Dad read the bookmark, ran his finger over the line it indicated, and burned the scrap of gas station receipt in Pastor Jim's fireplace.
Sam watched and their eyes met as he finished.
For years later, that binder traveled with him; the novel, Dad passed off to Sam and Dean for road reading. Sam never caught Dad studying the binder, but it got grubbier and rattier by the month. He wondered what Grisham had passed on: something about Sam, calling him a what instead of a who? Something about Mom, about why she'd been killed? Dad had his secrets, and now Sam had his own.
Sam got The Firm after Dean was done with it, the paper cover already sloughed off and discarded. After reading it, Sam decided it was an odd choice of concordance for a guy who got so incensed about disrespecting authority. Buried close against the spine on the edge of the introduction page-Sam liked reading the front matter, while Dean never cared-were three brief notes in faint pencil.
"Holy water doesn't work on every demon," the first read. Then, after a little space, "Never ever use performance-enhancing drugs of any kind." Crammed near the top of the page sat, "Always trust family first."
Two years later, locked in the bathroom and clutching an admission letter from Stanford University in shaking hands, Sam prayed for an instant that Grisham hadn't written those notes to him. He didn't need to use holy water; he didn't need to decide who to trust. He wasn't going to be a Hunter much longer, or a soldier in the trenches clinging to his comrades and his orders. Sam was getting out.
Note: The way John and Dean became alarmed when Sam held down the button on his radio was that their radios started receiving a signal. This is against walkie-talkie protocol because the radios aren't designed to talk over each-other (don't quote me on this). Whether or not they were able to make out garbled words transmitted from Sam's radio, the only possible explanations for someone signalling on their frequency without saying anything would be that someone was sitting on the talk button, Sam was deliberately holding it down to be annoying, or the radio was being convulsively gripped in someone's cold, dead fist as a mysterious final warning for the rest of the group. In any case, someone was due for an ass-whooping, at the very least for misusing communications equipment.
Honestly, I did not set out to write The One Where John Cuts Off Sam's Ear. Originally, I just had him harvest some hair from Future Sam, but it didn't really have the oomph I wanted for the moment. I like John. I am a John apologist. He was terrible at being a father, but I like to believe that he had his priorities straight, even if he didn't accomplish any of them (#1, keep the boys alive, or at least out of Hell . . . well, crap). So I wanted him to do something totally paranoid and badass to show Future Sam that he meant business when it came to keeping his boys safe, and that hassling Sammy because he's destined to become the Antichrist would earn him an excruciating and inescapable death by any means necessary. So now Sam is missing an earlobe as a sign of his father's love. And later John might sic witches on him. Um.
The prompt for this fic can be found here.