SPN fic: Stop Hitting Yourself 1/3
Title: Stop Hitting Yourself
Chapter: 1/3, The Bird Hunt
Characters: John, Dean, and Sammy Winchester; Sam Grisham
Pairing: none
Rating: T
Length: 2k
Warnings: Horrifying creatures getting violently slaughtered, poor gun safety
Disclaimer: Fanfic! It's a fanfic!
Note: I wrote this for an anonymous prompt at ohsam that was posted on April 27 last year. Last. Year. Making this last year's comment!fic. It's complete now, at least.
Summary: Dad gets a hunting partner, a tall guy with long hair and cool sideburns. He and Dad get along bizarrely well and Dean worships him, but he seems to have a grudge against Sammy, a grudge that surfaces on a hunt that spins dangerously out of control.
"Take cover!"
Dad was screaming at them, and for half a thought it was just like a war movie. Dad made Seagal and Stallone sound like prancing pansies when he was laying out plans, recounting a kill, or ordering his sons around in the field, but this, that scream, Sam had never heard outside the theater. It was the sound of a brave man panicking.
Sam stumbled as he sprinted after his brother to the rusty horse trailer hitched to Dad's pickup, cursing his gangly limbs as Dean raced nimbly over the rutted field, shotgun clutched picture-perfect across his chest. The Big Birds above them paused in their shrieking, and at the silence, Sam flinched to the ground. Two had broken from the flock and were streaking down at them, too close, too fast. Sam raised his own shotgun and fired at the nearest shape. His shot went wide. The bird circled around, and Dad's tough hand flung Sam to the dirt just as the other bird dove five feet above him, claws extended and a sneer on its apelike face. Sam felt his shoulder shuddering, and Dad's hand shuddering right back.
There were too many birds. Dad yanked Sam to his feet like he was half his height and shoved him ahead to the trailer where Dean was crouching already, knuckles white around the shotgun's forestock. Dean fired, sending iron shrapnel hissing overhead. Sam dove for the trailer as Dad shoved him ahead. He hit the steel floor hard and Dean slammed the door. Dad raced for the cab.
The hunt had fallen apart.
Big Birds had first been sighted in Texas in1976, then disappeared, likely taken down by some hunter. He'd apparently missed a few, because reports of similar creatures started popping up twenty years later in Kansas and Wyoming. They appeared at night, singly, variously described with a five- to twenty-foot wingspan and the face of a chimp, a red-eyed woman, or a vampire bat. Twenty-two solid citizens had confessed to seeing the creatures, and five middle-aged men had dropped dead of heart attacks outdoors at night. Dad and Dean had pegged it as a low-risk hunt-low risk enough to take Sam on. Cryptids rarely died any harder than natural animals. A head-shot with cold iron never hurt, but chupacabras and skunk apes went down with ordinary buckshot and bloodloss.
The Big Birds were roosting in an abandoned hay barn just outside of town. Dad had had Sam and Dean ring the decaying timber frame with twenty gallons of diesel and set it alight. He'd boosted an old horse trailer and brought his truck so they'd have some shooting cover in case any survived. An aerial enemy demanded a steel roof, and they could shoot out through the trailer windows.
The building had gone up beautifully, and just as the flames began to reach the roof, a hole had appeared in the corrugated steel and perhaps fifty Big Birds, heavy-headed, with piercing voices and long talons, had streamed into the sky, terrified and enraged. As the birds struck up their doom chorus, it had occurred to Sam that perhaps the men dead of heart attacks had had more than heart disease to blame.
They were too frightening for what they were.
The bloody tears in the back of Dean's jacket showed that at least some of their fear was justified. But not-Sam could barely think it-Dad, panicking.
"Load me up, Twig Boy!" Dean showed Sam a manic grin and a box of ammo. Sam swapped his own 12-gauge for Dean's empty and shoved seven down the magazine, his fingers fumbling and spilling shells. Dean fired three times out the window, and swore. There was no wounded keen from the birds outside. "Switch," Dean barked, thrusting the gun in Sam's face. Sam held up the loaded shotgun and Dean yanked it from his grip to fire again, and miss again.
Dean was a crack shot, but his hands were shaking.
Claws rattled on the roof and a talon and an angry face lunged through the shallow window. Dean recoiled, leaping back to stagger against the opposite wall of the trailer, and Sam popped up to fire, shells spilling from the open magazine, just as the bird withdrew.
The truck made a hoarse rasp. Dean was shaking, Sam was terrified, Dad was panicking, and the truck was out of commission. Sam frantically gathered up shells and stuffed them back down the magazine, pouring a couple back out as he realized he had loaded them backwards in his haste.
"The birds took the truck out?" Sam demanded. "They're that smart, they took the truck out?"
"I gotta cover Dad," Dean panted, eyes wild. "Stay in the trailer, cover me from inside-"
"No!" Sam grabbed Dean's jacket collar and twisted it. "They'll-you don't have enough ammo, they'll dive right through you. There's too many!"
"Dad needs me!" Dean insisted, ripping Sam's grip loose.
Another bird showed its face at the window, perching on the lower rim. Dean shot it, and a few balls of shot struck a girder and boomed and rattled inside the trailer.
"Sam, don't be stupid!" Dean grabbed the trailer latch. "If Dad can't fix the truck, we can't retreat. And the hunt turns into Jeepers Creepers II." Sam scrambled to his feet and jammed himself between Dean and the door. "Back off," Dean snapped.
Sam braced his legs against the trailer wall. "I'm covering you."
Dean crouched, wrapped his free arm around Sam's narrow waist, and slammed him to the steel floor, a pile of knees and elbows. "You stay here!" Dean snarled, "where it's safe! You stay here and hide 'till we come back and get you!"
The birds were screaming louder and louder, circling the trailer. The truck rasped again. Dean shuddered, swept a handful of shells off the floor, and stuffed them into Sam's jacket pocket. Dean was going to leave, Sam knew. Dean was going to die.
Sam clawed at Dean's coat, latching his fingers in his collar and making his heavier brother stagger. "No!" he cried, as Dean struggled to pry him loose. "No! No, no, no, no, Dean, no!"
A bird clattered on the trailer and perched at the window, ape-face hunched low and eager as it began to squeeze its way in. Sam's heart clogged his throat. He wrapped his arm around Dean's neck and dropped, sending them both booming to the floor, Dean's shotgun trapped between them. The bird gaped its jaws and screamed down at them, the noise echoing between the steel walls. Sam's chest felt heavy, and his skin burned cold. He heard Dean make a faint gasp of pain, and as Sam stared helplessly up at the animal's knowing leering face, something vicious stirred in him: he wanted to hurt it, choke it, wrap his hands around its bulldog neck and squeeze it into silence, then longer, until its face purpled and all the fear he felt left him to shine back at him from the bird's red, bulging eyes.
A shot boomed outside, and the bird vanished in a puff of ragged feathers. The flock's chorus faltered, and in the brief silence, Sam heard faint strains of Reggae. Don't worry, Bobby McFerrin's overdubbed chorus gently reprimanded them, be happy.
"I hate this song," Dean muttered, dazed.
'Cause when you worry, your face will frown, and that will bring everybody down, so don't worry. Another shotgun blast gave weight to the message. It was deep and concussive.
"That a 10-gauge?" Dean wondered, rolling off Sam. As one, they collected their shotguns, chambered shells, and stood to scan the outside. There was a dirty white Subaru parked beside the trailer. It'd likely approached while the birds' racket had drowned out all other sound. The windows on one side were open, and the speakers poured out music full blast. A man in a football helmet and a Carhartt jacket was swinging a shotgun around at the sky. As they watched, he fired again, over the truck, absorbing the recoil without a flinch, and as the echoes died, they heard Dad's voice.
"I got two more in the trailer," Dad barked at the man. "Drop us off at South Bend."
The man nodded, never taking his eyes from the sky.
Dad had gotten in first, taking shotgun and covering the other Hunter with his service pistol. The Subaru had reversed in a cloud of dust to pull up at the trailer door. Dad and the stranger had covered Sam and Dean's dive for the back seat, and they left the horse trailer, Dad's truck, and the frustrated flock of Big Birds shrinking in the distance.
The stranger killed the tape deck after the third loop of nauseating Cold War optimism, and popped off his football helmet, banging it on the ceiling in the cramped space he filled. Sam saw a lot of sweaty brown hair, and Dad watching their rescuer intently. "Nice timing," Dad growled.
"Saw the smoke," the stranger explained. "I've been in town the last . . . week, for the same hunt you're on. I figured . . . why miss out on the action when I've already done all the work?" Sam didn't like how much he hesitated. Dad didn't look impressed, either; Dad never did.
"Are we going back for the truck, Sir?" Dean asked. Dean had been driving the old family sedan for the past two years since Dad had acquired the truck. Sam had grown somewhat attached to the shotgun seat and didn't relish the thought of being kicked to the back bench.
"Not now, Dean." Dean sighed quietly, then sat up in his seat, his mouth twisting in disgust as he ran his hand over the cream velour upholstery. He engaged the safety on his shotgun and laid it carefully in the footwell as Sam did likewise. Dean hated new cars, white cars, hatchbacks, and Reggae, but his disgust seemed to be losing out to his curiosity as he sized the stranger up. Sam could count the hunters Dean had met on one hand, and Sam himself had never seen anyone but Dad on a hunt; he wasn't sure if it was because Dad didn't trust anyone but Dean for backup, or because there just weren't that many Hunters out there. It wasn't a fun way to live.
"You came in prepared," Dad remarked to the stranger. "What do you know about these things?"
The stranger stiffened a bit at the question. "You mean generally, or historically, or-they, uh, they're gregarious. Smart, maybe telepathic-they get us. I think they feed on fear. From the witness reports it sounds like they're, uh, supernaturally terrifying."
"Mm," said Dad. Sam shivered at the memory of just minutes ago: Dad panicking; Sam and Dean nearly killing each-other out of fear for each-other on the floor of the trailer, wrestling with loaded weapons.
"So," said the stranger awkwardly, "are you taking a taxi to your, to wherever you're staying? Because if we meet up later, I can get you your weapons back."
Dad had not relaxed during any of the stranger's explanations. "We'll chance it," he said.
"It's not hunting season," the stranger protested. He turned his head to look at Dad, and Sam caught a hint of a sharp nose and anxious mud-colored eyes.
"Drop us at the nearest gas station and forget about us," Dad ordered him, deadly cold.
The stranger looked at him sharply, as though to retort, but clicked his mouth shut instead. "I think we should keep in contact," he told Dad with forced mildness. "I heard you've been chasing something for a long time," he continued, watching Dad with cautious darts of his head. "I've been chasing it, too."
Dad was stone. Dean hissed through his teeth and clenched his fists in his lap, and even Sam felt vicarious adrenaline flood his veins with eagerness. There was one thing, one white whale that had ever eluded Dad for more than a month: the Thing that Killed Mom.
Next chapter!