SPN/Thor fic: The Tomato in the Mirror 1/4
Title: The Tomato in the Mirror
Chapter: 1/4
Characters: Sam Winchester, Thor Odinsson, Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, several Avengers and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and guest-starring Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth
Pairing: Gen
Rating: T
Length: 2.5k (of 18k total)
Warnings: Two uses of the F word, several uses of the S word, mild hand-to-hand violence, moderate comic-book violence, massive property destruction, a scene of body horror that may be objectionable to those with anxiety about diet
Spoilers: Thor, Supernatural through 7.11. No actual spoilers for Avengers, as this was written before I saw the film.
Disclaimer: Not for profit. Free advertising for both franchises!
Summary: Loki body-swaps with Sam. Later, things get weird.
Note: Yes, that tomato in the mirror.
They were on a hunt in Minnesota in the winter.
Minnesota in winter was absurdly cold. It was too cold to run. Sam and his brother Dean didn't have enough clothes with them in their gutless stolen Challenger that smelled like someone else's prescription hand lotion. They'd had to stop in to a charity store for gloves, hats, and a sweater apiece, and on the way to the nearest diner to pick up breakfast burritos and coffee, Sam was still shivering as he walked.
He passed a homeless guy with better gloves than he had. Nothing had even tried to kill him yet, and he was already hating this hunt.
Sam had agreed to the hunt because at least it wasn't Dick Roman; it wasn't revenge. Dean had been interested, Sam was starting to suspect, because the sheer variety and magnitude of their target's trail of mayhem gave him hope that, with a little persuasion, the whatever-it-was might be able to take on the Leviathan, but to Sam, bestowing venomous claws and super-strength for a day on an entire kindergarten class and watching the National Guard and CDC deal with the mass panic and casualties seemed kind of mean-spirited. Anyway, the thing was dangerous, so Sam and Dean were going to hunt it. Even if they had to go North in January to do so.
Dean wanted revenge for their uncle, shot two months ago by one of a new breed of shapeshifting monster impersonating the CEO of Roman Enterprises. Sam got where he was coming from; they'd both driven themselves to death and beyond for revenge in the past. The problem was, in a toe-to-toe between Leviathan-Dick Roman and Tony Stark, Sam's money was on Roman, Iron Man armor or no. Leviathan were un-killable as far as they knew, and the Roman Empire owned Kraft Foods and was looking to purchase PepsiCo. Stark Industries was lucky it stayed out of the food sector, or it would've been absorbed like the rest. Two drifters couldn't exactly fight that.
His stomach growled. The sky was iron-gray, pressing down on the city; the street lights were still glaring down on him. Waist-high berms of grimy plowed snow walled in the side-walk. Blue grains of ice melt sat in little round pocks in yesterday's slush. His long legs ate up the blocks in his haste to arrive somewhere warm, and he wrapped his arms around his chest, stretching his canvas jacket over his shoulders. Sam wished he'd taken the car. He'd needed to get moving after the long drive, but he'd been expecting North America, not Pluto.
An absurd figure strolled down out of the air to walk beside him: a pale thin man with long dark hair, a little taller than Dean and shorter than Sam, dressed in an oddly medieval-looking leather duster and trousers, with ornate bronze vambraces on his forearms and a long green cape flaring over his shoulders. It wasn't one of Sam's usual hallucinations, but it wasn't bothering him, unless he counted staring sidelong at him with pale green eyes alight with menace and hunger. Sam kept his eyes on the diner ahead of him and stripped off his left glove, ready to dig his fingers into the sensitive scar on that palm to snap himself back to reality if the phantasm got too distracting.
After two-hundred years in the core of Hell, Sam figured he'd gotten off pretty lightly, as far as side-effects went.
He could see the diner on the next block. His pace quickened.
The imaginary man in the green cape cocked his head aside like a crow. "What are you?" he wondered aloud, his voice smooth and approximately British. "Some kind of god-slayer?"
Sam watched the man more warily. He and Dean had driven here to hunt something that played games-something smart, vicious, powerful, and arrogant, something that might very well walk down out of the air and strike up a conversation with a Hunter just to creep him out.
Most things slowed down when they'd been shot in the eye. Sam reached for the gun at the small of his back.
The man grabbed him by the jacket collar and flung him thirty feet backward down the sidewalk. Ice cut at Sam's hand and road salt stung the gashes; the image of the man didn't even flicker. Definitely real. Probably a god, certainly more than Sam was ready to handle. Sam rolled to his feet and drew his gun.
By the time he got his bearings, he was looking at five identical angry gods in green capes and bronze vambraces. He froze.
A sixth god in green lunged at him from the side. Sam whirled and fired; the bullet passed right through him and ricocheted off a brick storefront across the street. Sam cursed. The god in front of him smirked. One of the gods he'd turned his back on pounced on him in his distraction, seized his gun arm by the wrist, and ground Sam's tendons together so hard he dropped his weapon.
Lurid green flames coiled strong as rope caught Sam by the throat as he tried to headbutt the attacker, whose hungry eyes sparked with the same green fire. Sam bared his teeth and yanked his phone out of his pants, switching to his bare left hand and dialing Dean from his contacts by touch.
The fiery ropes multiplied and strapped Sam spread-eagle to the wall of the nearby hardware store. A cop car drove right past Sam and the god, the partner's eyes gliding idly over them, and pulled into the diner's parking lot. The rope on Sam's left arm tightened, numbing. He dropped the phone in the snow.
The god smiled crookedly at him as he panted and struggled, and laid a cold slender hand against his face. "Peace, god-slayer," he murmured, a hint of a chuckle in his breath. "I'm only borrowing you."
The god's skin warmed, grew tan. He gained an inch or three. Sam felt his own skin rippling as though riddled with worms; his lungs grew tight and his legs weak. He watched a twin to the mole on his jaw sprout on the god's, and the god's slick black hair warm to brown. In a moment Sam was struggling not to pass out as he stared up into his own face.
The god tapped Sam between the eyes with his finger and shook his head as though he'd gotten water in his ear. He smiled Sam's smile, bent, and picked up the fallen phone. Sam heard Dean's voice, urgent, from the speaker. "Dropped the phone, sorry, dude," the god said, a perfect mimicry. "Hey, this place does pie for breakfast. Want a slice?" Dean's reply was an enthusiastic affirmative, and the god grinned and dragged his borrowed arm, palm up, down through the air. A bag of take-out materialized on it. "Apple it is. Back in five." Dean said something else, warm. "'Course, Dean," said the god, and hung up.
Sam struggled against the brilliant green ropes that immobilized him. The god frowned. "If you would pass out, you'd save my decency and your embarrassment, stubborn mortal," he said, voice drifting back to his own smooth accent. "In fact-pass out. Now."
He snapped his fingers.
God, it was cold.
The sun was high and the sky was clear, but it was relentlessly bitingly cold, numbingly cold, stuporously cold. Sam woke curled around his knees in a ditch between two high board fences painted beige-some housing development. He couldn't feel his hands or feet. His cheeks burned. He was shivering so hard he doubted he could uncurl himself if he tried.
He managed. He staggered to the nearest fence on numb feet, shaking uncontrollably. He had to get indoors. He had to warn Dean about the god.
It was while he was patting his pockets for the cell phone he'd forgotten he'd dropped that he noticed he wasn't wearing his own clothes. He was in some vaguely medieval-looking trousers and a close-fitting jacket under a calf-length duster of exquisitely hand-stitched and embossed black leather with a green wool lining that ran all the way to the edge, over long underwear that might be cashmere-it was hard to tell with his fingers numb and the rest of his skin covered in goose-bumps. A long green cape clasped to a small breastplate anchored in the front of his jacket. There were bronze vambraces on his forearms and long slender throwing knives in little sheathes sewn into the sides of the trousers and arms of the jacket.
The god had left Sam his knives. That showed exactly what he thought of Sam's threat level.
The cape had to go. Sam blew on his fingers and stomped back and forth in the snow until his shivering died down enough that he could work the clasps off. He still looked like he'd wandered out of a Renaissance fair, or maybe Comic Con.
They didn't exactly have those in January in small-town Minnesota.
With the cape gone, Sam found that the duster was held down by a bronze pauldron on his right shoulder that hooked to a strap that ran between the duster's lapels, through a slit in his jacket, and buckled to a belt that didn't actually hold up his pants, but looked like it might be intended to hold a weapon. Apparently the clothes came as a set, and were not meant to be removed.
It was while he was fighting to untangle himself from the contraption that he noticed that the fingers he was using weren't actually his. The hands on the ends of his wrists were slender and neatly groomed. His gun calluses were gone. From what little he could feel of his stinging face, the corner of his jaw was too round, his sideburns were missing, and his hairline was all wrong. His-or he should say, the god's-wisdom teeth were intact.
Noticing when you'd been body-swapped was apparently one of those skills that improved with practice. Sam added it to the ever-expanding list of skills he had, but really didn't want.
Strange clothes, strange body, strange location. Sam hoped he was still in Lakeville, but he couldn't assume. He detached bits and plates and baubles from the god's clothes until they could pass for fashion-forward motorcycle leathers, patted himself down for anything else useful-just more knives-and picked a direction in the maze of shoulder-high residential fencing that looked likely to lead to a road.
After ten minutes shuddering on the side of the road with his thumb out, Sam returned to the development, bashed his way into the nearest unoccupied apartment window, tossed the tenant's belongings for twenty dollars and a wire coat hanger, and stole a Kia Sportage.
The Kia's GPS put him thirty miles north of Lakeville and two days late to get Dean his breakfast burritos. Sam stared into the unfamiliar eyes in the rear-view mirror, blasted the heat, and headed back to his and Dean's motel.
Dean was gone.
The Challenger was gone, the clerk remembered the guys in #17 missing check-out, and the housekeeper was still nauseated at the memory of the pile of bloody towels left on the bathroom floor. Sam picked a bobby pin off the carpet on his way out of the office and used it and the tip of one of the god's knives to jimmy the old-fashioned lock on the room. There was nothing left, no news clippings, no notes, nothing tucked into a corner of the dresser, and nothing smuggled in the box springs.
Sam examined the god's body in the mirror with morbid fascination, and consoled himself that at least he was still tall (though he should have been taller), and at least he still had hair he could tuck behind his ears. He kind of liked the way the god's jacket winged out over his shoulders; it almost disguised the hard-won muscle he'd lost, and it fit. (Of course it fit. He wasn't Sam right now.)
The faint lines in his face didn't fold right when he smiled, though, and the longer Sam examined the closest link he had to the god, the more uneasy he became. The pale green eyes were hollow and wild, aching with exhaustion. Bitterness flowed into this face almost unbidden, as though stamped into the very flesh. There were little hairline scars here and there, on its face and hands, and a worrisome one, old and well-healed, low on the side of its throat. Gods and monsters were always bad, but the suffering ones were the worst. Sam feared for Dean.
He left the motel and drove to the nearest library. Twenty minutes at a computer terminal while examining the embroidery on the sleeve of the jacket and the engraving on the knife handles pointed Sam toward the Norse pantheon, and the modus operandi toward the trickster Loki, who was by all accounts very smart, stupidly impulsive, and goddamn difficult to kill. There had been no trickster chaos in town over the two days Sam had been out of the picture, and no ritualistic murders, mysteriously mummified corpses, museum thefts, missing persons, or fires, either. No evidence the god had caused any more trouble or that Dean had been hunting in the area.
Sam bought a bowl of soup across the street with his stolen twenty and called both Dean's phones from a payphone with the change. The ring, both times, was followed by the scratchy laughter of animatronic clowns in the place of Dean's voicemail. Sam slammed the headset back into the cradle.
So the god was actively keeping him away from Dean. That was good. There was no fun for a trickster in guarding a corpse.
Sam abandoned the Kia after a last look at the GPS, and, fortified by soup and desperation, headed off on foot for the Sheriff's office. A helicopter whup-whupped overhead, the noise somewhat muffled by the deep snow that still smothered the rooftops. It looked military. As it circled, a second, similar, joined it.
Sam stopped on a street corner and watched.
He heard a mechanical whine in the distance and spotted a gleaming streak of red in the corner of his eye before more voltage than a human body should ever conduct struck him unconscious.
To Chapter 2
Chapter: 1/4
Characters: Sam Winchester, Thor Odinsson, Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, several Avengers and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and guest-starring Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth
Pairing: Gen
Rating: T
Length: 2.5k (of 18k total)
Warnings: Two uses of the F word, several uses of the S word, mild hand-to-hand violence, moderate comic-book violence, massive property destruction, a scene of body horror that may be objectionable to those with anxiety about diet
Spoilers: Thor, Supernatural through 7.11. No actual spoilers for Avengers, as this was written before I saw the film.
Disclaimer: Not for profit. Free advertising for both franchises!
Summary: Loki body-swaps with Sam. Later, things get weird.
Note: Yes, that tomato in the mirror.
They were on a hunt in Minnesota in the winter.
Minnesota in winter was absurdly cold. It was too cold to run. Sam and his brother Dean didn't have enough clothes with them in their gutless stolen Challenger that smelled like someone else's prescription hand lotion. They'd had to stop in to a charity store for gloves, hats, and a sweater apiece, and on the way to the nearest diner to pick up breakfast burritos and coffee, Sam was still shivering as he walked.
He passed a homeless guy with better gloves than he had. Nothing had even tried to kill him yet, and he was already hating this hunt.
Sam had agreed to the hunt because at least it wasn't Dick Roman; it wasn't revenge. Dean had been interested, Sam was starting to suspect, because the sheer variety and magnitude of their target's trail of mayhem gave him hope that, with a little persuasion, the whatever-it-was might be able to take on the Leviathan, but to Sam, bestowing venomous claws and super-strength for a day on an entire kindergarten class and watching the National Guard and CDC deal with the mass panic and casualties seemed kind of mean-spirited. Anyway, the thing was dangerous, so Sam and Dean were going to hunt it. Even if they had to go North in January to do so.
Dean wanted revenge for their uncle, shot two months ago by one of a new breed of shapeshifting monster impersonating the CEO of Roman Enterprises. Sam got where he was coming from; they'd both driven themselves to death and beyond for revenge in the past. The problem was, in a toe-to-toe between Leviathan-Dick Roman and Tony Stark, Sam's money was on Roman, Iron Man armor or no. Leviathan were un-killable as far as they knew, and the Roman Empire owned Kraft Foods and was looking to purchase PepsiCo. Stark Industries was lucky it stayed out of the food sector, or it would've been absorbed like the rest. Two drifters couldn't exactly fight that.
His stomach growled. The sky was iron-gray, pressing down on the city; the street lights were still glaring down on him. Waist-high berms of grimy plowed snow walled in the side-walk. Blue grains of ice melt sat in little round pocks in yesterday's slush. His long legs ate up the blocks in his haste to arrive somewhere warm, and he wrapped his arms around his chest, stretching his canvas jacket over his shoulders. Sam wished he'd taken the car. He'd needed to get moving after the long drive, but he'd been expecting North America, not Pluto.
An absurd figure strolled down out of the air to walk beside him: a pale thin man with long dark hair, a little taller than Dean and shorter than Sam, dressed in an oddly medieval-looking leather duster and trousers, with ornate bronze vambraces on his forearms and a long green cape flaring over his shoulders. It wasn't one of Sam's usual hallucinations, but it wasn't bothering him, unless he counted staring sidelong at him with pale green eyes alight with menace and hunger. Sam kept his eyes on the diner ahead of him and stripped off his left glove, ready to dig his fingers into the sensitive scar on that palm to snap himself back to reality if the phantasm got too distracting.
After two-hundred years in the core of Hell, Sam figured he'd gotten off pretty lightly, as far as side-effects went.
He could see the diner on the next block. His pace quickened.
The imaginary man in the green cape cocked his head aside like a crow. "What are you?" he wondered aloud, his voice smooth and approximately British. "Some kind of god-slayer?"
Sam watched the man more warily. He and Dean had driven here to hunt something that played games-something smart, vicious, powerful, and arrogant, something that might very well walk down out of the air and strike up a conversation with a Hunter just to creep him out.
Most things slowed down when they'd been shot in the eye. Sam reached for the gun at the small of his back.
The man grabbed him by the jacket collar and flung him thirty feet backward down the sidewalk. Ice cut at Sam's hand and road salt stung the gashes; the image of the man didn't even flicker. Definitely real. Probably a god, certainly more than Sam was ready to handle. Sam rolled to his feet and drew his gun.
By the time he got his bearings, he was looking at five identical angry gods in green capes and bronze vambraces. He froze.
A sixth god in green lunged at him from the side. Sam whirled and fired; the bullet passed right through him and ricocheted off a brick storefront across the street. Sam cursed. The god in front of him smirked. One of the gods he'd turned his back on pounced on him in his distraction, seized his gun arm by the wrist, and ground Sam's tendons together so hard he dropped his weapon.
Lurid green flames coiled strong as rope caught Sam by the throat as he tried to headbutt the attacker, whose hungry eyes sparked with the same green fire. Sam bared his teeth and yanked his phone out of his pants, switching to his bare left hand and dialing Dean from his contacts by touch.
The fiery ropes multiplied and strapped Sam spread-eagle to the wall of the nearby hardware store. A cop car drove right past Sam and the god, the partner's eyes gliding idly over them, and pulled into the diner's parking lot. The rope on Sam's left arm tightened, numbing. He dropped the phone in the snow.
The god smiled crookedly at him as he panted and struggled, and laid a cold slender hand against his face. "Peace, god-slayer," he murmured, a hint of a chuckle in his breath. "I'm only borrowing you."
The god's skin warmed, grew tan. He gained an inch or three. Sam felt his own skin rippling as though riddled with worms; his lungs grew tight and his legs weak. He watched a twin to the mole on his jaw sprout on the god's, and the god's slick black hair warm to brown. In a moment Sam was struggling not to pass out as he stared up into his own face.
The god tapped Sam between the eyes with his finger and shook his head as though he'd gotten water in his ear. He smiled Sam's smile, bent, and picked up the fallen phone. Sam heard Dean's voice, urgent, from the speaker. "Dropped the phone, sorry, dude," the god said, a perfect mimicry. "Hey, this place does pie for breakfast. Want a slice?" Dean's reply was an enthusiastic affirmative, and the god grinned and dragged his borrowed arm, palm up, down through the air. A bag of take-out materialized on it. "Apple it is. Back in five." Dean said something else, warm. "'Course, Dean," said the god, and hung up.
Sam struggled against the brilliant green ropes that immobilized him. The god frowned. "If you would pass out, you'd save my decency and your embarrassment, stubborn mortal," he said, voice drifting back to his own smooth accent. "In fact-pass out. Now."
He snapped his fingers.
God, it was cold.
The sun was high and the sky was clear, but it was relentlessly bitingly cold, numbingly cold, stuporously cold. Sam woke curled around his knees in a ditch between two high board fences painted beige-some housing development. He couldn't feel his hands or feet. His cheeks burned. He was shivering so hard he doubted he could uncurl himself if he tried.
He managed. He staggered to the nearest fence on numb feet, shaking uncontrollably. He had to get indoors. He had to warn Dean about the god.
It was while he was patting his pockets for the cell phone he'd forgotten he'd dropped that he noticed he wasn't wearing his own clothes. He was in some vaguely medieval-looking trousers and a close-fitting jacket under a calf-length duster of exquisitely hand-stitched and embossed black leather with a green wool lining that ran all the way to the edge, over long underwear that might be cashmere-it was hard to tell with his fingers numb and the rest of his skin covered in goose-bumps. A long green cape clasped to a small breastplate anchored in the front of his jacket. There were bronze vambraces on his forearms and long slender throwing knives in little sheathes sewn into the sides of the trousers and arms of the jacket.
The god had left Sam his knives. That showed exactly what he thought of Sam's threat level.
The cape had to go. Sam blew on his fingers and stomped back and forth in the snow until his shivering died down enough that he could work the clasps off. He still looked like he'd wandered out of a Renaissance fair, or maybe Comic Con.
They didn't exactly have those in January in small-town Minnesota.
With the cape gone, Sam found that the duster was held down by a bronze pauldron on his right shoulder that hooked to a strap that ran between the duster's lapels, through a slit in his jacket, and buckled to a belt that didn't actually hold up his pants, but looked like it might be intended to hold a weapon. Apparently the clothes came as a set, and were not meant to be removed.
It was while he was fighting to untangle himself from the contraption that he noticed that the fingers he was using weren't actually his. The hands on the ends of his wrists were slender and neatly groomed. His gun calluses were gone. From what little he could feel of his stinging face, the corner of his jaw was too round, his sideburns were missing, and his hairline was all wrong. His-or he should say, the god's-wisdom teeth were intact.
Noticing when you'd been body-swapped was apparently one of those skills that improved with practice. Sam added it to the ever-expanding list of skills he had, but really didn't want.
Strange clothes, strange body, strange location. Sam hoped he was still in Lakeville, but he couldn't assume. He detached bits and plates and baubles from the god's clothes until they could pass for fashion-forward motorcycle leathers, patted himself down for anything else useful-just more knives-and picked a direction in the maze of shoulder-high residential fencing that looked likely to lead to a road.
After ten minutes shuddering on the side of the road with his thumb out, Sam returned to the development, bashed his way into the nearest unoccupied apartment window, tossed the tenant's belongings for twenty dollars and a wire coat hanger, and stole a Kia Sportage.
The Kia's GPS put him thirty miles north of Lakeville and two days late to get Dean his breakfast burritos. Sam stared into the unfamiliar eyes in the rear-view mirror, blasted the heat, and headed back to his and Dean's motel.
Dean was gone.
The Challenger was gone, the clerk remembered the guys in #17 missing check-out, and the housekeeper was still nauseated at the memory of the pile of bloody towels left on the bathroom floor. Sam picked a bobby pin off the carpet on his way out of the office and used it and the tip of one of the god's knives to jimmy the old-fashioned lock on the room. There was nothing left, no news clippings, no notes, nothing tucked into a corner of the dresser, and nothing smuggled in the box springs.
Sam examined the god's body in the mirror with morbid fascination, and consoled himself that at least he was still tall (though he should have been taller), and at least he still had hair he could tuck behind his ears. He kind of liked the way the god's jacket winged out over his shoulders; it almost disguised the hard-won muscle he'd lost, and it fit. (Of course it fit. He wasn't Sam right now.)
The faint lines in his face didn't fold right when he smiled, though, and the longer Sam examined the closest link he had to the god, the more uneasy he became. The pale green eyes were hollow and wild, aching with exhaustion. Bitterness flowed into this face almost unbidden, as though stamped into the very flesh. There were little hairline scars here and there, on its face and hands, and a worrisome one, old and well-healed, low on the side of its throat. Gods and monsters were always bad, but the suffering ones were the worst. Sam feared for Dean.
He left the motel and drove to the nearest library. Twenty minutes at a computer terminal while examining the embroidery on the sleeve of the jacket and the engraving on the knife handles pointed Sam toward the Norse pantheon, and the modus operandi toward the trickster Loki, who was by all accounts very smart, stupidly impulsive, and goddamn difficult to kill. There had been no trickster chaos in town over the two days Sam had been out of the picture, and no ritualistic murders, mysteriously mummified corpses, museum thefts, missing persons, or fires, either. No evidence the god had caused any more trouble or that Dean had been hunting in the area.
Sam bought a bowl of soup across the street with his stolen twenty and called both Dean's phones from a payphone with the change. The ring, both times, was followed by the scratchy laughter of animatronic clowns in the place of Dean's voicemail. Sam slammed the headset back into the cradle.
So the god was actively keeping him away from Dean. That was good. There was no fun for a trickster in guarding a corpse.
Sam abandoned the Kia after a last look at the GPS, and, fortified by soup and desperation, headed off on foot for the Sheriff's office. A helicopter whup-whupped overhead, the noise somewhat muffled by the deep snow that still smothered the rooftops. It looked military. As it circled, a second, similar, joined it.
Sam stopped on a street corner and watched.
He heard a mechanical whine in the distance and spotted a gleaming streak of red in the corner of his eye before more voltage than a human body should ever conduct struck him unconscious.
To Chapter 2