Bread and Circuses: 1/5
Title: Bread and Circuses
Author(s): safiyabat
Artist: majestic_duxk
Beta: elwarre
Characters: Sam winchester, John Winchester, Dean Winchester, OCs
Pairing: Sam/OMC
Rating: M
Word Count: This Chapter - 5,545 words; entire work - 24,834 words
Warning(s): Show-level violence, child death, negative depiction of John Winchester, creepy gladiator cult, consensual underage (both parties) sexual content
Summary: When Sam is taken by a gladiator-obsessed cult in Idaho, he has nothing to rely on but his wits and his fellow prisoners to get him out.
“I’m not doing it.” Sam crossed his arms across his chest and sat down on the bed. “This is ridiculous. I’m not going to be bait for your half-cocked hunt.”
Dean winced and turned his face away as their father turned around. A flash of guilt ran through Sam, but only a flash. He knew his brother hated it when he resisted John. “I know you didn’t just defy me, boy,” their father growled, molars grinding. “People are dying.”
“And you’re just chomping at the bit to make sure I’m one of them. Just shoot me. It’ll save time.”
He was expecting the crack to his jaw. “There’s no room for cowards in this army, boy,” John spat. “You’ll do your job.” Someday he would die - probably very soon - and get buried, and then eventually some archaeologist would dig up his skeleton and think he’d been a boxer or something. He focused on that image, on the idea of a scientist poking at the bones of a fifteen year old kid and coming to all the wrong conclusions.
“Good thing I didn’t enlist,” Sam retorted. “You can call me a coward all you want. I’m still not going out there and shaking my ass in some mall so you can get me killed. You want me dead, fine, but be a man and do it yourself.”
“Sammy, come on, man,” Dean tried. “You’re gonna be fine. Dad and me, we’re gonna be right behind you.”
“Shut it, Dean.” John’s smile was a grim, wicked gash in his face. “Don’t ‘convince’ him, it’s not like he’s got a choice in this. You may be too selfish to get up off your ass and do something for other people, boy, but the rest of us at least know what’s important.”
“Who’s selfish?” Sam bit out. “You’re the one sacrificing other people’s lives - my life, Dean’s life - for your stupid revenge crusade.”
Another crack, and he might have whiplash from that one. “You’re going to do your job if I have to drag you through that mall on a goddamn leash,” the hunter seethed. “She gave her life for yours and this is how you repay her?”
“You call this a life?” Sam shot back.
John made no answer, just picked him up bodily, slung him over his shoulder and stuffed him into the Impala. Sam fought but there wasn’t much he could do from this angle. The growth spurt everyone kept telling him was coming “any day now” hadn’t hit and he was still just an undersized, skinny kid with oversized feet and no leverage. The best he could do was maybe to knee his dad in the face.
He was forced into the shotgun position and strapped in, with the bonus fun of being cuffed to the door besides. He could feel his face beginning to bruise, but it didn’t matter. His father stormed off toward the truck while Dean threw himself into the driver’s seat. “You can’t say shit like that, Sam,” he growled. “And you know it.”
“Yeah, I realize actually engaging my brain is a cardinal sin.” He snorted.
“Jesus, Sam, no wonder he doesn’t -“ He bit his lip.
“What, trust me? Give two shits if I live or die?”
“Stick around!” Dean roared. “Dad doesn’t stick around because he can’t take your whining, all right? All you do is complain about not having a normal life and you can’t lower yourself to appreciate everything he does to keep us safe -“
“Dean!” Sam interrupted, tugging at the cuff on his wrist as he tried to turn around. “You can’t be serious. You’re driving me off to offer me up to some bunch of cultist perverts and you’re trying to pretend like he’s keeping us safe? On what planet is that keeping us safe? He is literally killing us.”
Dean slammed his hand against the dashboard. Sam flinched back. “Damn it, Sam, if you say another goddamn word this entire trip you won’t have to wait for some damn cult to kill you. Do I make myself clear?”
Dean wouldn’t kill him, but Sam sank into silence anyway. He didn’t need to antagonize his brother any further. He stared out the window instead, hoping that the cool glass would bring some relief for his aching face.
The drive to the mall took forty-five minutes, because sleazy motels didn’t occupy the same space as bright shiny malls. Sam didn’t speak during the ride. He let Dean’s silent-treatment music wash over him instead. It wasn’t like “Creeping Death” was a bad song, and unlike most of the crap forced into his ear canals it had been recorded after his birth if only barely. He didn’t honestly mind it so much, not the first few times in a row anyway. By the time that they got to the mall he kind of wanted to jump around screaming to the weird cult that they could just fucking take him already if they would just play something else, anything else, but he didn’t. Mostly because he knew the cult wasn’t there.
“You know what the plan is, boy?” John asked him. Always “boy,” never “Sam.” It was like his father had forgotten that he’d given Sam a name.
“It doesn’t matter,” he retorted, tugging against the cuff out of reflex. “They’re not going to do it here. Did you not read the case histories?”
John got red in the face. “Sam,” Dean sighed wearily. “Don’t tell Dad how to do his job, all right? He’s been doing it almost as long as you’ve been alive.”
“Okay, but not a single one of these kids has been taken from a populated area like a mall. They were all taken when they were isolated, alone. Not from a freaking ritzy shopping mall when they had freaking mall security following them around like flies on -“
John’s hand gripped his already bruised jaw. “I have had enough of your lip today!” he growled.
“What are you going to do, John?” the teen ground out in response. “Kill me?”
His father pushed him back into the seat. “Get your ass into that mall. And you walk every inch of it until they come for you.”
He rolled his eyes and let Dean unlock the cuffs. He could fight it, but he wasn’t up for making a scene. Maybe he was, he didn’t know. Maybe getting the police involved would be the best thing. Maybe then Dad would get the help he needed. But… Dean wouldn’t. Dean would hate him forever if he got Dad sent up for child abuse, or whatever else Dad got arrested for. And they’d find the arsenal in Dean’s car - the one Sam had been handcuffed to - not in Dad’s. That was smart thinking on Dad’s part. John might be an asshole and he might be killing his sons, but he wasn’t stupid.
So he shuffled his way into the mall, a higher-end mall in a ritzy suburb that probably had at least as many security guards and cameras as it did customers. Sam stood out here, in his thrift store hand-me-downs and his bruises. He couldn’t even pretend to blend in the way he could in other places. From the moment he set foot in that place he could feel eyes on him, and not because of the cult. A sales associate walked up to him every few yards and asked if he needed help. They smiled wide, fake smiles and they were polite, but he knew what they were really about. He heard the occasional subtle blip of a two-way radio being switched on, so he knew that security had gotten involved too.
And he had been made to go in unarmed, practically naked. You couldn’t be bait if you could defend yourself. Sam thought it was a bit of an oversell - after all, it wasn’t like they were going to strip him before putting him in the back of a van or anything - but John had insisted. Sam was pretty sure that his father had reasons beyond making it look “real.” Assuming that the cult did strike, Sam wasn’t intended to come back from this one.
Nothing happened in the mall. Nothing was ever going to happen in the mall. Sam walked every inch of the mall twice, just as his father wanted, before he was approached by his brother. “You can come back to the car now,” he said in disgust. “Come on. Security’s getting antsy.”
“No shit,” Sam spat. He followed along anyway, seething.
He slouched back out to the car and slouched into the shotgun position, taking a little bit of admittedly juvenile pleasure in slamming the heavy door shut behind him. John, as seemed to be his default today, got red in the face but then turned around and got into his truck. Dean got in the car. “Do you have to antagonize him, Sammy?”
“I didn’t say a fucking word, Dean.”
“Exactly. You couldn’t have apologized for mouthing off?”
“He’s doing his best to get me killed and I’m supposed to apologize to him for it?”
Another seven repetitions of “Creeping Death” later they’d arrived back at the motel, not another word exchanged between the brothers.
Sam stalked his way into the motel room, intending to sit down and do some homework since he hadn’t gotten killed today, but his father grabbed his shoulder. “You want to tell me what that was all about?” he snarled.
“What, wandering aimlessly through the mall?” Sam sneered. “Pretty sure that’s exactly what you ordered me to do.”
“They didn’t take you. Why?”
“Ask them. Oh wait - maybe it was because they don’t take any of their victims from well-populated areas. Or maybe it was because they weren’t going to grab someone who was already being followed by two thugs and a whole mall full of rent-a-cops.”
“You watch your tone with me, boy.” John’s grip on his shoulder tightened.
“You seriously going to pretend it’s not true?” Sam scoffed. “I stood out like a sore thumb in there. I would have even if you hadn’t marbled up my face nice and good. None of the other kids got taken from a mall, but no. You wanted me to get taken from a mall so you made me parade around there like some kind of goddamn show pony.”
“Freddie Milsom was taken from a mall,” Dean countered.
“Aw, Dad let his golden boy actually see the case material. I’m impressed.” Sam knew he shouldn’t lash out at Dean for being Dad’s favorite, but he’d gotten himself worked up by now and he couldn’t stop. He could hear his pulse in his ears. “Actually, no. Freddie Milsom, the last victim to be found dead, wasn’t taken from the mall. Security footage shows him leaving the mall with two of his friends, both of whom made it home just fine. He could only have been taken between the time that he got off the stupid goddamn public bus and his stupid goddamn house.”
“And how would you know that, boy?” John gave him a shake.
“I hacked the police report,” Sam tossed back. “While you were pissing and moaning about what a waste of space my schoolwork was and what a disappointment I am as a son, I hacked the police reports on all of the victims and I know goddamn well that the whole stunt with the mall was a waste.”
“Then why were you being such a whiny little bitch about it?” Dean demanded. “Why’d you make Dad rough you up?”
“He’s got no right to force me to be bait!” Sam heard his voice rise in tone and hated it. “He’ll find some other way to force me into getting killed for this and it’s stupid. I’m not willing to die for this.”
“You owe it to your mother -“ his father shouted.
Sam shouted him down. “The hell I do. The only thing I owe her is to live the life she gave me instead of wasting it on some asinine quest.” He shoved past the senior Winchester and through the motel room door. “I’m going out.”
Dean moved to grab him, but Sam easily skated out of the way and avoided restraint. He was very certain that he didn’t imagine the way his father reached out to stop Dean’s reaching him. It would have been nice if he could convince himself that John recognized his need for space and was forcing Dean to respect it.
He fought the urge to stuff his hands into his pockets and kept his head up as he shuffled his way down the side of the road. Snow hadn’t come to the area yet but it couldn’t be far off, and his thin clothes didn’t do much to ward off the chill. That probably wasn’t a bad thing; he needed to cool down. His dad had this ability - it had to be some kind of mutant superpower or something - to make his blood absolutely boil.
It was just… okay, he got that Dad had lost his wife and he was grieving. He would grieve forever. Maybe he didn’t “get” that, he didn’t ever want to truly understand that kind of pain, but he understood that it was a thing and that it was a motivating factor for his father. He had loved their mother. But what Sam just couldn’t wrap his head around why their mother’s death needed to define every aspect of her sons’ lives. His mother was dead, and that was bad. Sam had never known her. Why did her death mean that Sam was never allowed to have a stable roof over his head, or go to school on a consistent basis? Why did their mother’s fate mean that Sam had to die before he was twenty-five? Hell, before he was sixteen if his father had anything to say about it?
He’d never known Mary Winchester, but there was no way she could be the saint John and Dean insisted that she be venerated as if she would have wanted her sons to not know where their next meal was coming from or to have to know how to steal a car before they could legally drive one or the fact that both of her sons were drinking before they hit double digits. Poverty was nothing to be ashamed of if there was a legitimate reason for it, but their father had been part owner of an actual business before Mary died. He’d just thrown everything away to go tearing across the country putting Mary’s sons in all kinds of danger and then pretending that it was about “keeping you safe.”
He rubbed a hand against his aching jaw. Yeah, he felt safe all right.
He felt eyes on him almost as soon as he left the motel room, but he took no real notice of them. He assumed that they belonged to his father, or possibly to his brother. Why they thought that the cult was going to be striking in Preston over any other place in Idaho, or Wyoming, or Utah, was beyond Sam. There was no pattern at all to the disappearances, none whatsoever, and even less of a pattern to how or when the bodies of the missing boys showed up again. Sometimes a boy who had been missing for over a year would be discovered in Utah when he’d disappeared from a town in Wyoming that had been three hours away from the dump site; sometimes a boy would only be missing for a month and get dumped near the town he’d been taken from. The only consistency Sam could see was that the boys who had been gone longer had been in better physical condition than the ones who were killed after only a short time in captivity.
He saw a van coming up the road and he tensed up. His family was around to keep him from actually getting taken, right? They’d objected so strongly to him getting out in any way, whether it was going to go stay with Pastor Jim or running off to Flagstaff. They weren’t going to let him go to a cult. Not really. Right?
He took off running across the field on his left. He didn’t care if there had been cows there, he just made sure he didn’t slip in anything they’d left behind. He wasn’t going to let himself get taken. Yeah, sure, the cult (if it even was a cult and not just one or two creepy serial killers) needed to be gotten rid of, but that didn’t mean that it needed to be him taking them out. This was something that the police were for, something that a large force of actual professionals who got a paycheck and real training and had a proper education and had someplace to go and decompress at the end of the day so they weren’t literally doing the job all day, every day with no goddamn time off. It wasn’t a job for an alcoholic with a vendetta and two teenagers.
Sam could run. He could run fast, and he knew it. There was something that he couldn’t outrun, though. He felt something pierce his skin and he fell to the ground, unable to move. He heard footsteps on the crunchy, dry soil behind him before the darkness closed in and he knew no more.
He woke up sometime later; there was no real way of knowing how long. Even before his eyes opened he could tell that he wasn’t where he had been. He lay on his back on a cold metal table - like an exam table at a vet’s office or maybe in a morgue - instead of on his face in the mud. He breathed vaguely musty indoor air instead of clean mountain air. And oh yeah - he was naked.
“Open your eyes, boy.” The speaker stood somewhere near his chest, on the right side. She had an accent; he supposed it was a British accent if what he saw on PBS was anything to go by on the rare occasions he got to choose what he watched. That didn’t mean anything though - she could be faking it. “I heard your breathing start to change, we all know you’re awake.”
Well, crap. He could try to pretend to go back under but he didn’t think the woman would fall for it. He opened his eyes, wincing as the light triggered a headache. The room definitely looked like a medical office - almost certainly a veterinary office, given the anatomical diagram of a horse on the wall. The woman speaking to him was maybe five foot two, with iron-gray hair in a “sensible” haircut and dark, beady eyes. “You’re the cult,” he identified, looking at the two men in the room.
“We’re a community of worshippers,” she corrected him. “You can consider us a cult if you wish; you can consider us fish if it suits you to do so. None of that matters. What does matter, young man, is that you understand your place here and you do so very quickly. You are a slave. I own you. You will train. You will eat. You will follow the orders of the overseers. You will do what you are told to do when you are told to do it and that is all.” She ran a hand over his body.
He drew back, noticing for the first time that something had been painted onto his skin. “Don’t touch me, perv,” he growled.
She didn’t show any emotion as she raised her hand and slapped his face. As blows went, it wasn’t much. It didn’t even compare to any of the hits he’d taken that day, or the last time he’d been conscious anyway. “I own you,” she repeated. “I am entitled to touch you in any way that I want. It is in my best interest to ascertain your physical condition - all of your physical condition. A very thorough physical examination was conducted while you were unconscious - it seemed easiest to get your cooperation that way, and I must say that you seem to be in the best shape of any of our fighters.”
“I’m not a fighter,” Sam shot back. “I’m just a high school kid.”
She slapped his face again. “Not anymore. Not ever again. The sooner that you reconcile your mind to the fact that you will never leave this arena alive the more comfortable you will be while you’re here.” Cold, beady eyes flicked up to the men in the room. “Bring him to the arena. It’s time to present him to our Master.”
Well that sounded ominous. He had two options here. He could fight, or he could go along and try to figure out what was going on here. Everything in him wanted to fight. He was naked and he hadn’t started out that way, there were strange people grabbing at him, he’d been kidnapped. He was a fast kid and he was strong. He might make it.
Of course, the guys grabbing his arms and tugging him to the ground had Tasers. Maybe he could outrun them. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he could get out of this building. Where was he? The fact that he’d been knocked out for an unknown period of time meant that he could be anywhere by now. He’d been trained in survival in most environments but that assumed things like clothes, and shoes, and a knife because you always carried at least one knife on you because what if you encountered a shapeshifter at the Laundromat or a werewolf in the school cafeteria and you needed to cut its heart out right then and there, son and he was so screwed right now because John hadn’t let him bring his knife when he’d sent him out to offer himself up to these very people and he hadn’t grabbed it on his way out the door in his rush to get away from his father and now here he was in the clutches of this gaggle of freaks with no knife and no clothes and -
- and now was not the time to panic. He swallowed the rising bile in his throat as he allowed himself to be “encouraged” along a wide hallway. The place, he realized after a moment, looked a lot like a horse barn or maybe a county fair arena. He bit his lip, trying to focus on the number of steps it took to get between the treatment room and the arena.
Arena was the only possible word for this space. He was led up to the entrance to a space, where a spotlight focused on the doorway. The floor looked like a mix of sawdust and dirt and maybe hay. The space was ovoid, lined with bleacher-style seats, and he could hear a few people murmuring. “What the hell?” he whispered to himself.
“No talking,” one of his guards growled, while the other one punched him in the side.
They made their entrance, and as soon as they walked into the arena the spectators fell silent. The audience area was dark and the spotlight was right on Sam, so he couldn’t make out many details but he thought he could sense maybe fifty people there. Fifty people, all staring at his naked and painted body being marched across a huge expanse of space toward a giant stone altar.
The altar was covered in symbols. As Sam got closer he thought he could recognize some of them as being Greek, but that by no means covered everything he saw on the table. He forced his breathing to even out. They weren’t going to sacrifice him. Not right now, anyway. All of the dead boys that had been found, they’d been kept for at least a month before they’d been slaughtered. He didn’t feel badly enough to have been out for a month. His muscles would have atrophied. He’d read that in a book somewhere or something.
The short, vaguely British woman behind him began to chant. Sam tensed up. The language sounded familiar to his ears, but not familiar enough that he understood it. It was almost like listening to a Beatles album on reverse - things sounded like they should be familiar but everything was just wrong enough that he couldn’t -
Except he could. After a few moments of listening to the chanting and the babbling he picked up a few words, here and there. Then it became easy. John Winchester’s quest for whatever had destroyed his wife had demanded that Sam study Latin even before he knew why they had no home and moved every six weeks on average, but his single-minded obsession limited his son’s study to medieval and ecclesiastical Latin. Cicero would have been fine if he’d been writing about exorcisms, but since he was just writing about politics and history he was useless to a hunter and therefore strictly forbidden. The only people Sam had ever heard speak Latin had also limited their study, or at least limited their display of knowledge in Sam’s presence.
This woman was speaking an older, cleaner, more perfect Latin. She was speaking classical Latin. Sam couldn’t quite wrap his head around everything - tenses were wildly different and even in English there is a huge difference between you are loved and you will be loved and you would have been loved - but after a while he started to get the gist of what was being said. She was trying to summon something - a god? Yes, definitely a god. Charon, he identified. She was trying to summon Charon.
Something was poured over his head. He bit his lip to keep from shrieking when he recognized that it was blood. It was cold blood, too - refrigerated, probably had some kind of anti-coagulation agent added, but it was blood. He didn’t know whose blood it was, but it was in his hair and running down his spine and running down his chest and getting into his eyes. He took his hands and wiped the mess out of his eyes. What if the blood was contaminated? Could he get some kind of disease by someone else’s blood getting poured into his goddamn eyes? He didn’t think it worked that way, but not a lot of people are inclined to rationality when they’ve just had blood poured over their heads.
The chanting only stopped when the blood poured off of his body and hit the ground. Then the altar began to glow softly. The paint on Sam’s body glowed too, and he cut back on an hysterical scream. His body was not supposed to glow. “Lord Charon,” his “owner” intoned. “I present to you my latest offering. I invite you to mark him for your own.”
A mass began to take shape before the altar. Whatever it was, it didn’t become visible, not completely. It had a vague shape, and it was darker than the space around it, but even years later Sam wouldn’t be able to say for any certainty what it had looked like. It was simply a cold, dark, amorphous mass that chilled the air around it so thoroughly that Sam thought he might get frostbite just from proximity.
I cannot mark this one. Charon’s voice wasn’t so much a sound as a sensation, reverberating into the center of Sam’s very being. Others mark him already. I cannot gainsay them. There was a vague sensation of motion, as though the being was looking from Sam to the woman behind him. This should not impede his ability to participate in your games.
“Marked by others?” Sam repeated, before his world exploded in a world of burning agony. He screamed as electricity ripped through him.
I cannot read more. It is hidden. Nevertheless, it is immaterial. It means that I cannot touch your soul when you die, that is all. I am sorry. The deity picked Sam up off of the ground, setting him back on his feet.
“But he is a worthy sacrifice?” Sam’s “owner” pressed.
There are no flaws in that line, Charon affirmed. The glowing stopped. The mass disappeared. The audience began to whisper excitedly as they got up from their seats and began to file out of the arena.
His “owner” leaned into Sam’s face. “Why didn’t you tell me you were already marked?” she spat.
“Because you shot me full of horse tranquilizers and dragged me to god-knows-where?” he shot back. He had no idea what Charon could have meant by “marked by others,” who those others were or what that could possibly involve. Maybe it had something to do with the filth he’d always felt inside of him, just under the surface. Maybe it had something to do with his father, or his brother.
She stomped onto his foot. “I can see how your face came to be so bruised. Get him cleaned up and put away,” she snapped to the guards. “He’ll join the others tomorrow.”
He found himself escorted back to the treatment room. There was a shower room in the back, and while they watched him he was allowed to wash himself. After having been exposed as he had to an arena full of people, two goons watching him shower was only mildly creepy, so he focused on getting the blood off his body and out of his hair. This might have been the single highest quality shower he’d ever been in, he noticed as he scrubbed. The water pressure was good, and the hot water never seemed to run out.
Whoever did the doctoring in here must need to clean up an awful lot.
Once he had cleaned himself thoroughly - his guards checked, in an inspection that had his cheeks scarlet with shame - he was permitted to towel himself off. He was then issued a loincloth, a thin piece of cotton that really wasn’t more than a couple of flaps of fabric tied together at the hips. It wasn’t intended to do more than cover his bits when he was standing still.
He considered fighting once again. The loincloth was better than nothing, he decided, and he put the garment on. He was going to get no end of shit from Dean when they found him wearing this thing, but as long as this was the only humiliation he got put through after everything he’d already experienced he’d probably be able to get through the teasing.
They led him down two flights of stairs and then through a tunnel. The bricks didn’t look all that new. “You’ve been doing this a while?” he hazarded.
One of the guards shrugged, but gave an almost-imperceptible nod to the other one. “Yeah, sure,” Guard Two told him. “It’s not like it’s a crime for you to know. You’re not going anywhere.”
“You seem pretty sure of that,” he challenged. They had to be going into another building now.
“Kid, we’re in the mountains. No one who’s not part of this has been up this way in a good fifty years, you feel me? You’d freeze to death or fall to your death before anyone could help you - and that’s assuming you got out of the compound first. Face it, kid. This is your life now.” This came from Guard One, who seemed a bit older than Guard Two.
“Has anyone tried?” Sam pressed. “Escaping, I mean?”
“A couple of boys. It happens, sometimes. They don’t get far. Like I said, kid. We’ve been doing this for a while.” They got to a large, thick-looking fire door. Guard One unlocked it.
Beyond the door were more doors, lining a dank corridor lit by a naked light bulb. The doors all looked the same, except for the numbers painted on them. They were steel doors, with small openings for visual access that could only be opened from the outside. The guards led Sam to one of the doors - number thirteen, he noticed wryly and unlocked it.
“Welcome home kid,” Guard Two told him, not unkindly.
Sam was ushered inside. The cell was not large, but it could have been worse. There were two bunks built into the wall. He took the top bunk, burrowing under the scratchy blanket as much for something to cover his body with as for physical comfort. There was a toilet. The light came from a ceiling panel.
He lay back in his bunk and tried to calm himself. It didn’t work. If his father and brother had been concerned for him with the cult and everything, they’d have found him already. They wouldn’t have let him get taken. They wouldn’t have let him get “examined” by whatever quack of a medical professional they had going for them here, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have let him get stripped and paraded naked like a slab of meat for public consumption. Sam was on his own here, and on his own for finding a way out.
It wasn’t a good feeling.
This way to Masterpost -- This way to Chapter Two
Author(s): safiyabat
Artist: majestic_duxk
Beta: elwarre
Characters: Sam winchester, John Winchester, Dean Winchester, OCs
Pairing: Sam/OMC
Rating: M
Word Count: This Chapter - 5,545 words; entire work - 24,834 words
Warning(s): Show-level violence, child death, negative depiction of John Winchester, creepy gladiator cult, consensual underage (both parties) sexual content
Summary: When Sam is taken by a gladiator-obsessed cult in Idaho, he has nothing to rely on but his wits and his fellow prisoners to get him out.
“I’m not doing it.” Sam crossed his arms across his chest and sat down on the bed. “This is ridiculous. I’m not going to be bait for your half-cocked hunt.”
Dean winced and turned his face away as their father turned around. A flash of guilt ran through Sam, but only a flash. He knew his brother hated it when he resisted John. “I know you didn’t just defy me, boy,” their father growled, molars grinding. “People are dying.”
“And you’re just chomping at the bit to make sure I’m one of them. Just shoot me. It’ll save time.”
He was expecting the crack to his jaw. “There’s no room for cowards in this army, boy,” John spat. “You’ll do your job.” Someday he would die - probably very soon - and get buried, and then eventually some archaeologist would dig up his skeleton and think he’d been a boxer or something. He focused on that image, on the idea of a scientist poking at the bones of a fifteen year old kid and coming to all the wrong conclusions.
“Good thing I didn’t enlist,” Sam retorted. “You can call me a coward all you want. I’m still not going out there and shaking my ass in some mall so you can get me killed. You want me dead, fine, but be a man and do it yourself.”
“Sammy, come on, man,” Dean tried. “You’re gonna be fine. Dad and me, we’re gonna be right behind you.”
“Shut it, Dean.” John’s smile was a grim, wicked gash in his face. “Don’t ‘convince’ him, it’s not like he’s got a choice in this. You may be too selfish to get up off your ass and do something for other people, boy, but the rest of us at least know what’s important.”
“Who’s selfish?” Sam bit out. “You’re the one sacrificing other people’s lives - my life, Dean’s life - for your stupid revenge crusade.”
Another crack, and he might have whiplash from that one. “You’re going to do your job if I have to drag you through that mall on a goddamn leash,” the hunter seethed. “She gave her life for yours and this is how you repay her?”
“You call this a life?” Sam shot back.
John made no answer, just picked him up bodily, slung him over his shoulder and stuffed him into the Impala. Sam fought but there wasn’t much he could do from this angle. The growth spurt everyone kept telling him was coming “any day now” hadn’t hit and he was still just an undersized, skinny kid with oversized feet and no leverage. The best he could do was maybe to knee his dad in the face.
He was forced into the shotgun position and strapped in, with the bonus fun of being cuffed to the door besides. He could feel his face beginning to bruise, but it didn’t matter. His father stormed off toward the truck while Dean threw himself into the driver’s seat. “You can’t say shit like that, Sam,” he growled. “And you know it.”
“Yeah, I realize actually engaging my brain is a cardinal sin.” He snorted.
“Jesus, Sam, no wonder he doesn’t -“ He bit his lip.
“What, trust me? Give two shits if I live or die?”
“Stick around!” Dean roared. “Dad doesn’t stick around because he can’t take your whining, all right? All you do is complain about not having a normal life and you can’t lower yourself to appreciate everything he does to keep us safe -“
“Dean!” Sam interrupted, tugging at the cuff on his wrist as he tried to turn around. “You can’t be serious. You’re driving me off to offer me up to some bunch of cultist perverts and you’re trying to pretend like he’s keeping us safe? On what planet is that keeping us safe? He is literally killing us.”
Dean slammed his hand against the dashboard. Sam flinched back. “Damn it, Sam, if you say another goddamn word this entire trip you won’t have to wait for some damn cult to kill you. Do I make myself clear?”
Dean wouldn’t kill him, but Sam sank into silence anyway. He didn’t need to antagonize his brother any further. He stared out the window instead, hoping that the cool glass would bring some relief for his aching face.
The drive to the mall took forty-five minutes, because sleazy motels didn’t occupy the same space as bright shiny malls. Sam didn’t speak during the ride. He let Dean’s silent-treatment music wash over him instead. It wasn’t like “Creeping Death” was a bad song, and unlike most of the crap forced into his ear canals it had been recorded after his birth if only barely. He didn’t honestly mind it so much, not the first few times in a row anyway. By the time that they got to the mall he kind of wanted to jump around screaming to the weird cult that they could just fucking take him already if they would just play something else, anything else, but he didn’t. Mostly because he knew the cult wasn’t there.
“You know what the plan is, boy?” John asked him. Always “boy,” never “Sam.” It was like his father had forgotten that he’d given Sam a name.
“It doesn’t matter,” he retorted, tugging against the cuff out of reflex. “They’re not going to do it here. Did you not read the case histories?”
John got red in the face. “Sam,” Dean sighed wearily. “Don’t tell Dad how to do his job, all right? He’s been doing it almost as long as you’ve been alive.”
“Okay, but not a single one of these kids has been taken from a populated area like a mall. They were all taken when they were isolated, alone. Not from a freaking ritzy shopping mall when they had freaking mall security following them around like flies on -“
John’s hand gripped his already bruised jaw. “I have had enough of your lip today!” he growled.
“What are you going to do, John?” the teen ground out in response. “Kill me?”
His father pushed him back into the seat. “Get your ass into that mall. And you walk every inch of it until they come for you.”
He rolled his eyes and let Dean unlock the cuffs. He could fight it, but he wasn’t up for making a scene. Maybe he was, he didn’t know. Maybe getting the police involved would be the best thing. Maybe then Dad would get the help he needed. But… Dean wouldn’t. Dean would hate him forever if he got Dad sent up for child abuse, or whatever else Dad got arrested for. And they’d find the arsenal in Dean’s car - the one Sam had been handcuffed to - not in Dad’s. That was smart thinking on Dad’s part. John might be an asshole and he might be killing his sons, but he wasn’t stupid.
So he shuffled his way into the mall, a higher-end mall in a ritzy suburb that probably had at least as many security guards and cameras as it did customers. Sam stood out here, in his thrift store hand-me-downs and his bruises. He couldn’t even pretend to blend in the way he could in other places. From the moment he set foot in that place he could feel eyes on him, and not because of the cult. A sales associate walked up to him every few yards and asked if he needed help. They smiled wide, fake smiles and they were polite, but he knew what they were really about. He heard the occasional subtle blip of a two-way radio being switched on, so he knew that security had gotten involved too.
And he had been made to go in unarmed, practically naked. You couldn’t be bait if you could defend yourself. Sam thought it was a bit of an oversell - after all, it wasn’t like they were going to strip him before putting him in the back of a van or anything - but John had insisted. Sam was pretty sure that his father had reasons beyond making it look “real.” Assuming that the cult did strike, Sam wasn’t intended to come back from this one.
Nothing happened in the mall. Nothing was ever going to happen in the mall. Sam walked every inch of the mall twice, just as his father wanted, before he was approached by his brother. “You can come back to the car now,” he said in disgust. “Come on. Security’s getting antsy.”
“No shit,” Sam spat. He followed along anyway, seething.
He slouched back out to the car and slouched into the shotgun position, taking a little bit of admittedly juvenile pleasure in slamming the heavy door shut behind him. John, as seemed to be his default today, got red in the face but then turned around and got into his truck. Dean got in the car. “Do you have to antagonize him, Sammy?”
“I didn’t say a fucking word, Dean.”
“Exactly. You couldn’t have apologized for mouthing off?”
“He’s doing his best to get me killed and I’m supposed to apologize to him for it?”
Another seven repetitions of “Creeping Death” later they’d arrived back at the motel, not another word exchanged between the brothers.
Sam stalked his way into the motel room, intending to sit down and do some homework since he hadn’t gotten killed today, but his father grabbed his shoulder. “You want to tell me what that was all about?” he snarled.
“What, wandering aimlessly through the mall?” Sam sneered. “Pretty sure that’s exactly what you ordered me to do.”
“They didn’t take you. Why?”
“Ask them. Oh wait - maybe it was because they don’t take any of their victims from well-populated areas. Or maybe it was because they weren’t going to grab someone who was already being followed by two thugs and a whole mall full of rent-a-cops.”
“You watch your tone with me, boy.” John’s grip on his shoulder tightened.
“You seriously going to pretend it’s not true?” Sam scoffed. “I stood out like a sore thumb in there. I would have even if you hadn’t marbled up my face nice and good. None of the other kids got taken from a mall, but no. You wanted me to get taken from a mall so you made me parade around there like some kind of goddamn show pony.”
“Freddie Milsom was taken from a mall,” Dean countered.
“Aw, Dad let his golden boy actually see the case material. I’m impressed.” Sam knew he shouldn’t lash out at Dean for being Dad’s favorite, but he’d gotten himself worked up by now and he couldn’t stop. He could hear his pulse in his ears. “Actually, no. Freddie Milsom, the last victim to be found dead, wasn’t taken from the mall. Security footage shows him leaving the mall with two of his friends, both of whom made it home just fine. He could only have been taken between the time that he got off the stupid goddamn public bus and his stupid goddamn house.”
“And how would you know that, boy?” John gave him a shake.
“I hacked the police report,” Sam tossed back. “While you were pissing and moaning about what a waste of space my schoolwork was and what a disappointment I am as a son, I hacked the police reports on all of the victims and I know goddamn well that the whole stunt with the mall was a waste.”
“Then why were you being such a whiny little bitch about it?” Dean demanded. “Why’d you make Dad rough you up?”
“He’s got no right to force me to be bait!” Sam heard his voice rise in tone and hated it. “He’ll find some other way to force me into getting killed for this and it’s stupid. I’m not willing to die for this.”
“You owe it to your mother -“ his father shouted.
Sam shouted him down. “The hell I do. The only thing I owe her is to live the life she gave me instead of wasting it on some asinine quest.” He shoved past the senior Winchester and through the motel room door. “I’m going out.”
Dean moved to grab him, but Sam easily skated out of the way and avoided restraint. He was very certain that he didn’t imagine the way his father reached out to stop Dean’s reaching him. It would have been nice if he could convince himself that John recognized his need for space and was forcing Dean to respect it.
He fought the urge to stuff his hands into his pockets and kept his head up as he shuffled his way down the side of the road. Snow hadn’t come to the area yet but it couldn’t be far off, and his thin clothes didn’t do much to ward off the chill. That probably wasn’t a bad thing; he needed to cool down. His dad had this ability - it had to be some kind of mutant superpower or something - to make his blood absolutely boil.
It was just… okay, he got that Dad had lost his wife and he was grieving. He would grieve forever. Maybe he didn’t “get” that, he didn’t ever want to truly understand that kind of pain, but he understood that it was a thing and that it was a motivating factor for his father. He had loved their mother. But what Sam just couldn’t wrap his head around why their mother’s death needed to define every aspect of her sons’ lives. His mother was dead, and that was bad. Sam had never known her. Why did her death mean that Sam was never allowed to have a stable roof over his head, or go to school on a consistent basis? Why did their mother’s fate mean that Sam had to die before he was twenty-five? Hell, before he was sixteen if his father had anything to say about it?
He’d never known Mary Winchester, but there was no way she could be the saint John and Dean insisted that she be venerated as if she would have wanted her sons to not know where their next meal was coming from or to have to know how to steal a car before they could legally drive one or the fact that both of her sons were drinking before they hit double digits. Poverty was nothing to be ashamed of if there was a legitimate reason for it, but their father had been part owner of an actual business before Mary died. He’d just thrown everything away to go tearing across the country putting Mary’s sons in all kinds of danger and then pretending that it was about “keeping you safe.”
He rubbed a hand against his aching jaw. Yeah, he felt safe all right.
He felt eyes on him almost as soon as he left the motel room, but he took no real notice of them. He assumed that they belonged to his father, or possibly to his brother. Why they thought that the cult was going to be striking in Preston over any other place in Idaho, or Wyoming, or Utah, was beyond Sam. There was no pattern at all to the disappearances, none whatsoever, and even less of a pattern to how or when the bodies of the missing boys showed up again. Sometimes a boy who had been missing for over a year would be discovered in Utah when he’d disappeared from a town in Wyoming that had been three hours away from the dump site; sometimes a boy would only be missing for a month and get dumped near the town he’d been taken from. The only consistency Sam could see was that the boys who had been gone longer had been in better physical condition than the ones who were killed after only a short time in captivity.
He saw a van coming up the road and he tensed up. His family was around to keep him from actually getting taken, right? They’d objected so strongly to him getting out in any way, whether it was going to go stay with Pastor Jim or running off to Flagstaff. They weren’t going to let him go to a cult. Not really. Right?
He took off running across the field on his left. He didn’t care if there had been cows there, he just made sure he didn’t slip in anything they’d left behind. He wasn’t going to let himself get taken. Yeah, sure, the cult (if it even was a cult and not just one or two creepy serial killers) needed to be gotten rid of, but that didn’t mean that it needed to be him taking them out. This was something that the police were for, something that a large force of actual professionals who got a paycheck and real training and had a proper education and had someplace to go and decompress at the end of the day so they weren’t literally doing the job all day, every day with no goddamn time off. It wasn’t a job for an alcoholic with a vendetta and two teenagers.
Sam could run. He could run fast, and he knew it. There was something that he couldn’t outrun, though. He felt something pierce his skin and he fell to the ground, unable to move. He heard footsteps on the crunchy, dry soil behind him before the darkness closed in and he knew no more.
He woke up sometime later; there was no real way of knowing how long. Even before his eyes opened he could tell that he wasn’t where he had been. He lay on his back on a cold metal table - like an exam table at a vet’s office or maybe in a morgue - instead of on his face in the mud. He breathed vaguely musty indoor air instead of clean mountain air. And oh yeah - he was naked.
“Open your eyes, boy.” The speaker stood somewhere near his chest, on the right side. She had an accent; he supposed it was a British accent if what he saw on PBS was anything to go by on the rare occasions he got to choose what he watched. That didn’t mean anything though - she could be faking it. “I heard your breathing start to change, we all know you’re awake.”
Well, crap. He could try to pretend to go back under but he didn’t think the woman would fall for it. He opened his eyes, wincing as the light triggered a headache. The room definitely looked like a medical office - almost certainly a veterinary office, given the anatomical diagram of a horse on the wall. The woman speaking to him was maybe five foot two, with iron-gray hair in a “sensible” haircut and dark, beady eyes. “You’re the cult,” he identified, looking at the two men in the room.
“We’re a community of worshippers,” she corrected him. “You can consider us a cult if you wish; you can consider us fish if it suits you to do so. None of that matters. What does matter, young man, is that you understand your place here and you do so very quickly. You are a slave. I own you. You will train. You will eat. You will follow the orders of the overseers. You will do what you are told to do when you are told to do it and that is all.” She ran a hand over his body.
He drew back, noticing for the first time that something had been painted onto his skin. “Don’t touch me, perv,” he growled.
She didn’t show any emotion as she raised her hand and slapped his face. As blows went, it wasn’t much. It didn’t even compare to any of the hits he’d taken that day, or the last time he’d been conscious anyway. “I own you,” she repeated. “I am entitled to touch you in any way that I want. It is in my best interest to ascertain your physical condition - all of your physical condition. A very thorough physical examination was conducted while you were unconscious - it seemed easiest to get your cooperation that way, and I must say that you seem to be in the best shape of any of our fighters.”
“I’m not a fighter,” Sam shot back. “I’m just a high school kid.”
She slapped his face again. “Not anymore. Not ever again. The sooner that you reconcile your mind to the fact that you will never leave this arena alive the more comfortable you will be while you’re here.” Cold, beady eyes flicked up to the men in the room. “Bring him to the arena. It’s time to present him to our Master.”
Well that sounded ominous. He had two options here. He could fight, or he could go along and try to figure out what was going on here. Everything in him wanted to fight. He was naked and he hadn’t started out that way, there were strange people grabbing at him, he’d been kidnapped. He was a fast kid and he was strong. He might make it.
Of course, the guys grabbing his arms and tugging him to the ground had Tasers. Maybe he could outrun them. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he could get out of this building. Where was he? The fact that he’d been knocked out for an unknown period of time meant that he could be anywhere by now. He’d been trained in survival in most environments but that assumed things like clothes, and shoes, and a knife because you always carried at least one knife on you because what if you encountered a shapeshifter at the Laundromat or a werewolf in the school cafeteria and you needed to cut its heart out right then and there, son and he was so screwed right now because John hadn’t let him bring his knife when he’d sent him out to offer himself up to these very people and he hadn’t grabbed it on his way out the door in his rush to get away from his father and now here he was in the clutches of this gaggle of freaks with no knife and no clothes and -
- and now was not the time to panic. He swallowed the rising bile in his throat as he allowed himself to be “encouraged” along a wide hallway. The place, he realized after a moment, looked a lot like a horse barn or maybe a county fair arena. He bit his lip, trying to focus on the number of steps it took to get between the treatment room and the arena.
Arena was the only possible word for this space. He was led up to the entrance to a space, where a spotlight focused on the doorway. The floor looked like a mix of sawdust and dirt and maybe hay. The space was ovoid, lined with bleacher-style seats, and he could hear a few people murmuring. “What the hell?” he whispered to himself.
“No talking,” one of his guards growled, while the other one punched him in the side.
They made their entrance, and as soon as they walked into the arena the spectators fell silent. The audience area was dark and the spotlight was right on Sam, so he couldn’t make out many details but he thought he could sense maybe fifty people there. Fifty people, all staring at his naked and painted body being marched across a huge expanse of space toward a giant stone altar.
The altar was covered in symbols. As Sam got closer he thought he could recognize some of them as being Greek, but that by no means covered everything he saw on the table. He forced his breathing to even out. They weren’t going to sacrifice him. Not right now, anyway. All of the dead boys that had been found, they’d been kept for at least a month before they’d been slaughtered. He didn’t feel badly enough to have been out for a month. His muscles would have atrophied. He’d read that in a book somewhere or something.
The short, vaguely British woman behind him began to chant. Sam tensed up. The language sounded familiar to his ears, but not familiar enough that he understood it. It was almost like listening to a Beatles album on reverse - things sounded like they should be familiar but everything was just wrong enough that he couldn’t -
Except he could. After a few moments of listening to the chanting and the babbling he picked up a few words, here and there. Then it became easy. John Winchester’s quest for whatever had destroyed his wife had demanded that Sam study Latin even before he knew why they had no home and moved every six weeks on average, but his single-minded obsession limited his son’s study to medieval and ecclesiastical Latin. Cicero would have been fine if he’d been writing about exorcisms, but since he was just writing about politics and history he was useless to a hunter and therefore strictly forbidden. The only people Sam had ever heard speak Latin had also limited their study, or at least limited their display of knowledge in Sam’s presence.
This woman was speaking an older, cleaner, more perfect Latin. She was speaking classical Latin. Sam couldn’t quite wrap his head around everything - tenses were wildly different and even in English there is a huge difference between you are loved and you will be loved and you would have been loved - but after a while he started to get the gist of what was being said. She was trying to summon something - a god? Yes, definitely a god. Charon, he identified. She was trying to summon Charon.
Something was poured over his head. He bit his lip to keep from shrieking when he recognized that it was blood. It was cold blood, too - refrigerated, probably had some kind of anti-coagulation agent added, but it was blood. He didn’t know whose blood it was, but it was in his hair and running down his spine and running down his chest and getting into his eyes. He took his hands and wiped the mess out of his eyes. What if the blood was contaminated? Could he get some kind of disease by someone else’s blood getting poured into his goddamn eyes? He didn’t think it worked that way, but not a lot of people are inclined to rationality when they’ve just had blood poured over their heads.
The chanting only stopped when the blood poured off of his body and hit the ground. Then the altar began to glow softly. The paint on Sam’s body glowed too, and he cut back on an hysterical scream. His body was not supposed to glow. “Lord Charon,” his “owner” intoned. “I present to you my latest offering. I invite you to mark him for your own.”
A mass began to take shape before the altar. Whatever it was, it didn’t become visible, not completely. It had a vague shape, and it was darker than the space around it, but even years later Sam wouldn’t be able to say for any certainty what it had looked like. It was simply a cold, dark, amorphous mass that chilled the air around it so thoroughly that Sam thought he might get frostbite just from proximity.
I cannot mark this one. Charon’s voice wasn’t so much a sound as a sensation, reverberating into the center of Sam’s very being. Others mark him already. I cannot gainsay them. There was a vague sensation of motion, as though the being was looking from Sam to the woman behind him. This should not impede his ability to participate in your games.
“Marked by others?” Sam repeated, before his world exploded in a world of burning agony. He screamed as electricity ripped through him.
I cannot read more. It is hidden. Nevertheless, it is immaterial. It means that I cannot touch your soul when you die, that is all. I am sorry. The deity picked Sam up off of the ground, setting him back on his feet.
“But he is a worthy sacrifice?” Sam’s “owner” pressed.
There are no flaws in that line, Charon affirmed. The glowing stopped. The mass disappeared. The audience began to whisper excitedly as they got up from their seats and began to file out of the arena.
His “owner” leaned into Sam’s face. “Why didn’t you tell me you were already marked?” she spat.
“Because you shot me full of horse tranquilizers and dragged me to god-knows-where?” he shot back. He had no idea what Charon could have meant by “marked by others,” who those others were or what that could possibly involve. Maybe it had something to do with the filth he’d always felt inside of him, just under the surface. Maybe it had something to do with his father, or his brother.
She stomped onto his foot. “I can see how your face came to be so bruised. Get him cleaned up and put away,” she snapped to the guards. “He’ll join the others tomorrow.”
He found himself escorted back to the treatment room. There was a shower room in the back, and while they watched him he was allowed to wash himself. After having been exposed as he had to an arena full of people, two goons watching him shower was only mildly creepy, so he focused on getting the blood off his body and out of his hair. This might have been the single highest quality shower he’d ever been in, he noticed as he scrubbed. The water pressure was good, and the hot water never seemed to run out.
Whoever did the doctoring in here must need to clean up an awful lot.
Once he had cleaned himself thoroughly - his guards checked, in an inspection that had his cheeks scarlet with shame - he was permitted to towel himself off. He was then issued a loincloth, a thin piece of cotton that really wasn’t more than a couple of flaps of fabric tied together at the hips. It wasn’t intended to do more than cover his bits when he was standing still.
He considered fighting once again. The loincloth was better than nothing, he decided, and he put the garment on. He was going to get no end of shit from Dean when they found him wearing this thing, but as long as this was the only humiliation he got put through after everything he’d already experienced he’d probably be able to get through the teasing.
They led him down two flights of stairs and then through a tunnel. The bricks didn’t look all that new. “You’ve been doing this a while?” he hazarded.
One of the guards shrugged, but gave an almost-imperceptible nod to the other one. “Yeah, sure,” Guard Two told him. “It’s not like it’s a crime for you to know. You’re not going anywhere.”
“You seem pretty sure of that,” he challenged. They had to be going into another building now.
“Kid, we’re in the mountains. No one who’s not part of this has been up this way in a good fifty years, you feel me? You’d freeze to death or fall to your death before anyone could help you - and that’s assuming you got out of the compound first. Face it, kid. This is your life now.” This came from Guard One, who seemed a bit older than Guard Two.
“Has anyone tried?” Sam pressed. “Escaping, I mean?”
“A couple of boys. It happens, sometimes. They don’t get far. Like I said, kid. We’ve been doing this for a while.” They got to a large, thick-looking fire door. Guard One unlocked it.
Beyond the door were more doors, lining a dank corridor lit by a naked light bulb. The doors all looked the same, except for the numbers painted on them. They were steel doors, with small openings for visual access that could only be opened from the outside. The guards led Sam to one of the doors - number thirteen, he noticed wryly and unlocked it.
“Welcome home kid,” Guard Two told him, not unkindly.
Sam was ushered inside. The cell was not large, but it could have been worse. There were two bunks built into the wall. He took the top bunk, burrowing under the scratchy blanket as much for something to cover his body with as for physical comfort. There was a toilet. The light came from a ceiling panel.
He lay back in his bunk and tried to calm himself. It didn’t work. If his father and brother had been concerned for him with the cult and everything, they’d have found him already. They wouldn’t have let him get taken. They wouldn’t have let him get “examined” by whatever quack of a medical professional they had going for them here, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have let him get stripped and paraded naked like a slab of meat for public consumption. Sam was on his own here, and on his own for finding a way out.
It wasn’t a good feeling.
This way to Masterpost -- This way to Chapter Two