Walk 1/7: Your Signal In The Distance
Title: Walk
Author: safiyabat
Artist: chasingparallax
Characters & Pairing(s): Sam/Castiel; Sam, Castiel, Claire, Dean
Rating: M
Word Count: 32,417 / 5,529 (chapter)
Warnings: show-level violence, depression
Summary: An old friend reaches out to Sam for help.
Sam jolted awake when the phone rang.
His phone rarely rang. Once upon a time people had called or texted or emailed him on a regular basis just to check in, or to chat, or to make plans to get together just for the sake of fun. Those days were long gone. Stanford was such a distant memory that it seemed like someone else had gone there, like the Sam who lived now had just watched that life through some frankly dirty windows.
Sam’s phone rang when Dean called to give him orders on a case. It rang when something was wrong with Dean and other people needed to get information to him so they could take care of the problem with Dean. Otherwise it sat, silent but on at all times, so Dean could track him if he decided that he needed to, but otherwise it was useless. No one called just to talk. No one called just to hear his voice. No one called because they were curious about Sam.
So when the phone rang at five o’clock in the morning, tore him out of a slumber he’d only barely achieved, he knew that there was a problem.
“Hello?” he mumbled.
“Sam, it’s Jody.” Jody didn’t sound very much more awake than Sam was. He could still hear an underlying tension underneath all of the clouds of exhaustion. “It’s Claire.”
Claire. It took Sam half a second as he sat up in bed. Claire, Jimmy Novak’s daughter. Claire, who’d been Cas’ vessel for a hot minute. She’d gone to stay with Jody for a while after that mess with the Grigori; Dean and Cas had convinced themselves that she’d give up hunting if she went and stayed with the good sheriff and her daughter, Alex. “She took off?”
“Her bed was empty when I got up for work this morning,” Jody confirmed. “She left a note.”
He swung his legs over the side of his bed. “Well, you know. She’s over eighteen. She can decide to do these things, Jody.” He fumbled for the switch on the lamp so he could find real clothes instead of pajamas.
“I know that,” she hissed at him. “If she were under eighteen I could have the entire department out looking for her.”
Instead of you, Sam’s brain finished for her. “I get it. Hang on.” He grabbed his laptop off the nightstand and called up the website that would let him track the card he’d given Claire. “Okay. Her card was last used in the Sioux Falls bus station to get a ticket to Broken Bow, Nebraska.” He shuddered, able to get away with such a display here in the privacy of his little room. Broken Bow was the town with the crappy motel where he’d stolen his father’s journal and learned the truth - the truth about what his father and brother really did, the truth about what had happened to his mother, the truth about what his father felt for him. “I can be there in a couple of hours. Whatever she’s up to, I’ll keep her safe.”
He called up the schedule for the bus and decided he had enough time to go for a quick run before heading out. He was getting to an age where his joints emphatically disliked long car rides and let him know about it; if he could do something to keep them loose and limber before setting off on a day of tracking down a teenaged hunter he knew that he should do so. He went for his run, took a shower, packed a few things into a bag and left a note for Dean. He’d pay for that later, he knew, but even knowing that Dean would panic and that panic would lead to anger he knew that it would be better to ask forgiveness than permission.
Then he got into his rusty green-and-white pickup truck and headed out.
It shouldn’t have taken more than four and a half hours, if Claire had been driving. As it was, between bus transfers and stops, it was six o’clock in the evening before Claire’s bus pulled into the station on the outskirts of Broken Bow. He saw the teenager get off the bus and watched as she stalked over to a car and stole it. At some point, he was going to have to give her some lessons in technique, because the girl was sloppy. Granted, she hadn’t been stealing cars since she was all of nine or whatever, but still - that sloppy work was going to get her caught one of these days. Probably had gotten her caught more than once - hadn’t Cas gone and picked her up from a juvenile facility? Or had that been for pickpocketing?
Whatever. He tried to shield her from view as much as he could without getting caught, by her or by anyone else. Once she had stolen the car, he followed her to her destination: an abandoned farm about thirty miles outside of town. He started to feel uneasy about the whole thing as the farm loomed closer in his sights. Abandoned farms never spelled good news in his experience - there had been the one with Osiris, that had been fun. Or the one where they’d met Kate and Luther, more good times. He’d brought plenty of weapons, but he hadn’t brought anything too exotic. What if there was a god in there? What if there was something worse?
He saw the blonde get out of the car and creep around the barn, the only building left with any real structural integrity. She had the Grigori’s sword in her hand - inexpertly held, but at least she had it with her. She might get in a lucky stroke. He noticed something else about her grip and her stance, too: she held the sword like she expected to stab an angel. Not like she expected to fight one, and not like she expected to come across any other type of creature. Yeah, someone needed to have a nice long talk with her.
Part of him wanted that person to be him, because he knew that Dean and Cas would limit their talk to “Don’t,” and then wonder why it hadn’t worked. Maybe Sam didn’t like the idea of Claire hunting. He didn’t like the idea of anyone hunting. He got the idea of feeling so bereft, so adrift, that all one was capable of was destruction. She might as well be smart about it until she got it out of her system.
He pulled his angel blade out of the weapons case. On a hunch - or maybe a memory - he grabbed a machete too.
As if on cue, Claire froze. The barn door swung open and five people walked out. They stood in the twilight with sneers on their faces, cruel twists that proved that these vampires were nothing like the nest of “cruelty free” vampires Lenore had headed up so well. Claire yelped and started running back for her car.
Sam slid out of the truck, machete at the ready. The first vampire lost his head easily. The second got in a good shot to Sam’s gut, but Sam just used that as an opportunity to close the distance and take his head too. He’d had so much worse than a few hits to the midsection; these barely registered. Number three went down as Sam spun away from an attack from number four, kicking out at the latter assailant to drive him away. Number five managed to sink his teeth in and bite down on his other arm, which did hurt more than a little, but Sam punched him in the face and took his head.
Still bleeding, Sam grinned at the last vampire. The creature blanched. “You’re crazy, man,” his enemy accused.
Sam considered. “It’s been said,” he admitted, just before slicing through the man’s neck.
He turned to face Claire. The girl had pressed right up against the truck, eyes wide and hands up to her mouth. Her breath came in deep, fast gasps and her skin had drained of all color. “Do you need a paper bag?” he asked her.
It was enough to annoy her out of her shock. “You need a bandage, damn it!” she snapped. “And - and stitches, probably! What the hell?”
He rolled his eyes. “I’ll stitch it up when I get back to the motel.” He reached into the cab and grabbed a random rag out of the weapons bag. It wasn’t the cleanest thing in his arsenal but it would do for now; he’d never gotten an infection before, and he suspected that the demon blood in his veins would continue to give him an unwelcome little immune boost. “First things first.”
She rolled her eyes. “Let me guess: Claire shouldn’t be hunting, blah blah blah?”
He smirked. “Would you listen?”
“What do you think?”
“That’s why I’m not about to say it. No.” He wrapped the bite with the rag and tied it off with his good hand. “Besides, there’s time enough for that crap later. We’ve got more important things on our plate right now.”
“Like…” She looked down at his makeshift bandage. “You’re scarily good at doing that one handed.”
He gave a sheepish little smile. “It’s a learned skill. Anyway. What we need to do now is get rid of the evidence.” She might as well know the reality of the situation, especially if she was going to hunt alone. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat things for her.
“Evidence?” She blinked at him.
“Five headless corpses ring a bell? They don’t just dissolve into dust like in Buffy. And believe me when I tell you, you do not want law enforcement on your tail. Come on, help me drag them back into the barn.”
She gave a full-body shudder, but didn’t object to gathering the heads and chucking them back into the barn. Between the two of them they got the rest of the corpses into a pile, where Sam looked around to see what he had to work with. “We need to burn the bodies badly enough that it’s not obvious that they were beheaded,” he explained, “without making it obvious that it was arson. That means no accelerant that we can’t explain away as having already been in the barn.” His eyes lit on some candles and some oil lamps. “Yahtzee.”
“What do you mean?” She bit her lip.
“The stuffing in those couches dates back to before the mid-seventies, which means that when it gets hot enough it turns back into something that just fuels the fire. Do you see any shitty whiskey around? Vamps love shitty booze for some reason.” He’d never gotten that - they were vampires. He wasn’t even sure if they could get drunk; he’d never had a chance to ask Lenore or Eli, and Gordon hadn’t been keen on exploring the minutiae of his condition.
Claire started poking around. “Yeah, they’ve got a big old bar over here.”
“Awesome. Here, help me set up the bodies over here. Don’t have to be too precise; we can just make it look like they passed out. Could be from smoke or booze; there won’t be enough left when I’m done for the forensics teams to tell.”
She glanced at him out of the side of her eye. “That’s, um. That’s a lot of thought you’ve put into this already.”
He huffed out a little laugh. “Cleaning your way out of a crime scene is maybe fifty percent of being a successful hunter, Claire. I once cleaned up a crime scene so well even my dad and brother didn’t know the people they were hunting had been there, and that’s saying something.”
“Really?” She lifted her eyebrows and turned away. For a moment Sam thought he’d scared her off, and he wasn’t sure if he felt good about turning her off of hunting or bad about turning yet another person off of him, but she went back to work dragging bodies over to the couch.
Sam started the fire once he made sure that nothing would give them away and then herded the teen out of the barn. “This place is drier than old tinder,” he pointed out. “Plus they’ve got drums of lamp oil. Not the brightest idea - heh - but it works out in our favor.” Since when did vampires even need lamp oil, anyway? Maybe they kept it on hand for their prey? He’d have to write that down and consider it later. Right now he had a job to do.
He could see the moment when the connection was made on her face. “Right. So. Motel?”
“Let’s keep an eye out first.” He leaned against the hood of the truck. “Not for too long; you’re probably hungry and I want to get to stitching. Need better light than this.” He waved his hand to indicated the firelight.
She nodded. “So how’d you find me?” she asked after a moment.
“I’m good at what I do. Sometimes,” he added. “Look, Claire -“
“Don’t sit there and tell me not to hunt. I know you can’t be that much of a hypocrite.” She glared at him.
“Nope. Wasn’t even going to try. You’re going to do what you’re going to do. Of course, if you’d stayed with Jody, you’d have learned that those were vampires you were going up against, not angels.” He grinned when she gave a little start. “Yeah. I guess the new place wasn’t as forthcoming about their backgrounds as you might have thought?”
“I knew you knew Jody from hunting,” she blurted. I didn’t know she was a hunter.”
“Not full-time. She’s a cop, and a good one. But she probably didn’t want to bring it up in case you took it into your head to go out hunting again, and she probably didn’t want to bring it up around Alex because of Alex’ background.” He shrugged. “People think that hiding things from people, especially kids, means that they just don’t know anything’s going on.”
“You’d know about that?” She snorted.
“Right here is where I found out the first eight years of my life had been lies,” he told her. “My dad - he liked to keep secrets, just for the sake of keeping secrets I think. He was… he said he was doing it to keep me safe, but in reality he was trying to control me. Thought that if I didn’t know the truth I’d fall in line or something, out of fear.”
“Huh.” She lapsed into silence as they watched the barn burn. Sam occupied himself by cleaning Claire’s presence out of the stolen car. It was easier than remembering, and more productive too.
Once the roof fell in the pair left the scene. Sam found them a motel and got them a room for the night before calling Jody. “I found Claire. She’s safe,” he assured his friend before she could become distraught. “She thought she’d found something she hadn’t, but don’t worry. I’m going to hang out for a little while and make sure she’s okay.”
“I’d rather she came back here, but okay.” The sheriff sighed. “I guess this wasn’t the right place for her.”
He glanced at the bathroom door, where Claire was taking a shower. “Not everyone’s cut out for the apple-pie thing. Being a vessel, even for a little while, can put some things out of reach. And hey - maybe she’ll exorcise whatever it is from her system and be ready to settle down a bit in a few months. For now, though, she’s got to do what she’s got to do for her.”
“I know. I get it. I could wish it were different, but I get it. Thanks for running her down, though, Sam. I mean, I know she’s tough, I know she’s made it this far, but there’s stuff out there that she’s not prepared for, that she doesn’t even know about.”
“I know. I’m going to try. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Thanks, Sam.”
Next on his list of people to call back was Dean, who had sent him no less than ten messages during his absence. “It’s about time you called me back,” Dean snarled. “Where the hell’d you go?”
“Doing a favor for Jody,” he told his brother. There was no reason to hide it.
“How come she didn’t call me, huh?” Dean wanted to know.
Sam closed his eyes. They’d taken the Mark off of his brother, sure, but how much had really changed? Okay, sure, he wasn’t a bloodthirsty, immortal quasi-demonic thing on a hair trigger anymore, but the Mark changed people. It had changed Lucifer from God’s favorite angel into… well, Lucifer. And to be honest, a lot of those traits had been there before Dean had taken the Mark. This, for example - this kind of jealousy, this need for adherence to the Great Winchester Hierarchy, this had existed before Dean and Cain had ever met.
Of course, pointing that out would accomplish nothing good. “I guess you’d have to ask her that,” he replied, giving nothing away. “At any rate, it didn’t turn out to be anything that needed a whole cavalry charge. One person could handle it, it’s being handled, and it’s nothing to worry about, okay?”
Dean snorted. “Yeah, whatever.”
“Anyway. My turn for the shower is coming up and -“
“Your turn for the shower?” Crap. Sam should have known better than to let that slip. “You got another hunting partner you haven’t told me about?”
“Kind of a newbie. They ran into a little bit of trouble, but it’s okay now. Nothing one person couldn’t handle. I need a wash, okay?”
Claire came out of the bathroom.
“Whatever. We’ll talk about this when you get home.” Dean hung up.
Sam sighed and put his phone away. “Sounds like a fun talk,” Claire told him, one corner of her mouth quirked up.
“Just Dean. He wasn’t exactly thrilled about the whole solo thing.”
She smiled and sat down on her bed. “It must be nice to have someone who cares about you enough to worry about you hunting alone.”
He let out a huff and for just a second he didn’t care about how bitter he sounded. “I’m pretty sure that’s not exactly his issue. It’s more of a trust thing. And you have plenty of people who worry about you hunting alone.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t think that’s a ‘trust thing?’”
“No. I don’t. Jody called me because she was worried about you off and hunting on your own, and she was right to be. You went into a situation without knowing what you were getting into. If those vamps had gotten to you, you’d have been dead.” Ugh, had he really degraded so far since Stanford that he couldn’t use proper grammar?
She rolled her eyes and flopped back onto the bed. “I’d have gotten away.”
“Even if you had made it back to your car, Claire, vampires remember a scent. There are ways to hide it, but they’re not written down anywhere. They’d have followed you until they found you. And they wouldn’t have made it an easy death, either.” The memory of those women that Gordon had savaged, strung up in that fetid den where the former hunter had left them, sprang before his eyes without warning. He forced it back. He could do nothing to help them now; he could have done nothing then.
“Look, I had no way of knowing, okay? It sounded like angel crap -“
“Because everything sounds like angel crap to you. It’s what you know and what your big… issue is. And I get it.” He took off his outer shirts in an attempt to get at the bite wound.
“I sincerely doubt that you ‘get it,’” the teenager sneered at him.
“I get a lot more than you’d expect. You’re not the only one they’ve used as a vessel, Claire.” He tried to give her a smile, but he could tell even without a mirror that it was coming out more like a grimace. Instead, he turned into the bathroom and started cleaning out the wound.
She got off the bed and followed him. “Really? Even after… how we met?”
He gave a bitter laugh. “Yeah. Turns out the purity of the vessel isn’t much of a concern. I’m sure it’s not exactly a comfortable fit for most angels, being stuck in something like me, but it’ll do in a pinch.” He dumped peroxide onto the wound. It stung, and he watched the injury foam up.
“How do you get over it?” She sat on the toilet seat, looking up at him. “I mean, Castiel was only in me for a few hours and I still wake up remembering what that felt like.”
“You don’t,” he admitted with a sigh. “You get through it. And I’m not exactly your poster child for that.”
No, he wasn’t, was he? He’d dressed his attempts since then up as “sacrifices,” but he knew what they were even if no one else would admit it. He’d do anything to never have to remember the chill of Lucifer’s Grace, or the alien presence of Gadreel trying to force him under, or the roiling, slick, oily ooze that was Crowley, or Meg’s blazing anger and pain and hate.
“You seem to be okay,”
He threaded a needle. “Glad to hear it.”
She watched in horror as he started to stitch the bite mark closed. “You’re. Um. Shouldn’t someone else be doing that?”
“You done a lot of stitches?” he asked her.
“Well no, but -“
“We’ll find some way for you to practice. But I usually prefer to do my own. I’m pretty good at them; mine hardly ever scar.” He glanced at her for a second.
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“I guess. Not as much as the initial bite.” He got back to stitching.
“Is this your way of trying to turn me off of hunting?”
“Nope.” He focused on his work. “You’re going to do what you need to do. I get that. I wasn’t much different when I was eighteen. And like I said, I get your reasons. Eventually you’ll figure out a balance for yourself. I’d just rather you were alive when you got to that point. I know it doesn’t seem like it from our track records but not everyone has a revolving door into the afterlife.”
“I didn’t even realize vampires were a thing,” she blurted.
“For a long time we thought they were extinct. Tomorrow we’ll go out and buy you a journal. Yes, a journal, a paper journal, because you’re going to find yourself in a lot of situations where you’re not going to have power or a signal.” He grimaced. “We’ve got my father’s for that, and then I’ve got an electronic one for other stuff. But you don’t have that resource. Anyway, I’ll write down some of the most basic stuff for you.”
She frowned. “But I’m only really interested in hunting angels.”
“I know. But you’re going to find other things.” He glanced at her and sighed. There was so much he could say right now, stuff about not getting caught up in revenge cycles and not getting so focused that she lost herself, but why would she listen to him? She was eighteen, and she was hurting, and he was just some creep. Instead, he finished the line of stitches and grabbed his wallet. “Here. Call for a pizza and a salad and I’ll get you started on the basics.”
She nodded, an appraising look in her eye. He half expected her to disappear with the cash and his car, but she came back with pizza and salad and even beer by the time he emerged from the shower. She’d splurged, too, gotten some of the craft beer that he liked, and he knew he hadn’t given her enough for that. “Guess that fake ID’s holding up,” he observed, opening two beers and passing her one.
She grinned. “Not going to lecture me on underage drinking?”
He snorted. “You’re kidding, right? It’s not like you’re going to get blitzed. It’s a beer. It goes well with pizza.” He took a deep breath. “So. Crime scene cleanout. Very important, very boring.”
She glanced at him. “And something you’re apparently very good at.”
“Well, yeah. It helps to have a certain personality type. A certain attention to detail, I guess.” He smirked, knowing exactly why he’d always gotten stuck with the job. “You’re cleaning on two different levels. You’re cleaning for civilian forensics teams - you don’t want them to ever think that there’s a reason to look deeper. Like tonight - you don’t want them to even realize that there was a fight.
“Then you’re also cleaning it out in terms of hunting. You need to salt and burn any and all remains, because there’s always a risk of something coming back and causing trouble. It’s not always feasible, but if it’s possible you need to do that. You want to try to avoid leaving any trace of yourself behind - another reason for the fake IDs. You’re already in the system from your days as a juvenile offender.”
“Hey, those records are sealed! I’m eighteen now!” she objected, throwing herself back against the flimsy chair as her pizza slice went limp in her hand.
“That might cut it with backwoods departments. It’s not going to do much in a city, or with the feds. And depending on what kind of trouble you get into, you may find yourself having a lot more contact with the feds than you want.” He poked at his salad but didn’t eat it; the thought of Henricksen and his Lilith-summoned ghost turned his stomach. “They can make your life very difficult, so it’s best to stay off the radar.”
“How do you do it?” she asked, leaning forward again.
“Well, I do some creative computer work. And good crime scene cleanout. And I’ve been on the most wanted list… uh, three times? Twice? One of those times, though, something else really wanted me on that list. So I guess I couldn’t have done much about that one, but still.” He took a swig from his beer.
“So just light everything on fire,” the teen surmised.
“Tempting. But no. Then they’re looking for a serial arsonist. You’re going to have to be creative. And I’ve seen you work, so I know you’re capable.”
She froze. “Really.”
“Sure. You kept yourself alive and relatively safe out there for a long time. It wasn’t healthy, but you were a kid.” He shrugged. “You needed real guidance if you were going to be expected to do something else. I mean, yeah, you got caught sometimes. Don’t think we didn’t.”
“Seriously?” She smirked. “Come on. Out with it. Tell me some of your bad-boy exploits. To hear them tell it you were a little goody two shoes.”
He barked out a laugh. “Well I mean yeah, Dean and our father thought so. They also thought that if they locked me into a motel room for weeks at a time and told me to stay there that I’d, you know, do it.” He shook his head. “I was a thief. Pickpocket, housebreaker, and car thief. You name it. Sometimes I did it for money, because there never was enough money. Sometimes I did it because I was bored and pissed off.” He shrugged.
“But you didn’t get caught.”
“Not in any way that my father or brother found out about.” He closed his eyes and let himself remember. “There was this one time, I think it was in Fall River, I made the mistake of stealing a drug dealer’s car. With, uh, with a healthy amount of his product inside.”
She drew back. “How did you not die?”
“Very fast talking. I had to carry that stuff for him until we left. But I did a good job, I guess, because I got a good tip out of it.” He shrugged. “I guess it would have been a good career to fall back on if I’d stayed in Flagstaff.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh. Um, I ran off. A lot. Flagstaff was where I escaped to for the longest - I mean it took them the longest to track me down.” He squirmed. That had been a happy memory once. Now it was just one more thing for Dean to hate him for.
“Huh.” Her eyes narrowed. “You know, you guys always look so together, so united, when I see you.”
“We are,” he assured her. “We are. It’s just… well, families are complicated, and the Winchesters are more complicated than most.” He flashed back quickly to being on his knees in that abandoned restaurant, waiting for Dean to deliver the killing blow. It hadn’t been so much that he wanted to live; he just couldn’t stand to hear Dean thinking of himself as something that needed to be flung off into the sun or whatever.
The blow hadn’t come. Not yet. Sam was still waiting.
“I guess so.” She must have seen something on his face, because she changed the subject pretty quickly. “So. What else is on my class list, Professor?”
He laughed. “Professor. I’m pretty much a walking, talking example of what not to do, Claire.”
“You took out five vamps with, like, your pinky. You’re pretty bad-ass.”
He blushed. “Anyway. You were holding that sword all wrong for a fight. The only thing you could have done was to stab something in the back. Which - sure. It’s a technique, if you can pull it off. But you’re not going to be able to do it every time. We’ll talk about how to hold your sword, I’ll show you a few ways to practice when you’re alone.”
She gave him an appraising look. “Do you like hunting?”
He bit the inside of his cheek. “I tried for a long time to get out. I told myself that it was temporary. I accept that it’s my life now. I was… I was stupid for thinking that there could ever be anything else for me.” He had been, too. “It doesn’t have to be that way for you, but the important thing is that it’s your choice.”
“But there’s other stuff, too, right? I mean, you take time to go out and do the mini-golf thing, or you have girlfriends somewhere or something?” she pressed, meeting his eyes. “I know that Dean still makes time to enjoy life and stuff.”
He shrugged. The last time he’d shown interest in sex Dean kicked him to the curb. Of course, there had been a lot more at work there. But still. “Sure,” he lied, and changed the subject.
They ate their dinners and they went to sleep. They both had nightmares. Neither talked about it.
He woke early the next morning and went for a run. When he got back, he found Claire on his phone, arguing. “You’re not actually my father,” she seethed at the handset. “You don’t get to tell me where to go or what to do!” She paused to listen, looking vaguely like she’d bit into a lemon before handing the phone off to Sam. “It’s Castiel.”
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