birthday ficlets: The Knifethrower/The Safehouse/Shreds and Tatters
opprobrium has the dubious honour of being the most entertaining, motivating, c-bomb-dropping degenerate I've ever met. She constantly questions, shocks and titillates, and without her I have no doubt I'd be spending my spare time playing the Sims 2 and reading canadian litmags like an asshat. She has a fearsome ability to motivate others to produce - and god be good, considering she's building a career on manhandling reticent creatives, I'm pretty honoured to be the perverted side project. She feeds me ideas and work, and I'm grateful for every half-formed sentence she slides my way, because they're always, ALWAYS, awesome.
So, in honour of her birthday tomorrow, I just want to drop these three ficlets her way. All are based on prompts she gave me sometime over the summer, and these three were just too good to let go. I had to write them. They all read as Sam/Dean established relationships, they're all PG, and the spoilers are listed individually.
Happy Birthday, Brooke.
The Knifethrower: or, the one where they were raised in the circus. Spoilters to Everybody Loves a Clown.
The convoy drives through the night more often than not, and they pull into Kearney, Nebraska around nine a.m. on a dark Friday in September. The site is just a big muddy field with a few hairs of grass poking through here and elsewhere, and the rain coming down like little splinters of an early winter.
Dean twitches at the curtain as their trailer pulls up in a jagged formation with the others, and curses whatever dinky-ass town council thought it'd be a good idea to have a couple dozen sixty-ton semis and ten-ton flatbeds pulling up on a glorified soccer field. “They couldn't a cleared out a friggin' parking lot?” he growls out the window.
Sam eyes the clouds and the puddles and says, “The rides are all gonna be axle-deep in mud by Sunday.”
Still, they stump down out into the wet, Dean shrugging on the flannel-lined canvas jacket he pulled out from deep in a back cabinet, and Sam folding a knit cap over his head, shuddering briefly against the chill. Already there's a crew pulling back panels on the main rig, unstrapping poles and the giant folds of dirty plastic that'll make up the sideshow tents. They slog through ankle-deep mud to take up their share of the plywood flooring, Sam muttering about low crowd turnouts in this weather, at the ass-end of the season.
Five hours into set-up, Cooper shows up with a couple of guys in clean gore-tex jackets - locals, obviously - all looking a little foul around the mouths. The tents are up, the rides are mostly unfolded and every man standing is wet to the bone and splattered in mud that smells awfully well-fertilized.
Cooper waves an arm and shouts with a sliding edge in his ringmaster's voice, “Alright, everyone, let's pack it up! The illustrious mayor of Kearney here says we ain't welcome in this here shit-hole.”
There is a dense silence, and Dean slides a look at Sam from across the six-foot length of riser they're carrying. It's damn heavy. Sam crouches to put his end down, and Dean does the same.
“What the hell you mean, ain't welcome? We got a signed contract,” shouts someone. Dean sees that it's Karl, the knife thrower, and the only guy other than Cooper who's been around longer than him and Sam.
“Contract doesn't cover the serial killer you got riding around with you,” says the balder of the two locals. “We don't need any of that here.”
Sam expels a hiss of a breath, and looks just about as offended as the rest of the crew. All of them large men standing around half-frozen and faced with the prospect of undoing half a day's labour for free. Mayor Gore-tex is an awful ballsy man, telling three dozen roustabouts and carnies to their faces that one of them's a child-touching murderer. If he realizes it, though, he doesn't much show it. He stands with his feet planted, and Cooper looks around a little wildly, like maybe he's hoping someone will step up and cow the man.
But nothing. For a second Dean thinks Sam will take the hint and sock someone in the mouth, but it passes. It's an easy leap to say they don't have a lot of options. With another look, Dean and Sam bend to shoulder their riser again, and start back toward the truck it came off of. Pretty soon everyone's doing the same.
Everything's back on the trucks at six, and thank god all but one of them - the rig carrying the thirty-ton Turbo Drop - gets out of the mud okay. They put down some plywood, which splinters all to hell, but eventually they roll the truck out, and everyone loads back up into their trailers. As twenty engines roll over, Cooper mutters over the radio that they'll overnight at North Platte, a hundred miles down the road.
“Not gonna be any better in North Platte,” says Sam, stripping off wet layers. There's a red mark on his forehead from the hat, his hair is a pressed and greasy tangle. Dean sits on the bed they never bother turning back into a table and puts his sock feet up against the green cushion opposite. He watches Sam peel out of flannel and wool and cotton, down to damp skin. Sam continues: “Cooper should skip this end of the circuit, head straight down south for the winter. No one's heard about this shit down there.”
Dean doesn't answer. He kind of suspects they probably have. Three families, six murders, three states. Medford, Fergus Falls, Groton. The police caught on to the link pretty quick. The entire convoy's been searched four times now: local sheriffs and the feds once, too. But now it's just out and out rejection when they show up. Chased out of town like gypsies.
“You gonna ask Karl if you can do the knives next show?” Dean asks, instead. Outside, through the fog on the plastic windows he can see the lights of Kearney, a town full of bedrooms and breathing parents. The trailer rolls along steady, the contortionists who live on the other side of the curtain up front are too delicate for cold or heavy lifting, but at least they do most of the driving.
Sam shrugs and plugs in the kettle, dumps powdered cocoa in mugs. “He doesn't like it much when I do. Liked it better when I was eight years old standing still so he could split apples.”
“Just worried you're better than him,” Dean yawns and stretches. Now the engine's running and the air's warming up, smelling like diesel and mould. They don't clean much. Sometimes Leonora pokes her head back and complains, or just does it for them. “You are. And you don't need to fake blind to prove it, either.”
“I could do it blind,” says Sam, a tinge in his voice.
He could, probably. But Karl's still got seniority. Dean does the Houdini thing the nights Sam's allowed to play the big tent throwing knives. He does handcuffs, knots, straightjackets. Nothing truly challenging, because everything's gotta be mobile. And when Karl does the knifethrowing, Dean and Sam do the psychic thing in a sideshow tent: Dean borrows objects from the audience and Sam tells him what they are, blindfolded and facing backwards. They raise up spirits who shake the little stage and tell secrets no one could possibly know. Sam floats chairs with his mind and picks a blooming rose out of a mirror.
The kettle shrieks, and Sam hands Dean his mug.
Dean balances it with one hand and shifts his legs and body into the one position that is eighty percent comfortable for the both of them in their tiny nest of smashed cushions and dirty sheets. Sam drapes a quilt over himself and inches into position: head on chest; three knees interlocked, one cocked up; spare arms tucked under and away; feet either sticking out into the air or propped against the cabinet that serves as foot-board.
They don't say anything else about the knives or the murders. Just take turns sipping at their chocolate.
Dean knows Sam is asleep when his body starts putting off heat like a radiator and his breathing extends into long sighs. Dean puts their mugs aside and tries to close his eyes, but his heart keeps jumping like he's waiting for something long expected, and he feels self-conscious under the black sky outside the little window.
Three families. He can picture each one. Each parent's body, torn apart and half-eaten with blood on the bedsheets. And each horrified, dead-quiet child standing responsible in the carnage. In his mind's eye, the child is always a six year old boy with sandy hair and hazel eyes and a sleeping toddler in his arms.
The face of the clown, under all the make-up and the wig and the hideous, painted smile, is perfectly recalled, too. No surprise, considering he and Sammy see it every godforsaken day: faking blind and barking orders.
Dean settles back into his cushion, Sam breathing warm into the hollow of his throat. North Platte won't be better. But as long as Sammy stays, Dean will too. He learned long ago that it's not the where that matters, it's who you're with.
The Safehouse: or, the one where there's a school for hunters. Spoilers to AHBL Part II.
That first year, it's hard to remember why they're all here.
They line up at the makeshift firing range with their collection of borrowed or stolen handguns and deer rifles. Narrowly miss the tin cans lined up along the bed of an old Ford. Instead, shatter the glass out of dead headlights or a passenger window somewhere deep in the junkyard.
They feel like poor rebels, under-equipped Russian soldiers marching on bleeding, bare feet through a vast cold desert, no end in sight. A blind purpose that is promised but never manifest. They stand in line, sight down steel barrels, and watch each other's faces blur together into stone masks. Their parents and cousins are still going to work, planning trips to the Virgin Islands, eating dinner in front of the television. These are the hardest times, when they feel more like a cult than crusaders.
Other times, it's like summer camp. Boarding school. Everybody eating together in the main house - which used to be just Bobby's, some of the veterans let on - and joking and laughing and never, ever complaining about the food. It's cramped and meagre, seeing as there are two dozen mouths to feed and no one holds down a steady job. But against the midwinter chill the companionship is more nourishing than the soup.
At night, there are people strewn through the house, lending their warmth to that of the fire and the wan lights from the gas generator. People fall asleep on dusty rugs, in the cracks of the cock-springed couch.
Upstairs there are three bedrooms. Bobby's is the one with the grey wool blanket and piles of neatly folded clothes on the floor, reminding the sensitive that this house was once mostly empty, mostly alone. Ellen's door is always closed, and no one's ever been invited in, or even seen it ajar.
The third bedroom is kept for the desperate. Sometimes, someone will come down with the flu and be quarantined up there, with the luxury of a running toilet nearby and insulated walls and a mattress. But really, it's the guest room. And there are always plenty of guests.
Guests mean that the soup is thinner and that one of the kids - maybe the software engineer from Tulsa who can't shoot worth shit but sits quiet with the remains of Ash's demon-tracking hard drive every night; or the grocery store clerk who came in high on painkillers, carrying three sets of vampire fangs in her pocket; or the pair of college activists from New England who still wear their Free Tibet t-shirts and squabble about Iraq along with the best way to torture a demon into self-exorcism - is going to get their ego punctured good and hard by a hunter with more notches in his belt than hairs on his head.
But no one minds, even as they run off their mouths and get chastised like schoolchildren, because the dinner conversation is so much better when there are hunters around. Inspiring. Terrifying.
And sometimes, one of the kids - hard to tell who - might be taken aside by Ellen or Bobby, and handed a rifle and a flask of holy water. Told that Conover or Cleveland or Hector is willing to take them on for a while. Are you ready? is the question. The answer is always yes. The chosen are always gone with their hunters before dawn the next morning.
What is it about the hunters? They bring kids in and they bring kids out. They bring the guns and the shells, but never any food. That, they just eat in huge quantities while everyone else pecks self-consciously.
They tell stories that make you want to bury yourself deep in the junkyard till the world ends or the sun starts shining again.
And they have a look about them that grabs and holds and keeps you lusting for the day you'll be allowed to step out past the barbed wire fence, onto the road, into the cold wind of hell's breath with your back straight and your eyes open.
But it's hard not to see that even as more and more kids are coming in to hide behind Bobby's hoodoo and Latinate wards, fewer and fewer are coming back to tell stories and hook thumbs in notched belts. Those who have lingered - because they never seem to hit those tin cans, because they worry too loudly about parents or cousins - notice that the world outside is changing. The newcomers are less recruits, more refugees. The television news is no longer irrelevant. And there are fewer guests.
There are nights now when the wind never quiets, just howls at an impossible decibel through the small hours, shaking the little garden sheds and broken-down RVs that make up the shanty town of housing out back. There are mornings when the sun rises orange and the clouds stay black.
When the Winchesters knock at the door, it's not because they have spare bullets to pawn off. It's not because they're hungry for watery beef stew. They talk to Bobby and Ellen, upstairs in the third bedroom and the kids set aside the cleaning of guns, the translation of texts, to lurk around and hope for a raised voice, a clue.
They stay for three weeks. Grim as death and twice as frightening, they seem to just be killing time. The one of them prowls the junkyard, tinkering and toying where it suits him. One time, a city kid standing watch used the rust patterns on the hood Dean was working under as target practise, and nearly got her head torn off for her carelessness. First by Bobby then by Ellen. Dean didn't even look at her, just shook his head at Sam in bed that night. Wouldn't the bitch have loved that. Killed by friendly fire - or not even friendly, just stupid. And two weeks early.
Sam wanders around peering over shoulders until he's invited to help with the translations. He pulls a bag of books - looted from libraries, private collections, archives - out of the back seat of their car and donates them. He says has them all mostly memorized already, he barely needs them. And where Dean is silent, Sam tells stories. This demon, that one. Werewolves, vampires, sluaghs, demi-gods. A laundry list of kills, each one with a moral at the end. Each fable as firm as any of Aesop's.
There's one night, in the deep hours of the morning, when their raised voices come from the third bedroom. Voices bitter with the knowledge of years. Harsh as frayed ropes snapping. Either everyone or no one laying silent in their beds that night hears them. Hears a step on the stairs, the turn of an engine, outside.
And in the morning there's only the one of them. Sam asks for the butter, polite, at breakfast. He flips idly through a week-old newspaper, rips out one of the articles. In the afternoon, he reads the piece - six-unit apartment block emptied in the night, no blood, everything as it should be except for the timer coffee boiling dry in the pot - aloud to his group of eight padawans and they plan out a mock hunt. Steps one through one hundred and twenty-two, a web of possibilities. He snorts at their jokes and explains flaws in their suggestions with matronly patience.
And then that night Sam is gone, too. Walked out of the compound, as far as anyone can tell. Left his books, his duffel, his guns. He is gone for six days. Everything is quiet.
The day he comes back is a red one: red sun, red sky, the land clear for miles, but filtered with rust. He is alone in the driver seat of that black beast of a car, and he is grim. He asks Ellen and Bobby separately, formally, for permission to stay and teach. And again, it seems he's just killing time.
Shreds and Tatters: or, the His Dark Materials AU. Spoilers up to Everybody Loves a Clown, none for HDM.
The fox daemon curls in the space between their ankles, only just awake enough to enjoy this rarity. Her eyes are golden slits that watch the door of the motel room, even though the hawk tucked up against her - a nest made of silver fur, black paws and a sleek tail - is nipping gently at her ruff, insistent.
Dean thinks that he would go happy to hell if he could just spend the next twelve hours lying here together like this. Naked, clean and cool in the semi-dark of stale sunshine filtered through heavy orange curtains. Safe, mostly. And mostly is as good as it ever really gets.
A bare few weeks after they burned their father's corpse in an anonymous field somewhere off the I-70, and they're doing alright. Better than they could admit, anyway. Alive, functioning, if not hunting. Thoughts filter slow and half-formed through Dean's mind, and it occurs to him that he hasn't checked his phone for messages in probably four hours. Right now, if Ash called to tell him that that yellow-eyes was two miles away tied to the train tracks, he'd probably let the call go to voicemail. Stay in bed. He doesn't want anything rekindled, not yet.
But Sam is trying to twitch himself awake. His breath hitches and he twists around in place, disentangling himself from Dean's arms, Dean's legs, which can't help but curl tighter, then release. At the foot of the bed, the hawk gives herself a little shake and blinks. She's always had a hard time indoors, and as Sam pulls on underwear, jeans, a long-sleeved shirt off the floor, she half-spreads her wings in anticipation, utters a low kreel.
She is on his arm as soon as its offered and they let themselves out without a word. The frosty air of a Dakota November slips in behind them, feeling like the cold touch of repeal.
Dean curls into the warm spot left behind in the bed - feels that familiar touch of panic: he's gone, he's gone, he won't come back - and Io crawls up his body to tuck herself under his chin. Her fur is sleek and smells like summer trees. She whispers “Ath is just nervous,” to remind him it isn't their fault, Sam leaving. It doesn't have anything to do with them. He always comes back.
They fall asleep again. This time there is nothing so pleasant to stay awake for, so they just sleep to make the time go by.
When they wake up again, Sam is eating a sandwich out of a foil wrapper. There's another one set on the end table and Dean slides across the bed and reaches for it.
“I think we should stay put for a while,” Sam says as soon as Dean's mouth is full. “This place is quiet, and touristy enough we aren't that noticeable. I think a few days, a week.”
Dean chews. Red onion, salami, dijon mustard, vegetables, no black olives. “I thought you wanted to keep on going.” He doesn't say yellow-eyes, doesn't say dad. Won't speak of it.
“I thought so too.” Sam flicks his eyes up and away. The hawk is outside somewhere. Her absence is unnerving, like Sam came back without a leg. He seems to barely notice, sitting there slouched with his hair pushed back off his forehead.
Dean gets up and starts dressing - it creeps him out when they do that, all casual. The stretch and separation that is so painful for him and Io. A handful of yards and Dean feels like his heart is tearing itself apart in his chest, but Sam's daemon will fly for miles, above and behind the car on the highway, arriving sometimes hours after they do, glossy-eyed and triumphant. Dean has never seen anything like it. Sam barely mentions it, even though his link to her has been uncoiling like a ball of twine for the past year.
Even at the thought, Io is twining around his ankles, cat-like, a little silver ghost. He scoops her up, she is all fine bones and black-tipped fur, and fits his hand around her ribcage, thumb along her spine. He wants her close.
They step outside and she climbs up over his shoulder and leaps to the ground again, restless. The parking lot is black, and Dean isn't surprised to see they've slept all day. Across the street there are a handful of shops, and then the span of pines that closes off the view of the lake with all its attendant cabins. There are no cars on the road. Sam is right. Quiet, out of the way, but used to passers-through. Dean could handle a few days, maybe. It's not like it would be hard to spend every night safe in that room. No demons or victims. Just for a few days.
When Sam comes out, wearing a jacket against the bite of cold, he says, “Ath saw something in the forest this afternoon, while I was getting dinner. She's gone to look for it again.”
Dean clears his throat, expecting some sort of excuse, trick to get him to agree to stay for the good of the town. More victims. He finds it hard to believe that Sam doesn't already know that his own selfishness is enough to tether him here. “What kind of something? Sasquatch? Goat-man?”
Sam throws him a look. “She wouldn't say.”
Dean squints, suddenly intent on examining the distant windows of the closed shops. He doesn't dare look over. Just rubs his arms and holds them against his chest. Wouldn't say? No daemon has secrets. He doesn't want to ask.
Sam volunteers nothing else, but quietly, he catches one of Dean's hands. Insistent, he holds it between his own, and then leans down to put his cold nose and mouth to the pulse point under Dean's jaw. He leaves a kiss there, a blossom of warm breath, and then releases him.
He goes inside for half a second, and comes out with keys and Dean's jacket, which he tosses over.
“Let's go,” he says, already walking.
“Where?”
“Just for a while. C'mon.”
Sam has a look in his eyes, dark and hooded. Dean thinks of sitting in the room with the television on while Sam goes away alone, and thinks that even the icy wind off the lake is a better choice.
They head across the parking lot, the street. The copse of pines is thinner up close. Dean thinks he can see light ripple off the lake through the black of tree trunks. Sam aims parallel to the road, scuffling through mulch and dry grass. He is mostly silent, and Dean wants to walk closer, wants to reach out for his hand. Cling.
“How far away is she?” he asks, instead.
Sam grimaces at his feet, looks up into the blue-black of the sky. “I can never tell, exactly.” A sideways glance, embarrassed. “But not too far.”
Dean knows then that Sam has no destination at all.
Io ranges and skulks back and forth, in a circular, mobile range as perfectly defined as if she were leashed. Dean wonders if she yearns for that frightening, delirious freedom. But she always noses back to him. Hops around his steps, avoiding his feet neatly, playing. He feels a horrible pain, knowing that she is him, complete and whole, and it still isn't enough for him.
Sam shifts to angle through the trees, where everything is defined by shadow on shadow. Io murmurs a bit of guidance to them both: where they are headed for a fallen trunk, where there's an easier path.
Then they are out on a broad swath of grass - a slope that rolls down to the shoreline. Io and Sam stop, almost simultaneously. Dean slows, and follows suit, uncertain. The little fox-face points back the way they came, stone still, ears cocked, eyes gleaming amber.
Sam says, “Look.”
There is a familiar movement in the darkness under the trees. A narrow form moving low to the ground, haggard. A soldier's daemon. A grey wolf with only half a right ear, scars on her flanks, a natty tail. By the light thrown from the distant street and the reflection off the water she looks half-invisible, barely there at all.
“How?” asks Dean. It's a demand. He takes a step back toward the trees, knowing that their father is in there. A daemon dies with its person. So Dad isn't dead. Dad must be here.
But the wolf just turns her head to look at him, ears flat, tail tucked. She used to be inscrutable, never betraying anything Dad felt, a perfect mirror. Now she looks like a different animal, collapsed in on herself. She looks at them, and then she is gone again.
Dean twists back to Sam who can only stare at the spot where she stood, open-mouthed.
“Did you know?” Dean asks, voice hoarse. “Did you know she'd be here? That Dad's-” he doesn't know what he's asking. He can't say it.
“Dad's dead, Dean.” Sam looks over, and his voice is too loud. “I don't know what that - maybe a ghost, maybe a vision, of some sort. No daemon-”
Io murmurs, from her spot on the ground, “If something of John Winchester remains, then something of Basca does, too.”
“We burnt his body,” Sam addresses her directly, and Dean feels strangely mute. “And his soul-”
“Must remain,” the fox cuts him off, curls her tail over her feet. “I know a ghost when I see one, and I know Basca, also.”
Sam turns away, takes a few steps. They are all silent, until eventually Sam tilts his head and raises his arm for the hawk to land on, no doubt drawing blood through the jacket. Her return seems to calm him, he strokes her breast and asks none of the questions Dean wants answered.
Dean knows there are no answers. He wanders over to the spot where the wolf crouched, belly in the brambles, and finds no trace of her.
Sam comes to stand behind him. “We think she's been following us.”
“All the way from Missouri?”
“She must want something.”
“She wants Dad,” Dean snaps, stands. Isn't it obvious? Yellow-eyes tore him apart, left this tattered piece of his soul up here to watch over them in agony and grief. Dean turns around and eyes the daemon hawk, her alien yellow eyes, scissoring beak. His brother, either half a person or more than one, able to stretch his soul to infinity without tearing it.
Sam's mouth twitches down. He disagrees, but won't argue. Apparition, his look says. Wight, ghost. He touches Dean at the elbow, gives a little tug. “We should go back.”
They check out in the morning, both of them shoving dirty clothes into duffels, eager to be gone. Dean calls Ash and gets word of another case - no yellow-eyes, though, not yet. The fifty miles back down to the interstate are shouldered with pines and underbrush, and Sam keeps the tape deck silent. In the glide of bough and sunlight, Dean sees the suspicion of a familiar shape, and feels safe.
So, in honour of her birthday tomorrow, I just want to drop these three ficlets her way. All are based on prompts she gave me sometime over the summer, and these three were just too good to let go. I had to write them. They all read as Sam/Dean established relationships, they're all PG, and the spoilers are listed individually.
Happy Birthday, Brooke.
The Knifethrower: or, the one where they were raised in the circus. Spoilters to Everybody Loves a Clown.
The convoy drives through the night more often than not, and they pull into Kearney, Nebraska around nine a.m. on a dark Friday in September. The site is just a big muddy field with a few hairs of grass poking through here and elsewhere, and the rain coming down like little splinters of an early winter.
Dean twitches at the curtain as their trailer pulls up in a jagged formation with the others, and curses whatever dinky-ass town council thought it'd be a good idea to have a couple dozen sixty-ton semis and ten-ton flatbeds pulling up on a glorified soccer field. “They couldn't a cleared out a friggin' parking lot?” he growls out the window.
Sam eyes the clouds and the puddles and says, “The rides are all gonna be axle-deep in mud by Sunday.”
Still, they stump down out into the wet, Dean shrugging on the flannel-lined canvas jacket he pulled out from deep in a back cabinet, and Sam folding a knit cap over his head, shuddering briefly against the chill. Already there's a crew pulling back panels on the main rig, unstrapping poles and the giant folds of dirty plastic that'll make up the sideshow tents. They slog through ankle-deep mud to take up their share of the plywood flooring, Sam muttering about low crowd turnouts in this weather, at the ass-end of the season.
Five hours into set-up, Cooper shows up with a couple of guys in clean gore-tex jackets - locals, obviously - all looking a little foul around the mouths. The tents are up, the rides are mostly unfolded and every man standing is wet to the bone and splattered in mud that smells awfully well-fertilized.
Cooper waves an arm and shouts with a sliding edge in his ringmaster's voice, “Alright, everyone, let's pack it up! The illustrious mayor of Kearney here says we ain't welcome in this here shit-hole.”
There is a dense silence, and Dean slides a look at Sam from across the six-foot length of riser they're carrying. It's damn heavy. Sam crouches to put his end down, and Dean does the same.
“What the hell you mean, ain't welcome? We got a signed contract,” shouts someone. Dean sees that it's Karl, the knife thrower, and the only guy other than Cooper who's been around longer than him and Sam.
“Contract doesn't cover the serial killer you got riding around with you,” says the balder of the two locals. “We don't need any of that here.”
Sam expels a hiss of a breath, and looks just about as offended as the rest of the crew. All of them large men standing around half-frozen and faced with the prospect of undoing half a day's labour for free. Mayor Gore-tex is an awful ballsy man, telling three dozen roustabouts and carnies to their faces that one of them's a child-touching murderer. If he realizes it, though, he doesn't much show it. He stands with his feet planted, and Cooper looks around a little wildly, like maybe he's hoping someone will step up and cow the man.
But nothing. For a second Dean thinks Sam will take the hint and sock someone in the mouth, but it passes. It's an easy leap to say they don't have a lot of options. With another look, Dean and Sam bend to shoulder their riser again, and start back toward the truck it came off of. Pretty soon everyone's doing the same.
Everything's back on the trucks at six, and thank god all but one of them - the rig carrying the thirty-ton Turbo Drop - gets out of the mud okay. They put down some plywood, which splinters all to hell, but eventually they roll the truck out, and everyone loads back up into their trailers. As twenty engines roll over, Cooper mutters over the radio that they'll overnight at North Platte, a hundred miles down the road.
“Not gonna be any better in North Platte,” says Sam, stripping off wet layers. There's a red mark on his forehead from the hat, his hair is a pressed and greasy tangle. Dean sits on the bed they never bother turning back into a table and puts his sock feet up against the green cushion opposite. He watches Sam peel out of flannel and wool and cotton, down to damp skin. Sam continues: “Cooper should skip this end of the circuit, head straight down south for the winter. No one's heard about this shit down there.”
Dean doesn't answer. He kind of suspects they probably have. Three families, six murders, three states. Medford, Fergus Falls, Groton. The police caught on to the link pretty quick. The entire convoy's been searched four times now: local sheriffs and the feds once, too. But now it's just out and out rejection when they show up. Chased out of town like gypsies.
“You gonna ask Karl if you can do the knives next show?” Dean asks, instead. Outside, through the fog on the plastic windows he can see the lights of Kearney, a town full of bedrooms and breathing parents. The trailer rolls along steady, the contortionists who live on the other side of the curtain up front are too delicate for cold or heavy lifting, but at least they do most of the driving.
Sam shrugs and plugs in the kettle, dumps powdered cocoa in mugs. “He doesn't like it much when I do. Liked it better when I was eight years old standing still so he could split apples.”
“Just worried you're better than him,” Dean yawns and stretches. Now the engine's running and the air's warming up, smelling like diesel and mould. They don't clean much. Sometimes Leonora pokes her head back and complains, or just does it for them. “You are. And you don't need to fake blind to prove it, either.”
“I could do it blind,” says Sam, a tinge in his voice.
He could, probably. But Karl's still got seniority. Dean does the Houdini thing the nights Sam's allowed to play the big tent throwing knives. He does handcuffs, knots, straightjackets. Nothing truly challenging, because everything's gotta be mobile. And when Karl does the knifethrowing, Dean and Sam do the psychic thing in a sideshow tent: Dean borrows objects from the audience and Sam tells him what they are, blindfolded and facing backwards. They raise up spirits who shake the little stage and tell secrets no one could possibly know. Sam floats chairs with his mind and picks a blooming rose out of a mirror.
The kettle shrieks, and Sam hands Dean his mug.
Dean balances it with one hand and shifts his legs and body into the one position that is eighty percent comfortable for the both of them in their tiny nest of smashed cushions and dirty sheets. Sam drapes a quilt over himself and inches into position: head on chest; three knees interlocked, one cocked up; spare arms tucked under and away; feet either sticking out into the air or propped against the cabinet that serves as foot-board.
They don't say anything else about the knives or the murders. Just take turns sipping at their chocolate.
Dean knows Sam is asleep when his body starts putting off heat like a radiator and his breathing extends into long sighs. Dean puts their mugs aside and tries to close his eyes, but his heart keeps jumping like he's waiting for something long expected, and he feels self-conscious under the black sky outside the little window.
Three families. He can picture each one. Each parent's body, torn apart and half-eaten with blood on the bedsheets. And each horrified, dead-quiet child standing responsible in the carnage. In his mind's eye, the child is always a six year old boy with sandy hair and hazel eyes and a sleeping toddler in his arms.
The face of the clown, under all the make-up and the wig and the hideous, painted smile, is perfectly recalled, too. No surprise, considering he and Sammy see it every godforsaken day: faking blind and barking orders.
Dean settles back into his cushion, Sam breathing warm into the hollow of his throat. North Platte won't be better. But as long as Sammy stays, Dean will too. He learned long ago that it's not the where that matters, it's who you're with.
The Safehouse: or, the one where there's a school for hunters. Spoilers to AHBL Part II.
That first year, it's hard to remember why they're all here.
They line up at the makeshift firing range with their collection of borrowed or stolen handguns and deer rifles. Narrowly miss the tin cans lined up along the bed of an old Ford. Instead, shatter the glass out of dead headlights or a passenger window somewhere deep in the junkyard.
They feel like poor rebels, under-equipped Russian soldiers marching on bleeding, bare feet through a vast cold desert, no end in sight. A blind purpose that is promised but never manifest. They stand in line, sight down steel barrels, and watch each other's faces blur together into stone masks. Their parents and cousins are still going to work, planning trips to the Virgin Islands, eating dinner in front of the television. These are the hardest times, when they feel more like a cult than crusaders.
Other times, it's like summer camp. Boarding school. Everybody eating together in the main house - which used to be just Bobby's, some of the veterans let on - and joking and laughing and never, ever complaining about the food. It's cramped and meagre, seeing as there are two dozen mouths to feed and no one holds down a steady job. But against the midwinter chill the companionship is more nourishing than the soup.
At night, there are people strewn through the house, lending their warmth to that of the fire and the wan lights from the gas generator. People fall asleep on dusty rugs, in the cracks of the cock-springed couch.
Upstairs there are three bedrooms. Bobby's is the one with the grey wool blanket and piles of neatly folded clothes on the floor, reminding the sensitive that this house was once mostly empty, mostly alone. Ellen's door is always closed, and no one's ever been invited in, or even seen it ajar.
The third bedroom is kept for the desperate. Sometimes, someone will come down with the flu and be quarantined up there, with the luxury of a running toilet nearby and insulated walls and a mattress. But really, it's the guest room. And there are always plenty of guests.
Guests mean that the soup is thinner and that one of the kids - maybe the software engineer from Tulsa who can't shoot worth shit but sits quiet with the remains of Ash's demon-tracking hard drive every night; or the grocery store clerk who came in high on painkillers, carrying three sets of vampire fangs in her pocket; or the pair of college activists from New England who still wear their Free Tibet t-shirts and squabble about Iraq along with the best way to torture a demon into self-exorcism - is going to get their ego punctured good and hard by a hunter with more notches in his belt than hairs on his head.
But no one minds, even as they run off their mouths and get chastised like schoolchildren, because the dinner conversation is so much better when there are hunters around. Inspiring. Terrifying.
And sometimes, one of the kids - hard to tell who - might be taken aside by Ellen or Bobby, and handed a rifle and a flask of holy water. Told that Conover or Cleveland or Hector is willing to take them on for a while. Are you ready? is the question. The answer is always yes. The chosen are always gone with their hunters before dawn the next morning.
What is it about the hunters? They bring kids in and they bring kids out. They bring the guns and the shells, but never any food. That, they just eat in huge quantities while everyone else pecks self-consciously.
They tell stories that make you want to bury yourself deep in the junkyard till the world ends or the sun starts shining again.
And they have a look about them that grabs and holds and keeps you lusting for the day you'll be allowed to step out past the barbed wire fence, onto the road, into the cold wind of hell's breath with your back straight and your eyes open.
But it's hard not to see that even as more and more kids are coming in to hide behind Bobby's hoodoo and Latinate wards, fewer and fewer are coming back to tell stories and hook thumbs in notched belts. Those who have lingered - because they never seem to hit those tin cans, because they worry too loudly about parents or cousins - notice that the world outside is changing. The newcomers are less recruits, more refugees. The television news is no longer irrelevant. And there are fewer guests.
There are nights now when the wind never quiets, just howls at an impossible decibel through the small hours, shaking the little garden sheds and broken-down RVs that make up the shanty town of housing out back. There are mornings when the sun rises orange and the clouds stay black.
When the Winchesters knock at the door, it's not because they have spare bullets to pawn off. It's not because they're hungry for watery beef stew. They talk to Bobby and Ellen, upstairs in the third bedroom and the kids set aside the cleaning of guns, the translation of texts, to lurk around and hope for a raised voice, a clue.
They stay for three weeks. Grim as death and twice as frightening, they seem to just be killing time. The one of them prowls the junkyard, tinkering and toying where it suits him. One time, a city kid standing watch used the rust patterns on the hood Dean was working under as target practise, and nearly got her head torn off for her carelessness. First by Bobby then by Ellen. Dean didn't even look at her, just shook his head at Sam in bed that night. Wouldn't the bitch have loved that. Killed by friendly fire - or not even friendly, just stupid. And two weeks early.
Sam wanders around peering over shoulders until he's invited to help with the translations. He pulls a bag of books - looted from libraries, private collections, archives - out of the back seat of their car and donates them. He says has them all mostly memorized already, he barely needs them. And where Dean is silent, Sam tells stories. This demon, that one. Werewolves, vampires, sluaghs, demi-gods. A laundry list of kills, each one with a moral at the end. Each fable as firm as any of Aesop's.
There's one night, in the deep hours of the morning, when their raised voices come from the third bedroom. Voices bitter with the knowledge of years. Harsh as frayed ropes snapping. Either everyone or no one laying silent in their beds that night hears them. Hears a step on the stairs, the turn of an engine, outside.
And in the morning there's only the one of them. Sam asks for the butter, polite, at breakfast. He flips idly through a week-old newspaper, rips out one of the articles. In the afternoon, he reads the piece - six-unit apartment block emptied in the night, no blood, everything as it should be except for the timer coffee boiling dry in the pot - aloud to his group of eight padawans and they plan out a mock hunt. Steps one through one hundred and twenty-two, a web of possibilities. He snorts at their jokes and explains flaws in their suggestions with matronly patience.
And then that night Sam is gone, too. Walked out of the compound, as far as anyone can tell. Left his books, his duffel, his guns. He is gone for six days. Everything is quiet.
The day he comes back is a red one: red sun, red sky, the land clear for miles, but filtered with rust. He is alone in the driver seat of that black beast of a car, and he is grim. He asks Ellen and Bobby separately, formally, for permission to stay and teach. And again, it seems he's just killing time.
Shreds and Tatters: or, the His Dark Materials AU. Spoilers up to Everybody Loves a Clown, none for HDM.
The fox daemon curls in the space between their ankles, only just awake enough to enjoy this rarity. Her eyes are golden slits that watch the door of the motel room, even though the hawk tucked up against her - a nest made of silver fur, black paws and a sleek tail - is nipping gently at her ruff, insistent.
Dean thinks that he would go happy to hell if he could just spend the next twelve hours lying here together like this. Naked, clean and cool in the semi-dark of stale sunshine filtered through heavy orange curtains. Safe, mostly. And mostly is as good as it ever really gets.
A bare few weeks after they burned their father's corpse in an anonymous field somewhere off the I-70, and they're doing alright. Better than they could admit, anyway. Alive, functioning, if not hunting. Thoughts filter slow and half-formed through Dean's mind, and it occurs to him that he hasn't checked his phone for messages in probably four hours. Right now, if Ash called to tell him that that yellow-eyes was two miles away tied to the train tracks, he'd probably let the call go to voicemail. Stay in bed. He doesn't want anything rekindled, not yet.
But Sam is trying to twitch himself awake. His breath hitches and he twists around in place, disentangling himself from Dean's arms, Dean's legs, which can't help but curl tighter, then release. At the foot of the bed, the hawk gives herself a little shake and blinks. She's always had a hard time indoors, and as Sam pulls on underwear, jeans, a long-sleeved shirt off the floor, she half-spreads her wings in anticipation, utters a low kreel.
She is on his arm as soon as its offered and they let themselves out without a word. The frosty air of a Dakota November slips in behind them, feeling like the cold touch of repeal.
Dean curls into the warm spot left behind in the bed - feels that familiar touch of panic: he's gone, he's gone, he won't come back - and Io crawls up his body to tuck herself under his chin. Her fur is sleek and smells like summer trees. She whispers “Ath is just nervous,” to remind him it isn't their fault, Sam leaving. It doesn't have anything to do with them. He always comes back.
They fall asleep again. This time there is nothing so pleasant to stay awake for, so they just sleep to make the time go by.
When they wake up again, Sam is eating a sandwich out of a foil wrapper. There's another one set on the end table and Dean slides across the bed and reaches for it.
“I think we should stay put for a while,” Sam says as soon as Dean's mouth is full. “This place is quiet, and touristy enough we aren't that noticeable. I think a few days, a week.”
Dean chews. Red onion, salami, dijon mustard, vegetables, no black olives. “I thought you wanted to keep on going.” He doesn't say yellow-eyes, doesn't say dad. Won't speak of it.
“I thought so too.” Sam flicks his eyes up and away. The hawk is outside somewhere. Her absence is unnerving, like Sam came back without a leg. He seems to barely notice, sitting there slouched with his hair pushed back off his forehead.
Dean gets up and starts dressing - it creeps him out when they do that, all casual. The stretch and separation that is so painful for him and Io. A handful of yards and Dean feels like his heart is tearing itself apart in his chest, but Sam's daemon will fly for miles, above and behind the car on the highway, arriving sometimes hours after they do, glossy-eyed and triumphant. Dean has never seen anything like it. Sam barely mentions it, even though his link to her has been uncoiling like a ball of twine for the past year.
Even at the thought, Io is twining around his ankles, cat-like, a little silver ghost. He scoops her up, she is all fine bones and black-tipped fur, and fits his hand around her ribcage, thumb along her spine. He wants her close.
They step outside and she climbs up over his shoulder and leaps to the ground again, restless. The parking lot is black, and Dean isn't surprised to see they've slept all day. Across the street there are a handful of shops, and then the span of pines that closes off the view of the lake with all its attendant cabins. There are no cars on the road. Sam is right. Quiet, out of the way, but used to passers-through. Dean could handle a few days, maybe. It's not like it would be hard to spend every night safe in that room. No demons or victims. Just for a few days.
When Sam comes out, wearing a jacket against the bite of cold, he says, “Ath saw something in the forest this afternoon, while I was getting dinner. She's gone to look for it again.”
Dean clears his throat, expecting some sort of excuse, trick to get him to agree to stay for the good of the town. More victims. He finds it hard to believe that Sam doesn't already know that his own selfishness is enough to tether him here. “What kind of something? Sasquatch? Goat-man?”
Sam throws him a look. “She wouldn't say.”
Dean squints, suddenly intent on examining the distant windows of the closed shops. He doesn't dare look over. Just rubs his arms and holds them against his chest. Wouldn't say? No daemon has secrets. He doesn't want to ask.
Sam volunteers nothing else, but quietly, he catches one of Dean's hands. Insistent, he holds it between his own, and then leans down to put his cold nose and mouth to the pulse point under Dean's jaw. He leaves a kiss there, a blossom of warm breath, and then releases him.
He goes inside for half a second, and comes out with keys and Dean's jacket, which he tosses over.
“Let's go,” he says, already walking.
“Where?”
“Just for a while. C'mon.”
Sam has a look in his eyes, dark and hooded. Dean thinks of sitting in the room with the television on while Sam goes away alone, and thinks that even the icy wind off the lake is a better choice.
They head across the parking lot, the street. The copse of pines is thinner up close. Dean thinks he can see light ripple off the lake through the black of tree trunks. Sam aims parallel to the road, scuffling through mulch and dry grass. He is mostly silent, and Dean wants to walk closer, wants to reach out for his hand. Cling.
“How far away is she?” he asks, instead.
Sam grimaces at his feet, looks up into the blue-black of the sky. “I can never tell, exactly.” A sideways glance, embarrassed. “But not too far.”
Dean knows then that Sam has no destination at all.
Io ranges and skulks back and forth, in a circular, mobile range as perfectly defined as if she were leashed. Dean wonders if she yearns for that frightening, delirious freedom. But she always noses back to him. Hops around his steps, avoiding his feet neatly, playing. He feels a horrible pain, knowing that she is him, complete and whole, and it still isn't enough for him.
Sam shifts to angle through the trees, where everything is defined by shadow on shadow. Io murmurs a bit of guidance to them both: where they are headed for a fallen trunk, where there's an easier path.
Then they are out on a broad swath of grass - a slope that rolls down to the shoreline. Io and Sam stop, almost simultaneously. Dean slows, and follows suit, uncertain. The little fox-face points back the way they came, stone still, ears cocked, eyes gleaming amber.
Sam says, “Look.”
There is a familiar movement in the darkness under the trees. A narrow form moving low to the ground, haggard. A soldier's daemon. A grey wolf with only half a right ear, scars on her flanks, a natty tail. By the light thrown from the distant street and the reflection off the water she looks half-invisible, barely there at all.
“How?” asks Dean. It's a demand. He takes a step back toward the trees, knowing that their father is in there. A daemon dies with its person. So Dad isn't dead. Dad must be here.
But the wolf just turns her head to look at him, ears flat, tail tucked. She used to be inscrutable, never betraying anything Dad felt, a perfect mirror. Now she looks like a different animal, collapsed in on herself. She looks at them, and then she is gone again.
Dean twists back to Sam who can only stare at the spot where she stood, open-mouthed.
“Did you know?” Dean asks, voice hoarse. “Did you know she'd be here? That Dad's-” he doesn't know what he's asking. He can't say it.
“Dad's dead, Dean.” Sam looks over, and his voice is too loud. “I don't know what that - maybe a ghost, maybe a vision, of some sort. No daemon-”
Io murmurs, from her spot on the ground, “If something of John Winchester remains, then something of Basca does, too.”
“We burnt his body,” Sam addresses her directly, and Dean feels strangely mute. “And his soul-”
“Must remain,” the fox cuts him off, curls her tail over her feet. “I know a ghost when I see one, and I know Basca, also.”
Sam turns away, takes a few steps. They are all silent, until eventually Sam tilts his head and raises his arm for the hawk to land on, no doubt drawing blood through the jacket. Her return seems to calm him, he strokes her breast and asks none of the questions Dean wants answered.
Dean knows there are no answers. He wanders over to the spot where the wolf crouched, belly in the brambles, and finds no trace of her.
Sam comes to stand behind him. “We think she's been following us.”
“All the way from Missouri?”
“She must want something.”
“She wants Dad,” Dean snaps, stands. Isn't it obvious? Yellow-eyes tore him apart, left this tattered piece of his soul up here to watch over them in agony and grief. Dean turns around and eyes the daemon hawk, her alien yellow eyes, scissoring beak. His brother, either half a person or more than one, able to stretch his soul to infinity without tearing it.
Sam's mouth twitches down. He disagrees, but won't argue. Apparition, his look says. Wight, ghost. He touches Dean at the elbow, gives a little tug. “We should go back.”
They check out in the morning, both of them shoving dirty clothes into duffels, eager to be gone. Dean calls Ash and gets word of another case - no yellow-eyes, though, not yet. The fifty miles back down to the interstate are shouldered with pines and underbrush, and Sam keeps the tape deck silent. In the glide of bough and sunlight, Dean sees the suspicion of a familiar shape, and feels safe.