(no subject)
Happy Birthday,
esorlehcar!
You make fandom that much more bitchy and cynical sparkly for the rest of us.
And now, some fic!
Alike to Me
PG-13
Sam doesn't mind being a cat.
~
Sam couldn’t quite bring himself to get too worked up.
He knew it worried Dean, freaked him out. He saw the looks his brother cast him, sometimes, the concerned crease between his eyebrows, the way he bit his lip and looked uncomfortable when Sam did something unequivocally cat-like, like lick himself in unmentionable places or chase something shiny. He tried not to do it too much around Dean, tried to be a bit more human for him. It was hard.
It wasn’t like the cat part of his brain had taken over. He was still Sam Winchester, still had all his memories and thoughts and inclinations, still knew who he was and what he wanted.
But this body - Jesus. A string trailing across the floor made him twitch with the desire to run after it. The slightest little scratching noise of hidden mice in the walls of a cheap motel kept him up all night. He was sleeping twelve or fifteen hours a day, and manically, frighteningly awake and aware the rest of the time. Dean’s socks smelt like dinner. Sam had taken to hiding under the covers when Dean took his shoes off before bed, to keep from embarrassing himself. He couldn’t even talk and sometimes Dean took advantage of that, saying the most outrageous shit and calling Sam a pussy twenty times a day, scratching his ears or rubbing his belly the whole time, so Sam was helpless to react with anything other than a happy noise and wordless pleading for more.
But there were upsides to it all, as well.
He was sleeping twelve hours a day. With no nightmares, not even any dreams that he could remember, like his little cat brain couldn’t process them. And his appetite had started coming back, dirty socks aside. Dean was obligingly buying him all sorts of incredibly tasty things, and smiling with this almost fond look in his eyes as Sam devoured everything in sight.
And was easier, somehow, not to care. He could worry, about his destiny and the job and whether or not he’d be a cat for the rest of his damn life, but then Dean would rub under his chin just right, or he would spend an hour lying in a patch of sunlight or the circle of Dean’s body when he was curled up on his side in bed, arms and legs and body bracketing Sam, surrounding him.
It didn’t really take much to keep Sam happy, these days. He tucked his nose into the curve of his brother’s neck and slept.
~
To pass the time as they drove, Sam lounged on his back on the passenger seat and played with the conjoined plastic rings that had held together a long-forgotten six pack. He held one of the rings carefully between his teeth and stuck his paws in others, stretching and flexing, chewing patiently before rolling over and pouncing. He lost his grip and the toy went flying into the footwell. He chased it, caught it, and beat it into submission, emerging triumphant with the mangled plastic clenched between his jaws.
Dean looked amused, and Sam made a superior face at him. Dean just didn’t understand his genius.
To tell the truth, Sam could easily have spent the long journey doing something else - plotting, or brooding, or even reading. It took effort and concentration, and turning the pages was trial and error, but he could still read. He just didn’t want to. Flat words on a page were dull, and playing was so much more fun!
He amused himself by batting at the dangling seatbelt for a while and then crawled into the backseat to look for something else to entertain himself. “Careful back there, Sammy,” said Dean. “Never know what you might find.”
Sam ignored him, dodging old fast-food containers and dirty clothes to wriggle under the seat. He sneezed at the dust bunnies, chased some stale candy into corners, and poked at the rusted springs for a while, before leaping back into the front seat with one of Dean’s discarded t-shirts on his head, singing the Batman theme song to himself. He loftily ignored Dean’s snickers, taking a swipe at the big hand that came out of nowhere to tousle his ears and free him from the smelly garment.
“I never thought that being a cat would bring out your ADHD,” remarked Dean.
Sam licked his fingers fondly and thought, I never thought anything could make you willingly touch me again.
Dean left his hand there, a heavy weight on Sam’s head, thumb absently stroking between his ears for the rest of the drive.
~
It really was astonishing, what Dean let him get away with now. Sam pondered this thought to himself as he snuck up and pounced on the last bit of steak, from Dean’s hand, on its way to Dean’s lips.
“Hey!” said Dean, clearly startled, and grabbed him by the scruff. He’d been hesitant about doing that at the beginning, but had quickly gotten used to this method of restraining Sam, who chewed on the meat and looked at him innocently. Oh, sorry, were you going to eat that? he said to himself. I didn’t even realise. Sorry.
Dean gave him a gentle shake and ruffled his fur the wrong way, just because. “Mangy brat,” he muttered, ending the reprimanding gesture with an ear scratch.
Sam shot him a wounded look and licked his fur flat again. You love me anyway, he thought, and Dean chuckled.
“Okay, Scooby. Let’s go find out what’s killing these old folks, huh?”
Sam leapt off the desk where Dean had been eating and went straight over to sit by the door. I’ve been ready to go for an hour. What’s keeping you?
Despite his dark looks and muttering, Dean was gentle with him as he picked Sam up and stuffed him under his jacket to sneak past the “No pets allowed” sign. Sam repaid the favour by digging his claws into Dean’s chest so hard Dean yelped and got strange looks from passers-by.
Sam would have grinned smugly, had his cat face allowed it. Instead, he snuggled down in the warm space between Dean’s body and his jacket, smelling of leather and as safe as he could be, and purred.
~
The abandoned hospital wing was freezing. Sam felt his fur bristling and glared up at Dean. This wasn’t right. Cats were supposed to spend frozen nights curled up warm in front of a fire, or on somebody’s lap, being stroked and coddled and fed tidbits. He was a hedonist, he wasn’t meant for this, not getting his paws dirty poking around in dangerous, haunted, creepy abandoned buildings. He was getting dust in his fur and up his nose, and he was going to kill Dean, he really was. He just wanted to go back to the motel and sleep, not sneak around and maybe die of hypothermia or maybe get ripped into tiny kitty pieces by an angry spirit, or maybe even catch some horrible disease here in all this filth.
Okay, so the stink of spirit was getting to him in a big way. He had a bad feeling about this.
“Okay,” Dean breathed, words turning to steam in the frigid air. “You take the right and I’ll take the left. If you see anything, y’know, yell.” He waved his flashlight around, and Sam squashed the urge to chase the flickering beam, reminding himself firmly that they had a job to do here. He nosed at Dean’s ankle and set off down the right-hand branch of the wing, delicately trying not touch anything dirty.
The sound of Dean’s heavy footfalls, the rustle and creak of leather and the heavy mouth-breathing he did when it got cold, all eventually faded away. Sam kind of hoped that the spirit wasn’t down the left-hand corridor, because it would hear Dean coming a mile away. He wondered how he’d never noticed Dean was so noisy.
The dim corridor was clear as day, thanks to his spectacular cat vision, and he padded more-or-less silently ahead, occasionally poking his nose into open doorways and finding empty rooms, all stripped of any furniture or other identifying features that might tell him what they had been used for originally.
He hopped up onto the counter of what must have originally been a nurses’ station, peering around. Everything was bare and orderly and dull. He could faintly smell dust and chemical cleaners, but overlaying the whole place was the stormy, sharp smell of ozone.
There was, he reflected, a reason cats hated thunderstorms. They stank of spirit, and it rankled hard, felt all wrong, like a hole in the world. This scent told him that the spirit, though not here right now, had been recently and would probably be back. He wrinkled his nose and shuddered with distaste.
A shout of surprise from Dean in the distance broke the silence, and Sam froze for just a moment. Then the sharp crack of the shotgun had him in motion, down from the counter and speeding up the way he’d just come, faster as he realised there had been no further sounds. The darkened doorways flew past, and he noticed in some panicked corner of his brain that it was getting colder.
Sam skidded around the corner, paws sliding and scrambling for purchase on the smooth, dusty floor, and couldn’t choke back a loud, undignified noise at the sight before him.
Dean was flat on his back, head twisted to one side, shotgun lying inches away from his outflung hand, clearly unconscious. And looming over him -
- something wrong, something bad and dark -
Sam leapt, an unfamiliar snarling noise ripping from deep inside him. The shade - spirits looked so different through cat’s eyes - backed away, hissing incomprehensible sounds at him as he landed just shy of Dean’s prone form. But it didn’t evaporate, didn’t flee from what ever rubbed cats and spirits the wrong way around each other, just hovered there, staring. If Sam squinted, he could see its form - a small man in a white doctor’s coat - past the sucking haze of wrongbaddark that was all cats could see of the restless dead.
There was a still, tense moment. Sam felt his muscles coiling up, his claws unsheathing, his lips drawing back to reveal his teeth. He felt tiny and ridiculous, facing down an angry mass murderer with only his little claws to defend him. That - that thing, that stupid, thrice-cursed thing had hurt Dean and Sam felt his fur stand on end with rage. Dean was frighteningly still and silent, and Sam could smell the copper bite of blood even past the smothering scent of ozone and he was pissed.
Then, with a rush of air, the darkness dissipated, collapsing in on itself, vanishing. The spirit faded and Sam let himself sink back down onto all fours for just a moment.
Dean groaned and twitched spastically when Sam patted at his face with one paw, his big hand coming up in an attempt to brush the annoyance away. Sam tried to make reassuring noises as he nosed at Dean’s cheek, but it came out as pitiful, high-pitched squeaks that he couldn’t even be ashamed of right now.
Dean snorted as he came fully awake, the way he always did if he fell asleep lying on his back, and he sat straight upright and wide-eyed, groping for the shotgun. Sam only winced as Dean grabbed a handful of fur instead, and nipped gently at his brother’s wrist in reprimand.
“Sammy,” said Dean, breathless and panting. He squinted around the darkened corridor, and Sam could him shaking, feel his hands trembling as his fingers opened and closed on Sam’s back. “There was a spirit,” he said softly, and Sam nodded. “A doctor.” Sam nodded again, more urgently this time, and turned his head to grip Dean’s bracelet between his front teeth and tug - gently, because Dean would kill him if he broke it. Dean looked puzzled. “What?”
Sam freed himself from Dean’s gentle grasp and trotted up the corridor a ways, turning back and jerking his head to try and get Dean to follow him.
“What’s that, boy?” muttered Dean. “Timmy’s fallen in the well?” But he heaved himself to his feet with a pained noise, and then let out another noise when he had to bend over to pick up the shotgun. “Okay. Let’s go.”
His long strides closed the distance between them in a second, and he barely paused when he bent down and scooped Sam up into the crook of his elbow. The outer door slammed open hard, bouncing off the wall, and the night air was clean and cool and smelt nothing like storms or blood or death. Sam pressed his nose into the worn leather of Dean’s sleeve and let himself breathe.
~
There was something in the bushes on the other side of the fence, something small. A large rat, maybe, or a racoon. Sam turned his head, nose twitching. A part of him wanted to leave his post and investigate, prowl through the bushes and see what was to be seen. But he was supposed to be on guard, keeping watch. Graves this close to the edge of a cemetery were risky to dig up because there was always a chance that a passer-by outside the fence might notice the unusual activity. So Sam had to keep an eye out, since he couldn’t participate in the digging.
Dean grunted as he heaved another shovelful of dirt out of the grave. He’d abandoned jacket and outer shirt despite the cool night, and his thin grey t-shirt was soaked in sweat from his exertions.
“You know,” he said, pausing to wipe his sweating brow with an equally sweaty arm, thus not cleaning so much as smearing, “this is a whole lot easier with two.”
Sam finished pacing the fence line and padded over to sit right by the lip of the grave. It put him right on eye-level with Dean, who was about shoulder deep and still digging. Dean stuck the shovel in the earth at his feet and leaned on it, glaring. “Smug bastard.”
Sam yawned hugely, pointedly, and licked his chops. He shifted to settle down, tucking his paws under his chin and letting his eyes drift almost shut.
The next shovelful nearly buried him. He came up sputtering and shaking, yowling in protest, to see Dean smirking at him. “Sorry. Didn’t see you there.”
~
In the end, the hellhound was a bit of an anticlimax.
Sam sat primly in the middle of the stone archway, with his front paws pressed together, head held high, and tail curled around, twitching occasionally. Behind him, crashing noises, panicked shouts and the crackle of flames announced that Dean was doing what he did best - looting, destroying and burning in the name of all things good and holy.
But Sam had bigger fish to fry.
The thing is, the archway actually wasn’t any kind of mystical portal or hellmouth or anything out of the ordinary. Or at least it hadn’t been, before. It was all that was left of an old, old church, the stone altarpiece left standing when the wood and plaster had crumbled away in the weather and the years. It did look a bit like a doorway, but it hadn’t been until some stupid teenagers had done some stupid rituals where the old church had stood, and one of them had been drunk and stupid enough to accidentally get hurt and bleed all over the place and turn the whole area in unhallowed fucking ground.
Which in turn made it the perfect place for some demented cubicle slave to put into practice all of the very interesting things he’d read about an old grimoire he’d found in his grandfather’s attic.
It was bad luck, or bad timing, that they had arrived just too late to stop the ritual from being finished. Dean had set to with his usual aplomb, tipping the altar over, growling threats and insults at the small, nervous man and setting things on fire to see if they would burn. Sam, however, had looked at the archway and seen the wrongness there, seen the slight distortion invisible to human eyes, and rather than getting upset, had simply sighed and trotted over.
In Egyptian lore, cats were the guardians of the underworld. Sam could feel it now, settling himself into the archway, his whole body humming with it. It was an edge, a place where one thing became another, and something that wasn’t inside him before the change knew this feeling, was designed specifically to walk along the divide, to bridge and guard the gap.
When the hellhound appeared, Sam didn’t even blink.
He heard Dean cursing behind him, fumbling with the shotgun, knew it wouldn’t do a blind bit of good. It was also unnecessary. Sam could hold the hound here forever, if he so desired, keep it trapped between there and here. It would be so easy.
“Let me pass,” the thing snarled, tucking its head down into its meaty shoulders and drooling at him. Its eyes were red and crazed, and its teeth were bigger than Sam’s head.
“Why?” Sam said lazily, and yawned, licking his chops.
A head larger than Sam’s whole body swung back and forth, as if the question was puzzling. “I have been summoned?” it attempted, sounding unsure.
“Have you?’ Sam tilted his head. There was a deafening crack the shotgun, but the bullet passed over him and didn’t even seem to impact the hound. “Why?”
It shuffled to one side, like it was trying to edge out of sight, but Sam pinned it with a level glare. It wasn’t really present in reality yet, but neither was it able to retreat back into hell. It was in-between until Sam allowed it to pass.
“Don’t know,” it grumbled at last. “Mayhem, usually. Tearing people up. Revenge.” It sat down, settling its eight-foot-long body on the ground and propping its head on its paws. “Boring.”
Sam gave a cat-grin, stretching his jaws wide, eye narrowing to slits. “Then why do you want to pass?”
There was a long silence. This was genius-level thinking for a hellhound, whose primary reason for existence was to turn living creatures into tiny lumps of bloody flesh and then drag the souls back to hell. The scorched brow wrinkled, the reddened eyes narrowed, and it looked conflicted.
“I… don’t?” it said at last, and Sam nodded regally.
“Back you go, then,” he said, and shoved with all his psychic might.
The hellhound made a noise like all the air coming out of a balloon, and slunk back into hell.
“Sam,” said Dean. “Sam, what the hell was that?”
Sam coolly licked the fur on his shoulder, ruffled by the effort, back into place. He turned his head to look - a sobbing man sifting through the remains of a black altar, scorch marks and smoke all over the place, Dean, looking puzzled and clutching his shotgun like he thought it would do anything at all against a hellhound. “Mrow,” he explained, and Dean’s face cleared.
“Oh. Okay, then.”
~~
Dean sat cross-legged and barefoot on the bed, sipping his coffee and feeding Sam bits of bacon from his breakfast. “You’ll get fat,” he said as Sam licked his fingers appreciatively. “And I won’t carry you around places any more if you’re fat.” He leafed idly through the newspaper, easily fending off Sam’s attempts to go for his muffin. “Huh. Check this out.”
Sam gnawed at Dean’s cuff for a moment longer before twisting around to peer at the newspaper. He hadn’t lost any of his ability to read, though he sat hunched over with his little nose nearly pressed against the text in order to make his eyes focus. His head bobbed back and forth as he read, and Dean munched on his muffin and waited.
Finally Sam looked up, licking his lips. “Could be,” said Dean. “Feel up for a drive?’ He held out the last few crumbs on the tips of his fingers. Sam licked Dean’s hand and nodded.
And that was that.
esorlehcar!
You make fandom that much more bitchy and cynical sparkly for the rest of us.
And now, some fic!
Alike to Me
PG-13
Sam doesn't mind being a cat.
~
Sam couldn’t quite bring himself to get too worked up.
He knew it worried Dean, freaked him out. He saw the looks his brother cast him, sometimes, the concerned crease between his eyebrows, the way he bit his lip and looked uncomfortable when Sam did something unequivocally cat-like, like lick himself in unmentionable places or chase something shiny. He tried not to do it too much around Dean, tried to be a bit more human for him. It was hard.
It wasn’t like the cat part of his brain had taken over. He was still Sam Winchester, still had all his memories and thoughts and inclinations, still knew who he was and what he wanted.
But this body - Jesus. A string trailing across the floor made him twitch with the desire to run after it. The slightest little scratching noise of hidden mice in the walls of a cheap motel kept him up all night. He was sleeping twelve or fifteen hours a day, and manically, frighteningly awake and aware the rest of the time. Dean’s socks smelt like dinner. Sam had taken to hiding under the covers when Dean took his shoes off before bed, to keep from embarrassing himself. He couldn’t even talk and sometimes Dean took advantage of that, saying the most outrageous shit and calling Sam a pussy twenty times a day, scratching his ears or rubbing his belly the whole time, so Sam was helpless to react with anything other than a happy noise and wordless pleading for more.
But there were upsides to it all, as well.
He was sleeping twelve hours a day. With no nightmares, not even any dreams that he could remember, like his little cat brain couldn’t process them. And his appetite had started coming back, dirty socks aside. Dean was obligingly buying him all sorts of incredibly tasty things, and smiling with this almost fond look in his eyes as Sam devoured everything in sight.
And was easier, somehow, not to care. He could worry, about his destiny and the job and whether or not he’d be a cat for the rest of his damn life, but then Dean would rub under his chin just right, or he would spend an hour lying in a patch of sunlight or the circle of Dean’s body when he was curled up on his side in bed, arms and legs and body bracketing Sam, surrounding him.
It didn’t really take much to keep Sam happy, these days. He tucked his nose into the curve of his brother’s neck and slept.
~
To pass the time as they drove, Sam lounged on his back on the passenger seat and played with the conjoined plastic rings that had held together a long-forgotten six pack. He held one of the rings carefully between his teeth and stuck his paws in others, stretching and flexing, chewing patiently before rolling over and pouncing. He lost his grip and the toy went flying into the footwell. He chased it, caught it, and beat it into submission, emerging triumphant with the mangled plastic clenched between his jaws.
Dean looked amused, and Sam made a superior face at him. Dean just didn’t understand his genius.
To tell the truth, Sam could easily have spent the long journey doing something else - plotting, or brooding, or even reading. It took effort and concentration, and turning the pages was trial and error, but he could still read. He just didn’t want to. Flat words on a page were dull, and playing was so much more fun!
He amused himself by batting at the dangling seatbelt for a while and then crawled into the backseat to look for something else to entertain himself. “Careful back there, Sammy,” said Dean. “Never know what you might find.”
Sam ignored him, dodging old fast-food containers and dirty clothes to wriggle under the seat. He sneezed at the dust bunnies, chased some stale candy into corners, and poked at the rusted springs for a while, before leaping back into the front seat with one of Dean’s discarded t-shirts on his head, singing the Batman theme song to himself. He loftily ignored Dean’s snickers, taking a swipe at the big hand that came out of nowhere to tousle his ears and free him from the smelly garment.
“I never thought that being a cat would bring out your ADHD,” remarked Dean.
Sam licked his fingers fondly and thought, I never thought anything could make you willingly touch me again.
Dean left his hand there, a heavy weight on Sam’s head, thumb absently stroking between his ears for the rest of the drive.
~
It really was astonishing, what Dean let him get away with now. Sam pondered this thought to himself as he snuck up and pounced on the last bit of steak, from Dean’s hand, on its way to Dean’s lips.
“Hey!” said Dean, clearly startled, and grabbed him by the scruff. He’d been hesitant about doing that at the beginning, but had quickly gotten used to this method of restraining Sam, who chewed on the meat and looked at him innocently. Oh, sorry, were you going to eat that? he said to himself. I didn’t even realise. Sorry.
Dean gave him a gentle shake and ruffled his fur the wrong way, just because. “Mangy brat,” he muttered, ending the reprimanding gesture with an ear scratch.
Sam shot him a wounded look and licked his fur flat again. You love me anyway, he thought, and Dean chuckled.
“Okay, Scooby. Let’s go find out what’s killing these old folks, huh?”
Sam leapt off the desk where Dean had been eating and went straight over to sit by the door. I’ve been ready to go for an hour. What’s keeping you?
Despite his dark looks and muttering, Dean was gentle with him as he picked Sam up and stuffed him under his jacket to sneak past the “No pets allowed” sign. Sam repaid the favour by digging his claws into Dean’s chest so hard Dean yelped and got strange looks from passers-by.
Sam would have grinned smugly, had his cat face allowed it. Instead, he snuggled down in the warm space between Dean’s body and his jacket, smelling of leather and as safe as he could be, and purred.
~
The abandoned hospital wing was freezing. Sam felt his fur bristling and glared up at Dean. This wasn’t right. Cats were supposed to spend frozen nights curled up warm in front of a fire, or on somebody’s lap, being stroked and coddled and fed tidbits. He was a hedonist, he wasn’t meant for this, not getting his paws dirty poking around in dangerous, haunted, creepy abandoned buildings. He was getting dust in his fur and up his nose, and he was going to kill Dean, he really was. He just wanted to go back to the motel and sleep, not sneak around and maybe die of hypothermia or maybe get ripped into tiny kitty pieces by an angry spirit, or maybe even catch some horrible disease here in all this filth.
Okay, so the stink of spirit was getting to him in a big way. He had a bad feeling about this.
“Okay,” Dean breathed, words turning to steam in the frigid air. “You take the right and I’ll take the left. If you see anything, y’know, yell.” He waved his flashlight around, and Sam squashed the urge to chase the flickering beam, reminding himself firmly that they had a job to do here. He nosed at Dean’s ankle and set off down the right-hand branch of the wing, delicately trying not touch anything dirty.
The sound of Dean’s heavy footfalls, the rustle and creak of leather and the heavy mouth-breathing he did when it got cold, all eventually faded away. Sam kind of hoped that the spirit wasn’t down the left-hand corridor, because it would hear Dean coming a mile away. He wondered how he’d never noticed Dean was so noisy.
The dim corridor was clear as day, thanks to his spectacular cat vision, and he padded more-or-less silently ahead, occasionally poking his nose into open doorways and finding empty rooms, all stripped of any furniture or other identifying features that might tell him what they had been used for originally.
He hopped up onto the counter of what must have originally been a nurses’ station, peering around. Everything was bare and orderly and dull. He could faintly smell dust and chemical cleaners, but overlaying the whole place was the stormy, sharp smell of ozone.
There was, he reflected, a reason cats hated thunderstorms. They stank of spirit, and it rankled hard, felt all wrong, like a hole in the world. This scent told him that the spirit, though not here right now, had been recently and would probably be back. He wrinkled his nose and shuddered with distaste.
A shout of surprise from Dean in the distance broke the silence, and Sam froze for just a moment. Then the sharp crack of the shotgun had him in motion, down from the counter and speeding up the way he’d just come, faster as he realised there had been no further sounds. The darkened doorways flew past, and he noticed in some panicked corner of his brain that it was getting colder.
Sam skidded around the corner, paws sliding and scrambling for purchase on the smooth, dusty floor, and couldn’t choke back a loud, undignified noise at the sight before him.
Dean was flat on his back, head twisted to one side, shotgun lying inches away from his outflung hand, clearly unconscious. And looming over him -
- something wrong, something bad and dark -
Sam leapt, an unfamiliar snarling noise ripping from deep inside him. The shade - spirits looked so different through cat’s eyes - backed away, hissing incomprehensible sounds at him as he landed just shy of Dean’s prone form. But it didn’t evaporate, didn’t flee from what ever rubbed cats and spirits the wrong way around each other, just hovered there, staring. If Sam squinted, he could see its form - a small man in a white doctor’s coat - past the sucking haze of wrongbaddark that was all cats could see of the restless dead.
There was a still, tense moment. Sam felt his muscles coiling up, his claws unsheathing, his lips drawing back to reveal his teeth. He felt tiny and ridiculous, facing down an angry mass murderer with only his little claws to defend him. That - that thing, that stupid, thrice-cursed thing had hurt Dean and Sam felt his fur stand on end with rage. Dean was frighteningly still and silent, and Sam could smell the copper bite of blood even past the smothering scent of ozone and he was pissed.
Then, with a rush of air, the darkness dissipated, collapsing in on itself, vanishing. The spirit faded and Sam let himself sink back down onto all fours for just a moment.
Dean groaned and twitched spastically when Sam patted at his face with one paw, his big hand coming up in an attempt to brush the annoyance away. Sam tried to make reassuring noises as he nosed at Dean’s cheek, but it came out as pitiful, high-pitched squeaks that he couldn’t even be ashamed of right now.
Dean snorted as he came fully awake, the way he always did if he fell asleep lying on his back, and he sat straight upright and wide-eyed, groping for the shotgun. Sam only winced as Dean grabbed a handful of fur instead, and nipped gently at his brother’s wrist in reprimand.
“Sammy,” said Dean, breathless and panting. He squinted around the darkened corridor, and Sam could him shaking, feel his hands trembling as his fingers opened and closed on Sam’s back. “There was a spirit,” he said softly, and Sam nodded. “A doctor.” Sam nodded again, more urgently this time, and turned his head to grip Dean’s bracelet between his front teeth and tug - gently, because Dean would kill him if he broke it. Dean looked puzzled. “What?”
Sam freed himself from Dean’s gentle grasp and trotted up the corridor a ways, turning back and jerking his head to try and get Dean to follow him.
“What’s that, boy?” muttered Dean. “Timmy’s fallen in the well?” But he heaved himself to his feet with a pained noise, and then let out another noise when he had to bend over to pick up the shotgun. “Okay. Let’s go.”
His long strides closed the distance between them in a second, and he barely paused when he bent down and scooped Sam up into the crook of his elbow. The outer door slammed open hard, bouncing off the wall, and the night air was clean and cool and smelt nothing like storms or blood or death. Sam pressed his nose into the worn leather of Dean’s sleeve and let himself breathe.
~
There was something in the bushes on the other side of the fence, something small. A large rat, maybe, or a racoon. Sam turned his head, nose twitching. A part of him wanted to leave his post and investigate, prowl through the bushes and see what was to be seen. But he was supposed to be on guard, keeping watch. Graves this close to the edge of a cemetery were risky to dig up because there was always a chance that a passer-by outside the fence might notice the unusual activity. So Sam had to keep an eye out, since he couldn’t participate in the digging.
Dean grunted as he heaved another shovelful of dirt out of the grave. He’d abandoned jacket and outer shirt despite the cool night, and his thin grey t-shirt was soaked in sweat from his exertions.
“You know,” he said, pausing to wipe his sweating brow with an equally sweaty arm, thus not cleaning so much as smearing, “this is a whole lot easier with two.”
Sam finished pacing the fence line and padded over to sit right by the lip of the grave. It put him right on eye-level with Dean, who was about shoulder deep and still digging. Dean stuck the shovel in the earth at his feet and leaned on it, glaring. “Smug bastard.”
Sam yawned hugely, pointedly, and licked his chops. He shifted to settle down, tucking his paws under his chin and letting his eyes drift almost shut.
The next shovelful nearly buried him. He came up sputtering and shaking, yowling in protest, to see Dean smirking at him. “Sorry. Didn’t see you there.”
~
In the end, the hellhound was a bit of an anticlimax.
Sam sat primly in the middle of the stone archway, with his front paws pressed together, head held high, and tail curled around, twitching occasionally. Behind him, crashing noises, panicked shouts and the crackle of flames announced that Dean was doing what he did best - looting, destroying and burning in the name of all things good and holy.
But Sam had bigger fish to fry.
The thing is, the archway actually wasn’t any kind of mystical portal or hellmouth or anything out of the ordinary. Or at least it hadn’t been, before. It was all that was left of an old, old church, the stone altarpiece left standing when the wood and plaster had crumbled away in the weather and the years. It did look a bit like a doorway, but it hadn’t been until some stupid teenagers had done some stupid rituals where the old church had stood, and one of them had been drunk and stupid enough to accidentally get hurt and bleed all over the place and turn the whole area in unhallowed fucking ground.
Which in turn made it the perfect place for some demented cubicle slave to put into practice all of the very interesting things he’d read about an old grimoire he’d found in his grandfather’s attic.
It was bad luck, or bad timing, that they had arrived just too late to stop the ritual from being finished. Dean had set to with his usual aplomb, tipping the altar over, growling threats and insults at the small, nervous man and setting things on fire to see if they would burn. Sam, however, had looked at the archway and seen the wrongness there, seen the slight distortion invisible to human eyes, and rather than getting upset, had simply sighed and trotted over.
In Egyptian lore, cats were the guardians of the underworld. Sam could feel it now, settling himself into the archway, his whole body humming with it. It was an edge, a place where one thing became another, and something that wasn’t inside him before the change knew this feeling, was designed specifically to walk along the divide, to bridge and guard the gap.
When the hellhound appeared, Sam didn’t even blink.
He heard Dean cursing behind him, fumbling with the shotgun, knew it wouldn’t do a blind bit of good. It was also unnecessary. Sam could hold the hound here forever, if he so desired, keep it trapped between there and here. It would be so easy.
“Let me pass,” the thing snarled, tucking its head down into its meaty shoulders and drooling at him. Its eyes were red and crazed, and its teeth were bigger than Sam’s head.
“Why?” Sam said lazily, and yawned, licking his chops.
A head larger than Sam’s whole body swung back and forth, as if the question was puzzling. “I have been summoned?” it attempted, sounding unsure.
“Have you?’ Sam tilted his head. There was a deafening crack the shotgun, but the bullet passed over him and didn’t even seem to impact the hound. “Why?”
It shuffled to one side, like it was trying to edge out of sight, but Sam pinned it with a level glare. It wasn’t really present in reality yet, but neither was it able to retreat back into hell. It was in-between until Sam allowed it to pass.
“Don’t know,” it grumbled at last. “Mayhem, usually. Tearing people up. Revenge.” It sat down, settling its eight-foot-long body on the ground and propping its head on its paws. “Boring.”
Sam gave a cat-grin, stretching his jaws wide, eye narrowing to slits. “Then why do you want to pass?”
There was a long silence. This was genius-level thinking for a hellhound, whose primary reason for existence was to turn living creatures into tiny lumps of bloody flesh and then drag the souls back to hell. The scorched brow wrinkled, the reddened eyes narrowed, and it looked conflicted.
“I… don’t?” it said at last, and Sam nodded regally.
“Back you go, then,” he said, and shoved with all his psychic might.
The hellhound made a noise like all the air coming out of a balloon, and slunk back into hell.
“Sam,” said Dean. “Sam, what the hell was that?”
Sam coolly licked the fur on his shoulder, ruffled by the effort, back into place. He turned his head to look - a sobbing man sifting through the remains of a black altar, scorch marks and smoke all over the place, Dean, looking puzzled and clutching his shotgun like he thought it would do anything at all against a hellhound. “Mrow,” he explained, and Dean’s face cleared.
“Oh. Okay, then.”
~~
Dean sat cross-legged and barefoot on the bed, sipping his coffee and feeding Sam bits of bacon from his breakfast. “You’ll get fat,” he said as Sam licked his fingers appreciatively. “And I won’t carry you around places any more if you’re fat.” He leafed idly through the newspaper, easily fending off Sam’s attempts to go for his muffin. “Huh. Check this out.”
Sam gnawed at Dean’s cuff for a moment longer before twisting around to peer at the newspaper. He hadn’t lost any of his ability to read, though he sat hunched over with his little nose nearly pressed against the text in order to make his eyes focus. His head bobbed back and forth as he read, and Dean munched on his muffin and waited.
Finally Sam looked up, licking his lips. “Could be,” said Dean. “Feel up for a drive?’ He held out the last few crumbs on the tips of his fingers. Sam licked Dean’s hand and nodded.
And that was that.