Bread and Circuses: 2/5
Title: Bread and Circuses
Author(s): safiyabat
Artist: majestic_duxk
Beta: elwarre
Characters: Sam winchester, John Winchester, Dean Winchester, OCs
Pairing: Sam/OMC
Rating: M
Word Count: This Chapter - 5,476 words; entire work - 24,834 words
Warning(s): Show-level violence, child abuse, child death, negative depiction of John Winchester, creepy gladiator cult, consensual underage (both parties) sexual content. This chapter contains graphic child physical abuse.
Summary: When Sam is taken by a gladiator-obsessed cult in Idaho, he has nothing to rely on but his wits and his fellow prisoners to get him out.
Sam didn’t sleep easily. He didn’t sleep easily at home or what passed for it, he certainly wasn’t going to sleep easily in some dungeon with nothing but a piece of scratchy, coarse wool between himself and the elements. He stared at the ceiling for a while, trying to figure out what he knew. There wasn’t much. Apparently the cult was summoning Charon. Sam was equipped to handle - well, at the moment he was equipped to handle anything that could be slain by wool, thin cotton or naked human genitalia, not that he wanted to explore using his parts as a weapon.
The cult summoned a god. This was beyond anything he thought his father had ever faced, beyond anything Pastor Jim had talked about. He thought he dimly recalled Bobby Singer having some information about gods and how to kill them, back when he’d been holed up there after Dean got lost on a hunt in the Catskills maybe three years ago, but Bobby hadn’t been hugely keen on letting Sam loose in his library at the time. Not after Sam cast a location spell and tried to go running off after his brother….
He forced his mind back to the task at hand. He needed to concentrate if he was going to get himself out of this. He couldn’t count on his father and Dean to get him out, because they wouldn’t even remotely suspect that they were dealing with a god. Even if he could somehow get word to them - how he was supposed to do that he had no idea - they’d never believe him. Dean would laugh at his “overactive imagination.” John - well, John wouldn’t laugh.
And all that assumed that his family was even looking. Oh, Dean might miss him. Maybe. He had a lot of hang-ups about “take care of Sammy” that made him try to muscle his way in when he thought bullies were coming after Sam or something. Maybe he’d be antsy now. But John - John had been very eager to sacrifice Sam to this particular hunt with no idea what was going on, no clue as to what he was fighting. Maybe he wasn’t looking. Maybe he wasn’t interested in getting Sam back.
Or maybe that wasn’t being fair to John. The guy had fought tooth and nail to keep Sam from even getting the slightest hope of getting out of hunting, burning the one college brochure Sam had been stupid enough to bring home right in front of him. He’d vetoed any possibility of Sam moving in with Bobby or Pastor Jim on a long-term basis even when both hunters had urged the solution. If he couldn’t stand the thought of Sam getting away from him by staying with people he knew or getting to a safe and happy life in college, he probably wasn’t going to be all that thrilled with the idea of Sam escaping hunting through a short stint as a slave to a weird pseudo-Roman death cult.
Right?
He is marked by others already. Charon’s words came back to his mind unbidden, unwelcome. What did that mean, “marked?” For most people that just meant a hickey or some love bites. Maybe a tattoo. Sam had none of those things. Yeah, sure, Dwayne King had wanted to leave him with a hickey back in Kennewick, but Sam had made it very clear that he didn’t have enough privacy to get away with anything of the sort thank you very much. He was pretty sure that the deity hadn’t been talking about any such thing, especially since Kennewick had been several weeks ago and no marking of any kind had taken place.
Maybe Dad knew. Maybe that was what this was about. Maybe Dad had figured out that Sam was just unclean and this was just a convenient way of getting rid of him. Dean would probably get mad at Dad if he killed Sam outright (maybe, probably, he did think everything Dad did was wonderful so maybe not) but if he was just “lost” while being bait on a hunt? Well then Sam would have died a hero, no better fate, right? Sacrificed for the greater good.
Did Dad know what Charon had meant by “marked?” Had he figured it out? If so, when? He tried to think back to when his father had started to act differently toward him and he couldn’t figure it out. He’d always resented Sam, never had as much use for Sam as he did for Dean. Never taken any pride in Sam, no matter how far he ran or how strong he was or how well he could shoot. It never measured up to Dean’s accomplishments, so Sam learned to value other skills that could be measured in other units than “good job, son.” Which, in turn, only made John angrier. Maybe he’d always known Sam was dirty, though. Maybe that was why Sam could never measure up. Maybe that was why he’d been shunted off now.
Or not. Maybe they were out there looking for him. Maybe they were treating the case of his disappearance just like he was any other missing teenager, any other civilian. Maybe they were acting like his life was worth as much as someone else’s.
He wasn’t going to count on that. He couldn’t afford to.
Trapped underground, in a cell with no windows, he had no way of knowing what time it was or when the sun rose. Someone did start rapping on all of the doors eventually, though. “Rise and shine, girls,” an older, masculine voice demanded. “Time for breakfast.”
He heard the door to his cell unlock, and he tensed for a moment before moving. No one entered, so he hopped down onto the concrete floor and stuck his head out.
A fistful of other boys, all roughly his age, stood more or less to attention outside their cells. All of them wore loincloths basically indistinguishable from Sam’s. Some were bruised. Some had welts on their backs. Others glanced casually at Sam, and he couldn’t decide how he felt about that. “Hey, new guy,” said the one in the cell next to Sam. He had dark skin, close-cropped hair and a few welts. “I’m Miguel.”
“Sam,” he said. Miguel didn’t offer a hand, so Sam didn’t either. “How long have you been here?”
“Hard to say. Probably about three weeks maybe. It all kind of blends together after a while. They tell you anything?”
“No.” He tried to think back to the missing persons reports he’d looked into. Miguel Flores had been reported missing from just outside of Ogden, Utah three and a half weeks ago. He’d been a star football player. “They made me go talk to some god or something but that was it.”
“You talked to Charon?” The guy standing next to Miguel looked excited by the prospect. “That’s so cool! All he did was mark us.”
“What do you mean mark you?” Sam knew he was making a face, but he couldn’t help it. He hadn’t slept and the problem of “marking” was causing logistical and literal headaches for him.
“He didn’t mark you?” Miguel whispered. “That’s kind of a big deal, bro. It’s like… he touches your soul.” He shivered. “It’s not fun. And then he gets your soul when you die.”
“Huh.” Sam twitched his lips. Someone else already had a claim to his soul when he died? Who? And why didn’t he think that was likely to be a very good thing? He opened his mouth to ask another question but the guard at the end of the hallway hollered.
“All right, you maggots, let’s get you to your breakfast. No fraternizing.”
A second guard took a quick headcount. Apparently there were twenty-five boys incarcerated in this wing, including Sam. They moved out in single file, alert adult eyes watching for any infractions.
Sam paid attention to the route to the mess hall. The facility consisted of two long tables where the boys could sit. He noticed that there were enough seats for several more boys than were present at the moment, and that chilled him. “You want to eat up, Skinny Sam,” Miguel advised, sitting beside Sam. “I know you probably don’t feel much like it right now. The whole strange place, strange food, kidnapping thing, right? Plus that exam they give you - not anyone’s idea of a good time, am I right?”
“They knocked me out for that,” he admitted, poking at the eggs on top of his oatmeal. He was kind of afraid that they would poke back.
“Did they really? I guess there’s some fight in you already. Huh. Anyway, you’re going to be training hard and you’ve got to keep your strength up. I don’t care what your sport was, man. You haven’t trained like they’re going to have you training here.” One corner of his mouth quirked up in a grin.
Sam poked at the eggs. “I’ve never been a great eater.” He tried a bite. “So what exactly is this place?”
Miguel’s sidekick - cellmate? roommate? - chimed in. He was shorter than Miguel, shorter than Sam, and he was built like a barn. “Were you very good at history, Skinny Sam?”
He was going to learn to hate that nickname in about six seconds. It was better than “Sammy,” though. “Yeah. I guess. Why?”
“You remember the Romans? Caesar and Caligula and all that?”
Miguel punched him lightly in the bicep. “Caligula was a porno from, like, the seventies, man.”
“He was an emperor too,” Sam admitted, almost absently. The loincloth felt a lot more revealing now. “Tell me it’s not -“
“Oh God no,” the other boy - white-blond, with close-cropped hair and a few scars - shuddered. “I saw that one once with my brother. Had nightmares for weeks, man. No, they don’t seem to want us like that. It’s, uh. Have you seen, um, Spartacus? It’s really old, it has that Sir Laurence Olivier dude in it.”
“We’re gladiators,” Sam surmised, a pit forming in the middle of his stomach.
“That’s the word.” Blondie nodded, folding his lips grimly. “We’re all in training to be gladiators. Only there’s never going to be anyone giving us the thumbs up or anything. When they’re out there it’s just -“
“How long have you been here….” He paused, looking at the guy.
After a moment, Blondie responded. “Scott.”
“How long have you been here, Scott?”
“Six weeks. They picked me up in Logan, Utah.” He hung his head. “They’ve probably stopped looking for me by now.”
“They haven’t.” Sam reached out and put a hand on the other boy’s arm. “My dad - he looks for things just like this. Cults. They haven’t stopped looking for you. They haven’t stopped looking for either of you, okay? And your families aren’t going to.” He made eye contact with both of the others. He didn’t remember seeing Scott’s name among the missing, but he hadn’t seen every police report either. He’d been around enough victims and victims’ families to know more or less how to talk to them, though. “We’re going to get out of this.”
“They’ve been doing this for an awfully long time, Skinny Sam,” Miguel doubted.
“So’s my family.” He offered a smile he didn’t feel. “So. What was your sport?”
“What do you mean?” Scott asked, eyebrows drawing together.
“Everyone who was taken was some kind of athlete - they don’t want weak gladiators, that’s no kind of contest, right?” His mind flashed back to the conversation with Charon, when Sam’s “owner” had been so concerned as to whether or not Sam was a worthy sacrifice. Somehow he didn’t think the use of that word would benefit anyone.
“I played football,” Miguel told him proudly. “Quarterback.”
“Nice,” Scott grinned. “I played soccer.”
“Aw, man. I love soccer. My dad never lets me play.” He slumped a little.
“So what was your sport, then?” the quarterback pressed. “It’s obviously something, you’ve got muscles like rocks, man.”
“Nah, my dad’s just a drill sergeant.” He shrugged.
A bell near the front of the room rang, and Scott and Miguel immediately rose from their seats and raced to line up with the other boys. Miguel patted Sam on the arm. “Come on, man.”
Sam figured that lingering over the eggs and oatmeal was probably not in his best interests. He joined in, abandoning his breakfast and falling into line. The guards - more of them this time - led them out a door on the opposite side of the room than the one they’d entered and through a different maze of corridors until they came to another arena.
It wasn’t the same space they’d been in yesterday. There was no altar, no pervading aura of cold and impending doom. The floor was more dirt than anything else, and the wall was lined with what looked like… “Rattan?” he puzzled, looking up at the items as he lined up with the others.
A guard, middle aged with a slight paunch, punched him in the face. “You will speak when spoken to,” he bellowed.
Sam turned his face with the blow, but he didn’t fall or stagger. He’d had worse, after all - he’d had worse recently - and he wasn’t about to let this bunch of cultist assholes see him hurting.
“First things first,” another guard declared loudly. This one stood in front of the entire row of twenty-five boys and had a whistle. Sam nicknamed him Coach. “Get to running. New Kid - the rules are simple. You run until I blow the whistle. If you stop before I blow the whistle you get punished. Got it?”
He considered kicking the gray-haired man in the nads, but he didn’t think it would benefit him much to do so. After all, he didn’t even know his way around this warren of a place yet. “Yes, sir,” he ground out instead.
The whistle blew. The boys ran. The exercise didn’t seem exceptionally arduous to Sam. It was a workout - he worked up a sweat, sure, but it wasn’t what he would call grueling. He made sure not to outpace the others and stayed in the middle of the pack. Scott and Miguel seemed to be doing okay too. One kid, though - a tall, slender Asian kid, the only East Asian guy in the bunch - seemed to be having a hard time of it. After the first hour he sank to his knees and started retching, becoming violently ill in the center of the track.
Sam slowed down, intending to go help him, but Miguel put a firm hand on his back. He didn’t speak, but he didn’t need to. The message was clear. He wasn’t going to be allowed to help. He kept running.
The kid finished puking and was hauled to his feet as the rest of the boys continued their run. After another forty-five minutes Coach blew his whistle. Sam joined the others in forming a more-or-less orderly cluster around a tall pole. The kid who had been ill did not resist as a guard bound his wrists together on the other side of the pole; he just closed his eyes and bit his full lips in fear.
Sam tried to stretch a little bit, as subtly as he could, while Coach blew his whistle again. He wasn’t the only one; these guys were all athletes after all. “Listen up. This fella stopped running before I blew my whistle.” He pointed at Sam. “Do you know what the penalty is for ending your run before the whistle is?”
Sam felt sick. “No sir.” It hadn’t been the other guy’s fault. He’d just been sick. What was he supposed to do, run and puke at the same time?
“It’s your first day and you haven’t seen this sort of thing before so I’ll let it slide,” Coach declared. “You!” He pointed at a brown-haired boy who’d clearly started his growth spurt early. “What is the penalty for ending your run before the whistle is blown?”
“Ten strokes, sir.” The respondent didn’t sound enthusiastic. He didn’t sound upset either. He just sounded neutral, like he could have been talking about the weather.
Sam turned around. One of the other guards had gone to the wall of rattan, but it wasn’t one of the makeshift weapons that he’d gone after. “Eyes up here, new guy, or it’ll be your turn next,” Coach snarled. Sam turned his eyes back to the front of the crowd.
The guard presented Coach with a bundle of birch sticks. Sam definitely felt his gorge rise again. “One,” he counted, as Coach brought his arm back. A loud crack echoed through the air and the rods landed on the victim’s back. The only other sound was the boy whimpering. Sam didn’t tear his eyes away; he knew the screws had their eyes on him and he needed them to underestimate him, needed that like air if he was ever going to survive this. Still, his peripheral vision told him that different boys were reacting differently to the spectacle. Some stared straight ahead - not even really watching if they could avoid it. Some seemed to want to watch. And others - well, the thing about a loincloth is that it can’t hide much of anything. One or two of the boys clearly enjoyed the beating, even if they didn’t let it show on their faces.
Once the birching was over and done with the next step of the training began. Coach put them through calisthenics - beginning with crunches, because he was just that much of a dick. There was strength training, there was flexibility training. None of it was anything he hadn’t done before. By the time the bell sounded for lunch he found he was definitely ready for food, although he wasn’t starving and he was more than a little turned off by the flogging.
He made sure he sat near the birching victim at lunch. Miguel and Scott joined him. “You okay, man?” he asked, conversationally.
The guy jumped when he spoke. “Uh, yeah. I’ll live.”
Sam noticed that he was just poking at his lunch, which seemed to be some kind of soup and bread. At least the soup had greens in it. “I’m Sam. These are Miguel and Scott.”
He was silent for a moment. “Andy,” he admitted grudgingly. Sam’s brain, acting on autopilot, filled in the rest. Andy Nguyen, sixteen, tennis. “I guess it’s nice to not be the new guy anymore.”
“So you’ve been here…”
“A week,” he whispered. “Feels like ten years.”
“Was that the first time they….”
“No.” He folded his mouth shut and Sam decided not to continue that line of inquiry.
“So what’s usually next on the schedule?” he asked the group at large. “I want to know what I’m getting into.” He flashed a grin. “I hate walking into a situation blind, you know?”
That got little chuckles out of the others at least. “Afternoons are combat training,” Scott told him. “Start out with a little bit of a run to get us warmed up again - half an hour to forty-five minutes, nothing major.”
“Then hand-to-hand,” Miguel added. “We’re not supposed to be killing one another, but that’s about the only rule. We do that for a couple of hours.”
“Then weapons,” Andy told him. “They’ve got these rattan things, they’re supposed to be weighted like real swords and crap but they don’t have edges so they probably won’t kill us.”
Sam snorted. “Probably,” he repeated. John Winchester hadn’t bothered with fake weapons. He’d just expected them to just not kill each other. “All right. After that?”
“After that is dinner. Then prayers,” Miguel added. “Not that we really do much for that. We sit and stare. Then it’s back to bed.”
Okay. He could work with that, he supposed.
Training proved to be everything they promised. Hand to hand was nothing Sam couldn’t handle. He tried not to look “too” good, but he’d been training in this stuff since he could walk, long before he’d known about werewolves and ghosts and whatever-the-fuck-else went bump in the night, and his body just would not allow him to pretend to be incompetent. Every member of the group had to fight everyone else, not to the death but to submission, and Sam wasn’t about to let anyone else make him submit. Especially not the couple of guys who’d gotten boners watching Andy get beaten, not with the way they were looking at him. He got that some people had kinks, but that didn’t mean he was comfortable with the way they looked at him when they thought he was vulnerable.
After hand to hand was rattan. Rattan was a little harder to adjust to. Sam was used to fighting with a knife, usually a butterfly knife or a switchblade, sometimes a hunting knife. He was also a damn fine shot. It seemed like they wanted him to get used to fighting with much larger weapons like small spears and short swords and even a trident and net, and those weren’t as easy for him to wrap his head around. The stakes were higher, too - no protective equipment was provided, and of all things he needed more than anything to keep his head clear. He couldn’t afford to let anything hit him in the head. Coach seemed content to make everyone fight him with the same weapon he was using on his first day, which made things easier. Not easy, but easier.
He could hear his father’s voice in his ear as he fought. “You really think a wendigo is going to be easy on you because you’re new? Come on. You’re going to get ripped apart. And you’ll deserve it. What the hell have I been training you for if you can’t even take out a freaking high school linebacker with a stick? No wonder I abandoned you to a homicidal cult! Dean and I are better off without you.”
He tried not to listen to it, that voice in his head, and focus on figuring out the mechanics. He did manage to keep from getting hit in the head, which he supposed was about as good as he could hope for. As for the other stuff - the unfamiliar weapons, the strangers who were more adept with the weapons than he was - he ultimately went with what he knew. He might not know how to use a trident and net but he knew that both of those things gave an enemy a longer reach. If he eliminated that advantage - stepped right in and took out the arm with the net, and maybe knocked the guy to the ground at the same time, maybe he’d be able to work around that.
Dinner consisted of chicken sandwiches, piled high with as many fresh vegetables as chicken. “I’ll say this for this place,” Sam commented, regarding one of the two sandwiches they’d put on his plate. “The food is better so far.”
“Seriously?” Miguel doubted. “I think one of the worst parts of what’s happening is that I’m never going to eat my mother’s cooking again. I just want to try her black bean soup one more time, or tamales. Skinny Sam - you wouldn’t be skinny anymore if I could bring you home for just one weekend, I’m telling you.”
“No no no.” Scott waved a hand. “He hasn’t lived until he’s had my grandmother’s potato salad. It’s just like they used to make in the old country, with bacon and everything. Just a taste and you’ll think you’re back in Stuttgart.”
“Um, I’m pretty sure that Sam here doesn’t want tamales or potato salad.” Andy offered a sad smile. “He wants pho. My mom made - makes - the best pho in the US, everyone says so. Even my grandmother likes my mom’s pho, and she doesn’t even like my mom.”
Miguel nudged Sam with his shoulder, gently to avoid a bruise. One of the more aggressive boys had left it with one of the rattan short swords. Sam had left a retaliatory mark on the guy’s neck with a flying move that had gotten the rest of the boys to stop their bouts and watch - not what he’d been going for but there was nothing he could do about it now. “Come on, Skinny Sam. There has to be something your mom cooks that you like, man.”
“Uh, my mom died when I was a baby,” he told them. “So I don’t really know. Formula, maybe,” he joked when he saw their faces fall. “But, um, my brother once mentioned that she made pie. So I guess maybe pie?”
“So what, your dad never remarried or anything?” Andy bit into his sandwich.
“Nah. He just drags us around the country.” He was going to get these guys back to their mothers, to their tamales and potato salads and pho. There were no two ways about it.
The days did not change. Every day was exactly the same, although minor details might vary slightly. The specific food served at a meal might change, with sausage instead of eggs and cream of wheat instead of oatmeal, but the meals were always perfectly nutritionally balanced and perfectly healthy. The workout routines did not vary, although the exercises might. Prayer consisted of the boys being brought before Charon’s altar. Charon did not appear before them again.
Sam tried to avoid attention from the adults. This seemed like the most sensible option as he tried to understand the lay of the land here. While the guards were not afraid of demonstrating their sadistic sides if a prisoner stepped out of line, they didn’t seem to be trying to egg the kids on or urging them to give excuses to act out; they just seemed to try to avoid interacting with the kids as people at all. They didn’t even use names with the kids.
Rules were fairly simple. You obeyed orders. You did your training. Speaking was permitted in the mess hall, although the guards would come closer if they thought anyone seemed to be speaking intensely or if a knot of prisoners became too large.
Just as the Winchesters had noticed when the case came up, the kids were all between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. That meant that while they were all certainly traumatized by their circumstances they were also teenagers, and teenagers tend to separate by mutual interest and personality. There were distinct cliques. Sam had his friends, Miguel and Andy and Scott. They had a couple of other hangers-on, like Andy’s roommate, Dan, and Joel, whose cell was up near the end of the hall. They had all been there the shortest time.
Others, who had been there longer, were colder. They didn’t socialize much, but watched warily. They watched the punishments as opposed to simply staring ahead of themselves, their voices when they spoke were free of emotion. That didn’t surprise Sam. They’d been here for a long time. They’d been traumatized, they’d been separated from their families, they’d probably started to sink into despair already.
Then there were the two or three at the opposite end of the spectrum. They were the ultra-aggressive fighters. Miguel told him that one of them hadn’t even been there all that long, only about five weeks. Two of them had been the ones to get visibly excited at Andy’s beating. They didn’t sit together, they didn’t seek one another out. They didn’t speak at all anymore. They just stared and seethed, like they were trying to contain something.
Sam had been there four days when he found out what happened when that containment failed. He was sitting with the rest of the kids he’d already started to think of as “Awake” at a corner of the mess hall, telling the story about the time Dean had gotten caught by Jenna O’Brien’s dad in her room with no pants on. Sam hadn’t been there but he’d heard the story often enough from his brother, when Dean had been trying to distract him from pain or fear or his anger about his dad, that he knew every detail and embellishment by heart. He figured it was good enough to keep people’s spirits up right now. That was what it was for, for crying out loud.
And that was when one of the Lost Ones, as he thought of them, stood up. He didn’t have a name, or if he did no one had used it since Sam’s arrival. He was a redhead, and so covered in freckles that Sam had thought of him as Spot since first sight. It wasn’t like he had any other name to use.
Spot rose, but he never rose beyond a crouch. He didn’t speak, he didn’t yell. He just growled and charged at the corner occupied by the Awake kids, using his fork to stab out at Andy. The tennis player - tallest of the clique, but slimmest and least skilled as a fighter - cried out and brought up his own fork in a feeble attempt to defend himself. The guards, Sam noticed, looked militantly indifferent.
Sam met Miguel’s eyes and they rose as one, charging in to defend their friend. Sam punched Spot in the eye while Miguel grabbed the arm that held the fork, twisting it behind his back and taking the weapon away. Spot didn’t seem fazed by this thwarting of his design, although he shook his arm free of Miguel and shoved at Sam before taking a swing at Andy’s midsection.
Andy took the opportunity to stab at Spot’s face with his own fork. He managed to get the instrument into the neck, punching his attacker in the nose as Sam took the aggressor’s arm and hyperextended it behind his back, dislocating the shoulder. Spot didn’t cry out, but continued to struggle toward Andy. This was when the guards decided to intervene, Tasers out. The other Awake kids stood between Andy and Spot while Sam maintained his iron grip until two guards took over for him.
One of them made eye contact with him. “You’d have made a good CO, kid,” he offered before they dragged the injured boy away.
He couldn’t tell if he should be insulted or flattered and decided that “neither” was the best option. “What the hell?” he asked the others, eyes trailing over the area where the altercation had taken place. “You okay, Andy?”
“I’m fine,” his friend told him. “Lost my fork though.”
“I wouldn’t want to eat with it anymore. What happened there?”
“What happens to everyone eventually,” Scott sighed. “They all turn eventually. It’s like the guards wait for it. Eventually every single one of us turns into… that. Some of us take longer than others, but some only take a month.” He looked away. “Then they take you away. They put you in the arena.”
“You don’t mind fighting in there,” Joel concurred sadly, big hands massaging his own temples. “I’ve… I’ve seen it, Skinny Sam. I’ve seen those boys. They don’t care. They’re not afraid. They’re not afraid to die, they’re not afraid to kill. They just don’t care about a thing, you know?”
“But they can’t just send Spot into the ring like that,” Sam objected. “He’s got a dislocated shoulder and tableware sticking out of his goddamn neck.”
“They’ll patch him up. I’m not sure how many people they’ve got in the cages, but you saw. He can’t be around people anymore.” Scott shook his head. “Sorry.”
He sighed. “Okay. Okay. We’ll just have to….“
“To do what, Sam?” Andy gave a bitter little laugh. “Just wait until the end. It’s all we can do, man.”
“No. It’s not. There are people - good people, smart people - out there looking for us right now.” He couldn’t see any other guards coming in, but he kept his voice low anyway.
“So what?” Miguel shook his head. “Sam, dude, they’ve been running this thing for decades, man. You think that people weren’t looking for those other kids too?”
“Not like this.” He hoped he wasn’t lying. He probably wasn’t lying. It was a real case; John and Dean had definitely been doing real research. Unless it had all been an elaborate ruse? Sam hadn’t been sure that it had been a real supernatural case until he’d seen the altar. Maybe it had been a giant ruse. “And they didn’t have what we have.”
“What’s that, genius?” Dan sneered.
“Us.”
Scott scoffed and Miguel hung his shaking head, but they were both grinning so Sam counted them as being on board.
This way to Chapter One -- This way to Chapter Three
Author(s): safiyabat
Artist: majestic_duxk
Beta: elwarre
Characters: Sam winchester, John Winchester, Dean Winchester, OCs
Pairing: Sam/OMC
Rating: M
Word Count: This Chapter - 5,476 words; entire work - 24,834 words
Warning(s): Show-level violence, child abuse, child death, negative depiction of John Winchester, creepy gladiator cult, consensual underage (both parties) sexual content. This chapter contains graphic child physical abuse.
Summary: When Sam is taken by a gladiator-obsessed cult in Idaho, he has nothing to rely on but his wits and his fellow prisoners to get him out.
Sam didn’t sleep easily. He didn’t sleep easily at home or what passed for it, he certainly wasn’t going to sleep easily in some dungeon with nothing but a piece of scratchy, coarse wool between himself and the elements. He stared at the ceiling for a while, trying to figure out what he knew. There wasn’t much. Apparently the cult was summoning Charon. Sam was equipped to handle - well, at the moment he was equipped to handle anything that could be slain by wool, thin cotton or naked human genitalia, not that he wanted to explore using his parts as a weapon.
The cult summoned a god. This was beyond anything he thought his father had ever faced, beyond anything Pastor Jim had talked about. He thought he dimly recalled Bobby Singer having some information about gods and how to kill them, back when he’d been holed up there after Dean got lost on a hunt in the Catskills maybe three years ago, but Bobby hadn’t been hugely keen on letting Sam loose in his library at the time. Not after Sam cast a location spell and tried to go running off after his brother….
He forced his mind back to the task at hand. He needed to concentrate if he was going to get himself out of this. He couldn’t count on his father and Dean to get him out, because they wouldn’t even remotely suspect that they were dealing with a god. Even if he could somehow get word to them - how he was supposed to do that he had no idea - they’d never believe him. Dean would laugh at his “overactive imagination.” John - well, John wouldn’t laugh.
And all that assumed that his family was even looking. Oh, Dean might miss him. Maybe. He had a lot of hang-ups about “take care of Sammy” that made him try to muscle his way in when he thought bullies were coming after Sam or something. Maybe he’d be antsy now. But John - John had been very eager to sacrifice Sam to this particular hunt with no idea what was going on, no clue as to what he was fighting. Maybe he wasn’t looking. Maybe he wasn’t interested in getting Sam back.
Or maybe that wasn’t being fair to John. The guy had fought tooth and nail to keep Sam from even getting the slightest hope of getting out of hunting, burning the one college brochure Sam had been stupid enough to bring home right in front of him. He’d vetoed any possibility of Sam moving in with Bobby or Pastor Jim on a long-term basis even when both hunters had urged the solution. If he couldn’t stand the thought of Sam getting away from him by staying with people he knew or getting to a safe and happy life in college, he probably wasn’t going to be all that thrilled with the idea of Sam escaping hunting through a short stint as a slave to a weird pseudo-Roman death cult.
Right?
He is marked by others already. Charon’s words came back to his mind unbidden, unwelcome. What did that mean, “marked?” For most people that just meant a hickey or some love bites. Maybe a tattoo. Sam had none of those things. Yeah, sure, Dwayne King had wanted to leave him with a hickey back in Kennewick, but Sam had made it very clear that he didn’t have enough privacy to get away with anything of the sort thank you very much. He was pretty sure that the deity hadn’t been talking about any such thing, especially since Kennewick had been several weeks ago and no marking of any kind had taken place.
Maybe Dad knew. Maybe that was what this was about. Maybe Dad had figured out that Sam was just unclean and this was just a convenient way of getting rid of him. Dean would probably get mad at Dad if he killed Sam outright (maybe, probably, he did think everything Dad did was wonderful so maybe not) but if he was just “lost” while being bait on a hunt? Well then Sam would have died a hero, no better fate, right? Sacrificed for the greater good.
Did Dad know what Charon had meant by “marked?” Had he figured it out? If so, when? He tried to think back to when his father had started to act differently toward him and he couldn’t figure it out. He’d always resented Sam, never had as much use for Sam as he did for Dean. Never taken any pride in Sam, no matter how far he ran or how strong he was or how well he could shoot. It never measured up to Dean’s accomplishments, so Sam learned to value other skills that could be measured in other units than “good job, son.” Which, in turn, only made John angrier. Maybe he’d always known Sam was dirty, though. Maybe that was why Sam could never measure up. Maybe that was why he’d been shunted off now.
Or not. Maybe they were out there looking for him. Maybe they were treating the case of his disappearance just like he was any other missing teenager, any other civilian. Maybe they were acting like his life was worth as much as someone else’s.
He wasn’t going to count on that. He couldn’t afford to.
Trapped underground, in a cell with no windows, he had no way of knowing what time it was or when the sun rose. Someone did start rapping on all of the doors eventually, though. “Rise and shine, girls,” an older, masculine voice demanded. “Time for breakfast.”
He heard the door to his cell unlock, and he tensed for a moment before moving. No one entered, so he hopped down onto the concrete floor and stuck his head out.
A fistful of other boys, all roughly his age, stood more or less to attention outside their cells. All of them wore loincloths basically indistinguishable from Sam’s. Some were bruised. Some had welts on their backs. Others glanced casually at Sam, and he couldn’t decide how he felt about that. “Hey, new guy,” said the one in the cell next to Sam. He had dark skin, close-cropped hair and a few welts. “I’m Miguel.”
“Sam,” he said. Miguel didn’t offer a hand, so Sam didn’t either. “How long have you been here?”
“Hard to say. Probably about three weeks maybe. It all kind of blends together after a while. They tell you anything?”
“No.” He tried to think back to the missing persons reports he’d looked into. Miguel Flores had been reported missing from just outside of Ogden, Utah three and a half weeks ago. He’d been a star football player. “They made me go talk to some god or something but that was it.”
“You talked to Charon?” The guy standing next to Miguel looked excited by the prospect. “That’s so cool! All he did was mark us.”
“What do you mean mark you?” Sam knew he was making a face, but he couldn’t help it. He hadn’t slept and the problem of “marking” was causing logistical and literal headaches for him.
“He didn’t mark you?” Miguel whispered. “That’s kind of a big deal, bro. It’s like… he touches your soul.” He shivered. “It’s not fun. And then he gets your soul when you die.”
“Huh.” Sam twitched his lips. Someone else already had a claim to his soul when he died? Who? And why didn’t he think that was likely to be a very good thing? He opened his mouth to ask another question but the guard at the end of the hallway hollered.
“All right, you maggots, let’s get you to your breakfast. No fraternizing.”
A second guard took a quick headcount. Apparently there were twenty-five boys incarcerated in this wing, including Sam. They moved out in single file, alert adult eyes watching for any infractions.
Sam paid attention to the route to the mess hall. The facility consisted of two long tables where the boys could sit. He noticed that there were enough seats for several more boys than were present at the moment, and that chilled him. “You want to eat up, Skinny Sam,” Miguel advised, sitting beside Sam. “I know you probably don’t feel much like it right now. The whole strange place, strange food, kidnapping thing, right? Plus that exam they give you - not anyone’s idea of a good time, am I right?”
“They knocked me out for that,” he admitted, poking at the eggs on top of his oatmeal. He was kind of afraid that they would poke back.
“Did they really? I guess there’s some fight in you already. Huh. Anyway, you’re going to be training hard and you’ve got to keep your strength up. I don’t care what your sport was, man. You haven’t trained like they’re going to have you training here.” One corner of his mouth quirked up in a grin.
Sam poked at the eggs. “I’ve never been a great eater.” He tried a bite. “So what exactly is this place?”
Miguel’s sidekick - cellmate? roommate? - chimed in. He was shorter than Miguel, shorter than Sam, and he was built like a barn. “Were you very good at history, Skinny Sam?”
He was going to learn to hate that nickname in about six seconds. It was better than “Sammy,” though. “Yeah. I guess. Why?”
“You remember the Romans? Caesar and Caligula and all that?”
Miguel punched him lightly in the bicep. “Caligula was a porno from, like, the seventies, man.”
“He was an emperor too,” Sam admitted, almost absently. The loincloth felt a lot more revealing now. “Tell me it’s not -“
“Oh God no,” the other boy - white-blond, with close-cropped hair and a few scars - shuddered. “I saw that one once with my brother. Had nightmares for weeks, man. No, they don’t seem to want us like that. It’s, uh. Have you seen, um, Spartacus? It’s really old, it has that Sir Laurence Olivier dude in it.”
“We’re gladiators,” Sam surmised, a pit forming in the middle of his stomach.
“That’s the word.” Blondie nodded, folding his lips grimly. “We’re all in training to be gladiators. Only there’s never going to be anyone giving us the thumbs up or anything. When they’re out there it’s just -“
“How long have you been here….” He paused, looking at the guy.
After a moment, Blondie responded. “Scott.”
“How long have you been here, Scott?”
“Six weeks. They picked me up in Logan, Utah.” He hung his head. “They’ve probably stopped looking for me by now.”
“They haven’t.” Sam reached out and put a hand on the other boy’s arm. “My dad - he looks for things just like this. Cults. They haven’t stopped looking for you. They haven’t stopped looking for either of you, okay? And your families aren’t going to.” He made eye contact with both of the others. He didn’t remember seeing Scott’s name among the missing, but he hadn’t seen every police report either. He’d been around enough victims and victims’ families to know more or less how to talk to them, though. “We’re going to get out of this.”
“They’ve been doing this for an awfully long time, Skinny Sam,” Miguel doubted.
“So’s my family.” He offered a smile he didn’t feel. “So. What was your sport?”
“What do you mean?” Scott asked, eyebrows drawing together.
“Everyone who was taken was some kind of athlete - they don’t want weak gladiators, that’s no kind of contest, right?” His mind flashed back to the conversation with Charon, when Sam’s “owner” had been so concerned as to whether or not Sam was a worthy sacrifice. Somehow he didn’t think the use of that word would benefit anyone.
“I played football,” Miguel told him proudly. “Quarterback.”
“Nice,” Scott grinned. “I played soccer.”
“Aw, man. I love soccer. My dad never lets me play.” He slumped a little.
“So what was your sport, then?” the quarterback pressed. “It’s obviously something, you’ve got muscles like rocks, man.”
“Nah, my dad’s just a drill sergeant.” He shrugged.
A bell near the front of the room rang, and Scott and Miguel immediately rose from their seats and raced to line up with the other boys. Miguel patted Sam on the arm. “Come on, man.”
Sam figured that lingering over the eggs and oatmeal was probably not in his best interests. He joined in, abandoning his breakfast and falling into line. The guards - more of them this time - led them out a door on the opposite side of the room than the one they’d entered and through a different maze of corridors until they came to another arena.
It wasn’t the same space they’d been in yesterday. There was no altar, no pervading aura of cold and impending doom. The floor was more dirt than anything else, and the wall was lined with what looked like… “Rattan?” he puzzled, looking up at the items as he lined up with the others.
A guard, middle aged with a slight paunch, punched him in the face. “You will speak when spoken to,” he bellowed.
Sam turned his face with the blow, but he didn’t fall or stagger. He’d had worse, after all - he’d had worse recently - and he wasn’t about to let this bunch of cultist assholes see him hurting.
“First things first,” another guard declared loudly. This one stood in front of the entire row of twenty-five boys and had a whistle. Sam nicknamed him Coach. “Get to running. New Kid - the rules are simple. You run until I blow the whistle. If you stop before I blow the whistle you get punished. Got it?”
He considered kicking the gray-haired man in the nads, but he didn’t think it would benefit him much to do so. After all, he didn’t even know his way around this warren of a place yet. “Yes, sir,” he ground out instead.
The whistle blew. The boys ran. The exercise didn’t seem exceptionally arduous to Sam. It was a workout - he worked up a sweat, sure, but it wasn’t what he would call grueling. He made sure not to outpace the others and stayed in the middle of the pack. Scott and Miguel seemed to be doing okay too. One kid, though - a tall, slender Asian kid, the only East Asian guy in the bunch - seemed to be having a hard time of it. After the first hour he sank to his knees and started retching, becoming violently ill in the center of the track.
Sam slowed down, intending to go help him, but Miguel put a firm hand on his back. He didn’t speak, but he didn’t need to. The message was clear. He wasn’t going to be allowed to help. He kept running.
The kid finished puking and was hauled to his feet as the rest of the boys continued their run. After another forty-five minutes Coach blew his whistle. Sam joined the others in forming a more-or-less orderly cluster around a tall pole. The kid who had been ill did not resist as a guard bound his wrists together on the other side of the pole; he just closed his eyes and bit his full lips in fear.
Sam tried to stretch a little bit, as subtly as he could, while Coach blew his whistle again. He wasn’t the only one; these guys were all athletes after all. “Listen up. This fella stopped running before I blew my whistle.” He pointed at Sam. “Do you know what the penalty is for ending your run before the whistle is?”
Sam felt sick. “No sir.” It hadn’t been the other guy’s fault. He’d just been sick. What was he supposed to do, run and puke at the same time?
“It’s your first day and you haven’t seen this sort of thing before so I’ll let it slide,” Coach declared. “You!” He pointed at a brown-haired boy who’d clearly started his growth spurt early. “What is the penalty for ending your run before the whistle is blown?”
“Ten strokes, sir.” The respondent didn’t sound enthusiastic. He didn’t sound upset either. He just sounded neutral, like he could have been talking about the weather.
Sam turned around. One of the other guards had gone to the wall of rattan, but it wasn’t one of the makeshift weapons that he’d gone after. “Eyes up here, new guy, or it’ll be your turn next,” Coach snarled. Sam turned his eyes back to the front of the crowd.
The guard presented Coach with a bundle of birch sticks. Sam definitely felt his gorge rise again. “One,” he counted, as Coach brought his arm back. A loud crack echoed through the air and the rods landed on the victim’s back. The only other sound was the boy whimpering. Sam didn’t tear his eyes away; he knew the screws had their eyes on him and he needed them to underestimate him, needed that like air if he was ever going to survive this. Still, his peripheral vision told him that different boys were reacting differently to the spectacle. Some stared straight ahead - not even really watching if they could avoid it. Some seemed to want to watch. And others - well, the thing about a loincloth is that it can’t hide much of anything. One or two of the boys clearly enjoyed the beating, even if they didn’t let it show on their faces.
Once the birching was over and done with the next step of the training began. Coach put them through calisthenics - beginning with crunches, because he was just that much of a dick. There was strength training, there was flexibility training. None of it was anything he hadn’t done before. By the time the bell sounded for lunch he found he was definitely ready for food, although he wasn’t starving and he was more than a little turned off by the flogging.
He made sure he sat near the birching victim at lunch. Miguel and Scott joined him. “You okay, man?” he asked, conversationally.
The guy jumped when he spoke. “Uh, yeah. I’ll live.”
Sam noticed that he was just poking at his lunch, which seemed to be some kind of soup and bread. At least the soup had greens in it. “I’m Sam. These are Miguel and Scott.”
He was silent for a moment. “Andy,” he admitted grudgingly. Sam’s brain, acting on autopilot, filled in the rest. Andy Nguyen, sixteen, tennis. “I guess it’s nice to not be the new guy anymore.”
“So you’ve been here…”
“A week,” he whispered. “Feels like ten years.”
“Was that the first time they….”
“No.” He folded his mouth shut and Sam decided not to continue that line of inquiry.
“So what’s usually next on the schedule?” he asked the group at large. “I want to know what I’m getting into.” He flashed a grin. “I hate walking into a situation blind, you know?”
That got little chuckles out of the others at least. “Afternoons are combat training,” Scott told him. “Start out with a little bit of a run to get us warmed up again - half an hour to forty-five minutes, nothing major.”
“Then hand-to-hand,” Miguel added. “We’re not supposed to be killing one another, but that’s about the only rule. We do that for a couple of hours.”
“Then weapons,” Andy told him. “They’ve got these rattan things, they’re supposed to be weighted like real swords and crap but they don’t have edges so they probably won’t kill us.”
Sam snorted. “Probably,” he repeated. John Winchester hadn’t bothered with fake weapons. He’d just expected them to just not kill each other. “All right. After that?”
“After that is dinner. Then prayers,” Miguel added. “Not that we really do much for that. We sit and stare. Then it’s back to bed.”
Okay. He could work with that, he supposed.
Training proved to be everything they promised. Hand to hand was nothing Sam couldn’t handle. He tried not to look “too” good, but he’d been training in this stuff since he could walk, long before he’d known about werewolves and ghosts and whatever-the-fuck-else went bump in the night, and his body just would not allow him to pretend to be incompetent. Every member of the group had to fight everyone else, not to the death but to submission, and Sam wasn’t about to let anyone else make him submit. Especially not the couple of guys who’d gotten boners watching Andy get beaten, not with the way they were looking at him. He got that some people had kinks, but that didn’t mean he was comfortable with the way they looked at him when they thought he was vulnerable.
After hand to hand was rattan. Rattan was a little harder to adjust to. Sam was used to fighting with a knife, usually a butterfly knife or a switchblade, sometimes a hunting knife. He was also a damn fine shot. It seemed like they wanted him to get used to fighting with much larger weapons like small spears and short swords and even a trident and net, and those weren’t as easy for him to wrap his head around. The stakes were higher, too - no protective equipment was provided, and of all things he needed more than anything to keep his head clear. He couldn’t afford to let anything hit him in the head. Coach seemed content to make everyone fight him with the same weapon he was using on his first day, which made things easier. Not easy, but easier.
He could hear his father’s voice in his ear as he fought. “You really think a wendigo is going to be easy on you because you’re new? Come on. You’re going to get ripped apart. And you’ll deserve it. What the hell have I been training you for if you can’t even take out a freaking high school linebacker with a stick? No wonder I abandoned you to a homicidal cult! Dean and I are better off without you.”
He tried not to listen to it, that voice in his head, and focus on figuring out the mechanics. He did manage to keep from getting hit in the head, which he supposed was about as good as he could hope for. As for the other stuff - the unfamiliar weapons, the strangers who were more adept with the weapons than he was - he ultimately went with what he knew. He might not know how to use a trident and net but he knew that both of those things gave an enemy a longer reach. If he eliminated that advantage - stepped right in and took out the arm with the net, and maybe knocked the guy to the ground at the same time, maybe he’d be able to work around that.
Dinner consisted of chicken sandwiches, piled high with as many fresh vegetables as chicken. “I’ll say this for this place,” Sam commented, regarding one of the two sandwiches they’d put on his plate. “The food is better so far.”
“Seriously?” Miguel doubted. “I think one of the worst parts of what’s happening is that I’m never going to eat my mother’s cooking again. I just want to try her black bean soup one more time, or tamales. Skinny Sam - you wouldn’t be skinny anymore if I could bring you home for just one weekend, I’m telling you.”
“No no no.” Scott waved a hand. “He hasn’t lived until he’s had my grandmother’s potato salad. It’s just like they used to make in the old country, with bacon and everything. Just a taste and you’ll think you’re back in Stuttgart.”
“Um, I’m pretty sure that Sam here doesn’t want tamales or potato salad.” Andy offered a sad smile. “He wants pho. My mom made - makes - the best pho in the US, everyone says so. Even my grandmother likes my mom’s pho, and she doesn’t even like my mom.”
Miguel nudged Sam with his shoulder, gently to avoid a bruise. One of the more aggressive boys had left it with one of the rattan short swords. Sam had left a retaliatory mark on the guy’s neck with a flying move that had gotten the rest of the boys to stop their bouts and watch - not what he’d been going for but there was nothing he could do about it now. “Come on, Skinny Sam. There has to be something your mom cooks that you like, man.”
“Uh, my mom died when I was a baby,” he told them. “So I don’t really know. Formula, maybe,” he joked when he saw their faces fall. “But, um, my brother once mentioned that she made pie. So I guess maybe pie?”
“So what, your dad never remarried or anything?” Andy bit into his sandwich.
“Nah. He just drags us around the country.” He was going to get these guys back to their mothers, to their tamales and potato salads and pho. There were no two ways about it.
The days did not change. Every day was exactly the same, although minor details might vary slightly. The specific food served at a meal might change, with sausage instead of eggs and cream of wheat instead of oatmeal, but the meals were always perfectly nutritionally balanced and perfectly healthy. The workout routines did not vary, although the exercises might. Prayer consisted of the boys being brought before Charon’s altar. Charon did not appear before them again.
Sam tried to avoid attention from the adults. This seemed like the most sensible option as he tried to understand the lay of the land here. While the guards were not afraid of demonstrating their sadistic sides if a prisoner stepped out of line, they didn’t seem to be trying to egg the kids on or urging them to give excuses to act out; they just seemed to try to avoid interacting with the kids as people at all. They didn’t even use names with the kids.
Rules were fairly simple. You obeyed orders. You did your training. Speaking was permitted in the mess hall, although the guards would come closer if they thought anyone seemed to be speaking intensely or if a knot of prisoners became too large.
Just as the Winchesters had noticed when the case came up, the kids were all between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. That meant that while they were all certainly traumatized by their circumstances they were also teenagers, and teenagers tend to separate by mutual interest and personality. There were distinct cliques. Sam had his friends, Miguel and Andy and Scott. They had a couple of other hangers-on, like Andy’s roommate, Dan, and Joel, whose cell was up near the end of the hall. They had all been there the shortest time.
Others, who had been there longer, were colder. They didn’t socialize much, but watched warily. They watched the punishments as opposed to simply staring ahead of themselves, their voices when they spoke were free of emotion. That didn’t surprise Sam. They’d been here for a long time. They’d been traumatized, they’d been separated from their families, they’d probably started to sink into despair already.
Then there were the two or three at the opposite end of the spectrum. They were the ultra-aggressive fighters. Miguel told him that one of them hadn’t even been there all that long, only about five weeks. Two of them had been the ones to get visibly excited at Andy’s beating. They didn’t sit together, they didn’t seek one another out. They didn’t speak at all anymore. They just stared and seethed, like they were trying to contain something.
Sam had been there four days when he found out what happened when that containment failed. He was sitting with the rest of the kids he’d already started to think of as “Awake” at a corner of the mess hall, telling the story about the time Dean had gotten caught by Jenna O’Brien’s dad in her room with no pants on. Sam hadn’t been there but he’d heard the story often enough from his brother, when Dean had been trying to distract him from pain or fear or his anger about his dad, that he knew every detail and embellishment by heart. He figured it was good enough to keep people’s spirits up right now. That was what it was for, for crying out loud.
And that was when one of the Lost Ones, as he thought of them, stood up. He didn’t have a name, or if he did no one had used it since Sam’s arrival. He was a redhead, and so covered in freckles that Sam had thought of him as Spot since first sight. It wasn’t like he had any other name to use.
Spot rose, but he never rose beyond a crouch. He didn’t speak, he didn’t yell. He just growled and charged at the corner occupied by the Awake kids, using his fork to stab out at Andy. The tennis player - tallest of the clique, but slimmest and least skilled as a fighter - cried out and brought up his own fork in a feeble attempt to defend himself. The guards, Sam noticed, looked militantly indifferent.
Sam met Miguel’s eyes and they rose as one, charging in to defend their friend. Sam punched Spot in the eye while Miguel grabbed the arm that held the fork, twisting it behind his back and taking the weapon away. Spot didn’t seem fazed by this thwarting of his design, although he shook his arm free of Miguel and shoved at Sam before taking a swing at Andy’s midsection.
Andy took the opportunity to stab at Spot’s face with his own fork. He managed to get the instrument into the neck, punching his attacker in the nose as Sam took the aggressor’s arm and hyperextended it behind his back, dislocating the shoulder. Spot didn’t cry out, but continued to struggle toward Andy. This was when the guards decided to intervene, Tasers out. The other Awake kids stood between Andy and Spot while Sam maintained his iron grip until two guards took over for him.
One of them made eye contact with him. “You’d have made a good CO, kid,” he offered before they dragged the injured boy away.
He couldn’t tell if he should be insulted or flattered and decided that “neither” was the best option. “What the hell?” he asked the others, eyes trailing over the area where the altercation had taken place. “You okay, Andy?”
“I’m fine,” his friend told him. “Lost my fork though.”
“I wouldn’t want to eat with it anymore. What happened there?”
“What happens to everyone eventually,” Scott sighed. “They all turn eventually. It’s like the guards wait for it. Eventually every single one of us turns into… that. Some of us take longer than others, but some only take a month.” He looked away. “Then they take you away. They put you in the arena.”
“You don’t mind fighting in there,” Joel concurred sadly, big hands massaging his own temples. “I’ve… I’ve seen it, Skinny Sam. I’ve seen those boys. They don’t care. They’re not afraid. They’re not afraid to die, they’re not afraid to kill. They just don’t care about a thing, you know?”
“But they can’t just send Spot into the ring like that,” Sam objected. “He’s got a dislocated shoulder and tableware sticking out of his goddamn neck.”
“They’ll patch him up. I’m not sure how many people they’ve got in the cages, but you saw. He can’t be around people anymore.” Scott shook his head. “Sorry.”
He sighed. “Okay. Okay. We’ll just have to….“
“To do what, Sam?” Andy gave a bitter little laugh. “Just wait until the end. It’s all we can do, man.”
“No. It’s not. There are people - good people, smart people - out there looking for us right now.” He couldn’t see any other guards coming in, but he kept his voice low anyway.
“So what?” Miguel shook his head. “Sam, dude, they’ve been running this thing for decades, man. You think that people weren’t looking for those other kids too?”
“Not like this.” He hoped he wasn’t lying. He probably wasn’t lying. It was a real case; John and Dean had definitely been doing real research. Unless it had all been an elaborate ruse? Sam hadn’t been sure that it had been a real supernatural case until he’d seen the altar. Maybe it had been a giant ruse. “And they didn’t have what we have.”
“What’s that, genius?” Dan sneered.
“Us.”
Scott scoffed and Miguel hung his shaking head, but they were both grinning so Sam counted them as being on board.
This way to Chapter One -- This way to Chapter Three