Fic: Fire Into Rain (Sam/Dean, NC-17) 1 of 2
Title: Fire Into Rain
Author: smalltrolven
Artist: loracine
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Wordcount: 7,200
Warning: None
Summary: Turns out there are still dragons, Sam and Dean find that out the hard way.
Author’s Note: Not my characters, only my words. Written for the 2017 Wincest-Reverse bang, for prompt 24, loracine s fabulous illustration gave me the chance to finally write some dragon!fic. Thanks for the great beta advice, soyem, especially for corralling all, my, commas.
Read it over on AO3 right here
Be sure to go check out the Art Masterpost.
|~~^-^~~|
“Virgin sacrifices, Sammy, c’mon it’s gotta be a dragon, right?” Dean asked as he waved what was left of the dragon slaying sword towards his brother.
“Fine, you want to bring that thing, I’m not stopping you,” Sam said with a shrug and duck of his head that hopefully hid his bemusement. Dean would be even more insufferable if he knew how Sam really felt seeing him wielding that sword again.
“It’s only a little busted. Hey, it worked before when we needed to kill those dragons, right?”
“Dude, it’s obvious you want to play dragon-slayer again, bring the damn thing, like I said, I’m not stopping you. But we need to get going,” Sam said.
“Well, go get in the damn car already, we’re outta here, virgins are being sacrificed, there are dragons to be slaying!” Dean shouted as he stomped down the hall into the garage waving the stubby sword.
Sam shook his head at his brother, vowing yet again to try to limit his re-watches of Game of Thrones.
“From Lebanon to Lebanon, door to door ought to be about six hours, maybe seven if we stop at that diner with the buttermilk pecan pie you liked,” Dean said over the starting roar of the Impala.
“Now that would be worth stopping for again,” Sam said, surprised with a sudden warm feeling because Dean remembered something like that.
Sam settled into his worn-in spot in the passenger seat and flicked through the memory of sitting in that particular diner with his brother across from him. He could still feel how their feet had tangled together under the table. It had been one of the first, if not the first time, they’d gone out in public after finally giving in to the inevitable. It was a heady time when they hadn’t hunted too much because the distraction had overwhelmed them for days at a time.
Feeling a wave of emotion coming towards him, Sam squirmed around until he was facing away from Dean. He looked out the window at the fields flashing past and thought about how many years it was now. How long since they’d…he’d almost managed to make himself forget how good it was having that part of their hunting life to look forward to, almost, but not quite.
Sam looked over at Dean, bopping his head to the beat of the Ozzy song on the radio, oblivious to the turmoil roiling through his little brother and let himself smile, big and wide. The memory of how good it could be between them when they got it right was everything he still longed for. With a little worry about opening himself up to more heartbreak, he let the hope that it could be that way again flow through him.
|~~^-^~~|
The actual number of the caves in the Mark Twain National Forest were uncounted, but there were more than three-hundred in the map database Sam had been using. They already knew from interviewing the witnesses that the girls had been abducted within a pretty short range. Two were in day-hiking parties, and a third had been staying overnight with her family in one of the lookout campsites. That cut down the number of caves they had to explore to five.
Sam had eliminated the caves that had the smallest cave entrances because of what they knew about the human form that dragons could take. He was guessing it would have to be tall enough for an average male to be able to enter when carrying another human body.
“Good thing we don’t have claustrophobia, this one is smaller than the other two,” Dean joked as he headed into the third cave of the day.
“Sssh,” Sam whispered, pointing down one of the rounded cave tunnels where a yellow-green glow flickered on the arching walls.
Dean drew his sword stub and flicked off his flashlight. They crept up to the entrance and heard a deep male voice chanting inside, the strange words echoing around the space, bouncing off all the exposed rock. Dean pointed to the other side of the entrance and Sam stepped over quickly to see if he could get a visual on their suspect.
The words stopped as suddenly as if a switch had been flipped. The chartreuse glow flared blindingly bright as Sam was yanked forward into the smaller room of the cave by an unseen force. Dean grabbed at his brother’s arm, but whatever was pulling Sam away was so much stronger. Dean followed close behind and slashed at the hulking man he could now see holding his brother. The man screamed as the sword stub plunged into his chest, but he still managed to hold Sam with one arm while he shoved Dean with unexpected force with the other.
Dean felt the hit deep in his chest, then all he knew was a short flight through the Purgatory-scented air back into the tunnel, ending in darkness as his head made contact with the opposite wall.
What Dean saw when he resurfaced to consciousness was at first hard to quantify or even understand. The man he’d stabbed with the sword was obviously dead, lying on the cave floor in a puddle of yellow-green goo that shimmered and shined. That much he got, good, the bad guy was dead. But Sam was up there on the ceiling. Wait…up there?
Near the apex of the cave ceiling, maybe fifty feet high, his brother hovered, his enormous leathery wings beating steadily, moving the air in a breeze Dean could feel on his skin. Wings, his brother had freakin’ wings! Sam’s body was unchanged besides the wings, a few tatters of his shirt hung around his neck. His face looked serene, almost peaceful, and that worried Dean more than the damn wings, more than anything.
“Sammy, get the hell down here!” Dean yelled as he struggled to his feet.
Sam’s head turned and his eyes flared an impossibly brilliant chartreuse for a moment as they locked onto Dean. Then Sam was diving towards him, wings tucked-in, mouth open wide in an inhuman scream, hands reaching out to grab him. Dean rolled away out of Sam’s grasp, crashing into the girl they’d been searching for. He scooped her up and ran, hoping that the dragon or whatever it was Sam had turned into couldn’t follow through the small tunnel with those giant wings.
He could feel the wind generated from Sam’s wings beating at him as he raced down the tunnel, the girl in his arms moaning at being jostled. At least she was still alive, maybe this would end up being worth it. Then Sam roared again, unearthly loud and seeming to be right in his ear.
Dean burst out into the late afternoon light and dove to one side of the cave entrance. Sam flew past him and in a few beats of his wings he was up above the tree-line, soaring away into the cloudless sky. Dean screamed his brother’s name even though it was pointless, Sam was long gone, and he was a dragon.
|~~^-^~~|
Once the still-unconscious girl was dropped off at the closest emergency room, Dean sped back to the cave to examine what was left behind. Maybe there would be some clue about what the dragon-man was doing with all that chanting and the series of girls. Most of all, he needed to know how the hell Sam had been turned. As far as the lore went, becoming a dragon wasn’t a thing like a were-animal situation, you had to be born one. And Sam was definitely not born a dragon. Sam might have had the whole demon-blood thing done to him, but that wasn’t dragon related, right?
The dragon-man’s body had fallen apart in the hour he’d been gone, a pile of pulp tinged that now too-familiar sickly yellow-green. He dug through the piles of victim’s clothing left around the cave, searching for anything that might be useful to track Sam down. Finally, under the dragon man’s coat he found what looked like a rudimentary altar, a burned-out candle and a plate with offerings of human body parts arranged carefully and at the center of it all, a book like the one they’d found back when they’d been hunting Eve. Remembering how the other book had been bound in human skin, he wrapped a kerchief around his hand and picked the book up and tucked it into his jacket pocket.
He leaned over the remnants of the dragon-man and pulled the sword stub out of the mess. He wiped it off on the man’s coat and tucked it back into his scabbard. Dean did not let himself think about the possibility of having to use it on his brother, instead he told himself he owed it to Professor Visayak to keep track of the thing. He looked around the walls with the flashlight one last time and saw a small sigil over the doorway that glistened in red blood mixed with the dragon’s own. He snapped a picture of it with his cell, hoping it would be useful in his research.
On his way out of the cave, he tripped over something; it was the flashlight Sam had been using. The one with the ridiculous Superman stickers on it that he’d bought for his brother at the last gas station they’d stopped at that morning in Climax Springs.
Dean leaned against the wall of the cave and tried to steady himself with the memory of the last conversation they’d had over those damn pink coconut frosted snowballs Sam always chose when it was his turn to pick their road-trip snacks.
“Climax Springs, Sammy, gotta love that name, huh? Bet they get a lot of honeymooners stayin’ here,” Dean had said through a crumbly mouthful of coconut cake.
Sam had chuckled and smiled that blinding bright grin, pink frosting caught in the corner of his mouth, his tongue flashing out to lap it up.
Dean’s breath had caught then, knowing he wasn’t hiding the desire he’d always feel, but they hadn’t connected in so long. Then Sam was leaning across the seat between them, kissing him slow and perfect.
“After the case, we need to talk, okay?” Sam had murmured into his mouth, sealing the words in with another kiss that had turned Dean’s insides to jelly.
Before Dean could get it together enough to kiss him back, Sam had sat back in his seat and fastened his seatbelt. With a sigh that felt impossibly light Dean had driven them the rest of the way to Lebanon, Missouri.
Remembering the possibility of what he’d been missing for years made him smile, an unfamiliar hope growing again in his heart. It had been so hard, having Sam right there in the fight next to him, but not having all of him like he used to. All of that seemed to be, somehow, incredibly, against all the odds, possible again. Sam’s kiss had promised that. Dean growled quietly, the sound echoing through the empty cave, vowing to himself that he’d do everything it took to get Sam back. Just for the chance to return Sam’s kiss like he should have that morning.
|~~^-^~~|
Flying.
Up above.
Beat of wings, beat of heart, rhythm of the world turning beneath him.
No fear, no worry, just the hunt.
That reminded him of something, of someone…
No, there was only the hunt.
He shook his head and dove down from the sky, wind rushing past his ear holes until he forgot again.
Flying.
Up above.
|~~^-^~~|
The drive back to their Lebanon in Kansas, to their home as Sam had recently started calling it, took less time because Dean didn’t stop at that diner with the awesome pecan pie. He couldn’t bear it without Sam being there with him. The whole time he drove he kept touching his lips where Sam had kissed him that morning. The memory of it would have to keep him going until he got the real thing back.
The bunker’s filing system was complicated, and he was glad he’d paid attention when Sam had been patient enough to keep explaining it to him until he really got it down. The section on dragon lore was pretty sparse, but there was a language decoder chart he found in the index of one folio that helped explain the writing in the book he’d taken from the dragon’s den. If he’d translated it correctly, the guy had been in the midst of a last-ditch attempt to bring another dragon soul back from Purgatory. Dean guessed he was probably lonely or something since they’d killed those other dragons when Eve was making her comeback a few years ago.
That meant that the dragon soul being resurrected from Purgatory had gone into Sam somehow when they’d interrupted the virgin sacrifice. The dragon man had been trying to put the soul into the girl that Dean had managed to save. Then they’d probably have been able to re-populate the Earth with dragons. That plan was foiled at least, but he was still minus one brother. Who was a dragon, probably the very last one in the world.
|~~^-^~~|
Flying.
Up above.
Searching for a home.
Somewhere deep and dark.
Just a home to call his own.
That reminded him of something, of some place, someone…home.
He had a home, somewhere, with someone.
He shook his head and dove down from the sky, wind rushing past his ear holes until he forgot again.
Flying.
Up above.
|~~^-^~~|
It took days of searching, too many days, but Dean had finally found it, the wing-glider contraption the Men of Letters inventory had promised. In the leather satchel he found a small instruction manual with the enchantment to activate the wings, along with an exhaustive list of cautions he didn’t bother to fully read. He ran down the hall from the storeroom, arms full of the wings and ingredients for the spell he’d need to cast at midnight. Luckily they knew an angel, because one of the spell requirements was an angel feather and Cas had left behind a few over the years. He’d always teased Sam for keeping them, calling him an angel-fanboy, but it turned out they could be really useful in spell work.
He dumped everything on his bed and dressed in many layers for the cold, because it would be much colder if he managed to make it up high into the sky. That was of course, if the wings actually worked.
Dean sat at his desk and checked over the page in the dragon-man’s book he’d found that had a short spell to capture a dragon’s soul. He would have to draw the symbol from the cave somewhere on Sam’s skin with a mixture of his own blood and several herbs. The small bottle he’d already prepared was in his zipped jacket pocket along with one more of Cas’ feathers. It wasn’t in the spell instructions, where it just said to use a feather quill, but Dean figured it couldn’t hurt to use an angel feather. The vessel for the dragon soul was a small, lidded iron cauldron that he clipped onto his belt. He’d inscribed the same symbol on the inside that he’d be marking onto Sam’s skin.
The last thing Dean needed to do before he tried flying was to cast the dragon locator spell that he’d found in the dragon-man’s book. It energized an object that would act as a sort of compass to point you towards the nearest dragon. Since Sam was likely the only dragon in the world, it would hopefully point him in the right direction once he got himself airborne. The sky was a big place with no roads or signs, and he needed something to narrow down which way to head to find his brother.
The dragon locator instructions involved casting a spell on a wearable object that was flexible, something on a chain or cord was shown in the illustration. He dug through his box of keepsakes and found his old amulet buried where he’d stashed it so he wouldn’t have to look at it too much. He still couldn’t deal with the reminder of how he’d failed Sam, how his brother had kept it anyway. That and how it had glowed when Chuck had finally shown up. They’d never talked about it, Sam hadn’t asked for it back, so Dean had tucked it away along with the emotions and memories it held. The spell was an easy one, and he was glad to see the small brass face twist and turn at the end of the cord, finally coming to hold steady in one direction.
“Sammy, I’m comin’ for you, now that I know which way to go,” he said into the still air of the too-empty Bunker. He tied the cord of the amulet around his wrist, securing it tightly with several knots that he would need a knife to undo.
He thought about how Sam’s shirt had been destroyed by the dragon wings he’d sprouted. According to the lore, he would likely be full dragon by now, which meant he’d need some clothes to wear while they made the trip home. Luckily there were some of Sam’s clothes in the dryer so he didn’t have to make himself go through his dresser. Something about disturbing his brother’s things didn’t seem right. Not when he was a dragon. He didn’t want to think about that though, he swore at himself, stuffing the clothes into a small backpack that he’d have to wear on his front. The wings were going to take up all of his back, they were almost as tall as he was.
All that was left then was the waiting until midnight. Time seemed to crawl as he sat at his desk, staring at the symbol that would bring Sam back to him and drank a last glass of whisky. The pictures that Sam had used to break him out of his Mark of Cain rage were spread out on the desk. He studied them over and over, remembering Sam’s words about love, how they would help him remember how to love, that he was loved.
Tears started to come again, and he let himself shed them this time. He could die trying this flying thing tonight, and Sam would be a dragon forever. He’d be alone in the Empty without Sam, forever. That wasn’t how it was supposed to end. Not for them, not after what they’d done and sacrificed for this damn world. Chuck had practically promised them when he said he was right for making them soul mates. He finished his whisky and wrote Sam a note, just in case.
Dear Sammy,
I’m taking off after you tonight, with these wings I found in the storeroom, they’re supposed to work, angel feather powered and everything. Then all I have to do is find your dragon ass and write this symbol thing on you with my blood. No big deal, right? Piece of cake.
In case something goes wrong, and you end up back here because the wings didn’t work or you ate me or something, I just want to tell you something I never said before. And I’m sorry for not ever saying it out loud to you. I should have a long time ago. But here goes: You are the best part of my life, being with you makes it worth being alive.
I love you, Sammy, no matter what, and that’s a forever kind of thing, so I know I’ll see you wherever it is we end up next.
Love, Dean.
|~~^-^~~|
Flying.
Up above.
Beat of wings, beat of heart, rhythm of the world turning beneath him.
No fear, no worry, just the hunt.
That reminded him of something, of someone…the hunt.
He shook his head and dove down from the sky, wind rushing past his ear holes until he forgot again.
Flying.
Up above.
|~~^-^~~|
Part 2