[Fic] The Most Cursed Name, pt 1
The Most Cursed Name
A Supernatural Story
Rating: R (Language, Violence), Gen
Betas: quakerhobbit, caladria
Warnings/Tags: Season 4, demon blood, discussions of hell, possession
Written for spnaufestival
Part One
It happened that day, a nameless day, an unmemorable one. He only knows looking back, that's when it must have happened.
"I don't know, this is where she was last seen," Sam says. Before them is the dilapidated ruin of a large farmhouse, two stories, broken windows, tatters of curtains flailing out of the windows occasionally looking enough like white hair or desperate arms to be unsettling.
Dean looks up with a frown. "If you say so. She only died two years ago, though. No way is a house coming down like this in two years."
Sam shrugs. "I know. I'm with ya, I just." He shrugs. "The kid said it was an old house, and this is her address. Maybe it looked like this when she lived in it?"
Dean makes a face that makes Sam laugh. He's so easily grossed out by dirt, considering what they do every day, what they wade into, what they've had to clean out of their clothes.
Sam chuckles again, starts forward. "Come on, man."
Dean whistles when they get into the living room. It's taken some effort; the front door's swollen with rain wet, Sam's shoulder's still aching from beating it down.
"Well, we've stayed in worse motels," Dean laughs, elbows Sam. It's hollow, that laugh. After Hell, it's hollow but he's trying, Dean's trying. That's enough. "Remember that one dive?" he says, and laughs again to himself.
"You'll have to be a little more specific," Sam says, little grin, but he's back to business frowning at the state of the place. The foyer is spilled over in moth-eaten coats, scarves, boots - remnants of a bygone winter, left where the owners had dropped them and never returned. Beyond, the living room is similarly left untouched, left in the midst of something, like the people just up and left in the middle of whatever they were doing. "Something isn't right about this," he says, stepping into the foyer.
Dean rolls his eyes and pulls out the EMF detector, coming up behind Sam. "No way, everything's normal about the house that looks like it was abandoned in the 1800s despite having been lived in just two years ago. Nothin' fishy about that at all."
"Shh. Did you hear that?"
Sam can feel Dean's eyes sweep him, calculating, and he's proved right when Dean says, "Jumpy much?"
"I heard something upstairs," Sam insists, and Dean's little grunt means he thinks Sam is jumping at shadows, Sam is keyed up, Sam is going back on his promise to stop his psychic crap, no matter how it helps them, no matter how it saved Sam's life when Samhain was about to kill him. Dean would rather Sam was dead right now than accept Sam being anything other than run of the mill human.
But he's quit that, if only Dean would believe him. He's quit that, and if anything that's what's making him jumpy. It seems like every other case or seal has a bunch of demon activity around it, Lilith's grunts trying to break them, or demons who seem completely unrelated to anything just showing up because apparently Winchesters are too good to pass up messing with.
And now that he's stopped practicing, stopped drinking - which Dean doesn't know about and never has to know about - Sam is back to rattling off an exorcism, or, more often, stabbing the thing with the knife, killing the poor fuck trapped inside his own body.
So yeah, he's jumpy. But he did hear a sound, dammit.
"I'm gonna check out the upstairs."
"I didn't hear anything," Dean says. But Sam's already moving up the stairs, and he hears Dean mutter "Fine." Then a bit louder, "I'll check out the rest of this floor. Yell if you find anything."
"Will do."
The stairs creak under his feet; he tries to keep to either side of each step to minimize the sound. At the top, the old farmhouse opens up into the second floor, wallpaper peeling down the walls, water damage. Sam pokes his head into the first room he sees and disturbs a nest of black birds that shriek at him.
Could have been the sound he heard. They do sound a bit like wailing on the wind.
The window's broken, probably how they got in. Curtains flail out of the broken pane. A bed in the corner sags on springless springs. Bedspread moth-eaten, mirror on the low dresser broken.
He nudges the closet door open. Nothing.
He's close to believing the birds made the sound that brought him up here, and then a door slams down the hall.
There's a knife in his hand. All the evidence points to either a witch or a siren, but Sam's still worried; they haven't seen a demon in a week. The other shoe's gonna drop. Their luck's gonna run out. Or maybe the storm is gathering. Whatever it is, something about the case has bothered him from the start, and he's nervous.
A second door, empty room.
A third door, empty.
Bathroom, empty and dark with no windows. Sam clicks the light on just to check, but there's no power. He moves on.
The last room in the upstairs, the door is shut. The slammed door. He's twitchy, he knows it, he's weaker than he wants to be, he's got to remember what he did when Dean was gone, when Dean was down in a pit. Back when taking on three demons felt like going to church, felt like deserved suicide and holy faith all at once. Since Dean's gotten back, he's felt none of that.
Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe he isn't supposed to feel holy, and maybe he isn't supposed to feel like he could be saved by flinging himself into destruction. Maybe he's supposed to exist in this subspace, this place where he is neutral and inert.
But he can't be inert. He has to act on something. He breathes a moment at the door, knife in hand, and then pushes it open.
A blinding light greets him. At first he thinks it's one of the angel dicks and he considers that maybe suicide is on the table after all, death by angel, but the glow fades and she stands there, a figure in dirty white, skin and hair white, with dark eyes. Their two-years-dead vic. Just having finished a spell. A spell to...
What?
Sam shifts into a defensive stance-
Or tries to - she turns to him and flings out a hand and he's frozen where he is.
"You're not a ghost," he says, stalling. Dean'll come up to check on him soon, she might not know there's another person in the house, he'll preserve Dean's element of surprise as long as he can.
She smiles at him, just a little. A little upturn of her mouth, and she pulls him toward her with a gesture. Against his will, Sam's feet slide on the hardwood floor.
Shit. Shit. He can't move, he can't move and he can't stop himself from sliding toward her, soles of his shoes scraping through the dust and dirt on the floor. Sam opens his mouth.
"Dea-!"
And then there's nothing, no sound. At this rate, he feels lucky she's letting him keep breathing.
She smiles at him. "Dean's busy right now."
On cue, Sam hears crashing from the first floor, Dean's round cursing.
Shit.
Sam stares at her. This is the end, this is how it ends for him. He flexes his grip on the blade in his hand, but he can't raise his arm. The only thing he can do is drop the knife.
He stares at her, her white hair, her white face, her dark eyes. He remembers her photo, tanned skin, dark shining hair, glittering laughing eyes. Alive once. Loving once.
He drops the knife.
Carolyn Reed drops her hand; Sam stops sliding toward her. She's let him go, he falls to his knees next to the knife on the floor. He raises his arm, flexes his hand in front of his face.
"What happened to you?" he asks, breathless.
"I became something," she says.
"We can help you-"
"I already have help."
Another crash from downstairs, Dean yelling dammit. He's probably wondering where the hell Sam is that Sam isn't rushing to help him. He probably hasn't considered that Sam has found a bad guy of his own to deal with.
Sam sags, his hands drop to the floor. He's weary, his shoulders droop. The knife is an inch from his fingertips. "Who's down there?"
"A friend. Someone... immune."
"Immune to what? What happened to you? We can help fix it."
"There's no fix," she says. "There's only me, only this."
Dean yells again, a yelp really, and Sam doesn't have a choice in this anymore. In a blink he's got the knife again, and he lunges for her. The resistance of the blade through fabric, but not skin, not bone, not enough-
He feels the impact before he registers what's happened. He flails out an arm too late to stop from crashing into the wall, and he lies in a heap with blood running down his face.
But he's up again and running for her. She throws a hand out and he keeps coming. The surprise on her face means she meant to freeze him again, and in the back of his mind, working a million processes a second, he realizes the front of her dress is slashed through, and he can see the contents of a pouch under the fabric torn asunder - a witch then, a witch with an aging problem, a spell gone awry, maybe?
But there's no time for that puzzle anymore, Dean is yelling downstairs and Sam's still flying through the air at her. He lands. They roll. Under his hands, she's frail and thin, and she isn't a match for him physically. Which is why she flings him aside a moment later, he bets. Lights flash before his eyes when he collides with an old low dresser. Breathing hurts now, probably a cracked rib. Dean's still yelling, now it's his name, an impatient, desperate "Sam!"
"Dean!"
A cracked rib is nothing. He's broken more than that and gone on. He advances again and she is watching the knife as she clutches at the tattered remains of the spellbag around her neck. That's it; she's afraid of the knife. She won't let him get close again. So he won't get close.
He charges her, blade held high, and she shrieks and throws him across the room again. This time, he doesn't get back up immediately. Dean's calling for him but he resists, he collects himself, he's on his hands and knees, coughing. He doesn't have to feign injury, but he does have to feign weakness. So he does, and he watches her stand up straight in his periphery, he watches her lift her head in triumph, he watches her guard come down as she stares at her beaten foe.
He watches her eyes open wide a moment later, at the hilt of the knife sticking grotesquely out of her chest.
She falls in slow motion; color seems to fade back into the room as the silence spreads, age seeps away, dust seems lighter, the hardwood floor shines like it was laid down two years ago, not two hundred. The windows are still broken, but the glass on the floor is clean and sparkles. The curtains flail out of the window, but whole and white like they've been freshly laundered.
And she is ghost white; what little life was in her goes out like a light when she hits the ground.
The silence lasts a heartbeat, feels longer, Sam stares at her as he catches his breath.
Time resumes.
A cry from downstairs, then silence.
Sam races down the stairs, honey brown where they had been grey and rough. They do not creak.
"Dean?"
No answer. Sam races through the house as quietly as he can, because something might still be here. Around him, things brighten as time rushes back into them, but whatever was broken is still broken. Whatever lies still, remains still. Whatever is dead, dead.
"Dean!"
"Sam! Back here!"
Relief burns through him like a poison, Sam runs through the broken ruins of the abandoned house, a spotless couch bowed in the middle, a table leaning over on three of four legs; he vaults these things and ignores the ache in his side where he's sure he's cracked a rib, because the reedy way Dean is yelling for him, how he hasn't come to meet him halfway, how he hasn't come-
So Sam runs and ignores the way his head is heavy and how his arm is bleeding, he runs and when he sees Dean slumped in the back of the kitchen near the back door, he shoves the dusty table out of the way and slides to his knees, hands out for Dean.
"Look at me, buddy," he mutters, and Dean does, but he blinks long, and he puts a hand to his side and he's bleeding. "It's okay," he says, pulling Dean to him. "It's okay."
He's got them both to the hotel room, and Dean seems okay now. He's sitting up and talking as Sam does some first aid.
"Stop moving," he instructs, small careful stitches lining up Dean's side. He'd been bleeding, lots of blood, Sam thought, but he seems okay now. He's lucid, not light-headed, he hasn't lost as much blood as Sam had feared. None of this is as bad as he had feared. "Start from the beginning."
"I'm tellin' ya, Sammy," Dean says, "Whatever it was, it vanished, just like that." He holds a towel full of ice to his elbow.
"And then you passed out."
"Yeah, and then I passed out. You got somethin' to say about it?"
Sam shakes his head and tugs on a stitch.
"Where were you, anyway?"
"Busy." Sam shifts; his ribs have been complaining since they got into the room, he's managing to get these stitches done by splitting the difference between the two Deans he sees. "Come on. Hitch your shirt up a little more-"
And he's off his game, because Dean immediately says, "You know what, I got this. It's just a graze." And he looks at Sam with that look, like you're lyin' again, but it seems like he knows what Sam's keeping to himself this time, because he pats Sam innocently at his injured side to shoo him away and Sam winces and Dean just rolls his eyes.
Sam sighs, ties off the stitches. He was almost done anyway. And he leaves Dean to do the clean up, pour the alcohol, over the wound, down his throat, whatever, and Sam sags onto the other bed.
"So that's it? Think it's done?"
Dean looks at him. "I think you got her, yeah. A witch you said?"
"Yeah, I think so. She had a thing that looked like it could have been a hex bag around her neck. I sliced it open and she lost some of her powers-"
"What kinda powers?"
"I didn't take notes, Dean-"
"What, could she turn invisible? Mind control? What?"
Sam shrugs. "She could like-" He holds his hand out in front of him, mimicking her. "Stop you in place, stop you from moving, pull you toward her-"
He glances at Dean and the rest of his sentence dies on his lips. Dean's gaze is riveted to his hand, outstretched, like, like-
He drops his hand suddenly, looks at the carpet. Shrugs. "Just stuff she could do. I sliced it open with a lucky swing and she couldn't do that anymore."
"Oh yeah?" Dean watches him, eyes dark. "So explain that." He tosses the towel of ice to Sam; Sam who reaches for it and misses because he's reached for the wrong one of the two he sees, Sam who hisses in pain as his cracked ribs explode in agony.
"Not cool," Sam grumbles, carefully retrieves the towel and heads to the bathroom. No more ice for asshole Dean.
He's dumping the ice into the sink when Dean's voice, just a foot away at the bathroom door, makes him jump. He blows out the startle, turns to Dean with a frown. "What."
"I said, you didn't explain."
"Explain what? She threw me around a little. Nothing exciting-"
"You said she threw you around. Sounds a little demony to me."
"She was a witch, Dean." Sam sighs, put-upon. He isn't going to be shy about being frustrated by this. He's told Dean he's done, and he is. "She had a hex bag and everything. Witches can have flingy powers."
Dean watches him, face dark. Marking Sam's movement through the room, the hang of desperation and anger dragging whatever thankfulness Dean might have felt for Sam sewing him back together down into the deep, down into the pit of his distrust of Sam.
"They can," Sam tries again.
"Sure then can, Sammy," Dean says, and he sits in the chair at the table and he watches Sam the rest of the night, and Sam cleans up his own blood, sews his own wounds, gets his own ice for his ribs, and closes his eyes so the room will stop spinning.
Part Two →