[SPN] Your Hero's Exact Worth (In The Coinage of War)
Title: Your Hero's Exact Worth (In the Coinage of War)
Wordcount: ~5000
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Dean, Sam/Jess (kind of)
Rating: Um, R, for violence, I guess.
Disclaimer: I don't own them!
Summary: The world was grey and flickering orange, death and destruction, but with Dean's fingers on his skin Sam felt light. Pre-series, pretty graphic violence.
Note: I know, I know, it's NaNoWriMo, I should be writing original fiction. Blame stonemarionette, it's usually her fault. I started this before this month, so it doesn't....count?
Title from Aeschylus' The Oresteia, suggested by stonemarionette ♥
Sam closed his eyes against the too-bright sun. His breath was harsh, too fast. He could hear the wind in the trees, could hear tiny creatures moving in the underbrush. And there - he flung up an arm that ached with holding the gun in his hand - something big.
He opened his eyes, trying to track the thing's movement. "Dean?" He called, hating how thin and reedy his voice came out. He had asked for this. Insisted that they split up, that he could handle it.
The thing moved again, bounding movement that was not at all human. The tops of saplings swayed where it passed, and it was headed straight for Sam.
The sun dizzied him as the creature cleared the trees, an indistinct shape dappled in shadow. With a breath like a sob, Sam pulled the trigger. He scrambled back as the thing fell.
A deer.
It was a deer, a beautiful young buck, with new antlers just beginning to branch outwards. There was a bright bloom of blood at its throat and it twitched as it died.
Sam stared at it. "No, I..." He crouched, reaching out a trembling hand. His other was still frozen, clutched uncomfortably around the gun. "I didn't mean - "
"Sammy!" Dean leaped into the clearing, eyes a little desperate. "I heard the shot - " He stopped when he saw the dead deer and Sam kneeling next to it, tears on his cheeks like an idiot. Sam scrambled to his feet, scrubbing the back of his hand over his eyes. He expected Dean to mock him, some stupid joke - "Dude, you kill Bambi's mom, too?" - but his brother just took the gun from his hand, gentle, and tilted his chin up with a long-fingered hand. "You okay?"
Sam tore his face away, not sure if he was nodding or ignoring the question, knowing he was ignoring the way that Dean's close scrutiny made his stomach heat and squirm. Dean looked at him for a moment longer, face unreadable, and then turned his eyes to the deer. "We'll use it as bait." He said. "Lay a trap for this thing. Whatever the hell it is, I bet it can't resist fresh meat."
They set up tripwires all around the corpse, grenades nestled green and innocent in the crooks of trees. The explosives probably wouldn't kill the thing - silver, Sam had read in his father's journal, was the only thing good for most mammalian shapechangers - but it would certainly cripple it long enough for them to get there, for Dean to get a bead on it.
They headed back to their camp, where Dean lit a fire. Even with the gasoline drizzled over the logs the smoke rose clean and grey, nothing like the oily, acrid smell of salted corpses. They huddled close for warmth as the sun went down, Sam daring to curl slightly into Dean's chest. He wanted to hear his brother's heartbeat, remember what life sounded like, forget the slow glazing of the buck's eyes. Dean said nothing, just slung a protective arm around his shoulders and pulled him minutely closer, staring into the flames.
They fell asleep like that, warm together, and woke sometime just before dawn when the grenades went off, one by one like microwave popcorn, shatteringly loud in the stillness. Sam jerked awake to find his lips pressed into Dean's neck, and was glad of the dimness that hid his blush as he shook the sleep from his limbs. Dean didn't seem to notice, shoving himself upwards immediately, his gun already in his hand. He raced towards the crackling of fire and the low, whispering groan that made Sam shiver. He followed, crashing gracelessly through the trees.
The clearing was ablaze, the air thick with burning hair. Sam shielded his stinging eyes and peered at the center of the flames.
At first he had the sickening feeling that they'd made a mistake, that a normal bear had happened upon their trap. But the back legs of the thing were too long, and jointed wrong, and when it swung its ponderous head towards them with more of the whispering growl Sam saw that it had once had the face of a human woman.
Their grenades had ensured that it now had about half the face of a human woman. The entire right side of the thing's head was blown off, its skull cracked and dripping like an egg. Her eye was out of its socket, swinging free, still looking at them with its beautiful blue stare. Her mouth was fanged and dripping with blood, hanging half open because of its missing jaw. She rose up on her hind legs, displaying a shattered, bleeding chest with four strange, furred breasts.
"Ursa," Sam breathed, and then threw up. Through his retching he could hear one, two, three gunshots, and the Ursa's dying wail. He shivered, wiping his mouth, and felt a warm palm settle on top of his head. He looked up to see Dean toying with his hair almost idly, staring at the dead creature. He held the gun loosely in his other fist.
Sam wanted to grab his hand, wanted to clutch it tight and return the strength he'd stolen through the beat of Dean's heart. He wanted to lean up and kiss the empty look from Dean's face. But he was too much of a coward, and could only close his eyes and lean into the touch, full of longing.
"He charged you, right?" Dean asked suddenly.
"What?"
"The deer, he ran straight for you?"
He still wasn't looking at Sam, his hand smoothing through his hair, fingers sliding and caressing his forehead. As if as long as he didn't look, he could touch. Sam turned his eyes to what had been the deer, torn by shrapnel and fang, mutilated beyond recognition. He could feel his eyes prickle with smoke and tears. "Yeah."
"It wouldn't have done that unless it was being chased." Dean said, his fingers lingering against Sam's ear, soothing away the echoes of the Ursa's wail, of the gunshots, of the explosion, until nothing was left but the memory of his heartbeat, close and warm. The world was grey and flickering orange, death and destruction, but with Dean's fingers on his skin Sam felt light. "I know," he said, softly, not wanting to break whatever it was stretching between them.
"If you hadn't killed it, the thing probably would have." Dean continued. "And we wouldn't have been able to set the trap. We might never have caught it. It might have killed again." His hand slid around to Sam's face, tracing featherlight lines across his cheekbones, his eyebrows, his nose. He explored the curve of Sam's chin, as if mapping him out for memorization. Finally his thumb traced once across Sam's lips and, unbidden, Sam breathed, "Dean..."
They finally looked at each other, Dean's hand frozen against Sam's jaw. Dean's lips were parted slightly, the flickering flames making his eyes glow deep green. The silence stretched long, too long, and Sam had to say something, so he smiled into his brother's eyes and said, "I know. I'm alright."
He regretted it immediately. Dean dropped his hand quickly, nodding, his smirk slipping into place like a mask. "Of course you are. You're my little brother, aren't you? Now, come on, we've gotta clean this up. Not many people live around here, but an explosion's an explosion."
Sam nodded, and turned, walking away from his brother, framed by firelight. He got the salt, from their camp, and the gas and the matches, though Dean was carrying a lighter these days. Chicks dig it, he said to anyone that asked, but to Sam he added, and I don't want to scramble for matches if I've got a ghost breathing down my back.
John approved. Sam wasn't sure what he would think of the one or two loosely-rolled cigarettes that Dean keeps in his back pocket. He wasn't sure what Dean thought of them, either - he never smoked them, just took them out once in a while and stared at them. Sam thought maybe they were a gift. He thought of his own lucky pencil, trapped between the linings of his coat so it wouldn't get lost or ruined. He thought of the girl that gave it to him, something that started with J. A friend, she'd said, now lost to an endless stream of identical schools.
He thought of her freckles. Thought of how her teeth had knocked into his when they'd kissed, the tangles of her blond hair in his fingers.
Dean broke him out of his musing, holding out something in one blood-spattered hand. He took it. It was one of the buck's antlers, blackened at the tip, cracked along its length, but Dean insisted he keep it. "It might make a good knife." He said, as Sam stared at it. It was porous and strange, and wouldn't carve well. Sam looked back up at him, lost, and he sighed. "Your first kill, Sammy, even if it was a pansy one," he explained. "There's gotta be power in a hunter's first kill."
A hunter. Sam rolled the words around in his mind, looked at them from all sides. They were inevitable, he knew. In his father's mouth, hated. But like most things, when Dean said them, he got a secret sort of thrill. A feeling of power, awakening.
He slid the antlers into his backpack, with his two chocolate bars, his spare set of clothing, John's journal. His machete, gun, and vial of dead man's blood.
A hunter.
Dean was silent as they hiked back down the mountain. John would be half-mad with worry, by now, Sam pointed out as they scrambled over rocks. Dean's raised chin said he didn't care, but his eyes were bright and his steps were quick and he knew they were two days late.
"He'll say we should have waited for him." Sam said softly, perched atop a rock. The sun was at its peak, and it was starting to be too hot for comfort. Dean stood balanced on a rise, slightly further down the hill. The sun threaded golden through his hair, and Sam stared at him, lip caught between his teeth. "He'll say something like this was too much for us."
"And I'll tell him we couldn't, that it would have killed again." Dean said, and tossed him an apple. "Here. Besides, it wasn't too much for us, right? And you even figured out what it was, before I shot it full of holes."
Sam felt his face warm, averting his eyes. "Yeah. Didn't think you'd noticed."
Dean looked at him oddly. " 'Course I noticed." He bit into his own apple, snap-crunch.
Sam raised a shoulder in a shrug, kind of wishing Dean would look away, leave him free to watch the juice of the apple drip off his chin. It was going to trace trails down his neck that he would rub at, later, frown at the stickiness. "You kept calling it "thing", even after..."
"Yeah, because that part's not my job." Dean grinned at him. "We're a team, Sammy. And Dad'll see that, and we'll all hunt together, a family. Watch each others' backs."
Sam grinned back, felt the sunlight in the spaces between his teeth. "Yeah." He pressed his apple to his lips, not biting it but smelling it, the ripe sweetness. He watched Dean pick his way down the mountainside, a slim, dark shadow against the bright white rocks, and wondered what family meant to anyone else.
There wasn't any warning, just a hissing rumble that started somewhere under his feet and built up and up and up. The rock he stood on shifted, tipped, and he scrambled to leap to somewhere higher, to somewhere safer. His apple fell from his hand, bounced off his toe and slid downward, a spot of cheerful red in an avalanche of black and white and grey. The dust rose in front of his eyes and Sam opened his mouth to shout to his brother, warn him, help him, something, but it was thick and cloying, bitter. It filled his throat and choked him. He spat mud until his lungs were clear, wiped his streaming eyes and by then there was only the last groaning of rock against rock. Dean was gone.
It didn't stop him from calling until he was hoarse, though. It didn't stop him from bloodying his knees in his desperate slide downwards, to where he'd seen his brother last, to this outcropping, that one. It didn't stop him from tearing off half his fingernails scrabbling through the wreckage, rolling boulders out of the way. "Please, please, please," he whispered and sobbed, until it was indistinguishable from "Dean, Dean, Dean."
And then an answer, a mutter, a moan, a groan and he was bleeding freely from his fingertips now, bleeding freely from his knees, but he found Dean, hidden halfway under an outcropping, pinned down by rubble covering his left leg and part of his right. The rest of him was shaking and white. His eyes were rolled back in his head, his freckles standing out, and there was blood on the rock behind him.
Sam knelt by his side, shaking and crying, slapping his cheeks, harder and harder. "Dean, Dean, Dean," he was wailing now, "Please, please..." And Dean's eyes, feverish green, finally focused, and his lips curled into something ghastly that should have been a smile. "Sammy." He muttered, and Sam collapsed into him, hands painfully tight around his shoulders, relief making his bones soft. He pressed himself close, lips at Dean's neck in almost-kisses and he didn't care, he really didn't, Dean was alive.
He didn't let himself linger, scrubbing his face with bloody, muddy hands and swallowing his sobs in great, painful gasps. He turned to look at the rocks and dirt that half-covered his brother, started carefully shifting them off and away, the heaviest first, trembling. He ignored Dean's hands that reached for his face, that clutched his hair and his shoulders and his elbows with needy fingers. "I'm sorry." He said. "I'm sorry, I need to get you free." But Dean kept pulling at him, tugging at him, mumbling nonsense. When Sam got down to the little stuff, barely pebbles and sand, he started keening high in his throat, making whimpering, wounded noises like a hurt dog. "Sam," he gasped, "Sammy, stop, it hurts, it hurts - "
And suddenly the dirt was slick with blood and Sam saw that the last layer wasn't sand but crushed stone, tiny shards of rock that had embedded themselves in Dean's skin, pinning his jeans to his legs in torn, ragged patches. Tearing that away would take Dean's skin with it.
Sam felt bile rise in his throat for the second time that day, and again Dean's hand was in his hair, trembling now, tugging and yanking and petting and strange. "It's okay," he realized Dean was saying, "It's gonna be okay. You're gonna be alright, Sammy."
Sam turned to him, tears cleaning tracks in his filthy face, and shook his head, is mouth opening with a wet sort of gasp. "What about you, Dean?" He asked around the pain in his chest. "You're not - you can't...your legs."
Dean swallowed and swallowed down air, like he'd been holding his breath. "Don't need 'em." He announced, delirious. "Don't..don't need any of 'em, just." He managed to focus his eyes on Sam's face and something like peace, something like clarity, snuck into his smile. "Just need you." His eyes slipped closed, and Sam threw himself forward, fists tight in Dean's shirt and shook him, knocking their foreheads together with sickening cracks. "Don't you dare!" He screamed, to Dean, but also to this place, to this barren, too-bright mountain in the middle of nowhere. "Don't you dare take him away from me!"
He let Dean go, heart pounding, and listened to the echoes of his own voice. There had been no screams, to trigger the avalanche, no shifting of boulders, no earthquake. And he'd felt it begin, right below his feet, as if it were telling him, watch. Look. Feel this?
He should be the one crushed. He should be the one slipping away, barely breathing, leaving Dean crying and strong. Because Dean was strong. Dean would know what to do - he'd know why the avalanche had felt so strange, why it was so unnatural. He'd know whether to risk damage by pulling away Sam's jeans or to leave them. He'd be able to pick Sam up, carrying him down the mountain to help.
But Dean was so big and Sam was so small and so scared, too scared to move him.
Just need you. His heart wanted to leap at the words, any other day he would have been aflame with embarrassment and love but today it made the darkness behind his eyes even darker. Just need you.
Sam balled his hands up into fists. But what do I do?
He swung his backpack off his back, rifled through it for John's journal. The buck's antler caught on his sleeve, and he took it out, too, staring at it. He thought about the gasping way that the buck had died, and reached out a desperate hand. His whole mind was trembling, like it was ready to crack in half.
Dean's breath was hot and steady against his knuckles, and just like that he could breathe again.
The avalanche had started just below him, but he was fine. He looked back at the antler. "What is this?" He asked nothing in particular, or perhaps the mountain air. "Some kind of sick form of revenge?"
High above, a hawk called in what might have been answer.
Sam looked down at the book in his hands. "Okay," he said. "Okay." He flipped it open, turning the pages with hands suddenly sure and steady. His eyes flickered over the words, reading just enough, lingering over words like "mountain", "guardian", "curse". He found several mentions of guarding spirits taking the form of animals - none of deer specifically but that's alright, that's okay, because they were bound to be different, right, for different mountains?
Finally he found something that looked like a summoning ritual. Salt he had, and sidewalk chalk, childish blue and pink against the sun-whitened rocks. He had to pull Dean away from the stone at his back, laboriously untangle his too-heavy limbs from the straps of his backpack, to get at the gasoline. His eyes were stinging again by the time he had it in his hands, and he rubbed the back of his hand across them, rough and quick. He needed them clear to read his father's hand-writing in the journal. Something born by the spirit, it said, and Sam placed the antler in the center of his careful circle and slipped his matches from his pocket. He dropped the first two into the shallow hole he'd filled with gasoline, finally struck the third and began to read. He was mostly guessing at the pronunciation, and his voice was shaking badly, but his father had once said something about how most magic was mainly intention and his heart filled his mouth, tasting of grit and iron, and that must count for something.
The hawk cried again, and then another answered it, and far off, a flock of blackbirds began to caw. In the trees at the base of the rockslide small birds spat cheer at one another, openly disdainful of the tiny, shaking boy in his torn jeans and muddy t-shirt, his dark, mussed head held high. Sam clenched his fists at his sides. "I'm sorry, okay?" He shouted at them, throat tight. "I didn't mean to kill the deer! And we killed the Ursa, it would have brought more death to this place!" He's angry, now, hot and desperate. "You should thank me! Or if you've got to hurt, hurt me, not him! He didn't do anything!"
A cloud passed in front of the sun, and in the sudden dimness the gasoline fire flared. Beyond it, Sam thought that the antler might have moved, but when the sun came out and the flames died it lay still, dead and bland. He sagged, all the fight going out of him.
"We are hurting you, child," a voice came from behind him, and he spun, knife in his hand in a flash. There was a raven perched on the rock by Dean's head, leveling a bright-eyed gaze at him.
"Please." He said, simple, standing straight again. "Please fix him."
The raven cocked its head at him. "Why?" Its beak clacked over the word, a flash of black, disconcerting tongue.
"Because he's my brother." He said. "You understand that, don't you? Birds have flocks, wolves have packs."
"We understand that." The raven hopped to Dean's injured shoulder. Dean stirred, moaning, and Sam took a quick step forward, but the raven fixed him with a glare and his feet stopped moving, felt squirming and strange. He looked down to see to his horror that they were literally rooted, fleshy tendrils bursting through the worn, thin sides of his shoes and tangling down into the cracks in the stone. It hurt to tug upwards, tension straining against knots far below the surface.
The raven slid the side of his beak along Dean's nose, his eye fixed on Sam. "The deer you shot down was a brother of ours." He said, deadly-sharp beak snip-snapping closed so close to Dean's face.
"It was an accident," Sam said, pulling and pulling at his feet, ignoring the pain, ignoring the babbling fear in the back of his mind - ohgodmyfeetwilltheyalwaysbelikethiswhatohgodohgodthishastobeadreamohgodpleasemakethisadreamohgod - and concentrating on how Dean's head was rolling from the raven's touch, on how his eyelids were fluttering, on how his cheeks were flushed and bright.
"Ravens are scavengers, we are." The Raven continued, and Sam noticed almost idly the bright pinpricks of blood left behind when it shifted its position on Dean's shoulder. "If we found him here, dead or dying...We could accidentally take his eyes, his bright beautiful green eyes, child. Out of no malice, only mistake. Would you let it stop you from ringing our necks?"
Sam bit his lip, tasted tears. "Please. I need him."
The raven cawed, and took off, flapping dark towards Sam's head and he dodged instinctively. His roots tore free and he screamed with the pain of it, dropping to his knees. The raven landed lightly on his shoulder. Sam trembled, shook with the force of his pain and his fear and he saw through blurred eyes that his feet were just feet again, and maybe they always had been but his sneakers were soaked with blood. "What will you give us instead? We like things that shine, that glitter," the raven whispered in his ear.
Sam almost laughed aloud. "Money? You want money, in exchange for Dean's life?"
Its eye was too close to his, pure black. "No," click-clack, a flicker of dark tongue, "No. We want what shines. " It lifted a foot, scratching against his temple. "We want what glitters, in here."
Sam closed his eyes, struggled to understand. "Memories," he said at last.
"Treasures." The raven burbled, murmured.
Sam thought of the things he treasured. So many of them were Dean - Dean in sunlight, Dean in the rain, his hair plastered to his head. But giving them up felt like trying to tear his feet free of the stones again, and he didn't think he could pull anymore without going insane.
There were moments of his father - gruff hugs in the night when his head was split in two with nightmare, a word of praise dropped between sips of whiskey, the low, glowering pride in his eyes as Sam leveled his pistol at a target. The fights, too, stood out shining, but they shone with anger and fire, not with the cool perfection of starlight. He remembered heated words, slammed doors, remembered slouching in on himself, hands shoved into his coat pockets, seeking the smooth sides of his lucky pencil.
Oh.
She shone, yes, that friend of long ago, who'd greeted him with a smile and never let him get a word in edgewise, who'd looked at him with an admiration untouched by fear. He remembered playing basketball in the gym, his shirt sticking to him like her gaze. He remembered how she flirted with him, awkward and inexperienced, and he flirted back, drawing from his memories of Dean in countless bars, hustling for pool and sex both. She laughed at him and he knew he hadn't pulled it off but she kissed him anyway and he thought, It's alright that I'm not Dean.
It was a rare sort of thought. He held on to it, sometimes, examined it at every angle for truth. But now he was opening his eyes, looking at his brother's strange, flushed face, at the broken way his body looked dark against the rocks, and he gave it up.
Gave her up. Jess, her name had been. Jess.
The raven flickered his tongue, satisfied, and then took off in a too-loud flap of iridescent wings, leaving Sam on his knees, staring at his brother and feeling empty. Dean blinked his eyes open, his face fading back to normal, and looked at him. "Sammy?" He asked, voice gravelly and concerned. "What the fuck happened to you?"
Sam laughed, lacking strength to even stand, and gestured helplessly. Dean made to get up, and for a moment Sam's breath stuttered in fear that he wouldn't be able to, but his brother pushed himself to his feet, his eyes widening as he took in the blood spattered around where he'd been lying. "What the fuck happened to me?"
Still laughing, Sam shook his head, and hell, he should be out of tears by now but these ones felt cleansing, dripping off his face and smudging the lines of chalk against the rocks. Dean knelt by him and pulled him into a hug. "Shh." He said. "Shh, Sammy, it's alright. It's gonna be okay, you hear? I promise, I'll make it okay."
Choking on his breath, Sam pulled him impossibly close. "You don't need to," He said, and finally let himself be proud. "I already did."
Dean pulled back to look at him, not understanding, and Sam just smiled and tucked himself under Dean's chin, breathing in the smell of him, sweat and blood and life.
Later, they cleaned up his circle, and Sam gave Dean a shortened version of what had happened.
"Dude." Dean said, pausing as he picked up the antler. "You gave them memories? That can't be good."
Sam shrugged, a little pissed at that. "I got you back, didn't I?"
"Yeah." Dean reached down a hand, smoothing it through Sam's hair. "Yeah, you did. Thank you." He looked down at Sam for a moment, expression caught somewhere between pride and sorrow, a corner of emotion so tender it tugged Sam upwards. He leaned up, just slightly, hands on Dean's chest, and Dean dropped his hand, frowning. "I'm just wondering, what did you give them?"
Sam tore his eyes away. "How should I know?" He scowled, defensive. "I don't remember it anymore."
Dean huffed a mirthless laugh. "Great. So it could be anything."
"Yes." Sam said, and now he was full-out angry. He grabbed Dean's arm, made his brother look at him. "Anything, Dean. Because I would have given anything, to get you back." He was almost snarling at him, and Dean's eyes were wide and surprised. "Sam - "
"No. You don't get to trivialize this. You don't get to joke, you don't get to look away and not see this. Not see me, staring you in the face." He had both hands on Dean now, tucked hard into the spaces just above his hips, fisted in his shirt. "You - you told me you needed me, when you were hurt and dying." He continued, eyes still holding his brother's. "And I'm - I need you, Dean. I don't have to be dying to tell you, I don't have to be dying to need you, I, I need you all the time, need you to be noticing me and laughing at me and I need you to be touching me, pulling me in and loving me, please, I just - " He took a moment to breathe and noticed that Dean was doing the same, overlapping breaths hissing in and out of their lungs. "I can't lose you but I can't, can't keep halfway having you, either, it's like - " He shook his head, suddenly out of words, and bowed his head, pushing at Dean's chest like he can sink right into it and put his lips to his heart without going through the middleman of language.
Dean's hands came up to his shoulders, and then, hesitantly, his face, turning it upwards. Sam resisted, a little, at first, but he wanted to know what Dean looked like, now that he'd finally said it, and so he looked up.
Dean looked - well, Dean looked surprised, and that was expected, but he also looked a little bit in awe and so beautiful that it broke Sam's heart a little. "You.." Dean started, and then cleared his throat like the words wouldn't quite come. "You really want..." He trailed off, but he wasn't angry and he wasn't disgusted and Sam needed to kiss him right away.
So he did, quick and nervous, and then pulled away as far as Dean's hands would let him, which wasn't very far. Dean's freckles were very clear, with how close his face was, and his eyes were wide and shining green. "Sam," he said, his breath ghosting across Sam's lips, "Sammy."
And then he kissed Sam, neither quick nor nervous. Sam closed his eyes, letting himself treasure this moment, felt it fill up whatever place had been emptied in conversation with the raven. He pressed his lips to Dean's, so soft, slotted his mouth sideways, brought his hands up so that he could feel, press his palms over Dean's heart.
Eventually one of them pulled away, and Sam loved that he couldn't tell which one it was. He loved that Dean smirked at him, still a little amazed, loved that he smoothed his hands down Sam's face like he couldn't believe he was real, loved that he pulled Sam back in and just held him there forehead to forehead.
His feet hurt and he was covered in mud and blood, and they were miles away from where they should have been and his jeans were ruined and they'd both nearly died and Dad was going to be furious but Sam still couldn't imagine a better first kiss.
Wordcount: ~5000
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Dean, Sam/Jess (kind of)
Rating: Um, R, for violence, I guess.
Disclaimer: I don't own them!
Summary: The world was grey and flickering orange, death and destruction, but with Dean's fingers on his skin Sam felt light. Pre-series, pretty graphic violence.
Note: I know, I know, it's NaNoWriMo, I should be writing original fiction. Blame stonemarionette, it's usually her fault. I started this before this month, so it doesn't....count?
Title from Aeschylus' The Oresteia, suggested by stonemarionette ♥
Sam closed his eyes against the too-bright sun. His breath was harsh, too fast. He could hear the wind in the trees, could hear tiny creatures moving in the underbrush. And there - he flung up an arm that ached with holding the gun in his hand - something big.
He opened his eyes, trying to track the thing's movement. "Dean?" He called, hating how thin and reedy his voice came out. He had asked for this. Insisted that they split up, that he could handle it.
The thing moved again, bounding movement that was not at all human. The tops of saplings swayed where it passed, and it was headed straight for Sam.
The sun dizzied him as the creature cleared the trees, an indistinct shape dappled in shadow. With a breath like a sob, Sam pulled the trigger. He scrambled back as the thing fell.
A deer.
It was a deer, a beautiful young buck, with new antlers just beginning to branch outwards. There was a bright bloom of blood at its throat and it twitched as it died.
Sam stared at it. "No, I..." He crouched, reaching out a trembling hand. His other was still frozen, clutched uncomfortably around the gun. "I didn't mean - "
"Sammy!" Dean leaped into the clearing, eyes a little desperate. "I heard the shot - " He stopped when he saw the dead deer and Sam kneeling next to it, tears on his cheeks like an idiot. Sam scrambled to his feet, scrubbing the back of his hand over his eyes. He expected Dean to mock him, some stupid joke - "Dude, you kill Bambi's mom, too?" - but his brother just took the gun from his hand, gentle, and tilted his chin up with a long-fingered hand. "You okay?"
Sam tore his face away, not sure if he was nodding or ignoring the question, knowing he was ignoring the way that Dean's close scrutiny made his stomach heat and squirm. Dean looked at him for a moment longer, face unreadable, and then turned his eyes to the deer. "We'll use it as bait." He said. "Lay a trap for this thing. Whatever the hell it is, I bet it can't resist fresh meat."
They set up tripwires all around the corpse, grenades nestled green and innocent in the crooks of trees. The explosives probably wouldn't kill the thing - silver, Sam had read in his father's journal, was the only thing good for most mammalian shapechangers - but it would certainly cripple it long enough for them to get there, for Dean to get a bead on it.
They headed back to their camp, where Dean lit a fire. Even with the gasoline drizzled over the logs the smoke rose clean and grey, nothing like the oily, acrid smell of salted corpses. They huddled close for warmth as the sun went down, Sam daring to curl slightly into Dean's chest. He wanted to hear his brother's heartbeat, remember what life sounded like, forget the slow glazing of the buck's eyes. Dean said nothing, just slung a protective arm around his shoulders and pulled him minutely closer, staring into the flames.
They fell asleep like that, warm together, and woke sometime just before dawn when the grenades went off, one by one like microwave popcorn, shatteringly loud in the stillness. Sam jerked awake to find his lips pressed into Dean's neck, and was glad of the dimness that hid his blush as he shook the sleep from his limbs. Dean didn't seem to notice, shoving himself upwards immediately, his gun already in his hand. He raced towards the crackling of fire and the low, whispering groan that made Sam shiver. He followed, crashing gracelessly through the trees.
The clearing was ablaze, the air thick with burning hair. Sam shielded his stinging eyes and peered at the center of the flames.
At first he had the sickening feeling that they'd made a mistake, that a normal bear had happened upon their trap. But the back legs of the thing were too long, and jointed wrong, and when it swung its ponderous head towards them with more of the whispering growl Sam saw that it had once had the face of a human woman.
Their grenades had ensured that it now had about half the face of a human woman. The entire right side of the thing's head was blown off, its skull cracked and dripping like an egg. Her eye was out of its socket, swinging free, still looking at them with its beautiful blue stare. Her mouth was fanged and dripping with blood, hanging half open because of its missing jaw. She rose up on her hind legs, displaying a shattered, bleeding chest with four strange, furred breasts.
"Ursa," Sam breathed, and then threw up. Through his retching he could hear one, two, three gunshots, and the Ursa's dying wail. He shivered, wiping his mouth, and felt a warm palm settle on top of his head. He looked up to see Dean toying with his hair almost idly, staring at the dead creature. He held the gun loosely in his other fist.
Sam wanted to grab his hand, wanted to clutch it tight and return the strength he'd stolen through the beat of Dean's heart. He wanted to lean up and kiss the empty look from Dean's face. But he was too much of a coward, and could only close his eyes and lean into the touch, full of longing.
"He charged you, right?" Dean asked suddenly.
"What?"
"The deer, he ran straight for you?"
He still wasn't looking at Sam, his hand smoothing through his hair, fingers sliding and caressing his forehead. As if as long as he didn't look, he could touch. Sam turned his eyes to what had been the deer, torn by shrapnel and fang, mutilated beyond recognition. He could feel his eyes prickle with smoke and tears. "Yeah."
"It wouldn't have done that unless it was being chased." Dean said, his fingers lingering against Sam's ear, soothing away the echoes of the Ursa's wail, of the gunshots, of the explosion, until nothing was left but the memory of his heartbeat, close and warm. The world was grey and flickering orange, death and destruction, but with Dean's fingers on his skin Sam felt light. "I know," he said, softly, not wanting to break whatever it was stretching between them.
"If you hadn't killed it, the thing probably would have." Dean continued. "And we wouldn't have been able to set the trap. We might never have caught it. It might have killed again." His hand slid around to Sam's face, tracing featherlight lines across his cheekbones, his eyebrows, his nose. He explored the curve of Sam's chin, as if mapping him out for memorization. Finally his thumb traced once across Sam's lips and, unbidden, Sam breathed, "Dean..."
They finally looked at each other, Dean's hand frozen against Sam's jaw. Dean's lips were parted slightly, the flickering flames making his eyes glow deep green. The silence stretched long, too long, and Sam had to say something, so he smiled into his brother's eyes and said, "I know. I'm alright."
He regretted it immediately. Dean dropped his hand quickly, nodding, his smirk slipping into place like a mask. "Of course you are. You're my little brother, aren't you? Now, come on, we've gotta clean this up. Not many people live around here, but an explosion's an explosion."
Sam nodded, and turned, walking away from his brother, framed by firelight. He got the salt, from their camp, and the gas and the matches, though Dean was carrying a lighter these days. Chicks dig it, he said to anyone that asked, but to Sam he added, and I don't want to scramble for matches if I've got a ghost breathing down my back.
John approved. Sam wasn't sure what he would think of the one or two loosely-rolled cigarettes that Dean keeps in his back pocket. He wasn't sure what Dean thought of them, either - he never smoked them, just took them out once in a while and stared at them. Sam thought maybe they were a gift. He thought of his own lucky pencil, trapped between the linings of his coat so it wouldn't get lost or ruined. He thought of the girl that gave it to him, something that started with J. A friend, she'd said, now lost to an endless stream of identical schools.
He thought of her freckles. Thought of how her teeth had knocked into his when they'd kissed, the tangles of her blond hair in his fingers.
Dean broke him out of his musing, holding out something in one blood-spattered hand. He took it. It was one of the buck's antlers, blackened at the tip, cracked along its length, but Dean insisted he keep it. "It might make a good knife." He said, as Sam stared at it. It was porous and strange, and wouldn't carve well. Sam looked back up at him, lost, and he sighed. "Your first kill, Sammy, even if it was a pansy one," he explained. "There's gotta be power in a hunter's first kill."
A hunter. Sam rolled the words around in his mind, looked at them from all sides. They were inevitable, he knew. In his father's mouth, hated. But like most things, when Dean said them, he got a secret sort of thrill. A feeling of power, awakening.
He slid the antlers into his backpack, with his two chocolate bars, his spare set of clothing, John's journal. His machete, gun, and vial of dead man's blood.
A hunter.
Dean was silent as they hiked back down the mountain. John would be half-mad with worry, by now, Sam pointed out as they scrambled over rocks. Dean's raised chin said he didn't care, but his eyes were bright and his steps were quick and he knew they were two days late.
"He'll say we should have waited for him." Sam said softly, perched atop a rock. The sun was at its peak, and it was starting to be too hot for comfort. Dean stood balanced on a rise, slightly further down the hill. The sun threaded golden through his hair, and Sam stared at him, lip caught between his teeth. "He'll say something like this was too much for us."
"And I'll tell him we couldn't, that it would have killed again." Dean said, and tossed him an apple. "Here. Besides, it wasn't too much for us, right? And you even figured out what it was, before I shot it full of holes."
Sam felt his face warm, averting his eyes. "Yeah. Didn't think you'd noticed."
Dean looked at him oddly. " 'Course I noticed." He bit into his own apple, snap-crunch.
Sam raised a shoulder in a shrug, kind of wishing Dean would look away, leave him free to watch the juice of the apple drip off his chin. It was going to trace trails down his neck that he would rub at, later, frown at the stickiness. "You kept calling it "thing", even after..."
"Yeah, because that part's not my job." Dean grinned at him. "We're a team, Sammy. And Dad'll see that, and we'll all hunt together, a family. Watch each others' backs."
Sam grinned back, felt the sunlight in the spaces between his teeth. "Yeah." He pressed his apple to his lips, not biting it but smelling it, the ripe sweetness. He watched Dean pick his way down the mountainside, a slim, dark shadow against the bright white rocks, and wondered what family meant to anyone else.
There wasn't any warning, just a hissing rumble that started somewhere under his feet and built up and up and up. The rock he stood on shifted, tipped, and he scrambled to leap to somewhere higher, to somewhere safer. His apple fell from his hand, bounced off his toe and slid downward, a spot of cheerful red in an avalanche of black and white and grey. The dust rose in front of his eyes and Sam opened his mouth to shout to his brother, warn him, help him, something, but it was thick and cloying, bitter. It filled his throat and choked him. He spat mud until his lungs were clear, wiped his streaming eyes and by then there was only the last groaning of rock against rock. Dean was gone.
It didn't stop him from calling until he was hoarse, though. It didn't stop him from bloodying his knees in his desperate slide downwards, to where he'd seen his brother last, to this outcropping, that one. It didn't stop him from tearing off half his fingernails scrabbling through the wreckage, rolling boulders out of the way. "Please, please, please," he whispered and sobbed, until it was indistinguishable from "Dean, Dean, Dean."
And then an answer, a mutter, a moan, a groan and he was bleeding freely from his fingertips now, bleeding freely from his knees, but he found Dean, hidden halfway under an outcropping, pinned down by rubble covering his left leg and part of his right. The rest of him was shaking and white. His eyes were rolled back in his head, his freckles standing out, and there was blood on the rock behind him.
Sam knelt by his side, shaking and crying, slapping his cheeks, harder and harder. "Dean, Dean, Dean," he was wailing now, "Please, please..." And Dean's eyes, feverish green, finally focused, and his lips curled into something ghastly that should have been a smile. "Sammy." He muttered, and Sam collapsed into him, hands painfully tight around his shoulders, relief making his bones soft. He pressed himself close, lips at Dean's neck in almost-kisses and he didn't care, he really didn't, Dean was alive.
He didn't let himself linger, scrubbing his face with bloody, muddy hands and swallowing his sobs in great, painful gasps. He turned to look at the rocks and dirt that half-covered his brother, started carefully shifting them off and away, the heaviest first, trembling. He ignored Dean's hands that reached for his face, that clutched his hair and his shoulders and his elbows with needy fingers. "I'm sorry." He said. "I'm sorry, I need to get you free." But Dean kept pulling at him, tugging at him, mumbling nonsense. When Sam got down to the little stuff, barely pebbles and sand, he started keening high in his throat, making whimpering, wounded noises like a hurt dog. "Sam," he gasped, "Sammy, stop, it hurts, it hurts - "
And suddenly the dirt was slick with blood and Sam saw that the last layer wasn't sand but crushed stone, tiny shards of rock that had embedded themselves in Dean's skin, pinning his jeans to his legs in torn, ragged patches. Tearing that away would take Dean's skin with it.
Sam felt bile rise in his throat for the second time that day, and again Dean's hand was in his hair, trembling now, tugging and yanking and petting and strange. "It's okay," he realized Dean was saying, "It's gonna be okay. You're gonna be alright, Sammy."
Sam turned to him, tears cleaning tracks in his filthy face, and shook his head, is mouth opening with a wet sort of gasp. "What about you, Dean?" He asked around the pain in his chest. "You're not - you can't...your legs."
Dean swallowed and swallowed down air, like he'd been holding his breath. "Don't need 'em." He announced, delirious. "Don't..don't need any of 'em, just." He managed to focus his eyes on Sam's face and something like peace, something like clarity, snuck into his smile. "Just need you." His eyes slipped closed, and Sam threw himself forward, fists tight in Dean's shirt and shook him, knocking their foreheads together with sickening cracks. "Don't you dare!" He screamed, to Dean, but also to this place, to this barren, too-bright mountain in the middle of nowhere. "Don't you dare take him away from me!"
He let Dean go, heart pounding, and listened to the echoes of his own voice. There had been no screams, to trigger the avalanche, no shifting of boulders, no earthquake. And he'd felt it begin, right below his feet, as if it were telling him, watch. Look. Feel this?
He should be the one crushed. He should be the one slipping away, barely breathing, leaving Dean crying and strong. Because Dean was strong. Dean would know what to do - he'd know why the avalanche had felt so strange, why it was so unnatural. He'd know whether to risk damage by pulling away Sam's jeans or to leave them. He'd be able to pick Sam up, carrying him down the mountain to help.
But Dean was so big and Sam was so small and so scared, too scared to move him.
Just need you. His heart wanted to leap at the words, any other day he would have been aflame with embarrassment and love but today it made the darkness behind his eyes even darker. Just need you.
Sam balled his hands up into fists. But what do I do?
He swung his backpack off his back, rifled through it for John's journal. The buck's antler caught on his sleeve, and he took it out, too, staring at it. He thought about the gasping way that the buck had died, and reached out a desperate hand. His whole mind was trembling, like it was ready to crack in half.
Dean's breath was hot and steady against his knuckles, and just like that he could breathe again.
The avalanche had started just below him, but he was fine. He looked back at the antler. "What is this?" He asked nothing in particular, or perhaps the mountain air. "Some kind of sick form of revenge?"
High above, a hawk called in what might have been answer.
Sam looked down at the book in his hands. "Okay," he said. "Okay." He flipped it open, turning the pages with hands suddenly sure and steady. His eyes flickered over the words, reading just enough, lingering over words like "mountain", "guardian", "curse". He found several mentions of guarding spirits taking the form of animals - none of deer specifically but that's alright, that's okay, because they were bound to be different, right, for different mountains?
Finally he found something that looked like a summoning ritual. Salt he had, and sidewalk chalk, childish blue and pink against the sun-whitened rocks. He had to pull Dean away from the stone at his back, laboriously untangle his too-heavy limbs from the straps of his backpack, to get at the gasoline. His eyes were stinging again by the time he had it in his hands, and he rubbed the back of his hand across them, rough and quick. He needed them clear to read his father's hand-writing in the journal. Something born by the spirit, it said, and Sam placed the antler in the center of his careful circle and slipped his matches from his pocket. He dropped the first two into the shallow hole he'd filled with gasoline, finally struck the third and began to read. He was mostly guessing at the pronunciation, and his voice was shaking badly, but his father had once said something about how most magic was mainly intention and his heart filled his mouth, tasting of grit and iron, and that must count for something.
The hawk cried again, and then another answered it, and far off, a flock of blackbirds began to caw. In the trees at the base of the rockslide small birds spat cheer at one another, openly disdainful of the tiny, shaking boy in his torn jeans and muddy t-shirt, his dark, mussed head held high. Sam clenched his fists at his sides. "I'm sorry, okay?" He shouted at them, throat tight. "I didn't mean to kill the deer! And we killed the Ursa, it would have brought more death to this place!" He's angry, now, hot and desperate. "You should thank me! Or if you've got to hurt, hurt me, not him! He didn't do anything!"
A cloud passed in front of the sun, and in the sudden dimness the gasoline fire flared. Beyond it, Sam thought that the antler might have moved, but when the sun came out and the flames died it lay still, dead and bland. He sagged, all the fight going out of him.
"We are hurting you, child," a voice came from behind him, and he spun, knife in his hand in a flash. There was a raven perched on the rock by Dean's head, leveling a bright-eyed gaze at him.
"Please." He said, simple, standing straight again. "Please fix him."
The raven cocked its head at him. "Why?" Its beak clacked over the word, a flash of black, disconcerting tongue.
"Because he's my brother." He said. "You understand that, don't you? Birds have flocks, wolves have packs."
"We understand that." The raven hopped to Dean's injured shoulder. Dean stirred, moaning, and Sam took a quick step forward, but the raven fixed him with a glare and his feet stopped moving, felt squirming and strange. He looked down to see to his horror that they were literally rooted, fleshy tendrils bursting through the worn, thin sides of his shoes and tangling down into the cracks in the stone. It hurt to tug upwards, tension straining against knots far below the surface.
The raven slid the side of his beak along Dean's nose, his eye fixed on Sam. "The deer you shot down was a brother of ours." He said, deadly-sharp beak snip-snapping closed so close to Dean's face.
"It was an accident," Sam said, pulling and pulling at his feet, ignoring the pain, ignoring the babbling fear in the back of his mind - ohgodmyfeetwilltheyalwaysbelikethiswhatohgodohgodthishastobeadreamohgodpleasemakethisadreamohgod - and concentrating on how Dean's head was rolling from the raven's touch, on how his eyelids were fluttering, on how his cheeks were flushed and bright.
"Ravens are scavengers, we are." The Raven continued, and Sam noticed almost idly the bright pinpricks of blood left behind when it shifted its position on Dean's shoulder. "If we found him here, dead or dying...We could accidentally take his eyes, his bright beautiful green eyes, child. Out of no malice, only mistake. Would you let it stop you from ringing our necks?"
Sam bit his lip, tasted tears. "Please. I need him."
The raven cawed, and took off, flapping dark towards Sam's head and he dodged instinctively. His roots tore free and he screamed with the pain of it, dropping to his knees. The raven landed lightly on his shoulder. Sam trembled, shook with the force of his pain and his fear and he saw through blurred eyes that his feet were just feet again, and maybe they always had been but his sneakers were soaked with blood. "What will you give us instead? We like things that shine, that glitter," the raven whispered in his ear.
Sam almost laughed aloud. "Money? You want money, in exchange for Dean's life?"
Its eye was too close to his, pure black. "No," click-clack, a flicker of dark tongue, "No. We want what shines. " It lifted a foot, scratching against his temple. "We want what glitters, in here."
Sam closed his eyes, struggled to understand. "Memories," he said at last.
"Treasures." The raven burbled, murmured.
Sam thought of the things he treasured. So many of them were Dean - Dean in sunlight, Dean in the rain, his hair plastered to his head. But giving them up felt like trying to tear his feet free of the stones again, and he didn't think he could pull anymore without going insane.
There were moments of his father - gruff hugs in the night when his head was split in two with nightmare, a word of praise dropped between sips of whiskey, the low, glowering pride in his eyes as Sam leveled his pistol at a target. The fights, too, stood out shining, but they shone with anger and fire, not with the cool perfection of starlight. He remembered heated words, slammed doors, remembered slouching in on himself, hands shoved into his coat pockets, seeking the smooth sides of his lucky pencil.
Oh.
She shone, yes, that friend of long ago, who'd greeted him with a smile and never let him get a word in edgewise, who'd looked at him with an admiration untouched by fear. He remembered playing basketball in the gym, his shirt sticking to him like her gaze. He remembered how she flirted with him, awkward and inexperienced, and he flirted back, drawing from his memories of Dean in countless bars, hustling for pool and sex both. She laughed at him and he knew he hadn't pulled it off but she kissed him anyway and he thought, It's alright that I'm not Dean.
It was a rare sort of thought. He held on to it, sometimes, examined it at every angle for truth. But now he was opening his eyes, looking at his brother's strange, flushed face, at the broken way his body looked dark against the rocks, and he gave it up.
Gave her up. Jess, her name had been. Jess.
The raven flickered his tongue, satisfied, and then took off in a too-loud flap of iridescent wings, leaving Sam on his knees, staring at his brother and feeling empty. Dean blinked his eyes open, his face fading back to normal, and looked at him. "Sammy?" He asked, voice gravelly and concerned. "What the fuck happened to you?"
Sam laughed, lacking strength to even stand, and gestured helplessly. Dean made to get up, and for a moment Sam's breath stuttered in fear that he wouldn't be able to, but his brother pushed himself to his feet, his eyes widening as he took in the blood spattered around where he'd been lying. "What the fuck happened to me?"
Still laughing, Sam shook his head, and hell, he should be out of tears by now but these ones felt cleansing, dripping off his face and smudging the lines of chalk against the rocks. Dean knelt by him and pulled him into a hug. "Shh." He said. "Shh, Sammy, it's alright. It's gonna be okay, you hear? I promise, I'll make it okay."
Choking on his breath, Sam pulled him impossibly close. "You don't need to," He said, and finally let himself be proud. "I already did."
Dean pulled back to look at him, not understanding, and Sam just smiled and tucked himself under Dean's chin, breathing in the smell of him, sweat and blood and life.
Later, they cleaned up his circle, and Sam gave Dean a shortened version of what had happened.
"Dude." Dean said, pausing as he picked up the antler. "You gave them memories? That can't be good."
Sam shrugged, a little pissed at that. "I got you back, didn't I?"
"Yeah." Dean reached down a hand, smoothing it through Sam's hair. "Yeah, you did. Thank you." He looked down at Sam for a moment, expression caught somewhere between pride and sorrow, a corner of emotion so tender it tugged Sam upwards. He leaned up, just slightly, hands on Dean's chest, and Dean dropped his hand, frowning. "I'm just wondering, what did you give them?"
Sam tore his eyes away. "How should I know?" He scowled, defensive. "I don't remember it anymore."
Dean huffed a mirthless laugh. "Great. So it could be anything."
"Yes." Sam said, and now he was full-out angry. He grabbed Dean's arm, made his brother look at him. "Anything, Dean. Because I would have given anything, to get you back." He was almost snarling at him, and Dean's eyes were wide and surprised. "Sam - "
"No. You don't get to trivialize this. You don't get to joke, you don't get to look away and not see this. Not see me, staring you in the face." He had both hands on Dean now, tucked hard into the spaces just above his hips, fisted in his shirt. "You - you told me you needed me, when you were hurt and dying." He continued, eyes still holding his brother's. "And I'm - I need you, Dean. I don't have to be dying to tell you, I don't have to be dying to need you, I, I need you all the time, need you to be noticing me and laughing at me and I need you to be touching me, pulling me in and loving me, please, I just - " He took a moment to breathe and noticed that Dean was doing the same, overlapping breaths hissing in and out of their lungs. "I can't lose you but I can't, can't keep halfway having you, either, it's like - " He shook his head, suddenly out of words, and bowed his head, pushing at Dean's chest like he can sink right into it and put his lips to his heart without going through the middleman of language.
Dean's hands came up to his shoulders, and then, hesitantly, his face, turning it upwards. Sam resisted, a little, at first, but he wanted to know what Dean looked like, now that he'd finally said it, and so he looked up.
Dean looked - well, Dean looked surprised, and that was expected, but he also looked a little bit in awe and so beautiful that it broke Sam's heart a little. "You.." Dean started, and then cleared his throat like the words wouldn't quite come. "You really want..." He trailed off, but he wasn't angry and he wasn't disgusted and Sam needed to kiss him right away.
So he did, quick and nervous, and then pulled away as far as Dean's hands would let him, which wasn't very far. Dean's freckles were very clear, with how close his face was, and his eyes were wide and shining green. "Sam," he said, his breath ghosting across Sam's lips, "Sammy."
And then he kissed Sam, neither quick nor nervous. Sam closed his eyes, letting himself treasure this moment, felt it fill up whatever place had been emptied in conversation with the raven. He pressed his lips to Dean's, so soft, slotted his mouth sideways, brought his hands up so that he could feel, press his palms over Dean's heart.
Eventually one of them pulled away, and Sam loved that he couldn't tell which one it was. He loved that Dean smirked at him, still a little amazed, loved that he smoothed his hands down Sam's face like he couldn't believe he was real, loved that he pulled Sam back in and just held him there forehead to forehead.
His feet hurt and he was covered in mud and blood, and they were miles away from where they should have been and his jeans were ruined and they'd both nearly died and Dad was going to be furious but Sam still couldn't imagine a better first kiss.