Bonefingers 1/3
So I said I wasn't doing a wip for mini-nano, but apparently I lied. This is horror and very a bit weird. I hope you like it, but don't worry too much about reading if it isn't your cup of tea. I shan't be offended. Also, if you are reading, be aware that some of the text is in image-format, just so you know. This is not beta'd or ameripicked - though ♥ to atimi for some much-needed help. Okay, enough waffle, part one of hopefully three.
Bonefingers
(Sam/Dean + Dean/Other, nc-17, 4000 this part, warnings for non-con, pedophilia and basic not-nice stuff)
Once upon a time, this house had been beautiful and beautiful things had happened here. Now it was dead and restless.
As Sam came up through the trapdoor, he was met by a wall of freezing air. The small beam of his flashlight bounced frenziedly between the walls of the room, like a moth looking for escape. The tiles on the kitchen floor were black and white diamonds. Tall cabinets stood against every spare inch of wall. On the surface of the wooden table that dominated the room, there was a large dark stain that Sam refused to look too closely at.
He picked his way through the darkness, through corridors that pressed claustrophobically close on either side and all Sam could think of was how trapped he was if something were waiting at the end for him. His flashlight lit up the ragged mists of cobweb that stretched from wall to wall. As he passed through them, the cobwebs tore over Sam's face. They set the skin at the back of his neck fluttering like something just crawled over it.
When he reached the main hall, the muffled scuffing of his footsteps was smothered by carpet, dank and miserable as graveyard grass. He swept the flashlight wide, alert for any movement at the edges of its arc. A majestic staircase rose up, seemingly into nothingness. The carpet that covered the central line of its steps was darkly purple. Just to the side of the bottom stair was a grandfather clock, its ticking heartbeat stilled decades ago and its face smashed in.
Sam hesitated briefly, his flashlight's spot of light resting on a door at the other side of the hall. The rest of the first floor of the house was unknown to him. He'd studied the architectural plan from when it was built in 1912 but he'd seen other things, things in the house that shouldn't be there. There could be anything through the door. Training said he should do a proper look around, so that he'd know his exits and resources.
But it was upstairs he needed to be.
So Sam climbed the staircase. For a few moments, with only the ghostly, immediate flashlight, he was stranded. Below and above there was only darkness, only the moldering stairs under his feet. The banister was polished as porcelain and he didn't dare let go of it, keeping constant contact with it as he followed it upwards.
Finally, he reached the landing. In front of him, the walls were peelingly papered with some dark green paisley, scorched black in places. Sam rolled the flashlight back over the banister, down over the lower floor, and instantly regretted it. There were too many places down there for things to hide. Something only had to take the staircase away - like it had fucked with so much else in the house - and Sam would have no plan to get out.
His jaw tightened stubbornly and Sam turned the flashlight back in front of him. He turned to the left, kept walking, aware of his heart beating harder, both with anticipation and the irrational certainty that something was watching him, was maybe even now creeping through the shadows at the base of the staircase and coming up after him.
The next door banged back into the wall as he opened and Sam startled himself with the noise. Instinct made him freeze, made him click the flashlight off. Plunged into utter blackness, he held his breath and waited to see if the crash had woken anything it shouldn't. Without even his flashlight for reassurance, Sam found himself imagining what might be unseen and so very close to him right now. If he let it, he could hear the crackle of bones as something moved, could feel the air disturbed by its breath and smell the earthy dampness of its skin.
Still silence. Sam clicked the flashlight back on. He was alone on the landing and the door was open in front of him.
Inside, the walls were patterned with plump, cheerful birds. Large strips of the wallpaper were missing in a way that looked less like it had peeled off than it did that someone had scratched it off.
The room itself was empty - except, when Sam swung the beam of the flashlight back across, there was a small naked girl standing in the corner. A fat heart locket hung around her neck and her legs were shining red and sticky, darkest at her thighs. She turned her head to look at a blank section of wall, and then she wasn't there anymore.
Sam crossed to the wall instantly and, tucking his flashlight under his arm, felt around until he found the clasp. With a noise like a sudden huff of breath, a section of the wall opened up. Weak, unsteady light filtered towards him from the other end of the exposed stone passage.
Sam clicked his flashlight off and entered, didn't even look back when the wall sealed behind him.
The passage opened up, incongruously, onto a bedroom, big and high-ceilinged. It was devoid of furniture, save for one large bed standing in the center. Candles were clustered about the bed on the bare floor and their stems were misshapen with wax accumulated over God knew how long. The pools of their light only emphasized the thickness of the shadows at the edge of the room. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and between the walls, so low and so thick they could almost be mistaken for curtains. Something on the cold air smelled of sugar, the sickliness of fondant.
Sam hurried to the side of the bed. As he passed, the candlelight trembled and wavered, and the darkness briefly crowded closer. The bed covers were lace, more gray now than white, reminiscent of yet more cobwebs.
A spider was settled on the curve of Dean's cheekbone but he was too deeply asleep to notice it.
Although it was hard to put an exact figure to it, Sam would estimate that Dean was at least ten years younger than he should be. He had that delicate, vulnerable prettiness that had been hardening for years and had disappeared entirely after Hell. As he should be, Dean was beautiful, but in the way a really sharp knife was: sure, it's shiny and aesthetically pleasing, but don’t be stupid enough to try putting your hands on it. Now though, now he was all helpless innocence, especially asleep, where anyone could come and do anything they wanted to him. And there were a lot of things someone might want to do to him.
Fury sent a full body-shake through Sam. He clenched his jaw so tightly he was sure he could hear the bones grinding. Carefully, he picked the spider off Dean's face and threw it aside. He put a hand on Dean's shoulder, waking him as gently as he could.
Dean even woke up prettily, damn him. His lashes fluttered and his lips moved like an invitation to kiss. He sighed and blinked, slowly focused on Sam, then jerked away from him, fingers clutching the ash-gray coverlet.
"Hey," said Sam. "How are you? Are you okay?"
He wanted to touch Dean, to ground himself in the fact that his brother was alive, at least, fucked up and stolen but alive. Dean was looking at him with big green eyes full of wary suspicion.
"Who the hell are you?" Dean demanded.
"I'm a friend," said Sam. "Do you know my name?"
Dean raised an eyebrow, lips quirking into a crooked smile. "No, which would kind of go against the whole you being my friend thing, wouldn't it?"
He'd loosened his grip on the covers in an obvious attempt to appear less afraid. Detachedly, Sam took in the pale sweep of his exposed shoulder, all that perfect smooth skin, shining rosy gold in the candlelight, and the fragile little glass-bones underneath.
"Do you recognize me?" Sam tried again. "C'mon, I was only here a few days ago. You must remember me just a little."
"I don't."
Sam was honestly surprised. Last time he was here, Dean nearly screamed the place down when Sam tried to drag him out of the house. Struggling with his naked - and newly-younger - brother had been pretty memorable. Sam still had the bruises from the kicks and punches the stubborn little bastard had planted on him.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw movement. The little girl was crouched over one of the candles, her hair tucked back behind her ears. She looked up at him and cocked her head. Sam looked back at her with a gaze that said that if she were wrong about this, if what he was about to do wasn't the only way, he would find ways to hurt her, ghost or not.
Smiling that smile reserved for traumatized civilians, Sam carefully laid his hand on Dean's shoulder, his thumb resting in the dip of Dean's collarbone and his fingers brushing Dean's back. Dean looked down at Sam's hand on him, clearly not comfortable with it but not speaking a word of protest. Again, Sam had to choke down anger. His smile became a skull's rictus grin.
"Dean," he said. "God, Dean. I'm sorry."
Sam saw the question on Dean's face - Dean's chin lifted slightly, both in surprise and challenge - but before he could even get the words out, Sam was jamming a needle into the flesh of his upper arm. It was clumsy and rough but done in seconds. The look on Dean's face as he stared down at the needle puncturing his skin was more indignant than scared. He didn't have chance to look back at Sam before the drug was taking effect, turning him heavy and pliant. His eyelids drooped and closed, lips still parted like he was just on the verge of speaking.
Then he sagged back into the bed and Sam caught him, one arm curled around his shoulders to lower him gently onto the pillow. Dean's head fell slightly to the side and his profile in the candlelight was suddenly familiar. It was like seeing an old friend, uncovering a cherished childhood toy from a box in the attic. When Sam was a kid, just caught between sulky obedience and fiery rebellion, this had been his Dean.
"It's okay," Sam said as he eased the needle out.
The sedative kept Dean from even twitching as Sam worked his body free from the filthy old blanket. Dean was naked underneath and Sam's hands shook as he shoved the blanket aside. There were no visible marks on Dean's skin. Sam supposed he could be grateful for that, but it was sickening to feel anything other than rage. Something had taken Dean, stripped him and put him in this bed; Sam couldn't be grateful that there was no evidence.
"It's okay," he said again, dropping a quick, chaste kiss to Dean's temple. Dean was hot under him and his skin smelled of that too-rich sweetness, the kind that made Sam's teeth ache and his mouth water. "It's okay. It's just me."
It was too easy to manhandle Dean's altered body - no solid definition of muscle, just supple youth - too easy to roll him onto his side, where he sprawled out, slack and tempting and the candlelight rolling over his jutting angles like water. He was too pretty for Sam not to want him on some level. Been too much more than brothers for too long for Sam to get caught up in the fact it was incest. Sam had done just too much for this crime to be the one that he couldn't commit.
The silence was overpowering and it gave unpleasant significance to the smallest details of what Sam was doing, like the clink of metal as Sam undid his belt buckle and the hitch in his breath as he caught Dean's bony ankles in his hands, swallowing them up in his fingers, and spread his thighs wide. He smoothed his palms up Dean's legs, to the firm, high curves of his ass.
"It's just me," he said. "It's okay."
Pushing in close, his body covering Dean's, hiding him away, Sam nudged Dean's knees under him, until his ass was tilted up, exposing the tight little hole. Dean's cheek was still pressed to the gray pillow, shoulders rising and falling as he breathed. The purity of his expression sat uneasily beside the obscene spread of his legs.
It made Sam shudder. Maybe this was what it was all about: the violation, the filthiness of having him perfectly arranged for fucking, while, for all intents and purposes, he was sleeping so innocently. The thing that had stolen Dean didn't just want the sex; it wanted sex with someone who didn't understand, who couldn't share the experience.
Sam closed his eyes but he couldn't ignore the smooth heat of Dean pinned under him.
His hands were still trembling as he fumbled the lube out of his jacket, slicked his fingers with it. His eyes stayed fixed on the pale patch of skin at the back of Dean's neck, just peeking out under his hair, as he rubbed at the hot clinginess of his hole. He nudged it open with a fingertip and heard the rhythm of Dean's breathing change.
Briefly, he froze, crouched over Dean's prone body, his finger pushed inside Dean's tight perfect ass. There was a flush of color on Dean's cheeks. Something that could have been guilt, could have been desire settled heavy low down in Sam's belly. He couldn't help his own breath coming faster as he fingerfucked Dean quickly, stretching his hole first with one finger, then cramming a second in.
Dean didn't move but his breath stayed shallow, needy. His mouth was open and kissable. It was only Dean's drawn-together brow that Sam didn't like, that surprised frown, like he didn't know where these sensations were coming from, or what to do with them.
"S'okay, Dean. Let me. It'll feel good. I'll make you like it."
Sam swiped what was left of the lube over the length of his cock. He didn't waste time thinking about the implications of how hard he was, how much he was thinking of sinking into that fingered open hole. It served the plan and that was all he cared about.
Acutely conscious of the risk of crushing Dean, smothering him into the soiled mattress because Dean was too fucking small like this and Sam had outgrown him years ago anyway, Sam kept his weight on his elbows as he fitted his body to Dean's.
There was something almost comforting about the contact of their bare skin. It had been a month that Dean had been missing, and it had seemed cruel, that Dean should be taken yet again when they'd got through everything else, fought the apocalypse and somehow survived. Forget the circumstances, forget the murderous need to deal with what had done this, Sam had his brother back.
The head of Sam's cock bumped wetly into Dean's hole before Sam reached down between their bodies and pressed it in, the moment's resistance giving way to a slow, uncomfortable thrust. Sam groaned as he sank in deeper and deeper, but it wasn't loud enough to register over the thump of his heartbeat.
That sweet smell was even stronger, and Sam's head swam with it.
His breath was sticky in his throat. He felt too big inside Dean, like he could split him right open if he weren't careful. It was raw, not enough lube, and Dean's body slumped from where Sam was shoved right into him. Gently, Sam pushed Dean's legs wider apart, fitted himself in better. He touched the bumps along the thin ridge of Dean's spine, stroked up his sweat-damp skin to the back of his neck, where he tangled his fingers into Dean's hair.
He rocked his hips, dragging his dick out of the slick clutch of Dean's ass before pressing back in. The motion pushed a moan from Dean's open mouth, a blurred noise of vowels, and before Sam thought about what he was doing, his mouth was at the corner of Dean's slack lips, licking into him.
It wasn't actually a kiss; it wasn't a kiss to put your mouth on your brother when he was drugged and unaware you were fucking him. But it felt like one.
He fucked into Dean again, curved his hands around Dean's narrow hips to haul him up on all fours and back onto his cock. Briefly, his dick slipped out, rode between Dean's spread ass cheeks, before Sam eased back in. There was less resistance this time, more of Dean's body grudgingly accepting him inside. He kissed Dean again, that soft little dent at the corner of his mouth's red bow.
When Sam looked back down to where the blunt thickness of his cock was buried in Dean's stretched-out, wet flesh, he realized his belt buckle was digging into the back of Dean's thigh, leaving a tiny red mark. An unaccountable surge of guilt went through him, that he was the one to mark Dean. Another kiss, this time full of pleading apology.
The silence was all wrong. The hot hard pants of Sam's breath, the heavy thud of his heart, even Dean's lighter breaths, didn't do enough to counter the unnatural hush. Dean should never be this quiet. When he was, it made Sam tense, filled him with that same, desperate eagerness to please that he'd known as a kid.
While he rode Dean with a slow rolling rhythm, his balls rubbing the swell of Dean's ass and his chest draped over Dean's back with aching friction, Sam nuzzled at Dean's jawline, the shell of his ear, into the shallow dip of his collarbone. "It's gonna be okay," he whispered. "It’s all gonna be okay."
Dean didn't answer. He was still completely out of it, even as his cheeks were flushed and his mouth hung open, and he clenched around Sam, his hole pink and tender. Inside, Sam was frantic, shaking with badly-controlled need. Eyes screwed shut, he touched his forehead to the top of Dean's spine as he struggled to keep his thrusts steady, on the right side of forceful.
And then he was coming inside Dean, his dick throbbing hot in Dean's ass as he filled him with come deep inside, and it took him a second to realize he could hear himself groaning, hands clawed possessively into Dean's hips and his whole body shaking.
He drew out of Dean's wrecked hole carefully and a fat white dribble of his come followed, smearing Sam's dick and Dean's thighs as it dripped out of Dean's ass. More slipped out when Sam laid Dean back down on the bed, and he couldn't help thinking about how much more he'd left inside Dean.
Feeling dirty and weak, Sam tucked himself back inside his pants, then he pulled the lace covers back up over Dean's fucked-out body, like he was shoveling dirt back into an open grave.
He touched Dean's cheek, only very gently, then backed off the bed.
"It's okay," he said. "I found you. I know what I'm doing. It's okay."
:::
When he finally made it back outside, Sam threw up.
It really wasn't okay.
:::
In the distance, the gabled roof of the house could still be seen when Sam reached the crypt. His cheeks were burning cold, and his fingertips stung, hands clumsy, as he picked the lock on the metal gate.
The crypt dated back to the civil war. Once, it had been located right in the middle of a Union cemetery. But the tombstones had cracked and tumbled over time, the bodies they stood for forgotten beneath the dark earth, and the crypt was alone now, the last outpost of memory.
It was as cold inside the small stone chamber as it was outside in the roaring wind. Sam set his bag on the ground and took out notepad and pencil. The notepad was new and he opened it to the clean first page, ready for ruin like fresh snow.
"I know there are more of you out there," he said, addressing the air. "There's more than my brother and the little girl we came here for. So, tell me about Bonefingers."
He huffed warm breath on his hands and rubbed them together as he waited. It was quiet long enough for Sam to be considering giving up. Then, seemingly from inside the walls, there was the rattle of a few pebbles falling. Quiet again.
On the notepad, the pencil rose up, shaky like a newborn calf finding its legs, the point still resting on the paper. Sam didn't even dare breathe. It had grown colder still than before, so cold it seemed to freeze sound into silence.
The pencil moved. It scratched out words with awkward precision.
Sam let out a sigh of relief and grinned skywards. Stupid how words from dead people could make him feel less alone, but it had been one whole month since Dean was stolen, a month of nobody but him, and suddenly there was someone he could talk to about it, someone who might not just give cryptic little messages before disappearing.
"So, what is Bonefingers?"
Another pause, the pencil wobbling on the page.
Okay, so maybe not cryptic but still not exactly illuminating.
"Yes, but what is he? Warlock, lich, ghost?"
Just Bonefingers then. Nothing for Sam to work with. He sighed, scraped his fingers through his hair and studied the wavering pencil for a moment.
"You're his victims then? The ones he killed?"
"What did he do to you?"
There was a long pause before the pencil moved again, drawing a shaky, wandering line as if considering, then wrote,
The pencil jerked and Sam got the impression of it being wrenched away. This time when it wrote, the words were fast, scribbled.
He swallowed. "Then what did he do?"
A mournful wail rose up on a sudden blast of wind, hollow and scraping through the cold stones of the crypt.
Sam's stomach lurched queasily. He'd left Dean lying in that soiled bed, in that godforsaken house, he'd left Dean for Bonefingers. It wasn't like Sam had had any choice - the mind whammy Bonefingers had put on him had convinced Dean he was in love - but that didn't make Sam feel even a little bit better about it.
He wanted to be sick again. He wished they'd never come here.
Instead, they came, Dean was gone, and Sam was left to do the best he could. It felt unpleasantly like the new status quo.
"How many of you are there?"
The names kept on coming, one over another, blacking out the page like a swarm of flies against the sky. It was too much; the pencil's furious scrawl degenerated into illegible scribbling. With a crack louder than it should have been, the pencil point broke and the pencil dropped.
It rolled slowly across the crypt floor and came to rest a few inches from Sam's feet.
:::
After Bonefingers' mansion and the crypt, the motel room seemed deceptively bland: quiet and mundane, and strange because of it.
Sam dumped his bag and stripped out of his clothes. As he tugged his undershirt off, he thought, for a second, that he smelled Dean on him. Just a faint scent of his skin and the sickly sweetness Bonefingers had left on his breath. He balled the undershirt up and stuffed it into the bottom of his duffel.
He showered and then called out for pizza, which he had no appetite to eat when it came. Instead, he read through missing persons reports on his laptop. Now that he was looking for missing adults, not missing children, he found plenty. A horrifying number. He even found her, the one they'd come here for.
She was smiling in the picture the report had of her, a pretty brunette in her twenties. But it was the same heart locket around her neck.
The room shifted, just slightly, around him. Sam looked up and she was stood at the end of his bed. The blood on her legs was still sticky smears, never drying. She held up three fingers, then carefully curled one of them down.
"One down, two to go," said Sam. "I get it. Then what? How do I kill Bonefingers?"
She smiled and shook her head.
tbc
Bonefingers
(Sam/Dean + Dean/Other, nc-17, 4000 this part, warnings for non-con, pedophilia and basic not-nice stuff)
Once upon a time, this house had been beautiful and beautiful things had happened here. Now it was dead and restless.
As Sam came up through the trapdoor, he was met by a wall of freezing air. The small beam of his flashlight bounced frenziedly between the walls of the room, like a moth looking for escape. The tiles on the kitchen floor were black and white diamonds. Tall cabinets stood against every spare inch of wall. On the surface of the wooden table that dominated the room, there was a large dark stain that Sam refused to look too closely at.
He picked his way through the darkness, through corridors that pressed claustrophobically close on either side and all Sam could think of was how trapped he was if something were waiting at the end for him. His flashlight lit up the ragged mists of cobweb that stretched from wall to wall. As he passed through them, the cobwebs tore over Sam's face. They set the skin at the back of his neck fluttering like something just crawled over it.
When he reached the main hall, the muffled scuffing of his footsteps was smothered by carpet, dank and miserable as graveyard grass. He swept the flashlight wide, alert for any movement at the edges of its arc. A majestic staircase rose up, seemingly into nothingness. The carpet that covered the central line of its steps was darkly purple. Just to the side of the bottom stair was a grandfather clock, its ticking heartbeat stilled decades ago and its face smashed in.
Sam hesitated briefly, his flashlight's spot of light resting on a door at the other side of the hall. The rest of the first floor of the house was unknown to him. He'd studied the architectural plan from when it was built in 1912 but he'd seen other things, things in the house that shouldn't be there. There could be anything through the door. Training said he should do a proper look around, so that he'd know his exits and resources.
But it was upstairs he needed to be.
So Sam climbed the staircase. For a few moments, with only the ghostly, immediate flashlight, he was stranded. Below and above there was only darkness, only the moldering stairs under his feet. The banister was polished as porcelain and he didn't dare let go of it, keeping constant contact with it as he followed it upwards.
Finally, he reached the landing. In front of him, the walls were peelingly papered with some dark green paisley, scorched black in places. Sam rolled the flashlight back over the banister, down over the lower floor, and instantly regretted it. There were too many places down there for things to hide. Something only had to take the staircase away - like it had fucked with so much else in the house - and Sam would have no plan to get out.
His jaw tightened stubbornly and Sam turned the flashlight back in front of him. He turned to the left, kept walking, aware of his heart beating harder, both with anticipation and the irrational certainty that something was watching him, was maybe even now creeping through the shadows at the base of the staircase and coming up after him.
The next door banged back into the wall as he opened and Sam startled himself with the noise. Instinct made him freeze, made him click the flashlight off. Plunged into utter blackness, he held his breath and waited to see if the crash had woken anything it shouldn't. Without even his flashlight for reassurance, Sam found himself imagining what might be unseen and so very close to him right now. If he let it, he could hear the crackle of bones as something moved, could feel the air disturbed by its breath and smell the earthy dampness of its skin.
Still silence. Sam clicked the flashlight back on. He was alone on the landing and the door was open in front of him.
Inside, the walls were patterned with plump, cheerful birds. Large strips of the wallpaper were missing in a way that looked less like it had peeled off than it did that someone had scratched it off.
The room itself was empty - except, when Sam swung the beam of the flashlight back across, there was a small naked girl standing in the corner. A fat heart locket hung around her neck and her legs were shining red and sticky, darkest at her thighs. She turned her head to look at a blank section of wall, and then she wasn't there anymore.
Sam crossed to the wall instantly and, tucking his flashlight under his arm, felt around until he found the clasp. With a noise like a sudden huff of breath, a section of the wall opened up. Weak, unsteady light filtered towards him from the other end of the exposed stone passage.
Sam clicked his flashlight off and entered, didn't even look back when the wall sealed behind him.
The passage opened up, incongruously, onto a bedroom, big and high-ceilinged. It was devoid of furniture, save for one large bed standing in the center. Candles were clustered about the bed on the bare floor and their stems were misshapen with wax accumulated over God knew how long. The pools of their light only emphasized the thickness of the shadows at the edge of the room. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and between the walls, so low and so thick they could almost be mistaken for curtains. Something on the cold air smelled of sugar, the sickliness of fondant.
Sam hurried to the side of the bed. As he passed, the candlelight trembled and wavered, and the darkness briefly crowded closer. The bed covers were lace, more gray now than white, reminiscent of yet more cobwebs.
A spider was settled on the curve of Dean's cheekbone but he was too deeply asleep to notice it.
Although it was hard to put an exact figure to it, Sam would estimate that Dean was at least ten years younger than he should be. He had that delicate, vulnerable prettiness that had been hardening for years and had disappeared entirely after Hell. As he should be, Dean was beautiful, but in the way a really sharp knife was: sure, it's shiny and aesthetically pleasing, but don’t be stupid enough to try putting your hands on it. Now though, now he was all helpless innocence, especially asleep, where anyone could come and do anything they wanted to him. And there were a lot of things someone might want to do to him.
Fury sent a full body-shake through Sam. He clenched his jaw so tightly he was sure he could hear the bones grinding. Carefully, he picked the spider off Dean's face and threw it aside. He put a hand on Dean's shoulder, waking him as gently as he could.
Dean even woke up prettily, damn him. His lashes fluttered and his lips moved like an invitation to kiss. He sighed and blinked, slowly focused on Sam, then jerked away from him, fingers clutching the ash-gray coverlet.
"Hey," said Sam. "How are you? Are you okay?"
He wanted to touch Dean, to ground himself in the fact that his brother was alive, at least, fucked up and stolen but alive. Dean was looking at him with big green eyes full of wary suspicion.
"Who the hell are you?" Dean demanded.
"I'm a friend," said Sam. "Do you know my name?"
Dean raised an eyebrow, lips quirking into a crooked smile. "No, which would kind of go against the whole you being my friend thing, wouldn't it?"
He'd loosened his grip on the covers in an obvious attempt to appear less afraid. Detachedly, Sam took in the pale sweep of his exposed shoulder, all that perfect smooth skin, shining rosy gold in the candlelight, and the fragile little glass-bones underneath.
"Do you recognize me?" Sam tried again. "C'mon, I was only here a few days ago. You must remember me just a little."
"I don't."
Sam was honestly surprised. Last time he was here, Dean nearly screamed the place down when Sam tried to drag him out of the house. Struggling with his naked - and newly-younger - brother had been pretty memorable. Sam still had the bruises from the kicks and punches the stubborn little bastard had planted on him.
Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw movement. The little girl was crouched over one of the candles, her hair tucked back behind her ears. She looked up at him and cocked her head. Sam looked back at her with a gaze that said that if she were wrong about this, if what he was about to do wasn't the only way, he would find ways to hurt her, ghost or not.
Smiling that smile reserved for traumatized civilians, Sam carefully laid his hand on Dean's shoulder, his thumb resting in the dip of Dean's collarbone and his fingers brushing Dean's back. Dean looked down at Sam's hand on him, clearly not comfortable with it but not speaking a word of protest. Again, Sam had to choke down anger. His smile became a skull's rictus grin.
"Dean," he said. "God, Dean. I'm sorry."
Sam saw the question on Dean's face - Dean's chin lifted slightly, both in surprise and challenge - but before he could even get the words out, Sam was jamming a needle into the flesh of his upper arm. It was clumsy and rough but done in seconds. The look on Dean's face as he stared down at the needle puncturing his skin was more indignant than scared. He didn't have chance to look back at Sam before the drug was taking effect, turning him heavy and pliant. His eyelids drooped and closed, lips still parted like he was just on the verge of speaking.
Then he sagged back into the bed and Sam caught him, one arm curled around his shoulders to lower him gently onto the pillow. Dean's head fell slightly to the side and his profile in the candlelight was suddenly familiar. It was like seeing an old friend, uncovering a cherished childhood toy from a box in the attic. When Sam was a kid, just caught between sulky obedience and fiery rebellion, this had been his Dean.
"It's okay," Sam said as he eased the needle out.
The sedative kept Dean from even twitching as Sam worked his body free from the filthy old blanket. Dean was naked underneath and Sam's hands shook as he shoved the blanket aside. There were no visible marks on Dean's skin. Sam supposed he could be grateful for that, but it was sickening to feel anything other than rage. Something had taken Dean, stripped him and put him in this bed; Sam couldn't be grateful that there was no evidence.
"It's okay," he said again, dropping a quick, chaste kiss to Dean's temple. Dean was hot under him and his skin smelled of that too-rich sweetness, the kind that made Sam's teeth ache and his mouth water. "It's okay. It's just me."
It was too easy to manhandle Dean's altered body - no solid definition of muscle, just supple youth - too easy to roll him onto his side, where he sprawled out, slack and tempting and the candlelight rolling over his jutting angles like water. He was too pretty for Sam not to want him on some level. Been too much more than brothers for too long for Sam to get caught up in the fact it was incest. Sam had done just too much for this crime to be the one that he couldn't commit.
The silence was overpowering and it gave unpleasant significance to the smallest details of what Sam was doing, like the clink of metal as Sam undid his belt buckle and the hitch in his breath as he caught Dean's bony ankles in his hands, swallowing them up in his fingers, and spread his thighs wide. He smoothed his palms up Dean's legs, to the firm, high curves of his ass.
"It's just me," he said. "It's okay."
Pushing in close, his body covering Dean's, hiding him away, Sam nudged Dean's knees under him, until his ass was tilted up, exposing the tight little hole. Dean's cheek was still pressed to the gray pillow, shoulders rising and falling as he breathed. The purity of his expression sat uneasily beside the obscene spread of his legs.
It made Sam shudder. Maybe this was what it was all about: the violation, the filthiness of having him perfectly arranged for fucking, while, for all intents and purposes, he was sleeping so innocently. The thing that had stolen Dean didn't just want the sex; it wanted sex with someone who didn't understand, who couldn't share the experience.
Sam closed his eyes but he couldn't ignore the smooth heat of Dean pinned under him.
His hands were still trembling as he fumbled the lube out of his jacket, slicked his fingers with it. His eyes stayed fixed on the pale patch of skin at the back of Dean's neck, just peeking out under his hair, as he rubbed at the hot clinginess of his hole. He nudged it open with a fingertip and heard the rhythm of Dean's breathing change.
Briefly, he froze, crouched over Dean's prone body, his finger pushed inside Dean's tight perfect ass. There was a flush of color on Dean's cheeks. Something that could have been guilt, could have been desire settled heavy low down in Sam's belly. He couldn't help his own breath coming faster as he fingerfucked Dean quickly, stretching his hole first with one finger, then cramming a second in.
Dean didn't move but his breath stayed shallow, needy. His mouth was open and kissable. It was only Dean's drawn-together brow that Sam didn't like, that surprised frown, like he didn't know where these sensations were coming from, or what to do with them.
"S'okay, Dean. Let me. It'll feel good. I'll make you like it."
Sam swiped what was left of the lube over the length of his cock. He didn't waste time thinking about the implications of how hard he was, how much he was thinking of sinking into that fingered open hole. It served the plan and that was all he cared about.
Acutely conscious of the risk of crushing Dean, smothering him into the soiled mattress because Dean was too fucking small like this and Sam had outgrown him years ago anyway, Sam kept his weight on his elbows as he fitted his body to Dean's.
There was something almost comforting about the contact of their bare skin. It had been a month that Dean had been missing, and it had seemed cruel, that Dean should be taken yet again when they'd got through everything else, fought the apocalypse and somehow survived. Forget the circumstances, forget the murderous need to deal with what had done this, Sam had his brother back.
The head of Sam's cock bumped wetly into Dean's hole before Sam reached down between their bodies and pressed it in, the moment's resistance giving way to a slow, uncomfortable thrust. Sam groaned as he sank in deeper and deeper, but it wasn't loud enough to register over the thump of his heartbeat.
That sweet smell was even stronger, and Sam's head swam with it.
His breath was sticky in his throat. He felt too big inside Dean, like he could split him right open if he weren't careful. It was raw, not enough lube, and Dean's body slumped from where Sam was shoved right into him. Gently, Sam pushed Dean's legs wider apart, fitted himself in better. He touched the bumps along the thin ridge of Dean's spine, stroked up his sweat-damp skin to the back of his neck, where he tangled his fingers into Dean's hair.
He rocked his hips, dragging his dick out of the slick clutch of Dean's ass before pressing back in. The motion pushed a moan from Dean's open mouth, a blurred noise of vowels, and before Sam thought about what he was doing, his mouth was at the corner of Dean's slack lips, licking into him.
It wasn't actually a kiss; it wasn't a kiss to put your mouth on your brother when he was drugged and unaware you were fucking him. But it felt like one.
He fucked into Dean again, curved his hands around Dean's narrow hips to haul him up on all fours and back onto his cock. Briefly, his dick slipped out, rode between Dean's spread ass cheeks, before Sam eased back in. There was less resistance this time, more of Dean's body grudgingly accepting him inside. He kissed Dean again, that soft little dent at the corner of his mouth's red bow.
When Sam looked back down to where the blunt thickness of his cock was buried in Dean's stretched-out, wet flesh, he realized his belt buckle was digging into the back of Dean's thigh, leaving a tiny red mark. An unaccountable surge of guilt went through him, that he was the one to mark Dean. Another kiss, this time full of pleading apology.
The silence was all wrong. The hot hard pants of Sam's breath, the heavy thud of his heart, even Dean's lighter breaths, didn't do enough to counter the unnatural hush. Dean should never be this quiet. When he was, it made Sam tense, filled him with that same, desperate eagerness to please that he'd known as a kid.
While he rode Dean with a slow rolling rhythm, his balls rubbing the swell of Dean's ass and his chest draped over Dean's back with aching friction, Sam nuzzled at Dean's jawline, the shell of his ear, into the shallow dip of his collarbone. "It's gonna be okay," he whispered. "It’s all gonna be okay."
Dean didn't answer. He was still completely out of it, even as his cheeks were flushed and his mouth hung open, and he clenched around Sam, his hole pink and tender. Inside, Sam was frantic, shaking with badly-controlled need. Eyes screwed shut, he touched his forehead to the top of Dean's spine as he struggled to keep his thrusts steady, on the right side of forceful.
And then he was coming inside Dean, his dick throbbing hot in Dean's ass as he filled him with come deep inside, and it took him a second to realize he could hear himself groaning, hands clawed possessively into Dean's hips and his whole body shaking.
He drew out of Dean's wrecked hole carefully and a fat white dribble of his come followed, smearing Sam's dick and Dean's thighs as it dripped out of Dean's ass. More slipped out when Sam laid Dean back down on the bed, and he couldn't help thinking about how much more he'd left inside Dean.
Feeling dirty and weak, Sam tucked himself back inside his pants, then he pulled the lace covers back up over Dean's fucked-out body, like he was shoveling dirt back into an open grave.
He touched Dean's cheek, only very gently, then backed off the bed.
"It's okay," he said. "I found you. I know what I'm doing. It's okay."
:::
When he finally made it back outside, Sam threw up.
It really wasn't okay.
:::
In the distance, the gabled roof of the house could still be seen when Sam reached the crypt. His cheeks were burning cold, and his fingertips stung, hands clumsy, as he picked the lock on the metal gate.
The crypt dated back to the civil war. Once, it had been located right in the middle of a Union cemetery. But the tombstones had cracked and tumbled over time, the bodies they stood for forgotten beneath the dark earth, and the crypt was alone now, the last outpost of memory.
It was as cold inside the small stone chamber as it was outside in the roaring wind. Sam set his bag on the ground and took out notepad and pencil. The notepad was new and he opened it to the clean first page, ready for ruin like fresh snow.
"I know there are more of you out there," he said, addressing the air. "There's more than my brother and the little girl we came here for. So, tell me about Bonefingers."
He huffed warm breath on his hands and rubbed them together as he waited. It was quiet long enough for Sam to be considering giving up. Then, seemingly from inside the walls, there was the rattle of a few pebbles falling. Quiet again.
On the notepad, the pencil rose up, shaky like a newborn calf finding its legs, the point still resting on the paper. Sam didn't even dare breathe. It had grown colder still than before, so cold it seemed to freeze sound into silence.
The pencil moved. It scratched out words with awkward precision.
Sam let out a sigh of relief and grinned skywards. Stupid how words from dead people could make him feel less alone, but it had been one whole month since Dean was stolen, a month of nobody but him, and suddenly there was someone he could talk to about it, someone who might not just give cryptic little messages before disappearing.
"So, what is Bonefingers?"
Another pause, the pencil wobbling on the page.
Okay, so maybe not cryptic but still not exactly illuminating.
"Yes, but what is he? Warlock, lich, ghost?"
Just Bonefingers then. Nothing for Sam to work with. He sighed, scraped his fingers through his hair and studied the wavering pencil for a moment.
"You're his victims then? The ones he killed?"
"What did he do to you?"
There was a long pause before the pencil moved again, drawing a shaky, wandering line as if considering, then wrote,
The pencil jerked and Sam got the impression of it being wrenched away. This time when it wrote, the words were fast, scribbled.
He swallowed. "Then what did he do?"
A mournful wail rose up on a sudden blast of wind, hollow and scraping through the cold stones of the crypt.
Sam's stomach lurched queasily. He'd left Dean lying in that soiled bed, in that godforsaken house, he'd left Dean for Bonefingers. It wasn't like Sam had had any choice - the mind whammy Bonefingers had put on him had convinced Dean he was in love - but that didn't make Sam feel even a little bit better about it.
He wanted to be sick again. He wished they'd never come here.
Instead, they came, Dean was gone, and Sam was left to do the best he could. It felt unpleasantly like the new status quo.
"How many of you are there?"
The names kept on coming, one over another, blacking out the page like a swarm of flies against the sky. It was too much; the pencil's furious scrawl degenerated into illegible scribbling. With a crack louder than it should have been, the pencil point broke and the pencil dropped.
It rolled slowly across the crypt floor and came to rest a few inches from Sam's feet.
:::
After Bonefingers' mansion and the crypt, the motel room seemed deceptively bland: quiet and mundane, and strange because of it.
Sam dumped his bag and stripped out of his clothes. As he tugged his undershirt off, he thought, for a second, that he smelled Dean on him. Just a faint scent of his skin and the sickly sweetness Bonefingers had left on his breath. He balled the undershirt up and stuffed it into the bottom of his duffel.
He showered and then called out for pizza, which he had no appetite to eat when it came. Instead, he read through missing persons reports on his laptop. Now that he was looking for missing adults, not missing children, he found plenty. A horrifying number. He even found her, the one they'd come here for.
She was smiling in the picture the report had of her, a pretty brunette in her twenties. But it was the same heart locket around her neck.
The room shifted, just slightly, around him. Sam looked up and she was stood at the end of his bed. The blood on her legs was still sticky smears, never drying. She held up three fingers, then carefully curled one of them down.
"One down, two to go," said Sam. "I get it. Then what? How do I kill Bonefingers?"
She smiled and shook her head.
tbc