Fic: Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water 6/?
Every Snowflake is a Drop of water 6/?
Summary: SF AU, silliness.
Warnings: This chapter contains blood and violence. This is really very violent. And not very funny. Whoops! (There is seriously a lot of blood. I was a little shocked myself.)
Parte the first
Parte the second
Parte the third
Parte the fourth
Parte the fifth
____________________________
Every Snowflake… 6/?
“It’s worse than that,” Dean said curtly, as Cas scrambled quickly up the ladder toward the roof. “A lot worse. It wasn’t Gordon and his very special friend.”
“Other hunters? Reinforcements?”
Dean hoisted himself up over the lip of the roof with a grunt.
“Didn’t get a good look. Could be hunters, could be worse.”
“Let’s hope that’s not the case. Why did Jimmy stay behind?”
“To distract them. Wanted me to find you, and Claire. Keep you guys safe. And to keep an eye on-” He half-turned to glance back at the lip of the roof and froze, briefly, muscles in his shoulders tensing and a growl making it past suddenly clenched teeth.
“Son of a bitch,” he ground out, quietly. Cas’ eyes flicked from his face to the empty space behind him.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll look after Claire.”
“Jimmy’ll kill us both if anything happens to-”
“Go. We’ll be fine. Sam won’t.”
Dean dithered. Just for a moment. It wasn’t that Castiel wasn’t the most equipped, out of all of them, to deal with any potential threat that could arise. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t blend in more readily than Dean could ever hope to, or teleport, or, if really absolutely necessary, deliver a truly righteous smacking to whoever might dare to threaten her host. The problem was that Dean wanted to chase after Sam, needed to with the entirety of his being, and he was fighting that aspect of himself as hard as he could. Which spelled about fifteen seconds of hesitation on his part, which was some kind of record for any Dean to wait before haring off to rescue his wayward “brother.”
“Be safe, Dean,” Castiel murmured as he scrambled back over the edge of the building, but if he heard her words, he didn’t respond.
A moment later, the rooftop was empty.
--
Sam knew the city as well as any of the natives, almost as if he’d lived here his entire life. Sometimes he felt as if he’d committed the whole layout of the residential section of the orbiting platform to memory at some point, because he often found himself in areas he’d never visited yet, on some level, recognized and understood fundamentally in relation to the larger city blueprints.
It was one of those things he tried not to examine too closely.
Now he was huddled under an overpass blocks away from his own neighborhood, clutching the stolen bag and fighting to catch his breath. He wasn’t really out of shape, he didn’t think, but running full-pelt away from kidnappers and possibly toward unknown danger and a missing girlfriend was not the sort of thing he’d ever trained for, and now his feet hurt, his legs twinged, and his lungs struggled to drag breath into his body. His fingers clenched and unclenched spasmodically on the bag and it was only after several long minutes that he felt comfortable enough to relax his grip and raise his eyes to the artificial river, flowing languidly beneath the cloudless blue sky.
He sucked another few breaths through his nose and mouth and looked down at the bag in his arms. It was heavy, disturbingly so, and whenever he jostled it even slightly it made a distinctly metallic noise that Sam felt boded no good for anybody. Kidnappers. Crazy kidnappers who beat people up in alleys and invaded people’s homes and fought other…other crazy kidnappers and apparently harbored at least one genuinely mentally ill person, if his guesses about Claire-slash-“Cas” were anywhere near to being correct. Oh God. And now he was sitting here with a bag full of their unexpectedly solid, decidedly metallic heavy objects that could not be left behind even as they abandoned a room with food and clothes and computer parts and whatever other personal effects they presumably had stashed around the place.
The bag was full of weapons.
He didn’t even need to open it to know that was the case.
He didn’t need to.
But he opened it anyway.
--
Dean ran.
He wasn’t really designed for it. Not the way Sam was, all long legs and lean body. Dean was meant for close-quarter combat, and it showed in his genetic makeup: broad in the shoulders, strong and solid and quick. Running was not his favorite pastime.
Which isn’t to say he wasn’t good at it. He was pretty good at it. Even in the second-hand boots that fit wrong he ate up the distance between himself and Sam rapidly. It helped that Sam had stopped moving.
Sam had a head start. If he’d kept moving, if he’d headed for the ‘dock, hitched a ride on a transport off of St. Sebastian to some other, even more backwater orbital platform, Dean might have lost him. The chances were good, actually, and Dean had a sudden image of himself standing at the ‘docks, staring up at the orbital elevators in despair, too late, too late.
But Sam didn’t go to the ‘dock. It probably didn’t even occur to him that he should. He probably didn’t even realize that Dean knew exactly where he was, in relation to his own person, didn’t know that Dean could track his psychic signal pretty much anywhere he happened to roam while he remained on the platform. It was disturbing to imagine a Sam who didn’t know something like that, something so fundamental, so basic, to the nature of his own existence, but…it would make Dean’s job a hell of a lot easier. (And it was his job. Would continue to be his job.)
Unfortunately, Dean didn’t have a clear idea of the layout of the city, and suddenly he found himself wishing Cas had downloaded the entire map to his brain. It would have let him avoid running up against dead ends, blind alleys, unexpected waterways and branching tunnels that slowed his progress and left him sweaty, swearing and increasingly agitated.
The longer Sam stayed in one place, the more likely he was to get into trouble.
Despite his own sense of urgency, Dean started praying for Sam to get moving.
The fact that Sam probably couldn’t even hear him only added to the surreality of the situation.
--
The fact that his hands were actually shaking was not the main reason he’d been distracted. The shaking hands thing was mostly a side-effect of the sense of hollow near-nausea that had blossomed in his gut and left him once again struggling to draw breath, glad he was sitting down because if he hadn’t been then his legs would certainly have given out and dumped him unceremoniously into the mud and gravel and dirt beside the river.
He couldn’t catch his breath. The world wasn’t under him at all-he was hanging in space, adrenaline and fear thrilling along his skin, up his arms and through his fingers, running down his back and shivering over his ribcage.
…the one that got away…
…still makin’ my life difficult…
…you're not asleep, are ya, sam?...
…open them baby blues…
…sam…
Sam
Sammy?
“Saaaammmmyyyyy.”
He bit his lip, and looked up.
He wasn’t alone.
He dropped what he was holding.
--
Dean was getting closer. He could smell water, hear the noise of boats on the river.
The river.
He pushed himself to go faster.
--
“Hi Sam!” chirped a cheerful pretty face under a little pixie haircut, and Sam stared at the girl, at the hand waving perkily at him, at her cocked hip and little smirk. At the two big bruisers standing just behind her, not so much smirking as looming, in a distinctly menacing way.
“Uh,” he said intelligently.
“This is a real find!” the girl enthused, “It must be my lucky day!”
Her goons did not seem to share her chirpy disposition, as they continued to glower and loom menacingly, and Sam suspected one or both of them was moments away from cracking his knuckles pointedly.
“I mean,” the little blonde thing went on, sashaying up the incline toward Sam with a mad little grin, “We knew about the others being in town-it’s why we’re here to begin with. When you get word of an actual escape from the blue city, well, you drop whatever the hell you happen to be doing and hightail it to the drop site. And it was such a dramatic escape, too. Heh.”
She drew a little closer.
“And then there’s you. Little Sammy-Sam, all growed up and by his lonesome. And you’re looking real lonesome there, Sam-my-boy.”
“Stop,” someone said, and Sam realized with surprise that it was him.
She raised her eyebrows.
“Stop what?”
“Stop-saying my name.” Leave me alone. Go away.
Who are you?
Why is this happening?
Oh, God.
She smiled like a shark.
“Well, you’re just precious.” She stepped closer, leaned down, hands on her hips like a teacher dealing with an adorably precocious two-year-old. “That’s not really your name, you know.” Her smile broadened. “You don’t have one.”
She never got farther than another step in his direction. There was a noise, a quiet little shk! as if someone had cast a fishing line, and the girl’s eyes widened almost comically. Almost, because at that moment her hands flew to her throat and a fine red line appeared in the skin, and Sam was bathed in a delicate spray of blood.
The girl flew upward, legs kicking wildly, still clawing at her throat. Sam gaped wordlessly after her, too stunned and horrified to do more. Someone had grabbed her neck in a noose, someone had actually winched her up toward the ceiling of the underpass…
Fishing line, fishing line, his brain gabbled at him. Invisible wire! Invisible-
And a figure dropped between Sam and the goons, and there was more blood.
Sam had seen movies, of course. He had, he thought, a pretty good grasp of how a fight scene was meant to go. There might be taunts, a certain amount of chatter between the combatants before they squared off. There were usually a certain amount of kicks to the head, maybe some punches, some locks, some holds. Some joints being bent the wrong way. There tended, he knew, to be a degree of distance between the individuals locked in combat, as if they were engaged in something more like a dance than a fight. Blocks often nearly preceded attacks. Fighters magically knew where their fists and elbows and feet and heads needed to be.
This wasn’t like that. Dean dropped on the two heavy men with a firearm in one hand and a six-inch serrated blade in the other. He fired twice-at the knees of all things-and the men snarled and staggered on their suddenly shattered joints.
Sam scrambled backward up the muddy incline as Dean, bizarrely, dropped his gun and surged forward, knife in hand. He plowed into one of the goons and bore him to the ground and shoved the full length of the knife into the side of the man’s neck. Blood sprayed everywhere. Everywhere. Sam slammed a hand over his mouth as Dean wrenched the knife backward, tearing a huge ragged hole through tendons and arteries and muscle.
There wasn’t time to do more. The other man attacked without a sound, aiming a vicious kick at Dean’s head, sending him tumbling away. The man he’d cut remained on the ground, grasping at his neck, at the fountaining blood, but neither his buddy nor Dean spared him the slightest glance. Dean was staggering to his feet, shaking his head, a fresh cut opened above his ear. His eyes widened slightly as the other man slammed into him, leading with his fists.
It looked like a brawl. The two men whaled away at each other, until Dean managed to grab hold of the other man’s longer hair and introduce his face to Dean’s knee. Sam winced as the man’s nose spattered across his face, as Dean slammed him again and again, pulping the flesh, breaking his teeth. The other man clawed at Dean’s leg, tried to grasp it, to bear him to the ground, but Dean had the knife.
The goon was muscle.
Dean, Sam realized, wasn’t muscle at all.
He was a killer.
Dean hit the ground hard. It didn’t matter. The other man surged forward, fist raised clumsily, face dripping blood, and he never had a chance. Not a moment of a chance. Sam knew this, saw the arc of the knife, winced before it even struck, slamming into the side of the man’s throat, the soft flesh and tendons severing under the elegant horror of a piece of sharpened metal.
The man coughed, spilling blood down his chin. It spattered on his shirt, on Dean’s face, and the knife wrenched out and slammed home again, and again, and Dean did something with his legs and forcibly rolled them both over and grabbed the man’s hair and was prepared for another vicious stab when the man’s body bucked once, violently, and dropped back hard on the earth.
Dead.
Or…
Suddenly Dean was surging to his feet and lunging for Sam. Sam flinched. Couldn’t be blamed for flinching, or for shoving himself backward over the earth, or for babbling a refrain on the variation of “Nonononono get away get away.” But Dean wasn’t deterred, simply dropped the gore-covered knife to the ground and kept coming and at the last minute, as Sam was seriously considering his chances against the blood-covered, insane man, threw himself bodily on top of Sam and forced his head to the ground, blanketing his body with as much of Dean’s own as possible.
Behind them, a noise like the screaming of monsters concussed the air, slapped them both hard against the rocky ground, squeezed Sam’s muscles until he thought they would burst. The noise went on, and on, and Sam dug his fingers into the earth and couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t see, and all he could feel was the weight of the older man on his back and the slickness of blood and the mud and the stones under his skin and oh God, what was going on, what had happened to his life, it was wrong, it was all wrong and he was going to die, to die, to die….
And then it stopped. Silence slammed back into the world, so sudden and huge Sam nearly gasped, and was glad he didn’t because he would have inhaled a lungful of dirt. Dean shifted, rolled off him, and planted a heavy boot in his ribs.
“Up, Sammy. Get the hell up. We gotta move.”
That was, he would reflect later, pretty much the definition of “last straw.”
There was a gun in the bag, the duffle Sam had opened against his better judgment. It was on the very top, next to the photo viewer he’d been clutching when the scary blonde chick with the shark smile had surprised him into dropping it. He reached out, now, for the gun and the viewer, and raised the former to point at the blood-covered man’s chest.
Slowly, Dean raised his hands. They were red.
“Gonna shoot me, Sammy?”
Sam swallowed, hard. His hands weren’t trembling, anymore, and he wasn’t sure what to think about that fact. He tried not to. Instead he raised the viewer, holding it out so the screen was clearly visible, so that there was no mistaking the image it was currently displaying.
The picture of Sam, and Dean, together. Laughing. Waving. Sam leaning heavily on the other man, as if they’d known each other all their lives.
“Who are you?” He demanded, and was amazed at how quiet, how calm, his voice was. Swallowed against the shiver that tried to run up and down his spine. “What the hell is going on?”
Dean narrowed his eyes. He looked hard at Sam’s face, at the image on the viewer, at the gun in Sam’s hand. Blood was running from the cut on his head and Sam tried to ignore the way he swayed, a little, the way his skin had gone pale. The way he swallowed before opening his mouth.
“I’m your brother,” Dean said, and then paused. “Sort of.”
__________________________________
TBC…
Part 7
___________________________________
Okay, so I love me some badass!Dean. So sue me.
Next chapter, less violence. Probably.
Summary: SF AU, silliness.
Warnings: This chapter contains blood and violence. This is really very violent. And not very funny. Whoops! (There is seriously a lot of blood. I was a little shocked myself.)
Parte the first
Parte the second
Parte the third
Parte the fourth
Parte the fifth
____________________________
Every Snowflake… 6/?
“It’s worse than that,” Dean said curtly, as Cas scrambled quickly up the ladder toward the roof. “A lot worse. It wasn’t Gordon and his very special friend.”
“Other hunters? Reinforcements?”
Dean hoisted himself up over the lip of the roof with a grunt.
“Didn’t get a good look. Could be hunters, could be worse.”
“Let’s hope that’s not the case. Why did Jimmy stay behind?”
“To distract them. Wanted me to find you, and Claire. Keep you guys safe. And to keep an eye on-” He half-turned to glance back at the lip of the roof and froze, briefly, muscles in his shoulders tensing and a growl making it past suddenly clenched teeth.
“Son of a bitch,” he ground out, quietly. Cas’ eyes flicked from his face to the empty space behind him.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll look after Claire.”
“Jimmy’ll kill us both if anything happens to-”
“Go. We’ll be fine. Sam won’t.”
Dean dithered. Just for a moment. It wasn’t that Castiel wasn’t the most equipped, out of all of them, to deal with any potential threat that could arise. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t blend in more readily than Dean could ever hope to, or teleport, or, if really absolutely necessary, deliver a truly righteous smacking to whoever might dare to threaten her host. The problem was that Dean wanted to chase after Sam, needed to with the entirety of his being, and he was fighting that aspect of himself as hard as he could. Which spelled about fifteen seconds of hesitation on his part, which was some kind of record for any Dean to wait before haring off to rescue his wayward “brother.”
“Be safe, Dean,” Castiel murmured as he scrambled back over the edge of the building, but if he heard her words, he didn’t respond.
A moment later, the rooftop was empty.
--
Sam knew the city as well as any of the natives, almost as if he’d lived here his entire life. Sometimes he felt as if he’d committed the whole layout of the residential section of the orbiting platform to memory at some point, because he often found himself in areas he’d never visited yet, on some level, recognized and understood fundamentally in relation to the larger city blueprints.
It was one of those things he tried not to examine too closely.
Now he was huddled under an overpass blocks away from his own neighborhood, clutching the stolen bag and fighting to catch his breath. He wasn’t really out of shape, he didn’t think, but running full-pelt away from kidnappers and possibly toward unknown danger and a missing girlfriend was not the sort of thing he’d ever trained for, and now his feet hurt, his legs twinged, and his lungs struggled to drag breath into his body. His fingers clenched and unclenched spasmodically on the bag and it was only after several long minutes that he felt comfortable enough to relax his grip and raise his eyes to the artificial river, flowing languidly beneath the cloudless blue sky.
He sucked another few breaths through his nose and mouth and looked down at the bag in his arms. It was heavy, disturbingly so, and whenever he jostled it even slightly it made a distinctly metallic noise that Sam felt boded no good for anybody. Kidnappers. Crazy kidnappers who beat people up in alleys and invaded people’s homes and fought other…other crazy kidnappers and apparently harbored at least one genuinely mentally ill person, if his guesses about Claire-slash-“Cas” were anywhere near to being correct. Oh God. And now he was sitting here with a bag full of their unexpectedly solid, decidedly metallic heavy objects that could not be left behind even as they abandoned a room with food and clothes and computer parts and whatever other personal effects they presumably had stashed around the place.
The bag was full of weapons.
He didn’t even need to open it to know that was the case.
He didn’t need to.
But he opened it anyway.
--
Dean ran.
He wasn’t really designed for it. Not the way Sam was, all long legs and lean body. Dean was meant for close-quarter combat, and it showed in his genetic makeup: broad in the shoulders, strong and solid and quick. Running was not his favorite pastime.
Which isn’t to say he wasn’t good at it. He was pretty good at it. Even in the second-hand boots that fit wrong he ate up the distance between himself and Sam rapidly. It helped that Sam had stopped moving.
Sam had a head start. If he’d kept moving, if he’d headed for the ‘dock, hitched a ride on a transport off of St. Sebastian to some other, even more backwater orbital platform, Dean might have lost him. The chances were good, actually, and Dean had a sudden image of himself standing at the ‘docks, staring up at the orbital elevators in despair, too late, too late.
But Sam didn’t go to the ‘dock. It probably didn’t even occur to him that he should. He probably didn’t even realize that Dean knew exactly where he was, in relation to his own person, didn’t know that Dean could track his psychic signal pretty much anywhere he happened to roam while he remained on the platform. It was disturbing to imagine a Sam who didn’t know something like that, something so fundamental, so basic, to the nature of his own existence, but…it would make Dean’s job a hell of a lot easier. (And it was his job. Would continue to be his job.)
Unfortunately, Dean didn’t have a clear idea of the layout of the city, and suddenly he found himself wishing Cas had downloaded the entire map to his brain. It would have let him avoid running up against dead ends, blind alleys, unexpected waterways and branching tunnels that slowed his progress and left him sweaty, swearing and increasingly agitated.
The longer Sam stayed in one place, the more likely he was to get into trouble.
Despite his own sense of urgency, Dean started praying for Sam to get moving.
The fact that Sam probably couldn’t even hear him only added to the surreality of the situation.
--
The fact that his hands were actually shaking was not the main reason he’d been distracted. The shaking hands thing was mostly a side-effect of the sense of hollow near-nausea that had blossomed in his gut and left him once again struggling to draw breath, glad he was sitting down because if he hadn’t been then his legs would certainly have given out and dumped him unceremoniously into the mud and gravel and dirt beside the river.
He couldn’t catch his breath. The world wasn’t under him at all-he was hanging in space, adrenaline and fear thrilling along his skin, up his arms and through his fingers, running down his back and shivering over his ribcage.
…the one that got away…
…still makin’ my life difficult…
…you're not asleep, are ya, sam?...
…open them baby blues…
…sam…
Sam
Sammy?
“Saaaammmmyyyyy.”
He bit his lip, and looked up.
He wasn’t alone.
He dropped what he was holding.
--
Dean was getting closer. He could smell water, hear the noise of boats on the river.
The river.
He pushed himself to go faster.
--
“Hi Sam!” chirped a cheerful pretty face under a little pixie haircut, and Sam stared at the girl, at the hand waving perkily at him, at her cocked hip and little smirk. At the two big bruisers standing just behind her, not so much smirking as looming, in a distinctly menacing way.
“Uh,” he said intelligently.
“This is a real find!” the girl enthused, “It must be my lucky day!”
Her goons did not seem to share her chirpy disposition, as they continued to glower and loom menacingly, and Sam suspected one or both of them was moments away from cracking his knuckles pointedly.
“I mean,” the little blonde thing went on, sashaying up the incline toward Sam with a mad little grin, “We knew about the others being in town-it’s why we’re here to begin with. When you get word of an actual escape from the blue city, well, you drop whatever the hell you happen to be doing and hightail it to the drop site. And it was such a dramatic escape, too. Heh.”
She drew a little closer.
“And then there’s you. Little Sammy-Sam, all growed up and by his lonesome. And you’re looking real lonesome there, Sam-my-boy.”
“Stop,” someone said, and Sam realized with surprise that it was him.
She raised her eyebrows.
“Stop what?”
“Stop-saying my name.” Leave me alone. Go away.
Who are you?
Why is this happening?
Oh, God.
She smiled like a shark.
“Well, you’re just precious.” She stepped closer, leaned down, hands on her hips like a teacher dealing with an adorably precocious two-year-old. “That’s not really your name, you know.” Her smile broadened. “You don’t have one.”
She never got farther than another step in his direction. There was a noise, a quiet little shk! as if someone had cast a fishing line, and the girl’s eyes widened almost comically. Almost, because at that moment her hands flew to her throat and a fine red line appeared in the skin, and Sam was bathed in a delicate spray of blood.
The girl flew upward, legs kicking wildly, still clawing at her throat. Sam gaped wordlessly after her, too stunned and horrified to do more. Someone had grabbed her neck in a noose, someone had actually winched her up toward the ceiling of the underpass…
Fishing line, fishing line, his brain gabbled at him. Invisible wire! Invisible-
And a figure dropped between Sam and the goons, and there was more blood.
Sam had seen movies, of course. He had, he thought, a pretty good grasp of how a fight scene was meant to go. There might be taunts, a certain amount of chatter between the combatants before they squared off. There were usually a certain amount of kicks to the head, maybe some punches, some locks, some holds. Some joints being bent the wrong way. There tended, he knew, to be a degree of distance between the individuals locked in combat, as if they were engaged in something more like a dance than a fight. Blocks often nearly preceded attacks. Fighters magically knew where their fists and elbows and feet and heads needed to be.
This wasn’t like that. Dean dropped on the two heavy men with a firearm in one hand and a six-inch serrated blade in the other. He fired twice-at the knees of all things-and the men snarled and staggered on their suddenly shattered joints.
Sam scrambled backward up the muddy incline as Dean, bizarrely, dropped his gun and surged forward, knife in hand. He plowed into one of the goons and bore him to the ground and shoved the full length of the knife into the side of the man’s neck. Blood sprayed everywhere. Everywhere. Sam slammed a hand over his mouth as Dean wrenched the knife backward, tearing a huge ragged hole through tendons and arteries and muscle.
There wasn’t time to do more. The other man attacked without a sound, aiming a vicious kick at Dean’s head, sending him tumbling away. The man he’d cut remained on the ground, grasping at his neck, at the fountaining blood, but neither his buddy nor Dean spared him the slightest glance. Dean was staggering to his feet, shaking his head, a fresh cut opened above his ear. His eyes widened slightly as the other man slammed into him, leading with his fists.
It looked like a brawl. The two men whaled away at each other, until Dean managed to grab hold of the other man’s longer hair and introduce his face to Dean’s knee. Sam winced as the man’s nose spattered across his face, as Dean slammed him again and again, pulping the flesh, breaking his teeth. The other man clawed at Dean’s leg, tried to grasp it, to bear him to the ground, but Dean had the knife.
The goon was muscle.
Dean, Sam realized, wasn’t muscle at all.
He was a killer.
Dean hit the ground hard. It didn’t matter. The other man surged forward, fist raised clumsily, face dripping blood, and he never had a chance. Not a moment of a chance. Sam knew this, saw the arc of the knife, winced before it even struck, slamming into the side of the man’s throat, the soft flesh and tendons severing under the elegant horror of a piece of sharpened metal.
The man coughed, spilling blood down his chin. It spattered on his shirt, on Dean’s face, and the knife wrenched out and slammed home again, and again, and Dean did something with his legs and forcibly rolled them both over and grabbed the man’s hair and was prepared for another vicious stab when the man’s body bucked once, violently, and dropped back hard on the earth.
Dead.
Or…
Suddenly Dean was surging to his feet and lunging for Sam. Sam flinched. Couldn’t be blamed for flinching, or for shoving himself backward over the earth, or for babbling a refrain on the variation of “Nonononono get away get away.” But Dean wasn’t deterred, simply dropped the gore-covered knife to the ground and kept coming and at the last minute, as Sam was seriously considering his chances against the blood-covered, insane man, threw himself bodily on top of Sam and forced his head to the ground, blanketing his body with as much of Dean’s own as possible.
Behind them, a noise like the screaming of monsters concussed the air, slapped them both hard against the rocky ground, squeezed Sam’s muscles until he thought they would burst. The noise went on, and on, and Sam dug his fingers into the earth and couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t see, and all he could feel was the weight of the older man on his back and the slickness of blood and the mud and the stones under his skin and oh God, what was going on, what had happened to his life, it was wrong, it was all wrong and he was going to die, to die, to die….
And then it stopped. Silence slammed back into the world, so sudden and huge Sam nearly gasped, and was glad he didn’t because he would have inhaled a lungful of dirt. Dean shifted, rolled off him, and planted a heavy boot in his ribs.
“Up, Sammy. Get the hell up. We gotta move.”
That was, he would reflect later, pretty much the definition of “last straw.”
There was a gun in the bag, the duffle Sam had opened against his better judgment. It was on the very top, next to the photo viewer he’d been clutching when the scary blonde chick with the shark smile had surprised him into dropping it. He reached out, now, for the gun and the viewer, and raised the former to point at the blood-covered man’s chest.
Slowly, Dean raised his hands. They were red.
“Gonna shoot me, Sammy?”
Sam swallowed, hard. His hands weren’t trembling, anymore, and he wasn’t sure what to think about that fact. He tried not to. Instead he raised the viewer, holding it out so the screen was clearly visible, so that there was no mistaking the image it was currently displaying.
The picture of Sam, and Dean, together. Laughing. Waving. Sam leaning heavily on the other man, as if they’d known each other all their lives.
“Who are you?” He demanded, and was amazed at how quiet, how calm, his voice was. Swallowed against the shiver that tried to run up and down his spine. “What the hell is going on?”
Dean narrowed his eyes. He looked hard at Sam’s face, at the image on the viewer, at the gun in Sam’s hand. Blood was running from the cut on his head and Sam tried to ignore the way he swayed, a little, the way his skin had gone pale. The way he swallowed before opening his mouth.
“I’m your brother,” Dean said, and then paused. “Sort of.”
__________________________________
TBC…
Part 7
___________________________________
Okay, so I love me some badass!Dean. So sue me.
Next chapter, less violence. Probably.