Fic: Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water 8/?; PG-13
Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water
Summary: Sci-fi AU, with cliches galore! Orbiting platforms, nanotechnology, hyperintelligent machines bent on interstellar conquest, monofilament wire, highly trained not-quite-human killers, artifical intelligences, kidnapped girlfriends and mysterious pasts. And Sam just wanted to be normal.
(I'm sorry, can you tell I'm enjoying this?)
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Every Snowflake…8/?
“Winchester?” Dean was saying, face contorted with insufferable glee.
“It’s a name,” Sam retorted irritably, resisting the urge to reach out and smack the obnoxious bastard upside his head. “Jackass,” he added, for good measure.
“Oh it’s a name, all right,” Dean returned. “Not really subtle, though, is it? Not so much about flyin’ under the radar there, huh Sammy?”
“Stop calling me that! It’s Sam, okay? And lotsa people’ve had the name-not just, y’know, the guy who made the gun, or whatever. ”
“I think it’s a rifle, actually,” the older man mused, adding after a brief pause, “Sam,” in a long drawl that scraped on Sam’s nerves like a file being dragged along his spine. He bristled.
“You’re so freakin’ annoying! I should’ve left you behind!”
“Good luck trying,” Dean retorted cheerfully, but he didn’t elaborate. Sam scowled down at the street. Way down. They were currently perched about two stories up, sitting on the roof of a building Sam had previously only seen from the ground. He found he preferred it from that angle. But Dean had insisted.
“Nobody really looks up, Sam,” Dean had informed him with, he thought, an unnecessarily hard whack to the shoulder. “It’s a cliché, sure, but it’s also true. Human nature. Don’t ask me why, but it’s pretty universal, unless you get it trained outta you. Or programmed out.”
Sam was trying not to think too hard about what ‘programmed’ meant in this context.
“We're the first, last, and only real defense the Earth has.”
Dean had made that announcement with disturbing calm. After which he’d pretty much failed to go into any further detail, waving away Sam’s questions and swinging himself unsteadily to his feet.
“We heal fast,” he’d said, which wasn’t really much of an explanation at all in Sam’s book. “I’ll be fine in another couple hours.”
Sam was pretty sure that the ‘only real defense’ and ‘we heal fast’ things were connected.
He just wasn’t sure how. Wasn’t all that sure he wanted to know, except that for some insane reason he, Sam Winchester (whose name was perfectly normal and not at all showy, thank-you-very-much), was caught up in something that was really too damn big and complicated to fully comprehend. That, among other things, had involved his girlfriend being kidnapped. And Sam wasn’t really trusting Dean’s reassurances that she’d be “just fine.” He’d allowed himself to be sidetracked thus far, mostly due to being kidnapped himself, and attacked, and spattered in blood, and latched onto by a man whose capacity for violence Sam suspected had yet to be fully plumbed.
But Sam was nothing if not determined, once he’d attached himself to an idea, and since he’d woken up in the shitty little motel room surrounded by strangers one thought had continued to burn like a small but insistent pilot light in the back of his mind. Jess, save Jess find Jess get Jess Jess Jess. He was sorry about Jimmy. He actually was. But Jimmy wasn’t his responsibility. Jess was.
He really didn’t know what to make of the fact that Dean seemed to have decided Jess was somehow his responsibility as well, apparently by simple virtue of the fact that he now seemed determined not to let Sam out of his sight again.
So now here they were, perched across the street from the run-down little two-story that Sam and Jess had called home for the past seventeen-and-a-half months. They were coming up on an anniversary, for God’s sake. He and Dean had been perched in place for about an hour, and Sam was starting to feel a little restless.
“Come on, man,” he tried, and hoped he didn’t sound nearly as whiny as he suspected he did. (Like a little brother, some small traitorous voice in the back of his head whispered, before he unceremoniously squashed it.) “We haven’t seen anybody go in or out. There’s nobody in there. Nobody’s coming back.”
Dean pressed his lips together. He shot a quick glance at Sam, then at the apparently empty house. Rubbed a hand across his mouth in a gesture Sam had never seen before and which struck him as suddenly, terrifyingly familiar.
I don’t have a brother, he reminded himself fiercely.
“A few more minutes,” Dean declared, with an air of final authority that left Sam gaping, as if Dean couldn’t conceptualize a world where he wasn’t the one giving the orders.
Sam swallowed back the angry retort, something petulant and childish like, “You’re not the boss of me!” or “I never wanted your help in the first place!” Dean would just shoot him another ridiculous grin, and probably mock him some more.
The minutes stretched. Sam was uncomfortable and bored with this poor man’s stakeout. There should at least have been doughnuts and coffee.
Mm. Coffee.
“Man, screw this, I’m going.” Sam bit the words out and ignored Dean’s alarmed protest as he clambered to his feet and headed for the fire escape. Shook off the hand on his arm and swung one leg over the edge of the roof, and only paused when Dean sprang cleanly over the lip and landed with a thud behind him, shaking the entire rickety structure.
“Dammit Dean!” he snarled, and shoved the other man for good measure, “You’re gonna get us both killed!”
Expecting a cheeky grin and a smartass retort, he was taken aback when Dean grabbed his shoulders in an iron grip and hauled him down, until they were both crouching awkwardly behind the iron rail.
“Shut up you jackass. Look! Look down there!”
Maybe it was the urgency in Dean’s expression, the way his eyes managed to be both wide and narrowly piercing at the same time, which Sam was pretty sure was physically impossible. He was managing it, though, and digging his fingers into Sam’s shoulder for good measure.
Sam looked.
“Holy crap,” he hissed, only remembering at the last moment to lower his voice. “That’s-how did-I saw her-”
“Yeah,” Dean said grimly.
“She was bleeding from her neck. You like, garroted her! Or-is there some kind of technical ter-”
“Shh!” Dean clapped a hand over his mouth, looking scandalized. “Shut up! Christ,” he continued in lower tones, “You’re the-the most Sam Sam I’ve ever met.”
He wanted to ask if that was supposed to be some kind of compliment (and also what the hell that was supposed to mean, exactly), but judging by the look on Dean’s face, he wasn’t sure himself.
“Mmf,” he retorted instead, and Dean rolled his eyes and drew back.
“How did she-it-they-whatever-how’d they even find this place?”
Dean hoisted an eyebrow. “They’re machines, Sam, they’re designed to adapt to new environments and collect data. And they’re looking for you. They woulda found it sooner or later.”
“Well…” he paused, and added, “Shit.”
“Yeah,” Dean agreed.
Shit.
The little blonde thing in the pixie haircut with the smile like a shark, last seen dangling by her neck from an overpass and bleeding all over the place, was most definitely not dead. Sam boggled. Peering down from this distance, he couldn’t tell if she showed any evidence of the injury Dean had inflicted with his mysterious invisible wire, or whatever it was he’d used, but she moved with a cheerful bounce in her step that suggested a lack of any real concern over any sort of life endangering injuries, and her head definitely wasn’t wobbling in a way that suggested it was near to popping off.
Great. Fabulous.
“She doesn’t look like much of a threat,” Sam observed, cocking his head and keeping his voice low. The fact that he could actually hear Dean roll his eyes was something he wasn’t thinking about.
“Packaging’s got nothing to do with it, Sam. She’s stronger and faster than any normal human could hope to be, with the IQ of a nuclear physicist and the morals of New York insult comic. I caught ‘em by surprise last time-that’s how I managed to get in enough hits to scare them off. Now they know I’m around they’ll be more careful. And she’ll go straight through me to get to you.”
“Why does she want me, though? You didn’t explain anything about that!”
Dean fidgeted. “It’s complicated.”
“More complicated than that spiel you gave me about the war for the solar system?”
“…yeah.”
“You know, I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation,” Sam muttered.
“You’re not. This is actually all a crazy dream.” Dean paused, then added for good measure, “Crazy.”
Sam surprised himself by snorting. It wasn’t that Dean’s deadpan delivery had been in any way funny, though. Sam was probably just in shock. He’d start freaking out later, when they were out of here. When Sam was out of here. When they-he had Jess back. Then he could hold on and never, ever let go. And give Dean the boot for good measure.
Below them Blondie was circling around the rear of the house. Sam’s lips thinned at the thought of that-whatever-walking across his kitchen floor. The one he and Jess took turns cleaning with that lemon-smelling stuff. Sam loved that stuff.
“Is there anything we can do?” he blurted, and resolutely did not wonder why he’d said ‘we.’ Dean didn’t seem to have noticed Sam’s suddenly inclusive attitude, as he continued staring with squinty-eyed determinationat the spot where the girl-thing had last stood. He slapped Sam roughly on the shoulder and got to his feet.
“There’s at least one thing we can do,” he said, and Sam was halfway down the fire escape before he even realized he was following the other man. As if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“Dean,” Sam hissed, drawing up behind him and resisting the sudden urge to shove him, “Dean! You wanna maybe elaborate a little here?”
The self-satisfied grin flashed in his direction did absolutely nothing to calm Sam’s sudden case of nerves, and neither did the words that followed.
“Relax, Sammy. This is what I’m built for.”
--
Dean honestly didn’t know what the hell he was doing.
It wasn’t that the part where he was sneaking up on a brokedown house, pursuing a cloud of intelligent nanomachines crammed into the body of a little blonde girl, without backup and no weapon but a spool of monofilament wire in his pocket, didn’t seem pretty damn clear. He felt he had a good grasp on that whole situation. Where he was having trouble with at the moment was in regards to the boy sneaking along with him, for all the world as if he’d been born to it. Which, okay, was a pretty fair assessment. But how much did Sam-this Sam-really know? How much instinct and muscle memory did he retain, and how much had been lost or buried by the unknown number of years spent in the backwater off-planet shithole platform?
Hell, he’d already taken one nasty blow to the head for this kid. Did he really need another?
“Sam,” he hissed, drawing up under the sill of the kitchen window and hauling the younger man in close, “You stay out here while I check the place out.
“What? No!”
Oh God.
Every Sam, every time. It never failed.
“You stay. You’re not even armed for Chrissake. Just-stay here and shut the hell up, and hope Blondie doesn’t notice you before she notices me.”
He doesn’t give Sam a chance to reply, turning away and ducking through the back door, ignoring the indignant sputtering going on behind him.
So predictable.
He eased himself carefully into a silent, open room that he recognized, after a moment’s blankness, as a kitchen. It wasn’t like any kitchen he’d ever been in-the tiles were colored, the walls too, and along with the pans and knives and cooking utensils were scattered strange wall hangings, and photos decorated the glossy surface of a white refrigerator.
In spite of himself, Dean padded across the floor and peered at the photos. Sam’s face-the Sam crouched outside-smiled out at him, alongside his pretty blonde girlfriend and a crowd of other young people with wildly varying features. Some had big eyes, some small, some were wide-mouthed and some not. Black hair, red hair, some in shades that didn’t occur in nature…Dean drew back, lip curling a little. He’d never seen any of these faces before. Sam looked strange and vulnerable in that crowd of aliens.
He found himself wondering, again, where this Sam’s Dean was. Dead? Abandoned? Sacrificed? Or had he escaped as well, only to be recovered by hunters like Gordon and Kubrick? Had Sam mourned him? Did he even know what he’d lost?
Take care of Sammy.
How could a Sam survive without his Dean?
He slipped along the counter, moving as soundlessly as he was able. No noise came from the other room, but that didn’t really mean much. Chances were, Blondie knew he was here. In all probability she was lying in wait for him. Criminy. Didn’t he have a responsibility to Jimmy? To Claire and Castiel? Why in hell was he here wasting time with a Sam who didn’t know jack about shit, when he should be looking for Jimmy and maybe even saving his life?
He slipped around the corner into the half-destroyed room where he’d encountered the hunters and kicked the crap out of one of them. Silence reigned and it was, frankly, really really creepy. He stuffed a hand in his pocket and pulled out the spool of monofilament wire.
And froze when something cold and sharp tickled the hair at the back of his neck.
“Now now,” Blondie said, in a voice way too perky for Dean’s own good, “My neck doesn’t need any more ventilation in it, thank you very much. Just drop that on the floor there, sweet thing.”
With a quiet curse, he did. The spool hit the floor with a soft thump and he could feel Blondie’s smile.
“So,” the perky voice continued, dripping smugness, “Our little Sammy isn’t so alone after all. Shame.”
“You leave him the hell alone, you bitch.”
“Oh Dean. Clever threats never were your strong point. Why don’t we just dispense with the foreplay and I’ll gut you right here, okay peaches? Turn around now.”
The knife bit into the skin of his neck sharply enough to draw blood, and Dean bared his teeth. He turned around, slowly, to face the girl he’d failed to kill, and glowered at her.
“Oh,” she faked a pout, hip cocked and knife held just above his clavicle, “You’re not happy to see me.”
“It doesn’t matter if you kill me,” he said tightly. “You know it doesn’t.”
Her smile showed every one of her teeth.
“Oh come on. You’re defective, Dean-o,” she told him, voice matter-of-fact, “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. So we both know exactly how much it matters.”
“Go to hell.”
“No such place, Dean. Not for lifeforms like us.” She adjusted her grip on the knife, angling it and forcing Dean to drop to his knees or impale himself. He hit the floor without taking his eyes from her face.
He just hoped Sam had the good sense to run far, far away.
______________________________
Because Sam is famous for his good sense, right?
Part 9
Summary: Sci-fi AU, with cliches galore! Orbiting platforms, nanotechnology, hyperintelligent machines bent on interstellar conquest, monofilament wire, highly trained not-quite-human killers, artifical intelligences, kidnapped girlfriends and mysterious pasts. And Sam just wanted to be normal.
(I'm sorry, can you tell I'm enjoying this?)
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Every Snowflake…8/?
“Winchester?” Dean was saying, face contorted with insufferable glee.
“It’s a name,” Sam retorted irritably, resisting the urge to reach out and smack the obnoxious bastard upside his head. “Jackass,” he added, for good measure.
“Oh it’s a name, all right,” Dean returned. “Not really subtle, though, is it? Not so much about flyin’ under the radar there, huh Sammy?”
“Stop calling me that! It’s Sam, okay? And lotsa people’ve had the name-not just, y’know, the guy who made the gun, or whatever. ”
“I think it’s a rifle, actually,” the older man mused, adding after a brief pause, “Sam,” in a long drawl that scraped on Sam’s nerves like a file being dragged along his spine. He bristled.
“You’re so freakin’ annoying! I should’ve left you behind!”
“Good luck trying,” Dean retorted cheerfully, but he didn’t elaborate. Sam scowled down at the street. Way down. They were currently perched about two stories up, sitting on the roof of a building Sam had previously only seen from the ground. He found he preferred it from that angle. But Dean had insisted.
“Nobody really looks up, Sam,” Dean had informed him with, he thought, an unnecessarily hard whack to the shoulder. “It’s a cliché, sure, but it’s also true. Human nature. Don’t ask me why, but it’s pretty universal, unless you get it trained outta you. Or programmed out.”
Sam was trying not to think too hard about what ‘programmed’ meant in this context.
“We're the first, last, and only real defense the Earth has.”
Dean had made that announcement with disturbing calm. After which he’d pretty much failed to go into any further detail, waving away Sam’s questions and swinging himself unsteadily to his feet.
“We heal fast,” he’d said, which wasn’t really much of an explanation at all in Sam’s book. “I’ll be fine in another couple hours.”
Sam was pretty sure that the ‘only real defense’ and ‘we heal fast’ things were connected.
He just wasn’t sure how. Wasn’t all that sure he wanted to know, except that for some insane reason he, Sam Winchester (whose name was perfectly normal and not at all showy, thank-you-very-much), was caught up in something that was really too damn big and complicated to fully comprehend. That, among other things, had involved his girlfriend being kidnapped. And Sam wasn’t really trusting Dean’s reassurances that she’d be “just fine.” He’d allowed himself to be sidetracked thus far, mostly due to being kidnapped himself, and attacked, and spattered in blood, and latched onto by a man whose capacity for violence Sam suspected had yet to be fully plumbed.
But Sam was nothing if not determined, once he’d attached himself to an idea, and since he’d woken up in the shitty little motel room surrounded by strangers one thought had continued to burn like a small but insistent pilot light in the back of his mind. Jess, save Jess find Jess get Jess Jess Jess. He was sorry about Jimmy. He actually was. But Jimmy wasn’t his responsibility. Jess was.
He really didn’t know what to make of the fact that Dean seemed to have decided Jess was somehow his responsibility as well, apparently by simple virtue of the fact that he now seemed determined not to let Sam out of his sight again.
So now here they were, perched across the street from the run-down little two-story that Sam and Jess had called home for the past seventeen-and-a-half months. They were coming up on an anniversary, for God’s sake. He and Dean had been perched in place for about an hour, and Sam was starting to feel a little restless.
“Come on, man,” he tried, and hoped he didn’t sound nearly as whiny as he suspected he did. (Like a little brother, some small traitorous voice in the back of his head whispered, before he unceremoniously squashed it.) “We haven’t seen anybody go in or out. There’s nobody in there. Nobody’s coming back.”
Dean pressed his lips together. He shot a quick glance at Sam, then at the apparently empty house. Rubbed a hand across his mouth in a gesture Sam had never seen before and which struck him as suddenly, terrifyingly familiar.
I don’t have a brother, he reminded himself fiercely.
“A few more minutes,” Dean declared, with an air of final authority that left Sam gaping, as if Dean couldn’t conceptualize a world where he wasn’t the one giving the orders.
Sam swallowed back the angry retort, something petulant and childish like, “You’re not the boss of me!” or “I never wanted your help in the first place!” Dean would just shoot him another ridiculous grin, and probably mock him some more.
The minutes stretched. Sam was uncomfortable and bored with this poor man’s stakeout. There should at least have been doughnuts and coffee.
Mm. Coffee.
“Man, screw this, I’m going.” Sam bit the words out and ignored Dean’s alarmed protest as he clambered to his feet and headed for the fire escape. Shook off the hand on his arm and swung one leg over the edge of the roof, and only paused when Dean sprang cleanly over the lip and landed with a thud behind him, shaking the entire rickety structure.
“Dammit Dean!” he snarled, and shoved the other man for good measure, “You’re gonna get us both killed!”
Expecting a cheeky grin and a smartass retort, he was taken aback when Dean grabbed his shoulders in an iron grip and hauled him down, until they were both crouching awkwardly behind the iron rail.
“Shut up you jackass. Look! Look down there!”
Maybe it was the urgency in Dean’s expression, the way his eyes managed to be both wide and narrowly piercing at the same time, which Sam was pretty sure was physically impossible. He was managing it, though, and digging his fingers into Sam’s shoulder for good measure.
Sam looked.
“Holy crap,” he hissed, only remembering at the last moment to lower his voice. “That’s-how did-I saw her-”
“Yeah,” Dean said grimly.
“She was bleeding from her neck. You like, garroted her! Or-is there some kind of technical ter-”
“Shh!” Dean clapped a hand over his mouth, looking scandalized. “Shut up! Christ,” he continued in lower tones, “You’re the-the most Sam Sam I’ve ever met.”
He wanted to ask if that was supposed to be some kind of compliment (and also what the hell that was supposed to mean, exactly), but judging by the look on Dean’s face, he wasn’t sure himself.
“Mmf,” he retorted instead, and Dean rolled his eyes and drew back.
“How did she-it-they-whatever-how’d they even find this place?”
Dean hoisted an eyebrow. “They’re machines, Sam, they’re designed to adapt to new environments and collect data. And they’re looking for you. They woulda found it sooner or later.”
“Well…” he paused, and added, “Shit.”
“Yeah,” Dean agreed.
Shit.
The little blonde thing in the pixie haircut with the smile like a shark, last seen dangling by her neck from an overpass and bleeding all over the place, was most definitely not dead. Sam boggled. Peering down from this distance, he couldn’t tell if she showed any evidence of the injury Dean had inflicted with his mysterious invisible wire, or whatever it was he’d used, but she moved with a cheerful bounce in her step that suggested a lack of any real concern over any sort of life endangering injuries, and her head definitely wasn’t wobbling in a way that suggested it was near to popping off.
Great. Fabulous.
“She doesn’t look like much of a threat,” Sam observed, cocking his head and keeping his voice low. The fact that he could actually hear Dean roll his eyes was something he wasn’t thinking about.
“Packaging’s got nothing to do with it, Sam. She’s stronger and faster than any normal human could hope to be, with the IQ of a nuclear physicist and the morals of New York insult comic. I caught ‘em by surprise last time-that’s how I managed to get in enough hits to scare them off. Now they know I’m around they’ll be more careful. And she’ll go straight through me to get to you.”
“Why does she want me, though? You didn’t explain anything about that!”
Dean fidgeted. “It’s complicated.”
“More complicated than that spiel you gave me about the war for the solar system?”
“…yeah.”
“You know, I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation,” Sam muttered.
“You’re not. This is actually all a crazy dream.” Dean paused, then added for good measure, “Crazy.”
Sam surprised himself by snorting. It wasn’t that Dean’s deadpan delivery had been in any way funny, though. Sam was probably just in shock. He’d start freaking out later, when they were out of here. When Sam was out of here. When they-he had Jess back. Then he could hold on and never, ever let go. And give Dean the boot for good measure.
Below them Blondie was circling around the rear of the house. Sam’s lips thinned at the thought of that-whatever-walking across his kitchen floor. The one he and Jess took turns cleaning with that lemon-smelling stuff. Sam loved that stuff.
“Is there anything we can do?” he blurted, and resolutely did not wonder why he’d said ‘we.’ Dean didn’t seem to have noticed Sam’s suddenly inclusive attitude, as he continued staring with squinty-eyed determinationat the spot where the girl-thing had last stood. He slapped Sam roughly on the shoulder and got to his feet.
“There’s at least one thing we can do,” he said, and Sam was halfway down the fire escape before he even realized he was following the other man. As if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“Dean,” Sam hissed, drawing up behind him and resisting the sudden urge to shove him, “Dean! You wanna maybe elaborate a little here?”
The self-satisfied grin flashed in his direction did absolutely nothing to calm Sam’s sudden case of nerves, and neither did the words that followed.
“Relax, Sammy. This is what I’m built for.”
--
Dean honestly didn’t know what the hell he was doing.
It wasn’t that the part where he was sneaking up on a brokedown house, pursuing a cloud of intelligent nanomachines crammed into the body of a little blonde girl, without backup and no weapon but a spool of monofilament wire in his pocket, didn’t seem pretty damn clear. He felt he had a good grasp on that whole situation. Where he was having trouble with at the moment was in regards to the boy sneaking along with him, for all the world as if he’d been born to it. Which, okay, was a pretty fair assessment. But how much did Sam-this Sam-really know? How much instinct and muscle memory did he retain, and how much had been lost or buried by the unknown number of years spent in the backwater off-planet shithole platform?
Hell, he’d already taken one nasty blow to the head for this kid. Did he really need another?
“Sam,” he hissed, drawing up under the sill of the kitchen window and hauling the younger man in close, “You stay out here while I check the place out.
“What? No!”
Oh God.
Every Sam, every time. It never failed.
“You stay. You’re not even armed for Chrissake. Just-stay here and shut the hell up, and hope Blondie doesn’t notice you before she notices me.”
He doesn’t give Sam a chance to reply, turning away and ducking through the back door, ignoring the indignant sputtering going on behind him.
So predictable.
He eased himself carefully into a silent, open room that he recognized, after a moment’s blankness, as a kitchen. It wasn’t like any kitchen he’d ever been in-the tiles were colored, the walls too, and along with the pans and knives and cooking utensils were scattered strange wall hangings, and photos decorated the glossy surface of a white refrigerator.
In spite of himself, Dean padded across the floor and peered at the photos. Sam’s face-the Sam crouched outside-smiled out at him, alongside his pretty blonde girlfriend and a crowd of other young people with wildly varying features. Some had big eyes, some small, some were wide-mouthed and some not. Black hair, red hair, some in shades that didn’t occur in nature…Dean drew back, lip curling a little. He’d never seen any of these faces before. Sam looked strange and vulnerable in that crowd of aliens.
He found himself wondering, again, where this Sam’s Dean was. Dead? Abandoned? Sacrificed? Or had he escaped as well, only to be recovered by hunters like Gordon and Kubrick? Had Sam mourned him? Did he even know what he’d lost?
Take care of Sammy.
How could a Sam survive without his Dean?
He slipped along the counter, moving as soundlessly as he was able. No noise came from the other room, but that didn’t really mean much. Chances were, Blondie knew he was here. In all probability she was lying in wait for him. Criminy. Didn’t he have a responsibility to Jimmy? To Claire and Castiel? Why in hell was he here wasting time with a Sam who didn’t know jack about shit, when he should be looking for Jimmy and maybe even saving his life?
He slipped around the corner into the half-destroyed room where he’d encountered the hunters and kicked the crap out of one of them. Silence reigned and it was, frankly, really really creepy. He stuffed a hand in his pocket and pulled out the spool of monofilament wire.
And froze when something cold and sharp tickled the hair at the back of his neck.
“Now now,” Blondie said, in a voice way too perky for Dean’s own good, “My neck doesn’t need any more ventilation in it, thank you very much. Just drop that on the floor there, sweet thing.”
With a quiet curse, he did. The spool hit the floor with a soft thump and he could feel Blondie’s smile.
“So,” the perky voice continued, dripping smugness, “Our little Sammy isn’t so alone after all. Shame.”
“You leave him the hell alone, you bitch.”
“Oh Dean. Clever threats never were your strong point. Why don’t we just dispense with the foreplay and I’ll gut you right here, okay peaches? Turn around now.”
The knife bit into the skin of his neck sharply enough to draw blood, and Dean bared his teeth. He turned around, slowly, to face the girl he’d failed to kill, and glowered at her.
“Oh,” she faked a pout, hip cocked and knife held just above his clavicle, “You’re not happy to see me.”
“It doesn’t matter if you kill me,” he said tightly. “You know it doesn’t.”
Her smile showed every one of her teeth.
“Oh come on. You’re defective, Dean-o,” she told him, voice matter-of-fact, “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. So we both know exactly how much it matters.”
“Go to hell.”
“No such place, Dean. Not for lifeforms like us.” She adjusted her grip on the knife, angling it and forcing Dean to drop to his knees or impale himself. He hit the floor without taking his eyes from her face.
He just hoped Sam had the good sense to run far, far away.
______________________________
Because Sam is famous for his good sense, right?
Part 9