Memefic: And They Cry to See Your Face (PG13)
And They Cry to See Your Face
Warnings: Gore, language, violence.
Summary: Written for the current ohsam h/c comment-fic meme for rokhal's prompt: Sam meets old friends from Stanford and they don't recognize him, what with him and Dean swooping in all huge and violent with guns and knives and arcane rituals to rescue them all from some horrifying eldritch creature. And then his friends are all, "OMG! It's Psycho Sam who was a closet satanist and was wanted by the FBI!" And Sam is very conspicuously injured, but he and Dean can't stop to patch him up because the eldritch creature is still trying to rip their throats out. And Sam's feelings are hurt because his old friends are scared of him now.
Er, this is maybe a little more serious than the prompt called for.
...sorry.
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And They Cry to See Your Face
In the end, Jack can only hold her hand. He wishes he could do more, could reach out and gather her up, hide her face against his chest so she doesn’t have to see. He feels like a fool, clutching Leslie’s hand, bound together at the wrist, but it’s the best he can manage. He can feel the bones of her hand grinding in his desperate grip, but she doesn’t complain. Doesn’t so much as whimper.
“We’re going to die here,” she murmurs, tilting her head oddly so her hair falls across her face, “Aren’t we?”
“No.” He makes his voice as fierce as he can. “No.”
He can’t look at her face, though, and presses his lips together and turns away quickly. Unfortunately, that means he catches the eye of the man standing in the doorway, who winks.
Bastard.
Jack doesn’t know how many of them there are. Somewhere between four and six, he thinks, though they come and go and he’s never seen all of them together in the room at the same time. He’s sure there are two women, skinny little things with big eyes and wicked mouths. And a handful of men, most of them big bruisers with hands that curl themselves into fists in idle moments, and eyes that contemplate Leslie in ways that make Jack go cold deep, deep inside.
She wants him to save her and he wants to. But he can’t. Because of zip-ties and arm restraints and more leather and buckles than Jack’s ever seen in his life and it’d be hilarious if it wasn’t actually happening, and if this hadn’t suddenly somehow become his life.
But he’s bound and pinned to a wall with his fiancée and they’ve been here for two days and he doesn’t even know why.
“What do you want?” he’d demanded, five minutes into the whole black-bag-over-the-head, dragged-into-an-unmarked-van experience, and a small hand dealt him a ringing blow to the temple that toppled him over, face mashing into the seat.
A disturbingly calm, feminine voice said only, “It’s not about you, Jack.”
And that was the last time anyone other than Leslie spoke to him directly.
“Please,” he tries, catching the eye of the winking guard, holding his voice as steady as possible, “Please, just let Leslie go. She’s…she’s twenty-seven, she’s an editor and, and she wants to go skydiving. For her birthday. I promised to take her skydiving. Please. Just…she’ll be twenty-eight in six weeks. Her sister’s coming to visit from Pennsylvania. She’s bringing her daughter. Her daughter, she’s five years old. They’re going to stay with-with us. For a week.”
“Jack…” Leslie’s voice is soft, and he doesn’t dare to look at her. Knows he’ll make some horrible sound. He just trails off and squeezes her hand so hard she probably can’t even feel it anymore, and it’s not enough. Never enough.
“Sorry,” he whispers to her, “I’m…really. I just…God, I’m so sorry.”
Somehow, she squeezes back.
“It’s okay-” she begins, and doesn’t make it any further.
Someone screams.
Jack flinches back. His head bangs against the concrete wall. The man in the doorway swears and bursts away from his post. Leslie jerks in his direction but the straps keep her immobile and she gasps in short, panting breaths.
The scream goes on. It’s a woman, voice tearing the air, spiraling higher. A gunshots cracks across the noise and suddenly there’s shouting, men’s voices, hollering and furious. Another gunshot. The wall shakes, and dust drifts down. The woman screams again and there’s a wet splat and Leslie moans in horror.
“Jesus Christ,” Jack mutters, “Jesus fucking…”
A man bursts into the room, a new man, a goddamn giant bastard with a shotgun in one hand and a flat, wickedly curved blade in the other. He’s got blood on his face and it drips thick and red from the blade and holy motherfucking Christ there’s a hunk of scalp still clinging to the end of it.
The man pulls up short in the doorway and stares, and Leslie turns her head sharply toward the wall, matted hair falling across her face. Jack can’t see her but he knows she’s biting her lip. Tiny noises of horror are leaking out of her mouth. The blood-covered man’s eyes flick between the two of them, and for a moment his expression is disturbingly…familiar.
“No,” Jack says, feet scrabbling, “No please…”
The man in the doorway says, “Um,” and the hunk of skin and hair slides down the curve of the blade and splats onto the floor. He doesn’t notice.
“Hey!” thunders a voice from somewhere behind the man, “Little goddamn help here, princess?”
“Wha-” he spins, in the doorway, but doesn’t make it far as a tiny, shrieking body cannons into him, slamming him into the room and onto his back. One of the terrible women straddles his stomach and plunges a knife in at shoulder level, rakes it across his chest, and the man actually screams, two seconds before the woman’s head explodes.
Blood and bone and brain matter rain down on everyone and Jack hears a muffled shriek tear out of his own throat. Another man storms into the room, shotgun at the ready. The headless body topples over and the newcomer hurries to grab the bloody man’s arm and hoist him, staggering, to his feet.
“Sam?” he says, and ‘Sam’ presses his hand to the bleeding wound on his chest and nods tightly, white-faced.
And Jack knows that name.
And now he knows that face. Older, broader, spattered in blood and mean as hell, but he knows it. A phantom he never thought he’d see again, never wanted to see again, an echo of the boy he’d known, in another lifetime.
Sam Winchester.
Oh Jesus. God have mercy.
Leslie’s turned her face away from the wall, and caught a glimpse of the pair. Sam, and an older man with a cold, flat gaze and filthy hands.
“…S-Sam?” she quavers, and Sam sways back, his blood-covered fingers curling against his chest.
“We’re not done here,” the other man snarls, and shoves the curved weapon, hilt-first, in Sam’s direction. “Move.”
And Sam’s still swaying and white-faced and bleeding but he swallows and nods and takes the weapon.
Jack can’t shut his mouth. Even when they storm back out the door and the noises of dying drown out every other sense, still, he can’t close his goddamn mouth.
The wall shakes, again, and someone shouts and another shotgun blast blows a hole in the doorway, spraying plaster and drywall. Jack turns his face away, panting, squeezing his eyes shut. He’s sure the entire place is going to come crashing down around them. They’re going to die like this, here, in some basement, tied up and crushed to death.
But suddenly it’s quiet. Violently so, noiselessness slamming into the room like a wall, shutting everything else out. Jack can hear his own breath, rasping in and out, and Leslie’s tiny, panting moans. Her horror. His fear. He’s shaking all over. Every inch of him is trembling, and he’s coated in plaster and someone else’s blood, and all he can think, wildly, is that it can’t be sanitary and what if he gets some kind of disease and there’s a headless body lying on the floor and he can’t hear anything from the other room and they’re dead, they’re dead. They’re all dead.
Except Sam, apparently, who staggers back to stand in the doorway wiping his face and bleeding, and he looks down at his chest in something like irritation and shakes his head and Jack thinks, Well, he can’t be hurt that bad if he’s still standing.
The cold-eyed man from before seems to disagree, however, appearing suddenly and shoving Sam into the room, shotgun still in one hand. He physically forces Sam to sit, propping him up against the wall, and hauls his own shirt off. Balls it up, and presses it to Sam’s wound.
“Hold that there,” he says, then turns and grabs one ankle of the woman whose head he exploded. He doesn’t spare a glance for Jack or Leslie, just hauls the body out as if it’s so much meat. As if there hadn’t been a person inside five minutes ago.
A moment later, he comes back for the head. He holds it carefully, so nothing comes spilling out of the neck hole.
Sam had a brother, Jack recalls.
Sam has a brother.
He thinks he should say something. “Please don’t kill us,” seems like a pretty good starting point, but he can’t get his tongue to cooperate. Stares slack-jawed and useless at the horror leaning against the wall, the thing that used to be his friend.
They were friends. They were friends.
“You like…Lucky Charms,” a quiet voice says, and Sam blinks blearily. It takes Jack a moment to realize that it’s Leslie who’s spoken.
Sam’s mouth works. He shakes his head a little.
“…what?” he asks, vaguely.
“I remember. L-Lucky Charms. And…and Little Debbie Snack Cakes. You,” she breaks off when her voice trembles. Swallows, and continues. “You never wanted to admit it but you…you’d buy them whenever you had a little extra c-cash. Sam. I. I remember. We went to school, together. You, and and me, and Jack here. Do you remember? Remember us?”
Sam shuts his eyes briefly, and his whole body sags. When he opens them again, he looks more like the boy Jack remembers than he has any right to.
“I remember,” he murmurs, and adds, “I’m not…I’m not gonna hurt you. Whatever you’re thinking…I’m not. I’m not.”
Jack says, “The FBI interviewed us. You-God, I don’t even…” he rams his tongue between his teeth and clamps down hard, because antagonizing the psychotic Satanist serial killer is maybe not the way he wants to approach this situation. He knows better. It’s just that he’s been kidnapped and tied up and smacked around and, oh yeah, sprayed in someone else’s blood and brain matter. So he’s maybe not thinking all that clearly.
He shuts his eyes briefly, and Leslie squeezes his hand.
“Could you…untie us?” she asks, voice quiet. When Sam shakes his head, Jack’s heart drops into his stomach.
“I can’t,” Sam says, shifting minutely, repositioning the shirt on his chest, “Not now. But…m’brother can. He’ll be back in a minute.”
“Dean,” Jack blurts, without meaning to. “I-I remember…” and trails off. Sam’s looking at him. And he has no business wearing that face, looking so much like the kid Jack knew, the skinny awkward guy who helped him cram for his physics exam his first semester at two in the damn morning. The big puppy who once spilled an entire Frappuccino on his girlfriend’s parents’ sofa and nearly burst into tears when he realized what he’d done. The guy who showed up with tomato soup when Leslie had the flu, and insisted on collecting both her and Jack’s assignments from the TAs for that entire week. Always with a smile.
This is not that kid-hell, even when he was that kid he wasn’t that kid. And he’s all grown up, now. Into a monster.
“You sure had us fooled, Sam,” says a voice, and Jack realizes it’s his own. He snaps his mouth shut, but he can’t take the words back.
Isn’t sure he wants to.
Sam licks his lips, looks down. It’s incongruous. Jack doesn’t think he’s acting. But there’s still blood smeared across his cheek and matted in his hair.
“Yeah,” he says quietly, “I guess I did.”
No one says anything after that.
A little later, Dean comes back. He’s strangely gentle with his brother, cutting away shirts and cleaning and packing the injury with fresh white gauze. Sam never passes out, or grunts or makes any sound at all, and Jack feels a little sick knowing this probably isn’t the first time he’s dealt with something like this.
“Frickin’ witches,” he thinks he hears Dean grumble, and Sam snorts. As if it’s the most average exchange in the world. Jack’s skin is cold.
Sam’s insane. Of course he is.
“Were you always this way?” he hears himself ask, and this time Leslie jerks her hand away.
“Jack!” she hisses, and he can’t bring himself to meet her eyes. Sam shifts a little, and winces.
Dean says, “Sammy…”
Sam shakes his head.
“Dean, it’s okay,” he says, and his voice sounds thick. His brother grabs his face in both hands in a show of creepy intimacy, studying Sam’s face, peering at his eyes.
Apparently satisfied with whatever he sees, Dean stands up with a sharp injunction to “Stay here.” Sam blinks at him, mouth half-open.
“Dean!” he blurts, belatedly, when the other man has turned and is already stomping through the doorway. “You were supposed to-” But Dean’s gone and Sam’s waving vaguely in Jack and Leslie’s direction in a manner that’s disturbingly familiar, almost childish. Dean doesn’t come back and Sam huffs an irritated noise and flops his hand to the floor.
“Goddammit,” he mutters, and with a pained grunt heaves himself off the wall.
Oh God he’s coming closer.
Leslie presses herself back against the wall. Jack thins his lips and eyeballs Sam warily. He doesn’t seem like much of a threat at this point, stumbling forward the handful of steps between them in a half-crouch, and falling to his knees with a wince. A knife sort of just appears in his hand and Leslie makes a little noise. Sam doesn’t even really react, just reaches for Jack’s right hand where it’s connected to the straps on his waist, and starts cutting. Jack turns his face away so he doesn’t have to look at the blood in Sam’s hair, close enough now that he can pick out individual strands and note the variations in tone and thickness where it’s caked, and dried.
He remembers that night in the library, a million years ago. Sam rubbing his eyes and yawning over his foamy, sugar-enriched coffee, head bobbing and hair falling in his face. The memory is so sudden, so vivid, it’s as if he could reach out and touch it.
So close, but gone. Obliterated. Ruined.
Absolutely ruined.
“I’m sorry,” Jack whispers, and doesn’t know why. Sam stops busily sawing at the tie and turns his head. His hair falls away and he’s a boy. He’s a man. He’s a killer.
“It’s okay,” Sam says, “It doesn’t matter, now.”
Jack wants to tell him, I’m sorry I ever knew you. Because it’s the truth.
But the words won’t come.
Sam gives him a little smile.
He’s got Jack’s hand free and has started on their bound wrists when there’s a bang! outside and the whole house shakes, again, and Dean makes a noise like someone’s tearing his skin off. Some awful wordless cry. Sam’s on his feet before Jack even registers it, shouting, “Dean! Dean!”
Jack blurts, “Wait!” and he doesn’t know why. It doesn’t matter, though.
Sam’s gone.
Beside him, Leslie picks up the knife. She turns it over in her hand. It’s about four inches, sturdy, and worn. Well-used, and well cared for. Sam’s knife.
Coffee and studying and tomato soup and notes from the TA and death and blood and horror and well-cared-for knives.
“We need to get out of here,” he tells her, “Before Sam comes back.”
They’re a long way away before they finally stop running.
-end-
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Title is taken from “Radioactive” by Kings of Leon. :3
I love me some badass!Winchesters, so, yeah. With the exploding heads and all. DON’T JUDGE ME OKAY.
Warnings: Gore, language, violence.
Summary: Written for the current ohsam h/c comment-fic meme for rokhal's prompt: Sam meets old friends from Stanford and they don't recognize him, what with him and Dean swooping in all huge and violent with guns and knives and arcane rituals to rescue them all from some horrifying eldritch creature. And then his friends are all, "OMG! It's Psycho Sam who was a closet satanist and was wanted by the FBI!" And Sam is very conspicuously injured, but he and Dean can't stop to patch him up because the eldritch creature is still trying to rip their throats out. And Sam's feelings are hurt because his old friends are scared of him now.
Er, this is maybe a little more serious than the prompt called for.
...sorry.
_________________________________________
And They Cry to See Your Face
In the end, Jack can only hold her hand. He wishes he could do more, could reach out and gather her up, hide her face against his chest so she doesn’t have to see. He feels like a fool, clutching Leslie’s hand, bound together at the wrist, but it’s the best he can manage. He can feel the bones of her hand grinding in his desperate grip, but she doesn’t complain. Doesn’t so much as whimper.
“We’re going to die here,” she murmurs, tilting her head oddly so her hair falls across her face, “Aren’t we?”
“No.” He makes his voice as fierce as he can. “No.”
He can’t look at her face, though, and presses his lips together and turns away quickly. Unfortunately, that means he catches the eye of the man standing in the doorway, who winks.
Bastard.
Jack doesn’t know how many of them there are. Somewhere between four and six, he thinks, though they come and go and he’s never seen all of them together in the room at the same time. He’s sure there are two women, skinny little things with big eyes and wicked mouths. And a handful of men, most of them big bruisers with hands that curl themselves into fists in idle moments, and eyes that contemplate Leslie in ways that make Jack go cold deep, deep inside.
She wants him to save her and he wants to. But he can’t. Because of zip-ties and arm restraints and more leather and buckles than Jack’s ever seen in his life and it’d be hilarious if it wasn’t actually happening, and if this hadn’t suddenly somehow become his life.
But he’s bound and pinned to a wall with his fiancée and they’ve been here for two days and he doesn’t even know why.
“What do you want?” he’d demanded, five minutes into the whole black-bag-over-the-head, dragged-into-an-unmarked-van experience, and a small hand dealt him a ringing blow to the temple that toppled him over, face mashing into the seat.
A disturbingly calm, feminine voice said only, “It’s not about you, Jack.”
And that was the last time anyone other than Leslie spoke to him directly.
“Please,” he tries, catching the eye of the winking guard, holding his voice as steady as possible, “Please, just let Leslie go. She’s…she’s twenty-seven, she’s an editor and, and she wants to go skydiving. For her birthday. I promised to take her skydiving. Please. Just…she’ll be twenty-eight in six weeks. Her sister’s coming to visit from Pennsylvania. She’s bringing her daughter. Her daughter, she’s five years old. They’re going to stay with-with us. For a week.”
“Jack…” Leslie’s voice is soft, and he doesn’t dare to look at her. Knows he’ll make some horrible sound. He just trails off and squeezes her hand so hard she probably can’t even feel it anymore, and it’s not enough. Never enough.
“Sorry,” he whispers to her, “I’m…really. I just…God, I’m so sorry.”
Somehow, she squeezes back.
“It’s okay-” she begins, and doesn’t make it any further.
Someone screams.
Jack flinches back. His head bangs against the concrete wall. The man in the doorway swears and bursts away from his post. Leslie jerks in his direction but the straps keep her immobile and she gasps in short, panting breaths.
The scream goes on. It’s a woman, voice tearing the air, spiraling higher. A gunshots cracks across the noise and suddenly there’s shouting, men’s voices, hollering and furious. Another gunshot. The wall shakes, and dust drifts down. The woman screams again and there’s a wet splat and Leslie moans in horror.
“Jesus Christ,” Jack mutters, “Jesus fucking…”
A man bursts into the room, a new man, a goddamn giant bastard with a shotgun in one hand and a flat, wickedly curved blade in the other. He’s got blood on his face and it drips thick and red from the blade and holy motherfucking Christ there’s a hunk of scalp still clinging to the end of it.
The man pulls up short in the doorway and stares, and Leslie turns her head sharply toward the wall, matted hair falling across her face. Jack can’t see her but he knows she’s biting her lip. Tiny noises of horror are leaking out of her mouth. The blood-covered man’s eyes flick between the two of them, and for a moment his expression is disturbingly…familiar.
“No,” Jack says, feet scrabbling, “No please…”
The man in the doorway says, “Um,” and the hunk of skin and hair slides down the curve of the blade and splats onto the floor. He doesn’t notice.
“Hey!” thunders a voice from somewhere behind the man, “Little goddamn help here, princess?”
“Wha-” he spins, in the doorway, but doesn’t make it far as a tiny, shrieking body cannons into him, slamming him into the room and onto his back. One of the terrible women straddles his stomach and plunges a knife in at shoulder level, rakes it across his chest, and the man actually screams, two seconds before the woman’s head explodes.
Blood and bone and brain matter rain down on everyone and Jack hears a muffled shriek tear out of his own throat. Another man storms into the room, shotgun at the ready. The headless body topples over and the newcomer hurries to grab the bloody man’s arm and hoist him, staggering, to his feet.
“Sam?” he says, and ‘Sam’ presses his hand to the bleeding wound on his chest and nods tightly, white-faced.
And Jack knows that name.
And now he knows that face. Older, broader, spattered in blood and mean as hell, but he knows it. A phantom he never thought he’d see again, never wanted to see again, an echo of the boy he’d known, in another lifetime.
Sam Winchester.
Oh Jesus. God have mercy.
Leslie’s turned her face away from the wall, and caught a glimpse of the pair. Sam, and an older man with a cold, flat gaze and filthy hands.
“…S-Sam?” she quavers, and Sam sways back, his blood-covered fingers curling against his chest.
“We’re not done here,” the other man snarls, and shoves the curved weapon, hilt-first, in Sam’s direction. “Move.”
And Sam’s still swaying and white-faced and bleeding but he swallows and nods and takes the weapon.
Jack can’t shut his mouth. Even when they storm back out the door and the noises of dying drown out every other sense, still, he can’t close his goddamn mouth.
The wall shakes, again, and someone shouts and another shotgun blast blows a hole in the doorway, spraying plaster and drywall. Jack turns his face away, panting, squeezing his eyes shut. He’s sure the entire place is going to come crashing down around them. They’re going to die like this, here, in some basement, tied up and crushed to death.
But suddenly it’s quiet. Violently so, noiselessness slamming into the room like a wall, shutting everything else out. Jack can hear his own breath, rasping in and out, and Leslie’s tiny, panting moans. Her horror. His fear. He’s shaking all over. Every inch of him is trembling, and he’s coated in plaster and someone else’s blood, and all he can think, wildly, is that it can’t be sanitary and what if he gets some kind of disease and there’s a headless body lying on the floor and he can’t hear anything from the other room and they’re dead, they’re dead. They’re all dead.
Except Sam, apparently, who staggers back to stand in the doorway wiping his face and bleeding, and he looks down at his chest in something like irritation and shakes his head and Jack thinks, Well, he can’t be hurt that bad if he’s still standing.
The cold-eyed man from before seems to disagree, however, appearing suddenly and shoving Sam into the room, shotgun still in one hand. He physically forces Sam to sit, propping him up against the wall, and hauls his own shirt off. Balls it up, and presses it to Sam’s wound.
“Hold that there,” he says, then turns and grabs one ankle of the woman whose head he exploded. He doesn’t spare a glance for Jack or Leslie, just hauls the body out as if it’s so much meat. As if there hadn’t been a person inside five minutes ago.
A moment later, he comes back for the head. He holds it carefully, so nothing comes spilling out of the neck hole.
Sam had a brother, Jack recalls.
Sam has a brother.
He thinks he should say something. “Please don’t kill us,” seems like a pretty good starting point, but he can’t get his tongue to cooperate. Stares slack-jawed and useless at the horror leaning against the wall, the thing that used to be his friend.
They were friends. They were friends.
“You like…Lucky Charms,” a quiet voice says, and Sam blinks blearily. It takes Jack a moment to realize that it’s Leslie who’s spoken.
Sam’s mouth works. He shakes his head a little.
“…what?” he asks, vaguely.
“I remember. L-Lucky Charms. And…and Little Debbie Snack Cakes. You,” she breaks off when her voice trembles. Swallows, and continues. “You never wanted to admit it but you…you’d buy them whenever you had a little extra c-cash. Sam. I. I remember. We went to school, together. You, and and me, and Jack here. Do you remember? Remember us?”
Sam shuts his eyes briefly, and his whole body sags. When he opens them again, he looks more like the boy Jack remembers than he has any right to.
“I remember,” he murmurs, and adds, “I’m not…I’m not gonna hurt you. Whatever you’re thinking…I’m not. I’m not.”
Jack says, “The FBI interviewed us. You-God, I don’t even…” he rams his tongue between his teeth and clamps down hard, because antagonizing the psychotic Satanist serial killer is maybe not the way he wants to approach this situation. He knows better. It’s just that he’s been kidnapped and tied up and smacked around and, oh yeah, sprayed in someone else’s blood and brain matter. So he’s maybe not thinking all that clearly.
He shuts his eyes briefly, and Leslie squeezes his hand.
“Could you…untie us?” she asks, voice quiet. When Sam shakes his head, Jack’s heart drops into his stomach.
“I can’t,” Sam says, shifting minutely, repositioning the shirt on his chest, “Not now. But…m’brother can. He’ll be back in a minute.”
“Dean,” Jack blurts, without meaning to. “I-I remember…” and trails off. Sam’s looking at him. And he has no business wearing that face, looking so much like the kid Jack knew, the skinny awkward guy who helped him cram for his physics exam his first semester at two in the damn morning. The big puppy who once spilled an entire Frappuccino on his girlfriend’s parents’ sofa and nearly burst into tears when he realized what he’d done. The guy who showed up with tomato soup when Leslie had the flu, and insisted on collecting both her and Jack’s assignments from the TAs for that entire week. Always with a smile.
This is not that kid-hell, even when he was that kid he wasn’t that kid. And he’s all grown up, now. Into a monster.
“You sure had us fooled, Sam,” says a voice, and Jack realizes it’s his own. He snaps his mouth shut, but he can’t take the words back.
Isn’t sure he wants to.
Sam licks his lips, looks down. It’s incongruous. Jack doesn’t think he’s acting. But there’s still blood smeared across his cheek and matted in his hair.
“Yeah,” he says quietly, “I guess I did.”
No one says anything after that.
A little later, Dean comes back. He’s strangely gentle with his brother, cutting away shirts and cleaning and packing the injury with fresh white gauze. Sam never passes out, or grunts or makes any sound at all, and Jack feels a little sick knowing this probably isn’t the first time he’s dealt with something like this.
“Frickin’ witches,” he thinks he hears Dean grumble, and Sam snorts. As if it’s the most average exchange in the world. Jack’s skin is cold.
Sam’s insane. Of course he is.
“Were you always this way?” he hears himself ask, and this time Leslie jerks her hand away.
“Jack!” she hisses, and he can’t bring himself to meet her eyes. Sam shifts a little, and winces.
Dean says, “Sammy…”
Sam shakes his head.
“Dean, it’s okay,” he says, and his voice sounds thick. His brother grabs his face in both hands in a show of creepy intimacy, studying Sam’s face, peering at his eyes.
Apparently satisfied with whatever he sees, Dean stands up with a sharp injunction to “Stay here.” Sam blinks at him, mouth half-open.
“Dean!” he blurts, belatedly, when the other man has turned and is already stomping through the doorway. “You were supposed to-” But Dean’s gone and Sam’s waving vaguely in Jack and Leslie’s direction in a manner that’s disturbingly familiar, almost childish. Dean doesn’t come back and Sam huffs an irritated noise and flops his hand to the floor.
“Goddammit,” he mutters, and with a pained grunt heaves himself off the wall.
Oh God he’s coming closer.
Leslie presses herself back against the wall. Jack thins his lips and eyeballs Sam warily. He doesn’t seem like much of a threat at this point, stumbling forward the handful of steps between them in a half-crouch, and falling to his knees with a wince. A knife sort of just appears in his hand and Leslie makes a little noise. Sam doesn’t even really react, just reaches for Jack’s right hand where it’s connected to the straps on his waist, and starts cutting. Jack turns his face away so he doesn’t have to look at the blood in Sam’s hair, close enough now that he can pick out individual strands and note the variations in tone and thickness where it’s caked, and dried.
He remembers that night in the library, a million years ago. Sam rubbing his eyes and yawning over his foamy, sugar-enriched coffee, head bobbing and hair falling in his face. The memory is so sudden, so vivid, it’s as if he could reach out and touch it.
So close, but gone. Obliterated. Ruined.
Absolutely ruined.
“I’m sorry,” Jack whispers, and doesn’t know why. Sam stops busily sawing at the tie and turns his head. His hair falls away and he’s a boy. He’s a man. He’s a killer.
“It’s okay,” Sam says, “It doesn’t matter, now.”
Jack wants to tell him, I’m sorry I ever knew you. Because it’s the truth.
But the words won’t come.
Sam gives him a little smile.
He’s got Jack’s hand free and has started on their bound wrists when there’s a bang! outside and the whole house shakes, again, and Dean makes a noise like someone’s tearing his skin off. Some awful wordless cry. Sam’s on his feet before Jack even registers it, shouting, “Dean! Dean!”
Jack blurts, “Wait!” and he doesn’t know why. It doesn’t matter, though.
Sam’s gone.
Beside him, Leslie picks up the knife. She turns it over in her hand. It’s about four inches, sturdy, and worn. Well-used, and well cared for. Sam’s knife.
Coffee and studying and tomato soup and notes from the TA and death and blood and horror and well-cared-for knives.
“We need to get out of here,” he tells her, “Before Sam comes back.”
They’re a long way away before they finally stop running.
-end-
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Title is taken from “Radioactive” by Kings of Leon. :3
I love me some badass!Winchesters, so, yeah. With the exploding heads and all. DON’T JUDGE ME OKAY.