Not The Great American Novel

SPN Fanmix: Substitute

rokhal — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 21:21:15 GMT

To celebrate the one-month anniversary of me picking up a literal stray, here is a fanmix commemorating the delicious fail sundae that was Sam/Amelia!

Again, there are no actual links in this fanmix, so this is just a nuisance for you and a time-suck for me.

Sheryl Crow: The Globe Sessions
It Don't Hurt
Packed up and moved out after all.
Buldozed the house and watched it fall...
Now I can sing my song again.

The Refreshments: Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy
Nada
I'm just waiting for that cold, black, sun-cracked, numb-inside soul of mine
To come alive.

Melissa Etheridge: Melissa Etheridge
Chrome Plated Heart
But I have learned to leave no stone unturned
And keep the wall against my back
And my love is real as the day is long and the night is black.

U2: No Line On The Horizon
Moment of Surrender
I've been in every black hole,
At the altar of the dark star.
My body's now a begging bowl that's begging to get back
To my heart...

The Donnas: Gold Medal
It's So Hard
I'm not obsessed, I could care less--
I just want to get you undressed.

Aerosmith: Just Push Play
Sunshine
Cause I need sunshine, the kind that everybody knows:
Sunshine, she's finer than a painted rose.

Swear On Your Life: Burn My Crosses
Close To Life
Let me have this--
Let me take what is mine.
I got to get me close to life!

The Who: Greatest Hits
Substitute
I look pretty young but I'm just back-dated.

Alannah Myles: Alannah Myles
Love Is
Show me what you want me to do,
And love is what I've got for you.

U2: No Line On The Horizon
White As Snow
Well, I came from the West, no hills at all;
The land was flat, the highway straight and wide.
My brother and I would drive for hours, like years instead of days,
Our faces as white as the dirty snow.

Edna Swap: Wacko Magneto
Torn
Illusion never changed into something real.
I'm wide awake, and I can see the perfect sky is torn.

The Pretty Reckless: Hit Me Like A Man EP
Cold Blooded
There's one thing you must understand:
You can't trust a cold-blooded woman . . . or man.

An aside note: The Pretty Reckless, Edna Swap, and Swear On Your Life are all powerful female-fronted rock bands that deserve investigation. Edna Swap did the original Torn, as covered by Natalie Imbruglia and One Direction. The Pretty Reckless writes songs with titles like Hit Me Like A Man. Swear On Your Life's debut album has been banned as offensive at several US colleges, and the sound is awesome.

Recommendation: Ironychan's Avengers fanfic, "In Person"

rokhal — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 21:07:36 GMT

I first ran across Ironychan in the Pirates of the Caribbean fandom. Brilliant long fics that did not always survive to the finish line that I still recall vividly years later.

This one made it to the end. Holy crap. The plot twists. The visceral detail. The deep philosophical questions. The gut punches. The featherlight touch.

OMG read it. It's gen, PG-13, 120 thousand words, complete, hot off the author's home computer.

In it, JARVIS becomes a human, with all the misery and joy and uncertainty that that entails. (SPN people, read it for the parallels between Tony and JARVIS and Dean and Castiel.)

Read it!

SPN/Evil Dead fic: If Thy Face Offend Me, Cut It Off

rokhal — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 21:00:05 GMT

Title: If Thy Face Offend Me, Cut It Off
Chapter: 1/7
Characters: Ash Williams, Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester
Pairing: Mostly gen, with unobtrusive past het
Rating: R
Length: Longish
Warnings: Gore, dismemberment, gratuitous violence, man pain, explosions
Spoilers: Evil Dead I, II, and Army of Darkness; Supernatural early season 8.
Disclaimer: I actually have money now, but please don't sue me for it just because I like your work.
Summary: Ash teams up with Sam and Dean. Things go as well as can be expected.

“You been on the web two days. Watcha got?”

“Nothing to get excited over.”

“But something. Hit me.”

“Yuppies disappearing in the woods.”

“Location?”

“Adirondack Park. Tahawus mine.”

“So saddle up, Geek Boy, let’s move.”

“Dean—you hate this kind of case.”

“I do? Thought that was you, with no excuse to spend a wild night in a library.”

“You do. You hate hiking. You hate wildlife. You hate camping.”

“Maybe it’s grown on me.”

Silence.

“People change, Sam.”

“Survivor’s in the Alleghenny mental hospital. Should be a riot.”

The nuthouse was brilliant with light, immaculate with whitewash and bleach, secure as a bank vault. Every corner was bright. Linus had asked the staff to clear out the furniture and leave the lights on at all times, and with the head psychiatrist’s permission, they had grudgingly complied.

Linus spent his days turning random numbers over on an abacus, and his nights, near as he could tell that it was night, with one finger on his pulse and one ear to the crack under the door. He ate when he was hungry, slept when he dropped, and refused to see visitors. When the staff came in to check on him, he would back himself into a corner and shake until they left.

When two tall men in orderly’s uniform entered his room, he was not alarmed that they were unfamiliar. He was alarmed that they were in his room.

“Some publicist,” scoffed the man in front. His hair was cropped, and he had a bright sharp gaze like a guard dog and the swagger of a cop. Which he obviously was not, hence the pretense. The one in the back was taller and milder-looking, better for an orderly, but his hair was far too long, cut well past his chin. Long enough to grab. Strong enough to throw Linus against the opposite wall.

But in the right circumstances, anyone could be strong enough to throw Linus against the opposite wall.

“Linus Evans?” the bruiser in front asked as his larger companion softly shut the heavy white door. “I’m Pete, this is my buddy Simon. We’re new to the floor, and to get to know you nuts—” His companion kicked him in the ankle. “—inpatients, whatever—we were requested to meet with you guys individually and hear your story in your own words.”

Linus bristled. He knew rules. This was against a lot of them. “I’m not accepting visitors,” he murmured.

‘Pete’ was not deterred. “Just a couple minutes, and you can back to doing . . . whatever it is you do.”

“Not minutes,” Linus insisted from his sanctum in the corner of the room opposite the door. “Not seconds. No visitors. No visits. No chats. Meals twice a day, through the slot in the door, like I asked. Bathroom access three times daily through the shared door. Physical checks once a day. And since there is no way on God’s earth you two are orderlies, I’m still due a physical check at four o’clock.”

‘Pete’ knelt in front of him, and ‘Simon’ left the door to loom over them both. “You seem pretty with it to be sticking around so long in the cuckoo’s nest,” he quipped.

“I’m a danger to myself and others,” Linus growled. “I can’t be released. I can’t be taken out.”

“About that,” said Simon. His voice was less deep, more cutting. “Word is, you haven’t shown signs of violent behavior since your arrival.”

Linus jerked back against the wall. His hands would be shaking if they weren’t wrapped around his knees. “I can prove it,” he gasped.

Pete waved dismissively. “Nah. Dude, you want to spend the rest of your life in a hermetically sealed box of cotton balls, that’s your business. Nobody’s gonna pry you outta here.”

“What we want to know,” Simon added, “is what put you here.”

Linus glared at them. “I’m crazy. I know what I remember wasn’t real, but it’s all I remember, so don’t get mad when the crazy guy you picked to interview tells you a pile of crazy.”

Pete grinned. “We had to con our way into your room, we got no room to get pissy about anything.”

“All right then.” Linus steeled himself. “Could you sit over by that wall.”

His visitors obligingly sat.

“Say, what are you going to do about the surveillance cameras?” Linus asked.

“Spliced in a loop sequence,” Simon explained. “We have a couple hours.”

Linus shivered. “I suppose it wouldn’t do much good to call an orderly, either.”

Pete showed his teeth in something that was not quite a smile. “Catches on quick, doesn’t he?”

Simon kicked him again. “Don’t scare him,” he hissed.

“Somehow I doubt I rate very high on his personal terror alerts,” Pete remarked. “Go on, kid. The truth in your own words.”

The story itched in him, like a canker sore begging to be chewed. “Me and some friends from trail-running—weekend thing, trail-running—we wanted to try a hike-to-camp, try some trails deeper in the mountains. Adventure, see the stars, you know. There were five of us. You can get the obits out of the papers last week, I’m not reciting ‘em to you.

“It got dark early and it was way too cold. But we came over a ridge as the sun was setting and we found this old church . . .

“I wish we’d died out there in the woods. The trees were . . . I can’t even say anymore, but the things in the church . . .

“It got into every one of us.”

“Zombies.” Dean grinned as he plied the huge old black sedan along the tortuous pre-FDR byways of Upstate New York.

Sam groaned. “Zombies are shades of the living. They’re not grotesque. You gotta die first for a necromancer to turn you into a zombie. And they don’t fly!”

“Crouching Hunter, Hidden Zombie!”

“They’re not zombies! There’s no such thing as—”

“Are you seriously gonna try to say that with a straight face?”

Sam sighed and scowled out the window.

“Real, undead, juicy, flying Romero-style zombies, Sam. How can you not be pumped about this case?”

“You know what the problem with Romero zombies is, Dean?” Sam demanded. “Splatter.”

Dean grimaced.

“Brains. Bone. Blood. Eyeballs. On everything.”

Dean felt his zombie-killing buzz begin to wilt.

“Rotten zombie juice in your mouth.”

“I get it! Shut up!”

Sam sulked. Dean thought about cold blue skies.

“You know what this means,” Sam said after a silence of several minutes. “Unidentified fugly, good witness description, inaccessible area.”

Dean grumbled.

“We need Bobby’s books. I’ll call Garth.”

The lathe screamed. The circular saw howled. The forge roared. The hydraulic hammer clanged. Steel ingots of varying alloys and carbon content bowed to the vision of their master and flowed into shape.

A phone on the wall shrilled feebly, flashing a tiny light. The man at the power hammer pulled his half-shaped bar of steel out, shut down the motor, and crossed the workshop in a few strides to snatch the handset off the cradle.

“Yello.”

“Asharoonie, how’s it hangin’?” came an overly cheerful voice, male and vaguely adolescent.

“New guy,” Ash replied. “How many times I gotta tell ya—I’m not a pasta, and I’m sure as hell not your errand boy. I got one job. It’s covered.”

“I read you, man,” said the de facto Hunter dispatcher, Garth Fitzgerald IV. “Necronomicon ex Mortis, Deadites, you and the Evil Book of Evil and your special bond—”

“Don’t get smart, kid—”

“I’m not calling in Spiderman to take on the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, here. This is totally your bag.”

“Looks pretty quiet from where I’m standing,” Ash said warily.

“Upstate New York?”

Ash slammed his right hand on the nearest workbench, bouncing and scattering tools. “What—they—What’s it doing in New York? The book’s locked down—There’s nothing—Who’d you hear this from?”

“The Winchesters.”

“No way, they’re still alive?”

“For a given value of ‘still’—yeah, they got a witness. Putrefaction, levitation, grabby trees, the works. Some desecrated chapel up in the hills.”

“And the Brothers Grimm found the site, so they’ll want a piece of the action,” Ash grumbled.

“Aw, you’ll like them.”

“They’re a menace.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Ashster, but—”

“I get it, I get it. What’s the number?”

“You’re the best there is at what you do, man. Knew I could count on you.”

“Don’t make me regret it.”

Two black cars pulled in to a fallow field among a dense hardwood forest outside Saratoga Springs: one, a meticulously maintained 1967 Chevrolet Impala, the other, a heavily armored 1991 Dodge full-size van. Dust plumed in their tracks as they stopped.

Three men got out and sized each-other up: from the van, Ash Williams, tall and dark and going gray at the edges, with a steel prosthetic right hand and bloodlust burned into his bones; from the sedan, Sam and Dean Winchester, thirties and fighting fit, cynical after having faced down the brightest angels and foulest demons and found them all incompetent, self-serving dicks.

“The disaster duo,” Ash called out over the ten feet of dust and gravel that separated their respective war machines. “How’s the gypsy life treating you?”

“FBI got us our fifteen minutes of fame, but the limelight’s moved on and it’s all booze, babes, grifting, and the open road,” Dean rumbled. Across the roof of the car, Sam rolled his eyes. “How’s retail?”

“Hell. I don’t know how I’d get up in the morning if it weren’t for the royalties pouring in from my six patents.”

Sam straightened from a strategic slouch to his full imposing height. “I’m sorry, is this a hunt or a dick-measuring contest?”

Ash showed his teeth. “No contest, bucko.”

Sam snorted. “Garth says you’re the expert on these revenants. How do we play this?”

Ash turned and slid open the van’s cargo door, revealing a mattress, bars lining the windows, Sumerian and Akkadian protection symbols on every flat surface in silver paint, a rack of five shotguns, and a Punisher poster. “The name of the game is total bodily dismemberment.”

“Decapitation doesn’t do the trick?” Dean clarified.

“Barely slows ‘em down. I’ve had ‘em pitch the heads at me. Decent aim. And they bite.”

“Like rattlesnakes,” Sam mused.

“Chattier. And it’s no picnic afterwards—somebody gets bit, you gotta lop a limb off or blow their head off. I hear most Hunters do the deed with handguns—silver, blessed iron—but if you’re after Deadites, you gotta be handy with short-range buckshot and blades.” Ash snatched up one of the lightweight chainsaws from the back of the van. “Really big blades.”

Dean’s eyes widened. “I knew these were my kind of zombies.”

Sam skirted to the driver’s side of their sedan and popped the trunk, shoved some heavy duffel bags toward the back, and lifted a false bottom, revealing a smorgasbord of firearms, knives, mystical herbs and talismans, moldy books, and a gift-store dream-catcher. He pulled out a pair of machetes and handed the smaller one to his brother.

Dean waved the blade away, reached deep into the weapons locker, and withdrew something that was not a machete, and definitely not of modern make: a war axe made from a humanoid femur bound close to a two-foot blade of rippling dark stone. Ash clenched his teeth at the sight, and Sam eyed the weapon almost hungrily.

Ash pointed out a sapling, about four inches thick, standing off a stride’s length from the rest of the trees. “Let’s see you muscle through that without horsepower,” he challenged.

Sam and Dean shrugged at each-other, and Dean waved Sam at the tree. With a fluid swing that twisted from the toes to the shoulders of his six-four frame, Sam lopped off the top of the tree in a single powerful blow, then caught the crown and shoved it away as it fell. Dean pushed up beside him and swung his savage, fragile-looking bone weapon. A perfect inch-thick slice of alder popped into the air, and the glittering stone blade was impossibly unharmed.

Ash lifted his saw, then shrugged and lowered it, still cold. “Okay, tough guys, but in ten years, don’t come crying to me about your tennis elbow.”

Finished with the dick-measuring contest—Sam was pleased, in a grade-school way, that he and his brother had won that one—they adjourned to the nearest sports bar. Ash had found the one screen with hockey on and parked them in front of it, ordered a pitcher of Bud Light, and asked the waitress to “keep the hot stuff coming, sweetheart.” By which he meant the Atomic Fire Wings. Sam was relieved there hadn’t been a Hooters in the area, or he’d be suffocating under the combined tackiness of his brother and their temporary partner.

Sam crunched on a celery stick and picked breading off his wings. His I-Pad shared the table with his plate, and the touch-screen was a hopeless greasy mess, no matter how high the pile of used napkins at his elbow grew.

“So I drank the juice, said the words, and here I am,” Ash concluded, spreading his mis-matched hands over the growing boneyard of wing-joints and grease-paper that had overtaken the table.

“So your car’s a history mystery,” Dean mused. “I don’t know if that’s awesome or tragic.”

“Tragic,” Ash growled. “I land fifteen years too late, presumed dead, in England, and without a dime to my name—‘my own time,’ my ass. That woulda been a solid five grand in plane ticket and bread money.”

Dean’s face fell. He’d managed to get loose after five beers, which was an improvement over his Charles Bukowski impression two years ago, but cars were one of his weird tender spots that Sam didn’t think he’d want to leave exposed. “Hey, you ever hear about the time Dean stabbed an angel in the face?” Sam interrupted.

Ash cocked his head. “No kidding. What makes you call it an angel?”

Dean took a pull of his beer and clonked it down. “Smug entitled cosmic fart torturing my family to get me to let their brat of a leader wear me like a custom tux so he could start the Apocalypse—yeah, I’d call that an angel. He just—” Dean’s eyes went distant. “Lit up with white fire—left the poor sucker of a vessel dead on the floor—”

Ash looked oddly crestfallen, like a kid just finding out that Santa Claus was actually a European fertility god who wasn’t into filling stockings so much as eating civilians. Sam knew the feeling.

“Hey, you hear about the time Sam ganked a vamp with a roll of razor wire?”

“No kidding,” Ash said again, brighter. “How’d that go?”

Sam flushed. Dean grinned beside him and elbowed him in the ribs. “Garroted ‘im,” Dean said proudly. “Popped the head clean off.” Sam spread his hands, revealing faint scars on his palms.

Ash shook his head and cleaned off a buffalo wing in one bite. “You guys need some actual tools,” he remarked through a mouthful of chicken skin.

“You use what you’ve got,” Sam replied. He coughed and sipped his lager. “Speaking of—you ever try an exorcism on these things? Even if they’re not standard black-eye demons, there should be something that’ll shift ‘em.”

“Kid,” Ash snapped, pounding his right fist on the table hard enough to rattle every plate. The gears whirred. “I read. I been fighting these things since I got back. There’s two things that’ll shift a Deadite, same as when I started, and that’s direct sunlight and the power of love. And you got no leg to stand on if we’re talking about saving hosts.”

“Right,” Sam said, spreading his hands peaceably even as he glared down his nose at the older man, “Just offering a suggestion.”

“Yeah, ‘offer,’” Ash growled. “You survive that hell, you can talk, but—”

“Hey,” Dean cut in, a commanding John Winchester ‘knock it off’ rumble. “We here to gank demon-zombies or play ‘my hell was worse than your hell’? ‘Cause living it once was bad enough, trust me.”

Sam started to smirk until Dean kicked him in the ankle. “We should think about packing it in,” Sam announced. “It’s a long drive and it sounds like we’ll want daylight on our side.”

Ash nodded and reached for another wing, then froze and stared at the plasma screen on the wall. A fight had broken out; Sam watched as the two squads of men flocked tight around two furiously scuffling figures. “Go for him, go for him, go for him!” Ash muttered, then, “Yes! That’s how we do it in Detroit, punk-ass!” The referee penetrated the knot of players and separated the fighters. Both retreated to the bench, one bleeding, the other fouled.

Sam huffed.

“Whatsa matter, can’t stand a little blood?” Ash demanded with a feral smirk.

“Not that,” Sam said. “It’s a game. The whole point of a game is that people don’t get hurt. And now the guy who started it is off the ice.”

“Sacrifice play,” Ash countered. “The Hurricanes draft good, but rough ‘em up a little and they shake easy. Wings’ll tear ‘em to pieces.”

Dean rose heavily and bent over the back of his chair. “Gotta piss,” he grunted.

Sam ate another celery stick. “Hiking in the woods tomorrow. Fun times.”

Completed work at Ao3 http://archiveofourown.org/works/1016925.

SPN Fanmix: Get Juiced

rokhal — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 05:08:21 GMT

I don't have the motivation or know-how to make this downloadable, but you've probably heard most of it before, anyway. I work with the materials I have at hand, okay? Okay.

Anyway, this is a great mix for power cardio, getting pumped up for a big exam, or whenever you need to rise to your full potential.

GET JUICED

A Sam/Ruby Work-Out Mix
Addictive rock from the 70's, 80's, and 90's to make you STRONGER!!!

Meat Loaf
Life Is A Lemon And I Want My Money Back

What about your childhood?
It's defective!
It's getting buried in the past.

What about your future?
It's defective!
You can shove it up your ass!

Blondie
One Way or Another

I'm gonna trick ya! I'll trick ya!

Aerosmith
The Farm

I got terminal uniqueness
I'm an egocentric man.
I get caught up in my freakness
But I ain't no Peter Pan.

EdnaSwap
YDWIBE

You don't want it badly enough!

The Refreshments
Girly

I'm goin' to the firearms store
I'm gonna buy you a really pretty hand gun.
Girly won't you blow this mess out of my mind?

Blondie
Dig Up the Conjo

Deep in the bayou. Demon beside you.
Put on the hoo-doo. Put on the voo-doo.

Who do you love?

Aerosmith
Trip Hoppin'

One more day with you, trip hoppin'.
One more night with you, no stoppin'.

I was hangin' on to yesterday, and now the only way out is through.

Heart
Bad Animals

Come a little closer, now--
If you dare.

Rush
Tom Sawyer

Monday warrior, mean mean stride,
Today's Tom Sawyer, mean mean pride.

Sammy Hagar
Returning Home

I don't know what I cried about, but reality removed all doubt.
I felt warm, but all alone, once upon returning home.

Aerosmith
Hoodoo/Voodoo Medicine Man

Everybody's looking at the sky.
Don't believe the coverups and lies.

Some kinda hoodoo's come across this land!
Some kinda voodoo-- we need a medicine man!

Heart
I Want Your World To Turn

I want your world to turn
Just for me.
I want your fire to burn
Just for me!

Aerosmith

Under My Skin

There's this girl living under my skin.
There's this girl, and she's wearing me thin,
And I think she's the reason
That it's open broken-hearted season.

Led Zeppelin
Communication Breakdown

Communication breakdown, it's always the same.
I'm having another breakdown to drive me insane.

Blondie
Screaming Skin

Following my trust in wonder, I watch the circus begin.
I can't escape the scent of it--the scent of my screaming skin.

My skin cries, my blood sighs,
And I still owe some dread on this hide.

Santana/Everlast
Put Your Lights On

There's a darkness living deep in my soul
That's still got a purpose to serve.
So let your light shine deep into my home,
And God, don't let me lose my nerve.

Heart
Black on Black II

The oldest story known to man:
The willing sacrificial lamb.
Behind the light a shadow falls.
The code of silence shakes the walls!
A whisper to a silent scream,
The power is the brightest thing.
They say that opposites attract:
Like right and wrong.

Led Zeppelin
Nobody's Fault But Mine

Tryin' to save my soul tonight . . .
Nobody's fault but mine.

Dear Diary: Welcome to the Real World

rokhal — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:52:27 GMT

I've been an all around Bad Citizen of LJ, FFnet, and AO3 lately, reasons being that I'm doing paperwork, wringing my hands over paperwork, trying to graduate, debating whether or not I even want to attend Commencement, playing around on my awesome internship, and detaching myself from my computer. There is good news: I've got myself a job offer. Bad news is the job sounds really hard.

But greatness was never forged in idleness! Look me up on America's back roads, in a small town fifty miles north of Dean's Diner, where the Old West meets Walmart and the Classic Rock Station is the only station! Serendipity, baby. No joke.

This is gonna be fun.

Dear Diary: Car Fail

rokhal — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 02:16:17 GMT

Two long-standing questions I've wondered about myself were answered today.

Ever since I emerged from puberty physically a woman, but as ambivalent toward men as I had always been as a child, I've wondered if my sexual orientation may be a less convenient one than most people's, or, when I read online that asexuality was a thing, whether I have a sexuality to orient at all. A second question I've had was, if I were to put in the effort to mingle with available people and met someone to return my attentions, what would I do about it?

Today, I met a gorgeous Kwik-E-Mart cashier. He was compact, straight-backed, with bright blue eyes, and built. Think miniature Captain America. He was a spectacular-looking human being, from an artistic sense. I didn't want to approach him, or anything; staring at him felt like looking into a halogen lamp, and the discomfort could only worsen with proximity.

When I had trouble pumping gas, he walked out and jiggled the pump handle for me, explained that the pumps were finicky, and returned to the station store. As he was outside, I dropped my flash drive out of my pocket, then my keys out of my other pocket. After retrieving my belongings and topping off my engine oil, I drove away.

While adding engine oil, I had set the oil reservoir cap on the radiator. The cap was gone by the time I arrived at my destination, my hood is now covered in oil, and my car smells like a tire fire. Smooth.

So now I know that I have a sexual orientation, I am attracted to men, and if I ever met someone who returned my attention, I would forget my wallet on a park bench before choking on my own tongue.

Dear Diary: Apparently I am doing something wrong.

rokhal — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 06:28:59 GMT

So I took The Remarkably Thorough Harry Potter Character test, you know, to see what some random Internet test-crafter makes of my personality.

Er.

Your result for The Remarkably Thorough Harry Potter Character Test...

Tom Riddle/Lord Voldemort

“Get back here, Potter! I want to see your face when I kill you! I want to see the light leave your eyes!”

You are Tom Marvolo Riddle, aka Lord Voldemort. He is the main antagonist of the story, and for good reason. Cunning, sly, and merciless, he seeks to control the wizarding world and rid it entirely of muggles. He is much like Grindelwald in this sense, but unfortunately for Grindelwald, Dumbledore was alive and kicking ass at the height of his career! Such a shame. Oh well, tough luck for him. No one is quite sure how Voldemort became so evil, or what happened to him between leaving school and forming his own group of minions, but it doesn’t matter. He is what he is and no one can change that. Efforts to do so are futile. You are similar to Voldemort in the way that both of you approach situations with remarkable shrewdness, but your narcissism gets in the way of your success. You make many plans that often go to pieces from lack of details, seeing as you are so intent on the goal that the process of getting there becomes disorganized. Not only that, but even if you see to it that the goal lies straight ahead, something always foils your plan (the culprit is almost always Harry Potter... WHY WON'T HE DIE?!!). You are also more prone to keep to yourself, seeing as the people around you are nothing but idiots. Keep on truckin’, sweetie. You’ll be ruler of the world one of these days!

In short, you are more:

Cautious than impulsive

Mature than immature

Arrogant than modest

Weird than normal

Introverted than extroverted

Your polar opposite is Ron Weasley.

Take The Remarkably Thorough Harry Potter Character Test at HelloQuizzy

All I can say is, AT LEAST I GOT AN IMPORTANT CHARACTER. There. Happy.

SPN Ep Rxn 8.01: The Spiral of Doom

rokhal — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 06:14:39 GMT

I used to do pretty much frame-by-frame reviews, with speculation and a detailed plot synopsis and a list of important technical and creature details. This is not one of those reviews.

I used to be a Dean girl. It took me a until Season 5 to warm up to Sam.

I didn't like Sam from the episode we met him, when he accused his absent father in front of his girlfriend who didn't know any better and his brother who worshiped the ground John walked on of being an irresponsible ineffectual careless drunk. That is multiple layers and dimensions of passive-aggressive, whiny, and out-of-line. And how he was pretty much solely motivated by revenge, playing at being the nice, normal guy when he really couldn't give a damn about people dying in the woods in Colorado. And the thing with the EMF meter -- could Sam make one out of a broken WalkMan? No. Shut your trap, Sam.

Sam, I say, is an asshole.

But the thing about Sam is, the longer we know him, the easier it is to forget he's an asshole because he tries so extremely hard all the time to be a good person. Sam is a constant titanic battle between good and evil, and it's not just demon-blood evil, it's regular evil, it's the evil in every one of us as we get on the bus and stare at our co-workers' food in the fridge and resent people for being more good-looking than we are. Sam tries so hard to be a nice guy that it shocks us when he is anything but. Sam works at being the hero.

Usually.

Most of the time.

The thing about this titanic battle is, sometimes evil wins. No -- frequently, evil wins. Sam gets knocked down, hard: he gets addicted, he falls into revenge spirals, he plays blame games, he believes what he wants to hear . . . and then he gets back up again. You ain't never gonna keep him down. Sam's quest to become a better person is like Wile E Coyote pursuing the Roadrunner. It's great television.

Because Sam works so hard at being the good guy, but he seems to be born to be an asshole, we get some seriously weird behavior patterns. Two of my favorite recent Sam moments come from Season Seven, Time For A Wedding (seriously) and are as follows:
The evil: (Dean and Garth approach Sam and Becky.) Sam: Who's the temp?
Who's the temp? I could spend paragraphs unpacking the many dimensions and mechanisms of disrespect, derision, contempt, and patronism embedded in those three flippant syllables Sam tosses off so effortlessly. Sam talks over Garth like he's not even there. He impugns Garth's status as a legitimate hunter. He questions Dean's judgment in hunting with anyone but Sam. He mocks Dean for lacking the confidence to hunt alone. Sam is just . . . mean. And it's subtle mean. How do you call somebody on a casual insult like that? It's effortlessly, perfectly mean; it takes talent. And Sam wasn't even paying attention; he really has nothing against Garth.
The good: Sam (gritting his teeth through it) forgives Becky.
This was above and beyond the call of duty. Forgiving Becky? After what she'd planned to do? Becky was unhinged, and misled, and a pawn, and needy and lonely, but few people, few good people, would have it in them to spare a kind word to her after this episode. A naturally nice person, in whom kindness and compassion flows like a bubbling spring, would feel righteous anger at the violation Becky planned and inflicted, and, listening to their anger because it is so rare, might make an exception to their habitual kindness and turn their mercy away. Sam sucks it up, forges past the volcano of anger and resentment he lives with every day, and forgives her anyway, because Sam doesn't expect being a good person to be easy. Sam works really, really hard at it. Often he does the right thing when few others would bother.

When Sam's on his game, he's magnificent. When he's not paying attention, he's a petty, arrogant, passive-aggressive little boy -- you know, Lucifer's perfect vessel. When he's alone, all bets are off. Sam's an introspective, self-made hero who screws up, often and majorly, but keeps trying to fix his mistakes. That's why most of my ficlets are about Sam now.

This season, I think Sam may have fallen into evil again. There's a relevant saying I heard somewhere that goes something like this: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." Turn that saying on its head, and we have, "Stupidity can do as much damage as malice, far more commonly." Thus we have the lesser vices, apathy, disinterest, selfishness, short-sightedness, laziness, despair, willful blindness, deliberate helplessness. Easy vices. Soft and inviting as a snow-bank when you're freezing to death. Weakness.

Dean, by contrast, is the Righteous Man. Saving people, hunting things, looking out for Sammy. In the early seasons, Sam talked sweet, but Dean pointed them at people who needed saving. When Dean breaks down, it's gradual, irresistible, and usually the result of outside forces. Being a hero seems to come naturally to Dean. If Sam's spiritual battle is two wolves fighting, Dean's is a diamond constantly getting caked in manure and wood glue (the manure being the bitterness and PTSD life piles on him, the glue being the illusions and denial Dean wraps around himself). Dean's internal conflicts are not so often "what do I do now" as "am I strong enough to do what I know is right".

Dean has principles. When he compromises them, it's under duress and it's temporary. Sometimes his devotion to his principles is a little unsettling, especially when he's applying them to other people he cares for; look at his interactions with Castiel after he returned from the watery grave. Look at Sam's first detox, and "At least he'll die human."

But by the end of Season 7, Dean was losing his edge. I mean, the fight with the snake women in Adventures in Babysitting -- ouch. And the drinking, the revenge quests, losing sleep . . . Purgatory was a much-needed boot camp. Dean took a level in badass and returned raring to go and ready to strike terror into the heart of the darkness once again.

Wait, Dean Winchester took a level in badass?

On second thought, that doesn't sound so great.

We've seen Dean Winchester X-Treme Editions before: the resistance fighter of 2014, and Caucasian Blade. They were both awesome, but slightly less than desirable as brothers, friends, and team-mates. They were missing some essential part of humanity. Dean's always, when it comes down to it, had room in his principles for Sam, a little mercy and tolerance, but not anymore. Maybe it's not a diamond under all that manure and wood glue, but a knife. Knives cut.

Sam and Dean's reunion this season is a weird full-circle to their reunion in Season 1, with Sam being the soft civilian and Dean being the hardcore hunter, only this time, it's pure. Under his mild mask of propriety, Season 1 Sam was an angry, resentful young man who slid effortlessly into revenge and bloodlust. Under his badass jacket and the screaming vocals of AC/DC, Season 1 Dean was a desperate, loyal son and brother who just wanted his family back together again. By this time, Sam's had plenty of hard years to learn just how little joy and freedom he deserved out of life, and Dean's had so many disappointments, betrayals, and losses to maybe give up on faith in his family altogether. This time, I think Sam really is soft, and Dean is hardcore, in ways they could only pretend to be eight seasons ago.

Meta: I believe there's a hero in all of us.

rokhal — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 04:16:29 GMT

I recently saw Thor and The Avengers and got pressganged into Loki's legions of fangirls. And I've been wondering why. Sure, Tom Hiddleston is cute and engaging and funny and so happy with his role and his fandom that he makes me feel a little less silly about being a fan. The actor's a cool guy.

Loki's a whiner.

But it's Loki who holds my fascination, who provides, as all my obsessions provide, a face I can recognize as a facet of myself. He's . . . he's a whiner. A snide commentator from the hero's elbow. A judger. A coward with grudges. A weasel. I dig me some Loki!redemption!fic, is what I'm saying here.

But more to the point, I like Loki's story, because it's a villain's story, and we need those even more than heroes' stories.

Let's pick up Loki's story in The Avengers. Loki was snagged out of space like Ripley from her life pod by the Chitauri, who are basically space orcs. They torture and threaten Loki, wire a bug-zapper into his brain, and set him loose on Earth with orders to retrieve the Tesseract, an artifact of phenomenal cosmic power, or else suffer further and worse tortures for his failure.

Imagine you were Loki. What would you do?

Well, you're Loki. You've been raised a prince of Asgard, the pinnacle of civilization and military power within the known universe. And you were tortured and have a metaphorical bug-zapper wired into your skull. You're terrified of the Chitauri; they have to be destroyed, and Earth is your only hope of making that happen.

Conquering Earth is not merely a plausible option, it is what you were trained to do all your life, in addition to diplomacy and administration and history and economics and such. You are trained as a king. You would be a damn good king. You could conquer Earth, according to your deal, and after giving over the Tesseract, use your new territory as a power base from which to destroy the loathesome Chitauri race before their foulness could taint the golden pillars you once called home. You'd have to spill some human blood, but this is conquest! You're trained to be a king! You have the authority to spill blood, especially human blood; they barely live a hundred years if they're lucky.

Alternatively, you could make a few feints at conquest, draw the attention of Earth's nascent band of heroes, and lure them into position to destroy the Chitauri for you. They will fight for their planet, and you never know -- they might be more capable than you or the Chitauri expect.

There's less potential for glory in strategy #2, but you don't have to stick with it. Combine plans! Pretend to be willing to surrender the Tesseract to the Chitauri, and claim innocence if the Avengers' counterassault fails to destroy them, then over the next few years, unify the weakened planet Earth, and disseminate Aesir and dwarven technology among your human subjects until they build a military that can quash the Chitauri for good.

There are other options: you could surrender immediately to the most powerful human authority, beg Thor for protection, give up intelligence on the Chitauri, and help SHIELD seal the Tesseract in an undersea concrete bunker. The Chitauri would know and you would spend the rest of your very long life wishing for something so sweet as pain, and centuries later, they'd figure some other way to retrieve the Tesseract, bringing their plague to Earth while you are still powerless and in agony.

Or you could spare all possible human lives: go Ocean's Eleven on the vault with the unobtainium in it instead of taking a man's eyeball (he'd probably live, as long as the bleeding got stopped) with a cordless drill/teleporter doodad. Take an extra few months to open the portal for the Chitauri, enough time for the humans to get their acts together enough to stop you, maybe for your mind-slaves to learn to resist your control and your masters to become impatient.

Or you could simply refuse to do anything, and so defy the Chitauri: lie down in some private hollow and scream and scream and scream --

So stop being Loki for a minute and answer: what did Loki do in Avengers that was actually so bad?
He made people into mind-slaves -- humans. A lower race. Barely a step above livestock, and mind-control is infinitely more humane than any other means of effective persuasion at his disposal. Loki is a god, for crying out loud. If he can't use mind control, who can?
He killed eighty people in five days -- people die all the time, plus, it's conquest. You've got to knock over a few ant hills if you're trying to plow a field. And the Chitauri would have killed far more, when they eventually found a way to Earth.
He killed Coulson -- Coulson was trying to kill him. Leaving people alive after they try to kill you is both risky and insulting.
He caused billions in property damage to New York -- it's the humans' war, too. He couldn't very well invite the Chitauri down somewhere they'd go unnoticed, could he?
And he was probably mind-controlled at least a little bit, too. If I were the Chitauri leader, that's how I'd run things.

In the end, Loki weaseled his way around threats, mind control, and telepathic observation and ensured that Earth's first major alien invasion was an unqualified disaster that left the planet largely intact. You're welcome.

But what Loki did was that bad, because no matter how difficult or painful or frightening the moral road was, it was still there. You can't tell me every death was necessary. You can't tell me he treated his minions with the respect they deserved as moral beings. You can't tell me he surpassed his self-imposed handicaps and asked for help from his brother or the humans.

It would have been difficult to do the right thing, almost impossible. And he didn't. He was afraid. He was in a tight spot. It would have taken an act of incredible heroism to do the right thing, and Loki chose not to do that. Loki chose to be less than heroic and killed a whole lot of human beings.

Sometimes you have to be a hero if you don't want to be a villain. Sometimes being decent isn't good enough, a bystander is as good as an accomplice, walking away is murder, and there is no third option. Hero, or villain. The only right choice is the seemingly impossible choice.

You've got to believe in the impossible. Transcend your imaginary limits and work around your real ones. Know right from wrong and accept no compromise.

And if possible, win, so your buddies get to write the history books.

That's what I see as the moral of Loki's story.

Dear Diary: My Obsession with Animal Cruelty

rokhal — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 01:20:28 GMT

At this time in my life, August 6, 2012, I see the need to write an unambiguous self-explanation to my future acquaintances.

If you read stories on this LiveJournal and on my other self-publication profiles, you will notice strong pervasive themes of suffering, exploitation, and neglect of, and occasionally of deliberate cruelty to, animals, often in story contexts in which these themes are not overtly suggested by the premise. They haunt me. I am obsessed.

I am not a cat-murdering psychopath. This is not a fetish.

I write about animal cruelty because I was mildly traumatized by animal husbandry practices I observed and engaged in as a child and teenager, some of which I now believe were ethical and others of which I now regret, would not repeat, and would advise other people not to perform. I am obsessed by guilt and this guilt finds its outlet in fiction.

In reality, one of my primary life goals is to use understanding and education to improve the quality of life and prevent the suffering of all animals for which I am responsible, through my own practices and by providing feasible, empathetic, good-faith advice to clients and associates

I've seen a good deal of people take down their online profiles because of conflict between their creative works and their real-world co-workers, superiors, clients, press, etc. I stand by my creative works, with the caveat that in the future I may learn very different attitudes and values as I mature.

SPN/Thor fic: The Tomato in the Mirror 5/4

rokhal — Tue, 29 May 2012 04:53:23 GMT

Title: The Tomato in the Mirror
Chapter: 5/4 (Missing scene)
Characters: Sam Winchester, Thor Odinsson, Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, several Avengers and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and guest-starring Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth
Pairing: Gen
Rating: T
Length: 3k (of 22k total)
Warnings: Two uses of the F word, several uses of the S word, mild hand-to-hand violence, moderate comic-book violence, massive property destruction, a scene of body horror that may be objectionable to those with anxiety about diet
Spoilers: Thor, Supernatural through 7.11. No actual spoilers for Avengers, as this was written before I saw the film.
Disclaimer: Not for profit. Free advertising for both franchises!
Summary: Loki body-swaps with Sam. Later, things get weird.

Note: Guys! Guys! There's more! I have a missing scene to share with you all. But this isn't just any missing scene, some cute bit of dialogue that couldn't get jammed into the plot or some campy melodrama that would have totally thrown off the whole mood of the movie - this one made one reader wonder, "What were they thinking? Did a roll of film fall off the truck? Did the actors just all skip a day? Did the studio get involved and ruin the film? Was there a writers' strike?"

Well, yes, the writer was on strike. I had no idea how to write this particular scene back when I was working on it, because at the time, I'd assumed I'd be doing the whole fic from Sam's POV, and there's only so much psychedelic hallucinatory whump a girl can write before getting bored. All I do is vivisection. I don't know how to do psychological horror. So I had Dean narrate the confrontation after the fact.

But! The reader had a (now) blindingly obvious solution to my problem: why not write the scene from Thor's POV?

I had a free weekend.

The spider-armed smoke cloud that hovered at the center of the mortal city was born of no true storm, but of foul magic, acrid as the fumes of hot springs or decay. Thor's heart quailed to know that Loki could muster such forces, that he had held them coiled and quiescent beneath his skin and done so knowingly, willingly. He had known his brother had strayed, and heard the tales of horror from those trampled in his path, but to hear him laugh over his crimes and taste the vile energies he had stooped to harness, was worse than Thor could bear to imagine. He clung to a seam on the back of Tony Stark's enchanted armor, Mjolnir insensate in his hand. Stark spiraled over the black smoke, and Thor peered between its tendrils, tense to leap at the first glitter of gold.

It was their sixth pass.

When Thor had first joined the battle, he'd flung himself and Mjolnir into the sky, heedless of whether he were facing Loki himself or one of his brother's illusions, so eager was he for reunion—any reunion. Somewhat to his surprise, Loki was there in the flesh to block his strike with an upraised arm. Loki had grinned into his face, his eyes glittering as they always did whenever he'd started some blaze he wasn't quite certain he could put out, then licked his finger and smeared spittle on Mjolnir's head. With a look of triumph, he'd shaken off Thor's grip and kicked him in the stomach. Thor had dropped uncontrolled through thin Midgardian walls, and landed to find Mjolnir an unchanging weight, his mighty birthright hobbled and confused. Stark's flying machinery, save for that in his right glove, had escaped the curse upon the city, though his weapons had not, and he and Thor now fought in close partnership.

The writhing smoke parted for an instant, revealing Loki, beckoning. The Man of Iron swooped toward him, and when they'd gained enough speed, Thor flung himself down at his brother, bellowing his wrath.

Loki was but light and fancy under his hands. It was the first time this day he'd used that trick, and Thor had grown complacent. Thor cursed himself as he dropped through the illusion and into the choking dark vapor. He would drop, and the Man of Iron would wait for him to emerge from the bottom and catch him—wait not out of any distaste Stark held for the smoke, but because he claimed his helm's keen vision could not penetrate the haze. Thor wondered why the mortal always seemed astonished whenever his nascent wizardry failed some challenge.

Something soft but unexpectedly strong snatched Thor, binding his arms to his body and arresting his fall within the cloud. He struggled. No light reached him. When he tried to touch his attacker, he encountered a yielding sludge, coiling round and round, downy at its edges and steely at its core. The bonds tore under his strength, but as soon as they loosened, they renewed themselves, as strong as ever—smoke, animated, as absurd as the answer to a riddle.

He ran out of air. Forced to inhale, he felt the vapor blazing down his lungs, and blood spatter his tongue as he coughed. Worse than that, the coils of smoke had grown in girth and power, crushing the blood and air from his chest like a great serpent. They parted for Mjolnir—the dwarf-forged Uru was not quite muzzled—but Thor could barely swing his arm to wield it.

Something hard clanged against his boot and was gone. Startled, Thor let out a fearsome bellow. A whining drone accompanied the impact, and as it faded in the distance, then regained strength, Thor recognized the noise of the Man of Iron in flight. The coils of smoke weakened in the wake of the repulsors, then tightened again, as though in anger. Thor was pleased, warmed, even, that Tony Stark had braved the toxic vapors blind to locate him.

Stark rammed into him from behind and grabbed hold, but the cloud clutched Thor fast. "Fly on!" Thor grunted, seized by the clarity of battle. "Let thy armor's fiery train dispel the smoke!"

"You crazy?" Stark demanded. "At five feet, I'm running four-hundred degrees and fifty en-see-em-squared!"

"Spare your mortal caution!" Thor gasped back. "Now is for action!"

"Your funeral." Stark released him, and Thor panicked for a shameful instant, alone in the smoke. "I know a guy who makes blonde wigs; ask and I'll hook you up." Then the armor passed over Thor, twisting, catching him in a blast of heat and pressure. The strangling smoke dispelled like mist in the sun. Thor dropped, and passed with relief into the clean bright air below.

He stared up at the belly of the evil cloud, concerned for the Man of Iron; the smoke had an antipathy to the repulsors, but the repulsors were housed in the feet and hands of the fighting armor, leaving the main mass full vulnerable.

The armor burst from the cloud, looking well, so far as Thor could see. Thor rolled in midair, anxious that he not crush some mortal. To his surprise, he saw the fraying remnants of a whirlwind, slowing and flinging plaster and lumber from atop a low mortal building in whose roof a wide hole gaped. He spotted a gleam of green fire from within, and then a glimpse, just as Tony Stark caught him by the back of his jerkin, of Loki.

"Release me!" Thor bellowed as Tony Stark circled over the building. He reached back and gripped the armor's glove, making the mortal metals creak in warning. "Loki has some scheme a-work! I must confront him!"

"You tried confronting him," Stark said. "Hate to say it, but it's time to give Shield a try. A strike team's at the door and Barton's closing in; his normal arrows still hit things." Below, as they circled around the front of the building, Thor saw a band of Shield warriors at the balcony of the room Loki had entered, ramming the door with a steel pipe, and the hawk-eyed archer scaling the roof by a grapnel.

Thor contemplated striking him with Mjolnir, weakened though it was. Their circling had hidden Loki from his sight; he saw only carpet and rubble. "Shrink thou so from every battle?" he spat instead.

"Do you not have brick walls in Asgard?" Stark retorted nonsensically. He reported the sights his helmet revealed. "Okay, it's just three guys with him—no, two. Infrared says two. One's armed; they've both got this weird voodooey energy signature on 'em."

It would be dishonorable indeed for Loki to use hostages, but that had never stopped him from doing so in their quests of old. "Fly near, and let him taste my wrath!"

"Okay, he's doing something," Stark reported, distracted. "The guy on the ground—he's touching him—there's some kind of distortion—"

"Then drop me, that I may disrupt his workings! Loki will not fear death at my hands; release me and let this day be bloodless!"

Stark descended, the wind singing in Thor's ears. "Lemme kill some altitude or you'll go right through the floor. You can punch your brother and talk at the same time, right?" They swooped nearer and nearer to the hole. "Whoa. He's backing away. The guy's getting up, he's—" A horrid howl rose from the building. Thor gripped Stark's gauntlet that dangled him in the air. "—He's charging the guy with the gun," Stark reported, as Thor ripped himself free and dropped. As he fell, he heard Stark yelp, "Shit!"

Thor clipped the edge of the hole with his elbow as he plunged through, and landed kneeling. A small gun spun across the floor toward him, and he turned to its origin. Two men grappled, the upper one wreathed in mage-light, as Loki looked on. He met Thor's eye with a flinch and a smirk—the little sneak, he was making them fight. The winning man wore the cloth armored vest the Shield men favored, and as Thor watched, he let out another frantic, desperate scream—not wounded pride, as Thor might expect of one of Loki's pawns, but terror. "Loki, end this magic!" Thor bellowed, shocked.

"But of course," Loki assented. The mage-fire vanished, and instead of breaking free of his savage state, the screaming man lunged and latched hold of the other's throat, attempting to strangle him and pound his head against the floor.

Thor seized the man by the shoulders, prized his hands away, and flung him clear across the room. He rolled to his feet, his teeth bared and dark hair screening his streaming eyes, with the look of a captive a-frenzy with goading. His hands were chained. Thor recognized by his clothing and features Shield's prisoner Sam Winchester, though all the caution and concern that once marked him were effaced. Sam charged Loki wildly, manacles flashing, and Loki sidestepped and shoved him toward the other mortal, whom Sam attacked as furiously as before. Thor grabbed him again.

"End this magic, or by my Hammer, I will end you!" he demanded, holding the tall mortal fast by the shoulders as he clawed at the steel of Thor's jerkin.

"I doubt you'll end me by your hammer today," Loki tossed back. Thor released Sam Winchester and seized Loki by the breastplate. He heard a low bellow— "Sam, snap out of it!" —from behind him.

"Mind your pet," Loki grunted as Thor pinned him to the wall. Thor twisted, and saw the bewitched man strangling the other mortal with the chain of his manacles. In his distraction, Loki shoved him away with a strike that sent him tumbling end-over-end, using all the skill Thor remembered from their training and a passion that was new. Thor lunged toward him again, then changed direction and saved the mortals from each-other.

"Stark!" Thor bellowed.

"Sammy!" the mortal rasped, leaping up to tackle Thor, attempting to wrest Sam free from his restraining arm.

"Fear not!" Thor reproved him, ignoring his futile grappling. "Loki, whence comes this cruelty? 'Twas thou that once stopped me rending wings from wasps!"

Whatever reply Loki might have made was lost as the room's wall collapsed from the outside, the Man of Iron driving beams and plaster before him. Loki dodged. Warriors of Shield poured in through the breach, and Thor shoved Sam at the nearest two. "Mind this man!" he commanded. "I shall speak to Loki!"

"Speak. Right," Stark echoed. "You got two minutes."

Undistracted now, Thor cornered Loki and pinned against the wall again, lifting his brother-of-heart by his breastplate. Loki let his feet dangle, infuriatingly passive. "I know this man; he is stout of heart, and noble. Free him from this madness! Release him!"

"But I have," said Loki, looking over Thor's shoulder to watch Sam struggle with the mortals who held him.

"How canst thou toy with words while a good man screams like a dying beast?" Thor demanded, searching Loki's darting eyes for a counterpart to the misery in his own. "Loki, what driveth thee?"

Loki sneered at him. "What drives you, Thor? Not a mention of this city? Five thousand mortals brought to their knees—is my work so forgettable? Can you not count?"

Sam screamed again and broke free with heroic strength, drawing shouts of alarm from the Shield men. Thor heard scraping and banging, and a startled cry from the Man of Iron. "Little help!" Stark shouted. Thor chanced a glance behind him. Stark's enchanted armor was hovering, a measure of trickery to spare his flying machinery from the curse, and Sam had hooked the chain of his manacles around its neck to secure himself in place. His fingers scraped and clutched at the helm's visor, perilously close to discovering the catch, smearing the glossy paint with blood. In a sharp strike, he pounded the visor with his forehead. His teeth snapped audibly.

Thor shivered. In this strange madness, Sam Winchester had no care for his person or the strength of his opponent, but his every movement held lethal intent.

The woman in black, widow-of-none, answered Stark's call. Stark lifted Sam by the chain and dropped him to the ground; Natasha, swift and inescapable as the spider she was called for, leapt upon his back, snatched up his chain to rob him of his arms, and tangled her legs about his knee to topple him. Pinned on his belly, with one leg full flexed beneath the Widow's slight weight and his chain held fast behind his own neck, Sam struggled on, rolling and twisting his shoulders as if to draw her in reach of his bared bloody teeth. The mortal who seemed to know him knelt at his head, clutching one of his hands and grasping his face to force him to meet his eyes. Sam's ferocity was undimmed.

Thor turned back to Loki, whose lips were tight in stifled...something—mirth? Was that not always mirth, when Loki had looked so?—and eyes were over-wide. He looked as he always had when glorying in his own cunning. There was no fresh pain, no shame, no self-division, only Loki as Thor had always known him. Had thought he'd known him. Demands and reasoning and reprimand flashed half-formed through Thor's mind, but what passed his lips was a strangled "Why?"

"You ask," Loki hissed, "you bid me speak, but you never listen. Why should I tell you?"

A stern voice from above interrupted them: the archer Clint Barton, perched at the hole in the roof. "Fix reality or you get an arrow through the eye."

Thor tensed, caught between his comrades and his brother. Loki looked upward, unimpressed, and then the distant air he always assumed while story-telling dropped over him like a cloak. "Why, Thor?" he said, addressing the room at large. "Why? Because I want to see. Kill me, and the curse on the city of Reno will remain. Spread, even—I know not." He grabbed Thor's shoulder and shoved himself aside to look across, as though his feet were on the ground and Thor merely standing in his path. "Dean Winchester, brother of Sam—answer my question and save this human city."

All eyes, Thor's included, rested on the drab, stricken man attempting to comfort Sam as he writhed. He looked up at Loki—his face was ashen and fair-featured and heavy with the promise of death and agony. "Last guy messed with Sam died ugly," he snarled, his deep voice quaking with rage. "Guy before that, I know for a fact is still paying for it. Get out of his head and pray I don't track you down, you petty, twisted freak."

Loki smiled at him, in a way Thor cringed to see. "All that fills his mind was already there." A shock crossed Dean Winchester's face, then he rose. Sam yelled, deep, trailing off into a gurgle and the click of searching teeth. Dean opened his mouth when Sam fell silent, but Loki spoke first. "Dean, you paragon, you martyr, loyal beyond death. Tell me, that I may go—what more will you give your brother, now you have seen him, for the first time, in his natural state?"

Dean stared Loki down, the evidence of Loki's power lying fear-crazed and slavering behind him. Loki blinked very rapidly and swallowed, suddenly tense under Thor's hands. "You sonofabitch," Dean snarled to his face.

"Not an answer," said Loki steadily. His sharp gaze was fixed on the mortal.

Sam howled and struggled against his manacles again, and in the din that smothered speech, Thor watched Dean cast about the room—at the fighting men of Shield, at his brother prostrate, at the shape of a man lying against a wall—a wood-carven man as large as life, a curious object. When he faced Loki again, defiance curled his lip. Thor knew his answer before he spoke; by the moments he'd seen of Dean, he saw that he and the mortal were of a kind, and their shared honor would admit but one reply.

"Fine," Dean growled, cursing Loki with his eyes. "You win. I'm done. I'm done with him."

Or perhaps not.

Loki's breath hissed in, a faint noise of distress, but when Thor turned back to look, there was only triumph on his face. "If you do not listen, do you see?" Loki murmured, for Thor's ears alone. "Say it again!" he called to Dean. "Is your brotherhood so cheap, is your shame so slight?" Loki's eyes slitted. Spittle struck Thor's throat. "You would condemn him for a madman? You, who gave your soul, would leave him to those wolves who slaver for him still?"

"Yes!" Dean howled, over Sam's shrieking. "I give up, dammit! You hear me, freak? I give up, they can take him, I don't give a damn anymore!" He stood resolute. His shoulders trembled, but his sure gaze never wavered. Thor felt as though he'd watched the sun die just hours from dawn, such an abomination was this moment, this betrayal.

Loki smiled, vindicated and grim. "So you see love has limits," he announced. "Another time, Thor."

Thor gripped his breastplate harder—even skilled mages were hard-put to transport themselves if one had a sure grip on them—but after a last shuttered glance toward Sam, Loki faded from his grasp like ice in a fire, in a new traveling-magic the like he'd never seen, leaving Thor with nothing but a sickness in his heart and a whiff of the same stench that suffused the moving black cloud overhead.

Mjolnir grew light and animate in his hand; he bade it change its weight, feather-light to leaden and back again, and it responded as swiftly as it always had. The curse had lifted. Thor turned around, and saw that Sam's struggles had slowed, Loki choosing now to be merciful (or perhaps his attention was gone, or this was some new twist of his cruelty; Thor clung to the hope that he'd shown mercy, for the alternatives pained him too sore to dwell upon). Dean, Sam's brother who had betrayed him, knelt at his side to comfort him as though his heart were still unstained.

Thor knew discretion. As the Shield men converged on the brothers Winchester, as hawk-eyed Barton stowed his steel arrow and let himself down from the roof, as Tony Stark finally let his repulsors still and touched the ground again, and as Sam Winchester returned to reason, Thor let Sam be comforted, and said nothing.

The end. (For real this time.)

SPN/Thor fic: The Tomato in the Mirror 4/4

rokhal — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:04:10 GMT

Title: The Tomato in the Mirror
Chapter: 4/4
Characters: Sam Winchester, Thor Odinsson, Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, several Avengers and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and guest-starring Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth
Pairing: Gen
Rating: T
Length: 3k (of 18k total)
Warnings: Two uses of the F word, several uses of the S word, mild hand-to-hand violence, moderate comic-book violence, massive property destruction, a scene of body horror that may be objectionable to those with anxiety about diet
Spoilers: Thor, Supernatural through 7.11. No actual spoilers for Avengers, as this was written before I saw the film.
Disclaimer: Not for profit. Free advertising for both franchises!
Summary: Loki body-swaps with Sam. Later, things get weird.

Sam had been in Hell for longer than a human could expect to live. Lucifer, whose prison he'd shared, had had a keen sense of timing, of drama, and many millennia to come to terms with the fact that in Hell, one could never run out of time. He liked a nice long lead-in before starting the hard and fast soul-shredding torment.

Loki had less patience.

Loki made Sam's memory skip right to the good parts.

"I'll do it!" Dean was roaring. "I give up, dammit! You hear me, freak? I give up, they can take him, I don't give a damn anymore!"

It could have been a thousand memories of lies, but this scene didn't match the cold, the tearing chains and artful hooks and twisting that had Sam fighting and gasping with an irrational fear that would never die. It was the wrong scene. Sam felt the fog lift and struggled for awareness. He was out of Hell, and he probably wasn't going back; he wasn't technically hallucinating; he was pressed face-down into the carpet, the chain of his handcuffs hooked over the back of his neck and one of his legs cranked back at the knee until his heel was on his ass. The panic was a surging tide. He bucked and panted. There was blood in his mouth. The chain dug in hard to the base of his skull as he planted his hands on the floor and shoved instinctively—he'd had a hundred hears to learn what chains meant; chains meant forever, chains meant intimate and undivided attention, chains meant there was no way to win, but it would always be worse if he didn't fight.

Sam fought.

"So you see, love has limits," said a cold voice—Loki. Sam tried to concentrate, but the chain was too tight and sharp on the back of his neck; any second and his captor would start playing his spine like a church organ. The memory was vivid and tactile. Sam screamed.

He heard men yelling and saw a flash of light through his eyelids. He cranked his head around to look for Dean; Dean was stumbling toward him, looking a little shaky, but generally all right. Thor leaned down over Dean's shoulder, white-faced and gaping at both of them. Sam wondered when he'd gotten there. He relaxed his arms and tried to unhook his cuffs from the back of his head. "Where'd he go?" he croaked.

"Zapped out," Dean replied.

Thor cast a look of bald horror at Dean's back, then examined the hole in the ceiling. "He took some hidden path of his."

"Well, crap," said a strange man, standing where Sam couldn't see.

Sam spat out the blood in his mouth. His tongue hurt. "I think I'm okay. Can I get up?"

"I dunno, you done being a reaver?" asked a second stranger.

"That was freakish and horrifying," added the first. His voice echoed faintly, like it was coming through speakers. "Thor, I dunno where you get off whining about how unnatural mortal technology is when your psycho brother just turns a guy into a rage zombie by poking him in the face.

"You mortals seldom understand what you do," Thor retorted.

"So Loki did that on purpose?"

Sam's mouth was full of blood again. He figured it was his own, and swallowed. "I'm really okay now."

"Let him up," ordered a third man. Agent Coulson. Whoever was pinning Sam to the ground let go and slid off his back.

His leg and the chain of his cuffs were released. Sam lurched to his feet. The red-haired woman in the black jumpsuit grabbed him by the elbow and helped steady him. Her head barely cleared his shoulder.

Sam looked around the room. The ceiling had been practically gone, last he'd noticed, but now the front wall was mostly gone, too. There was broken glass and scraps of wall-board covering the floor. Thor was pacing around the room, looking lost and punchy. Agent Coulson, the archer, and four operatives in Kevlar had invaded the place and were flanking Dean, and the Iron Man armor stood in the impromptu doorway. He tipped his faceplate back, and, yes, there was Tony Stark from the cover of Fortune.

Dean was still un-restrained, Sam noted. He asked Sam's question for him. "So what now?"

"Unless anyone figures out how to track him," Stark groused, "we wait for Loki to show himself again. I hate playing whack-a-mole with this guy. If we can't take the fight to him, it's all a big game on his end."

"Not even you can know another's mind," Thor growled.

Sam edged toward Dean, and Coulson's men raised their guns at him. Stark tensed, the armored suit whirring softly as it followed his movements. "Hey, Coulson, who are these guys?"

"S.H.E.I.L.D. business," Coulson replied. A smart phone started going off. Dean's phone buzzed in his pocket. The archer patted himself down, and the operatives looked relieved. Coulson pulled a smart-phone out of his breast pocket and checked his messages, holding up a hand to his men. "Your story about the extra-dimensional shape-shifting doppelgangers checks out," he said to Sam.

Dean gaped. "The hell you been telling these clowns, Sammy?"

"The truth," Coulson replied, cutting Sam's explanation off. "At least in part. Now, since both of you are considered dead and the FBI wants a piece of you, it would actually be less convenient for us to hold you for investigation for the many crimes you did commit than to overlook your presence and offer you each a permanent advisory position away from the public eye."

"A job," Dean summarized.

"What do you mean, our story checked out?" Sam demanded. "How did you—what kind of fact-checkers do you have?"

"The kind they need to go toe-to-toe with a guy like Loki," the archer answered him. "Meet the one branch of the government that occasionally takes a peek outside of its own colon."

Tony Stark snapped down the visor of his suit without moving a muscle, as far as Sam could tell, like it was wired into his brain. Agent Coulson winced subtly. There was a moment of quiet.

"The Winchester Brothers?" Stark barked after a moment. "You got me, you got Thor, you got . . . Natalie, but these psychos do not make the cut."

"Hey, what am I?" the archer interrupted.

"An asshole with a great resume. I am not working with people who would hire the Winchester Brothers."

"And yet you work with Thor," Sam interrupted. Thor looked betrayed and gripped his hammer tighter.

"What about Thor?" asked Coulson.

Sam bared his teeth. "Who's in charge of feeding your pet god?"

"I still don't know what you think you're talking about," Coulson said. "Stark, S.H.I.E.L.D. believes the Winchesters are—" He checked his smart-phone again. "Vigilantes removing threats that until now, law enforcement had no comprehension of."

Stark pointed an armored hand at Dean. "That one skinned somebody."

"She was a shapeshifter," Dean explained. "She was probably gonna moult in an hour or two, I pulled too hard, you know the drill."

"And that is the field of expertise that S.H.I.E.L.D. needs now," Coulson interrupted. "My superiors would appreciate an answer as soon as possible—so for new identities, operational support, and seventy-thousand a year before taxes in return for your services as paranormal research and field experts, what do you say?"

Sam felt his eyes bug out of his skull. He shared a numb, bewildered look with Dean, and felt them both reach the same inescapable conclusion at once. "I'm sorry, Agent," Sam said, "but if S.H.I.E.L.D. hasn't been infiltrated by the Leviathan yet, it's only a matter of time."

Dean slapped Sam on the shoulder and smiled grimly. "So it's not that we don't trust you, but we just don't trust you."

Coulson nodded. "Then at least take my card," he said, handing Sam a bland white and blue business card with the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo, but not the name, on it. "We'll let you go as a gesture of good faith."

They sped East on I-80 in a white 2002 Chevy Impala, Dean driving, Sam turning Agent Coulson's card over and over in his fingers as he stared out the window. Sam shifted and checked his face in the side mirror. Still him. A guy got paranoid after a couple body-swaps.

"What the hell was that?" Dean burst out, shattering the quiet of the sealed cabin and modern engine.

Sam looked up at him. "What, the Men In Black letting us go? The trickster holding a major city hostage and then just turning tail? The job offer?"

"The evil clone act," Dean ground out. "He spends three days pretending to go darkside—"

"You're okay?" Sam interrupted. "He didn't do anything—"

"What you saw's as bad as it got. I've had worse," Dean said, not exactly reassuring Sam. "Days messing with me. Trickster, I get it. Trying to teach me everyone has their limit, like I don't already—and then just when the show's heating up, when Carrie's walking into the prom, he switches out for Pinocchio? He hits your crazy switch, and then he just leaves?"

"His brother showed up to fight him," Sam said. "I guess that was more important than some game."

Dean chewed on his lip. "Hammer-dude?"

"Thor."

"Thought Loki was a giant or something—best buds with Odin, got invited to join his little pagan gang in the sky?"

Sam huffed, sardonic. "Yeah, he is, but according to Thor, Loki was adopted by Odin and didn't know that. Makes him the last person in the known universe to find out, and he's not taking it well. It's kind of a soap opera."

"Dad issues?"

"Brother issues."

Dean grunted.

"Dean, why'd he leave?" Sam asked.

"You best buddies with Thor now?" Dean deflected.

"I like the guy, but I'd never forgive him if I wound up on his dinner plate," Sam replied. "Come on. I can't really remember; I was having a flashback or something."

"Or something. You tried to rip out Iron Man's throat with your teeth. You head-butted a suit of armor. You tried to eat that Natalie chick, and not in the good way."

Sam rubbed the rising knot on his forehead, which throbbed worse now that he knew how he'd gotten it.

"Seriously, you good?" Dean asked. "Lucid?"

"I've had worse," Sam echoed. "Why'd he leave, man."

Dean fidgeted. Sam visualized his eyes as infrared lasers burning into the skin above Dean's right ear. "He kept pushing," Dean said after a while. "Kept upping the ante. First it was just—he had that look, like when I got back from Hell and you were blitzed to the eyeballs on demon go-juice."

"I had a look?" Sam winced.

"You had a look. He kept sneaking off. We were following demon-sign, and he'd disappear, come back with blood on his shirt. He got rough with the witnesses. And I did all the tests, man. But nothing came up, so I had to figure it was just you, maybe you went off the deep end or you had some stupid plan."

"I wouldn't," Sam protested.

"That's what you said until you decided to ride the devil down to Hell personally," Dean said. "Anyway. Fake-you, your temporary psychotic pagan god evil twin, he started getting all whiny and melodramatic. Now I was sure it was you. Asked me to kill him, said he was gonna turn evil. Well, the obvious solution was to stop pushing the demonic uppers, but when I pointed that out, he blew up at me and ran off. By this time we're in Reno. I go looking, the city gets all improbable, I come back, and he's gone full-on voodoo necromancer, blood all over the place, no way it's all his, sigils cut into his skin. Once you ran in and spilled the beans, it was pretty obvious he was trying to make me ditch you. So when he switched to messing your brains up . . . I washed my hands of you and sold you to the G-men."

Sam blinked. "Well, good thing the crazy wore off, I guess."

Dean grinned. "Hey, I lied."

"To—you know one of Loki's kennings is Liesmith?"

"Not like he's got a patent on it. Anyhow, once I told the MIBs they could stuff you in a padded room for the rest of your natural life for all I cared—can't believe he bought that." Dean grimaced. "But since his brother was right there . . ."

"He was putting on a show for Thor," Sam finished.

"I'd wondered why the big guy took it so bad."

Sam frowned. "Yeah, he would." He watched the dumb-bumps carved in the asphalt blur past, weeds turn to streaks of green and white, and white reflectors flash. "That coulda been us, man."

Dean snorted. "Sam, even when you're evil, you're the Diet Coke of evil. Tell you what, he comes after us again, you get to stake him. Be therapeutic."

"You're a crap therapist."

"Cause you keep blowing me off!"

Sam huffed. "Anyway. S.H.I.E.L.D. We getting rid of the card? The Black Helicopter thing sounds like a Leviathan's chum-slick."

"Save it for a rainy day," Dean ordered.

Sam stuck it grudgingly in his wallet. "It's always rainy," he muttered.

Dean shrugged, unrepentant, and played with the cruise control. "Hey, Sammy," he said after a while.

There was something in his tone. Sam looked at him warily.

"Never gonna give you up," Dean said, his voice light and sing-songy. "Never gonna let you down. Never gonna—"

"Are you Rick-Rolling me?" Sam demanded, horrified.

"Never gonna bring you down . . . desert you!"

"It's creepy!" Sam protested. "And it doesn't mean what you think it means!"

"Hey, Rick Astley's big with the geeks these days. Thought you'd appreciate it."

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose. "You really shouldn't be allowed on the Internet."

Dean shook his head in mock regret. "I was almost better off with Loki."

Sam ignored him.

"You're both total tsunderes."

"Please. Please shut up."

Dean cackled. The stolen car hummed over the freeway as they disappeared into the Rockies, into the empty snow.

The Man of Iron had no propriety and little honor, but he was an able partner in battle and his furnishings were beyond reproach. Thor reclined before a tall cracking fire that burned without wood, in the most comfortable padded chair he had ever sat in. The archer Clint sat opposite him in a similar chair, sipping at a chilled bottle of fine ale.

Thor wondered at the Midgardians' preoccupation with chilled drink. But his thoughts were snared in thornier matters. His limbs were cooled, now, from the day's weapons drills, and when his drills were done, and no mission came to hand, there was little light to occupy his mind.

The archer pulled a lever on the side of his chair, which unfolded nearly flat, like a bed. Truly Midgard had perfected the arts of sloth. Nonetheless, the archer's eyes, half-hooded, were ever watchful.

"What's going through your head?" Clint asked, swirling the dregs of his ale.

Thor opened his mouth and found his tongue hobbled, flinching—as though the act of speech was as frightful as lancing a boil or leaping unaided from some precipice into the sea. He tried again. "Loki did an evil thing," he said. It was as if the thought was new to him, so surprised he was at speaking it but once he heard the words, he knew them for his own.

Tony Stark, Thor thought, would have congratulated him on this revelation, or mocked him for his delay. Clint raised an eyebrow laconically. "What do you call what he normally does?" he asked.

"Tricks," Thor said, shock making his voice weak as a stripling's. "Tricks and testing. Probing our defenses for weakness, our words for lies, our minds for folly. But what he did to those brothers—"

"He crossed a line," the archer supplied.

Thor felt something swelling in his blood, like the heat of battle would, but cold and slick. Horror. "He drove the elder to betrayal!"

"Everyone snaps eventually," Clint said, doing nothing to warm the chill in Thor's heart.

"They did nothing to him!" Thor protested, rising from Tony Stark's opulent chair. The backs of his greaves caught on a seam of the leather. "He sought them out! Surely Loki knew the sons of Winchester for the monster-slayers they are and not the vermin your rulers take them for—"

"Yeah, the whole time, I'd been hoping for a chance to put a hole in one of those bastards," Clint admitted. "But what I mean is, maybe that's what Loki wanted to prove. Everyone snaps. He's trying to get you to give up."

"I will never give him up," Thor shot back, offended.

"Suit yourself," said Clint. "Personally, I'd love to see you guys be best buds; it'd make everyone's lives way easier. But sometimes, you just gotta let people go."

"Never," Thor protested. "I will never desert him, not in his time of madness. I will never let him go!" Thor kneaded the padded leather of his chair's back in his fists until the wood beneath creaked with the strain. A familiar bloodlust warmed him, and he stormed from the room to spend another session in Tony Stark's training arena. But as he walked a question troubled him—was it truly brotherhood to demand the return of one's own devotion from one who had no wish for such a bond?

Loki might have an answer, Thor supposed. But Loki was mad. And when he harmed the people of Midgard, Thor must needs strike him down.

Missing scene - now found!

Note: Sam has some preconceptions re: Thor's diet, because in the past he and Dean have discovered and slain several forgotten minor gods who had begun to subsist on human flesh in the absence of human worship.

Do you know who Rick Astley is? Google the term "Rick-Roll." I dare you.

Sorry for not including all the Avengers. I didn't know what to do with Hulk and I sort-of forgot Captain America existed . . . I'm a terrible fan. So I just went with "S.H.I.E.L.D. in an awkward adolescence and whichever Avengers I feel like including in a half-formed team."

"Tsundere" is an annoying otaku term for a really annoying girl who blows hot and cold (Manga and Anime vocab). Dean has recently developed an appreciation for "Japanese cartoon porn." To Sam's incredulity, he protests, "It's an art!"

"Tomato In The Mirror" is a trope on TVTropes that Sam and Loki both embody, Sam with his demon blood and Loki with his blueness. They had similarly self-destructive and brother-destructive reactions to that information, and they were both balls of angst and daddy issues to begin with. Seriously, they have so much in common. They should go for drinks together, but a malicious body-swap is as close as they're gonna get.

SPN/Thor fic: The Tomato in the Mirror 3/4

rokhal — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:59:17 GMT

Title: The Tomato in the Mirror
Chapter: 3/4
Characters: Sam Winchester, Thor Odinsson, Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, several Avengers and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and guest-starring Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth
Pairing: Gen
Rating: T
Length: 6k (of 18k total)
Warnings: Two uses of the F word, several uses of the S word, mild hand-to-hand violence, moderate comic-book violence, massive property destruction, a scene of body horror that may be objectionable to those with anxiety about diet
Spoilers: Thor, Supernatural through 7.11. No actual spoilers for Avengers, as this was written before I saw the film.
Disclaimer: Not for profit. Free advertising for both franchises!
Summary: Loki body-swaps with Sam. Later, things get weird.

They grabbed Sam out of Analysis, slapped a Kevlar vest and some cuffs on him, jerked a black flannel bag over his head, and bundled him into the back seat of a large sedan with cushy shocks and a newer automatic transmission. The sedan spent about fifteen minutes in stop-and-go city traffic, zoomed up a freeway on-ramp and off again four minutes later down a two-hundred-and-seventy degree loop, climbed a long, gently curving highway, and stopped in a parking lot with two speed bumps at the entrance. Sam guessed they'd traveled about thirty-five miles from headquarters. As he was tugged from the car, he heard doors opening and slamming all around; apparently he'd come along with a caravan.

Someone whipped the bag off his head, and Sam blinked in the snow glare. There were six black cars filling the freshly plowed parking lot of a private airstrip, and around twenty heavily armed S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives swarming an anonymous jet that waited on the runway. Two of the men grabbed Sam by the elbows and escorted him up the ladder and into the warm cabin of the plane. Thor, a red-haired woman, and a couple of guys in less bulky gear occupied the plush forward compartment. Sam was escorted to a seat in the back, surrounded by the rank and file.

Judging by the thinly veiled hostility in the eyes of the operatives around him, none of them were in the mood for friendly conversation. Neither was he. He shut his eyes and did some breathing exercises, ignoring the man occupying the arm rest and blocking him from the aisle, until the plane taxied down the runway and leapt into the air.

It turned out that without Dean in the seat next to him furiously humming heavy metal to soothe his own in-flight panic attack, Sam was a bit of a nervous flier himself. He shut the window on the gleaming white plains flecked with dark pines that dropped steadily away below, and rolled the scar on his palm discretely against a corner of his handcuffs. A tiny nozzle in the lighting panel overhead was blowing air on his face to make him feel like the fuselage was wider and less claustrophobic than it really was, a tiny white lie for his caveman brain. He screwed it shut.

Sam jumped when the man beside him folded down to dig something out from under the seats, a steel-and-rubber laptop that looked sturdy enough to bludgeon a ghoul with. The man started it up and opened some kind of browser with a hideous user interface, probably something proprietary, then called up Google. He brought up a map of Reno, Nevada.

They were on a plane, and they had Internet. Sam raised an eyebrow.

"We have Loki to within ten miles of the city center," the operative announced. "We'd like a smaller grid than that, so now you're going to help us find your brother."

"Assuming Loki's still with him," Sam said, the insanity of the situation smacking him behind the eyes like a hangover. "What happened in Reno?"

The communications operative held up a hand at Sam and spoke into the air. "Sir, what am I cleared to tell the prisoner?" He was silent, watching the middle distance intently, and nodded after a while. "Yessir. Geophysicists detected an earthquake two hours ago; apparently it shouldn't have happened. All cell signals from within the city were blocked at the same time. We're still trying to get a hold of someone on the ground."

"But not having much luck," Sam concluded with a sigh. "We need some news from the city over the past two months, look for unexplained or unusual deaths. If Dean's in charge of where they're staying, he would've come for a hunt."

"A hunt. Right," said the operative speculatively. "Because you're vampire slayers. Analysis is already checking for vampires; we need to find Dean Winchester. That's your contribution."

Sam thought about the incident in Lakeville, the kindergarteners-turned-gremlins that he'd barely had the chance to investigate. He recalled past encounters with gods and trickster gods. No biggie, Sam, said a callous, illusory voice. It hummed. You know freedom's just some people talking. Dean's prison is walking through this world all alone—it's like he's already there.

Sam shook the voice out of his ear. "If you want to find Dean, your best chance is wherever he's holed up. Could be a motel, a cheap one. Bottom of the barrel cheap; he hates chains. Or he could be squatting; we like to squat in houses. Someplace safe to leave our gear out for a while, rooms, light. Check the model homes in housing developments, or places that are up for sale. On the ground, look for the car. If he's out on a case, it could be at the cop-shop, the morgue, or a library where public records are kept. Or it could be anywhere. It's probably a '72 Challenger, yellow, or he could've switched already; if he's switched, he'll pick something American, made between 1960 and 1980, any color but pink or baby blue, usually a sedan. If he's feeling nervous, he might go to a later model, maybe even an import, white."

"Got it," replied the communications operative. Sam slid the window blind back up and watched the screen out of the corner of his eye as the operative efficiently parsed through a selection of motels on Google Maps and began flicking through traffic camera stills in a scary-looking S.H.I.E.L.D. surveillance program. He lost interest when the plane began to cross the Rockies, and the landscape creased up in harsh white tree-flecked wilderness.

"I got a possible," the agent announced to the air, after an hour or two. Sam's knee bounced.

When they touched down an airstrip just north of the city, in the midst of a desert winter of greening sagebrush and patches of thin snow, a small fleet of County PD vehicles were waiting for them. A sheriff in a khaki uniform greeted Agent Coulson when they filed out of the little jet, his eyes wide and his lips tight.

"Once you enter city limits, keep the engines running, whatever you do," Sam heard. "The quake's just the tip of the iceberg. We can't get Reno PD out of the building, most people are still trapped in their homes… I don't even want to think about what that place'd do to a firearm. Radios are touch-and-go. I hope it's true your department is the one to call in on the weird shit, 'cause this is the definition right here."

"We're a highly adaptable team," Coulson replied, and that was the last Sam heard before he was herded into the middle seat of a blue and white SUV. Field operatives, two new and one the man with the computer who had sat beside him on the plane, surrounded him with their bulky Kevlar and holstered weapons. Sam hunched his shoulders forward and rested his elbows on his knees to make room. They sized each-other up before the driver climbed in: Sam was the biggest guy in the car, by at least three inches, and Sam's hands were cuffed in front where he might be able to try a punch or a grab, but the agents beside him were solid, armed, and doubtless highly trained, even the communications officer. Agent Coulson got into the front passenger seat. Sam didn't see any weak links.

The S.H.E.I.L.D. team started their engines with some concern, and caravanned toward the city through rolling scrub, passing a few glittering neon-decked casinos at the city border and detouring briefly into an emerald warren of suburbs. Even on the arterials, still on the tail of what should have been the morning rush hour, they were the only cars in motion. They passed a few wrecks—a sedan with its back crumpled against a brick house, across the street from a garage with the door torn off from the inside; a long row of cars parked parallel, crunched up bumper-to-bumper, alarms shrieking; black rubber marks on a driveway across the street from a house with a ten-foot hole in the living room. There were a few people on the street, not as many as Sam would expect in a supernatural crisis. Coulson motioned for the driver to stop, and they idled while Coulson rolled down his window to talk to the civilians. A tall man in a charcoal suit with a stern face drew near, while tight knots of what Sam assumed were families clustered around to listen in.

"We're from the D.O.D., S.H.I.E.L.D. division. I'm Agent Coulson," Coulson said before the civilians could get a word out. "We understand the city has suffered some unusual incidents and we're here to resolve the problem. Your first-hand accounts of such incidents would be helpful at this time."

The man in the suit rocked back a step, cowed. Another man, clutching a little round-faced girl in his arms, stepped forward. "Water's out, you know about that, right? Power's dead, too. Who—the—whoever it was, terrorists, I dunno, that's what you guys are here for, right? Somebody wired the front door to blow. Took me like fifty tries to get it open, and then it exploded. Guess we're all lucky whoever did it had the explosives pointed wrong so the door blew outward."

"Has anyone been injured?" Coulson asked.

"EMS is MIA," the man in the suit cut in. "Cell phones are down. Land lines are down."

"There's Jim Taylor, down that way," said the other man. The girl was hiding her face in his jacket now. "His truck doesn't have airbags, and he went right through… he's walking and talking. Didn't hit anybody, thank God."

"I'll have a field medic take a look at him," Coulson replied.

The operative with the laptop woke his machine up and tried to make contact with another car. He grimaced. "Coms are down, sir."

"Have group Delta leave a man anyway," Coulson replied, and the operative rolled down his window and flashed hand signals to the car behind them.

"Number 1049 has hot coffee pouring out the front door," said the guy with the daughter. "I kinda doubt they're doing that on purpose."

"Good to know," replied Coulson. "We're not certain yet to what extent utilities have been compromised, so we advise you not to attempt to use water or electricity until communications have been restored and we notify you that the problem has been resolved. Advise others to remain in their homes. Do not attempt to drive anywhere. We have reason to believe all vehicles within the city limits have been tampered with."

The dad paled and the man in the suit nodded grimly.

"Sit tight," Coulson said, rolling up his window. "We hope to have the situation resolved within the day." He waved two fingers at the driver, and they drove off. Well—the driver managed to get the car in gear on the fifth try, and they rabbited forward ten feet when he did, and then they drove off. The car behind them, after it let out the field medic, seemed to be having similar difficulties.

"Avoid shifting gear from now on," Coulson told the driver. "Anything mechanized is suspect. You're familiar with the term Belgian Mule?"

"Bites in the front, kicks in the back, burns in the middle," replied the operative on Sam's right, reciting an old saying about primitive muskets.

"Avoid discharging firearms and stun guns," Coulson told his team. "We're here to do what we can to neutralize Loki with the goal of minimizing civilian casualties. Nobody needs to lose limbs. We may not be able to do as much as we expected. Take any opportunity for reconnaissance. Any additional observations or suggestions before the rendezvous briefing?"

"Lee, Roberts, and Scander failed advanced hand signaling repeatedly," said the communications operative. The man on Sam's right glared at him across Sam's hunched back. "It's true," the communications operative protested.

"Winchester, you have anything to add?" Coulson asked.

Sam raised his eyebrows. "Uh. So, he can do a lot of damage. This is a very broad scale of attack, which might mean he's stretching his limits, but you can't bank on that. He could have performed a powerful spell with a wide range of effects, or interfering with thousands of objects at the same time might just be easy for him. If it's a spell, you can't sneak past it, but you can use loopholes if you figure out the pattern. If he's just doing it all brute force, he could change the game as soon as he knows we're on to him."

Coulson nodded. Sam wasn't sure how much credence he was going to get.

As they drove deeper into the city they saw more cars, more people wandering around outside looking lost. Sam spotted a middle-aged man fruitlessly banging on a glass storefront with a brick. The glass wasn't even cracked—which explained the lack of looting. A parking meter was bleeding change. An elaborate neon venue sign threw blue sparks, bright as an arc welder, over a sidewalk glittering with broken glass. The place was generally haywire. Sam wondered if it was a good thing that most people seemed to be trapped in their homes, or if that just meant there was carnage out of sight.

A fistfight broke out. Three men traded hard blows, and none of them seemed fazed.

They pulled in to a parking lot behind an old warehouse-turned-office building to join the vehicles that had arrived ahead of them. All the engines were still running. Thor was pacing back and forth in the lot, an operative in short sleeves bearing a compound bow and quiver of arrows across his back and a red-haired woman in a sleek black jumpsuit flanking him and herding him back toward the caravan whenever he strayed too near the streets. There was a mechanical whine that made Sam cringe in familiarity, and Iron Man—Iron Man—swooped out of the sky and hovered over the lot, balancing five feet off the ground on his levitation beams.

Tony freaking Stark was working with S.H.E.I.L.D. That was some kind of endorsement for the division—Sam wasn't sure if it meant they knew what they were doing or they were just really exciting to work with.

Someone had apparently told Stark about the problem with starting engines in the area, because he wasn't touching down. He flipped up his signature gold visor with an unseen command, and when Thor and the humans formed into a rough half-circle that Coulson got out of the SUV to address, everyone had to yell to be heard over the tiny, powerful engines.

There was a swift conference that Sam couldn't see much of. Sam's foot bounced uncontrollably. The operatives glared at him. Sam ducked his head and smiled his harmless smile, but they didn't seem to buy it.

The men in Kevlar scattered one way around the office building, the woman another, and the archer scaled the fire escape. Stark flicked down his visor like a knight riding to the joust, and Thor hefted a broad rectangular hammer, swung it into the air, and let it carry him skyward as he clung to its handle as though propelled solely by the momentum of his throw.

For all the vaunted sophistication of the smart weapons once produced by Stark Industries, Iron Man tended to leave a swath of destruction behind whenever he encountered a comparable opponent. There would be property damage. Rubble. Dust. Chaos. Thor didn't seem like the most subtle guy in the world either. Sam figured the motel Loki and Dean occupied sat somewhere within a bow-shot, but out of direct view.

Sam trusted Stark's commitment to minimizing human casualties and Thor's desperation to reconcile with his brother to keep Dean alive, and waited. The whine of Stark's engines rose and fell in the distance. Far away, a chorus of car alarms went off. The operative on Sam's right pulled a packet of peanuts out of his cargo pants and ripped it open.

"Again with the peanuts, Mark?" groaned the communications operative. He was clicking frustratedly on the laptop's touch-pad, trying to start up what Sam guessed was an audio feed, by the grainy microphone icon.

Mark shook a couple peanuts into his palm, rolled the plastic packet closed, and lipped the peanuts out of his hand with his head bowed. It made him look like a rodent. "I'm hungry," he said, chewing. He frowned when he swallowed and poked around his gums with his tongue.

"So," Sam said, watching as the men tensed. "What's the plan here? Your boss is out there somewhere, communications are down for the count, the car's burning gas—I mean, I'm a diversion at best, so—"

"No," interrupted the driver.

Sam frowned. "But you don't—"

"No. No, no, no-no, no. Operational secrets, prisoner. Just—"

A gleaming streak of red plummeted from the sky and gouged a massive crater into the asphalt nearby, flinging chunks of pavement high into the air like lava bombs. The Iron Man armor skidded away over the street, engines still firing, and eventually wobbled upright, like a drunk rising from a bathtub, and rose to disappear again over the crest of the office building. The operatives in the car simultaneously released their grips on their weapons, only to clutch them again when, with a boom and rumble of falling bricks, Thor's back punched a hole in the building. A section of masonry dented the SUV's hood, just a foot from the windscreen. Thor landed on the edge of Iron Man's crater and plowed his own hole in the street before rolling to his feet, spinning his hammer around on its cord and leaning forward suddenly. Instead of towing him into the sky, the hammer swung down like any ordinary weight on a string and hit him in the knee. He tried again, and stared mystified at the engraved steel head. After a third attempt, he roared at the sky and took off around the building on foot.

"Hang on," said the driver, and pulled a donut out of the parking lot to skid to a halt across the street, out of the demolition zone. The rest of the waiting fleet of blue-and-whites followed his example. "Looks like the big boys are having trouble. We could be here a while."

They watched the sky for falling man-gods. Mark unrolled his peanuts, shook a few into his palm, and munched on them. Unroll, reroll, munch. Unroll, reroll, munch. The repetitive crinkling was the kind of thing Dean might do if he wanted to provoke Sam into a wrestling match; it made Sam's teeth itch, and with his nerves already stretched to breaking with Dean at the mercy of an insane pagan god two blocks away, Sam was very close to smacking Mark and getting himself shot for the trouble.

"Could you make an exception and not do that for this one stakeout?" the communications operative demanded, glaring at Mark across Sam's back.

Mark stifled a glare and crunched on the peanuts he still had in his hand. "I did a ten-miler the other day, I'm hungry."

The communications operative poked at the audio icon with ever-increasing ferocity and muttered "whiner" under his breath. Sam wasn't sure if Mark had heard him or not, but Mark didn't react.

The driver tried the radio, but all the stations were static.

Mark unrolled his peanut packet after ten minutes of no further action, shook out more peanuts, and crinkled the plastic back up. The communications operative rolled his eyes. "Okay, that's weird," Mark said, staring down at the nuts in his palm instead of eating them.

"What?" asked the driver.

"I'm half a pack down and I'm still starving."

"Must be the ten-miler," dismissed the communications operative. He clicked on the audio icon again, and swore in Russian and Farsi as the desktop flooded with window after window of a black-and-green user interface displaying a wavy frequency line and a text box. Sound abruptly burst from the machine.

The feed was alive with EMF, sparking and hissing with pulsed noise that Sam itched to analyze, and clearly audible in the gaps between the bursts of static were screams. Not Dean's screams. These were strange—harsh, warbling, unstifled, as though for the joy of it, a mix of despair and aggression—rageful screams. He heard Dean's voice, a soft indecipherable murmur, and then his own name.

"That's Loki screaming," Sam said, nerves buzzing with tension as the communications operative fruitlessly Ctrl+F-4'd the windows of audio program as they multiplied. "Loki's disguised as me. Dean's with him, trying to calm him down."

"The bad guy gets you arrested, infiltrates your double act, sticks around for four days, and all he wants to do is play mind games?" the driver demanded.

Sam took a deep, slow breath. "Apparently." If Thor reminded Sam of Dean, maybe Dean reminded Loki of Thor, and while Freud had placed Mommy and Daddy issues at the root of all emotional wounds, in Sam's experience sibling conflict had a good shot for the title. Loki was role-playing with Dean—well, to Loki it was role-play; to Dean it was a brother who'd gone screaming and flailing off the deep end into psychosis.

Duplicate windows of the audio feed interface continued to mushroom onto the screen. The communications operative mashed Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Task Manager didn't appear, and the cooling fan began to whirr angrily.

The EMF spiked, obliterating the voices. When it died back again, Sam heard a clatter and an animal growl, and Dean yelling "Shit! Shit! Sammy, tone it down! Just whatever you're thinking—let me go, I can't help if you don't let me move! Aw, dammit, are you even seeing me?" Static poured back, died away. Dean spoke again, low and panicked, over breathy snarls from elsewhere in the room. "Sam. Sam, undo it. Just think about something else, stop it, come on, Sammy, please!"

The display screen blinked blue and then black as the laptop let out a defeated whine. The communications operative stabbed at the power button, but it refused to reboot.

The idling engine was the only sound in the car, and the space was close and humid. Sam shifted, tense almost to shaking, and found that his wrists were deeply bruised from straining against the handcuffs. Loki was playing with Dean; he was still having fun with him, and Dean could take it. Dean had taken the worst Sam could dish out, and the worst Hell could dish out, and he could take this. He'd be fine. Sam just had to get to him, or wait for Thor and Iron Man to draw Loki out, fighting through the catastrophe magnet that had once been Reno, the constant equipment failures, the . . . the cursed luck. Like the audio program on the laptop. Like opening doors in the suburbs.

Nothing, and then too much, Sam realized. That was the pattern, that was the rule that had been applied to the city. It was irony—Alanis Morisette irony, not the real kind. It was poetic.

"It's a slot machine," Sam announced, the epiphany bursting from his lips. "That's the curse; he turned the whole city into a slot machine, it all makes sense!"

The operatives stared at him, wary and bemused. Sam sighed and wished Dean were here. Preferably not in cuffs.

Mark unrolled and rerolled his peanuts a couple more times while they waited for something to happen. Maybe Coulson would stroll around the corner and wave them into the combat zone. Maybe Loki would peel Sam out of the SUV like a kid unwrapping a Butterfinger. Maybe the building would fall on them. Sam got a bad feeling, an overlooking feeling, as Mark dumped the last of the peanuts out into his hand, wadded the empty wrapper into a ball, and crunched on them. Mark coughed. His mouth twisted. "Uh," he said, tugging at the collar of his shirt.

Sam glanced over his shoulder at him, then stared. Mark was panting shallowly and his face looked puffy. He flailed stiffly with his arms and feet, and as Mark's breaths rasped and stopped altogether, his tactical jacket swelled drum-tight, and rolls of chin spilled out from under the high neck of his jacket collar, Sam realized that they'd just been sucked into a Roald Dahl novel.

"He's not breathing," Sam realized. The bewildered stares of the other operative tightened into combat-focus. The driver spun in his seat to pay at Mark's Kevlar vest, whose heavy nylon straps were strangling Mark like a python. Mark's face was red and his mouth worked silently. His eyes were wide and bloodshot.

"Let me," Sam snapped, undoing his seat belt. Even with his hands cuffed, he had better access than the driver. He forced himself to focus as he pawed at the unfamiliar equipment, releasing plastic snap buckles strained so tight they were practically locked. The front panel of Kevlar sprung free, bouncing on Mark's supernaturally induced beer gut. The jacket's zipper ran down the topline of a rigid dome; Sam reached under Mark's chin and tugged it down. Mark gasped as the jacket opened. His belly heaved with the breath, and his arms and legs stuck out rigidly, still encased in the unyielding fabric like sausages.

"Fuck," Mark gasped.

The communications operative hopped out of the car, leaving the door wide open. "Hang on, man, I'll cut you out of those."

"Fuck, how'm I supposed to pas the challenge course like this?" Mark groaned. His stun gun hung from the left side of his taut belt and his hand-gun from his right.

As the communications operative swung open Mark's door, tense with concern, Sam grabbed him by his vest and jerked him over Mark and into the foot-well in a powerful heave. He snatched at Sam's cuffs, but Sam simply overpowered him, twisted his wrists down, and buckled him to the middle seat by one of his vest's straps. He flailed in the cramped space, half-in and half-out of the car.

"Oh, you fucker," the driver hissed. Mark pawed at Sam, trying to get a grip on him with his arms squeezed straight, and the driver drew his stun gun, but Sam was out of the car and out of reach, sprinting for the scene of the battle with his hands clasped in front of him. Sam heard shots—he was surprised they'd managed to fire anything. He kept running.

Loki was a god, and by the sense of twisted justice underpinning the spell he'd put on the city, a trickster God. He's have no plans beyond playing mind games with Dean. Stop the mind games and he'd have no reason not to let Dean go—he might be pissed or come up with some symbolic punishment for Dean's supposed pathology, but a trickster's sense of fair play should be enough to give them both a faint chance of escape.

Shots chipped brick off the office building at the level of Sam's knees as he turned the corner and put his babysitters behind him. He might as well have run straight into Fallujah. The pagan god and the human wrecking ball that made up S.H.I.E.L.D.'s shock force had torn the street apart, casting chunks of brick and cinderblock far and wide, blowing out windows and downing telephone poles. As for the demolition team themselves, Sam didn't see them. He saw operatives in Kevlar scurrying around the rubble. Coulson, conspicuous by his calm demeanor and dust-coated black suit, was directing the shepherding of a gaggle of civilians through a Thor-sized hole in the wall of an apartment building.

Everyone looked a bit busy to bother with Sam. He ducked between two parked SUVs and scanned for the motel that had to be nearby. There was a parking garage towering into the skyline the next street over, a mirror-shining nameless block building, a row of charming facades with novelty shops at the street entrances, a convenience store with a slot machine squatting out front under the awning, and an L-shaped seventies cinder-block structure with four rows of balconies overlooking a small full parking lot. A sparking and dented neon sign crawling up one corner of the complex proclaimed it the Queen's Inn, and sported a little fan of playing card pips at the top. Bingo. The 1973 Barracuda in the lot, the oilslick mirage wrapping the top floor, and the Stark-Tech listening device suction-cupped to the window of room 403 were just gravy.

Sam was half-way across the street when he heard the roar of a large object exceeding terminal velocity on its way Earthward. He looked up and saw where the battle had moved.

Thor was plummeting uncontrolled toward the city, just a glittering dot of polished steel trailing scarlet cloth. As Sam watched, Iron Man swooped down from higher in the sky and ducked under him, engines whining at the strain of carrying the god. Thor rolled upright and knelt on Stark's armor's back, and as they picked up speed and elevation, Sam thought he saw Thor brandishing his hammer like a cowboy waving his hat. Before them waited a smoky cloud that snaked unnatural, still contrails out in rays toward the borders of the city. Green chain-lightening flashed as they disappeared into it, and Sam heard wild laughter in the distance.

Thor was keeping Loki busy. Good.

Sam bolted into the shadow of the Queen's Inn and hurled himself up the stairs, flight after flight. Two operatives blocked his path on the fourth floor, and Sam barely stopped himself from bouncing their heads off the wall. Probably wouldn't work, anyway, with everything from starting cars to eating peanuts being turned to a disastrous game of all-or-nothing. One of them made a lightening grab for the chain of his cuffs, but Sam yanked his hands aside. The men split to each side of the balcony, flanking him.

"Coulson sent me," Sam spat, jerking his head at the apartment the agent was busy evacuating. "I'm supposed to go in the room."

"Pull the other one," said an operative, tense for a fight.

Sam rocked onto the balls of his feet and rolled his shoulders, ready to give him one.

"Let him through," said a woman from behind him. Sam startled and turned sideways, trying to watch three people at once. It was the red-haired woman who'd accompanied Thor in the SUV. She looked rumpled, with a bruise on her chin, smoke blackening one side of her face, and chunks and shreds missing from the top layer of her black bodysuit.

The operative shifted, daring silent glances at each-other. Neither of them stopped Sam when he stormed past.

He stopped at 403, backed up to the rail, and kicked the door just at the sweet spot next to the latch. The door held strong, and Sam almost overbalanced when his foot bounced back. The oily distortion of Loki's magic was almost tangible, a sickly enticing taste on the air, a maddening scent. Loki's mimicry of Sam was screaming and raving inside the room, and Dean was muttering urgently in consolation or pleading—Sam couldn't tell. He kicked the door again and staggered back against the rail, then slammed it with his shoulder. He panted and pawed at the locked doorknob. The operatives and the woman were staring at him. He wasn't getting in. He had to think.

Kicking in the door would either fail or blast fragments of plywood into the room at supersonic speeds, by the rules of Reno, and he could tire himself out or injure himself before he got the jackpot.

The rule was that the outcome would massively exceed the effort applied, and the odds of success at each attempt were very low.

Sam laid his palms flat against the door and pushed firmly. Half a second later, he tried again. He built up an urgent rhythm, with a little chant in his head, push and maybe, push and this time, push and please. The red-haired woman has disappeared as silently as she had come, leaving the two operatives watching him dubiously. Below in the street, Agent Coulson had noticed him and was pointing a handful of operatives toward his position.

A soft hysterical laugh escaped him as he kept pushing again and again on the door, as fast as he could move. He couldn't stop. He was a rat in a skinner box, deep in the quagmire of sunk costs; any single attempt could be the one that forced the door open, and Dean was right there on the other side, pleading—oh, god—pleading for Sam to let him go, to stop.

"Sammy, no!" Dean bellowed suddenly, in a gap in the screaming. "Sam, please—we can work with this, please!"

Sam heard bootsteps on the stairs, and a quick conference between the operatives guarding the fourth floor. Sam got the impression that the woman's command authority was ad hoc rather than official. Whatever break she'd seen fit to grant him wouldn't last long.

He pushed frantically at the door, ignoring the snide whisper at his shoulder (that wasn't there, wasn't there) that he was just making shit up—that he was trying to play slots with laundromat tokens.

The door gave way, bouncing off the interior wall and rebounding in his face. Sam stumbled inside.

The air was choked with black smoke and golden light. The ceiling was smoldering, charred from wall to wall, with ragged heat-warped chunks curling down into the room. The bedside table was embedded into the opposite wall as though it had merged with it. As Sam crossed the threshold, a film of glowing gold gas parted around his face like cobwebs, briefly blinding him and leaving his hair standing on end. He could feel power clogging in his nostrils. If he opened his mouth he could drink it from the air.

He clamped his lips and swallowed spit.

He heard Dean gag from deeper in the maelstrom, and pushed further. A chunk of charcoal dropped from the ceiling and bounced against his hair. His shoes stuck to the carpet; he smelled blood and smoke and the tang of power.

He plowed through knot after knot of gold-lacy energy, his eyes stinging, until he spotted Dean, pinned to the hotel wall by twining gold-fire ropes, desperation as obvious as the arterial spray that dotted his face, as his infinite horror. His eyes fixed on another Sam, livid-pale, tense, hulking, with arcane symbols cut into his bare sides and his wrists slit down to the bone. A monster, a willing monster in pain.

"Dean!" Sam bellowed. The other Sam snapped his head around to face him. His eyes flashed black on gold—no demon Sam had ever seen, but a composite of the worst. He looked annoyed and feral. "That's a trickster!"

Dean met his eyes through the smoke and flare. Sam could see relief ripple through him. He raised an arm Sam hadn't known was free, drew a gun Sam hadn't known he held, and shot the monstrous Sam in the back of the head.

Wood chips cut into Sam's face. The other Sam stood, head half-shattered and illusory flesh fading to pine and paint—but still moving. It snapped its fingers and the taste of power went out of the air; the room un-burned, the smoke and flood vanished. Dean flopped to the floor, gasping. "You get arrested without me?" Dean panted, struggling to his feet.

Sam searched the room for an appropriate weapon—a stake for a trickster, but this was some kind of golem, not Loki in disguise. Machete. The weapons duffel was under the window. Sam dove for it.

Fiery ropes snagged him out of the air, green this time, digging and sawing at his skin as they pulled him to the ground. The wood automaton strode over and looked down at him, a strange wild sneer pulling at the carved features. "You are hardly such an obstacle as you suspect, mortal," it snarled, still in Sam's voice, but now with the god's diction.

A roar like a freight train shook the motel and Sam thought of tornado sirens in the Midwest, the chaos and ruin afterward. The ceiling punched open from the inside, plaster to rafters. The wooden Sam golem stared up at the hole. Sam decided that this was probably a real hole, not more of Loki's illusions, when the god himself descended through it, arms crossed and the cape of his black leather and bronze battle-armor fluttering around him. He wore a gleaming helmet with a crest of goat's horns, and a manic snarl. "Odin's blood, will no one stay where they are put," he spat. He gestured at the wooden Sam, which stilled and toppled over, its enchantment lost. "Dean, hello again. I fear I must be somewhat crude, now that your brother has interrupted what would have been a showy but humane little game."

Sam kicked against the phantom ropes. "Don't you touch him!" he roared, hearing Dean across the room yelling something similar. "Dean's got nothing to do with you!" Sam continued, fighting for air as the ropes shifted and began to twine around his throat. Looking up through the hole in the ceiling, Sam saw a red-fringed mote of gleaming steel—Thor, descending, maybe with Iron Man along with. "If you don't have the stones to face your own brother, you think screwing with mine is gonna change anything? Let him go and take a look at yourself!"

Loki smiled faintly—a shallow smile, the grin of a wild wolf with its guts spilling from its belly, all menace and desolation. "Did you just double-dog-dare me?" he asked indulgently, bending down to stroke Sam's hair with his fine pale fingers. "Simple mortals. I like my plan better."

He laid his palm on Sam's forehead, and for an earthly eternity, Sam's world went to Hell.

To Chapter 4

SPN/Thor fic: The Tomato in the Mirror 2/4

rokhal — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:25:36 GMT

Title: The Tomato in the Mirror
Chapter: 2/4
Characters: Sam Winchester, Thor Odinsson, Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, several Avengers and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and guest-starring Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth
Pairing: Gen
Rating: T
Length: 6k (of 18k total)
Warnings: Two uses of the F word, several uses of the S word, mild hand-to-hand violence, moderate comic-book violence, massive property destruction, a scene of body horror that may be objectionable to those with anxiety about diet
Spoilers: Thor, Supernatural through 7.11. No actual spoilers for Avengers, as this was written before I saw the film.
Disclaimer: Not for profit. Free advertising for both franchises!
Summary: Loki body-swaps with Sam. Later, things get weird.

Note: This was written before watching Avengers, and is therefore spoiler-free. Did I mention it's also wildly inaccurate?

Sam woke chained to a steel ring in the floor of a small concrete cell with a door and a one-way mirror. When he lifted his head to get his bearings, a fan whirred under the door and the air got staler and staler until he passed out again.

The second time Sam woke, he fought past his growing headache to discover he'd been fitted with a tight dog collar whose prongs dug into the back of his neck, his hands had been duck-taped into fists, and the god's clothes had been swapped for a set of powder-blue scrubs with the draw-string removed from the pants.

Whoever had him was scared. They had money, infrastructure, and resources, and they were still scared, cobbling restraints together, urgency driving them to forty-dollar fixes on a fifty-thousand-dollar budget. Probably government, by the mirror. Enlightened government, attacking a supernatural problem, so civilians didn't have to. Apparently the Men in Black were real.

Where had they been all Sam's life?

The door rattled. Sam gritted his teeth, rested his head on the foam mattress on the floor, and tried to look even more harmless than he felt.

A huge blond man in scale mail and a red cape burst into the cell, bouncing the door against the wall in his haste, skidded on his knees to Sam's side, and crushed him to his brawny chest. Sam wheezed.

"Brother!" the man cried. He held Sam at arm's length as though he weighed no more than a small child, and cast worried blue eyes over the shock collar and Sam's duck-taped fists. "What a sad reunion, this, that thou art bound—for the men of Shield still argue the need. My brother, why fledst thou so? Father and Mother mourned thee as the son of their very flesh, and shame on all the House of Odin, have we sown doubt that we thee cherish!" The man—god—pleaded with his eyes.

Sam did not relish this new god's reaction to the fact that he was not his errant brother. He licked his lips.

He was saved from some Shakespearean web of deceit when a second man swept into the room, this time, like Sam had been expecting of his captors, in a black Fed suit.

"I thought we'd agreed you were going to observe the interview," the Fed told the god.

The god rose in a swirl of red and armor. "Son of Coul, forgive my impatience. But to seek my brother so long, and to find him chained like a spy—"

"I understand," said 'Son of Coul.' "But you understand Loki is a serious threat."

"I do." The god slumped. The Fed gestured to the door, and the god left and locked it behind him.

Sam had been interviewed in front of one-way glass before, but he was used to sitting in a chair, cuffed to a table. He scooted back against the wall and sat cross-legged, watching the Fed tense at his every movement. The Fed remained standing. Sam folded his sweaty fists in his lap.

"I'm Agent Coulson, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, United States Department of Defense, United States of America, Earth, Midgard," the Fed announced. "I apologize for the accommodations," he continued, sounding about as far from sorry as professionalism could permit, "and I should warn you now that until we obtain a more appropriate restraint system, any time you attempt to escape, assault anyone, or work magic of any kind, you will receive a strong electrical shock. Do you understand?"

Sam nodded, and decided to treat the S.H.I.E.L.D. like a well-organized clan of demon hunters—they were working with a pagan god (and that said volumes about their ethics; he'd have to be extremely careful) so at least they had to be open-minded. "Before we get too far," Sam said cautiously, "I should tell you that I'm not actually . . . Loki."

"You'll forgive me for assuming otherwise," the agent replied. "Keep your hands and face visible from the mirror at all times. The mattress is on the floor; leave it on the floor. Don't fidget. Don't talk to yourself. Meals are provided three times daily. Bathroom breaks are after meals and just before lights out. We will continue to monitor you after lights out, so don't move. Do you understand?"

"What if I have an itch?"

"Warn us before you scratch it."

Sam grimaced. He was more concerned about what he could do to snap himself out of a hallucination if one happened—but he supposed a good taser to the back of the neck would work just fine. "I know I look like Loki," Sam said. "I met him in Lakeville. He grabbed me, and did some kind of—he changed my body so I look like him. And he switched our clothes."

"Again, you'll forgive S.H.I.E.L.D. for assuming otherwise."

"I'm an American citizen," Sam warned him.

"We don't do waterboarding," the agent said. He knelt, hands ever poised to draw some hidden weapon, and looked Sam in the eyes. "You seem to be taking this easily," he remarked.

Sam showed him a self-deprecating grin. "I'm panicking on the inside. Will your superiors understand that I don't know anything Loki knows?"

The agent's face soured. "We know better than to take any information from Loki at face value. You have nothing to worry about."

"Perfect." Sam sighed. He was trapped in the skin of a compulsive scheming liar and master of disguise. At least he hadn't been captured wearing his own face. "Can you explain to your pagan buddy that I'm not actually his brother?" He glanced at the door, then the mirror, and let his worry show.

The agent shrugged. "I'll try but he won't buy it from me. He's a good guy, though. Now because of the threat Loki poses and the difficulty we face in verifying your claims, you should expect to be detained indefinitely. Good behavior will not lower your security level. I understand this is unconstitutional and illegal, but in this case, S.H.I.E.L.D. is willing to shoulder that responsibility for the protection of the American People."

Sam's face twitched, and he looked around the bare room. "Could I get some reading material?"

"We'll consider it," the agent replied. "Probably not."

Sam grimaced. Pencil and paper, he could see being used in some kind of spell by an expert with considerable intrinsic power and a great memory. A book as a weapon or tool stretched the bounds of his considerable imagination.

"Dinner is in three hours," the agent told him, rising. "Don't ask the guards for anything. Don't give yourself a medical emergency. In fact, don't speak unless spoken to and don't look anyone in the eye. If the complex experiences anything unusual for the duration of your stay, you're getting shocked and sedated. Do you understand?"

Sam swallowed and nodded.

The agent turned to the mirror. "Thor, you can come back in if you like."

Thor. Once heavily worshiped as a fertility and weather god; prideful, honest, and impetuous, with a bit of a temper—according to the lore of the peoples who'd worshiped him. Sam narrowed his eyes and against his better judgment, addressed the agent. "You know what he is and you still work with him?"

The agent shot him a warning look. "We do."

"You know what he eats, right?"

The agent's brow wrinkled, but whatever reply he had was stoppered when the god in red and scale mail thundered back into the room. Sam pasted on an awkward smile. The agent patted Thor on the shoulder and left the cell.

Thor gazed down at Sam sadly. "Truly thou art not Loki?" he asked. "Or Loki in truth, lying and willingly captured. Oh my brother, why must thou hide in these games?"

"That thing with the kindergarteners, that killed two people and scarred the kids and teachers for life, that was a game?" Sam demanded, narrowing his eyes.

The god swallowed loudly and sat crosslegged, mirroring Sam. "A harsh game," he said. "My brother's mind is subtle. I confess I'd never troubled to divine the truth of him." He smiled apologetically and searched Sam's changed eyes.

"I'm not him," Sam told the god. "I don't even sound like him, except for the voice."

"My brother is very clever," the god replied wistfully.

Sam took a risk. If S.H.I.E.L.D. caught on to who Sam actually was, and then caught up to Dean, the best they could hope for was a psychiatric facility, otherwise death row. But Sam and Dean had had dealings with a being calling itself Loki before, each of which had ended in humiliation or tragedy or both, and while all the signs implied this Loki was a different person entirely, Sam suspected he would bring more of the same. He'd play with Dean a bit before playfully killing him.

Thor seemed straight-forward from what Sam had seen, and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s control over him seemed tenuous at best. If he was getting free, it would be through Thor. Sam leaned forward and met Thor's eyes, his voice low and urgent. "I have a brother, too," he confided. "When Loki gave me his body, he took mine, and I think he's out there somewhere wearing my face and playing a game with my brother. Now, all I know about Loki is what he did to those kids and me, but it makes me scared what he's doing now."

Thor scowled at him, and Sam had to stop himself from flinching. "My brother would never—" He cut himself off and subsided. "Since we were children—He was ever cunning, canny. His mind grew restless and he made strange amusements. But he was never cruel. He was always fair when we played—though at times it seemed not so." Confusion was raw in Thor's face, a shock still humming there like the thrum of a rung bell, from something recent.

"Could you tell me about your brother?" Sam asked. "Why's he missing? What happened?"

Thor gazed at the floor with anguish on his open face, sighed, and told Sam a story. Sam listened, snatching at every detail, and imagined what the god whose body he wore might be doing right now to Dean.

On returning from the day's excursion to the Astral Plane, Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth, joined his wife Clea, Sorceress Supreme of the Dark Dimension, for a dinner of Spanish pork prepared by their talented chef Adelaide, perused the financial section of the New York Times, communed with a few departed souls, and returned the day's phone calls.

The third call, to an unfamiliar number, connected him to the most terrifying man ever entrusted with the security of the United States of America.

"Fury," snapped the man. "S.H.I.E.L.D. Talk."

"Colonel Fury, this is Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth," Dr. Strange replied, unfazed. "You called me this afternoon. I believe you consider your problem urgent?"

"Damn right," Fury barked. "You hear of a jumped-up psycho god called Loki? 'Cause we've got him. Thought you might be interested, and you bet your ass it's urgent, 'cause we got no clue how long we'll be able to hold him in custody."

Dr. Strange sighed. "You haven't 'got' Loki."

"Well, my men cuffed someone who looks a hell of a lot like him," Fury shot back.

"I can count on one hand the means that would neutralize a being like Loki," Strange replied, "and they are all beyond your capability. Beyond mine, too, for the time being."

"What do you know about our capabilities?" Fury demanded.

"More than you know of mine." A tense silence cracked on the phone lines. "While I avoid publicity, I don't bury my head in the sand."

"That's fair," Fury replied, after another breath of silence. "So you're saying either Loki's playing us, or it's like the guy says and he's not Loki."

"Or the godling got into trouble and turned himself in to use you for sanctuary," Strange suggested. "Whatever the case, I would consent to see your prisoner."

"Good to hear. I'll send you a jet."

Strange smiled and curled his toes in his silk slippers. "No need. I prefer to transport myself. We couldn't want to endanger your men or your prisoner with your barbaric incompetence any longer than necessary."

He replaced the handset with a satisfying click, stood, and opened his closet. A visit to S.H.I.E.L.D. merited his full regalia. One virtue the government had never mastered was humility, and Fury was a prime example—but in Stephen Strange, any humility would just be false.

Thor's story was long, but Sam, faced with days of sitting on the floor of an empty cell trying not to twitch threateningly, was in no hurry for him to finish. Thor had a linear, factual way of remembering things that forced Sam to read between the lines for hints at Loki's character.

Loki was the younger of the pair—"Though now I think on it, I cannot be certain"—and the more secretive one. He seemed to have tagged along on many of Thor's adventures with his friends. Hunts—they were always killing something dangerous, whether a wolf or a dragon or a mystical boar. Sam didn't know what to do with the notion of gods as Hunters. Perhaps the troublesome gods he and Dean had killed had left gaps in the top of the monster ecosystem, and humans would be paying for their deaths down the road.

The murky picture of Thor and Loki's childhood—brothers? Where did the myths get their information?—cleared a bit when Thor recounted the day of his coronation. Apparently Loki was the second place brother as well as the second born; his quick mind and magical aptitude hadn't earned him any real place in the court. And Loki sounded like the type to let a grudge stew. Thor's story grew more jagged as he recalled more recent events and rawer wrongs—Thor, banished; Loki, thrust to his father's throne; the kind of fist fight that happened when two brothers had a communication breakdown and access to arcane super-weapons; and at last, in a coup de gras of untold schemes, Loki's assassination of an enemy king, near-genocide of an enemy people, strumming of the guy-wires of the entire multiverse, and willing drop into the void of space beneath Asgard's great bridge.

Sam had walked that road. Loki had apparently gotten farther along, what with fleeing his brother's overtures of reconciliation and choosing instead to inflict wanton havoc upon humanity, but Sam knew that road.

"I suspect my brother's mind is still troubled, ever since our father confessed that Loki is, in truth, a son of Jötunheim," Thor remarked in closing, cradling his broad head in his hands, and for Sam, that was the clincher.

"He discovered he's the same kind of monster he was raised to fight all his life?" Sam clarified.

Thor bristled. "My brother is no monster," he boomed. Sam flinched back. "And the people of Jötunheim—but, yes. Ere now, we would both have called them so."

Sam chewed on Thor's story. A revelation like that . . . once you got hit with that bombshell, you couldn't go on as yourself; you couldn't chase your dreams and desires just because they were yours; if you were a monster, you didn't deserve dreams. If you went on living at all, it was because you had a mission.

Sam looked up at Thor and prayed he'd be able to provide a useful answer. "If Loki had a mission," Sam asked, slowly, "what do you think it would be?"

"A mission," Thor echoed. He looked up. "Like a quest?"

Sam grimaced. "Like an obsession," he replied.

Thor's brow furrowed. "I must think on this."

"No, just off the top of your head," Sam protested, unwilling to lose Thor's company. "Whatever comes to mind is fine."

"This is a weighty matter deserving careful thought," Thor rebuked him, and Sam knew better than to argue. Thor rested a heavy callused hand on Sam's shoulder, and Sam tensed. "In case—if thou art Loki," Thor said thickly, "know that I forgive thee thy true and imagined crimes, and wish only that thou wouldst hie home."

Sam opened and closed his mouth, concerned, in spite of himself, for the sincere and affectionate god, who was likely to get his inhuman heart smashed to bits. "Sometimes when people know they've done something wrong," Sam suggested, watching Thor's eyes, "they don't want to go home until they think they've suffered enough."

"Then I shall drag him back by force," Thor declared, and left Sam alone in the cell.

Sam's fists itched. He glared at Loki's face in the mirror, still at a loss for what the god might want with Dean. The talk with Thor had been educational, but he wasn't going anywhere tonight.

Sam's hallucinations were always worse when he was bored and nervous, so after dinner (a hot dog and a sports bottle of water; no, they wouldn't un-tape his hands) and a bathroom break (a bed-pan and four guards, three armed and one with latex gloves) he spent an hour watching Satan's human vessel finger-painting on the walls with his blood. His nose itched. When he lifted his cuffed hands to scratch it against the duck tape, he got his first shock from the collar, which left him choking for air and snapped Lucifer back to the scarred crevices of Sam's brain.

It was good to know that the voltage on the collar wasn't lethal to humans, but he was in no hurry to get zapped again. Sam spent the rest of the hours until lights out rigid with nerves.

They really weren't taking any chances on him getting loose. Sam's best bet was still Thor, who seemed decent and ungovernable enough to help Sam escape, for a good enough reason. An alternative would be to promise S.H.I.E.L.D. a line on the real Loki—he could do it, as long as Loki stuck around with Dean—but that would put Dean and a being that looked like Sam Winchester in the clutches of a law enforcement agency, and things would be worse than when they'd started.

After lights out, Sam lay flat on his back on the mattress, wide awake, trying not to move. It took an hour before he started to relax. Then the lights turned back on.

Agent Coulson came in the door, then stood aside to admit yet another tall man in an elaborate costume complete with cape. This one's neatly cut salt and pepper hair could let him pass for a human corporate executive, but the flowing blue silk shirt, high-collared red cape with brocade trim, and large gold brooch made the conservative grooming moot. He was followed by an imposing black man in an eye-patch and a leather trench coat, bearing a Desert Eagle. Sam figured they meant serious business.

"More gods?" he demanded. He got shocked for startling the guy behind the mirror with the remote, and the visitors reacted: Coulson with a subtle wince, the man with the Desert Eagle by taking aim, and the man in the cape with a sneer of contempt.

"Crude," said the possible god, "and useless against any being of real power. If your organization has the intelligence of an average ten-year-old, you should free this man."

"I decide the level of risk my men live with," the man in the eyepatch retorted. He twitched his mouth and turned to the mirror. "Stand down for now. The expert's on site."

Sam cautiously pushed himself to a seat. "Who—and what—are you?" he grunted, when the movement didn't earn him another shock.

"Colonel Nick Fury," the black man boomed, "director of S.H.I.E.L.D., which takes down threats the rest of the D.O.D. isn't ready to know about. I'm a human. My friend, here, is Stephen Strange, some kind of wizard type. Despite his best efforts, he's still a human."

"And this prisoner," said Strange, waving two fingers through the air and making the duck tape on Sam's hands peel away into two neat rolls, "is either Loki in a severely disabled state, or a United States citizen unlawfully detained."

Fury glared. Sam winced and rubbed the backs of his hands where the hairs had been ripped out. Moving slowly, he unbuckled the dog collar and rubbed the dents the electrodes had left in the back of his neck.

"Do your thing," Fury ordered Strange.

Strange waved his hand and conjured a black velvet cushion onto the floor, then sat in half-lotus on it, facing Sam. Sam tightened his fists and looked sidelong at Fury. Magic did strange things to the brain, and he'd prefer facing the government agent with no oversight to the brusque "wizard type."

Strange's eyes glazed over, and Sam wondered what abnormalities he was seeing. The gold brooch at Strange's throat glowed unnaturally. Looking at it hurt Sam's head.

"There is no great power in this man," Strange murmured, clearly engaged in his unseen work. "Though there are . . . channels for it. Burns and stomata and fistulous tracts—" his brow wrinkled in disgust— "scars and healed breaks, islands and pockets in his psyche—by the Vishanti, I've never seen a live human in such a state."

Sam bared his teeth. "I find a positive attitude helps get me through the day."

Strange raised a bushy eyebrow. "None of which is relevant to the nation's security," he allowed. "This man is not and has never been Loki, and he has no active spellwork on him—"

"It's not a glamour?" Sam interrupted, drawing sharp looks from the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.

"Not at all; it's a true transmogrification," Strange announced, fascinated. "Much more delicate and draining in the short term, but perpetually stable because the change is as real as matter."

Sam swallowed.

"A novice could glamour you into a fish," Strange continued, oblivious or perhaps dismissive of Sam's growing panic, "but you'd drown in water. Transmogrified, on the other hand, you could be a fish for the rest of your life."

Well, Sam thought hysterically, at least he didn't match his mugshot anymore.

Fury loomed over them. "We already know Loki's bad news. Can you track him?"

"The cords and wave-forms of Asgardian magic are refined and intricate, and Loki's workmanship is such that what few residues remain of his power are fully self-contained," Strange said. "So, no."

Fury growled.

"I can, of course, reverse the entire effect with access to an item the victim owned before the change," Strange added, snatching something out of the air. Sam had a half second to recognize a wad of blood-stained flannel that had been one of his shirts two months ago, before Strange clapped his entire free hand across Sam's face and intoned an incantation in a language Sam didn't recognize that made the room grow hot and blurred. Sam couldn't move away. He had a bad feeling about the whole thing, but the reason escaped him until the spell finished and Strange dropped his hand.

Fury and Coulson both sighted their pistols on Sam's head.

"Coulson," Fury demanded, "is that Sam motherfuckin' Winchester?"

Coulson nodded, his aim steady. "I believe so, sir."

Fury gestured with the muzzle of his Desert Eagle. "Put the shock collar back on."

Strange, securing his place on Sam's list of assholes powerful enough to save the world twice over but too self-absorbed to bother, had vanished quick as a demon after undoing Loki's work. Bored, apparently. Fury had wasted no time in pouncing on Sam.

"The Winchester boys," he gloated, pacing back and forth before the mirror. "Always suspected we'd run into you. You fake your death once or twice, we stop assuming decapitation is gonna take."

"Obviously you don't need the 'truth is out there' speech," Sam replied. "Those shootings weren't us."

"The shootings only fooled the rest of the world because we live on a planet of dumbasses," Fury agreed. "For the rest of your rap sheet—let me guess, you had a good reason."

Sam glared. "We take out the threats the rest of the world isn't ready to know about. Not human, but sometimes the corpses look that way. And we gotta eat."

"You're no good to me unless you start pointing fingers."

"Dick Roman, the Dick Roman of Richard Roman Enterprises, was replaced last year by one of a new species of shapeshifters that escaped to the living world when a gate to Purgatory was opened as part of an angelic civil war. They're called Leviathan. They can blend into society almost perfectly, but they'll go for long-pig whenever they can get away with it. Their skin burns under a weak solution of sodium borate. Decapitation slows them down, but we still don't know how to kill them. Two of them took our faces and did the shootings."

"So you're a vigilante," Fury summarized, "and you and your brother were both framed for mass murder by evil shapeshifters from another dimension."

Sam just glared. If Fury wanted the truth, he could choke on the truth.

Fury snapped his fingers, and Sam twitched, half expecting some elaborate weapon or savage animal to manifest from the force of his will. But Fury was only human, and he was only getting the attention of the personnel behind the mirror. "You got that?" he demanded to the air. "Leviathans. Put 'em on the threat wall."

There was no sound from beyond the cell, but from Fury's assured expression, there was no question his order was being carried out.

"So you believe me?" Sam asked, suspicious.

Fury snorted. "That's what I have fact checkers for. Now, I'm gonna level with you—whether or not you're some wanna-be supervillain who shoulda joined theater club when you had the chance, we don't do murder and torture here. Not even for fellas who are legally dead. Loki, on the other hand, once killed the Norse version of Jesus with a pointy stick for shits and giggles." Fury let himself out the door and paused at the threshold. "Let my men know when you're ready to help us track your brother down."

"Now's fine," Sam said. His blood pounded. Lucifer was laughing in his ear.

Fury raised his eyebrows, then nodded in approval. "Good answer." He left Sam and Coulson staring at each-other across Coulson's gun. Sam tried to control his racing heart.

"I'll need a list of your brother's hide-outs and aliases," Coulson said.

"We don't operate like that anymore," Sam replied. "I'll need a computer with Internet access. The trail's cold; you can't track him, but I might be able to figure out where he's going."

Coulson lowered his weapon. "Send in Voight from Analysis and an escort team," he commanded to whoever watched behind the mirror.

Sam forced himself to relax in the cuffs, ignored Lucifer, and told himself that he knew what he was doing. Four armed guards and a middle-aged woman in khakis arrived to lead him from the interview room five minutes later. Sam went quietly.

S.H.I.E.L.D. pretty much let Sam research whatever he could possibly think of, and what Sam couldn't access without the hacking scripts from his laptop, Agent Voight could retrieve through Patriot Act back-doors in seconds. Once Voight got over the idea of working with a notorious satanist serial killer and got a handle on the kinds of news Sam was looking for, the work went fast. Sam found five new hunts and checked up on several anomalies he'd had his sights on already. A series of unexpected deaths in Lexington looked less like a vengeful spirit than a cursed object, according to a map one of Voight's programs generated from victims' credit card purchases. Something was eating teenagers in Cascade State Park. Voight found a kid in New Mexico, either a warlock, a rogue psychic, or a mutant, who seemed to drive people around him violently insane.

Finding Dean was complicated by the fact that it wasn't just Dean he was looking for—it was Dean hunting with Loki, who they could only assume was still impersonating Sam. If Loki nixed the hunts or sucked Dean into his own games, Sam might never find his brother unless Loki wanted him to.

Assuming Sam would even follow through with leading S.H.I.E.L.D. to Dean. Loki might just be the lesser of the two evils.

S.H.I.E.L.D. was considerate enough, now they knew Sam as just a six-and-a-half-foot mass murderer with combat training instead of a trickster god, to bring him and Agent Voight coffee. They worked through the night, looking for hunts that might catch Dean's attention, and Sam pursuing rabbit trails to keep S.H.I.E.L.D. from zeroing in on him until Sam had made up his mind.

Murderers took years—decades, often—to make it to the chair or the needle, and he and Dean were shoe-ins for the insanity defense. Hell knew they'd both benefit from psychiatric care. They still had a mission out there, ghosts and monsters and curses and demons, but other hunters could do the same jobs. They knew more than anyone else alive about Leviathan, but that really wasn't much. Dean wanted revenge, but he'd most likely die in the attempt—and Sam might just be arrogant enough to take that from him, even if they spent the rest of their lives in separate cells.

Or Sam could find it in himself to let Dean die on his own terms. If he found a hunt he knew would draw Dean in, he honestly didn't know what he'd tell S.H.I.E.L.D.

At 6:00 am, Voight's shift ended, and the escort team dragged Sam away from the computers, through bland white hallways, into an elevator, and down a heavily monitored concrete corridor to leave him in an ordinary prison cell.

Sam meditated himself to sleep on the too-small bunk.

He woke panicked. He was trapped, there were bars all around, and he couldn't hear Dean breathing raggedly across the room. He was imprisoned by some kind of shadow-government and a pagan god with brother issues was playing house with Dean.

Thor was back, looming outside the cell. He was wearing the same red cape and scale mail from yesterday, looking more like the clothes were a natural part of his skin than like he'd rolled out of bed in them. He was frowning.

Sam rolled to his feet and stretched his shoulders. He couldn't kid himself—for all that he could push-start a Dodge Ram, in a fight, he was barely on a par with a demon-possessed fifth-grade girl. Most of Sam's heavily trained muscle served only to protect his spine when he got flung into walls and tombstones, and to spring him to his feet fast enough to retrieve his weapon. Thor could probably smash his skull in by flicking him in the forehead. Looking him in the eye still made Sam feel a little better.

"Hi," Sam said warily.

Thor squinted at him, shifting from foot to foot.

"We talked yesterday," Sam reminded him when the silence got too long.

"Indeed," Thor boomed, as though startled at being caught hesitating. He puffed himself up, and Sam felt himself standing even straighter to match him and shifting his weight onto his toes. There was nowhere to escape in the small cell, but if Thor came in after him, he'd have to get the door open first—Sam assumed. "I shared my brother's woes with thee," Thor announced, "and I see I did so in error."

"I told you I wasn't him," Sam protested, struggling to keep his tone level and calm.

"I took a risk," Thor replied. "And as I hear tell, thou art held outlaw—thou lackst the honor to bind thee to thy word, and may well spread my brother's troubles to the four winds."

Sam blinked and ran Thor's words over in his head. He sat on the small cot and looked up at Thor. "Just because I've broken . . . some laws, doesn't mean I don't have personal honor."

"Fah!" Thor scoffed. "Thou defyest thy sworn liege and ask me to spare thy neck on thy weak word, dog?"

Sam stiffened and checked that the light on the cell's surveillance camera was still blinking. "Your allies wouldn't be happy if you killed me without their permission. And we don't have—I've never sworn 'fealty' to any 'liege'; we don't do that in this country."

Thor blanched. "A nation without oath or lordship?"

"It works on penalties and remuneration," Sam explained. "I mean—me and my brother, we have honor. We can keep secrets," though that depended on whose. "I'd be shocked if these people ever let me go, and if I did get out, the odds of us running into anyone who has a chance against your brother are—" pretty good actually— "negligible." Sam dug deep and pulled out his sincerest face.

Thor looked less thunderous, more stymied. He scratched the back of his neck a gesture that reminded Sam startlingly of Dean caught on the horns of a dilemma.

"You know S.H.I.E.L.D. wants me to lead them to my brother," Sam threw out. "I don't know how much luck I'll have with that."

"Loki is likely still with him," Thor said. "If he caught his fancy enough for him to concoct such an elaborate ruse."

Sam winced. "Yeah."

"If he were finished with this game, he would make it known," Thor mused, pacing in front of Sam's cell. "He always finds an audience when he wants one."

"I've got to ask you about that," Sam cut in. "You've seen him...play games, you've gotta know how they tend to play out."

Thor's eyebrows furled doubtfully.

"I mean, if S.H.I.E.L.D. walked in on him and did their government spook strike force thing—would that make things better or worse? Why's he doing this? What's he want?"

"My brother's motives—" Thor cut himself off and drummed his thumb against the bars. "I think—he is a riddle."

"I just want my brother to get out...okay," Sam said. "Free would be great, even though I doubt S.H.I.E.L.D. would just let him walk. But he's gotta be okay."

Thor bowed his head. "I say this as between lone travelers, without bonds or history—if thou wishest thy brother to be well—though it pains me mightily to say—my comrades had best confront my brother, ere his game begins to bore him."

Sam swallowed, fresh adrenaline flooding his system. "Thanks, Thor."

"You owe me nothing," Thor replied, and left the cell block.

Sam stood and looked the cell's camera in the eye, waving. "I'm ready to get back to work now."

Sleep deprivation set in by noon, when Sam got some funny looks when it turned out he'd been having a conversation with the day shift analyst assigned to him, an Agent Wills, that Agent Wills hadn't actually participated in. Sam hated when the crazy got subtle. Give him a knee-deep flood of blood and intestines, and he wouldn't miss a step, but when it got plausible—or, when gods got involved, when the implausible happened to be true—Sam would wonder for the hundredth time whether it was a net benefit to humanity for him to carry a gun.

Agent Wills had turned away from his computer terminal to stare at him and two of the escort team had drawn stun guns. "I'm sorry," Sam said, keeping his hands on his desk.

"Kieth, hit the vending machine and get the prisoner a Monster," Wills ordered a guard.

"No, no, that won't help," Sam interrupted. Stimulants were the opposite of helpful when this happened. "Let's just get back to the research, all right?"

Wills waved a hand for Kieth to stand down. Sam was positive he'd report his schizo moment. Let him.

He was starting to love working with the S.H.I.E.L.D. analysts. Voight had put out an APB last night reminding police departments to verify the credentials of any Federal agents showing up at crime scenes unannounced, in case Dean had been flashing his F.B.I. badge. S.H.I.E.L.D. data-mining programs easily adapted to search coroner's reports for unusual clusters of deaths. Both Wills and Voight had caught on to Sam's nebulous search criteria that sifted out what Dean called "our kind of crazy," as well as they could without the trivia bank Sam had accumulated from years of hitting dead end after dead end until he finally got a match for the latest supernatural threat. Get S.H.I.E.L.D. on board with ghost-busting, and humanity might be the safest it'd been since the Devil's Gate was first sealed. They even knew not to spill the beans to the public and cause mass panic.

Two hours after a fast-food lunch, they stopped—not because Sam had found Dean, but because breaking news from Reno, Nevada screamed trickster god so loud that S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't really need Sam's help after all. Loki had gotten bored.

To Chapter 3

SPN/Thor fic: The Tomato in the Mirror 1/4

rokhal — Wed, 16 May 2012 03:34:53 GMT

Title: The Tomato in the Mirror
Chapter: 1/4
Characters: Sam Winchester, Thor Odinsson, Phil Coulson, Nick Fury, several Avengers and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and guest-starring Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme of Earth
Pairing: Gen
Rating: T
Length: 2.5k (of 18k total)
Warnings: Two uses of the F word, several uses of the S word, mild hand-to-hand violence, moderate comic-book violence, massive property destruction, a scene of body horror that may be objectionable to those with anxiety about diet
Spoilers: Thor, Supernatural through 7.11. No actual spoilers for Avengers, as this was written before I saw the film.
Disclaimer: Not for profit. Free advertising for both franchises!
Summary: Loki body-swaps with Sam. Later, things get weird.
Note: Yes, that tomato in the mirror.

They were on a hunt in Minnesota in the winter.

Minnesota in winter was absurdly cold. It was too cold to run. Sam and his brother Dean didn't have enough clothes with them in their gutless stolen Challenger that smelled like someone else's prescription hand lotion. They'd had to stop in to a charity store for gloves, hats, and a sweater apiece, and on the way to the nearest diner to pick up breakfast burritos and coffee, Sam was still shivering as he walked.

He passed a homeless guy with better gloves than he had. Nothing had even tried to kill him yet, and he was already hating this hunt.

Sam had agreed to the hunt because at least it wasn't Dick Roman; it wasn't revenge. Dean had been interested, Sam was starting to suspect, because the sheer variety and magnitude of their target's trail of mayhem gave him hope that, with a little persuasion, the whatever-it-was might be able to take on the Leviathan, but to Sam, bestowing venomous claws and super-strength for a day on an entire kindergarten class and watching the National Guard and CDC deal with the mass panic and casualties seemed kind of mean-spirited. Anyway, the thing was dangerous, so Sam and Dean were going to hunt it. Even if they had to go North in January to do so.

Dean wanted revenge for their uncle, shot two months ago by one of a new breed of shapeshifting monster impersonating the CEO of Roman Enterprises. Sam got where he was coming from; they'd both driven themselves to death and beyond for revenge in the past. The problem was, in a toe-to-toe between Leviathan-Dick Roman and Tony Stark, Sam's money was on Roman, Iron Man armor or no. Leviathan were un-killable as far as they knew, and the Roman Empire owned Kraft Foods and was looking to purchase PepsiCo. Stark Industries was lucky it stayed out of the food sector, or it would've been absorbed like the rest. Two drifters couldn't exactly fight that.

His stomach growled. The sky was iron-gray, pressing down on the city; the street lights were still glaring down on him. Waist-high berms of grimy plowed snow walled in the side-walk. Blue grains of ice melt sat in little round pocks in yesterday's slush. His long legs ate up the blocks in his haste to arrive somewhere warm, and he wrapped his arms around his chest, stretching his canvas jacket over his shoulders. Sam wished he'd taken the car. He'd needed to get moving after the long drive, but he'd been expecting North America, not Pluto.

An absurd figure strolled down out of the air to walk beside him: a pale thin man with long dark hair, a little taller than Dean and shorter than Sam, dressed in an oddly medieval-looking leather duster and trousers, with ornate bronze vambraces on his forearms and a long green cape flaring over his shoulders. It wasn't one of Sam's usual hallucinations, but it wasn't bothering him, unless he counted staring sidelong at him with pale green eyes alight with menace and hunger. Sam kept his eyes on the diner ahead of him and stripped off his left glove, ready to dig his fingers into the sensitive scar on that palm to snap himself back to reality if the phantasm got too distracting.

After two-hundred years in the core of Hell, Sam figured he'd gotten off pretty lightly, as far as side-effects went.

He could see the diner on the next block. His pace quickened.

The imaginary man in the green cape cocked his head aside like a crow. "What are you?" he wondered aloud, his voice smooth and approximately British. "Some kind of god-slayer?"

Sam watched the man more warily. He and Dean had driven here to hunt something that played games—something smart, vicious, powerful, and arrogant, something that might very well walk down out of the air and strike up a conversation with a Hunter just to creep him out.

Most things slowed down when they'd been shot in the eye. Sam reached for the gun at the small of his back.

The man grabbed him by the jacket collar and flung him thirty feet backward down the sidewalk. Ice cut at Sam's hand and road salt stung the gashes; the image of the man didn't even flicker. Definitely real. Probably a god, certainly more than Sam was ready to handle. Sam rolled to his feet and drew his gun.

By the time he got his bearings, he was looking at five identical angry gods in green capes and bronze vambraces. He froze.

A sixth god in green lunged at him from the side. Sam whirled and fired; the bullet passed right through him and ricocheted off a brick storefront across the street. Sam cursed. The god in front of him smirked. One of the gods he'd turned his back on pounced on him in his distraction, seized his gun arm by the wrist, and ground Sam's tendons together so hard he dropped his weapon.

Lurid green flames coiled strong as rope caught Sam by the throat as he tried to headbutt the attacker, whose hungry eyes sparked with the same green fire. Sam bared his teeth and yanked his phone out of his pants, switching to his bare left hand and dialing Dean from his contacts by touch.

The fiery ropes multiplied and strapped Sam spread-eagle to the wall of the nearby hardware store. A cop car drove right past Sam and the god, the partner's eyes gliding idly over them, and pulled into the diner's parking lot. The rope on Sam's left arm tightened, numbing. He dropped the phone in the snow.

The god smiled crookedly at him as he panted and struggled, and laid a cold slender hand against his face. "Peace, god-slayer," he murmured, a hint of a chuckle in his breath. "I'm only borrowing you."

The god's skin warmed, grew tan. He gained an inch or three. Sam felt his own skin rippling as though riddled with worms; his lungs grew tight and his legs weak. He watched a twin to the mole on his jaw sprout on the god's, and the god's slick black hair warm to brown. In a moment Sam was struggling not to pass out as he stared up into his own face.

The god tapped Sam between the eyes with his finger and shook his head as though he'd gotten water in his ear. He smiled Sam's smile, bent, and picked up the fallen phone. Sam heard Dean's voice, urgent, from the speaker. "Dropped the phone, sorry, dude," the god said, a perfect mimicry. "Hey, this place does pie for breakfast. Want a slice?" Dean's reply was an enthusiastic affirmative, and the god grinned and dragged his borrowed arm, palm up, down through the air. A bag of take-out materialized on it. "Apple it is. Back in five." Dean said something else, warm. "'Course, Dean," said the god, and hung up.

Sam struggled against the brilliant green ropes that immobilized him. The god frowned. "If you would pass out, you'd save my decency and your embarrassment, stubborn mortal," he said, voice drifting back to his own smooth accent. "In fact—pass out. Now."

He snapped his fingers.

God, it was cold.

The sun was high and the sky was clear, but it was relentlessly bitingly cold, numbingly cold, stuporously cold. Sam woke curled around his knees in a ditch between two high board fences painted beige—some housing development. He couldn't feel his hands or feet. His cheeks burned. He was shivering so hard he doubted he could uncurl himself if he tried.

He managed. He staggered to the nearest fence on numb feet, shaking uncontrollably. He had to get indoors. He had to warn Dean about the god.

It was while he was patting his pockets for the cell phone he'd forgotten he'd dropped that he noticed he wasn't wearing his own clothes. He was in some vaguely medieval-looking trousers and a close-fitting jacket under a calf-length duster of exquisitely hand-stitched and embossed black leather with a green wool lining that ran all the way to the edge, over long underwear that might be cashmere—it was hard to tell with his fingers numb and the rest of his skin covered in goose-bumps. A long green cape clasped to a small breastplate anchored in the front of his jacket. There were bronze vambraces on his forearms and long slender throwing knives in little sheathes sewn into the sides of the trousers and arms of the jacket.

The god had left Sam his knives. That showed exactly what he thought of Sam's threat level.

The cape had to go. Sam blew on his fingers and stomped back and forth in the snow until his shivering died down enough that he could work the clasps off. He still looked like he'd wandered out of a Renaissance fair, or maybe Comic Con.

They didn't exactly have those in January in small-town Minnesota.

With the cape gone, Sam found that the duster was held down by a bronze pauldron on his right shoulder that hooked to a strap that ran between the duster's lapels, through a slit in his jacket, and buckled to a belt that didn't actually hold up his pants, but looked like it might be intended to hold a weapon. Apparently the clothes came as a set, and were not meant to be removed.

It was while he was fighting to untangle himself from the contraption that he noticed that the fingers he was using weren't actually his. The hands on the ends of his wrists were slender and neatly groomed. His gun calluses were gone. From what little he could feel of his stinging face, the corner of his jaw was too round, his sideburns were missing, and his hairline was all wrong. His—or he should say, the god's—wisdom teeth were intact.

Noticing when you'd been body-swapped was apparently one of those skills that improved with practice. Sam added it to the ever-expanding list of skills he had, but really didn't want.

Strange clothes, strange body, strange location. Sam hoped he was still in Lakeville, but he couldn't assume. He detached bits and plates and baubles from the god's clothes until they could pass for fashion-forward motorcycle leathers, patted himself down for anything else useful—just more knives—and picked a direction in the maze of shoulder-high residential fencing that looked likely to lead to a road.

After ten minutes shuddering on the side of the road with his thumb out, Sam returned to the development, bashed his way into the nearest unoccupied apartment window, tossed the tenant's belongings for twenty dollars and a wire coat hanger, and stole a Kia Sportage.

The Kia's GPS put him thirty miles north of Lakeville and two days late to get Dean his breakfast burritos. Sam stared into the unfamiliar eyes in the rear-view mirror, blasted the heat, and headed back to his and Dean's motel.

Dean was gone.

The Challenger was gone, the clerk remembered the guys in #17 missing check-out, and the housekeeper was still nauseated at the memory of the pile of bloody towels left on the bathroom floor. Sam picked a bobby pin off the carpet on his way out of the office and used it and the tip of one of the god's knives to jimmy the old-fashioned lock on the room. There was nothing left, no news clippings, no notes, nothing tucked into a corner of the dresser, and nothing smuggled in the box springs.

Sam examined the god's body in the mirror with morbid fascination, and consoled himself that at least he was still tall (though he should have been taller), and at least he still had hair he could tuck behind his ears. He kind of liked the way the god's jacket winged out over his shoulders; it almost disguised the hard-won muscle he'd lost, and it fit. (Of course it fit. He wasn't Sam right now.)

The faint lines in his face didn't fold right when he smiled, though, and the longer Sam examined the closest link he had to the god, the more uneasy he became. The pale green eyes were hollow and wild, aching with exhaustion. Bitterness flowed into this face almost unbidden, as though stamped into the very flesh. There were little hairline scars here and there, on its face and hands, and a worrisome one, old and well-healed, low on the side of its throat. Gods and monsters were always bad, but the suffering ones were the worst. Sam feared for Dean.

He left the motel and drove to the nearest library. Twenty minutes at a computer terminal while examining the embroidery on the sleeve of the jacket and the engraving on the knife handles pointed Sam toward the Norse pantheon, and the modus operandi toward the trickster Loki, who was by all accounts very smart, stupidly impulsive, and goddamn difficult to kill. There had been no trickster chaos in town over the two days Sam had been out of the picture, and no ritualistic murders, mysteriously mummified corpses, museum thefts, missing persons, or fires, either. No evidence the god had caused any more trouble or that Dean had been hunting in the area.

Sam bought a bowl of soup across the street with his stolen twenty and called both Dean's phones from a payphone with the change. The ring, both times, was followed by the scratchy laughter of animatronic clowns in the place of Dean's voicemail. Sam slammed the headset back into the cradle.

So the god was actively keeping him away from Dean. That was good. There was no fun for a trickster in guarding a corpse.

Sam abandoned the Kia after a last look at the GPS, and, fortified by soup and desperation, headed off on foot for the Sheriff's office. A helicopter whup-whupped overhead, the noise somewhat muffled by the deep snow that still smothered the rooftops. It looked military. As it circled, a second, similar, joined it.

Sam stopped on a street corner and watched.

He heard a mechanical whine in the distance and spotted a gleaming streak of red in the corner of his eye before more voltage than a human body should ever conduct struck him unconscious.

To Chapter 2

SPN fic: Stop Hitting Yourself 1/3

rokhal — Sun, 06 May 2012 01:19:56 GMT

Title: Stop Hitting Yourself
Chapter: 1/3, The Bird Hunt
Characters: John, Dean, and Sammy Winchester; Sam Grisham
Pairing: none
Rating: T
Length: 2k
Warnings: Horrifying creatures getting violently slaughtered, poor gun safety
Disclaimer: Fanfic! It's a fanfic!
Note: I wrote this for an anonymous prompt at ohsam that was posted on April 27 last year. Last. Year. Making this last year's comment!fic. It's complete now, at least.
Summary: Dad gets a hunting partner, a tall guy with long hair and cool sideburns. He and Dad get along bizarrely well and Dean worships him, but he seems to have a grudge against Sammy, a grudge that surfaces on a hunt that spins dangerously out of control.

"Take cover!"

Dad was screaming at them, and for half a thought it was just like a war movie. Dad made Seagal and Stallone sound like prancing pansies when he was laying out plans, recounting a kill, or ordering his sons around in the field, but this, that scream, Sam had never heard outside the theater. It was the sound of a brave man panicking.

Sam stumbled as he sprinted after his brother to the rusty horse trailer hitched to Dad's pickup, cursing his gangly limbs as Dean raced nimbly over the rutted field, shotgun clutched picture-perfect across his chest. The Big Birds above them paused in their shrieking, and at the silence, Sam flinched to the ground. Two had broken from the flock and were streaking down at them, too close, too fast. Sam raised his own shotgun and fired at the nearest shape. His shot went wide. The bird circled around, and Dad's tough hand flung Sam to the dirt just as the other bird dove five feet above him, claws extended and a sneer on its apelike face. Sam felt his shoulder shuddering, and Dad's hand shuddering right back.

There were too many birds. Dad yanked Sam to his feet like he was half his height and shoved him ahead to the trailer where Dean was crouching already, knuckles white around the shotgun's forestock. Dean fired, sending iron shrapnel hissing overhead. Sam dove for the trailer as Dad shoved him ahead. He hit the steel floor hard and Dean slammed the door. Dad raced for the cab.

The hunt had fallen apart.

Big Birds had first been sighted in Texas in1976, then disappeared, likely taken down by some hunter. He'd apparently missed a few, because reports of similar creatures started popping up twenty years later in Kansas and Wyoming. They appeared at night, singly, variously described with a five- to twenty-foot wingspan and the face of a chimp, a red-eyed woman, or a vampire bat. Twenty-two solid citizens had confessed to seeing the creatures, and five middle-aged men had dropped dead of heart attacks outdoors at night. Dad and Dean had pegged it as a low-risk hunt—low risk enough to take Sam on. Cryptids rarely died any harder than natural animals. A head-shot with cold iron never hurt, but chupacabras and skunk apes went down with ordinary buckshot and bloodloss.

The Big Birds were roosting in an abandoned hay barn just outside of town. Dad had had Sam and Dean ring the decaying timber frame with twenty gallons of diesel and set it alight. He'd boosted an old horse trailer and brought his truck so they'd have some shooting cover in case any survived. An aerial enemy demanded a steel roof, and they could shoot out through the trailer windows.

The building had gone up beautifully, and just as the flames began to reach the roof, a hole had appeared in the corrugated steel and perhaps fifty Big Birds, heavy-headed, with piercing voices and long talons, had streamed into the sky, terrified and enraged. As the birds struck up their doom chorus, it had occurred to Sam that perhaps the men dead of heart attacks had had more than heart disease to blame.

They were too frightening for what they were.

The bloody tears in the back of Dean's jacket showed that at least some of their fear was justified. But not—Sam could barely think it—Dad, panicking.

"Load me up, Twig Boy!" Dean showed Sam a manic grin and a box of ammo. Sam swapped his own 12-gauge for Dean's empty and shoved seven down the magazine, his fingers fumbling and spilling shells. Dean fired three times out the window, and swore. There was no wounded keen from the birds outside. "Switch," Dean barked, thrusting the gun in Sam's face. Sam held up the loaded shotgun and Dean yanked it from his grip to fire again, and miss again.

Dean was a crack shot, but his hands were shaking.

Claws rattled on the roof and a talon and an angry face lunged through the shallow window. Dean recoiled, leaping back to stagger against the opposite wall of the trailer, and Sam popped up to fire, shells spilling from the open magazine, just as the bird withdrew.

The truck made a hoarse rasp. Dean was shaking, Sam was terrified, Dad was panicking, and the truck was out of commission. Sam frantically gathered up shells and stuffed them back down the magazine, pouring a couple back out as he realized he had loaded them backwards in his haste.

"The birds took the truck out?" Sam demanded. "They're that smart, they took the truck out?"

"I gotta cover Dad," Dean panted, eyes wild. "Stay in the trailer, cover me from inside—"

"No!" Sam grabbed Dean's jacket collar and twisted it. "They'll—you don't have enough ammo, they'll dive right through you. There's too many!"

"Dad needs me!" Dean insisted, ripping Sam's grip loose.

Another bird showed its face at the window, perching on the lower rim. Dean shot it, and a few balls of shot struck a girder and boomed and rattled inside the trailer.

"Sam, don't be stupid!" Dean grabbed the trailer latch. "If Dad can't fix the truck, we can't retreat. And the hunt turns into Jeepers Creepers II." Sam scrambled to his feet and jammed himself between Dean and the door. "Back off," Dean snapped.

Sam braced his legs against the trailer wall. "I'm covering you."

Dean crouched, wrapped his free arm around Sam's narrow waist, and slammed him to the steel floor, a pile of knees and elbows. "You stay here!" Dean snarled, "where it's safe! You stay here and hide 'till we come back and get you!"

The birds were screaming louder and louder, circling the trailer. The truck rasped again. Dean shuddered, swept a handful of shells off the floor, and stuffed them into Sam's jacket pocket. Dean was going to leave, Sam knew. Dean was going to die.

Sam clawed at Dean's coat, latching his fingers in his collar and making his heavier brother stagger. "No!" he cried, as Dean struggled to pry him loose. "No! No, no, no, no, Dean, no!"

A bird clattered on the trailer and perched at the window, ape-face hunched low and eager as it began to squeeze its way in. Sam's heart clogged his throat. He wrapped his arm around Dean's neck and dropped, sending them both booming to the floor, Dean's shotgun trapped between them. The bird gaped its jaws and screamed down at them, the noise echoing between the steel walls. Sam's chest felt heavy, and his skin burned cold. He heard Dean make a faint gasp of pain, and as Sam stared helplessly up at the animal's knowing leering face, something vicious stirred in him: he wanted to hurt it, choke it, wrap his hands around its bulldog neck and squeeze it into silence, then longer, until its face purpled and all the fear he felt left him to shine back at him from the bird's red, bulging eyes.

A shot boomed outside, and the bird vanished in a puff of ragged feathers. The flock's chorus faltered, and in the brief silence, Sam heard faint strains of Reggae. Don't worry, Bobby McFerrin's overdubbed chorus gently reprimanded them, be happy.

"I hate this song," Dean muttered, dazed.

'Cause when you worry, your face will frown, and that will bring everybody down, so don't worry. Another shotgun blast gave weight to the message. It was deep and concussive.

"That a 10-gauge?" Dean wondered, rolling off Sam. As one, they collected their shotguns, chambered shells, and stood to scan the outside. There was a dirty white Subaru parked beside the trailer. It'd likely approached while the birds' racket had drowned out all other sound. The windows on one side were open, and the speakers poured out music full blast. A man in a football helmet and a Carhartt jacket was swinging a shotgun around at the sky. As they watched, he fired again, over the truck, absorbing the recoil without a flinch, and as the echoes died, they heard Dad's voice.

"I got two more in the trailer," Dad barked at the man. "Drop us off at South Bend."

The man nodded, never taking his eyes from the sky.

Dad had gotten in first, taking shotgun and covering the other Hunter with his service pistol. The Subaru had reversed in a cloud of dust to pull up at the trailer door. Dad and the stranger had covered Sam and Dean's dive for the back seat, and they left the horse trailer, Dad's truck, and the frustrated flock of Big Birds shrinking in the distance.

The stranger killed the tape deck after the third loop of nauseating Cold War optimism, and popped off his football helmet, banging it on the ceiling in the cramped space he filled. Sam saw a lot of sweaty brown hair, and Dad watching their rescuer intently. "Nice timing," Dad growled.

"Saw the smoke," the stranger explained. "I've been in town the last . . . week, for the same hunt you're on. I figured . . . why miss out on the action when I've already done all the work?" Sam didn't like how much he hesitated. Dad didn't look impressed, either; Dad never did.

"Are we going back for the truck, Sir?" Dean asked. Dean had been driving the old family sedan for the past two years since Dad had acquired the truck. Sam had grown somewhat attached to the shotgun seat and didn't relish the thought of being kicked to the back bench.

"Not now, Dean." Dean sighed quietly, then sat up in his seat, his mouth twisting in disgust as he ran his hand over the cream velour upholstery. He engaged the safety on his shotgun and laid it carefully in the footwell as Sam did likewise. Dean hated new cars, white cars, hatchbacks, and Reggae, but his disgust seemed to be losing out to his curiosity as he sized the stranger up. Sam could count the hunters Dean had met on one hand, and Sam himself had never seen anyone but Dad on a hunt; he wasn't sure if it was because Dad didn't trust anyone but Dean for backup, or because there just weren't that many Hunters out there. It wasn't a fun way to live.

"You came in prepared," Dad remarked to the stranger. "What do you know about these things?"

The stranger stiffened a bit at the question. "You mean generally, or historically, or—they, uh, they're gregarious. Smart, maybe telepathic—they get us. I think they feed on fear. From the witness reports it sounds like they're, uh, supernaturally terrifying."

"Mm," said Dad. Sam shivered at the memory of just minutes ago: Dad panicking; Sam and Dean nearly killing each-other out of fear for each-other on the floor of the trailer, wrestling with loaded weapons.

"So," said the stranger awkwardly, "are you taking a taxi to your, to wherever you're staying? Because if we meet up later, I can get you your weapons back."

Dad had not relaxed during any of the stranger's explanations. "We'll chance it," he said.

"It's not hunting season," the stranger protested. He turned his head to look at Dad, and Sam caught a hint of a sharp nose and anxious mud-colored eyes.

"Drop us at the nearest gas station and forget about us," Dad ordered him, deadly cold.

The stranger looked at him sharply, as though to retort, but clicked his mouth shut instead. "I think we should keep in contact," he told Dad with forced mildness. "I heard you've been chasing something for a long time," he continued, watching Dad with cautious darts of his head. "I've been chasing it, too."

Dad was stone. Dean hissed through his teeth and clenched his fists in his lap, and even Sam felt vicarious adrenaline flood his veins with eagerness. There was one thing, one white whale that had ever eluded Dad for more than a month: the Thing that Killed Mom.

Next chapter!

SPN fic: Stop Hitting Yourself 2/3

rokhal — Sun, 06 May 2012 01:19:25 GMT

Title: Stop Hitting Yourself
Chapter: 2/3, Research And/Or Homework
Characters: John, Dean, and Sammy Winchester; Sam Grisham
Pairing: none
Rating: T
Length: 6k
Warnings: Teen angst
Disclaimer: Fanfic! It's a fanfic!

The stranger's name was Grisham. Surprisingly enough, after they'd walked back to the motel in South Bend and driven back to the apartment in Buffalo Fork, Wyoming, Dad had called Grisham and met with him while Sam was at school. Sam heard about it from Dean. They were working together to finish the hunt.

Supernaturally smart though they were, the birds were still flesh and blood, and they still needed a roost during the day. Dad and Dean spent nights out of the apartment more often than not, leaving Sam to bus home and fix himself a mess of chicken breast and boiled vegetables in silence. Sam found out about the end of the hunt after the fact: Dean and Dad had trooped in the door just before Sam sat down to his dinner, Dean grinning, Dad cracking a smug smile over Dean's shoulder, and recounted how they'd slowly infused butane into an abandoned grain silo and set off a massive fuel-air explosion, taking out the entire flock in a column of flame visible for miles in every direction. Grisham's idea. Dean had a new god.

Sam was just washing up after a dinner of frozen peas and ground beef when Dad and Dean swept into the apartment. "Get in the car, we're eating out," Dad announced, swiping his journal off the top of the refrigerator. Sam jumped and grabbed his school notebook. Even on a full stomach, no Winchester turned down free food.

They piled into the car and Dad drove a little ways across town to a bar and grill. A pretty decent bar and grill. Everything looked clean. The neon and beer signs in the windows were tacky, but cheerful, and the lights were dim for mood, not because half the bulbs were burnt out. The parking lot was full of late-model Japanese sedans. The walls had shelves and display frames for bits and bobs of memorabilia, like an Applebees but with a twist of Hard Rock Cafe.

Dad never splurged like this. Sam wondered what the occasion was.

They filed into the restaurant part, Sam sandwiched between Dad and Dean like usual, and Dad announced them to the host—there was a host!—as Grisham, party of four.

"It says here, party of three," said the host, checking the reservation list—they had a reservation!

"Now it's four," Dad told him.

The host smiled nervously and stepped back, scribbled a note in the margin, and led them to a corner boot where Grisham sat. Sam hadn't actually seen him since the ill-fated first assault on the Big Birds. In a civilized setting, without the stink of gun smoke and fear and without the football helmet, Sam saw he was fairly well-groomed for a hunter—clean-shaven, recently bathed and laundered, shirt cuffs free of blood-stains—hard to manage on the road. Grisham seemed to have taken a note from Pulp Fiction and married John Travolta's hair to Samuel L. Jackson's sideburns. It was kind of awesome. Sam figured as Hunters went, Grisham might be one of the saner ones.

Dean threw back his shoulders like Dad's training exercises had turned him into an actual Marine, and gave Grisham a restrained nod. The restraint was for the hero worship. Sam had a sudden flash of Wayne and Garth kow-towing to Alyce Cooper in Wayne's World 2.

Dad shook Grisham's hand and sat next to him on the booth. Sam and Dean piled in opposite. "Grisham, meet my son Sammy," Dad announced. "Sammy, Sam Grisham."

Sam's mouth spasmed as though he'd been force-fed a lemon. Grisham made a similar flicker of distaste, or maybe surprise. Sam was pretty sure he hadn't been included in the "party of three," and he imagined few professionals appreciated the unexpected addition of a kid just cutting his teeth on the job.

Sam folded himself into his corner of the booth and flipped open his notebook. Sixteen years of extended car rides and unannounced extracurricular field trips had trained him to write an English Lit essay any time, any place. His topic was Alfred Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," a poem commemorating a cavalry charge that had accomplished nothing but killing most of the cavalrymen, executed under bad orders. The poem moved him nearly to physical violence. Sam would settle, instead, for verbal violence—double-tap, decapitate, disembowel, dismember, burn, until all the careful craftsmanship, rosy nationalist ideology, and pretty visions of honor and duty had been weighed, dissected, and reduced to so much ash.

If Sam ever got drafted, he'd probably kill himself.

Dad and Grisham had spread some clippings and Xeroxes across the table and Dean sat at attention, alert for orders as he scanned the research across from him upside-down.

"You find any deaths between sunrise and sunset?" Dad asked.

Grisham shook his head. "That's no guarantee for a daylight approach, though."

"Till we tap out the news and records, nobody sets foot on the place," Dad replied. "This thing covers a lot of territory, and nobody's seen it, far as we know."

Sam shut them out and paged to the text of the poem, copied into the notebook by hand that afternoon.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Killing something, whether it was a hyper-intelligent fanged forest beast or classic poetry, could be as dangerous for the careless as it was straight-forward for the prepared. Everything had a weakness; some weaknesses were just less obvious than others.

Literature had to be confronted first with a show of respect and understanding. Tennyson was a master of verse-craft. Sam sketched out a paragraph commending the way the dactyls of the stanzas mimicked the rhythm of hoof-beats and added tension and impetus to the piece, enhancing the drama when read aloud. Creative works that—Sam reached for a delicate term for propaganda—aspire to hold a place of authority in the cultural consciousness—need universal appeal. They must be easy to love. They need charisma, and "Light Brigade" had it.

Dean elbowed Sam. The waitress had arrived with an extra menu. Sam scanned the entrees, looking at Dad for guidance. Dad gave a small nod with a tilt toward Grisham, which Sam took to mean, "Go nuts, it's his dollar."

There were the usual All-American bar and grill classics—ribs and steak and hamburgers—but also vegetables. Salads. Sam couldn't even imagine what a sixteen-dollar salad might have in it, but he was going to find out.

When the waitress came back, Dad and Dean each got a burger, and Sam and Grisham ordered the same salad. There was an awkward moment when they almost had a staring contest over who should change their order, but Dad distracted Grisham by shoving everyone's water glasses out of the way so he could unfold a map of Wyoming. They traced roads with colored pencils until the food came.

You couldn't hunt until you knew the territory—how to get to the target—and the target's pattern of activity—where it came and went. It was a rare hunt that didn't force Dad and Dean to work out the whole history of an area long before they had any clue how to kill the monster when they found it. That search for context started with a map and a timeline.

Tennyson had written "Charge of the Light Brigade" during the Crimean War, trying to make sense of a news report of a disaster of leadership that had cost hundreds of British lives. It was human nature to make sense of the senseless and find purpose in tragedy; Tennyson, and the British public that had embraced the poem, simply could not accept that the cavalrymen's deaths had been for nothing. They'd found solace in a story of devotion and submission that reinforced Britain's support of its overseas military and the chain of command that was its backbone.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

In the face of disasters like this, the public needed some kind of compensatory dogma to keep dangerous thoughts at bay. Commanders made mistakes—that was fact—but the chain of command was all that separated a modern military from the Visigoths. If an officer gave a command and a soldier said no, well. Cats falling from the sky, panicked retreats, logistical breakdowns, pillaging, and dishonor. Only a master like Tennyson could make unquestioning obedience in the face of uninformed orders palatable to the civilian audience, let alone honorable, and Tennyson had come through for Britain. He had sold a message that was critical to the prosecution of an overseas war.

But whose business was the war?

Where was the nobility in a soldier putting not just his life, but also his soul—because many traditions called murder a mortal sin, and killing was a sure way to wound anyone's soul—in the hands of whichever commander chance had given him to obey? What was honorable in giving up his responsibility for his own actions, in surrendering his own agency as a human being? What precisely was honor made of, if human societies could just decide that killing people from other societies en masse was honorable?

What were duty and devotion in a world at war? Machines were dutiful. Dogs were devoted. Human beings were supposed to be more than that, and to sell out whatever higher purpose humanity might have for some social construct called "honor". . . it made Sam sick.

The food arrived. Dean tucked in, while Dad, Sam, and Grisham shoved their work a little aside and ate absently. Sam flipped a few pages ahead in his notebook and summarized his objections to honoring the Light Brigade's Noble Six-Hundred in bullet form, to be rephrased more diplomatically later.

The salad dressing tasted like strawberries and pepper. The lettuce was dark and fine, with interesting ruffly edges. There were tiny strips of rare steak in it. Sam was pretty sure Dean would be ragging on him about it for the whole meal if Grisham hadn't had one, too.

Grisham had passed Dean a manila folder of smudged Xeroxes. Dean, uncharacteristically focused, was nearly as absorbed in the information as he was in his cheeseburger. Ever since Dean had dropped out of high school he'd been his usual Dad-idolizing, gung-ho hunter, big-damn-hero self, cubed. Around another hunter—Pastor Jim, Uncle Bobby, and now Sam Grisham, apparently—he was even worse, like it wasn't just his own credibility on the line, but Dad's, too. He'd always watched Dad's back before his own.

Sam could admit to himself that his and Dad's world would probably collapse without Dean, but the corollary was that any time Dean wanted, he could bring their life on the hunt to a crashing halt. But Dean didn't. Dean didn't . . . want.

"Nice work," Grisham told Dean when he passed the folder back skimmed, underlined, and summarized. Dean's eyes lit up and he sort of preened without moving a muscle.

Grisham narrowed his eyes and jerked his chin at the wall décor, the framed concert posters, vintage band shirts, amplifiers, bent cymbals, and dented guitar cases. Some of the logos were from bands Sam had never heard of, and others from Lynrd Skynrd, George Thoroughgood, and Aerosmith. "I hear this place got the theme from one of the employees who used to be a roadie," Grisham remarked, watching Dean's eyes as they went bright and wide. "The bartender, I think?" There was a question in his tone, but Sam didn't get the sense Grisham was at all uncertain. "I hear he's good for a few stories."

"The bartender roadied for Skynrd?" Dean shot back, just to be clear. He glanced rapidly between Dad and Grisham. "Permission to visit the bar, sir?"

Dean sometimes treated the "sir" thing as a respectful joke, but Sam had never found it funny.

"Your card good?" Dad asked. Dean nodded. "Two drinks. I'll come get you."

Dean stood and hovered at the end of the booth. "Sammy, you got your card? Let's go."

Sam took a tight grip on his notebook, braced himself against his corner, and dug in. "I'm doing homework," he protested. He didn't want to perch on a barstool getting spilled beer on his essay draft while listening to stories about rock stars puking on themselves and watching women Grisham's age fawn all over his brother.

Sam had goals. To meet his goals, Sam had to do the homework. It was a statistical fact.

Dean swaggered off to the bar, tossing Sam a "Later, loser," and Dad and Grisham stacked their empty plates on Dean's abandoned place to make room for the map.

"Leach mining," Dad muttered, poring over a yellowed newspaper. "What's involved in that?"

Grisham shrugged with his lips. "Pouring a solvent in a hole in the ground and pumping it back out from another one," he explained.

"So a smaller footprint than the excavations," Dad mused.

"Smaller holes, more groundwater contamination."

"Wyoming has groundwater?"

Sam tuned them out and plotted the overthrow of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The essay was going to turn into a deconstruction of nationalism and military service as a whole if he wasn't careful, and that wouldn't do the job. For all he knew, Mr. Schwartz's son had been in the Gulf War. Come in too fast too hard, and Sam would get smacked down, but a softer, circuitous approach could wear down most reasonable people's defenses.

Comprehension and commendation, then critique. Sam remembered what hero worship felt like. He could give the devil its due: fulfill the assignment by demonstrating that he understood and appreciated the poem for its merits, then turn and pick it apart at the seams in a second thesis.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Sam allowed that Tennyson respected the evil and savagery of war, for all that he'd never fought in one, though the poetic language didn't really capture the tunnel-vision of real danger. Fear made the world go sharp like strobe-light, and shoved the mind down one of two tracks: instinct or training. There was no room for comparisons to Hell or personifying box canyons in the heat of the moment, only rote behavior and panic. Poetic imagery tended to grow the other way around: years later, the surviving cavalrymen might have pictured Hell as a temperate valley rimmed by hidden cannons and thick with the smell of powder-smoke and blood, echoing with thunder and the screams of men and horses.

Sam chewed on his pen as he wondered how much personal experience was safe to include in this thing. Make it too believable, and there could be trouble.

"If you're done with that, you can do a witness sheet," Dad interrupted, pushing a stack of clippings across the table to him.

"I'm working," Sam protested. He set his pen back to his paper and willed something useful to come out.

"You've been staring into space for the past five minutes," Dad said. "Do the witness sheet."

"I was thinking!" Sam's voice cracked. Grisham smirked, and Sam reddened.

"Do it and don't argue," Dad growled, leaning toward him. Dad twitched his head toward the peaceful family seated around a table nearby, a mom and a dad and a well-behaved brother and sister about Sam's age. Unless the cops were involved, Dad had far less objection to making an embarrassing public scene than Sam did. Sam subsided and stiffly picked up the clippings.

The news clippings were about university and EPA-sponsored research expeditions to the grounds of a defunct uranium mine, in which one or more of the visitors had died. Law enforcement didn't like it when papers included enough details for vigilantes like Dad to launch their own investigations, but all the papers did by leaving out names was make things take longer. Give Sam the name and department of the supervising professor and the number of grad students on the research team, and Sam would note it down on the witness sheet so Dad could find out the rest by knocking on doors and asking questions.

Sam had been doing witness sheets since he was ten; it was the kind of chore a ten-year-old could reliably do. No staring off into space involved here. The best way to ease the pain was to grit his teeth and plow through the tedium as fast as possible. He took his notes: names, departments, organizations, dates. It was automatic. He couldn't write too fast, though, or Dad wouldn't be able to read his handwriting and he'd have to do the whole thing over.

"Permission to visit the bar, sir?" Sam demanded as soon as he'd finished. Dad shot him a flat look. Sam glared right back, clutching his notebook. The booth was hemming him in.

"He could check into the oral history," Grisham cut in, digging around in the bag that sat next to him.

"No, he's done some good work," Dad said.

It was a witness sheet. Sam couldn't imagine a way to screw it up.

"Permission granted."

Sam scrambled out of the booth. Dad caught him by the elbow before he could disappear. "You got that new ID from Marcus?"

"Yessir," Sam replied. He'd known this wasn't a school field trip.

"One drink," Dad ordered, squeezing his arm.

Sam stiffened. "All due respect, sir," he hissed, "if I'm using poker money and a fake ID, what the heck difference does it make how much I drink?"

"You will respect yourself," Dad growled, "and you will respect my orders, or you will stay here where I can watch you. I'll expect four miles out of you tomorrow morning before school."

Sam clenched his notebook in his fist. His blood was pounding in his ears. He was trapped.

Grisham smiled at him, oozing schadenfreude. "How hard do you think it'd be to find out how much you drink, anyway?"

Dad relaxed and patted Sam's arm, rising from the booth to take over Sam's seat. He and Grisham shoved the rest of their research over the whole table. "Tell you what, son, you can drink all you want as long as you get those four miles done in the morning."

Sam swallowed. "Understood."

He was across the restaurant and into the bar area by the time he realized he'd left his pen behind.

There was no way he was going back for it. He'd just have to amuse himself until Dad and Dean finally got bored and drove him home.

Dean, perched at the bar, was listening rapt to a weathered, tattooed barkeep spinning out some long-practiced, well-loved anecdote for the little crowd on the bar-stools, never pausing as he worked. As though he had eyes in the back of his head, Dean twisted in his seat and grinned at Sam, waving him over. Sam shrugged back at him and headed for the pool table.

The table was clean and polished, but not very even. A few grade-school kids were shooting balls back and forth at random. Sam occupied one end and did some strike drills to work on his control, but with balls rushing around and two thirds of the table in use, he couldn't concentrate or practice his back-spin.

He put his cue back and dragged himself and his useless notebook over to the bar-stool Dean had saved for him. His ID passed inspection with barely a raised eyebrow; Sam was damn tall for fifteen, and Marcus was a guru of identity fraud.

Dean bumped his shoulder and Sam sighed deeply. "What he's having," Sam requested, pointing to Dean's beer. The barkeep spun and filled him a glass of lager from the tap, and Sam and Dean nursed their beers as they listened to the story of that time the crew had to hunt through every hole-in-the-wall in Denver to capture Skynrd's drummer and drag him back to the venue in time for the show.

Dean was in hog heaven. Sam shuffled through his notebook and consoled himself that his evening could have gone a lot worse.

Five days later, Dad, Dean, and Grisham were still working up the Wyoming hunt, and Sam had his usual A on his Tennyson essay. Mr. Schwartz had appreciated the "metacritical dialectic," which Sam thought was kind of a smartass thing to write on a tenth grade paper, no matter how brilliant the student. Mr. Schwartz was not, and would never be, reviewing avante garde literature for the New Yorker.

Grisham's car was in the lot below when Sam clumped up the stairs, and there were pieces of the new Wyoming hunt tacked up all over the living room wall. Dean was clipping an obituary from a stack of newspapers with a knife, Dad was gazing at the crude timeline, and Grisham was taking notes from a big beige book that looked like it never ought to have left the library: marriage records, Sam saw, glancing over his shoulder as he scurried toward the bedroom for some well-earned privacy.

As he detoured for the kitchen to snag a bagel for dinner, Grisham coughed from the table, and Dad's hand landed on his shoulder and spun him toward the stove and the pot of cooling spaghetti with meat sauce. Sam slumped. "Dish yourself up and take a seat," Dad commanded, "Then take a look at this Hippie manifesto and tell me what you find."

Grisham flicked a page of marriage records, swop-snap. "I've already been over that; he won't find anything new," he predicted.

Dad frowned. "My boy needs the experience, Sam. I'm not turning down a fresh pair of eyes."

Sammy—dammit, Sam—could list a dozen or two times Dad had refused his offer of a fresh pair of eyes, but he wasn't about to mouth off in front of another adult, not when Dad was—wonder of wonders—defending him. He took the little paperback book, noting a vanity publisher's label on the back cover, and slopped some drying noodles and the remainder of the sauce into Dean's oversized coffee mug. The three mismatched bowls they had were already dirty in the sink.

Grisham stared unabashed at him as he took a seat at the table, marking his clothes, his hair, his attitude, the way he pinned the book open without cracking the binding, the way he gulped down spaghetti after twirling it into neat little spools. "What?" Sam mouthed at him, and Grisham startled and looked back down at his notes.

The Hippie Manifesto—Dad was politically incorrect at the best of times, and some of it always rubbed off no matter how Sam watched himself—was "Biological, Environmental, and Social Impacts of Uranium Mining in Natrona County, Wyoming" and contained enough scientific jargon, left-handed spin, and barely restrained vitriol to make Sam's head whirl giddily. He dug one of his spiral notebooks out of his backpack and used the back page for notes, jotting down the characters of the sordid drama as he came to them. The villain of the story was Richard Shear and Shear Mineral Industries, who had raped—the author had used "arsenide ore tailings" and "raped from the living rock" in the same paragraph—a few acres of Rocky Mountain foothills, carrying on in spite of constant protests, ever-tightening Federal regulations, and Shear's own death of metastatic meningiosarcoma in 1974. Twenty-six property owners had been bought out or evicted, either by Shear Industries for access to their land or by the EPA when their land was deemed too hazardous for human habitation.

A piece of newspaper hit Sam in the head, a little roll like a cigarette, and Sam glared at Dean. Dean, on the floor with the antique newspapers, mimed toking a joint with one hand and made a Peace sign with the other. Sam rolled his eyes and reached for the dummy joint to pitch it back. It was gone.

Grisham had snagged the joint. Sam stared as he turned it over in his fingers, smiling faintly, and tucked it away in his coat pocket.

Other than Richard Shear going violently insane and dropping dead from the most bizarre cancer ever and the family refusing to put him in a textbook afterward, the history of the mine was riddled with shady activity and irrational rage. There was an old bachelor who lived downstream of the mine whom the author spoke of with fearful awe, like some magnificent lion defending his domain instead of a Kazinski wannabe threatening mine administrators, environmentalists, and EPA inspectors alike with an ass-full of buckshot. Employee turnover at the mine was high, and there'd been several industrial accidents—like the father of four crushed to death by a bucket of ore. Richard Shear's mistress had shot herself in the head in Shear's on-site office, just before the evening shift change and in full view of two thirds of the employees through the brightly lit picture window. Before succumbing to brain cancer, Shear had tried to slit his wrists with a box cutter in that same office.

It was too much to hope that all these people had diaries. Sam was leaning toward Shear or the stubborn homesteader, himself. "What's the victim profile?" he asked.

Dad, bent over a crude, bloodstained map of the mine, looked up. "Dean?"

"Meddling, trespassing kids," Dean supplied. He was folding some more paper as he studied a back-page article. "Hikers, spelunkers, climbers, surveyors, grad students. It's like a Bermuda Triangle—people tromp around in there all the time monitoring the radiation and looking for privacy; some of 'em die a hideous Rube Goldberg accidental death." Dean cut a new clipping. "Mean sonofabitch, too."

"What are you thinking, Sammy?" Dad asked.

Sam's guts twisted, like they never did before a pop quiz in a class. Dad could take the fun out of learning like no-one else on the planet. He wouldn't listen quietly to a few key points and pat Sam on the head for something clever or reasonable, no, he'd have half the case worked out already and as soon as Sam revealed his nascent theories, he'd list off all the facts he hadn't shared and explain why Sam was wrong. There was no way to win. Sam would always wind up looking like a rookie.

Sam held back a glare and glanced quickly between Dad, Dean, and Grisham—Dad demanding, Dean hopeful, Grisham . . . snide and contemptuous. Great. Sam looked down at his notes again for strength. "Possible spirits might be . . . Marcia Rourke, jealous suicide; Donald Barker, accident; Jim McKennagh; found dead with his head bashed in; Richard Shear, he was obsessed with the mine and got his blood all over the office, then died crazy; Bill Ford, he wasn't dead when the book was published, but I'd bet he died in his cabin and rotted there."

Sam swallowed and licked dry lips. Dad had been silent, and the silence was worse than the lectures, because at least when he yelled Sam had some idea what he was thinking.

Dad nodded, his poker face on. "Good start. Any other theories?"

Shit, Sam mouthed, bending back over the book. Other theories. That meant Dad was thinking something completely different; he hadn't pushed for details on any possible spirits, because he wanted something bigger. Sam pleaded at Dean with his eyes, but Dean was deliberately focused on his newsprint. Dad was still waiting; Grisham was still staring with slitted eyes like Sam was a vaccum cleaner salesman or a malingerer with a painfully fake cough. Sam combed his fingers through his hair, willing something, anything, to come to mind. "The mine, the mineral company had a lot of bad luck, pretty much from the beginning. So maybe it's, um . . . maybe something was already there, like, um, like a nature spirit, maybe something linked to . . . aspens?" Sam watched Dad from under his bangs. "There was a lot of deforestation. Or it could be a water spirit; the water was heavily contaminated by the leach operation after they abandoned the pit."

"What do you think about the more recent deaths?" Dad asked.

Sam let out a slow breath through his nose. "It's, um . . . if it's a nature spirit, it saw what happened with the mine, and now it's . . . scared. It's taking a proactive approach."

Dad smiled. Just a sliver, before he turned back to his map.

"Well?" Sam asked. "Did I get it right?"

Grisham tugged a page of note paper out of the middle of a pile on the table and spun it to face Sam without making eye contact. 3 sq mi (wide for spirit), it read. Ford, Bill. Shear, Richard. Rourke, Marcia. McKennagh, Jim: poss vengeful. Suicide, murder: poss poltergeist. Preexisting bad luck, possible curse (Plains, Euro-American witchcraft). Burial ground? Poss naiad, nymph. Poss god: Iktomi, other rock deity, forest deity. Sam deflated.

"No such thing as right, Sammy," Dad corrected him, already absorbed again in his maps. "Just whatever keeps you alive and gets the job done."

Sam sighed and looked up from Grisham's notes. Grisham was no longer studying him, but his face was tight as though he'd eaten something moldy.

Grisham was reading Sam's Tennyson essay. Sam saw the top of it peeping out behind the table, not even concealed. Heat flared in Sam's chest and tingled in his palms. He checked his backpack—it was unzipped, moved a foot from his chair, the papers neatly parted around the place where the essay had been. A muscle ticked in Grisham's cheek as he turned a page in his massive hands, and Sam, feeling violated, restrained himself from snatching it back. "Mr. Grisham," he hissed instead.

Grisham ignored him. He ignored him! Sam steeled himself—it didn't matter that the guy could snap him in half over his knee, he was still an adult, and adults were supposed to respect simple rules like "look at people when they're talking to you," and "don't snoop through someone else's belongings while they're in the room." "Mr. Grisham," Sam tried again, louder.

Grisham reached the end of a paragraph before he looked up, slowly. His lip was curling back a bit from his teeth, and his eyes were dark and sharp.

Sam felt sweat prickle all across his back. He checked the couch, where Dad was cross-checking maps, and the floor, where Dean was profiling victims. "Can I have that back, please," Sam forced out. "Sir."

His politeness made no dent in Grisham's contempt; the big man all-out sneered at him before glancing at Dad and Dean himself, flipping to the last page, and slowly passing the essay across the table to Sam, reading as he went.

Its pages rattled as Sam returned it to his backpack. When a second wad of paper struck his face, he jumped. "Dammit, Dean!"

"Language!" Dad barked.

Dean was grinning. Sam grabbed the bit of paper and examined it: a sort of cone with a twisted, pleated base and a trumpet's flare—a flower. Devil's Herb. What the heck.

Flower power, Dean mouthed at him from the floor.

Grisham snorted in laughter, watching Dean fondly with the side of his eyes. It was creepy.

Sam rested his head on his hands and bent again over the book.

When Sam returned to the apartment from school the next day—he'd had to finish his math homework under his desk during first period American History, since he'd spent the whole last night reading up on the sordid politics of 1960's uranium mining—he stopped short.

The front room stunk of sage.

If Sam enjoyed anything about Hunting, it was botany: he knew the ritual and medicinal uses of over three hundred and fifty trees and herbs and how to recognize them. Burning sage was the ritual equivalent of closing all your Windows while installing new software. It helped keep complicated, dangerous processes from spinning out of control.

Sam also knew how to recognize a hex bag—he'd been warned about them from so early an age that the first time he'd seen a baggie of pot, he'd run to find Dean, panicked that there was a witch at his middle school, and had since learned the difference. Hex bags were wrapped in something opaque, like human leather. They contained things like precious metals, teeth, poisonous plants, and carved fetishes. Before they were wrapped up, someone had to chant over them, just like Dean was doing right now, leaning over four piles of gewgaws and herbs on circles of buckskin, as Grisham looked on.

"Are you teaching Dean witchcraft?" Sam demanded, his voice cracking. Dean whipped a hand up, showing Sam the back of it—stuff it, Sammy, big boys are working here—and closed out the chant with something about an eclipse and a shroud. His pronunciation was appalling. Sam doubted he even knew all he was talking about.

Grisham lit something in an ash-tray that sparked and sent up fumes of gunsmoke and frankincense, and Dean tied up each bundle with three widdershins winds of a rough cord.

When the room was safe, Sam continued, "Does Dad know about this?"

"Relax, Sammy," said Dean, tossing a hex bag from hand to hand like a hacky-sack.

Sam scowled. He wanted Grisham gone and he wanted his name back.

"He knows," Grisham dismissed him. As Dean stood and made a move to pack away some of the piles of dried leaves and seeds that dotted the kitchen floor, Grisham waved him away and grabbed a nearby broom and dust pan. "Why don't you take a load off, teach your brother something cool? You did great today."

Dean beamed. "Thanks, man. Sammy, siddown. Storytime."

Sam grudgingly perched on the corner of the couch, and Dean launched in at a speed usually reserved for lectures on music history and picking up girls. "So Dad and Grisham figure the whole mine's cursed, unholy ground—not like, Klaatu Barata Nicto, skeletons fisting you in the throat cursed, just like, Country Music cursed. Everything that comes on the place turns to crap cursed."

"Or, 'the soil is radioactive, the economy's tanked, and I'm a womanizing ass' cursed," Sam interrupted.

"You saw the statistics, kid," Grisham rebuked from the kitchen.

"King Midas in Reverse cursed," Dean continued, grinning. "So we're gonna cast this, uh, anti-curse. All-purpose cleansing ritual, 'cause we got no clue what's actually out there. The hex bags represent the four directions and the four elements, so that's gonna get the Four Winds to crash the curse party whatever witch invited the forces of darkness around for, and send 'em packing with their Care Bear Stare."

Sam raised an eyebrow at Grisham, who nodded. "That's it in a nutshell," he confirmed, his eyes flicking to Dean before he looked down and grinned behind his hair at the dustpan of occult herbs.

"The four elements," Sam repeated, rolling a hex bag between his hands—he supposed it wasn't technically a hex bag, but didn't know what else to call it. Fetish? That just sounded gross outside an anthropology book. "So, those are what, air, water, earth, and fire?"

"Fire, air, earth, and rock," Dean corrected, handing Sam another hex bag that felt like it was full of gravel. "Sioux elements. Air is hard enough to put in a hex bag, turns out, but fire was supposed to be impossible."

Sam leaned forward, intrigued.

"Can't exactly seal it up in a bag," Dean explained. "Unless you got asbestos and an oxygen supply or something."

"This is fire?" Sam clarified, probing the little bundle of soft leather and grit. "Fire pow—Fire's power?"

Dean smirked wickedly. "You just gotta find something close enough to fire, happening really slowly. In this case . . . radioactivity!"

Sam dropped the hex bag with a crunch.

"Don't be a pussy," said Dean, retrieving the bag with his bare hands.

"What—no—don't touch that!" Sam snapped, hearing himself whine. He grabbed for the bag. Dean jumped away, hand in the air, and Sam lunged after him with his new reach. Dean crouched and closed in, hooking his sturdy leg under Sam's spindly one and toppling him to the hard floor. "Dean! Drop it!" Sam rolled and popped up, hair in his eyes. Dean was bent over laughing at him, and Sam decided to help the suffocation process along by punching him in the stomach.

"Hey!" Grisham barked.

Dean folded, and Sam swiped the hex bag and bank-shot it past Grisham's scowling face into the kitchen sink. Maybe the eighth-inch of stainless steel would be some protection—or maybe that was just lead.

"Jeez, you little bitch," Dean wheezed.

Grisham had set down the dustpan and was curling and uncurling his long fingers around the broom handle, the tendons of his hand rippling menacingly. Sam sidestepped until he was standing behind Dean.

"Don't freaking try to kill yourself!" Sam growled at Dean, jamming himself back into his corner of the ancient couch.

"It's barely radioactive, anyway," Dean panted as he settled himself on the opposite end. "It's just ore from the mine, not enriched uranium slugs or anything."

"You're a jerk," Sam grunted, and hooked his backpack with the toe of this shoe. "Don't talk to me, I'm doing school."

"How 'bout I just talk at you?"

Sam's lips tightened and he yanked his algebra book up onto the couch, unwilling to closet himself in the bedroom, not when Grisham was in the kitchen staring him down, waiting for him to flinch.

Note: Future Sam has major issues. I never decided how or why he's in the past, but I get the feeling his Dean is dead. Or worse, there's always worse, especially in Season 5.
Sammy's thoughts on military service are the thoughts of a disgruntled fifteen-year-old boy, not a sophisticated ideological position.
The Big Birds are a class of cryptid that people have actually believed in recently. I assume they'd be vulnerable to massive fireballs.
The Sioux medicine bags and elements of their cosmological system were derived from this lesson from an actual medicine man.

Next chapter!

SPN fic: Stop Hitting Yourself 3/3

rokhal — Sun, 06 May 2012 01:18:57 GMT

Title: Stop Hitting Yourself
Chapter: 3/3, The Hunt At The Mine
Characters: John, Dean, and Sammy Winchester; Sam Grisham
Pairing: none
Rating: T
Length: 20k
Warnings: Shamelessly ripping off Sam Raimi movies, bad taste
Disclaimer: Fanfic! It's a fanfic!

Saturday, they headed north at dawn to plant the hex bags around the perimeter of the mine in Wyoming. Dad was driving, Dean had shotgun, and Sam was in the back, which he didn't mind today because if Dean hadn't ridden in the Impala with him and Dad, he'd be in Grisham's Subaru grinning like a puppy while Grisham taught him about automatic weapons and curse-breaking and Sandanista interrogation techniques, or whatever it was big badass action villains like Grisham got their degrees in.

Of course, it'd be a cold day in Phoenix before Dad trusted another hunter alone with one of his sons, no matter how well they clicked. (Dad was clicking. Sam felt ill.) And Dean wouldn't be caught dead touching Grisham's yuppie car.

Road reflectors on eight-foot steel poles metered the miles as they whipped along the highway, flashing in and out of tree-shadow, climbing. The morning sun sliced in.

Four two-way radios sat beside Sam on the bench seat, along with flares, canisters of salt, and circular iron chains just long enough for a lost hunter to curl up in to wait for rescue or daylight. Dad's idea. Sam appreciated the paranoia, but it didn't change the fact that they'd always be safer far away from the cursed uranium mine.

Sam got that Dad had a hero complex. He got that Dean had his own. But statistically, if they didn't seek out the horrors of the shadow world to show them who's boss, Dean and Dad would have 18 fewer broken bones between them, and five or so fewer concussions. It wasn't like Dad would let Dean take up motocross or bullriding. Hunting shouldn't be an exception.

Mile 23 slipped past. They side-wound up hills and forged through woods, past Keep Out, No Trespassing, and Danger Radiation Area. They stopped at a chainlink fence with a padlocked gate, just long enough for Dean to hop out of shotgun and grab the bolt cutters, then rumbled on, the sun slanting through the restless aspens to dapple the road in gold, Grisham's white hatchback creeping behind.

The mine's processing building was a broad cinderblock structure with a corrugated steel roof and three loading ramps off one end. Sam thought he could see the office where Richard Shear's mistress had shot herself, a broad window on the second story, but the glass was broken and boarded up. Smaller buildings, likely part of the leaching operation, dotted the weedy gravel lot it squatted in, like monopoly houses clustered beside a hotel. Everything was padlocked and boarded, and no pipes or machinery remained. Woods and hills pressed in on all sides.

"Dean, with me," Dad ordered when they parked in the shadow of one of the outbuildings, out of view from the driveway. "Sam—"

Sam's pulse jumped as he watched Grisham unfold from the Subaru. Dad wouldn't put Sam on a hunt with a stranger, never anywhere he couldn't watch for his inevitable screwups. Sam knew this. He tightened his fist around the door handle.

"Any law enforcement wants to tow the cars," Dad ordered, "stop them."

Sam nodded and relaxed. Dad reached across the seat, and Sam passed him the gear.

"Everyone check your radios," Dad called out, tossing one to Grisham over the back of the Impala. Grisham caught his neatly and grinned down at it, like it was familiar. Maybe he was some kind of ex-military action-villain, Sam mused. Sam dutifully clicked his own radio in his turn, in a long-practiced chorale of "testing" and "received" that Grisham inserted himself seamlessly into. The hunters divvied up the rest of the gear, then tromped off into the woods, Dad and Dean to the north, and Grisham to the south, leaving Sam alone in the cooling car and the silence.

Sam crawled over the front seat, hefted his backpack and his radio after himself, jammed his feet against the dashboard, and thumbed open The Fountainhead. He liked Ayn Rand; he figured he and she would have similar things to say to Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The shadow of the roof was perched at the very crest of the steering wheel. Sam watched until the strip of sunlight contracted into a hot white ribbon and disappeared.

The radio crackled. "Sammy, report!" Dad commanded.

Sam hit talk, cutting out the static. "Car's still here, Sir," he drawled into his mike. The radio buzzed back for a bit, and Sam could imagine Dad's finger absently smashing the talk button as he tried to decide if Sam's tone was really that snotty, or if it was an artifact of the static. A nervous thrill ran down his spine and he gnawed on the side of his finger.

"Copy," Dad replied at last, slow with warning. "Grisham, report!"

There was another pause, before Grisham's voice filled the Impala, brisk and light, too brisk and too light. "Placed the South bag on the fence at thirteen-hundred. There's some topography in the way, so I'll be delayed getting back."

The radio stilled, and Sam realized he was waiting anxiously for Dad's voice in the car again. "Copy," Dad replied, mildly, and no—Sam was waiting for Dad's anger, Dad's furious roar that said no one lied to him and got away with it, no one looked at his sons without his permission, and he'd spent six months in Hell-on-Earth in '72 and wasn't above bringing that place back to US soil. Grisham's voice was a liar's voice. It had none of the tells Sam knew to look for, knew to hide, but hearing his report felt like hearing a lie—felt like telling a lie himself.

"We placed the North bag at twelve-fifteen," Dad reported, and Sam hugged his chest as Grisham replied, "Copy," and the airwaves went dead.

Sam picked up The Fountainhead again and got sweat from his fingers on the pages.

Grisham emerged from the woods just half an hour later.

Sam snatched up his radio, then froze. Dad and Dean were still a ways out, and Grisham was right there, stalking through the weeds and gravel, his huge chest heaving with each breath, like he was an engine or a mad bull. Sam could see Grisham's radio swinging from his belt.

The Impala's keys were with Dad, had stayed with him or Dean ever since Sam's disappearing stunt in Flagstaff, and Grisham was looming tall outside, his eyes dark under his heavy brow and his wind-blown hair screening his face.

Sam locked his door. He locked the right rear door, and as Grisham broke into a sprint to round the Impala, Sam dove across to the driver's side and locked both left-hand doors. Panting in the driver's seat, Sam watched Grisham's prowling bulk and pawed in the footwell for the Glock taped underneath.

He gripped ridged plastic, ripped it free, and tucked the gun between his knees, flipping off the safety by touch. Beyond the glass, Grisham stroked the chrome seal of the Impala's window, his face all in shadow as the sun beat down.

Sam aimed the gun slightly up into the door, where he figured Grisham's thigh might be, and rolled the window down a quarter inch. "What do you want?" he demanded. His voice was shrill.

Grisham slid his hand gently over the window frame again, and rubbed away a bit of dried mud with his thumb, his thumb that was half the width of Sam's own wrist. His breathing was deep and loud and fast. "You can relax, kid," Grisham promised, low and soft, sincere but for the cloying phantom taste in Sam's mouth, kind but for the electric claws latched in the back of Sam's neck. "I just want to talk," Grisham continued. Sam twisted sideways in the driver's seat, and felt behind him for the radio. Grisham shifted and bent to peer through the window. "You don't want your Dad and Dean to hear what I'm gonna say." Sam stilled. "You like keeping secrets," Grisham mused. "Might as well start your collection."

Sam worked spit into his mouth and kept his voice steady. "What did you want to talk about?"

Grisham fidgeted outside, the hand that caressed the car rising to card his hair away from his face. The silence dragged. Thoughts slotted together behind his eyes, heavy and jagged.

"Tennyson," Grisham said at last.

"The—my essay? The poem?" Sam tightened his right hand around the gun and found the radio with his left. If he clicked it, Grisham would hear on his own set; he'd be angry and smash through the windows.

"'Course, you think of the essay first; everything revolves around you," Grisham sneered. "That essay, that 'metacritical dialectic' crap. Where you said—you wrote about duty." Grisham leaned close again, resting one big palm against the glass of the back seat and the other on the windshield.

Sam met his shadowed eyes. The glass looked very, very thin.

"You said devotion to duty is betraying your own humanity. It's—it's prostituting one's own agency, that's what you said." Grisham's voice rose and shivered as the veins of his wrists rose and the car leaned away from his weight and the strength of his arms. "You thought of Dean when you wrote that. And you think Dad's some dumbass British general who can't give a crap to get his facts straight before he sends his soldiers off to die. But it's not true!" Grisham snarled, baring his white teeth like an animal. "You think like it's some great noble enterprise to break away, you think you can write your own game plan." It was a statement, Sam observed, not a question. Grisham bent his head and gave the car a shove that swayed the frame on the shocks. "Well, it can't work!" he roared. His shoulders heaved with each breath, and they spanned the side window. The glass before his face was growing fogged. "You can't write your own story, kid. A soldier might have to suffer some dumbass general's mistakes, but he knows who he's following. You go off on your own, you're just a puppet. You're an animal. Duty's what separates people from monsters, and you just want to throw it away like trash. Like you know better."

Sam backed across the seat, clutching his gun and his radio. Grisham pushed off the car with a sneer of disgust, sending it rocking again, and prowled around the hood to the opposite window.

"You're a real smart kid," Grisham breathed, his voice muffled through the glass. "You know that. Anyone'd think you got some bright future. Mr. Wannabe New Yorker Correspondent Schwartz sure does. Deep down, you know there's something wrong with that picture, but you wanna believe 'em, 'cause you can just believe whatever you want. You're normal. Dean's the freak. Dad's dragging the two of you on some quixotic revenge quest on a whim. A new American fairy tale."

Sam held the radio and, again, contemplated pushing the talk button. If he provoked Grisham, and then shot him, he'd need a headshot. If Grisham were even human. He imagined Grisham charging him, his chin smeared red with bloody froth and his reaching hand slick with it, ferocious and undeterred.

Grisham slapped his hand against the windshield, and Sam's thumb tightened reflexively on the button, silencing the faint fuzz of static that it received from the air, and clicking sharply on every other radio. Grisham didn't seem to notice. "Repeat what I just told you!" he demanded, bent over and pinning Sam with his sharp eyes.

"Fairy tale," Sam echoed, his lips fumbling. "You're saying . . . I . . ." He clutched the radio and rolled his shoulders, drawing a deep breath. "I'm a smartass bitch and I should be grateful Dean and Dad let me bask in their presence, that's what you're saying."

Grisham shuddered in rage, one fist rocking back as if of its own accord, before relaxing shakily to rest against the windshield. Frustration boiled off him, his lip curling and his hands clenching and stretching as he gazed through the glass at his prey. Grisham was gentle with the car, Sam realized. Sam took another deep breath and rechecked the locks.

"Yeah, that's actually pretty close," Grisham gritted out when he had himself under control. "You gotta start pulling your weight. Stop whining. Stop buying all those pity pep talks from Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Wyatt. You're never gonna get out."

Mr. Wyatt—Sam hadn't thought of him in over a year, though he remembered the essay he'd written him: honest to God my family killed a werewolf on my summer vacation, what do you make of that, and he recalled the man who'd mistaken jaded honesty for genius. But college—escape—had bounced around in Sam's skull ever since, faster and faster like a flubber ball.

The clip in the Glock just had lead bullets. If Grisham were some thing that could read minds, read pasts—some psychic vampire if there was such a thing—lead wasn't going to cut it. Sam studied Grisham's face—his eyes so thin with rage the whites and irises were shadowed, his skin unshaven but clear, his neck corded with muscle. Like human, but better: like a top-bloodline, performance show human, like a thing in a custom human chassis.

"The Hunt's for you," Grisham hissed. "Your dad's hunt, it's all 'cause of you. Little Sammy, gotta watch out for little Sammy before the dark things get him. Your dad could get out if it weren't for you. Dean—Dean could get out, Dean could be happy, but he's flushing his life down the toilet for you! Into the goddamn mouth of Hell—and you—" He broke off and took a heaving breath that sent his shoulders rolling. "You're not even human! You're only human in the ways that count, and the joke is? That's the worst part of you!"

Sam watched him, his blood pounding in his ears. Grisham knew indisputable things, facts, and dim shameful things, feelings. But he'd never thought that he—he knew he had to get out, that the underworld of blood and secrets delighted and nurtured all the parts of himself that he feared the most, but to think that he belonged to it, that he might be drawing it to him— "No," Sam protested. "No."

"Trust me," Grisham snarled.

Sam crept toward the window, his hands shaking. "You don't know that." He panted, his lungs burning. "Dad's a good hunter. He's hard-core. He'd know if I was a—something else. I touch salt and iron and silver, every freaking week I'm sharpening the silver knives, so I can't be. You don't know anything. You don't know anything about me, or how I—so you can just—"

"Humans can't tell holy water from tap water," Grisham interrupted, his cheek almost touching the glass.

Sam's mouth shut.

"You don't know how your mom died yet, do you?" Grisham's gaze steadied and his head tipped, a big cat cocking its ears, or something colder. His nostrils flared and his lips curled. "No, you're still thinking it was an ifrit or a salamander or freaking arson, broad daylight maybe."

Sam shook his head, slow and helpless.

"She died in your nursery." Grisham splayed his hand against the window, his head low, eyes burning. "On your six-month birthday, she died because of you. Like a lamb on a goddamn altar."

Dad's voice roared outside the car—muffled, but so clear and so welcome— "Back away from my son, now!"

Grisham flinched. Sam spun on the front seat and saw Dad advancing from the treeline, his service pistol cocked and trained, his stride steady and swift. "I was just talking," Grisham lied, the lie thick in his voice, thick like bile in Sam's throat. This time, Dad heard the lie. Dad rounded the car and herded Grisham toward the white hatchback.

"I trusted you, you sonofabitch," Dad snarled, as Grisham planted himself feet from his car. "I told you not to mess with my son—"

Grisham flung his arms wide and lowered his head like a bull. "We were just—"

"Hey, asshole!" Dean shouted from another quarter of the woods, his own Colt drawn. He shot.

Sam and Grisham jumped. It was a warning shot. Grisham deflated, wary. "Next one goes in your forehead," Dad warned him, deadly soft.

Grisham opened his mouth and lifted a foot, as if to advance or argue again, but at whatever he saw on Dad's face, he retreated stiffly, slipping into his car. As he looked out the windshield, away from Dad, his face lost its fury and twisted in distress.

Grisham's hatchback reversed, and Dad watched until it disappeared down the access road.

Sam unlocked the passenger door of the Impala. Dad opened it and leaned in, bracing his arm against the roof. "You hurt?" Dad demanded. "Did he ask you anything?"

Sam took a deep breath and shook his head.

"Asshole stole our radio," Dean groused in the silence.

Dad was pacing in the shade, fifty yards off. Dean was in the driver's seat, his arm flung over the seat back, and Sam still huddled in the passenger seat, his elbows on his knees and the Glock beside him.

"Good thinking with the talk button," Dean continued. "At first we thought you'd just clicked it by accident, but then we figured you were either sitting on it or doing it on purpose."

"I know how to use a freaking short-wave, Dean," Sam snapped.

"Geez, you're touchy." Dean took his arm off the seat back, and chewed on his lip. "Sammy, he didn't, uh—"

"It's Sam. There's no one around to confuse me with."

Dean groaned. "Sam. You were safe in the car the whole time, right? Like, he didn't—"

"No, he didn't try to touch me in a bad place. He just talked. He was mad and talking crazy, but he couldn't do anything."

"Yeah, that's good," Dean muttered. "Good." He picked at a scab on the back of his hand. "I'm sorry, man."

Sam waited, his fingers wrapped around his own face. He could imagine Grisham grabbing him like that, and squeezing until his bones broke and his eyeballs popped out.

"I can't believe I liked the guy," Dean said. "He just—he was cool, and he asked me stuff, like, he'd find things for me to do whenever him and Dad were working. But really—"

"So you didn't pick up on the raging psycho vibes," Sam grumbled.

Dean shook his head, staring out the window, dazed.

"He fooled Dad, too," Sam consoled him.

"Yeah." Dean turned aside to watch Dad where he strode back and forth in the woods, thinking loud enough to shake the hillside. "Holy shit. He did fool Dad, didn't he?"

"He hates me," Sam murmured. "He likes you and Dad, but he hates me."

"Must be from Bizarro-World, huh, Sammy?" Dean ruffled Sam's hair, until Sam shoved him off and slid to the edge of the seat, one leg raised in warning. "Freaking teacher's pet—ow! You bitch, you can't kick me in the face!"

Dad stalked back to the car and opened the driver's side door. Dean sat at attention, like a retriever or—like he was prostituting his human agency for social approval. No. "We finish the hunt," Dad announced, and Sam held his tongue.

"Yessir."

"Sam, you're coming with us. Dean, move the car into reserved parking; that might buy us some time if any security comes around. We got two more bags to place, and we got to check Grisham's work."

"What if he comes back?" Sam asked softly. "Sabotages the car, follows us out?"

"He has a gun with him," Dad said. "If he was going to—Dean, you see him again, you shoot to kill, understand? He knows better than to come around, but if he does, don't let him get close."

He'd had a gun, Sam thought. He'd been so angry he'd rocked the car with an unconscious shove, and he'd had a gun the whole time.

"Radios?" Dean asked.

"Leave 'em."

Sam got to see a real life hex bag planted for the first time. Dean scuffed a hole in the dirt at the fenceline with the toe of his boot, dropped the bag in, and kicked leaves and twigs on top. Later, on the way to the South end of the mine property, they startled a rattlesnake, which Dad didn't let Dean shoot. Sam startled at every rustle and snap of leaves. Sometimes he would turn toward a noise, and when he turned back, would find Dad facing the same direction.

The sun dropped low.

Walking the South fence, they discovered Grisham's hex bag tied to the base of the chain link. Dean checked the binding, but the seal looked intact, same as when he'd knotted it. Without breaking it open and in the process breaking its power, that was as sure as they'd get that Grisham hadn't sabotaged the entire hunt.

The West end, the site of the last bag, was exposed to the brightest of the twilight, though Dad and Dean still waved their flashlights over the low-hanging branches and Sam peered peevishly into the gloom, wishing for his own. The old pit mine was in the way, from before the industry had switched to leach extraction, so they had to skirt it—and maybe Sam was some kind of hybrid freak, because he felt more than cold in the breeze that stirred with nightfall. Before the chill could sink past his skin and into his mind, they broke through the edge of the woods and Sam caught his first real view of the old excavations.

He'd thought the environmental impact reports he'd read had exaggerated the scale of the dig; he'd seen a few gravel quarries as he'd cris-crossed the US, and while their fifty-foot cliffs would hurt to take a dive from, they had nothing on nature for grandeur. They were just gouges, like road cuts in the Rockies, a few weeks' work with dynamite and backhoes. But this mine was the work of years. The pit gaped as deep and wide as the hills around were high, its walls solid gray rock. Truck-wide terraces spiraled into its shadowed depths, ten yards down at a time, marking its growth like the rings of a tree. The destruction was incredible—the mass of a hill, the volume of a lake, all crumbled into granite boulders and trucked away, year by year, the walls warping and twisting to chase veins of ore, leaving nothing of the old landscape but cracked bare rock and harsh right angles—but it was beautiful, too, in a way, like a moonscape or a temple. The long ramp that made up the shelf below led down and down. The madly-warped walls had begun to crumble in spots, sprouting weeds and saplings and strewing the old spiral path with mounds of jagged stone. The weak slanting gold of dusk petered out far above the bottom of the pit, leaving a deep black mystery that could have touched the center of the Earth.

Dean, already familiar with the mines, ranged ahead, scrambling around the edge where tree roots and thin soil gave way to blasted rock face, scouting for obstacles. Sam and Dad followed slower, taking the shortcuts Dean found for them. Sam wondered if it was Dad's knees or his worry for his youngest that made him let Dean take point.

"Look sharp," Dad had murmured in Dean's ear before letting him run ahead. "Just because the job's three-fourths done doesn't mean the curse is three-fourths broken."

Some dumbass British general who couldn't be bothered to get his facts straight—no. Sam never thought that, but why was he surprised when Dad's grip had lingered too long on Dean's shoulder, and now when half the time Dad's flashlight was on Dean instead of his and Sam's own path?

"Dad?" Sam asked softly. "Are there . . . monsters that can read your mind just by looking at you?"

"A few," Dad said, surprised. "Crocattas, changelings, Korrigans . . . Things that need to keep a human alive to feed have ways to keep us from running, and sometimes that means knowing what we think."

"Are there monsters that know the future?" Sam continued, glad to have caught Dad in a revelatory mood.

Dad's jaw twitched. "Not that I know."

"What about psychics?" Sam asked. A low continuous rustle of leaves sounded to their left, and the wind crawled down his collar. "Are there any that aren't just cold-readers? Seers, mind-readers?"

"What's got into you?" Dad asked, grabbing his arm.

Sam listened to the leaves. He didn't want Dad fighting his battles for him, didn't want Dad interrogating him, but Dad had already scared off Grisham and maybe the interrogation could go two ways. "Grisham knew things," Sam said vaguely. "About me."

Dad hissed through his teeth. "What?" Dad rumbled, his hand tightening.

"He said . . ." Sam took an instant to calculate his angle. Dad was quick—any waffling and he'd wise to the game. "He told me I'd never get out," Sam confided, listening to Dad's breath and feeling the twitch of his tense fingers. "He said . . . Mom died 'cause of me."

It was as if Dad died for the instant the words hung on the air; his grip slipped and his breath halted. He swayed on his feet, and Sam's heart raced at Dad's weakness and the confirmation of Grisham's words.

Then Dad shook him. Dad shook him once, twice, and dropped his hands as though Sam's jacket burned him. "What else did he say?" Dad growled. "Tell me! What else—"

"So you knew," Sam challenged, stepping back. His throat was hot and tight. "All this time, there's something—about me, you knew?"

"It wasn't your problem."

"It's me!" Sam snapped. "I'm my problem."

"Tell me what that bastard said to you!"

"Why, so you can keep your story straight?"

"Sam!" Dad barked, looming over him. "You don't want to go there. Everything I do, I do to keep you boys safe—"

"Well, I've finally got a reason to believe that," Sam snarled.

Dad broke away. "Son, you can't believe everything you hear."

"That's been pretty clear so far, sir," Sam hissed.

"No!" Dad snapped. "Listen! For once! There are things out there, that will lie to you. They might mix in some truth, but there's always a lie; you can't listen to them!"

"So what was Grisham, Dad?" Sam demanded. "If he's one of those things?"

"I don't know!" Dad scowled into the dark. "I don't know. But if you'd told me soon enough, I would've killed him when I had the shot."

Sam dropped his head. "'Cause he's a monster?" he asked softly.

"Because he's a threat to you."

Dad's flashlight had dropped to his side, splashing against loam and gravel, lighting the sides of their faces as they stared away into the dim woods. The continuous crackling hiss of leaves grew louder and nearer, and Dad flicked the light at it, expecting, perhaps, a maple bent sideways in a draft of wind funneled by the topography.

It wasn't a tree. The light struck a tall ribbon of motion swaying between two pine trees, built of flickering horizontal bands and perhaps three feet wide at its narrowest. A plume of leaves and dirt rose from its base. It shimmied, advancing a yard, then Dad's full weight slammed Sam to the ground. The rattling noise ceased and Sam heard a spatter of impacts—rock striking trees, dirt, boulders, leather and denim and bone. Dad grunted. A rock struck Sam's shoulder and he yelped.

A dust-devil of gravel. By the time Sam had begun to wrap his mind around the thing, Dad had his arm clamped in his grip and was hauling him up. "Dean, get away from the pit!"

"Dean?" Sam yelled.

"Yessir!" Dean shouted back, his voice wary and puzzled. Dad burst into a limping jog, taking the light with him, and Sam followed, wishing he knew whether the splash of dark on the back of Dad's thigh were shadow or blood.

They heard a rumble, and Dean shouting, "Holy shit!"

"Dean!" Dad roared.

"I'm okay!" Dean yelled back. "Just—rocks're a little—goddammit—unstable—"

"Get away from the rocks, now!" Dad bellowed, lurching into a sprint on his dark-splotched leg. They saw the winking of Dean's light among the boulders as they drew near the edge, and heard a crack like muffled gunfire to their left from the base of a spreading pine. Dad jagged toward the noise. "Sam, run!"

Sam, already running, twisted after him until he looked up at the black canopy that clawed the air beneath the fading dusk, saw the devouring sway, and bolted away from the tree. Dad twisted midstride, stagger-sprinting to Sam, and yanked him back. "This way!" he insisted, still running, but hampered by the hand he had wrapped in Sam's sleeve, and they charged toward the trunk, the canopy looming larger and larger overhead, until the tree began to tilt in earnest, crashed against the ground, and Sam and Dad were long out of its path, looking back on the sky-reaching roots, still shaking and dripping fresh dirt, and the massive trunk behind them.

"Dean!" Dad bellowed, taking off toward the pit again. "Something's here!"

Dean replied, as they closed on the pit and finally spotted him, perched on a peninsula flanked by two gouges of fresh scree and clinging to a spindly dogwood, "I know. It's coming toward you."

"What?" Dad panted, so soft that only Sam heard him.

Dean's little tree shivered, and the craggy stone peninsula wrinkled and crumbled, the whole bulk of it slumping intact before great cracks splintered it, gouging out terraces of raw stone that Dean vaulted over, his light jumping, legs springing, losing ground as the rockslide accelerated, staggering over plate-sized shards of granite, and finally stumbling, falling, and drifting down into the dark of the pit as the stones swallowed him up.

The rocks stopped. There was a jagged pile of boulders leaning against the wall of the pit, obliterating the rocky shelves. Dad's light rested on the place they'd seen Dean last.

"Dean!" Sam shrieked, and from behind him, like an echo but much deeper, he heard, "Dean!"

A human shape bounded out of the woods and down the fresh rubble, slip-sliding down the loose-packed rocks to the flashlight beam. It latched hold of a stone and flung it away, digging desperately.

Dad tugged Sam's arm, and they scrambled down the torn slope, slipping and wobbling, listening to the harsh pants and the clatter of rock from the man in the dark digging for Dean. Sam Grisham.

Grisham's hands were bleeding by the time they reached him. Dad aimed his light in his face. "Look at me!" he bellowed, and as Grisham looked away from his work, his eyes wide and wounded, Dad shouted, "Christo!"

Sam dropped to his knees and began to tug at the heavy rocks that hid Dean. "Give me your weapon," he heard Dad bark.

"There's a poltergeist," Grisham panted as he passed Dad a massive semiautomatic. "Went after me when I tried to leave. The curse, or the suicide or the murder, attracted a poltergeist, and now its reacting to the bags. It'll just get worse until we get 'em all planted."

Dad grabbed Sam again, pulling him away from the rocks, and handed him Grisham's pistol. "Check it." Sam opened the slide, ejected the clip, and found eleven rounds. "Keep it." Sam secured the gun in his inner jacket pocket, and Dad passed him his flashlight and the last hex bag. "Plant this. Keep yourself safe." He man-handled Sam around to face up the slope, and shoved him. "Go, Sam!"

A poltergeist, Sam thought dully. An intelligence, reacting in self-defense to the incomplete cleansing spell. He ran up the slope, the flashlight slick in his palm. He would reach the fence. He'd plant the bag. Dad and Grisham would stay back and dig, and he'd pray Dad and Dean were alive by the time he killed the thing.

The trees were moving.

The trees bowed their branches toward him like supplicants at a faith healing, and Dean could be dead, and as the dusk faded, Sam turned to the stars to find his way West. He ran, flashlight bobbing crazily. The width of the pit had forced him off-course, and he drove himself over the loam and roots, punishing his shredding lungs and rubber-weak legs. It felt like the last leg of a five-mile when Dad was pacing him with the car. It felt like training. Dean could be dead, and Sam's stupid legs thought they were just running for training.

Something screamed off to his left, and Sam just ducked in time for a flailing raccoon to fly through the air over his head, white teeth and green eyes flashing in the edge of his light. It struck something deeper in the woods and was silent. Sam kept running, and saplings bowed to meet him.

Vines unspooled from tree trunks, reaching like tentacles.

Dean could be dead. Sam coaxed more speed from his legs, and the mesh of the fence glimmered ahead of him, in a clearing just beyond the shadow of the tree-trunks.

A soft gasp of triumph escaped him, and he found sprint in him he hadn't known was there. He checked his jacket pocket and felt the last bag, Air, soft under his fingers, light in his hand. A vine shot out like a harpoon, the slender green growth at the tip crumpling against his jeans, and as Sam leapt away forward, it recurved like a snake and snapped out again, stabbing old wood and bark through Sam's shin.

It yanked Sam down with a savage shredding tear. The flashlight fell from his hand, and the hex bag flew into the dark.

With a snarl, Sam squirmed forward, fear and fury steaming through him. More vines latched onto him by his legs, his arm, his chest, binding and crushing his waist. Sam yanked at a vine fingering along his shoulder with his free arm, just as another looped over his head.

Bark tightened coarse and cable-strong about his forearm and the nape of his neck, sawing at his skin as it advanced probing leaves around his throat, tickling under his clothes. Sam's thin muscles burned against his outsized bones, and his body began to lift off the ground with the vines' tension.

The poltergeist was going to draw-and-quarter him.

"Stop!" Sam gasped. "Stop! Please! I'll destroy the bag!"

The vines stopped lifting. Sam heaved a breath. His left arm was numb from the elbow and his impaled shin was burning, lightening flaring from it with each throb of his pulse. "You kill me, and my family's gonna finish the job," Sam panted. "My dad and my brother. They're tough, and they're real good on revenge. Let me go—" let go, let go— "and I'll break the spell. I'll tell 'em the job's done, and if you keep quiet 'till they leave, they'll never know. I'll say I did it. Please."

The vines tightened again, the one around Sam's throat cutting off his air, and he bucked like a dying animal, rage and panic stealing his body and smothering his mind. They relaxed after a minute that felt like an hour, and Sam gasped, dragging air in through his half-closed throat. His face felt hot and fat with trapped blood. "I know you can hear me, you sonofabitch!" he rasped. "I swear—I promise you, I'll do it! Just let me get the bag before my dad finds me gone—cause he's smart, he's a great hunter. He'll find a way to kill you! You won't stop him!"

Another tornado of rocks bloomed under Sam's nose, a scale model of the first one, dim and half-seen in the glow of the flashlight that the woods threw back. It drilled a little hole in the dirt, and its rocks were just pebbles and grit. It was a witness, Sam thought, not a weapon. The vines were the weapon.

"I swear," Sam repeated. The vines lowered him six inches, until his knees and hips just brushed the ground, but no further. The little rock dust-devil wriggled. "I said I swear," Sam insisted, hope revving up his heart and sending more blood to his strangled head. "I swear on my life. I swear before God—before the Great Spirit. I swear by the All-Maker. I swear by my dad. I swear by my brother. I swear on my brother's life. Let me go and I'll break open the bag, on my brother's life, and you'll never hear from us again!"

The little tornado contracted, then exploded, bruising Sam's face with a splatter of rock like a ricochet of buckshot. The vines unwound, scraping Sam's skin and grating against the bone. A dribble of blood joined the pins and needles flaring in his limbs.

Sam gasped a few breaths, lying on the dirt and feeling his limbs come back online. He'd need them . . . the thought of things that could read minds flashed past, and he cleared his. Had to get the bag. Everything was going to be okay. He'd sworn on Dean's life.

Sam struggled to his feet, and his shin screamed at him. He gritted his teeth and bounced on the leg, punishing it into submission until his entire body was electrified with ceaseless, featureless pain, then stepped firmly to the flashlight. He found the hex bag at the base of a vine-wrapped aspen, and retrieved it with a wary eye on the foliage.

He began to fiddle with the ties as he backed away from the trees, away from the vines, toward the western fence. "Damn, Dean got these on tight," he muttered, staggering backward and letting his limp explain the four or five steps it took him to catch his balance. Dean could be dead. "I can't," he whimpered. "I don't have my pocket knife—I'll get it open, I just gotta—"

He bolted toward the fence, and heard the the woods hiss behind him.

The trees thinned. The poltergeist had less to throw at him here in the clearing, but Sam heard a rumble as he closed on the fence, pain stabbing up from his shin at each step to jolt his heart and stop his breath. The rumble behind him built as he neared his goal, ten yards, five yards, three—Sam took a last leap from his good leg and dove at it, flinging himself blindly through the air and crashing to the ground, just as a clammy weight of earth and grass pounced on him from behind, flattening him. Coughing dirt, Sam gouged out a hole with the handle of his flashlight and stuffed the bag in.

The night went still.

Sam sat up from under a foot-deep blanket of dirt and wobbled to his good leg, steadying himself against the nearby chainlink. A broad strip of sod had been disturbed, doubled up at Sam's end and dragged forward six feet from the unbroken turf at the other, exactly following his path from the treeline. The bag was in place, but Dean could be dead.

It was a long miserable stagger-trot back to the pit. Sam's shin stiffened by the minute, until he'd had to use a shoelace to suspend the toe of his boot by a hole in his jeans to keep from dragging it on the ground. When he saw the bluish light of Grisham's flash rising over the rim, he ripped out the whole assembly as he lurched to the edge.

Grisham was kneeling in the light, his hands clasped and resting on top of his head, making a piteous face. Dad was a black silhouette. To the side, in the dim fringe of the lamp beam, Dean lay on the rocks, his head propped up on Grisham's jacket, his left leg splinted to the knee with a pine branch and his right arm bound to his chest. Sam's breath left him in a long wheeze and his vision blurred. "Dean," he choked as he picked his way down the debris slope. "Dad—Dean?"

Dean turned his head and twitched his unbound leg. "Hey, Sammy," he croaked.

Dad twitched, and his shoulders swayed in a great sigh. "Job done?"

"'Course," Sam replied, rattling down the slope.

"Can you help carry your brother?" Dad continued, counting up his assets.

Sam stepped wrong on his bloody shin and nearly lost his balance. "No, sir," he grunted through his teeth. Not that he could carry Dean anyway—maybe with a travois—but even misplaced confidence was nice for a change.

"Lucky you," Dad said to Grisham. "You get to walk us out of here."

Sam finally limped over the rocks to Dean, and examined his bruised, mottled, bloody face.

"You look like you lost a fight with the Lawn and Garden department," Dean remarked with a nearly hidden wince. He squinted off to the side of Sam's head, and Sam wondered if his vision was rattled. "That poison ivy?"

Sam checked his hair and ripped out a fine three-bladed leaf, then cursed, phantom itches flaring all along his throat and wrists.

"Language!" Dad barked.

Sam hissed something that maybe sort of resembled "sorry, sir," as he tied up his toe to his jeans again.

"Sam, you know not to walk into terrain you can't run out of," Dad scolded.

"I can't run, period," Sam grumbled.

"How bad?"

"I got stabbed, a little," Sam admitted. "But it's not really bleeding anymore. Can still feel my foot."

"Mm," Dad replied. "Sam, come put this chain around Grisham's neck."

It was a surreal moment as Sam took one of the ghost-proof iron chains Dad handed him from their gear, and looped it tight under Grisham's chin, his fingers brushing his stubble and the tips of his hair as he braced himself against his massive shuddering shoulder. Dad's gun gleamed reassuringly in the edge of the flashlight beam, and Grisham's gun, heavy in Sam's inner pocket, bumped his elbow as he secured the chain with several heavy knots in a piece of Dean's shoelace left over from his splint.

Dad loaded a protesting Dean into Grisham's arms, his splinted leg sticking skyward and his good arm locked around his neck. Sam trained Grisham's gun and propped up Dad's injured side where the rock from the gravel-devil had torn his thigh, and Dad held Grisham's chain.

"This is so wrong on so many levels," Grisham muttered.

"Shut up and climb," Dad growled.

They reached the parking lot at 2030, Sam and Dad buckling against each-other, their wounds swollen into immobility, Grisham trembling under Dean's 190 solid pounds, Dean nauseous from the pain and the blow to his head. The evening security lamps had kicked on, buzzing blue soup cans on telephone poles throwing the gravel parking lot into harsh relief. Dad switched off his flashlight.

"Take him to my Chevy," Dad ordered Grisham. The chain jingled, he and Sam hobbled after him, and Sam raised Grisham's gun. "Set him down by the back wheel."

Grisham obeyed, choking a bit before Dad caught up to him with the chain. He crouched on the pavement, shuddering with exhaustion, and gently propped Dean up against the car, avoiding his bound arm and lowering his splinted leg slowly to the ground. His eyes never left Dean's tense white face.

"Good," Dad said coldly. "Now back away."

Grisham crept back from Dean until Sam's line of fire was clear. Dad drew his own gun and unlatched his arm from Sam's shoulders, staggering a step as he moved away. "Sam, help your brother into the car. Grisham, with me."

Sam stared disbelieving down at Dean, who sprawled against the Impala, white with pain. Dean scowled up at him and hissed, "Oh, this is such bullshit."

"Dad," Sam protested, hobbling to the car to sag against the trunk, "I can't just lift him in with the splint—I can't lift Dean, period—"

"I want Dean safe in the car when I get back," Dad barked. He dug in his jacket pocket and tossed something small and jingling through the air—keys. Sam caught them and held the Impala's keys in his hand for the first time since Dean had taught him to pull donuts in a Sears parking lot the shortly before Sam had run away to live alone in a vacant shack for a week and used up all his driving privileges for the rest of time.

"Dad?" Sam asked, his gut lurching, but Dad just limped out into the dark, toward the corner of the mine office, guiding Grisham with his service pistol and the chain. Sam had the keys and the car and a gun, everything he needed to keep Dean safe, according to Dad.

Dean smacked him in the stomach with his good arm. "You wanna gimme a leg up, bitch?"

Sam nodded, still watching as Dad marched the larger man across the lot toward the corner of the office. Another ten yards and they'd be out of view. "Watch your head," he warned, and swung open the creaky back door. Dad's pace picked up a bit and his shoulders straightened.

"Sammy, don't," Dean murmured. Sam froze and looked him over, but Dean didn't seem to be in any more pain than when Grisham had first set him down. "Whatever you're thinking of doing, brainiac," Dean clarified. "Dad'll go postal if we're not waiting in the car; can't you see he's spooked?"

Sam snorted.

"I'm serious."

"You're the one who said this was bullshit," Sam retorted.

Dean gaped. "I meant you lifting me, twig boy. I'm not that crippled."

"Whatever. Arm." Dean slung his good arm around Sam's bony shoulders, and Sam planted his feet and shoved upward.

He got about a foot before his legs gave out. "Shit," Dean gasped as his splinted leg jostled against the ground, and Sam hissed, "Sorry! Sorry! Shit!" and repositioned his feet to try again. He set his legs at ninety degrees and braced his and Dean's backs against the car, then pushed again.

"You're scratchin' the paint!" Dean whined.

"More worried about your leg," Sam grunted. He chanced a glance backward and just caught the last of Dad's shadow disappearing around the corner of the building. Dean slipped, and Sam clutched his arm tighter and cursed.

Dean did something with his good leg—hopped on it, scuffling against the gravel, trying to pull it in close enough to stand on—and Sam's own legs wobbled and slipped, sending them skidding to the ground again. Dean yelped, then sat very, very still, his eyes unblinking and very wide.

"This isn't working," Sam muttered, pushing himself shakily to his feet. Dean's good hand pawed at his jacket, but Sam shoved it away, sticking Grisham's gun into it as an afterthought. "Just sit tight. Dad can kill me later."

"You suck so very much," Dean hissed.

"Like that's news." Sam staggered away and limped across the parking lot as fast as he could go without flexing his bad foot, hugging the wall of the mine office. He slowed as he reached the corner. Worst case scenario, Dad would spot him on the way back. Best case, and Sam could—what, run screaming out of the dark to stop Dad from shooting Grisham?

Holy shit, he was expecting Dad to shoot Grisham. Murder him, and leave him nameless and un-mourned in the middle of the woods for the vultures to clean up. Dad always said the job was about saving people, but Grisham was another hunter—and apparently hunters didn't count. Not even when they'd helped save Dean.

Sam reached the corner of the office and leaned against the cinderblock wall, creeping toward the edge until he could just make out low voices beyond: Grisham whispering, "Yessir."

"Write it down," Dad ordered. Sam's ears perked; Dad had obviously just said something critical. He cursed himself for not arriving five seconds sooner.

There was a nerve-wracking pause, a rustle, and the click of a retractable pen.

"I'll contact you," Dad ground out. I'll contact you. "Cross your arms and get down on your stomach."

Sam heard the crunch of gravel and the jingle of chains. He used the sound to cover his movements, and before he peered around the corner, he knelt awkwardly on the sharp rocks to keep his face below Dad's line of sight. Dad stood beside Grisham's squirming dark bulk, sharp-shadowed in the harsh beam of a security lamp, the chain swaying from his left hand and his gun steady in his right. When Grisham was flat on the ground, Dad planted his bad foot between his shoulderblades and leaned down.

"I want your intel," Dad murmured, as Sam held his breath to catch the words. "Hell, there may be times I'll want your advice. But you don't come near my sons—you don't meet them, you don't contact them, you don't track them, you don't tell a goddamn soul about—" Dad cut himself off and took a breath. "About anything that don't concern the here-and-now. And I'll know. I'll find someone—I'll let someone live so they can track you down and make you pay if anything happens to my boys. Make you pay in ways you can't run from, understand?"

Grisham lifted his face from the gravel, the shadows masking his features, and Sam dodged back behind the wall.

Dad snarled. "Do you understand?"

"Yessir," Grisham replied, softly.

Dad dug his boot into Grisham's back and pulled on the chain, forcing a choked noise from the larger man. "If stopping this costs me my boys, I don't give a good goddamn about your doomsday story."

There was a long pause, and both dark figures were still. "Oh," said Grisham.

"Yeah. Oh." Dad scrubbed his jaw against his shoulder, the pistol fixed above Grisham's head. "I knew a guy in seventy-two, reminded me of you," Dad remarked. "In-country, some guys got delicate. Other guys, this guy, took to it; he took to it real well. Word was, he carried a three-foot wampum belt made of Viet Cong ears. Every engagement, he'd sniff out a corpse and cut a new one. He'd kill anything you pointed him at. The VC had women and children armed—if they didn't kill us outright, the guilt was enough to kill you anyway—but none of 'em got past Private Clark. Cutter Clark. Every day in-country we thought he was our savior. Every day on base, or when the VC stopped breathing down our necks, we'd change our tune and call him a monster, but that never changed the fact that he'd saved good kids by killing kids or that back home we'd've shot him down in the street." When Dad leaned down, the shadows took his face and the light gleamed on his gun. "We let Cutter live because he was under control."

Dad tossed the chain aside, and drew his boot knife with his left hand, keeping the pistol trained. He reached down toward Grisham's face, the big blade flashing until it disappeared behind Grisham's hair, and jerked his hand back. Dad's fingers were choked up high on the blade. Grisham flinched and gasped, grinding his face on the gravel.

With his right hand, Dad uncocked his pistol and struck Grisham across the skull with the barrel. He prodded his slack face experimentally with his boot, then holstered the gun. From between the blade and his left thumb, he took something small, held it up to the light, and tucked it into an inner coat pocket. He wiped off the knife and his fingers on Grisham's jacket, then stood, pain creeping into his stance.

Sam shook himself out of his daze and scurried back toward the car, Dad's words about making Grisham pay sliding into a macabre sort of sense. Witchcraft could work in several ways, he'd been taught: they could plant a hex bag near the victim, taking the spell to them, but on the other hand, with access to part of the victim's body—even dead parts like hair or nails—they could target the victim without ever knowing where he or she was. Some curses, like in voodoo, found their target through a handmade model of the victim. Cursing Grisham through a piece of his ear would be no challenge to a competent witch.

Sam felt ill. What happened to "magic is an enemy in itself"? What happened to "we don't trust monsters, we don't need their information, we don't use their methods"?

What did Grisham know that was so critical that Dad was breaking all those rules to keep him alive and under control?

"Do as I say, not as I do" still held, at least.

Sam prayed he was limping faster than Dad was. He lurched toward the glimmer of the Impala's chrome, crashing onto his good leg and yanking his bad leg toward his butt, crunch...crunch-ow, crunch...crunch-ow, and between his steps he heard Dad crunching along behind the building, faintly, swinging his own bad leg rigidly from the hip.

When he rounded the car, Dean wasn't there. His breath stopped.

A bruised fist knocked against one of the back windows from inside, and Sam let himself into the driver's seat, his heart racing dizzily. Dean was sprawled, shivering, across the back bench, leaning against the passenger-side door. He passed Grisham's gun to Sam, arm shaking. Sam stuck the keys into the ignition and slid into the passenger seat. He opened his mouth.

"Can it," Dean cut him off.

"Are you—"

"Sam." Dean's voice was low and harsh through his clenched teeth.

Sam huddled against the passenger door, looking at the floorboards. He felt sick, and he knew better than to blame the pain of his swelling shin. "I di—"

Dad swung open the driver's door and Sam fell silent. Dad just leaned in, supporting himself with a hand on the roof, grabbed the keys, and lurched back toward the trunk. Sam stared over the back seat at Dean, and Dean stared out the side window, clenching his jaw.

"Pills," Dad announced when he returned from rummaging around in the trunk. Sam and Dean each held out their hands: Tylenol all around, and a Vicodin for Dean. Dad eased himself into the seat, a little cockeyed so he could work the gas pedal with his good foot, and peeled them out of the lot in a scrape of gravel.

Sam didn't manage to catch Dean's eye until they were out of the mountains and almost to the hospital. Dean was starting to look dopey and pale instead of pissed and pale. I'm sorry, Sam mouthed over the back of the seat.

Dean lifted one hand and mimed cracking a whip, then pointed to his leg. You're my slave until I'm back on my feet.

Sam nodded, relief flooding in.

Dean chomped on an invisible sandwich and knocked back an invisible beer, picked at a fold of his shirt, and pretended to ball it up and throw it away. Meals and laundry. Sam nodded again. Anything.

Dean zipped his lips, made an O with his hand, and held up four fingers. No whining for four months.

Sam's mouth turned down at the corners. Don't push it. Dean smirked, and Sam turned back to look out the windshield.

The next morning, while Sam was in the hospital for monitoring after getting the hole in his shin flushed out and Dean was unconscious with a plate in his leg, Dad crammed all their belongings into their duffels and a few trash bags, loaded up the Impala, bought a vacuum cleaner suck any stray hairs and fingernails out of their apartment's carpet, and bailed on their lease to move them to a motel in another town, all while limping around on a thigh that was mostly bruise and forgoing prescription painkillers.

Sam, hobbling despite a full dose of his own opioids, was grudgingly impressed.

It was two months before they heard from Grisham again.

Pastor Jim had a dinner of left-over church-lady casseroles and cookies waiting from them when they stopped over on the way to a new school and new hunting grounds in Indiana, and after dinner, a brown paper package for Dad. Dad's face went cold at the handwriting on the wrapper.

Inside was a recent hardback novel, John Grisham's The Firm, bookmarked somewhere toward the end, and a thick three-hole binder of typed gibberish spaced to look like words—cipher, with a line from the novel as the concordance. Dad read the bookmark, ran his finger over the line it indicated, and burned the scrap of gas station receipt in Pastor Jim's fireplace.

Sam watched and their eyes met as he finished.

For years later, that binder traveled with him; the novel, Dad passed off to Sam and Dean for road reading. Sam never caught Dad studying the binder, but it got grubbier and rattier by the month. He wondered what Grisham had passed on: something about Sam, calling him a what instead of a who? Something about Mom, about why she'd been killed? Dad had his secrets, and now Sam had his own.

Sam got The Firm after Dean was done with it, the paper cover already sloughed off and discarded. After reading it, Sam decided it was an odd choice of concordance for a guy who got so incensed about disrespecting authority. Buried close against the spine on the edge of the introduction page—Sam liked reading the front matter, while Dean never cared—were three brief notes in faint pencil.

"Holy water doesn't work on every demon," the first read. Then, after a little space, "Never ever use performance-enhancing drugs of any kind." Crammed near the top of the page sat, "Always trust family first."

Two years later, locked in the bathroom and clutching an admission letter from Stanford University in shaking hands, Sam prayed for an instant that Grisham hadn't written those notes to him. He didn't need to use holy water; he didn't need to decide who to trust. He wasn't going to be a Hunter much longer, or a soldier in the trenches clinging to his comrades and his orders. Sam was getting out.

Note: The way John and Dean became alarmed when Sam held down the button on his radio was that their radios started receiving a signal. This is against walkie-talkie protocol because the radios aren't designed to talk over each-other (don't quote me on this). Whether or not they were able to make out garbled words transmitted from Sam's radio, the only possible explanations for someone signalling on their frequency without saying anything would be that someone was sitting on the talk button, Sam was deliberately holding it down to be annoying, or the radio was being convulsively gripped in someone's cold, dead fist as a mysterious final warning for the rest of the group. In any case, someone was due for an ass-whooping, at the very least for misusing communications equipment.

Honestly, I did not set out to write The One Where John Cuts Off Sam's Ear. Originally, I just had him harvest some hair from Future Sam, but it didn't really have the oomph I wanted for the moment. I like John. I am a John apologist. He was terrible at being a father, but I like to believe that he had his priorities straight, even if he didn't accomplish any of them (#1, keep the boys alive, or at least out of Hell . . . well, crap). So I wanted him to do something totally paranoid and badass to show Future Sam that he meant business when it came to keeping his boys safe, and that hassling Sammy because he's destined to become the Antichrist would earn him an excruciating and inescapable death by any means necessary. So now Sam is missing an earlobe as a sign of his father's love. And later John might sic witches on him. Um.
The prompt for this fic can be found here.

Dear Diary: Book Review

rokhal — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:27:17 GMT

So I finally read The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

It was sort of a funny story to read.

So to start off with, I should tell you that I used to row, when I was in college. Rowing is a very technical sport. There's lots of techniques to learn if you want to do it right. Erging, that's what we called using the ergometer, which is the latin word for the indoor rowing machine, is sort of technical, too. What makes it technical is, if you're just learning, you can hardly pull any lower than 3:30, even if you're tugging your arms with all your might and going back and forth at twenty-eight strokes per minute. Someone who knows what they're doing can sit next to you pulling 2:10 at twenty-two strokes per minute. Once the coach comes over and teaches you the proper technique, like you have to power through with your legs in the first part, then swing from the back, and then at the last you can use your arm muscles after all your stronger muscles have had their say, then pretty soon you're pulling 2:45, then 2:15, and from there you might as well break out the champagne every time you shave off a second.

What The Catcher in the Rye is like, is knowing how to row, being a pretty decent rower, and watching some goddamn gym bunny sit down on the erg next to you and try to erg on it.

It hurts you almost as much to watch them erg as it did when you were that bad of an ergger pulling 3:30 at twenty-eight strokes per minute yourself. You see every mistake you learned to stop making, coming back to haunt you like some sort of ghost. They do every goddamn part of the stroke wrong. They can't use half their power, and their arms'll tire out in five minutes or so, and they're not even doing their lungs any good. It's enough to drive you nuts, they're so ignorant. That's what reading about our Holden Caulfield is like. Watching that phony goddamn gym bunny who can't use the erg and keeps driving you nuts because they're so terrible that you sort of can't look away.

But when you get to know Holden Caulfield, you start to figure out the kid's not just ignorant. He's sort of stupid, but that's not all it is, either. He doesn't just not know how to row (I'm using rowing as a metaphor for life, in this review) he doesn't even know where his arms and legs are. He keeps falling off the machine, like he's not even sure where the seat is. Eventually you figure out he's not just ignorant, he's half-blind, his foot's broken, he's had a series of strokes to the motor cortices of the cerebrum, his lungs are lousy what with all the smoking he does, and he's just survived the Bataan Death March. It's enough to break your heart that you can't step into the book and show him what he's doing wrong, pass on the coaching you got that got you from 3:30 like he is to 2:15 like you are now, but even if you could, he'd still be missing his lungs and his foot and his eyes and be all tired out what with all the marching around he'd been forced to do in Cambodia. It kills you, it really does.

At the end of the book, that's still what poor Holden Caulfield is. A lousy rower that all the coaching in the world can't fix. He's got the heart for it, and maybe he's got the game, but with all the strokes in his cerebrum and stuff like that, he's never gonna get the chance to prove his heart or test his game, and he's got no idea he's doing anything wrong anyhow. Oh, and he's deaf, too.

And the whole time you're reading about Holden Caulfield's pre-Christmas Break vacation, feeling sorry for the kid and sorry for the people he's bugging in the middle of the night and sort of hating him for an ignorant yellow phony all at once, there's this little voice in the back of your head, like that still small voice that talked to Elijah, I think it was. It's saying, "Takes one to know one." And that's what wakes you up in the middle of the night, thinking about that book.

I'm gonna be picking Salinger's diction out of my ear for weeks.

Dear Diary: Applied Anatomy

rokhal — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 02:08:45 GMT

Today, I watched one of my professors give a dog a hand-job.

Dear Diary: 23 is the new 16

rokhal — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:52:10 GMT

I have a car. It's got go.

It's a little like riding a high-strung Arabian mare who's been on box rest for the past three weeks, not like I'd be stupid enough to do anything like that, and because it's an automatic, it kind of has a mind of its own that comes with some mild impairment, the styling is terrible, the clear coat is peeling off, it's probably been sideswiped, and the brakes needed to be replaced right out of the sale yard, but when I punch it at the stoplight, man does this thing have go.

It's also possessed by the spirit of Courage Wolf.

Also, I remember when I used to do episode reviews for SPN. I must've been temporarily insane.

SPN fic: The Parable of the Rats in the Oubliette

rokhal — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:31:51 GMT

Title: The Parable of the Rats in the Oubliette
Characters: Lucy, Mikey, their vessels
Pairing: none
Rating: T
Length: 1.5K
Warnings: animal abuse (here's hoping this never gets traced back to me)
Disclaimer: This is not an original fiction. The characters belong to the CW network and to John Milton.
Note: Drum-roll, please. It's time for . . . EXTREME PRETENTIOUSNESS!!!
It's a parable in second-person present tense. What's wrong with me? Don't I have last year's comment fics to work on?

Imagine this.

Imagine a room without doors or windows. The walls are three-foot-thick slabs of poured reinforced concrete. A daily supply of complete nutrition bars is available from a small hopper beside a simple sink and toilet. The floor is littered with bits of scrap lumber. There is no furniture. You've lived here before and didn't like it.

Imagine you're trapped in this room.

No one is watching and no one is coming. You are trapped here with your patronizing and self-righteous older brother who hurt you.

Each of you has a rat.

Imagine you are not a nice person.

Locked in here with your brother, you fight. You're angry, but it hurts when he hits you, and you hurt to see him hurt. The two of you break off your fight and you look around the room for your rat.

It was this rat that lured you here. You know it can't be blamed for your predicament; it's only a rat.

It's small and frightened. It flees from you, and you work off your frustrations in chasing it around the room.

You and your brother are not talking to each-other, each trying to burn the other in the chill of your silence. Bored, you break off a corner of one of the nutrition bars to lure one of the rats. It ignores the bait.

You sit in your corner, crumbs resting on slack fingers, and wait for your rat to give in. It fears you after the hour you spent chasing it, but it is only a rat, and you control the only source of food. The damage you did in making it afraid of you only adds to the challenge and distracts you from the growing urge to break your silence and cave to your brother's will.

The rat approaches.

You hold absolutely still.

After the rat takes the bait for the first time, you keep working to gain its trust, shunning your brother as you become completely absorbed in your pet. You turn your back on him and invite the rat onto the platform of your crossed legs. You wield kindness like a chisel. It takes months, but the rat learns to come when you call it, scramble up onto your shoulder, walk in a circle on its hind legs, and raise its cheeks to be stroked. The rat no longer sees you as a predator, but as a friend.

Your brother remains on the opposite side of the room; his back is still set against you. He has his own private games, and you have nothing but a tame rat nuzzling your fingers.

You are disappointed, and, again, bored.

You try to chase your rat. It stares up at you, trusting, and you catch it and hurt it until it remembers its fear and flees again.

As you chase your rat around the room, your brother grows angry at your noise and strikes you. You smile. You fight again.

No one wins the fight. You rail and scream about old wrongs, but your brother does not listen. Even if he did listen, even if you did persuade him to your side, nothing would change: no one is listening, so no one would know. You and he are the proverbial cat in a box. What is not observed has no reality. You are no longer real.

In despair, you cling to him and he weeps with you. He has lost his family just as surely as you have.

The pair of you put aside your anger and talk for a long time about all the years between you. You forget about the rats, until the conversation turns touchy and the rats become a necessary diversion.

Your rat no longer comes to humans. It could take years to rebuild its trust. Your brother offers his own rat, safe in a small enclosure of scrap wood, to lure yours back.

You and he amuse yourselves watching the two rats interact. They play. They fight. They huddle together. They compete for food. They respond to the other's cries of pleasure or distress.

You test the rats, building mazes from the litter of scrap wood on the floor. You leave food on barely accessible ledges and watch the rats climb for it. You make them jump. You make them run.

You exhaust your interest in the rats' athleticism and intelligence, and slump unhappily against a wall. Eventually you catch your rat, put it in a small dark box of piled lumber, and leave it undisturbed for months. Your curiosity and impatience swells pleasantly in your chest, distracting you from the unchanging inescapable four walls. This new game is a waiting game.

Imagine nothing dies in this room.

The rat is alive when you take it from the improvised isolation cage. It's blind and disoriented, covered with self-inflicted bites. Its behavior toward you, your brother, and your brother's rat has profoundly changed.

Your brother is intrigued enough at the changes to repeat your experiment with his own pet. You smile to yourself at your elder following your lead.

It's your brother's idea to train the rats to fight. You hesitate to take his instructions, but since he just finished imitating you, you swallow your pride and listen. You console yourself in the thought that you had had the idea first, but had never imagined your brother would cooperate.

The two of you condition the rats to fear each-other by holding them side-by-side and hurting them. You do this until their fights satisfy you. They grapple and tumble together in a blur of fur and teeth and naked tails, leaving blood where they roll. Across the small arena of plywood and string, you bare your teeth at your brother and imagine biting his throat out, like your rat is doing to his rat.

Your brother remarks that it's now impossible for you to win back your rat's trust. You spend the next three years proving him wrong.

You relish the look on his face when your rat rides on your shoulder again. Your brother remarks that if you had put your talent for reconciliation to proper use when you'd had the chance, you might never have seen this room.

You club your brother with a piece of lumber because he tricked you into spending three years apologizing to a rat.

Remember that nothing dies in this room.

You make your rat go mad again. You tear it open and watch it cry and struggle as its intestines dry. You figure out what makes it live and move by tearing out parts of it and watching to see if it compensates for the loss. You let your rat heal. You make it love you. You make it fear you. You are human, and your patience and cunning are beyond the rat's comprehension.

Your brother watches you with resignation and you watch him with defiance, but your defiance is hollow because the trust that you mold and destroy in your rat as ceaselessly and idly as a child making pots in modeling clay is not even an echo of the acceptance you long for from your brother, which you might never have for as long as the two of you remain in this room. He is torture to you. He is your equal and you cannot mold him. He is sure in his convictions and you cannot persuade him; even if you could, his acceptance would be as meaningless as the rat's bewildered trust.

No one is watching or listening anyway.

Sam never watches reality TV, and one night when he stumbled on a streaming video of animals being used in behavioral research, he left the unsold house he and Dean were squatting in to run alone in the dark until blisters burned on his heels, and limped back inside at one in the morning.

End Note: I find that the best way to imagine what someone is going to do is to start with why they're doing it. The best way to understand things outside human experience, like multi-dimensional objects, a triune God, or quantum, is through analogies. This is my attempt to get a handle on what sort of things happened to Sam in the Cage. The way to do that, I think, is through Lucifer.
In no way do I condone cruelty to rats unless it is necessary in the pursuit of clear and legitimate benefits to human or animal welfare.

SPN fic: Homeward Bound By Proxy

rokhal — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 01:53:09 GMT

Done for ratherastory's comment meme, here, for the prompt below from shangrilada:

So Sam is having a really bad time with post-concussion crap and hallucinations and basically feeling overwhelmed and everything, and there's this little stray puppy that keeps crying at the door of Rufus's cabin. Naturally Sam starts leaving it food, but he discovers slowly how much the little guy is helping him feel grounded and needed and capable, and taking care of the puppy is something he can do well and reliably, and it gives him a reason to get up.

Dean really does not like (or is allergic to????) freaking dogs. It doesn't help that the last ones he knew were the ones who chewed him up and dragged him down to hell.

DISCUSS.

I got maybe a little of Sam's post-concussion crap--more like healing by distraction and neglect than actual H/C. And maybe a tiny bit of Dean's Hellhound issues. And the puppy--he's pushing the age range.

But dammit, I met this dog. And I don't know if he got his happy ending in real life, so I had to write this.

Title: Homeward Bound By Proxy
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Dean, Bobby. Gen.
Warnings: Self-harm (never thought I'd have to write that)
Spoilers: 7.3
Word Count: 4000
Genre: Puppy!fic
Disclaimer: I disclaim!
Summary: Sam makes friends with a dog who lives in the woods around Rufus' cabin.

Sam was trying very hard not to freak out again.

He'd had his one freak-out, and Dean had taken care of it -- fortunately, that was a few hours before the concussion started eating into his memories and everything became a blur of burnt timber and twisted metal. Now that Dean had taught him how to at least keep a toe-hold on reality, it was up to Sam to figure out the long term, and that meant research. He got online with his wifi card and looked at research articles and support for rape survivors and prisoners-of-war. Some of it was familiar from when Dean had come back from Hell, but it made a whole lot more sense now.

Inevitably, he'd notice Lucifer reading over his shoulder, and then he'd be reading about recovering from abuse with his abuser mocking him just inches from his ear, and then he'd force himself to remember that Lucifer was all in his head, which lead him to the horrifying conclusion that part of his subconscious had turned into Lucifer and Lucifer was now a permanent part of him. Research wasn't helping.

"Sammy!" Dean called from the couch, startling him. Sam's head throbbed and his vision blacked out for a moment when he turned too fast. It felt a little like flying off a merry-go-round, and for some reason his cheeks wanted to grin spontaneously, even as his stomach contemplated crawling up his throat. The part of his subconscious that was Lucifer became distracted by the battle to keep his lunch down and forgot to exist.

"I need my tunes!" Dean whined.

Sam scowled at him.

"And my Walkman!"

Sam caught himself before he snapped something stupid like, "I'm not your freaking butler," and instead eased himself to his feet and shuffled out the door. It was mid-morning, still cold, and the sunbeams hurt his eyes, ricocheted around his skull, and lodged in his teeth. Having a real body was unmistakeably weird.

The birds and squirrels were silent. Sam managed not to pass out as he leaned into the Impala, retrieving the box of tapes from under the front seat and the Walkman from a surplus M-16 ammo crate in the depths of the trunk, and as he stacked his burdens and turned back toward the house, he spotted a dark shape watching from the woods. He shifted the box to one arm and reached for his gun.

Wind tossed the shadowing trees aside, and in a flicker of sunlight, Sam saw glossy black fur, two eyes, four legs, and a slowly wagging tail on a rangy frame no higher than his knee. A long tongue lolled out between the usual number of teeth. Sam slipped his hand out from under the back of his shirt, and knelt in the gravel. He licked his lips, and the dog cocked its head, tail stilling. "Here, bud --"

The dog hunched and dashed into the woods, the crash and swish of shaken bracken faint and fading fast.

--

That evening, Sam took the heels out of the bags of sandwich bread and left them on the cabin's front porch. They were gone by morning. He supposed it could have been raccoons or birds that'd eaten them, but he saw the dog watching the place again. It patrolled methodically, loping through the woods on straight paths, more like a coyote than a house pet running loose. Maybe it was a farm dog. Looked like a Labrador.

He left more bread out for the dog, and Dean and Bobby never seemed to miss it, but he knew Dean knew he was up to something by the way Dean would focus extra hard on PBS or Lifetime or whatever saccharine drivel had caught his imagination, whenever Sam headed toward the door. Like Sam was a stray dog who wouldn't eat when he was being stared at. Speaking of which, Sam needed a book, a blanket, and a deck chair, because if he wanted to get a good look at the dog, he'd need to pull a stake-out.

Dusk found him parked in the driveway with a couple pieces of bread and a book on forest ecology, straining his eyes in the dim light and watching the bats crawl out from under the eaves. Dean texted him every fifteen minutes griping about how lame whatever TV show that had suckered him in was. Sam swallowed his pride and texted back, pretending to make fun of him so Dean would know he was still conscious, then got back to squinting at the tiny print to see if the label on that graph on ecological succession said 37 +/- 12 or 87 +/- 12 and speculating that an archeology book might be a lot more useful for figuring out how to locate hundred-year-old graves. A bat dived at his head, and he froze, his whole body knotted and stupid with terror -- and how was he going to hunt now, when he sees something coming for him and he freezes so as not to make it mad?

He caught his breath and looked around, then sent the book and his phone flying when he spotted glowing green eyes in the dark and jumped out of the chair.

The dog fled again, and he swore.

His head pounded at the sudden movement. He pawed around blindly for the chair back, then braced himself, hunching in dull pain, until he could see and stand on his own. When his eyes cleared, he saw the dog again, just five feet away, licking bread crumbs off its lips. The dog's ears flicked back, and Sam cut his eyes away, holding very still.

It sniffed his hand.

Sam looked down, and the dog looked up with its limpid fathomless eyes, and a switch had flipped somewhere, because it was no longer the wary self-possessed prowler of the forest that Sam had been stalking: its floppy ears bunched forward, its large jaws parted, its front paws splayed, and its tail began to wag in earnest, harder and harder the longer Sam watched, until its whole hind end was swinging from side to side. Sam eased his fingers behind its ears, and the dog leaned into his leg as he began to scratch, gazing up at him adoringly. He grinned back.

--

The dog wasn't there the next morning when Sam checked out the windows. He walked around the cabin to be sure. Lucifer was leaning against the front door when he got back. "Dean just doesn't do it for you anymore, does he?" The other vessel's brow furrowed in sympathy. "It's been way too long since Alistair had a crack at him. I get it. But no run-of-the-mill stray dog's gonna fill your hole, Sammy. You'll have to string 'im up in a tree and beat 'im with a stick for a few months, maybe shoot his nose off with a shotgun, if you wanna pretend the thing's half as broken as you."

Sam squeezed his temples. "Dean?" he called.

"Yeah?" Dean shot up as well as he could, head whipping around over the couch arm. He'd been reading the forty-year-old manual for Rufus' generator during the commercial breaks for Cartoon Network.

"I need you to multiply two two-digit prime numbers. Don't tell me what they are, just tell me the answer." Sam shook his head at Dean's bewildered look.

"Cryptography?" Dean and Lucifer chorused.

"Just? Please."

Dean rolled his eyes up to the ceiling for a few moments and wiggled his fingers in the air distractedly. "Fifteen-seventy-three," he said at last. "What's the deal?"

Sam pursed his lips, jerking his head at Lucifer, then glared at Lucifer, raising an eyebrow in challenge.

"I already admitted I'm not real," Lucifer drawled. He swaggered forward, and Sam sucked in a breath, imagining his feet rooted to the floor. "And even if I was -- if I'm me? And not you? I don't have to show myself just 'cause you threw me a puzzle." He widened his eyes as though a thought had come to him. "Do you miss me?"

Sam grabbed his bad hand until warm blood slicked the inside of the bandage. Dean was staring at him, twisted almost all the way around on the couch, fingers digging into the arm. "Stop listening to that bastard," Dean growled. "Don't play games with him, just concentrate on what's real."

"He's just in my head, Dean, he's not gonna outwit me," Sam sighed.

Dean grimaced. "Well, if anyone could outwit himself, it's you. Make me a sandwich, bitch. Side order of Percocet."

Sam did, looking out the kitchen window for the dog.

--

The dog showed back up when Bobby did. Sam couldn't look at the TV for an hour straight, much less the road, so Bobby was the only one who could head out for the so-called town (lumber yard, main street, and gas station) for provisions. When Bobby's car pulled in, Sam headed out to help carry in grocery bags, and as they both stomped back in the door, the dog rattled up the steps and slipped right past Sam's knees and into the house.

Dean yelped. Bobby tossed his bags onto the nearby table and charged over, Sam following unsteadily. Dean was bolt upright, struggling to swing his leg casted leg down to the floor with his nerves fogged by opiates as he windmilled his arms at the dog, which was licking his toes. As Bobby circled around, the dog left off Dean's foot, and darted back to investigate Dean's crotch, then his face. Dean let out another undignified noise, and flailed at the dog until he managed to catch it by the neck, holding it at arm's length while it bowed and wriggled, whining happily and licking his elbows.

Dean's face was a mask of horror, just like that time he'd had ghost sickness, and like then, it was pretty hilarious until Sam realized why it wasn't funny at all. For an instant, Sam's vision of the skinny black dog narrowed to white teeth and saliva, and he almost went for his gun, could have, except the dog bounced away from Dean to jump up on the table and try to steal the frankfurters. Sam lunged for it, and the dog darted aside with a wary look. It lifted its leg to piss on a cabinet on the way into the kitchen, then clawed wildly at the floor when Sam followed it in and tried to corner it, slipped back out into the living room, pissed on the back of the couch, and at last bolted back outside when Bobby herded it toward the wide-open door.

Dean finally got his twisted walking stick in hand and levered himself upright. He looked down at his spit-covered hands and the yellow stain half-way up the back of the couch, and swore energetically.

Sam felt himself trying to disappear. “I'll get the . . . um.” Exactly how did they get piss out of fabric upholstery? “Towels?” He looked sideways at Bobby. “Bleach?”

Bobby huffed, and rubbed his hip with his palm. “Start with water. Then, I don't know, whatever's under the kitchen sink, do I look like Martha Stewart to you? Just don't bleach the woodwork.”

Sam nodded and lowered himself slowly to the floor in the kitchen. Dean's unsteady thumping sounded behind him. “Sit down, man,” Sam told him. Dean looked like he wanted a shot or three, but he'd have to make do with Swiss Miss. Like this one kid Sam had met in twelfth grade who threw small parties every time his parents left on business, Bobby knew where Rufus stashed all his liquor, but he'd hid it. It was probably a good idea.

“He pissed on my couch,” Dean exclaimed, incredulous. “Right behind my head!”

“Sorry.” Sam grabbed a bottle of dish soap and a couple of kitchen towels. The cabin had spares, but no washing machine. Bobby bustled around behind him, putting cans in cupboards. “I'll clean it up --”

“And I swear he was tryin' to eat my face,” Dean continued, going a little pale and swaying as he clung to his stick. “Damn dog.” He clumped to one of the dining chairs and settled into it awkwardly. “You and your friends, Sammy.”

Bobby scowled at Sam as he stood up. “So that's where the bread all got to.”

“Hey, Sam,” Lucifer exclaimed, perching on the counter and waving the carving knife under Bobby's nose. “Wanna see me kill 'em?”

Sam rammed his funny bone into a nearby wall, then counted to a hundred while he sank back to his knees to clean up dog piss.

--

The next day, Sam sat out in the sun and read oral tradition collected from the Lakota Sioux, a frankfurter on the gravel under his chair. The dog came back after a few hours, and after gulping down the meat in two bites, jumped up on his lap and did its best to clean out the inside of his nostrils, tail swinging its hips back and forth.

Sam pulled his head away and fended him off. His fingers hooked in something thin, tight around the dog's neck: a chain, one of those snare chains that slip on over a dog's head, able to tighten down hard, but mostly supposed to hang loose. This one was far too small. As though sensing he was caught, the dog stopped wagging, and flattened his ears against his neck. Sam shushed him as he began to pull away, and slid the chain up his neck with one hand while he scratched the dog's throat and under his chin with the other.

The chain wouldn't come off.

With the dog half in his lap, in the daylight, Sam got a good look. His spine jutted up, his waist was tucked and angular, and his ribs all stuck out. His legs and neck were muscled, and the dog moved well, fast and confident as it crept under bushes and leapt over logs, but his neck was scrawny. He was young, obviously not too young what with all the pissing, but still had the elastic whole-body wriggle of a puppy.

Sam found two tags dangling from the chain: a stainless steel rabies tag, and a weathered anodized aluminum tab reading, “Blue.”

--

The next afternoon, Sam watched Blue out the window as he lay in front of Bobby's Charger, methodically tearing a squirrel into bits and pieces. He'd already horked all the guts down, and was working on gnawing the head off. Sam was morbidly curious how he'd swallow the rest of it.

Dean was watching Sam from the couch, a muted smile flickering on his face. “Find any Amber Alerts on him?”

Sam looked down at his IPad. “They're not that organized,” he grumbled. “According to this, the only way to find the owner with just the rabies tag is through the clinic that gave him the shots, and even then, they could get him confused with some other dog, or they might've tossed out the owner's contact information. You know, 'cause they probably think he's dead.” Sam rubbed his eyes. “He's probably been on his own since he was half this size.”

“Sam, take a break,” Dean grunted, settling back into his nest.

Sam glared at the back of his head. “I don't need you telling me to take a nap anymore, it's been a week.”

“You're all grouchy. Go play with the slobbery flea-ridden bag-of-bones. Buck's waiting for you.”

Sam glanced out the window, and saw the dog wrestling with the squirrel carcass, its head in his mouth and his paw on its torso, an eyeball popping out between his teeth every time he chewed. “It's Blue,” Sam corrected.

“Don't tell me you never read Call of the Wild.”

After Blue finished his squirrel, Sam went outside and threw a stick for him. Blue watched the stick, then stared at him as though waiting for the punchline of a joke. “You're supposed to --” Sam sighed and leaned down to scratch his head. Blue sat on his boots, panting up at him. “Never mind.”

Sam lured him over to the Impala and cut his chain off with the bolt cutters. The chain drizzled to the ground and Blue stared down at it, startled, before shaking himself and scratching his neck, revealing a white ring of broken hair where the chain had been. Sam saved the tags, trudged back up to the front door, and blocked Blue with his legs when he tried to sneak inside. “You need some finishing school, Buddy,” he remarked.

Behind him, Lucifer clucked his tongue, then dug his thumbs deep into Blue's eyes. Sam had to stop himself from clawing at thin air while Blue screamed. “You know he's never gonna adjust to civilian life, don't you?” Lucifer grinned down. Sam could see the scratch marks Blue's scrabbling claws left in the porch boards. “He'll have to rough it up here, all alone . . . or he could spend years in a tiny cage begging for lethal injection. Oh, the parallels.”

Sam squeezed Blue's tags until the edges bit into his palm, slipped inside, and sat down with his phone and a pad of paper.

--

“Bobby, I need a favor,” Sam announced over scrambled eggs the next morning.

Bobby muttered something that sounded like “when don't you?” into his coffee, but he seemed tolerant when he met Sam's eyes. “As long as it don't involve driving that dog around in my car, sure, Sam.”

Sam swallowed.

--

Dean saw them off. Blue had been hanging around the house a lot the last few days, and once Sam got part of an old belt around his neck for a collar, he was allowed to poke his nose into the cabin and sniff Dean's fist. Dean gave Blue and Sam a grimace that was trying its best to act like a smile. “Yeah, you're a good dog,” Dean muttered. “A good, black, mangy, feral, rabbit-killing dog -- Sam, just take him home. And pick yourself up some flea shampoo while you're out.”

Bobby made Sam cover the Charger's back seat in an old blanket before they picked Blue up and stuffed him in. Blue wouldn't stay in the back seat. They drove an hour to Blue's old vet clinic with Blue sitting on Sam's lap, digging his paws into his crotch and whacking his tail back and forth between the seat back and the gear shift. When they finally arrived and got out of the car, Blue nearly strangled himself trying to run away with his makeshift leash, then pissed happily on Sam's leg. Sam glared at him. Blue licked his hand.

The vet clinic was a small cinderblock building on the outskirts of the nearest town with a Kmart. Its lobby was decorated with framed watercolor Gary Larson cartoons, and staffed by a chubby young blonde woman. Blue pissed on the door frame as they came in, then he took aim at one of the chairs and would have soaked the seat if Sam hadn't pulled him off balance in the nick of time. He nailed the front desk twice while Sam and Bobby filled out forms and handed over his tags. All the while, his tail wagged in powerful sweeping arcs that bent his whole body like a fish.

“You found the owners?” Sam asked for the third time as he invented contact information to fill the hungry lines on the form. Each false letter felt like threads fraying from a rope. He ignored Bobby's bemused glance and the receptionist's sigh. “I mean, you contacted them -- somebody contacted them, so you know they want him back? I mean, he's not really -- he's not house-trained. At all. And if they don't . . .” Sam cut himself off, blinking at the form containing Graham Greene's contact information and the phone number for an apartment Sam had lived at in 1998. Blue gnawed on the molding of the reception desk, tail whacking against the back of Bobby's leg. “If he can't --”

“Here,” Bobby interrupted, handing the woman a business card. “If Graham here can't be reached at home, call this number and I'll get the message to him. Boy's developed a personal interest in that dog.”

The receptionist nodded, her eyes softening. “ I'll make a note to let you both know how Blue settles in.”

Sam handed over Blue's leash. She pulled him into the back of the clinic, one hand on the improvised collar and the other behind his ears, and then all Sam had left of Blue was half a chain collar in the kitchen trash can and a drying stain on his jeans.

Bobby picked up a bottle of flea shampoo from a nearby shelf and showed it to Sam with a dry smirk.

Sam shook his head sourly. “I'll chance it.”

--

Dean found Homeward Bound on TV that night and made Sam watch with him. Sam compared Blue to the improbably sarcastic dogs and cat onscreen (free from CGI puppetry, small mercy) and decided Blue had done relatively well for himself out there, since he didn't have half a porcupine embedded in his face. Blue probably didn't have some heartbroken child actor waiting for him to come home, though. Sam wondered how he'd react to his first chain-link fence, if he'd walk right into it or dig his way out, and if he'd feel an itch under his fur for the woods and wilds, if he'd vanish in the night to hunt coyotes, if he'd eat people's cats. He was, likely as not, doomed between scraping by alone and getting thrown out on his furry rear end. Like Dean, you'd never know it to look at him.

Dean snickered at the TV, oblivious to Lucifer petting his hair.

Bobby got a call the next afternoon while he was throwing together a pot of chili. “Speaking,” he grumbled after rinsing onion off his hands. “M-hm. Yes, I can. Go ahead, ma'am.” Sam, busy carving up a bright red shank of unidentified mammal recovered from Rufus' freezer, slowed his work and listened in. A faint voice slipped past Bobby's ear from the speaker, and Bobby mm'ed and m-hm'ed at appropriate intervals. As the caller continued, Bobby's mustache bristled and his eyes widened. Sam caught the phrase “a bit bloody” and “a bit of a mess” and then it was bloodbath and a bit of a massacre, and when he bent back down to his work, shaking his head hard, the shank on the carving board was round and pale-skinned, gushing blood that slithered and spread up his knife, over his hand; in the time it took to gasp, it was coating him, blinding him with red, teasing his throat and nostrils with sulfur, suffocating his skin in wet heat. He couldn't move. The blood was already stinging the corners of his eyes, trying to burrow its way in, and if he opened his mouth --

A stinging slap struck his cheek. He blinked down dumbly at Bobby, who hissed, “Breathe, dammit.”

Sam breathed. Bobby picked his phone back up and apologized. The voice on the other end finished its story, and Bobby hung up. “That was the vet's,” Bobby reported.

Sam set the knife down and tried to compose himself. “Yeah?”

“Dog's owners came and picked him up.”

Sam let out a rush of breath and waited for Bobby to continue.

“It's a family out in the back-country. The son was over the moon to get his dog back.”

“Good,” Sam replied. A dog like that needed a kid, and a kid would throw a fit if anyone tried to get rid of him for pissing on furniture. “That's excellent. Thanks, Bobby.”

“Apparently,” Bobby added, watching Sam as though bearing bad news, “the dog didn't do so well in the kennels overnight. Wagged its tail against the wall so hard it broke the skin and bled all over the clinic. Dog's fine,” he assured Sam, like the delicate flower Sam had become. “Just left a mess.”

“Bloodbath,” Sam muttered to himself.

Bobby patted his shoulder. “Dog's fine.”

--

After dinner, Sam joined Dean with a printout from Rufus' Kaballa database and a beer, flicking on a floor lamp and settling into a nearby armchair. Dean turned the volume down on what looked like a god-awful MTV reality show so Sam could concentrate.

“So how's Chance?”

Sam looked up from the sheaf of paper and the Hebrew dictionary balanced on his knees, and took his pen out of his mouth. “Huh?”

Dean studiously avoided eye contact, watching a half-dozen moneyed twenty-somethings mingle in a hot tub. One had her chest blurred out in post-production. “Your furry friend.”

“Blue.” Sam winced, wondering why everyone was being so solicitous about the dog, after it had tried to pee on every vertical surface in the house and Sam had sneaked it a third of their food. It was like they thought he was some sort of post-trauma therapy dog, sent by Fate that Sam might remain vertical, not a seriously unlucky pup with no social skills who needed all the help he could get. “Blue's fine. He's with his family. He's good.”

“You?” Dean asked hesitantly.

Sam cut him off. “Can't complain.” He put the pen back in his mouth and flipped aimlessly through the dictionary.

“I woulda liked a dog like that,” Dean murmured, a still silhouette in the corner of Sam's eye. “Before.”

Sam huddled in the too-small easy chair, poring over the baffling text and watching Dean watch MTV, until the moon rose, and Dean began to snore.

Silently, Sam got up to turn off the TV and the lights. When he turned around, Lucifer had stolen his seat. “Mm, nice and warm,” Lucifer purred.

Sam bared his teeth and backed away, the backs of his knees banging into the coffee table.

“I got the question to your answer, Sam,” said Lucifer mildly, sitting up and leaning his elbows on his knees. “Of course you'll be consumed with curiosity until you figure out how I did it. Maybe the number Dean gave you came from me instead. Maybe I possessed you for an hour to use a calculator and some prime number tables, then gave you amnesia.”

“Shut up,” Sam hissed. Lucifer wasn't yet verging on pain-bringing territory, except Sam could feel his own terrified curiosity sucking him in. He clasped his hands.

“Twenty-nine times fifty-three makes fifteen-thirty-seven,” Lucifer announced. “I solved your riddle. I am a champion code cracker -- and now, bitch boy, you have three options: you're just that crazy, we're just that smart -- and seriously, you were never as smart as you think you are -- or, my favorite --” He rose from the chair and hooked Sam's neck under his arm, strangling the blood from Sam's head as his breath ruffled Sam's hair. “I'm actually here. With you. Full circle.”

Sam crushed his bad palm with his thumb and gasped in the silence. Dean slept on, muzzy and incautious with opiates. Pain was different here; thanks to Dean, he knew he was back. As for the rest --

“I'm outwitting myself,” Sam whispered in the dark. “I'm just outwitting myself. Like Dean said.”

As he trudged up to bed, Sam caught himself wondering if Lucifer knew anything helpful about Leviathans.

Dear Diary: To Give Or Receive

rokhal — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:35:47 GMT

A brief story.

My dad and I have a no-contact agreement, that is, I don't contact him and twice a year or so he sends me humorous spam email or a birthday note or a letter explaining that I'm a bad daughter and should show him some respect as is his prerogative as the goddamn paterfamilias. On Christmas, he attempts to leverage gift-giving for communication.
I don't thank him for his gifts and I forget to cash his checks. I am never excited to receive communication.
It shook me up pretty hard when he moved out. My mom had to talk me out of exhuming the skull of my favorite goat and mailing it to him to show my displeasure. He didn't seem too impressed with the disturbing poetry I wrote instead, which I brought to a group counseling session six years ago, the last time I saw him.
He's a self-important son of a bitch. My grandmother gave us permission to use that term regarding him.
He never touched me in anger or any other passion, but years later, the thought of him showing up at one of my sporting events terrified me so much that I threatened to cut off all contact with my grandmother, just as I had done to him, if he did so. It was the only leverage I could think of, and I've regretted thinking of it ever since.
The appearance of a note from him this Christmas was, therefore, nerve-wracking. It could be another check that would expire before I managed to decide if I was too proud to cash it. It could be another letter, talking about how happy he was with his new wife, and weren't we all missing out on the pleasure of his sterling company? And by the way, he might be more generous next year (to the tune of two-hundred dollars in Christmas and birthday gifts, provided I gave him a list first) if I called him.
Compelled by morbid curiosity to see how my dad had proved himself an asshole this year, I steeled myself and tore open the envelope.
Inside was an unlined sheet of paper folded around a twenty dollar bill. On the paper in an irregular scrawl:

Merry Christmas,
Dad

I wadded up the note and stuck the bill in my pocket, grateful that my dad finally felt pissy enough not to bother with an essay.
I spent the rest of my Christmas with nice people.

Dear Diary: Art

rokhal — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 00:17:36 GMT

Saw the Picasso exhibit in Seattle today. Lots and lots of art.

In a word:

Boobs.