Guys...I've done it...I've started a multi-chapter story.
I don't know exactly what this is, but it literally possessed me this evening and I couldn't stop writing it.
I'm only gonna publish the first 1,500 words tonight, I've got more written, but I need to polish it first and since I have the perfect cliffhanger to end on, ripe with juicy foreshadowing just to make you squirm, I will leave it at this first bit.
I'm not gonna make any rigid promises for update times, because I get consumed by other ideas and I may have some one-shots in me that I have to get out before I complete a chapter. I will TRY for once or twice a week though.
What I hope is that you guys will hold me accountable and not let me waver on this.
Rated T
Don't own anything but these humble words.
It's a lesson every hunter has to learn.
They go about it in a couple of ways, easy or hard, to quote the overused expression. The hard way involves black bruises, broken bones, concussions, internal bleeding, punctured lungs, to name a few. The hard way lands you in the ER nine times out of ten, and the other time, it's the last thing you ever learn.
John Winchester prefers his boys take the second option. But the 'easy' way has it's downsides too.
Dean was kind of a natural at falling.
The first time he ever got thrown around he was only 10 years-old and it was by Mrs. Oak, the sweet little schoolteacher with a penchant for beating on her students.
Timmy in second grade forgot one of his times tables and she whacked his palms with a ruler until he screamed and bled, and she just kept going. Timmy's mother asked him about the weals on his palms but he didn't tell. Everyone knew Mrs. Oak would kill you if you tattled.
John couldn't exactly call the authorities when she tossed Dean into a crumbling stone wall that left his spine and right arm severely bruised and aching for days.
Good old Mrs. Oak, the sunny schoolmarm, had died in 1895; shot in the face with a muzzleloader by little Timmy himself.
But Dean, small and fragile and years away from ready for that kind of punishment had somehow gotten right up. Sore but standing, he shook off the impact and grabbed John's zippo, flicked it once, and ignited the pile of grimy bones that were all that remained of Mrs. Oak's corporeal form.
"Mrs. Oak, up in smoke." Dean sang it out with childhood pride above the ashes of the burning bitch.
Later on John told the story over a couple of beers to his hunting buddies at the roadhouse.
Yeah, Dean was a natural faller.
Sammy, on the other hand...not so much. Took everything John had to keep that gangly boy from cracking his skull open. And he really tried everything.
When Sam was about 11they practiced fighting for hours, sometimes he'd put him up against Dean, shouting out directions from the sidelines while the boys went at each other.
But it was hardly tooth and nail. At age 15, Dean was mostly grown into himself, though still wiry and lean, he already showed the lines of musculature and broad shoulders that would make him a perilous fighter in years to come.
But with Sam he held back, pulled his punches. And no amount of swearing and shoving on John's part could get Dean to really lay into his little brother. It was a psychic block that ran deep through Dean Winchester, a weakness for his Sammy that would only increase with time. Like magnets with opposite poles, Dean's force simply died when he got near Sam. His fists came in contact like pats and caresses, just running out of momentum before they fell.
So most of the time it was John who sparred with Sam. And Dean couldn't even watch.
Sam was a good fighter, he worked hard, he was fast, he kept swinging. He had the offense down, but, goddammit, that boy didn't know how to minimize impact on himself. He threw himself into fighting so hard that every blow that rained down on him hit like a ton of bricks. Dean wondered how many black eyes and micro-fractures it was gonna take before his little brother learned to stop bearing the brunt of every fist.
And falling, oh god, but Sam knew how to get hurt when he fell. He made a fucking art out of it.
On his first ever hunt with Dean and John, Sam had just turned 12. He got kicked down a flight of stairs by the ghost of a little girl.
The girl had big sad eyes and a huge bow fastened onto what was left of the back of her head. The satin fabric, still pink in places, was mostly black with blood, sopping up the leaking bits of her brains in the mottled pit where her father had gone at her with a carving knife in a drunken rage.
Sam's shock and compassion had left him rooted to the spot and the pretty child showed Sam that sugar and spice and everything nice doesn't carry over into the afterlife.
His misguided heart got him a fractured tibia and a seething lecture and
he spent a week in the hospital getting pumped full of expensive painkillers and crying silent tears onto the plastic-coated pillow.
John never went to see him. He said babies who let themselves get tossed like that after everything he'd done, didn't deserve visitors.
Dean had just gotten his temps but he drove down to that hospital after his dad was asleep. He charmed a sleepy nurse at the front desk to let him in after visiting hours and came into Sam's room laden down with hot cocoa and snacks from the vending machine.
One thing's for sure, Dean never knew how to let a blow fall on Sammy.
In the weeks that followed, John tried a new approach to Sam's training, keeping up with their regular sparring, but incorporating the lessons into his daily life.
They'd be walking out to the Impala and John would swipe a foot out and trip Sam up, then stand back and watch him fall. He'd grimace and shout "foosh, Sam!" An acronym in martial arts meaning 'falling on outstretched hands', a natural reflex, but one that would earn you a cracked wrist in a real fight. Sam had a sprained wrist to manage for awhile and a new wrinkle of hard-knock knowledge in his brain.
John would push Sam off his bed in the middle of the night, shaking his head when Sam landed face-first. "You'll learn, son. Or die trying." He'd mutter while Dean ran for a warm washcloth to soothe Sam's bloody nose.
There wasn't a time in the next year, when Sam wasn't on edge. His dad was clever and Sam was learning, slowly and painfully, but learning all the same.
Eventually, a creak of the floorboards at 3 am could jar Sam out of even that witching-hour-peaceful, sweet-spot of sleep. A change in the pitch of the fan on the air conditioning from a body passing in front of the current could make his hazel-green eyes flick open, body tense and catlike for the strike.
Sam learned to tuck and roll, to soften his growing body so that concrete was like a cradle, and his father's fists like kitten-paws. He learned to spread out the force of his impact, to protect his head at all costs, to never land on his wrists. He stopped plunking like a cartoon bunny, splat-flat on the unforgiving ground-to land on meat not bone.
By the time Sam was 15, he was at least as good as Dean at taking hits and getting kicked around.
Hunter evolution complete. Level up and bonus points.
John was as satisfied as an old-marine corp drill instructor ever could be. Dean was proud to the point of blindness.
Which is why they never saw the biggest hit coming.
To Be Continued... )