Rated for language and violence, some non-graphic sexual references in later chances, maybe. This is a work in progress, but it's all plotted.
This is AU, meaning, it's set in a canon where AHBL never happened. There's no deal and no war. I did it that way because I really miss season one, and also because I don't want to get too tangled in the demon mythology just in case I want to rewrite this some day as original fiction. Sam still knows what YED showed him in AHBL, but he learned it some other way, and YED is still dead. There are no psychics.
If you be not BiBro, you won't like this story, because I'm telling you right now, I hurt 'em both whenever I get the inkling. Anyone with anything bad to say about either of my boys can stop reading now, kthx.
You and I both know I don't own 'em, and I have yet to receive a paycheck in the mail. So, that's the last I'm gonna mention money and ownership, because it really depresses me that I do this for free.
Give It Away
by dragynfly grl
Chapter One
Sam's read Lord of the Flies. What kid survives the American public education system without being forced to question his own humanity? Still, Sam's a Winchester, grew up knowing what becomes of people, or at least their spirits, when they make their own rules. The demise of one little fat boy had never really struck him the way he was certain it was suppposed to.
What had stuck with him, in all that graphic loss of innocence was the dude in the parachute hanging from the trees, and not because of the symbolism and allegorical signifcance of the imagery. Sam was a kid, raised on open wounds and B-movies in motel rooms that actually oozed in places.
So, the slaughtering of poor Piggy made him sad, a little, maybe inspired a little sense of save the world, and one love, and blah, blah, blah. But the dude hanging from the tree and rotting? Well, that was just gross enough to be really cool.
It's not so cool when the corpse in the tree is his brother.
Earlier
Sam realizes too late that the little things about Dean -- the things that sometimes drive Sam nuts and make him want to lock his brother in a padded room somewhere for his own protection -- well, they're not Dean's fault.
Not that Sam has ever thought they were, not entirely.
"Dean! Where the hell are you? I said not to do anything 'til I got back from the library." Sam slams the bathroom door, heart still pounding, because Dean's supposed to be here, and if he ain't in the bathroom, he's either freakin' invisible or on the other end of the phone Sam clutches to his ear, exactly where he's not supposed to be.
So, yeah, Sam's pissed.
"Where do you think I am?" The voice on the end of the line is definitely Dean, which does absolutely nothing to calm Sam's racing heart. "Just because you can't drag your ass away from your books in time to make our dinner date with Big Bertha doesn't mean I'm going to just hang around and let someone else get hurt. Don't worry about it, though. I'll handle it. I took another look at the map, and I think I figured out where she's hiding."
"You think? Dean, you can't run in there half-cocked. You don't know what you're getting into. How'd you even get there? I've got the car." Sam's hand twists in his hair with frustration, his gut churning as he drops down to sit on the edge of the bed.
"Community service. The guy in the next room looked way too drunk to drive when he pulled up, so I designated myself the driver of his shitty Fiat. He won't even miss it. And gimme a little credit, why don't ya. It's not the first Sasquatch we've hunted. What's the matter? No faith in your big bro?"
"I have all the faith in the world, Dean. There's no absolutely no doubt in my mind you're going to get yourself killed one of these days. How's that for faith?"
Yeah, the stuff about Dean that Sam's always written off as too much responsibility draped over too-small shoulders and too much power given by way of there being no one else there to handle the important stuff are not that at all. They're not all that.
Sam pinches the bridge of his nose and takes a deep breath to keep from letting Dean have it with both ends of his very sharp, pointed tongue. "Look, just stop what you're doing and come back here. You need me to back you up on this."
"Sam, I can't just drop what I'm doing. I'm kinda hot on the trail at the moment, " a nervous laugh, "and I'm pretty sure she knows I'm here."
Sam drops his hand to his thigh with a thud, slack-jawed. "Wait? What? She knows you're there? How? Dean, that's stupid. Get out of there."
"How? Gee, I dunno, Sammy. I think it might have something to do with the high-pitched, girly squealing coming out of my phone." There's a pause and a grunt. "Well, that and the fact that I might've accidentally forgotten to set it to vibrate. The bitch's got ears like a wolf."
Panicked, Sam stands up and grabs his jacket. "Dean, do not approach her. If you leave her alone, she'll leave you alone. Those other people were provoking her."
"C'mon, dude. She dropped a tree on their tent while they were asleep inside it. How was that provoking her? She couldn't take the snoring?"
"Everyone at the campground saw them shooting target practice with their bows and arrows, and from what I heard, they weren't being too careful about where their arrows went. She could've perceived that as a threat." He's already got the keys in his hand, long index finger through the ring as he flings the room door open and heads for the parking lot.
"So, what? Ignorance and stupidity are cause to dismiss murder? I mean, if that's the case, I might like to take a tour of Washington, D.C. spread a little enlightenment."
"No..." Sam grits his teeth as he slides into the car, grunts with frustration in echo of the squeaking door as he slams it shut. "Dean, would you just shut up and listen to me for once? Just once!" Pinning the phone to his shoulder with his ear, he turns the key and throws the car into reverse, tires squealing as he gasses the engine. "Look," he sighs, "you do not want to get on this thing's bad side. I found something in the archives, some obscure local myth. I don't think this is a Sasquatch."
"Dude, tall, smelly, and covered in hair. Check, check, and check. Last I knew, that was a Sasquatch."
"Or a Wild Woman," Sam explains, spinning the wheel hard enough to fishtail out of the parking lot.
"Wild Woman?" There's a definite air of amusement in his voice. "So, she's like into kinky sex or something?"
Sam's about to say something along the lines of 'not kinky enough to do you' when Dean grunts into the phone.
Dean getting the final word; Dean raising his voice louder when Sam raises his; Dean never caving when Sam wants him to the most-- that's not Dean being a bossy older brother. It's not Dean being an ass or disrespecting Sam, not Dean refusing to see that Sam's grown up now and doesn't need a babysitter. It's not Dean full of himself or even confident, truth be told.
It's Dean sick. And yeah, by the time Sam realizes that, it's almost too late.
"Shit!"
"Dean? Dean, what's going on?" All he gets in reply is a crackling roar that sounds like something out of The Blair Witch Project and a clunk, followed by the tell-tale silence of disconnection.
One hand on the wheel and one eye on the road, Sam hits the End button with his thumb, then Call and Dean's speed dial code before pressing it back to his ear and waiting with his lip rolled between his teeth for Dean to pick up. Nothing.
"Damn it!" He drops the phone into the empty passenger seat and bangs his hand against the steering wheel before gripping it with white-knuckled ferocity and gunning the engine. One of these days, he's going to lock Dean in a padded cell for both their protection.
Gravel dust paints the giant oaks and sucker brush as the Impala roars down the camping lane toward the site of their last too close for comfort incident with the Wild Woman, also affectionately known as Bertha. About half a mile up from where they picked up the trail yesterday, he spots the camo-painted Fiat abandoned on the side of the road and does a 180 spin stop on the shoulder behind it. Dean can bitch all he wants about uneven tire wear and the inch of white dust on his baby after Sam kicks his ass. What the hell was he thinking anyway?
Slamming the door, Sam runs around the front of the Impala toward the Fiat, but as soon as his ears get used to the absence of the engine rumbling in his head, the forest behind him takes up its own raucous and draws his attention. A crack like ball lightning from a transformer splits through the wall of foliage, and Sam looks up in time to see the top of a giant spruce disappear into the canopy below it, swallowed into some unseen maw of darkness.
In his vast experience, only two things he knows can make that much noise: a high school marching band warming up and something trying to kill Dean Winchester.
Dean has a way of causing a disturbance everywhere he goes. The hidden lairs of hairy supernatural creatures are no match for Hurricane Dean, the human flare gun. Who needs maps when you've got a masochistic older brother?
Diving through the brush, Sam reaches into the waistband of his jeans for his Glock. He ducks the dangling branches heavy with moss and thick spring foliage, keeping the gun close to his chest as he pops the clip.
With the ammo in one hand and the rest of the gun in the other, he ploughs forward until he can see the trees swaying in front of him. Their leaves quake a tambourine rhythm against the percussive backdrop of snapping trunks. Ground zero.
Sam dives behind an oak broad enough to hide a Volkswagen and inspects his weapon. Standard rounds for him are consecrated iron. They'll pack a hell of a wallop on just about anything, and are cheaper than silver. They can afford to fire off a few rounds and not recover them, and plenty of creepy crawlies are sensitive to iron, making it a good shot in the dark if nothing else.
He's not sure what it takes to kill a Wild Woman--he was still waiting on a return phone call from Bobby when Dean pulled his disappearing act--but judging from the amount of commotion in the woods ahead, making friends with her is probably not an option. His best guess would be consecrated iron even if he didn't already happen to be packing it.
Best he can figure, a Wild Woman's something like a fairy crossed with a Sasquatch, big and hairy but supposedly good-looking underneath, and no slouch in the magics department. Last he checked, consecrated iron could take out both ends of the evolutionary ladder Bertha used to climb out of the primordial ooze, assuming she didn't just fall from the sky, and barring some hellacious hybrid vigor, she can be killed.
Not that there's time to grab another weapon if she turns out to be made of flubber or Kevlar.
Sam slides the clip back into the gun, gets a good whiff of gun oil warmed by the friction, the Winchester's performance enhancing drug of choice. As soon as it slides across his sinuses like tears blinked back in embarrassment, his hands steady and the pupils of his eyes dilate. His eyes are shadows, part of the darkness and what's between. His ears, just a second ago ringing and shell-shocked on the fringe of the battlefield, are suddenly too aware of what they can't hear.
He can't hear Dean.
Sam presses his back against the tree trunk, gun raised, and tries to quiet his pounding heart, his panting breaths, but even with the solid oak at his back to absorb the extra vibration, he can't hear anything that sounds like Dean.
There's little doubt in Sam's mind that someday Dean'll get himself killed doing what they do, but there's no way he'll do it quietly. No way in Hell or Backwoods, U.S.A. is Dean Winchester going down without a fight and, at the very least, a giant eff you.
Sam strains his ears, filtering out the adrenaline-forced rush of blood and too-loud rasp of hide and seek breath. Around him, trees snap, leaves crunch, and chaos is a four letter word--loud. Hell, the ground even shakes, and that has to make a noise that something can hear. But there's nothing in the air that says 'Dean Winchester is here,' so there's nothing in the air, as far as Sam's concerned.
Dean's either never been here, or he was--past tense.
The latter's not an option Sam's willing to consider, yet some part of him doesn't care about free will. So says the hair on the back of his neck and the vacuum fighting him for every breath.
What he wouldn't give for anything other than this raucous silence, the profound abundance of everything NOT Dean. He'd welcome a scraggly cedar to come out with a "Bite me," or a rock to start humming Metallica. At this point, he'd take a poorly aimed gunshot bouncing off the tree above his head as cause to stand in church--glory, Hallelujah. Instead he gets a banshee scream and a sloppy, sucking gurgle.
Sam rolls around to one side of the tree and looks for a better vantage point, spies a smaller trunk with a good amount of sucker brush beneath it, and decides that will have to do. Three long, hunched strides later, he ducks into the brush and creeps forward, paying no mind to the rot of dead leaves and fresh kills made of crunchy things that burst across his skin where his shirt rucks up.
When he reaches the other side, there's no sign of Dean. Sam figures he can't be far, though, because what he can see is one very pissed (and hairy) Wild Woman. Again, one of Dean's calling cards.
From behind, she takes after her Sasquatch cousins, except that her hair is golden, thick, and wavy. The pungent dead-skunk odor of matted, unwashed doghair doesn't hit him square in his olfactory center either. There's a smell, yes, but more a dead marigold smell, not sweet or perfumey but not pleasant. Close to the ground where the air's thick, the forest is a locker room just cleaned with generic scouring powder and dollar store spray.
The Wild Woman has her chin pointed to the sky, either smelling or listening, Sam can't say which, but when the vines and branches quit their quaking, he guesses listening, and takes their cue. There's nothing he can do about his heart pounding in his throat except swallow and keep the sweat in his hand chilled against the butt of the gun.
She cocks her head, a robin awaiting an earthworm, and leaps forward. She lands in a crouch with a splash and rocks back on her haunches. Squatting, she waits, and when she tires of waiting, her hands raise at her sides, fingers curling and uncurling, beckoning silently.
The earth answers.
From the center of the clearing water springs from the ground, tiny geysers that grow and dance, bobbing in and out like Whack-a-Mole decoys, then burst, spray from the blowhole of some underground whale. The Wild Woman bounces on her haunches, obviously pleased and swims her arms out in front of herself, parting unseen layers of fabric.
The forest answers.
Trees on the edges of the clearing lean outward, lifting their roots, and curling them back like fingers, leave a gaping hole in the center. The sodden earth slides through and swirls brown and milky into the bowl, but ivy and thorny dewberry vines slither down, around, and through, form a living mesh to hold back the mudslide.
Sam watches, so entranced by what transpires on the forest floor that he doesn't notice movement in the canopy until a shadow slides across the clearing. Jerking his eyes upward, Sam stifles the retch that roils up beneath his ribs.
Present
Dean dangles over head, wrapped completely in branches and vines like a spider's next meal. All Sam needs is one exposed steel toe cap glinting off Dean's boot through a gap in the vines to know it's his brother in there and not some Blair Witch stick doll. At that point, he's done crawling through the filth.
The question of 'Oh, brother, where art thou' answered, Sam doesn't dilly dally to find out if he'll get back more than a bloody rag with some mysterious hunks of meat wrapped in it. He fires a round through the Wild Woman's heart and bites back a snarl as she does a slow pivot in his direction, a look of betrayal in her eyes before she sees him and understands. After that, it's just a sliding collapse into the mud, an abandoned car sinking on dry-rotted tires into its grave.
Sam claws his way out of the undergrowth and launches himself forward as the trees release their human fruit. The vines draw back, unraveling around Dean with a twang like guitar strings drawn too tight until he's hanging by just a single strand,every inch of exposed skin striped with red welts and bruises.
Balancing precariously on the edge of the hole in the center of the clearing, Sam realizes as the last vine snaps that he can't reach Dean and watches his brother plummet into the open grave, Sam's stomach close behind.
Like the vines retreating back into their original places among the foliage, the ground shifts under Sam's feet, and he sprawls backward, falling hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. One of his long legs dangles into the cavern from the knee down and is swallowed into wet and cold before he can scramble away from the edge. He grunts and yanks his foot free, clawing for purchase with his upper body against the slippery earth.
Once free, he kips up onto the balls of his feet and lunges back to standing, pinwheeling his arms to gain balance on the still moving ground. By the time he gains his footing enough to move, there's no sign of Dean except the end of one broken grape vine peeking out of the mud like a memorial marker at the scene of a car wreck.
"Dean! No!" Sam throws himself forward and wraps both hands around the vine as the hole seals itself around his fists. "Dean!"
He drops back on his heels and pulls, feels the tendons cord in his neck and stand out like the quaking muscles in his forearms. There's a chance, he knows, that the vine's wrapped around Dean's neck, a strangling umbilicus, but it's the only grip Sam can gain, and he's not ready to let go. His feet start to lose purchase. Scrambling, he falls on his ass more than once. His teeth snap together when he does, hurt just enough to back up his adrenaline rush with pain induced anger.
"AAAAAHhhh!" He yanks again, certain his shoulders will come out if something else doesn't give first. The first tell-tale stretch and pop of impending dislocation vibrates down his spine, but he ignores it and pulls harder.
Freezing mud plays 'Uncle' with the last dry spot in his sock and wins, makes a victory lap up his calf. Sam trembles from head to toe, adrenaline, fear, anger, and just plain cold warring for the last ounce of determined strength in his long muscles. His breath hisses between his teeth as his lips curl back.
A sucking hole forms around the vine as he strains and twists at it, white knuckles bleeding, and he gains an inch, two, the hole broadening as something shifts beneath the mud. Finally, a hand emerges, bent like a sprout at the wrist.
Sam drops the vine and starts to dig at the soft earth around Dean's hand. He doesn't notice that the dirt's full of rocks, broken bits of wood, and stringy roots as his fingernails snag in them. They're bloody, some naked to the cuticle by the time Sam finds the cuff of Dean's jacket, and raw by the time he finds an elbow, but still, Sam digs.
"Dean!" His voice is scratched, strained like every other fiber of his body, and he barely recognizes it. All he cares about is Dean, Dean's hand, and Dean's (oh, God) blue fingernails.
Sam regroups, abandons the digging like a dog tactic, one hand at a time, and cups his hands together in the shape of a makeshift spade. There are at least two shovels in the trunk, he knows, but no time to get them. He thrusts his arms into the muck to his elbows and throws out a basketball-sized clump to the side, then another, and another, sweat burning in his eyes.
He finds Dean's hair first, then an ear, a stubbled jaw. He pauses with Dean's head uncovered to the chin, reaches under and around, searching for a pulse.
He almost doesn't feel it, weak and tentative in fingertips already throbbing to their own rhythm, but it's there, faint. No breath, though. No gurgle, no choke, no whine, hiss, or whistle, just silence.
Uncovering a shoulder, Sam reaches down into the muck and curls his hands into claws beneath Dean's arms. He takes a long, shuddering breath, and holds it, (brain aneurysm be damned) contracts every muscle in his body, and pulls.
There's a sound like a million leeches being scraped from their hosts, and Dean slides out of the hole, all but his boots above ground. Sam's bracing for the final heave, when his back spasms white hot and refuses to pull. His stomach curls in on itself, bending him forward at the navel, his breath coming in gasps that only make it as far as the branch in his trachea before his lungs hit a brick wall and refuse to expand. He loses his balance and drops to his knees, one hand at the base of Dean's neck and the other fisting in his own shirt.
His vision slides out of focus, but he can feel wet between his fingers that's not water, mud, or even sweat. At this point he'd almost hope for urine, something either one of them could afford to lose, but between the sticky, and the warm, there's hard and foreign. It hurts like a bitch and smells like blood.
Behind him, the Wild Woman laughs.
He doesn't want to give her the satisfaction of looking, of having the same look in his eyes he'd seen in hers, but there's some morbid fascination with blood and gore that's instinctive, part of the human mold.
He looks down.
No matter how much violence Sam's seen-- more than he'd care to remember-- his own blood on his own hands is still a shock. The splintered end of a broken vine protrudes grotesquely out of his abdomen, inside skin pushed outside.
"Son of a bitch."
TBC
A/N: Please review. Yeah, I know, everyone says that, but seriously...can't hurt, and you never know, I might update quicker if I get my fix early. Hint, hint...
Final Author's Note. I am cranking away on this, already have a couple of chapters done. Speed of updates will depend on feedback for the most part, and my hectic work schedule. But I'm warning you now that I have a few scenes planned that might delay me posting, because they were written with spoilery knowledge. I won't spoil anyone, so if I finish those chapters before the pertinent episode airs, I will hold off posting. You've been warned. And hopefully this is the last long author note you'll see.