JINX
Summary: An abandoned orphanage, two Winchester brothers, and three creepy spirits of deceased children deciding to use the brothers as pawns in their own twisted games. Hurt!Sam, Hurt!/Protective!Dean.
Author's note: I started this story a while back but now, after several months, I've finally managed to make some progress with it. Yippee! I'm so sorry for taking so long to write and post a new story, but it's been some busy months – again!
This was originally meant to be a one-shot but since it's becoming longer than I intended it to be, I'm turning it into a two-shot. Last chapter will (hopefully!) be posted within the next couple of days.
Shout-out to Middle-Earthling, PJHPcrazysis, The fan of supernatural and the always amazing KKBELVIS for sending me such sweet PMs. You guys are too kind.
-Elisa.
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"There are no winners in real games."
- Dejan Stojanovic, "The Sun Watches the Sun".
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"Ready or not, here we come!"
Fighting against vertigo, Sam pressed his back harder against the wall he was leaning against – his heart hammering rapidly and his blood running cold as the children's voices kept up their singsong around him.
"We know you're heeeere… Squeak, Piggy, Squeak!" One of them sang and giggled. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"
In the pitch-dark hallway of the old, abandoned orphanage, Sam felt rather than saw the shadows creep closer. He slowly started edging his way along the walls; searching for an exit while his breath puffed out in little white clouds that were barely visible in the darkness of the room. The lights of the dusty-old lamps, hanging on each side of the walls of the narrow hallway, flickered shortly and allowed Sam a brief glimpse of pale, twisted children faces – their black holes instead of eyes staring unseeingly back at him – before the hallway fell dark once more.
Despite the chilly temperature of the hallway, a drop of sweat rolled down Sam's temple and got mixed with the trickle of blood from his hairline. Trying to blink his disorientation away, Sam desperately fumbled for a way out of the darkness – a way to escape the creepy spirits of the dead orphaned kids that was currently closing in on him, and a way to get back to Dean. The younger Winchester prayed his big brother was okay; had last seen Dean a few seconds before the ghosts had decided to make the brothers a couple of pawns in their own twisted version of Hide and Seek by separating the Winchesters by an invisible force. Sam could only wonder what had happened to Dean - could only hope that Dean hadn't been dragged through the various corridors in the old orphanage, as Sam had, until left in the situation where Sam found himself now; in darkness, bruised and alone. The youngest Winchester brother had lost his weapon and flashlight along the way, and was only left with a small container of salt in his pocket that Sam knew wouldn't be much to ward himself against the ghosts.
"Goosey goosey gander, where shall I wander? Upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber.." The children voices reeled off while coming disturbingly closer.
Sam's heart pounded wildly in his chest as he desperately searched his pockets for anything useful – letting out a short sigh of relief when his fingers closed around his zippo. It wouldn't be a great defense against the ghosts but it could at least provide him with a little bit of light until he'd made a protective circle of salt around himself. The younger Winchester pulled the lighter out, and swiftly opened the lid with a clink-sound which easily ignited a glowing flame that lit up the smothering darkness around him – then gasped as he found himself face to face with one of the dead kids.
"There I met an old man who wouldn't say his prayers.." The ghost sang with a disconcerting smirk, and Sam's eyes widened as he, while reaching into his pocket for the salt, felt something grasp his ankle."I took him by the left leg and threw him down the stairs."
Sam yelped as he was suddenly airborne – his breath stolen from him a few seconds later as the ghost let go of him and sent his body tumbling down a set of stairs, before the young hunter connected with the bottom of the staircase with a sickening thud.
A small, pale hand closed around the zippo lighter and picked it up from where it had landed in the commotion – the gleam of the small flame lighting up the staircase underneath. The dead child looked down at the youngest Winchester, who was lying motionless and sprawled out on the bottom of the stairs, and the ghost smirked wickedly before turning towards the two other ghosts.
"Gotcha." The kid smirked and blew out the flame with a giggle that echoed into the night.
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"Saaaaam?" Dean called - then coughed from the dust of plaster that had rained down on him from when his body had collided with the drywall. "Sammy?"
Shotgun still in hand, Dean shook off the cobwebs and picked up his still luminous flashlight from the floor before letting the beam slide across the room. Through the dusty beam of light, the older Winchester's eyes fell upon the remains of what had most likely been the dining room back when the house had been a functioning home for orphaned kids. The room was more or less empty – apart from an oblong table in the middle of the room with a row of chairs on each side of it. Judging from the layer of dust covering the surface of the table and the enormous patterns of spider webs that decorated the space between the chairs, it was clear as day that the furniture hadn't been used in ages. It was like having entered a frigging museum.. or a tomb.
"Sam?" Dean called again and hissed a bit as a sharp stab of pain shot through his head.
Dean winced as he touched the back of his throbbing head, then gritted his teeth as his hand came back bloody.
"Those ghosts are in need of some serious ass-kicking!" Dean growled to himself.
He got back on his feet with a grunt, raised the shotgun and flashlight in front of him and left the dusty room in the direction he'd originally come from before he and his brother had been separated.
The brothers had arrived and checked into a motel room in the nearest town earlier that day after Dean had found the case in a local paper. Some teenagers had gone missing after they'd supposedly been camping in the nearby woods and played a round of I dare you-challenges that involved staying a night in the old orphanage. Only two out of five teenagers had made it out of the house alive. The bodies of the three other teenagers had been found the following day - one of them hanging from a banister with a set of jump ropes around her neck. Another one had bled out in the basement of the house after his tongue had been cut out, and the last one had died from eternal bleedings after having received multiple hard blows to his body.
Dean and Sam had talked shortly with the local police who thought the murders were the work of a serial killer, and the brothers then spent most of the day questioning the surviving teenagers before doing research about the abandoned orphanage. They found several testimonies and reports witnessing about weird experiences or mysterious deaths happening at the orphanage, and the brothers had then decided to pay the house a visit themselves.
After entering the house, they had decided to stay together and search the house in unison. The orphanage was a three stories house with lots of stairways, rooms in different shapes and sizes, and crooked hallways that seemed to go on forever.
"Hey, check this out." Sam had said at one point as he had used his flashlight to light up a framed picture hanging on the shabby yellowish wallpaper that covered the walls.
"Oak Hollow Orphanage, 1927." Dean read at the bottom of the picture and let his eyes scan the old black and white picture showing a bunch of kids lined up in front of the building.
"You see this?" Sam asked and tapped the glass with a finger, pointing at three kids that seemed a bit desolated from the rest of the kids. "I think these are the disabled kids who died here back in the early 30s."
"It was a blind kid, a mute and a cripple, right?" Dean had asked, thinking back at the article Sam had shown him at the motel room earlier in the day, while he studied the faces of the kids on the framed picture.
"Right." Sam nodded. "Although it was never proved, rumor has it that they were murdered by some of the other orphans because they didn't like how the disabled kids were different from the rest of them. They were the first reported deaths in this house, but all the mystery didn't start until years later."
"Still, several witnesses have mentioned hearing children's laughter and some even swear they've seen glimpses of kids here too." Dean said. "Could be the ghosts we're looking for."
"Yeah, seems plausible." Sam agreed and nodded towards a door behind Dean. "Maybe we can find their names in a register."
Dean turned around and let the beam of his flashlight slide over the sign on the outside of a door saying 'Private' before looking back at his younger brother.
"Time to do some more research, geek boy." Dean grinned.
It had all gone rather smooth from there. Sam had picked the lock of the door while Dean kept a look-out for any potential dangers, and the brothers had then entered the room. The dusty office-like room consisted of a wooden desk with a chair, and up against the walls were several card index cabinets filled with files about the orphans that had stayed in the house over the years.
Dean had to give it to his brother; Sam was skillful in everything that contained documents and systematics and it didn't take the youngest Winchester long to locate the files belonging to the murdered orphans. Since the kids hadn't had any families, their bodies had been buried in the woods behind the orphanage – no cremation involved.
It had all been rather easy.. too damn easy.
As the Winchester brothers headed back towards the entrance of the house to get outside to find the graves, Dean had suddenly been flung across the hall and through a large doorway before having connected with a wall. The impact shortly robbed him of consciousness and when he'd woken up again, everything around him had been eerily quiet and Sam had been nowhere in sight.
"Sammy?" Dean called again, then froze on the spot as he heard children's laughter echo through the big house.
Dean involuntarily shuddered from the sound of their giggles - there was always something extra creepy about the ghosts of dead kids, but the pure evilness in the sound also reminded the older Winchester brother that these ghosts could have done anything to Sam while Dean had been out cold.
"I swear to God, if you've hurt Sam.." Dean muttered and clenched his jaw hard before moving forward once more.
With his shotgun and flashlight still held out in front of him, Dean started ascending the stairs of the main hall as soundlessly as possible, while he listened carefully for any sound that could indicate where the ghosts were hiding and where Dean could find his missing brother.
"Olly olly oxen free!" A kid's voice singsonged.
"What is this? The Casper version of Hide and Seek?" Dean growled, his breath turning into white puffs in the now chilly temperature of the hallway. "Where's my brother?"
"Huckle Buckle Beanstalk!" One of the kids yelled.
"Your turn to find him! Close your eyes and count to sixty!" Another one of the kids giggled and Dean's knuckles turned white as he clenched the shotgun hard in anger.
"No more games!" He shouted. "What have you done to my brother?"
"Play with us!" One of the kids demanded and Dean then had to jump to the side when a ball, the size of a small boulder, suddenly came flying directly at him from the darkness.
"The hell..?" Dean muttered - then dodged as another ball swooshed through the air, barely missing his head.
"Peek-a-boo." One of the dead orphans announced as she all of a sudden showed up in front of him, but Dean was fast and fired off a round of rock salt bullets that pierced through the ghost and forced it to disappear before it could do any harm.
As the resound of the gunshot died out, Dean expected more hits to come his way - his finger resting over the trigger of the shotgun, alert and prepared for the next attack to appear. But nothing came at him. In fact, everything had once more turned eerily quiet around him and that actually felt more disconcerting to Dean than the straightforward attacks had done.
The hallway turned colder around him, and the flashlight in his hand started flickering. Dean tapped the flashlight against his thigh a couple of times, and when he raised it again to light up the surroundings in front of him, the older Winchester gaped a little from the sight that met him.
Jinx.
The word, that hadn't been present just a few seconds earlier, was now painted everywhere in front of him – on the walls, on the floor and even on the ceiling – and a cold feeling, that had nothing to do with the temperature of the hallway, crept up on Dean. The crimson-colored word, that had already started sagging, looked like it had been painted in blood, and Dean swallowed nervously while dread started filling his heart.
"It's not Sam's blood. It's not Sam's blood." Dean muttered to himself before he picked up his search for his little brother once more - slowly moving down the corridor while keeping his senses on high alert.
He rounded a corner and clenched his teeth as the word Jinx kept decorating the walls he passed by. Dean felt like a pawn in a sick game – like a mouse in a maze trying to find the piece of cheese without knowing that electrocution could be waiting right ahead. Dean knew that the ghosts could attack him at any time they wanted, but they didn't as much as make a sound, and that made the oldest Winchester feel even more like a piece in the dead orphans' twisted games.
Dean was about to call for Sam once again when the beam of his flashlight fell upon Sam's shotgun that was lying deserted in the middle of the floor. The older brother's worry for the youngest Winchester didn't lessen one bit by the thought of Sam being without a weapon to protect himself from the ghosts, but Dean still felt a little bit hopeful that the discovery of the gun meant that he was at least getting closer to finding Sam.
Drops of blood on the floor was the next thing Dean noticed – a fresh, bloody trail that could only have been left behind by Sam, and could only mean that Sam was hurt. The oldest Winchester followed the trail and his concern for Sam only grew bigger – especially when the trail abruptly ended like had the younger brother suddenly vanished into thin air.
Dean stopped in front of a staircase; his heart started hammering rapidly when he lit up the darkness below him and saw a small puddle of blood at the bottom of the stairs.
"Sam." Dean whispered, his mouth turning dry when he thought about the huge possibility that his younger brother had fallen down the stairs somehow.
Sam was nowhere in sight but Dean could clearly tell that a person had been dragged away from the bloody puddle on the floor – the red trail leading away from there surely indicating that much. The only question – one Dean didn't want to think about for even one second - was whether his brother had survived the fall or not.
"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water." The ghosts suddenly sang in unison, tearing Dean out of his dark thoughts while the temperature dropped once more around him. "Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after."
Dean thanked his great hunter reflexes when he all of a sudden felt something shove him in the back and the quick grasp he took of the wooden banister averted the fall he would have definitely taken down the stairs had he not been trained to react fast. Dean had dropped his flashlight in the hurry, but he picked it up from where it had landed a few steps down - then rushed down the rest of the stairs before the ghosts could try to push him a second time.
"You're it!" One of the ghosts giggled from somewhere above him.
"I'm done playing!" Dean growled at it, only barely holding off his desire to wildly fire off his shotgun until hitting one of the frigging spirits, but knowing it would be pretty damn stupid to waste the bullets. As soon as he'd found Sam though, those ghosts would be nothing but a burning pile of bones – and Dean would personally be the one to light up the fire!
The dead orphans went quiet yet again, and the hair on the back of Dean's neck stood up as the word Jinx turned up in his new surroundings as well. The older Winchester followed the bloody trail from the bottom of the stairs and through an opened set of doors – then found himself in a big room, containing a long row of beds on each side of the oblong walls, which he guessed must have been working as a dormitory in the orphanage's glory days. Dean let his flashlight slide across the empty beds but then stopped in his tracks when his eyes suddenly fell upon his missing little brother.
"Oh shi-, Sam!" Dean shouted and quickly ran towards his brother.
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TBC..