A/N: This is related to What are we going to say? and Huh, don't quite know that one. It would be best to read those before this so that you get the little details, but the overall plot doesn't need them.
Please enjoy!
Sam snores. It's not loud nor obnoxious but it's there, creeping in every so often, more of a hitch than a jagged intake. As if his throat sticks just long enough to delay his breath.
It's nothing really, but it scares the dog on occasion. Like now,
"Get on your side," Dean groggily shoves at the body next to him that had jumped closer.
"Can't help it if your brother freaks me out," now Dean's pushing on the lump with his foot.
"He freaks me out too but you don't see me crying about it." There's a struggle, "you're hogging the sheets, give."
"Could you two shut up?" Floats over to the pair, "trying to sleep." Eddy snorts.
"Really? It sounds like you're dying over there." No one sees the face Sam makes in the dark.
"Do you want the floor? Normally, you'd be on the floor." Eddy doesn't exactly take that threat seriously, but he shifts slightly allowing Dean to stretch out again. "Go over to Sam. He should suffer since it's his fault."
"Yes, throw me into the giant limbs. He's huge. He'll turn over and crush me and then what will you have?"
"Peace and quiet?" Eddy growls; Dean chuckles; Sam frowns.
"What'd I do?" Two barks of laughter come from the other bed, and Sam's left without an answer.
"Go back to sleep." Sam already did.
The day had been long and full with running and dodging, much more defensive rather than offensive maneuvers than Dean liked. Their research had failed them, which they learned the very hard way, but learned none the less and dealt with it. At least a tight plan had been made, waiting to be implemented; even Sam didn't see any holes in it and that boy was hard to please.
Throughout the night Eddy slides more and more into Dean's space until his nose is pressed into Dean's back, neither notice.
In little over a year Eddy had grown into a large frame. His mother was no small contender but his dad most definitely helped Eddy get his bulk. Like the boys, it wasn't fat, he was mostly muscle. Eddy was the quickest way to a girls heart, Dean had found early on, something about mismatched eyes made the girls melt. Oh God, putting Sam and the dog together was a dangerous combination. Dean attributed it to the floppiness of Eddy's ears and Sam's hair.
Today Sam had gone through a wall, ok not so much through as more like dented severely. Foolishly they split up to cover more ground in the apartment building to find the creepy. It found Sam easily enough.
During hunts, Eddy usually kept pace with Sam. Dean joked that his brother was a magnet for trouble; it wasn't all that funny when true. Eddy guarded Sam more, never deliberately doing so; it was a habit. One that saved Sam's life today.
The boys woke up to barking. Sam immediately noticed the lack of light from the window; Dean noticed he was alone in the bed.
THUMP
More barking.
Dean pulled his knife out from under the pillow; both brothers got up in union from different beds. Eddy was a few feet away from the door; his barks turned into growls, teeth poked out from his mouth as his lips curled.
THUMP
"…the fuck?"
A bulge appeared momentarily where the force of the hit had been on the door and the wood around the latch creaked and splintered slightly.
"Guess he didn't like our plan."
"Guess not, Dean." The shotguns were in the trunk; Sam had only a .45. It was already leveled at the door. "Ed, move."
Still growling, he slowly backed away from the door until he was by Dean's side. A gun had already replaced the knife in Dean's hand.
The third attack on the door did it in.
It didn't wait for them to react, even if they were pulling triggers multiple times that it didn't seem to feel. Dean certainly did feel the counter hitting his face as he was thrown back into the sink outside the bathroom.
In a situation where one is down, it's not polite to make a break for the door, but then in normal situations the effective guns would already be in the room rather than the trunk of the car; keys in hand, Sam scrambled through the thrashed door toward the nearby Impala.
The form absorbed the surrounding light, dimming the room. Shadows danced with the same fury as the creature when it leapt onto Dean, catching his skin with it's claws. Dean fought; he always did. Black bled from it's claws into the wounds it made on Dean, leaving a trail on him.
Eddy leaped toward the black creature and Dean experienced the briefest moment of split reality. He was watching Alex fight. He was watching Eddy fight.
White hot pain tore through his chest shooting to his back, and he was done. In the darkness he was pushed into he could have sworn he heard shotgun blasts, muffled a bit but still a shotgun; he lost count of how many times it went off.
The Man of Black normally went after children. Hid underneath their beds, behind doors, in closets. It wasn't often that it searched out it's prey so large and willing to fight. Guess after taking little children for so long it finally felt like a challenge. Probably not the wisest of night creatures if it went for two random men it saw one night while contemplating a little girl in the motel room next door to them. Children are easy, give them a peak and their imagination does the rest. These boys? He smelled their deep imagination without even taking a breath. There wasn't a need to play hide and go seek with them.
Too bad the two random guys he finally took a chance to go after, weren't so random, and had been there for him knowing full well what he was.
It didn't help that he had injured the younger one earlier in the day.
"Dean…"
Eyes fluttered. Nothing else followed.
"Dean." Stronger, firmer.
Sam held his brother as he checked the wounds underneath the shredded shirt. All of it was bleeding freely, being as loose with the meaning of 'freely' as possible. What bothered him more than that was the black within the torn skin. He wasn't sure, but some black had been absorbed by Dean. No good ever came from absorbing something from a creature.
"Dean. Wake up." Commanding.
They needed to get out of the room as gun shots and the screaming would have made people call cops, of course no one would want to check on the customers who were being murdered, that was what cops were for.
"Eddy." Sam turned toward the crouching mutt. "Watch Dean while I get everything together." Sam weakly smirked, "He'd kill me if I left his stuff behind." Eddy was already curling up next to Dean as Sam put a pillow underneath his brother's head. Sam worked fast. Usual response to a 911 call was seven minutes but gunshots usually shaved a few minutes off that time frame.
Eddy licked Dean's face.
"Knew you liked me…just didn't know in that way…" Whispered out to the dog. "But then…you always choose to sleep with me." Eddy nudged at Dean's chin with his nose.
"Dean." Across the room Sam hesitated, then began working more quickly. "Sam's a little worried." Dean's attempt at a chuckle earned him coughs instead. "We're getting you to a hospital, and the-"
"I have a feeling that this," Dean weakly gestured toward his wounds, "isn't covered." Eddy noticed there was less black within the wounds, but there was more blood.
"How do you feel?" Dean's eyes fluttered again
"Strange…" He was out again. Eddy whimpered.
"Sam."
"I know…"
Sam managed to maneuver Dean into the back seat of the car. Eddy joined him, letting Dean's head rest on his back. There wasn't any music playing when Sam drove.
"You can't take him to the hospital."
Sam looked at Eddy from the rear view mirror,
"I know." He hadn't been heading in that direction.
"This is wrong," signaled the waking of Dean. Eddy was lucky he was a dog and didn't have to strain his ears to hear; he doubted Sam even heard the man's ragged breathing.
"We are getting you help."
"It should be you in Sam's lap."
Eddy tilted his head,
"What?"
"When you were smaller. You'd sleep in Sam's lap as we drove." Eddy didn't like how Dean's eyes looked. "Remember?" They had been driving in silence long enough for some of the shallowest injuries to crust up, stopping the bleeding. In the majority, Dean was a bloody mess. He'd scream at himself for ruining the seats if he could. "He'd pet you without even knowing…just kept going until he nodded off himself." The faintest hint of a smile caressed Dean's face.
"Dean." His eyes were closed. "Dean."
"Hhm?"
"Can you please not go to sleep, it freaks me out." Eddy fixed him with a look, "don't make me resort to biting you."
"I could take you."
"Like a flea could take an Elephant," Eddy turned to Sam, "Right, Sam?"
"He owns you, Dean." Dean shook his head faintly.
"You're a dog. I own you." Eddy blinked.
"You didn't."
"I think he did," supported Sam.
"Right, first thing after you get all healed I kick your ass. It wouldn't be fair to fight a man when he's down. That's just wrong." Dean blinked in a quick succession, fighting, until they stayed closed. It was with the last blink Eddy became scared.
"His eyes are black."
Sam was silent while the car roared.
Eddy had asked where they were going enough times to know he wasn't going to get an answer. Sam kept driving, but it was a driving that had purpose, not aimless. One single hour had passed since the motel and Dean had been unconscious for three quarters of it. Every so often Sam heard a whine from the dog, but not from pain. Perhaps a little of it was because of pain; he had fought off a vicious black creature. Sam felt it was safe to say every single one of them had been thrown into a wall within the last twenty four hours.
It had become so common an occurrence neither of the boys nor the dog thought much of it. At least the wall was there to keep them from going any further. Imagine that, getting tossed away from where you need to be.
The dog was whining.
"Eddy?" Exact words weren't needed.
"I don't like this. He doesn't feel right."
"Feel?"
"He's too cold." Blood loss will do that, "And Dark." Usually pale with blood loss.
"I'm doing what I can, Ed. Have to sit tight like the rest of us."
"Tell me where we are going." No more questions. Sam adjusted his grip on the wheel.
"There was a girl not far from here who survived an attack from this thing. I figure if she escaped it then, she can help us now."
"A little girl?"
"Well, she's grown now, much older."
"She the old lady you interviewed?"
"Hit the nail."
"She didn't seem to know anything."
"You were in the car listening to Creedence." Sam's eyes flickered to the rear view mirror. "If she escaped it, she can help us."
"I wonder how she's going to take us showing up at her door like this."
"Don't give a damn," Sam sighed, "won't be much longer."
At five in the morning, headlights illuminated the front window to Catherine O'Keen's house, which was followed by urgent knocking then followed by even louder urgent barking, and poor Catherine was awakened. From her fluffy bed she hobbled to the window of her second story room and caught sight of the commotion on her porch. It didn't take long for her to more than hobble down the stairs and swing open the door. In another life Sam could have been a fireman by the way he carried Dean.
Soft blue nightgown fluttered through the living room as Catherine flipped on every light she could.
"What happened?"
"It found us," Sam said as he laid Dean down on a floral patterned sofa. Ragged breathing escaped from the unconscious form.
"It did this?" Asked the small elderly woman as she came around to sofa. "Your faster than me. Upstairs bathroom, everything you'll need is in there." Sam took the order without question bounding up the stairs. Catherine hadn't closed the front door in the rush; Eddy had used it to his advantage to invite himself in.
Gingerly she kneeled near Dean's head feeling his pulse, feeling his cold skin second. The boy was darkening, his light becoming dimmer. She heard the rush of Sam coming down the stairs.
"You need to clean these up before you do anything," Catherine said referring to the angry red torn flesh.
"Sam, the black's all gone." Catherine turned to the dog.
"You," deep surprise coloring her voice, "did you just…"
"You survived an attack by the boogeyman and you stumble when you see a talking dog?" She stared. "You said the black's all gone." The dog nodded. Catherine doesn't think she'll get used to this all that quickly. "Black…from the attack?"
"Wherever he has a scratch there was black." She paled.
"Oh God." She caressed the top of Dean's head. Sam kneeled next to her and began cutting the t-shirt off of his brother.
"What?" He worked and worried together.
"I only got a cut on my hand, only a little got in…that was enough." The boy in front of her was thrashed. Many of her flowers in the upholstery would never be seen again.
"His eyes are black." She didn't want to check to see if the dog was right. Catherine took one of the rags Sam had brought down and began cleaning alongside the boy.
"Clean and stitch the wounds, that I can do." She focused on the task at hand, "the rest I don't know what to do with."
"You said you got some. What happened?"
"It goes after children. It always has. Every story is the same. He comes at night and takes them away." She continued to rub away flakes of blood away from torn flesh. "You know why he chooses night, right?"
"Cover." She shook her head.
"Imagination. Black is a blank canvas for what is out there. Children look at it and see different things." She sighed, "it's a power we tend to loose as we grow older." She held up her hand, allowing Sam to see a slender scar across the meaty part of her palm. "He takes them, but the ones that escape become him."
"We aren't children."
She laughed and motioned toward the dog,
"doesn't mean you don't see as one. Children are open in a way that you are too." She gestures to the scar, "this let's me see that." Sam raised an eyebrow. "I don't think I got enough of him to become what he was, just enough to…" She focuses back on Dean. "I don't know what it means for him, if he was all covered."
"We don't become what we hunt." Soon it would be time to stitch, they were beginning to see more flesh than blood. "Ed, get the bottle in the glove compartment." The dog flew through the open front door; they didn't bother to close the Impala's doors during the scramble to get inside the house.
"Holy water," answered Sam to Catherine's questioning gaze, "before the stitches." All the dried blood was gone, now they were only dampening it's flow. "It might cause more bleeding…"
"Am I to think that this is the reason why you didn't take him to the hospital?" She sighed, "didn't want to explain the weird substance?"
"I can explain that way, who gives a damn." Dean after nearly an hour of being outside the range of the living, decided to join them. Either that or finally something just forced him to the surface, pain probably. He didn't come quietly.
Sam, already at his brother's side, didn't have to move much to get into his brother's view.
"Dean…" The whole of the injured man's eyes were so dark Sam couldn't tell if Dean had his focus on him. The tilt of his head clued Sam in; he was looking at Catherine. "You remember Catherine," Sam felt Dean look back at him.
"…look…fferent…"
"Dean, we cleaned the marks. We are going to use some holy water now."
"…Brighter…"
"Understand?" Dean blinked.
"I see you." How he stressed the last word set off warning bells inside Sam's head. Dean grabbed at the hand on his face, Sam's hand. "Sam…you're different."
Eddy trusted Sam and Dean, knew they would never do anything to harm him or anyone else, so it unnerved him when his back hairs stood up as he reentered the house. A small growl escaped when he gave Sam the bottle. The growl grew deeper when Eddy caught Dean's.
"Sam…please." Eddy didn't know what he wanted. "Move."
"Eddy…" Dean called softly; Eddy stopped himself from baring his teeth. Hesitating, Sam turned back to his brother.
"We are going to see if this helps," unscrewed the cap, "it might hurt." Dean grimaced,
"I know."
"Move please, Sam," pleaded Eddy. Sam shook his head.
"I can't," he poured water on Dean's torn chest. What followed wasn't a scream, that would have been expected; not a sound was made by Dean. What did make a sound was Sam crashing through the coffee table. The bottle of holy water breaking on the hard wood floor joined in on the chorus.
Now Eddy was barking. He didn't want to.
"It's not going to work," stressed Dean as he slowly pulled himself up; Sam was now the unconscious brother. "We don't like the light, but it doesn't hurt us."
As Catherine moved to get away Dean threw her down near his brother, broken glass cutting her hands.
"You destroyed the other one but not me." Still more an injured man than anything else, he was breathing hard and fast, left arm cupping his side, feet steady in their approach of the fallen. Eddy's presence got in the way.
"Dean," he growled, "Stop right now."
The injured man watched his companion before speaking.
"Ed, be a dear and get the fuck out of my way."
"Please Dean," Dean sighed deeply before stepping closer to the guardian of the fallen.
Eddy launched and Dean kicked out, stomachs were never made to have boots hit them. Dark fur skidded across the floor landing next to Catherine with a yelp. More agility presented in Dean's movements as he followed the destruction, dark eyes focused.
"Dean, Please." Catherine cried as he reached her. "Don't do this."
"Dean, Please," he mimicked, "what's with all the pleases and the calling of my name?" He grabbed her up, "I'm right here, no need to address what's in front of you." The force of his grab propelled her into him and he wrapped his other hand around her waist. "You're the one who escaped." She fought against him, blood smearing on his chest with each weak hit. He squeezed her closer making it harder for her to move.
"Stop this. We are trying to help you."
"I think he'd be angry having you slip through his fingers." His skin blackened where there was contact with woman in his arms. Hand prints smeared darkness across his chest, bleeding down into his arms. She kept fighting, only smearing more blood onto the darkness than getting away from it.
Strong hands tore her out of Dean's grasp; Catherine was free to disappear behind Sam.
"This isn't going to work," words stronger than he felt as he glimpsed what Dean was becoming.
Dean shook his head and smiled,
"Not at all, brother."
White gleamed out from Dean's mouth, a harsh contrast to the rest of his body. He lashed out hitting Sam hard in the chest. Falling back, Sam rebalanced before kicking Dean's feet from under him, who rolled out of way from Sam's attempt to subdue, catching Sam with a left hook to the jaw.
Each hit brought them closer together and farther away from the old woman bleeding on the floor. At this point, that's all Sam can hope for.
He'd sparred with his brother before, the only difference was now Dean wanted to harm.
Caught between guarding the innocent or helping Sam, Eddy watched on. Not knowing what to do, he didn't move. When Sam ended up in a chokehold, lips turning blue, Eddy figured his place in the little dance and rushed forward biting at Dean's arms.
Leaving one hand on his brother's neck, Dean muzzled Eddy. His hand covering Eddy's nose and closing his mouth. The dog joined Sam in not being able to breath.
Silence engulfed the room alongside the struggle.
Everything was soft in Sam's focus and bright dots danced around, teasing him of their nimbleness. Slowly, he lost at his fight. He couldn't hear Eddy next to him anymore, nor did he feel the hand on his throat.
"Oh God," left Dean's lips.
Eyes squeezed closed, Sam swam in air.
"Get on your side," Dean groggily shoves at the form next to him.
"If you weren't too busy rolling around, you'd know that I am," a leg kicks out catching Dean in the shin.
"Hey. I'm a sick man here," pulls the sheets closer, "who beats up a sick man?"
"You do."
"Ok, one thing? Those were special circumstances. It's not going to happened again."
"Says you." Dean rubbed at his face, noticing he was still sore in his arms.
"Well, ya know, if you piss me off, maybe, but never again, no."
"Uh-huh."
"Who's the one who decided to sleep in the same bed as the freak?"
"I'm a talking dog." Dean laughs.
"Every fucking time." He laughs harder, "never gets old. Never."
"You are one lucky bitch." An eyebrow goes up on that.
"I am not a bitch."
"Oh, you're completely a bitch."
"Sam's the bitch; I'm not." A shrug answers him back.
"After all we put this woman through, she makes us stay in her guest room." Eddy curls into Dean's side. "If it were me, I'd kick us out…We meet the nicest people."
Dean furled his brows,
"Do you even have memory?" Dean felt Eddy yawn,
"So there's a few bad plums. The ones that can keep their cool after having everything change around them are alright in my tale."
"Apples…bad apples."
"Whatever…She's nice."
"Oh you think she's being nice but this is just her bizarre tactic of torture," gestures at the wall, "three days of this flowery wallpaper and I'm sure my brain is being eaten away."
"You're just jealous of her skills at decorating."
"No, but Sam is."
"Where is he?" Dean shrugged weakly sleep grabbing hold,
"Probably having tea with the lady of the house."
Sam was in town not a mile away in a gas station looking at sunglasses; better to have a spare pair than have Dean walk around with his eyes closed in case his first pair breaks.Thanks to Catherine, the only thing cured was Dean's bloodlust. Best they could figure, her blood calmed Dean when he had absorbed it like the black.
Whatever had happened, Sam didn't think he could get rid of it. Catherine was evidence of that. When Dean and Sam first interviewed her, she had left things out of her story thinking they were only there for a thrill not to actually learn. She was a small girl when he came for her, young enough to handle change quite well. It was in her teen years she read up on what happened, tried hard to understand what she was. It dawned on her that it wasn't alright to know what a person's color was, if they were bright or darker than others. She found nothing but the legend and other variations across the world. Sam figured if she couldn't find anything there wasn't much else he could do.
Eddy said Dean felt different, smelled different, but assured Sam that it wasn't bad, nothing like that night. This smell was something to get used to.
There is a pair similar to Dean's own so Sam buys those; Dean's never really been big on change.