A/N: So when I was writing this chapter I was looking up the boys' guns on the Internet Movie Firearms Database (yeah, as awesome as it sounds) and then I ended up just scrolling past all the Season One stills going, "So young, so young!"
So I'm not going to die by demon, John thought as the gun in the boy's hand swung up. I'm going to be murdered by a Sasquatch instead.
He didn't have a second. His hand was in his pocket. The brass knuckles were a smooth gilt weight.
He hurled them at the boy in a blur of gold. The boy dodged to the side, caught by surprise. The mouth of the gun never moved from John's center of gravity, but the kid wasn't watching him anymore. John took two swift steps and as the brass knuckles fell to the linoleum with a ringing clatter he seized the boy's right wrist in his left hand and brought his right fist swinging up towards his face.
The boy saw it coming, moved, failed to move fast enough. John's blow caught him on the chin and he grunted and staggered. But up close the kid was even bigger and about as solid as a log, and the blow didn't faze him for long. John deflected an elbow to his neck, moved his feet out of stomping range. It was an awkward shuffling dance, the two of them joined by John's octopus grip on the gun hand.
"Omni immundus spiritus," the kid chanted, in a young, rough, unleavened baritone, "omnis satanica potestas-"
Rite of Rome. Rite of Rome. An exorcist?
John chimed in at a shout. "Omnia incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio-"
The kid stuttered off into confusion. He reached for John's face with his free hand, fingers crawling after John's eyes. John jerked back.
"Christo," he spat.
And there - the kid's arms slackened, broad face awash in uncertainty, eyes saying What is going on-
John wrapped his leg behind one booted foot, got a hand on that thick neck, and pushed. The boy crashed back like a felled tree, his skull cracking gently against the ground, which was linoleum over concrete.
John knelt on his chest, took a second to wrench the gun out of his loosened grip. It was a pistol and it was chambered, that's all that John could tell, and he thanked You Know Who - all right, he thanked Godholy for something of an answered prayer. It was no shotgun, but it was a projectile weapon and that was all he needed to take on a human.
He put the barrel up against the fold of flesh beneath the boy's throat. This was maybe over-aggressive, considering the Roman Rite and what that implied. But the kid did try to shoot John first, so. And it got him to lie quietly, hands up by his head.
John was suddenly so attached to his life, now that he'd gotten it back.
"Are you an exorcist?" John hissed.
The boy's ribcage expanded and deflated against John's knees like a bellows. Shit, Sasquatch was incredibly accurate, this kid was going to be huge. He blinked, head still obviously ringing from the impact with the floor, and focused dark eyes on John. "I'm a hunter."
"Yeah, I guessed that from the duds, pal," John said. "And that haircut. Trucker-hat custom. Just what the hell kind of thing would you be hunting in here?"
"Look," the kids said, very very calmly, "look. I'm sorry about-" he gestured gently with one finger towards the gun pressed against his throat. "-that. It was a mistake. I thought that you were some-"
"You thought I was a demon," John said. "But hey. Christo. Name of God on my lips. So I'm not. So what I want to know is what brought you in here?"
The boy swallowed against the steel. "It's hard to explain when you're sitting on my lungs," he pointed out, reasonably enough. Indeed, he sounded slightly breathless. Also as though this was not the first time he had been held down at gunpoint. That was interesting. "Let me up and I'll tell you."
John considered. He didn't really want to surrender the upper hand. But what was the point in keeping a human kid pinned to the floor?
Besides. If Ravenscar had pulled in some out-of-towner who had the Roman Rite memorized, something was definitely going on. John needed to figure out what. This seemed like a better starting point than wandering around having satanic hallucinations.
"Fine," he said. He pulled away the gun, lifted it into sight. "I think I'll hang on to this, though, you know?"
The kid grimaced but looked resigned. He gave a jerky little nod. As if John were actually asking for his agreement.
John rocked off his knees back onto the balls of his feet, lifted himself off the kid's chest and packed up a few paces. Slowly, the kid rolled up to sitting and then gathered his long legs under him, coltish and almost comical, what with the shaggy hair and the baggy jacket.
As soon as he was standing he cast his head around, searching for something - for the book he'd had in his hand. It had flown across the hall during the fight and fetched up against the wall by the door painted with the Seal. He crossed over to it and picked it up, moving slowly, probably fighting dizziness from blow to the head.
John pointed to the red paint on the door. "That was you?"
"Yeah."
"Last night?"
"No. This morning."
"That's not right," John argued. "The chains have been off the doors since last night, I have it on good authority."
"Yeah," said the kid. "And we sealed the doors then. But that one," he pointed to the red Seal behind him, "that one I just painted, maybe an hour ago."
"What? Why?"
The kid shifted, shrugged. "The first one was gone." He lifted his hands, twiddled his fingers. "It's like it…dissolved."
"Dissolved," John repeated. He looked at the Seal, saw the slight bubbled distortions in the red paint, and the thought again bubbled up to the top of his mind. Pollution.
"Shit," he said out loud.
"What do you know?" the kid asked, low and intense.
John looked at him. "Not much," he said. "But I've got a feeling."
God, he thought, I would kill for a cigarette. There were pin-clawed lizards crawling over his skin. It felt hard to breathe; he parted his lips to drag air down into his (pink and clean and wide, wide-open) lungs.
"Wait," he said sharply. "You said we."
"My brother and I," said the kid, and then there came down the long echoing hallways the sound of a door slamming shut.
The door slammed behind him and a string of curses immediately sprang to Dean's mind. But he felt resigned, in a way. Monsters and creatures were one thing: that was a true hunt, woods and open spaces. Wandering around in abandoned mental hospitals was another. Of course something like this would happen. Why had he and Sam split up, again? He needed to take a lesson from Scooby-Doo: split up and somebody falls through a trapdoor. Come on, Dean.
The room he had wandered into was empty, aside from some tables and chairs and a puddle of inky blackness that had turned the EMF into a tiny portable Christmas tree and smelled like… like things Dean didn't have words for, things you could only feel and not describe. Smelled oily and sweet and fecund, like mold in a motel sink. Only not, only… worse. And it was warm, too, giving off a faint moist heat when he put his hand down near it. Which was when the door had slammed and the handle locked up.
So he was cut off there. Dean turned to survey the room again. It was windowless and dark, but on the far side there was a doorway, wide enough for double doors, letting in faint light that Dean used to pick his way across. He'd have used the flashlight but he was carrying the shotgun, a heavy cool weight that centered him. Sam had figured that it was a spirit haunting the hospital, some enraged post-patient gone posthumously poltergeist, so Dean had loaded up on rock salt.
That black shit by the door, though. No way a little rock salt was going to take care of that.
The light was coming from above: a skylight, empty of glass, over a shallow and befouled pool. Shards of glass glinted on the concrete bottom. There were things that looked like blackened feathers wallowing in the corners with other kinds of scum. What, did a seagull die in here? Dean sniffed delicately. He smelled water and dust, but no rot.
He stayed back from the edge of the pool. Something about it made his skin crawl.
The door that had slammed was locked.
"Dean's in there," the kid said, voice a pitch lower and frenetic. "I need to get inside." He looked up and down the hallway. "Is there another door?"
"No," John said curtly.
John rummaged in his pocket. Matchbook, lighter, a tangle of talismans, card deck, knife, notebook, pen, lint. He swapped the handgun into his other hand and delved into the other pocket. Lint, knife, flask and - yes.
He pulled out the charm, fingerbone of a thief carved into a slender arrow-point on one end and an elaborate pattern of sigils on the other. He warmed it in his hand.
"What's that?" asked the kid.
Before John could answer there was a loud spitting BANG from beyond the door. The kid grabbed the door handle and shouted. "Dean!"
John muscled him aside and jammed the arrow of bone into the spilt between the doors. "Do you have a flashlight?"
The boy fumbled one out from his deer hunter's jacket. "Why-"
John snatched it out of his hand and with one thumb spun the cap on the vial of rood-light oil. He spattered oil thickly on the glass lens.
"These doors will open. Do not go in. Just turn that on, and keep the light pointing straight forward." The bone in his palm warmed against the skin. "Understand?"
He nodded, dark eyes wide and wild but lifting the flashlight up into position, and John thought passingly of Chas and of Angela. People who followed his orders in this dark-lit version of the world; and one dead (or gone), the other something hollowed out by horror but resolute and watchful, one who had sent John to this place-
Definitely mostly not about the girl-
BANG. The boy flinched and his eyes bled desperation.
John stepped back from the doors and said one very old word. The thief's bone wobbled and twisted and a sharp crack sundered the doors apart.
The flashlight beam dove forward into darkness. John saw the black footprints of Lucifer throwing back a scrim of light from near the door; he saw lumpen human shapes on the floor, heaving and roiling. Only where the anointed flashlight beam fell did he see the clear linoleum, a circle of light darting uncertainly around. Then the kid pointed it up, towards the back of the room, towards the pool.
The pool.
The water boiled and steamed. Or it seemed to. Something about that was not quite right, but it was too far away, the flashlight beam too yellow, and John could not see clearly enough. But there was a man, standing back from the lip of the pool, a shotgun in his hands trained downwards into the water.
"DEAN!" shouted the boy, and the man turned.