Warnings: Minor character deaths, violence, dark themes and children in danger, altered!Sam, PTSD and the like.
When Dean learns that Sam had been in the back of that truck, he makes the drive two times faster than he should have. He begs over and over for anything other than a smoldering wreckage — or anything other than a crew of police officers, shaking their heads and discussing roasted bones. He'd brought his FBI suit just in case. As if it fucking matters. If that truck is nothing but a burnt up memory now, he wouldn't even have the composure to fake his way through the fake cop gig to get more answers.
Because it would mean that Sam's dead.
There is absolutely no reason Sam is alive, right now, he knows. None of the hunters had called him to tell him that his baby brother had made it out of this one. Then again, calling their cells gave him nothing but tired old hunter voice mails. Leave a message after the beep; if I'm probably dead, call so-and-so. The usual. And that's what Dean got. It's the same thing he gets when he calls Sam's cell phone sometimes, knowing his brother won't ever pick it up; it's just good to hear his voice sometimes.
God, he fucked up.
He puts a few dents in Baby's dash, and for once it doesn't register, because who fucking cares about the dash? He's fixed the dash a lot. He's made her good as new. Sam, though. He can't smooth the dents out of Sam. He can't scrape him off the bed of a fucking diesel truck and pat him off, good as new.
He thinks maybe he could be driving towards his brother's tomb.
And it'd be his fucking fault, if that is the kind of shitty, miserable tomb that Sam had to be violently put to rest in. He combs his stiff fingers through his hair, knuckles thudding and bloody. A grim luck: no cops yet, as he pulls up to the grizzly scene. But why? Those construction road blocks couldn't have stopped anyone from snooping after the likely black smoke rising up above that treeline.
His questions are answered, but he's as unsure as ever before when he parks the Impala beside the corpse of a hunter. All of them are from the night before, actually, laid out in awkward angles. They'd fallen like that, and there were slit marks across their throats, coating the leaves tacky with browned blood. Dean feels a pang for them, brief and nothing in the wake of his fear for his brother as he steps over them to investigate the back of the blackened cargo.
"Sammy?" he calls, voice rough and — maybe a little desperate.
It's a stupid thing, to call out. His voice echoes back at him from the singed metal walls. Inside, there are empty cages, bloody splatters, the remains of creatures that had burned awfully. And really, Dean hadn't even thought twice about that, about lighting a bunch of monsters on fire; it's not exactly humane. Isn't what Sam would have wanted.
His stomach lurches.
There's nothing alive in this truck.
There's no Sam. Or maybe there is.
Maybe Sam's just a smear now, a collection of bones lit up into ash.
And here Dean thought that meant Sam wouldn't be able to haunt him. Yet he's an entity, a memory, wringing all the junk in Dean's chest that keeps him breathing. It's like a weight over him, and he wishes that it had been Sam's ghost doing it. No, Dean knows this feeling too well. The heavy sensation of guilt and loss that drags him to his knees.
He's gone, he's gone, he's gone.
Here's — what happened, the night before.
The wild things began to burn.
It's strange to Sam that demons would be the bastards that took him in the first place all those years ago, and yet also be the key to his freedom. Or maybe it's only fitting. Sam isn't sure what to think anymore, after all these years. He's not sure what he is, what to believe, what to do with himself. He had expected to die then and there in the back of a burning diesel truck full of caged monsters. He had expected to look into the eyes of this little kitsune child and watch her scream and tortuously go up in flames alongside him.
Smoke fills the back, a thick cover that burns his eyes and makes them all cough and choke; the air tastes like burning flesh, embers drifting, some singeing small, red pockmarks against his skin. It's all familiar to him, at the very least — the sensation of roasting in a cage, anyway. The metal is hot but his hands are still being gripped for dear life by the girl, her eyes clenched shut and teeth grown sharp and exposed. Just a knee-jerk thing, a reaction to danger. She's afraid.
There are quite a few monsters up front that die by the flame since they'd been openly doused at the mouth of the dark diesel bed, their voices crackling like the inferno throttling their lungs, and then things suddenly just —stop. The smoke whirls and the flames die out like the pinched wick of a candle. Sam opens his irritated eyes, tears leaking down his face, and in the blurred world beyond him he hears the screams of things that aren't in the truck. The hunters, his mind supplies. The hunters outside are being butchered. He releases the shivering kitsune's fingers to turn himself in the direction, and though he can't make everything out that well, his ears are tuned in; in the darkness of the old warehouse, he had honed his other senses well enough.
Here's what he knows: demons.
Demons with back-up. It doesn't take them long at all to dispel the hunters at all, and he has to assume a demon with some pretty impressive pyrotechnic skills had killed off the blaze entirely. Likely… it's the young woman, or rather, the demon shaped like one; the one who had told him Dean was coming; the one he'd raked his longer fingernails down the arm of, like an animal spitting and biting for escape. He almost slumps against the bars in some concoction of relief and despair but decides against it, feeling the heat rising from the iron bars. Plan, Sam. Need a plan.
"It's okay," Sam chokes out in a low, low voice.
The kitsune girl crawls backward, her breathing uneven and heavy when the first demon steps up into the entanglement of dented cells. He tuts at the sight, as if he'd stepped into gum more than anything, but Sam focuses more on slumping forward like a drunkard. If he could just… If he could — just —
"Damn, this is a shitty ass mess if I ever did see one."
"Mmm, it's unfortunate. The hunters were quick on their feet tonight," another says, and Sam knows now for sure it's the woman from before. He can hear the thwumping of her shoes as she walks through to the back of the holding area; at the beginning of her strut, the holding cages are all filled with dead, unidentifiable beasts. Toward the middle, there are upended cells with burnt but inhaling monsters, writhing or moaning or hurling strangled obscenities. There's a little boy weeping and covering his ears in a cage barely fit for a bird, the top rounded, and the demonic thing doesn't even cast a glance at him. No. When the woman gets to Sam, though, she gives pause — and gives her brightest and most friendly smile.
"Sam. So nice to see you survived. I always knew you were made for bigger and better things."
Sam twitches. His heart stutters. His lungs ache.
But see — she makes one small mistake.
And even a Sam Winchester with a head injury who's just coming off of a high dose of drugs can see it: she gets close, her hand skating the hot edges of his confines before dipping in to touch his chin, and he's sure she's preparing for another damnable speech about how he's trapped, how he can't leave, how he's theirs nowforever, but he's not going to let her get to that point, no. No, no, no. He won't stay here. He won't sit still. Instead, he lunges forward, clamps his mouth onto her soft forearm until the skin rips under his canines, and then he sucks greedily. Then it's an explosion in his head, all blood blood blood, rich and vicious and sweet, sweet like nectar that makes his whole body warm and strong, enduring, more capable — !
The demon screams, pulling back — or trying to, anyway, but Sam pushes himself against the cage and bears the brunt of the hot metal, hooking his other arm around her. She can't leave. A strange, hysterical giddiness floods his brain when he realizes he's leeching the power right out of her, one drink at a time.
The only thing that stops him is the girl near him, crying out and shrinking away from the sight.
He lets go like he's struck by lightning, the demon staggering weakly backward on her forearms like a wounded soldier crawling in the trenches. She's sliding through the remains of her little empire, staining her business casual outfit. Sam puts out his hand with fingers splayed wide, ripping the black smoke out of her vessel like he's yanking out the skeleton itself. In an eerie ripple of sound much akin to a verbal throe of death, she's just smoke. She'd put out their fires here. Now he can put out hers. With a clench of his fist, she's turned into nothing. He feels her diminish so easily.
Sam doesn't remember ripping open his cage door.
He does remember how each demon's soul felt, weighted in the palms of his hands, before he crushes them all into nothing. The hunters are all ragged dolls on the ground that he steps over. He can't see straight, just sees the ring — full of demons, nervous and startled. They're his enemy, and he has to fight, or he'll die. And hecan't die. He spent years not dying, and too many monsters have fallen in his place for him to rip out his own throat now.
He wanders back into the masked supply truck to make sure nothing's left to try to kill him in the ring; he kills the monsters left in there. Most mercy kills, some simply because he knows they'll be coming for him next.
… Kills almost all of them, anyway.
When the red film over his vision has settled and he has to stop himself from throwing up on his own feet, he sees the little girl again. Trapped in her cage and waiting for possible freedom or death, her delicate hands wringing together as she looks at him in this way, this way that is doubtful and yet hopeful. He'd held her hands and told her it would be okay. But would it, really? What is there out there, for her? His drugged, haggardly mind tells him that she'll die horribly, like Amy. After all, is that not what she needs, to survive? To murder? Dean had butchered his friend with the belief that once you've killed, that was it —
And this child has no doubt been forced to kill someone. Something.
And will no doubt be forced to kill for food.
But she looks at him like he's a superhero. A shaking, high, rabid superhero, hopped up on demon blood, with hands so tense and locked, they look like claws in the darkness.
And beside her — a crying boy, a few years younger than her. There's a burn on his leg, a shake of his shoulders. Worst of all, there's skin sloughed off around him, and it's only then that Sam realizes the boy looks different than he had an hour before. A shifter? A small, scared shifter.
… Like Glenda had been.
"… It's going to be okay," he says again, feebly. Suddenly, he doesn't feel so strong anymore… Suddenly, his legs feel like they weigh a hundred pounds each. Feels like the fire had gnawed them down to bones, weak and without stringy muscle, pale white. Where is he supposed to go? Back home to Dean? He's got blood all over his mouth. He doesn't want to be locked up in a room again, not again. Not in a cage. He doesn't want Dean to call him a monster and turn away from him.
Or hunt him.
He looks around dazedly, horror and fear in his eyes.
"It's going to be okay."
"I know."
Sam flinches, looking at the kitsune. She's wrapped a hand around the thick bar in front of her face, green eyes muted in the dimness. It's so dark, but Sam can see her… see her just fine. Because he's…
He closes his eyes, runs his hands over his chopped hair.
When he walks away into the thick brush of the roadside forest, he has the girl's hand clasped completely in his, and a small shifter's sooty face pressed into his collarbone, as he takes them from the remnants of the traveling fighting ring.
Sam isn't sure if the world has looked any more frightening than it does now.
But at least the bloodbaths are over.
