Disclaimer All recognizable characters/settings belong to their creators. The stories listed here are transformative works, from which I've made/am making no financial profit.

Warnings Language; references/allusions to torture and non-con.


7. Exit Light, Enter Night


He loses himself in fever dreams about hunting alongside his father and brother, dreams where every move is perfectly choreographed, where expression and gesture take the place of words, where they slash, feint, duck and weave in unison, where the rush of the kill is exhilarating, intoxicating. He exults in his ruthlessness, his coldblooded thirst to annihilate, obliterate, exterminate, destroy. Saving people, hunting things… the family business.

And his family means everything to him, his father and brother are his reason, his life, his breath, his heart's desire. Without them he will cease to be, fade away. For they are the best part of him and if he loses them nothing of him can survive, his existence will be pointless, his whole being will atrophy, collapse in on itself, and it will be like he never was.


Gabe comes round in fits and starts, at turns whispering and running off at the mouth, yelling the kinds of things that Pa would have whupped him good for, thinks Lee. Fucktard? Lee doesn't even want to think what that might be, and Missy looks black affronted at Gabe's new turn of phrase. She kneels down next to him, grasps his shoulder and gives him a shake, tells him to stop yammerin', you're scarin' your brother.

Gabe hits out with his good fist and knocks Missy onto her butt in the snow, and Lee honestly thinks it'd be funny if his sister didn't sit up with a face like thunder. The noise as she slaps Gabe's cheek echoes around the clearing like a pistol shot, and it's the widest open Lee has seen his brother's eyes since they started out.

"Wh… th… fuck…?" Gabe sputters weakly, and Missy whacks him again, leaving a bloody trail streaking from his lip.

Lee winces in sympathy, having been at the receiving end of his sister's right hand too many times to count. Any remaining color abruptly leaches from Gabe's already washed-out face, and he starts coughing wetly, his uninjured hand fluttering to his chest and pressing there in an attempt to control his spasms.

"Nuh… nuh... feel… gd…" he slurs, staring at Lee with panic-stricken eyes that Lee could swear are trying to tell him something, maybe asking for something – asking for Lee to do something? Lee stares back, doesn't know what to do, unconsciously reaches out his hands, palms up, helpless, mouths, she's the boss!

"You watch your mouth, boy!" Missy growls, and Lee thinks that if she ain't a holy terror when she's mad, then he don't know what is. "You need your medicine," she decides, and reaches for Pa's bag.

In between coughs, Gabe eyes her angrily as she drops a couple of gaudily colored pills into a cup of water and uses a spoon to grind them to a powder that dissolves into nothing. He keeps his lips firmly pressed together as Missy holds the cup up to his mouth, until she snaps at Lee, "Lee, take that stick and give Gabe here a tap on the leg."

Lee gapes, stammers out, "Buh-buh-but Missy, that's just mean."

So Missy reaches over and grabs the stick herself, rewards her brother with a vicious blow to his bloodsoaked bandage.

Gabe opens his mouth in a howl of mixed agony and protest that turns into a paroxysm of choking as Missy upends the cup of medicated water between his lips. Once done, she leaves him where he falls and in a series of tiny, clearly painful shifts in position, he curls in on himself, trembling, his injured arm tucked protectively into his chest and the other arm stretched out to his right, along the ground, his fingers twitching uncontrollably. His breath puffs out in brief, wheezing pants interrupted only by progressively weaker coughs. His eyes still stare at Lee but Lee doesn't think they really see him – they're empty eyes, empty like all the staring dead eyes he's ever seen.

"You can sleep outside until you learn some manners," Missy announces, crawling into the tent.


The bar is quiet, still smoky although it's past closing time. Hudak catches Joe's eye as she walks in, and he points over to a corner booth.

Sam is draped across the table, alongside an assortment of bottles and glasses of all shapes and sizes, and Hudak gives a low whistle as she pulls to a halt. "Beer, vodka, wine, whiskey… rum? All the major food groups… Jesus, Sam." Good job he's been walking here, she thinks. There's just no way he'd have driven back to her place the last few nights without wrapping his brother's car around a tree.

The barkeep approaches. "Third time this week," he comments. "You need a hand getting him out to the car?"

Between them they manage to drag Sam out to where Hudak has parked the Impala and they fold him clumsily into the passenger seat, where he flops against the door and starts snoring. As if he's used to it, Hudak thinks, as she peels out of the parking lot and back up through town. The boat-like vehicle barely fits in the garage but the nights are still cold and since there's no way she can haul Sam as far as the couch, she doesn't want to leave him freezing out on the driveway.

She treks into the house and back out to the garage with a quilt, covers him, leaves the garage light on. Then she channel surfs her way to one of her brother's favorite movies and slowly dozes off as John Wayne rides across the endless snowbound prairie, searching for his long-lost niece.


The one good thing about the biting cold is that it numbs the pain, he thinks, vaguely. The fire still glows a few feet away but any warmth it was sending his way has long since gone and the thin blanket Lee tucked around him before he crawled into the tent, with a quick backward glance of apology, isn't much protection.

He watches the dog, lying up close to the fire. For some reason it unnerves him. As if it knows he's focusing on it, it raises its head from its paws, looks right at him. He holds his breath, closes his eyes… it won't see me if I close my eyes. He can remember how when they were small he and his brother would play hide-and-seek, and his brother would abruptly sit down wherever he was and cover his eyes, full sure it turned him invisible. But although the memory seems clear as day, it doesn't make sense, because in his head it's his kid brother sitting there, and Lee's a good few years older, though for the life of him he can't remember how old.

He knows he hit his head bad in the wolf attack, his creeping, shaking hand has felt a dry, caked-on mess in his hair that he thinks must be blood, so he guesses his brain is all shook up. And it smarts with a dull, confusing ache that makes his thoughts labored and spoken words crawl at a snail's pace from his lips. He thinks his arm is broken. He tries to move his fingers and flowers of agony blossom in bright red and orange. He looks at the dog again and winces as lurid, split-second images of slavering jaws beam in front of his eyes in wobbly, hand-held camera newsflashes.

The dog is staring at him. It's as if it can read his mind, like they're telepathically connected somehow, the way it looks at him… as if it knows him like nothing and no one else does, a knowledge born of some profound shared experience. And he knows it means he's losing it, totally losing it if he's thinking this way, because it's the kind of emo crap his brother bleats on about all the time.

The dog gets up, moves in his direction. He freezes, holds his breath, feeling like his heart might judder to a dead stop in his fear. In the back of his mind, the portion that isn't fried, he doesn't comprehend why he should be so afraid of the family mutt.

It sniffs him, nudges him. It lies down next to him.

He can't hold on any longer, his vision is graying out. He has to start breathing again, in tiny, whistling huffs, and he's so desperately afraid that he knows damn well he's making barely discernible squeaks of sheer terror.

The dog doesn't react. Its body is solid against his, warm. A warmth he craves in the freezing cold.

By gradual increments he wriggles up against it, swallowing down his rising panic as he becomes ever more aware of its bulk, its rock hard muscle. He gingerly raises his arm, trying not to jar the injury or pull any more than Missy already has at his shoulder as she hauls him this way and that, trying to get him fed. He places his arm across the dog. It remains perfectly still.

"Good dog," he whispers timidly.


Hudak is jolted awake at oh-dark-thirty by the noise of Sam regurgitating copious amounts of booze, along with the lining of his stomach, or so it sounds, into the sink in her garage. The horse opera has long finished, to be replaced by Hannibal Lecter menacing Clarice Starling. Not appropriate for her present state of mind nor Sam's, so she switches it off.

Sam stumbles in from the garage right then, groaning, hair in disarray. He looks at her and squints, as if he's seeing double, before collapsing on the couch.

Hudak rolls her eyes, pushes up and pads to the kitchen to fetch aspirin, a glass of water, and a separate plastic bottle of water, which she parks beside the couch. "Drink that – it'll dilute the alcohol."

Sam mutters an expletive as he sits up, knocks back the aspirin. He slumps back on the couch.

"Something to eat?" Hudak asks him.

"God, no," Sam groans. "Even thinking about food makes me want to puke again."

There's a newspaper nearby and Hudak leans over to snag it, arranges the paper sheets across the floor around Sam's feet and he cracks an eye open.

"What am I doing…?" he drags out, suddenly leaning forward and resting his head in his hands.

Hudak considers it for a moment. "It's normal to deny the reality of loss in the first—"

Sam snorts, raises an eyebrow. "The seven stages of grief?" he says, with not a little sarcasm.

"Well…" she pauses, shrugs. "I have been through this."

His face falls and he heaves out a sigh. "I know… I know. I'm sorry. I—I have no excuse."

Hudak cocks her head. "You do," she tells him mildly. "You have every excuse. You don't have to explain yourself or defend yourself to me, Sam. If this helps you, then I'm here to scrape you up afterwards." She lets the silent but at the end hang there for a minute or two. "But does it help you?"

He doesn't even have to answer her, because she knows it doesn't help, even if it numbs it all for a few blessed hours.

"I don't know what to do," Sam says. "I feel… I feel like I should be still out there looking. I feel guilty that I folded. I gave up. And I don't know why. Dean wouldn't give up."

Hudak stands and lowers herself down to sit next to him, knee to knee. She knows this, the need to do something, so you can sleep at night telling yourself that you tried. "We can go back out, start looking again," she says. "The forecast is for better weather day after tomorrow."

Sam slants his eyes sideways, and his look is steady. "What do you think the odds are? I mean, really?"

She wants to offer the kid some comfort but even so, she's brutally honest. "Slim to none, Sam. But as long as you want to keep looking, we'll keep looking."

He ponders for a minute. "How long did you keep looking for your brother?"

Hudak smiles at the hurt that will never go away. "I'll always be looking, Sam. Some small part of me will always hope to find him."


It's quiet in the tent and Missy sleeps deeply, untroubled by dreams.

Lee lies awake, worrying about Gabe, and eventually he gives in and worms his way as surreptitiously as he can out from under the sleeping bag and through the tent flap. He sneaks over to where Gabe and the dog are curled up together under the tree, motions to the dog to lie still as he feeds the fire with logs and puts water on to boil. Gabe's face, lit up by the fire, is infinitely sad in repose and Lee stops for a second, feels real bad for his brother, and thinks he might never have seen anything so beautiful as him fast asleep and peaceful like that.

He potters about, brewing coffee, and before long he knows he's being watched.

The dog slumbers, twitching every now and then, but Gabe is staring at him through bleary eyes, utterly still, his peace overcome by the exhaustion that clouds his face now he's awake.

Lee pours coffee, sits down there next to him. "You want some coffee, Gabe? Warm you up inside?

Gabe's eyes light up. "Caffeine…" he murmurs.

Lee takes it as a yes, shifts round so he has a leg either side of his brother, and gently eases him upright against his chest. He holds the cup to Gabe's lips and offers small sips his brother gulps greedily, and it occurs to Lee that the last few times his brother has drunk anything it's been nothing more than a couple of mouthfuls of dribbled-in water to wash down his medicine. Maybe they haven't been taking such good care of Gabe as he thought.

"Is our dad really dead?" Gabe asks suddenly, hesitantly.

Lee nods behind him. "He sure is, Gabe. But Pa died brave. He died fightin', fightin' monsters that don't like how we live our life."

He can feel his brother's shoulders start to shake, hear muffled sobs, and Lee hugs him close. "Now Gabe, don't you cry, boy," he says. "You still got me! You still got your brother! Nothin's ever gonna get you while I'm here. You got that?"

Gabe doesn't reply, doesn't even seem to hear him, just weeps quietly. And even with him and the dog there, Lee gets a sense that Gabe feels alone. He lays his cheek on his brother's filthy, blood-spiked hair. "I'm here, Gabe," he says, and kisses the top of his head.

Beside them, the dog jerks in sleep, growling, its tail thumping, its legs twitching, and Lee feels Gabe tense up like a coiled spring. "It's okay, Gabe, dog's just havin' a dream, ain't he?" Lee soothes. "He's dreamin' about… rabbits!" And Lee plucks a random memory from his childhood. "Giant man-eating rabbits! That's what it is! He sees them runnin' up over the hill and he wants to hunt them bunnies down, that's what it is!"

Lee feels Gabe slump back against him again, into the warmth. "I saw that movie…" Gabe whispers. "Me and you… we saw that movie… fuckin' rabbits… I hate 'em…"


The next day Sam drives the Impala out to the Bender place, stops in the approximate spot where he and Dean had rested, oh so briefly. He can see the gap where they crashed into the woods, and he follows the trail of broken branches all the way to the ridge where they belly flopped into the water. He walks along the riverbank, eyes all the time searching, searching for signs. He comes to a place he thinks he recognizes, sits down heavily.

It's incredibly peaceful, the rush of the water soothing, sunbeams dancing on the river's surface, and Sam shivers to think of the violence that took place here. And all of a sudden the sunlight is bleak, the gurgling of the river taunts him, and the trees loom menacingly. It's as if the place is haunted by that violence, haunted by his brother's suffering and terror. Sam stares around wildly, sees brownish spatters on the smooth rocks.

He scrambles back upright and runs.

When he gets back to Hudak's house, he calls the Dean at Stanford.