Chapter 6
"Sam?" Dean asked gently, kneeling down next to his brother and putting a hand on his shoulder. "Sammy?" Sam pressed his fingers into his forehead as if trying to dig something out, and Niko saw Dean's knuckles go white as he tightened his grip.
Watching them, Niko thought of himself and Cal and felt an almost physical ache, but before he could love his tenuous composure, Sam muttered something that made him forget his feelings entirely.
"A grave…" the hunter rasped, his voice not hoarse, but ragged. "An open grave…"
Dean held a hand out and Sam took it, using it to get shakily to his feet. Dean supported him the few steps back to the couch, both of them seeming not to notice that Niko was about to rip both their heads off.
Or maybe they did, because as soon as Sam was seated he went on.
"I saw a graveyard, and…Gordon was there. He had someone with him—Cal, I'm assuming. Whoever it was, he was—he wasn't fighting. And there was this grave—it had already been dug up. And Gordon…he…"
Sam trailed off, meeting Niko's eyes, and Niko knew.
He felt something deep inside him crystallize at that look, hardening him, freezing him, making him into a man able to shove his terror and pain and disgust and rage down where he couldn't feel it. He knew that later he would want to know how Sam had gotten this information, what had happened to make him so sure of where Cal was, but now was not the time for that.
He took a step forward, and the voice that came out of him didn't even sound like his own.
"Did you get the name on the grave?"
XXX
"Okay, here she is."
Niko didn't move from his position on the floor, merely looking up at the laptop on the desk as he absently stroked the mala beads in his hand. "She's pretty," he commented upon seeing the brunette girl in the picture on the site Sam had pulled up. He didn't mow why he felt the need to point it out—details seemed oddly important right now.
"Uh…yeah. Sure. Okay. What're you doing down there, anyway?" Dean asked, looking down at him from his position behind Sam's chair.
"Meditating," Niko replied.
"Uh…right. So what's her story?" Dean asked, shaking his head and turning back toward the computer.
"Pretty much what it says. Murdered. They arrested her husband. Classic vengeful spirit stuff."
"And Gordon didn't torch her?" Dean asked, surprised.
Sam shrugged. "Not that I saw. Maybe someone else already did."
"Or maybe he just didn't care," Dean said darkly.
Niko cleared his throat. "It doesn't matter. Which cemetery?"
Sam told him, and he was out the door before the laptop was in its bag.
XXX
Dean beat the speed limit to a broken, bloody pulp all the way to the cemetery, but the eight-minute-fifty-three-second trip still felt like an eternity to Niko. And yet, even though he felt as if he would fly apart at any moment, the two hunters kept glancing back at him as if waiting for something. As if he weren't reacting enough.
But Niko knew himself, and he knew that if he allowed himself to show even a tenth of what he was feeling, they would all come to regret it—especially Dean, who seemed to treasure this silly car above almost all other things.
When they finally pulled up at the large iron gates, Niko leapt out while the car was still moving, listening to Dean cursing as he ran toward the entrance. He'd never run so fast in his life, and so consequently he found the grave while Sam and Dean were still huffing to catch up.
Someone was waiting for them.
He was leaning against the grave, patient as anything, and if he'd already been waiting a lifetime and could wait for several more, as long as he knew Cal would be dead at the end of those lifetimes.
And he was evidently very rude, because he didn't even wait for Sam and Dean to catch up before he lifted a gun from behind the gravestone and started firing.
Guns were such distasteful things, Niko reflected as he ducked behind the nearest stone. They were all noise and no finesse. Such sharp smell sand loud bangs, and for what? A dead body with a large hole in it and far more blood and brain matter than there should be.
Niko killed things that needed killing, but he hated easy, messy slaughter, and in the wrong hands, that was all a gun could bring.
This gun was most definitely in the wrong hands.
As Niko tried to decide his next move, he became aware that Dean was crouched behind the gravestone across from him. Niko glanced at him, and Dean almost immediately began to make obscure hand signals at him.
Niko thought he was very patient—he spent almost three whole seconds trying to figure the signals out before he did exactly what he wanted to anyway. He waited for the sound of Gordon taking a step forward—checking to see if he'd hit anyone, Niko supposed—and then he gathered himself and simply leapt over the stone he was hiding behind.
Gordon squeezed off a shot, but by then the gun was pointing up in the air. Then it was in Niko's hand, and then it was empty, and then Gordon was on the ground, all before he could figure out what was going on.
"Or that works, too," Dean said conversationally from behind him. "Here, boy wonder, we brought you an extra." Niko turned just in time to catch the shovel flying at him. "So tell me," the hunter went on as he, Niko, and Sam started digging. "You sure you don't have any of that Auphe blood in you?"
"Dean!" Sam protested.
"What? I've just never seen anyone human move that fast, is all. So do you?"
Niko didn't look up. "No. Now dig."
XXX
Niko had no idea how he maintained his sanity as he sank his shovel into the dirt time after time. For the first couple of feet, he simply concentrated on the breathing of those around him, but by the time they got down three feet, his hands were shaking. When the got to four, he was mentally reviewing all the ways he was going to kill Cal for doing this to him. As they passed the fifth, he began to promise Cal anything and everything, the only stipulation being that he had to be alive to claim it. Somewhere near the sixth he moved on to blind prayer.
By the seventh, he wasn't thinking anything at all.
He was so out of it that he barely registered the hollow thunk and what it meant. He simply switched to autopilot, tossing his shovel up and out of the grave and going to his knees and pulling up the lid of the coffin without thinking, his brain surrounded by fog.
Until he saw Cal.
Except…except it couldn't be Cal. No. Cal would never be so lifeless, so pale and bloody and still. It could only be some pretend Cal lying in this coffin in this grave with this skeleton lying almost on top of him and oh, God, get him out of there now.
And just like that, Niko was pulling both of them up onto solid ground and collapsing there, Cal cradled in his arms.
He wasn't sure which he felt first—the pulse beneath the fingers wrapped around Cal's wrist, or the shallow but steady rise and fall of Cal's breathing. It didn't matter—whichever came first, they combined to lay siege on whatever remained of Niko's composure.
Niko longed to let them win. He felt suddenly so tired of being strong, of keeping control. He finally had Cal back and suddenly all he wanted to do was let go.
But he couldn't. Not yet. Because right now Cal was bleeding, and cut, and drugged, and probably traumatized, and Niko was still his big brother.
He couldn't fold yet, because Cal still needed him.
He couldn't fold until he fixed this.
TBC
Author's Note: I know it was a short chapter and not a particularly satisfying one, but the next one will probably be longer and there will finally be talking and questions and answers and all that good stuff. Or…there should be, if all goes as planned…
