Chrys sat in a sun-dappled kitchen, sipping on coffee, leaned back against the wall with her feet in Sam's lap. His big hand was on her ankle as he scanned the news website, and she spent a brief moment wishing vehemently that their lives were as peaceful as this scene presented them as.
Unfortunately, Sam's eyes were darting between the laptop screen, herself, and something in the corner, and she knew she was going to be screwed out of a good morning of daydreaming.
She leaned forward to cup a hand around Sam's neck to bring him close to her. She let her lips brush his ear. "Hey, you know he's not real. I'm real, you're real, he's not, okay?"
Sam inhaled sharply and closed his eyes. "I know, I know," he said softly. "He's just… Persuasive."
Bobby came in and grumbled at them, headed straight for the coffee cup. "Goddamn kids, canoodlin' in my kitchen, can't catch no goddamn peace around here anymore-"
His grumpiness brought a smile to Sam's face, which brought a smile to Chrys'. Her heart ached with the love that she had for these men. Just a couple of years ago, she'd been so adrift, so desperately alone, and now she was in a home with three people she'd die for without batting an eyelash.
Life was weird.
A few hours later, Chrys and Sam had hardly moved.
She was flipping through a lore book, looking for information on leviathans. There was diddly squat so far, but she figured it was worth a shot.
She was also unwilling to leave Sam to his own devices. As the day wore on, Sam was becoming harder and harder to bring back to her. She was determined not to let Lucifer have him, hallucination or no, but she was terrified she'd already lost.
It had made for a stressful morning.
Dean, who'd gone into town for groceries, came banging back in, still trying and failing to look cheerful. "How's it hangin, kids?"
"Bad news," Sam said, not looking up from his computer screen. "Stockville, in north Kansas, most of a high school swim team got mangled to death in their locker room."
Bobby, who was walking back into the kitchen, nodded. "Cop talk on the wire's kind of garbled, saying it looks like some kind of wild animal attack. They're saying whatever attacked them's about the size of a linebacker."
Dean looked skeptical, and Chrys rolled her eyes. "It's a lead, Dean."
The older Winchester sighed and scrubbed his face hard with his palm. "All right." He pointed at Sam. "But if you think you're going out on a hunt-"
"No, I know," Sam interrupted evenly. "But you are. Look, Bobby's running the hub, I'm… I'm fifty-one-fifty'd, and I kinda need Chrys here. Which leaves you to follow this thing up."
Dean glared. "Sam, you're in the middle of a psychotic break."
Chrys glared back at Dean. "And I'm right here, slow your roll."
"C," he said pleadingly. "Come on."
"Go," Bobby said imperiously, and Chrys was, once again, grateful for the older hunter. "We can eyeball the kid. Work off some of those nerves on something useful."
Dean took a moment to stare at each one of them hard. All of them met his gaze head on.
He sighed, shoulders slumping in defeat. "Fine."
Later that night, while Chrys was in the shower, Sam was struggling.
Should have gone with her, he thought ruefully.
Instead, he was sitting in Bobby's living room, clinging to his sanity and trying to ignore Lucifer, who was reading a newspaper at the kitchen table.
How is this my life? The thought was a little bit hysterical.
When his cell phone rang, he lunged for it, almost embarrassingly grateful for the distraction. "Yeah?"
"Well, we are positive for ick," Dean said grimly. "Same kind of stuff that came out of Cass. And, uh, two of the swim kids are missing. They stole one of their parents' cars."
"You know," Lucifer said from the table, "I really think Prince William has found the right girl. What do you think?"
Sam closed his eyes and spoke into the phone. "So you think these, um, these leviathan things just jump into people? Like Eve did?"
"I don't know, it makes sense, right? Anyway, uh, state trooper's got surveillance cam on the kids about six hours old, of them gassing up just south of Dakota line, so I'm headed back your way. We'll just track them from Bobby's."
"Sounds good."
"How, uh… How are you doing?"
Sam looks over at Lucifer. "Uh, okay."
"Well, hang in there, all right?"
As soon as they hang up, Lucifer slams the newspaper down indignantly. "Just okay? Man, I'm having a great day."
Chrys leaned against the tiled wall of the shower and let the hot water beat against her skin. She ran her hands through her hair and rubbed her face hard.
The last few days had been hard. Trying to keep up with Sam, trying to make sure he knew what was real and what wasn't, and trying to make sure that Dean wasn't cracking under the pressure, it was all so exhausting. She knew she wouldn't trade it for anything, but that didn't make it any less difficult.
As she watched the water swirl down the drain, she let her fear overtake her for a moment. Her fear that she was losing her soulmate. Sam was further and further away from her, and as much as she wanted to fight it with pure force of will, she knew that it might be a losing battle. She could talk a big game as much as she wanted to, but at the end of the day, Lucifer had been pulling this kind of shit for millennia. Even if it was just a hallucination, she was scared.
Steeling herself, she switched the water off and flung the shower curtain back. She pulled her stubbornness, her unwillingness to lose Sam, her inability to not have this entire family with her, she pulled all of that around her like a cloak as she stepped out. Chrys would not lose.
She could not lose.
Sam was watching, bemused, as Lucifer swung the iron fire poker like a golf club. Every hunter instinct he had was telling him that, if Lucifer was an apparition or a ghost, he wouldn't be able to touch the fire poker at all. Sam knew it was nonsense, but there was nothing he could do about his instincts screaming how wrong all of it was.
He was trying to clean his guns, but was thoroughly distracted by Satan practicing his goddamn swing.
"Okay," he said softly, trying to be quiet enough that neither Bobby nor Chrys would hear him, "if this is some dream, and you've got power over it, why don't you just end it?"
Lucifer looked up, pausing his movements. "End it? This? You not knowing what's real, the paint slowly peeling off your walls, come on, man, this is the sweet spot! Why would I end it? Not like we got HBO in the Pit. All I got is you, floating over the coals, with half a hope that you're gonna figure it all out. There's only one way to figure it out, Sam. It's up to you. It ends when you can't take it anymore." His eyes flicked toward the guns, organized neatly on the table for cleaning. "I think maybe that's why we're cleaning our guns."
Sam felt himself blanch. "Shut up," he snarled.
"… Having yourself a bag lady moment, Sammy?"
Sam looked up at Chrys as she came down the stairs. She was smiling, but it was tight with worry, and her incredibly blue eyes shone with concern. He watched as she gracefully walked across the room to him, then was helpless to look away when Lucifer damn near pounced on her, playing with her hair and sniffing at her neck.
She came to stand in front of Sam, and he spread his legs so she could stand between them. He groaned and pressed his face into her stomach. She ran her fingers through his hair soothingly. "Shh, Sammy," her melodic, low voice was like a balm to his frayed, raw nerves. "You're gonna beat him."
"What if I can't?" he asked harshly.
"Done it before," Bobby said simply. Sam looked up to see the older hunter standing in the doorway, three beers in his hand. "Don't see why this would be any different."
"It's miles different," Sam insisted.
"Not really," Chrys said thoughtfully, accepting the beer from Bobby without looking away from Sam. He rested his chin on her belly and stared up at her, trying to focus on how in love he was with her, and not on how Lucifer was currently groping her. "You're not in hell anymore, you're here, with us." She smiled. "With me."
Bobby's phone rang and he frowned. "That's my local" He flipped it open and walked away a bit to talk.
Chrys ran her fingers through Sam's hair again. "With me?" she asked gently.
He hesitated, because he didn't want to lie to her, but he did want to be with her, god dammit. "Trying to be."
"Well, we'll take it."
Bobby came back in frowning. "Well, either Sheriff Mills is having an ObamaCare-insured opium dream, or something's eating folks down at Sioux Falls General Hospital."
"Do you think it's leviathans?" Chrys asked.
Bobby shrugged. "Maybe. You kids good here?"
Chrys nodded. "We'll man the phones."
"Threesome!" Lucifer crowed, and Sam winced.
Chrys was watching Sam reassemble his gun again, timing himself. She didn't like it, thought it was a little too much like obsessive behavior for her to really be comfortable with it, but as long as it kept the hollowed look he got when Lucifer was talking to him out of his eyes, she would deal.
He suddenly looked up, then frowned and stood. Chrys followed him to the door, her eyes wide when he opened it and started a conversation with Dean.
Well, Chrys assumed it was with Dean, because no one was there.
"What?" Sam was asking the empty air in front of the door.
After a beat. "Did you call Bobby?"
Another. "Wait, are you sure about that?"
Chrys had had enough. She stood in front of Sam firmly and cupped his face in her hands hard.
"Sam," she said severely.
He frowned down at her, confused. "What?"
"Sam, whoever you're seeing, probably Dean?" In response to his nod. "Yeah, Dean's not there."
"What…" He started to look scared. "What are you talking about?"
She tried to think quickly. "Sam, if I stood in front of Dean like this, he would push me out of the way, right?"
"I… I mean, I guess? I don't-"
"You know he would. He's probably cussing up a blue streak behind me, instead, because he can't touch me. It's not Dean."
Sam's eyes flicked up to look behind her, then widened. "Fuck," he breathed out weakly.
"Hey, it's okay," she said soothingly.
Sam yanked his head away. "God dammit! No, it's fucking not, Chrys!"
He turned to the kitchen and swiped the couple of empty bottles off of the counter, sending them crashing to the floor. Chrys rolled her eyes. Drama queen. She didn't really feel that way, but she was panicking internally, and sarcasm really was her only refuge in times like these.
Sam was stomping around the kitchen, furious. "What good am I ever gonna be?! I can't tell what's real and what's not! I can't even tell you if this is real!"
She approached slowly, not really looking to get punched by the love of her life. His chest was heaving and his eyes were wild, rolling around, searching for Lucifer. "Sam, we talked about this, baby. You and me, right? We know what's real, because we're real."
"But what if you're not?" The fear in his whisper broke her heart into a million pieces. "What if you're some part of the hallucination? What if I can't trust you?'
"Well, you're just gonna have to," she said simply as she came to stand in front of him, almost chest to chest. "I know it isn't ideal, but you're too smart to believe any proof I give you. So you're just gonna have to take a chance that I am who I say I am, and you're gonna have to trust me, okay?" She searched his eyes when they finally landed and stuck on her. "Okay, Sammy?"
He stared at her for a long time, and Chrys could only hope she'd pass whatever evaluation he was putting her through.
"Okay, beautiful," he croaked out, and she fought not to sag in relief.
Hours later, Chrys was dozing on the couch when Sam shook her, waking her up abruptly.
"Sam?" she asked, trying to clear the fog of sleep from her mind. "Sam, what's wrong?"
"Chrys," he said softly. "The smoke. Is it real?"
She looked up, a caustic question on the tip of her tongue that died the moment she saw the actual smoke pouring from one side of the house. "Shit," she said vehemently, lurching to her feet and fisting her hand in Sam's flannel to drag him with her as she ran. "Real! Real!"
They both stumbled out of the house and into the yard, turning to see one side of the building up in flames. Chrys felt her chill in her veins.
Sure, it was possible that this was an electrical fire of some sort. It was possible that maybe some artifact or spell or something had finally gotten a little too close to something else and exploded.
Honestly, though, what were the chances of that?
"We need to hide," she decided, grabbing Sam's shirt again and pulling him along.
As they ran, crouching to keep low, they ran into Dean, who was also keeping low.
His green eyes were wild as he grabbed Chrys' arms. "Shit. You guys are okay. Thank fuck."
"Dean," she hissed. "What are you doing here?"
"Followed the leviathan kids back," he said, distracted by checking Sam over for injuries. "They headed this way, so I figured we could track them from here." He looked up and met Chrys' eyes again. "Where's Bobby?" He paled. "Oh, God, he's not still in there, is he?"
Chrys shook her head. "No, no, he was at the hospital with Sheriff Mills, still." She shivered at the thought of Bobby being gone. That would be bad. "But Dean, listen, we've gotta go."
"Yeah, yeah, come on." They ran through the salvage yard, back toward the Impala, keeping an eye out for those who set the fires.
When the three of them rounded the corner, there was a bearded man standing in the middle of one of the aisles. He was standing casually with his hands in his coat pockets, smirking. "Ah, the Winchesters. Congratulations! Apparently, you three are competent enough to warrant annihilating." He leaned forward. "I'd take it as a compliment," he said with a conspiratory air.
Dean whipped his gun out and shot the man in the side of the head. His temple exploded with black goo, and Chrys dove and rolled under one of the cars. Sam and Dean were staring at the man, whose face had regenerated quickly. Chrys watched in horror as his mouth transforms, elongating and growing to cover almost his entire head, with two long, sharp rows of teeth. A huge split tongue snaked from his mouth, flicking a few times, before he pulled it back in and his face returned to normal.
Welp. Shit.
The man took two quick steps toward Dean, knocked his gun away, then picked the eldest Winchester up and flung him several feet. Chrys heard the thick, wet snap of a bone cracking and winced when he hit the ground.
She rolled from under the car and ran toward the hoist, thanking the powers that be that she'd helped Bobby run the salvage yard for the week before she'd gone to Kevin and Serene.
She grabbed the control just as she heard Sam shout.
"Chrys, now!"
She slammed on the button and turned in time to watch the leviathan strike Sam over the head with a metal pipe, to watch Sam go down like a sack of bricks, and to watch the car crush the leviathan.
"Sam!" She whipped her phone out and was dialing nine-one-one before she got to either Winchester.
**Feedback gives me the warm fuzzies and keeps me going.
