Disclaimer, Summary & Ratings: See Chapter 1
THE WHOLE OF THE MOON
Chapter 2
Now Chuckles was indulging in his little attempt at mind-games, fondling that dagger and regretfully stating that 'the woman' – her identity already forgotten as if unimportant, assuming he'd ever bothered to remember it – had indeed been right in her assessment of Dean as an exceptionally healthy human specimen.
"Sorry, dude, I'm not that kind of boy," Dean waggled his eyebrows. "I don't put out on the first date…well, not unless I get dinner first," he added.
Chuckles merely chuckled as if Dean was a witty raconteur up there with George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde or W. G. Grace. "I shall in no way touch your weak human frame," Chuckles smirked, then raised his voice slightly, "Come along now, my pet, time to finish up here."
The cavern was presumably L-shaped or had a deep side niche; a figure moved out of the blackness Dean had taken for solid wall, moving forward. For an instant relief was Dean's dominant emotion as his eyes raked over Sammy and he saw, for once, nary a lump or bump, no bruises, contusions or scrapes and – believe it or not – no precious red liquid leaking from any part of his brother's person, which had to be a first.
As instantly as it flared, relief was extinguished. Sam stopped directly in front of him about three feet away, less than an inch from the coagulating pool of blood still seeping from Selena. Or more accurately his body did, since his brain was apparently AWOL. There was no slack-mouthed drooling, but his face was just utterly blank; devoid of animation, expression and emotion, like a painted wooden doll. His eyes were open but stared at nothing…it was like in those comedy movies where you waved your hand in front of the guy's face and snapped your fingers or shoved a semi-naked dancing girl in front of him, but there was no reaction.
"Sam, are you okay?" Dean asked the dumb question anyway, just to hear his brother's voice.
There was no response from Sam, but Chuckles answered, "Oh he'll soon be better than okay, won't you my little pet?"
It was presumably a rhetorical question since Sam didn't respond to him either, but unperturbed Chuckles reached out and placed the dagger hilt in Sam's palm, who in turn slowly closed his hand around it and held it with blank patience.
"Whatever you've done to him, if you've hurt him, I'll kill you," Dean's voice was low, and vicious – and threatening in a way that nobody bound immobile and half-naked should have been able to pull off.
Chuckles chortled again, "I haven't injured his body in any way, but I have destroyed his mind; humans are much better as working animals when their minds are vegetables, if you'll forgive the pun…and actually, Sam is going to kill you, so I'll save my trepidation."
"Never going to happen!" Dean snorted derisively, even though a small, very cold lump was beginning to grow in his stomach.
He'd just pulled the classic 'get the Arch-villain bragging and gloating' diversionary manoeuvre, at which point Sam should have dropped the gormless act like a hot potato and stuck the dagger in Chuckles' heart. Sam stood there showing all the intelligence of someone who'd spent a lifetime collecting social security cheques and watching daytime TV while considering it 'healthy eating' to have a Diet Coke with his daily Big Mac once in a while. There were livelier lichens on Antarctic rocks.
"Roosevelt Asylum tells a different story," Chuckles countered with spiteful amusement. "He's already tried to kill you once…this time he'll succeed."
"Are you kidding?" Dean retorted, "That was nothing more than a sibling squabble, Winchester style." He felt no need to justify his and Sam's relationship to the creep but the longer he talked, the more time he was giving Sam to snap out of it. "Sam knew the shotguns were loaded with rock salt - yet he just stood there waiting for me to show up without swapping the load for real bullets while he was counting the ceiling cracks? And he knew there was no way I was gonna just hand him a loaded pistol when he was stood over me waving a shotgun in my face. You really think I don't know my brother's far too strong for your bark like a chicken cluck like a dog routine?"
"Strong?" Chuckles giggled as though this were the joke of the year. "A human? Pathetic wriggling worms as weak as wet paper, yet you think you rule the world…" Chuckles shook his head as if a parent baffled by the antics of a toddler, "Besides, even if he could have resisted me for more than a second, he was fighting himself as well, because he knows that your blood is all he needs…and I'll have him bathe in it momentarily. Then you'll be strong, my pet," Chuckles assured Sam almost kindly as if talking to an eager-to-please puppy, "and powerful enough to be my warhorse as I rule everything."
Ah…so that was it; the players change, but the game remains the same, Dean acknowledged. Clear away the window dressing and the individual why-I'm-better-than-god whining and Evil always went for one of two MOs: rule the world, or destroy it.
"Well, I suppose I should say I'm flattered, but I think you need to take another look at the instruction manual under the Sacrificing Innocents for Ultimate Power section," Dean suggested. "I'm pretty sure it has to be either a scantily-clad blonde teenage virgin or the superhero themselves…and Sam has the power. Him Sam; me Dean. Trust me, the only criteria I fit currently is the scantily-clad tick-box, which considering you're fugly and non-female is something I'd appreciate if we could skip right on past."
Chuckles giggled again and contradicted gaily, "Of course you have the power; that is what makes this so delicious. You are the moon."
Dean had never dealt well with cryptic, especially cryptic delivered by evil bad guys claiming they had turned his baby brother into a puppet-slave and were going to have him fillet Dean like a salmon.
"Well I am the handsome one," he acknowledged with false modesty, "but I have to say I think you're being rather forward…our relationship is not at the point where I'm comfortable with you calling me moonbeam."
For the first time faint irritation flickered in the bottomless black pits that were Chuckles' eyes at Dean's relentless refusal to take him seriously, even in such dire straits as this.
"How can you have destroyed so much power yet be so unaware?" Chuckles shook his head in something akin to honest bewilderment. "The moon is smaller than the sun; it doesn't shine brightly and burn hotly, yet all life on this world is as equally dependent upon it to exist as its bigger, brighter sibling. Nobody notices the moon, yet without it this world would slowly and agonisingly suffocate to death." He looked at Dean, "You are just as much the child of John and Mary Winchester as Samuel here is; your blood is just the same, and just because you lack the brightness of being psychic or the heat of possessing telekinesis does not make you any less powerful in the way that is yours."
"I don't have a way, I'm just the muscle…" the words slipped out before Dean could stop them, and he was aware that he had come dangerously close to engaging with the enemy as Chuckles' lyrical oratory tugged at him with hypnotic cadence. Snap out of it, Dean.
Chuckles gave that annoying giggle which Dean silently vowed he would bitch-slap out of the creep right before he killed it.
"And who is to say that is not your power, to be your brother's strength, his support, his shield…Like the world needs the moon: cool and shaded and restfully silent, with the Dark Side always turned away so he doesn't have to see it if he doesn't want to. Always close by, always there, always between Samuel and the sun that sometimes burns too fiercely, searing him with its flame."
"Do you crib this crap off Hallmark or key chains?" Dean retorted with a cockiness he was far from feeling; if Sam hadn't snapped out of it now he wasn't going to and Dean had no hope of working his way free of those ropes.
Chuckles smiled with perverted delight. "When he has ripped you open like a wolf-savaged carcass and bathed in your blood he will swallow up your power like the sun engulfing the moon and it will be as fuel to him."
"In your dreams," Dean sneered.
Chuckles laughed, "And in his…oh yes, he knew. Do you think that the reason he knew why Mary Worthington would come after him was the only secret he kept from you? John Winchester the toaster-killer and chip-off-the-block Dean, happy to let the Geek-boy do the web-surfing and search-engine research, to spend the hours curled up with a good grimoire and just decant the Reader's Digest edition to you. The toxin generates the anti-toxin, and like calls to like. Poor Samuel, struggling with those agonising headaches and draining visions, knowing all the time that your blood will not just eradicate them from his body but increase his abilities a hundredfold? As if I was going to stand idly by until you figured out he knew how to stop his own pain and got it out of him? Now your brother's power is as a single, yellow sun, but when he has your blood within him he will burn like a newborn galaxy and I will rule the universe by means of him for eons before his energy is exhausted."
Chuckles leaned in close to Dean's face, a vicious smile twisting his features, "So much pain when he sees, so much shame when he longs for the surcease he knows your blood can bring…such a fierce determination to endure rather than harm his big brother – and such a feeble resolution, like a rabbit determined to fight off the wolf with its dainty paws and fluffy tail. He will take what he needs from you…and I will devour him for eternity."
Stepping back from his taut-faced victim, Chuckles turned to Sam and placed one hand under his elbow, with mock solicitousness easing Sam forward until he was inches from his brother. Chuckles took a step away to the right and his chortling was almost loud enough to echo as he told Dean gleefully, "The last sight you'll see in this world is your baby brother gutting you like a slaughterhouse sow."
Continued in Chapter 3…
© 2006, Catherine D Stewart