Disclaimer, Summary & Ratings: See Chapter 1
THE WHOLE OF THE MOON
Chapter 4
The tip of the dagger skinned a shallow groove of flesh just below Dean's belly button as Sam's sweeping slash continued into a graceful pirouette and with the momentum of all his bodyweight he drove the dagger into Chuckles' torso with such force that the creature was bodily lifted up onto tip-toes and sent staggering backwards.
Just like Selena, Chuckles had no time to do more than become wide-eyed and slack-faced with shock, and crumpled the floor as if pole-axed.
For a moment the world seemed to wait with bated breath as if for some sort of signal. The small part of Dean's mind that was remotely rational and logical looked at the dead entity and noted that unlike Selena no bones had cracked, indicating the thing probably didn't have ribs.
Then Sam looked at him; his face was still expressionless. But his eyes were no longer like the windows of your neighbour's house when you peer in and see lifeless furniture and realise they've all gone to the mall. Sammy was in there again, but somehow it wasn't very reassuring.
Sam stepped in close, but without retrieving the dagger from its current scabbard of Chuckles' belly…was he seriously intending to unpick these hell-knots by hand?
Once again, Sam placed his first and second fingers on the cut he had made, only this time down at Dean's hip. Slowly he trailed them up the cut like he was a blind man reading Braille, and…
Holy healing, Batman; the shallow, stinging slice vanished as if Sam were zipping up his jacket, like it had never been. No stinging, no cut, not even the hint of a mark. That just from touching a few drops of Dean's blood to his lips? Clearly Chuckles's 'bathing in blood' routine had been the usual Gloating Psychopath overkill.
Sam took a step back and looked at the ropes, which simply fell away as if all they'd actually been waiting for was someone to suggest the idea. Dean gasped at the pain in his arms and his eyes automatically welled up with tears as blood sought to surge into his hands through the suddenly no longer constricted veins and he would have hit the cavern floor in a heap had Sam not been in the way of his fall so he landed against him. Sam clasped Dean's wrists with his own hands and once again there was that sensation of tingling warmth; the pain stopped and the raw, bloodied grooves in Dean's wrists became healthy, pink flesh.
Sam put his arm tight around Dean's waist and looped Dean's arm around his shoulder. "Come on, we need to get the stuff to barbeque the bad guy."
Despite Sam and his suddenly healing hands, Dean was still stiff and not totally steady on his feet. Together they made their way out of the cavern to discover that incredibly it was only mid-afternoon if that since Selena had accosted them after breakfast at the diner. They were halfway up a steep slope deep in the woods around Antietam and down through the trees they could see the Impala parked, or more accurately just stopped, in a clearing where presumably Selena had moved it to avoid arousing interest in the vehicle when nobody came to claim it.
"Thank god we're in the middle of nowhere at least," Sam muttered as he helped Dean down the trail.
"Yeah, not very likely any of the Alphabet noodle soup will see more than is good for them," Dean replied, feeling a sense of relief as they reached the Impala and it looked as if Selena had never thought to pop the trunk and have a look-see.
"Who cares about them?" Sam retorted. "I'm hugging a half-naked man…if we were still at Keedysville my rep' would be ruined."
"As what…the Prince of Geekdom? I'm the one girls would be throwing themselves off bridges over, dude, at the thought I was batting for the other team." Dean declared.
Sam let his brother rest against the rear passenger door and opened the trunk, blowing out a deep breath of relief when it was clear all their gear was intact and undisturbed. Plucking a black T-shirt out of their emergency 'we need to hide the blood-and-gore/our sucking chest wounds from rapidly approaching officials right now' pile, he held it out. "Here, put this on and improve the view."
Obediently Dean took the T-shirt and pulled it over his head, pulling out his charm necklace so it rested against the fabric as usual. Already he was feeling a lot better, though he supposed coming literally within a whisker of a hideous death and getting away alive and unscathed would do that to you.
Since this was a serious evil, he didn't bat an eyelid when Sam handed him a bottle of Holy Water as well as hefting a tub of salt and their trusty cigarette lighters as well as a box of matches.
"Say, how good is your healing whammy?" Dean asked.
"I don't know, why?" Sam immediately gave him his full attention, his eyes raking his brother's figure for signs of distress and missed injury.
"Well, next time give me a booster shot, another few inches will do nicely…above and below." Dean leered lasciviously.
Ladies and gentlemen…my brother, only Dean Winchester could turn the trauma of being millimetres and milliseconds away from evisceration into sexual innuendo.
"It only works on illness and injury…you'll just have to deal with having the midget genetics…your genes and your jeans are your problem…jerk." Peculiarly, the final insult was said almost tenderly.
"At least I got the inches where it counts, bitch." The final epithet was as gently uttered by Dean.
There was a low hissing sound like steam escaping from a pan on a hotplate.
Both brothers turned and without apparently moving through the intervening space to get there, Sam was in front of his brother, his face a stern, almost judgemental mask.
Chuckles wasn't at his best as he stood next a poplar tree that his right hand pressed against in unconscious support. He had pulled out the dagger from his torso and held it in his hand. The weapon was completely covered in a viscous, lumpy black fluid that was presumably Chuckles' blood, but there was no mass exsanguination as with Selena. His face had shrunken tighter around his skull, giving him a skeletal appearance, and his teeth were now shorter and pointed, accentuating the image of the humanity fading from him.
"Aw, look, he came all the way down here so we could kill his evil ass more easily, wasn't that good of him?" Dean said mockingly, "For that, we'll torch your ass quick."
Chuckles hissed again contemptuously, "Worm…I am impervious to your fire…"
"But only until you're dead," Sam amended calmly, "after that you're just another corpse to char grill."
Chuckles bared his stumpy fangs, "I will rip you both asunder like tissue paper, and feasts on raw gobbets of your flesh –"
"Oh please!" Dean rolled his eyes. "Can't you guys ever come up with something more original than the maniacal super-villain riff? The obligatory psycho-speech is so last season…and it would be a lot more impressive if you didn't have that great big so-noticeable fatal hole in your guts."
Chuckles snarled, "Fool…Do you think this is more than an irritation to me? My power is beyond your pathetic ability to comprehend…I will stand here and laugh as you use your puny knives and guns against me…I have no internal organs to shred or bones to lethally crush."
"Yes, I know…" Sam spoke before Dean could fully absorb or react to the declaration, "Which is why I poisoned you to death."
"You did?" Dean's incipient look of alarm dissolved like hoarfrost. "Go, baby bro'!"
But Chuckles sneered, "I think not; is that the best you can do, such a feeble bluff, when I am impervious to herbs and charms and incantations, and when you had no thought or will save to serve my desire!"
Sam remained unperturbed. "Yes, I realised your powers when you tried to enslave me. That's why I let you bring yourself to your doom…my brother's blood will kill you soon."
Chuckles laughed – now not the smooth, condescending snigger of his faux humanity but the hissing, rasping cackle of his true form – at this hubris. "I have wallowed in the blood of the human vermin for millennia…I have swum in it and gorged myself fat on the gore of your kind…his blood is as insignificant as a teaspoonful of honey to me…"
"Except that my brother's blood is now sanctified."
There was an infinitesimal pause, as if the universe itself had been waiting for the words that momentarily seemed to hang visibly in the air, glowing and tinkling, as Dean understand without understanding that this moment was profound.
For a moment Chuckles' malicious sneer remained in place before faint uncertainty took hold. "Iiiiimmposssssssible," he slurred the word past thinner lips and a tongue now forked as he became ever more reptilian of appearance, his hair having begun floating down and faint impressions of scales taking the follicles place.
Sam looked at Chuckles with that stern visage, suddenly looking older and more authoritative. "You are always the same…you only know how to take. You steal, you snatch, you bully and coerce and force…it never occurs to you that you would be given, if only you asked."
Dean did not understand, and clearly neither did Chuckles, whose tongue flicked out between his lips grotesquely. "Him, when he I steeped in corruption? Foetid with sin until he stinks like a sewer?"
"Dude, glasshouses and stones –" retorted Dean.
Chuckles hissed malevolently and fixed sly eyes on Sam's face as he spitefully spat truths warped and twisted and removed from context. "Sanctified blood, from Dean Winchester, compulsive liar? Fourteen when he perpetrated his first credit card fraud? Card cheat and pool hustler?"
For the first time Dean was provoked to anguished rage as the thing exposed his shameful acts to Sammy, the one person in the world whose good opinion he needed as air, whose imagined look of disgust and contempt at his deviancy and shame was his second recurring nightmare after the perpetual No.1 hit of him failing to protect Sammy from being killed on a Hunt.
"Shut up!" He swung up the shotgun but Sammy's body was still between him and the creature, blocking his line of fire.
Chuckles spewed the words as if a cobra spitting venom, hacking with rasping glee, "Dean Winchester, rich women's whore? Playing their pool-boy and rough-trade fantasies for gas and grocery money? Seducer and womaniser…thief and pickpocket…drug dealer and murderer –"
Dean tried to barge past Sam, the shotgun raised to stop the litany of his sins, but Sam simply held out his arm as an immovable bar, his palm flat and warm against Dean's chest and incredibly his hand moved slightly like a loving father rubbing a small child's tummy soothingly.
Sam looked at Chuckles, and Dean looked at Sam, and Sam looked unsurprised, but also unmoved, not contemptuous and not disgusted.
"Love is sacrifice…" Sam told the thing simply, his voice soft yet somehow ringing in the small glade like a sweet crystal bell chiming. "…Which is why Evil always loses out in the end. You never had any control over my mind or ability to damage my will at all, though you could command my physical body for a little while. And that is why you brought your death upon yourself…you broke your own spell over me the instant you told my brother the truth that I needed his blood."
"It is impossible for his blood to be sanctified!" But Chuckles' voice lacked conviction and despite the increasing lack of humanity to his features he suddenly looked like nothing so much as someone who had eaten a burger too fast and was getting bad heartburn.
Sammy smiled, a happy, affectionate smile, like when he was really little and after dinner when he was bathed and warm and sleepy, Dean would lift him onto his lap and read to him from his favourite book of bedtime stories as Sammy snuggled in the cocooning safety of Dean's arms, delighting in the way Dean gently rubbed his chin in the silky hair of Sammy's scalp and the way his brother would editorialise the sanitised tales and babyishly but laughingly mock-scolding Dean when his brother changed the endings to things like "'and the third little pig whipped out both his .45s and turned the wolf into a rug'" or "'and little Red Riding Hood pulled out an AK47 and screamed at the wolf-punk to make her day before she blew his ass to hell'".
"Of course it is, because when you told him I needed his blood to stop it hurting, you had no advantage in lying, so he knew you were telling the truth, and from that moment on, Dean was no longer your victim." Sammy told Chuckles softly with something akin to genuine pity in his tone.
And Dean finally began to understand.
"My brother loves me more than anything in the world, and there is nothing he would not do for me. He was a willing sacrifice for my sake; if you had released his bonds there and then he would not have stopped my death-stroke. His offered his lifeblood freely and without resentment on the altar of my need, and was thus made holy."
The words echoed like a bell and seemed to resonate in every atom of the air itself and the thing before them shuddered in physical pain from the very utterances of love, and faith, and sacrifice.
"Every drop of blood within him was saturated with his love, and there was enough in that small smear on the edge of the dagger to kill a legion of your kind," Sam's voice was deeper and sonorous, carrying a hint of thunder. "You were dead from the instant it was plunged into you, moving through your physical carcass like sweet incense, cleansing this world of your vileness from the inside out…and it should have infused every rotting pore of you right about….now." he finished as Chuckles suddenly and simply keeled over like a felled tree.
Not even leaves flirted up at the impact, as if the body were already insubstantial and not affecting the world around it.
It shrivelled up like a deflated balloon when you placed it on a fire, and then the tiny spot on the ground began to smoke, not black but white, and then there was nothing.
Concluded in Epilogue…
© 2006, Catherine D Stewart