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.

4. An Axe to Break the Ice

Dean is staring at Sam, his eyes bloodshot and shiny, and Sam knows his brother is hammered, knows it because Dean is only that malicious, that brutally honest, when he's feeling no pain. But even if he is secure in the knowledge Dean never would have said it if he was sober, it spikes right through him because it suddenly occurs to him that his brother must have felt this way since that night in Cold Oak, even though Sam knows damn well he has never uttered one word about his guilt, never uttered it for the simple reason that he can't bear the thought that he might see affirmation in Dean's eyes.

"Yeah…" Dean brother is curling his lips now, in a mean, twisted smile that looks more like he's baring his teeth. "Never thought of that, did you? You let your fuckin' guard down and I paid the price. Again."

That cuts through to the quick, and Sam feels confused, flustered. "Again?" he says. "Again? What do you mean by that?"

"Bender," his brother growls viciously, and he lifts a shaking hand to his brow, rubs it hard. "You let your guard down with Bender and it was me who ended up… Jesus. And you let it down with that fuckin' loser, Jake Talley. You climbed right up to the moral high ground, didn't you, instead of killing the sonofabitch when you had the chance."

Sam flounders for a second, stutters helplessly. "N-no. Dean. Y-you don't understand. I couldn't. I couldn't kill him—"

"Couldn't kill him?" Dean cuts in, his eyes gone narrow and mean. "Well Sammy, you made a pretty good job of killing him at the devil's gate. Emptied a full clip into him if memory serves, and it looked like you got a hell of a kick out of it." He shakes his head, drops his gaze for a second. "Too late for me."

Sam feels breathless, tight in his chest, shame mixed with desperation as he suddenly recalls the demon, its yellow eyes malign and its grin feral. "No, Dean," he protests. "No. Don't you see, I couldn't, because that was what Yellow Eyes wanted, he wanted me to do that, he wanted me—"

"He wanted me," Dean hollers back, a hoarse, grating rasp, while his finger stabs at the air, and Sam wants to tell him to calm down, but it has gone beyond that so swiftly he's at a loss, and now Dean is an arm-waving fury right up in Sam's face, yelling out the words so violently Sam can hear his voice fracture and feel spittle showering his skin.

"He wanted me, you fuckin' idiot. Me. Not you. You walked right into the trap and led me by the fuckin' nose. And then you, you… fuckin' wasted me."

With that, Dean lets rip a right hook that takes Sam unawares, slamming into the side of his face and sending him reeling. The blow is followed by an uppercut to the ribs that lifts him half a foot off the ground before landing him on his butt in the mud. He shakes his head, momentarily dazed by flashing lights, before pushing slowly up onto his feet, rubbing at his ribcage and trying to swallow down his sudden urge to puke.

"I don't want to fight you, Dean," he says helplessly, but his brother is circling, prowling, eyes suddenly brilliant with rage, hackles raised, has him in his sights, is taking the measure of him. He barrels right into Sam again and Sam holds up his arms, defends himself as best he can while Dean forces him back up against the wall.

"Fuckin' buzzkill," Dean shouts, his voice raw. "Fight back, you little shit."

His fists are thudding into Sam, but he's out of control, irrational, the attack lacking its customary finesse and choreographed grace. It's sloppy, in fact, like Dean's heart really isn't in it despite his taunts, like he isn't able for it, like he isn't the man he was. And Sam finally reaches out, grabs Dean's hand mid-punch, spins him and twists his arm up behind him before shoving him face-first into the wall, hoping to God it isn't the shoulder Alastair dislocated again.

"Dean," he hisses, right in his brother's ear. "Stop this. I am not going to fight you. I won't do it."

He has sparred with Dean and seen him in action enough times to know he fights dirty when he's up against losing odds, but even so he doesn't expect the back of his brother's skull to slam into his face quite so viciously. Agony flares whitely, and it poleaxes Sam, leaving him flat on his back in puddles of rain, blind with tears. He reaches up a hand and feels blood on his nose, can feel it flooding his mouth too, and he tastes copper and iron.

And then Dean is reaching down, hauling Sam up by a handful of his jacket. His features are drawn and grim, but he can't hide the wince of discomfort, and all Sam can see is the pain, the bruises, eyes flat and dead now, and God help him, he doesn't want to hurt his brother but this is getting to the point where he's going to have to defend himself and Dean is in no shape for that after Alastair. Or maybe there's another way, and Sam reaches for it, finds himself willing Dean backwards, just one tiny nudge, an Andy Gallagher nudge when he needs it most, minimal, strategic, and controlled, because he's practiced the big moves enough with Ruby to know that he could notch it right up to hurling his brother against a handy gravestone or tree if he wanted to, just like Yellow Eyes did that night in Wyoming, just like Alastair did in Greybull.

"Dean," he says, nudging while his brother pulls his fist back again. "Please, Dean, I don't want to hurt you, I don't want to—"

"Hurt me? Because you can? Because I'm weak?"

It's choked out, and Dean lets go, steps back, jerky and robotic, and Sam can feel the thrill of power spark all colorful and warm inside him, the nudge. He focuses on that, doesn't want to think about what his brother just said, doesn't want to think about that fucking siren any more than he has to, wants to think it was the nudge that stopped this and not Dean's memory of what he said back in Bedford, even as his mind is calmly denying that he just gave his brother the demon whammy.

Dean is staring at Sam with a foggy, bewildered expression, like he might not even realize what just happened. And his voice quiets right down to so intensely sad and heartfelt that it makes Sam feel sick to his stomach, and suddenly, appallingly, his brother is crying, maybe he was crying all the time and I just didn't notice, and his shoulders are sagging, his knees buckling so that he sits down heavily.

The torrent of bile over as abruptly as it began, reduced now to whispering. "What I went through for you. You'll never. Never, I can never… And you wasted it. You wasted me. You did that, Sam. You still did that, that thing you did. That thing you do. That I asked you not to. My dying fuckin' wish, you called it. So. It was for nothing, what I did, what happened to me there. All for nothing."

Sam finds he's rubbing at his own eyes as Dean sits there, motionless, not even reaching up to stall the tears dripping off his chin. He doesn't know what to say, only knows that in spite of his brother's drunkenness and the likelihood Dean might not even remember most of what he's just said, this is some sort of turning point, fork in the road, whatever. And the thought Dean might think that he spat in the face of his sacrifice does awful, tearing, ripping, grinding things to Sam's insides, and he knows damn well he has to get the situation back under control right the fuck now.

He wipes his nose and lip, sees a dark smear of blood glistening on the back of his hand, blood on my hands, and he starts talking. "Did you know that blood makes up seven percent of the human body?" he asks softly. "That we have about five quarts inside us on average, and that our hearts create enough pressure as they pump to squirt blood ten feet away? It's called arterial spray. I know that because I saw it happen, to you, Dean." He sees it now, again, his brother fighting, screaming, dying in a suburban newbuild while he watched, helpless, and he clenches his fists. "So I know it's true. Five quarts of blood, spraying ten feet away, more even. And I heard it happen too, heard you scream my name and beg for your life."

Dean is looking up at Sam, eyes dull and jaded now, old beyond their years, shattered, and Sam bends at the knees, settles down on his own backside on the ground, finds he's recalling another memory now, of another alleyway where he gathered up the broken pieces of his brother and tried to fit them back together as best he could. "It was so quiet afterwards. Like the world stopped. And I knelt down in your blood. There were puddles of it." He pauses, shifts his gaze from his brother's face to the ground next to him, reaches down and touches his fingertips to the surface of a rainwater pool. "Puddles like this, and it dripped from my fingers and it got under my nails, got right into the skin there. And my knees, they skidded in it. It was slippery. It soaked into my jeans and I didn't wash them for weeks afterwards. It was like those Elvis concerts where he'd wipe his sweat off on scarves and hand them out to the women and they never washed it off. Never."

Dean is still watching him, and he seems a tad more lucid now, but tears are still trailing down his cheeks.

"I did wash them eventually," Sam whispers. "Had to really, because it got all hard where the blood soaked in so they weren't all that comfortable to wear. And Bobby didn't like seeing them." He shivers. "There was so much blood, Dean. The floor in that room, it was wooden. So all that blood just pooled there, and soaked into my jeans while I held you and asked you not to go." Sightless eyes, he remembers. "You looked right at me, and I thought you were going to laugh and say you fooled me good. But you never did. And after a while, Bobby came and lifted Ruby, or whoever she was, up, and took her out to the car. And then he came back and lifted you up and took you out to the car. And then he came back again and sat me down, poured me a drink, and he never said a word, Dean. Nothing. And then the woman, that kid's mom… you remember her?"

It's barely perceptible, but Dean nods.

"She came in. I guess she was in shock, maybe she saw you and Bobby or something. And she started yelling about, about th-the m-mess." Sam is stammering now, has to breathe deep. "The m-mess. And she went out and came back in and she had a mop and a bucket of water. It stank of bleach. And she just kept screaming about the mess, and she…" He stops, gasps. "She. Washed you away. She took that mop and she washed you away, Dean. Cleaned up the mess, and it wasn't a mess at all, it was you. My brother, who I… she called you a mess. And how dare she, how, how dare—"

"Fuck. Sammy. Sammy."

Dean's voice breaks, and he's reaching out his arms, and Sam throws himself in there, holds on like he might never let go, like he did in New Harmony until Bobby pried his fingers loose. But this time his brother is warm, breathing, alive; Sam can feel Dean's heart thud, and he holds on too and hugs back.

And now that Sam has started, it's like he might never stop. "We just drove, never said a word to each other, just knew we wanted to take you back home to Bobby's," he stumbles on. "We drove non-stop, back roads in case we got pulled over, and we weren't really paying attention. We ran out of gas, middle of nowheresville, and I had to walk a few miles back to a gas station. Bobby said he'd stay with you, and it was the first thing he said to me since before you… and I walked there and back, and the woman at the gas station, she said, have a nice day as I left." He barks out a horrified laugh. "Can you believe that? And it took hours. And it was hot. And we had the windows down, but it was hot, Dean. Real hot. And you, you. You started to. To… and I can still smell it, Dean. My brother rotting on the back seat. I can still. I can… and so we had to stop, couldn't take you home, and—"

"Shhhh," Dean is murmuring into his hair. "Here now. Shhhh. It doesn't matter now."

Sam shakes his head. "No, it does matter. It's the reason, it's why, all of it. Why I couldn't do what you asked, why I couldn't let it go. Why you wasted yourself on me, and you're right. It wasn't worth it. I wasn't worth it. And you shouldn't have, you—"

"Never be a waste, Sammy," Dean slurs. "Wasn't then, isn't now. Don't mind me. Just the drink talking…"

He sounds dazed, tired, sleepy, and Sam disentangles himself, stares into half-lidded, inebriated eyes, knows he'll be carrying Dean back across to the motel if they don't go now. He knows he meant what he said, every damn word, and his heart is wrung out. But he feels hollow inside because he knows it served its purpose too, that it achieved exactly what he hoped it would, and the undercurrent of subterfuge and deceit makes him feel sick to his stomach.

"Come on," he says wearily, and he clambers to his feet, hauls his newly docile brother with him. "Time to sleep it off."

The girl scans the photographs, points a flat stare at Hudak. "Nope. Sorry. I ain't seeing the guy here at all."

Hudak taps her pen on the desktop a couple of times, tries to do it calmly but knows she failed when the kid smirks faintly. "Well, could you describe him?" she prods tersely. "We've got a guy here who can sketch."

The girs sniffs. "Yeah. I guess. Tall. Wide."

"Can you give us any more than that? Come on, you said you walked right up to them." It's painful, Hudak thinks, because the girl might be playing dumb but she has this sixth sense about the sly gleam in her eye, this sense it might be the incongruous crafty intelligence of the academically dim genius, the kind of people who can't read or add up to save their lives but who graduated summa cum laude in outthinking, outwitting, outsmarting, outdoing the opposition.

"He looked like that guy in Star Wars," the girl says after pouting. "The old Star Wars."

Getting somewhere, maybe. At last. "You mean Mark Hamill? Or Harrison Ford?"

Clueless stare by way of an answer.

"Like Luke Skywalker?" Hudak clarifies.

"Nah," the girl scowls. "The other one."

"Han Solo?" Hudak follows up, sparing a moment to muse abstractedly that even she would walk into the night with a serial killer who looked like Han Solo.

"Not him either. The other guy. The big one." The girl blows out a pink bubblegum balloon at Hudak and it pops, plasters her lips for a few seconds until she peels it off, stuffs it back in there, chews the cud again.

Hudak mentally runs though who's left, and for a second she remembers the werewolf conversation with Coop, thinks wildly that maybe she was right, and that maybe the girl actually saw the thing with its game face on. "The big hairy guy?" she croaks.

"You mean the Wookiee?" The girl gives Hudak a look that's a mixture of amusement and pity. "You think we maybe have a Wookiee problem in Duluth, lady cop?" she quips acidly, and maybe the little bitch is twenty-one after all, because no teenager should be that scathing.

And now Hudak is on the defensive herself and she pauses to admire how effectively the kid has turned the tables on her, feels a grudging respect for her, thinks the brat missed her vocation and should be working this case herself, or maybe prosecuting.

"Well, the only other big guy is Darth Vader," she counters. "And since you didn't mention the black mask and the asthma, I'm assuming it wasn't him."

The kid shakes her head, sighs. "The other other big guy. You know. With the tail." She flaps her hands, furrows her brow in concentration. "Wait a second. It's coming back to me."

It was there all afuckinglong, Hudak thinks snidely.

"Pizza the hut. That guy."

Hudak sends the girl back out into the dark with twenty bucks fisted in her grubby paw. "Stay in tonight, huh?" she says, and the kid looks at her with an odd mix of gratitude and who the fuck do you think you are, the boss of me?

"Waste of time," Hudak mutters, but she passes the intel onto Coop just the same. "We're looking for an eight-foot by eight-foot slug-like space alien with a tail," she announces. "Jabba the Hutt, in fact."

He smirks. "I told you it was a man," he says again. "They all are. White males, approximate age twenty-eight point five. Right here in River City, Kathleen. Seventy one percent of these guys operate in a specific location or area, and we're it."

She shrugs. "It's just this whole heart thing, Coop. And the deal with the face. Especially the face. They were good-looking guys. Pretty. It seems…" She pauses, blows out. "I can't believe I'm going to say this, but it seems too bitchy for a man."

Coop snorts. "Three wives later, Katie, I ain't gonna disagree with you on that one. But I don't think it's gonna read scientific enough for the profile." He chews his lip. "In my experience, these guys, they come in three flavors. You got your thrill-seekers, and it's a game to them… it's all about outsmarting us, getting in the newspapers, but those guys, they send messages."

"Like the Zodiac killer," Hudak offers, and she pulls out her chair, sits, because Coop has been in this game for pushing twenty years and he knows it, loves it, and she can learn from him, loves to sit and soak it up, the years of experience.

"Like the Zodiac killer," he nods. "Then you got the ones on a mission from God, clearing out the lowlife scum, Travis Bickle types. But these victims, they weren't scum. We don't even have any real evidence they were cruising for hookers, 'cept this one guy, this Garner kid." He taps the desk with his finger. "Then you got your power and control freaks. And they're in it for the kick, Katie. It's a labor of love for these guys, they enjoy the terror, and the suffering, and the screaming. And I think we got us one of them. Fits in with the assaults too."

"And the face?" Hudak prompts. "The hearts?"

"Souvenirs," he says. "Trophies. A memory of the crime, helps them relive it. He might even be building a shrine." He roots through his files, pulls out a red folder and slides it over. "FBI database pulled up something interesting. Guy's dead though… had a run-in with the Feds, not that long ago, in fact. Pity, since he had a pretty impressive rap sheet. Looks like he ran the gamut from arson and credit card fraud through to murder and torture. There's even some grave desecration in the mix." He grimaces. "Real piece of work. Anyhoo, it's possible the unsub might be connected to him in some way. He's spot on for looks."

Hudak opens it up, knowing who she'll see. And yep, there he is, one of the FBI's most wanted, pulling some dorkish face, next to the other picture from the Milwaukee bank job. And she feels that wave of regret, of pity, of grief for a life wasted, the same one she crushed down inside herself after Bobby's call. She forces it back down now as well. "Could just be a coincidence," she murmurs thickly.

"Could be," Coop agrees amiably. "Most likely is. But it's all we have right now." He lens back in his chair, huffs. "But this guy will get greedy, Katie, they all do. The more they get away with it, the more they start believing their own success, thinking maybe they can take chances. That's when these nutjobs get sloppy. And that's when they get caught."

He seems so sure of himself Hudak doesn't want to remind him that sometimes they don't get caught; that sometimes they aren't nutjobs at all, that they're bright, adaptive. Smarter than the cops, in fact. "You've been watching Criminal Minds again, Coop," she says instead, and he snorts.

"It's a tad more likely than X Files and werewolves, kid."

Dean leans against Sam for the first few steps, then lists heavily as his knees buckle, and Sam heaves him up over his shoulder, lurches back across the road to the motel room, eases him down on the bed as carefully as he can.

The smell of stale liquor turns Sam's stomach but any thought of rousing Dean into the shower is forgotten when he turns the lamp on low and gazes down at his brother. Dean is ashen, the shadow of bruising still obvious around his eyes and nose, evidence of the demon's handhold still purpling his neck. Sam hasn't really watched his brother sleeping, tries to sleep when Dean sleeps, before the nightmares wake them both; but he can see that his brother looks scared, tense, uptight, shot to pieces in fact. And it makes him feel sick, makes him feel rage for the fact there is no peace, no rest for Dean.

He glances across to the bottle of Jack next to the bed, debates for a few seconds before he picks it up and walks it to the bathroom to slosh a quarter of what's left down the toilet, before he returns to set it back down on the nightstand. He leans over Dean then, starts unlacing his boots, tugging them off his feet.

Dean comes round, and kicks out, making tired sounds of protest. "Shammy. Leave 'em. On. On. Hear me?"

Sam flops his brother's foot down, kneels down on the floor so he's level with his face. "You aren't going anywhere, Dean," he says gently. "The boots come off in bed, jeans and hoodie too. If you puke it'll get all over you. I don't want your puke on my hoodie, okay?" He starts to crawl back down to the end of the bed when his brother snaps his hand out viper fast, panicked, grabs his wrist.

"Need 'em on," he croaks. "Clothes. For when they come. The hounds. Can't be naked down there. When I go back. S'bad news. Sham… Sham. Please." He's barely comprehensible now, wincing as he swallows. "They do bad things down there. Real bad things. In the dark. Tied down. Can't fight." He stops, blinks. "Cas," he mutters. "Don't leave me here… Alastair, he makes me see things that aren't real, can't be real, he makes me see people that aren't really there… Need my clothes, don't want them touching me."

And it's so fundamental, yet Sam never realized why Dean sleeps fully dressed now, sometimes even on top of the bed with his jacket draped over him. And maybe he never even bothered to wonder why. He knows he never bothered to ask. "They aren't coming for you, Dean," he chokes out. "The hounds, they're never coming back. You're never going back there, I promise. I promise. I won't let that happen."

Dean's eyes are already drifting closed and Sam doesn't think he hears the pledge. He eases the boots and jeans off, wrestles his brother's lax body out of the hoodie. After he showers himself off, he maneuvers Dean over towards the wall and sleeps there on the bed beside him, and he knows it's to comfort himself when the dreams start, as much as his brother.

The twenty feels soft and warm in her hand, and it's honest money, honest money she came by helping the cops. It makes her preen inside, and she thinks maybe she'll do like the cop lady said, and have herself a night off. Maybe eat like a queen too, so she stops off at Subway and buys a couple of footlongs and a liter of soda, calls into the seven eleven for cigarettes and a can of tuna too.

The elevators in her building have long since stopped working, and she takes a breather on the fourth floor, glances over the balcony at the bright orange and yellow machinery parked a few hundred yards away. There's just a single block between hers and the wrecking ball now. "Soon be time to move," she concedes ruefully before she starts climbing again.

Once on her floor she pushes her door open, and announces herself with a hard rap on the door opposite. "Al," she shouts. "Hey, big Al. Got a footlong for you. Fancy some company?"

The door squeaks open and she stares up, up, as Al maneuvers his huge bulk out sideways. She waves the bag invitingly. "Footlong. Feast, all the meats. Just how you like it. And look…" She roots the can out of her pocket. "Tuna for your cat, even."

He smiles widely, shows her broken stained teeth, but his big, moonlike face lights up. And that makes her feel like she's family.