"Oh shit." Sam gasped as the monster formed behind him. He turned to watch as the Astroturf twisted and towered into a thick brute of a troll. His blood ran cold, even though it was a hot night in rural Missouri and his skin was thick with sweat.

The monster moved forward on cobbled feet, slowly, in a strange yet powerful waddle. His mouth moved, but made no sounds. Sam turned to run, but the monster's thick fingers caught one foot nearly instantly. Sam felt himself lifted, being swung up into the air. He couldn't tell if the monster was feeling peckish or simply wanted to learn to write his name using Sam as a pencil. Either scenario was not ideal. Then he heard the sound of his brother's GTO coming out of the distant twilight.

He saw the lights soon after and the rest of the rust-colored bucket came behind. Dean was singing...something...but Sam couldn't quite make it out. Avoiding getting slammed while keeping himself still in the air was a bigger issue at the moment.

"I'm comin' Sammy!" Dean bellowed as he brought the car to a squealing halt and jumped out with dad's sawed-off shotgun by his side. He ran forward, using one arm for aiming and leverage. Falling into a kneeling position, Dean squinted and fired off two shots. Sam scrunched in on himself so that he would be a smaller target. But it didn't matter. Dean barely had time to hit the dirt as the bullets ricocheted off of the thick hide of the Astroturf beast.

"Dean, get me down!"

"I'm working on it, huh? Aren't you supposed to be the genius and me the lowly demon hunting prodigy?"

Sam barely avoided the jaws of the beast and was currently trying to kick the monster's eyes out, or the space where the eyes should have been. "Are you still pissed about that? I said I was sorry."

"You didn't say it like you meant it."

Sam would have thrown his hands up in the air if they hadn't already been there. "Okay, okay. I'll apologize after you get me down and destroy this thing."

"That's better. Thoughts?"

Sam felt the dirt as it brushed by his hair and he knew it would probably have taken a chunk out of the middle. Dean was moving back towards the car, looking for a better weapon. Sam was going to have to figure out something before this thing actually got a piece of him, seeing as how he was already getting woozy from the blood rushing to his head.

"Dean, get the vodka! Make a molotov!"

"Are you insane?!" Dean called from the car. "This is dad's last secret bottle. No way am I getting in trouble..."

"Dean!"

Dean sighed and hurried around to the glove box, pulling out the bottle of vodka that he and Sam had worked so hard to steal. Taking a final swig, Dean grunted and proceeded to stuff the top with bits of newspaper scattered throughout his GTO. By the time he was ready to roll the makeshift bomb, Sam was unconscious and the brute of a lawn troll was already throwing Sam's body into his own thick rib cage.

"Its just like at the alley last week with Kathy," Dean muttered as he took his cheap-ass lighter and lit it against his jeans. Tossing the lit bottle, it rolled and exploded right on cue. The surprised monster threw Sam a few feet off of the blast site and turned in surprised rage to the people that had created it. He started to waddle his way towards them, which caused more than one scream and more than one shot to be fired.

"Idiots," Dean muttered as he slapped his brother's cheek to wake him up, "I already tried that. Hey Sammy, get up. Prom's over and our hour's paid up."

"Wha...." Sam muttered as he woke up to Dean's outstretched arm ready to give him a lift. "Don't say it," Sam pleaded with a groan.

"Say what? Say that you stole and used Dad's last good bottle of vodka to destroy a monster created by the high school kids of the gypsy clan...."

"Hey! You used that vodka!"

Dean slipped his body beneath his brother's arm. He could feel the labored breathing and he ventured a guess that there was probably already one broken rib. "To save your life. Tell you what, I'll take credit for the kill but I wanna be in the room when you tell dad why you got in this mess."

Sam snorted. "Thanks. You gonna read my eulogy too?"

Dean shook his head as they halted at the GTO. "Well, lets get your broken ass in Miranda first and then we'll talk about your eulogy."

Sam gingerly started to lower himself into the passenger seat, on top of a smattering of grocery ads. "Dude, you have to stop naming your cars."

It was always during times like these (when he was kidnapped) that Sam remembers the old days, like the memory of the Astroturf demon. Dean's ongoing tribute of making his brother bait was due to the fact that his gawky brother didn't know when to tell the dumb jock kids of the gypsy cursers in Clanton, Missouri that he would think about joining the football team (in the South) instead of just giving an outright no to begin with, no matter how he felt about it.

Sam was pretty good at playing the Daphne to his brother's Fred at this point. He didn't even have to practice his defensive pouty face to make his captors think he identified with him. Neither did Sam have to be cavalier, he just expected that Dean would come to his rescue. He could care less if the captors knew.

The first thing that registered with Sam, after the feeling that he had eaten a blood and Astroturf sandwich on the floor of a rusted out van, that had left a lovely streak of dirt on the side of his cheek, was the throbbing headache. It was a nice touch to have those, it gave him an area of pain to concentrate on, like a sun to revolve his pain around. Good, long ones could even keep his mind sharp.

The surroundings were nothing to write home about. The lights were still off and there was no light from any windows that he could tell. The shape of a slight stairway or possibly just a lift in the floor broke the tension of the black. He tried moving his legs, knowing they were tied with thick, well-knotted rope already, and noting that there was a definite springy squeak as he moved.

"Okay, on a bed with a bad mattress," Sam thought and added with an after smell, "a moldy, old mattress."

Lights came on quickly and his body tensed, but he let his arms relax. He wouldn't be able to swing with the way they were tied anyways. He could take quite a few punches, but not being able to hit back right away would be a disadvantage that Sam didn't care for. She came around the corner and you could have knocked Sam out with a feather.

"Ruby?!"

She looked around quickly, bringing a knife out of her back pocket to start shredding through the ropes with. "Sam. Glad to see you're awake, I'll have you free in a minute."

"How...why...you're here."

Ruby smirked. "Good to see you know who I am. At least I don't have to ask you who the president is or anything."

"Ruby....."

Ruby moved from the left wrist to the right wrist. "Look, not much time. I've been trailing you and I don't know where your pair of captors went, but they won't be gone long. They said something about Castiel."

"You think I can trust you?"

Ruby grimaced as she came in contact with a particularly difficult knot. "Look, Dean's not the only one who can be taken out of hell for less than charitable reasons. They sent me to help."

Dean's arms snapped up slightly, free of the weights of the rope. He used his free arms to work on the loop underneath his right calf. "Look, not that I'm not grateful and everything, but you realize that I can't trust you."

Ruby nodded. "Didn't say you had to Sam, just said that I was here to help. Can you wiggle the other leg out?"

Sam groaned under his breath, panting as he watched his skin being pulled into an obscene shade of red. "Damn it, no."

It seemed to take Ruby forever to slash through the last knot, but she eventually did and Sam found that he could sit up without too much pain. His headache weighed out the slack pain in his muscles. Ruby headed back up the division in the floor and checked to make sure the coast was clear.

"Come on, lets get back to Dean."

Sam shook his head, furrowing his brow. "Why would you want to see Dean?"

"C'mon, I'm sure he's gotten over what I did."

"You were the final seal, Ruby! And I don't know how the hell you intend to make up for that, but I got a feeling that Dean wouldn't let you. No, we gotta go elsewhere."

Ruby moved back towards Sam, a look of anger flashing across her face. "Look, I rescued you and I'm taking you back to Dean, okay? Then I'll scamper off on my merry way. You just gotta tell me where he is."

"I won't do that. I won't put you in danger. Not with this psychopath after him."

A corner of Ruby's mouth turned up in a sweet smirk as she closed the space between Sam and herself. "I had forgotten how much you loved him, how much you wanted to protect him."

Sam felt one of his knees shaking. She was so close, he could reach out and ..... he heard his voice, but there was a disconnect with something in his mind screaming at him. "He's my brother."

Ruby reached up and pulled Sam's lips into a kiss that he wasn't expecting. But it didn't taste like Ruby at all. Something was wrong, it was aggressive and yet distracted. Even if she had changed, and people pulled from hell often do change, Sam doubted that she should have changed that much.

"Ruby, we...."

The laugh on the other end of the kiss wasn't Ruby. In fact, it wasn't anyone he had ever met before. Her face was pale and her dark hair flowed out of a spiky bun. She was wearing different clothes as well, a fake red fur among them. Sam felt his body shaking, repelled away from her to a point where he fell back to a sitting position on the mattress.

"Sorry, Sam. Guess I'm not the girl you were looking for."

"C'mon Dru," Angelus added with a twisted hint of glee as he stepped out from where Ruby/Drusilla had come from, "it was just getting good and hot. You should have fucked him, then he might have killed himself before we would've had to. Less messy that way."

"Mmmm..." Drusilla purred, "Ms. Doolittle says he was a naughty thing, but he tries so hard to be good."

Angelus let loose with a fanged smile. "Well, maybe we can fix that."

"Okay," Sam snarled as he sat up on the bed, "what the hell are you?"

Angelus pointed to himself. "Excuse me, I'm the captor here. I will ask the questions. Like, I don't know, where the hell is your brother hiding himself?!"

"You seem to know just as much about our movements as we do. Why don't you tell me how she turned into someone I knew and I'll tell you where Dean is." Sam snarled, barely hiding his contempt under his breath.

Angelus' eyes lit up as he grabbed a chair from underneath the vanity, the mirror already gone from above the desk. As he sat in a relaxed position of confident superiority, he let one hand slide down to his crotch. Even though Sam didn't look, it was clear that Angelus was going to torture him and most likely get off on it. Drusilla's fingers were long and black and slid along Angelus' shoulders until she stood by his side, one arm draped across his back.

"A trade. Hmmm...seems kind of old-fashioned. But, then, I am an old-fashioned kind of guy. Guess that's what happens when you're made into a dark creature back in the Old World. In my day, we didn't even have chainsaws. It was a real shame."

"I bet. Now, you wanna know where my brother is or are you gonna talk all night?"

Angelus stood slowly. "So, you're a get down to business kind of guy, huh? I can appreciate that. I mean, you're young. You still have places to go, things to do...incidentally, what places would those be that you would go to? Maybe Bobby's auto shop with that demon shack in the middle?"

"I hated that place," Drusilla pouted, "all dirty and pure. Miss Doolittle shuddered the entire time we were there."

"If you hurt Bobby..."

"Careful how you finish that sentence, Junior," Angelus chuckled darkly, "threatening is no way to talk to your elders. But, just so you know," Angelus continued as he towered over Sam, leaning into him so that Sam had to sprawl out on the bed beneath him, "I didn't do anything to him. Yet."

Sam tried for a swift kick to the groin but Angelus caught his leg, leaving his held up in the air while he admired the split in the younger Winchester son's pants. "You know, the old me with the soul would have never caught your leg because he didn't like human blood. Well, he liked it, but he was a wuss. Luckily, he's not here. And you try that again and I'll have you begging me to fuck you after I get through with you."

"What? You gonna use your girlfriend's magic act on me again?"

Drusilla peeked over Angelus' shoulder. "Does he think we're mates, Daddy?" She stroked a long, sharp fingernail over Sam's extended leg, causing Sam to feel a tiny split in his skin where her nails had gone through cloth and skin. It was just enough to be annoying and possibly to get infected, but not enough to cause extreme pain. Sam's brain went into over drive.

Angelus looked from Drusilla to the terrified Sam. "I forget how uncomplicated you mortals take yer life to be. Now, how about just cooperating and telling us where your brother is and I might even fuck you before I kill you, but there's no guarantees. You're actually not as cute as him."

"Fine....but I wanna know how she turned into someone I knew? What is it? A magic trick, hypnotic gaze?"

Angelus shrugged as he took hold of Sam's ankle and broke it in four places with a swift thrust of his palm. Sam felt the shiver of pain before it registered, his mangled foot flopping over the side of Angelus' hand like a broken balloon of blood and skin. "Sure. Hypnotic gaze, whatever. Don't know how Dru does it, only that she does that voodoo she do so well. Maybe you should tell me where your brother is before I take a shining to the other leg."

Sam spoke through gritted teeth while screams welled up in his belly. "He's at 1800 Fuck You Lane, Shit Faced Crazy Motel, Nebraska."

Angelus let go of Sam's leg and then moved his neck from one side to the other, hearing it pop and sighing with fondness. "I had forgotten how devoted brothers are to each other. Must be nice. I was devoted to family like that once. But I ate'em and found that they weren't surprisingly tasty, either."

With that, Angelus proceeded to start a pattern of black and blue bruises on Sam's skin, beginning somewhere in his stomach. He only knew it because of the temporary displacement of vile in his throat as Angelus punched and his mind eventually blacked out from the inflicted pain.