Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural.
Warnings: Hurt Sam, Sad Dean. Minor Language. Minor Violence.
Author's Note Part One: I'm late! I'm so sorry, but I was unable to properly access computers or the internet for a fair portion of last week and could not work on this story. I did, however, do my best to make up for that and get this chapter uploaded.
"Sam is what?"
His father's tone made him suspect that John heard him perfectly, but wanted Dean to admit fully to his mistakes. Or maybe he just didn't want to think about his younger son being snatched in the middle of the night by God knows what when Dean wasn't there to do his job.
If he could just turn back time…
"Gone, Dad," Dean said. He had a sinking feeling that he hadn't felt in years. The one where he knew that he royally messed up and nothing he could do would reverse that.
"What do you mean Sam is gone?" John demanded.
Dean felt his mouth go dry and the words refused to come out easily. "He's gone. Taken."
"Where the hell were you?"
Each word was a nail driven through him—the really big ones used back in biblical times. If someone could just crucify him already, it would be less painful than dealing with Sam's absence and his father's anger at the same time.
"I was at the bar," he said, sounding more like a child than a 19-year-old. "I think it was the same people who have been kidnapping the kids in the area that I told you about before."
He added the last statement in an attempt to regain control over the situation, figure out a starting point for Operation Rescue Sammy, but the litany of muffled cursing coming from his father on the other end of the line told him it might not have been the greatest decision. Not that he could claim he'd been making many great decisions lately.
"God damn it, Dean. Do you even—" John cut off his own sentence with what sounded like a punch to the wall. A wall that likely gave way from the force of John's fist and was now sporting a hole from the sound of it. "I can't believe—damn it."
Dean heard the phone drop onto a hard surface followed by his father speaking, words inaudible over the phone and distant. Each second took a year to pass, but John was finally back on the other line. If only to bark out orders at Dean.
"Call the police, Dean. The second this call is over, understood?"
"But we never call the police," Dean said. Didn't John realize that this had become personal? He didn't want strangers snooping around. He could still do his job. With his dad's help, it shouldn't be difficult to find Sam. They hunted things, how could hunting people be all that different?
"Now is really not the time to argue with me, Dean. If you want what's best for Sam, you'll call the police," John said. He wasn't yelling, but the cold tone of his voice made Dean almost wish that he was being yelled at. "I'm on my way back right now."
John hung up, and Dean followed orders. The very thing he should have been doing since John dropped him off with Sam at that motel outside of town. He called the police and was promised that they'd be on the scene soon, but it would never be soon enough. He had no idea how long passed between Sam being taken (from his own bed, his mind helpfully reminded) and him arriving back at the motel room. The blood matted in the shag carpeting told him, with its faded shine and crusted sections, there was far too much time between Sam's kidnapping and his own return. The one thing he was grateful for was that he decided to turn down the woman at the bar instead of spending the night with her.
He sat at the tiny table while he waited, wreathed in guilt and his father's anger. He could handle a lot of forms of anger, but the kind so deep that it turned to disappointment and lost trust was not among those forms.
He would've given anything to switch places with Sam. Especially when he had no idea what Sam was facing. He would rather have known that Sam was safe (more or less) back at the motel and let those responsible for taking him do whatever they wanted to him instead. He had one job: watch out for Sam. He really messed up this time and wasn't sure that he would ever be able to make it up to either Sam or John.
His head throbbed, but he was on something almost soft. If only he could remember why a fuzziness plagued his mind.
The men. The motel. He stabbed one, he thought. Killed him, he hoped. Then, one stabbed him, only with a needle instead of a knife.
He brought up a hand and brushed his fingertips over his neck, finding the swollen injection site for whatever they gave him to knock him out.
It took a minute for him to pry open his eyes, and the lack of light helped immensely. He knew he was no longer in the motel room from the simple fact that this new place smelled infinitely better (though still not very great and contracting asbestosis might remain a threat even in the new place), but he didn't exactly know where he was instead.
It was small and the length and width formed a perfect square (and if only Dean were around to call him a nerd for mentally measuring the dimensions of the 'room'). The floor was tiled, but the tiles were filthy—covered in dust and debris—and some were cracked or missing pieces. There were two doors, but one didn't have any handles that Sam could see and looked more modern and cared for than anything else in the room. The barred windows started to help him form an idea as to where he had been taken and imprisoned. It looked like a rundown mental hospital. The kind that would be considered littered with unethical treatments and poor living conditions by modern standards. The kind that performed lobotomies because it was better to have a docile, brain damaged patient or risk them dying to become one, than to have a patient with a mind of their own.
Which begged the question: why the hell was he in an old, abandoned hospital?
God, his head throbbed, but he still pulled himself off of the thin mattress and wiry bed frame he'd been placed on at some point in his unconscious state. At least they hadn't touched his clothes, he didn't want to think about being stripped down by strangers. Keeping on bloodstained pajamas was by far the better option, and if he was convincing enough, he could just pass off the blood as him being a sloppy painter who was really fond of brownish-red instead of a sloppy stabber.
He stumbled across the room, ignoring the tiny stabs of pain in the bottom of his feet as he stepped on the bits and pieces of whatever composed the building that had broken down and made a home on the floor of his room, and opened the door with that had a handle. A bathroom. Plain and without any mirrors or glass. Couldn't have their prisoners offing themselves before they had the chance to do the job themselves.
Which begged another question: what the hell did they want with him?
Without much else to do, he sat on his pitiful bed and waited. If they wanted him alive, they'd have to come eventually to give him food and water.
He didn't have to wait very long before the door keeping him locked in opened (automated locks from the outside, it turned out) and a man with a tray of food (or a bowl of cold mush depending on perspective) and a cup of water (plastic, not glass).
The man was no hospital worker, not dressed in scrubs. No name tag. Nothing to distinguish him from any other man on the street. And that was the problem with human monsters. They look the same as every other human, no matter how twisted or monstrous they were on the inside. There's no test to be done that can set them apart like with most supernatural creatures.
He looked down at Sam with a smirk that was more of a leer and showed off his decaying teeth.
"Heard you're a fighter," he said. "Best part about gettin' a fighter is breakin' their spirit."
Sam waited until the man moved closer and bent to set the tray on the nightstand next to his bed, made of all chipped, rotted wood ravaged by time. Then, he kicked the outside of his knee and the man crumpled to the ground. Knees were only meant to bend certain ways.
The man fell to the ground and gripped his knee in both hands, breaths coming out in harsh gasps and hisses. "You're gonna pay for that, boy," he said, the threat falling short when his words were laced with pain.
Sam grabbed the tray and let the items atop it fall to the ground. He swung it down on the man. It wasn't extraordinarily heavy or dense, but the edge of it would no doubt be painful and leave marks.
Sam's sole regret of that day was that he only managed to strike the man three times with the tray before his ankle was grabbed and pulled until he fell backwards. The back of his head collided with the metal frame of his bed and he heard the ringing from it long after its echo faded from the room. He thought he felt the stinging heat of blood as it dripped down the back of his neck, but it was difficult to know for sure.
The man crawled over to Sam and wrapped his meaty, calloused fingers around Sam's neck and no amount of pulling in his dazed state could pry them away. He raised Sam's head and slammed it into the ground, refreshing the already present pain each time until the edges of Sam's vision blackened while the rest blurred.
"Gonna be sorry, boy," the man said from between grit teeth.
One more slam against the hard tiled floor and Sam fell limp, fading to unconsciousness.
John stormed into the room, and everything in Dean screamed to get out of the way of his father's wrath, but it was the least of what he deserved.
Half of the motel room was now blocked off with glossy yellow crime scene tape, but Dean had been allowed to take their duffle bags. He would have to leave behind his silver knife, seeing as it was now part of a kidnapping investigation, but he could part with his knife if it meant helping Sam. Hell, there were very few things he wasn't willing to do if it meant finding Sam.
Hard to believe that a matter of hours ago they were just riding in the Impala and hunting together, bonding almost. Sam may not have been one hundred percent with it, but he was starting to get over the mood he fell into since their most recent move.
John held out his hand, palm-up. "Give me the Impala's keys," he ordered.
Dean obeyed. He knew now what disobeying meant. The keys fell into John's hand. Some people felt like a weight was lifted when they relinquish their hold on an object, but Dean wasn't some people and he felt like a weight had been added when he turned the keys over to their original owner.
"Load up the bags in my truck and get in," he said. His tone was too strained for Dean's liking, and he was just waiting for the inevitable reaming coming his way.
"What about the Impala?" he dared to ask.
"Dropping the keys off with Caleb for now. He'll swing by later and keep it safe. Now, pack up and get in the truck."
Packing up meant 'toss the duffle bags into the trunk' and took less than five minutes. Then, Dean sat in the passenger seat of his dad's truck, wondering what was taking John so long in the motel room. He saw the silhouette of his shadow against the curtains and it looked like he was on the phone and having a heated discussion based on the waves of his arms. Gestures of anger that Dean witnessed far too many times, and had no delusions that he would be witnessing them often in the near future.
Calling in back-up to help fix my failure?
Dean wondered if he would ever manage to regain the trust of his father, and more importantly of Sam. They both tried to warn him. Sam didn't even want to be part of the hunt, but Dean dragged him into it anyway. And now Sam was missing and his dad was pissed.
If John took much longer, Dean would have to leave the truck before he threw up in its cab. His churning stomach threatened to return-to-sender all the food he'd eaten that day.
Finally, John slipped into the driver's seat and they were on the road.
"I'm having a hard time even looking at you, Dean," he growled out after several minutes of silence. "You were supposed to watch out for Sammy, but you went to the bar instead! Why the hell did you leave him there alone?"
"I didn't know," Dean said. "I didn't think anything would happen. I was so sure we weren't followed. I just… I don't know."
His words sounded pathetic to his own ears and he couldn't imagine how they sounded to his father. Dean didn't fail to notice how his father's jaw clenched or how his grip on the wheel was so tight that his hands were nearly trembling. The music turned on low was out of place in the tense atmosphere of the truck's cab.
"You didn't think at all, Dean. I told you to leave it alone, but you just had to ignore me. Did that get you anywhere? Did you solve the case you wanted to take on so badly?"
"No, sir."
"No!" John echoed. "No, all you did was paint a target on your brother's back and then leave him alone for them to take."
"You know I would never want Sam to be hurt," Dean said, his sole defense. Every word from his father's mouth hurt more than a physical blow ever could. He knew his faults and knew that he majorly messed up this time around, but hearing it all verbally laid out for him was almost too much.
Was this how Sam always felt when he argued with John?
"Yet you were the one who got him hurt, weren't you?" John asked. "Do you have any idea why I told you to leave the case alone?"
"I might've if you gave me a reason," Dean said. "They were just kids, Dad. We're supposed to save people."
"I gave you an order and counted on you to obey it; I shouldn't have to give you a reason as well. You can't save people from everything, Dean. Those kids weren't just disappearing, they were taken by human traffickers. This area has a ring of them, but the police can never pick up their trail because they move around the country too often," John said. Dean would've preferred yelling to the cold tone John had adapted. "You basically just got Sam sold into slavery."
Dean rolled down the window and threw up out of the side of the truck.
Sam woke up once again in pain and with only vague memories of what happened. Another head injury was the last thing he needed. He knew the risks of repeated head trauma, and none of them were things he wanted to face. None of them were things that the lifestyle his family lived would allow.
Memory loss. Erratic behavior. Balance issues. Frequent headaches. Frequent nausea and fatigue. Impaired cognition. Sleeping too much. Sleeping too little.
The list went on (thanks to his freshmen health class, where the biggest concern of most students involved contact sports), but Sam thought that he only had to worry about Dean or his dad being the ones facing head trauma. They were, after all, the ones who took blow after blow to the head during hunts. However, Sam was racking up a count pretty quickly in his feeble attempts to save himself.
But hey, better brain damaged than dead.
He tried to sit up, but his arms wouldn't quite obey and he glanced down to see them bound together.
"A zip tie? Really?" he asked his empty room. His captors were either cheap or smart as he couldn't pick the lock of a zip tie, seeing as it had no lock, and that was just great. He also didn't have anything sharp enough to cut it or enough room to wiggle his wrists free of its grasp. This was something that his father never prepared them for, but how could he have ever predicted that someone would use zip ties for restraints?
Could this situation get any worse?
He felt a weight on his neck, on the verge of being tight enough to cross into being uncomfortable. He brought his hands up to feel it and could only conclude that it was some type of collar, smooth and made out of something hard, but nothing beyond that. Without a mirror, he wouldn't be able to inspect it with his eyes anytime soon.
If Dean wanted to play hero, now would be fantastic. Sam hated it, but he knew that he was going to need some help getting out of the mess he found himself in.
Sam closed his eyes and laid still on the mattress. He didn't have a plan, but maybe he could buy himself some time by pretending to remain unconscious for as long as they would believe it. It was a gamble on the hope that they would leave him be, that they would have no reason to bother him if he wasn't awake. If he was lucky, he'd be able to overhear them talking as they passed his room, or if they entered it and wanted to talk about him while he was unaware.
It wasn't much, but it was one of the few options he had with his hands bound. His legs remained unbound, which was one of the few silver linings he could find. He wished he knew what sort of collar they put on him, but at the same time he wasn't sure he wanted that particular answer.
He intended to fake his sleep to try and gather information, but he never intended to actually fall asleep.
John parked in the parking lot of the motel Caleb was staying at, nicer than the room they had, but in the middle of the town that John wouldn't let Sam and Dean stay in. The same place where he had been helping to finish up a hunt just hours earlier.
Dean followed him into the room, the reasoning behind his father's actions and orders before leaving to help Caleb blindingly clear now. If he could have just been patient for answers until after Caleb's hunt was over and the town was just a speck in the rear view mirror, Sam would have been with them and okay. Sam would have been safe.
John's anger could not match the anger that Dean felt towards himself. He almost thought he understood why some people threw themselves off of bridges because the burden of his emotions and mistakes was so great that they felt physically painful.
John tossed the Impala's keys to Caleb—who caught them with ease—and Dean felt another piece of his heart break having to part with another thing he loved.
Caleb looked confused and asked, "Wouldn't you two be able to cover more ground with two cars?"
John didn't even spare Dean a glance. "Seems that I can't trust Dean as much as I thought I could. Until he proves to me that he can handle a little bit of responsibility, the Impala is gonna be in your hands."
Each word cut into him and he felt like he was a ten-year-old in Fort Douglas again. On some nights, he still had nightmares of the way John looked at him while he sat on the bed and cradled a sleepy and confused six-year-old Sam in his lap, back when Sam was Sammy with no arguments or attitude. The way he looked at Dean like a stranger instead of his own son. The betrayal and anger. The look that screamed he was no longer trustworthy. That it was a mistake to entrust the care of something precious to him.
Dean didn't understand the extent of his father's anger until they arrived in Blue Earth and Sam was tucked away in bed, once again sleeping soundly and unaware as to what happened or why they moved so suddenly.
John pulled him aside and laid out the research for the Fort Douglas hunt across Pastor Jim's kitchen table. It was called a Striga. Some type of ancient, inhuman witch.
An ancient, inhuman witch that liked to feed on the life force of children.
For a few hours playing an arcade game, Dean almost let Sam be drained of his life by a freak in a black robe with a poisonous touch.
He didn't sleep that night and instead kept watch over Sam just to be sure that he was still alive. That Dean hadn't messed up badly enough to kill his little brother.
And he felt similar to that now. For a few hours spent at the bar, unwinding from the stress of a hunt he was never meant to take and a brother who was distant and moody, Dean let Sam be kidnapped by human traffickers. His dad had been right, and he might as well have just handed Sam over to them with his own hands.
Caleb, on the other hand, seemed to pity him. "You don't think that's a bit harsh on the kid, John?" he asked. "Look at him, he's beating himself up enough over this for all three of us. And then some, probably."
"If Sam doesn't make it out of this in one piece, this will look like a mercy," John said.
Dean rubbed a hand over his face. He was tired, but knew he wouldn't find any peaceful rest knowing that Sam was gone and likely miserable and scared. Hurt, maybe, if the blood spilled on the carpet was his and not one of his attacker's.
And here he was, safe with his dad and Caleb, where the most he could do was take deep breaths and hold onto what little composure he had left.
Sam was jolted back into consciousness when the muscles of his throat spasmed and he gasped in an attempt to get air into his lungs before he suffocated. He was on the edge of unconsciousness again when the sharpest pain stopped and he could breath, despite the lingering ache and twitches of his throat. He coughed, but there was no way to cough up the lump in his throat that wasn't actually there.
"Easy, boy. Ain't gonna kill ya," a man said.
Sam barely had the strength to lift his head up for longer than a second to get a look at the man standing against the door of his room with a small black remote in his hand. He looked like any man pulled from the street after a day of work. A polo shirt and some khaki pants, the best business casual attire for any nine-to-five job.
"Though I should," he continued. "You almost killed a good friend of mine. Jack almost bled out after you stuck that knife in him. Doctors said that if it had been another inch to the left, Jack wouldn't have made it to the emergency room."
"Shoulda aimed better, I guess," Sam mumbled.
Sharp pain radiated from his neck again. He tried to reach his hands up towards it, but his movements were jerky and his body seemed unwillingly to obey commands.
He was gasping again with the sensation stopped. He knew it couldn't have been more than a few seconds, but when he couldn't breath or move properly, the time stretched on for much longer.
The man held up his tiny remote so Sam could see it clearly.
"Shock collar. Won't kill you, but it'll hurt like a bitch. Might even leave some pretty burns," he explained with a grin. "Specially designed by another good friend for use on humans. Yeah, a friend made this to keep kids in line. Heard you and the other one at the library. Trying to play hero. Guess you landed in something a little bigger than you expected, seeing as we have connections in higher places than you can imagine."
The man spread his arms in a grand gesture to the room around him. "High enough places to hook us up with neat little storage areas like this, where no one is gonna bother snooping."
Sam ground his teeth together with enough force that he felt the start of a headache coming (though, being fair, that could also be due to the recent amount of blunt force trauma that has been inflicted upon his poor skull). He didn't want to encourage the mad man to press the little button on his little remote and let the shock collar light up his nervous system again.
"Heard you're a fighter. First Jack, then Old Harold. You know, he's gonna be in a knee brace and on crutches for weeks." The man whistled a low note softly. "I just hope we can break that spunk before you're gone."
"Gone?" Sam repeated before he could hold onto his stubbornness and keep his curiosity at bay, not that he was ever good at such a thing.
The man walked over to the side of Sam's bed, slowly and making sure the shock collar's remote was in Sam's view at all times, likely as a reminder to not try anything or else.
Or else they'll continue to treat me like a damn misbehaving dog.
"We don't tell the younger ones, but sometimes we let the older ones in on a little secret about what we all do for a living. And let me tell you, it makes for a pretty decent living if you know how to reel in the rich customers."
And for the love of God, just get to the point.
"You ain't going nowhere, kid," he said. "Except straight to the highest bidder."
Author's Note Part Two: Sam's in trouble. Dean's upset and lost the trust of his father. John is angry and in mission mode. All part of the average Winchester experience. I hope that you enjoyed the chapter and I would very much appreciate it if you took a second to leave a review with your thoughts!
Thank you to those who review, follow, favorite, and simply read. Until next time!