Most of the time, being a hunter means tracking down and killing monsters. Things that used to be people: ghosts, demons, vampires, wendigoes, werewolves, stuff like that. Things that were never people in the first place: dragons, trolls, wraiths, rugarus, banshees. Things that aren't even animate: cursed objects, hex bags, spells. So it'll be easy, most of the time. You're going toe-to-toe with pure evil. Predators. Murderers, cannibals. Rapists and child-killers, in some cases. It's not hard to ram a stake or send a bullet through the head of something that doesn't look or act at all like a human being.
Where you can expect to hit a wall is when you have to take out another person. Yeah, you read that exactly right: chances are that, sometime in your career, you're gonna have to kill a human. Either for your safety and/or somebody else's. Not every monsters has two sets of fangs and weird eyes.
Our duty is to protect normal people. And if there's another person posing as a threat to them, then you have to remove it. A serial killer using a severe local haunting to cover up his own murders. An arsonist following a cherufe around and provoking it into starting fires. Some nutbag trying to train werewolves – trust me, it's happened before, people are idiots. It'll bother you for a long, long time. Of course it will. You just have to remember that it's not murder if you're protecting innocents.
You can still be charged for it, though, so…I wouldn't sit next to a police officer if you go to a bar planning to get drunk.
One of the biggest taboos in our community is killing another hunter. You don't do that. There are so few of us, and we've got a tough enough time with the things we hunt coming at us from all directions. At best, if you kill a hunter, you'll be ostracized. At worst, someone will find you and make you pay. Does that mean that hunters are never violent or dangerous enough to have to be put down for the greater good? Of course it doesn't.
- "Killing Human Monsters," posted on website of Sam Winchester
"Come on," Dean complained as he trailed after Sam. "Stop being such a pussy, Sam. He tried to do it to me. And you can't seriously believe that he wouldn't do it to you in a second if he got the chance."
"No, I – I get it, he's a psychopath. He wants to vivisect me," Sam replied, crouching down in order to pick up a length of chain. After a second, he tossed it away and straightened up, dusting his hands off on his jeans. It'd been too rusty on the end to be Dean's. "But that – it's just not a good idea, Dean. It's the worst idea, actually."
"Worse than – " Dean began, but Sam immediately held up a hand to cut him off as he stepped over a torn-up plastic bucket.
"No," he said, shaking his head. It was going to be something stupid or cruel, he could just tell, and he wasn't in the mood for Dean's sense of humor. "Just don't. This is serious."
"Yeah. I know." Dean's boots crunched over refuse, metal and plastic and cloth and decaying meat. The trash pile didn't smell good (primarily because of that last thing), which was why it was located so far away from the cabin. Sam's leg ached just from hiking out here, and stumbling around on uneven ground wasn't helping. He heard a jingle behind him and turned in order to see Dean holding up a half-ring of iron, the hem of his T-shirt wrapped around his hand so he wouldn't burn himself. "Look. Found the other half of my collar."
"Awesome. Put it over there." Sam pointed to a small pile off to the side that already held Dean's separated handcuffs and the first half of his collar.
"You put all this crap in your shed to begin with, right?" Dean asked, tossing the collar. It hit the other things with a loud, ringing clang. When Sam nodded, he continued. "So why the hell'd you throw it out here? It was probably a whole lot easier to find back in there."
Sam watched him jerk a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the general direction of the shed. He bent to pick up another chain, but stopped when he realized that it was too thin.
"I just didn't like looking at it," he replied.
"Well, now you're looking for it." Dean kicked over a sagging, water-weakened cardboard box and looked under it. Sam turned his back on him for a second, but glanced over his shoulder when he heard a wet crunching sound. Dean had apparently uncovered a snake and was grinding its head under his heel. He looked at Sam, speaking normally to him despite the snake brains on his boot. "Seriously. Why are we doing this? What is so wrong with my plan?"
"Besides that it involves kidnapping, torturing, and killing a very prominent hunter?" Sam replied after a slight pause. "Oh, nothing."
"How many times do I gotta tell you," Dean began, walking over to the nearest tree and beginning to scrape his boot off on its bark, "that the bastard deserves it?"
"It's not a matter of whether or not he deserves it," Sam replied, sighting another chain and tromping over to it. He had the oddest feeling that he was repeating himself, for whatever reason. "I know he deserves it. But it's a matter of what'll happen to me if it gets out what I did to him. My position in the community's kind of important."
"Chicken," Dean accused. "C'mon, Samsquatch, go ahead and live a little! Which'd be more fun – pulling Gordon's fingernails out or pretending to tie me up so you can try and trick him?"
Sam didn't answer. This chain was finally the right one, so he picked it up and carried it over to the other pieces.
"And so what if all the other hunters come after you with torches and pitchforks?" Dean was continuing, turning so that he could keep his eyes on Sam. "I can protect you. I can get you outta here if we need to run."
Sam ignored him, mostly tuning him out, but he stopped and looked at him when he reached the pile of restraints. Dean stared back, silent now. The chain hung limply in Sam's hands as the faint but unmistakable ringing of a telephone drifted through the woods, coming from the direction of the cabin.
"Think that's him?" Dean asked, coolly serious now.
"Well – probably," Sam answered, shrugging.
"So he's most likely on his way up right now."
"Uhh, seems safe to assume that, yeah."
"All right." Dean said it decisively as he brought his hands together in a brisk clap, then walked towards the collar and the handcuffs on the ground. "Let's go tie me up, then."
"There is no way he's gonna buy this," Dean predicted, shaking his head slowly as Sam tightly wrapped a few layers of dark gray duct tape around one of the breaks in his collar.
"Yeah. Shut up," Sam replied, speaking through teeth that had been gritted by stress for over an hour now. "You're the one who suggested using – " He tore the tape off, violently, and tucked the ragged edge of it up under the solid iron of the collar. " – duct tape!"
"Well, excuse the fuck outta me for not wanting you to weld the damn thing back together while it was around my neck," Dean replied, looking toward the open doorway of the cell.
"How'd he get it on you in the first place?" Sam demanded, moving to Dean's other side so that he could tape up the second break.
"I don't know," Dean answered. "He knocked me out first. Salt-coated bullet, straight into the skull. How he caught me, actually." He lifted his hands, cuffed together again and the chain repaired by the clever application of fishing line, so that he could point at the very base of his skull. "It was a real bitch to close that up."
Sam stopped for a second, shocked even though he was plenty familiar with how brutal Gordon could be. "Is there still a bullet in there?"
"No," Dean replied. "I wound up spitting it out."
Finished with the duct tape, Sam tossed the roll aside. He heard it bouncing across the concrete floor as he picked up the chain and got started with it, wrapping it around Dean's upper body and hooking it to his collar and handcuffs. He really should have taken a picture or at least done a sketch before he dismantled Dean's restraints. He was having trouble remembering exactly how Gordon had had the chain.
Gordon had called, speaking of him. Dean's guess had been exactly right; it'd been him on the phone, informing Sam that he was only a couple states away now and would be at his cabin before sundown. Dean had assumed that that gave them plenty of time. Sam, however, hadn't been able to keep the vagueness of the deadline from making him freak out. Which was why he'd immediately gone to work getting Dean locked down the way that Gordon would remember him being. Strapping his legs to the chair (he couldn't do his chest until he was finished with the chain). Putting his handcuffs on. There were some things he couldn't fix, like the damage to the Circle and to Dean's collar, so he just did his best to cover them up. With a dirty, frayed towel and duct tape, respectively. He was just doing what he could.
"Think he'll notice that I'm wearing different clothes?" Dean asked.
"They're close enough," replied Sam, who had thought of that and made Dean change.
"Think he'll notice that they're clean?" Dean pressed.
"What I'm really hoping – " Sam attached the chain to the last free point on Dean's collar, then moved on to the straps around his chest. " – is that he won't look at you too closely. Which is also why I agreed to your – idiotic duct tape idea." The chair was slightly askew. He turned it. "If I have the time, I'll throw dirt and blood at you. If not, I'll just tell him I spent a few hours really hosing you down because you were starting to stink."
Dean glanced at him as he checked the tightness of all the straps. Sam wasn't looking up, but he could feel his eyes on him. He could also tell that he was shaking his head a little.
"I gotta say, it's really weirding me out to hear you talking about me like I'm some kinda circus animal or something," he said.
"Welp, that's how Gordon thinks of you, so…" Sam cleared his throat. "Get used to it."
"You are a lot less fun when you're freaking the fuck out," Dean observed, after a ten-second pause in which Sam made sure his boots were laced. "What crawled up your ass, anyway?"
Sam opened his mouth to snark something right back, angry and offended, but Dean interrupted him before he could get it out, suddenly serious once again. "Sam. Car coming."
No other three words could have struck such icy terror into Sam's heart. "How far away?" He straightened, standing bolt upright next to Dean. Like someone had taped a poker to his spine. They might as well have, with the iron-cold chills running up and down it.
"…twenty miles?" Dean guessed. He sounded so collected that it was shocking to the silently-panicking Sam. "Should be here in at least as many minutes. Probably less."
"Okay." Sam forced himself to stay moderately calm and think about what that new information meant for his plan. He could have a full breakdown later. In Dean's arms. When they were both safe. Had living alone in the cabin really made him so fragile that a visit from a suspicious hunter could completely undo him? "No time for blood and dirt, then. How're you gonna talk to me?"
"I'm not," Dean replied. "I hate your crippled ass, and I'm not afraid you, either. You're not worth my time."
"And how're you gonna talk to Gordon?"
"Scream as many cuss words as I can think of at him," Dean replied. "Him, I'm afraid of."
"Okay. Awesome." They could do this. This would work.
"Wanna have sex again after he leaves?" Dean asked him. Sam stared, then brought his hands up to rake the fingers through his hair.
"Can – can you focus on something else?" he asked. "Can you do that, please? For five minutes? Can you – " He tapped his temples with the tips of his fingers, realizing, at the same time that he did it, that the panic was slipping through. Water trickling through cracks in the dam. " – switch on your upstairs brain?"
"I am focusing on something else," Dean replied, sounding a little indignant. "I'm focusing on you. You're like a freaking Chihuahua, man. I've never seen anybody so damn neurotic."
"I can't help it." Sam tried to snap it out, but it just sounded…well, helpless.
"Yeah, I can tell," Dean replied. He raised both eyebrows. "Could you look forward to the two of us making love again when this is all over? Window thrown open, bed made, sun setting outside? Would that distract you?"
Sam was quiet. He closed his eyes and rubbed them with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, envisioning the scene that Dean was describing despite himself.
"Sammy, I'm just trying to get you to calm down." Dean's voice had softened considerably. "Look, Gordon might be a maniac worthy of his own Alfred Hitchcock movie, but he ain't stupid. Or blind. If you answer the door as jittery as you are now, he's gonna know for sure that something's up."
Sam ran the fingers of one hand through his hair again, blowing out a deep breath as he looked away. As much as he hated to admit it, Dean had a real point.
"Hey. Look at me." Even in handcuffs, Dean could snap his fingers pretty effectively. Sam looked. "Everything's gonna be fine, okay? It'll be a cakewalk. You just play your part, and I'll play mine, and he'll be outta here in under half an hour."
Sam closed his eyes and blew out another deep breath. "Yeah. You're right,"
"You bet that tight little ass of yours I'm right," Dean replied, a smile tugging at one corner of his full mouth. "Now, c'mere."
Sam walked over to him, then bent when Dean tilted his face up and closed his eyes. The kiss, soft, quick, and innocent, went a long way towards calming the nerves that Dean's words hadn't reached. When he straightened up again, he could hear an engine approaching.
"Go get 'im, tiger," Dean encouraged as Sam turned around as headed for the doorway of the cell. He brought his hands together in a weak clap, limited by the cuffs. "We got this."
"I think I'm good now," Sam assured, closing and locking the gate. He could tell because Dean had started to sound like a Little League coach to him. "Oh. Wait." He'd just thought of something. "Change your eyes."
Dean blinked, and his gaze became solid black instead of green. Tires crunched over gravel and twigs outside. "Good idea."
Sam smiled quickly in acknowledgment, stuffing his keys back into the pocket of his jeans. The weathered boards of his porch creaked under a hunter's weight, and there were three firm knocks on his door. Dean started yelling almost immediately
"That you, you son of a bitch?! How fucking stupid do you have to be to get close to me again? Like I don't remember what you and all your fuckbuddies did to me before you turned me over to this limping piece of shit! I'll rip your skin off with my fucking teeth!"
Sam made a little bit of a face, turning away and crossing the room to his front door. Ouch. But he couldn't say that it didn't sound realistic. He undid the locks that had been in place since earlier this morning, settling into a weary, fed-up expression without having to think much about it. Locks disengaged, he swung open the door, beginning, "H – "
He never got the chance to finish the word. Of course he saw the shotgun butt swinging up beneath Gordon's face, which might as well have belonged to a statue. Of course he heard Dean's furious, terrified bellow of warning. He just processed both way too slowly to keep it from smashing into his chin.
"That's gonna be the last thing you ever did – you lay a finger on him, and I'll pull you apart for months!"
Chains rattled, a chair's legs thumped against a concrete floor. A demon howled and raged. Sam, on the floor, the lower half of his face numb and useless, looked up, and saw the stock ripping down towards him. His vision exploded with bloody fireworks.
And then there wasn't anything at all.
Sam came to slowly, fuzzily. It wasn't like waking up in the morning, even after a night of extremely fitful sleep; it was really more like waking up after a night of heavy drinking. Which had ended in a particularly nasty barfight. And then getting hit by a semi.
Sickening aches pounded in his jaw and head and converged in his stomach, which felt about as calm as an ocean with a hurricane passing over it. He couldn't quite get his eyes open. His neck and shoulders were flaming with the agony of pulled muscles. A moan rolled out of him, mostly against his will, and it sounded distant to his ears. That probably wasn't a good sign.
"Sammy?" Someone called his name, tense and urgent. It sounded pretty far away, too, but the voice was warmly familiar. Maybe there'd been some kind of accident. Maybe they were looking for him. Sam tried to call back, to open his eyes, but all he managed was another moan and to make his head loll limply on his neck. It was dangling, he realized. He could feel his chin against his chest. "Aw, Jesus. Can you see okay?" D'you feel sick?"
Sam half-grunted, half-whimpered when bootsteps rapidly approached and someone seized a handful of his hair. His head was roughly hauled up. His eyelids fell away from each other, but it didn't do him much good, since the world around him was blurry and out of focus. Just shapes and colors. He became vaguely aware of a string of drool hanging from his lower lip.
"You satisfied now, you black-eyed bastard?" a new voice, not directed at Sam, demanded. He didn't like this one. A shudder of fear and nausea ran through him. "I didn't kill your whore." The hand let Sam drop. His chin hit his chest, and his teeth clicked together so hard that part of him worried about chipping. The rest of him was preoccupied with the bolt of pain that it produced. "Now go ahead and talk."
"Let him outta that chair first," the first voice replied. "You might be one twisted son of a bitch, but you don't want your only edge to die. He's concussed. Bad. You lose him, you got nothing on me."
Recognition flashed like a strobe light in Sam's brain. He forced his head up so that he could try to see again, forced the muscles of his neck to do what he wanted them to, just like he had so many times before with the ones in his leg. Hair hung in a blood-matted curtain in front of his eyes, so he wouldn't have been able to see even if his vision hadn't been blurry. His mouth felt clumsy and alien to him, but he somehow managed to get out a single simple word: "Dean."
"Right over here, Sam," Dean assured him. Some of the fuzziness was starting to lift from Sam's battered mind. He needed to focus. They were in trouble. But what was going on? "In the cell. Where you put me. Genius plan, by the way."
"What?" Sam asked blankly, having no idea what Dean was talking about. Boots crossed the floor, metal clinked against itself. A huge, threatening blur moved across Sam's hair-obscured vision.
"Yeah, you are totally out of it," Dean concluded. "Never mind about your stupid plan. Just listen to me, sheepdog-boy. Okay?" Sam turned his head in the direction that he thought his voice was coming from. "Close enough. Mr. Sunshine over there – laying his knives out on your desk right now, by the way – just about knocked your brains out with a shotgun. You've probably got a concussion. You're tied to a chair." The heavy boots moved again. "And he knows about…us."
Something smashed, loudly, against what sounded like the metal bars of a gate, and Sam winced.
"Shut it, Singer," someone ordered. Probably whoever Dean had called "Mr. Sunshine." "Or thing wearing Singer's meat, at least. Else I'll start pulling off body parts."
Dean didn't say anything, and Sam realized, suddenly, that he was protecting him. It was his body parts that the guy was talking about.
The boots approached him. He shrank away, instinctively. He couldn't control his reactions right now. But the owner of the boots made a soothing sound, and a huge, callused hand cupped his chin. Another brushed his hair back from his eyes as pain lanced through his wounded jaw, and he blinked up at the face above him with the realization that his vision had started to clear. Details resolved themselves, and he knew who he was looking at. Gordon. Gordon had knocked him out and tied him up; he was in a chair, his wrists held together behind the back of it with a zip tie. His ankles, though, were free.
"Well, good morning, Juliet," the big guy practically cooed. "Ooh. Got a coupla nasty marks coming up, don't you? I'm sure your boyfriend'll still think you're pretty." He let go of him, and Sam had to fight to keep his head up. "Besides. He fucks you from the back, doesn't he? Like wild animals."
"We don't," Sam said thickly. He tried to shake his head, but it made him sick, so he stopped. "I've never…" But wait. Gordon already knew – Dean had told him that. He couldn't remember why Gordon was here, or how he'd knocked him out, but that was solid.
"Don't lie to me." Gordon gave Sam's head an aggressive shove. "Your demon told me everything. So I wouldn't cut your tongue off while you were out. I won't even pretend to understand it, but he's attached to you for some godforsaken reason." He took hold of Sam's hair again, maneuvering his head until he had to stare up at him. Gordon's face was a mask of disgust and fury. "He told me that you took his chains off. How you let him out. What you did with him." He gave Sam's head a rough shake, making him cry out in pain. "How the hell could you?"
"Watch it," Dean warned from his cell. Sam couldn't see him, but Gordon turned his head in order to address him.
"Or what, Casanova?" he asked. "You can't do a damn thing." He looked back to Sam, and smiled at him. "Little Sammy here wrapped you up nice and tight before I even got here. Like a Christmas present."
Sam didn't remember that, either, but man. He'd really screwed up.
"I should thank you for that, but I just can't bring myself to condone anything that you do," Gordon continued, shaking his head. "Letting yourself become a demon's fucktoy?" He let go of Sam, almost throwing his head away from himself. "Goddammit, boy. You were a hunter. You're a human being."
Sam stared dumbly up at him as he added, "I made sure." Gordon dragged a hand over the left side of his neck, and the patchwork of small cuts and burns there suddenly lit up with feeling. "Used every test in the book. You're clean."
He actually sounded disappointed about that, Sam noted as, wearily, he told him, "I could've told you that."
Gordon ignored him, dropping into a crouch. He snapped his fingers in front of Sam's nose, impatient, to get him to focus. Sam gave it his best shot.
"Yeah. Look at me when I'm talking to you, asshole," he instructed. "Your ass is mine now. Doesn't have 'Dantalion' written all over it anymore."
"You fucking touch him – " Dean began, yelling furiously.
"Keep your goddamn pants on," Gordon interrupted, yelling over his shoulder to shut him up. "Your precious little sex doll is safe – I'm no fag." He looked at Sam again, who had felt a muscle in his jaw start to work. "Got no problem with 'em. Don't get me wrong. Just as good at hunting as anybody else. It's when you start taking a monster's dick up your ass that it starts bothering me. And demons…" Gordon straightened up. "…are some of the worst monsters out there."
"I got rid of…a huge threat," Sam replied, struggling inside of his own mind. He knew that, technically, he couldn't think past a concussion, but that didn't mean that he wasn't going to try. "I tamed a Knight of Hell. I flipped a major demonic agent. So you can go to hell."
"Attaboy, Sammy, you tell 'im," Dean encouraged. Gordon ignored him.
"Well, I don't know about me, but that's definitely where you're going," he told Sam, turning away from him and walking over to his desk. Knives were laid out all along the surface, as well as a bulging leather satchel. He pulled open the latter and began to rummage through it. "Giving yourself to a demon? Gotta be a one-way ticket. Just as bad as selling your soul to one of 'em." He pulled out an extremely battered old journal, held together with little more than masking tape and staples. "You are an abomination, Sam Winchester. You are as close to fallen as a man can possibly be. You've betrayed all of us, by letting this Knight roam around free and violate your body, and you're going to pay for it."
"So you're going to kill me?" Sam asked, straightening himself up in his chair by planting his bare feet on the floor and pushing. He was in a corner, the furthest one from Dean's cell. His meager, mismatched weight set had been dragged out to make room for his chair. He noticed it all, head getting more and more clear with every second that passed (though the pain stayed right where it was). He nodded in the direction of the demon cell as he added, "While he watches."
"Kill you? Oh, no, no." Gordon shook his head, frowning, as he let the beat-up journal fall open in his hand. "Y'see, Sam, I caught wind of something interesting on my way up here. And, frankly, killing you the way you deserve would be a waste of time, which I'm pretty short on currently." He started flipping through the frayed and faded pages, reminding Sam eerily of himself as his dark eyes scanned rapidly. "I'm gonna be hard-pressed to exorcise Dantalion Singer here before his friends push past your wards as it is."
Sam laughed. Very briefly, because it hurt.
"Well, good luck with that," he told Gordon, smugness leaking into his voice. "More power to you. But you're not gonna be able to get rid of him. I threw my strongest rituals at him, and he didn't budge."
"That'd be," Gordon began, looking up from his journal, "because your rituals were just meant for standard demons. Mine is designed specifically for Knights." He shook the journal, fluttering the pages and smirking as Sam's own smile disappeared from his face. "You're not the only one out there who can do research, you smug bastard. And I'm not tied somewhere like you are, 'cause I'm physically no good."
A sharp, furious rattling started up in Dean's cell. Gordon raised his voice in order to be heard above it as he began to walk around the cabin's main room.
"Rattle those chains all you want, demon," he called. "You're not budging an inch. Your pet cripple made sure of that."
He glanced at Sam, next, even as he kept looking through his journal. "Honestly didn't think I'd be able to figure it out on my own," he told him. "Or have the time to. Get rid of a Knight, I mean." He frowned down at the book for a second. "Plus, this is pretty much all you're good for: figuring out how these damn things tick. Thought I might as well contribute to your purpose." He flipped another page, then smiled, suddenly. "But I started getting suspicious pretty soon, when you weren't giving me any information at all. Decided to try and find a few things out on my own. Took a while, and it was a pain in the ass, but I dug up a lot of interesting information. Looks like I'm better at this than you ever were, and I was reading books and doing interviews between exorcisms." He lifted his eyes and shook his head as he started to walk forward. "Useless."
Sam clenched his jaw and glared murderously as Gordon approached him once again. He wouldn't give him the satisfaction of speaking anymore. Gordon grinned down at him.
"You know what your problem is?" he asked him. "You're weak. So weak. In mind, in spirit…" He suddenly slammed a booted foot into Sam's twisted calf, a vicious kick reminiscent of the one Dean had given him such a long time ago. Sam screamed as tears sprang, burning, to his eyes. Wendigoes and pine trees and rotting meat. Dean shouted wordlessly, the sound enraged, from his cell. "…and in body most of all. All that muscle, all that height, and you can't lift a finger to save your demon." He walked away, journal in hand. "That's another reason that it'd just be a waste of time to kill you. The others'll take care of you when they show up to save their Knight. Or something else will. Dehydration. Starvation. Exposure."
Sam watched him reach into the pocket of his jeans as he reached the gate to Dean's cell, pulling out the keys that he must have stolen from him while he was knocked out. A low, angry growling came from inside as Gordon unlocked it – Sam hadn't known that Dean could make that sound. It was replaced by a rapid-fire stream of caustic swear words as he swung it open and stepped inside. Then the exorcism started.
Dean kept swearing, at the top of his lungs. Screaming and yelping as his smokey essence was pulled, inch by inch, out of his body. Yelling random words in Latin to try and mess Gordon up. Retching loudly as he vomited up himself. Calling out to Sam. Sometimes trying to reassure him, sometimes begging for his help. And through it all, Gordon's deep voice boomed in archaic Latin, forcing him out.
Sam tried to stop it. Of course he did. He tried to get out of the chair, just stand up and go, but quickly realized that the zip tie around his wrists had also been looped around one of the chunky dowels that made up the back of the chair. The position was too awkward for him to break it. He tried to pick up the whole chair, and discovered that Gordon hadn't moved all of his weights out of the corner. He'd secured about sixty pounds' worth of them to the legs of the chair. Sam couldn't lift it without dislocating both his shoulders.
"Don't!" he yelled, resorting to a different tactic. "Gordon, stop, don't – he knows how to close the Gates of Hell!"
He knew it was a desperate gamble. He knew how dangerous it was to tell Gordon that Dean knew that. But he would have done anything at all to keep him here – and it didn't work, anyway. Gordon just kept on going.
Sam strained at the plastic of the zip ties until their unforgiving edges bit into his wrists hard enough to draw blood. He clawed at the wooden floor with his bare feet, desperately trying to scoot himself forward. Of course, he didn't budge an inch on either front. Gordon had known what he was doing.
Sam didn't want to cry. It seemed to him that that would just be handing Gordon the ultimate victory, on a silver platter. But listening to Dean's pain, his struggle, turned out to be too much after wrestling with his own bonds for about forty-five minutes. He was losing him. Gordon's words were driving him back to Hell, back to all that pain, back to the demons he'd betrayed by telling Sam who he was and restraining himself so he wouldn't hurt him. Away from Sam. Everything had been useless. Sam bowed his head, hair hanging around his face and blocking out his cabin, and gritted his teeth as his eyes burned. It made his jaw feel like someone was pounding a red-hot railroad spike into it, but he ignored the pain. Everything hurt right now, after all.
It took an eternity, but the ritual finally wound down. Dean's voice had been weakening for a while now, and as Sam listened, it faded to soft, agonized whimpers. He wanted to say something. Assure him that it would be all right. He couldn't think of a way to phrase something like that without it coming out weak and devastatingly unconvincing, though, and it was too late anyway, all of a sudden. The whimpers became a long, rattling gurgle that cut off into nothing after about a minute. Hot saltwater pattered onto the thighs of Sam's jeans, and all he could think about was fire and blood and knives made of teeth. And pale, freckled flesh, fragile as porcelain under a blade.
He heard the gate swing open again, nearly soundless, and Gordon stepped out of the cell. The hunter crossed the room towards him as he began to speak, tone conversational.
"Welp, he's definitely gone," Gordon announced. "No heartbeat on the vessel. It'll probably start rotting soon. I'd tell you to clean it up, but I doubt you're gonna be around much longer, either. Those demons can't be far away."
Sam lifted his head, and didn't care that his eyes were wet and probably swollen as he glared, boiling over with hate and rage, at Gordon.
"You just did it to hurt me, and him," he stated quietly. His voice came out a lot clearer than he'd expected it to. "Don't even try to pretend it was for the 'greater good.' You sent a cooperative Knight of Hell, with intimate knowledge of – of everything we need to know, back to the demons. You don't care about people, you don't care about winning this damn war you've been going on and on about to me. You're just a sadist – all you care about is getting off on pain and suffering." His voice had risen, furious. "How does it feel to know you're more of a monster than the demon you just exorcised?"
Gordon chuckled, glancing down at his boots. "Is that really what – "
He cut himself off, because Sam had spit at him, saliva landing directly under his left eye. Gordon blinked, his lips parting slightly, as he reached up to wipe it away. He regarded Sam for a second. Sam glared back; sucking up a thin string of leftover spittle. He didn't look away, even when Gordon's fist smashed into his face and set off fireworks in his head for the second time that day.
Sam's eye immediately started to swell shut, pounding and throbbing. It hadn't done his head or jaw any favors, but at least it hadn't knocked him out again. He was still reeling a little, though, when Gordon grabbed his hair once more and wrapped it tightly around his fist, pulling so hard on it that Sam's scalp stung.
"I'm no monster," he said adamantly, making fierce eye contact with Sam. "No, that's you, Winchester. Loving these things. Treating 'em like kids and people, letting 'em out after we've spent years locking 'em up. You're as bad as any of them. As for your boyfriend – think he's burning now? Think they're pulling his guts out for letting himself get captured?" Sam felt his face tighten. Gordon jerked his head, painfully, back. "Oh, no. No more spitting, bitch." He grinned. "I told you you were weak. And you're even weaker now that your hard cock's gone. You didn't have the strength to keep me from sending him back to Hell. You don't have the strength to act like a human being, a man – "
Sam didn't think as he raised the leg that a wendigo had gouged to pieces seven years ago, pulling it back. The tattered muscles might as well have been moving on their own. But he felt as he kicked forward, savage satisfaction flooding him as he stared down Gordon. The ball of his foot hit his knee, and it bent backwards like a dry twig, bone snapping and cartilage crunching and ligaments popping out of their moorings. He didn't smile as Gordon screamed and let go of him in order to collapse to the ground, just moved his foot out of the way. He didn't take any pleasure in this. He wasn't anything like the other man.
Gordon clutched his knee on the floor, teeth bared and eyes clamped shut in a grimace of agony. Sam didn't waste any time, lifting his feet again.
Goddammit, I hope I remember how to do this –
One foot under the head. The other on the jaw. Toes digging into the skin, gripping. His father had tied his hands behind his back when he was fourteen and made him practice on a cloth dummy he'd made himself.
You're gonna get tied up. You'll need this someday.
Sam's calf already ached. He'd overdone it trying to drag himself across the floor with his legs when the one had already been sore from Gordon's kick, and he'd really overdone it when he'd broken the older man's knee. But he forced his leg to move, muscles contracting as they screamed in pain, pulling up and back. He let Gordon's head drop, limp, as soon as he heard the telltale crack, and his exhausted feet thudded to the ground a second later. His chest heaved as he slumped in his chair.
He didn't allow himself to rest for long, though. Within a couple of minutes, he was sitting up straight again, hauling on the zip ties as blood trickled down over his knuckles, only one thought in his mind: Dean.