Bonitatem et Disciplinam et Scientiam Doce Me

Sick with the Flu

2008-12-18T13:37:37Z

Dear God,

I already feel sorry for my poor little two-year-old niece. There's no need to make me intimately familiar with all of her symptoms.

Thanks,
Lux

P.S. Please kill me.

Supernatural

2008-07-05T11:51:37Z

I had a season four dream last night. I don't remember much about it except that there was beat poetry and wolf!Dean. It...seemed really cool at the time.

Vegetables Are What Food Eats

2008-06-24T13:33:13Z

"I tell you what: bring the cow out here, I'll cut off the pieces I want and ride the rest home."

Every once in a while I click one of those random YouTube links. Supa Beef! The video isn't really all that interesting, just some footage of those super muscle-y cows they breed. But, because I can't resist a good train wreck, I found myself reading the comments, which contained your typical vegetarian outrage.

Obviously, it's a free country and if someone chooses to not eat meat, that is their right. But these people who go around saying that humans are not "natural" meat-eaters (however the fuck one is supposed to define "natural," which they never do, leaving their audience to do the work for them), well, they baffle me.

Whaddya mean humans don't eat raw meat? I eat my beef raw all the time. I also salivate when I see a cow. Seriously. Live cows make me HUNGRY. And to say that humans don't have the natural equipment to hunt down our prey and eat it?! Have you been paying attention for the past few million years? Our greatest evolutionary adaptation is our brain. Or, from a religious perspective, we are made in God's image, i.e. with an intelligence that is an echo of His. A long time ago, humans started hunting with their brains, fashioning crude tools that over the course of human history were slowly but surely replaced by clever inventions like domestication, artificial selection and slaughterhouses. So, anyone who says we don't have the equipment to hunt for meat can suck balls.

Also, even if it were true that humans don't "naturally" eat meat, why should that make any difference in our diet? It's "natural" to die of influenza, too, if by "natural" you mean the course of events in the absence of human (technological) intervention. But I bet you're still going to want your flu shot this year.

By the same token, eating meat is not automatically morally justified because we have been doing it for so many millennia. So, I can understand someone not eating meat on moral grounds. It's a logical position if you believe that all living creatures have the right to live free and unmolested. It's not a personal belief of mine, but I can grok it. Just don't try to sell me on this "defending the natural order of things" bullshit. Primates are omnivores, with a metabolism adapted to a mixed plant/animal diet. Get used to it.

ETA: Seriously? The spellchecker will accept "millenniums" but not "millennia?" Are you shitting me? You wait till the Roman Empire makes its comeback. They'll pwn your Anglicizing asses!

ETA2: Also, someone compares artificial selection of livestock to Nazi eugenics/genocide. Because...what? Jewish people (and gypsies and homesexuals and the handicapped, etc) are morally equivalent to cows? There's no moral difference there? Are you serious?

WoW Lets Me Out on Patch Day!

2008-06-24T11:52:07Z

Was Reading My Friends List for the First Time in Ages...

So james_nicoll linked this news about Terry Goodkind. Weird! I always felt a bit strange enjoying his books after I found out that he was basically writing Objectivist allegories (since I hate allegory), but this makes it sound like he sees Fantasy as an inferior mode. I suppose there's no crime in wanting to move to a different genre if that's what gets him stoked, but I can't see myself picking up his "mainstream" books, seeing as the preachy philosophical parts of his later books were "skim-only" material for me. Ayn Rand did that already, after all. It was of some passing interest the first time, but I don't really see any point in revisiting it.

Been Watching a Lot of Doctor Who...

In "The Impossible Planet," they talk about a piece of rock in "geostationary orbit around a black hole."

Dot. Dot. Dot.

Am I wrong? I mean, to be in GEOstationary orbit, don't you have to be, I don't know, orbiting the earth or something?! Does a black hole even rotate? I don't know a whole lot about astrophysics, but this made particularly little sense to me.

luxorien @ 2008-01-03T00:06:00

2008-01-03T05:10:10Z

From CSICOP:

The scope of the design act is breathtaking. It can be as simple as enhancing a mood by moving one stone in a Zen garden, or as overwhelming in complexity as conceiving the space shuttle. The diagnostic commonality here has nothing to do with material or manufacture, nothing to do with specificity or irreducibility or organization or any attempted combination of these and other qualities. The diagnostic commonality in design is intent. We know that something is designed when we understand the deliberation that produced it. Design is the expression of purpose. And the truth is there is only one way we can know that purpose is inherent in any act or artifact, and that is to know something of the designer. When we recognize design, it is either because we are familiar with similar systems or structures that we know to be designed, or we are familiar with the design processes that might have produced it. All such familiarity is based, at root, upon knowledge of the designers.

In the immortal words of the late, great Charlie Brown...THAT'S IT!

Swimming the Lethe (7/?)

2007-12-06T14:55:38Z

Title: Swimming the Lethe (7/?)
Author: Luxorien
Words: 3156/?
Rating: R (violence, Dean's potty mouth, no porn--sorry)
Genre: Gen/Dean Gets Supernatural Mojo/Dark!Dean
Pairings: Dean/OFCs (no romance; just sex of the off-screen variety)
Feedback: Yes? Please? Help?
Notes: I was playing WoW, okay? Leave me alone.
Summary: After an infelicitous one-night stand, Dean becomes a danger to Sam. This chapter: Dean tries to fix things. So does Sam. Charity hangs out.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Farr off from these a slow and silent stream
Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
-Paradise Lost

The world was the double yellow lines weaving across the small strip of illuminated blacktop in front of his bumper. Nothing else existed. He wouldn't – couldn't – allow it. Not yet.

Miles died behind him. Beyond the reach of city lights, where there were no shops or motels or residences – just empty Texas desert – he pulled to the shoulder and slammed to a stop. He let the engine idle for a few moments before he cut it and climbed numbly from the car.

The darkness here was absolute, but with his augmented vision, he saw the landscape in clear shades of grey. The moon was new and hidden, the endless sky awash in diamond dust. It made the world up there look more real than the dead monochrome that surrounded him. He breathed, his breath slightly fogging the dry, cold air. He breathed, the world expanded again, and the fire tore into him, roiling inside his chest like a live animal. It was catching his memories, breaking them down to ash and rebuilding them, filling dark, cold rooms with light and heat. Everything suddenly, painfully, meant.

His mother, no longer just a blonde woman in a white dress, now again as she had been: angels turning their backs, a soft touch and a sweet voice disappearing forever. He was wracked again by a grief that only children know.

His father's pyre before his eyes, tears not just remembered but felt: a strength that had deserted him, willingly swallowed, self-betrayed. It was as if it had just happened, the chain of his family broken, the principles they fought for destroyed from within.

Sam, flooding back into him, a tiny bundle of jerky limbs, a duty, a job to do that turned into a labor of love, and of desperation. Sam, the only path he could take, the only clear way, even if it ended in fratricide, in blood and madness that would end all roads.

Sam.

Blood on his hands, on the knife they held. A gun that had never, ever, been pointed at Sam (never point your gun at something you don't intend to shoot) lined up for a kill shot. Sam's form framed by three-dot sights. He'd pulled the trigger. He'd actually pulled the fucking trigger.

He puked again, as he had in the hospital, only this time he knew why. He heaved his guts out on the dusty ground. It was hot under his knees, still bleeding heat into the air. His head dipped, and he fought to catch his breath. When he looked up, he saw her. She was standing a stone's throw from the berm: a modern witch in strappy sandals and a form-fitting top that didn't reach her jeans. Her eyes were as blue as the day he'd met her, all her crazy locked up inside.

A pistol appeared in her hand. He looked down, and found that his own hand had drawn a Colt – not the Colt, just his 1911 - he hadn't realized he'd been carrying. The smile that answered his unspoken question was a lover's smile, warm and inviting. He could read her intent, knew where she would point the gun, because she'd already done it. She would keep doing it until the bullets reached Sam. If one method failed, she'd try another: gun, knife, bare hands (his hands) until the job was done.

Dean didn't hesitate. He didn’t even blink.

* * *

It was the second time he'd seen Dean die, but the first time the gun was in his brother's own hands.

The vision came on him suddenly. No foreplay this time. No pretending to be an incipient headache. The double sight slammed into him at the same time as the blinding pain, and Sam closed his eyes tight to ward off the vertigo of receiving two versions of sensory input at once. When he came out of it, Charity was standing over him, looking concerned, but refraining from actually touching him. In the heat of that interminable moment, she meant nothing to him except what she could do, and he spat orders at her that were laced with pleading. "Help me up" and "Where's your car" and "Faster."

Charity seemed to catch his urgency, because she obeyed without question, loading him into her car and following his terse directions. The Cavalier rattled as it approached sixty on the highway, and skidded noisily when she slammed to a stop after spotting the chrome of the Impala's bumper reflecting the light of her headlamps. Sam was out almost before they stopped, staggering out into the night, clutching the stitches across his abdomen and calling for his brother. Twenty yards from the road, he found him: a hunched silhouette blocking the light of the stars that hovered over the distant horizon.

Something clinked on the ground as he moved forward, and he paused to look down and observe the casings strewn about, the discarded pistol with its slide locked back, empty. The blood soaking the thirsty ground. Everything was painted with the red of the Cavalier's brake lights, but he was sure it was blood. He moved for his brother, hiding panic in movement and action and what next. Dean's face appeared out of the darkness, coated in the same red-on-red, his eyes silver in the dark and naked with desperation that propelled Sam forward, looking for its source. But Dean retreated as Sam advanced, his movements strong, if jerky, and betraying none of the weakness of the walking wounded. Sam, his insides held together with surgeon's thread, was certainly in no position to push the issue, and quickly pulled himself to a halt.

"Dean, Jesus…"

"Sammy," Dean replied, his voice hoarse and pitched low. "You gotta get outta here."

Something sailed through the air towards Sam, and he snapped out a hand to catch it: the keys to the Impala.

"Pick a direction and shag ass," Dean continued. "Anywhere that's not here. You see me again, shoot and keep runnin'."

Sam hesitated, confused and reeling from unused adrenaline. The vision was still hanging in the future…

He looked again at the shells on the ground, remembered the way Dean's body had jerked with the impact of the bullets when Charity shot him, and the way he'd gotten up like nothing happened.

"Oh, fuck," he whispered, wanting to say more, needing answers, but he was still stuck on the idea of Dean trying to kill himself, and the fact that the witch's magic was the only reason his brother was still alive. Sam felt like he was unraveling.

"She's usin' me to get to you. I'll keep…she'll keep trying to use me to kill you. I can't stop her. I tried." The evidence of the attempt was scattered across the dirt at his brother's feet. "Go, Sam. Hurry."

Sam gaped at him, his mind running in a dozen directions, trying to put the pieces together and figure out what to do, but his brother was in agony, and that made it hard to think about anything except that things had to be really bad if Dean wasn't pretending they were okay.

"What are you, high? I'm not leaving you anywhere."

Dean opened his mouth to protest, but Sam steamrolled over whatever words he would have formed. He was surprised at how steady, how quiet his voice sounded, even as his body trembled with the force behind it.

"It's both of us or neither of us, man. You know that."

"Sam…" His voice was gravelly with annoyance and argument and inarticulate despair.

"If it were me, you wouldn't leave. How can you ask me to?"

"You don't understand," he insisted. "I can't stop her. I'll kill you, Sam."

The words should have chilled him, but Dean was looking at him – really looking at him – for the first time since the whole nightmare started, and he couldn't feel anything but relief that his brother was finally back. That was Dean looking out at him through a sheen of barely-controlled tears. The gleam of his irises couldn't change that.

"Dude, we'll figure something out. Now that we know what kind of spell it is-"

"Sam, goddammit-" Dean stopped short, reined himself in. With his eyes closed, he was a dark profile against the sky. "Just go."

Sam let out a little huff of grim amusement, and pulled his Beretta.

"Dean, if I have to shoot you and toss you in the trunk, you're coming with me."

As it turned out, that was exactly what Sam had to do. Well. Charity did most of the heavy lifting.

* * *

"Ow," Dean said when Sam opened the trunk.

"You shouldn't be so stubborn."

Dean scowled and launched himself feet-first onto the pavement, ignoring Sam's outstretched hand. In retrospect, Sam had to admit it wasn't the brightest idea he ever had, trying to haul his brother out of the trunk when he couldn't even support his own weight without leaning on the fender.

"Where's your partner in crime?" Dean asked, casting about for the Cavalier or its driver.

"I sent her home." Sam tossed his brother a wet rag and a clean shirt. Dean set the shirt on the car and began scrubbing his face with the rag. "We can take care of this now, you're…"

"Not quite so homicidal?"

"Yeah."

"You should get inside," he said. "Rest. And lock the door."

Sam just stood there as Dean tossed down the bloody rag and peeled off two shirts, replacing them with the t-shirt Sam had offered. The complex tattoos looked even more sinister in the sodium light, and the razor lines of scar tissue across Dean's back showed in sharp, white contrast. They were different. Not just different spells, but of completely different characters. He filed that information away, to be examined by a brain not quite so exhausted as his was at the moment.

"You need to sleep too, Dean."

"No, actually, I don't. And if you think I'm spendin' the night in the same room as you, you're a bigger dumbfuck than I thought."

Dean tossed his bloody shirts next to the rag and leaned back against the car, eyes anywhere but on Sam. It was as close as he would ever get to conceding the point Sam had been trying to make. But he still worried.

"So you can take off again?"

"I'll be here when you get up. Promise." Throat-clearing. A carefully controlled breath. "Then we'll go back to the foundry."

Sam blinked. "Why the hell would we do that?"

"Because, Sam. If we're doing this, you're gonna take some fucking precautions."

"I'm not chaining you up and leaving you!"

"Then we're not doing this."

"You can't be serious."

Dean just looked at him. He was a little ragged around the edges, and his eyes were the wrong color, but it was Dean, deadly calm and humorless. Not a version of his brother that got a lot of play. Certainly no point in arguing with him. But then, Sam sometimes felt he spent his life tilting at windmills, especially where Dean was concerned.

"Look, if you're that concerned about it, we can set something up here. You don't have to-"

"Sam." He said his name like a warning, violence in his tone.

"What's so special about the foundry? We've got cuffs."

"The ones she set up will hold. Nothing else will."

"How do you know?"

"I just know."

Sam gave a defeated sigh. His side was pulsing with regular throbs of pain. His legs felt slightly gelatinous. If he didn't lie down soon, he wouldn't make it on his own.

"Fine. We'll talk about it tomorrow. So you better be around to do the talking."

"I will."

"I'm serious."

"I'll be here, Sam."

The response was short and clipped, but Sam believed it. At least, he thought he did. His head was still pounding from the vision. The risk of Dean slipping away during the night was a very real one; if Dean didn't want to be found, he could disappear off the face of the fucking planet. But Sam was so tired, and Dean was the one person he was supposed to be able to trust. The knife sliding in, shock and cold and bite. Gunshots flung from a nightmare into the waking world. Dead silver eyes like coins in the darkness.

Sam walked to the door of the motel room and unlocked it, pausing in the threshold to look back at his brother. Dean was still leaning against the car, eyes on his feet. He looked like a Beckett character, waiting for something that would never come.

It was getting late. Sam started to shiver.

He turned around, shut the door. And, after hearing his name called out in reproach, he locked it and drew the chain.

* * *

It helped to have a locked door between them.

Dean knew it wouldn't stop him; he could easily kick the thing down (something which, judging by the condition of the jamb, several cops or spouses had already done). But doing so would certainly wake Sam, and an awake Sam had a much better chance of defending himself.

As the night wore on, he tried to pretend that he was watching over Sam, standing guard from a strategic position. He didn't exactly sleep these days, and it wasn't as though he had anything better to do. But the ridiculousness of it destroyed the illusion. He was the biggest danger to Sam right now. He tried to pretend, and he choked on his own panic over what might happen if the witch's influence acted on him before he could get to the foundry. He was practically trembling with the need for shackles, for the relief of being unable to harm Sam. Pretty messed up, actually. But when hadn't their lives been fucking twisted?

More than once he considered hotwiring the Impala, but every time it came back to the weariness in Sam's eyes, the stiffness of his movements, the injury that Dean had himself caused. He'd promised. He was terrified of hurting Sam, but he had promised. There'd been a time when that wouldn't have mattered, when Sam's safety would have superseded his happiness. But that was a attitude taken towards children, and Sam was no longer a child. Not tonight. Not since Dad, maybe.

Dean couldn't trust his own judgment, was the thing. He'd tried to end this himself, and had failed. He could only trust Sam, because he was all out of options. That bitch had fucked him up but good. He was holding onto himself by his fingernails, and sometimes he wished it would all just stop. He was so goddamned tired.

He pushed his sleeves up and stared at the black ink on his forearms, the intricate symbols he didn't recognize. He could feel them, though. What they meant. Like tiny, sharp claws in his skin, piercing deep into bone and soul. A different kind of shackle. He dropped his hands and stood staring into darkness that wasn't dark - not for him.

He started getting jittery a few hours in. It was the waiting again. Nothing to do, nothing to be done. Stillness that killed with suffocating slowness. He walked a few blocks to the 24/7 Quik Mart by the expressway. The dark streets, perfectly lit to his eyes, reminded him of a Twilight Zone ghost town. He passed a chain-link fence with a badass mutt behind it, some combination of fighting breeds, loyal and vicious. The animal moved towards him as he approached, but stopped without making a sound, and watched without making eye contact. It remained in that attentive, submissive posture until Dean turned onto the side street that ran towards the interstate. Weird dog.

The convenience store was a island of artificial light in the natural darkness. There was a steady trickle of customers passing in and out, holding bags of chips and candy bars and caffeine pills. Truckers and travelers and insomniacs, passing each other in the fluorescent glare. Dean bought a fifth of Jim Beam and two packs of Kentucky's Best, unfiltered. He took a different route back to the motel, telling himself that he wasn't avoiding the dog. But he kind of was. Fucking creepy.

The bourbon didn’t last long. Might as well have been drinking water. He had more success with the cigarettes. There was no sedative effect, but he started to relax with the motion from hand to mouth, and the heightened awareness of his breathing. He pulled the smoke in deep and let it out slow, watching it curl up and out into the darkness. When it escaped the dim shine of the streetlight and he could see it in total darkness, it looked like the breath of ghosts.

Dad had made it clear when they were kids that if he ever caught them smoking they'd regret it 'til the day they died. Dean had never been tempted. Smoking, like long hair, was a liability. Lung capacity matters when you're running from (or towards) a psychopathic spirit.

Or when you're watching out for your little brother.

He'd pulled Sam away from the school dumpster once, and punched the kid who'd been handing out the stolen cigs. The idea of telling Dad had never crossed his mind, but he was so pissed at Sam. Wasn't like him to go that far just to fit in. But that had been a difficult year, a new high school every few months and more hunting than ever before. Sam hated it and Dean loved it. At least, he'd thought he had. Lately, it'd been hard to separate the job-worth-doing sentiment from the blood and the death and the sheer sacrifice. They'd lost so much. Everything they'd ever had. There had to be an end to it, somehow. It couldn't go on forever.

The compulsion came just as the sky was hinting at dawn. For the first time, he could separate it from his own will, and he almost sobbed with the relief of it. It was all he could do to stay where he was, to not kick down the door and start in on Sam with his bare hands. He couldn't move, was barely holding himself in place against the foreign tide, smoldering cigarette dropping from a nerveless hand, but at least he was no longer swept up in the spell. It was a sweet agony to be aware, finally, of what was happening to him. Like being torn apart from the inside, but he would never want it like he did in the memories that were nightmares. He had a choice, at least until he reached the end of his endurance.

Not Sam not Sam not Sam not Sam…

The earth turned, the sun began to rise, and Dean prayed to a god he didn't believe in that his brother would find a way to kill him.

In Nomine (1/1)

2007-11-19T13:11:01Z

Title: In Nomine
Author: Luxorien
Pairings: None.
Rating: R (Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth, Dean has a Potty Mouth!)
Words: 319
Spoilers: "Sin City"
Summary: AU "Sin City" scene borne out of my frustration that the Winchesters never thought to memorize the Rituale Romanum, and my vague memory of the way exorcisms are supposed to have worked in the early Christian church.
Author's Note: I don't know what the hell happened here. Either I'm blaspheming (in which case, don't tell my bishop 'cause I kinda gotta go to Mass and stuff), or I'm writing religious!Dean (oh God, please, NO), or I'm writing Christ-figure!Dean (hot in a rilly wrong sort of way?). I can't really figure out which of these is the least evil (and there's still some crap that doesn't fit into any of those categories) so...this drabble just crawled out of my head, and I am taking no more responsibility than that. I am, however, taking responsibility for a shower and a nap.
Gratuitous Author's Note: Oh, come on! Who DID pay attention?! We were all too busy drawing beards on Cornelia and inking over Gaius's pink shoes! (I think it was Gaius...)

In Nomine

"Guess you should have paid more attention in Latin class."

He surprises her by laughing.

"For something so goddamned old, you got a short fucking memory." He's dusting himself off, climbing to his feet. Readying some unspeakable attack. The fear that always worms inside of her, the fear that drives her and makes her brave, it writhes and snaps, threatening to break free and reduce her to hell-state: groveling, mewling, inarticulate, agonized. A mortal! A thrice-damned mortal, already doomed to walk the same road. What has she to fear from him?

"Guess we'll have to do this the old-fashioned way." And he looks her in the eye, doomed and as unafraid as all of hell's legions - which is to say, excruciatingly terrified, but charging ahead anyway. She looks into his soul (eyes are windows) and she sees it all laid out there, paradoxical and unavoidable.

"You can't." For the first time her voice, dancing to the tune of a hapless bartender's vocal chords, sounds weak in her stolen ears. "You...we own you...faithless..."

He layers a smirk over his face, like he's possessing himself, and it says, Hey, look, you caught me being awesome. Then the impossible words (from that mouth, that bartered away its own humanity) are assaulting the world around her, collapsing the pillars of the earth in on her essence, driving her out. She can hear them over her own screaming, over (what feels like) the end of everything, over the roar of the singularity that drags her back down into what she is.

"In the name of Christ, I command you to get the fuck out of here. In the name of Christ, I command you to leave His child the fuck alone. In nomine Christe, Khristos, Yehoshua, Iesous, Jesus H. tap-dancing Christ in a cartoon, LEAVE."

And just like that, eternity starts over at the beginning, playing the same tired tape of lightless self-loathing and nothingness.

Eternity her ruiner will share.

Pleasure, Texts, and Sex

2007-11-19T09:30:19Z

Dood! Lookit! Jim Butcher is Roland Barthes! Only...less confusing and French.

Swimming the Lethe (6/?)

2007-11-19T09:06:53Z

Title: Swimming the Lethe (6/?)
Author: Luxorien
Words: 2738/?
Rating: R (violence, Dean's potty mouth, no porn--sorry)
Genre: Gen/Dean Gets Supernatural Mojo/Dark!Dean
Pairings: Dean/OFCs (no romance; just sex of the off-screen variety)
Feedback: Yes? Please? Help?
Notes: I'm finally releasing this chapter from purgatory. It's not going to get any better, no matter how hard I stare at it. :\
Summary: After an infelicitous one-night stand, Dean becomes a danger to Sam. This chapter: Dean tries to murder Sam in his sleep.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6

Farr off from these a slow and silent stream
Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
-Paradise Lost

The third time Dean tries to kill his brother, it feels less like a decision and more like a reflex.

He's cleaning an assortment of weapons, keeping his hands busy with rods and brushes. He wipes down the actions of his carry pistols every day, but the others haven't been taken apart since Dean and Sam stopped in Clarksville with nothing to do and not enough daylight to hit the next town. That was when he would have listened to Joe Walsh and argued with Sam for the hell of it. This time he is silent and so is the room. His brother, a prescription bottle on the table beside him, is asleep on the other bed. Three days out AMA and fucking proud of it, he breathes with deep, convalescent breaths. Dean listens to them, trying to remember what they mean.

There's nothing.

As he slips the slide of the 226 off the rails, he wonders how long he'll last with his insides ripped out and scrapped. He can drive a car and fire a gun, put together a pattern of mysterious deaths or burn a spirit's bones to ash, but it's all unsupported rote. Habits belonging to a dead man. Not near enough to feed living flesh and blood. He finishes the takedown with familiar motions, brushes away the dirt, wipes down every piece and oils every surface. Snaps everything back in place and shoves the magazine in. Racks the slide to chamber a round.

Picks a target on his brother's chest and fires.

The action doesn't exactly surprise him, but he doesn't plan on doing it either. He isn't thinking beyond the aiming and the firing. He doesn't know what he'll do when the bullets hit. Will a dead Sam finally fill him? Give back the true memory of the life he's just destroyed? Or will he simply walk out, take the guns and the Impala, and not look back?

Doesn't matter, because Sam is somehow, miraculously, launching himself at the floor in the instant before the shots are fired. His eyes are snapping open: wide, lucid, instantly awake. He spends no time assessing the situation, doesn't even look at Dean. His reaction time is zero. It is as if the jump to the floor is a continuation of some motion he has been performing in a dream.

As if he's been warned.

Dean has never been one to stand around wondering what to do, and his run-in with Psycho Bitch hasn't changed that. He quickly begins gathering up the weapons and cleaning supplies, while Sam lies on the floor cursing through gritted teeth. By the time their stuff is in the car, his brother has managed to sit up against the bed. His shirt is dark where he's popped a few stitches and his face shows a thin sheen of sweat.

"What the fuck, Dean?" he pants.

Even if he wanted to answer - and a part of him, lost in the corridors of his mind, does - he couldn't begin to explain himself. It is as much a mystery to him as it is to Sam.

"Cops'll be here," he says, pulling Sam to his feet. "Let's go."

* * *

It wasn't a dream. "Nightmare" didn't begin to fucking cover it. When it released her, Charity launched herself out of bed, limbs flailing and clumsy. She felt like she was moving someone else's arms and legs, some other body newly released from the paralysis of the vision. She struggled to remember who she was, where she was, but her head was rimed in emptiness and agony. She grabbed for handholds as she stumbled across the room, missed, and crumpled to her hands and knees, shaking and panting with the force of what she had seen.

She'd known she was only buying time against the inevitable. She'd spent the last few days trying to gather her strength, but it seemed pointless now. There was nothing she could do to prepare, no comfort she could take with her that would make this desert any easier to cross. Dean was going to rip her apart one way or another. They were connected, now. She could face this, or she could wait for the blackness to pull her in with dark heat, and need, and that torturous hollowness.

She staggered to the bathroom and splashed water on her face. She tried not to see Dean when she looked in the mirror, but he was there. He was always there. When she closed her eyes, she could hear that same refrain: save Sam.

"Why is this happening?" she rasped at her reflection. Why me? Isn't there anyone else?

There was no answer, of course. And what would that change? She would bend in this wind, or she would break.

* * *

Sam was alert and sitting up when Charity entered the motel room, but his face was pale and haggard. She tried not to look back at Dean, who was closing the door behind her.

"Maybe you should go back to the hospital," she said as she approached the bed.

"I can take care of myself," Sam replied firmly. She swallowed, and tried not to inch away when Dean stepped up next to her, face casually blank as he looked on. It was hard to reconcile him with the man who had smiled at her, kissed her, fucked her, made her scream. She wanted to scream now, for entirely different reasons. "Besides, we can't go back there."

"Yeah, I heard about you guys on the news. Shooting through a motel wall, that was fucking brilliant. Y'know, you get more points if you kill innocent bystanders."

"That was a mistake," Sam said, his voice hitching slightly at Charity's no-shit expression. "Dean's not, uh, handling weapons anymore."

"That's comforting."

"You didn't hear about this on the news, though." Clearly a statement, not a question. Charity frowned at the change of subject, and stared at him a long time before answering.

"I sort of had a dream."

"So did I. Except it wasn't a dream. You knew what was going to happen, and you stopped it."

"Maybe," she said slowly. "It's not like I had any control over what happened."

"But you have control now."

"I don't know what you think I can do," she lied.

"You're connected. She used your hair as a ritual object." Sam's voice took an inward turn, as if he were thinking out loud, talking for his own benefit as much as hers. Which was good, because she had no clue what the fuck he was going on about. "There are a lot of rites that recognize the symbolism of sexual unions. She used that symbolism twice, to make sure she could get in deep enough. That kind of thing doesn't go away easy. The link is obviously still active. Maybe you can use it."

"Use it to do what, exactly?"

"Help my brother."

The same arguments that had driven her from the hospital pushed at her now: not my problem, not my fault. But the wreckage of Dean's soul was staring her in the face, demanding justice. She looked at Sam, barely strong enough to make it to the bathroom five feet away. Pale, a little high on painkillers. Desperate. Grieving for one not dead.

Save Sam.

"Godfuckingdammit," she said.

She didn't see Sam's reaction because she looked to Dean, and he pulled her into the empty halls behind his eyes, the Spartan headspace where everything that didn't have a deadly purpose had been removed. She felt burning cold, and then…

…she's back in the dream. She's sinking into the forgetful waters, drifting in currents that go nowhere.

But there is fire in the water. She's running, and there is fire. Smoke burns her lungs. She has her orders. She has to get out. Don't look back. She's carrying something (someone) and she has to get OUT.

She stands on a threshold, heat licking at her back. There is a woman standing in the way. Her look is wild, and fevered with madness. They must all die, the woman says without speaking. Her eyes are endless mirrors, and the past behind them is bloody, littered with corpses. One of them has the same blue eyes as the killer. The yellow demon has touched them, her silence says, they must all die: sisters and brothers, daughters, sons - all of them. The woman is a wall of terrible sorrow, of pain and violent anger, but the flailing bundle pushes against Charity's chest, crying out with helpless need, and the fire is burning, driving at her back, driving her into the arms of the kinslayer.

Charity opened her eyes and found the world not where she left it. Sam was next to her, addressing the floor. She struggled to sit up and make sense of things, but her muscles had liquefied somewhere between standing and sprawling on the floor. She settled for rolling to the side and peering blearily at Sam. He was sweating and trembling with the effort of his movement, but his voice was steady as he called for his brother.

Dean, lying bonelessly on the thin motel carpet, did not answer. He breathed shallowly. Even his eyes were still beneath the lids.

"What happened?" Sam asked when he noticed Charity stirring.

She blinked a few times, tried to formulate a response. Nothing came consciously, but her mouth started forming senseless words of its own accord. "He woke up," she heard herself say.

Sam didn't have to voice his incredulity. Charity mirrored his expression.

"I don't know, man. I saw…there was a house on fire, and I…Dean was running, carrying something. A kid."

Sam's head snapped up at her words and she fell silent under the force of his gaze. He looked as though he would say something, but he just turned away again, confused and clearly distressed.

"Does that mean something to you?" she asked. When Sam answered with a pensive frown, she added, "Come on, we're past privacy here."

"When we were kids," Sam replied, after a long pause. "There was a fire, and Dean sort of…carried me out."

"Who's the yellow demon?" she asked, trying to sort through the symbolic and the literal. She wasn't prepared for the change that came over Sam. Like blast doors slamming shut.

"What about it?"

"That witch or whatever she was, she was there. And she said something about a yellow demon, about killing the ones he'd touched. That mean something to you?"

Sam's averted, shuttered expression did not change.

Charity bit her lip in irritation and got up to leave, her limbs still wobbly, but doing their jobs. "Fine. Whatever. Good fucking luck."

"Wait," Sam said as she reached the door. "Just…was there anything else?"

She stopped, but did not turn around. "Bodies. She's killed before. I think…I think she killed her sister."

She wrenched the door open, fearing more words, more questions to tug her back by her sense of duty. But Sam was quiet, and she made it outside where no demands would be made on her, and the darkness hid nothing to frighten her. She made it to her car, but didn't get in. She told herself that she'd done all she could reasonably be expected to do. She told herself that Sam was hiding things from her for scary reasons, that she was getting involved in something really weird and dangerous, and that running was the smartest thing she could do.

She told herself those things, but she couldn't leave.

* * *

He thinks he is dreaming.

He thinks this because the scene is constantly shifting, and life doesn't have scenes - just stuff, and places. Then there's the dream-drug, the indifference that softens and blurs the edges that draw blood in the waking world. What he sees, he sees from a distance. Some part of him is relieved by this, though he doesn't know why. Hasn't it always been like this? Won't it always be? He is aware of time passing like a great, slow-moving river. It washes over him with steady, soft currents, with no end and no beginning. The Mississippi of the fucking universe. Straight out of Buddhism for Dummies. Time is a river, and life is a journey, interrupted only by rest stops with dim lighting and no TP.

The locations are all familiar. Bring-your-own-soap, thirty-dollar motels. Bars with neon PBR signs and no windows. Graveyards. The woods at night. He plays pool or drinks beer. Stalks through shadows with a gun in his hand. Always goes back to her place, not his. Digs and burns, digs and burns, in an endless cycle of death and more permanent death. Sam is never there. He thinks that maybe Sam should be there, but he never is. No Sam. It's like missing a limb he doesn't remember ever having.

There's no Sam, but there are others. A fuckable chick with leaves in her hair: she plays nine-ball against him and wins. An old man with an eye patch: he stares from the counter of a greasy spoon, silent like he knows more than he should. Twin brothers with streams of hippie-long hair: they race their bikes against the Impala, eating up the highway until there's nothing left but sky. Another chick, this time with roses: she refuses to leave with him, but smiles invitingly all the while.

He feels their eyes on him everywhere, while the tape of his life keeps playing itself out: fighting and fear and close calls and shore leave. He knows the words and the rhythms, but he knows them like they belong to someone else. A movie he's memorized, or a song he knows by heart. It doesn't feel like his life.

Scene. The police station is dark, and the front desk is hard against his back. The silver-eyed woman is on top of him, and he remembers this part. She's using tongue, hands, hips, and soon it will be her whole body. But something happened didn't it? Something went wrong. What was it? It's so hard to think with her there, seeping into him. Her lips aren't moving, but he thinks he can hear her talking, cajoling.

The flames burn some of the haze from his mind. The wall is sheathed with them by the time he notices. This isn't how it happened. He tries to get up and run, but the woman on top of him holds him down like she wants to watch him burn. It's nothing, she says without saying anything. And he thinks, She's wrong. The fire's everything.

Figures emerge from the approaching flames. He feels the furnace heat and the smoke, but his eyes are clear. He sees the pool-player, the old man, the two boys, the cocktease. And there are others, looking like more than they are: just people in ordinary clothes, but they aren't really people. He thinks that maybe he's having a fucking religious experience, except his gods are holding assault rifles and handguns and tactical knives. Firelight glints off gunmetal and steel in a solid wall behind him. The witch's nails are digging into his skin like claws. She pulls at him, voicelessly, but the heat drowns her out, and he's hearing his father's voice instead. It's a lecture he was given often, in state after state, hunt after hunt.

Better to make the wrong decision than no decision, son. The safest place for your bullet is in the other guy's chest. You don't hesitate, you don't go halfway. You do it, or you don't.

It's liking waking up from a dream he didn't realize he was having, and in his sudden awareness, his instincts scream for him to act. He pushes against the weight on his chest. Her claws rip at him as they grapple. He shoves her away and stumbles for the door, bursting out onto wet grass. The house that was a police station a moment before is being consumed, casting flickering light out over the deserted street. He kneels on the ground, panting, disoriented. He forgot something. There's something he has to do. Something about the fire.

Then it comes back, like a mountain crashing on top of him. The house. That night. The light reflecting off the Impala's hood as the second floor is consumed. He screams his brother's name, and the world shatters around him.

Chapter 7

Appearances

2007-11-19T08:25:29Z

James Hetfield has a ridiculous beard. Or maybe it just looks ridiculous because of his ridiculously large head.

Still, you can't listen to shit like this and honestly tell me that isn't the best sound you've ever heard.

I would have sacrificed an alarming number of innocent goats to have been present at that concert.

"Eye for an Eye, GSW for a GSW"

2007-11-11T05:32:04Z

Title: "Eye for an Eye, GSW for a GSW"
Author: Luxorien
Words: 395
Rating: R (violence and language)
Genre: Gen, AU
Pairings: None
Spoilers: For "Bad Day at Black Rock"
Summary: Apparently the Dean Winchester in my head is more of a badass than the Dean Winchester onscreen. Or maybe certain writers don't know their own character. Whatever. This is rewrite of that climatic scene. I feel better now that it's out of my head and screaming its head off to teh intarwebs.

"You don't just go around shooting people!"

"Oh, please. It's just a flesh wound. I can aim."

Dean's brain gave up conscious control of his limbs for a short while. When he came back to himself, he was straddling Bela, the gun in his hand. It had discharged when he made his play for it. He knew this because he could smell the powder and he'd felt the recoil. Strangely, he didn't remember hearing anything.

His first conscious act was to place the muzzle of the semiauto against her knee. Their eyes met as the metal bit through her clothes and into the skin. Her gaze challenged him, either because she didn't think he'd do it, or because she was too proud to beg.

Irrelevant, either way. He pulled the trigger. A few pounds of pressure, and the joint shattered messily, spattering him with blood and bits of bone. Bela screamed and Sam cried out, but he ignored both of them. Grabbed the bitch's chin, forced her to look past the pain and see him. She eventually blinked away the agony long enough to pay attention. He could feel her teeth grinding together where his fingers were pressed into her jaw.

"I ever see you again, the next one goes in your skull, you get me?"

He pushed the hot barrel against her temple for added emphasis. She trembled, but didn't react.

"You get me?" he asked again, drawing out each syllable with boiling anger. Her eyes followed his trigger finger as it drifted back inside the guard and started inching backwards. She swallowed, and offered an almost imperceptible nod.

Dean sprang to his feet and got to work burning the goddamn stupid rabbit's foot. Sam was saying something, but he couldn't hear it over the flames. He was so fucking pissed he couldn't get his sensory input straight.

As he took off his top layer and tied it around the wound in Sam's arm, it finally registered that Sam was objecting to his treatment of Bela.

"I don't see you bending over backwards to help her," he replied shortly.

Sam's mouth opened and closed a few times, but he didn't say anything. He looked back at her bleeding figure twice as they walked back to the Impala. Dean didn't. He was too busy running over the list of possible complications, and making plans for a hospital heist.

Just a fucking flesh wound. Christ, what an idiot.

Sin City

2007-10-26T07:57:51Z

I want more episodes like "Faith" and fewer like "Houses of the Holy." I already bitched about them destroying Dean's religious beliefs in a stupid way. I'm going to do it again, because "Sin City" was...lackluster.

I did enjoy the way the demon talked about Lucifer as the god of the demons. That's a cool idea to use. But all this crap about humans being corrupt and blahblahblah despaircakes? It got kind of old. I was not impressed by Dean's convo with the bartender from Hell. It was like that episode of House where he didn't do anything but talk in circles at that rape victim. I don't mind the dialogue, but it's gotta be good dialogue.

Still, great acting all around, so there's that. Bobby shot the demon chick, which pleased me. Sam did not, which infuriated me. I know, I know. It would destroy the plot. *sigh* I just like it when the Winchesters are all badass. Doesn't happen nearly as often as it should.

I don't really buy Dean's new religion. He came to it for a completely stupid reason. I liked him better as an atheist. I guess he's agnostic now. Oh, well.

Bobby still rocks the hizzie. And manwhore!Dean still makes me squee.

ETA: The Cheney crack? I hate that shit. It's not that I like Cheney, I just hate political crap in a TV show that has nothing to do with politics. Talk about a fucking buzzkill.

Supernatural

2007-10-25T04:17:20Z

I like the comedy episodes. I really do. It's just...all drama/action shows have a problem when they start doing "funny" episodes: it's really hard to do drama and comedy at the same time. IMO, the best comedy is the sort of serious kind, but it's so difficult to hit that mark. This is what happens: you start sacrificing character on the altar of humor. That's what killed Gary Hobson. And it sorta...wounded the Winchesters last week.

Here's my big beef: Dean should have, at the very least, shot the bitch lady. Yes, it's very funny that she fooled them and I know this episode was supposed to be all lighthearted, but SHE SHOT SAM! And Dean Winchester just ignores this after a brief flirtation with disbelief, anger and near-panic.

I just don't buy it. Dean would have given her double what she gave Sam. Maybe shot out a kneecap or something.

On the positive side of things, Padalecki did a great job with Hapless!Sam. I loved the rueful resignation. He was hilarious, without sacrificing the dignity of his character. I think the script leaned a little heavily on Sam, but Padalecki turned it to his advantage.

Swimming the Lethe (5/?)

2007-10-15T15:16:29Z

Title: Swimming the Lethe (5/?)
Author: Luxorien
Words: 2463/?
Rating: R (violence, Dean's potty mouth, no porn--sorry)
Genre: Gen/Dean Gets Supernatural Mojo/Dark!Dean
Pairings: Dean/OFCs (no romance; just sex of the off-screen variety)
Feedback: Yes? Please? Help?
Notes: I give up.
Summary: After an infelicitous one-night stand, Dean becomes a danger to Sam. This chapter: Sam has a plan. Charity makes a break for it.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

Farr off from these a slow and silent stream
Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
-Paradise Lost

"You could say something." Sam sighed and leaned back against the wall, Sig still in hand. "I know you want to kill me, but don't you want to tell me your evil plan first?"

Dean gazed at him emptily.

"Yeah." He scoffed. "You don't have an evil plan. That's sort of the point, isn't it? Well, maybe I'll tell you my brilliant plan to save your sorry ass."

Sam slid down the rough wall and held his gun carefully in both hands, his attention still on Dean but his eyes watching the dull gleam of the flashlight on the weapon's alloy frame.

"The ritual she used is obscure. No record of anyone ever pulling it off. It's supposed to be a last ditch defense against evil. You take a willing sacrifice and call on the gods to recognize that sacrifice with divine gifts." His tone was as mild as it ever was when they were on a hunt, hashing out theories or reporting on research. He knew nothing he said would make any difference to Dean as he was, but it felt wrong to do what he came to do without a word of explanation. "No specifics on what form those divine gifts should take, but there's some stuff about the recipient's soul, I guess, being uncovered. Actually, the word is nacod, which became naked. I thought you might enjoy that."

There was, of course, no response from Dean. No dirty joke, no leer, no playful bite of the tongue. None of those things would serve any tactical purpose. Sam hit the mag release on the Sig and then cleared the pipe. He would approach Dean symbolically unarmed.

"Thing is, she modified the ritual. Added something. Used a seal to lock you away while you were…open. I have no idea why. But I can fix it." He took a breath. "I think."

In the garish light, his hand looked as pale as the chalk he held, but it was steady as he drew the lines of the symbol around Dean. He'd carefully memorized the words of the fourteenth-century counterritual. Latin slipped from his tongue in graceful, rolling cadences. The magic slowly took hold, locking Dean more firmly in place than physical restraints ever could. Sam removed the cuffs and shifted Dean's arms out to the sides.

He drew the tactical knife he'd prepared: eight inches long, razor sharp, and illegal in most states. It felt heavy with blood that hadn't even been shed yet. He hesitated a moment and then plunged it into his frozen brother's back, pushing Dean to the ground with the force of it. The move didn't even elicit a grunt. Sam put an unnecessary steadying hand on Dean's neck and began adding fresh lines to the pattern of scars on his brother's back. The only sound Dean made was a rough, wet coughing when his lungs filled with blood, but Sam could see the fatal wounds beginning to mend themselves already, even through the stinging dampness in his eyes.

"I'm sorry, Dean," he whispered, and then finished off the incantation in the original language of the Anglo-Saxon ritual.

"Modceares gemyne dyrnne dream."

Heart-cares remember, and hidden joy.

"Thole thu ond leofa…"

Suffer, and live.

He could feel the power of the ritual, contained and channeled by the containment circle, whipping around them and through them as it was released. There was a sound/feeling of something snapping or breaking, and he could see, for a moment, his brother's face twisted in agony. Then his vision was swept away in the shockwave of some new spell he hadn't initiated. It was coming from Dean, and he had just enough time to recognize it as some sort of goddamned mystic tripwire before Dean stabbed him with his own knife.

Poetic justice, maybe. The knife did technically belong to Dean.

* * *

Charity was standing in the stiff breeze, guzzling a Red Bull, when she watched her one-night stand flee the scene with bloody hands. The Impala growled sweetly and took off in a gravelly cloud of dust that smelled of isolation and rust and abandonment. As soon as the vehicle reached the highway, she bolted for the foundry, smashing down metal stairs and crunching debris with her boots as she raced through the dimly lit metal graveyard. Her flashlight bounced crazily across the walls and floor, splashing her retinas with ugly glances of neglect. She slid to a stop at the threshold of what she thought of as The Room, the only piece of the industrial ruin that mattered, and found Sam adding a fresh coat of blood to the concrete floor. She called his name to no response, put pressure on the gushing wound in his abdomen, and made some swift calculations.

"Son of a shitfucking-"

She cut off sharply, conserving the breath she would need, tied Sam's shirt tightly around the wound to keep him from bleeding to death and pulled him over her shoulder with great effort. On a good day, she could bench Sam's weight, but that was benching. Carrying was something altogether different, but she managed. She pulled five different muscles and wrenched her back, but she managed.

"Red Bull does give you wings," she panted as she laid him in her rustbucket Cavalier and took off in a second tornado of dust. Red Bull, adrenaline, whatever. She redlined the tiny sedan all the way to the hospital and collapsed in a plastic chair as soon as Sam disappeared into the ER. Her arms and legs felt like they were vibrating apart and she kept seeing shadowy black flashes in her peripheral vision. Nobody needed to tell her to let the professionals do their jobs. She dodged the paperwork by insisting that she didn't know who she'd brought in and fell asleep sitting up.

The dreams that greeted her were of blood and glittering eyes.

* * *

He's running. Asphalt disappearing beneath chrome, an endless ribbon leading into nowhere. Only the vaguest notion of what (or whom) he's running from, but the inchoate, instinctual impulse is enough. Something's wrong. The job went south.

He'd had him. The ritual had changed something inside him, shifted the hallways of his mind (again), but his arms had been free and he hadn't hesitated on the first thrust. It was only when he pulled the knife back for a more immediately fatal cut that his arm seemed to catch on the other's eyes. He remembered them well, having looked into them or suffered their gaze on a daily basis as long as he could remember. He knew their color and size, knew the habits of the creature to whom they belonged.

But as he lay there with one bloody fist poised to douse their light, something tugged at him, a memory of a memory, something he'd forgotten. He'd been able to read those eyes once. He remembered that. He didn't remember how to read them and their expression was now a mystery to him, but he recalled a time when subtle muscle contractions in his brother's face had told him important things, or things that had seemed important at the time.

There's something missing inside him, he decides. A jagged hole where a part of him has been ripped free. It makes him suddenly and violently angry. Anger at such a violation is something he can feel and he lets the emotion wash through him. It doesn’t fill the vacancy – nothing can do that – but it pushes hard against the wound, cauterizes it. They reached inside him and fucked with him, rearranged his soul for purposes of their own. He's already killed the woman, but the boy (Sammy – whose name used to mean something) is probably not dead. Yet.

He remembers the cold concrete, the metal on his wrists. Remembers being slammed to the floor. The searing bite of the knife in his back. The taste of his own blood in his mouth. Hot anger flares from cold detachment. He relishes the irrationality of it: something beyond the indifferent calculus of the hunt. He remembers how to hurt, and how to strike back, and that's something. Not everything, not the missing piece of himself, but it's something.

He skids to a stop and reverses direction, his blood burning hot as the rubber on the Impala's tires.

* * *

It was night, and Sam was drowsing on a gentle sea of painkillers when he saw his brother's eyes in the darkness. Even after he registered the sharp, smooth blade against his throat, his senses were some time in convincing his brain that he was neither dreaming nor hallucinating. He stared while adrenaline vied for control of his nervous system, and Dean stared back. The knife began to tremble; Sam felt it bite ever so shallowly into the skin above his collarbone.

Then the knife and the eyes disappeared, and he heard someone retching.

The dim tunnel of his vision expanded, and he starting taking in his surroundings. Hospital whites painted grey and black by the moonlight. Vertical shades on the large window to his left, half-open and casting stripes of shadow on the pale floor. A wide door leading to an empty hallway, dim and third-shift quiet. And Dean. Standing in the bathroom doorway, leaning against the jamb. He looked pale, and unsteady on his feet. When he spoke, his voice was a hoarse whisper that carried easily in the small room.

"What did you do to me?"

Sam had thought he'd be relieved to see any expression on his brother's face, any indication that the ritual had brought him back to himself. But he looked in Dean's eyes and felt like an accomplice in the violation that had caused the desperate, confused despair he saw there. He tried to push through the chemical and emotional clouds that obscured his thinking, tried to find the right words and string them together.

"Dean, I'm sorry." His throat felt like it was clogged with broken glass. "She fucked with your head, man. I thought, if I could reverse the ritual..."

He trailed off in the face of the obvious discrepancy between planning and reality. His brother slid slowly down the wall, as if he hadn't really expected an answer – a reason – to solve anything. He sat there. Just…stopped. His knife, lying in one limp hand, reflected a low strip of moonlight, eerily matching the faint phosphorescence in his eyes. A few small, still moments passed before he spoke.

"I came here to kill you."

Sam swallowed. "But you didn't."

"Wanted to."

The words came with a breathy exhalation, an echo of a fierce desire. Sam groped for a response, but his tongue felt thick and slow and clumsy. He didn't know how to tell his brother that was okay, wasn't sure Dean wanted to hear it or that he was even capable of saying it. Just wasn't sure.

"I was…angry," Dean continued flatly. He drew his knees up to his chest and crossed his arms over them. "I was so fucking pissed. Wanted to so bad. Wanted to cut you 'til-"

Sam hadn't realized he'd stopped breathing until Dean slipped abruptly into silence and he let out a long, painful breath. He knew that his Dean – the real Dean – couldn't want something like that. He knew it was impossible. But he was still afraid. Still overtaken with a personal sort of terror that went beyond the sharp pull where the knife had slipped into his flesh. He had to force himself to disbelieve, had to remind himself that Dean needed him to not fuck this up.

"But you stopped," Sam said, somewhat surprised by how calm his own voice sounded. Maybe it was the drugs.

"Couldn't tell you why."

"I'm your brother, Dean."

"I know. I remember…things. I just don't-" Confusion settled over his blank face as he struggled for words. "It doesn't mean anything."

"It does mean something," Sam replied gently. "Just…stay, okay? Stay, and we'll figure this out. I promise."

Dean turned to face him, and Sam kept his eyes on his brother, willing him to be as stubborn as he'd always been, not to give up this time. Because Sam couldn't bear it if Dean ever stopped fighting.

Dean didn't answer him, just turned back to the wall. But he didn't leave, either. He sat there while Sam caught a slow boat to Darvocet-induced slumber. The dark image of his brother's hunched form followed him into his dreams.

* * *

When Charity walked into Sam's room the next morning, she started at the sight of Dean slumped against the opposite wall. Sam was awake, but she didn't get the impression that she'd walked in on anything. The boys just stood there (or, in Sam's case, sat there) in silence.

"Hey, Charity," Sam said. She didn't look at him. Dean hadn't moved, hadn't reacted at all to her presence, but she still didn't move any further into the room. "It's okay. Dean's…we, uh, talked."

"Was that before or after he stabbed you?" she asked, turning to Sam and finding a pale, hollowed version of the guy she'd blindly trusted. It was hard to feel threatened by him now.

"Um. After."

She turned back to Dean, eyeing him warily. He returned the look with customary indifference, but there was much more behind that carefully blank look. Something had changed: darkness filling the empty spaces. It frightened her and she recoiled.

She was taken suddenly by a deep memory: a hot summer, and the yellow-painted kitchen of her childhood home. Her mother, sweating as she spread peanut butter on bread, telling Charity that a good man could be as dangerous as a lousy one, in his own way. And she'd taken her sandwich, set it next to her milk and thought of her father, whoever he was, and said nothing. Nothing, until her mother died without answering the unspoken question and she was left with the empty house and the silence.

She looked at Dean and saw also Dean-that-was, the Dean of her memory. The contrast between present and past was sharp and cutting, and made her think of her mother's words. When she finally came back to herself, she realized that Sam had been asking her something.

"What?"

"I asked if you could, you know, read him for me?"

Charity chewed her lip anxiously, looking from one broken brother to the other. That foreign impulse was sweeping over her again in hot waves: SaveSamSaveSamSaveSam… She could hear her mother's voice. Sometimes a good man is more trouble than a lousy one. And she understood, finally, what her mother had meant.

She backed away, shaking her head and trembling.

"I'm sorry…"

She fled the hospital and didn't look back.

Chapter 6

No Use Whatsoever

2007-10-12T02:34:51Z

I am soooo drunk right now.

Someone log on so I can talk at you. Drunkenly.

Swimming the Lether (4/?)

2007-10-10T04:32:30Z

Title: Swimming the Lethe (4/?)
Author: Luxorien
Words: 2476/?
Rating: R (violence, Dean's potty mouth, no porn--sorry)
Genre: Gen/Dean Gets Supernatural Mojo/Dark!Dean
Pairings: Dean/OFCs (no romance; just sex of the off-screen variety)
Feedback: Yes? Please? Help?
Notes: This chapter brought to you by, "Ahhh!!! New season!"
Summary: After an infelicitous one-night stand, Dean becomes a danger to Sam. This chapter: Charity dreams. Sam gets his geek on.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Farr off from these a slow and silent stream
Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
-Paradise Lost

The logistics were maddening, not because it was a complicated process, but because it meant treating Dean like a rabid dog. Yet the characterization was devastatingly close to the truth; Dean was constantly coiled to strike. Sam had already been forced to shoot him again; he'd only looked away for a second, but that had been enough for his brother to make a play for the gun.

Sam allowed himself to relax slightly once Dean was secured in the room where not-Mina had done whatever she had done. Locking his brother up was ten kinds of wrong, but he didn't see any alternative. He couldn't hold a gun on Dean while he searched for a way to undo whatever had been done to him. And, like it or not, the bitch had left behind a perfect set-up, one that simply could not be matched by the amenities (HBO and a fridge) offered at the Lookout Motel .

"Charity, you don't have to stay," he grunted as he dragged the body they'd found to an even more discreet location.

Though she observed his efforts with wide eyes and did not offer to serve as an accomplice, she shook her head firmly. "I wanna help, if you think there's a way to reverse this…shit. This spell or whatever."

Sam tossed the still-warm corpse into the crumbling metal tank he'd picked out. The ground above had started to buckle the top of the corroded structure, and there was enough debris at the bottom to conceal quite a few bodies. The woman, whoever she was, slid into the darkness and fell for several seconds before thudding into the sliding pile. Despite the grimness of the task, Sam found a sick kind of satisfaction in knowing that the bitch would rot, unburied and unmourned, in this deserted maze of rust and grime. Then he thought of his brother chained to the same place and he wanted to throw up.

"I'll take care of this. Just-" Sam sighed and started walking back towards Dean. "Go home."

"I…can't."

The strangled, rasping whisper gave Sam pause. He stopped, and turned to look at her. The flashlight fell on features taut with distress. Her eyes were bright and her hands were shaking.

"What do you mean?" Sam asked.

"I can't leave you."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. It's Dean, he- I just can't. He wouldn't. So I can't."

"That doesn't make any sense," Sam replied, frowning.

"He's in my head." She put a hand to her temple and scrunched her eyes shut a moment, shaking her head as if she could extricate herself from some mental entanglement. "I felt it after you had your vision or whatever at the restaurant. I can't read you at all, but Dean…I can feel him. I can't leave. I have to help."

"So," Sam said, regarding her doubtfully. "You think he's still…there? Communicating with you?"

"No, I…think he left something behind when I read him that first time. It's never happened before, but-" She cut off, shrugged. "It's like getting a song stuck in your head or something."

Sam regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, then grunted and continued down the corridor. Charity followed, and the discussion faded, unresolved. When they returned to the bloody room to find Dean just as they'd left him, some of the tension eased from Sam's body. He had half-expected his brother to have pulled another impossible trick. There was some comfort in knowing that steel would hold him. It was a strange, cold sort of comfort, but Sam was willing to take what he could get.

He tried to ignore the blood that had pooled on the floor and dried on the walls. Dean's utter indifference made it especially hard. Dean should have cared that he was kneeling in blood he had shed, that he was back where he'd been before the cavalry rode to the rescue. It should have outraged and confused him. His robotic acceptance, his calculating patience, made Sam feel guilty as hell.

"What happened here, Dean?"

As before, there was no answer. His brother (what was left of him) refused to talk. When Sam looked into those glittering, predatory eyes, he saw Dean on the hunt: frozen in that moment of patience and perfect focus.

Sam let out a frustrated breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and scanned his brother for any clues that could not be kept silent. Dean was wearing what he'd had on - god, had it been the night before? There were two entry wounds on his chest, and blood spatters on his jeans, but no other signs of injury. Yet this was the room from the vision, and there was more blood here than their adversary's death could account for.

"This is where the vision took place, yeah?" Sam asked, sweeping the room with the flashlight before tossing an inquiring expression towards Charity.

"Yeah. I mean, I think so."

"And what we saw…happened. We didn't stop it. We couldn't have."

"But we, you saw him…I mean, he's still alive. So it couldn't-"

"Yeah, he's still alive. With two rounds in him."

Dean's eyes glowed more brightly with the light directed elsewhere. Sam turned back to him and they dimmed. Weird.

"Dean, take off your jacket and shirt."

Dean considered the request a moment, and Sam put on his best "do it or I'll make you do it" expression. Dean bent down and pulled both garments over his head with his bound hands.

"Jesus," Charity breathed.

Sharp lines of fresh scar tissue crisscrossed Dean's arched upper back, tracing an intricate spellform. His arms were heavily inked with additional symbols stretching from shoulder to wrist. Whatever spell or spells the witch had used, they were heavy shit, anchored in painstaking ritual and designed to channel considerable power. That they had to be both permanent, and etched in blood and flesh, meant seriously dark magic. The most powerful rituals demanded the most significant sacrifices.

Sam let out a breath, mouth grimly set, expression pensive.

"I'm gonna have to make some calls."

* * *

It took twelve hours and fifteen cups of caffeine for Sam to find what he was looking for.

Just drawing the symbols up took a considerable chunk of time, but he didn't dare pass photos around for fear of revealing Dean's present state to hunters of the Gordon Walker variety. Then there was the obligatory internet search, which turned out to be a giant waste of time, even with the hacks Ash gave him. Despite all the people patting themselves on the back about the internet revolution, a frustratingly large amount of information was still only available at research libraries or in private rare book collections. Even universities with digital facsimile projects did not assign a very high priority to grimoires or collections of incantations. He spent hours on the phone, tracking down every contact he had, starting with Bobby and ending with the last page of his father's journal. It took every cajoling ounce of diplomacy he could force into his voice to convince them to pass the word on, to spread it like a virus throughout the distributed network of hunters.

It's Dean. It's my brother. My brother. Do you understand?

But he didn't dare reveal the full extent of the problem. As far as the others were concerned, it was just another hunt; he was afraid for the innocent who might be hurt, not terrified for the only family he had left. He talked softly when he wanted to scream, prodded gently when he wanted to barrel forward. Sometimes being John Winchester's son hurt his case more than helped it, but ultimately the sense of common purpose that existed throughout the loosely organized community was enough. He worked his way down the list with a careful, unfelt methodicism, until someone found him a source.

It was someone who knew someone whom Bobby knew: Aaron Paterson, a researcher at Notre Dame, and a man accustomed to breaking into the library when a hunter needed some obscure scrap of information and needed it yesterday. His voice was hushed as he described what he'd found, and Sam could just imagine him sitting covertly in some flashlight-lit room, wearing the obligatory white gloves as he leafed through a fragile manuscript valued at thousands of dollars.

"These diagrams look like amalgamations of a bunch of different traditions. There are Persian, Mediterranean and Greco-Roman influences for starters. And the way the water symbols are used, there are some Germanic and Celtic influences there. That, and the dates on some of these containment circles made me think we were looking for something Anglo-Saxon, around the turn of the second millennium."

"So you have a record of the ritual?" Sam asked, trying to keep the impatience out of his voice.

"I've got a Kentish manuscript here from around that time. It describes several rituals that use some of the symbols you sent, but not in this combination. I think we're looking at two separate rites here. I can get you a translation for one of them, but the other? If there's a record of it, I can't find it. Give me a few years, I might be able to track something down, but…"

"What do you know about the one that is included?"

"Well, it's not exactly black magic. It's part of a series of religious rituals appealing to God or gods for protection." There was the sound of papers being shuffled and keys being tapped. "Uh, looks like an analog of Freya, the horse brothers, the Virgin…kinda all over the map."

"What sort of protection is it designed to provide?"

"Armor for the fight against evil, that sort of thing. I don't know, I haven't finished translating the incantations. Some of these look like nonce words, maybe-"

"Can you send me the translation when its finished?"

"Sure. You'll probably also be interested in the parts of the puzzle that don't fit, though."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, some of these lines have been altered. I'll have to do some more digging to figure out what's going on, but this might be the black magic you were talking about. It looks like somebody might have used a tainted version of one of these spells."

Sam swallowed hard. "Okay. Just, let me know what you find."

"Will do."

"Thanks, man." And he meant it.

"Yeah, well. It's everybody's fight, isn't it?"

* * *

Charity had tried sitting outside the heavy, reinforced door, but not seeing him was worse than seeing him. At least inside she knew what he was doing: staring at her with those freaky eyes. If she shined the flashlight directly at him, the disconcerting silver hue would go away, but she felt bad doing it, even if he didn't seem to mind, didn't react at all beyond an involuntary constriction of the pupils.

The longer she stayed, the deeper the ice behind his eyes settled in her bones, latching on and pulling until she was shivering despite the mild weather. It was a terrible emptiness, pitiless and inexorable. She wanted to run, but the memory of what he had been kept her, called to her. Save Sam, it whispered.

She tore her gaze away long enough to glance at her watch. Ten minutes had passed since her last check-in, so she texted the obligatory all-clear to Sam's cell. Fuck, but she was tired. Dean's hypnotic, animal stare wasn't helping. Didn't he have to sleep? He certainly didn't look tired. She felt like hell, and was fumbling with her fifth Red Bull when she didn't notice the world slip out from under her.

It is a soft, dark dream, full of vague movements and shadowy figures. She is looking for something and she can't find it and…what was she looking for? She's moving restlessly, fleeing something, trying to maneuver into a position where it can't get her, where she can be safe and forget about everything because she is so tired and the darkness is so soft...

She is in the water, drifting pleasantly, though completely submerged. It is smooth and warm and weightless. Comforting. There are vague, umbrous movements around her, but she ignores them as she glides deeper into a bliss so complete as to obliterate thought entirely.

Yet somehow that vague sense of searching for something returns: something she's forgotten, something important...what was it? She looks, but whatever she seeks is always just out of reach, just beyond her sight...

And then she sees him in the water, drifting lifelessly, his limbs gently supported by the currents, face serene as death. She reaches for the pale face, not sure if this is what she seeks, but feeling as though she ought to know those eyes, if only they would open...

Silver ice and emerald fire. Churning turbulence in the water. She is looking into the face of a drowning man. She is drowning herself, lost in the terrible, cyclic pull. Someone shouts soundlessly

SAMMY

and then she is running through heavy smoke that feels like water, thick and suffocating. There is heat and flickering light, but she runs, lungs burning, she runs, holding a tiny squirming bundle to her chest and not daring to look back...

There was no slow approach to wakefulness. She snapped her eyes open to see Sam standing over her, breathing slightly faster than normal, a semiautomatic in one hand, but turned away, his trigger finger against the slide.

"Oh God," she breathed, feeling unaccountably out of breath. "Shit. Fell asleep-"

"It's okay," he replied, crouching next to her. "I was just worried when you didn't check in. But I don't think Dean's...going anywhere."

She glanced at Dean to find him just as he'd been before she fell asleep: calm, silent, coiled. She looked away quickly.

"Did you find anything?" She stretched and rubbed at her scratchy eyes.

When he didn't immediately respond, she squinted up at him in the faint light, trying to ignore Dean's cats' eyes boring into her from the center of the small room.

The grave, determined set of Sam's jaw seemed distinctly out of place on him. It clashed with his unassuming, college-student haircut and clothes, making him look like an overgrown kid. The practiced grip on the gun helped balance things a little, but his eyes still looked so much older than the rest of him.

"I think I've got something that might work, but...you don't have to be here for this. Go home. Get some sleep. You've done more than enough-"

"Sam, if there's anything I can do, I want to help."

He turned away from her then, eyes fixed on Dean's.

"I'd like to be alone with my brother."

Chapter 5

Swimming the Lethe (3/?)

2007-10-06T02:25:04Z

Title: Swimming the Lethe (3/?)
Author: Luxorien
Words: 2857/?
Rating: R (violence, Dean's potty mouth, no porn--sorry)
Genre: Gen/Dean Gets Supernatural Mojo/Dark!Dean
Pairings: Dean/OFCs (no romance; just sex of the off-screen variety)
Feedback: Yes? Please? Help?
Notes: The partial incantation is written in extremely poor Old English. Ashes and thorns have been replaced by ae and th respectively.
Summary: After an infelicitous one-night stand, Dean becomes a danger to Sam.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

Farr off from these a slow and silent stream
Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
-Paradise Lost

Charity decided that she was having a bad day.

Some of it was little stuff: she'd been late for work, Sarah had called in sick, somebody'd hit a skunk on Highway 18…and there was the possibility of someone walking into the restaurant and calling the cops to arrest her for brandishing. Okay. Those were what her grandmother used to call "worries." Not day-breakers.

But Sean – no, Sam – was definitely cause for an official announcement of Tuesday's ruin. She'd seen things in her goddamned head when she touched him. And now, trying to look inside him and read his intentions, she was stymied for the first time in her life. Either he was immune to her special talent or he was a robot, because she saw neither deception nor truth. It was as if he didn't exist for her. It was fucking creepy.

He was looking at her through his boyish bangs, eyes frighteningly full of...something. Charity tightened her grip on her gun, fingers digging into the crosshatching.

"You saw what I saw," he said. A statement, but he sounded surprised. He sounded.

"What do you want from me?"

"I swear, I just want to find my brother." Earnest. Pleading. True?

She was taken by a sudden overwhelming urge to concede; to trust; to do whatever he asked because he asked; to make the desperation in those soft eyes go away. It was as if Dean was right beside her, bleeding into her. She could feel the fire in him as clearly now as she had two days previous, when he'd been hitting on her and she'd taken a speculative look inside him to see what sort of lover he'd be.

If Sam was a hole where a person should have been, Dean was a mass of nuclear fusion, slinging great plumes of soul-fire into the empty space around him. At the time, Charity had only cared that he was full of life and heat, and devoid of homicidal tendencies. Now she recalled the filial devotion that fueled the flames, and knew that it had captured her and chained her down to the need in those used-to-be little-boy eyes.

She'd never had to trust anyone before, never had to rely just on what she saw or heard. She'd always been sure. But Sam was at the center of Dean's fire, and she supposed a good reference would have to be enough. She lowered the gun, slipped it back into her waistband holster.

"Okay. So. You have...visions."

"Yeah," he replied, relaxing slightly.

"What does this mean? Dean...Dean's..." She couldn't say it. They'd both seen him bleeding out, choking on his own blood. She hadn't expected to ever see him again, but the thought of him dead...

"Not yet. I mean, what I see, I can change."

"Future tense." Fucking unbelievable. But then, so was looking into people's souls.

"Yeah. So if there's anything you can tell me. Anything at all."

"I..." She was overwhelmed again by that intrusive feeling, that burning urge to level mountains and boil oceans to take away the pain in that boy's eyes. But even if she wanted to follow that impulse, she didn’t know how. "I'm sorry. I haven't seen him."

"What about the woman? From the vision. Her eyes were silver there, but they would have been blue if you saw her."

She opened her mouth to give him another painful negative, but something tugged at the back of her mind, something she had to pause to try and identify. What was it?

"What?" Sam asked, his eyes locked on hers.

"I don't...I don't know." She closed her eyes and measured her breaths, examining that tiny nagging feeling, following it like a thread. Slowly. Patiently. It was buried deep under a thousand other inconsequential memories, but it was there. Somewhere. A memory of that face. Of ice-blue eyes.

It was like clawing at a crumbling wall. Once she had a piece loose (that face) the rest fell smoothly, barriers toppling like dominoes. And she remembered.

"Oh, that bitch."

* * *

Dean woke up, and took that as evidence that he was still alive.

Unfortunately.

He was lying on the floor again, unable to stop shivering on the cold concrete, though the smallest movement sent agony radiating through his chest and down his arms. Even the blood coating his skin felt cold and sticky, not warm like it should have. He felt icy steel on his wrists again and would have laughed if he'd had the energy. He could just make out the faint clink of the chain in the silence. Where the fuck did that crazy bitch think he was going?

There was nothing he could do except lie there on his side, chained and shivering and bleeding out into the darkness. So that's what he did. He hadn't been doing it very long when the door creaked open again and that voice wafted towards him.

"It's time, Dean."

He didn't respond, didn't see the point. All his strength had trickled out and sunk into the cold floor. He could feel himself going into shock, the shivers already growing less pronounced.

Gentle hands removed one of the bracelets from his wrist and rolled him over so that he was lying face-down. The pain was excruciating and he wasn't sure why he didn't pass out, except that the warm fingers were on his neck again, holding on, keeping him there.

"No one's attempted this in more than a thousand years." The voice was a low whisper now, soft and filled with an unnatural lust. "I'm going to make you perfect."

The scream that Dean couldn't contain came out as a grunting moan when she made the first cut. Her touch on his neck stilled the tremors but the knife was so much worse than that had been, and he wanted to fight, to struggle, to scream, to die, but she wouldn't let him. He lay there, eyes open in the dark, and let it wash over him and through him until he wasn't sure there was anything left.

She was cutting deep into his back, through the dermal layers down into muscle, scraping against bone. She was whispering incantations again, matching the power of the words to the power of the symbol she was etching deep into his back.

Horsa leoht ond Hengest guthwine
With hel-runan, with ealle hetelic thingas
Nithplega gethafas, nacod laetan
Thingian, thaet dyrne ne beon thrym…

He could feel her speech and the emerging pattern of agony across his shoulder blades beating in time with one another even as his own heartbeat slowed. It felt like he was freefalling, nothing but empty space all around him, no up and no down. Then, from somewhere far away, he heard what he somehow knew was a final word, and it was tugging at him, pulling him, whether farther down or back up he couldn't say.

Let go, Dean. I've got you. You're so tired. Just let go and forget. I promise it will stop hurting, and Sammy will be safe. You can rest now. I'll make sure Sammy's safe. Nothing is safer than death. You know, that. You know that so well. Don't you want Sammy to have what you've been aching for? Don't you want him to be at peace?

He tried to fight, but he was so tired of fighting. He tried to breathe, but it was too hard. Everything he was stopped, and in the space between heartbeats something else took over.

His eyes snapped open to concrete next to his face, smooth and crimson with his blood. He moved instinctively, automatically, and he could feel things grinding and twisting inside of him in ways that should have made it impossible to do so. He ignored the sensation, didn't have time for it. He could feel the threat standing over him, saw the gore-covered knife inches from his bloody hand. Pushed himself up smoothly, grabbed the weapon with the same grace. He didn't need to look to find her heart, didn't need another second to find his target or maneuver his body into a striking position. It was one coordinated, lightening movement. There was no thought, no motive, no complicated impression. He let his body translate stimuli into reactions that were purely instinctual.

He held onto the knife as he watched the light in the silver eyes fade. She died with a smile on her face and he could no more summon confusion or curiosity over that than he could summon any sort of feeling about her death at all. She had been a threat. He had eliminated her.

That was all. There was nothing else.

* * *

Sam, feeling a bit like Dean in one of his gun porn moods, made sure he had a backup for his backup before they went in. Charity had led him to a foundry, a labyrinth of rusting metal and crumbling catwalks. Any equipment that could be liquidated had long since been removed, but the place still retained the smell of use under the metallic odors of decay and obscurity. It conjured images of hot slag and alloying metal. It was a place of both purification and adulteration; of focused, imposed change. This was where not-Mina Rose had gone after she stole a lock of Charity's hair and spelled her into silence and forgetfulness.

"Okay, you got me here," Sam said as he slammed the trunk and came around the side of the car. "You should-"

"Sam." Charity's eyes were level and pained. "She stuck her skanky little hands in my brain. And stole my hair. Who does that? Maybe this kinda thing happens to you all the time, but I'm not bailing. I can't."

That's the point, he wanted to argue. I'm used to this. You're not. There was also the small matter of why not-Mina would be interested in Charity and how Charity knew where she was going. Sam wasn't convinced she was being completely forthcoming about her reasons for tagging along. But time was slipping by all around them, so he just sighed and took the lead. This was where the trail ended; it would be close combat tactics from here on out. He drew his Sig and braced it on the hand holding the flashlight as he headed for the entrance.

The door opened on a wide, industrial space, littered with broken furnaces and giant slag buckets. The sounds of their footsteps stuttered around corroding metal and years of accumulated filth. Color-coded pipes ran in various directions, displaying faded lettering and stamped symbols. The air was heavy, thick with the absence of sentience. Sam thought of Dean in this place (trapped/hurt) and he wanted to scream, to run through every room, chasing the battering beating of his heart through the darkness to his brother. A lifetime of reluctant training and hard-learned prudence held him back; he took careful, measured steps, watching and listening as he systematically searched the room.

In the sepulchral silence, he should have been able to hear even light footfalls. His own were echoing modestly, though he consciously cushioned his steps. Sort of silly that he was even trying, considering how loudly Charity's boots were striking the concrete floor. Still, it was habit, and it lessened the static he had to filter out as he listened. But all the listening in the world wouldn't have helped. It was only dumb, blind (deaf) luck that he saw a shadow's movement in the faintest corner of the flashlight's arc. By that time, it was too late to do anything that was calculated or quiet.

He whipped the beam around, muscles snapping with adrenaline and long habit. It took him fractions of a second to begin sighting on his target, to recognize that target as Dean, face curiously intent, light flashing silver off his irises. Fractions of a second to hesitate and to realize that his moment of hesitation would cost him his life because Dean (Dean!) was coming at him with a stained blade in one bloody fist.

The world was like sand slipping through his fingers. He had no space to act, only to watch, as if his life, his hour of death, had become a vision in someone else's head.

The report from Charity's compact .45 exploded towards the wide walls, and sent an ejected casing skittering across Sam's cheek. He smelled the sharp sting of powder, memory of a thousand practice sessions, a thousand battles. And he saw her double tap Dean's center mass, watched his brother crumple bonelessly to the ground with two hollowpoints in his chest.

He turned his weapon on Charity as naturally as he'd turned it away from Dean. In the sharp light, her features looked ghostly, unreal. She was still in her shooting stance, staring at the body on the ground. When she turned to look at him, the devastation in her eyes almost made him take his finger off the trigger.

Almost.

"Drop the gun."

She crouched slowly and placed the Kahr on the floor. "Sam, I'm sorry," she said. But her voice carried the guilt of someone who had done the hard thing, not someone who had made a terrible mistake. He wanted to shoot her. He wanted to empty his magazine into her. He wanted to eat the round that was in the chamber. He wanted to hold his brother's body and scream. But the world was too new, too empty for him to do anything but stand there numbly.

"Sam, he was already gone." Her eyes seemed to cloud over. "He was gonna kill you. He wasn't confused or angry or…he was gonna kill you and walk outta here like nothing happened."

And he knew she was right. He could read his brother's body language as easy as breathing, even when Dean wasn't broadcasting his intentions like that. He'd been going for Sam.

"Then it's not Dean." He spoke the words at the same time he thought them. Of course it wasn't Dean. It couldn't be. Maybe something that could shapeshift, maybe-

"It was him," Charity insisted, eyes glistening. "I'm telling you, he was already gone."

Sam tightened his grip. "How the hell would you know? You've been pulling an awful lot of convenient information out of your ass tonight. Why are you doing this?"

"I can- I can read people, okay? I can sort of…see inside."

"So you're a mind-reader now? A human MRI machine? And you just wanna help out of the goodness of your heart, right?"

"I saw this place, when that- that woman did her witchy shit. I didn't remember until you showed up. And Dean-" She choked off, trembling. "Sam, I looked at him and there was nothing. He'd been cleaned out. He was gone."

Sam was trying to formulate an answer when Dean stirred, rising slowly to his knees. Sam saw Charity take a step back even as he swung the light away from her and towards his brother. Dean coughed and spat blood before turning silver-tinted eyes first on Sam, then on Charity and her gun, lying a few yards away. Sam felt something inside him twist and fall away as he realized that Charity had been right. It was his brother but not his brother, regarding him with cold, predatory calculation. He struggled to breathe with the weight of what was going on.

"Charity," he called without cutting his eyes away, without blinking. "Pick up your gun and check out the rest of this place." He waited while she got over the shock of seeing someone come back from two .45s to the chest at close range. Waited while she stepped carefully behind him and continued through the broken landscape of forgotten steel. Waited for the heavy sound of her steps to recede into the darkness and ignored her backward glances.

"Who are you?" he asked as Dean climbed calmly to his feet.

"You know who I am, little brother."

"You can't be. Dean wouldn't-"

"I promised Dad I'd kill you. That was the last thing he ever said: that I had to kill you if I couldn't save you. That demon wants you for somethin'. Smart thing would be to make sure he can't touch you. Ever."

Sam struggled to keep his breathing steady, to keep his grip tight and his eyes on his target.

"You shouldn't ask for promises you don't want me to keep. We hunt evil, Sam, remember? Doesn't matter if it's human or not. Come on. Give me the gun. You know I'll make it quick."

He would have preferred an evil Dean, a possessed Dean, a deranged Dean. Anything else but this strange dispassionate version of his brother. It didn't just look like Dean. It acted like him, felt like him - or what Dean would feel like if twenty-two years of brotherhood ceased to have any meaning for him.

"You're lying."

Dean just looked at him. No anger. No indignation. No sadness. No hate. Nothing.

"What happened to you, man?" Sam whispered. "What did she do to you?"

His brother's dead, silver eyes were his only answer.

Chapter 4

Dean Winchester Vindicates Me

2007-10-05T02:08:50Z

'Cause, y'know. It's all about me.

I was right! Dean made the deal because he's selfish. And that's okay. I still love him because he is adorable and funny and...*zones out on crotch shot*

Swimming the Lethe (2/?)

2007-10-03T15:24:51Z

Title: Swimming the Lethe (2/?)
Author: Luxorien
Words: 2635/?
Rating: R (violence, Dean's potty mouth, no porn--sorry)
Genre: Gen/Dean Gets Supernatural Mojo/Dark!Dean
Pairings: Dean/OFCs (no romance; just sex of the off-screen variety)
Feedback: Yes? Please? Help?
Notes: This chapter brought to you by the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything: "Colon, semicolon, or comma? Hm."
Summary: After an infelicitous one-night stand, Dean becomes a danger to Sam. This chapter: Dean fails to escape. Sam searches for Dean.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Farr off from these a slow and silent stream
Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
-Paradise Lost

It was nearly midnight when Sam pulled into the parking lot. The last few hours had been a blur of questioning anyone who might have seen his brother, of clueless head shaking and unknowing shrugs. He was retracing their steps, geographically and chronologically. This was his last stop: last slim chance for a live lead.

Layla's was a 24/7 sort of joint, one of those combination truck stop/convenience store/greasy spoons that were usually packed this time of night. Usually. Not always. He saw a few trailer-less semis parked on the cracked asphalt, but the lot was mostly filled with silence. Sam climbed reluctantly from the Impala, feeling a strange sympathy with the groaning creak of her door hinges.

The gravely debris of the American highway crunched underfoot as he walked up to the building and through the glass door. Cloudy chrome and faded vinyl greeted his gaze once inside. He took a seat at the mostly empty counter and looked around for Charity.

He figured the lithe waitress was his best bet. She'd remember Dean - he'd spent most of a night at her place, after all - and she'd be able to tell him if his brother had been through again. He hoped.

Sam allowed himself the tiniest sigh of relief when he saw that she was on, deftly placing hot plates in front of unshaven truckers at the other end of the counter. The smell of waffles and syrup and fried eggs and bacon produced a Pavlovian response in Sam. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten something. It'd been Before, that was all he knew. Before he discovered Dean missing. Before he had to drive the Impala alone. Before the highway seemed so long and empty.

"What can I getcha?"

Sam raised his eyes to Charity's, looking at her - really looking at her - for the first time and wondering suddenly if Dean had been drawn to her because of her resemblance to Cassie. Her skin was a few shades darker, but something about her expressive eyes and the confident grace of her movements brought Cassie to mind. Then again, statistical laws alone demanded that Dean was bound to bed a Cassie look-alike at some point.

"I'll take the Western omelet. And some coffee with cream."

His voice sounded rough, even to him, but she just nodded and said, "Comin' right up."

Sam leaned on the counter and stared at his folded hands, trying to work out a game plan, hoping it would be easier to think once he had something in his stomach, knowing it wouldn't be. He heard Charity in the back asking the cook for a "Western wreck" and a few moments later she slid a plain white mug of coffee in front of him and sent two tiny plastic cups of creamer tumbling after. He glanced up and thanked her, earning a smile before she danced away down the counter to deliver an enormous stack of pancakes at the other end.

He was halfway through his coffee before he realized that he was stalling, putting off asking her because he was afraid of what she would say, or rather what she wouldn't say. He needed something (anything) even vaguely resembling a lead. This was his last chance to find it before Dean's trail faded forever. Just the thought of it made the hollow ache in his chest expand and tighten at the same time.

By the time his food arrived, Sam's brief flirtation with an appetite was gone, but he forced himself to eat anyway. He was still picking at his food when the truckers paid and left. The diesel rumble of their semis filtered in from the parking lot and faded, leaving Sam alone with Charity and the distant clinking of the short order cook out of sight in the back. It was as if the universe was sending him an invitation. He reluctantly accepted it.

"Check, please."

"Somethin' wrong with your eggs?" Charity asked as she took his half-full plate.

"Just...not as hungry as I thought." He offered a conciliatory smile.

When she returned with his bill, he handed her Jim Morrison's Visa and slid off the worn barstool to follow her as she made her way down the counter to the register.

"Can I ask you something?" he asked as she swiped his plastic.

She gave him a curious look, like she was trying to get a read on him and couldn't. "If it has anything to do with my pants, it would probably be healthier not to."

Sam blinked. "No, I just...I came through here the other day with my brother, Dean. Do you remember?"

"Dean's brother! Thought I recognized you. Sean, was it?"

"Sam. Um, have you seen Dean since then? Did he come back through here?"

"Nope." She slid the credit slip and a pen across the checkered surface of the counter. "And I ain't holdin' my breath neither."

Sam swore he could feel the world closing in, Deanless. It pressed against him, stealing his breath.

Charity was looking at him, all the casualness gone from her bearing. "You okay, man?"

No. There is absolutely fucking nothing okay about this.

"I'm fine, I just...ah..."

The pain started deep in his skull and radiated outward like a miniature mushroom cloud, like a nuclear explosion in his brain. He was dimly aware that he was slumped over something smooth and hard, vaguely conscious of concerned brown eyes searching out his, but those things were footnotes to the stabbing shockwaves of agony ripping through his head. Then the vision started and how much he hurt seemed inconsequential.

Darkness. But he sees. Dean. Handcuffs dangling from one bloody wrist. Blood. Blood everywhere. His back is coated in it. Torn muscle and the whiteness of bone beneath. Coughing. Trying to speak, but there are no words, just more blood. He's choking on it. Someone standing over him. Blue eyes have turned to silver, but it's her. It's HER.

When the pain faded and the world slammed disorientingly back into place, he was greeted with the ouchy end of a subcompact Kahr. It was close enough to his face that he could read the model number etched into the slide. Charity's eyes were wide with confusion and fear, but her double-handed grip was steady.

"The hell did you just do?" Anger layered over barely-concealed panic.

Sam stayed very still. "Take it easy. I just...I have these headaches sometimes-"

"Don't jerk me around," she demanded, voice dangerously low and hands unflinchingly still. "You just mindfucked me or something. Get an answer. Now."

"Look.." Well, hell. A forty-five-caliber argument was very persuasive. "I have these, uh, visions sometimes. That's all it was." Yeah. Just a little vision. Of the last person I saw with my brother standing over him as he bled to death. Happens all the time. No biggie. FUCK.

"I can't…tell if you're lying." Sam's tone had placated her a little and confusion was overtaking the anger in her tone.

"Look, just - can we point the gun in a safe direction and talk about this?"

"Why would you have a vision of Dean like that?" she asked haltingly. "What - what does it mean?"

Sam stared. "How do you know I saw Dean?"

* * *

Dean was starting to get frustrated.

Normally, he liked a challenge. He wanted to work for that perfect hustle or one-night stand or brilliant bit of credit card fraud. If everything came easily, if there was no possibility of failure, then where was the fun?

But that crazy bitch was gunning for Sammy and he didn't care how easy or difficult it was: he needed out. There was always another bar, another woman, another falsifiable application. Only one Sam.

The only grudgingly nice thing he had to say about the cuffs was that they were surprisingly comfortable. Otherwise, they were an absolute bitch. There was nothing in the key shaft for the paper clip to catch and jarring the pins accomplished nothing aside from bruising his wrists, et cetera and so on. One method left, and he wasn't sure he was quite that desperate.

Broken bones he could handle. He'd even put up with permanent nerve damage if he had to. The problem was the chain. No way he'd be able to break it, which meant he'd have to get both hands out of the cuffs. Which would mean disabling both hands. Which would mean not being able to hold a weapon or even open a damn door: two things he would prefer to be able to do while breaking out of some insane harpy's lair.

He exhaled sharply over clenched teeth. If it came down to crushing both his hands, so be it. But he wouldn't do it a moment before he had to.

He slipped the paperclip back into the waistband of his jeans and groped in the dark for the chain, trying to feel some weakness he could exploit. The metal was smooth and unbroken. Clean, as much as metal could be clean, though it still gave his hands that gritty, nickels-and-pennies feel. It was painfully obvious that there was nothing more he could do to improve the situation, so he resigned himself to sitting in the dark and waiting.

The waiting was the worst. He'd always hated waiting. And waiting in handcuffs was about the worst thing he could imagine. Besides waiting in handcuffs on an airplane - that would suck hard. However, knowing that the situation could be (slightly) worse didn't really help. He was still rushing headlong into the kind of animal panic that drives a fox to gnaw its leg out of a trap. His mind was stuck in an endless loop of get out and Sammy; the stillness was strangling him. He had to do something.

So, he started at the beginning: blood and fire and a child's grief. He sank deep into memories that were treasured simply because they were his and no one else's. Many of them weren't pleasant, but they were comforting, in a harsh sort of way. They explained the world.

Take your brother outside as fast as you can! Don’t look back! Now, Dean - go!

She would want me to be brave. And I think about that every day.

And from time to time, there had been shafts of light flung across the path: Sammy smiles, Sammy starts walking, Sammy goes to school. Sammy loves school. Dean had been six when Dad first started trusting him with important jobs like clean the semiautos and watch out for your brother. He didn't remember much of the time before that; it was a blur of ashes and smoke and silence. Life seemed to start again when he had something to do. Even when Sam was a royal pain in the ass, it was like that stupid little baby was providing the gravity their broken family had lost. Sam made Dean a link in a chain: there was someone to follow and someone to protect. Dean had a place and a purpose. Watching out for him was both the hardest and the easiest thing in the world to do. And the moments of peace didn't mean anything without the frustration and failure. Every time he sighed and pushed down his anger, his restlessness, was a victory. Every time he gave something for Sammy instead of himself, he was winning something back from the dark.

Hours passed and years flashed before Dean's eyes. He'd gotten to high school, to Our Town, when the door opened again and his world became that sound.

"It's almost time." The woman's voice floated out of the blackness. She sounded like a phone sex operator. Not that Dean knew what those sounded like. "But there are still some preparations to make."

There were hands on him then, cold and hard and strangely lifeless. The chain rattled, slipped away, and the moment his hands were free he was moving, fighting blind and vicious. She'd left him his boots (stupid) and he knew he'd be breaking bones if he could connect. But his well-balanced kicks jarred his legs more than the figures holding him. It was like kicking sand or clay or the earth itself. Solid. Unyielding.

He squirmed wildly, lashed out with every dirty close combat move his dad had taught him, and even a few he'd discovered on his own. But he couldn't break away, couldn't budge those iron limbs. They ignored his struggles, unlocked the handcuffs and spread his arms as they slammed him face-first against the wall. New shackles replaced the old, pulling at his wrists so his arms remained taut. Something was pressing his legs against the wall with bone-crushing force. He could barely move and what little fight he was able to put up was accomplishing nothing more than additional bruising for his already battered body.

He didn't care. It was the principle of the thing.

"Please tell me you didn't arrange all this for a lonely trucker," he gasped as he twisted uselessly against his bonds. He felt annoyingly vulnerable with his back exposed.

"You shouldn't struggle, Dean. I need you awake and still for this part. You have no idea how horribly wrong things will go if your movement alters the runes."

"Bitch, bitch, bitch," he replied, going for a little double entendre.

"This is for your own good."

It happened so quickly, that he had no time to prepare himself. Not that it mattered. All the preparation in the world wouldn't have kept his body from reacting.

His neck arched and his mouth opened in a prolonged breathless gasp. For a few moments there was nothing but the pain. Then his suddenly sluggish brain registered what had happened, that she'd slid something right through each shoulder, effectively pinning him to the wall so that the slightest movement caused even greater agony to ripple through his torso as whatever she'd used ground against the now broken bones in his shoulders. He couldn't even think about his arms, couldn't feel them. Were they still there? Did it matter? Godfuckingdamn it hurt.

There were cool, soft hands on his neck. Warm breath caressing his earlobe as crazy psycho chick made low comforting noises at him. He wanted to snap his head back and splatter her nose all over her pretty cheekbones, but it wasn't quite worth jarring his shoulders. Blood oozed down his chest and back, spattering occasionally on the floor with a low wet sound.

"Stay with me, Dean," she whispered. "You have to stay conscious. Don't worry. This'll all be over soon..."

Okay, his arms were definitely still attached because now he could feel needles in them. Real, literal fucking needles: a drop of water in an ocean of pain.

"You-you're...inkin' me?" he gasped out, as he realized what was happening. "You gotta...gotta be fuckin' kidding."

The woman didn't respond, but she remained pressed up against him, holding on, as if her touch would keep him conscious. Maybe it would. He didn't know. His brain was having trouble moving beyond the receiving stimuli step.

Time sort of stopped and sped up at the same time, so he had no idea how much had really passed when she started speaking again. This time, he clearly recognized an incantation, though the language was unfamiliar. It sounded like a cross between German and Gaelic. And as it went on, he felt the ink that was now scattered over his skin burning like a brand, felt the wild thrum of magic in the fingers on his neck, the breath in his ear. He felt it diving down inside him, winding around the secret places of his heart and binding them in iron and frost.

He couldn't have screamed if he'd wanted to.

Chapter 3

Swimming the Lethe (1/?)

2007-09-30T04:12:32Z

Title: Swimming the Lethe (1/?)
Author: Luxorien
Words: 2409/?
Rating: R (violence, Dean's potty mouth, no porn--sorry)
Genre: Gen/Dean Gets Supernatural Mojo/Dark!Dean
Pairings: Dean/OFCs (no romance; just sex of the off-screen variety)
Notes: As of this posting, I have roughly 16,000 words written. I am frustratingly close to finishing. I was supposed to be finished before Season 3. Might that still happen? God only knows. This fic brought to you by Buck Cherry's "Crazy Bitch" and Kid Rock's "So Hott."
Summary: After an infelicitous one-night stand, Dean becomes a danger to Sam.

Chapter 1

Farr off from these a slow and silent stream
Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
-Paradise Lost

It was the first time one of Dean's homemade IDs had failed to get him in the door, and he was rendered momentarily speechless. Sam had to take up the slack and, predictably, he tried that "truth" thing.

"We're just trying to stop anyone else from getting hurt. That's the only reason we want to look at the files, I swear. Please."

The kid radiated emo honesty. He was the very soul of trustworthiness. Officially, Dean was too cool for that. Unofficially, he admired the way Sam could say the most unbelievable things and get complete strangers to take leaps of faith for him. The same words out of Dean's mouth only produced creeped-out expressions and assumptions of criminal insanity, which Dean didn't think was fair because his police record was totally not his fault.

Well, mostly not his fault.

Regardless of whether it was fair, Sam's puppy dog mojo always worked. And that, to Dean's practical mind, was the most important thing. So, he fully expected the deputy to cave. She was too young and the town was too rural for her to be jaded yet. Sam's earnest tone would tug at the cockles of her heart or whatever damn thing and she would decide to take the risk. It was three in the morning and she was the only one on duty. Nobody would have to know.

"Yeah. Right." The deputy stared at them, her blue eyes flat as her tone.

Sam took a moment to be rendered speechless by the failure of his special talent. Meanwhile, Dean's brain was busy stalling and he had two instinctual, easy-as-breathing methods of reignition. Fighting was always a last resort with law enforcement, so that left...

"Come on, sweetheart," Dean drawled through his most suggestive smile. "There has to be something we can do to convince you."

The cold blue eyes lowered as Dean leaned forward over the counter and practically wiggled his ass. Sam was shooting him a look that screamed MANWHORE. He ignored it. The woman took her time dragging her gaze up his lean body and back to his face.

"You trying to bribe me with sexual favors?" she asked.

"If I say yes, will you let us into the records room?"

Dean was keeping his sights on his target, but he didn't need to see Sam's face: he could hear him rolling his eyes. The deputy was tilting her head contemplatively, assessing the salacious promise in his expression.

"Your brother goes," she said, tossing a key ring to Sam without looking at him. "You stay," she added, and hauled Dean over the counter with two fistfuls of leather jacket. The move caught him off-guard, but his muscles didn't really need his brain's input anyway. He twisted spasmodically, like a cat righting itself in midair, and managed to land on his feet, though the momentum slammed his back into the wall behind. He was barely finished rebounding when she started the tonsil examination.

Dean's view of Sam's unamused expression was at that point relatively unobstructed. It was a face straight out of high school, before Dean dropped out, and Sam was still waiting around every day for his brother to finish fooling around behind the bleachers so they could go home.

Come to think of it, he'd spent an awful lot of time behind the bleachers even after he'd dropped out.

At least five different smartass remarks involving the word "cooties" sprang to mind, but unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on whether sex rated higher than sarcasm - his mouth was too full of the tongue of the law to use any of them. He settled for cutting his eyes to the side and motioning his brother towards the back door.

Sam wasn't gone very long, but by the time he reemerged, Dean was wearing nothing from the waist up except scars and his amulet. The cop had shed the unflattering beige uniform for muscled curves and smooth skin. Dean had considered complimenting her on her tracts of land, but wasn't sure she'd get the Monty Python reference. Also, his mouth was, once again, not taking any calls.

Sam's irritated sigh ruined the moment a little. Okay, a lot.

"Come on, Dean. Let's go."

He had to admire the way his younger brother could glower while keeping his eyes averted from the deputy's naughty bits. That was talent.

"Maybe we can pick this up later," Dean started as he began to reluctantly disentangle himself. He didn't get very far before he was shoved roughly back into place.

"Uh-uh," the deputy warned. "All night. That's the deal."

"Okay-twist-my-arm," Dean breathed as they recoupled. "Sorry, Sammy. I'm gonna hafta take one for the team."

"Yeah," Sam scoffed as he tossed the cop's key ring on the counter and dug in Dean's discarded jacket for the keys to the Impala. "Just make sure you can find your way back to the motel."

"Mm-hmm."

There was the sound of sulky footsteps, then the front door of the sheriff's office opening and closing. And as his jeans slid from his hips, Dean mentally checked Make Sammy Dig Up Graves While I Watch the Cute Girl off his list of Things to Do Before That Reaper Finally Catches Up with My Ass.

* * *

Dean wasn't in their room when Sam returned from the boneyard covered in filthy sweat and reeking of rot. He sighed, tossing the keys on the nightstand as he headed for the shower. Not surprising. Dean had spent entire nights "pumping" women for information before. Sam knew not to expect him before noon.

He took advantage of Dean's absence to use all the hot water. When the steam and soap had driven the stench of decaying organic matter out of his sinuses, he put on some relatively unstinky jeans and grabbed a book from his duffel. He'd have to start looking for their next gig in the evening, but he figured he'd earned a few hours of downtime. Chances for more than five or ten minutes of uninterrupted reading were so few and far between; living in close quarters with Dean was like living with a dervish. A sort of anti-Zen: there was little of silence or stillness.

The solitude settled bone-deep. For a few hours Sam could stop thinking about the job, the things he'd seen, the people he'd lost. He could stop worrying about what he might turn into or where the next attack would come from. He could stop moving and just be for a little while.

When his screwed-over sleep schedule finally caught up to him, there were no nightmares. No dreams at all.

It was getting dark again when Sam opened his eyes and stretched groggily. He stared at the digital display on the obligatory clock-radio for a few seconds (7:32) before bolting upright. Somehow, even before his eyes swept the room, he knew that everything was as he'd left it.

Dean wasn't back.

He rolled over, grabbed his cell phone and hit his first speed dial.

Straight to voicemail.

He felt the first strands of icy panic worming through his gut and ignored them. It could be nothing. Maybe Dean was still sleeping it off. Maybe he'd decided to get something to eat. Maybe he'd come back and gone out again.

Except Sam knew that no one had come in while he was asleep. Certainly not his brother. Dean never left a room exactly as he'd found it unless it was a crime scene.

And Dean would never turn off his phone.

He was out the door in seconds and on the highway a few minutes later. His quiet sense of solitude was gone, consumed by the Dean-shaped hole in his world. It felt like a string snapping under tension, like a sudden cessation of the gravity that kept them in each other's orbits. He had to find Dean before they both tumbled off into nothing.

The sheriff's office didn't look much different than it had earlier that day (or the night before, depending on how you looked at it). That middle-of-the-night electricity was gone from the air, replaced by slow-paced, small-town quiet. He headed straight for the front desk.

"I'm looking for, ah," Sam stalled a moment, trying to remember the name on the shirt he'd seen crumpled next to his brother's. "Mina Rose?"

"I'm Mina Rose," the forty-ish, dark-eyed deputy replied. "Can I help you with something?"

In a moment, the bottom seemed to drop out of everything. This was really happening. Dean was really in trouble.

Dean was the next gig.

* * *

The trek back to consciousness never got any shorter no matter how many times Dean made it. There were always several seconds (minutes?) of sensory input before he was able to find the wheel again, before his grogginess finally registered and his adrenals started dumping uppers into his bloodstream.

He took in the hard, cold surface he was lying on, the absence of his shirt and the presence of his jeans and boots. He was definitely hung over, but not from alcohol. He'd been drugged, which meant somebody's ass needed kicking and he didn't have time to waste getting his shit together.

His eyes snapped open to complete blackness. He listened for a few seconds but heard nothing. Moving was next on the list, so he tried that. He was rewarded with the sound of metal jangling against stone and a sharp pull against his wrists. Handcuffs. And a chain running to a ring in the floor. Great. Way to win the Waking Up in Strange Places lottery. Why couldn't he just have been pantsless in a gutter somewhere?

He levered himself upright with his bound hands but couldn't get further than his knees on the chain's short slack. He searched his pockets. They'd been emptied, but the paperclip he kept in the waistband was still there. Sweet.

He was feeling around for a keyhole when the silence was shattered by the screeching of metal on metal. A door. Few feet away. He instinctively palmed the paperclip, though it was a senseless act in the dark.

"Hi, Dean."

He recognized the cold tone, the smooth feminine voice. Right. The deputy. That's what he'd been doing the night before - that morning. She'd been fantastic. Shame about the psychosis.

He cleared his throat as best he could and when he spoke his voice was a little hoarse, but otherwise steady. "I gotta be honest with ya, this is a little kinky - even for me."

"I've been waiting for this a long time. You're hard to track down."

"Uh...thanks? Look, I'm flattered you want to join the fan club. Can't say as I blame you. But whaddya say we unlock these," he gave the metal around his wrists a quick shake, "and you can just post porn on the internet like everyone else?"

"You have something I want."

"Didn't get enough last night, huh?"

"Something that can't be bought or sold or learned."

"What is this, a MasterCard commercial?"

"Something that's not John or Sam. Just you. They make you good, but you could be so much better. Do you know what makes a good hunter great?"

Those names from her lips made him angry. She didn't get to say those names. Try to fuck with him? Fine. Let's play, bitch. But those names weren't part of it. They weren't part of any game. He clenched his jaw until the violent fear receded.

"Any particular reason you haven't hit the lights? Not like you've got anything I ain't seen."

"They say there's only one thing faster than light, and that's darkness." He managed not to flinch when her next words sounded inches from his ear, but just barely. "You know darkness, don't you Dean? Can't you see in the dark yet?"

"I wanted night-vision goggles for Christmas, but apparently Santa isn't a tulpa after all."

He caught a flash of silver irises in the dark, glowing like cat's eyes for just a moment before his field of vision was blank again.

"There are other ways to see in the dark, Dean. So many years fighting with the odds stacked in the monsters' favor. Haven't you ever wanted to level the field?"

"Whatever. Can we get to the point of this infomercial? What's the deal? Five easy payments of $39.99 and I get a free toaster with my Lasik surgery?"

"I can give you this gift. This and many others. I can make you stronger, faster, more deadly. All I have to do is bring out what's inside of you."

"I think I will bring up what's inside me if this goes on much longer. You're worse than that Oxyclean guy."

"You're a true killer, Dean. Your daddy didn't have it. He thought he was willing to do what it took, but when you really needed him, what did he do? Gave himself over to the monster he'd sworn to fight with his last breath. Handed the burden on to you because he knew you'd do what he could not, end the life he wouldn't."

Something snapped inside him. He felt it cracking through his insides, whip-like and resonating. His blood hummed with it.

"Shut your fucking mouth," he growled, pulling noisily at the chain as he lunged impotently in the direction of her voice. He knew he'd lost his cool, was acting recklessly. He didn't care. "You don't talk about my dad, you stupid little cunt!"

"You kill clean," she continued, unresponsive. "There's no malice in it. You're a sharp edge, built for damage. And I can make you so much sharper."

"You don't know the first fucking thing about me."

"You think you won't do it? You think you'd rather die?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," he breathed through clenched teeth, trying to rein himself in. But it was too late for that. Maybe it had always been too late.

"Oh, but you do, Dean. And you can do it. I can help. I can make it so much easier. So painless. All you have to do is forget. Forget everything but the kill. Be the hunter you were born to be. Be how you were made."

Her last words faded gradually and were punctuated by the creaking of the door. It closed with a solid, metallic thump, and Dean was left alone in the dark.

Chapter 2

Truck Update

2007-09-24T03:09:23Z

I GOT MY TRUCK BACK! WOOT!

*hugs truck*

Hmm. The CD player and AC are broken. I don't really care about the latter, but the former...

Science News...Of Sorts

2007-09-23T22:32:05Z

Blaming the Air Quality on Somebody

There's an article in the October Discover ("The 9/11 Cover-up") about illnesses caused by bad air after the WTC attacks. It basically amounts to a lot of wailing about the injustices perpetrated by the government officials who told people the air was safe when it really wasn't.

I would have preferred an article less concerned with figuring out whose fault it was and more concerned with explaining the scientific issues. I just had this crazy idea that Discover was a SCIENCE magazine.

Even if we were discussing politics, I'd be more interested in ideas on how to fix the problem than ideas about how many people we should point fingers at. I recognize and share the impulse to denounce and demand "justice" but the fact of the matter is that true "justice" on this earth means protecting victims (or refusing to be a victim) not meting out "punishment" to the people who most deserve it. No amount of punishment can turn back the clock. It just makes people feel better in small, petty ways.

America Needs Another Sputnik

There's also an interview with Burt Rutan, who's in the business of space tourism:

"Who would have thought in the 1960s that the first capitalists to sell tickets to let the public fly would be the damned Russians? Who would have thought that? Doesn't that piss you off?"

DEAR GOD, YES!!!!!!

I was trying to explain this concept to my brother, as it applies to the American transportation system. It's not about how many lives bridge collapses cost or how much money we'd have to spend to make sure no bridges ever collapse. It's a matter of pride. American bridges shouldn't just fall down. It's embarrassing. Our engineering projects need to be AWESOME because American engineering is AWESOME simply by merit of its being AMERICAN. (It's a home team thing, okay?) Have you seen what northern European countries have been doing with their roads and dams and locks? They SHAME us. I don't care how much it costs us. I wanna see that stuff here in the States. Take some money out of the useless shit the feds spend money on and put it into roads and highways. And more money for the space program! And let farmers build rockets! That's what I'm talking about.

The Abortion Issue...Again

In other news, scientists are whining that it's hard to do research because those mean conservatives are demonizing the work they are doing on stem cells.

(Aside: I hate this crap about how everybody who's pro-life is so because of religious convictions. I know there are a lot of religious institutions who make pro-life issues a big part of their agenda, but goddammit, it's a PHILOSOPHICAL issue. It's not in the Bible. A lot of Pro-life organizations are part of the problem, in that respect.)

I don't understand where these scientists get off acting all victimized because certain groups of people think their research is not worth the moral cost. They go on and on about what good things they're doing, about all the lives they're going to save and the diseases they'll cure, as if pro-lifers don't care about sick people.

Dudes. It's a cost-benefit issue. Yes, it would be great if we could cure neurodegenerative disorders. My grandmothers would surely have appreciated it, as would I. But at the cost of destroying human lives? Yeah, that's a bit steep. Why don't these same people advocate loosening the restrictions on how doctors run human clinical trials? After all, if we didn't care about the lives of patients undergoing experimental treatment we sure could advance medicine a lot quicker. Oh, right. It's IMMORAL.

(Some sanctimonious asshole in one of my college classes suggested that people wouldn't be against stem cell research if they had relatives with Alzheimer's, etc. Because it's IMPOSSIBLE to be affected by such diseases and still take a principled stand on the issue. Right. Asshole.)

I can completely understand the position that embryos are not human beings and therefore not subject to the same ethical guidelines as adults and children are. That's why I don't think pro-choicers are evil baby killers. They are as responsible and moral as people on the other side of the fence. This is a subject on which reasonable people might disagree. But when people suggest that the pro-life position is somehow unscientific (how can a moral/philosophical question be unscientific, exactly?) or that pro-lifers are holding back scientific progress because they hate sick people and want them to die...agh. STFU.

(Aside: If abortion and IVF are legal, the use of "extra" embryos for scientific research should be also. Bush's whole "no federal funding for new stem cells lines" thing? Bullshit. Either embryos are people are they aren't. Now, not only are we killing children, we're not even getting the scientific benefits from their deaths. Nobody wins! Yay.)

Why Human Beings Kill Each Other

Somebody did a study and found evidence that famine causes wars. Well, no shit.

snort

2007-09-07T17:56:46Z

Jared Padalecki pimps PETA.

Not that I really care what actors do when they aren't entertaining me, but because I ran across this I have to be amused.

Yes, I'd wear my dog. Yes, I salivate when I see cows in a field. Meat protein is the reason we have the big brains needed to produce all the technology that PETA uses to frighten and shame people into agreeing with them. And it boggles my mind that these nutters have never picked up on the fact that PEOPLE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANIMALS. I mean, I thought I had no life.

Of course, I'd rather actors try to convince me that they are some sort of authority on this kind of trivial bullshit than have them try to convince me that I should give a fuck what their opinions are on foreign policy (or religion...or psychiatry...or, well, you get the point).

If you're going to spend your time doing useless shit, you might as well play an MMORPG or something. At least then you're not skewing the signal to noise ratio so much.

*whistles innocently*

*watches Warcraft videos on YouTube to fight the withdrawal symptoms*

That's It? That's the End?

2007-08-21T05:28:15Z

Haha. I knew Rowling didn't have the balls to kill him.

So...Harry's Jesus, Dumbledore's God and the Forbidden Forest is Gesthemane? That's the big conclusion?

Okay. Not bad, I guess, as these things go. I would have preferred a little less dicking around, but at least she didn't pull a Robert Jordan. I think somebody figured out that 80% of his initial fans have died since he started WoT, assuming that WoT fans die at the same rate as the rest of the population...

"I Thought You Were DEAD!"

2007-08-09T08:42:57Z

So, I was pretty sure that I was correct in remembering CPR as a stopgap measure until real help arrives. But I thought I'd check anyway, and Wikipedia's word is good enough for me in this case. 'Cause I know I'm right, and television writers are all bitches.

In the course of my five-second investigation, I ran across this bit of Wikipedia wisdom, which is too good not to share:

"It is entirely feasible to perform CPR on animals like cats and dogs. The principles and practices are virtually identical to CPR for humans. One is cautioned to only perform CPR on unconscious animals to avoid the risk of being bitten."

That's giggle-worthy in like, five different ways.

Bonitatem et Disciplinam et Scientiam Doce Me

Sick with the Flu

Supernatural

Vegetables Are What Food Eats

WoW Lets Me Out on Patch Day!

luxorien @ 2008-01-03T00:06:00

Swimming the Lethe (7/?)

In Nomine (1/1)

Pleasure, Texts, and Sex

Swimming the Lethe (6/?)

Appearances

"Eye for an Eye, GSW for a GSW"

Sin City

Supernatural

Swimming the Lethe (5/?)

No Use Whatsoever

Swimming the Lether (4/?)

Swimming the Lethe (3/?)

Dean Winchester Vindicates Me

Swimming the Lethe (2/?)

Swimming the Lethe (1/?)

Truck Update

Science News...Of Sorts

*snort*

That's It? That's the End?

"I Thought You Were DEAD!"

snort