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Fic: Winchester Synchronicity (NC17, Chapters 3-4)
Title: Winchester
Author: Rivestra
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: violence
~ Go Back to Chapter 2 ~
Chapter Three
Gravel Voice was back. At least Dean thought it was Gravel, its demeanor was very different from the janitor’s, and its clothing, while equally black, probably didn’t come from Wal-Mart. The bars started to rise as it said, “Get up.” Dean didn’t move. “Now.”
“You taking me to see your boss?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t see why…” It grabbed Dean by the shoulders and pinned him against the wall, pushing the air out of his lungs. “Listen,” Dean struggled, but couldn’t break its easy hold, “we don’t have much time, and you need to take this seriously.”
Dean nodded, hoping the thing would let him down, and it did. It didn’t back off though, and its face was intent as it continued. “They’ll be here in just a minute, and you need to understand. Go with them. Don’t make them hurt you. Because they will, and then you’ll go into the ring injured. I don’t know why you’re so important to him, but you need to survive, and you can. You’re ready. I’ve seen the video, and you can take this guy easily, if you’re focused.”
It handed Dean a stack of green clothing from under its arm. “Change.” Dean took it, and Gravel backed off enough for him to match action to command. Moving quickly, Dean did. Whatever the fuck was going on, the urgency was contagious. Ring?
The green clothes were heavier than what he’d been wearing: denim, pocketless and close fitting. Dean finished changing right as two more of the creatures came into view. They had chains for him. Goody. He let them bind his hands behind his back, not entirely certain why he was cooperating.
Gravel called out, “Don’t die,” as they led him off.
It was advice Dean intended to take, regardless of the motivation behind it.
*****
Ring? It was a fucking underground arena, complete with stadium seating for the already riled-up audience and two release-the-lions-type tunnel entrances. A flat-eyed, blonde man in brown strode toward him from one of the tunnels as Dean was led out through the other. The crowd, 15 feet above the floor and mostly humanoid, if not necessarily human, was clearly excited by their arrival: their noise was near-deafening in the enclosed space.
Suddenly both Gravel’s advice and all the attacks in his cell made a lot more sense. Demon sponsored pit fighting? He was stuck in a fucking Saturday matinee. Or a classic Trek episode.
They reached the center all at the same time. Thing one released his cuffs. The blonde guy bowed in his general direction, and Thing two pushed Dean into a similar bow when he didn’t immediately reciprocate. Thing one handed him an 8-inch hunting knife. Blondie drew two slender, 6-inch stilettos, and bowed again. Dean was with the program now, and bowed on his own.
His guards headed back toward the tunnel and bam! Blondie was on him like a freight train. Fuck! If freight trains had really sharp teeth. “Don’t die,” he'd said. Right.
The crowd cheered at the sight of blood dripping from his left arm. Guess I’m not the home team Dean thought as he threw himself into the fight.
Five minutes later, he wasn’t so sure about ol’ Gravel Voice’s assessment of his chances. The guy in brown had 40 lbs on him, was fast as fuck and clearly ambidextrous, making both knives into lethal extensions of his hands. Dean was keeping busy just trying to avoid them, but he was watching for an opening.
When it finally came, he made use of his longer reach and slipped in on the guy’s left, nearly slicing his arm off with the hunting knife. He landed hard on the guy’s other arm, wrenching the second knife free as well. The crowd was booing him enthusiastically and he was surprised at how exhilarating it was.
The guy bucked under his weight, thrashing. “Just give it up,” Dean spits out, breathless. “You’re losing way too much blood.” Blondie didn’t listen though, he just kept struggling.
Dean shot a hopeless glance at his guards, but their impassive faces told him all he needed to know. He held the guy down while he bled out, standing up only when it was done.
The crowd cheered wildly as his guards led him out, their shouts even more deafening than before.
*****
They didn’t take him far though, just to the inner edge of the other tunnel. He just stood there as they stripped him of his bloody green shirt. He was batting their hands away from his fly when Gravel Voice walked in. It grabbed his left arm and roughly inspected the knife track. “Anywhere else?”
“No.” he replied quietly. One of the guards tossed a pair of brown pants at him, and Dean got the idea. Eyes locked with Gravel’s, he changed into the new pants.
Gravel gestured, and Dean preceded him back out into the ring.
*****
The crowd was respectfully quiet as they emerged back into the ring, which made Dean immediately suspicious.
His suspicions were pretty much confirmed when Gravel indicated he should head back to the center of the ring to where several men were encircling a small ceremonial fire pit. Dean balked, the sight of fire bringing him back to himself a bit.
Gravel’s hand came to the small of his back, pushing gently but inexorably forward. “Your resisting now will change nothing, except to weaken your position.”
“Our position.” Dean corrected, just a hint of a question creeping into his voice.
“Our position,” Gravel confirmed, ushering them forward with his hand. Wait: “his”? When had Gravel Voice become a “he”? Focus here, Dean thought, then nodded slightly and strode forward on his own, trying for a measure of his usual cocky confidence.
The circle of men parted, letting them in. Gravel pushed down on Dean’s shoulders, “Kneel by the fire,” his voice quiet but firm. Sucking in a deep breath, Dean went to his knees, but his eyes rebelled, looking up defiantly, catching on each of the yellow-skinned demons surrounding the fire before settling on the only hooded figure in the group, standing directly across the fire. The robes obscuring his face were old and rich with embroidered runes.
He had no doubt Obi-Wan there was the one throwing this little tea party, and he was probably the one who knew what the fuck had happened to Sam. Reminded that it would do little good for him to see the runes clearly, Dean stared openly anyway, somehow managing to resist the urge to growl when two of the demons moved toward him. Each took hold of an arm, holding him in place and he didn’t even come close to not tensing up.
Gravel looked at the robed man when he spoke, but his voice was pitched to carry into the rafters, “Frey Kráketill1, I present this supplicant to you, bloodied and victorious, ready for the honor of your brand, if you’ll have him.”
The dude in the hood spoke next, “I have your oath he is fit?” and Dean recognized his voice from the infirmary, though he thought it was a lot less resonant at the time.
“You have it, Frey Ketill.” There was weight to Gravel’s words. Magic. Fuck.
“Then I accept your tribute into my house.” More weight there, just on the edge of suffocating.
Dean struggled to breathe normally, though a certain morbid fascination had taken over the place in him that would normally cause him to struggle physically. He was calm when the guy, Ketill, reached for the wooden-handled brand Dean just then noticed resting in the fire (where the fuck was his survival instinct?). Throwing back his hood, the guy came around the fire, and the demons tightened their hold on his arms, expecting him to flail violently.
Dean was unsurprised to recognize the scared face under the hood as the godlet he and Sam had been chasing. Well, mostly unsurprised anyway. It was good to know for sure he wasn’t dead ahead of schedule, because he was really expecting more from Hell than this B-movie shit.
He watched Ketill as he chanted over the brand, getting a really good look at him for the first time. At first he seemed vaguely familiar, but even with the deep scars under his right eye, he could’ve been any one of a hundred bland, annoying college guys Dean’s encountered. The ones who always showed up at the bar right when he was getting somewhere and swept the chick effortlessly off into the night. Come to think of it, maybe those guys had been demons too.
When Ketill looked up from the fire, Dean locked eyes with him until the guards bent his head down. He braced himself as the white-hot iron bit into his right shoulder: he expected it to hurt like crazy, but the bolt of blinding agony from his left shoulder was what knocked him limp in his guards’ iron hold.
Dazed, he tried to follow Ketill’s words, “…brand, you belong to me.” It wasn’t just the brand that hurt, it was everywhere, and he couldn’t focus. He fucking hated magic. Ketill grabbed at his chin then, making him look up at him as he continued. “You live for my service.” Dean wanted to glare, but didn’t have the strength – it was fucking embarrassing. Ketill was still talking, loud and smooth so they wouldn’t miss a word up in the nosebleed seats and Dean was willing to bet that the half he was missing was the half that was going to be on the test. He tried to take some of his weight back from the guards, and blacked out for a second.
When he resurfaced, Ketill was still going strong, and Dean wanted to ask why they needed him for this at all. “You will answer only as you have been so named here. Any previous names have been burned from you mind, you will not utter or cause them to be thought again.” He paused for dramatic effect before continuing, “So say I, and so shall it be.” Why did all the bad guys have to be such drama queens?
The guards hauled him to his feet. Loudly and in perfect unison, the demons standing around the fire intoned, “What is your name, Warrior?”
Before he’d even processed the question, Dean heard himself responding, “Erich Samsen.”
And the crowd roared back, “Welcome, Erich Samsen!” and then broke into thunderous applause.
He staggered out of the ring under his own power but just barely, most of his weight supported effortlessly by Gravel Voice. Once they were out of the crowd’s sight, Dean paused their progress to look up into his face, “What the fuck’s your name, you son of a bitch?”
He let out a short bark of laughter. “Nazim. I am called Nazim.”
1 As a personal name-element, Frey- means in part "lord," but also signifies a god in old Swedish and OW Norse.
Raven: Masculine: Hrafn-, Korp-, Krák-. OW. Norse
"Ketill", from the OW. Norse noun ketill. The basic sense of this word is "kettle" but is used in names meaning "helmet," as in a kettle-helm. Another sense is "chieftain with helmet." (http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/ONMensNames.shtml, thank you Ailise for the research)
Chapter Four
Dean trained with Nazim, ate his food when it appeared, fought when he was told and tried not to be sick when the crowd cheered him. He slept when he could and got used to the brand on his right shoulder, and the constant ache radiating from his left. He got used to being called Erich and not being able to say his own name aloud. He asked to see Ketill a lot, for all the good that did him.
He rarely saw another human after his first few fights – except for the spectators, that is. He was really pretty sure that some of his adoring fans were just plain-old bloodthirsty human beings. Oddly, both of those things helped a little.
His second demon fight landed him in the infirmary again, this time with a nasty gash on his head. It had bled like a motherfucker through the last half of his fight, and he felt lucky to have picked the guy on the left to gut with his knife, seeing as he knew there was only one other warrior in the ring. The nasal-voiced doc stitched him up, and he asked Nazim how bad it was, worried he wouldn’t have a chance to recover before his next match.
Nazim laughed and told him it was healing already. Dean was openly skeptical, casting about for a way to see for himself, finally hopping off the exam table and over towards the window into the other exam room. The broad-chested Irish dude on the other side was moving toward the window too. He stared back at Dean through the glass with a slightly puzzled expression on his face, blood caking his flaming red hair. Dean turned toward Nazim, and so did the guy. He turned back to face Dean as Dean turned to face him. Touched his hair when Dean touched his own.
Oh fuck no.
Nazim didn’t understand why a mirror would make his favorite rising star so upset. He insisted that this was what Dean had always looked like, and Dean began to catch up with the clue bus before he argued too much. New name, check. New body, check.
He ransacked the doctor’s desk, muttering curses under his breath, frantic for a calendar. The BP machine finally gave him the date: June 3, 2008.
Weeks past his fucking expiration date.
He dropped his head into his hands and resisted the urge to tear the office apart. Or to scream out loud what was running through his head on an endless loop: Sammy! What in fucking hell did you do!
******
When the apocalypse came, Dean got to watch it on TV.
It was a few weeks later, and Nazim inexplicably wheeled a cart with a battery powered TV into the corridor outside his cell. Dean looked at him quizzically, but he didn’t seem to know what was going on. All he had to offer was, “Ketill thought you should see this.”
The set was tuned to CNN’s live coverage of the Welcome Summer Parade in upstate
Everything changed at once with a resonant roar: the sky darkened and the camera fell to the ground. Dean felt the boom too, deep as he was underground, so he knew it wasn’t just on the TV. Knew in his bones that it wasn’t just this one small town, it was all of them. Everywhere.
Dean watched the silent street, littered with tiny yellow-clad bodies, until the camera batteries ran down. Then he watched the dead air until an unusually somber Nazim arrived to take the TV away, what must have been hours later.
He fought a lot more after that, often outside in the lurid, omnipresent twilight.
Not humans though.