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SECTION ONE – Equinox to Equinox
Chapter One
Dean woke itchy. Forcing himself to lie still, he listened. He could hear shuffling movements in the distance, but nothing close by. A quick personal inventory revealed a splitting headache, that damn itching, and enough muscle stiffness to indicate he’d been in the same position for quite a while. The air was cool, moist and nearly still across his face, and he had that slight feeling of pressure in his ears that he recognized. Underground then.
Perfect.
He wasn’t on the floor though, there was too much give and he wasn’t cold enough. Some kind of mat maybe? And he was covered with… a heavy blanket? Dean risked twitching his fingers against the covering slightly, and felt the scrape of wool shifting against his skin. Everywhere.
Of course he was naked. At least that explained the itching.
He opened his eyes a tiny slit and bit back a curse. Wherever he was, it was pitch black.
Fuck it.
Dean jumped up into a defensive pose, casting the blanket aside as he moved. A sudden surge of light blinded him, and he nearly fell, his limbs clumsy and slow to respond. As his eyes adjusted, he added “drugged” to his personal inventory. It just kept getting better.
He had just enough time to think, “Yep, that’s stone under my feet” before the room came into focus around him. His attention was immediately drawn to the wall of iron bars in front of him. Beyond the bars was a stone corridor, about 10 feet wide, leading off both left and right. It was roughly carved out of living rock. Dean wished someone could explain to him why being trapped in a cave felt so much more hopeless than a basement.
The noise level stayed the same. Apparently the light was the only immediate reaction to his waking and why not? The bars in front of him looked pretty damn secure, drilled top and bottom into the stone. After a moment’s study, he even figured out the light: there was a motion detector mounted under the light fixture bolted to the cave wall across from him.
There was no sign of Sam anywhere.
Since nothing was running toward him, at least as far as he could tell, Dean took a good look around his prison. Fifteen feet deep and ten wide, rough-hewn stone on three, make that 5 sides, with bars on the sixth. Fifteen foot ceiling. No windows. No vents. The bars seemed just as hopeless on his second, more thorough inspection: they were drilled deep into the rock, spaced close together, solid iron about as wide around as his wrist. No way he was moving those without the help of high explosives. It took a moment for him to realize that there were no doors. Anywhere. Not even in the bars.
Fuckin’ creepy.
The room was hardly four-star, but as his attention turned from immediate escape, Dean quickly realized he’d been stuck in worse. Behind him a four-foot-high stone ledge took up the entire wall. At five-feet-wide, it dominated the room and made the thin camping mat he’d been laying on look small. He eyed the blanket pooled on the floor at the ledge’s base and only then remembered his nakedness. He hesitated a moment before deciding that there was no way he was going to cower in it like a little girl in her first horror film. Pulling himself up straighter and puffing his chest out a bit, Dean continued his inspection resolutely.
To his left as he faced the ledge, there was a hole in the stone floor and a smaller hole in the wall above. As he moved in for a closer inspection, water began to flow from the hole in the wall down to the one in the floor. Oh goody, he had his own caveman toilet and it was motion activated too.
On the other side of the cell, there was a counter-height stone shelf jutting out from the wall right next to the bars. That was it. Not another damned thing in the cell.
Except for his sorry, naked ass.
Dean paced the cell: threes steps, table, a step to the right, bed-ledge, then three steps back to the wall. He didn’t remember deciding to grab the bars and shake them. Didn’t remember deciding to yell “Sammy!” at the top of his lungs. Not that it mattered: there was no discernable reaction from the darkness beyond his cell.
He went back to pacing, willing his heart rate back down to normal and trying to even out his ragged breathing. Chose to think of it as working the remaining drugs out of his system: his skin still itched and even pacing he felt sluggish and uncoordinated.
After a while, still feeling slow but no longer fuzzy, Dean had to admit to himself that there was more to naked than sissy modesty: he was fucking cold. He shifted the camping mat back so it was against the wall at the back of the ledge, wrapped the scratchy blanket around himself, and sat down to wait for something to happen.
Some minutes later, the lights went out. He moved his arms, and they came back on. Dean started counting under his breath, and at 613-Mississippi, the lights went off again. About 10 minutes. He sat in the dark and let his eyes adjust. After a while, he could just make out very faint light at both ends of the corridor outside his cell. It wasn’t enough to see more than the suggestion of the shelf silhouetted against the bars, but it was something.
Eventually, he fell back asleep, trying not to think too hard about what kind of trouble Sam must be getting into.
*******
He woke with a start, sure something had changed but unable to tell what. After listening uselessly for a few minutes, he shifted to the front of his ledge, flooding the room with light. In short order, his eyes adjusted and he was happy to discover that whatever had woken him, it hadn’t been someone waiting for him in the darkness.
A moment later though, Dean scowled. There was a pile something on the shelf where he was certain nothing had been before. Someone had been in his cell, and he’d completely missed it. Wonderful.
He guessed he’d slept for a while since didn’t feel drugged anymore. A moment later, he had to reconsider that thought when he nearly tripped on his own feet getting down off the ledge. Shaking it off, he went to investigate the pile on the shelf.
It was clothing: simple, black drawstring pants and a long-sleeved shirt of the same material in white. No underwear, but there were sneakers hiding underneath the clothes. He picked up the too-large pants and noticed a tag: his captor shopped at Wal-Mart and was a cheap bastard - $7.99 pants, really? Dean ripped the tags off and dropped his blanket, hurrying into the clothes, which fit surprisingly well. Even the shoes fit, and they were two sizes too big according to the label. What can you expect when you hire 7-year-olds to do your sewing?
The clothes made him feel better, but they also made him more restless. He pulled uselessly at the bars for a while before giving in to the inevitable and figuring out how to use his lovely pit toilet. He was standing on the bed-ledge, running his hands along the wall as close to the fifteen foot ceiling as he could reach when he heard a tiny hiss behind him.
Dean spun toward the noise, jumping down at the same time. He landed hard and wrong, cracking his skull on the edge of the ledge when his ankle turned beneath him. What the fuck?
Cursing loudly, he got to his feet just in time to watch a panel in the wall next to the table-shelf close with another quiet hiss. There was a tray of something on the table.
Resolutely not limping, he crossed to the table. The tray contained some kind of greasy stew and a stack of corn tortillas. He could just barely make out the outline of the panel in the stone with his fingers, but couldn’t see it at all.
Dean didn’t touch the food; he just started pacing again.
*****
The next time he woke, Dean was positive someone was watching him. A few minutes later, the corridor light flared against his eyelids, but he didn’t stir until a low rumbling began. Then he couldn’t help peeking out through his eyelashes. Interesting as it was, he paid little attention to the bars rising straight out of the floor. He was far more concerned with the man dropping down to dart under them… and the glint of silver in his hand.
Dean tensed involuntarily, but stayed still as the man came to loom over him while the bars closed behind him. His better judgment failed him again though when the man just stood there, breathing heavily – what’d he have for lunch, rancid onions? – into the air over Dean’s face.
“You gonna use that knife, or just breathe on me? Because, between you and me? I think your breath might be the more lethal wea….” The man was on him before Dean finished speaking. He got in a slice along Dean’s side with the knife when Dean overextended in his initial lunge, but a moment after that, the knife was clattering against the bars on the far side of the cell. The moment after that saw the man following the knife’s trajectory, careening limply into the bars off Dean’s right hook.
Dean wasn’t even breathing hard. After a long look at the blood on his knuckles, he crossed to his attacker. The man, and yes, it did appear to actually be a man, was slumped where he’d landed, curled over so his head was between his knees. Dean kicked his feet. “Hey! No napping before you tell me what the fuck is going on here!”
Poking the guy in the shoulder, he continued, “I said…” He cut himself short when the man’s head lolled lifelessly to the left, exposing his ruined face. Habit made Dean check for a pulse, but there was no surprise in him when he couldn’t find one.
He stood abruptly, not realizing he was backing away until his ass bumped into the ledge behind him. Anger propelled him back to the bars. He focused it on the motion-sensing light and shouted, “What the fuck was that about?”
He listened as his voice echoed down the hall. He kept listening until the low, indistinguishable movement-noises from the dark resumed. Dean then turned to pick up his attacker’s knife, continuing the motion to make it into a slow circuit of the room. When his survey was done, he found himself standing over the body and rubbing his hand, as if that would bring on the pain expected after caving half a man’s face in like that, but there was nothing. His hand felt completely normal. He wiped it clean on clothes virtually identical to his own before beginning to search the corpse.
Ten minutes and a very thorough search later, the only thing he’d discovered was a small brand on the back of the man’s right shoulder. Well, that and that the dead man didn’t rate underwear either. The symbol looked familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Where the fuck was Sam? He wasn’t supposed to have to remember this shit. Surreptitiously, Dean ran his fingers over his own shoulder, then rolled his eyes at himself and tried to look. He couldn’t see much, but didn’t think there were any strange marks lurking there.
Arts and crafts for the day was making a sheath for the knife out of his attacker’s left shoe, then wrapping it with the laces of both to make it snug onto the blade. As he was trying to figure out a way to get the knife to stay in his waistband, he brushed his side and remembered his injury. Cannibalizing the man’s shirt, Dean cleaned up the wound with water from his caveman plumbing. Sam would have insisted on a few butterfly bandages, but it wasn’t really that deep. He turned his shirt inside out so the cut would have at least that much protection, and settled in to wait for something else to happen.
Not his strong suit.
*****
Dean spent the next who-the-fuck-knew-how-many hours trying to figure out a way to MacGyver a clock from solid stone, solid plastic (man, did that tray ever not want to break), and cotton and wool fiber. Or, you know, a gun. Which would be way better than a clock.
Probably.
Sometimes, he paced. Sometimes, he drifted off. He’d pulled all the thread from the bottom 2 inches of Dead Guy’s pants and was starting to eye his blanket when he heard footsteps in the corridor.
Another man dressed like him lead the way, stepping out of the hard shadows in the hall and eying Dean’s cell with caution. The man looked over his shoulder as the two who followed him stepped into view. They were considerably taller than him, dressed head-to-toe in black and, Dean soon saw, decidedly not human. At least, not if road-sign yellow skin and tiny red eyes were as good an indicator as they used to be.
The bars started to rise when the yellow-skins reached them, and the white shirted man dropped and rolled under, coming up straight at Dean. Ready for the man’s attack, Dean slashed at him as he went by. It was a textbook move, but Dean somehow managed to fucking overreach again and the other man pulled him off balance, slamming his head into the base of the ledge hard enough to make Dean see stars. He shook it off quickly, reflexively coming up into a crouch as his attacker lunged at him again. The next few seconds blurred together as they rolled, struggling for control of the knife. In a desperate move, Dean surged upward, driving the knifepoint into the other man’s adam’s apple. He dropped hard onto Dean, throat spurting ruby red all over Dean’s shirt, knife buried to the hilt in his throat, the tip just barely visible on the other side of his skull.
Dean shimmied out from under the body quickly, needing to know why the yellow-skinned creatures hadn’t joined in the attack. Apparently, they’d kept busy moving his first attacker’s body out into the corridor. Well, one of them had, anyway. The other was standing in the hall watching Dean as the first approached and grabbed body number two’s feet. The ledge firm against his back, Dean just stared as it dragged the body out into the hall.
Almost as an afterthought, it grabbed his tray of congealed food and tossed it into a cart hidden in the shadows of the corridor. The bars shot down with a thud as they loaded the bodies onto the cart, then ambled off into the darkness, back the way they came.
Fucking demon janitors.
This thing had to make sense to somebody, but it sure as fuck wasn’t him. “Hey!” he shouted after them, a bit belatedly. “Tell the dickhead you work for that I want to talk to him!” His torn, bloody shirt shifted wetly against his skin as he yelled, so he added, louder still, “And that I need a new fucking shirt!”
*****
The next time the hatch opened, he was taking a piss and it moved too fast for him to investigate without peeing all over his cell.
By the time he got there, the hatch was closed and there was another tray of food for him to ignore. This time it held a hunk of dry salami, an apple and some hockey puck-like biscuits. Yum. On the table next to the tray was a fresh, white Wal-Mart shirt, tags still attached.
He stared at the food as he changed his shirt. Logically, he knew he should eat. If they wanted to drug him, they’d just put it in his water. Which they were probably doing anyway, explaining the omnipresent clumsiness that had taken over his body. He just couldn’t bring himself to though.
Just on the tiniest chance it was pissing someone out there off.
*****
He tried to stay awake. He was really getting irritated that he had no way to tell how long he managed before he started slumping against the wall. The first time he dozed, the empty knife sheath bit into his back and woke him up.
He ripped it off and threw it against the far wall.
*****
His next attacker was huge. Like, linebacker huge. He took longer to go down than the other two, but he still only took a few minutes to kill.
The fucking disorientation was really pissing him off. He’d been determined to talk to this guy, but the wet crack of fractured skull was unmistakable. This guy wasn’t going to be spilling his guts; he was too busy spilling his brains all over Dean’s hands and the iron bar behind them.
Dean smeared the disgusting stuff onto the guy’s pants. Whatever they’d given him should be out of his system by now, unless they were drugging the water. In which case, he was totally screwed.
*****
Whatever game this was, Dean was done playing by their rules. When the next guy showed up, he played dodge ‘em instead.
The guy was tiny, maybe five feet tall and skinny, but fast. He chased Dean all over the cell with two itty-bitty knives. He got a pretty good chunk off Dean’s thigh before Dean gave in and smothered him with his blanket.
Just like numbers one and three, this one had the brand behind his right shoulder. Unlike the other two, he also had a couple of similarly sized-amorphous scars in the same part of his back. Dean cleaned up and bound his thigh as best he could with the guy’s shirt, then took his tiny shoes and put them in the corner furthest from the body. Hopefully, the janitors would leave them, because craft hour would have to wait; Dean had lost quite a bit of blood and was going to sleep whether he wanted to or not. He tucked the knives within easy reach and curled up on his ledge, telling himself he was too tired to grab the blanket off the floor.
Chapter Two
Dean drifted in and out, his fuzzy brain only allowing him to catch snatches of conversations, of sensations, completely unsure if days or hours were passing him by.
There was a low, nasal voice: “We put his thigh back together again and are dosing him good with fluids and E-TPN to replace all that blood. He should be…” Dean lost the thread of conversation before he found out what he was supposed to be, or if they were even talking about him at all.
His thigh throbbed though, so he figured it was likely.
Later, off to his right, a gravelly voice spoke, “…never would have gotten that close if your boy, Red, here’d been taking things more seriously.” Red? Not him then. There must have been other prisoners being treated here as well. Dean drifted away again, losing his fight with the heavy anesthesia.
The first thing he noticed next time was the bright light piercing the veil of his closed eyelids, shining warm down on his face. Like a day at the beach. Which this wasn’t, at all.
Gravel voice was talking again. Dean wondered if it was the same conversation, or days later. “…eating thing’s going to become an issue soon though. Even the enhanced TPN won’t keep him fighting fit.”
A new voice next, pleasant, mild and male, like they’d all been so far, responded, “Then we’ll wait until he’s weak enough for…” the warm light vanished and Dean lost track of the conversation for a moment, his mind wandering in the cold. He didn’t hear Gravel’s reply, but caught up as the new guy asked, “Other than that, you’re sure he’s ready?”
Gravel voice replied, “Yes Sir. He’ll earn his brand soon enough.” Then there was nothing but retreating footsteps on stone, and Dean was sure, in the pit of his stomach, that they were gone. He may have been groggy, but he was awake enough to think about that for a while.
The room was quiet the next time he surfaced, and Dean felt a tiny bit more together. Together enough to realize he couldn’t move. At all. Not tied-up couldn’t move, totally-fucking-paralyzed couldn’t move. He was trying to figure out how to get worked up about this through the drug haze when the nasal voice from earlier said, “I’ll dose him again, then you can move him,” and Dean felt a hand on his arm and then a glorious white rush pumping through his veins. He tried to count all the colors in that incredible, brilliant white as the world went away again.
*****
The room was spinning violently, and Dean’s hands scrambled for whatever he was lying on, trying to hold on. What was left of his brain was busy trying to figure out what in the fuck he’d been drinking last night. And why the fuck Sam had let him drink it. And why he was naked and, apparently, alone. His fingers latched onto the thin camping mat, and it all rushed back into his brain.
Shit.
Well, at least his fingers were working again.
He opened his eyes slowly, almost happy to find the familiar darkness and soft silhouettes of his cell. When the spinning died down, he sat up, triggering the light.
Yep. It was his cell, all right. Unchanged except… someone’d mopped the blood off the floor. And the walls. They’d even gifted him with new stuff on his table. Yippee. He stood tentatively, testing his thigh muscles, not trusting his head. The muscles twinged and he was a bit wobbly, but he made his way over to the table anyway. New food. And very familiar new clothes. Didn’t they believe in laundry around here?
Dean stared at the tray of jerky, cookies and dried fruit for a moment, shaking his head when the troublesome memories wouldn’t come together coherently. A wave of dizziness enveloped him and his head sloshed with the trails of color the light wove through his movement. He clutched the table-shelf for balance and just barely managed not to land on his ass; head shaking was still a stupid idea. Grabbing up the clothes, he sat on the floor intent on inspecting his thigh.
It wasn’t the easiest wound to inspect, and Dean counted his blessings that the guy was trying to kill, not castrate, him. He came pretty fucking close without trying. The cut was stitched neatly, and what he could see of it wasn’t puffy or red, so these freaks knew their way around a bottle of rubbing alcohol at least. It was actually healing pretty well. Even assuming it wasn’t as deep as he’d thought, they must have kept him drugged up for a while.
Pleased not to be as disabled as he’d feared, he pulled on his new clothes and leaned back onto his mat, waiting for his head to settle… and for someone else to try and kill him.
And Sammy said they never took fun vacations.
*****
Of course, he fell asleep again. It was practically inevitable, with all the drugs coursing through his system. He really wished that waking up disoriented wasn’t also part of the program though, because the yellow-skinned thing was in his cell before he’d managed to get to his feet.
The cell bars were wide open. It was alone, attention on his untouched food tray, “You’ll never make it past the first bend, boy, but you’re certainly welcome to try.” Hearing that cultured speech coming out of that red-eyed face was seriously distracting. It started speaking again before Dean recognized the gravely voice as the one from his time in the… infirmary? “If you don’t eat something soon, he’ll need to force you and that is decidedly…” the bastard paused for effect, closing the distance between them like a classic TV villain, “unpleasant.”
Dean stood his ground, revisiting his instinctual urge to lunge at the thing. He needed answers, and he needed them now. “What the fuck have you done with my brother?” The question came out as a low growl.
“Eat,” Gravel Voice responded, “and then I’ll talk.”
Dean crossed to the table, deliberately putting his full weight on his bad leg, testing its strength. It twinged, but less than it did the last time he was awake. He picked up one of the cookie things and popped the whole thing into his mouth. Crumbs fell out as he spoke, “Fine, I put something in my tummy.” He crossed his arms. “Now tell me where Sam is.”
“You need more food than that.”
“Uh uh. Not until I know where Sam is.”
“Listen Boy, I’m going to lay a few things out for you…” Dean cut him off.
“The only thing I’m interested in hearing from you is what’s going on with Sam.” Dean frowned. “And nobody gets to call me ‘Boy’ except my Father.”
It let out a burst of laughter, harsh to Dean’s ears, but eerily human. “Fine. Eat some of the jerky, and I’ll tell you everything I know about ‘Sam’.”
Dean let out an explosive, “Fuck!” and banged his fists into the ledge behind him. “You don’t have any idea who he even is!”
“He’s your brother, I presume, but you’re correct: I had never heard of Sam until you mentioned him. You’ll have to go higher up the food chain than myself for your answers.” Dean began cursing under his breath as it continued, “I’d advise you to focus on your own situation for now, navigating it will take a certain amount of attention.”
It picked up the tray and held it out to Dean. “Now eat. I promised you’d be fit, so fit you will be.”
Dean kicked it out of its hands, sending bits of fruit and jerky flying through the air, cookies rolling into the corridor.
“Fine. We’ll do this the hard way.” It turned on its heel and ducked out under the lowering bars. Dean couldn’t help his flinch when the bars slammed down behind it.
*****
Dean woke. He sat up. Folded his blanket neatly as he stood.
He crossed to the table and picked up the spoon. Ate the greasy stew that had appeared while he slept in 25 methodical bites. Ate the 3 hard biscuits that accompany it.
Slid his tray back into the dumbwaiter thing when it opened.
He rubbed his hands clean under the running water, then took a long drink. Straightened up and released the drawstring on his pants. Pulled out his dick and peed a little into the hole. Shook himself off and tucked back in. Tied the drawstring off again.
He sat down on the ledge. Started to slump like a cut puppet... Then caughthimself and whipped his head up and around to glare furiously at the cloaked man standing on the other side of the bars.
The man held his stare for a moment, then nodded curtly at him and left.
*****
The next time food arrived, Dean ate it on his own, right after it appeared.
~ On to Chapter 3 ~
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