Title: The Last Hurrah
Author:![]()
snugduff
Recipient:![]()
stuffs_inc
Rating: R
Pairing: Sam/Bela
Summary: Sam pulled over at a homey looking diner three days after the world ended and ordered a cup of coffee. What he got instead was a cup full of boiling blood, an electrical storm that he registered as the telltale swarm of demons, and Bela Talbot.
Author's Notes: Violence, cursing, and plenty of bickering.
The hell hounds come two months early for Dean. He leaves Sam in a motel room in West Texas; ignorant of the cheeseburgers and the six pack falling out of Sam’s frozen hands as Dean hits the ground and started screaming. Sam drops everything as he slams the door shut, screaming at the top of his lungs, screaming in horror of the inevitable.
He doesn’t think it could get much worse.
But then it does.
The end of the world comes three days later. The sky, one morning, just doesn’t go from pink to orange to blue. Instead, the stars slowly begin to go out, one by one, with Sirius the last to go.
The world is in chaos, screaming into the black of the eternal night. Who doesn’t go nuts right then, hysterically swarms every church and pray fiercely to the God that they just decided existed was merciful. Those who didn’t pray lose their minds. They go on murdering sprees, their mouths frothing red as they wave their arms around, shouting, spewing gibberish and spitting blood. And those who didn’t go insane know it is only a matter of time before they do, because they are hunters, and they know what is going to happen next.
Sam pulls over at a homey looking diner three days after the world ends and tiredly orders a cup of coffee. What he gets instead was a cup full of boiling blood, an electrical storm that he resignedly registers as the telltale swarm of demons, and Bela Talbot.
“Took you long enough,” she growls as she comes out from behind the counter and grabs his arm, yanking him off of his stool.
“Wasn’t aware that you were waiting for me,” he drawls, blinking at her listlessly. Tired, he is so damn tired all the damn time.
She twitches her nose, annoyed, and begins to tear open packages on all the tables. She murmurs to herself, “salt, salt, get the salt,” as she goes, dumping a handful on the counter beside him, hoping he would get the message and help her.
He stares at the pile beside him and watches her, bemused, as she continues to trot around the place. “That’s Splenda.”
She slams the packet she is holding down and glares at him. “Then you get the salt out, and you fucking help me salt this place.” She looks around, noticing his singularity for the first time. “Where’s Dean?”
“Dead,” he mumbles, not even noticing as she flinches as if she had been tasered. “He’s been dead for a week.”
He is so tired, so damn tired.
She stares at him, and wonders whether she should feel any sympathy for him. She knows that his whole world centered on Dean, and now that he’s gone there just isn’t anything left to make him feel, to tie him down. But the world is over, and he isn’t the only one who has lost, so she decides to not give a damn, and to make him know it. “Well, lucky him. He’s already in Hell and we’re still trying to get there.”
He snaps his head up to stare at her, three shades of angst and violence pouring over his livid and purple face. But why should Bela care? She’s still trying to save her own ass.
“Salt!” she screams, and the cook and the waitresses at the damn homey diner just stare at her dumbfounded, their attention between their livelihoods and the screaming hysterical woman and the electrical storm that is erupting all around them. “Give me salt, now!”
Her voice shrieks out a pitch Sam hadn’t even know existed and he winces for a moment, his ears ringing. “Just give her fucking salt,” he whispers voice cracking and low and husky and tired.
She looks at him, a glimmer of what could have been a smile passes over her face as she just stares and takes in the tired slump of his shoulders, the hopeless look on his face, the kind that broadcasts, “Just kill me already, I’ve seen enough.” The cook and the waitresses go in the back and dump every bag of salt and every container they have on the counter and look at her expectantly, as if she knows what to do. “Sam?” Bela whispers as she looks at them. “Tell them what to do.”
He sighs and shifts to face them and looks them each in the eye, giving each of them the truth. “You need to salt this place down,” he says carefully, filling his voice with something Bela had never heard on him: authority. “Every entrance, every door, every freaking window- salt it. You need iron, and holy water, and any fucking thing else you think will help you stay alive. That storm that’s coming? It’s demons and they are not afraid to come in and just slit your throats. They don’t care that you’re human, and they don’t care if you have a family that you need to protect. They will kill you, and then they will keep killing. So you’ve gotta kill them, is that clear?” He gets up and grabs the bag of salt and rips it open and begins salting the window sill, looking at them to make sure they’ll follow his lead. They don’t.
“Look! Either salt the windows down and look like a fool for two minutes and stay alive, or protect what you think is your precious dignity and stand there and watch your death come for you. Forewarning? It’s not nearly as beautiful as the Grim Reaper.” Bela glares at them all and nods as they scamper from out behind the counter and grab everything that even vaguely resembles salt they can get. “Salt, dammit, salt!”
She strides around just as purposefully as Sam had a minute earlier, small lithe limbs covered in a trench coat that Sam only just realized he recognized. She wore it in a dream of his long ago, in a dream before he realized that there is just no chance in hell that with the job he has that you can even think about having any sort of relationship with anything, because what he hunts will find out, and they’ll take it away just as fast. His relationships are his weaknesses, and he can’t afford to have any more.
But he still remembers the dream.
Bela jitters around, excitement and terror racing through her veins as she moves salt into orderly lines and listens to Sam in the back of the diner, listens to him puttering around in search for iron and water. She has a rosary in her back pocket, so strange for her to have one. She sold her soul a long, long time ago; she shouldn’t need faith in a god who won’t even come to her rescue. The rosary, however, is a priceless antique, dating back to the eight century. It has dirt (pft, dirt) from Vatican hill said to have been scooped up as Peter was nailed to his humiliating crucifix. She doubts it has any real powers to act on faith, because, really, all St Peter did was get you up to the pearly gates, and then there’s a queue involved, but Mr. Johnson, her overwhelmingly rich patron with a firm belief in all things holy, really, really wants it, and who is she to argue? She had just been pawning it off the drunk and senile cook in the backroom when she heard the familiar roar of the impala’s engine out in the front. She had hit him with the butt of her gun and grabbed the rosary from his front pocket and fled just in time to see Sam (Sam? Where the hell was Dean?) sit down at the counter and order one cup of coffee, please.
She finds him again a minute later, sitting calmly and quietly in the corner most booth, his fingers calmly stroking a long iron pole. She doesn’t ask him where he got it and she doesn’t really care. She stomps over and folds her arms over her chest and looks down at him, trying to give him the most annoyed Catholic School teacher look she had (if only she had a ruler). “Sam,” she snaps at him and he raises his eyes to look at her, his entire expression blank, “why don’t you help the lovely people behind the back counter? You know, make sure they know how to shoot their shotguns and spray the demons with holy water.”
He gives her a disbelieving stare. “We’re in Windwick, New Hampshire. I seriously doubt anyone here will not know how to use a shotgun.”
“And I seriously doubt that the thirteen year old girl who is bussing the tables knows how it feels to have a black cloud ramming its way down her throat.”
“What does that have to do with-?”
“Teach her how to fire a shot gun, Sam!”
He stood up slowly, keeping her eyes until her neck was cracking with the strain to hold their gaze. “Why?”
“Why what?” she snarls, looking at him sourly. His chest is bumping against her folded arms and she’s acutely aware of how tightly he’s gripping the iron bar. He’s almost as close as the time when she- she drops the thought so fast her mind is left spinning blankly, thoughts turning to her dead father and the black and the deal and Lilith and-
“Why do you want me to teach her? Why do you want me to help them?”
She purses her lips and flips her eyes away for a second, to the cook, hanging out in the booth beside them, watching the window and electrical cloud with terrified eyes, before turning back to Sam- but he already knows then. “I scare them.”
He stares at her, studies, and takes her in before nodding. “Okay, but you have to move first.”
Bela backs up rapidly, not even bothering to be embarrassed as they run into each other, her shoulder running into his chest. He catches her as she’s thrown back by their impact and set’s her carefully back on her feet, out of his way. “Don’t scare them,” she whispers, surprising herself with the apathy she shows.
He turns to look at her, a smile almost cracking over the glacial ice of his face. “You’ve already got that covered, though, don’t you?”
She hisses and glares but he has already turned around, and with a gentle gesture he places his hand on the small girl’s shoulder and asks for her name. The girl looks up at him, tears leaking out of her pale grey eyes, and she answers “Karalee.”
Bela watches them with hard eyes before turning to the cook in the booth beside. She puts on a grin and can barely contain the venom in her voice, “Justin, let’s have a chat.” She lets him stand and follows him into the kitchen, trying to ignore the light tinkling nervous laugh of Karalee. She can’t ignore the smile on Sam’s face.
Bugger.
***
Bela hisses as she wipes blood and salt off of her shoulder, her ribs, and stands, cursing as her ankle tries to give out in her pumps. Her revolver is clutched loosely in her right hand as she tidies up Justin’s body, beating down his pockets for the money that they had exchanged not an hour before. It’s not that she had a grudge against him or anything (she didn’t usually kill her supplier) but she instinctly knew that when push came to shove, Justin would have caved, and that would have been one more hysterical person Sam would have to deal with when the demons came to them. That, and he reminded her of her father, and her father-
She straightens her skirt and cleans her gun in the grass, tapping Justin’s head with the toe of her shoe to make sure he was actually dead. “Dead,” she tells herself firmly, “He’s dead.”
She doesn’t even know which one she’s speaking of.
Going in through the back door of the diner two minutes later she knows that everyone is aware of what she had just done, even if it only looked as if she and Justin had a chat and he decided to take a piss in the bushes (better than the bathrooms there).
Sam looks at her as she passes to the front of the diner and she immediately picks up her pace. He knows. But of course he would know, it’s Sam Winchester. He stalks over to follow her, follows her to the counter where she whirls to face him, eyes livid with hate and anger and paranoia. “He would have slowed us down.”
“They’re all going to slow us down, Bela. We have to help them.” She sucks in a breath between her teeth and resists the urge to shoot him at the point blank range, but calmly bites out:
“You weren’t so keen on helping any of them before I made you. Do you recall that?”
He glares at her, fingers twisting and curling into fists at his side. He wants to shake her, wants to slam her against a wall, wants to make her bleed. But he remembers well, remembers counting the people in the diner as he waited for his coffee- coffee he still had yet to receive- and thought about the various ways they could die over the course of the next three hours. “I remember. And I also remember you were the one who started protecting them in the first place.”
She rolls her eyes at his accusation. “I was protecting my own ass and you know it.”
“Of course I knew it, why do you think I was so surprised when you actually asked for my help? Why do I matter?” She sighs and backs up to look at the broken down payphone hanging off the wall. She murmurs something and closes her eyes to hide herself from his disbelieving gaze. “What?”
“Someone’s got to help me survive,” she says again, opening her eyes to stare vacantly at the opposite wall. Behind her she can hear him suck in a surprised breath and huff, and she can almost see the expression on his face. Flabbergasted and annoyed, Sam contemplates throttling her right there. The mere thought of it wakes him up just a little more, let’s his senses become more keen.
“Well it won’t be me,” he snarls into her ear before stomping off to the others again, furiously shouting as he looks out the window to get ready, because the demons are coming.
Bela watches the wall for a long while, doesn’t even blink when she realizes that the rosary she had had in her pocket, the only reason she was there, was gone. She doesn’t even blink as the lights flicker twice before going out.
***
Bela used to plan everything- plan out her calls, plan out the exact phrases and lilt in her voice to use, plan out who to call, her fake names, her heists. She had considered herself a person of words, rather than of action. She planned out her heists, sure, but she employed others to do them (even though she wasn’t afraid to get down and get dirty to get what she wanted- as long as she showered right after).
But then the Winchesters walked into her life, and nothing after that ever went right.
When the demons attack there is no time for thought- it’s all action, action, save your ass, kick their ass. The demons took over the forms of everyone in the small town, and she sees the man who pumped her gas three hours before take a round through his forehead by the tall and dark waitress who had been working, and then he get doused by Karalee.
Flickers of images pass through her eyes as she fights, shrieking the Latin and flinging the holy water and all the while thinking, “I definitely should not have worn these shoes today- blisters!” She sees Sam taking down four at a time, an unholy grin on his face. He’s in his element, he knows how to fight, how to survive, how to protect, how to win. And she only knows how to lie.
The whole world around her is shrieking into the night, but she can’t listen to them, she can’t focus; fight, fight, kill, save your own ass, save Sam’s. People and demons alike are all around her, bodies pressing against hers for help and to kill, but she doesn’t pay attention to them- she’s going to kill her way out of here, and she’s going to drag whoever else is coming with her.
When she jumps behind the counter, feeling very Shawn of the Dead, Sam knelt behind it with her, reloading his gun, shell between his teeth. “Anyone left?”
He looks up to her, and his eyes are dancing. It’s Sam, the Sam she thought she used to know, the animated, “Let’s go nuts, let’s kill that evil son of a bitch” Sam. “You mean besides you and me?”
She twists a bit, hears the demons over her scrabbling to reach them- her ankle is killing her. “Besides you and me, yes.” She’s loading her revolver unconsciously, quickly assessing the scenarios that might just get her out of here alive. There are few and it shows in her eyes.
“You and me.”
“Well don’t I just feel like a country song.” He grins at her again and she wonders what life could have been like for him before his father died, before he died, before Dean dealed. She wonders if he could have been a happy kid who worked hard and loved hard and smiled and was always quick with the comebacks. She wonders what it would take to make him be that again.
“I have a plan,” he says slowly, and she spins her revolver and looks at him with a raised eyebrow.
“Well, I feel very safe. Should we sing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ while we go about this or the ‘Rocky Theme’?”
“Eye of the Tiger, definitely.”
“Well, I’m thrilled.” He smiles as he looks at his gun and ignores the demons yowling for their blood. She clutches at the pendant she has around her neck; no way is a demon going to get in her body. Almost unconsciously he rubs the spot over his heart, and she sees the outline of black under his threadbare white t-shirt. “So… your plan?”
“Run like hell and don’t look back.” She stares at him, waits for the mocking laughter she knows is coming. But it doesn’t.
“That’s your plan? ‘Run like hell’? How stupid can you be?”
He looks up suddenly; glares. “Apparently very to find myself stuck in this situation with you. Fucking hell, Be-” He cuts himself off, swallows, “they’re going to back off sometime.”
“Or Lilith will come.”
Sam doesn’t meet her eyes as he pulls at the fraying edges of his shirt. “She won’t.” She doesn’t ask what he means, she doesn’t want to know. “The impala is parked ten yards from the front door. We just have to get out of here without them getting us and leave.”
She looks at her long tapering fingers, contemplates what it’s like to have adrenaline coursing through her veins, contemplates what it feels like to have a partner, to have someone watching her back just as closely as she’s watching theirs. “But we’re killing first, right. Just a few?”
He looks up at her, eyes dancing and alive and so fucking green. He’s at peace, he’s alive, he’s awake, he’s breathing. “Wouldn’t be fun if we didn’t.”
She gathers herself up on her heels, wobbles unsteadily as a man reaches down and sweeps over her hair, trying to drag her up. “I’m driving.”
He stands up, loads his shotgun and shoots at the demon over her head. “You are not! It’s my car!”
She squints at him as he says the words, sees how he breaks when he claims ownership. No, the impala still isn’t his. “Whoever gets there first, then?”
“You’re on.” He leaps over the bar with a roar and she barely blinks before she climbs over right behind him, shooting and kicking and screaming and Latin she hadn’t even known that she had known spewing out of her. He charges on ahead of her, shooting and spraying holy water and just looking at the demons sometimes make them flee. But he looks back for her, makes sure she’s still holding up her own, because for some reason, even though he’s hated her, he thinks he always has, he needs to protect her, because life just isn’t life without someone to back you up.
He barrels out of the diner and bounces on anxious feet for her to get out behind him so they can run, run and laugh. She barrels out momentarily, running backwards as she shoots and demons squeal behind her. She whirls just in time to hit the first stair and launches herself down them, bypassing him within a second. He watches her for a second before realizing she has a goal in mind and he lopes off behind her, already heading for the right side of the car. She slaps the driver’s door with a silly grin on her face and catches the keys as he tosses them. “Drive, drive, drive,” he whispers as they throw themselves in and collide shoulders.
She’s thrown the car in gear before he even gets the words out and they’re gone, back tires spinning in the soft mud and lurching down the road. Sam watches the diner in the back mirror, sighs as the black cloud rises out of the open doors and windows and is gone, spinning away to fight another day. He’s tired, he’s ecstatic, he’s overwhelmed and under whelmed and sad and happy and- he smiles as he watches her spin out of town and onto a paved road going eighty miles an hour. He turns on the radio, laughs when he realizes the song he found was the middle of ‘Eye of the Tiger’. She turns the radio off and he looks at her, smile gone.
“We’re not listening to that.”
“Why not?” She keeps her eyes at ten and two as she scans the road ahead, sees the clouds (rain clouds, she thinks happily) rolling in.
“Because it’s an awful song, I hate listening to it, and I’m driving, that’s why.” He wrinkles his nose and bites back a hiss and tries to remember why they ended up together. Oh yeah, that was her fault too. “How do I turn on the windshield wipers?”
He tells her through gritted teeth, and as she flicks them on and looks back to the road again he defiantly turns on the radio.
“Dammit, Sam!”
Author:
snugduffRecipient:
stuffs_incRating: R
Pairing: Sam/Bela
Summary: Sam pulled over at a homey looking diner three days after the world ended and ordered a cup of coffee. What he got instead was a cup full of boiling blood, an electrical storm that he registered as the telltale swarm of demons, and Bela Talbot.
Author's Notes: Violence, cursing, and plenty of bickering.
The hell hounds come two months early for Dean. He leaves Sam in a motel room in West Texas; ignorant of the cheeseburgers and the six pack falling out of Sam’s frozen hands as Dean hits the ground and started screaming. Sam drops everything as he slams the door shut, screaming at the top of his lungs, screaming in horror of the inevitable.
He doesn’t think it could get much worse.
But then it does.
The end of the world comes three days later. The sky, one morning, just doesn’t go from pink to orange to blue. Instead, the stars slowly begin to go out, one by one, with Sirius the last to go.
The world is in chaos, screaming into the black of the eternal night. Who doesn’t go nuts right then, hysterically swarms every church and pray fiercely to the God that they just decided existed was merciful. Those who didn’t pray lose their minds. They go on murdering sprees, their mouths frothing red as they wave their arms around, shouting, spewing gibberish and spitting blood. And those who didn’t go insane know it is only a matter of time before they do, because they are hunters, and they know what is going to happen next.
Sam pulls over at a homey looking diner three days after the world ends and tiredly orders a cup of coffee. What he gets instead was a cup full of boiling blood, an electrical storm that he resignedly registers as the telltale swarm of demons, and Bela Talbot.
“Took you long enough,” she growls as she comes out from behind the counter and grabs his arm, yanking him off of his stool.
“Wasn’t aware that you were waiting for me,” he drawls, blinking at her listlessly. Tired, he is so damn tired all the damn time.
She twitches her nose, annoyed, and begins to tear open packages on all the tables. She murmurs to herself, “salt, salt, get the salt,” as she goes, dumping a handful on the counter beside him, hoping he would get the message and help her.
He stares at the pile beside him and watches her, bemused, as she continues to trot around the place. “That’s Splenda.”
She slams the packet she is holding down and glares at him. “Then you get the salt out, and you fucking help me salt this place.” She looks around, noticing his singularity for the first time. “Where’s Dean?”
“Dead,” he mumbles, not even noticing as she flinches as if she had been tasered. “He’s been dead for a week.”
He is so tired, so damn tired.
She stares at him, and wonders whether she should feel any sympathy for him. She knows that his whole world centered on Dean, and now that he’s gone there just isn’t anything left to make him feel, to tie him down. But the world is over, and he isn’t the only one who has lost, so she decides to not give a damn, and to make him know it. “Well, lucky him. He’s already in Hell and we’re still trying to get there.”
He snaps his head up to stare at her, three shades of angst and violence pouring over his livid and purple face. But why should Bela care? She’s still trying to save her own ass.
“Salt!” she screams, and the cook and the waitresses at the damn homey diner just stare at her dumbfounded, their attention between their livelihoods and the screaming hysterical woman and the electrical storm that is erupting all around them. “Give me salt, now!”
Her voice shrieks out a pitch Sam hadn’t even know existed and he winces for a moment, his ears ringing. “Just give her fucking salt,” he whispers voice cracking and low and husky and tired.
She looks at him, a glimmer of what could have been a smile passes over her face as she just stares and takes in the tired slump of his shoulders, the hopeless look on his face, the kind that broadcasts, “Just kill me already, I’ve seen enough.” The cook and the waitresses go in the back and dump every bag of salt and every container they have on the counter and look at her expectantly, as if she knows what to do. “Sam?” Bela whispers as she looks at them. “Tell them what to do.”
He sighs and shifts to face them and looks them each in the eye, giving each of them the truth. “You need to salt this place down,” he says carefully, filling his voice with something Bela had never heard on him: authority. “Every entrance, every door, every freaking window- salt it. You need iron, and holy water, and any fucking thing else you think will help you stay alive. That storm that’s coming? It’s demons and they are not afraid to come in and just slit your throats. They don’t care that you’re human, and they don’t care if you have a family that you need to protect. They will kill you, and then they will keep killing. So you’ve gotta kill them, is that clear?” He gets up and grabs the bag of salt and rips it open and begins salting the window sill, looking at them to make sure they’ll follow his lead. They don’t.
“Look! Either salt the windows down and look like a fool for two minutes and stay alive, or protect what you think is your precious dignity and stand there and watch your death come for you. Forewarning? It’s not nearly as beautiful as the Grim Reaper.” Bela glares at them all and nods as they scamper from out behind the counter and grab everything that even vaguely resembles salt they can get. “Salt, dammit, salt!”
She strides around just as purposefully as Sam had a minute earlier, small lithe limbs covered in a trench coat that Sam only just realized he recognized. She wore it in a dream of his long ago, in a dream before he realized that there is just no chance in hell that with the job he has that you can even think about having any sort of relationship with anything, because what he hunts will find out, and they’ll take it away just as fast. His relationships are his weaknesses, and he can’t afford to have any more.
But he still remembers the dream.
Bela jitters around, excitement and terror racing through her veins as she moves salt into orderly lines and listens to Sam in the back of the diner, listens to him puttering around in search for iron and water. She has a rosary in her back pocket, so strange for her to have one. She sold her soul a long, long time ago; she shouldn’t need faith in a god who won’t even come to her rescue. The rosary, however, is a priceless antique, dating back to the eight century. It has dirt (pft, dirt) from Vatican hill said to have been scooped up as Peter was nailed to his humiliating crucifix. She doubts it has any real powers to act on faith, because, really, all St Peter did was get you up to the pearly gates, and then there’s a queue involved, but Mr. Johnson, her overwhelmingly rich patron with a firm belief in all things holy, really, really wants it, and who is she to argue? She had just been pawning it off the drunk and senile cook in the backroom when she heard the familiar roar of the impala’s engine out in the front. She had hit him with the butt of her gun and grabbed the rosary from his front pocket and fled just in time to see Sam (Sam? Where the hell was Dean?) sit down at the counter and order one cup of coffee, please.
She finds him again a minute later, sitting calmly and quietly in the corner most booth, his fingers calmly stroking a long iron pole. She doesn’t ask him where he got it and she doesn’t really care. She stomps over and folds her arms over her chest and looks down at him, trying to give him the most annoyed Catholic School teacher look she had (if only she had a ruler). “Sam,” she snaps at him and he raises his eyes to look at her, his entire expression blank, “why don’t you help the lovely people behind the back counter? You know, make sure they know how to shoot their shotguns and spray the demons with holy water.”
He gives her a disbelieving stare. “We’re in Windwick, New Hampshire. I seriously doubt anyone here will not know how to use a shotgun.”
“And I seriously doubt that the thirteen year old girl who is bussing the tables knows how it feels to have a black cloud ramming its way down her throat.”
“What does that have to do with-?”
“Teach her how to fire a shot gun, Sam!”
He stood up slowly, keeping her eyes until her neck was cracking with the strain to hold their gaze. “Why?”
“Why what?” she snarls, looking at him sourly. His chest is bumping against her folded arms and she’s acutely aware of how tightly he’s gripping the iron bar. He’s almost as close as the time when she- she drops the thought so fast her mind is left spinning blankly, thoughts turning to her dead father and the black and the deal and Lilith and-
“Why do you want me to teach her? Why do you want me to help them?”
She purses her lips and flips her eyes away for a second, to the cook, hanging out in the booth beside them, watching the window and electrical cloud with terrified eyes, before turning back to Sam- but he already knows then. “I scare them.”
He stares at her, studies, and takes her in before nodding. “Okay, but you have to move first.”
Bela backs up rapidly, not even bothering to be embarrassed as they run into each other, her shoulder running into his chest. He catches her as she’s thrown back by their impact and set’s her carefully back on her feet, out of his way. “Don’t scare them,” she whispers, surprising herself with the apathy she shows.
He turns to look at her, a smile almost cracking over the glacial ice of his face. “You’ve already got that covered, though, don’t you?”
She hisses and glares but he has already turned around, and with a gentle gesture he places his hand on the small girl’s shoulder and asks for her name. The girl looks up at him, tears leaking out of her pale grey eyes, and she answers “Karalee.”
Bela watches them with hard eyes before turning to the cook in the booth beside. She puts on a grin and can barely contain the venom in her voice, “Justin, let’s have a chat.” She lets him stand and follows him into the kitchen, trying to ignore the light tinkling nervous laugh of Karalee. She can’t ignore the smile on Sam’s face.
Bugger.
***
Bela hisses as she wipes blood and salt off of her shoulder, her ribs, and stands, cursing as her ankle tries to give out in her pumps. Her revolver is clutched loosely in her right hand as she tidies up Justin’s body, beating down his pockets for the money that they had exchanged not an hour before. It’s not that she had a grudge against him or anything (she didn’t usually kill her supplier) but she instinctly knew that when push came to shove, Justin would have caved, and that would have been one more hysterical person Sam would have to deal with when the demons came to them. That, and he reminded her of her father, and her father-
She straightens her skirt and cleans her gun in the grass, tapping Justin’s head with the toe of her shoe to make sure he was actually dead. “Dead,” she tells herself firmly, “He’s dead.”
She doesn’t even know which one she’s speaking of.
Going in through the back door of the diner two minutes later she knows that everyone is aware of what she had just done, even if it only looked as if she and Justin had a chat and he decided to take a piss in the bushes (better than the bathrooms there).
Sam looks at her as she passes to the front of the diner and she immediately picks up her pace. He knows. But of course he would know, it’s Sam Winchester. He stalks over to follow her, follows her to the counter where she whirls to face him, eyes livid with hate and anger and paranoia. “He would have slowed us down.”
“They’re all going to slow us down, Bela. We have to help them.” She sucks in a breath between her teeth and resists the urge to shoot him at the point blank range, but calmly bites out:
“You weren’t so keen on helping any of them before I made you. Do you recall that?”
He glares at her, fingers twisting and curling into fists at his side. He wants to shake her, wants to slam her against a wall, wants to make her bleed. But he remembers well, remembers counting the people in the diner as he waited for his coffee- coffee he still had yet to receive- and thought about the various ways they could die over the course of the next three hours. “I remember. And I also remember you were the one who started protecting them in the first place.”
She rolls her eyes at his accusation. “I was protecting my own ass and you know it.”
“Of course I knew it, why do you think I was so surprised when you actually asked for my help? Why do I matter?” She sighs and backs up to look at the broken down payphone hanging off the wall. She murmurs something and closes her eyes to hide herself from his disbelieving gaze. “What?”
“Someone’s got to help me survive,” she says again, opening her eyes to stare vacantly at the opposite wall. Behind her she can hear him suck in a surprised breath and huff, and she can almost see the expression on his face. Flabbergasted and annoyed, Sam contemplates throttling her right there. The mere thought of it wakes him up just a little more, let’s his senses become more keen.
“Well it won’t be me,” he snarls into her ear before stomping off to the others again, furiously shouting as he looks out the window to get ready, because the demons are coming.
Bela watches the wall for a long while, doesn’t even blink when she realizes that the rosary she had had in her pocket, the only reason she was there, was gone. She doesn’t even blink as the lights flicker twice before going out.
***
Bela used to plan everything- plan out her calls, plan out the exact phrases and lilt in her voice to use, plan out who to call, her fake names, her heists. She had considered herself a person of words, rather than of action. She planned out her heists, sure, but she employed others to do them (even though she wasn’t afraid to get down and get dirty to get what she wanted- as long as she showered right after).
But then the Winchesters walked into her life, and nothing after that ever went right.
When the demons attack there is no time for thought- it’s all action, action, save your ass, kick their ass. The demons took over the forms of everyone in the small town, and she sees the man who pumped her gas three hours before take a round through his forehead by the tall and dark waitress who had been working, and then he get doused by Karalee.
Flickers of images pass through her eyes as she fights, shrieking the Latin and flinging the holy water and all the while thinking, “I definitely should not have worn these shoes today- blisters!” She sees Sam taking down four at a time, an unholy grin on his face. He’s in his element, he knows how to fight, how to survive, how to protect, how to win. And she only knows how to lie.
The whole world around her is shrieking into the night, but she can’t listen to them, she can’t focus; fight, fight, kill, save your own ass, save Sam’s. People and demons alike are all around her, bodies pressing against hers for help and to kill, but she doesn’t pay attention to them- she’s going to kill her way out of here, and she’s going to drag whoever else is coming with her.
When she jumps behind the counter, feeling very Shawn of the Dead, Sam knelt behind it with her, reloading his gun, shell between his teeth. “Anyone left?”
He looks up to her, and his eyes are dancing. It’s Sam, the Sam she thought she used to know, the animated, “Let’s go nuts, let’s kill that evil son of a bitch” Sam. “You mean besides you and me?”
She twists a bit, hears the demons over her scrabbling to reach them- her ankle is killing her. “Besides you and me, yes.” She’s loading her revolver unconsciously, quickly assessing the scenarios that might just get her out of here alive. There are few and it shows in her eyes.
“You and me.”
“Well don’t I just feel like a country song.” He grins at her again and she wonders what life could have been like for him before his father died, before he died, before Dean dealed. She wonders if he could have been a happy kid who worked hard and loved hard and smiled and was always quick with the comebacks. She wonders what it would take to make him be that again.
“I have a plan,” he says slowly, and she spins her revolver and looks at him with a raised eyebrow.
“Well, I feel very safe. Should we sing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ while we go about this or the ‘Rocky Theme’?”
“Eye of the Tiger, definitely.”
“Well, I’m thrilled.” He smiles as he looks at his gun and ignores the demons yowling for their blood. She clutches at the pendant she has around her neck; no way is a demon going to get in her body. Almost unconsciously he rubs the spot over his heart, and she sees the outline of black under his threadbare white t-shirt. “So… your plan?”
“Run like hell and don’t look back.” She stares at him, waits for the mocking laughter she knows is coming. But it doesn’t.
“That’s your plan? ‘Run like hell’? How stupid can you be?”
He looks up suddenly; glares. “Apparently very to find myself stuck in this situation with you. Fucking hell, Be-” He cuts himself off, swallows, “they’re going to back off sometime.”
“Or Lilith will come.”
Sam doesn’t meet her eyes as he pulls at the fraying edges of his shirt. “She won’t.” She doesn’t ask what he means, she doesn’t want to know. “The impala is parked ten yards from the front door. We just have to get out of here without them getting us and leave.”
She looks at her long tapering fingers, contemplates what it’s like to have adrenaline coursing through her veins, contemplates what it feels like to have a partner, to have someone watching her back just as closely as she’s watching theirs. “But we’re killing first, right. Just a few?”
He looks up at her, eyes dancing and alive and so fucking green. He’s at peace, he’s alive, he’s awake, he’s breathing. “Wouldn’t be fun if we didn’t.”
She gathers herself up on her heels, wobbles unsteadily as a man reaches down and sweeps over her hair, trying to drag her up. “I’m driving.”
He stands up, loads his shotgun and shoots at the demon over her head. “You are not! It’s my car!”
She squints at him as he says the words, sees how he breaks when he claims ownership. No, the impala still isn’t his. “Whoever gets there first, then?”
“You’re on.” He leaps over the bar with a roar and she barely blinks before she climbs over right behind him, shooting and kicking and screaming and Latin she hadn’t even known that she had known spewing out of her. He charges on ahead of her, shooting and spraying holy water and just looking at the demons sometimes make them flee. But he looks back for her, makes sure she’s still holding up her own, because for some reason, even though he’s hated her, he thinks he always has, he needs to protect her, because life just isn’t life without someone to back you up.
He barrels out of the diner and bounces on anxious feet for her to get out behind him so they can run, run and laugh. She barrels out momentarily, running backwards as she shoots and demons squeal behind her. She whirls just in time to hit the first stair and launches herself down them, bypassing him within a second. He watches her for a second before realizing she has a goal in mind and he lopes off behind her, already heading for the right side of the car. She slaps the driver’s door with a silly grin on her face and catches the keys as he tosses them. “Drive, drive, drive,” he whispers as they throw themselves in and collide shoulders.
She’s thrown the car in gear before he even gets the words out and they’re gone, back tires spinning in the soft mud and lurching down the road. Sam watches the diner in the back mirror, sighs as the black cloud rises out of the open doors and windows and is gone, spinning away to fight another day. He’s tired, he’s ecstatic, he’s overwhelmed and under whelmed and sad and happy and- he smiles as he watches her spin out of town and onto a paved road going eighty miles an hour. He turns on the radio, laughs when he realizes the song he found was the middle of ‘Eye of the Tiger’. She turns the radio off and he looks at her, smile gone.
“We’re not listening to that.”
“Why not?” She keeps her eyes at ten and two as she scans the road ahead, sees the clouds (rain clouds, she thinks happily) rolling in.
“Because it’s an awful song, I hate listening to it, and I’m driving, that’s why.” He wrinkles his nose and bites back a hiss and tries to remember why they ended up together. Oh yeah, that was her fault too. “How do I turn on the windshield wipers?”
He tells her through gritted teeth, and as she flicks them on and looks back to the road again he defiantly turns on the radio.
“Dammit, Sam!”