dollarformyname | FIC: Fight From The Inside 3/? (Reply)

Beat The Dogs And Cheat The Cold Electronic Eyes

Redwood Guy's shoulder is a mess, a glistening white piece of collarbone peeking out like a snapped twig, but it looks like the bullet tore straight through the other side after mangling all the flesh it could touch at high velocity, so that's one good thing. No shrapnel to dig out.

Connor's hands are smeared and slippery as he applies pressure, fashions bandaging and a makeshift sling from the shirt he had to rip off the guy. He's still unconscious, prone and docile in the middle of the librarian's office floor.

The single entrance is barricaded with the heaviest book-loaded shelf Connor could drag in and fit through the door after he'd decided the library was simply too huge and labyrinthine to defend properly. And there were too many windows. Huge, hulking windows revealing them to the enemy.

The inside of the building is mostly untouched by the chaos, the students that had been inside confused and horrified at the blasting sounds and the bloody giant Connor had come barreling in with. They're all crammed into the neatly-kept office now, about twenty people in all, and they're mostly chilled the fuck out after Connor had to hit one hysterical dude for trying to push him back outside like he was inviting the homicidal maniacs in with his mere presence, or as chilled as they can be under the circumstances.

Except that guy over in the corner who keeps gagging and gasping at Connor as he works. Connor told him not to watch, but he doesn't seem to have any sense.

"Oh, God, that's—oh, God." The guy turns, folds and pukes as Connor nudges the broken ends of bones back down a little bit, sets it the way it's supposed to look, then shrugs off his own shirt to bandage the craggy holes it punched through.

The sound of puking is disgusting; Connor's always hated it, and he grits his teeth. His cell phone's not working (no one's is), there were so many people plunging and dying and writhing outside, Dawn's not in his line of sight, his parents are probably freaking out, Angel's probably flipping his shit and beating things up in the sewers for the traitorous fact of the sun being up, and it all serves to make him crankier, not conducive to diplomacy.

"Shut the fuck up," he bites out, eyes firmly on his busy hands.

God, that wreaks, the wet choking sounds are irritating but his order has a purpose, too. He's trying to listen, and the breathing and whispering is loud enough without the upchuck soundtrack over there.

There's been movement on the roof for the past ten minutes or so, and he's trying to keep tabs on it.

Vomit Guy finally cuts it out and keeps his spectacled gaze elsewhere, heeding the dangerous rigidity in Connor's posture. He knows he probably freaked everyone out when he basically lifted hundreds of pounds of bookcase onto his back and strolled with it over to the office like it was nothing more than a bulky backpack, but he doesn't have time to care about secret identities right now, and he doesn't care if it makes the panicking mob cower and tremble when he gets pissy.

Connor doesn't handle fear well himself, never has. He has memories of a hellish place and reigning dominion, chasing its nightmare inhabitants to other dimensions in terror. There was no room for fear because that world honed in on the scent, gobbled up its source without compunction, and Connor didn't want to be gobbled. So he learned to create fear in other things, learned to be the thing that honed and hunted.

Being here in this office and not running out to raze the enemy and find what's his, what they better not fucking touch or even look at funny, it's not sitting right. Add to that, he doesn't know exactly what he's dealing with, and the room starts to close in around him, making it hard to fume properly.

He's going to have to come up with a better plan soon, go out there and gather more intel before he vents on the wrong hapless victim in a more devastating way. A bulletproof vest would be nice, though.

Connor finally finishes up with his patient, sighs and looks around as he wipes his gory hands on his jeans. People are lined up all against the walls, crouching and hugging, a big clump taking refuge behind the huge oak desk. Their fear is pungent and overwhelming, makes him want to chase them up a tree. He's aware he's not the best person for leadership here, but he's all there is.

Just as he opens his mouth to try for some kind of reassurance, Redwood Guy gasps sharply and jackknifes, eyes blown wide and shocked with the sudden invasion of what has to be excruciating pain. "Fuck! Oh, ow, fuck! Shit!" He hisses and screws his face down, eyes clinched into straight lines.

Connor gently pushes him back down, says, "You probably shouldn't move around so much."

The guy's trembling with anguish he can't will away but complies, lays back down with a curt nod. "Yeah. That's smart," he gets out through grit teeth, features tight and eyes clouding with confusion as he tries to reconcile where he is and why his whole left side is on fire. "What— fuck," he breathes tremulously, bites the inside of his cheek, which is swollen and black from where he rudely introduced his face to the asphalt. "What the hell?" he manages.

Connor frowns. He's not good with comforting victims: examine his horde of ungrateful damsels that can't cringe far enough away from him. "You got shot," he says plainly. "We're kinda like hostages, I guess. Kids with guns? Any of this ringing a bell?"

The guy squints in thought, shakes his head, pauses. "I thought I saw a hand, um, a little hand." He looks to Connor with better focus. "I wasn't seeing things?"

"You were seeing real things," Connor confirms, shrugs.

He grunts thoughtfully, gaze going distant for a short minute. This whole complicated process of information absorption, reactive emotion, and contingencies flits across his face in fast forward. The dude is quick as hell on the uptake, Connor thinks as his face settles into a pensive scowl, doing his damnedest to relegate the bright pain to a pesky peripheral thing with his mouth and eyes pinched.

"Think you can tell me everything you saw?"

Connor doesn't have a better idea at the moment, so he nods.

He tells him about the phones, the girl with the rifle, the strange feeling he got from her (not much detail on scents or anything like that, because Connor kinda likes that this guy's not eyeing him like Godzilla on a collision course for Japan), how fast she moved, and his brief glimpse of the children's military precision. He's not holding back on freaky details because that helps no one, they need to know what they're up against so they don't do anything retarded, and plans can't be effectively laid with only half the intel. The erratic beats of distant gunfire don't hurt his credibility as he talks.

Of course, Vomit Guy is ever so helpful, pipes up from his scared twist in the corner to add Connor's freakish shows of strength and rudeness to the tale, like Mr. Redwood is going to swoop in with his mauled shoulder and save them all from bad manners.

The guy listens, narrows his eyes on him, and Connor huffs, throwing a glare at Vomit Guy to convey his unending appreciation. "I save puppies and crap, let's leave it at that, okay? If I wanted to hurt anyone," he smirks coldly, "I totally woulda done it by now without even breaking a sweat."

They stare each other down for another minute before the guy seems to remember he's in no condition to challenge a preternaturally strong opponent. His face gives a little, and he says resignedly, bitterly, "My backpack. I need it." He pats awkwardly at his pocket with his good hand while he waits for Connor to follow through on that, finds his cell phone and tries it for himself.

Connor hesitates, lingering on how Redwood Guy is accepting this all a little too easily, while the others have already had their turns at calling him crazy and are muttering more things in that vein even now. The guy just looks back with the phone jammed against his ear, brow cocked and impatient, and Connor leans up and snatches the bag off the desk, the thing having hung onto his huge frame for all it was worth until Connor finally untangled it.

At his behest, he helps get the guy upright with more loud cursing and a dangerous second where he looks too white and nauseous, props him against the desk, and shoves the bag into his lap.

"Can you handle a gun?" He's wrestling with the pack one-handed, looks a little mad at himself. A distrustful glance upward clues Connor in to the fact that he's still wary of him and enormously pissed that he needs to rely on someone strange and new and unclassified for backup, even if he obviously patched him up when he could have just left him to bleed out.

It's shitty, but it's just that kind of situation, and they both know it.

Connor makes a face, shakes his head. "Not really my forte."

"Are knives your forte?"

"I'm good with knives," he agrees, perking up. Weapons are always good, never mind the fact that this guy seems to have a small armory in his backpack. He can forgive the mysterious danger vibe given his own, and of course, the generously gifted, wickedly curved blade. "So, you have a puppy fondness, too, huh?" Connor observes.

He cocks a sour smirk, tugs out a handgun and tucks it into his waistband. "Something like that."

"Awesome." And it is. It's spectacular. Connor has a bad-ass stabbing implement and one other person in the trenches with him who isn't losing his cool. Definite improvement over five minutes ago. Now all he needs is something to stab and a clear bead on Dawn's scent.

"I'm Connor." He remembers manners and introductions now that he's not half-feral with agitation.

"Sam."

"Are you— are you guys insane?" Vomit Guy suddenly demands, and Connor looks at him, remembers that he's very annoying. Sam can't see from his position slumped against the desk, but Connor's pretty sure he has glare enough for the both of them. "I mean, who the hell are you people? Guns and... are you serial killers or what?"

The question is clearly the stupidest one thus far, because if either of them were serial killers, Vomit Guy would be thoroughly serial-killed by now, Connor is certain, so he doesn't bother dignifying it with a response. He looks at Sam with a crooked scowl, tells him straight out, "That's your puppy. I don't like his fur."

Something changes before Sam can respond, a shift in the rooftop shuffle that goes quick and away and then around, and Connor's head snaps up to regard the ceiling. He can feel Sam stiffen next to him, and then there's the distinct sleigh-bell sound of breaking glass in quick succession, crash-crash-crash, deft footsteps, swift and purposeful, coming closer.

Connor stands, whirls to face the door as something thuds and bounces off, rattling the shelf and jostling the books forward. "Got trouble," he says needlessly, hears Sam moaning and grunting his way to his feet, looming up behind him.

They look so ridiculous, Connor thinks, he and Sam both shirtless and caked in blood, like twin Tarzans straight from a fresh kill in the jungle, all rippling muscle, unkempt hair and raised by apes, except without the loin cloth. Sam's got his gun up, hand a little shaky and his paled skin shimmering with sweat, but his face says this is a familiar irritation that won't hinder his ability to shoot the hell out things, and Connor's got his sickle-knife at his side.

There are more thuds, one-two-three; the bookshelf jolts forward and slams back again, books harassed and teetering to the floor. The sounds stop for several pounding heartbeats, breaths tense and held, hushed whimpers from the peanut gallery. Connor's waiting for it, expecting it, any minute now they're going to crash the gate as one.

The bookshelf wobbles some more, grates against the hardwood as it's slid sideways for no apparent reason, no more thuds, and Connor's not expecting that. You push things from behind, they go forward: these are the laws of physics. But there's no pushing and no forward motion, and these kids are clearly abiding by no laws whatsoever because the bookcase is still groaning its sideways dance.

"Freakin' magic," he decides, and that is just no fun at all. He hates magic for a reason. It's cheating.

"Guess that rules out shapeshifters," Sam mumbles, ticking off some head list he's got.

Connor doesn't know of any shapeshifters that look like kids, but whatever. There's the standard were-things with their furry times of the month, and that's about all the experience he has on that front.

The makeshift barricade scoots jerkily and lurches, abruptly spins on its edge and flies into the adjacent wall with a resounding crash. Two women are pinned behind it while Vomit Guy catches the furthest edge in the face, glasses cracking in half before he slides down, unconscious and trickling blood from his hairline. The women scream bloody murder, injured and scared witless, but there's no time to worry about them just now because the door is free and clear and currently being kicked in.

It splinters and claps down, and Connor has to jump back to avoid it, knocking into Sam's abused arm.

"Ah, goddammit!" Sam bitches, goes a translucent shade of agonized, but he valiantly pushes through it as a matching set of three baby soldiers come strolling in, faces hard and young with weapons taller than they are.

There's an older boy of about eight leading the raid, the same speedy girl from before and another kid not much older than her, all of them with skimmed round heads and gray-mottled fatigues. Connor notices Sam's gun-hand falter a little, a choked gasp, and he risks a glance at him.

Sam looks like he's seen a ghost, staring agog at the boy on the left. The kids don't seem to notice this, or don't care, eyes roving the small space and its occupants; then the barrels of their rifles are lifting, taking aim.

Connor's not waiting around for that bullshit, surges forward and takes the mini unit leader by surprise with his speed. They're faster but they don't expect their prey to put up any kind of decent fight, so it's easy enough for him to snatch the kid in whirl by his collar and pin him against his own chest, shake his rifle loose, blade glinting and hungry at his throat.

The other two watch this with vague interest, the threat to their leader not exactly affecting them the way he'd hoped. Crap. Okay, so plan B.

Connor spins the kid back around and cracks him across the temple with the blunt handle of his knife. The kid's dazed, pissed, kicks out and slams a boot against his shin.

"Shit!" Connor leaps back a step, reassessing. "That actually hurt, you little bastard."

He dodges too late when the kid streaks forward and delivers a series of brutal, rib-creaking strikes to his midsection. Connor grunts, gets him by the arm and knocks his brain around his skull a couple more times, a snapping crunch of cartilage beneath his knuckles before the boy finally goes down.

"Sam!" he yells, trying to snap the dude out of his stasis. "Duck or shoot, man, 'cause they're not backing down!"

Sam jolts back to himself, raises the pistol again, while Connor dodges the barrel tracking him and leaps for it.

"Drop it!" Sam orders, his sights set on the girl in a way that guarantees he can't miss. She just looks back at him, empty and soulless, unfazed, doesn't drop anything as she points the barrel of her weapon at his broad chest, a standoff that won't last very long if she's as uncaring about her own mortality as she seems.

Connor's engaging the boy, who's wise to his tricks now and blurs out of the path of every strike. Connor kicks, the kid jumps, Connor punches, the kid weaves, Connor goes full-speed ahead and the kid dances back and to the side, coming up behind him in a dizzying rush. Connor spins, feints left and slaps right, knocking the gun away. The kid's mossy eyes narrow, and he flings a hand up, sending Connor crashing back into the wall just left of the threshold.

"Cheater," Connor huffs, struggling against the invisible hold that's got his feet dangling a few feet off the ground.

And then Sam says, "Christo," and both of the kids flinch and hiss, eyes pooling black.

Connor slips down a few inches, gets stuck again. "What the heck's that about?" he really wants to know as they shake it off and glare hellfire, and Sam's face is like crumbling granite, furious and pained.

"We can't kill them," he says. "They're possessed."

"You mean these are actual freaking kids?" Connor's appalled. Poor little kids, and he went and knocked that little dude out. Uncool.

Sam doesn't get a chance to answer because the girl chunks her rifle aside and hurls herself through the air with an animalistic roar, pounds into Sam's chest and knocks him back with a scream of agony as he twists too late and lands hard on his shoulder. Connor's wondering why she didn't just shoot him as she scrambles on top of him and starts pounding at his face, Sam's head snapping back and forth and his gun still in hand. It's blatantly suicidal on her part.

The boy is just standing there, keeping Connor pinned to the wall, twitching strangely, some crazy facial tick that's got him all distracted.

He hisses, "Winchester, you're gonna—" and then in a snake's tone, "Stop it, you little shit!" and then he sounds his age, young and horrified and pleading helplessly, face knotted up in horrible anguish, "Stop us. Make it stop."

The girl screams, "Shoot me!" and cracks Sam across the jaw, but Sam won't, absolutely refuses, slides the gun up under the desk and brings his arm wildly back around, slamming his fist into her face. Her head rocks back and she lurches forward again, pounding childish fists against his chest, less devastating and more helpless. "Make it stop! We just want it to stop!"

"I can help you!" he insists, wincing at the abuse and slurring his speech like he's inches away from passing out again, but mulishly determined. "You're fighting it! Let me up and I can help you!"

The boy's still trapped in his schizophrenic inner struggle, a back-and-forth of, "Back off, runt! Get it out! Make it stop! Quit whining you little brat! Just kill us!" and the alternating tears and snarling rage is making Connor's chest feel too small and tight.

He has to get off this fucking wall faster, but the demon's still clawing for dominance, jerking him back up when he slips down, up and down, and Connor's getting a little seasick.

"Leave him alone!" Connor shouts, sudden inspiration that's probably the dumbest dumb he's ever dumbed, but he doesn't care, can't sit here and watch some tiny innocent person struggle so hard against this kind of malevolence. "Don't you want something a little more durable? C'mon, you saw how awesome I am! You know you want it!"

But the demon just sneers at him, jerks its head distractedly, growls, "Got enough problems with this little supershit, fuck you very much!"

Connor's a little thrown by that, stops issuing stupid invitations into his body.

The girl's got her fingers clawed into Sam's chest like she's holding on for dear life now, head bowed low and her back hitching sharp and fast with exertion. Sam stops trying to talk her into letting him up, starts shouting in Latin, brows frowning tight in pain and deep concentration, like he's rusty.

The reaction is immediate. Both children reel and scream, shaking themselves around like wild dogs, and the unconscious boy's body is twitching around on the floor. They're alternating curses and cries of pain, stopping and starting all over the place. Sam's voice gains surety and rhythm.

"I'll rip your throat out!" the girl snarls at him, but she's too busy seizing and trying to choke something down to follow through on that threat. "Lab rats! Animals! They're killers!" A wet cough. "Shoot them!"

"Shoot us!" the boy gags out in agreement, dropping hard onto his knees with his shoulders juddering. "Make it stop!"

Connor's pretty sure shooting them would be bad. Something tells him the demons won't have the courtesy to stay down if that happens, and probably there'll be nothing left to fight them. So he's fairly certain it's a good thing when Sam continues speaking in tongues, ignoring the pleas.

All at once, gravity regains dominion and Connor lands on his feet, the kids throw their heads back and screech out these writhing black clouds pulsing with unadulterated hatred and cold intent. The clouds whirl ominously for a moment, then sink slowly, falteringly, into the floor, and if they had solid form, Connor imagines there'd be claws scrabbling at the hardwood in a last-ditch effort to defy Hell's summons.

He skids across the floor and catches the boy before his face smashes into the wood, pulls him into his arms. He's trembling violently, sheened with sweat, sobbing so softly like he's fighting it, like he doesn't know how to stop fighting. He still smells wrong, but it's altered, more like a den of animals that don't belong together than the overpowering match smell of before. And fear. The fear is overwhelming.

Connor looks to Sam, who's still prone on the ground with a similarly shaken girl tucked up against him, good arm draped over her and holding her close as he stares at Connor's burden with this sort of shocked awe.

Sam really doesn't look good, face waxy and lined with his body's distress, more discoloration swelling up underneath the new layers of blood from where the girl smacked him around with her little sledgehammer fists, and he's sweaty and panting hard.

But he's staring harder, like he can't blink until things make more sense.

Connor notices movement and puts being preoccupied by Sam's weird fixation on hold, sees a couple of squeaky-looking guys slinking along the wall and heading for the door. There are far fewer people in here than there were before, and he guesses some of them already snuck out while he was distracted. They're idiots, refusing to believe the danger right in front of them, like they can flee the room and it'll be all gone instead of hopelessly multiplied.

"You go out there, you're pretty much gonna die," Connor warns. He's not in the mood for this, has a bitty, terrified and recently suicidal person to attend to, and Sam is sure to black out any second, so that's as out of his way as he feels like going for these morons.

The guys stop short, the reluctant line forming behind them suddenly going still, second-guessing. The two in front dash out anyway, and three more follow while the librarian and her assistant decide to stick with the well-armed men. As pissed as he is with the circumstances, he can't help but feel a cold stab of guilt for the runners once they're gone; his responsibility and he let his emotions get the better of him.

The librarian is a young, perky blond thing, and she hesitates a moment, questions crowding her eyes that she thinks better of asking just now, then moves over to check on the unconscious kid, whose smashed nose has spurted blood all over his face. The two trapped girls are still sobbing behind the bookcase, and Connor needs to fix that pretty soon, but he can't bring himself to let go of the kid.

The boy in Connor's arms croaks out, "Shoulda killed us. Now we hafta go back to the bad place," fingers that are so skinny and small digging into Connor's side, and Connor squeezes him tighter, hot coal flaring inside of him at the terrified tremor, the plaintive words.

"You don't have to go back," he grates, and he wants to kill something unknown for this child he's just met, doesn't care that it's crazy or weird because this little being is strumming heartstrings he didn't even know he had like a harp.

"Shoulda killed us," he repeats like Connor's assurance is worth about as much as thin air.

The older boy suddenly shoots upright with a low growl, reflexively shoves the librarian out of his personal space, "Don't touch me!" and she sprawls backwards on her ass, scoots away.

"Hey, hey, it's okay," Sam tries, and the boy's paranoid gaze whips over to him, narrows on his proximity to the girl. He doesn't even seem to care that his nose is crooked.

"Let go of her," he warns, but it's not like Sam has the flexibility to extract her at the moment, and it doesn't look like she wants to be extracted, her bald head buried in Sam's armpit.

Connor feels like he should help calm him, but given the kid's protective vibe and the fact that he bashed his face in, he doesn't think he'll be all that receptive to anything he has to say. Luckily, Sam is on a roll.

"I'm not hurting her," he soothes, tone even and slow like he's placating a mental patient or a wounded animal. "She's fine, she's safe, okay? I can't even get up right now." Sam seems like he's used to talking down the overprotective and unreasonable. Connor wonders if that's how people talk to him when someone looks at Dawn sideways; he's never really been in the frame of mind to notice.

The boy scans him critically, lips pursed and and eyes squinched, clearly distrustful of anyone and anything new and unknown. Connor doesn't miss the very subtle tremors or the way he's strung taut in his effort to hide it. It indicates several troubling things to someone with an eye for trouble. The kid's clearly used to being responsible, in charge, too grown up and not at all comfortable with showing weakness.

"Don't make us go back," the girl interjects between hitching sobs. It's not a plea for protection but another one for quick and neat obliteration: kill them and they won't have to go.

The older boy looks panicked, like she's revealing state secrets, hisses a loud stage whisper for her to, "Shut up!" and she does.

Sam holds onto her like he's announcing to the world that they'll have to pry these kids from his cold, dead clutches. "You're gonna be okay now." His tone is rigid and commanding the universe's obedience, eyes reckless like he doesn't even care if he has to face down the National Guard to make it true, and Connor thinks he could really start to like this guy.

They're afraid of something more than just demons, would rather die than be returned to it. Connor doesn't know where these kids came from, but he'll be damned if he's sending them back to something that elicits this kind of terror after their traumatizing possession ordeal.

The smaller boy doesn't believe it, won't believe it, shaking his head vehemently against Connor's shoulder, not seeming to care that his elder is against talking to the strangers. "They'll take us, you can't stop them, they'll take us."

There's something possessive in Sam's gaze as it travels back to Connor's quaking little package, and it's no small feat that the Destroyer finds it unsettling.

Sam says, "No one's taking you anywhere," and he fucking means it.