oselle | Fic: Deguello , Part 1 of 2

Title: Deguello
Author: Oselle
Genre: Gen, pre-series
Pairings: None
Principals: John, Dean, Sam
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst, gore, some language
Spoilers: None
Word Count: 4,400 for Part One
Disclaimer: The Winchesters and all canon characters are the intellectual property of their creators. All original characters are mine. No money was made or sought in the writing of this story.
Summary: John wrestles with his conscience and calling after Dean is hurt for the first time.

Deguello: Part One

In this part of the country the boys should have been in school weeks ago and if he tried to cross the border with them he would be stopped and the car searched. That was more risk than he could take even though he knew that what he had tracked all that late summer would head north and go to ground up there for the winter. For three days it rained and by the end of the third day he was certain there would be no sign left of it in these parts. He told Dean to pack up and it was Dean who said to wait one more day. The fourth day dawned wet but not raining. He took the boys to breakfast and then brought Sam back to the motel and he drove out to the forest in a light mist that late September morning with Dean beside him.

* * *

He parked the car at a ranger station already closed for the season and they got out and John stood there for a moment and listened to the woods. The day was dim and there was no birdsong. The car's engine ticked and moisture dripped off the trees around him and deep inside the woods and the air smelled thick and wet and loamy. On the other side of the car Dean stood looking at him with his Browning twenty-gauge across his arm.

"Anything?" he said.

"We need to get deeper in. You stay right beside me."

"I know."

"You didn't know last time," he said and Dean looked down and nodded and didn't say anything. "Let's go."

They hiked up northeast through the woods and cut for sign. It was cool and raw. The leaves spiraling down and landing with whispered taps. Midmorning John picked up the sharp tang of blood on the air and beside the rotted husk of a fallen tree they found the carcass of a black bear. Its belly was torn open and empty as a gourd and the leaf litter beneath it was soaked in blood and a cloud of flies harrowed the body.

"That's it," John said. He pointed the muzzle of his shotgun at the bear's hollowed gut. "Only a gytrash'll feed like that, cleaning out everything. That's why the cops always think it's a serial killer. They think only a person could be that precise."

"It couldn't've been anything else?"

John looked around and a few steps away from the carcass he motioned Dean over. "A gytrash always shits where it eats."

Dean stared at the mess and swallowed hard. "Looks like he crapped it all out."

John knelt down beside the pile and saw white bone in the ordure. Two hikers on the Appalachian Trail had gone missing this summer and John had begun to track the pattern. Then a twelve-year-old girl disappeared while camping with her parents and the forest service found the girl with her torso gutted like the bear's. She had been only two years older than Sam.

"They kill, they eat, they shit and they sleep," he said to Dean.

"They sleep during the day."

"Mostly. Sometimes no. Come on, it won't have gone far after feeding like this."

They took off up a slope where the soft groundcover had been matted down in places by the gytrash's step. John pointed out spatters of bear blood the creature had left behind and broken twigs on the trees and then a cracked and gnawed rib jutting out of the leaves. The woods were very quiet and their steps made almost no sound. He stopped and scanned the area with Dean beside and a little behind him, maybe two feet away. He looked at Dean and Dean raised his eyebrows and John shook his head and turned away and took two steps and then he heard a hard thump behind him as if Dean had fallen and in the splinter of a second it took to turn around the boy was gone and he saw nothing but a black shadow in the woods that was faster than wind-driven smoke and then that was gone too.

"Dean!"

He saw where Dean had been brought down and the low rut through the leaves where the gytrash had dragged him and he ran crashing through the trees after them but the thing was that fast that there was no sign. He bellowed his son's name but got no answer and then John heard two shots from a distance due north maybe thirty, forty feet. Shotgun blasts, twenty-gauge. One crisp report and the second one muffled.

He set off at a dead run. His heart and breath hammered in his ears and the sound of the two gunshots still rang off the trees but there were no more shots and no howl and no cry for help. Nothing. The leaves drifted down in their lazy arcs as if nothing out of the ordinary had come this way and John ran.

He found Dean alone in a clearing lying on his back with his legs bent under him and his right arm across his chest as if he were pledging allegiance. He was still holding the shotgun and his face and hair were splattered with the gytrash's black blood and he was sucking air and staring up into the trees. John fell on his knees beside him and put a hand on his face. The gytrash's blood cold and viscous under his palm.

"Are you hurt?"

Dean shook his head.

"Did you hit it both times?"

The boy nodded and John asked him which way it had gone.

"North. That way. I got it right in the guts. I don't know how it's still up."

John got to his feet. "You need to get it in the heart. A gutshot won't kill it. Come on."

He held an arm out and Dean took it with his left hand and hauled himself upright.

"This way?" John asked and Dean nodded.

The gytrash had left a trail black as tar upon the dead and dying leaves and it was livid in the day's milky light. They were ten yards out of the clearing when he heard Dean fall beside him and he turned and saw the boy on his knees with his forehead down on the stock of his shotgun. He stooped and caught him just as he was falling over and ran his hand over his chest and stomach.

"Where are you hurt?"

"Dad..."

John's hand sank into a wetness at Dean's left hip and the boy tightened up and hissed through his teeth and John sat back on his heels and rolled Dean against his chest and saw a gaping wound in his left hip and claw marks that raked the length of his thigh down to his knee.

"Ah Jesus..."

"Is it bad?"

"No," John said. He pulled off his field coat and shirt and tore two strips off the shirt. "Little messy." He wound the strips around the deepest wounds and tied them off and Dean gasped and fisted his hands in the leaves when he made the tourniquets fast.

"Anywhere else?"

"What?"

"Are you hurt anywhere else?"

"My arm hurts."

John rolled the boy onto his back and felt his right arm. It was swelling beneath the sleeve and the fabric was already taut against it.

"That's broken. Okay."

John raised Dean up and put his field coat around him and pulled his arms through the sleeves. Dean was trembling and his face was damp and almost gray.

"Where is it?" he asked. "Where is it?"

"It's hurt. It won't come back."

The woods were deathly silent without so much as an insect chirp or even the sound of falling leaves or water. John leaned forward and tipped the boy over his shoulder. He gathered up his own shotgun and the Browning in his right hand and wrapped his left arm tight around Dean's legs and stood up and Dean stiffened and clutched the back of John's leg.

"I know it hurts. Hang in there."

Dean said nothing and John set off at a loping jog. He knew from the way Dean's breath was hitching that he was hurting him but he couldn't risk going slower. He had a two slugs chambered in the shotgun and he kept his eyes on the trees around him and went on. Every few yards he did a full-circle sweep of the area and saw nothing and after a mile he began to hear the normal sounds of the woods and knew he had left the gytrash behind.

By the time he got back to the car his arm was wet with Dean's blood and Dean had gone limp over his shoulder. He thought the boy had passed out but when he opened the door and laid him down in the backseat his eyes were open and he smiled at John and said, "It's not that bad."

John nodded and closed the door. He got behind the wheel and threw the car into reverse and sawed it around and slammed it into drive so hard its iron frame shuddered. On the road he said, "Dean. Talk to me. How're you doing?"

"I'm okay."

"Why the hell didn't you tell me you were hurt? Jesus Christ, Dean."

"I didn't think it was bad."

"Part of the job is knowing when you're out. Understand?"

"Yes, sir," Dean said. His voice was fading. "I think I got it though."

"You did. It would've torn your head off if you hadn't."

"Would've killed it if..."

"Dean?" John cut his eyes to the rearview mirror but there was nothing to see there but the blacktop road behind him and fog in the distance. "Dean?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Stay with me, Dean."

"Yes, sir."

* * *

Dean lay across the backseat and above him he could see the gray roof of the car and the cloudy domelight. He rolled his eyes up and saw white sky and tree branches flying past and that made him feel sick. He turned his face toward the back of the seat and studied the white stitching in the vinyl. The pain he was in was stunning, he hadn't even known that so much pain existed. It seemed as wholly outside of himself and as huge as the gytrash had been. He could still feel the recoil of the shotgun in his shoulder although that and even the broken arm were barely buzzing irritations compared to the shrieking agony in his hip and leg. He was all wet, bloody and sweating and cold.

He smiled. He said, "Sam will shit." His teeth were chattering.

"What? Dean?"

"Sam will shit, he'll...he'll be really..." His thoughts drifted and splintered and came back together and he said, "Jealous," and passed out.

When he came to the car was stopped and his father was in the backseat with him and he was wiping him off with a towel that had the oily rubber smell of the Impala's trunk.

"Dad?"

"Gotta get this black shit off you."

"What?"

"They'll ask about it at the hospital.

"I don't...I don't need..."

"Yeah you do," John said. He threw the towel on the floor and got up and out of the backseat and Dean heard the backdoor slam and then the driver's door and the engine turned over and Dean lay there and said, "Dad? Dad?" but John didn't answer.

* * *

John got back to the motel around three o'clock and when he opened the door Sam was on the couch with a book on his lap and his .410 lying on the floor out of arm's reach although he knew better. He looked up at his father standing in the doorway and he looked at the gun and back at his father and John shut the door behind him and crossed the room without saying anything.

"Where's Dean?"

He picked Dean's bag up off the floor and threw it on the bed and started shoving Dean's things into it, such as they were. Socks and t-shirts and his Walkman and toothbrush and there wasn't much else. Sam was at his elbow.

"Dad? Where's Dean?"

"In the hospital," he said. He didn't turn around.

"What?"

"He's in the hospital. He got a little banged up."

"He's okay, right? Dad? He's okay?"

"Yeah," John said. "He's fine. We're checking out. Get your stuff together."

"What, why?"

John stopped and turned around and looked down at Sam. "I don't know how long Dean's gonna be in the hospital so we're gonna find a place in Van Buren. Now get your stuff. Pronto."

Sam stared at him and his eyes dropped down and John felt his other son's drying blood on his hands and in his clothes as if it were burning him and for a moment he could just stand there. Sam looked up at John from under his bangs.

"What happened to him?"

"Get your stuff," John said and turned his back and went out to the car.

* * *

When they got to the hospital Dean was in a pediatric room with teddy bears on the walls. The kid in the bed by the door was on a ventilator and a woman who looked too old to be his mother sat beside him reading a Gideon's New Testament. In the back bed Dean was asleep on his stomach with his right arm in a cast beside his head.

"Dad," Sam whispered. "What's that?"

John looked down and saw the collection bottle fastened to the bed and the catheter winding up from it and under the blanket.

"Nothing. Don't touch it," he said.

"It looks like piss."

"Leave it alone."

He put his hands on the bedrail. Dean was very white and his face was scratched and he was sleeping with his eyes slitted open the way he'd slept when he was little more than a baby. John picked up his left hand and saw that he'd lost two fingernails and the others were clotted with blood and dirt that they hadn't cleaned out. Lazy sonsofbitches, he thought. Goddamn careless lazy sons of bitches. He took his army knife from his pocket and started to clean Dean's nails.

"Dad?"

"What?"

"When is he gonna wake up?"

"You heard the doctor. A few hours."

"Is he okay?"

"He's fine. He just needs to rest."

"Did you see that other kid?"

"Sam," John said. He put Dean's hand down on the bed and took out his wallet. He pulled out two dollars and gave them to Sam. "There's a vending machine down the hall, go get yourself something."

"What if he wakes up?"

"He's not gonna wake up any time soon. Go get yourself a soda and a Snickers or something." Sam folded the bills and looked at Dean and folded them again and didn't budge. "Go on, Sam."

Sam looked up at him and John nodded and Sam turned and left. When he was gone John raised the blanket. Dean was wearing a cotton hospital gown and John lifted it gingerly and stood there looking. He took a deep breath and let it out.

He replaced the gown and the blanket. He pulled up a chair and sat down and leaned over and put his hand on Dean's head. He combed his fingers through the boy's hair. When Dean was very small his hair had been white-blond and now it was darker, like his mother's had been. He had his mother's face too, and over time it would probably change but now in its still childish contours his face had a softness that was nearly feminine and so much like Mary. The curve of his jaw, the blunt tip of his nose, the arch of his eyebrows. They were all hers. John was shaking and he pressed the knuckles of his other hand against his mouth and sat there.

* * *

It was nearly midnight and he was dozing in the chair with Sam half on his lap and asleep when a sound roused him and he opened his eyes and saw Dean looking at him.

"Hey," John whispered. "Hey, kiddo." He gently pushed Sam off him and leaned forward. "How're you feeling?"

"Okay."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Got the wind knocked outta you, huh?"

Dean smiled. "Yeah."

"The doctor said you're gonna be fine. You'll be outta here in a couple days."

"Why's Sam sleeping?"

"It's really late."

"Is it dark?"

"Yeah. It's almost midnight."

"Oh," he said. He closed his eyes and opened them. "I screwed up."

"No," John said. "No, you kicked some tail back there, kid."

"Is it dead?"

"Probably, by now. You got it twice Dean, point blank. Beautiful shots."

"You need to go and look. You need to make sure."

"Don't worry about it. You just take it easy."

"What did you tell them?"

"Bear attack. We were out hunting and we surprised a bear and it just happened like that."

"Okay," Dean said. "What's our name?"

"Sullivan."

"Sullivan?"

"Right."

"Okay. Sullivan." He closed his eyes and was quiet and John thought he'd fallen asleep. Then without opening his eyes he said, "Dad?"

"Yeah, Dean."

"I was really fuckin scared."

John reached out and took Dean's hand and ran his thumb over the scraped knuckles. "You wouldn't've known it." Dean smiled and John said, "Go back to sleep. Everything's okay."

"Yeah," Dean said and he closed his eyes.

* * *

Dean was able to sit up in bed the next morning in a weird cockeyed perch on his right hip with his knees drawn up and his broken arm cradled in his lap and John was in the chair and Sam cross-legged at the foot of the bed.

Sam said, "Lemme see it."

Dean squinted at him through a narcotic haze. "Gimme five dollars."

"I don't have five dollars."

"Aw, so sorry. No money no looky."

"Is it gross?"

"It's totally gross. Hamburger."

"I wanna see it."

"Get lost."

"Dad."

"Sam," John said. "Leave your brother alone."

"You suck," Sam hissed at Dean. Dean grinned and made a jerking off gesture with his left hand and John said, "Okay that's enough," and thought, He's gonna be fine. He's gonna be just fine. He couldn't stop looking at him.

* * *

He went to see Dean the next morning but Dean was sleeping and he took Sam out for breakfast and Sam asked when Dean would get out of the hospital.

"Few more days."

"Are we staying here?"

"After he's out? No, what for?"

"Well," Sam said. He pushed around the pancakes on his plate. "It's almost October. And the doctor said Dean would need some therapy or something."

"Yeah?"

"So..."

"Come on Sam, spit it out."

Sam put down his fork and sat up and looked at his father. "So why don't I start school? It's right down the street I wouldn't even need you to take me there. And the motel is nice and the hospital is really close by if Dean has appointments or something and it's gonna be winter soon anyway and...and maybe in the spring you could look for that thing again."

"I'm going up there this afternoon," John said. "Make sure it's dead."

"You're going up there?"

"Yeah."

"Am I going with you?"

"Hell no."

"What if something happens to you?"

"Nothing's gonna happen to me. That thing's got two slugs in it thanks to your brother and if it's not dead yet it's not gonna take long to finish off."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"You're going back to the motel and on my way back I'll pick you up and we'll go see Dean."

"I could be in school. I'm supposed to be in school."

The waitress came over with the coffee pot and John nodded and she smiled and topped off his cup and left.

"Dad?"

John sat there and turned the white mug around in a circle on the table. In the black liquid he could see his own face and the swag light above him and the window next to their booth. He looked outside where his car was backed into the parking space beneath the window. Dead leaves were lodged against the Impala's wipers. His hands had been all bloody when he'd brought Dean out of the woods and from here he could see a stain of dried blood on the rear doorhandle. He looked back at Sam.

"You like it here?"

"I just...I wish we didn't always move around so much."

John nodded. He put a spoon in the coffee and stirred it for no reason and took it out and clinked it on the edge of the cup and set it down on the table. He picked up the cup and looked at his son over the edge of it.

"I'll think about it," he said and Sam smiled.

* * *

It hadn't rained since the day Dean had gotten hurt and when John parked at the same ranger station he saw a bright drizzle of dried blood on the pavement. It was still red. Today the sky was brilliant blue and the colors of the leaves stood out in jeweltones against it and the sun was strong and the air almost mild but still with that scent and feeling of fall on it. Time for picking apples. He took his pack and his twelve-gauge shotgun out of the trunk and the Remington rifle also and he put the rifle over his shoulder and chambered a round in the shotgun and he stopped and listened to the woods and then went on.

He hiked due north as they had that other day and he found the bear's carcass in the same place although now furred with maggots and stinking. In the place where the gytrash had gotten Dean he found a red flannel scrap of the boy's shirt and he stood there for a moment and looked at it and then he rolled it up neatly and put it into his pocket. He raised his head and looked around at the tree trunks, the sun in the leaves. Today the birds were singing.

The drag path of Dean's body was undisturbed and easy to follow and he could see gouges where Dean had tried to grab onto the ground. His son's two fingernails would be somewhere in them. In the clearing there was still blood on the leaves where John had found him. He remembered kneeling over the boy and asking him if he was hurt. He remembered Dean saying he wasn't. I didn't see it, he thought. I didn't see it.

In a few months these woods would be shrouded in snow and all trace of these things would be gone. For now there lay a black trail of the gytrash's blood upon the leaves and ferns and roots of the forest floor. The thing had been wounded and clumsy in its retreat and John had no trouble tracking it. Above him the sun was near its midday peak. He continued on a quarter of a mile and the woods became quiet and he put the shotgun under his arm took the rifle from his shoulder and bridged the barrel across his arm and when he came to a turning in the trees the gytrash looked up at him.

John dropped back a step. He was maybe ten feet from it. It was sitting like a drunkard in a slouch with its hindlegs stuck out in front of it and its claws turned up on its thighs and its back against the vestige of some colonist's stone wall and its belly was open and crusted thick with its own tarry blood. He could smell it and hear it breathing. Its eyes were the ashen red of banked coals and its snout was matted with blood. It put its wolflike head down and blood ran from its mouth and John sighted the rifle and curled his finger around the trigger and then it looked up at him again and its eyes were yellow. Burning. Like sulfurlamps burning in its head.

It looked at John and said, "How's your boy?"

For a moment John was stunned motionless. He looked up from the riflescope and stared at this thing that could not speak, should not speak, was for all its supernatural abilities still little more than a beast and as he looked at it it grinned as it also should not have done and then the yellow light went out of its eyes and it dropped its head and John pulled the trigger and shot it through the heart and killed it.

He approached it slowly and with the muzzle of the rifle he turned it over onto its back and stared at it. Its eyes were open and black and already clouding. He stood there and studied it.

"You don't talk," he said.

He set down the guns and his pack and took a bowie knife from the pack and sawed off its head. Then with a short-handled spade he dug two pits some distance apart and rolled the body into one of the pits and the head into the other and filled in the pits with dirt and tamped them down and covered them with leaves.

When he got back to the ranger station it was mid-afternoon and he put his things in the trunk and got behind the wheel. He sat there with his elbow on the car door and his hand over his mouth and stared into the trees where the fading daylight was already not reaching to the forest floor and the woods were growing dark. Dark as all the dark places. Known and unknown.

After a while he took out his journal and slid the pencil from it and turned to a clean page and wrote the location and the date and the time and the weather at the top of the page. He sketched the gytrash as he had come upon it sitting against the stone wall. When he was finished with the sketch underneath it he wrote This one could talk, but he didn't write down what it had said. Then he wrote Yellow eyes, and closed the journal and put it on the passenger seat and turned the ignition and pulled out.

Go to Part Two

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

roque-clasique.livejournal.com

Ah, lovely as always.
I truly envy the rhythm of your sentences.
This is a great look at John, and you write him the way I like him best -- a good father, a good man, doing what he can, maybe not the best, but he's trying.
Very eerie ending to that chapter.
I can't wait for the next part.

From:

Fic: Deguello , Part 1 of 2

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