#consent with the girl he was with in the backseat and i got really protective of her. she was so grateful she ended up kissing me instead !

[fionarara]

still randomly remembering that one time i attended the creator of Minecraft's annual house party even though i've never even played that video game lmao and after getting to watch Skrillex dj in such an intimate setting (surreal), we all hung out and he had like a harem of cute girls surrounding him on the couch, haha it seemed super platonic though and he was really respectful,,, literally he was so kind to me and everyone,, by far the nicest celeb i've ever met besides elijah wood.

[traumatizeddfox]

hi fox — i wanted your opinion on something that happened to me when i was 17. please know that i’m a girl. i went out with some friends and i consumed alcohol for the first time ever (around three glasses of rum mixed with water and ice). later that night one of my guy friends (22 at time) was driving to my best friends house bc i was staying over. we had flirted in the past and i recall we even spoke about having sex but we never really ever fooled around (it’s also important for you to know that he had had a couple of beers, but he’s no lightweight, it takes a lot more than that for him to actually face the effects of alcohol). on the way to my friends house he started talking about how sad he was about his ex girlfriend leaving him and about loosing his dad, and so he started crying (i don’t recall being 100% sober at that point), and so i didn’t get off of the car when we got to my friends house. im not sure how one thing led to the other but he ended up asking me if he could grind on me, which i stupidly agreed to (but only that), but somehow he managed to remove my bottoms and actually penetrate me (no protection or actual verbal consent from my part for him to do so). just so that you understand how things were happening: he told me to go to the backseat and he placed me on all fours and started grinding me from the back, and somehow he penetrated me after that. and so he continued to be inside of me, the whole time i kept telling him that i felt like a dog, that he was f***king me like an animal. mind you this was only the third time i had had sex (the two first times were with a previous boyfriend). i recall telling my closest friend that i had felt forced and that i felt violated. afterwards, like a week after that, i told him that that night i had felt forced by him, and throughout the rest of my relationship with him i continued to remind him how i hadn’t wanted to have sex with him that night. i continued to see him and sleep with him afterwards (i turned 18 during this time). i ended up breaking ties with him after i found out that he was after a 15 year old. i’m 21 now, and looking back at that night, considering that i was only 17, was still a little drunk, only consented to grinding, and felt guilty after he started talking about his dead father — i feel so strange…and i think that i was raped. was i raped ?

you were raped 100% the fact you didn’t consent at all, and were also drunk or under the influence AND you were 17. so yes you were raped im sorry :(

[winchester-fantasies]

Backtrack - Borrowed Time: Chapter 1

Backtrack Masterlist

Series Summary: What if you were the one Dean came to instead of Lisa? Rewrite of “Swan Song” and some of S6.

Word Count: 1310

Warnings: angst, some swearing

Pairing: Dean x Female!Reader

A/N: I know this a really short chapter, but think of it as a kind of prologue to Part Two! Hope you enjoy. ❤❤ Chapter 1′s song: My Body by Eliza Shaddad.

Winchester Fantasies’ Masterlist

“‘Night, Mandy!” you called to your coworker as she walked down the sidewalk. She turned around, raising her hand in a quick wave, continuing to walk backwards before turning forwards once again. 

You turned your key in the lock before shaking the door gently. Satisfied that it was properly locked, you threw your keys into your backpack before hoisting it over your shoulder and heading towards home. 

The night was quiet, the only sounds being those of dogs barking in the distance, an occasional car driving past, or a plane passing overhead. It was warm, too, humidity enveloping you as sweat trickled down your back and fireflies danced in the waning light. It was a perfect summer night, you thought. Much like a certain moonlit night filled with passion on a clifftop overlooking the sea. But that had been ten years ago. 

You sighed heavily as you tried to get your mind off the past as it so easily tended to do. You were twenty-nine now. You weren’t supposed to be thinking about the boy who had captured your heart and left it broken. But it was impossible. Dean was etched into your mind like a tattoo. 

You rounded the corner, turning down the sidewalk that led you to your apartment. You walked up the stone steps leading to your front door, unlocking it and stepping into the darkness of your home. You flipped on the light, hanging your keys on the hooks by the door.

You walked to the dining room, depositing your backpack on the table before heading to the kitchen. Taking out the moscato from the fridge, you poured yourself a glass of the red liquid. You were feeling a little nostalgic and that brought all the memories of the past that you had so desperately tried to run from.

After Dean had left, you’d waited around for years until you finally accepted he wasn’t coming back. But living in the same town where you’d experienced so many firsts with him was like a slap in the face. You could barely walk out of your house without being reminded of him. 

So two days after your twenty-second birthday you packed a bag, left your house at three in the morning, and never looked back. You traveled from state to state, searching for a place you could settle down and try to piece your heart back together. But no place really felt like home - not if Dean wasn’t there.

It wasn’t until you reached Crested Butte, Colorado that you finally found a place you could settle down; a place that called to your battered heart. You got yourself a small apartment, applied for several different jobs, and finally landed one at a local art gallery. You hadn’t realized you had a passion for art until you started working there and began to dabble a little in painting.

You hadn’t really made a name for yourself. You never went to college like Leah. You’d remained a nomad, and you hated the looks your parents always sent your way. They never said anything, but you could tell they were disappointed in how you’d turned out. You weren’t Leah.

Leah had finished college and was now a big time attorney. She had married an Ivy League dude right out of college and had two kids. Now Brad was running for state representative and they had another kid on the way. Leah had always been the golden child, and she still was.

As much as you wanted to please your parents and make them proud, the need to be your own person was much stronger. That’s one of the reasons you hadn’t gone home in nearly seven years. You couldn’t stand to see the disappointment in their eyes and the lecture you knew would eventually come. 

But you felt you’d finally found your niche in art, and you were pretty good at it, too, if the amount of money you were making from selling your work was any indication. You were truly happy and for the first time in your life you felt content. Well��. Mostly content. There was still the part of your heart that yearned for a companion; someone you could come home to and share a life with. It wasn’t that you hadn’t tried, heaven knows you had. But it just never seemed to pan out. You had a long list of shitty boyfriends and failed relationships. You had only had one good guy in your life; he’d been the love of your life, and even he had left you….

You heaved a sigh, setting your glass down on the countertop with more force than you’d intended, the wine sloshing out of the glass. You needed to get your mind off the past. There wasn’t anything you could do to change it, and you were only hurting yourself further by reopening old wounds. But how could you when Dean had been woven into the very fabric of your heart?

You ran your hands through your windswept hair before making your way to the spare bedroom that you’d converted to a makeshift art studio. It was by no means perfect, but it suited your needs. 

Flipping on the light, you made your way to the far wall where a canvas sat on a large easel. You smiled and studied the painting you’d been working on for several weeks now. It didn’t usually take you long to finish an art piece, whipping it out in a matter of mere days. But this one was special. Maybe it was the reason you couldn’t forget that summer of ‘98, you thought as you stared at the cliff overlooking a cove. 

You sighed, picking up your painting supplies and starting on the low-hanging moon. It sometimes surprised you how much of that fateful night you remembered. Most people would have forgotten it long ago, but it was still so imprinted in your memory that sometimes you still felt the way he felt as he hovered over you, the way your bodies melded together, the love you felt, and the way the salty breeze caressed your sweaty skin as he gave himself over to you completely. 

You felt the awakening arousal course through your veins at the memory and you shook yourself. As much as you were addicted to revisiting the past, you had to admit just how stupid you both had been. You’d been so young and in love, but now looking back, you were shocked and thankful at just how lucky you’d gotten that night, especially since he hadn’t used protection and you sure as hell hadn’t been on the pill. You were already hurting when he left, and you couldn’t imagine what it would’ve been like if you’d also had a kid. 

You had just put the finishing touches on the sky when a loud knock sounded on your door. You frowned. It was late. None of your friends would be making a call, especially this late at night.

You set down your supplies, wiping your hands on the paint-covered cloth beside you before making your way to the front door. You cautiously approached it, another thudding knock sounding out in the silence. You glanced out the peephole. The head of a man was visible through the hole, but you couldn’t make out anything definite.

You stepped away, worrying your lip. You didn’t usually answer the door to strangers. You still weren’t an outgoing person, plus nowadays you couldn’t really trust anyone. You started to turn away from the door, but something stopped you. You didn’t know what it was, but you found yourself going back to the door and opening it.

You peeked out before swinging it open wide. You stepped back, your jaw hanging slack. “Oh, my god,” you breathed, your stomach dropping and goosebumps rolling across your skin. 

“Dean?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for reading! If you liked what you read, let me know!! ❤❤

***Please do not share my content on any other platform without my consent.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Everything:

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Dean Girls:

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Backtrack:

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[samsexualdeancurious]

Thanks For Listening | Chapter Three

Square: Free Space

Pairing: Sam x Reader

Words: 1,653

Warnings: hurt!Reader, pining, eventual smut, dirty talk, voice!kink, unprotected sex.

Summary: Sam hosts two podcasts - a secret one for hunters called the War Room and a public one with fellow hunter Y/N called Criminal History. Y/N and Sam have never seen each other, let alone met, but that doesn’t stop Sam from worrying when Y/N suddenly goes missing.

Betaed by @manawhaat​

Written for @spnkinkbingo​

Header by me and Mana

Masterlist - AO3

--

The Impala is simultaneously absolutely gorgeous and scary as fuck.

You’re sitting in a diner on the edge of town when the black beast of a car pulls into the parking lot, a stark contrast to the crisp white snow piling up. You hear the roar of the engine first and twist in your seat to see it. Sam texted you about thirty minutes ago to let you know their ETA and what the car looks like, as well as what they’re wearing - you told him what you’re wearing as well so he should be able to recognize you. Your stomach flips at the sight of the car and you force yourself to face forward in your seat instead of staring.

The waitress has just brought your coffee when the bell over the door rings. You glance up and your breath catches in your throat.

You see Dean first. He’s tall, broad shoulders made even broader by his green jacket. Like most hunters, he’s dressed in at least three layers including the jacket, blue jeans, and heavy biker boots. He’s handsome in a classically beautiful way, with his strong jaw, plump lips, and carefully styled hair. Behind him, though, is a man who takes your breath away.

Sam is taller than his brother and handsome in a more… ethereal way? It’s not a word you would ever think to use to describe a man, let alone a fellow hunter, but it fits Sam’s high cheekbones and pointed, almost delicate features. He’s layered up, too, with a dusty orange jacket over a blue and orange plaid shirt. He brushes a hand through his long hair as he scans the diner quickly. Fox-tilted eyes land on you and Sam’s face lights up.

“Y/N!” he says happily, crossing the diner with a few strides of those ridiculously long legs.

Before you realize you’ve moved, you’re on your feet and Sam is sweeping you into his embrace. You loop your own arms around his slim waist and can’t resist breathing in his scent - coffee and sandalwood and a hint of vanilla.

“Hiya, Chief,” you say, grinning up at him. “Glad to finally put a face to the voice.”

Sam’s smile is captivating. He’s a little scruffy but that doesn’t hide his adorable dimples and it definitely doesn’t hide the beauty mark beside his nose. A sudden desire to kiss that little mark wells up in your chest but you quickly push that down.

“This is Dean,” Sam is saying, beckoning his brother over.

“Hi.” Dean offers his hand for you to shake, green eyes taking you in. He’s putting on a flirtatious front but you can see that he’s sizing you up, deciding whether or not you’re a threat.

“It’s good to finally meet you,” you tell him. “Sam talks about you a lot.”

Dean chuckles and relaxes a little. “Trust me, he talks a lot about you, too. It’s about time you kids finally met.”

Your cheeks heat up and you duck your head a little, hoping neither brother notices. When you glance up at Dean again, though, he’s smirking. Shit, he definitely knows.

“I hope this place has good burgers,” Dean says, thankfully choosing to ignore your (probably very obvious) crush on his brother. “Move your ass, Sammy. I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry.”

The brothers immediately start bickering, a back and forth that’s both hilarious and heartwarming to witness. You sit again and the boys slide into the other side of the booth, somehow managing to order their food without once breaking their stride. When the food arrives, Dean launches into teasing Sam about his grilled chicken sandwich. Sam just shakes his head and turns his attention to you.

“I’m so sorry you have to listen to this,” he says, his tone telling you he’s getting back at his brother a little.

“Hey now,” Dean protests. “I’m a joy to listen to.”

You can’t help a giggle at Sam’s eye roll. “I don’t mind, really. It’s actually kind of sweet to see you guys like this, considering the reputation you Winchesters have in the community.”

Sam’s expression softens at that and he turns his attention back to his food with a smile. Dean, however, pouts and begins shoveling food in his mouth.

“So, Wendigo?” Dean asks around a mouthful of food, interrupting the moment of silence that’s settled. “Haven’t seen one of those in a while.”

“We packed some camping gear.” Sam side eyes his brother, who actually looks kind of adorable with his cheeks full of food. “But I’m hoping we won’t have to spend the night outside.”

“I’ve got a room at the place down the street,” you say. “It’s mine for the week. I think they have some vacancies left so you guys can sleep in proper beds.”

---

After the boys get their own cabin at the Aspen Cottages, you decide it would be better to only take one car and all pile into the Impala. You, unlike Dean, don’t mind riding in the backseat, especially of a car as gorgeous and well cared for as the Impala.

The drive to the campsite is a bumpy one and you arrive around sundown. You hate hunting in the woods at night and part of you wants to ask the boys to camp until morning but you also don’t want to spend any more time out here than is absolutely necessary.

“Holy shit, it’s cold,” Dean says, popping open the hidden compartment in the trunk.

You nod, hopping in place a little as you bury your nose in the thick scarf you’re so glad you brought, tugging your hat down tighter over your ears. Sam and Dean don their own winter gear - Sam, you can’t help noting, looks adorable in a beanie - and then you head off along the trail.

---

The Winchesters are excellent trackers. Once you reach the campsite the last victims were taken from, they quickly pick up the trail of the Wendigo. Dean takes the lead and Sam brings up the rear. You get the distinct feeling he’s doing it to protect you but decide not to mention it. If you’re honest with yourself, it’s a chivalrous gesture you can definitely appreciate.

The forest is eerily silent beyond the crunch of three pairs of boots in the snow. No one talks beyond one or two words for about a half hour, before Sam moves in to walk beside you.

“You doing okay?” he asks, keeping his voice low.

“Sam,” you sigh, shaking your head in fond amusement. “It’s been over a month. I’m fine.”

You can see in the way he turns his head away from you that he would be blushing if his cheeks weren’t already pink from the cold. “Sorry.”

You bump his arm gently with your shoulder. “I don’t mind. It’s sweet.”

Sam’s cheeks turn even redder and he stammers a little. Lucky for him, Dean swoops in.

“Quit flirting, you two. That looks like our wendigo den.”

You follow his pointing finger to a pile of boulders against the cliff face. Behind one of the largest boulders is a dark opening you really don’t want to go into.

“Why can’t monsters ever live in nice places?” you complain, already digging out your flashlight. “At least a cheery little cabin?”

Sam chuckles, giving his flamethrower a once over. Dean stares at him, appalled.

“What?” Sam lifts an eyebrow at his brother.

“I make those jokes and get an eye roll,” Dean says. “She makes those jokes and gets a laugh?”

Sam shrugs, shooting you a wink. “She’s cuter than you are.”

Dean pretends to gag while heat rushes to your cheeks.

“Hey, asshole,” you yell, your voice echoing around the cavern. “Fresh meat.”

The wendigo screeches, claws scraping against the stone walls and sending a shudder down your spine. Beside you, Sam readies the flamethrower as the sounds of the wendigo grow closer.

Suddenly it’s there, looming large in the beam of your flashlight. Sam doesn’t hesitate, the burst of flame striking the wendigo right in the chest. It screams and stumbles backward before crumpling as the flames engulf it.

“Good aim,” you say, relaxing as the creature is devoured by flames.

“Thanks.” Sam flashes you a grin. “We make a pretty good team.”

You shift a little closer to him, warmth blooming in your chest. “Yeah, we do.”

He leans down so his mouth is close to your ear. “I think next time we should do this without Dean.”

You laugh softly, hoping he's hinting at what you think he is as you reply, “Well, I did get my own room.”

Sam brightens up at that. One hand comes up to rest in the small of your back. “That's true.” Something in his tone and the firm press of his hand through your puffy coat suggests he definitely was hinting at exactly what you hope he was.

You allow yourself to be drawn in closer, enjoying the way his body feels against yours even through the layers of bulky winter clothes. Sam tips your chin up with one finger, colorful eyes flickering with wendigo fire searching yours for a moment.

“You’re okay with this?” he asks. Arousal shoots down your spine - something about the desire for consent combined with Sam’s velvet smooth voice is just so… damn.

You nod, lifting your chin in invitation. That’s all Sam needs. His lips press softly against your own, testing the waters. You want more, though, and are more than happy to let Sam know with a hand in his hair. He chuckles and obliges.

“Seriously, guys?”

You break apart frantically, stumbling a little. Dean laughs and brushes between you two. The girls you came to rescue, which he apparently found, giggle and follow. Once they’re moving off down the tunnel, Sam reaches over to take your hand.

Your stomach does more happy flips. Your heart agrees with the sentiment.

--

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--

Team Forever: @mrswhozeewhatsis @books-and-icecream @laughing-at-the-darkness @tumbler-tidbits​ @imsuperawkward​

Team Sam: @saxxxology​

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[xaphrin]

What Wakes in Shadows - aka: “I love you, you dumb idiot.”

“Fuck.”

Damian thought the bass of the warehouse around him was going to burst his eardrums. It was annoying and it was so loud he was sure Metropolis could hear it from six hours away. The flashing lights whipped around him and the smell of alcohol, dirt, and sweat practically burned his skin like acid. Disgusting. Who came to these things? Oh. Right. Gar and Raven. Idiots. He looked around the warehouse and glared at a few girls whose stares wandered a down the length of his body - he was not interested. His arm twitched more out of habit than anything else. It was like the echo of the brand was still there, leaving an echo of Raven where he didn’t expect her.

Why in the world had she made that deal with Blood? Jesus. She was so fucking stupid.

His anger rose and he whipped his head around the dark warehouse, still looking for her. Where the fuck was she, and why in the hell did she let Gar drag her to a place like this? Fucking hell. He ground his teeth together and ran his hand through his hair as he elbowed someone out of the way, looking through the dark shadows and glowsticks. When he found he he was going to throttle her. A girl pressed against him, dragging her tongue along his ear, and he shoved her out of the way.

“Consent.”

She pouted, her pupils high from whatever she was on, and wandered away. Damian rolled his eyes and wiped at his ear with his sleeve, still scanning the space for Raven. He saw her across the dancefloor, talking to someone who wasn’t even making eye-contact with her - his eyes were completely glued to her chest. At least pick a good guy, Raven. Geeze. Damian felt possession rise up like a poison, threading through his whole body until it felt like he was going to burn up in a shower of flames. He pushed through a group of dancers and over to where she was standing.

Raven blinked, her eyes wide. She looked from the idiot to him and tried to say something. “Dami-”

“We’re going.” His hand wrapped around her wrist and he looked around for another exit, pulling Raven along. “Say goodbye to this asshole, and let’s fucking leave. I don’t have time to deal with your shit right now.”

“Damian.”

He ignored her protest, pulling her out of this sanctuary of bass and noise and into the sickly scent of rain and rusted metal outside. It was pouring now, the dirt lot turning into a thick mud that caked the soles of his shoes. Honestly, he couldn’t care right now. He was so damn angry at her for doing what she did. Blood? After he told her not to? She was testing every inch of his patience, and he wasn’t entirely certain he wouldn’t kill her by the end of the night. The bass still pounded in the back of his head and he glared at her, anger ripping through him.

“Fuck, Raven.” He shook, clenching his hands into fists. “What in the world were you thinking?”

She blinked, as if she was struggling to come up with something to say. “Gar was with me.”

“Not about that!” He wanted to punch something, and realized why Jason preferred the raucous release of guns to the subtle style of a sword. It was cathartic to watch something fucking blow up when you were this angry. Damian released her wrist and shoved the sleeve of his shirt up, showing her his bare arm. “This. You… you promised me. You promised me that you weren’t going to Blood, but this is gone and I… I know what the fuck you did. I’m not stupid. Fucking hell, Raven. Do you even know what you’ve done?”

“There wasn’t a way to fix it!” Her voice sounded panicked and she looked up at him, swallowing air. “We looked! We looked for months, Damian… I got… I got desperate. The longer we dragged that out, the longer it would take before we found an answer, and the more your soul and your magic would be pulled into me. I didn’t want that. Not for you. Not when-”

“What did you promise him?” He pushed her against his car and glared down at her. “What in the fuck did you promise Blood? Because he doesn’t do favors, I know.”

“I… it’s… I don’t know.” Raven looked away, pulling her thin jacket closer to her. She shivered. “He said he would collect when he was ready. But… there weren’t any real terms of repayment discussed.”

“Fucking….” Damian felt that anger rip through him again and he glared at her, wishing he had the powers she did. At least he could have blown something up.  “You… you’re so goddamned dumb.” He ran his fingers through his wet hair, nearly ripping out the strands. Did she even know? “Do you even know what you agreed to?”

“He can’t touch me in Azarath. It’s another dimension, and the monks will protect me there. I… I figured I would be safe when this semester is over.” Raven looked up into his eyes and shifted, her face sad. She looked as if she had been turning this thought over for a while, uncertain how the ending would play out. She chewed on her lower lip, and that… that wasn’t helping. She didn’t need to look vulnerable when he was so damn angry at her. Raven pushed her wet hair out of her face. “I figured after how I royally fucked everything up this past year, the monks would never let me free anyway. I would need to stay there until my end finally came.”

That made him even angrier, and he nearly punched out his own window he was so mad. How in the world could she be so damn selfish? His eyes narrowed and he set his jaw with a click. “So, that’s it? You’re just going to fucking leave? Just… just leave me here?”

“You don’t like-”

“I fucking love you, you dumb idiot.”

Raven’s eyes widened and she pulled back, her hand pressing against his chest. He watched as she swallowed, unsure of what to say next. “W-what?”

He growled at her and pushed her against his car, not even trying to hide the rush of emotions inside him. “I don’t repeat myself.”

He watched as the rain spilled down her face, wetting her hair and pouring down her face. She was gasping, swallowing air, her hands shaking against him. Raven shivered, and she looked up into his eyes. “Kiss me.”

He didn’t even pause to question his own actions before his mouth was on hers, pushing her against the side of his car. He wanted to yell at her, wanted to tell her how fucking stupid she was, wanted to tell her how much he didn’t want her to return to Azarath - he wanted so many things. But instead he wrapped his arms around her and pushed her tight against his car, his fingers burying into her hair. Their lips slid against each other, rain pouring down, the scent of mud filling his senses, and he murmured her name between kisses.

It was cathartic, but he still wanted to punch something - or at the very least, destroy something. He tilted his head to the side and deepened the kiss, his tongue sliding along her lower lip as he tasted every bit of her. His hand found her tights and he dug his fingers into the thin fabric, ripping holes. He really should buy her new ones, this was the third pair he ruined making out with her.

“Damian…”

He shivered, and before he knew what he was doing, he dropped to his knees in front of her, ripping her tights even further. His breath was a ragged thing, ripping into his lungs as he smelled the scent of her wetness mixing with the earthy smell of the rain. He wanted her. He wanted her more than he ever let himself feel, and… and he should have realized this fucking months ago. He should have known what he wanted before this became such a complicated mess.

His fingers pulled the edge of her panties to the side, exposing her, and Damian slid his tongue along the length of her. She tasted almost sweet, mixed with rain and his own desire, he thought that he could probably gorge himself on her if she let him. Raven gasped and her hand threaded in his hair for just a moment before she groped for the handle of his car. It popped open and they fell back into the backseat of his car. Damian had barely had the good sense to shut the door before he found himself over Raven again, his hands pulling down her underwear and tights, tossing them under the front seat.

Raven pushed him into a sitting position before she crawled into his lap, her fingers digging into his hair.

“It wants to be free.”

Damian glared up at her as he pulled her closer, his fingers spreading her and finding her clit. She tightened around him, and he felt some iota of pride at knowing how weak she was for him. Almost as weak as he was for her. “I’m in love with you, not your demon, so try to keep it contained.”

Raven shivered against him, and her hands fumbled against the zipper in his jeans, sliding over the head of his cock. Damian sucked in a breath, trying to last at least a little longer than the last time she had touched him this freely. His head tilted back against the seat, and he looked up into her eyes. His fingers threaded through her hair and he pulled her tight against him, his mouth desperately seeking hers. Every kiss felt like it was a stitch, sewing them together. He wanted to be part of her forever, and he wanted her to be part of him - the way they had been before she had made that stupid deal with Blood.

“Raven.”

Her eyes slid closed and she pressed her forehead against his, swallowing breaths until she calmed down. “Sorry.”

He closed his eyes and slid his hands down her back. “Don’t fucking apologize. You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

Raven pulled back and blinked, her eyes wide.

“I don’t have a condom.” He rolled his shoulders and took a shaking breath. “And I’m guessing you probably don’t have one either.”

“Oh.” Her face burned and she scrambled off him, pulling her skirt back down to her knees. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” He sighed and leaned back into the seat, looking out at the dark sky. He shouldn’t have been so damn eager to get to her. He should have at least come prepared with… something. Damian rubbed the back of his neck and looked away. “Let’s…. Let’s cool off before we do something we both regret.”

“I… I can’t get pregnant.” Raven looked away, shame coloring her face. “It’s… ah… when I was younger, the monks thought it would be best if the spawn of Trigon didn’t have spawn of her own. So… I… I don’t exactly have the equipment for creating offspring.” She paused, glancing back at him. “If that’s what you’re worried about, anyway.”  

Damian stared at her, eyes wide. They did what to her? And she still wanted to go back? “Raven…”

She shifted, pulling her skirt down further. “I was young. I don’t really even remember, so… no loss right?” She took a shaky breath and looked out the window they had fogged up, her voice quiet. They both looked at the condensation running down the glass, taking slow, ragged breaths as they tried to understand just what happened between them. Damian’s hand tightened next to him, and he swallowed air as he tried not to think about Raven’s bare thigh pressing against his own.

She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “Let’s go home.”

Damian looked at her, knowing his face was unreadable. A long moment passed between them before he shook his head. “No.”

Raven blinked, but stayed silent.

“No. Not tonight. I don’t want to go back to the dorms tonight.”

“Then… where?”

He licked his lips and looked at her, expression dark. Choices pooled in the back of his mind and he desperately tried to search for the right one, but he already knew the answer. He didn’t even know why he tried to create a response that didn’t exist. He took a shaky breath and looked over at her, watching her eyes as they searched his own.  

“We’ll find somewhere, but I… I want you with me.”

[mirkwoodshewolf]

A girl’s best familiar; Winchester brothers x sister reader

Here is yet another supernatural fic that I worked on after seeing another episode of SPN. I may even post another one that I finished recently yesterday. Now the opening scene was inspired from s8 ep.15 which kinda helped inspire the whole fic. Now I will add a face cast for another character in this story. I also want to apologize for the ending incase it sucked cause I feel like it did so I would like some feedback on what you all though of it.

Now warnings: Swearing, SUICIDE IS MENTION *If this triggers you PLEASE DO NOT READ IT*, torture *again if triggered DO NOT READ*, doggies (yes that is a warning I made it for my Dean oneshot) 

______________________________________________________

It all began with a stay at a hotel in St. Louis. Sam and Dean Winchester had just finished up a case and were gonna stay one more night at their motel then take off early the next morning back to the bunker.  Sam was in the bathroom washing his hands when he heard the sound of scratching at the door.

He shut off the water and turned around slowly and heard the scratching continue. He walked towards the door and slowly opened it to reveal a pure black Alaskan noble companion dog sitting outside.  It looked up at Sam and whimpered looking up at him with big brown puppy dog eyes.  Sam looked around hoping to see an owner but that’s when the dog raced inside and as Sam tried to stop him it was too late.  The Alaskan noble hoped up on his bed and made itself comfortable.

Sam closed the door and walked up towards the dog and spoke to it.

“Oh boy umm….hey, you friendly?” He held out his hand and the dog sniffed it before giving it a lick then Sam said, “Friendly, good, alright. You’re a pretty cool-looking dog”. The dog then rolled onto its back grunting revealing his belly to Sam. “Oh really you want a belly scratch?” Sam proceeded to him a belly scratch which he seemed to enjoy as its tongue rolled out of its mouth panting happily. “So who do you belong to?” 

Sam took notice of the bandana wrapped around the dog’s neck and lifted it up to see if there was also a collar underneath but saw that there wasn’t any.

“No collar or tags just a bandana okay….what are you doing here boy?” It was then Sam heard a familiar rumble of the Impala signaling that his older brother Dean was back. “Oh no” Sam muttered which made the dog whimper.

Sam opened the door and quickly shut it and greeted his brother and Dean greeted him back as he held in his hand a couple bags of groceries.

“Okay, okay look before you get pissed off. I just want you to know that this isn’t my fault. He just—showed up at the door, okay? Didn’t track any mud just wanted a belly scratched, I figured maybe he could spend the night and we could—try to find his home in the morning”. Sam then opened the door but when Dean looked inside he was even more surprised to see what was inside.

Now leaning up against Sam’s bed was a man about the same age as the brothers, sleeked back pure black hair, dark grey eyes that almost looked black, a scruffy beard starting to form.  His clothing was pure casual but the significant feature was the black jacket, a couple of rings decorated his fingers, and around his neck was the same red bandana that the Alaskan noble wore.  Dean looked at Sam questioningly and said.

“So long as he gets his own room”. When Sam turned around his paranoia grew higher as he whispered to Dean.

“Three seconds ago he was a dog!” The Winchester brothers came in with either a knife or gun drawn and the man said.

“Don’t even bother those won’t work on me. You’ve met someone like me before, in fact she’s my half-cousin Portia”.

“You’re a familiar?” Dean questioned.

“You got it pal, the names Billy”. Billy then got up and continued, “And I’m here to ask you guys for help”.

“Our help? In case you didn’t know Billy boy, witches and us don’t exactly mix. And your ‘half-cousin’ we only helped her out because her witch was an old friend of ours. Other than that we don’t help witches” Dean stated.

“Well this witch is closer to you than he was!” Billy snarled. He then walked up to the brothers and untied the bandana and held it out to them and asked, “Does this bandana look familiar to you guys?” Sam took it in his hands and examined it closely but saw no initials or anything.

“How do we know you couldn’t have swiped this at a store or something?” Sam questioned.

“I knew you’d say that, which is why I also have this”. Billy then pulled something out from his jacket and handed it to Dean.  Dean unfolded the piece of paper to reveal a familiar photo.  Once the boys saw the picture, they immediately turned towards Billy.“Yes, I’m your sister’s familiar. And she’s in trouble”.

“Okay so start from the beginning pal, what happened to our baby sister and I swear to God if anything happened to her I’ll—”

“Dean be cool! Billy feels guilty enough already!” Sam proclaimed. He then turned towards the familiar and said, “Just tell us what happened?”

“Your sister and I had gotten wind of a couple of witches dabbling into some serious dark magic near New Orleans about a month ago. We thought it would be a simple burn and dust. I was on point, then before I knew it I was blindsided and it all just went wrong. When I finally woke up, your sister was missing. I searched and searched the entire city but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I even tried to reach out to her telepathically but everytime she hasn’t respond”. At that moment Sam and Dean took a huge deep sigh.

They both knew their little sister was cursed with witchcraft after a witch hunt gone wrong.  She feared so much that she would become a bad witch but they always made sure to keep her in track by allowing her to only use her magic to heal their injuries and make potions to help stop other witches.  Then one day with no note, she left them and they hadn’t really heard from her since. They didn’t even know where she was currently living.

And now after a few years with no word on her, they are suddenly called up by their sister’s familiar and are told that she could be in deep trouble.  It’s bad enough that she’s a Winchester but if they get word of her witch powers, those monsters will tear her to shreds, or even worse other hunters will get word about her.

“Alright take us to the place where you and our sister went to for that witch hunt, Sammy get the bags packed, we’re leaving tonight”. Sam nodded then he packed up the bags while Dean went out of the hotel room to check them out early due to a family emergency and soon the three of them pilled in the car and Dean turned to Billy and said.

“Don’t go shittin in my backseat or barfing back there, one slip up and you’re walking the rest of the way to New Orleans, got it?”

“I don’t get car sick, and I’ve got more class than that. I’m not full dog you know”. Billy stated. Dean turned on the ignition and they took the long drive from St. Louis to New Orleans. 

When they arrived in New Orleans, they first checked into a local motel then Billy led them to the warehouse where he had last seen (y/n) Winchester.  He was currently in dog form sniffing around till finally he stopped and looked at the brothers and Sam said.

“Is this where it happened?” Billy nodded then he began sniffing the ground and could still smell his master’s scent.  He whimpered sadly and got down on his stomach right where (y/n) once stood and whimpered sadly again. “Hey, we’ll find her. This wasn’t your fault”. Sam said as he stroked Billy’s head.

“Hey! Hey think I got something over here!” Dean’s voice cried out. Sam and Billy turned towards Dean and they walked up to him and Dean held out a small shell-casing. “Silver bullet casing,” Sam took it in his hand then Dean continued, “and something else too,” he then pulled out a familiar piece of clothing and he said, “Ringing any bells Sammy?”

“Gordon!” Sam sneered.

“Seems that sick bastard is back, and worse he’s got our little sis ‘cause I found this next to his piece of fabric”. He then held up the silver ring that they both gave her to keep the moment she became a witch. “Hey Billy come here,” Billy walked up towards Dean and he told him, “Can you track Gordon down?” Billy nodded determinately now knowing who exactly they were dealing with.

Dean held out the piece of fabric and Billy took a long good sniff of it before sniffing the ground and letting out a snarl and a series of barks as he went charging on ahead with the brothers’ close behind him in their Impala.

*My POV*

I don’t know how long it’s been since I was captured and tortured by the sick hunter we once came across on our travels Gordon. Could’ve been days, weeks, months, hell maybe even a year for all I know.  All I know is that I won’t last long in this hell hole.

The bastard had led me and Billy straight to a trap, he took me, suppressed my magic by putting some kind of cuff on me and kept me locked in some kind of secret hide way strapped to a table and enduring torment after torment.  Lately he’s decided to end it all and go with ‘electro-therapy’ as he likes to call it.  To try and convince me that magic is a sin and so am I. And it can all end if I give him my consent for him to kill me.  I heard the door open and Gordon came strolling in and he said to me.

“Good morning little Winchester”. I remained silent. I didn’t want to waste my breath on him, he didn’t deserve to have the satisfaction of hearing my voice. “Oh what no good morning sweetheart?” I still didn’t answer him, just glared at him.  “Well then I guess we get down to business but first I want to run something by you, there’s a rumor that your brothers are in town”.

What? How the hell did they find me? I haven’t seen them in three years when I left them at 13 to protect them. I was having some trouble with my magic so I hid it from my brothers.  The first sign was the hand trembling and then one day a huge red energy erupted in the middle of an alleyway.

Thankfully no one was hurt and no one saw it happen but it was that moment that I knew I couldn’t be near my brothers.  So that night in Beuford, South Carolina I packed up my things and left. I traveled along the road all night till I got to the next town and took shelter in it for a while before heading off again.

A few months later when I reached in some small town in North Carolina, I met him. My Familiar; Billy. 

I don’t like to admit this but—I got low, I didn’t see any way out with my powers growing worse and worse each day.  And my brothers hadn’t even tried to come and find me which got me thinking that they were probably glad to be rid of their witchy-bitchy sister. Better to throw her out then stay with the enemy and figure a way how to kill her in her sleep.

So I went up to the Winter Hill bridge and was about to jump, when I heard frantic barking beside me.  When I turned to see the Alaskan noble companion sitting there, it whimpered at me while staring at me with sad eyes.  Like my brother Sammy, I’m a sucker for dogs. So I got down off the bridge and the dog immediately ran up to me and proceeded to kiss all over my face.

It was then shortly the next morning when I found a man around the same age as my brother Sam sleeping curled up beside me holding me to his chest.  It was then he introduced himself as Billy and told me that he was my Familiar. He explained to me what they were and that he’s been looking for me for a long time. I thought I was crazy but I took him in and he’s helped me with my depression, he helped me train and focus my magic and for the past three years he’s been like my third brother, and my best friend. 

But it was on that hunt god knows how long ago when I was separated from him. And I have a feeling that he must’ve gone to my brothers and told them what happened to us.

“First I’ve heard of it, don’t know why they would be here in New Orleans”. I tried to pass off.

“Ain’t it obvious sweetheart? They’re here for you. However sad news for them is that they’ll only find their sister’s corpse once I’m done with you”. He then activated the machine and shocks once again ran through my body.  I groaned and felt my body spazzing out but due to my restraints I could only lift my head up and arch my back in agony until he stopped the machine and I collapsed back onto the table.

“You have no—idea who you’re dealing with” I groaned out.

“Actually sweetpea you don’t know who you’re dealing with,” he came over me and said in my face.  “Every hunter out there knows your dirty little secret. Word travels fast especially when it involves you and your brothers. You go back out there on the road, and there will be hunters who won’t hesitate to shoot you, Me, I’m giving you a mercy killing. You see I may have failed to kill your brother Sammy years ago with that demon Azazel, but witches, them bitches be a whole different story. I won’t make that mistake, because all it takes is just a taste of dark magic and you’re hooked for life. So I’ll spare your brothers the pain and just kill you right here and now”.

“Do you bad guys ever not monologue your plans to the heroes?” I asked. Gordon glared down at me and upped the voltage and turned it on making me grit my teeth in pain.  He just watched me suffer for over a minute and a half before he finally turned it off.

“You know you definitely got your brother Dean’s sense of humor and you’ve got Sammy’s good heart but—deep down you know the truth. You’re beyond hope, and no one’s coming to save you, not even your brothers”.

“If—they are here….you’ll be very, very sorry you took me”.

“Hate to break it to you sweetheart but they’re happy to be done with you. Been told that the minute you left town, they were celebrating. Drinking shots and hooking up with a few girls on the side, happy to be rid of a witch-bitch like you”. I just looked at him in shock. 

I know his tricks. He’s done this before and he likes to talk but hearing this and knowing back then I thought like that myself, it brought back those insecurities and doubts. Maybe my brothers are just here for a separate case and don’t want to have anything to do with me anymore. Maybe they came to terms with the fact that their little sister is a real witch and want nothing to do with her anymore.

My thoughts were interrupted when I felt higher voltage shocking me and I let out a scream.

*3rd Person POV*

Billy stopped at a closed down crawfish factory by the docks.  He sniffed the ground and could smell Gordon’s scent nearby but he could also smell something else too.  He phased into his human state just as Baby came rolling in and the brothers came out of their car.

“Is he in there?” Dean asked.

“Yes, and I can smell (y/n) in there too. But our connection is still blocked I can’t reach her”. Billy said.

“Alright, Sammy you take around back, I’ll take the front, and Bill we’ll whistle for yah for an attack”. Dean explained the plan.

“Screw that plan my master’s in there and I took a vow to make sure no harm comes to her! I already failed her once I’m not going through it again. I won’t wait in the shadows for a signal, I’m going in there with you both whether you like it or not!” Billy snapped. Dean looked at Billy’s eyes and saw the loyalty this guy had towards his little sister and finally gave in.

“Alright but one slip up and you’re dead. Gordon doesn’t take any prisoners, he almost tried to kill Sam one time by blowing him up by using me and (n/n) as bait. And I don’t want my little sis crying over your dead body once we get her out of here”.

“If I have to die to ensure her safety, so be it” Billy stated before taking off into the crawfish factory with the brothers close behind him.  As the three men walked silently around the abandoned factory, they soon heard screams echoing through the walls.

“Shh, shh. Do you guys here that?” asked Sam.  Dean and Billy stopped and listened and soon the screaming came out again.

“That’s (y/n)!” Billy exclaimed.

“Can you track where she’s at?” Dean demanded.

“I get the first bite out of the bastard first!” Billy’s eyes soon glowed into his dog colors eyes then the next minute the boys saw him turn into his dog form and his ears twitched and he took off running with the brothers behind him.

*My POV*

This was unlike any pain I’ve ever endured before. I have been cut up, bitten, punched, tossed around like a rag doll, and even whipped but this was unlike any other torture I have ever been through.

Gordon now had the voltage up to its maximum limit as I could even hear the machine humming due to so much voltage percentage.  I was literally spazzing on the table as the shocks went all through my body until it stopped and I was back on the table.

“You feel that? Huh, that’s the end of you Winchester!” He then turned it back on and my back arched again.  My vision went black and my brain was going fuzzy. I couldn’t even scream anymore because I have been screaming for god knows how long about an hour ago when the dick literally left it in for five minutes. The second that machine turned off, I collapsed and I blacked out.

*3rd Person POV*

Gordon looked down at the Winchester’s youngest sibling and sneered to her as he took out a silver blade.

“Now you’re not gonna get the chance to hurt anyone”. Suddenly he heard barking and the next thing he saw when he looked up was a giant black dog launching at him knocking him back against the machine breaking it.

Billy had tackled Gordon down to the ground and while barking like a rapid dog, he proceeded to literally tear Gordon to pieces.  He first went for the hand that held the knife and bit down so hard, he actually felt bone and Gordon let out an agonizing scream.  Billy then bit Gordon’s shoulder and tossed him down tearing away clothes and flesh.  Blood spurted out of Gordon like a fountain then Billy actually phased back into his human form and started to literally beat the crap out of Gordon with punches and kicks before finally picking him up by the throat and slamming him against the wall.

“I’ve been looking for you yah son of a bitch!” Billy then took out his hidden knife he kept within the sleeve of his jacket and began to blindly but accurately stab Gordon in the throat before jamming the knife deep into his skull. “You look into my eyes you piece of shit, kidnapping and torturing a child is one thing, kidnapping and torturing my master, that’s a whole different story. Never come between a witch and their familiar!” Billy then beat Gordon’s head against the one with one strong blow and Gordon collapsed dead on the ground.

Billy took his knife out from Gordon’s head and flicked the blood off before turning to see her brother’s just getting in and seeing the damage of the room. Billy put his knife back in place and raced up to (y/n).  He along with her brothers worked to get the restraints off of her and unhooked the wires and suction cups from her temples and when Billy took notice of her arm, everything fell into place.

“That’s why I couldn’t reach her telepathically, he cuffed her with a magic restraint”.

“Then let’s get it off, Sammy get a knife out”.

“It doesn’t work like that, it’s not like any ordinary bind. Once locked onto a witch only magic from another witch can release it. But luckily I know someone who can help us and she’s not far, but we have to hurry, she’ll die if we don’t get her there fast!” Billy picked up his master and led onwards downwards towards the dock and managed to find a boat and as her brother’s climbed in, Billy fired up the engine and drove the boat while Sam and Dean held their sister and wiped away her sweat.

As they rode down the bayou they came to a cabin in the middle of the swamp.  Billy stopped the boat and picked up (y/n) from her brothers and walked along the wooden deck and up the stairs to the cabin.

“Who exactly are we seeing here Billy?” asked Sam.

“Mama Odie is the best known witch this side of New Orleans, she’s been helping (y/n) control her powers ever since we came here 2 years ago”.  Once they came up to the door, Sam knocked on the door and it immediately opened up.  Dean and Sam were a little skeptical but Billy immediately walked in and Sam muttered.

“Dean you really think we should just go waltzing in?”

“Billy did it, plus if what he says is true then we’ve got no choice, this is our sister Sammy. We’ve finally found her after three years, and I’m not gonna lose her now so at this rate I’ll be desperate enough to allow a witch to heal our baby sister”. Dean then walked in followed by Sam and the door immediately shut behind them.

“Is that ol Billy boy I hear’ a comin?” A New Orleans’s accent came out.

“Right here Mama Odie”. A cackle soon came out but it wasn’t like no evil witch’s cackle, more like a friendly grandma’s cackle and soon a black woman around her late 40’s, she wore all white with golden earrings hanging lowly on her ear and golden bracelets on her wrists as well as some golden rings.

“Ohhhh Billy-boy its sooo good to hear ya voice again honey, how you been sugar?”

“Mama Odie, it’s (y/n). Her magic is under a restricted cuff, and she’s been tortured for over a month, we need your help”.

“Oh my, oh my, bring her on in honey!” Billy rushed towards Mama Odie and it was then Dean said.

“Please you have to save her. At least tell us she’s gonna be alright, she’s not gonna die is she?”

“Would you calm down Dean Winchester?! You Winchesters I tell you what, men ain’t got no patience whatsoever”. Mama Odie grumbled as Billy set her down on a small bed big enough to hold her.

“You know who we are?” asked Sam.

“Sammy my boy I’ve heard a lot about you Winchesters even before I met your sister, I see all and know all. Now you boys leave me to work in peace and go sit over there”. Mama Odie then began to brew some magic powder to help get the cuff off of (y/n)’s wrist.

She threw in every ounce of magic powder, grinded it up, added some crow’s feet, skin of a frog and eye of newt and mixed it up until finally the powder was a pure blue. She then took a hand full of it and sprinkled it onto the cuff which slowly dissolved it freeing (y/n) from her bond.

“Now that the cuff is off, she’ll be okay. Given time and rest, her magic should return to her”. She said to the boys whom all sighed with relief.  Billy took Mama Odie’s hands and thanked her.

“Thank you Mama Odie, thank you so much” he kissed her fingers making Mama Odie laugh and she said.

“Aww Billy I love you like the son I never had. Now you boys hadn’t eaten anything all day so why don’t you have a bite of my gumbo?”

“Oh we—we really couldn’t impose, we…..”

“Nonsense Sammy-boy, now you boys better sit your butts down before I whip you behinds into oblivion”. Mama Odie proclaimed.

“Better do as she says boys, she don’t play around when it comes to her guests”. Billy stated as he made himself a bowl of Mama Odie’s gumbo. 

As the boys ate, they felt their taste buds had died and gone to heaven, even Dean found himself falling for the witch’s cooking, and when she brought out the banana cream pie, Dean was in hook-line-and sinker. He even told her that he didn’t care if she were to cook him up and eat him so long as he got more pie which made Mama Odie laugh.

“Boy that sister of yours wasn’t lyin when she said her eldest brother loved himself a pie. I give you anymore, you’re gonna run me outta house and home”.

“Mama Odie where have you been all my life?” Dean asked. Sam then turned his attention to see Billy turn into his dog form and hop up onto the bed where his sister was sleeping and placed his head on her stomach breathing out heavily once in a while.

“When he brought her to me, I had never seen such a fragile little thing. Poor honey-pie was so scared of her powers and so filled with darkened thoughts, I thought something horrible would happen to her”. Mama Odie’s voice broke Sam from his thoughts and he said.

“It was pretty bad, even after we killed the witch that cursed her, we still had no idea how to help her”.

“Hate to break it to yah boys but there’s nothing that can be done. Once a witch curses another host to have his or her powers, the power sticks to them like bees to honey. Now your sister, she maybe fragile but she has strength to her, gets it from her older brothers”. Both Sam and Dean smiled at that point and both brothers turned towards their sister. “She’s missed you guys soo much. Not a day went by where she didn’t regret leaving you boys”.

“Believe us, when we woke up to see her gone we were devastated. Any case we got we hoped to come across her. If it involved a witch, we prayed to God that it wouldn’t be her”. Sam stated.

“Well under my tutelage, she hasn’t touched a speck of black magic, and her heart’s still as pure as a shining star. She’s mainly stuck around here, helping me get rid of some witches that are drawn to here. New Orleans is like a drug for witches, this city here is where the most powerful of magic is at. Anything Supernatural that can wield magic is drawn to here like a moth to a flame, the power here is addictive and some witches want to use that power for darkness. But your little sister along with her familiar, helped me bring those bitches down”.

“Never thought I’d live to see the day when I would hear a witch call another witch a bitch” Dean stated.

“Oh believe me honey, them bitches be better off buried six feet under”.

“Amen to that sister” Mama Odie and Dean clinked their beer bottles and drank to that. 

It was then they heard a soft groan and when they turned around, the three of them saw (y/n) beginning to wake up.

*My POV*

I slowly opened my eyes to feel a cold, wet rag on top of my head and some sort of pressure on my stomach.  When my vision became clear, I saw lanterns lighting up a wooden cabin and when I looked to my right, I saw Billy in his dog form.

“Billy?” He let out a happy whimper and proceeded to lick my face frantically whimpering happily. I smiled and stroked through is soft black fur as he proceeded to nuzzle my neck grunting lovingly.

“Glad to see you up honey” I turned to my left to see Mama Odie.

“Mama Odie…..”

“Hold on sugar before you continue talking take a sip of this”. She handed me a cup and at first I thought it would be potion but when the taste was just normal water, I gulped it down like my life depended on it.

“You guys found me?” I asked.

“Billy did, he brought you here after he saved you from that hunter that had you hostage for over a month”.

“A month?” I turned towards Billy to see his ears bent back and looking down at me with guilt. I stroked his head and said to him. “But you found me in the end, thanks Billy”.

“But it wasn’t just him, he got someone else involved to help find you too” Mama Odie stated and it was then she backed away and I soon saw my two brothers standing there.

I felt my body tense up and Mama Odie winked at me before leaving the room.  I turned to Billy and he nodded to me before licking my cheek one last time before trotting behind Mama Odie giving my brothers and I some privacy.

God it was sooo awkward. The silence between us, I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t want to start off by arguing. For the first time in three years here were my brothers a bit older looking than when I last saw them and I had no idea what the hell I was going to say.

“I umm…..I guess you both are probably wondering—” I was stopped by the two of them embracing me in the famous Winchester bro-sandwich embrace. Growing up, whenever I was sad or lonely, my brothers came up with this hug they like to call the Winchester bro-sandwich. Dean always hugged me from the right while Sammy always got the left.

“Don’t you ever scare us like that again” Dean whimpered.  I looked up at them nervously and for the first time I had actually seen both of my brothers crying, like real crying not like fake tears or ugly crying but real, genuine tears.  I allowed tears to fall down my face as well as I nuzzled my face into Sammy’s chest and placed my hand on top of Dean’s head stroking his face and hair. 

That entire time was silent. Neither my brothers or I said a single word, in fact I don’t think anything else needed to be said. Just the fact that they came all because of Billy and the fact that they didn’t start off this reunion by yelling at me, I knew right there and then that my brothers missed me as much if not even more than I missed them.

Then once Mama Odie gave me the all clear to go home, we all gathered back on the boat and Billy now back in human form drove us back to the docks and from there on it was back into the Impala and my brothers took both Billy and I back to their motel. 

For the rest of the night until the early morning, my brothers and I just talked. We talked and talked and talked about random and small things that we rarely talked up, things that we all had been up to, they asked me about my progress in magic, they wanted to know everything so I told them what they wanted and it was the same vice versa.

I don’t even know what time it ended up being, but while it was still pitch black out, my brothers and I soon passed out and fell asleep together in one bed like we used to when we were kids.

*Dean’s POV*

As I lay there watching my baby sis sleep, I couldn’t help but think that the world was for once finally back in order. After all this time, she was safe and still the same girl she’s always been from the moment I held her in my arms when she was born. I might’ve failed her before when she ran away, but this time I was gonna do better. Sammy and I were gonna prove to her that those dark demons that would invade her mind are nothing but lies.

I soon heard the sound of the jointing bedroom door open up and through the shadows I could instantly tell that it was Billy in that mutt form of his.  He was on his stomach staring up at us and he let out a couple of soft grunts.  I felt the corner of my mouth lift up and normally I wouldn’t allow this ever not even for a billion dollars, but I owe him for everything he’s done for our little sis. 

I gestured him to come. 

Billy immediately hopped up on the bed and went straight for (y/n). He softly nuzzled underneath her arm until he was fully underneath her arm with his face almost parallel to hers.  He then looked up at me and I rubbed his head and whispered to him.

“Thank you, for everything you’ve done”. He let out a grunt before closing his eyes and falling asleep. I stroked his head a few more times before falling asleep myself wrapping an arm around my baby sis.

*Extended ending*

“Now that threat still stands, if you even shift into that mutt form of yours in this car you’re walking the rest of the way. You know what scratch that I’ll just have your nuts clipped off”. Dean said.

“You really don’t like dogs do you? And if you even try to clip my balls, I’ll lock you in a room full of cats you dick” Billy teased. I then tossed his tennis ball at his face which made his face suddenly turn stone stoic.

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” I asked as I turned back to my magazine.

“Sometimes, and I’ll do it again right now!” I was then pulled in and felt Billy’s scruffy face plant kisses all over my face making me exclaim out playfully trying to get out of his strong grip. “Get off!” I playfully shoved him away and Dean laughed as he continued to drive on and I told him, “And don’t think you’re off the hook yet either Buster-brown. Threaten to castrate my Familiar again and I’ll turn you into a dog and have you fixed, see how you like it”. At that statement Dean shut up which made Sam and Billy laugh.

“Oh (n/n) you never cease to amaze me”. Sam stated as he held his fist out and I fist-bumped him and I went back to reading my magazine as Dean kept driving onward.

[hazeofhearts]

Modern!Billy Hargrove Headcanons

(Ok!! So this idea came to me and idk how many of these there are on here but I it doesn’t matter because this is gonna be great!)

(EDIT 2/15/18: I’VE BEEN WORKING ON THIS FOR LITERALLY TWO MONTHS I HOPE YOU ALL LIKE THIS!!!)

So we all know that Billy likes looking pretty for his ladies based on how long he probably took to do himself up for his date in episode 8.

So we KNOW that the modern boy would be ALL👏🏻ABOUT👏🏻SKINCARE👏🏻

He does face masks like twice a week. One for stress relief and another of random choice from his collection of free samples

When he goes into the store, he pretends to be shopping for you but really it’s for him so he can get the samples

You have ‘girls’ night in and wear your masks and you paint your nails and Billy wears fluffy socks after he puts lotion on his feet because he’s an ‘old man’.

Modern Billy would hate smoking. Hate it with a fucking passion. Lemme explain myself ok?

In the 80s, people were smoking because that was the thing to do. You just did. So everyone smoked.

But now that we know all we know about how bad it is for your skin and lungs and your general health (no shade to anyone that does smoke, it’s your choice but you have to know the dangers and you probably do)

So Billy would smoke for a couple years and then when he got together with you, he stopped because you wouldn’t kiss him if he tasted like cigarettes

To keep Billy from smoking, you replaced his cigarettes with lollipops

Like those Dum Dum lollipops. The ones you can buy in a bag of 100 or something.

You’d put them in his car in place of his cigarette cartridge, on his bedside table, on his desk, in the pockets of all of his jackets

He was never without a lollipop in his mouth

Your favourites on him were bubblegum and blue raspberry

His favourites were cherry and lemon lime

Billy is all about protection and consent in every way possible!!!!

He wants you to feel like you’re safe with him and that you can be assured that you’re not going to get pregnant

So before the two of you even get naked, you’ve talked about condoms and birth control and all that jazz

Depending on if you’re already on birth control for menstruational reasons, this part of the conversation is easy

Condoms are another thing

Billy tries to pull that ‘condoms make me uncomfortable’ shit and you’re not having it

‘Either you wear a condom or you’re not getting ass at all’

Billy wears a condom from then on

He totally buys the funny ones to make you laugh

Like he once bought a neon coloured box of them and you nearly pissed yourself laughing you couldn’t even have sex

The first time you had sex, Billy was nervous as all hell because he knew that you felt your body was a temple and if he disrespected you, he’d be out on the curb

So he went super slow, asking if everything he did was okay

‘Can I go down on you?’

‘I’m just gonna open your legs like this, is that okay?’

You’re like ‘just fuck me already’

Modern Billy still loves his cars

He works on them all the time

He’s one of those guys that finds really shitty cars on the side of the road that have been abandoned or in junk yards and is like ‘yep new baby’

You just love walking into wherever he’s set up shop to see him without a shirt, jeans still as tight as ever, grease stains in the dirtiest places

Like there’s on right in the center of his crotch and he’d bring them to you and be like ‘oh how did that get there???????’

“Baby come kiss me”

“No you’re dirty”

“That’s never stopped you before”

Billy surprising you at work all the time

He starts recording himself going to your work every couple days to bring you coffee or lunch or anything

“Excuse me?”

*gasps because he scared you*

“I brought you your lunch”

He hands you a bag of your favourite food and you immediately break for lunch because you missed your man and you want to spend time with him

You totally live together if that wasn’t obvious by now

Your apartment clashes because Billy is an alpha male who doesn’t pick up anything and just slings stuff wherever there’s an empty space

You however can’t stand when he does that

You’ve managed to get him to replace the toilet paper roll when he finishes one, put the toilet seat and lid down and take off his shoes before walking on the carpet

He still doesn’t put his jacket on the hook by the door but that doesn’t matter because if you’re both coming from somewhere, the entryway is going to be littered with clothes anyway ;)

Which brings me back to sex ofc

So

Sex happens everywhere

On the floor, on the couch, in the shower

Floor sex happens when you come back from a night out on the town and too many guys were looking at you the wrong way

Couch sex happens the day after the night out when you’re both nursing hangovers and all you want to do is spoon so you do but you also fuck

Shower sex is one of those things where it happens rarely and only if you’re both 100% in the mood like if you’re not, not happening

You have sex on the counter and it’s rough and hard and fast and sexy and you can’t get enough and you just want him more and more and more

Sex in an abandoned parking lot at two in the morning in Billy’s car where the windows fog up and you rock the car on its wheels until the sun comes up

Sex in your bed is by far the best though, of course

I mean, you’re both comfortable, you’re both completely naked, you can fall asleep together right afterwards

Bed sex is slow and sensual

Billy thrusts into you slowly and sucks on your neck

He runs his hands all over your body and through your hair

He lifts both of your legs up over his shoulders and now you’re in missionary

Billy presses you to his chest while he fucks you like this, your nails digging into his back

Not painful, but on the edge of too much pleasure

After sex time

YOU👏🏻ARE👏🏻THE👏🏻THE👏🏻BIG👏🏻SPOON👏🏻BC👏🏻MODERN👏🏻BILLY👏🏻IS👏🏻A👏🏻SOFT👏🏻BOY👏🏻

Road trips all the time!!!

You’re both so young and you’re already living together

You need some time to grow but who says that you can’t grow together?

Literally no one

So you drop everything for the weekend and go to the beach, rent a beach house but usually just camp out of the trunk of your car

(You convinced Billy that sex is better in the hatchback of your car than in the backseat of his for the trip. This is almost a daily argument that you guys have and it always ends up in test runs in both cars ;) )

You cook burgers and hot dogs on the mini grill you brought and wrap yourselves up in a giant ass blanket and look at the stars

Talk about the future with each other

Plan your lives together

Modern Billy being in love with the idea of having kids and raising them

He had a shitty childhood and being a teenager sucked ass

(In my AU, instead of projecting out onto others as much as he does, Billy also grows from his abusing father and has a solid relationship with Max after he moves away from his family)

So Billy would be in a constant wave of baby fever

He’d stop moms on the street and coo at their babies

He’d love to go to parks with you and just stare at the kids

Thinking of babies made him think of marriage

Which leads me to....

Billy is not rich by any means

He essentially ran away from home as soon as he was a legal adult and had his high school diploma

He had been secretly packing his stuff up for months and storing it at friends houses and in the backyard of his house

He met you and moved into your apartment with you when you both decided things were going to be serious

So

When he decided he wanted to marry you, he knew he loved you

He had spent his whole life in a rocky home

His father was never around and when he was, his parents fought so hard the pictures rattled off the nails and onto the floor

So if he wanted to marry you, it meant that he trusted you and believed there would be a future with you

He spent weeks hovering around ring stores, looking and looking but never finding the right one

He became frantic, sure that if he didn’t propose soon, he would lose you

He wouldn’t but he didn’t want to be right in his doubt

So after a romantic dinner and even better dessert (ifyaknowwhatimsayin’) you’re slightly disappointed because it was the perfect set up for a proposal

Like Billy splurged on you for dinner

You wore your new red dress

You rolled over and were half way asleep when Billy prodded his elbow into your back

Now you were irritated

You turned sharply to snap at him when you saw the look in his eyes

You’re left speechless

His eyes are so soft, this beautiful sky blue

His bottom lip is between his teeth and he has his arm out for you to roll into his chest

But first he says those words 

“Will you marry me?”

You immediately burst into tears

Billy panicks

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Just forget it!!”

You smack him and say of course you’ll marry him, stupid!

You fall asleep after you calm down and Billy just has the biggest smile on his face

Out of everyone on the planet, he managed to find you

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Road Virus Heads North

Stephen King (1999)

Richard Kinnell wasn't frightened when he first saw the picture at the yard sale in Rosewood.

He was fascinated by it, and he felt he'd had the good luck to find something which might be very special, but fright? No. It didn't occur to him until later ("not until it was too late," as he might have written in one of his own numbingly successful novels) that he had felt much the same way about certain illegal drugs as a young man.

He had gone down to Boston to participate in a PEN/New England conference tided "The Threat of Popularity." You could count on PEN to come up with such subjects, Kinnell had found; it was actually sort of comforting. He drove the two hundred and sixty miles from Derry rather than flying because he'd come to a plot impasse on his latest book and wanted some quiet time to try to work it out.

At the conference, he sat on a panel where people who should have known better asked him where he got his ideas and if he ever scared himself. He left the city by way of the Tobin Bridge, then got on Route 1. He never took the turnpike when he was trying to work out problems; the turnpike lulled him into a state that was like dreamless, waking sleep. It was restful, but not very creative. The stop-and-go traffic on the coast road, however, acted like grit inside an oyster-it created a fair amount of mental activity ... and sometimes even a pearl.

Not, he supposed, that his critics would use that word. In an issue of Esquire last year, Bradley Simons had begun his review of Nightmare City this way: "Richard Kinnell, who writes like Jeffery Dahmer cooks, has suffered a fresh bout of projectile vomiting. He has tided this most recent mass of ejecta Nightmare City."

Route 1 took him through Revere, Malden, Everett, and up the coast to Newburyport. Beyond Newburyport and just south of the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border was the tidy little town of Rosewood. A mile or so beyond the town center, he saw an array of cheap-looking goods spread out on the lawn of a two-story Cape. Propped against an avocado-colored electric stove was a sign reading YARD SALE. Cars were parked on both sides of the road, creating one of those bottlenecks which travelers unaffected by the yard sale mystique curse their way through. Kinnell liked yard sales, particularly the boxes of old books you sometimes found at them. He drove through the bottleneck, parked his Audi at the head of the line of cars pointed toward Maine and New Hampshire, then walked back.

A dozen or so people were circulating on the littered front lawn of the blue-and-gray Cape Cod. A large television stood to the left of the cement walk, its feet planted on four paper ashtrays that were doing absolutely nothing to protect the lawn. On top was a sign reading MAKE AN OFFER-YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED. An electrical cord, augmented by an extension, mailed back from the TV and through the open front door. A fat woman sat in a lawn chair before it, shaded by an umbrella with CINZANO printed on the colorful scalloped flaps. There was a card table beside her with a cigar box, a pad of paper, and another handlettered sign on it. This sign read ALL SALES CASH, ALL SALES FINAL. The TV was on, turned to an afternoon soap opera where two beautiful young people looked on the verge of having deeply unsafe sex. The fat

woman glanced at Kinnell, then back at the TV. She looked at it for a moment, then looked back at him again. This time her mouth was slightly sprung.

Ah, Kinnell thought, looking around for the liquor box fined with paperbacks that was sure to be here someplace, a fan.

He didn't see any paperbacks, but he saw the picture, leaning against an ironing board and held in place by a couple of plastic laundry baskets, and his breath stopped in his throat. He wanted it at once.

He walked over with a casualness that felt exaggerated and dropped to one knee in front of it. The painting was a watercolor, and technically very good. Kinnell didn't care about that; technique didn't interest him (a fact the critics of his own work had duly noted). What he liked in works of art was content, and the more unsettling the better. This picture scored high in that department. He knelt between the two laundry baskets, which had been filled with a jumble of small appliances, and let his fingers slip over the glass facing of the picture. He glanced around briefly, looking for others like it, and saw none - only the usual yard sale art collection of Little Bo Peeps, praying hands, and gambling dogs.

He looked back at the framed watercolor, and in his mind he was already moving his suitcase into the backseat of the Audi so he could slip the picture comfortably into the trunk.

It showed a young man behind the wheel of a muscle car-maybe a Grand Am, maybe a GTX, something with a T-top, anyway - crossing the Tobin Bridge at sunset. The T-top was off, turning the black car into a half-assed convertible. The young man's left arm. was cocked on the door, his right wrist was draped casually over the wheel. Behind him, the sky was a bruise-colored mass of yellows and grays, streaked with veins of pink. The young man had lank blond hair that spilled over his low forehead. He was grinning, and his parted lips revealed teeth which were not teeth at all but fangs.

Or maybe they're filed to points, Kinnell thought. Maybe he's supposed to be a cannibal.

He liked that; liked the idea of a cannibal crossing the Tobin Bridge at sunset. In a Grand Am. He knew what most of the audience at the PEN panel discussion would have thought - Oh, yes, great picture for Rich Kinnell he probably wants it for inspiration, a feather to tickle his tired old gorge into one more fit of projectile vomiting-but most of those folks were ignoramuses, at least as far as his work went, and what was more, they treasured their ignorance, cossetted it the way some people inexplicably treasured and cossetted those stupid, mean-spirited little dogs that yapped at visitors and sometimes bit the paperboy's ankles. He hadn't been attracted to this painting because he wrote horror stories; he wrote horror stories because he was attracted to things like this painting. His fans sent him stuff - pictures, mostly - and he threw most of them away, not because they were bad art but because they were tiresome and predictable. One fan from Omaha had sent him a little ceramic sculpture of a screaming, horrified monkey's head poking out of a refrigerator door, however, and that one he had kept. It was unskillfully executed, but there was an unexpected juxtaposition there that lit UP his dials. This painting had some of the same quality, but it was even better. Much better.

As he was reaching for it, wanting to pick it up right now, this second, wanting to tuck it under his arm and proclaim his intentions, a voice spoke up behind him: "Aren't you Richard Kinnell?"

He jumped, then turned. The fat woman was standing directly behind him, blotting out most of the immediate landscape. She had put on fresh lipstick before approaching, and now her mouth had been transformed into a bleeding grin.

"Yes, I am," he said, smiling back.

Her eyes dropped to the picture. "I should have known you'd go right to that," she said, simpering. "It's so You."

"It is, isn't it?" he said, and smiled his best celebrity smile. "How much would you need for it?"

"Forty-five dollars," she said. "I'll be honest with you, I started it at seventy, but nobody likes it, so now it's marked down. If you come back tomorrow, you can probably have it for thirty." The simper had grown to frightening proportions. Kinnell could see little gray spit-buds in the dimples at the comers of her stretched mouth.

"I don't think I want to take that chance," he said. "I'll write you a check right now."

The simper continued to stretch; the woman now looked like some grotesque John Waters parody. Divine does Shirley Temple. "I'm really not supposed to take checks, but all right," she said, her tone that of a teenage girl finally consenting to have sex with her boyfriend. "Only while you have your pen out, could you write an autograph for my daughter? Her name is Michela?"

"What a beautiful name," Kinnell said automatically. He took the picture and followed the fat woman back to the card table. On the TV next to it, the lustful young people had been temporarily displaced by an elderly woman gobbling bran flakes.

" Michela reads all your books," the fat woman said. "Where in the world do you get all those crazy ideas?"

"I don't know," Kinnell said, smiling more widely than ever. "They just come to me. Isn't that amazing?. "

The yard sale minder's name was Judy Diment, and she lived in the house next door. When Kinnell asked her if she knew who the artist happened to be, she said she certainly did; Bobby Hastings had done it, and Bobby Hastings was the reason she was selling off the Hastings' things. "That's the only painting he didn't bum," she said. "Poor Iris! She's the one I really feel sorry for. I don't think George cared much, really. And I know he didn't understand why she wants to sell the house." She rolled her eyes in her large, sweaty face - the old can-you-imagine-that look. She took Kinnell's check when he tore it off, then gave him the pad where she had written down all the items she'd sold and the prices she'd obtained for them. "Just make it out to Michela," she said. "Pretty please with sugar on it?" The simper reappeared, like an old acquaintance you'd hoped was dead.

"Uh-huh," Kinnell said, and wrote his standard thanks-for-being-a-fan message. He didn't have to watch his hands or even think about it anymore, not after twenty-five years of writing autographs. "Tell me about the picture, and the Hastingses."

Judy Diment folded her pudgy hands in the manner of a woman about to recite a favorite story.

"Bobby was just twenty-three when he killed himself this spring. Can you believe that? He was the tortured genius type, you know, but still living at home." Her eyes rolled, again asking Kinnell if he could imagine it. "He must have had seventy, eighty paintings, plus all his sketchbooks. Down in the basement, they were." She pointed her chin at the Cape Cod, then looked at the picture of the fiendish young man driving across the Tobin Bridge at sunset. "Iris-that's Bobby's mother - said most of them were real bad, lots worse'n this. Stuff that'd curl your hair." She lowered her voice to a whisper, glancing at a woman who was looking at the Hastings' mismatched silverware and a pretty good collection of old McDonald's plastic glasses in a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids motif. "Most of them had sex stuff in them."

"Oh no," Kinnell said.

"He did the worst ones after he got on drugs," Judy Diment continued. "After he was dead-he hung himself down in the basement, where he used to paint-they found over a hundred of those little bottles they sell crack cocaine in. Aren't drugs awful, Mr. Kinnell?"

"They sure are."

"Anyway, I guess he finally just got to the end of his rope, no pun intended. He took all of his sketches and paintings out into the back yard-except for that one, I guess - and burned them. Then he hung himself down in the basement. He pinned a note to his shirt. It said, 'I can't stand what's happening to me.' Isn't that awful, Mr. Kinnell? Isn't that just the awfulest thing you ever heard?"

'Yes," Kinnell said, sincerely enough. "It just about is."

'Like I say, I think George would go right on living in the house if he had his druthers, " Judy Diment said. She took the sheet of paper with Michela's autograph on it, held it up next to Kinnell's check, and shook her head, as if the similarity of the signatures amazed her. "But men are different."

"Are they?"

"Oh, yes, much less sensitive. By the end of his life, Bobby Hastings was just skin and bone, dirty all the time-you could smell him - and he wore the same T-shirt, day in and day out. It had a picture of the Led Zeppelins on it. His eyes were red, he had a scraggle on his cheeks that you couldn't quite call a beard, and his pimples were coming back, like he was a teenager again. But she loved him, because a mother's love sees past all those things."

The woman who had been looking at the silverware and the glasses came over with a set of Star Wars placemats. Mrs. Diment took five I dollars for them, wrote the sale carefully down on her pad below "ONE DOZ. ASSORTED POTHOLDERS & HOTPADS," then turned back to Kinnell.

They went out to Arizona," she said, "to stay with Iris's folks. I know George is looking for work out there in Flagstaff-he's a draftsman-but I don't know if he's found any yet. If he has, I suppose we might not ever see them again here in Rosewood. She marked out all the stuff she wanted me to sell-Iris did - and told me I could keep twenty percent for my trouble. I'll send a check for the rest. There won't be much." She sighed.

"The picture is great," Kinnell said.

"Yeah, too bad he burned the rest, because most of this other stuff is your standard yard sale crap, pardon my French. What's that?"

Kinnell had turned the picture around. There was a length of Dymotape pasted to the back.

"A tide, I think."

"What does it say?"

He grabbed the picture by the sides and held it up so she could read it for herself This put the picture at eye level to him, and he studied it eagerly, once again taken by the simpleminded weirdness of the subject., kid behind the wheel of a muscle car, a kid with a nasty, knowing grin that revealed the filed points of an even nastier set of teeth.

It fits, he thought. If ever a title futted a painting, this one does.

" The Road Virus Heads North," she read. "I never noticed that when my boys were lugging stuff out. Is it the tide, do you think?"

"Must be." Kinnell couldn't take his eyes off the blond kid's grin. I know something, the grin said. I know something you never will.

"Well, I guess you'd have to believe the fella who did this was high on drugs," she said, sounding upset - authentically upset, Kinnell thought. "No wonder he could kill himself and break his mamma's heart."

"I've got to be heading north myself," Kinnell said, tucking the picture under his arm. "Thanks for-"

" Mr. Kinnell?"

"Yes?"

"Can I see your driver's license?" She apparently found nothing ironic or even amusing in this request. "I ought to write the number on the back of your check."

Kinnell put the picture down so he could dig for his wallet. "Sure. You bet."

The woman who'd bought the Star Wars placemats had paused on her way back to her car to watch some of the soap opera playing on the lawn TV. Now she glanced at the picture, which Kinnell had propped against his shins.

"Ag," she said. "Who'd want an ugly old thing like that? I'd think about it every time I turned the lights out."

"What's wrong with that?" Kinnell asked.

Kinnell's Aunt Trudy lived in Wells, which is about six miles north of the Maine - New Hampshire border. Kinnell pulled off at the exit which circled the bright green Wells water tower, the one with the comic sign on it (KEEP MAINE GREEN, BRING MONEY in letters four feet high), and five minutes later he was turning into the driveway of her neat little saltbox house. No TV sinking into the lawn on paper ashtrays here, only Aunt Trudy's amiable masses of flowers. Kinnell needed to pee and hadn't wanted to take care of that in a roadside rest stop when he could come here, but he also wanted an update on all the family gossip. Aunt Trudy retailed the best; she was to gossip what Zabar's is to deli. Also, of course, he wanted to show her his new acquisition.

She came out to meet him, gave him a hug, and covered his face with her patented little birdy-kisses, the ones that had made him shiver all over as a kid.

"Want to see something?" he asked her. "It'll blow your pantyhose off."

"What a charming thought," Aunt Trudy said, clasping her elbows in her palms and looking at him with amusement.

He opened the trunk and took out his new picture. It affected her, all right, but not in the way he had expected. The color fell out of her face in a sheet-he had never seen anything quite like it in his entire life. "It's horrible," she said in a tight, controlled voice. "I hate it. I suppose I can see what attracted you to it, Richie, but what you play at, it does for, real. Put it back in your trunk, like a good boy. And when you get to the Saco River, why don't you pull over into the breakdown lane and throw it in?"

He gaped at her. Aunt Trudy's lips were pressed tightly together to stop them trembling, and now her long, thin hands were not just clasping her elbows but clutching them, as if to keep her from flying away. At that moment she looked not sixty-one but ninety-one.

" Auntie?" Kinnell spoke tentatively, not sure what was going on here. "Auntie, what's wrong?"

"That." she said, unlocking her right hand and pointing at the picture. "I'm surprised you don't feel it more strongly yourself, an imaginative guy like you."

Well, he felt something, obviously he had, or he never would have unlimbered his checkbook in the first place. Aunt Trudy was feeling something else, though ... or something more. He turned the picture around so he could see it (he had been holding it out for her, so the side with the Dymotaped title faced him), and looked at it again. What he saw hit him in the chest and belly like a one-two punch.

The picture had changed, that was punch number one. Not much, but it had dearly changed. The young blond man's smile was wider, revealing more of those filed cannibal-teeth. His eyes were squinted down more, too, giving his face a look which was more knowing and nastier than ever.

The degree of a smile ... the vista of sharpened teeth widening slightly ... the tilt and squint of the eyes ... all pretty subjective stuff. A person could be mistaken about things like that, and of course he hadn't really studied the painting before buying it. Also, there had been the distraction of Mrs. Diment, who could probably talk the cock off a brass monkey.

But there was also punch number two, and that wasn't subjective. In the darkness of the Audi's trunk, the blond young man had turned his left arm, the one cocked on the door, so that Kinnell could now see a tattoo which had been hidden before. It was a vine-wrapped dagger with a bloody tip. Below it were words. Kinnell could make Out DEATH BEFORE, and he supposed you didn't have to be a big best-selling novelist to figure out the word that was still hidden. DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR was, after all, just the sort of a thing a hoodoo traveling man like this was apt to have on his arm. And an ace of spades or a pot plant on the other one, Kinnell thought.

"You hate it, don't you, Auntie?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, and now he saw an even more amazing thing: she had turned away from him, pretending to look out at the street (which was dozing and deserted in the hot afternoon sunlight), so she wouldn't have to look at the picture. "In fact, Auntie loathes it. Now put it away and come on into the house. I'll bet you need to use the bathroom."

Aunt Trudy recovered her savoir faire almost as soon as the watercolor was back in the trunk. They talked about Kinnell's mother (Pasadena), his sister (Baton Rouge), and his ex-wife, Sally (Nashua). Sally was a space-case who ran an animal shelter out of a double-wide trailer and published two newsletters each month. Survivors was filled with astral info and supposedly true tales of the spirit world; Visitors contained the reports of people who'd had close encounters with space aliens. Kinnell no longer went to fan conventions which specialized in fantasy and horror. One Sally in a lifetime, he sometimes told people, was enough.

When Aunt Trudy walked him back out to the car, it was fourthirty and he'd turned down the obligatory dinner invitation. "I can get most of the way back to Derry in daylight, if I leave now."

"Okay," she said. "And I'm sorry I was so mean about your picture. Of course you like it, you've always liked your ... your oddities. It just hit me the wrong way. That awful face. " She shuddered. "As if we were looking at him . . . and he was looking right back."

Kinnell grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. "You've got quite an imagination yourself, sweetheart."

"Of course, it runs in the family. Are you sure you don't want to use the facility again before you go?"

He shook his head. "That's not why I stop, anyway, not really."

"Oh? Why do you?"

He grinned. "Because you know who's being naughty and who's being nice. And you're not afraid to share what you know."

"Go on, get going," she said, pushing at his shoulder but clearly pleased. "If I were you, I'd want to get home quick. I wouldn't want that nasty guy riding along behind me in the dark, even in the trunk. I mean, did you see his teeth? Ag!"

He got on the turnpike, trading scenery for speed, and made it as far as the Gray service area before deciding to have another look at the picture. Some of his aunt's unease had transmitted itself to him like a germ, but he didn't think that was really the problem. The. problem was his perception that the picture had changed.

The service area featured the usual gourmet chow - burgers by Roy Rogers, cones by TCBY - and had a small, littered picnic and dogwalking area at the rear. Kinnell parked next to a van with Missouri plates, drew in a deep breath, let it out. He'd driven to Boston in order to kill some plot gremlins in the new book, which was pretty ironic. He'd spent the ride down working out what he'd say on the panel if certain tough questions were tossed at him, but none had been-once they'd found out he didn't know where he got his ideas, and yes, he did sometimes scare himself, they'd only wanted to know how you got an agent.

And now, heading back, he couldn't think of anything but the damned picture.

Had it changed? If it had, if the blond kid's arm had moved enough so he, Kinnell, could read a tattoo which had been partly hidden before, then he could write a column for one of Sally's magazines. Hell, a fourpart series. If, on the other hand, it wasn't changing, then ... what? He was suffering a hallucination? Having a breakdown? That was crap. His life was pretty much in order, and he felt good. Had, anyway, until his fascination with the picture had begun to waver into something else, something darker.

"Ah, fuck, you just saw it wrong the first time," he said out loud as he got out of the car. Well, maybe. Maybe. It wouldn't be the first time his head had screwed with his perceptions. That was also a part of what he did. Sometimes his imagination got a little ... well ...

"Feisty," Kinnell said, and opened the trunk. He took the picture out of the trunk and looked at it, and it was during the space of the ten seconds when he looked at it without remembering to breathe that he became authentically afraid of the thing, afraid the way you were afraid of a sudden dry rattle in the bushes, afraid the way you were when you saw an insect that would probably sting if you provoked it.

The blond driver was grinning insanely at him now-yes, at him, Kinnell was sure of it-with those filed cannibal-teeth exposed all the way to the gumlines. His eyes simultaneously glared and laughed. And the Tobin Bridge was gone. So was the Boston skyline. So was the sunset. It was almost dark in the painting now, the car and its wild rider illuminated by a single streetlamp that ran a buttery glow across the road and the car's chrome. It looked to Kinnell as if the car (he was pretty sure it was a Grand Am) was on the edge of a small town on Route 1, and he was pretty sure he knew what town it was-he had driven through it himself only a few hours ago.

"Rosewood," he muttered. "That's Rosewood. I'm pretty sure."

The Road Virus was heading north, all right, coming up Route 1 just as he had. The blond's left arm was still cocked out the window, but it had rotated enough back toward its original position so that Kinnell could no longer see the tattoo. But he knew it was there, didn't he? Yes, you bet.

The blond kid looked like a Metallica fan who had escaped from a mental asylum for the criminally insane.

"Jesus," Kinnell whispered, and the word seemed to come from someplace else, not from him. The strength suddenly ran out of his body, ran out like water from a bucket with a hole in the bottom, and he sat down heavily on the curb separating the parking lot from the dog-walking zone. He suddenly understood that this was the truth he'd missed in all his fiction, this was how people really reacted when they came face-to-face with something which made no rational sense. You felt as if you were bleeding to death, only inside your head.

"No wonder the guy who painted it killed himself," he croaked, still staring at the picture, at the ferocious grin, at the eyes that were both shrewd and stupid.

There was a note pinned to his shirt, Mrs. Diment had said. "I can't stand what's happening to me. " Isn't that awful, Mr. Kinnell?

Yes, it was awful, all right.

Really awful.

He got up, gripping the picture by its top, then strode across the dog-walking area. He kept his eyes trained strictly in front of him, looking for canine land mines. He did not look down at the picture. His legs felt trembly and untrustworthy, but they seemed to support him all right. just ahead, close to the belt of trees at the rear of the service area, was a pretty young thing in white shorts and a red halter. She was walking a cocker spaniel. She began to smile at Kinnell, then saw something in his face that straightened her lips out in a hurry. She headed left, and fast. The cocker didn't want to go that fast so she dragged it, coughing, in her wake.

The scrubby pines behind the service area sloped down to a boggy area that stank of plant and animal decomposition. The carpet of pine needles was a road litter fallout zone: burger wrappers, paper soft drink cups, TCBY napkins, beer cans, empty wine-cooler bottles, cigarette butts. He saw a used condom lying like a dead snail next to a torn pair of panties with the word TUESDAY stitched on them in cursive girly-girl script.

Now that he was here, he chanced another look down at the picture. He steeled himself for further changes even for the possibility that the painting would be in motion, like a movie in a frame - but there was none. There didn't have to be, Kinnell realized; the blond kid's face was enough. That stone-crazy grin. Those pointed teeth. The face said, Hey, old man, guess what? I'm done fucking with civilization. I'm a representative of the real generation X, the next millennium is tight here behind the wheel of this fine, high-steppin' mo-sheen.

Aunt Trudy's initial reaction to the painting had been to advise Kinnell that he should throw it into the Saco River. Auntie had been right. The Saco was now almost twenty miles behind him, but . .

"This'll do," he said. "I think this'll do just fine."

He raised the picture over his head like a guy holding up some kind of sports trophy for the postgame photographers and then heaved it down the slope. It flipped over twice, the frame caching winks of hazy late-day sun, then struck a tree. The glass facing shattered. The picture fell to the ground and then slid down the dry, needle-carpeted slope, as if down a chute. It landed in the bog, one comer of the frame protruding from a thick stand of reeds. Otherwise, there was nothing visible but the strew of broken glass, and Kinnell thought that went very well with the rest of the litter.

He turned and went back to his car, already picking up his mental trowel. He would wall this incident off in its own special niche, he thought ... and it occurred to him that that was probably what most people did when they ran into stuff like this. Liars and wannabees (or maybe in this case they were wannasees) wrote up their fantasies for publications like Survivors and called them truth; those who blundered into authentic occult phenomena kept their mouths shut and used those trowels. Because when cracks like this appeared in your life, you had to do something about them; if you didn't, they were apt to widen and sooner or later everything would fall in.

Kinnell glanced up and saw the pretty young thing watching him apprehensively from what she probably hoped was a safe distance. When she saw him looking at her, she turned around and started toward the restaurant building, once more dragging the cocker spaniel behind her and trying to keep as much sway Out of her hips as possible.

You think I'm crazy, don't you pretty girl? Kinnell thought. He saw he had left his trunk lid up. It gaped like a mouth. He slammed it shut. You and half the fiction-reading population of America, I guess. But I'm not crazy. Absolutely not. I just made a little mistake, that's all. Stopped at a yard sale I should have passed up. Anyone could have done it. You could have done it. And that picture

" What picture?" Rich Kinnell asked the hot summer evening, and tried on a smile. "I don't see any picture."

He slid behind the wheel of his Audi and started the engine. He looked at the fuel gauge and saw it had dropped under a half. He was going to need gas before he got home, but he thought he'd fill the tank a little further up the line. Right now all he wanted to do was to put a belt of miles - as thick a one as possible - between him and the discarded painting.

Once outside the city limits of Derry, Kansas Street becomes Kansas Road. As it approaches the incorporated town limits (an area that is actually open countryside), it becomes Kansas Lane. Not long after,, Kansas Lane passes between two fieldstone posts. Tar gives way to' gravel. What is one of Derry's busiest downtown streets eight miles east of here has become a driveway leading up a shallow hill, and on moonlit summer nights it glimmers like something out of an Alfred Noyes poem. At the top of the hill stands an angular, handsome barn-board structure with reflectorized windows, a stable that is actually a garage, and a satellite dish tilted at the stars. A waggish reporter from the Derry News once called it the House that Gore Built ... not meaning the vice president of the United States. Richard Kinnell simply called it home, and he parked in front of it that night with a sense of weary satisfaction. He felt as if he had lived through a week's worth of time since getting up in the Boston Harbor hotel that morning at nine o'clock.

No more yard sales, he thought, looking up at the moon. No more yard sales ever.

I "Amen," he said, and started toward the house. He probably should stick the car in the garage, but the hell with it. What he wanted right now was a drink, a light meal - something microwaveable - and then sleep. Preferably the kind without dreams. He couldn't wait to put this day behind him.

He stuck his key in the lock, turned it, and punched 3817 to silence the warning bleep from the burglar alarm panel. He turned on the front hall light, stepped through the door, pushed it shut behind him, began to turn, saw what was on the wall where his collection of framed book covers had been just two days ago, and screamed. In his head he screamed. Nothing actually came out of his mouth but a harsh exhalation of air. He heard a thump and a tuneless little jingle as his keys fell out of his relaxing hand and dropped to the carpet between his feet.

The Road Virus Heads North was no longer in the puckerbrush behind the Gray turnpike service area.

It was mounted on his entry wall.

It had changed yet again. The car was now parked in the driveway of the yard sale yard. The goods were still spread out everywhereglassware and furniture and ceramic knickknacks (Scottie dogs smoking pipes, bare-assed toddlers, winking fish), but now they gleamed beneath the light of the same skullface moon that rode in the sky above Kinnell's house. The TV was still there, too, and it was still on, casting its own pallid radiance onto the grass, and what lay in front of it, next to an overturned lawn chair. Judy Diment was on her back, and she was no longer all there. After a moment, Kinnell saw the rest. It was on the ironing board, dead eyes glowing like fifty-cent pieces in the moonlight.

The Grand Am's taillights were a blur of red-pink watercolor paint. It was Kinnell's first look at the car's back deck. Written across it in Old English letters were three words: THE ROAD VIRUS.

Makes perfect sense, Kinnell thought numbly. Not him, his car. Except for a guy like this, there's probably not much difference.

"This isn't happening," he whispered, except it was. Maybe it wouldn't have happened to someone a little less open to such things, but it was happening. And as he stared at the painting he found himself remembering the little sign on Judy Diment's card table. ALL SALES CASH, it had said (although she had taken his check, only adding his driver's license ID number for safety's sake). And it had said something else, too.

ALL SALES FINAL.

Kinnell walked past the picture and into the living room. He felt like a stranger inside his own body, and he sensed part of his mind groping for the trowel he had used earlier. He seemed to have misplaced it.

He turned on the TV, then the Toshiba satellite tuner which sat on top of it. He turned to V-14, and all the time he could feel the picture out there in the hall, pushing at the back of his head. The picture that had somehow beaten him here.

"Must have known a shortcut," Kinnell said, and laughed.

He hadn't been able to see much of the blond in this version of the picture, but there had been a blur behind the wheel which Kinnell assumed had been him. The Road Virus had finished his business in Rosewood. It was time to move north. Next stop

He brought a heavy steel door down on that thought, cutting it off before he could see all of it. "After all, I could still be imagining all this," he told the empty living room. Instead of comforting him, the hoarse, shaky quality of his voice frightened him even more. "This could be ... But he couldn't finish. All that came to him was an old song, belted out in the pseudo-hip style of some early '50s Sinatra done: This could be the start of something BIG ...

The tune oozing from the TV's stereo speakers wasn't Sinatra but Paul Simon, arranged for strings. The white computer type on the blue screen said WELCOME TO NEW ENGLAND NEWSWIRE. There were ordering instructions below this, but Kinnell didn't have to read them; he was a Newswire junkie and knew the drill by heart. He dialed, punched in his Mastercard number, then 508.

"You have ordered Newswire for [slight pause] central and northem Massachusetts," the robot voice said. "Thank you very m--"

Kinnell dropped the phone back into the cradle and stood looking at the New England Newswire logo, snapping his fingers nervously. "Come on," he said. "Come on, come on."

The screen flickered then, and the blue background became green. Words began scrolling up, something about a house fire in Taunton. This was followed by the latest on a dog-racing scandal, then tonight's weather - clear and mild. Kinnell was starting to relax, starting to wonder if he'd really seen what he thought he'd seen on the entryway wall or if it had been a bit of travel-induced fugue, when the TV beeped shrilly and the words BREAKING NEWS appeared. He stood watching the caps scroll up.

NENphAUG19/8:40P A ROSEWOOD WOMAN HAS BEEN BRUTALLY MURDER-ED WHILE DOING A FAVOR FOR AN ABSENT FRIEND. 38-YEAR-OLD JUDITH DIMENT WAS SAVAGELY HACKED TO DEATH ON THE LAWN OF HER NEIGHBOR'S HOUSE, WHERE SHE HAD BEEN CONDUCTING A YARD SALE. NO SCREAMS WERE HEARD AND MRS. DIMENT WAS NOT FOUND UNTIL EIGHT O'CLOCK, WHEN A NEIGHBOR ACROSS THE STREET CAME OVER TO COMPLAIN ABOUT LOUD TELEVISION NOISE. THE NEIGHBOR, DAVID GRAVES, SAID THAT MRS. DIMENT HAD BEEN DECAPITATED. "HER HEAD WAS ON THE IRONING BOARD," HE SAID. "IT WAS THE MOST AWFUL THING I'VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE." GRAVES SAID HE HEARD NO SIGNS OF A STRUGGLE, ONLY THE TV AND, SHORTLY BEFORE FINDING THE BODY, A LOUD CAR, POSSIBLY EQUIPPED WITH A GLASSPACK MUFFLER, ACCELERATING AWAY FROM THE VICINITY ALONG ROUTE ONE. SPECULATION THAT THIS VEHICLE MAY HAVE BELONGED TO THE KILLER

Except that wasn't speculation; that was a simple fact.

Breathing hard, not quite panting, Kinnell hurried back into the entryway. The picture was still there, but it had changed once more. Now it showed two glaring white circles - headlights - with the dark shape of the car hulking behind them.

He's on the move again, Kinnell thought, and Aunt Trudy was on top of his mind now - sweet Aunt Trudy, who always knew who had been naughty and who had been nice. Aunt Trudy, who lived in Wells, no more than forty miles from Rosewood.

" God, please God, please send him by the coast road," Kinnell said, reaching for the picture. Was it his imagination or were the headlights farther apart now, as if the car were actually moving before his eyes ... but stealthily, the way the minute hand moved on a Pocket watch? "Send him by the coast road, please."

He tore the picture off the wall and ran back into the living room with it. The screen was in place before the fireplace, of course; it would be at least two months before a fire was wanted in here. Kinnell batted it aside and threw the painting in, breaking the glass fronting-which he had already broken once, at the Gray service area - against the firedogs. Then he pelted for the kitchen, wondering what he would do if this didn't work either.

It has to, he thought. It will because it has to, and that's A there is to it.

He opened the kitchen cabinets and pawed through them, spilling the oatmeal, spilling a canister of salt, spilling the vinegar. The bottle broken open on the counter and assaulted his nose and eyes with the high stink.

Not there. What he wanted wasn't there.

He raced into the pantry, looked behind the door - nothing but a plastic bucket and an 0 Cedar - and then on the shelf by the dryer. There it was, next to the briquets.

Lighter fluid.

He grabbed it and ran back, glancing at the telephone on the kitchen wall as he hurried by. He wanted to stop, wanted to call Aunt Trudy. Credibility wasn't an issue with her; if her favorite nephew called and told her to get out of the house, to get out light now, she would do it ... but what if the blond kid followed her? Chased her?

And he would. Kinnell knew he would.

He hurried across the living room and stopped in front of the fireplace.

"Jesus," he whispered. "Jesus, no."

The picture beneath the splintered glass no longer showed oncoming headlights. Now it showed the Grand Am on a sharply curving piece of road that could only be an exit ramp. Moonlight shone like liquid satin on the car's dark flank. In the background was a water tower, and the words on it were easily readable in the moonlight. KEEP MAINE GREEN, they said. BRING MONEY.

Kinnell didn't hit the picture with the first squeeze of lighter fluid; his hands were shaking badly and the aromatic liquid simply ran down the unbroken part of the glass, blurring the Road Virus's back deck. He took a deep breath, aimed, then squeezed again. This time the lighter fluid squirted in through the jagged hole made by one of the firedogs and ran down the picture, cutting through the paint, making it run, turning a Goodyear Wide Oval into a sooty teardrop.

Kinnell took one of the ornamental matches from the jar on the mantel, struck it on the hearth, and poked it in through the hole in the glass. The painting caught at once, fire billowing up and down across the Grand Am and the water tower. The remaining glass in the frame turned black, then broke outward in a shower of flaming pieces. Kinnell crunched them under his sneakers, putting them out before they could set the rug on fire.

He went to the phone and punched in Aunt Trudy's number, unaware that he was crying. On the third ring, his aunt's answering machine picked up. "Hello," Aunt Trudy said, "I know it encourages the burglars to say things like this, but I've gone up to Kennebunk to watch the new Harrison Ford movie. If you intend to break in, please don't take my china pigs. If you want to leave a message, do so at the beep."

Kinnell waited, then, keeping his voice as steady as possible, he said:

"It's Richie, Aunt Trudy. Call me when you get back, okay? No matter how late."

He hung up, looked at the TV, then dialed Newswire again, this time punching in the Maine area code. While the computers on the other end processed his order, he went back and used a poker to jab at the blackened, twisted thing in the fireplace. The stench was ghastly - it made the spilled vinegar smell like a flowerpatch in comparison-but Kinnell found he didn't mind. The picture was entirely gone, reduced to ash, and that made it worthwhile.

Mat if it comes back again?

"It won't," he said, putting the poker back and returning to the TV. "I'm sure it won't."

But every time the news scroll started to recycle, he got up to check. The picture was just ashes on the hearth ... and there was no word of elderly women being murdered in the Wells-Saco-Kennebunk area of the state. Kinnell kept watching, almost expecting to see A GRAND AM MOVING AT HIGH SPEED CRASHED INTO A KENNEBUNK MOVIE THEATER TONIGHT, KILLING AT LEAST TEN, but nothing of the sort showed up.

At a quarter of eleven the telephone rang. Kinnell snatched it up. "Hello?"

"It's Trudy, dear. Are you all right?"

"Yes, fine."

"You don't sound fine," she said. "Your voice sounds trembly and funny. What's wrong? What is it?" And then, chilling him but not really surprising him: "It's that picture you were so pleased with, isn't it? That goddamned picture!"

It calmed him somehow, that she should guess so much ... and, of course, there was the relief of knowing she was safe.

"Well, maybe," he said. "I had the heebie-jeebies all the way back here, so I burned it. In the fireplace."

She's going to find out about Judy Diment, you know, a voice inside warned. She doesn't have a twenty-thousand-dollar satellite hookup, but she does subscribe to the Union-Leader and this'll be on the front page. She'll put two and two together. She's far from stupid.

Yes, that was undoubtedly true, but further explanations could wait until the morning, when he might be a little less freaked ... when he might've found a way to think about the Road Virus without losing his mind ... and when he'd begun to be sure it was really over.

"Good!" she said emphatically. "You ought to scatter the ashes, too!" She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was lower. "You were worried about me, weren't you? Because you showed it to me.

"A little, yes."

"But you feel better now?"

He leaned back and closed his eyes. It was true, he did. "Uh-huh. How was the movie?"

"Good. Harrison Ford looks wonderful in a uniform. Now, if he'd just get rid of that little bump on his chin . . ."

"Good night, Aunt Trudy. We'll talk tomorrow."

"Will we?"

"Yes," he said. "I think so."

He hung up, went over to the fireplace again, and stirred the ashes with the poker. He could see a scrap of fender and a ragged little flap of road, but that was it. Fire was what it had needed all along, apparently. Wasn't that how you usually killed supernatural emissaries of evil? Of course it was. He'd used it a few times himself, most notably in The Departing, his haunted train station novel.

"Yes, indeed," he said. "Bum, baby, bum."

He thought about getting the drink he'd promised himself, then remembered the spilled bottle of vinegar (which by now would probably be soaking into the spilled oatmeal-what a thought). He decided he would simply go on upstairs instead. In a book-one by Richard Kinnell, for instance - sleep would be out of the question after the sort of thing which had just happened to him.

In real life, he thought he might sleep just fine.

He actually dozed off in the shower, leaning against the back wall with his hair full of shampoo and the water beating on his chest. He was at the yard sale again, and the TV standing on the paper ashtrays was broadcasting Judy Diment. Her head was back on, but Kinnell could see the medical examiner's primitive industrial stitchwork; it circled her throat like a grisly necklace. "Now this New England Newswire update," she said, and Kinnell, who had always been a vivid dreamer, could actually see the stitches on her neck stretch and relax as she spoke. "Bobby Hastings took all his paintings and burned them, including yours, Mr. Kinnell ... and it is yours, as I'm sure you know. All sales are final, you saw the sign. Why, you just ought to be glad I took your check."

Burned all his paintings, yes, of course he did, Kinnell thought in his watery dream. He couldn't stand what was happening to him, that's what the note said, and when you get to that point in the festivities, you don't pause to see if you want to except one special piece of work from the bonfire. It's just that you got something special into The Road Virus Heads North, didn't you, Bobby? And probably completely by accident. You were talented, I could see that right away, but talent has nothing to do with what's going on in that picture.

"Some things are just good at survival," Judy Diment said on the TV. "They keep coming back no matter how hard you try to get rid of them. They keep coming back like viruses."

Kinnell reached out and changed the channel, but apparently there was nothing on all the way around the dial except for The Judy Diment Show.

" You might say he opened a hole into the basement of the universe," she was saying now. "Bobby Hastings, I mean. And this is what drove out. Nice, isn't it?"

Kinnell's feet slid then, not enough to go out from under him completely, but enough to snap him to.

He opened his eyes, winced at the immediate sting of the soap (Prell had run down his face in thick white rivulets while he had been dozing), and cupped his hands under the shower-spray to splash it away. He did this once and was reaching out to do it again when he heard something. A ragged rumbling sound.

Don't be stupid, he told himself. All you hear is the shower. The rest is only imagination.

Except it wasn't.

Kinnell reached out and turned off the water.

The rumbling sound continued. Low and powerful. Coming from outside.

He got out of the shower and walked, dripping, across his bedroom on the second floor. There was still enough shampoo in his hair to make him look as if it had turned white while he was dozing-as if his dream of Judy Diment had turned it white.

My did I ever stop at that yard sale? he asked himself, but for this he had no answer. He supposed no one ever did.

The rumbling sound grew louder as he approached the window overlooking the driveway-the driveway that glimmered in the summer moonlight like something out of an Alfred Noyes poem.

As he brushed aside the curtain and looked out, he found himself thinking of his ex-wife, Sally, whom he had met at the World Fantasy Convention in 1978. Sally, who now published two magazines out of

her trailer home, one called Survivors, one called Visitors. Looking down at the driveway, these two tides came together in Kinnell's mind like a double image in a stereopticon.

He had a visitor who was definitely a survivor.

The Grand Am idled in front of the house, the white haze from its twin chromed tailpipes rising in the still night air. The Old English letters on the back deck were perfectly readable. The driver's side door stood open, and that wasn't all; the light spilling down the porch steps suggested that Kinnell's front door was also open.

Forgot to lock it, Kinnell thought, wiping soap off his forehead with a hand he could no longer feel. Forgot to reset the burglar alarm, too . not that it would have made much difference to this guy.

Well, he might have caused it to detour around Aunt Trudy, and that was something, but just now the thought brought him no comfort.

Survivors.

The soft rumble of the big engine, probably at least a 442 with a four-barrel carb, reground valves, fuel injection.

He turned slowly on legs that had lost all feeling, a naked man with a headful of soap, and saw the picture over his bed, just as he'd known he would. In it, the Grand Am stood in his driveway with the driver's door open and two plumes of exhaust rising from the chromed tailpipes. From this angle he could also see his own front door, standing open, and a long man-shaped shadow stretching down the hall.

Survivors.

Survivors and visitors.

Now he could hear feet ascending the stairs. It was a heavy tread, and he knew without having to see that the blond kid was wearing motorcycle boots. People with DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR tattooed on their arms always wore motorcycle boots, just as they always smoked unfiltered Camels. These things were like a national law.

And the knife. He would be carrying a long, sharp knife - more of a machete, actually, the sort of knife that could strike off a person's head in a single sweeping stroke.

And he would be grinning, showing those filed cannibal-teeth.

Kinnell knew these things. He was an imaginative guy, after all.

He didn't need anyone to draw him a picture.

"No," he whispered, suddenly conscious of his global nakedness, suddenly freezing all the way around his skin. "No, please, go away." But the footfalls kept coming, of course they did. You couldn't tell a guy like this to go away. It didn't work; it wasn't the way the story was supposed to end.

Kinnell could hear him nearing the top of the stairs. Outside the Grand Am went on rumbling in the moonlight.

The feet coming down the hall now, worn bootheels rapping on polished hardwood.

A terrible paralysis had gripped Kinnell. He threw it off with an effort and bolted toward the bedroom door, wanting to lock it before the thing could get in here, but he slipped in a puddle of soapy water and this time he did go down, flat on his back on the oak planks, and what he saw as the door clicked open and the motorcycle boots crossed the room toward where he lay, naked and with his hair full of Prell, was the picture hanging on the wall over his bed, the picture of the Road Virus idling in front of his house with the driver's side door open.

The driver's side bucket seat, he saw, was full of blood. I'm going outside, I think, Kinnell thought, and closed his eyes.

[rpf-bat]

I’m Coming Back From The Dead (And I’ll Take You Home With Me)

Pairing: Party Poison x Vampire!Reader

Genre: Action, Drama

Summary: After the events of ‘SING’, the Fabulous Killjoys are dead. But, what if you had the power to make them undead?

A/N: The Vampirefuckers Anonymous group chat on Kik asked for something with vampire Killjoys. Hope you like this, Vampirefuckers!

The Fabulous Killjoys all knew that you were a vampire. At first, that night when they'd caught you with blood on your fangs, you thought they would call you a monster. But, then they learned that you only ripped blood from the necks of Scarecrows and Draculoids - monsters, you thought, in their own way. They had no sympathy for these villianous victims, the soldiers of your common enemy, BL/ind. Still, you'd never sipped blood from the Killjoys themselves - even your boyfriend, Party Poison. You always thought his blood smelled delicious, but you'd never bite him without his consent. 

The day of that final battle at BL/ind headquarters, the scent of your lover's blood filled the air when that bastard Korse shot him in the head. 

"NO!" you screamed, rushing to the fallen rebel leader's side. Korse shot you, but the laser blast did nothing to your immortal skin. You heard Kobra Kid cry out in anguished grief, too, but then his cries were silenced as a shot struck his mortal body down. No.

Only Jet Star contained his agony, and remembered the mission: protect The Girl. He grabbed her by the hand and led her out of the lobby, towards Dr. Death Defying's waiting van. You knew you should be helping him, that The Girl's safety should be your greatest priority, but instead you continued to cradle Party Poison's bleeding body, brushing the scarlet hair off his marred forehead. No.

Fun Ghoul did what you could not, and provided covering fire to aid Jet and The Girl's escape. He could have fled himself, but he stood fast, continuing to shoot at Korse and his minions. They struck him down, too. No - now Jet Star was the only one of your companions left!

The Girl made it into the van safely. "Just go," Jet Star shouted to the DJ driver. "Y/N and I will hold them off, just save The Girl and get out of here!" 

"No, Uncle Jet, Auntie Y/N, I don't want to leave without you!" The Girl protested, sobbing. She'd just watched her three other 'uncles' die. You still held one of one of them against your chest, bullets continuing to hit your body ineffectually. 

"Go!" Jet Star insisted, and then he fell, too, his lifeless body collapsing against the hood of the Trans Am. The van peeled away, leaving you with four dead bodies, and a room full of enemies. 

Oh, God, they're all dead, you thought. They're dead, oh, Phoenix Witch, help me.....

You had to pull it together. You had to get out of here. You stood, throwing Party Poison's body over your shoulder. He wasn't going in one of those BL/ind bastard's body bags, that was for damn sure. With your vampiric strength, his corpse weighed almost nothing at all. You ran for the exit, stepping over Kobra Kid and Fun Ghoul's corpses, as well. You wanted to take them all with you, but there was no way. 

Forgive me, Kid, you thought, tears streaming down your face as you ran from the Exterminators. Forgive me, Ghoul. 

You threw open the passenger door of the Trans Am and put Party Poison's body in the passenger seat. Just an hour ago, he'd been sitting there beside you, laughing, blasting Mad Gear And The Missile Kid.....oh, god, Poison. A fresh wave of grief washed over you.

But, there wasn't time for that. You grabbed Jet Star's body off the hood of the car and tossed it in the backseat. Then, you got into the driver's seat and you hit the gas. You drove until the Battery City buildings gave way to open desert. You burned robber across the scorching sands until you were sure Korse wasn't chasing you anymore. Only then did you hit the brakes. 

You pulled the keys  out of the ignition and looked at the body beside you. He's dead, you thought. My Party Poison, my Gerard, my baby, he's dead.

"Should I bury him?" you muttered to yourself. "And put his mask in the Mailbox?" 

But then, another idea came to you. Modern medicine could not save the Killjoy now. It was far too late for that. But....technically, you were dead, too. But, you still walked and breathed, because a fanged creature you'd met on your first night in the desert, before the Fab Four had found you, had given you the gift/curse of eternal life. Undeath. 

Party Poison's blood already slicked your hands from where you'd held him. In spite of your grief and pain and nausea, the sick, primal part of you had to admit, the smell was making you hungry. 

There was a way, you realized, that Party Poison did not have to stay dead. He may not like it - he may despise you when he realized what you had done to him - but there was a way that he could open those eyes again, and look at you, and be here, instead of leaving you alone in this world. If there was a way to bring him back - even if he hated you for it - you had to do it, right? 

You couldn't never hear his voice again. You couldn't never feel his touch again. "Forgive me, Party Poison," you said softly. And then you reached over and gently brushed the crimson locks away from his face, and plunged your fangs into his neck.

You didn't want to focus on the way his blood tasted. You were not doing this for your own pleasure, to slake your own thirst. You were doing this to save him. But, you had to admit, it was the sweetest thing you'd ever tasted. You restrained yourself, and only drank as much as the ritual required. Then, you pulled a knife from your belt (Poison had given it to you himself, your first day at the diner, to defend yourself with until he could teach you how to fire a ray gun) and pointed it at your own wrist. 

You hesitated, knowing this would hurt. But, it wouldn't kill you. Nothing short of a stake to the heart would. You sliced at the place where your vein was, letting your life-giving blood drip from the wound. Then, you pressed your bleeding wrist to Party Poison's soft lips.

"Drink, my love," you whispered, "and live." 

You weren't sure how long it would take for the Turning to be complete. Did he need to drink more? Or was this enough? You'd never Turned anyone before. What if you'd done something wrong? What if it wasn't going to work? 

Just when you thought it was all going to be for nothing, you felt fangs bloom in Party Poison's mouth. You tugged your wrist away. His closed eyes twitched, like he was just waking up from a long nap. You'd done it. 

He opened those beautiful, hazel eyes that you knew so well, and you pulled him into your arms, sobbing with relief. 

"Y/N?" Poison blinked, confused. "Where are we? We...we were in Battery City...." 

He looked around, and then he saw Jet Star's corpse strewn across the backseat, and he screamed. 

"Jet! Oh my god!" he cried. "What happened to him?! Where's my brother? Where's Ghoul? Where's The Girl? Is she safe? What....." 

"Poison, calm down," you said, grabbing him by the shoulder. "I can explain." 

"How can I be calm?!" Poison gasped. "Jet Star is dead!"

"So are you, Poison," you replied.

"I......what??" Poison looked at you, bewildered.

"Technically," you confessed, "you're undead." 

Poison's eyes widened in realization. "No." His hand flew to his mouth, and, at last, he realized that there were fangs there. "No.....Y/N.....what did you do to me....."

"Korse killed you!" you argued. 

"He....." After a moment, the memory of what had happened in Battery City seemed to filter into Party Poison's consciousness. "That's.....we.....we were in the lobby. We'd rescued The Girl, and Korse was chasing us, and....." 

Party Poison began to hyperventilate as the recollections hit him. 

"He....he pinned me against the wall...." Poison flashed back. "And he took out his gun....and....he....he shot me, didn't he? In the head." 

"Yes," you admitted. "I died," Poison realized.

"You did," you nodded. 

"I died," Poison repeated, like he couldn't believe it. "And you....you brought me back?"

"I'm sorry, Poison," you cried, fearing he would hate you now, for making him a monster like yourself. "I couldn't lose you. I couldn't live in this world without you."

"It's ok," Poison said, taking you in his arms. "I'm glad I'm alive - even if it's not a human life anymore. Thank you, Y/N. You saved me." 

"The Girl made it out alive," you informed him as you held him tight, so relieved that he didn't despise you for transforming him without his consent. "Dr. Death Defying took her somewhere safe." 

"Good," Poison said, relieved. "And Jet...." He looked down at his friend's body, like he might cry. 

"He died to save her," you revealed. 

"Can we bring him back, too?" Poison asked desperately. "Just tell me what to do, and I'll do it myself." 

"Are you sure that's what he would want?" you wondered. "Or would he want us to let him go, let his soul travel with the Phoenix Witch to the place that lies beyond the Zones?" 

You were being hypocritical, you knew. You hadn't given Poison that option. 

"I think he would want to be here, with us," Poison said certainly. 

"Even if it means he has to consume the blood of the living to survive?" you wondered. Could gentle Jet really do something like that? 

"He's killed Dracs before," Poison figured. "What's the difference between killing for self-defense, and killing for food?"

"True," you acknowledged. "Plus, he could subsist on the blood of coyotes and cobras, if he really wanted to."

"Kobra," Poison gasped. "Oh, god, Y/N, what happened to Kobra Kid? Where's my baby brother?"

You didn't want to tell him, but you knew you had to. "The Exterminators got him, too." 

"He's dead?!" Poison gaped. "Where's his body?" 

"I couldn't grab all four of you and escape," you confessed. "I'm sorry." 

"So, you just left him there?" Poison accused angrily. 

"We can go back for him," you planned, "and bring him back, like you're about to bring back Jet." 

"What do I have to do to make Jet a vampire?" Poison asked. 

"Start by sucking his blood," you advised.

Poison looked squeamish. "From....from his neck?" 

"Anywhere there's a vein will work, really," you shrugged. 

Poison rolled up the sleeve of Jet Star's jacket, shuddering as he felt the cold, limp flesh of the corpse's hand. He felt for the place where the vein was, and brought the dead Killjoy's wrist to his lips. Hesitantly, he bit down, and let Jet's blood fill his mouth. 

"You must be thirsty, since you just woke up," you noticed. After a few sips, Poison put Jet's arm down. 

"Now what?" he asked. 

"Now, you have to put some of your blood in his mouth," you instructed. You handed him the knife you'd slit your own wrist with. Thanks to your vampiric regeneration, that wound had already closed. 

Poison blanched. He'd done this before, in a less selfless context, years ago, as a teenager in Battery City. You didn't want him to become triggered. 

"It doesn't have to be from the wrist," you said gently. 

Poison made a small nick in the tip of his finger, and placed the finger in Jet's still mouth. It looked a bit odd, but it would work. After a moment, Jet's one eye (the one that hadn't been shot out by a Drac, the one that wasn't covered by a patch) twitched open, and looked down, confused, at Poison's pinkie. 

Poison removed the finger from his friend's mouth, and embraced him with relief, as you had moments before. "You're alive."

Jet Star was savvier than Party Poison, and realized immediately what had taken place. "No, I'm not alive," he gasped. "I'm a vampire! And so are you! How....why......Y/N, why did you turn him? Why did you let him turn me?"

"Korse dusted you," you explained. "Both of you. Do you remember?" 

Jet went quiet for a moment as the events of the day came back to him. "Poison, you got shot," he recalled.

"Yeah, I guess I did," Poison said, like he could scarcely believe it.

"Y/N ran to your side. She was too distracted to protect The Girl, so I grabbed her and tried to run with her. They killed Kobra. They killed Ghoul. I got The Girl into the van, and then....."

"And then, according to Y/N, you died," Poison said grimly. "She brought me back, and then I brought you back. I hope you can forgive me."

"I do," Jet said quietly. "But.....we have to go get the others." 

"You want us to turn them?" you confirmed.

"I want my brothers back," Jet nodded. "I want the Fabulous Killjoys to live to fight another day. There's still so much we have to do to stop BL/ind. Can you imagine if The Girl had to go on and lead the Resistance all on her own, knowing we died to save her?" 

"She doesn't know we're alive yet," Poison realized, frowning. 

"We'll get the gang together," you planned. "Then, we'll find The Girl." 

"Ghoul and the Kid have got to be in Bat City, still," Jet guessed. "We're going to have to drive back there to go get them." 

"Your latest invention should help us with that, Jet," Poison smiled, for the first time since his resurrection. He was once again the team leader, directing a mission. 

Recently, Jet Star had modified the Trans Am's car radio to be able to pick up the radio frequences that the Exterminator vehicles, like cop cars, used to communicate with each other. He turned the dial away from 109, to their signal. 

The transmission was peppered with static. "This is Korse to all units.....bzzzt......the terrorists known as the Killjoys have been terminated."

"Like hell we have," Poison growled.

"Sssh, listen," Jet hushed him.

"Two of the bodies have not been.....bzzzt.....recovered," Korse informed his squad. 

"That would be ours," Poison smirked. BL/ind still thought him dead. Imagine their faces when he showed up, guns blazing. 

"The cadavers were abducted by the terrorists'...bzzt... accomplice," Korse huffed.

"That would be me," you laughed proudly. 

"The other two cadavers are being......bzzt.....transported presently," Korse explained. "To.....bzzt......bzzt....."

"To where?!" Poison cried, smacking the radio in frustration.

"Party, that's not helping!" Jet hissed.

"......bzzt......Street, also known as the Battery City Morgue," Korse revealed before the transmission cut out entirely. 

"The morgue," Poison decided. "That's where we need to go."

"We didn't hear the address," Jet frowned. "So, we have no idea where in the city it is."

"Well, we'll find out," you shrugged. "I mean, what are they going to do when we go barreling back into the city gates? Kill us?"

"They can't," Poison realized. "Because they already did." ********************************************************************************** You drove through the same tunnel you'd travelled to en route to corporate headquarters. You saw a Scarecrow on patrol. He raised his ray gun at you immediately, but Jet was a quicker shot. The Scarecrow fell to the pavement, shot nonlethally in the leg.

Poison got out of the car and gripped the Scarcrow by the collar. "Tell us where the morgue is," he hissed, revealing his bloodstained fangs, "or I'll fucking eat you." 

Shaking like he'd seen a ghost (and, perhaps, you had to admit, he had) the Scarecrow cooperated. "T-t-turn right on Main Street," the terrified soldier directed, "a-and then left on Battery Boulevard. And pl-please don't kill me." 

"If you tell your supervisor you saw us, I'll find you, and I'll drain you to the last drop," Poison threatened. 

"Just shoot him," Jet said mercilessly from the backseat window. "You know he'll raise the alarm if you let him live." 

"I....I won't!" the Scarecrow promised. "Please, I...I have a family...."

"So did I, before your boss shot him to death,"  Poison growled.

"We're going to fix that, Poison," you reminded. "Let the man go. Even if his buddies try to attack us, their laser beams can't hurt us anymore." 

"You're right," Poison decided, listening to your counsel, and threw the trembling Scarecrow back on the ground. The grunt ran for his life. Party Poison got back in the car, and you followed the Scarecrow's directions towards the morgue. 

"Wow," Jet tutted. "The idiot didn't even think to give us wrong directions." 

"Let's just go get Mi....get the Kid, and Ghoul," Poison commanded. You and Jet Star followed him, ray guns drawn, as he kicked down the morgue's front door. An Exterminator guard was at the entrance, of course. "No!" he gaped when he saw Party Poison's face. "It can't be! I saw Korse kill you! There's no way his shot missed!" 

"It didn't," Party Poison laughed. "That fucker ghosted me good. But I came back from the depths of hell just to kick your ass." He shot a ray gun blast in the Exterminator's face, dusting him instantly.

Warning klaxons blared, and more Exterminators rushed into the room. 

"Technically," you laughed, "I brought you back from the depths of hell, baby." You shot at the enemies, and your laser struck too.

"And I'm so glad you did, bunny," Poison said jovially as he wiped out more of the BL/ind operatives. Jet Star took care of the rest, and then the three of you stepped over the corpses that littered the floor and towards the room where the bodies were kept. 

You found Fun Ghoul on a slab, his colorful Frankenstein mask removed, missing, his long, black hair strewn out behind his still form. Laser burns covered his lifeless body. 

"You...you could've escaped, you idiot," Jet Star mumbled, his voice choked with tears. "You could have gotten out of there, but you got ghosted trying to give me and The Girl a chance." 

"You can thank him for it when we wake him up," you reminded. "That's what we're here for." 

"Shouldn't there be some kind of BL/ind doctor here, to do an autopsy or something?" Poison realized. "And there were too few guards here. No Korse, either. Something's not right." 

"Where's Kobra Kid?" you wondered, the borrowed blood in your veins running cold. 

"Where....where did they take him?!" Poison gasped, growing agitated. "If his body ain't in the morgue, what the fuck are they doing with it?" 

"We'll worry about that in a minute," Jet Star soothed. "Right now, let's turn Ghoul. Poison, do you want to do it, or should I?"

"I know you and the Kid had a special bond, Jet," Poison considered. "So I'll leave him to you, when - if - we find him."

"We will find him, Poison," you assured your boyfriend.

"Right," Poison nodded grimly. "But....yeah, it would be gross to stick my fangs in my own brother anyway. But, Jet, Y/N.....if you don't mind, I want to be the one to turn Fun Ghoul." 

"Alright," you nodded. Poison had had a special connection to the man who lay in front of him. Not simple brotherhood, like he had with Kobra. And something....more than the friendship he had with Jet. You weren't sure exactly what the nature of their relationship had been before you entered the picture. But, this wasn't the time to ask. 

Poison knelt beside the medical table where Ghoul's corpse lay. He stroked Ghoul's black hair with shaking fingers. "I'm so sorry they hurt you, Ghouly baby," he murmured. "But, it's alright. You're gonna come back to us, so you can pay them back for it. You'll blow 'em right up." 

He picked Ghoul's head up, bringing the man's neck to his mouth. He bit down gently, even though he knew that his friend could feel no pain. When he thought he'd sipped enough, he set Ghoul back down, and wiped his bloody lips on the sleeve of his jacket.

"Y/N. The knife, please," he asked. You handed it to him quietly. The nick on his finger he'd created to turn Jet Star had already healed, so he pricked a different digit this time. He grabbed Ghoul by the chin, gingerly forcing open his closed mouth. He placed the finger in Ghoul's mouth, letting the blood drip onto his tongue and down his throat. Then, he removed the finger and waited. 

You were worried that more Exterminators would come busting in here to fight your gang before the transformation was finished. But Poison was right- BL/ind was making this strangely easy. Something was definitely wrong. 

But, you were distracted from your paranoid thoughts when Fun Ghoul opened his eyes. He looked around, realizing that he was in the morgue, that Poison had tears in his eyes.....

"I.....died, didn't I?" Fun Ghoul said savvily. "I remember. They ghosted me. How....how the fuck am I breathing right now?" 

"You're a vampire," Poison explained.

"Y/N turned me?" Ghoul guessed.

"No," Poison shook his head. "I did. I'm a vampire, too, now. We all are." 

Ghoul sat up, looking wildly around the room at his companions. He saw the fangs in all of your mouths. You were worried he was going to panic. 

"Where's Kobra?" he demanded. "Did you turn him, too?" 

"No," you admitted. 

"So, he made it out alive, then?" Ghoul asked hopefully. "He's ok?"

"No," Jet said grimly. 

"So, he's dead," Ghoul realized, and his smile vanished. "No...." 

"You were dead about five minutes ago," Poison reminded. "We can save my brother. We just got to find him first."

"He's not here?" Ghoul asked. "He's not in any of these drawers?" 

The four of you started looking. There were bodies in some of the slots, but none of them were Kobra Kid's. An awful thought seized you, and you walked back into the morgue's lobby, where the bodies of the Exterminators still lay. You could faintly hear Korse's voice emanating, with a crackle, from one of the dead enemy's walkie-talkies.

You picked up the walkie talkie, and listened. "Don't worry about the Killjoy, Madam President," you heard Korse chuckle. He sounded so triumphant as he spoke to BL/ind's CEO. You shivered. "She should be at the Battery City morgue, attempting to recover the body of terrorist Frank Iero, alias Fun Ghoul." 

"How the fuck did Korse know you'd be here, Y/N?" Ghoul wondered, coming up behind you.

"It still sounds like he doesn't know Jet and I are alive, though," Poison pointed out.

"Both of you ssh so we can hear," Jet snapped. The men fell silent as you listened intently.

"We allowed her to intercept our transmission regarding the location of Iero's cadaver," Korse gloated. "We even gave my subordinates permission to direct her to the morgue. While she is distracted, our real mission may continue." 

Real mission? you thought, growing anxious. 

"Ah, yes," the Asian-accented voice of the CEO replied. "The Draculization of terrorist Michael Way." 

"They're going to turn him into a Drac?!" Poison howled. "When they put that mask on you, your soul gets ripped out!" 

"We have to find him first!" Jet cried.

"Where the fuck could they be?" Ghoul wondered.

"Not headquarters, where we were earlier," you figured. 

"Where we died earlier," Jet mumbled. 

"Not helping, Star," Ghoul snapped.

"If Korse was at HQ," you said logically, "he wouldn't have to radio the CEO, because he'd be in the same room as her."

"Unless she's on the move," Poison pointed out. 

"Maybe after we infiltrated HQ, she decided it wasn't a safe place to hide out anymore," Jet agreed.

"So, she left Korse there by himself?" you wondered.

"She doesn't care if you come back for revenge and dust him," Ghoul figured. "In Bat City, nobody's got feelings, right? The pills take care of that. So why would she give a fuck about what you do to her subordinate, as long as he completes his mission first?"

You realized Ghoul probably knew what he was talking about. In his former life, as the Exterminator, Frank, he'd seen how the upper echelons of BL/ind's corporate culture worked. 

"He's not going to complete his mission," Poison vowed. "I won't let him turn my brother into a monster."

"Well," Jet chuckled bitterly, showing his fangs, "a different sort of monster than we are, that is." 

"There's no way the car will get us there fast enough," Ghoul worried.

"With our vampiric speed," you considered, "we might get there faster running than driving."

"Are you serious, Y/N?" Poison asked.

"I didn't use my super speed powers a lot before," you admitted. "Because, normally, when I went somewhere, you guys were going with me, and I didn't want to dash ahead of you. But, I think it will work." 

"Ok," Jet nodded. "Ghoul, you know the way to HQ, right?" 

"That's right," Ghoul smirked. "Follow me." ****************************************************************************** In moments, you made it to BL/ind headquarters, even though it was miles from the morgue. Frantically, worried you'd be too late, you dashed up the stairs, to the room where the CEO had been holding The Girl earlier, on your first trip here.

It was unnerving to be back here. It must be even worse for the boys, who could clearly remember breathing their last human breaths in this place. But, you found courage in each other's company, and entered the control room at the top of the stairs. 

Korse was leaning over Kobra Kid's body, about to stretch the Draculoid mask over his still face. 

"NO!" Party Poison cried, whipping out his lemon yellow ray gun and firing a shot at Korse. It hit the bald Exterminator in the arm, making him drop the mask just in time.

"You!" Korse cried, looking at the red-haired man in shock. "Impossible! I terminated you, Way!" 

"The name ain't Way," your lover grinned as he fired another shot that sent Korse sinking to his knees. "It's motherfucking Party Poison. And Killjoys never die!" 

Korse still lived. He was an android. Like vampires, they could take more damage than humans. "Reinforcements to the control room!" he screamed into his walkie talkie. "All units, provide backup immediately!" 

"Jet, you get the Kid!" Poison ordered. "We'll hold these fuckers off!" He pistol whipped Korse, knocking him unconscious, and then turned his attention to the door. 

Dozens of Scarecrows and Draculoids surged into the room. You, Poison, and Ghoul fired at them, exchanging scores of laser blasts. One of the rays hit Poison in the neck, but didn't seem to phase him. 

"Just try and shoot me in the head again, motherfucker!" he cried. "I'm goddamn immortal now!" 

A Scarecrow tried a different tactic, and shot the blaster out of Ghoul's hand. Ghoul simply smirked and kicked the Scarecrow in the groin. When the BL/ind employee doubled over in pain, Ghoul sank his fangs into his neck.

"I have been so fucking thirsty since I woke up in that morgue," Ghoul laughed. "Holy shit, blood is delicious!" 

While the three of you fought off the enemies, Jet approached the body of Kobra Kid. "I'm sorry about this, Mikey," you heard him whisper. He gently bit down on the fallen Killjoy's neck.

A Scarecrow tried to run over, to stop him, but you shot the bastard dead. That was the last one. Nothing could stop you now. You tossed Jet Star the knife. 

To your surprise, he cut open his lip, and pressed his mouth against Kobra Kid's. After a few moments, Kobra's eyes opened, but he didn't immediately remove his mouth from the other man's.

So they had that kind of relationship, you guessed.

When Jet Star released him at last, Kobra Kid looked around the room, bewildered. You knew the last thing he remembered was watching his big brother die. 

"Poison," Kobra Kid gaped when he saw the redhead standing there, spattered with Scarecrow blood, but unharmed. "You're.....you're alive!" 

"Technically, I'm undead," Poison explained, "and so are you."

"What?" Kobra Kid blinked. "I don't understand." 

"It's a long story," Party Poison smiled. "But, we can tell you all about it in the Trans Am, on our way to meet up with Dr. D. and The Girl."

"All you need to know for now," Fun Ghoul grinned, "is that vampires will never hurt you."