Protect Her ~ supernatural / sam winchester

Twenty Three

Two weeks had passed since Sam awoke, bleary-eyed and furious, on the hot pavement in front of the bunker.

Two weeks since Dani had made a fool's bargain with Naomi.

Dean tried to get Sam to go on useless hunts, busywork to get him out of the bunker. But he stayed put, cleaning unused weapons and attempting to track her down.

They all knew where she was, though none of them dared say it and make it true. She had been taken to Heaven. They had no way to get to her, not without an angel to let them in.

After Sam, Dean, and Castiel had shared their stories, Sam had gone unnervingly quiet. The polar opposite to his brother when angry; Dean would yell and break things until his fury was spent, while Sam let it eat away at him, slowly, until he broke. Dean's heart had cracked when he nodded once and prowled off like a predatory animal.

Castiel had told Dean their plans for her: mind control. They would hone her into a perfect weapon for their use. He asked Cas not to tell Sam. He had already gone through too much. Besides, there was no point, not if they could not find her.

******

The angel blade plunged through skin and bone, tendon and muscle, and the man went limp, her grip on his collar the only thing keeping him upright. She looked into his blank hazel eyes for a moment, the fear and sadness in them faded away into nothing. Then she dropped him as if he was nothing.

The angel clapped her hands together slowly. She had to step over another corpse to reach the girl. The woman clapped her on the shoulder, something like pride shining in her eyes.

"You've done well, Jordan," she sighed.

The girl blinked, dissolving the blackness that had consumed the whites of her eyes.

"You're ready."

A hand still on her arm, the angel led the demon girl in a path around the bodies strewn across the room.

******

The bed was cold.

The scratchy, thin blanket was rumpled around Sam as he tossed and turned. Every time he tried to stop thinking about it, to just get an hour of sleep like Dean begged him, a new picture of her face popped into his mind.

He felt foolish for missing the feeling of her, noting just how empty the other pillow seemed. They had not slept together in a long while, and even then, they had not done it much. Still, he wished he had one more moment with her, one more chance to run his fingers over every scar on her body and feel her thin, calloused fingers on his.

Humans could not see angel wings. Still, Sam swore that when he found Naomi, he would cut her wings off her body and mount them in the library like a prize kill. As a true hunter would.

The nights were turning colder now, the first signs of summer turning into autumn. And with it, so was his heart. He could barely hear Dean's words of concern or feel Cas's contemplative glance.

His eyes burned. He rubbed at them again and again as if he could press the tears back in.

After half an hour of fitfully trying to sleep, Sam hauled himself out of bed and over to his desk. The bluish light of his laptop lit the room.

Though it was useless at this point, the first thing he did was track her phone. Again, it could not be detected. Next in his routine, checking emails and messages from other hunters, leading into scouring news headlines.

Maybe if he locked himself in his room for long enough, Dean would go on another hunt without him. In a fit of impatience and cabin fever, he had given up on trying to convince Sam to chase down a lead on a ghost and went alone. The solitude had been a lovely reprieve to Dean's hovering.