SPN fic-in-progress

[snowdarkred]

 Working title: Secret Agent Man
Summary: Some government agencies are like cults: you don't get out until you drink the red Kool-Aid.
Words so far: 4.5K
Notes: I'd forgotten I'd written this. Oops. I'll just drop this entire thing here for now.

~Secret Agent Man~

They approached him in his first year at college. He told them to go to hell, since he hadn't escaped one life of terror and shooting things just to get bullied into another, but they were persistent fuckers. He held them off until he was a sophomore, at which point they told him to break them off a piece of that Kit-Kat Bar or loose his scholarship, and he'd put up with too much of Professor Brodinski's bullshit at that point just to walk away. He wanted that fucker to burn in humiliation, and he couldn't do that if he was no longer in the guy's class.

So, yeah, Sam sort of became a secret agent in college.

Everyone’s gotta have a hobby, right?

Anyway, so Sam wasn't really a secret agent. A more accurate label for him would have been a handler, or really advanced computer tech/research dude who happened to be able to shoot things. Whatever. The agency that recruited him—it had too many letters in its acronym for him to remember, though he thought that they might have spelled out something suitably iconic, like F.U.C.K.U.S.A. Or something. He tried not to think about it.

They assigned him an agent, supposedly to protect him, though it was more likely that she was there to make sure he didn't just get bored and leave. Her name was Jessica, and she was an awesome baker of cookies filled with chocolate-y goodness, so he stuck around. It wasn't as if he had anything better to do.

He and his agent moved his ass into an apartment, because that would be a much easier place to keep an eye on him, and also to make sure he didn't get killed by some pissed off Russian hitman. Well, he thought it might be the Russians. It could have been the Chinese, or maybe even the Bulgarians.

The funniest thing about it—or maybe just the part that got to him the most—was that the dudes in black suits knew all about the 'family business'. They even sat him down at the very beginning and said, “We know all about your family business.” If it was supposed to reassure him, it didn't work, and if it was supposed to intimidate him.... Well, that didn't work either. It actually kind of pissed him off.

If the government knew about the supernatural, why weren't they doing something about it? Why were they leaving the hunting to the redneck hicks with attitude problems (Sam loved his brother, he really did, but please) instead of training the fucking army on how to take out werewolves?

For the record, “funding problems” is not a suitable answer.

So, yeah. Sam was kind of secret agent, and he was really good at his job. So good, in fact, that people had started to notice, and when people start to notice, they usually send someone to kill you for being better then they are. Out of spite or something. And if you're really good, they try to kidnap and torture you instead. Too bad they hadn't gotten the memo: Sam Winchester does not come quietly.

----

Sam looked at the dead guy in his living room and sighed. It was Halloween, the only holiday besides Christmas that could make him edgier than a fucking shuriken hand-basket. It also meant that it was harder to tell when someone was just a drunk frat boy in a costume versus when someone was an assassin wannabe here to kill him because the Nigerians upped the bounty on his head. Thankfully, the guy on his floor was one of the latter, and Sam didn't have to feel guilty about offing some poor bastard who broke into the wrong apartment to pull a prank or something.

Jess would be back from her little meet up any minute now, and he was dreading it. He had just gotten her convinced that she really, really didn't have to be with him every second of every day, thank you not. He could take care of himself. One look at Mr. Too-Stupid-to-Duck, and she was going to pack him in a van and take off. The only reason that the government hadn't disappeared him already was that he had a deal: he gets to finish college and pretend to be a 'real boy' for just a little while longer, and then he goes quietly and becomes their next superstar until someone finally decides that he knows too much and really makes him disappeared.

At the very least, Jess was going to pack up their stuff and move them to another apartment. Again.

He really hated moving, especially since the wannabes keep finding him anyway and would keep finding him until he vanishes completely.

He explained all of this to the dead guy on the floor, but the asshole didn't give him any useful advice, or even apologize for this shit he put Sam through. Jess was going to flip, since she was off sipping lattes with her sugar daddy or whatever, and had left him alone. Never mind that he had an apartment full of guns and the weapons training to use them, or that he could and had kill people with his bare hands.

He frowned at the corpse again, said, “I hope you feel a little sorry, at least,” and wandered into the kitchen to see if they had any more cookies left.

He heard a noise from the dining room-turned-office, so soft that he would have missed it if he hadn't already been on high alert. Fuck, apparently the guy brought a buddy. One hand immediately went to the gun stashed in the drawer beside the sink, and the other one snatched up a kitchen knife from the knife block. Not the best choice, but it would do, and he was too lazy to get one of the blades taped to the underside of the kitchen table.

They didn't have normal visitors over that often. It was kind of obvious.

He went to where he'd heard the sound, making sure to keep the lights off and to stick to the shadows. He knew this place like the back of his hand, so he knew to avoid the third floorboard over from the living room door. It creaked.

He came of behind the intruder and put the gun against the back of their head.

“Don't move,” he said, low and dangerous, “or I'll blow your brains out. I won't even feel sorry about it.”

He didn't get the reply he expected. Instead, the intruder gasped "Sam" like he couldn't believe it.

Sam lowered the gun, because fuck, it was Dean. His brother. In his living room with the body of the guy Sam had killed just half an hour before. Fuck.

----

The first thing Dean said to him, after Sam pulled the gun away and tucked it into the back of his pants, was, “Dude, what the fuck?”

The second thing was, “That is a really fucking realistic Halloween decoration you've got there.” He pointed at the body. It was dark, but the shape was unmistakable, especially since Dean had seen similar before.

The second thing Sam said to his brother after not seeing him for four years and not speaking to him for two was, “Stupid is not a good look for you, Dean.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and then Sam shook his head and went back to the kitchen to eat another cookie.

Dean followed him, possibly to say something, something important, or it could have just to avoid being alone in a room with the guy his little brother had killed. Or whatever. Sam didn't care as long as Jess's really fantastic cookies were there to distract him from how fucked his life just went. He ate another cookie, and he even went so far as to offer Dean the last one. Dean turned him down; Sam shrugged and ate that one too.

Dean stood in the doorway, and Sam waited for him to break and start talking. He didn't have to wait long.

“What the hell, Sam,” Dean snarled, slamming his fist against the door frame. Sam frowned, knowing that if any new holes appeared in the walls, he and Jess would have to pay extra to have it repaired. “There's a dead guy in your living room.”

“I noticed,” Sam retorted drily. “After all, I was the one that killed him.”

“We kill monsters, not people,” Dean started to shout, but Sam interrupted him.

“What the hell was I supposed to do, let him kill me? Or was I supposed to play the helpless victim and let myself get fucking kidnapped and then stick around for a nice game of Torture the Captive? Thanks but no thanks, Dean, I'd rather live.”

Dean blinked at him, his mouth gaping open. Sam wanted to make a snide remark about catching flies, but he restrained himself. Yeah, his brother had broken into his apartment and nearly given him a heart attack, but Sam's pissy mood wasn't really about him.

Sam shook his head again and started gathering together all the weapons they had placed around the kitchen. He pretty much ignored Dean, focusing instead on whether he had gotten around to putting that extra SIG under the sink or not. Dean went stiller and stiller the more weapons he laid out, and Sam was pointedly not looking into his brother's eyes. He didn't want to see the shock and, well, horror that he knew would be there.

He didn't hear Jess come in, but he knew when she arrived. She came up behind Dean, the same way Sam had, and put a gun to the back of his head. Dean went even stiller, and his face became emotionless.

“Hey Jess,” Sam said easily, sorting through the back of the freezer to find the small bundle of cash they had for emergencies. “I ate the last of the cookies. Also, that's my brother you're pointing a gun at. Don't shoot him. I'd have to hurt you, for appearance's sake.”

Jess snorted, but she put the gun away. She looked at what Sam was doing and raised her eyebrows.

“Some asshole got in,” he said. Her gaze flickered to Dean. “Not him, another one. One that didn't know what the fuck he was doing. He's in the living room.”

Jess swore and went to check it out. Sam felt Dean's eyes heavy on his shoulders.

“Sam, what—” he started to ask, but Sam held a finger to his lips. Don't, he mouthed. Not here. The stubborn set of Dean's shoulders promised that they would talk and soon.

Jess stomped back into the kitchen, a cellphone clutched tight against her ear. “I don't give a fuck, Rich, this has gotten fucking ridiculous.” Pause. “We can't deal with this for another six months. Wesson has got to get out of here.” Pause. “I don't care!” Pause. “I don't care if you swore you'd buy him a pink pony and fly him to the fucking moon, I'm not gonna sit around here and wait for someone to take advantage of that big-ass fucking sign you pasted on his back that says, Kill me dead, please. Kill me dead hard!”

Dean's eyes got wider, and his mouth opened to say something—no doubt to ask what the hell was going on, seriously. Sam just smiled blandly and headed to their bedroom. Dean trailed behind him as if that was the only thing he could do. And really, it was. Whatever Dean had come here for had fallen to the wayside at his first glimpse of Sam's current life.

Sam got down on his knees and pulled a fully packed duffel bag out from under the bed. He dragged out an empty bag and took it and the full one back to the kitchen with him. Dean continued to follow him like a ducking or something, and Sam continued to pretend that he was just a figment of his imagination.

Jess was still on the phone. “Of course this is your fault, you're the one who—Don't you pull that shit on me, you gigantic douche, I will fuck you up. This is your fault, which means that you have to fix it. We can't just keep moving every time one of those assholes gets too close; we're running out of places to live.” Pause. “If you had done your job in the first place, they wouldn't know where he is! Wesson is our most valuable asset, and you too busy dicking around and showing off to protect him, which is your fucking job!”

Jessica liked to swear when she got angry. She said it made her feel more in touch with her drunken sailor side, since agents were discouraged from drinking often. Sam hadn't had so much as a beer since the black suits had pulled that scholarship thing on him.

Jess hung up on Rich, cutting off his useless apologies will a careless, “Fuck you, you fat sleazeball, and do your goddamn job!”

“You know, Rich only weighs, like, a hundred pounds,” Sam said, just as he would if it had been just him and her. “He's hardly fat. Though I guess he is a gigantic douche. So close enough.” She gave him a scathing look and ripped the empty bag out of his hands. She started putting all of the kitchen weapons in it, and Sam went off to do the dining room-turned-office, and see what damage Dean had done getting in.

Dean waited until they were in the other room before exploding, as if a thin wall in between them and the kitchen would stop Jess from hearing every word.

“Sam, stop. Sam—!” Sam stopped. “Okay, what the fucking hell is going on. There is a goddamn dead body in your living room,” he pointed at the door to the living room, just to be clear as to where the dead body resided, “your girlfriend—who is unbelievably hot, by the way, what's up with that—is talking about—about, shit, I don't even know, and no one seems concerned about the dead body in the goddamn living room! I—what the hell No, really, seriously, what. The. Hell.”

Sam continued to be stopped, listening to his brother wind himself up. He felt sort of detached from the situation, but that was okay. He'd been feeling detached about a lot of stuff lately. He thought he ought to be worried about that. He didn't know. He would ask Jessica; she would know.

“Answer me, dammit! Explain this shit to me, because it's not making a whole lot of fucking sense right now.”

Sam opened his mouth—he was going to explain, really—but then Jessica made an appearance. She leaned against the doorway, overly casual and steel-eyed, taking in every detail about his brother. From his hair to his muddy boots. Which, really, he should have wiped off before breaking in like that. Sam didn't want muddy bootprints all over the apartment. They'd be a bitch to get out of the rugs. And that was probably grave dirt anyway, which Sam really didn't need in his apartment.

“So you're Sam's sketchy brother, right?” she asked. Her head tilted to the side. “I thought you'd be taller.”

“Who are you?” Dean demanded. His fingers twitched like they wanted to wrap around a gun. “Christo.”

“Thanks, I'm not a demon, asshole.” Jess rolled her eyes. “I'm the person that's been keeping your brother alive for the past two years.”

“You—You know about demons?” Dean sputtered.

“The U.S. government knows about a lot of things.” Jess looked hard at Sam. “Shut up about your usual 'what about the little people shpeel;' I'm not in the mood to humor you.”

Jessica was kind of a bitch. Usually it was awesome, but sometimes it wasn't. At least she made great cookies.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I just thought you should know that an extraction team is on its way. You,” she said to Dean, “might want to be gone when they get here. In fact, you might want to forget you ever came here. Really, just forget you ever had a brother, 'cause you're never going to see him again.”

Of course Dean would argue with that. Sam was going to argue with that.

“Look, bitch, I don't know what the fuck is going on here, but if you think that—”

“I had a fucking deal!” Sam shouted. Dean stopped arguing in order to stare at him, because the Sam he remembered didn't swear, and he just realized that Sam had been swearing a lot that night.

“Christo,” he said. Sam stared at him like he was an idiot.

“Dude, not everything comes down to demons.”

And then he was ranting again, and all Dean could do was gape and wonder what had happened to his sweet little brother who blushed when people said fucking or cunt.

“I had a fucking deal!” he repeated, shouting. “I get to live for three years as a normal person—three years—and then you can whisk me off to wherever to clone me, I don't fucking care. But for three years, I get to go to class and do homework and bitch about my professors. I get to party and stay up all night writing essays I should have done weeks before and I get to eat pizza and be normal.”

“Normal?” Jess screamed back, because Jessica never backed down, ever. “Wake up, Sam! You're deluding yourself. You think you have normal, you think you need normal, but you don't. You signed your fucking soul to the government, asshole, you don't get to be normal. You're living on borrowed time! You killed a guy in the living room of the apartment you're staying at—We don't even live here! You're holding on to something that's come and gone, and you want to be normal? I put my ass on the line for you, in more ways than one. Now it's time to put on your big girl panties on and face what you agreed to!”

“I. Had. A. Deal,” Sam growled. “I made a fucking deal. I don't care if this is pretending, this is as close as I have ever gotten before. It's enough. I want the rest of my three years. Just a few more months, and then whatever. Put me in a locked room full of computers and watch me crash nations, I don't care. But I got my slice of normal pie, and I damn well want to eat it too.”

“Whoa! Does someone want to explain this to me, because I am confused as hell over here!” Dean shouted, grabbing their attention. Sam and Jess didn't fight often, but it was spectacular when they did. “Start at the beginning, back at the Sam-sold-his-soul thing. Because I'm mighty interested in learning more about that.”

“She didn't mean it like that, Dean. It's not like that. I just—It the U.S. government, okay. Not everything is about de—”

“So help me, if you say that condescending bullshit to me one more time, I will cut you,” Dean said. “Tell me what the fuck you're talking about—You signed up for something. What?”

Jess narrowed her eyes, and Sam knew that she was going to lose her temper at Dean. She didn't want him here, that was obvious, and Sam understood that. As much as he had wanted to see his brother again, he hadn't wanted to see him now. Not when everything is going sideways, and certainly not where someone could see him and—

Dean being here was not a good idea. Jess's body language told him that much. He trusted her with his life, and he knew that she had what was best for him in mind.

“Look, Dean, it's been fun seeing you again, but you have to go,” he whispered finally. “You have to get out of here.”

“No.”

“Dean—”

“Fucking no, man. No, I'm not going anywhere until someone explains it to me.”

Sam and Jess looked at each other. And kept looking at each other. Dean cleared his throat, and Jess looked away.

“Okay, okay, whatever,” she said to Sam. “But this is going on your ass, not mine.” She turned to Dean. “You're brother's a very special man. A very intelligent, every resourceful man. We wanted him. The government, we wanted him. So much untapped potential, wasting away to become a lawyer or some bullshit. Whatever. Why save the criminals when you can save the country? So, yeah, we got him. Or, they got him, because there's no way I'd do something as stupid as the arm-twisting they pulled.”

“What do you mean?” Dean demanded. Sam figured that he wasn't needed for this part of the conversation, so he went back to getting stuff together for when the agents—wherever the hell they were, because really, they should have been here by now—came. “What arm-twisting?”

Jess sighed. “First, they threatened to make him loose his scholarship. That by itself wouldn't make someone like Sam give in. He'd just go, and get a job at a diner or something and save up until he could pay his own way. Then, when he kept saying no, they got pushy. They started talking about you. About your dad, and about your little family business crap.”

“They said that the only reason you and Dad weren't sitting in jail or worse was because they were interfering,” Sam said. “I didn't believe it, at first, but—A few years ago, you and Dad were in Texas, right? You got arrested for grave desecration, and they locked you up for a few days. Then, one day, one of the guards dropped the keys close to the bars—by accident?” Dean nodded slowly, a weary expression on his face.

“That was them proving that they had complete control over whether you and your daddy went free,” Jess smirked. It was a wry smirk, a sure sign of someone who had seen too much. “So, yeah, your little brother made a deal. He drove a hard bargain, too. Said that he wanted you and your dad free, with no one to get in your way, and that he gets three years of a normal life. After that, he's Mister Agent Man.”

“I don't—” Dean started to say.

“And hasn't it been easy for you?” Jess continued bitterly. “Hasn't it? You haven't had much trouble with the law lately, have you? Just a long string of sheriffs telling you to leave and never come back, am I right? The local law enforcement suddenly getting a little too sharing-is-caring?” Her lips twisted. She was as bitter as a basket full of lemons, and infinitely more likely to shoot you. “That's them. Pulling your strings, getting you to do their dirty work while Sam gives up his life to keep you safe.”

“Hold on,” Dean said. “Hold on one fucking minute. You're telling me, seriously, that, that....”

“Part of the deal was that he not have contact with you,” Jess said, and it was like a light-bulb went off in Dean's head. He turned to stare at Sam, and the emotion was so strong that Sam had to look away. He didn't want to deal with this, and he wished that Jess would shut up already.

“Sammy,” Dean whispered, reaching for him. “Sammy, did you.... You did this? For us? For me?”

“It wasn't—Yeah,” Sam said. “Yeah. The agency, they know about the supernatural, but it's easier to let people like you and Dad handle it than to get flunkies involved. They, they wanted to shut you down, but.” He shrugged. “You and Dad, you love the hunt. And they wanted to put you in prison to keep you from doing it, so I. Yeah.”

“They're late,” Jess interrupted. Sam snapped to attention again, cursing his distraction. He'd lost track of time. Hell, he bet Jess had lost track of time too. It must be hard, watching Sam get to see his family again while she had to go without hers. “They extraction team, they're late.”

“Fuck,” Sam said.

“Yeah,” she echoed. “Fuck.”

---

Dean didn't say anything else for a while; he just watched as Sam and Jess finished grabbing all of the necessary stuff that they needed. They had the whole thing done in under twenty minutes. The last thing Sam took was the picture of his mom and dad. His hands shook a little as he pulled it free of it's frame. It was the only picture of them that he had, and he never left it behind. He would and had run back into burning buildings to get it. Jess thought it was stupid, but she understood.

She hadn't seen her sister or brothers in five years. She said that it was worth it, but Sam wasn't sure that he believed her. He wasn't sure that she believed herself.

“So, these government people really have you by the balls, don't they?” Dean asked. They were sitting in the living room, spread out on couches with a corpse in the middle.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Something like that.”

“Sam, um. The reason I came here was....” Dean looked at Jess. Jess rolled her eyes but didn't move, or even pretend to stop listening. “Dad's gone. Disappeared. He went missing on a hunting trip.”

Sam's heart froze. Because shit. This could have been nothing, it could just have been John going off and killing some evil son of a bitch, like usual, but then again. Then again, it could have been that someone got their hands on him, and that he was being held somewhere, or worse.

He and Jess swore at the same time. This wasn't right. The team still hadn't shown up, and Sam was pretty sure that they weren't ever going to, and John Winchester was missing, possibly kidnapped.

Sam didn't want his family involved in this. He'd made the deal so that they'd be protected, but maybe he just put them in more danger, since fighting international goons tended to put one in the spot light—more so when the guy in charge of you was an incompetent egomaniac who let everyone get their international ghost fingers all over Sam's file.


---

Some government agencies are like cults: you don't get out until you drink the red Kool-Aid.