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Entry tags:
Ficpost, Trouble
Title: Trouble
Fandoms: Supernatural, SG-1
Characters: Dean and Sam Winchester, Sam Carter, Vala
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I own neither the Winchesters nor SG-1, I just like to play with the characters.
Written for:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
karrenia_rune, for the SPN crossover ficathon
Betaed by: The incomparableheylittleriver, who wins at life.
Summary: Carter should have known by now. Taking Vala out anywhere is just asking for trouble. Dean should probably have realized that about Sam, as well.
Sam Winchester
Sam would have liked to have been able to say that he’d known they were trouble from the moment he saw them.
Unfortunately, that would be a lie. They’d looked normal - just more attractive than most of the women you saw at the kinds of bars and dives he and Dean spent their time at. Then again, that didn’t take much, if Sam was going to be strictly honest.
So, of course, Dean would hone in on them the second they walked into the bar. His brother had an eye for attractive women under any circumstances, and right after they’d finished a case without getting injured or popping up on the police’s radar, he was ready to celebrate. And of course that would have to involve going up to said attractive women and introducing himself with the kind of cocky charm that Sam would have thought women would get sick of, after a while. It never stopped annoying him, at least.
Therefore, it was all Dean’s fault that they’d ended up getting Sam Carter and Vala Mal Doran involved in everything that had followed. That was Sam’s story and he was sticking to it. No matter what Dean had to say about the rest of the weekend and Sam’s tendency to get kidnapped by anyone with half a brain cell.
Samantha Carter
She still wasn’t quite sure how they ended up in this mess. Or, rather, how she’d ended up in this mess. Vala being involved wasn’t that much of a surprise. The day Vala managed to keep herself from getting involved in trouble was the day Sam agreed that Rodney McKay was smarter than she was - in his presence.
Which meant that in all likelihood, she’d never have to inflate his already overweening arrogance.
But still, she was a bit surprised that she herself was getting involved in all this. After all, if you’d asked her a year ago, the concept of voluntarily spending that much time with Vala outside of Cheyenne Mountain and various missions would have had her bent double laughing. Or asking if Daniel and Teal’c had set something up as a prank.
Sam had to admit that having Vala as a friend did have its perks. She’d missed having a female friend around, missed the kind of silliness and conversations that just didn’t happen with the guys, however much she loved all of them. And so when Vala had asked her to go on a road trip, just the two of them, for a week, it had sounded like fun, a break from studying Asgard science until her eyes bled.
She’d just forgotten two cardinal rules of SG-1 when she’d agreed. One, that any vacation taken by a team member was doomed to end with one of them in the base infirmary. Two, that any innocent activity performed in the company of someone like Vala would inevitably snowball into insanity.
Still, meeting the Winchesters almost made up for it. Almost.
She could have done without finding out that demons were real, though. Really, her life was weird enough knowing that aliens were around, dealing with demons and other monsters existing was just too much on top of it.
Dean Winchester
He wasn’t going to bother trying to assign blame to anyone in their little foursome. What’s done is done, and sitting around trying to figure out whether it was more his fault for introducing himself to them, or Sam’s fault for getting himself kidnapped with Vala, or either of the women’s fault for the whole shebang wasn’t going to do anything.
Besides, he figured in the end it was all Gordon’s fault for telling one of his hunter friends about Sam, for setting the guy on him in the first place. All Dean had wanted from the evening was a couple of good drinks and a nice time with a great looking woman. The fact that there had been two such women at the bar had been a bonus; it had meant that he and Sam could double-team and they could both have a great time.
That has been his plan, anyway.
They’d all had fun for a while. He’d had to switch gears a bit when the girls had introduced themselves. Vala was a bit more his taste, normally, but the minute the blonde had introduced herself as Sam, he knew his brother wasn’t going to be interested in hooking up with her. The concept of dating someone with his name gave Sam the creeps, and had ever since he’d gotten old enough to notice girls
Still, it wasn’t as if Sam Carter wasn’t fun to look at, even if she was a little less obvious about her interests than Vala had been. It wasn’t exactly a hardship to switch his focus over, especially when she started talking about cars and engines. The woman knew more about muscle cars than most mechanics did, and she lit up the second he started describing the Impala.
If he’d been thinking straight, he never would have left his brother alone in the bar when he offered to take Sam Carter out to see his baby. Nevermind that the job was over and the town seemed relatively safe. That was the one thing he did blame himself for.
Vala Mal Doran
Well, on the bright side, at least this time she hadn’t been kidnapped because of anything she or her former Goa’uld had done.
You know, come to think of it, that wasn’t exactly that bright of a bright side. Although it did mean she could tell Daniel that it wasn’t her fault for once, and he’d have to agree with her.
And Sam Winchester had been very sweet at the beginning of the whole affair, apologizing to her the minute he realized that they’d been kidnapped because of who he was. He’d been quite willing to comfort her from the start, even while their kidnapper had been ranting about what he’d do to a demon-spawn like Sam. It was quite gallant, even if she hadn’t exactly needed it then. She was willing to give him top marks as far as being a fellow hostage. A little more serious about the whole thing than Daniel ever was, and less likely to make the sardonic comments that always got them into more trouble than they had started out with. Sam just made comments that got himself injured, and actively worked to distract the man from going after her.
It still wasn’t the relaxing vacation she’d been hoping for when she and Sam planned their little road trip. Even if their kidnapper did leave her alone once he’d splashed her with water and shouted a few names at her.
That didn’t really help, because he then turned to Sam. And the only word for what he did next was torture. Torture of the kind she hadn’t seen since the Goa’uld. Inflicted on a young man who had done nothing to deserve it.
No matter how hardened she’d become in her wanderings through the galaxy, she was never going to be able to watch someone be tortured without being sickened.
Sam Winchester
Okay, so he’d decided. The next time Dean said he wanted to kill Gordon, Sam wasn’t going to object. Honestly, the guy didn’t have to tell every hunter he knew that Sam wasn’t exactly normal, now did he? Or send them all after him, once he had told them.
Never mind. He wasn’t going to wait for Dean to decide he wanted to, he was going to do it himself. Torture had a way of changing his mind about certain issues.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Gordon’s friend would have just stuck with the things that only worked on demons. The holy water had almost been refreshing, and the look on the idiot’s face when Sam moved freely across a salt-line would have been amusing under any circumstances.
But damn it, a silver knife with a sharp enough blade hurts humans just as easily as it does various supernatural creatures. Sam now had the gashes to prove it to anyone who doubted. And an iron poker in the ribs was incredibly painful, even if it didn’t make him discorporate like it would a ghost.
He’d tried to reason with the man, in between his attacks. And there was some grim satisfaction in the fact that he’d gotten him to leave Vala alone after a few quick demon tests. Now, if he could just hold on until Dean showed up, they’d be just fine.
Well, if he could hold on and not let Dean ever find out that Sam had sat there waiting to be rescued like some princess in a tower. Because once Dean got through his “You got kidnapped again!” freak-out, he’d tease Sam mercilessly.
At this point, escaping on his own was looking rather good. If he could just get Gordon’s idiot friend to leave the room for a while, he could at least get himself untied and Vala out of here. He wasn’t really sure how fast he’d be moving any time soon. But if Vala got loose she’d be able to lead Dean straight back here.
Sam Carter
Dean Winchester had an impressive vocabulary. In the first ten minutes after they’d realized that Sam and Vala were missing, he’d sworn with more complexity and in more languages than three-quarters of her classmates back at the Academy put together could have achieved. Daniel could and had done better, in her opinion, but then again, Daniel was a linguist who spoke over twenty-three languages. It was hard to beat him when he decided to swear.
“…stupid-ass son of a bitch,” Dean was finishing. “When I get him back I’m stapling our hands together. See him get himself kidnapped after that.”
She blinked. She’d expected him to be worried and upset, yes, but she hadn’t even thought that whoever Sam and Vala had been grabbed by would have been after Sam. The idea that Vala might have just been an innocent bystander in all of this, rather than the target, was rather unusual. Not to mention the surprise of finding out that the polite young man she’d talked to earlier had been kidnapped before. It wasn’t exactly a common occurrence. At least, not outside of being on the SGC’s flagship team.
Still, it was best not to assume that Dean was right. There were still a lot of people out there who could be after Vala, and most of them wouldn’t hesitate to take a hostage to use as leverage against her. She couldn’t take anything for granted here.
Alright, on to dealing with this mess. First step, damage control. Get Dean and herself out of here, give the simplest explanation for why it was likely for Vala to have been the target, and call the SGC and get them tracking Vala’s signal.
“Dean, we need to get someplace secure,” she said, trying to be as soothing as was possible while she took charge.
Unfortunately, Dean wasn’t exactly the easiest person to soothe. “What the hell do you mean, get out of here? We’ve got to look for some clues so we can find the asshole who did this and force him to give Sam back.”
She resisted the urge to roll her eyes or huff in frustration. It seemed like Dean could be as bad as Jack, in some ways. “We don’t have to look for clues to figure out where they are, not as long as they keep Vala and your brother together.”
He hadn’t broken a stride in his pacing back and forth when he’d responded to her the first time. But now he did, turning to face her, fists clenching and unclenching in quick succession. “What the hell do you mean?”
She didn’t bother hiding her frustration this time, and glared back at him. “Not till we get to a secured area.”
He stared at her for a minute, evidently wanting more than that, but when she kept silent he snorted angrily and strode over to his car. “Then let’s stop wasting time out here, princess.”
Sam bit her lip. She was not going to kill him. If for no other reason than the fact that she’d liked the younger Winchester too much to rescue him and then tell him that she’d had to murder his brother in the process. At least she was finally getting Dean somewhere where she could give an abbreviated and highly cleaned-up explanation for why they’d planted a sub-dermal transceiver on Vala.
Dean Winchester
He was getting pretty ticked off with all this James Bond secrecy crap. If Sam Carter didn’t start talking soon, he was going to have to dump her out of the car and start searching on his own.
He let her give directions back to where she and Vala had apparently been staying, one of those god-awful bed and breakfasts that charged extra for smothering you in chintz.
She led him up to the room she’d been splitting with Vala, and yeah, it was as bad as he’d thought. And just when he was about to start asking questions, starting with “What the heck can you say here you couldn’t say back at the bar?” she started pulling high-tech gizmos out from under the mountain of pillows stashed on her bed.
A quick sweep around the room with one of them and she lost some of the tension she’d been radiating ever since they’d gone back inside and realized that Sam and Vala had disappeared on them. She sat down on what he was assuming was her bed, and motioned for him to grab a seat on the other one. He did, but he wasn’t going to give her much more than that. It was time she stopped dicking around and started talking straight with him.
She seemed to get what he was thinking from his glare, and leaned forward a bit. “Vala and I work for the US military on highly classified projects. There are people out there who know what we do, and they often want to know a lot more than they should. They’ve sometimes taken steps to try and force the information out of us, including kidnap and torture. After the last time it happened, all of the members of our team were implanted with tracers. If you give me a bit, I’ll be able to track her. Give me three hours and the other members of my team will be here with all the reinforcements we’ll need to get both of them back.”
Okay, that changed things. The upshot was that they’d get Sam out of wherever the fuck he was a heck of a lot faster than he could do it on his own. The downside was that he was going to have to be a hell of a lot more careful than he’d been earlier, if he didn’t want her to play connect-the-dots and find out that he and Sam were wanted by the Feds.
Vala Mal Doran
Their kidnapper finally left. Which was good, because it meant she could finish getting these bonds untied without him catching sight of her halfway through the process. She’d had her hands mostly free for about an hour, with just the slightest loop still present to make him think he still had her confined. She couldn’t risk untying her legs though. He might be stupid enough to believe that torturing a young man and accusing him of being a demon was a good idea, but she wasn’t going to assume that he’d be an absolute idiot and miss her bending over to undo the rest of her bonds.
Sam Winchester was looking rather woozy and altogether out of it, which wasn’t exactly surprising, given how much punishment their current deranged kidnapper had inflicted upon him. Still, he started a bit when she flashed him a faked grin and spoke. “Well, now that he’s gone, give me a minute and I’ll be over there to get you untied, and we’ll be off with a lovely story to tell to all our friends afterwards. And by lovely I mean the bit where you and I abscond with our idiot of a kidnapper’s vehicle and make our way to freedom.”
There, that bit made him blink. Good to know she hadn’t lost her touch there either. Ten seconds more and she had both legs unbound and was on her way over to deal with his ties.
Sam Winchester
Vala was a lot more than meets the eye, that Sam knew for sure. Of course, that much had been obvious from the fact that she hadn’t freaked out when they’d been kidnapped in the first place. When he put that together with her ease at untying herself and her calm plans for escape, well, Sam wasn’t stupid. She’d had a lot more interesting past than he’d assumed at first glance. It had only taken her a few minutes to get him untied and escaping out the window.
She’d fumbled a bit at the car though. He’d had to be the one to wire it and get things going on the road. And he’d been the one to drive it, since she claimed she’d never learned how.
After a bit of aimless wandering, they hit a road that he knew he’d driven during the past week on the case. It hadn’t taken too much work after that to track it back into town, and from there to her bed and breakfast, where he’d planned on dropping her off and calling Dean from her room. Seeing the Impala parked in front meant that he’d get to skip that last step.
He did wish they hadn’t opened the door on Sam Carter holding a gun on Dean, though. Dealing with that on top of his injuries was a little much.
Sam Carter
She’d sent Dean out of the room for a bit, told him that some of the things she needed to do were classified.
On one level, they were. Anything to do with the SGC, including contacting them in the first place, was classified to some degree.
But the main reason she’d needed to get him out was so that she could ask someone there to run a quick background check on both of the Winchesters. They could just be innocent civilians caught in the line of fire, or they could be a lot more dangerous than they’d let on. Dean definitely hadn’t been telling her everything he knew, and Sam had been taken along with Vala. She couldn’t count on anything being what it seemed with them.
By the time Dean strode back into the room ten minutes later, she’d already put in the request for more information as well as asking General Landry to send Teal’c, Daniel, and Mitchell to come with the tracking device and help retrieve their wayward teammate. Their initial readings from it suggested that Vala was still in the general area, but the device wasn’t especially accurate unless you were a bit closer to their position than the SGC was.
He walked in just after she’d hung up on Landry, and raised an eyebrow, a silent question.
“From what they can tell from our base, Vala is still somewhere close to here. Presumably your brother is being held with her, and if so, we can extract him at the same time as we do Vala. My team will be here in approximately three hours, and it’s best to wait for them to get closer so we can pinpoint Vala before launching any attack.” She said, sitting back down on the bed.
He blinked. “We’re just going to sit here and twiddle our thumbs while those bastards hold onto my brother and your friend? What the hell is wrong with you?” He was pacing back and forth through the room, glaring at random objects as if they were to blame for all of this.
She bit her lip and tried to remind herself that it wasn’t as if he was used to situations like this. She absolutely was not allowed to take her frustrations out on him, even if he wasn’t showing her the same courtesy. “Yes, we wait. We go out now, we have no idea where either of them are and we waste valuable time and energy searching places they’re not. We wait and we’ll know exactly where they are and we’ll have the personnel needed to take out whoever is there. My team’s been doing this stuff longer than you have, we’re good at this and we will get them back alive and in one piece.”
She ignored his muttered, “I’ve been doing it longer than you’d think, lady,” and pulled out her firearm. If they had to sit around and wait, she could at least check it and make sure that everything was working properly.
He glanced over at her and apparently decided that she had the right idea, as he pulled a similar gun out from a holster behind his back that she hadn’t noticed previously.
They managed to get through an hour like that, alternating checking and rechecking their weaponry and pacing throughout the room, which seemed to grow smaller with each passing minute. She’d be glad to be back with her team again, Dean’s method of worrying was driving her up the wall sideways.
When her cell went off, it jarred them out of their worried distractions, for which she couldn’t be anything but glad.
The message, however, was anything but glad tidings. Landry’s voice rang tight with anxiety as he barked out, “Carter, get out of there. The man’s a serial killer!”
She held her expression as impassive as possible, as she replied, “Understood, sir,” and hung up the phone. Dean looked up eagerly, apparently hoping for more information about where his brother might be. Her hand didn’t shake as she raised her gun and pointed it at him.
“You have five minutes to explain yourself,” she said.
Dean Winchester
He’d only had a few seconds to process Sam Carter’s sudden switch from tense to “I’m going to shoot you now” when Sammy and Vala burst into the door.
He couldn’t help himself. “Good timing,” he drawled, as Sam staggered to a stop. His brother had always been better at explaining this shit than he was.
Carter, he noticed, hadn’t let the distraction sway her for an instant. Her gun had stayed focused on him throughout the whole surprise entrance, even as her eyes had flicked over to check on her friend, who looked just fine. Sammy, on the other hand, looked like he’d been through five of Dad’s intensive training exercises in a row, then been attacked by a nasty poltergeist with a taste for knives.
“You okay there, little brother?” he asked. If Carter hadn’t shot him immediately, she could wait long enough for him to check in with Sam.
Sam pulled out Bitch-face Number Five, the one that said that he’d had a bad day already without adding in Dean’s messes as well, then nodded. “Nothing permanent. What did you do to deserve getting shot this time?”
Dean glanced back over at Carter, who was looking a bit less antsy than she’d been a minute or two ago, but still not exactly happy. “Hadn’t exactly had a chance to ask her that yet, Sam. Seeing as she’d just pulled her gun on me a minute before you decided to cancel our rescue operation before it got going.”
“He was going to explain why he’s wanted as a serial killer, and why I shouldn’t just kneecap him and take him into custody,” Carter broke in.
Okay, so apparently she’d called in for a background check as well when she passed on the request for backup. Damn, he thought he’d avoided that bit. “You want to do the explaining bit, Sammy, or should I?”
Sam huffed slightly, then rolled his eyes. “As if I’d let you try to explain it with your life on the line. You don’t do talking well at all, Dean.”
Turning towards Carter and Vala, he started, “Dean wasn’t the one to commit those murders. In fact, we were called in after the first few had already occurred, to stop it. A friend of mine from Stanford called me and asked for help.” He paused to collect his thoughts, then continued, “But I need to explain a bit before we get to that point, to explain why it was that we could solve what happened there, or at all the other places we go.”
Impatient, Dean burst in. “Demons, ghosts, and all sorts of other monsters straight out of the B movies of the week exist. We stop them.” And at Sam’s incredulous glance he continued, “What, dude, you were taking way too long to get to the point.”
Huffing again, Sam started up. “It sounds a bit insane, but I can explain it all to you, if you give me a chance.”
Carter was half-turned towards Sam by this point, and was listening intently. Dean slouched back and let his brother’s words flow past him without sinking in as he studied him. A bunch of bruises, all over, it looked, and from the way Sam was standing some of them had to be pretty deep. A few cuts, shallow and not that long, but they looked painful. And a glance over at Vala showed that she was intact, without any of the damage that Sam had obviously taken. Whoever it had been, he’d definitely wanted Sam. He’d force his brother to tell him everything later, after they’d talked Carter and her group out of arresting or shooting the both of them, and they’d show the guy that he didn’t mess with Winchesters.
For now he was going to relax and watch his brother introduce another pair of newbies to the craziness that was their lives. He’d get a kick out of watching the dumbfounded looks on their faces.
Hey, a guy had to have some fun in his life, didn’t he?
Vala Mal Doran
She wasn’t sure what she found more disturbing, actually. Sam’s explanation, or the fact that, apart from the utter insanity of the concept, it made more sense than anything else. Of course, given that her life had involved being possessed by a parasitic alien, conning her way across the galaxy, and finally finding a home with a group that regularly attempted to get themselves killed, she didn’t think she had much room to complain about anyone else’s life being insane.
Judging by the look on Sam’s face, she was buying it as well. Unusual, that. Vala had always thought that Sam would be the one least willing to believe in ghosts and demons.
Whatever the reason, after a few incredulous noises made during the beginning of the younger Winchester’s speech, Sam had actually started nodding along, as if it were making sense to her. And by the end of it, she’d lowered the gun and clicked the safety back on.
“It’s absolutely insane,” she said grudgingly. “But I’ve spent a lot of my life working with insane ideas. I might regret this, but I’m letting you go. Don’t make me regret it.”
The Winchesters evidently decided to take her at her word, and were gone before Vala could say anything. She turned to face Sam.
“Well, that was an interesting evening.”
Fandoms: Supernatural, SG-1
Characters: Dean and Sam Winchester, Sam Carter, Vala
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I own neither the Winchesters nor SG-1, I just like to play with the characters.
Written for:
karrenia_rune, for the SPN crossover ficathonBetaed by: The incomparable
heylittleriver, who wins at life.Summary: Carter should have known by now. Taking Vala out anywhere is just asking for trouble. Dean should probably have realized that about Sam, as well.
Sam Winchester
Sam would have liked to have been able to say that he’d known they were trouble from the moment he saw them.
Unfortunately, that would be a lie. They’d looked normal - just more attractive than most of the women you saw at the kinds of bars and dives he and Dean spent their time at. Then again, that didn’t take much, if Sam was going to be strictly honest.
So, of course, Dean would hone in on them the second they walked into the bar. His brother had an eye for attractive women under any circumstances, and right after they’d finished a case without getting injured or popping up on the police’s radar, he was ready to celebrate. And of course that would have to involve going up to said attractive women and introducing himself with the kind of cocky charm that Sam would have thought women would get sick of, after a while. It never stopped annoying him, at least.
Therefore, it was all Dean’s fault that they’d ended up getting Sam Carter and Vala Mal Doran involved in everything that had followed. That was Sam’s story and he was sticking to it. No matter what Dean had to say about the rest of the weekend and Sam’s tendency to get kidnapped by anyone with half a brain cell.
Samantha Carter
She still wasn’t quite sure how they ended up in this mess. Or, rather, how she’d ended up in this mess. Vala being involved wasn’t that much of a surprise. The day Vala managed to keep herself from getting involved in trouble was the day Sam agreed that Rodney McKay was smarter than she was - in his presence.
Which meant that in all likelihood, she’d never have to inflate his already overweening arrogance.
But still, she was a bit surprised that she herself was getting involved in all this. After all, if you’d asked her a year ago, the concept of voluntarily spending that much time with Vala outside of Cheyenne Mountain and various missions would have had her bent double laughing. Or asking if Daniel and Teal’c had set something up as a prank.
Sam had to admit that having Vala as a friend did have its perks. She’d missed having a female friend around, missed the kind of silliness and conversations that just didn’t happen with the guys, however much she loved all of them. And so when Vala had asked her to go on a road trip, just the two of them, for a week, it had sounded like fun, a break from studying Asgard science until her eyes bled.
She’d just forgotten two cardinal rules of SG-1 when she’d agreed. One, that any vacation taken by a team member was doomed to end with one of them in the base infirmary. Two, that any innocent activity performed in the company of someone like Vala would inevitably snowball into insanity.
Still, meeting the Winchesters almost made up for it. Almost.
She could have done without finding out that demons were real, though. Really, her life was weird enough knowing that aliens were around, dealing with demons and other monsters existing was just too much on top of it.
Dean Winchester
He wasn’t going to bother trying to assign blame to anyone in their little foursome. What’s done is done, and sitting around trying to figure out whether it was more his fault for introducing himself to them, or Sam’s fault for getting himself kidnapped with Vala, or either of the women’s fault for the whole shebang wasn’t going to do anything.
Besides, he figured in the end it was all Gordon’s fault for telling one of his hunter friends about Sam, for setting the guy on him in the first place. All Dean had wanted from the evening was a couple of good drinks and a nice time with a great looking woman. The fact that there had been two such women at the bar had been a bonus; it had meant that he and Sam could double-team and they could both have a great time.
That has been his plan, anyway.
They’d all had fun for a while. He’d had to switch gears a bit when the girls had introduced themselves. Vala was a bit more his taste, normally, but the minute the blonde had introduced herself as Sam, he knew his brother wasn’t going to be interested in hooking up with her. The concept of dating someone with his name gave Sam the creeps, and had ever since he’d gotten old enough to notice girls
Still, it wasn’t as if Sam Carter wasn’t fun to look at, even if she was a little less obvious about her interests than Vala had been. It wasn’t exactly a hardship to switch his focus over, especially when she started talking about cars and engines. The woman knew more about muscle cars than most mechanics did, and she lit up the second he started describing the Impala.
If he’d been thinking straight, he never would have left his brother alone in the bar when he offered to take Sam Carter out to see his baby. Nevermind that the job was over and the town seemed relatively safe. That was the one thing he did blame himself for.
Vala Mal Doran
Well, on the bright side, at least this time she hadn’t been kidnapped because of anything she or her former Goa’uld had done.
You know, come to think of it, that wasn’t exactly that bright of a bright side. Although it did mean she could tell Daniel that it wasn’t her fault for once, and he’d have to agree with her.
And Sam Winchester had been very sweet at the beginning of the whole affair, apologizing to her the minute he realized that they’d been kidnapped because of who he was. He’d been quite willing to comfort her from the start, even while their kidnapper had been ranting about what he’d do to a demon-spawn like Sam. It was quite gallant, even if she hadn’t exactly needed it then. She was willing to give him top marks as far as being a fellow hostage. A little more serious about the whole thing than Daniel ever was, and less likely to make the sardonic comments that always got them into more trouble than they had started out with. Sam just made comments that got himself injured, and actively worked to distract the man from going after her.
It still wasn’t the relaxing vacation she’d been hoping for when she and Sam planned their little road trip. Even if their kidnapper did leave her alone once he’d splashed her with water and shouted a few names at her.
That didn’t really help, because he then turned to Sam. And the only word for what he did next was torture. Torture of the kind she hadn’t seen since the Goa’uld. Inflicted on a young man who had done nothing to deserve it.
No matter how hardened she’d become in her wanderings through the galaxy, she was never going to be able to watch someone be tortured without being sickened.
Sam Winchester
Okay, so he’d decided. The next time Dean said he wanted to kill Gordon, Sam wasn’t going to object. Honestly, the guy didn’t have to tell every hunter he knew that Sam wasn’t exactly normal, now did he? Or send them all after him, once he had told them.
Never mind. He wasn’t going to wait for Dean to decide he wanted to, he was going to do it himself. Torture had a way of changing his mind about certain issues.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Gordon’s friend would have just stuck with the things that only worked on demons. The holy water had almost been refreshing, and the look on the idiot’s face when Sam moved freely across a salt-line would have been amusing under any circumstances.
But damn it, a silver knife with a sharp enough blade hurts humans just as easily as it does various supernatural creatures. Sam now had the gashes to prove it to anyone who doubted. And an iron poker in the ribs was incredibly painful, even if it didn’t make him discorporate like it would a ghost.
He’d tried to reason with the man, in between his attacks. And there was some grim satisfaction in the fact that he’d gotten him to leave Vala alone after a few quick demon tests. Now, if he could just hold on until Dean showed up, they’d be just fine.
Well, if he could hold on and not let Dean ever find out that Sam had sat there waiting to be rescued like some princess in a tower. Because once Dean got through his “You got kidnapped again!” freak-out, he’d tease Sam mercilessly.
At this point, escaping on his own was looking rather good. If he could just get Gordon’s idiot friend to leave the room for a while, he could at least get himself untied and Vala out of here. He wasn’t really sure how fast he’d be moving any time soon. But if Vala got loose she’d be able to lead Dean straight back here.
Sam Carter
Dean Winchester had an impressive vocabulary. In the first ten minutes after they’d realized that Sam and Vala were missing, he’d sworn with more complexity and in more languages than three-quarters of her classmates back at the Academy put together could have achieved. Daniel could and had done better, in her opinion, but then again, Daniel was a linguist who spoke over twenty-three languages. It was hard to beat him when he decided to swear.
“…stupid-ass son of a bitch,” Dean was finishing. “When I get him back I’m stapling our hands together. See him get himself kidnapped after that.”
She blinked. She’d expected him to be worried and upset, yes, but she hadn’t even thought that whoever Sam and Vala had been grabbed by would have been after Sam. The idea that Vala might have just been an innocent bystander in all of this, rather than the target, was rather unusual. Not to mention the surprise of finding out that the polite young man she’d talked to earlier had been kidnapped before. It wasn’t exactly a common occurrence. At least, not outside of being on the SGC’s flagship team.
Still, it was best not to assume that Dean was right. There were still a lot of people out there who could be after Vala, and most of them wouldn’t hesitate to take a hostage to use as leverage against her. She couldn’t take anything for granted here.
Alright, on to dealing with this mess. First step, damage control. Get Dean and herself out of here, give the simplest explanation for why it was likely for Vala to have been the target, and call the SGC and get them tracking Vala’s signal.
“Dean, we need to get someplace secure,” she said, trying to be as soothing as was possible while she took charge.
Unfortunately, Dean wasn’t exactly the easiest person to soothe. “What the hell do you mean, get out of here? We’ve got to look for some clues so we can find the asshole who did this and force him to give Sam back.”
She resisted the urge to roll her eyes or huff in frustration. It seemed like Dean could be as bad as Jack, in some ways. “We don’t have to look for clues to figure out where they are, not as long as they keep Vala and your brother together.”
He hadn’t broken a stride in his pacing back and forth when he’d responded to her the first time. But now he did, turning to face her, fists clenching and unclenching in quick succession. “What the hell do you mean?”
She didn’t bother hiding her frustration this time, and glared back at him. “Not till we get to a secured area.”
He stared at her for a minute, evidently wanting more than that, but when she kept silent he snorted angrily and strode over to his car. “Then let’s stop wasting time out here, princess.”
Sam bit her lip. She was not going to kill him. If for no other reason than the fact that she’d liked the younger Winchester too much to rescue him and then tell him that she’d had to murder his brother in the process. At least she was finally getting Dean somewhere where she could give an abbreviated and highly cleaned-up explanation for why they’d planted a sub-dermal transceiver on Vala.
Dean Winchester
He was getting pretty ticked off with all this James Bond secrecy crap. If Sam Carter didn’t start talking soon, he was going to have to dump her out of the car and start searching on his own.
He let her give directions back to where she and Vala had apparently been staying, one of those god-awful bed and breakfasts that charged extra for smothering you in chintz.
She led him up to the room she’d been splitting with Vala, and yeah, it was as bad as he’d thought. And just when he was about to start asking questions, starting with “What the heck can you say here you couldn’t say back at the bar?” she started pulling high-tech gizmos out from under the mountain of pillows stashed on her bed.
A quick sweep around the room with one of them and she lost some of the tension she’d been radiating ever since they’d gone back inside and realized that Sam and Vala had disappeared on them. She sat down on what he was assuming was her bed, and motioned for him to grab a seat on the other one. He did, but he wasn’t going to give her much more than that. It was time she stopped dicking around and started talking straight with him.
She seemed to get what he was thinking from his glare, and leaned forward a bit. “Vala and I work for the US military on highly classified projects. There are people out there who know what we do, and they often want to know a lot more than they should. They’ve sometimes taken steps to try and force the information out of us, including kidnap and torture. After the last time it happened, all of the members of our team were implanted with tracers. If you give me a bit, I’ll be able to track her. Give me three hours and the other members of my team will be here with all the reinforcements we’ll need to get both of them back.”
Okay, that changed things. The upshot was that they’d get Sam out of wherever the fuck he was a heck of a lot faster than he could do it on his own. The downside was that he was going to have to be a hell of a lot more careful than he’d been earlier, if he didn’t want her to play connect-the-dots and find out that he and Sam were wanted by the Feds.
Vala Mal Doran
Their kidnapper finally left. Which was good, because it meant she could finish getting these bonds untied without him catching sight of her halfway through the process. She’d had her hands mostly free for about an hour, with just the slightest loop still present to make him think he still had her confined. She couldn’t risk untying her legs though. He might be stupid enough to believe that torturing a young man and accusing him of being a demon was a good idea, but she wasn’t going to assume that he’d be an absolute idiot and miss her bending over to undo the rest of her bonds.
Sam Winchester was looking rather woozy and altogether out of it, which wasn’t exactly surprising, given how much punishment their current deranged kidnapper had inflicted upon him. Still, he started a bit when she flashed him a faked grin and spoke. “Well, now that he’s gone, give me a minute and I’ll be over there to get you untied, and we’ll be off with a lovely story to tell to all our friends afterwards. And by lovely I mean the bit where you and I abscond with our idiot of a kidnapper’s vehicle and make our way to freedom.”
There, that bit made him blink. Good to know she hadn’t lost her touch there either. Ten seconds more and she had both legs unbound and was on her way over to deal with his ties.
Sam Winchester
Vala was a lot more than meets the eye, that Sam knew for sure. Of course, that much had been obvious from the fact that she hadn’t freaked out when they’d been kidnapped in the first place. When he put that together with her ease at untying herself and her calm plans for escape, well, Sam wasn’t stupid. She’d had a lot more interesting past than he’d assumed at first glance. It had only taken her a few minutes to get him untied and escaping out the window.
She’d fumbled a bit at the car though. He’d had to be the one to wire it and get things going on the road. And he’d been the one to drive it, since she claimed she’d never learned how.
After a bit of aimless wandering, they hit a road that he knew he’d driven during the past week on the case. It hadn’t taken too much work after that to track it back into town, and from there to her bed and breakfast, where he’d planned on dropping her off and calling Dean from her room. Seeing the Impala parked in front meant that he’d get to skip that last step.
He did wish they hadn’t opened the door on Sam Carter holding a gun on Dean, though. Dealing with that on top of his injuries was a little much.
Sam Carter
She’d sent Dean out of the room for a bit, told him that some of the things she needed to do were classified.
On one level, they were. Anything to do with the SGC, including contacting them in the first place, was classified to some degree.
But the main reason she’d needed to get him out was so that she could ask someone there to run a quick background check on both of the Winchesters. They could just be innocent civilians caught in the line of fire, or they could be a lot more dangerous than they’d let on. Dean definitely hadn’t been telling her everything he knew, and Sam had been taken along with Vala. She couldn’t count on anything being what it seemed with them.
By the time Dean strode back into the room ten minutes later, she’d already put in the request for more information as well as asking General Landry to send Teal’c, Daniel, and Mitchell to come with the tracking device and help retrieve their wayward teammate. Their initial readings from it suggested that Vala was still in the general area, but the device wasn’t especially accurate unless you were a bit closer to their position than the SGC was.
He walked in just after she’d hung up on Landry, and raised an eyebrow, a silent question.
“From what they can tell from our base, Vala is still somewhere close to here. Presumably your brother is being held with her, and if so, we can extract him at the same time as we do Vala. My team will be here in approximately three hours, and it’s best to wait for them to get closer so we can pinpoint Vala before launching any attack.” She said, sitting back down on the bed.
He blinked. “We’re just going to sit here and twiddle our thumbs while those bastards hold onto my brother and your friend? What the hell is wrong with you?” He was pacing back and forth through the room, glaring at random objects as if they were to blame for all of this.
She bit her lip and tried to remind herself that it wasn’t as if he was used to situations like this. She absolutely was not allowed to take her frustrations out on him, even if he wasn’t showing her the same courtesy. “Yes, we wait. We go out now, we have no idea where either of them are and we waste valuable time and energy searching places they’re not. We wait and we’ll know exactly where they are and we’ll have the personnel needed to take out whoever is there. My team’s been doing this stuff longer than you have, we’re good at this and we will get them back alive and in one piece.”
She ignored his muttered, “I’ve been doing it longer than you’d think, lady,” and pulled out her firearm. If they had to sit around and wait, she could at least check it and make sure that everything was working properly.
He glanced over at her and apparently decided that she had the right idea, as he pulled a similar gun out from a holster behind his back that she hadn’t noticed previously.
They managed to get through an hour like that, alternating checking and rechecking their weaponry and pacing throughout the room, which seemed to grow smaller with each passing minute. She’d be glad to be back with her team again, Dean’s method of worrying was driving her up the wall sideways.
When her cell went off, it jarred them out of their worried distractions, for which she couldn’t be anything but glad.
The message, however, was anything but glad tidings. Landry’s voice rang tight with anxiety as he barked out, “Carter, get out of there. The man’s a serial killer!”
She held her expression as impassive as possible, as she replied, “Understood, sir,” and hung up the phone. Dean looked up eagerly, apparently hoping for more information about where his brother might be. Her hand didn’t shake as she raised her gun and pointed it at him.
“You have five minutes to explain yourself,” she said.
Dean Winchester
He’d only had a few seconds to process Sam Carter’s sudden switch from tense to “I’m going to shoot you now” when Sammy and Vala burst into the door.
He couldn’t help himself. “Good timing,” he drawled, as Sam staggered to a stop. His brother had always been better at explaining this shit than he was.
Carter, he noticed, hadn’t let the distraction sway her for an instant. Her gun had stayed focused on him throughout the whole surprise entrance, even as her eyes had flicked over to check on her friend, who looked just fine. Sammy, on the other hand, looked like he’d been through five of Dad’s intensive training exercises in a row, then been attacked by a nasty poltergeist with a taste for knives.
“You okay there, little brother?” he asked. If Carter hadn’t shot him immediately, she could wait long enough for him to check in with Sam.
Sam pulled out Bitch-face Number Five, the one that said that he’d had a bad day already without adding in Dean’s messes as well, then nodded. “Nothing permanent. What did you do to deserve getting shot this time?”
Dean glanced back over at Carter, who was looking a bit less antsy than she’d been a minute or two ago, but still not exactly happy. “Hadn’t exactly had a chance to ask her that yet, Sam. Seeing as she’d just pulled her gun on me a minute before you decided to cancel our rescue operation before it got going.”
“He was going to explain why he’s wanted as a serial killer, and why I shouldn’t just kneecap him and take him into custody,” Carter broke in.
Okay, so apparently she’d called in for a background check as well when she passed on the request for backup. Damn, he thought he’d avoided that bit. “You want to do the explaining bit, Sammy, or should I?”
Sam huffed slightly, then rolled his eyes. “As if I’d let you try to explain it with your life on the line. You don’t do talking well at all, Dean.”
Turning towards Carter and Vala, he started, “Dean wasn’t the one to commit those murders. In fact, we were called in after the first few had already occurred, to stop it. A friend of mine from Stanford called me and asked for help.” He paused to collect his thoughts, then continued, “But I need to explain a bit before we get to that point, to explain why it was that we could solve what happened there, or at all the other places we go.”
Impatient, Dean burst in. “Demons, ghosts, and all sorts of other monsters straight out of the B movies of the week exist. We stop them.” And at Sam’s incredulous glance he continued, “What, dude, you were taking way too long to get to the point.”
Huffing again, Sam started up. “It sounds a bit insane, but I can explain it all to you, if you give me a chance.”
Carter was half-turned towards Sam by this point, and was listening intently. Dean slouched back and let his brother’s words flow past him without sinking in as he studied him. A bunch of bruises, all over, it looked, and from the way Sam was standing some of them had to be pretty deep. A few cuts, shallow and not that long, but they looked painful. And a glance over at Vala showed that she was intact, without any of the damage that Sam had obviously taken. Whoever it had been, he’d definitely wanted Sam. He’d force his brother to tell him everything later, after they’d talked Carter and her group out of arresting or shooting the both of them, and they’d show the guy that he didn’t mess with Winchesters.
For now he was going to relax and watch his brother introduce another pair of newbies to the craziness that was their lives. He’d get a kick out of watching the dumbfounded looks on their faces.
Hey, a guy had to have some fun in his life, didn’t he?
Vala Mal Doran
She wasn’t sure what she found more disturbing, actually. Sam’s explanation, or the fact that, apart from the utter insanity of the concept, it made more sense than anything else. Of course, given that her life had involved being possessed by a parasitic alien, conning her way across the galaxy, and finally finding a home with a group that regularly attempted to get themselves killed, she didn’t think she had much room to complain about anyone else’s life being insane.
Judging by the look on Sam’s face, she was buying it as well. Unusual, that. Vala had always thought that Sam would be the one least willing to believe in ghosts and demons.
Whatever the reason, after a few incredulous noises made during the beginning of the younger Winchester’s speech, Sam had actually started nodding along, as if it were making sense to her. And by the end of it, she’d lowered the gun and clicked the safety back on.
“It’s absolutely insane,” she said grudgingly. “But I’ve spent a lot of my life working with insane ideas. I might regret this, but I’m letting you go. Don’t make me regret it.”
The Winchesters evidently decided to take her at her word, and were gone before Vala could say anything. She turned to face Sam.
“Well, that was an interesting evening.”
thank you
Re: thank you
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*giggles madly*
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Heeeeeee!!!!!!! That was such a fun read! *BG* Wonderful.
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More! Mooorreee!!!!
*Claps hands*
*hugs*