' i didn’t feel like i deserved a good life. '
The local hunter cell thinks it's a fleshgait. New-World monsters roughly comparable to an egregore; a nightmarish manifestation of collective psyche dreaming up the summoning ritual for a demon born from a community's paranoia and fear of cultural outsiders. Two was pretty sure it was a shapeshifting, silicon-based alien unnaturally adept at foreign camoflauge and with exceptional neuroplasticity for adaptation in unnatural environments.
He didn't really care. It was killing people. Flechette-loaded buckshot shells would beat a demon, right?
Across the sky, comets streaked in fading-fast lines of light and ice. Each on a journey, a personal pilgrimage through the stars. How did that human song go? I would walk five-hundred light years, just to fall down at your mesosphere? Didn't ring quite right. Other people were better songwriters than him. Two was better at this sort of thing, lengthy standoffs in the deep country and in the wispy woods.
Cold air prickled the edges of his beard. Wind whipped thick and curly locks of dark hair against his forehead. He adjusted position. Racked the sniper rifle in his hands and twisted the scope's magnification dial to the right. Righty-zoomy, lefty-long-range. Frost coiled in the air from Sam's lips and out of his nose, and Two found he couldn't help but observe, bubbles drifting to the surface of a lake from beneath a stone. No such respiratory condensation for him. He wondered what it was like to get your tongue stuck to a lamppost, for a moment.
"Mm," Two responded, more of an idle sound of acknowledgement than anything else. They were out here on business and in truth Two didn't really know this guy, but he had a singular impulse that they shared motivation here. In his experience, their line of work was not one where you really spent time chatting with the other guy at the water cooler.
"So, now you do this," he said, "which I struggle to imagine is really more of an upgrade than ... I don't know. Have you ever tried just being an accountant? I hear it has less of a risk of death than--"
The comets streaked through the sky again. In the distant hills, against the edge of the firmament where the sky met the horizon, comets crashed into the far-off rolling grass and pitched stone into the air. Sickly teal light spread up through the trees. Fireflies ceased their blinking. The birds stopped. There it was- payload. Two noted Sam's gear was less anti-personnel and definitely way more analog. Whether he was prepared for a different kind of hunt, Two didn't know.
He sighed. Life intertwined with life. Two heard the traces of misery in the other man's words, for it was, frankly, impossible to miss. He knew it well. He'd heard it in the words of a hundred humans by now. Humans had a special talent for hand-crafting the architects of their own misery. All the more reason they needed a guiding hand. He shouldered his own rifle, standing - nearly a full foot shorter than the younger Winchester brother, but his composure was stony. Light from the moon colored the darkness of Two's complexion with silver.
"Look, I didn't think I would live to the age I am, truthfully. But- well, here we are. Nobody knows anything. Clairvoyance is not an excuse to ignore our potential and no amount of mythologizing it will make our histories easier. We are all going to die. Come on. We need to kill an alien."
