Afternoon Snacks, Ch. 4
Flashback!
Chapter 4
Benny finds her.
Not finds. Finds isn’t the right word. Benny.
Benny notices her.
Emma had caught the scent as she crept from the shelter up in the big tree by the bone-canyon to the small cave hidden in the hilly south. She’d breathed it in and panicked, scampering up a nearby oak to tremble and bite her bloodied lips and breathe hard, ragged, until she came back to herself and the sun was down and she could remember.
That scent. There’d been another with it, far more important, but that scent was why she was here.
She tracked Sam Winchester until he reached a place that stank of illicit magic, of portals and portents, and disappeared.
Emma crouched in a scattering of small boulders, and settled in to wait.
The sky brightened and grew dim twice, a third time. She knew distantly that words existed for such things, day and night, but she had no use for the words. Not here.
Not until now, because Sam Winchester emerged from the portal, carrying a soul. Sam Winchester was found by a vampire, who didn’t behave like a vampire should. And now the vampire is looking directly at Emma’s hiding place, where she’s scuttled thirty feet back from the pair. The vampire is sniffing, and she should run.
But there is. That other scent. It clings to the vampire, too, faint but strong enough that she can smell it from here. It makes the middle of her chest hurt.
“Sam,” the vampire is talking, and his voice is honey-slow and easy. “I’m not accusin’ nobody of nothin’, you understand. But there’s a little girl back there that smells an awful lot like Winchester.”
She sees the tall one go still. His face does something complicated, something she can see clearly but cannot comprehend. He says, “Dean,” and she flinches.
When she opens her eyes the vampire is right there.
Emma squawks out her alarm and scrambles for the tree behind her, scampering up light and quick because that’s the only way you survive this place. But there isn’t – there isn’t hunt coming from the vampire. He’s not stalking her. He’s not looking at her like she’s prey. His eyes are old denim, the color her jeans used to be before they became filthy with blood and mud and grime.
His eyes look. Kind.
She doesn’t think Mama or the Matriarch ever looked at her like that. There was – something similar, maybe, hidden in the green eyes of the person who had that other scent, but it was layered with caution and wariness. The green eyes knew she was dangerous. And maybe it’s just cause the vampire knows she’s no threat to him, but he doesn’t carry those shades of distrust.
She doesn’t know what to do with kind.
She hasn’t seen it for two years.
“You wanna come home, chere?” He’s talking to her, the vampire. She doesn’t remember a lot about speech. Sam (danger, threat, danger) is coming closer, but the vampire isn’t minding him at all. Emma darts her gaze between them, unsure who to watch, who is the greater threat.
Sam says We killed her then I killed her but Emma is not listening, is not.
“And you’re sure that was the right choice.” The vampire looks away from her, now, and so they’re both looking at Sam. They both see how he crumples, a little, his shoulders rounding down and his head ducking.
He doesn’t answer.
He does say, “How’d we even get her out? I only have two arms.” He waves them, and something white is glowing in the right one.
“She kill anyone, up there?”
Sam says, “No. She tried to – Dean. But no.”
The vampire looks thoughtful. “Could be. And I could be wrong about this, but could be. That by blood she’s monster enough to get sent here, sure. But she hasn’t turned. She’s not a full blood Amazon. And could be she’s human enough to get through the portal.”
Sam is quiet.
The vampire reaches a hand out to her, and smiles. She remembers smiles. He says, “I’m Benny. I’m a friend of your Daddy’s.”
Emma doesn’t move. She looks at him, quiet and still. Looks at his hand, huge, probably big enough to crush her skull. But that’s not where her worry lies.
She looks at Sam.
Benny speaks, though it’s her and Sam looking at each other. Staring, silent, because he killed her and she doesn’t think he regrets it, cause he’s still looking at her like she’s a threat. She is. She is. She’s smaller, but she’s fast and she’s strong. Is she stronger than him?
There aren’t humans in this place. She doesn’t know. She wasn’t stupid enough to seek out the human that was here, once. Everything had been madness then, everyone screaming about hunters and angels and humans and she’d hunkered down in a cave, stayed in one place for nearly a year just to escape the chaos.
Benny speaks, and he says, “I’m not leavin’ her here. Brother.” His voice got hard, and he’s not talking to her.
Sam hasn’t broken eye contact with her til now; he does, runs a hand through his hair. “Dean would just come back in after you,” he says, tired.
Benny’s grin is blinding and full of teeth, catches her eye again. “That’s the idea.”
And they’re staring at each other now, staring and staring, and she’s seen enough battles to know one when it happens right in front of her but she’s never seen people fight like this. Not since she was back there, out in the world.
Benny wins.
She knows because Sam looks away first, and Benny looks to her with that easy grin. Reaches his hand back up.
This time she takes it. The scent clinging to his clothes is beckoning her, promising her, and those promises were broken last time but Emma has been alone and frightened and hunted for an eternity in this wasteland, and if going back there means getting broken again at least it will be a different kind of broken.
“You wanna tell us your name, honey?” Benny’s voice. Quick becoming familiar. She can’t trust anything yet to be safe, but this might come close. She can’t find the words quite, but she doesn’t have to. From Benny’s other side her name comes, slow and cautious.
“Emma. I – think. It was Emma.”
She stops.
Stares at him.
Sam Winchester stops too, and turns around, both men do. Benny is looking between her and Sam with a steady danger in his gaze, but it’s not aimed at her and so she ignores it.
Sam clenches his fists. Emma flinches back, then bares her teeth to show she isn’t scared of him, even though she is, she is.
“I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t understand those words. Not really, not in the way that normal people might; she knows enough to know just how blisteringly abnormal she is.
It might also be the first apology she’s ever heard. Except for girls begging the Matriarch for mercy when they fell short, but no one fell as short as Emma had.
Sam’s lips push together, his hands flex. She’s crouched and half-wild, but she watches. Waits.
“I thought you were trying to kill him. You were trying to kill him,” it’s almost an accusation. “I was protecting my family.”
“I was.” Had she been? Even now Emma didn’t know. She’d felt drawn toward the scent-person with the green eyes, but she’d had a mission too, and she had been a maelstrom of confusion in the small kitchen as she wielded her blade. She thought he would have helped her. She thought he might have tried to save her. She thought he might have succeeded. She thought she could have killed him, and she’ll never know which one it would have been. “I.”
She understands the importance of truth. And truth was that if she had killed him she would have been – “I wanted to be safe.”
Sam nods, and blows a big breath in through his nose. “We can keep you safe. But you can’t kill people.”
She laughs, sharp and harsh. He understands, too, goes red with it because her murderer telling her not to kill people is hilarious and awful, the only funny thing she’s heard in this wasteland of endless death and blood.
“Right. Don’t. Kill people.” She gasps it out, and then lets the laughter die. They are going out, these two, maybe going back to before, back to the world that wasn’t full of nothing but monsters. She cannot trust Sam, but she has to – has to reach some kind of peace, if she wants to get out too.
If she wants a chance to figure out the complicated mess in her head tied up with the not-Benny scent that was all over Benny’s clothes. She is avoiding his name, and his relationship to her.
“I won’t try to kill you if you don’t try to kill me.” That was fair, right? She knows she’d only been in their world a short time, knows she is missing a lot of important information, down to the ability to communicate, but she still has a brain. She can still think, and talk, and reason. Every bit of what they would call humanity hasn’t been stripped out of her just yet.
That offer isn’t good enough, from the wrinkle of Sam’s mouth. “I won’t try to kill him,” Emma adds, because she thought that was obvious, how slow can Sam be? “I won’t kill anyone who isn’t trying to kill me.”
Finally, Sam nods, like only those last two are the ones that matter.
“Now that’s settled, let’s get out of here, hmm?” Benny drawls, looking around at the trees like he hasn’t been staring the two of them down through that whole confrontation. “I didn’t like Purgat’ry enough the first time to hang around again.” He starts walking again, and she and Sam fall back to his sides.