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“Hey Jo,” Gwaine said into the phone, his voice rougher than usual. Rougher than any sixteen year old’s should be. His poison was liquor, not nicotine, but tonight he sounded like he smoked a pack a day.
“Gwaine?” The bleary-eyed tween asked. “Why are you calling? It’s… I don’t even know what time it is, it’s that early.”
“Can you put your mom on the phone?”
“Why? Is everything okay?” The slightly younger girl was instantly awake in concern. She didn’t know many people her own age, but when she found them and made friends, she was fiercely protective.
“Please, just get Ellen for me,” he begged. He couldn’t deal with this right now. Not now. He just needed to get out of here, and he needed to know where he could go.
“Yeah, okay, just a second.” The teenager tapped his foot anxiously as he waited. He knew, rationally, that he was safe. Gwaine was already a hundred miles away, and he had no way to follow, not without his truck. He was only going to be angrier when he found his vehicle stolen though. He loved that thing. Finally a voice came back over the other side.
“Gwaine, this is Ellen. What’s wrong?”
“Who’s the best Hunter you know?”
“Uh, Burt, I guess,” the roadhouse owner replied.
“No, I mean, like, not the most efficient killer, but a hunter who is actually a good person,” he clarified. The last thing he needed was to back to Burt.
“Gwaine, are you in trouble?”
“Yeah,” the teenager admitted for the first time. “And it’s not the kind of trouble I’m comfortable getting you and Jo tangled up in.”
“Well, best man I know who also happens to be a hunter is Bobby Singer,” the woman gave him his answer. “He’s a bit of a drunk, but not a mean one. Lives in an auto yard in Sioux Falls.”
“That’s not too far away,” Gwaine said, a little bit of brightness in his tone. That was the first bit of good news he’d gotten all day. “You don’t happen to know the address off the top of your head?” She gave it to him, and he wrote it down on a torn-out page of the phonebook tied into the phone booth. “Thanks Ellen.”
“Call whenever you need to, Gwaine,” she replied. Getting into hunting was hard for everyone. She could only imagine what it would be like for a teenage orphan. This kid had been through enough without whatever trouble he was in now.
“Thanks,” he said. “Oh, and when Burt next shows up at the Roadhouse, keep him away from Jo.” Those words sent a shiver down Ellen’s spine. If Burt had done something to the boy… Gwaine hung up before she could say anything more. He hobbled back over to Burt’s truck, let himself in with the stolen keys, and began to drive. Though he was tempted to pull over and take a nap on the bench seat, he pushed on through his exhaustion and pulled into the auto yard right at dawn. There was what looked like a pretty normal house at the back of it, which he walked stiffly up to and knocked on the door. His forty five was tucked into the back of his waistband just in case Ellen had given him bad info. An old man with a salt and pepper mustache that was still mostly pepper and a baseball cap opened the door after an extensive amount of knocking.
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The older Hunter wasn’t sure who he had been expecting, maybe Rufus or John and his boys, but it certainly wasn’t a different beat to hell teenager.
“Are you Bobby Singer?” the kid asked. His bottom lip was badly split, his flannel shirt hung open to reveal a cut up and bloody tank top, there were bruises visible peeking out of his sleeves, and his right eye was black and half swollen shut. He might've been quite handsome normally.
“Depends on who’s asking,” the man replied.
“Ellen said this was a safe place to come.” Bobby relaxed a little at those words.
“You better come inside then kid,” he said, leaving the door open wide as he turned around and went in first. He could hear the kid’s hesitation, then his heavy boots on the wood porch as he followed him inside. Without being told to do so, he closed the door and locked each of the seven deadbolts behind him. “What’s your name?”
“Gwaine.”
“Ga wain?” Bobby asked. “What the hell kind of a name is that?”
“My parents had an affinity for the letter G and Arthurian legends,” he replied. “My little sister was named Guinevere.” Bobby didn't miss how he spoke in the past tense about his family.
“You want something to drink, Gawain?” He couldn’t tell whether the kid needed coffee or scotch. He looked both jittery and exhausted.
“Glass of water and an aspirin?”
“Yeah, sure,” he agreed, tossing a pill bottle at the kid and filling him a whiskey glass from the tap. “So what’s after you kid? Vamp, werewolf, skinwalker?” It was clear he was a hunter.
“None of the above,” he said. “Not a monster. Not a literal one anyway.”
“Who've you been hunting with?”
“Burt Mackelson.”
“Let me guess. Not all those bruises are from monsters.” Gwaine’s lack of a response spoke loudly enough. “Well, what do you want me to do about it kid?”
“Man, I don't know,” the teenager said, rubbing a hand over his face. “I had… I had a really rough night, and I just needed to get away from him, and I didn't know where to go. If I could just stay here for a little while, figure out what I'm going to do with myself…”
“Well, there's a couch in there and some food in the fridge. You want something to eat?”
“Oh god yes,” Gwaine said, his stomach growling in agreement. He hadn’t eaten since lunch at the shitty burger stand yesterday, and for a boy currently growing like he was, going a few hours without food was a hardship. “Please.”
“Come beat some eggs for me then. I’m not going to do everything here.” Fifteen minutes later Gwaine was happily chowing down on a massive pile of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast.
“Slow down, boy. You're gonna make yourself sick, not to mention eat me out of house and home,” Bobby said as he picked at his own food with a lot less urgency. “You're just like Dean.”
“Dean?” the kid asked around a full mouth.
“Another teenage hunter. Gets beat up a lot too.”
“By the monsters?”
“Sometimes. But it's by his father, most of the time.”
“He’s got a family left?” The look on Gwaine’s face was unbridled sadness and jealousy under a thin, thin veneer of teenage apathy as he paused in his devouring.
“Part of one. Father and his little brother. Their mom got killed when they were both little.”
“Sucks to be them.” The other teenager resumed his breakfast, but now he ate angrily, glaring down at his eggs like they were the ones that had killed his family. “Lucky bastards. What I wouldn’t give for Gwen to be alive right now.”
The conversation lapsed, because there was nothing for Bobby to say to that. Gwaine finished his eggs, gnawed on a piece of really burnt bacon. It was clear from the look on his face that he had something to say but didn’t exactly know how to word it.
“My family all got killed by a ghost,” he finally said flat-out. “Apparently our new house was haunted. Fuck, things like that are supposed to kill only stupid teenagers who wander into them for kicks, not kill everyone but the stupid teenager. I was staying over at a friend's house at the time it went down. Just came home to find them all dead in the living room among the boxes.”
“I’m sorry,” Bobby said, and meant it.
“Yeah, well,” Gwaine said flippantly, but his eyes glistened. “Anyway, the police get me locked up in some interview room because they think I did it. I had one misdemeanor for shoplifting and another for possession, hah, the other kind, and suddenly they think I jump to triple murder of my family. This FBI guy comes in though, Burt of course, and next thing I know I’m in his pickup truck and he’s telling me that the batty old lady that died the house a hundred years ago killed them, and then he takes me to burn her bones and watch the bitch go up in flames. After that, I obviously couldn’t just go back to normal life, because I didn’t have one anymore, so I ran away from the foster care they stuck me in and went looking for the monsters and the people who hunted them.” It was a pretty typical hunting story then, except for his young age. “Found Burt again, who I guess you could say took me on as his apprentice or whatever. He was nice enough at first. Started teaching me. How to shoot a gun, behead a vamp, smoke a ghost. I was too young to pass as an FBI agent, so I didn't learn much about casework. Taught me a bunch of excuses for the bruises before he started dishing them out.”
“How long were you with him?”
“Eighteen months.”
“Why did you you leave now?”
“I don't know. Just got tired of the abuse. Sick of using my own money to pay the ice machines in shitty motels when he hit me. Figured I should get out before he broke something. Half the time I couldn't even hunt, which was why I was with him in the first place. I don't need him anyway. I'm already a better hunter than he ever was.”
“Arrogance like that will get you killed.”
“Would that really be such a bad thing?”
“You know Hell is a real place, right boy?” Bobby snapped. “You might not be headed there yet, but if I were you I wouldn't be so willing to go out so fast. Plus, wouldn't you want to go out on your own terms?” He thought about the bullet in his desk drawer.
“Yeah, I guess,” he agreed with a shrug and an unhealthy dollop of teenage apathy.
“Listen,” the older man sighed. “You’re young, you haven’t really lived enough to value being alive. When you’re my age, you’ll hold on a bit tighter, fight a bit harder.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Gwaine said in a tone that made Bobby want to reach over and shake him until he understood. He forced himself to breathe and remember that he was just a kid, and though he had a lot to learn, he had a lot of time left to learn it. That is, he would if someone kept him alive until then.
“Look, I can't stop you from going out and hunting and getting yourself killed if you really have your heart set on that. But if you want to be a little better prepared, well, I have the best supernatural library around, and over a decade of experience under my belt. I can give you a damn good book education about all the important things, and I won't beat you. You're welcome to stick around as long as you want.”
“I might just take you up on that.”