Roof But No Ceiling (1/8)
She came through at 3:27 in the morning, a time when Dean was usually asleep, or not home at all. He figured that was why he'd never noticed her before.
She was a stylish woman, he supposed, for her era at least, wearing a long dress with broad, puffy shoulders and an unnaturally narrow waist, and holding a wide-brimmed hat covered in feathers. She glided neatly through the wall of his bedroom, glowing faintly in the dark and flickering at the edges, but Dean didn't bother reaching for a weapon. She wasn't looking at him. She wasn't interacting with anything.
She was a death echo, maybe the most serene one he'd ever seen. She looked calm, if tired, her lips set and weighed down at the edges by the folds of her bagging cheeks. Her dark hair was streaked here and there with gray and pulled back into a sharp bun at the nape of her neck. She held herself upright and proud as she skirted the edge of his bed, walking a straight path to the corner of his room, and disappeared again through the far wall. Dean jumped up, sending his blanket and topsheet slithering to the floor, and rushed through the door, looking down the hall just in time to see the train of her long skirt swish once as it vanished through the far wall. He checked the wall, then crouched down, feeling along the baseboards and tile, but found nothing out of the ordinary.
Of course not. She was just a death echo.
He straightened, looking from the wall outside his room where she must have exited, back to where she'd vanished.
". . . Huh."
*
"A death echo?"
Sam didn't so much sit as sprawl these days, propped up on his bed by every pillow Dean could find in the entire bunker, barring the single one he used on his own bed. It was probably overkill - the bed was crowded enough with just the massiveness that was Sam in it, much less fifteen musty lumps of down - but it made Dean feel better. Sam breathed, he was conscious about as much as he was asleep these days, and Dean could no longer see the outline of his skull through his skin. Other than making him watery chicken soup, oatmeal, and toast, getting Sam enough pillows to almost get him fully upright was the best Dean could do for him.
"Yeah," Dean said. He sat half on the bed and half on the nightstand. Thank god for the rounded corners of art deco furnishing.
"In your room," Sam said.
"No, Sam, I was sleeping in the kitchen again."
"Look, I'm not saying I don't -" Sam blinked. "Wait, again?"
"Shut up." Dean flicked Sam in the shoulder with his fist. He was a little afraid if he hit him any harder, Sam would bruise. Or die.
The first few weeks after the angels fell had been rough. He'd almost been ready to call in the cavalry, which considering that pretty much all their friends and allies were dead would have meant either trying to get Charlie and Kevin to work out a hoodoo mojo resurrection spell, or making an open-ended call to the angels that had just hit the earth. Dean didn't much want to think of what a freak show that would have been. Cas aside, the angels had never really come off as big Winchester fans.
It was only the sheerest of luck - something that a month ago, Dean would have sworn up and down he didn't have - that Sam had managed to pull through the worst of what the trials did to him. Dean had them aimed for the hospital after stuffing Crowley in the trunk and leaving the church, but on a whim had turned instead for the bunker, not able to take the idea of seeing Sam pale and gray against hospital sheets. He'd seen enough of that to last him a lifetime. He'd cursed himself the whole way home, then cursed some more the whole time he was dragging Sam's dead-fucking-weight down the stairs and through the halls to his room. Then, just as Dean had been getting him into position to flop down onto the mattress (memory foam, like Dean wasn't going to treat his brother just as well - better - than he did himself), Sam had started cursing him back, and Dean had just about cried.
Okay. He'd burst into fucking tears. He'd just had to talk his brother down from a suicide mission and then had watched what he'd thought was his best friend kicking all the angels out of heaven and locking the door behind him. He'd fucking earned bursting into tears.
"Okay," Sam said. "There's a death echo." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He wasn't really big on endurance right now; even talking sometimes took it out of him. Dean liked to tease that it meant he finally got a break from all of Sam's bitching. Sam just demonstrated that pointed looks didn't take anything out of him at all. "It makes sense. This place is old."
"So was our new friend from Little House on the Prairie," Dean agreed.
"The TV show?" Sam asked. Dean flicked him again, then rolled his eyes when Sam grinned. "I know you're not going to tell me you read the books. So we're talking pioneer era?"
Dean frowned. "Sort of. Fancy pioneer. She had the hair, but her skirt wasn't really . . . fluffy enough."
"Well, that narrows it down," Sam said. Dean couldn't quite decide if he was being sarcastic or not. "You could check online, see if you can pinpoint the style."
"Yeah, or I could get on with my life because she's a fucking death echo. It's not like she's going to go all vengeance on our asses." Dean rubbed his fingers together. "No ectoplasm, no residue of any kind. She didn't even ruffle the papers on my desk."
"You have a desk," Sam marveled. "With actual papers on it."
"Well, someone has to take up the geek mantle while you're on bed rest." Dean patted Sam's thigh through the four blankets he had draped over his lap (again, probably overkill; the bunker had a pretty robust heating system for a place that hadn't been used since Eisenhower was in office).
"Seriously, though," Sam said. "You don't think this is a thing, do you?"
Dean shrugged. "A death echo? Nah."
"Then why're you telling me about it?"
"Dunno. I'm bored?"
Sam huffed a laugh, then coughed into his elbow. Dean tried not to be obvious as he checked Sam's sleeve to see if he'd spat up any blood. It looked clean. He patted him on the thigh again, pleased. "Speaking of. Let's watch a movie, huh? I'll even let you pick which one."
Sam smiled, a wan expression that was slowly regaining its old sparkle. "Wow. You really are bored."
"What can I say? There's only so much following harmless dead chicks a guy can do in a day." Dean grabbed the remote from Sam's desk, only an arm's reach across the room from the massive bed. "Gotta give this big screen a test run before we run out of time on the return policy."
"The secret headquarters doesn't stay very secret if you keep having delivery guys come in and out, Dean."
"Hey." Dean mock-scowled at him. "Like I'd let Best Buy into our inner sanctum. Kevin and I handled this puppy all by ourselves. Only managed to ding the plaster a couple times doing it, too."
"And apparently release a death echo, while you were at it."
Dean's scowl went legitimate, his lower lip edging out into what was decidedly not a pout, thank you very much. ". . . Shut up."
*
Sam honestly didn't think much of Dean's death echo. Leave it to Dean to manage to find someone new to occupy himself with, even laying low in an old locked bunker. His half-dead brother wasn't enough entertainment for him. Neither was the half-crazy prophet. Even the half-cured King of Hell couldn't keep the great Dean Winchester from getting bored. He had to end up with a death echo walking through his room.
Well. Maybe he'd lay off the giant purchases, at least.
Even better, maybe he'd lay off Sam. If Dean didn't stop hovering, Sam was pretty sure he was going to scream. They'd spent enough time living in each other's pockets over the last several years that it took a lot of extra Dean for Sam to start to feel a little stir crazy, but the whole "too weak to get farther than the bathroom twice a day" thing was really making his brother's mother-hen routine hard to take.
Oh, and there was the part where Sam was kind of pissed at Dean, too.
He wasn't proud of that. He wasn't proud at all. But honestly, he'd had a low, simmering rage going in regards to Dean since he disappeared fighting Dick Roman.
Sam had honestly believed Dean was dead. He hadn't been able to handle believing anything else. And, well, he'd always had a little bit of trouble getting past the "anger" stage of grief. Or the "anger" stage of anything else. So, yeah, he was angry. He was angry at Dean for leaving him behind. For taking Cas with him. For letting Sam stew in his own juices for a year and then for coming back. He was angry at Dean for being angry at Sam for not getting him back. He was angry that Dean managed to make new friends even in Purgatory, and he was angry at Dean for not telling him about Benny the moment they got back. He was angry at Dean for breaking things up between Sam and Amelia, and he was angry at Dean for wanting to take the trials on himself and leave Sam behind all over again. None of it was even remotely rational, and that made Sam even angrier - that Dean made him feel this way, that Dean couldn't see that he made him feel this way - and in the end, the only thing Sam had been able to do was to turn that anger back on himself, to revel in the idea of it all finally being over, of all the anger burning away under the full force of the trials' cleansing light, of being sucked down into Hell and locked, suspended forever above it, finally completely alone, finally completely useful.
And now Dean hadn't even let him have that.
Sam was tired - was completely fucking exhausted - of being angry. He was sucked dry of everything else, stuck on the absurd pile of pillows that Dean had scrounged up for him and dependent on Dean to bring him toast and coffee and the news of what was going on beyond the short stretch of hallway that connected Sam's room to the institutional toilets and open shower room that somehow, miraculously, always had piping hot water. Hell, Dean was probably taking cold showers just to save all the hot for Sam. Which pissed him off.
At least without the trials cooking Sam's brain, he could hold it all in. He didn't have to let Dean know he was still pissed, that his anger issues were brimming and had been for so very long. So he smiled at his brother, let him hang out on the bed and goad Sam into watching movies and tease him about his choices and look so damned relieved that Sam, bedbound or not, was still breathing and conscious at least part of the time.
And sometimes, Sam even managed to forgive Dean. When he winced and cheered at the end of an epic cinematic car crash and turned his head to look back at Sam, just the way he used to when they were kids. When, no matter how much he bitched about it, he still brought home jar after jar of Sam's favorite raspberry jelly.
When Dean was willing to compromise, instead of sacrifice; that was when Sam forgave him.
Sam smiled back when Dean waggled his eyebrows, not letting it fade until Dean turned back towards the screen. The TV wasn't a bad idea - Dean could watch that while Sam used his laptop to start some research, help work out where Cas ended up, write up some of the things they'd learned from the Men of Letters so far. The demon cure wasn't something they should be keeping to themselves. There were still hunters out there who counted the Winchesters as allies, if not friends, and who would be grateful for any information that might help them stop demons. Actually end them instead of just banishing them, without hurting the hosts.
If Dean wasn't going to let Sam close Hell for good, the least they could do was help make Hell's wide open status less of an issue for the world at large.
"You're scowling."
Sam swallowed a sigh. "I'm thinking, Dean."
"You're not supposed to be thinking. You're supposed to be resting."
"It's not something all of us can turn off." Sam shrugged. "And Faster and Furiouser Seventeen just doesn't do it so much for me."
"This is why I told you to pick." Dean pushed himself up from the sprawl he'd fallen into at the edge of Sam's bed. "You gotta turn that freaky brain of yours off sometimes, Sam, or you'll drive yourself crazy."
"I thought we had it pretty well established that we're both already nuts."
"- er, then." Dean smiled. "Crazier."
Sam knew Dean had never been able to see the world his way; he'd never even tried. Dean's brain turned off at the drop of a hat, so naturally, the fact that Sam's didn't must make him crazy. It'd be easier for Sam to forgive Dean for that one if he weren't at least half-sure his brother was right. And there was nothing more infuriating than Dean being right.
*
Dean's plan for dealing with the death echo was to just ignore it. He had enough on his plate to worry about, what with Sam's slow recovery and Kevin's slow retreat into full crazy hermitude. The kid had taken up residence in a small reading room off the main library, and if Dean didn't swing by to remind him how to be a human being every now and then, he was pretty sure Kevin would start quietly collecting his bodily fluids in jars. And that was not to mention the king of Hell - or maybe former king of Hell? - locked up in the dungeon. He didn't need to add a death echo to the list, especially since they were completely harmless. Dean had known that forever, since his dad learned it when Dean was maybe eight and passed it along. Death echoes weren't aware of their surroundings. They didn't interact with those surroundings. The most they did was make the norms shit their pants in terror and call a tabloid.
But they were also pretty fucking rare, ramshackle houses haunted by survivalist, necrophiliac nutjobs aside. And honestly Dean was, in fact, goddamn bored.
So when he found himself lying awake in his bed at 3:25 that night, he couldn't help but sit up and watch the wall by his dresser, waiting for her to emerge.
She was punctual, Dean had to give her that. She swept through the wall the moment the clock ticked over to 3:27, both hands holding her large, floofy hat low in front of her. She stood very straight, the kind of posture that had gone out of style the minute women stopped wearing corsets every day, and were it not for the flutter of the front of her long skirt as she kicked it out away from her feet, he'd swear she was gliding rather than walking.
Dean had seen a lot of death in his time. He'd never seen anyone walk towards it with so much quiet dignity.
She couldn't have known what was coming for her. He wondered what she thought she was walking to. Church? She looked tired, maybe she was going to bed. Had she been a Woman of Letters? He knew it wasn't completely unheard of, the woman Abaddon possessed was proof of that. Or were her remains squirreled away somewhere in the bunker, part of some old investigation, forgotten when Abaddon took out the old guard?
Dean stood before the death echo had made it even halfway across the room, stepping quickly across her path to avoid running into her. It wouldn't matter much to her, but direct contact with a spirit, even an echo, was pretty damned unpleasant as a rule. He opened his door, standing half in and half out, and watched as she swept through the second wall and out into the hallway.
She crossed it at the same angle she'd taken his room, as though she were walking along some long forgotten hallway that ran just barely off angle from this one. She hit the next wall about ten feet further down from Dean's room, the kitchen, if he wasn't mistaken. He rushed down the hall, swinging into the kitchen and nearly colliding with one of the many racks of enameled metal shelves that lined the space, but wasn't in time to catch her. She'd vanished again, though her trajectory should have taken her right through the middle of the old cast iron stove. She'd either turned when he wasn't looking, or met her fate somewhere in the wall.
Either way, he wasn't going to find out tonight. He went back to his room, ran his hand over the spot where she'd emerged from his wall, then sat down on his bed and lay back to get some sleep.
What was her name? Was she a Winchester? He and Sam were legacies, maybe they - and Henry - were hers. Had they stirred her up, somehow, by moving into the bunker? Had it really been him and Kevin knocking the TV box into walls? Or had she spent the last fifty years walking through this room every night at 3:27 on the dot?
Why 3:27? Had the Men of Letters organized watches? They worked with hunters, at times, maybe she was one of them. He could see a hunter walking knowingly into death like that.
Had she known what was going to happen to her?
Had she wanted it?
He couldn't make out his ceiling in the dark of the room - the lack of windows made the dorms in the bunker extremely dark at night - but he could plot the marks and stains on it in his head even without seeing it. He rolled over onto his side, shoving his arms around his single pillow.
Did she have family? Children?
A brother?
Fuck.
Kevin was still up when Dean gave up and headed for the library; Dean could see the light of the four old bankers' lamps in the little reading room he'd taken over. He leaned in and flashed him a wan smile. "Hey. How's it going?"
Kevin barely glanced up. "I'm still alive. I remembered to eat dinner and I have a whole pitcher of water here and I promise I'm not pissing into jars."
"Great." Dean stepped into the room, his hands dug into the pockets of his dressing gown. He took a deep breath, rocking back on his heels as he looked around. "Mind if I join you?"
Kevin looked up fully then. His eyes had massive circles around them and his hair was growing long again. It stuck out awkwardly to the side; Dean imagined him fisting his hands in it when the tablet work got too frustrating. He looked like he couldn't quite understand what Dean was asking or even the words coming out of his mouth, like he was trying to parse out a foreign language.
"Yeah," he said at length. "Okay. Grab a chair."
Dean smiled and pulled a chair in from the main room. "So," he asked, sitting down and leaning his elbows on the table, careful not to shift any of Kevin's notes. "Find anything interesting?"
*
Dean slept through almost as much daylight the next day as Sam did. Once upon a time, he'd have been able to spring up bright and early, even after a night filled with the remnants of the dead and discussions over a document of obscure ways to control or off a supernatural creature.
Apparently, he was getting old.
"Hey." He leaned in to check on Sam sometime around two in the afternoon. He took a sip of his coffee, then gestured to his brother with the mug. "You up for eating anything?"
Sam narrowed his eyes groggily at him. "Dude, did you just not bother to get dressed, today?"
Dean looked down at his outfit: t-shirt, dressing gown, and sure enough, no pants. He looked back up and shrugged. "Guess not."
Sam sighed, pushing himself a little further upright in his bed than he'd managed for the past few days and holding out one hand as if to shield his eyes from something bright. "Could you go do that, please?"
Dean looked down again. "What? I'm wearing underwear. You want breakfast or not?"
"Yeah." Sam licked his lips a little and swung the stretched out hand down to pick up the water glass Dean made sure was always full up at his bedside. "Toast?"
"Toast," Dean confirmed. "Jelly?"
"Do we have any of that raspberry stuff left?"
Dean sighed melodramatically. "Yes. I still don't know why you can't eat grape like a normal person."
"I like raspberry."
"Uh huh." Dean took another sip of coffee. "Think you can take anything a little more substantial? We've got eggs, and you could use a little protein."
Sam grimaced. "Toast," he said. "Maybe I could try some peanut butter."
"Better than nothing."
It was their basic morning routine - or early afternoon routine, since Sam was still only managing to be awake for about six or seven hours at a stretch these days, and almost never before noon. Dean would come by when he heard Sam start to stir and offer him breakfast. Sam would dither. Dean would point out that a great hulking behemoth like Sam needed to live off of more than water and the occasional coffee, and Sam would agree - to a point. Dean would take his little victories, like peanut butter as well as jelly on the toast, and then fill Sam in on the gossip of the day, usually something Kevin had found out in his research - or yelled at Dean in frustration over not finding anything in his research - or the continued non-progress in Dean's attempt to figure out what had happened to Castiel. Then they'd spend the next several hours just hanging out, Dean getting as much Sam time in as he could before his brother was too tired to stay upright any more and fell back asleep, leaving Dean to his own devices in the bunker all over again.
Dean's mornings usually involved checking in on Kevin and Crowley, maybe making a run to the grocery store to make sure they were always stocked up on bread and freaking raspberry jelly, and poking around in the library, trying to get at least an idea of all the different fields the Men of Letters were experts in. This did usually mean that at some point before Sam woke up, Dean put on pants.
"So." He set the tray with toast and Sam's weak, froofy coffee on the nightstand. "Death echo lady was back last night."
Sam looked up. "Did she do anything different?"
"Dude," said Dean. "She's a death echo."
Sam shook his head, carefully spreading the jelly evenly over the entire surface of one of the slices of toast. "Then why are you bringing her up?"
Dean shrugged. "I don't know. Dead lady in my room. Sure, she's just an echo, but still: dead lady."
"You're bored," Sam said.
"I think that's been pretty firmly established."
"No." Sam pushed himself even further upright. "I mean, you're really bored. You should get out of here. Go find a hunt or something."
"What, and just leave you here?"
"I'm fine, Dean."
Dean looked down at Sam's tray, then back up at Sam.
"Okay, I'm not fighting fit, yet, but I'm not going to keel over if I have to look after myself for a couple days. Besides, Kevin's here. It's not like I'll be alone."
"Kevin has barely left his little study room since we got back."
"So give him something to focus on other than the tablets," Sam said. "We can entertain each other and you can stop going totally stir crazy."
"I'm not going stir crazy."
"You're obsessed with a death echo."
"I'm not obsessed!" Dean stood up and started for the door. Sam made a little squawk of protest.
"Dude, where are you going?"
Dean glanced back. "If you're so sick of me, I'll get out of your hair. Yell if you need anything."
"Dean!" Sam called. "Dean, come on, I wasn't - goddammit, Dean!"
Dean groaned, running his hand over his hair. He wasn't obsessed. Two nights did not equal obsessed. And he totally wasn't going crazy. That was stupid. What, did Sam expect him to start typing "all work and no play" on some typewriter? Maybe show up one morning with an axe?
Like he'd ever go crazy when he had Sam to look after.
Obsessed.
Please.
*
At 3:20 AM, Dean stood in the doorway of the kitchen, all set to catch the death echo as she came through the wall from his room and track her properly.
Okay. Maybe he was a little obsessed.
*
Dean paced.
Watching from the kitchen hadn't helped. The woman definitely disappeared between entering the wall and when she would be entering the kitchen. There was no accompanying noise to her echo, nothing that would hint about a sudden fall or attack somewhere within the wall. She just walked. Calmly. Quietly. Appearing through one wall, going straight through the next, and disappearing somewhere in a third.
She was just a death echo. There was no reason for Dean to be so curious about this. Sure, she was a death echo that went walking through his room every night. The only room he'd had to himself since he was four years old. He could share it with some old dead lady, no problem. And it wasn't like he didn't have other things to think about.
"Hey." He peered into Kevin's reading room. Kevin raised a hand in a wave without looking up from his notes. "You need anything?"
"Peace and quiet," Kevin said. Dean huffed and straightened up. He rolled his shoulders and looked around the library.
He should check on Sam.
Sam had managed to get his hands on a book somewhere (not from Dean, he knew those things would rot his brother's still healing brain) and had his nose thoroughly burrowed in it.
"I swear to god, Dean," Sam said before Dean could even open his mouth. "If you come in here and say one word about watching Netflix, I will gut you."
Dean opened his mouth to rebut. Sam lowered the book far enough to glare at him over it.
Okay, maybe he'd been spending a little too much time doting on Sam.
There was still Crowley, right? . . . Yeah, he'd rather pace the library and think about the dead chick.
He walked a lap around the central table, his fingers trailing over the polished wood, letting them run over the books and papers strewn across it. They glided over the smooth plastic finish of the laptop, then down again onto the table. He paused. It hadn't turned up a damned thing any other time he'd tried, but that didn't mean he might not be able to find Cas this time, right?
The trouble was, finding people on the internet required a couple of pieces of information that Dean just didn't have. Cas had managed to call once, just after the fall, just long enough to tell Dean that Metatron had pulled a fast one on him and stolen his grace before booting the angels out. The plan had been for Cas to make for the bunker, where he could help Dean look after Sam and figure out what to do about the angels, but Dean hadn't heard word one from him since. If anyone other than Sam had been bedridden and mostly comatose, Dean would have been on the road the next day, trying to hunt Cas down and bring him home. Instead he was stuck here, trying to guess what alias Cas might be using out in the world, where he'd landed, where he might be hiding out - or what hospitals and morgues to call to try and find his dead, human body.
The US was a big place. Dean had always known that, sure, but it never seemed so big as when he was trying to find just one person in the middle of all of it. At least with his dad, he'd had leads.
He checked a few of the usual sites: newspapers, big city obituaries, missing persons networks, but didn't find anything. He was tempted to try to contact some of the networks directly, get some people who weren't stuck watching after their invalid brothers on the case, but a former angel was enough of a target to all the nasty crap out in the world without Dean painting a sign on his back. He was stuck. He just had to keep hanging on, hoping Cas would call or show up or just - email him or something. Send a friend request to the Facebook account that Dean had set up in a fit of desperation last week. The one where he had a grand total of three friends: Kevin, the account he'd set up in Sam's name, and Charlie.
Charlie.
Dean cursed himself for not thinking of it before and pulled up his email program. She had a tendency not to pick up the phone if she didn't have advance warning anyone was calling, especially if it was one of the many Moondoor weekends, but if she wasn't pretending to be an ancient queen, she'd answer an email in a matter of hours. He rattled off all the pertinent details (most of which she probably already knew, honestly) and added a few pleases to the whole mix for spice before hitting send.
There. Now he at least felt like he accomplished something.
Only ten more hours until the death echo would be showing up again.
*
He was determined to sleep through it, this time. He'd quite possibly managed it any number of times before; he and Sam had spent plenty of nights in the bunker - hell, possibly more than they'd spent on the road since they'd found the place last year - and he'd only seen her the first time a few nights ago. Clearly she wasn't that big of a deal. If she were, he'd have noticed and dealt with her already.
If he hadn't let himself sleep in that morning, he might have even managed it. As it was, though he aimed for bed by 2, he was still wide awake by the time the clock hit 3:25, was sitting up facing the wall by 3:27.
She glided into the room exactly as she had the first night she showed up, glowing faintly blue, her skirt ethereal, her expression serene. Dean stood, pacing along beside her.
"You're dead," he told her. "You hear me, lady? You're dead. You've probably been dead for a century. You're nothing more than a memory of a memory. The fucking universe passing gas. You're not even rotting any more, you're nothing more than a skeleton somewhere. You're dead." She didn't look over or acknowledge him at all. "You're dead!" Dean waved a hand in front of her face, barely snatching it away again before she could walk through it, and watched as she disappeared through the far wall. He jogged out the door and around the corner to follow her down the hallway.
"Listen to me! You're dead! You're long gone! There's nothing left for you here, you're just bugging the shit out of me, so get the hell out, okay? Move the fuck on!" She was getting close to the far wall again, about to disappear for another night. Dean couldn't do another whole night of this. He swiped at her in frustration, then made a grab for the hat she held low by her side.
His hands closed on stiff wool felt and velvet that crunched and crumbled beneath his fingers. The woman's head snapped up and she turned, staring down at Dean.
Dean froze, half-crouched, his hand still gripping the now dusty remains of her hat, caught in her gaze, which struck straight through him, piercing him in a way that no one else could. No one but Sam or Dad, that was - or Mom. He knew that expression, had even seen it in the mirror a time or two. She was a Winchester. Or a Campbell or whatever other names there were in his and Sam's family tree that they'd never gotten to hear because their tree was diseased and dying and fucked to all hell.
"Come along then, cousin." Her voice was low and smoky, like a golden age starlet's. Her lips curled up just the tiniest bit at the edges as she tipped her head towards the wall. "And I will finally greet my death with a happy heart."
She started moving before Dean could think what to say in return, tugging her hat free of his grip. He lunged forward as she hit the wall, as though he could wrap his arms around her waist and force her to stay behind, to explain - and his fingers scraped along plaster, grasping at nothing.
"Oh hell no." He stepped up to the wall and looked it over. He ran his fingers over the scratched and scarred surface, marked by years of passing Men of Letters carrying boxes and umbrellas and who knew what else without worrying about touching up something as simple and innocuous as a hallway wall. And, yeah, by him and Kevin and all the things they'd brought in, too. Rapping a knuckle against it, he heard the faint echo of the hollow spaces between studs. He leaned in close, turning his head and pressing his ear as though he would hear her calling to him from the other side.
Something caught his eye along the wall, an irregularity just a few hand-spans from where he leaned. A tiny ledge, an infinitesimal shift in the depth of the wall. He slid along, running his hand in front of him, and felt a crack in the plaster. Leaving his hand on it, he stepped back.
The lights in the hallway were always rather dim, antique incandescents that lit everything well enough to avoid walking into the wall or people, but not enough to make out the perfectly fitted plaster-and-tile door in the wall where Dean was standing. He felt the edge of it with his fingers and confirmed that it was at least as tall as his reach. He pressed in against it, looking for the latch. When that didn't work, he pulled out his knife, slicing a little "X" into the plaster just next to crack to mark his place while he rushed back to his room for a flashlight.
Under a direct beam, the edges of the door became apparent. It stretched from the last line of tile above the floor to just beneath the ceiling, running about twice the width of the standard gap between modern studs, not quite three feet across. He tried to picture the woman in his head, her actions just before going through the wall, to see if he could remember any sort of latch she might have pressed or catch she triggered, but the door must have been open in her time, because as far as he could remember, she'd just walked on through.
He should wait till morning. Let Kevin and Sam get a look at this. They'd enjoy the puzzle of a secret passage as much, if not more, than he did. And who knew what could be behind the wall, after so many years? He shouldn't go wandering off in the bunker alone without telling anyone. They'd found enough curse boxes and books of dark magic to know that this place wasn't all sunshine and roses, after all.
He should totally just go back to bed, come back and look at this again after a good night's sleep.
He should absolutely not be using his knife to wedge into the crack and pry the door open.
A blast of stuffy air rushed past him as the door gave under his manipulations, swinging open with a shriek of old hinges. Dean looked up towards Sam's room, waiting to see if the noise woke him up. When Sam didn't make a sound, he turned back to the hole now gaping in the wall and shone his flashlight in.
"Well, 'cousin'," he muttered. "Looks like I'm coming along, after all."
The passage looked pretty normal, initially, just an ordinary stretch between the walls, about eight feet long. Old newspaper lined the wood-backed plaster by way of insulation, though it was too smudged to read. A pipe ran through the floor on the right side, jutting into the wall at about the level of Dean's knee. He just barely managed to miss walking into it and hissed under his breath. He aimed the flashlight at the floor in front of him, noting a few more pipes running in and out of the wall ahead. This part of the passage was probably something of an open secret back in Henry's day, at least for whoever did the Men of Letters' plumbing.
At the end of eight feet the walls abruptly changed, wood and plaster giving way to brick. A metal door spotted with rust and marked with a now-illegible etching blocked his further passage, an old fashioned lock set into it just above the handle. It looked similar to the lock on the front doors of the bunker itself, and Dean almost turned around to go back for the key. Or, hell, to go to bed. All of this really could wait until morning. Sam would just about shit himself to hear they had a real secret passage in the bunker.
Then his hand closed over the handle, and he pressed down on the latch. It gave beneath his grip with a crack, the bolt apparently rusted through enough to break.
He wondered if he should be a little bit worried about that.
The door swung open with another old-hinge shriek and a burst of stale air that sent a shiver over his scalp and down his spine. He found himself looking down worn stone stairs through an arched tunnel that looked more like something he might find under a castle in Europe rather than a warehouse-shaped bunker in Kansas. He had a fleeting moment to wonder if he was going deeper into the Men of Letters' history than he wanted to, but then a flicker of ghost-light far down the tunnel drew his eye.
The spirit had called him 'cousin'. Men of Letters history was his history, and he had to believe his family line had something better than the Campbell hunters in it. His curiosity was well and truly piqued. Sam wouldn't make it this far down the passage, anyway; he could barely make it down the hallway without getting winded. And Kevin - hell, Kevin was already more than armpit deep in mystery of his own with those tablets. He didn't need a secret sub-basement added on top of all that.
Dean would just check it out and report back. No big deal.
He expected the stairs to be slick, worn down into ramps in the middle, but they were flat and solid beneath his feet - which was damned lucky, since whenever this tunnel had been built, it was before handrails were a requirement. Falling down these stairs would suck ass, and he really didn't want to think that his not-a-death-echo ancestor was trying to lead him to his death.
Unless she was an omen.
God damn, he hoped she wasn't an omen. It would be just his luck to follow an omen right into his own sticky, probably finally permanent death. And then who would keep Sam from getting all suicidally stupid?
There, see? Same mission as always. Stay alive until he knew Sam would stay that way, too. Sure, he knew it wasn't the healthiest way to live his life - enough people had pointed that out to him over the years, not the least of all Sam himself - but it worked for him. Living for other people kept him going, and if it wasn't Sam, it was Dad, or Lisa and Ben, or Cas, or even Kevin or Charlie. He didn't let many people in; each person he added just drew the whole living thing out that much further. He'd die for just about anyone, would die for humanity itself if he had to, but living for them?
That was a whole lot harder.
"Hey," he called as he came to the bottom of the staircase. His flashlight picked up a wide, empty chamber built in the same brick as the tunnel, the floor covered an inch thick in undisturbed dust. He played the light over the walls, picking out a few archways leading off, dark as pits. There were old gas fixtures in the walls, installed sometime after the chamber had been built, judging by the external piping and the soot stains along the ceiling. The arch was tall enough for him to stand in upright, but reaching up, he could place his full palm against the ceiling without stretching. He felt the weight of the layers of brick and concrete above him. He tried to work out what room in the bunker the chamber ran under, but the dimensions warped in his head, and he couldn't quite place it. A side room of the library, maybe, or one of the storage closets.
So long as he remembered it wasn't six or ten or however many feet of dirt, he did alright.
"Hello?" he called again. "Uh, Cousin? You down here?"
"Things are escalating," a voice said, male, with the precise phrasing of someone who'd trained themselves out of a thick accent. "The tensions between Austria and the Serbs are getting worse, and the Kaiser is anxious to prove his worth. The council fears the old prophecies are coming to pass. They have called for the transfer."
Dean aimed the flashlight low, feeling behind him for his knife and wishing he'd thought to grab his gun before coming down. He slunk forward towards the archway in the center of the far wall and came up to rest with his shoulder against the bricks, out of sight from anyone who might be inside. Looking carefully around the edge of the arch, he spotted more ghost light, this time from two figures wearing dark suits. One wore a bowler, the other a straw boater.
"It's as I told you, Richard," the death echo said. Dean leaned a little further and saw her standing just beyond the two men, her hat held low in front of her in both hands. "Though I suppose they must be quite irritated that a woman holds seniority in such a time of crisis."
"Mary Annabelle," the man who wasn't Richard said, his voice high and tight. "Are you absolutely sure -"
"My dear William." Mary Annabelle reached for the man in the boater, resting her hand on his cheek. Dean watched him shut his eyes and swallow. "Do you think I would ever leave you, if there were another way?"
"We must begin immediately." Richard doffed his bowler respectfully. He reached into his jacket and withdrew a long dagger of Roman design, with a spiraled grip and simple, unadorned guard and pommel. The blade looked inscribed, but Dean was too far away to make out what it said, or even the language it was written in. Richard held it tightly, but with uncertainty, glancing once to William, who'd turned his face away.
"Mary Annabelle Winchester, née Moore, legacy of Arthur Edmond Moore, and senior member of the Men of Letters American Annex." Richard paused, here, frowning and glancing to the side. "Ah -"
"You could name my sponsor," Mary Annabelle said. "But I suspect that's precise enough identification for the ritual."
"Yes," Richard said, his faint smile pained as he readjusted his grip on his knife. He cleared his throat and resumed. "Are you prepared?"
"Very nearly," Mary Annabelle - who was in serious need of a nickname - said, a small smile crossing her lips. "Cousin!" she called, turning her face towards the arch where Dean stood and giving him a hard startle. "I know you're there, cousin, your lantern is far too bright to miss. Come forward, please. We'll require your witness."
"The hell?" Dean looked behind him, expecting to see another ghost come wafting up. He looked back to find her looking directly at him. Richard and William both turned, but their eyes flicked about, as though looking for something invisible.
"I'll thank you to leave aside the crass language," Mary Annabelle's eyebrow quirked up. "It's unbecoming of a gentleman and tempting fates besides. I will not have that place spoken of where I am to die."
"Son of a -" Dean cut himself off when her eyebrow quirked higher, followed by the side of her mouth. A full litany of curses continued through his head as his heart rate jacked up a few notches. "Uh, are you talking to me?"
She nodded once, taking one hand off her hat to gesture him forward. "I welcome your company. Your spirit has traveled a great distance to be here, and I can only assume it bodes well."
Really? Because Dean was pretty sure it boded the opposite. "Lady." He moved hesitantly forward. Richard and William were still scanning the room, unable to work out who Mary Annabelle was speaking to. "Great, great grand-aunt or whoever you are. I ain't the spirit in this room."
"That's all a matter of perspective." Mary Annabelle stepped forward between Richard and William, shrugging off their hands when they tried to stop her, and walked right up to Dean, holding out her hat. "If you please," she said, her voice much softer. "I cannot have my William see this, and the ritual requires two witnesses."
Dean hesitated, his eyes flicking over to William and back. His instincts screamed at him to turn the fuck around and get about fifty gallons of rock salt to drown this whole ritual in, but something else, some quiet, niggling part of his brain insisted he had to see how it ended.
"You understand," she said. "You are a Winchester, I believe, and a Winchester will understand."
Dean swallowed. He'd wanted to know more about the legacy Henry had left him - them - and this woman, this long dead, spooky-ass woman who'd walked through his room at least the last four nights in a row - she was family. He took a deep breath and nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, okay, I got your back."
She smiled gently at him, lifting two fingers to her lips. "Please hold my hat." She thrust the thing into Dean's hands before he could refuse, and he found himself trying to juggle his flashlight, his knife, and a giant pile of dusty ostrich feathers that smelled like ectoplasm. "William. You may leave."
"Mary Annabelle."
"My dearest William." She ducked her head, not looking back at him, as though she couldn't bring herself to look him in the face again. "You will not deny me my final wish."
William looked as though he wanted to protest again, but instead closed his mouth, jaw twitching, and nodded. "We will see each other again." His hand clamped down on the brim of his boater. Then he spun on his heel and walked as swiftly from the room as a man could walk without breaking into a jog, moving deeper into the chambers and tunnels.
"No." Mary Annabelle didn't look up at him. "I don't believe we will."
"Your witness," Richard said, his voice formal, though the dagger trembled in his hands. "His name?"
"Cousin?" Mary Annabelle asked.
"Dean," Dean said, and hoped he wouldn't have to go through the whole "legacy of" shebang, too.
"Dean Winchester," Mary Annabelle answered, seeming satisfied.
"Deceased?" asked Richard.
"Hell no." Dean shook his head. "Sorry."
Mary Annabelle gave him a sharp, knowing look and inclined her head. "Foretold," she said.
"A temporal imbalance," Richard murmured, looking down at the dagger. "The power required -"
"It bodes well," Mary Annabelle said, her tone indicating she would brook no argument. "A Winchester in this place, from such distance, it can only mean our work here endures." She turned to face Richard, her arms held towards him, wrists turned up, hands clasped in loose fists. "Now let's get on with it, Richard. Before all three of us die of our age."
Richard nodded and held the dagger aloft. He spoke a prayer in Latin, a simple one asking for cleansing and forgiveness, then switched into another language, harsher but with a lilting, song-like quality. Something just a few steps removed from modern Hebrew. He looked Mary Annabelle in the eye, then pressed the tip of the knife into the inside of her right elbow, driving it in deep before pulling it down towards her wrist. Mary Annabelle flinched, but didn't cry out, even as her blood poured forth in the hard, rhythmic spurts of severed arteries. Richard swiftly repeated the process on her left arm, then caught her as her knees went out. Dean hissed through his teeth and held himself back from rushing in, reminding himself that what he was watching had already happened, that Mary Annabelle and Richard and William were all long gone. He had no idea what this ritual was, or why he'd been dragged into it, or what the ramifications would be if it were interrupted.
That didn't make it any easier to watch as a woman in whose features he could see himself and his father and Sam in bleed out on the dusty floor.
"Be at peace, Mary," Richard said, and Dean bit his tongue to keep from adding You fucking wish outloud. He had no idea if Mary Annabelle could still hear him. "With your blood, the Men of Letters are rechristened. Though war may come, we will not falter. Through death, we will persevere." Mary Annabelle smiled shakily at him, her mouth moving along with his words, though no sound came out. She shuddered in his arms, searching the air. "Dean Winchester." Richard didn't look away from the woman dying in his arms. "Wherever and whenever you are, remember what you witness here tonight. This is the power of your legacy, these are the lengths we'll go to to protect our knowledge. Remem -"
With Mary Annabelle's final breath, they both vanished, leaving Dean standing alone in the cavernous darkness.
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