[FIC] Father's Gun (75/?)
Title: Father's Gun
Authors: diana_lucifera & tersichore
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Rating: Mature
Warnings: minor character death, mentions of torture, the slowest of burns, and excessive bed-sharing
Summary: After the events of "Brother's Blood," Sam and Dean are faced with teaming up with John to hunt the Yellow-Eyed Demon, all while keeping Sam's powers a secret and dodging their dad's questions about just why things between them are so... different.
Previous Chapter | Master Post
Unsurprisingly, it’s a roadhouse.
The place is cut from the same cloth as Ellen’s place, a sagging, sunken spit of a building on the outskirts of Waterloo, “Vic’s” spelled out across a warped, weatherbeaten stretch of faded-blue siding in flickering, uneven neon, uninspiring in the muted midday sun as sits stranded in an empty stretch of parking lot between what looks to be an abandoned garage and a half-out-of-business charter service.
“It’s a palace, Ellen,” Dean remarks, slamming the door to the Impala and crunching his way across the cigarette butt-littered pavement to the Chevelle.
Sam takes equal measure of the place from his brother’s side, uncomfortably shifting his laptop bag from one shoulder to the other as he tries and fails to judge what a normal space between brothers even would be here without tipping Dean off and sending him sulking all over again.
“A palace that doesn’t open ‘til two,” Sam notes, spotting the copier-paper notice scotch-taped to the place’s front door and checking his watch.
12:45.
“Well I figure someone’ll be around and in a drink-pourin’ mood, we act sociable enough,” Ellen grunts, ducking under the dirt-flecked, chipped gingerbread awning and shouldering open the rusty, painted-over door with a heft. “Come on, boys. No sense lettin’ all the A/C out.”
Dean follows her through readily enough, taking the measure of the place from the inside with a marked relaxing of his shoulders, an easier set to his brother’s stride now that they’re standing on worn, warped flooring, sandwiched between bar stools and pool tables, salt-stains and beer suds battling with the place’s wheezing, whining, whistling A/C for dominance in the stale, Midwestern air as the faltering, flickering fluorescents try and fail to banish completely the dark, dim corners of the dive.
The place is the Roadhouse Redux, from the battered, beaten bar to the humming, half-cocked neon sign declaring the two dart boards and single, scarred pool table the resident Game Room to the lazy, laconic click of the jukebox in the corner, clicking over to the Righteous Brothers as they cross the threshold.
Sam will give Ellen credit, though. For all the lace curtains and rose patterned wallpaper in the apartment she kept for herself and Jo, she never brought gingerbread molding anywhere near the business end of the Roadhouse itself, much less tacked the stuff up inside and out, then lined the whole thing in flickering red neon. As if that weren’t garish enough, there are what looks to be a couple hundred ceramic Jim Beam bottles shelved in shadowed rows to the ceiling behind the bar, each and every one in vary states of dingy, disreputable disrepair.
“Long time no see, Ellen.” a voice crackles from somewhere down the bar, and Sam turns from a particularly unsettling bottle in the shape of a clown (Why?! Why would you even?!), to see a woman roughly Ellen’s age with dark hair, wearing a white Vic’s t-shirt and hefting a keg in from a back room.
“Peggy, they still got you haulin’ kegs up from the back?” Ellen laughs, coming around the bar to give the other woman a quick hug and then, just as quickly, snagging the rim and getting it over the threshold and behind the bar with a quick tug. “Thought that’s what you kept them nieces and nephews around for?”
“It is,” the woman laughs, giving Ellen a clap on the back and straightening up, “but you know as soon as the school started, they done gone off and left me. How’ve you been? You know, I had those cousins of yours in here not a week ago askin’ after you. Some of Bill’s kin, too.”
“I hope you told ‘em they wanted to know what I was doin’, they could just truck on down the highway and ask me their damn selves,” Ellen grouses, and the other woman, Peggy, just laughs.
“I did.” She grins. “They said ‘f they did that, you’d just charge ‘em twice for their booze, tear ‘em a new one, and send ‘em packin’ before they even got out so much as a ‘How d’ya do?’ and that they’d just as soon save themselves the gas and tongue-lashin, ask me instead.”
How these cousins of Ellen’s managed to say anything at all with as much as this woman talks, Sam will never know. He sets his laptop bag in an empty stool and drops down next to Dean at the bar.
“That’s just how I like my relations.” Ellen smirks. “Distant as all hell.”
“Well, you know I’ll never say no to bein’ your switchboard,” Peggy says, “and speaking of, who are these tall drinks of handsome? Not boyfriends of your Josie, I hope?”
“You are a married woman, Peggy Deutsch,” Ellen reminds, trying to bite back a reluctant smile as the other woman reaches across the bar to shake hands with Sam and Dean.
“Peggy Deutsch-Knutson,” she corrects with a wink, “but I can kick ol’ Knuts to the curb, either a’ you tall drinks of gorgeous are single.”
“Nice to meet you,” Sam stalls with a shaky, unsteady half-smile.
Dean makes eye contact with Ellen, a silent, split-second check on whether, Mary Sunshine smile and bubbly gossip or not, this lady’s alright to give their real names to. A second later, he’s brother’s back, sidling in and taking her hand like the born charmer he is. Apparently he got the go-ahead from Ellen that this woman, for all that she stands every chance of talking all of their ears off, is harmless enough in the grand scheme of things.
“That’s Sam. I’m Dean, and this Knuts is every bit the drag he sounds, I’m happy to announce that we are both, very much single,” his brother smarms, leaning on the bar and laying it on thick, for all that this lady’s old enough to be their mother.
At the very least a matronly aunt.
“Hell, Ellen, I like him!” she cackles, taking her hand back and laughing her way down the bar. “You ain’t usin’ ‘em, I’ll take ‘em both off your hands.”
“Tough luck,” Ellen snorts, wry turn to her mouth. “They got work to do, and they need to get down to it. Jaimie ever get her girl to hook up the internet for ya’ll?”
“Somehow or another,” Peggy gusts, blowing frazzled brown bangs from her eyes and fishing a battered, beaten business card from behind the bar’s single register before passing it over to Sam, “but hell if I can make North or South of the damn thing half the time.”
“Sam honey, you need anything else to get down to it?” Ellen asks, shooting him a glance as he eyes the password scrawled on the card and digs out his laptop.
“No, ma’am,” Sam shakes his head before Dean open his mouth and interrupt this lady’s day any more by asking her to pull them up some drafts and a couple of burgers.
“Then Peggy and I are just gonna pop into the back for some shop talk, see if we can rustle up some lunch in the process. Robbie still workin’ the grill, Peg?”
“I wish,” Peggy snorts as they move down the bar. “Picked up for Schenectady with that new wife of his. We got Jeff back there now and bless his heart- Well, he’s a dream with the vendors, but poor thing can’t toast a bun without turnin’ it into a hockey puck, believe you me.”
They disappear through the back door. Peggy’s chatter and Ellen’s intermittent grumbles fade in a moment into the soft, indistinct sibilance of the hum of the air conditioner and the slow, steady spin of the jukebox, Bill Medley’s long, low baritone winding down into a sluggish, sleepy heartbeat of white noise.
“Never thought I’d see Ellen ditching out on a hunt for girl talk,” Sam remarks, more to have something to say than anything as he watches the laptop work through its boot cycle on the battered bar in front of him.
“She’s not looking for gossip, she’s looking for Jo.” Dean mutters, same shut off, shuttered look in his eye from the car this morning, from before, shelved for the hunt and making nice with Proprietor Peggy but back in full force here and now as he spins the plastic placard announcing Vic’s drink specials between his fingers, house specialties (The Pinecone!) warring with Dollar Wine Wednesdays in a wobbling, whirling kaleidoscope between his fingers. “Puttin’ the word out. Kid’s worked in a hunter dive her whole life. Money gets tight, places got work openin’ up with kids goin’ back to school. Might be she goes back to what she knows or near enough. Talker like this lady? Ellen’ll know Jo so much as looks at any dive from here to Albany.”
Sam’s mouth drops open because- because of course. Ellen is- and Jo is her daughter- and she’s been bending over backwards to help them ever since before Jo took off, and- and of course she’d want to find her, want to know that her kid was okay, especially in the wake of the only home they’ve ever known burning down, and especially especially with all the things that they know are hiding in the dark, dogging their steps and just waiting, waiting for their chance to strike.
“I- I didn’t,” he gropes, can’t find anything, can’t believe he missed- missed this. This is big, really big, and he always told himself he was the perceptive one, the one who picked up on this stuff, but with the case, with all the stuff with Mom, with Dad and Dean and him, all tangled up and twisted together, he didn’t- he didn’t even think, not once. “Ellen didn’t-”
“She wouldn’t.” Dean snorts, never taking his eye from the placard spinning between his fingers. Pinecone, plastic, Wine Wednesdays, over and over again. “Ellen, goin’ on about her personal crap when we’ve all got shit to shovel? Hunting Shit? Big Damn Deal Shit? ‘S not her style.”
“Dean...” Sam tries, tries because it’s not just Ellen that shoves it all down for the hunt, shelves it all when times get tough, just so they don’t make them that much tougher for everyone else.
It’s not just Ellen trying to find her way back to her daughter as the world, their whole world, falls apart around them, that’s got that damn shuttered look in his brother’s eye, his face tight and drawn, eyes sullen and serious when they should be laughing and leering and giving Sam hell from across the bar, teasing him for being a nerd and a geek and then egging him into setting up a game of Bank on the pool table while he goes and cons Rob or Jeff or whoever the hell it is working the grill to pop them out a couple of unburnt burgers while Sam’s laptop warms up and solves this damn case for them.
And yeah, part of that lands on Sam’s doorstep. Part of that is genuinely Sam’s fault for pulling back, for pushing forward his radical anti-incest agenda and doing his very goddamn best not to act out his sick, twisted, possibly demonically-motivated fantasies on his brother’s unconscious body which, in a backwards and very frustrating turn of events, is landing him deeper in the doghouse with Dean than jacking him off in his sleep ever goddamn did which, Jesus, their fucking lives.
So yeah. Dean is shoving down the crap from the case and the crap from this morning and the crap from them arguing about this morning and the crap from Sam trying to keep what happened this morning from happening ever again and whatever deep, dark, secret crap he’s got buried down beneath all that other crap.
His brother’s life is a big pile of crap right now, and it’s all, directly or indirectly, Sam’s craptastic fault.
Dean’s life sucks because Sam’s in it. He knows that, and he knows Dean’s gotta know that, at least a little or some variation on that. That might just be the deep, dark, awful thing Dean still won’t tell him, and Sam’s trying to deal with it, he is, trying to shelve it all and shove it down without the safe, sane, steadying standby of Dean, warm and here beneath his fingertips because they can’t do that anymore, can’t because- because-
Because Sam might be a monster.
Might have had the choice whether or not to be black, to be twisted and tainted and wrong, stolen from him in his cradle when he was six months old, might have had it sold out from under him before he or Dean were ever born, broken off and bartered away in a bargain the details of which they may never know.
But hell if he turns around and does the same damn thing to Dean.
Hell if he lets this, any of this, hurt his brother any more than it already has.
“What?” Dean asks, but it’s not so much a question as a dare, a challenge, a dig that Sam should just try to take a poke at the sleeping dragon that Handjobgate and whatever the hell it is Dean is hiding has made him, and you know, Sam might not have much of a plan for the former beyond “Don’t Let it Ever, Ever Happen Again,” but the latter...
Sam doesn’t know what he is, what Yellow Eyes’ blood turned him into all those years ago. He doesn’t know what their dad’s doing or what’s in Ash’s email or what the hell he’s gonna do about psychic powers or demon destinies or kind of, maybe being the man-psychic-demon-kid-thing that ends the world as they know it, but he knows Dean.
He knows his brother and he knows his tells and he knows that if he just waits, waits and stays calm and pays attention, Dean’ll tell him.
Maybe he won’t mean to. Maybe he won’t want to, maybe he won’t even know he’s telling him, but Sam sticks around long enough, he just keeps his goddamn head on straight, he’ll figure it out. Accidentally or on purpose, Dean will tell him and things’ll get better and they’ll get through this.
They’ll get through this. They will.
After all, compared to every other goddamn reveal they’ve been dragged kicking and screaming through the past couple of days, how much worse could it get?
“She could, you know. Tell us,” Sam offers, ducking his head back down to his laptop to click through the login page, sidestepping meeting Dean head on but still not quite taking the easy way out, a solid advance to the middle that lands the ball smack dab in the middle of Dean’s court, because he didn’t know what was going on with Ellen and he doesn’t know what’s going on with Dean but he’s gonna find out.
If it’s the last thing he does on this earth, he’s gonna find out.
“She won’t,” Dean dismisses, placard clattering to the bar in font of him as he lets it drop. “No need to bring it up, make it that much worse by makin’ a big deal out of it.”
And that’s Dean Logic, Winchester Logic, if Sam ever heard it, handed down from on emotionally constipated high by John Winchester himself, and even if neither of them say the name, the association is there. The knowledge of exactly whose playbook Dean’s using here is there, and it’s just similar enough, just close enough to home to burn, too similar to cages and closets and demon blood, Yellow Eyes and secrets kept and never knowing, never really knowing, which version of the truth you’re getting, so much that the entire thing rings wrong, unreal, so harsh and hollow in the hushed, strained silence of the empty bar it has Dean bridging the awful, unspoken gap Sam’s staked between them, nudging Sam, just a little, and Sam-
God, he can’t help but latch onto it, that tiny slice of casual, of usual, of can’t-have-it-again-or-it’ll-happen-again, leaning into Dean just that little bit, allowing himself just this small thing, just this once.
Just one for the road...
“She’s not alone in this, Dean,” he murmurs, hoping, God, hoping that Dean gets it, that it makes it through his thick goddamn skull. “She doesn’t have to be alone in this.”
‘You can tell me,’ Sam wants to say, wants to just snatch that stupid little placard from the bar and smack his brother in the head with it until something goddamn sinks in through his thick goddamn skull. ‘Whatever it is, you can tell me. I’m not going anywhere.’
“She’s gonna be,” Dean gruffs, shoving off from the barstool to go cram quarters in the jukebox behind them, “no matter how much we shoot our mouths off.”
A ‘shut up, Sam’ if he’s ever heard one, Sam thinks, huffing out a sigh as he types in the wifi password and pulls up his browser.
“What’s Ash got to say?” Dean rumbles as he takes his seat again, a spare quarter between his fingers, and if he starts spinning the goddamn thing, Sam is hurling it at the nearest Jim Beam bottle.
Ten points if he can nail the clown one by the register.
"Only one way to find out.” Sam sighs, laying down arms for now, but not giving up, never giving up.
He opens his mail, clicks again on the message sitting there in his inbox, the one from ‘elcazador69’, the one with the time stamp two days after the fire at the Roadhouse. It could be a lot of things, could be things they know, things they don’t know, a hello or a goodbye or a goddamn chain letter full of cat pictures, but Sam hopes, hopes beyond hope, that this is what finally, finally breaks it open for them.
Hopes that if nothing else, nothing else, they have a lead. Any lead.
Chapter 76
Authors: diana_lucifera & tersichore
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Rating: Mature
Warnings: minor character death, mentions of torture, the slowest of burns, and excessive bed-sharing
Summary: After the events of "Brother's Blood," Sam and Dean are faced with teaming up with John to hunt the Yellow-Eyed Demon, all while keeping Sam's powers a secret and dodging their dad's questions about just why things between them are so... different.
Previous Chapter | Master Post
Unsurprisingly, it’s a roadhouse.
The place is cut from the same cloth as Ellen’s place, a sagging, sunken spit of a building on the outskirts of Waterloo, “Vic’s” spelled out across a warped, weatherbeaten stretch of faded-blue siding in flickering, uneven neon, uninspiring in the muted midday sun as sits stranded in an empty stretch of parking lot between what looks to be an abandoned garage and a half-out-of-business charter service.
“It’s a palace, Ellen,” Dean remarks, slamming the door to the Impala and crunching his way across the cigarette butt-littered pavement to the Chevelle.
Sam takes equal measure of the place from his brother’s side, uncomfortably shifting his laptop bag from one shoulder to the other as he tries and fails to judge what a normal space between brothers even would be here without tipping Dean off and sending him sulking all over again.
“A palace that doesn’t open ‘til two,” Sam notes, spotting the copier-paper notice scotch-taped to the place’s front door and checking his watch.
12:45.
“Well I figure someone’ll be around and in a drink-pourin’ mood, we act sociable enough,” Ellen grunts, ducking under the dirt-flecked, chipped gingerbread awning and shouldering open the rusty, painted-over door with a heft. “Come on, boys. No sense lettin’ all the A/C out.”
Dean follows her through readily enough, taking the measure of the place from the inside with a marked relaxing of his shoulders, an easier set to his brother’s stride now that they’re standing on worn, warped flooring, sandwiched between bar stools and pool tables, salt-stains and beer suds battling with the place’s wheezing, whining, whistling A/C for dominance in the stale, Midwestern air as the faltering, flickering fluorescents try and fail to banish completely the dark, dim corners of the dive.
The place is the Roadhouse Redux, from the battered, beaten bar to the humming, half-cocked neon sign declaring the two dart boards and single, scarred pool table the resident Game Room to the lazy, laconic click of the jukebox in the corner, clicking over to the Righteous Brothers as they cross the threshold.
Sam will give Ellen credit, though. For all the lace curtains and rose patterned wallpaper in the apartment she kept for herself and Jo, she never brought gingerbread molding anywhere near the business end of the Roadhouse itself, much less tacked the stuff up inside and out, then lined the whole thing in flickering red neon. As if that weren’t garish enough, there are what looks to be a couple hundred ceramic Jim Beam bottles shelved in shadowed rows to the ceiling behind the bar, each and every one in vary states of dingy, disreputable disrepair.
“Long time no see, Ellen.” a voice crackles from somewhere down the bar, and Sam turns from a particularly unsettling bottle in the shape of a clown (Why?! Why would you even?!), to see a woman roughly Ellen’s age with dark hair, wearing a white Vic’s t-shirt and hefting a keg in from a back room.
“Peggy, they still got you haulin’ kegs up from the back?” Ellen laughs, coming around the bar to give the other woman a quick hug and then, just as quickly, snagging the rim and getting it over the threshold and behind the bar with a quick tug. “Thought that’s what you kept them nieces and nephews around for?”
“It is,” the woman laughs, giving Ellen a clap on the back and straightening up, “but you know as soon as the school started, they done gone off and left me. How’ve you been? You know, I had those cousins of yours in here not a week ago askin’ after you. Some of Bill’s kin, too.”
“I hope you told ‘em they wanted to know what I was doin’, they could just truck on down the highway and ask me their damn selves,” Ellen grouses, and the other woman, Peggy, just laughs.
“I did.” She grins. “They said ‘f they did that, you’d just charge ‘em twice for their booze, tear ‘em a new one, and send ‘em packin’ before they even got out so much as a ‘How d’ya do?’ and that they’d just as soon save themselves the gas and tongue-lashin, ask me instead.”
How these cousins of Ellen’s managed to say anything at all with as much as this woman talks, Sam will never know. He sets his laptop bag in an empty stool and drops down next to Dean at the bar.
“That’s just how I like my relations.” Ellen smirks. “Distant as all hell.”
“Well, you know I’ll never say no to bein’ your switchboard,” Peggy says, “and speaking of, who are these tall drinks of handsome? Not boyfriends of your Josie, I hope?”
“You are a married woman, Peggy Deutsch,” Ellen reminds, trying to bite back a reluctant smile as the other woman reaches across the bar to shake hands with Sam and Dean.
“Peggy Deutsch-Knutson,” she corrects with a wink, “but I can kick ol’ Knuts to the curb, either a’ you tall drinks of gorgeous are single.”
“Nice to meet you,” Sam stalls with a shaky, unsteady half-smile.
Dean makes eye contact with Ellen, a silent, split-second check on whether, Mary Sunshine smile and bubbly gossip or not, this lady’s alright to give their real names to. A second later, he’s brother’s back, sidling in and taking her hand like the born charmer he is. Apparently he got the go-ahead from Ellen that this woman, for all that she stands every chance of talking all of their ears off, is harmless enough in the grand scheme of things.
“That’s Sam. I’m Dean, and this Knuts is every bit the drag he sounds, I’m happy to announce that we are both, very much single,” his brother smarms, leaning on the bar and laying it on thick, for all that this lady’s old enough to be their mother.
At the very least a matronly aunt.
“Hell, Ellen, I like him!” she cackles, taking her hand back and laughing her way down the bar. “You ain’t usin’ ‘em, I’ll take ‘em both off your hands.”
“Tough luck,” Ellen snorts, wry turn to her mouth. “They got work to do, and they need to get down to it. Jaimie ever get her girl to hook up the internet for ya’ll?”
“Somehow or another,” Peggy gusts, blowing frazzled brown bangs from her eyes and fishing a battered, beaten business card from behind the bar’s single register before passing it over to Sam, “but hell if I can make North or South of the damn thing half the time.”
“Sam honey, you need anything else to get down to it?” Ellen asks, shooting him a glance as he eyes the password scrawled on the card and digs out his laptop.
“No, ma’am,” Sam shakes his head before Dean open his mouth and interrupt this lady’s day any more by asking her to pull them up some drafts and a couple of burgers.
“Then Peggy and I are just gonna pop into the back for some shop talk, see if we can rustle up some lunch in the process. Robbie still workin’ the grill, Peg?”
“I wish,” Peggy snorts as they move down the bar. “Picked up for Schenectady with that new wife of his. We got Jeff back there now and bless his heart- Well, he’s a dream with the vendors, but poor thing can’t toast a bun without turnin’ it into a hockey puck, believe you me.”
They disappear through the back door. Peggy’s chatter and Ellen’s intermittent grumbles fade in a moment into the soft, indistinct sibilance of the hum of the air conditioner and the slow, steady spin of the jukebox, Bill Medley’s long, low baritone winding down into a sluggish, sleepy heartbeat of white noise.
“Never thought I’d see Ellen ditching out on a hunt for girl talk,” Sam remarks, more to have something to say than anything as he watches the laptop work through its boot cycle on the battered bar in front of him.
“She’s not looking for gossip, she’s looking for Jo.” Dean mutters, same shut off, shuttered look in his eye from the car this morning, from before, shelved for the hunt and making nice with Proprietor Peggy but back in full force here and now as he spins the plastic placard announcing Vic’s drink specials between his fingers, house specialties (The Pinecone!) warring with Dollar Wine Wednesdays in a wobbling, whirling kaleidoscope between his fingers. “Puttin’ the word out. Kid’s worked in a hunter dive her whole life. Money gets tight, places got work openin’ up with kids goin’ back to school. Might be she goes back to what she knows or near enough. Talker like this lady? Ellen’ll know Jo so much as looks at any dive from here to Albany.”
Sam’s mouth drops open because- because of course. Ellen is- and Jo is her daughter- and she’s been bending over backwards to help them ever since before Jo took off, and- and of course she’d want to find her, want to know that her kid was okay, especially in the wake of the only home they’ve ever known burning down, and especially especially with all the things that they know are hiding in the dark, dogging their steps and just waiting, waiting for their chance to strike.
“I- I didn’t,” he gropes, can’t find anything, can’t believe he missed- missed this. This is big, really big, and he always told himself he was the perceptive one, the one who picked up on this stuff, but with the case, with all the stuff with Mom, with Dad and Dean and him, all tangled up and twisted together, he didn’t- he didn’t even think, not once. “Ellen didn’t-”
“She wouldn’t.” Dean snorts, never taking his eye from the placard spinning between his fingers. Pinecone, plastic, Wine Wednesdays, over and over again. “Ellen, goin’ on about her personal crap when we’ve all got shit to shovel? Hunting Shit? Big Damn Deal Shit? ‘S not her style.”
“Dean...” Sam tries, tries because it’s not just Ellen that shoves it all down for the hunt, shelves it all when times get tough, just so they don’t make them that much tougher for everyone else.
It’s not just Ellen trying to find her way back to her daughter as the world, their whole world, falls apart around them, that’s got that damn shuttered look in his brother’s eye, his face tight and drawn, eyes sullen and serious when they should be laughing and leering and giving Sam hell from across the bar, teasing him for being a nerd and a geek and then egging him into setting up a game of Bank on the pool table while he goes and cons Rob or Jeff or whoever the hell it is working the grill to pop them out a couple of unburnt burgers while Sam’s laptop warms up and solves this damn case for them.
And yeah, part of that lands on Sam’s doorstep. Part of that is genuinely Sam’s fault for pulling back, for pushing forward his radical anti-incest agenda and doing his very goddamn best not to act out his sick, twisted, possibly demonically-motivated fantasies on his brother’s unconscious body which, in a backwards and very frustrating turn of events, is landing him deeper in the doghouse with Dean than jacking him off in his sleep ever goddamn did which, Jesus, their fucking lives.
So yeah. Dean is shoving down the crap from the case and the crap from this morning and the crap from them arguing about this morning and the crap from Sam trying to keep what happened this morning from happening ever again and whatever deep, dark, secret crap he’s got buried down beneath all that other crap.
His brother’s life is a big pile of crap right now, and it’s all, directly or indirectly, Sam’s craptastic fault.
Dean’s life sucks because Sam’s in it. He knows that, and he knows Dean’s gotta know that, at least a little or some variation on that. That might just be the deep, dark, awful thing Dean still won’t tell him, and Sam’s trying to deal with it, he is, trying to shelve it all and shove it down without the safe, sane, steadying standby of Dean, warm and here beneath his fingertips because they can’t do that anymore, can’t because- because-
Because Sam might be a monster.
Might have had the choice whether or not to be black, to be twisted and tainted and wrong, stolen from him in his cradle when he was six months old, might have had it sold out from under him before he or Dean were ever born, broken off and bartered away in a bargain the details of which they may never know.
But hell if he turns around and does the same damn thing to Dean.
Hell if he lets this, any of this, hurt his brother any more than it already has.
“What?” Dean asks, but it’s not so much a question as a dare, a challenge, a dig that Sam should just try to take a poke at the sleeping dragon that Handjobgate and whatever the hell it is Dean is hiding has made him, and you know, Sam might not have much of a plan for the former beyond “Don’t Let it Ever, Ever Happen Again,” but the latter...
Sam doesn’t know what he is, what Yellow Eyes’ blood turned him into all those years ago. He doesn’t know what their dad’s doing or what’s in Ash’s email or what the hell he’s gonna do about psychic powers or demon destinies or kind of, maybe being the man-psychic-demon-kid-thing that ends the world as they know it, but he knows Dean.
He knows his brother and he knows his tells and he knows that if he just waits, waits and stays calm and pays attention, Dean’ll tell him.
Maybe he won’t mean to. Maybe he won’t want to, maybe he won’t even know he’s telling him, but Sam sticks around long enough, he just keeps his goddamn head on straight, he’ll figure it out. Accidentally or on purpose, Dean will tell him and things’ll get better and they’ll get through this.
They’ll get through this. They will.
After all, compared to every other goddamn reveal they’ve been dragged kicking and screaming through the past couple of days, how much worse could it get?
“She could, you know. Tell us,” Sam offers, ducking his head back down to his laptop to click through the login page, sidestepping meeting Dean head on but still not quite taking the easy way out, a solid advance to the middle that lands the ball smack dab in the middle of Dean’s court, because he didn’t know what was going on with Ellen and he doesn’t know what’s going on with Dean but he’s gonna find out.
If it’s the last thing he does on this earth, he’s gonna find out.
“She won’t,” Dean dismisses, placard clattering to the bar in font of him as he lets it drop. “No need to bring it up, make it that much worse by makin’ a big deal out of it.”
And that’s Dean Logic, Winchester Logic, if Sam ever heard it, handed down from on emotionally constipated high by John Winchester himself, and even if neither of them say the name, the association is there. The knowledge of exactly whose playbook Dean’s using here is there, and it’s just similar enough, just close enough to home to burn, too similar to cages and closets and demon blood, Yellow Eyes and secrets kept and never knowing, never really knowing, which version of the truth you’re getting, so much that the entire thing rings wrong, unreal, so harsh and hollow in the hushed, strained silence of the empty bar it has Dean bridging the awful, unspoken gap Sam’s staked between them, nudging Sam, just a little, and Sam-
God, he can’t help but latch onto it, that tiny slice of casual, of usual, of can’t-have-it-again-or-it’ll-happen-again, leaning into Dean just that little bit, allowing himself just this small thing, just this once.
Just one for the road...
“She’s not alone in this, Dean,” he murmurs, hoping, God, hoping that Dean gets it, that it makes it through his thick goddamn skull. “She doesn’t have to be alone in this.”
‘You can tell me,’ Sam wants to say, wants to just snatch that stupid little placard from the bar and smack his brother in the head with it until something goddamn sinks in through his thick goddamn skull. ‘Whatever it is, you can tell me. I’m not going anywhere.’
“She’s gonna be,” Dean gruffs, shoving off from the barstool to go cram quarters in the jukebox behind them, “no matter how much we shoot our mouths off.”
A ‘shut up, Sam’ if he’s ever heard one, Sam thinks, huffing out a sigh as he types in the wifi password and pulls up his browser.
“What’s Ash got to say?” Dean rumbles as he takes his seat again, a spare quarter between his fingers, and if he starts spinning the goddamn thing, Sam is hurling it at the nearest Jim Beam bottle.
Ten points if he can nail the clown one by the register.
"Only one way to find out.” Sam sighs, laying down arms for now, but not giving up, never giving up.
He opens his mail, clicks again on the message sitting there in his inbox, the one from ‘elcazador69’, the one with the time stamp two days after the fire at the Roadhouse. It could be a lot of things, could be things they know, things they don’t know, a hello or a goodbye or a goddamn chain letter full of cat pictures, but Sam hopes, hopes beyond hope, that this is what finally, finally breaks it open for them.
Hopes that if nothing else, nothing else, they have a lead. Any lead.
Chapter 76