[FIC] Father's Gun (76/?)
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
What it is, at the end of the day, is a video.
A video that needs to download before they can fucking watch it.
Cue five to seven awkward, awful minutes of staring at a progress bar scooting along at a glacial pace while Dean tries and fails to act like he’s not hiding something at Sam’s elbow and Sam tries and fails to act like he isn’t burning to know what the hell it goddamn is beside him.
And Motörhead is playing.
Sam hates Motörhead.
“Gimme your quarter,” Sam demands as the bar sticks at 27% and he’s about to go out of his goddamn mind. “I want to put on some good music for a change.”
“What?” Dean scoffs. “No. It’s my quarter. Find your own. And what’s wrong with Motörhead? It’s the story-song of the American people, Sam.”
“Okay, a) they’re British, and b) it’s not a story-song, Dean; it’s coke-fueled cock rock blasted a few decibels shy of aural assault,” Sam grumbles, the strain from all of today’s crap weighing down on him and wailing guitars digging into him and about two seconds away from snatching the coin from Dean his damn self.
“Tell me what you’ve got against oral all of a sudden.” Dean snorts, but the joke is weak, strained even by their new goddamn standards, and yesterday-
Goddammit, it wasn’t like this yesterday. They’d be joking and jabbing, spilling half in, half out of bar stools as they cracked up at each other or cracked down on the hunt. Either way, it wouldn’t be like this, wouldn’t be a silent war of double entendres and heavy silences, things meant but not said, said but not meant, the words that do make their way out hollow and haunting the empty air of the bar as they fall flat, echo dark and dissonant in the dank dim of the dive, and it’s all Sam’s fault.
This is all because Sam fucked up. All of it.
Dean sighs as they sit there watching the progress bar not move across the screen, giving the quarter one heavy half-turn in his hand. Sam knows he feels it, knows his brother knows how wrong this is, how wrong it’s all gotten, how fast it’s all falling apart. They’ve spent their lives crammed on bar stools and in booths, in and around and on top of one another, saying and not saying every damn thing that’s crossed their minds. Right before Stanford, even after, it was never like this, never this bad. Sam hates himself, hates himself so much for screwing it all up, for fucking up and not having any other answer but this to set things right.
He hates it, hates every inch of it, is a half second away from breaking, from just begging Dean to tell him what dark, awful thing teamed up with the nightmare that was this morning to crank their lives from bad to unbearable, but Dean catches him, catches his eye a half-second before Sam breaks, just comes out and begs Dean to goddamn tell him what else there could possibly be, what could be goddamn worse than demon’s blood, than boy kings and apocalypses and a brother who’s Rosemary’s Fucking Baby with an incestuous goddamn hard on, and what?
What could be that bad? Could weigh on Dean that hard after everything? After all they’ve been through?
Sam almost asks, he does, but Dean just shakes his head, gives the quarter in his goddamn hands another fucking turn. As good as says, ‘Not yet, Sammy. Not yet.’
Except, even in his own head, Sam knows that’s a lie, knows that that’s not what that shake, that shadow in Dean’s eye means.
It means later. A later that any other person on the planet would call ‘never,’ but for Dean just means when he’s ready, which is the exact same thing.
Same song, different verse.
He knows Sam knows there’s something, just like he knows he doesn’t have it in himself to tell, and that’s- Sam can work with that. He can. He can just keep trying and keep fighting and hope, hope to god, that by the time they get done with all this, when everything’s broken and reset into something less awful, less horrible, something they can both live with…
God, he hopes there’s a them left to live with.
And of course now, when everything is a hundred times worse than it was when they sat down, now, when Sam needs something, anything not a reminder of what a failure, what a colossal fuck-up he is, now is when the video loads, when Ash pops, in living, breathing color, to life on Sam’s screen.
Just another soul lost to Sam’s fire. Joining mom and Jess, Stanford and life outside of hunting, safety and security and living, even a little bit, a life not made of soot and sulfur, outside of knowing he can do good in this world, outside of believing he actually deserved the audiobooks and the fingers in his hair, the slept-in mornings and the shared covers and the warm, strong arms chasing away the nightmares as everything- the guilt and the memories and the expectations and disappointments and the ghosts of everyone in his life he’s every let down just- just falls and fades away for a few soft, warm, silent hours.
He should have known better.
He should have just known better.
And then Ash is speaking, dragging Sam from his thoughts by way of a grainy, pixelated webcam recording playing out across the screen as Van Halen filters in from the background, fuzzy and indistinct.
“Hola, amigos!” He nods, wry smile taking up his features as he tosses his hair behind him and waves amiably to the camera, and why did Sam get him involved in this? Why?
“Well, if ya’ll are read in’ this, I’m guessin’ I’ve shuffled my way off the mortal coil, which?” Ash sighs gustily, cheeks puffing out and bangs skittering with the breath. “S’rough, ‘specially considerin’ our kind’s tendency to leave this life in a violent and bloody fashion, but hey.” He shrugs, snagging a pen with an oversized masked wrestler head on the cap and twirling it between his fingers as Dean brings his hand up to rest between Sam’s shoulder blades.
Sam should shrug him off. Should just start learning how to bear this crap on his own, but he’s just- just so damn tired.
He can’t. Not today.
“What are you gonna do, right? Life we live and all,” Ash continues as Sam settles into Dean’s silent, steady support at his back. Freely, if foolishly, given, even after everything. “Or, you know, not.”
Ash lifts a shoulder idly on screen, letting the hand with the pen drop out of frame.
“Point is, ya’ll got me workin’ on somethin’ heavy, and I, good little worker bee that I am,” he draws himself up with a half-smirk, wrestler-capped pen holding hand coming up to land over his heart, “back up my work with the religiosity of the truly paranoid. So, listen and be amazed, compadres.”
He sits back, and the video cuts to a different day, a different Ash in a different flannel vest, the little Mexican wrestler pen shoved behind his ear now as a different metal track plays in the background.
(Judas Priest this time. “Screaming for Vengeance.” Sam never liked it. Likes it even less now.)
“Alright, Winchesters Uno and Dos,” Ash sighs into the camera, and Sam wonders bleakly how many times he set up this camera, how many times he went through, over and again, this last conversation with them. “You wanna nail this sonofabitch, next place you’re gonna wanna be is ‘Bama. Lined up the patterns you gave me, crunched the numbers, fed in the data and next couple weeks, you’re in for some prime omenage right over T-town.”
He jerks his chin at the screen, presumably where he has the raw feeds playing out in font of him, and sends the luchador nestled over his ear cock-eyed in the process.
“I got the info all laid out for you pretty-like. Alls you gots to do is go hunt down the son of a bitch. And Sam, Dean?” Ash pauses, giving the camera a slow, steady look. “Not that I’m the vengeful type, but seein’ how every dot on the map I’m lookin’ at’s another kid what never got a say in their part in this...”
He shoves a hand through the dishwater-blonde riot of his bangs with a sigh, sending the little wrestler tripping and skittering offscreen in the process.
“Seein’ as probably every one of those little dots are goin’ through as hard a time as Sam is, but with twice the trouble and half the help?” Another sigh, another look, an absent card of hand through hair, looking for a masked wrestling man that isn’t there anymore.
Sam was so wrong to get him involved in this, so, so wrong.
“Well, I don’t feel too bad askin’ you to take this sucker down hard and get in a couple of licks for me,” Ash finishes, giving up on his search for the pen and giving one last, sad half-smile to the camera. “See you two on the other side.”
The video ends, reverts to a pane of blank, basic grey in the static, standard-issue sameness of Sam’s desktop, and it’s just he and Dean again, alone in the still, stifling silence of the abandoned bar.
“Tuscaloosa’s about twelve hours out,” Dean estimates, reaching out and shutting the laptop without ever taking his hand from Sam’s back, and he’s starting to look around the bar, shifting like he already wants to be on the road as he sends a glance at the front door to Vic’s, around to the back rooms Ellen disappeared into minutes ago, for all that it feels like hours. “We could make it by morning, we push hard.”
Sam blinks, eyes glued to where the blank video screen was as it all sinks in, the message from Ash still in his inbox, the ghost of those fingers, playing with that wrestler pen and the strained, staticky echoes of his voice, miles away from teasing about PBR and chili fries (chili cheese fries, his mind corrects), as the message outlived the man, outsmarted Meg and Yellow Eyes and all of their snarling, shark-toothed soldiers to land this one, last blow from beyond.
This is going to be what wins it for them.
This, this one last lead Ash managed to pass them? This is going to be what wins it for them.
As soon as he cards through the reams of research Ash’s dead man’s switch just dumped in his lap.
As soon as he maps out exactly where in Tuscaloosa they need to be and what family they need to track down and when and where and how Yellow Eyes is gonna sweep in, what they need to do to protect the family but not tip the Hell crowd off and how that all works with his psychic thing, with Meg in the wind and Dad on their tail along with who-knows-how-many hunters besides and Dean, sour and sullen and secretive and fighting Sam so hard to keep things the same even though they have to change, they have to-
“Sam? You alright in there?” Dean breaks his train of thought, and Sam drags himself from the ghost of the computer screen, shoves a hand through his hair with a sigh.
“Yeah.” He nods, scrubbing a hand over his face as it all, suddenly catches up to him, weighs down on him like it always, always seems to if he stops moving long enough to let it.
“Listen, Sam, I’m sorry. I know…” Dean starts, breaks off again, like he doesn’t know what to say. “I know you and Ash…”
“Forget about it, Dean.” Sam shakes his head and avoids his brother’s eye, shamelessly stealing a page from his brother’s playbook as he shoves his laptop in his bag, because even though he should be following the leads Ash left them, mapping out the omens and looking for the family the demon was targeting and getting them that next lead, that next step, he just can’t- can’t even look at it right now.
It’s too much. It’s just too much.
“Got bigger stuff to worry about, right?” Sam shrugs, still avoiding Dean’s eye, and maybe it’s a dick move, throwing Dean’s words back at him, running his own plays against him to skirt talking about this, but with Ash on top of everything...
He’s barely moving right now. Only just getting through it all upright and breathing. If Dean turns the stoic asshole switch off and picks now to suddenly start being his brother again, turns everything Sam wants but can’t let himself have at him full force, Sam knows he doesn’t have it in him to say no, to keep himself from giving in and setting them down a path that’s just gonna lead to him taking advantage of Dean all over again and he can’t, won’t.
He can’t and he won’t and he wants to. He wants to so bad it hurts.
“It doesn’t matter,” he mutters, shouldering past Dean towards the flickering, fritzing neon sign marked ‘restrooms’ without another word.
Chapter 77
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
What it is, at the end of the day, is a video.
A video that needs to download before they can fucking watch it.
Cue five to seven awkward, awful minutes of staring at a progress bar scooting along at a glacial pace while Dean tries and fails to act like he’s not hiding something at Sam’s elbow and Sam tries and fails to act like he isn’t burning to know what the hell it goddamn is beside him.
And Motörhead is playing.
Sam hates Motörhead.
“Gimme your quarter,” Sam demands as the bar sticks at 27% and he’s about to go out of his goddamn mind. “I want to put on some good music for a change.”
“What?” Dean scoffs. “No. It’s my quarter. Find your own. And what’s wrong with Motörhead? It’s the story-song of the American people, Sam.”
“Okay, a) they’re British, and b) it’s not a story-song, Dean; it’s coke-fueled cock rock blasted a few decibels shy of aural assault,” Sam grumbles, the strain from all of today’s crap weighing down on him and wailing guitars digging into him and about two seconds away from snatching the coin from Dean his damn self.
“Tell me what you’ve got against oral all of a sudden.” Dean snorts, but the joke is weak, strained even by their new goddamn standards, and yesterday-
Goddammit, it wasn’t like this yesterday. They’d be joking and jabbing, spilling half in, half out of bar stools as they cracked up at each other or cracked down on the hunt. Either way, it wouldn’t be like this, wouldn’t be a silent war of double entendres and heavy silences, things meant but not said, said but not meant, the words that do make their way out hollow and haunting the empty air of the bar as they fall flat, echo dark and dissonant in the dank dim of the dive, and it’s all Sam’s fault.
This is all because Sam fucked up. All of it.
Dean sighs as they sit there watching the progress bar not move across the screen, giving the quarter one heavy half-turn in his hand. Sam knows he feels it, knows his brother knows how wrong this is, how wrong it’s all gotten, how fast it’s all falling apart. They’ve spent their lives crammed on bar stools and in booths, in and around and on top of one another, saying and not saying every damn thing that’s crossed their minds. Right before Stanford, even after, it was never like this, never this bad. Sam hates himself, hates himself so much for screwing it all up, for fucking up and not having any other answer but this to set things right.
He hates it, hates every inch of it, is a half second away from breaking, from just begging Dean to tell him what dark, awful thing teamed up with the nightmare that was this morning to crank their lives from bad to unbearable, but Dean catches him, catches his eye a half-second before Sam breaks, just comes out and begs Dean to goddamn tell him what else there could possibly be, what could be goddamn worse than demon’s blood, than boy kings and apocalypses and a brother who’s Rosemary’s Fucking Baby with an incestuous goddamn hard on, and what?
What could be that bad? Could weigh on Dean that hard after everything? After all they’ve been through?
Sam almost asks, he does, but Dean just shakes his head, gives the quarter in his goddamn hands another fucking turn. As good as says, ‘Not yet, Sammy. Not yet.’
Except, even in his own head, Sam knows that’s a lie, knows that that’s not what that shake, that shadow in Dean’s eye means.
It means later. A later that any other person on the planet would call ‘never,’ but for Dean just means when he’s ready, which is the exact same thing.
Same song, different verse.
He knows Sam knows there’s something, just like he knows he doesn’t have it in himself to tell, and that’s- Sam can work with that. He can. He can just keep trying and keep fighting and hope, hope to god, that by the time they get done with all this, when everything’s broken and reset into something less awful, less horrible, something they can both live with…
God, he hopes there’s a them left to live with.
And of course now, when everything is a hundred times worse than it was when they sat down, now, when Sam needs something, anything not a reminder of what a failure, what a colossal fuck-up he is, now is when the video loads, when Ash pops, in living, breathing color, to life on Sam’s screen.
Just another soul lost to Sam’s fire. Joining mom and Jess, Stanford and life outside of hunting, safety and security and living, even a little bit, a life not made of soot and sulfur, outside of knowing he can do good in this world, outside of believing he actually deserved the audiobooks and the fingers in his hair, the slept-in mornings and the shared covers and the warm, strong arms chasing away the nightmares as everything- the guilt and the memories and the expectations and disappointments and the ghosts of everyone in his life he’s every let down just- just falls and fades away for a few soft, warm, silent hours.
He should have known better.
He should have just known better.
And then Ash is speaking, dragging Sam from his thoughts by way of a grainy, pixelated webcam recording playing out across the screen as Van Halen filters in from the background, fuzzy and indistinct.
“Hola, amigos!” He nods, wry smile taking up his features as he tosses his hair behind him and waves amiably to the camera, and why did Sam get him involved in this? Why?
“Well, if ya’ll are read in’ this, I’m guessin’ I’ve shuffled my way off the mortal coil, which?” Ash sighs gustily, cheeks puffing out and bangs skittering with the breath. “S’rough, ‘specially considerin’ our kind’s tendency to leave this life in a violent and bloody fashion, but hey.” He shrugs, snagging a pen with an oversized masked wrestler head on the cap and twirling it between his fingers as Dean brings his hand up to rest between Sam’s shoulder blades.
Sam should shrug him off. Should just start learning how to bear this crap on his own, but he’s just- just so damn tired.
He can’t. Not today.
“What are you gonna do, right? Life we live and all,” Ash continues as Sam settles into Dean’s silent, steady support at his back. Freely, if foolishly, given, even after everything. “Or, you know, not.”
Ash lifts a shoulder idly on screen, letting the hand with the pen drop out of frame.
“Point is, ya’ll got me workin’ on somethin’ heavy, and I, good little worker bee that I am,” he draws himself up with a half-smirk, wrestler-capped pen holding hand coming up to land over his heart, “back up my work with the religiosity of the truly paranoid. So, listen and be amazed, compadres.”
He sits back, and the video cuts to a different day, a different Ash in a different flannel vest, the little Mexican wrestler pen shoved behind his ear now as a different metal track plays in the background.
(Judas Priest this time. “Screaming for Vengeance.” Sam never liked it. Likes it even less now.)
“Alright, Winchesters Uno and Dos,” Ash sighs into the camera, and Sam wonders bleakly how many times he set up this camera, how many times he went through, over and again, this last conversation with them. “You wanna nail this sonofabitch, next place you’re gonna wanna be is ‘Bama. Lined up the patterns you gave me, crunched the numbers, fed in the data and next couple weeks, you’re in for some prime omenage right over T-town.”
He jerks his chin at the screen, presumably where he has the raw feeds playing out in font of him, and sends the luchador nestled over his ear cock-eyed in the process.
“I got the info all laid out for you pretty-like. Alls you gots to do is go hunt down the son of a bitch. And Sam, Dean?” Ash pauses, giving the camera a slow, steady look. “Not that I’m the vengeful type, but seein’ how every dot on the map I’m lookin’ at’s another kid what never got a say in their part in this...”
He shoves a hand through the dishwater-blonde riot of his bangs with a sigh, sending the little wrestler tripping and skittering offscreen in the process.
“Seein’ as probably every one of those little dots are goin’ through as hard a time as Sam is, but with twice the trouble and half the help?” Another sigh, another look, an absent card of hand through hair, looking for a masked wrestling man that isn’t there anymore.
Sam was so wrong to get him involved in this, so, so wrong.
“Well, I don’t feel too bad askin’ you to take this sucker down hard and get in a couple of licks for me,” Ash finishes, giving up on his search for the pen and giving one last, sad half-smile to the camera. “See you two on the other side.”
The video ends, reverts to a pane of blank, basic grey in the static, standard-issue sameness of Sam’s desktop, and it’s just he and Dean again, alone in the still, stifling silence of the abandoned bar.
“Tuscaloosa’s about twelve hours out,” Dean estimates, reaching out and shutting the laptop without ever taking his hand from Sam’s back, and he’s starting to look around the bar, shifting like he already wants to be on the road as he sends a glance at the front door to Vic’s, around to the back rooms Ellen disappeared into minutes ago, for all that it feels like hours. “We could make it by morning, we push hard.”
Sam blinks, eyes glued to where the blank video screen was as it all sinks in, the message from Ash still in his inbox, the ghost of those fingers, playing with that wrestler pen and the strained, staticky echoes of his voice, miles away from teasing about PBR and chili fries (chili cheese fries, his mind corrects), as the message outlived the man, outsmarted Meg and Yellow Eyes and all of their snarling, shark-toothed soldiers to land this one, last blow from beyond.
This is going to be what wins it for them.
This, this one last lead Ash managed to pass them? This is going to be what wins it for them.
As soon as he cards through the reams of research Ash’s dead man’s switch just dumped in his lap.
As soon as he maps out exactly where in Tuscaloosa they need to be and what family they need to track down and when and where and how Yellow Eyes is gonna sweep in, what they need to do to protect the family but not tip the Hell crowd off and how that all works with his psychic thing, with Meg in the wind and Dad on their tail along with who-knows-how-many hunters besides and Dean, sour and sullen and secretive and fighting Sam so hard to keep things the same even though they have to change, they have to-
“Sam? You alright in there?” Dean breaks his train of thought, and Sam drags himself from the ghost of the computer screen, shoves a hand through his hair with a sigh.
“Yeah.” He nods, scrubbing a hand over his face as it all, suddenly catches up to him, weighs down on him like it always, always seems to if he stops moving long enough to let it.
“Listen, Sam, I’m sorry. I know…” Dean starts, breaks off again, like he doesn’t know what to say. “I know you and Ash…”
“Forget about it, Dean.” Sam shakes his head and avoids his brother’s eye, shamelessly stealing a page from his brother’s playbook as he shoves his laptop in his bag, because even though he should be following the leads Ash left them, mapping out the omens and looking for the family the demon was targeting and getting them that next lead, that next step, he just can’t- can’t even look at it right now.
It’s too much. It’s just too much.
“Got bigger stuff to worry about, right?” Sam shrugs, still avoiding Dean’s eye, and maybe it’s a dick move, throwing Dean’s words back at him, running his own plays against him to skirt talking about this, but with Ash on top of everything...
He’s barely moving right now. Only just getting through it all upright and breathing. If Dean turns the stoic asshole switch off and picks now to suddenly start being his brother again, turns everything Sam wants but can’t let himself have at him full force, Sam knows he doesn’t have it in him to say no, to keep himself from giving in and setting them down a path that’s just gonna lead to him taking advantage of Dean all over again and he can’t, won’t.
He can’t and he won’t and he wants to. He wants to so bad it hurts.
“It doesn’t matter,” he mutters, shouldering past Dean towards the flickering, fritzing neon sign marked ‘restrooms’ without another word.
Chapter 77