[FIC] Father's Gun (77/?)
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
When Sam gets back, Ellen’s there. God, he forgot about her again, forgot that she’s got just as much riding on what was in Ash’s email as they do, and one day Sam’s gonna not be a completely worthless human being, he really is.
“Ya’ll get that toy of Sam’s workin’?” she asks, making herself at home at the taps and pulling drafts with a deft hand as she looks between them.
“Yeah.” Sam nods, digging his laptop back out of his bag to show her. “Let me just-”
“Why don’t you listen for a bit, first,” Ellen starts, keeping her hands busy and her eyes down as she sets them up with brews, complete with coasters and napkins and something is up, every single red alert Sam’s got going haywire.
“Got somethin’ to share, Ellen?” Dean asks, sits up just a little straighter as the condensation gathers on his draft, the fingers of one hand oh-so-casually tracing whorls in the dew, the other edging ever so slightly towards his .45 under the bar, just at the edge of Sam’s peripheral vision. Sam follows his lead, shifting slightly to get a better draw on his Taurus.
“Spoke with your daddy a while ago.” Ellen chases the admission with a long pull of her beer and huffs out an explosive sigh when Dean responds by getting a fistful of Sam’s shirt and not so much pulling him off of the barstool as dragging, Sam’s laptop bag tumbling down after in an ungainly gambol as Dean moves for the door.
“Hold your horses,” Ellen barks when Dean whirls to glare at her, fist still a hot, heady knot over Sam’s shoulder. “I ain’t said my goddamn piece yet, and believe me, Dean Winchester, I got a piece you’re gonna wanna hear.”
“Oh, sorry,” Dean snaps, dropping his is grip on Sam to stride back towards the bar. “Lemme just remind you how well our last meet with someone who’d been talkin’ with our dad played out!”
“Oh, just sit your dumb ass down.” She rolls her eyes, not flinching for a second in the face of his brother’s rage, just taking another swig of her beer as Sam rebalances his laptop bag, closes the distance between he and Dean at a cautious pace. “Do I look like Jim goddamn Murphy to you? Like I’m gonna get one call from your daddy and suddenly lose my damn mind?”
“What’d he say?” Sam asks, cutting off whatever retort Dean had for that one and very likely preventing his brother’s untimely death at the hands of a pissed-off Ellen Harvelle in the process.
“Well, first and foremost, that he fucked up back in Blue Earth,” Ellen answers, gamely ignoring Dean’s sullen grumbles as he flings himself back on his barstool.
“Yeah, you’re tellin’ us.” Dean mutters, taking a wary sip of his beer and squinting at it, like he could see the roofie in it if he tried hard enough.
“Then,” Ellen continues, glaring over the bar but continuing anyway, “that he ain’t got no one comin’ after you, and that he was worried.”
“You figure he was possessed or just had a gun to his head?” Dean asks, snorting into his draft.
“I’m paraphrasing,” Ellen grinds out, very clearly digging for patience as she looks like she’d like nothing more to reach across the bar and pop Dean in the head again.
Sam, for his part, keeps his mouth shut and tries to hide his snort in his beer, which only kind of works and ends with him scrambling for napkins as he slops suds on the bar
“Great. That mean he’s comin’ after us by himself?” Dean picks up, passing Sam his napkin as Ellen hands him a stack from behind the bar and Sam tries very hard not to feel like a messy six-year-old.
“Seemed more concerned with chasin’ leads on the fire at the Roadhouse, but I wouldn’t rule it out,” Ellen hedges once Sam’s finished mopping up puddles of barley and hops. “Kept your 20 out of it, just be on the safe side.”
“He find anything?” Sam jumps in. “Anything on Ash’s death, what tipped them off?”
“Only that whatever did this took Ash out before they set the fire, which we coulda guessed if they were after whatever you boys had him workin’ on,” Ellen gusts, heavy look in her eyes. “Now, I’m gonna go out on a limb, go ahead and say what was in that message, whatever you had Ash diggin’ after, was worth dyin’ for?”
The age and location of every kid with demon blood out there.
Every place Yellow Eyes has been and everywhere he’s going to be for the foreseeable future. A roadmap of the Deals he’s made, the families he’s hurt, and the ones he hasn’t yet, the ones out there who they can still save, who could never have to face a life of smoke and cinders, of black eyes and yellow nightmares and an awful, evil, red-soaked future.
All those kids... All those families, those perfectly ordinary families, staring down the barrel of smoke and flames and awful, evil yellow eyes. And this their silver bullet against every one of them awing up in the nightmare that’s marred Sam and Dean’ whole lives...
Is that worth dying for?
“Yeah,” Sam breathes, nodding. “Definitely.”
“Well,” Ellen starts, “knowin’ that and knowin’ if I get in touch with your daddy again, I’m gonna give him whatever the hell he needs to get me a lead on the black eyed sons of bitches what burnt my goddamn home to the ground, I’m gonna ask you this: There anything in that message I need to know?”
“Ellen...” Sam starts, only to trail off, look to Dean. It’s Ellen - and Ash and Jo and the Roadhouse - but it’s their dad, too.
It’s Jim all over again and knowing too little and trusting too much. He wants to, god he wants to, but he’s wanted to before. He’s wanted to and he has and it’s all gone wrong, horribly, terribly, up-in-smoke wrong, and he doesn’t- He’s not sure what the right call here is, not sure it’s even his call to make.
And maybe Dean gets it, the doubt, the confusion, gets that Sam wants to trust her more than anything, wants this to be anything but Blue Earth all over again. Maybe he gets that there’s too much riding on this, too much depending on it, on them, for Sam to make this call without someone else to chime in. Maybe he gets that if he makes the call, makes it and this goes south, if everything goes wrong, spectacularly wrong, all over again, Sam just isn’t sure he can shoulder that guilt on top of everything else.
Sam hopes he gets it. Hopes things aren’t so bad, so lost, between them that Dean doesn’t get it at least a little, because he can see the shift in him, that split-second steel of Dean’s spine as he snags Sam’s fumble, takes control, takes command.
“He doesn’t know where Sam is,” Dean snaps, holding Sam’s gaze for a second before his eyes meet’s Ellen’s. “You wanna use him to get even for them takin’ out your place and Ash with it, go a-goddamn-head. God knows the man could use a goddamn hobby, but you say another word to him? You use any of this we got here? He don’t get a word of where we are or what we’re goddamn doing, you got that? Not if it leads him to Sam. Not again.”
Dean’s balls his fists up his sides, his face set in harsh, unforgiving lines.
“He had his chance,” Dean finishes. “He don’t get another one. You wanna play ball? Fine. You want us to square with you still havin’ him on your goddamn speed dial? Whatever. But you give him so much a lick as to where we’re at, Ellen? You give him so much as half a chance at makin’ a move on Sam again?”
“Dean,” Sam breaks in, cuts Dean off before the threat can bloom, before he can draw another line in the sand, cross another name off their dwindling list of allies without so much as a second thought. Stops his brother before he takes another step towards cutting out everyone they’ve ever known or cared about, all in name of protection Sam doesn’t even deserve. Because if Dean doesn’t have Dad... or Caleb or Jim or Ellen or Bobby... if he doesn’t have any of them-if he doesn’t have any of them and he doesn’t have anything but Sam, Sam who’s- who’s the cause of all this is the first place and- and-
Sam’s not worth this.
He’s never been worth this.
“Won’t fight you on that one.” Ellen nods quietly, a shadow in her eye. “Won’t pretend it doesn’t do me ease, knowin’ you boys are here and he’s there. What he was thinkin’ in that goddamn church...”
She shakes her head.
“Don’t make no nevermind,” she says. “Stunt like that? He’s gotta earn his place back in any room with you boys in it, far as I’m concerned. So you say he don’t know where you are? Well, then he don’t know where you goddamn are.”
Sam wants to trust her. He wants to trust her so bad, but they’ve heard this tune before. Heard the same song and dance from Jim before he slammed the locks and sent everything straight to hell, and Sam can see the same catch in Dean’s eyes, the same hesitation.
“And Jim Murphy might have told you the same thing,” Ellen admits, “might have sworn to the high heavens he’d only tell John what you wanted, that he was for you and about you, all the livelong day. But I’ll tell you one thing Jim Murphy won’t,” Ellen grinds out, taking a long pull of her draft, “can’t, for all the years he’s spent at John’s elbow. I’ll tell you what your daddy does when he makes a mistake. When he screws a hunt so royally that he’s got no way out, no choice but to look facts in the face and admit that he got someone killed or near as.”
Ellen drops her glass on the water-stained counter behind the bar with a dull ‘thunk’.
“He runs,” she bites out. “He turns tail and cuts ties and scampers off like the coward he goddamn is. And I know, ‘cause twelve goddamn years ago he showed up on my doorstep, bloodstained and sorry, handed me the keys to Bill’s damn RV, and then drove off without a word.”
And if Sam wasn’t listening hard, hanging on Ellen’s every goddamn word before, he sure as hell would be now, because that puts Dad- that would mean he was on the hunt that got Bill Harvelle killed. That left Ellen a widow and- and Dad never said-
“Nothing,” Ellen forces out, swallowing hard. “Not a god damn thing, not ‘til you boys backed him into it. Now you want a promise that he’s not gonna try and find you? I can’t make it. Got nothing to give you there. But you want a promise that I am the last person on the the goddamn planet that is gonna make this easy for that stubborn coward daddy of yours?” Ellen meets both of their eyes in turn, slow and steady and every inch of her salt and steel. “Well that I can goddamn give.”
She continues, strong and straightforward: “Now, I’m gonna ask you boys again, and you can tell or not as you like. Did Ash give you anything in that email I need to know?
“Tuscaloosa,” Sam says before Dean can open his mouth. “The demon’s gonna be in Tuscaloosa.”
“Well,” Ellen nods, “Let’s get you boys fed and on the road, then. I’ll swing by Sioux Falls, get the cavalry’s cranky ass caught up and meet you there.”
“Ellen-” Dean protests.
“Just ‘cause this is you boys’ fight,” she interrupts, “don’t mean it’s just your fight. Sure as hell don’t mean you gotta face it alone. Now you make you peace with that and tell me how you like your burgers done.”
Sam’s protests that they really need to get on the road get pretty loudly shouted down by Dean, Ellen and Proprietor Peggy in turn, something he really regrets when she re-emerges from the belly of the bar bearing slightly-singed sandwiches and just-this-side-of-cold-in-the-center fries.
No one lingers over lunch.
“Ellen, we didn’t,” Sam starts as he and Ellen begin cleaning up the table and his brother oh-so-fortuitously remembers he needs to go to the bathroom right this instant. “We didn’t know about our dad. What he and your husband…”
“Honey, I know you didn’t.” Ellen smiles at him, soft and steady as she rinses glasses. “How could you’ve?”
“I’m sorry.” Sam apologizes as he gathers up straggling bottles of ketchup and mustard. “Sorry he… Sorry.”
“My Bill would have liked you.” Ellen smiles, plucking the condiments out of his hands and slotting them into their places at the wait station. “Your brother, too. Woulda gotten a kick outta watchin’ you two drive Josie up the wall.”
“You never blamed him? Our dad?” Sam asks softly, not quite knowing why, but needing to know all the same.
“Maybe a little, maybe at first,” Ellen admits with a nod, coming around the bar to help I’m slot chairs back into place around the warped, wobbly round wooden tables, “but you know as well as I do, Sam. That’s just loss.”
“And after?” Sam ventures, eyes flicking up to hers for a second before darting back down to the table, brushing at stray sprinkles of salt lingering on the surface.
“I should wish it was another hunter there with Bill?” Ellen asks, busying herself with going back around the bar and rummaging beneath the sink. “Daniel? Bobby? One of Bill’s family? One of mine? I should wish he was alone, leavin’ me worryin’ and wondering at the Roadhouse with Josie? I should wish I was there with him? That we left our baby girl all alone?”
She shakes her head softly, coming back around the bar and handing him a damp rag to help her wipe down the table with.
“You can’t do that, Sam. Can’t lose yourself in maybe like that. What happened, happened. I could live with the hurt. John couldn’t. From what I hear tell, it wasn’t the first time.”
“Yeah,” Sam snorts, half losing himself in slow, steady passes of rag over ribbed, rippling wood grain. “Family tradition.”
And it’s sad how true that is, how true it keeps being as they keep going forward, keep writing more of their stories and learning more of their mom and keep running, keep chasing after this demon, always racing, always running, but never looking back.
Little Mary who would never go near her parents’ hose after their death at Yellow Eye hands, giving everything, everything she had and more to just make it all go away, make it all stop.
Dad putting Lawrence in his rear view after the fire and never looking back.
Sam leaving for Stanford. The fight between Sam and Dean and those two years they lost, that they almost ended everything on before Covington, before Louisiana and losing Dean and getting him back and another fire, another sweet, precious perfect life lost, burned up and blasted away, and if you asked Sam to go back, asked him to see those people, to go to those places to walk down those streets and breathe that same air, names, faces, bricks, mortar, oxygen going in sour, coming out wrong, all because last time it was with her, last time she was here, smiling and laughing and loving and alive, and now she’s- she’s-
“Bobby told me about the fire back in California,” Ellen offers, gently taking the rag back when he’s long since finished wiping down the table. “Sam, it wasn’t-”
“Please don’t, Ellen,” Sam begs, his voice unabashedly breaking on her name, shattering because Jess is gone. She is gone and she’s been gone and she’ll always be gone. It’s been a year. A year without her smile, her voice in his ear or her hands at his waist or her legs tangling with his under the covers, hair tangling around them both, a glinting, golden hurricane as they come down, exhausted and panting, sleepy and sated, Jess bursting into a riot of giggles when he goes to brush her hair out of his face and just gets his hand stuck instead.
She wouldn’t even recognize him now.
Would have no idea what to do with the man, the monster, he’s become. The blood on his hands and in his veins, the blackness crawling up and creeping inside him and what he did to Dean...
God, she wouldn’t recognize him, and he wouldn’t want her to, couldn’t stand if she connected the person he was with the nightmare he’s become, and it’s Jess and Dean and Dean and Jess, all he’s ever had and all he’s ever wanted, and he failed them, let them both down so hard.
“Looks like that ball of sunshine brother of yours is about ready to go,” Ellen remarks, pulling him from his thoughts as Dean stalks out of the bathroom.
“Yeah,” Sam nods, subtly-but-probably-not-subtly scrubbing at his face, trying to get rid of the he evidence before Dean sees.
“You gonna be alright?” Ellen asks, giving him a quick nod as an all-clear.
“I’m…” Sam stumbles. He gropes for something other than ‘Probably not, considering the circumstances.’
“I hope so,” he settles, giving Ellen a sad, summoned half-smile and a weak shrug as Dean makes his way over.
“Me too, sweetie,” she agrees, straightening the creases in his shirt with a couple of smart tugs and then completely undoing her hard work by giving him a sympathetic squeeze on the shoulder.
Sam figures, as they say their goodbyes and make their way out into the parking lot, that it’s Ellen’s way of saying “I want you to know I care about you, but, because we are not currently staring death in the face, am not going to ruin your tough-as-nails hunter rep by actually hugging you.”
“You two look after one another,” she gruffs, giving them a nod as they reach their respective cars. “Don’t forget to call and check in.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they answer in unison, and Ellen cracks half a grin at that, keeps it as she slides into the cracked, creaking driver’s seat of the Chevelle, pulls out of the lot and off into the midday sun, leaving them alone against the Impala, their own stretch of highway yawning long and lonely before them.
“Let’s get a move on, then,” Dean grumbles as he throws himself in the driver’s seat.
The terse finality of the words, the tight, tense line of his brother’s shoulders as he cranks the engine and pulls out into the weathered blacktop, make it painfully clear that Dean’s not in the talking mood, not about Ellen still talking to their dad, not about Dad being on the hunt that killed Bill Harvelle all those years ago, not about Ash’s last message or what happened this morning or last night or the dark, awful secret hiding in his eyes.
There’s nothing Sam can say. Nothing that won’t end up in another shredding, stinging, salt-in-the-wound exchange of everything they aren’t saying to each other, significant silence warring with weighted words in their stupid, stubborn secret-based tug of war.
Because Dean’s not telling him something, and Sam doesn’t know what it is, all he knows is that it’s big and that Dean hates what Sam is doing and Sam hates what Sam is doing and they both hate living with the only way there is to make their lives liveable, and there’s nothing Sam can do.
Nothing he can do or say to make Dean tell him, to make him not hate Sam for this, but better his brother hate him for this than hate him for something worse, If the first step to living with all of this is sitting in the front seat silent, Salinger clicking through the tape deck, trying and failing to cut through the space between them, heavy and mined with everything that’s been said and done and meant but not meant at all, and the hundred thousand other things that they’ll never say, not in a hundred lifetimes, but still wield and wound with like the sharpest, cruelest knives… If this is it, if this is all they’re left with, all that’s survived the break, Sam’s merciless excision of everything he’s let seep, sick and sour between them, then that’s...
Well, that’s just another thing Sam is going to have to live with, to atone for, to fix.
Because this? Right now? It’s awkward and awful, all this stilted, strangled, stranding distance. All this normal Sam dredged up and shoved between them, used to fill the spaces between ‘he’ and ‘me’ in the wake of cutting away anything and everything that could ever, ever lead to his taking advantage of- of fucking assaulting Dean again, under any circumstances, and it’s what they need, what’s right.
This is what’s right and what’s normal and despite that, despite all of that, Sam can’t help but want- want everything, fingers in his hair and Dean beneath his hands and home, gun smoked and leather-wrapped, here and alive and and all around him, holding and helping and taking, just for a second, the weight of birth and blood and destiny.
But he can’t. They can’t, and he has to remind himself, over and over again, that this has to happen, that this is for the best.
This is for Dean, and it’s for the best.
He settles into the passenger seat, elbow propped on the window as Holden Caulfield loses his foils on the subway and Sam digs in for the long haul.
Chapter 78
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
When Sam gets back, Ellen’s there. God, he forgot about her again, forgot that she’s got just as much riding on what was in Ash’s email as they do, and one day Sam’s gonna not be a completely worthless human being, he really is.
“Ya’ll get that toy of Sam’s workin’?” she asks, making herself at home at the taps and pulling drafts with a deft hand as she looks between them.
“Yeah.” Sam nods, digging his laptop back out of his bag to show her. “Let me just-”
“Why don’t you listen for a bit, first,” Ellen starts, keeping her hands busy and her eyes down as she sets them up with brews, complete with coasters and napkins and something is up, every single red alert Sam’s got going haywire.
“Got somethin’ to share, Ellen?” Dean asks, sits up just a little straighter as the condensation gathers on his draft, the fingers of one hand oh-so-casually tracing whorls in the dew, the other edging ever so slightly towards his .45 under the bar, just at the edge of Sam’s peripheral vision. Sam follows his lead, shifting slightly to get a better draw on his Taurus.
“Spoke with your daddy a while ago.” Ellen chases the admission with a long pull of her beer and huffs out an explosive sigh when Dean responds by getting a fistful of Sam’s shirt and not so much pulling him off of the barstool as dragging, Sam’s laptop bag tumbling down after in an ungainly gambol as Dean moves for the door.
“Hold your horses,” Ellen barks when Dean whirls to glare at her, fist still a hot, heady knot over Sam’s shoulder. “I ain’t said my goddamn piece yet, and believe me, Dean Winchester, I got a piece you’re gonna wanna hear.”
“Oh, sorry,” Dean snaps, dropping his is grip on Sam to stride back towards the bar. “Lemme just remind you how well our last meet with someone who’d been talkin’ with our dad played out!”
“Oh, just sit your dumb ass down.” She rolls her eyes, not flinching for a second in the face of his brother’s rage, just taking another swig of her beer as Sam rebalances his laptop bag, closes the distance between he and Dean at a cautious pace. “Do I look like Jim goddamn Murphy to you? Like I’m gonna get one call from your daddy and suddenly lose my damn mind?”
“What’d he say?” Sam asks, cutting off whatever retort Dean had for that one and very likely preventing his brother’s untimely death at the hands of a pissed-off Ellen Harvelle in the process.
“Well, first and foremost, that he fucked up back in Blue Earth,” Ellen answers, gamely ignoring Dean’s sullen grumbles as he flings himself back on his barstool.
“Yeah, you’re tellin’ us.” Dean mutters, taking a wary sip of his beer and squinting at it, like he could see the roofie in it if he tried hard enough.
“Then,” Ellen continues, glaring over the bar but continuing anyway, “that he ain’t got no one comin’ after you, and that he was worried.”
“You figure he was possessed or just had a gun to his head?” Dean asks, snorting into his draft.
“I’m paraphrasing,” Ellen grinds out, very clearly digging for patience as she looks like she’d like nothing more to reach across the bar and pop Dean in the head again.
Sam, for his part, keeps his mouth shut and tries to hide his snort in his beer, which only kind of works and ends with him scrambling for napkins as he slops suds on the bar
“Great. That mean he’s comin’ after us by himself?” Dean picks up, passing Sam his napkin as Ellen hands him a stack from behind the bar and Sam tries very hard not to feel like a messy six-year-old.
“Seemed more concerned with chasin’ leads on the fire at the Roadhouse, but I wouldn’t rule it out,” Ellen hedges once Sam’s finished mopping up puddles of barley and hops. “Kept your 20 out of it, just be on the safe side.”
“He find anything?” Sam jumps in. “Anything on Ash’s death, what tipped them off?”
“Only that whatever did this took Ash out before they set the fire, which we coulda guessed if they were after whatever you boys had him workin’ on,” Ellen gusts, heavy look in her eyes. “Now, I’m gonna go out on a limb, go ahead and say what was in that message, whatever you had Ash diggin’ after, was worth dyin’ for?”
The age and location of every kid with demon blood out there.
Every place Yellow Eyes has been and everywhere he’s going to be for the foreseeable future. A roadmap of the Deals he’s made, the families he’s hurt, and the ones he hasn’t yet, the ones out there who they can still save, who could never have to face a life of smoke and cinders, of black eyes and yellow nightmares and an awful, evil, red-soaked future.
All those kids... All those families, those perfectly ordinary families, staring down the barrel of smoke and flames and awful, evil yellow eyes. And this their silver bullet against every one of them awing up in the nightmare that’s marred Sam and Dean’ whole lives...
Is that worth dying for?
“Yeah,” Sam breathes, nodding. “Definitely.”
“Well,” Ellen starts, “knowin’ that and knowin’ if I get in touch with your daddy again, I’m gonna give him whatever the hell he needs to get me a lead on the black eyed sons of bitches what burnt my goddamn home to the ground, I’m gonna ask you this: There anything in that message I need to know?”
“Ellen...” Sam starts, only to trail off, look to Dean. It’s Ellen - and Ash and Jo and the Roadhouse - but it’s their dad, too.
It’s Jim all over again and knowing too little and trusting too much. He wants to, god he wants to, but he’s wanted to before. He’s wanted to and he has and it’s all gone wrong, horribly, terribly, up-in-smoke wrong, and he doesn’t- He’s not sure what the right call here is, not sure it’s even his call to make.
And maybe Dean gets it, the doubt, the confusion, gets that Sam wants to trust her more than anything, wants this to be anything but Blue Earth all over again. Maybe he gets that there’s too much riding on this, too much depending on it, on them, for Sam to make this call without someone else to chime in. Maybe he gets that if he makes the call, makes it and this goes south, if everything goes wrong, spectacularly wrong, all over again, Sam just isn’t sure he can shoulder that guilt on top of everything else.
Sam hopes he gets it. Hopes things aren’t so bad, so lost, between them that Dean doesn’t get it at least a little, because he can see the shift in him, that split-second steel of Dean’s spine as he snags Sam’s fumble, takes control, takes command.
“He doesn’t know where Sam is,” Dean snaps, holding Sam’s gaze for a second before his eyes meet’s Ellen’s. “You wanna use him to get even for them takin’ out your place and Ash with it, go a-goddamn-head. God knows the man could use a goddamn hobby, but you say another word to him? You use any of this we got here? He don’t get a word of where we are or what we’re goddamn doing, you got that? Not if it leads him to Sam. Not again.”
Dean’s balls his fists up his sides, his face set in harsh, unforgiving lines.
“He had his chance,” Dean finishes. “He don’t get another one. You wanna play ball? Fine. You want us to square with you still havin’ him on your goddamn speed dial? Whatever. But you give him so much a lick as to where we’re at, Ellen? You give him so much as half a chance at makin’ a move on Sam again?”
“Dean,” Sam breaks in, cuts Dean off before the threat can bloom, before he can draw another line in the sand, cross another name off their dwindling list of allies without so much as a second thought. Stops his brother before he takes another step towards cutting out everyone they’ve ever known or cared about, all in name of protection Sam doesn’t even deserve. Because if Dean doesn’t have Dad... or Caleb or Jim or Ellen or Bobby... if he doesn’t have any of them-if he doesn’t have any of them and he doesn’t have anything but Sam, Sam who’s- who’s the cause of all this is the first place and- and-
Sam’s not worth this.
He’s never been worth this.
“Won’t fight you on that one.” Ellen nods quietly, a shadow in her eye. “Won’t pretend it doesn’t do me ease, knowin’ you boys are here and he’s there. What he was thinkin’ in that goddamn church...”
She shakes her head.
“Don’t make no nevermind,” she says. “Stunt like that? He’s gotta earn his place back in any room with you boys in it, far as I’m concerned. So you say he don’t know where you are? Well, then he don’t know where you goddamn are.”
Sam wants to trust her. He wants to trust her so bad, but they’ve heard this tune before. Heard the same song and dance from Jim before he slammed the locks and sent everything straight to hell, and Sam can see the same catch in Dean’s eyes, the same hesitation.
“And Jim Murphy might have told you the same thing,” Ellen admits, “might have sworn to the high heavens he’d only tell John what you wanted, that he was for you and about you, all the livelong day. But I’ll tell you one thing Jim Murphy won’t,” Ellen grinds out, taking a long pull of her draft, “can’t, for all the years he’s spent at John’s elbow. I’ll tell you what your daddy does when he makes a mistake. When he screws a hunt so royally that he’s got no way out, no choice but to look facts in the face and admit that he got someone killed or near as.”
Ellen drops her glass on the water-stained counter behind the bar with a dull ‘thunk’.
“He runs,” she bites out. “He turns tail and cuts ties and scampers off like the coward he goddamn is. And I know, ‘cause twelve goddamn years ago he showed up on my doorstep, bloodstained and sorry, handed me the keys to Bill’s damn RV, and then drove off without a word.”
And if Sam wasn’t listening hard, hanging on Ellen’s every goddamn word before, he sure as hell would be now, because that puts Dad- that would mean he was on the hunt that got Bill Harvelle killed. That left Ellen a widow and- and Dad never said-
“Nothing,” Ellen forces out, swallowing hard. “Not a god damn thing, not ‘til you boys backed him into it. Now you want a promise that he’s not gonna try and find you? I can’t make it. Got nothing to give you there. But you want a promise that I am the last person on the the goddamn planet that is gonna make this easy for that stubborn coward daddy of yours?” Ellen meets both of their eyes in turn, slow and steady and every inch of her salt and steel. “Well that I can goddamn give.”
She continues, strong and straightforward: “Now, I’m gonna ask you boys again, and you can tell or not as you like. Did Ash give you anything in that email I need to know?
“Tuscaloosa,” Sam says before Dean can open his mouth. “The demon’s gonna be in Tuscaloosa.”
“Well,” Ellen nods, “Let’s get you boys fed and on the road, then. I’ll swing by Sioux Falls, get the cavalry’s cranky ass caught up and meet you there.”
“Ellen-” Dean protests.
“Just ‘cause this is you boys’ fight,” she interrupts, “don’t mean it’s just your fight. Sure as hell don’t mean you gotta face it alone. Now you make you peace with that and tell me how you like your burgers done.”
Sam’s protests that they really need to get on the road get pretty loudly shouted down by Dean, Ellen and Proprietor Peggy in turn, something he really regrets when she re-emerges from the belly of the bar bearing slightly-singed sandwiches and just-this-side-of-cold-in-the-center fries.
No one lingers over lunch.
“Ellen, we didn’t,” Sam starts as he and Ellen begin cleaning up the table and his brother oh-so-fortuitously remembers he needs to go to the bathroom right this instant. “We didn’t know about our dad. What he and your husband…”
“Honey, I know you didn’t.” Ellen smiles at him, soft and steady as she rinses glasses. “How could you’ve?”
“I’m sorry.” Sam apologizes as he gathers up straggling bottles of ketchup and mustard. “Sorry he… Sorry.”
“My Bill would have liked you.” Ellen smiles, plucking the condiments out of his hands and slotting them into their places at the wait station. “Your brother, too. Woulda gotten a kick outta watchin’ you two drive Josie up the wall.”
“You never blamed him? Our dad?” Sam asks softly, not quite knowing why, but needing to know all the same.
“Maybe a little, maybe at first,” Ellen admits with a nod, coming around the bar to help I’m slot chairs back into place around the warped, wobbly round wooden tables, “but you know as well as I do, Sam. That’s just loss.”
“And after?” Sam ventures, eyes flicking up to hers for a second before darting back down to the table, brushing at stray sprinkles of salt lingering on the surface.
“I should wish it was another hunter there with Bill?” Ellen asks, busying herself with going back around the bar and rummaging beneath the sink. “Daniel? Bobby? One of Bill’s family? One of mine? I should wish he was alone, leavin’ me worryin’ and wondering at the Roadhouse with Josie? I should wish I was there with him? That we left our baby girl all alone?”
She shakes her head softly, coming back around the bar and handing him a damp rag to help her wipe down the table with.
“You can’t do that, Sam. Can’t lose yourself in maybe like that. What happened, happened. I could live with the hurt. John couldn’t. From what I hear tell, it wasn’t the first time.”
“Yeah,” Sam snorts, half losing himself in slow, steady passes of rag over ribbed, rippling wood grain. “Family tradition.”
And it’s sad how true that is, how true it keeps being as they keep going forward, keep writing more of their stories and learning more of their mom and keep running, keep chasing after this demon, always racing, always running, but never looking back.
Little Mary who would never go near her parents’ hose after their death at Yellow Eye hands, giving everything, everything she had and more to just make it all go away, make it all stop.
Dad putting Lawrence in his rear view after the fire and never looking back.
Sam leaving for Stanford. The fight between Sam and Dean and those two years they lost, that they almost ended everything on before Covington, before Louisiana and losing Dean and getting him back and another fire, another sweet, precious perfect life lost, burned up and blasted away, and if you asked Sam to go back, asked him to see those people, to go to those places to walk down those streets and breathe that same air, names, faces, bricks, mortar, oxygen going in sour, coming out wrong, all because last time it was with her, last time she was here, smiling and laughing and loving and alive, and now she’s- she’s-
“Bobby told me about the fire back in California,” Ellen offers, gently taking the rag back when he’s long since finished wiping down the table. “Sam, it wasn’t-”
“Please don’t, Ellen,” Sam begs, his voice unabashedly breaking on her name, shattering because Jess is gone. She is gone and she’s been gone and she’ll always be gone. It’s been a year. A year without her smile, her voice in his ear or her hands at his waist or her legs tangling with his under the covers, hair tangling around them both, a glinting, golden hurricane as they come down, exhausted and panting, sleepy and sated, Jess bursting into a riot of giggles when he goes to brush her hair out of his face and just gets his hand stuck instead.
She wouldn’t even recognize him now.
Would have no idea what to do with the man, the monster, he’s become. The blood on his hands and in his veins, the blackness crawling up and creeping inside him and what he did to Dean...
God, she wouldn’t recognize him, and he wouldn’t want her to, couldn’t stand if she connected the person he was with the nightmare he’s become, and it’s Jess and Dean and Dean and Jess, all he’s ever had and all he’s ever wanted, and he failed them, let them both down so hard.
“Looks like that ball of sunshine brother of yours is about ready to go,” Ellen remarks, pulling him from his thoughts as Dean stalks out of the bathroom.
“Yeah,” Sam nods, subtly-but-probably-not-subtly scrubbing at his face, trying to get rid of the he evidence before Dean sees.
“You gonna be alright?” Ellen asks, giving him a quick nod as an all-clear.
“I’m…” Sam stumbles. He gropes for something other than ‘Probably not, considering the circumstances.’
“I hope so,” he settles, giving Ellen a sad, summoned half-smile and a weak shrug as Dean makes his way over.
“Me too, sweetie,” she agrees, straightening the creases in his shirt with a couple of smart tugs and then completely undoing her hard work by giving him a sympathetic squeeze on the shoulder.
Sam figures, as they say their goodbyes and make their way out into the parking lot, that it’s Ellen’s way of saying “I want you to know I care about you, but, because we are not currently staring death in the face, am not going to ruin your tough-as-nails hunter rep by actually hugging you.”
“You two look after one another,” she gruffs, giving them a nod as they reach their respective cars. “Don’t forget to call and check in.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they answer in unison, and Ellen cracks half a grin at that, keeps it as she slides into the cracked, creaking driver’s seat of the Chevelle, pulls out of the lot and off into the midday sun, leaving them alone against the Impala, their own stretch of highway yawning long and lonely before them.
“Let’s get a move on, then,” Dean grumbles as he throws himself in the driver’s seat.
The terse finality of the words, the tight, tense line of his brother’s shoulders as he cranks the engine and pulls out into the weathered blacktop, make it painfully clear that Dean’s not in the talking mood, not about Ellen still talking to their dad, not about Dad being on the hunt that killed Bill Harvelle all those years ago, not about Ash’s last message or what happened this morning or last night or the dark, awful secret hiding in his eyes.
There’s nothing Sam can say. Nothing that won’t end up in another shredding, stinging, salt-in-the-wound exchange of everything they aren’t saying to each other, significant silence warring with weighted words in their stupid, stubborn secret-based tug of war.
Because Dean’s not telling him something, and Sam doesn’t know what it is, all he knows is that it’s big and that Dean hates what Sam is doing and Sam hates what Sam is doing and they both hate living with the only way there is to make their lives liveable, and there’s nothing Sam can do.
Nothing he can do or say to make Dean tell him, to make him not hate Sam for this, but better his brother hate him for this than hate him for something worse, If the first step to living with all of this is sitting in the front seat silent, Salinger clicking through the tape deck, trying and failing to cut through the space between them, heavy and mined with everything that’s been said and done and meant but not meant at all, and the hundred thousand other things that they’ll never say, not in a hundred lifetimes, but still wield and wound with like the sharpest, cruelest knives… If this is it, if this is all they’re left with, all that’s survived the break, Sam’s merciless excision of everything he’s let seep, sick and sour between them, then that’s...
Well, that’s just another thing Sam is going to have to live with, to atone for, to fix.
Because this? Right now? It’s awkward and awful, all this stilted, strangled, stranding distance. All this normal Sam dredged up and shoved between them, used to fill the spaces between ‘he’ and ‘me’ in the wake of cutting away anything and everything that could ever, ever lead to his taking advantage of- of fucking assaulting Dean again, under any circumstances, and it’s what they need, what’s right.
This is what’s right and what’s normal and despite that, despite all of that, Sam can’t help but want- want everything, fingers in his hair and Dean beneath his hands and home, gun smoked and leather-wrapped, here and alive and and all around him, holding and helping and taking, just for a second, the weight of birth and blood and destiny.
But he can’t. They can’t, and he has to remind himself, over and over again, that this has to happen, that this is for the best.
This is for Dean, and it’s for the best.
He settles into the passenger seat, elbow propped on the window as Holden Caulfield loses his foils on the subway and Sam digs in for the long haul.
Chapter 78