SPN fic: In Restless Dreams I Walked Alone
Title: In Restless Dreams I Walked Alone
Author: erushi
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 4827
Summary: Dean can't quite remember anything of his life before coming to Cicero. He's come to accept this as his lot in life. However, when children in the town start falling sick, and a stranger who seems to know more than he lets on appears, he begins to question.
Author's notes: For faunaana for the spn_j2_xmas exchange. Here's my attempt at blending one of his/her prompts (good!post-hell!powers!Sam and smart!Dean) with an s1/s2-style case fic. AU after s5, but with some detail taken from episode 6.01. Title from Simon & Garfunkel's 'Sounds of Silence'.
The alarm no longer startles Dean in the morning. He’s grown used to its frantic string of beeps, to its rectangular, plastic body that always feels cool to his sleep-warm fingers, to its digital 07:00 which blinks crisp and green back at him when finally holds it up. The cold of the bare floorboards no longer bothers him quite as much as it once did either, and he doesn’t wince the way he used to as he pads to the bathroom and its even colder tiles, splashes his face with water and brushes his teeth, rinse, gargle, spit.
Lisa isn’t in bed by the time he returns to the bedroom to dress, and he knows she’s gone to wake Ben. He tries not to feel guilty about the way he hasn’t kissed her good morning the way he keeps feeling as though he should, makes his way downstairs instead to slice up the bread for toast and to fry up a few eggs. Ben will protest twice before finally deigning to shove his covers aside, and by the time both of them make their way into the kitchen, it will be twenty-five minutes past seven, and Dean will have most of breakfast laid out. He’s had exactly three months and two weeks to get his part of the routine correct, and he thinks he might even have come to like this still-unfamiliar sense of regularity after having tasted it for a hundred and five days that he doesn’t count.
Work’s in the construction industry; it is simple, so simple Dean likes to think he could have done it in his sleep. Like everything else he’s since become accustomed to it too, to the high whine of the drills and the steady tap-tap-tapping of his hammer as he works his way down a row of nails. He has sandwiches for lunch, roast beef on rye with mustard for a couple of dollars, and he washes it down with a can of flat-tasting cola bought from the same store for another sixty-five cents more.
At a quarter past six he sets his tools aside, joins the rest of the men for drinks at their usual place on West Jackson Street. He’s just the Braeden girl’s old boyfriend to them, joined up with the army after a whirlwind romance and only just got back from Afghanistan a couple ’a months ago, but that’s more than enough for them to see him as one of theirs. Dean doesn’t mind them thinking that: it’s as good as any explanation he thinks he could have come up with, and besides, he doesn’t have any of the answers anyway.
(He doesn’t like trying to think about Before.)
He smiles as he slides into the stool next onto Sid. Sid’s both colleague and neighbor, and the man buys Dean a beer in the first round, lets Dean buy him his in the second, and tells Dean about his nephew in another state who wants to enlist straight out of high school, he’s crazy, that boy, but it might just make a man out of him. Dean sips his two beers as he lets Sid talk, hums and grunts in the right places.
The other men have long moved on from sharing their gripes about the day’s work by the time Sid’s done listing the various follies of suburban youth. It’s Richie Carlson they’re talking about when Dean shifts his attention back to them, lost his baby daughter three weeks ago and his wife another week after, the poor bastard.
Moved to the other end of town, didn’t he?
Wouldn’t you? Carlson loved his Susan, he did. Don’t imagine he’d want to stay on in the same house she died.
New family moving in this weekend, I hear.
Hope they ain’t got children. Fourth child on that street down with that funny flu. Probably what did Carlson’s baby girl in as well.
There’s an itch at the base of Dean’s skull. It’s a strange, niggling twitchiness, one he can’t rid himself of even though he digs at the spot with the pad of his thumb. It even follows him to the parking lot when he finally does excuse himself for the evening. He’s still rubbing at it when his elbow narrowly misses a man who enters the bar the same time as Dean exits, and he absently keeps at it while he mumbles a vague apology before hurrying to his truck, drives back to Lisa’s with only one hand on the wheel.
He falls asleep with his knuckles kneading into his nape.
=-=-=
The weekend takes Dean down the street which runs past the old Carlson place. The area’s quieter than he remembers, the playground in the tiny park empty. It’d been the headlines that morning, how the neighborhood pre-school will shut for a week now that the eighth child had taken ill. Dean had read it while standing in the line to pay for the box of health teas Lisa had asked him to buy, and it now strikes him that all eight of them live on the same street he’s driving down that very moment. It’s not a pleasant thought.
The base of his skull still itches.
He spies the flash of white (again, he thinks, the third time in as many times he’s driven by) just as he pulls his truck up alongside the curb outside the now-empty house. It lingers at the corners of his vision, always just a touch out of sight, and he pauses for a bit after he heaves himself out of the driver’s seat, stands by the cab of his truck with his fingers still curled around the handle of the open door and just breathes.
There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment. He thinks this should surprise him - he certainly doesn’t remember keeping a flashlight there - but it just feels familiar somehow, much like the gun he finds secreted away beneath the driver’s seat. He takes them both with him up the driveway and into the still-empty house, relishes the heft of either in his hands, and only sets them aside briefly when he has to pick the lock to the front door. He isn’t very much surprised either by the way he automatically keeps his arms out before him as he climbs the single flight of stairs to the dimly-lit landing above, by how he crosses them at the wrists, gun-hand on top, steadied, its weight supported. The house is as empty on the inside as it looks to be on the outside, and he finds himself taking comfort in the peculiar not-quite-familiarity of it all.
(Just like old times, eh, he begins to say at the top step, but there’s no one behind him when he turns around to look, and a name he can’t quite recall catches in his throat.)
Dean blinks.
The first room to his left bears all the hallmarks of a nursery, pastel-striped wallpaper, child’s cot, toy chest all. It’s also the first room he’s found in the house thus far that’s still fully furnished. There’s even a teddy bear still sitting on the embroidered blanket in the cot, its fur still plush even though its glass eyes are dusty, and Dean can’t help lowering both flashlight and gun as he makes his slow, careful way past the duck-printed curtains. He thinks he can almost see it now, still from the corner of his eye, there, in the corner of the room by the adult-sized rocking chair, that same flash of white, just up to his knee, and a step behind, something larger, someone larger, a woman, white dress, long hair, arm -
The cough comes from behind him, whip-crack sharp in the late-morning stillness of the room. Dean’s shoes slip in the carpet as he spins around, and the gun trembles in his fingers before he tightens his grip around its handle.
“You should go now,” says the man at the nursery door. He has his hands up, and he sounds vaguely apologetic. He also looks entirely too familiar.
“I’ve seen you before.” There’s a tremor in his voice, Dean realizes; a slight bubbling beneath his vowels. “The other day at the bar. You know, the one on West Jackson,” he continues, and does his best not to frown. It’s something else too, something more, but he figures this’ll have to suffice for now.
The man ducks his head. “You’re probably right,” he shrugs. “And you really should go now. The moving trucks will be here soon. Don’t think the new owners will take kindly to strange men in their house, dude.”
“Like you.”
“Like us,” the man laughs. The palm he holds out is brown and broad. “And you’re the one with a gun.”
Dean swears.
“I’ll meet you at our bar,” the man winks. He has paused at the top of the stairs, and his grin is just visible over his shoulder.
The rocking chair is the only thing Dean sees when he turns back briefly, and he bites back a second curse as he makes his own way downstairs.
The itch is now an unpleasant wriggle down the length of his spine.
=-=-=
“The moving trucks came,” Dean announces as he slides into the seat across the man. “Just as I was pulling my truck away from the curb, in fact. How did you know?”
The man smiles. “I have my ways.”
Dean holds out his hand. “Dean Winchester.” Instinct, he thinks, and wants to laugh.
“Sam Wesson.” Sam Wesson’s palm is dry, his grip strong.
This time, Dean does laugh. “Like the gun?”
The corners of Sam’s lips quirk up further. “Yeah,” he drawls, “like the gun,” and it’s as though he’s letting Dean in on a little private joke Sam would otherwise savor alone.
Something in Dean’s chest clenches. “So,” he says instead, when he thinks he can, when he’s certain his voice will no longer crack at its seams, “why were you there?”
“Same reason you were there, I suspect.”
“I don’t even know why I was there,” Dean confesses after he’s sent the smiling waitress away with an order for a black Americano, no sugar. His skin feels too tight about his shoulders, an ill-fitting jacket of sorts, and he shrugs irritably even as he leans forward, rests his elbows on the cheap Formica tabletop.
“You do,” Sam snorts as he leans forward too. His brow is furrowed, and he matches Dean stare for stare.
“There’s something unnatural about the way those children are falling ill.” An involuntary whisper, this, hoarse from where it scrapes past the tightness of his throat.
Sam’s smile can only be described as satisfied. “And I’m here to find out how this is happening, and to stop it.”
“Why?”
“It’s what I do.” His smile broadens into a smirk as he sits back and gestures for Dean to go ahead and drink his newly-arrived coffee. “The family business, you might say.”
“So what do you think is happening?” The coffee is still a touch too hot, but Dean gulps half of it down anyway, winces at the burn of scalding liquid and frazzled nerves.
Sam shrugs. “Ghosts,” he says, tongue clicking audibly against the back of his teeth at the T.
Dean stirs his coffee three times simply to give his hands something to do, clockwise, precise. Then he sets the smudged metal teaspoon on the table with a noisy clatter and begins to stand. “It’s been interesting meeting you, Mr. Wes - ”
“No, wait.” Sam’s grip is painfully hard where it tightens on Dean’s wrist, strong enough to bruise, and for a moment Dean wonders if, when he rolls his cuffs back up after he gets back home, he will find a cluster of yellow-purple smudges about his wrist. “I swear I’m not pulling your leg. I think we might have a vengeful spirit on our hands. Read up about it when you get home. And read these.”
These, it turns out, is a loosely bundled stack of paper, which Sam takes from the empty seat beside him and places on the table.
“It’s a copy of everything I’ve gathered about this case,” Sam continues. He’s also gotten up, and his body is a long, hard line where it presses against Dean’s right side. He still has his hand about Dean’s wrist, thumb warm against the flutter of Dean’s pulse. “Notes, records of interviews with witnesses, everything. I’ll be in the parking lot outside tomorrow night, at eleven. Don’t be late. ”
=-=-=
Dean reads. He stays up all night, sits in front of the luminescent screen of his computer, and ignores five separate chidings from Lisa to turn in. He learns that there are people out there who believe in various things supernatural, who believe that the troubled dead may come back occasionally as vengeful spirits, that said spirits were known to cause trouble for the living.
He also ignores the way everything seems painfully familiar but yet isn’t quite, and how he almost has himself convinced that he does already know everything he’s reading even though he clearly doesn’t.
Sam’s material proves as interesting as everything else Dean has read, and considerably more coherent besides, with paper tabs stuck neatly to the margins of the pages thought more important than the rest and crucial bits of text marked out with neon highlighter. All the witnesses had reported the sightings of a lady in the child’s bedroom two days before the child in question had fallen ill, standing briefly by the child’s bed amidst a low, white mist before fading away, and all of them had agreed that said lady had borne a striking resemblance to the late Mrs. Carlson. An interview with the still-grieving Carlson in turn revealed that his Susie had always wanted a child; had, in fact, been desperate to have lil’ Annie, and that she had, in the week between Annie’s death and hers, blamed herself for her daughter’s demise before shutting herself up in the nursery. This, Sam had concluded in thick pen-strokes and broad, sloping handwriting at the bottom of a sheet of notepaper, made Susan Carlson their most probable ghostly candidate.
Dean thinks he follows Sam’s reasoning. It’s almost too easy how the pieces fall into place: woman dies from grief, only to return to take from others what she herself had been denied. Even the symptoms of the eight children match those of Annie Carlson before she died.
He meets Sam in the parking lot outside the bar as agreed. Sam’s grin when he sees Dean is broad in the yellow glare of the streetlight, and it widens into something maniacal and wild as he eases himself forward to meet Dean halfway.
“And now we have to salt and burn her remains,” Sam announces as he guides Dean to the black Dodge, hand warm through Dean’s jacket where he has clapped it to Dean’s shoulder, and Dean feels his lips stretch into an answering smile even as something in his belly flips.
=-=-=
Dean discovers that night that desecrating a grave is yet another thing in his recent list of things that feel familiar but aren’t quite. He digs his shovel deep into the earth, and when they finally unearth Susan Carlson’s coffin, he salts her corpse while Sam liberally douses it with gasoline. Sam lets him drop the lighted match.
He discovers that night, too, that Sam’s apparently living out of a room in the Super 8 that’s built on the outskirts of the town. Sam’s body is lean and hard and so very, very warm where it cradles Dean against the door of the motel room, and Dean digs his nails into the smooth skin and taut muscles of Sam’s shoulders even as he tilts his head to grant Sam greater access to his neck. It’s a while before they make it to the bed, and an even longer while before they fall asleep.
In the morning Dean wakes before Sam does, and he lies quietly for a while with his head tucked beneath Sam’s chin and with the fingers of his right hand tangled in the leather cord of the amulet Sam had given him right before they’d slept, a funny sort of horned face Sam said he felt would look better on Dean. He thinks about Lisa, remembers trying to hold her, one night in his third week, and how she’d felt so utterly wrong in his arms, her body too small and her bones too fragile, and he wonders if this, this thing he may possibly have with Sam now, is also something he should already have known but apparently no longer does.
They have breakfast eventually, or rather, brunch, fifteen minutes past noon in the diner just across the street from the Super 8. They order eggs and bacon, hash browns and pancakes, a pot of strong coffee to share, and they’re in the middle of furious elbow-scuffle for the first slice of buttered toast when they learn about the ninth child.
They have their food packed to go, and leave the diner for the motel shortly after.
=-=-=
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Dean grinds out. His packed breakfast is cold on the desk where he had left it upon re-entering the motel room, and he has, by his reckoning, paced the same length of green carpet for a little over an hour. “We’ve salted and burned her. We must have missed something.”
“She could have had a bit of her somewhere else,” Sam mutters absently. He’s working his way through tab after tab in rapid succession on his internet browser, and his hair is a rumpled mess after having raked his fingers through it one time too many. “We just need to find out where. It’s usually something sentimental, but it could be anything: hair in a locket, toenail clippings in the seam of a handkerchief - ”
Dean laughs, and he fancies it comes out short and sharp and vaguely hysterical. “Toenail clippings in a handkerchief? That’s fucked, man.”
“People,” says Sam, and his lips twitch into what Dean suspects is supposed to be a smirk but which better resembles a grimace. “They usually do the weirdest shit when they’re grieving, dude.”
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Dean repeats as he turns sharply on his heel and takes the first of another nine quick strides forward. “The pattern has changed. You heard the talk. The ninth child’s worse than all the rest, and her mother didn’t see any mysterious lady. She saw another child.”
“So we’re talking about another spirit?” Sam sighs. He has his face buried behind his hands, and he sounds muffled. “A new spirit? Two spirits working together?”
“Fuck,” says Dean, and upends the Styrofoam cup of cold coffee he’d been reaching for. “Fuck, Sam, that’s it.”
“What’s it?” Sam asks, eventually, after they’ve transmogrified what’s left of the roll of toilet paper in the washroom into a sodden hill of pulpy brown. He has a smudge on his cheek too, and a lock of hair sticking somewhat unattractively to his forehead, and Dean suddenly wants nothing more than to kiss him.
“The second spirit,” he says, instead, because he likes to think that his priorities right after all, and that he has discipline and restraint. “Sam, we never asked why she was so desperate for Annie Carlson to live.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Rustle of papers, flimsy and dry beneath his fingertips. “Here: Susan had another daughter even before she even became a Carlson. And here: ‘Girl, 5, Drowns in Freak Accident, Single Mother Distraught’. So what if the spirit of her first daughter never left her? I saw them, man, that day in the Carlson house just before we met; there was a woman, but there was something else too, something else small, small enough to be the size of a child.”
“And Susan could have been trying to protect the other children from her first daughter,” Sam finishes. “Which is why, with Susan gone, the attacks escalate. Shit, it all makes sense. And we’ve probably just made things worse.” He has settled himself before the laptop once more, now, and his fingers fly over the keyboard with a funny sort of grace. “So if we find out where her first daughter’s buried - ”
“Hate to burst your bubble, dude, but she wasn’t buried. She was cremated.” He’s giddy, is what he is, Dean thinks, positively delirious, and he grins as he holds the newspaper cut-out up against the jaundiced light of the motel lamp. “But I happen to know where Susan might have kept a lock of her hair.”
“You think?” Sam grins.
“Yeah,” says Dean, and he laughs. “Guess we’re breaking & entering again, Sammy.”
=-=-=
The Carlson place that Monday, Dean discovers, is very much different from how he had found it on Saturday. There is furniture now, for one, silent occupants in otherwise-empty rooms, dressed in cheerful upholstery and polished wood. The walls have pictures, too, smiling photographs in plastic frames and cheap oil paintings in gilded metal hiding the lighter rectangles left in the wallpaper where older pictures had once hung. Dean notes them all as they make a quick sweep about the house before heading up to the nursery, silently counts the various signs he spies of a life that has been interrupted and hastily left, the book left dog-eared on the arm of the couch, the dishes in the kitchen sink still soaking in anticipation of a later wash, the pink dress crumpled at the foot of the bed in what can only be the main bedroom.
The nursery, by contrast, is almost as Dean had first found it, if significantly less dusty. The walls are still striped with pastels, the cot and toy chest and rocking chair in their respective corners. The teddy bear’s no longer in the cot, but it’s close enough on the floor, and Dean bends to pick it up. Its fur is still as plush to touch as he remembers.
“Hair inside a teddy bear,” Sam remarks next to him, and Dean’s pretty certain that, if he were to turn and look, he’d see Sam rolling his eyes. “Dude, that’s just creepy.”
Dean snorts. “You said it yourself, man. People usually do the weirdest shit when they’re grieving.” He shrugs, holds the bear out with one hand and pulls his lighter out with his other. “So we’re torching this?”
“Yeah,” says Sam, which is (of course, Dean thinks) when things start to go wrong.
The first thing Dean notices as he picks himself up from where been thrown against the wall is that she’s small. Tiny, even, for a girl who was allegedly five when she drowned in a play pool one unfortunate day. She has her hair in pigtails and her hands in the embroidered pockets of her skirt, and she is frowning.
The second thing Dean notices is that he really should roll out of the way right about fucking now, because the rocking chair is rocking its way furiously across the room, and he suspects he’s about to learn just how it feels to have the heavy wooden curve of a rocker rock right across his ankles. He can just about spy the lighter on the floor to his left, an arm’s length away from the fallen teddy, and he tucks his legs in at the knees, counts, in one, two -
And blinks when the rocking chair suddenly goes flying across the room, away from Dean and into the wall across from him, one of its arms splintering on impact.
“Dean!” yells Sam, “the bear, quick!” as the girl turns around to face him instead, and Sam’s eyes are glowing white as he throws an arm out and the approaching girl stumbles and jerks into a reluctant halt, and Sam’s eyes are glowing white, and -
Sam, thinks Dean. Sammy, he thinks as he dives for both bear and lighter. You bitch, you lying bitch, you fucking fucker, he thinks, and watches both bear and girl go up in flames. And he thinks, I thought I lost you, you bastard; thinks as he stands and meets Sam’s - normal again, thank God, normal again, though God probably has nothing to do with it - eyes, what have you done, Sammy, what have you done.
“Dean,” says Sam, and he sounds so normal that something in Dean’s chest stutters. “Dean, I’m still me, dude.”
“Like hell you are,” says Dean, and it comes out sandpaper-rough as it squeezes past the catch in his throat. “Like hell you are,” he says again, and this time it’s louder, the words tripping past the tip of his tongue like so many broken, stunted things. “I saw you fall in, Sammy. You fell in.”
“But I came back, Dean” Sam whispers. “I came back, and I’m still me. More of me, maybe, but I’m still Sam Winchester. I’m still your brother, Dean.”
“You made me forget!” And here it is, Dean thinks, here’s where I yell, and he winces at the way his voice cracks and crumples.
“Damn it, Dean,” says Sam, and he’s right in Dean’s space, hands hot and hard where they curve around Dean’s shoulders. “Don’t you see? I wanted to give you what you wanted. I wanted to give you normal. I wanted you to be happy.”
“I wanted my brother back, you bastard,” Dean whispers, and allows himself to be pulled into the kiss.
It’s nothing like anything Dean remembers, not like what they’d had long ago, before his sojourn to hell and Sam’s thing with Ruby had ruined it all, and certainly not like any of the kisses they’d shared the previous night when Dean still hadn’t known himself. Sam’s mouth is hot and hard as he presses it against Dean’s, scrape of teeth against the inside of a lip and a tongue that’s slick and obscene, and Dean fists his hands in the lapels of Sam’s over-shirt and gives back as good as he can, relishes the dig of the amulet where it is caught between their chests.
They’re both breathing hard by the time they finally part.
“And now?” Dean asks, because he has to.
“And now I need you, Dean,” Sam tells him, voice whiskey-raw, and Dean has to bite his lip to stop himself from leaning in again. “I need you now. I’m still me, Dean, I swear I am, but I also control hell now. I have Lucifer’s powers too, see? Only something, someone, summoned me topside, and I need to find out who that person is. And you’re the only one I trust enough to help me.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
Sam’s grin is wide and easy as he steps away. “You will,” he says, and he sounds as certain as Dean has known him to sound about anything. “You know where to find me.”
Then he disappears.
=-=-=
Dean stays in Cicero for six more days. He quits his job, does the various things he imagines people usually think of when they talk about putting one’s affairs into order. He reads, too, dusty, leather-bound books from the surrounding libraries, obscure websites he manages to pull up on his computer screen, anything and everything he can find that has the slightest bit to do with hell and the apocalypse.
On the sixth day he heads into the garage. The Impala’s easy enough to find, now that he actually remembers that she’s there under the tarp, and she just about purrs when he starts her up for the first time after days of careful servicing. The last thing he does is write Lisa an apologetic note, thanking her for putting up with him and promising to be in touch. He leaves her his number should she ever need to contact him again, and sits in the kitchen for over an hour after he leaves his note by the breadbox for Lisa and Ben to find before breakfast because he feels sorry about the way he’s leaving, about leaving at all.
He just doesn’t feel sorry enough.
Dean stands at precisely seven o’clock in the morning, when he hears the first beep of the alarm clock from the floor above. The drive down the I-70E is smooth enough, and certainly far more pleasant than his last journey down it through night and rain which he (now) recalls making. It’s almost evening by the time he pulls up outside the cemetery in Stull, windows rolled down to let in the breeze and Led Zeppelin playing full-blast, and he grins when he sees Sam lounging by the cemetery gate, waiting.
“Knew you’d come,” Sam tells him through the window when he gets into speaking distance.
“You did,” Dean agrees, and laughs as he reaches over to unlock the door to the shotgun seat. “Get in, Sammy. We’ve got work to do.”
FIN.
Author: erushi
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 4827
Summary: Dean can't quite remember anything of his life before coming to Cicero. He's come to accept this as his lot in life. However, when children in the town start falling sick, and a stranger who seems to know more than he lets on appears, he begins to question.
Author's notes: For faunaana for the spn_j2_xmas exchange. Here's my attempt at blending one of his/her prompts (good!post-hell!powers!Sam and smart!Dean) with an s1/s2-style case fic. AU after s5, but with some detail taken from episode 6.01. Title from Simon & Garfunkel's 'Sounds of Silence'.
The alarm no longer startles Dean in the morning. He’s grown used to its frantic string of beeps, to its rectangular, plastic body that always feels cool to his sleep-warm fingers, to its digital 07:00 which blinks crisp and green back at him when finally holds it up. The cold of the bare floorboards no longer bothers him quite as much as it once did either, and he doesn’t wince the way he used to as he pads to the bathroom and its even colder tiles, splashes his face with water and brushes his teeth, rinse, gargle, spit.
Lisa isn’t in bed by the time he returns to the bedroom to dress, and he knows she’s gone to wake Ben. He tries not to feel guilty about the way he hasn’t kissed her good morning the way he keeps feeling as though he should, makes his way downstairs instead to slice up the bread for toast and to fry up a few eggs. Ben will protest twice before finally deigning to shove his covers aside, and by the time both of them make their way into the kitchen, it will be twenty-five minutes past seven, and Dean will have most of breakfast laid out. He’s had exactly three months and two weeks to get his part of the routine correct, and he thinks he might even have come to like this still-unfamiliar sense of regularity after having tasted it for a hundred and five days that he doesn’t count.
Work’s in the construction industry; it is simple, so simple Dean likes to think he could have done it in his sleep. Like everything else he’s since become accustomed to it too, to the high whine of the drills and the steady tap-tap-tapping of his hammer as he works his way down a row of nails. He has sandwiches for lunch, roast beef on rye with mustard for a couple of dollars, and he washes it down with a can of flat-tasting cola bought from the same store for another sixty-five cents more.
At a quarter past six he sets his tools aside, joins the rest of the men for drinks at their usual place on West Jackson Street. He’s just the Braeden girl’s old boyfriend to them, joined up with the army after a whirlwind romance and only just got back from Afghanistan a couple ’a months ago, but that’s more than enough for them to see him as one of theirs. Dean doesn’t mind them thinking that: it’s as good as any explanation he thinks he could have come up with, and besides, he doesn’t have any of the answers anyway.
(He doesn’t like trying to think about Before.)
He smiles as he slides into the stool next onto Sid. Sid’s both colleague and neighbor, and the man buys Dean a beer in the first round, lets Dean buy him his in the second, and tells Dean about his nephew in another state who wants to enlist straight out of high school, he’s crazy, that boy, but it might just make a man out of him. Dean sips his two beers as he lets Sid talk, hums and grunts in the right places.
The other men have long moved on from sharing their gripes about the day’s work by the time Sid’s done listing the various follies of suburban youth. It’s Richie Carlson they’re talking about when Dean shifts his attention back to them, lost his baby daughter three weeks ago and his wife another week after, the poor bastard.
Moved to the other end of town, didn’t he?
Wouldn’t you? Carlson loved his Susan, he did. Don’t imagine he’d want to stay on in the same house she died.
New family moving in this weekend, I hear.
Hope they ain’t got children. Fourth child on that street down with that funny flu. Probably what did Carlson’s baby girl in as well.
There’s an itch at the base of Dean’s skull. It’s a strange, niggling twitchiness, one he can’t rid himself of even though he digs at the spot with the pad of his thumb. It even follows him to the parking lot when he finally does excuse himself for the evening. He’s still rubbing at it when his elbow narrowly misses a man who enters the bar the same time as Dean exits, and he absently keeps at it while he mumbles a vague apology before hurrying to his truck, drives back to Lisa’s with only one hand on the wheel.
He falls asleep with his knuckles kneading into his nape.
=-=-=
The weekend takes Dean down the street which runs past the old Carlson place. The area’s quieter than he remembers, the playground in the tiny park empty. It’d been the headlines that morning, how the neighborhood pre-school will shut for a week now that the eighth child had taken ill. Dean had read it while standing in the line to pay for the box of health teas Lisa had asked him to buy, and it now strikes him that all eight of them live on the same street he’s driving down that very moment. It’s not a pleasant thought.
The base of his skull still itches.
He spies the flash of white (again, he thinks, the third time in as many times he’s driven by) just as he pulls his truck up alongside the curb outside the now-empty house. It lingers at the corners of his vision, always just a touch out of sight, and he pauses for a bit after he heaves himself out of the driver’s seat, stands by the cab of his truck with his fingers still curled around the handle of the open door and just breathes.
There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment. He thinks this should surprise him - he certainly doesn’t remember keeping a flashlight there - but it just feels familiar somehow, much like the gun he finds secreted away beneath the driver’s seat. He takes them both with him up the driveway and into the still-empty house, relishes the heft of either in his hands, and only sets them aside briefly when he has to pick the lock to the front door. He isn’t very much surprised either by the way he automatically keeps his arms out before him as he climbs the single flight of stairs to the dimly-lit landing above, by how he crosses them at the wrists, gun-hand on top, steadied, its weight supported. The house is as empty on the inside as it looks to be on the outside, and he finds himself taking comfort in the peculiar not-quite-familiarity of it all.
(Just like old times, eh, he begins to say at the top step, but there’s no one behind him when he turns around to look, and a name he can’t quite recall catches in his throat.)
Dean blinks.
The first room to his left bears all the hallmarks of a nursery, pastel-striped wallpaper, child’s cot, toy chest all. It’s also the first room he’s found in the house thus far that’s still fully furnished. There’s even a teddy bear still sitting on the embroidered blanket in the cot, its fur still plush even though its glass eyes are dusty, and Dean can’t help lowering both flashlight and gun as he makes his slow, careful way past the duck-printed curtains. He thinks he can almost see it now, still from the corner of his eye, there, in the corner of the room by the adult-sized rocking chair, that same flash of white, just up to his knee, and a step behind, something larger, someone larger, a woman, white dress, long hair, arm -
The cough comes from behind him, whip-crack sharp in the late-morning stillness of the room. Dean’s shoes slip in the carpet as he spins around, and the gun trembles in his fingers before he tightens his grip around its handle.
“You should go now,” says the man at the nursery door. He has his hands up, and he sounds vaguely apologetic. He also looks entirely too familiar.
“I’ve seen you before.” There’s a tremor in his voice, Dean realizes; a slight bubbling beneath his vowels. “The other day at the bar. You know, the one on West Jackson,” he continues, and does his best not to frown. It’s something else too, something more, but he figures this’ll have to suffice for now.
The man ducks his head. “You’re probably right,” he shrugs. “And you really should go now. The moving trucks will be here soon. Don’t think the new owners will take kindly to strange men in their house, dude.”
“Like you.”
“Like us,” the man laughs. The palm he holds out is brown and broad. “And you’re the one with a gun.”
Dean swears.
“I’ll meet you at our bar,” the man winks. He has paused at the top of the stairs, and his grin is just visible over his shoulder.
The rocking chair is the only thing Dean sees when he turns back briefly, and he bites back a second curse as he makes his own way downstairs.
The itch is now an unpleasant wriggle down the length of his spine.
=-=-=
“The moving trucks came,” Dean announces as he slides into the seat across the man. “Just as I was pulling my truck away from the curb, in fact. How did you know?”
The man smiles. “I have my ways.”
Dean holds out his hand. “Dean Winchester.” Instinct, he thinks, and wants to laugh.
“Sam Wesson.” Sam Wesson’s palm is dry, his grip strong.
This time, Dean does laugh. “Like the gun?”
The corners of Sam’s lips quirk up further. “Yeah,” he drawls, “like the gun,” and it’s as though he’s letting Dean in on a little private joke Sam would otherwise savor alone.
Something in Dean’s chest clenches. “So,” he says instead, when he thinks he can, when he’s certain his voice will no longer crack at its seams, “why were you there?”
“Same reason you were there, I suspect.”
“I don’t even know why I was there,” Dean confesses after he’s sent the smiling waitress away with an order for a black Americano, no sugar. His skin feels too tight about his shoulders, an ill-fitting jacket of sorts, and he shrugs irritably even as he leans forward, rests his elbows on the cheap Formica tabletop.
“You do,” Sam snorts as he leans forward too. His brow is furrowed, and he matches Dean stare for stare.
“There’s something unnatural about the way those children are falling ill.” An involuntary whisper, this, hoarse from where it scrapes past the tightness of his throat.
Sam’s smile can only be described as satisfied. “And I’m here to find out how this is happening, and to stop it.”
“Why?”
“It’s what I do.” His smile broadens into a smirk as he sits back and gestures for Dean to go ahead and drink his newly-arrived coffee. “The family business, you might say.”
“So what do you think is happening?” The coffee is still a touch too hot, but Dean gulps half of it down anyway, winces at the burn of scalding liquid and frazzled nerves.
Sam shrugs. “Ghosts,” he says, tongue clicking audibly against the back of his teeth at the T.
Dean stirs his coffee three times simply to give his hands something to do, clockwise, precise. Then he sets the smudged metal teaspoon on the table with a noisy clatter and begins to stand. “It’s been interesting meeting you, Mr. Wes - ”
“No, wait.” Sam’s grip is painfully hard where it tightens on Dean’s wrist, strong enough to bruise, and for a moment Dean wonders if, when he rolls his cuffs back up after he gets back home, he will find a cluster of yellow-purple smudges about his wrist. “I swear I’m not pulling your leg. I think we might have a vengeful spirit on our hands. Read up about it when you get home. And read these.”
These, it turns out, is a loosely bundled stack of paper, which Sam takes from the empty seat beside him and places on the table.
“It’s a copy of everything I’ve gathered about this case,” Sam continues. He’s also gotten up, and his body is a long, hard line where it presses against Dean’s right side. He still has his hand about Dean’s wrist, thumb warm against the flutter of Dean’s pulse. “Notes, records of interviews with witnesses, everything. I’ll be in the parking lot outside tomorrow night, at eleven. Don’t be late. ”
=-=-=
Dean reads. He stays up all night, sits in front of the luminescent screen of his computer, and ignores five separate chidings from Lisa to turn in. He learns that there are people out there who believe in various things supernatural, who believe that the troubled dead may come back occasionally as vengeful spirits, that said spirits were known to cause trouble for the living.
He also ignores the way everything seems painfully familiar but yet isn’t quite, and how he almost has himself convinced that he does already know everything he’s reading even though he clearly doesn’t.
Sam’s material proves as interesting as everything else Dean has read, and considerably more coherent besides, with paper tabs stuck neatly to the margins of the pages thought more important than the rest and crucial bits of text marked out with neon highlighter. All the witnesses had reported the sightings of a lady in the child’s bedroom two days before the child in question had fallen ill, standing briefly by the child’s bed amidst a low, white mist before fading away, and all of them had agreed that said lady had borne a striking resemblance to the late Mrs. Carlson. An interview with the still-grieving Carlson in turn revealed that his Susie had always wanted a child; had, in fact, been desperate to have lil’ Annie, and that she had, in the week between Annie’s death and hers, blamed herself for her daughter’s demise before shutting herself up in the nursery. This, Sam had concluded in thick pen-strokes and broad, sloping handwriting at the bottom of a sheet of notepaper, made Susan Carlson their most probable ghostly candidate.
Dean thinks he follows Sam’s reasoning. It’s almost too easy how the pieces fall into place: woman dies from grief, only to return to take from others what she herself had been denied. Even the symptoms of the eight children match those of Annie Carlson before she died.
He meets Sam in the parking lot outside the bar as agreed. Sam’s grin when he sees Dean is broad in the yellow glare of the streetlight, and it widens into something maniacal and wild as he eases himself forward to meet Dean halfway.
“And now we have to salt and burn her remains,” Sam announces as he guides Dean to the black Dodge, hand warm through Dean’s jacket where he has clapped it to Dean’s shoulder, and Dean feels his lips stretch into an answering smile even as something in his belly flips.
=-=-=
Dean discovers that night that desecrating a grave is yet another thing in his recent list of things that feel familiar but aren’t quite. He digs his shovel deep into the earth, and when they finally unearth Susan Carlson’s coffin, he salts her corpse while Sam liberally douses it with gasoline. Sam lets him drop the lighted match.
He discovers that night, too, that Sam’s apparently living out of a room in the Super 8 that’s built on the outskirts of the town. Sam’s body is lean and hard and so very, very warm where it cradles Dean against the door of the motel room, and Dean digs his nails into the smooth skin and taut muscles of Sam’s shoulders even as he tilts his head to grant Sam greater access to his neck. It’s a while before they make it to the bed, and an even longer while before they fall asleep.
In the morning Dean wakes before Sam does, and he lies quietly for a while with his head tucked beneath Sam’s chin and with the fingers of his right hand tangled in the leather cord of the amulet Sam had given him right before they’d slept, a funny sort of horned face Sam said he felt would look better on Dean. He thinks about Lisa, remembers trying to hold her, one night in his third week, and how she’d felt so utterly wrong in his arms, her body too small and her bones too fragile, and he wonders if this, this thing he may possibly have with Sam now, is also something he should already have known but apparently no longer does.
They have breakfast eventually, or rather, brunch, fifteen minutes past noon in the diner just across the street from the Super 8. They order eggs and bacon, hash browns and pancakes, a pot of strong coffee to share, and they’re in the middle of furious elbow-scuffle for the first slice of buttered toast when they learn about the ninth child.
They have their food packed to go, and leave the diner for the motel shortly after.
=-=-=
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Dean grinds out. His packed breakfast is cold on the desk where he had left it upon re-entering the motel room, and he has, by his reckoning, paced the same length of green carpet for a little over an hour. “We’ve salted and burned her. We must have missed something.”
“She could have had a bit of her somewhere else,” Sam mutters absently. He’s working his way through tab after tab in rapid succession on his internet browser, and his hair is a rumpled mess after having raked his fingers through it one time too many. “We just need to find out where. It’s usually something sentimental, but it could be anything: hair in a locket, toenail clippings in the seam of a handkerchief - ”
Dean laughs, and he fancies it comes out short and sharp and vaguely hysterical. “Toenail clippings in a handkerchief? That’s fucked, man.”
“People,” says Sam, and his lips twitch into what Dean suspects is supposed to be a smirk but which better resembles a grimace. “They usually do the weirdest shit when they’re grieving, dude.”
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Dean repeats as he turns sharply on his heel and takes the first of another nine quick strides forward. “The pattern has changed. You heard the talk. The ninth child’s worse than all the rest, and her mother didn’t see any mysterious lady. She saw another child.”
“So we’re talking about another spirit?” Sam sighs. He has his face buried behind his hands, and he sounds muffled. “A new spirit? Two spirits working together?”
“Fuck,” says Dean, and upends the Styrofoam cup of cold coffee he’d been reaching for. “Fuck, Sam, that’s it.”
“What’s it?” Sam asks, eventually, after they’ve transmogrified what’s left of the roll of toilet paper in the washroom into a sodden hill of pulpy brown. He has a smudge on his cheek too, and a lock of hair sticking somewhat unattractively to his forehead, and Dean suddenly wants nothing more than to kiss him.
“The second spirit,” he says, instead, because he likes to think that his priorities right after all, and that he has discipline and restraint. “Sam, we never asked why she was so desperate for Annie Carlson to live.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Rustle of papers, flimsy and dry beneath his fingertips. “Here: Susan had another daughter even before she even became a Carlson. And here: ‘Girl, 5, Drowns in Freak Accident, Single Mother Distraught’. So what if the spirit of her first daughter never left her? I saw them, man, that day in the Carlson house just before we met; there was a woman, but there was something else too, something else small, small enough to be the size of a child.”
“And Susan could have been trying to protect the other children from her first daughter,” Sam finishes. “Which is why, with Susan gone, the attacks escalate. Shit, it all makes sense. And we’ve probably just made things worse.” He has settled himself before the laptop once more, now, and his fingers fly over the keyboard with a funny sort of grace. “So if we find out where her first daughter’s buried - ”
“Hate to burst your bubble, dude, but she wasn’t buried. She was cremated.” He’s giddy, is what he is, Dean thinks, positively delirious, and he grins as he holds the newspaper cut-out up against the jaundiced light of the motel lamp. “But I happen to know where Susan might have kept a lock of her hair.”
“You think?” Sam grins.
“Yeah,” says Dean, and he laughs. “Guess we’re breaking & entering again, Sammy.”
=-=-=
The Carlson place that Monday, Dean discovers, is very much different from how he had found it on Saturday. There is furniture now, for one, silent occupants in otherwise-empty rooms, dressed in cheerful upholstery and polished wood. The walls have pictures, too, smiling photographs in plastic frames and cheap oil paintings in gilded metal hiding the lighter rectangles left in the wallpaper where older pictures had once hung. Dean notes them all as they make a quick sweep about the house before heading up to the nursery, silently counts the various signs he spies of a life that has been interrupted and hastily left, the book left dog-eared on the arm of the couch, the dishes in the kitchen sink still soaking in anticipation of a later wash, the pink dress crumpled at the foot of the bed in what can only be the main bedroom.
The nursery, by contrast, is almost as Dean had first found it, if significantly less dusty. The walls are still striped with pastels, the cot and toy chest and rocking chair in their respective corners. The teddy bear’s no longer in the cot, but it’s close enough on the floor, and Dean bends to pick it up. Its fur is still as plush to touch as he remembers.
“Hair inside a teddy bear,” Sam remarks next to him, and Dean’s pretty certain that, if he were to turn and look, he’d see Sam rolling his eyes. “Dude, that’s just creepy.”
Dean snorts. “You said it yourself, man. People usually do the weirdest shit when they’re grieving.” He shrugs, holds the bear out with one hand and pulls his lighter out with his other. “So we’re torching this?”
“Yeah,” says Sam, which is (of course, Dean thinks) when things start to go wrong.
The first thing Dean notices as he picks himself up from where been thrown against the wall is that she’s small. Tiny, even, for a girl who was allegedly five when she drowned in a play pool one unfortunate day. She has her hair in pigtails and her hands in the embroidered pockets of her skirt, and she is frowning.
The second thing Dean notices is that he really should roll out of the way right about fucking now, because the rocking chair is rocking its way furiously across the room, and he suspects he’s about to learn just how it feels to have the heavy wooden curve of a rocker rock right across his ankles. He can just about spy the lighter on the floor to his left, an arm’s length away from the fallen teddy, and he tucks his legs in at the knees, counts, in one, two -
And blinks when the rocking chair suddenly goes flying across the room, away from Dean and into the wall across from him, one of its arms splintering on impact.
“Dean!” yells Sam, “the bear, quick!” as the girl turns around to face him instead, and Sam’s eyes are glowing white as he throws an arm out and the approaching girl stumbles and jerks into a reluctant halt, and Sam’s eyes are glowing white, and -
Sam, thinks Dean. Sammy, he thinks as he dives for both bear and lighter. You bitch, you lying bitch, you fucking fucker, he thinks, and watches both bear and girl go up in flames. And he thinks, I thought I lost you, you bastard; thinks as he stands and meets Sam’s - normal again, thank God, normal again, though God probably has nothing to do with it - eyes, what have you done, Sammy, what have you done.
“Dean,” says Sam, and he sounds so normal that something in Dean’s chest stutters. “Dean, I’m still me, dude.”
“Like hell you are,” says Dean, and it comes out sandpaper-rough as it squeezes past the catch in his throat. “Like hell you are,” he says again, and this time it’s louder, the words tripping past the tip of his tongue like so many broken, stunted things. “I saw you fall in, Sammy. You fell in.”
“But I came back, Dean” Sam whispers. “I came back, and I’m still me. More of me, maybe, but I’m still Sam Winchester. I’m still your brother, Dean.”
“You made me forget!” And here it is, Dean thinks, here’s where I yell, and he winces at the way his voice cracks and crumples.
“Damn it, Dean,” says Sam, and he’s right in Dean’s space, hands hot and hard where they curve around Dean’s shoulders. “Don’t you see? I wanted to give you what you wanted. I wanted to give you normal. I wanted you to be happy.”
“I wanted my brother back, you bastard,” Dean whispers, and allows himself to be pulled into the kiss.
It’s nothing like anything Dean remembers, not like what they’d had long ago, before his sojourn to hell and Sam’s thing with Ruby had ruined it all, and certainly not like any of the kisses they’d shared the previous night when Dean still hadn’t known himself. Sam’s mouth is hot and hard as he presses it against Dean’s, scrape of teeth against the inside of a lip and a tongue that’s slick and obscene, and Dean fists his hands in the lapels of Sam’s over-shirt and gives back as good as he can, relishes the dig of the amulet where it is caught between their chests.
They’re both breathing hard by the time they finally part.
“And now?” Dean asks, because he has to.
“And now I need you, Dean,” Sam tells him, voice whiskey-raw, and Dean has to bite his lip to stop himself from leaning in again. “I need you now. I’m still me, Dean, I swear I am, but I also control hell now. I have Lucifer’s powers too, see? Only something, someone, summoned me topside, and I need to find out who that person is. And you’re the only one I trust enough to help me.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
Sam’s grin is wide and easy as he steps away. “You will,” he says, and he sounds as certain as Dean has known him to sound about anything. “You know where to find me.”
Then he disappears.
=-=-=
Dean stays in Cicero for six more days. He quits his job, does the various things he imagines people usually think of when they talk about putting one’s affairs into order. He reads, too, dusty, leather-bound books from the surrounding libraries, obscure websites he manages to pull up on his computer screen, anything and everything he can find that has the slightest bit to do with hell and the apocalypse.
On the sixth day he heads into the garage. The Impala’s easy enough to find, now that he actually remembers that she’s there under the tarp, and she just about purrs when he starts her up for the first time after days of careful servicing. The last thing he does is write Lisa an apologetic note, thanking her for putting up with him and promising to be in touch. He leaves her his number should she ever need to contact him again, and sits in the kitchen for over an hour after he leaves his note by the breadbox for Lisa and Ben to find before breakfast because he feels sorry about the way he’s leaving, about leaving at all.
He just doesn’t feel sorry enough.
Dean stands at precisely seven o’clock in the morning, when he hears the first beep of the alarm clock from the floor above. The drive down the I-70E is smooth enough, and certainly far more pleasant than his last journey down it through night and rain which he (now) recalls making. It’s almost evening by the time he pulls up outside the cemetery in Stull, windows rolled down to let in the breeze and Led Zeppelin playing full-blast, and he grins when he sees Sam lounging by the cemetery gate, waiting.
“Knew you’d come,” Sam tells him through the window when he gets into speaking distance.
“You did,” Dean agrees, and laughs as he reaches over to unlock the door to the shotgun seat. “Get in, Sammy. We’ve got work to do.”
FIN.