Breathing In - Chapter Six
He's no stranger to Sam hiding things. Hell, kid's been hiding things since before he had his first wet dream (and maybe it's a little strange that Dean know exactly when that it is, but whatever).
This is the first time he finds it hard to push though and demand answers; dead girlfriend's a card Dean can't really trump. He bites back the words, settles in for the long wait. If he sticks close, nothing's going to happen to Sam. It's the first promise he ever made, years ago, and maybe the only one he'll really keep.
-
Meantime, a recon team discovers an infestation of changelings up in Midpines, a small town on the edge of Yosemite. It's a high priority mission. Urgent, because unlike other attacks, they need to make sure the community remains unaware of the hunt. They have to go in undercover and take care of the freaks as quietly as possible.
Changelings are whole different level of fucked up. They get people where they're weakest, inspire paranoia like no other and break down morale about as fast as you'd expect from a monster that pretends to be your darling little snookums. There's been more than one headline-making story of a mother or father who murdered their own child in a fit of insane suspicion, more than one burn-scarred kid who's ended up an orphan after their parent kills themselves out of shame.
Dean hates changelings, hates them down in his marrow.
It puts him in a bad mood, has him snapping at his team more than usual as they prepare to leave. Sam starts giving him concerned looks, tries to soft-voice talk to him like he's a victim on a hunt. Sammy with the shoulder to cry on. Sammy the good listener.
Dean shrugs him off as they all briefly discuss how to handle the changelings.
"Why is this even a question?" Connolly says, striking a match and lighting his cigarette. He smokes it for a moment, handless, squinting around at them all. "Let's just torch 'em."
"We can't just 'torch them'," Sam says, and Dean, watching Connolly's shoulders twitch in irritation, wishes he would for once try not to sound so goddamn superior. "That county's been in a drought since Spring."
Connolly's mouth twists into a sneer. "Okay, thanks for the report, Samantha-with-the-weather. And now back to the relevant shit."
Sam's expression goes cold. "I'd say it's pretty relevant unless you want to be responsible for burning Yosemite to the ground."
Dean jumps in before Connolly can say anything stupid about Smoky the Bear. "This isn't up for debate - we are under strict no open fire orders anyway."
"How the fuck are we supposed to kill a bunch of Changelings without setting them on fire?" Hawthorne asks from the corner, direct and to the point. The others echo her question with nods and curses.
As Dean considers it, his eyes wander back to his brother, who he finds looking right back at him. After a moment, they start to grin, and it's like a wildfire in his veins, this kinetic synchronicity, this remembered link.
"I have an idea," he says.
-
Midpines is less a town and more a name on the map. It doesn't have a downtown, and most of the services and shops are nestled along the Central Yosemite Highway in amongst granite bluffs and towering pines. Homes are scattered here and there off narrow, unmarked side roads. It's basically a hunter's worst nightmare for a search and destroy mission.
They take three separate, non-military vehicles into the area, two Ford pickups and a middle-aged GMC Jimmy that Dean will never cop to liking.
Dean breaks them up into three teams before leaving camp, which with this unit is its own minor headache. Kite and Ernst can't go together because they'd end up dead within the hour. He didn't want to send anyone off with Gene alone because he's pushy and possibly off his rocker. And, of course, he's not going to let Sam go off with anyone other than himself.
In the end, he puts Gene with Connolly, who can handle himself and has a sort of massive disregard for the Marine Corps anyway, being an Army brat. Hawthorne goes with Kite, which leaves Ernst with him and Sam.
Dean doesn't know much about Ernst, which is probably a failing for him as unit leader, but he can't help it. Every time he tries talking to the guy, they end up just standing around in a tense silence. The kid's young, but he's not dumb like Kite, exactly; he's absent-minded, which Dean kinda hates more. Dumb can be reliable in its own way. Head-in-the-clouds just gets people killed.
Ernst carries a camera on every mission and can often be found standing on the fringes after the action, thoughtfully snapping pictures of everything from gruesome shit like the clawed-out chest of a werewolf victim to an oil slick on wet pavement. Dean doesn't get him and has no desire to; he just wants him out of his war.
-
Driving a non-military vehicle, he and Sam both in civvies, it almost gets Dean feeling nostalgic and shit and within an hour on the road his mood's improved by leaps.
Jethro Tull's on the radio, piping them through hostile hills with skittering psychedelia. Sam's slouching in the passenger seat with his knees against the dash with a state map of California spread over his lap. He's wearing a hoodie, and it's bizarre how quickly Dean has gotten used to him in uniform.
"So what are we looking for here?" Sam says as they pass the population sign for Midpines. They've got both windows cranked down, Dean's elbow sticking out the driver's side, and Sam sitting real obvious, bolt upright and alert, as if he hadn't spent several years pretending to be a civilian.
"The Mother usually stashes the real kids underground. Out-of-the-way location so as to attract less notice."
Sam looks around at their hilly, tree-covered surroundings. "Dean, every house in this town is an out-of-the-way location. What are we supposed to do here, canvass door-to-door?"
"Uh, we sure as hell ain't gonna do that," Dean says. "People will know what's up immediately. It's not exactly a secret that USHC's in the region."
"Well, what do you propose, then?"
"They start with the most vulnerable," Ernst says from the backseat, and Dean almost jumps. He forgot the kid was back there.
He's ready to sneer, but Sam's already twisting in his seat and fixing the kid with that soulful accepting look he remembers so well from their teenage years. (Sammy with the shoulder to cry on. Sammy the good listener.)
"What do you mean, Carl?"
Carl. Jesus.
"Well," Ernst says hesitantly. "The first families they target, they're almost always single mothers or people who've separated. But to know who those are, the Mother would have to be someone who with a reason to be in everyone's business."
Sam's got a thoughtful look on his face and he starts talking straight past Dean's ear to the backseat.
Dean's willing to admit it's decent theory, but it still doesn't get them any closer to figuring out who or where the Mother is.
He cuts off the conversation, "It'll be easier to track down the kids and work backwards. There're more of them, and they usually can't pass as good as the Mother."
"I could," Ernst stops, shifting nervously in his seat. Dean eyes him skeptically in the rearview mirror, which just seems to make the fidgeting worse.
"Go on," Sam prompts, for some reason casting Dean a Category 3 bitchface. Dean irritably mouths what? but gets no further response.
"I could make the rounds with my camera. You said their reflection sometimes shows their true self, right?" That last is directed at Dean. He nods grudgingly. "Well, I've got a mirror lens that might work on them."
Dean says, "And you're just going to, what? Hope no one minds you snooping around taking photos of all the little kiddies?"
Okay, he feels a little guilty when the kid deflates. He catches Sam's glare and twitches out a shrug. Alright, alright.
They pass a gas station, an old one that's got hand-written signs on planks of wood and a bar instead of a general store. Parked at one of the ancient round pumps is an ice cream truck, tall, boxy, and multi-colored. Dean unconsciously slows the car.
When he glances over, Sam's already looking at it, mouth quirked and considering.
-
Dean should feel like a bit of a creep, rolling through town in a white van giving small children ice cream under false pretenses, but the kids will never know the difference and it's not like they're drugging the ice cream or anything.
Besides, seeing Sam standing at the window in an apron and perky folded hat with his head ducked to fit under the van ceiling could never not be worth it.
"Ease up, Nancy Drew," he says after Sam finally hands over a Klondike bar after giving the kid a hard searching stare. "You're gonna scare them."
"Dean, I don't think you're taking this seriously." Sam casts a cold eye over the gaggle of fidgeting children. "Any one of them could be it."
Dean shakes his head. Changelings are predictable because they have this uncanny valley simplistic understanding of kids and obsessively stick to it. In their hive mind, every child calls their mother mommy and wants nothing more than to constantly play and eat sweets. If Dean had any doubts as to the freaks' opinion of humanity, murder and mayhem aside, changelings' soulless caricatures would remove them.
"Dude, trust me, you'll know one when you see it. They're like pod people minus the subtlety. We see a kid acting strange, we get Ernst to confirm with his camera. Easy as pie." Mm, pie. He hasn't had any in what feels like forever.
He helps himself to some ice cream, loading a perfectly spherical scoop of strawberry onto a wafer cone, and eats it while watching Sam play the most awkward and grim ice cream man in the history of the business.
"How come I have to do all the work?" Sam demands finally, casting him a scowl.
Dean gives a leisurely lick and shrugs. "Hey, I'm handling the cash. Can't do both, it's unsanitary."
Sam looks over again, glancing at his mouth and away. His ears are red. Dean wonders if he has ice cream on his face and wipes it with the back of his hand.
"Dean," Sam says suddenly, voice tense and eyes trained out, and Dean straightens up, all thoughts about jokes and ice cream forgotten.
A small boy is standing about ten feet from the shrinking line of kids, looking straight at them. Everything from his face to the way he's holding himself is unnaturally still, his arms held stiff at his sides and expression empty.
"Yeah," Dean says. He pounds a fist on the panel separating them from the front of the van. "Ernst?"
"Hold on," comes the call. He can hear him shifting in the seat and fumbling with his camera and then: "Christ -- yeah, it's definitely one of them."
Dean nods. "Okay, that's our cue to close up shop." He sticks his head out the window and calls down, "Sorry kids, we're out of ice cream," and slides the glass shut, ignoring the chorus of groans and complaints from below.
The children start to scatter, some on foot, some by bike. Through the small milling crowd, they watch the freak stand by, blank-faced and unmoving. When it finally turns to go, they follow it, on foot and out of sight.