Fic: Out Here in the Fields
Out Here in the Fields
Summary: Victor interviews Sam. Repeatedly. (AU, lots of talking.)
Spoilers: Victor/FBI-related plot points.
Warnings: Gore, suggestions of child abuse
Note: Since I came to SPN late, I missed out on a lot of great characters who were killed off. Henriksen is easily one of my top three favorite dead guys, and I just really wanted to write something with him in it. This has been sitting on my hard drive for weeks and I kept forgetting about it, so I've cleaned it up a bit and tried to make it presentable.
Out Here in the Fields
________________
I don’t need to fight
to prove I’m right
I don’t need to be forgiven
________________
-1-
Victor doesn’t like it here. He sits, elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of his face, and glares indiscriminately at the room. He’s been here for a while, sitting nearly motionless as the sun slides down the sky and the light dims. Long shadows crawl over everything, darkening the blood on the walls, stretching up to meet the rust-brown spray across the ceiling.
Victor’s fingers tighten, just slightly.
There’s blood on the ceiling.
He’d overheard, hours ago, the local PD muttering about monsters and butchery, and knew better than to hold it against them. Things like this were not supposed to happen. Even people who saw ugliness and catastrophe every day of their lives couldn’t be confronted with something like this and be expected to deal without going a little overboard on the metaphors. Despite the opinions of some, Victor is capable of letting things slide. Once in a while.
The muttering had been going on at about the same time that someone else was being noisily sick around the side of the house. Victor knew better than to draw attention to that, either.
Reidy had been angry. Quietly so, and not at anyone in particular. He’d just stood in the center of the room, in the middle of the crowd of officers and analysts, surrounded by horror, and very slowly opened and closed his hands. Everyone else moved around him, casting sidelong glances.
“He’s getting worse,” Reidy had said later, when they were standing outside and a little downwind, away from the smell.
“You listen to me,” Victor ground out, voice so low it should have been inaudible over the general noise, “We’re bringing this bastard in. You hear me?”
Reidy was angry, but Victor had moved past anger a long time ago.
His partner met his eyes, and nodded.
Now, Victor sits alone in the empty, blood-ruined house. Forensics is gone, local PD is gone, Reidy is gone. It’s just Victor, and the total obliteration of a human being Dean Winchester has left behind.
He has to catch this son of a bitch.
When his phone rings he eases himself upright, joints popping and muscles protesting. He’s been here far too long. He goes outside and ducks under the yellow tape. It’s Reidy on the other end.
He listens for a moment, and then grins into the fading light.
--
Victor knows a lot about Dean Winchester. He damn well wishes he didn’t. He knows Reidy feels pretty much the same way. Winchester’s file is a horror-show that crosses decades and state lines and undermines faith in humanity-even the tiny faiths people like Victor and Reidy nurture in small, tucked-away corners of their souls. Dean Winchester is twenty-seven years old, hideously charming, offensively handsome, and completely psychotic. He’s not a sociopath and he is capable of forming human connections, albeit rarely, and never in a remotely healthy way. He has one immediate family member, his brother Sam Winchester. Their father and mother are deceased. The relationship between Sam and Dean is complicated at best and also, Victor knows, the key to understanding everything about both Winchesters.
They picked up Sam nearly by accident, spotted outside a Circle K by an off-duty officer, hauled in with far less fuss than anyone expected, thanks to a little fancy footwork and a couple of unmarked cars. They left his coffee in a puddle in the motel parking lot, but brought along the sack of jerky and M&Ms he’d dropped in his surprise. Dean, not surprisingly, was nowhere to be found.
When Victor rolled into the station, Reidy was wearing that grim little smile of his, the smug bastard. At this point, though, Victor’s willing to forgive the man pretty much anything.
Sam motherfucking Winchester.
Yes.
Victor knows a lot of people look at Sam and immediately experience some serious cognitive dissonance. He gets it-it’s tough for them to reconcile his height, his sheer mass, with his face of angelic, slightly wounded innocence. In his mug shot from Maryland, he looks like nothing so much as a frat kid picked up for drunk driving, waiting on his Daddy to come bail him out.
A lot of people have glanced at Sam, seen the broad shoulders and large hands and the beat-to-shit clothing, and concluded that the soft eyes and compassionate smile are nothing but a mask. Debra, Victor’s current protégé, had argued sometime last year that Sam is a sociopath, that he might even be manipulating his brother, that all of Dean’s crimes are nothing more than a way for Sam to keep score. Victor considered that for a while, but then he had the opportunity to read through some interviews and talk to some of his old Stanford classmates.
Victor knows that Sam isn’t a sociopath. Knows that it would be a mistake to dismiss him as such. And he knows that the gentleness is real.
Right up to the moment when it isn’t.
“Hi, Sam.” He eases himself into the chair across from the larger man and flicks a quick glance over his uncuffed hand, resting loosely on the tabletop, and his arms and shoulders, a little tight with tension, before coming to rest on his face. Sam gazes back mournfully. His eyes are huge.
He says, “Oh,” very quietly.
Victor lets a small chuckle pass his lips. Makes it rueful, self-deprecating.
“So let’s take a look at what we got here.” He lays the file folder on the table and Sam’s lips tighten, barely. A flinch, almost. He probably has a pretty good idea what’s in there.
“You know we’re not all that interested in you, Sam,” Victor tells him, tone light. He’s doing his best to avoid condescension. He thinks about Sunday afternoons, relaxing on the back porch, shooting the shit. Just two guys hanging out in the warm summer sun. Feeds it right into his language, his posture, his tone of voice.
“I know,” Sam murmurs.
“This is your file here,” he taps the folder with his middle and ring fingers. “And this one,” he lays another fat folder side-by-side with Sam’s, “belongs to your brother.”
It’s a risk, bringing Dean into it this early. Victor debated for a while with Reidy about it, in quiet voices halfway down the hall while Sam stewed alone in the interview room. Neither one of them is sure that this is the best way to approach the situation. Sam is unpredictable. Sam might react to a mention of his brother by clamming up, or lashing out. Victor is hoping, and Reidy had grudgingly allowed for the possibility, that it might allow him to form a connection with the younger man. Draw him out a little.
He’s still not really sure how he wants to play this. God knows how Sam will react to an ostensibly friendly voice. The kid’s not a moron.
“Listen,” Sam says, leaning forward a little in his chair, brow furrowing earnestly, “I know you don’t believe me, but Dean isn’t-he’s not. Hurting people. He’s not a killer. Not a monster. He’s not.”
“Oh really?” Victor splays a hand over the folder. “So this is full of what, exactly? Copies of my unfinished screenplay? I know you know better.”
“That’s not-” Sam leans back, blows a frustrated breath. “No. You’re wrong. Okay? All of it. Everything in there.”
Victor raises an eyebrow. “Lotta people worked a long time to put this together, Sam.” He leaves the sentence in the air between them.
“It’s wrong,” Sam reiterates quietly. “You’re wrong.”
Victor purses his lips a little, then pushes Sam’s file to one side, and carefully opens Dean’s. He shuffles through some of the more recent reports, laying aside photos, ignoring the way Sam’s eyes track his meticulous movements. Victor knows that Sam is the sort of person who can appreciate meticulousness.
He shifts in his chair a little when Victor withdraws two Polaroids from about halfway down the pile and sets them out carefully on the table, turned so that Sam can see them both. The other man lets out a little puff of air.
“If I’m so wrong,” Victor tells him, voice serious as he can make it. “You explain this to me.”
Sam blinks rapidly. The skin around his mouth tightens, just a little. He looks very young. Victor just watches.
“It was an accident,” is what Sam says, finally, when several long and heavy moments have gone by. “We were trying to help.”
Victor nods. It’s what he’s been hoping to hear. “You know what, Sam?” he meets the other man’s gaze and gives him the barest nod, catches the flicker of confusion in his hazel eyes. “I believe you.”
The thing is, Victor does.
Sam says, “It was in her.”
He reaches out a hand, halfway, hesitates and shoots a glance at Victor, then lightly touches one of the Polaroids. Slides it across the table, peers down at the glossy surface.
Victor almost opens his mouth, almost prompts him. Something like there was a lot of blood, or, what, exactly was ‘in her’? But he wants inside Sam’s head. Not what’s on the surface. He keeps his mouth shut and watches Sam stare down at the pictures, the splashes of red, the flashes of skin. Sam’s face crumples a little, before he manages to smooth it out.
“Look,” he says softly, “It seems bad, I know. But Dean-he doesn’t hurt people, okay? Not like that. Not people. Sometimes…I guess it gets a little messy, but that’s-those are just accidents.”
“‘Accidents,’” Victor repeats, knows he hasn’t managed to completely keep the incredulity out of his voice. Sam narrows his eyes.
“Do you know what’s out there?” he very nearly demands. Victor shrugs. It’s still light, still easy. Sure, he’s not buying what Sam’s selling, but maybe he could be convinced. The right words could convince him.
“I know some things.”
Sam opens and shuts his mouth, seems to think better of whatever he’s about to say. Shakes his head so his hair falls across his face. He folds in on himself and the incongruity of it is startling. This is little Sammy, and God help them both because it’s not a smokescreen or some kind of act.
Victor resists the urge to sigh.
“He’s not evil. We’re not. We’re not the bad guys here. Why won’t you see that?”
“Dean’s going to be worrying about you,” Victor tells him, and Sam’s eyes flicker, between the table and the photographs and, very briefly, Victor’s face. His breath quickens.
“He’s already left town. You won’t find him. You won’t.”
“Maybe.” Victor folds his hands atop Sam’s file. “Something tells me he’s not going far as long as he knows you’re in custody. And he knows, Sam. We’ve made sure of that. You think he won’t come back for you?”
“He’s not-he won’t-”
“Our boy’s not an idiot. I know. But I think…maybe this time his good sense might take a back seat to the fact that his brother’s in custody. What do you think, Sam? Is he gonna walk away? Leave you to rot here, until we get you extradited?”
The look Sam turns on him is a little desperate, a little terrified. When he speaks, his voice breaks, and both of them know that the word is a lie.
“Yes.”
--
Victor would be the first to admit he isn’t a real imaginative guy. It comes with the territory--suit, tie, shoulder holster, humorless demeanor and total lack of imagination. Diligence and stolid patience, and the ability to mainline caffeine on a handful of hours of sleep without lapsing into a waking coma, are Victor’s strongest character traits. He has people like Debra around for sudden flights of fancy and occasional flashes of brilliance that can nudge a faltering investigation onto a new track.
There are moments, though, where Victor finds himself confronted with a mental image so powerful it’s almost tangible. Hunting the Winchesters has led to more than one flash of something very near a waking dream when he shuts his eyes. He can’t picture them as anything but a pair, shoulder to shoulder in some Midwestern city, calm and terrifyingly aware in the midst of a crowd of distracted, noisy people. The Winchesters don’t even walk like other people, turned in on themselves, a constant mantra of appointments and bills and meetings and errands and Things To Do bouncing around their skulls. Sam and Dean move through space wholly aware of the world, of the presence of every body, of every man, woman and child. Every person is observed, catalogued, assessed. Every last one a possible target.
The whole thing is ridiculously melodramatic. Victor mentally sneers at himself. He’d say it’s the result of too much TV, if he ever had time to watch TV.
He’s sitting in the room he and Reidy have commandeered on the second floor, rearranging the most recent data on Dean. There’s not much that’s new. A few school transcripts, a hospital record from Pontiac, dated to 1995 (concussion, three fractured ribs-overzealous tackle in a football game, apparently), two eyewitness interviews from the motel.
He looks up when Reidy strolls into the room, looking as fresh as a man reasonably can at eleven-thirty at night. The fluorescent lights don’t do anything for his complexion but he won’t appreciate Victor telling him that. He leans against the desk and Victor holds up a hand because he already knows what’s coming, but that doesn’t stop the other man.
“Take your sorry ass to bed, Vic,” Reidy says, and Victor scowls.
“My sorry ass is fine right where it is,” he snaps.
“I’m not gonna give you the ‘you’re no good to anyone as a caffeine zombie’ speech,” Reidy pauses, “Except that I just did. Take your ass back to the motel and go the hell to bed.”
“Reidy, you know goddamn well Winchester’s not sitting around out there twiddling his fucking thumbs. We locked up his brother, he’s not gonna be a happy camper-”
Reidy snatches up the file from Victor’s desk. “Four hours. I’m not peeling you off your desk with a spatula at five o’clock tomorrow morning. Go.”
Reidy has a lot of fucking nerve, being right all the damn time. Victor musters up a sneer from somewhere but they both know how halfhearted it is. At this point there isn’t even much sense in going off on a tirade.
“Shit,” he grumbles and Reidy snorts, which is as close to a grin as he ever gets.
-2-
The psychiatrist is pretty, and brunette, and Victor’s thinking he should be ashamed of himself for bringing her into this room. But he’s not, even a little, and that fact probably has a lot to do with why his last marriage didn’t make it past their second anniversary.
Bethany Galo is tough, though. Not that Victor really wants to think of what might happen if she found herself in Sam Winchester’s sights. She might be a fierce little thing when it comes to facing down thugs with mommy issues and the occasional underachieving sociopath, but she probably weighs about as much as Sam’s left forearm. Sticking her in front of him is both dangerous and probably a little stupid, but he’s got to try every trick. He’s still got a conscience, shriveled as it may be, and if there’s a chance of getting Dean in off the streets, he’s got to take it.
She toys with her hair and smiles that lip-gloss smile and Sam is sullen and flustered, completely at sea. He’s fixed his eyes on the photographs of the dead girl.
Galo says, “It’s been two days.”
“Then he’s two states away by now,” Sam answers dully.
“I doubt that very much.” Her voice is soft. He flicks a glance at her and she smiles.
“Sam.” Gently.
“You’re not going to find him.” His voice trembles, barely.
“And what if you’re wrong? What if we do? What then? You think he’ll come along quietly?”
“If we get him in alive,” Victor murmurs, and Sam’s shoulders stiffen.
“He’ll come for you,” Galo offers, and Sam shuts his eyes.
She says, “He’s a good brother. He won’t leave you here.”
“He’s Dean,” Sam says, opening his eyes, staring down at the table. Victor resists the urge to bare his teeth.
“He’s very important to you,” Galo observes, as if she’s agreeing with him and not laying something new on the table. “He looks out for you.”
“He’s my brother,” he answers, in the same tone as before.
“He looks out for you.”
He lifts his eyes and meets her gaze.
“He did a lot,” he says, softly, “He always has. For me, I mean. He looks out for me. He-he takes care of me.”
I’ll bet he does, Victor’s brain supplies, but he knows better than to open his mouth.
“Dean’s looked after you for a long time.” Galo’s voice is low, smooth, almost sonorous. Victor doesn’t grin.
“He-” Sam breaks off. “He always got in the way. Y’know? He put himself in the way. Of everything.”
“He was protecting you.”
“Yeah,” Sam breathes.
“He got in the way.”
“Dad used to tie him in the bathroom and leave him.”
The words are so sudden, flat and toneless and rushed. All Victor’s skin prickles, sudden and cold. Sam’s facing the doctor but his eyes have lost a little of their focus. Victor doesn’t dare to move.
Galo says, “He left him?”
“He left us alone.” Sam’s voice is taking on a strange, lilting quality. Almost singsong. “He’d go for days, leave Dean tied up, I…I wasn’t supposed to touch him.”
“Did you do what you were told, Sam?”
His smile is empty, vague.
“I used to bring him water,” he whispers. “And food.”
This is a terrible secret, Victor realizes. It’s something Sam’s never told anyone.
He shoots a glance at the doctor. She keeps her gaze locked on the man across the table.
The boy, really.
“Dad found out one day,” Sam goes on, left hand flexing slightly against the table, fingertips making slow strange motions against its surface. “He was so…and Dean had pissed himself, of course. Three days tied to a sink, no one can….” He trails off and looks down at his fingers and smiles again, makes a little noise that Victor realizes belatedly is a laugh.
“People get hurt, people get hurt, and sometimes you can’t stop it. Sometimes you just can’t.” Sam squeezes his hand on the table, nails scraping on steel. “But you have to try, don’t you? You have to.”
Victor hesitates, afraid to speak and break Sam out of the near-trance he’s retreated into. This is what we’re dealing with, he thinks. This is what they are. Children. They’re like children. Never socialized, never really growing up. Broken down into monsters. They’d never be able to be anything else.
He needs Sam to tell him about Dean. Christ. They’ve got to get him off the streets. Bury them both in deep dark holes for the rest of their goddamn lives.
“I was the one who killed him,” Sam says, voice quiet and small. Galo doesn’t ask who he is. “I got him out back and I hit him and hit him. I was bigger than him. I was bigger. And Dean wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do it. Twenty-one years old and he wouldn’t fucking make him stop.” And he makes a fist, right there on the table.
He beat his father to death when he was seventeen years old.
Jesus fuck.
“You have to protect people who can’t take care of themselves.” Sam raises his head, looks right in the doctor’s face. He sounds proud, now. He sounds like a five-year-old stating the utter certainty of the things he knows to be true.
She says, “Sometimes people have to be allowed to help themselves.”
“Sometimes they can’t,” Sam shoots back.
Victor stirs, slides a hand forward, taps the photos. The doctor breaks Sam’s gaze. Victor doesn’t want to think that she might be unnerved.
“By the time we got to Heather,” Victor says, “most of her skin had been peeled off.”
Sam narrows his eyes. His voice is low, intense.
“She had a monster in her. Under her skin.” He leans back. “And she ran, you know. Through the house. I was outside and caught her coming through a window.” His lips twitch, just slightly.
Victor can picture it clearly. The woman running through the dark house, tripping over familiar objects. Crawling through the downstairs window, straight into the embrace of Sam Winchester. She wouldn’t have been able to scream-Sam’s hands are big enough to have covered her entire face.
Dean was inside, waiting.
Shit.
“So what should I do, then, Sam?” He reaches for the nearest photo, slides it closer to the file. “Just…call off the investigation? Chase some jaywalkers off the streets? Catch those guys swiping office supplies at Quantico?”
“Dean’s not a monster,” Sam spits.
“You took that girl’s skin off.”
“And I’d do it again!” Sam’s free hand bangs down on the table. Galo flinches, barely. “You think it’s wrong, you don’t know, you don’t know.”
He laces his fingers together. “You could explain it to me.”
“My brother’s not evil. He’s not a fucking monster. You call him all these, these, these things, they talk about him on the news, you’re all so goddamn stupid.”
That’s the thing about children. They can turn on a dime. Sammy’s working his way up to a tantrum, face tight, shoulders hunching. The doctor shoots Victor a warning look.
“I’ve had enough of this.” He slaps the file shut, grabs up the photos, ignores the way Sam’s fingers curl against the table, nails scraping.
Victor half-rises from the chair, meets Sam’s narrow, furious eyes.
“You kill people, Sam. You can lie to yourself all you damn well please, but it doesn’t change anything. Dean’s no saint, and maybe you’re brainwashed-hell, maybe you both are. I don’t give a good goddamn. You kill people.”
“I think you should shut your mouth,” Sam says softly.
“Oh, is that what you think? Maybe you think I should unlock those cuffs and drop you back in your brother’s lap, too. That a good idea, Sammy?”
“It’s Sam.”
“It’s whatever the hell I say it is, kid.”
Sam’s nostrils flare, but he says nothing. His whole body is still, hand open flat on the table. Given half a chance, he’d be over the table introducing Victor’s teeth to the back of his skull.
He’s not going to get that chance.
“We’re done here,” Victor says, turning away but letting the doctor move in front of him toward the door. At his back, Sam is a cold, silent wall.
He shuts the door quietly. Sam doesn’t say a word.
________________
Part 2
________________
Note: I wanted to write a second part to this, with Dean. I still might. I haven’t decided. Thoughts?
Summary: Victor interviews Sam. Repeatedly. (AU, lots of talking.)
Spoilers: Victor/FBI-related plot points.
Warnings: Gore, suggestions of child abuse
Note: Since I came to SPN late, I missed out on a lot of great characters who were killed off. Henriksen is easily one of my top three favorite dead guys, and I just really wanted to write something with him in it. This has been sitting on my hard drive for weeks and I kept forgetting about it, so I've cleaned it up a bit and tried to make it presentable.
Out Here in the Fields
________________
I don’t need to fight
to prove I’m right
I don’t need to be forgiven
________________
-1-
Victor doesn’t like it here. He sits, elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of his face, and glares indiscriminately at the room. He’s been here for a while, sitting nearly motionless as the sun slides down the sky and the light dims. Long shadows crawl over everything, darkening the blood on the walls, stretching up to meet the rust-brown spray across the ceiling.
Victor’s fingers tighten, just slightly.
There’s blood on the ceiling.
He’d overheard, hours ago, the local PD muttering about monsters and butchery, and knew better than to hold it against them. Things like this were not supposed to happen. Even people who saw ugliness and catastrophe every day of their lives couldn’t be confronted with something like this and be expected to deal without going a little overboard on the metaphors. Despite the opinions of some, Victor is capable of letting things slide. Once in a while.
The muttering had been going on at about the same time that someone else was being noisily sick around the side of the house. Victor knew better than to draw attention to that, either.
Reidy had been angry. Quietly so, and not at anyone in particular. He’d just stood in the center of the room, in the middle of the crowd of officers and analysts, surrounded by horror, and very slowly opened and closed his hands. Everyone else moved around him, casting sidelong glances.
“He’s getting worse,” Reidy had said later, when they were standing outside and a little downwind, away from the smell.
“You listen to me,” Victor ground out, voice so low it should have been inaudible over the general noise, “We’re bringing this bastard in. You hear me?”
Reidy was angry, but Victor had moved past anger a long time ago.
His partner met his eyes, and nodded.
Now, Victor sits alone in the empty, blood-ruined house. Forensics is gone, local PD is gone, Reidy is gone. It’s just Victor, and the total obliteration of a human being Dean Winchester has left behind.
He has to catch this son of a bitch.
When his phone rings he eases himself upright, joints popping and muscles protesting. He’s been here far too long. He goes outside and ducks under the yellow tape. It’s Reidy on the other end.
He listens for a moment, and then grins into the fading light.
--
Victor knows a lot about Dean Winchester. He damn well wishes he didn’t. He knows Reidy feels pretty much the same way. Winchester’s file is a horror-show that crosses decades and state lines and undermines faith in humanity-even the tiny faiths people like Victor and Reidy nurture in small, tucked-away corners of their souls. Dean Winchester is twenty-seven years old, hideously charming, offensively handsome, and completely psychotic. He’s not a sociopath and he is capable of forming human connections, albeit rarely, and never in a remotely healthy way. He has one immediate family member, his brother Sam Winchester. Their father and mother are deceased. The relationship between Sam and Dean is complicated at best and also, Victor knows, the key to understanding everything about both Winchesters.
They picked up Sam nearly by accident, spotted outside a Circle K by an off-duty officer, hauled in with far less fuss than anyone expected, thanks to a little fancy footwork and a couple of unmarked cars. They left his coffee in a puddle in the motel parking lot, but brought along the sack of jerky and M&Ms he’d dropped in his surprise. Dean, not surprisingly, was nowhere to be found.
When Victor rolled into the station, Reidy was wearing that grim little smile of his, the smug bastard. At this point, though, Victor’s willing to forgive the man pretty much anything.
Sam motherfucking Winchester.
Yes.
Victor knows a lot of people look at Sam and immediately experience some serious cognitive dissonance. He gets it-it’s tough for them to reconcile his height, his sheer mass, with his face of angelic, slightly wounded innocence. In his mug shot from Maryland, he looks like nothing so much as a frat kid picked up for drunk driving, waiting on his Daddy to come bail him out.
A lot of people have glanced at Sam, seen the broad shoulders and large hands and the beat-to-shit clothing, and concluded that the soft eyes and compassionate smile are nothing but a mask. Debra, Victor’s current protégé, had argued sometime last year that Sam is a sociopath, that he might even be manipulating his brother, that all of Dean’s crimes are nothing more than a way for Sam to keep score. Victor considered that for a while, but then he had the opportunity to read through some interviews and talk to some of his old Stanford classmates.
Victor knows that Sam isn’t a sociopath. Knows that it would be a mistake to dismiss him as such. And he knows that the gentleness is real.
Right up to the moment when it isn’t.
“Hi, Sam.” He eases himself into the chair across from the larger man and flicks a quick glance over his uncuffed hand, resting loosely on the tabletop, and his arms and shoulders, a little tight with tension, before coming to rest on his face. Sam gazes back mournfully. His eyes are huge.
He says, “Oh,” very quietly.
Victor lets a small chuckle pass his lips. Makes it rueful, self-deprecating.
“So let’s take a look at what we got here.” He lays the file folder on the table and Sam’s lips tighten, barely. A flinch, almost. He probably has a pretty good idea what’s in there.
“You know we’re not all that interested in you, Sam,” Victor tells him, tone light. He’s doing his best to avoid condescension. He thinks about Sunday afternoons, relaxing on the back porch, shooting the shit. Just two guys hanging out in the warm summer sun. Feeds it right into his language, his posture, his tone of voice.
“I know,” Sam murmurs.
“This is your file here,” he taps the folder with his middle and ring fingers. “And this one,” he lays another fat folder side-by-side with Sam’s, “belongs to your brother.”
It’s a risk, bringing Dean into it this early. Victor debated for a while with Reidy about it, in quiet voices halfway down the hall while Sam stewed alone in the interview room. Neither one of them is sure that this is the best way to approach the situation. Sam is unpredictable. Sam might react to a mention of his brother by clamming up, or lashing out. Victor is hoping, and Reidy had grudgingly allowed for the possibility, that it might allow him to form a connection with the younger man. Draw him out a little.
He’s still not really sure how he wants to play this. God knows how Sam will react to an ostensibly friendly voice. The kid’s not a moron.
“Listen,” Sam says, leaning forward a little in his chair, brow furrowing earnestly, “I know you don’t believe me, but Dean isn’t-he’s not. Hurting people. He’s not a killer. Not a monster. He’s not.”
“Oh really?” Victor splays a hand over the folder. “So this is full of what, exactly? Copies of my unfinished screenplay? I know you know better.”
“That’s not-” Sam leans back, blows a frustrated breath. “No. You’re wrong. Okay? All of it. Everything in there.”
Victor raises an eyebrow. “Lotta people worked a long time to put this together, Sam.” He leaves the sentence in the air between them.
“It’s wrong,” Sam reiterates quietly. “You’re wrong.”
Victor purses his lips a little, then pushes Sam’s file to one side, and carefully opens Dean’s. He shuffles through some of the more recent reports, laying aside photos, ignoring the way Sam’s eyes track his meticulous movements. Victor knows that Sam is the sort of person who can appreciate meticulousness.
He shifts in his chair a little when Victor withdraws two Polaroids from about halfway down the pile and sets them out carefully on the table, turned so that Sam can see them both. The other man lets out a little puff of air.
“If I’m so wrong,” Victor tells him, voice serious as he can make it. “You explain this to me.”
Sam blinks rapidly. The skin around his mouth tightens, just a little. He looks very young. Victor just watches.
“It was an accident,” is what Sam says, finally, when several long and heavy moments have gone by. “We were trying to help.”
Victor nods. It’s what he’s been hoping to hear. “You know what, Sam?” he meets the other man’s gaze and gives him the barest nod, catches the flicker of confusion in his hazel eyes. “I believe you.”
The thing is, Victor does.
Sam says, “It was in her.”
He reaches out a hand, halfway, hesitates and shoots a glance at Victor, then lightly touches one of the Polaroids. Slides it across the table, peers down at the glossy surface.
Victor almost opens his mouth, almost prompts him. Something like there was a lot of blood, or, what, exactly was ‘in her’? But he wants inside Sam’s head. Not what’s on the surface. He keeps his mouth shut and watches Sam stare down at the pictures, the splashes of red, the flashes of skin. Sam’s face crumples a little, before he manages to smooth it out.
“Look,” he says softly, “It seems bad, I know. But Dean-he doesn’t hurt people, okay? Not like that. Not people. Sometimes…I guess it gets a little messy, but that’s-those are just accidents.”
“‘Accidents,’” Victor repeats, knows he hasn’t managed to completely keep the incredulity out of his voice. Sam narrows his eyes.
“Do you know what’s out there?” he very nearly demands. Victor shrugs. It’s still light, still easy. Sure, he’s not buying what Sam’s selling, but maybe he could be convinced. The right words could convince him.
“I know some things.”
Sam opens and shuts his mouth, seems to think better of whatever he’s about to say. Shakes his head so his hair falls across his face. He folds in on himself and the incongruity of it is startling. This is little Sammy, and God help them both because it’s not a smokescreen or some kind of act.
Victor resists the urge to sigh.
“He’s not evil. We’re not. We’re not the bad guys here. Why won’t you see that?”
“Dean’s going to be worrying about you,” Victor tells him, and Sam’s eyes flicker, between the table and the photographs and, very briefly, Victor’s face. His breath quickens.
“He’s already left town. You won’t find him. You won’t.”
“Maybe.” Victor folds his hands atop Sam’s file. “Something tells me he’s not going far as long as he knows you’re in custody. And he knows, Sam. We’ve made sure of that. You think he won’t come back for you?”
“He’s not-he won’t-”
“Our boy’s not an idiot. I know. But I think…maybe this time his good sense might take a back seat to the fact that his brother’s in custody. What do you think, Sam? Is he gonna walk away? Leave you to rot here, until we get you extradited?”
The look Sam turns on him is a little desperate, a little terrified. When he speaks, his voice breaks, and both of them know that the word is a lie.
“Yes.”
--
Victor would be the first to admit he isn’t a real imaginative guy. It comes with the territory--suit, tie, shoulder holster, humorless demeanor and total lack of imagination. Diligence and stolid patience, and the ability to mainline caffeine on a handful of hours of sleep without lapsing into a waking coma, are Victor’s strongest character traits. He has people like Debra around for sudden flights of fancy and occasional flashes of brilliance that can nudge a faltering investigation onto a new track.
There are moments, though, where Victor finds himself confronted with a mental image so powerful it’s almost tangible. Hunting the Winchesters has led to more than one flash of something very near a waking dream when he shuts his eyes. He can’t picture them as anything but a pair, shoulder to shoulder in some Midwestern city, calm and terrifyingly aware in the midst of a crowd of distracted, noisy people. The Winchesters don’t even walk like other people, turned in on themselves, a constant mantra of appointments and bills and meetings and errands and Things To Do bouncing around their skulls. Sam and Dean move through space wholly aware of the world, of the presence of every body, of every man, woman and child. Every person is observed, catalogued, assessed. Every last one a possible target.
The whole thing is ridiculously melodramatic. Victor mentally sneers at himself. He’d say it’s the result of too much TV, if he ever had time to watch TV.
He’s sitting in the room he and Reidy have commandeered on the second floor, rearranging the most recent data on Dean. There’s not much that’s new. A few school transcripts, a hospital record from Pontiac, dated to 1995 (concussion, three fractured ribs-overzealous tackle in a football game, apparently), two eyewitness interviews from the motel.
He looks up when Reidy strolls into the room, looking as fresh as a man reasonably can at eleven-thirty at night. The fluorescent lights don’t do anything for his complexion but he won’t appreciate Victor telling him that. He leans against the desk and Victor holds up a hand because he already knows what’s coming, but that doesn’t stop the other man.
“Take your sorry ass to bed, Vic,” Reidy says, and Victor scowls.
“My sorry ass is fine right where it is,” he snaps.
“I’m not gonna give you the ‘you’re no good to anyone as a caffeine zombie’ speech,” Reidy pauses, “Except that I just did. Take your ass back to the motel and go the hell to bed.”
“Reidy, you know goddamn well Winchester’s not sitting around out there twiddling his fucking thumbs. We locked up his brother, he’s not gonna be a happy camper-”
Reidy snatches up the file from Victor’s desk. “Four hours. I’m not peeling you off your desk with a spatula at five o’clock tomorrow morning. Go.”
Reidy has a lot of fucking nerve, being right all the damn time. Victor musters up a sneer from somewhere but they both know how halfhearted it is. At this point there isn’t even much sense in going off on a tirade.
“Shit,” he grumbles and Reidy snorts, which is as close to a grin as he ever gets.
-2-
The psychiatrist is pretty, and brunette, and Victor’s thinking he should be ashamed of himself for bringing her into this room. But he’s not, even a little, and that fact probably has a lot to do with why his last marriage didn’t make it past their second anniversary.
Bethany Galo is tough, though. Not that Victor really wants to think of what might happen if she found herself in Sam Winchester’s sights. She might be a fierce little thing when it comes to facing down thugs with mommy issues and the occasional underachieving sociopath, but she probably weighs about as much as Sam’s left forearm. Sticking her in front of him is both dangerous and probably a little stupid, but he’s got to try every trick. He’s still got a conscience, shriveled as it may be, and if there’s a chance of getting Dean in off the streets, he’s got to take it.
She toys with her hair and smiles that lip-gloss smile and Sam is sullen and flustered, completely at sea. He’s fixed his eyes on the photographs of the dead girl.
Galo says, “It’s been two days.”
“Then he’s two states away by now,” Sam answers dully.
“I doubt that very much.” Her voice is soft. He flicks a glance at her and she smiles.
“Sam.” Gently.
“You’re not going to find him.” His voice trembles, barely.
“And what if you’re wrong? What if we do? What then? You think he’ll come along quietly?”
“If we get him in alive,” Victor murmurs, and Sam’s shoulders stiffen.
“He’ll come for you,” Galo offers, and Sam shuts his eyes.
She says, “He’s a good brother. He won’t leave you here.”
“He’s Dean,” Sam says, opening his eyes, staring down at the table. Victor resists the urge to bare his teeth.
“He’s very important to you,” Galo observes, as if she’s agreeing with him and not laying something new on the table. “He looks out for you.”
“He’s my brother,” he answers, in the same tone as before.
“He looks out for you.”
He lifts his eyes and meets her gaze.
“He did a lot,” he says, softly, “He always has. For me, I mean. He looks out for me. He-he takes care of me.”
I’ll bet he does, Victor’s brain supplies, but he knows better than to open his mouth.
“Dean’s looked after you for a long time.” Galo’s voice is low, smooth, almost sonorous. Victor doesn’t grin.
“He-” Sam breaks off. “He always got in the way. Y’know? He put himself in the way. Of everything.”
“He was protecting you.”
“Yeah,” Sam breathes.
“He got in the way.”
“Dad used to tie him in the bathroom and leave him.”
The words are so sudden, flat and toneless and rushed. All Victor’s skin prickles, sudden and cold. Sam’s facing the doctor but his eyes have lost a little of their focus. Victor doesn’t dare to move.
Galo says, “He left him?”
“He left us alone.” Sam’s voice is taking on a strange, lilting quality. Almost singsong. “He’d go for days, leave Dean tied up, I…I wasn’t supposed to touch him.”
“Did you do what you were told, Sam?”
His smile is empty, vague.
“I used to bring him water,” he whispers. “And food.”
This is a terrible secret, Victor realizes. It’s something Sam’s never told anyone.
He shoots a glance at the doctor. She keeps her gaze locked on the man across the table.
The boy, really.
“Dad found out one day,” Sam goes on, left hand flexing slightly against the table, fingertips making slow strange motions against its surface. “He was so…and Dean had pissed himself, of course. Three days tied to a sink, no one can….” He trails off and looks down at his fingers and smiles again, makes a little noise that Victor realizes belatedly is a laugh.
“People get hurt, people get hurt, and sometimes you can’t stop it. Sometimes you just can’t.” Sam squeezes his hand on the table, nails scraping on steel. “But you have to try, don’t you? You have to.”
Victor hesitates, afraid to speak and break Sam out of the near-trance he’s retreated into. This is what we’re dealing with, he thinks. This is what they are. Children. They’re like children. Never socialized, never really growing up. Broken down into monsters. They’d never be able to be anything else.
He needs Sam to tell him about Dean. Christ. They’ve got to get him off the streets. Bury them both in deep dark holes for the rest of their goddamn lives.
“I was the one who killed him,” Sam says, voice quiet and small. Galo doesn’t ask who he is. “I got him out back and I hit him and hit him. I was bigger than him. I was bigger. And Dean wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do it. Twenty-one years old and he wouldn’t fucking make him stop.” And he makes a fist, right there on the table.
He beat his father to death when he was seventeen years old.
Jesus fuck.
“You have to protect people who can’t take care of themselves.” Sam raises his head, looks right in the doctor’s face. He sounds proud, now. He sounds like a five-year-old stating the utter certainty of the things he knows to be true.
She says, “Sometimes people have to be allowed to help themselves.”
“Sometimes they can’t,” Sam shoots back.
Victor stirs, slides a hand forward, taps the photos. The doctor breaks Sam’s gaze. Victor doesn’t want to think that she might be unnerved.
“By the time we got to Heather,” Victor says, “most of her skin had been peeled off.”
Sam narrows his eyes. His voice is low, intense.
“She had a monster in her. Under her skin.” He leans back. “And she ran, you know. Through the house. I was outside and caught her coming through a window.” His lips twitch, just slightly.
Victor can picture it clearly. The woman running through the dark house, tripping over familiar objects. Crawling through the downstairs window, straight into the embrace of Sam Winchester. She wouldn’t have been able to scream-Sam’s hands are big enough to have covered her entire face.
Dean was inside, waiting.
Shit.
“So what should I do, then, Sam?” He reaches for the nearest photo, slides it closer to the file. “Just…call off the investigation? Chase some jaywalkers off the streets? Catch those guys swiping office supplies at Quantico?”
“Dean’s not a monster,” Sam spits.
“You took that girl’s skin off.”
“And I’d do it again!” Sam’s free hand bangs down on the table. Galo flinches, barely. “You think it’s wrong, you don’t know, you don’t know.”
He laces his fingers together. “You could explain it to me.”
“My brother’s not evil. He’s not a fucking monster. You call him all these, these, these things, they talk about him on the news, you’re all so goddamn stupid.”
That’s the thing about children. They can turn on a dime. Sammy’s working his way up to a tantrum, face tight, shoulders hunching. The doctor shoots Victor a warning look.
“I’ve had enough of this.” He slaps the file shut, grabs up the photos, ignores the way Sam’s fingers curl against the table, nails scraping.
Victor half-rises from the chair, meets Sam’s narrow, furious eyes.
“You kill people, Sam. You can lie to yourself all you damn well please, but it doesn’t change anything. Dean’s no saint, and maybe you’re brainwashed-hell, maybe you both are. I don’t give a good goddamn. You kill people.”
“I think you should shut your mouth,” Sam says softly.
“Oh, is that what you think? Maybe you think I should unlock those cuffs and drop you back in your brother’s lap, too. That a good idea, Sammy?”
“It’s Sam.”
“It’s whatever the hell I say it is, kid.”
Sam’s nostrils flare, but he says nothing. His whole body is still, hand open flat on the table. Given half a chance, he’d be over the table introducing Victor’s teeth to the back of his skull.
He’s not going to get that chance.
“We’re done here,” Victor says, turning away but letting the doctor move in front of him toward the door. At his back, Sam is a cold, silent wall.
He shuts the door quietly. Sam doesn’t say a word.
________________
Part 2
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Note: I wanted to write a second part to this, with Dean. I still might. I haven’t decided. Thoughts?