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One would think that after hunting for so long, Dean Winchester would’ve gotten used to the horrors of the job and nightmares wouldn’t be an issue, but that wasn’t at all the case. In fact, he got more nightmares than most, though, this probably had something to do with the fact he’d watched his brother die repeatedly and he’d been through Hell. Literally. Even for hunters, they had strange lives. However, when Dean awoke from his nightmares that night, they hadn’t been of Hell or of any of Sam’s deaths, they’d been of the death of someone else, who’d been close to him, someone who had just died recently: Bobby Singer.
He’d been like a father to the two boys. He’d seemed almost more invincible than their real father had at the time of his death. It just seemed unreal that could be gone, too. But that was the fact of the matter. He’d been shot in the head by a Leviathan, Dick Roman, and now he was gone and he wasn’t coming back. Dean had learned his lesson with making deals to bring back the dead. So, instead, he was planning his revenge and, when he woke up that night after having yet another dream of being unable to save Bobby from his fate, instead of going back to sleep, he went to the computer, sitting on the table in the kitchenette of their motel and began searching for clues as to Dick Roman’s whereabouts. They knew that Borax weakened a Leviathan and they knew that chopping off their head slowed them down, but they had yet to figure out what killed one and that was what Dean was searching for. He wanted Roman dead.
“What’re you doing up so early?”
Sam’s sleepy voice startled Dean. He looked up from the computer and at his brother. As his visions of Lucifer had gotten steadily worse, he’d started having more and more trouble sleeping, which was why whenever Dean was awake and Sam was asleep, he would let him sleep. He didn’t want to wake him. He felt bad about having done it now.
“Just…” he tried to think of an excuse as to why he would be on Sam’s laptop at four in the morning and when none came to him, his brother sighed audibly.
“Please tell me you’re not still looking for leads on Dick,” he mumbled, sounding about as tired as he looked.
Dean said nothing.
“Do you really think this is what Bobby would’ve wanted for us?” he asked, sounding almost angry. “Searching for his killer obsessively? Forgetting that we have other, better things to be doing? Like getting rid of the Leviathan as a whole?”
This time it was Dean that sighed. “Yeah, well, we’ve got no leads on that, so I’m trying to find one for the son of a bitch that’s leading these bastards.”
Sam sighed again and said nothing else. He staggered to the bathroom, turned on the light, and closed the door. A few moments later, Dean heard the shower go on. He half wondered if he should sit closer to the door in case his brother slipped or fell asleep. He knew he was being more than a little overprotective right now, but after Sam’s wall had broken his brother had lost a step, so Dean’s anxiety wasn’t exactly unfounded.
And neither was Sam’s.
As the younger of the two Winchester’s stood under the hot shower spray, he thought about how Dean’s drinking had increased, how he slept about as much as Sam did anymore and sometimes not at all, how he spent all of his free time on his computer going on fruitless searches of Dick Roman’s current location. Dean wasn’t seeing hallucinations of Lucifer, but he still had to be looked after, just in a different way than Sam did.
“How are you supposed to look after him when you can barely handle me?”
The devil’s puzzled voice made Sam jump and knock over the shampoo bottle provided by the motel. It rolled around in the tub noisily.
“You okay in there? Or do you need me to come in?”
This time the voice was Dean’s.
“I’m fine,” Sam called back, pretending he hadn’t heard his brother’s second question.
He scoffed lightly.
What a pair they made.
-
They’d moved on to the next town and their next case by the time Dean found something that could help him in his vendetta against the leader of the Leviathan. Apparently there was one living nearby that spoke with Roman often. Of course, there were only ten or twelve Leviathan total, so they all had spoken with him more than once, but this one was said to be around him almost constantly, which meant either the Leviathan was taking a paid vacation or they had just stumbled upon the town Dick Roman was in and their luck was finally turning around. They were supposed to be hunting a ghost of a seven year old girl that was haunting a church a few blocks away from their motel, but Dean told Sam they had to drop that case now that this new information had come to light.
“We have a chance to get the bastard that killed Bobby! We have to take this chance! It could be the only one we get!” he told him after they’d gotten back from the church and another round of questions that had been directed at the pastor and his wife.
“You know we can’t kill him, Dean!” Sam reminded him. “As far as we know, Leviathan can’t be killed! What’s the point of getting him now when all we’ll be doing is dragging him around with us? He’ll have every chance in the world to get away!”
“Does it matter?!” Dean asked, sounding incredulous. “We’ll have him and we’re not idiots, Sam. We’ll make sure he doesn’t get away! I’m not letting him walk away from this!”
Sam pursed his lips as Lucifer reminded him, “You know that once he puts his mind to something there really isn’t any way you can stop him.”
The devil paused.
“He’s probably going to get himself killed. You’re not very good at protecting him.”
Sam’s hands balled into fists.
“In fact, you’re not much good at anything, are ya, Sammy?”
Sam had clenched his teeth as well when he noticed that Dean was looking at him funny and he knew his brother knew that Lucifer was talking to him again. He’d since figured out that they were just hallucinations, they weren’t real, Lucifer wasn’t really there, but that didn’t make them happen any less often. In fact, this seemed to almost have encouraged the devil into appearing more than was necessary. Still, Sam had a trick now, one Dean had taught him when the hallucinations were first getting to be unbearable. He pressed his thumb into the scar on his hand and the devil stuck his tongue out at him before he flickered out of sight.
That problem having been taken care of, Sam let out a nervous sigh and said, “Fine. We’ll do this, but we’re capturing his man first and questioning him. I’m not going to go into Roman’s offices with no information whatsoever. We need to be prepared Dean.”
“Fine,” Dean agreed, but he was excited. Finally, finally after too long, Bobby would be avenged. He just had to wait a little while longer and, with how things were going, he was pretty sure he could do that.
-
It took Sam a week to be convinced they were ready. They spent three days watching the Leviathan. He did things that every other human being did: he went to the grocery store, he got gas, he walked his neighbor’s dog. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was wearing the meatsuit of a man, who’d gone missing in Milwaukee around the time the Leviathan had first started appearing, he might almost have thought they had the wrong person. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. They were all too certain about what this man was and what he was doing.
It was on the Friday of that week, when everyone else was going to the movies and buying popcorn that Sam and Dean Winchester decided it would be a good idea to capture the Leviathan, question him on Dick Roman’s whereabouts and activities, before cutting off his head and burying it at least a thousand miles away from where they would bury his body making it ten times harder for humpty-dumpty to put himself back together again - as Dean so graciously put it the afternoon they were sitting in their motel room, cleaning their guns and getting them ready for the night ahead.
To be completely honest, Sam was more worried about his brother getting cocky and getting himself killed than capturing the Leviathan they were supposed to be after. Having been around him his entire life, Sam knew that the odds of Dean keeping his head in the coming fight was slim. Dean had a problem keeping his head when their job involved revenge. All he wanted to do was kill. Of course, he knew he had to plan first if the job were to be successful, but once they got there, once they’d done everything they’d planned to do, he would go off on his own, do what he thought was best and fuck anyone who disagreed with him. This had gotten better over the years, but it was still bad enough that Sam was worried.
“Maybe you should lock him in a closet,” Lucifer said from a chair near the door. He was blowing a pinwheel. Sam wasn’t sure how he’d acquired it. They hadn’t walked past any houses with pinwheels that day that Sam recalled. He struggled to ignore the devil, even as he reminded him, “he has locked you up before when it was for your own good. Like when you couldn’t stop drinking that juicy red demon blood. Remember that, Sammy?”
“Sam?”
This time the voice was Dean’s. Sam looked up from what he was doing. He didn’t remember freezing in his actions of putting his sawed-off together, but Lucifer’s words had gotten to him. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t afraid to this day of succumbing to his previous addiction and he began feeding off of demons again. That was the one thing that had come between him and his brother and the last thing he wanted was for it to happen again.
Mentally shaking himself and subtly pressing his thumb against the scar on his hand, he gave Dean a tight-lipped smile and said, “I’m fine,” before returning to doing what he had been before the devil had distracted him.
“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” Dean’s voice was soft and soothing, but sure and firm at the same time. “You’re seeing him again, aren’t you? Lucifer.”
Sam swallowed, his grip on the sawed-off tightening once more. “I’m fine,” he said again, neither confirming nor denying that he was, in fact, seeing the devil. He would be lying if he said it hadn’t gotten slightly worse since Bobby’s death, but he pretended he was alright, he pretended he was fine, because Dean needed him to be and burdening his brother with his hallucinations was just plain selfish, especially after all they’d been through lately. Dean had enough on his mind. He didn’t need to be thinking about his hallucinations, too.
“I just want to help you, Sam,” Dean said, cutting through his thoughts. Sam expected him to say more, tell him that he was being ridiculous in hiding this from him, but he didn’t. He just went back to sorting through their guns, putting what he thought they would need into a black duffle bag and leaving the rest, which was almost worse because it meant that Dean was too upset to talk about it.
-
They left the motel and took all of their belongings with them. The likelihood of them being able to come back after capturing the Leviathan was slim. Dick Roman was one of the most popular people in America at the moment and it wouldn’t go unnoticed that one of his favorite henchmen - as Dean referred to him - was suddenly missing. It also was unlikely that it would go unnoticed that the people who’d taken him were none other than the killers everyone had recently presumed dead.
“We get in, grab him, get out, and get as far away from this town as possible,” Dean told Sam as they parked their current vehicle a block away from the nondescript house the Leviathan was residing in. “Dick’s going to have a warrant out for our arrest the minute he realizes what happened, which, considering how well he knows us, won’t take very long. I just want all the information we can squeeze out of this bastard before we gank him.”
Sam didn’t argue. What he wanted was for Dean to stop caring about Dick Roman so much. What he wanted was for Dean to give this up and realize that killing Dick Roman shouldn’t be a vengeance mission because it wouldn’t bring Bobby back. What he wanted was for Dean to put all of his energy into stopping the Leviathan because he would kill others if they didn’t. All Sam wanted was for Dean to be happy and he realized that their lives weren’t exactly built for that, but still that was what he wanted and he knew that trying to get the drop on Roman wasn’t going to make him happy. It was only going to fulfill him for an instant, before he fell back into the sadness that had consumed him since Bobby’s death.
“Let’s get this done,” Dean mumbled as he slammed the trunk of the car shut and started down the sidewalk towards the Leviathan’s house, their big, black duffle bag, full of their weapons, slung over his shoulder.
Sam watched his brother walk away, still thinking about Dick Roman and his brother’s unhappiness as Lucifer whispered, “He’s going to get himself killed, Sammy. You’re going to have to watch Dean die.”
“Shut up,” Sam hissed and hurried after Dean.
-
Sam wasn’t sure what Dean was expecting to happen when they got to the house, but he had to stop his brother from banging on the door and announcing their arrival thus giving their enemy time to escape. Instead, Sam pulled him to the side, forced him to empty the duffle bag of the weapons that they deemed necessities, before hiding it in a clump of bushes by the side of the house. They could come back for it once they were done with their job.
After picking the lock to the house, the two brothers moved inside as quietly as they could manage, squirt guns full of every day dish soap held out in front of them.
“I feel ridiculous,” Dean whispered to Sam as he glanced around a corner.
“This is full of the only stuff we know of that harms Leviathan,” he reminded Dean. “Ridiculous or not it’s the only weapon we have that’ll really work on them.”
Dean didn’t say anything in response, but Sam knew he hadn’t exactly helped boost Dean’s pride, though, considering Dean’s recent actions and mental state - which wasn’t much better than Sam’s - maybe this was a good thing.
There was a creak upstairs that made both of their gazes snap up to the ceiling. Dean signaled towards the stairs and Sam nodded and soon they were both making their way silently up the staircase. Once they reached the top, Dean pressed his back against the wall to the right of the stairs and signaled for Sam to do the same. For a moment, they stood, listening to the sounds of the settling house. Then they heard another creak, sounding more like a footstep from their new vantage point, and made their way down the hall towards the bedrooms.
Without warning, a man, just a little shorter than Dean, burst out of one of the bedrooms and stood before the Winchesters. For a moment, he looked like an ordinary man, worried because two strangers had invaded his home and, for a moment, Dean wondered if they were wrong and this was just some guy that happened to work closely with Dick Roman. Then he remembered that no human worked that closely with a Leviathan and the man standing before him had disappeared from his real home only a few days ago and he lunged at him again, just as the Leviathan smirked in a way that suggested he could read his thoughts and maybe he could. Who knew? There was next to no lore on Leviathan. They weren’t a creature any hunter had ever faced before. For all they knew, mind-reading was a skill they had that they hadn’t yet revealed. But, for the record, Dean certainly hoped not.
They struggled in the hallway. Dean pressing the Leviathan up against the wall, his watergun pressed against his throat as he struggled to gain the upper hand long enough to pull his weapon out of the Leviathan’s grip and spray him with some of the soap suds that were deadly to the creature before him. Sam did it instead, getting him right between the eyes. The creature howled in pain and Dean stepped back to catch his breath before the Leviathan lunged at him again, pushing him through a door and into what looked like a laundry room. Dean’s head cracked against the window as the Leviathan slammed him up against the wall across from the door and, for a moment, he saw stars. When he opened his eyes again, Sam was pulling the Leviathan off him long enough to spray more of his soapy water in the creature’s face. Dean’s gun had been lost in the struggle and when the creature started to go after his brother again, he threw open the cupboards above the washing machine and began sifting through them for something that could potentially contain Borax. Eventually, he found a carton of bleach. He unscrewed the cap and flung a load onto the Leviathan. The creature rounded on him and tossed the bottle to Sam, who caught it in the midair. While Dean struggled to keep the Leviathan from eating him, Sam threw the stuff onto the creature.
Or at least he tried to.
At the last second before the bleach would’ve hit the Leviathan, the both of them changed positions. Dean, seeing the wall of bleach coming out of the corner of his eye, turned. He saw Sam’s scared expression, he saw the white liquid ready to come down on top of him. He closed his eyes a second too late. And then his retinas were on fire. His grip on the Leviathan slackened as he cried out in pain. He blinked, the world growing fuzzy around the edges, and he gasped as he looked up into Sam’s hazel eyes, full of worry as he began saying, “Dean, oh god, Dean, are you alright? Are you okay?” over and over again.
Dean had opened his mouth to say something, but his throat was on fire as well and that was when he realized he’d swallowed some of the stuff. Sam was already on his cell phone, calling 9-1-1, saying his brother had swallowed bleach by accident and gotten some in his eyes. Dean didn’t hear the person on the other line say they’d be there soon, that everything was going to be alright, but, if he had, he would’ve known that wasn’t true. Everything wasn’t going to be alright. Already his vision was fading and, as much as it hurt him, he kept his eyes wide open, staring into Sam’s. He wanted those hazel eyes to be the last thing he saw.
On to Ch. 2
One would think that after hunting for so long, Dean Winchester would’ve gotten used to the horrors of the job and nightmares wouldn’t be an issue, but that wasn’t at all the case. In fact, he got more nightmares than most, though, this probably had something to do with the fact he’d watched his brother die repeatedly and he’d been through Hell. Literally. Even for hunters, they had strange lives. However, when Dean awoke from his nightmares that night, they hadn’t been of Hell or of any of Sam’s deaths, they’d been of the death of someone else, who’d been close to him, someone who had just died recently: Bobby Singer.
He’d been like a father to the two boys. He’d seemed almost more invincible than their real father had at the time of his death. It just seemed unreal that could be gone, too. But that was the fact of the matter. He’d been shot in the head by a Leviathan, Dick Roman, and now he was gone and he wasn’t coming back. Dean had learned his lesson with making deals to bring back the dead. So, instead, he was planning his revenge and, when he woke up that night after having yet another dream of being unable to save Bobby from his fate, instead of going back to sleep, he went to the computer, sitting on the table in the kitchenette of their motel and began searching for clues as to Dick Roman’s whereabouts. They knew that Borax weakened a Leviathan and they knew that chopping off their head slowed them down, but they had yet to figure out what killed one and that was what Dean was searching for. He wanted Roman dead.
“What’re you doing up so early?”
Sam’s sleepy voice startled Dean. He looked up from the computer and at his brother. As his visions of Lucifer had gotten steadily worse, he’d started having more and more trouble sleeping, which was why whenever Dean was awake and Sam was asleep, he would let him sleep. He didn’t want to wake him. He felt bad about having done it now.
“Just…” he tried to think of an excuse as to why he would be on Sam’s laptop at four in the morning and when none came to him, his brother sighed audibly.
“Please tell me you’re not still looking for leads on Dick,” he mumbled, sounding about as tired as he looked.
Dean said nothing.
“Do you really think this is what Bobby would’ve wanted for us?” he asked, sounding almost angry. “Searching for his killer obsessively? Forgetting that we have other, better things to be doing? Like getting rid of the Leviathan as a whole?”
This time it was Dean that sighed. “Yeah, well, we’ve got no leads on that, so I’m trying to find one for the son of a bitch that’s leading these bastards.”
Sam sighed again and said nothing else. He staggered to the bathroom, turned on the light, and closed the door. A few moments later, Dean heard the shower go on. He half wondered if he should sit closer to the door in case his brother slipped or fell asleep. He knew he was being more than a little overprotective right now, but after Sam’s wall had broken his brother had lost a step, so Dean’s anxiety wasn’t exactly unfounded.
And neither was Sam’s.
As the younger of the two Winchester’s stood under the hot shower spray, he thought about how Dean’s drinking had increased, how he slept about as much as Sam did anymore and sometimes not at all, how he spent all of his free time on his computer going on fruitless searches of Dick Roman’s current location. Dean wasn’t seeing hallucinations of Lucifer, but he still had to be looked after, just in a different way than Sam did.
“How are you supposed to look after him when you can barely handle me?”
The devil’s puzzled voice made Sam jump and knock over the shampoo bottle provided by the motel. It rolled around in the tub noisily.
“You okay in there? Or do you need me to come in?”
This time the voice was Dean’s.
“I’m fine,” Sam called back, pretending he hadn’t heard his brother’s second question.
He scoffed lightly.
What a pair they made.
-
They’d moved on to the next town and their next case by the time Dean found something that could help him in his vendetta against the leader of the Leviathan. Apparently there was one living nearby that spoke with Roman often. Of course, there were only ten or twelve Leviathan total, so they all had spoken with him more than once, but this one was said to be around him almost constantly, which meant either the Leviathan was taking a paid vacation or they had just stumbled upon the town Dick Roman was in and their luck was finally turning around. They were supposed to be hunting a ghost of a seven year old girl that was haunting a church a few blocks away from their motel, but Dean told Sam they had to drop that case now that this new information had come to light.
“We have a chance to get the bastard that killed Bobby! We have to take this chance! It could be the only one we get!” he told him after they’d gotten back from the church and another round of questions that had been directed at the pastor and his wife.
“You know we can’t kill him, Dean!” Sam reminded him. “As far as we know, Leviathan can’t be killed! What’s the point of getting him now when all we’ll be doing is dragging him around with us? He’ll have every chance in the world to get away!”
“Does it matter?!” Dean asked, sounding incredulous. “We’ll have him and we’re not idiots, Sam. We’ll make sure he doesn’t get away! I’m not letting him walk away from this!”
Sam pursed his lips as Lucifer reminded him, “You know that once he puts his mind to something there really isn’t any way you can stop him.”
The devil paused.
“He’s probably going to get himself killed. You’re not very good at protecting him.”
Sam’s hands balled into fists.
“In fact, you’re not much good at anything, are ya, Sammy?”
Sam had clenched his teeth as well when he noticed that Dean was looking at him funny and he knew his brother knew that Lucifer was talking to him again. He’d since figured out that they were just hallucinations, they weren’t real, Lucifer wasn’t really there, but that didn’t make them happen any less often. In fact, this seemed to almost have encouraged the devil into appearing more than was necessary. Still, Sam had a trick now, one Dean had taught him when the hallucinations were first getting to be unbearable. He pressed his thumb into the scar on his hand and the devil stuck his tongue out at him before he flickered out of sight.
That problem having been taken care of, Sam let out a nervous sigh and said, “Fine. We’ll do this, but we’re capturing his man first and questioning him. I’m not going to go into Roman’s offices with no information whatsoever. We need to be prepared Dean.”
“Fine,” Dean agreed, but he was excited. Finally, finally after too long, Bobby would be avenged. He just had to wait a little while longer and, with how things were going, he was pretty sure he could do that.
-
It took Sam a week to be convinced they were ready. They spent three days watching the Leviathan. He did things that every other human being did: he went to the grocery store, he got gas, he walked his neighbor’s dog. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was wearing the meatsuit of a man, who’d gone missing in Milwaukee around the time the Leviathan had first started appearing, he might almost have thought they had the wrong person. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. They were all too certain about what this man was and what he was doing.
It was on the Friday of that week, when everyone else was going to the movies and buying popcorn that Sam and Dean Winchester decided it would be a good idea to capture the Leviathan, question him on Dick Roman’s whereabouts and activities, before cutting off his head and burying it at least a thousand miles away from where they would bury his body making it ten times harder for humpty-dumpty to put himself back together again - as Dean so graciously put it the afternoon they were sitting in their motel room, cleaning their guns and getting them ready for the night ahead.
To be completely honest, Sam was more worried about his brother getting cocky and getting himself killed than capturing the Leviathan they were supposed to be after. Having been around him his entire life, Sam knew that the odds of Dean keeping his head in the coming fight was slim. Dean had a problem keeping his head when their job involved revenge. All he wanted to do was kill. Of course, he knew he had to plan first if the job were to be successful, but once they got there, once they’d done everything they’d planned to do, he would go off on his own, do what he thought was best and fuck anyone who disagreed with him. This had gotten better over the years, but it was still bad enough that Sam was worried.
“Maybe you should lock him in a closet,” Lucifer said from a chair near the door. He was blowing a pinwheel. Sam wasn’t sure how he’d acquired it. They hadn’t walked past any houses with pinwheels that day that Sam recalled. He struggled to ignore the devil, even as he reminded him, “he has locked you up before when it was for your own good. Like when you couldn’t stop drinking that juicy red demon blood. Remember that, Sammy?”
“Sam?”
This time the voice was Dean’s. Sam looked up from what he was doing. He didn’t remember freezing in his actions of putting his sawed-off together, but Lucifer’s words had gotten to him. He would be lying if he said he wasn’t afraid to this day of succumbing to his previous addiction and he began feeding off of demons again. That was the one thing that had come between him and his brother and the last thing he wanted was for it to happen again.
Mentally shaking himself and subtly pressing his thumb against the scar on his hand, he gave Dean a tight-lipped smile and said, “I’m fine,” before returning to doing what he had been before the devil had distracted him.
“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” Dean’s voice was soft and soothing, but sure and firm at the same time. “You’re seeing him again, aren’t you? Lucifer.”
Sam swallowed, his grip on the sawed-off tightening once more. “I’m fine,” he said again, neither confirming nor denying that he was, in fact, seeing the devil. He would be lying if he said it hadn’t gotten slightly worse since Bobby’s death, but he pretended he was alright, he pretended he was fine, because Dean needed him to be and burdening his brother with his hallucinations was just plain selfish, especially after all they’d been through lately. Dean had enough on his mind. He didn’t need to be thinking about his hallucinations, too.
“I just want to help you, Sam,” Dean said, cutting through his thoughts. Sam expected him to say more, tell him that he was being ridiculous in hiding this from him, but he didn’t. He just went back to sorting through their guns, putting what he thought they would need into a black duffle bag and leaving the rest, which was almost worse because it meant that Dean was too upset to talk about it.
-
They left the motel and took all of their belongings with them. The likelihood of them being able to come back after capturing the Leviathan was slim. Dick Roman was one of the most popular people in America at the moment and it wouldn’t go unnoticed that one of his favorite henchmen - as Dean referred to him - was suddenly missing. It also was unlikely that it would go unnoticed that the people who’d taken him were none other than the killers everyone had recently presumed dead.
“We get in, grab him, get out, and get as far away from this town as possible,” Dean told Sam as they parked their current vehicle a block away from the nondescript house the Leviathan was residing in. “Dick’s going to have a warrant out for our arrest the minute he realizes what happened, which, considering how well he knows us, won’t take very long. I just want all the information we can squeeze out of this bastard before we gank him.”
Sam didn’t argue. What he wanted was for Dean to stop caring about Dick Roman so much. What he wanted was for Dean to give this up and realize that killing Dick Roman shouldn’t be a vengeance mission because it wouldn’t bring Bobby back. What he wanted was for Dean to put all of his energy into stopping the Leviathan because he would kill others if they didn’t. All Sam wanted was for Dean to be happy and he realized that their lives weren’t exactly built for that, but still that was what he wanted and he knew that trying to get the drop on Roman wasn’t going to make him happy. It was only going to fulfill him for an instant, before he fell back into the sadness that had consumed him since Bobby’s death.
“Let’s get this done,” Dean mumbled as he slammed the trunk of the car shut and started down the sidewalk towards the Leviathan’s house, their big, black duffle bag, full of their weapons, slung over his shoulder.
Sam watched his brother walk away, still thinking about Dick Roman and his brother’s unhappiness as Lucifer whispered, “He’s going to get himself killed, Sammy. You’re going to have to watch Dean die.”
“Shut up,” Sam hissed and hurried after Dean.
-
Sam wasn’t sure what Dean was expecting to happen when they got to the house, but he had to stop his brother from banging on the door and announcing their arrival thus giving their enemy time to escape. Instead, Sam pulled him to the side, forced him to empty the duffle bag of the weapons that they deemed necessities, before hiding it in a clump of bushes by the side of the house. They could come back for it once they were done with their job.
After picking the lock to the house, the two brothers moved inside as quietly as they could manage, squirt guns full of every day dish soap held out in front of them.
“I feel ridiculous,” Dean whispered to Sam as he glanced around a corner.
“This is full of the only stuff we know of that harms Leviathan,” he reminded Dean. “Ridiculous or not it’s the only weapon we have that’ll really work on them.”
Dean didn’t say anything in response, but Sam knew he hadn’t exactly helped boost Dean’s pride, though, considering Dean’s recent actions and mental state - which wasn’t much better than Sam’s - maybe this was a good thing.
There was a creak upstairs that made both of their gazes snap up to the ceiling. Dean signaled towards the stairs and Sam nodded and soon they were both making their way silently up the staircase. Once they reached the top, Dean pressed his back against the wall to the right of the stairs and signaled for Sam to do the same. For a moment, they stood, listening to the sounds of the settling house. Then they heard another creak, sounding more like a footstep from their new vantage point, and made their way down the hall towards the bedrooms.
Without warning, a man, just a little shorter than Dean, burst out of one of the bedrooms and stood before the Winchesters. For a moment, he looked like an ordinary man, worried because two strangers had invaded his home and, for a moment, Dean wondered if they were wrong and this was just some guy that happened to work closely with Dick Roman. Then he remembered that no human worked that closely with a Leviathan and the man standing before him had disappeared from his real home only a few days ago and he lunged at him again, just as the Leviathan smirked in a way that suggested he could read his thoughts and maybe he could. Who knew? There was next to no lore on Leviathan. They weren’t a creature any hunter had ever faced before. For all they knew, mind-reading was a skill they had that they hadn’t yet revealed. But, for the record, Dean certainly hoped not.
They struggled in the hallway. Dean pressing the Leviathan up against the wall, his watergun pressed against his throat as he struggled to gain the upper hand long enough to pull his weapon out of the Leviathan’s grip and spray him with some of the soap suds that were deadly to the creature before him. Sam did it instead, getting him right between the eyes. The creature howled in pain and Dean stepped back to catch his breath before the Leviathan lunged at him again, pushing him through a door and into what looked like a laundry room. Dean’s head cracked against the window as the Leviathan slammed him up against the wall across from the door and, for a moment, he saw stars. When he opened his eyes again, Sam was pulling the Leviathan off him long enough to spray more of his soapy water in the creature’s face. Dean’s gun had been lost in the struggle and when the creature started to go after his brother again, he threw open the cupboards above the washing machine and began sifting through them for something that could potentially contain Borax. Eventually, he found a carton of bleach. He unscrewed the cap and flung a load onto the Leviathan. The creature rounded on him and tossed the bottle to Sam, who caught it in the midair. While Dean struggled to keep the Leviathan from eating him, Sam threw the stuff onto the creature.
Or at least he tried to.
At the last second before the bleach would’ve hit the Leviathan, the both of them changed positions. Dean, seeing the wall of bleach coming out of the corner of his eye, turned. He saw Sam’s scared expression, he saw the white liquid ready to come down on top of him. He closed his eyes a second too late. And then his retinas were on fire. His grip on the Leviathan slackened as he cried out in pain. He blinked, the world growing fuzzy around the edges, and he gasped as he looked up into Sam’s hazel eyes, full of worry as he began saying, “Dean, oh god, Dean, are you alright? Are you okay?” over and over again.
Dean had opened his mouth to say something, but his throat was on fire as well and that was when he realized he’d swallowed some of the stuff. Sam was already on his cell phone, calling 9-1-1, saying his brother had swallowed bleach by accident and gotten some in his eyes. Dean didn’t hear the person on the other line say they’d be there soon, that everything was going to be alright, but, if he had, he would’ve known that wasn’t true. Everything wasn’t going to be alright. Already his vision was fading and, as much as it hurt him, he kept his eyes wide open, staring into Sam’s. He wanted those hazel eyes to be the last thing he saw.
On to Ch. 2