Fic: Flesh and Blood (Supernatural)
Title: Flesh and Blood
Author: Ivy
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R (for F-bombs)
Length: 4,500
Warnings: Character death. Oh yes, I’ve been bitten by the emo bunny.
Summary: "Either I’m possessed or I’m wearing cursed boxers," Dean said, hopping on the balls of his feet.
A/N: Thanks to trakkie for the plot bunny, the beta and the Latin, and for pimping me into the damn fandom in the first place.
~*~
The first time it happened Dean was hunting the ghost of a fur trapper in the woods of North Idaho. He’d come here following newspaper stories of a string of accidental shootings. Authorities had attributed them to inexperienced out-of-state hunters, but Dean didn’t even have to try anymore to read between the lines when reporters were trying to cover up something supernatural.
Dean had found the trapper’s cabin deep in the woods - roof caved in and green with fungus. Local legend had it that Jeff Rendon had starved to death in his cabin one winter because he’d run out of bullets to shoot game. So he was wandering around the woods now, shooting other hunters. Didn’t matter how many spirits he hunted, Dean still didn’t understand the mean, vindictive bastards.
He held the EMF detector out in front of him, keeping one eye out for rotten floorboards. The thing was going off constantly, five red lights lit and hardly flickering. Whole fucking building was haunted, which didn’t help Dean figure out where the bones were. He readjusted the strap of the duffel on his shoulder and turned slowly round the single room again, looking closely at rotted timbers falling over broken furniture, trying to find what he’d missed. He flipped the detector over to fiddle with the battery casing, wondering if he’d somehow busted the thing, when he caught a glimpse of something moving out of the corner of his eye. He looked up quickly but it was gone - par for the course - but it looked like it had been a reflection in a tarnished mirror resting against one still-standing wall.
He took a step towards it, then heard a whistle and a thunk as a bullet buried itself in a timber right behind where he’d been standing. "Jesus!" he swore and dove for cover. By the time he’d finished dodging phantom bullets and finding Rendon’s bones (in the closet - jeez, who crawls into a closet to die?) he’d forgotten all about the movement in the mirror. If he thought of it at all as he hiked back to his car in the twilight, he figured it was just one of Jeff’s tricks.
~*~
It was full dark and Dean was sailing through farmland on an Idaho state highway when his Black Sabbath tape got to the end of side A and there were a few seconds of silence while the tape flipped over. Over the road noise and the clicking of the tape deck, Dean heard the distinct whine of his EMF detector going off. "The hell…?"
Dean pulled over to the side of the road. "Just my luck," he said as he pushed open the door of the Impala. He’d come across haunted stretches of highway before - phantom hitchhikers, Indian burial grounds, old battle fields. Of course he just had to drive right through one while he still had splinters as big as carpenter's nails in his shoulder and hip from diving for cover in that death trap of a cabin.
He pulled the EMF detector out of the back seat and started pacing off a rough circle around the car, trying to pinpoint the hot spot. "Huh," Dean said. The readings were staying pretty constant, just like in the cabin. He tried walking straight out into the field a hundred yards, but the readings didn’t change at all.
Dean looked up, trying to see if there were power lines. He couldn’t see any dark silhouettes against the canopy of stars, but it was possible they were there somewhere, hidden in the dark, messing around with his meter.
Dean hiked back to the car feeling a little ridiculous and tossed the detector in the front seat before taking off again. Twenty miles later, the damn thing was still going off. Either Dean had found the single most haunted stretch of fields in the country or there was something seriously screwy going on. He pulled onto the shoulder again and slammed out of the car. Again, no matter where he wandered, along the road or into the fields on either side, the readings didn’t change. "This is absurd," he muttered, stomping back to the car.
He was just about to pop the batteries out of the damn thing and keep going when a thought occurred to him. He walked a ways from the car and set the detector down on the shoulder. Then he slowly backed away, keeping his eyes on the red lights. When he was ten paces away, one light went dark. Another ten paces and the second light winked out, then another and another until he was standing on the side of the road, his car a silent hulk in the distance, and staring into complete darkness.
"OK…" Dean started back towards the car, and the lights blinked on again, one by one, until the detector was squealing when he reached down to pick it up. "That…could be coincidence."
Once, maybe, but by the third time Dean had jogged away from it and seen it go dark, Dean had come to the conclusion that he had accidentally picked up something cursed at the cabin. First things first. Dean grabbed a shotgun filled with rock salt from the trunk of the Impala in case Jeff had decided to hitch a ride. Holding the gun in one hand, Dean checked his pockets to see if there was anything obviously out of place, but didn’t come up with anything unusual. Could be it had attached itself to something he was wearing?
Dean took off his pendant first and dropped it by the detector, then jogged down the road. He heard the whine silence behind him. Not the pendant, then. He tried the jacket next, then his belt, then his boots. By the time he was barefoot wearing just his jeans and still holding the shotgun he was starting to get pissed. It was eleven o'clock in October in middle of nowhere Idaho and it wasn’t exactly toasty out. He was starting to shiver and the damn EMF detector was telling him that he was still wearing a cursed object.
"Dammit!" Dean said, shimmying out of his jeans and dropping them in the small pile of clothes next to the detector on the roadside. It would be a perfect end to the night if a state trooper drove by right now and arrested him for public indecency. The dew-covered wild grass that grew along the shoulder tickled the tops of his feet as he jogged out again, clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering. The EMF detector went silent again.
Reluctantly Dean left his shotgun on the roadside this time, standing in the dark in just his boxers. Again, the detector was silent as long as he was standing away from it. "Either I’m possessed or I’m wearing cursed boxers," Dean said, hopping on the balls of his feet. He rubbed at the tender skin at the back of his neck, fingers brushing the bandage there, and stared at the dark spot on the road where the detector must be sitting, mocking him. "Shit."
God, he’d never hear the end of it if Sam-
Dean threw his clothes back on quickly, still shaking with the cold when he started the Impala back up again. He sat for a minute waiting for the heater to start pumping out warm air again and glared at the EMF detector. Then he popped the batteries out and pulled back onto the highway.
~*~
A week later the EMF detector was still going off every time he turned it on and he was starting to get annoyed, if for no other reason than he had made the damn thing because it was useful and as long as he kept setting it off himself he might as well be using an actual walkman to try and find ghosts.
When he hit the local fleabag motel in Holbrook, Arizona, he set up his voice-activated tape recorder on the teal and pink-painted bedside table. He lay on the bed for a few hours, staring up at the underside of the cow’s skull mounted tastelessly above him and studiously kept his mind blank, trying to fall asleep. He hadn’t been sleeping well for almost a year now and he didn’t need a shrink to tell him why. He felt the tender skin at the back of his neck ache like a sunburn pressed into the pillow and focused for a while on not touching it. Eventually he rolled so his back was turned to the tape recorder and fell asleep.
~*~
He played back the tape the next morning, sitting in the slanting light that cut through the venetian blinds, highlighting every single speck of dust in the air. He heard his own rustling of the covers, but also the unmistakable static interference of something that shouldn’t be here.
It took another two hours of fiddling around with tape speed before he separated out a voice in the static. His skin was prickling as he went through the routine motions. The EMF and the static - he knew what that meant. And he wanted to be wrong. But he wanted so badly to be right.
He had to make two laps around the inside of the hotel room before he could make himself sit down and press play on the tape.
Clearly in the static now he could hear a voice: "Visere me." Look at me.
It was Sam’s voice.
~*~
Dean didn’t stay in the same place two nights in a row after that. He was being ridiculous and he knew it. The EMF detector still went crazy when he put the batteries back in to check and he was sure if he left the tape recorder on again he’d hear his brother. But he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to hear Sam sound like all those other spirits he had hunted, disjointed and desperate. Whenever there was silence he could still hear it, "visere me," so he played his tapes as loud as the speakers would go and kept driving.
~*~
He felt normal again after a week or two. He pushed the shape in the glass and voice on the tape down with all those things that he just never thought about. Sometimes when he hadn’t slept in too long he’d feel their weight pressing against him, but he was surprised at how easy it was just to push it all away and keep going, as he’d been doing from the start.
He was hunting a poltergeist in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey that the locals were sure was the Jersey Devil when it happened again. Standing in the kitchen of a house, he heard Sam’s voice, sharp and urgent in his ear, like he was standing by Dean’s shoulder. "Dean! Get down!"
Dean reacted automatically to his brother’s command, dropping to the floor just as a knife flew like a shuriken from the butcher’s block. Dean was just pissed off enough to yell, "What are you now, Obi-Wan Kenobi?" as he dashed out into the hallway, hearing more knives lodge themselves in the kitchen wall.
"Fuck yeah, bitch!" Sam called and Dean could hear the smile in his voice though he knew, if he turned his head to look, there would be nothing there to see.
~*~
Dean slammed the door to the hotel room shut and threw his duffel bag onto the bed, bouncing it on the bad springs. "What the hell are you doing here, Sammy? You don’t have any bones - I scattered what they were able to salvage from the fire. You don’t even have a gravestone, Sammy. You can’t be here."
Dean felt raw from the rage tearing itself out of him. When Dean had seen the house go up in flames and knew that neither his brother or the demon that had killed his family were coming out again all he had wanted to do was kick Sam’s stupid little face in. The self-absorbed asshole had known he wasn’t getting out of there alive and had set Dean up so he was being escorted from the scene by two burly detectives when he realized what his brother had done.
And now he had the gall to come creeping around with warnings and cryptic Latin whisperings. He couldn’t believe that a Winchester - any Winchester - knowing what they knew, seeing what they’ve seen, would stick around on this plane past their expiration date.
"You can’t be here!" He screamed at the ceiling.
There was no answer. Only as the silence stretched on did Dean realize how much he wanted one. He wanted a chance to unleash this anger, he wanted Sam to goad him into saying everything he would never say even to himself. And he wanted to see his brother again and never have to let him go.
Dean raised shaking hands to his face and rubbed his eyes.
~*~
Dean lay in a bed that smelled like mildew that night and thought about how he’d find the perfect girl and fall in love and someday when they’d been married for years and had five children and a white picket fence and a dog because his oldest son wanted one and a kitten because his only daughter begged for one he’d lay in bed late at night and tell his wife about his baby brother that he spent his whole life protecting but couldn’t protect just once. And when he told her it would be just one of the facts of his life, distant on the landscape of his past, just one of any number of things that brought him to this quiet moment.
Dean knew it would never happen.
~*~
In the morning Dean showered until the water ran cold with his eyes shut so that he couldn’t see the rust stains in the tub. The water pattering on the back of his neck was just on the line between soothing and pain.
His eyes weren’t really focused on the mirror when he shaved. He hoped that somewhere in the night he might have dozed off a bit, but he was pretty sure he’d heard every single tick of the bedside clock. He rinsed off his razor under the tap and glanced up at his half-shaved reflection then startled so badly he dropped the razor in the sink.
Sam was standing behind him, perfectly dry in the humid bathroom, staring at the back of his neck. Dean stared at his brother, hoping that if he didn’t move Sam wouldn’t go away. Sam looked just like he did the last time Dean saw him, bangs flopping just short of his eyes, wearing a white shirt and red flannel. He looked pale but Dean didn’t think about that.
The stare was so focused, Dean could feel the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He unconsciously raised a hand and ran his fingers over the reddened skin. When he touched it, Sam looked at him in the mirror. His eyes were so black Dean felt like he was falling forward into them, terrified of his brother for the first time since he’d given Sam the keys to his car.
Dean blinked and he was alone again.
~*~
As he always had when he didn’t want to think, Dean spent a lot of time after Sam’s death fiddling around with his car. He changed the oil and the filter, checked the belts, balanced the tires. When it was running as well as a forty-year-old car could be expected to, he detailed the outside and cleaned the inside. He cleaned and organized the trunk. When he finished that he realized how little of Sam he had left. Most of what had been Sam’s had burned up in his apartment in Stanford. Since then, Dean had leant Sam everything he needed. Now those things were his again as they had been before, as if the past few years had just been an anomaly.
He didn’t remember when he’d first started thinking about it, just that it seemed so desperately unfair that Sam was burned so deeply into every part of his life but, when he died, had slid completely away, leaving no outward mark. A stranger wouldn’t even know he’d had a brother. He wanted a mark, something that he'd never lose, that would always say that Sam had been a part of him.
He turned the idea over in his head for a long time, trying to decide what would be most fitting. He couldn’t just use Sam’s name - that was too much like Eminem and those other rappers with the names of their children written in pseudo-mystical fonts. Dean knew too much about real mysticism to want anything that could accidentally be a Tibetan meditation symbol written in his skin.
Besides, anybody could know Sam’s name. Some floozy from a one-night stand (as if his brother ever went in for that) could hear about his brother’s death and tattoo his name artistically on her hip to lend an air of tragedy to her flirtations next time she went to a bar. No, Dean wanted something that only a brother would know, that only he would know what it meant.
In the end he spent eighteen hours on a campus quad stealing wireless internet and flipping through baby accessory websites. After a while he got into a sort of a zen state clicking through the links and scrolling down the pages, not thinking anymore about why he was doing this.
Sammy had had a baby blanket - well, Dean had had it first, but when Sammy had been born his father had asked him to be a big boy and give it to his little brother. It was white and soft and had a little duck embroidered in blue in one corner, followed by three little blue ducklings. His mother had wrapped Sammy in it the night she died. Dean had carried Sammy down flaming stairs and out to safety in that blanket. Sammy had clung to it for years, despite the time Dean told him that if too much of his drool dried in the blanket it would turn into a drool monster and drown him in his sleep. (Sammy had cried long enough after that to bring Dad over and get Dean a lecture about never, ever joking about monsters and demons.)
Sammy had left the blanket in a motel room when he was five. Dean remembered the exact moment when Sammy had realized it was gone, riding in the backseat of the car, already thirty miles out of town. Sammy had cried for a week but Dad didn’t turn back. The local authorities had caught wind of his latest credit card scam and they couldn’t risk going back for "just a blanket, Sammy. Fine, fine, I’ll buy you another one." The only thing that made Sammy stop crying was Dean telling him that he’d had to give up the blanket when he was only four and it just meant that Sammy was a big boy now.
It wasn’t the first time that Dean had hated his father for not being a normal dad and driving back to the motel just to make his son happy.
Dean was terrible at drawing and he wanted it to be just right. He finally did find a jpg of the original design on some crazy cat lady's site about vintage baby blankets. When he found it he almost laughed - he’d just love to see the look on Sammy’s face if he bought him an exact replica of the blanket he’d lost, twenty years later.
Instead Dean just carried his laptop to a Kinko’s and printed out a color copy.
He went to a tattoo parlor the next day and was impressed when the artist didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the design Dean wanted. Forty-five minutes later Dean had a mama duck and three ducklings tattooed onto the skin at the base of his neck. It still stung when the tattoo artist taped a piece of gauze over it. He never asked why someone with three days of stubble and a leather jacket wanted a tattoo of baby ducks and Dean didn’t offer a reason.
~*~
Dean turned around in the bathroom, to where the reflection of his brother had stood. "A tattoo?" He brushed his fingers over it again - he’d wanted it somewhere he wouldn't have to see it everyday. "You’re haunting my tattoo? Jesus christ, Sammy."
Dean stretched out with everything he had, trying to feel if Sam was still there, but he wasn't his brother, he wasn't psychic, and he didn't feel anything at all. He dropped his head forward until his forehead touched the cold glass of the mirror and his breath ghosted across it.
~*~
"I don't know quite what I'm doing here, Sammy, so you're going to have to cut me a little slack."
Everything Dean knew about spirits boiled down to three things: they had a purpose, they were tied to an object or place, they could be killed if you found that object and burned it to the ground. Things were a little complicated here by the fact that the object was his neck, but if this were any other case he'd figure a way around it. If this were any other case.
"I know Caspers get attached to flesh and bone, but it's usually their own. Frankly, Sammy, I'm finding this a little freaky." He sat on the brown and orange bed spread cross-legged and placed one hand over the tattoo. Spirits could be called to their object - like Bloody Mary to her mirror - so he just had to hope he could somehow call Sam. "OK," he said, closing his eyes in mock concentration, "You're in a waiting room, crowded with people with gunshots and knife wounds and things, and there's a gruff nurse there calling out numbers, but when she calls your number, you're not going to go, you're going to decide instead to come to this ratty hotel with some sort of demented Aztec decorating scheme going and -"
Dean opened his eyes and all the rest of his words fell out of his head. His brother was standing in front of him, arms crossed and the corner of his mouth fighting a smile. "What am I supposed to do, say, 'Beetlejuice, beetlejuice, beetlejuice?'"
Dean surprised himself by laughing. "Remember when I double-dared you to say that and you told Dad that I was making you summon demons?"
Sam smiled and everything felt normal and easy again, and Dean couldn't help but relax muscles he didn't know he'd been tensing all these months. "Dad revoked our TV privileges for a month." Sam shook his head to hide a laugh. He looked up again and then his image flickered in and out like static on an old TV. Dean felt like he'd fallen through a hole in the floor and he'd never hit the ground again.
Sam must have seen the look on his face because he stepped towards Dean, stuttering and too fast to be human. Dean couldn't help it, he flinched back. "Aren't you happy to see me?" Sam said, tilting his head. It was a motion he'd done a thousand times in life, but now it just felt wrong, like all Dean would have to do is touch him and Sam's skin would break open and peel back like it had in the fire.
"Why are you here?" Dean asked.
Sam rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on."
"No," Dean said, standing and forcing Sam - or what was left of him - to step back. "Why are you here?" Each word grated in his throat. Dean refused to flinch when Sam flickered again, quicker than the blink of an eye.
"You're here," Sam said, using his most annoyingly earnest tone. "I've got your back."
Dean stared at his brother, then touched the back of his neck, torn between laughing at the awful pun and lashing out. He'd been telling himself he was fine for a year, and was just now beginning to feel how wrong he was. This must be what hysteria felt like. "You've got my back? You got me arrested for breaking and entering, then you went off to die with that thing! I'm in a family of fucking martyrs! You don't have anything anymore, Sammy, you can't be here."
Sam shook his head. "I'm sorry about all that. You're right, I was being a dick."
"Jesus, Sammy, try and sound a little sorry. You sounded more sincere when you apologized for breaking my Tonka truck."
"It's OK, Dean, I know I'm supposed to be with you, now. We're all we have - that's what you told me, right?"
Dean looked at his brother, those big eyes that always made him give Sam everything he wanted, from the last of the Lucky Charms to the keys to the Impala that last night. But the light in Sam's eyes was wrong and it pulled at the pit of his stomach. "Don’t you see what you're doing here, Sammy? You're a spirit, you don't get to stay around. Those are the rules. You stick around things will go bad, you'll get lost. You can't do this. You have to go."
"But don't you want -"
"Yes!" Dean howled. If he could've punched his brother he would've, but settled for throwing the nearest thing - a ruffled orange accent pillow - against the wall. "Yes, I need you here! I need you by my side because you're all I have and I don't know how to do this anymore. But I need you breathing, Sammy, I need you to put me before your stupid quest and I need you not to throw your life away, OK?" Dean was crying and he couldn't remember ever crying in front of his brother before. "I need you here," he started again, his voice choking in his throat. "But I need you to be OK more. And you're never going to be when you're here."
Sam looked at him and reached out, his fingers stopping just before they touched Dean's cheek. "I'm sorry," he said, and Dean could hear tears in the trembling of his brother's voice.
"I know," Dean said. It was him and his brother again, just like it had always been, and Dean did what he'd always done when his brother was hurt and scared and didn't know what to do. "I'll be OK, Sammy. This isn't your fight anymore. I need to know that you'll be safe. Will you go?" Dean looked at his brother and wished that he could say what he knew Sam wanted to hear, that they'd be together again, somehow, that Dean would join him, Sam just had to be patient. But deep down Dean didn't believe that and he couldn't lie to his brother this one time, not about this.
"OK." Sam said. Dean breathed in relief and squeezed his eyes shut, feeling hot tears spill over his cheeks. When he opened them again Sam was gone.
~*~
Dean found a dermatologist in the next town over. He specialized in gang-bangers trying to straighten out their lives. He didn't have any local anesthetic, but he was cheap and effective and Dean figured he'd want to feel this pain for a while. A laser wasn't fire, but Dean thought it was close enough. When he left he felt alone in his own skin.
Read on AO3.
Author: Ivy
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R (for F-bombs)
Length: 4,500
Warnings: Character death. Oh yes, I’ve been bitten by the emo bunny.
Summary: "Either I’m possessed or I’m wearing cursed boxers," Dean said, hopping on the balls of his feet.
A/N: Thanks to trakkie for the plot bunny, the beta and the Latin, and for pimping me into the damn fandom in the first place.
~*~
The first time it happened Dean was hunting the ghost of a fur trapper in the woods of North Idaho. He’d come here following newspaper stories of a string of accidental shootings. Authorities had attributed them to inexperienced out-of-state hunters, but Dean didn’t even have to try anymore to read between the lines when reporters were trying to cover up something supernatural.
Dean had found the trapper’s cabin deep in the woods - roof caved in and green with fungus. Local legend had it that Jeff Rendon had starved to death in his cabin one winter because he’d run out of bullets to shoot game. So he was wandering around the woods now, shooting other hunters. Didn’t matter how many spirits he hunted, Dean still didn’t understand the mean, vindictive bastards.
He held the EMF detector out in front of him, keeping one eye out for rotten floorboards. The thing was going off constantly, five red lights lit and hardly flickering. Whole fucking building was haunted, which didn’t help Dean figure out where the bones were. He readjusted the strap of the duffel on his shoulder and turned slowly round the single room again, looking closely at rotted timbers falling over broken furniture, trying to find what he’d missed. He flipped the detector over to fiddle with the battery casing, wondering if he’d somehow busted the thing, when he caught a glimpse of something moving out of the corner of his eye. He looked up quickly but it was gone - par for the course - but it looked like it had been a reflection in a tarnished mirror resting against one still-standing wall.
He took a step towards it, then heard a whistle and a thunk as a bullet buried itself in a timber right behind where he’d been standing. "Jesus!" he swore and dove for cover. By the time he’d finished dodging phantom bullets and finding Rendon’s bones (in the closet - jeez, who crawls into a closet to die?) he’d forgotten all about the movement in the mirror. If he thought of it at all as he hiked back to his car in the twilight, he figured it was just one of Jeff’s tricks.
~*~
It was full dark and Dean was sailing through farmland on an Idaho state highway when his Black Sabbath tape got to the end of side A and there were a few seconds of silence while the tape flipped over. Over the road noise and the clicking of the tape deck, Dean heard the distinct whine of his EMF detector going off. "The hell…?"
Dean pulled over to the side of the road. "Just my luck," he said as he pushed open the door of the Impala. He’d come across haunted stretches of highway before - phantom hitchhikers, Indian burial grounds, old battle fields. Of course he just had to drive right through one while he still had splinters as big as carpenter's nails in his shoulder and hip from diving for cover in that death trap of a cabin.
He pulled the EMF detector out of the back seat and started pacing off a rough circle around the car, trying to pinpoint the hot spot. "Huh," Dean said. The readings were staying pretty constant, just like in the cabin. He tried walking straight out into the field a hundred yards, but the readings didn’t change at all.
Dean looked up, trying to see if there were power lines. He couldn’t see any dark silhouettes against the canopy of stars, but it was possible they were there somewhere, hidden in the dark, messing around with his meter.
Dean hiked back to the car feeling a little ridiculous and tossed the detector in the front seat before taking off again. Twenty miles later, the damn thing was still going off. Either Dean had found the single most haunted stretch of fields in the country or there was something seriously screwy going on. He pulled onto the shoulder again and slammed out of the car. Again, no matter where he wandered, along the road or into the fields on either side, the readings didn’t change. "This is absurd," he muttered, stomping back to the car.
He was just about to pop the batteries out of the damn thing and keep going when a thought occurred to him. He walked a ways from the car and set the detector down on the shoulder. Then he slowly backed away, keeping his eyes on the red lights. When he was ten paces away, one light went dark. Another ten paces and the second light winked out, then another and another until he was standing on the side of the road, his car a silent hulk in the distance, and staring into complete darkness.
"OK…" Dean started back towards the car, and the lights blinked on again, one by one, until the detector was squealing when he reached down to pick it up. "That…could be coincidence."
Once, maybe, but by the third time Dean had jogged away from it and seen it go dark, Dean had come to the conclusion that he had accidentally picked up something cursed at the cabin. First things first. Dean grabbed a shotgun filled with rock salt from the trunk of the Impala in case Jeff had decided to hitch a ride. Holding the gun in one hand, Dean checked his pockets to see if there was anything obviously out of place, but didn’t come up with anything unusual. Could be it had attached itself to something he was wearing?
Dean took off his pendant first and dropped it by the detector, then jogged down the road. He heard the whine silence behind him. Not the pendant, then. He tried the jacket next, then his belt, then his boots. By the time he was barefoot wearing just his jeans and still holding the shotgun he was starting to get pissed. It was eleven o'clock in October in middle of nowhere Idaho and it wasn’t exactly toasty out. He was starting to shiver and the damn EMF detector was telling him that he was still wearing a cursed object.
"Dammit!" Dean said, shimmying out of his jeans and dropping them in the small pile of clothes next to the detector on the roadside. It would be a perfect end to the night if a state trooper drove by right now and arrested him for public indecency. The dew-covered wild grass that grew along the shoulder tickled the tops of his feet as he jogged out again, clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering. The EMF detector went silent again.
Reluctantly Dean left his shotgun on the roadside this time, standing in the dark in just his boxers. Again, the detector was silent as long as he was standing away from it. "Either I’m possessed or I’m wearing cursed boxers," Dean said, hopping on the balls of his feet. He rubbed at the tender skin at the back of his neck, fingers brushing the bandage there, and stared at the dark spot on the road where the detector must be sitting, mocking him. "Shit."
God, he’d never hear the end of it if Sam-
Dean threw his clothes back on quickly, still shaking with the cold when he started the Impala back up again. He sat for a minute waiting for the heater to start pumping out warm air again and glared at the EMF detector. Then he popped the batteries out and pulled back onto the highway.
~*~
A week later the EMF detector was still going off every time he turned it on and he was starting to get annoyed, if for no other reason than he had made the damn thing because it was useful and as long as he kept setting it off himself he might as well be using an actual walkman to try and find ghosts.
When he hit the local fleabag motel in Holbrook, Arizona, he set up his voice-activated tape recorder on the teal and pink-painted bedside table. He lay on the bed for a few hours, staring up at the underside of the cow’s skull mounted tastelessly above him and studiously kept his mind blank, trying to fall asleep. He hadn’t been sleeping well for almost a year now and he didn’t need a shrink to tell him why. He felt the tender skin at the back of his neck ache like a sunburn pressed into the pillow and focused for a while on not touching it. Eventually he rolled so his back was turned to the tape recorder and fell asleep.
~*~
He played back the tape the next morning, sitting in the slanting light that cut through the venetian blinds, highlighting every single speck of dust in the air. He heard his own rustling of the covers, but also the unmistakable static interference of something that shouldn’t be here.
It took another two hours of fiddling around with tape speed before he separated out a voice in the static. His skin was prickling as he went through the routine motions. The EMF and the static - he knew what that meant. And he wanted to be wrong. But he wanted so badly to be right.
He had to make two laps around the inside of the hotel room before he could make himself sit down and press play on the tape.
Clearly in the static now he could hear a voice: "Visere me." Look at me.
It was Sam’s voice.
~*~
Dean didn’t stay in the same place two nights in a row after that. He was being ridiculous and he knew it. The EMF detector still went crazy when he put the batteries back in to check and he was sure if he left the tape recorder on again he’d hear his brother. But he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to hear Sam sound like all those other spirits he had hunted, disjointed and desperate. Whenever there was silence he could still hear it, "visere me," so he played his tapes as loud as the speakers would go and kept driving.
~*~
He felt normal again after a week or two. He pushed the shape in the glass and voice on the tape down with all those things that he just never thought about. Sometimes when he hadn’t slept in too long he’d feel their weight pressing against him, but he was surprised at how easy it was just to push it all away and keep going, as he’d been doing from the start.
He was hunting a poltergeist in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey that the locals were sure was the Jersey Devil when it happened again. Standing in the kitchen of a house, he heard Sam’s voice, sharp and urgent in his ear, like he was standing by Dean’s shoulder. "Dean! Get down!"
Dean reacted automatically to his brother’s command, dropping to the floor just as a knife flew like a shuriken from the butcher’s block. Dean was just pissed off enough to yell, "What are you now, Obi-Wan Kenobi?" as he dashed out into the hallway, hearing more knives lodge themselves in the kitchen wall.
"Fuck yeah, bitch!" Sam called and Dean could hear the smile in his voice though he knew, if he turned his head to look, there would be nothing there to see.
~*~
Dean slammed the door to the hotel room shut and threw his duffel bag onto the bed, bouncing it on the bad springs. "What the hell are you doing here, Sammy? You don’t have any bones - I scattered what they were able to salvage from the fire. You don’t even have a gravestone, Sammy. You can’t be here."
Dean felt raw from the rage tearing itself out of him. When Dean had seen the house go up in flames and knew that neither his brother or the demon that had killed his family were coming out again all he had wanted to do was kick Sam’s stupid little face in. The self-absorbed asshole had known he wasn’t getting out of there alive and had set Dean up so he was being escorted from the scene by two burly detectives when he realized what his brother had done.
And now he had the gall to come creeping around with warnings and cryptic Latin whisperings. He couldn’t believe that a Winchester - any Winchester - knowing what they knew, seeing what they’ve seen, would stick around on this plane past their expiration date.
"You can’t be here!" He screamed at the ceiling.
There was no answer. Only as the silence stretched on did Dean realize how much he wanted one. He wanted a chance to unleash this anger, he wanted Sam to goad him into saying everything he would never say even to himself. And he wanted to see his brother again and never have to let him go.
Dean raised shaking hands to his face and rubbed his eyes.
~*~
Dean lay in a bed that smelled like mildew that night and thought about how he’d find the perfect girl and fall in love and someday when they’d been married for years and had five children and a white picket fence and a dog because his oldest son wanted one and a kitten because his only daughter begged for one he’d lay in bed late at night and tell his wife about his baby brother that he spent his whole life protecting but couldn’t protect just once. And when he told her it would be just one of the facts of his life, distant on the landscape of his past, just one of any number of things that brought him to this quiet moment.
Dean knew it would never happen.
~*~
In the morning Dean showered until the water ran cold with his eyes shut so that he couldn’t see the rust stains in the tub. The water pattering on the back of his neck was just on the line between soothing and pain.
His eyes weren’t really focused on the mirror when he shaved. He hoped that somewhere in the night he might have dozed off a bit, but he was pretty sure he’d heard every single tick of the bedside clock. He rinsed off his razor under the tap and glanced up at his half-shaved reflection then startled so badly he dropped the razor in the sink.
Sam was standing behind him, perfectly dry in the humid bathroom, staring at the back of his neck. Dean stared at his brother, hoping that if he didn’t move Sam wouldn’t go away. Sam looked just like he did the last time Dean saw him, bangs flopping just short of his eyes, wearing a white shirt and red flannel. He looked pale but Dean didn’t think about that.
The stare was so focused, Dean could feel the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He unconsciously raised a hand and ran his fingers over the reddened skin. When he touched it, Sam looked at him in the mirror. His eyes were so black Dean felt like he was falling forward into them, terrified of his brother for the first time since he’d given Sam the keys to his car.
Dean blinked and he was alone again.
~*~
As he always had when he didn’t want to think, Dean spent a lot of time after Sam’s death fiddling around with his car. He changed the oil and the filter, checked the belts, balanced the tires. When it was running as well as a forty-year-old car could be expected to, he detailed the outside and cleaned the inside. He cleaned and organized the trunk. When he finished that he realized how little of Sam he had left. Most of what had been Sam’s had burned up in his apartment in Stanford. Since then, Dean had leant Sam everything he needed. Now those things were his again as they had been before, as if the past few years had just been an anomaly.
He didn’t remember when he’d first started thinking about it, just that it seemed so desperately unfair that Sam was burned so deeply into every part of his life but, when he died, had slid completely away, leaving no outward mark. A stranger wouldn’t even know he’d had a brother. He wanted a mark, something that he'd never lose, that would always say that Sam had been a part of him.
He turned the idea over in his head for a long time, trying to decide what would be most fitting. He couldn’t just use Sam’s name - that was too much like Eminem and those other rappers with the names of their children written in pseudo-mystical fonts. Dean knew too much about real mysticism to want anything that could accidentally be a Tibetan meditation symbol written in his skin.
Besides, anybody could know Sam’s name. Some floozy from a one-night stand (as if his brother ever went in for that) could hear about his brother’s death and tattoo his name artistically on her hip to lend an air of tragedy to her flirtations next time she went to a bar. No, Dean wanted something that only a brother would know, that only he would know what it meant.
In the end he spent eighteen hours on a campus quad stealing wireless internet and flipping through baby accessory websites. After a while he got into a sort of a zen state clicking through the links and scrolling down the pages, not thinking anymore about why he was doing this.
Sammy had had a baby blanket - well, Dean had had it first, but when Sammy had been born his father had asked him to be a big boy and give it to his little brother. It was white and soft and had a little duck embroidered in blue in one corner, followed by three little blue ducklings. His mother had wrapped Sammy in it the night she died. Dean had carried Sammy down flaming stairs and out to safety in that blanket. Sammy had clung to it for years, despite the time Dean told him that if too much of his drool dried in the blanket it would turn into a drool monster and drown him in his sleep. (Sammy had cried long enough after that to bring Dad over and get Dean a lecture about never, ever joking about monsters and demons.)
Sammy had left the blanket in a motel room when he was five. Dean remembered the exact moment when Sammy had realized it was gone, riding in the backseat of the car, already thirty miles out of town. Sammy had cried for a week but Dad didn’t turn back. The local authorities had caught wind of his latest credit card scam and they couldn’t risk going back for "just a blanket, Sammy. Fine, fine, I’ll buy you another one." The only thing that made Sammy stop crying was Dean telling him that he’d had to give up the blanket when he was only four and it just meant that Sammy was a big boy now.
It wasn’t the first time that Dean had hated his father for not being a normal dad and driving back to the motel just to make his son happy.
Dean was terrible at drawing and he wanted it to be just right. He finally did find a jpg of the original design on some crazy cat lady's site about vintage baby blankets. When he found it he almost laughed - he’d just love to see the look on Sammy’s face if he bought him an exact replica of the blanket he’d lost, twenty years later.
Instead Dean just carried his laptop to a Kinko’s and printed out a color copy.
He went to a tattoo parlor the next day and was impressed when the artist didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the design Dean wanted. Forty-five minutes later Dean had a mama duck and three ducklings tattooed onto the skin at the base of his neck. It still stung when the tattoo artist taped a piece of gauze over it. He never asked why someone with three days of stubble and a leather jacket wanted a tattoo of baby ducks and Dean didn’t offer a reason.
~*~
Dean turned around in the bathroom, to where the reflection of his brother had stood. "A tattoo?" He brushed his fingers over it again - he’d wanted it somewhere he wouldn't have to see it everyday. "You’re haunting my tattoo? Jesus christ, Sammy."
Dean stretched out with everything he had, trying to feel if Sam was still there, but he wasn't his brother, he wasn't psychic, and he didn't feel anything at all. He dropped his head forward until his forehead touched the cold glass of the mirror and his breath ghosted across it.
~*~
"I don't know quite what I'm doing here, Sammy, so you're going to have to cut me a little slack."
Everything Dean knew about spirits boiled down to three things: they had a purpose, they were tied to an object or place, they could be killed if you found that object and burned it to the ground. Things were a little complicated here by the fact that the object was his neck, but if this were any other case he'd figure a way around it. If this were any other case.
"I know Caspers get attached to flesh and bone, but it's usually their own. Frankly, Sammy, I'm finding this a little freaky." He sat on the brown and orange bed spread cross-legged and placed one hand over the tattoo. Spirits could be called to their object - like Bloody Mary to her mirror - so he just had to hope he could somehow call Sam. "OK," he said, closing his eyes in mock concentration, "You're in a waiting room, crowded with people with gunshots and knife wounds and things, and there's a gruff nurse there calling out numbers, but when she calls your number, you're not going to go, you're going to decide instead to come to this ratty hotel with some sort of demented Aztec decorating scheme going and -"
Dean opened his eyes and all the rest of his words fell out of his head. His brother was standing in front of him, arms crossed and the corner of his mouth fighting a smile. "What am I supposed to do, say, 'Beetlejuice, beetlejuice, beetlejuice?'"
Dean surprised himself by laughing. "Remember when I double-dared you to say that and you told Dad that I was making you summon demons?"
Sam smiled and everything felt normal and easy again, and Dean couldn't help but relax muscles he didn't know he'd been tensing all these months. "Dad revoked our TV privileges for a month." Sam shook his head to hide a laugh. He looked up again and then his image flickered in and out like static on an old TV. Dean felt like he'd fallen through a hole in the floor and he'd never hit the ground again.
Sam must have seen the look on his face because he stepped towards Dean, stuttering and too fast to be human. Dean couldn't help it, he flinched back. "Aren't you happy to see me?" Sam said, tilting his head. It was a motion he'd done a thousand times in life, but now it just felt wrong, like all Dean would have to do is touch him and Sam's skin would break open and peel back like it had in the fire.
"Why are you here?" Dean asked.
Sam rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on."
"No," Dean said, standing and forcing Sam - or what was left of him - to step back. "Why are you here?" Each word grated in his throat. Dean refused to flinch when Sam flickered again, quicker than the blink of an eye.
"You're here," Sam said, using his most annoyingly earnest tone. "I've got your back."
Dean stared at his brother, then touched the back of his neck, torn between laughing at the awful pun and lashing out. He'd been telling himself he was fine for a year, and was just now beginning to feel how wrong he was. This must be what hysteria felt like. "You've got my back? You got me arrested for breaking and entering, then you went off to die with that thing! I'm in a family of fucking martyrs! You don't have anything anymore, Sammy, you can't be here."
Sam shook his head. "I'm sorry about all that. You're right, I was being a dick."
"Jesus, Sammy, try and sound a little sorry. You sounded more sincere when you apologized for breaking my Tonka truck."
"It's OK, Dean, I know I'm supposed to be with you, now. We're all we have - that's what you told me, right?"
Dean looked at his brother, those big eyes that always made him give Sam everything he wanted, from the last of the Lucky Charms to the keys to the Impala that last night. But the light in Sam's eyes was wrong and it pulled at the pit of his stomach. "Don’t you see what you're doing here, Sammy? You're a spirit, you don't get to stay around. Those are the rules. You stick around things will go bad, you'll get lost. You can't do this. You have to go."
"But don't you want -"
"Yes!" Dean howled. If he could've punched his brother he would've, but settled for throwing the nearest thing - a ruffled orange accent pillow - against the wall. "Yes, I need you here! I need you by my side because you're all I have and I don't know how to do this anymore. But I need you breathing, Sammy, I need you to put me before your stupid quest and I need you not to throw your life away, OK?" Dean was crying and he couldn't remember ever crying in front of his brother before. "I need you here," he started again, his voice choking in his throat. "But I need you to be OK more. And you're never going to be when you're here."
Sam looked at him and reached out, his fingers stopping just before they touched Dean's cheek. "I'm sorry," he said, and Dean could hear tears in the trembling of his brother's voice.
"I know," Dean said. It was him and his brother again, just like it had always been, and Dean did what he'd always done when his brother was hurt and scared and didn't know what to do. "I'll be OK, Sammy. This isn't your fight anymore. I need to know that you'll be safe. Will you go?" Dean looked at his brother and wished that he could say what he knew Sam wanted to hear, that they'd be together again, somehow, that Dean would join him, Sam just had to be patient. But deep down Dean didn't believe that and he couldn't lie to his brother this one time, not about this.
"OK." Sam said. Dean breathed in relief and squeezed his eyes shut, feeling hot tears spill over his cheeks. When he opened them again Sam was gone.
~*~
Dean found a dermatologist in the next town over. He specialized in gang-bangers trying to straighten out their lives. He didn't have any local anesthetic, but he was cheap and effective and Dean figured he'd want to feel this pain for a while. A laser wasn't fire, but Dean thought it was close enough. When he left he felt alone in his own skin.
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