Fic: Tiger by the Tail
Title: Tiger by the Tail
Author: judith_88_g
Rating: R (language and violence)
Genre: Gen
Characters: Dean, Sam, OMC
Spoilers: Up to 8x10
Word Count: 9,100
Disclaimer: Not mine, Santa's that mean.
Summary: Set after 8x10. The boys are back on the road together. Sam’s quiet and Dean proves he’s capable of making some stupendously stupid decisions.
A/N: A huge thank you to the very wonderful autumnfey for her kind and cogent edits, and to the always helpful astute spangielka, the merciless persecutor of incoherence and things Sam Winchester Would. Never. Say.
Consciousness was drifting back to him in lazy swells. Dean blinked, his eyes catching the sight of something coppery soaking in the denim of his jeans. He tried to focus on that, willed his mind to claw its way out from that syrupy mass it seemed to be dipped in. His vision blurred, danced chaotically before his eyes, swimming in and out, and making him feel dizzy. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to win over the cold flash of nausea.
The breath he finally let out was ragged. The dull ache in his head started to take shape, together with the rest of his surroundings. He was sitting, his arms tied tightly behind at his wrists. He tugged at the restraints, wriggled his hands and searched for any loops, an inch of air trapped somewhere in the bonds that would let him handle it from there. He didn’t find any.
“Getting fidgety there, Dean?”
It shouldn’t have come as any surprise, really. It was professional work, hunter’s quality sign. He should have known better. He should have known better about lots of things lately.
“This whole… Disarray. I never wanted it to come down to this, you do realize that, right?”
Dean wanted to tell him to go to hell, but didn’t trust his voice enough just yet and no way he was giving the guy that satisfaction. Instead, he focused on blinking his wandering gaze back under control, staring straight at his laps. Kian fucking Taylor. Another red bead rolled down from his temple and joined the prominent stain on his thigh.
“We can still settle this down, you know.” His voice sounded closer. “And really, if you think about it, it’s a win-win situation. The bottom line is one less of those sons of bitches and you gotta admit that’s a damn good thing to aim for. You and me? We call it a misunderstanding and go home, no hurt feelings.”
It was bullshit. Dean knew it and as he lifted his head, he could see in Kian’s eyes that the guy knew it as well. They had been past that point the moment the butt of Kian’s gun had landed on Dean’s temple. The guy might have been crazy enough to pull it off but still not far enough over the edge to let a debt like that flash red over his head.
The minute Kian got what he wanted, Dean was a dead man.
He huffed out a grim smirk. He was not amused in the slightest. “Aren’t you a charming devil? Keep talking like that and I might think the gun was just an excuse.”
Kian’s mouth twisted in a smile that could almost pass as rueful. He shrugged. “It’s your call.”
*****
“So say the zombie apocalypse hits, who would you rather have on your side: Mila Jovovich, Sarah Polley or that chick with a machine gun leg?”
Dean pushed the door close with a heel of his boot, cutting off the biting cold from the outside. He crossed the small room and placed one of the steaming Styrofoam cups next to Sam’s arm on the kitchenette table.
“Should I be worried or is it just your philosophical side getting a voice?” His brother muttered, not even bothering to lift his eyes from the screen of his laptop.
“It’s called strategizing,” he said with a cluck of the tongue. “Worry’s for the feeble and unprepared.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I just thought you said zombie apocalypse. But hey, that was before I knew you already got a plan cooking.”
“So which one?” Dean half sat, half lay on his bed, slurping what remained of his coffee. “Cause I gotta say, as cool as that gun looks, personally, I think it can be kind of a nag. The situation strikes, how long can you hold it up? I mean, dude, that just can’t be comfortable. Not to mention -”
“You know what? Scratch what I said earlier. The zombie apocalypse? I’ll take it any day.”
Dean’s response was halted by the phone ringing. He groped a bit before grudgingly managing to wrench it out of his jeans pocket.
“Yo Garth, what’s up?”
"Hola amigo. Got a buddy here who wants to get a hold of you and your brother. A hunter, says he needs some inside scoop on a demon, heard you’re savvy in the area. I wondered if I might point him into your direction."
“Garth, no offence, man,” Dean said in a tone that bellied the words, giving a slight shake of his head at the frown Sam sent him over the laptop, “but the guy wants demon info, tell him to crack a book.”
"Paper tends to fall short in yielding field experience. It’s in the front rank with body count though and you know it."
“Well, body count’s par for the course. The sooner he realizes it, the better for him.”
"Whoa, okay, no need to be harsh. We all want that ball in the back of the same net. Just think about it. Even your daddy used some help when tracking Azazel."
“Garth,” Dean cut him off. “You may think that you got it all worked out real nice, but you don’t know shit about shit when it comes to my father. You got a line on a job, you let us know, but I sure as hell ain’t giving some wannabe hunter a demon 101.”
Dean didn’t wait for whatever Garth might have to add, he hung up, the phone staying in the tight grip against his forehead.
“That went smooth,” Sam observed, his voice calm but expectant.
“Yeah well, I’m a pro,” Dean grumbled absentmindedly, tapping the phone against his knee.
He climbed to his feet, paced to the tiny fridge across the dirty carpet. Burgundy-ish? He had a vague recollection of Sam using that word on one or two occasions. Or something that sounded equally geeky.
“It smell fishy to you?” He said finally, flipping a beer bottle open and sending the cap flying somewhere onto the sticky cupboard top. “Cause it sure does to me.”
“Okay,” Sam nodded raising his eyebrows, his posture twisted on the chair so that he could face Dean. “I’m gonna take a chance and assume you’re not talking about the beer. Care to elaborate?”
“It was Garth,” Dean accented the word with an emphatic gesture that splashed some contents of the bottle on his jeans. “Crap.”
“Yeah, kinda got that one.”
Dean sent his brother an annoyed glare. “He said there’s a hunter out there who badly wants a chat with us. Apparently, the guy’s in need of our demon expertise.”
“That it?” Sam frowned genuinely surprised and Dean suddenly remembered what master bitchfaces Sam was capable of throwing if he only set his mind to that.
“Yeah, smartass, that’s it,” he said pushing himself from the cupboards and resuming his pace around the motel room.
“And Dad got involved in this exactly how?”
“Garth might’ve said Dad had learned from other hunters on his chase after the Yellow Eyes and I might’ve suggested he stove it up his ass.” Dean swiped his palm up and down the back of his head. “I mean, dude, how does he even know those things? Was it broadcast on hunter’s radio or hunter mammas just have a funny concept of bedtime stories?”
“It’s true enough though. Dad did learn the ropes from others.”
“Some, yeah, maybe, but I don’t really recall the old man waiting for a friendly soul to hold his hand through a hunt. ‘Sides, it’s not the point. The guy wants some info, ain’t nothing I can tell him Garth can’t himself. He still insists on socializing with us, and by that I mean you and me specifically, well, let’s just say it makes me uneasy.”
“I don’t know, Dean. Who is he anyway? And what’s he after? Even if you’re right, I still think it’s pretty decent logic to have some skinny on the guy. Probably even more so.”
Dean scratched the insides of his ear, cringed when his finger met with something gluey. He hated it when Sam was right and his brother always had an annoying propensity for that. “Yeah well, maybe. But I’ll tell you what, the guy beeps on the radar too close for my comfort, I’ll start worrying. Until then? I think our plates are full enough as it is.”
Sam furrowed his brows, rubbed his fingers against the stubble on his chin, clearly unconvinced, and suddenly Dean found himself fixed on the movement. It felt unfit, and it struck him like the sight of a nun in a stripper club might, the contrast too stark, too obvious. There was a time when Sam would just call him a moron and Dean would sling some shit back, and later he might set the first clown site that would pop up as Sam’s start page and maybe change his ringtone to Hair, because no matter how many times Dean had pulled that one, it had never failed to make Sam huff and puff and call Dean a child, and it just cracked his shit up six ways to Sunday. And then Sam would make him call Garth back, because this is what he does and Dean just can’t help it, and he would be bitching and dialing Garth’s number and that would be it.
He felt a flash of unreasonable anger tangling a knot somewhere below his sternum. He wanted to call Sam on that, but there was nothing he could pick and point, and flash before Sam’s eyes and then preferably shoot until the thing was good and dead. It’d been a while since the world had gone askew on its hinges and what used to be familiar and easy started to feel as if made of nothing but sharp angles.
“Actually, I was kinda thinking we could use a change of scenery. It’s been a week, if there was anything here to find, we would’ve found it by now.” Dean dropped the empty bottle into the bin and it landed with a heavy clink. He thought about getting another one, but then looked at Sam typing something on his laptop and decided against it. He added almost as an afterthought, “If you’re done here, that is.”
Sam lifted his gaze from the screen, gave him an incredulous look.
“What?” Dean huffed.
“Nothing, just,” Sam shook his head. “Never mind.” He closed the lid in an abrupt movement, raked a palm down his face. “Okay,” he sighed. “Guess, you’re right, it doesn’t make much sense at this point.”
Dean stopped himself short of pointing out it really didn’t right from the start. “Kevin’s on it,” he said instead.
“Kevin’s a kid.”
It wasn’t even anger in Sam’s words. It was a bone-weary appeal of somebody who knew better than to think it ever mattered.
Dean gave the thought a useless workout. He grabbed his duffel, tossed it onto the bed and started gathering a week’s worth of unpacked stuff back where it belonged. There wasn’t much, a change of T-shirts and underwear, a knife. Dean was already cataloguing his gear and mentally pushing it back into the Impala’s trunk.
“Not that it changes anything, but I really don’t think he’s been one for a while now,” he said after some time, zipping the bag shut.
They left in the late afternoon and Dean told himself that this time Sam had made his call, that there was nothing forced or strained about them hitting the road under the biting February breeze. He kept telling himself that until the open stretch of the interstate unfolded ahead of them, making Boston nothing but yet another memory in the rearview mirror and he almost managed to convince himself that it made a difference.
*****
Dean planned on driving through the night, playing his music too loud and pushing his baby too fast, clearing his head. And it worked just fine until about twenty miles outside of Cleveland the weather took a downturn, caught them in a blizzard and changed the drive into a snail-pace struggle. With the snowflakes lit by the headlights and gusting against the windshield, there was little room to actually see the road looming somewhere in front. Dean managed to drag the car to Toledo, but that seemed about as far as the whiteout would let them.
He spotted a vacancy sign and woke Sam up. Waited until his brother blinked himself out of sleep, then pulled off into the motel parking lot and did a ninety handbrake turn, making the Impala fishtail on the snow and fit perfectly into a space right in front of the entrance.
The corners of Sam’s lips yanked up drowsily. “Admit it, you’ve been dying for an occasion to do that since November.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dean said with a grin. He killed the engine and got out to check them in.
It was a start, he told himself, trying not to think about the lack of questions and the detached look in Sam’s features as Dean had driven West without even pretending their destination was any clearer than that.
*****
They had breakfast in a small diner tucked up behind the motel. The sky had cleared out by then and the rays of cold winter sun bounced against the layer of snow, deceptive and achingly bright. Dean had to squint his eyes as he sent a look at the world outside from the warmth of the diner; postcard-fucking-perfect.
He felt irrationally pissed at the stopover, unable to shake off the deep-seated conviction that if he only put enough miles between here and there, whatever there was wouldn’t matter anymore. The road bore a promise, the allure of both cognizance and distraction, and he just couldn’t help the antsy feeling tingling stubbornly in his limbs; going always agreed with him more.
“So what’s the word in the Land of Snow?” He asked munching on a piece of bacon and chasing it with a generous slurp of coffee.
Sam lifted his head from the newspaper he had grabbed on the way to the diner. “You have anything specific in mind when you pushed it down the I-90?”
Yeah, Sammy, pretty fucking specific. It wasn’t what Sam was asking about though. “Why?”
“Cause I think I might’ve found us a job.”
“A job?”
“Yeah, that would be the one. You with me, man?”
“Oh, that’s hilarious. I mean, I thought we were gonna take a break from the job for a while.”
“Well, I figured since we’re already here, we may as well look into it.”
It wasn’t exactly an answer, but then again Dean’s wasn’t exactly a question. Sam wanted to take a job and Dean thought it wasn’t really the worst that could have happened right now.
“So whattaya got there?”
“Monroe, Michigan. Twenty five miles north. An abandoned house, a long history of sightings, and a teenage couple found dead five days ago within the premises of the estate. Both struck with cardiac arrest, both without any previous record of a heart condition.”
“That just screams a spirit.”
“Yeah well, you can join the choir.” Sam turned the newspaper around and slid it across the table top.
Dean cocked an eyebrow and pushed his plate aside, sent his greasy fingers down his thighs for the lack of anything more suitable before reaching for the paper. He cast an eye at the picture of an old ramshackle building accompanied by two yearbook photos of a girl and boy smiling broadly at the camera.
“Okay, what am I looking at?” He asked tapping two fingers against the black-and-white pictures.
“Try reading. Reading’s actually the keyword here.”
“Uh, no. Actually, I’m pretty sure it isn’t. You said something about a haunted house though. That sounds more like it.”
“Dude, it’s a one-page article. The probability your eyeballs’re gonna explode is really pretty low.”
“It’s a one-page article that you already read, you crackhead. You may as well untwist your panties from that giant knot and just fucking tell me.” It came out harsher than he intended but Dean made a point of resting the paper on the table and folding his arms all the same.
Sam held his gaze for a notch longer than what could be passed as casual. “It used to be a school,” he said finally. “Back in 1914 a local priest burnt it down to the ground, together with a teacher and twenty six children that happened to be inside. Six days later the guy offs himself in the prison cell. The site is rebuilt in 1920 and changed into a regular house. A couple of occupants since then, never for too long. Last ones are actually reported to have died in the place in 1992. Heart failure.”
“1992 huh? Guess dead people don’t make for the best marketing.”
“Not only that. There’ve been sightings, too. Locals saying they heard children’s cries, some claiming that,” Sam leaned in and grabbed the paper, frowned while looking for the right passage, “the hunched figure of the priest is still looming about the property and at dark moonless nights a distant glow of fire can be seen in the darkness.” He looked up from above the paper. “Enough violent deaths to serve for quite a handful of angry spirits.”
Dean lounged back in his booth, flashed a quirk of an eyebrow. “I betcha five dollars humpy’s our guy.”
Sam shrugged, “It’s as good a start as any. We got a name: Tom Miller. The article doesn’t touch on any whys though so we might wanna look into those first. But that’d involve, you know, reading and such.”
“Yeah well, you go nuts.” Dean stretched an arm across the backrest. That last word sounded like a slap even to his own ears. Good. He raised an appraising eyebrow, The ball’s in your court, Sammy.
He could see the fight bubbling right under the surface in the long clouded look Sam gave him. He felt a compelling urge to push his brother over that edge of outburst Sam was balancing, push him and watch all hell break lose, push him and pray that it wouldn’t be Sam finally dropping out of his reach that he would have to watch instead.
“Well, if you’d rather pickaxe your way through half the cemetery,” Sam trailed off, his voice contained but brittle nonetheless.
Dean smirked, an unpleasant sound he was unable to catch before it rolled from his lips. He seized Sam up, his brother not moving an inch, a stony fuck-you written all over his face.
Dean made a deliberate show of reaching for his coffee and slurping the remnants of the tepid bitter liquid.
“My point stands,” he said plunking the cup and motioning to stand up. “Just be careful and don’t paper-cut yourself while you’re at it.”
*****
The swing threw his head sideways, made his skull rattle like a jackhammer. When his vision cleared out a bit, Dean ran his tongue against his teeth, wriggled his mouth and spat, a bloody mass landing around his feet. He stayed like that for a while, dipped chin and heavy lids, unable to stop the shaky, jagged breathing that misted around his lips in a white cloud of vapor. He was trembling too, not sure it was the cold alone responsible for that.
“All I need’s the gun.”
Kian’s voice sounded disappointed, almost apologetic, sounded close, and it was the proximity that forced Dean to lift his head. He must have blacked out for longer than he’d thought, because Kian was now sitting on a chair of his own, elbows propped on knees, right in Dean’s face. Looking like he was weighed down with the sad inevitability of the situation. Dean was suddenly struck by the image of his father, sitting in the exact same way after Dean had told him he wasn’t going back to school all those gazillion years ago. Not asked, not hinted, just flat-out informed, ready to cop whatever was following while all his instincts screamed at him to bolt the fuck away. He remembered his dad looked at him, a pistol slide and a wire brush motionless in his hands, and the gaze that seemed hundreds of years old. Then he’d nodded his okay, which Dean had damn well known was not okay but at the same time still somehow was, and gone back to cleaning his gun.
It felt like a violation much worse than whatever punches Kian might throw and suddenly Dean regretted wasting his gob on the dusty floor.
“You’re nothin’ like ‘im you piece a shit,” he rasped, his words a handful of razorblades pushed down his chalk-dry throat.
He braced for another blow but instead saw Kian’s eyebrows fly up his forehead, realized he must’ve said something wrong, just couldn’t put his finger at what it’d been exactly.
“Just tell me where the colt is, kid. It’s all I want, all I can think about,” the voice was almost pleading. “Everything that happened, you must understand.”
Dean had a blurry recollection of telling the son of a bitch the colt was gone and that if he really was set on finding it, Lucifer was the one to ask. Or maybe he just wanted to. Because that shit right there? It was blunt, artless truth, and despite of how fucked-up a spot he was smacked in, it was still fucking hilarious. He wasn’t sure though and that alone screamed in his head the scary kind of dangerous.
You’re losing it, man.
There was a crunching sound in his chest, like pieces of glass on gravel, shifting with every ragged breath. He knew he should do something, but God, he was tired. His head had rolled down again, he wasn’t even sure when, but he didn’t think he had enough left in himself to raise it. If Sam wanted to make it, he better hurry the fuck up or he was gonna miss the show entirely.
Then it hit him, and this time the fear that made his knee bounce involuntarily was white-cold and real: What if Sam was not looking?
It turned out he was able to gaze up after all, just in time to see an ugly smile contorting Sam’s face when his fist landed heavily on Dean’s ribs.
*****
“I still don’t get it. So let’s assume Miller’s our guy, how does he choose his vics? I mean, there must be a connection, there always is.”
The old wooden floor creaked and whined under Sam’s feet. Dean could see a yellowish halo of his brother’s flashlight bouncing a few steps ahead of him. It wasn’t entirely dark, but most of the sunlight was stolen by the planks that at some point had replaced the panes in most of the windows. There were places where the wood was either too crumbled or not fixed neatly enough and the shafts of cold daylight cut through the dusty air like laser beams, crisscrossing the cruddy room as if it was a museum’s gallery rather than interior of a long abandoned, rather precarious, and most probably haunted, construction. The only alarm that might end up being set off rested in Dean’s jacket pocket, but he caught himself avoiding the narrow lines all the same. Just in case.
“The guy burnt the school down ‘cause he believed the teacher was cutting a deal with the devil. I’d say his logic might be tilted a bit towards brazenly insane.”
Sam was moving more to the right, currently pointing his flashlight at a chest of drawers that apparently no one had thought worthy of taking. The place was practically empty, only few pieces of furniture left behind and even as decor oriented as he was, Dean could very well see why.
“You think she was? Dabbling with the thing? Aiming to sacrifice those kids?” Sam slid open the top drawer, rummaged in it briefly before closing it and moving on to the others.
“I think wacko lady or not, Miller’s the one to have struck the match.”
Sam headed on, stopped before the staircase and swept the old steps with the beam of his flashlight. “Maybe this is it, maybe he’s still doing it.”
“What, kindling bonfires? ‘Cause in that case I wish I’d brought some marshmallows for the party.”
“I was rather thinking about fighting evil. So far we got what? Those teenage kids, the cop and Alissa Skrawsky, and these are only the ones we know for sure visited the place. It’s really not that hard if you think about it, you could probably point at anyone and find something they’re not exactly proud of, and death, if anything, only tends to redouble paranoia.”
Dean peeked behind a tattered curtain drawing it away with the nose of his gun. “Dude sure wasn’t a half-assed type while still alive and preaching. Twenty six kids, man, I’d really hate to see that redoubled.”
“Yeah.” Sam paused. “’M going upstairs.”
Sam was halfway up when the EMF reader woke up in Dean’s pocket. He froze on the steps, back to the wall, sawed-off pulled and ready to hit whatever welcome party the host was about to throw. Dean mirrored his stance.
“Dean?” Sam hissed, climbing the steps one at a time.
“Nothing yet.”
Turned out it worked like a charm and Dean thought he really should’ve known better than to tempt the Universe’s sick sense of humor like that, because next thing he saw was Sam fly through the railing and hit the floor with a sickening thump.
For the fraction of a second it took him to acknowledge the fall Dean’s heart honest to God stopped beating. He dashed towards his brother, firing both of the shells waiting in his double in the general direction of the staircase. He dropped to his knees.
“Sam. Christ, Sam.”
Sam’s breath hitched in an unvoiced protest, his right hand wandered wildly over the floor, fingers scratching against the boards convulsively, looking for a grip. Dean’s hands shook when he reloaded his gun.
“Sam. Sammy, stay with me. Jesus. Sammy, come on, man.”
There was a movement at the foot of the staircase and Dean felt the temperature drop down to the marrow-freezing level. His trembling finger found the trigger, he made sure he fired just one shell this time.
The EMF kept wheezing at a mind-piercing volume, almost as loud as the words ‘spine injury’ in Dean’s head. He grabbed Sam’s searching arm, crouched and threw it over his shoulders, lifted his brother’s weight and refused to stop even when a weeping sound rose somewhere at the back of Sam’s throat.
He used the second shot as a diversion, sending it wide, as the spook was still nowhere to be seen, before losing the shotgun and focusing solely on dragging his giant brother outside, a string of nonsensical reassurances falling from his lips.
Sam’s grip on consciousness seemed to grow stronger as they neared the Impala and when his feet started floundering awkwardly against the ground Dean felt like crying out of the sheer relief.
He lowered Sam to the ground clumsily, his back propped against the car, ass in the snow.
“Hey, Sammy. Come on, stay with me. That’s good, you’re gonna be just fine. Stay with me.”
Sam gave a sound that could have meant ‘okay’ or could have meant ‘fuck you’, but as long as he seemed to react Dean didn’t care which.
He held Sam’s face in his hands. “Come on, man, talk to me. Where does it hurt?”
“Shoul’r.” The word no more than a hiss through the clenched teeth.
Only then did Dean notice that Sam’s arm was cradled close to his chest. Unnaturally so. He touched his brother’s hand, ignoring Sam’s rapid intake of breath. When he tried to move it though, the involuntary yelp that escaped Sam’s mouth stopped him cold.
“Looks dislocated to me. Anything else?”
Sam shook his head, eyes shut. Okay then. Dean looked at the house, a dark shape against the dimming cloudless sky, both of their sawed-offs somewhere inside.
“Okay,” he said aloud. “Okay.”
He manhandled Sam into the car, rummaged in the first aid kit, and handed Sam two vicodins and a bottle of water telling him to keep them down. He drove fast, cutting his eyes every now and then to Sam, who was wordlessly making his tours around the pain in the passenger seat.
Once in the relative safety of their motel room, Dean sat his brother on the bed like a kid and checked for any other injuries. Peeling off the jacket proved excruciating enough even despite the drugs, and left Sam covered in sweat and shaking. Dean cut his T-shirt off, had to shut his eyes for a second at the sight of the bone protruding oddly under the skin.
It’s nothing, he told himself. A fall like that, they were goddamn lucky.
He crouched in front of the bed, grabbed Sam’s hand and bent it at the elbow.
“Okay?”
His brother’s tensed white-faced nod made something in Dean’s abdomen churn nauseatingly. Okay, an empty fucking word. Regular Winchester permission for all things fucked-up. Maybe that was where they’d made a mistake. There was absolutely nothing okay about this whole situation and yet the word was found easily rolling on the tongue and falling from the lips, a stock threadbare lie which had lost its comforting quality thousands of miles ago. What the hell had they thought letting okay ever sound like this?
Dean swallowed hard, set about popping Sam’s shoulder back.
*****
Sam’s back was turned to him when his brother made his way up, step by step, not making any sound, his feet slow as if dipped in molasses. “The haunted house, huh? I must admit it’s a classic touch.”
“You know me, I’ve always been a sucker for this shit.”
“So what now? Get it done and get gone?”
“You betcha.”
“You keep on telling yourself that. It’s what you don’t get.”
Dean shrugged, “It’s either or, I told you. Anything in-between gets you killed. Head in the game, Sammy.”
“Ghosts to hunt. People to kill.”
“Yahtzee.” Dean took out his zippo, stared at the small flame for a while. “Should I say something?”
It was Sam’s turn to shrug, “You never do.”
“Still, it feels like I should say something.”
Sam turned around, perched on one of the steps. “Dad always said you don’t chat up your mark, you shoot it.”
“Get the job done.”
Sam nodded, “Get the job done.”
Dean crouched and put the lighter at the foot of the steps, watched as the flames climbed them inaudibly until the fiery wall swallowed them whole and his nostrils were hit by the sharp reek of burning flesh.
*****
Dean woke up with a start, palms sweaty when he dragged them across his face, heart pounding against his ribcage. He felt blindly for a light switch, found it and flicked it on, the dim light making his eyes ache when he tossed a look to the other bed; Sam was sleeping deeply, unperturbed, a steady rise and fall of his chest easily observable under the covers. No sign of flames, no smoke, no stench.
Just a fucked-up dream. Calm down, you fucking pussy.
“Sam?” He knew it was ridiculous, but couldn’t help standing up and patting Sam’s legs all the same. “Hey, Sam.”
His brother gave a groaning sound which Dean clearly understood as universal for leave me the fuck alone. Yeah, about that.
“Hey, Sammy, you good?” He felt like an idiot, but his hands were still shaking and his heart still beating at the breakneck speed, drowning everything else, his sensible side included.
“Th’ hell?”
“Hiya there, hop-head. I’m going out. You be good on your own for a while?” The words were out before he could think better of them, but hell if they didn’t sound good. Take care of the shit that needed taking care of, it should’ve been his fucking starting point.
“Wha-?” Suddenly more awake and showing more signs of lucidity, Sam climbed to a sit, winced when he forgot his shoulder. It was a moment before he collected himself enough to speak again, but when he did the worry was flashing bright and clear in his pasty face. “Dean? ‘S happened?”
“Jesus, just relax. It’s okay. I mean, as okay as it was when you hit the sack. I’m just gonna go and collect our shotguns. See what’s what.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“You do remember what we do, right? And what a flashlight is?”
Sam stared at him wide-eyed like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard, like Dean had just put two and two and pronounced it twenty two. “There’s a fucking ghost out there!”
“That whipped you but good in the broad daylight. Which makes your argument invalid. ‘Sides that ghost’s kinda the whole point.”
“Okay, then I’m going with you.”
“Yeah, like hell you are. High as a fucking kite and with that ass-awful sling to scare the spook. And there’s also that pesky whipping thing you were right to mention.”
“I din’t-” Sam started to protest, but soon realized what he was doing and dropped it. He shook his head, jaw set. “I’m fine.”
“Guess, your fine might use some working on then. I’ll tell you what, you go ahead and be in charge of that and let me worry about the rest.”
Dean grabbed his jacket hanging conveniently on the footboard of his bed and threw it over his shoulder, declaring the conversation over. Waking Sam up, a genius fucking move. Right in tow with taking July Brighton to her prom. And almost saying yes to Michael, that too. Although deep down he felt that the almost part tipped the scales in July’s favor. He was fucking thankful he’d never made it to his own prom, his list of spectacular dumbness could really do without that frill.
“Go back to sleep. See you later.”
“Dean. Wait. Just, wait. You shouldn’t go alone. Crap, Dean, wait.”
“Dude, sleep, don’t sleep, whatever,” Dean stopped at the door, threw up his hands feeling his annoyance getting the better of him. “Just ‘scuse me for not staying and watching you do that while the ghost’s dishing out heart attacks like Halloween candies. Jesus, Sam.”
“That’s fucking low, man, even for you. All I’m saying ‘s that you shouldn’t go back there by yourself.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake I can do a fucking job by myself alright. I already have, you know? And I would have. I swear to fucking God, wherever that bastard is, if I’d had to, I would’ve done it myself. So fuck you very much, Sammy, for your kind concern.”
He slammed the door behind himself thinking: The string’s cut off. If that’s what’s keeping you here, Sam, there you go, the string’s cut right off.
*****
The first shotgun was lying right at the foot of the stairs, a conspicuous shape caught in the oval beam of the flashlight, accompanied by a few splinters from the broken railing. Dean crossed the distance from the entrance gingerly, wary of the continuous low wheezing of the EMF reader. Despite the cold prickling at his face, the air felt heavy; dense and unnatural and thick with static, it seemed to be ringing the place like a fog, making the hairs at the nape of his neck stand upright. This ghost wasn’t your run of the mill, straightforward I’ll strangle you with my own spooky hands gig. No, this one was a fucking shrinking violet, giving people heart attacks and dislocating their shoulders without as much as flashing its dead mug.
Dean stooped to pick up the weapon, froze when he caught an outline of a silhouette out of the corner of his eye. An unmistakable one, climbing up the stairs silently, without the merest sound. He looked up fast, gun ready to shoot, but the steps were as abandoned as the second ago.
It had been just a flash, the kind you blink and miss, but had managed to chill his spine all the same. It’d been Sam he’d seen, Dean was sure, and the certainty whispered a persistent litany of fear and anger from behind his ear like an old familiar secret. Something was wrong. His eyes instinctively trailed the route back to the exit, but he forced his sight to relax, waiting for any movement to register in his peripheral vision. The EMF kept whimpering weakly for his attention and the floor creaked as he slowly started skirting the room.
The temperature instantly dropping an impossible few notches lower was the only warning he got before receiving a potent blow to his ribcage. The brute force of it knocked him over and made his body slide a painful length on the jagged splintery floor. Surprisingly enough, his fingers were still tightly woven around the barrel of the sawed-off and without sparing it another thought he rolled over and fired a round into the bleakness ahead.
He was halfway through the process of standing up when another cold belt foiled his effort and sent him crashing against the staircase. The hit knocked the air out of him and for a moment Dean just lay there, rolled in on himself, trying to find his breath.
Then a cold ring swathed around his neck, clamped around his throat in an iron grip and lifted him up. In front of himself, Dean saw the dead face of Tom Miller, the apparition flickering in and out, freaking strangling him, and Dean felt a ludicrous urge to look for hidden cameras, a hysterical laughter building up in his throat. It never got a chance to find a way out though as the cold that seared through his body was white and livid, and effectively quelled any lingering vestiges of amusement. He struggled against it with all he had until his moves became spasmodic and his feet jerked on the floor convulsively. He felt blindly for anything that might be used as a weapon, nails scraping over the old wood and black spots dancing chaotically in his vision.
A sudden gun shot rang in his ears and Dean felt his body collapse in a limp heap an inconceivable second later. A cough painfully seized his abused throat, and for a spell limiting it to a manageable level was all he could wrap his mind around.
“Come on, Winchester. Beauty rest can wait.”
Something wasn’t right, Dean could feel it, but when he gazed up he still fully expected to see Sam’s pissed off expression. Even in the dark, the guy who was reaching out his hand to him looked nothing like Sam. It shouldn’t have, really, but it still felt like a kick in the guts.
“Time’s a-waistin’.” It was said lightly, in the tone of a good salesman. Take it or leave it, like there was a choice in that. Dean could almost hear the ticking sound of a countdown in the background.
He took the outstretched arm. The guy pushed a shotgun into his second hand and Dean welcomed the familiar weight with sudden gratitude.
“Might wanna stick to that.”
They made a beeline for the entrance and Dean headed straight to the Impala. Parked right next to it was a pick-up truck, whose make he couldn’t recognize in the darkness. He rummaged a bit in the backseat, found a bottle of water, and sat heavily on the bench, door open and legs outside of the car, gulping greedily. The guy waited without a word, the way he studied Dean wasn’t lost on him.
Dean propped the bottle on his knee, gave his mouth a swipe with a sleeve of his jacket with a purposefully drawn-out courtesy.
“Nice timing,” he pointed at the man with the neck of the bottle, his voice sounded strained and hoarse and weak, much too weak for his liking.
“Looked like you could use a hand,” the guy shrugged, his eyes like a cocked gun. He lowered the weapon but still kept a hold of it. “You ID-ed the spook yet?”
“The spook, yes, I did.” Dean left the rest unsaid, but could see understanding in the crooked smile that yanked at the guy’s lips.
“Name’s Kian Taylor.”
“No offense, dude, but that tells me zilch.”
“I wouldn’t think it any different. I’ve heard quite a lot about you though.”
The crippling suspicion took a form then and Dean didn’t need any more confirmation than that; most of the time if it looked like a dog and barked like a dog then it probably really was a dog.
“You’re a good tracker for a guy who needs somebody to tie his shoelaces for him.”
Kian sniffed out a small laugh, jutted his temple towards the house. “Yours seemed pretty loose back there. You ain’t careful, one day you might trip on them.”
“Yeah well, one day I probably just might. Perks of the job.”
“Garth didn’t tell me anything. Thought you’d wanna know that.”
“Oh, Kian, man, now you’re just bragging.”
He smirked. “Where’s your brother?” An off-hand question, like it didn’t matter.
Dean gave him a quirk of an eyebrow for an answer and it brought another smile to Kian’s face. The guy sure did that a lot. Even under normal circumstances it was the kind of buzzer that would tip Dean off. And meeting in the deep night of Monroe, Michigan in a haunted house was not normal even according to his, arguably stretched, standards.
“Fair enough. I shoulda known better than to ask. Whattaya say we talk somewhere where it ain’t ass-freezing cold? Can’t see why you can’t thank me over a coupla drinks.”
Dean shrugged in the carefully concocted semblance of indifference, “Got a grave to dig.”
Another smirk, never reaching Kian’s eyes though. His eyes remained penetrating and cold and deadly. “I reckon those tend to stick to one place, can’t be bothered about when you get down to them.”
Dean knew it was a bad idea, could sense it humming in his bones deep and unmistakable. He said yes anyway, not ready to admit that maybe the ominous feeling he got was partly the reason.
*****
He thought he heard somebody talking, shouting even. Maybe. In one of the few voices he was ever genuinely glad to hear and thought that couldn’t be. The realization was sad but that felt strangely okay because so were most of the things around.
There was an unrelenting palm on his cheek, but Dean couldn’t muster enough strength to shy away from it. He felt tugging at his wrists - restraints, he rebuked himself, that was not something he could afford forgetting - and then his body was being lifted to a sit like a ragdoll. He didn’t even realize the presence of the cold floor hugging his left side until the lack of it made the change of position painfully clear.
“Shhhh. Shhhhh.”
He wasn’t sure if the shushing sound was directed at him but thought that maybe probably was as there was no way the pain that had lit up his chest had been kept on mute. He didn’t remember how he’d ended up on the floor but was distantly aware of somebody holding him up. The familiar smell of smoke and gun oil and wet soil filled his nostrils and he let that be his anchor, even if just for a little while. It smelled like the Impala, like Sam, like home and he drifted on that smell until he felt dizzy and decided that enough was enough and tried to pry his eyes open.
His vision would not stand still. He fought with his wandering gaze, instincts urging him to localize Kian, but soon he felt his lids going down like lead balloons. He let them. There wasn’t really much of a point to the contrary anyway. He’d figured it out when Tom Miller had made his visit, which Dean probably should have been grateful for but somehow didn’t have it in himself to give. He wasn’t at all interested in facing what it meant just yet. And then there it was again, that shushing sound, rustling in his ears like dry leaves.
“Shhhhh. I know, man, just hold on. I’ll get you out of here.”
There was a thumb stroking at the wetness on his cheeks and Dean hummed in protest, not sure whether it was against the intimacy of the touch or against the tears themselves.
“Sam.” He put into the word all his strength, got it past his lips on a shuddering breath. He needed it out, a plea, a holler, an apology, a question, a thousand other things that couldn’t wait unvoiced in the pit of his stomach.
“’S okay, I’m here. It’s over. We’re getting out of here. ‘s okay.”
Dean wasn’t sure how but at that moment he could tell this Sam was his Sam and he believed him. Believed every damn familiar lie he heard, because Sam was really here and he’d said it was okay and Dean believed him, and it brought a fresh trail of tears running down his face before his brother struggled to manhandle him upright and then there was nothing but blackness.
*****
It was nine days and three states later, the middle of nowhere, Missouri, and a road that was meandering down a hill like a serpent when Dean said, “Pull over.”
Sam cut his eyes to him, cleared his throat before speaking in that infuriatingly careful way he’d got lately. It wasn’t the first time in those nine days that Dean had to quell the urge to wipe that look from his brother’s face, preferably with a fist. Sam’s guilt trips were the last thing Dean needed right now.
“You sick?”
Dean caught his reflection in the side mirror. Swelling had already subsided but bruises and cuts were still prominent, didn’t leave any room for doubts as to what had happened.
“Just pull over,” Dean said again without losing the face from his sight.
Those last couple of days they hadn’t had much of a conversation. For his part, Dean had stuck to the simplicity of who, where and when, and Sam had known better than to ask. Scraps and bits of information that had let them organize the mess of the events, a few of how are you feeling’s followed by some misplaced grunts, and not much more beyond that. Those last couple of days Dean had been drugged up to his eyeballs anyway.
Sam had gone after him, found one of the shotguns still lying on the old wooden planks of the haunted house and become friendly with one Tom Miller. He’d dispatched the ghost. How exactly he’d managed to do that with a busted shoulder was beyond Dean, but since Sam wasn’t telling and Dean wasn’t asking it was apparently staying in the zone of the unexplained. All Dean’s hectic calculations had told him was that it had taken a while. Somehow he didn’t want to go any further than that.
Sam had found him some time later, in an old hunting cabin. Alone. Kian already gone. And even through the drug infused haze that one had succeeded to sink in.
Dean wasn’t too clear on the later stages of his stay in the cabin, wasn’t too curious either. He remembered believing it had really been Sam opposite that chair, the memory which had hit him with all its magnitude the moment Sam had decided to cut his pain killer dosages. But he couldn’t recall when exactly Tom Miller had broken their little rendezvous and what had happened after. His best guess was that whatever Miller had made Kian see proved enough to chase the guy away. Hell, if only he hadn’t been tied to the fucking chair, Dean would’ve run away himself. Or blow his brains out; Miller’d been a convincing son of a bitch. As it was though, Sam had taken care of the spook just in time to save Dean. Which meant that most probably Kian was somewhere out there as well, very much alive.
He also remembered calling Cas. Earlier, when his thoughts hadn’t been so barbed yet. He should’ve known better, but he’d called. For all the good it had done to him.
A week in the motel room and Dean had thought he might chisel his eyes out of sockets with a spoon just so that he wouldn’t have to stare at that yellowish flowery wallpaper a second longer. He’d kept his trap shut, but Sam, that sneaky bastard, had seen more than he’d been letting on and decided it was time to hit the road even though they had both known it really wasn’t. That first drive had been short and painful and nearly made Dean pass out when the Impala hit a stretch of a road that hinted at being a former firing ground. It had also been the best goddamn thing Dean could think of in those nine days and for a while it had made him feel like himself again.
Sam sent him another worried look before he navigated the Impala to the shoulder of the road.
Snow was still lounging around in lazy patches, unhurriedly relenting here and there to uncover dead grass lying in wait underneath. The spring was still a long time a-coming.
Dean wrenched the door open and stumbled outside, leaned back against the hood of the Impala and breathed in the cold air. His eyes stopped at the angry marks left on his wrists by the ropes and he stared at them for a spell before stuffing his hands into the pockets. He waited for Sam to join him.
“Dean? What is it?”
“I really hate winter, you know?”
Sam took a place next to him on the Impala. There was a hint of hesitant humor in his voice when he said, “Is that why we stopped here? To fully appreciate its atrocity before it goes away?”
Dean smiled. They were quiet for a while.
“I figured out who Miller was after. Some time around in that cabin,” Dean said finally and felt his brother going tense next to him. “Guess, better late ‘n ever doesn’t really apply here.”
“Dean-”
“I had a dream. That night after we came back from the spot, I dreamt we were back at the haunted house and I set fire to the stairs you were walking up.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah well. It should’ve been my fucking clue. Anyway, you said something to me, something I didn’t quite get at the time.”
Sam shifted uncomfortably. It was bizarre, the gentleness in his voice when he asked, “What did I say?”
Dean sighed shallowly, attentive of his sore ribs. “Something about getting the job done, like at all costs. Back in that cabin, I mean, I was pretty messed up by then, but I remember Tom Miller showing up and going after Kian. I think the person Miller had the biggest issues with was himself. He killed all those children, right? Burnt them alive. Seemed like a reasonable price to pay in order to gank the teacher at the time. But the idea backfired and six days later the only thing Miller could think about were those kids, so he decided to make the bill square.”
“And killed himself. Became his first victim.”
Dean nodded. “I don’t know if the guy was psychic while still alive or whether it was just his special ghost mojo, but what he did was fuck with your head. I think he wanted people to see the same thing he’d seen, the one that’d made him strap the noose. And I gotta tell you, man, in terms of persuasiveness? Sonuvabitch had a fucking gift.”
“That dream,” Sam turned around, looked at him with something indecipherable in his eyes. “Christ, Dean, why didn’t you say anything?”
Dean snorted a humorless desperate laugh. “The moment I realized it, it couldn’t change anything. Didn’t matter.” Except it wasn’t true and Dean really hoped Sam understood that. “Miller must’ve targeted me when we were checking out the site. The dream was first, then came the visions. I mean, Christ, Sammy, when I think about it, Kian was pretty fucking determined to get the colt.”
“Dean,” Sam swallowed. “Kian was a sociopath that didn’t care about anything but his revenge. There’s no equation mark between the two of you.”
“Guess, Miller was of a different opinion on the subject, huh?” The corners of Dean’s mouth fell down in a grim smile, he raked a hand through his hair. “Jesus, I really fucked up this one, didn’t I? I guess what I’m trying to say is sorry. For the thing with Amelia. And for a bunch of other things I screwed up along the way. And I’ll do that. As soon as I get a grip on how to.”
Sam took a breath as if to say something but Dean beat him to it. “I don’t know about you but I could really use some coffee. And fries. And maybe pie. God, what I wouldn’t give for a slice of good pie.”
Sam blinked and for a moment Dean thought that no way he was getting away with that. There were more things to be said, more questions to be answered that were throbbing painfully at the back of his throat, but for now Dean felt spent. Weary like after a ten-mile run. He really, really hoped Sam would see his plea for what it was though; This is about as far as I can get, man.
“Actually,” Sam cleared his throat and when he spoke his voice was calm and easy, like he could be talking over a pile of pancakes on the Sunday morning in some TV soup, like he hadn’t had his shoulder dislocated and his brother hadn’t almost frozen to death after being spectacularly caught up in his own shit. “I wouldn’t say no to good pie myself.”
Dean must have looked dumbstruck, because Sam shrugged and smiled and said, “It’s cold out here.”
Dean nodded. Then shook his head, couldn’t suppress a sniff of laughter. “No, it fucking isn’t. Thanks, Sam. Pie it is.”
“Pie it is.”
Author: judith_88_g
Rating: R (language and violence)
Genre: Gen
Characters: Dean, Sam, OMC
Spoilers: Up to 8x10
Word Count: 9,100
Disclaimer: Not mine, Santa's that mean.
Summary: Set after 8x10. The boys are back on the road together. Sam’s quiet and Dean proves he’s capable of making some stupendously stupid decisions.
A/N: A huge thank you to the very wonderful autumnfey for her kind and cogent edits, and to the always helpful astute spangielka, the merciless persecutor of incoherence and things Sam Winchester Would. Never. Say.
Consciousness was drifting back to him in lazy swells. Dean blinked, his eyes catching the sight of something coppery soaking in the denim of his jeans. He tried to focus on that, willed his mind to claw its way out from that syrupy mass it seemed to be dipped in. His vision blurred, danced chaotically before his eyes, swimming in and out, and making him feel dizzy. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to win over the cold flash of nausea.
The breath he finally let out was ragged. The dull ache in his head started to take shape, together with the rest of his surroundings. He was sitting, his arms tied tightly behind at his wrists. He tugged at the restraints, wriggled his hands and searched for any loops, an inch of air trapped somewhere in the bonds that would let him handle it from there. He didn’t find any.
“Getting fidgety there, Dean?”
It shouldn’t have come as any surprise, really. It was professional work, hunter’s quality sign. He should have known better. He should have known better about lots of things lately.
“This whole… Disarray. I never wanted it to come down to this, you do realize that, right?”
Dean wanted to tell him to go to hell, but didn’t trust his voice enough just yet and no way he was giving the guy that satisfaction. Instead, he focused on blinking his wandering gaze back under control, staring straight at his laps. Kian fucking Taylor. Another red bead rolled down from his temple and joined the prominent stain on his thigh.
“We can still settle this down, you know.” His voice sounded closer. “And really, if you think about it, it’s a win-win situation. The bottom line is one less of those sons of bitches and you gotta admit that’s a damn good thing to aim for. You and me? We call it a misunderstanding and go home, no hurt feelings.”
It was bullshit. Dean knew it and as he lifted his head, he could see in Kian’s eyes that the guy knew it as well. They had been past that point the moment the butt of Kian’s gun had landed on Dean’s temple. The guy might have been crazy enough to pull it off but still not far enough over the edge to let a debt like that flash red over his head.
The minute Kian got what he wanted, Dean was a dead man.
He huffed out a grim smirk. He was not amused in the slightest. “Aren’t you a charming devil? Keep talking like that and I might think the gun was just an excuse.”
Kian’s mouth twisted in a smile that could almost pass as rueful. He shrugged. “It’s your call.”
*****
“So say the zombie apocalypse hits, who would you rather have on your side: Mila Jovovich, Sarah Polley or that chick with a machine gun leg?”
Dean pushed the door close with a heel of his boot, cutting off the biting cold from the outside. He crossed the small room and placed one of the steaming Styrofoam cups next to Sam’s arm on the kitchenette table.
“Should I be worried or is it just your philosophical side getting a voice?” His brother muttered, not even bothering to lift his eyes from the screen of his laptop.
“It’s called strategizing,” he said with a cluck of the tongue. “Worry’s for the feeble and unprepared.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I just thought you said zombie apocalypse. But hey, that was before I knew you already got a plan cooking.”
“So which one?” Dean half sat, half lay on his bed, slurping what remained of his coffee. “Cause I gotta say, as cool as that gun looks, personally, I think it can be kind of a nag. The situation strikes, how long can you hold it up? I mean, dude, that just can’t be comfortable. Not to mention -”
“You know what? Scratch what I said earlier. The zombie apocalypse? I’ll take it any day.”
Dean’s response was halted by the phone ringing. He groped a bit before grudgingly managing to wrench it out of his jeans pocket.
“Yo Garth, what’s up?”
"Hola amigo. Got a buddy here who wants to get a hold of you and your brother. A hunter, says he needs some inside scoop on a demon, heard you’re savvy in the area. I wondered if I might point him into your direction."
“Garth, no offence, man,” Dean said in a tone that bellied the words, giving a slight shake of his head at the frown Sam sent him over the laptop, “but the guy wants demon info, tell him to crack a book.”
"Paper tends to fall short in yielding field experience. It’s in the front rank with body count though and you know it."
“Well, body count’s par for the course. The sooner he realizes it, the better for him.”
"Whoa, okay, no need to be harsh. We all want that ball in the back of the same net. Just think about it. Even your daddy used some help when tracking Azazel."
“Garth,” Dean cut him off. “You may think that you got it all worked out real nice, but you don’t know shit about shit when it comes to my father. You got a line on a job, you let us know, but I sure as hell ain’t giving some wannabe hunter a demon 101.”
Dean didn’t wait for whatever Garth might have to add, he hung up, the phone staying in the tight grip against his forehead.
“That went smooth,” Sam observed, his voice calm but expectant.
“Yeah well, I’m a pro,” Dean grumbled absentmindedly, tapping the phone against his knee.
He climbed to his feet, paced to the tiny fridge across the dirty carpet. Burgundy-ish? He had a vague recollection of Sam using that word on one or two occasions. Or something that sounded equally geeky.
“It smell fishy to you?” He said finally, flipping a beer bottle open and sending the cap flying somewhere onto the sticky cupboard top. “Cause it sure does to me.”
“Okay,” Sam nodded raising his eyebrows, his posture twisted on the chair so that he could face Dean. “I’m gonna take a chance and assume you’re not talking about the beer. Care to elaborate?”
“It was Garth,” Dean accented the word with an emphatic gesture that splashed some contents of the bottle on his jeans. “Crap.”
“Yeah, kinda got that one.”
Dean sent his brother an annoyed glare. “He said there’s a hunter out there who badly wants a chat with us. Apparently, the guy’s in need of our demon expertise.”
“That it?” Sam frowned genuinely surprised and Dean suddenly remembered what master bitchfaces Sam was capable of throwing if he only set his mind to that.
“Yeah, smartass, that’s it,” he said pushing himself from the cupboards and resuming his pace around the motel room.
“And Dad got involved in this exactly how?”
“Garth might’ve said Dad had learned from other hunters on his chase after the Yellow Eyes and I might’ve suggested he stove it up his ass.” Dean swiped his palm up and down the back of his head. “I mean, dude, how does he even know those things? Was it broadcast on hunter’s radio or hunter mammas just have a funny concept of bedtime stories?”
“It’s true enough though. Dad did learn the ropes from others.”
“Some, yeah, maybe, but I don’t really recall the old man waiting for a friendly soul to hold his hand through a hunt. ‘Sides, it’s not the point. The guy wants some info, ain’t nothing I can tell him Garth can’t himself. He still insists on socializing with us, and by that I mean you and me specifically, well, let’s just say it makes me uneasy.”
“I don’t know, Dean. Who is he anyway? And what’s he after? Even if you’re right, I still think it’s pretty decent logic to have some skinny on the guy. Probably even more so.”
Dean scratched the insides of his ear, cringed when his finger met with something gluey. He hated it when Sam was right and his brother always had an annoying propensity for that. “Yeah well, maybe. But I’ll tell you what, the guy beeps on the radar too close for my comfort, I’ll start worrying. Until then? I think our plates are full enough as it is.”
Sam furrowed his brows, rubbed his fingers against the stubble on his chin, clearly unconvinced, and suddenly Dean found himself fixed on the movement. It felt unfit, and it struck him like the sight of a nun in a stripper club might, the contrast too stark, too obvious. There was a time when Sam would just call him a moron and Dean would sling some shit back, and later he might set the first clown site that would pop up as Sam’s start page and maybe change his ringtone to Hair, because no matter how many times Dean had pulled that one, it had never failed to make Sam huff and puff and call Dean a child, and it just cracked his shit up six ways to Sunday. And then Sam would make him call Garth back, because this is what he does and Dean just can’t help it, and he would be bitching and dialing Garth’s number and that would be it.
He felt a flash of unreasonable anger tangling a knot somewhere below his sternum. He wanted to call Sam on that, but there was nothing he could pick and point, and flash before Sam’s eyes and then preferably shoot until the thing was good and dead. It’d been a while since the world had gone askew on its hinges and what used to be familiar and easy started to feel as if made of nothing but sharp angles.
“Actually, I was kinda thinking we could use a change of scenery. It’s been a week, if there was anything here to find, we would’ve found it by now.” Dean dropped the empty bottle into the bin and it landed with a heavy clink. He thought about getting another one, but then looked at Sam typing something on his laptop and decided against it. He added almost as an afterthought, “If you’re done here, that is.”
Sam lifted his gaze from the screen, gave him an incredulous look.
“What?” Dean huffed.
“Nothing, just,” Sam shook his head. “Never mind.” He closed the lid in an abrupt movement, raked a palm down his face. “Okay,” he sighed. “Guess, you’re right, it doesn’t make much sense at this point.”
Dean stopped himself short of pointing out it really didn’t right from the start. “Kevin’s on it,” he said instead.
“Kevin’s a kid.”
It wasn’t even anger in Sam’s words. It was a bone-weary appeal of somebody who knew better than to think it ever mattered.
Dean gave the thought a useless workout. He grabbed his duffel, tossed it onto the bed and started gathering a week’s worth of unpacked stuff back where it belonged. There wasn’t much, a change of T-shirts and underwear, a knife. Dean was already cataloguing his gear and mentally pushing it back into the Impala’s trunk.
“Not that it changes anything, but I really don’t think he’s been one for a while now,” he said after some time, zipping the bag shut.
They left in the late afternoon and Dean told himself that this time Sam had made his call, that there was nothing forced or strained about them hitting the road under the biting February breeze. He kept telling himself that until the open stretch of the interstate unfolded ahead of them, making Boston nothing but yet another memory in the rearview mirror and he almost managed to convince himself that it made a difference.
*****
Dean planned on driving through the night, playing his music too loud and pushing his baby too fast, clearing his head. And it worked just fine until about twenty miles outside of Cleveland the weather took a downturn, caught them in a blizzard and changed the drive into a snail-pace struggle. With the snowflakes lit by the headlights and gusting against the windshield, there was little room to actually see the road looming somewhere in front. Dean managed to drag the car to Toledo, but that seemed about as far as the whiteout would let them.
He spotted a vacancy sign and woke Sam up. Waited until his brother blinked himself out of sleep, then pulled off into the motel parking lot and did a ninety handbrake turn, making the Impala fishtail on the snow and fit perfectly into a space right in front of the entrance.
The corners of Sam’s lips yanked up drowsily. “Admit it, you’ve been dying for an occasion to do that since November.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dean said with a grin. He killed the engine and got out to check them in.
It was a start, he told himself, trying not to think about the lack of questions and the detached look in Sam’s features as Dean had driven West without even pretending their destination was any clearer than that.
*****
They had breakfast in a small diner tucked up behind the motel. The sky had cleared out by then and the rays of cold winter sun bounced against the layer of snow, deceptive and achingly bright. Dean had to squint his eyes as he sent a look at the world outside from the warmth of the diner; postcard-fucking-perfect.
He felt irrationally pissed at the stopover, unable to shake off the deep-seated conviction that if he only put enough miles between here and there, whatever there was wouldn’t matter anymore. The road bore a promise, the allure of both cognizance and distraction, and he just couldn’t help the antsy feeling tingling stubbornly in his limbs; going always agreed with him more.
“So what’s the word in the Land of Snow?” He asked munching on a piece of bacon and chasing it with a generous slurp of coffee.
Sam lifted his head from the newspaper he had grabbed on the way to the diner. “You have anything specific in mind when you pushed it down the I-90?”
Yeah, Sammy, pretty fucking specific. It wasn’t what Sam was asking about though. “Why?”
“Cause I think I might’ve found us a job.”
“A job?”
“Yeah, that would be the one. You with me, man?”
“Oh, that’s hilarious. I mean, I thought we were gonna take a break from the job for a while.”
“Well, I figured since we’re already here, we may as well look into it.”
It wasn’t exactly an answer, but then again Dean’s wasn’t exactly a question. Sam wanted to take a job and Dean thought it wasn’t really the worst that could have happened right now.
“So whattaya got there?”
“Monroe, Michigan. Twenty five miles north. An abandoned house, a long history of sightings, and a teenage couple found dead five days ago within the premises of the estate. Both struck with cardiac arrest, both without any previous record of a heart condition.”
“That just screams a spirit.”
“Yeah well, you can join the choir.” Sam turned the newspaper around and slid it across the table top.
Dean cocked an eyebrow and pushed his plate aside, sent his greasy fingers down his thighs for the lack of anything more suitable before reaching for the paper. He cast an eye at the picture of an old ramshackle building accompanied by two yearbook photos of a girl and boy smiling broadly at the camera.
“Okay, what am I looking at?” He asked tapping two fingers against the black-and-white pictures.
“Try reading. Reading’s actually the keyword here.”
“Uh, no. Actually, I’m pretty sure it isn’t. You said something about a haunted house though. That sounds more like it.”
“Dude, it’s a one-page article. The probability your eyeballs’re gonna explode is really pretty low.”
“It’s a one-page article that you already read, you crackhead. You may as well untwist your panties from that giant knot and just fucking tell me.” It came out harsher than he intended but Dean made a point of resting the paper on the table and folding his arms all the same.
Sam held his gaze for a notch longer than what could be passed as casual. “It used to be a school,” he said finally. “Back in 1914 a local priest burnt it down to the ground, together with a teacher and twenty six children that happened to be inside. Six days later the guy offs himself in the prison cell. The site is rebuilt in 1920 and changed into a regular house. A couple of occupants since then, never for too long. Last ones are actually reported to have died in the place in 1992. Heart failure.”
“1992 huh? Guess dead people don’t make for the best marketing.”
“Not only that. There’ve been sightings, too. Locals saying they heard children’s cries, some claiming that,” Sam leaned in and grabbed the paper, frowned while looking for the right passage, “the hunched figure of the priest is still looming about the property and at dark moonless nights a distant glow of fire can be seen in the darkness.” He looked up from above the paper. “Enough violent deaths to serve for quite a handful of angry spirits.”
Dean lounged back in his booth, flashed a quirk of an eyebrow. “I betcha five dollars humpy’s our guy.”
Sam shrugged, “It’s as good a start as any. We got a name: Tom Miller. The article doesn’t touch on any whys though so we might wanna look into those first. But that’d involve, you know, reading and such.”
“Yeah well, you go nuts.” Dean stretched an arm across the backrest. That last word sounded like a slap even to his own ears. Good. He raised an appraising eyebrow, The ball’s in your court, Sammy.
He could see the fight bubbling right under the surface in the long clouded look Sam gave him. He felt a compelling urge to push his brother over that edge of outburst Sam was balancing, push him and watch all hell break lose, push him and pray that it wouldn’t be Sam finally dropping out of his reach that he would have to watch instead.
“Well, if you’d rather pickaxe your way through half the cemetery,” Sam trailed off, his voice contained but brittle nonetheless.
Dean smirked, an unpleasant sound he was unable to catch before it rolled from his lips. He seized Sam up, his brother not moving an inch, a stony fuck-you written all over his face.
Dean made a deliberate show of reaching for his coffee and slurping the remnants of the tepid bitter liquid.
“My point stands,” he said plunking the cup and motioning to stand up. “Just be careful and don’t paper-cut yourself while you’re at it.”
*****
The swing threw his head sideways, made his skull rattle like a jackhammer. When his vision cleared out a bit, Dean ran his tongue against his teeth, wriggled his mouth and spat, a bloody mass landing around his feet. He stayed like that for a while, dipped chin and heavy lids, unable to stop the shaky, jagged breathing that misted around his lips in a white cloud of vapor. He was trembling too, not sure it was the cold alone responsible for that.
“All I need’s the gun.”
Kian’s voice sounded disappointed, almost apologetic, sounded close, and it was the proximity that forced Dean to lift his head. He must have blacked out for longer than he’d thought, because Kian was now sitting on a chair of his own, elbows propped on knees, right in Dean’s face. Looking like he was weighed down with the sad inevitability of the situation. Dean was suddenly struck by the image of his father, sitting in the exact same way after Dean had told him he wasn’t going back to school all those gazillion years ago. Not asked, not hinted, just flat-out informed, ready to cop whatever was following while all his instincts screamed at him to bolt the fuck away. He remembered his dad looked at him, a pistol slide and a wire brush motionless in his hands, and the gaze that seemed hundreds of years old. Then he’d nodded his okay, which Dean had damn well known was not okay but at the same time still somehow was, and gone back to cleaning his gun.
It felt like a violation much worse than whatever punches Kian might throw and suddenly Dean regretted wasting his gob on the dusty floor.
“You’re nothin’ like ‘im you piece a shit,” he rasped, his words a handful of razorblades pushed down his chalk-dry throat.
He braced for another blow but instead saw Kian’s eyebrows fly up his forehead, realized he must’ve said something wrong, just couldn’t put his finger at what it’d been exactly.
“Just tell me where the colt is, kid. It’s all I want, all I can think about,” the voice was almost pleading. “Everything that happened, you must understand.”
Dean had a blurry recollection of telling the son of a bitch the colt was gone and that if he really was set on finding it, Lucifer was the one to ask. Or maybe he just wanted to. Because that shit right there? It was blunt, artless truth, and despite of how fucked-up a spot he was smacked in, it was still fucking hilarious. He wasn’t sure though and that alone screamed in his head the scary kind of dangerous.
You’re losing it, man.
There was a crunching sound in his chest, like pieces of glass on gravel, shifting with every ragged breath. He knew he should do something, but God, he was tired. His head had rolled down again, he wasn’t even sure when, but he didn’t think he had enough left in himself to raise it. If Sam wanted to make it, he better hurry the fuck up or he was gonna miss the show entirely.
Then it hit him, and this time the fear that made his knee bounce involuntarily was white-cold and real: What if Sam was not looking?
It turned out he was able to gaze up after all, just in time to see an ugly smile contorting Sam’s face when his fist landed heavily on Dean’s ribs.
*****
“I still don’t get it. So let’s assume Miller’s our guy, how does he choose his vics? I mean, there must be a connection, there always is.”
The old wooden floor creaked and whined under Sam’s feet. Dean could see a yellowish halo of his brother’s flashlight bouncing a few steps ahead of him. It wasn’t entirely dark, but most of the sunlight was stolen by the planks that at some point had replaced the panes in most of the windows. There were places where the wood was either too crumbled or not fixed neatly enough and the shafts of cold daylight cut through the dusty air like laser beams, crisscrossing the cruddy room as if it was a museum’s gallery rather than interior of a long abandoned, rather precarious, and most probably haunted, construction. The only alarm that might end up being set off rested in Dean’s jacket pocket, but he caught himself avoiding the narrow lines all the same. Just in case.
“The guy burnt the school down ‘cause he believed the teacher was cutting a deal with the devil. I’d say his logic might be tilted a bit towards brazenly insane.”
Sam was moving more to the right, currently pointing his flashlight at a chest of drawers that apparently no one had thought worthy of taking. The place was practically empty, only few pieces of furniture left behind and even as decor oriented as he was, Dean could very well see why.
“You think she was? Dabbling with the thing? Aiming to sacrifice those kids?” Sam slid open the top drawer, rummaged in it briefly before closing it and moving on to the others.
“I think wacko lady or not, Miller’s the one to have struck the match.”
Sam headed on, stopped before the staircase and swept the old steps with the beam of his flashlight. “Maybe this is it, maybe he’s still doing it.”
“What, kindling bonfires? ‘Cause in that case I wish I’d brought some marshmallows for the party.”
“I was rather thinking about fighting evil. So far we got what? Those teenage kids, the cop and Alissa Skrawsky, and these are only the ones we know for sure visited the place. It’s really not that hard if you think about it, you could probably point at anyone and find something they’re not exactly proud of, and death, if anything, only tends to redouble paranoia.”
Dean peeked behind a tattered curtain drawing it away with the nose of his gun. “Dude sure wasn’t a half-assed type while still alive and preaching. Twenty six kids, man, I’d really hate to see that redoubled.”
“Yeah.” Sam paused. “’M going upstairs.”
Sam was halfway up when the EMF reader woke up in Dean’s pocket. He froze on the steps, back to the wall, sawed-off pulled and ready to hit whatever welcome party the host was about to throw. Dean mirrored his stance.
“Dean?” Sam hissed, climbing the steps one at a time.
“Nothing yet.”
Turned out it worked like a charm and Dean thought he really should’ve known better than to tempt the Universe’s sick sense of humor like that, because next thing he saw was Sam fly through the railing and hit the floor with a sickening thump.
For the fraction of a second it took him to acknowledge the fall Dean’s heart honest to God stopped beating. He dashed towards his brother, firing both of the shells waiting in his double in the general direction of the staircase. He dropped to his knees.
“Sam. Christ, Sam.”
Sam’s breath hitched in an unvoiced protest, his right hand wandered wildly over the floor, fingers scratching against the boards convulsively, looking for a grip. Dean’s hands shook when he reloaded his gun.
“Sam. Sammy, stay with me. Jesus. Sammy, come on, man.”
There was a movement at the foot of the staircase and Dean felt the temperature drop down to the marrow-freezing level. His trembling finger found the trigger, he made sure he fired just one shell this time.
The EMF kept wheezing at a mind-piercing volume, almost as loud as the words ‘spine injury’ in Dean’s head. He grabbed Sam’s searching arm, crouched and threw it over his shoulders, lifted his brother’s weight and refused to stop even when a weeping sound rose somewhere at the back of Sam’s throat.
He used the second shot as a diversion, sending it wide, as the spook was still nowhere to be seen, before losing the shotgun and focusing solely on dragging his giant brother outside, a string of nonsensical reassurances falling from his lips.
Sam’s grip on consciousness seemed to grow stronger as they neared the Impala and when his feet started floundering awkwardly against the ground Dean felt like crying out of the sheer relief.
He lowered Sam to the ground clumsily, his back propped against the car, ass in the snow.
“Hey, Sammy. Come on, stay with me. That’s good, you’re gonna be just fine. Stay with me.”
Sam gave a sound that could have meant ‘okay’ or could have meant ‘fuck you’, but as long as he seemed to react Dean didn’t care which.
He held Sam’s face in his hands. “Come on, man, talk to me. Where does it hurt?”
“Shoul’r.” The word no more than a hiss through the clenched teeth.
Only then did Dean notice that Sam’s arm was cradled close to his chest. Unnaturally so. He touched his brother’s hand, ignoring Sam’s rapid intake of breath. When he tried to move it though, the involuntary yelp that escaped Sam’s mouth stopped him cold.
“Looks dislocated to me. Anything else?”
Sam shook his head, eyes shut. Okay then. Dean looked at the house, a dark shape against the dimming cloudless sky, both of their sawed-offs somewhere inside.
“Okay,” he said aloud. “Okay.”
He manhandled Sam into the car, rummaged in the first aid kit, and handed Sam two vicodins and a bottle of water telling him to keep them down. He drove fast, cutting his eyes every now and then to Sam, who was wordlessly making his tours around the pain in the passenger seat.
Once in the relative safety of their motel room, Dean sat his brother on the bed like a kid and checked for any other injuries. Peeling off the jacket proved excruciating enough even despite the drugs, and left Sam covered in sweat and shaking. Dean cut his T-shirt off, had to shut his eyes for a second at the sight of the bone protruding oddly under the skin.
It’s nothing, he told himself. A fall like that, they were goddamn lucky.
He crouched in front of the bed, grabbed Sam’s hand and bent it at the elbow.
“Okay?”
His brother’s tensed white-faced nod made something in Dean’s abdomen churn nauseatingly. Okay, an empty fucking word. Regular Winchester permission for all things fucked-up. Maybe that was where they’d made a mistake. There was absolutely nothing okay about this whole situation and yet the word was found easily rolling on the tongue and falling from the lips, a stock threadbare lie which had lost its comforting quality thousands of miles ago. What the hell had they thought letting okay ever sound like this?
Dean swallowed hard, set about popping Sam’s shoulder back.
*****
Sam’s back was turned to him when his brother made his way up, step by step, not making any sound, his feet slow as if dipped in molasses. “The haunted house, huh? I must admit it’s a classic touch.”
“You know me, I’ve always been a sucker for this shit.”
“So what now? Get it done and get gone?”
“You betcha.”
“You keep on telling yourself that. It’s what you don’t get.”
Dean shrugged, “It’s either or, I told you. Anything in-between gets you killed. Head in the game, Sammy.”
“Ghosts to hunt. People to kill.”
“Yahtzee.” Dean took out his zippo, stared at the small flame for a while. “Should I say something?”
It was Sam’s turn to shrug, “You never do.”
“Still, it feels like I should say something.”
Sam turned around, perched on one of the steps. “Dad always said you don’t chat up your mark, you shoot it.”
“Get the job done.”
Sam nodded, “Get the job done.”
Dean crouched and put the lighter at the foot of the steps, watched as the flames climbed them inaudibly until the fiery wall swallowed them whole and his nostrils were hit by the sharp reek of burning flesh.
*****
Dean woke up with a start, palms sweaty when he dragged them across his face, heart pounding against his ribcage. He felt blindly for a light switch, found it and flicked it on, the dim light making his eyes ache when he tossed a look to the other bed; Sam was sleeping deeply, unperturbed, a steady rise and fall of his chest easily observable under the covers. No sign of flames, no smoke, no stench.
Just a fucked-up dream. Calm down, you fucking pussy.
“Sam?” He knew it was ridiculous, but couldn’t help standing up and patting Sam’s legs all the same. “Hey, Sam.”
His brother gave a groaning sound which Dean clearly understood as universal for leave me the fuck alone. Yeah, about that.
“Hey, Sammy, you good?” He felt like an idiot, but his hands were still shaking and his heart still beating at the breakneck speed, drowning everything else, his sensible side included.
“Th’ hell?”
“Hiya there, hop-head. I’m going out. You be good on your own for a while?” The words were out before he could think better of them, but hell if they didn’t sound good. Take care of the shit that needed taking care of, it should’ve been his fucking starting point.
“Wha-?” Suddenly more awake and showing more signs of lucidity, Sam climbed to a sit, winced when he forgot his shoulder. It was a moment before he collected himself enough to speak again, but when he did the worry was flashing bright and clear in his pasty face. “Dean? ‘S happened?”
“Jesus, just relax. It’s okay. I mean, as okay as it was when you hit the sack. I’m just gonna go and collect our shotguns. See what’s what.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“You do remember what we do, right? And what a flashlight is?”
Sam stared at him wide-eyed like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard, like Dean had just put two and two and pronounced it twenty two. “There’s a fucking ghost out there!”
“That whipped you but good in the broad daylight. Which makes your argument invalid. ‘Sides that ghost’s kinda the whole point.”
“Okay, then I’m going with you.”
“Yeah, like hell you are. High as a fucking kite and with that ass-awful sling to scare the spook. And there’s also that pesky whipping thing you were right to mention.”
“I din’t-” Sam started to protest, but soon realized what he was doing and dropped it. He shook his head, jaw set. “I’m fine.”
“Guess, your fine might use some working on then. I’ll tell you what, you go ahead and be in charge of that and let me worry about the rest.”
Dean grabbed his jacket hanging conveniently on the footboard of his bed and threw it over his shoulder, declaring the conversation over. Waking Sam up, a genius fucking move. Right in tow with taking July Brighton to her prom. And almost saying yes to Michael, that too. Although deep down he felt that the almost part tipped the scales in July’s favor. He was fucking thankful he’d never made it to his own prom, his list of spectacular dumbness could really do without that frill.
“Go back to sleep. See you later.”
“Dean. Wait. Just, wait. You shouldn’t go alone. Crap, Dean, wait.”
“Dude, sleep, don’t sleep, whatever,” Dean stopped at the door, threw up his hands feeling his annoyance getting the better of him. “Just ‘scuse me for not staying and watching you do that while the ghost’s dishing out heart attacks like Halloween candies. Jesus, Sam.”
“That’s fucking low, man, even for you. All I’m saying ‘s that you shouldn’t go back there by yourself.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake I can do a fucking job by myself alright. I already have, you know? And I would have. I swear to fucking God, wherever that bastard is, if I’d had to, I would’ve done it myself. So fuck you very much, Sammy, for your kind concern.”
He slammed the door behind himself thinking: The string’s cut off. If that’s what’s keeping you here, Sam, there you go, the string’s cut right off.
*****
The first shotgun was lying right at the foot of the stairs, a conspicuous shape caught in the oval beam of the flashlight, accompanied by a few splinters from the broken railing. Dean crossed the distance from the entrance gingerly, wary of the continuous low wheezing of the EMF reader. Despite the cold prickling at his face, the air felt heavy; dense and unnatural and thick with static, it seemed to be ringing the place like a fog, making the hairs at the nape of his neck stand upright. This ghost wasn’t your run of the mill, straightforward I’ll strangle you with my own spooky hands gig. No, this one was a fucking shrinking violet, giving people heart attacks and dislocating their shoulders without as much as flashing its dead mug.
Dean stooped to pick up the weapon, froze when he caught an outline of a silhouette out of the corner of his eye. An unmistakable one, climbing up the stairs silently, without the merest sound. He looked up fast, gun ready to shoot, but the steps were as abandoned as the second ago.
It had been just a flash, the kind you blink and miss, but had managed to chill his spine all the same. It’d been Sam he’d seen, Dean was sure, and the certainty whispered a persistent litany of fear and anger from behind his ear like an old familiar secret. Something was wrong. His eyes instinctively trailed the route back to the exit, but he forced his sight to relax, waiting for any movement to register in his peripheral vision. The EMF kept whimpering weakly for his attention and the floor creaked as he slowly started skirting the room.
The temperature instantly dropping an impossible few notches lower was the only warning he got before receiving a potent blow to his ribcage. The brute force of it knocked him over and made his body slide a painful length on the jagged splintery floor. Surprisingly enough, his fingers were still tightly woven around the barrel of the sawed-off and without sparing it another thought he rolled over and fired a round into the bleakness ahead.
He was halfway through the process of standing up when another cold belt foiled his effort and sent him crashing against the staircase. The hit knocked the air out of him and for a moment Dean just lay there, rolled in on himself, trying to find his breath.
Then a cold ring swathed around his neck, clamped around his throat in an iron grip and lifted him up. In front of himself, Dean saw the dead face of Tom Miller, the apparition flickering in and out, freaking strangling him, and Dean felt a ludicrous urge to look for hidden cameras, a hysterical laughter building up in his throat. It never got a chance to find a way out though as the cold that seared through his body was white and livid, and effectively quelled any lingering vestiges of amusement. He struggled against it with all he had until his moves became spasmodic and his feet jerked on the floor convulsively. He felt blindly for anything that might be used as a weapon, nails scraping over the old wood and black spots dancing chaotically in his vision.
A sudden gun shot rang in his ears and Dean felt his body collapse in a limp heap an inconceivable second later. A cough painfully seized his abused throat, and for a spell limiting it to a manageable level was all he could wrap his mind around.
“Come on, Winchester. Beauty rest can wait.”
Something wasn’t right, Dean could feel it, but when he gazed up he still fully expected to see Sam’s pissed off expression. Even in the dark, the guy who was reaching out his hand to him looked nothing like Sam. It shouldn’t have, really, but it still felt like a kick in the guts.
“Time’s a-waistin’.” It was said lightly, in the tone of a good salesman. Take it or leave it, like there was a choice in that. Dean could almost hear the ticking sound of a countdown in the background.
He took the outstretched arm. The guy pushed a shotgun into his second hand and Dean welcomed the familiar weight with sudden gratitude.
“Might wanna stick to that.”
They made a beeline for the entrance and Dean headed straight to the Impala. Parked right next to it was a pick-up truck, whose make he couldn’t recognize in the darkness. He rummaged a bit in the backseat, found a bottle of water, and sat heavily on the bench, door open and legs outside of the car, gulping greedily. The guy waited without a word, the way he studied Dean wasn’t lost on him.
Dean propped the bottle on his knee, gave his mouth a swipe with a sleeve of his jacket with a purposefully drawn-out courtesy.
“Nice timing,” he pointed at the man with the neck of the bottle, his voice sounded strained and hoarse and weak, much too weak for his liking.
“Looked like you could use a hand,” the guy shrugged, his eyes like a cocked gun. He lowered the weapon but still kept a hold of it. “You ID-ed the spook yet?”
“The spook, yes, I did.” Dean left the rest unsaid, but could see understanding in the crooked smile that yanked at the guy’s lips.
“Name’s Kian Taylor.”
“No offense, dude, but that tells me zilch.”
“I wouldn’t think it any different. I’ve heard quite a lot about you though.”
The crippling suspicion took a form then and Dean didn’t need any more confirmation than that; most of the time if it looked like a dog and barked like a dog then it probably really was a dog.
“You’re a good tracker for a guy who needs somebody to tie his shoelaces for him.”
Kian sniffed out a small laugh, jutted his temple towards the house. “Yours seemed pretty loose back there. You ain’t careful, one day you might trip on them.”
“Yeah well, one day I probably just might. Perks of the job.”
“Garth didn’t tell me anything. Thought you’d wanna know that.”
“Oh, Kian, man, now you’re just bragging.”
He smirked. “Where’s your brother?” An off-hand question, like it didn’t matter.
Dean gave him a quirk of an eyebrow for an answer and it brought another smile to Kian’s face. The guy sure did that a lot. Even under normal circumstances it was the kind of buzzer that would tip Dean off. And meeting in the deep night of Monroe, Michigan in a haunted house was not normal even according to his, arguably stretched, standards.
“Fair enough. I shoulda known better than to ask. Whattaya say we talk somewhere where it ain’t ass-freezing cold? Can’t see why you can’t thank me over a coupla drinks.”
Dean shrugged in the carefully concocted semblance of indifference, “Got a grave to dig.”
Another smirk, never reaching Kian’s eyes though. His eyes remained penetrating and cold and deadly. “I reckon those tend to stick to one place, can’t be bothered about when you get down to them.”
Dean knew it was a bad idea, could sense it humming in his bones deep and unmistakable. He said yes anyway, not ready to admit that maybe the ominous feeling he got was partly the reason.
*****
He thought he heard somebody talking, shouting even. Maybe. In one of the few voices he was ever genuinely glad to hear and thought that couldn’t be. The realization was sad but that felt strangely okay because so were most of the things around.
There was an unrelenting palm on his cheek, but Dean couldn’t muster enough strength to shy away from it. He felt tugging at his wrists - restraints, he rebuked himself, that was not something he could afford forgetting - and then his body was being lifted to a sit like a ragdoll. He didn’t even realize the presence of the cold floor hugging his left side until the lack of it made the change of position painfully clear.
“Shhhh. Shhhhh.”
He wasn’t sure if the shushing sound was directed at him but thought that maybe probably was as there was no way the pain that had lit up his chest had been kept on mute. He didn’t remember how he’d ended up on the floor but was distantly aware of somebody holding him up. The familiar smell of smoke and gun oil and wet soil filled his nostrils and he let that be his anchor, even if just for a little while. It smelled like the Impala, like Sam, like home and he drifted on that smell until he felt dizzy and decided that enough was enough and tried to pry his eyes open.
His vision would not stand still. He fought with his wandering gaze, instincts urging him to localize Kian, but soon he felt his lids going down like lead balloons. He let them. There wasn’t really much of a point to the contrary anyway. He’d figured it out when Tom Miller had made his visit, which Dean probably should have been grateful for but somehow didn’t have it in himself to give. He wasn’t at all interested in facing what it meant just yet. And then there it was again, that shushing sound, rustling in his ears like dry leaves.
“Shhhhh. I know, man, just hold on. I’ll get you out of here.”
There was a thumb stroking at the wetness on his cheeks and Dean hummed in protest, not sure whether it was against the intimacy of the touch or against the tears themselves.
“Sam.” He put into the word all his strength, got it past his lips on a shuddering breath. He needed it out, a plea, a holler, an apology, a question, a thousand other things that couldn’t wait unvoiced in the pit of his stomach.
“’S okay, I’m here. It’s over. We’re getting out of here. ‘s okay.”
Dean wasn’t sure how but at that moment he could tell this Sam was his Sam and he believed him. Believed every damn familiar lie he heard, because Sam was really here and he’d said it was okay and Dean believed him, and it brought a fresh trail of tears running down his face before his brother struggled to manhandle him upright and then there was nothing but blackness.
*****
It was nine days and three states later, the middle of nowhere, Missouri, and a road that was meandering down a hill like a serpent when Dean said, “Pull over.”
Sam cut his eyes to him, cleared his throat before speaking in that infuriatingly careful way he’d got lately. It wasn’t the first time in those nine days that Dean had to quell the urge to wipe that look from his brother’s face, preferably with a fist. Sam’s guilt trips were the last thing Dean needed right now.
“You sick?”
Dean caught his reflection in the side mirror. Swelling had already subsided but bruises and cuts were still prominent, didn’t leave any room for doubts as to what had happened.
“Just pull over,” Dean said again without losing the face from his sight.
Those last couple of days they hadn’t had much of a conversation. For his part, Dean had stuck to the simplicity of who, where and when, and Sam had known better than to ask. Scraps and bits of information that had let them organize the mess of the events, a few of how are you feeling’s followed by some misplaced grunts, and not much more beyond that. Those last couple of days Dean had been drugged up to his eyeballs anyway.
Sam had gone after him, found one of the shotguns still lying on the old wooden planks of the haunted house and become friendly with one Tom Miller. He’d dispatched the ghost. How exactly he’d managed to do that with a busted shoulder was beyond Dean, but since Sam wasn’t telling and Dean wasn’t asking it was apparently staying in the zone of the unexplained. All Dean’s hectic calculations had told him was that it had taken a while. Somehow he didn’t want to go any further than that.
Sam had found him some time later, in an old hunting cabin. Alone. Kian already gone. And even through the drug infused haze that one had succeeded to sink in.
Dean wasn’t too clear on the later stages of his stay in the cabin, wasn’t too curious either. He remembered believing it had really been Sam opposite that chair, the memory which had hit him with all its magnitude the moment Sam had decided to cut his pain killer dosages. But he couldn’t recall when exactly Tom Miller had broken their little rendezvous and what had happened after. His best guess was that whatever Miller had made Kian see proved enough to chase the guy away. Hell, if only he hadn’t been tied to the fucking chair, Dean would’ve run away himself. Or blow his brains out; Miller’d been a convincing son of a bitch. As it was though, Sam had taken care of the spook just in time to save Dean. Which meant that most probably Kian was somewhere out there as well, very much alive.
He also remembered calling Cas. Earlier, when his thoughts hadn’t been so barbed yet. He should’ve known better, but he’d called. For all the good it had done to him.
A week in the motel room and Dean had thought he might chisel his eyes out of sockets with a spoon just so that he wouldn’t have to stare at that yellowish flowery wallpaper a second longer. He’d kept his trap shut, but Sam, that sneaky bastard, had seen more than he’d been letting on and decided it was time to hit the road even though they had both known it really wasn’t. That first drive had been short and painful and nearly made Dean pass out when the Impala hit a stretch of a road that hinted at being a former firing ground. It had also been the best goddamn thing Dean could think of in those nine days and for a while it had made him feel like himself again.
Sam sent him another worried look before he navigated the Impala to the shoulder of the road.
Snow was still lounging around in lazy patches, unhurriedly relenting here and there to uncover dead grass lying in wait underneath. The spring was still a long time a-coming.
Dean wrenched the door open and stumbled outside, leaned back against the hood of the Impala and breathed in the cold air. His eyes stopped at the angry marks left on his wrists by the ropes and he stared at them for a spell before stuffing his hands into the pockets. He waited for Sam to join him.
“Dean? What is it?”
“I really hate winter, you know?”
Sam took a place next to him on the Impala. There was a hint of hesitant humor in his voice when he said, “Is that why we stopped here? To fully appreciate its atrocity before it goes away?”
Dean smiled. They were quiet for a while.
“I figured out who Miller was after. Some time around in that cabin,” Dean said finally and felt his brother going tense next to him. “Guess, better late ‘n ever doesn’t really apply here.”
“Dean-”
“I had a dream. That night after we came back from the spot, I dreamt we were back at the haunted house and I set fire to the stairs you were walking up.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah well. It should’ve been my fucking clue. Anyway, you said something to me, something I didn’t quite get at the time.”
Sam shifted uncomfortably. It was bizarre, the gentleness in his voice when he asked, “What did I say?”
Dean sighed shallowly, attentive of his sore ribs. “Something about getting the job done, like at all costs. Back in that cabin, I mean, I was pretty messed up by then, but I remember Tom Miller showing up and going after Kian. I think the person Miller had the biggest issues with was himself. He killed all those children, right? Burnt them alive. Seemed like a reasonable price to pay in order to gank the teacher at the time. But the idea backfired and six days later the only thing Miller could think about were those kids, so he decided to make the bill square.”
“And killed himself. Became his first victim.”
Dean nodded. “I don’t know if the guy was psychic while still alive or whether it was just his special ghost mojo, but what he did was fuck with your head. I think he wanted people to see the same thing he’d seen, the one that’d made him strap the noose. And I gotta tell you, man, in terms of persuasiveness? Sonuvabitch had a fucking gift.”
“That dream,” Sam turned around, looked at him with something indecipherable in his eyes. “Christ, Dean, why didn’t you say anything?”
Dean snorted a humorless desperate laugh. “The moment I realized it, it couldn’t change anything. Didn’t matter.” Except it wasn’t true and Dean really hoped Sam understood that. “Miller must’ve targeted me when we were checking out the site. The dream was first, then came the visions. I mean, Christ, Sammy, when I think about it, Kian was pretty fucking determined to get the colt.”
“Dean,” Sam swallowed. “Kian was a sociopath that didn’t care about anything but his revenge. There’s no equation mark between the two of you.”
“Guess, Miller was of a different opinion on the subject, huh?” The corners of Dean’s mouth fell down in a grim smile, he raked a hand through his hair. “Jesus, I really fucked up this one, didn’t I? I guess what I’m trying to say is sorry. For the thing with Amelia. And for a bunch of other things I screwed up along the way. And I’ll do that. As soon as I get a grip on how to.”
Sam took a breath as if to say something but Dean beat him to it. “I don’t know about you but I could really use some coffee. And fries. And maybe pie. God, what I wouldn’t give for a slice of good pie.”
Sam blinked and for a moment Dean thought that no way he was getting away with that. There were more things to be said, more questions to be answered that were throbbing painfully at the back of his throat, but for now Dean felt spent. Weary like after a ten-mile run. He really, really hoped Sam would see his plea for what it was though; This is about as far as I can get, man.
“Actually,” Sam cleared his throat and when he spoke his voice was calm and easy, like he could be talking over a pile of pancakes on the Sunday morning in some TV soup, like he hadn’t had his shoulder dislocated and his brother hadn’t almost frozen to death after being spectacularly caught up in his own shit. “I wouldn’t say no to good pie myself.”
Dean must have looked dumbstruck, because Sam shrugged and smiled and said, “It’s cold out here.”
Dean nodded. Then shook his head, couldn’t suppress a sniff of laughter. “No, it fucking isn’t. Thanks, Sam. Pie it is.”
“Pie it is.”