FIC: The Lee 8/10 Part II
Title: The Lee 8/10 Part II
Author: pdragon76
Rating: R (sailor mouths, sex, violence)
Genre: Het
Characters: Sam, Dean, OFC
Spoilers: Set late Season Two, after WIAWSNB. AU for timeline and some minor canon-jiggery.
Disclaimer: It’s Kripke’s world, we’re all just living in it. *snaps fingers, points*
Summary: Wherever you go, there you are.
A/N: This fic was commissioned for Sweet Charity by the very lovely janglyjewels , who wanted “something angsty that involves Sam and his powers”. Hope this scratches the itch, my dear. Chapters will post as completed. Apologies in advance to any native West Virginians. Beta’d by the feisty, astute
july_july_july and the ever insightful, truly delightful riverbella . Isolated pockets harangued by the hawk-eyed kimonkey7 . These guys demand that I earn it - and own it - to the best of my debatable ability, every step of the way. Any remaining niggles, wtf’s and humdingers are mine, all mine. Sorry about the delay on this one, folks.
Previous chapter links: Ch1 Ch2 Ch3 Ch4 Ch5 Ch6 Ch7
Escape is never the safest path.
~ ‘Dissident’, Pearl Jam
The mid morning sky was low and overcast. Through the front windows, the flowering orchard swayed and twisted under the command of a brisk wind. The darkening clouds threatened a summer rain. Sam laid the salt against the glass on the inside sill while the breeze made twisters of the leafy detritus on the porch, rattled the window frames.
It felt like something was building and peeling back, all at the same time. The scuttle was always the easy part. You could sink your whole damn world, make everything disappear, but it was keeping things sunk…that was where you came undone. The tide came in and went out - shifting and dragging - and it all came back to the surface eventually. Sam had a vague, detached mental image of cadavers washing up on a shore. He knew them all, he was certain, and could have told you their names, had he been in any condition to give them faces.
He was trying hard not to panic. Trying to stop methodically scouring the landscape, left to right, in grids, the way their dad had taught them. Logically, it was unlikely Keehan actually knew where they were. He’d had plenty of time to cover the ground, and every opportunity to make his move last night. Lord knew Sam’s attention had been elsewhere, and even if Dean had been awake, in his current state he posed no realistic threat to an organized assault.
In all likelihood, Sam reasoned - pleaded, prayed, hoped - Spencer would come at them via Vermont, once he realized the location was a ruse. The reprieve Ellen had bought them would no doubt be brief, but it had granted them some room for maneuvering nonetheless. A golden window in which to get Beth and her aunt out of harm’s way.
Gwen was at a land management seminar in Beckley, but Beth had dug up the number. They’d gotten word to her, and she was on her way home to deal with the undisclosed emergency.
Dean was still on the phone to Bobby, organizing the specifics. Cameron Miller, a hunter from Tilford, Kentucky, was already on the road, but they needed a second escort, and Sam knew it even before Dean proposed the option. It made practical sense to split the risk - Gwen in one place, Beth in another. Dean relayed a few names and Sam passed on them in turn until Roach’s name came up.
He was in the area, and far less of a cretin than both his name and appearance suggested. They’d met him maybe a dozen times, usually at Bobby’s, and he was perceptibly less psychotic than your average hunter for one very good reason. Her name was Katie, she was three, and a tie like that tended to tone down the crazy, make a guy less reckless. Nothing about this situation felt good, but Roach didn’t feel like a mistake, which was more than Sam could say about any other decision he’d made of late.
Dean stared down at the phone in his hand after he’d ended the call. “Fuck,” he said eventually, and it appeared to be the sum total of his thoughts on current affairs.
“If this man’s dead, how is any of this even possible?”
Beth was on the couch, grappling with the latest tectonic shift, and Sam crouched at her knee. He tried to think of a way to answer that wouldn’t end in screaming.
“I’m gonna take care of this,” he said instead. “You don’t have to worry. This is all just a precaution.”
The windows rattled under a fresh gust, and Beth hugged herself a little tighter. She wouldn’t look Sam in the face. He wanted to shift and duck his head, force the eye contact, but he was afraid of what he’d find there.
“Like lying about Spencer was just a precaution?” she asked distantly, and Sam dipped his chin to his chest, let his eyes fall shut. “You told her you didn’t know where he was.”
“Beth, you have to believe me. It’s not what you think.”
She started to laugh. A high, unnatural sound that tapered into something more resigned.
"I am so stupid. I'm the stupidest person that ever lived. Because for a second, I thought this might actually be happening. I thought it might be possible that you were a decent person. But that doesn’t happen, does it? We all get what we deserve, right?"
"Beth-"
"You're not decent. I’m not decent. The La Butte’s weren’t decent.” Her knee jumped impatiently and her fingertips thrummed manically against her lips. “Nobody’s decent.”
She sounded as if her own naivety disgusted her, and Sam turned on his haunches toward Dean, desperate for some rational explanation that might undo the entire mess.
“Dean, is there any way he could still be-?”
His brother shot him down mid-ask with a titanium glare.
“I’m just trying to be sure here.”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay.”
They waited in the living room like an abandoned exercise in triangulation. Dean seemed preoccupied, quiet. The flat of his fingers slid absently up and down his jaw in a compulsive, unconscious loop until Sam broke the spell.
“Dean, you alright?”
His brother’s hand stilled and he gazed sightlessly in Sam’s direction. “You still got those names and dates Bobby gave you for Gordon’s visitors?”
Sam tried to think where they were. “Yeah, I wrote them down.” He got up, fished through the first few pages of the notebook in his back pocket before he decided it wasn’t in there. He went through the stuff on the coffee table until he found a larger notebook, flipped through ten or so penned pages before he found the scrawled information. He ripped it out and took it back to Dean. “What are you thinking?”
Dean produced his cell again. “I wanna see if any of these names have been back there the last coupla weeks.” He punched Bobby’s number in, shook his head. “I’m a fuckin’ idiot,” he muttered, clearly to himself, and Sam frowned as he handed over the page.
“What?”
Dean snatched the paper, waved him off. “Nothin’. Make me some coffee.”
*****************************************************************
Robert Ginte was only name that had popped up again on the visitor’s list. One quick call to Ellen confirmed the name was among Keehan’s aliases. Dean made the leap from mildly perturbed to flat-out agitated when Sam called the prison and found Walker’s latest visitor hadn’t exactly left him in a positive frame of mind. Gordon had been sedated in the prison infirmary ever since.
“He knew it wasn’t Keehan,” Dean surmised, when Sam got off the phone and brought him up to speed. “Fuckin’ sonuvabitch. Goddamn it.” He screwed up the list of names, threw it sideways across his chest.
“What does that mean?” Beth asked, and she sounded afraid of the answer before she even heard it. “How can he not be himself?”
“Something’s usin’ his body,” Dean said, abandoning all effort to withhold the brutal truth.
Beth looked stricken. “Is that possible?”
“Yes.” Dean dragged a hand down his face, sent a heavy breath down his nose. “Unfortunately, it is.”
“Oh, my God.” Beth rose unsteadily to her feet, began to move woodenly toward the door. “I have to go,” she said slowly, and Sam crossed the room to stop her.
“Beth, you can’t. You need to sit down.”
“No, because things can be inside people, and that means-”
“It means you have to sit down. Please. I can fix this, but you have to stay here.” Sam steered her back to the couch, applied enough downward pressure on her shoulders that her knees gave and she sat. He squatted to look her in the eye. “I’m not gonna let anything happen to you. This man has absolutely no business with you. It’s me he’s got a problem with, and there’s nothing practical he gains by targeting you or Gwen. But he’s going to keep looking until he finds me, and if you so much as get in his periphery, he will go through you without blinking. And I can’t have that. So I need you guys to disappear, and the two men on their way here can make that happen. This way I can know you’re both safe until we take him out.” The last fell unchecked from his lips, and the damage was done before he could correct.
Beth’s face crumpled and she began to cry. “Oh, God. How many people have you killed?”
Sam’s throat grew unexpectedly tight, and he shook his head hurriedly at the accusation. Because people were dead, yes. His mother and Jess and Dad and Ronald Resnick and Wandell and Meg and Madison and probably Ava and maybe it was his fault. Maybe if he’d been quicker or louder or smarter or stronger, they’d still be alive. Or maybe if he’d listened to himself a long time ago, before that second fire had razed everything to the ground, all but one of those people might have lived.
He hadn’t listened, though, and a lot of people were dead. But people were alive, too. That had to count for something. He had to believe it counted. And he’d never meant for anyone to get hurt.
“It’s not what you think,” he said again.
*****************************************************************
Dean met Gwen on the porch. Sam only caught snatches of the conversation, but he could tell from the tone there was very little sugar-coating.
We fucked up. Something’s on its way and you need to be gone when it gets here. If you need anything from the house, speak now.
Sam escorted her to the main residence, through the orchard and its apple blossoms, with the loaded saltgun loose at his side. The way Gwen was stalking ahead, Sam knew the reconnaissance was less about practical retrieval and more to do with snatching back some power in a situation that had spiraled violently out of her control.
He knew the feeling.
“I should be calling the damn police,” she muttered with barely concealed rage.
They’d managed to spare her the vast majority of the truth, and it was depressingly easy to sell her on a fabricated story about the dangerous associate who’d tracked them down. She’d hardly batted an eyelid.
“As soon as this is over, you can go right ahead and do whatever you think is right,” he said, with a forced calm. “No one’s going to stop you.”
“She trusted you, and this is what you give her in return.”
Sam pulled up beneath the last of the apple trees, jogged the shotgun in his hand. “You know, this may come as a shock to you, but I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
Gwen whirled around and marched back at him with such aggression Sam nearly stepped back. “Oh, I believe you. That's the problem with people like you, Sam." Her face was screwed tight like a prune, and her eyes were dark pinpricks of fury. "You never mean for anything to happen, do you? It just does, all by itself.”
She didn’t wait for a response. Left Sam flush-faced and tight with frustration beneath the boughs of the fruit trees while she strode up the porch stairs to the house.
Inside, she packed a small floral-print overnight bag, and when she started on a second, Sam felt the time growing short and succumbed to his impatience.
“Gwen, this isn’t a vacation.”
She whipped around like a striking snake. “This bag is for Beth, you lying ingrate. Of course, it hasn’t occurred to you that she might need a change of clothes.” She pushed past him down the hall to the bathroom, and Sam let the impact bounce him off the wall, threw up an exasperated hand. There was the smack and scrape of opening drawers, and then Gwen emerged, brandishing a long, thin blister pack in ridiculous outrage. “Or a toothbrush!”
She just about put it up his nose as she stormed past. In the kitchen she went through the knife block with a flourish, loosed the two largest blades in dramatic arcs. Sam shifted his weight from one foot to the other, suddenly uneasy. “Gwen, what are you doing?”
She delivered a knife into each bag, zipped them smartly shut. She straightened with the aid of her hand upon the counter, narrowed her eyes.
“I’m going to repeat the situation to you, young man, as I understand it. You and your brother are criminals, and you’ve upset some other criminals. And to fix this, you’ve arranged for even more criminals to come to my house. And then Beth and I are going to hitch up our trousers and climb into the vehicles with the criminals, and travel to an undisclosed location for God knows how long. And in the meantime, in case we have any objection to any of this, you’ll be accompanying our every move with firearms. Did I miss anything?”
None of the thousand things Sam wanted to say to that would pass as an appropriate answer. He coaxed his acute sense of persecution back into check, managed to form a sentence that didn’t include punctuation by the Browning.
“No, I think that just about covers it,” he said tightly.
“Right. That’s what I thought. So, we’re taking the knives.”
He needed to warn Roach and Miller. He shouldn’t forget that.
“That will be all.” Gwen folded her arms, and Sam stood dumbly before her, both hands full of shotgun, until he realized he was expected to carry the bags.
*****************************************************************
Cameron Miller looked more like a stockbroker than a hunter. In fact, if Sam remembered correctly, he actually was a financial advisor. That was his day job. Dean tended to give him a fair amount of shit over the suits, but the man came highly recommended by Bobby Singer, which was about as glowing a character reference as anyone could hope for in this business. And Sam had to confess to a covertly-held admiration for his adherence to a dress code. Although he couldn’t, for the life of him, understand why anyone would voluntarily sprint in business shoes.
In keeping with his general demeanor, Cameron arrived early, and with a plan. Once across the cabin’s threshold, he downed a perfunctory belt of holy water from Dean’s proffered flask, and patiently endured an observation about the knees of his pants seeming worn. Dean stopped short of openly asking him if he sucked IRS cock, which - believe it or not - was actually an improvement on their last rendezvous.
The first executable in Cameron’s strategy was that Sam and Dean remain utterly ignorant of every detail from that point on. Sam found this at least as unnerving as he did reassuring.
Miller wanted to talk to Gwen alone, and they’d retired to Sam’s bedroom for a little over half an hour when Roach pulled up. Sam was still wondering if it was immediately obvious Beth had shared his bed. He didn’t know if the preoccupation was further evidence of his tragically skewed priorities, or merely symptomatic of his progressive, virulent anxiety.
Dean got the door before Roach had to knock, swung it open on a raised set of scratched knuckles.
The disheveled, bear-shaped hunter gave him an exaggerated up-and-down, shook his head. “You’re a fuckin’ medical insurer’s nightmare, you know that?”
Dean gave him a half-smile. “I believe the term you’re after is ‘nurse’s wet dream’. Where’s Katie?”
“Her mother’s. What am I - an idiot?”
Dean shrugged innocently. “Apparently not.”
They knew Roach a little better than Miller. Well enough to be acquainted with the small blonde bundle who was impossibly his daughter. She was sometimes with him, sometimes not, and up until that second, Sam was guilty of assuming her mother was dead. He hadn’t been aware she was even in the picture, much less sharing custody. Any other day it might have been an intriguing snippet of intel on an enigmatic associate, but under the circumstances it only served to remind Sam how little they knew about him.
Roach turned his sun-weathered face and gave Sam a nod. He slapped his hands together and rubbed when he locked on Beth.
“You must be Beth.” He gave a half-assed bow. “It appears I will be your driver today.”
Beth gaped at his grimy attire and grizzled beard in horror. Sam had to admit, it did kind of look like he’d forgotten to take his clothes off before threw them in the dryer.
Roach tried on a smile, but somehow that never looked right unless Katie was on the other end. “I’da shaved and changed, but…hell, I don’t shave and…frankly, I don’t have any clean clothes.”
Beth’s mouth clicked shut, and she pivoted dubiously toward Sam. Are you kidding me? her eyes inquired.
He smiled with a reassurance he didn’t feel. “It won’t be for long.”
“I have a three year-old,” Roach offered, by way of explanation. “I don’t have clean anything. But I can throw a jacket down on the passenger seat.” He smoothed the air in front of him with a scuffed paw. “Your pants’ll be fine.”
*****************************************************************
Cameron took a left out of the drive, and that was as much as Sam knew about where he was taking Gwen.
"Is Taylor even your name?" Beth asked, as Sam swung shut the passenger door of the pickup.
He let out a breath, squinted over the pasture to the orchard where just yesterday Gwen had been pruning. The branches of the trees sagged and bowed under a breeze yet to reach them.
"No."
Beth looked sharply down at her hands where they rested in her lap. She shook her head slowly, as though that figured. When she glanced back up, there was nothing but anger in her expression.
"What’s your real name?”
Sam bit his lip and gazed back toward the trees. "Beth, I don't think that's such a great idea."
“Son of a bitch,” she said softly, with feeling, and then cranked up the window between them.
Sam wanted to apologize again. He didn’t want her to leave with that exchange hanging between them, but he was suddenly, painfully aware he didn’t deserve anything more.
He slapped a hand on the car roof, stepped back. Roach reached a hand up out of his open window, waved.
“You boys watch your backs,” he called, and then peeled the car away and three-pointed her down the drive toward the road.
They took a left, too. Probably out to I-64, and Sam watched until he lost the car in the trees past the end of Gwen’s property. He could roughly guess the route they’d take to Bobby’s, and he checked his watch so he could work out later when to expect a call.
His brother was already in the car. Sam carried the last of the bags down the stairs, effortless with a sudden spike of adrenaline and the need to be gone. Dean was studiously doodling in the margin of a notebook resting in his lap. Sam slipped behind the wheel, stuck the keys in the ignition, and took a second before he started her up. He dragged a hand down his face and forced a couple of long, even breaths.
Dean looked up from the page, his face a careful canvas of blank. “You alright?” he asked finally, after a long stare.
Sam busied himself turning over the engine. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he fibbed. “You okay? You need any painkillers before we take off?”
“No.” He looked like he wanted to say something else. Sam hoped he wasn’t about to launch into any kind of I-told-you-so. If that happened, he was pretty sure he was going to snap and punch his brother in the face.
He twisted on the leather, started to back up, and Dean said “I’m sorry, Sammy,” with a genuine compassion that was far, far worse.
****************************************************************
Dusk was beginning to settle. Sam wove them through the now-familiar bends of the blacktop, while the setting sun strobed through the trees. Dean was quiet - an unsettled brand of pensive that was absolutely warranted, given the situation. But there was something ominous about his silence too, like a slow shadow beneath the surface of a lake.
“You think it’s the Yellow-Eyed Demon?”
Dean cleared his throat, rubbed at his mouth. “I dunno.”
“He has to be possessed.”
“Yes.”
“Why would the Yellow-Eyed-Demon do that? I mean, why not stick with the same body?”
“I dunno.”
“Dean.”
“Hmm?”
“What’s wrong?”
His brother sniffed a tight, hysterical laugh, and Sam tilted his head in concession. “Apart from the obvious.”
“Nothin’. I’m just thinkin’.”
“Well, good. Because I need you to concentrate. We have to figure this out.” Sam elbowed the door frame, curled a habitual finger in the hair at his temple. “He said I was about to get popular. That could mean other demons, right? Why would a demon go see Gordon?”
“I dunno.”
Sam cut eyes between the road and Dean in quick succession, frustrated. “You wanna weigh in, here? Or you wanna tell me what’s wrong? One of the two, man.”
Dean closed his eyes, shook his head a little. “This is my fault.”
Sam’s face scrunched in confusion. “What? How the-? Dean, how is this your fault?” At the back of his mind, the teeth on a cog suddenly caught. “Wait a second, at the cabin, you said you were an idiot. What was that about?”
“Nothin’.”
“Dean, don’t fuck around with me right now. Why did you say that?”
Dean brought a hand up over his face, and Sam trudged back further through the memory banks with growing unease. Oh, Jesus. “You were gonna give Keehan a choice. What did that mean?”
He saw Dean’s throat work on a hard swallow. Sam wanted to pull over, shake it out of him, but he knew they shouldn’t stop. It wasn’t safe. Nothing was safe anymore. “Dean, what was the choice?”
“I was so angry.” He sounded wounded, and it dropped Sam’s stomach.
“Dean, what?”
“I said…” Dean shook his head. “I said if he told me who sent him, I’d salt and burn the body.”
Sam’s foot came off the accelerator of its own accord, and he had to consciously reapply it. A good two miles passed before he could say anything.
“He didn’t-?”
“I wasn’t ever going to, Sam.”
Another mile passed. “You couldn’t have known.”
Dean closed his eyes in answer, rested his head against the window. Sam knew better than to push the point, but he wanted to. He wanted to do or say something to take the horrible weight of Vann Avenue from Dean’s shoulders. Tell him it was okay, that he was right. Keehan hadn’t deserved that courtesy.
But Sam had left. He’d followed orders and gone up those stairs and out of that building while Dean bartered and bloodied his hands. Sam had let that happen, because somewhere primal and deep inside him, he had wanted Keehan dead. Surely it wasn’t that simple. The man had tried to kill him, and in that act his life was forfeit.
How could it be that simple?
Sam wanted to ask. He wanted Dean to explain it to him, in the same step-by-step way he could explain how to change an alternator. But Dean was shut fast, locked inside himself with his own questions, and Sam wasn’t sure he wanted to know what they were.
“What are we gonna do about La Butte?” he asked a few miles later.
Dean didn’t open his eyes. “Screw La Butte. We leave it.”
“Dean, we can’t just leave it. All we have to do is find Marie’s body and-”
“The fuck we can’t. Demon trumps ghost, Sammy. ‘Specially one that’s been in Gordon Walker’s ear. We bail.”
They drove the rest of the way to I-77 in silence. When Harper Road met the interstate, Sam slowed but didn’t take the exit.
Dean’s head came off the glass like an internal sensor had been tripped. “Where are you goin’?” he barked as Sam hit the gas, shot them across the overpass toward Beckley.
“I’m gonna finish this job.”
“What the…? Are you high?” Somewhere, Dean’s disbelief was probably registering seismically.
Sam clamped his mouth shut and his fingers tightened on the wheel, but his silence was insufficient armor.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“This won’t take long.”
“Jesus Christ. Pull over.”
When Sam made no show of halting the vehicle, Dean shouted. “Stop the fuckin’ car!”
The road was busy enough there wasn’t any safe place to pull up, so Sam jerked the wheel at the first driveway, bounced the Impala through a pair of open wrought-iron gates and into a parking lot.
When he threw open his door and clambered out, blood and breath rushing hot through his system, he was standing on the grass verge of an honest-to-goddamn cemetery.
Are you kidding me? he wanted to scream up at the sky.
He stalked a wide, useless loop through the first rows of headstones, aware of the wasting minutes but unable to bring himself back to the car.
Dean pushed his door open, all fumble and crutches and hands slapping paint, and Sam was gripped with a sudden, ferocious desire for him to fall and be unable to get up again.
“We’re finishing this fucking job,” Sam shouted. They weren’t. He knew that. In a minute, he was going to get back in that car and they were going to drive out of Beckley ahead of an endless storm. “I’m not leaving,” he hollered outrageously. “I’m not setting foot outside this county until Henry La Butte and Wendy La Butte and Marie Pierres and the entire Lewis McManus Memorial trail is on fire.”
He paced some more, chest heaving, and waited for Dean to come back at him. Waited for his brother to yell, tell him he was crazy, and to get in the goddamn car. He needed that. Someone - something - to rage against, so he could keep the spark of purpose fired. Fuck the Yellow-Eyed Demon. Fuck Keehan. Fuck everything. Because without that, it was just the yawning fear of blood yet to be spilled, and that constant feeling of tugging inside him. A growing whisper in his skull he couldn’t quite yet hear.
“You done?” Dean wanted to know. He didn’t sound angry or hurt or confused or surprised.
“I dunno,” Sam hurled back honestly.
“This’s a no-brainer, Sammy,” Dean called, sounding bored. “We’ve gotta demon on our asses. Standard rules apply. Everything else takes a backseat.”
“I am so sick of-”
“You’re not sick of anything, you’re scared. And that’s good. You should be. That shit’ll keep you alive.”
“If anything happens to her-”
“You’re not gonna let it.”
“I don’t know if I can-”
“Drive? All I’m askin’ you to do is drive. That’s all you gotta do right now. One thing at a time, Sam.”
“I gotta know what’s going on. I can’t walk around like this anymore.”
“Sure you can. One foot in front of the other. You’re doin’ it right now.”
Sam stopped, looked down at his traitorous feet.
“Sammy, let’s just go to Ellen’s, okay? Ash’s working on it. He could have somethin’ for us by the time we get there. We can send someone back to finish the job. I promise you, we’ll make sure someone takes care of La Butte. But right now, I need you to be smart, and I need you to think, and I need you to get us the fuck out of this town before Spencer shows up and I have to put another bullet in his head.”
The tide of Sam’s rage washed out a little. He turned away from the Impala, laced both hands behind his head and waited for the graveyard to offer a viable alternative.
There wasn’t one. He knew that, too. And after a minute he dropped his arms to his sides and headed reluctantly back to the car. They were turning onto I-77 when Sam’s cell rang.
The caller ID said Roach, but it was Beth, and she was crying.
Ch 9
Author: pdragon76
Rating: R (sailor mouths, sex, violence)
Genre: Het
Characters: Sam, Dean, OFC
Spoilers: Set late Season Two, after WIAWSNB. AU for timeline and some minor canon-jiggery.
Disclaimer: It’s Kripke’s world, we’re all just living in it. *snaps fingers, points*
Summary: Wherever you go, there you are.
A/N: This fic was commissioned for Sweet Charity by the very lovely janglyjewels , who wanted “something angsty that involves Sam and his powers”. Hope this scratches the itch, my dear. Chapters will post as completed. Apologies in advance to any native West Virginians. Beta’d by the feisty, astute
july_july_july and the ever insightful, truly delightful riverbella . Isolated pockets harangued by the hawk-eyed kimonkey7 . These guys demand that I earn it - and own it - to the best of my debatable ability, every step of the way. Any remaining niggles, wtf’s and humdingers are mine, all mine. Sorry about the delay on this one, folks.
Previous chapter links: Ch1 Ch2 Ch3 Ch4 Ch5 Ch6 Ch7
Escape is never the safest path.
~ ‘Dissident’, Pearl Jam
The mid morning sky was low and overcast. Through the front windows, the flowering orchard swayed and twisted under the command of a brisk wind. The darkening clouds threatened a summer rain. Sam laid the salt against the glass on the inside sill while the breeze made twisters of the leafy detritus on the porch, rattled the window frames.
It felt like something was building and peeling back, all at the same time. The scuttle was always the easy part. You could sink your whole damn world, make everything disappear, but it was keeping things sunk…that was where you came undone. The tide came in and went out - shifting and dragging - and it all came back to the surface eventually. Sam had a vague, detached mental image of cadavers washing up on a shore. He knew them all, he was certain, and could have told you their names, had he been in any condition to give them faces.
He was trying hard not to panic. Trying to stop methodically scouring the landscape, left to right, in grids, the way their dad had taught them. Logically, it was unlikely Keehan actually knew where they were. He’d had plenty of time to cover the ground, and every opportunity to make his move last night. Lord knew Sam’s attention had been elsewhere, and even if Dean had been awake, in his current state he posed no realistic threat to an organized assault.
In all likelihood, Sam reasoned - pleaded, prayed, hoped - Spencer would come at them via Vermont, once he realized the location was a ruse. The reprieve Ellen had bought them would no doubt be brief, but it had granted them some room for maneuvering nonetheless. A golden window in which to get Beth and her aunt out of harm’s way.
Gwen was at a land management seminar in Beckley, but Beth had dug up the number. They’d gotten word to her, and she was on her way home to deal with the undisclosed emergency.
Dean was still on the phone to Bobby, organizing the specifics. Cameron Miller, a hunter from Tilford, Kentucky, was already on the road, but they needed a second escort, and Sam knew it even before Dean proposed the option. It made practical sense to split the risk - Gwen in one place, Beth in another. Dean relayed a few names and Sam passed on them in turn until Roach’s name came up.
He was in the area, and far less of a cretin than both his name and appearance suggested. They’d met him maybe a dozen times, usually at Bobby’s, and he was perceptibly less psychotic than your average hunter for one very good reason. Her name was Katie, she was three, and a tie like that tended to tone down the crazy, make a guy less reckless. Nothing about this situation felt good, but Roach didn’t feel like a mistake, which was more than Sam could say about any other decision he’d made of late.
Dean stared down at the phone in his hand after he’d ended the call. “Fuck,” he said eventually, and it appeared to be the sum total of his thoughts on current affairs.
“If this man’s dead, how is any of this even possible?”
Beth was on the couch, grappling with the latest tectonic shift, and Sam crouched at her knee. He tried to think of a way to answer that wouldn’t end in screaming.
“I’m gonna take care of this,” he said instead. “You don’t have to worry. This is all just a precaution.”
The windows rattled under a fresh gust, and Beth hugged herself a little tighter. She wouldn’t look Sam in the face. He wanted to shift and duck his head, force the eye contact, but he was afraid of what he’d find there.
“Like lying about Spencer was just a precaution?” she asked distantly, and Sam dipped his chin to his chest, let his eyes fall shut. “You told her you didn’t know where he was.”
“Beth, you have to believe me. It’s not what you think.”
She started to laugh. A high, unnatural sound that tapered into something more resigned.
"I am so stupid. I'm the stupidest person that ever lived. Because for a second, I thought this might actually be happening. I thought it might be possible that you were a decent person. But that doesn’t happen, does it? We all get what we deserve, right?"
"Beth-"
"You're not decent. I’m not decent. The La Butte’s weren’t decent.” Her knee jumped impatiently and her fingertips thrummed manically against her lips. “Nobody’s decent.”
She sounded as if her own naivety disgusted her, and Sam turned on his haunches toward Dean, desperate for some rational explanation that might undo the entire mess.
“Dean, is there any way he could still be-?”
His brother shot him down mid-ask with a titanium glare.
“I’m just trying to be sure here.”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay.”
They waited in the living room like an abandoned exercise in triangulation. Dean seemed preoccupied, quiet. The flat of his fingers slid absently up and down his jaw in a compulsive, unconscious loop until Sam broke the spell.
“Dean, you alright?”
His brother’s hand stilled and he gazed sightlessly in Sam’s direction. “You still got those names and dates Bobby gave you for Gordon’s visitors?”
Sam tried to think where they were. “Yeah, I wrote them down.” He got up, fished through the first few pages of the notebook in his back pocket before he decided it wasn’t in there. He went through the stuff on the coffee table until he found a larger notebook, flipped through ten or so penned pages before he found the scrawled information. He ripped it out and took it back to Dean. “What are you thinking?”
Dean produced his cell again. “I wanna see if any of these names have been back there the last coupla weeks.” He punched Bobby’s number in, shook his head. “I’m a fuckin’ idiot,” he muttered, clearly to himself, and Sam frowned as he handed over the page.
“What?”
Dean snatched the paper, waved him off. “Nothin’. Make me some coffee.”
*****************************************************************
Robert Ginte was only name that had popped up again on the visitor’s list. One quick call to Ellen confirmed the name was among Keehan’s aliases. Dean made the leap from mildly perturbed to flat-out agitated when Sam called the prison and found Walker’s latest visitor hadn’t exactly left him in a positive frame of mind. Gordon had been sedated in the prison infirmary ever since.
“He knew it wasn’t Keehan,” Dean surmised, when Sam got off the phone and brought him up to speed. “Fuckin’ sonuvabitch. Goddamn it.” He screwed up the list of names, threw it sideways across his chest.
“What does that mean?” Beth asked, and she sounded afraid of the answer before she even heard it. “How can he not be himself?”
“Something’s usin’ his body,” Dean said, abandoning all effort to withhold the brutal truth.
Beth looked stricken. “Is that possible?”
“Yes.” Dean dragged a hand down his face, sent a heavy breath down his nose. “Unfortunately, it is.”
“Oh, my God.” Beth rose unsteadily to her feet, began to move woodenly toward the door. “I have to go,” she said slowly, and Sam crossed the room to stop her.
“Beth, you can’t. You need to sit down.”
“No, because things can be inside people, and that means-”
“It means you have to sit down. Please. I can fix this, but you have to stay here.” Sam steered her back to the couch, applied enough downward pressure on her shoulders that her knees gave and she sat. He squatted to look her in the eye. “I’m not gonna let anything happen to you. This man has absolutely no business with you. It’s me he’s got a problem with, and there’s nothing practical he gains by targeting you or Gwen. But he’s going to keep looking until he finds me, and if you so much as get in his periphery, he will go through you without blinking. And I can’t have that. So I need you guys to disappear, and the two men on their way here can make that happen. This way I can know you’re both safe until we take him out.” The last fell unchecked from his lips, and the damage was done before he could correct.
Beth’s face crumpled and she began to cry. “Oh, God. How many people have you killed?”
Sam’s throat grew unexpectedly tight, and he shook his head hurriedly at the accusation. Because people were dead, yes. His mother and Jess and Dad and Ronald Resnick and Wandell and Meg and Madison and probably Ava and maybe it was his fault. Maybe if he’d been quicker or louder or smarter or stronger, they’d still be alive. Or maybe if he’d listened to himself a long time ago, before that second fire had razed everything to the ground, all but one of those people might have lived.
He hadn’t listened, though, and a lot of people were dead. But people were alive, too. That had to count for something. He had to believe it counted. And he’d never meant for anyone to get hurt.
“It’s not what you think,” he said again.
*****************************************************************
Dean met Gwen on the porch. Sam only caught snatches of the conversation, but he could tell from the tone there was very little sugar-coating.
We fucked up. Something’s on its way and you need to be gone when it gets here. If you need anything from the house, speak now.
Sam escorted her to the main residence, through the orchard and its apple blossoms, with the loaded saltgun loose at his side. The way Gwen was stalking ahead, Sam knew the reconnaissance was less about practical retrieval and more to do with snatching back some power in a situation that had spiraled violently out of her control.
He knew the feeling.
“I should be calling the damn police,” she muttered with barely concealed rage.
They’d managed to spare her the vast majority of the truth, and it was depressingly easy to sell her on a fabricated story about the dangerous associate who’d tracked them down. She’d hardly batted an eyelid.
“As soon as this is over, you can go right ahead and do whatever you think is right,” he said, with a forced calm. “No one’s going to stop you.”
“She trusted you, and this is what you give her in return.”
Sam pulled up beneath the last of the apple trees, jogged the shotgun in his hand. “You know, this may come as a shock to you, but I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
Gwen whirled around and marched back at him with such aggression Sam nearly stepped back. “Oh, I believe you. That's the problem with people like you, Sam." Her face was screwed tight like a prune, and her eyes were dark pinpricks of fury. "You never mean for anything to happen, do you? It just does, all by itself.”
She didn’t wait for a response. Left Sam flush-faced and tight with frustration beneath the boughs of the fruit trees while she strode up the porch stairs to the house.
Inside, she packed a small floral-print overnight bag, and when she started on a second, Sam felt the time growing short and succumbed to his impatience.
“Gwen, this isn’t a vacation.”
She whipped around like a striking snake. “This bag is for Beth, you lying ingrate. Of course, it hasn’t occurred to you that she might need a change of clothes.” She pushed past him down the hall to the bathroom, and Sam let the impact bounce him off the wall, threw up an exasperated hand. There was the smack and scrape of opening drawers, and then Gwen emerged, brandishing a long, thin blister pack in ridiculous outrage. “Or a toothbrush!”
She just about put it up his nose as she stormed past. In the kitchen she went through the knife block with a flourish, loosed the two largest blades in dramatic arcs. Sam shifted his weight from one foot to the other, suddenly uneasy. “Gwen, what are you doing?”
She delivered a knife into each bag, zipped them smartly shut. She straightened with the aid of her hand upon the counter, narrowed her eyes.
“I’m going to repeat the situation to you, young man, as I understand it. You and your brother are criminals, and you’ve upset some other criminals. And to fix this, you’ve arranged for even more criminals to come to my house. And then Beth and I are going to hitch up our trousers and climb into the vehicles with the criminals, and travel to an undisclosed location for God knows how long. And in the meantime, in case we have any objection to any of this, you’ll be accompanying our every move with firearms. Did I miss anything?”
None of the thousand things Sam wanted to say to that would pass as an appropriate answer. He coaxed his acute sense of persecution back into check, managed to form a sentence that didn’t include punctuation by the Browning.
“No, I think that just about covers it,” he said tightly.
“Right. That’s what I thought. So, we’re taking the knives.”
He needed to warn Roach and Miller. He shouldn’t forget that.
“That will be all.” Gwen folded her arms, and Sam stood dumbly before her, both hands full of shotgun, until he realized he was expected to carry the bags.
*****************************************************************
Cameron Miller looked more like a stockbroker than a hunter. In fact, if Sam remembered correctly, he actually was a financial advisor. That was his day job. Dean tended to give him a fair amount of shit over the suits, but the man came highly recommended by Bobby Singer, which was about as glowing a character reference as anyone could hope for in this business. And Sam had to confess to a covertly-held admiration for his adherence to a dress code. Although he couldn’t, for the life of him, understand why anyone would voluntarily sprint in business shoes.
In keeping with his general demeanor, Cameron arrived early, and with a plan. Once across the cabin’s threshold, he downed a perfunctory belt of holy water from Dean’s proffered flask, and patiently endured an observation about the knees of his pants seeming worn. Dean stopped short of openly asking him if he sucked IRS cock, which - believe it or not - was actually an improvement on their last rendezvous.
The first executable in Cameron’s strategy was that Sam and Dean remain utterly ignorant of every detail from that point on. Sam found this at least as unnerving as he did reassuring.
Miller wanted to talk to Gwen alone, and they’d retired to Sam’s bedroom for a little over half an hour when Roach pulled up. Sam was still wondering if it was immediately obvious Beth had shared his bed. He didn’t know if the preoccupation was further evidence of his tragically skewed priorities, or merely symptomatic of his progressive, virulent anxiety.
Dean got the door before Roach had to knock, swung it open on a raised set of scratched knuckles.
The disheveled, bear-shaped hunter gave him an exaggerated up-and-down, shook his head. “You’re a fuckin’ medical insurer’s nightmare, you know that?”
Dean gave him a half-smile. “I believe the term you’re after is ‘nurse’s wet dream’. Where’s Katie?”
“Her mother’s. What am I - an idiot?”
Dean shrugged innocently. “Apparently not.”
They knew Roach a little better than Miller. Well enough to be acquainted with the small blonde bundle who was impossibly his daughter. She was sometimes with him, sometimes not, and up until that second, Sam was guilty of assuming her mother was dead. He hadn’t been aware she was even in the picture, much less sharing custody. Any other day it might have been an intriguing snippet of intel on an enigmatic associate, but under the circumstances it only served to remind Sam how little they knew about him.
Roach turned his sun-weathered face and gave Sam a nod. He slapped his hands together and rubbed when he locked on Beth.
“You must be Beth.” He gave a half-assed bow. “It appears I will be your driver today.”
Beth gaped at his grimy attire and grizzled beard in horror. Sam had to admit, it did kind of look like he’d forgotten to take his clothes off before threw them in the dryer.
Roach tried on a smile, but somehow that never looked right unless Katie was on the other end. “I’da shaved and changed, but…hell, I don’t shave and…frankly, I don’t have any clean clothes.”
Beth’s mouth clicked shut, and she pivoted dubiously toward Sam. Are you kidding me? her eyes inquired.
He smiled with a reassurance he didn’t feel. “It won’t be for long.”
“I have a three year-old,” Roach offered, by way of explanation. “I don’t have clean anything. But I can throw a jacket down on the passenger seat.” He smoothed the air in front of him with a scuffed paw. “Your pants’ll be fine.”
*****************************************************************
Cameron took a left out of the drive, and that was as much as Sam knew about where he was taking Gwen.
"Is Taylor even your name?" Beth asked, as Sam swung shut the passenger door of the pickup.
He let out a breath, squinted over the pasture to the orchard where just yesterday Gwen had been pruning. The branches of the trees sagged and bowed under a breeze yet to reach them.
"No."
Beth looked sharply down at her hands where they rested in her lap. She shook her head slowly, as though that figured. When she glanced back up, there was nothing but anger in her expression.
"What’s your real name?”
Sam bit his lip and gazed back toward the trees. "Beth, I don't think that's such a great idea."
“Son of a bitch,” she said softly, with feeling, and then cranked up the window between them.
Sam wanted to apologize again. He didn’t want her to leave with that exchange hanging between them, but he was suddenly, painfully aware he didn’t deserve anything more.
He slapped a hand on the car roof, stepped back. Roach reached a hand up out of his open window, waved.
“You boys watch your backs,” he called, and then peeled the car away and three-pointed her down the drive toward the road.
They took a left, too. Probably out to I-64, and Sam watched until he lost the car in the trees past the end of Gwen’s property. He could roughly guess the route they’d take to Bobby’s, and he checked his watch so he could work out later when to expect a call.
His brother was already in the car. Sam carried the last of the bags down the stairs, effortless with a sudden spike of adrenaline and the need to be gone. Dean was studiously doodling in the margin of a notebook resting in his lap. Sam slipped behind the wheel, stuck the keys in the ignition, and took a second before he started her up. He dragged a hand down his face and forced a couple of long, even breaths.
Dean looked up from the page, his face a careful canvas of blank. “You alright?” he asked finally, after a long stare.
Sam busied himself turning over the engine. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he fibbed. “You okay? You need any painkillers before we take off?”
“No.” He looked like he wanted to say something else. Sam hoped he wasn’t about to launch into any kind of I-told-you-so. If that happened, he was pretty sure he was going to snap and punch his brother in the face.
He twisted on the leather, started to back up, and Dean said “I’m sorry, Sammy,” with a genuine compassion that was far, far worse.
****************************************************************
Dusk was beginning to settle. Sam wove them through the now-familiar bends of the blacktop, while the setting sun strobed through the trees. Dean was quiet - an unsettled brand of pensive that was absolutely warranted, given the situation. But there was something ominous about his silence too, like a slow shadow beneath the surface of a lake.
“You think it’s the Yellow-Eyed Demon?”
Dean cleared his throat, rubbed at his mouth. “I dunno.”
“He has to be possessed.”
“Yes.”
“Why would the Yellow-Eyed-Demon do that? I mean, why not stick with the same body?”
“I dunno.”
“Dean.”
“Hmm?”
“What’s wrong?”
His brother sniffed a tight, hysterical laugh, and Sam tilted his head in concession. “Apart from the obvious.”
“Nothin’. I’m just thinkin’.”
“Well, good. Because I need you to concentrate. We have to figure this out.” Sam elbowed the door frame, curled a habitual finger in the hair at his temple. “He said I was about to get popular. That could mean other demons, right? Why would a demon go see Gordon?”
“I dunno.”
Sam cut eyes between the road and Dean in quick succession, frustrated. “You wanna weigh in, here? Or you wanna tell me what’s wrong? One of the two, man.”
Dean closed his eyes, shook his head a little. “This is my fault.”
Sam’s face scrunched in confusion. “What? How the-? Dean, how is this your fault?” At the back of his mind, the teeth on a cog suddenly caught. “Wait a second, at the cabin, you said you were an idiot. What was that about?”
“Nothin’.”
“Dean, don’t fuck around with me right now. Why did you say that?”
Dean brought a hand up over his face, and Sam trudged back further through the memory banks with growing unease. Oh, Jesus. “You were gonna give Keehan a choice. What did that mean?”
He saw Dean’s throat work on a hard swallow. Sam wanted to pull over, shake it out of him, but he knew they shouldn’t stop. It wasn’t safe. Nothing was safe anymore. “Dean, what was the choice?”
“I was so angry.” He sounded wounded, and it dropped Sam’s stomach.
“Dean, what?”
“I said…” Dean shook his head. “I said if he told me who sent him, I’d salt and burn the body.”
Sam’s foot came off the accelerator of its own accord, and he had to consciously reapply it. A good two miles passed before he could say anything.
“He didn’t-?”
“I wasn’t ever going to, Sam.”
Another mile passed. “You couldn’t have known.”
Dean closed his eyes in answer, rested his head against the window. Sam knew better than to push the point, but he wanted to. He wanted to do or say something to take the horrible weight of Vann Avenue from Dean’s shoulders. Tell him it was okay, that he was right. Keehan hadn’t deserved that courtesy.
But Sam had left. He’d followed orders and gone up those stairs and out of that building while Dean bartered and bloodied his hands. Sam had let that happen, because somewhere primal and deep inside him, he had wanted Keehan dead. Surely it wasn’t that simple. The man had tried to kill him, and in that act his life was forfeit.
How could it be that simple?
Sam wanted to ask. He wanted Dean to explain it to him, in the same step-by-step way he could explain how to change an alternator. But Dean was shut fast, locked inside himself with his own questions, and Sam wasn’t sure he wanted to know what they were.
“What are we gonna do about La Butte?” he asked a few miles later.
Dean didn’t open his eyes. “Screw La Butte. We leave it.”
“Dean, we can’t just leave it. All we have to do is find Marie’s body and-”
“The fuck we can’t. Demon trumps ghost, Sammy. ‘Specially one that’s been in Gordon Walker’s ear. We bail.”
They drove the rest of the way to I-77 in silence. When Harper Road met the interstate, Sam slowed but didn’t take the exit.
Dean’s head came off the glass like an internal sensor had been tripped. “Where are you goin’?” he barked as Sam hit the gas, shot them across the overpass toward Beckley.
“I’m gonna finish this job.”
“What the…? Are you high?” Somewhere, Dean’s disbelief was probably registering seismically.
Sam clamped his mouth shut and his fingers tightened on the wheel, but his silence was insufficient armor.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“This won’t take long.”
“Jesus Christ. Pull over.”
When Sam made no show of halting the vehicle, Dean shouted. “Stop the fuckin’ car!”
The road was busy enough there wasn’t any safe place to pull up, so Sam jerked the wheel at the first driveway, bounced the Impala through a pair of open wrought-iron gates and into a parking lot.
When he threw open his door and clambered out, blood and breath rushing hot through his system, he was standing on the grass verge of an honest-to-goddamn cemetery.
Are you kidding me? he wanted to scream up at the sky.
He stalked a wide, useless loop through the first rows of headstones, aware of the wasting minutes but unable to bring himself back to the car.
Dean pushed his door open, all fumble and crutches and hands slapping paint, and Sam was gripped with a sudden, ferocious desire for him to fall and be unable to get up again.
“We’re finishing this fucking job,” Sam shouted. They weren’t. He knew that. In a minute, he was going to get back in that car and they were going to drive out of Beckley ahead of an endless storm. “I’m not leaving,” he hollered outrageously. “I’m not setting foot outside this county until Henry La Butte and Wendy La Butte and Marie Pierres and the entire Lewis McManus Memorial trail is on fire.”
He paced some more, chest heaving, and waited for Dean to come back at him. Waited for his brother to yell, tell him he was crazy, and to get in the goddamn car. He needed that. Someone - something - to rage against, so he could keep the spark of purpose fired. Fuck the Yellow-Eyed Demon. Fuck Keehan. Fuck everything. Because without that, it was just the yawning fear of blood yet to be spilled, and that constant feeling of tugging inside him. A growing whisper in his skull he couldn’t quite yet hear.
“You done?” Dean wanted to know. He didn’t sound angry or hurt or confused or surprised.
“I dunno,” Sam hurled back honestly.
“This’s a no-brainer, Sammy,” Dean called, sounding bored. “We’ve gotta demon on our asses. Standard rules apply. Everything else takes a backseat.”
“I am so sick of-”
“You’re not sick of anything, you’re scared. And that’s good. You should be. That shit’ll keep you alive.”
“If anything happens to her-”
“You’re not gonna let it.”
“I don’t know if I can-”
“Drive? All I’m askin’ you to do is drive. That’s all you gotta do right now. One thing at a time, Sam.”
“I gotta know what’s going on. I can’t walk around like this anymore.”
“Sure you can. One foot in front of the other. You’re doin’ it right now.”
Sam stopped, looked down at his traitorous feet.
“Sammy, let’s just go to Ellen’s, okay? Ash’s working on it. He could have somethin’ for us by the time we get there. We can send someone back to finish the job. I promise you, we’ll make sure someone takes care of La Butte. But right now, I need you to be smart, and I need you to think, and I need you to get us the fuck out of this town before Spencer shows up and I have to put another bullet in his head.”
The tide of Sam’s rage washed out a little. He turned away from the Impala, laced both hands behind his head and waited for the graveyard to offer a viable alternative.
There wasn’t one. He knew that, too. And after a minute he dropped his arms to his sides and headed reluctantly back to the car. They were turning onto I-77 when Sam’s cell rang.
The caller ID said Roach, but it was Beth, and she was crying.
Ch 9