SPN Fic: Till Human Voices Wake Us
Title: Till Human Voices Wake Us
Characters: Dean, Sam, random OCs of little consequence
Genre: Gen
Word-count: 4185
Rating: PG-13 for brief language
Spoilers: AU post-7.23
Summary: Getting back in the saddle sounds straightforward - until you try it. Sam isn't even sure they're mounting the right horse.
Notes: Title and cut-text snagged shamelessly from T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Third in the ongoing series Death By Water, after For Fierce Confusion, Peace.
Sam stands barefoot in the doorway and chokes, the hair on his shins prickling in the heat that surges out of the bathroom. The backs of his legs shiver.
“What the hell, Dean,” he says, even though that doesn't really cover it. It's a place to start, anyway.
Dean's sitting on the toilet, ass planted on the closed lid and heels propped against the rim of the tub. The space is tiny enough that his face reaches his bent knees without any trouble, hiding everything but his scraped ears in worn denim and flannel. His toes, blunted by mute tan band-aids, twitch lightly in the steam billowing off the mess inside.
Sam's been staring at it for five minutes, and he still doesn't know what to call it.
He can taste it, though, and smell it, and that's how he knows what he's looking at. Salt and the slight tang of lighter fluid, but without the heavy stickiness of bone underneath. Just cotton and polyester, and (but maybe he's imagining this part) his own familiar sweat laced throughout.
He doesn't have to go out and look at the half-empty duffel bags to be sure. With the exception of the boxers he's wearing at the moment, Sam no longer has a stitch to his name.
Without a word, he steps forward and turns the handle of the shower. Under the sudden deluge, the piled ash turns to soup, spattering gray against the sides of the tub like some kid's salad-spinner art project gone terribly wrong. Filthy droplets mist over Dean's bare feet, peppering the hems of his jeans.
Sam watches the sea of watery burnt puke whirl down the drain, and weighs the merits of smashing the side of his brother's skull in. Arson plus murder. The chambermaids love that kind of thing.
“You thought I was dead, didn't you,” he remarks to the mildewed walls. “You thought I was a ghost. A hallucination or something.” Dean digs his face deeper into his kneecaps. Sam scratches at the fresh cut on his left arm, feeling the tackiness of blood coat his fingertips. “You thought I was some kind of monster.”
The last of his wardrobe disappears into the motel's plumbing, and Sam reaches through the spraying shower to shut off the water.
“I'm not a ghost, Dean,” he says.
The stench of his former earthly possessions steams up at them from the warped brown bottom of the tub.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
They spend the morning in a huge, mostly-empty Sal-Val off the freeway. Sam stalks up and down the stark aisles, yanking out hangers and shoving them back in rising frustration, because every damn thing in the place is tiny and paisley and made out of fucking velvet. He tugs impatiently at the cuffs of Dean's shirt, which barely reach his wrists, and tries to approach bell-bottoms with an open mind.
Dean trails behind him, waiting on the benches parked at intervals along the rows of gaudy seventies castoffs. He doesn't crack a single joke, not even when Sam pulls out a pair of bright salmon corduroys and stands blinking in horror. He just sits and stares at his hands, examining the bandages with quiet fascination.
When Sam's finally managed to scrounge up a couple of pairs of jeans that reach most of the way down his legs, and what appear to be the only four shirts in the place that aren't either peach-and-turquoise plaid or gritty brown canvas, they head for the register.
“Getting ready for winter?” the lady behind the counter inquires, without much interest. She throws a suspicious look at Dean, who's weaving his way through the empty check-out lines behind Sam, glaring at the security cameras above the door.
Sam turns back to the cashier, and breaks his face on a reassuring smile. “Something like that.”
They stop at a rest area a few exits down the road so that Sam can duck into the bathroom and change, tossing Dean's old clothes back to him over the door of the stall. The new jeans barely brush the tops of his shoes, and he rolls his shoulders uneasily against the awkward cling of someone else's flannel shirt.
Then they get back in the Impala and drive on without speaking, until the mile markers change color and the towns light up along the horizon.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The Carnation Inn needs to fix its damn coffee machine.
Sam jabs the button pointlessly with his thumb, listening to the dumb sputter of emptiness in the pipes and hoping whoever chipped in at the staff meeting with the bright idea of a fussy new mechanical contraption to replace the trustworthy, straightforward urns got the paper cut of his or her lifetime.
Sighing, Sam tries the decaf button, and hisses when the scalding liquid pours cheerily out onto the empty tray, splattering his fingers. Once he's performed minor first aid on the injured hand, Sam fills two cups with decaf and heads back to the room.
On the way out the door, he picks a newspaper from each of the racks, folding them comfortably under his arm. It's not until he's fumbling with the room keys that he registers having done it, like some forgotten reflex - as though his body's remembering the muscle memories of his old life.
Dean's slumped on the bed where Sam left him, still firmly trapped under the knot of bedding strewn around him. He's awake now, staring at the TV, but since the lady on the screen's demonstrating the correct way to beat a souffle, Sam's got a hunch his brother isn't paying much attention to the gripping television program unfolding in front of him. Instead, he seems focused on clawing away the bandage beside his ear.
“I told you to leave that alone,” Sam remarks, stepping into the room and tossing the newspapers onto the table by the window.
Dean doesn't answer, but his hand drops into his lap. He squints towards the screen, as though he's just noticed what he's looking at, and changes to the weather channel with a cursory scowl. Sam drops the coffee off on the beside table and leaves Dean to educate himself on the color-coded mysteries of atmospheric fronts.
Settling himself behind the laptop with a pile of newspapers and his pitifully under-caffeinated cup of coffee, he sets out to get the first leg back up in the saddle before they both develop a dire fear of horses.
Luckily, whoever (whatever?) broke Dean out of Purgatory chose to do it near the end of October, which means haunted house season, and their pick of hunts to choose from. The fact that most of the reports are entirely fictitious doesn't make his job any easier, but at least sorting through a thousand different local news articles from Lincoln to Annapolis about the ubiquitous “old house on the hill” gives him something to do while Dean dozes in front of the television.
Sam doesn't ask Dean when he plans to quit channel surfing and start pulling his share of the weight; he's not sure what makes him keep his mouth shut. Maybe it's the fact that Dean's barely opened his mouth since the night he found him, except to mumble unintelligibly into the bedclothes whenever his head topples over in fatigue. Maybe it's the tense, absentminded way he's picking at the bandages, as though he left something underneath them and can't remember what it was. Maybe it's the look he keeps catching in Dean's eyes as they scan the room, like he hasn't got a clue where he is - until those eyes fall on Sam's face, and close into bruises spanning his broken nose.
Or maybe it's all in his imagination.
Dean's just taking advantage of his Get-Out-of-Purgatory-Free card, in the lamest way possible: with decaf, daytime TV, and a series of voluble catnaps. And Sam - well, Sam's just paranoid.
(Maybe.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dean doesn't haul his ass out of bed until 3 o'clock that afternoon, by which time Sam's compiled a list of fourteen different possible hauntings in a 300-mile radius, complete with information on all the supposed ghosts and several floor plans to give them a start on strategizing. He waits until Dean's found the container of fried rice Sam ordered during his last nap, wrapped himself in the floral comforter, and dragged himself and the takeout box over to the table, before giving his bleary-eyed brother a précis of the available options.
“So - guy called Tobias Flint,” he begins. “Supposed to have died in a house in Michigan in 1782. His ghost was seen last Tuesday, and the next morning a girl was found dead on the floor in the foyer.” Dean takes his time chewing, mouth half open and the heel of his hand rubbing the bruise above his left eye.
Sam forges ahead. “How about Levinia Lawrence? Died 1863, shot by a Union soldier with a nervous trigger finger who wandered too far south and got scared when she caught him looting in her basement. It'd be a drive, but we've got four deaths in the last year alone. From the police reports, it looks like she's probably going after New Englanders.” Dean swallows, blinking stickily. “Worth checking out,” Sam concludes, and waits again for a response that Dean, focused on limp cabbage and dried-out pork, doesn't seem interested in providing.
“Or we could check out this one in Clarksville - mysterious power outages, weird noises at night, and then last week the gardener turns up chopped to pieces in the dining room. No suspects, no sightings, but I looked at some local history, and it turns out some guy was murdered there in 1912. Might be planning some kind of centennial celebration.” Finished with the rice, Dean silently gnaws the tines off the fork, eyes fixed religiously on the laptop's logo. He spits the plastic spikes onto the tabletop, and doesn't answer.
Sam sighs and leans back in his own chair. “Look, man. If you don't want to do this, just say so. We can take it easy for a little while, if that's what you need.” Dean's gaze doesn't shift. “You just got out of Purgatory, Dean. It's okay to be a little - weird. I just figured you'd want to…I thought you'd be happier, hunting.”
He waits the silence out this time, and after what feels like it must be five full minutes, Dean shrugs.
“Is that a no?” Sam guesses, but Dean shakes his head, and shrugs again, pulling the slipping blanket back up around his shoulders.
“Whatever,” he says, in a voice that would sound like his by now if he'd just use it more than twice a day.
A few years ago, Sam would have pushed, but he knows better now. If Dean wants to say something, he'll say it, and no amount of nagging on Sam's part is going to convince him to talk before he wants to.
“Okay then,” he announces, picking a face at random out of the pile of papers; it's the campus ghost of Bradford College, the dark-eyed girl with the puffy sleeves who's fascinated with mechanical devices, who killed an admissions officer in September by electrocuting him with his own printer. “How's this? Girl wandering through Bradford Hall; everyone calls her Elizabeth because they figure it's the ghost of the lady who founded the school.” He pauses for effect, until Dean flicks his gaze reluctantly from the mildewed curtains to the papers in Sam's hand.
“But get this - Elizabeth Bradford didn't die until she was eighty-two - natural causes - and she never even lived in that building. Turns out, Bradford Hall used to be a women's dormitory, back when the college first started admitting female students. And about a week before the first class of girls graduated, a student called Alice Winslow died in that dormitory.”
If the news sparks any interest in Dean's closed-off brain, it's not making it to his eyes. “C'mon, man,” Sam prods. “You up for this?”
Dean slumps sideways in the chair with the heavy blanket collapsing around him, and nods, already back to studying the dust caught in the afternoon sunlight.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The third floor of Bradford Hall smells of lead paint and cheap floor wax. Sam can hear the stiff warehouse soles of his shoes echo against the checkerboard floor, deep chocolate tiles against dirt-flecked cream. This wing used to be devoted to the school's honor society, after it was converted into office space - there's a lingering odor of leather and furniture polish that reminds him of the legal firm he interned with during his senior fall - but for the last three years, it's been empty. There's nothing left but bare rooms full of dust and odd rainbows cast by sunlight through warped glass, and occasionally a black scuff mark where somebody once shoved a desk too hard across the tile. Now it's just waiting for the downstairs offices to be moved elsewhere so that the university can demolish the entire building and pour funds into something new and eco-friendly.
But Sam, of course, knows nothing of this. He's just a confused non-traditional transfer student, after all - his first week on campus, and already lost his ID. It's not his fault that he was born with such a terrible sense of direction that he missed the four signs on the first floor pointing to the admissions office with clear arrows and three-inch letters.
As for the handheld electronic device he's got tucked into his brown-and-gold Bradford hoodie - purchased this morning at the bookstore (because, hey, Sam's entire wardrobe is heading for the Pittsburgh water cleaning facilities), and still not broken in - well, he's got a deathly fear of radiation poisoning, that's all. There's no rule against carrying Geiger counters on school property.
Half an hour later, four trips up and down the hall haven't brought him any closer to finding admissions. He's run the blinking gadget over every chapped, pebbly wall in the place, and there's no sound but his own breathing, and the clamor of his shoes on the glossy floor.
Disgusted, Sam snaps the EMF meter's antenna down and heads for the huge mahogany stairs twisting down to the admissions lobby, to the clean white information desk where Dean's getting friendly with HELLO-I'M-Shayna (teal Sharpie and a mess of kinky red hair) - and, hopefully, turning up more than Sam has about the mysterious dead girl who scrambles calculators and haunts dormitories and apparently doesn't leave any trace of her presence behind her.
When he gets to the information desk, though, Dean's gone and Shayna's bent over her cell phone, typing intently with both thumbs. Sam glances at the armchairs ringed around the waiting room, but Dean's not slouched in any of them.
So he's out at the car, Sam tells himself, even though it'd be the first time he's seen Dean abandon five feet nine inches of collegiate redhead for the society of gum wrappers and cracked asphalt.
But the Impala's empty, and the only person he sees weaving between the rows of parked cars is a shrimpy kid with half a mustache and a physics textbook twice as thick as his own arm. Sam shouts Dean's name, but all it does is attract the attention of a group of girls sprawled on the lawn outside a neighboring dorm. They squint under their hands at the bellowing stranger, and break into giggles that carry surprisingly well across the choppy sea of car roofs.
So much for getting back in the saddle.
Shayna glances up as Sam bursts through the glass doors, and thrusts the cell phone quickly under the desk, flashing him a smile that's half charm and half guilt.
“Hi, can I help you?”
“Did you talk to a guy a little while ago - he would have been a little shorter than me, kinda brownish hair?” Shayna's buoyant attitude falters a little, her eyebrows pushing up uncertainly.
“Um, there was a guy about half an hour ago. Came in, stared around the room for a while, and then took off down the hall.” She shrugs, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. “I asked if he needed anything, but I'm not sure he heard.”
“He didn't say anything?”
Shayna shakes her head. “Nope. Is he okay? I thought he looked kind of weird. If you guys are looking for the health center, that's next door.” She puts a hand on a shiny directory booklet, reaching for the phone. “I can call them up for you, if you want,” she offers.
“No - no, we're fine,” Sam beams, because it's what his face does when he'd like to kick people in the teeth. “Uh, which way did you say - ?”
“There.” Shayna points, and Sam doesn't wait to thank her.
The corridor she directs him down is almost the exact double of the one he just scanned for paranormal activity two floors up, except that this one has brass nameplates beside the closed doors, and potted plants at regular intervals. Sam ignores the ranks of offices for Outreach and Student Life and University Planning, and heads instead toward a sign at the end of the hall that reads, in plain white letters, Restrooms.
The wrinkled golden panes in the door to the men's room channel light from the windows on the far wall. Sam pushes the heavy door open on hinges that don't seem to have been given much attention in the last decade, and finds himself facing a row of sea-green soap dispensers.
“Dean?” His voice echoes against the high walls and the marble partitions, but there's no answer. Sam strides down the row of chipped porcelain sinks, examining the gap beneath each door for signs of occupancy.
Before he can get to the end of the row, he hears it.
A steady convulsive rhythm, like the incessant dripping of a broken tap. He can almost imagine it's a fluke in the plumbing, the age of pipes telling in the walls of an antique building. But there's a catch on the edge of each repetition that stabs at his brain, tells him he's hearing a voice, a voice he knows well enough to feel slightly sick listening to it wrenched into quiet, unrecognizable sounds.
Half holding his breath, he approaches the stall, and reaches for the door handle - locked, naturally.
“Dean,” he calls through the marble door.
There's a brief hesitation before the strangled noises begin again, a little softer: he doesn't want to call them sobs, but it's the closest word he can come up with for what he's hearing. “You okay?” And yeah, Sam probably wins Stupidest Question of the Year for that one, but at least it's something to cover up the sound of his brother unraveling on the other side of the door. Besides, he doesn't know what else Dean would want him to say.
“What's wrong, man?” he tries, leaning his forehead against the cool, milky stone. But Dean doesn't respond - just keeps choking out the same harsh, bitten-off gasps, and Sam has waited for his brother to speak up long enough.
“Dean,” he orders, “unlock the door or I'm coming in.” For a minute, he thinks he's actually going to have to get down on the grubby tile floor on his hands and knees and roll underneath the door. He's about to drop into a crouch when the latch rattles abruptly, and the door swings slightly ajar.
Dean's sitting on the floor next to the toilet, folded up against the wall with his arms crossed over his face and hands clasped in his hair, knuckles pale with tension. Held tight in that defensive crouch, his body rocks slightly, the back of his skull rapping the whitewashed cinder blocks on the upswing of each mangled breath.
Navigating carefully around puddles of various fluids pooled on the tile, Sam kneels beside Dean and scans through his thirty years of experience for some point of reference to ground him, some clue to steer him towards a solution to the problem of Dean breaking visibly apart in front of him.
But there's no such point of reference, and all he can think to do is to set his hand cautiously on Dean's shoulder. It rests there like a dead mouse dragged onto a doorstep. Dean doesn't seem to notice that it's even there, just goes on rocking.
“Dean,” Sam says, trying not to make it sound like a question. It comes out pleading instead, and Dean ducks his head farther behind his knees, leaving Sam to stare helplessly at the goosebumps creeping up and down his brother's shivering arms.
Sam thought he was prepared for something, but now he's not sure what he imagined having to face. Another stomach-turning story squeezed in during some quiet moment, a few minutes of watching Dean's back shake in an uncomfortably direct way, maybe some mention of the Grand Canyon and pulling out of the life before they settle back into their routine for good. Not Dean shorting out in the middle of a job, without warning or explanation, not this. Sam can only think of one thing to do, and it's about as lame as slapping a Band-aid over on open fracture.
He does it anyway, because he's got fucking nothing else.
Settling back on his heels, he drags the Bradford hoodie over his head, jerking his shirt back down when it rides up. Then he takes hold of one of Dean's chilly wrists and pulls it firmly away from his face. Ignoring his brother's salt-burnt cheeks and screwed-up eyes, he eases the hoodie down over Dean's head, letting him struggle with the sleeves on his own.
While Dean's writhing in the clutches of the sweatshirt, punctuating his efforts with teary, frustrated grunts, Sam seats himself on the cold tiles and scoots around so that he's sitting side by side with his brother. Tipping his head back against the wall, he closes his eyes, and reaches blindly with an outstretched toe to find the edge of the stall door. He kicks it shut, and waits.
They sit together in their own darkness without speaking, while the sun creeps down the walls and the puddles dry underneath them. Sam doesn't know how long they've been frozen in the same moment when Dean finally shudders and stretches, rocking onto his toes to stand up, one hand splayed against the wall of the cubicle to steady him.
He doesn't say anything, but before he steps out to scrub his face in the lukewarm tap water, he nods once in Sam's direction - like it's a signal, a secret code they've agreed on to negotiate the intricacies of raw emotional pain without actually using words.
Standing alone in the cubicle listening to the splash of water and the rumbling of pipes, Sam thinks that if it's a code, he can't remember learning it.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
All the way back from the school, Dean faces the window like he's trying to memorize the streaks on the unwashed glass, and Sam knows better than to try to strike up a conversation with the back of his brother's head. When they arrive, the bathroom swallows Dean and his swollen eyes before Sam's even had a chance to toss the bags onto the bed and stretch his frozen shoulder muscles.
But at least this, finally, seems like the Dean he knows: retreating into solitude to lick his own wounds, avoiding confrontation at exactly the moment it makes most sense, using up all the hot water and not apologizing. They've gotten through the rough patch, whatever it was (and knowing Dean, he'll probably never find out), and when Sam finally breaks into the bathroom he'll find it choked with steam and strewn with soggy towels and articles of Dean's clothing in various states of cleanliness.
He'll slip on the slick, humid floor.
He'll bitch at Dean for emptying the tiny shampoo bottle.
He'll clatter through a frigid shower, and shiver his way out of the bathroom to find Dean sprawled across the bed, sweaty and smug.
He'll lose the remote fight, and he'll fall asleep to the sound of Dean commentating on Next Generation reruns. And tomorrow morning, the two of them will finish the research together, burn the bones, and drive on to the next town. Because that's what they always do.
Because by now, it's the only thing they know that makes any sense.
Characters: Dean, Sam, random OCs of little consequence
Genre: Gen
Word-count: 4185
Rating: PG-13 for brief language
Spoilers: AU post-7.23
Summary: Getting back in the saddle sounds straightforward - until you try it. Sam isn't even sure they're mounting the right horse.
Notes: Title and cut-text snagged shamelessly from T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Third in the ongoing series Death By Water, after For Fierce Confusion, Peace.
Sam stands barefoot in the doorway and chokes, the hair on his shins prickling in the heat that surges out of the bathroom. The backs of his legs shiver.
“What the hell, Dean,” he says, even though that doesn't really cover it. It's a place to start, anyway.
Dean's sitting on the toilet, ass planted on the closed lid and heels propped against the rim of the tub. The space is tiny enough that his face reaches his bent knees without any trouble, hiding everything but his scraped ears in worn denim and flannel. His toes, blunted by mute tan band-aids, twitch lightly in the steam billowing off the mess inside.
Sam's been staring at it for five minutes, and he still doesn't know what to call it.
He can taste it, though, and smell it, and that's how he knows what he's looking at. Salt and the slight tang of lighter fluid, but without the heavy stickiness of bone underneath. Just cotton and polyester, and (but maybe he's imagining this part) his own familiar sweat laced throughout.
He doesn't have to go out and look at the half-empty duffel bags to be sure. With the exception of the boxers he's wearing at the moment, Sam no longer has a stitch to his name.
Without a word, he steps forward and turns the handle of the shower. Under the sudden deluge, the piled ash turns to soup, spattering gray against the sides of the tub like some kid's salad-spinner art project gone terribly wrong. Filthy droplets mist over Dean's bare feet, peppering the hems of his jeans.
Sam watches the sea of watery burnt puke whirl down the drain, and weighs the merits of smashing the side of his brother's skull in. Arson plus murder. The chambermaids love that kind of thing.
“You thought I was dead, didn't you,” he remarks to the mildewed walls. “You thought I was a ghost. A hallucination or something.” Dean digs his face deeper into his kneecaps. Sam scratches at the fresh cut on his left arm, feeling the tackiness of blood coat his fingertips. “You thought I was some kind of monster.”
The last of his wardrobe disappears into the motel's plumbing, and Sam reaches through the spraying shower to shut off the water.
“I'm not a ghost, Dean,” he says.
The stench of his former earthly possessions steams up at them from the warped brown bottom of the tub.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
They spend the morning in a huge, mostly-empty Sal-Val off the freeway. Sam stalks up and down the stark aisles, yanking out hangers and shoving them back in rising frustration, because every damn thing in the place is tiny and paisley and made out of fucking velvet. He tugs impatiently at the cuffs of Dean's shirt, which barely reach his wrists, and tries to approach bell-bottoms with an open mind.
Dean trails behind him, waiting on the benches parked at intervals along the rows of gaudy seventies castoffs. He doesn't crack a single joke, not even when Sam pulls out a pair of bright salmon corduroys and stands blinking in horror. He just sits and stares at his hands, examining the bandages with quiet fascination.
When Sam's finally managed to scrounge up a couple of pairs of jeans that reach most of the way down his legs, and what appear to be the only four shirts in the place that aren't either peach-and-turquoise plaid or gritty brown canvas, they head for the register.
“Getting ready for winter?” the lady behind the counter inquires, without much interest. She throws a suspicious look at Dean, who's weaving his way through the empty check-out lines behind Sam, glaring at the security cameras above the door.
Sam turns back to the cashier, and breaks his face on a reassuring smile. “Something like that.”
They stop at a rest area a few exits down the road so that Sam can duck into the bathroom and change, tossing Dean's old clothes back to him over the door of the stall. The new jeans barely brush the tops of his shoes, and he rolls his shoulders uneasily against the awkward cling of someone else's flannel shirt.
Then they get back in the Impala and drive on without speaking, until the mile markers change color and the towns light up along the horizon.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The Carnation Inn needs to fix its damn coffee machine.
Sam jabs the button pointlessly with his thumb, listening to the dumb sputter of emptiness in the pipes and hoping whoever chipped in at the staff meeting with the bright idea of a fussy new mechanical contraption to replace the trustworthy, straightforward urns got the paper cut of his or her lifetime.
Sighing, Sam tries the decaf button, and hisses when the scalding liquid pours cheerily out onto the empty tray, splattering his fingers. Once he's performed minor first aid on the injured hand, Sam fills two cups with decaf and heads back to the room.
On the way out the door, he picks a newspaper from each of the racks, folding them comfortably under his arm. It's not until he's fumbling with the room keys that he registers having done it, like some forgotten reflex - as though his body's remembering the muscle memories of his old life.
Dean's slumped on the bed where Sam left him, still firmly trapped under the knot of bedding strewn around him. He's awake now, staring at the TV, but since the lady on the screen's demonstrating the correct way to beat a souffle, Sam's got a hunch his brother isn't paying much attention to the gripping television program unfolding in front of him. Instead, he seems focused on clawing away the bandage beside his ear.
“I told you to leave that alone,” Sam remarks, stepping into the room and tossing the newspapers onto the table by the window.
Dean doesn't answer, but his hand drops into his lap. He squints towards the screen, as though he's just noticed what he's looking at, and changes to the weather channel with a cursory scowl. Sam drops the coffee off on the beside table and leaves Dean to educate himself on the color-coded mysteries of atmospheric fronts.
Settling himself behind the laptop with a pile of newspapers and his pitifully under-caffeinated cup of coffee, he sets out to get the first leg back up in the saddle before they both develop a dire fear of horses.
Luckily, whoever (whatever?) broke Dean out of Purgatory chose to do it near the end of October, which means haunted house season, and their pick of hunts to choose from. The fact that most of the reports are entirely fictitious doesn't make his job any easier, but at least sorting through a thousand different local news articles from Lincoln to Annapolis about the ubiquitous “old house on the hill” gives him something to do while Dean dozes in front of the television.
Sam doesn't ask Dean when he plans to quit channel surfing and start pulling his share of the weight; he's not sure what makes him keep his mouth shut. Maybe it's the fact that Dean's barely opened his mouth since the night he found him, except to mumble unintelligibly into the bedclothes whenever his head topples over in fatigue. Maybe it's the tense, absentminded way he's picking at the bandages, as though he left something underneath them and can't remember what it was. Maybe it's the look he keeps catching in Dean's eyes as they scan the room, like he hasn't got a clue where he is - until those eyes fall on Sam's face, and close into bruises spanning his broken nose.
Or maybe it's all in his imagination.
Dean's just taking advantage of his Get-Out-of-Purgatory-Free card, in the lamest way possible: with decaf, daytime TV, and a series of voluble catnaps. And Sam - well, Sam's just paranoid.
(Maybe.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dean doesn't haul his ass out of bed until 3 o'clock that afternoon, by which time Sam's compiled a list of fourteen different possible hauntings in a 300-mile radius, complete with information on all the supposed ghosts and several floor plans to give them a start on strategizing. He waits until Dean's found the container of fried rice Sam ordered during his last nap, wrapped himself in the floral comforter, and dragged himself and the takeout box over to the table, before giving his bleary-eyed brother a précis of the available options.
“So - guy called Tobias Flint,” he begins. “Supposed to have died in a house in Michigan in 1782. His ghost was seen last Tuesday, and the next morning a girl was found dead on the floor in the foyer.” Dean takes his time chewing, mouth half open and the heel of his hand rubbing the bruise above his left eye.
Sam forges ahead. “How about Levinia Lawrence? Died 1863, shot by a Union soldier with a nervous trigger finger who wandered too far south and got scared when she caught him looting in her basement. It'd be a drive, but we've got four deaths in the last year alone. From the police reports, it looks like she's probably going after New Englanders.” Dean swallows, blinking stickily. “Worth checking out,” Sam concludes, and waits again for a response that Dean, focused on limp cabbage and dried-out pork, doesn't seem interested in providing.
“Or we could check out this one in Clarksville - mysterious power outages, weird noises at night, and then last week the gardener turns up chopped to pieces in the dining room. No suspects, no sightings, but I looked at some local history, and it turns out some guy was murdered there in 1912. Might be planning some kind of centennial celebration.” Finished with the rice, Dean silently gnaws the tines off the fork, eyes fixed religiously on the laptop's logo. He spits the plastic spikes onto the tabletop, and doesn't answer.
Sam sighs and leans back in his own chair. “Look, man. If you don't want to do this, just say so. We can take it easy for a little while, if that's what you need.” Dean's gaze doesn't shift. “You just got out of Purgatory, Dean. It's okay to be a little - weird. I just figured you'd want to…I thought you'd be happier, hunting.”
He waits the silence out this time, and after what feels like it must be five full minutes, Dean shrugs.
“Is that a no?” Sam guesses, but Dean shakes his head, and shrugs again, pulling the slipping blanket back up around his shoulders.
“Whatever,” he says, in a voice that would sound like his by now if he'd just use it more than twice a day.
A few years ago, Sam would have pushed, but he knows better now. If Dean wants to say something, he'll say it, and no amount of nagging on Sam's part is going to convince him to talk before he wants to.
“Okay then,” he announces, picking a face at random out of the pile of papers; it's the campus ghost of Bradford College, the dark-eyed girl with the puffy sleeves who's fascinated with mechanical devices, who killed an admissions officer in September by electrocuting him with his own printer. “How's this? Girl wandering through Bradford Hall; everyone calls her Elizabeth because they figure it's the ghost of the lady who founded the school.” He pauses for effect, until Dean flicks his gaze reluctantly from the mildewed curtains to the papers in Sam's hand.
“But get this - Elizabeth Bradford didn't die until she was eighty-two - natural causes - and she never even lived in that building. Turns out, Bradford Hall used to be a women's dormitory, back when the college first started admitting female students. And about a week before the first class of girls graduated, a student called Alice Winslow died in that dormitory.”
If the news sparks any interest in Dean's closed-off brain, it's not making it to his eyes. “C'mon, man,” Sam prods. “You up for this?”
Dean slumps sideways in the chair with the heavy blanket collapsing around him, and nods, already back to studying the dust caught in the afternoon sunlight.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
The third floor of Bradford Hall smells of lead paint and cheap floor wax. Sam can hear the stiff warehouse soles of his shoes echo against the checkerboard floor, deep chocolate tiles against dirt-flecked cream. This wing used to be devoted to the school's honor society, after it was converted into office space - there's a lingering odor of leather and furniture polish that reminds him of the legal firm he interned with during his senior fall - but for the last three years, it's been empty. There's nothing left but bare rooms full of dust and odd rainbows cast by sunlight through warped glass, and occasionally a black scuff mark where somebody once shoved a desk too hard across the tile. Now it's just waiting for the downstairs offices to be moved elsewhere so that the university can demolish the entire building and pour funds into something new and eco-friendly.
But Sam, of course, knows nothing of this. He's just a confused non-traditional transfer student, after all - his first week on campus, and already lost his ID. It's not his fault that he was born with such a terrible sense of direction that he missed the four signs on the first floor pointing to the admissions office with clear arrows and three-inch letters.
As for the handheld electronic device he's got tucked into his brown-and-gold Bradford hoodie - purchased this morning at the bookstore (because, hey, Sam's entire wardrobe is heading for the Pittsburgh water cleaning facilities), and still not broken in - well, he's got a deathly fear of radiation poisoning, that's all. There's no rule against carrying Geiger counters on school property.
Half an hour later, four trips up and down the hall haven't brought him any closer to finding admissions. He's run the blinking gadget over every chapped, pebbly wall in the place, and there's no sound but his own breathing, and the clamor of his shoes on the glossy floor.
Disgusted, Sam snaps the EMF meter's antenna down and heads for the huge mahogany stairs twisting down to the admissions lobby, to the clean white information desk where Dean's getting friendly with HELLO-I'M-Shayna (teal Sharpie and a mess of kinky red hair) - and, hopefully, turning up more than Sam has about the mysterious dead girl who scrambles calculators and haunts dormitories and apparently doesn't leave any trace of her presence behind her.
When he gets to the information desk, though, Dean's gone and Shayna's bent over her cell phone, typing intently with both thumbs. Sam glances at the armchairs ringed around the waiting room, but Dean's not slouched in any of them.
So he's out at the car, Sam tells himself, even though it'd be the first time he's seen Dean abandon five feet nine inches of collegiate redhead for the society of gum wrappers and cracked asphalt.
But the Impala's empty, and the only person he sees weaving between the rows of parked cars is a shrimpy kid with half a mustache and a physics textbook twice as thick as his own arm. Sam shouts Dean's name, but all it does is attract the attention of a group of girls sprawled on the lawn outside a neighboring dorm. They squint under their hands at the bellowing stranger, and break into giggles that carry surprisingly well across the choppy sea of car roofs.
So much for getting back in the saddle.
Shayna glances up as Sam bursts through the glass doors, and thrusts the cell phone quickly under the desk, flashing him a smile that's half charm and half guilt.
“Hi, can I help you?”
“Did you talk to a guy a little while ago - he would have been a little shorter than me, kinda brownish hair?” Shayna's buoyant attitude falters a little, her eyebrows pushing up uncertainly.
“Um, there was a guy about half an hour ago. Came in, stared around the room for a while, and then took off down the hall.” She shrugs, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. “I asked if he needed anything, but I'm not sure he heard.”
“He didn't say anything?”
Shayna shakes her head. “Nope. Is he okay? I thought he looked kind of weird. If you guys are looking for the health center, that's next door.” She puts a hand on a shiny directory booklet, reaching for the phone. “I can call them up for you, if you want,” she offers.
“No - no, we're fine,” Sam beams, because it's what his face does when he'd like to kick people in the teeth. “Uh, which way did you say - ?”
“There.” Shayna points, and Sam doesn't wait to thank her.
The corridor she directs him down is almost the exact double of the one he just scanned for paranormal activity two floors up, except that this one has brass nameplates beside the closed doors, and potted plants at regular intervals. Sam ignores the ranks of offices for Outreach and Student Life and University Planning, and heads instead toward a sign at the end of the hall that reads, in plain white letters, Restrooms.
The wrinkled golden panes in the door to the men's room channel light from the windows on the far wall. Sam pushes the heavy door open on hinges that don't seem to have been given much attention in the last decade, and finds himself facing a row of sea-green soap dispensers.
“Dean?” His voice echoes against the high walls and the marble partitions, but there's no answer. Sam strides down the row of chipped porcelain sinks, examining the gap beneath each door for signs of occupancy.
Before he can get to the end of the row, he hears it.
A steady convulsive rhythm, like the incessant dripping of a broken tap. He can almost imagine it's a fluke in the plumbing, the age of pipes telling in the walls of an antique building. But there's a catch on the edge of each repetition that stabs at his brain, tells him he's hearing a voice, a voice he knows well enough to feel slightly sick listening to it wrenched into quiet, unrecognizable sounds.
Half holding his breath, he approaches the stall, and reaches for the door handle - locked, naturally.
“Dean,” he calls through the marble door.
There's a brief hesitation before the strangled noises begin again, a little softer: he doesn't want to call them sobs, but it's the closest word he can come up with for what he's hearing. “You okay?” And yeah, Sam probably wins Stupidest Question of the Year for that one, but at least it's something to cover up the sound of his brother unraveling on the other side of the door. Besides, he doesn't know what else Dean would want him to say.
“What's wrong, man?” he tries, leaning his forehead against the cool, milky stone. But Dean doesn't respond - just keeps choking out the same harsh, bitten-off gasps, and Sam has waited for his brother to speak up long enough.
“Dean,” he orders, “unlock the door or I'm coming in.” For a minute, he thinks he's actually going to have to get down on the grubby tile floor on his hands and knees and roll underneath the door. He's about to drop into a crouch when the latch rattles abruptly, and the door swings slightly ajar.
Dean's sitting on the floor next to the toilet, folded up against the wall with his arms crossed over his face and hands clasped in his hair, knuckles pale with tension. Held tight in that defensive crouch, his body rocks slightly, the back of his skull rapping the whitewashed cinder blocks on the upswing of each mangled breath.
Navigating carefully around puddles of various fluids pooled on the tile, Sam kneels beside Dean and scans through his thirty years of experience for some point of reference to ground him, some clue to steer him towards a solution to the problem of Dean breaking visibly apart in front of him.
But there's no such point of reference, and all he can think to do is to set his hand cautiously on Dean's shoulder. It rests there like a dead mouse dragged onto a doorstep. Dean doesn't seem to notice that it's even there, just goes on rocking.
“Dean,” Sam says, trying not to make it sound like a question. It comes out pleading instead, and Dean ducks his head farther behind his knees, leaving Sam to stare helplessly at the goosebumps creeping up and down his brother's shivering arms.
Sam thought he was prepared for something, but now he's not sure what he imagined having to face. Another stomach-turning story squeezed in during some quiet moment, a few minutes of watching Dean's back shake in an uncomfortably direct way, maybe some mention of the Grand Canyon and pulling out of the life before they settle back into their routine for good. Not Dean shorting out in the middle of a job, without warning or explanation, not this. Sam can only think of one thing to do, and it's about as lame as slapping a Band-aid over on open fracture.
He does it anyway, because he's got fucking nothing else.
Settling back on his heels, he drags the Bradford hoodie over his head, jerking his shirt back down when it rides up. Then he takes hold of one of Dean's chilly wrists and pulls it firmly away from his face. Ignoring his brother's salt-burnt cheeks and screwed-up eyes, he eases the hoodie down over Dean's head, letting him struggle with the sleeves on his own.
While Dean's writhing in the clutches of the sweatshirt, punctuating his efforts with teary, frustrated grunts, Sam seats himself on the cold tiles and scoots around so that he's sitting side by side with his brother. Tipping his head back against the wall, he closes his eyes, and reaches blindly with an outstretched toe to find the edge of the stall door. He kicks it shut, and waits.
They sit together in their own darkness without speaking, while the sun creeps down the walls and the puddles dry underneath them. Sam doesn't know how long they've been frozen in the same moment when Dean finally shudders and stretches, rocking onto his toes to stand up, one hand splayed against the wall of the cubicle to steady him.
He doesn't say anything, but before he steps out to scrub his face in the lukewarm tap water, he nods once in Sam's direction - like it's a signal, a secret code they've agreed on to negotiate the intricacies of raw emotional pain without actually using words.
Standing alone in the cubicle listening to the splash of water and the rumbling of pipes, Sam thinks that if it's a code, he can't remember learning it.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
All the way back from the school, Dean faces the window like he's trying to memorize the streaks on the unwashed glass, and Sam knows better than to try to strike up a conversation with the back of his brother's head. When they arrive, the bathroom swallows Dean and his swollen eyes before Sam's even had a chance to toss the bags onto the bed and stretch his frozen shoulder muscles.
But at least this, finally, seems like the Dean he knows: retreating into solitude to lick his own wounds, avoiding confrontation at exactly the moment it makes most sense, using up all the hot water and not apologizing. They've gotten through the rough patch, whatever it was (and knowing Dean, he'll probably never find out), and when Sam finally breaks into the bathroom he'll find it choked with steam and strewn with soggy towels and articles of Dean's clothing in various states of cleanliness.
He'll slip on the slick, humid floor.
He'll bitch at Dean for emptying the tiny shampoo bottle.
He'll clatter through a frigid shower, and shiver his way out of the bathroom to find Dean sprawled across the bed, sweaty and smug.
He'll lose the remote fight, and he'll fall asleep to the sound of Dean commentating on Next Generation reruns. And tomorrow morning, the two of them will finish the research together, burn the bones, and drive on to the next town. Because that's what they always do.
Because by now, it's the only thing they know that makes any sense.