Lineage - Chapter Five
She’s too weak to dig, the years of being away at school with no more than a measly student gym and no motivation having taken their toll. Although, really, she couldn’t be sure that she’d ever been able to dig up a body, even when training under her uncle’s inscrutable gaze, seeing as how the last hunt she’d been on, only hunt for that matter, she’d simply held the shovel for as long as it took them to traverse the cemetery. It was entirely likely that she’d always been too weak.
“Part of the job, kid,” Dean grunts through haggard breaths as he takes his turn in the hole, thick, rocky dirt being flung near her shoes as he continues to break the earth.
She watches him through cloudy eyes, first hints of spring being hell on her allergies, and notices the steady and studied method he has. Sense memory, he’s been doing this for so long he doesn’t even have to think about it, his body just takes over. She knows for a fact that he’s got a bum shoulder, the right one often clicking in and out of place, bone on bone. At times he favors it, only when he thinks no one’s watching, he’ll stretch and groan at the pain. He’s never told her what happened to it, just work-related injury or nothing really, just worse for the wear.
He leads with the right, shoving the shovel in deep, chunking away at the ground, in wide fluid motions, never so much as wincing.
“I know,” she says quietly, still studying his movements. “I guess I need to hit the gym.”
When he strikes something solid he tosses the shovel up into her father’s waiting hand, the other wrapping around Dean’s wrist as he hauls his brother from the hole and hops down inside, taking his place, wiping away the layers of dirt before wrenching open the coffin with a crowbar. All this they do without a word, falling into rhythm, an odd sort of dance between two men she’s known her whole life yet doesn’t recognize at all. Out here they’re different.
Once the casket’s been pried open, Dean now extending his hand to pull Sam up, they dump salt and lighter fluid onto the decades old body, stench of musty rot being overwhelmed by the oddly sweet odor or accelerant.
She stands in the background, quiet and still, until her uncle looks her way, bites out a “Rache,” startling her from her trance.
“Yeah?” she says simply.
He quirks his head at her, points to her hand where she holds a book of matches. “You mind?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says, shaking her head and moving forward, striking a match and then igniting the entire book before dropping it unceremoniously into the open grave.
They stand there in silence, Sam and Dean catching their breath behind her as she looms over the edge, watching as the corpse burns, wondering how many times a person could possibly come this close to an open grave without falling in.
***
They hadn’t been on a hunt since Maya, hadn’t seen much need to and certainly hadn’t had any desire to, so both Sam and Dean stared, speechless, mouths agape, when she approached them with the proposition. “I just think it could be…fun,” she said, aiming for lighthearted and casual.
“Rachel,” her father began, words slow and measured, “hunting isn’t fun. It’s not supposed to be fun.”
And for a moment she actually felt guilty, childish insecurities having mysteriously plagued her ever since her return home a couple months earlier. That’s why she only then brought up the idea of hitting the road, despite the desire to hunt prickling at her senses over the entirety of those months. “I just thought,” she said, head down in uncharacteristic solemnity, but wasn’t able to finish, a loud and insolent scoff coming from her uncle.
“Bullshit, it’s not fun,” he said simply. “Sammy, the stick in the mud.” He turned to her then, asked, words drowning out the sentiment of his brother’s disdainful glare, “What did you have in mind?”
And everything pretty much fell into place from there.
It was a simple salt and burn, something to keep them busy, something to get her back into the swing of things. Just something to do.
Sam had asked her repeatedly why she wanted to go on a hunt. Why was it so important? What was the point? And she’d had an answer for everything, fitting as they were, paying no heed to the fact that, she could tell, he didn’t believe a word of it.
You always said you’d take me again. And what’s the point of having the training if I don’t use it. It might be good for you, for all of us, to do something…different.
And there was some truth in everything she said, a glimmer here, a nugget there. She did believe it would be good for them, because Uncle Dean always loved to hunt, she’d known that from the time she was a small child and noticed the look on his face when he prepared to leave for a weekend. And her dad could use the distraction, having had his head buried in his work, papers constantly spread all over the kitchen table, his office now sitting hollow and empty for some undisclosed reason.
And it seemed to have worked, old habits dying hard, each brother quickly falling into pace beside one another, hitting their working rhythm. This was old hat to them, a comfortable former life that did, as she suspected, serve as a distraction, a welcome one at that. Right up until the end. Right up until they remembered what it was they were all being distracted from.
***
She was about to turn twenty-one, had lived, essentially, on her own for the better part of three years, but still she was being made to share a room with her father and uncle, despite informing them both, “We can afford separate rooms you know.”
“This is how we do it,” Dean had said simply, ending the conversation before it ever began.
Hunting was their territory, she was just along for the ride.
Still, she had, initially, moped about the lack of privacy, purposely leaving her lady things out on the bathroom counter, bras and underwear strewn across her bed for all to see, punishment for not getting her way, a tiny passive-aggressive attack taken despite her knowing full well it was a losing battle.
But in the end, it didn’t really matter, only spending two nights in the cramped motel room, the second of which, after wearing herself out trying to dig up a body, not even registering as an embarrassment through the exhausted haze.
It’s this night that she wakes, so late it seems almost sacreligious to have her eyes open, slowly pulled from sleep by the familiar low rumble of her father’s voice, the forced silence of her uncle’s breaths.
“You understand,” Sam’s saying, words slowly taking form in her mind as they filter through her ears. “I know you understand.”
“Sam,” Dean sighs, but before he can finish his thought, whatever it may be, he’s cut off by his brother’s heady words.
“People dying suddenly, unexpectedly, violently…I can’t do it anymore. Digging that girl up tonight,” he pauses, takes a deep breath, and when he goes on his voice sounds thick and ragged. “All I could think is…I don’t know…where is she? Is she okay? Is she at peace?”
Despite the relatively slow pace of her sleep stained mind, it takes Rachel no time at all to figure out what he means, who he’s talking about.
“She was cremated,” Dean says quietly, solemnly.
“That’s not…”
“I know.”
“I can’t do it, Dean. I can’t do it anymore, any of it. I don’t want to hunt down ghosts, I don’t want to burn bodies, I sure as hell don’t want to even talk about demons. I can’t.”
The room falls into silence for several long moments, the new quiet pocked only by the whoosh of the small heater lulling her back into a light sleep. She almost doesn’t hear her uncle say, voice more unsteady than she can ever recall it being, “What was in her journal?”
Demons. Ghosts. It was only a matter of time before it came to this, only a matter time before this thing they had done for so long, this bizarre life they’d tried so hard to leave behind, make only into a weekend endeavor, started up again as an odd means of escape, would lead them back to Maya.
“Nothing,” he responds shortly, an obvious lie.
“Then why’d you burn it?”
“I told you,” he says with a sigh, “I couldn’t have it around.”
“Why not?” he presses.
“Because I couldn’t.”
“Why the fuck not, Sam?”
He doesn’t respond, doesn’t say a word. Rachel works to steady her breathing, remain undetected as her body pulls itself from sleep.
When he does speak again, she’s amazed to hear what sounds like the truth. “She saw things she never should have seen,” he says, tears evident in his voice. “I think…I think, maybe, she saw herself…doing things she shouldn’t have been doing…never would do. Never.”
Even without observing them herself, slumber being easier to feign when facing a wall, preventing her eyes from accidentally opening on them, she knows how they look now. Slumped. Beaten.
Her father, undoubtedly, is slouched over himself, elbows on his knees, head hanging low. This is how he always appears when too much weighs on his shoulders. He crumples beneath the pressure, as though if he could only make himself smaller, fold his huge frame in, curl up into near nothingness, then maybe the pain and frustration would just roll off his rounded back, unable to find a way to seep back in.
And Dean, still staunch in his own way, remaining straight despite mirroring his brother’s curled posture. His face is hard, in a way that hides what he really feels, what he really thinks. Hides it even, perhaps, from himself.
The silence is overwhelming, and if it’s that bad for her, it must be nearly unbearable for her uncle. She hears him shift in his seat and can’t help but wonder if he does so because he needs to move, or simply to cure his ears of that foreboding ringing.
“What did it say, Sam?” he asks, low and rumbling.
He lets out a long sigh. “There was something about Rachel,” he says, words quick, almost casual. And she can actually feel her ears stretching and perking to hear better. “And blood.”
“What does that mean?” Dean asks, confusion pocking his voice. “What did the journal say?”
“It said she…Maya…killed her. I think.”
Rachel stiffens in place, surprised not nearly as much by the revelation as her utter shock at the revelation. Of course there was reason. There had to be a reason. She had been trying to prevent something, that much she’d suspected all along. Either that or she was simply trying to run away from it.
“You think?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I know what she wrote, what she dreamed.” He sighs, puts on, she’s certain, a silent shrug. “I don’t know.”
A chair creeks as someone rises too quickly, the soft and subtle sound of synthetic carpeting squishing under heavy soled feet echoing in the room. Dean’s pacing, she knows this simply because she knows him. He’s pacing and thinking and dreading all at once.
When he stops moving, silence again pervading the small room, an awful sort of stillness creeps around her, as though she knows what he’s about to say, and it sets her body shuddering. “That’s why she did it,” he almost whispers. “She didn’t want to…she couldn’t let that happen.” There’s almost a hint of glee buried among the sorrow in his words when he repeats, “That’s why she did it.”
“Maybe,” Sam utters.
His voice is loud when he turns to his brother, loud enough that it would have easily woken her had she actually been asleep. “How the hell could you not tell me this?!”
Her father nearly shrieks, “Dean,” in an attempted chide, and she can feel his eyes on her back, willing her to stay down, stay asleep, stay out of it.
“All these months, we’re wondering, thinking the worst, thinking…God, Sam.” He’s pacing again, words loud enough that she’d feel ridiculous not beginning to stir, like an utter liar. “Why did she do it?” he growls. “Why?” By the time he says, “And this whole time, you knew,” she’s sitting up, turned to face them.
“Not the whole time,” Sam says, calm and concise, answering his brother, but staring straight into his daughter’s eyes.
And while it seems ludicrous that he wouldn’t have known he’d waken her, when Dean tosses a glance over his shoulder to see her sitting there, a flash of surprise takes over his features. But it only lasts a moment, barely even that. Then he turns back to Sam and says, more vehemently than either of them had ever heard him speak, “You should have told me.”
***
“It was a dream,” her father says, voice oddly steady. “You know how they are.” He lets out a slight laugh, bitter and sardonic, before correcting himself. “No, I guess you don’t know actually. But they’re…confusing. Some things you know are real…others, you don’t. She wrote down the dream. That’s what the journal was for. Doesn’t mean it really…well, in a lot of ways, it was just that, a dream.”
She nods her head, squints out at the rising sun over the parking lot.
“It’s not because of you.”
But she knows better, because she’s smart and not entirely oblivious. Because she’s a Winchester.
Her father brought her out here, early morning chill still striking at their bones despite the hot coffee warming their insides, to talk. In private. About a family secret that had been kept long enough, one that really should have been kept even longer.
It’s nice, she thinks, that he’s willing to tell her, though it likely wouldn’t be the case had she not already heard. Still, the way he speaks, honest and forthright and without too much preface, the hardest thing for a lawyer to master, makes her feel like an adult. Like an equal.
But she knows better than to think that he’s being truly honest with her. She knows better than to think that this little secret spilled, so conveniently to her uncle, by accident to her, is the deepest and darkest family secret they have, the deepest and darkest one that Maya had.
She knows better because she’s smart and not entirely oblivious. Because she’s a Winchester.