Supernatural: Clangs (2/2) by Vehemently
Title: Clangs
By: Vehemently (vee_fic)
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R for language, scariness, and adult themes
Spoilers: none.
Beta by minim_calibre and cofax7.
What is it: Gen AU. A homecoming. A horror.
Tagline: It was just a stupid accident. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that.
Continued from Part 1
***
They ate on the front stoop, Dean pickily correcting how Sam held his chopsticks. A few students came in and out, not many, nobody Sam knew. He watched Dean eye them suspiciously. With a scowl on his face, he wasn't nearly the ladies' man he liked to think he was.
"So," said Sam, as they were crinkling the plastic on their fortune cookies, "I think the nearest VA psych center is in Omaha. I can drive you there tonight, if you want." Dean's hands stilled on the plastic and his forehead took over creasing.
"Not tonight." He hesitated, and steeled himself. "You don't want me here, I can sleep in the car or something. Just -- not till tomorrow."
Sam paused. "Something special about tomorrow?"
Dean balled up the cookie wrapper, held it still and silent in his hand. "No, no. I just, I have a lot to tell you, man. You don't need an hour's drive on top of that. Two hours, both ways. Look, can we go inside?"
"You seemed a little claustrophobic inside, last time. I figured you'd be calmer out in public."
"This is private business, man. I can't go telling your neighbors all this shit."
There was a long pause while Sam thought about the two of them, cramped into his tiny apartment, and whether there were any alternatives. There really -- weren't. "Okay, I guess," he said at last.
As if to reassure him, Dean said, "Your house, your rules."
Sam detoured them to the basement to pick up Dean's dry clothes, and then they were back in his little apartment. Sam slung himself down on the futon while Dean fussed with folding his jeans. He stuffed things back into the pockets just as Sam had turned them out: the Zippo, the paltry cash. He fingered the two loose keys for a long moment.
"This is for you," he said, handing the smaller one to Sam. "It's a safe deposit box at your bank. I opened it a couple days ago."
Sam hid the key in his fist. "You've been following me."
Dean blinked, surprised, although he'd been dropping hints all afternoon. "I was just -- keeping an eye on you. And, you've been busy. I didn't want to interrupt."
The lab schedule was pretty heavy, but Sam spent hours by himself in the library, in his apartment, running on the track on campus. With a pang, Sam realized he was hearing code for I was afraid of your seeing me.
"So. What's in the deposit box?"
Dean's smile was brittle. "Four thousand dollars in cash. It's for you." He saw the look on Sam's face and said immediately, "It's all legit. I didn't rob a bank or anything. I sold the truck." He put no inflection in it, as if selling your means of transport and stuffing wads of cash into a box were something everybody did, as casually as you might trace a crack in the wall. Dean put out a finger, feeling the rough edges, and as Sam watched him do it he realized that it really was a crack, not just a bad paint job but the wall in the early stages of structural failure. He'd never noticed it before.
"Why sell your truck, Dean? Won't you need it? What about your savings and stuff back in California?"
His back to the room, Dean followed the crack upward. Sam could see now that the join at the ceiling was a little bowed, most likely warped from moisture. No wonder the ceiling paint peeled in that corner. Dean said, without turning, "Dad's got power of attorney. That doesn't expire, right? If you need it, that's yours too."
Santa Claus Dean was not. He was always broke, always bumming a couple of bucks from Dad. Sam asked, uneasy, "Why won't you need that money?"
"I might." Dean chuckled, then grew serious again as he faced Sam. "But I think you'll need it more."
"Dude, I have scholarships. I have Dad. Summers, I've got jobs and internships and stuff." Sam tried to guess what was going on, Dean standing there calm with the crack climbing the wall behind him. People give away all their stuff when they're about to go join a cult in India, or when they're about to -- Scrambling, Sam asked, "What if the Corps discharges you? What if you need more rehab, and the VA won't pay for it --
Dean rolled his eyes. "I told you already --"
Sam's heart thumped hard. He didn't know how to ask why Dean wasn't thinking beyond the next couple of days. "But there's like years of therapy and social situations and figuring out how to handle stress and --"
"Why do you think I took up smoking?" Dean joked. "And you're the first person I've had a conversation with in weeks."
His face was a smirky rictus, his voice completely level. But the world his words created was so bleak in Sam's imagination he was struck dumb. He saw Dean in his mind's eye, trying to hitchhike next to a wheat field, out in the west of the state where you could see forever and it was wheat all the way, tall yellow straw, mesmerizing symmetrical rows of it, endless, empty under an empty gray sky. Thumb out, and not a fellow human breath in miles. Dean stood under the peeling paint in Sam's apartment armed and dangerous and beatifically ready to donate all his worldly goods to the younger brother he didn't even like. The only thing Sam could do was lay all his cards on the table. "Then at least give me the gun. Please."
Dean stiffened and pulled it out from the back of his jeans. "Wait, you think I --" He didn't finish that sentence. He looked at the gun instead of at Sam's face. Along its silvered muzzle, pointed at the floor, Sam thought he could see his own reflection. There was a long silence while Dean stood there mute and Sam worked himself up to stating the obvious.
"If you killed yourself, you'd be killing Dad too, and you'd screw me up for life." The crude bludgeon of the words themselves helped Sam firm his voice into anger. Anything but tears, at this moment. Anything but fear. "So don't you dare."
Dean held the gun casually, in his right hand. It looked like it fit there, which of course it did. He'd spent eight years learning how to shoot people, and stab people, and do whatever else it was Marines did to fuck people up. He didn't talk about it much, but he hadn't won the medals he had just for his pretty face. He wasn't a killer, but he'd done some killing.
With his other hand on the top of the weapon, Dean twisted his wrist, and in three or four efficient movements he'd removed the clip and popped out the last bullet. He twiddled it between his fingers and snapped it into the clip, and held out both clip and gun to Sam.
"You're right, you might need this too." Sam didn't take the offered hardware. Dean paused, and sat next to Sam on the futon. "I'm not gonna do anything to myself, man. I swear." He pushed the clip back into the gun with the ease of long practice and set the gun on a corner of the desk, and as he leaned back it was the easiest thing in the world for Sam to throw an arm around him. Dean tolerated Sam's shaky breathing and clinginess, and after a minute he gave a shrug. Sam pulled away and gave him his space.
"I'm sorry," sniffled Sam. "I just thought --"
"I swear, Sammy."
It was terrifying, not just the thought that he might die, but the overwhelming surge of dependence Sam felt at the thought. Sam didn't know who he was, without Dean as an opposite to model himself against. Sam felt like he was eight years old all over again. He hated feeling so small.
"Why are you such an asshole?" he protested, dull. But all Dean did was chuckle.
"How else are you gonna know you're the good kid of the family?" This was so close to what Sam had been thinking that he flinched away and stood up.
"Look, I am not responsible for your problems --"
"This psychology major crap is poisoning your brain, dude. What is with you and whipping out the expertise right and left?"
The anger was overwhelming. Sam hissed, "If you see a guy drowning, even if you can't stand the guy, do you just let him drown? Well hell, maybe you do. But I can't."
Dean blinked, his face slowly going blank. He set his feet on the floor and sat up straight, his hands unmoving on the futon. There was a little fold of fabric in-between each knuckle, where he'd clenched his fists in the slipcover and then let go.
"Okay. Okay, I did this wrong." Dean said, "I didn't come back here to get rescued. I don't need to be rescued. I came back here to tell you something, and you're not gonna like it anyway, and I already managed to piss you off." He stood up and paced to the door, and back, glancing in all the corners of the room. It was one thing to see him paranoid and withdrawn in public, but when he pulled it off in a one-room apartment --
"I'm listening," Sam allowed.
"This is about the fire," said Dean. He didn't say which fire, as if Sam should know, as if everyone should know, as if there had only been one fire in the history of the world.
"The white phosphorus?" Sam knew there had been a confession in that speech somewhere.
But Dean screwed up his face in impatience. "No. The fire that killed Mom."
This was -- unexpected. Sam realized that Dean did need a shrink -- and was using his own brother as a stand-in in the meantime. Which was better than nothing, but, Sam definitely wasn't qualified, and really wasn't sure he was ready to hear about it. It had all been so long ago, so over and done with and swept under the rug, Sam didn't know how to handle the idea of pulling it out and examining it now.
Reaching into his jeans again, Dean pulled out the big manila envelope Sam had seen before. He unfolded it carefully, smoothing out the creases, and shoved it at Sam. "The police report's in there. The fire investigator's report too. They're all public records." With slow clumsiness Sam pulled the papers out of the envelope. They were heavily folded down the middle, and would not lie flat. The edges of each page were gummy and gray, photocopy smudges and greasy fingerprints. Sam glanced at them, just enough to see the way some of the forms had been fed into a typewriter unevenly, so that the letters drifted subtly from left to right as if seasick. He really wasn't interested in reading.
"What do you want me to see?"
Dean paced away, and back again. "I tracked down the fire investigator: he's retired now. He'd never seen anything like it. He said that fire couldn't have been hotter if the walls had been painted with thermite. That's why they couldn't tell."
This amount of research, this kind of dogged long-distance work, was not something he'd ever expected Dean to do. "Couldn't tell what?"
"Read the goddamned report, Sam. The body was so burned they couldn't tell whether she was still breathing when the fire started. That's the only reason they didn't arrest Dad for her murder."
Murder. Dean was so earnest, eyebrows folded together. The interpretation of this one event meant everything to him. Murder, though. Sam didn't know how to approach the word. He couldn't even imagine it, a stubborn blank in the middle of his mental picture of disaster. He tried to put rage into his father's face, or the cruel calculation necessary to plan something like that, and failed. Dad just wasn't like that.
Something must have showed on Sam's face. "What are they gonna think? Unexplained fire, likely presence of accelerants, the little kid makes it out but the grown woman doesn't? What would you think?"
"I --" Sam controlled himself. He could see suddenly how Dean would come to believe it: Dad's unwillingness to talk about it; Dean's problems with his temper; finding the worst-case scenario to explain everything. It was the kind of simplistic cause-and-effect ideation that worked in the movies: a timeline, a dramatic revelation and a good cry, and you got better. "How long have you had this stuff?"
"I've been putting it all together for the past two years --"
"Dean, you know Dad. He's just -- he doesn't have the capacity to kill somebody." He didn't have the capacity to discipline an out-of-control teenager; he couldn't possibly kill his own wife.
"Fuck no," Dean exploded. "Of course he didn't do it."
Relief flooded over Sam, and then a hollow backwash of irritation and confusion. The whole family was trapped in the past, all of them except Sam himself. He wasn't willing to rescue Dean if it meant letting himself be pulled down and trapped too. He shuffled through the paper in his hands and saw again where Dean's hands had touched those pages, had worried at them and dog-eared them. It came out snappish, moreso than he'd meant it to: "So what is this about? If you're not accusing him of murder."
Dean flopped into the desk chair. "You don't want to hear it."
"I'm sorry. I'm trying to listen. You just kind of threw me for a loop with that one." Sam could see Dean's hands, trembling as he dug his fingertips into his scalp. "Look, I -- I need a Coke. You have a smoke, I'll go down to the machine in the lobby, and, and, I'll listen."
"You'll listen," Dean aped, his voice shaky. "Okay."
"We can talk all night, if you need that. I want you to get better." Sam stood by the door and watched Dean stare glassily into the middle distance.
"Yeah," said Dean. "By the end of the night I guess I'll know."
***
With a cold plastic Coke bottle resting against his forehead, Sam felt a little less like panicking. He could handle the idea of Dean being screwed up by the war, or even screwed up by growing up with Dad. The fire, though -- the fire was something Sam knew nothing about. It terrified him, that everyone in his life was so damaged by that one event that he didn't even remember. The idea that he might be damaged too, in some way he didn't even know, was unacceptable.
He sighed and headed back up the stairs. It took some juggling to transfer the two Coke bottles around so he could open the door, so when he stepped into the apartment Dean wasn't startled. Dean was watching him already, a wary look on his face, Sam's phone to his ear. He was deathly pale. "Yeah, Dad," he said into the phone.
Dad. Sam looked at the clock. It was after seven, which meant Dad was two or three deep at least. Not so far deep he wouldn't remember what he was saying, but deep enough to get loose. Sam had no idea what to think of this.
"Of course I know that." Dean turned his eyes toward the middle distance, as if seeing the three hours' drive between here and Lawrence. Sam set down one Coke on the desk, within arm's reach, and went into the kitchen to open his own, so the noise of it wouldn't be audible. He came back out in time to see Dean put his free hand to his head, as if shading his eyes from sun or scrutiny. His voice when he spoke was rough.
"I know, Dad. I'm sorry." He sat there and took whatever oppressive enthusiasm Dad was heaping on him. Sam sat down on the futon beside him and offered the Coke, but Dean shook his head. "Yeah. Yeah, Sam's got a plan. Yeah, look, I gotta go, Dad. Okay."
He closed the phone and put it carefully on the desk.
"How's he doing?" Sam asked, offhand so that it was as okay to answer as not.
Dean shook himself. His eyes were a little red, and he made them redder by pressing his thumbs against his eyelids. "Happy as a pig in shit."
The only person Sam knew who could out-personality Dad in his good phase was Dean. He was expansive, charming, everybody's best friend. The Dean in Sam's apartment, this twitchy, serious character, probably wouldn't be fooled. Sam was pretty sure Dean wouldn't be fooled. "Did he say he'd pull a few strings, get you reinstated?"
"Something like that. Like he's got any strings to pull."
Sam made an agreeing noise and drank his Coke, gestured for Dean to do the same. It was unclear from the way he talked whether Dean had called Dad, or had picked up Dad's call. Neither scenario seemed all that likely.
"I could hear myself in the background," Dean added. "'You don't like it, go join the Marines.' God, I was annoying. He was watching the tape from my highschool graduation." Sam remembered that day. A skinnier, more animated Dean flapping his idiotic maroon robes and beaming, just two weeks away from the Corps and eager for their arcane initiation. Sam sighed.
Dean wiped his eyes. "Why does he have to be so goddamned nice?"
"So you've never talked to him? About the fire?"
A harsh laugh. "What'm I gonna say? Hey Dad, remember when we all almost died? Good times, huh?" At last Dean reached out for his own Coke, opened it, drank. They sat side by side for a little while, just the noise of carbonated bubbles between them. Sam felt suddenly close to his brother, as he hadn't in years. As if they could say anything to each other, and it wouldn't be a disaster. If there was a way to coax silence into speech using only the power of wishing, Sam used it. As if in response, Dean spoke: "The rest of the papers there are my medical records. I called up the office and asked for all of them, from my first shots after I was born."
Sam nudged the pile of papers with a finger. Under the official-looking typed records, a stapled sheaf with crazy handwriting on the front page. Doctor Thorn's handwriting, the doctor they'd been seeing all their lives.
"I fell off an obstacle course when I was 20, got all tangled up in a rope line. I felt this click in my elbow, right? Like pitchers always say they feel when they're about to go in for Tommy John surgery. So they take me in and do x-rays, and when the x-rays come out the doctor asks me why I never told him I broke my arm before."
Sam straightened where he sat. "You've never broken your arm."
"He could see it on the x-rays, where it'd broken and healed. He said it happened when I was real young, before I grew. So I asked them for all my records, and I open it up to 1984 and there it is, broken radius, age five. It said I climbed out a second story window and fell."
Dean had been a death-defying kid, and hell on wheels as a teenager, but Sam was pretty sure he would have heard about a broken bone. If Dean himself remembered it. He'd already copped to blackouts in adulthood, drinking or dissociation Sam wasn't sure, but if he'd had them in childhood too, that was -- bad. As gently as he knew how, Sam asked, "Do you have a lot of holes in your memory?"
"I guess, I don't know." Dean waved that away irritably. "That's not the point. I'm so little, most of the explanation comes from Dad. How I must have had a nightmare about the fire and tried to climb out the window. So he tells the whole story of the fire all over again, and this is four months later, right?"
Sam was only half-listening, as he flipped through the stapled sheaf of papers. Dr. Thorn's handwriting was impossible to read most of the time, surrounded with nurses' translations and annotations. He found what he was looking for: a note at the bottom of the page about the arm. Mutism, withdrawn aspect. Referral to child therapist 3/22/84. Sam looked up, stunned, but Dean was barrelling onward.
"The stories don't match, Sam. They don't match. Between November '83 and March '84 Dad changed his story."
"Did Dad ever take you to a therapist? The note here says he was supposed to."
Dean burst into incredulous laughter. "Dad?" He turned his laugh into a dull noise in his throat and Sam realized with misery how unlikely it was that Dad would follow up on something like that.
"Yeah, okay," Sam allowed.
Up on his feet, pacing, Dean was serious again. "So, the later version, he just picked us both up, got us out. But the earlier one: Dad saw something, that night. During the fire. Something -- unnatural."
Sam didn't know what unnatural was supposed to mean. He sat very still, dreading what Dean might say.
"I went through the police file and the fire-investigator's report. It's all there, every word he said. They wrote it out pretty baldly: they thought he was lying or they thought he was nuts. The investigator guy remembered Dad right off." Dean stopped and turned to Sam, earnest. "Mike Guenther told me some stuff too. About how paranoid Dad was, after. He was convinced he saw something. And then after a while, after Mike threatened to report him, he said what everybody wanted to hear. He rolled over, man. He gave in. And," Dean slowed, shaky, "it's like he pretended it never happened."
He was sweating, jumpy. Sam didn't look at him, but at his reflection in the windows. Slowly, hands out, Sam crossed the room and put his hands on the sash and tugged till one of the windows came open. Just a handspan, just to get some cool air into the room. "So," Sam analyzed, his face an inch from the glass. All he could see was the room behind him, nothing of the world outside. "The part that bugs you isn't what happened, but the fact Dad wasn't able to handle it."
"For Christ's sake, Sam, don't you give a shit about this at all? This is like the most important thing that ever happened to you. Pay attention." Dean's angry gestures made Sam back up a step. Dean took his place by the window, intense as if seeing something there Sam couldn't see. "Dad said she was already dead. He said she was already dead and stuck on the ceiling in your room. Like a fridge magnet or something. He said she was bleeding from a cut on her belly. It's all in the original police report," he added, as if expecting Sam's skepticism. "Read the papers on the table. It's all there."
Of all the meanings of unnatural, that wasn't what Sam had been expecting. Nerveless, he paged through the police report and saw in stark typewritten letters the evidence of Dad's delusions.
It made no sense. Sam left the papers where they lay and returned to the windows. He opened all of them, all the way up screens or no. Dean put his elbow on a frame and leaned his head there, tired. His borrowed brown sweater flapped in the evening breeze.
Riddled with pauses, as if confessing something shameful, Dean went on. "It was something evil. It was something really evil, that hurt Mom. And Dad saw it and knew it and then just pretended he hadn't." He was close to tears. He screwed his eyes shut. "He screwed us over, man. He gave up."
It made no sense. They stood together in the open window and the fire escape glinted in the moonlight. Out beyond, Sam could see houses, lights in windows, college students too silly to understand the concept of blinds, walking around their apartments, ignorant of his intrusive view. A car went by, down on the street, its headlights showing the hard pavement and the weeds on the edge of the curb and the tumbling candy wrappers in the gutter. Sam took a deep breath.
"Look. There are a lot of things that happen when people deal with traumatic events. You have a crappy memory. Dad sedates himself every night."
Dean made an impatient motion with his shoulders, and lifted his head as if to argue.
"No, wait. This -- I study some of this. Dad lost his wife, and almost lost us too. The idea that it was just a stupid accident makes no sense, you know? It's got to be more important than that. So, in his head, he made it into something important. He made it into murder, or whatever satanic thing he hinted at, because a concrete threat makes sense in a way that stupid bad luck doesn't. And then," he added, hand raised, as Dean turned right around with anger on his face, "and then, when it came down to it, when his belief got so far that it started being a threat, he was able to give it up. I mean, so he ended up a drunk instead, but he was able to recognize that his belief was going to get us put into foster care, and admit that it was false. How is that giving up?"
And just saying it was the first time it had occurred to Sam that Dad had been somebody else before the fire, before anything Sam himself could remember, that he might have been happy once. It was weird and frightening, like some shapeless monster shambling around in his head, knocking things over and rearranging the furniture. Now Sam was the one close to tears, and he couldn't really say why.
But Dean was away from the window, agitated, prowling through the tiny kitchen and back out again. He must have realized how his behavior was coming off, because he put his back to the wall next to the bathroom and stilled himself. The jitters in his torso, the fast breathing, gradually slowed. He kept his eyes closed.
Sam watched him and belatedly remembered the gun on the desk. It had been sitting there for half an hour while they'd argued. With Dean in the state he was in -- Sam picked it up, ginger with that heavy weight in his hand, and went to the kitchen and stuffed it in the freezer. He pointed the muzzle of it at the back wall, the way Dean had done every time he'd put it down. His hand was still on the freezer door handle when he heard a mumble from the other room.
It was so quiet he couldn't understand what Dean was saying. He stepped out of the kitchen and heard, more clearly this time, "It wasn't false." A thump, as Dean banged his head on the wall, and said it again, louder. "It wasn't false." He banged his head a second time. He was opening his mouth to repeat himself yet again when Sam bounded across the room to stop him. He pressed a hand over Dean's mouth and pulled him away from the wall, not roughly, but as quickly and securely as he knew how.
"Don't say that, man. Don't say that."
Dean didn't resist. He let Sam yank at him and and just stared, just those big sorrowful eyes above Sam's bony fingers, full of conviction. No twitch across his forehead gave him the lie, no quirk of an eyebrow turned it into a joke. They stood there like that, Sam looming over him with all the power and Dean standing still and giving it to him, hands loose at his sides. The wind blew into the apartment so chilly that Sam shivered, and with that involuntary motion he pulled away and gave Dean his back. Sam slumped to the futon and put his head in his hands.
***
So, maybe Dean was psychotic. It explained more than a few things, like maybe he'd fled Camp Pendleton in a fugue state, unaware even of his own name. Sam realized he was living out his nightmares of the past few weeks: Dean himself and not himself at the same time, that old familiar face terrifyingly new. Sam was in way, way over his head. He sat still on that futon for a long time, trying to think.
He heard the futon frame creak and felt body warmth beside him. Dean didn't touch him, just sat there, quiet. His breathing was fast but even.
"It wasn't a false belief of Dad's. It was something real, some evil thing, and it was in that room." He cleared his throat. "I didn't want to believe it either, but the stuff I've learned, I can't just, it's not --" He lapsed, unable to continue.
The gun was in the freezer. The windows were open, but there was a fire escape to stop anyone's fall. Sam's phone and keys were right there on the desk. If he needed to get out, he could get out. His heart thumped at him, hard and jarring in his ribcage, just like Dean's head against the wall.
"There's a whole other world out there, that people don't see. But once you know how to look, it's all around. There's people you can talk to." Sam didn't raise his head and he didn't react. Dean shifted, restless. "It freaked me out at first too, but it also explained a lot."
A buzzing sound, somewhere above Sam's head, like white noise. It waxed and waned, a tiny throttling engine, never loud enough to drown out the litany of Dean's insane arcana.
"I didn't mean to spring it on you like that." A hand came and settled on Sam's knee, as if that could possibly be comforting. "I should have been here days ago. I just, I knew you'd take it badly."
Sam scrubbed his face with both hands. "How am I supposed to take it? 'Hey, sorry I bugged out, I came back because I'm being persecuted by the devil.'"
"Goddamnit." Dean was up and pacing again. Sam winced at the joke's leaden failure. "You are, Sammy. It was in your room. It was after you." Dean's gravity was so convincing, so persuasive, if only he weren't talking nonsense. He glanced around the room, fumbled for the calendar on the wall. It was a cheap giveaway from the Italian place on the other side of campus, the whole year on one big sheet. "Look, look at today. It's the second. Do you think I picked today out of a hat?"
"I think," and Sam struggled to keep his tone neutral, "that you picked today because you figured out I didn't have any labs after two in the afternoon."
"It's the anniversary, you idiot. It's the anniversary and it's coming back for you, tonight."
That buzzing noise again. Sam focussed on it, held that noise in his head. It was something mundane, so mundane he couldn't place it. It was a comforting summer noise.
"And that evil thing, I don't even have a name for it, I just know it figured me out months ago. It's been trying to stop me getting to you, so I won't save you." Those penetrating bright eyes, that forward chin like an arrow. "I start putting it all together and suddenly I'm seeing crazy things, guys I know with their eyes turned all black, grinning at me like some kind of sick fuck. The stuff they would say, man. And then a second later the guy'd be normal again, just a little dizzy or something, no idea what just happened. Like it wasn't him."
As he finished his sentence Dean darted forward, so quick and close to Sam that he flinched. But all Dean did was clap his hands once, not far from Sam's ear, like a crack of close thunder. The buzzing was gone. He stood back and opened his palms, and showed Sam the smear of dead yellowjacket obscuring his lifeline. He frowned at the base of his thumb, and picked out the stinger.
"And then it wasn't me. I'm not denying I was there, I was. But it wasn't me." He pulled off a paper towel and wiped off his hands. "I was totally helpless inside my body. I was standing there and the fire was like looking at the sun and I couldn't even shut my eyes against it. Somebody knocked me down or else I'd have been the perfect target, just standing there and the air like daylight, and I couldn't move. I don't even know how long it went on, what else got done in my name. But I know it wasn't me. It was something else, something evil, taking control away from me."
He was not agitated now. He stood over Sam, brows furrowed, nodding a little to himself as if confirming a basic truth. Unconsciously he worried at the sting-mark on his thumb.
"That's how I knew it was real. I would never use that stuff on people. Not even on the bad guys."
There was no point driving all the way to the psych center in Omaha. It was going to have to be the University clinic, or St. Elizabeth's emergency room, which Sam was pretty sure didn't have a psychiatry department at all. It would be far better if he could convince Dean to go voluntarily.
"So. So, what would happen if I decided I didn't believe you?"
Asking blandly made Dean slump a little. He pushed the calendar away on the desk and flopped into the desk chair. "I guess I'd leave, break in after you're asleep, and save you anyway. That's not what you want to hear," he added, bitter.
"No," Sam admitted. "It's not."
Dean reached out both hands and grabbed Sam's wrists, hard, unyielding. He had power in his hands, and Sam felt trapped. "You have to let me do this."
Sam raised his arms, slowly, and flexed against Dean's grip. Dean didn't let go. Between them, Dean's arms turned over and on the white flesh inside his forearms were new tattoos, ones he'd obviously gotten since his disappearance. On his left wrist, just below the standing tendons, a pentacle, like pagans wear, and on the right, some other circular symbol Sam didn't recognize. They were in plain blue ink, stark, weirdly lovely, only half-hidden by Dean's borrowed sleeves. "Let me go," Sam said.
But Dean only held on tighter. He was hunched forward, his face in shadow at that angle, long hair in his eyes. The intensity of him was as hot as the temperature of his fingers. "Maybe this time," he whispered, so close Sam could feel the breath on his cheek, "maybe this time it'll be me on the ceiling."
"Dean." Sam swallowed, more terrified for him than of him. The lock on Sam's wrists was severe, a little painful, and his hands throbbed against the cutoff in their blood supply; but it probably wouldn't leave any bruises. He flexed his wrists again, calculating the right tone of quaver with which to say: "You're hurting me."
Instantly on hearing those words Dean let go, stood up and crossed the room and faced away, only a few inches from the wall. He looked like a little kid who was being punished.
"I'm sorry," he hoarsed. "I never wanted to do that again."
The easy thing to do would be to sweep it under the rug. It probably wouldn't have left any bruises. Sam was the bigger of the two of them. They were both adults. He used the ammunition Dean had given him: "That's what you said last time."
Dean gave one rough sob and Sam knew he'd hit his mark. Cautious, he advanced further.
"You've had a lot of shit thrown at you. Mom dying, how that screwed up Dad, the war, whatever. And I'm sorry it hurt you so bad." They were both shaky now, and it shocked Sam how afraid he was, afraid and exalted at the same time. "But that doesn't give you the right to hurt me."
With a low piteous cry Dean spun around. "You think I don't know that I screwed up? You have to let me help you."
"Dean. Dean. Listen to what you're saying." Sam stood and put both hands on Dean's shoulders like a coach or a teammate, shaking him gently. "You joined the Marines to, I don't know, to get a do-over on Dad's life for him --"
Dean broke from Sam's touch and fled. The apartment had never seemed so small. "This isn't about me --" Sam chased him with his words.
"-- And all the Marines did to you was screw you up worse, make you do things you couldn't handle, do you think that white phosphorus story is going to fool anybody? You've done a lot of awful things, but that doesn't make you an awful person. And I'm sorry nobody else ever told you that, but it's really that simple. You hit me once two years ago and it scared you, and whatever you did in Iraq scared you worse, and here you are scared out of your head trying to rescue me to prove you're not a villain. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that."
They stood on opposite sides of the room and stared at each other, Dean horrified and Sam a little pugnacious, ashamed and proud at the same time. It was with ugly gratification that he touched his lip, evoking in one gesture the mental image of Dad's kitchen, Sam sprawled on the linoleum and Dean standing over him blank, shoulders heaving, with red spatter on his knuckles. He watched Dean's face crumple and was afraid he'd gone too far.
"I want to help you. I do," Sam insisted. "But I can't believe in what you're saying."
"Sam, please." Dean took a step, another. He crossed the room and reached for Sam's hands again and this time he was all gentle pleading. "Please let me help you. You're in danger. If I can't do anything else right I can at least save you from that."
"I'm not the one who needs saving, Dean. You are." The tears on Dean's face were hard to take. The way he stumbled, Sam couldn't help but sit them both down again on the futon. Dean hunched down so far he looked sick, or injured.
"Please," he mumbled, his voice muffled. "It's coming tonight. I know it is. You have to let me save you."
Sam put an arm over his brother's shoulder. "Only if you let me save you first." Inspiration struck, and Sam held out his pinkie. "You swore, right? We both swore. We go down to the birch tree circle, and stay there till you feel safe. All night, if we have to. And in the morning, you'll let me take you to the emergency room and have you evaluated."
That pinkie finger hung there in the air for a long time. Dean didn't raise his head to see it, didn't even seem to notice Sam's faltering expectation. After several silent minutes, and as Sam's hand began to tremble, Dean wiped his face with his forearm. His new tattoo flashed, just peeking over the edge of his sleeve. "I know what I saw."
Sam said nothing. Dean stood up and paced two steps toward the wall, stopped, and finally turned.
"Yeah, okay." He gulped and came forward to hook his pinkie into Sam's own. Then with both hands he grabbed Sam's wrist and pulled him to a stand and enveloped him in hard, trembling arms. "We both live through tonight," Dean told him, "and I'll do whatever circus tricks you want."
***
They lay side by side in the grass, Sam on his back and Dean on his side, watching Sam. The blanket they'd brought was wet with dew, and they shivered under it. Any bees that had survived this late into the fall, any that hadn't found a warm house to hide in, had to have died in the night. The sky was dark iron-gray, still at least an hour before dawn, and Dean had talked himself hoarse a long time ago.
"I dreamed about you," Sam said, more to convince himself he really was awake and lying in a graveyard with his insane brother, that this itself wasn't a dream, than for conversation. "While you were missing. For weeks. I dreamed that I came home to Lawrence and you were already there. But you weren't you, I mean, it was your face but somehow it wasn't really you."
Dean stirred, but said nothing for a long time. Sam was opening his mouth to go on when he heard the low rasp: "Did I have black eyes?"
But Sam pushed onward instead of trying to remember. "This isn't you, you know that, right?" It felt vulnerable to say, as if he were pleading. "You'll get better, and you'll be able to look back on this as just one bad night."
"You're wrong," Dean murmured. "This is the best I've ever been."
Sam blinked at sudden tears. Above his head, the darkish sky and the pale gray fingers of the birch saplings, their knots like black-edged knuckles, a mass of hands not killing but protecting some tiny vulnerable creature underneath: a lightning bug, a dragonfly, a tiny lizard perched in a little kid's palm. Dean shifted and rolled so he was on his back, wedged up close under Sam's shoulder. It was a little warmer, anyway.
"I don't know about other kinds of trees," said Dean into the cold air, starting back on his litany of advice. "But birch definitely works against bad stuff. Even if you can't wrap your head around the symbols and the charms, the basics still matter. Iron for power, bronze for clear vision, salt for purity -- I already said that, didn't I?"
He had already said that, six or eight times. He'd said the part about holy water and sacred ground and Solomon something and the mystical value of silver. But that didn't stop him.
"Maybe you should find out about your dreams, too. If he can come at people during the day, no reason he couldn't invade your dreams. There's gotta be a way to guard against that."
There wasn't anything Sam could say. He let the tears roll and just listened to the cadence of that voice, the certainty of it, the way Dean was trying to be reassuring and just making himself sound crazier with every word. They watched the sky together, as it paled in the predawn. The spade-shaped leaves over their heads became distinguishable one from the next, and then slowly their gray shapes took on color: a riot of yellow, with the last flushes of green among the lower branches.
When Sam heard the first sparrows he shook himself and wiped his face. "We still have a deal?" Dean sat up, grass in his hair, and with his back to Sam he nodded.
"I'm ready. I can take it."
He didn't sound relieved or confused or whatever Sam had been expecting. He just sounded tired. Sam sat up. "I just want you to be well, Dean. There's medications you can take. There'll be people you can talk to."
"You're still alive, man." Dean busied himself retying his boots. "You're still you."
Sam stretched, sore, and then clutched his knees to his chest for one last moment of warmth. "I don't know what the Marines will say. They might retire you on disability, or something."
"Whatever happens, you're prepared now." Dean stood, and put out a hand to help Sam stand. "Use this place if you have to, man. That's what it's here for." He held onto Sam's hand to make sure the point got across. Sam pulled gently and got his hand back without a struggle. "Use those phone numbers I wrote down. That dude Caleb, he helped me a lot. He explained all about --"
"Don't," Sam begged. "Please."
The sun broke suddenly over the eastern edge of the park, startling warm pink on their faces. Sam was in charge now. Watching Dean's reactions carefully, he stepped out from the circle of birches and onto the even mown turf that sloped downward gently toward the boulevard. They would be walking into the sun; Sam liked that imagery. Dean crossed out of the circle without a twitch or a protest, and followed where Sam led him.
The lack of sleep and the stress of it all came down on Sam suddenly, and his head pounded dully, back to front. "Trust your instincts," Dean said, low, as they came to the pavement. There were no cars at this hour, just a wide expanse of painted road and the apartment building on the other side. "I'll get out as soon as I can. I got your back on this one, I swear."
"Okay," Sam said, dully. He threw an arm over Dean's shoulders, maybe to steer Dean in the right direction or maybe to keep himself from keeling over. They turned right instead of crossing the street, and walked toward the emergency room. Huddling together, Dean's arm across his back, Sam stumbled in the morning light and could not have said which of them was leading the way.
***
END
Part 1 | (Part 2)
By: Vehemently (vee_fic)
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: R for language, scariness, and adult themes
Spoilers: none.
Beta by minim_calibre and cofax7.
What is it: Gen AU. A homecoming. A horror.
Tagline: It was just a stupid accident. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that.
Continued from Part 1
***
They ate on the front stoop, Dean pickily correcting how Sam held his chopsticks. A few students came in and out, not many, nobody Sam knew. He watched Dean eye them suspiciously. With a scowl on his face, he wasn't nearly the ladies' man he liked to think he was.
"So," said Sam, as they were crinkling the plastic on their fortune cookies, "I think the nearest VA psych center is in Omaha. I can drive you there tonight, if you want." Dean's hands stilled on the plastic and his forehead took over creasing.
"Not tonight." He hesitated, and steeled himself. "You don't want me here, I can sleep in the car or something. Just -- not till tomorrow."
Sam paused. "Something special about tomorrow?"
Dean balled up the cookie wrapper, held it still and silent in his hand. "No, no. I just, I have a lot to tell you, man. You don't need an hour's drive on top of that. Two hours, both ways. Look, can we go inside?"
"You seemed a little claustrophobic inside, last time. I figured you'd be calmer out in public."
"This is private business, man. I can't go telling your neighbors all this shit."
There was a long pause while Sam thought about the two of them, cramped into his tiny apartment, and whether there were any alternatives. There really -- weren't. "Okay, I guess," he said at last.
As if to reassure him, Dean said, "Your house, your rules."
Sam detoured them to the basement to pick up Dean's dry clothes, and then they were back in his little apartment. Sam slung himself down on the futon while Dean fussed with folding his jeans. He stuffed things back into the pockets just as Sam had turned them out: the Zippo, the paltry cash. He fingered the two loose keys for a long moment.
"This is for you," he said, handing the smaller one to Sam. "It's a safe deposit box at your bank. I opened it a couple days ago."
Sam hid the key in his fist. "You've been following me."
Dean blinked, surprised, although he'd been dropping hints all afternoon. "I was just -- keeping an eye on you. And, you've been busy. I didn't want to interrupt."
The lab schedule was pretty heavy, but Sam spent hours by himself in the library, in his apartment, running on the track on campus. With a pang, Sam realized he was hearing code for I was afraid of your seeing me.
"So. What's in the deposit box?"
Dean's smile was brittle. "Four thousand dollars in cash. It's for you." He saw the look on Sam's face and said immediately, "It's all legit. I didn't rob a bank or anything. I sold the truck." He put no inflection in it, as if selling your means of transport and stuffing wads of cash into a box were something everybody did, as casually as you might trace a crack in the wall. Dean put out a finger, feeling the rough edges, and as Sam watched him do it he realized that it really was a crack, not just a bad paint job but the wall in the early stages of structural failure. He'd never noticed it before.
"Why sell your truck, Dean? Won't you need it? What about your savings and stuff back in California?"
His back to the room, Dean followed the crack upward. Sam could see now that the join at the ceiling was a little bowed, most likely warped from moisture. No wonder the ceiling paint peeled in that corner. Dean said, without turning, "Dad's got power of attorney. That doesn't expire, right? If you need it, that's yours too."
Santa Claus Dean was not. He was always broke, always bumming a couple of bucks from Dad. Sam asked, uneasy, "Why won't you need that money?"
"I might." Dean chuckled, then grew serious again as he faced Sam. "But I think you'll need it more."
"Dude, I have scholarships. I have Dad. Summers, I've got jobs and internships and stuff." Sam tried to guess what was going on, Dean standing there calm with the crack climbing the wall behind him. People give away all their stuff when they're about to go join a cult in India, or when they're about to -- Scrambling, Sam asked, "What if the Corps discharges you? What if you need more rehab, and the VA won't pay for it --
Dean rolled his eyes. "I told you already --"
Sam's heart thumped hard. He didn't know how to ask why Dean wasn't thinking beyond the next couple of days. "But there's like years of therapy and social situations and figuring out how to handle stress and --"
"Why do you think I took up smoking?" Dean joked. "And you're the first person I've had a conversation with in weeks."
His face was a smirky rictus, his voice completely level. But the world his words created was so bleak in Sam's imagination he was struck dumb. He saw Dean in his mind's eye, trying to hitchhike next to a wheat field, out in the west of the state where you could see forever and it was wheat all the way, tall yellow straw, mesmerizing symmetrical rows of it, endless, empty under an empty gray sky. Thumb out, and not a fellow human breath in miles. Dean stood under the peeling paint in Sam's apartment armed and dangerous and beatifically ready to donate all his worldly goods to the younger brother he didn't even like. The only thing Sam could do was lay all his cards on the table. "Then at least give me the gun. Please."
Dean stiffened and pulled it out from the back of his jeans. "Wait, you think I --" He didn't finish that sentence. He looked at the gun instead of at Sam's face. Along its silvered muzzle, pointed at the floor, Sam thought he could see his own reflection. There was a long silence while Dean stood there mute and Sam worked himself up to stating the obvious.
"If you killed yourself, you'd be killing Dad too, and you'd screw me up for life." The crude bludgeon of the words themselves helped Sam firm his voice into anger. Anything but tears, at this moment. Anything but fear. "So don't you dare."
Dean held the gun casually, in his right hand. It looked like it fit there, which of course it did. He'd spent eight years learning how to shoot people, and stab people, and do whatever else it was Marines did to fuck people up. He didn't talk about it much, but he hadn't won the medals he had just for his pretty face. He wasn't a killer, but he'd done some killing.
With his other hand on the top of the weapon, Dean twisted his wrist, and in three or four efficient movements he'd removed the clip and popped out the last bullet. He twiddled it between his fingers and snapped it into the clip, and held out both clip and gun to Sam.
"You're right, you might need this too." Sam didn't take the offered hardware. Dean paused, and sat next to Sam on the futon. "I'm not gonna do anything to myself, man. I swear." He pushed the clip back into the gun with the ease of long practice and set the gun on a corner of the desk, and as he leaned back it was the easiest thing in the world for Sam to throw an arm around him. Dean tolerated Sam's shaky breathing and clinginess, and after a minute he gave a shrug. Sam pulled away and gave him his space.
"I'm sorry," sniffled Sam. "I just thought --"
"I swear, Sammy."
It was terrifying, not just the thought that he might die, but the overwhelming surge of dependence Sam felt at the thought. Sam didn't know who he was, without Dean as an opposite to model himself against. Sam felt like he was eight years old all over again. He hated feeling so small.
"Why are you such an asshole?" he protested, dull. But all Dean did was chuckle.
"How else are you gonna know you're the good kid of the family?" This was so close to what Sam had been thinking that he flinched away and stood up.
"Look, I am not responsible for your problems --"
"This psychology major crap is poisoning your brain, dude. What is with you and whipping out the expertise right and left?"
The anger was overwhelming. Sam hissed, "If you see a guy drowning, even if you can't stand the guy, do you just let him drown? Well hell, maybe you do. But I can't."
Dean blinked, his face slowly going blank. He set his feet on the floor and sat up straight, his hands unmoving on the futon. There was a little fold of fabric in-between each knuckle, where he'd clenched his fists in the slipcover and then let go.
"Okay. Okay, I did this wrong." Dean said, "I didn't come back here to get rescued. I don't need to be rescued. I came back here to tell you something, and you're not gonna like it anyway, and I already managed to piss you off." He stood up and paced to the door, and back, glancing in all the corners of the room. It was one thing to see him paranoid and withdrawn in public, but when he pulled it off in a one-room apartment --
"I'm listening," Sam allowed.
"This is about the fire," said Dean. He didn't say which fire, as if Sam should know, as if everyone should know, as if there had only been one fire in the history of the world.
"The white phosphorus?" Sam knew there had been a confession in that speech somewhere.
But Dean screwed up his face in impatience. "No. The fire that killed Mom."
This was -- unexpected. Sam realized that Dean did need a shrink -- and was using his own brother as a stand-in in the meantime. Which was better than nothing, but, Sam definitely wasn't qualified, and really wasn't sure he was ready to hear about it. It had all been so long ago, so over and done with and swept under the rug, Sam didn't know how to handle the idea of pulling it out and examining it now.
Reaching into his jeans again, Dean pulled out the big manila envelope Sam had seen before. He unfolded it carefully, smoothing out the creases, and shoved it at Sam. "The police report's in there. The fire investigator's report too. They're all public records." With slow clumsiness Sam pulled the papers out of the envelope. They were heavily folded down the middle, and would not lie flat. The edges of each page were gummy and gray, photocopy smudges and greasy fingerprints. Sam glanced at them, just enough to see the way some of the forms had been fed into a typewriter unevenly, so that the letters drifted subtly from left to right as if seasick. He really wasn't interested in reading.
"What do you want me to see?"
Dean paced away, and back again. "I tracked down the fire investigator: he's retired now. He'd never seen anything like it. He said that fire couldn't have been hotter if the walls had been painted with thermite. That's why they couldn't tell."
This amount of research, this kind of dogged long-distance work, was not something he'd ever expected Dean to do. "Couldn't tell what?"
"Read the goddamned report, Sam. The body was so burned they couldn't tell whether she was still breathing when the fire started. That's the only reason they didn't arrest Dad for her murder."
Murder. Dean was so earnest, eyebrows folded together. The interpretation of this one event meant everything to him. Murder, though. Sam didn't know how to approach the word. He couldn't even imagine it, a stubborn blank in the middle of his mental picture of disaster. He tried to put rage into his father's face, or the cruel calculation necessary to plan something like that, and failed. Dad just wasn't like that.
Something must have showed on Sam's face. "What are they gonna think? Unexplained fire, likely presence of accelerants, the little kid makes it out but the grown woman doesn't? What would you think?"
"I --" Sam controlled himself. He could see suddenly how Dean would come to believe it: Dad's unwillingness to talk about it; Dean's problems with his temper; finding the worst-case scenario to explain everything. It was the kind of simplistic cause-and-effect ideation that worked in the movies: a timeline, a dramatic revelation and a good cry, and you got better. "How long have you had this stuff?"
"I've been putting it all together for the past two years --"
"Dean, you know Dad. He's just -- he doesn't have the capacity to kill somebody." He didn't have the capacity to discipline an out-of-control teenager; he couldn't possibly kill his own wife.
"Fuck no," Dean exploded. "Of course he didn't do it."
Relief flooded over Sam, and then a hollow backwash of irritation and confusion. The whole family was trapped in the past, all of them except Sam himself. He wasn't willing to rescue Dean if it meant letting himself be pulled down and trapped too. He shuffled through the paper in his hands and saw again where Dean's hands had touched those pages, had worried at them and dog-eared them. It came out snappish, moreso than he'd meant it to: "So what is this about? If you're not accusing him of murder."
Dean flopped into the desk chair. "You don't want to hear it."
"I'm sorry. I'm trying to listen. You just kind of threw me for a loop with that one." Sam could see Dean's hands, trembling as he dug his fingertips into his scalp. "Look, I -- I need a Coke. You have a smoke, I'll go down to the machine in the lobby, and, and, I'll listen."
"You'll listen," Dean aped, his voice shaky. "Okay."
"We can talk all night, if you need that. I want you to get better." Sam stood by the door and watched Dean stare glassily into the middle distance.
"Yeah," said Dean. "By the end of the night I guess I'll know."
***
With a cold plastic Coke bottle resting against his forehead, Sam felt a little less like panicking. He could handle the idea of Dean being screwed up by the war, or even screwed up by growing up with Dad. The fire, though -- the fire was something Sam knew nothing about. It terrified him, that everyone in his life was so damaged by that one event that he didn't even remember. The idea that he might be damaged too, in some way he didn't even know, was unacceptable.
He sighed and headed back up the stairs. It took some juggling to transfer the two Coke bottles around so he could open the door, so when he stepped into the apartment Dean wasn't startled. Dean was watching him already, a wary look on his face, Sam's phone to his ear. He was deathly pale. "Yeah, Dad," he said into the phone.
Dad. Sam looked at the clock. It was after seven, which meant Dad was two or three deep at least. Not so far deep he wouldn't remember what he was saying, but deep enough to get loose. Sam had no idea what to think of this.
"Of course I know that." Dean turned his eyes toward the middle distance, as if seeing the three hours' drive between here and Lawrence. Sam set down one Coke on the desk, within arm's reach, and went into the kitchen to open his own, so the noise of it wouldn't be audible. He came back out in time to see Dean put his free hand to his head, as if shading his eyes from sun or scrutiny. His voice when he spoke was rough.
"I know, Dad. I'm sorry." He sat there and took whatever oppressive enthusiasm Dad was heaping on him. Sam sat down on the futon beside him and offered the Coke, but Dean shook his head. "Yeah. Yeah, Sam's got a plan. Yeah, look, I gotta go, Dad. Okay."
He closed the phone and put it carefully on the desk.
"How's he doing?" Sam asked, offhand so that it was as okay to answer as not.
Dean shook himself. His eyes were a little red, and he made them redder by pressing his thumbs against his eyelids. "Happy as a pig in shit."
The only person Sam knew who could out-personality Dad in his good phase was Dean. He was expansive, charming, everybody's best friend. The Dean in Sam's apartment, this twitchy, serious character, probably wouldn't be fooled. Sam was pretty sure Dean wouldn't be fooled. "Did he say he'd pull a few strings, get you reinstated?"
"Something like that. Like he's got any strings to pull."
Sam made an agreeing noise and drank his Coke, gestured for Dean to do the same. It was unclear from the way he talked whether Dean had called Dad, or had picked up Dad's call. Neither scenario seemed all that likely.
"I could hear myself in the background," Dean added. "'You don't like it, go join the Marines.' God, I was annoying. He was watching the tape from my highschool graduation." Sam remembered that day. A skinnier, more animated Dean flapping his idiotic maroon robes and beaming, just two weeks away from the Corps and eager for their arcane initiation. Sam sighed.
Dean wiped his eyes. "Why does he have to be so goddamned nice?"
"So you've never talked to him? About the fire?"
A harsh laugh. "What'm I gonna say? Hey Dad, remember when we all almost died? Good times, huh?" At last Dean reached out for his own Coke, opened it, drank. They sat side by side for a little while, just the noise of carbonated bubbles between them. Sam felt suddenly close to his brother, as he hadn't in years. As if they could say anything to each other, and it wouldn't be a disaster. If there was a way to coax silence into speech using only the power of wishing, Sam used it. As if in response, Dean spoke: "The rest of the papers there are my medical records. I called up the office and asked for all of them, from my first shots after I was born."
Sam nudged the pile of papers with a finger. Under the official-looking typed records, a stapled sheaf with crazy handwriting on the front page. Doctor Thorn's handwriting, the doctor they'd been seeing all their lives.
"I fell off an obstacle course when I was 20, got all tangled up in a rope line. I felt this click in my elbow, right? Like pitchers always say they feel when they're about to go in for Tommy John surgery. So they take me in and do x-rays, and when the x-rays come out the doctor asks me why I never told him I broke my arm before."
Sam straightened where he sat. "You've never broken your arm."
"He could see it on the x-rays, where it'd broken and healed. He said it happened when I was real young, before I grew. So I asked them for all my records, and I open it up to 1984 and there it is, broken radius, age five. It said I climbed out a second story window and fell."
Dean had been a death-defying kid, and hell on wheels as a teenager, but Sam was pretty sure he would have heard about a broken bone. If Dean himself remembered it. He'd already copped to blackouts in adulthood, drinking or dissociation Sam wasn't sure, but if he'd had them in childhood too, that was -- bad. As gently as he knew how, Sam asked, "Do you have a lot of holes in your memory?"
"I guess, I don't know." Dean waved that away irritably. "That's not the point. I'm so little, most of the explanation comes from Dad. How I must have had a nightmare about the fire and tried to climb out the window. So he tells the whole story of the fire all over again, and this is four months later, right?"
Sam was only half-listening, as he flipped through the stapled sheaf of papers. Dr. Thorn's handwriting was impossible to read most of the time, surrounded with nurses' translations and annotations. He found what he was looking for: a note at the bottom of the page about the arm. Mutism, withdrawn aspect. Referral to child therapist 3/22/84. Sam looked up, stunned, but Dean was barrelling onward.
"The stories don't match, Sam. They don't match. Between November '83 and March '84 Dad changed his story."
"Did Dad ever take you to a therapist? The note here says he was supposed to."
Dean burst into incredulous laughter. "Dad?" He turned his laugh into a dull noise in his throat and Sam realized with misery how unlikely it was that Dad would follow up on something like that.
"Yeah, okay," Sam allowed.
Up on his feet, pacing, Dean was serious again. "So, the later version, he just picked us both up, got us out. But the earlier one: Dad saw something, that night. During the fire. Something -- unnatural."
Sam didn't know what unnatural was supposed to mean. He sat very still, dreading what Dean might say.
"I went through the police file and the fire-investigator's report. It's all there, every word he said. They wrote it out pretty baldly: they thought he was lying or they thought he was nuts. The investigator guy remembered Dad right off." Dean stopped and turned to Sam, earnest. "Mike Guenther told me some stuff too. About how paranoid Dad was, after. He was convinced he saw something. And then after a while, after Mike threatened to report him, he said what everybody wanted to hear. He rolled over, man. He gave in. And," Dean slowed, shaky, "it's like he pretended it never happened."
He was sweating, jumpy. Sam didn't look at him, but at his reflection in the windows. Slowly, hands out, Sam crossed the room and put his hands on the sash and tugged till one of the windows came open. Just a handspan, just to get some cool air into the room. "So," Sam analyzed, his face an inch from the glass. All he could see was the room behind him, nothing of the world outside. "The part that bugs you isn't what happened, but the fact Dad wasn't able to handle it."
"For Christ's sake, Sam, don't you give a shit about this at all? This is like the most important thing that ever happened to you. Pay attention." Dean's angry gestures made Sam back up a step. Dean took his place by the window, intense as if seeing something there Sam couldn't see. "Dad said she was already dead. He said she was already dead and stuck on the ceiling in your room. Like a fridge magnet or something. He said she was bleeding from a cut on her belly. It's all in the original police report," he added, as if expecting Sam's skepticism. "Read the papers on the table. It's all there."
Of all the meanings of unnatural, that wasn't what Sam had been expecting. Nerveless, he paged through the police report and saw in stark typewritten letters the evidence of Dad's delusions.
It made no sense. Sam left the papers where they lay and returned to the windows. He opened all of them, all the way up screens or no. Dean put his elbow on a frame and leaned his head there, tired. His borrowed brown sweater flapped in the evening breeze.
Riddled with pauses, as if confessing something shameful, Dean went on. "It was something evil. It was something really evil, that hurt Mom. And Dad saw it and knew it and then just pretended he hadn't." He was close to tears. He screwed his eyes shut. "He screwed us over, man. He gave up."
It made no sense. They stood together in the open window and the fire escape glinted in the moonlight. Out beyond, Sam could see houses, lights in windows, college students too silly to understand the concept of blinds, walking around their apartments, ignorant of his intrusive view. A car went by, down on the street, its headlights showing the hard pavement and the weeds on the edge of the curb and the tumbling candy wrappers in the gutter. Sam took a deep breath.
"Look. There are a lot of things that happen when people deal with traumatic events. You have a crappy memory. Dad sedates himself every night."
Dean made an impatient motion with his shoulders, and lifted his head as if to argue.
"No, wait. This -- I study some of this. Dad lost his wife, and almost lost us too. The idea that it was just a stupid accident makes no sense, you know? It's got to be more important than that. So, in his head, he made it into something important. He made it into murder, or whatever satanic thing he hinted at, because a concrete threat makes sense in a way that stupid bad luck doesn't. And then," he added, hand raised, as Dean turned right around with anger on his face, "and then, when it came down to it, when his belief got so far that it started being a threat, he was able to give it up. I mean, so he ended up a drunk instead, but he was able to recognize that his belief was going to get us put into foster care, and admit that it was false. How is that giving up?"
And just saying it was the first time it had occurred to Sam that Dad had been somebody else before the fire, before anything Sam himself could remember, that he might have been happy once. It was weird and frightening, like some shapeless monster shambling around in his head, knocking things over and rearranging the furniture. Now Sam was the one close to tears, and he couldn't really say why.
But Dean was away from the window, agitated, prowling through the tiny kitchen and back out again. He must have realized how his behavior was coming off, because he put his back to the wall next to the bathroom and stilled himself. The jitters in his torso, the fast breathing, gradually slowed. He kept his eyes closed.
Sam watched him and belatedly remembered the gun on the desk. It had been sitting there for half an hour while they'd argued. With Dean in the state he was in -- Sam picked it up, ginger with that heavy weight in his hand, and went to the kitchen and stuffed it in the freezer. He pointed the muzzle of it at the back wall, the way Dean had done every time he'd put it down. His hand was still on the freezer door handle when he heard a mumble from the other room.
It was so quiet he couldn't understand what Dean was saying. He stepped out of the kitchen and heard, more clearly this time, "It wasn't false." A thump, as Dean banged his head on the wall, and said it again, louder. "It wasn't false." He banged his head a second time. He was opening his mouth to repeat himself yet again when Sam bounded across the room to stop him. He pressed a hand over Dean's mouth and pulled him away from the wall, not roughly, but as quickly and securely as he knew how.
"Don't say that, man. Don't say that."
Dean didn't resist. He let Sam yank at him and and just stared, just those big sorrowful eyes above Sam's bony fingers, full of conviction. No twitch across his forehead gave him the lie, no quirk of an eyebrow turned it into a joke. They stood there like that, Sam looming over him with all the power and Dean standing still and giving it to him, hands loose at his sides. The wind blew into the apartment so chilly that Sam shivered, and with that involuntary motion he pulled away and gave Dean his back. Sam slumped to the futon and put his head in his hands.
***
So, maybe Dean was psychotic. It explained more than a few things, like maybe he'd fled Camp Pendleton in a fugue state, unaware even of his own name. Sam realized he was living out his nightmares of the past few weeks: Dean himself and not himself at the same time, that old familiar face terrifyingly new. Sam was in way, way over his head. He sat still on that futon for a long time, trying to think.
He heard the futon frame creak and felt body warmth beside him. Dean didn't touch him, just sat there, quiet. His breathing was fast but even.
"It wasn't a false belief of Dad's. It was something real, some evil thing, and it was in that room." He cleared his throat. "I didn't want to believe it either, but the stuff I've learned, I can't just, it's not --" He lapsed, unable to continue.
The gun was in the freezer. The windows were open, but there was a fire escape to stop anyone's fall. Sam's phone and keys were right there on the desk. If he needed to get out, he could get out. His heart thumped at him, hard and jarring in his ribcage, just like Dean's head against the wall.
"There's a whole other world out there, that people don't see. But once you know how to look, it's all around. There's people you can talk to." Sam didn't raise his head and he didn't react. Dean shifted, restless. "It freaked me out at first too, but it also explained a lot."
A buzzing sound, somewhere above Sam's head, like white noise. It waxed and waned, a tiny throttling engine, never loud enough to drown out the litany of Dean's insane arcana.
"I didn't mean to spring it on you like that." A hand came and settled on Sam's knee, as if that could possibly be comforting. "I should have been here days ago. I just, I knew you'd take it badly."
Sam scrubbed his face with both hands. "How am I supposed to take it? 'Hey, sorry I bugged out, I came back because I'm being persecuted by the devil.'"
"Goddamnit." Dean was up and pacing again. Sam winced at the joke's leaden failure. "You are, Sammy. It was in your room. It was after you." Dean's gravity was so convincing, so persuasive, if only he weren't talking nonsense. He glanced around the room, fumbled for the calendar on the wall. It was a cheap giveaway from the Italian place on the other side of campus, the whole year on one big sheet. "Look, look at today. It's the second. Do you think I picked today out of a hat?"
"I think," and Sam struggled to keep his tone neutral, "that you picked today because you figured out I didn't have any labs after two in the afternoon."
"It's the anniversary, you idiot. It's the anniversary and it's coming back for you, tonight."
That buzzing noise again. Sam focussed on it, held that noise in his head. It was something mundane, so mundane he couldn't place it. It was a comforting summer noise.
"And that evil thing, I don't even have a name for it, I just know it figured me out months ago. It's been trying to stop me getting to you, so I won't save you." Those penetrating bright eyes, that forward chin like an arrow. "I start putting it all together and suddenly I'm seeing crazy things, guys I know with their eyes turned all black, grinning at me like some kind of sick fuck. The stuff they would say, man. And then a second later the guy'd be normal again, just a little dizzy or something, no idea what just happened. Like it wasn't him."
As he finished his sentence Dean darted forward, so quick and close to Sam that he flinched. But all Dean did was clap his hands once, not far from Sam's ear, like a crack of close thunder. The buzzing was gone. He stood back and opened his palms, and showed Sam the smear of dead yellowjacket obscuring his lifeline. He frowned at the base of his thumb, and picked out the stinger.
"And then it wasn't me. I'm not denying I was there, I was. But it wasn't me." He pulled off a paper towel and wiped off his hands. "I was totally helpless inside my body. I was standing there and the fire was like looking at the sun and I couldn't even shut my eyes against it. Somebody knocked me down or else I'd have been the perfect target, just standing there and the air like daylight, and I couldn't move. I don't even know how long it went on, what else got done in my name. But I know it wasn't me. It was something else, something evil, taking control away from me."
He was not agitated now. He stood over Sam, brows furrowed, nodding a little to himself as if confirming a basic truth. Unconsciously he worried at the sting-mark on his thumb.
"That's how I knew it was real. I would never use that stuff on people. Not even on the bad guys."
There was no point driving all the way to the psych center in Omaha. It was going to have to be the University clinic, or St. Elizabeth's emergency room, which Sam was pretty sure didn't have a psychiatry department at all. It would be far better if he could convince Dean to go voluntarily.
"So. So, what would happen if I decided I didn't believe you?"
Asking blandly made Dean slump a little. He pushed the calendar away on the desk and flopped into the desk chair. "I guess I'd leave, break in after you're asleep, and save you anyway. That's not what you want to hear," he added, bitter.
"No," Sam admitted. "It's not."
Dean reached out both hands and grabbed Sam's wrists, hard, unyielding. He had power in his hands, and Sam felt trapped. "You have to let me do this."
Sam raised his arms, slowly, and flexed against Dean's grip. Dean didn't let go. Between them, Dean's arms turned over and on the white flesh inside his forearms were new tattoos, ones he'd obviously gotten since his disappearance. On his left wrist, just below the standing tendons, a pentacle, like pagans wear, and on the right, some other circular symbol Sam didn't recognize. They were in plain blue ink, stark, weirdly lovely, only half-hidden by Dean's borrowed sleeves. "Let me go," Sam said.
But Dean only held on tighter. He was hunched forward, his face in shadow at that angle, long hair in his eyes. The intensity of him was as hot as the temperature of his fingers. "Maybe this time," he whispered, so close Sam could feel the breath on his cheek, "maybe this time it'll be me on the ceiling."
"Dean." Sam swallowed, more terrified for him than of him. The lock on Sam's wrists was severe, a little painful, and his hands throbbed against the cutoff in their blood supply; but it probably wouldn't leave any bruises. He flexed his wrists again, calculating the right tone of quaver with which to say: "You're hurting me."
Instantly on hearing those words Dean let go, stood up and crossed the room and faced away, only a few inches from the wall. He looked like a little kid who was being punished.
"I'm sorry," he hoarsed. "I never wanted to do that again."
The easy thing to do would be to sweep it under the rug. It probably wouldn't have left any bruises. Sam was the bigger of the two of them. They were both adults. He used the ammunition Dean had given him: "That's what you said last time."
Dean gave one rough sob and Sam knew he'd hit his mark. Cautious, he advanced further.
"You've had a lot of shit thrown at you. Mom dying, how that screwed up Dad, the war, whatever. And I'm sorry it hurt you so bad." They were both shaky now, and it shocked Sam how afraid he was, afraid and exalted at the same time. "But that doesn't give you the right to hurt me."
With a low piteous cry Dean spun around. "You think I don't know that I screwed up? You have to let me help you."
"Dean. Dean. Listen to what you're saying." Sam stood and put both hands on Dean's shoulders like a coach or a teammate, shaking him gently. "You joined the Marines to, I don't know, to get a do-over on Dad's life for him --"
Dean broke from Sam's touch and fled. The apartment had never seemed so small. "This isn't about me --" Sam chased him with his words.
"-- And all the Marines did to you was screw you up worse, make you do things you couldn't handle, do you think that white phosphorus story is going to fool anybody? You've done a lot of awful things, but that doesn't make you an awful person. And I'm sorry nobody else ever told you that, but it's really that simple. You hit me once two years ago and it scared you, and whatever you did in Iraq scared you worse, and here you are scared out of your head trying to rescue me to prove you're not a villain. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that."
They stood on opposite sides of the room and stared at each other, Dean horrified and Sam a little pugnacious, ashamed and proud at the same time. It was with ugly gratification that he touched his lip, evoking in one gesture the mental image of Dad's kitchen, Sam sprawled on the linoleum and Dean standing over him blank, shoulders heaving, with red spatter on his knuckles. He watched Dean's face crumple and was afraid he'd gone too far.
"I want to help you. I do," Sam insisted. "But I can't believe in what you're saying."
"Sam, please." Dean took a step, another. He crossed the room and reached for Sam's hands again and this time he was all gentle pleading. "Please let me help you. You're in danger. If I can't do anything else right I can at least save you from that."
"I'm not the one who needs saving, Dean. You are." The tears on Dean's face were hard to take. The way he stumbled, Sam couldn't help but sit them both down again on the futon. Dean hunched down so far he looked sick, or injured.
"Please," he mumbled, his voice muffled. "It's coming tonight. I know it is. You have to let me save you."
Sam put an arm over his brother's shoulder. "Only if you let me save you first." Inspiration struck, and Sam held out his pinkie. "You swore, right? We both swore. We go down to the birch tree circle, and stay there till you feel safe. All night, if we have to. And in the morning, you'll let me take you to the emergency room and have you evaluated."
That pinkie finger hung there in the air for a long time. Dean didn't raise his head to see it, didn't even seem to notice Sam's faltering expectation. After several silent minutes, and as Sam's hand began to tremble, Dean wiped his face with his forearm. His new tattoo flashed, just peeking over the edge of his sleeve. "I know what I saw."
Sam said nothing. Dean stood up and paced two steps toward the wall, stopped, and finally turned.
"Yeah, okay." He gulped and came forward to hook his pinkie into Sam's own. Then with both hands he grabbed Sam's wrist and pulled him to a stand and enveloped him in hard, trembling arms. "We both live through tonight," Dean told him, "and I'll do whatever circus tricks you want."
***
They lay side by side in the grass, Sam on his back and Dean on his side, watching Sam. The blanket they'd brought was wet with dew, and they shivered under it. Any bees that had survived this late into the fall, any that hadn't found a warm house to hide in, had to have died in the night. The sky was dark iron-gray, still at least an hour before dawn, and Dean had talked himself hoarse a long time ago.
"I dreamed about you," Sam said, more to convince himself he really was awake and lying in a graveyard with his insane brother, that this itself wasn't a dream, than for conversation. "While you were missing. For weeks. I dreamed that I came home to Lawrence and you were already there. But you weren't you, I mean, it was your face but somehow it wasn't really you."
Dean stirred, but said nothing for a long time. Sam was opening his mouth to go on when he heard the low rasp: "Did I have black eyes?"
But Sam pushed onward instead of trying to remember. "This isn't you, you know that, right?" It felt vulnerable to say, as if he were pleading. "You'll get better, and you'll be able to look back on this as just one bad night."
"You're wrong," Dean murmured. "This is the best I've ever been."
Sam blinked at sudden tears. Above his head, the darkish sky and the pale gray fingers of the birch saplings, their knots like black-edged knuckles, a mass of hands not killing but protecting some tiny vulnerable creature underneath: a lightning bug, a dragonfly, a tiny lizard perched in a little kid's palm. Dean shifted and rolled so he was on his back, wedged up close under Sam's shoulder. It was a little warmer, anyway.
"I don't know about other kinds of trees," said Dean into the cold air, starting back on his litany of advice. "But birch definitely works against bad stuff. Even if you can't wrap your head around the symbols and the charms, the basics still matter. Iron for power, bronze for clear vision, salt for purity -- I already said that, didn't I?"
He had already said that, six or eight times. He'd said the part about holy water and sacred ground and Solomon something and the mystical value of silver. But that didn't stop him.
"Maybe you should find out about your dreams, too. If he can come at people during the day, no reason he couldn't invade your dreams. There's gotta be a way to guard against that."
There wasn't anything Sam could say. He let the tears roll and just listened to the cadence of that voice, the certainty of it, the way Dean was trying to be reassuring and just making himself sound crazier with every word. They watched the sky together, as it paled in the predawn. The spade-shaped leaves over their heads became distinguishable one from the next, and then slowly their gray shapes took on color: a riot of yellow, with the last flushes of green among the lower branches.
When Sam heard the first sparrows he shook himself and wiped his face. "We still have a deal?" Dean sat up, grass in his hair, and with his back to Sam he nodded.
"I'm ready. I can take it."
He didn't sound relieved or confused or whatever Sam had been expecting. He just sounded tired. Sam sat up. "I just want you to be well, Dean. There's medications you can take. There'll be people you can talk to."
"You're still alive, man." Dean busied himself retying his boots. "You're still you."
Sam stretched, sore, and then clutched his knees to his chest for one last moment of warmth. "I don't know what the Marines will say. They might retire you on disability, or something."
"Whatever happens, you're prepared now." Dean stood, and put out a hand to help Sam stand. "Use this place if you have to, man. That's what it's here for." He held onto Sam's hand to make sure the point got across. Sam pulled gently and got his hand back without a struggle. "Use those phone numbers I wrote down. That dude Caleb, he helped me a lot. He explained all about --"
"Don't," Sam begged. "Please."
The sun broke suddenly over the eastern edge of the park, startling warm pink on their faces. Sam was in charge now. Watching Dean's reactions carefully, he stepped out from the circle of birches and onto the even mown turf that sloped downward gently toward the boulevard. They would be walking into the sun; Sam liked that imagery. Dean crossed out of the circle without a twitch or a protest, and followed where Sam led him.
The lack of sleep and the stress of it all came down on Sam suddenly, and his head pounded dully, back to front. "Trust your instincts," Dean said, low, as they came to the pavement. There were no cars at this hour, just a wide expanse of painted road and the apartment building on the other side. "I'll get out as soon as I can. I got your back on this one, I swear."
"Okay," Sam said, dully. He threw an arm over Dean's shoulders, maybe to steer Dean in the right direction or maybe to keep himself from keeling over. They turned right instead of crossing the street, and walked toward the emergency room. Huddling together, Dean's arm across his back, Sam stumbled in the morning light and could not have said which of them was leading the way.
***
END
Part 1 | (Part 2)