March-Stalkers Mighty: 11/22
Passus VI: Pes dexter.
“We don’t hurt children, Dean,” Ellen said, firm and far too steady, and her eyes flicked down for a moment to that notebook again, with something like regret. “But children grow up.”
Wolf: But slow, little girl, hark and hush: the birds are singing sweetly.
You’ll miss the birds completely, you’re travelling so fleetly.
(Grandmother first, then Miss Plump:
What a delectable couple!
Utter perfection, one brittle, one supple -)
One moment, my dear...
Red Riding Hood: Mother said, ‘Come what may,
Follow the path and never stray.’
Wolf: Just so, little girl: any path, so many worth exploring.
Just one would be so boring - and look what you’re ignoring!
(Think of those crisp, aging bones,
Then something fresh on the palate -
Think of that scrumptious carnality twice in one day...
There’s no possible way to describe what you feel
When you’re talking to your meal!)
Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, 1983.
That first week, after the ravine and the etayn and the disappearance of Sam and Cas, everyone was kind of quiet. Not a peaceful quiet: more like they’d been stunned. Dean managed not to notice it at first - he was too busy trying not to think, and trying not to look at people he’d known all his life, half afraid he wouldn’t recognise them anymore.
It was unexpectedly easy: most people didn’t really seem to want to meet his eyes either. Little sideways glances, and eyes sliding uncomfortably away, keeping just far enough away on the path or in the Roadhouse that they could avoid talking to him, without making it look like a slight.
They’d lost seven dogs, all up, and three horses. No people confirmed dead, somehow, although Gwen... seriously, even at your most optimistic you surely wouldn’t expect to find anything, not under all that mess of rock, but her family was refusing to go into mourning because no one had seen evidence of her death. Andy would always walk with a limp, now, and Jo had taken a blow to the head that still had her seeing double. And Bobby, well...
Bobby’s legs were both fractured. Which wasn’t in itself as bad as it could have been. They weren’t going to have to amputate, and his hips were bruised but not broken. So he’d been lucky. Tough old coot, Ellen called him, and if her hands had been shaking a bit when she’d fixed the dressings, no one who valued his balls was going to call her on it.
So, yeah. No bits cut off, no deadly blood loss, no blood poison. Lucky. Sure. The fact that Bobby couldn’t feel anything below the waist and couldn’t move his legs - well, not as bad as it could have been, right? Right.
At the best of times, Bobby was a bitch to be around when he felt useless. And needing someone else holding you up just to take a piss? propping you up in the bath? Definitely useless.
Somehow this was all Dean’s fault. The problem was, no matter how much he lay awake at night turning it over in his mind, Dean couldn’t work out what he could have done differently.
Bobby asked where Sam was, of course.
Dean replied that he was gone, that he’d chosen to leave. Which was absolutely true, and neatly avoided the whole angel question. Right up until the moment where Bobby looked at him like he was an oak tree that had suddenly sprouted water lilies, or something, and Dean realised that he’d just admitted to letting his little brother wander off alone into the wild when he still wasn’t quite sure how to use his feet.
So then he had to explain that Sam was with Gabriel, and pretend that was why he’d broken Gabriel out, and, hell, make like he thought the guy was trustworthy. Which, given his performance back in the ravine, wasn’t a walk in the park. Because after what he’d seen of Gabriel there and before, he was trying really hard not to think about what Gabriel might do to Sam (might already have done). Which meant Sam’s safety was relying on Cas - a weakened angel against an archangel. An angel who, though he might mean well, had called in Rachel to fetch the etayn, had spoken regretfully of “compromises” like he thought Dean wouldn’t like what he’d done if he knew.
An angel who had been here for a reason that had something to do with demons.
And the more Bobby looked at Dean like he was crazy, the harder it was to believe that he wasn’t: that there was any way he’d ever see Sam again.
“So you want me to buy that it wasn’t true, what the archangel was going on about back there?” Bobby’s voice was heavy with scepticism.
So easy to worm your way into their heads and twist them around, y’know? It’s even funnier when it wears off and they realise what they’ve done.
“Nope.” Dean tried hard to keep his voice light and easy and not like he was feeling all manipulated by a snarky archangel. “That was all Gabriel being a dick.”
Bobby gave him a hard look. “Put it this way. How willing are you to bet your brother’s life on that?”
… Dean extricated himself with difficulty and an underhanded offer to help Bobby to the bathroom. (Hey, it was his business now, until Bobby could manage to do it alone - Dean and Colt were already discussing making a low wheeled platform for Bobby to push himself around on, but Bobby had thrown the kettle at Dean’s head when he’d tried to bring the subject up, so he’d just have to put up with Dean asking after his bowel movements twice a day until he stopped being so damned stubborn).
If Gabriel had put some kind of influence on Dean, how would he know?
He never mentioned Cas, not even to Bobby. Cas was his. Besides, if “I sent my brother away with an insane archangel who just tried to squash us all with a giant” sounded bad, Dean didn’t really want to try “I patched up the angel who engineered that whole smoke thing, who, hey, also happened to be some kind of leader, then I busted out our best hope of information to get the other angel out of the land.”
So much for not letting everyone down.
Demon signs started cropping up again. They’d barely had any trouble with demons lately, not since the angels had stepped up their side of things. But now they kept coming across crop circles, traces of sulphur, and deer and wild goats whose throats had been slit and drained of blood.
Some people started putting salt on their windowsills again, just in case the demons got over the walls. People were paranoid just now - the walls weren’t enough to make them feel safe anymore.
Rufus said, calm as ever, that he hoped the angels hadn’t just been softening them up.
Dean spent most of the first week looking after Bobby fiercely, thinking as hard as he could about nothing else, shaping his whole day around it. It was easier to do that than to keep ignoring it when one woman hustled her kids away from him, and another talked to him too gently like he was an idiot, and started apologising fiercely to other people on his behalf for whatever sins she imagined they saw in him.
Bobby was a terrible invalid. No surprises there. After two days of spending pretty much every waking minute over there anyway (moving things, carrying things, ducking things Bobby threw at his head), Dean insisted on moving in. After two more, Bobby insisted even harder on him moving out.
“And pick up a goddamned razor, boy, you look like a billygoat!”
... Dean’s house was too quiet.
He started drawing again.
It gave him something to do with his hands. And it let him look at people without having to meet their eyes. All those odd creatures moving around him, so long familiar and now so very strange, were so easily reduced to lead and ink on paper. They made more sense there, caged in the movements of Dean’s pen, frozen steady and still and comprehensible and a hell of a lot less disturbing.
After a few days, though, it wasn’t just that.
Dean hadn’t drawn this much in years, and he’d forgotten how much it let him see. People were used to the sight of him with book and pen, Chevy flopped snoozing over his feet. They were used to overlooking him when he was doing that, and now, even while he was apparently something new and untrustworthy, that still held true.
It was sort of a relief. He saw heads tilted and shaken, glances exchanged, the quirk of mouths, and it didn’t have anything to do with him. So he could watch it, and record it, and think.
Turned out that he wasn’t the only one getting the confused and uncomfortable treatment. Everyone was subdued and reduced. Pretty much everyone was suspicious of somebody, and awkward about somebody else, and going out of their way to be loudly, brightly inclusive toward a third.
The thing was, Dean worked out slowly, he wasn’t the only one who’d walked out of the march-lands that day with a bit less faith in people than he’d had in the morning. And there were a hell of a lot of people who had, in that frantic dash for safety, done things they didn’t really want to think they had.
Mark had taken Gwen’s horse and ridden off without stopping to check on her. No one had seen her since, and Mark was very pale and silent. There was a bruise and a cut punched into young Claire’s frail cheekbone that exactly matched the shape of Bela’s signet ring. Poor Andy, who wasn’t really a hunter - spent his time doing everyone else’s weirdest little odd jobs and experimenting (often disastrously) with the distillery - had been roped into it more and more often lately to make up numbers. Every time was meant to be the last time - only it seemed this time it really would be, because his twin Ansem had kicked him right over in his panic, and Andy had barely got out alive.
No one knew if Dean had done something with the angel who’d been shot down, or why he’d freed Gabriel. But he had passed all the tests thrown at him and he’d stuck by Bobby, and they did know that, in a crisis, Gordon would rather save his great-grandfather’s precious knife than help Andy to his feet.
So, yeah. Subdued.
Dean drew Jo a lot, just in little snatches: the turn of a wrist, the fall of hair over her cheek, her shadowed eyes. He was sort of used to having her around, after all, even if she was furious at him, and there’d been a couple of times lately when he’d thought she wasn’t going to make it, one way or another. Jo’s sharp face and soft eyes were one of those things Dean really hoped he’d never have to work out how to lose.
And, huh. Okay, so yes, she was still mad at Dean, but she had the same flat glare for a hell of a lot of other people too, and she barely spoke to anyone. Seemed like she wasn’t doing well.
Dean was having the weirdest dreams.
Sleep became a real bitch. If it hadn’t been for Chevy’s warm weight pressed up against him, her familiar nose nudging cold into his neck when he woke up sweating and gasping, Dean thought he might have had to try doing without it.
If he sometimes thought, in that half-tangible place between sleeping and waking, of the sweet tangy scent of angel and the brush of feathers over his naked back and shoulders, of sliding his arm around a lean, muscled waist that was slicker than it ought to be with sweat… well, he’d only had that for one night. It made no sense that he was still thinking about it.
Dean wasn’t sure what to do with that. So he pushed it aside.
In the second week, Bela thought she saw two demons wafting blackly through the trees beside them when they were out on a hunt. Demons hardly ever worked together, but... Bela? Really not the jumpy see-things-that-aren’t-there type.
Salt and protective sigils were reinforced and re-drawn. The demon trap at the Gates was recut stronger and clearer than ever. Dean grimly enlisted a task force to help rebuild the section of wall that Gabriel had damaged, and the underside of the river culvert and of the Gates were painted to ward against angels too. Anti-possession symbols of every kind were painted onto each hunter’s chest before he or she went outside, adding hours to a simple, routine sweep.
That week, Dean found himself hanging around the Roadhouse a lot, helping Ellen with Bill’s half of the chores. Not that there was anything she couldn’t do herself - if there was anyone Dean knew who wasn’t afraid of hard work, it was Ellen - but, well, he’d been neglecting her and Jo. They sort of deserved better from him.
Ellen gave him a sharp I-can-see-right-through-you look the first time he chopped her firewood for her and carried it in to stack nearly inside the kitchen door; but she said nothing, and two days later, when he was done scrubbing the floor of the outhouse and the outsides of the windows, and had tidied himself up, the table was set for three.
That was sort of welcome. Dean wasn’t really enjoying cooking for one.
Jo didn’t say anything, but she tossed her hair and glared very eloquently. Dean wasn’t suicidal enough to call her on it, but he did take the time to make the hour-long trek out to the base of one of the springs near the wall, where the creamy sweet cicely that Jo was especially fond of always flowered earliest. He left a large handful on Jo’s bench in the kitchen, roots and all, and snuck out very stealthily.
When Jo next saw him, she blacked his eye and storming out, shaking. Well, how was Dean to know Bill had always used to do exactly that, every June?
But Ellen gave him a little smile, sad and tight and warm, and next time he saw Jo she blinked hard a few times, then nodded. And that evening she made pie.
... Dean would never understand girls. Even Jo, who was in many ways as good as a boy.
He dreamed that he was searching, searching frantically. He wasn’t sure what he was searching for, and then he had in his hands a little knitted bootie, a match to the ones Sam had worn when he’d been tiny, only this one was much bigger, and there was only one of it. And Dean’s hands were claws, and they caught and tore at the wool when he tried to be gentle.
He hid it away in the woods, told it to stay put, promised he’d come back for it, and ran, trying to find the other one. Only he couldn’t, it was lost, and when he came back for the first it was deep in silver water, and he couldn’t dive for it, and it was drowning. And his own monstrous hands turned on him and clawed at his face, and he ran for help, ran like a lost kid, looking for the other bootie. It was all his fault - they were meant to be together, meant to be a pair.
There was too much noise, dinning through his head, everyone laughing and singing and joking and shouting far too loud, and he clawed at his ears and roared his protest, couldn’t make words that anyone would understand. He stalked in over the moors, closer and closer, looked down on the Roadhouse nestled in the curve of a bog, too bright and too loud, a party, hurting his eyes and his ears. His arms were long and great like a beast’s, all knotted muscle and claws like fangs. He stormed in, ripping the perfectly crafted doors (so ornate and delicate, nothing like its real doors) and raged, destroying it from the inside. He tore up the benches, savaged the walls, even as he was yelling at himself to stop. And he still couldn’t find what he was looking for.
And he turned on the people there, tearing them to pieces with long sweeps of his claws, blood hot all over his arms, and the noise still wouldn’t stop. His claws and his teeth turned on his own flesh, breaking his body and raging. His limbs and his belly were decaying, body eating itself up in its helpless child-like passion, rot and ruin and rending.
Seriously? What was wrong with a nice warm sex dream, or something?
The third week, the demons came back with a vengeance.
Five of them ambushed a small scouting party. Barnes, who wasn’t really a hunter but who’d got roped in reluctantly at the last minute, was possessed. The demon riding him killed Bela. If it hadn’t been for the nearby demon trap, carved as a backup into the road (and they had all been touched up lately), no one would have made it home.
That night, three more demons charged the Gates, two in their bodily form and a third as black smoke, and the lintel (with its protective markings) was cracked almost through before a panicking Christian could call for reinforcements.
It was worse than it had been a few years back, at the height of their infestation, before the angels had arrived. Hunting was suspended, because everyone who set foot outside the walls was catching glimpses of black smoke out of the corners of their eyes, in the shadows of the trees. One by one, hunters - the front line of their defence - were starting to show signs of demonic influence: getting dreamy, then sullen, then morose, snapping out irrationally at people they loved. The trouble was, right now? Everyone was doing that anyway.
And the thing was. Anti-possession symbols and so on were all very well, but all they did was discourage a demon, and keep it from outright taking control of your body. They could still attack you with hands and claws, still pick you up and fling you into a tree with their freaky object-control powers. And they could still whisper silently inside your head, concentrate all their persuasion on you, until you didn’t even notice you’d drawn that symbol just sloppy enough, on yourself or on someone else, or left the Gates unwarded. And sooner or later, one would. It was only a matter of time before one of them got its sneaky-ass claws into someone deep enough to lay them all open.
They were already falling apart at the seams.
It was a chilly day for mid July, with a harsh breeze coming in off the granite peaks. Dean was hauling the rickety old wood sled with the wobbly runners up to the houses, with only enough split logs stacked on it for Bobby’s place and the Roadhouse. No one had offered to share labour with him to stock up their own woodpile, like they usually would. Not that Dean needed the help. He could do it himself. Screw them anyway.
He looked up, and Jo was on the street ahead. She startled at the sight of him, set her jaw, and slipped away. A bit unexpected - Dean had thought they were up to basic civilities now, but hey, not going to argue. His momentary distraction almost had the sled jolting off its runners on a stone, so it was another half-minute before he realised that she’d been heading away from his and Sam’s house, and that, as she’d turned away, she’d hidden something under her shawl.
He could have called out to her, or hunted her down once he’d off-loaded the wood; but he had a feeling that that would end in a confrontation, and Dean had had just about enough of that to last him a hell of a long time. Besides. If she was lifting something, what about it? There was nothing in that house just now that he could really bring himself to care about.
All things considered, though, he really shouldn’t have been surprised later to receive The Summons. He was crossing the back yard of the Roadhouse when Ellen, churning butter in the sunny corner outside the bedroom window with Chevy and one of the farm dogs snoozing beside her, looked up at Dean and jerked her head sharply.
Far be it from Dean to be backwards in slinking forward. Especially when Ellen was wearing her someone is going to be called to account face.
Then she took one of his sketchbooks out of her skirt, and tossed it down on the iron strut that held up the barrel of the churn. Not one of his recent ones either, of course not. One of the ones from when he’d been a kid. One of those ones.
His first thought was, the hell? Jo had gone snooping around behind his bed?
Then he remembered, with that sickening clench of “oh shit did I really do that,” the sixth glass of Andy’s weird apple spirits last night, all alone in his kitchen with a single candle, brooding over...
And he hadn’t put it away. Because apparently he was a freaking amateur at sneaky.
Ellen was watching his silent freak-out with clear, hard eyes, and her hand hadn’t even faltered in its steady rhythm on the handle.
“Care to explain that, Dean Winchester?”
Only, what could he say? There were years of betrayal in it, either way.
He reached out, impulsively, and stopped himself just short of touching the corner of the notebook. He should have destroyed it, of course he should. But there was Cas in there, and there was Sammy, and they looked happy together.
Sentimental idiot.
Dean reached instinctively for the familiar shape of the amulet against his chest, but of course it was gone. It was with Sam. He cleared his throat, and his voice came out cracked and lame anyway. “Would you believe me if I said that was... a long time ago?”
Chevy opened one eye at the sound of him, and thumped her tail sleepily. Ellen looked much less impressed. “Been more than a long time since your brother was small enough to fit in those knickerbockers. How old were you? Nine?”
“Six, ma’am,” Dean mumbled, words dragged out of him humble and automatic at the sharp, stern crack of her voice. “When I first met him. Six.”
Women, hell. Talk about weird mysterious powers.
Ellen stared at him for long enough that he had to meet her eyes and let them drag him back to when he was six again. Then she observed, “That’s a long time to keep a secret.”
Dean tried to drag his voice down into gruff manliness again. It sounded forced and childish in his own ears, not at all the kind of voice that said hey, trust me, I know what I’m doing.
“Yeah, well. Didn’t see him again after Dad died. Figured no one needed to know. Wasn’t like it could’ve made a difference once...”
“Not what I was worried about,” she cut in, and brought him stuttering to a halt. Then she pushed one loose sleeve back up above her elbow and, in one of her dizzying conversational turns, asked, “You’ve never really paid much mind to any young lady, have you?”
He blinked at her, feeling a bit like the rabbit whose eyes are suddenly dazzled by a lantern being uncovered at night and can’t work out which way it all comes from. “What?” What had that got to do with anything?
“No little infatuations, no calf-eyes.” Dean’s feet seemed determine to shuffle under the burn of that narrowed brown gaze. “No setting your cap, no brawling with other young men over anything in a skirt.”
The scowl was automatic. Not that it was a sensitive subject or anything. Just. What the hell? “It’s always just been - me and Sam.” Great. Now he was sounding defensive. “Not like we ever really needed, you know.” A woman around all the time.“Someone else.” In the house. In Dean’s bed, which would just be weird, because it was his bed, and he’d have to move over, and share the blankets, and... “Cooking and so on. Polishing things.” Or whatever other weird things a woman would want to do around the house. Dean wasn’t very clear on the subject.
He cleared his throat again, and grunted, “Never really thought about it.”
Which was only half a lie. He’d never managed to think about it and like the idea, not once it got past the very abstract “hey, marrying sometime would probably be a good idea, right?” and into the practical “but then I’d have a wife” part.
... Dean had the uncomfortable feeling that Ellen had heard all of that. Even the bits he hadn’t said.
“No,” she said, thoughtful and drawn-out and shrewd like she was reading off the inside of his head. “... No, it’d have to be a hunting woman for you, not some soft domestic hen. So why haven’t you ever put the moves on my Jo, then?”
For the record, Dean did not squeak. Not even a manly whimper. (It didn’t count if you bit your tongue before it got all the way out.) He had no freaking idea where this was going, and if it had been anyone but Ellen he could have glared them down and out of his damn business, but she was looking at him, and she’d just wrong-footed him again and he wasn’t even sure he had enough feet for all the wrong-footing in this conversation, and - Jo? Really?
“Oh, come on,” he protested in a very manly way that did not involve whining. “Jo’s never going to marry until she doesn’t have to feel guilty sending the hunt out without her as soon as she gets knocked up, you know that.”
Ellen’s snort was eloquent. “And you’re such a gentleman that you’ve never even thought about it.”
“No!”
“Not her or any girl?”
Dean was on the home stretch here. Probably. “No. Never even thought about it.”
He bit down on the “can I go now, ma’am?” that wanted to stumble out after, like she was asking him if he was the one who’d gone through the cookie jars in her kitchen.
“Exactly,” Ellen said, incomprehensibly. Then she stopped turning the handle, wiped her hands on the hips of her apron, and leaned forward to rap sharply on the cover of the notebook, eyes dark and serious. “Dean Winchester, look me in the eye and tell me you never laid eyes on that feathery child after he grew his balls.”
Now he was completely lost.
“No! Not...” he stuttered, trying not to think about Cas’ balls, because his mouth was sort of stuck on ‘deny everything’ mode. “Not until,” it helpfully supplied, under the gimlet eyes that had wormed every naughty little secret out of him when he’d been a kid; then it overloaded and shut down in confusion.
But Ellen was already nodding. “Until about eight weeks back, or a little more. Am I right?”
There was something brusquely gentle in her voice, like she was trying to understand. Like he was something to pity. And when did Ellen ever do that, instead of just clipping you around the ear and telling you to fix your own screw-ups then trust you with direly terrifying trust to do it better next time?
The back of Dean’s neck itched. Something was seriously wrong here.
He set his jaw and didn’t say anything.
“I saw the angel we winged the day Bill died,” Ellen said, firm and steady. “And he was the spitting image of what that kid would be, all grown up.”
Dean nodded, one quick jerk of acknowledgement, because if she’d seen that he wasn’t about to deny it. “He’s gone now,” was the best he could do, curt and honest, just to make sure no one went after Cas. “Left when Gabriel did. Won’t see him again.”
There was a weird tremor in his own voice on the last words, and he wasn’t sure where that came from, but he could see from the sharpening of Ellen’s eyes that she’d picked up on it and recruited it to whatever mad theory was spinning about in her head.
“You know who you’ve been putting me in mind of lately, Dean?” she asked, and it wasn’t a question. “Martin, after something started crawling in his window at night. It’s more than just Sam you’ve been moping over. Go home and put angel-proofing and white sand at all your doors and windows, you hear me? I’ll be checking before dark.”
White sand. White sand to keep out...
Hold on, what?
Ellen was staring at him, dark and calculating and sad.
Incubi. Incubi made you irrational, driven by the burn of the monster’s face in your heart. Dean wasn’t irrational. Was he? Had he been? Hold on, was she still stuck on that childhood thing?
“Look,” he tried, and his voice felt strange and desperate in his own throat. “I get that I should have told someone, way back then, but... he wasn’t hurting anyone. And I was worried that Dad would...”
“We don’t hurt children, Dean,” she said, firm and far too steady, and her eyes flicked down for a moment to that notebook again, with something like regret. “But children grow up.”
“There wasn’t -” Dean took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, trying to calm the bewilderingly harsh pounding in his chest. Because, okay, so he’d turned out to be a monster technically, but...“He wasn’t an incubus, Ellen. Just a kid.”
“Okay,” she said, far too easily, like she was waiting for something more.
“Fuck.” He scrubbed one hand viciously over the phantom itch at the back of his neck, and dropped his gaze. There was shame crawling under his skin, sickening and visceral, and he couldn’t work out why. “That was... a long time ago.”
“I know,” she said, gently enough that it really didn’t sound like her, and that wasn’t doing anything to calm the twitchy sense of wrong wrong wrong screaming inside his head. “And time has a way of changing things.” He felt her eyes on his face for another moment; then she stood up and lifted the heavy churn up onto her hip, with barely a grunt. “You keep an eye out for yourself, you hear me now?” she said, brisk and stern and warm, and left him there, more alone than before.
... Incubus. Really?
Incubi were ugly little shitheads, with hair like grey straw and long fragile teeth and wings like an aging bat’s. Sure, their influence made you think that look was the most awesome thing ever, but that wasn’t the same thing as a full-blown illusion. And there wasn’t any question about Cas’ species.
But Ellen knew all that. So what the tiny pig-studded hell did she mean?
“We don’t hurt children, Dean,” Ellen said, firm and far too steady, and her eyes flicked down for a moment to that notebook again, with something like regret. “But children grow up.”
Wolf: But slow, little girl, hark and hush: the birds are singing sweetly.
You’ll miss the birds completely, you’re travelling so fleetly.
(Grandmother first, then Miss Plump:
What a delectable couple!
Utter perfection, one brittle, one supple -)
One moment, my dear...
Red Riding Hood: Mother said, ‘Come what may,
Follow the path and never stray.’
Wolf: Just so, little girl: any path, so many worth exploring.
Just one would be so boring - and look what you’re ignoring!
(Think of those crisp, aging bones,
Then something fresh on the palate -
Think of that scrumptious carnality twice in one day...
There’s no possible way to describe what you feel
When you’re talking to your meal!)
Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, 1983.
That first week, after the ravine and the etayn and the disappearance of Sam and Cas, everyone was kind of quiet. Not a peaceful quiet: more like they’d been stunned. Dean managed not to notice it at first - he was too busy trying not to think, and trying not to look at people he’d known all his life, half afraid he wouldn’t recognise them anymore.
It was unexpectedly easy: most people didn’t really seem to want to meet his eyes either. Little sideways glances, and eyes sliding uncomfortably away, keeping just far enough away on the path or in the Roadhouse that they could avoid talking to him, without making it look like a slight.
They’d lost seven dogs, all up, and three horses. No people confirmed dead, somehow, although Gwen... seriously, even at your most optimistic you surely wouldn’t expect to find anything, not under all that mess of rock, but her family was refusing to go into mourning because no one had seen evidence of her death. Andy would always walk with a limp, now, and Jo had taken a blow to the head that still had her seeing double. And Bobby, well...
Bobby’s legs were both fractured. Which wasn’t in itself as bad as it could have been. They weren’t going to have to amputate, and his hips were bruised but not broken. So he’d been lucky. Tough old coot, Ellen called him, and if her hands had been shaking a bit when she’d fixed the dressings, no one who valued his balls was going to call her on it.
So, yeah. No bits cut off, no deadly blood loss, no blood poison. Lucky. Sure. The fact that Bobby couldn’t feel anything below the waist and couldn’t move his legs - well, not as bad as it could have been, right? Right.
At the best of times, Bobby was a bitch to be around when he felt useless. And needing someone else holding you up just to take a piss? propping you up in the bath? Definitely useless.
Somehow this was all Dean’s fault. The problem was, no matter how much he lay awake at night turning it over in his mind, Dean couldn’t work out what he could have done differently.
Bobby asked where Sam was, of course.
Dean replied that he was gone, that he’d chosen to leave. Which was absolutely true, and neatly avoided the whole angel question. Right up until the moment where Bobby looked at him like he was an oak tree that had suddenly sprouted water lilies, or something, and Dean realised that he’d just admitted to letting his little brother wander off alone into the wild when he still wasn’t quite sure how to use his feet.
So then he had to explain that Sam was with Gabriel, and pretend that was why he’d broken Gabriel out, and, hell, make like he thought the guy was trustworthy. Which, given his performance back in the ravine, wasn’t a walk in the park. Because after what he’d seen of Gabriel there and before, he was trying really hard not to think about what Gabriel might do to Sam (might already have done). Which meant Sam’s safety was relying on Cas - a weakened angel against an archangel. An angel who, though he might mean well, had called in Rachel to fetch the etayn, had spoken regretfully of “compromises” like he thought Dean wouldn’t like what he’d done if he knew.
An angel who had been here for a reason that had something to do with demons.
And the more Bobby looked at Dean like he was crazy, the harder it was to believe that he wasn’t: that there was any way he’d ever see Sam again.
“So you want me to buy that it wasn’t true, what the archangel was going on about back there?” Bobby’s voice was heavy with scepticism.
So easy to worm your way into their heads and twist them around, y’know? It’s even funnier when it wears off and they realise what they’ve done.
“Nope.” Dean tried hard to keep his voice light and easy and not like he was feeling all manipulated by a snarky archangel. “That was all Gabriel being a dick.”
Bobby gave him a hard look. “Put it this way. How willing are you to bet your brother’s life on that?”
… Dean extricated himself with difficulty and an underhanded offer to help Bobby to the bathroom. (Hey, it was his business now, until Bobby could manage to do it alone - Dean and Colt were already discussing making a low wheeled platform for Bobby to push himself around on, but Bobby had thrown the kettle at Dean’s head when he’d tried to bring the subject up, so he’d just have to put up with Dean asking after his bowel movements twice a day until he stopped being so damned stubborn).
If Gabriel had put some kind of influence on Dean, how would he know?
He never mentioned Cas, not even to Bobby. Cas was his. Besides, if “I sent my brother away with an insane archangel who just tried to squash us all with a giant” sounded bad, Dean didn’t really want to try “I patched up the angel who engineered that whole smoke thing, who, hey, also happened to be some kind of leader, then I busted out our best hope of information to get the other angel out of the land.”
So much for not letting everyone down.
Demon signs started cropping up again. They’d barely had any trouble with demons lately, not since the angels had stepped up their side of things. But now they kept coming across crop circles, traces of sulphur, and deer and wild goats whose throats had been slit and drained of blood.
Some people started putting salt on their windowsills again, just in case the demons got over the walls. People were paranoid just now - the walls weren’t enough to make them feel safe anymore.
Rufus said, calm as ever, that he hoped the angels hadn’t just been softening them up.
Dean spent most of the first week looking after Bobby fiercely, thinking as hard as he could about nothing else, shaping his whole day around it. It was easier to do that than to keep ignoring it when one woman hustled her kids away from him, and another talked to him too gently like he was an idiot, and started apologising fiercely to other people on his behalf for whatever sins she imagined they saw in him.
Bobby was a terrible invalid. No surprises there. After two days of spending pretty much every waking minute over there anyway (moving things, carrying things, ducking things Bobby threw at his head), Dean insisted on moving in. After two more, Bobby insisted even harder on him moving out.
“And pick up a goddamned razor, boy, you look like a billygoat!”
... Dean’s house was too quiet.
He started drawing again.
It gave him something to do with his hands. And it let him look at people without having to meet their eyes. All those odd creatures moving around him, so long familiar and now so very strange, were so easily reduced to lead and ink on paper. They made more sense there, caged in the movements of Dean’s pen, frozen steady and still and comprehensible and a hell of a lot less disturbing.
After a few days, though, it wasn’t just that.
Dean hadn’t drawn this much in years, and he’d forgotten how much it let him see. People were used to the sight of him with book and pen, Chevy flopped snoozing over his feet. They were used to overlooking him when he was doing that, and now, even while he was apparently something new and untrustworthy, that still held true.
It was sort of a relief. He saw heads tilted and shaken, glances exchanged, the quirk of mouths, and it didn’t have anything to do with him. So he could watch it, and record it, and think.
Turned out that he wasn’t the only one getting the confused and uncomfortable treatment. Everyone was subdued and reduced. Pretty much everyone was suspicious of somebody, and awkward about somebody else, and going out of their way to be loudly, brightly inclusive toward a third.
The thing was, Dean worked out slowly, he wasn’t the only one who’d walked out of the march-lands that day with a bit less faith in people than he’d had in the morning. And there were a hell of a lot of people who had, in that frantic dash for safety, done things they didn’t really want to think they had.
Mark had taken Gwen’s horse and ridden off without stopping to check on her. No one had seen her since, and Mark was very pale and silent. There was a bruise and a cut punched into young Claire’s frail cheekbone that exactly matched the shape of Bela’s signet ring. Poor Andy, who wasn’t really a hunter - spent his time doing everyone else’s weirdest little odd jobs and experimenting (often disastrously) with the distillery - had been roped into it more and more often lately to make up numbers. Every time was meant to be the last time - only it seemed this time it really would be, because his twin Ansem had kicked him right over in his panic, and Andy had barely got out alive.
No one knew if Dean had done something with the angel who’d been shot down, or why he’d freed Gabriel. But he had passed all the tests thrown at him and he’d stuck by Bobby, and they did know that, in a crisis, Gordon would rather save his great-grandfather’s precious knife than help Andy to his feet.
So, yeah. Subdued.
Dean drew Jo a lot, just in little snatches: the turn of a wrist, the fall of hair over her cheek, her shadowed eyes. He was sort of used to having her around, after all, even if she was furious at him, and there’d been a couple of times lately when he’d thought she wasn’t going to make it, one way or another. Jo’s sharp face and soft eyes were one of those things Dean really hoped he’d never have to work out how to lose.
And, huh. Okay, so yes, she was still mad at Dean, but she had the same flat glare for a hell of a lot of other people too, and she barely spoke to anyone. Seemed like she wasn’t doing well.
Dean was having the weirdest dreams.
Sleep became a real bitch. If it hadn’t been for Chevy’s warm weight pressed up against him, her familiar nose nudging cold into his neck when he woke up sweating and gasping, Dean thought he might have had to try doing without it.
If he sometimes thought, in that half-tangible place between sleeping and waking, of the sweet tangy scent of angel and the brush of feathers over his naked back and shoulders, of sliding his arm around a lean, muscled waist that was slicker than it ought to be with sweat… well, he’d only had that for one night. It made no sense that he was still thinking about it.
Dean wasn’t sure what to do with that. So he pushed it aside.
In the second week, Bela thought she saw two demons wafting blackly through the trees beside them when they were out on a hunt. Demons hardly ever worked together, but... Bela? Really not the jumpy see-things-that-aren’t-there type.
Salt and protective sigils were reinforced and re-drawn. The demon trap at the Gates was recut stronger and clearer than ever. Dean grimly enlisted a task force to help rebuild the section of wall that Gabriel had damaged, and the underside of the river culvert and of the Gates were painted to ward against angels too. Anti-possession symbols of every kind were painted onto each hunter’s chest before he or she went outside, adding hours to a simple, routine sweep.
That week, Dean found himself hanging around the Roadhouse a lot, helping Ellen with Bill’s half of the chores. Not that there was anything she couldn’t do herself - if there was anyone Dean knew who wasn’t afraid of hard work, it was Ellen - but, well, he’d been neglecting her and Jo. They sort of deserved better from him.
Ellen gave him a sharp I-can-see-right-through-you look the first time he chopped her firewood for her and carried it in to stack nearly inside the kitchen door; but she said nothing, and two days later, when he was done scrubbing the floor of the outhouse and the outsides of the windows, and had tidied himself up, the table was set for three.
That was sort of welcome. Dean wasn’t really enjoying cooking for one.
Jo didn’t say anything, but she tossed her hair and glared very eloquently. Dean wasn’t suicidal enough to call her on it, but he did take the time to make the hour-long trek out to the base of one of the springs near the wall, where the creamy sweet cicely that Jo was especially fond of always flowered earliest. He left a large handful on Jo’s bench in the kitchen, roots and all, and snuck out very stealthily.
When Jo next saw him, she blacked his eye and storming out, shaking. Well, how was Dean to know Bill had always used to do exactly that, every June?
But Ellen gave him a little smile, sad and tight and warm, and next time he saw Jo she blinked hard a few times, then nodded. And that evening she made pie.
... Dean would never understand girls. Even Jo, who was in many ways as good as a boy.
He dreamed that he was searching, searching frantically. He wasn’t sure what he was searching for, and then he had in his hands a little knitted bootie, a match to the ones Sam had worn when he’d been tiny, only this one was much bigger, and there was only one of it. And Dean’s hands were claws, and they caught and tore at the wool when he tried to be gentle.
He hid it away in the woods, told it to stay put, promised he’d come back for it, and ran, trying to find the other one. Only he couldn’t, it was lost, and when he came back for the first it was deep in silver water, and he couldn’t dive for it, and it was drowning. And his own monstrous hands turned on him and clawed at his face, and he ran for help, ran like a lost kid, looking for the other bootie. It was all his fault - they were meant to be together, meant to be a pair.
There was too much noise, dinning through his head, everyone laughing and singing and joking and shouting far too loud, and he clawed at his ears and roared his protest, couldn’t make words that anyone would understand. He stalked in over the moors, closer and closer, looked down on the Roadhouse nestled in the curve of a bog, too bright and too loud, a party, hurting his eyes and his ears. His arms were long and great like a beast’s, all knotted muscle and claws like fangs. He stormed in, ripping the perfectly crafted doors (so ornate and delicate, nothing like its real doors) and raged, destroying it from the inside. He tore up the benches, savaged the walls, even as he was yelling at himself to stop. And he still couldn’t find what he was looking for.
And he turned on the people there, tearing them to pieces with long sweeps of his claws, blood hot all over his arms, and the noise still wouldn’t stop. His claws and his teeth turned on his own flesh, breaking his body and raging. His limbs and his belly were decaying, body eating itself up in its helpless child-like passion, rot and ruin and rending.
Seriously? What was wrong with a nice warm sex dream, or something?
The third week, the demons came back with a vengeance.
Five of them ambushed a small scouting party. Barnes, who wasn’t really a hunter but who’d got roped in reluctantly at the last minute, was possessed. The demon riding him killed Bela. If it hadn’t been for the nearby demon trap, carved as a backup into the road (and they had all been touched up lately), no one would have made it home.
That night, three more demons charged the Gates, two in their bodily form and a third as black smoke, and the lintel (with its protective markings) was cracked almost through before a panicking Christian could call for reinforcements.
It was worse than it had been a few years back, at the height of their infestation, before the angels had arrived. Hunting was suspended, because everyone who set foot outside the walls was catching glimpses of black smoke out of the corners of their eyes, in the shadows of the trees. One by one, hunters - the front line of their defence - were starting to show signs of demonic influence: getting dreamy, then sullen, then morose, snapping out irrationally at people they loved. The trouble was, right now? Everyone was doing that anyway.
And the thing was. Anti-possession symbols and so on were all very well, but all they did was discourage a demon, and keep it from outright taking control of your body. They could still attack you with hands and claws, still pick you up and fling you into a tree with their freaky object-control powers. And they could still whisper silently inside your head, concentrate all their persuasion on you, until you didn’t even notice you’d drawn that symbol just sloppy enough, on yourself or on someone else, or left the Gates unwarded. And sooner or later, one would. It was only a matter of time before one of them got its sneaky-ass claws into someone deep enough to lay them all open.
They were already falling apart at the seams.
It was a chilly day for mid July, with a harsh breeze coming in off the granite peaks. Dean was hauling the rickety old wood sled with the wobbly runners up to the houses, with only enough split logs stacked on it for Bobby’s place and the Roadhouse. No one had offered to share labour with him to stock up their own woodpile, like they usually would. Not that Dean needed the help. He could do it himself. Screw them anyway.
He looked up, and Jo was on the street ahead. She startled at the sight of him, set her jaw, and slipped away. A bit unexpected - Dean had thought they were up to basic civilities now, but hey, not going to argue. His momentary distraction almost had the sled jolting off its runners on a stone, so it was another half-minute before he realised that she’d been heading away from his and Sam’s house, and that, as she’d turned away, she’d hidden something under her shawl.
He could have called out to her, or hunted her down once he’d off-loaded the wood; but he had a feeling that that would end in a confrontation, and Dean had had just about enough of that to last him a hell of a long time. Besides. If she was lifting something, what about it? There was nothing in that house just now that he could really bring himself to care about.
All things considered, though, he really shouldn’t have been surprised later to receive The Summons. He was crossing the back yard of the Roadhouse when Ellen, churning butter in the sunny corner outside the bedroom window with Chevy and one of the farm dogs snoozing beside her, looked up at Dean and jerked her head sharply.
Far be it from Dean to be backwards in slinking forward. Especially when Ellen was wearing her someone is going to be called to account face.
Then she took one of his sketchbooks out of her skirt, and tossed it down on the iron strut that held up the barrel of the churn. Not one of his recent ones either, of course not. One of the ones from when he’d been a kid. One of those ones.
His first thought was, the hell? Jo had gone snooping around behind his bed?
Then he remembered, with that sickening clench of “oh shit did I really do that,” the sixth glass of Andy’s weird apple spirits last night, all alone in his kitchen with a single candle, brooding over...
And he hadn’t put it away. Because apparently he was a freaking amateur at sneaky.
Ellen was watching his silent freak-out with clear, hard eyes, and her hand hadn’t even faltered in its steady rhythm on the handle.
“Care to explain that, Dean Winchester?”
Only, what could he say? There were years of betrayal in it, either way.
He reached out, impulsively, and stopped himself just short of touching the corner of the notebook. He should have destroyed it, of course he should. But there was Cas in there, and there was Sammy, and they looked happy together.
Sentimental idiot.
Dean reached instinctively for the familiar shape of the amulet against his chest, but of course it was gone. It was with Sam. He cleared his throat, and his voice came out cracked and lame anyway. “Would you believe me if I said that was... a long time ago?”
Chevy opened one eye at the sound of him, and thumped her tail sleepily. Ellen looked much less impressed. “Been more than a long time since your brother was small enough to fit in those knickerbockers. How old were you? Nine?”
“Six, ma’am,” Dean mumbled, words dragged out of him humble and automatic at the sharp, stern crack of her voice. “When I first met him. Six.”
Women, hell. Talk about weird mysterious powers.
Ellen stared at him for long enough that he had to meet her eyes and let them drag him back to when he was six again. Then she observed, “That’s a long time to keep a secret.”
Dean tried to drag his voice down into gruff manliness again. It sounded forced and childish in his own ears, not at all the kind of voice that said hey, trust me, I know what I’m doing.
“Yeah, well. Didn’t see him again after Dad died. Figured no one needed to know. Wasn’t like it could’ve made a difference once...”
“Not what I was worried about,” she cut in, and brought him stuttering to a halt. Then she pushed one loose sleeve back up above her elbow and, in one of her dizzying conversational turns, asked, “You’ve never really paid much mind to any young lady, have you?”
He blinked at her, feeling a bit like the rabbit whose eyes are suddenly dazzled by a lantern being uncovered at night and can’t work out which way it all comes from. “What?” What had that got to do with anything?
“No little infatuations, no calf-eyes.” Dean’s feet seemed determine to shuffle under the burn of that narrowed brown gaze. “No setting your cap, no brawling with other young men over anything in a skirt.”
The scowl was automatic. Not that it was a sensitive subject or anything. Just. What the hell? “It’s always just been - me and Sam.” Great. Now he was sounding defensive. “Not like we ever really needed, you know.” A woman around all the time.“Someone else.” In the house. In Dean’s bed, which would just be weird, because it was his bed, and he’d have to move over, and share the blankets, and... “Cooking and so on. Polishing things.” Or whatever other weird things a woman would want to do around the house. Dean wasn’t very clear on the subject.
He cleared his throat again, and grunted, “Never really thought about it.”
Which was only half a lie. He’d never managed to think about it and like the idea, not once it got past the very abstract “hey, marrying sometime would probably be a good idea, right?” and into the practical “but then I’d have a wife” part.
... Dean had the uncomfortable feeling that Ellen had heard all of that. Even the bits he hadn’t said.
“No,” she said, thoughtful and drawn-out and shrewd like she was reading off the inside of his head. “... No, it’d have to be a hunting woman for you, not some soft domestic hen. So why haven’t you ever put the moves on my Jo, then?”
For the record, Dean did not squeak. Not even a manly whimper. (It didn’t count if you bit your tongue before it got all the way out.) He had no freaking idea where this was going, and if it had been anyone but Ellen he could have glared them down and out of his damn business, but she was looking at him, and she’d just wrong-footed him again and he wasn’t even sure he had enough feet for all the wrong-footing in this conversation, and - Jo? Really?
“Oh, come on,” he protested in a very manly way that did not involve whining. “Jo’s never going to marry until she doesn’t have to feel guilty sending the hunt out without her as soon as she gets knocked up, you know that.”
Ellen’s snort was eloquent. “And you’re such a gentleman that you’ve never even thought about it.”
“No!”
“Not her or any girl?”
Dean was on the home stretch here. Probably. “No. Never even thought about it.”
He bit down on the “can I go now, ma’am?” that wanted to stumble out after, like she was asking him if he was the one who’d gone through the cookie jars in her kitchen.
“Exactly,” Ellen said, incomprehensibly. Then she stopped turning the handle, wiped her hands on the hips of her apron, and leaned forward to rap sharply on the cover of the notebook, eyes dark and serious. “Dean Winchester, look me in the eye and tell me you never laid eyes on that feathery child after he grew his balls.”
Now he was completely lost.
“No! Not...” he stuttered, trying not to think about Cas’ balls, because his mouth was sort of stuck on ‘deny everything’ mode. “Not until,” it helpfully supplied, under the gimlet eyes that had wormed every naughty little secret out of him when he’d been a kid; then it overloaded and shut down in confusion.
But Ellen was already nodding. “Until about eight weeks back, or a little more. Am I right?”
There was something brusquely gentle in her voice, like she was trying to understand. Like he was something to pity. And when did Ellen ever do that, instead of just clipping you around the ear and telling you to fix your own screw-ups then trust you with direly terrifying trust to do it better next time?
The back of Dean’s neck itched. Something was seriously wrong here.
He set his jaw and didn’t say anything.
“I saw the angel we winged the day Bill died,” Ellen said, firm and steady. “And he was the spitting image of what that kid would be, all grown up.”
Dean nodded, one quick jerk of acknowledgement, because if she’d seen that he wasn’t about to deny it. “He’s gone now,” was the best he could do, curt and honest, just to make sure no one went after Cas. “Left when Gabriel did. Won’t see him again.”
There was a weird tremor in his own voice on the last words, and he wasn’t sure where that came from, but he could see from the sharpening of Ellen’s eyes that she’d picked up on it and recruited it to whatever mad theory was spinning about in her head.
“You know who you’ve been putting me in mind of lately, Dean?” she asked, and it wasn’t a question. “Martin, after something started crawling in his window at night. It’s more than just Sam you’ve been moping over. Go home and put angel-proofing and white sand at all your doors and windows, you hear me? I’ll be checking before dark.”
White sand. White sand to keep out...
Hold on, what?
Ellen was staring at him, dark and calculating and sad.
Incubi. Incubi made you irrational, driven by the burn of the monster’s face in your heart. Dean wasn’t irrational. Was he? Had he been? Hold on, was she still stuck on that childhood thing?
“Look,” he tried, and his voice felt strange and desperate in his own throat. “I get that I should have told someone, way back then, but... he wasn’t hurting anyone. And I was worried that Dad would...”
“We don’t hurt children, Dean,” she said, firm and far too steady, and her eyes flicked down for a moment to that notebook again, with something like regret. “But children grow up.”
“There wasn’t -” Dean took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, trying to calm the bewilderingly harsh pounding in his chest. Because, okay, so he’d turned out to be a monster technically, but...“He wasn’t an incubus, Ellen. Just a kid.”
“Okay,” she said, far too easily, like she was waiting for something more.
“Fuck.” He scrubbed one hand viciously over the phantom itch at the back of his neck, and dropped his gaze. There was shame crawling under his skin, sickening and visceral, and he couldn’t work out why. “That was... a long time ago.”
“I know,” she said, gently enough that it really didn’t sound like her, and that wasn’t doing anything to calm the twitchy sense of wrong wrong wrong screaming inside his head. “And time has a way of changing things.” He felt her eyes on his face for another moment; then she stood up and lifted the heavy churn up onto her hip, with barely a grunt. “You keep an eye out for yourself, you hear me now?” she said, brisk and stern and warm, and left him there, more alone than before.
... Incubus. Really?
Incubi were ugly little shitheads, with hair like grey straw and long fragile teeth and wings like an aging bat’s. Sure, their influence made you think that look was the most awesome thing ever, but that wasn’t the same thing as a full-blown illusion. And there wasn’t any question about Cas’ species.
But Ellen knew all that. So what the tiny pig-studded hell did she mean?