Fic: Imperfectly, 2/3 (SPN: Wincest: Sam/Dean)
Title: Imperfectly (Chapter 2 of 3; completed)
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG13 this chapter; NC17 overall
Genre: Plotty Wincest
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Dean
Disclaimer: All the property of people not me.
Wyandotte and Corydon are real places, but all the people and events depicted herein are entirely fictional.
Beta: parenthetical is an amazing, awesome beta of wonder. She has nursed this fic through every stage of creation, polishing and suggesting changes and generally being brilliant. You know this is yours, dear, if you want it.
Summary: We get a little further from perfection each year on the road.
Future fic: 5 years hence. Sam and Dean are still learning how to go on living.
Author's notes: Title from Ani di Franco's song 'Imperfectly'.
The library Sam and Dean visit is modelled on Harrison County Public Library. I owe a debt of thanks to the real librarians there, who were kind enough to respond to my queries about the area in great detail, and were extremely helpful.
Imperfectly: Chapter 1
Imperfectly: Chapter 2
They're on the road by eight the next morning. Dean drives, the Impala running smooth under his hands, and he feels thankful that he at least had time to work over the car before they had to be moving again. Sam sleeps, head lolling and face squashed up against the window. The position tips his scarred cheek up full into the light, and Dean realises that since the wound healed Sam's been careful to sleep the other way whenever possible. He can't do it in the car, though; as long as Dean's driving he can see the ugly gash along the side of his brother's face, twisting his cheek out of shape. Dean never looks at it when Sam can see him, but at times like this he keeps his eyes on it as much as he can, reminding himself.
Dean's stiff from lying in the same position all night, but apart from that he feels pretty fresh. He wants to let Sam sleep, so even when his stomach starts to growl a little he doesn't stop for a break, just keeps driving. After about four hours, Sam finally wakes, jerking out of sleep and staring around wildly for a second until he registers where he is.
'Morning, sleeping beauty, ready for lunch?' They're just passing through a little town, and Dean slows down to find a diner.
Sam stretches as far as he can in the confines of the car, arching his back and extending his arms back behind the seat. The motion pulls his shirt up, exposing a tiny sliver of skin above his waistband.
'Sure thing, man, I could eat a whale.'
Dean rolls his eyes. 'When can you not?' However else the years have changed them, Sam still manages to eat like he's trying to fill up a bottomless pit and yet never puts on so much as an extra ounce. The time he's spent tired and sick these past months has left him skinnier than usual, so it's a relief to see him with a real appetite again, even if it's somewhat mindblowing, watching him shovel his food away. Dean's no picky eater himself, but Sam eats like there's a competition at stake. Not that either one of them is ever likely to shift from their all-you-can-eat metabolism to middle-aged spread: Dean figures the constant adrenalin rush of going from one near-death situation to another is enough to keep them both looking thin and pretty for life.
Thin, anyway.
'Fried chicken!' he says one notch too loudly, and pulls over next to a scruffy little diner.
It's empty except for a couple of old guys nursing their coffee cups and a bored-looking waitress slumped at the counter. She perks up a bit when she sees them come in and hurries over to take their order. She eyes them both up and Dean half-considers flirting with her to pass the time, but then he sees shock and sympathy pass over her face at the sight of Sam's scar and changes his mind. Instead he orders extravagant amounts of grease and coffee, and forgives the woman slightly when he sees that the plate she brings Sam is heaped extra high. Just as well, because Sam really is hungry and vacuums up the meal like he hasn't seen food in weeks. They chat about nothing much while they eat, mostly concentrating on the taste of good fried chicken and biscuits. Eventually the waitress brings over coffee and pie and Dean feels ready to think about the job.
'So, strange fruit, huh? Any ideas on what we're dealing with here?'
Sam stirs another spoonful of sugar into his coffee. 'I'm not sure... not your run-of-the-mill monster, though. The bodies I saw... they hadn't just been killed randomly, there was some kind of purpose behind it.'
'Any idea what?'
'Raising power of some kind, I think, and whatever chooses to get its power that way is planning something pretty nasty. I think we'll need to take this one slowly, Dean; I don't want to walk into something major without getting more than half an idea of what's going on.'
Sam looks up then, smiles at Dean. 'Sorry for waking you last night, man. It could have waited till morning.'
'No problem... I'm glad you woke me.'
Sam's smile broadens and Dean risks a quick squeeze of his fingers under cover of reaching for the sugar.
Sam pulls the roadmap from his duffle and spreads it out across the table, tracing their route. 'We're making good time.'
Dean squints at the map. 'Yeah - we did good, setting off when we did. It's a shame we didn't have a chance to say bye to Jo and the kids before we left, though. That Jordy's one smart little kid - it was fun teaching him.'
'Yeah, you looked like you did a good job.' Sam smiles again, but this time it seems a little forced, and he quickly glances down and away. Dean tries a couple more topics of conversation, but it seems like Sam's in the mood for silence now, so instead he signals for the check and then goes to take a leak, leaving Sam to pay. When he gets back he tosses the car keys at his brother.
'You've had enough beauty sleep, princess. It's my turn to ride easy.'
Sam catches the keys and they head back to the car.
It's gone nine by the time they reach Corydon and they're both pretty tired. Again. Dean wonders if they'll ever bounce back to their old fight - sleep - doitallagain selves, and hopes like fuck they will, because he may be over thirty but that's a long way from being over the hill. Dad never seemed to have any trouble, even when he was much older than Dean is now. Then again, he doesn't need to be reminded how much he's not Dad.
'You figure we need to get to work tonight?' he asks Sam.
His brother purses his lips, considering. 'Not so much. I think if we grab the local papers, maybe get something to eat and quiz a few people, that'll be enough for tonight. Whatever's coming... I get the feeling it's working to a schedule. Nothing's going down tonight.'
They check in at the Super8 - pricier than their usual haunts, but it has wireless and they've saved money staying at the Roadhouse - and head out to find food. Dean's in the mood for a beer, and it's easier to talk to people when they're drinking anyway, so they wind up in a scruffy little bar eating wings. Once they're done, Sam sits at the bar talking to a couple of girls - his scar doesn't seem to put them off, just makes them let their guards down more - and Dean plays a few rounds of pool. The guys at the table are relaxed and easy to talk to, and Dean enjoys himself, but they're not giving out a scrap of information that's useful to him. He wins a couple of games, then decides to call it a night before his newfound friends decide he's hustling them - which he's not, for once - and swings by the bar to extricate Sam.
'Anything?'
Sam shakes his head. 'Nothing. I got the conversation round to weird happenings, tried suggesting girls like them should be careful walking alone in this area, but it didn't seem like they had anything to tell. Maybe I was wrong about this having already started.'
'Guess we can check out the papers tomorrow.'
They head back to the motel and Sam jumps in the shower. He comes back with a towel wrapped around his waist, hair damp and curling at the nape of his neck, and he's so beautiful Dean wants to go down on his knees in front of him. They haven't done... anything like that since Sam was hurt, though, and he's not too sure how it would be received now, so he just heads for the shower himself. By the time he gets back Sam's already asleep, sprawled across the whole of one bed. Normally they sleep together when they're in motels, but when Sam checked them in he took a twin room, so Dean's not sure if he should make Sam budge over. In the end he gets into the other bed, figuring Sam's too out of it to move. It takes a long time to fall asleep.
Next morning, they grab bagels from the lobby to eat in their room, and take advantage of the wireless internet to do a bit of research. Sam's still in a quiet mood, intent on the laptop, looking for anything which might fit the details of his vision. Dean flicks through Dad's journal - augmented now by all the things they've seen or heard of in their own years on the road - looking for some creature or ritual that might demand this kind of killing.
An hour later Sam slams the laptop closed, frustrated.
'Nothing! Local news isn't worth crap: no murders or anything else big enough to show up, nothing that hints at the kind of thing I saw.'
'Dude, maybe it's just a false alarm. No job for us?' Even as he says it Dean knows it's BS. Sam's visions have never sent them in completely the wrong direction, even if they're sometimes so inscrutable that it seems that way until afterwards.
Sam rubs at the bridge of his nose, frowning, and Dean decides enough is enough. 'C'mon man, time for some decent coffee. We can get some fresh air, check out the papers at the diner.'
They end up not in a diner, but a fancy coffee joint where Sam can feed his froofy coffee habit. They comb the local papers, but find nothing. Eventually Dean zones out, mind worrying at the question of why Sam's been so quiet. He's half-listening to the sounds of the morning trade around him when he hears a woman say, 'Well, I think it's shameless! You would've thought they'd have enough of a sense of decency not to put a notice in the paper.'
'The girl was only 15, Susan, have a heart.'
Dean snaps to attention and looks around for the source of the voices. He spots two middle-aged women across the room, tutting over a copy of The Democrat. It's the main local paper, the exact same one that Sam's poring over. Dean grabs it, ignoring Sam's yelp of protest, and leafs through until he finds the 'Births, Deaths and Marriages' section. Given the extreme nature of the deaths in Sam's vision, they'd been looking for news reports, sensational accounts of gory murders, but now Dean's looking with a different eye. It's no wonder they'd missed it before - the notice the women were exclaiming over is no more than a couple of lines:
Brianna Gabriel: b. 28 April, 1997, d. 26 September, 2012, aged 15.
Wyandotte, IN. Rest in Peace.
'Look at this, Sam.' He shoves the page under his brother's nose. 'Fifteen-year-old girl died, next town over, and that's all the paper prints. That seem funny to you?'
Sam squints at the death notice and his face darkens. He drains the last of his coffee and gets to his feet. 'Very funny. I think we need to visit the library.'
The library is Sam's domain, so Dean peels off once they get there, leaving Sam to speak to the librarian at the desk. He spots a cluster of easy-chairs over by the rack of magazines and figures he can go through the papers again, see if there's maybe one here that they didn't see in the coffee shop. Failing that, he can always check out the latest Guns and Ammo. He flops down in one of the chairs and watches Sam nodding and smiling at the librarian, slipping into 'appealing geek' mode like he always does. After a couple of minutes Sam comes over and says, 'I think we should check for a pattern, so I'm going to have a look at the archives. The Local History section's out back, you wanna come?'
'Nah, I'll leave the school work to you, geekboy. I'll just hang out here, maybe speak to a few people. Could be that someone here can give us some more information.'
'Yeah right, Dean. I know you're hoping for a sneaky peek at Vogue. You just sit tight and pick up a few skincare tips while I go and actually do some work.'
Dean flips him the bird and settles down in his chair, prepared for a long wait. Once Sam hits the books there's no telling how long he'll be at it. Flipping through Guns and Ammo, Dean notes there's a new model of the Desert Eagle. Maybe they should think about buying a new pistol. He browses another couple of magazines and then looks around for something else to read - not Vogue, thank you very much, Sam - and meets the eyes of a girl sitting opposite.
She is a girl, not a woman by a long shot, but she's holding American Baby in one hand and the other is curled loosely around her abdomen. Jeez, Dean thinks, she only looks about fifteen. Still, if he didn't get anyone knocked up when he was fifteen it was through pure dumb luck, so he probably shouldn't be surprised.
Fifteen. A thought strikes him and he reaches for the library copy of The Democrat, then glances back at the kid like he's just wanting to be polite.
'Hi,' he says, giving her his best non-threatening smile. It's normally easy enough to make women warm to him, but he wants her to think he's a nice guy, not some perv who macks on little girls.
'Hi,' she says and smiles shyly back.
Dean casts around for something to say next. He never had any trouble talking to girls when he was a kid, but the kind of lines he used to use then are no good in this situation. Plus, it's obviously dumb asking her about school or anything like that, since she's sitting here in the library on a week day and clearly about to enter into the bit of life where you start asking other people about school.
Well, then, the obvious is what he'll talk about.
'Congratulations. When are you due?' he asks, hoping that this isn't a question that's going to make her bust out crying or something. It seems like he's made the right call, because her face lights up.
'The beginning of March,' she says. 'A spring baby.'
March isn't really spring in Dean's book, but he expresses further congratulations and lets himself get drawn into a conversation about whether she wants a boy or a girl, and does it really make any difference, and babycare in general. Eventually he glances down at the newspaper and makes out he's just noticed Brianna's obit.
'God, awful, some fifteen-year-old kid died near here,' he says. It's about the clumsiest opening gambit ever, but he figures it'll at least establish whether the kid's even heard about Brianna.
It does more than that.
The kid's eyes fill with tears and she leans towards Dean. 'Brianna. It's in the paper? An article?'
'Just a death notice,' Dean says, and shows her.
'God,' she says. 'I wonder who put it in? Her parents, I guess, except they seemed like they weren't even going to admit she was dead.'
'Oh?' Dean says softly, trying to draw out more information without sounding like a ghoul.
She swallows, looks up at Dean. 'Brianna was my friend,' she says quietly. 'She was my friend, and something awful happened to her, and nobody seems to care except me. No one will...' - she swallows hard - 'No one will even talk about her.'
She's breathing fast, body tensed as if for flight, and Dean's half-afraid to ask her anything else in case she loses it totally. But he's gonna have to, damn it, because this is the shit he needs. He draws breath to ask her what happened to Brianna, but before he can get the words out the kid's speaking again.
'She was in my year at school. We didn't share any classes - I didn't know her at all before this year - but then, well, we both got pregnant and we kind of got to know each other. Her parents absolutely freaked when she told them, kicked her out of the house and refused to speak to her, and even though my parents took the whole thing a lot more calmly, they weren't exactly pleased. So it was good to have someone who understood, and then it turned out she was a really nice girl anyway. We used to hang out here, the librarian lets us use the adult computers; you can't look up pregnancy stuff on the kids' ones.'
All of this is beside the point to Dean, but he can hear that she needs to say it, probably hasn't had anyone else to say it to, so he just keeps listening.
'She ended up living out on the edge of town, they have some studios there that take you if you're on welfare. She was walking back out there and she just... never made it. They found her body two days later, out in the forest. They say that she hung herself, but she wouldn't have, she couldn't!'
'Sometimes people do crazy things when they're desperate,' Dean says gently.
'She wasn't desperate! She was struggling, sure, thanks to her oh-so-supportive parents, but she was happy to be having a baby! And even if she had been, I don't see how anyone could think she'd done that to herself.'
'Done what?' Dean asks, but he has a horrible feeling he already knows what's coming.
'Slit open her own belly,' the girl hisses, and now she does cry, horrified, gasping sobs.
Dean pats her arm helplessly and looks around wildly for help. He's relieved to see Sam heading back towards him, hands full of Xeroxed copies.
Then he spots the librarian next to his brother, eyes fixed on the girl and a look of fury on her face. Shit, has he got some damage control to do.
Half an hour later Dean's thinking - not for the first time - that there's maybe something in the whole college education thing, because Sam has situation management skills that seem to have passed Dean by entirely. They've faced hysterical people crying about death nearly as often as they've faced the things that do the killing, but give Dean a choice between a gun and a box of tissues and he'll take the gun any time. It's a miracle to him how Sam managed to size up the situation in under a minute, calm the girl - who turns out to be called Paige, well done Dean for bothering to ask - and convince the librarian that his brother's not some kind of evil, girl-molesting freak.
They're helped with this last one by the fact that, unlike some of the librarians Dean's encountered, Ms. Pennington seems more interested in making sure Paige is OK than in avenging the disturbance to her library. When he comments on this to Sam, his brother rolls his eyes and says, 'Well, duh', but having been the victim of more than one righteous smiting by library staff in the past, Dean's still vaguely shellshocked.
Not only has the librarian not called the cops on them, she's provided Sam with a sheaf of information on everything from local family history and folk tales of the area to gory murder reports, which Sam proceeds to spread out across every available surface the second they get back to their room. Normally there's a limit to what you can ask for before people start to look at you funny and enquire exactly what it was you were researching again, but that doesn't seem to have been a factor here.
'Dude, what did you tell her? Was the chick part of the Demon Hunters' Library Association or something?'
'I told her I was doing a thesis on memory and culture, but I don't think she cared, to be honest. She didn't ask many questions about why I wanted the information, just kept bringing stuff out. Their local history library rocks! It has its own building and everything!' Sam's eyes light up at the memory.
Dean shakes his head in despair. Only his dork brother could get that excited about a library.
'You actually find anything useful in that lot, or are you too busy coming in your pants about the joys of research?'
'I dunno... much as I hate to admit it, I think your little library buddy's story might be a better place to start looking. I did find another report of a young girl being murdered in this area - about the same age - but that was back in 2004.'
'Same kind of deal?' Dean asks.
'Difficult to tell. It's like Brianna, no big story, just a couple of lines. I might not have spotted it at all if the librarian hadn't mentioned it. So - two potentially linked deaths. But the other girl was cremated - Ms. Pennington knew that much - and it's going to be a lot harder to ask questions about something that happened eight years ago.' Sam pauses, considering.
'A lot damn harder,' Dean decides. 'I say we find out a bit more about Brianna and come back to looking into this other kid's death if we have to.'
Sam nods and hauls himself up off the bed. 'Morgue, parents, place of death?'
'Food first,' Dean corrects. 'Then we can start digging around for more information.'
Dean's stomach is growling - too much coffee and no cooked food - and he's not about to let Sam start trailing around town without eating something more than half-stale motel bagels. Anyway, they've got plenty of leads now - how hard can it be to dig up some real information?
Damn hard, turns out to be the answer, because nobody whatsoever seems to want to talk to them about what happened to Brianna. They try talking their way into her parents' house, but her mother takes a horrified look at Sam's face and shoots a mistrustful one at Dean's, before hissing, 'Haven't people like you brought my family enough trouble?' and slamming the door shut. Often that kind of reaction presages long, information-rich rants, but in this case the door stays shut. Enquiries among the neighbours don't bring them much more, except that it becomes clear that 'people like you' is less a useful pointer towards potential murderers and more to do with the typical evangelical reaction to good-looking young men who probably get teenage girls pregnant.
The morgue staff are hostile, and the morgue itself is grim. The scent of old blood and disinfectant reminds Dean queasily of the days and nights he spent at the hospital, wondering whether Sam was going to wake up and how he would look him in the eye when he did. Looking at dead bodies is never exactly the fun part of their job, and Brianna's is particularly bad. The slash across her abdomen hasn't touched her belly, as he had expected from Paige's account - it's lower, criss-crossing her pelvis. Her hands are cut up too, marked where she obviously tried to protect herself, and her face is so disfigured from the strangulation that Dean doubts her friends would recognise her now. Only her feet and legs are unmarked: white and perfect. Looking at the body tells Dean that Sam's right that they're dealing with some sick evil, but apart from that it doesn't give them any new information.
They end up driving disconsolately around in the rain, looking for the place where Brianna's body was found. The police have proved strangely intransigent when it comes to giving strangers details of their murder reports, and 'in the woods' isn't really giving them enough to go on.
On their fourth circuit of the outskirts of town, Dean suddenly spots Paige standing at a bus stop, looking wet and miserable. After the scene in the library it had seemed unwise to press her any further, but her reappearance now feels like a gift. He pulls the car over.
'Want a lift somewhere?'
Paige gets in the car without a second of hesitation, and Dean feels like giving her a lecture on the insanity of driving off with strange men when her friend's just been butchered. That would be a bit self-defeating, though. He bites his lip and checks they've got no weapons on view instead.
'I'm sorry I freaked out in the library,' Paige says. 'I guess I'm a bit out of control at the moment - hormones.'
'Paige,' Sam says gently. 'Your friend just died, you have no need to apologise for getting upset.'
'I shouldn't be getting upset,' Paige says, her voice unsteady. 'I should be getting angry.'
'Angry?' Sam asks, and then, 'Say, Paige, d'you have somewhere you need to be right away? You seem like you could use someone to talk to, and I for one feel like it would be easier to concentrate on talking if I had some food inside me.'
For a minute Dean's confused - why interrupt when it sounds like she's just about to get onto telling them something useful? - but then he realises that quizzing the kid about a bloody murder while she's trapped in the car with them might not be the best way to make her feel like she's safe. Besides, Paige is too thin - all birdlike bones and scrawny face around her rounded belly and boobs - and she could probably use a decent meal or three.
'Sammy-boy here's always hungry,' he says. 'You know a place round here we can talk while we eat?'
They end up in a little family pizza joint, pretty much empty this early on a weeknight. The Italian waitress clearly shares Dean's opinion of Paige's need for food, because she brings them plates of antipasti on the house and urges the girl to eat. She doesn't seem to think it's strange that two grown men should be eating with a fifteen-year-old girl, and after a while Dean realises that she's assumed they're family. Paige does look a little like him - green eyes, at least - and when you think that il Colosso is his brother it's not such a stretch of the imagination that people might mistake her for his sister. Hell, thinking about it, she's young enough that she could be his goddamn daughter.
It seems as if Paige has forgotten the emotion she felt in the car; she chatters on to them both quite freely, talking about her pregnancy and her hopes of getting an apartment for her and the baby and maybe going back to school someday.
'It's so cool that the first thing you said to me was "congratulations",' she says to Dean. 'Most people are all "oh, sorry" and "are you going to keep the baby?" Or else they look at me like I'm some kind of whore and ask me whether I know who the father is. You just... treated me like a person.'
Dean shifts in his seat, embarrassed.
'Well, we're not so much about the judging people. You're pregnant, you're happy, your kid won't have any weirder a life than most people.'
Sam shoots him a look before agreeing, 'Yeah, anyone can see you're gonna be a good mom.'
He regards Paige seriously from under his bangs for a moment, then applies himself to his plate of pasta once more.
The conversation lulls until the waitress brings them coffee, hot milk and biscotti - 'Mangia! Mangia!' - and presses a glass of some kind of sweet liqueur on Sam and Dean. Finally there's no way to ignore the real reason they're there any longer.
'Paige?' Dean says quietly. 'When you said you should be angry about Brianna, what did you mean?'
As soon as he asks the question he realises that Paige hadn't forgotten about the conversation in the car at all, because the look of anger and pain which is naked on her face is the same look that's been lurking beneath the surface all through the meal.
'Because of what I said,' she answers. 'There's no way that Brianna could have killed herself. It's obvious she was murdered, but nobody here seems to care. I mean - I know neither of us are exactly poster girls for the new America, but I thought all dead girls were straight-A students by default. Some crazy fucker's walking around out there and everyone's just happy to think she put that rope around her neck herself.' Paige twists her napkin in her hands, eyes filled with tears.
'We care, Paige.' Sam's voice is hard. 'There's a chance we can find out who did it, but we need your help. We need to know more about Brianna, about exactly what happened to her. Do you think you can do that?'
Paige swallows and nods. 'Brianna was my friend. If you can find out the truth, I owe her that at least.'
By the time they've finished talking to Paige and driven her home it's late, and Dean worries that they might be greeted by another set of angry parents. The lights are out at the house they pull up at, though, and when he asks Paige if her folks will be OK with her not having checked in she gives him a look that lets him know just how much that isn't an issue. He hopes she gets her own place soon.
Among the things she's told them is the exact place Brianna's body was found. It turns out it's not in Corydon itself, but out in the deeper woods over by Leavenworth. They drive over there without discussing it both of them feel Sam's vision hanging over them, a cold certainty that they haven't seen the worst yet, not by a long way. Maybe if they can do the job quick enough they won't have to.
Remembering Brianna's body, broken and bruised, Dean hopes like hell that they won't have to see the worst.
The clearing where Brianna was killed is pretty deep into the woods, deep enough that Dean wonders how the fuck she was found at all. The trees are dark and foreboding, oak and maple, and they look a sight older than most of the forest around here. There's no way anyone could believe that a fifteen-year-old girl would come out here to kill herself, even without the slashed belly and defence marks to show them that this was murder. This thing might be bigger than one evil fucker of a demon or monster, big like Burkitsville big, because the way nobody aside from Paige seems able to see what's gone down says that something's got most of these people in thrall.
In which case, let's play it cool, Dean-o, because you've let yourself walk into enough fucked-up situations lately.
He puts his hand to the comforting solidity of the gun nestled in his jacket, and shoots Sam a look to let him know he needs to do the same. They prowl around the clearing, looking for anything that might tell them more than 'something evil happened here'.
It's easy enough to see where Brianna's body was, cut end of a rope still hanging from the branch of a tree. It's new nylon rope, the kind you could easily buy in Wal-Mart, and Dean figures that whatever they're dealing with, it's probably not the primordial creature type of evil. That just makes him even more sure that Corydon's mysterious blindness to 'evil fuckers stalking your neighbourhood' is not just down to the failures of the Indiana school system.
At first it seems like the rope's the only clue, everything else obliterated by the rain of the last few days, but Dean can feel the weight of evil pressing down around him, residue from a helluva nasty working. Finally he spots something on the opposite side of the clearing, low down on one of the trees.
'Sammy!' he calls quietly. 'What do you make of this?'
Sam bends to look at the mark Dean's seen, a crude carving in the bark of the tree. The details are almost obscured by moss, but it's still possible to make out a crude rectangle next to a sort of cross. Sam leans in closer, and then sucks his breath in sharply.
'Recognise this?'
'Yes... maybe... I've seen it recently, but I'm not sure where. I think we need to head back to the motel, do some more research.'
'Who woulda thought it,' Dean says, and rolls his eyes, but it feels good to be getting somewhere at last. If he's honest, the fact that getting somewhere involves getting out of the dark, wet woods and going back to a warm motel room has its appeal, too. He may be used to hanging out in cold and creepy places, but that doesn't mean it's his number one choice for a Friday night.
As soon as they get back to the motel, Sam shoves a handful of papers at Dean and starts leafing through a pile of his own. Dean dutifully starts looking through, searching for anything which resembles the symbol he'd found. Half an hour and innumerable local newspaper reports later, he's reconsidering the notion that being in a warm motel doing research is preferable to the gloomy woods side of the gig.
'Hynan!' Sam says suddenly.
'Never had one,' Dean can't resist saying, even though he knows Sam's found something. 'Not of my own, anyway.' He smirks at his brother.
Sam heaves a long-suffering sigh and ignores the comment.
'Hynan,' he says again. 'He was some kind of local worthy back in the Fifties - he endowed a couple of the schools. Apparently he was an ancient history enthusiast, only for enthusiast read obsessive. He wrote a couple of books on the Mayan civilisation, although reading between the lines it seems like his ideas were pretty far out: it says here one of the books sparked a bit of controversy.'
Sam stares into space for a moment, with an expression that Dean identifies as 'research stoned'.
'Anyway - ' he prompts, and Sam refocuses with a start.
'Anyway, Hynan was really into the idea that this year was majorly significant: it's supposed to herald the end of a calendar cycle and the end of the world. It also coincides with a transit of Venus, which was really important to the Mayan calendar. And guess how they represented Venus?'
Sam taps the paper, and Dean's not especially surprised to see a symbol which is recognisably the same as the one they'd found on the tree, if a lot more ornate.
'So, what? This Hynan dude's decided he needs to cue up a few blood sacrifices for the end of days?'
'Man, I hope not. He's been dead for sixty years - this is his obituary.'
'Could be his ghost working. If he was as obsessed as you say, maybe he just couldn't rest knowing he was missing out on the big finale?'
'Dean, you said it yourself, it isn't something supernatural that killed Brianna, unless Wal-Mart have branched out into serving the other world. Whoever it is, they're definitely raising power - I could feel that in the vision, not to mention the stink of it all round that clearing.'
'So we find out who it is that's doing it, and we shoot the fucker.'
Sam gives him a look that says 'not that simple, buddy', and Dean sighs.
It would be so much easier if this was a salt and burn gig, or even if they were dealing with some pretty hardcore creature like a vampire. Dean kind of misses the 'kill everything in sight' days: more and more they seem to be running up against the kind of nasty that doesn't have the courtesy to be undead. When it's some human there's always research, and sneaking around looking for amulets, and a lot of other crap that ends up being just about as dangerous and illegal as the killing things option.
'What, then?' Dean demanded. 'If it's not Hynan, who else would've known all this Mayan mumbo-jumbo?'
'Well, anyone who came within shouting distance of Hynan, by the sound of it. It seems like he was a bit of a bore. But that was sixty years ago - I doubt there's anyone around who can remember him. Not that's fit enough to be abducting young girls, at any rate. But he wrote books, remember, and he left all his notes to the library here when he died.'
'So we check out who's been reading up on Hynan and we've got our man? How do we deal with him once we get that far?'
Sam gnaws at his lip. 'It's hard to be sure. I'm not too up on Mayan mythology, and whoever it is is using some kind of perversion of the original ideas anyway. But if we're dealing with someone raising power - a person - they'll need somewhere to focus that power. I have a few ideas about what they could be using, but I'll need to read up a bit more.'
He flips open the lid of the laptop and gets to work. Dean regards him for a few minutes and then starts setting out their weapons to clean.
'Like to give me any hints on what we'll be needing tomorrow, geekboy?' He starts on cleaning his favourite pistol, metal heavy and reassuring in his hands.
It strikes him that most people wouldn't find this scene so familiar and comforting. Then again, they're not most people.
It's late by the time Dean's gotten all the weapons primed to his satisfaction. Sam flakes out about half an hour before, after suggesting they take the rock salt rounds along just in case Hynan does decide to make an appearance. Dean checks through their arsenal once more, then uses the can before stripping down for bed.
There's no question of sleeping alone tonight - Sam's covered the other bed with Xeroxes and scrawled notes, just the way Dad used to do his research. Dean hesitates for a second before crawling in next to Sam, feeling oddly nervous. Between illness and single beds and being in places where they had to be watching their backs, it's been a while since they curled up together as a matter of course. It's always felt like some kind of crazy miracle that Sam wanted him there at all and now, seeing Sam turned away to hide his scar, it doesn't seem like Dean's earned the right.
'Come on, Dean,' he mutters to himself. 'What are you, some kind of fucking pussy?'
It's cold standing there in nothing but t-shirt and shorts, so he quashes his uncertainty and crawls into bed.
Sam's sprawled diagonally across the bed, hogging the space like he always does, body heavy and slack with sleep. He radiates warmth, and Dean curls up against his back and soaks it up. His brother shifts slightly, and Dean feels the rounded curve of his ass through the thin fabric of their shorts. His cock swells in response, and he wriggles until he lies flush with Sam, cock resting at the dip where his spine curves in and out to his ass. He aches to move against his brother, to put his lips to the curve of Sam's neck and kiss and suck until Sam whimpers and moans, but Sam's sleeping. He needs his sleep, they both do if they're going after some crazy sorcerer with a fetish for stringing up little girls. Dean checks for the gun under his pillow and forces his mind to blankness. He's got Sammy's back: that's enough.
Chapter 3
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG13 this chapter; NC17 overall
Genre: Plotty Wincest
Pairing/Characters: Sam/Dean
Disclaimer: All the property of people not me.
Wyandotte and Corydon are real places, but all the people and events depicted herein are entirely fictional.
Beta: parenthetical is an amazing, awesome beta of wonder. She has nursed this fic through every stage of creation, polishing and suggesting changes and generally being brilliant. You know this is yours, dear, if you want it.
Summary: We get a little further from perfection each year on the road.
Future fic: 5 years hence. Sam and Dean are still learning how to go on living.
Author's notes: Title from Ani di Franco's song 'Imperfectly'.
The library Sam and Dean visit is modelled on Harrison County Public Library. I owe a debt of thanks to the real librarians there, who were kind enough to respond to my queries about the area in great detail, and were extremely helpful.
Imperfectly: Chapter 1
Imperfectly: Chapter 2
They're on the road by eight the next morning. Dean drives, the Impala running smooth under his hands, and he feels thankful that he at least had time to work over the car before they had to be moving again. Sam sleeps, head lolling and face squashed up against the window. The position tips his scarred cheek up full into the light, and Dean realises that since the wound healed Sam's been careful to sleep the other way whenever possible. He can't do it in the car, though; as long as Dean's driving he can see the ugly gash along the side of his brother's face, twisting his cheek out of shape. Dean never looks at it when Sam can see him, but at times like this he keeps his eyes on it as much as he can, reminding himself.
Dean's stiff from lying in the same position all night, but apart from that he feels pretty fresh. He wants to let Sam sleep, so even when his stomach starts to growl a little he doesn't stop for a break, just keeps driving. After about four hours, Sam finally wakes, jerking out of sleep and staring around wildly for a second until he registers where he is.
'Morning, sleeping beauty, ready for lunch?' They're just passing through a little town, and Dean slows down to find a diner.
Sam stretches as far as he can in the confines of the car, arching his back and extending his arms back behind the seat. The motion pulls his shirt up, exposing a tiny sliver of skin above his waistband.
'Sure thing, man, I could eat a whale.'
Dean rolls his eyes. 'When can you not?' However else the years have changed them, Sam still manages to eat like he's trying to fill up a bottomless pit and yet never puts on so much as an extra ounce. The time he's spent tired and sick these past months has left him skinnier than usual, so it's a relief to see him with a real appetite again, even if it's somewhat mindblowing, watching him shovel his food away. Dean's no picky eater himself, but Sam eats like there's a competition at stake. Not that either one of them is ever likely to shift from their all-you-can-eat metabolism to middle-aged spread: Dean figures the constant adrenalin rush of going from one near-death situation to another is enough to keep them both looking thin and pretty for life.
Thin, anyway.
'Fried chicken!' he says one notch too loudly, and pulls over next to a scruffy little diner.
It's empty except for a couple of old guys nursing their coffee cups and a bored-looking waitress slumped at the counter. She perks up a bit when she sees them come in and hurries over to take their order. She eyes them both up and Dean half-considers flirting with her to pass the time, but then he sees shock and sympathy pass over her face at the sight of Sam's scar and changes his mind. Instead he orders extravagant amounts of grease and coffee, and forgives the woman slightly when he sees that the plate she brings Sam is heaped extra high. Just as well, because Sam really is hungry and vacuums up the meal like he hasn't seen food in weeks. They chat about nothing much while they eat, mostly concentrating on the taste of good fried chicken and biscuits. Eventually the waitress brings over coffee and pie and Dean feels ready to think about the job.
'So, strange fruit, huh? Any ideas on what we're dealing with here?'
Sam stirs another spoonful of sugar into his coffee. 'I'm not sure... not your run-of-the-mill monster, though. The bodies I saw... they hadn't just been killed randomly, there was some kind of purpose behind it.'
'Any idea what?'
'Raising power of some kind, I think, and whatever chooses to get its power that way is planning something pretty nasty. I think we'll need to take this one slowly, Dean; I don't want to walk into something major without getting more than half an idea of what's going on.'
Sam looks up then, smiles at Dean. 'Sorry for waking you last night, man. It could have waited till morning.'
'No problem... I'm glad you woke me.'
Sam's smile broadens and Dean risks a quick squeeze of his fingers under cover of reaching for the sugar.
Sam pulls the roadmap from his duffle and spreads it out across the table, tracing their route. 'We're making good time.'
Dean squints at the map. 'Yeah - we did good, setting off when we did. It's a shame we didn't have a chance to say bye to Jo and the kids before we left, though. That Jordy's one smart little kid - it was fun teaching him.'
'Yeah, you looked like you did a good job.' Sam smiles again, but this time it seems a little forced, and he quickly glances down and away. Dean tries a couple more topics of conversation, but it seems like Sam's in the mood for silence now, so instead he signals for the check and then goes to take a leak, leaving Sam to pay. When he gets back he tosses the car keys at his brother.
'You've had enough beauty sleep, princess. It's my turn to ride easy.'
Sam catches the keys and they head back to the car.
It's gone nine by the time they reach Corydon and they're both pretty tired. Again. Dean wonders if they'll ever bounce back to their old fight - sleep - doitallagain selves, and hopes like fuck they will, because he may be over thirty but that's a long way from being over the hill. Dad never seemed to have any trouble, even when he was much older than Dean is now. Then again, he doesn't need to be reminded how much he's not Dad.
'You figure we need to get to work tonight?' he asks Sam.
His brother purses his lips, considering. 'Not so much. I think if we grab the local papers, maybe get something to eat and quiz a few people, that'll be enough for tonight. Whatever's coming... I get the feeling it's working to a schedule. Nothing's going down tonight.'
They check in at the Super8 - pricier than their usual haunts, but it has wireless and they've saved money staying at the Roadhouse - and head out to find food. Dean's in the mood for a beer, and it's easier to talk to people when they're drinking anyway, so they wind up in a scruffy little bar eating wings. Once they're done, Sam sits at the bar talking to a couple of girls - his scar doesn't seem to put them off, just makes them let their guards down more - and Dean plays a few rounds of pool. The guys at the table are relaxed and easy to talk to, and Dean enjoys himself, but they're not giving out a scrap of information that's useful to him. He wins a couple of games, then decides to call it a night before his newfound friends decide he's hustling them - which he's not, for once - and swings by the bar to extricate Sam.
'Anything?'
Sam shakes his head. 'Nothing. I got the conversation round to weird happenings, tried suggesting girls like them should be careful walking alone in this area, but it didn't seem like they had anything to tell. Maybe I was wrong about this having already started.'
'Guess we can check out the papers tomorrow.'
They head back to the motel and Sam jumps in the shower. He comes back with a towel wrapped around his waist, hair damp and curling at the nape of his neck, and he's so beautiful Dean wants to go down on his knees in front of him. They haven't done... anything like that since Sam was hurt, though, and he's not too sure how it would be received now, so he just heads for the shower himself. By the time he gets back Sam's already asleep, sprawled across the whole of one bed. Normally they sleep together when they're in motels, but when Sam checked them in he took a twin room, so Dean's not sure if he should make Sam budge over. In the end he gets into the other bed, figuring Sam's too out of it to move. It takes a long time to fall asleep.
Next morning, they grab bagels from the lobby to eat in their room, and take advantage of the wireless internet to do a bit of research. Sam's still in a quiet mood, intent on the laptop, looking for anything which might fit the details of his vision. Dean flicks through Dad's journal - augmented now by all the things they've seen or heard of in their own years on the road - looking for some creature or ritual that might demand this kind of killing.
An hour later Sam slams the laptop closed, frustrated.
'Nothing! Local news isn't worth crap: no murders or anything else big enough to show up, nothing that hints at the kind of thing I saw.'
'Dude, maybe it's just a false alarm. No job for us?' Even as he says it Dean knows it's BS. Sam's visions have never sent them in completely the wrong direction, even if they're sometimes so inscrutable that it seems that way until afterwards.
Sam rubs at the bridge of his nose, frowning, and Dean decides enough is enough. 'C'mon man, time for some decent coffee. We can get some fresh air, check out the papers at the diner.'
They end up not in a diner, but a fancy coffee joint where Sam can feed his froofy coffee habit. They comb the local papers, but find nothing. Eventually Dean zones out, mind worrying at the question of why Sam's been so quiet. He's half-listening to the sounds of the morning trade around him when he hears a woman say, 'Well, I think it's shameless! You would've thought they'd have enough of a sense of decency not to put a notice in the paper.'
'The girl was only 15, Susan, have a heart.'
Dean snaps to attention and looks around for the source of the voices. He spots two middle-aged women across the room, tutting over a copy of The Democrat. It's the main local paper, the exact same one that Sam's poring over. Dean grabs it, ignoring Sam's yelp of protest, and leafs through until he finds the 'Births, Deaths and Marriages' section. Given the extreme nature of the deaths in Sam's vision, they'd been looking for news reports, sensational accounts of gory murders, but now Dean's looking with a different eye. It's no wonder they'd missed it before - the notice the women were exclaiming over is no more than a couple of lines:
Brianna Gabriel: b. 28 April, 1997, d. 26 September, 2012, aged 15.
Wyandotte, IN. Rest in Peace.
'Look at this, Sam.' He shoves the page under his brother's nose. 'Fifteen-year-old girl died, next town over, and that's all the paper prints. That seem funny to you?'
Sam squints at the death notice and his face darkens. He drains the last of his coffee and gets to his feet. 'Very funny. I think we need to visit the library.'
The library is Sam's domain, so Dean peels off once they get there, leaving Sam to speak to the librarian at the desk. He spots a cluster of easy-chairs over by the rack of magazines and figures he can go through the papers again, see if there's maybe one here that they didn't see in the coffee shop. Failing that, he can always check out the latest Guns and Ammo. He flops down in one of the chairs and watches Sam nodding and smiling at the librarian, slipping into 'appealing geek' mode like he always does. After a couple of minutes Sam comes over and says, 'I think we should check for a pattern, so I'm going to have a look at the archives. The Local History section's out back, you wanna come?'
'Nah, I'll leave the school work to you, geekboy. I'll just hang out here, maybe speak to a few people. Could be that someone here can give us some more information.'
'Yeah right, Dean. I know you're hoping for a sneaky peek at Vogue. You just sit tight and pick up a few skincare tips while I go and actually do some work.'
Dean flips him the bird and settles down in his chair, prepared for a long wait. Once Sam hits the books there's no telling how long he'll be at it. Flipping through Guns and Ammo, Dean notes there's a new model of the Desert Eagle. Maybe they should think about buying a new pistol. He browses another couple of magazines and then looks around for something else to read - not Vogue, thank you very much, Sam - and meets the eyes of a girl sitting opposite.
She is a girl, not a woman by a long shot, but she's holding American Baby in one hand and the other is curled loosely around her abdomen. Jeez, Dean thinks, she only looks about fifteen. Still, if he didn't get anyone knocked up when he was fifteen it was through pure dumb luck, so he probably shouldn't be surprised.
Fifteen. A thought strikes him and he reaches for the library copy of The Democrat, then glances back at the kid like he's just wanting to be polite.
'Hi,' he says, giving her his best non-threatening smile. It's normally easy enough to make women warm to him, but he wants her to think he's a nice guy, not some perv who macks on little girls.
'Hi,' she says and smiles shyly back.
Dean casts around for something to say next. He never had any trouble talking to girls when he was a kid, but the kind of lines he used to use then are no good in this situation. Plus, it's obviously dumb asking her about school or anything like that, since she's sitting here in the library on a week day and clearly about to enter into the bit of life where you start asking other people about school.
Well, then, the obvious is what he'll talk about.
'Congratulations. When are you due?' he asks, hoping that this isn't a question that's going to make her bust out crying or something. It seems like he's made the right call, because her face lights up.
'The beginning of March,' she says. 'A spring baby.'
March isn't really spring in Dean's book, but he expresses further congratulations and lets himself get drawn into a conversation about whether she wants a boy or a girl, and does it really make any difference, and babycare in general. Eventually he glances down at the newspaper and makes out he's just noticed Brianna's obit.
'God, awful, some fifteen-year-old kid died near here,' he says. It's about the clumsiest opening gambit ever, but he figures it'll at least establish whether the kid's even heard about Brianna.
It does more than that.
The kid's eyes fill with tears and she leans towards Dean. 'Brianna. It's in the paper? An article?'
'Just a death notice,' Dean says, and shows her.
'God,' she says. 'I wonder who put it in? Her parents, I guess, except they seemed like they weren't even going to admit she was dead.'
'Oh?' Dean says softly, trying to draw out more information without sounding like a ghoul.
She swallows, looks up at Dean. 'Brianna was my friend,' she says quietly. 'She was my friend, and something awful happened to her, and nobody seems to care except me. No one will...' - she swallows hard - 'No one will even talk about her.'
She's breathing fast, body tensed as if for flight, and Dean's half-afraid to ask her anything else in case she loses it totally. But he's gonna have to, damn it, because this is the shit he needs. He draws breath to ask her what happened to Brianna, but before he can get the words out the kid's speaking again.
'She was in my year at school. We didn't share any classes - I didn't know her at all before this year - but then, well, we both got pregnant and we kind of got to know each other. Her parents absolutely freaked when she told them, kicked her out of the house and refused to speak to her, and even though my parents took the whole thing a lot more calmly, they weren't exactly pleased. So it was good to have someone who understood, and then it turned out she was a really nice girl anyway. We used to hang out here, the librarian lets us use the adult computers; you can't look up pregnancy stuff on the kids' ones.'
All of this is beside the point to Dean, but he can hear that she needs to say it, probably hasn't had anyone else to say it to, so he just keeps listening.
'She ended up living out on the edge of town, they have some studios there that take you if you're on welfare. She was walking back out there and she just... never made it. They found her body two days later, out in the forest. They say that she hung herself, but she wouldn't have, she couldn't!'
'Sometimes people do crazy things when they're desperate,' Dean says gently.
'She wasn't desperate! She was struggling, sure, thanks to her oh-so-supportive parents, but she was happy to be having a baby! And even if she had been, I don't see how anyone could think she'd done that to herself.'
'Done what?' Dean asks, but he has a horrible feeling he already knows what's coming.
'Slit open her own belly,' the girl hisses, and now she does cry, horrified, gasping sobs.
Dean pats her arm helplessly and looks around wildly for help. He's relieved to see Sam heading back towards him, hands full of Xeroxed copies.
Then he spots the librarian next to his brother, eyes fixed on the girl and a look of fury on her face. Shit, has he got some damage control to do.
Half an hour later Dean's thinking - not for the first time - that there's maybe something in the whole college education thing, because Sam has situation management skills that seem to have passed Dean by entirely. They've faced hysterical people crying about death nearly as often as they've faced the things that do the killing, but give Dean a choice between a gun and a box of tissues and he'll take the gun any time. It's a miracle to him how Sam managed to size up the situation in under a minute, calm the girl - who turns out to be called Paige, well done Dean for bothering to ask - and convince the librarian that his brother's not some kind of evil, girl-molesting freak.
They're helped with this last one by the fact that, unlike some of the librarians Dean's encountered, Ms. Pennington seems more interested in making sure Paige is OK than in avenging the disturbance to her library. When he comments on this to Sam, his brother rolls his eyes and says, 'Well, duh', but having been the victim of more than one righteous smiting by library staff in the past, Dean's still vaguely shellshocked.
Not only has the librarian not called the cops on them, she's provided Sam with a sheaf of information on everything from local family history and folk tales of the area to gory murder reports, which Sam proceeds to spread out across every available surface the second they get back to their room. Normally there's a limit to what you can ask for before people start to look at you funny and enquire exactly what it was you were researching again, but that doesn't seem to have been a factor here.
'Dude, what did you tell her? Was the chick part of the Demon Hunters' Library Association or something?'
'I told her I was doing a thesis on memory and culture, but I don't think she cared, to be honest. She didn't ask many questions about why I wanted the information, just kept bringing stuff out. Their local history library rocks! It has its own building and everything!' Sam's eyes light up at the memory.
Dean shakes his head in despair. Only his dork brother could get that excited about a library.
'You actually find anything useful in that lot, or are you too busy coming in your pants about the joys of research?'
'I dunno... much as I hate to admit it, I think your little library buddy's story might be a better place to start looking. I did find another report of a young girl being murdered in this area - about the same age - but that was back in 2004.'
'Same kind of deal?' Dean asks.
'Difficult to tell. It's like Brianna, no big story, just a couple of lines. I might not have spotted it at all if the librarian hadn't mentioned it. So - two potentially linked deaths. But the other girl was cremated - Ms. Pennington knew that much - and it's going to be a lot harder to ask questions about something that happened eight years ago.' Sam pauses, considering.
'A lot damn harder,' Dean decides. 'I say we find out a bit more about Brianna and come back to looking into this other kid's death if we have to.'
Sam nods and hauls himself up off the bed. 'Morgue, parents, place of death?'
'Food first,' Dean corrects. 'Then we can start digging around for more information.'
Dean's stomach is growling - too much coffee and no cooked food - and he's not about to let Sam start trailing around town without eating something more than half-stale motel bagels. Anyway, they've got plenty of leads now - how hard can it be to dig up some real information?
Damn hard, turns out to be the answer, because nobody whatsoever seems to want to talk to them about what happened to Brianna. They try talking their way into her parents' house, but her mother takes a horrified look at Sam's face and shoots a mistrustful one at Dean's, before hissing, 'Haven't people like you brought my family enough trouble?' and slamming the door shut. Often that kind of reaction presages long, information-rich rants, but in this case the door stays shut. Enquiries among the neighbours don't bring them much more, except that it becomes clear that 'people like you' is less a useful pointer towards potential murderers and more to do with the typical evangelical reaction to good-looking young men who probably get teenage girls pregnant.
The morgue staff are hostile, and the morgue itself is grim. The scent of old blood and disinfectant reminds Dean queasily of the days and nights he spent at the hospital, wondering whether Sam was going to wake up and how he would look him in the eye when he did. Looking at dead bodies is never exactly the fun part of their job, and Brianna's is particularly bad. The slash across her abdomen hasn't touched her belly, as he had expected from Paige's account - it's lower, criss-crossing her pelvis. Her hands are cut up too, marked where she obviously tried to protect herself, and her face is so disfigured from the strangulation that Dean doubts her friends would recognise her now. Only her feet and legs are unmarked: white and perfect. Looking at the body tells Dean that Sam's right that they're dealing with some sick evil, but apart from that it doesn't give them any new information.
They end up driving disconsolately around in the rain, looking for the place where Brianna's body was found. The police have proved strangely intransigent when it comes to giving strangers details of their murder reports, and 'in the woods' isn't really giving them enough to go on.
On their fourth circuit of the outskirts of town, Dean suddenly spots Paige standing at a bus stop, looking wet and miserable. After the scene in the library it had seemed unwise to press her any further, but her reappearance now feels like a gift. He pulls the car over.
'Want a lift somewhere?'
Paige gets in the car without a second of hesitation, and Dean feels like giving her a lecture on the insanity of driving off with strange men when her friend's just been butchered. That would be a bit self-defeating, though. He bites his lip and checks they've got no weapons on view instead.
'I'm sorry I freaked out in the library,' Paige says. 'I guess I'm a bit out of control at the moment - hormones.'
'Paige,' Sam says gently. 'Your friend just died, you have no need to apologise for getting upset.'
'I shouldn't be getting upset,' Paige says, her voice unsteady. 'I should be getting angry.'
'Angry?' Sam asks, and then, 'Say, Paige, d'you have somewhere you need to be right away? You seem like you could use someone to talk to, and I for one feel like it would be easier to concentrate on talking if I had some food inside me.'
For a minute Dean's confused - why interrupt when it sounds like she's just about to get onto telling them something useful? - but then he realises that quizzing the kid about a bloody murder while she's trapped in the car with them might not be the best way to make her feel like she's safe. Besides, Paige is too thin - all birdlike bones and scrawny face around her rounded belly and boobs - and she could probably use a decent meal or three.
'Sammy-boy here's always hungry,' he says. 'You know a place round here we can talk while we eat?'
They end up in a little family pizza joint, pretty much empty this early on a weeknight. The Italian waitress clearly shares Dean's opinion of Paige's need for food, because she brings them plates of antipasti on the house and urges the girl to eat. She doesn't seem to think it's strange that two grown men should be eating with a fifteen-year-old girl, and after a while Dean realises that she's assumed they're family. Paige does look a little like him - green eyes, at least - and when you think that il Colosso is his brother it's not such a stretch of the imagination that people might mistake her for his sister. Hell, thinking about it, she's young enough that she could be his goddamn daughter.
It seems as if Paige has forgotten the emotion she felt in the car; she chatters on to them both quite freely, talking about her pregnancy and her hopes of getting an apartment for her and the baby and maybe going back to school someday.
'It's so cool that the first thing you said to me was "congratulations",' she says to Dean. 'Most people are all "oh, sorry" and "are you going to keep the baby?" Or else they look at me like I'm some kind of whore and ask me whether I know who the father is. You just... treated me like a person.'
Dean shifts in his seat, embarrassed.
'Well, we're not so much about the judging people. You're pregnant, you're happy, your kid won't have any weirder a life than most people.'
Sam shoots him a look before agreeing, 'Yeah, anyone can see you're gonna be a good mom.'
He regards Paige seriously from under his bangs for a moment, then applies himself to his plate of pasta once more.
The conversation lulls until the waitress brings them coffee, hot milk and biscotti - 'Mangia! Mangia!' - and presses a glass of some kind of sweet liqueur on Sam and Dean. Finally there's no way to ignore the real reason they're there any longer.
'Paige?' Dean says quietly. 'When you said you should be angry about Brianna, what did you mean?'
As soon as he asks the question he realises that Paige hadn't forgotten about the conversation in the car at all, because the look of anger and pain which is naked on her face is the same look that's been lurking beneath the surface all through the meal.
'Because of what I said,' she answers. 'There's no way that Brianna could have killed herself. It's obvious she was murdered, but nobody here seems to care. I mean - I know neither of us are exactly poster girls for the new America, but I thought all dead girls were straight-A students by default. Some crazy fucker's walking around out there and everyone's just happy to think she put that rope around her neck herself.' Paige twists her napkin in her hands, eyes filled with tears.
'We care, Paige.' Sam's voice is hard. 'There's a chance we can find out who did it, but we need your help. We need to know more about Brianna, about exactly what happened to her. Do you think you can do that?'
Paige swallows and nods. 'Brianna was my friend. If you can find out the truth, I owe her that at least.'
By the time they've finished talking to Paige and driven her home it's late, and Dean worries that they might be greeted by another set of angry parents. The lights are out at the house they pull up at, though, and when he asks Paige if her folks will be OK with her not having checked in she gives him a look that lets him know just how much that isn't an issue. He hopes she gets her own place soon.
Among the things she's told them is the exact place Brianna's body was found. It turns out it's not in Corydon itself, but out in the deeper woods over by Leavenworth. They drive over there without discussing it both of them feel Sam's vision hanging over them, a cold certainty that they haven't seen the worst yet, not by a long way. Maybe if they can do the job quick enough they won't have to.
Remembering Brianna's body, broken and bruised, Dean hopes like hell that they won't have to see the worst.
The clearing where Brianna was killed is pretty deep into the woods, deep enough that Dean wonders how the fuck she was found at all. The trees are dark and foreboding, oak and maple, and they look a sight older than most of the forest around here. There's no way anyone could believe that a fifteen-year-old girl would come out here to kill herself, even without the slashed belly and defence marks to show them that this was murder. This thing might be bigger than one evil fucker of a demon or monster, big like Burkitsville big, because the way nobody aside from Paige seems able to see what's gone down says that something's got most of these people in thrall.
In which case, let's play it cool, Dean-o, because you've let yourself walk into enough fucked-up situations lately.
He puts his hand to the comforting solidity of the gun nestled in his jacket, and shoots Sam a look to let him know he needs to do the same. They prowl around the clearing, looking for anything that might tell them more than 'something evil happened here'.
It's easy enough to see where Brianna's body was, cut end of a rope still hanging from the branch of a tree. It's new nylon rope, the kind you could easily buy in Wal-Mart, and Dean figures that whatever they're dealing with, it's probably not the primordial creature type of evil. That just makes him even more sure that Corydon's mysterious blindness to 'evil fuckers stalking your neighbourhood' is not just down to the failures of the Indiana school system.
At first it seems like the rope's the only clue, everything else obliterated by the rain of the last few days, but Dean can feel the weight of evil pressing down around him, residue from a helluva nasty working. Finally he spots something on the opposite side of the clearing, low down on one of the trees.
'Sammy!' he calls quietly. 'What do you make of this?'
Sam bends to look at the mark Dean's seen, a crude carving in the bark of the tree. The details are almost obscured by moss, but it's still possible to make out a crude rectangle next to a sort of cross. Sam leans in closer, and then sucks his breath in sharply.
'Recognise this?'
'Yes... maybe... I've seen it recently, but I'm not sure where. I think we need to head back to the motel, do some more research.'
'Who woulda thought it,' Dean says, and rolls his eyes, but it feels good to be getting somewhere at last. If he's honest, the fact that getting somewhere involves getting out of the dark, wet woods and going back to a warm motel room has its appeal, too. He may be used to hanging out in cold and creepy places, but that doesn't mean it's his number one choice for a Friday night.
As soon as they get back to the motel, Sam shoves a handful of papers at Dean and starts leafing through a pile of his own. Dean dutifully starts looking through, searching for anything which resembles the symbol he'd found. Half an hour and innumerable local newspaper reports later, he's reconsidering the notion that being in a warm motel doing research is preferable to the gloomy woods side of the gig.
'Hynan!' Sam says suddenly.
'Never had one,' Dean can't resist saying, even though he knows Sam's found something. 'Not of my own, anyway.' He smirks at his brother.
Sam heaves a long-suffering sigh and ignores the comment.
'Hynan,' he says again. 'He was some kind of local worthy back in the Fifties - he endowed a couple of the schools. Apparently he was an ancient history enthusiast, only for enthusiast read obsessive. He wrote a couple of books on the Mayan civilisation, although reading between the lines it seems like his ideas were pretty far out: it says here one of the books sparked a bit of controversy.'
Sam stares into space for a moment, with an expression that Dean identifies as 'research stoned'.
'Anyway - ' he prompts, and Sam refocuses with a start.
'Anyway, Hynan was really into the idea that this year was majorly significant: it's supposed to herald the end of a calendar cycle and the end of the world. It also coincides with a transit of Venus, which was really important to the Mayan calendar. And guess how they represented Venus?'
Sam taps the paper, and Dean's not especially surprised to see a symbol which is recognisably the same as the one they'd found on the tree, if a lot more ornate.
'So, what? This Hynan dude's decided he needs to cue up a few blood sacrifices for the end of days?'
'Man, I hope not. He's been dead for sixty years - this is his obituary.'
'Could be his ghost working. If he was as obsessed as you say, maybe he just couldn't rest knowing he was missing out on the big finale?'
'Dean, you said it yourself, it isn't something supernatural that killed Brianna, unless Wal-Mart have branched out into serving the other world. Whoever it is, they're definitely raising power - I could feel that in the vision, not to mention the stink of it all round that clearing.'
'So we find out who it is that's doing it, and we shoot the fucker.'
Sam gives him a look that says 'not that simple, buddy', and Dean sighs.
It would be so much easier if this was a salt and burn gig, or even if they were dealing with some pretty hardcore creature like a vampire. Dean kind of misses the 'kill everything in sight' days: more and more they seem to be running up against the kind of nasty that doesn't have the courtesy to be undead. When it's some human there's always research, and sneaking around looking for amulets, and a lot of other crap that ends up being just about as dangerous and illegal as the killing things option.
'What, then?' Dean demanded. 'If it's not Hynan, who else would've known all this Mayan mumbo-jumbo?'
'Well, anyone who came within shouting distance of Hynan, by the sound of it. It seems like he was a bit of a bore. But that was sixty years ago - I doubt there's anyone around who can remember him. Not that's fit enough to be abducting young girls, at any rate. But he wrote books, remember, and he left all his notes to the library here when he died.'
'So we check out who's been reading up on Hynan and we've got our man? How do we deal with him once we get that far?'
Sam gnaws at his lip. 'It's hard to be sure. I'm not too up on Mayan mythology, and whoever it is is using some kind of perversion of the original ideas anyway. But if we're dealing with someone raising power - a person - they'll need somewhere to focus that power. I have a few ideas about what they could be using, but I'll need to read up a bit more.'
He flips open the lid of the laptop and gets to work. Dean regards him for a few minutes and then starts setting out their weapons to clean.
'Like to give me any hints on what we'll be needing tomorrow, geekboy?' He starts on cleaning his favourite pistol, metal heavy and reassuring in his hands.
It strikes him that most people wouldn't find this scene so familiar and comforting. Then again, they're not most people.
It's late by the time Dean's gotten all the weapons primed to his satisfaction. Sam flakes out about half an hour before, after suggesting they take the rock salt rounds along just in case Hynan does decide to make an appearance. Dean checks through their arsenal once more, then uses the can before stripping down for bed.
There's no question of sleeping alone tonight - Sam's covered the other bed with Xeroxes and scrawled notes, just the way Dad used to do his research. Dean hesitates for a second before crawling in next to Sam, feeling oddly nervous. Between illness and single beds and being in places where they had to be watching their backs, it's been a while since they curled up together as a matter of course. It's always felt like some kind of crazy miracle that Sam wanted him there at all and now, seeing Sam turned away to hide his scar, it doesn't seem like Dean's earned the right.
'Come on, Dean,' he mutters to himself. 'What are you, some kind of fucking pussy?'
It's cold standing there in nothing but t-shirt and shorts, so he quashes his uncertainty and crawls into bed.
Sam's sprawled diagonally across the bed, hogging the space like he always does, body heavy and slack with sleep. He radiates warmth, and Dean curls up against his back and soaks it up. His brother shifts slightly, and Dean feels the rounded curve of his ass through the thin fabric of their shorts. His cock swells in response, and he wriggles until he lies flush with Sam, cock resting at the dip where his spine curves in and out to his ass. He aches to move against his brother, to put his lips to the curve of Sam's neck and kiss and suck until Sam whimpers and moans, but Sam's sleeping. He needs his sleep, they both do if they're going after some crazy sorcerer with a fetish for stringing up little girls. Dean checks for the gun under his pillow and forces his mind to blankness. He's got Sammy's back: that's enough.
Chapter 3