True north- The living

[adrenalineshots]

-SAM-

Dean died on Sam’s birthday. It took the young Winchester a whole week to realize that fact. Of course, rare had been the occasions he had been sober enough to realize anything at all during those days, but still... the irony of the fact should have caught his attention sooner.

Dean drew his last breath on the same day Sam had taken his first, twenty-four years apart. It seemed appropriate, in some twisted and scorning way.

Sam buried his brother two days after the Hell-hounds had ripped Dean to shreds in front of his eyes. For a whole day after it had happened, he couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.

Sam had no recollection of what had happened after Lilith had smoked out of Ruby’s former body until he found himself in the passenger seat of Bobby’s pick-up, heading down a dark road in the middle of nowhere.

His first thought had been panic, not knowing where Dean’s body was, unaware of what had become of it.

Empty vessel though it was, it was important to Sam to keep it safe. While Dean’s soul suffered unfathomable horrors in Hell, the only thing Sam could do was keep his body safe.

Dean would need it when he returned.

Bobby’s suggestion of burning Dean’s body had not been welcomed. And that was putting it mildly. Sam was pretty sure he’d knocked a tooth out of the older man’s mouth with the punch he’d thrown before he left to bury Dean in secret.

Bobby would eventually forgive him.

The task of finding a place to bury Dean had fallen to Sam alone. That part, despite the amounts of alcohol that had followed, Sam remembered all too well.

Covered in blood, body stiff from rigor, Dean's clothes barely hung from his already rotting flesh. It was something that wouldn’t have bothered Dean; after all, he had been covered in blood all of his life.

The blood of those they could not save.

The blood of the things they killed.

The blood of his mother.

The blood of his father.

Sam’s blood.

His own.

It wouldn’t have bothered Dean, but it bothered Sam to see his brother soiled in such a way.

With the same care a mother would pick her newborn child to give him his first bath, Sam had carried Dean’s body to a nearby river.

The water was flowing rapidly, fed by the last rains of winter, still too cold to be called pleasant and attract swimmers.

The dead, however, do not complain.

He had tried to gently remove Dean’s shirts and jeans, but fabric fell apart as soon as Sam tried to maneuver them. It was as if, absent of life, what Dean had been and used while alive, was disintegrating and turning to ashes already.

The water was too fast and too cold, but Sam had barely taken notice of that. His only concern was to wash away the blood from Dean’s skin and not lose his grip on his brother. His hands were numb, matching his heart.

Clean water washed away the gore, but the ugly truth underneath it was almost enough to undo Sam’s resolve.

The piece of meat he was holding in his hands was not his brother.

It bore deep gashes that gave way to the ghastly view of hidden bones; flesh and muscle fell apart between his fingers like soggy matter, refusing to hold together.

An old shed, abandoned in the middle of the woods, donated part of its cracked planks to build a coffin to hold what was left of Dean.

It was a glorified box, barely big enough to hold a grown man, and yet... death had shrunken Dean into less than he had been. The space occupied by his soul was gone, Sam realized.

Dean was smaller without it.

The ground was soft, dirt loosened by the recent rain. Digging Dean’s grave took far less time than Sam had imagined.

Rain started failing again as Sam had struggled to cover it. He felt like apologizing for every shovel of dirt that landed on top of that coffin.

I’m sorry Dean. I’m so sorry.

A shallow grave, made for a quick exit. A spit-glued coffin for a temporary death. Fresh clothes for those who will live again.

Jesus had returned from the dead in three days, as the Christian lore goes. Sam had sworn to his brother, as he covered his coffin in wet dirt, that he would be faster than God Himself.

A week after, he realized that he was a failure.

-MARTIN-

The country was on the verge of being split apart. An unstoppable conflict, rising like a tidal wave that promised to set brother against brother, family against family.

If Lincoln’s rhetoric about setting slaves free and treating them like regular folks continued, there would be blood shed. American blood. A war like none this country had experienced before; not against the British or the French, but American against American.

Martin Bowe, however, couldn’t care less.

Irish by birth, he'd immigrated to North America as a young boy and once his feet had touched dry land, surviving in the streets of New York had led to a life of violence and bloodshed. It was a way of life that had lead him to grow strong, ruthless. It had taught him the value of family, how to take what he wanted and mercilessly kill those who'd dared harm them or stand in his way. It had been a good life and he'd intended for it to go on for much longer.

Until some stool pigeon had ratted him and his brothers out to the police.

The judge, in his ever loving mercy, had declined to have them hung. Instead, he'd given them over to the state hospital's latest study in human behavior, for the, as he put it, 'betterment of society in ridding our growing nation of refuse like yourselves’... or some other dog’s crap like that.

Mercy, as it were, had always been a foreign word for the Bowe family. Martin had never dreamt that it actually meant Hell. Because that's where they'd ended up.

It was snowing the day he watched the bodies of his brothers Jack and Jim being eaten by the earth only a few months after they'd arrived. The priests back home had been wrong; Hell, as it turned out, was actually a place on Earth.

Procedural complications, the doctor in charge had spat at him, but only after Martin had shouted himself hoarse demanding answers from the man.

He’d heard his brothers’ screams.

He was familiar with the so-called procedures.

It was raining on that day, icy water that slipped inside his blue cotton pajamas and chilled him to the bone. They’d come for Will this time, the youngest of his three brothers.

Will had been handy with a knife, Martin recalled with affection. The things he'd done to people with that blade were worthy of a master. Like that old Italian guy his mother had been so fond of... Michelangelo.

They hadn’t even allowed Martin to look at his brother one last time. Didn’t want him to see the mess that was left after what they’d done, all in the name of the thing they called science, all of it done in secret, behind those closed doors.

There were no coffins. Not for the prisoners who had been ‘volunteered’ by the government to the betterment of medical science. No, they'd forfeited even that right when the judge had struck his gavel.

Martin looked at the empty space beside the three fresh graves. He would be joining his brothers soon, he knew that for sure. Already he felt his insides battling each other, fever slowly gaining ground. He was too weak and unhinged to plan for his revenge.

Not in this life, at least.

-MICHAEL-

“Let us remember Karen Hobbs not as she is presented here today, but as the shining light of hope and joy that she was in life. We are gathered here to commend her body to the ground, her soul to Our-”

Michael filtered out the rest of the pastor’ speech, barely controlling the angry snort that wanted to escape his tightly pressed lips. His hands were balled into fists so stiff that he no longer could feel his fingers.

They were commending nothing to the ground. The whole funeral was a farce, a show. Something tangible in which people could pour out their grief.

It was all bullshit because the coffin was empty, just like the coffins of Amelia, Blake, Gretchen, Kyle and Andrew had been empty. His closest friends, their empty coffins taken home by their parents, to be laid to rest in their family plots.

Six empty coffins, six parodies.

Official line was that they had drowned in the river, the waters treacherous and stormy this time of the year. That they had never made it to the island or back to the city, their bodies carried by the strong undertow of Hell’s gate, out to sea, gone forever...

Michael knew better however. He had shown Karen’s text message to the cops, the one she had sent when they’d arrived at the island, saying that there was something spooky going on.

They hadn’t believed him. There were no bodies, no proof of foul play. Except for the feeling in the pit of Michael’s stomach. It had been years since he’d felt it, that sense that something more was going on.

Denial, the rest of their friends had called it.

Survivor's guilt.

He was supposed to have gone with them. He should’ve been there with them. But he’d come down with a nasty case of the flu, of all things.

It had all been a joke, easy money. A way for them to pay the rest of their University tuition. Something that Michael had welcomed as much as the rest of his, now dead, friends. And he had escaped not because he was smarter or because he knew best, but because he had been sick.

He felt sick now. Impotent.

Something on that damn island had killed his friends. And no one would believe him when he had told his story.

Michael felt like Cassandra, doomed to know the truth and have no one believe him.

Rain started to fall as the first handful of dirt hit Karen’s coffin. It sounded like everyone was throwing mud at her, at who she had been.

Karen’s goal, her sole reason for going to med school in the first place had been to find the cure for immunodeficiency related diseases. And she was... she had been bright and committed enough to eventually do it.

Now, she was fish food, if he was to believe the police. One more, soon to be forgotten, casualty of the East River.

Michael couldn’t allow that to happen.

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