The usual suspects
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
It’s late at night when Dean finally starts talking.
“There was this guy there, in one of the cells,” he begins, as if they hadn’t been pretending to be asleep for the past half an hour. “Caught his wife cheating on him with his next-door neighbor. Killed him, killed her, emptied their eye sockets and made himself an eyeball omelet. Police caught him, sitting at the kitchen table, fork in hand.”
“People are weird, you know that,” Sam says, not sure where Dean is going with this.
“He kept yelling at the cops that he was hungry, that they hadn’t let him finish his meal.”
“Crazy guy. What does th-“
“The cops were more scared of me than they were of him,” Dean cuts in, voice heavy with disappointment. “With everything that we see, everything that we do, everything that we lost... some cannibal, nut-bag still rates lower in the cops creep factor than we do... than I do.”
Sam pauses, swallows hard. It’s the inglorious part of what they do, the other side of the coin that no one ever gets to see. Because Batman too had his cave, where he could hide and wonder why people treat him like a criminal. And they have dark motel rooms that serve as a confessionary and wonder if they’d be seen as anything but criminals one day.
“Go to sleep, Dean.”