Fool for Lesser Things (3/5)
3:Woodwose
Sam sat up sharply, pulling in a hard breath through his nose, and pawed at the piece of paper stuck to his face.
"Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty." Dean sat across the desk from him, one hoof propped up on the far edge. He was dressed, his horns were seven inches long, and his expression was calm, bordering on bland. He was chewing again.
"Please tell me you're not eating one of Bobby's forks."
Dean swallowed and dropped his hoof back down to the floor. He flicked his eyes over Sam for a second. "Had a hell of a dream there, huh?"
Sam pushed himself further upright, tugging at his shirt and leaning back in his chair, trying for casual. "You know goats don't really eat everything, right? That's just a myth."
"So are satyrs," Dean pointed out cheerfully. "And I wasn't eating Bobby's fork. I was just . . . chewing on it."
"You ate fast food packaging, yesterday."
"Yeah, well." Dean flipped a page in the book in his lap, then tossed it onto the desktop in front of Sam. "Apparently I have four stomachs. Forgive me for being hungry." He grimaced. "I'm skipping the plastic next time, though. That . . . didn't go down well." He burped, then started chewing again. Sam frowned.
"You're -- are you chewing cud?"
Dean shoved whatever was in his mouth to the side to answer. "It's called 'ruminating'," he said primly.
"You threw up in your mouth and now you're eating it."
Dean scowled, swallowing again. "Four stomachs, dude. Do I make fun of how you eat?"
"Yeah. You do."
"Yeah, well, you're changing the subject." Dean leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk and lowering his head to peer at Sam. Sam leaned further back instinctively as Dean's horns pointed at his forehead. "You having visions again?"
Sam shook his head. "I haven't had a vision in, like, three years."
Dean tilted his head. "Seems to me we thought the visions were gone once before. And you ended up killing demons with your brain."
Bobby's desk chair was suddenly the most uncomfortable place Sam had ever sat. He shifted, glancing to the side. "But not having visions. Besides, no more demons, remember?"
Dean was silent for a long moment, and Sam suspected that if he looked, Dean would be chewing again. Ruminating. It kind of put things into perspective. Sure, Sam had demon blood running through him, but hey, Dean was half-goat.
Sam tried to get them back on track again. "You manage to learn anything other than your amazing new stomach issues?"
Dean sighed and tapped his fingers against the desk. "Fine, Dodgy McDeflectorpants. Be that way. No. We didn't find the magical answers while you were sleeping. You get anything before you decided to take a nap?"
Sam rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to get the dream -- just a dream, not a vision -- out of his head long enough to remember what he'd been looking at. He picked up the paper that had been stuck to his face when he'd woken up and looked it over.
Ah, yes. Right.
"Maybe. I was looking up some of the myths of satyrs and similar half-goat spirits around the world. There's definitely some similarities. Most of them are considered to be representations of wilderness or pasture. They've got big appetites --" He held up his hand to forestall any further protestations of "four stomachs, dude". "-- and, well, they're pretty damned horny. Satyrs especially are often depicted with permanent erections."
Dean's eyebrows went up. "Well, we can scratch that one off the list. I'm not Viagra-man over here."
"Yeah, we know." Bobby's voice came from the doorway of the library, causing both of them to look up. He gave Dean a meaningful look. "Now put some goddamn pants on."
Sam turned his head to stare at Dean. He half-stood to peer over the desk. Sure enough, though he had as many layers as usual on his upper body, Dean was only wearing his shorts, revealing his hairy, multiply jointed legs in all their glory. Sam flashed back to the image from his dream, Dean's leg broken and laid open by the bear trap, and swallowed. The fur wasn't as thick now as it was in his dream and his hooves weren't quite as fully formed, but the general shape of Dean's legs was right. Dean's legs in the dream had seemed natural somehow, though, despite how different they were from human legs. Now, without the full coat, they looked pale, scrawny, and wrong.
"Why the hell aren't you wearing any pants?!"
Dean pursed his lips, looking between Bobby and Sam and folding his arms across his chest. "It's hot in here, okay? You try sprouting fur and see how much you like wearing clothes."
Silence reigned for a few moments. Sam looked over at Bobby, who rubbed a hand across his chest and shrugged. Sam looked back at Dean and caught him sinking lower in his chair.
"Okay, I never thought I'd say this, but can we get back to the research, now?" Dean pulled his legs in closer to his body as though he could hide them. Sam looked away again and sat down.
"Yeah. Sorry." He cleared his throat and looked from his notes to his laptop and back again a few times. "Uh. Anyway. Satyrs are known for their foolishness, too. Not like being stupid, but the traditional role of the 'fool', the character used to mock certain ideas, poke holes in commonly held wisdom. I'm pretty sure that's where the word 'satire' comes from, actually."
Dean straightened again. "You mean knock people down a peg? Take the wind out of 'em?"
Sam shrugged. "Yeah, I guess."
"And who do we know who's favorite thing to do is take people down a peg and happens to have the kind of power it'd take to do this sort of thing?" Dean smacked his fist down on the desk. "The freaking Trickster!"
Sam looked at Bobby. Bobby looked back and shrugged. Sam frowned.
"I dunno, Dean."
"What's not to know? It's not like he hasn't messed with me before, Sam."
Except that the thing in Florida had been designed to mess with Sam, not Dean. "The Trickster's not really known for being this, you know, subtle."
"You calling this subtle? I have horns."
"Which aren't even fully grown yet." Sam watched Dean's face crumple, his hand coming up to touch one of the horns. He wondered if Dean had thought that the seven inch growths were as long as they were going to get. "This has been going on over weeks, Dean. We've been bouncing from state to state every couple of days. The Trickster's . . . he's not that patient."
Bobby cleared his throat. "And Cox mighta been a blowhard, but far as I know, he never crossed the sucker."
Dean gaped at both of them for a few moments, his legs curling in towards his body again in an outward expression of his disappointment and discomfort. He'd really thought he'd figured it out, there, had an easy way to go back to looking like he was supposed to. "Well, fine. Then what good does that 'fool' stuff do us?"
Sam looked at Bobby again and saw his own thoughts reflected on the older man's face. "It's kind of appropriate, don't you think?"
"Appropriate?!"
"You've been poking at people you thought were too full of themselves your whole life. Mind you, with you it's mostly authority figures, but still. And the appetite?"
Bobby cleared his throat, and Sam looked up to see him rubbing his beard, which he still hadn't trimmed. If anything, it seemed to have gotten even scragglier, making him look a bit like Grizzly Adams after a three day bender. Bobby didn't seem too concerned by it, though. "And you are something of a horn-dog, kid."
"So, what? You're telling me that just 'cause I happen to like to eat and have sex and laugh at people, I have to turn into a goat-man?"
Bobby shrugged. "If the shoe fits. . . ."
Dean stretched out one leg to thump his hoof onto the desk again. "My shoes don't fit any more!"
Sam cleared his throat. "There's, uh, more."
"That's not enough?!"
Sam looked up at Bobby. "What do you know about the Horned God?"
Bobby gave Dean an appraising look. "Huh."
Dean twisted his head back and forth, looking from Sam to Bobby and back again. "Spit it out already."
Bobby took point, and Sam let him, feeling oddly comforted by falling into the familiar role of student to Bobby's teacher, even when he already knew the information being taught. "The Horned God is the male half of the Wiccan deity system. The female, the Triple Goddess, tends to get more press, but they're both equally important." Bobby ran a finger over the spines of several books while he spoke before pulling out one in particular, flipping to a certain page, and handing it over to Dean. Sam leaned forward to take a look. The page showed an image of a winged, goat-headed man with a pentagram in the center of his forehead. Dean huffed as he looked at it, then handed it back to Bobby.
"That's great, but I don't have three horns. Or man boobs."
"Yes, well, artistic license and talent aside, the idea of the Horned God is pretty damned ancient. Some theories state that he was one of the primary pagan deities of Western Europe, before Christianity came in and demonized him. You boys know as well as I do that demons don't look a damned thing like that, but popular mythology has dressed 'em up like goatmen for centuries."
"Well, good to know I'm not turning into an old school demon stereotype," Dean said. "But I'm sure as hell not some witchy god, either."
Bobby nodded to him and continued. "The Horned God is known for doing a lot of different things in the spirit and fairy realms. Everything from ruling the Underworld and holding mastery over death -- which, well, consider the number of times you're supposed to have died -- and leading the Wild Hunt."
"The dude's a hunter?"
"That's not all." Sam took over the narrative, figuring that Bobby wasn't that likely to include some of what he'd found. He turned the laptop so Dean could see it. "The Horned God has a lot of weight in psychology, too. Jungian theory suggests that the Horned God might represent compensation for 'inadequate fathering'."
Dean's expression darkened. "Oh, you are not bringing Dad into this." He leaned forward and scrolled through the website a bit. "Dude, you're getting this from Wikipedia? You know that was totally added by some twelve year old who'd just discovered Oedipus, right?"
Sam decided not to ask what Dean thought he knew about Oedipus. "Look, I'm just saying there's a lot of parallels here, okay? It's something to look into." He looked up at Bobby, hoping for back up.
Bobby sighed. "It's some interesting stuff about why, Sam, but it doesn't tell us a damned thing about how."
Sam felt his shoulders slump. "Yeah. I know." He closed his eyes, wincing as the image of Dean dead on the forest floor flashed against his eyelids.
It wasn't a vision. It wasn't.
"Hey, maybe we should talk to Chuck."
Sam's eyes shot open. "Chuck."
"Chuck?" Bobby looked between the two of them. Sam nodded, realizing that in the excitement of the war coming to a head the year before, they'd never quite explained Chuck and his novels to their mentor.
"He's, uh. He's a prophet."
"You boys know a prophet." Bobby said. "And you're still comin' to me for all your answers?"
Dean grinned. "You smell better." The grin vanished as he cocked his head, his nostrils flaring. "Well, you used to."
Bobby crossed his arms over his chest and tried to surreptitiously sniff his own armpit. "Shaddup."
* * *
So Sam called Chuck, the prophet who wrote the Winchester Gospel -- though Sam was pretty sure that should just be the "Gospel according to Chuck" or maybe the "Book of Winchester". Or was "books" just for the Old Testament? He was pretty sure a "gospel" was supposed to be about Jesus, and unless there were some things that Castiel never got around to telling them -- which, yeah, okay, so that was pretty possible, the guy practically defined "cagey" -- neither Dean nor Sam was supposed to be the second coming. So the Supernatural books, those would be, what, the first through umpty-somethingth epistle to the Winchesters? Except they weren't written to Sam and Dean, just about Sam and Dean.
And while Sam couldn't speak for Dean, of course, this was why he hadn't told Bobby about their own personal prophet Chuck. It was, despite everything else they'd been through -- Dean becoming part-goat excepted -- just too bizarre. It didn't work. Sam couldn't fit his brain around the trashy novels, their author, their fan-base, or their supposed importance in the grand scheme of things, so for the most part, he pretended they didn't exist.
You know, when he wasn't sneaking onto the message boards while Dean was out and starting flame wars with the so-called "Dean girls".
So. Sam called Chuck. The phone rang -- once, twice, three times -- and then Chuck answered with a hurried, panicked "No, I will not write you a love interest, it doesn't work that way and you know it!" and hung up.
Sam stared at his phone until the light of the display faded out, then lifted his eyes to where Dean was slouched pantless on Bobby's couch, eating a maple leaf. Dean looked back, his jaw idling open, his lips pursed around the stem of the leaf, his eyes wide in a look of childish innocence that no one who knew Dean had fallen for since he was seven. Sam dropped his chin and tilted his head. Dean's eyebrows crawled up another two millimeters towards the base of his horns, then another three when Sam failed to bow under the pressure of his guileless look. Sam held still and when Dean's brows twitched like they were just discovering they couldn't go up any higher, he knew he'd won. The brows dropped and Dean's lips quirked, ingenuous to devious in two easy moves. He slid the leaf stem to the corner of his lips and flashed his teeth.
Sam groaned. "So have you actually been asking for Chuck to write you more sex scenes, or were you just planning to?"
Dean did something with his tongue that made the leaf stem twirl in a wide, somehow decidedly dirty circle and shrugged. Sam's fingers twitched.
"Did you have to make them from my phone?"
Dean pulled the gnawed, stripped, and sodden leaf from his mouth like it was a lollipop and smacked his lips. "My battery was dead."
Sam threw the phone at Dean's head.
* * *
He tried again, this time from Bobby's phone, figuring that Chuck wouldn't know the number and therefore wouldn't assume he was being harassed. Of course that backfired, since Chuck didn't know the number and therefore didn't bother even answering the phone to find out if he was being harassed. Sam left a message, a succinct "Chuck, it's Sam, call me back," but he wasn't satisfied. They'd been forced to be unusually passive about this whole transformation thanks to their lack of information and Dean's increasing conspicuousness, and Sam was sick of it. Calling Chuck was the first real idea they'd had since calling Bobby, and Sam wasn't going to stop trying it until he got definitive answers.
So he tried Dean's phone.
Chuck answered on the first ring. "Okay, look, do you think I don't know what you're doing? This is -- this is harassment, or something! Prophet harassment, and I don't have to stand for it. I --"
"Chuck," Sam interrupted, before he could be treated to any more hurried, terrified accusations from the man. "It's Sam."
Chuck went very quiet. After a moment, his tone changed to the quieter, gentler tones that Sam was more used to hearing from him. Sam frowned at that. Why did Dean get panicked warbling while Sam got the psychoanalyst? In a certain sense, Chuck knew them better than they knew even themselves. What did it say about Sam and Dean that this was how Chuck reacted?
"Hey, Sam. Sorry about that."
"No problem. Dean gets on everybody's nerves." Sam took a deep breath, pacing across Bobby's library, past Dean, who was still slumped on the couch, still chewing -- sorry, ruminating -- on leaves. By now, though, he had a whole twig full of them. He'd open his mouth wide, tongue at the points until the entire leaf was in his mouth, then clamp his lips around the stem and tug until it pulled free of the stick. Then he'd suck the stem into his mouth and chew for a few moments before he opened his mouth to start again. It was fascinating, in a grotesque sort of way, and Sam paused on his way towards the kitchen to watch. Open, tongue, tug, suck, chew. Open, tongue, tug, suck --
"Sam, you there?"
Oh, right, he was on the phone. He tore his eyes away from his brother -- surely Dean hadn't actually just winked at him over his mouthful of leaf, right? -- and stepped through the doorway to the kitchen, sliding the pocket doors closed behind him. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm here."
"So . . . why'd you call?"
Sam took a deep breath. "You tell me."
There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, then Chuck spoke again, the tempo of his voice picking up, starting to sound more like the one he used on Dean. Nervous. More freaked out prophet, less sympathetic if occasionally cruel writer. "Hey, man, the apocalypse is over, remember?"
"Yeah, then why are you still refusing to write Dean's sex scenes?"
"Have you ever tried writing a sex scene before, man? It's hard! You either sound too clinical or too shmoopy, or your characters turn into contortionists and then the feelings get all involved and all anyone's saying is 'oh, oh, there, there, god, yes, god, yes' so you wanna spice things up, but then the next thing you know, they're calling each other 'lover' or screaming obscenities and there's toys and-and things involved and someone's getting tied to the bed --"
Sam started trying to interrupt him shortly after the "It's hard", but Chuck was a difficult man to derail at times. Especially when it came to talking about his writing. He settled for saying "Chuck, Chuck," with increasing volume and firmness until Chuck cut himself off.
"Oh. Sorry, I guess you don't really wanna hear about that."
"Not so much."
"But, yeah. I mean, it's not like a girlfriend would work with your dynamic, anyway. What, would she ride along in the back seat of the Impala? Stand out on her widow's walk and pace until he came home after a hunt? That would suck. I get enough complaints about the treatment of women in the series as it is. You know, I always kind of thought I just stuck Jo and Bela in to try and give the fans their strong female guest stars, but I guess they're real, too, huh?"
"Chuck."
"Which kind of makes you think: did the universe decide that you guys needed more gender-balanced allies, too? If so, why'd they write them out? I mean, sure, Bela went to Hell and managed to give you guys the intel on Lilith before she went, but as far as I know, Cassie's still alive. You should tell Dean if he really wants a love interest, he should look her back up. Sure, a lot of the fans didn't like her, either, but --"
Sam ran out of patience. "Chuck," he bit out, far angrier than he'd intended, but it worked. Chuck fell silent. Sam heard him breathing into the phone for a moment, then a loud clink and crackle as something -- Sam suspected it was the mouth of a liquor bottle -- connected with the headset on Chuck's end. Chuck swallowed, then let out a faint "ahhhh" before he spoke again.
"So, uh, yeah, you wanna talk to Jo."
"I'm not that interested in making our lives more gender-balanced, Chuck. And Dean's not into Jo."
"If you're calling why I think you're calling, you want to talk to Jo."
Sam leaned against the wall, crossed his arm over his chest, then switched the phone to his other ear. "I thought you said you weren't a prophet any more?"
"I said the apocalypse was over. Which, uh, it is. But I'm still getting dreams."
"And you've seen --"
"Dean's new look? Yeah." Another pause, another swallow and "ahhhh". "I don't know what you guys did in your past lives that got this much crap getting thrown at you, but I'd say it's time to start working on your karma. Because that shit is weird."
"What's causing it?"
"Talk to Jo."
"Yeah, I got that, but you have to know what's been --"
"Talk to Jo."
"Chuck, come on. You've gotta give me something here. Have you written anything? Can you email it to me?"
"Talk. To. Jo. Bring an axe." Another swallow-"ahhhh". "And, uh. You might wanna look into where Dean's been getting those leaves."
Sam took the phone away from his ear and stared at the handset for a moment before putting it back. "The leaves?"
Chuck had hung up.
Sam pulled the phone away again. He bounced his hand up and down a few times, biting his lip as he went over the conversation in his head. Jo. Karma. Axe? Leaves.
Then he tucked the phone away and threw the pocket doors to the library open again, striding over to pull the now barren twig from his brother's hand. Dean sat up with a squawk, frowning as Sam waved the twig in his face.
"Where did you get this?"
Dean looked affronted and opened his mouth as though to make some smart-assed remark, but something on Sam's face must have warned him off. Instead he sat back on the couch again, rubbing his thumb down the curl of his goatee. "Funny you should ask that."
* * *
Sam stared. There wasn't much else he could do. Even with the axe that Chuck had mentioned, it'd take days, if not longer, to take care of this problem, and who knew if the problem would let them even try? After all. . . .
"That wasn't there two days ago."
Dean was standing next to him in the scrap yard, the twig he'd stripped the leaves off of clamped between his teeth like a cigar. He nodded towards the problem.
"Hell, I'm pretty sure that wasn't there yesterday."
"Why didn't you mention this?"
"You were busy calling Chuck." Dean reached out and clapped a hand onto Sam's shoulder. "Man, Bobby's gonna freak."
"No kidding."
"That sucker's gonna play hell with his foundation."
Sam blinked, then cast his eyes sideways towards his brother, who stared forward, his expression blank and serious. "Dean."
"Hm?"
"A fifty foot maple tree has sprung up overnight and you think Bobby's gonna be upset about his foundation?"
Dean's shoulders lifted and held there for a moment before he let out an audible breath. "No, but it's true. Some of those branches have already busted out the upstairs windows."
Sam pinched his lower lip between his teeth, staring at the tree. "You don't -- you don't suppose this is like Anna, do you? Some angel threw their grace over this way?"
Dean didn't answer for a long moment. The angels were always a bit of an odd subject between them, Anna especially. Sam was never sure what he thought of them, his lifelong faith in God and heavenly forces of good shaken in the face of the cold, uncaring, and infinitely fallible creatures angels had turned out to be, unconcerned with Sam's problems and thoughts except to tell him -- or, more often, tell Dean to tell him -- that he was doing it wrong. Sam suspected that Dean felt the same way towards Anna and Castiel and the angels as Sam had felt towards Ruby and the demons -- both sides had done their best to manipulate the brothers to their ends, both had proven to be untrustworthy, and both -- in the cases of Ruby and Anna, anyway, if not Castiel -- had managed to worm in and demand a certain level of respect and admiration.
Besides, Dean had slept with Anna.
Of course, sleeping with a woman didn't mean much in the grand scheme of things to Dean. Not a human woman, anyway. But sleeping with a woman he was well aware wasn't your average, ordinary girl? Dean might talk big, but he balked at even touching psychics, much less groping a fallen angel. Sam suspected that Dean, deep down in the darkest, closest, safest corner of his soul, saw sex as much more than just a fun way of passing the time. Sex was vulnerability, and Dean was, if nothing else, very, very aware that he was only human.
Well, you know, before he'd started turning half-goat.
"No," Dean said finally. "No, I don't."
"It's the only thing we've ever heard of that could do this kind of thing, Dean."
Dean shook his head. "It doesn't add up, man. I mean, come on, an angel just happens decide to throw herself to Earth not long after I start going all fuzzy? When we haven't heard a single peep from the feathered sons of bitches in more than a year? It's too much, dude, and you know it."
"It's too much? That's your reason?"
"Well, that and there's eight feet worth of another one sprouting up around the other side."
Sam blinked, then shuffled sideways to look around the other side of the house. Sure enough, there it was -- an oak this time, judging by the leaves. The hubcaps that had formerly been decorating the siding of the house were now wedged into the bark of the sprouting tree as it grew up around them.
Okay, so Dean might have had a small point about that foundation thing. Sam walked back over to where his brother was still resting against the rusted-out car shell. "It's more like ten feet, now."
"Huh." Dean stroked his goatee and sucked at his teeth. "What did Chuck say?"
"To talk to Jo. And to bring an axe."
"Axe nothing. We're gonna need a chainsaw." Dean brightened at this prospect.
"I think he meant bring an axe to talk to Jo."
Dean blinked, still rubbing his facial hair. "Huh."
* * *
Sam jotted down a few more notes on the pad resting on his knee. "Okay. Thanks, Ellen. I'll call you when I know more." He flipped his phone closed and pressed his index finger and thumb against the bridge of his nose.
He was tired.
He was more than tired, really. He was exhausted. Things -- strange, unprecedented, nightmare things were happening, and Sam couldn't for the life of him figure out why. And according to Ellen, his only current lead had gone radio silent a week ago while on a trip to the wilds of Idaho. Planned, since Ellen wasn't exactly freaking out about it. Said it was a "research trip", whatever that meant, that she and Jo had figured out where they stood on Jo hunting. All good news -- except for the fact that it meant to "talk to Jo" as Chuck had so succinctly put it, he and Dean would have to drive a good sixteen hours to the Idaho panhandle to find her. Sixteen hours and twelve hundred miles without anyone trying to kill Dean for having horns and a tail.
Piece of cake.
He heard the faint clop-clop of Dean approaching and opened his eyes. Dean stopped in the doorway to the library, leaning against the jamb and looking Sam up and down, his expression serious and considering. Sam inclined his head to him.
"Right, so, Jo's in Idaho. We should probably try and pull a night drive to get out to her, keep you out of the public view."
Dean nodded once, his lips pursed, not chewing anything for the first time in Sam didn't want to think how long. "Bobby's not wearing a shirt."
Okay. "What?"
"Bobby's not wearing a shirt," Dean said again, not moving from his lean against the jamb. Sam frowned.
"What does that have to do with --"
Dean spoke over the end of Sam's question. "Bobby's not wearing a shirt," he said, his voice taking on new weight, "for the same reason I'm not wearing any pants."
Sam blinked. Moments later he was up and past his older brother, leaning into the hallway to peer towards the end of the stairs where Bobby was descending, several books that had been in storage on the second floor gripped in his arms. Sam immediately saw what Dean meant.
He'd noticed when Bobby had first gotten home that the scruffy older hunter had let his beard grow longer than usual. What had been a few inches of wild growth seemed to have expanded exponentially, the salt-and-pepper tip now brushing at the top of Bobby's pants. If the thing kept growing at its current rate, Bobby would be able to maintain his dignity by pure facial hair alone. That alone was weird enough, but apparently Bobby's chest hair had decided to launch a counter attack and take over the rest of the man's upper body. Sam tore his eyes from Bobby's stomach and met the man's eyes. Bobby looked back at him, paused at the base of the stairs, his expression blank and his eyes tired.
"Yeah," Bobby said. "I know." He lifted his free hand to scratch at his chest through the thick curtain of hair. Sam gaped a moment longer, trying to find words, but his mind had gone blank.
Weird stuff happening to Dean was cause for concern, but in the grand scheme of things not all that bizarre. On a certain level, Dean almost seemed to ask for them to happen -- not to the extent of a full transformation, sure, but still -- daring the universe and all the evil, twisted things in it to try something. Weird stuff happening to Bobby, attack by dream root aside, that was new. Bobby was too reserved, too experienced and smart, to draw attention to himself the way Dean did.
Bobby rolled his eyes heavenward, as though asking for the strength to survive Sam's dumb shock, then started forward again. "You boys find anything?"
Sam gaped some more, trying to get his thoughts in order, leaving Dean to answer.
"Just a lead on Jo in Northern Idaho, about fifty miles out from where Joshua's got a place. Don't know what good that's supposed to do, exactly, but, well, no offense, I sure as hell wouldn't mind hitting the road again."
Dean sounded very normal when he wasn't chewing, Sam realized. He could almost imagine that there was nothing wrong with his brother at all, that he wasn't getting close to having to duck through doorways to avoid hitting his horns on things, that he hadn't had to relearn how to walk over the last couple of -- days? Weeks? Bobby nodded at them, pulling the top book, a smallish hard copy sans dust jacket, the gold lettered title on the spine not yet visible to Sam, from his stack. He, too, looked like he was just taking all this in stride, like his hair gaining a life of its own wasn't anything to write home about.
"Take this. Dunno if it'll be of any use to you, but it sure as hell couldn't hurt."
Sam collected himself enough to reach out and take the book, flipping it open and scanning over page after page of oddly whimsical illustration. "Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods," he read aloud. "'with a few desert and mountain beasts.'" He looked back up at Bobby, only to knock his head against the base of one of Dean's horns as his brother leaned in to read over his shoulder. "Ow! Dammit, Dean."
Dean snorted, not sounding the least bit repentant. "Watch your head, Sasquatch."
Bobby echoed Dean's snort. "It's a compendium of some of the lesser known cryptids out there," he said. "Written around the turn of the twentieth century. Most folks think it's entirely fictional, but you'll find the billdad in there, as well as hodags, squonks, splinter cats, and the Snoligoster."
"We already killed the Snallygaster," Dean pointed out.
"Yeah, that's great for you," Bobby said, reaching over to flip the pages so that Sam was looking at a picture of a large, legless crocodile thing with a black man impaled on a spike on its back. He felt Dean move in to peer over his shoulder again. "This is the Snoligoster."
"Wow." Dean's voice was dry and bland. "And here I thought people were creative."
Sam read over the entry on the Snoligoster, grimacing. "-- or even a full grown -- Bobby!"
Bobby shrugged. "Ain't like I wrote it, kid. Like I said, turn of the 20th century."
"This is about a hunter skipping killing this thing because it was only killing black people."
Bobby ran a hand over his beard, a gesture that now took him almost a full minute and a half to complete. "If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure someone did the Snoligoster in six months ago. Old school racism aside, from what I've heard, the rest of the information in there is pretty damn accurate."
"It got anything in there on a creature that can turn people into. . . ." Dean trailed off, and Sam looked up in time to catch his grimace. "Well, creatures?"
"'Fraid not. And even if it did, that wouldn't account for the trees attacking this place."
Dean nodded. "True. Well. Thanks again, Bobby. We should go see what Jo's managed to get herself into." He raised an eyebrow. "You gonna come with?"
Bobby grimaced, looking for a brief moment like he couldn't think of a single thing worse than the prospect of leaving his own house. Sam frowned and filed that expression away, wondering if it might be a hint as to some sort of overall theme to the growing beard and trees. "Nah. I'll keep up the home front, here. You boys check in if you find anything."
"Will do." Sam forced a smile he didn't feel. Dean nodded, then turned to trot -- literally -- off to gather their things. Sam started to follow, but stopped when Bobby laid one hand, hairy save for the skin of his palm, on Sam's arm.
"Woodwose," he said.
Sam blinked. "What?"
Bobby glanced down at his chest, then back up at Sam. "Wild man of the woods."
Sam nodded slowly. "Just about every culture's got one." He sifted through facts in his mind. "They're associated with . . . hunters and hermits, right? Existing on the fringe of society. Often portrayed as poets or prophets."
Bobby shrugged. "Dunno about the poetry, but they're said to be hairy sons of bitches." He seemed resigned, like he'd just realized his whole life was leading up to becoming some kind of woodland creature -- a woodwose. Sam swallowed, then forced another smile.
"Hey, who knows? Maybe we're actually about to get to the bottom of this." He snapped Fearsome Creatures closed, not wanting to look at the gruesome Snoligoster illustration any longer than he had to. Bobby let go of his arm and he turned to head out.
He was pretty sure he wasn't meant to hear what Bobby muttered as he closed the door.
"If this thing has a bottom, kid, I get the feeling we might already be there."
| Previous | Next |
| Master Post |
Sam sat up sharply, pulling in a hard breath through his nose, and pawed at the piece of paper stuck to his face.
"Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty." Dean sat across the desk from him, one hoof propped up on the far edge. He was dressed, his horns were seven inches long, and his expression was calm, bordering on bland. He was chewing again.
"Please tell me you're not eating one of Bobby's forks."
Dean swallowed and dropped his hoof back down to the floor. He flicked his eyes over Sam for a second. "Had a hell of a dream there, huh?"
Sam pushed himself further upright, tugging at his shirt and leaning back in his chair, trying for casual. "You know goats don't really eat everything, right? That's just a myth."
"So are satyrs," Dean pointed out cheerfully. "And I wasn't eating Bobby's fork. I was just . . . chewing on it."
"You ate fast food packaging, yesterday."
"Yeah, well." Dean flipped a page in the book in his lap, then tossed it onto the desktop in front of Sam. "Apparently I have four stomachs. Forgive me for being hungry." He grimaced. "I'm skipping the plastic next time, though. That . . . didn't go down well." He burped, then started chewing again. Sam frowned.
"You're -- are you chewing cud?"
Dean shoved whatever was in his mouth to the side to answer. "It's called 'ruminating'," he said primly.
"You threw up in your mouth and now you're eating it."
Dean scowled, swallowing again. "Four stomachs, dude. Do I make fun of how you eat?"
"Yeah. You do."
"Yeah, well, you're changing the subject." Dean leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk and lowering his head to peer at Sam. Sam leaned further back instinctively as Dean's horns pointed at his forehead. "You having visions again?"
Sam shook his head. "I haven't had a vision in, like, three years."
Dean tilted his head. "Seems to me we thought the visions were gone once before. And you ended up killing demons with your brain."
Bobby's desk chair was suddenly the most uncomfortable place Sam had ever sat. He shifted, glancing to the side. "But not having visions. Besides, no more demons, remember?"
Dean was silent for a long moment, and Sam suspected that if he looked, Dean would be chewing again. Ruminating. It kind of put things into perspective. Sure, Sam had demon blood running through him, but hey, Dean was half-goat.
Sam tried to get them back on track again. "You manage to learn anything other than your amazing new stomach issues?"
Dean sighed and tapped his fingers against the desk. "Fine, Dodgy McDeflectorpants. Be that way. No. We didn't find the magical answers while you were sleeping. You get anything before you decided to take a nap?"
Sam rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to get the dream -- just a dream, not a vision -- out of his head long enough to remember what he'd been looking at. He picked up the paper that had been stuck to his face when he'd woken up and looked it over.
Ah, yes. Right.
"Maybe. I was looking up some of the myths of satyrs and similar half-goat spirits around the world. There's definitely some similarities. Most of them are considered to be representations of wilderness or pasture. They've got big appetites --" He held up his hand to forestall any further protestations of "four stomachs, dude". "-- and, well, they're pretty damned horny. Satyrs especially are often depicted with permanent erections."
Dean's eyebrows went up. "Well, we can scratch that one off the list. I'm not Viagra-man over here."
"Yeah, we know." Bobby's voice came from the doorway of the library, causing both of them to look up. He gave Dean a meaningful look. "Now put some goddamn pants on."
Sam turned his head to stare at Dean. He half-stood to peer over the desk. Sure enough, though he had as many layers as usual on his upper body, Dean was only wearing his shorts, revealing his hairy, multiply jointed legs in all their glory. Sam flashed back to the image from his dream, Dean's leg broken and laid open by the bear trap, and swallowed. The fur wasn't as thick now as it was in his dream and his hooves weren't quite as fully formed, but the general shape of Dean's legs was right. Dean's legs in the dream had seemed natural somehow, though, despite how different they were from human legs. Now, without the full coat, they looked pale, scrawny, and wrong.
"Why the hell aren't you wearing any pants?!"
Dean pursed his lips, looking between Bobby and Sam and folding his arms across his chest. "It's hot in here, okay? You try sprouting fur and see how much you like wearing clothes."
Silence reigned for a few moments. Sam looked over at Bobby, who rubbed a hand across his chest and shrugged. Sam looked back at Dean and caught him sinking lower in his chair.
"Okay, I never thought I'd say this, but can we get back to the research, now?" Dean pulled his legs in closer to his body as though he could hide them. Sam looked away again and sat down.
"Yeah. Sorry." He cleared his throat and looked from his notes to his laptop and back again a few times. "Uh. Anyway. Satyrs are known for their foolishness, too. Not like being stupid, but the traditional role of the 'fool', the character used to mock certain ideas, poke holes in commonly held wisdom. I'm pretty sure that's where the word 'satire' comes from, actually."
Dean straightened again. "You mean knock people down a peg? Take the wind out of 'em?"
Sam shrugged. "Yeah, I guess."
"And who do we know who's favorite thing to do is take people down a peg and happens to have the kind of power it'd take to do this sort of thing?" Dean smacked his fist down on the desk. "The freaking Trickster!"
Sam looked at Bobby. Bobby looked back and shrugged. Sam frowned.
"I dunno, Dean."
"What's not to know? It's not like he hasn't messed with me before, Sam."
Except that the thing in Florida had been designed to mess with Sam, not Dean. "The Trickster's not really known for being this, you know, subtle."
"You calling this subtle? I have horns."
"Which aren't even fully grown yet." Sam watched Dean's face crumple, his hand coming up to touch one of the horns. He wondered if Dean had thought that the seven inch growths were as long as they were going to get. "This has been going on over weeks, Dean. We've been bouncing from state to state every couple of days. The Trickster's . . . he's not that patient."
Bobby cleared his throat. "And Cox mighta been a blowhard, but far as I know, he never crossed the sucker."
Dean gaped at both of them for a few moments, his legs curling in towards his body again in an outward expression of his disappointment and discomfort. He'd really thought he'd figured it out, there, had an easy way to go back to looking like he was supposed to. "Well, fine. Then what good does that 'fool' stuff do us?"
Sam looked at Bobby again and saw his own thoughts reflected on the older man's face. "It's kind of appropriate, don't you think?"
"Appropriate?!"
"You've been poking at people you thought were too full of themselves your whole life. Mind you, with you it's mostly authority figures, but still. And the appetite?"
Bobby cleared his throat, and Sam looked up to see him rubbing his beard, which he still hadn't trimmed. If anything, it seemed to have gotten even scragglier, making him look a bit like Grizzly Adams after a three day bender. Bobby didn't seem too concerned by it, though. "And you are something of a horn-dog, kid."
"So, what? You're telling me that just 'cause I happen to like to eat and have sex and laugh at people, I have to turn into a goat-man?"
Bobby shrugged. "If the shoe fits. . . ."
Dean stretched out one leg to thump his hoof onto the desk again. "My shoes don't fit any more!"
Sam cleared his throat. "There's, uh, more."
"That's not enough?!"
Sam looked up at Bobby. "What do you know about the Horned God?"
Bobby gave Dean an appraising look. "Huh."
Dean twisted his head back and forth, looking from Sam to Bobby and back again. "Spit it out already."
Bobby took point, and Sam let him, feeling oddly comforted by falling into the familiar role of student to Bobby's teacher, even when he already knew the information being taught. "The Horned God is the male half of the Wiccan deity system. The female, the Triple Goddess, tends to get more press, but they're both equally important." Bobby ran a finger over the spines of several books while he spoke before pulling out one in particular, flipping to a certain page, and handing it over to Dean. Sam leaned forward to take a look. The page showed an image of a winged, goat-headed man with a pentagram in the center of his forehead. Dean huffed as he looked at it, then handed it back to Bobby.
"That's great, but I don't have three horns. Or man boobs."
"Yes, well, artistic license and talent aside, the idea of the Horned God is pretty damned ancient. Some theories state that he was one of the primary pagan deities of Western Europe, before Christianity came in and demonized him. You boys know as well as I do that demons don't look a damned thing like that, but popular mythology has dressed 'em up like goatmen for centuries."
"Well, good to know I'm not turning into an old school demon stereotype," Dean said. "But I'm sure as hell not some witchy god, either."
Bobby nodded to him and continued. "The Horned God is known for doing a lot of different things in the spirit and fairy realms. Everything from ruling the Underworld and holding mastery over death -- which, well, consider the number of times you're supposed to have died -- and leading the Wild Hunt."
"The dude's a hunter?"
"That's not all." Sam took over the narrative, figuring that Bobby wasn't that likely to include some of what he'd found. He turned the laptop so Dean could see it. "The Horned God has a lot of weight in psychology, too. Jungian theory suggests that the Horned God might represent compensation for 'inadequate fathering'."
Dean's expression darkened. "Oh, you are not bringing Dad into this." He leaned forward and scrolled through the website a bit. "Dude, you're getting this from Wikipedia? You know that was totally added by some twelve year old who'd just discovered Oedipus, right?"
Sam decided not to ask what Dean thought he knew about Oedipus. "Look, I'm just saying there's a lot of parallels here, okay? It's something to look into." He looked up at Bobby, hoping for back up.
Bobby sighed. "It's some interesting stuff about why, Sam, but it doesn't tell us a damned thing about how."
Sam felt his shoulders slump. "Yeah. I know." He closed his eyes, wincing as the image of Dean dead on the forest floor flashed against his eyelids.
It wasn't a vision. It wasn't.
"Hey, maybe we should talk to Chuck."
Sam's eyes shot open. "Chuck."
"Chuck?" Bobby looked between the two of them. Sam nodded, realizing that in the excitement of the war coming to a head the year before, they'd never quite explained Chuck and his novels to their mentor.
"He's, uh. He's a prophet."
"You boys know a prophet." Bobby said. "And you're still comin' to me for all your answers?"
Dean grinned. "You smell better." The grin vanished as he cocked his head, his nostrils flaring. "Well, you used to."
Bobby crossed his arms over his chest and tried to surreptitiously sniff his own armpit. "Shaddup."
* * *
So Sam called Chuck, the prophet who wrote the Winchester Gospel -- though Sam was pretty sure that should just be the "Gospel according to Chuck" or maybe the "Book of Winchester". Or was "books" just for the Old Testament? He was pretty sure a "gospel" was supposed to be about Jesus, and unless there were some things that Castiel never got around to telling them -- which, yeah, okay, so that was pretty possible, the guy practically defined "cagey" -- neither Dean nor Sam was supposed to be the second coming. So the Supernatural books, those would be, what, the first through umpty-somethingth epistle to the Winchesters? Except they weren't written to Sam and Dean, just about Sam and Dean.
And while Sam couldn't speak for Dean, of course, this was why he hadn't told Bobby about their own personal prophet Chuck. It was, despite everything else they'd been through -- Dean becoming part-goat excepted -- just too bizarre. It didn't work. Sam couldn't fit his brain around the trashy novels, their author, their fan-base, or their supposed importance in the grand scheme of things, so for the most part, he pretended they didn't exist.
You know, when he wasn't sneaking onto the message boards while Dean was out and starting flame wars with the so-called "Dean girls".
So. Sam called Chuck. The phone rang -- once, twice, three times -- and then Chuck answered with a hurried, panicked "No, I will not write you a love interest, it doesn't work that way and you know it!" and hung up.
Sam stared at his phone until the light of the display faded out, then lifted his eyes to where Dean was slouched pantless on Bobby's couch, eating a maple leaf. Dean looked back, his jaw idling open, his lips pursed around the stem of the leaf, his eyes wide in a look of childish innocence that no one who knew Dean had fallen for since he was seven. Sam dropped his chin and tilted his head. Dean's eyebrows crawled up another two millimeters towards the base of his horns, then another three when Sam failed to bow under the pressure of his guileless look. Sam held still and when Dean's brows twitched like they were just discovering they couldn't go up any higher, he knew he'd won. The brows dropped and Dean's lips quirked, ingenuous to devious in two easy moves. He slid the leaf stem to the corner of his lips and flashed his teeth.
Sam groaned. "So have you actually been asking for Chuck to write you more sex scenes, or were you just planning to?"
Dean did something with his tongue that made the leaf stem twirl in a wide, somehow decidedly dirty circle and shrugged. Sam's fingers twitched.
"Did you have to make them from my phone?"
Dean pulled the gnawed, stripped, and sodden leaf from his mouth like it was a lollipop and smacked his lips. "My battery was dead."
Sam threw the phone at Dean's head.
* * *
He tried again, this time from Bobby's phone, figuring that Chuck wouldn't know the number and therefore wouldn't assume he was being harassed. Of course that backfired, since Chuck didn't know the number and therefore didn't bother even answering the phone to find out if he was being harassed. Sam left a message, a succinct "Chuck, it's Sam, call me back," but he wasn't satisfied. They'd been forced to be unusually passive about this whole transformation thanks to their lack of information and Dean's increasing conspicuousness, and Sam was sick of it. Calling Chuck was the first real idea they'd had since calling Bobby, and Sam wasn't going to stop trying it until he got definitive answers.
So he tried Dean's phone.
Chuck answered on the first ring. "Okay, look, do you think I don't know what you're doing? This is -- this is harassment, or something! Prophet harassment, and I don't have to stand for it. I --"
"Chuck," Sam interrupted, before he could be treated to any more hurried, terrified accusations from the man. "It's Sam."
Chuck went very quiet. After a moment, his tone changed to the quieter, gentler tones that Sam was more used to hearing from him. Sam frowned at that. Why did Dean get panicked warbling while Sam got the psychoanalyst? In a certain sense, Chuck knew them better than they knew even themselves. What did it say about Sam and Dean that this was how Chuck reacted?
"Hey, Sam. Sorry about that."
"No problem. Dean gets on everybody's nerves." Sam took a deep breath, pacing across Bobby's library, past Dean, who was still slumped on the couch, still chewing -- sorry, ruminating -- on leaves. By now, though, he had a whole twig full of them. He'd open his mouth wide, tongue at the points until the entire leaf was in his mouth, then clamp his lips around the stem and tug until it pulled free of the stick. Then he'd suck the stem into his mouth and chew for a few moments before he opened his mouth to start again. It was fascinating, in a grotesque sort of way, and Sam paused on his way towards the kitchen to watch. Open, tongue, tug, suck, chew. Open, tongue, tug, suck --
"Sam, you there?"
Oh, right, he was on the phone. He tore his eyes away from his brother -- surely Dean hadn't actually just winked at him over his mouthful of leaf, right? -- and stepped through the doorway to the kitchen, sliding the pocket doors closed behind him. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm here."
"So . . . why'd you call?"
Sam took a deep breath. "You tell me."
There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, then Chuck spoke again, the tempo of his voice picking up, starting to sound more like the one he used on Dean. Nervous. More freaked out prophet, less sympathetic if occasionally cruel writer. "Hey, man, the apocalypse is over, remember?"
"Yeah, then why are you still refusing to write Dean's sex scenes?"
"Have you ever tried writing a sex scene before, man? It's hard! You either sound too clinical or too shmoopy, or your characters turn into contortionists and then the feelings get all involved and all anyone's saying is 'oh, oh, there, there, god, yes, god, yes' so you wanna spice things up, but then the next thing you know, they're calling each other 'lover' or screaming obscenities and there's toys and-and things involved and someone's getting tied to the bed --"
Sam started trying to interrupt him shortly after the "It's hard", but Chuck was a difficult man to derail at times. Especially when it came to talking about his writing. He settled for saying "Chuck, Chuck," with increasing volume and firmness until Chuck cut himself off.
"Oh. Sorry, I guess you don't really wanna hear about that."
"Not so much."
"But, yeah. I mean, it's not like a girlfriend would work with your dynamic, anyway. What, would she ride along in the back seat of the Impala? Stand out on her widow's walk and pace until he came home after a hunt? That would suck. I get enough complaints about the treatment of women in the series as it is. You know, I always kind of thought I just stuck Jo and Bela in to try and give the fans their strong female guest stars, but I guess they're real, too, huh?"
"Chuck."
"Which kind of makes you think: did the universe decide that you guys needed more gender-balanced allies, too? If so, why'd they write them out? I mean, sure, Bela went to Hell and managed to give you guys the intel on Lilith before she went, but as far as I know, Cassie's still alive. You should tell Dean if he really wants a love interest, he should look her back up. Sure, a lot of the fans didn't like her, either, but --"
Sam ran out of patience. "Chuck," he bit out, far angrier than he'd intended, but it worked. Chuck fell silent. Sam heard him breathing into the phone for a moment, then a loud clink and crackle as something -- Sam suspected it was the mouth of a liquor bottle -- connected with the headset on Chuck's end. Chuck swallowed, then let out a faint "ahhhh" before he spoke again.
"So, uh, yeah, you wanna talk to Jo."
"I'm not that interested in making our lives more gender-balanced, Chuck. And Dean's not into Jo."
"If you're calling why I think you're calling, you want to talk to Jo."
Sam leaned against the wall, crossed his arm over his chest, then switched the phone to his other ear. "I thought you said you weren't a prophet any more?"
"I said the apocalypse was over. Which, uh, it is. But I'm still getting dreams."
"And you've seen --"
"Dean's new look? Yeah." Another pause, another swallow and "ahhhh". "I don't know what you guys did in your past lives that got this much crap getting thrown at you, but I'd say it's time to start working on your karma. Because that shit is weird."
"What's causing it?"
"Talk to Jo."
"Yeah, I got that, but you have to know what's been --"
"Talk to Jo."
"Chuck, come on. You've gotta give me something here. Have you written anything? Can you email it to me?"
"Talk. To. Jo. Bring an axe." Another swallow-"ahhhh". "And, uh. You might wanna look into where Dean's been getting those leaves."
Sam took the phone away from his ear and stared at the handset for a moment before putting it back. "The leaves?"
Chuck had hung up.
Sam pulled the phone away again. He bounced his hand up and down a few times, biting his lip as he went over the conversation in his head. Jo. Karma. Axe? Leaves.
Then he tucked the phone away and threw the pocket doors to the library open again, striding over to pull the now barren twig from his brother's hand. Dean sat up with a squawk, frowning as Sam waved the twig in his face.
"Where did you get this?"
Dean looked affronted and opened his mouth as though to make some smart-assed remark, but something on Sam's face must have warned him off. Instead he sat back on the couch again, rubbing his thumb down the curl of his goatee. "Funny you should ask that."
* * *
Sam stared. There wasn't much else he could do. Even with the axe that Chuck had mentioned, it'd take days, if not longer, to take care of this problem, and who knew if the problem would let them even try? After all. . . .
"That wasn't there two days ago."
Dean was standing next to him in the scrap yard, the twig he'd stripped the leaves off of clamped between his teeth like a cigar. He nodded towards the problem.
"Hell, I'm pretty sure that wasn't there yesterday."
"Why didn't you mention this?"
"You were busy calling Chuck." Dean reached out and clapped a hand onto Sam's shoulder. "Man, Bobby's gonna freak."
"No kidding."
"That sucker's gonna play hell with his foundation."
Sam blinked, then cast his eyes sideways towards his brother, who stared forward, his expression blank and serious. "Dean."
"Hm?"
"A fifty foot maple tree has sprung up overnight and you think Bobby's gonna be upset about his foundation?"
Dean's shoulders lifted and held there for a moment before he let out an audible breath. "No, but it's true. Some of those branches have already busted out the upstairs windows."
Sam pinched his lower lip between his teeth, staring at the tree. "You don't -- you don't suppose this is like Anna, do you? Some angel threw their grace over this way?"
Dean didn't answer for a long moment. The angels were always a bit of an odd subject between them, Anna especially. Sam was never sure what he thought of them, his lifelong faith in God and heavenly forces of good shaken in the face of the cold, uncaring, and infinitely fallible creatures angels had turned out to be, unconcerned with Sam's problems and thoughts except to tell him -- or, more often, tell Dean to tell him -- that he was doing it wrong. Sam suspected that Dean felt the same way towards Anna and Castiel and the angels as Sam had felt towards Ruby and the demons -- both sides had done their best to manipulate the brothers to their ends, both had proven to be untrustworthy, and both -- in the cases of Ruby and Anna, anyway, if not Castiel -- had managed to worm in and demand a certain level of respect and admiration.
Besides, Dean had slept with Anna.
Of course, sleeping with a woman didn't mean much in the grand scheme of things to Dean. Not a human woman, anyway. But sleeping with a woman he was well aware wasn't your average, ordinary girl? Dean might talk big, but he balked at even touching psychics, much less groping a fallen angel. Sam suspected that Dean, deep down in the darkest, closest, safest corner of his soul, saw sex as much more than just a fun way of passing the time. Sex was vulnerability, and Dean was, if nothing else, very, very aware that he was only human.
Well, you know, before he'd started turning half-goat.
"No," Dean said finally. "No, I don't."
"It's the only thing we've ever heard of that could do this kind of thing, Dean."
Dean shook his head. "It doesn't add up, man. I mean, come on, an angel just happens decide to throw herself to Earth not long after I start going all fuzzy? When we haven't heard a single peep from the feathered sons of bitches in more than a year? It's too much, dude, and you know it."
"It's too much? That's your reason?"
"Well, that and there's eight feet worth of another one sprouting up around the other side."
Sam blinked, then shuffled sideways to look around the other side of the house. Sure enough, there it was -- an oak this time, judging by the leaves. The hubcaps that had formerly been decorating the siding of the house were now wedged into the bark of the sprouting tree as it grew up around them.
Okay, so Dean might have had a small point about that foundation thing. Sam walked back over to where his brother was still resting against the rusted-out car shell. "It's more like ten feet, now."
"Huh." Dean stroked his goatee and sucked at his teeth. "What did Chuck say?"
"To talk to Jo. And to bring an axe."
"Axe nothing. We're gonna need a chainsaw." Dean brightened at this prospect.
"I think he meant bring an axe to talk to Jo."
Dean blinked, still rubbing his facial hair. "Huh."
* * *
Sam jotted down a few more notes on the pad resting on his knee. "Okay. Thanks, Ellen. I'll call you when I know more." He flipped his phone closed and pressed his index finger and thumb against the bridge of his nose.
He was tired.
He was more than tired, really. He was exhausted. Things -- strange, unprecedented, nightmare things were happening, and Sam couldn't for the life of him figure out why. And according to Ellen, his only current lead had gone radio silent a week ago while on a trip to the wilds of Idaho. Planned, since Ellen wasn't exactly freaking out about it. Said it was a "research trip", whatever that meant, that she and Jo had figured out where they stood on Jo hunting. All good news -- except for the fact that it meant to "talk to Jo" as Chuck had so succinctly put it, he and Dean would have to drive a good sixteen hours to the Idaho panhandle to find her. Sixteen hours and twelve hundred miles without anyone trying to kill Dean for having horns and a tail.
Piece of cake.
He heard the faint clop-clop of Dean approaching and opened his eyes. Dean stopped in the doorway to the library, leaning against the jamb and looking Sam up and down, his expression serious and considering. Sam inclined his head to him.
"Right, so, Jo's in Idaho. We should probably try and pull a night drive to get out to her, keep you out of the public view."
Dean nodded once, his lips pursed, not chewing anything for the first time in Sam didn't want to think how long. "Bobby's not wearing a shirt."
Okay. "What?"
"Bobby's not wearing a shirt," Dean said again, not moving from his lean against the jamb. Sam frowned.
"What does that have to do with --"
Dean spoke over the end of Sam's question. "Bobby's not wearing a shirt," he said, his voice taking on new weight, "for the same reason I'm not wearing any pants."
Sam blinked. Moments later he was up and past his older brother, leaning into the hallway to peer towards the end of the stairs where Bobby was descending, several books that had been in storage on the second floor gripped in his arms. Sam immediately saw what Dean meant.
He'd noticed when Bobby had first gotten home that the scruffy older hunter had let his beard grow longer than usual. What had been a few inches of wild growth seemed to have expanded exponentially, the salt-and-pepper tip now brushing at the top of Bobby's pants. If the thing kept growing at its current rate, Bobby would be able to maintain his dignity by pure facial hair alone. That alone was weird enough, but apparently Bobby's chest hair had decided to launch a counter attack and take over the rest of the man's upper body. Sam tore his eyes from Bobby's stomach and met the man's eyes. Bobby looked back at him, paused at the base of the stairs, his expression blank and his eyes tired.
"Yeah," Bobby said. "I know." He lifted his free hand to scratch at his chest through the thick curtain of hair. Sam gaped a moment longer, trying to find words, but his mind had gone blank.
Weird stuff happening to Dean was cause for concern, but in the grand scheme of things not all that bizarre. On a certain level, Dean almost seemed to ask for them to happen -- not to the extent of a full transformation, sure, but still -- daring the universe and all the evil, twisted things in it to try something. Weird stuff happening to Bobby, attack by dream root aside, that was new. Bobby was too reserved, too experienced and smart, to draw attention to himself the way Dean did.
Bobby rolled his eyes heavenward, as though asking for the strength to survive Sam's dumb shock, then started forward again. "You boys find anything?"
Sam gaped some more, trying to get his thoughts in order, leaving Dean to answer.
"Just a lead on Jo in Northern Idaho, about fifty miles out from where Joshua's got a place. Don't know what good that's supposed to do, exactly, but, well, no offense, I sure as hell wouldn't mind hitting the road again."
Dean sounded very normal when he wasn't chewing, Sam realized. He could almost imagine that there was nothing wrong with his brother at all, that he wasn't getting close to having to duck through doorways to avoid hitting his horns on things, that he hadn't had to relearn how to walk over the last couple of -- days? Weeks? Bobby nodded at them, pulling the top book, a smallish hard copy sans dust jacket, the gold lettered title on the spine not yet visible to Sam, from his stack. He, too, looked like he was just taking all this in stride, like his hair gaining a life of its own wasn't anything to write home about.
"Take this. Dunno if it'll be of any use to you, but it sure as hell couldn't hurt."
Sam collected himself enough to reach out and take the book, flipping it open and scanning over page after page of oddly whimsical illustration. "Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods," he read aloud. "'with a few desert and mountain beasts.'" He looked back up at Bobby, only to knock his head against the base of one of Dean's horns as his brother leaned in to read over his shoulder. "Ow! Dammit, Dean."
Dean snorted, not sounding the least bit repentant. "Watch your head, Sasquatch."
Bobby echoed Dean's snort. "It's a compendium of some of the lesser known cryptids out there," he said. "Written around the turn of the twentieth century. Most folks think it's entirely fictional, but you'll find the billdad in there, as well as hodags, squonks, splinter cats, and the Snoligoster."
"We already killed the Snallygaster," Dean pointed out.
"Yeah, that's great for you," Bobby said, reaching over to flip the pages so that Sam was looking at a picture of a large, legless crocodile thing with a black man impaled on a spike on its back. He felt Dean move in to peer over his shoulder again. "This is the Snoligoster."
"Wow." Dean's voice was dry and bland. "And here I thought people were creative."
Sam read over the entry on the Snoligoster, grimacing. "-- or even a full grown -- Bobby!"
Bobby shrugged. "Ain't like I wrote it, kid. Like I said, turn of the 20th century."
"This is about a hunter skipping killing this thing because it was only killing black people."
Bobby ran a hand over his beard, a gesture that now took him almost a full minute and a half to complete. "If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure someone did the Snoligoster in six months ago. Old school racism aside, from what I've heard, the rest of the information in there is pretty damn accurate."
"It got anything in there on a creature that can turn people into. . . ." Dean trailed off, and Sam looked up in time to catch his grimace. "Well, creatures?"
"'Fraid not. And even if it did, that wouldn't account for the trees attacking this place."
Dean nodded. "True. Well. Thanks again, Bobby. We should go see what Jo's managed to get herself into." He raised an eyebrow. "You gonna come with?"
Bobby grimaced, looking for a brief moment like he couldn't think of a single thing worse than the prospect of leaving his own house. Sam frowned and filed that expression away, wondering if it might be a hint as to some sort of overall theme to the growing beard and trees. "Nah. I'll keep up the home front, here. You boys check in if you find anything."
"Will do." Sam forced a smile he didn't feel. Dean nodded, then turned to trot -- literally -- off to gather their things. Sam started to follow, but stopped when Bobby laid one hand, hairy save for the skin of his palm, on Sam's arm.
"Woodwose," he said.
Sam blinked. "What?"
Bobby glanced down at his chest, then back up at Sam. "Wild man of the woods."
Sam nodded slowly. "Just about every culture's got one." He sifted through facts in his mind. "They're associated with . . . hunters and hermits, right? Existing on the fringe of society. Often portrayed as poets or prophets."
Bobby shrugged. "Dunno about the poetry, but they're said to be hairy sons of bitches." He seemed resigned, like he'd just realized his whole life was leading up to becoming some kind of woodland creature -- a woodwose. Sam swallowed, then forced another smile.
"Hey, who knows? Maybe we're actually about to get to the bottom of this." He snapped Fearsome Creatures closed, not wanting to look at the gruesome Snoligoster illustration any longer than he had to. Bobby let go of his arm and he turned to head out.
He was pretty sure he wasn't meant to hear what Bobby muttered as he closed the door.
"If this thing has a bottom, kid, I get the feeling we might already be there."
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