you're just like everybody else
preceded
Sam’s car causes Dean pain.
“Ow,” he says when they’re standing in front of it. He squints and it doesn’t get any prettier. “Gross.”
Sam kicks at him wearily, his heart not in it. “Shut up.”
It’s some cramped Japanese thing the color of bruised dirt, the kind of car a civil servant drives, somebody who doesn’t even know how to change the oil. A dent the size of a watermelon adds depth to the driver’s side door, one of the windshield wipers gone missing, the floor on the shotgun side carpeted with coffee cups and Red Bull cans and Payday wrappers. A college kid’s car, really.
“You paid money for this?” Dean asks, fearing that if Sam says yes, he’ll never be able to respect him again.
But Sam shakes his head. “It was haunted and I cleansed it but then the dude it belonged to was too freaked out and he made me take it as a thank you.”
“You’re driving a haunted car.”
“Are you deaf? It’s clean.”
Dean swipes his finger across the side panel, leaving a path in the dust. “It is in no way clean.”
Sam rolls his eyes and gets in, leaning across to unlock Dean’s side because apparently power locks are too much to hope for. Dean settles gingerly, eyeing the No Smoking sticker on the dashboard, the ace of spades hung on a chain around the rearview mirror. His feet crunch in the mess on the floor.
“This is just awesome,” Dean says. “Definitely better than taking my car.”
Sam scowls at the road, taking up too much space in this little piece of shit car, out of place here just as bad as Dean.
“Can we focus on the matter at hand, please?” Sam drums his fingers on the steering wheel. Dean notices that he’s started biting his nails again, an old nervous habit that left for California when Sam did.
“Sure.”
“Okay. I’ve been looking into the town’s history, ‘cause maybe the pattern is all the kids are from here. I haven’t found anything that might explain it, though. Obviously there were natives who got wiped out two hundred years ago, but that’s the same as, you know, everywhere. It seems very specifically targeted to the town, but there’s no record of witch hunts or famous lynch mobs or massacres or anything.”
Dean slouches against the door, free to watch Sam because Sam is usually good about keeping his eyes on the road. Sam is easier like this, when he knows what to say and has evidence to back it all up. Dean could listen to him talk for days, turn Sam into the background soundtrack of his life.
“So I’m stumped, basically,” Sam concludes, and sighs. “Your thoughts?”
Dean moves his shoulders in half a shrug, eyes narrow and content tracking over the lines of Sam’s wrists, his smooth arms.
“I don’t know,” Dean says absently. “I’ve heard of people summoning fire demons but it’s all old stories. I didn’t think it could still be done.”
“Yeah. There have only been about five documented cases like this since World War II, all over the world. And in none of them was the demon under the kind of pinpoint control this one’s under. The fires are restricted to the beds, the curtains don’t burn, the walls aren’t even scorched. It would take a necromancer twenty years to get that good.”
“Are we.” Dean stops, glancing at Sam’s face. “Do you have any idea how much time before the next one?”
The muscle in Sam’s jaw twitches. “Not much. Couple days, week maybe.”
“And, what, what do the cops think? How come this town isn’t going batshit?”
Dean gestures at the sunny mid-afternoon sidewalks, kids in shimmery AYSO soccer uniforms eating ice cream on the curb while their parents sipped coffee and read the newspaper. Shiny happy people, he thinks, trying to recall the melody but no luck.
“They think they’re dealing with a serial killer using a homemade blowtorch or something. I only got that much from talking to the parents. They haven’t released details to the press, so all the townsfolk know is that four kids have died over the past two months and the circumstances surrounding their deaths are still being investigated. The town’s pretty freaked out, as you’ll see, but holding it together. Not panicked yet, but if the FBI gets involved that’ll change quick.”
“The fucking feds are coming?” Dean hates the fucking feds.
“Maybe. One more kid, and my money’s on it. So we save the kid, we stay ahead of the g-men.”
“And then drive off into the sunset in your crapmobile.”
Sam laughs, an awkward snort of a laugh that catches them both by surprise, and Sam sounds so dumb that a grin breaks on Dean’s face. Sam flushes and darts a look at Dean and he coughs, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. There’s something crooked and dark in Sam’s eyes, tugging at Dean from the inside.
“Anyway,” Sam says, slightly composed. “There’s some stuff at the library that you should take a look at.”
“Food, though, Sam. Food first, right?”
“Oh. Sure, yeah.” Sam’s forehead lines. “Sorry, I didn’t think. You haven’t eaten.”
“It’s okay,” Dean says, a little taken aback by how Sam’s face has twisted. “Any kinda cheeseburger will do.”
Sam nods and finds a old-fashioned hamburger stand within a few blocks. He gets out of the car without saying anything, and Dean watches him walk over and stand with his hands in his pockets, reading the big menu over the window.
That crack about driving off into the sunset, Dean didn’t mean anything by it. He knows he and Sam won’t be leaving this town in the same car. Whichever direction Sam goes, Dean will go the opposite, the two of them racing for mirrored horizons. Dean wonders if Sam is worried about that, worried Dean will stick around or not let Sam leave again.
Dean would never do that, of course. He may have an unnatural fixation on his brother and it may be destroying his life, but Sam told him no and that’s all Sam ever had to say.
They eat their burgers on the hood of the car, hard sunlight bouncing off windshields and absorbed by the wet-black asphalt. Dean people-watches and sees what Sam means by the town being freaked out: no kids are out alone, their hands swallowed up in the hands of adults, and everyone’s eyes are thin from more than the brightness. A harried dad passes juggling a double-armful of groceries and saying to his son in a strained voice, “Walk in front, Joshua, stay where I can see you and don’t pick that up, that’s trash.”
Dean offers a few attempts at conversation, but Sam turns each down with a short answer, and so they eat in silence. Dean tries to think about the job but his mind wanders and he’s thinking about Sam’s big hands, the brush of ketchup on the side of his mouth. There’s a low ache in Dean’s stomach, a sad and constant want. He’d give just about anything to be allowed to fuck his brother.
At the library, Sam shows Dean the original newspaper articles of each of the murders, hoping that Dean might spot something he missed. Dean is doubtful; Sam has always been the brains of the operation.
But after he’s been through each several times, he stops at one photograph of a mother and father weeping into each other’s shoulders, and in the background, hovering beyond the police tape, an itchingly familiar face.
Dean points at it, a goateed face in the crowd, asks Sam, “Who’s that? How come he’s familiar to me?”
Sam leans in, squints. “Because that, that’s Ted Mason.” He flips the microfiche machine ahead a few weeks to the article about the next killing, and there’s the man with the goatee again, now on the front steps with his wife, sitting as if they’d collapsed amid a forest of policeman legs, both of them shell-shocked with dangling useless hands. “Donnie Mason’s dad, he was the fourth one.”
“Why was he in the crowd for this one then?” Dean points back at the first article, the second child killed. “Do they live in the same neighborhood?”
“No. Maybe he was friends with the parents and came over when he heard? Wait, do a search for me.”
Dean happens to be sitting in front of a computer with access to the internet, and he obediently brings up Google, types in Sam’s “Ted Mason” and “Jeff Esposito,” both of them fathers of victims.
Sam hunches over Dean’s shoulder, close and intent on the monitor. “There. Is that-”
“Yep. High school classmates. Graduated twenty years ago.”
“Fuck. Did Roger Dauvois graduate with them?”
“Um. Yeah.”
“Fuck.”
Sam forgets they’re in a library and draws a glare over horned-rim glasses from the circulation desk. He grabs on to the edge of the table and he’s forgotten other stuff too, because his knee is pressed against Dean’s now and he doesn’t seem to care. The look on his face is disbelief and horror, this massive black wave about to crash down.
Dean kinda doesn’t want to ask but he knows he has to. “Sam, didn’t you-”
“No.” Wood creaks under Sam’s grip. “I looked at them individually, just for priors, but I never, I didn’t check them against each other. I’ve been focused on the kids, why the kids, I didn’t think.”
“It could be a coincidence,” Dean offers even though he doesn’t really believe it. “It’s a small town.”
Sam glances at his notes, throws out half-heartedly, “Max McCormack.”
Dean tries it, and says surprised and grateful, “No! Max McCormack went to high school in Akron.” He sits back, relieved. “Well, there you go.”
Sam gives him a second, then mentions drily, “His wife’s maiden name is Schiff. Tracy Schiff.”
“Oh.” Dean types it in slowly. “Oh. Yeah. She did graduate with those other guys.”
“Fuck.” Mindful of his voice now, Sam hisses it, sounding sinister. “There’s a fucking connection for you. Parents of all four were in the same class. They were friends or, what, the whole class is cursed? That’s gotta be hundreds of little kids by now, I cannot fucking believe I missed that.”
“We found it now, it’s okay-”
“It is not okay, that’s the break I’ve been dying for and it’s incredibly obvious.”
“Okay,” and Dean hauls Sam out of his seat before the librarian can make her way over to kick them out herself. He gets Sam outside and releases him on the lawn, in the flickering shadows of the trees. “Pitch your fit, go ahead.”
Dean acknowledges that it’s somewhat of a dick thing to say, but he doesn’t think it quite warranted Sam shoving him that hard in the chest.
“Shut up, Dean, you know how big a screw-up this is.” Sam looks frantic, his hair snarled from all the nervous running of his hands. His red-rimmed eyes are huge and dry. “Has it been like this for you too?”
Wary, Dean rubs his chest. “How do you mean?”
“It’s just that, I, I’ve been fucking up. The job. It’s much harder.”
Dean shakes his head without thinking. “Just because we were doing it together. And you’ve never done it alone.”
“I anticipated the physical but it’s like half my brain’s gone too.” Sam gives him a hesitant look, half-spooked and killing Dean with his fucking eyes. “You’ve done it alone before. Is this worse?”
Dean opens his mouth to say that it’s different, it’s complicated, but hears instead, “Yes.”
“You make stupid mistakes. You get yourself in trouble.”
Dean nods, thinking about the time every bone in his hand was almost broken in a bar’s parking lot and the time he let himself get pinned down by a creature that ate skin, the glittering edge of sleep deprivation over everything and all the times he spoke out loud and expected an answer. Sam mirrors the nod at him, touches his own chest. Sam looks freaked out and relieved and so tired, he looks impossibly good to Dean.
Taking an unconscious step closer, Dean says, “Our timing’s off. It’s natural. Gotta adapt, that’s all.”
Sam shakes his head, his gaze locked on Dean’s. “It’s been four months.”
“I know how long it’s been.”
“And have you adapted?” Sam asks with a pretty sneer. “Are you okay without me?”
“Dear God, no.”
That shuts Sam’s mouth, at least. He blinks at Dean and for a second the anger cleans off his face and he looks about fifteen years old and absolutely finished, about to pass out on his feet. Dean wants to put his hands on Sam’s hips and hold him up. Sling Sam’s arm around his shoulder and take all of his weight. Dean remembers, suddenly and starkly, falling asleep on couches when he was eight or nine and waking up with a Sammy blanket, the simple weight of a chest breathing flatly against his own.
Dean smiles, watching Sam’s face fall.
“I do the dumbest stuff, Sam, you should see. You’d laugh.” Dean pushes at his sleeves, wishing he had scars to show. “I’ve learned to work around it. It’s only ever near misses. What did you expect?”
Color rising on his cheeks, Sam looks away, pressing his lips together. “I never expected any of this.”
“Well. Join the club.”
“It’s not trivial. I might have saved two of those kids if I had. If.” Sam trails off, his brow heavily lined and his mouth pinched like he’s biting the inside of his lip.
Dean is finding it tough to look at Sam, tough to swallow past the thickness in his throat. Sam keeps running up against the wall of what happened four months ago, forgetting it briefly in the investigative rush of the case and his vicious self-abasement, and Dean has the pleasure of watching him remember again and again, that terrible black thing shuttering across his eyes.
“Look, don’t,” Dean says, and can’t think of what comes next. Lost, he reaches for Sam’s shoulder and takes hold, his grip sure. “Let’s just worry about whoever’s next, okay? It could be hundreds of kids, like you said.”
Sam tenses when Dean’s hand closes on his shoulder, but he’s solid and doesn’t move away. Dean is embarrassed by how relieved he is to have a hand on Sam once again, like the only rail before a hundred story drop.
Sam breathes out carefully, closing his eyes and forcibly clearing his expression. When he looks at Dean again, he’s more straightforward and easier to face, and Dean lets his hand drop.
“Yeah.” Sam rubs at his face discontentedly. “I’m so ready to be done with this case, you have no idea.”
Dean gets to the library door first and holds it open for Sam without quite recognizing what he’s doing. “Don’t worry, Sammy,” he says even though he knows it won’t help. “This is what we do.”
*
In a twenty year old high school yearbook, Sam and Dean find the common thread between the parents of the dead children. It’s not convoluted or obscure. There’s a black-and-white photo for each school club, and Ted Mason, Jeff Esposito, Roger Dauvois, and Tracy Schiff are all grinning out of the same shot, a lifetime younger and framed by trees, holding rifles cocked on their shoulders.
“A school-sponsored hunting club?” Sam asks. “Really?”
“Never underestimate the sticks,” Dean tells him, writing down the names of the other kids in the club. “Or the allure of a good firearm.”
“It’s like a bad joke,” Sam complains, still upset about the turns the case has taken. “Let’s arm the disaffected suburban kids!”
“Oh, give me a break. You know the more weapons training people receive the less stupid shit they pull.”
“Apparently not these people. Considering they’ve brought down hellfire on the next generation.”
Dean sits back and gives Sam a look. “Getting kinda biblical there, aren’t you?”
“It’s kinda appropriate.” Sam slams the yearbook closed, ruffling the loose papers on the table, but it’s just for drama’s sake and a second later he opens it from the front again. He taps his fingers on one of the first pages. “And I’d like this explained, too.”
Dean looks over and sees a picture of a little girl, maybe nine years old with her lank hair combed straight and a big wedge of a gap-toothed grin on her face. The girl is Patricia Kelly, and the yearbook is dedicated to her in memoriam.
“Why is the high school yearbook dedicated to a girl who died if she wasn’t a student?”
“Maybe she was a younger sister? A teacher’s daughter?” Dean suggests, but he doubts it and he can tell Sam does too.
“Look her up.”
Dean does. Sam’s close over his shoulder again, unthinking, and every few seconds Dean can feel him shift, a hyperawareness that causes Dean’s fingers stumble on the keys, inverting letters a few times before he gets it right. If Sam notices, he doesn’t say anything.
In the microfiche, Dean finds the same photo of Patricia Kelly in the yearbook on the front page of the local newspaper twenty years ago, under the black-and-white headline: “Young Girl Killed in Hunting Accident.”
“Well, hell,” Dean says. He sits back and bumps into Sam and jerks forward awkwardly, hunching over the computer. He doesn’t dare glance back. “There you go,” he finishes weakly.
Sam’s quiet for a second, and Dean tries to imagine his face, finely lined and sad-eyed and intent.
“They shot her?” Sam asks eventually. Dean shakes his head automatically, even though what Sam said is incontrovertibly true.
“It was an accident. The hunting club was supposed to stay in a specific part of the forest but they wandered out onto land owned by Dennis Kelly, that’s Patricia’s dad, and she was playing out there, I guess.”
“And they, they somehow mistook her for a deer?” Sam says, his voice rising and Dean pushes his elbow back into Sam’s stomach by instinct, knowing what thin ice they’re on with the librarian. Sam is as solid as a wall and warm and he breathes in sharply under Dean’s arm.
“Look,” Dean says in a pointed whisper. “It says nobody really knows what happened. None of them saw her until they found her body. There were eight of them out there; it could have been any one of them who actually fired the shot.”
“They didn’t run ballistics on the bullet?”
Dean scrolls through a series of articles about the aftermath. Half the kids in the gun club are mentioned by name, the other half described anonymously as juveniles. All of them, it’s evident, were completely horrified by what had happened, stammering and damnably young every time they were quoted begging for forgiveness. The shooting had rocked the little town to its core. People put up Patricia Kelly’s picture in store windows and left flowers and cards on the playground at the elementary school, all the flags flown at half-mast for a month.
“Something about the guns. They weren’t using their own, somebody had loaned them out and they got mixed up in the truck? It sounds like it was a collective panic attack after they realized what they’d done.”
“So all eight faced charges?”
“All eight pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and received suspended sentences and a shit ton of community service.” Dean pauses. “They were minors, Sam. At least the ones we already knew about. That’s why you didn’t see it when you looked for priors. The records were sealed.”
He risks a glance over and sees Sam shaking his head with his eyes and mouth tense and small, not giving himself an inch.
“Don’t,” Sam says shortly. He stares at the screen like instructions for absolution are written in the white space between the lines. “What are the names of the others? We need to figure out how many of them have kids.”
Dean reads him the ones that were printed in the newspaper and they fill in the eighth name, another minor, by doing a process of elimination on the club roster in the yearbook. Dean wishes that there were dozens of other rote tasks to do, mindless chattering stuff that wouldn’t leave Sam time to dwell. Sam dwells like a champ.
“All right,” Dean says once they have their list of imminent victims. “That’s what they did. There’s your why. Now time for the punchline.”
Sam nods. “Who’s exacting revenge for Patricia Kelly?”
Dean leans back, crossing his arms over his chest and looking over at Sam. “How long did you say it would take a necromancer to get that kind of control over a fire demon?”
“’Bout twenty years.” Sam’s eyes catch Dean’s and the corner of his mouth curls up. For a second it’s just like old times.
“Well,” Dean says. “Maybe we go pay Dennis Kelly a visit.”
“Hell yeah we do.”
Sam stands up, and Dean grabs his wrist, trying not to notice the way it makes Sam freeze immediately.
“Just one thing, baby brother,” trying to make it sound like it used to but it’s sour and doesn’t fit his mouth, so Dean tries out an old devil-may-care grin that hangs on his face like a crooked sign. “We’re taking my car.”
*
They go back to the motel to get the Impala and Sam doesn’t say anything until they pull into the parking lot and he announces abruptly that he’s gonna take a shower.
Dean is taken off-guard but he plays it off and nods like it’s perfectly normal. It looks like it’s been a few days, Sam’s hair crazier than normal the way it gets when he hasn’t washed it in awhile, the dark rough on Sam’s face that Dean isn’t thinking about too much. Sam’s always got a secondary motive, though, and Dean figures this one is metaphorical. Sam’s hallucinating blood on his hands again.
Dean finds an apple in the pocket of Sam’s bag where he usually keeps one, and he sits on the edge of the bed, carving it into moon-shaped pieces with his switch. He flips through the nine channels on the television, pressing the buttons with his knuckles to keep it from getting sticky, listening to the spastic sound of the spray.
Trying hard as he can not to let his mind go anywhere untoward, Dean ends up thinking about the case again, but that’s loaded too, because it’s hard to ignore the fact that Sam’s been out here for three weeks slamming himself bloody on the walls, and it took them all of an afternoon once they were together again.
It just really isn’t that tough of a case. Perversely, this now scares the fuck out of Dean, wondering with a kind of nascent panic what has happened to his very smart brother. Sam walked out on Dean because he’s smart, way smarter than Dean who can only want the impossible. Sam gets defensive but Dean has never had any doubts that if Sam wanted to go it alone in the manner of most hunters, he would quickly be the best at that like anything else he’s ever tried. The kid lived out of a car for half of high school and landed a scholarship to Stanford. Dean never underestimates him.
But this, this is something entirely new. Dean has gone to his strengths and basically laid off cases that require solving; he stalks known monsters and walks into hauntings with only the local bar legend to work off, but he’s always trusted his instincts in a fight way more than in any kind of academic situation. It figures that Sam’s the opposite and as impaired as Dean has been physically (and he has, hasn’t he, lucky to be alive sometimes because he’s millimeters slower and so endlessly distracted, caught with a wall at his back all too often), so Sam must find himself when trying to put clues together.
Dean doesn’t like the idea of it. If he’d known Sam was still hunting, he would have worried about injury and death strictly by biological imperative-they are the last of the line, after all-but this is far more insidious. If Sam can’t solve cases, people are gonna die and Sam’s gonna think it’s his fault.
That’s a whole different story. A brand-new level of hell.
The shower cuts off and Dean jumps, then sighs at himself.
He finishes his apple and tosses the core, leaves the television on a re-run of M*A*S*H, poking at some of their notes from the library. He thinks, fleetingly, that if Sam stays like this he might not actually be able to let him leave again, but immediately forces it away.
Sam comes out wearing his boxers and Dean is staring at the papers on the bed, hearing Radar call “Choppers,” and listening to the quiet rustle of Sam getting dressed. Steam rolls out of the bathroom and the scent of Sam’s cheap shampoo comes with it and tightens every inch of Dean’s skin. He can feel the heat on his face and knows what that must look like but what can he do about it.
“Some stuff makes more sense now,” Sam says, subdued and neutral.
Dean glances over and it’s a bad idea because Sam’s got jeans on but no shirt. Dean’s brain kinda short-circuits for a second, everything forgotten because Sam’s shoulders are still huge even though you can see his ribs a little bit, hard pale skin of his stomach and Dean’s staring and Sam’s staring back and Dean jerks his eyes away with a bit-off gasp.
A moment passes. Dean clears his throat.
“What sorta stuff?” he asks eventually. Sam is frozen in the corner of his eye, blurry and tall with a red shirt hanging in his hand.
Another taut moment and the tension is corrosive, eating away at Dean. He wants to look over at Sam again but he knows he can’t. Everything would show and Sam would see all the wicked things that Dean wants to do to him, see that the sickness in Dean is incurable.
“Jeff Esposito,” Sam says. “I went over there the day after his daughter died. They had him sedated, and he kept muttering about penance.”
“Penance?”
“I tried to ask for what, but then the cops rushed me out of there.” Sam makes a rough impatient sound. “Those fucking cops. I knew they weren’t telling me shit.”
“What was your cover?”
“Reporter. It wasn’t working too well.”
Dean nods, thinking that’s probably another part of it, they must lie better as a team. It occurs to him with the blare of the obvious that they probably do pretty much everything better as a team. He angles a look at Sam and Sam is wearing the red shirt, slumped in the chair with his hair curling wet and dark. His eyes are unfocused, far away.
“And Donnie Mason’s mom, Cynthia. Just a couple days after Donnie, she was already talking about divorce, saying all this terrible stuff and blaming Ted, and he just. He just sat there. Let her say whatever she wanted, and he didn’t even flinch. With this look on his face, like, like.” Sam stops, exhales. “I thought it was just the shock.”
“You couldn’t know, Sam,” Dean tries.
“Bullshit.”
Dean shuts up then. He’s not doing anyone any good.
Sam creaks and thumps around getting his socks and shoes on, and Dean feels unbelievably stupid sitting here doing nothing except avoid looking at Sam, so he takes out his gun and sees if he can break it all the way down and back before Sam’s ready to go. Swift and easy, black prints of grease on his fingers, Dean lives for the moment when something clicks into place, the sure and uncomplicated fit just as it was meant to be.
The sun is going down when they come out, bleeding and deeply orange, and Dean’s heart just wrenches in his chest when he sees the flutter of Sam’s hand over the dashboard of the Impala, the slight hesitant caress like he’s not sure he’s still allowed.
Dean gets them on the road, the setting sun centered in the windshield and absolutely blinding. Sam doesn’t put down his visor, slumping in the seat with his eyes closed, letting the thick gold light blast him. With his damp hair and his wrinkled clothes and the worn look on his face, Sam looks like he’s underwater, some distant sun-made sea.
Dean tries to keep his eyes on the road. He wonders what kind of calamity it would be if he just reached over and put his hand on Sam’s leg.
“I missed this car,” Sam says softly.
Dean looks over before he can stop himself, but Sam’s eyes are still closed. “Yeah?”
“That piece of shit I’m driving starts shaking if you push eighty. And it’s too small, you can’t sleep in it.”
“And it’s ugly.”
The corner of Sam’s mouth quirks. “And it’s ugly,” he concedes.
Dean grins for a second, his mind kinda fogged. “At least you were smart enough not to bother with trying to find a prettier car than mine.”
“No such thing,” Sam responds automatically, twisting a neat little knife in Dean’s stomach.
“Aw, Sammy. What a sweet thing to say.”
Sam smirks, still without opening his eyes and his face is so tired and lined, his big hands curled on his knees.
“I thought I saw you once, you know,” Sam says, sounding faintly detached. “Getting on the highway right when I was getting off, this, this perfect-looking car. Black, shiny black and you know how it can blind you sometimes, if the sun hits it right? It was like that. This blinding black thing flying away down the highway. And then it was crazy, I rolled over the median hooking a U, and I got back on the road and took off after it. I just. I wanted to see, I thought it was you and I wanted to see. I musta followed it for a hundred miles. Crummy little car could barely keep up, I’d see you on the horizon and then I’d lose sight again and again. It was. It was so strange. It didn’t seem like any time was passing at all.”
Sam’s hand squeezes into a slow fist. Dean is holding his breath, glancing compulsively at Sam’s smoothed-shut eyelids, the long exposed edge of his throat. Dean’s hands are white-knuckled on the wheel, all the energy in his body dedicated to just holding on.
“But then I caught up at a truckstop and it wasn’t you. It wasn’t even an Impala.”
Sam falls silent and Dean doesn’t know what to say. He keeps feeling like Sam is speaking in code, like there are secrets to be found in the pauses and breaths, the times that Sam’s voice cracks and the careful knead of Sam’s fist into his leg.
“Why,” Dean hears, and realizes after a second that it’s him. He swallows, figures what the hell, and continues, “Why’d you follow it?”
There is a very long moment in which Sam does not answer and Dean is certain that he won’t. Lines dig deeper on Sam’s forehead and Dean wants to push his hand across, clear Sam’s brow as easily as a plane of sand. But Dean can’t fix anything anymore, and he worries that he’s made it worse by asking Sam why. Why is a more dangerous question than it used to be, because after all, why does Dean want to have sex with his little brother? Why does it feel like he’ll die if he can’t? After everything he’s done and everyone he’s saved, why has God let this happen to him?
“I thought it was you,” Sam says, his voice low and uncertain.
And Dean shakes his head, teeth hard against the inside of his lip. “But why would you want to follow me?” Doesn’t say, barely bites back, you’re the one who wanted to leave.
“I just wanted to see,” Sam insists, his eyes staying ever-closed. “I wasn’t gonna do anything, I just wanted to see if it was you.”
“That’s not-” Dean starts, his voice rising and he’s getting angry, an upward flood in his chest, and he cuts himself off because of it, swallows whatever he’d been about to say and it wedges down his throat painfully.
“What?” Sam asks, sounding wary, honestly curious.
“Nothing.” Dean grits his teeth, hands so hard on the steering wheel he can hear it squeak. “You wanna get some food before we get to it?”
Sam takes a long pause, but Dean refuses to look over at him. He hears Sam whisper, “Yeah, sure,” and wonders if Sam’s eyes are still closed.
*
Conversation stalls and lags in the diner and Dean wishes they’d just hit a taco truck. The waitress takes too long with everything, way down at the other end of the counter chatting with a few old men in John Deere caps while Sam and Dean sit side by side and stare at the coffee mugs cupped in their hands.
It’s because they’re almost done. Dean’s feeling pretty good about Dennis Kelly either being or knowing the demon-raiser, and that means the hard part’s done. He looks ahead twenty-four hours, maybe thirty-six at the outside, and he can see the two of them exchanging some kind of tortured goodbye in the motel parking lot, their two mismatched cars moving apart, each trapped in a rearview mirror.
He doesn’t know if Sam’s bothered by the same train of thought. He thinks probably not. Sam’s all torn up about the case, haunted by the bedrooms of dead children, pinched looks and his hands trembling whenever they leave the mug. When it comes to guilt, Sam has a tendency to be single-minded. It kills Dean to see him going through it again, especially when he doesn’t know what’s gonna come next. God knows how long it’ll be after they split up this time, now that the past four months seems like forty years in a desert, now that Dean can’t imagine the idea of a half-year without seeing Sam, can’t even process the possibility of never again.
These spare hours in this luckless draining Ohio summer might be the last Dean has of Sam, and it’s thoughts like that that make talking hard.
When they get back in the car and back on the road, Dean considers his chances of making a break for it. Even Sam’s not stubborn enough to jump out of a car going sixty. Dean just topped her off and he could have hundreds of miles to talk Sam into coming back, hours through the featureless heart of the country with nothing for them to look at but each other.
Dean gives up on the idea pretty fast, really just a misplaced early-evening daydream. It’s got no logic behind it; Sam is stubborn enough to sit stonefaced and silent, let Dean talk until his voice or the gas ran out, and then leave again without a word, forcing Dean to take the blame for the whole thing.
Dean drives with his wrists, slumped back. He’s been exhausted for a long time, but nothing like the constant wearing of Sam’s presence.
Sam directs Dean to the address listed for Dennis Kelly, which takes them farther out of town, into the woods. Dean makes a not-funny crack about the Unabomber and Sam rolls his eyes and ignores him like he’s seventeen again and too cool to laugh at anything.
Closing in, Dean drives down a narrow dirt road with his headlights on, trees dark and pressing close, and he thinks he’s seeing things when there’s a flash of silver suddenly through woven forest, but Sam sees it too, saying:
“What the hell?”
Dean leans forward over the wheel, comes around the last shallow curve and for a second he thinks he’s looking at a spaceship, experiencing a jolt of amazement.
“Dude,” Sam says. “Old school.”
The headlights fall on it fully and its bizarre shape solidifies for Dean, an Airstream trailer the color of dulled platinum. It’s on blocks and obviously has been for decades, the weeds grown up over the metalwork, dents pocked on the side like buckshot.
“Where was it-” Dean starts to say, and Sam answers, “Blackfoot, Idaho. Summer I was fifteen.”
Dean nods, remembering it clearly, the silver trailer on the outskirts where they’d lived like anchovies in a can, training in fathomless heat and sweating out in the sere ink-colored shadow of a gnarled tree. He remembers the smears and partial handprints of dirt on Sam’s bare skin, the scuffmarks on his broad shoulders as they rolled through the dry grass.
Next to the Airstream is a shed, quilted together from pieces of corrugated tin and plastic, rotting sections of plywood, and in front of the shed is parked a junker of a pick-up truck that has taken on the indeterminate brown color of the unpaved road. Dean pulls up next to the truck, and as they both step out, the door to the trailer bangs open, sharp as a shot.
“You from the police or the papers?” a man shouts from the door, gravelly and strident.
Sam throws Dean a questioning look over the hood of the car, and Dean shrugs. Sam calls back, “We’re not police!”
The man is smallish with steel-colored hair, big thick glasses, and Dean doesn’t like the way he’s got one hand out of view, holding something just inside the doorframe. Dean has pretty much all his money on it being a firearm of some kind, and he hopes that Sam has seen it and stays behind his open door.
“You here about the fires?” the man asks.
Sam looks over at Dean again but Dean can’t read his expression, then answers, “We’re here about Patricia.”
The man’s mouth opens but he doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Slowly, he pulls his hand back into view and takes the few steps down to the dirt. Sam and Dean swing their car doors shut and walk out to meet him.
“Pete,” the man says, the papery skin of his face covered in salt-white stubble and his watery blue eyes enormous, magnified by his glasses.
“Steve Gaines,” Sam says, offering his hand.
The man shakes his head, pursing his lips. “No, that’s what we called her. Patricia. She always liked to be called Pete.”
“I hadn’t heard that, sir.” Sam lets his hand fall. “You’re Dennis Kelly?”
The man nods, eyeing Sam suspiciously, then Dean, then Sam again. Dean is kinda creeped out, Kelly’s gaze fluid and unblinking, drinking in the both of them and drinking something out of them, lessening them somehow.
“I won’t take too much of your time, Mr. Kelly,” Sam says. “We work for the Dayton Sentinel and we’d like to ask you about what happened to your daughter.”
“Been twenty years since they killed her,” Kelly tells him. “Everybody knows all there’s to know already.”
Sam bobs his head earnestly. “Yes sir, twenty years this October, that’s why we wanted to do a retrospective of the accident and the community response.”
“Community response,” Kelly echoes with a sneer, something flaring suddenly in his eyes. “Let those kids walk, that was the community’s goddamn response.”
Dean glances at Sam but Sam doesn’t see it, all his attention focused on Kelly, his brow conscientiously furrowed.
“You don’t think the plea bargain reached by the hunting club was fair?”
“Fair?” Kelly’s voice goes tremulous, and the brightness in his eyes goes sharp at the edges, almost neon in its intensity. “Pete was on my land, not a hundred yards from here. Her own goddamn backyard, and they came in and shot her. Just a little girl. No reason for it. My Pete never hurt nobody.”
“Yes sir,” Sam says quietly.
“I sat in that courtroom thinkin’ those kids were gonna pay for what they did, and I watched them walk out of there.”
The light in Kelly’s eyes continues to grow, swollen out of proportion by the thickness of his lenses, and Dean realizes that it can’t be natural about the same time Sam does, each of them swaying backwards slightly.
“Can you boys even imagine what that’s like?” he finishes on a decrepit hiss, broken yellow teeth bared. Sam shakes his head but Dean doesn’t move, his eyes locked on Kelly. Dean slips his hand behind his back and sets it on the gun in his belt.
“No, it’s terrible,” Sam says. “I can’t think of a worse thing.”
Four kids burned alive in their beds is kinda worse. Dean thinks of contributing, but stays quiet.
Kelly nods, blinking slowly a few times. Dean recognizes the traces of a life-changing grief on the man’s face, like childhood scars breaking and paling as you grow but always there. Some stuff you don’t ever get over. Most of the people Dean meets on this job carry that kind of grief around with them, and he never gets used to seeing it.
But beyond the sorrow, Dean can also see a razor’s edge of madness, glinting cold. Kelly smells faintly of sulfur, and that eerie light in his eyes refuses to fade. Dean keeps his hand on his gun, keeps one eye on Sam.
“It was all a long time ago,” Kelly says, then adds, mumbled in afterthought, “They get theirs, anyway.”
“The fires?” Sam asks immediately, and Dean winces because it’s too soon to bring that up.
Kelly’s face sharpens with suspicion, boring into Sam and Dean catches the momentary flash of panic across Sam’s expression, the subtle duck of his throat.
“I don’t know nothing about that. I already told the cops, told ‘em every damn time they came.”
Sam’s nodding fast, his hands up. Color is rising on his face and he’s losing eloquence as he says, “Of, of course not, Mr. Kelly, I wouldn’t, I didn’t mean to suggest-”
Dean jumps in then, this old habit he has of rescuing his brother. “So what do you think is actually happening?” he asks Kelly, genuine and without aggression. “I mean, it can’t be a coincidence, right? Four of the eight losing their kids like this?”
Kelly smiles then, a sincerely terrifying thing to see, all malicious glee and insane zealotry. Dean recoils half an inch, barely sees the twitch of Sam doing the same.
“The Lord’s seeing to it.” Kelly sounds as certain as the color of the sky. His eyes are as big as eggs, mesmerizing and electric blue.
Dean wants to take a few slow steps backward, just to get within arm’s reach of the car again, and he would really feel a whole lot better if Sam would get his hand on a weapon of some kind. Sam suddenly seems unacceptably exposed, red-shirted like a target and his chest unprotected, his hands hanging defenseless at his sides. Dean wishes there was a way to put his body between Kelly’s and Sam’s without making things weird.
“You think someone’s doing His work for Him?” Sam asks carefully.
“I think the Lord doesn’t need a middleman,” Kelly answers. “If He wants to send down a hand of fire to collect those children, I don’t question His plan.”
“Hand of fire,” Dean repeats under his breath, weirdly fascinated by the thought of it, and Sam glances at him quickly, the corners of his mouth taut.
“That’s what you think is happening?” Sam asks. “Divine retribution for Pete?”
Kelly moves his shoulders and looks away, out into the dark woods. “I don’t know,” he says, ringing a bit hollow. “She deserves it, though. She was the best thing I ever did.”
Sam bows his head, his face twisted, so Dean’s the one who says, “Yes sir,” one last time.
*
“It’s him, right?” Dean says as soon as they get out of view.
“It’s definitely him.”
“‘The Lord doesn’t need a middleman,’” Dean mocks, making his voice gruff and splintery. “Satan kinda does, though, huh?”
Sam rests his knee on the dashboard, slumped down in his seat and drumming his fingers on his leg. “I couldn’t tell if that guy was crazy or possessed.”
“He can’t be both? Lost his daughter, went a little crazy; delved into black magic for two decades, got a little possessed.”
A ghost of a smile passes over Sam’s face. Dean gives a little inner cheer that Sam’s still got the ability.
“And it’s gotta be the shed, yeah?” Sam says. Dean nods.
“No doubt. There’s not enough room in those Airstreams.”
“I remember. That couch you found-”
Dean smirks, knowing immediately what Sam’s talking about. That summer they’d spent in Idaho, and the sweet blue plaid couch that he’d paid fifty bucks for at a garage sale, and how he and Sam had strained and sweated just wedging it through the door of their trailer, only to find that it was six inches too long in every direction. Dean had left it in the yard and slept out there for a week, until he was woken up by pelting rain, his eyes clearing to see Sam laughing and swinging from the tree, shirtless and barefoot in the deluge.
“That couch was way cooler than anything else we’ve ever owned,” Dean informs Sam.
“Especially when it started growing mildew all over. That was awesome.”
Sam says it in a deadpan and Dean assumes it’s sarcastic because that’s the only kind of joke Sam makes anymore, but he decides to take it at face value because it was kind of awesome. It was like the couch was turning into a giant Chia pet.
“And then Dad let us use it for practice with the machetes,” Dean says happily. “That was even better.”
“Yeah, we kicked that couch’s ass.” Sam lets out a long exhale. Dean looks over and Sam’s got his eyes closed.
“You’re tired?” he asks and it sounds kinda strange but he can’t pinpoint why.
Sam nods slightly. “You had your little nap.”
“Yeah, ‘cause I red-lined it all night instead of sleeping.”
“I didn’t sleep last night, either.”
Dean stares at the spray of headlights on the trees, trying not to look back at Sam because he’s not sure he’ll be able to stop. He thinks about Sam up all night, pacing the close confines of the room with his phone on the bed and the television on mute. Waiting for Dean and filling his mind with the thought of him, pushing his hands through his hair the way Sam does when he can’t sit still.
“Well, you shoulda took a nap then,” Dean says, hating how hoarse he sounds.
“I’ve been preoccupied.”
“No, really?” One quick glance just to see the corner of Sam’s mouth curl up in that tired fraction of a smirk that seems all he can offer. Dean continues, “It’s not much of an excuse, anyway.”
“I know.” Sam pauses. “Maybe we’re overthinking it. Maybe hunting is harder because we’re trying to do it on three hours of sleep every night.”
Dean shifts uncomfortably. “I sleep more than that.”
“Liar.” Sam barely even dignifies it. “The simplest explanation, Dean.”
“Hardly. Even if you’re right, not being able to sleep is just another symptom.”
Sam doesn’t answer for a minute, and when Dean looks over Sam’s eyes are open, thinned and glittering. He’s not looking at Dean, fixed on the road ahead, and Dean wonders half-heartedly if he’s ever gonna have all of Sam focused on him again.
“All right,” Sam says, measuring out each word. “Then how come you can’t sleep?”
Dean tightens his grip on the steering wheel. “Nightmares.”
He sees Sam nodding in his peripheral vision. Dean swallows with a click, trying to imagine what Sam’s nightmares must be like.
“And it’s too quiet,” Sam says very soft.
It hits Dean hard. He doesn’t know why but it feels like an anvil landing on his chest, hearing Sam say that. Since Sam got over his hero-worship of Dean, he has told his big brother to shut up approximately a dozen times a day. Sometimes it’s like Sam barely tolerates Dean, like Dean’s voice and taste in music actually hurt him, but as it turns out the world doesn’t sound right to Sam if Dean’s not there.
“Yeah,” he says, cautious and without inflection. He feels like he might be about to throw up or crash into a tree or something equally dramatic, but he’s got a good poker face.
“So,” Sam says slow. “What’re we gonna do about that?”
Dean almost bites through his lip. He doesn’t say anything for almost a full minute, squeezing the steering wheel and trying to calm down enough to think rationally. It doesn’t really work. Sam’s so close, been so close all day and it’s like free smack after months in rehab. It’s driven Dean kinda nuts, and he blurts out:
“What, anything you want-” before he hears himself and cuts off, horrified.
Another full minute of silence passes, and Dean does not look at Sam, counting the pieces of broken yellow line rolling under his wheels. He can hear Sam breathing slightly ragged and the several times he makes a sound but no word follows. Dean is glad for it because he’s pretty sure whatever Sam says next is going to be fatal. Dean cannot believe what a fucking wreck he’s made of things.
But all Sam says next is, “Dean,” and he sounds so forlorn, all the air crushed out of him, and Dean closes his eyes for a spare second.
He looks over and Sam is looking back, drawn and solemn, sadder than Dean has ever seen him. “It’s never gonna go away, is it?” Sam says, his voice cracking.
Dean drags his eyes back to the road, blinking fast and fighting a burn in his sinuses. He shakes his head jerkily, trying to banish the crippled note in Sam’s voice, the heartbreaking expression on his face. Dean can’t even calculate how much damage he’s done to his brother, it’s like trying to count stars.
“Not for me,” Dean answers, dead honest.
Sam makes a low noise like a moan and presses his fist against his eye. He’s nodding, looking pained. Dean’s mouth is dry and his mind is spinning, a thousand possible timelines flickering past, all the crazy things he might say next. He wants to tell Sam that this is the kind of love men fight crusades for. It’s greater than the two of them, greater than the unfortunate circumstances of their births or their inevitable sanguine end. A force like gravity, like luck and faith and memory, an epic poem so beautiful that it gets passed down orally for five thousand years before anyone bothers to write it down. He wants to tell him that together they can overcome anything, but Dean’s never been able to lie to Sam.
“You’re just so,” Sam says and then stops and scrubs at his face and tries again, “I thought I could. Get over it. Get some distance. I thought if I didn’t see you-”
“Don’t,” Dean interrupts, his heart pounding and he’s so scared it’s making him sick.
“Why not? Is there anything I could say that’s gonna fuck up the relationship more?”
Dean really has no answer to that, and Sam continues, sounding kinda frantic, pushing the words out:
“It was like cabin fever, temporary insanity. That way you get when you’re drunk, something. That stuff’s not supposed to, to linger, and I thought it was just seeing you every day. Seeing nothing but you. And on my own I could work it out of my system. You know. Figure out how to break the curse.”
A laugh fights out of Dean, a single cough-like sound. “You thought we were cursed?”
Sam sends him a sidelong look, shadowy and weighted. “Well, gee, Dean, I’ve become overwhelmed by the urge to stick my hand down my brother’s pants, and it’s fucked me up beyond comprehension. Cursed didn’t seem too much of a stretch.”
He really shouldn’t say things like that, Dean thinks kinda woozily. His head is crowded suddenly with vivid flashes, Sam’s fingertips sliding south down his stomach, his wrist caught and pinned by Dean’s belt, the rough edges of Sam’s fingers and his wide smooth palm, moving fast and graceless and eager and Jesus.
Dean nearly sideswipes a Cadillac, a high bleat of a horn chasing behind them, and Sam barely flinches. Absurd random death would not exactly be out of place, so Dean dedicates himself to the road again.
“But nothing I did worked,” Sam tells him. “Everywhere I went was the same.”
Dean is nodding blindly, trying with everything he’s got to figure out where Sam’s going with this. Dean has seen how wretched Sam has become, but it never seemed plausible that they’ve been suffering from the same disease, this thing that Sam is making sound hopeless.
“And now you’re back.”
Dean waits for him to add to that, but Sam refuses, weaving his hands between his legs so the streetlight washes across and catches photo-like images. He’s staring out the window and his face is still except for that one traitorous muscle in his jaw that you have to know him pretty well to look for.
Yes, Dean is back, but god only knows how long that’ll last. This whole deal is like living in a minefield, a hair-trigger away from dismemberment.
“I believe I was summoned,” Dean manages.
“Yeah well. You see how well I’m doing without you.”
“That cuts both ways.”
“Dean.” And Sam takes a strange sudden breath, quiet for a moment. “I can’t even think of a name for what you are to me anymore. Do you. You know what I mean?”
Dean shakes his head automatically, but he knows Sam’s right and he’s sure it shows on his face. He’s tried very hard not to put specific words to it, because he doesn’t want to be Sam’s lover or god forbid his boyfriend, and brother just sounds like backstory these days. Dean just wants Sam. He doesn’t want to define it any better than that.
Sam blows out a breath. “I’m having trouble stomaching it. This can’t be a normal way to feel about a person, blood relation or not.”
“I don’t think you can separate out the blood relation part.”
“Sure, sure you can. Part of this is about you being my brother and part of it is something else.”
“Oh, it’s really really not.” Dean coughs, his chest feeling tight. He’s twenty miles above the speed limit and just flying. “I didn’t forget you were my brother that night.”
“You just didn’t care.”
“I. Yes.”
“That’s not a problem for you?”
“Sam, I, I don’t even know what you want me to say.”
“Honestly I’m thrilled I got you to say this much.”
“Yeah, much less of a girl over here,” Dean sneers.
“I’m sorry, did you want to go back to communicating with me through fucking voicemail,” Sam almost shouts.
“I never wanted to in the first place!”
“Dean!” Sam punches the dashboard, his mouth half-open and gnashing. “Maybe you haven’t noticed but this thing is killing both of us, will you please at least talk to me about it.”
Dean is really driving too fast for this conversation. His heart feels like it’s about to punch out of his chest and he can clearly picture it skidding wetly across the dash, pages of intermittent yellow light washing across it. He’s kinda breathless and he can’t understand anything that’s happening, this apocalyptic scent in the air.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Dean says, and sees Sam’s eyebrows hunch down because Dean’s said that before. Dean tries to do better. “I don’t know how to explain it any better, I wish I did. I wish I wasn’t like this but I can’t help it.”
“It’s not just you.”
Dean shakes his head, not wanting to hear that right now. “I know it’s not right. I knew that while it was happening and ever . . . ever since. I wish you hadn’t left, but I get why you did.”
“Really?” Sam doesn’t believe him.
“You’re a better person than I am, Sam, and you, you always have been. I know it’s not right but I don’t care, I can’t. I’m not gonna get better. You were smart to take off.”
And Sam crumples, burying his face in his hands. Dean’s stomach flips over, staring at the shuddering arch of Sam’s back. He pulls off the road into a church parking lot, saying, “Sammy,” in a futile tone.
“I didn’t leave ‘cause it’s wrong,” Sam says from behind his hands. His voice is a wrecked thing, strained and uneven. “You think I care about morality at this point?”
Dean’s hand flutters over Sam’s shoulder and he hesitates and hates himself, hates how miserable Sam is right now and how fucking ineffectual he has become in the face of it.
“Then why?” Dean asks.
Sam moans. “Jesus, Dean, you already have almost everything. This thing, it, it’s too much. It’s asking for too much.”
Dean takes it like a man, pulling back and looking away and swallowing a few times. The church is white clapboard and small-town perfect except for the great hole torn in the dark-shingled roof, patched over with a blind swatch of tarp, the kind of thing that happens when a tornado uproots a tree and tosses it around. Dean remembers sheltering in basements without heat or power, Sam tucked warm and slight under his arm because Dad had said, you take care of your brother, just like always.
Sam is probably right. Dean has been appalled by the course his life has taken, dull and colorless and fraught with nameless danger, and he knows it’s because Sam means more to him than God ever intended. There’s this power Sam has over him. It makes Dean do the craziest things.
“If I can get all of you,” Dean says without looking over. “You can have all of me.”
There’s a long moment where nothing happens. Dean doesn’t breathe and doesn’t move. He doesn’t think or wonder or meet Sam’s eyes, staring at the wounded church and trying not to pray.
Sam touches the side of Dean’s face, just a brief stroke of two fingertips along the line of his cheekbone, and Dean flinches hard, sucks in a breath between his teeth. He kinda sees it coming.
“I, I can’t,” Sam manages, his throat thick. “I did that once before.”
Dean can’t think of anything to say for the longest time. He clutches the steering wheel like it’s the last rung of a broken ladder. He’s not built for this kind of stuff. He doesn’t know how to explain it to Sam, this dogged certainty he has that they’ve been crippled and the only solution is to go through life holding each other up.
Sam says his name and makes Dean look over at him. He’s slumped, all his strings cut, a profoundly sad look on his face. Dean feels deeply out of character, cravenly clinging to his car and scared to even look at his brother, and Sam seems to feel the same way, his eyes skittering over Dean’s face and not catching.
“Dean,” Sam says again, and this time it’s mostly a whisper. “Please understand that it’s breaking my heart.”
Dean makes a sound not close to a laugh, and lets his head fall onto the steering wheel. Everything that happens to him these days is fucking unbelievable, and it’s not even the monsters. His stomach is trying to crawl up his throat, as if Sam rejecting him needs a physical response.
Never had a chance, he thinks, and weirdly enough, it settles him a little. He insists to himself forcefully, you were never gonna end up with your fucking brother, and wonders bleakly if it will ever ring true.
*
concluded