Fic: Fear No More (10/13)
Chapter IX: It's Not Worth the Freaking Price
Chapter X: How Things Usually Aren't as Bad as Dean Thinks
And now that we're back to where I was fully coherent, I can tell the story.
Dean's made it sound like I wasn't scared, which isn't entirely accurate. The truth is that I didn't know just how bad it was. Sure, I'd heard what the doctor had said, and it had terrified me at first. I knew that some of the other kids have died, and I knew it was a possibility that I might, but once I'd had time to think, it wasn't a possibility I really believed in. I'd been hurt on hunts before. Dean and Dad always sorted it out. I was sure they'd sort it out this time, too.
If I'd been aware enough to realize just how scared they were, I would've been a lot more scared myself.
Before we actually went outside, I wanted to find out about my classmates. The nurses brought me a wheelchair - I didn't argue; I didn't want to fall flat on my face in two minutes and be dragged back in - and Dean helped me into it and wrapped a blanket around my knees.
Because it was the PICU, the blanket had big bunnies on it.
"Dean, it's going to be sunny outside."
"We're not taking risks."
We got a lot of sympathetic looks as Dean pushed me down the corridor. One elderly woman burst into tears when she saw us.
I twisted around to ask Dean, "Do I look that bad?"
Dean just looked at me, eyes bright with the tears he wouldn't let fall in my presence. That was the first hint I had of how terrified he really was.
Neither of us said anything else as he wheeled me to the nurses' station and asked about the other kids. One of them nodded sympathetically.
"We haven't lost anyone today. Dennis Pierce coded on us last night, but we managed to get him going again and he's been stable." The nurse patted my cheek. "Not much improvement in anyone either, I'm afraid. But maybe things will start looking better today. Right, Sam?" She glanced at Dean. "Are you taking him outside?"
"Yeah, is that OK?"
"Sure." She smiled. "The weather's nice. It might even be good for him. Just stay where it's sunny and come back in right away if it starts raining or gets cold."
Dean nodded his thanks.
He took us outside and found a secluded, sunny spot by a small clump of trees. He put the brakes on the wheelchair and dropped to the grass in front of me.
After a few minutes, he sighed, rested his head on my knee, and shut his eyes.
"Tell me when you want to go in, Sammy," he mumbled.
"Yeah."
I didn't think anything of it at first. This was back in the days when Dean wasn't afraid his junk would shrivel up and fall off if he actually showed some affection. It wasn't normal for him to want to be so close, but it wasn't unexpected, especially not with how sick I was.
Then I realized Dean was sobbing quietly.
I put my hand on his head. "Dean. Don't. It's not your fault. Please."
He didn't reply, but he pushed his head up into my palm. I ran my fingers through his hair, and then he leaned up, wrapped his arms around my waist, buried his face in the blanket on my lap, and cried. Really cried, helpless, heaving sobs that sounded like they were being wrenched from the depths of his soul.
"Dean."
Then I was starting to panic. I had been a little nervous before - I mean, it wasn't like I wanted to die - but Dean's desperate tears made me feel how close the danger was. For all I'd said earlier about inevitability, I'd been perfectly confident that Dean would find a way to sort everything out. That was when I realized that he didn't know how to fix this - that he might not be able to fix it.
I couldn't keep my fingers from curling in his shirt at the realization.
"I'm sorry," Dean choked, words barely discernible. "I tried, Sammy. But I can't think of anything - anything other than Jacobi's spell -"
"Dean."
"And you don't want me to kill him, fine, although I think he deserves to die. But - God I don't know if I can live without -"
And that was even more horrible than the thought that I might die. I didn't wait for him to finish the sentence. I grabbed his collar and pulled him up. Or, well, I tried to pull him up. I was too weak to do it. But Dean felt my hands and looked up on his own.
"Don't," I whispered urgently. "Don't - don't you ever even suggest that. Do you think I could ever be at peace if you… if you… Dean, don't."
"You think I can live without you?"
"You'll be fine. You're strong."
Dean sighed and lowered his head to my knee again. "I'm strong because I have something to be strong for, Sammy. Take that away, who knows?"
"You have your baby," I said lightly. Dad had given Dean the Impala just that year.
Dean looked up, scowling. "Sam, I love my baby, but if you're even hinting that you think a car is going to make up for you not being with me anymore -"
"Dean!" He wasn't normally this touchy. "I was joking. I know you love me almost as much as you love the Impala."
"It's not funny." Dean's glare intensified. "And you're more important to me than -" He broke off and ducked his head. A moment later, he whispered, "More important than anything else." Then he looked up again. "But don't tell anyone I said so."
"Especially not your baby?" I teased.
"You can tell my baby," Dean assured me. "My baby understands. Me and my baby, we have a deal."
"A deal? With the Impala?"
"Yeah." Dean grinned. "I keep you safe when she's not around. She keeps you safe when I'm not around." I couldn't help laughing. "I'm not joking, Sammy! See, that's why you have to get better. I was supposed to be on duty at Ellison, and she'll never forgive me if…" Dean's eyes darkened. "You can't die."
He refused to say another word no matter how much I prodded, so we sat together in silence until the sun started to go down.
The sudden nip in the air made me start to cough, and then Dean jumped like he'd been scalded, yelled at me about telling him if I was feeling sick, wrapped the blanket around me, put his jacket on top of that, and hurried us inside.
Caroline - the pretty nurse that Dean, for some reason, didn't seem interested in flirting with - helped him get me in bed and put the oxygen mask over my face. I started to protest, but Dean was looking at me with such a horrible mixture of guilt and sorrow that I would probably have let her intubate if I'd thought that would cheer him up.
The mask helped with the coughing.
By the time Dad came back I was feeling a lot more comfortable. Dean had got up on the bed again, making me feel warm and safe. Caroline had produced a battered copy of Andersen's fairytales. Dean was reading to me from the book, inserting enough of his own commentary to make me snicker. ("Seriously, Sammy? Snow bees? What was this guysmoking? More importantly, do you think we can get some?")
Dad, when he arrived, looked a little bemused at the sight. Dean glanced at him and lowered the book, although he didn't shut it.
"Did you find anything?"
Dad shook his head sadly. "Nothing."
For a second - just for a second - Dean looked like the entire world had come crashing down around him. Then he shut his eyes and breathed deeply.
When he opened them again, they were glinting with determination.
"Fine," he said. "Want to finish the story, Sammy?"
"Dean?" Dad asked, sounding as startled as I felt. "Did you get what I said?"
"Yeah, I did. Sammy? Story? Want to find out what happened to Kay?"
"Dean -"
"Yeah, Dad!" Dean snapped. I looked up in surprise at the sudden fury in his voice. His arm came around my shoulders at once. "It's OK, Sammy." He turned back to Dad. "I get it. You can't figure out a way to help Sammy. And I'm sure as hell going to try, but I don't know if I can either. And…" His arm tightened. "And I don't know how I'm going to live without him, if it's even going to be possible for me to live without him, but that's my problem. Right now Sam's alive, and I'd rather save the research for when he's sleeping. If he's just got a couple of weeks left then they're going to be as happy as I can make them." Dean looked at me. "Sammy? The story?"
I'd never felt prouder of my big brother, or closer to him, than I did in that moment.
"Yes, please, Dean."
As Dean read, Dad came silently to the bed, sat on the edge, and patted my shoulder with gruff affection.
Soon after, I was half asleep.
A knock at the door startled me into wakefulness. Dean held me closer, his arm a protective barrier against the world.
Dad rolled his eyes. "It's probably dinner. Or one of the nurses coming to check on him. I'll see."
It wasn't dinner. Or the nurses.
When the old man pushed past Dad into the room, I felt myself stiffen. Dean promptly put the book down and drew me closer.
"Who the hell are you?" he demanded.
"He's Fitch," I whispered.
I was sure the words had been lost in the oxygen mask - I almost couldn't hear myself - but Dean, hearing preternaturally keen when I was the one speaking, understood and glared at the old gardener.
"Fitch? You're Jacobi's father? You're the one who wouldn't help Sam when he went to you?"
"He what?" Dad snarled, taking a threatening step towards Fitch.
The gardener looked from one of them to the other calmly. "Thanks to my son's activities, my house is full of bottles of blood and pieces of bone and all kinds of other unspeakable things. The ghost of a twelve-year-old boy has practically taken up permanent residence and I'm reasonably sure there's a special hell waiting for me for not having put a stop to this sooner. You're not scary."
He pulled a chair up to the bed and sat. "Sam. Your name isn't Sam Davis, is it?" He didn't wait for an answer. "But that's the one I know you by, so… Believe me when I tell you that I'm truly sorry about what happened, Sam."
"Sorry?" Dean said incredulously. "You're sorry? Children died because you let your son go on killing."
"Actually, that's not true." Fitch turned his attention to Dean. "I didn't know what he'd done. Adam went down in the records as being dead. I saw his corpse. I watched them put it in the coffin and I watched them lower the coffin into his grave."
"Then he came back to life?" Dad asked.
"He never died. He - I found out later that my wife helped him. I had no idea… And she had been dead for years when I learnt of it, so… I don't know the details, but apparently he managed to rally his strength a little. That isn't uncommon with a terminal illness. She - my wife - kidnapped a youth from a nearby town to avoid drawing attention to the school. It was the same thing Adam did later, absorbing the boy's strength into himself. The boy died in Adam's place, and Carol used a spell to change the boy's appearance to match Adam's. Then Carol came home, although she must have done something wrong - the spell backfired on her somehow - because she died soon after. Fatal heart attack. Adam got himself hired at the school as an under-gardener. In different clothes, with a different haircut, nobody recognized him. The… the ritual he performed - I think you must have worked it out, if you managed to find him, Sam. The first time, he drew enough of the children's energy to make them highly susceptible to illness and injury, and he did it just before they were due to go home. Suspicion never fell on the school. Why would it? They all died in their parents' care."
"Why did he stop?"
"You understand this is all hearsay," Fitch said. "I had no idea at the time… the principal in the sixties was a man called Culver. He - well, he had to notice that several of his students were having mysterious accidents over their vacations. First he thought there might be a - a normal problem. Some sort of immune-lowering fungus in the ventilation shafts, something like that. He had experts come in. Discreetly, of course; the school had a reputation to maintain. They found nothing."
Dean and Dad still looked suspicious, but at least they were listening.
"Then… He called a woman. Someone like you. Zoë Morales."
"Zoë," Dean breathed. "So… she was real?" I wondered what the story was; if Dean knew, he could tell me later.
Fitch nodded. "There's a rumour she left her weapons hidden somewhere in the school." That explained what I'd found. "Adam killed her as well. Finally Culver gave in and stopped taking students under fourteen. When I heard about that, I was, naturally, interested. I read the newspaper accounts. One of them had a picture of the school staff, and in the corner…"
"Your son," Dean said quietly, rubbing my arm.
"There was no mistaking him. It had been fifteen years, but he only looked two or three years older than he'd been when he died. I… I was torn between hope and fear. I hurried to California and looked into it."
"And found the truth," Dad spat. "And didn't turn him in."
"He'd stopped killing children by then. He begged me not to give him away - he swore he wouldn't do it again. And there was no way to bring the dead children back to life." Fitch sighed. "He was my son. I gave in. Eventually he went to college and came back as a teacher."
I felt the weight of Dean's cheek resting on my head.
"Would you have done anything different?" Fitch asked plaintively. "He'd stopped killing children. I couldn't save anyone or bring back the children he'd killed. All I could do was hurt him. And he was my boy. My only child."
"That's no excuse," Dad growled. "You should have turned him in."
Dean's arms tightened around me.
"Why are you here?" he asked the old gardener wearily. "We've caught Jacobi - Adam - whatever he is now. You can't help him."
"I understand. I'm not here for that." Fitch slipped his hand into his jacket pocket. "I told you Adam kept a lot of his equipment at my house. Or maybe you could say I confiscated it. I didn't burn it - I probably should have done, but I was afraid of unleashing something even worse." He leaned forward. "You have to understand - I didn't want to believe Adam was hurting children again. But after I spoke to Sam the last time, I went and checked on the things. Some were missing."
I could feel Dean's heart beating faster under my cheek.
"I found something I thought might help." Fitch pulled a book - an old book, a grimoire - from his pocket and put it on the table by the bed. "He got his spell from that. Maybe you'll find something to undo it." Fitch got to his feet. "I'm not asking for forgiveness. Not even understanding. What I've done is unforgiveable, I know that. Nothing I do can bring back the children who've died, now, because I didn't tell the truth when I had the chance. But for the sake of the children still alive - for Sam's sake - take the gift in the spirit it's given."
TBC