The Witch Is Dead: Part 4
“So,” Sam said. It was four in the morning, and the wind had been picking up outside, making for too much extra noise.
“Ssh. I’m awake.”
Sam shifted a little on the bed to get closer. They got a king this time, because it was more difficult to fall asleep that way and easier to keep an eye on one another. It would also be easier to grab Dean and hold him down if he tried to escape. Sam had some extra plans for tonight. “So I thought it would be a good idea to know what we’re up against.”
Dean, lying on his stomach, lifted his head enough to give Sam an incredulous look. “Sam. We’re on a fucking stakeout. Can this wait?”
No, because I don’t think you’d talk to me unless it’s in the dark. He said, “The snake probably isn’t coming tonight anyway.”
“Yeah? You’re a snake mind-reader now?”
“Probably doesn’t speak any English.”
“Fuck me.” Dean pressed a hand over his eyes. “Doesn’t speak any English? Seriously?”
“Dean, I need to know about the snake. I’m hunting it with you, so you don’t get to keep secrets.”
“What secrets? What makes you think I know anything about the snake?”
“Who’s Sarah Barnard?”
Dean went very still, if only for a second, and Sam thought, Ah. He felt the anger then, creeping in slowly around the corners, thickening. It wasn’t just Sam’s imagination after all. Dean knew, he’d known for a long goddamn time, and he didn’t even say anything. Sam had half-hoped that he was wrong, but there it was now, some secret he didn’t know existed, betrayed by the tiniest catch in his brother’s breath. He clutched a sheet in his fist and waited. It was weird - lying this still when he kinda wanted to drag Dean off the bed and have nice fight just about now.
“Who?”
“I was looking for that pattern today, and guess whose name came up? Sarah Barnard. Remember that roller coaster in Pennsylvania that wanted you, even though you didn’t fit its pattern?”
Dean sighed. His head was still turned the other way, and Sam wanted to grab it, make him look. “Sam, we’re on a stakeout. I really want to get this snake, because I’d like to get some sleep for real sometime soon. Can we talk about it later?”
“The snake, exactly. The snake that, I’m pretty sure, is connected to the child disappearances in the area all the way from 1988, unless you and I just stumbled upon some supernatural convention. And if it’s connected to that, it’s connected to Sarah Barnard, and for some reason to you, just like that roller coaster that almost killed you back then. You don’t get to keep this shit from me now, man.”
Dean was quiet for a long time. Sam listened to the wind outside and waited. Not a sound came from the bathroom. Sam could only hope that he didn’t ruin the hunt, that the big black snake wasn’t somewhere in the dark, listening. In the end, the information would be worth it. Out of nowhere, for the first time in years, the thought came to him about Kipling’s Chuchundra, the muskrat that crept along the wall all night, believing that he was safer from the snakes if he didn’t run into the center of the room. Sam imagined that snake in the dark now.
“Sarah was a witch,” Dean said, “but she’s been dead a long time. There were two others with her. Dad went after them, but either he couldn’t get them or only believed that he did. He never told me.”
“So Dad killed Sarah, and the other two want revenge?”
Dean shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know what the deal was with the roller coaster, I swear.”
“Why you and not me?”
“I don’t know. You were five or something back then. Maybe they didn’t recognize you. Can we hunt some snakes now?”
“It’s not here.”
“Yeah, and it’s never going to be unless you shut up.”
Sam kicked him under the blankets. “We don’t drag each other blind into a case, Dean, and you should’ve told me about Sarah. Who’s that duchess of yours?”
Dean lifted himself on his elbows. The look on his face that made Sam think they might get into that fight tonight after all, snakes be damned. “What.” The way he said it wasn’t a question.
Sam met his eyes in the dark. “I grew up with you, Dean. Every time you’re out of your head, it’s duchess this and duchess that, and then you lie about it. Who or what is the duchess?”
“That,” Dean said slowly, like he was holding back, “that has fuck all to do with anything and is none of your business.”
Sam could push it, and then there would be a fight for sure. Dean might smash Sam’s nose into the floor, or Sam might end up sitting on Dean’s head, but in either case, the subject of the duchess would be closed forever. “Okay,” Sam said. Dean was still glaring at him. “Okay then. I’ll leave it alone.”
Dean lay back down and hugged his pillow, gripping the knife under it. The room was silent again, with the wind rustling in the trees outside. Sam waited ten minutes to let Dean cool off and dropped a hand on his back - a silent apology and a ‘thank you’. Dean’s muscles were tense. Sam rubbed circles over his shoulder blades until he relaxed, until he stopped radiating fury so strong that the snake could probably feel it in the sewer pipes, wherever it was.
The time was past five, the night almost over, when a soft splash came from the bathroom. Sam wasn’t drifting off but wasn’t entirely focused either, and the sound brought him back to reality like a slap. For a minute or two, everything was still, then came more splashing, and something wet slid out of the toilet bowl. Sam looked at Dean across the bed. Dean winked at him and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. Give the man a hunt and a toilet snake - and he’s happy. Sam closed his eyes as well and listened.
Something large went dragging through the salt ring, crystals scratching against the floor. The ring was there for show more than anything else, but now that the night visitor had crossed it, Sam became convinced that it was a witch - one of Sarah’s friends, still human enough to not be repelled by salt.
If they were of human intelligence, it made no sense that they wouldn’t know that Sam was also John Winchester’s son. It made no sense that they’d been out for revenge for twenty years and never researched John’s family.
The snake made its way into the room and stopped in the bathroom’s doorway. Sam squeezed the gun under his pillow and focused on keeping his breathing slow and even. Next to him, Dean was faking sleep remarkably well. The snake made some noise, a lot like a chuckle, and Sam thought, The bed. She knew they were brothers, she had to. The snake slithered across the floor, closer and closer, her belly scales making a dry rustle against the linoleum. She passed under the bed. Sam felt tingling along his spine and in the tips of the fingers as the long thick body dragged on so close below him. In his mind’s eye, he could see the snake flicking her tongue to feel the air. She lifted herself up and onto the bed - Sam felt the way the mattress dipped under the added weight. She must’ve crawled right over Dean’s leg. Fucking nerves of steel. Then the snake was up on the bed, and Sam was momentarily afraid that Dean had actually fallen asleep. The snake did keep him asleep that last time.
“Hey, Black Betty,” Dean said.
Sam pulled the gun from under the pillow, taking aim by the hissing at the snake’s head raised above the mattress, and he pulled the trigger before he was fully oriented in the dark. He saw the snake’s open mouth in the flash when the gun went off, her long teeth and her venom glands. The bullet went through the snake’s head and threw her body backward on the floor, where it lay still.
Somebody had fallen off their bed in the next room, and there was the familiar panicked commotion behind the wall. Dean switched on the bedside lamp to check that the snake was dead. “Nice shot, Sammy. Let’s go.”
They wrapped the body in a garbage bag, in case she was going to turn human again after death and get the police particularly interested, and hurried to the car. Back on the road, they heard the sirens approaching, but the sound disappeared in the distance soon, when the police car turned into the motel’s parking lot. With the windows rolled down, the car was a wind tunnel. Dean laughed and slapped Sam on the shoulder, looking like a maniac with a blood splatter on the side of his neck. And all Sam could think was, Black Betty.
~~~~
Black Betty was a boogeyman, a menace, one of the monsters that haunted Sam’s childhood along with clowns and the dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park. He didn’t know who Black Betty was or where she came from, only that she was half-dog and half-woman. Dad told him she was an old song. Dean told him she was a bad dream. Sam didn’t know any songs about Black Betty and didn’t remember dreaming about her, but he knew for sure that she was going to come into his room one night while he slept and rip his tongue out.
Rip your tongue out? Dad said. Did your brother read you a scary book?
Rip his tongue out, knock his teeth out, kick him in the stomach until he was dead - that was Black Betty of Sam’s early childhood. She was vicious, though he didn’t know the word then. She was a mean lady-dog that waited in the dark. She was a figment of his imagination, and he had forgotten all about her until Dean called the black snake by her name.
~~~~
Clementine’s morning was quiet. She spent the night at the kitchen table, chewing on the ends of her hair and staring at her wide-eyed reflection in the window. Betty was late with the fresh supply of blood. Clementine watched the sky grow lighter over the tops of the great pines as night turned to day, and Betty still didn’t come home. The house was unusually silent without Betty there to drag her claws on the floor, bang cabinet doors or growl in her sleep while she napped on the couch, wrapped in an old cardigan that smelled like dog.
At eight, Clem made a round of the house, pausing at the door of Betty’s bedroom to peer inside, in case she somehow sneaked in. She walked twice through every room, marveling at how her footsteps sounded in isolation. This was new. This was nothing like the misery of losing Sarah, but this was interesting. Different. Unexpectedly, one could say it even stung a little.
Around nine, when the sun was up, Clem finally switched on the tiny black-and-white TV set in the kitchen. What she was looking for turned out to be a brief mention on the local news station: shots fired at the Mountain View motel last night. A pool of blood found on the floor in one of the rooms wasn’t human. The police were investigating. Clementine switched off the TV and stood in the middle of the kitchen, listening to the overwhelming silence of the place that was now entirely hers.
“Free!” The echo carried her voice around the house. Clem threw her arms open and whirled on the spot. “Free! Free!”
First, Clem put on music, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” on an old turntable. She turned it up until the wondrous voice of Mama Cass rang through every room. Next, she pulled from the fridge the remainder of the blood Betty brought back the night before, mixed it into water and went down to the greenhouse. Cutie Pie had come back to life. Clem paused to admire the changes brought by the little blood laden with Sarah’s spellwork. The brown-red color was back in the bone. Cutie Pie had grown an elbow and half a forearm, with a single dose of blood. Who even knew how much of it had grown under the ground? It was beautiful, Clemmie’s little pumpkin. Sarah sure had a touch for growing beautiful things.
“Clem’s gonna take good care of you,” she told it as she poured the bloody water into the soil. “Call me mommy, baby buns.”
So maybe those kids knew now, Clem thought later as she powdered her face and wrapped a silk scarf over her head. It was bound to happen eventually. Betty called them witch hunters the first time she saw them in her dreams. So maybe Clem couldn’t turn into a big snake and creep into their room to drink the older one’s blood at night, to feed to Cutie Pie. Oh well. Clem shrugged and winked at herself in the mirror before putting on a large pair of sunglasses that she imagined made her look like Audrey Hepburn a little bit. Clem wasn’t planning on crawling through the sewers for a pint of blood. She could get the whole boy to come running to her doorstep, carrying Sarah’s touch in his flesh. She made him run to her in 1988, if unintentionally.
For the first time in decades, Clementine headed out of the house in the daylight, to look for Sam Winchester.
~~~~
Somewhere not too far away, someone was playing a cheerful old song: lollipop, lollipop, oh lolli-lolli-lolli… Sam’s wristwatch kept coming in and out of focus with the rhythm of it. He blinked a few times and squinted at the hands again. Nine twenty. He had no idea if it was morning or evening. That afternoon, he went to get coffee. He took a sip and saw the parking lot tilt. He remembered thinking that he’d better sit down before he fell and cracked his head open on the pavement. He had no memories of sitting down.
Fuck.
He was lying on wooden floor of a dimly lit room. Sam blinked a few more times, but the light didn’t improve. The keys in his pocket were jammed into his hip uncomfortably. He tried to straighten his legs and hit a wall. Not good. There were vertical metal bars in front of him, sunk into the floor. Sam reached out and grabbed one, missing on the first try. His arms felt shaky, too heavy and uncoordinated. He held onto the bar and waited for the room to focus, for his own thoughts to stop squirming and getting tangled up. The room he was in appeared to be a large kitchen, judging by the work table in the middle and an array of pots and skillets hanging from the ceiling above it. The light and the music were coming from somewhere down the hallway, but where from Sam couldn’t see from this angle. There was also a back door and a window by it, which was dark. So it was nine twenty at night, and Sam was out for several hours.
Sam got up on his knees, holding onto the bars, and almost brained himself on the roof of the cage. He was locked inside a niche in the wall, large but not large enough for a grown man. He twisted around until he could sit and gave the bars an experimental kick. They held.
He took a look around the kitchen from the new angle and felt an unpleasant tug somewhere under the diaphragm. It looked familiar. It looked like someplace he’d seen before, and a bad place, a place that was larger the last time he was here.
A woman popped her head around the corner. He hadn’t heard her coming. They stared at each other for a minute, he craning his neck up and she tilting her head to the side. The woman had river grass tangled up in her dirty blonde hair, her eyes were milky, and her chest and neck bore patches of decomposition. Sam felt that odd jolt again and knew for sure that he’d seen her before.
“Hi, pumpkin!” She waived, coming into the kitchen. “Remember Clemmie?”
Sam wasn’t sure what to answer, so he kept quiet. The woman squatted before the cage. She looked even worse close up, and Sam caught a whiff of river mud and rot, weak but noticeable. A small fish fell from between her legs and flopped on the floor, which she ignored. Clemmie, he though. Clem. Clementine? With the name came the thought of Black Betty again, the way she was in his childhood nightmares.
The woman wagged her finger at him. “I’m not putting anything in that cage with you this time, oh no.”
“I guess we’ve met. I’m Sam.”
“I’m Clementine. Remember me?” She stuck out her index finger, which looked like the upper half of it had been roughly reattached with thick thread. “My poor finger has never been the same again.”
Something resurfaced briefly, a memory of a memory - of being locked in a cage like a circus animal from old movies, and of a dead woman wagging a finger at him. Except that was just a bad nightmare, wasn’t it?
“You’re Sarah’s friend,” he said, and then, because the name also brought a face, “the mushroom witch.”
She pursed her lips. “Yeah, that was Sarah. Thanks to your daddy, now it’s only me and Black Betty. Oh wait.” She got up and stomped off to the stove, dusting off her skirt. “Betty who?”
Sam found a more or less comfortable position with his back against the wall. He couldn’t stretch his legs all the way, but it was good enough for now. He could see the edge of Clem’s skirt as she moved by the stove, making tea. “Lucky for you,” she went on, “I’m not a mean person. Betty only got what she deserved.” She’d been stirring sugar into her tea, and now the spoon stopped and Clementine made a tiny sniffling noise.
“You miss her? I bet someone misses their baby somewhere.”
She kicked the bars. It tore off her toenail. Clementine paid no attention and sat down at the table with her mug of tea that said St. Catherine’s University School of Nursing. Somewhere outside glass shattered.
“So,” Sam said quickly. “Here we are. What now?”
“Now we wait for your brother to show up for you again, silly goose. I suppose you heard that window breaking. That was probably him.”
So much for a surprise. But then again, Dean wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t going to count on surprise alone. Just then another memory came back, something about a rescuer being turned into an animal, though Sam was unsure if it really happened or if some old fairytale got mixed up into everything.
“Boy, am I ready for him,” said Clementine and wriggled her eyebrows. “Has Clemmie got someone for you two to meet!”
Someone to meet? “There’s nothing like good old revenge. My dad knew all about that.”
She spat on the floor with a globe of gray-green mucus. “Revenge is for stupid men like your dad. Me, I’m busy. Got a baby to raise.”
There was a sound of breaking glass from outside again. She heard it and rolled her eyes at it. Sam had a sudden chilling realization that he and Dean both never had a stellar record of cunning rescue attempts. The witch had said something about a baby. “Yeah. I’m sure you’re a great mother.”
“As a matter of fact I am, mister! Do you know that he almost died? A lesser woman would’ve taken him to the compost pile.”
“Compost pile?”
Clementine thumped her chest with a fist for emphasis. “But not I! I watered him three times a week for twenty years. It’s not my fault I can’t grow things like Sarah. And now I’m sitting here, all alone, waiting for a big thug like that brother of yours to show up - all for Cutie Pie.”
How do you get like this, Sam wondered. How do you eat a kid each year, and five in five months, then get offended when someone questions your mothering skills?
“You brother is taking all night,” Clementine complained, swinging her feet. “I do hope he’s not going to break all my windows.”
There had to be a reason for all the noise. Dean must’ve known he’d be heard inside the house. “Since we’re waiting anyway, will you tell me something? Who’s the duchess?”
She looked puzzled at first, but then she made a small sound and her face changed to an expression of happy amazement. All of a sudden, Sam wanted to take it back. The thing he wondered about for years, some secret his brother kept close, was finally in front of him, and Sam didn’t want to know it. He had asked on a whim, to keep her from paying too much attention to whatever Dean was doing in the yard.
“Wait,” he started to say, “it’s not-”
“But that’s you. You’re the duchess.” She gave him a toothy rotting smile. “It was the last thing Sarah did before your dad, that big stinker, killed her. That’s why your brother’s blood has been so good for Cutie Pie. Sarah planted a seed in his head.” Clementine tapped her own head with a tip of her finger. There was a noise of breaking branches near the house, but neither Clementine nor Sam paid it any attention. “We wanted to make him fall in love with someone embarrassing, and then Betty suggested you, and Sarah-”
The kitchen door came crashing in, ripped off the hinges by a great blow from the outside. Clementine shrieked and fell off the chair when a skeletal arm reached into the house, knocking down furniture. It must’ve belonged to a creature forty feet tall. Wetly gleaming deep musculature was clinging to the bones, with ropes of new nerves and vessels twisting over it and through it. Clementine yelled something at the arm that Sam couldn’t hear behind the crashing of furniture and dishes raining down from shelves. She threw her arms open as if to greet the monster, and the skeletal hand grabbed her and squeezed. Sam heard bones break, so many at once. The arm retracted through the doorway, taking the witch’s body with it. In the yard, great jaws snapped and started grinding.
Sam had backed further into the cell and couldn’t see out the window anymore. The creature made a disappointed wail. Somewhere in the woods, dozens of birds rose into the air, crying, disturbed by the sound. Where the arm had been before, a portion of a dirt-covered face appeared in the doorway. Its muscles were almost complete and covered with translucent skin that gave that face a deep red color. Hair was growing on the scalp in uneven patches, hanging long and matted. The creature turned its head this way and that, trying to fit it through the door. In his cage by the stove, Sam tried to stop breathing. The creature drew a sharp breath through its nose - once, twice, sniffing the air. Its face disappeared, and the arm reached inside again, looking for the cage.
~~~~
Dean got to the clearing around the cabin just in time to see an earth-covered monster crawl through the smashed wall of the greenhouse and reach inside the kitchen. The thing was the size of an eighteen-wheeler, and just as graceful. Dean had brought a handgun with him and a machete for backup, expecting a fight with the dead witch, Clementine. Now he stood on the edge of the woods and watched the monster drag a broken body out of the house and stuff it into its mouth. Dean’s heart skipped a beat when he thought the body was Sam’s, but he saw long blonde hair disappearing between the monster’s jaws. It chewed with a horrible grinding sound, and swallowed. Dean saw its exposed esophagus move behind the trachea, dropping the dead witch into its stomach concealed behind a layer of thin, underdeveloped muscle.
Dean looked down at the gun in his hand. It could probably make a hole in an artery if he managed to hit it somehow.
The monster dropped down to its hands and knees and jammed its face right up to the doorway, sniffing. It looked delighted and reached inside again, and Dean couldn’t just stand there anymore, had to do something, anything, because Sam was inside and maybe unconscious.
“Okay,” Dean told himself, “okay.”
He went into the clearing at half-run with the machete, looking for a weak spot to hit. There was a rush of crazy energy pumping through his body, getting stronger. The wind changed, and Dean caught a lungful of the creature’s smell - thick and meaty, clogging. Dumb, greedy fucker, Dean thought. If it was him, he would’ve stayed in the ground until he grew some real skin, but these things, these child-eaters, always stomach over mind….
The creature screamed and yanked its arm back out. One of its fingers was broken off, hanging by the tendon. And Dean was already there, enough crazy energy in him that the monster didn’t look so big anymore. The thing shook its hand in the air with the broken finger flapping. Its foot was right in front of Dean, big as a tree trunk, and there, open to the air, were shiny white tendons attached to the heel bones, with clots of dirt stuck between them.
“Fuck yeah, Sammy!” And he brought the machete down hard on the Achilles tendon. As it went down, he had a brief mental image of the blade bouncing off, but it was a sharp weapon aimed at a good angle, and the tendon snapped.
The creature made a sound - not so much enraged monster as an upset baby that almost made Dean burst out laughing. It twisted its head, looking for what hit it, but Dean had moved on, saw a tendon stretched under its knee and went for that one. It snapped off, an artery that got in the way splashed Dean with blood, and monster tilted sideways, spread its arms trying to catch balance, but its knee wasn’t holding anymore. Dean saw it waver, saw the moment when its weight shifted too far and thought, for one heart-stopping moment, It’s going to fall on the house. But it didn’t. The monster threw itself back to stop the fall, overcompensated and crashed backward instead.
Way to go, dude. Now he can crawl after you. Dean wiped the blood out of his eyes with a sleeve and went after the fallen monster again. He wanted to get his gun but didn’t think he had time to do it. He wondered if the tendons had dulled the blade. But if he stopped to think for a second now, if he stopped moving, either the monster would get him or his own fear would. He could see John Winchester suddenly, explaining the basic rules of going up against monsters. Move fast and don’t hesitate. Dean dove under a flailing arm, skidded through the dirt and came within a foot of a great snapping jaw that looked like it could break his spine in half like a toothpick. Strands of blonde hair were caught between the monster’s teeth - the hair of a woman who raised the dumb, evil shit. Dean saw that he couldn’t chop that head off, not with a machete, so he hit what he could see - vessels, tendons, ropes of muscle, cartilage rings of the trachea. Blood went up in a fountain, and Dean couldn’t see his targets any longer.
The creature roared, wheezed and gurgled, flailing its arms and shaking its head. Dean felt like he was caught in an earthquake, when the sense of up and down was gone and everything was shifting, crashing and shaking. He didn’t know where to run anymore, couldn’t see anything but movement. The smell of blood was overwhelming. The mud was turning into a swamp under his feet. Dean jumped aside to avoid a hand falling on him from the sky and got tangled in the monster’s hair.
It was never going to die. He hurt it and pissed it off, and it was never going to die.
Ages passed, and the struggling grew weaker. The monster scraped at its throat a couple of feet away from where Dean was trying not to move, caught in the hair. The huge skeletal hand with its broken finger twitched one final time and fell limp. The wheezing stopped.
~~~~
Sam had been trying to pick the lock with a broken cake fork when the thrashing stopped outside. He froze, looking up at the doorway. Keep working, goddammit, keep working. But he looked at the monster’s leg visible through the door and could do nothing else. The leg was twisted at a bad angle, probably injured. The thing would’ve moved it if it was conscious, or alive. No, don’t get too excited. The leg wasn’t moving anymore, but Dean wasn’t coming in either.
Sam felt a slight shake start in his shoulders and gripped the lock tighter.
The birds and the frogs had been quiet, scared by the noise the monster made. Then a single frog croaked. Then another one. Sam strained his hearing and waited. A sound came from the yard, like mud squelching. The frogs were getting started up for good again, and Sam wished they’d shut the hell up. That sound came again - footsteps, like those of a person, not the earth-shuddering walk of a monster. And then Dean stood in the ruined doorway, looking like something out of a horror flick. Dirt mixed with blood covered his clothes and face, and he was grinning. He looked like a monster-killer, like a big brother.
“Ding-dong,” Sam said - the first thing that popped into his head, “the witch is dead.”
Dean crossed the kitchen in three seconds, jumping over broken furniture, and kneeled before the cage. He reached inside and grabbed Sam’s shoulders, pulling him in. Sam had dropped the fork to take a fistful of Dean’s jacket. He let his face get smashed to Dean’s chest between the bars, sat there breathing iron of the monster blood, soaking in the feeling of alive and brother.
~~~~
Sam was giving him funny looks. Not often, certainly not enough for Dean to pick up on it right away, but sometimes he’d catch Sam looking like he was trying to puzzle something out. Dean dismissed it the first time. There was no telling what was going on in Sam’s head, and usually he managed to resolve whatever it was on his own and move on. But this time it was taking too long. He kept looking. Dean wondered if it was about Lucky, if he guessed and had a problem with it, but Sam wasn’t suggesting they change plates, lie low or otherwise take extra care to stay out of the law’s way. He just looked sometimes.
And then one day Dean got it. The witch had told him. No, really, sometimes Dean wondered if Sam got dropped on his head one time too many when he was little.
Still, how do you bring up something you’ve kept silent about for over twenty years? Dean was very tempted to take Sam’s unspoken offer of privacy and forget the whole business all over again.
They were headed to western Washington, all the way to the coast where some simple salt-and-burn awaited, and there weren’t many places better suited for private conversations than Washington coast. Sam wasn’t paying attention to where they went, finishing up his book with a flashlight, so Dean found the loneliest place he remembered from a long time ago and took them there. Sam raised his head from the book when the car stopped, blinked at the black sky over the sea and shone his flashlight through the windshield. Dean had already gotten out and was pulling blankets from the trunk. He could see the look of pleasant surprise on Sam’s face when he stepped out. This was a good place - a rocky beach fringed with pines stripped bare and polished by the storms, with more broken enormous tree trunks washed ashore. This was a perfect place to watch the stars, or to drag out dirty old secrets. In the dark, the Pacific sounded like it was taking huge whooshing breaths.
The cold was a good thing. Maybe they wouldn’t have to talk that long.
“Nice place,” Sam said.
“Yup.”
They settled on a piece of driftwood - a pine trunk perhaps fifty feet long tossed onto the beach. Out here, the stars gave so much light that Dean was sure they didn’t need the moon or the flashlights to see.
“Okay,” he said. The speech he prepared on the way here had fled. Sam was looking at him, probably frowning, though Dean couldn’t see his face very well. “Okay. I’m not some pervert.”
“I’m pretty sure we both are.”
That wasn’t in the script. “What?”
Sam ran his hand over Dean’s thigh as some way of explanation, intimate. At least it wasn’t his dick. Dean would’ve fallen off the tree because talk about bad moments. Sam shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
What is your fucking excuse? Dean almost asked. He had wondered ever since they started this a few years ago. “Well, I’m not talking about that. I mean I am, but.” Shit, where was he planning to go with this anyway?
Sam shone a flashlight in his face, probably as some kind of joke designed to lighten the mood. Dean knocked it out of his hand, and it rolled down into the surf. The waves picked it up and dragged it back and forth, the light winking, until it got smashed against a rock and went out.
“That was a bad move,” Sam said. Maybe he had a point. “Going to break our necks on the way back.”
“Sam, I’m doing this for you, man, and if you’d rather not, I’d love to never bring it up again. How about that? Only you have to quit staring at me.”
“What’re you even talking about?”
“The duchess. I’m trying to tell you about the duchess.” And he could almost hear Sam’s mouth clicking shut, whatever joke he was going to crack forgotten. “I put a knife through Sarah’s foot, and she said she’d make me love someone. You. I mean, do you get how stupid that sounds?”
Sam nodded. “So what happened then?”
That was a good question, and the one Dean kept asking himself throughout the years. “The thing is, I don’t know exactly. It’s not like I turned into Lucky.” Sam frowned at that but didn’t ask. “You were still my little brother. I was nine, girls had cooties, I probably didn’t know that guys were an option. I knew kids who hated their brothers, but maybe those kids were just assholes, not a norm.”
“But now,” Sam said, “now can you tell what difference it made?”
“Dude. Do you think when you’re fifty you’ll remember what it was like to have ten toes?”
Sam glanced down at his right shoe automatically. “So do we fuck because of the spell?”
Of course he’d think that. Dean put a hand into Sam’s hair, gripped the roots at the back of his head just a bit too tight like Sam loved. “What’s your excuse then?”
“Aw shit, don’t have one.” Dean saw his teeth flash in a smile in the dark. “Is it gone? Now that all three are dead?”
Dean dropped his hand. He had asked himself this question as well and hadn’t been able to come up with an answer. He woke up one night with an idea that Sarah lied, that she never did anything other than heat up his forehead a little, and he got all twisted on his own, with the power of a suggestion.
“I don’t know, Sam. I could never tell anyway.”
What he wanted to say was, I don’t love you like a woman. I don’t love you like a man. You don’t love me that way either. Even if he sometimes forgot himself for a moment and treated Sam like a woman he was very much into, even if Sam sometimes treated him like he probably did Jessica - it was like a kneejerk reflex. He was wary for years, afraid that he’d suddenly turn into a pedophile if Sam just looked at him wrong. He went digging in his head for that seed that the witch planted and he never found it. He sometimes suspected that whatever Sarah planted simply got buried under this other family love and its perverted manifestations. Having been involved in fraternal incest for years, Dean could now proudly call himself an expert and say that the reasons for fucking one’s brother had nothing to do with tastes, romantic love or conventional attraction.
He thought about it for a moment and repeated the last thought out loud, fraternal incest and all. Sam was quiet for a long time, until Dean started to think that he was laughing on the inside, sure he was. But Sam just threw an arm over his shoulder. His fingers were cold, and he made sure to hook a freezing thumb into Dean’s collar. Dean sat facing the surf, with the weight of Sam’s arm on him and the imperceptible tidal motion of Sam’s breathing next to him making him think of a smaller, secret kind of ocean. In his mental eye Dean saw once again that weird sight they passed on the way here - huge boulders balanced on top of skinny tree stumps, some sort of lumberjack art. He pictured those boulders tumbling down now, one after the other, and it felt good to watch them fall, to feel the weight of them shifting.
The black sky full of stars was hypnotizing. If Dean looked to the side, there would be an outline of Sam’s face turned toward the Pacific. Behind them, skeletal trees stripped bare by storms jutted up, like arms of huge monsters growing underground.
THE END
Notes and Sources .. Master Post