SPN FIC - Legend (Part Fifteen: The Legend)
I'd heard whispered bits of the story since I was a kid. Just after Halloween, back in '83, the demon Azazel had crept into the nursery of a baby boy, intending to drip blood into the child's mouth and turn him into demon spawn. But Mary Campbell was waiting for him. She had a gun a stranger had brought to her family ten years before: a gun that could kill anything. She used it to kill Azazel that night. Saved her child. Then she disappeared.
Legends are told in bits and pieces, spread by word of mouth over the years. This is the story of Mary Campbell's family: the husband to whom she told the truth of who she was. The son who grieved the loss of her so deeply that he spent half his life on the road alone, searching for her. And the son who found success, and love, and peace ... until things went a little bit sideways.
Part One: Dean and Jo
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
Part Three: John and Deacon
Part Four: Missouri and Pamela
Part Five: Sam and Dean
Part Six: John, Mary, Dean and Sam
Part Seven: Dean and Pamela
Part Eight: Deanna and Samuel
Part Nine: Sam and Missouri
Part Ten: John and Dean
Part Eleven: The Intruder
Part Twelve: Sam, Meg, and Samuel
Part Thirteen: Dean, the Hellhound, and Deanna
Part Fourteen: Deanna and Samuel
CHARACTERS: Sam, Dean, Mary, John, Samuel, Deanna, Missouri, Meg, Pamela
GENRE: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3210 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Fifteen: The Legend
Focus, dammit!
It's no different from being in court.
Except that in court they don't want to KILL you.
FOCUS.
"Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine. Ut Ecclesiam…"
Maybe it was different for Dean, because he hunted full time. Dad had made sure - if a little reluctantly - that we were both trained pretty early on, but Dean had stuck with it, starting when he was sixteen, and I hadn't. Doing it as a weekend thing, longer trips here and there (Jesus, just like the National Guard), didn't make for a hunter who felt any of this was…right. When Missouri put her hands on the hilt of that knife and started telling the demon to come, all I could think was, This really isn't going well.
And that if we all ended up getting killed, Jessica was going to be really, seriously pissed.
"Come"?
Seriously?
The priest in The Exorcist tried that, and look how that ended.
What I wanted to do then was grab Missouri up and carry her out of there - except that "out" meant out where the hellhound was, and I didn't think for a second that I could outrun it, especially carrying somebody down a flight of steps and having to fumble to get the car doors open. We would have been Dog Chow.
At least Meg was amused. She had a silver knife stuck all the way through her, and she started to smirk at me like things were going exactly the way she'd planned. Demons love to yap about their big plans, how everything's all a part of some bigger picture, but I couldn't imagine how getting skewered could be considered a positive development.
Ut Ecclesiam tuam secura tibi facias libertate servire te rogamus, audi nos.
Dean used to mock me for knowing it all by heart.
It was no different from memorizing cases, rulings, opinions, arguments. Before that, lists of dates and places for American History class. I got good at looking at something and committing it to memory - but my brother's always been a man of action. I had the next chunk of the exorcism lined up and ready, but before I could say anything, I saw Dean launch himself toward Missouri. He didn't like her standing there with her hands wrapped around that knife any more than I did, and he was going to do something about it.
Then our grandmother shoved him away.
It got things moving, though; Dad grabbed up a gun from the dining room table. He knew which one to take - Dean had them all laid out by type of ammo.
I got one for myself and one for Dean, grabbed Dean by the hand and hauled him up off the floor.
"You turn her LOOSE and do it NOW," Missouri said then, looking Meg right in the eye. "You come right here and deal with ME."
All I could think was No no no no no…
Meg had stopped howling when I stopped reciting, but the dog hadn't. It was flinging itself against the front door like something gone completely insane, using its body as a battering ram. It was a good, thick old door, but that dog was determined (and strong; all the damned are crazy strong), and the screws holding the hinges against the doorframe started to give way.
"If it gets in, just keep firing," Dean said. "Blast the son of a bitch."
"But we won't be able to see -"
He had that look in his eye. He was going to keep shooting until he got something. Or until it got him.
"You do that, Dean," Meg said. "It'll be just like Custer's Last Stand."
Missouri still had a grip on that knife. Meg smiled at her, then tipped her - Pamela's - head back, opened her mouth wide and screamed. The oily black smoke that was the true form of the demon began to boil out, more of it than you'd think a human body could contain, all of it climbing toward the ceiling and slowly circling.
We couldn't shoot it.
The hellhound slammed the front door a couple more times, baying and snarling.
Then a shotgun went off, and the dog screamed.
Dean and Dad and I looked at each other. "The fuck?" Dean said.
All I could think was, one of Missouri's neighbors had had exactly enough of all the noise. I went on thinking it as the door came flying open and banged against the little table Missouri had set alongside it to hold mail and her keys.
There was a woman standing on the threshold: average height, short dark hair, a little thin, dressed in boots and jeans and a Carhartt jacket. She was holding a sawed-off in a way that said it was as familiar to her as her right arm. She hesitated for a second, as if she was trying to convince herself to come on in - then she did come in. Stalked into the house, into the living room, spent half a second looking at Missouri, then pushed Missouri aside and took hold of the hilt of the silver knife with the hand that wasn't holding the gun.
"You and me, bitch," she said to what used to be Pamela Barnes. "This has nothing to do with them. I'm the one you want."
Obediently, the smoke reversed course.
When I looked at Dean, all the color had drained out of his face.
His lips formed the word Mom?
"Well, well, well," the demon said when enough of it had settled back into Pamela's body that it could animate her vocal cords. "Look who's come to dinner."
My father looked like he couldn't decide whether to shit or go blind.
"You and me," the woman said. "It was always between you and me. You didn't have the balls to bring it on? You had to go involve them?"
"Oh, honey," the demon said. "I tried. But I have to admit: you are the world's acknowledged champion at making yourself scarce. I searched high and low. I fried a few sources. But no luck. So I decided, let's encourage you to come to me. And it worked."
The woman half-turned.
Looked full-on at my father.
"Take the boys out of here," she said.
Dad was tempted. I could see that. Whatever issues he had with my mother, whatever lingered inside him that he hadn't either worked out or buried so deeply that it would never see sunlight again, none of them made much impact right now.
She was going to handle this, and he could walk. Take me and Dean (and, presumably, Missouri) with him.
The look on his face said Mom could burn the house down, for all he cared.
But that's the thing about my dad. You can think you know him - know what he's going to do, how he's going to feel - and you'd be wrong.
My mother huffed out a small breath.
Then she turned back to the demon.
The wound in her gut genuinely hurt Meg; you could see that. Her chin was trembling and her eyes kept going in and out of focus. I'd known that silver packed a punch, was the weapon of choice against any number of supernatural things, but with demons that just went so far. Salt, holy water, silver, it would just slow them down.
Smiling, my mother set her sawed-off down on the coffee table. She kept her left hand wrapped around the hilt of the knife, and when she straightened back up, she wrapped her right hand around her left.
"It was funny, in the movie," she said to Meg.
Meg's eyebrow twitched.
"The Princess Bride," my mother said. "'My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.'"
Meg opened her mouth to speak.
And my mother said something to her in a language I didn't recognize.
Meg squeaked softly and her eyes unfocused again.
"Get out of my house," my mother told her.
Then she went on, in that strange language. Not Latin. Not any of the Romance languages. Not Chinese, or Russian, or anything I'd ever heard before. It had an otherworldly music to it, an almost hypnotic rhythm that made it lovely, made it something you could listen to for days on end and never get tired of hearing it.
Meg didn't seem too keen on it, though.
She started to scream in a way that made my knees shake. I looked at Dean, and at my father, and both of them were having the same reaction. As lovely as that strange language was, Meg's screaming was its counterpoint, and if Missouri's neighbors could hear any of that caterwauling (they'd have to be stone deaf not to), I can only imagine what they were thinking. The only people who seemed at all comfortable with what was going on were my grandparents, both of whom had moved in close and were standing just behind Missouri, as if they intended to catch her if she fell.
I have no idea what it was that my mother was saying. It could have been an exorcism rite; it could have been more dialogue from The Princess Bride. She's never told me, and I haven't asked. Something tells me I don't really want to know.
It went on for a couple of minutes, during all of which Meg's attention was glued to my mother, and my mother's to Meg.
Then, when I began to think that I couldn't listen to Meg scream for one more second, her body - Pamela's body - began to droop toward the floor. My mother followed it down, moving like a dancer, shifting her weight carefully so that she'd be able to spring to her feet if need be but never losing her grip on the knife and never pausing whatever it was that she was reciting.
No; it wasn't a recitation.
A prayer, maybe.
Pamela's body had been lying sprawled on the floor for maybe ten or twelve seconds when her mouth opened and a thin stream of dark gray smoke began to drift out of it, heading up toward the ceiling. It didn't manage to rise more than a couple of feet. It circled the coffee table, drifted around us, then settled into a wandering pool near the floor, like fog, or swamp gas.
My mother said a few more words.
A minute later, there was nothing left of Meg but a couple of small puddles of what my Stanford roommate Alan Lebowitz would have called schmutz.
No one said anything for a while.
Then Dean said, not very convincingly, "That was awesome."
It wasn't, exactly. Effective, certainly. Mr. Spock might have called it "fascinating." Either way, it left Pamela Barnes lying dead in the middle of the living room floor with an old silver knife thrust through her body just beneath her rib cage.
Missouri sighed at her, long and heartfelt.
I thought we were done. I thought all that was left was an evening full of explanations - unless my mother chose to climb to her feet and walk back out the door.
Instead, she bowed her head over the body of Pamela Barnes. Crooned a little more of that strange language, and gently, carefully, pulled the knife free. When it was fully out, she placed her hand over the wound and spoke a little more, something whose cadence made it sound like a lullaby.
Pamela's chest rose a little.
Fell.
Rose again.
"The next time you talk to Walter Bear Tooth," Mom said over her shoulder to Dean, "you might tell him he needs to furnish the instructions along with the weapon. Without the prayers, it's just a knife. And you can get those a lot cheaper at Walmart."
"Silver," Dean muttered.
Mom reached over to the couch, grabbed hold of a throw pillow, and tucked it gently underneath Pamela's head. Pamela was undeniably breathing at that point, and didn't seem to be in any kind of distress - or at least, she didn't until she opened her eyes. She began to look around wildly, and it was plain that she had no idea where she was, or if the thing that had brought her there was still around. Mom shushed her, the way I imagine she'd shushed me or Dean a long time ago, trying to soothe us down into sleep.
Then Mom climbed to her feet and walked out into the kitchen.
We could see her out there, leaning against the sink, head bowed, as if she was completely exhausted.
None of us said anything.
~~~~~~~~
I found my brother a couple of hours later in the playground of our old elementary school. It was the middle of the night by then, but he didn't seem to notice, or care.
Maybe he preferred that it was dark.
"You okay?" I asked him.
He looked at me for a moment, then went back to studying the ground. He was sitting on one of the swings, nudging it back and forth by rocking his boots in the dirt. I remembered him saying once, a long time ago, that he thought he could build up enough momentum swinging to snap the chain right off the bracket that held it to the frame.
When I explained to him that he'd end up crashing into the dirt, he'd grinned at me and said, "Nah. I'd be out flying over the trees."
"Kinda cold out here," I said.
"Got nothing to say to her, Sam. Let her and Dad work it out. I got nothing to say."
"After all this time?"
He looked up at me again. "What do you want me to do? Go find an all-night bakery and buy a frigging cake?"
"It's a process, Dean. It's gonna take a long time."
"You gonna stay, then?"
"I don't know. I need to go to work on Monday."
"Fly out. Take you a few hours to get back to Portland. Dad can drive you to the airport."
"And you'll be…where?"
He looked past me, at the row of houses across the street from the school. There was a light on in one of them; the rest were dark. Maybe the person who'd turned on the light was watching me and Dean, figuring we were up to no good.
Or maybe they didn't give a damn.
There was an empty swing next to Dean's. I sat down on it carefully, not sure if it would support my weight.
"Go on back," Dean said. "I don't need you to hold my hand."
It happens to all of us. You dream all your life of something. Search for it. Work for it. Build it up in your mind until it's the be-all and end-all of your existence. And when you get there - if you get there - it's not at all what you thought it would be.
If you claim that's never happened to you, I'll call you a liar.
"I'll go with you," I said.
"You gotta go to work. You got Jessica."
"She'll understand."
Once more, he looked at me, his expression grim and as unyielding as granite. "I'm not inviting you, Sam. Go home. Go back to your life."
"Dean."
He got up then and stalked away from the playground, across the wide stretch of lawn that led up to the school itself. For a minute I thought he was going to look around for something to throw, so he could break a window. Commit a little frantic vandalism so whoever had that light on across the street could bring the cops down on his ass.
He did that once, during the year he should have been a graduating senior. They kept him in jail for a couple of days, made him pay a fine and do a hundred hours of community service. At least, they sentenced him to a hundred hours of community service. I think he still owes the City of Lawrence about ninety-eight of them.
This time, he simply stood looking through a window.
"She ruined my fucking life," he said when I walked up beside him.
I could have pulled a Dr. Phil on him - told him that yes, she'd thrown his childhood off course, but he was an adult now (and had been for a long time), able to make his own decisions. Able to put his past behind him, overwrite the tapes playing in his head, and get on with things. Forgive our mother for doing what she felt was right.
She'd left to keep us safe. I heard her say that to Dad. Heard him bark, "It wasn't your decision to make, God damn it. Not alone."
Safe.
Well, there are varying interpretations of what that amounts to.
"Pamela's okay," I said quietly. "She's asleep. Whatever that mumbo-jumbo was that Mom recited - it killed the evil and preserved the good. Pretty good trick."
"Yeah?" Dean replied. "Ask me if I give a shit."
"I don't need to ask. I know you do."
"I don't even know the woman."
"Do you know any of them?"
"Leave me alone, Sam," he sighed. "If I wanted company, I would've gone to the frigging McDonald's."
"Perkins?" I suggested. "There's one over on 23rd, south of campus. Open twenty-four hours. They have pie."
"Go away, Sam."
I had, once, when I was eighteen and Dean was twenty-two. I'd gone off to California, to college. After that, I'd only come back to Lawrence for a couple of summers. But Dean was long gone by then. As if he'd thought that by staying away, he could change something.
I shook my head. "Let's get some sleep. Huh? In the morning we can do whatever you want. Hit the road. Whatever."
"I don't -"
For a second, he looked like he wanted to hit something.
Then he just looked heartbroken.
Dad told me once, when it was just the two of us at home, that for a long time after Mom left, Dean would run to the phone every time it rang. That he insisted on being the one to answer it. He'd run to the door, too, every time the doorbell rang - though Mom wouldn't have rung the bell. Each time, for a long time, he'd wear the same look of thrilled expectation on his face.
Like a dog that simply won't learn.
The air was sharp and cold that night, but still. No wind, and the sky was clear. There was no traffic, because of the holiday, and standing there outside the school we'd both attended, with differing results, all I could hear was the raspy sound of my brother's breathing.
The brother who used to crawl into bed with me to comfort me if I'd had a nightmare, or if I was afraid.
"You want to go now?" I said. "We'll go. Just let me grab my stuff."
"Sam -"
"It's a process, Dean. It's gonna take a long time. If you want to walk away from it now, I'll go with you."
Everybody else was back at the house. Our parents. Our grandparents. Missouri and Pamela.
I didn't honestly feel like I had anything to say to any of them.
Not then.
"We can buy more stuff," Dean said.
And I nodded.
* * * * *
Legends are told in bits and pieces, spread by word of mouth over the years. This is the story of Mary Campbell's family: the husband to whom she told the truth of who she was. The son who grieved the loss of her so deeply that he spent half his life on the road alone, searching for her. And the son who found success, and love, and peace ... until things went a little bit sideways.
Part One: Dean and Jo
Part Two: Dean, Sam, and Jessica
Part Three: John and Deacon
Part Four: Missouri and Pamela
Part Five: Sam and Dean
Part Six: John, Mary, Dean and Sam
Part Seven: Dean and Pamela
Part Eight: Deanna and Samuel
Part Nine: Sam and Missouri
Part Ten: John and Dean
Part Eleven: The Intruder
Part Twelve: Sam, Meg, and Samuel
Part Thirteen: Dean, the Hellhound, and Deanna
Part Fourteen: Deanna and Samuel
CHARACTERS: Sam, Dean, Mary, John, Samuel, Deanna, Missouri, Meg, Pamela
GENRE: Gen (AU)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3210 words
LEGEND
By Carol Davis
Fifteen: The Legend
Focus, dammit!
It's no different from being in court.
Except that in court they don't want to KILL you.
FOCUS.
"Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine. Ut Ecclesiam…"
Maybe it was different for Dean, because he hunted full time. Dad had made sure - if a little reluctantly - that we were both trained pretty early on, but Dean had stuck with it, starting when he was sixteen, and I hadn't. Doing it as a weekend thing, longer trips here and there (Jesus, just like the National Guard), didn't make for a hunter who felt any of this was…right. When Missouri put her hands on the hilt of that knife and started telling the demon to come, all I could think was, This really isn't going well.
And that if we all ended up getting killed, Jessica was going to be really, seriously pissed.
"Come"?
Seriously?
The priest in The Exorcist tried that, and look how that ended.
What I wanted to do then was grab Missouri up and carry her out of there - except that "out" meant out where the hellhound was, and I didn't think for a second that I could outrun it, especially carrying somebody down a flight of steps and having to fumble to get the car doors open. We would have been Dog Chow.
At least Meg was amused. She had a silver knife stuck all the way through her, and she started to smirk at me like things were going exactly the way she'd planned. Demons love to yap about their big plans, how everything's all a part of some bigger picture, but I couldn't imagine how getting skewered could be considered a positive development.
Ut Ecclesiam tuam secura tibi facias libertate servire te rogamus, audi nos.
Dean used to mock me for knowing it all by heart.
It was no different from memorizing cases, rulings, opinions, arguments. Before that, lists of dates and places for American History class. I got good at looking at something and committing it to memory - but my brother's always been a man of action. I had the next chunk of the exorcism lined up and ready, but before I could say anything, I saw Dean launch himself toward Missouri. He didn't like her standing there with her hands wrapped around that knife any more than I did, and he was going to do something about it.
Then our grandmother shoved him away.
It got things moving, though; Dad grabbed up a gun from the dining room table. He knew which one to take - Dean had them all laid out by type of ammo.
I got one for myself and one for Dean, grabbed Dean by the hand and hauled him up off the floor.
"You turn her LOOSE and do it NOW," Missouri said then, looking Meg right in the eye. "You come right here and deal with ME."
All I could think was No no no no no…
Meg had stopped howling when I stopped reciting, but the dog hadn't. It was flinging itself against the front door like something gone completely insane, using its body as a battering ram. It was a good, thick old door, but that dog was determined (and strong; all the damned are crazy strong), and the screws holding the hinges against the doorframe started to give way.
"If it gets in, just keep firing," Dean said. "Blast the son of a bitch."
"But we won't be able to see -"
He had that look in his eye. He was going to keep shooting until he got something. Or until it got him.
"You do that, Dean," Meg said. "It'll be just like Custer's Last Stand."
Missouri still had a grip on that knife. Meg smiled at her, then tipped her - Pamela's - head back, opened her mouth wide and screamed. The oily black smoke that was the true form of the demon began to boil out, more of it than you'd think a human body could contain, all of it climbing toward the ceiling and slowly circling.
We couldn't shoot it.
The hellhound slammed the front door a couple more times, baying and snarling.
Then a shotgun went off, and the dog screamed.
Dean and Dad and I looked at each other. "The fuck?" Dean said.
All I could think was, one of Missouri's neighbors had had exactly enough of all the noise. I went on thinking it as the door came flying open and banged against the little table Missouri had set alongside it to hold mail and her keys.
There was a woman standing on the threshold: average height, short dark hair, a little thin, dressed in boots and jeans and a Carhartt jacket. She was holding a sawed-off in a way that said it was as familiar to her as her right arm. She hesitated for a second, as if she was trying to convince herself to come on in - then she did come in. Stalked into the house, into the living room, spent half a second looking at Missouri, then pushed Missouri aside and took hold of the hilt of the silver knife with the hand that wasn't holding the gun.
"You and me, bitch," she said to what used to be Pamela Barnes. "This has nothing to do with them. I'm the one you want."
Obediently, the smoke reversed course.
When I looked at Dean, all the color had drained out of his face.
His lips formed the word Mom?
"Well, well, well," the demon said when enough of it had settled back into Pamela's body that it could animate her vocal cords. "Look who's come to dinner."
My father looked like he couldn't decide whether to shit or go blind.
"You and me," the woman said. "It was always between you and me. You didn't have the balls to bring it on? You had to go involve them?"
"Oh, honey," the demon said. "I tried. But I have to admit: you are the world's acknowledged champion at making yourself scarce. I searched high and low. I fried a few sources. But no luck. So I decided, let's encourage you to come to me. And it worked."
The woman half-turned.
Looked full-on at my father.
"Take the boys out of here," she said.
Dad was tempted. I could see that. Whatever issues he had with my mother, whatever lingered inside him that he hadn't either worked out or buried so deeply that it would never see sunlight again, none of them made much impact right now.
She was going to handle this, and he could walk. Take me and Dean (and, presumably, Missouri) with him.
The look on his face said Mom could burn the house down, for all he cared.
But that's the thing about my dad. You can think you know him - know what he's going to do, how he's going to feel - and you'd be wrong.
My mother huffed out a small breath.
Then she turned back to the demon.
The wound in her gut genuinely hurt Meg; you could see that. Her chin was trembling and her eyes kept going in and out of focus. I'd known that silver packed a punch, was the weapon of choice against any number of supernatural things, but with demons that just went so far. Salt, holy water, silver, it would just slow them down.
Smiling, my mother set her sawed-off down on the coffee table. She kept her left hand wrapped around the hilt of the knife, and when she straightened back up, she wrapped her right hand around her left.
"It was funny, in the movie," she said to Meg.
Meg's eyebrow twitched.
"The Princess Bride," my mother said. "'My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.'"
Meg opened her mouth to speak.
And my mother said something to her in a language I didn't recognize.
Meg squeaked softly and her eyes unfocused again.
"Get out of my house," my mother told her.
Then she went on, in that strange language. Not Latin. Not any of the Romance languages. Not Chinese, or Russian, or anything I'd ever heard before. It had an otherworldly music to it, an almost hypnotic rhythm that made it lovely, made it something you could listen to for days on end and never get tired of hearing it.
Meg didn't seem too keen on it, though.
She started to scream in a way that made my knees shake. I looked at Dean, and at my father, and both of them were having the same reaction. As lovely as that strange language was, Meg's screaming was its counterpoint, and if Missouri's neighbors could hear any of that caterwauling (they'd have to be stone deaf not to), I can only imagine what they were thinking. The only people who seemed at all comfortable with what was going on were my grandparents, both of whom had moved in close and were standing just behind Missouri, as if they intended to catch her if she fell.
I have no idea what it was that my mother was saying. It could have been an exorcism rite; it could have been more dialogue from The Princess Bride. She's never told me, and I haven't asked. Something tells me I don't really want to know.
It went on for a couple of minutes, during all of which Meg's attention was glued to my mother, and my mother's to Meg.
Then, when I began to think that I couldn't listen to Meg scream for one more second, her body - Pamela's body - began to droop toward the floor. My mother followed it down, moving like a dancer, shifting her weight carefully so that she'd be able to spring to her feet if need be but never losing her grip on the knife and never pausing whatever it was that she was reciting.
No; it wasn't a recitation.
A prayer, maybe.
Pamela's body had been lying sprawled on the floor for maybe ten or twelve seconds when her mouth opened and a thin stream of dark gray smoke began to drift out of it, heading up toward the ceiling. It didn't manage to rise more than a couple of feet. It circled the coffee table, drifted around us, then settled into a wandering pool near the floor, like fog, or swamp gas.
My mother said a few more words.
A minute later, there was nothing left of Meg but a couple of small puddles of what my Stanford roommate Alan Lebowitz would have called schmutz.
No one said anything for a while.
Then Dean said, not very convincingly, "That was awesome."
It wasn't, exactly. Effective, certainly. Mr. Spock might have called it "fascinating." Either way, it left Pamela Barnes lying dead in the middle of the living room floor with an old silver knife thrust through her body just beneath her rib cage.
Missouri sighed at her, long and heartfelt.
I thought we were done. I thought all that was left was an evening full of explanations - unless my mother chose to climb to her feet and walk back out the door.
Instead, she bowed her head over the body of Pamela Barnes. Crooned a little more of that strange language, and gently, carefully, pulled the knife free. When it was fully out, she placed her hand over the wound and spoke a little more, something whose cadence made it sound like a lullaby.
Pamela's chest rose a little.
Fell.
Rose again.
"The next time you talk to Walter Bear Tooth," Mom said over her shoulder to Dean, "you might tell him he needs to furnish the instructions along with the weapon. Without the prayers, it's just a knife. And you can get those a lot cheaper at Walmart."
"Silver," Dean muttered.
Mom reached over to the couch, grabbed hold of a throw pillow, and tucked it gently underneath Pamela's head. Pamela was undeniably breathing at that point, and didn't seem to be in any kind of distress - or at least, she didn't until she opened her eyes. She began to look around wildly, and it was plain that she had no idea where she was, or if the thing that had brought her there was still around. Mom shushed her, the way I imagine she'd shushed me or Dean a long time ago, trying to soothe us down into sleep.
Then Mom climbed to her feet and walked out into the kitchen.
We could see her out there, leaning against the sink, head bowed, as if she was completely exhausted.
None of us said anything.
~~~~~~~~
I found my brother a couple of hours later in the playground of our old elementary school. It was the middle of the night by then, but he didn't seem to notice, or care.
Maybe he preferred that it was dark.
"You okay?" I asked him.
He looked at me for a moment, then went back to studying the ground. He was sitting on one of the swings, nudging it back and forth by rocking his boots in the dirt. I remembered him saying once, a long time ago, that he thought he could build up enough momentum swinging to snap the chain right off the bracket that held it to the frame.
When I explained to him that he'd end up crashing into the dirt, he'd grinned at me and said, "Nah. I'd be out flying over the trees."
"Kinda cold out here," I said.
"Got nothing to say to her, Sam. Let her and Dad work it out. I got nothing to say."
"After all this time?"
He looked up at me again. "What do you want me to do? Go find an all-night bakery and buy a frigging cake?"
"It's a process, Dean. It's gonna take a long time."
"You gonna stay, then?"
"I don't know. I need to go to work on Monday."
"Fly out. Take you a few hours to get back to Portland. Dad can drive you to the airport."
"And you'll be…where?"
He looked past me, at the row of houses across the street from the school. There was a light on in one of them; the rest were dark. Maybe the person who'd turned on the light was watching me and Dean, figuring we were up to no good.
Or maybe they didn't give a damn.
There was an empty swing next to Dean's. I sat down on it carefully, not sure if it would support my weight.
"Go on back," Dean said. "I don't need you to hold my hand."
It happens to all of us. You dream all your life of something. Search for it. Work for it. Build it up in your mind until it's the be-all and end-all of your existence. And when you get there - if you get there - it's not at all what you thought it would be.
If you claim that's never happened to you, I'll call you a liar.
"I'll go with you," I said.
"You gotta go to work. You got Jessica."
"She'll understand."
Once more, he looked at me, his expression grim and as unyielding as granite. "I'm not inviting you, Sam. Go home. Go back to your life."
"Dean."
He got up then and stalked away from the playground, across the wide stretch of lawn that led up to the school itself. For a minute I thought he was going to look around for something to throw, so he could break a window. Commit a little frantic vandalism so whoever had that light on across the street could bring the cops down on his ass.
He did that once, during the year he should have been a graduating senior. They kept him in jail for a couple of days, made him pay a fine and do a hundred hours of community service. At least, they sentenced him to a hundred hours of community service. I think he still owes the City of Lawrence about ninety-eight of them.
This time, he simply stood looking through a window.
"She ruined my fucking life," he said when I walked up beside him.
I could have pulled a Dr. Phil on him - told him that yes, she'd thrown his childhood off course, but he was an adult now (and had been for a long time), able to make his own decisions. Able to put his past behind him, overwrite the tapes playing in his head, and get on with things. Forgive our mother for doing what she felt was right.
She'd left to keep us safe. I heard her say that to Dad. Heard him bark, "It wasn't your decision to make, God damn it. Not alone."
Safe.
Well, there are varying interpretations of what that amounts to.
"Pamela's okay," I said quietly. "She's asleep. Whatever that mumbo-jumbo was that Mom recited - it killed the evil and preserved the good. Pretty good trick."
"Yeah?" Dean replied. "Ask me if I give a shit."
"I don't need to ask. I know you do."
"I don't even know the woman."
"Do you know any of them?"
"Leave me alone, Sam," he sighed. "If I wanted company, I would've gone to the frigging McDonald's."
"Perkins?" I suggested. "There's one over on 23rd, south of campus. Open twenty-four hours. They have pie."
"Go away, Sam."
I had, once, when I was eighteen and Dean was twenty-two. I'd gone off to California, to college. After that, I'd only come back to Lawrence for a couple of summers. But Dean was long gone by then. As if he'd thought that by staying away, he could change something.
I shook my head. "Let's get some sleep. Huh? In the morning we can do whatever you want. Hit the road. Whatever."
"I don't -"
For a second, he looked like he wanted to hit something.
Then he just looked heartbroken.
Dad told me once, when it was just the two of us at home, that for a long time after Mom left, Dean would run to the phone every time it rang. That he insisted on being the one to answer it. He'd run to the door, too, every time the doorbell rang - though Mom wouldn't have rung the bell. Each time, for a long time, he'd wear the same look of thrilled expectation on his face.
Like a dog that simply won't learn.
The air was sharp and cold that night, but still. No wind, and the sky was clear. There was no traffic, because of the holiday, and standing there outside the school we'd both attended, with differing results, all I could hear was the raspy sound of my brother's breathing.
The brother who used to crawl into bed with me to comfort me if I'd had a nightmare, or if I was afraid.
"You want to go now?" I said. "We'll go. Just let me grab my stuff."
"Sam -"
"It's a process, Dean. It's gonna take a long time. If you want to walk away from it now, I'll go with you."
Everybody else was back at the house. Our parents. Our grandparents. Missouri and Pamela.
I didn't honestly feel like I had anything to say to any of them.
Not then.
"We can buy more stuff," Dean said.
And I nodded.
* * * * *