Swimming the Lethe (3/10)
Title: Swimming the Lethe (3/10)
Author: Luxorien
Words: 2863/28,027
Rating: R (multiple f-bombs, graphic violence)
Genre: Gen/Dark!Dean/AU
Pairings: Dean/OFCs (because it's Dean)
Notes: The partial incantation is written in extremely poor Old English. Ashes and thorns have been replaced by ae and th respectively.
Summary: After an infelicitous one-night stand, Dean becomes a danger to Sam. This chapter: Sam and Charity bond over Dean's blood. Dean bleeds. A lot.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Farr off from these a slow and silent stream
Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
-Paradise Lost
Charity decided that she was having a bad day.
Some of it was little stuff: she'd been late for work, Sarah had called in sick, somebody'd hit a skunk on Highway 18…and there was the possibility of someone walking into the restaurant and calling the cops to arrest her for brandishing. Okay. Those were what her grandmother used to call "worries." Not day-breakers.
But Sean - no, Sam - was definitely cause for an official announcement of Tuesday's ruin. She'd seen things in her goddamned head when she touched him. And now, trying to look inside him and read his intentions, she was stymied for the first time in her life. Either he was immune to her special talent or he was a robot, because she saw neither deception nor truth. It was as if he didn't exist for her. It was fucking creepy.
He was looking at her through his boyish bangs, eyes frighteningly full of...something. Charity tightened her grip on her gun, fingers digging into the crosshatching.
"You saw what I saw," he said. A statement, but he sounded surprised. He sounded.
"What do you want from me?"
"I swear, I just want to find my brother." Earnest. Pleading. True?
She was taken by a sudden overwhelming urge to concede; to trust; to do whatever he asked because he asked; to make the desperation in those soft eyes go away. It was as if Dean was right beside her, bleeding into her. She could feel the fire in him as clearly now as she had two days previous, when he'd been hitting on her and she'd taken a speculative look inside him to see what sort of lover he'd be.
If Sam was a hole where a person should have been, Dean was a mass of nuclear fusion, slinging great plumes of soul-fire into the empty space around him. At the time, Charity had only cared that he was full of life and heat, and devoid of homicidal tendencies. Now she recalled the filial devotion that fueled the flames, and knew that it had captured her and chained her down to the need in those used-to-be-little-boy eyes.
She'd never had to trust anyone before, never had to rely just on what she saw or heard. She'd always been sure. But Sam was at the center of Dean's fire, and she supposed a good reference would have to be enough. She lowered the gun, slipped it back into her waistband holster.
"Okay. So. You have...visions."
"Yeah," he replied, relaxing slightly.
"What does this mean? Dean...Dean's..." She couldn't say it. They'd both seen him bleeding out, choking on his own blood. She hadn't expected to ever see him again, but the thought of him dead...
"Not yet. I mean, what I see, I can change."
"Future tense." Fucking unbelievable. But then, so was looking into people's souls.
"Yeah. So if there's anything you can tell me. Anything at all."
"I..." She was overwhelmed again by that intrusive feeling, that burning urge to level mountains and boil oceans to take away the pain in that boy's eyes. But even if she wanted to follow that impulse, she didn’t know how. "I'm sorry. I haven't seen him."
"What about the woman? From the vision. Her eyes were silver there, but they would have been blue if you saw her."
She opened her mouth to give him another painful negative, but something tugged at the back of her mind, something she had to pause to try and identify. What was it?
"What?" Sam asked, his eyes locked on hers.
"I don't...I don't know." She closed her eyes and measured her breaths, examining that tiny nagging feeling, following it like a thread. Slowly. Patiently. It was buried deep under a thousand other inconsequential memories, but it was there. Somewhere. A memory of that face. Of ice-blue eyes.
It was like clawing at a crumbling wall. Once she had a piece loose (that face) the rest fell smoothly, barriers toppling like dominoes. And she remembered.
"Oh, that bitch."
* * *
Dean woke up, and took that as evidence that he was still alive.
Unfortunately.
He was lying on the floor again, unable to stop shivering on the cold concrete, though the smallest movement sent agony radiating through his chest and down his arms. Even the blood coating his skin felt cold and sticky, not warm like it should have. He felt icy steel on his wrists again and would have laughed if he'd had the energy. He could just make out the faint clink of the chain in the silence. Where the fuck did that crazy bitch think he was going?
There was nothing he could do except lie there on his side, chained and shivering and bleeding out into the darkness. So that's what he did. He hadn't been doing it very long when the door creaked open again and that voice wafted towards him.
"It's time, Dean."
He didn't respond, didn't see the point. All his strength had trickled out and sunk into the cold floor. He could feel himself going into shock, the shivers already growing less pronounced.
Gentle hands removed one of the bracelets from his wrist and rolled him over so that he was lying face-down. The pain was excruciating and he wasn't sure why he didn't pass out, except that the warm fingers were on his neck again, holding on, keeping him there.
"No one's attempted this in more than a thousand years." The voice was a low whisper now, soft and filled with an unnatural lust. "I'm going to make you perfect."
The scream that Dean couldn't contain came out as a grunting moan when she made the first cut. Her touch on his neck stilled the tremors but the knife was so much worse than that had been, and he wanted to fight, to struggle, to scream, to die, but she wouldn't let him. He lay there, eyes open in the dark, and let it wash over him and through him until he wasn't sure there was anything left.
She was cutting deep into his back, through the dermal layers down into muscle, scraping against bone. She was whispering incantations again, matching the power of the words to the power of the symbol she was etching deep into his back.
"Horsa leoht ond Hengest guthwine
With hel-runan, with ealle hetelic thingas
Nithplega gethafas, nacod laetan
Thingian, thaet dyrne ne beon thrym…"
He could feel her speech and the emerging pattern of agony across his shoulder blades beating in time with one another even as his own heartbeat slowed. It felt like he was freefalling, nothing but empty space all around him, no up and no down. Then, from somewhere far away, he heard what he somehow knew was a final word, and it was tugging at him, pulling him, whether farther down or back up he couldn't say.
Let go, Dean. I've got you. You're so tired. Just let go and forget. I promise it will stop hurting, and Sammy will be safe. You can rest now. I'll make sure Sammy's safe. Nothing is safer than death. You know that. You know that so well. Don't you want Sammy to have what you've been aching for? Don't you want him to be at peace?
He tried to fight, but he was so tired of fighting. He tried to breathe, but it was too hard. Everything he was stopped, and in the space between heartbeats something else took over.
His eyes snapped open to concrete next to his face, smooth and crimson with his blood. He moved instinctively, automatically, and he could feel things grinding and twisting inside of him in ways that should have made it impossible to do so. He ignored the sensation, didn't have time for it. He could feel the threat standing over him, saw the gore-covered knife inches from his bloody hand. Pushed himself up smoothly, grabbed the weapon with the same grace. He didn't need to look to find her heart, didn't need another second to find his target or maneuver his body into a striking position. It was one coordinated, lightening movement. There was no thought, no motive, no complicated impression. He let his body translate stimuli into reactions that were purely instinctual.
He held onto the knife as he watched the light in the silver eyes fade. She died with a smile on her face and he could no more summon confusion or curiosity over that than he could summon any sort of feeling about her death at all. She had been a threat. He had eliminated her.
That was all. There was nothing else.
* * *
Sam, feeling a bit like Dean in one of his gun porn moods, made sure he had a backup for his backup before they went in. Charity had led him to a foundry, a labyrinth of rusting metal and crumbling catwalks. Any equipment that could be liquidated had long since been removed, but the place still retained the smell of use under the metallic odors of decay and obscurity. It conjured images of hot slag and alloying metal. It was a place of both purification and adulteration; of focused, imposed change. This was where not-Mina Rose had gone after she stole a lock of Charity's hair and spelled her into silence and forgetfulness.
"Okay, you got me here," Sam said as he slammed the trunk and came around the side of the car. "You should-"
"Sam." Charity's eyes were level and pained. "She stuck her skanky little hands in my brain. And stole my hair. Who does that? Maybe this kinda thing happens to you all the time, but I'm not bailing. I can't."
That's the point, he wanted to argue. I'm used to this. You're not. There was also the small matter of why not-Mina would be interested in Charity and how Charity knew where she was going. Sam wasn't convinced she was being completely forthcoming about her reasons for tagging along. But time was slipping by all around them, so he just sighed and took the lead. This was where the trail ended; it would be close combat tactics from here on out. He drew his Sig and braced it on the hand holding the flashlight as he headed for the entrance.
The door opened on a wide, industrial space, littered with broken furnaces and giant slag buckets. The sounds of their footsteps stuttered around corroding metal and years of accumulated filth. Color-coded pipes ran in various directions, displaying faded lettering and stamped symbols. The air was heavy, thick with the absence of sentience. Sam thought of Dean in this place (trapped/hurt) and he wanted to scream, to run through every room, chasing the battered beating of his heart through the darkness to his brother. A lifetime of reluctant training and hard-learned prudence held him back; he took careful, measured steps, watching and listening as he systematically searched each corridor and every room.
In the sepulchral silence, he should have been able to hear even light footfalls. His own were echoing modestly, though he consciously cushioned his steps. Sort of silly that he was even trying, considering how loudly Charity's boots were striking the concrete floor. Still, it was habit, and it lessened the static he had to filter out as he listened. But all the listening in the world wouldn't have helped. It was only dumb, blind (deaf) luck that he saw a shadow's movement in the faintest corner of the flashlight's arc. By that time, it was too late to do anything that was calculated or quiet.
He whipped the beam around, muscles snapping with adrenaline and long habit. It took him fractions of a second to begin sighting on his target, to recognize that target as Dean, face curiously intent, light flashing silver off his irises. Fractions of a second to hesitate and to realize that his moment of hesitation would cost him his life because Dean (Dean!) was coming at him with a stained blade in one bloody fist.
The world was like sand slipping through his fingers. He had no space to act, only to watch, as if his life, his hour of death, had become a vision in someone else's head.
The report from Charity's compact .45 exploded towards the wide walls, and sent an ejected casing skittering across Sam's cheek. He smelled the sharp sting of powder, memory of a thousand practice sessions, a thousand battles. And he saw her double tap Dean's center mass, watched his brother crumple bonelessly to the ground with two hollowpoints in his chest.
He turned his weapon on Charity as naturally as he'd turned it away from Dean. In the sharp light, her features looked ghostly, unreal. She was still in her shooting stance, staring at the body on the ground. When she turned to look at him, the devastation in her eyes almost made him take his finger off the trigger.
Almost.
"Drop the gun."
She crouched slowly and placed the Kahr on the floor. "Sam, I'm sorry," she said. But her voice carried the guilt of someone who had done the hard thing, not someone who had made a terrible mistake. He wanted to shoot her. He wanted to empty his magazine into her. He wanted to eat the round that was in the chamber. He wanted to hold his brother's body and scream. But the world was too new, too empty for him to do anything but stand there numbly.
"Sam, he was already gone." Her eyes seemed to cloud over. "He was gonna kill you. He wasn't confused or angry or…he was gonna kill you and walk outta here like nothing happened."
And he knew she was right. He could read his brother's body language as easy as breathing, even when Dean wasn't broadcasting his intentions like that. He'd been going for Sam.
"Then it's not Dean." He spoke the words at the same time he thought them. Of course it wasn't Dean. It couldn't be. Maybe something that could shapeshift, maybe-
"It was him," Charity insisted, eyes glistening. "I'm telling you, he was already gone."
Sam tightened his grip. "How the hell would you know? You've been pulling an awful lot of convenient information out of your ass tonight. Why are you doing this?"
"I can- I can read people, okay? I can sort of…see inside."
"So you're a mind-reader now? A human MRI machine? And you just wanna help out of the goodness of your heart, right?"
"I saw this place, when that- that woman did her witchy shit. I didn't remember until you showed up. And Dean-" She choked off, trembling. "Sam, I looked at him and there was nothing. He'd been cleaned out. He was gone."
Dean's gone, he's gone, gonegonegone…
Sam was trying to formulate an answer when Dean stirred, rising slowly to his knees. Sam saw Charity take a step back even as he swung the light away from her and towards his brother. Dean coughed and spat blood before turning silver-tinted eyes first on Sam, then on Charity and her gun, lying a few yards away. Sam felt something inside him twist and fall away as he realized that Charity had been right. It was his brother but not his brother, regarding him with cold, predatory calculation. He struggled to breathe with the weight of what was going on.
"Charity," he called without cutting his eyes away, without blinking. "Pick up your gun and check out the rest of this place." He waited while she got over the shock of seeing someone come back from two .45s to the chest at close range. Waited while she stepped carefully behind him and continued through the broken landscape of forgotten steel. Waited for the heavy sound of her steps to recede into the darkness and ignored her backward glances.
"Who are you?" he asked as Dean climbed calmly to his feet.
"You know who I am, little brother."
"You can't be. Dean wouldn't-"
"I promised Dad I'd kill you. That was the last thing he ever said: that I had to kill you if I couldn't save you. That demon wants you for somethin'. Smart thing would be to make sure he can't touch you. Ever."
Sam struggled to keep his breathing steady, to keep his grip tight and his eyes on his target.
"You shouldn't ask for promises you don't want me to keep. We hunt evil, Sam, remember? Doesn't matter if it's human or not. Come on. Give me the gun. You know I'll make it quick."
He would have preferred an evil Dean, a possessed Dean, a deranged Dean. Anything else but this strange dispassionate version of his brother. It didn't just look like Dean. It acted like him, felt like him - or what Dean would feel like if twenty-two years of brotherhood ceased to have any meaning for him.
"You're lying."
Dean just looked at him. No anger. No indignation. No sadness. No hate. Nothing.
"What happened to you, man?" Sam whispered. "What did she do to you?"
His brother's dead, silver eyes were his only answer.
Chapter 4
Author: Luxorien
Words: 2863/28,027
Rating: R (multiple f-bombs, graphic violence)
Genre: Gen/Dark!Dean/AU
Pairings: Dean/OFCs (because it's Dean)
Notes: The partial incantation is written in extremely poor Old English. Ashes and thorns have been replaced by ae and th respectively.
Summary: After an infelicitous one-night stand, Dean becomes a danger to Sam. This chapter: Sam and Charity bond over Dean's blood. Dean bleeds. A lot.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Farr off from these a slow and silent stream
Lethe the River of Oblivion roules
Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
-Paradise Lost
Charity decided that she was having a bad day.
Some of it was little stuff: she'd been late for work, Sarah had called in sick, somebody'd hit a skunk on Highway 18…and there was the possibility of someone walking into the restaurant and calling the cops to arrest her for brandishing. Okay. Those were what her grandmother used to call "worries." Not day-breakers.
But Sean - no, Sam - was definitely cause for an official announcement of Tuesday's ruin. She'd seen things in her goddamned head when she touched him. And now, trying to look inside him and read his intentions, she was stymied for the first time in her life. Either he was immune to her special talent or he was a robot, because she saw neither deception nor truth. It was as if he didn't exist for her. It was fucking creepy.
He was looking at her through his boyish bangs, eyes frighteningly full of...something. Charity tightened her grip on her gun, fingers digging into the crosshatching.
"You saw what I saw," he said. A statement, but he sounded surprised. He sounded.
"What do you want from me?"
"I swear, I just want to find my brother." Earnest. Pleading. True?
She was taken by a sudden overwhelming urge to concede; to trust; to do whatever he asked because he asked; to make the desperation in those soft eyes go away. It was as if Dean was right beside her, bleeding into her. She could feel the fire in him as clearly now as she had two days previous, when he'd been hitting on her and she'd taken a speculative look inside him to see what sort of lover he'd be.
If Sam was a hole where a person should have been, Dean was a mass of nuclear fusion, slinging great plumes of soul-fire into the empty space around him. At the time, Charity had only cared that he was full of life and heat, and devoid of homicidal tendencies. Now she recalled the filial devotion that fueled the flames, and knew that it had captured her and chained her down to the need in those used-to-be-little-boy eyes.
She'd never had to trust anyone before, never had to rely just on what she saw or heard. She'd always been sure. But Sam was at the center of Dean's fire, and she supposed a good reference would have to be enough. She lowered the gun, slipped it back into her waistband holster.
"Okay. So. You have...visions."
"Yeah," he replied, relaxing slightly.
"What does this mean? Dean...Dean's..." She couldn't say it. They'd both seen him bleeding out, choking on his own blood. She hadn't expected to ever see him again, but the thought of him dead...
"Not yet. I mean, what I see, I can change."
"Future tense." Fucking unbelievable. But then, so was looking into people's souls.
"Yeah. So if there's anything you can tell me. Anything at all."
"I..." She was overwhelmed again by that intrusive feeling, that burning urge to level mountains and boil oceans to take away the pain in that boy's eyes. But even if she wanted to follow that impulse, she didn’t know how. "I'm sorry. I haven't seen him."
"What about the woman? From the vision. Her eyes were silver there, but they would have been blue if you saw her."
She opened her mouth to give him another painful negative, but something tugged at the back of her mind, something she had to pause to try and identify. What was it?
"What?" Sam asked, his eyes locked on hers.
"I don't...I don't know." She closed her eyes and measured her breaths, examining that tiny nagging feeling, following it like a thread. Slowly. Patiently. It was buried deep under a thousand other inconsequential memories, but it was there. Somewhere. A memory of that face. Of ice-blue eyes.
It was like clawing at a crumbling wall. Once she had a piece loose (that face) the rest fell smoothly, barriers toppling like dominoes. And she remembered.
"Oh, that bitch."
* * *
Dean woke up, and took that as evidence that he was still alive.
Unfortunately.
He was lying on the floor again, unable to stop shivering on the cold concrete, though the smallest movement sent agony radiating through his chest and down his arms. Even the blood coating his skin felt cold and sticky, not warm like it should have. He felt icy steel on his wrists again and would have laughed if he'd had the energy. He could just make out the faint clink of the chain in the silence. Where the fuck did that crazy bitch think he was going?
There was nothing he could do except lie there on his side, chained and shivering and bleeding out into the darkness. So that's what he did. He hadn't been doing it very long when the door creaked open again and that voice wafted towards him.
"It's time, Dean."
He didn't respond, didn't see the point. All his strength had trickled out and sunk into the cold floor. He could feel himself going into shock, the shivers already growing less pronounced.
Gentle hands removed one of the bracelets from his wrist and rolled him over so that he was lying face-down. The pain was excruciating and he wasn't sure why he didn't pass out, except that the warm fingers were on his neck again, holding on, keeping him there.
"No one's attempted this in more than a thousand years." The voice was a low whisper now, soft and filled with an unnatural lust. "I'm going to make you perfect."
The scream that Dean couldn't contain came out as a grunting moan when she made the first cut. Her touch on his neck stilled the tremors but the knife was so much worse than that had been, and he wanted to fight, to struggle, to scream, to die, but she wouldn't let him. He lay there, eyes open in the dark, and let it wash over him and through him until he wasn't sure there was anything left.
She was cutting deep into his back, through the dermal layers down into muscle, scraping against bone. She was whispering incantations again, matching the power of the words to the power of the symbol she was etching deep into his back.
"Horsa leoht ond Hengest guthwine
With hel-runan, with ealle hetelic thingas
Nithplega gethafas, nacod laetan
Thingian, thaet dyrne ne beon thrym…"
He could feel her speech and the emerging pattern of agony across his shoulder blades beating in time with one another even as his own heartbeat slowed. It felt like he was freefalling, nothing but empty space all around him, no up and no down. Then, from somewhere far away, he heard what he somehow knew was a final word, and it was tugging at him, pulling him, whether farther down or back up he couldn't say.
Let go, Dean. I've got you. You're so tired. Just let go and forget. I promise it will stop hurting, and Sammy will be safe. You can rest now. I'll make sure Sammy's safe. Nothing is safer than death. You know that. You know that so well. Don't you want Sammy to have what you've been aching for? Don't you want him to be at peace?
He tried to fight, but he was so tired of fighting. He tried to breathe, but it was too hard. Everything he was stopped, and in the space between heartbeats something else took over.
His eyes snapped open to concrete next to his face, smooth and crimson with his blood. He moved instinctively, automatically, and he could feel things grinding and twisting inside of him in ways that should have made it impossible to do so. He ignored the sensation, didn't have time for it. He could feel the threat standing over him, saw the gore-covered knife inches from his bloody hand. Pushed himself up smoothly, grabbed the weapon with the same grace. He didn't need to look to find her heart, didn't need another second to find his target or maneuver his body into a striking position. It was one coordinated, lightening movement. There was no thought, no motive, no complicated impression. He let his body translate stimuli into reactions that were purely instinctual.
He held onto the knife as he watched the light in the silver eyes fade. She died with a smile on her face and he could no more summon confusion or curiosity over that than he could summon any sort of feeling about her death at all. She had been a threat. He had eliminated her.
That was all. There was nothing else.
* * *
Sam, feeling a bit like Dean in one of his gun porn moods, made sure he had a backup for his backup before they went in. Charity had led him to a foundry, a labyrinth of rusting metal and crumbling catwalks. Any equipment that could be liquidated had long since been removed, but the place still retained the smell of use under the metallic odors of decay and obscurity. It conjured images of hot slag and alloying metal. It was a place of both purification and adulteration; of focused, imposed change. This was where not-Mina Rose had gone after she stole a lock of Charity's hair and spelled her into silence and forgetfulness.
"Okay, you got me here," Sam said as he slammed the trunk and came around the side of the car. "You should-"
"Sam." Charity's eyes were level and pained. "She stuck her skanky little hands in my brain. And stole my hair. Who does that? Maybe this kinda thing happens to you all the time, but I'm not bailing. I can't."
That's the point, he wanted to argue. I'm used to this. You're not. There was also the small matter of why not-Mina would be interested in Charity and how Charity knew where she was going. Sam wasn't convinced she was being completely forthcoming about her reasons for tagging along. But time was slipping by all around them, so he just sighed and took the lead. This was where the trail ended; it would be close combat tactics from here on out. He drew his Sig and braced it on the hand holding the flashlight as he headed for the entrance.
The door opened on a wide, industrial space, littered with broken furnaces and giant slag buckets. The sounds of their footsteps stuttered around corroding metal and years of accumulated filth. Color-coded pipes ran in various directions, displaying faded lettering and stamped symbols. The air was heavy, thick with the absence of sentience. Sam thought of Dean in this place (trapped/hurt) and he wanted to scream, to run through every room, chasing the battered beating of his heart through the darkness to his brother. A lifetime of reluctant training and hard-learned prudence held him back; he took careful, measured steps, watching and listening as he systematically searched each corridor and every room.
In the sepulchral silence, he should have been able to hear even light footfalls. His own were echoing modestly, though he consciously cushioned his steps. Sort of silly that he was even trying, considering how loudly Charity's boots were striking the concrete floor. Still, it was habit, and it lessened the static he had to filter out as he listened. But all the listening in the world wouldn't have helped. It was only dumb, blind (deaf) luck that he saw a shadow's movement in the faintest corner of the flashlight's arc. By that time, it was too late to do anything that was calculated or quiet.
He whipped the beam around, muscles snapping with adrenaline and long habit. It took him fractions of a second to begin sighting on his target, to recognize that target as Dean, face curiously intent, light flashing silver off his irises. Fractions of a second to hesitate and to realize that his moment of hesitation would cost him his life because Dean (Dean!) was coming at him with a stained blade in one bloody fist.
The world was like sand slipping through his fingers. He had no space to act, only to watch, as if his life, his hour of death, had become a vision in someone else's head.
The report from Charity's compact .45 exploded towards the wide walls, and sent an ejected casing skittering across Sam's cheek. He smelled the sharp sting of powder, memory of a thousand practice sessions, a thousand battles. And he saw her double tap Dean's center mass, watched his brother crumple bonelessly to the ground with two hollowpoints in his chest.
He turned his weapon on Charity as naturally as he'd turned it away from Dean. In the sharp light, her features looked ghostly, unreal. She was still in her shooting stance, staring at the body on the ground. When she turned to look at him, the devastation in her eyes almost made him take his finger off the trigger.
Almost.
"Drop the gun."
She crouched slowly and placed the Kahr on the floor. "Sam, I'm sorry," she said. But her voice carried the guilt of someone who had done the hard thing, not someone who had made a terrible mistake. He wanted to shoot her. He wanted to empty his magazine into her. He wanted to eat the round that was in the chamber. He wanted to hold his brother's body and scream. But the world was too new, too empty for him to do anything but stand there numbly.
"Sam, he was already gone." Her eyes seemed to cloud over. "He was gonna kill you. He wasn't confused or angry or…he was gonna kill you and walk outta here like nothing happened."
And he knew she was right. He could read his brother's body language as easy as breathing, even when Dean wasn't broadcasting his intentions like that. He'd been going for Sam.
"Then it's not Dean." He spoke the words at the same time he thought them. Of course it wasn't Dean. It couldn't be. Maybe something that could shapeshift, maybe-
"It was him," Charity insisted, eyes glistening. "I'm telling you, he was already gone."
Sam tightened his grip. "How the hell would you know? You've been pulling an awful lot of convenient information out of your ass tonight. Why are you doing this?"
"I can- I can read people, okay? I can sort of…see inside."
"So you're a mind-reader now? A human MRI machine? And you just wanna help out of the goodness of your heart, right?"
"I saw this place, when that- that woman did her witchy shit. I didn't remember until you showed up. And Dean-" She choked off, trembling. "Sam, I looked at him and there was nothing. He'd been cleaned out. He was gone."
Dean's gone, he's gone, gonegonegone…
Sam was trying to formulate an answer when Dean stirred, rising slowly to his knees. Sam saw Charity take a step back even as he swung the light away from her and towards his brother. Dean coughed and spat blood before turning silver-tinted eyes first on Sam, then on Charity and her gun, lying a few yards away. Sam felt something inside him twist and fall away as he realized that Charity had been right. It was his brother but not his brother, regarding him with cold, predatory calculation. He struggled to breathe with the weight of what was going on.
"Charity," he called without cutting his eyes away, without blinking. "Pick up your gun and check out the rest of this place." He waited while she got over the shock of seeing someone come back from two .45s to the chest at close range. Waited while she stepped carefully behind him and continued through the broken landscape of forgotten steel. Waited for the heavy sound of her steps to recede into the darkness and ignored her backward glances.
"Who are you?" he asked as Dean climbed calmly to his feet.
"You know who I am, little brother."
"You can't be. Dean wouldn't-"
"I promised Dad I'd kill you. That was the last thing he ever said: that I had to kill you if I couldn't save you. That demon wants you for somethin'. Smart thing would be to make sure he can't touch you. Ever."
Sam struggled to keep his breathing steady, to keep his grip tight and his eyes on his target.
"You shouldn't ask for promises you don't want me to keep. We hunt evil, Sam, remember? Doesn't matter if it's human or not. Come on. Give me the gun. You know I'll make it quick."
He would have preferred an evil Dean, a possessed Dean, a deranged Dean. Anything else but this strange dispassionate version of his brother. It didn't just look like Dean. It acted like him, felt like him - or what Dean would feel like if twenty-two years of brotherhood ceased to have any meaning for him.
"You're lying."
Dean just looked at him. No anger. No indignation. No sadness. No hate. Nothing.
"What happened to you, man?" Sam whispered. "What did she do to you?"
His brother's dead, silver eyes were his only answer.
Chapter 4