Sam was awakened by the pain in his side that had been dancing at the edge of his awareness flaring to the forefront of his brain and dragging his consciousness with it. Sam grumbled and tried to shift away from the pain.
"Hold still, Sammy," Dean's gentle voice (the voice of big brother tending to his hurt baby brother) made Sam open his eyes. Dean was standing over his bed, bent over and peeling back the bandage on Sam's cut to examine the wound.
"I can do that," Sam muttered sleepily.
Dean grunted. "Shut up."
Sam nodded, teeth clenched together, and obeyed as best he could.
Rather than try to twist and see his own side, Sam took the measure of the damage from Dean's expression. It was tight, his brother's lips pressed tightly together and the skin around his eyes taut while the light behind them was fiery. Funny thing about Dean's face when Sam was hurt - it was the same face Dean made when he himself was the one injured. The only difference was that there was more anger in the look in Dean's eyes and the set of his jaw when it was Sam battered and bruised.
Roused so recently from sleep (and eager to think about something else other than the sting as Dean freed the bandage), the observation struck Sam as sort of amusing and he smirked.
Dean's eyes flitted from Sam's side to his face when he caught a twitch from the corner of his eye. His brow furrowed further. "You a sadist, man? Why are you smiling that you're hurt?"
"Masochist," Sam mumbled absently. "If I was a sadist, I'd be smiling that you were hurt."
Dean narrowed his eyes a little and turned his attention back to Sam's side. "Really, Sam, I'm a little worried about what your 'college experience' exposed you to."
Sam snorted. "Please, if I learned to be uncomfortably fine with pain anywhere, it was from Da-"
"You're a twisted puppy, dude," Dean interjected before Sam could finish. It was intentional, and Sam knew it. He let it go.
"Is it infected?" Sam asked, though from the type of pain he felt he didn't think so. He knew what an infected would felt like, and it was just shy of utter agony. Even worse, an infection always meant a visit to the hospital, which Winchesters avoided like the plague. The pain Sam was in thankfully wasn't that kind of pain.
"I think you'll live," Dean joked flatly, but that he joked at all said enough. If Dean hadn't been flippant, if he'd stared grimly and his upper lip twitched, Sam knew he was in trouble.
Dean straightened and went to the open first aid kit on the motel room dresser. While his brother gathered the supplies he would need to clean and re-bandage the cut, Sam sat up and propped himself against the headboard, his shirt still hiked up to stay off the wound.
There was a thick, heavy silence in the air and Sam knew Dean was well aware of it.
The silence was last night and it. It was Sam's bursting curiosity about it and Dean's absolute resistance to discussing it.
Dean was taking his time with the kit. He obviously preferred having his back to Sam; it made the topic (that was practically streaking naked through their room) easier to avoid.
In so many ways, it all still seemed to Sam like a weird, pain-induced dream. His brother couldn't actually turn into a wolf… that was just crazy.
But what wasn't crazy, what was all too impossible to forget, had been the pain in Dean's voice, the agony in his face, the heat that had poured off his body in waves. 'Don't be afraid, Sam.' Dean's desperate plea still rang in Sam's ears.
To hear Dean beg…
Dean finally turned around and returned to Sam's beside. Sam shifted over enough to give Dean room to perch on the edge next to him. Dean set the supplies in his loaded hands down on the nightstand and unscrewed the cap on the hydrogen peroxide. He got up again to go into the bathroom and fetch a washcloth… pristine white. Sam couldn't count all the snow-white hotel towels the Winchesters had used to mop up blood. Some families stole hotel towels, the Winchesters changed their color.
As Dean walked back to the bed, Sam was abnormally silent. He was watching his brother, trying to see any difference - anything of the wolf - in the brother he thought he knew backward and forward.
The problem was, Dean moved like a hunter already. It was a stalking kind of walk he'd adopted in adolescence and perfected as he matured. When it needed to be, it was utterly soundless. If Dean was any more of a wolf during the day for his new form, it was impossible to tell it apart from the predator Dean had been raised to be.
When had Dean changed? Sam knew it had to be fairly recently. The more he thought about it, it had to have happened while he was at Stanford. Within the last two years, then, when Sam hadn't been there to watch his brother's back on hunts. It was only since Jess's death that had Sam discerned his brother's monthly vanishing act. That was definitely new.
How? Dean must have been cursed somehow. Maybe run afoul of a witch and was bewitched or under a spell. Maybe he touched something, a spiritual object that he shouldn't have, that conferred some strange symptoms upon him.
Did their father know about Dean's monthly transformation? What did John Winchester think about having a son that turned into a beast? Somehow, Sam couldn't imagine their father taking it well.
What was Dean?
There were so many questions.
Sam watched Dean's pendant sway as his brother moved, tapping lightly against Dean's sternum every now and then as he leaned forward then back to mess with the supplies on the nightstand.
Sam couldn't stop seeing the pendant as it had rested at the throat of a wolf.
He had to know, to understand.
"Dean…" Sam whispered as his older brother was dabbing at the stitched cut with the sizzling peroxide.
Dean straightened his back and slowly looked up to face Sam. His shoulders were tense and his face unreadable. Dean had to know from the tone of Sam's voice what he was going to ask.
Sam waited, his face imploring.
Dean didn't move for a moment, frozen as though turned to stone, then he went back to the task of patching Sam up. He was intent on that chore to the exclusion of all else, and Sam waited for him to finish.
When Dean put on the last piece of tape holding the fresh bandage in place, Sam tried again, "Dean… we need to talk…"
Dean sighed and turned his head to look away. Even in profile, Sam could see the distress in his brother's expression. "Yeah, I know."
Sam pulled down his shirt and fumbled with choosing which question of the thousand he had to ask first. "When… I mean, how… what are you?"
Dean winced and rose from the bed to put some distance between them. Sam eased himself up into a more upright position and waited anxiously.
Dean turned back to Sam, his eyes tortured, then he raked a hand through his short hair. "I'm your brother, Sam." The voice was almost frail, as though Dean's greatest fear was being realized in Sam's words.
Sam realized he had phrased his question poorly. He made it seem that Dean was now something other than a brother to him.
"I know, Dean, but that wasn't what I… of course you're my brother, but you're more than that."
Dean went forlornly to his own bed, sat down, and looked across the short distance between beds to where Sam sat. Sam shifted to face Dean.
Dean struggled with his control (over what, Sam wasn't sure) for what seemed minutes before he answered haltingly, "I'm a lycanthrope."
One thing to be said for Sam Winchester, he knew his supernatural lore. Dean's answer had him confused. "How can you be a werewolf?"
"I'm not," Dean said lowly. "I said I'm a lycanthrope."
Sam frowned. "They're both words for the same thing." It was a statement offered up for correction, and Sam's uncertain tone betrayed that.
Dean smirked, but it looked sickly and weary rather than Dean's usual cocky and teasing. "No, actually they're not… but I thought so, too, until…" Dean stopped, his expression closed, and he shifted uneasily on the mattress.
Sam shifted closer to the edge of the mattress. Sam beseeched his brother. "Dean… just tell me; you can trust me."
Dean looked stricken just the same, but he knew there was no stopping now. Sam could almost see the resignation settle over Dean's frame. "Right after that nasty fight you had with Dad, when you left for Stanford, Dad and I split for a while."
Sam had never heard this before. It honestly surprised him that for as well as he thought he knew his brother, things he didn't know about Dean could still crop up.
Dean didn't look up. He stared at the carpet, his shoelaces … anywhere but at his brother.
Almost hesitantly (because anything related to that ugly period in the Winchester family history was staunchly avoided), Sam asked the question that had to be asked. "Why?"
Dean's facial expression tightened. "Because I told him I needed time alone… away from him." Dean spared a glance at his brother.
Sam wondered if he looked as shocked as he felt.
"You ditched Dad?"
"Yeah. I talked to him on the phone now and then," Dean continued awkwardly, "but we didn't meet back up again for more than two months after that night you walked out."
"Why did you cut and run on Dad?" Sam asked in a small voice. Dean had always been the good little soldier, John Winchester's pride and accomplishment while Sam had been the bane and disappointment (at least it seemed that way to Sam).
"Because I was mad at him."
"About me leaving? I thought you were mad at me for that."
Dean snorted. "I was mad at both of you. You didn't fight with yourself, Sammy. Dad had just as much to do with you walking out as you did. And he told you to never come back." Dean's jaw tightened angrily at the memory of that brutal shouting match and John's most grievous command. Sam could see that part of Dean still resented John for that ultimatum thrown at Sam in the heat of the argument. Banishing Sam like that, shutting him out, abandoning him, turning him away from the family… that was, by no stretch of the imagination, okay in Dean's mind. That was one unforgivable offense in the universe of Dean Winchester. Not even the great John Winchester could live down that tarnish on his record.
Sam couldn't believe he had to be told that to know that would be how Dean viewed that night. He should have known it because he knew Dean.
"I took up a hunt in this tiny town in the Pacific Northwest while I was going solo," Dean continued after a few seconds to let Sam grapple with the idea of Dean running off on their father. "I thought it was a werewolf. Animal attacks on the full moon - what more proof do you need?"
"Hearts?" Sam ventured.
Dean shrugged. "There was a lot missing from the corpses, hearts among them."
Sam nodded for Dean to go on.
Dean's face screwed as he revisited the hunt in his memories. "It was a really freaky town, and I guess that should have been a warning that something different was up."
"Freaky how?"
"Freaky in how 'communal' the community was. I mean, we've seen pigeon-hole tiny towns that take being neighborly too far, all up-in-your-face apple pie and a side-helping of gossip, but this was… I know now, after the fact, that they were acting as a pack."
Sam's spine stiffened. "There was a pack of werewolves?! I mean, lycanthropes?" That was a seriously scary thought. Werewolves were destructive and dangerous enough, but they were always solitary creatures.
"Yeah. One of theirs had been in the Middle East serving in the military. How he kept his 'condition' hidden all that time is still a mystery to me. Anyway, the kid lived through the combat zone but came back kind of screwed up in the head. Finally snapped, I guess. Started killing."
Dean lifted a hand and absently rubbed at his chest. "The others in his 'pack' were trying to get a handle on the poor kid, but when I got there they still weren't willing to harm him. He was one of theirs, you know."
"So lycanthropes are… social?"
Dean nodded. "Eerily so, if you ask me. Imagine an entire freaking town dealing with things like a big family. They were all trying to figure out how to save this boy." The skin around Dean's eyes tightened. "I almost caught the kid once. Tracked him into the woods and found him with a hiker backed into a corner, so to speak. I was really thrown when I saw a wolf instead of a tripped-out person with fangs, but hey… I was willing to put a vicious animal out of its misery to save lives just as well as a restless spirit."
Sam nodded. Made sense.
"I was jumped before I got a shot off. By Skye." Dean almost smiled, but it still had a torque of disquiet to it. "She was one of the pack. Keeping an eye on the kid to try and stop him from taking another human life. When she found me about to waste him, she jumped me.
"Long story short, I explained who I was and what I was doing. Skye told me about what they were and offered to help me trap the kid if I promised not to hurt him and to turn him over to the pack and let them deal with him." Dean shrugged. "I couldn't believe half of what I was hearing, but I could understand them wanting to take care of their own."
Sam nodded his understanding. It had always been the Winchester way.
"We kept up with the kid for a few weeks, staying ahead of him just enough to foul his hunts against people, but trapping him without killing him was another story. Skye and I spent… a lot of time together."
Sam, for the first time since Dean started his tale, actually smiled. "You slept with her."
Dean paused. "She wasn't like most of my… uh… well, she was different…"
Sam knew the uncomfortable, awkward tone of Dean's voice, though he had heard it very infrequently in his life. "You mean you cared about her."
Dean nodded faintly. "She was… I wish you could have met her, Sam."
That had an ominous feel to it, but Sam didn't want to bombard Dean with questions until he got the rest of the story that ended with his brother being a lycanthrope.
"Skye and I had the kid pinched between us in a riverbed… I thought we finally had him. He charged at me."
"Didn't you have a weapon?" Sam asked, horrified.
Dean winced. "Skye screamed for me not to hurt him."
Sam blinked, open-mouthed.
"He took me down, tore into my chest," Dean dropped his hand from the phantom pain.
Sam connected the dots. "And that's when you turned."
"No."
Sam frowned.
"Lycanthrope bites aren't like werewolf bites. They don't automatically transform their victim. To change a human takes more doing. It's actually similar to vampires. The lycan has to ingest the blood of the human they mean to turn, then the human has to taste that same lycan's blood. But even then, their 'pack' had very strict rules to prohibit their members from turning others." Dean pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Most lycans are the way they are through heredity."
"A lycan is born a lycan?" That was far more natural than most of the crap they regularly dealt with.
Dean nodded.
Sam's eyes widened when the further implications dawned on him. "Does that mean that if you…"
Dean nodded at great pains. "Yeah."
Sam knew Dean didn't actually have plans to have children one day, but now to know he would be destined to pass on this to his kids if he did…
"Man… I'm sorry."
Dean shrugged as if it didn't matter, but Sam could tell that it mattered. A lot.
"So… if you knew all this, why did you let Skye turn you? I'm assuming she's the one who did."
Dean nodded. "When that boy attacked me, he damn near tore me open from throat to armpit. He was like a rabid dog, Sam. Amped up on crazy."
Sam shuddered at the mere thought. "What happened?"
Dean's eyes were stony as he stared a hole in the carpet. "Skye shot him. She knew it was either kill her pack mate or watch him kill me. She chose me."
Sam was speechless. He wished he could meet Skye, too. To thank her.
"Skye saved my life, but it wouldn't have been for long, the way I was bleeding out.
"Fun fact: Lycans heal faster than people do. I'm not really sure about all the biology mumbo jumbo involved. Something about the body going into overdrive to make the change, speeds healing as it reshapes bones and guts."
That made a lot more sense than some of the supernatural laws of the unnatural that they accepted as truth, so Sam was willing to go on faith that Dean was right.
"We were in the middle of freaking nowhere," Dean said with a sour shake of his head. "I was lying in that sorry-ass excuse for a river, miles from civilization…" Dean sighed, his shoulders sagging. "Skye had no other choice. It was turn me or watch me die."
"Was it your choice, Dean?" Sam asked carefully. That would make a world of difference. If this was done to him against his ability to refuse, then it was just as bad as a curse.
Dean went very still and finally looked up and met his brother's eyes. "I knew what she was doing when she licked my wound. I knew what she was doing when she opened her wrist for me. She gave me the choice. I chose to live."
Sam let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. Dean chose this. He hadn't been forced to live as… this.
"What happened after you drank her blood?"
Dean grimaced, "Do you have to say drink, like I'm some kind of freaking vampire? I just… it doesn't take much."
"But she opened her wrist…"
"Because it flowed fast from there and I was fading fast. She wouldn't die from it, anyway. After her blood was in my mouth, she changed. Just for a second. The cut was barely a scratch when she turned back to a chick."
"Oh… well, then what?"
"Then the most god-awful pain I've ever been in. It was my first change, and it was like…" Dean frowned and searched for words. "I don't even know what it was like, because it was a hell of a lot worse than anything I've ever felt before."
Coming from a Winchester, that was no small claim. Sam went ashen at the very thought. "Shit… I thought you said it didn't hurt, not if you don't fight it."
"It doesn't now, but the first time…" Dean mustered up a wry smile, "must be what it's like for chicks to lose their virginity… except, I guess to be even half as painful you'd have to actually rip their hymens out through their nostrils…"
"Dude, gross," Sam interrupted.
Dean shrugged. "That's really all there is to tell. I turned, my body healed enough that I wasn't on death's door, and voila," Dean opened his hands. "Dean Winchester, lycanthrope."
Sam was slack-jaw in amazement at the story. He took a few moments to process it. His brother, a lycanthrope. As far as he'd always known, they were synonymous with werewolves. He was having to readjust his thinking to account for the newfound knowledge that they were not. And that his brother was one of them.
Sam glanced up at Dean and found his brother watching him nervously. When their eyes met, Dean turned his head aside just barely, "Sammy?"
"Yeah?"
Dean looked inordinately concerned about Sam's every move. "Well… aren't you going to freak out? Reach for the silver bullets? Lock me up in the closet?"
Sam would have laughed, because he was a hunter and those should be his first thoughts, but they weren't. Because aside all of that, this was Dean. Instead, he asked calmly, "Should I?"
Dean gaped. "I just tell you that your brother is a hunt and you act like I'm the one being paranoid for suggesting a gun?"
"Do you kill at the full moon?" Sam countered, sharp but deadly serious.
Dean flinched back, first stunned, then defensive. "No, I don't."
"Have you ever?"
"No!"
"Then you're not a hunt, simple as that," Sam answered.
Dean just stared at him a moment. "That's it?"
Sam sighed. "Dean, what do you want from me?"
"I don't know, just… less understanding and acceptance, I guess."
"You want that?" Sam asked doubtfully.
"Hell, no, that's not what I want, but it's what I expect. I'm not human anymore, Sam! You're the hunter or the hunted, you know that."
Sam grew uneasy at their father's old words repeated to him. "I never saw that as the black and white that you and Dad did, Dean."
Dean stopped cold and regarded Sam closely. Sam met his gaze and willed Dean to understand that he was being honest. Sam had always seen the shades of gray; one of many reasons the hunt had been too hard for him to reconcile as a lifestyle.
When the rigidity melted out of Dean's posture, Sam knew his brother had realized that Sam Winchester truth. He became pensive, watching Sam with a strange, assessing look.
Sam offered a quick but (hopefully) reassuring smile, then asked, "How is being a lycanthrope different from being a werewolf?"
Dean opened his mouth, failed to make any sound, and closed his mouth again.
Sam lifted his eyebrows expectantly. If Dean was waiting for panic and a frenzied grab for guns from Sam, he'd be disappointed.
Sam had told Dean he trusted him, and he stood by that promise. He would not make Dean regret letting his brother in on the secret.
Dean slowly relaxed, still eyeing Sam, then said, "Other than being affected by the lunar cycle, they're completely different."
"Just that you turn at the full moon," Sam mused.
"Have to turn at the full moon," Dean clarified. When Sam looked at him, Dean continued, "The first night of the full moon is when we can't help changing. All other times, it's a matter of will."
Sam's eyes widened. "You mean, you can change anytime you want?"
Dean nodded.
"You could… you could change right now?" Sam stammered, knocked for a loop by that idea.
Dean looked strangely at him. "Do you want me to?"
"No! I just… day or night, makes no difference?"
Dean shook his head.
"Whoa…" was all Sam could manage in reply. So much of what they knew, the supernatural world they lived and breathed, was constrained by strict rules… like werewolves being tied to the nights of the full moon. It was staggering to think there was something out there, something like what Dean was, that didn't have to be but was instead a matter of choice.
Dean cocked his head thoughtfully. "We're not crazed, bloodthirsty monsters like werewolves are. You saw that last night," Dean said uneasily.
Sam remembered the wolf lying sentry at his feet, refusing to leave his side while he was injured.
"It…" Dean faltered, clearly afraid to say what he'd begun to say.
"It what, Dean?" Sam urged gently.
Dean looked almost scared to say more. "It doesn't feel unnatural, Sam. When I'm the wolf…" Dean's lips twisted, almost a smile and almost a grimace, "when I'm the wolf, I feel fantastic."
Sam didn't know what to say. He had not expected Dean to like what had become of him. He was a damn hunter! He killed things like what he had become. He was the last person Sam would ever suspect of enjoying becoming a creature.
A light bulb went off. "That's what scares you, isn't it?"
Dean froze but after a moment gave a stilted nod. "I'm a hunt, Sam. Maybe not to you, but to every other hunter in the world, I am. I know that. How far gone am I that I like what's happened to me? That's… it's wrong, Sam. I know! But… I like it anyway."
Sam thought back to every 'morning after' when Dean returned from his all-nighters practically elated. There was no question that being the wolf made Dean feel great.
Why did something that made a Winchester feel happy mean pain in the same stroke? Dean's wolf, Jessica…
"Does Dad know about this?"
Dean recoiled. "Hell no!"
Sam blinked.
Dean shook his head vehemently. "Dad could never understand this. You… you're taking this all really well, but he wouldn't. He would see me as a hunt. Even if he tried not to, as our father, every time he looked at me that is all he'd see."
"Maybe… maybe he'd see it more like a curse, something to be fixed."
"I don't want this fixed, Sammy."
Sam sat stone-still, processing that simple sentiment.
Dean's voice dropped. "And that Dad couldn't understand, either."
Sam had to agree with Dean on that.
"Besides," Dean continued ruefully, "if Dad found out this happened when I'd gotten mad at him and went off hunting solo… he'd never let me forget that."
If Sam knew his father as well as Dean did, he knew the exact word John Winchester would use for a mishap like that… ammunition. Having made his own painful break for their father, Sam knew what it was like and what it took. And he knew all too well what kind of fuel for the fire John Winchester would bring to the table to support his argument.
He sat a moment, turning over everything he'd learned that morning, then asked, "What happened to Skye?"
Dean's fire left, and in its wake was sorrow. "She had to answer to the pack for killing one of their own."
"But surely they must have realized she had no choice!" Sam protested.
"And she had to answer for telling an outsider their secret and then turning a human."
"They didn't…" Sam began, dreading the answer.
"No. They're not brutes, Sam. They were going to lock her up on the full moons as a punishment. Those nights when the whole town turns, the pack runs together." Dean shivered. "I… I can only imagine what it would be like to run with them." Dean bit back a wistful sigh. "She was devastated that she'd never get to run with them again; that's like a life-sentence to a lycan… so if they weren't going to run with her, I would." Dean seemed to shrink in on himself painfully, but he kept on talking. Now it seemed if he stopped the story might never come out. "One night I was going to meet her in the woods; some of the townsfolk still didn't like me much, and I didn't want to make even more trouble for her. She never showed. I went looking for her and found her by the side of the road. She'd been hit by a damn car." Dean clenched his teeth. "The guy must have been flying down the highway. Cracked her skull open on impact… she couldn't even change to heal herself."
Sam watched Dean struggle through the tragic retelling without saying a word, letting Dean get through the story.
Dean took a breath. "I carried her home to her family. You know, their laws demanded she be punished for what she'd done for me, but they loved her. They knew that Skye… that she only turned me because she… you know." Dean's voice caught and he cleared his throat roughly. "For her, sort of as a last request that she'd never had a chance to make, they offered to bring me into the pack…" Dean trailed, regrouped, then shook his head. "I left after the funeral."
"I'm sorry," Sam whispered. From the emotion Dean's body language was screaming, he knew Skye had been important to him. If she hadn't died, Sam had a sneaking suspicion Dean would have taken her with him on the road. She might have been sitting in this very motel room with them. She already a being of the secret, unknown side of nature and the unnatural, hunting the supernatural would not have been a reason to shy from Dean as it would have been for a normal woman.
Strangely, it made Sam miss Jess all over again.
For a long time, the two brothers sat quietly with their own painful memories.
When the silence was broken, it was Sam who spoke in a whisper, "Why couldn't you tell me this before?"
Dean's lips twitched. "Well, I didn't know how you'd take it for one, and secondly… I couldn't lay that kind of responsibility on you. This is something that could get me killed. Hunters find out what I am, they won't care that there's a difference between lycanthrope and werewolf. I couldn't put you in the position to be accomplice to that… to some hunters, that would make you just as guilty. And just as dead."
"I'm your brother, Dean," Sam stressed. "It's my job to protect you. I wish you'd stop acting like you have to be superman and just let me."
"Well, doesn't matter now, you know."
"Now that I know, it's going to make both our lives so much easier, you know," Sam said matter-of-factly, trying to impress upon Dean how counterproductive that secrecy had been in the first place. "We can both work around this, instead of you just about gnawing off your own arm to get out of the city on a day with a full moon."
Dean shuddered at the memory. "Dude, I thought I was going to lose my freaking mind."
"I noticed… but now we just avoid getting into that position again. We can take to the boondocks those nights, tuck into places in the middle of the woods so there's less chance you'll be seen… geez, Dean, this is going to be so much easier on you." Sam stood from the bed, resolute that the conversation was over for now and no longer able to deny the press of his bladder.
Dean quickly stood opposite Sam, coming to stand almost toe to toe with him, and he looked up and leveled an eye-to-eye stare at Sam. Sam watched Dean's eyes flash gold. It was a test, Winchester style, and Sam knew it. He didn't so much as blink.
Dean's eyes faded back to hazel-green when Sam failed to react. He narrowed his gaze attentively at Sam. "You're not afraid?"
Sam offered up a half smile. "Dean, I told you… I trust you."
Dean backed up a step, rocked. "Thanks, Sammy," he whispered, so softly Sam could barely hear it.
Sam nodded and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Alone with his thoughts, he wondered how his life would change beginning today.
Life with his brother, the lycanthrope.
Sam had a feeling their already weird lives were about to become a lot weirder.
Eleven