Crescendo of the Moon: (2/?)
Author’s Note: All information, such as disclaimers, summary, etc. can be found in the notes prior to the first chapter.
Two
Forty-five minutes after they had left the gasoline station, the brothers arrived at a long forgotten motel clustered amongst a set of dwindling buildings painted ashen gray in the milky light of the moon. Dean nudged Sam awake, and then he walked inside the motel by himself while Sam gathered their duffel bags and a few of the less conspicuous weapons. While there were other cars in the parking lot, the Impala alone wore an out of state license plate. The only sound across the flat land was the murmured crunching of fine gravel beneath Sam’s feet as he followed Dean through a flimsy screen door into the darkened lobby.
Dean had to awaken the motel owner, who did not appreciate being roused and thus threatened Dean with a wave of his antique shotgun. However, Dean was undisturbed by the firearm and, along with a convincing lie to evoke sympathy, handed the man a thick fold of bills on top of the credit card. Although the owner was in his pajamas, the money proved to be the extra incentive Dean had hoped for to get a room at such an obscene hour. Before handing Dean the key, the man gave a dubious glance from one bleary-eyed brother to the next. He muttered their room number under his whiskey roughed voice and moved stiffly with arthritic joints back to his own bed.
Limping slightly himself, Dean walked to their room with Sam, still rubbing his heavy eyes with the edge of his hand, not far behind. The mahogany paint had peeled off in thick flakes on the edges of the doorframe, and the hinges were so sticky with age that Dean had to aggressively shove the door open with his shoulder. Inside, the room smelled of dust and mildew, causing Sam to wonder if they were the first guests the beds had seen all decade. Such matters, however, did not appear to concern Dean, who flung the motel keys onto what appeared to be a table in the corner shadows of the room. While Sam struggled to close the door and slapped the wall in search for a light switch, Dean tumbled in a pile of sore, bloody limbs onto the small bed, heedless to his dirty clothes he was still wearing. Sam gave a disgruntled sigh at his older brother’s habits, but he decided not to turn on the light, knowing how exhausted Dean was and how generous he had been in letting Sam sleep in the car. Instead of unpacking as he had wanted, Sam kicked off his shoes laced with the desert’s sand, peeled back the covers off the stale-smelling mattress and fell asleep effortlessly.
When Sam awoke the next morning well before Dean, there was sleep crusted around the corners of Sam’s eyes and his hair was flattened at odd angles against his head. Dandelion yellow sunshine illuminated the room well enough through cream colored curtains for Sam to see his duffel bag, thrown carelessly at the foot of the bed, and find a pair of track pants and faded t-shirt. Since there were naturally no courtesy notepads in the room, he dug through his wallet until he found an old receipt, on which he scribbled a quick note to Dean that he was out, would be back soon, and was safe. Even though he doubted that Dean would be functioning, let alone out of bed, before he returned, Sam nevertheless placed the note by the lamp on the bedside table and exited the room.
Despite the crisp brightness of the sun, the heat was still not completely unbearable in the early hours of the day, and it even felt soothing to Sam as he jogged down the road. While he enjoyed his morning runs and used to take one every day at college when the only eyes watching him were those of the dotted dew droplets on the grass, he noticed that exercise routines were becoming fewer as his trips with Dean grew longer. It had been over a week since his last jog, and that was largely because their most recent hunt had occupied nearly every waking moment they had.
A bead of sweat skittered over Sam’s eye ridge, and he was pleased to feel the low ebb of a familiar burn in his muscles. Unconsciously, his thoughts rolled from the barren desert environment back to the last town. Combination of an angry spirit wreaking havoc on a family’s house while also possessing the same family members had truly been nothing out of the ordinary in supernatural terms when Sam looked back on the events. Nevertheless, what was bothering him and still clearly eating away at Dean was the death of the mother in the family. She had been a single mother, divorced less than a year, with two children. The daughter was the older of the two, approximately fourteen years old, and the son had not been more than ten.
Although he tried to convince himself that there had been nothing either Dean or he could have done to prevent the death, Sam continued to feel a heavy weight pressing on his heart as he jogged down the empty road. Sam had been out of the house at the time of the poltergeist’s final attack, trying to locate the daughter who was spending the night at a friend’s house out of fear that the spirit would possess her while she resided in her own home. Loaded with rock salt and Latin phrases, Dean had been left in the house with the mother and her son, simply waiting for either Sam’s return or the poltergeist’s raid. The ghost had never bothered the family when they were separated, and there had been no reason for both of the brothers to retrieve the daughter. The daughter needed to be at the house so the spirit would become agitated enough to attack, and then with her returned, along with Sam, the paranormal being could be expelled. Both of the brothers had, in unknowing naiveté, seen this as the best possible solution. Sam was capable on his own, especially if it was just one girl, and Dean had been hunting long enough to take care of himself.
However, things had gone terribly wrong when the ghost attacked while the family was separated. Dean had not told Sam everything that had happened during the assault, and Sam knew that he probably never would, but from what had been shared, Sam understood that Dean’s abilities were no match for the strength of the spirits. The ghost in the house had begun to tear up the floorboards and to smash open holes in the walls where it sealed the small boy behind the drywall. Objects had been flying around the room, and Dean, Sam could only assume, had done his best to protect the mother and her son at the same time. Sometime during the violent assailment, Dean had fallen through the main floor into the basement level where he was knocked unconscious when one of the walls caved in on top of him.
This was where Sam, after battling against some minor spirits at the house entrance, found Dean when he came back with the daughter. The son, who was still alive and had been pulled from behind the wall by Dean, was curled into a corner and crying hysterically. Although he was dotted with bruises and had a few scratches, he was essentially unharmed. The mother was dead, garroted by a metal coat hanger in the back closet where she had been tossed. Sam blamed himself for not arriving soon enough, as her skin was still warm to the touch by the time he broke the hinges off the main door of the house to enter, armed with two guns and prepared to kill. But she had been dead, and although there was nothing more that could be done for her, Sam attended to her surviving children and Dean as best he could.
Sam was convinced that Dean had most likely suffered a concussion to a degree because he had not only been initially unconscious, but also dizzy and confused upon awakening. Yet the only visible wound he allowed Sam to see was the one on his leg where the poltergeist had stabbed him with a kitchen blade. If there were other marks, as Sam believed there were, Dean refused to admit to any pain and threw himself into tending to the children. They had taken the children to their father’s house, who thanked the Winchesters profusely with tears in his eyes that Sam was surprised to see for an ex-wife.
Sam pushed the damp hair out of his eyes as he moved back towards the motel room in long strides and continued to reflect on the latest case. Ever since they had left the city, Dean had been strangely quiet, and Sam figured that it was not only the woman’s death on its own, but the idea of a loss of a mother to her children that was bothering Dean. It was no secret that Dean permitted their own mother’s death to continually eat away at him, as if to find the inner strength to maintain their father’s quest for demonic revenge. If Dean were to allow himself to heal again and move forward with his life, perhaps he would not have been as personally passionate about the cases. Then again, Sam thought, maybe he still would be. Sam didn’t think that he would ever be able to figure Dean out without Dean letting him, and it didn’t take much further contemplation to know that such a personal revelation from Dean was not going to occur anytime soon.
As he entered the motel parking lot, Sam slowed to a steady walk to catch his breath until he reached their room’s door and gave a sharp twist on the unlocked handle. Dean was standing between the beds and shoving clothes around in his duffel bag with his back to the entrance when Sam opened the door. The sharp squeal of the hinges caused Dean to whip around with a knife in his hands, wet from an apparent shower and wearing only his faded blue jeans. His look quickly went from alerted anger to embarrassed shock when he realized that the person coming into the room was just Sam. Desperately, he began to scramble for a shirt to conceal his skin.
“What the hell are you doing back already?” Dean muttered to the duffel bag, clasping his one of his arms across his chest and digging with the other hand through the assortment of clothes.
However, he had not been quick enough to cover himself because Sam had already seen the deep purple bruises flowered over Dean’s skin and several bright, red abrasions running alongside Dean’s faded white scars. Such war marks made Sam’s own scratches from the smaller spirits appear as childish crayon scribbles.
“Dean?” Sam asked, approaching his brother, who twisted himself into a fresh shirt with a grimace from the movements of his hurt muscles. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Dean shot back, moving away as Sam came closer.
“No, you’re not. I didn’t realize that you were…well, so badly injured.”
“Dude, I’m fine. Drop it, all right?” They were squeezed into the narrow space separating the two beds, and in order to leave, Dean would either have to climb over the beds or push past Sam’s large frame, neither making for an easy escape and avoidance of the conversation.
“You sure you don’t have any internal bleeding?”
“I think I’d know by now if I had internal bleeding,” Dean responded, glaring up at Sam. “It’s just some bruises. Move it or else.”
“Or else what? You’re going to cut me with that knife? I’m just worried is all.”
“Yeah? Well, worry about someone else for a change. I don’t need to be taken care of.” As best he could, Dean shoved past Sam and crossed the room in bare feet to the table where he busied himself in shuffling their limited possessions to evade eye contact.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Sam repeated again, looping his arms over his damp shirt.
“What do you care? You weren’t there anyway-”
“We agreed that’s what was best.”
“Yeah, I know we did!” Dean barked, his head snapping up to meet Sam with blazing eyes.
“I came as fast as I could, I would have been there-”
“No! You weren’t there when everything fell apart, Sam!” Violently, Dean jabbed a scabbed finger in Sam’s direction. “You weren’t there to listen to that kid screaming when that damn spirit took his mother away and killed her! You weren’t there! You didn’t have to fight off that poltergeist, knowing that if you didn’t get killed, that mom sure as hell would, and you were going to have to be the one to break the news to her son! All right? You want to know what happened? That’s what happened, Sam!”
Sam, gut punched by Dean’s uncharacteristic revelation, said nothing and tried to approach once again. His words were quiet and seemed to lack conviction when he spoke, “Dean, I’m sorry.”
Dean held out his hand to prevent Sam from coming closer, not facing his younger sibling. “So am I. Just…leave me alone. Give me that much, okay?”
As much as he wanted to sit beside Dean and make his brother talk, Sam nodded blankly, found a clean pair of clothes, and disappeared into the shower. Outside the shower, Dean slumped against the table, knees buckling underneath him and heart dropping down from his chest. His mind was littered with the son’s screams that blended with Sam’s own infant cries from twenty years ago when another mother died far too young.
Chapter Three