New Wings For Icarus | PART 3
Title: New Wings For Icarus
By: revenant_scribe
Rating: R
Word Count: 10,418
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Part of the Icarus 'Verse
He decided it was human hatred and not divine vengeance
that had plunged him into this abyss. He doomed these
unknown men to every torment that his inflamed imagination
could devise, while still considering that the most frightful
were too mild and, above all, too brief for them: torture
was followed by death, and death brought, if not repose,
at least an insensibility that resembled it.
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
In the spring of 1994, John Winchester had been tracking a ghoul through Faribault County. Its kills were frequent and gory: half-eaten corpses of children and adults, male and female. There was no real pattern to its victims, until John had discovered that the ghoul was targeting first-born children with strong ties to their parents. “So he figured you were at risk?” Sam said, still trying to comprehend why their dad would send Dean to a detention facility for six months.
“Geezes, Sam, have you been out of the hunt that long?” Dean said. “Think about it. Hunters are always at risk, especially if the thing they’re after knows it’s being hunted. Dad kept us away more often than not because he didn’t want us to be used against him. I guess he figured he needed to send me somewhere safe.”
“Why not Bobby’s? Or Caleb’s? Why jail, Dean?”
Dean sighed. “Ghouls are shape shifters, Sam. It could have been one of the teachers at our school, or the neighborhood cat, there was no way of being certain. It wasn’t just about getting me away from the thing’s hunting ground, he was making sure it wouldn’t think of going after me, that it would think there was a rift between us. I guess Faribault seemed as good a place as any. I mean there was twenty-four hour surveillance, and trained guards. He was essentially putting me into a fortress.”
“You’re making excuses for him. You always do this!”
Dean shook his head, crossed over to his duffel where he rummaged around before pulling out the familiar leather bound journal and flipping through it, placing it carefully onto the bed so Sam could see the open pages. “He wrote it out, man. I’m not making any of it up.”
Sam scanned through the entry and then looked up at his brother. “When did you read this?”
Dean rubbed his face and shrugged, “After dad died.” He shrugged, rubbed a hand over the back of his neck and shrugged again. “I carried it around for a while, and then it started to come in handy, you know, for hunts. And then I just found it.” Sam looked down at the tiny paragraph of scrunched handwriting; just a brief entry that broke down so clinically and succinctly a decision that Sam knew would change everything. “I don’t know if that makes it better, but at least it was a reason.”
Sam remembered how things were after their dad died, the giddy triumph of finally having killed the thing that had destroyed their family erased as John had staggered and then dropped heavily to the ground. Dean’s broken pleas echoed through Sam’s ears even years later. He wondered how long Dean had been on the road; hunting, alone in a way he never had been, before he had found the page in the book. Wondered if he’d called anyone, if anyone would have really understood.
Sam clenched his fist as it occurred to him why keeping in touch with Aaron and Jesse had been such an important thing for Dean. The only people who would have never required an explanation. He wondered about Grady, had only the vaguest memories of a soft-faced, smiling dark-haired kid who had always had trouble sitting still, and frequently turned ordinary objects into percussive instruments. It was impossible to picture the boy who had taught him how to play the spoons being abused in prison by the men who were supposed to protect him, his mind shied-away from it.
“Dean,” Sam said, felt like the silence was swallowing them up and yet somehow couldn’t bring himself to let the subject drop. “What did they do to you?”
“Sammy…”
“Stop treating me like I’m still a little kid, Dean! I want to know … I need to know. Right now, man, my mind’s running the gamut, I can’t stop thinking about everything they could have done. Just … please.”
“Whatever happened,” Dean said, his voice deeper and choked, like something was trying to get past his lips only Dean was too stubborn to let it. “It happened and it’s done. It’s in the past, and that’s where we’re going to leave it.” It was a tone of voice Sam had heard often from his brother, and at one point he had believed it blindly. Now, Sam wondered.
Outside Dean’s window, Sam could see the street lamps and house lights warding off the oncoming dark and found himself wishing that he didn’t have to drive back to his own hotel, didn’t have to do anything but shuck his clothes and crawl under the blankets. Somehow, though, he couldn’t bring himself to ask Dean if he could spend the night. The day had been too long, he’d been running on fear and anger and adrenaline and Sam just felt spent, like someone had scooped out every piece of him and left him hollow.
“They really killed him, didn’t they?”
“Yeah,” Dean said. “They shot the bastard cold in that fucking pub.”
It should have been chilling, how casually satisfied Dean sounded, like he only wished he’d been there, but Sam wasn’t chilled, he felt only disappointed that Edward Dowell was dead. Seven bullets didn’t seem like enough.
The door closed behind Sam and Dean felt as if he could finally breathe, as if suddenly there was space to move. He flicked the lock to his room closed and ran his hands over his face, releasing a long slow breath and imagining he could just let all the history his brother had dug up and thrown in his face go.
He was over it. It had happened and it had been horrible and for a while afterward, nothing had been right and he’d wondered if it ever would be again; but then time had passed and he’d kept pushing through it until finally it didn’t feel like there was a noose wrapped around his neck anymore. He’d moved on.
His dad’s journal lay on his bed where Sam had left it, and Dean stared at it, the worn brown leather clashing with the bright bedspread on which it sat. Sam knew. Dean tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, that if he kept the facts vague enough then nothing at all had to change. His brother would just keep on digging, though, and he wouldn’t stop until he’d stirred everything back up and then sorted it into piles to satisfy his OCD, and then sat down and talked about every part of it, like Dean really needed to sit through it all and share and care. He’d pick and pick and pick at Dean, “How did it feel, Dean?” and, “What did they do to you, Dean?” until everything was fresh and raw.
Dean snatched the journal from the bed and hurled it across the room, watched as it knocked the bedside lamp from the nightstand before continuing on its collision course with the wall, its pages curling and folding as it landed, open and upside down, the loose snatches of paper that John had always kept organized and tucked inside falling free.
Bottom line, Jesse and Aaron had put something in motion that Dean had been sketching out for years. Sam knowing, Sam being back in his life when Dean had thought they’d finally parted ways for good, none of that changed anything. He made his decision four years ago to let Sam be, to finally let him build his life the way his brother always wanted it, and the fact that their lives were colliding again didn’t change the fact that he had made the right choice then. So he’d make it again; put the past down good and proper so that this time, when he walked away from Minnesota, there would be no dark shadows lurking.
Dean dragged his battered copy of The Count of Monte Cristo from the bedside drawer, pulled off the elastic band that held the book intact and snatched the folded piece of graph paper from where it had been tucked in the back, glanced quickly at the names and numbers jotted down in black ink. One down, he thought, remembering how Aaron had said it. One down; shot up in a pub for the world to see. It wasn’t at all the way Dean had thought it would go, but there wasn’t anything for it, now. Either way, there were three other names on Dean’s list before he could return the past to where it belonged. He didn’t intend to waste any more time.
His briefcase dropped to the ground with a heavy thump, the shoulder strap slipping down around the floor and threatening to catch Sam’s leg as he concentrated on pulling free of the layers he had donned in order to brave the outdoors. The silence of the room felt absolute after a long day of constant bustle, but the emptiness chafed somehow, in a way that he had become adept at overlooking.
He pulled a bottle of beer from the mini-fridge and wished that there was something stronger to help chase away the mess he had stumbled into. Sam had two guilty clients with no regrets and likely no inclination to live a moral life should they be acquitted, and had never been more determined to win a case for a client in his life. He had four witnesses and the start of what promised to be a vicious headache, and amidst all of it he had a brother, who was also maybe sometimes his lover, who was tied up in everything. It felt somehow like a second chance, but a second chance at what was something Sam hadn’t figured out yet, and wasn’t certain he wanted to. The one thing he was confident of was that he didn’t think he could face himself or his brother again if Jesse and Aaron went down for the murder of Edward Dowell.
O’Malley’s sat in limbo between Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore and Koscielski’s Guns & Ammo. The shop front was small enough that the name of the pub didn’t fit above it, but Dean always figured that what was important about a pub wasn’t its curb appeal. There was a tacky green-painted sign accented with four leaf clovers that hung, half covered in snow, threatening pedestrians on the sidewalk with icicles, creaking faintly when it was caught by a strong gust of wind. From the street, the place looked closed, but Dean knew better and he crossed the road at a jog, hands tucked into his coat pockets, his collar turned up against the wind and a hat tugged low to cover his ears, wishing that there had been a place to park the Impala that was closer, even though he had found a place just around the corner.
The inside of O’Malley’s was bigger than Dean had anticipated, and considering the area and the people who frequented the place, the overall appearance was a lot more reputable than he was entirely comfortable with: dark mahogany a little worn, bearing the marks of age and undoubted drunken abuse but still polished enough to draw attention away from the cheap tile floor. There was brown brick exposed along the walls like someone designed it that way, and flat screen televisions at either side of the bar, which looked like it was plucked straight from the prohibition era and, as far as Dean knew, might well have been. The front room was dominated by the bar, with small tables and stools for people who appreciated the pretense of privacy, but around the corner were large mahogany booths and big tables that Dean could just make out from his position at the foot of the narrow stairs that led up to the street entrance.
Dean wondered where Dowell had been sitting that night, his gaze drawn into the further room. “Winchester,” a sharp voice called his attention to a man sitting at the far edge of the bar. He jerked his head in a ‘come here’ gesture when he saw Dean was looking, and wiggled a beer bottle as added incentive.
“Do I know you?” Dean asked as he stopped beside the other man.
“Clay.” He tipped his beer back and finished it off, setting the empty bottle down with a clank. Dean eyed him critically as he waved at the bartender, gesturing for two more beers. “Clay Miller.”
Resigned, Dean settled onto a bar stool beside Clay and folded his arms on the counter-top, accepting the beer when it came with a strange sort of relief. “Well, it’s just lovely to meet you, Clay,” Dean said, sarcasm smoothing his tone out and giving it a bite. “How’d you get my number and why’d you call me.” More importantly, Dean thought, why choose this of all places to meet?
“Got your number from my boy, a friend of yours.” Clay’s eyebrow crooked upward and then, as if on afterthought, he shrugged the button up he was wearing over a gray T-shirt off one shoulder, exposing the upper portion of his left arm where a dark-inked tattoo stood out on milk chocolate skin, the design just familiar enough for Dean to relax. “Aaron and I did some time together, that’s how I ended up running with the Dogs.”
Dean smirked and shook his head. “That almost has a sort of poetry to it.” He took a long drink of his beer and tried to ignore the assessing stare that Clay had focused on him. “So what do you want?”
“I want what you want,” Clay said. “Both our boys walking free and clear away from this mess. Just thought I’d let you know that me and the others, we’re ready to do whatever it takes.”
Dean snorted, “I don’t know what Aaron’s said about me, but I’m not interested.”
Clay’s hand on his forearm stopped him, and he leaned closer a little, dropped his voice low so Dean had to tilt his head some to really hear him. “Now I know you’re not a clean-cut, lily-white citizen, there’s some dirt on your hands.”
“I might be a thief,” Dean acknowledged, “and a bit of a con man, but there’s a line and I’m not crossing it. Especially if whatever you’re talking here involves hurting innocent people.” He glanced around and noticed that they hadn’t really garnered any attention from anyone. Even the bartender was down at the other end of the bar, focused on cleaning up some glasses. It occurred to him that when Jesse spoke about the odds of Dowell picking O’Malley’s of all places to stop for dinner, he had meant it honestly. As far as Jesse and Aaron were concerned, they had been sharing a drink at their regular bar, a place where most people knew to keep themselves to themselves. The bartender wasn’t among the witnesses, though he had to have been present.
He considered what Aaron might have shared with his gang about Dean and it made him feel a little reckless because he was pretty sure, like ninety-seven percent sure, that the first thing his friend would have specified was not to hurt Dean and the next would have been to not drag him into shit.
Ninety-seven percent sure was sure enough as far as Dean was concerned, and he’d handle the rest when he got there, so he turned a hard glare on Clay and said, “You want to let go of my arm?”
Clay smirked and pulled his hand away. “You got it wrong, y’know. We’re not just mindless thugs.”
“Yeah, you’re all upstanding, shiny citizens. I got it, but if that’s all…”
“Sit down and finish your beer, hot shot,” Clay said. “Now, I get that Jesse and Aaron have gone and got themselves some smooth-talking lawyer…” he cut off when Dean snorted, but continued when Dean had no further comment. “I also get that whatever you’ve got going, you aren’t exactly in our world, if you get me.” Dean nodded and fiddled with his beer bottle, wondering if he should finish it off and call for another, or just wait. “What you should get is that maybe there’s some things that me and the rest of the boys can help with, that maybe you and that lawyer might not manage. I’m not saying we want to make a mess, you get me? I’m saying that there’s things we can do, and we’ve got connections, so I’m just putting it out there. Just in case there’s something.”
Dean ended up finishing the rest of his beer. He flagged down another and mulled the offer over as he waited for the bartender to return. The old, round-bellied man, graying with the threat of baldness thinning out his hair pulled the bottle from the little fridge and flicked the cap off before bringing it over. Clay’s offer was tempting, Dean couldn’t help thinking of his own resolution from earlier that day, and then he thought beyond that, to the trial Sam was undoubtedly preparing for that seemed, however much Dean wanted to fight it, fairly open-and-shut. “No messes?” Dean double-checked, not wanting to send out a bunch of violent criminals on a mission and get someone hurt or killed.
“We’ll play it straight,” Clay affirmed, and then grinned, his lips pulling back to display a row of white teeth. “Well,” he said, and shrugged, the gesture bizarrely bashful for someone Dean knew was a violent and likely remorseless criminal.
“This is your bar, yeah?”
“It’s not like we own it,” Clay said. “It’s in our neck of the woods, though, and, well,” he jerked his head at the interior, the people spread out, nursing their drinks around the place, focused on their own conversations. “It’s quiet.”
Dean set his beer bottle down and stared at his hands, splayed on the dark wood of the bar top. Sam would kill him if he ever found out, but Dean was beyond caring about that. Sam had chosen his life and he could get as pissed as he wanted, but at the moment Sam’s world was stepping on the toes of Dean’s and that was something they both would just have to accept.
Dean shifted on the barstool, leaned forward more and turned to really look at Clay. The man’s gaze was strikingly sharp and intense, and Dean could tell he was used to intimidating people without having to put much thought or effort into it, there was a bitter twist at the corner of Clay’s mouth, hiding there, and that was something Dean was familiar with, had seen enough hunter’s with that same twist to their expressions, even when they were laughing, like they did everything with a certain amount of dark irony. Dean wondered if Clay had his own Faribault lurking somewhere in the ridges of his past.
“There’s enough stacked against them, I’m not sure what you can do,” Dean admitted.
“Not much, I grant you,” Clay said. “Especially since we’re playing this one clean-cut and all. Put something out there.”
Dean had spoken with Sam about the case, not about what his brother planned to argue or what would be likely to happen though Dean felt sure that Sam had a pretty good idea about it already. As far as Dean could figure, though, the biggest thing stacked against his friends was, “The witnesses.”
Clay nodded to himself and then said, “We can do that.”
“Just like that,” Dean said, doubtful at how easy the other man made it sound.
Clay shrugged. “We’ll make ‘em an offer they can’t refuse.”
Dean snorted, and then tilted his beer toward Clay and said, “Without….”
But Clay cut him off. “Relax, we won’t harm a hair on anyone’s head. Anything else and you let me know,” he slipped a matchbook across the table, a four-leaf clover on one side, and the name of the pub on the other. Dean flicked it open to see a phone number written in blue ink. He flipped it closed and nodded.
Technically speaking, Sam didn’t have to stop by and visit Jesse and Aaron as frequently as he did. Some of the visits were business related, but as far as Sam could tell, there was no reason why either man would have to take the stand in their own defense, and he didn’t intend to put them up there, so it wasn’t as if he had to prepare them as witnesses. Nor was it necessary to keep them abreast of the details, because neither seemed overly concerned with his research, or the strategy he had worked up. They were both perfectly happy to sit back and let him do what he did and Sam hadn’t decided whether that was an indication of their trust in him or not.
Sam visited once a day, though, because they weren’t just clients they were friends. Or had been, at least, and that counted for something. If Sam were entirely honest, he visited them because he couldn’t quite make himself go out to Snelling and see Dean. It was mostly cowardice, but there was too much that Sam was trying to work out and his brother had way of making everything seem a lot simpler than they had any right to be.
Mostly, his visits were fairly short: he checked in, they chatted some, sometimes he had something to run by them or to drop off. Sam was usually optimistic, but he knew the court case looked, for all intents and purposes, as if it were a simple open-shut matter, and not in their favor, either. At best, it was a crap-shoot. No matter how much it felt like he had riding on the verdict, he couldn’t make himself feel confident about any aspect, and he wondered if maybe Aaron and Jesse knew the odds. If they did, they hadn’t made any effort to set his mind at ease about it. Instead, they talked like they had absolute faith in Sam, and it made him feel like they had been spending too much time with Dean, had picked up his stupid confidence in the ‘genius little brother’ and were just kicking back and laying it all on him. Which was ridiculous, because it was his job, and it was also a hell of a lot easier to have clients who were more or less happy to let him work as he saw fit and not poke and prod at things they really didn’t know anything about. It was possible he was maybe more than slightly emotionally involved.
“You are my hero, man,” Jesse insisted as he gobbled up the chocolate bar in a single bite. Sam glanced at Aaron and they shared an eye roll. “I moved out here,” he continued, answering Sam’s question as he licked the melted chocolate off his fingers, “because Blue Earth felt claustrophobic, you know? Or,” he paused, squinting a little at Sam, “Maybe you don’t. People knew me, either way, and it felt like maybe I just wanted to start over.”
Jesse had explained some about his home life, how his mother had died when he was a kid and his dad was drunk most of the time and violent for pretty much all of it. Jesse had gotten into a lot of trouble back then, started early because it was one of the few things he’d discovered he was good at, or at least, one of the few things anyone had ever taken the time to tell him he had a talent for. It was a matter of a misunderstood, misdirected kid looking for some place to fit in and finding a role model in the wrong man, and so Jesse had started boosting cars when he wasn’t studying for algebra tests. Sam wondered if it was maybe why Dean had taken his friends along when John had called him out, asked him to drive out as quick as he could knowing Dean had no car readily available. He sure as hell knew it was why his brother had such a stiff sentence dropped on him for his first criminal offense. Faribault was cracking down on car theft, and since Dean and Grady had clearly fallen in with the wrong crowd the judge hadn’t cared to distinguish between them.
Aaron, for his part, had been happy to shadow his best friend wherever he went, which included out on boosts and also, right into trouble and also, over to Minneapolis. “After a while,” he had said, “when you get through something like Faribault, you don’t want to come back to teachers and parents who think they know you when they really don’t.” Sam wondered if that was maybe why Dean had lasted three months before he had taken off on his own, leaving Sam with their father, waving it off like he’d just grown too old not to be on his own. Sam had been twelve; Dean had only been sixteen.
“Hey,” Sam said, “whatever happened to Grady?” He could barely remember Grady from back then. As far as Sam had been concerned, Dean had been his hero and his role model and Jesse had been a loud-mouthed mischief-maker, always keen to get up to something outrageous. Aaron played Sam at chess more than once, taught him some tricks with lock picks that John himself hadn’t known, and had a sarcastic, biting wit that had made Sam gleeful to listen to. Grady had mostly drifted in the background: not as clever as Aaron, not as troublesome as Jesse, but Grady had always been smiling or laughing. He was funny, Sam remembered, and in love with music.
Jesse and Aaron shared a look that Sam was growing uncomfortably familiar with, like they were deciding what to tell him. “Dean didn’t mention him?”
Sam huffed. “My brother never mentioned any of you once he left Blue Earth.”
“Grady died,” Jesse said.
“Grady fucking killed himself,” Aaron corrected. “He washed a handful of Zoloft down with a bottle of whiskey, and he knew what he was doing.” Jesse looked like he wanted to argue, but the bitter edge of Aaron’s voice indicated that, as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t up for debate.
“When?” Sam asked, tried to imagine the soft-smiling, quiet dark-haired boy that he remembered doing what Aaron had described. The thought hurt, maybe more than it should have, but he knew that whatever Grady had done had more than a little to do with what had happened to him, to all of them, and it was just another indication of the severity at Faribault.
“Sometime in August,” Aaron said, sounding clinical and detached. Sam wondered if it was because he had stopped caring, or because he cared too much. “2007.”
Sam found his breath catching and he choked a little. “Uh,” he said. “That’s…” but couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t think of anything to say, his head too busy turning over the date, more pieces coming together to make a pretty harsh picture that Sam was having trouble looking at. “It’s too bad,” he finished, entirely inadequately. “It’s horrible,” he corrected, and then, “I’m sorry.”
Sam was more than a little tired of getting blind-sided by details about his brother’s history that Dean had never seen fit to impart, and regardless of whether he knew why Dean kept so much in the dark or not, he was sick of letting it continue. He flipped his phone open and selected Dean’s name from the caller list, a number he hadn’t used in ages but managed to keep regardless of how many times he’d gotten drunk enough and angry enough to consider deleting for good. Not that he hadn’t had it memorized since he’d been a kid, the gesture would have been symbolic at best. “Hey,” he said, sounding as casual as he could when Dean answered the phone. “You at the motel?” Dean’s answer was slightly reticent but Sam brushed passed that, “Great, I’m stopping by; don’t go anywhere.”
Dean answered the door three minutes later, his expression a combination of resigned amusement. “What, did you call from the parking lot?” he said as he closed the door behind Sam.
“So, hey, I was thinking about when we were kids,” Sam said, still trying to sound casual and more than a little irritated that his voice came out thick and false and maybe a little more throaty than usual. “In Blue Earth,” he clarified. “I remember Jesse and Aaron really well, but whatever happened to Grady?”
Dean pinched the bridge of his nose and then raised dull eyes. “Stop it, Sam.”
“What?” He really didn’t sound as innocent as he’d been hoping, maybe he’d gotten out of practice; not that he’d ever been able to use it successfully against Dean. His brother could always tell when Sam was laying out bullshit, though most times, Dean would go right ahead and give into it, even after calling Sam out on it.
“Stop coming over here and asking questions like you don’t already have the answers.” It was gratifying to hear the volume of Dean’s voice rise, his brother was moving passed resigned and into more familiar grounds. He was getting angry, and Sam sensed a fight growing between them, and it was like exercising a muscle he hadn’t used in a while, the first few minutes filled with adrenaline and excitement to be moving again after so many years of disuse.
“He committed suicide sometime in August,” Sam said. “In 2007.” He rolled his shoulders back and tilted his head before he asked, “So how much of that had to do with why you left?”
“It had nothing to do with it.”
“Bull shit,” Sam said, separating the words and biting them out. Let’s do this, he thought, and then, slightly panicked, We’re doing this. “Dad had just died and then Grady died, and you started thinking about it all again, didn’t you? You couldn’t push it away like you’ve been doing, probably since it happened! Am I right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “And I was there, and you couldn’t keep it together and you knew that it was either tell me the truth about all of it, or push me away and you took the coward’s way out!”
“No,” Dean said, pushing into Sam’s space. “Dad was dead and the demon was dead, and you started spouting off a bunch of bullshit about hunting again.”
Sam looked at angry green eyes and when he spoke again his voice was gruff but softer than it had been, “It wasn’t bullshit.”
“That’s exactly what it was!” Dean shouted. “It was you giving up everything you always wanted because of some misplaced attempt to make it up to dad after-the-fact. Like dad would give a shit that you were hunting like he always wanted! That wasn’t your life … that isn’t your life.”
“It was what I wanted,” Sam said, catching his brother’s wrist before Dean could pace away from him. He remembered the argument they had then, both of them knowing the other too well not to know precisely what to say to wound deep. He should have known right then what Dean had been doing, because it was just what Dean always did; but there had been truth at the heart of what his brother had been saying; there was a part of Sam that felt he had to make it up to his dad. Most of him, though, had been too wrapped up in Dean, who had been falling apart, Sam could see it a little clearer every day, and it had scared him. Sam knew that whether Dean could face it or not, there had been truth in what Sam had said as well, Dean had pushed extra hard because he’d needed to be able to walk away, just like he’d needed to walk away when he was sixteen and fresh out of Faribault. His brother hadn’t dealt with what had happened in the detention center; that was clearer than anything.
“Maybe it’s what you thought you wanted,” Dean said. “But I’d heard you talk about school, about becoming a lawyer … about Jess … enough to know that you weren’t walking away from it with only one year left between you and everything you’d been working towards.”
“Jess and I broke up,” Sam said, his jaw clenching. Dean shrugged, like he didn’t care. It pissed Sam off a little more, the anger that had been abating at the sight of Dean’s anguish rising again. “If I wanted it so damned bad, why did I break-up with her when I got back to Stanford?”
“I dunno,” Dean snarled. “I’m not your god-damned shrink! What do you want from me?”
It was Sam’s turn to push into Dean’s space, and the room was small enough that Dean stumbled over the waste paper basket and ended up with his back pressed against the wall as Sam said, “I want you to quit treating me like I’m still a little kid, Dean! I want you to stop making my god-damned decisions for me and acknowledge the fact that I am a fucking adult!”
Dean’s hand flashed up and Sam half expected a punch, but instead Dean grasped the back of his neck and yanked him forward, pressed their mouths into a fierce kiss that went on until Sam started to worry about catching his breath. Dean broke the kiss with a sharp bite of teeth on Sam’s bottom lip, and then they stood, both panting, defiance in the depths of Dean’s eyes and Sam could almost hear his brother saying, ‘Tell me I treat you like a kid now!’
It was too much and it was not enough. There was so much stretching between them, it seemed impossible that they could ever resolve it all and move beyond it. Dean expected Sam to walk away, just like he always did, their well-choreographed dance of push-pull angry revelations always seemed to play out that way, with Dean striking out fast and hard and to the very heart of Sam, revealing something too much to bear. It was there, plain as day, for Sam to read in his brother’s face. That Dean would give-in and let his brother in, but only because he was confident that Sam would never see it through, that he would leave just like he seemed to always do. Just like when Sam had marched out of his high school graduation and right onto a bus and straight to Dean, and within a week had badgered and argued and insisted until finally he had won. Sam had lost his virginity in a run-down, disco-themed motel room to his brother. It hadn’t ended there. Not until August came and Sam stepped out of the Impala and into Stanford, just like he’d always planned.
Sam could declare his commitment to Dean all he wanted, but it certainly hadn’t been evident, he could see that, looking back. Hindsight was 20/20, but he also knew that he had only ever been brave enough to make a move on his brother because he had been so confident in who he was and where he was going. He’d had to fight so hard to get to Stanford that fighting Dean hadn’t been anything, barely a challenge; it had certainly been worthwhile. Dean wasn’t interested in college, though, or in settling down. He wasn’t happy to drift around Palo Alto and fit himself into the life Sam was determined to build. He would drive through often enough, and they would lose themselves in each other, and for the empty space in his life where Sam had made room for thoughts of commitment and romance, there had been Jess. He’d never asked Dean what he’d wanted, though. Sam had assumed his brother would know that he was wanted, that he was missed, but looking at Dean, Sam finally understood that the confident, cocky defense his brother put on was protecting a deeper insecurity that he’d ever anticipated. Dean didn’t know any of those things; he was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
With a growl, Sam yanked Dean’s T-shirt over his head, shoved him back against the wall as he sucked a path down Dean’s neck, his hands working over his brother’s skin until both his hands were tangled in Dean’s hair, tipping his head back as Sam kissed his mouth, his skin. It wasn’t release; it was revelation. His brother’s fingers working the buttons of his shirt free, and then bypassing his exposed chest entirely as they worked his pants open and tugged his cock free. Sam found himself stilling as Dean gripped him, dropped his head to a pale freckled shoulder and just gasping as the rough hand slid down and then up just once.
Dean pushed him backward, one hand to his chest as the other worked his cock, and Sam let himself drop backward onto the bed, his brother kneeling above him. Sam had seen Dean tousled before, seen his hair mussed in all directions and seen him in all states of undress. He still found his breath catching, Dean with his knees pressed into the bed on either side of him, one hand gripping his cock. Dean’s hair was tousled, his lips bitten red; his chest was glowing in the light with a thin sheen of sweat and his eyes were dark and full of promise. There was a bruise that Sam had sucked into his neck; his jeans were unbuttoned, slung low on his hips. It was just a moment to catch their breath, but Sam couldn’t move, couldn’t think anything beyond how beautiful his brother was, how incredible. “Dean,” and maybe that said it all, maybe a part of everything he meant was in his tone, because Dean tipped forward, kissing him, pressing him back into the bed and then drifting lower, tongue laving across his chest.
Sam couldn’t think beyond the idea of more, his hands pressed against his brother’s back, trying to get more of that devilish tongue, and then drifted down, pushed inside his brother’s pants to grip his ass, growled, “Fucking do it.”
Dean’s voice was a husky whisper as he said, “Do what?”
Sam bucked his hips upward as his hands pulled his brother down, trying to press their cocks together. He wanted to push inside him, like coming home; wanted to feel Dean moving beneath him, around him. With his new understanding, however, Sam wasn’t sure he had the right, didn’t know if he hadn’t already made too many demands of his brother, so he said, “Something, anything.”
Dean knelt-up, pushed his jeans off and then slid down the length of Sam’s body, stood at the side of the bed and worked Sam’s pants down his legs as Sam toed off his shoes. He tossed down a foil packet and a tube of lube beside Sam’s arm and then crawled up the length of Sam’s body, dropped his mouth to Sam’s neck and shifted his knees further apart, canted his hips as he said, “go on,” in a husky growl against Sam’s ear.
Sam grabbed a fistful of his brother’s hair and kissed him, every inch of the ferocious love he felt he’d been drowning in for so long, all the frustration and hurt that had been simmering since Dean had walked out, his desperate hunger, he poured it into Dean’s mouth and Dean drank it down, pushed back with his own hunger. Sam worked the cap of the lube off as they kissed, coated his fingers and bit down on Dean’s lip as he pushed two fingers inside, found himself arching off the bed as Dean moaned and angled his hips for more, bringing their cocks together.
It could have gone on forever and Sam would have been happy. The slick slide of his fingers, of their cocks, of their tongues, tied up in one another like they should be. He’d forgotten what it had been like between them. No, not forgotten; he’d convinced himself that it couldn’t ever have been like that. But the proof was there in their moans, in their motions. When Dean sat back, Sam’s fingers still inside him, Sam growled and chased his mouth, quieted as he watched his brother bite a tear into the foil packet, eyes dark with want as he slid the condom down the length of Sam’s cock.
Dean took him in slowly, head tipped back until he was fully seated and Sam lost patience, pulled him forward and into another kiss. “I can’t,” but Sam didn’t know what he couldn’t do, and it didn’t matter, because then Dean was shifting his hips, circling them slowly and grinding down. Sam just couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but grab Dean’s hips and push up, thrust up hard and again, gasping into his brother’s mouth as Dean said, “Yeah,” and “Jesus, Sammy,” and sucked bruises across his chest. He pressed down to meet every thrust, hands braced against Sam’s chest, gripping Sam’s upper arms, knotting through Sam’s hair and pulling him closer, demanding Sam’s mouth against his body.
Swallowed up in the feel of Dean’s skin beneath his fingers, of the taste of him, the smell of him, the feel as he clenched around Sam and rolled his hips, Sam could barely think to move his hand. He gripped Dean’s cock and let his brother thrust forward, back and forth, into his grasping hand, felt the grip of Dean’s body around him as his brother came, the sticky-warmth spilling across Sam’s chest and Sam lost himself in Dean, pushed in hard and stared at his brother’s face lost in bliss, at the bruises Sam’s fingers, Sam’s mouth had pushed into his familiar, freckled skin, his hands in Sam’s hair, the burn of his nails down Sam’s chest. Sam’s vision whited-out as he came.
Everything was a mess, Sam could see that; it was more than clear. The more he tried to work through it and figure things out, the more it seemed to fly out of his control. He wasn’t sure if he could patch things up with Dean, if Dean would let him. His earlier realization only made it harder to overlook the history of hurts between them.
The closer the date of the trial came, the more concerned Sam grew about it. It seemed impossible that he would manage to pull a miracle out of somewhere and win a verdict that wouldn’t send Dean out of his life forever. Maybe it shouldn’t feel like any chance of reconciliation with his brother was tied-up in in the verdict, but it did. Sam wanted to prove that Stanford and all the drama that he had caused with his going there had been worth it. Like Dean wouldn’t understand why the compulsion to break away into that new life had been so strong.
More than that, it felt as if Jesse and Aaron were entrusting themselves to him, like they had put the cards out there, and then dealt him into the game of revenge they were playing and he could somehow redeem the injustice of what they had experienced if only he could get them out of it Scott-free.
It was impossible to pretend it was a court case, with a simple ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ decision. The weight of it fell heavy on him, and he worried that he would be another in the long line of people who had let Jesse and Aaron and Dean down. The specter of Faribault loomed large over the case, and he had done enough research into trauma to understand that Dean’s practice of avoidance was only delaying the inevitable. Dean needed exactly what he hadn’t gotten when he’d been a kid, he needed justice, and Sam needed to prove that sometimes the law, when it was used the right way, could deliver that justice. He needed to show Dean exactly what had drawn him to his profession; and maybe a part of that had to involve ripping open his brother’s old wounds and making them fresh again, but Sam had to hold on to the hope that they would heal, and maybe then Dean could really move past it all.
Somehow, Sam had to introduce Faribault into that courtroom and put Dowell and the men involved on trial. If he had to be held in contempt of court in order to achieve that, he would.
Growing up, the one thing Jim Murphy had always heard his parents and their friends stating and re-stating time and again was that there was no profession in the world that was without flaw. At the age of five, while other little boys were still entertaining fantasies of being astronauts and firemen, Jim had already determined that he was going to be a priest, and so each time a grown-up claimed that no job was perfect he had always quietly assured himself that he had found one that was. His mother who, though never outright discouraging, had nonetheless been slightly hesitant to wholly encourage her son’s chosen career, had frequently elaborated, “It’s not that you won’t ever find a job that you absolutely enjoy, but there’s always some aspect of it that keeps it just shy of perfection.” She had pictured her son traveling the world as a renowned soloist, performing in operas that he would invite her to see. Between her husband’s outright pride, and Jim’s own determination, she had quickly begun talking about his singing potential in a wistful tone but settled for Jim’s promise that he would never stop singing.
In seminary school, Jim had discovered that there were parts of being a priest that were indeed very difficult, but that it didn’t mean they were not still enjoyable, or at least, rewarding. One year after being fully ordained he had been posted at a little rural church in Japan when he learned that devils indeed took many forms, and some of them inspired legends and myths and fairytales but were no less real. So Jim found himself in a foreign land researching and then setting about ridding the village of a Shu no Bon who had caused several heart attacks in the area. Even then, he embraced the new and entirely unforeseen aspect of his job with excitement and curiosity.
No job, however, was completely perfect, and while Jim loved every aspect of being a priest, he discovered the most significant downside when he returned to North America and took up his place as minister in Blue Earth. In the summer time, the historic white church sat perched atop a slight hill amidst a swell of trees, nestled in the heart of a residential area, overseeing many of its parishioners from its vantage point; the building itself a shepherd keeping watch of its flock. In the winter, surrounded by branches and snow, it blended, serene and elegant. Inside, however, there was no masking its age, and while the church did not frown on its congregation huddling happily inside their winter coats, the priest had a precise dress code.
It was a small thing, a wholly survivable thing, but Jim had never been one to enjoy the cold and there was no denying that, between the drafts and need to keep the heating bill at a certain amount, the church was never entirely comfortable in the cold months. Jim drew the line at his office which, located in the basement of the church, had four thick stone walls and one small, though still remarkably drafty, window. He kept a pair of knitted gloves in the top drawer of his desk and a small heater in the corner beside his chair; two little guilty pleasures but ones he would stand by. The Lord, in all his wisdom, would surely forgive him.
Stepping outside of his office, Jim took a moment to adjust to the nip in the air before climbing the steps to the main body of the church. It was a weekday and early enough that he was not surprised to find he was the only one inside, though he made a slow circuit just the same, as much to stretch his legs as the make certain that he was not neglecting his duties. He ended his circuit by the votive candles, watching the flames bob and twist, his thoughts overtaken with the memory of a small dark-haired boy who had stood in that very spot so may years ago and looked up at him with solemn eyes and asked, “Why do we light the candles, Father?” He held the memory of that earnest face as he lit a candle of his own, and then another beside it, thought of the two boys as they had been, troubled but always searching for the right path. Jim lit the candles for the boys they had been, but he prayed for the men that Aaron and Jesse had become.
The rumble was low, like oncoming thunder filtering through the walls of the church, but it was undeniably familiar, even after so many years. Jim blessed himself and strode briskly to the doors at the back, pulling them open just in time to see Dean Winchester reach the top of the cracked cement steps. “I’d know the sound of that engine anywhere,” he said, when Dean looked slightly startled by his sudden appearance. “It’s good to see you, Dean.” He couldn’t keep the smile from his face as he gripped Dean’s upper arms, holding him still long enough to get a good look at the boy he hadn’t seen in ages.
He was a man, now, Jim corrected himself, and no longer the scrawny teen he remembered. Dean stood tall and broad, a hint of stubble along his jaw and dark smudges beneath his eyes; the tips of Dean’s ears were pink and Jim could see that the man’s knuckles were the same color, chapped from the brisk chill of the wind. There were hints of the boy Jim had known in the familiar march of freckles across a face that had a familiar, if more defined shape, and the wide green eyes and hair that spiked up in that same way it always had done, encouraged by Dean’s restless fingers despite his father’s displeasure with it. Still, Jim could read the shadows in Dean’s eyes and found himself mourning the loss of the wide smile with which Dean had always greeted him, wondered if it had been a single event that had made the man who faced him now so subdued, or if it had taken an unrelenting succession of misfortune.
He noted it all in moments, his attention recalled as Dean ducked his head slightly, hesitant, and said, “Pastor Jim.”
Jim found his smile again and pulled Dean into a hug. “It’s good to see you,” he said, the truth in his words making his statement heavy. “Come in. It’s cold outside.” Not that the inside of the church was that much better, he thought as he pulled the door closed, rubbing his hands together to return circulation to them. He looked up and caught Dean’s lips twisting up.
“Still hate the cold?” Dean said, amusement clear in his expression as in his tone.
Jim dropped his hands back to his side and noted that Dean stood taller than Jim himself by at least three inches. “I was going to offer you a drink to warm up, but now I am having second thoughts.”
His faked indignation was rewarded as the twisting smirk of a smile blossomed to something more relaxed as Dean huffed and shook his head, “That’s okay, I’m a little old for hot chocolate anyway.”
Jim shrugged and began walking back toward his office, “I was thinking more about a glass of scotch, but if you’d prefer…” He opened the door to his office, stopped just shy of rubbing his hands together in appreciation for the warmth that wrapped around him as he stepped inside, and instead headed across the room to pull the scotch from the bottom cupboard.
Pouring two glasses, he handed one over to Dean, and gestured for the other man to take a seat. “How have you been?” he asked, after Dean had taken a sip of the scotch and settled back in his chair. Jim watched as the other man categorized the changes to the office, took in the framed photographs on the shelves with a slight widening of his eyes but nothing more.
“I’ve been hunting,” Dean said, the shrug evident in his tone if not his body language. “I’ve got my car and the open road. I’m still here.” Jim thought about John, four years dead, almost five, and wondered if that was enough time for Dean to reconcile himself with everything his father was, and wasn’t, time enough to heal.
“Well, that’s something.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He watched as Dean took another long drink from his glass before leaning forward in his chair. “I didn’t just come to catch up.”
Even as a boy, Dean had never been one to observe social niceties when there was something he was after. Jim had found it refreshing then, but a part of him wished for a little more time with the man who he had regarded as a son and yet hadn’t seen in so long. Still, it wasn’t anything he hadn’t been expecting, ever since Sam had breezed through, looking pinched and earnest and clearly struggling with something. Now there was a boy who could prevaricate and mislead, Jim wondered what he was like as a lawyer and couldn’t imagine him as being anything short of formidable.
“I didn’t think so,” he said, taking another sip of his scotch as he waited.
The silence stretched as Dean sat, leaning forward and staring into his glass, swirling the amber liquid one way and then the other. Jim waited, the words of one of his mentors echoing in his thoughts, advice he’d given about confession and being patient above all else, “sometimes people need some time to get themselves in order, before they ask for something they don’t think they deserve.”
“I need your help,” Dean said.
Jim set his glass on the desk and leaned back in his chair, his fingers interlocking as he asked, “What is it?”
“Jesse and Aaron,” Dean said. He cleared his throat and glanced quickly up before looking back down at his scotch, setting it on the desk as Jim had done, before focusing back on the floor, analyzing the pattern of the rug, no doubt. “They’ve been accused of murder…”
“I know this,” Jim said, softly prompting. “I don’t see how I could help with that.”
Dean looked up at him then. Years ago, a pale, gaunt-faced boy had looked at him with the same pleading, solemn eyes and said, “No matter what you hear, tell my dad that I’m okay.” Jim swallowed down the memory as Dean said, “We need a witness. Someone to testify that they were with Aaron and Jesse on the night of the murder.”
“You’re asking for an alibi,” Jim said. “And you thought a priest would be perfect?”
Dean shook his head. “Not just a priest.”
Jesse had red hair when he was a child. Jim had baptized him, just like he baptized Aaron. Unlike Aaron, however, Jesse had wriggled and generally been uncooperative, and splashed water all over Jim’s vestments. He had seen them every Sunday for morning mass, spoken with them after their Catechism. When Jesse’s mother had died, he’d presided over the funeral, tried to help him grieve and cope with his loss, and in the end, watched with a heavy heart as his efforts met with resounding failure. Then, after years of listening to stories about, “those two bad seeds” who were committing criminal acts in and around Blue Earth, there was Dean, who Jim had always worried was too isolated, with shy, quiet Grady and Jesse and Aaron in tow. Jim still couldn’t help the fond recollection of the day Aaron and Jesse had stopped boosting cars and returned to the church, shuffling and awkward like they thought he might boot them out for daring to show up after everything they’d been up to.
“You once told me,” Dean said, cutting through Jim’s thoughts, “that if I ever needed anything, that I should come and ask you.”
Maybe it was a reasonable request. Maybe someone else would have found themselves in less of a moral quandary, but Jim knew it was a slippery slope, integrity sold for so little sometimes, and he wasn’t sure that, after all he had come through he could throw it away. Before seminary school, Jim had studied at college, had received a degree in philosophy. There were so many levels on which he found himself rebelling against the thought: Kant’s categorical imperative twisted up with the vows he had taken as a priest, his duty and responsibility and his determination not to ever in any way abuse his position. Amongst all of this was the thought of placing his hand on the Bible and vowing to speak only truth, and then uttering only lies. “I don’t think you fully understand what it is you’re asking me to do.”
“I’m asking you to save two of your boys.”
Jim ran a hand over his chin, torn in two different directions, by two different tenets of his faith. “Are they guilty? Did they murder that man?”
“Yes.”
Dean didn’t hesitate in his reply, and he did not avert his gaze. “I know what they have been up to, Dean. I know…” he sighed again, because regardless of what he knew, it was ingrained in him to hold out hope, to never turn away a soul in need. “Why would you ask me this,” Jim wondered. “What about the life that was taken? What is that life worth?”
“To me?” Dean said. “Absolutely nothing.”
The answer was chilling in itself. Jim knew Dean well enough to be certain that he would never ask for Jim to lie without good reason: Dean knew the importance of vows and he also knew how Jim himself valued them. Yet he showed not the slightest hint of remorse over the victim of what Jim understood to be a brutal murder. It was the darkening of familiar green eyes with a depth of pain that caught Jim off guard.
“Why?” he asked, which perhaps should have been his very first question, but he had stopped expecting more from Jesse and of Aaron, was too familiar with the line they’d crossed to hold out much hope that they would ever return. Dean was a different matter; Dean had always seen the world in black and white, good and bad. Jim knew the man hunted and, from what he had heard, was even better than John had been; but demons and ghouls were one thing, people were another. “Tell me why you feel that way.”
Dean looked away, his jaw clenching visibly and Jim sat forward, fought to remain patient and let Dean answer in his own time. “Because of what he did to us,” Dean said, his voice thick, struggling to hold back an avalanche of emotion. “The four of us,” he said. Jim felt a horrible understanding begin to blossom, and he fought it desperately, the truth too horrible to entertain on a whim. “We were just kids.” Dean drew in a shuddering breath and Jim could see that he was shaking with the effort to hold back the emotion surging through him, his eyes wet and, as Jim sat awash in the dawning understanding and horror, a tear slid down Dean’s cheek.
“Faribault?” Jim asked.
He wasn’t prepared for the answer. Wasn’t ready to hear about six months of humiliation, abuse and rape. Of four boys that Jim knew, just fifteen years old, clinging together and counting down the days, the subjects of a broken system. If anyone had known, and they must have, they hadn’t said anything, hadn’t done anything, and there was nothing the boys themselves could have done. Jim wondered if Dean understood that. Understood that he was not responsible for what had happened, wasn’t weak because it had.
Jim kept thinking that he had been there. He’d spent his Saturdays driving out to see them, and he’d never questioned it, not that there had been any real indications. Jim knew places like Faribault, knew to expect some bruises: boys were boys, and troubled boys were troubled boys. He held on to the fact that Dean knew how to fight, more than knew how to take care of himself; they all had. He’d told them each to hold on, talked to them to keep their morale up. When he asked, however, they each individually assured him that everything was fine, dismissed the hurts as petty squabbling between other boys. Jim should have known better.
The press of responsibility and guilt weighed down on him, and he knew that whatever he could do to help Dean, he would do. Still, he could not so easily consider throwing away his vows, couldn’t justify in himself that it was right to do so. It was a matter for the court, and Jim believed that religion had no place in the courtroom.
Jim pulled the decanter of scotch from the cupboard and refilled their glasses, but he could not bring himself to sit down. He finished his drink, and stared at the glass, found himself repeating the Lord’s Prayer over and over in the back of his head. He dropped a hand to Dean’s shoulder and squeezed it gently. “I have a decision to make,” he said.
Dean set his empty glass carefully onto Jim’s desk as he stood up, meeting Jim’s eye he nodded. “You’ll make the right choice,” he said. “Whatever you decide.”
|<< END PART THREE >>|
MASTERPOST
By: revenant_scribe
Rating: R
Word Count: 10,418
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Part of the Icarus 'Verse
He decided it was human hatred and not divine vengeance
that had plunged him into this abyss. He doomed these
unknown men to every torment that his inflamed imagination
could devise, while still considering that the most frightful
were too mild and, above all, too brief for them: torture
was followed by death, and death brought, if not repose,
at least an insensibility that resembled it.
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
In the spring of 1994, John Winchester had been tracking a ghoul through Faribault County. Its kills were frequent and gory: half-eaten corpses of children and adults, male and female. There was no real pattern to its victims, until John had discovered that the ghoul was targeting first-born children with strong ties to their parents. “So he figured you were at risk?” Sam said, still trying to comprehend why their dad would send Dean to a detention facility for six months.
“Geezes, Sam, have you been out of the hunt that long?” Dean said. “Think about it. Hunters are always at risk, especially if the thing they’re after knows it’s being hunted. Dad kept us away more often than not because he didn’t want us to be used against him. I guess he figured he needed to send me somewhere safe.”
“Why not Bobby’s? Or Caleb’s? Why jail, Dean?”
Dean sighed. “Ghouls are shape shifters, Sam. It could have been one of the teachers at our school, or the neighborhood cat, there was no way of being certain. It wasn’t just about getting me away from the thing’s hunting ground, he was making sure it wouldn’t think of going after me, that it would think there was a rift between us. I guess Faribault seemed as good a place as any. I mean there was twenty-four hour surveillance, and trained guards. He was essentially putting me into a fortress.”
“You’re making excuses for him. You always do this!”
Dean shook his head, crossed over to his duffel where he rummaged around before pulling out the familiar leather bound journal and flipping through it, placing it carefully onto the bed so Sam could see the open pages. “He wrote it out, man. I’m not making any of it up.”
Sam scanned through the entry and then looked up at his brother. “When did you read this?”
Dean rubbed his face and shrugged, “After dad died.” He shrugged, rubbed a hand over the back of his neck and shrugged again. “I carried it around for a while, and then it started to come in handy, you know, for hunts. And then I just found it.” Sam looked down at the tiny paragraph of scrunched handwriting; just a brief entry that broke down so clinically and succinctly a decision that Sam knew would change everything. “I don’t know if that makes it better, but at least it was a reason.”
Sam remembered how things were after their dad died, the giddy triumph of finally having killed the thing that had destroyed their family erased as John had staggered and then dropped heavily to the ground. Dean’s broken pleas echoed through Sam’s ears even years later. He wondered how long Dean had been on the road; hunting, alone in a way he never had been, before he had found the page in the book. Wondered if he’d called anyone, if anyone would have really understood.
Sam clenched his fist as it occurred to him why keeping in touch with Aaron and Jesse had been such an important thing for Dean. The only people who would have never required an explanation. He wondered about Grady, had only the vaguest memories of a soft-faced, smiling dark-haired kid who had always had trouble sitting still, and frequently turned ordinary objects into percussive instruments. It was impossible to picture the boy who had taught him how to play the spoons being abused in prison by the men who were supposed to protect him, his mind shied-away from it.
“Dean,” Sam said, felt like the silence was swallowing them up and yet somehow couldn’t bring himself to let the subject drop. “What did they do to you?”
“Sammy…”
“Stop treating me like I’m still a little kid, Dean! I want to know … I need to know. Right now, man, my mind’s running the gamut, I can’t stop thinking about everything they could have done. Just … please.”
“Whatever happened,” Dean said, his voice deeper and choked, like something was trying to get past his lips only Dean was too stubborn to let it. “It happened and it’s done. It’s in the past, and that’s where we’re going to leave it.” It was a tone of voice Sam had heard often from his brother, and at one point he had believed it blindly. Now, Sam wondered.
Outside Dean’s window, Sam could see the street lamps and house lights warding off the oncoming dark and found himself wishing that he didn’t have to drive back to his own hotel, didn’t have to do anything but shuck his clothes and crawl under the blankets. Somehow, though, he couldn’t bring himself to ask Dean if he could spend the night. The day had been too long, he’d been running on fear and anger and adrenaline and Sam just felt spent, like someone had scooped out every piece of him and left him hollow.
“They really killed him, didn’t they?”
“Yeah,” Dean said. “They shot the bastard cold in that fucking pub.”
It should have been chilling, how casually satisfied Dean sounded, like he only wished he’d been there, but Sam wasn’t chilled, he felt only disappointed that Edward Dowell was dead. Seven bullets didn’t seem like enough.
The door closed behind Sam and Dean felt as if he could finally breathe, as if suddenly there was space to move. He flicked the lock to his room closed and ran his hands over his face, releasing a long slow breath and imagining he could just let all the history his brother had dug up and thrown in his face go.
He was over it. It had happened and it had been horrible and for a while afterward, nothing had been right and he’d wondered if it ever would be again; but then time had passed and he’d kept pushing through it until finally it didn’t feel like there was a noose wrapped around his neck anymore. He’d moved on.
His dad’s journal lay on his bed where Sam had left it, and Dean stared at it, the worn brown leather clashing with the bright bedspread on which it sat. Sam knew. Dean tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, that if he kept the facts vague enough then nothing at all had to change. His brother would just keep on digging, though, and he wouldn’t stop until he’d stirred everything back up and then sorted it into piles to satisfy his OCD, and then sat down and talked about every part of it, like Dean really needed to sit through it all and share and care. He’d pick and pick and pick at Dean, “How did it feel, Dean?” and, “What did they do to you, Dean?” until everything was fresh and raw.
Dean snatched the journal from the bed and hurled it across the room, watched as it knocked the bedside lamp from the nightstand before continuing on its collision course with the wall, its pages curling and folding as it landed, open and upside down, the loose snatches of paper that John had always kept organized and tucked inside falling free.
Bottom line, Jesse and Aaron had put something in motion that Dean had been sketching out for years. Sam knowing, Sam being back in his life when Dean had thought they’d finally parted ways for good, none of that changed anything. He made his decision four years ago to let Sam be, to finally let him build his life the way his brother always wanted it, and the fact that their lives were colliding again didn’t change the fact that he had made the right choice then. So he’d make it again; put the past down good and proper so that this time, when he walked away from Minnesota, there would be no dark shadows lurking.
Dean dragged his battered copy of The Count of Monte Cristo from the bedside drawer, pulled off the elastic band that held the book intact and snatched the folded piece of graph paper from where it had been tucked in the back, glanced quickly at the names and numbers jotted down in black ink. One down, he thought, remembering how Aaron had said it. One down; shot up in a pub for the world to see. It wasn’t at all the way Dean had thought it would go, but there wasn’t anything for it, now. Either way, there were three other names on Dean’s list before he could return the past to where it belonged. He didn’t intend to waste any more time.
His briefcase dropped to the ground with a heavy thump, the shoulder strap slipping down around the floor and threatening to catch Sam’s leg as he concentrated on pulling free of the layers he had donned in order to brave the outdoors. The silence of the room felt absolute after a long day of constant bustle, but the emptiness chafed somehow, in a way that he had become adept at overlooking.
He pulled a bottle of beer from the mini-fridge and wished that there was something stronger to help chase away the mess he had stumbled into. Sam had two guilty clients with no regrets and likely no inclination to live a moral life should they be acquitted, and had never been more determined to win a case for a client in his life. He had four witnesses and the start of what promised to be a vicious headache, and amidst all of it he had a brother, who was also maybe sometimes his lover, who was tied up in everything. It felt somehow like a second chance, but a second chance at what was something Sam hadn’t figured out yet, and wasn’t certain he wanted to. The one thing he was confident of was that he didn’t think he could face himself or his brother again if Jesse and Aaron went down for the murder of Edward Dowell.
O’Malley’s sat in limbo between Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore and Koscielski’s Guns & Ammo. The shop front was small enough that the name of the pub didn’t fit above it, but Dean always figured that what was important about a pub wasn’t its curb appeal. There was a tacky green-painted sign accented with four leaf clovers that hung, half covered in snow, threatening pedestrians on the sidewalk with icicles, creaking faintly when it was caught by a strong gust of wind. From the street, the place looked closed, but Dean knew better and he crossed the road at a jog, hands tucked into his coat pockets, his collar turned up against the wind and a hat tugged low to cover his ears, wishing that there had been a place to park the Impala that was closer, even though he had found a place just around the corner.
The inside of O’Malley’s was bigger than Dean had anticipated, and considering the area and the people who frequented the place, the overall appearance was a lot more reputable than he was entirely comfortable with: dark mahogany a little worn, bearing the marks of age and undoubted drunken abuse but still polished enough to draw attention away from the cheap tile floor. There was brown brick exposed along the walls like someone designed it that way, and flat screen televisions at either side of the bar, which looked like it was plucked straight from the prohibition era and, as far as Dean knew, might well have been. The front room was dominated by the bar, with small tables and stools for people who appreciated the pretense of privacy, but around the corner were large mahogany booths and big tables that Dean could just make out from his position at the foot of the narrow stairs that led up to the street entrance.
Dean wondered where Dowell had been sitting that night, his gaze drawn into the further room. “Winchester,” a sharp voice called his attention to a man sitting at the far edge of the bar. He jerked his head in a ‘come here’ gesture when he saw Dean was looking, and wiggled a beer bottle as added incentive.
“Do I know you?” Dean asked as he stopped beside the other man.
“Clay.” He tipped his beer back and finished it off, setting the empty bottle down with a clank. Dean eyed him critically as he waved at the bartender, gesturing for two more beers. “Clay Miller.”
Resigned, Dean settled onto a bar stool beside Clay and folded his arms on the counter-top, accepting the beer when it came with a strange sort of relief. “Well, it’s just lovely to meet you, Clay,” Dean said, sarcasm smoothing his tone out and giving it a bite. “How’d you get my number and why’d you call me.” More importantly, Dean thought, why choose this of all places to meet?
“Got your number from my boy, a friend of yours.” Clay’s eyebrow crooked upward and then, as if on afterthought, he shrugged the button up he was wearing over a gray T-shirt off one shoulder, exposing the upper portion of his left arm where a dark-inked tattoo stood out on milk chocolate skin, the design just familiar enough for Dean to relax. “Aaron and I did some time together, that’s how I ended up running with the Dogs.”
Dean smirked and shook his head. “That almost has a sort of poetry to it.” He took a long drink of his beer and tried to ignore the assessing stare that Clay had focused on him. “So what do you want?”
“I want what you want,” Clay said. “Both our boys walking free and clear away from this mess. Just thought I’d let you know that me and the others, we’re ready to do whatever it takes.”
Dean snorted, “I don’t know what Aaron’s said about me, but I’m not interested.”
Clay’s hand on his forearm stopped him, and he leaned closer a little, dropped his voice low so Dean had to tilt his head some to really hear him. “Now I know you’re not a clean-cut, lily-white citizen, there’s some dirt on your hands.”
“I might be a thief,” Dean acknowledged, “and a bit of a con man, but there’s a line and I’m not crossing it. Especially if whatever you’re talking here involves hurting innocent people.” He glanced around and noticed that they hadn’t really garnered any attention from anyone. Even the bartender was down at the other end of the bar, focused on cleaning up some glasses. It occurred to him that when Jesse spoke about the odds of Dowell picking O’Malley’s of all places to stop for dinner, he had meant it honestly. As far as Jesse and Aaron were concerned, they had been sharing a drink at their regular bar, a place where most people knew to keep themselves to themselves. The bartender wasn’t among the witnesses, though he had to have been present.
He considered what Aaron might have shared with his gang about Dean and it made him feel a little reckless because he was pretty sure, like ninety-seven percent sure, that the first thing his friend would have specified was not to hurt Dean and the next would have been to not drag him into shit.
Ninety-seven percent sure was sure enough as far as Dean was concerned, and he’d handle the rest when he got there, so he turned a hard glare on Clay and said, “You want to let go of my arm?”
Clay smirked and pulled his hand away. “You got it wrong, y’know. We’re not just mindless thugs.”
“Yeah, you’re all upstanding, shiny citizens. I got it, but if that’s all…”
“Sit down and finish your beer, hot shot,” Clay said. “Now, I get that Jesse and Aaron have gone and got themselves some smooth-talking lawyer…” he cut off when Dean snorted, but continued when Dean had no further comment. “I also get that whatever you’ve got going, you aren’t exactly in our world, if you get me.” Dean nodded and fiddled with his beer bottle, wondering if he should finish it off and call for another, or just wait. “What you should get is that maybe there’s some things that me and the rest of the boys can help with, that maybe you and that lawyer might not manage. I’m not saying we want to make a mess, you get me? I’m saying that there’s things we can do, and we’ve got connections, so I’m just putting it out there. Just in case there’s something.”
Dean ended up finishing the rest of his beer. He flagged down another and mulled the offer over as he waited for the bartender to return. The old, round-bellied man, graying with the threat of baldness thinning out his hair pulled the bottle from the little fridge and flicked the cap off before bringing it over. Clay’s offer was tempting, Dean couldn’t help thinking of his own resolution from earlier that day, and then he thought beyond that, to the trial Sam was undoubtedly preparing for that seemed, however much Dean wanted to fight it, fairly open-and-shut. “No messes?” Dean double-checked, not wanting to send out a bunch of violent criminals on a mission and get someone hurt or killed.
“We’ll play it straight,” Clay affirmed, and then grinned, his lips pulling back to display a row of white teeth. “Well,” he said, and shrugged, the gesture bizarrely bashful for someone Dean knew was a violent and likely remorseless criminal.
“This is your bar, yeah?”
“It’s not like we own it,” Clay said. “It’s in our neck of the woods, though, and, well,” he jerked his head at the interior, the people spread out, nursing their drinks around the place, focused on their own conversations. “It’s quiet.”
Dean set his beer bottle down and stared at his hands, splayed on the dark wood of the bar top. Sam would kill him if he ever found out, but Dean was beyond caring about that. Sam had chosen his life and he could get as pissed as he wanted, but at the moment Sam’s world was stepping on the toes of Dean’s and that was something they both would just have to accept.
Dean shifted on the barstool, leaned forward more and turned to really look at Clay. The man’s gaze was strikingly sharp and intense, and Dean could tell he was used to intimidating people without having to put much thought or effort into it, there was a bitter twist at the corner of Clay’s mouth, hiding there, and that was something Dean was familiar with, had seen enough hunter’s with that same twist to their expressions, even when they were laughing, like they did everything with a certain amount of dark irony. Dean wondered if Clay had his own Faribault lurking somewhere in the ridges of his past.
“There’s enough stacked against them, I’m not sure what you can do,” Dean admitted.
“Not much, I grant you,” Clay said. “Especially since we’re playing this one clean-cut and all. Put something out there.”
Dean had spoken with Sam about the case, not about what his brother planned to argue or what would be likely to happen though Dean felt sure that Sam had a pretty good idea about it already. As far as Dean could figure, though, the biggest thing stacked against his friends was, “The witnesses.”
Clay nodded to himself and then said, “We can do that.”
“Just like that,” Dean said, doubtful at how easy the other man made it sound.
Clay shrugged. “We’ll make ‘em an offer they can’t refuse.”
Dean snorted, and then tilted his beer toward Clay and said, “Without….”
But Clay cut him off. “Relax, we won’t harm a hair on anyone’s head. Anything else and you let me know,” he slipped a matchbook across the table, a four-leaf clover on one side, and the name of the pub on the other. Dean flicked it open to see a phone number written in blue ink. He flipped it closed and nodded.
Technically speaking, Sam didn’t have to stop by and visit Jesse and Aaron as frequently as he did. Some of the visits were business related, but as far as Sam could tell, there was no reason why either man would have to take the stand in their own defense, and he didn’t intend to put them up there, so it wasn’t as if he had to prepare them as witnesses. Nor was it necessary to keep them abreast of the details, because neither seemed overly concerned with his research, or the strategy he had worked up. They were both perfectly happy to sit back and let him do what he did and Sam hadn’t decided whether that was an indication of their trust in him or not.
Sam visited once a day, though, because they weren’t just clients they were friends. Or had been, at least, and that counted for something. If Sam were entirely honest, he visited them because he couldn’t quite make himself go out to Snelling and see Dean. It was mostly cowardice, but there was too much that Sam was trying to work out and his brother had way of making everything seem a lot simpler than they had any right to be.
Mostly, his visits were fairly short: he checked in, they chatted some, sometimes he had something to run by them or to drop off. Sam was usually optimistic, but he knew the court case looked, for all intents and purposes, as if it were a simple open-shut matter, and not in their favor, either. At best, it was a crap-shoot. No matter how much it felt like he had riding on the verdict, he couldn’t make himself feel confident about any aspect, and he wondered if maybe Aaron and Jesse knew the odds. If they did, they hadn’t made any effort to set his mind at ease about it. Instead, they talked like they had absolute faith in Sam, and it made him feel like they had been spending too much time with Dean, had picked up his stupid confidence in the ‘genius little brother’ and were just kicking back and laying it all on him. Which was ridiculous, because it was his job, and it was also a hell of a lot easier to have clients who were more or less happy to let him work as he saw fit and not poke and prod at things they really didn’t know anything about. It was possible he was maybe more than slightly emotionally involved.
“You are my hero, man,” Jesse insisted as he gobbled up the chocolate bar in a single bite. Sam glanced at Aaron and they shared an eye roll. “I moved out here,” he continued, answering Sam’s question as he licked the melted chocolate off his fingers, “because Blue Earth felt claustrophobic, you know? Or,” he paused, squinting a little at Sam, “Maybe you don’t. People knew me, either way, and it felt like maybe I just wanted to start over.”
Jesse had explained some about his home life, how his mother had died when he was a kid and his dad was drunk most of the time and violent for pretty much all of it. Jesse had gotten into a lot of trouble back then, started early because it was one of the few things he’d discovered he was good at, or at least, one of the few things anyone had ever taken the time to tell him he had a talent for. It was a matter of a misunderstood, misdirected kid looking for some place to fit in and finding a role model in the wrong man, and so Jesse had started boosting cars when he wasn’t studying for algebra tests. Sam wondered if it was maybe why Dean had taken his friends along when John had called him out, asked him to drive out as quick as he could knowing Dean had no car readily available. He sure as hell knew it was why his brother had such a stiff sentence dropped on him for his first criminal offense. Faribault was cracking down on car theft, and since Dean and Grady had clearly fallen in with the wrong crowd the judge hadn’t cared to distinguish between them.
Aaron, for his part, had been happy to shadow his best friend wherever he went, which included out on boosts and also, right into trouble and also, over to Minneapolis. “After a while,” he had said, “when you get through something like Faribault, you don’t want to come back to teachers and parents who think they know you when they really don’t.” Sam wondered if that was maybe why Dean had lasted three months before he had taken off on his own, leaving Sam with their father, waving it off like he’d just grown too old not to be on his own. Sam had been twelve; Dean had only been sixteen.
“Hey,” Sam said, “whatever happened to Grady?” He could barely remember Grady from back then. As far as Sam had been concerned, Dean had been his hero and his role model and Jesse had been a loud-mouthed mischief-maker, always keen to get up to something outrageous. Aaron played Sam at chess more than once, taught him some tricks with lock picks that John himself hadn’t known, and had a sarcastic, biting wit that had made Sam gleeful to listen to. Grady had mostly drifted in the background: not as clever as Aaron, not as troublesome as Jesse, but Grady had always been smiling or laughing. He was funny, Sam remembered, and in love with music.
Jesse and Aaron shared a look that Sam was growing uncomfortably familiar with, like they were deciding what to tell him. “Dean didn’t mention him?”
Sam huffed. “My brother never mentioned any of you once he left Blue Earth.”
“Grady died,” Jesse said.
“Grady fucking killed himself,” Aaron corrected. “He washed a handful of Zoloft down with a bottle of whiskey, and he knew what he was doing.” Jesse looked like he wanted to argue, but the bitter edge of Aaron’s voice indicated that, as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t up for debate.
“When?” Sam asked, tried to imagine the soft-smiling, quiet dark-haired boy that he remembered doing what Aaron had described. The thought hurt, maybe more than it should have, but he knew that whatever Grady had done had more than a little to do with what had happened to him, to all of them, and it was just another indication of the severity at Faribault.
“Sometime in August,” Aaron said, sounding clinical and detached. Sam wondered if it was because he had stopped caring, or because he cared too much. “2007.”
Sam found his breath catching and he choked a little. “Uh,” he said. “That’s…” but couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t think of anything to say, his head too busy turning over the date, more pieces coming together to make a pretty harsh picture that Sam was having trouble looking at. “It’s too bad,” he finished, entirely inadequately. “It’s horrible,” he corrected, and then, “I’m sorry.”
Sam was more than a little tired of getting blind-sided by details about his brother’s history that Dean had never seen fit to impart, and regardless of whether he knew why Dean kept so much in the dark or not, he was sick of letting it continue. He flipped his phone open and selected Dean’s name from the caller list, a number he hadn’t used in ages but managed to keep regardless of how many times he’d gotten drunk enough and angry enough to consider deleting for good. Not that he hadn’t had it memorized since he’d been a kid, the gesture would have been symbolic at best. “Hey,” he said, sounding as casual as he could when Dean answered the phone. “You at the motel?” Dean’s answer was slightly reticent but Sam brushed passed that, “Great, I’m stopping by; don’t go anywhere.”
Dean answered the door three minutes later, his expression a combination of resigned amusement. “What, did you call from the parking lot?” he said as he closed the door behind Sam.
“So, hey, I was thinking about when we were kids,” Sam said, still trying to sound casual and more than a little irritated that his voice came out thick and false and maybe a little more throaty than usual. “In Blue Earth,” he clarified. “I remember Jesse and Aaron really well, but whatever happened to Grady?”
Dean pinched the bridge of his nose and then raised dull eyes. “Stop it, Sam.”
“What?” He really didn’t sound as innocent as he’d been hoping, maybe he’d gotten out of practice; not that he’d ever been able to use it successfully against Dean. His brother could always tell when Sam was laying out bullshit, though most times, Dean would go right ahead and give into it, even after calling Sam out on it.
“Stop coming over here and asking questions like you don’t already have the answers.” It was gratifying to hear the volume of Dean’s voice rise, his brother was moving passed resigned and into more familiar grounds. He was getting angry, and Sam sensed a fight growing between them, and it was like exercising a muscle he hadn’t used in a while, the first few minutes filled with adrenaline and excitement to be moving again after so many years of disuse.
“He committed suicide sometime in August,” Sam said. “In 2007.” He rolled his shoulders back and tilted his head before he asked, “So how much of that had to do with why you left?”
“It had nothing to do with it.”
“Bull shit,” Sam said, separating the words and biting them out. Let’s do this, he thought, and then, slightly panicked, We’re doing this. “Dad had just died and then Grady died, and you started thinking about it all again, didn’t you? You couldn’t push it away like you’ve been doing, probably since it happened! Am I right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “And I was there, and you couldn’t keep it together and you knew that it was either tell me the truth about all of it, or push me away and you took the coward’s way out!”
“No,” Dean said, pushing into Sam’s space. “Dad was dead and the demon was dead, and you started spouting off a bunch of bullshit about hunting again.”
Sam looked at angry green eyes and when he spoke again his voice was gruff but softer than it had been, “It wasn’t bullshit.”
“That’s exactly what it was!” Dean shouted. “It was you giving up everything you always wanted because of some misplaced attempt to make it up to dad after-the-fact. Like dad would give a shit that you were hunting like he always wanted! That wasn’t your life … that isn’t your life.”
“It was what I wanted,” Sam said, catching his brother’s wrist before Dean could pace away from him. He remembered the argument they had then, both of them knowing the other too well not to know precisely what to say to wound deep. He should have known right then what Dean had been doing, because it was just what Dean always did; but there had been truth at the heart of what his brother had been saying; there was a part of Sam that felt he had to make it up to his dad. Most of him, though, had been too wrapped up in Dean, who had been falling apart, Sam could see it a little clearer every day, and it had scared him. Sam knew that whether Dean could face it or not, there had been truth in what Sam had said as well, Dean had pushed extra hard because he’d needed to be able to walk away, just like he’d needed to walk away when he was sixteen and fresh out of Faribault. His brother hadn’t dealt with what had happened in the detention center; that was clearer than anything.
“Maybe it’s what you thought you wanted,” Dean said. “But I’d heard you talk about school, about becoming a lawyer … about Jess … enough to know that you weren’t walking away from it with only one year left between you and everything you’d been working towards.”
“Jess and I broke up,” Sam said, his jaw clenching. Dean shrugged, like he didn’t care. It pissed Sam off a little more, the anger that had been abating at the sight of Dean’s anguish rising again. “If I wanted it so damned bad, why did I break-up with her when I got back to Stanford?”
“I dunno,” Dean snarled. “I’m not your god-damned shrink! What do you want from me?”
It was Sam’s turn to push into Dean’s space, and the room was small enough that Dean stumbled over the waste paper basket and ended up with his back pressed against the wall as Sam said, “I want you to quit treating me like I’m still a little kid, Dean! I want you to stop making my god-damned decisions for me and acknowledge the fact that I am a fucking adult!”
Dean’s hand flashed up and Sam half expected a punch, but instead Dean grasped the back of his neck and yanked him forward, pressed their mouths into a fierce kiss that went on until Sam started to worry about catching his breath. Dean broke the kiss with a sharp bite of teeth on Sam’s bottom lip, and then they stood, both panting, defiance in the depths of Dean’s eyes and Sam could almost hear his brother saying, ‘Tell me I treat you like a kid now!’
It was too much and it was not enough. There was so much stretching between them, it seemed impossible that they could ever resolve it all and move beyond it. Dean expected Sam to walk away, just like he always did, their well-choreographed dance of push-pull angry revelations always seemed to play out that way, with Dean striking out fast and hard and to the very heart of Sam, revealing something too much to bear. It was there, plain as day, for Sam to read in his brother’s face. That Dean would give-in and let his brother in, but only because he was confident that Sam would never see it through, that he would leave just like he seemed to always do. Just like when Sam had marched out of his high school graduation and right onto a bus and straight to Dean, and within a week had badgered and argued and insisted until finally he had won. Sam had lost his virginity in a run-down, disco-themed motel room to his brother. It hadn’t ended there. Not until August came and Sam stepped out of the Impala and into Stanford, just like he’d always planned.
Sam could declare his commitment to Dean all he wanted, but it certainly hadn’t been evident, he could see that, looking back. Hindsight was 20/20, but he also knew that he had only ever been brave enough to make a move on his brother because he had been so confident in who he was and where he was going. He’d had to fight so hard to get to Stanford that fighting Dean hadn’t been anything, barely a challenge; it had certainly been worthwhile. Dean wasn’t interested in college, though, or in settling down. He wasn’t happy to drift around Palo Alto and fit himself into the life Sam was determined to build. He would drive through often enough, and they would lose themselves in each other, and for the empty space in his life where Sam had made room for thoughts of commitment and romance, there had been Jess. He’d never asked Dean what he’d wanted, though. Sam had assumed his brother would know that he was wanted, that he was missed, but looking at Dean, Sam finally understood that the confident, cocky defense his brother put on was protecting a deeper insecurity that he’d ever anticipated. Dean didn’t know any of those things; he was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
With a growl, Sam yanked Dean’s T-shirt over his head, shoved him back against the wall as he sucked a path down Dean’s neck, his hands working over his brother’s skin until both his hands were tangled in Dean’s hair, tipping his head back as Sam kissed his mouth, his skin. It wasn’t release; it was revelation. His brother’s fingers working the buttons of his shirt free, and then bypassing his exposed chest entirely as they worked his pants open and tugged his cock free. Sam found himself stilling as Dean gripped him, dropped his head to a pale freckled shoulder and just gasping as the rough hand slid down and then up just once.
Dean pushed him backward, one hand to his chest as the other worked his cock, and Sam let himself drop backward onto the bed, his brother kneeling above him. Sam had seen Dean tousled before, seen his hair mussed in all directions and seen him in all states of undress. He still found his breath catching, Dean with his knees pressed into the bed on either side of him, one hand gripping his cock. Dean’s hair was tousled, his lips bitten red; his chest was glowing in the light with a thin sheen of sweat and his eyes were dark and full of promise. There was a bruise that Sam had sucked into his neck; his jeans were unbuttoned, slung low on his hips. It was just a moment to catch their breath, but Sam couldn’t move, couldn’t think anything beyond how beautiful his brother was, how incredible. “Dean,” and maybe that said it all, maybe a part of everything he meant was in his tone, because Dean tipped forward, kissing him, pressing him back into the bed and then drifting lower, tongue laving across his chest.
Sam couldn’t think beyond the idea of more, his hands pressed against his brother’s back, trying to get more of that devilish tongue, and then drifted down, pushed inside his brother’s pants to grip his ass, growled, “Fucking do it.”
Dean’s voice was a husky whisper as he said, “Do what?”
Sam bucked his hips upward as his hands pulled his brother down, trying to press their cocks together. He wanted to push inside him, like coming home; wanted to feel Dean moving beneath him, around him. With his new understanding, however, Sam wasn’t sure he had the right, didn’t know if he hadn’t already made too many demands of his brother, so he said, “Something, anything.”
Dean knelt-up, pushed his jeans off and then slid down the length of Sam’s body, stood at the side of the bed and worked Sam’s pants down his legs as Sam toed off his shoes. He tossed down a foil packet and a tube of lube beside Sam’s arm and then crawled up the length of Sam’s body, dropped his mouth to Sam’s neck and shifted his knees further apart, canted his hips as he said, “go on,” in a husky growl against Sam’s ear.
Sam grabbed a fistful of his brother’s hair and kissed him, every inch of the ferocious love he felt he’d been drowning in for so long, all the frustration and hurt that had been simmering since Dean had walked out, his desperate hunger, he poured it into Dean’s mouth and Dean drank it down, pushed back with his own hunger. Sam worked the cap of the lube off as they kissed, coated his fingers and bit down on Dean’s lip as he pushed two fingers inside, found himself arching off the bed as Dean moaned and angled his hips for more, bringing their cocks together.
It could have gone on forever and Sam would have been happy. The slick slide of his fingers, of their cocks, of their tongues, tied up in one another like they should be. He’d forgotten what it had been like between them. No, not forgotten; he’d convinced himself that it couldn’t ever have been like that. But the proof was there in their moans, in their motions. When Dean sat back, Sam’s fingers still inside him, Sam growled and chased his mouth, quieted as he watched his brother bite a tear into the foil packet, eyes dark with want as he slid the condom down the length of Sam’s cock.
Dean took him in slowly, head tipped back until he was fully seated and Sam lost patience, pulled him forward and into another kiss. “I can’t,” but Sam didn’t know what he couldn’t do, and it didn’t matter, because then Dean was shifting his hips, circling them slowly and grinding down. Sam just couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but grab Dean’s hips and push up, thrust up hard and again, gasping into his brother’s mouth as Dean said, “Yeah,” and “Jesus, Sammy,” and sucked bruises across his chest. He pressed down to meet every thrust, hands braced against Sam’s chest, gripping Sam’s upper arms, knotting through Sam’s hair and pulling him closer, demanding Sam’s mouth against his body.
Swallowed up in the feel of Dean’s skin beneath his fingers, of the taste of him, the smell of him, the feel as he clenched around Sam and rolled his hips, Sam could barely think to move his hand. He gripped Dean’s cock and let his brother thrust forward, back and forth, into his grasping hand, felt the grip of Dean’s body around him as his brother came, the sticky-warmth spilling across Sam’s chest and Sam lost himself in Dean, pushed in hard and stared at his brother’s face lost in bliss, at the bruises Sam’s fingers, Sam’s mouth had pushed into his familiar, freckled skin, his hands in Sam’s hair, the burn of his nails down Sam’s chest. Sam’s vision whited-out as he came.
Everything was a mess, Sam could see that; it was more than clear. The more he tried to work through it and figure things out, the more it seemed to fly out of his control. He wasn’t sure if he could patch things up with Dean, if Dean would let him. His earlier realization only made it harder to overlook the history of hurts between them.
The closer the date of the trial came, the more concerned Sam grew about it. It seemed impossible that he would manage to pull a miracle out of somewhere and win a verdict that wouldn’t send Dean out of his life forever. Maybe it shouldn’t feel like any chance of reconciliation with his brother was tied-up in in the verdict, but it did. Sam wanted to prove that Stanford and all the drama that he had caused with his going there had been worth it. Like Dean wouldn’t understand why the compulsion to break away into that new life had been so strong.
More than that, it felt as if Jesse and Aaron were entrusting themselves to him, like they had put the cards out there, and then dealt him into the game of revenge they were playing and he could somehow redeem the injustice of what they had experienced if only he could get them out of it Scott-free.
It was impossible to pretend it was a court case, with a simple ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ decision. The weight of it fell heavy on him, and he worried that he would be another in the long line of people who had let Jesse and Aaron and Dean down. The specter of Faribault loomed large over the case, and he had done enough research into trauma to understand that Dean’s practice of avoidance was only delaying the inevitable. Dean needed exactly what he hadn’t gotten when he’d been a kid, he needed justice, and Sam needed to prove that sometimes the law, when it was used the right way, could deliver that justice. He needed to show Dean exactly what had drawn him to his profession; and maybe a part of that had to involve ripping open his brother’s old wounds and making them fresh again, but Sam had to hold on to the hope that they would heal, and maybe then Dean could really move past it all.
Somehow, Sam had to introduce Faribault into that courtroom and put Dowell and the men involved on trial. If he had to be held in contempt of court in order to achieve that, he would.
Growing up, the one thing Jim Murphy had always heard his parents and their friends stating and re-stating time and again was that there was no profession in the world that was without flaw. At the age of five, while other little boys were still entertaining fantasies of being astronauts and firemen, Jim had already determined that he was going to be a priest, and so each time a grown-up claimed that no job was perfect he had always quietly assured himself that he had found one that was. His mother who, though never outright discouraging, had nonetheless been slightly hesitant to wholly encourage her son’s chosen career, had frequently elaborated, “It’s not that you won’t ever find a job that you absolutely enjoy, but there’s always some aspect of it that keeps it just shy of perfection.” She had pictured her son traveling the world as a renowned soloist, performing in operas that he would invite her to see. Between her husband’s outright pride, and Jim’s own determination, she had quickly begun talking about his singing potential in a wistful tone but settled for Jim’s promise that he would never stop singing.
In seminary school, Jim had discovered that there were parts of being a priest that were indeed very difficult, but that it didn’t mean they were not still enjoyable, or at least, rewarding. One year after being fully ordained he had been posted at a little rural church in Japan when he learned that devils indeed took many forms, and some of them inspired legends and myths and fairytales but were no less real. So Jim found himself in a foreign land researching and then setting about ridding the village of a Shu no Bon who had caused several heart attacks in the area. Even then, he embraced the new and entirely unforeseen aspect of his job with excitement and curiosity.
No job, however, was completely perfect, and while Jim loved every aspect of being a priest, he discovered the most significant downside when he returned to North America and took up his place as minister in Blue Earth. In the summer time, the historic white church sat perched atop a slight hill amidst a swell of trees, nestled in the heart of a residential area, overseeing many of its parishioners from its vantage point; the building itself a shepherd keeping watch of its flock. In the winter, surrounded by branches and snow, it blended, serene and elegant. Inside, however, there was no masking its age, and while the church did not frown on its congregation huddling happily inside their winter coats, the priest had a precise dress code.
It was a small thing, a wholly survivable thing, but Jim had never been one to enjoy the cold and there was no denying that, between the drafts and need to keep the heating bill at a certain amount, the church was never entirely comfortable in the cold months. Jim drew the line at his office which, located in the basement of the church, had four thick stone walls and one small, though still remarkably drafty, window. He kept a pair of knitted gloves in the top drawer of his desk and a small heater in the corner beside his chair; two little guilty pleasures but ones he would stand by. The Lord, in all his wisdom, would surely forgive him.
Stepping outside of his office, Jim took a moment to adjust to the nip in the air before climbing the steps to the main body of the church. It was a weekday and early enough that he was not surprised to find he was the only one inside, though he made a slow circuit just the same, as much to stretch his legs as the make certain that he was not neglecting his duties. He ended his circuit by the votive candles, watching the flames bob and twist, his thoughts overtaken with the memory of a small dark-haired boy who had stood in that very spot so may years ago and looked up at him with solemn eyes and asked, “Why do we light the candles, Father?” He held the memory of that earnest face as he lit a candle of his own, and then another beside it, thought of the two boys as they had been, troubled but always searching for the right path. Jim lit the candles for the boys they had been, but he prayed for the men that Aaron and Jesse had become.
The rumble was low, like oncoming thunder filtering through the walls of the church, but it was undeniably familiar, even after so many years. Jim blessed himself and strode briskly to the doors at the back, pulling them open just in time to see Dean Winchester reach the top of the cracked cement steps. “I’d know the sound of that engine anywhere,” he said, when Dean looked slightly startled by his sudden appearance. “It’s good to see you, Dean.” He couldn’t keep the smile from his face as he gripped Dean’s upper arms, holding him still long enough to get a good look at the boy he hadn’t seen in ages.
He was a man, now, Jim corrected himself, and no longer the scrawny teen he remembered. Dean stood tall and broad, a hint of stubble along his jaw and dark smudges beneath his eyes; the tips of Dean’s ears were pink and Jim could see that the man’s knuckles were the same color, chapped from the brisk chill of the wind. There were hints of the boy Jim had known in the familiar march of freckles across a face that had a familiar, if more defined shape, and the wide green eyes and hair that spiked up in that same way it always had done, encouraged by Dean’s restless fingers despite his father’s displeasure with it. Still, Jim could read the shadows in Dean’s eyes and found himself mourning the loss of the wide smile with which Dean had always greeted him, wondered if it had been a single event that had made the man who faced him now so subdued, or if it had taken an unrelenting succession of misfortune.
He noted it all in moments, his attention recalled as Dean ducked his head slightly, hesitant, and said, “Pastor Jim.”
Jim found his smile again and pulled Dean into a hug. “It’s good to see you,” he said, the truth in his words making his statement heavy. “Come in. It’s cold outside.” Not that the inside of the church was that much better, he thought as he pulled the door closed, rubbing his hands together to return circulation to them. He looked up and caught Dean’s lips twisting up.
“Still hate the cold?” Dean said, amusement clear in his expression as in his tone.
Jim dropped his hands back to his side and noted that Dean stood taller than Jim himself by at least three inches. “I was going to offer you a drink to warm up, but now I am having second thoughts.”
His faked indignation was rewarded as the twisting smirk of a smile blossomed to something more relaxed as Dean huffed and shook his head, “That’s okay, I’m a little old for hot chocolate anyway.”
Jim shrugged and began walking back toward his office, “I was thinking more about a glass of scotch, but if you’d prefer…” He opened the door to his office, stopped just shy of rubbing his hands together in appreciation for the warmth that wrapped around him as he stepped inside, and instead headed across the room to pull the scotch from the bottom cupboard.
Pouring two glasses, he handed one over to Dean, and gestured for the other man to take a seat. “How have you been?” he asked, after Dean had taken a sip of the scotch and settled back in his chair. Jim watched as the other man categorized the changes to the office, took in the framed photographs on the shelves with a slight widening of his eyes but nothing more.
“I’ve been hunting,” Dean said, the shrug evident in his tone if not his body language. “I’ve got my car and the open road. I’m still here.” Jim thought about John, four years dead, almost five, and wondered if that was enough time for Dean to reconcile himself with everything his father was, and wasn’t, time enough to heal.
“Well, that’s something.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He watched as Dean took another long drink from his glass before leaning forward in his chair. “I didn’t just come to catch up.”
Even as a boy, Dean had never been one to observe social niceties when there was something he was after. Jim had found it refreshing then, but a part of him wished for a little more time with the man who he had regarded as a son and yet hadn’t seen in so long. Still, it wasn’t anything he hadn’t been expecting, ever since Sam had breezed through, looking pinched and earnest and clearly struggling with something. Now there was a boy who could prevaricate and mislead, Jim wondered what he was like as a lawyer and couldn’t imagine him as being anything short of formidable.
“I didn’t think so,” he said, taking another sip of his scotch as he waited.
The silence stretched as Dean sat, leaning forward and staring into his glass, swirling the amber liquid one way and then the other. Jim waited, the words of one of his mentors echoing in his thoughts, advice he’d given about confession and being patient above all else, “sometimes people need some time to get themselves in order, before they ask for something they don’t think they deserve.”
“I need your help,” Dean said.
Jim set his glass on the desk and leaned back in his chair, his fingers interlocking as he asked, “What is it?”
“Jesse and Aaron,” Dean said. He cleared his throat and glanced quickly up before looking back down at his scotch, setting it on the desk as Jim had done, before focusing back on the floor, analyzing the pattern of the rug, no doubt. “They’ve been accused of murder…”
“I know this,” Jim said, softly prompting. “I don’t see how I could help with that.”
Dean looked up at him then. Years ago, a pale, gaunt-faced boy had looked at him with the same pleading, solemn eyes and said, “No matter what you hear, tell my dad that I’m okay.” Jim swallowed down the memory as Dean said, “We need a witness. Someone to testify that they were with Aaron and Jesse on the night of the murder.”
“You’re asking for an alibi,” Jim said. “And you thought a priest would be perfect?”
Dean shook his head. “Not just a priest.”
Jesse had red hair when he was a child. Jim had baptized him, just like he baptized Aaron. Unlike Aaron, however, Jesse had wriggled and generally been uncooperative, and splashed water all over Jim’s vestments. He had seen them every Sunday for morning mass, spoken with them after their Catechism. When Jesse’s mother had died, he’d presided over the funeral, tried to help him grieve and cope with his loss, and in the end, watched with a heavy heart as his efforts met with resounding failure. Then, after years of listening to stories about, “those two bad seeds” who were committing criminal acts in and around Blue Earth, there was Dean, who Jim had always worried was too isolated, with shy, quiet Grady and Jesse and Aaron in tow. Jim still couldn’t help the fond recollection of the day Aaron and Jesse had stopped boosting cars and returned to the church, shuffling and awkward like they thought he might boot them out for daring to show up after everything they’d been up to.
“You once told me,” Dean said, cutting through Jim’s thoughts, “that if I ever needed anything, that I should come and ask you.”
Maybe it was a reasonable request. Maybe someone else would have found themselves in less of a moral quandary, but Jim knew it was a slippery slope, integrity sold for so little sometimes, and he wasn’t sure that, after all he had come through he could throw it away. Before seminary school, Jim had studied at college, had received a degree in philosophy. There were so many levels on which he found himself rebelling against the thought: Kant’s categorical imperative twisted up with the vows he had taken as a priest, his duty and responsibility and his determination not to ever in any way abuse his position. Amongst all of this was the thought of placing his hand on the Bible and vowing to speak only truth, and then uttering only lies. “I don’t think you fully understand what it is you’re asking me to do.”
“I’m asking you to save two of your boys.”
Jim ran a hand over his chin, torn in two different directions, by two different tenets of his faith. “Are they guilty? Did they murder that man?”
“Yes.”
Dean didn’t hesitate in his reply, and he did not avert his gaze. “I know what they have been up to, Dean. I know…” he sighed again, because regardless of what he knew, it was ingrained in him to hold out hope, to never turn away a soul in need. “Why would you ask me this,” Jim wondered. “What about the life that was taken? What is that life worth?”
“To me?” Dean said. “Absolutely nothing.”
The answer was chilling in itself. Jim knew Dean well enough to be certain that he would never ask for Jim to lie without good reason: Dean knew the importance of vows and he also knew how Jim himself valued them. Yet he showed not the slightest hint of remorse over the victim of what Jim understood to be a brutal murder. It was the darkening of familiar green eyes with a depth of pain that caught Jim off guard.
“Why?” he asked, which perhaps should have been his very first question, but he had stopped expecting more from Jesse and of Aaron, was too familiar with the line they’d crossed to hold out much hope that they would ever return. Dean was a different matter; Dean had always seen the world in black and white, good and bad. Jim knew the man hunted and, from what he had heard, was even better than John had been; but demons and ghouls were one thing, people were another. “Tell me why you feel that way.”
Dean looked away, his jaw clenching visibly and Jim sat forward, fought to remain patient and let Dean answer in his own time. “Because of what he did to us,” Dean said, his voice thick, struggling to hold back an avalanche of emotion. “The four of us,” he said. Jim felt a horrible understanding begin to blossom, and he fought it desperately, the truth too horrible to entertain on a whim. “We were just kids.” Dean drew in a shuddering breath and Jim could see that he was shaking with the effort to hold back the emotion surging through him, his eyes wet and, as Jim sat awash in the dawning understanding and horror, a tear slid down Dean’s cheek.
“Faribault?” Jim asked.
He wasn’t prepared for the answer. Wasn’t ready to hear about six months of humiliation, abuse and rape. Of four boys that Jim knew, just fifteen years old, clinging together and counting down the days, the subjects of a broken system. If anyone had known, and they must have, they hadn’t said anything, hadn’t done anything, and there was nothing the boys themselves could have done. Jim wondered if Dean understood that. Understood that he was not responsible for what had happened, wasn’t weak because it had.
Jim kept thinking that he had been there. He’d spent his Saturdays driving out to see them, and he’d never questioned it, not that there had been any real indications. Jim knew places like Faribault, knew to expect some bruises: boys were boys, and troubled boys were troubled boys. He held on to the fact that Dean knew how to fight, more than knew how to take care of himself; they all had. He’d told them each to hold on, talked to them to keep their morale up. When he asked, however, they each individually assured him that everything was fine, dismissed the hurts as petty squabbling between other boys. Jim should have known better.
The press of responsibility and guilt weighed down on him, and he knew that whatever he could do to help Dean, he would do. Still, he could not so easily consider throwing away his vows, couldn’t justify in himself that it was right to do so. It was a matter for the court, and Jim believed that religion had no place in the courtroom.
Jim pulled the decanter of scotch from the cupboard and refilled their glasses, but he could not bring himself to sit down. He finished his drink, and stared at the glass, found himself repeating the Lord’s Prayer over and over in the back of his head. He dropped a hand to Dean’s shoulder and squeezed it gently. “I have a decision to make,” he said.
Dean set his empty glass carefully onto Jim’s desk as he stood up, meeting Jim’s eye he nodded. “You’ll make the right choice,” he said. “Whatever you decide.”
|<< END PART THREE >>|
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