[Fic: Supernatural] "When you come to a fork in the road"
Title: When you come to a fork in the road
Author: Brittany rocknload
Fandom: Supernatural
Words: ~5000
Rating: PG
Summary: Spoilers for 3x02; semi-AU. So what if Lisa was lying? And came clean later? How would Dean handle that? Without any chick flick moments, that’s for sure.
Author’s Notes: levade wanted to see a story where Ben maintained an interest in the supernatural and ran into Dean on the job. And hopefully, finishing this will knock my writer’s block flat on its ass! So that I can get to the owed fics and stuff. >_____> AND NOW I CAN SLEEP. HURRAH.
*
Dean never came back until Ben was eleven, which was freaking ridiculous, but mom said that his job was real important but also real sucky and he just didn’t have time, so whatever. Even though things were “different” now, he still didn’t seem to have enough time to say much, because the first time he showed up again, he was there for like ten minutes.
“Ben,” Mom said. “There’s someone here to talk to you,” and he knew that meant he had to put the video game down and look.
And there was Dean standing next to her, looking pretty much exactly like the picture in Ben’s head except not as tall. He grinned like they knew each other or something. “Hey, remember me?”
“Barely,” Ben said, and picked up his PSP again.
They didn’t really talk much after that.
Ben didn’t know why he’d been so mad. He knew that he’d bee “totally unacceptable” and “childish” and “rude” and some other stuff, he knew because he expected Mom to say all that just as soon as Dean was gone. But she didn’t. She’d said that he was mean.
Mean? How could be mean? Dean was like, forty-five, and Ben had just turned eleven. It didn’t even make sense and that night he couldn’t even sleep, that’s how wrong it was.
Mean?
Okay, Mom hadn’t quite said that. She’d said something in her disappointed voice like, “I think you really hurt his feelings, honey,” and that made it even more bizarre. Mom just didn’t understand that guys like Dean weren’t girls.
It bothered him a lot.
And maybe Mom was right, because the next time Dean showed up it was almost Christmas and Ben was twelve. The resent he brought with him was pretty obviously a skateboard - it was in a box but the wheels were sticking out and the wrapping paper was all crumbled around them. But Ben remembered what Mom had said about being mean, so he made sure not to say anything but, “Thank you,” as he went to put it under the tree.
Dean just looked at him funny. “Since when are you so polite?”
“Since always.”
“Uh huh. Right.” Dean was still looking at him sideways, and later in the kitchen when he thought he was alone with Mom, Ben heard him ask, “Lisa, are you sure that’s Ben? Really Ben? Not one of those creepy-”
Mom whacked him on the arm. “Dean.”
“Hey, I’m just saying.”
Then they had pizza and soda, and Ben wasn’t really surprised when Dean had to go after that. Or when he started getting postcards after that. Not lots, but one every couple months or so. A whole letter on his birthday. The letters didn’t say much of anything, except the hi, how is school stuff he was used to getting from grownups who didn’t know what to say. The stamps on the back of them said a lot more.
The first one was from North Dakota, and the next one was from California. And then Virginia and Florida and Michigan and Wyoming and New York and Tennessee and Texas. Sometimes he’d lock the door to his bedroom and spread the postcards all across his bed and try to see if there was any kind of pattern. There wasn’t.
He didn’t even know why he was locking his door. So Mom wouldn’t see him looking so close, probably.
Okay, definitely.
He’d stopped telling her about the nightmares by the time he was ten. He didn’t tell her about the time he spent in the library reading books about ghosts and vampires and zombies and stuff, even if none of the stories rang true at least they rang familiar. Right, somehow, even if the nightmares still woke him up, every night.
The Internet was more useful.
It was a long time before he asked Mom if he could mail a letter back. It was a real short one, it was right to the point and it was a question he couldn’t ask anyone else, ever. Dear Dean, do you know anything about monsters?
He never got another letter again.
That didn’t really surprise him, either.
It was just after his birthday again before he heard anything at all, except it was two years later. Ben recognized the voice on the phone, but Dean acted like he was a total stranger when he said, “Hey, kid, is Ms. Braeden there?”
Ben handed over the phone without a word and then he got kicked out of the kitchen.
“Oh,” Mom said, when she thought Ben was too far away to hear. “It’s… It’s been a while.” She listen to Dean talk for a while, and Ben crouched down near the floor, by the kitchen door, so she wouldn’t see him if she looked.
“New Haven? That’s about fifty miles away…” Mom looked over her shoulder, but the wrong way. Ben was by the other door. “…I don’t think that’s a good idea, Dean.” Ben had known it was Dean anyway, but now he knew for sure.
Dean talked for a long time. Then Mom said, “I already told you-I don’t know. No.”
Ben ducked away from the door and headed towards his room. Mom’s voice still followed him: “I said no. It’s not a good idea.”
*
Finding some stuff was easier than Ben had thought it would be.
Getting to New Haven was just a matter of walking past his school bus stop and getting waiting at a regular one. He had enough money saved to pay the fare and also buy some ice cream when he got to the town, and that was the perfect time to ask the man behind the counter if there was any weird stuff going on.
“Weird stuff? Weird stuff like what?”
Ben didn’t like the look he was getting; he looked away and squirmed where he stood. He hadn’t thought much further than this. “Weird stuff like… I’m doing a school project about the news, and I’m… looking for stuff that’s-”
And it was like someone somewhere felt sorry for him, because then the man said, “Oh. You gotta be talking about the murders down at the hotel.”
That sounded pretty good, yeah.
It took all day to walk to where the Hotel Alden, because he couldn’t get a taxi if he wanted to have enough money to go home eventually. The sun almost gone by the time he saw it - a huge, broken down, white monument at the end of a lonely road. A big sign identified the place. At least, Ben was pretty sure Hotel Alden was what it said under all that graffiti.
This was a lot like a scene out of all those movies Mom didn’t like him watching.
At least he recognized the car. It was low and black, shiny in the dying light. Ben’s fingers ghosted over the paint as he walked by, approached the front entrance as fast as he could without running. He didn’t want to give himself a chance to chicken out.
The lock was broken. The door swung in with a creak when he pushed on it.
The man behind the counter back at the ice cream store had said the people that died were mostly teenagers that broke in, which not only sounded like a stupid horror movie but also a lot like right now. Ben didn’t get scared very easy but he knew he’d be stupid if that didn’t make him nervous, and he kept that in mind as he walked through the lobby.
There was no furniture, no paintings on the wall, the whole place was empty, and in the night that made it pretty creepy. He stopped when he got near the elevators, he didn’t know if he should go down the left hallway or the right one. He didn’t want to go down either of them, really.
He picked the left one.
It was too dark to see anything, which was fine, because Ben had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for. All he could make out were the two rows of identical wooden doors.
The first door he tried wasn’t locked. It felt weird to walk in without knocking, so he rapped on the door. “Hello?”
He was a dork.
The room had all the stuff a regular hotel room did, just a little grosser. There was a bed that smelled like it was stuffed with sawdust and a lamp covered in spider webs, Ben flicked the switch but the lights didn’t come on.
There was a creak when he touched the bathroom door, which was weird, because he was sure that was the exactly same noise the other door had made when he opened it.
He looked over his shoulder. “Is someone-”
He couldn’t help but yell when someone grabbed him by the jacket, and he was jerked around so fast that his sneakers squeaked on the tile floor. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”
It was too dark to see, but he still knew the voice. He’d just heard it, yesterday. He’d been startled, yeah, but he wasn’t really surprised.
It was pretty obvious Dean didn’t even recognize him, which made sense. His flashlight was pointed down at the ground, and it’d been two years anyway. At least Dean let go of the death grip on his jacket after a second, and said, “Listen, sorry, kid.”
“S’okay,” Ben said, shrugging.
“You kinda caught me by surprise,” Dean continued.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“What’re you doing here?”
Ben didn’t think that I want you to answer my question would go over very well at all, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say, either. There wasn’t any good reason to break into old buildings after dark, so he didn’t say anything.
“C’mon, you here with some buddies?”
Ben shook his head.
“Alone?”
He nodded.
“Heard the stories and just couldn’t stay away.” Dean’s tone said he didn’t think much of that, and he sighed heavily. “Brilliant, kid, just brilliant. What’s your name?”
Ben looked at the ground. “I’m…”
Dean sighed loudly. “C’mon, kid, just-”
“Ben.”
“Okay, Be…” Dean stopped talking all of a sudden, and then he was quiet for so long that Ben had to look up.
Just in time to get the flashlight right in his face. “Ow!” He jerked away.
He tried to, anyway, but he couldn’t get far because Dean had him by the arm. And then it was like they were back at the beginning of the conversation, because Dean yelled, “Jesus-what the hell are you doing here?”
Lucky for Ben, he didn’t have to answer that.
“Dean!”
Ben only remembered that Dean’s brother’s name was Sam because the postcards mentioned him once or twice or five times. Dean liked his brother a lot and worked with him, so that was probably who the tall guy was. There was a long shadow in his hand that looked like a gun, and Ben swallowed.
“Dean, we’ve gotta-who’s this?”
Dean let go of his arm. “Who’s this,” he muttered. “Who is this.”
Sam was quiet for a second. “Dean? You alright?”
“It’s Ben, Sam.”
Ben’s eyes were getting more used to the dark, he could see Sam’s mouth open and shut again. He lowered the shotgun. “Ben… Dean-Ben Ben? Ben Braeden? The kid we-”
“Oh, no, Sam. This is the other Ben Braeden, came this close to getting into the freakin’ Brady Bunch.”
The silence that followed was long and awkward. Ben wished he was invisible. Or that he’d stayed home.
“So, uh.” Sam cleared his throat. “What do we do?”
“Now,” Dean said. “We go outside.”
Ben didn’t have a choice about that.
Dean pulled him along as they marched out of the room, back down the left hand hallway, through the empty lobby, out the broken front door. Dean steered him towards the old car with impala written in cursive on the side, opened the door and shoved him in.
He slammed the door shut hard.
Ben couldn’t hear what they were saying, because they stayed outside, but they argued a while.
*
“Wow,” Sam said, his eyes drifting towards the Impala. “That’s… unexpected. Dude, he followed you.”
If Dean’s expression was anything to judge by, he didn’t think this was remotely funny. Which it wasn’t, but-it was kind of impressive that the kid had managed to find them. Kind of improbable, now that Sam thought about it. “Dean, how’d he even-”
“I called Lisa yesterday afternoon. Damnit!”
Sam didn’t ask why. He just watched Dean pace in place, a step in one direction and then another step the other way. He was absolutely not looking at the car. “We’re done for tonight,” he said.
Sam nodded.
“We call Lisa right now, we drive him back to Cicero and then we-”
Sam hesitated. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“Why the hell not?”
Good question. Sam thought a second on the best way to present the problem to Dean, and settled for the admittedly lame, “This would give you a chance to talk to him.”
Dean stopped his freaky nervous pacing dance to stare at him like he’d lost his mind. “Right.”
“I mean-” Sam tried to save it.
Dean wasn’t hearing it. Instead, he laughed out loud. “Because the right time and place for that is the middle of a school night at a condemned haunted hotel that eats kids. I’ve gotta say, man, your sense of timing’s gotten pretty-”
“Dude, he followed you,” Sam repeated.
Again, Dean was giving him the face that said you’re losing it, man. “I could swear we’ve been over this already.”
It was hard to present a point when Dean wouldn’t even let him build up to it properly, so Sam just rolled his eyes and moved on. “So what’s going to stop him from doing it again? On another job, maybe?”
“I-” Dean stopped, and he frowned. Then he held up his hands in exasperation. “What do you want me to do? I’ll buy Lisa a leash. I’ll threaten the kid with an ass kicking.”
Sam sighed.
Dean shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’ll tell him I don’t want anything to do with him, period. I’ll keep him away somehow.”
“He won’t ever speak to you again.” Which was obvious, and the idea, but Sam thought it was important to point this out.
“Yeah, well.” Dean snuck a glance at the car, where Ben was busy riffling through the cassette tape collection under the passenger’s seat. “Might save his life.”
Sam sighed again.
“Dude, will you quit that?”
“Do you want to hear what I’ve got to say, or not?”
“Not really.” He must have caught the almost deadly levels of irritation on Sam’s face, though, because then he rolled his eyes and said, “Okay, what?”
“He knows what you do.” Not a question-he wouldn’t have shown up here if he didn’t. It didn’t matter if he’d remembered what happened when he was younger, or been told bits and pieces of it by his mom, or maybe figured it out from Dean. The point was, he knew. “And you said yourself, jobs just don’t get tamer than this.”
Dean didn’t say anything.
“The ghost is completely quiet. We know where the body is. All we have to do is burn the bones.”
Dean knew what he was getting at and he’d have to say something about it at some point, and until that moment, Sam had every intention of filling in the silence with more relevant facts. “There’s not any reason why you couldn’t-”
“Sam, shut up.”
Sam stuck his hands in his pockets. “Maybe reasons why you shouldn’t, but not why you couldn’t-” And the right decision was always so freaking ambiguous anyway, in their line of work. In their lives. “I think you should think about it. At least for a second.”
Dean answered, then, and he didn’t even blink. “I did, and I’m done. Let’s go.”
He didn’t start off towards the car, though. He wanted Sam to make the first step in that direction, and Sam wasn’t going to make that decision for him. “Maybe for a little longer than that.”
“Sam, I am not Da-I’m not babysitting someone who’s not even old enough-he’s just-”
And he was stuck-couldn’t finish the first sentence without admitting more than he wanted, couldn’t cover it up with the second statement without admitting there was something really wrong with their own deeply screwed up childhoods. Sam let him flounder for a few sounds, opening and shutting his mouth like a fish, before he gently offered, “I’m not saying you should give him a gun.”
Dean turned to openly glare at the Impala, but from the look of things, Ben was too asleep to notice. “Definitely not Dad,” he muttered.
“No kidding.”
Now Dean was the one who sighed, turning away from the car and rubbing his temples, like the whole thing was one big headache. “Well, shit.”
*
Ben was almost asleep on the door, so it sucked out loud when the crappy metal pillow was jerked right out from under him. He grabbed onto the seatbelt before he fell, just barely reclaiming his balance.
“Out of the car.”
Ben knew he was in major trouble so he managed to stop the smart ass reply before it actually left his mouth. He did what Dean said, he climbed out quick.
Dean wasn’t as tall as Ben remembered but he was still pretty tall, staring down on him like he was, his arms folded across his checst. He looked pretty freaking serious. “How do you know?” he asked.
“Know what?”
Dean gestured around them, at the hotel, the car, it even looked like he included his brother and himself. “All of this. Everything. What we do.”
“I… don’t, really.” Ben dug in the dirt with his toes. “Mom said some stuff. And I read some other stuff.”
Actually, he pretty much remembered everything that’d happened back when he was eight. Mom hadn’t told him much but she hadn’t lied either, so when she’d told him that Dean’s job was helping people… It just made sense.
That was a bad answer, because Dean groaned. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter, now.”
“Ben,” Sam said, way more quiet than Dean. Ben was starting to think Sam was nicer than his brother. “You have to understand-what we do is very, very dangerous.”
Even if Sam thought he was stupid. He fumed. “You don’t have to talk to me like I’m-”
“Sam’s right, Ben,” Dean interrupted. And then he took a deep breath. “So why am I letting you come with us?”
It was a good question, especially since until right them Ben hadn’t known they were going to let him go with them. “Um,” he said, staring at them both. The wrong answer might change everything, so he thought about it for a minute. “You want to scare me, huh.”
Dean almost grinned. Ben could see his teeth, anyway. “Smart boy.”
Their plan didn’t sound very hard. Dean said there were bones in the west side of the hotel, Sam said he could perform some kind of spell in the east side of the hotel that’d summon the spirit so it wouldn’t mess with Dean. He was going to read it out of a book.
“You’re sure that’ll work?” Dean asked.
Sam shrugged. “Not entirely?”
“Um,” Ben said, not sure how he fit into all of this. “What am I supposed to-”
“You,” Dean said, and no question who he was talking to. “You stay with me, and you don’t go anywhere I haven’t gone first, understand?”
He sounded like an Army guy or something. “Yes, sir,” Ben said sarcastically, and apparently that was about the same as hitting Dean in the face with a brick. It’s what it looked like from his expression.
“You were saying?” Sam said.
“Shut the hell up,” Dean said right back, so friendly Ben thought he had to be joking. “Don’t you have some distracting to do somewhere?”
Sam didn’t really look like he was used to being bossed around like this, but he was only muttering a little when he left. Ben didn’t need to be told to follow Dean to the trunk of the car, where the guy pulled out a backpack and starting slinging all kinds of stuff into it.
“What’s that?” Ben asked, his eyes following a red bottle of … something. Another bottle of what looked like water followed. “What’s all that for?”
“There’s rules,” Dean said, totally ignoring his question. “You follow them or you don’t come, got it?”
There were a lot of rules. Ben had to do whatever Dean said, he couldn’t fall behind, he couldn’t stop to look at anything, he couldn’t go in a room first, he had to say if he saw anything weird, he couldn’t listen to any voices that told him what to do. Unless the voice was Dean.
“Yeah, I got it,” Ben grumbled.
“Good,” Dean said, slamming the trunk of the car, shut. He swung his back onto his back, and he held a shotgun loosely in one hand.
“Can I have a gun?” Ben asked.
“Not on your life.”
“Can I hold a gun?”
“Nope.”
Dean knew where they were going. They headed back into the hotel and skipped all the rooms, they threaded through the hallways and Ben didn’t say a word, because he was busy thinking about the rules and making sure he wasn’t breaking any of them. They were pretty easy but Ben knew Dean wasn’t being an idiot adult, he hadn’t said anything that wasn’t important.
It wasn’t long before Dean kicked the door open to one of the back room. Ben followed the rules, he waited a second or two before he followed.
It wasn’t the same style as the rest of the hotel. The floor was unfinished cement, the windows had plastic over them. Even weirder was the hole in the middle of the room, Ben could tell by the cracks in the cement, even if the pit was covered by a heavy tarp, secured with cement blocks.
“Huh,” Dean said. “That was easy.”
Ben shifted uncomfortably, but he still followed Dean to the tarp. “Wasn’t it…” He tried to think of what he meant. “Wasn’t it kind of too easy?”
“No such thing as too easy.”
“But-anyone could find this, right?”
“Private property,” Dean answered. “And the uninvited guests don’t make it back this far and leave. And hasn’t been here for that long.” He shrugged. “Kid, trust me, it makes sense.”
He pulled the tarp back and exposed what Ben knew was there already. It didn't stop his jaw from dropping.
He stared for almost a minute. “H-how…”
“Way I figure it,” Dean started, putting down the shotgun and crouching next to the skeleton. Almost skeleton. There were still… parts… Dean looked at the thing like he’d seen a million of them. “Someone wanted this guy dead, did the job with a .45 or something like it,” he pointed at the head, “and figured this here’s one place they’d never find the body. Shut the hotel down right after that.”
Ben’s stomach was doing somersaults in his chest. “So, you mean-it was whoever…” He looked away from the body. “Whoever owns the hotel?”
Dean chuckled. “Smart boy. Could be. But,” he said, getting to his feet. “Not our business. This is our business.”
Everything they needed was in that bag, Dean pulled out a bag and a bottle and started dousing the body in both. Salt and kerosene, he explained shortly, and Ben didn’t ask why. He’d do that later. Right now, he was just glad Dean didn’t want him to help or anything.
“And that’s that,” Dean said, as soon as he was done. “Now, we-”
Ben waited for him to say something else. Instead, Dean dropped his bag of stuff, and then he picked up the shotgun. His face had gone dark, dead serious, and Ben knew he'd seen or heard or maybe even just felt something.
“What?” Ben asked. “What is it?”
Dean shook his head. “When I say go,” he started, “I want you to-”
There was a flash of something, and the shotgun went spinning off into the dark.
Dean went flying, and he hit the wall across the room, so hard the window next to him cracked. He sagged down to his knees, groaning, shaking his head. “Ben, stay back,” he yelled.
Ben had no idea what that meant, so he stayed frozen in place. Back where?
The whole room was cold.
Dean was trying to stand up, bracing his hand against the wall. “Ben, I told you-” And maybe he was going to be clearer, but it didn’t matter, because there was the flash again. The window shattered, and Dean didn’t get up.
Nothing moved and no one made a sound.
Ben didn’t move because he couldn’t, there was something here and he couldn’t even see it. It took him a second-okay, longer-for him to get his nerve back, and then he was running across the room. “Dean?”
The air flashed, and it was exactly like getting punched in the face.
It didn’t hit him as hard, probably, but he slid across the floor on his back with blood in his mouth. He didn’t even yell, that’s how surprised he was.
He waited. Nothing else happened. He didn’t know if he should stand up or sit up or look around or what.
The shotgun had landed over here, he realized suddenly. It was only a few feet away, he didn’t even need to think about that. He rolled over and scrambled to it as fast as his hands and knees could carry him, and it was the best feeling in the world when his fingers closed around it.
The feeling didn’t last.
When he turned around, he could see it better-the thing with arms he could see through. The arms grabbed him, and for a second he was sure he was looking into an empty face.
It threw him.
He hit the ground again, but he wasn’t as scared. He had the gun, he could-but when he tried to get up, something hit him in the chest, the solar plexus and sent him right back down.
He yelled when it happened again, but it was getting hard to breathe.
He scrambled back on his hands, he tried to, and when it gave him a second he managed to get back to his feet. That’s when it grabbed him again, and this time it didn’t throw him.
The gun was missing. He didn’t know when he’d dropped it.
He couldn’t see anything at all, but he could feel frozen fingers around his throat, it felt like the cold was reaching down his throat. He struggled but there wasn’t anything to push against, nothing to grab onto. He couldn’t even talk or yell, he-
“Ben, get down!”
The shotgun blast sounded way louder than they ever did in the movies. It let go, and Ben ducked without even thinking, his hands over his ears, his knees banging hard on the cement. He cringed all over when it went off again.
The cold was gone.
He didn’t have any time to think about that, or wonder if the ghost had left-oh, man, that was definitely a ghost-because Dean was dragging him to his feet and talking real loud. “Did I hit you?” he demanded, grabbing Ben by the shoulders, shaking him a few times.
Ben looked up at him. He didn’t understand any of those words.
“Did I hit-”
Ben shook his head.
Dean shoved him down.
The ground hurt just as much this time as it did the other times, except now he landed on his hands and knees. He wanted to swear, he didn’t want to say anything-he bit his lip and looked up.
The thing was coming back, the pieces pulling themselves together like they were made of smoke. Dean fired again, blasting them apart. He had a little fire in his hand, he was standing next to the grave, and Ben squeezed his eyes shut when Dean dropped the lighter.
The scream was the worst thing Ben had heard in his whole life. He waited until it stopped before he opened his eyes.
Dean was standing by the body, watching the fire. It lit his face up orange, but Ben could still see the blood on it.
He hesitated, then he stood up, walking over to where the fire was going. He’d thought maybe the burning body would be sick, but it didn’t smell like anything but smoke.
He swallowed. “Dean, I-”
“Are you okay?”
Ben stared at the ground, more ashamed than he’d ever been in his life. “I’m sorry, I was supposed to leave, it just-I was stupid, I didn’t-” Didn’t listen to orders or even try to. Sure he knew best because of no reason at all. Acting like a freaking baby. Stupid.
Dean just raised his voice. “Are you okay?”
God, he was crying and he wasn’t even hurt. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
He waited for the yelling. He deserved it.
Instead Dean grabbed him so fast it was like an attack and hugged him so hard it was like another attack, and Ben could hardly breathe. But he could still smell the leather jacket smashed up against his face, old and a little dusty and just exactly like he remembered it.
“God,” Dean said. “I can’t fucking do this.”
*
Dean yelled at Sam a lot.
That was pretty much the whole car ride back to Cicero. Dean yelled at Sam. A lot. At first Sam apologized, and explained that it’d been kind of an experiment anyway, and they’d have to check with some guy to see what went wrong. Ben didn’t hear the name.
When Dean kept going, Sam started getting mad back. “Dean, I said I was sorry, alright?”
And then he just let Dean yell without saying much of anything.
Ben stared out the window from the backseat. He didn’t know his way around that well, but he noticed when things started to look familiar. Dean had asked him at one point if he still lived in the same house, and Ben had nodded in response.
By the time they pulled up to the house, Dean didn’t seem mad anymore. Ben wasn’t even sure he’d been mad to begin with.
By the time they pulled up in front of the house they’d all fallen into dead, depressing silence, even if Sam had glanced back once or twice to make sure he was still there. Dean turned off the car and got out, and Ben waited a second before he followed.
He only did that because he knew Mom would have noticed him missing by now. He wanted away from this situation more than anything.
“It’ll be alright, Ben,” Sam said.
“I know.” Ben gave him a small smile. “It was… fun.”
Sam laughed. It made Ben feel a little better when he climbed over the front seat and out of the car. Yeah, Mom would be pissed, but he’d live. Things could be… way worse.
Dean shut the door, and started following him up the driveway.
Ben gave him a funny look. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to talk to your mom.”
Ben froze in place and stared at him. “What? No, you can’t do that, you’re-”
“And let her think I encouraged you?” Dean laughed. It wasn’t funny, and he didn’t think so, either. “Yeah freaking right, I don’t think so.”
Ben didn’t say anything to that, because even if he was going to tell Mom the truth she might not believe him, so maybe he was right. Dean wouldn’t lie to Mom, and she probably knew that. It was still weird to have the guy follow him to his front door.
He felt like he was under arrest.
He didn’t go inside or knock on the door right away, even if Dean seemed to be waiting for that. “You’re not coming back, are you?” He hadn’t meant for it to come out as a question, but now it was, and he really, really wanted an answer.
Dean was quiet for a second. “Listen,” he said. “Ben. You can’t-do that, again. Ever. Understand?”
Ben nodded. He wouldn’t, anyway. He still didn’t knock on the door.
Dean waited. Then, “I’ll write.”
“Yeah, right,” Ben snapped back, not caring if he was rhyming, or if he sounded like a brat. “You weren’t very good at that before.”
Neither of them said anything for a while. Dean scratched the back of his head, he glanced at the front door. “I don’t know what to tell you, Ben, I really don’t.” Then he reached up to knock on the door himself.
“You’re not very good at this,” Ben said, quietly.
Dean flinched like that stung. “Nope.”
He didn’t get to stay long, because Mom threw him out of the house. Screaming. Ben tried to calm her down but it just wasn't working-he’d never been grounded until the end of high school, before. He locked himself in his room and beat his pillow with his fists until he fell asleep.
Sam said it’d be okay, right? Sam was a jerk. They both were.
When the postcards started coming again-from Washington, Alabama, Oklahoma, Main-he threw them all away. At first, anyway. He figured every one would be the last and it was stupid to get his hopes up.
But they kept coming.
He got a Led Zepplin CD for his next birthday.
Ben didn’t write back for a long time, a long time. He had homework, he had school, he and friends and girls he liked and-he didn’t know what to say. Dean probably had that problem, too, his notes were always short, how’s school, or work’s good, but he managed to say something.
Ben managed, too. The first letter he sent said, school’s good, how’s work?
The next one said, When I’m eighteen you can call or something, right?
He wasn’t expecting the answer he got back. He wasn’t expecting an answer at all. It came seven weeks later on the back of a postcard of the Grand Canyon, all covered in snow, and the postmark was from Prescott, Arizona.
It just said, Sure.
He kept that postcard in a drawer in his desk, along with the CD. He didn’t like Led Zepplin, much. And he didn’t have any idea at all if that one word was true or not, but he thought it probably was-it’d taken Dean a while to write back. He’d probably thought about it a long time.
It was nice to think about, anyway. Ben reread that card all the time. Even if it was just one stupid word.
God, he was turning into such a girl.
*
Author: Brittany rocknload
Fandom: Supernatural
Words: ~5000
Rating: PG
Summary: Spoilers for 3x02; semi-AU. So what if Lisa was lying? And came clean later? How would Dean handle that? Without any chick flick moments, that’s for sure.
Author’s Notes: levade wanted to see a story where Ben maintained an interest in the supernatural and ran into Dean on the job. And hopefully, finishing this will knock my writer’s block flat on its ass! So that I can get to the owed fics and stuff. >_____> AND NOW I CAN SLEEP. HURRAH.
*
Dean never came back until Ben was eleven, which was freaking ridiculous, but mom said that his job was real important but also real sucky and he just didn’t have time, so whatever. Even though things were “different” now, he still didn’t seem to have enough time to say much, because the first time he showed up again, he was there for like ten minutes.
“Ben,” Mom said. “There’s someone here to talk to you,” and he knew that meant he had to put the video game down and look.
And there was Dean standing next to her, looking pretty much exactly like the picture in Ben’s head except not as tall. He grinned like they knew each other or something. “Hey, remember me?”
“Barely,” Ben said, and picked up his PSP again.
They didn’t really talk much after that.
Ben didn’t know why he’d been so mad. He knew that he’d bee “totally unacceptable” and “childish” and “rude” and some other stuff, he knew because he expected Mom to say all that just as soon as Dean was gone. But she didn’t. She’d said that he was mean.
Mean? How could be mean? Dean was like, forty-five, and Ben had just turned eleven. It didn’t even make sense and that night he couldn’t even sleep, that’s how wrong it was.
Mean?
Okay, Mom hadn’t quite said that. She’d said something in her disappointed voice like, “I think you really hurt his feelings, honey,” and that made it even more bizarre. Mom just didn’t understand that guys like Dean weren’t girls.
It bothered him a lot.
And maybe Mom was right, because the next time Dean showed up it was almost Christmas and Ben was twelve. The resent he brought with him was pretty obviously a skateboard - it was in a box but the wheels were sticking out and the wrapping paper was all crumbled around them. But Ben remembered what Mom had said about being mean, so he made sure not to say anything but, “Thank you,” as he went to put it under the tree.
Dean just looked at him funny. “Since when are you so polite?”
“Since always.”
“Uh huh. Right.” Dean was still looking at him sideways, and later in the kitchen when he thought he was alone with Mom, Ben heard him ask, “Lisa, are you sure that’s Ben? Really Ben? Not one of those creepy-”
Mom whacked him on the arm. “Dean.”
“Hey, I’m just saying.”
Then they had pizza and soda, and Ben wasn’t really surprised when Dean had to go after that. Or when he started getting postcards after that. Not lots, but one every couple months or so. A whole letter on his birthday. The letters didn’t say much of anything, except the hi, how is school stuff he was used to getting from grownups who didn’t know what to say. The stamps on the back of them said a lot more.
The first one was from North Dakota, and the next one was from California. And then Virginia and Florida and Michigan and Wyoming and New York and Tennessee and Texas. Sometimes he’d lock the door to his bedroom and spread the postcards all across his bed and try to see if there was any kind of pattern. There wasn’t.
He didn’t even know why he was locking his door. So Mom wouldn’t see him looking so close, probably.
Okay, definitely.
He’d stopped telling her about the nightmares by the time he was ten. He didn’t tell her about the time he spent in the library reading books about ghosts and vampires and zombies and stuff, even if none of the stories rang true at least they rang familiar. Right, somehow, even if the nightmares still woke him up, every night.
The Internet was more useful.
It was a long time before he asked Mom if he could mail a letter back. It was a real short one, it was right to the point and it was a question he couldn’t ask anyone else, ever. Dear Dean, do you know anything about monsters?
He never got another letter again.
That didn’t really surprise him, either.
It was just after his birthday again before he heard anything at all, except it was two years later. Ben recognized the voice on the phone, but Dean acted like he was a total stranger when he said, “Hey, kid, is Ms. Braeden there?”
Ben handed over the phone without a word and then he got kicked out of the kitchen.
“Oh,” Mom said, when she thought Ben was too far away to hear. “It’s… It’s been a while.” She listen to Dean talk for a while, and Ben crouched down near the floor, by the kitchen door, so she wouldn’t see him if she looked.
“New Haven? That’s about fifty miles away…” Mom looked over her shoulder, but the wrong way. Ben was by the other door. “…I don’t think that’s a good idea, Dean.” Ben had known it was Dean anyway, but now he knew for sure.
Dean talked for a long time. Then Mom said, “I already told you-I don’t know. No.”
Ben ducked away from the door and headed towards his room. Mom’s voice still followed him: “I said no. It’s not a good idea.”
*
Finding some stuff was easier than Ben had thought it would be.
Getting to New Haven was just a matter of walking past his school bus stop and getting waiting at a regular one. He had enough money saved to pay the fare and also buy some ice cream when he got to the town, and that was the perfect time to ask the man behind the counter if there was any weird stuff going on.
“Weird stuff? Weird stuff like what?”
Ben didn’t like the look he was getting; he looked away and squirmed where he stood. He hadn’t thought much further than this. “Weird stuff like… I’m doing a school project about the news, and I’m… looking for stuff that’s-”
And it was like someone somewhere felt sorry for him, because then the man said, “Oh. You gotta be talking about the murders down at the hotel.”
That sounded pretty good, yeah.
It took all day to walk to where the Hotel Alden, because he couldn’t get a taxi if he wanted to have enough money to go home eventually. The sun almost gone by the time he saw it - a huge, broken down, white monument at the end of a lonely road. A big sign identified the place. At least, Ben was pretty sure Hotel Alden was what it said under all that graffiti.
This was a lot like a scene out of all those movies Mom didn’t like him watching.
At least he recognized the car. It was low and black, shiny in the dying light. Ben’s fingers ghosted over the paint as he walked by, approached the front entrance as fast as he could without running. He didn’t want to give himself a chance to chicken out.
The lock was broken. The door swung in with a creak when he pushed on it.
The man behind the counter back at the ice cream store had said the people that died were mostly teenagers that broke in, which not only sounded like a stupid horror movie but also a lot like right now. Ben didn’t get scared very easy but he knew he’d be stupid if that didn’t make him nervous, and he kept that in mind as he walked through the lobby.
There was no furniture, no paintings on the wall, the whole place was empty, and in the night that made it pretty creepy. He stopped when he got near the elevators, he didn’t know if he should go down the left hallway or the right one. He didn’t want to go down either of them, really.
He picked the left one.
It was too dark to see anything, which was fine, because Ben had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for. All he could make out were the two rows of identical wooden doors.
The first door he tried wasn’t locked. It felt weird to walk in without knocking, so he rapped on the door. “Hello?”
He was a dork.
The room had all the stuff a regular hotel room did, just a little grosser. There was a bed that smelled like it was stuffed with sawdust and a lamp covered in spider webs, Ben flicked the switch but the lights didn’t come on.
There was a creak when he touched the bathroom door, which was weird, because he was sure that was the exactly same noise the other door had made when he opened it.
He looked over his shoulder. “Is someone-”
He couldn’t help but yell when someone grabbed him by the jacket, and he was jerked around so fast that his sneakers squeaked on the tile floor. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”
It was too dark to see, but he still knew the voice. He’d just heard it, yesterday. He’d been startled, yeah, but he wasn’t really surprised.
It was pretty obvious Dean didn’t even recognize him, which made sense. His flashlight was pointed down at the ground, and it’d been two years anyway. At least Dean let go of the death grip on his jacket after a second, and said, “Listen, sorry, kid.”
“S’okay,” Ben said, shrugging.
“You kinda caught me by surprise,” Dean continued.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“What’re you doing here?”
Ben didn’t think that I want you to answer my question would go over very well at all, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say, either. There wasn’t any good reason to break into old buildings after dark, so he didn’t say anything.
“C’mon, you here with some buddies?”
Ben shook his head.
“Alone?”
He nodded.
“Heard the stories and just couldn’t stay away.” Dean’s tone said he didn’t think much of that, and he sighed heavily. “Brilliant, kid, just brilliant. What’s your name?”
Ben looked at the ground. “I’m…”
Dean sighed loudly. “C’mon, kid, just-”
“Ben.”
“Okay, Be…” Dean stopped talking all of a sudden, and then he was quiet for so long that Ben had to look up.
Just in time to get the flashlight right in his face. “Ow!” He jerked away.
He tried to, anyway, but he couldn’t get far because Dean had him by the arm. And then it was like they were back at the beginning of the conversation, because Dean yelled, “Jesus-what the hell are you doing here?”
Lucky for Ben, he didn’t have to answer that.
“Dean!”
Ben only remembered that Dean’s brother’s name was Sam because the postcards mentioned him once or twice or five times. Dean liked his brother a lot and worked with him, so that was probably who the tall guy was. There was a long shadow in his hand that looked like a gun, and Ben swallowed.
“Dean, we’ve gotta-who’s this?”
Dean let go of his arm. “Who’s this,” he muttered. “Who is this.”
Sam was quiet for a second. “Dean? You alright?”
“It’s Ben, Sam.”
Ben’s eyes were getting more used to the dark, he could see Sam’s mouth open and shut again. He lowered the shotgun. “Ben… Dean-Ben Ben? Ben Braeden? The kid we-”
“Oh, no, Sam. This is the other Ben Braeden, came this close to getting into the freakin’ Brady Bunch.”
The silence that followed was long and awkward. Ben wished he was invisible. Or that he’d stayed home.
“So, uh.” Sam cleared his throat. “What do we do?”
“Now,” Dean said. “We go outside.”
Ben didn’t have a choice about that.
Dean pulled him along as they marched out of the room, back down the left hand hallway, through the empty lobby, out the broken front door. Dean steered him towards the old car with impala written in cursive on the side, opened the door and shoved him in.
He slammed the door shut hard.
Ben couldn’t hear what they were saying, because they stayed outside, but they argued a while.
*
“Wow,” Sam said, his eyes drifting towards the Impala. “That’s… unexpected. Dude, he followed you.”
If Dean’s expression was anything to judge by, he didn’t think this was remotely funny. Which it wasn’t, but-it was kind of impressive that the kid had managed to find them. Kind of improbable, now that Sam thought about it. “Dean, how’d he even-”
“I called Lisa yesterday afternoon. Damnit!”
Sam didn’t ask why. He just watched Dean pace in place, a step in one direction and then another step the other way. He was absolutely not looking at the car. “We’re done for tonight,” he said.
Sam nodded.
“We call Lisa right now, we drive him back to Cicero and then we-”
Sam hesitated. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“Why the hell not?”
Good question. Sam thought a second on the best way to present the problem to Dean, and settled for the admittedly lame, “This would give you a chance to talk to him.”
Dean stopped his freaky nervous pacing dance to stare at him like he’d lost his mind. “Right.”
“I mean-” Sam tried to save it.
Dean wasn’t hearing it. Instead, he laughed out loud. “Because the right time and place for that is the middle of a school night at a condemned haunted hotel that eats kids. I’ve gotta say, man, your sense of timing’s gotten pretty-”
“Dude, he followed you,” Sam repeated.
Again, Dean was giving him the face that said you’re losing it, man. “I could swear we’ve been over this already.”
It was hard to present a point when Dean wouldn’t even let him build up to it properly, so Sam just rolled his eyes and moved on. “So what’s going to stop him from doing it again? On another job, maybe?”
“I-” Dean stopped, and he frowned. Then he held up his hands in exasperation. “What do you want me to do? I’ll buy Lisa a leash. I’ll threaten the kid with an ass kicking.”
Sam sighed.
Dean shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’ll tell him I don’t want anything to do with him, period. I’ll keep him away somehow.”
“He won’t ever speak to you again.” Which was obvious, and the idea, but Sam thought it was important to point this out.
“Yeah, well.” Dean snuck a glance at the car, where Ben was busy riffling through the cassette tape collection under the passenger’s seat. “Might save his life.”
Sam sighed again.
“Dude, will you quit that?”
“Do you want to hear what I’ve got to say, or not?”
“Not really.” He must have caught the almost deadly levels of irritation on Sam’s face, though, because then he rolled his eyes and said, “Okay, what?”
“He knows what you do.” Not a question-he wouldn’t have shown up here if he didn’t. It didn’t matter if he’d remembered what happened when he was younger, or been told bits and pieces of it by his mom, or maybe figured it out from Dean. The point was, he knew. “And you said yourself, jobs just don’t get tamer than this.”
Dean didn’t say anything.
“The ghost is completely quiet. We know where the body is. All we have to do is burn the bones.”
Dean knew what he was getting at and he’d have to say something about it at some point, and until that moment, Sam had every intention of filling in the silence with more relevant facts. “There’s not any reason why you couldn’t-”
“Sam, shut up.”
Sam stuck his hands in his pockets. “Maybe reasons why you shouldn’t, but not why you couldn’t-” And the right decision was always so freaking ambiguous anyway, in their line of work. In their lives. “I think you should think about it. At least for a second.”
Dean answered, then, and he didn’t even blink. “I did, and I’m done. Let’s go.”
He didn’t start off towards the car, though. He wanted Sam to make the first step in that direction, and Sam wasn’t going to make that decision for him. “Maybe for a little longer than that.”
“Sam, I am not Da-I’m not babysitting someone who’s not even old enough-he’s just-”
And he was stuck-couldn’t finish the first sentence without admitting more than he wanted, couldn’t cover it up with the second statement without admitting there was something really wrong with their own deeply screwed up childhoods. Sam let him flounder for a few sounds, opening and shutting his mouth like a fish, before he gently offered, “I’m not saying you should give him a gun.”
Dean turned to openly glare at the Impala, but from the look of things, Ben was too asleep to notice. “Definitely not Dad,” he muttered.
“No kidding.”
Now Dean was the one who sighed, turning away from the car and rubbing his temples, like the whole thing was one big headache. “Well, shit.”
*
Ben was almost asleep on the door, so it sucked out loud when the crappy metal pillow was jerked right out from under him. He grabbed onto the seatbelt before he fell, just barely reclaiming his balance.
“Out of the car.”
Ben knew he was in major trouble so he managed to stop the smart ass reply before it actually left his mouth. He did what Dean said, he climbed out quick.
Dean wasn’t as tall as Ben remembered but he was still pretty tall, staring down on him like he was, his arms folded across his checst. He looked pretty freaking serious. “How do you know?” he asked.
“Know what?”
Dean gestured around them, at the hotel, the car, it even looked like he included his brother and himself. “All of this. Everything. What we do.”
“I… don’t, really.” Ben dug in the dirt with his toes. “Mom said some stuff. And I read some other stuff.”
Actually, he pretty much remembered everything that’d happened back when he was eight. Mom hadn’t told him much but she hadn’t lied either, so when she’d told him that Dean’s job was helping people… It just made sense.
That was a bad answer, because Dean groaned. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter, now.”
“Ben,” Sam said, way more quiet than Dean. Ben was starting to think Sam was nicer than his brother. “You have to understand-what we do is very, very dangerous.”
Even if Sam thought he was stupid. He fumed. “You don’t have to talk to me like I’m-”
“Sam’s right, Ben,” Dean interrupted. And then he took a deep breath. “So why am I letting you come with us?”
It was a good question, especially since until right them Ben hadn’t known they were going to let him go with them. “Um,” he said, staring at them both. The wrong answer might change everything, so he thought about it for a minute. “You want to scare me, huh.”
Dean almost grinned. Ben could see his teeth, anyway. “Smart boy.”
Their plan didn’t sound very hard. Dean said there were bones in the west side of the hotel, Sam said he could perform some kind of spell in the east side of the hotel that’d summon the spirit so it wouldn’t mess with Dean. He was going to read it out of a book.
“You’re sure that’ll work?” Dean asked.
Sam shrugged. “Not entirely?”
“Um,” Ben said, not sure how he fit into all of this. “What am I supposed to-”
“You,” Dean said, and no question who he was talking to. “You stay with me, and you don’t go anywhere I haven’t gone first, understand?”
He sounded like an Army guy or something. “Yes, sir,” Ben said sarcastically, and apparently that was about the same as hitting Dean in the face with a brick. It’s what it looked like from his expression.
“You were saying?” Sam said.
“Shut the hell up,” Dean said right back, so friendly Ben thought he had to be joking. “Don’t you have some distracting to do somewhere?”
Sam didn’t really look like he was used to being bossed around like this, but he was only muttering a little when he left. Ben didn’t need to be told to follow Dean to the trunk of the car, where the guy pulled out a backpack and starting slinging all kinds of stuff into it.
“What’s that?” Ben asked, his eyes following a red bottle of … something. Another bottle of what looked like water followed. “What’s all that for?”
“There’s rules,” Dean said, totally ignoring his question. “You follow them or you don’t come, got it?”
There were a lot of rules. Ben had to do whatever Dean said, he couldn’t fall behind, he couldn’t stop to look at anything, he couldn’t go in a room first, he had to say if he saw anything weird, he couldn’t listen to any voices that told him what to do. Unless the voice was Dean.
“Yeah, I got it,” Ben grumbled.
“Good,” Dean said, slamming the trunk of the car, shut. He swung his back onto his back, and he held a shotgun loosely in one hand.
“Can I have a gun?” Ben asked.
“Not on your life.”
“Can I hold a gun?”
“Nope.”
Dean knew where they were going. They headed back into the hotel and skipped all the rooms, they threaded through the hallways and Ben didn’t say a word, because he was busy thinking about the rules and making sure he wasn’t breaking any of them. They were pretty easy but Ben knew Dean wasn’t being an idiot adult, he hadn’t said anything that wasn’t important.
It wasn’t long before Dean kicked the door open to one of the back room. Ben followed the rules, he waited a second or two before he followed.
It wasn’t the same style as the rest of the hotel. The floor was unfinished cement, the windows had plastic over them. Even weirder was the hole in the middle of the room, Ben could tell by the cracks in the cement, even if the pit was covered by a heavy tarp, secured with cement blocks.
“Huh,” Dean said. “That was easy.”
Ben shifted uncomfortably, but he still followed Dean to the tarp. “Wasn’t it…” He tried to think of what he meant. “Wasn’t it kind of too easy?”
“No such thing as too easy.”
“But-anyone could find this, right?”
“Private property,” Dean answered. “And the uninvited guests don’t make it back this far and leave. And hasn’t been here for that long.” He shrugged. “Kid, trust me, it makes sense.”
He pulled the tarp back and exposed what Ben knew was there already. It didn't stop his jaw from dropping.
He stared for almost a minute. “H-how…”
“Way I figure it,” Dean started, putting down the shotgun and crouching next to the skeleton. Almost skeleton. There were still… parts… Dean looked at the thing like he’d seen a million of them. “Someone wanted this guy dead, did the job with a .45 or something like it,” he pointed at the head, “and figured this here’s one place they’d never find the body. Shut the hotel down right after that.”
Ben’s stomach was doing somersaults in his chest. “So, you mean-it was whoever…” He looked away from the body. “Whoever owns the hotel?”
Dean chuckled. “Smart boy. Could be. But,” he said, getting to his feet. “Not our business. This is our business.”
Everything they needed was in that bag, Dean pulled out a bag and a bottle and started dousing the body in both. Salt and kerosene, he explained shortly, and Ben didn’t ask why. He’d do that later. Right now, he was just glad Dean didn’t want him to help or anything.
“And that’s that,” Dean said, as soon as he was done. “Now, we-”
Ben waited for him to say something else. Instead, Dean dropped his bag of stuff, and then he picked up the shotgun. His face had gone dark, dead serious, and Ben knew he'd seen or heard or maybe even just felt something.
“What?” Ben asked. “What is it?”
Dean shook his head. “When I say go,” he started, “I want you to-”
There was a flash of something, and the shotgun went spinning off into the dark.
Dean went flying, and he hit the wall across the room, so hard the window next to him cracked. He sagged down to his knees, groaning, shaking his head. “Ben, stay back,” he yelled.
Ben had no idea what that meant, so he stayed frozen in place. Back where?
The whole room was cold.
Dean was trying to stand up, bracing his hand against the wall. “Ben, I told you-” And maybe he was going to be clearer, but it didn’t matter, because there was the flash again. The window shattered, and Dean didn’t get up.
Nothing moved and no one made a sound.
Ben didn’t move because he couldn’t, there was something here and he couldn’t even see it. It took him a second-okay, longer-for him to get his nerve back, and then he was running across the room. “Dean?”
The air flashed, and it was exactly like getting punched in the face.
It didn’t hit him as hard, probably, but he slid across the floor on his back with blood in his mouth. He didn’t even yell, that’s how surprised he was.
He waited. Nothing else happened. He didn’t know if he should stand up or sit up or look around or what.
The shotgun had landed over here, he realized suddenly. It was only a few feet away, he didn’t even need to think about that. He rolled over and scrambled to it as fast as his hands and knees could carry him, and it was the best feeling in the world when his fingers closed around it.
The feeling didn’t last.
When he turned around, he could see it better-the thing with arms he could see through. The arms grabbed him, and for a second he was sure he was looking into an empty face.
It threw him.
He hit the ground again, but he wasn’t as scared. He had the gun, he could-but when he tried to get up, something hit him in the chest, the solar plexus and sent him right back down.
He yelled when it happened again, but it was getting hard to breathe.
He scrambled back on his hands, he tried to, and when it gave him a second he managed to get back to his feet. That’s when it grabbed him again, and this time it didn’t throw him.
The gun was missing. He didn’t know when he’d dropped it.
He couldn’t see anything at all, but he could feel frozen fingers around his throat, it felt like the cold was reaching down his throat. He struggled but there wasn’t anything to push against, nothing to grab onto. He couldn’t even talk or yell, he-
“Ben, get down!”
The shotgun blast sounded way louder than they ever did in the movies. It let go, and Ben ducked without even thinking, his hands over his ears, his knees banging hard on the cement. He cringed all over when it went off again.
The cold was gone.
He didn’t have any time to think about that, or wonder if the ghost had left-oh, man, that was definitely a ghost-because Dean was dragging him to his feet and talking real loud. “Did I hit you?” he demanded, grabbing Ben by the shoulders, shaking him a few times.
Ben looked up at him. He didn’t understand any of those words.
“Did I hit-”
Ben shook his head.
Dean shoved him down.
The ground hurt just as much this time as it did the other times, except now he landed on his hands and knees. He wanted to swear, he didn’t want to say anything-he bit his lip and looked up.
The thing was coming back, the pieces pulling themselves together like they were made of smoke. Dean fired again, blasting them apart. He had a little fire in his hand, he was standing next to the grave, and Ben squeezed his eyes shut when Dean dropped the lighter.
The scream was the worst thing Ben had heard in his whole life. He waited until it stopped before he opened his eyes.
Dean was standing by the body, watching the fire. It lit his face up orange, but Ben could still see the blood on it.
He hesitated, then he stood up, walking over to where the fire was going. He’d thought maybe the burning body would be sick, but it didn’t smell like anything but smoke.
He swallowed. “Dean, I-”
“Are you okay?”
Ben stared at the ground, more ashamed than he’d ever been in his life. “I’m sorry, I was supposed to leave, it just-I was stupid, I didn’t-” Didn’t listen to orders or even try to. Sure he knew best because of no reason at all. Acting like a freaking baby. Stupid.
Dean just raised his voice. “Are you okay?”
God, he was crying and he wasn’t even hurt. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
He waited for the yelling. He deserved it.
Instead Dean grabbed him so fast it was like an attack and hugged him so hard it was like another attack, and Ben could hardly breathe. But he could still smell the leather jacket smashed up against his face, old and a little dusty and just exactly like he remembered it.
“God,” Dean said. “I can’t fucking do this.”
*
Dean yelled at Sam a lot.
That was pretty much the whole car ride back to Cicero. Dean yelled at Sam. A lot. At first Sam apologized, and explained that it’d been kind of an experiment anyway, and they’d have to check with some guy to see what went wrong. Ben didn’t hear the name.
When Dean kept going, Sam started getting mad back. “Dean, I said I was sorry, alright?”
And then he just let Dean yell without saying much of anything.
Ben stared out the window from the backseat. He didn’t know his way around that well, but he noticed when things started to look familiar. Dean had asked him at one point if he still lived in the same house, and Ben had nodded in response.
By the time they pulled up to the house, Dean didn’t seem mad anymore. Ben wasn’t even sure he’d been mad to begin with.
By the time they pulled up in front of the house they’d all fallen into dead, depressing silence, even if Sam had glanced back once or twice to make sure he was still there. Dean turned off the car and got out, and Ben waited a second before he followed.
He only did that because he knew Mom would have noticed him missing by now. He wanted away from this situation more than anything.
“It’ll be alright, Ben,” Sam said.
“I know.” Ben gave him a small smile. “It was… fun.”
Sam laughed. It made Ben feel a little better when he climbed over the front seat and out of the car. Yeah, Mom would be pissed, but he’d live. Things could be… way worse.
Dean shut the door, and started following him up the driveway.
Ben gave him a funny look. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to talk to your mom.”
Ben froze in place and stared at him. “What? No, you can’t do that, you’re-”
“And let her think I encouraged you?” Dean laughed. It wasn’t funny, and he didn’t think so, either. “Yeah freaking right, I don’t think so.”
Ben didn’t say anything to that, because even if he was going to tell Mom the truth she might not believe him, so maybe he was right. Dean wouldn’t lie to Mom, and she probably knew that. It was still weird to have the guy follow him to his front door.
He felt like he was under arrest.
He didn’t go inside or knock on the door right away, even if Dean seemed to be waiting for that. “You’re not coming back, are you?” He hadn’t meant for it to come out as a question, but now it was, and he really, really wanted an answer.
Dean was quiet for a second. “Listen,” he said. “Ben. You can’t-do that, again. Ever. Understand?”
Ben nodded. He wouldn’t, anyway. He still didn’t knock on the door.
Dean waited. Then, “I’ll write.”
“Yeah, right,” Ben snapped back, not caring if he was rhyming, or if he sounded like a brat. “You weren’t very good at that before.”
Neither of them said anything for a while. Dean scratched the back of his head, he glanced at the front door. “I don’t know what to tell you, Ben, I really don’t.” Then he reached up to knock on the door himself.
“You’re not very good at this,” Ben said, quietly.
Dean flinched like that stung. “Nope.”
He didn’t get to stay long, because Mom threw him out of the house. Screaming. Ben tried to calm her down but it just wasn't working-he’d never been grounded until the end of high school, before. He locked himself in his room and beat his pillow with his fists until he fell asleep.
Sam said it’d be okay, right? Sam was a jerk. They both were.
When the postcards started coming again-from Washington, Alabama, Oklahoma, Main-he threw them all away. At first, anyway. He figured every one would be the last and it was stupid to get his hopes up.
But they kept coming.
He got a Led Zepplin CD for his next birthday.
Ben didn’t write back for a long time, a long time. He had homework, he had school, he and friends and girls he liked and-he didn’t know what to say. Dean probably had that problem, too, his notes were always short, how’s school, or work’s good, but he managed to say something.
Ben managed, too. The first letter he sent said, school’s good, how’s work?
The next one said, When I’m eighteen you can call or something, right?
He wasn’t expecting the answer he got back. He wasn’t expecting an answer at all. It came seven weeks later on the back of a postcard of the Grand Canyon, all covered in snow, and the postmark was from Prescott, Arizona.
It just said, Sure.
He kept that postcard in a drawer in his desk, along with the CD. He didn’t like Led Zepplin, much. And he didn’t have any idea at all if that one word was true or not, but he thought it probably was-it’d taken Dean a while to write back. He’d probably thought about it a long time.
It was nice to think about, anyway. Ben reread that card all the time. Even if it was just one stupid word.
God, he was turning into such a girl.
*