Strange Brew 1/10
Title: Strange Brew
Author: safiyabat
Artist: stormbrite
Rating: PG-13
Genre/pairing: Gen
Characters: Sam Winchester, John Winchester, Dean Winchester
Word count: 51,698 (fic) / 5,575 (chapter)
Summary: The Winchester Family Business sets up shop in Tully, New York to hunt down a vengeful spirit.
Spoilers: None
Warnings: Nothing major in this chapter.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. No, really.
Sam stepped into the trailer behind his brother and put his bag down. They’d stayed in a lot of shady places before but this one outshone the rest. “Where’s the bathroom, Dad?” Dean asked, letting his eyes take in the small space.
Sam’s eyes darted to the one room that had been bracketed off with crossed two-by-fours. He swallowed.
“There’s a port-a-john out back,” their father informed them easily. “The guy that owns the property, Rocco, he sends a truck around every few days or so to clean it. We don’t need more than that.”
Sam’s stomach turned. “Is there running water?” he asked.
John Winchester turned a baleful eye on him. “You think a poltergeist cares if your hands are dirty, boy?”
So no, Sam answered himself, and mopped his forehead with the back of his arm.
“Relax, Sammy,” Dean grinned. “I saw a hose and a spigot next to the place. We should be okay to wash up and stuff.” He reached out and ruffled Sam’s hair. Sam squirmed away.
“Don’t coddle the boy, Dean. We’re not here to be prissy. We’re here because people are dying.” John strode into the small building. “We’re damn lucky Rocco owed Joshua a favor and was able to lend us this place off the books; there’s no reason there needs to be any official record that we were here at all.” He strode into the one separate room that the place boasted. “It’s practically the Ritz.” He turned around. “You boys can bunk down in here. That couch looks like it pulls out.” He looked around. “Come on. Let’s head into town for provisions.”
Sam and Dean looked at each other. They looked at the couch. They looked back at each other. “There is no way that couch folds out,” Dean hissed at Sam.
“There’s no way I’m sleeping on it, either,” Sam hissed back. “I bet you your next time washing the Impala that it’s got an entire colony of mice living in there.”
“Boys!” John barked, pushing past them and out the door. “No lollygagging!”
There was nothing else to do but get back into the car and head out again.
The town of Tully wasn’t much. It was pretty, Sam supposed, in a small-town kind of way. It was old, much older than their usual haunts, and it was green. Everything was green, from the lush (and often overgrown) grass to the tall and leafy trees to some of the rooftops. The town seemed predominantly rural, too, although it had a distinct town center with a library and a few shops. Sam looked at the library with a sigh. “No official record” meant no library card.
The grocery store looked to be on the small side, but well stocked with fresh produce that just had to be local. Sam let himself stare at it as his father and brother walked past. He could usually judge how long they were going to be in a given town by what kind of grocery purchases their father made. As a general rule, Winchesters didn’t do fresh vegetables at all - too expensive and too short a shelf life, not to mention too long of a prep time. Most meats were off the table too, for the same reasons, although Dean would sometimes fix hamburgers if they could get them on sale. John avoided the meat counter this time, though. Not a great sign. He did swing through the pasta section and stock up on store-brand pasta and sauce. He even sprung for containers to put the pasta into, which said that he’d at least noticed the state of the trailer even if he hadn’t said anything. He picked up some other things in cans, too - canned ravioli, canned meat, canned soup - and some peanut butter and bread. Much to Sam’s shock he even picked up milk and eggs before heading into the cleaning supplies section.
The contents of their cart drew stares from the other patrons. From young girls Dean’s age to little old ladies in black, no one seemed to approve of Dad’s nutritional decisions. The little old ladies let him know with more than just looks, too. One, so doubled over that she might have halved her original height, got right up in his face and started berating him in what sounded like it was probably Italian just as they got closer to the checkout counter. At first Dad just looked surprised and kind of indulgent; then he started to look angry. After all, who was she to tell him how to raise his boys? Dean bristled too, for mostly the same reasons.
Sam just tried to stay out of the way. He couldn’t understand what the lady was saying, not any better than Dean or Dad could, but he knew they ate like crap.
Finally, though, one of the cashiers intervened. A teenager, maybe eighteen or so, she spoke to the woman in halting but gentle Italian and got her calmed down before she could hit Dad with her shoe, which she’d been preparing to do. Instead the lady continued about her business, muttering to herself, while the Winchesters went through their savior’s line.
“I guess that lady’s a bit of a handful, huh?” John began with a brittle grin.
The woman gave a thin smile back. “Mrs. Petrillo? She’s a fixture around here. Moved in with her daughter about, oh, sixty years ago and keeps herself busy looking out for all the neighborhood kids. She’s forgotten her English by now, poor thing, but that doesn’t stop her.”
John frowned. Sam and Dean exchanged glances. “What gives her the right to ‘look out for’ other people’s kids, huh?” the patriarch wanted to know as the cashier scanned his items.
She fixed him with a fearless green eye. “Raising six kids alone, on a very tight budget, for starters. She’s a good person. Takes care of others.” Sam thought he’d never seen a bigger hero than this young girl. “That’ll be sixty-five seventy-two, please.”
John paid her, the boys picked up the bags and the family left. John’s back was ramrod-straight and his hands clenched into fists at his sides; he’d be in a rare mood tonight.
The drive back to the trailer was made in silence; neither boy dared to break it on pain of a severe tongue-lashing. When they got back to their temporary home, they unloaded into the main room of the residence and John turned to his sons. “Dean - sparring, now. Out back. Sam - you get these supplies put away. Then I want this place spotless, do you hear me?”
“Sir,” the boy replied, already moving to obey.
His father’s eyes narrowed at him, but he didn’t speak to change his mind or anything. Instead it was Dean who objected. “Dad, shouldn’t Sam get some sparring in too?”
“I’m pretty sure I gave an order, son,” John growled. “Besides, this dump isn’t going to clean itself and I’d rather use my time more productively.”
Dean winced but scurried to obey.
Sam didn’t mind having the trailer to himself and he didn’t mind missing out on sparring practice. Cleaning wasn’t his favorite activity, but having a clean space was. This way, at least, he got to organize the trailer to his preferences instead of dealing with things the way their father wanted them. And he got to avoid sparring, because it wasn’t as though either his father or his brother went easy on him because he was so much smaller.
The downside, of course, was that the trailer was not a comfortable place to be, temperature-wise. He’d thought upstate New York was supposed to be cooler than other places they’d been. After Bardstown they’d gone to Cedar Bluff, Virginia to very quickly address an issue with a wood spirit and then to Frazier’s Bottom, West Virginia for a specter before settling in for the long drive up to Tully, New York and he’d been looking forward to cool breezes and shady trees. Trees, at least, the place had plenty of. It also had scorching temperatures and enough humidity to make it feel like you were breathing through one of Dean’s old gym socks. He’d sweated clear through his clothes by the time he’d gotten done just with the windows - washed properly first, and then with salt water just to be sure.
Dinner was peanut butter sandwiches. Both Dad and Dean looked a little bit the worse for wear, but Sam would have expected that given that they’d spent hours fighting. Sam’s own muscles quivered with fatigue and his clothes had crusted with sweat; how much worse must they be? His father inspected his work to the minutest detail before he would let them sit down, but Sam knew that he would find no faults there. “You covered the couch with a sheet. Why?” the hunter demanded.
“Mouse nest, sir.”
“A mouse nest? You want to explain that further?” John’s brow rose. Sam hadn’t thought that he’d be able to sweat any more than he already was, but he’d been wrong.
“There was a mouse nest in the couch, sir. I got them out, but I knew it wasn’t a great idea to lie down on the stuff they leave behind. Sir. There are diseases transmitted that way. So I put the sheet down. Wouldn’t want to miss out on training or hunting because of leptospirosis or Hanta virus, sir.” Sam kept his eyes straight ahead and his hands folded behind his back.
John sneered. “Aren’t you a prissy little thing? Worried about diseases when there’s something out there killing people right now!”
“You and Dean can’t do much to help them if you’re sick or dead, sir,” Sam shot back. He met his father’s eye.
Dean squirmed. “He’s got a point, sir,” he admitted, face screwed up like he’d bitten into a powdery lemon. “I mean, I’ve got no problem roughing it, you know that, sir, but leptospirosis isn’t anything to mess around with.”
John’s lip curled, but he said no more as he continued to inspect the trailer. Instead, he sought out dirt in the most obscure places. Fortunately for Sam, he’d been expecting this. When John found no further faults, he decided that they could go ahead and eat, having nothing further to say about Sam’s housecleaning skills. Instead, he turned to Dean. “I have to say, Dean, I was pleasantly surprised by your performance today. I would have figured that spending so much time cooped up in the car would have left you stiff and slow, but you moved just fine.”
Dean preened. Of course he did. Dad didn’t hand out praise very often. “Thank you, sir. I tried some of those techniques you showed me to keep myself loose while we were in the car; I guess they must have worked.”
“I suppose they must. I could have been happier with the way that you kept dropping your guard after coming in toward the face. I know it’s only me, Dean, but you need to take this seriously. Your life isn’t the only one that depends on this stuff. Your job is to watch my back and to keep your brother safe while we help other people. You’re so worried about some stupid disease that you may or may not get, but you won’t defend yourself against a simple blow to the face like that. You need to keep your mind on what’s important.”
Dean hung his head. “Yes, sir.”
Sam snuck in a glance at Dean’s face. From the looks of it, John hadn’t let Dean’s inability to block stop him from trying to deliver blows to that side of his face. “So what are we in town for?” Sam asked, poking at his sandwich.
John looked at him, intent. “What makes you think that you need to know that?”
Sam quailed. Dean was always telling him that he should show more of an interest, that it would make their father happier if he seemed to want to be involved, but that wasn’t his father’s “happy” face. Then again, Sam didn’t think he’d ever seen his father’s “happy” face, at least not directed toward him. “Just trying to take an interest,” he admitted, looking away. “I’ll stop now.”
“That’s not how you ‘take an interest,’ Sam,” their father told them, gesturing with his beer. “You ‘take an interest’ by buckling down, doing more than the bare minimum of your training without trying to get out of it, and by not asking questions. I tell you things when you need to know them and not a second before, do you understand me?”
“Sir.” Sam wouldn’t say “yes,” because he couldn’t pretend that he understood his father, but he could at least acknowledge what his father had said.
“Go hose off. You stink of cleaning chemicals.”
Sam pushed away from his place at the table. He’d finished maybe half of his half sandwich. He knew it would be gone when he got back. Oh well - he hadn’t been very interested in it anyway.
He grabbed a towel and the soap from the place he’d set up for such things and went outside, only to find out that when his father had told him to go hose off he’d been speaking literally. They hadn’t set up a shower; literally all that they had was the hose attached to the spigot. He washed quickly. The trailer might have been secluded from the road, but it still didn’t feel quite right, being all naked and exposed like this. He scurried inside and changed into pajamas as fast as he could. Not only did he feel like he had someone’s eyes on him the whole time he was outside, but the cold shower was more bracing than anyone deserved in the waning light.
Of course, the trailer wasn’t just lacking in running water. It lacked electricity, too. As the sun began to dip below the horizon, Dean lit a couple of Coleman lanterns. Sam repressed a groan. Dad was so not going to want to hear his thoughts about living without electricity. “Dad’s going out,” Dean informed him, glancing significantly at the closed bedroom door. “Case research.”
Sam bit back a comment about how the “case research” was more likely to involve a case of Schlitz than anything else. That wall was thin, after all, and comments like that didn’t endear him to Dean anymore than they endeared him to their father. “We’re staying here?”
“Of course.” Dean smirked at him. “He’s got to get the lay of the land and everything. Figure out the best way to keep us safe. You know that.” He swatted the back of Sam’s head, but gently, almost affectionately. “You and me are going to have a quiet evening in. You’re probably pretty tired anyway, I know you didn’t sleep well last night.”
Sam shifted. “That obvious?”
“Dude. We shared a bed. I think my bruises have bruises.” The elder Winchester grimaced. “Only ten year old I know who dreams in friggin’ Latin, dude.”
Sam hung his head. “Sorry.”
“Ain’t like you can help it. Maybe talking about it would help?”
The boy glanced at the closed door to the bedroom. Somehow he doubted that the content of his dreams would make his father any more enthusiastic about him. He could maybe wait until Dad left, but anything he said would just make its way back to Dad “for his own good.” “Probably not. They’re just dreams, Dean. They don’t mean anything. I mean, you dreaming about Pamela Anderson every night doesn’t mean you’re going to get with her, right?”
Dean blushed scarlet. “How do you even know about that?”
“Dude. We shared a bed,” Sam deflected with a smirk. He toned it back quickly, though. “I’ll be fine, Dean. They’re just dreams.”
The door opened. Their father emerged, looking a little more crisp and put-together than his normal hunter self. “Don’t wait up,” he directed. “We’re still training tomorrow, no matter how late the two of you stay up, so I’d get to bed early if I were you.” He left the trailer, his only salutation being “Look out for Sammy!” as the door swung shut behind him.
Dean locked the door as Sam rolled out his bedroll on the ground. “What are you doing?” the elder Winchester demanded. “Dad said to sleep on the couch!”
Sam lay down on his roll. He knew that the floor was clean. He’d seen to it himself, after all. He probably made it dirty just by putting his body on it; good thing he had the bedroll between it and him. “The couch won’t fit both of us, Dean. He thinks we’re four and one still. You’re fourteen, you’re already five foot seven! You stay on the couch, I’m fine down here.”
Dean shook his head and went to turn out the Coleman lanterns. “This sucks,” he admitted as they heard the Impala rumble away. “There isn’t even a TV. How are we supposed to watch porn if there isn’t a TV?”
“Silver lining, I guess,” Sam commented. “Hey, Dean?”
“Your time’s coming, squirt. Just you wait. There’s gonna come a day when you’re not gonna be able to get enough of the stuff, and you’re gonna dream about Pam Anderson, and, and -“
Sam had heard such things mentioned in health class, although not in quite such terms. He privately doubted that they applied to him. “Dean, why are we really here?”
Dean paused in the middle of his pubescent rant. “Sammy, you heard Dad. He doesn’t want you to know that stuff until you’ve shown that you can be trusted to follow orders and that you trust him.”
“You mean like with Trotter Head? Or with that tulpa back in Bardstown?” Sam challenged. He fought to keep his tone calm and even, but his cheeks burned with humiliation. Had neither of them figured out that he had a brain yet? That trying to hide things from him just made him more determined to find the truth?
“It’s not like that, Sammy. He needs to know that he can trust you, and he can’t trust you if you question everything. In our line of work it’s absolutely vital that we be ready to obey him without hesitation. You hesitate. You don’t trust him, so he can’t trust you. It’s that simple. You need to learn to trust him.”
“So the way he teaches me to trust him is by hiding things from me,” Sam observed flatly.
“Exactly,” Dean beamed.
In the dark, his brother couldn’t see him cover his face with his hands. “Okay,” Sam said slowly and carefully. “But if I don’t know what’s going on, how am I supposed to know what to do if there’s an emergency? Like, what if we get separated and I have to actually think for myself?”
“Never gonna happen, Sammy,” Dean told him confidently. “You’re always gonna have me or Dad around to tell you what you need to know.”
Sam wanted to punch something, but that wouldn’t get him what he needed. “Remember who it was that figured out what was going on in Bardstown? Maybe it’s something that Dad hasn’t seen before. We made a good team there, Dean. I mean, you and me. We found the case, we researched the case, we figured out what it was and we killed the monster.”
“Okay but we can’t keep going around Dad like that. He’s not going to be able to -“
“Trust us, right,” Sam finished. “But we can make it easier for him to find the right information, right? And he never even has to know that I was involved. All we’re doing is keeping him safe, Dean.” Sam closed his eyes against the hot tears of frustration.
Dean fell silent for a moment. “A bunch of people have been dying,” he told his brother then. “They’ve been dying bloody and they’ve been dying ugly. Can’t figure out why. Dad’s thinking cursed object maybe, could be vengeful spirit. This place is old as dirt, wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Did the victims have anything in common?” Sam wanted to know.
“You know everything I know.” He rolled over. “If we find anything I’ll find a way to let Dad know, but you see how it is here Sammy. I mean, we’re miles away from anything and we don’t even have electricity. There’s not supposed to be any official record of our being here so you can’t get a library card. I don’t think this is a case you get to just steal from Dad.”
Sam bristled at the accusation. He’d never stolen a case from their father. He just had information that their father hadn’t. It wasn’t his fault that Dad got all hung up on ideas of who was in charge instead of getting the job done. “Whatever, jerk.”
“You’re welcome, bitch.”
Dad came home at about two thirty in the morning. How he’d gotten the Impala home was anyone’s guess, given that he smelled like a distillery and swayed on his feet, but he came home. Sam had laid out his bedroll carefully so as not to be in his father’s path, but John still looked down at him and gave a little snort of contempt before staggering back to the bedroom.
Dad woke them bright and early the next morning, although “bright” might have been an overstatement. While the sun had beat down on them without mercy the day before, the humidity came to a head today and it rained. This in no way inhibited their father’s need to make them run, of course. All three Winchesters trotted along the hilly roads before returning to the trailer, where they were permitted to exchange their sodden clothing for dry before cleaning the weapons for the day.
Sam found himself dropped off to take care of laundry at the town’s one laundromat. Truth be told, it was well past time to take care of it, but he couldn’t shake the suspicion that he was being gotten out of the way while their father confided in Dean.
It shouldn’t bother him, he thought as he dutifully sorted everything by color. He found the blankets and pillows and got them into the machines too - they had plenty of quarters and it had been a while since any of those had been done. The exclusion shouldn’t bother him, because it wasn’t like he liked hunting. He hated hunting. He hated the danger, he hated the insecurity, he hated the constant mobility. He didn’t want to be a part of their stupid “family business” so he shouldn’t feel bad about his exclusion from all but the “bait” part of it.
At the same time, he’d be lying if he said that the exclusion didn’t chafe. If he was going to be forced into the life, and he couldn’t see any way out that didn’t involve getting killed, he hated the fact that he wasn’t allowed to be of any value. He knew he was unclean, but come on; even Ted Bundy was making himself useful from prison! Why couldn’t Sam have something to offer, too?
And those things that Dean had said - those hurt almost as much. Dad needed to know that he could trust Sam to never think for himself, even when Dad was wrong? Sam was always going to have Dad or Dean to do the thinking for him? Was this really all that there was to life, or at least to his life? Subservient to someone else, never to have anything to offer? Doing the laundry while other people did the thinking?
“A boy your age should be in school.”
The voice came from behind him. Sam whirled around, hands up, and found himself face to face with a woman. She stood at average height, with long, gray braids by the sides of her head, and she looked down at him with a mixture of distrust and consternation. “Sorry, ma’am. We only got to town yesterday, and since the school year ends next week I don’t think my father thought there was much point, you know?” He put on his best “charming” face, let his dimples show through and all, and hoped like hell that it worked.
Her face softened. Marginally. “Don’t you think you’d have better waited to move until the school year was over?”
He kind of wondered who she might be, that she had the time to sit there in the laundromat on a weekday morning and criticize other people’s parenting choices, but he just shrugged. “Have to do what the job wants, ma’am. I’m sure he’d rather have kept us in school a while longer, but sometimes it can’t be about what the kids want.” He gave an apologetic shrug. In reality, his father hadn’t bothered to put him back into school after they left Bardstown, but he didn’t think that would help his cause at all.
“I suppose. Children’s education should always take precedence. Then they can get jobs, someday, that don’t require them to neglect their own children.” Sam just smiled blandly. He knew he wasn’t having any children. “I work for the library, young man. We’ve got a program for children your age starting up as soon as school lets out; it runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You don’t even need a library card to participate.”
Sam tried not to get too excited. After all, what kind of library program didn’t require the use of a library card? “So what goes on at this program?” he asked.
“Whatever the students want, for the most part. We have movies and board games, and those who want to can continue with subjects that interested them in school or explore areas of interest.” She smiled, and for a moment she was beautiful. “It’s mostly to give the kids around here something to do during the summer months that isn’t destructive. Options can be kind of limited, I’m afraid.”
Sam thought about digging up a grave and burning some poor man’s bones, as he’d done in West Virginia. “I can see where that would be the case. I’ll see what my father says. He’s not very big on outsiders.”
“Hm. Well, that’s all you can do.” She reached into her bag - a cavernous thing; Sam wondered what other secrets she might be hiding inside - and pulled out a flier on light blue paper. “Maybe this will help.”
Eventually the laundry was done, although the underpowered dryers took their time about it. It wouldn’t take much to fix them, but he supposed that wouldn’t make them any money. He sat and waited for Dad and Dean to come pick him up, which took about an hour and a half after he finished with the laundry. They were probably doing something very important, he reasoned. They did come to get him eventually, though, and Dean even helped him to load the laundry into the car. “How did we managed to generate this much dirty laundry?” he groused.
“We haven’t done laundry in weeks, Dean,” Sam retorted. “It builds up. If you wash it more often, you don’t have these huge piles.”
“There are more important things in life than washing clothes, boy,” John growled from the front seat.
“Apparently not for me,” Sam retorted without thinking. Dean froze. “Or did you think I was too stupid to notice that you both came back covered in mud?”
“Too stupid to keep your mouth shut,” their father snarled, putting the car into drive and pulling out onto the road. The rest of the ride back to the trailer was conducted in silence.
Dad insisted that Sam unpack the laundry and put it away by himself, as punishment for his “smart mouth.” After that he had two hundred knuckle pushups to do before he was allowed to deal with the mud and grime that they’d tracked all over the floor. At least the roof seemed to be holding, he thought grimly. John and Dean looked over some paperwork while Sam cleaned and scrubbed. Dinner consisted of pasta, made by Dean, and then John went out to do more “research” as the boys went to bed again.
“Did you have to mouth off to him again, Sammy,” Dean sighed. “He’d probably have been impressed with how you did the laundry if you hadn’t have mouthed off.”
Sam rolled his eyes. John would not have been impressed with how he did the laundry. John did not care about the laundry. If he ran out of clean underwear, John would just steal more until it became convenient to wash it. “Like it wasn’t obvious that he just wanted me out of the way,” Sam scoffed. “He should just send me off to live with Pastor Jim if I’m such a problem for him.”
Dean grabbed his arm, hard enough to bruise. “Don’t you ever talk like that, Sammy. You know better. We’re family. We stick together. I can’t keep you safe if you’re with Pastor Jim.”
“You can’t keep me safe if I’m with Dad, either. He won’t let you.”
His brother shook him before letting him go. “That’s all he wants, Sammy. All he wants is to keep you safe. You’re just too pig-headed to see it.”
Sam rolled his eyes. If John Winchester were to be presented with an opportunity to get his shameful youngest safely killed he’d take it, no questions asked. God forbid that he should let Sam just go live safely someplace else, though. Not that Sam would be comfortable doing that, not without Dean. What good was safety to him if Dean wasn’t with him? “They’re having a program at the library over the summer,” he told Dean after a few moments.
“So?”
“So it’s a good place to dump me so you and Dad can go do important stuff without me,” Sam pointed out reasonably. “I know Dad won’t let me get an actual library card, but it’s a good way to keep me out of the way and it’s a good way to get me into the library and have them used to seeing me around so that I can be in there and looking things up for you if you need it.”
Dean was quiet for so long that Sam almost thought he’d fallen asleep, except he knew how Dean breathed when he slept and that wasn’t it. “Dad won’t go for it,” he said finally. “But I’ll see what he says.”
Dad came home that night, smelling worse than he had the night before. He didn’t even pause to contemplate his sons, just staggered to the back and passed out without getting changed or closing the door. He stayed asleep the next morning, too, even through Dean’s quiet preparation of coffee and eggs. They did not run; the rain was too extreme even for that.
Dean brought their father a beer and some dry toast when he woke up at noon. Sam tried to stay out of the way as much as possible. He had a book courtesy of the Frazier’s Bottom Public Library, and he kept to a vaguely lit corner of the trailer and tried not to attract notice once he’d done as much cleaning as he could. Instead, he let Dean assess their father’s mental state and approach him when the time was right.
That time turned out to be over dinner. “Hey, Dad. I’ve been wanting to talk to you. There’s this, uh, program, for kids Sammy’s age at the library in town.”
John glared at him. “I thought I made it clear. No official record of our presence. That means no library card, no programs, no anything.”
Dean swallowed. “It says here that it’s ‘drop-in,’ which means that he doesn’t have to sign up for anything. He’ll just show up on Tuesdays and Thursdays, doesn’t even have to be every Tuesday and Thursday. It would get him out of the house, give him someplace to go and something to do.”
The eldest Winchester let out an exasperated sigh. “The whole point of hiding out up here this summer, Dean, was to realign his priorities. He spends too much time thinking about things other than this family, other than the hunt. Other than Mary. We need to make sure that Mary’s the only thing on his mind, not school or books or dumb movies. He’s already too distracted by crap.” He sighed. “But there is a job, and it’s not like he’s any use. You make damn sure that he does his training every day, and that his Latin doesn’t suffer because of all of this… frippery.”
Sam tried hard to hide his elation. On the one hand, his father was talking as though Sam wasn’t right there in the room. Like he didn’t even see Sam. Like he’d always planned to hide Sam away, isolate him in some kind of twisted way to brainwash Sam into turning into an obsessed freak like him. That chilled him, chilled him to his very bones.
On the other hand, he was going to get to go to the library program. He was going to be allowed to spend two days per week around other people. He might have gotten permission because he was in the way and useless, but he’d gotten permission nevertheless. He was determined to make the most of it.
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