Variations on a Theme
Oh em eff gee, fanfiction! Long fanfiction. Full of alternate universes, because I am easily bored.
Title: Variations on a Theme (or five ways it might have been)
Rating: I'm gonna say a hard PG-13
Words: ~8,000
Spoilers: Basically everything, but in particular for the Winchester-and-the-FBI arc, seasons 4/5, "What is and What Should Never Be."
Warnings: Descriptions of violence and physical child abuse, discussion of suicide, lots of language, mental illness, major character death, gratuitous hurt!Dean with a little bit of hurt!Sam, hardcore Biblical geekery in part four. John does not come off well in this story, which was not my intention (though I'm not great fan of John so I'm not too fussed).
Summary: Maybe the Winchesters fight monsters and prevent the apolcalypse, and maybe they don't. Five places the Winchester boys might have ended up.
Neurotic author's notes: This happened because I was sitting in my religion class thinking about parallel universes. And also about how fun/weird it would be to contemplate the addition of new books to the canonical Bible, because I am a huge nerd. Therefore, this happened. Also, the cut text is from Richard Feynman's The Character of Physical Law, because I am an incurable dork.
1.
Somewhere along the line, Rob started thinking of him as his Mysterious Uncle Dean.
When he was just small, it had been the Secret Uncle Dean, because nobody ever talked about him, and when they did Dad got tense and quiet and sometimes angry, and Mom got fidgety and nervous, and the one time anybody ever mentioned Uncle Dean to Nana (his little sister, Molly, still to young to know better) she’d looked like she was going to cry. Later, when Rob was thirteen and pointlessly callous, he’d thought of him as Dead Uncle Dean, and made a point to pry his father for salacious details-very few of which he was ever actually granted. He’d decided the secrecy had to indicate something awful, wondered what kind of a fuck up Uncle Dean must have been.
Now, though, at nineteen, Rob isn’t interest in rebellion, and is concerned mostly with facts. He knows Dean was born in 1979, four years before Dad, and died in 2007, the winter before his mom and dad got married. He knows he was a mechanic, knows he had a cool leather jacket and wore his hair short. He’d had a girlfriend, and Rob had only met her once, a very long time ago, around the time he worked out that there’d ever been an Uncle Dean. He knows that the sleek black 1967 Chevy Impala he is poised to inherit was once Dean’s, and before that, his Grandpa John’s. He’s never met either of them, and he doesn’t know if they drove it or just kept it clean and maintained, like Dad does. He knows that Dad doesn’t like to talk about Uncle Dean, and Mom has always said to let it be. He knows Dean was an alcoholic, and occasionally a thief, because his Dad told him once, bitterly, and almost out of nowhere. He has also gathered, from almost two decades of unfinished whispers, that Uncle Dean killed himself.
What he doesn’t know, that’s a much longer list, and an infuriating one. He doesn’t know why Dean killed himself, and he doesn’t know if he was close to Dad, and he doesn’t know if he was tender or angry or a bastard or a lost soul. He doesn’t know if he was a half-decent older brother, which seemed especially important, as Rob had always taken his brotherly duty very seriously. Did Dean have Dad’s back, the way Rob has Molly’s? Did Dad drive Dean crazy, the way Molly does Rob?
He doesn’t know, and now he’s home for Christmas, at his Nana’s house in Kansas, in the home where Dad and Dean grew up, and he’s just found out this was the last place Dean ever was before he died.
“What?” he asks, staring at his mother, who is bunched up in an armchair and inspecting her mostly-empty wine glass forlornly. It’s two days since Christmas, and late, and Nana and Dad and Molly are all upstairs, asleep, Dad in his childhood bedroom, Molly and Rob’s empty cot in Dean’s. That’s what had prompted Rob to ask his mom about Dean at all.
“I said, this house was the last place Dean was, before he drove off to-to Illinois, to a warehouse. And-you know. In front of Sam-of your dad.”
Rob feels a bit like somebody’d just punched him in the stomach. His uncle-his father’s brother-had killed himself in front of Dad? Jesus. Jesus.
Mom takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Oh, Dean. Quite the lost soul.” She finishes her wine and then stares at the empty glass, eyes unfocused.
Rob is breathless. An ache is developing somewhere deep in his chest, a dull, horrible pain. “Mom?” he prompts her, and she looks up, looking tired and a little lost. “What-what do you mean?”
Mom shakes her head, twirls the glass in her hands. “He wasn’t okay, honey,” she says. “He-especially right up near the end. It was Mary-your Nana’s-birthday, you know, and right after your dad asked me to marry him. That weekend. It was that weekend. The stupid, selfish bastard.”
Rob is staring now, openly. All this new information is scrambling around in his brain, reshaping the image of the Mysterious Uncle Dean, twisting it. They’d all have been here, gathered in this warm little house in Kansas, this sweet place that to Rob had always meant holidays and warmth and Nana’s spoiling. They must have been, because Mom and Dad had lived out in California even then, he’s sure of it. He tries to imagine it, this little family, Nana and Mom and Dad, Dean and maybe his girlfriend, celebrating Nana’s birthday, Mom showing off an engagement ring, Dad pink and grinning like he was on their anniversaries when he and Mom got dressed up and went out dancing. Dad with that stupid long hair he’d had right up until Molly was born. And Dean, leather-jacket mystery Dean, the alcoholic, dragging Dad to Illinois-Illinois?-and-and-
“He k-killed himself in front of Dad?” asks Rob, softly, and his mother nods, looking up at him again.
“Stabbed himself. In the-in the stomach. Rambling about monsters and, and I guess he thought he was dreaming. Sam didn’t really-anyways. Towards the end I guess he thought your Nana was there, too, and Carmen. And-and me.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath and becomes suddenly very interested in her empty glass again.
“Carmen?”
“His girlfriend. Sweet girl. God, I haven’t seen her in twenty years. The poor thing. I never knew why-well, that’s not fair. Dean was. Dean was difficult. But he had a big heart. Your dad forgets that sometimes. Used to forget. I-he loved your dad very much.” She looks up then, smiles wetly at Rob. “The way you are with Molly. Dean and your dad, they weren’t-they weren’t friends like you and Mols are, but he had Dad’s back. He-I’m sorry he-” She cuts herself off, biting her lip, and Rob realizes abruptly that his mom is about to cry.
“Mom,” he says, and stands from the couch, crosses to his mother, crouches down beside her. Puts a hand on her shoulder. “Mom,” he says again, “don’t cry, please. It’s okay.”
His mom lets out a shaky laugh and puts a hand on his head, exceedingly gentle. “You know, Robby, I see him in you. Your dad-it’s hard for him, you know, but Dean was always kind to me. He loved your dad and your nana. He was-he was gentle. You kind of look like him, baby.” She tucks a piece of his hair behind his ear. She lectures him that it’s too long, but he knows she likes it, know it reminds her of Dad when he was younger. “He-in the end, he was-he was over the fence and long gone, you know, and it’s sad, but he-I guess he was-he was sorry, I think. He loved your dad, and they weren’t always-well. He was sorry. And your dad was sorry. Is sorry.” She runs her fingers through his hair one more time, then mutters, “Okay, bedtime,” and pulls herself out of the chair and onto her feet. Rob follows suit, and walks with his mother out of the warm living room, up the stairs and to the door of the room she’s sharing with Dad. She kisses his cheek and goes inside, and Rob walks past his Nana’s door to the room he’s sharing with Molly, enters quietly so as not to wake her, climbs onto the cot fully-clothed, lies in the darkness. The room is empty of anything to indicate it has once belonged to a teenager or a child, to Dean, but it was his, once. Uncle Dean, gentle, selfish, crazy, sorry Dean, who was gone without any good reason. And right in front of Dad.
In the morning, neither Rob nor his mother acknowledge their conversation the night before, but as he brushes close to his father pouring coffee, Rob ducks his head against his dad’s shoulder, just a moment’s closeness. He’s not sure why he does it, and the soft, surprised noise Dad makes only turns Rob’s ears hot and pink, and he tugs away quickly, leaving Dad with a strange, soft smile on his face.
“Hey, Mols,” says Rob, turning to his sister, who is sitting at the table with Mom and Nana, drinking cinnamon-smelling tea. She’s a month shy of sixteen, and still not used to coffee.
Molly looks up, her eyebrows raised, mouth quirked, looking so much like she had when she was little and her big brother was her hero, and an aching love for her hits Rob like a wave.
“You still want me to teach you how to drive?” he asks, and she nods eagerly, and Rob nods back. “Okay, Molly,” he says, “we can start today.”
•
2.
“Alright, talk to me.”
“Jesus, Hendrickson, give me a second.”
Victor doesn’t really want to give anybody any seconds, but he purses his lips and lets Yoon, the exhausted-looking shrink-oh, sorry, forensic psychiatrist-pour herself a cup of coffee, and he waits patiently while she dumps about a pound of cream into it and stirs. Victor likes Yoon, likes that she’s straightforward, cuts the crap, gives him the answers he needs. But she also has a way of going about things, and Victor knows better than to disrespect it, lest she stonewall him with a thousand official psychiatric terms he’ll waste a night looking up. He needs Yoon’s Victor-specific rundown.
“Okay,” she says, “better sit down. This is-well-”
“Fucked up?” Victor prompts, already settling down at the table with his own coffee (black and strong and steaming-hot) and his pen, ready to annotate his second-most troublesome file: Winchester, S.
Yoon frowns and sets her coffee down. “It’s not-okay, yes, it is. It’s not easy, that’s for damn sure. This poor kid-well, let’s just say I’m not looking forward to talking to the brother.”
Victor’s eyebrows shoot up at that. “Talking to the brother? Yoon, Dean Winchester hasn’t given a productive interview in his entire life. He’s way too far gone. If you think little Sammy was a nightmare…” He trails off, shaking his head. “Talk to me about Sam, then.”
“Right.” Yoon is flipping through her own notes, her face betraying consternation and exhaustion. “I’m assuming you already know a bit about the father-sounds like PTSD and some kind of paranoid schizophrenia, but I couldn’t say for sure. Suffice to say, the man suffered delusions upon delusions, and-quit making that face, Victor, you asked what I found out and I’m getting there.”
Victor’s scowl deepens in reply. Yes, he knows all about John Winchester, knows the guy was as batshit crazy at they come, knows he killed people everywhere he went, dug up graves and stole from small-town motels and lied to everyone, knows he raised two serial killers, knows Sam probably did the world a favor when he accidentally killed the guy in a car wreck back on ’06. He has his own theories about how Sam and Dean’s early days must have been, knows the Winchesters left a trail of unsettling hospital records wherever they went. Knows that in the year 1988 alone, Dean sustained a concussion, two broken ribs, a sprained wrist, and a series of gashes in his leg he apparently insisted were inflicted by an animal-and that’s just the ones he’s confirmed. The Winchesters didn’t use their real name all that often, which to Victor just proves John knew what he was doing was insane, was wrong. It just proves guilt.
Yoon gives him a look, and then glances down at her notes. “So he-John Winchester, he had this obsession with the occult, I guess, with demons and hell and ghosts and all kinds of supernatural evils, after his wife died. He taught Sam and Dean all this stuff, and he was dogmatic. They memorized exorcisms and trained in how to kill demons. Think of-God, I don’t know, the mother from Carrie, except it’s all demons and evil spirits. And he was their drill sergeant, too, those were Sam’s words.” She takes a breath, pushes her hair out of her eyes. “You probably already know he was also physically abusive, and I mean really incredibly violent, though it seems like Dean took the bulk of it. Sam kept repeating that, ‘Dean protected me.’ When he’s lucid, he knows Dean protected him from John. It’s just…”
“He’s not lucid too often,” says Victor, nodding. He knows all too well how it is to talk to Sam. In some ways, it’s harder than Dean-Dean is a lunatic, but he’s a consistent lunatic. He sticks to the same story-he’s daddy’s little soldier, he’s ridding the word of the monsters he sees everywhere, he needs to see Sammy, now, please, or I’ll fucking rip your lungs out, I swear to God.
Sam, though, Sam is trickier. He flits in and out. He’ll talk about being crushed into a closet with his brother, five years old, six, seven, terrified of some devil his father was out hunting, some devil who was really just a eighteen-year-old high school kid or a thirty-one-year-old librarian, and he gets this smile, like, Crazy, right? He’ll say how he cried the first time his father ever made him kill someone, how his father was screaming that he had to, had to or people would die, had to or they’d all go up in flames and the world would descend into hell, how Dean had stood at his elbow and coached and soothed him, comforted him, guided him through it. How Dean was proud when it was done, hadn’t even teased him for crying, how he’d been grateful for that, had basked in his father’s approval, and he’d shake his head and say, “How fucked up is-I mean, God, I was-I was sixteen, and she was only-maybe twenty-” And then he’d panic and shut down and fold into himself, insist dully that he had to, there were monsters, and somebody had to hunt them down.
Yoon is nodding sympathetically, her mouth a thin line. “I think…it’s shitty, Victor, because you know, Sam could have been okay. Not okay, fine, but, you know. He ran away, when he was eighteen, I guess he and John had some kind of explosive fight and he stormed out and I’m not clear on the details but he enrolled in a community college. Four years he was-well, not fine, but functional. He had friends, a girlfriend, an apartment. 3.5 GPA and a job. He may even have been seeing a counselor-he wasn’t too clear on that matter-and then-”
Yoon pauses, looking strained, sorry, and Victor leans forward, desperately curious. He’s never heard this part of the story. He knows, in stark terms, what must have happened, but he still rocks back a little in his seat, involuntarily, when Yoon finishes, “Then Dean showed up and set the apartment on fire. The girlfriend died. Sam-regressed.”
Victor almost snorts, wants to say, “Yeah, that’s one word for it,” but the look on Yoon’s face shuts him up. Lost little Sam Winchester has broken her heart. Yeah, well. She never saw what he and his brother did to people. She never saw Dean when he was angry, or psychotic. Never saw Sam grip his head and scream nonsense. Never saw either boy’s handiwork with a knife.
“And off on their merry little murder spree they went,” says Victor instead, and Yoon’s defeated expression shifts to annoyance.
“Sam’s sorry,” she says, “sometimes. And a product of his environment. John was violent, Dean was violent, Sam’s violent. John said devils walk the earth and it’s the boys’ job to stop them. Dean buys it, all of it, and he’s got Sam terrified to do anything but go along with it.” She pauses. “Sometimes thinks Dean was saving him from monsters, sometimes John,” she says, softly, “but Dean kept saving him. He’s convinced he can’t survive without Dean.”
“Dean can’t survive without Sam,” says Victor, and the old implacable anger for John Winchester resurfaces. His mind retrieves a picture he saw once, years ago, early in this case: two boys, one with a round face and shaggy hair, maybe five, smiling broadly, revealing the proud holes where baby teeth had fallen out, the other with close-cropped hair and a thin, freckled face, his smile tighter and not quite reaching his eyes, his arm secure around the little boy’s shoulder. Sam and Dean Winchester, winter 1988. Just boys, children, without access to a world behind their father, who was violent and terrifying but also all they had, their only teacher and sole provider. Just little boys, caught up in something awful that they couldn’t control.
But then Victor’s mind speeds forward, to a girl, twenty-one or so, blonde, pretty, delicate, beaten and torn open, thrown out a window and then dragged over hot coals once again. This was the devil Sam and Dean Winchester hunted, this tiny girl with a whole life ahead of her, a life cut short. They’d found her twenty minutes dead in a circle of salt and satanic scrawls, her cooling blood and organs spilling out onto the floor, one arm still curled around her stomach, the other resting on her abandoned phone. She’d died trying to hold her organs in, and call her little sister. Meg, her name had been, Meg Masters. She was from Andover, Massachusetts, and had a mother and a father and a sister, and it was Victor, not Sam and Dean, who had to face them and their anger and grief. It was those three, the battered remaining Masters, who had to live with the knowledge that their Meg died terrified and in horrible pain. Not Sam, and not Dean.
Victor sees the question forming in Yoon’s face, and cuts her off before she can say it. “They have to stay separated,” he says, shortly, “trust me. Together, they don’t have any bounds. They’ll kill us all with their fingernails if they’ve got each other to egg ’em on. Separated, they’re…” He pauses. “Not a threat,” he finishes, with finality, and it’s not the whole truth, but it’s a crucial piece of it, and it’s a crying fucking shame.
•
3.
Jessica Moore always wanted a brother or sister. Her childhood was an easy one-and she suspected this was really the biggest difference between her and Sam-but there was a loneliness there, an absence. A space where some other person ought to have been.
This was not the only thing she’d never understand about Sam Winchester, but it was certainly in the top five. Sam had a brother, one who-judging by the fairly frequent long, newsy letters and rambling voicemails-cared about him quite a bit, and wanted to be close to him. Jess could never understand Sam’s reluctance, never thought his excuses seemed fair. “Dean’s sick,” he’d said, at first, and as they grew closer “sick” became “mentally ill” because “unstable” became, once, in the dead of night, when they were sweaty and tangled and whispering their deepest secrets, “scary.” Dean scared Sam, sometimes, and that was Sam’s biggest secret. “Because he thinks he’s protecting me,” Sam had said, pressing his mouth against Jess’s curls, encircling her body completely with hers. “He’s protecting me, he thinks, and if he knew how much he scares me, it would kill him.”
Jess had turned this information over in her head, considered what she knew of Sam, Sam who she loved with a completeness that sometimes shocked her, given how little she really knew of his inner life. Sam’s childhood was a rocky one. His mother had died when he was very small. They’d been poor. Their father was distant. They moved a lot, and Sam felt isolated his whole life. His father looked down on higher education. He’d been raised mostly by Dean and, around the time Sam started high school, something went very wrong with Dean.
It started, according to Sam, with fear-and Jess has long suspected that everything about the Winchesters’s lives comes down to fear-and paranoia, and gradually became hallucinations and delusions and by the time Sam left, four years on, Dean apparently needed supervision. Sam spoke of his brother with something approaching derision, but Jess thought that as probably a defense mechanism (but she’d promised to stop analyzing Sam), and she could see, sometimes, when Sam talked about Dean making him dinner or taking him trick-or-treating (back, she supposed, before he’d hated Halloween) or taught him to wrestle, that he missed his brother, was mourning the person Dean Winchester might have been.
And now, it is one in the morning, and Dean Winchester is standing in the front room of her apartment.
He’s at once exactly as she’d pictured him-he could have leapt out of Sam’s one framed picture of him, handsome, cropped hair, gangly smile, and leather jacket all intact-and radically different from how she’d imagined. He’s confident, swaggering even. His grin is cocky. He hits on her right off the bat, and his grin is easy. He has none of the scrubby, skittish strangeness Jess associates with people who have been in and out of mental institutions since they were nineteen. He isn’t jumpy or twitchy or scared or angry, and Jess chastises herself for even believing he would be. It’s just that when Sam talks about him, he always sounded-well, unstable, frightening, manic. This guy just seems kind of guarded, but easy-going. Even trustworthy.
He tells Sam that their dad is on a hunting trip, and Sam dismisses this with an easy comment about Jim, Jack, and Jose-the same automatic derision that always emerges when Sam talks about his family. But Dean seems earnest, and then afraid, and Sam excuses himself and Jess, pulls her into the bedroom.
“I’m going to fucking kill him,” he hisses, as soon as the door is closed.
“Dean?” asks Jess, shocked but he outburst. Sam doesn’t curse much.
“No, not Dean,” he says, and runs a hand through his hair, looking helpless. “My dad. He’s off on some bender and if Dean’s out here it must have been-God, a week? Two?-Dean’s off his meds, Jess, he’ll think it’s demons. That’s what he-he thinks demons are after us. He probably thinks a demon has my dad. I am going to kill him.” Sam is pacing now, and his anger is building. For the first time in a very long while, Jess is aware of how big he is.
“Sam, honey, try to-”
Sam rounds on her in an instant. “Jess, I’m sorry, but you don’t get it. If Dad is gone, he’s probably not taking his meds. If he’s not taking his meds, he’s probably panicking and seeing demons at the mall. And now he’s going to assume demons have our dad and he’s going to think the meds are a trick and he’s going to attack some random person because he thinks he sees the devil in their eyes-Jess. This isn’t good.”
Sam actually looks a little manic himself at the moment, running a hand through his hair and gnawing his lip. Jess feels a pang of sympathy for Dean, left shuffling awkwardly in the front room, apparently convinced his father was captured by demons.
As if on cue, Dean’s voice floats through the door. “Sammy?”
“It’s Sam,” Sam growls back, and from the look on his face Jess can tell it was harsher-or louder-than he meant it to be. He visibly pulls himself together and opens the door. Dean is fidgety and looks worried, but he relaxes when he sees Sam again.
“Sam,” he says, mollified, “can we-talk for just a minute? Us two?”
Jess, hovering nervously in the doorway, is about to vanish back into the bedroom when she hears Sam announce in a loud, clear voice, “No, Dean, anything you need to say to me, you can say in front of Jess.”
She pokes her head back out and watches as Dean appears to struggle with this, before mumbling, “She-she knows?”
Sam is standing firmly between Dean and Jess, half-protectively, though she couldn’t say for sure who exactly he’s protecting. When he speaks, his voice has that same deliberate, patient rhythm, like he’s talking to a child. Jess can’t tell if she’s impressed with how quickly he’s pulled himself together, or vaguely offended on Dean’s behalf. “Knows what, Dean?” Sam is asking.
Dean looks trapped for a moment, and he shifts his weight like a kid trying to come up with a lie. His eyes dart around the room, find the windows, the door, Jess, Sam. He bites his lip.
“Dean,” Sam prompts, firmly.
Dean’s voice comes out high and thin. “You told her, Sammy? Did something-did something happen?”
Sam sighs and without even seeing his face Jess knows his lips are pursed and he’s fighting every possible instinct to roll his eyes. “Told her what, Dean?”
“I am not a fucking child!” Dean suddenly barks, and Jess flinches back. Sam holds his ground, and Dean is fidgeting more now, looking pissed. “So stop talking like I am, tell this bitch to go away because I need to talk to you!”
“Dean!” Sam snaps, aghast, and Jess is tempted to do exactly as Dean said and get the hell out if his way, but Sam has shifted to place himself all the more deliberately between the two of them. “What the hell is your problem?”
“My problem, you asshole, is that Dad is missing and he’s been gone for a month, and I don’t know what he was hunting but something’s got him, Sam, this is your own flesh and blood we’re talking about, and-”
“Hunting? Dean, we’ve been through this-” Sam cuts himself off, pinches the bridge of his nose. From her awkward perch in the doorway, Jess can see how wired Dean is, and how scared. She feels another pang of sympathy for him, and for Sam too, whose shoulders are slumping in a way that tells her he’s tired-past-tired and his heart is breaking. “Dean,” he says, calmly, evenly, “have you been taking your meds?”
Dean looks astonished for a moment, his jaw working, and then he snaps, “Really, Sam? Really? I know you and Dad didn’t always-”
“Dean! Have you been taking your meds?”
“-but this is really the fucking limit, Sam, I mean God knows what’s got him and you’re going to stand there in your Stanford t-shirt and argue with me like a little girl? This is your life, man, I’m sorry but you can’t just-”
“Dean! Your meds!”
“THEY WERE LYING, SAM, THEY WERE LYING ABOUT THE MEDS!”
Dean seems to move from his place in the front room to right up in Sam’s face in an instant, and they’re nearly nose to nose, Dean radiating violence and fury and panic and Sam planting his feet wide and standing his ground, snapped to attention, every muscle in his body tense. Without taking her eyes from the two of them, Jess reaches behind her and gropes blindly at the dresser, reaching for the phone.
“Who was lying, Dean?” asks Sam, and it sounds like he’s panting a little. “What were they saying?”
“It’s not important, Sam, it’s not-you don’t-we need to go! Dad is-Dad’s gonna-”
“Dad is on a bender and ignoring you, Dean, because he is an asshole, and he’s not-”
“SHUT UP!” Again, Dean seems to move in an instant, and he has rammed himself into Sam and they’ve both tumbled to the floor. Dean is yelling and Jess is screaming and Sam is writhing beneath his brother, losing the very last of his patience as he swings blindly up at Dean’s face, and Dean is trying to hold him down and begging him to just listen, and it takes Jess a minute to realize there’s a voice coming out of the phone in her hand.
“911, what’s your emergency? Hello? Hello?”
“Jess-get-in the-bedroom!” Sam gasps, pawing at Dean’s face, and she steps backward, presses herself against the doorframe.
“Hello, 911, what’s your-”
“Hi,” she gasps, wrenching her attention away from Sam and Dean long enough to pull the phone up to her ear. “Hi, hi, I-um-my name is Jessica Moore and I live at, um, at 22 Ramos Way, a-apartment 3D, and, and my boyfriend’s brother is here and he’s-he’s having some kind of-he’s off his meds, they’re fighting, he thinks-Sam!-oh, God, please get here, please hurry, they’re fighting and I don’t know what-”
“Miss, miss, I need you to calm down, somebody’s on their way-” Sam appears to have gained the upper hand, but Dean is still holding his own, and is now panicking in full, crying possession and shouting in Latin and begging, please, please, get out of my brother, leave him alone, please-
“-like me to stay on the line until they arrive?”
“Please, yes, yes please,” she’s choking out, sagging against the doorframe, watching as Sam disentangles himself from Dean and holds him down as he tries to shout something in Latin, “please stay, they’re still fighting, my brother’s boyfriend-I mean my, my boyfriend’s brother, he thinks, he thinks it’s a demon, he’s not okay, oh, God-”
Jess is still holding the phone to her ear when two cops come crashing into her apartment, drag Sam off of Dean and yank Dean to his feet, Dean who is still hollering half-heartedly about possession and demons and please, Sammy, please hang on, I’m here, okay, please oh God please get out of my brother. It’s Sam who pulls it from her hands and hangs up, and he scrubs a hand over his nose, succeeding only in smearing the blood around. He looks like a schoolboy who’s been in a fight, and Jess thinks her heart might break as he stands there, disheveled and panting and still in his pajamas, while outside they are probably sedating his big brother.
“I’m gonna kill my dad,” his mutters, after a long time, and Jess nods and lets him pull her close.
•
4.
An excerpt The Revelation to John (the Apocalypse), from the The New Oxford Revised Standard Third-Canon Bible (with Apocrypha and the Letters of Kevin), 3017 edition
7 And when the thousand years are
ended, Satan will be loosed from his
prison 8 and will come out to deceive
the nations which are at the four
corners of the earth, that is, Gog and
Magog, to gather them for battle; their
number is like the sand of the sea.
9 And they marched up over the broad
earth and surrounded the camp of the
saints and the beloved city; but fire
came down from heaven and consumed
them, 10 and the devil who
had deceived them was thrown into the
lake of fire and sulphur where the beast
and the false prophet were, and they
will be tormented day and night for
ever and ever.
11 Then I saw a great white
throne and him who sat upon it; from
his presence earth and sky fled away,
and no place was found for them.
12 And I saw the dead, great and
small, standing before the throne, and
books were opened. Also another book
was opened, which is the book of life.
And the dead were judged by what was
written in the books, and by what they had
done. 13 And the sea gave up the dead
in it, Death and Hades gave up the
dead in them, and all were judged by
what they had done. 14 Then Death
and Hades were thrown into the lake
of fire. This is the second death, the
lake of fire; 15 and if any one’s name
was not found in the book of
life, he was thrown into the lake of
fire.
An excerpt The Gospel According to Chuck*, from the The New Oxford Revised Standard Third-Canon Bible (with Apocrypha and the Letters of Kevin), 3017 edition
*Translated from the First Common Era English by K.A. Janda
12 It was at this time that Sam went to his brother
Dean and confessed he was tempted by the offer Lucifer
had made him. At this time Dean was seized by a terrible
fear; 13 he thought himself unable to defend his brother or
the earth, and he begged before the angel Castiel for assistance.
14 But the angel Castiel said onto the brothers, “There is
nothing to be done, for the time of judgement has arrived.”
And the brothers despaired. 14 But Sam said to his brother,
“It was you who taught me of duty, and if it is so
that you and I must be the ones to carry out the
LORD’s will, so be it.” 15 And Dean though he was despairing
found he could not sway his brother.
16 And so with courage the brothers embraced
and opened their hearts to the angels of the LORD
which had called to them.
An except from the Book of Castiel*, from the New Oxford Revised Standard Third-Canon Bible (with Apocrypha and the Letters of Kevin), 3017 edition
*Translated from the First Common Era English by K.A. Janda
20 And after forty years the war had ceased,
and the earth was ravaged, 21 and the LORD’s will
was done on earth, and there was peace. The archangel
Lucifer was dead, and the archangel Michael was
freed from his human flesh, and he spoke onto
the remains people of the earth, “I am the LORD
your God from this time onwards.” 22 And the people
began to rebuild the earth and to multiply,
and there was joy in the remaining nations, as the people
prepared temples in honor of the Angel King.
23 In this time the angel Castiel was discovered
by Michael to be honoring the bodies of the
vessels of the angels, 24 and to be laying them
into the ground, and to be mourning them.
25 And the Angel King spoke onto Castiel,
and he said, “Castiel, you are the soldier who brought
the vessel out of perdition, and sin, and
you are the shepherd who brought them here.”
And Castiel said that he was. 26 And the Angel
King blessed Castiel, and said to him, “For your
loving service on earth, and your devotion
to the angels and to the vessels and to the prophet,
you shall receive honor on earth and in heaven.”
27 And he gave to the angel Castiel dominion
over the people of the earth and gave onto
him the task of guarding the humans from sin
and from evil, 28 for he saw that Castiel loved the
people of the earth, and then the Angel King departed,
leaving Castiel to bury and honor the bodies
of the vessels Sam and Dean.
•
5.
Dean Winchester is nine years old, and he knows only two things to be absolutely true. First, home is his father’s Chevy Impala, and second, he has to take care of his little brother, Sammy, no matter what. These are the facts that shape his life, and they always have been. Even now, in the car, in the snow, and it feels like it’s been a day since Dad left for “just a second.” Sammy says Daddy’s been gone a thousand hours, and Dean knows it isn’t possible, but just right now? He’s not quite sure.
“I’m cold,” says Sammy, for about the hundredth time, and Dean reaches over the tugs Sam’s zipper all the way back up to his chin. Sam frowns and fidgets with it, and Dean knows that in a minute or two Sam will grip it in both mittened hands and pull it back down again, but for now his small, cold hands only fumble for a moment before he slumps back against Dean. “Wanna hear a story?” he asks.
Dean turns to look down at Sam, surprised. Since Dad left Sam has asked Dean for stories several times, but this is the first time-ever, Dean thinks-that Sam has offered to return the favor. “Sure, Sammy,” he says, and Sam tucks himself closer against Dean, draws little circles on Dean’s thigh as he thinks.
“Dean, Dean…Dean and Sammy went to a carnival, and they rode the roller coasters till they puked, and Sammy was big enough for the coasters and nobody said anything when they rode a thousand times for free. And there was a clown, but Dean didn’t let Sammy look at it, and then they had cotton candy and Daddy pushed them on the swings until the were up in the sky.”
Dean looks back down at Sam, who had let out a little sigh and seems to be finished. He recalls going to a state fair last summer, how Sam had been too small for the ferris wheel-hardly a roller coaster-and he and Sam had sat on the swings by the fairground in the summer evening heat for a long time, waiting for their Dad. He remembered Sam pulling up the dry, yellow-grey grass in bunches, making a bouquet. They couldn’t afford any dinner, not after the merry-go-round, but Dean had promised Sam some cotton candy someday, and ice cream, and fried dough.
“That was a good story, Sammy,” he says, and Sam lets out a contented little hum.
“Tell me ’bout Daddy,” says Sam, into Dean’s shoulder, and Dean reaches out and makes his cold fumbling fingers yank Sam’s zipper back up. He wishes there were two pairs of mittens. He wishes the sun would come up.
“Dad…Dad fights monsters, Sammy,” says Dean, staring out at the whirling snow and the blue-black night. “Dad goes and he kills the bad guys, remember, and he’s gonna teach you and me to do it, too. Dad is like the hero.”
“Is that how come we always have to move?” Sam mumbles, and Dean knows that Sammy knows all this, knows this story by heart, because this is the story Dean always tells when they’re trapped or cold or hungry or alone for hours and hours, pressed into closets or under beds, or out in the beating sun in front of a motel room because Dad has not showed for days and days and they can’t just stay in rooms they’re not paying for.
“Yeah,” says Dean, putting his heavy cold hand on the back of Sam’s head for a moment before settling it back on his shoulder and pulling him close. “That’s how come we always have to move.”
“Cuz the cops don’t know Daddy’s hunting monsters?” Sam whispers, and Dean hums his approval. Sam is quiet for a moment, then nestles a little closer and says, “Dean?”
“Yeah, Sammy?”
“Are we monsters?”
Dean wants to be shocked and angry and horrified, but he’s cold, and he’s tired, so what falls from his mouth is, “What?”
“Cuz Daddy sometimes-” Sam cuts himself off, scrubs his nose against Dean’s sleeve.
“We gotta be tough, Sammy,” says Dean, and he’s sorry for it, because Sam is just so little still and ought to be able to act like it. Ought to always be this small and quick to seek comfort, always this open and tactile and unafraid. “That’s all. Dad just wants us to be tough.”
Sam is quiet so long Dean thinks he might have fallen asleep, and he thinks he might do the same, and some part of his brain is absolutely screaming no no no stay AWAKE, wait for Dad, stay warm, stay up, but it’s muffled like somebody yelling through a wall, or from under a blanket. He thinks he might actually be asleep, but then he hears Sam’s voice, thin and strained in the darkness. “Dean? Is Daddy coming back?”
“Of course he is, Sammy,” he says, and is distantly alarmed by how faint his voice sounds.
“Dean?” asks Sam again, burrowing still further into his brother, pressing his face against Dean’s side. “Is Daddy hunting a monster?”
“Yes,” says Dean, firmly, and he thinks of his father, coming home at last, yelling, smelling of alcohol and something metallic, gathering their stuff in a frantic heap into the car, seizing his sons by their collars and throwing them into the backseat, move, you fuckers, move, driving through nights and early mornings and screeching into dirty pay-by-the-hour motels, vanishing, slamming doors and throwing things and pinning Dean to the bed and screaming at him, you stupid little bastard, because Dean has always done something wrong, is always shoved into some closet or car or filthy room. He thinks of the time Dad knocked his tooth out and he couldn’t find it and they had to leave before they did, thinks his tooth is somewhere in central Ohio on the floor of a miserable motel room waiting for some nonexistent fairy to replace it with a quarter.
“Yeah, Sam,” says Dean, “Dad’s hunting a monster.”
“Is the monster gonna get me?” Sammy mumbles into Dean’s jacket.
“No, Sammy,” says Dean, pulling his brother close to him, thinking of Sam’s two missing teeth which he saved in a pocket of his duffle bag and for which Sam was rewarded with a soda can from the machine each time because Sam only likes soda as an occasion treat, like how it tickles his mouth and nose. “No monsters are gonna get you.”
Title: Variations on a Theme (or five ways it might have been)
Rating: I'm gonna say a hard PG-13
Words: ~8,000
Spoilers: Basically everything, but in particular for the Winchester-and-the-FBI arc, seasons 4/5, "What is and What Should Never Be."
Warnings: Descriptions of violence and physical child abuse, discussion of suicide, lots of language, mental illness, major character death, gratuitous hurt!Dean with a little bit of hurt!Sam, hardcore Biblical geekery in part four. John does not come off well in this story, which was not my intention (though I'm not great fan of John so I'm not too fussed).
Summary: Maybe the Winchesters fight monsters and prevent the apolcalypse, and maybe they don't. Five places the Winchester boys might have ended up.
Neurotic author's notes: This happened because I was sitting in my religion class thinking about parallel universes. And also about how fun/weird it would be to contemplate the addition of new books to the canonical Bible, because I am a huge nerd. Therefore, this happened. Also, the cut text is from Richard Feynman's The Character of Physical Law, because I am an incurable dork.
1.
Somewhere along the line, Rob started thinking of him as his Mysterious Uncle Dean.
When he was just small, it had been the Secret Uncle Dean, because nobody ever talked about him, and when they did Dad got tense and quiet and sometimes angry, and Mom got fidgety and nervous, and the one time anybody ever mentioned Uncle Dean to Nana (his little sister, Molly, still to young to know better) she’d looked like she was going to cry. Later, when Rob was thirteen and pointlessly callous, he’d thought of him as Dead Uncle Dean, and made a point to pry his father for salacious details-very few of which he was ever actually granted. He’d decided the secrecy had to indicate something awful, wondered what kind of a fuck up Uncle Dean must have been.
Now, though, at nineteen, Rob isn’t interest in rebellion, and is concerned mostly with facts. He knows Dean was born in 1979, four years before Dad, and died in 2007, the winter before his mom and dad got married. He knows he was a mechanic, knows he had a cool leather jacket and wore his hair short. He’d had a girlfriend, and Rob had only met her once, a very long time ago, around the time he worked out that there’d ever been an Uncle Dean. He knows that the sleek black 1967 Chevy Impala he is poised to inherit was once Dean’s, and before that, his Grandpa John’s. He’s never met either of them, and he doesn’t know if they drove it or just kept it clean and maintained, like Dad does. He knows that Dad doesn’t like to talk about Uncle Dean, and Mom has always said to let it be. He knows Dean was an alcoholic, and occasionally a thief, because his Dad told him once, bitterly, and almost out of nowhere. He has also gathered, from almost two decades of unfinished whispers, that Uncle Dean killed himself.
What he doesn’t know, that’s a much longer list, and an infuriating one. He doesn’t know why Dean killed himself, and he doesn’t know if he was close to Dad, and he doesn’t know if he was tender or angry or a bastard or a lost soul. He doesn’t know if he was a half-decent older brother, which seemed especially important, as Rob had always taken his brotherly duty very seriously. Did Dean have Dad’s back, the way Rob has Molly’s? Did Dad drive Dean crazy, the way Molly does Rob?
He doesn’t know, and now he’s home for Christmas, at his Nana’s house in Kansas, in the home where Dad and Dean grew up, and he’s just found out this was the last place Dean ever was before he died.
“What?” he asks, staring at his mother, who is bunched up in an armchair and inspecting her mostly-empty wine glass forlornly. It’s two days since Christmas, and late, and Nana and Dad and Molly are all upstairs, asleep, Dad in his childhood bedroom, Molly and Rob’s empty cot in Dean’s. That’s what had prompted Rob to ask his mom about Dean at all.
“I said, this house was the last place Dean was, before he drove off to-to Illinois, to a warehouse. And-you know. In front of Sam-of your dad.”
Rob feels a bit like somebody’d just punched him in the stomach. His uncle-his father’s brother-had killed himself in front of Dad? Jesus. Jesus.
Mom takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Oh, Dean. Quite the lost soul.” She finishes her wine and then stares at the empty glass, eyes unfocused.
Rob is breathless. An ache is developing somewhere deep in his chest, a dull, horrible pain. “Mom?” he prompts her, and she looks up, looking tired and a little lost. “What-what do you mean?”
Mom shakes her head, twirls the glass in her hands. “He wasn’t okay, honey,” she says. “He-especially right up near the end. It was Mary-your Nana’s-birthday, you know, and right after your dad asked me to marry him. That weekend. It was that weekend. The stupid, selfish bastard.”
Rob is staring now, openly. All this new information is scrambling around in his brain, reshaping the image of the Mysterious Uncle Dean, twisting it. They’d all have been here, gathered in this warm little house in Kansas, this sweet place that to Rob had always meant holidays and warmth and Nana’s spoiling. They must have been, because Mom and Dad had lived out in California even then, he’s sure of it. He tries to imagine it, this little family, Nana and Mom and Dad, Dean and maybe his girlfriend, celebrating Nana’s birthday, Mom showing off an engagement ring, Dad pink and grinning like he was on their anniversaries when he and Mom got dressed up and went out dancing. Dad with that stupid long hair he’d had right up until Molly was born. And Dean, leather-jacket mystery Dean, the alcoholic, dragging Dad to Illinois-Illinois?-and-and-
“He k-killed himself in front of Dad?” asks Rob, softly, and his mother nods, looking up at him again.
“Stabbed himself. In the-in the stomach. Rambling about monsters and, and I guess he thought he was dreaming. Sam didn’t really-anyways. Towards the end I guess he thought your Nana was there, too, and Carmen. And-and me.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath and becomes suddenly very interested in her empty glass again.
“Carmen?”
“His girlfriend. Sweet girl. God, I haven’t seen her in twenty years. The poor thing. I never knew why-well, that’s not fair. Dean was. Dean was difficult. But he had a big heart. Your dad forgets that sometimes. Used to forget. I-he loved your dad very much.” She looks up then, smiles wetly at Rob. “The way you are with Molly. Dean and your dad, they weren’t-they weren’t friends like you and Mols are, but he had Dad’s back. He-I’m sorry he-” She cuts herself off, biting her lip, and Rob realizes abruptly that his mom is about to cry.
“Mom,” he says, and stands from the couch, crosses to his mother, crouches down beside her. Puts a hand on her shoulder. “Mom,” he says again, “don’t cry, please. It’s okay.”
His mom lets out a shaky laugh and puts a hand on his head, exceedingly gentle. “You know, Robby, I see him in you. Your dad-it’s hard for him, you know, but Dean was always kind to me. He loved your dad and your nana. He was-he was gentle. You kind of look like him, baby.” She tucks a piece of his hair behind his ear. She lectures him that it’s too long, but he knows she likes it, know it reminds her of Dad when he was younger. “He-in the end, he was-he was over the fence and long gone, you know, and it’s sad, but he-I guess he was-he was sorry, I think. He loved your dad, and they weren’t always-well. He was sorry. And your dad was sorry. Is sorry.” She runs her fingers through his hair one more time, then mutters, “Okay, bedtime,” and pulls herself out of the chair and onto her feet. Rob follows suit, and walks with his mother out of the warm living room, up the stairs and to the door of the room she’s sharing with Dad. She kisses his cheek and goes inside, and Rob walks past his Nana’s door to the room he’s sharing with Molly, enters quietly so as not to wake her, climbs onto the cot fully-clothed, lies in the darkness. The room is empty of anything to indicate it has once belonged to a teenager or a child, to Dean, but it was his, once. Uncle Dean, gentle, selfish, crazy, sorry Dean, who was gone without any good reason. And right in front of Dad.
In the morning, neither Rob nor his mother acknowledge their conversation the night before, but as he brushes close to his father pouring coffee, Rob ducks his head against his dad’s shoulder, just a moment’s closeness. He’s not sure why he does it, and the soft, surprised noise Dad makes only turns Rob’s ears hot and pink, and he tugs away quickly, leaving Dad with a strange, soft smile on his face.
“Hey, Mols,” says Rob, turning to his sister, who is sitting at the table with Mom and Nana, drinking cinnamon-smelling tea. She’s a month shy of sixteen, and still not used to coffee.
Molly looks up, her eyebrows raised, mouth quirked, looking so much like she had when she was little and her big brother was her hero, and an aching love for her hits Rob like a wave.
“You still want me to teach you how to drive?” he asks, and she nods eagerly, and Rob nods back. “Okay, Molly,” he says, “we can start today.”
•
2.
“Alright, talk to me.”
“Jesus, Hendrickson, give me a second.”
Victor doesn’t really want to give anybody any seconds, but he purses his lips and lets Yoon, the exhausted-looking shrink-oh, sorry, forensic psychiatrist-pour herself a cup of coffee, and he waits patiently while she dumps about a pound of cream into it and stirs. Victor likes Yoon, likes that she’s straightforward, cuts the crap, gives him the answers he needs. But she also has a way of going about things, and Victor knows better than to disrespect it, lest she stonewall him with a thousand official psychiatric terms he’ll waste a night looking up. He needs Yoon’s Victor-specific rundown.
“Okay,” she says, “better sit down. This is-well-”
“Fucked up?” Victor prompts, already settling down at the table with his own coffee (black and strong and steaming-hot) and his pen, ready to annotate his second-most troublesome file: Winchester, S.
Yoon frowns and sets her coffee down. “It’s not-okay, yes, it is. It’s not easy, that’s for damn sure. This poor kid-well, let’s just say I’m not looking forward to talking to the brother.”
Victor’s eyebrows shoot up at that. “Talking to the brother? Yoon, Dean Winchester hasn’t given a productive interview in his entire life. He’s way too far gone. If you think little Sammy was a nightmare…” He trails off, shaking his head. “Talk to me about Sam, then.”
“Right.” Yoon is flipping through her own notes, her face betraying consternation and exhaustion. “I’m assuming you already know a bit about the father-sounds like PTSD and some kind of paranoid schizophrenia, but I couldn’t say for sure. Suffice to say, the man suffered delusions upon delusions, and-quit making that face, Victor, you asked what I found out and I’m getting there.”
Victor’s scowl deepens in reply. Yes, he knows all about John Winchester, knows the guy was as batshit crazy at they come, knows he killed people everywhere he went, dug up graves and stole from small-town motels and lied to everyone, knows he raised two serial killers, knows Sam probably did the world a favor when he accidentally killed the guy in a car wreck back on ’06. He has his own theories about how Sam and Dean’s early days must have been, knows the Winchesters left a trail of unsettling hospital records wherever they went. Knows that in the year 1988 alone, Dean sustained a concussion, two broken ribs, a sprained wrist, and a series of gashes in his leg he apparently insisted were inflicted by an animal-and that’s just the ones he’s confirmed. The Winchesters didn’t use their real name all that often, which to Victor just proves John knew what he was doing was insane, was wrong. It just proves guilt.
Yoon gives him a look, and then glances down at her notes. “So he-John Winchester, he had this obsession with the occult, I guess, with demons and hell and ghosts and all kinds of supernatural evils, after his wife died. He taught Sam and Dean all this stuff, and he was dogmatic. They memorized exorcisms and trained in how to kill demons. Think of-God, I don’t know, the mother from Carrie, except it’s all demons and evil spirits. And he was their drill sergeant, too, those were Sam’s words.” She takes a breath, pushes her hair out of her eyes. “You probably already know he was also physically abusive, and I mean really incredibly violent, though it seems like Dean took the bulk of it. Sam kept repeating that, ‘Dean protected me.’ When he’s lucid, he knows Dean protected him from John. It’s just…”
“He’s not lucid too often,” says Victor, nodding. He knows all too well how it is to talk to Sam. In some ways, it’s harder than Dean-Dean is a lunatic, but he’s a consistent lunatic. He sticks to the same story-he’s daddy’s little soldier, he’s ridding the word of the monsters he sees everywhere, he needs to see Sammy, now, please, or I’ll fucking rip your lungs out, I swear to God.
Sam, though, Sam is trickier. He flits in and out. He’ll talk about being crushed into a closet with his brother, five years old, six, seven, terrified of some devil his father was out hunting, some devil who was really just a eighteen-year-old high school kid or a thirty-one-year-old librarian, and he gets this smile, like, Crazy, right? He’ll say how he cried the first time his father ever made him kill someone, how his father was screaming that he had to, had to or people would die, had to or they’d all go up in flames and the world would descend into hell, how Dean had stood at his elbow and coached and soothed him, comforted him, guided him through it. How Dean was proud when it was done, hadn’t even teased him for crying, how he’d been grateful for that, had basked in his father’s approval, and he’d shake his head and say, “How fucked up is-I mean, God, I was-I was sixteen, and she was only-maybe twenty-” And then he’d panic and shut down and fold into himself, insist dully that he had to, there were monsters, and somebody had to hunt them down.
Yoon is nodding sympathetically, her mouth a thin line. “I think…it’s shitty, Victor, because you know, Sam could have been okay. Not okay, fine, but, you know. He ran away, when he was eighteen, I guess he and John had some kind of explosive fight and he stormed out and I’m not clear on the details but he enrolled in a community college. Four years he was-well, not fine, but functional. He had friends, a girlfriend, an apartment. 3.5 GPA and a job. He may even have been seeing a counselor-he wasn’t too clear on that matter-and then-”
Yoon pauses, looking strained, sorry, and Victor leans forward, desperately curious. He’s never heard this part of the story. He knows, in stark terms, what must have happened, but he still rocks back a little in his seat, involuntarily, when Yoon finishes, “Then Dean showed up and set the apartment on fire. The girlfriend died. Sam-regressed.”
Victor almost snorts, wants to say, “Yeah, that’s one word for it,” but the look on Yoon’s face shuts him up. Lost little Sam Winchester has broken her heart. Yeah, well. She never saw what he and his brother did to people. She never saw Dean when he was angry, or psychotic. Never saw Sam grip his head and scream nonsense. Never saw either boy’s handiwork with a knife.
“And off on their merry little murder spree they went,” says Victor instead, and Yoon’s defeated expression shifts to annoyance.
“Sam’s sorry,” she says, “sometimes. And a product of his environment. John was violent, Dean was violent, Sam’s violent. John said devils walk the earth and it’s the boys’ job to stop them. Dean buys it, all of it, and he’s got Sam terrified to do anything but go along with it.” She pauses. “Sometimes thinks Dean was saving him from monsters, sometimes John,” she says, softly, “but Dean kept saving him. He’s convinced he can’t survive without Dean.”
“Dean can’t survive without Sam,” says Victor, and the old implacable anger for John Winchester resurfaces. His mind retrieves a picture he saw once, years ago, early in this case: two boys, one with a round face and shaggy hair, maybe five, smiling broadly, revealing the proud holes where baby teeth had fallen out, the other with close-cropped hair and a thin, freckled face, his smile tighter and not quite reaching his eyes, his arm secure around the little boy’s shoulder. Sam and Dean Winchester, winter 1988. Just boys, children, without access to a world behind their father, who was violent and terrifying but also all they had, their only teacher and sole provider. Just little boys, caught up in something awful that they couldn’t control.
But then Victor’s mind speeds forward, to a girl, twenty-one or so, blonde, pretty, delicate, beaten and torn open, thrown out a window and then dragged over hot coals once again. This was the devil Sam and Dean Winchester hunted, this tiny girl with a whole life ahead of her, a life cut short. They’d found her twenty minutes dead in a circle of salt and satanic scrawls, her cooling blood and organs spilling out onto the floor, one arm still curled around her stomach, the other resting on her abandoned phone. She’d died trying to hold her organs in, and call her little sister. Meg, her name had been, Meg Masters. She was from Andover, Massachusetts, and had a mother and a father and a sister, and it was Victor, not Sam and Dean, who had to face them and their anger and grief. It was those three, the battered remaining Masters, who had to live with the knowledge that their Meg died terrified and in horrible pain. Not Sam, and not Dean.
Victor sees the question forming in Yoon’s face, and cuts her off before she can say it. “They have to stay separated,” he says, shortly, “trust me. Together, they don’t have any bounds. They’ll kill us all with their fingernails if they’ve got each other to egg ’em on. Separated, they’re…” He pauses. “Not a threat,” he finishes, with finality, and it’s not the whole truth, but it’s a crucial piece of it, and it’s a crying fucking shame.
•
3.
Jessica Moore always wanted a brother or sister. Her childhood was an easy one-and she suspected this was really the biggest difference between her and Sam-but there was a loneliness there, an absence. A space where some other person ought to have been.
This was not the only thing she’d never understand about Sam Winchester, but it was certainly in the top five. Sam had a brother, one who-judging by the fairly frequent long, newsy letters and rambling voicemails-cared about him quite a bit, and wanted to be close to him. Jess could never understand Sam’s reluctance, never thought his excuses seemed fair. “Dean’s sick,” he’d said, at first, and as they grew closer “sick” became “mentally ill” because “unstable” became, once, in the dead of night, when they were sweaty and tangled and whispering their deepest secrets, “scary.” Dean scared Sam, sometimes, and that was Sam’s biggest secret. “Because he thinks he’s protecting me,” Sam had said, pressing his mouth against Jess’s curls, encircling her body completely with hers. “He’s protecting me, he thinks, and if he knew how much he scares me, it would kill him.”
Jess had turned this information over in her head, considered what she knew of Sam, Sam who she loved with a completeness that sometimes shocked her, given how little she really knew of his inner life. Sam’s childhood was a rocky one. His mother had died when he was very small. They’d been poor. Their father was distant. They moved a lot, and Sam felt isolated his whole life. His father looked down on higher education. He’d been raised mostly by Dean and, around the time Sam started high school, something went very wrong with Dean.
It started, according to Sam, with fear-and Jess has long suspected that everything about the Winchesters’s lives comes down to fear-and paranoia, and gradually became hallucinations and delusions and by the time Sam left, four years on, Dean apparently needed supervision. Sam spoke of his brother with something approaching derision, but Jess thought that as probably a defense mechanism (but she’d promised to stop analyzing Sam), and she could see, sometimes, when Sam talked about Dean making him dinner or taking him trick-or-treating (back, she supposed, before he’d hated Halloween) or taught him to wrestle, that he missed his brother, was mourning the person Dean Winchester might have been.
And now, it is one in the morning, and Dean Winchester is standing in the front room of her apartment.
He’s at once exactly as she’d pictured him-he could have leapt out of Sam’s one framed picture of him, handsome, cropped hair, gangly smile, and leather jacket all intact-and radically different from how she’d imagined. He’s confident, swaggering even. His grin is cocky. He hits on her right off the bat, and his grin is easy. He has none of the scrubby, skittish strangeness Jess associates with people who have been in and out of mental institutions since they were nineteen. He isn’t jumpy or twitchy or scared or angry, and Jess chastises herself for even believing he would be. It’s just that when Sam talks about him, he always sounded-well, unstable, frightening, manic. This guy just seems kind of guarded, but easy-going. Even trustworthy.
He tells Sam that their dad is on a hunting trip, and Sam dismisses this with an easy comment about Jim, Jack, and Jose-the same automatic derision that always emerges when Sam talks about his family. But Dean seems earnest, and then afraid, and Sam excuses himself and Jess, pulls her into the bedroom.
“I’m going to fucking kill him,” he hisses, as soon as the door is closed.
“Dean?” asks Jess, shocked but he outburst. Sam doesn’t curse much.
“No, not Dean,” he says, and runs a hand through his hair, looking helpless. “My dad. He’s off on some bender and if Dean’s out here it must have been-God, a week? Two?-Dean’s off his meds, Jess, he’ll think it’s demons. That’s what he-he thinks demons are after us. He probably thinks a demon has my dad. I am going to kill him.” Sam is pacing now, and his anger is building. For the first time in a very long while, Jess is aware of how big he is.
“Sam, honey, try to-”
Sam rounds on her in an instant. “Jess, I’m sorry, but you don’t get it. If Dad is gone, he’s probably not taking his meds. If he’s not taking his meds, he’s probably panicking and seeing demons at the mall. And now he’s going to assume demons have our dad and he’s going to think the meds are a trick and he’s going to attack some random person because he thinks he sees the devil in their eyes-Jess. This isn’t good.”
Sam actually looks a little manic himself at the moment, running a hand through his hair and gnawing his lip. Jess feels a pang of sympathy for Dean, left shuffling awkwardly in the front room, apparently convinced his father was captured by demons.
As if on cue, Dean’s voice floats through the door. “Sammy?”
“It’s Sam,” Sam growls back, and from the look on his face Jess can tell it was harsher-or louder-than he meant it to be. He visibly pulls himself together and opens the door. Dean is fidgety and looks worried, but he relaxes when he sees Sam again.
“Sam,” he says, mollified, “can we-talk for just a minute? Us two?”
Jess, hovering nervously in the doorway, is about to vanish back into the bedroom when she hears Sam announce in a loud, clear voice, “No, Dean, anything you need to say to me, you can say in front of Jess.”
She pokes her head back out and watches as Dean appears to struggle with this, before mumbling, “She-she knows?”
Sam is standing firmly between Dean and Jess, half-protectively, though she couldn’t say for sure who exactly he’s protecting. When he speaks, his voice has that same deliberate, patient rhythm, like he’s talking to a child. Jess can’t tell if she’s impressed with how quickly he’s pulled himself together, or vaguely offended on Dean’s behalf. “Knows what, Dean?” Sam is asking.
Dean looks trapped for a moment, and he shifts his weight like a kid trying to come up with a lie. His eyes dart around the room, find the windows, the door, Jess, Sam. He bites his lip.
“Dean,” Sam prompts, firmly.
Dean’s voice comes out high and thin. “You told her, Sammy? Did something-did something happen?”
Sam sighs and without even seeing his face Jess knows his lips are pursed and he’s fighting every possible instinct to roll his eyes. “Told her what, Dean?”
“I am not a fucking child!” Dean suddenly barks, and Jess flinches back. Sam holds his ground, and Dean is fidgeting more now, looking pissed. “So stop talking like I am, tell this bitch to go away because I need to talk to you!”
“Dean!” Sam snaps, aghast, and Jess is tempted to do exactly as Dean said and get the hell out if his way, but Sam has shifted to place himself all the more deliberately between the two of them. “What the hell is your problem?”
“My problem, you asshole, is that Dad is missing and he’s been gone for a month, and I don’t know what he was hunting but something’s got him, Sam, this is your own flesh and blood we’re talking about, and-”
“Hunting? Dean, we’ve been through this-” Sam cuts himself off, pinches the bridge of his nose. From her awkward perch in the doorway, Jess can see how wired Dean is, and how scared. She feels another pang of sympathy for him, and for Sam too, whose shoulders are slumping in a way that tells her he’s tired-past-tired and his heart is breaking. “Dean,” he says, calmly, evenly, “have you been taking your meds?”
Dean looks astonished for a moment, his jaw working, and then he snaps, “Really, Sam? Really? I know you and Dad didn’t always-”
“Dean! Have you been taking your meds?”
“-but this is really the fucking limit, Sam, I mean God knows what’s got him and you’re going to stand there in your Stanford t-shirt and argue with me like a little girl? This is your life, man, I’m sorry but you can’t just-”
“Dean! Your meds!”
“THEY WERE LYING, SAM, THEY WERE LYING ABOUT THE MEDS!”
Dean seems to move from his place in the front room to right up in Sam’s face in an instant, and they’re nearly nose to nose, Dean radiating violence and fury and panic and Sam planting his feet wide and standing his ground, snapped to attention, every muscle in his body tense. Without taking her eyes from the two of them, Jess reaches behind her and gropes blindly at the dresser, reaching for the phone.
“Who was lying, Dean?” asks Sam, and it sounds like he’s panting a little. “What were they saying?”
“It’s not important, Sam, it’s not-you don’t-we need to go! Dad is-Dad’s gonna-”
“Dad is on a bender and ignoring you, Dean, because he is an asshole, and he’s not-”
“SHUT UP!” Again, Dean seems to move in an instant, and he has rammed himself into Sam and they’ve both tumbled to the floor. Dean is yelling and Jess is screaming and Sam is writhing beneath his brother, losing the very last of his patience as he swings blindly up at Dean’s face, and Dean is trying to hold him down and begging him to just listen, and it takes Jess a minute to realize there’s a voice coming out of the phone in her hand.
“911, what’s your emergency? Hello? Hello?”
“Jess-get-in the-bedroom!” Sam gasps, pawing at Dean’s face, and she steps backward, presses herself against the doorframe.
“Hello, 911, what’s your-”
“Hi,” she gasps, wrenching her attention away from Sam and Dean long enough to pull the phone up to her ear. “Hi, hi, I-um-my name is Jessica Moore and I live at, um, at 22 Ramos Way, a-apartment 3D, and, and my boyfriend’s brother is here and he’s-he’s having some kind of-he’s off his meds, they’re fighting, he thinks-Sam!-oh, God, please get here, please hurry, they’re fighting and I don’t know what-”
“Miss, miss, I need you to calm down, somebody’s on their way-” Sam appears to have gained the upper hand, but Dean is still holding his own, and is now panicking in full, crying possession and shouting in Latin and begging, please, please, get out of my brother, leave him alone, please-
“-like me to stay on the line until they arrive?”
“Please, yes, yes please,” she’s choking out, sagging against the doorframe, watching as Sam disentangles himself from Dean and holds him down as he tries to shout something in Latin, “please stay, they’re still fighting, my brother’s boyfriend-I mean my, my boyfriend’s brother, he thinks, he thinks it’s a demon, he’s not okay, oh, God-”
Jess is still holding the phone to her ear when two cops come crashing into her apartment, drag Sam off of Dean and yank Dean to his feet, Dean who is still hollering half-heartedly about possession and demons and please, Sammy, please hang on, I’m here, okay, please oh God please get out of my brother. It’s Sam who pulls it from her hands and hangs up, and he scrubs a hand over his nose, succeeding only in smearing the blood around. He looks like a schoolboy who’s been in a fight, and Jess thinks her heart might break as he stands there, disheveled and panting and still in his pajamas, while outside they are probably sedating his big brother.
“I’m gonna kill my dad,” his mutters, after a long time, and Jess nods and lets him pull her close.
•
4.
An excerpt The Revelation to John (the Apocalypse), from the The New Oxford Revised Standard Third-Canon Bible (with Apocrypha and the Letters of Kevin), 3017 edition
7 And when the thousand years are
ended, Satan will be loosed from his
prison 8 and will come out to deceive
the nations which are at the four
corners of the earth, that is, Gog and
Magog, to gather them for battle; their
number is like the sand of the sea.
9 And they marched up over the broad
earth and surrounded the camp of the
saints and the beloved city; but fire
came down from heaven and consumed
them, 10 and the devil who
had deceived them was thrown into the
lake of fire and sulphur where the beast
and the false prophet were, and they
will be tormented day and night for
ever and ever.
11 Then I saw a great white
throne and him who sat upon it; from
his presence earth and sky fled away,
and no place was found for them.
12 And I saw the dead, great and
small, standing before the throne, and
books were opened. Also another book
was opened, which is the book of life.
And the dead were judged by what was
written in the books, and by what they had
done. 13 And the sea gave up the dead
in it, Death and Hades gave up the
dead in them, and all were judged by
what they had done. 14 Then Death
and Hades were thrown into the lake
of fire. This is the second death, the
lake of fire; 15 and if any one’s name
was not found in the book of
life, he was thrown into the lake of
fire.
An excerpt The Gospel According to Chuck*, from the The New Oxford Revised Standard Third-Canon Bible (with Apocrypha and the Letters of Kevin), 3017 edition
*Translated from the First Common Era English by K.A. Janda
12 It was at this time that Sam went to his brother
Dean and confessed he was tempted by the offer Lucifer
had made him. At this time Dean was seized by a terrible
fear; 13 he thought himself unable to defend his brother or
the earth, and he begged before the angel Castiel for assistance.
14 But the angel Castiel said onto the brothers, “There is
nothing to be done, for the time of judgement has arrived.”
And the brothers despaired. 14 But Sam said to his brother,
“It was you who taught me of duty, and if it is so
that you and I must be the ones to carry out the
LORD’s will, so be it.” 15 And Dean though he was despairing
found he could not sway his brother.
16 And so with courage the brothers embraced
and opened their hearts to the angels of the LORD
which had called to them.
An except from the Book of Castiel*, from the New Oxford Revised Standard Third-Canon Bible (with Apocrypha and the Letters of Kevin), 3017 edition
*Translated from the First Common Era English by K.A. Janda
20 And after forty years the war had ceased,
and the earth was ravaged, 21 and the LORD’s will
was done on earth, and there was peace. The archangel
Lucifer was dead, and the archangel Michael was
freed from his human flesh, and he spoke onto
the remains people of the earth, “I am the LORD
your God from this time onwards.” 22 And the people
began to rebuild the earth and to multiply,
and there was joy in the remaining nations, as the people
prepared temples in honor of the Angel King.
23 In this time the angel Castiel was discovered
by Michael to be honoring the bodies of the
vessels of the angels, 24 and to be laying them
into the ground, and to be mourning them.
25 And the Angel King spoke onto Castiel,
and he said, “Castiel, you are the soldier who brought
the vessel out of perdition, and sin, and
you are the shepherd who brought them here.”
And Castiel said that he was. 26 And the Angel
King blessed Castiel, and said to him, “For your
loving service on earth, and your devotion
to the angels and to the vessels and to the prophet,
you shall receive honor on earth and in heaven.”
27 And he gave to the angel Castiel dominion
over the people of the earth and gave onto
him the task of guarding the humans from sin
and from evil, 28 for he saw that Castiel loved the
people of the earth, and then the Angel King departed,
leaving Castiel to bury and honor the bodies
of the vessels Sam and Dean.
•
5.
Dean Winchester is nine years old, and he knows only two things to be absolutely true. First, home is his father’s Chevy Impala, and second, he has to take care of his little brother, Sammy, no matter what. These are the facts that shape his life, and they always have been. Even now, in the car, in the snow, and it feels like it’s been a day since Dad left for “just a second.” Sammy says Daddy’s been gone a thousand hours, and Dean knows it isn’t possible, but just right now? He’s not quite sure.
“I’m cold,” says Sammy, for about the hundredth time, and Dean reaches over the tugs Sam’s zipper all the way back up to his chin. Sam frowns and fidgets with it, and Dean knows that in a minute or two Sam will grip it in both mittened hands and pull it back down again, but for now his small, cold hands only fumble for a moment before he slumps back against Dean. “Wanna hear a story?” he asks.
Dean turns to look down at Sam, surprised. Since Dad left Sam has asked Dean for stories several times, but this is the first time-ever, Dean thinks-that Sam has offered to return the favor. “Sure, Sammy,” he says, and Sam tucks himself closer against Dean, draws little circles on Dean’s thigh as he thinks.
“Dean, Dean…Dean and Sammy went to a carnival, and they rode the roller coasters till they puked, and Sammy was big enough for the coasters and nobody said anything when they rode a thousand times for free. And there was a clown, but Dean didn’t let Sammy look at it, and then they had cotton candy and Daddy pushed them on the swings until the were up in the sky.”
Dean looks back down at Sam, who had let out a little sigh and seems to be finished. He recalls going to a state fair last summer, how Sam had been too small for the ferris wheel-hardly a roller coaster-and he and Sam had sat on the swings by the fairground in the summer evening heat for a long time, waiting for their Dad. He remembered Sam pulling up the dry, yellow-grey grass in bunches, making a bouquet. They couldn’t afford any dinner, not after the merry-go-round, but Dean had promised Sam some cotton candy someday, and ice cream, and fried dough.
“That was a good story, Sammy,” he says, and Sam lets out a contented little hum.
“Tell me ’bout Daddy,” says Sam, into Dean’s shoulder, and Dean reaches out and makes his cold fumbling fingers yank Sam’s zipper back up. He wishes there were two pairs of mittens. He wishes the sun would come up.
“Dad…Dad fights monsters, Sammy,” says Dean, staring out at the whirling snow and the blue-black night. “Dad goes and he kills the bad guys, remember, and he’s gonna teach you and me to do it, too. Dad is like the hero.”
“Is that how come we always have to move?” Sam mumbles, and Dean knows that Sammy knows all this, knows this story by heart, because this is the story Dean always tells when they’re trapped or cold or hungry or alone for hours and hours, pressed into closets or under beds, or out in the beating sun in front of a motel room because Dad has not showed for days and days and they can’t just stay in rooms they’re not paying for.
“Yeah,” says Dean, putting his heavy cold hand on the back of Sam’s head for a moment before settling it back on his shoulder and pulling him close. “That’s how come we always have to move.”
“Cuz the cops don’t know Daddy’s hunting monsters?” Sam whispers, and Dean hums his approval. Sam is quiet for a moment, then nestles a little closer and says, “Dean?”
“Yeah, Sammy?”
“Are we monsters?”
Dean wants to be shocked and angry and horrified, but he’s cold, and he’s tired, so what falls from his mouth is, “What?”
“Cuz Daddy sometimes-” Sam cuts himself off, scrubs his nose against Dean’s sleeve.
“We gotta be tough, Sammy,” says Dean, and he’s sorry for it, because Sam is just so little still and ought to be able to act like it. Ought to always be this small and quick to seek comfort, always this open and tactile and unafraid. “That’s all. Dad just wants us to be tough.”
Sam is quiet so long Dean thinks he might have fallen asleep, and he thinks he might do the same, and some part of his brain is absolutely screaming no no no stay AWAKE, wait for Dad, stay warm, stay up, but it’s muffled like somebody yelling through a wall, or from under a blanket. He thinks he might actually be asleep, but then he hears Sam’s voice, thin and strained in the darkness. “Dean? Is Daddy coming back?”
“Of course he is, Sammy,” he says, and is distantly alarmed by how faint his voice sounds.
“Dean?” asks Sam again, burrowing still further into his brother, pressing his face against Dean’s side. “Is Daddy hunting a monster?”
“Yes,” says Dean, firmly, and he thinks of his father, coming home at last, yelling, smelling of alcohol and something metallic, gathering their stuff in a frantic heap into the car, seizing his sons by their collars and throwing them into the backseat, move, you fuckers, move, driving through nights and early mornings and screeching into dirty pay-by-the-hour motels, vanishing, slamming doors and throwing things and pinning Dean to the bed and screaming at him, you stupid little bastard, because Dean has always done something wrong, is always shoved into some closet or car or filthy room. He thinks of the time Dad knocked his tooth out and he couldn’t find it and they had to leave before they did, thinks his tooth is somewhere in central Ohio on the floor of a miserable motel room waiting for some nonexistent fairy to replace it with a quarter.
“Yeah, Sam,” says Dean, “Dad’s hunting a monster.”
“Is the monster gonna get me?” Sammy mumbles into Dean’s jacket.
“No, Sammy,” says Dean, pulling his brother close to him, thinking of Sam’s two missing teeth which he saved in a pocket of his duffle bag and for which Sam was rewarded with a soda can from the machine each time because Sam only likes soda as an occasion treat, like how it tickles his mouth and nose. “No monsters are gonna get you.”