Orphans (2/2)
It was a good thing he did, because he discovered all kinds of ways to preserve meat in addition to the country ham method; before now, he’d desperately tried to use up all the meat before it went bad. The root cellar was as cold as a refrigerator, so it took a few days, but it was always a close call. Now he didn’t have to worry about a beating if he didn’t manage to use it all while it was still fresh.
It was a good thing he was learning to make clothes, too, because already, it was getting damn cold at night. He saved and tanned the skins of all the animals he slaughtered, and screw Dennis; before he let him have any of them, he was going to make everything he could think of for himself. He made the tick out of sheepskin rugs, and actually, though he had to replace the straw now and then, it was both soft and warm. He made himself fur hats, scarves, a cloak he labored for weeks on, and finally, a fur blanket. Dennis never said anything about him taking all the skins for himself, though he seemed pleased when Dean finally gave him a few, out of things to make for himself, and hopeful he’d make something new for Sam. He needed everything he’d made just to keep from going numb with cold after he got up from his nice warm bed in the morning to light a fire in the wood stove to start breakfast.
He found he had to figure out how to use the knitting machine, though, when he went down to the beach to make salt again and discovered the animal skins didn’t keep him warm at all once they got wet. One of the books he used for reference claimed wool was nearly as warm wet as when dry, and as light. Dean had noticed Dennis had started going around in knit wool leggings. It looked ridiculous--the guy was basically wearing tights. With a sigh, Dean realized he was going to have to go around in tights, too.
Dennis gave him an old, wind-up alarm clock so he could be sure to get up in time to make breakfast, which was vital once the days got short and he had to get up before dawn. He was glad to have the tights as he carefully made his way down the cliffside by lanternlight to build the fire under the cauldron as the dawn slowly bloomed over the ocean. If he had time, he just sat there warming himself by the fire there in the cove, sheltered from the wind, watching the sun rise.
It was ... peaceful. Now that he knew his duties and did them without complaint, Dennis didn’t bother him anymore, didn’t even usually make fun of him. Dennis was right that there wasn’t that much to do in the winter. Dean spent long hours knitting wool for more pairs of tights--double-knit this time, even triple knit, to really keep out the cold. He made some for Sam, too, so they might be able to venture outside sometimes during playtime. The animals were calm, a reassuring presence, sometimes even cuddling up against Dean when he just sat for hours in the barn, thinking.
There really was no escape. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t see a way. He and Sam had spent many afternoons brainstorming ideas. After Sam found out Dean had made Sam’s new wool tights himself, he thought Dean should weave a huge ‘HELP’ sign and hang it down the cliff face. It was a good idea, the best either of them had had yet, except Dennis would undoubtedly soon find it, tear it down, throw it away, and beat Dean, if he didn’t finally kill him for it.
“I’ll show you how to shear a sheep,” Dennis told Dean, as the weather was beginning at last to get warm again. Warm again. Had they really been here almost a year already? “Then you’ll have some more wool to work with. It’s not that hard. I know they’re a pain in the ass to milk--”
“They’re a pain in the ass in general,” Dean agreed.
“Yes, but delicious and fleecy, they give milk ... and this particular flock was free, so sheep it is. Anyway, once you get one on its back, it becomes helpless.” He smiled to himself. Dean didn’t get the joke.
Dean watched as Dennis sheared one expertly. “Try to be very careful with the shears. Unfortunately, you will cut one sometimes. It causes them to suffer if their fleece is never sheared, from excessive heat and weight, so remember that one way or another, it must be done, and now, before it gets too hot. Just do your best. Now you try.”
Dean couldn’t even wrestle the first one to the ground. Dennis unceremoniously dumped the thing onto its back for him. “Don’t feel sorry for them; just do what has to be done.” As Dean started making his first cuts with the long scissor-looking shears, Dennis went on, looking pleased with himself, “Words to live by.”
As he watched Dean struggle to get the second one onto its back, too, not helping this time, Dennis said, “Dean, if this is really the kind of pussy you are, you may as well throw yourself off the cliff right now; you’ll never make it.”
“Plenty of people aren’t as mean as you, and they get by,” Dean grunted, finally getting the sheep into position.
“Civilians, maybe. Not hunters.”
“I’ve met a ton of hunters. Still none as mean as you.”
“Ooh, mean ol’ Dennis,” Dennis mocked, “doing what needs to be done.”
“You don’t ‘need’ to threaten to kill me every five minutes.”
“Of course a selfish little creep like you would see it that way, but the fact is, Dean, maybe you don’t ‘need’ to exist, any more than that sheep you’re shearing. We ate one of her lambs last week.”
Why did Dennis have to put it like that?? The sick freak managed to turn the most harmless activities macabre. Dean flinched when Dennis, observing him start shearing this one, said, “Good.” Somehow even a positive word from this guy felt creepy. “You do pick things up pretty quickly. Keep that up, and you’ll prove you’re worth keeping around.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Dean worked in silence as Dennis watched. “The fleece looks like shit,” Dennis remarked. “It’s not even fit to be spun, the way you’re shearing it. But it’s still useful; you can line a jacket with it, a quilt--anything. Don’t waste it. Eventually, after some practice, you’ll get some halfway decent fleeces to work with. In the meantime, spin the ones I gave you last summer.”
Tired of just watching, Dennis got up and started collecting eggs. “I know you think I’m the meanest person who ever lived, but someday, Dean, you’ll realize I’m actually very nice.”
Dean managed to hold in his guffaw.
“I admit, the way I grew up made me have to be harder than many. I suppose you’re right about that. One of the names out there in the forest, Jason ... he was one of my favorite brothers. He was only twelve. He was mortally wounded and in agony. He begged me to kill him, not make him have to suffer like that for the hours or days it would take him to die of his wounds, and once I fulfilled his wish ... I knew there was nothing I couldn’t do.”
Jesus. Dean had stopped working, stopped moving, scarcely able to breathe. This guy had killed his brother? No wonder he was so twisted.
“I know you think I’m evil, but to believe that, you must never have seen true evil. The priest was evil, and many of the nuns. I’ll spare you the details of all the countless ways they tortured us ... but you know, there’s a reason whips hang from walls in the hallway by the dining room.”
“Did they ever get caught?”
“‘Caught’--oh, you mean by the authorities? No; it was the fifties; guardians of children could get away with anything, doubly so if they were of the cloth. No, no. We slaughtered them.”
Dean stood up straight. The sheep he’d been shearing jumped to its feet and ran off, bleating outraged. “What?!”
“If you push a person far enough, it’s inevitable,” Dennis said, like this was the most normal, everyday conversation. “We were all good kids--disturbingly good and well-behaved; nothing like you. But there came a day ... I woke up that morning believing it would be a day like any other, but when we were all gathered together for mealtime, one child revolted and was beaten brutally, as any rebel always was. As happened all too often, the priest went overboard. You’ve never seen such rage as was in that man. He was killing him. He knew it. He didn’t stop. We’d all seen it before, and we just ... couldn’t take it anymore. As one, we went nuts. We killed the priest--quite brutally, blood and body parts everywhere, and then we got a couple of nuns. The rest barred themselves in the chapel, but we found our way in, and slaughtered them to the last one. It’s a shame, really; some of them were kind, and did what they could to protect us. But once it began, it was bound to end thus.”
“Holy shit.” No wonder half of them killed themselves, knowing they were murderers several times over. Not Dennis and Barbara, though. “Then what happened?”
“Then we fed the bodies to the pigs and went to the most sympathetic neighbors for help, who had some inkling what went on here all those years they lived nearby, children disappearing, never to be heard from again, and the like. They covered for us and got us out, the younger ones to better places, the rest of us out on our own, me and Barbara among the latter. That’s partly why we were pretty sure we would be able to return here, when we thought up the idea, a few years ago. We were virtually certain none of our brothers and sisters would ever want to come back here. We didn’t want to, either, but it was exactly what we were looking for: someplace private, untouched, a place no one would ever find. That’s what appealed to the priest, as well. A place where we could live off the land. We were right that no one seemed to have lived here in all the intervening years--in fact, it was quite haunted. Barbara and I found the remains and burned them, got rid of all the ghosts.” He smirked. “It was a shock, seeing some of those faces again! But once we did that ... it hasn’t been so bad to be back here. It’s kind of nice.”
Dennis sat there, pressing his hands together, the strangest smile on his face. He did this sometimes. Now Dean knew what he must be thinking about. He’d said it was hard to live with the memories. He’d never be able to escape them. At last, Dennis seemed to return to the present and got up. He rubbed his hands together as he headed back up to the abbey. “Mmm, mutton.”
Well, that wasn’t a story you heard every day. Why did Dennis even tell him that? Wasn’t that the kind of thing you took to your grave? Even if he did decide to tell someone, why Dean? Dennis was chummy like that. It seemed like there was nothing he wouldn’t wax on to Dean about--Dean, whom he knew very well hated his guts.
Had Dennis developed some fondness for Dean after living and working together all this time? That was natural, wasn’t it? Grudgingly, Dean had developed a little sympathy for Dennis and all he’d been through in his life. You just couldn’t help it, if you were human. Dean tried to take it to mean that Dennis was warming to him, at least a bit, only it didn’t feel like that. It felt like ... the opposite.
It was one night, on the very edge of sleep, that it suddenly hit him: A dead man couldn’t tell your secrets. There was absolutely nothing Dennis wouldn’t tell Dean, no secret he wouldn’t unburden himself about with him, because he had decided long ago that, sooner or later, he was going to kill Dean.
Maybe it would be when Dean got strong and big enough to finally beat him in a fight. Maybe he had some date in mind, to do with how they intended to manipulate Sam or when they feared they might make their move to escape. Maybe he was always itching to do it, if Dean didn’t prove himself useful enough. Maybe he simply fully assumed that one day he would go overboard while he was beating him, as apparently happened to many of his brothers and sisters. If there was any way out of here ... they had to do it soon.
Very soon. The next day, running outside to play now that the weather was finally getting warm again, Sam only made it halfway down the hill before suddenly, inexplicably becoming so winded he had to sit down. Dean stared, bewildered, asking Sam if he was sick. Sam just shook his head, and the way he wouldn’t look Dean in the eye ... Sam knew what it was that had rendered him so weak. It was something those freaks were doing to him, but he insisted it was nothing and he was fine, and tried all afternoon to hide how hard his body quivered any time he tried to exert himself.
Dennis had said they got into the chapel when the nuns barricaded themselves in there, which meant there must be a way. Dean had looked at this abbey from every angle, inside and out, in every part he could get to. Every wall was made of stone, feet thick. The doors were the thickest, hardest wood Dean had ever seen--Dennis had shown him scratches in the door into the kitchen made by a bear, and they’d hardly left a dent. He’d have to hack at any door in here with an axe for days before he’d even begin to break through, and they didn’t have days when they were coming for the nuns. The caved-in parts were untraversable. They locked themselves and Sam behind multiple sets of doors in the parts of the building still standing, anyway. He just couldn’t figure it out ... until one night when he lay on his makeshift bed in the hallway before he doused the lantern, and gazing upward ... he saw the rafters.
The rafters! Across most of the building, they were so high up, you usually couldn’t even see them, lost in the murky darkness where no sunlight reached--two, even three stories up. But in the kitchen, and anywhere near the north and south outside walls the roof descended toward, the high-up rafters were joined to lower ones by others affixed at a slant--at an angle Dean could navigate. The rafters still stood, even where the walls had fallen. Even where the walls were whole, there was always a little gap just above each rafter, big enough for a kid to get through.
The very next morning, the second he heard the bar slot in place into the forbidden area, Dean ran for his tallest ladder and put it against the rafter he’d chosen after scouting around before breakfast. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he had reason to believe this might lead him directly into the chapel, or if not, he wouldn’t have far to go on a connecting rafter to get to one that would.
Shimmying up the angled rafter into the upper reaches of the abbey, trying to ignore the spiders and bats flying away as he came upon their daytime sleeping spots and the dust that surely must have sat atop these rafters undisturbed since a group of kids used them to gain access to the hiding place of their captors forty-some years ago, he felt only excitement to reach the upper level ... until he looked down and instantly got dizzy. He had to cling to the rafter as hard as he could with arms and legs both lest he fall--a fall that would either maim or kill him. This was a bad plan. But ... the only one. Whatever they were doing to Sam, he had to know.
Just don’t look down. He scooted across the top of the fortunately wide, sturdy rafter, going faster as he started to hear voices. He crossed a section of wall and was suddenly nearly blinded by daylight. The chapel! He was right that this rafter would get him all the way there. He could see the very top of the wall of stained-glass windows. He crawled forward, desperately eager. Dennis and Barbara were talking. Dean heard a little clanking and footsteps from inside the chapel. He was almost there.
He crossed the final wall--crumbled much more than he’d been led to believe, given how much Dennis waxed on about the miracle of the stained glass having withstood what so much stone couldn’t. A whole two-thirds of one end of the inner wall of the chapel was rubble, though indeed, most of the rest of it was intact. No wonder they locked Dean out of multiple sets of doors between the dining room and here--he would be able to hear them if he was any closer.
Dean looked down, his fervor to see Sam overcoming the instinctive terror of the danger of precariously perching at such a height. Dean was pretty far away, so high up, but he had a birds-eye view ... of Sam, spread-eagled on the floor, in the middle of an enormous circle with runes written all around it. A pentagram, actually, and Sam’s four limbs and his head were each at one of the five points. They made him lie there on the cold floor?? But then he saw the blankets beneath him. Well, at least there was that.
Still, Sam just ... did it, just laid himself out there for them like a sacrificial lamb? It was terrible to see his pale face, eyes closed, just ... resigned to having to submit to all this. Then Dean saw what the chains around his neck, wrists, and ankles were really for: he was chained to the floor.
Dean forced himself to hold in his gasp of rage. What they were doing to his little brother! Was this what they had done all along?? Had Sam had to come in here every day and simply lie there while they did whatever they wanted to him? What were they doing?
Dean peered closely. Mostly they were walking around. Barbara was lighting a ton of candles positioned around the circle. There were flowers and herbs in bowls within easy reach, and some other kind of dark-brown substance he couldn’t identify--it looked like witchcraft to Dean. Dennis was paging through some ancient-looking book. He started reading an incantation, and then ... then Barbara bent over a bowl next to Sam’s arm, where ....
Dean couldn’t stop himself from letting out a sound. Blood! It was Sam’s blood in the bowl! Barbara stroked Sam’s cheek, thanked him, and told him he was doing a great job, removing a needle from his arm and taking the bowl away to place on the altar. It was all Dean could do to hold in a scream.
At Dean’s sound, Sam’s eyes opened. He peered curiously, confused, into the rafters, and as his eyes settled on Dean, they got huge. His mouth fell open.
“What is it, Sam?” said Barbara, noticing.
When Sam didn’t answer, Barbara and Dennis started looking up, too. Dean tried to make himself as small as he could up there, but he was bathed in the morning light coming through the wall of windows. Shit!
Suddenly, Sam cried out. “Sam, what’s wrong?” Barbara asked solicitously. Dean dared to peer over the edge again, only to realize Sam had thought fast to get their attention off the rafters. Both Barbara and Dennis’s attention was entirely focused on him now. “Sam, what’s the matter?”
As Dean carefully made his way back to the ladder, he seethed with rage. Dennis and Barbara were going to die. They could barricade themselves in any room in the place, and Dean would come for them. Nothing could stop him.
“Please don’t watch,” Sam whispered, soft as a breath. “Dean ... I can handle everything else they do--it makes me tired, but I can take it, but I just can’t take ... for you to ... see me like that.”
Dean thought back to what it felt like when Dennis was beating him in the courtyard, fearing Sam could see from the windows. He’d felt exactly like that: like he could take the beating, and whatever else Dennis dished out, he just couldn’t bear the thought that Sam had seen him humiliated like that. Now he knew surely he hadn’t, chained to the floor as he was, and anyway, Dean had seen while he was in the rafters that the windows started much higher up the wall than Sam could reach to see. The relief he felt when he realized Sam definitely hadn’t seen it ... although he couldn’t imagine why Sam would feel shame over something he had no control over, still, he understood what he was saying. Dennis once said the worst part about the punishments the orphans had to endure was that his brothers and sisters all had to watch. Dean got it.
“But I had to see, Sam, don’t you get it?? You should’ve told me!”
“So that what? So you’d feel helpless, too? Except that you wouldn’t! You’d have attacked Dennis and Barbara, and I’m so afraid of what they’d do to you! It would only make you feel bad--it did only make you feel bad!--but there’s no solution.”
“So, what, then, Sam? Because this can’t go on.”
“Well ... are you okay?”
Dean shrugged. He was okay. There were ways to escape Dennis’s wrath. Dennis was pretty predictable, actually. And the work ... sometimes he enjoyed it. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“Then I’m okay. I know they won’t kill me, Dean. They need me alive. I can take it. But I can’t take you ... worrying about me.”
Dean scoffed. “Like I could not!”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you, Dean!” His voice was high, keening. He was still just a child. Just a little child, being put through all this. Any shred of belief Dean had ever had in the concept of God vanished when he saw He would allow something like this to happen to a little kid. How could Dennis believe? “I couldn’t stand for you to know! I hate that you know now. It was so much better when you thought it was just weird rituals.”
“I knew it wasn’t just that, though.”
Sam looked up at him, surprised. “How?”
“I could feel it. From the very beginning, I knew.”
Sam looked down. “It’s still worse now, though,” he whispered.
“It can’t go on like this,” Dean repeated. “We have to do something.”
“No. Not yet. Bobby’s still looking for us, I’m sure--”
“Dennis is right. He’ll never find us.”
“--Or maybe someone else will come someday to visit, and we can tell them what they’re doing to us.”
“They’re completely self-sufficient, though. They even make their own salt! Their own pails! I haven’t seen anything new since we got here. And they don’t have a car. I checked. No one will ever come. They never tell people about this place or how to get here. They don’t want anyone to find out what they’re doing here to kids they kidnapped.”
“Dean ... someday ... something will change. It has to.”
Dean looked at Sam, sitting there on the grass of the meadow, looking out toward the lowering sun, pale and thin, old beyond his years. He always was, but now he was even much more beyond his years than ever, like a little old man. At least they were still alive. And they had each other. If Dean gave into his most fervent desires and attacked Dennis and Barbara ... he would almost certainly fail, and they would kill him, and little Sam, perpetually weakened, would be left all alone in their clutches forever. Sam was right that, now anyway, there was nothing else they could do.
“It better,” said Dean.
Dean slammed the bowl of brownish, viscous liquid down on the lunch table. “Here you go, just like you kept requesting: blood soup.” Dennis’s face lit up and he reached for the ladle. “Sam doesn’t have to eat any, though.” Nor did Dean intend to, of course.
Dennis pulled his hand back. He didn’t seem to be getting Dean’s hint about him being a blood-draining monster; he took another meaning from it. “Well, but Sam has to have at least a little, doesn’t he?” Dennis said, ladling a bit into a bowl and setting it in front of Sam. Dennis had grown lax as weeks turned to months and Dean hadn’t tried to poison him, but he never missed a warning sign, never once.
As if all he had energy for was moving a utensil from plate to mouth, Sam silently dipped in his spoon and brought it to his mouth. Dean recoiled. Ugh, poor Sam, having to eat that disgusting stuff. Cooking it up turned Dean’s stomach, even if Dennis was surely right that it was full of protein and other nutrients, and they had plenty of it every time they slaughtered an animal. Sam didn’t flinch, though; either he was too worn out to think much about it, or ... no, it was because he trusted Dean’s cooking that much. Dean didn’t fix it for him, though! He made it as a punishment for Dennis! He barely even seasoned it.
Dean watched closely as Sam took his first bite, but Dennis was watching Dean. Seeming satisfied when Dean didn’t knock the spoon out of Sam’s hand or fess up to having included something he shouldn’t have in the soup, Dennis happily ladled himself out a big bowlful, Barbara following suit. “Finally!” Dennis said, digging in.
Dean only had eyes for Sam, though, as after the first bite, he took a second, much bigger one, then a third. Noticing this, Dennis filled his bowl to the brim, and Sam ate every bite. Of course he did, Dean realized. He must be so anemic, and the soup must be full of iron and whatever else he was desperately lacking.
Dean slumped down in his chair and put his head in his hands. He could never get a lick in that didn’t come back and hit him instead. At times like this, it was hard not to lose all hope.
Once Dean figured out how to get into the forbidden areas, he set up rope ladders in the kitchen and the most convenient place on the other side of the always barred door, pulling that one up behind him when he was done with it before Dennis and Barbara got up. During the day, when the kitchen rope had to be hidden, he stuffed it atop the rafter with a broom, and got it down at night with the same broom after they all went to bed.
He finally got to see Sam’s room. He didn’t have even one window. Otherwise, it really was fit for royalty: white-and-gold silk sheets with blue silk edges, thick warm carpets over the stone floor, tapestries on the wall. Still, Sam didn’t like to be in there. They screwed around to their hearts’ content the first few nights they finally got to be together without any kind of surveillance, exploring the whole abbey. When they got too tired to stay awake any longer, Sam couldn’t bear to be locked in his room again, where Dean barred the door from the outside before dawn, just as he found it, suggesting they sleep in ‘Dean’s bed.’ It could be done without great danger, since Dean had that alarm clock to make sure he got Sam back to his room in time, but that wasn’t the problem; it was that he didn’t want Sam to see where he slept.
When Sam insisted, he looked around curiously at everything: the burlap sacks he still kept under the straw tick for added insulation, the fur rugs and blankets, the few objects Dean liked to keep there, the way that part of the hallway was carefully swept. “They make you sleep here?” he asked at last, perplexed.
“Well ... they let me sleep here. I passed out here the first night, and it’s out of the way, so ....”
Sam sat on Dean’s bed and looked up at him. “Why are they so ... mean to you?” He looked sad.
“Good fucking question,” Dean growled, sitting next to him.
Sam touched a bruise on Dean’s arm. Dean pulled his sleeve lower so he couldn’t see it, but he could feel that Sam knew, just like that. Just seeing that and where Dean slept told him everything. “Really mean,” Sam whispered.
Dean shrugged and lay back, his hands behind his head. Sam lay back, too, imitating his pose. He’d always done that. “So they make you do all the cooking, and ... what else?”
There was no point trying to hide it from him anymore. “Everything,” Dean said shortly. “It’s like I’m Cinderella,” he grumbled.
“It really is. So what does that make me? One of your wicked step-sisters, wearing silk robes, bathing in all the water you fetch, eating all the food you make?” Sam asked glumly.
“No! It’s not like you like all that crap! No, you’re--Rapunzel! Locked in that tower ....”
“But I don’t have any hair.” His eyes grew wet. Dean had known that must be killing him.
“Well, I don’t have a fairy godmother or cool shoes, either.”
“Your shoes are pretty cool,” Sam insisted.
Dean held them up for him to see, turning his foot so Sam could look from multiple angles, glad that he didn’t have to keep any secrets anymore about this place or all he had to do here. “I made them myself,” Dean told him proudly.
“I want some!”
“I’ll make you some,” Dean assured him.
He did--better ones even than his own, now that he knew what he was doing as he drilled the holes in the wooden sole--Dean had had to redrill some of his own when he’d drilled them too close to the edge and they’d broken through. Also, he made Sam’s boots out of pure white snowhare fur, in hopes maybe Dennis and Barbara might let him wear them outside so they could play out there even when it was cold.
“There’s two good things about this place,” Dean told Sam as he led him up the tower steps to the belltower one night after Dennis and Barbara went to bed. He looked back when he didn’t hear Sam’s footsteps right behind him, to see him lagging behind. He was so pale, and so winded. Dean went back and simply picked him up. It was just easier. Besides, Dean was really strong these days; probably all the wood chopping, and Sam by contrast now weighed virtually nothing.
“All the bacon and jam and jelly and pie you can eat, and ... this.” Dean set Sam down, opened the hatch to the belltower, and let Sam climb that part himself. Dean pointed up to the sky, which was so dark and clear, you could see a million stars at least.
Sam gasped as he saw a shooting star, pointing. “Yep. There’s been a ton of ’em lately. That’s what I brought you up here for. Make a wish. Make a lot of ’em. I know I’m gonna.”
Sheltered by the low walls of the belltower from the spring wind that blew perpetually off the ocean, wrapped in the fur blanket Dean brought along, they were comfortable enough, lying on their backs looking up at the sky. With each starfall, Dean made another wish, but they all seemed to come back to Sam: Heal Sam. Make him strong again. Make him okay.
Dean woke to something he hadn’t in almost a year: sunlight on his face. It was pleasant. As the meaning of it came to him, he sat up with a start. They’d fallen asleep! Dennis and Barbara might already be up!
Not even bothering to wake him, Dean picked up Sam and carried him down the tower stairs into his room, where he barely remembered to grab the blanket before rushing out, barring the door, and fleeing to the rope ladder. He’d barely gotten to the top and pulled it up after him when he heard Barbara and Dennis emerge from wherever they slept at night, chatting cheerily. Dean froze as Dennis came straight to the kitchen calling for him, scarcely even daring to breathe. One glance upward and it was all over.
When he didn’t immediately find him, Dennis got frantic. Dean discovered Dennis did indeed know where Dean slept, as that was the first place he looked for him, before booking it outside, all of which Dean could see from this high vantage. Dennis couldn’t have developed some sort of affection for Dean over the year he served him, could he? Hearing him muttering about how he would beat him so viciously he wouldn’t be able to sit for a week if he’d tried to run away, Dean realized of course it wasn’t that. He was just afraid Dean had made some sort of escape attempt.
Dennis ran out to check the garden. Dean scarcely had time to jump down into the kitchen and throw the rope back up before Dennis came flying in again, his face a dark mask of fury. Dennis looked bewildered but relieved to see Dean there. “Where were you?” he asked, confused.
“Using, uh ... my ‘chamber pot.’”
“Oh.” His explanation didn’t seem to add up to Dennis, but Dennis was so relieved he wasn’t missing, he just smiled. “Okay. Please make a good breakfast today. I’m craving eggs--lots of runny eggs, sunny-side up.”
“Gotcha.”
Dean turned and immediately went down to the chicken coop, trying to regain his composure after that close call. How could he have fallen asleep?? Of course Sam did; he slept like the dead these days, but Dean was appalled at himself. Why didn’t he at least bring the alarm clock?? They’d been up there many nights, and he’d never fallen asleep before. It was the cold, he realized. Last night was almost balmy, the air no colder than in the hallway where he slept. He’d definitely have to remember the alarm clock from now on.
He spent extra long in the chicken coop, trying to pull himself together, made harder by how tired he was. He and Sam had stayed up for hours, talking and making wishes. Sam hadn’t even woken up when Dean put him back in his bed. Had Dean forgotten anything in his room in his rush to get back to places he was allowed to be? He couldn’t remember.
Still, all seemed normal over breakfast, Dennis slurping up those half-raw eggs like the freak he was. Even Sam liked them. Dean cast off his fears as he went out to the garden to start doing some early planting.
Mid-morning, Dennis came into the courtyard. “Dean, could you come with me, please?” Dennis grabbed a hoe as he led them back into the abbey.
Dean laid down the shovel and followed him, astonished when Dennis led him past the door that had always remained barred to Dean before this moment, except that time he took them up to the belltower. Had--had Dennis finally decided he trusted him enough to let him into more parts of the abbey than the little corner he’d been relegated to all this time?
Of course it wasn’t that. Why had he thought that? Lifting the hoe up to the top of the rafter, Dennis rummaged around with it as Dean stared in horror. Presently, the rope ladder fell down. Dennis looked at Dean expectantly.
“I’ve--never seen that before. I guess it must have been from someone else who lived here.”
Dennis gripped it, yanked on it. “Yet it’s new rope. Brand-new.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell ya. Maybe someone was living here right before you guys got back.”
“You aren’t the worst liar I’ve ever seen, Dean, but not great. I’d been noticing things here and there--Sam’s feet and hems dirty first thing in the morning, him positioned strangely in his bed this morning ... all kinds of things. But only when you were nowhere to be found today did I begin to piece it all together.”
“You gave me the idea. I figured out how you kids must have gotten into the chapel when the nuns hid in there.” There was no sense hiding it anymore. Dennis was already convinced. Any ongoing attempts to lie would only enrage him further. The beating was inevitable.
Dean eyed the hoe still in Dennis’s hand nervously. If he could just disarm him ... actually, if he could get it himself, he could really do some damage. He’d never won a fight against Dennis, not once, yet he couldn’t allow that to make him give up hope. With every new day, he was a tiny bit bigger and stronger than before. Besides, he couldn’t help analyzing each of their scuffles afterward and figuring out what he could have done better. One day ... one day, he had to win. He had to, because if he didn’t, one day, Dennis would kill him.
Dennis smirked, also glancing at the hoe. “This? Yeah, this can kill a man. It can easily kill a child. I’m really pissed this time, Dean. You won’t ever forget this one, as long as you live. Believe me.”
Dean didn’t even have time to find a defensive position before the first blow from the handle of the hoe. He stayed as silent as he could during every beating, so as not to give Dennis the satisfaction, but he couldn’t help the sound that came out of him. Dennis had once hit him with a mop handle, but it was about half the diameter of the hoe handle. He would have broken bones at the end of this beating, he knew it.
Dean lunged for the hoe, only to be grabbed by the face by Dennis, squeezing as hard as he could, filled with rage. Dennis flung him backwards, where he hit the sideboard and went down.
He jumped to his feet as quickly as he could, because Dennis, like the sicko he was, loved to pummel you without mercy once he had you down--yet as soon as Dean was up, before he had a chance to turn to face him again, Dennis whacked him across the back with the full force of the handle like he was wielding a baseball bat. Dean heard something crack inside him. Not only did he cry out, but he couldn’t help groaning as he lay on the ground, getting his knees under him, trying to get to his feet again, not succeeding ... and then he heard Sam’s voice. He was saying, “What’s happening? What’s that sound? I thought I heard Dean.” Barbara reassured him in her creepy way.
“Quiet!” Dennis hissed, grabbing one of the whips off the wall and taking advantage of Dean’s position on his knees to go to town on his back. “You’ll have to grow back half your skin after this,” Dennis said with grim satisfaction.
Then a bunch of stuff happened that didn’t make any sense. Dean thought he heard Barbara scream, but only for a second. Dennis stopped whipping Dean, calling for her, then just kicking Dean a few times for good measure, Dean got the impression to make sure Dean would stay down while he went to investigate. Then, as Dean looked up to see that he was really walking away, trying to gather the strength to get to his feet and get that hoe before he came back, Dennis shrieked, too, and ... was suddenly gone. Just disappeared, except that his boots were still there ... and where he had been, a dark grinning cloud, with the face of a monster.
Then he heard Sam. “No! Not Dean! Don’t eat Dean!” he was screaming at the top of his lungs.
At that sound, Dean was able to scramble to his feet and run for the chapel, holding his ribs, veering around the cloud-monster, which apparently had the power to eat a human in a single bite but was holding its ground, held back by something. Dean was afraid the door would be barred, but Dennis had only pulled it to when he went to confront Dean. Dean burst through, to find Sam chained to the floor, very little of Barbara left beside him.
Sam looked over when he came in. “No, Dean, run! It’s gonna kill us next!”
Dean ran to Sam to try to unhook him from the floor.
“Dean, no, you have to run!”
“I’m gonna save us both!”
“You can’t, because it comes from inside me!” Dean looked up as a shadow came over them, and there it was, between them and the stained-glass windows, grinning hungrily. Dean managed to get the first chain unhooked, and moved on to the next, where it occurred to him to try to just break the golden chain instead, which was much thinner than the hooks. As he grabbed it, Sam cried urgently, “No! Don’t break it--it’s the only thing allowing me to control him!” Dean glanced up at the thing. It hadn’t come any closer. He went back to work, trying to unhook Sam without breaking the chains.
“Please, Dean,” Sam begged, tears rolling down his temples, “I can’t hold it back forever! You have to leave! I have to--I have to know that at least you’re okay.”
“I ain’t okay if you’re not,” Dean grunted. He was getting the hang of how these hooks worked. He managed to unhook him completely, and hauled Sam to his feet. “I can’t carry you right now. We have to run.”
“We can’t run from something that comes from me!”
The cloud demon had shimmered a couple of times, light beginning to pass through it, as Dean worked. Dean feared that meant it was gathering energy, but instead, as he took another look at it, he saw that it was farther from them now, and seemed less dark and solid than it did before. What had changed? Sam wasn’t touching the hooks now. Did the type of metal the hooks were made of somehow strengthen the monster? They still stood in the circle, though. Dean took them out of it, and the monster faded by half.
He looked around. The rituals--evidently they had finally worked. Parts of the rituals were to bring out the demon; other parts were to control it, if Sam was correct about what the chains were for. The chains, the hooks, the circle, what else? Dean saw the bowl of blood on the altar, a bowl of what looked like hair next to it--Sam’s hair.
Sam saw it at the same moment--he knocked the bowl of hair to the floor. The demon roared. “We have to take my blood somewhere where the earth can purify it,” he said, seeming to refer to things Dennis and Barbara had mentioned in his presence.
Dean grabbed the bowl of blood. The monster swiped at Dean, but somehow it didn’t quite reach him. Dean glanced down at Sam, at his lined, ashen face, the tension, the--the effort. He was controlling it. “Come on,” said Dean, and raced out of the chapel, as fast as he could go without spilling Sam’s blood.
Later, he would wonder why he hadn’t just thrown it in the ocean. That would have been easiest, right? But when Sam said a place where the earth could purify it, Dean thought of only one place: the garden. He’d already been pouring blood on it for a long time, and anyway, it was as pure a place as he knew. Glancing up one last time at Sam to see if he had any objection and seeing that Sam, at least, didn’t seem to have any better ideas, Dean poured it over the place he’d planted seeds just that morning. As he did, he saw the last hint of the shadow that had followed them out here, remaining always exactly the same distance from them, tethered to Sam, dissipate in the morning sun.
“Is it over?” Dean asked, unable to keep from falling to his knees now that they seemed to have escaped all the most immediate danger.
Sam looked around, looked over the trees, the dew on the leaves, put his hand over his own solar plexus. The birds had started cheeping again after what Dean was now beginning to realize was a strange and terrible hush when they first came out. When Dean poured out the bowl, the first few chirps here and there were hesitant. Now they were beginning to return to their usual morning clamor.
Sam nodded. “It’s gone.”
They spent most of the rest of the day passed out in Dean’s bed, dead to the world. When Dean finally woke after peaceful, happy dreams, everything that happened that morning slowly came back to him. That was all impossible, right? It had to be a dream. But seeing Sam lying there beside him, still in his silken robes, now filthy; shifting his position and feeling the pain of Dennis’s vicious beating that morning, there could be no doubt. Even just being there in his bed with Sam when the light was so low and golden told him so. He got up, making sure not to jostle Sam, trying not to groan loud enough to wake him as he struggled to get upright, more sore and throbbing than he’d ever been in his life.
The first thing he did was check on Dennis and Barbara. Were they really--was his perception accurate, that only their shoes and maybe something in them was all that was left of them? He found Dennis’s shoes in the big hallway just as he remembered them. He peeked in the chapel, afraid of seeing the monster again, but all seemed peaceful in there, fresh flowers still sitting in the pews, the picture of serenity and piety, except for the bits of human in the pentagram circle. He went outside to check on the blood in the garden, which looked just like any blood he’d ever poured on there, and no monster lurked in the shadows.
Finally, he tended the animals. It was the first thing he did upon waking every day for almost a year; he didn’t know what else to do. As the pigs rejoiced to see him, he found comfort in the routine, in the work itself, in the familiarity of all these things he knew now how to do so well. Natural things. Everything Dennis and Barbara did tried to twist what was natural to their terrible ends. They took what was pure and sought to control it until it became something dark and unnatural. They knew no other way. He was kind of bummed not to have been the one who killed them, but on the other hand, it seemed right that as Dennis found a way to turn every effort Dean made against him back on Dean, in the end it came back on him, permanently. Actually, really, it was Sam who got them. As much reason as Dean had to kill Dennis, Dean figured Sam had still more.
Slowly hauling the egg pail up to the kitchen, he saw Sam standing outside the door, just ... looking, at the world he’d been forbidden all this time. Dean’s world. They’d been separated from each other by a couple of doors and a vast gulf of experience. Somehow they were carrying on completely different lives, a few dozen yards away from each other. All these things that made up Dean’s daily life were entirely unknown to Sam. He peeked in the pail when Dean brought it in and looked up at Dean with wonder. “You did all this yourself?” he asked, awed.
“I’ve never laid an egg, Sam,” Dean teased, setting them down.
Sam picked up an egg, feeling it, amazed. “It’s still warm!”
Sam couldn’t get enough of it, of watching and helping Dean light a fire in the wood stove, of exploring the root cellar and retrieving things for Dean down there as he made dinner while he was too sore to go himself. Sam looked over the wheels of cheese Dean had made, the barrels full of salt pork, the rows and rows of canned vegetables, brightly colored on the shelves. “I can’t believe how much you know now,” Sam said as he brought up another thing Dean asked for. “I don’t know anything. I haven’t even gotten to read a book in all this time,” he said glumly.
“You learned how to control demons. I saw you were doing it, Sam. That’s the only reason it didn’t eat us, too--because of you.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah,” he sighed. “That’s what I spent the last year doing--learning how to control demons. And ... lots of supernatural things. They tried to call all kinds of things through me, and I was always able to hold them back ... until I heard Dennis hurting you.”
So that was what set off that whole chain of events. Dennis really had brought it all on himself. Dean thought of Dennis saying of slaughtering the nuns that it was bound to end thus, once it began. “That’s not nothin’, Sam.”
Sam brightened a little. “I guess not.”
“Anyway, I guess it’s a good thing I know how to do all this now, because we’re probably stuck here for a while.”
Sam seemed to like everything about this life. He loved the animals, he loved tending the garden, loved being outside and getting to feel the sun. Fishing in the cove together one warm afternoon, nothing but the sound of waves lapping against the wood and a light breeze to cool them, Dean couldn’t remember ever feeling so good. Just seeing Sam up and about and excited about life, starting to look like himself again, filled him with contentment.
Sam wouldn’t let Dean break the golden chains, insisting not only did they keep the demon locked away as long as he wasn’t inside the pentagram and his blood and hair weren’t on the altar, but he said Barbara had once said the chains would keep the demon blood from awakening on its own later. “I always had this feeling that someday something bad would happen. Something really bad ... and I’m just so glad there’s a way now to stop it,” he said. The chains got in his way, but he seemed to feel the price was worth it.
He was a little superstitious about giving up the robes at first, until as he put on his old clothes--which still fit, he was so skinny now--and other clothes Dean had made himself and grown out of, he decided the robes didn’t do anything important, and he wore whatever he wanted. He let his hair grow out immediately.
“What about when we get out of here, though?” Dean said. “I know hunters can be eccentric, but ... the ear chains are weird.”
“Maybe I can grow my hair out long and just tie it back when we’re alone. I could wear long sleeves. People could only see my rings then.”
Dean was glad Sam was talking about what would happen when they left. He seemed to like it so much here, Dean had been afraid he’d want to stay forever. Sam learned to tend the animals as Dean gave him instructions. It was a good thing Sam wasn’t just willing but eager to learn all this, as Dean couldn’t do half of what he usually did while his broken ribs healed. Every time Dean bathed--now in the nice metal tub Sam had bathed in all this time, that sat above a firepit so you could heat the water to just the right temperature first--afterward, Sam wrapped up his ribs as tight as he could with strips he made from his silk robes.
“We could do your idea now,” Dean said, “weave a big ‘HELP’ sign and hang it from the cliffs.”
Sam nodded eagerly. “Yeah! Spinning yarn is so fun.”
“Glad you think so. I hate it.”
“I’ll do it!” Sam said.
“Still, though ... all the time I was out there fishing and crabbing and making salt, I only ever saw two ships, and they were probably too far away to see a sign, no matter how big we made it.”
“It’s okay,” Sam said, unconcerned. He’d bounced right back from everything Dennis and Barbara did to him. He was no longer pale and winded only a week after their demise. Now he was even putting on muscle. Maybe it was just being free again at last to get to play and be a kid, but he seemed light, lighter than he had in his whole life, like a weight he’d felt since infancy had been lifted. Happy. Dean ... Dean felt happy, too. “You know everything about how to keep us alive here as long as we have to stay.”
“How long’s that gonna be?”
Sam looked up at him with that newly optimistic grin, indomitable. “Until something changes.”
It was a good thing he was learning to make clothes, too, because already, it was getting damn cold at night. He saved and tanned the skins of all the animals he slaughtered, and screw Dennis; before he let him have any of them, he was going to make everything he could think of for himself. He made the tick out of sheepskin rugs, and actually, though he had to replace the straw now and then, it was both soft and warm. He made himself fur hats, scarves, a cloak he labored for weeks on, and finally, a fur blanket. Dennis never said anything about him taking all the skins for himself, though he seemed pleased when Dean finally gave him a few, out of things to make for himself, and hopeful he’d make something new for Sam. He needed everything he’d made just to keep from going numb with cold after he got up from his nice warm bed in the morning to light a fire in the wood stove to start breakfast.
He found he had to figure out how to use the knitting machine, though, when he went down to the beach to make salt again and discovered the animal skins didn’t keep him warm at all once they got wet. One of the books he used for reference claimed wool was nearly as warm wet as when dry, and as light. Dean had noticed Dennis had started going around in knit wool leggings. It looked ridiculous--the guy was basically wearing tights. With a sigh, Dean realized he was going to have to go around in tights, too.
Dennis gave him an old, wind-up alarm clock so he could be sure to get up in time to make breakfast, which was vital once the days got short and he had to get up before dawn. He was glad to have the tights as he carefully made his way down the cliffside by lanternlight to build the fire under the cauldron as the dawn slowly bloomed over the ocean. If he had time, he just sat there warming himself by the fire there in the cove, sheltered from the wind, watching the sun rise.
It was ... peaceful. Now that he knew his duties and did them without complaint, Dennis didn’t bother him anymore, didn’t even usually make fun of him. Dennis was right that there wasn’t that much to do in the winter. Dean spent long hours knitting wool for more pairs of tights--double-knit this time, even triple knit, to really keep out the cold. He made some for Sam, too, so they might be able to venture outside sometimes during playtime. The animals were calm, a reassuring presence, sometimes even cuddling up against Dean when he just sat for hours in the barn, thinking.
There really was no escape. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t see a way. He and Sam had spent many afternoons brainstorming ideas. After Sam found out Dean had made Sam’s new wool tights himself, he thought Dean should weave a huge ‘HELP’ sign and hang it down the cliff face. It was a good idea, the best either of them had had yet, except Dennis would undoubtedly soon find it, tear it down, throw it away, and beat Dean, if he didn’t finally kill him for it.
“I’ll show you how to shear a sheep,” Dennis told Dean, as the weather was beginning at last to get warm again. Warm again. Had they really been here almost a year already? “Then you’ll have some more wool to work with. It’s not that hard. I know they’re a pain in the ass to milk--”
“They’re a pain in the ass in general,” Dean agreed.
“Yes, but delicious and fleecy, they give milk ... and this particular flock was free, so sheep it is. Anyway, once you get one on its back, it becomes helpless.” He smiled to himself. Dean didn’t get the joke.
Dean watched as Dennis sheared one expertly. “Try to be very careful with the shears. Unfortunately, you will cut one sometimes. It causes them to suffer if their fleece is never sheared, from excessive heat and weight, so remember that one way or another, it must be done, and now, before it gets too hot. Just do your best. Now you try.”
Dean couldn’t even wrestle the first one to the ground. Dennis unceremoniously dumped the thing onto its back for him. “Don’t feel sorry for them; just do what has to be done.” As Dean started making his first cuts with the long scissor-looking shears, Dennis went on, looking pleased with himself, “Words to live by.”
As he watched Dean struggle to get the second one onto its back, too, not helping this time, Dennis said, “Dean, if this is really the kind of pussy you are, you may as well throw yourself off the cliff right now; you’ll never make it.”
“Plenty of people aren’t as mean as you, and they get by,” Dean grunted, finally getting the sheep into position.
“Civilians, maybe. Not hunters.”
“I’ve met a ton of hunters. Still none as mean as you.”
“Ooh, mean ol’ Dennis,” Dennis mocked, “doing what needs to be done.”
“You don’t ‘need’ to threaten to kill me every five minutes.”
“Of course a selfish little creep like you would see it that way, but the fact is, Dean, maybe you don’t ‘need’ to exist, any more than that sheep you’re shearing. We ate one of her lambs last week.”
Why did Dennis have to put it like that?? The sick freak managed to turn the most harmless activities macabre. Dean flinched when Dennis, observing him start shearing this one, said, “Good.” Somehow even a positive word from this guy felt creepy. “You do pick things up pretty quickly. Keep that up, and you’ll prove you’re worth keeping around.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Dean worked in silence as Dennis watched. “The fleece looks like shit,” Dennis remarked. “It’s not even fit to be spun, the way you’re shearing it. But it’s still useful; you can line a jacket with it, a quilt--anything. Don’t waste it. Eventually, after some practice, you’ll get some halfway decent fleeces to work with. In the meantime, spin the ones I gave you last summer.”
Tired of just watching, Dennis got up and started collecting eggs. “I know you think I’m the meanest person who ever lived, but someday, Dean, you’ll realize I’m actually very nice.”
Dean managed to hold in his guffaw.
“I admit, the way I grew up made me have to be harder than many. I suppose you’re right about that. One of the names out there in the forest, Jason ... he was one of my favorite brothers. He was only twelve. He was mortally wounded and in agony. He begged me to kill him, not make him have to suffer like that for the hours or days it would take him to die of his wounds, and once I fulfilled his wish ... I knew there was nothing I couldn’t do.”
Jesus. Dean had stopped working, stopped moving, scarcely able to breathe. This guy had killed his brother? No wonder he was so twisted.
“I know you think I’m evil, but to believe that, you must never have seen true evil. The priest was evil, and many of the nuns. I’ll spare you the details of all the countless ways they tortured us ... but you know, there’s a reason whips hang from walls in the hallway by the dining room.”
“Did they ever get caught?”
“‘Caught’--oh, you mean by the authorities? No; it was the fifties; guardians of children could get away with anything, doubly so if they were of the cloth. No, no. We slaughtered them.”
Dean stood up straight. The sheep he’d been shearing jumped to its feet and ran off, bleating outraged. “What?!”
“If you push a person far enough, it’s inevitable,” Dennis said, like this was the most normal, everyday conversation. “We were all good kids--disturbingly good and well-behaved; nothing like you. But there came a day ... I woke up that morning believing it would be a day like any other, but when we were all gathered together for mealtime, one child revolted and was beaten brutally, as any rebel always was. As happened all too often, the priest went overboard. You’ve never seen such rage as was in that man. He was killing him. He knew it. He didn’t stop. We’d all seen it before, and we just ... couldn’t take it anymore. As one, we went nuts. We killed the priest--quite brutally, blood and body parts everywhere, and then we got a couple of nuns. The rest barred themselves in the chapel, but we found our way in, and slaughtered them to the last one. It’s a shame, really; some of them were kind, and did what they could to protect us. But once it began, it was bound to end thus.”
“Holy shit.” No wonder half of them killed themselves, knowing they were murderers several times over. Not Dennis and Barbara, though. “Then what happened?”
“Then we fed the bodies to the pigs and went to the most sympathetic neighbors for help, who had some inkling what went on here all those years they lived nearby, children disappearing, never to be heard from again, and the like. They covered for us and got us out, the younger ones to better places, the rest of us out on our own, me and Barbara among the latter. That’s partly why we were pretty sure we would be able to return here, when we thought up the idea, a few years ago. We were virtually certain none of our brothers and sisters would ever want to come back here. We didn’t want to, either, but it was exactly what we were looking for: someplace private, untouched, a place no one would ever find. That’s what appealed to the priest, as well. A place where we could live off the land. We were right that no one seemed to have lived here in all the intervening years--in fact, it was quite haunted. Barbara and I found the remains and burned them, got rid of all the ghosts.” He smirked. “It was a shock, seeing some of those faces again! But once we did that ... it hasn’t been so bad to be back here. It’s kind of nice.”
Dennis sat there, pressing his hands together, the strangest smile on his face. He did this sometimes. Now Dean knew what he must be thinking about. He’d said it was hard to live with the memories. He’d never be able to escape them. At last, Dennis seemed to return to the present and got up. He rubbed his hands together as he headed back up to the abbey. “Mmm, mutton.”
Well, that wasn’t a story you heard every day. Why did Dennis even tell him that? Wasn’t that the kind of thing you took to your grave? Even if he did decide to tell someone, why Dean? Dennis was chummy like that. It seemed like there was nothing he wouldn’t wax on to Dean about--Dean, whom he knew very well hated his guts.
Had Dennis developed some fondness for Dean after living and working together all this time? That was natural, wasn’t it? Grudgingly, Dean had developed a little sympathy for Dennis and all he’d been through in his life. You just couldn’t help it, if you were human. Dean tried to take it to mean that Dennis was warming to him, at least a bit, only it didn’t feel like that. It felt like ... the opposite.
It was one night, on the very edge of sleep, that it suddenly hit him: A dead man couldn’t tell your secrets. There was absolutely nothing Dennis wouldn’t tell Dean, no secret he wouldn’t unburden himself about with him, because he had decided long ago that, sooner or later, he was going to kill Dean.
Maybe it would be when Dean got strong and big enough to finally beat him in a fight. Maybe he had some date in mind, to do with how they intended to manipulate Sam or when they feared they might make their move to escape. Maybe he was always itching to do it, if Dean didn’t prove himself useful enough. Maybe he simply fully assumed that one day he would go overboard while he was beating him, as apparently happened to many of his brothers and sisters. If there was any way out of here ... they had to do it soon.
Very soon. The next day, running outside to play now that the weather was finally getting warm again, Sam only made it halfway down the hill before suddenly, inexplicably becoming so winded he had to sit down. Dean stared, bewildered, asking Sam if he was sick. Sam just shook his head, and the way he wouldn’t look Dean in the eye ... Sam knew what it was that had rendered him so weak. It was something those freaks were doing to him, but he insisted it was nothing and he was fine, and tried all afternoon to hide how hard his body quivered any time he tried to exert himself.
Dennis had said they got into the chapel when the nuns barricaded themselves in there, which meant there must be a way. Dean had looked at this abbey from every angle, inside and out, in every part he could get to. Every wall was made of stone, feet thick. The doors were the thickest, hardest wood Dean had ever seen--Dennis had shown him scratches in the door into the kitchen made by a bear, and they’d hardly left a dent. He’d have to hack at any door in here with an axe for days before he’d even begin to break through, and they didn’t have days when they were coming for the nuns. The caved-in parts were untraversable. They locked themselves and Sam behind multiple sets of doors in the parts of the building still standing, anyway. He just couldn’t figure it out ... until one night when he lay on his makeshift bed in the hallway before he doused the lantern, and gazing upward ... he saw the rafters.
The rafters! Across most of the building, they were so high up, you usually couldn’t even see them, lost in the murky darkness where no sunlight reached--two, even three stories up. But in the kitchen, and anywhere near the north and south outside walls the roof descended toward, the high-up rafters were joined to lower ones by others affixed at a slant--at an angle Dean could navigate. The rafters still stood, even where the walls had fallen. Even where the walls were whole, there was always a little gap just above each rafter, big enough for a kid to get through.
The very next morning, the second he heard the bar slot in place into the forbidden area, Dean ran for his tallest ladder and put it against the rafter he’d chosen after scouting around before breakfast. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he had reason to believe this might lead him directly into the chapel, or if not, he wouldn’t have far to go on a connecting rafter to get to one that would.
Shimmying up the angled rafter into the upper reaches of the abbey, trying to ignore the spiders and bats flying away as he came upon their daytime sleeping spots and the dust that surely must have sat atop these rafters undisturbed since a group of kids used them to gain access to the hiding place of their captors forty-some years ago, he felt only excitement to reach the upper level ... until he looked down and instantly got dizzy. He had to cling to the rafter as hard as he could with arms and legs both lest he fall--a fall that would either maim or kill him. This was a bad plan. But ... the only one. Whatever they were doing to Sam, he had to know.
Just don’t look down. He scooted across the top of the fortunately wide, sturdy rafter, going faster as he started to hear voices. He crossed a section of wall and was suddenly nearly blinded by daylight. The chapel! He was right that this rafter would get him all the way there. He could see the very top of the wall of stained-glass windows. He crawled forward, desperately eager. Dennis and Barbara were talking. Dean heard a little clanking and footsteps from inside the chapel. He was almost there.
He crossed the final wall--crumbled much more than he’d been led to believe, given how much Dennis waxed on about the miracle of the stained glass having withstood what so much stone couldn’t. A whole two-thirds of one end of the inner wall of the chapel was rubble, though indeed, most of the rest of it was intact. No wonder they locked Dean out of multiple sets of doors between the dining room and here--he would be able to hear them if he was any closer.
Dean looked down, his fervor to see Sam overcoming the instinctive terror of the danger of precariously perching at such a height. Dean was pretty far away, so high up, but he had a birds-eye view ... of Sam, spread-eagled on the floor, in the middle of an enormous circle with runes written all around it. A pentagram, actually, and Sam’s four limbs and his head were each at one of the five points. They made him lie there on the cold floor?? But then he saw the blankets beneath him. Well, at least there was that.
Still, Sam just ... did it, just laid himself out there for them like a sacrificial lamb? It was terrible to see his pale face, eyes closed, just ... resigned to having to submit to all this. Then Dean saw what the chains around his neck, wrists, and ankles were really for: he was chained to the floor.
Dean forced himself to hold in his gasp of rage. What they were doing to his little brother! Was this what they had done all along?? Had Sam had to come in here every day and simply lie there while they did whatever they wanted to him? What were they doing?
Dean peered closely. Mostly they were walking around. Barbara was lighting a ton of candles positioned around the circle. There were flowers and herbs in bowls within easy reach, and some other kind of dark-brown substance he couldn’t identify--it looked like witchcraft to Dean. Dennis was paging through some ancient-looking book. He started reading an incantation, and then ... then Barbara bent over a bowl next to Sam’s arm, where ....
Dean couldn’t stop himself from letting out a sound. Blood! It was Sam’s blood in the bowl! Barbara stroked Sam’s cheek, thanked him, and told him he was doing a great job, removing a needle from his arm and taking the bowl away to place on the altar. It was all Dean could do to hold in a scream.
At Dean’s sound, Sam’s eyes opened. He peered curiously, confused, into the rafters, and as his eyes settled on Dean, they got huge. His mouth fell open.
“What is it, Sam?” said Barbara, noticing.
When Sam didn’t answer, Barbara and Dennis started looking up, too. Dean tried to make himself as small as he could up there, but he was bathed in the morning light coming through the wall of windows. Shit!
Suddenly, Sam cried out. “Sam, what’s wrong?” Barbara asked solicitously. Dean dared to peer over the edge again, only to realize Sam had thought fast to get their attention off the rafters. Both Barbara and Dennis’s attention was entirely focused on him now. “Sam, what’s the matter?”
As Dean carefully made his way back to the ladder, he seethed with rage. Dennis and Barbara were going to die. They could barricade themselves in any room in the place, and Dean would come for them. Nothing could stop him.
“Please don’t watch,” Sam whispered, soft as a breath. “Dean ... I can handle everything else they do--it makes me tired, but I can take it, but I just can’t take ... for you to ... see me like that.”
Dean thought back to what it felt like when Dennis was beating him in the courtyard, fearing Sam could see from the windows. He’d felt exactly like that: like he could take the beating, and whatever else Dennis dished out, he just couldn’t bear the thought that Sam had seen him humiliated like that. Now he knew surely he hadn’t, chained to the floor as he was, and anyway, Dean had seen while he was in the rafters that the windows started much higher up the wall than Sam could reach to see. The relief he felt when he realized Sam definitely hadn’t seen it ... although he couldn’t imagine why Sam would feel shame over something he had no control over, still, he understood what he was saying. Dennis once said the worst part about the punishments the orphans had to endure was that his brothers and sisters all had to watch. Dean got it.
“But I had to see, Sam, don’t you get it?? You should’ve told me!”
“So that what? So you’d feel helpless, too? Except that you wouldn’t! You’d have attacked Dennis and Barbara, and I’m so afraid of what they’d do to you! It would only make you feel bad--it did only make you feel bad!--but there’s no solution.”
“So, what, then, Sam? Because this can’t go on.”
“Well ... are you okay?”
Dean shrugged. He was okay. There were ways to escape Dennis’s wrath. Dennis was pretty predictable, actually. And the work ... sometimes he enjoyed it. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“Then I’m okay. I know they won’t kill me, Dean. They need me alive. I can take it. But I can’t take you ... worrying about me.”
Dean scoffed. “Like I could not!”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you, Dean!” His voice was high, keening. He was still just a child. Just a little child, being put through all this. Any shred of belief Dean had ever had in the concept of God vanished when he saw He would allow something like this to happen to a little kid. How could Dennis believe? “I couldn’t stand for you to know! I hate that you know now. It was so much better when you thought it was just weird rituals.”
“I knew it wasn’t just that, though.”
Sam looked up at him, surprised. “How?”
“I could feel it. From the very beginning, I knew.”
Sam looked down. “It’s still worse now, though,” he whispered.
“It can’t go on like this,” Dean repeated. “We have to do something.”
“No. Not yet. Bobby’s still looking for us, I’m sure--”
“Dennis is right. He’ll never find us.”
“--Or maybe someone else will come someday to visit, and we can tell them what they’re doing to us.”
“They’re completely self-sufficient, though. They even make their own salt! Their own pails! I haven’t seen anything new since we got here. And they don’t have a car. I checked. No one will ever come. They never tell people about this place or how to get here. They don’t want anyone to find out what they’re doing here to kids they kidnapped.”
“Dean ... someday ... something will change. It has to.”
Dean looked at Sam, sitting there on the grass of the meadow, looking out toward the lowering sun, pale and thin, old beyond his years. He always was, but now he was even much more beyond his years than ever, like a little old man. At least they were still alive. And they had each other. If Dean gave into his most fervent desires and attacked Dennis and Barbara ... he would almost certainly fail, and they would kill him, and little Sam, perpetually weakened, would be left all alone in their clutches forever. Sam was right that, now anyway, there was nothing else they could do.
“It better,” said Dean.
Dean slammed the bowl of brownish, viscous liquid down on the lunch table. “Here you go, just like you kept requesting: blood soup.” Dennis’s face lit up and he reached for the ladle. “Sam doesn’t have to eat any, though.” Nor did Dean intend to, of course.
Dennis pulled his hand back. He didn’t seem to be getting Dean’s hint about him being a blood-draining monster; he took another meaning from it. “Well, but Sam has to have at least a little, doesn’t he?” Dennis said, ladling a bit into a bowl and setting it in front of Sam. Dennis had grown lax as weeks turned to months and Dean hadn’t tried to poison him, but he never missed a warning sign, never once.
As if all he had energy for was moving a utensil from plate to mouth, Sam silently dipped in his spoon and brought it to his mouth. Dean recoiled. Ugh, poor Sam, having to eat that disgusting stuff. Cooking it up turned Dean’s stomach, even if Dennis was surely right that it was full of protein and other nutrients, and they had plenty of it every time they slaughtered an animal. Sam didn’t flinch, though; either he was too worn out to think much about it, or ... no, it was because he trusted Dean’s cooking that much. Dean didn’t fix it for him, though! He made it as a punishment for Dennis! He barely even seasoned it.
Dean watched closely as Sam took his first bite, but Dennis was watching Dean. Seeming satisfied when Dean didn’t knock the spoon out of Sam’s hand or fess up to having included something he shouldn’t have in the soup, Dennis happily ladled himself out a big bowlful, Barbara following suit. “Finally!” Dennis said, digging in.
Dean only had eyes for Sam, though, as after the first bite, he took a second, much bigger one, then a third. Noticing this, Dennis filled his bowl to the brim, and Sam ate every bite. Of course he did, Dean realized. He must be so anemic, and the soup must be full of iron and whatever else he was desperately lacking.
Dean slumped down in his chair and put his head in his hands. He could never get a lick in that didn’t come back and hit him instead. At times like this, it was hard not to lose all hope.
Once Dean figured out how to get into the forbidden areas, he set up rope ladders in the kitchen and the most convenient place on the other side of the always barred door, pulling that one up behind him when he was done with it before Dennis and Barbara got up. During the day, when the kitchen rope had to be hidden, he stuffed it atop the rafter with a broom, and got it down at night with the same broom after they all went to bed.
He finally got to see Sam’s room. He didn’t have even one window. Otherwise, it really was fit for royalty: white-and-gold silk sheets with blue silk edges, thick warm carpets over the stone floor, tapestries on the wall. Still, Sam didn’t like to be in there. They screwed around to their hearts’ content the first few nights they finally got to be together without any kind of surveillance, exploring the whole abbey. When they got too tired to stay awake any longer, Sam couldn’t bear to be locked in his room again, where Dean barred the door from the outside before dawn, just as he found it, suggesting they sleep in ‘Dean’s bed.’ It could be done without great danger, since Dean had that alarm clock to make sure he got Sam back to his room in time, but that wasn’t the problem; it was that he didn’t want Sam to see where he slept.
When Sam insisted, he looked around curiously at everything: the burlap sacks he still kept under the straw tick for added insulation, the fur rugs and blankets, the few objects Dean liked to keep there, the way that part of the hallway was carefully swept. “They make you sleep here?” he asked at last, perplexed.
“Well ... they let me sleep here. I passed out here the first night, and it’s out of the way, so ....”
Sam sat on Dean’s bed and looked up at him. “Why are they so ... mean to you?” He looked sad.
“Good fucking question,” Dean growled, sitting next to him.
Sam touched a bruise on Dean’s arm. Dean pulled his sleeve lower so he couldn’t see it, but he could feel that Sam knew, just like that. Just seeing that and where Dean slept told him everything. “Really mean,” Sam whispered.
Dean shrugged and lay back, his hands behind his head. Sam lay back, too, imitating his pose. He’d always done that. “So they make you do all the cooking, and ... what else?”
There was no point trying to hide it from him anymore. “Everything,” Dean said shortly. “It’s like I’m Cinderella,” he grumbled.
“It really is. So what does that make me? One of your wicked step-sisters, wearing silk robes, bathing in all the water you fetch, eating all the food you make?” Sam asked glumly.
“No! It’s not like you like all that crap! No, you’re--Rapunzel! Locked in that tower ....”
“But I don’t have any hair.” His eyes grew wet. Dean had known that must be killing him.
“Well, I don’t have a fairy godmother or cool shoes, either.”
“Your shoes are pretty cool,” Sam insisted.
Dean held them up for him to see, turning his foot so Sam could look from multiple angles, glad that he didn’t have to keep any secrets anymore about this place or all he had to do here. “I made them myself,” Dean told him proudly.
“I want some!”
“I’ll make you some,” Dean assured him.
He did--better ones even than his own, now that he knew what he was doing as he drilled the holes in the wooden sole--Dean had had to redrill some of his own when he’d drilled them too close to the edge and they’d broken through. Also, he made Sam’s boots out of pure white snowhare fur, in hopes maybe Dennis and Barbara might let him wear them outside so they could play out there even when it was cold.
“There’s two good things about this place,” Dean told Sam as he led him up the tower steps to the belltower one night after Dennis and Barbara went to bed. He looked back when he didn’t hear Sam’s footsteps right behind him, to see him lagging behind. He was so pale, and so winded. Dean went back and simply picked him up. It was just easier. Besides, Dean was really strong these days; probably all the wood chopping, and Sam by contrast now weighed virtually nothing.
“All the bacon and jam and jelly and pie you can eat, and ... this.” Dean set Sam down, opened the hatch to the belltower, and let Sam climb that part himself. Dean pointed up to the sky, which was so dark and clear, you could see a million stars at least.
Sam gasped as he saw a shooting star, pointing. “Yep. There’s been a ton of ’em lately. That’s what I brought you up here for. Make a wish. Make a lot of ’em. I know I’m gonna.”
Sheltered by the low walls of the belltower from the spring wind that blew perpetually off the ocean, wrapped in the fur blanket Dean brought along, they were comfortable enough, lying on their backs looking up at the sky. With each starfall, Dean made another wish, but they all seemed to come back to Sam: Heal Sam. Make him strong again. Make him okay.
Dean woke to something he hadn’t in almost a year: sunlight on his face. It was pleasant. As the meaning of it came to him, he sat up with a start. They’d fallen asleep! Dennis and Barbara might already be up!
Not even bothering to wake him, Dean picked up Sam and carried him down the tower stairs into his room, where he barely remembered to grab the blanket before rushing out, barring the door, and fleeing to the rope ladder. He’d barely gotten to the top and pulled it up after him when he heard Barbara and Dennis emerge from wherever they slept at night, chatting cheerily. Dean froze as Dennis came straight to the kitchen calling for him, scarcely even daring to breathe. One glance upward and it was all over.
When he didn’t immediately find him, Dennis got frantic. Dean discovered Dennis did indeed know where Dean slept, as that was the first place he looked for him, before booking it outside, all of which Dean could see from this high vantage. Dennis couldn’t have developed some sort of affection for Dean over the year he served him, could he? Hearing him muttering about how he would beat him so viciously he wouldn’t be able to sit for a week if he’d tried to run away, Dean realized of course it wasn’t that. He was just afraid Dean had made some sort of escape attempt.
Dennis ran out to check the garden. Dean scarcely had time to jump down into the kitchen and throw the rope back up before Dennis came flying in again, his face a dark mask of fury. Dennis looked bewildered but relieved to see Dean there. “Where were you?” he asked, confused.
“Using, uh ... my ‘chamber pot.’”
“Oh.” His explanation didn’t seem to add up to Dennis, but Dennis was so relieved he wasn’t missing, he just smiled. “Okay. Please make a good breakfast today. I’m craving eggs--lots of runny eggs, sunny-side up.”
“Gotcha.”
Dean turned and immediately went down to the chicken coop, trying to regain his composure after that close call. How could he have fallen asleep?? Of course Sam did; he slept like the dead these days, but Dean was appalled at himself. Why didn’t he at least bring the alarm clock?? They’d been up there many nights, and he’d never fallen asleep before. It was the cold, he realized. Last night was almost balmy, the air no colder than in the hallway where he slept. He’d definitely have to remember the alarm clock from now on.
He spent extra long in the chicken coop, trying to pull himself together, made harder by how tired he was. He and Sam had stayed up for hours, talking and making wishes. Sam hadn’t even woken up when Dean put him back in his bed. Had Dean forgotten anything in his room in his rush to get back to places he was allowed to be? He couldn’t remember.
Still, all seemed normal over breakfast, Dennis slurping up those half-raw eggs like the freak he was. Even Sam liked them. Dean cast off his fears as he went out to the garden to start doing some early planting.
Mid-morning, Dennis came into the courtyard. “Dean, could you come with me, please?” Dennis grabbed a hoe as he led them back into the abbey.
Dean laid down the shovel and followed him, astonished when Dennis led him past the door that had always remained barred to Dean before this moment, except that time he took them up to the belltower. Had--had Dennis finally decided he trusted him enough to let him into more parts of the abbey than the little corner he’d been relegated to all this time?
Of course it wasn’t that. Why had he thought that? Lifting the hoe up to the top of the rafter, Dennis rummaged around with it as Dean stared in horror. Presently, the rope ladder fell down. Dennis looked at Dean expectantly.
“I’ve--never seen that before. I guess it must have been from someone else who lived here.”
Dennis gripped it, yanked on it. “Yet it’s new rope. Brand-new.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell ya. Maybe someone was living here right before you guys got back.”
“You aren’t the worst liar I’ve ever seen, Dean, but not great. I’d been noticing things here and there--Sam’s feet and hems dirty first thing in the morning, him positioned strangely in his bed this morning ... all kinds of things. But only when you were nowhere to be found today did I begin to piece it all together.”
“You gave me the idea. I figured out how you kids must have gotten into the chapel when the nuns hid in there.” There was no sense hiding it anymore. Dennis was already convinced. Any ongoing attempts to lie would only enrage him further. The beating was inevitable.
Dean eyed the hoe still in Dennis’s hand nervously. If he could just disarm him ... actually, if he could get it himself, he could really do some damage. He’d never won a fight against Dennis, not once, yet he couldn’t allow that to make him give up hope. With every new day, he was a tiny bit bigger and stronger than before. Besides, he couldn’t help analyzing each of their scuffles afterward and figuring out what he could have done better. One day ... one day, he had to win. He had to, because if he didn’t, one day, Dennis would kill him.
Dennis smirked, also glancing at the hoe. “This? Yeah, this can kill a man. It can easily kill a child. I’m really pissed this time, Dean. You won’t ever forget this one, as long as you live. Believe me.”
Dean didn’t even have time to find a defensive position before the first blow from the handle of the hoe. He stayed as silent as he could during every beating, so as not to give Dennis the satisfaction, but he couldn’t help the sound that came out of him. Dennis had once hit him with a mop handle, but it was about half the diameter of the hoe handle. He would have broken bones at the end of this beating, he knew it.
Dean lunged for the hoe, only to be grabbed by the face by Dennis, squeezing as hard as he could, filled with rage. Dennis flung him backwards, where he hit the sideboard and went down.
He jumped to his feet as quickly as he could, because Dennis, like the sicko he was, loved to pummel you without mercy once he had you down--yet as soon as Dean was up, before he had a chance to turn to face him again, Dennis whacked him across the back with the full force of the handle like he was wielding a baseball bat. Dean heard something crack inside him. Not only did he cry out, but he couldn’t help groaning as he lay on the ground, getting his knees under him, trying to get to his feet again, not succeeding ... and then he heard Sam’s voice. He was saying, “What’s happening? What’s that sound? I thought I heard Dean.” Barbara reassured him in her creepy way.
“Quiet!” Dennis hissed, grabbing one of the whips off the wall and taking advantage of Dean’s position on his knees to go to town on his back. “You’ll have to grow back half your skin after this,” Dennis said with grim satisfaction.
Then a bunch of stuff happened that didn’t make any sense. Dean thought he heard Barbara scream, but only for a second. Dennis stopped whipping Dean, calling for her, then just kicking Dean a few times for good measure, Dean got the impression to make sure Dean would stay down while he went to investigate. Then, as Dean looked up to see that he was really walking away, trying to gather the strength to get to his feet and get that hoe before he came back, Dennis shrieked, too, and ... was suddenly gone. Just disappeared, except that his boots were still there ... and where he had been, a dark grinning cloud, with the face of a monster.
Then he heard Sam. “No! Not Dean! Don’t eat Dean!” he was screaming at the top of his lungs.
At that sound, Dean was able to scramble to his feet and run for the chapel, holding his ribs, veering around the cloud-monster, which apparently had the power to eat a human in a single bite but was holding its ground, held back by something. Dean was afraid the door would be barred, but Dennis had only pulled it to when he went to confront Dean. Dean burst through, to find Sam chained to the floor, very little of Barbara left beside him.
Sam looked over when he came in. “No, Dean, run! It’s gonna kill us next!”
Dean ran to Sam to try to unhook him from the floor.
“Dean, no, you have to run!”
“I’m gonna save us both!”
“You can’t, because it comes from inside me!” Dean looked up as a shadow came over them, and there it was, between them and the stained-glass windows, grinning hungrily. Dean managed to get the first chain unhooked, and moved on to the next, where it occurred to him to try to just break the golden chain instead, which was much thinner than the hooks. As he grabbed it, Sam cried urgently, “No! Don’t break it--it’s the only thing allowing me to control him!” Dean glanced up at the thing. It hadn’t come any closer. He went back to work, trying to unhook Sam without breaking the chains.
“Please, Dean,” Sam begged, tears rolling down his temples, “I can’t hold it back forever! You have to leave! I have to--I have to know that at least you’re okay.”
“I ain’t okay if you’re not,” Dean grunted. He was getting the hang of how these hooks worked. He managed to unhook him completely, and hauled Sam to his feet. “I can’t carry you right now. We have to run.”
“We can’t run from something that comes from me!”
The cloud demon had shimmered a couple of times, light beginning to pass through it, as Dean worked. Dean feared that meant it was gathering energy, but instead, as he took another look at it, he saw that it was farther from them now, and seemed less dark and solid than it did before. What had changed? Sam wasn’t touching the hooks now. Did the type of metal the hooks were made of somehow strengthen the monster? They still stood in the circle, though. Dean took them out of it, and the monster faded by half.
He looked around. The rituals--evidently they had finally worked. Parts of the rituals were to bring out the demon; other parts were to control it, if Sam was correct about what the chains were for. The chains, the hooks, the circle, what else? Dean saw the bowl of blood on the altar, a bowl of what looked like hair next to it--Sam’s hair.
Sam saw it at the same moment--he knocked the bowl of hair to the floor. The demon roared. “We have to take my blood somewhere where the earth can purify it,” he said, seeming to refer to things Dennis and Barbara had mentioned in his presence.
Dean grabbed the bowl of blood. The monster swiped at Dean, but somehow it didn’t quite reach him. Dean glanced down at Sam, at his lined, ashen face, the tension, the--the effort. He was controlling it. “Come on,” said Dean, and raced out of the chapel, as fast as he could go without spilling Sam’s blood.
Later, he would wonder why he hadn’t just thrown it in the ocean. That would have been easiest, right? But when Sam said a place where the earth could purify it, Dean thought of only one place: the garden. He’d already been pouring blood on it for a long time, and anyway, it was as pure a place as he knew. Glancing up one last time at Sam to see if he had any objection and seeing that Sam, at least, didn’t seem to have any better ideas, Dean poured it over the place he’d planted seeds just that morning. As he did, he saw the last hint of the shadow that had followed them out here, remaining always exactly the same distance from them, tethered to Sam, dissipate in the morning sun.
“Is it over?” Dean asked, unable to keep from falling to his knees now that they seemed to have escaped all the most immediate danger.
Sam looked around, looked over the trees, the dew on the leaves, put his hand over his own solar plexus. The birds had started cheeping again after what Dean was now beginning to realize was a strange and terrible hush when they first came out. When Dean poured out the bowl, the first few chirps here and there were hesitant. Now they were beginning to return to their usual morning clamor.
Sam nodded. “It’s gone.”
They spent most of the rest of the day passed out in Dean’s bed, dead to the world. When Dean finally woke after peaceful, happy dreams, everything that happened that morning slowly came back to him. That was all impossible, right? It had to be a dream. But seeing Sam lying there beside him, still in his silken robes, now filthy; shifting his position and feeling the pain of Dennis’s vicious beating that morning, there could be no doubt. Even just being there in his bed with Sam when the light was so low and golden told him so. He got up, making sure not to jostle Sam, trying not to groan loud enough to wake him as he struggled to get upright, more sore and throbbing than he’d ever been in his life.
The first thing he did was check on Dennis and Barbara. Were they really--was his perception accurate, that only their shoes and maybe something in them was all that was left of them? He found Dennis’s shoes in the big hallway just as he remembered them. He peeked in the chapel, afraid of seeing the monster again, but all seemed peaceful in there, fresh flowers still sitting in the pews, the picture of serenity and piety, except for the bits of human in the pentagram circle. He went outside to check on the blood in the garden, which looked just like any blood he’d ever poured on there, and no monster lurked in the shadows.
Finally, he tended the animals. It was the first thing he did upon waking every day for almost a year; he didn’t know what else to do. As the pigs rejoiced to see him, he found comfort in the routine, in the work itself, in the familiarity of all these things he knew now how to do so well. Natural things. Everything Dennis and Barbara did tried to twist what was natural to their terrible ends. They took what was pure and sought to control it until it became something dark and unnatural. They knew no other way. He was kind of bummed not to have been the one who killed them, but on the other hand, it seemed right that as Dennis found a way to turn every effort Dean made against him back on Dean, in the end it came back on him, permanently. Actually, really, it was Sam who got them. As much reason as Dean had to kill Dennis, Dean figured Sam had still more.
Slowly hauling the egg pail up to the kitchen, he saw Sam standing outside the door, just ... looking, at the world he’d been forbidden all this time. Dean’s world. They’d been separated from each other by a couple of doors and a vast gulf of experience. Somehow they were carrying on completely different lives, a few dozen yards away from each other. All these things that made up Dean’s daily life were entirely unknown to Sam. He peeked in the pail when Dean brought it in and looked up at Dean with wonder. “You did all this yourself?” he asked, awed.
“I’ve never laid an egg, Sam,” Dean teased, setting them down.
Sam picked up an egg, feeling it, amazed. “It’s still warm!”
Sam couldn’t get enough of it, of watching and helping Dean light a fire in the wood stove, of exploring the root cellar and retrieving things for Dean down there as he made dinner while he was too sore to go himself. Sam looked over the wheels of cheese Dean had made, the barrels full of salt pork, the rows and rows of canned vegetables, brightly colored on the shelves. “I can’t believe how much you know now,” Sam said as he brought up another thing Dean asked for. “I don’t know anything. I haven’t even gotten to read a book in all this time,” he said glumly.
“You learned how to control demons. I saw you were doing it, Sam. That’s the only reason it didn’t eat us, too--because of you.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah,” he sighed. “That’s what I spent the last year doing--learning how to control demons. And ... lots of supernatural things. They tried to call all kinds of things through me, and I was always able to hold them back ... until I heard Dennis hurting you.”
So that was what set off that whole chain of events. Dennis really had brought it all on himself. Dean thought of Dennis saying of slaughtering the nuns that it was bound to end thus, once it began. “That’s not nothin’, Sam.”
Sam brightened a little. “I guess not.”
“Anyway, I guess it’s a good thing I know how to do all this now, because we’re probably stuck here for a while.”
Sam seemed to like everything about this life. He loved the animals, he loved tending the garden, loved being outside and getting to feel the sun. Fishing in the cove together one warm afternoon, nothing but the sound of waves lapping against the wood and a light breeze to cool them, Dean couldn’t remember ever feeling so good. Just seeing Sam up and about and excited about life, starting to look like himself again, filled him with contentment.
Sam wouldn’t let Dean break the golden chains, insisting not only did they keep the demon locked away as long as he wasn’t inside the pentagram and his blood and hair weren’t on the altar, but he said Barbara had once said the chains would keep the demon blood from awakening on its own later. “I always had this feeling that someday something bad would happen. Something really bad ... and I’m just so glad there’s a way now to stop it,” he said. The chains got in his way, but he seemed to feel the price was worth it.
He was a little superstitious about giving up the robes at first, until as he put on his old clothes--which still fit, he was so skinny now--and other clothes Dean had made himself and grown out of, he decided the robes didn’t do anything important, and he wore whatever he wanted. He let his hair grow out immediately.
“What about when we get out of here, though?” Dean said. “I know hunters can be eccentric, but ... the ear chains are weird.”
“Maybe I can grow my hair out long and just tie it back when we’re alone. I could wear long sleeves. People could only see my rings then.”
Dean was glad Sam was talking about what would happen when they left. He seemed to like it so much here, Dean had been afraid he’d want to stay forever. Sam learned to tend the animals as Dean gave him instructions. It was a good thing Sam wasn’t just willing but eager to learn all this, as Dean couldn’t do half of what he usually did while his broken ribs healed. Every time Dean bathed--now in the nice metal tub Sam had bathed in all this time, that sat above a firepit so you could heat the water to just the right temperature first--afterward, Sam wrapped up his ribs as tight as he could with strips he made from his silk robes.
“We could do your idea now,” Dean said, “weave a big ‘HELP’ sign and hang it from the cliffs.”
Sam nodded eagerly. “Yeah! Spinning yarn is so fun.”
“Glad you think so. I hate it.”
“I’ll do it!” Sam said.
“Still, though ... all the time I was out there fishing and crabbing and making salt, I only ever saw two ships, and they were probably too far away to see a sign, no matter how big we made it.”
“It’s okay,” Sam said, unconcerned. He’d bounced right back from everything Dennis and Barbara did to him. He was no longer pale and winded only a week after their demise. Now he was even putting on muscle. Maybe it was just being free again at last to get to play and be a kid, but he seemed light, lighter than he had in his whole life, like a weight he’d felt since infancy had been lifted. Happy. Dean ... Dean felt happy, too. “You know everything about how to keep us alive here as long as we have to stay.”
“How long’s that gonna be?”
Sam looked up at him with that newly optimistic grin, indomitable. “Until something changes.”