Our Own Lives and Nobody Else’s, for kalliel
Title: Our Own Lives and Nobody Else’s
Recipient: kalliel
Rating: PG-13
Word Count or Media: 5,750
Warnings: language and some gore, [possible spoilers]non-con and consent issues re: possession, PTSD
Author's Notes: Special thanks to hells_half_acre, whose stellar Supernatural Timeline helped me place this fic chronologically.
Summary: When Dean is halfway to hell, he and Sam hunt a half-dog, half-man, while Sam struggles with memories and instincts that are only half his own.
Dean’s in a good mood. You’re trying to be in a good enough mood, to find the balance between qualified denial and sober recognition. You’ve been at that for six months-long enough to realize that there is no good balance. Every ratio is destructive; you choose the destruction.
You’re at a motel in Indiana when you find yourself dropping to your knees, one arm outstretched to push against something that’s not there. You catch yourself with that hand-not because you’re unsteady, but because you’re unsolid. You take a moment to commune with gravity until you feel the substance of your body. You’re breathing slower than your fear; the panic sits deeper than adrenaline. In a few breaths, it’s all but gone. You try to hold onto the shape of it and forget the feeling, but the feeling itself is more true than the shape. The shape is unfathomable; the feeling is horror and anger, things you know all too well.
This isn’t familiar. There’s no brain-deep, searing pain, no clarity to the images. The nightmare felt like someone else’s-that’s not your rage (or is it?)-secondhand fabric stitched with the thread of your nerves. That must be why you were trying to get out of it. You haven’t sleepwalked since you were ten.
You wonder if you missed your name being spoken. But when you look back, Dean is still sleeping, his soft breaths the only thing disturbing the dead air.
The carpet is nubby under your palm. You try to remember what color it is in the light. Teal is your best guess.
You’re on the floor for a long while before you realize you’re still on the floor. The digital clock reads 3:21am. You get up and grab your laptop. Pull up your shitty list of potential leads. Email two “occultist experts” who are probably hacks. Skim a wordy academic article, pick out two more shitty potential leads from the references. When you rub your eyes, red blooms furiously behind your lids. You type crossroads demon into Search the Web. Maybe you missed something the first fifty times.
Dean wakes up at 5:18, suddenly and physically, like he’s reacting to something louder than the taps of your keyboard. You keep your eyes on your screen when he looks at you. There’s the soft rustle of sheets and then his feet against the floor, the click of the bathroom door. You sigh when you hear him tapping his razor against the sink. Short night for both of you: he wasn’t in bed until about two a.m. Soon he’s digging his own laptop out of his bag, bringing it to his bed, and settling there with his back against the wall. He clicks on the bedside lamp.
At around 7, he goes out and then reappears with a couple of coffees in flimsy cups and a paper bowl full of baked beans.
“Found their unadvertised complimentary breakfast, I see.”
“Found their complimentary microwave.” He plunks one of the coffees on your table. “Lights?”
“Yeah.”
He flicks the switch. Sits back on the bed.
(The carpet is, in fact, teal.)
You stretch and consider brushing your teeth. Remember the coffee. Take a sip of that instead.
Dean asks if you’re having any luck.
You’re on a rabbit trail: Tartini, Paganini, Liszt. The Faustian rumors. Probably publicity stunts. Probably nothing.
You say, “Not really.”
“Good. ‘Cause I’ve got something.”
Your heart jumps. You’re immediately up and looking at Dean’s laptop.
“Whoa. Didn’t realize you were jonesing so hard for a hunt.”
Oh. Right. A hunt. Of course.
Emmet County Woman Claims Attacker was ‘Michigan Dogman.’
“Okay?”
“Oh, don’t worry. There’s more.”
Dean has more articles, Dean has theories, Dean has the memory of a 1999 conversation with a hunter who claims to have been attacked by the Beast of Bray Road. Dean has the address of a cemetery groundskeeper who immediately moved to Indiana after a supposed encounter with a dogman in Emmet County, Michigan. His home is only an hour’s drive north.
You interject: There are almost no reports of a dogman ever attacking anyone.
“But there are some. This Emmet County woman is one. One person hurt is too many people.”
You agree with this, in principle. You offer no comment.
“Sam, we’ve killed ghosts for knocking picture frames off-balance. This dogman thing is worth a shot.”
You suddenly, desperately want a ghost hunt. Ghosts are easy. Even with complications, ghosts are easy. Familiar. Salt and burn. You want that. Dean has been circling his own perimeter, throwing up caricatures of himself when the situation calls for more of him. You want a situation where the all of him that is required isn’t too much for him to give. You want him grounded. You want you grounded. You want your hands sure on the trigger; you want the crackle of a match flame and confidence in the consequences of dropping it.
“We know ghosts. We don’t know what these things are. We don’t know what we’re walking into.”
“We never do. Not really. But this thing is dangerous. And we won’t-” Dean pauses, for the briefest moment, but he repeats himself same as before: “We won’t get a shot at this for another ten years.”
The “we” is conciliatory. Like speaking of the deceased at a funeral to someone who hasn’t yet embraced past tense. It makes your eyes sting and your jaw clench both at once. It’s not what you want.
* * *
Elias Granger is all tan and sinew, upper back bowed and jaw forward, time compressing him into a form that will spring his soul to the other side before his last breath even finishes leaving him. When you mention his sighting at the cemetery in 1997, he comes out the door and beckons you to follow him off the weathered porch, leaving his rust-colored plaid rolled up to the elbows. The cold breeze skitters dead leaves across the driveway behind you.
He won’t talk about that around his wife, he says. “And not usually around anyone else, either.” He stops. Looks at the two of you.
“Of course,” says Dean easily, pulling out his wallet. “We’re happy to compensate you for your story.”
Granger accepts and pockets the money. His stance has suspension now; his head is looser on his neck. “People think you’re loony for saying this sorta thing,” he says. “Found that out the hard way. Can’t just go yakking about it to any old person.”
“Just anyone who’s willing to cough up some cash, right?” you say, and what the hell is wrong with you.
Dean makes an excuse for you, turning the charm dial up to eleven.
“This ain’t a local paper, is it?”
“Not at all. It’s a book, actually. And we’re changing names to protect the innocent. Our last interviewee wanted to remain anonymous; we’ve got her in our notes as ‘Madonna.’”
Granger laughs. “Call me Elvis.” He gestures with his wad of bills and walks toward his truck where it’s parked in the driveway. “Always keep a stash of these in my glove compartment. So I can leave one in any mailboxes I hit.”
You can feel Dean blinking a silent beat while Granger leans into the vehicle. “That happen often?”
Granger closes the door and brushes off his hands. “Nod off while I’m driving every so often. I don’t get more than, oh, three or four hours of sleep a night.”
“You have nightmares?” you ask. About the cemetery. About this dogman thing. Or about vague but visceral echoes of primal fury, maybe.
Granger shifts his weight like he’s just acknowledging the greyness of the sky. “Not much,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Just your general, run-of-the-mill insomniac.”
“Might want to get that checked out,” you say.
“Wife wants me to, but…” He shrugs noncommittally. “Maybe I’m just waiting for the day I hit a tree dead-on, you know?” He laughs abruptly, bending forward in an invitation for you to join in, straining for levity and personally finding it in the strain.
“That’s not funny,” you say under the noise of his voice.
But Dean nods, drops his gaze to the ground. “Yeah,” he says to Granger; “I get that.”
* * *
“You’re a shit hunter today, you know that?” Dean says this over Impala hum, against windshield and windows that bounce every word back, back, back without refraction. “What’s going on with you?”
“He’s gonna hurt someone someday.”
Dean looks at you, then back at the road. “You mean mailbox-buster back there? Nah, he’s got one asscheek still on his rocker. He’ll probably kill himself before he kills anyone else.”
“Oh good, a victimless tragedy.” You wonder what Elias Granger’s wife is like.
“Hey,” says Dean suddenly, as if intercepting his own thoughts, “at least we got some prime information out of him. No thanks to you and your emo attitude. We’ll have a good beat on this thing before we even get to Cross Village. Might even gank it the next night.”
Dean insists on driving Michigan’s “Route 66." It’s all drab farmland, leafless trees; the occasional rural business with a sleepy, uneven parking lot; forgotten hand-painted signs spelling out NO CORN TODAY or FIREWOOD: $5.00. Dean buys a kitschy “mitten”-shaped key chain from a gas ‘n’ sip, which sparks a conversation with the guy at the pump in front of them-red beard and Lynyrd Skynyrd hoodie-who apparently spends a good five minutes recommending a restaurant without mentioning its location, because Dean gets back in the car and suggests getting dinner there. You point out beard-guy's bumper sticker: OUTTA MY WAY, I’M GOIN’ TO PLOW’S DINER LLC CASPER, WY.
Dean’s in a good mood. You’re trying to be in a good enough mood, to find the balance between qualified denial and sober recognition. You’ve been at that for six months-long enough to realize that there is no good balance. Every ratio is destructive; you choose the destruction.
But right now, with Dean countering your mood and you modifying it to meet him, you think maybe this is what balance looks like. Tempered destruction. You watch Dean, almost vicariously, and imagine being there-here-with him.
You pass through Athens (“World tour, Sammy!”) and Nashville, end up at a no-name motel whose sign advertises Dial Phones and Color TV. The owner emerges from the back in a loose ponytail and shorts and seems surprised at the existence of customers, but doesn’t bat an eye when you pay in cash and request the room at the far end of the building. Dean goes out (you decline his invitation) and comes back slightly flushed, with a few new dirty bills and a small takeout box, which he opens with a flourish and proudly displays for your appraisal.
“Pie,” he announces.
“I can see that. Why does it look like it’s been deconstructed?”
Dean frowns and examines the spilling blueberries, the whipped cream toppled and souped on the bottom of the box. “Huh. Probably because I ran back here in the dark so I could share this with you before it gets cold. You want a fork or what?”
You share the slice. It’s still pretty warm.
You wake up the next morning with your forearm cramping and your hand in a fist. Dean says good morning and your arm tenses for a right hook like muscle memory.
* * *
When you arrive at your final stop, the credit card falls through. Through the vertical blinds on the office windows, you see the motel clerk eye Dean over the tops of his glasses, after eyeing the card long enough to memorize. You curse yourself. You were supposed to be keeping tabs on cards. You hadn’t been. You’d been in correspondence with a voodooist, your attention pulled south while you traveled north. Weird dreams apparently sneaking in at the places you started to split.
“That’s a bust,” Dean says before he even gets the Impala door shut. He tosses a fluttering bundle in your direction: the dead card and a handful of brochures. The man at the desk pulls a phone up to his ear as the Impala shifts out of reverse.
You ride for a few minutes without talking. Dean brakes-two brochures slide off your lap and onto the floor-for a trio of deer stepping across the road, eyes gleaming in the headlights. He rolls down his window to holler “How ya doin’?” as you pass.
“Jesus.” You pull the collar of your coat up against the rush of cold air.
“Sorry,” says Dean, half-contrite. “Hey," he adds, in a tone neutral enough to be steered any direction, "check out that one with the totem poles."
You click on your flashlight and shuffle through the brochures scattered in the footwell until you find the right one. “Legs Inn?” you say. Then, preemptively, “Not those kinds of legs, Dean.”
Dean hangs his smile on the unsaid joke. “But dude, look at the antlers in there.”
“It’s a seasonal business. Probably survives on summer tourism. They closed a month ago.”
“Well, maybe next year.”
You look at Dean. His lips part as he realizes. You turn toward the window and the blur of shadows and bare trees.
“Maybe next year,” he says again. “You can always raise a glass to me.”
* * *
The Legs Inn may be closed-Dean makes a quip about that-but it has outdoor rental cabins off of the main road. You find one tucked further back than the others and pick the lock by light of the lantern in Dean’s hand and to the sound of waves washing gently against the Lake Michigan shoreline.
The temperatures are near freezing and your fingers feel stiff even under your gloves. Sometimes the fog of your breath makes it hard to see your hands. Suddenly, they feel separate from you. Your heart skips but your fingers are still moving, automatic. You’re afraid of what they might do.
Stop, you think.
The hands still. You take a breath. Turn the palms toward you, then away.
“What?” says Dean quietly, leaning his ear closer to you.
“Fingers are cold.” You shake them out, to prove it. You conquer the lock. Open the door, click on your flashlight.
The walls inside are ostentatiously wooden. The room is just wide enough for two single beds with some walking space in-between. The window is blocked by dark blinds. You could be in the belly of a still, dead ship.
No electricity. You know not to use the bathroom; there’s gonna be air in the pipes, antifreeze in the drains. You haul in your spare blankets, the flattened and torn sleeping bag from the corner of the trunk. The linens are still on the beds. Dean plops onto one, sniffs the pillow, and makes a private face of approval.
The clock on the wall is still ticking; no one thought or cared to remove the batteries. Each shift of its second hand is as arduous as it is methodical. Every time it reaches the 10, it begins a staccato crescendo that only lets up when it moves past the 1 and starts falling again in measured, military beats.
“Doesn’t that bother you?” you eventually ask, as the clock labors into another new minute. Your words are a rebellion against the rhythm, chiseled by clenched teeth.
Dean shrugs. “If it’s still got bristles, it’s good enough for me. Buy me another one, if it bothers you. A going-away present. Make it an electric.” You can hear his grin through a mouthful of toothpaste.
Each passing second collides with one of Dean’s teeth. Cracks it.
He hums “Stairway to Heaven” as he wanders outside to spit in the dirt.
You lie flat on the mattress so that the bottom of the bed frame presses into your Achilles tendons.
* * *
The nearest library is open two days a week. Miraculously, one of those days is today. The road is dotted with barns and fields. The parking lot is dirt. The building is tiny, the back piece of the “Township Hall.” The two of you in turn make good use of the single-toilet bathroom. You make silent apologies to the eagle-nosed librarian as you situate yourself in an inconspicuous corner.
“Well,” Dean says quietly as he checks his watch, “I’m gonna be late for my interview with Scarface.”
“Oh my god, Dean,” you can’t help saying. “The woman was traumatized.”
He seems genuinely apologetic. “Yeah, too soon.” He looks at you an extra moment with words in his throat before he decides to tuck them away. Raps the table with his knuckles. “See you in a couple hours.” You’re left with his laptop, a couple spare phones, wall chargers, and a bag of trail mix.
You take time to verify all your info, make a grasp at loose ends, check the weather, map out the area surrounding the abandoned house you’re eyeing. Tonight’s a stakeout-the skies will be pretty clear-you’ll see where that leads.
You check your email while the phones finish charging. One of the so-called occultist “experts” is requesting $300 in exchange for their “valuable expertise.”
Your drafted response reads, Fuck you.
* * *
You clear out the cabin, just in case. You’ll want the blankets, anyway. You make the beds. Military style. Perfect corners. The clock is still ticking and you make sure to outmatch it.
The woman from the article said that she had been walking along the road and stopped to get a closer look at the abandoned house when the monster appeared out of nowhere, at least seven feet tall, hairy and hideous. It lashed out at her, then crouched menacing and growling between her and the house while she stood frozen. The thing retreated into the woods at the sound of an approaching vehicle. The woman suffered deep scratches across her shoulder and four lacerations down her face that barely missed doing severe damage to her eye. Its claws, apparently, are vicious.
The farmhouse sits far back from the road, with a fully collapsed barn on one side and a patch of woods on the other. Dean parks the Impala near the trees, with a good view of two sides of the house and the fields that surround it. The walls are flaking dirty white paint, revealing dull wood underneath. The windows gape like empty sockets.
You make sure your hand warmer packet is in your coat. Dean tucks a blanket around his shoulders and cocoons himself inside. The shadows outside hardly shift, even in the breeze. You sit and watch. Every so often, you glance at your hands.
“You good?” says Dean, to your left.
“Not really.”
There’s a pause. “I was offering you caffeine. But tell me what ‘not really’ means.”
You accept the proffered thermos. “I don’t know.” The coffee has been cold for hours.
Dean nods. “That’s fair.” He keeps his eyes on the field beyond the house.
Do you feel like you’re losing control of everything, including your own person? (You don’t say that; you don’t want to hear him say “light at the end of the tunnel.”)
Time goes by. You pass the thermos back to Dean and he takes a swallow. You keep up a visual scan. The view feels removed, like footage on a security camera. The cold gets worse; you feel your muscles getting tighter. You sense, distantly, the shape of your gun on the seat beside you.
Dean opens his hand warmers and puts one in each pocket, pulls out his gun and flashlight, and announces he’s “going in.” He didn’t see anything; he just wants to scope out the house. He gets out of the car, grabs the duffle out of the trunk. “Sam?”
Yeah, you’re moving. You find your gun. Pat your coat pocket, take out the flashlight. Suffer a small crisis when you don’t know what comes next. Door handle. None of your free hands will move to open it. No, wait: two hands, both full. You put the flashlight back in your pocket and open the door, step outside.
Step across the yard.
Step inside the house.
Dean freezes almost as soon as he opens the door. There’s a stairway to the second floor right in front of you, and Dean gestures that he saw something at the top. You stay close to him as he climbs. Your gun is aimed past his left shoulder. A couple of the stairs are cracked or crumbled and your feet navigate around them. You reach the top.
There’s a blur of fur and a growl and something impacts you hard at the clavicle, sending you backwards, falling, colliding with the stairs and tumbling down. There’s a shout, and gunfire, and movement you can’t track. You catch yourself and scramble up and there’s a gun in your hand and you’re coughing and running and tripping up into the big, empty room on the right. There’s a huge snarling shape crouching in the middle of the floor with its massive hands around Dean’s torso, squeezing.
Your chest burns, trickling blood, and your body suddenly buzzes with a bright surge of fear: it knows exactly where that claw sliced skin.
You fire into the dogman’s chest, neck, head. Blood spurts heavy onto Dean.
Something snakes into your brain and releases a fold that isn’t yours; it unfurls into cigarette smoke between your lips, the smell of Jo Harvelle’s scalp.
The wolfman's shoulders slump as it begins to crumple.
The smell of its blood is stomach-churning.
You feel Jo’s arm in your hand: the heat of the skin, the bones small and breakable in your grip. A thrill of power spreading from your chest to your groin.
Dean thumps to the floor, scuttles backward as the wolfman collapses. He takes a drowning gulp of air and immediately begins heaving.
There’s the thick glut of smoke down your throat and the panicking, thrashing moment before your consciousness is seized.
You’re dragging Dean away by his ankles, pulling him up against the wall by the front of his coat. He’s gasping and choking. Fingers grasp at your sleeve. He retches convulsively. He’s not getting air.
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” says a voice that must be yours.
You’re digging a thumb into the bullet wound on his shoulder, and this is what you’ve wanted, your rage blooming outward into the release of his pain, these are your hands, this is your payback for hell,
for hell,
for hell.
You have one hand outstretched to push against something. You don’t know who you are, but these are your hands. These are your hands.
You go to a window. The wolfman isn’t moving. At least, you recall it lying motionless on the floor from when you looked at it just now. It feels like a memory from ten years ago: distant, unreliably crystallized. Maybe you can’t trust it. Fuck it. You’re at the window. It’s broken, a third of the pane missing. You go to the other window. You unlatch it, and it sticks and squeaks but slides all the way up. You stick your head and shoulders outside. There’s wild grass up against the side of the house, dead and brown. You might vomit. You might lean forward until you tumble head over heels toward the ground below. You watch with disinterest for what will happen next.
Nothing happens.
There’s a sound like air being let out of a tire: “Ffffffff.” It’s Dean, with a hand against his ribs. His aliveness is startling. One leg bends. His neck tenses. His head thunks back against the wall.
“Yeah,” he says breathlessly as you’re testing his ribs with your fingers, “at least one of those is broken.” He’s right. Probably two.
He gags painfully. He’s drenched with the thing’s dark blood, head to stomach.
You take out a bandana and wipe off his face and neck as best you can, as best you can see past the constant cloud of your breath colliding between you. You unzip his surface-soaked coat and slide it off his shoulders. He’s shivering. There’s a dark, sopping stain on the flannel underneath. You remove the flannel, too. Activate your two hand warmers in your coat pockets. Remove your coat, then your flannel, and hand them to Dean. When he takes them, you think you feel your fingers again, the fabric against them. He’s either looking very hard at you or looking anywhere but your face, depending on where your face is (you're not sure).
You go check on the monster. The smell of its blood is suffocating; it coats the back of your throat like varnish.The creature's fur is matted against the wood of the floor in a puddle of fetid maroon-brown. It’s bigger than a wolf. Its form is mostly dog-gigantic dog-but its shoulders are skewed, somewhere between canine and human. The hands are furry and knobbed, but with elongated fingers and opposable thumbs. They’re enormous, muscular hands. You wonder how much of its prey it has killed just by squeezing. You push at a meaty arm with your boot and have to lean in to get it to budge.
“Sam?” Dean has put on your flannel and is gingerly working his arm into the second sleeve of the coat. You walk back toward him, sidestepping the trail of vomit he left behind. He’s looking at you intently, holding his own coat at arm’s length. “Think you can wear this?”
You nod. You slide into his coat.
“You wanna put your gloves back on?”
They’re sitting on the floor. You don’t remember taking them off. You pull them over your fingers.
“Okay. I need a minute. Can we just chill a minute?”
You nod again. You put your hands in Dean’s coat pockets. You start counting in your head without knowing why.
“For fuck’s sake, Sam. Sit down.”
You sit.
Dean takes careful breaths. Shallow, but two lungs’ worth of shallow.
“How you feeling?” he says.
It takes a minute to answer, and even then you only manage a sentence fragment. “Wrong end of a telescope.”
Dean grunts as he lifts an arm to put a hand on your left shoulder. The cut on your chest pulls. You feel wildly destructible, which is maybe the same thing as invincible.
You and Dean make it halfway down the stairs when you hear a noise on the first floor, and you’re the first to move toward it.
In a corner of the room is a small pile of what looks like a couple of dirty sheets and a bunch dead leaves. Clumped in the center are several small dark somethings, moving. You steady your gun and angle your flashlight.
It’s a bundle of charcoal fur, little rotund bodies with tails tucked around. A litter. The room smells like waste and decay.
“Aw, fuck,” Dean whispers. “The wolfman is a wolf lady?”
Maybe. Or maybe it has a mate.
Dean wants to know if you saw its junk.
“No, did you?”
“No.” He sounds offended. “Why the hell would I be paying attention to that?”
You love your stupid brother. One of the lenses between you and the world dissipates. You move a step closer to Dean, where time is more immediate, and the floor feels solid under your boots.
You lean toward the pile of fur and a tiny muzzle pops up, bares its teeth in a yawn. The mouth is smeared in viscous maroon, the fur of its face and neck glutted with it.
“Dean.”
There’s a dark liquid smear leading into the next room. Gun ready, you step around the corner.
There’s an offensive odor of fresh rot and the glistening entrails of a massive carcass. It lays in a messy puddle of blood spattered and smudged by small paws. The gut and chest are half-hollowed out; the rib cage is a cavern. You recognize pieces of intestine (chewed) and something that might be the aorta. The ugly canine face is familiar. Some of the fur and flesh is torn from the hands; the exposed, skeletal form looks more human, and more repulsive.
"Holy shit,” Dean breathes. “Talk about mommy issues."
You can feel the blooming warmth of the decay in the air, against your wrists where Dean’s coat sleeves end. You step back out of the doorway.
“Okay,” says Dean, lowering his gun. “Looks like these little mother-munching motherfuckers did our job for us.”
The pups wiggle and whimper. You check your magazine. You’ve got enough silver bullets.
Dean steps between you and the litter. “Sammy, I can do it.”
He’s got that look. He’s seeing you, at seven years old, crying over an injured stray in Georgia. He’s seeing you standing right in front of him with a gun in your hands. These are not separate things. The past and the present coalesce in his eyes. This has always been Dean, trying to get the now back to the way it was.
But you’re here, you’re now, you have your two hands and your brother and if you play your cards right, you’ll have the future, too. You’ll have more than ten years; you’ll have all of them. Both of you. It’s what you want Dean to see: that the future is unavoidable but it’s malleable, and it starts right in front of your face. You can’t say it like that, because you’re afraid Dean will hear you like he heard you at seventeen.
What you say is, “I’m shooting these ugly-ass puppies. And then we’re getting out of here.”
Dean’s eyebrows raise a little, but he yields.
“Give me two minutes.”
Dean leans against the wall. After twenty seconds he’s surrendered any fucks he had left and taken a slouching seat on the floor.
You pull the sleeves of Dean’s coat over your hands as much as you can to pick up the baby wolf things-you’re wary of teeth. But the puppies are drowsy and sated and don’t put up a fight as you line them up on the floor. Their hind legs bend backward, but the arms have elbows, stretch out or tuck in like a baby’s might. They’re monsters. This is the future in the here and now, laid out in front of you.
The gun is in your hands; your hands are holding this gun. Dean lifts an arm to cover his face.
Five quick shots and they’re done.
You avoid looking at the mess at your feet. You wipe a spot of blood off your weapon.
You reach out a hand to help Dean stand up.
“Let’s go.”
“Bodies?” says Dean reluctantly. Putting his hands back in the pockets of his coat (your coat) where the handwarmers are. Wincing as he adjusts his shoulders against the cold.
You’ve got two hands and a future to change. In the meantime, this rage is yours.
“We’re gonna burn the house down.”
* * *
You reach an arm out: your palm meets nose, where the bone gives way to cartilage: the hollow triangle on a skull. Dean shifts and you feel eyelashes brush your fingers as you pull away.
“Ugh. What.”
“Keep breathing.”
“Fuck breathing.”
Dean’s ribs are bandaged; that was a blur of slowing tire-dirt-gravel crunch, and vivid bruising under flashlight inspection, brief flashes of red and blue against Dean’s pale face, a backdrop of clear night sky framing the billowing smoke a couple miles behind you.
Dean makes a painful effort to sit up straighter. “You okay?”
Your hip, back, and shoulder are bruising; you’re holding your wrenched neck at an angle. “My bones are intact.”
“Just keep your head inside the window.”
“Do you remember what Meg said? About hell?”
You expect Dean to divert, or to deliberately misunderstand you. Instead, he meets you exactly where you are. “Yeah. That it’s hell, even for demons.”
An oncoming car approaches, forgetting to turn off its brights. It passes you and the world goes regular-dark again.
“You’re not worthless, Dean,” you say, suddenly . “You’re not worthless.”
“Glad to hear you have such high standards for me.”
“No, I’m-I’m not better off without you. I was never better off without you.”
You can’t look at him or say anything more. He doesn’t offer a response.
You’re unraveling in a dozen different ways at any given moment, and someday you’ll just be a pile of useless pieces unless you bolster the failing parts of you as fast as they come undone. Your shape is changing a little with every repair. You could blame Dean for some of the problems; you credit him for mitigating most of the others. You might be able to function without him, although you’re scared of what shape you’d have to take to do that. But you’re willing to break off pieces if it means bolstering him. The puzzle works when you’re both here.
“Sam-look out!!”
You feel the wheel in your hands. Instinctively push the brake, grip tighter. Your eyes seem to open last, to register the empty road, the woods at the edge of the headlights as the Impala comes to a sharp halt.
“Fuck,” you say, by way of apology.
Dean groans and pushes a hand against his ribs, but he’s still leaning forward into the dash, peering out the windshield, gasping, “Holy shit. That wasn’t a wolf, was it?”
“You saw another dogman?”
“Did that look like a dogman to you?”
“Did what look like a dogman?”
“It was literally right in front of us.” He’s looking at you, a little wildly, and you have nothing to give back to him. He turns his gaze back toward the woods. “I thought I saw…” he murmurs absently. His face is transparent; you can see the fear behind it. There’s a difference between knowing what’s behind his usual camouflage and actually seeing it there, naked.
You’re ready to kill whatever it is. You go for your gun.
“Whoa, Sam,” says Dean. “Leave it. It’s gone.”
You can still feel the dogman pups in your hands. The fullness of their bellies.
You know that ten years from now will exist whether or not there are dog-people or wolf-things here to kill. Ten years from now will exist even if every monster on earth is dead. But you decide that leaving this one here is a promise. You’ll be back for it. You’ll create the future where you can come back for it.
“We’ll be back,” you say. “We’ll be back in ten years.”
You shift the Impala into drive and grip the steering wheel with both of your hands.
Recipient: kalliel
Rating: PG-13
Word Count or Media: 5,750
Warnings: language and some gore, [possible spoilers]non-con and consent issues re: possession, PTSD
Author's Notes: Special thanks to hells_half_acre, whose stellar Supernatural Timeline helped me place this fic chronologically.
Summary: When Dean is halfway to hell, he and Sam hunt a half-dog, half-man, while Sam struggles with memories and instincts that are only half his own.
Dean’s in a good mood. You’re trying to be in a good enough mood, to find the balance between qualified denial and sober recognition. You’ve been at that for six months-long enough to realize that there is no good balance. Every ratio is destructive; you choose the destruction.
You’re at a motel in Indiana when you find yourself dropping to your knees, one arm outstretched to push against something that’s not there. You catch yourself with that hand-not because you’re unsteady, but because you’re unsolid. You take a moment to commune with gravity until you feel the substance of your body. You’re breathing slower than your fear; the panic sits deeper than adrenaline. In a few breaths, it’s all but gone. You try to hold onto the shape of it and forget the feeling, but the feeling itself is more true than the shape. The shape is unfathomable; the feeling is horror and anger, things you know all too well.
This isn’t familiar. There’s no brain-deep, searing pain, no clarity to the images. The nightmare felt like someone else’s-that’s not your rage (or is it?)-secondhand fabric stitched with the thread of your nerves. That must be why you were trying to get out of it. You haven’t sleepwalked since you were ten.
You wonder if you missed your name being spoken. But when you look back, Dean is still sleeping, his soft breaths the only thing disturbing the dead air.
The carpet is nubby under your palm. You try to remember what color it is in the light. Teal is your best guess.
You’re on the floor for a long while before you realize you’re still on the floor. The digital clock reads 3:21am. You get up and grab your laptop. Pull up your shitty list of potential leads. Email two “occultist experts” who are probably hacks. Skim a wordy academic article, pick out two more shitty potential leads from the references. When you rub your eyes, red blooms furiously behind your lids. You type crossroads demon into Search the Web. Maybe you missed something the first fifty times.
Dean wakes up at 5:18, suddenly and physically, like he’s reacting to something louder than the taps of your keyboard. You keep your eyes on your screen when he looks at you. There’s the soft rustle of sheets and then his feet against the floor, the click of the bathroom door. You sigh when you hear him tapping his razor against the sink. Short night for both of you: he wasn’t in bed until about two a.m. Soon he’s digging his own laptop out of his bag, bringing it to his bed, and settling there with his back against the wall. He clicks on the bedside lamp.
At around 7, he goes out and then reappears with a couple of coffees in flimsy cups and a paper bowl full of baked beans.
“Found their unadvertised complimentary breakfast, I see.”
“Found their complimentary microwave.” He plunks one of the coffees on your table. “Lights?”
“Yeah.”
He flicks the switch. Sits back on the bed.
(The carpet is, in fact, teal.)
You stretch and consider brushing your teeth. Remember the coffee. Take a sip of that instead.
Dean asks if you’re having any luck.
You’re on a rabbit trail: Tartini, Paganini, Liszt. The Faustian rumors. Probably publicity stunts. Probably nothing.
You say, “Not really.”
“Good. ‘Cause I’ve got something.”
Your heart jumps. You’re immediately up and looking at Dean’s laptop.
“Whoa. Didn’t realize you were jonesing so hard for a hunt.”
Oh. Right. A hunt. Of course.
Emmet County Woman Claims Attacker was ‘Michigan Dogman.’
“Okay?”
“Oh, don’t worry. There’s more.”
Dean has more articles, Dean has theories, Dean has the memory of a 1999 conversation with a hunter who claims to have been attacked by the Beast of Bray Road. Dean has the address of a cemetery groundskeeper who immediately moved to Indiana after a supposed encounter with a dogman in Emmet County, Michigan. His home is only an hour’s drive north.
You interject: There are almost no reports of a dogman ever attacking anyone.
“But there are some. This Emmet County woman is one. One person hurt is too many people.”
You agree with this, in principle. You offer no comment.
“Sam, we’ve killed ghosts for knocking picture frames off-balance. This dogman thing is worth a shot.”
You suddenly, desperately want a ghost hunt. Ghosts are easy. Even with complications, ghosts are easy. Familiar. Salt and burn. You want that. Dean has been circling his own perimeter, throwing up caricatures of himself when the situation calls for more of him. You want a situation where the all of him that is required isn’t too much for him to give. You want him grounded. You want you grounded. You want your hands sure on the trigger; you want the crackle of a match flame and confidence in the consequences of dropping it.
“We know ghosts. We don’t know what these things are. We don’t know what we’re walking into.”
“We never do. Not really. But this thing is dangerous. And we won’t-” Dean pauses, for the briefest moment, but he repeats himself same as before: “We won’t get a shot at this for another ten years.”
The “we” is conciliatory. Like speaking of the deceased at a funeral to someone who hasn’t yet embraced past tense. It makes your eyes sting and your jaw clench both at once. It’s not what you want.
* * *
Elias Granger is all tan and sinew, upper back bowed and jaw forward, time compressing him into a form that will spring his soul to the other side before his last breath even finishes leaving him. When you mention his sighting at the cemetery in 1997, he comes out the door and beckons you to follow him off the weathered porch, leaving his rust-colored plaid rolled up to the elbows. The cold breeze skitters dead leaves across the driveway behind you.
He won’t talk about that around his wife, he says. “And not usually around anyone else, either.” He stops. Looks at the two of you.
“Of course,” says Dean easily, pulling out his wallet. “We’re happy to compensate you for your story.”
Granger accepts and pockets the money. His stance has suspension now; his head is looser on his neck. “People think you’re loony for saying this sorta thing,” he says. “Found that out the hard way. Can’t just go yakking about it to any old person.”
“Just anyone who’s willing to cough up some cash, right?” you say, and what the hell is wrong with you.
Dean makes an excuse for you, turning the charm dial up to eleven.
“This ain’t a local paper, is it?”
“Not at all. It’s a book, actually. And we’re changing names to protect the innocent. Our last interviewee wanted to remain anonymous; we’ve got her in our notes as ‘Madonna.’”
Granger laughs. “Call me Elvis.” He gestures with his wad of bills and walks toward his truck where it’s parked in the driveway. “Always keep a stash of these in my glove compartment. So I can leave one in any mailboxes I hit.”
You can feel Dean blinking a silent beat while Granger leans into the vehicle. “That happen often?”
Granger closes the door and brushes off his hands. “Nod off while I’m driving every so often. I don’t get more than, oh, three or four hours of sleep a night.”
“You have nightmares?” you ask. About the cemetery. About this dogman thing. Or about vague but visceral echoes of primal fury, maybe.
Granger shifts his weight like he’s just acknowledging the greyness of the sky. “Not much,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Just your general, run-of-the-mill insomniac.”
“Might want to get that checked out,” you say.
“Wife wants me to, but…” He shrugs noncommittally. “Maybe I’m just waiting for the day I hit a tree dead-on, you know?” He laughs abruptly, bending forward in an invitation for you to join in, straining for levity and personally finding it in the strain.
“That’s not funny,” you say under the noise of his voice.
But Dean nods, drops his gaze to the ground. “Yeah,” he says to Granger; “I get that.”
* * *
“You’re a shit hunter today, you know that?” Dean says this over Impala hum, against windshield and windows that bounce every word back, back, back without refraction. “What’s going on with you?”
“He’s gonna hurt someone someday.”
Dean looks at you, then back at the road. “You mean mailbox-buster back there? Nah, he’s got one asscheek still on his rocker. He’ll probably kill himself before he kills anyone else.”
“Oh good, a victimless tragedy.” You wonder what Elias Granger’s wife is like.
“Hey,” says Dean suddenly, as if intercepting his own thoughts, “at least we got some prime information out of him. No thanks to you and your emo attitude. We’ll have a good beat on this thing before we even get to Cross Village. Might even gank it the next night.”
Dean insists on driving Michigan’s “Route 66." It’s all drab farmland, leafless trees; the occasional rural business with a sleepy, uneven parking lot; forgotten hand-painted signs spelling out NO CORN TODAY or FIREWOOD: $5.00. Dean buys a kitschy “mitten”-shaped key chain from a gas ‘n’ sip, which sparks a conversation with the guy at the pump in front of them-red beard and Lynyrd Skynyrd hoodie-who apparently spends a good five minutes recommending a restaurant without mentioning its location, because Dean gets back in the car and suggests getting dinner there. You point out beard-guy's bumper sticker: OUTTA MY WAY, I’M GOIN’ TO PLOW’S DINER LLC CASPER, WY.
Dean’s in a good mood. You’re trying to be in a good enough mood, to find the balance between qualified denial and sober recognition. You’ve been at that for six months-long enough to realize that there is no good balance. Every ratio is destructive; you choose the destruction.
But right now, with Dean countering your mood and you modifying it to meet him, you think maybe this is what balance looks like. Tempered destruction. You watch Dean, almost vicariously, and imagine being there-here-with him.
You pass through Athens (“World tour, Sammy!”) and Nashville, end up at a no-name motel whose sign advertises Dial Phones and Color TV. The owner emerges from the back in a loose ponytail and shorts and seems surprised at the existence of customers, but doesn’t bat an eye when you pay in cash and request the room at the far end of the building. Dean goes out (you decline his invitation) and comes back slightly flushed, with a few new dirty bills and a small takeout box, which he opens with a flourish and proudly displays for your appraisal.
“Pie,” he announces.
“I can see that. Why does it look like it’s been deconstructed?”
Dean frowns and examines the spilling blueberries, the whipped cream toppled and souped on the bottom of the box. “Huh. Probably because I ran back here in the dark so I could share this with you before it gets cold. You want a fork or what?”
You share the slice. It’s still pretty warm.
You wake up the next morning with your forearm cramping and your hand in a fist. Dean says good morning and your arm tenses for a right hook like muscle memory.
* * *
When you arrive at your final stop, the credit card falls through. Through the vertical blinds on the office windows, you see the motel clerk eye Dean over the tops of his glasses, after eyeing the card long enough to memorize. You curse yourself. You were supposed to be keeping tabs on cards. You hadn’t been. You’d been in correspondence with a voodooist, your attention pulled south while you traveled north. Weird dreams apparently sneaking in at the places you started to split.
“That’s a bust,” Dean says before he even gets the Impala door shut. He tosses a fluttering bundle in your direction: the dead card and a handful of brochures. The man at the desk pulls a phone up to his ear as the Impala shifts out of reverse.
You ride for a few minutes without talking. Dean brakes-two brochures slide off your lap and onto the floor-for a trio of deer stepping across the road, eyes gleaming in the headlights. He rolls down his window to holler “How ya doin’?” as you pass.
“Jesus.” You pull the collar of your coat up against the rush of cold air.
“Sorry,” says Dean, half-contrite. “Hey," he adds, in a tone neutral enough to be steered any direction, "check out that one with the totem poles."
You click on your flashlight and shuffle through the brochures scattered in the footwell until you find the right one. “Legs Inn?” you say. Then, preemptively, “Not those kinds of legs, Dean.”
Dean hangs his smile on the unsaid joke. “But dude, look at the antlers in there.”
“It’s a seasonal business. Probably survives on summer tourism. They closed a month ago.”
“Well, maybe next year.”
You look at Dean. His lips part as he realizes. You turn toward the window and the blur of shadows and bare trees.
“Maybe next year,” he says again. “You can always raise a glass to me.”
* * *
The Legs Inn may be closed-Dean makes a quip about that-but it has outdoor rental cabins off of the main road. You find one tucked further back than the others and pick the lock by light of the lantern in Dean’s hand and to the sound of waves washing gently against the Lake Michigan shoreline.
The temperatures are near freezing and your fingers feel stiff even under your gloves. Sometimes the fog of your breath makes it hard to see your hands. Suddenly, they feel separate from you. Your heart skips but your fingers are still moving, automatic. You’re afraid of what they might do.
Stop, you think.
The hands still. You take a breath. Turn the palms toward you, then away.
“What?” says Dean quietly, leaning his ear closer to you.
“Fingers are cold.” You shake them out, to prove it. You conquer the lock. Open the door, click on your flashlight.
The walls inside are ostentatiously wooden. The room is just wide enough for two single beds with some walking space in-between. The window is blocked by dark blinds. You could be in the belly of a still, dead ship.
No electricity. You know not to use the bathroom; there’s gonna be air in the pipes, antifreeze in the drains. You haul in your spare blankets, the flattened and torn sleeping bag from the corner of the trunk. The linens are still on the beds. Dean plops onto one, sniffs the pillow, and makes a private face of approval.
The clock on the wall is still ticking; no one thought or cared to remove the batteries. Each shift of its second hand is as arduous as it is methodical. Every time it reaches the 10, it begins a staccato crescendo that only lets up when it moves past the 1 and starts falling again in measured, military beats.
“Doesn’t that bother you?” you eventually ask, as the clock labors into another new minute. Your words are a rebellion against the rhythm, chiseled by clenched teeth.
Dean shrugs. “If it’s still got bristles, it’s good enough for me. Buy me another one, if it bothers you. A going-away present. Make it an electric.” You can hear his grin through a mouthful of toothpaste.
Each passing second collides with one of Dean’s teeth. Cracks it.
He hums “Stairway to Heaven” as he wanders outside to spit in the dirt.
You lie flat on the mattress so that the bottom of the bed frame presses into your Achilles tendons.
* * *
The nearest library is open two days a week. Miraculously, one of those days is today. The road is dotted with barns and fields. The parking lot is dirt. The building is tiny, the back piece of the “Township Hall.” The two of you in turn make good use of the single-toilet bathroom. You make silent apologies to the eagle-nosed librarian as you situate yourself in an inconspicuous corner.
“Well,” Dean says quietly as he checks his watch, “I’m gonna be late for my interview with Scarface.”
“Oh my god, Dean,” you can’t help saying. “The woman was traumatized.”
He seems genuinely apologetic. “Yeah, too soon.” He looks at you an extra moment with words in his throat before he decides to tuck them away. Raps the table with his knuckles. “See you in a couple hours.” You’re left with his laptop, a couple spare phones, wall chargers, and a bag of trail mix.
You take time to verify all your info, make a grasp at loose ends, check the weather, map out the area surrounding the abandoned house you’re eyeing. Tonight’s a stakeout-the skies will be pretty clear-you’ll see where that leads.
You check your email while the phones finish charging. One of the so-called occultist “experts” is requesting $300 in exchange for their “valuable expertise.”
Your drafted response reads, Fuck you.
* * *
You clear out the cabin, just in case. You’ll want the blankets, anyway. You make the beds. Military style. Perfect corners. The clock is still ticking and you make sure to outmatch it.
The woman from the article said that she had been walking along the road and stopped to get a closer look at the abandoned house when the monster appeared out of nowhere, at least seven feet tall, hairy and hideous. It lashed out at her, then crouched menacing and growling between her and the house while she stood frozen. The thing retreated into the woods at the sound of an approaching vehicle. The woman suffered deep scratches across her shoulder and four lacerations down her face that barely missed doing severe damage to her eye. Its claws, apparently, are vicious.
The farmhouse sits far back from the road, with a fully collapsed barn on one side and a patch of woods on the other. Dean parks the Impala near the trees, with a good view of two sides of the house and the fields that surround it. The walls are flaking dirty white paint, revealing dull wood underneath. The windows gape like empty sockets.
You make sure your hand warmer packet is in your coat. Dean tucks a blanket around his shoulders and cocoons himself inside. The shadows outside hardly shift, even in the breeze. You sit and watch. Every so often, you glance at your hands.
“You good?” says Dean, to your left.
“Not really.”
There’s a pause. “I was offering you caffeine. But tell me what ‘not really’ means.”
You accept the proffered thermos. “I don’t know.” The coffee has been cold for hours.
Dean nods. “That’s fair.” He keeps his eyes on the field beyond the house.
Do you feel like you’re losing control of everything, including your own person? (You don’t say that; you don’t want to hear him say “light at the end of the tunnel.”)
Time goes by. You pass the thermos back to Dean and he takes a swallow. You keep up a visual scan. The view feels removed, like footage on a security camera. The cold gets worse; you feel your muscles getting tighter. You sense, distantly, the shape of your gun on the seat beside you.
Dean opens his hand warmers and puts one in each pocket, pulls out his gun and flashlight, and announces he’s “going in.” He didn’t see anything; he just wants to scope out the house. He gets out of the car, grabs the duffle out of the trunk. “Sam?”
Yeah, you’re moving. You find your gun. Pat your coat pocket, take out the flashlight. Suffer a small crisis when you don’t know what comes next. Door handle. None of your free hands will move to open it. No, wait: two hands, both full. You put the flashlight back in your pocket and open the door, step outside.
Step across the yard.
Step inside the house.
Dean freezes almost as soon as he opens the door. There’s a stairway to the second floor right in front of you, and Dean gestures that he saw something at the top. You stay close to him as he climbs. Your gun is aimed past his left shoulder. A couple of the stairs are cracked or crumbled and your feet navigate around them. You reach the top.
There’s a blur of fur and a growl and something impacts you hard at the clavicle, sending you backwards, falling, colliding with the stairs and tumbling down. There’s a shout, and gunfire, and movement you can’t track. You catch yourself and scramble up and there’s a gun in your hand and you’re coughing and running and tripping up into the big, empty room on the right. There’s a huge snarling shape crouching in the middle of the floor with its massive hands around Dean’s torso, squeezing.
Your chest burns, trickling blood, and your body suddenly buzzes with a bright surge of fear: it knows exactly where that claw sliced skin.
You fire into the dogman’s chest, neck, head. Blood spurts heavy onto Dean.
Something snakes into your brain and releases a fold that isn’t yours; it unfurls into cigarette smoke between your lips, the smell of Jo Harvelle’s scalp.
The wolfman's shoulders slump as it begins to crumple.
The smell of its blood is stomach-churning.
You feel Jo’s arm in your hand: the heat of the skin, the bones small and breakable in your grip. A thrill of power spreading from your chest to your groin.
Dean thumps to the floor, scuttles backward as the wolfman collapses. He takes a drowning gulp of air and immediately begins heaving.
There’s the thick glut of smoke down your throat and the panicking, thrashing moment before your consciousness is seized.
You’re dragging Dean away by his ankles, pulling him up against the wall by the front of his coat. He’s gasping and choking. Fingers grasp at your sleeve. He retches convulsively. He’s not getting air.
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” says a voice that must be yours.
You’re digging a thumb into the bullet wound on his shoulder, and this is what you’ve wanted, your rage blooming outward into the release of his pain, these are your hands, this is your payback for hell,
for hell,
for hell.
You have one hand outstretched to push against something. You don’t know who you are, but these are your hands. These are your hands.
You go to a window. The wolfman isn’t moving. At least, you recall it lying motionless on the floor from when you looked at it just now. It feels like a memory from ten years ago: distant, unreliably crystallized. Maybe you can’t trust it. Fuck it. You’re at the window. It’s broken, a third of the pane missing. You go to the other window. You unlatch it, and it sticks and squeaks but slides all the way up. You stick your head and shoulders outside. There’s wild grass up against the side of the house, dead and brown. You might vomit. You might lean forward until you tumble head over heels toward the ground below. You watch with disinterest for what will happen next.
Nothing happens.
There’s a sound like air being let out of a tire: “Ffffffff.” It’s Dean, with a hand against his ribs. His aliveness is startling. One leg bends. His neck tenses. His head thunks back against the wall.
“Yeah,” he says breathlessly as you’re testing his ribs with your fingers, “at least one of those is broken.” He’s right. Probably two.
He gags painfully. He’s drenched with the thing’s dark blood, head to stomach.
You take out a bandana and wipe off his face and neck as best you can, as best you can see past the constant cloud of your breath colliding between you. You unzip his surface-soaked coat and slide it off his shoulders. He’s shivering. There’s a dark, sopping stain on the flannel underneath. You remove the flannel, too. Activate your two hand warmers in your coat pockets. Remove your coat, then your flannel, and hand them to Dean. When he takes them, you think you feel your fingers again, the fabric against them. He’s either looking very hard at you or looking anywhere but your face, depending on where your face is (you're not sure).
You go check on the monster. The smell of its blood is suffocating; it coats the back of your throat like varnish.The creature's fur is matted against the wood of the floor in a puddle of fetid maroon-brown. It’s bigger than a wolf. Its form is mostly dog-gigantic dog-but its shoulders are skewed, somewhere between canine and human. The hands are furry and knobbed, but with elongated fingers and opposable thumbs. They’re enormous, muscular hands. You wonder how much of its prey it has killed just by squeezing. You push at a meaty arm with your boot and have to lean in to get it to budge.
“Sam?” Dean has put on your flannel and is gingerly working his arm into the second sleeve of the coat. You walk back toward him, sidestepping the trail of vomit he left behind. He’s looking at you intently, holding his own coat at arm’s length. “Think you can wear this?”
You nod. You slide into his coat.
“You wanna put your gloves back on?”
They’re sitting on the floor. You don’t remember taking them off. You pull them over your fingers.
“Okay. I need a minute. Can we just chill a minute?”
You nod again. You put your hands in Dean’s coat pockets. You start counting in your head without knowing why.
“For fuck’s sake, Sam. Sit down.”
You sit.
Dean takes careful breaths. Shallow, but two lungs’ worth of shallow.
“How you feeling?” he says.
It takes a minute to answer, and even then you only manage a sentence fragment. “Wrong end of a telescope.”
Dean grunts as he lifts an arm to put a hand on your left shoulder. The cut on your chest pulls. You feel wildly destructible, which is maybe the same thing as invincible.
You and Dean make it halfway down the stairs when you hear a noise on the first floor, and you’re the first to move toward it.
In a corner of the room is a small pile of what looks like a couple of dirty sheets and a bunch dead leaves. Clumped in the center are several small dark somethings, moving. You steady your gun and angle your flashlight.
It’s a bundle of charcoal fur, little rotund bodies with tails tucked around. A litter. The room smells like waste and decay.
“Aw, fuck,” Dean whispers. “The wolfman is a wolf lady?”
Maybe. Or maybe it has a mate.
Dean wants to know if you saw its junk.
“No, did you?”
“No.” He sounds offended. “Why the hell would I be paying attention to that?”
You love your stupid brother. One of the lenses between you and the world dissipates. You move a step closer to Dean, where time is more immediate, and the floor feels solid under your boots.
You lean toward the pile of fur and a tiny muzzle pops up, bares its teeth in a yawn. The mouth is smeared in viscous maroon, the fur of its face and neck glutted with it.
“Dean.”
There’s a dark liquid smear leading into the next room. Gun ready, you step around the corner.
There’s an offensive odor of fresh rot and the glistening entrails of a massive carcass. It lays in a messy puddle of blood spattered and smudged by small paws. The gut and chest are half-hollowed out; the rib cage is a cavern. You recognize pieces of intestine (chewed) and something that might be the aorta. The ugly canine face is familiar. Some of the fur and flesh is torn from the hands; the exposed, skeletal form looks more human, and more repulsive.
"Holy shit,” Dean breathes. “Talk about mommy issues."
You can feel the blooming warmth of the decay in the air, against your wrists where Dean’s coat sleeves end. You step back out of the doorway.
“Okay,” says Dean, lowering his gun. “Looks like these little mother-munching motherfuckers did our job for us.”
The pups wiggle and whimper. You check your magazine. You’ve got enough silver bullets.
Dean steps between you and the litter. “Sammy, I can do it.”
He’s got that look. He’s seeing you, at seven years old, crying over an injured stray in Georgia. He’s seeing you standing right in front of him with a gun in your hands. These are not separate things. The past and the present coalesce in his eyes. This has always been Dean, trying to get the now back to the way it was.
But you’re here, you’re now, you have your two hands and your brother and if you play your cards right, you’ll have the future, too. You’ll have more than ten years; you’ll have all of them. Both of you. It’s what you want Dean to see: that the future is unavoidable but it’s malleable, and it starts right in front of your face. You can’t say it like that, because you’re afraid Dean will hear you like he heard you at seventeen.
What you say is, “I’m shooting these ugly-ass puppies. And then we’re getting out of here.”
Dean’s eyebrows raise a little, but he yields.
“Give me two minutes.”
Dean leans against the wall. After twenty seconds he’s surrendered any fucks he had left and taken a slouching seat on the floor.
You pull the sleeves of Dean’s coat over your hands as much as you can to pick up the baby wolf things-you’re wary of teeth. But the puppies are drowsy and sated and don’t put up a fight as you line them up on the floor. Their hind legs bend backward, but the arms have elbows, stretch out or tuck in like a baby’s might. They’re monsters. This is the future in the here and now, laid out in front of you.
The gun is in your hands; your hands are holding this gun. Dean lifts an arm to cover his face.
Five quick shots and they’re done.
You avoid looking at the mess at your feet. You wipe a spot of blood off your weapon.
You reach out a hand to help Dean stand up.
“Let’s go.”
“Bodies?” says Dean reluctantly. Putting his hands back in the pockets of his coat (your coat) where the handwarmers are. Wincing as he adjusts his shoulders against the cold.
You’ve got two hands and a future to change. In the meantime, this rage is yours.
“We’re gonna burn the house down.”
* * *
You reach an arm out: your palm meets nose, where the bone gives way to cartilage: the hollow triangle on a skull. Dean shifts and you feel eyelashes brush your fingers as you pull away.
“Ugh. What.”
“Keep breathing.”
“Fuck breathing.”
Dean’s ribs are bandaged; that was a blur of slowing tire-dirt-gravel crunch, and vivid bruising under flashlight inspection, brief flashes of red and blue against Dean’s pale face, a backdrop of clear night sky framing the billowing smoke a couple miles behind you.
Dean makes a painful effort to sit up straighter. “You okay?”
Your hip, back, and shoulder are bruising; you’re holding your wrenched neck at an angle. “My bones are intact.”
“Just keep your head inside the window.”
“Do you remember what Meg said? About hell?”
You expect Dean to divert, or to deliberately misunderstand you. Instead, he meets you exactly where you are. “Yeah. That it’s hell, even for demons.”
An oncoming car approaches, forgetting to turn off its brights. It passes you and the world goes regular-dark again.
“You’re not worthless, Dean,” you say, suddenly . “You’re not worthless.”
“Glad to hear you have such high standards for me.”
“No, I’m-I’m not better off without you. I was never better off without you.”
You can’t look at him or say anything more. He doesn’t offer a response.
You’re unraveling in a dozen different ways at any given moment, and someday you’ll just be a pile of useless pieces unless you bolster the failing parts of you as fast as they come undone. Your shape is changing a little with every repair. You could blame Dean for some of the problems; you credit him for mitigating most of the others. You might be able to function without him, although you’re scared of what shape you’d have to take to do that. But you’re willing to break off pieces if it means bolstering him. The puzzle works when you’re both here.
“Sam-look out!!”
You feel the wheel in your hands. Instinctively push the brake, grip tighter. Your eyes seem to open last, to register the empty road, the woods at the edge of the headlights as the Impala comes to a sharp halt.
“Fuck,” you say, by way of apology.
Dean groans and pushes a hand against his ribs, but he’s still leaning forward into the dash, peering out the windshield, gasping, “Holy shit. That wasn’t a wolf, was it?”
“You saw another dogman?”
“Did that look like a dogman to you?”
“Did what look like a dogman?”
“It was literally right in front of us.” He’s looking at you, a little wildly, and you have nothing to give back to him. He turns his gaze back toward the woods. “I thought I saw…” he murmurs absently. His face is transparent; you can see the fear behind it. There’s a difference between knowing what’s behind his usual camouflage and actually seeing it there, naked.
You’re ready to kill whatever it is. You go for your gun.
“Whoa, Sam,” says Dean. “Leave it. It’s gone.”
You can still feel the dogman pups in your hands. The fullness of their bellies.
You know that ten years from now will exist whether or not there are dog-people or wolf-things here to kill. Ten years from now will exist even if every monster on earth is dead. But you decide that leaving this one here is a promise. You’ll be back for it. You’ll create the future where you can come back for it.
“We’ll be back,” you say. “We’ll be back in ten years.”
You shift the Impala into drive and grip the steering wheel with both of your hands.