original by innie_darling
Remix Title: Negative Space
Remix Author: angstslashhope
Original Story: Lacuna
Original Author: innie_darling
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Cassie, John/OFC
When the music stops, you can hear Dean.
The bodily drag that you'd been struggling forward against releases with a snap, sending you stumbling abruptly with the sudden relief of it, and then you know it's safe to turn.
The noises Dean makes are without rhythm, without tone; there's enough of the dawn light coming in from open mouth of the cave that you can see him clear enough, jagged teeth of rock spiking down around him from the low roof. He's kneeling, back curved like being upright is more agony than he can bear; body jerking and shuddering with sobs. There's a crumpled, still shape on the ground before him.
Your legs ache, ankles weak, but still have energy enough to propel yourself toward him. Your hand lands at the back of his neck, gripping his collar with the intent to haul; it's then you see what he's leaning over and your knees hit the stone ground, solid impact you barely feel.
Dean's hands are covered in blood. You can't even see the weapon he used; his fingers curled oddly, red-soaked almost up to his elbows, splattered over the thighs of his jeans, his chest and throat. The body below you both has been eviscerated, destroyed, but is still recognizable.
The voice of it had been incongruous, sweet; maybe it'd only taken on this form when Dean had turned around. Maybe, even in death, it'd only shed the form when you turned away from it.
Dean's hands move over its face like he doesn't even realize you're there, and your hand tightens convulsively on the back of his shirt, instinctual spasm to pull him backward, away from it. Its hair's plastered over its face with the still sticky-slick blood, eyes open and glittering, if motionless. Mouth open. The relaxed, vulnerable expression of sleep that you've seen a million times, still nunused to the ferociousness of the punch it slams into your chest.
"Sammy," Dean's sobbing, coherence finally becoming apparent; or maybe you can just understand him better, now. "Sammy."
"No," you say, and it comes out as a low growl, subterranean echo against the rock surfaces around you. The twisting nausea in your stomach hardens, and the muscles in your thighs stiffen as you force yourself to stand again, pulling Dean with you. He's nearly completely limp in your grasp, marionette-like and dragging downward, the occasional violent motion still shocking through his body. His feet stumble and drag as you begin to pull him away, out toward the light, so you grip one blood-slick wrist and thread it behind your shoulders, hitching him further upright. The hand not pulling down on his wrist you grip in his hair, pushing the side of his head against your collarbone, not letting him turn again, not looking back.
Dean sleeps. Too-many hours, and you sit in the motel room, sometimes at the desk - writing in or flicking through your journal - sometimes on the other bed, dozing upright, watching his still, sunken face, interspersed with dreams full of blood and small, broken bodies.
When Dean wakes he doesn't speak, just moves his body in a slow surge upward, hands still as limp and inarticulate as they'd been when you'd cleaned the blood from them. He turns to you immediately, eyes meeting yours then skittering away, gaze landing on the hours-old coffee cup on the side table. He reaches for it, takes a swig. Grimaces, then drinks again.
His eyes are sunken, skin around them bruised. He doesn't look like someone who's just slept for fifteen hours straight. I told you, you think. I told you not to look back. No use in saying it now.
You watch him for a few minutes longer, watch him finish the coffee, push himself further upward, lean against the headboard. You'd stripped off his shirt and jeans while they were still blood-wet, not yet stiff; and the brass amulet seems strangely upraised against his chest, like the rest of him's sinking into itself. You voice the decision you made hours ago.
"Had a couple of calls."
Dean blinks, makes a breath-sound of acknowledgement, watching you.
"Jill's having some problems up at the Columbia Bar."
"Water beast?" Dean's voice is rough, unused.
"Something like that. And Rick called."
Dean frowns a little, expression thick like he can't move his face properly.
"Ohio," you say. "Athens. Ghost trouble."
"Didn't we do a job in Ohio back in-"
"'99," you say. "Yeah. There's always ghost trouble in Athens."
"So where we heading first?"
You pause for a moment, studying his face, keeping your own features still and unchanging. "I'm heading to Oregon."
Dean frowns again, brows drawing down as his mouth tenses.
"You take Ohio. Rick's got a sofa bed, looks like it'll just be a routine cleansing on the campus, there."
"But if it's a water beast, you'll need-"
"Jill can handle it. We've hunted together before. Should take me a couple weeks, round trip. I can meet you back in Athens."
"Two weeks? But-"
"Two weeks," you say firmly, cutting off any bargaining. It's the first time you've separated in a long time, but... It's necessary. "Long enough to patch yourself back up."
He casts his gaze down. You'd both come out of the caves with little more than a few scrapes, but Dean doesn't offer any more challenge. The tune of the creature's song is lost to your memory, but the image of its borrowed face remains. You're not sure that you'll ever forget it, or the way Dean's sobs had broken over it. "Yes, sir."
Jill calls the creature Scylla with a kind of affectionate familiarity, and it's a running joke between the two of you in the four days of preparation for the fight. Keep an eye out for Charybdis. Don't neglect poor old Charybdis, she can be a mean bitch if you ignore her. A real sucker.
The joke lasts up until you hack off a pair of Scylla's heads with your machete, and in response one of her necks winds around your ankles, pulling taut and row upon row of sharp teeth snapping dangerously close. Jill gives a shout, heavy blade in her hands slicing downward, and you're spun and flung outward, slamming into slippery rock.
The waves crash around your body, then above your head; you can see Scylla's fish-tail through the murky violence of the water, see Jill's booted feet wide-planted on the rock, and pain flashes through your vision, white-sharp. You reach for a hand-hold, try to get a grip on the hard-slick surface, haul yourself out of the water and back into the fight and the pain sears brighter, through your wrist. Your mouth gasps open involuntarily, and you sink under the churning water as if you're being sucked down.
The water burns, moreso than the sudden flesh-hot pressure of something gripping your throat and curling under the edges of your jaw. Your head breaches the surface again and the grip moves to the shoulders of your shirt, Jill dragging you out of the water, both of you gasping.
You cradle your arm to your chest, steady ache-throb-slice of pain flashing through your wrist. Your bones feel sharp just beneath the surface of your skin, wrong. The water's still seething, but mainly from the rain pelting down; you look over to see the stone-gray dead scales of the beast resting on the rock, sinuous limbs half-moving with the motion of the water.
"Not gonna have to give you mouth-to-mouth, am I?" Jill asks dryly.
You laugh, half-choking with the tingle of salt water in you throat. You cough, spit. "Nah," you say at length. Jill's kneeling by you, a weal of red crossing her face and short-cropped hair utterly bedraggled, but otherwise unharmed. "Thanks for saving my ass."
She pushes up to her feet, reaches out a hand to haul you up. "You owe me." You hiss through your teeth as the movement jars your wrist. "Broken?"
"Yeah, think so."
"Hospital?"
You grimace. "Yeah."
You remember why you hate hospitals. You're kept waiting long enough that Jill has time to go back to her place, change into dry clothes, come back again. Your wrist hurts too much to pull your shirt and jacket over it, so the nurse has to make a cut up by the shoulder, tear it all the way down. You shrug the flannel sleeve off the other shoulder, wind the automatic shivers tight into stillness as you sit and wait for the doctor in your slightly-clammy tee-shirt. Jill stands in the corner of the room, arms crossed over her chest, watching impassively.
The pain meds they insist you take before they set it make you wonky when you finally step out of Jill's car and into her house, resting a hand briefly against the truck on your way up the drive. Inside it's warm, dim, strange-smelling and she doesn't turn on the light so you step slowly forward, using your feet to feel your way toward the sofa as your eyes gradually adjust.
Jill's gone further into the house, but then she's back and right in front of you. "Lemme give you a hand with that," she says, and then her hands are at the top of your jeans, deftly unbuckling your belt, pulling at the fly. The denim's still a little damp, stiff with salt, and you sway and grab for her shoulder with your left hand as she yanks your jeans and shorts down your thighs.
Your right hand feels too-heavy with the plaster cast weighing it down, and you're not quite sure where to put it. It jars against the back of the sofa when she shoves you down on it. "Wait," you say. "Wait, you don't have to-" Though your dick's already expressing interest, drugged and sea-pickled as your brain is.
"Just shut the hell up," she says, sounding more mildly amused than seriously pissed-off, and shoves down her own jeans, stepping out of them before straddling your thighs.
"I thought-" you say, struggling to form coherent words through the haze and the residual false sense of movement from being in the water. "I thought you were a-"
"A dyke?" she laughs shortly, wrapping her hand around your erection and rising a little, kneeling above you. Your hands come to rest on her hips automatically, one loose-gripped and the other plaster-hard fitting into the slot of her hipbone. You can't even see it, just feel its shape through the solid cast and the cotton of her flannel. "You are a very pretty girl, Johnny."
You go to respond, half-laugh and half-biting comeback, but she's dropping her hips now, sinking down on you, and you can't speak.
"Besides," she says, low rumble out on a heavy breath. "You owe me."
She rotates her hips a little, and you buck upward. Fuck.
Charybdis.
Sammy's crying. Desperate, screaming wails for his Mommy, but you can't see him ahead of you and you can't turn back. Your eyes strain in the semi-dark, half-light glowing off the rock face in your periphery.
"Daddy?"
You turn.
You'd expected Mary, but Dean's standing there, all of five years old, wearing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt you bought him from Goodwill for his first birthday after Mary died. He's holding a baby shape in his arms, all wrapped up in blankets. Sammy's wails stop, and you see blood start to seep through the pale swaddling.
"Daddy," Dean says again. "Sammy's having a nightmare. We need to come sleep with you."
You startle awake, heart pounding like you're in the middle of a fight, fist full of sweat. Your right arm is heavy, like something's pulling you down, and you struggle against it for a moment before you remember the cast. There's a dull ache all through your wrist.
It's late morning. Jill's on the back porch tilting back on a battered old kitchen chair, booted feet propped on the railing of the veranda, mug of coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other. You watch her through the fly-spotted screen for a moment, then move noiselessly into the kitchen.
You flick through your journal, finding the page then running your finger down it, over the ridges of scored-out names until you find the one you're looking for. You prop the butter-yellow receiver between your jaw and shoulder, dial with your free hand.
"M'boy there?" you say when Rick answers, and the next thing you hear is Dean's voice, tinny and half-breathless through the wires between.
"Dad," he says. "You get it?"
"Yeah."
"You okay?"
"Yeah," you say, flexing your fingers beneath the cuff of the cast a little wryly. "I'm safe."
Dean huffs out a sigh through his nose, sound magnified through the receiver, probably louder than he intends.
"You find the ghost?"
"Yeah, it was a poltergeist. This guy in back in the twenties wrote some devil's diaries or something, got himself a teenaged cult. Their spirits have been haunting the manuscripts ever since."
"And they're at the university?"
"Yeah, in the writing centre there. Just getting hold of the stuff for the ritual now, to clear it out tomorrow night. Nothing much else to report."
You grunt in affirmation.
"But, Dad."
"Yeah?"
"There's plenty of other crap around here. The poltergeists were just the ones causing the most trouble. And," Dean pauses. "I think I got a way of hunting them out. The ghosts."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Rick's got this EMF meter, he lent it to me for the job. Was hella useful for advance warning, I swear, the number of spirits I didn't even know were there... The campus is crawling with them."
"Electromagnetic field meter," you say. "Huh."
"Yeah. I think... I think I can put one together."
"Good," you say. "Look, I'm gonna... I'm on my way now. But I'll be another week."
"Another week?"
"Yeah. I'm gonna come down through California."
Dean's quiet for a long moment. "Oh."
"You clean out as many of those sons of bitches as you can, and I'll see you in seven days."
"Seven days," Dean says, voice firming again. "Yes, sir."
It gets warmer the further south you go, truck windows wound down and plaster-cast arm resting on the sprawl of your thigh as the sea-scented wind loses its trigger to nausea again. March tips over into April the day you arrive in Palo Alto, and as if it's been waiting on the calendar, the heat ramps up abruptly, sticky-humid and uncomfortable.
Your FBI ID gets you access to personnel files, and Sammy's in the same dorm this time but different room. You park the truck off-street from some boho precinct, get a coffee and a newspaper, and walk back to the campus. There's a park opposite the dorm, and you sit on a bench beneath a tree there.
As the day winds on the shade moves, and sweat worms down the back of your neck. You pull one sleeve of your jacket off, not bothering with wrestling the other down over the cast just yet, and awkwardly roll the left sleeve of your flannel up. Your skin beneath the cast itches, the knitting bone a steady, dull ache.
As the sun sinks toward the horizon it turns the air gold; the volume of students coming and going through the main doors increases briefly, and then as the light drops almost to the point where it's too difficult to see anything, you see him.
Sammy's wearing a gray tee-shirt, dark blue jeans and flip-flops. He's got a satchel slung over his shoulder, slapping against his hip as he walks. It's only when he gets to the steps and in amongst the other students that you can tell just how tall he is, how broad his shoulders. You can see his grin even from this far away, and your chest hurts as his arms drop down in a slow easy slope to rest his wrists against a girl's shoulders. She's so small in comparison, dark hair and wide smile, hands tiny on Sammy's hips.
It's not until they move inside the building and out of sight that you can breathe again, sucking in air deep, but not deep enough to fill the space in the pit of your chest, dark ache of it like a coal-black bruise, tender enough to sink fingers into, skin easily broken.
It's late afternoon by the time you arrive at Rick's place. No one's answering the door, so Dean's not in, and you know not to expect Rick until at least five so you wait in the truck with the windows wound down. At 5.20 Rick's somewhat older truck rumbles up next to yours, and he grins at you through the frames of your open windows.
"Beer?" he offers when you're both inside, his kitchen dim and cool after the hazy afternoon glow outside.
"No thanks," you say, and, "Dean around?"
Rick shrugs, crack-hiss opens his own beer, takes a swig. "Somewhere," he says. "Not been around here much of late."
You nod, keeping your expression impassive. The Chevy hadn't been outside, either, and the sofa bed was folded up. One of Dean's duffels leant against its foot, the only evidence that Dean had been here.
It's still light out, will be for a while. Rick had slapped a newspaper down on the table when he'd walked in, you pick it up. "Mind if I borrow this?" you ask.
Rick nods, waves a hand, swallows another mouthful of beer. "Go right ahead, man. And hey, if you see Dean? Bring him back here. It's his turn to shout take-out."
You nod, head outside again. There's a pistol in the glove compartment of the truck, you reach in through the window to retrieve it, then slide it beneath the waistband of your jeans at your lower back. You tuck the newspaper under your right arm, keep your whole left arm free to swing as you walk. It'll get cooler, later, but it's more effort than it's worth to wrestle your jacket on over the cast again.
The park here's different to the one in California, trees smaller, shrubbier, more deciduous than tropical species, and the park's walled by pseudo-modern apartment complexes instead of the old-establishment architecture of dorms.
You find a picnic table, sit down and flip open the newspaper. The park's almost deserted at this time of afternoon, kids heading in for a meal instead of making the most of the late daylight, so you're kind of not expecting it when you hear, "Dad?"
Dean. Standing there with his face open and joyful, laughing, bruise-marred. Wearing a goddamn purple shirt, of all things, a little too small for him. There's a girl at his side, slight but compact build, fit under his arm, staring back at you. You see her eyes flit over the cast on your right arm, over the reddened bruises from Jill's fingers at your throat.
"How's Jill?" Dean asks, tone sobering, as if he's read your thoughts.
"She's good." You smile a little, thinking Charybdis, and the tilt of her hips when she swung the machete in her grip. "Real good. But I'd rather have had you backing me up." Thinking of Dean's economy of movement, the weight behind his swings. You can see the power below the skin in the bones of Dean's wrists, exposed beneath the cuffs of his shirt, fitting into the curve of the girl's waist. "Must be the first time you're glad you had to stay behind, patch yourself up."
Dean's sliding further and further from the delight he'd greeted you with, going still and considered. "How was California?"
You watch his face, seeing the hardly-veiled eagerness there, aware of the girl still observing you closely. "California's a big place, Dean." Because he'd left Dean behind on this one for a reason, to stitch himself together, get back to the hunt again like he should. Like he needs to. You think of Sam's wide smile, of how the heat of the day itched into your clothes and under your skin until you could barely stand it. "It was sunny, just like this. But sticky. Way too hot for April."
Dean's always been able to read you. It's part of what makes him such a good fighter, a good soldier. Knowing what you need him to do before say it, a concord between you that'd only even been discord with Sammy. Dean blinks, breaking the eye contact, slipping back into deceptively relaxed ease, lines of his body sliding back to fit into those of the girl's.
"Dad," Dean says. "This is Cassie. Cassie, this is my dad, John Winchester."
And that tells you more than the way their arms are wrapped around each other, more than the incongruity of Dean's shirt. And it'd only been, what, two weeks? Your throat hurts, like there's a hand wrapped around it, squeezing. You can't help but smile. "Good to meet you, Cassie."
She smiles, a little warily, and you find you have no inclination to ease up. There's a strange fierceness rising in you, a challenge to put to the person Dean's shared his name with, as if he's given it to her keeping, to destroy or hold safe, power over both of them. They sit on the opposite side of the table when he nods to them. "So, you already trying to whip my boy's wardrobe into shape?"
She looks at your bared teeth. "No," she says, not hesitant, but not continuing nonetheless.
"I'm just borrowing it until we get to Rick's," Dean volunteers.
"Rick told me you haven't been sticking around much."
"No. Had a job to do." Dean's mouth twitches a little. "And a girl to see." His gaze is level, staring right at you when you look up from the girl - Cassie - again.
"Job's done, then?"
Dean nods, and you rest your right arm on the table in front of you, letting the blood that had throbbed into it from angling downward flow through evenly again. Dean's smiling, still watching you, still folding Cassie into his side. Your chest and throat feel tight, a twisted version of the sensation felt in the park in California. You find you're smiling. "Right. Time for me to get back to Rick's." You remember Rick's comment about the take-out, realize how hungry you are after hours on the road. Think about sitting on Rick's sofa, crowded around the coffee table, you and Rick and Dean and Dean's girl eating pizza, shooting the breeze. "You two coming?"
They glance at each other, then Cassie shakes her head with a smile. "We need to get going," she says. "It was nice meeting you."
You don't wait to see them go. You say your goodbye and turn around, don't look back.
Dean's at Rick's every morning before you wake up, a not-quite farce as you're the only one sleeping on the sofa bed. You check out the campus with him, see the new EMF in action. There's an old building on the hillside that Dean tells you it used to be the Athens Lunatic Asylum; the meter squeals as soon as the step onto the lawn leading up to it. There's a lot of activity, a lot of work to be done. On the third day when he arrives, hair still sleep-tousled and fresh red bite marks on his throat below the fading bruise, you're up and dressed, packing a bag.
"We going some place?" he asks.
"Yeah," you say shortly. "River."
It's quieter down by the river. There's the risk of fishing boats drifting by and spotting you from the water, but still less risky than doing this in a public park in the town. You sling the bag of weapons down at the base of one of the trees cupping the damp-grounded clearing against the waterfront. Dean's standing by the water, his back to you, peering out over the surface of it. You take a breath, kick out quick and sharp, boot heel connecting to the vulnerable back of his knee, his leg buckling.
He swears shortly, swinging his own leg out and around even as he goes down; you dodge it easily, stepping back and too far away to intervene as he rises to his feet again. Your heart's already pounding, vision sharpening as he lifts his hands into loose fists, expression shifting through brief confusion into determination.
"Dad," he says. "You're hurt." His voice vibrates low and non-threatening.
You curl your lip, and his head snaps back away from your left fist. He blinks hard, shakes his head a little; you know the burn-shock of your knuckles against his cheekbone must be buzzing out sheets of pain, now. He ducks his chin a little, feet beginning the slow, considered pacing you've been waiting for.
A right hook you dodge easily; the glance of his left across your ribcage. You circle each other, darting in and out, blows connecting as often as missing. You kick out again and then suddenly you're both down, churning the wet sod into mud, Dean's weight bearing down on you. Your left hand finds the knife-stroke he'd shown you, half-crescent claw marks, and presses, hard. He cusses again, brings his knee up too-slow and you block it easily, throwing him off but then his hand's around your throat so you whip your right arm up, slamming the plaster cast into his face.
The off-white cast stains red with Dean's blood, gushing down even as Dean grips it, pins it above your head, flips you over with fierce ease and shoves your face down before pushing back off and away.
Your mouth tastes of blood and mud; you roll over and rise just as quickly. Dean's poised a few arm's lengths away, fists still lifted, darker scrapes and grazes beneath the slick of bright red. His nose is still bleeding steadily, down over his mouth. His eyes are slits in his face, pale above the red, mouth open but jaw still taut. The bruises on your neck throb anew. Dean licks his lips, and his voice is thick. "Again," he says.
You pinpoint a spirit, unsurprisingly in the old asylum, and catch sight of it two nights in a row before it attacks you on the third, flinging some research student's desk clear across the room. Dean spends the next day in the university library, going through the old hospital records, seeking out a most likely suspect. You meet him outside it, on campus, as the sun starts to set and you don't even speak a greeting. Dean eyes the bag slung over your shoulder.
"Target practice," you say. "Need to work on your night vision." Dean doesn't challenge it. "What you got for me?"
"Well," Dean begins, sucks in a breath. "Athens Lunatic Asylum has more pissed-off spirits than freaking Arkham," he says. "And most of them just as wacky. According to the records, the majority of patients in..." He checks his notebook. "1876 were admitted because they were driven mad by masturbation."
He looks up at you, quirks an eyebrow. You smirk in return.
"Anyway, makes for a whole lot of seriously pissed-off, sexually frustrated ghosts." He pauses. "Dad," he says, almost hesitant.
You start heading for the truck. Dean'd left the car at Rick's, walked to the library from there, familiar enough with the lay of the land in Athens. "Yeah," you say.
Dean hauls open the passenger-side door, climbs in next to you. He takes another breath, looks down at the notebook he's still holding open in his lap. "I'm not kidding about the number of spirits around here. This stuff..." He looks up at you, then. "We could stick around here for a while. Clear it all out."
You don't answer, jaw locked, and you know Dean's still watching you as the sky darkens and streetlights come on, flashing through the cab as you drive along the only road out of town. "We got better things to do, Dean," you say at last, and he drops his head then, looks down and away.
"It was good," he says to the window, and you blink, fingers of your left hand flexing on the wheel. "Being apart. Separating to work on different jobs. Get more work done."
You force another breath into your lungs, as if to speak, but you can't hold onto it and it rushes back out again.
"Dad," Dean says, turning back to face you. You don't look at him. "You know I can."
"Not the point, Dean," you say.
"But-"
"This conversation is over."
You can hear Dean swallow, see his throat move in your peripheral vision. His hands move aimlessly in his lap, smoothing the pages of the notebook briefly before falling loose again. "Sir."
The field's far enough out of town that Athens is just a pale glow on the horizon, faint yellow farmhouse in the middle distance. The dark is spread out all around you; you can barely see Dean but for the instantaneous flashes against his face as the rifle fires.
You drive back to Rick's in silence, both exhausted and neither admitting it; Dean doesn't even come inside, just gets out of the truck and into the Chevy. You stand on the porch, watching him go.
It's less than half an hour before you hear the rumble of the car again, and you don't look up as the screen door hisses open and closed again, don't look up as Dean stands motionless before the coffee table, guns and cleaning gear spread out in front of you.
He takes a deep breath as you slide the clip of silver bullets back into the glock, lay it back down. The shudder in the sound makes you look up. Dean's face is pale, like you've just punched him in the gut. "I want to get it," Dean says, voice low, a serrated edge to it and it doesn't break, is already broken. "I want to get this son of a bitch."
His stare is fierce, and you don't break eye contact. You stand, rest a hand on his shoulder. He rocks a little under the touch, rocks into it. "We'll leave in the morning," you say, and he nods fiercely. You tighten your grip, shake him a little, say instinctually, "Don't look back, okay?"
His eyes close briefly, but when he opens them they're clear. The memory of blood on his hands, his face broken open is distress, is fading behind the vividness of the red coating his mouth and chin, eyes hard and determined. You think of the cold water closing over your head, the salt infusing all your senses, pain washing through you before the hands gripped around your throat.
Do as I say, you want to say, not as I do. But you don't need to. Dean's always been able to read you. You're two of a kind.
Remix Author: angstslashhope
Original Story: Lacuna
Original Author: innie_darling
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Cassie, John/OFC
When the music stops, you can hear Dean.
The bodily drag that you'd been struggling forward against releases with a snap, sending you stumbling abruptly with the sudden relief of it, and then you know it's safe to turn.
The noises Dean makes are without rhythm, without tone; there's enough of the dawn light coming in from open mouth of the cave that you can see him clear enough, jagged teeth of rock spiking down around him from the low roof. He's kneeling, back curved like being upright is more agony than he can bear; body jerking and shuddering with sobs. There's a crumpled, still shape on the ground before him.
Your legs ache, ankles weak, but still have energy enough to propel yourself toward him. Your hand lands at the back of his neck, gripping his collar with the intent to haul; it's then you see what he's leaning over and your knees hit the stone ground, solid impact you barely feel.
Dean's hands are covered in blood. You can't even see the weapon he used; his fingers curled oddly, red-soaked almost up to his elbows, splattered over the thighs of his jeans, his chest and throat. The body below you both has been eviscerated, destroyed, but is still recognizable.
The voice of it had been incongruous, sweet; maybe it'd only taken on this form when Dean had turned around. Maybe, even in death, it'd only shed the form when you turned away from it.
Dean's hands move over its face like he doesn't even realize you're there, and your hand tightens convulsively on the back of his shirt, instinctual spasm to pull him backward, away from it. Its hair's plastered over its face with the still sticky-slick blood, eyes open and glittering, if motionless. Mouth open. The relaxed, vulnerable expression of sleep that you've seen a million times, still nunused to the ferociousness of the punch it slams into your chest.
"Sammy," Dean's sobbing, coherence finally becoming apparent; or maybe you can just understand him better, now. "Sammy."
"No," you say, and it comes out as a low growl, subterranean echo against the rock surfaces around you. The twisting nausea in your stomach hardens, and the muscles in your thighs stiffen as you force yourself to stand again, pulling Dean with you. He's nearly completely limp in your grasp, marionette-like and dragging downward, the occasional violent motion still shocking through his body. His feet stumble and drag as you begin to pull him away, out toward the light, so you grip one blood-slick wrist and thread it behind your shoulders, hitching him further upright. The hand not pulling down on his wrist you grip in his hair, pushing the side of his head against your collarbone, not letting him turn again, not looking back.
Dean sleeps. Too-many hours, and you sit in the motel room, sometimes at the desk - writing in or flicking through your journal - sometimes on the other bed, dozing upright, watching his still, sunken face, interspersed with dreams full of blood and small, broken bodies.
When Dean wakes he doesn't speak, just moves his body in a slow surge upward, hands still as limp and inarticulate as they'd been when you'd cleaned the blood from them. He turns to you immediately, eyes meeting yours then skittering away, gaze landing on the hours-old coffee cup on the side table. He reaches for it, takes a swig. Grimaces, then drinks again.
His eyes are sunken, skin around them bruised. He doesn't look like someone who's just slept for fifteen hours straight. I told you, you think. I told you not to look back. No use in saying it now.
You watch him for a few minutes longer, watch him finish the coffee, push himself further upward, lean against the headboard. You'd stripped off his shirt and jeans while they were still blood-wet, not yet stiff; and the brass amulet seems strangely upraised against his chest, like the rest of him's sinking into itself. You voice the decision you made hours ago.
"Had a couple of calls."
Dean blinks, makes a breath-sound of acknowledgement, watching you.
"Jill's having some problems up at the Columbia Bar."
"Water beast?" Dean's voice is rough, unused.
"Something like that. And Rick called."
Dean frowns a little, expression thick like he can't move his face properly.
"Ohio," you say. "Athens. Ghost trouble."
"Didn't we do a job in Ohio back in-"
"'99," you say. "Yeah. There's always ghost trouble in Athens."
"So where we heading first?"
You pause for a moment, studying his face, keeping your own features still and unchanging. "I'm heading to Oregon."
Dean frowns again, brows drawing down as his mouth tenses.
"You take Ohio. Rick's got a sofa bed, looks like it'll just be a routine cleansing on the campus, there."
"But if it's a water beast, you'll need-"
"Jill can handle it. We've hunted together before. Should take me a couple weeks, round trip. I can meet you back in Athens."
"Two weeks? But-"
"Two weeks," you say firmly, cutting off any bargaining. It's the first time you've separated in a long time, but... It's necessary. "Long enough to patch yourself back up."
He casts his gaze down. You'd both come out of the caves with little more than a few scrapes, but Dean doesn't offer any more challenge. The tune of the creature's song is lost to your memory, but the image of its borrowed face remains. You're not sure that you'll ever forget it, or the way Dean's sobs had broken over it. "Yes, sir."
Jill calls the creature Scylla with a kind of affectionate familiarity, and it's a running joke between the two of you in the four days of preparation for the fight. Keep an eye out for Charybdis. Don't neglect poor old Charybdis, she can be a mean bitch if you ignore her. A real sucker.
The joke lasts up until you hack off a pair of Scylla's heads with your machete, and in response one of her necks winds around your ankles, pulling taut and row upon row of sharp teeth snapping dangerously close. Jill gives a shout, heavy blade in her hands slicing downward, and you're spun and flung outward, slamming into slippery rock.
The waves crash around your body, then above your head; you can see Scylla's fish-tail through the murky violence of the water, see Jill's booted feet wide-planted on the rock, and pain flashes through your vision, white-sharp. You reach for a hand-hold, try to get a grip on the hard-slick surface, haul yourself out of the water and back into the fight and the pain sears brighter, through your wrist. Your mouth gasps open involuntarily, and you sink under the churning water as if you're being sucked down.
The water burns, moreso than the sudden flesh-hot pressure of something gripping your throat and curling under the edges of your jaw. Your head breaches the surface again and the grip moves to the shoulders of your shirt, Jill dragging you out of the water, both of you gasping.
You cradle your arm to your chest, steady ache-throb-slice of pain flashing through your wrist. Your bones feel sharp just beneath the surface of your skin, wrong. The water's still seething, but mainly from the rain pelting down; you look over to see the stone-gray dead scales of the beast resting on the rock, sinuous limbs half-moving with the motion of the water.
"Not gonna have to give you mouth-to-mouth, am I?" Jill asks dryly.
You laugh, half-choking with the tingle of salt water in you throat. You cough, spit. "Nah," you say at length. Jill's kneeling by you, a weal of red crossing her face and short-cropped hair utterly bedraggled, but otherwise unharmed. "Thanks for saving my ass."
She pushes up to her feet, reaches out a hand to haul you up. "You owe me." You hiss through your teeth as the movement jars your wrist. "Broken?"
"Yeah, think so."
"Hospital?"
You grimace. "Yeah."
You remember why you hate hospitals. You're kept waiting long enough that Jill has time to go back to her place, change into dry clothes, come back again. Your wrist hurts too much to pull your shirt and jacket over it, so the nurse has to make a cut up by the shoulder, tear it all the way down. You shrug the flannel sleeve off the other shoulder, wind the automatic shivers tight into stillness as you sit and wait for the doctor in your slightly-clammy tee-shirt. Jill stands in the corner of the room, arms crossed over her chest, watching impassively.
The pain meds they insist you take before they set it make you wonky when you finally step out of Jill's car and into her house, resting a hand briefly against the truck on your way up the drive. Inside it's warm, dim, strange-smelling and she doesn't turn on the light so you step slowly forward, using your feet to feel your way toward the sofa as your eyes gradually adjust.
Jill's gone further into the house, but then she's back and right in front of you. "Lemme give you a hand with that," she says, and then her hands are at the top of your jeans, deftly unbuckling your belt, pulling at the fly. The denim's still a little damp, stiff with salt, and you sway and grab for her shoulder with your left hand as she yanks your jeans and shorts down your thighs.
Your right hand feels too-heavy with the plaster cast weighing it down, and you're not quite sure where to put it. It jars against the back of the sofa when she shoves you down on it. "Wait," you say. "Wait, you don't have to-" Though your dick's already expressing interest, drugged and sea-pickled as your brain is.
"Just shut the hell up," she says, sounding more mildly amused than seriously pissed-off, and shoves down her own jeans, stepping out of them before straddling your thighs.
"I thought-" you say, struggling to form coherent words through the haze and the residual false sense of movement from being in the water. "I thought you were a-"
"A dyke?" she laughs shortly, wrapping her hand around your erection and rising a little, kneeling above you. Your hands come to rest on her hips automatically, one loose-gripped and the other plaster-hard fitting into the slot of her hipbone. You can't even see it, just feel its shape through the solid cast and the cotton of her flannel. "You are a very pretty girl, Johnny."
You go to respond, half-laugh and half-biting comeback, but she's dropping her hips now, sinking down on you, and you can't speak.
"Besides," she says, low rumble out on a heavy breath. "You owe me."
She rotates her hips a little, and you buck upward. Fuck.
Charybdis.
Sammy's crying. Desperate, screaming wails for his Mommy, but you can't see him ahead of you and you can't turn back. Your eyes strain in the semi-dark, half-light glowing off the rock face in your periphery.
"Daddy?"
You turn.
You'd expected Mary, but Dean's standing there, all of five years old, wearing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt you bought him from Goodwill for his first birthday after Mary died. He's holding a baby shape in his arms, all wrapped up in blankets. Sammy's wails stop, and you see blood start to seep through the pale swaddling.
"Daddy," Dean says again. "Sammy's having a nightmare. We need to come sleep with you."
You startle awake, heart pounding like you're in the middle of a fight, fist full of sweat. Your right arm is heavy, like something's pulling you down, and you struggle against it for a moment before you remember the cast. There's a dull ache all through your wrist.
It's late morning. Jill's on the back porch tilting back on a battered old kitchen chair, booted feet propped on the railing of the veranda, mug of coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other. You watch her through the fly-spotted screen for a moment, then move noiselessly into the kitchen.
You flick through your journal, finding the page then running your finger down it, over the ridges of scored-out names until you find the one you're looking for. You prop the butter-yellow receiver between your jaw and shoulder, dial with your free hand.
"M'boy there?" you say when Rick answers, and the next thing you hear is Dean's voice, tinny and half-breathless through the wires between.
"Dad," he says. "You get it?"
"Yeah."
"You okay?"
"Yeah," you say, flexing your fingers beneath the cuff of the cast a little wryly. "I'm safe."
Dean huffs out a sigh through his nose, sound magnified through the receiver, probably louder than he intends.
"You find the ghost?"
"Yeah, it was a poltergeist. This guy in back in the twenties wrote some devil's diaries or something, got himself a teenaged cult. Their spirits have been haunting the manuscripts ever since."
"And they're at the university?"
"Yeah, in the writing centre there. Just getting hold of the stuff for the ritual now, to clear it out tomorrow night. Nothing much else to report."
You grunt in affirmation.
"But, Dad."
"Yeah?"
"There's plenty of other crap around here. The poltergeists were just the ones causing the most trouble. And," Dean pauses. "I think I got a way of hunting them out. The ghosts."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Rick's got this EMF meter, he lent it to me for the job. Was hella useful for advance warning, I swear, the number of spirits I didn't even know were there... The campus is crawling with them."
"Electromagnetic field meter," you say. "Huh."
"Yeah. I think... I think I can put one together."
"Good," you say. "Look, I'm gonna... I'm on my way now. But I'll be another week."
"Another week?"
"Yeah. I'm gonna come down through California."
Dean's quiet for a long moment. "Oh."
"You clean out as many of those sons of bitches as you can, and I'll see you in seven days."
"Seven days," Dean says, voice firming again. "Yes, sir."
It gets warmer the further south you go, truck windows wound down and plaster-cast arm resting on the sprawl of your thigh as the sea-scented wind loses its trigger to nausea again. March tips over into April the day you arrive in Palo Alto, and as if it's been waiting on the calendar, the heat ramps up abruptly, sticky-humid and uncomfortable.
Your FBI ID gets you access to personnel files, and Sammy's in the same dorm this time but different room. You park the truck off-street from some boho precinct, get a coffee and a newspaper, and walk back to the campus. There's a park opposite the dorm, and you sit on a bench beneath a tree there.
As the day winds on the shade moves, and sweat worms down the back of your neck. You pull one sleeve of your jacket off, not bothering with wrestling the other down over the cast just yet, and awkwardly roll the left sleeve of your flannel up. Your skin beneath the cast itches, the knitting bone a steady, dull ache.
As the sun sinks toward the horizon it turns the air gold; the volume of students coming and going through the main doors increases briefly, and then as the light drops almost to the point where it's too difficult to see anything, you see him.
Sammy's wearing a gray tee-shirt, dark blue jeans and flip-flops. He's got a satchel slung over his shoulder, slapping against his hip as he walks. It's only when he gets to the steps and in amongst the other students that you can tell just how tall he is, how broad his shoulders. You can see his grin even from this far away, and your chest hurts as his arms drop down in a slow easy slope to rest his wrists against a girl's shoulders. She's so small in comparison, dark hair and wide smile, hands tiny on Sammy's hips.
It's not until they move inside the building and out of sight that you can breathe again, sucking in air deep, but not deep enough to fill the space in the pit of your chest, dark ache of it like a coal-black bruise, tender enough to sink fingers into, skin easily broken.
It's late afternoon by the time you arrive at Rick's place. No one's answering the door, so Dean's not in, and you know not to expect Rick until at least five so you wait in the truck with the windows wound down. At 5.20 Rick's somewhat older truck rumbles up next to yours, and he grins at you through the frames of your open windows.
"Beer?" he offers when you're both inside, his kitchen dim and cool after the hazy afternoon glow outside.
"No thanks," you say, and, "Dean around?"
Rick shrugs, crack-hiss opens his own beer, takes a swig. "Somewhere," he says. "Not been around here much of late."
You nod, keeping your expression impassive. The Chevy hadn't been outside, either, and the sofa bed was folded up. One of Dean's duffels leant against its foot, the only evidence that Dean had been here.
It's still light out, will be for a while. Rick had slapped a newspaper down on the table when he'd walked in, you pick it up. "Mind if I borrow this?" you ask.
Rick nods, waves a hand, swallows another mouthful of beer. "Go right ahead, man. And hey, if you see Dean? Bring him back here. It's his turn to shout take-out."
You nod, head outside again. There's a pistol in the glove compartment of the truck, you reach in through the window to retrieve it, then slide it beneath the waistband of your jeans at your lower back. You tuck the newspaper under your right arm, keep your whole left arm free to swing as you walk. It'll get cooler, later, but it's more effort than it's worth to wrestle your jacket on over the cast again.
The park here's different to the one in California, trees smaller, shrubbier, more deciduous than tropical species, and the park's walled by pseudo-modern apartment complexes instead of the old-establishment architecture of dorms.
You find a picnic table, sit down and flip open the newspaper. The park's almost deserted at this time of afternoon, kids heading in for a meal instead of making the most of the late daylight, so you're kind of not expecting it when you hear, "Dad?"
Dean. Standing there with his face open and joyful, laughing, bruise-marred. Wearing a goddamn purple shirt, of all things, a little too small for him. There's a girl at his side, slight but compact build, fit under his arm, staring back at you. You see her eyes flit over the cast on your right arm, over the reddened bruises from Jill's fingers at your throat.
"How's Jill?" Dean asks, tone sobering, as if he's read your thoughts.
"She's good." You smile a little, thinking Charybdis, and the tilt of her hips when she swung the machete in her grip. "Real good. But I'd rather have had you backing me up." Thinking of Dean's economy of movement, the weight behind his swings. You can see the power below the skin in the bones of Dean's wrists, exposed beneath the cuffs of his shirt, fitting into the curve of the girl's waist. "Must be the first time you're glad you had to stay behind, patch yourself up."
Dean's sliding further and further from the delight he'd greeted you with, going still and considered. "How was California?"
You watch his face, seeing the hardly-veiled eagerness there, aware of the girl still observing you closely. "California's a big place, Dean." Because he'd left Dean behind on this one for a reason, to stitch himself together, get back to the hunt again like he should. Like he needs to. You think of Sam's wide smile, of how the heat of the day itched into your clothes and under your skin until you could barely stand it. "It was sunny, just like this. But sticky. Way too hot for April."
Dean's always been able to read you. It's part of what makes him such a good fighter, a good soldier. Knowing what you need him to do before say it, a concord between you that'd only even been discord with Sammy. Dean blinks, breaking the eye contact, slipping back into deceptively relaxed ease, lines of his body sliding back to fit into those of the girl's.
"Dad," Dean says. "This is Cassie. Cassie, this is my dad, John Winchester."
And that tells you more than the way their arms are wrapped around each other, more than the incongruity of Dean's shirt. And it'd only been, what, two weeks? Your throat hurts, like there's a hand wrapped around it, squeezing. You can't help but smile. "Good to meet you, Cassie."
She smiles, a little warily, and you find you have no inclination to ease up. There's a strange fierceness rising in you, a challenge to put to the person Dean's shared his name with, as if he's given it to her keeping, to destroy or hold safe, power over both of them. They sit on the opposite side of the table when he nods to them. "So, you already trying to whip my boy's wardrobe into shape?"
She looks at your bared teeth. "No," she says, not hesitant, but not continuing nonetheless.
"I'm just borrowing it until we get to Rick's," Dean volunteers.
"Rick told me you haven't been sticking around much."
"No. Had a job to do." Dean's mouth twitches a little. "And a girl to see." His gaze is level, staring right at you when you look up from the girl - Cassie - again.
"Job's done, then?"
Dean nods, and you rest your right arm on the table in front of you, letting the blood that had throbbed into it from angling downward flow through evenly again. Dean's smiling, still watching you, still folding Cassie into his side. Your chest and throat feel tight, a twisted version of the sensation felt in the park in California. You find you're smiling. "Right. Time for me to get back to Rick's." You remember Rick's comment about the take-out, realize how hungry you are after hours on the road. Think about sitting on Rick's sofa, crowded around the coffee table, you and Rick and Dean and Dean's girl eating pizza, shooting the breeze. "You two coming?"
They glance at each other, then Cassie shakes her head with a smile. "We need to get going," she says. "It was nice meeting you."
You don't wait to see them go. You say your goodbye and turn around, don't look back.
Dean's at Rick's every morning before you wake up, a not-quite farce as you're the only one sleeping on the sofa bed. You check out the campus with him, see the new EMF in action. There's an old building on the hillside that Dean tells you it used to be the Athens Lunatic Asylum; the meter squeals as soon as the step onto the lawn leading up to it. There's a lot of activity, a lot of work to be done. On the third day when he arrives, hair still sleep-tousled and fresh red bite marks on his throat below the fading bruise, you're up and dressed, packing a bag.
"We going some place?" he asks.
"Yeah," you say shortly. "River."
It's quieter down by the river. There's the risk of fishing boats drifting by and spotting you from the water, but still less risky than doing this in a public park in the town. You sling the bag of weapons down at the base of one of the trees cupping the damp-grounded clearing against the waterfront. Dean's standing by the water, his back to you, peering out over the surface of it. You take a breath, kick out quick and sharp, boot heel connecting to the vulnerable back of his knee, his leg buckling.
He swears shortly, swinging his own leg out and around even as he goes down; you dodge it easily, stepping back and too far away to intervene as he rises to his feet again. Your heart's already pounding, vision sharpening as he lifts his hands into loose fists, expression shifting through brief confusion into determination.
"Dad," he says. "You're hurt." His voice vibrates low and non-threatening.
You curl your lip, and his head snaps back away from your left fist. He blinks hard, shakes his head a little; you know the burn-shock of your knuckles against his cheekbone must be buzzing out sheets of pain, now. He ducks his chin a little, feet beginning the slow, considered pacing you've been waiting for.
A right hook you dodge easily; the glance of his left across your ribcage. You circle each other, darting in and out, blows connecting as often as missing. You kick out again and then suddenly you're both down, churning the wet sod into mud, Dean's weight bearing down on you. Your left hand finds the knife-stroke he'd shown you, half-crescent claw marks, and presses, hard. He cusses again, brings his knee up too-slow and you block it easily, throwing him off but then his hand's around your throat so you whip your right arm up, slamming the plaster cast into his face.
The off-white cast stains red with Dean's blood, gushing down even as Dean grips it, pins it above your head, flips you over with fierce ease and shoves your face down before pushing back off and away.
Your mouth tastes of blood and mud; you roll over and rise just as quickly. Dean's poised a few arm's lengths away, fists still lifted, darker scrapes and grazes beneath the slick of bright red. His nose is still bleeding steadily, down over his mouth. His eyes are slits in his face, pale above the red, mouth open but jaw still taut. The bruises on your neck throb anew. Dean licks his lips, and his voice is thick. "Again," he says.
You pinpoint a spirit, unsurprisingly in the old asylum, and catch sight of it two nights in a row before it attacks you on the third, flinging some research student's desk clear across the room. Dean spends the next day in the university library, going through the old hospital records, seeking out a most likely suspect. You meet him outside it, on campus, as the sun starts to set and you don't even speak a greeting. Dean eyes the bag slung over your shoulder.
"Target practice," you say. "Need to work on your night vision." Dean doesn't challenge it. "What you got for me?"
"Well," Dean begins, sucks in a breath. "Athens Lunatic Asylum has more pissed-off spirits than freaking Arkham," he says. "And most of them just as wacky. According to the records, the majority of patients in..." He checks his notebook. "1876 were admitted because they were driven mad by masturbation."
He looks up at you, quirks an eyebrow. You smirk in return.
"Anyway, makes for a whole lot of seriously pissed-off, sexually frustrated ghosts." He pauses. "Dad," he says, almost hesitant.
You start heading for the truck. Dean'd left the car at Rick's, walked to the library from there, familiar enough with the lay of the land in Athens. "Yeah," you say.
Dean hauls open the passenger-side door, climbs in next to you. He takes another breath, looks down at the notebook he's still holding open in his lap. "I'm not kidding about the number of spirits around here. This stuff..." He looks up at you, then. "We could stick around here for a while. Clear it all out."
You don't answer, jaw locked, and you know Dean's still watching you as the sky darkens and streetlights come on, flashing through the cab as you drive along the only road out of town. "We got better things to do, Dean," you say at last, and he drops his head then, looks down and away.
"It was good," he says to the window, and you blink, fingers of your left hand flexing on the wheel. "Being apart. Separating to work on different jobs. Get more work done."
You force another breath into your lungs, as if to speak, but you can't hold onto it and it rushes back out again.
"Dad," Dean says, turning back to face you. You don't look at him. "You know I can."
"Not the point, Dean," you say.
"But-"
"This conversation is over."
You can hear Dean swallow, see his throat move in your peripheral vision. His hands move aimlessly in his lap, smoothing the pages of the notebook briefly before falling loose again. "Sir."
The field's far enough out of town that Athens is just a pale glow on the horizon, faint yellow farmhouse in the middle distance. The dark is spread out all around you; you can barely see Dean but for the instantaneous flashes against his face as the rifle fires.
You drive back to Rick's in silence, both exhausted and neither admitting it; Dean doesn't even come inside, just gets out of the truck and into the Chevy. You stand on the porch, watching him go.
It's less than half an hour before you hear the rumble of the car again, and you don't look up as the screen door hisses open and closed again, don't look up as Dean stands motionless before the coffee table, guns and cleaning gear spread out in front of you.
He takes a deep breath as you slide the clip of silver bullets back into the glock, lay it back down. The shudder in the sound makes you look up. Dean's face is pale, like you've just punched him in the gut. "I want to get it," Dean says, voice low, a serrated edge to it and it doesn't break, is already broken. "I want to get this son of a bitch."
His stare is fierce, and you don't break eye contact. You stand, rest a hand on his shoulder. He rocks a little under the touch, rocks into it. "We'll leave in the morning," you say, and he nods fiercely. You tighten your grip, shake him a little, say instinctually, "Don't look back, okay?"
His eyes close briefly, but when he opens them they're clear. The memory of blood on his hands, his face broken open is distress, is fading behind the vividness of the red coating his mouth and chin, eyes hard and determined. You think of the cold water closing over your head, the salt infusing all your senses, pain washing through you before the hands gripped around your throat.
Do as I say, you want to say, not as I do. But you don't need to. Dean's always been able to read you. You're two of a kind.