kin & keeper; part 8.

[steeplechasers]

Cicero, Indiana

Present Day

It was snowing when he went downstairs, and for a moment he paused at the bottom of the steps, looking down the narrow hall into the kitchen where Lisa, in her early-morning workout clothes, was standing at the coffee maker, one foot poised backwards, the slope of her back against the white window like a magazine cutout.

The New Year was in two days; the Christmas tree still stood in the front room, though it felt stale and strange there, now, stripped of all its meaning.

Dean went in to her, in to the kitchen, quiet. The calendar didn't rise and fall anymore when he passed. Its one remaining page hung flat against the pantry door, almost marked through to its end.

“Morning.”

Lisa hummed, but didn't look at him. Her fingers were toying round the edge of her coffee mug. Hesitant, Dean put his arms around her waist, rested his head against hers-she didn't react but to lean back into him a little, easy, and with his cheek against her hair he looked at the last green page of the calendar-laid there as unsupposing as could be.

In a few days it would be gone, replaced with the new one. And then it would be a whole new year-a whole new piece of time to push into, a future. Dean didn't know what he thought about that, yet, besides the inkling that it scared him, that he was leaving this year behind, and everything that had been in it, too.

The coffee maker beeped and Lisa pulled away a little, to pour her mug, and Dean let her go-drifted listlessly to the window, looked out at the snow coming down in its droves, obscuring the houses across the way.

Behind him a cupboard opened, ceramic clinked. Lisa said, “You want some coffee?”

“I shouldn't,” he said. The bushes, the lawn looked like a feather bed, acres of pillows and soft cold and sleep. “I'm gonna be late for work.”

One of the kitchen chairs ground out against the floor.

“Come sit down a minute,” Lisa said, and he turned to her. She was sitting there, one leg crossed over the other, looking calmly past the rim of her mug where it touched her lips, and there was no saying no to that.

He lingered there a moment, at the counter, one fist curled against the sink, the whole dead world at his back. She'd put a mug at his place diagonal to her, steaming softly up in translucent curls.

She waited, didn't say anything, until he gave in, and settled into the seat across the table, fingertips barely touching the prickle-hot sides of the mug. He was sagging; he could feel it. He knew what was coming, too.

“I saw you up,” she said, finally, setting her mug down on the red place-mat in front of her. It curled at the edges, Dean saw, from where it had been washed one too many times. “On Christmas Eve.” There was nothing accusatory in her tone-only weary. “I saw you, um-get up, and go stand at the window-and you stood there for hours. Or it felt like hours. It was a long time. I watched you, I didn't say anything. I didn't think.” She took a sip of her coffee, her jaw tight. “I didn't think it would be right to disturb you.”

“Lis-”

“No more,” she said, “of this vague, stupid I'm just having a bad time bullshit. Please.” She looked at him, and he couldn't hold her gaze-it was too hard, too knowing, to be held. “Something's not right. Hasn't been right for a while now with you. And I've told you, I can only handle this stuff up to a point-”

“I know.”

“-and the one thing you haven't done, Dean,” she said, keeping her hands fixedly around her mug, as if she was afraid that touching him would break her resolve, “is talk.”

There were thin black bubbles skating around the top of his coffee. He followed them with his eyes.

“So can you-can I ask you-can you talk to me?” She cleared her throat. “Can you tell me something, anything, about what's going on with you, so we can-fix it, or try? Because Christmas-Dean, Christmas was-”

She smiled, then, and he didn't expect it, only saw it from the corner of his eye like the snow coming down.

“Christmas was great,” Lisa said. “Ben and I haven't had a Christmas like that-you know, properly, with a tree, and gifts, with a whole house, we haven't had anything like that in-longer than you know, Dean, and that was because of you, and it was good, and I thought-maybe you were even a little happy. And I want that to be every day for us, I want-”

She took a breath. Dean thought absently for a minute that she carried winter about her like a warm coat and she was right, wasn't she, that for a moment there, every now and then, he had been happy. In front of that tree with her he'd been happy. Scared, and sad, and nervous, but happy.

“I want you to get better so that we can be that family,” she said, “if you'll-if you'll have us.”

He didn't say anything; couldn't. Just looked into his coffee. Either it was too early for words or he simply didn't have any.

“So-details or no details, will you tell me? Will you give me a sense of what's going on?”

“Lisa-”

But how to start? How to get past the lump that had taken up permanent residence in his throat?

“I want to, but I just-I don't know how the hell to say any of it.”

He knew it would be a world off his shoulders if he only spilled it out on the table in front of her like loose coffee beans in the December sunlight but where was the beginning? In the doorway the day the Millers' baby came home, or was it further back, in his little labeled square on the calendar, or Terrible May itself, was it in the graveyard, or the convent or in Hell, in Cold Oak or California streets, or way, way back, on a half-birthday, packaged neatly in the smell of sulphur and the screams of his mother and the awful weight of the baby in his arms? There was too much to say. Too much had been.

He swallowed hard-his throat felt slick, sick-pushed his coffee away. It was going sour on his tongue.

“I've been-”

Remembering, hallucinating, thinking, thinking, thinking, about my brother, about my brother and me.

“I've been having these-I don't know what you'd call them-these dreams, maybe.” Dean looked down at his hand, curled loosely on the wood. Rolled his knuckle down as if he could gouge into it with his bone. “Or memories, or something, about when we were kids, and I can't stop-I can't stop thinking about him.”

Him. His voice broke there like cheap plastic. He felt it like a shiver down his spine, as if that were splitting too.

“About Sam,” Lisa said. His name crawled out of her mouth like a crippled pale white thing and he could almost see it-dropping to the table off her lips, weak and feeble and half-dead. He pulled his eyes away from her.

“Yeah. And I don't-I don't know what to do about them.” he said, something uncoiling and loosening and breathing in his chest. “I like them, Lis.”

He swallowed again, still harder. His tongue felt like cotton, soft cold cotton.

“And I don't know what's worse, you know-feeling all this, or not feeling any of it. Forgetting.”

Dean fell silent, then. There was nothing else to say.

Lisa didn't say anything, either. He was grateful for that-grateful for the way she reached up to touch his cheek for just an instant and no longer, grateful that she sat there with him for ten, fifteen minutes, until they were both late for work and the snow was glaring bright in the window, until their coffee was cold dregs. Grateful that he could almost feel her thinking, calm and collected and determined that something could be done, though she said nothing of it. When she got up, finally, and kissed the top of his head, and went upstairs to shower, he felt both weightless and heavy as Hell, and he watched the snow out the window for a long, long time, until it blended with the bleak white sky and there was nothing out there anymore-nothing at all. Just this oasis of light and the crippled pale thing on the table that sat and watched and was with him.

He went to the library again. There were two floors of books in this place, any number of topics that might distract him, but Dean found himself in that one aisle a second time. O - Occult P - Paranormal R - Religion.

A few books looked new, but though he took each one out and flipped through them nothing stuck out. As if-it was laughable-as if anything in a public library would be enough to change what had happened eight months ago.

Eight months. It seemed like eight years, or only yesterday, or both at once.

The Diabolical Bestiary was a parody of truth and had nothing in its index about the Cage in the Pit. Raising the Dead: A History was more interested in the trend of zombie movies in the last five years than in the art itself. For a while, Inferno: Hell, the Devil, and Sin looked almost promising-he sat on the floor between the metal shelves, boots propped up against the row labeled W - Wisdom, running a finger down the table of contents, saw the name Michael and perused the chapter for any hint of what he knew to be reality-but it cited nothing except the cleanest, most innocuous of holy texts-simple information, a fable, nothing more.

The dead fly was still stuck, he saw, in the fluorescent light above his head. He sat there, the occasional bibliophile passing in his peripheral vision, looking at it. Inferno dangled between his fingers.

He needed to do something. Get his blood flowing, or take some kind of action. That was what Lisa wanted, and he knew she was right to want it, and to try and push her rationale into his skull. But what he'd told her this morning wasn't enough, and there was no one else to talk to-no shrink that could ever understand, and like Hell was he doling out on her health insurance to talk to some Freud-worshiping asshole in a suit. Like Hell was he telling anyone like that about Sam.

He could see a window, vaguely, at the far far end of the aisle. It was breathlessly cold outside, though the snow had stopped falling; now it was all blankness. Endless white sky.

But maybe-

Dean pulled his coat tight across his chest as he got up, shoved Inferno back carelessly into the first empty space on the shelf he saw. The woman at the front desk lifted her head to wish him a good afternoon as he left, angling through the alarm barriers by the door.

There was no one idling on the steps of the library, but he went round the corner anyway, where the snow was piled up against the outer wall and the only sound was cars on the road a ways off, and the occasional faint noise of the doors opening and closing. He crossed his arms to keep his own warmth in, looked up into that cold eternal expanse of cloud, watched his breath rising up to vanish into it.

“Cas?” He ducked his head around the corner to make sure no one was eavesdropping, then pulled back. “You got your ears on up there?”

He remembered what the angel had said about civil war. Hoped he wasn't yanking him off the battlefield, but hoped he was, a little, too. The idea of Cas fighting his family was an idea too close to the raw nerves of his own regret. That wasn't something he'd wish on anyone.

“I know you're busy, man, but if you've got a second-I just need to talk to somebody. I need to talk to you.”

He shivered, drew himself tighter against the chill stone of the library.

“I'm outside Hamilton County Public-”

A cascade of wings. “Hello, Dean.”

Cas appeared in the snow beside him as if he'd been there all along, and if Dean was startled, well, it was only because it had been so long-months, since he'd seen his best friend last. He took him in for an instant-the same ratty coat, the same ill-fitting suit and backwards tie-but something new, dark, cloven out of his face; there was blood on his white shirt cuff, and blood on his temple, though Dean wasn't sure if it was his or not, or if angels bled like that at all.

“Shit,” he said, and Cas blinked at him. “Am I interrupting something?”

“I was helping to put down an insurrection,” Cas said, calmly, as if it was something he did every day. “I'm fine.” He tilted his head-looked Dean over the way Dean had looked over him-frowned. “But you're not.”

Dean didn't know what to do besides agree. He shrugged his shoulders, hunching; the frost was biting his fingers.

“D'you wanna, um-there's gotta be a coffeeshop or something around here, somewhere warm,” he said, eyeing the parking lot and the far-off street warily, acutely aware of how under-dressed for the weather Castiel looked out here, lurking behind the library. “I mean-”

Cas nodded, still looking at him with that skin-piercing gaze of his, and followed silently when Dean ducked back into the sunlight and back down the steps to the truck.

Dean ordered a black coffee for Cas and nothing for himself, and found the quietest booth in the corner of the shop to sit in. It was hardly an afternoon rush; the barista behind the counter was busy fixing something, ears plugged up with headphones, and save for one sleepy-looking old woman by the front window, they were alone.

Cas sat across from him, swirling his coffee with a triad of black stirrers, not bothering to drink it.

“You said you needed to talk to me,” he said, keeping his voice appropriately low.

“I didn't mean to pull you away from anything important-”

“I told you before, Dean,” he said, firmly, with gravity. “You take precedence over war. Especially-as you are.”

Dean looked up at him, trying to feel amused, or insulted, and failing. “What's that supposed to mean?”

Cas didn't answer that-just sat there, waiting patiently for Dean to speak, to get to the point.

Before, with Lisa, it had felt like an event, trying to find the right words for what was happening, but now-for some reason, watching Cas make little whirlpools out of his steaming coffee, idle but alert, now, he thought, he could do it. Lisa loved him, but Cas loved and knew, and there was so much less to explain this way.

His breath shuddered when he drew it. He fought it down.

“I thought I was doing better,” he said, quiet, more to the table between Castiel's elbows than to Castiel's face. “I mean, there have been months-around September, you know, I started thinking maybe I was moving in the right direction, finally.”

Cas' fingers dropped the coffee stirrers; they rested against the rim of his cup and he folded his hands around the cardboard holder, didn't say anything.

“But we have these neighbours, you know-across the street, the Millers.” It was like snow melting from tree branches now-that was what it felt like; like drops of water dangling from dead leaves and finally falling to Earth. “They just had a new baby. Brought it home in October. And I-”

Dean cleared his throat, scrubbed at his eyes, closed them.

“We saw them coming home,” he said, “and I had this-this passing thing-I was just standing in the door, looking at their house, and thinking about that baby, and I remembered-”

Warm sun, road, and nickel-eyes.

“I remembered the day we brought-the day we brought Sam home. But it wasn't like-I mean, I felt it, you know?” He looked up at Cas, straight into those thoughtful quiet eyes, the steam drifting over them. “Like I was there again, like I was four, and I swear to God, Cas, I smelled the leather in the car-”

He had to stop a moment, choke down the hot thing that was rising in his throat.

“And I just keep-remembering.” There was no other way to put it. “It keeps happening. All these images of him and me, and we're kids, all these pieces of us-him-growing up. And I told Lisa, but I didn't tell her how bad it is. It's almost constant, I mean, everything triggers it, when I'm not awake I'm dreaming about it, and it's been months now, and I can't stop it. I don't want to stop it. And I don't know if that makes me-weak, or broken, or stupid, but it's-it's Sam, Cas,” he said, feeling the undersides of his eyes begin to sting. “It's Sam, in all of this stuff, and it's all that's left, and I don't want to stop it.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, hard, squinted tight.

“It might kill me, you know. But I don't want to stop it.”

Cas didn't say anything for a long time; he just sat there in his coat, looking at him, with a pull of sympathy against the corners of his mouth. Like he could see right past Dean's skin to the parts of him that were bleeding, twitching, exposed, and who knew? Maybe he could.

“And worse,” Dean said, finally, quieter than before, “I mean, I can't dig too much, where I'm at-but I've been looking. For a way to get him back.”

“That would be unwise,” Cas said gently, and Dean couldn't do anything but nod.

He was right, and there was a reason Sam had forbidden him from doing that kind of digging, had made him swear to normalcy like that in the first place.

“But that's all I can do,” Dean said, looking up at him again. “Otherwise I just work and sleep and have these memories, and-if I don't look, if I don't even try, what kind of brother am I? Huh? What kind of brother am I then?”

“One who keeps his promises,” Cas said.

Dean pushed his hands against his head, bowed it down a little. The back of his neck was aching.

“I don't have answers for you,” the angel said, then, pushing his coffee aside, laying his hands flat on the table. “I'm sorry. I wish I knew how to take away your pain. I know how-how massive it is.”

Dean laughed at that, mirthlessly, shook his head.

“No offense,” he said, cracked, “but you don't know. You don't know anything about it.”

“I know what he was to you,” Cas said slowly, carefully, “and I know it wasn't just family. It was deeper. And that only makes it worse.”

Dean felt his heart drop a beat, lifted his head cautiously, found Castiel's eyes.

“What do you mean?”

Cas didn't respond, but his face made it plain.

“You-you knew? About-”

“It wasn't hard to figure out,” the angel said gently.

Dean sat back in his chair, a little aghast. “And you-what?” He had to laugh, more out of incredulity than anything else this time. “You got nothing to say about that?” He leaned forward, though the barista and the sleepy old woman were well out of earshot. “You're cool knowing I slept with my brother?”

“It's not my place to judge who and how you choose to love,” Cas said. “And I know you loved him more than anything else in this world.”

Any amusement Dean may have grasped for that split second fell away again, and he sat there, listless, heavy.

“Loved,” he said, after a while. Smiled. A pull of the lips with no meaning to it. He looked down at the table between them. “You know, you say that like he's gone forever.”

“I'm sorry,” Castiel said. “I'm sorry.”

Jerusalem, Arkansas

April 1992

Of all the things that had changed since Christmas, at least one thing was constant. Sam still hated the guns.

Knowing what they were for, finally, didn't seem to help alleviate his disgust; if anything, knowing only made it worse. He almost always got up and left whenever Dad or Dean brought them in to clean on the motel table, went outside to wander the blank, empty streets for hours, more comfortable in the whistling wind among the dilapidated houses than inside, near the smells of gunpowder and oil. Sometimes Dean had to venture out after him, track him down blocks and blocks away from the shit place they were staying this month, drag him back by the scruff of his hoodie while the sun set and the cold stars pushed out.

He was resolved not to learn to shoot. That was another trouble. He was only eight-going on nine-but his stubbornness had shot up like a beanstalk, and didn't seem to be going anywhere. When he wasn't asking avalanches of questions about the things in the dark outside he was sulking about them, holding goodbyes inside his teeth whenever Dad left on a job, covering his face with library books whenever Dean brought out his sawed-off to field-strip and clean.

In March, Dean had asked if he wanted to learn how to pull the trigger-his heart in his throat the whole time, remembering that stupid shattered promise he'd made on Ms Chancey's living room floor-but Sam had only glared at him, bitten out a “no,” and returned to Old Yeller or whatever it was the schmucks at the miniscule elementary school were having him read these days. More often than not his default position, in afternoons and evenings, was curled up on the bed with his face in a book, defying as best an eight-year-old could the terrible awful weight of what he knew now, bending over him.

Dean, for his part, left his homework mostly folded up inside the ratty old backpack he'd had since fifth grade, favoured the whipping spring winds outside, rattling through the blackened, shrunken trees that stood like sentinels in this part of the state-charcoal-coloured, warped, witchy things, sticking up like broken fingers from the Earth. None of them grew leaves, but every grey, sagging house around here seemed to have at least one near their curb, and they were perfect for climbing, for sitting in to watch the clouds skid soundlessly overhead, for shooting into with the pearl-handled pistol Dad had given him for his thirteenth birthday. Bullets couldn't hurt dead trees. A week after they arrived here he wandered out past the furthest houses and riddled the last stop sign he saw with holes-flat metal clanging against its own post. Shot to shit.

Sam had no interest in putting bullets into things-not into stop signs or trees and certainly not into anything with bone and meat. Every time Dean latched the door at night, sliding the chain, testing the rusted knob, he thought about turning around and being definitive, saying something like, “Tomorrow I'm gonna teach you how to shoot;” but he never did; the sight of Sam either engrossed safely in the never-ending pages of Narnia or the flat buzz of the TV always made him falter.

Sam needed to be safe. But he also-foolhardy as Dean knew it was-needed to be a kid, for as long he could.

It was Dad, eventually, who made the decision for him. Came back to check in on them before he headed out again, chasing some haint out across the windy flats, and laid out one bolt-action and Dean's pistol on the table, looking pointedly at his eldest son.

“Tomorrow. Go out to Cedar Creek Cemetery. You know where that is?”

Dean nodded.

“Take these. Find a quiet spot and show your brother the ropes.”

It was ludicrous, sending a thirteen-year-old trekking more than a mile with an eight-year-old who didn't want to go, just to put a gun in the hand of a kid who wanted nothing to do with them. He could feel Sam's annoyance, his anger, from across the room, though his face was obscured by his hands clutching the cover of a book, but Dad had made up his mind, and there was no arguing with it.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Dad made a half-hearted attempt to ruffle his hair and vanished, back into the darkness; Dean watched the headlights of the car pull away and turn and disappear.

The cemetery was a long way away, so they set out in the early morning, after Dean shook Sam awake and dunked his head under the bathwater and poured the last of their Froot Loops into a bowl for him. While his brother sulked around and took his sweet time putting on his socks Dean stood at the window, hip against the siding, looking out at the bleakness. Dead grass, dead trees, dead sky, hardly any sun to speak of, too warm for rain, too humid for comfort. Nothing ever breathed or moved in this place. It wasn't even a town; the only other people he'd seen in the last month, besides the people at the school, were the woman who ran the front desk (and had no teeth), and a blank-faced old man with a blind dog who sat out on his porch down the block sometimes. Jerusalem felt like a place you could get lost in, and not in a good way.

He swiveled his head; Sam was still tying his shoelaces with all the caution of someone defusing a bomb.

“Get your ass in gear, slow-poke,” he said, and Sam thrust a glare up at him, but listened.

“I don't wanna go.”

“Dad said you had to. So we're going.”

“Cemetery's like twenty miles away.”

“More like two.” Dean looked back out the window, at the black road that stretched off and away. “We don't have to stay out all day. Let's just get it over with.”

Sam was quiet for a while, searching under the bed for his other shoe.

Eventually, he said, “Dean?”

“Yeah.”

“Are we-is there something coming to get us?”

Dean turned again at that, looking down at his little brother half-obscured by the corner of the bed. “What?”

“Like-like a monster,” Sam said, finally finding his lost shoe and pulling it out. He kept his face turned carefully down while he put it on. “Is that why I have to learn?”

For once, Dean didn't know what to say. He couldn't say yes-as far as he knew they were safe here, behind their latches, behind the salt on the windowsill, and nothing with teeth wanted to bite into them just then-but he couldn't say no; couldn't rightfully understand the nighttime that would push into their window later and say with any certainty that it was empty. Couldn't say there might always be something coming to get us, but we won't know it 'til it comes. Couldn't quite bring himself to do that-not to Sam, not right now.

“You just gotta learn,” he said, finally, swallowing hard. “Come on, tie your shoe and let's go.”

Sam fidgeted and made a noise of frustration and Dean sighed, came round from the window. His laces were all muddled up, tangled and limp, and he was fighting unsuccessfully to get the rabbit through the hole.

“Here,” Dean said, dropping down on the hard carpet in front of him. He didn't say anything about Sam being eight and still unable to remember how to tie his shoes right; didn't say anything about the flush on his brother's face. Just reached down and untangled the mess and tied them up right, and then gripped Sam's forearm to haul him to his feet.

He put the guns carefully into the duffel Dad had left, slung it over his shoulder, and Sam followed him-still irritated, but obeisant-out into the harsh spring light. The door of the room clicked shut and locked behind them.

Past the cemetery there was only open ranch-land-barbed wire stretching for miles, copses of corpse-like trees, and the drifting highway at their backs. Sam sat under a tree for a while, out of breath from the hike, and Dean idled near a fence-post until he was good to go, scuffing the dirt with the heels of his boots.

They ducked under one of those tricky fences and slogged through the tall silvery grass to an island of trees; inside it was cool and dark and hidden, no houses in sight, no one to hear the shots but them and the clouds and the cows, maybe, somewhere far away.

Sam frowned at the rifle when Dean put it into his hands, but he didn't throw it down or refuse it. He let Dean push his arms into position, change and re-change the angle of his elbows, correct his aim, and didn't say anything. He was gripping it as if he knew he had to but his face was-almost sad; almost betrayed.

Dean tried not to dwell on it.

When all was said and done, Sam hit the nearest tree two times out of five, and recoiled violently with the gun when it went off. His knees were shaking a little when he gave it back to Dean, but Dean pretended not to notice. He was heart-sick, and looking at Sam too long only made it worse-all he could think about was that thing he'd said, all those years ago. You're never gonna shoot a gun. It's fun, but I won't let you.

“Here,” he said, trying not to let his voice crack. Sam looked up at him while he angled the gun at the tree. “You gotta-you see? And keep it steady-”

Three loud pops and bark spun off the tree every time. The gun clicked and buzzed against his hands when he pushed it back into Sam's, watched-past the itch in his eyes-while his little brother raised it, corrected his own stance, aimed at the tree and fired again.

Five shots. This time three hit home.

You'll never have to shoot a gun, 'cause I'll protect you.

Dean cleared his throat, turned back to the duffel bag on the ground to find his pistol. He hoped Sam couldn't see the wet gleam in his eyes in what little sunlight there was.

While his back was turned Sam fired off two more shots and hissed a little “yes,” so quiet that Dean almost couldn't hear. He crouched there, hand in the bag.

“Here,” he said, finally rising, scuffing his wrist along his nose. He held the pistol out for Sam to take, gently, into his hands. Dean sniffed, cleared his throat, slung his shoulders back. “Try this out.”

He stood behind Sam while he aimed the pearl-handled pistol at the tree, his skinny elbow shaking but his wrist steady, and he watched while his little brother pounded those rounds into the tree-a full six, and every one hit their mark.

“Good,” he said, but his face was burning, and he felt lower than he'd ever felt in his life, standing there. This kid, this little kid he'd tried so very, very hard to protect from all this, opening up holes in dead tree trunks like this.

Every time the trigger snapped back under Sam's finger felt like a crack in all the goodness and the innocence and the childishness Dean had hoped-foolishly-could last in him.

Eight years old. Shot to shit.

Allagash, Maine

October 1992

“Up and at 'em, Sammy.”

Dean swatted the massive huddle of blankets on the opposite bed as he went by, yawning, into the bathroom.

It was six AM, and still dark outside, and Dean thought for what must have been the millionth time how cruel it was that Dad made them trek the two miles to school in the autumn chill every morning, even though he was gone. They'd been here a week and a half and it was only getting colder every day, and they both needed new coats if they were going to weather the winter up here in the northeast this year-Dean's had holes in its pockets and the zipper was busted, and Sam's only had one button left.

There was only stillness from the room. Dean smacked the side of the bathroom door a few times to rouse his brother.

He turned the taps in the sink, waited for the water to get warm. Frowned down into it. He'd considered just staying home with Sam more than once since Dad had gone up near the border-probably would have already done it, were it not for his fear that Dad (who knew everything) would find out. That was something he didn't want.

“Sammy, I'm serious, get up.”

He splashed water on his face from his hands, rubbed it dry with one of the dingy, stringy towels on the rack. Still no movement from the room.

“You sick or something?” Dean said, leaning out of the bathroom. Sam's pile of blankets hadn't budged. “We gotta go to school.”

Still nothing; he felt a little twinge-maybe Sam was sick, and that was why he wasn't moving. He threw the towel on the floor and went back in, grasped the part of the blanket-lump that was most likely his brother's shoulder and shook.

The pile of blankets shifted and collapsed under his hand. The bed was empty.

Dean stood there for a minute, his heartbeat slowing down, his brain clicking over. “Sammy?” he said, loudly, listening for any sound inside the room, but it was dead silent save for the hum of the motel's generator outside and around the corner.

By all appearances, Sam was gone.

“Shit,” Dean hissed.

He dropped to his knees, peered under the bed in case Sam was playing some kind of stupid trick on him-but there was only bare flooring and dust bunnies; the same went for his own bed; the closet with the sliding doors was empty, the bathtub too, and when he stuck his head out the door there was no one on the dimly-lit sidewalk beneath the portico. Just the black shapes of cars in the blooming blue morning light, and the last of the street-lamps shedding their sodium-yellow onto the street, and no Sam.

He called his name out, once, just in case-it echoed in the empty dawn, but he didn't care-there was no response.

Dean stumbled back into the room, swearing under his breath with as many words as he had that he'd picked up from Dad, and shoved his feet into his boots without bothering to tie them. He threw on his coat, and saw that Sam's was no longer underneath it, where it had been the night before-that, at least, was a relief. So he'd wandered off on his own-he hadn't been taken.

Dean stopped in the doorway long enough to shove his pearl-handled pistol into his pocket. It bulged suspiciously, but he didn't care. His heart was pounding in his throat and all he could think was that this was just like Fort Douglas all over again, shtriga all over again, Sam in danger or lost or hurt or scared and it was his fault for not having been awake, for not having heard the latch or noticed the scattered salt on the threshold until it was too late-this time, if there was something to shoot, he wasn't going to hesitate.

Out in the parking lot his resolve faltered-the main street ran parallel to the motel and it went on and on for ages, and he had no idea which way Sam might have gone, what he was looking for, where he was headed, and he slumped against the room door for a moment, trying not to panic. It was blisteringly chill out here and he had no gloves and his gun was heavy in his pocket.

Shit. If Dad happened to come home today, if Dean didn't have Sam with him when that happened, he knew Dad wouldn't have a second thought about smacking him around-it was scarier each time and worse, worse, if Dean didn't find Sam, there were a million million things that could hurt or steal or kill him out here in the near-wilderness, monsters and humans alike, and Sam had no gun and no resolve to use one anyway, and he was only nine, and still scrawny as anything-

What was he supposed to do? He was thirteen and he had no car and no ideas and if he went to the man at the front desk for help no doubt police or CPS would get involved with the two kids living alone in Room 15 and he couldn't have that-Dad had always told him never to get in touch with the police unless it was absolutely imperative-it was six-thirty AM, his fingers were cold, and he was all alone.

Slowly Dean went back into the room, shut the door, slid down and sat against it, tried to think.

He'd woken up a little after four for just a minute, but he remembered seeing Sam's hand out from under the covers then, so he couldn't have been gone for more than two hours. Where would a little kid go before the sun was up in a cold place like this?

Think, think.

Why would he leave now? Everything had been fine, Dean thought, in the last few days-Sam seemed to like this town well enough, though he complained of the walk to school-Dad had been gone practically since they'd arrived, but that was commonplace-the kid was always down in the dumps to some degree these days, but not any more than usual, as far as Dean could tell, not lately.

What had they done the night before? He remembered they'd found a TV movie and let it run, turned out all the lights and flicked a paper football back and forth the aisle between the beds to each other for hours; Sam hadn't been very talkative, but that was normal. Dean had been tired, too tired to do much but indulge in that game. Dad had left them money for food before he'd gone, so they must have eaten-

“Shit, shit,” Dean hissed, “shit,” scrambling to his feet. There was an envelope on the side-table where Dad had left two hundred dollars and it was gaping a little bit, as if small fingers had recently been inside.

He pulled it open and rifled through it-ten dollars were gone that he knew he hadn't spent so far.

Dean shoved the envelope down into his pocket next to the gun and ran from the room, pausing only long enough to lock the door.

His teeth were chattering by the time he got into the parts of Allagash that constituted a town; the streets were still dark, and only a few shop windows showed buttery light from their storefronts. The whole world was still asleep, and he'd seen no one on the sidewalks, only a few cars passing, and the chilly wind brushing by.

Dean peered into every window and alleyway and door-front he saw, kept one hand curled around the handle of his pistol. Still no sign of Sam, but he had an idea, now, where he might be.

There was a diner, JoAnn's, on one of these streets, and he'd been cursing himself since the motel, because odds were Sam was there, and it was Dean's fault-he'd been so tired the night before, so exhausted from waking at six to trudge two miles to school and two miles back, from making and unmaking the protections on the room without Dad to help him and checking and double-checking them and helping Sam with his book report, that he'd forgotten to use the money in the envelope to buy them dinner-and Sam had probably woken that morning with an empty stomach and gone out with that ten dollars in search of a hot breakfast, wandered down here all by himself in the frigid cold, and it was Dean's fault.

Stupid, stupid, he thought, hunching his shoulders against the cold. It was stinging his eyes raw. So what if you weren't hungry? You should have remembered. You can't even feed him? Stupid, stupid.

There was no excuse. He felt awful, sick, low in his stomach, and he knew even if he did get Sam back to the motel before Dad came back, he'd still deserve to be smacked for what he'd done. Look out for Sammy. That was his only job, and he'd messed it up again.

JoAnn's was just around the curb with the crosswalk on it and its lights were on when he rounded the corner-glass-front, with the name painted on in bright red curling script, above the weekly specials-and there (thank God, his heart dropped out of his throat) in a far booth was Sam, his legs still too short for his feet to touch the floor, hunched over the table.

Dean tried not to make a scene out of the relief that he felt; he shouldered the door open, ignored the jangle of the bell overhead, and he quietly moved through the canned Muzak playing above the counter to the booth where Sam was sitting with a plate of eggs and bacon and toast and hash-browns. Sunny-side up, extra crispy. A mug of what looked like hot chocolate at his elbow. Silver fork clutched in his fingers and the bottle of Tabasco sauce close at hand.

He slid into the opposite seat. Sam didn't look at him.

“Hey,” Dean said, very softly. There was hardly any food left on the plate; Sam was scraping it up in giant forkfuls, all muddled together, his shoulders pulled in. Dean fidgeted, felt himself going low in the sticky red seat. There were a few crumpled bills and a bit of change scattered on the table next to his brother's arm.

He cleared his throat. “Sammy?”

Sam didn't say anything, but it wasn't his usual spiteful silence; it was the way he went quiet when he knew that, if he opened his mouth, he'd cry, or shout, or lose his temper, and Dean felt a twinge in his heart, like someone pinching and twisting at it.

So they sat there, in silence, and Dean watched him mop up every last bit of grease with his toast and suck the crumbs off his fingers and drain the mug of hot chocolate even though it was still steaming, and the waitress came by to put a glass of water down on the table and Dean watched that, too, watched the condensation drip off its sides and puddle around its base until it soaked a little into Sam's paper napkin.

When his plate was nearly spotless Sam finally sat back rigidly in his seat, looking resolutely at its white surface, his bow-mouth red with grease, and he still didn't say anything, though his face was a clamour of guilt and uncertainty.

Dean swallowed hard, scrubbed at his eyes-looked out the window because it hurt too much to look at Sam.

“I'm sorry, Sammy,” he said, and knew he didn't have to expand on what he was sorry for; Sam knew; they both knew, in the tightness of their little stomachs all too used to hunger.

“It's okay,” Sam said, very very softly.

And it wasn't okay; forgetting to feed his little brother was never okay; sleeping too deeply to notice him sneaking out into the morning was the furthest possible thing from okay. For an instant Dean let himself feel blisteringly angry at Dad, for leaving them in that crap room with almost nothing for so long, just like he did everywhere else, too focused on a job that didn't even make him any money to care about his children who were always cold and always lonely and often starving, who weren't like any other children because they were too busy being grown-ups for one another at nine and thirteen-if he wasn't so scared of Dad's anger and the flat of his hand, Dean thought, he'd stand up to him when he got back from the border and tell him exactly what he thought of him.

But it was his fault too, he felt, even though Sam didn't seem to blame him. His fault for neglecting his one responsibility.

“You can't do that again,” he said, finally, once he'd mustered the strength to look at his brother again. “Okay? I know it was my fault but you can't go off like that. You had me so scared.”

Sam shrank in his seat, still looking at his empty plate. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“It's okay,” Dean said, and that was true, because how could he blame a little kid for trying to feed himself? He couldn't. “It's okay, Sammy. I'm not mad, but you can't-you can't do that.”

“I was hungry,” Sam said, in the smallest possible voice, and Dean could see tears welling up in his red eyes, and his heart plummeted. And he couldn't do anything-he sat there, immobile, while Sam bit at his red chapped lips and hot tears ran down his face as if he were ashamed of himself for that meal he'd scraped off his plate and it was so wrong, so utterly wrong to see that, that Dean felt paralysed.

Abruptly Sam clambered off his seat and came around and put his arms around Dean's neck and buried his wet face in Dean's shoulder and just stood there, shaking a little, and Dean closed his eyes; the Muzak up above them kept wailing on until he stood, too, and grabbed up the change on the table and guided Sam back out into the cold bleak light of early morning, one arm around his brother's scrawny shoulders, and they walked back-faces into the wind-all the way to the motel, and when they got inside Dean put down the salt on the floor and found a station playing cartoons on the TV, and when Sam had washed his face off Dean wrapped them both up in blankets and they watched the screen blip and fuzz and change over for hours and hours, huddled up together. School and Dad be damned.

Dean walked down the corner store at lunchtime and ordered pizza for dinner and gave Sam the bigger portion of everything, too sick at heart to eat much himself anyway. But Sam still left half the pizza alone in the box, left it open on the table closer to Dean's bed, as if quietly saying, that's yours, not mine. You need to eat, too.

When Dad finally came home, a few days later, neither of them said anything about it. It was their secret. In those long cold dark months that followed to the end of the year, on the protruding tip of the country, Sam never ran away again.

Moscow, Tennessee

Summer 1993

Sam hit double-digits with the turning of another summer and somewhere in the turn he lost something in himself; Dean was sure of that. He just couldn't put his finger on what it was.

Dad was home more these days, which was both a blessing and a curse. He drank enough to put a smaller man in the ground, but luckily he was a placid drunk more often than an angry one. When he wasn't out in the boonies nosing out cases he was sitting in the uneasy sunlight inside the room, Jack in one hand, sometimes his journal open on his knee, or the radio rattling off some sermon that he never listened to.

It was hard to be around him like that, so Sam and Dean left-spent their days exploring Moscow, rambling up and down the streets and the hillsides, into the trees and down again. It was a turbid summer. Sam seemed to have a keen ability to find cricks and streams and they'd sit down on their banks, bare feet in the water, watching fish swim by and disappear, or the hot clouds steam by above them, listening to vanishing roar of semi-trucks on the highway at their backs.

They hit tennis balls with sticks or played catch, or scrounged around in the change-catchers of vending machines for enough coins for a popsicle at the corner store. Never enough for each of them to have their own-only ever enough for one, which they snapped in half between them.

Sam took a liking to climbing the ancient, bending tree out back behind the motel, and would sit up there for hours, feet flat against the bark, in the old jean-shorts that Dean had cut out for him from a pair of Levi's. What he did up there, Dean wasn't sure; but the more Sam clambered up its twisted trunk and settled himself into the cradle of the branches, quiet and isolated of an afternoon, the more Dean got the sinking feeling that something was changing in him.

And he saw it, more and more, like a cloud passing over the sun, the longer that Tennessee summer crept; something different in Sam's smile, a stiff shift in his walk. He learned how to throw knives that July, and there were days when Dean saw him wander up into the hills near the road by himself to practise with them-he'd skulk a little ways behind, watching him, and sometimes he saw that Sam would lose himself in those blades like he'd once lost himself in books. It was strange to see that. It was sad.

Gone were the days of the incessant questions about hunting and about where Dad had gone; when their father left now, Sam said goodbye with a neutral face, never asked what he was hunting or when he'd be back or if he'd be safe. There was a chasm opening between Dad and Sam, and Dean saw it-like a crack in the fabric of the world-and he was powerless to stop it; it was the kind of thing that only got bigger with time, and he dreaded it. Now Sam was quiet, content to wander in the woods with Dean, but there was a shadow of something blooming behind his face, and Dean saw that too-wondered at it, worried about it.

Sam's eyes were getting flat and old and there was blackness behind them and that scared Dean, because his own eyes were like that, too. And he'd first noticed it in himself when it had become clear to him, for the first time, years ago, that this was his life, and it was never going to change-it was going to be poor and uncertain and unstable forever. And if Sam had that knowledge now, too-ten years old, well-it broke his heart.

And there was nothing to be done. There was no way to get that big, bright baby-smile back on Sam's face, not now. The more Dad drank, the more they moved on, the more schools they went into and came out of, the more towns they added to the list in their wake, the worse it would get; before long another year would pass and Sam would be another year older and he was only going to get sharper and sadder and meaner and darker, and Dean wished more than anything that he could take all that back. Keep Sam's sunshine and innocence and wide, fickle eyes the way they'd been before he'd known the truth, before Christmas two years ago, before he'd read Dad's journal and given up the amulet that still hung around Dean's neck and grew hot in the sun. Before he'd shot up those trees in Jerusalem. But there was only going forward-never hit the same town twice; never look back; those were Dad's rules, his commandments. To be followed absolutely.

Dean wished sometimes that he could stop time here, in this place, pause it in the middle of summer and never shift into anything else again. But the trees began to brown before he even knew the season was over; they lost their tennis ball in the creek one day; when September came they moved on again, always on, always forward, and Dean twisted to look at Moscow vanishing behind the Impala, imagining a bright little version of Sam standing there on the edge of the highway, waving goodbye, never to be seen again.

The real Sam sat in the back-seat, head lolling on the leather, watching the scenery go by. It was just another move, for him. There was nothing special in Moscow; nothing he was even aware of leaving behind.

When the sun began to set, as they pushed into Georgia, Dean watched him in the rear-view mirror, tracking the shadows as they passed and carved over his face, chiseling out the hollows beneath his cheekbones and the corners of his eye sockets, making him bony and pale and gaunt, as if to cut him to pieces.