fic: Sacrum Vitium
Fandom: SPN: Dean/Sam
Spoilers: general, but something from the finale could've easily slipped in.
Rating: Adult. Graphic sex and violence, a little bit of cursing.
Notes: Dark AU: 3228 words. Written for delighter with lust in my heart, as per usual. Check out the freaking ILLUSTRATED STORYBOOK she made for last week's fic, Vocation.
Summary: The old man went to prison for killing Bill Harvelle, and when Sam's visions start, Dean doesn't have a lot to go on. Especially because Sam isn't exactly out to help the people he sees.
When the boy's ribs start cracking they're loud enough to make Sam stutter in his reading: Deus in adiutorium meum intende; Domine ad adiuvandum me fes- festina. He meets Dean's look, then glances back down to the grimoire. He continues, and the cracking resumes.
Dean is poised with the knife, his thumb and forefinger pinning the head of an orange-striped corn snake lifted from a local garden. The snake twists and coils slowly, unconcerned until Sam says Adjuro te, serpens antique, per judicem vivorum et mortuorum and Dean presses the knife down hard.
The snake's head drops in the brass bowl on the table. The rest of its thrashing length is a faucet that pours a hiss of hot blood, dissolving and tarnishing the bowl till it crumples like tinfoil in a campfire. The ruin runs over the cross on the linen altar cloth.
The boy's chest cavity gapes open in a popcorn racket of split bone. Over Sam's intonation, a cloudy exhalation of demonic remnants voices its own Latin, and simultaneously the brothers drop their bloody instruments.
Sam has a pen and is poised to scratch whatever he can catch on a tatter of paper. Dean stands still and tense as a scenting hound, listening to the wisps of black as they drift past.
--
Seventeen months back Dean woke up to Sam retching in the motel room wastebasket. He'd thought it was the booze, and Sam thought it was a migraine - he choked out the word when Dean's sleep-slack hand landed on the small of his back - but it wasn't either.
They'd been drinking - beers, mostly whiskey, followed by aftersale gin, followed by tex-mex late-nite delivery - because they'd visited Dad at San Quentin that afternoon. It hadn't gone well. The old man had been putting on weight the last couple years, the guards had shaved his beard for him, he'd been losing the fights he picked. Ten years ago, when he'd first got in he'd promised a quick escape, he'd said Wait for me, don't go far. But it had never happened, and now he looked just like the rest of the animals: caged and sedated, if not tame. And the boys visited maybe three times a year now, when once it had been weekly, the only event that marked their feral, rabid time as orphans in the wilds of the greater San Francisco landscape.
Dean barely kept it together enough to give a news update, tell some half-assed anecdotes, distract his wilted brother and skeleton of a father from their mutual disappointment.
For instance: Jo Harvelle had got herself possessed by a dice-roller of a demon a few weeks back. Thing took a big risk with a hunter's whelp like that, got itself exorcised good and fast by friends of the family. But not until after it had cut a swathe of mutilated hunters a mile long out from the Roadhouse.
Dad barely blinked an eye. He leaned back in his chair and looked down the crowded table at a scrawny, tattooed man in orange as he bounced a blond toddler on his thigh. When he looked back it was like Dean had never opened his mouth. "You boys bring your old man any gifts?" He meant smokes, and malt liquor in tiny bottles.
Right. Because the Harvelles were not a good topic: Bill's murder was the major conviction in a slew of smaller ones that had the old man putrefying in his cell like a Louisiana corpse, never mind the mean old bush fairy that had done the dirty work.
Sam stood up and left without looking back or saying a word. Dean said, "We miss you, Dad." When they stood to hug, Dean slipped three flat packets into his father's overalls. "We'll be back again soon."
But for all that it was Sam who did most of the drinking, so that he was good and tossed when they fell into bed sometime after the streetlights went out.
And he was still plastered now, hugging the wastebasket and convulsing, incapable of being led to the toilet. Dean slipped down to the floor, hooked a pragmatic arm around the kid's torso to help keep the him upright while he did his thing.
But Sam had a fist clenched into his hair at the temple, and his body was shuddering like a mouse's might, his heart beating so fast and big that it shook his ribcage. Sam sobbed a hoarse word through a clenched jaw, and that alone was strange enough for Dean to note it - sweetgrass.
--
Sam stumbled onto the rite pretty much by accident, while he was looking up holy wards. And even after he'd realized what it was, it still took a few tries for the various subtleties of his patchy translation to sink in. After half an hour of flipping back and forth between texts and a brief bout at the public computer he raised his head and barked Dean's name across the library, to the reference desk where his brother was perusing the covers of the harlequins.
"They used it during the Inquisition. Sacrum Vitium, or fault rite." Sam jabbed the words with his finger. "It's a sin, Dean, letting something like that in your body. They figured that to be possessed, you had to attract a demon, there had to be some part of you that wanted it, even unconsciously. So this is a cleansing of fault. It opens you up, cleans you out, and on the way out whatever's left of the demon's evil is visible. And audible, to the examiner."
Dean shifted on the wooden bench. "You think doing this could help us figure out last night?"
"Well, yeah, Dean." Sam's eyes flicked across the library and back, "I mean, I saw it leave her body, right? That's pretty much all I saw. Don't you think that means we're supposed to hunt it, track it down to wherever it's going?"
"Sounds like a goose chase to me. A distraction."
Sam shook his shaggy head, impatient. "Don't you get it? We don't know where these visions come from - this could be it - this could be him, the one Dad always talked about. The one that killed her."
Sam watched Dean's scepticism melt away, outshone by something hotter than determination or stubbornness. Dean held hatred like a molten core within him, and Sam knew it, stoked it occasionally. Matched it to his own needs and thirst.
Sam waved a scrap of notepaper with directions on it, casually dropped the book in his bag. "Come on. I know where we're going."
--
They only saw Sunburst, Montana by night: a grid of rutted dirt roads, a handful of little trailers with bigger trucks parked in the yards, and a single solitary gas pump across the ditch from a neon-lit bar.
The signs had been there, though, in the papers on the way up. Big-shouldered farmgirl spits her pa on a pitchfork, and every heifer on their range so swollen up pregnant that their bellies split open with sharp-hoofed twin, triplet, quadruplet calves the same night.
Only sign of people in the entire black little town was in that bar, so Sam and Dean headed in, got the silence and the raking stares. Men sat at the bar in their border guard uniforms, off shift from their rounds up at the Sweetgrass crossing, eight miles north. They stared, too, shifted fat asses in their holsters to cock their pistols out.
"You need directions, boys?" said the squint-eyed hand behind the counter.
"We're Joe Reilly's cousins. Up from Rawlins," said Dean.
"You missed the funeral," said someone.
"Wasn't aiming for it," Sam's voice slid out flat as glass. "Aiming to find that bitch cunt daughter a his."
Low chuckles died quickly. The same someone said, "Try their spread east down 9 Mile Road, turn-off's called Iverson. If she ain't gone, then she's there. Cops sure as hell didn't comb the cornfields for her. Too fuckin many of em. I mean, cornfields."
They left, and when Sam spoke in the car, the raw-edged slant in his voice was gone. He said, "When we find her, we do it."
"Sammy," Dean said, a consolation, a place-holder for what he really meant.
"She's already defective," Sam repeated, as he had a hundred times on the drive up. His fingers ran over the cover of the grimoire he'd taken from the California library. "Corrupted."
The girl was in the barn, curled up in an empty stall. She answered when Sam called out in a gentle voice. She had sorry, stupid eyes and a stutter that dropped to a sob without warning.
"Did I kill him, please tell me, did I kill him?" she kept asking them, but Dean didn't hang back, because Sam was in at her, quick and efficient.
He pulled her to her feet, dragged her to the gravel drive between the house and the barn, where they'd set up the altar cloth, bowl, and a glass jar with a grass snake curled inside. Dean pulled his knife out of its sheath, grabbed the snake below its head.
Sam swung the girl to the ground, put his boot on her sternum to keep her there, and started.
--
After that, they learned pretty quickly that not everyone had the same breaking point. Not everyone had been equally tainted by their co-habitation with evil. Some people, their skin would start to stretch and split open and maybe their nose or eyes would dry enough to bleed, but then the fault, the grey whisper of fault, would come whipping out immediately, and they would leave the cleansed alive and conscious and really only frightened a bit, for all their crimes.
But sometimes - and this is how it was with Jo - Sam would just keep reading and reading, the infinite exhortations and imprecations listed in the book, and she'd just keep screaming and screaming, her body holding on to the corruption, clinging to it.
But to get to Jo in the first place they'd had to be tricky. Real fucking subtle, really. They'd sauntered into the Roadhouse one night late in June, and Dean had sat back and had a real long discussion with her about their dads. Quiet, accidental-seeming, and very companionable. Sam stayed at the bar, kept his eyes to his beer and didn't say much of anything to anyone, except a sullen look at Ellen when she gave him a grimace of recognition that said, I remember you, and slapped another bottle on the counter.
They left that same night, Sam drunk as he cared to be and Dean carelessly letting a bit of paper slip out of his pocket when he took his jacket off of Jo's shoulders. They'd gone for a walk. Sam had gone to wait in the car while Dean took care of that particular bit of business.
But it was enough. Between the ragged newspaper article and a rekindled schoolgirl crush, she did their work for them and banged on their motel room door one night in South Dakota, ready to take on the harpy's nest in Yellowstone and whatever else they cared to hunt.
"What about your mother?" Dean hedged.
"Ma thinks I'm taking a fishing trip with Jim Marpole, said if I come back pregnant I'll be countin' pretzels in the cellar till the kid's old enough to vote." She smirked and tossed her jacket over a chair, “Ma's such a romantic."
"Naw, she just loves you," said Dean, and Jo gave him such a hopeful, unsteady smile that he looked away when Sam's elbow connected with her temple.
But what could they do, really? The demon - and now they were pretty damn sure it was the same one, Black-Eyes, who wasn't the one but still pretty up there, pretty informed and pretty fucking terrible on its own - had taken Jo first. Of all the things they'd heard and translated, all the words they'd pieced together to form some sort of plot, they were still missing key components. Why the visions, for instance. And why Sam? But they'd learned one thing: the more evil you did as a puppet, the more evil you retained to whisper out Latin in a breath of cold, dark air.
Jo had killed a dozen people in her one night back in the fall. A handful of hunters, then a carload of tourists, their kids, the pair of motorcyclists who'd stopped to help with what they'd thought was a blown tire. No one talked to her about it, Ellen had made threats to that effect. And no one knew if she even remembered.
But when she woke up with each wrist tied to a bed leg, Sam incanting her impurities and Dean crouched at her feet with his knife, she remembered. They saw it in her eyes, lucid, shamed and guilty. It spurred Sam on in his reading to a rapid, triumphant tone. He paced as he read, up and down beside her, between the bed and the wall. Dean barely moved, perfectly balanced, another docile serpent in hand, waiting.
God, but she bled forever. Dean watched as long as he was able, then turned to watch Sam instead, sick and hoping for relief. No dice. Sam's voice was hoarse, his tongue thick. He repeated words by rote, brow twisted with concern and frustration. And Jo had gone silent, eyelids closed and her breathing ragged. The sheets were soaked straight through to the boxspring, probably, a bright red blossom folded around her.
Dean stood, dropped the lifeless snake tail on the defaced altar, went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, rubbing at his bloody wrists.
Outside he heard Sam's voice falter, resume, and then stop. He heard Jo's tiny sob of relief.
Sam came into the doorway, looked at him a long while. Then he came forward and shut the door, turning to face the mirror and start the tap running as he washed his clean hands and took long gulps of water from them.
"This isn't right, Sam," Dean's words were hollow, hypocritical in his own ears. But he had to say them.
"Neither is what she did last November."
"It wasn't her fault," Dean knew that they wouldn't stop, didn't even want them to stop. He wanted to know what was happening to Sammy, and he wanted to get that bastard Yellow-Eyes. For Mom. And for Dad, who couldn't.
"Dean," Sam's voice was raw, but bright with authority despite that. He knew what role he had to play. "You know what I'm going to say. It was her. It was her fault. This - what we're doing is the only thing that can absolve her. It helps her, it helps us. How can you say it isn't right?"
Dean shook his lowered head, and Sam came forward to kneel in front of him. He took Dean's folded hands in one of his own, put the other on Dean's elbow. Dean looked up and Sam leaned forward to rest his forehead in the crook between shoulder and jaw, nose at the jugular. Dean turned his face into his brother's hair, opened his hands to wrap them around Sammy's dry fingers. "You're right, you're right," he murmured, and Sammy moaned into his throat, "I am sorry, I am so so sorry for doing this to us."
Dean shook his head again, and slid forward off the tub until he was sitting splay-legged on the lino floor. He craned his face up until his mouth reached Sam's, who was suddenly adjusting to a crouch and rubbing his hands up Dean's arms to cradle his head, running his thumbs over Dean's cheekbones and fingers brushing the soft skin behind his ears. "It's OK, it's OK," Dean's hushed mantra always accompanied this, in one way or another. This, the only comfort they'd found since Dad got jumped by the cops at a diner in Portland and Family Services said emotional trauma and every adult, no, every human being they'd ever met turned out to be worse - crueler, colder, infinitely more powerful - than the poltergeists of their childhood.
Sam pushed his mouth against Dean's, harder, an insistent tongue and working jaw. Reciprocal hands in hair, kneading necks and hard knots, rubbing away reality. Sam's knees weighed hard and bony on Dean's hips, until they paused to maneuver and re-adjust, and then it just intensified. Shirts were shed, and pants unbuttoned. A hitched, inevitable rocking started and Dean's mantra, "It's OK, it's OK, it's OK" got interrupted twice, three times, four, by low moans at the hardness and the fucking fingertip-sunburst unreal pleasure of it. Sam muttered his name, and only his name, and that was all that could ever possibly matter as they sucked and jerked each other into helpless, desperate puddles. Sam still straddled his thighs, so that when they came, respectively, the messes clung and ran between them, and Sam swayed in close, rested his chest on Dean's, spent.
It was the most Dean could do to reach behind him, jerk aside the plastic curtain and turn on the shower. "C'mon, Sammy," he levered his brother's chin off his shoulder, kissed the available cheek and sank his heated skin further onto the floor while Sam pulled himself together, got to his feet and stepped under the scalding water. After a second, Dean got up and joined him.
If Jo was awake when they came back out of the bathroom, she pretended otherwise. Dean said, "I need another snake," and Sam said, "No, I'll just keep going. I'm not done." And he did: straight through the night, so that as dawn was twitching at the closed curtains, Jo's eyes snapped open, and her mouth worked in a mute scream, and her bones splintered under her skin.
Dean felt a horrible satisfaction as the formless waft of dust rustled through the paper and fabric in the room, whispering. This was it. Now they'd know.
He watched Sam's face, and was the only one who saw the sudden light and fear of understanding blanch his brother's features. Knowledge crawled inside them like a worm to eat their hearts and rot their hope.
--
In the cellar of an abandoned house in Connecticut, Sam has a pen and is poised to scratch whatever he can catch on a tatter of paper. Dean stands still and tense as a scenting hound, listening to the wisps of black as they drift past. He is listening for his brother's future, a loophole for a terrible destiny. Sam is ready, but he finds he can write nothing down, even as the smoke dissipates to clear air. There is nothing to write. Nothing new.
Sam licks his lips, drops his hand. Dean goes to untie the boy with the cracked-open chest, but stops when he realizes the kid isn't breathing anymore. The blood has stopped pumping into the dirt.
There is a brief, silent debate, but then Dean puts his hand out to Sam's elbow, and points him up the cellar steps. They leave the body where it lies.
Spoilers: general, but something from the finale could've easily slipped in.
Rating: Adult. Graphic sex and violence, a little bit of cursing.
Notes: Dark AU: 3228 words. Written for delighter with lust in my heart, as per usual. Check out the freaking ILLUSTRATED STORYBOOK she made for last week's fic, Vocation.
Summary: The old man went to prison for killing Bill Harvelle, and when Sam's visions start, Dean doesn't have a lot to go on. Especially because Sam isn't exactly out to help the people he sees.
When the boy's ribs start cracking they're loud enough to make Sam stutter in his reading: Deus in adiutorium meum intende; Domine ad adiuvandum me fes- festina. He meets Dean's look, then glances back down to the grimoire. He continues, and the cracking resumes.
Dean is poised with the knife, his thumb and forefinger pinning the head of an orange-striped corn snake lifted from a local garden. The snake twists and coils slowly, unconcerned until Sam says Adjuro te, serpens antique, per judicem vivorum et mortuorum and Dean presses the knife down hard.
The snake's head drops in the brass bowl on the table. The rest of its thrashing length is a faucet that pours a hiss of hot blood, dissolving and tarnishing the bowl till it crumples like tinfoil in a campfire. The ruin runs over the cross on the linen altar cloth.
The boy's chest cavity gapes open in a popcorn racket of split bone. Over Sam's intonation, a cloudy exhalation of demonic remnants voices its own Latin, and simultaneously the brothers drop their bloody instruments.
Sam has a pen and is poised to scratch whatever he can catch on a tatter of paper. Dean stands still and tense as a scenting hound, listening to the wisps of black as they drift past.
--
Seventeen months back Dean woke up to Sam retching in the motel room wastebasket. He'd thought it was the booze, and Sam thought it was a migraine - he choked out the word when Dean's sleep-slack hand landed on the small of his back - but it wasn't either.
They'd been drinking - beers, mostly whiskey, followed by aftersale gin, followed by tex-mex late-nite delivery - because they'd visited Dad at San Quentin that afternoon. It hadn't gone well. The old man had been putting on weight the last couple years, the guards had shaved his beard for him, he'd been losing the fights he picked. Ten years ago, when he'd first got in he'd promised a quick escape, he'd said Wait for me, don't go far. But it had never happened, and now he looked just like the rest of the animals: caged and sedated, if not tame. And the boys visited maybe three times a year now, when once it had been weekly, the only event that marked their feral, rabid time as orphans in the wilds of the greater San Francisco landscape.
Dean barely kept it together enough to give a news update, tell some half-assed anecdotes, distract his wilted brother and skeleton of a father from their mutual disappointment.
For instance: Jo Harvelle had got herself possessed by a dice-roller of a demon a few weeks back. Thing took a big risk with a hunter's whelp like that, got itself exorcised good and fast by friends of the family. But not until after it had cut a swathe of mutilated hunters a mile long out from the Roadhouse.
Dad barely blinked an eye. He leaned back in his chair and looked down the crowded table at a scrawny, tattooed man in orange as he bounced a blond toddler on his thigh. When he looked back it was like Dean had never opened his mouth. "You boys bring your old man any gifts?" He meant smokes, and malt liquor in tiny bottles.
Right. Because the Harvelles were not a good topic: Bill's murder was the major conviction in a slew of smaller ones that had the old man putrefying in his cell like a Louisiana corpse, never mind the mean old bush fairy that had done the dirty work.
Sam stood up and left without looking back or saying a word. Dean said, "We miss you, Dad." When they stood to hug, Dean slipped three flat packets into his father's overalls. "We'll be back again soon."
But for all that it was Sam who did most of the drinking, so that he was good and tossed when they fell into bed sometime after the streetlights went out.
And he was still plastered now, hugging the wastebasket and convulsing, incapable of being led to the toilet. Dean slipped down to the floor, hooked a pragmatic arm around the kid's torso to help keep the him upright while he did his thing.
But Sam had a fist clenched into his hair at the temple, and his body was shuddering like a mouse's might, his heart beating so fast and big that it shook his ribcage. Sam sobbed a hoarse word through a clenched jaw, and that alone was strange enough for Dean to note it - sweetgrass.
--
Sam stumbled onto the rite pretty much by accident, while he was looking up holy wards. And even after he'd realized what it was, it still took a few tries for the various subtleties of his patchy translation to sink in. After half an hour of flipping back and forth between texts and a brief bout at the public computer he raised his head and barked Dean's name across the library, to the reference desk where his brother was perusing the covers of the harlequins.
"They used it during the Inquisition. Sacrum Vitium, or fault rite." Sam jabbed the words with his finger. "It's a sin, Dean, letting something like that in your body. They figured that to be possessed, you had to attract a demon, there had to be some part of you that wanted it, even unconsciously. So this is a cleansing of fault. It opens you up, cleans you out, and on the way out whatever's left of the demon's evil is visible. And audible, to the examiner."
Dean shifted on the wooden bench. "You think doing this could help us figure out last night?"
"Well, yeah, Dean." Sam's eyes flicked across the library and back, "I mean, I saw it leave her body, right? That's pretty much all I saw. Don't you think that means we're supposed to hunt it, track it down to wherever it's going?"
"Sounds like a goose chase to me. A distraction."
Sam shook his shaggy head, impatient. "Don't you get it? We don't know where these visions come from - this could be it - this could be him, the one Dad always talked about. The one that killed her."
Sam watched Dean's scepticism melt away, outshone by something hotter than determination or stubbornness. Dean held hatred like a molten core within him, and Sam knew it, stoked it occasionally. Matched it to his own needs and thirst.
Sam waved a scrap of notepaper with directions on it, casually dropped the book in his bag. "Come on. I know where we're going."
--
They only saw Sunburst, Montana by night: a grid of rutted dirt roads, a handful of little trailers with bigger trucks parked in the yards, and a single solitary gas pump across the ditch from a neon-lit bar.
The signs had been there, though, in the papers on the way up. Big-shouldered farmgirl spits her pa on a pitchfork, and every heifer on their range so swollen up pregnant that their bellies split open with sharp-hoofed twin, triplet, quadruplet calves the same night.
Only sign of people in the entire black little town was in that bar, so Sam and Dean headed in, got the silence and the raking stares. Men sat at the bar in their border guard uniforms, off shift from their rounds up at the Sweetgrass crossing, eight miles north. They stared, too, shifted fat asses in their holsters to cock their pistols out.
"You need directions, boys?" said the squint-eyed hand behind the counter.
"We're Joe Reilly's cousins. Up from Rawlins," said Dean.
"You missed the funeral," said someone.
"Wasn't aiming for it," Sam's voice slid out flat as glass. "Aiming to find that bitch cunt daughter a his."
Low chuckles died quickly. The same someone said, "Try their spread east down 9 Mile Road, turn-off's called Iverson. If she ain't gone, then she's there. Cops sure as hell didn't comb the cornfields for her. Too fuckin many of em. I mean, cornfields."
They left, and when Sam spoke in the car, the raw-edged slant in his voice was gone. He said, "When we find her, we do it."
"Sammy," Dean said, a consolation, a place-holder for what he really meant.
"She's already defective," Sam repeated, as he had a hundred times on the drive up. His fingers ran over the cover of the grimoire he'd taken from the California library. "Corrupted."
The girl was in the barn, curled up in an empty stall. She answered when Sam called out in a gentle voice. She had sorry, stupid eyes and a stutter that dropped to a sob without warning.
"Did I kill him, please tell me, did I kill him?" she kept asking them, but Dean didn't hang back, because Sam was in at her, quick and efficient.
He pulled her to her feet, dragged her to the gravel drive between the house and the barn, where they'd set up the altar cloth, bowl, and a glass jar with a grass snake curled inside. Dean pulled his knife out of its sheath, grabbed the snake below its head.
Sam swung the girl to the ground, put his boot on her sternum to keep her there, and started.
--
After that, they learned pretty quickly that not everyone had the same breaking point. Not everyone had been equally tainted by their co-habitation with evil. Some people, their skin would start to stretch and split open and maybe their nose or eyes would dry enough to bleed, but then the fault, the grey whisper of fault, would come whipping out immediately, and they would leave the cleansed alive and conscious and really only frightened a bit, for all their crimes.
But sometimes - and this is how it was with Jo - Sam would just keep reading and reading, the infinite exhortations and imprecations listed in the book, and she'd just keep screaming and screaming, her body holding on to the corruption, clinging to it.
But to get to Jo in the first place they'd had to be tricky. Real fucking subtle, really. They'd sauntered into the Roadhouse one night late in June, and Dean had sat back and had a real long discussion with her about their dads. Quiet, accidental-seeming, and very companionable. Sam stayed at the bar, kept his eyes to his beer and didn't say much of anything to anyone, except a sullen look at Ellen when she gave him a grimace of recognition that said, I remember you, and slapped another bottle on the counter.
They left that same night, Sam drunk as he cared to be and Dean carelessly letting a bit of paper slip out of his pocket when he took his jacket off of Jo's shoulders. They'd gone for a walk. Sam had gone to wait in the car while Dean took care of that particular bit of business.
But it was enough. Between the ragged newspaper article and a rekindled schoolgirl crush, she did their work for them and banged on their motel room door one night in South Dakota, ready to take on the harpy's nest in Yellowstone and whatever else they cared to hunt.
"What about your mother?" Dean hedged.
"Ma thinks I'm taking a fishing trip with Jim Marpole, said if I come back pregnant I'll be countin' pretzels in the cellar till the kid's old enough to vote." She smirked and tossed her jacket over a chair, “Ma's such a romantic."
"Naw, she just loves you," said Dean, and Jo gave him such a hopeful, unsteady smile that he looked away when Sam's elbow connected with her temple.
But what could they do, really? The demon - and now they were pretty damn sure it was the same one, Black-Eyes, who wasn't the one but still pretty up there, pretty informed and pretty fucking terrible on its own - had taken Jo first. Of all the things they'd heard and translated, all the words they'd pieced together to form some sort of plot, they were still missing key components. Why the visions, for instance. And why Sam? But they'd learned one thing: the more evil you did as a puppet, the more evil you retained to whisper out Latin in a breath of cold, dark air.
Jo had killed a dozen people in her one night back in the fall. A handful of hunters, then a carload of tourists, their kids, the pair of motorcyclists who'd stopped to help with what they'd thought was a blown tire. No one talked to her about it, Ellen had made threats to that effect. And no one knew if she even remembered.
But when she woke up with each wrist tied to a bed leg, Sam incanting her impurities and Dean crouched at her feet with his knife, she remembered. They saw it in her eyes, lucid, shamed and guilty. It spurred Sam on in his reading to a rapid, triumphant tone. He paced as he read, up and down beside her, between the bed and the wall. Dean barely moved, perfectly balanced, another docile serpent in hand, waiting.
God, but she bled forever. Dean watched as long as he was able, then turned to watch Sam instead, sick and hoping for relief. No dice. Sam's voice was hoarse, his tongue thick. He repeated words by rote, brow twisted with concern and frustration. And Jo had gone silent, eyelids closed and her breathing ragged. The sheets were soaked straight through to the boxspring, probably, a bright red blossom folded around her.
Dean stood, dropped the lifeless snake tail on the defaced altar, went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub, rubbing at his bloody wrists.
Outside he heard Sam's voice falter, resume, and then stop. He heard Jo's tiny sob of relief.
Sam came into the doorway, looked at him a long while. Then he came forward and shut the door, turning to face the mirror and start the tap running as he washed his clean hands and took long gulps of water from them.
"This isn't right, Sam," Dean's words were hollow, hypocritical in his own ears. But he had to say them.
"Neither is what she did last November."
"It wasn't her fault," Dean knew that they wouldn't stop, didn't even want them to stop. He wanted to know what was happening to Sammy, and he wanted to get that bastard Yellow-Eyes. For Mom. And for Dad, who couldn't.
"Dean," Sam's voice was raw, but bright with authority despite that. He knew what role he had to play. "You know what I'm going to say. It was her. It was her fault. This - what we're doing is the only thing that can absolve her. It helps her, it helps us. How can you say it isn't right?"
Dean shook his lowered head, and Sam came forward to kneel in front of him. He took Dean's folded hands in one of his own, put the other on Dean's elbow. Dean looked up and Sam leaned forward to rest his forehead in the crook between shoulder and jaw, nose at the jugular. Dean turned his face into his brother's hair, opened his hands to wrap them around Sammy's dry fingers. "You're right, you're right," he murmured, and Sammy moaned into his throat, "I am sorry, I am so so sorry for doing this to us."
Dean shook his head again, and slid forward off the tub until he was sitting splay-legged on the lino floor. He craned his face up until his mouth reached Sam's, who was suddenly adjusting to a crouch and rubbing his hands up Dean's arms to cradle his head, running his thumbs over Dean's cheekbones and fingers brushing the soft skin behind his ears. "It's OK, it's OK," Dean's hushed mantra always accompanied this, in one way or another. This, the only comfort they'd found since Dad got jumped by the cops at a diner in Portland and Family Services said emotional trauma and every adult, no, every human being they'd ever met turned out to be worse - crueler, colder, infinitely more powerful - than the poltergeists of their childhood.
Sam pushed his mouth against Dean's, harder, an insistent tongue and working jaw. Reciprocal hands in hair, kneading necks and hard knots, rubbing away reality. Sam's knees weighed hard and bony on Dean's hips, until they paused to maneuver and re-adjust, and then it just intensified. Shirts were shed, and pants unbuttoned. A hitched, inevitable rocking started and Dean's mantra, "It's OK, it's OK, it's OK" got interrupted twice, three times, four, by low moans at the hardness and the fucking fingertip-sunburst unreal pleasure of it. Sam muttered his name, and only his name, and that was all that could ever possibly matter as they sucked and jerked each other into helpless, desperate puddles. Sam still straddled his thighs, so that when they came, respectively, the messes clung and ran between them, and Sam swayed in close, rested his chest on Dean's, spent.
It was the most Dean could do to reach behind him, jerk aside the plastic curtain and turn on the shower. "C'mon, Sammy," he levered his brother's chin off his shoulder, kissed the available cheek and sank his heated skin further onto the floor while Sam pulled himself together, got to his feet and stepped under the scalding water. After a second, Dean got up and joined him.
If Jo was awake when they came back out of the bathroom, she pretended otherwise. Dean said, "I need another snake," and Sam said, "No, I'll just keep going. I'm not done." And he did: straight through the night, so that as dawn was twitching at the closed curtains, Jo's eyes snapped open, and her mouth worked in a mute scream, and her bones splintered under her skin.
Dean felt a horrible satisfaction as the formless waft of dust rustled through the paper and fabric in the room, whispering. This was it. Now they'd know.
He watched Sam's face, and was the only one who saw the sudden light and fear of understanding blanch his brother's features. Knowledge crawled inside them like a worm to eat their hearts and rot their hope.
--
In the cellar of an abandoned house in Connecticut, Sam has a pen and is poised to scratch whatever he can catch on a tatter of paper. Dean stands still and tense as a scenting hound, listening to the wisps of black as they drift past. He is listening for his brother's future, a loophole for a terrible destiny. Sam is ready, but he finds he can write nothing down, even as the smoke dissipates to clear air. There is nothing to write. Nothing new.
Sam licks his lips, drops his hand. Dean goes to untie the boy with the cracked-open chest, but stops when he realizes the kid isn't breathing anymore. The blood has stopped pumping into the dirt.
There is a brief, silent debate, but then Dean puts his hand out to Sam's elbow, and points him up the cellar steps. They leave the body where it lies.