The Killing Moon
8. The Petrified Forest
Sam finds himself watching Dean like a hawk as they get further and further in. He doesn't know whether he's on the alert for a total emotional collapse or a mach-4 meltdown, but his brother strides easily through the undergrowth, eyes front, mind on the job, not talking much at all bar the odd, cautionary watch your step, dude. Still Sam watches and waits. Which is probably why he's taken totally unawares by the fact that it isn't Dean who flips at all.
It's him.
Bobby sees it first, halts abruptly. "Would you look at that…" he says, in an odd tone that's astonishment liberally sprinkled with sadness.
It's a tree he's stopped to stare at, and for a minute Sam thinks, well, it's not as if there's any damn shortage is there? But Hudak is staring too, and Dean, and as Sam ranges up behind them he can see his brother turn away from it suddenly, see that he's sucking on his bottom lip, looks shell-shocked, that he glances away and back again with a sort of unwilling fascination.
Being as he's a head taller, Sam gets it level with his eyes: three sets of initials carefully carved into the bark: LB GB MB. And it's what it signifies that has his initial sharp intake of breath start whirling out of control to hurricane-force: it's the fact that it's commemorating something that never really was, something that was a vicious and cruel illusion spun from sick minds and used to corrupt the things Dean held closest to his heart, to terrorize his insensible brother into complete submission.
"That's just. That's just. Fucking. Bastard. How… how could…"
Sam knows he's starting to let go of the last vestiges of control, and someone's grabbing his arm, and it's Dean, and his brother is talking to him but the words are lost in a tumult of noise in Sam's head: building wrath. Dean's eyes are calm and there's so much understanding shining out of them, but Sam wants to scream at him, don't try to fucking understand that bastard, and he does.
"Don't try to fucking understand that bastard and what he did, Dean. There is no fucking understanding. He wasn't confused and messed up! He knew exactly what he was doing." Sam is yelling right into Dean's face and his brother recoils, only minutely, but Sam sees it and it only fuels his rage. "Christ. See what he did? You're a fucking drunk, a pathetic nervous wreck who's terrified of his own brother. Fuck."
Dean falls back a step or two, and Sam sees worry start niggling at his brother's features, sees his eyes start flicking nervously over to Bobby, who's coming up beside him, putting a hand on his shoulder, starting to ease Dean behind him, protect him from Sam's onslaught.
Sam keeps shouting, can't stop himself. "You never even really got out of here, did you, not really… there's a piece of you still here… still here with that bastard, with his claws stuck in, pulling you back all the time. Fight it! Fight him. Jesus…"
The initials in the tree trunk are still taunting Sam and he storms towards it, Hudak sidestepping adroitly so he doesn't knock her over, and he's pounding at the bark, scraping at it, screaming out noises he knows aren't even proper words now, just animalistic sounds of fury. He digs in with his nails, feels them split and tear, thinks he needs a fucking knife to do this properly, to git her done, and like magic there's one right in front of him, as if he said scalpel, nurse. He grabs it, slashes and rips at the bark until the letters are obliterated, before burying the blade savagely, finally, hilt-deep in the scarred wood, slamming it in with both hands as he bellows out a sort of primal scream.
And suddenly it stops, the crescendo. Sam feels his cheeks wet, his chest heaving, his shoulder aching, his fingertips throbbing, his nerve endings screaming. "He shouldn't have done that," he hears himself mumble though gritted teeth. "Not his to do."
He hears his brother right beside him, because of course it was Dean's hand with the knife, and Dean's voice is sandpaper-hoarse but so, so gentle, the voice of endless lullabies, and nursery rhymes, and bedtime stories, and hospital vigils, and drunk-dialed voicemails he never returned.
"He didn't carve it on there, Sam. I did."
They camp in a clearing conveniently close to the river, and the silence, the awkwardness is, well, awkward, Bobby thinks. After ten or so minutes of watching Dean and Sam fannying about trying to put up the tents while Hudak sits on a rock and chews her lip, he's had enough.
"Food," he barks. "It's about time we eat. Kathleen, any ideas? Keeping in mind that if you offer me another power bar, I'm liable to start shooting."
Hudak open-shuts her mouth at him for a moment before rooting in her pack for a small tin. "Fish. Stream's just through there… assuming it's safe to split up?"
"Should be, since it's daylight," Bobby confirms gruffly. He slants his eyes over at Dean, who seems miles away, going though the motions with mechanical, steady movements as he taps in tent pegs, studiously ignoring the glances Sam's throwing at him.
Hudak flaps her hand at him, goggle-eyed. "Are they okay?" she mutters surreptitiously.
Bobby rolls his eyes. "Damned if I know," he hisses. But: enough. "Dean!" he snaps. "Guard duty while Kathleen fishes."
Hudak baits her line, casts it into the stream, sits in tranquil stillness and teases the fish while Dean sits guard a few feet behind her, glancing back into the woods every so often, wary, alert.
He sees her watching him and then looking beyond him, back into the trees, and smiles thinly. "They don't usually hunt in the day," he reassures, but his eyes are still sharp, quick, observant, his calm still the surface calm of a coiled spring.
"Sam okay?" she ventures.
"He will be. Working it out is all."
Hudak is cautious. "He's got a lot to work through too."
"I can handle Sam."
"It's just that I think he-"
"I'm thinking too, Kathleen," Dean pulls her up. "All the time. I know he blames himself."
"Oh," she says, and she can't help the note of surprise. "Actually I thought he blamed me."
Dean pricks up his ears at that. "Why would he blame you?"
"Well, I did leave you to walk," she replies. "He threw that one at me when I was trying to twist his arm to take you to the hospital. Back then."
Chuckling, Dean retorts, "Yeah, there is that." He seems genuinely amused as he plays with the Bowie Sam used to savage the tree, but she can see his hands are shaking, and his tone goes somber. "No, it's… Sam took his eye off the ball. That's how they grabbed him in the first place. They grabbed him, they grabbed me. That's how he sees it."
Hudak decides she’ll fish metaphorically too. "Is that how you see it?"
Dean shrugs. "If you build it, they will come," he says dismissively. "He was by himself because I was hitting the head and he didn't wait for me. We were in the bar because I wanted a drink. We were in town because of Sam's research… how far back shall I go?"
A few minutes pass by in silence broken only by the rustling of the trees and distant birdsong. "If he blames himself is that why you don't talk to him about it?" Hudak asks him then. "You don't want him feeling worse, surely?"
Dean's face says it all: bleak, shadowed. "There are so many variables in this it isn't even worth thinking about, Kathleen," he says softly.
"But if you-"
"Look," he snaps, irritated now. "Don't. I can't do this with you, not on the hunt. It's one thing to do it in a parked car, but out here I'm trying to keep my head above it, and if I don't I'll be a liability."
Hudak watches the water again, then steals another glance at him. "Your hands are shaking."
"That's right."
"You need a drink."
"That's right."
"Did you bring any liquor with you?"
His voice is cold, hard. "Bobby's watching me like a hawk. And I'm not doing this with you either. Not the time or the place."
After a minute or two, Hudak realizes he never answered the question. Sly bastard, she thinks.
Bobby knows all he has to do is wait. If it were Dean it'd be different, and he shakes his head ruefully to himself as he ponders how the boy keeps his pain inside, pushes it down, crams it into the smallest space, handcuffs it to the wall, bricks it up there till it dies slowly from lack of attention while the kid ignores its - his - cries for help, till just the skeleton of what's bothering him remains. It doesn't salve his hurt though, Bobby muses, because while the flesh might have rotted off it, the bones remain, and while they take up less space they're hard and unyielding.
Sam is a different story, and Bobby wonders if it's all tied into the kid's sheer thirst for knowledge. Dean is singleminded, wants to know whatever specific thing he needs to know in order to do what needs to be done; he absorbs it all quietly, and nothing else matters. Sam wants to know anything and everything that's out there to be learned, all of the collateral information, the baggage that comes with that one initial fact he set out to investigate, and he always has… Why is the sky blue, Uncle Bobby? How does the telephone work? Why do dogs pant? How do birds fly? Why do bees buzz? How do submarines stay under the water? What's in toothpaste? How do planes stay up? Where does electricity come from? Why don't I have a mom? How does exorcism work? Where does my dad go for weeks on end? How do I kill this? Why is my brother so sad? How do I tell him I'm leaving?
Bobby knows he started out life simple, uncomplicated. He doesn't ponder too much about what set him on his current path, thinks that maybe he's bricked it up like Dean does. But he knows why he's still alive and in one piece, and he thinks on that often: on the mute boy whose silent grief and sheer need gave him a reason to pull himself back from the brink, and the baby who effectively taught Bobby all he knows because as he grew into a curious toddler, preschooler, tween and honking great sasquatch, Sam could never know enough and Bobby had to hit the books big time to answer the questions Dean couldn't.
Not that Bobby had answers for all of them. I don't know how you tell him you're leaving, Sam. And don't ask me to be a part of it.
So, just like he's been expecting for the last hour, Sam eventually broaches, "Bobby. Why do you think Dean carved their initials on that tree?"
Bobby is careful. "Guess it comes back to what your brother said about family, Sam. He thought they were it. And he had a brother, knew it in his subconscious."
Sam chews his lip.
"It bothers you," Bobby observes. "You feel jealous, like he switched horses mid-race or something. It's okay to feel that way, Sam. This didn't just happen to your brother. It happened to you too. And me. Not in the same way. But we're caught up in the fallout too."
Sam meets his gaze. "Do you think he would have shot me, back then when we found him? Before Kathleen winged him?"
"Looked that way at the time, boy," Bobby says ruefully.
"But I don't understand why he'd feel that loyalty to Bender," Sam mutters. "After what Bender did. Was doing. I don't understand why he'd stay."
Bobby considers it some more, because truth is he's ruminated over that very question more than once. "Don't forget Sam, he was doped up the wazoo," he says. "Other than that, well - Stockholm syndrome, I guess. Bender obviously didn't start out by raping your brother. Seems he was kind to him, shielded him from the brat at first. So I guess Dean did what babies do - form an emotional attachment to the nearest powerful adult to enable their own survival."
Sam grimaces. "Even to the extent that he stayed with them after Bender - hurt him."
"Your brother's a deeply loyal man, Sam," Bobby concedes. "Comes down to family. They were his family, and it all begins and ends with family for Dean. You know that. And it all got mixed up into Gabe. And Lee was Gabe's brother, not you."
"But I'm his family…"
"Dean's family," Bobby interjects, "Not Gabe's family, boy." He can see the doubt in Sam's eyes. "Kid, maybe you need to move on from this too," he says. "Seems to me as if you're pushing your brother to move on but you aren't moving with him. You need to try to separate Gabe and whatever he did or didn't do, from Dean."
Sam nods slowly. "I know if he'd been Dean and not Gabe he would have fought more-"
"Sam," Bobby cuts in, voice sharper. "Your brother fought. We saw how hard he fought. Don't ever talk yourself into thinking he didn't fight."
"I know. I know…" Sam throws ups his hands, helpless. "It's just. I just can't get it straight in my head. Why he stayed when Bender was hurting him like that."
Bobby sighs. "That's something I can't explain for you, Sam. Something you're going to have to approach with your brother. Diplomatically."
Dean is clucking his tongue off the roof of his mouth, and over the next ten minutes it graduates into a Timberlakean human boombox as he gets up and starts pacing up and down, wearing out a trench in the soil right behind Hudak.
"This is taking too long," he says abruptly.
"That's part of it, Dean," she tells him. "Luring them in. Lulling them into a false sense of security, see the shiny feathery thing, swim up closer to take a look, and maybe taste and-"
"This is taking too long."
"There's a Zen to it," she tries. "As we fish, we attain enlightenment through meditation, self-contemplation and intuition."
She almost jumps out of her skin when all of a sudden he's right down next to her, on his butt, hugging his knees, eyeballing her.
"You really believe that dreck?" he chides.
"Yeah, I do," Hudak admits. "It's the gentle stillness of solitude and soul-reflection."
Dean seems to be considering it, seems interested. "You - reflect - often?"
"I guess," she confirms. "You should try it."
He laughs, hollow, and his voice is whisper-thin when he replies. "I don't think reflection is going to enlighten me, Kathleen. I know all there is to know about me and it doesn't bear reflection, believe me. I don't look too closely at my soul if I can help it."
He gazes out over the water, and his eyes are shuttered. He seems lost and lonely in that moment, vulnerable despite the bravado, and after a moment of quiet, Hudak clears her throat. "A mantra," she offers.
Dean snaps to attention. "Where? Can we eat it?" And a brief bewildered glance. "Don't we need sea for those things?"
Smiling, Hudak says, "Not a manta ray. A mantra. Something you say to create a spiritual transformation within yourself. You need one."
"Huh?"
"I am a manifestation of divine consciousness," she pulls out of nowhere. "Something like that."
Blank-faced. "And I say again. Huh?"
"You know. Like in yoga. Ohm…"
Sudden gleam in his eye. "You do yoga?"
"Yeah," Hudak nods. "A class at the local Y."
"So," he says, and his tone is lighter, teasing or mocking, though she can't tell which. "You bendy enough to do that thing Madonna does, where you hook your right leg up around the back of your neck?"
Hudak decides she'll play it straight. "Yeah, believe it or not. I know I don't look it, but-"
"Can you show me that?" he cuts in. "Like, now?"
She studies him for a moment. "Well, I'd have to…"
The gleam in his eye sparkles even crazier now, danger, Kathleen, and she rolls her eyes. "Cut it out, Dean."
He grins widely, stretches out his legs, leans back, gazes at her in a way that's disturbing because it's so damned inviting.
"It's good if you have low self-esteem," she adds faintly.
"I'll bet," he says enthusiastically. "Fact, it'd do my self-esteem a world of good if you'd just-"
"A mantra. Idiot. I use the same one all the time."
His expression drifts back to the huh he wore earlier. "You have low self-esteem?"
"Well…" she eases out. "Yeah. I guess."
"I don't understand that," he says, and his tone is incredulous. "I mean. Look at you."
Hudak snorts as she pauses for a moment's reflection."Yeah, look at me. Wrong side of thirty-five, one failed marriage, no kids, and I live up the ass of nowhere. With my dog. And the most exciting thing that ever happened to me was helping haul a dying man through these woods."
Dean makes a noise somewhere between a grunt and a squeak. "Christ. That's. Well. Crap. That's… I don't believe that. That you think that."
She shrugs at him. "Well, them's the facts, Dean."
"Bullshit," he snaps. "You aren't leaving this conversation without thinking you're fuckin' awesome, Kathleen. I mean it. Like - Ripley. Or Thelma and Louise. Agent Scully. Sarah fuckin' Connor. Hell, yeah." He blows out in emphasis. "I mean. You shot me. What a fuckin' turn-on. Hell, yeah."
She waits a beat while his eyes shine. "I'm the best me I can possibly be," she says then.
"What? Whassat?"
"My mantra," she clarifies. "I'm the best me I can possibly be."
Dean considers it, his eyebrows drawing in and a line forming between them. "And is that working for you?"
There's a second where she thinks no, it damn well isn't and maybe it never really did. She puts it out of her head, chuckles. "Probably not as well as Sarah-fucking-Connor-hell-yeah is going to."
Dean grins, his face lighting up to sunny. "Alright. Now you're cooking with gas."
They sit a few more minutes, peaceful.
"This is taking too long," Dean says.
Hudak sighs. "Patience, grasshopper."
"Maybe there aren't any fish in there," he suggests. "Ever think of that?"
She waves a hand over into the distance. "These streams lead off Pelican Lake. Plenty of crappies in here. They're just taking their time."
Amusement bubbles up in his tone. "Crappies?"
Hudak knows what's coming. "Anyway, it's not about the fish, Dean," she reminds him primly. "It's about the fish-ing."
"Crappies?"
She hears the click behind her, ducks instinctively as Dean fires a couple of rounds into the water. Concussed fish rise lazily to the surface and float belly up.
She looks up, sees him blowing out a puff of air across the top of the gun barrel. "I'm making it about the fish, Kathleen," he says, and smirks. "Blowing the crap out of the crappies."
She huffs. "What about the noise? Won't it know we're here now?"
He snorts derisively. "It already knows we're here."
The sun is sinking lower in the sky, the woods growing quieter and subdued, and it roams noiselessly along the forest trails, a passing shadow constantly in motion among the trees.
It is ever-alert, its ears twitching at every sound, its eyes flitting to every movement, its nostrils quivering at every message carried on the air. And it senses something that fills it with a strange unrest, makes it ache with longing, and so it searches for the source, irresistibly drawn towards its scent, its call. It creeps closer and closer, watching for the signs, eager, and craving, and delighted. It hears the beating of his heart, and its own heart pounds with joy, and it hears the blood pumping in his veins, and it shivers with the thrill of anticipation.
Hudak pauses halfway out of the tent, raises a skeptical eyebrow as Dean uses a stick to inscribe intricate swirling patterns in the soft dirt that borders the clearing. He's on a down-cycle, it seems, less twitchy and aggressive than earlier, but still restless, tapping the fingers of his left hand on the ground as he sketches.
"Are you sure those work?" she ventures.
He glances up. "They're Anasazi symbols. The Ancient Ones. The Lenni-Lenape - that's Delaware tribes to you - went to war with any wendigo that entered their territory, and they would draw these symbols in a circular pattern as protection against it. They fought them all the way up here to Minnesota."
She raises an eybrow. "I've heard of the Anasazi. They were on the X-Files. They flew off to another planet or something."
He smiles fondly, and for a split second all the tension leaves him and his shoulders visibly relax, dropping a couple of inches. "I loved that show," he says. "They even got it right a lot of the time. That Scully. Fuckin' awesome thirtysomething woman." He winks, draws some more, senses that she's still not convinced. "Still not buying it, huh?"
Hudak walks over, looks down at the scrawl, critical. "It could be anything. Does it have powers? Or something? I mean, if the thing turned up and misread it, could it get through? Can they even read? Bobby said they used to be woodsmen and trappers. Well what if this one was dyslexic when it was a woodsman or a trapper? Or what if it never learned to read in the first place when it was a woodsman or a trapper?"
Bobby looks up from where he's expertly gutting the fish, sniggers.
Dean starts to say something, stops, ponders like it only just occurred to him. "Well. Uh. Actually, I don't know. Bobby?"
The old man shrugs. "Anyone's guess as to how intelligent these things are, what they retain from before. But they sure as hell remember how to hunt. And they're damn good mimics… they copy voices they've heard, lure their victims out into the woods that way."
Hudak shivers. "Jesus. That's creepy."
"Yes it is," Dean says emphatically. "And it means you stay inside the symbols after dark, no matter what happens, no matter what you hear. Even if you hear your friend. It isn't her. Got that?"
She nods, starts glancing off into the trees, wraps her arms around herself. "I feel like something's watching us."
Dean tracks her gaze, out into the gathering dusk. "There's always something watching," he says. "But these things, they usually hunt in the dark. And there'll be signs it's out there." He starts drawing in the dirt again. "Relax. We know how to kill it. And anyway, they didn't fly to another planet. They migrated south and became the Hopi."
She must blank at him, because he shakes his head. "The Anasazi," he says, and he sits back on his haunches, admires his work.
"What if a raccoon or something walks through that and disturbs it?" she pushes. "It could change the meaning, change it from go away to come on in, help yourself. Couldn't that happen?"
Exasperated now. "Kathleen, you think too much."
Sam calls over from her left. "Anyway, that's what this is for." He's shaking a can of spray paint, starts decorating the trees that circle them with the same symbols. "Insurance."
Hudak frowns. "I'm not sure that's allowed."
"Well, we used to always use sidewalk chalk for this kind of thing," Dean says. "But one time it rained, washed away the sigils, and Jeez, it wasn't pretty. Fuckin' leprechaun gave Sammy the whammy. Remember that, kiddo?"
Sam makes a vaguely agreeable and definitely regretful noise from the other side of the clearing.
"He was talking in limericks for days. Top-o-the-mornin-to-you-bejasus, and all that. Good week and a half before he could sleep without needing a toadstool on his pillow." He calls over to his brother again. "Isn't that right, Sammy?"
His tone is light, but something tells Hudak his flippancy is forced, and Sam's answering grin is weak.
She squats down beside Dean. "You need to talk to him," she says, urgently. "He seems off. After what happened. You know, with the tree."
He leans down hard on his stick and it snaps, nearly sending him face first into the dirt. "Jesus, woman. Give it a rest," he hisses, glances uneasily from her to Bobby. "I told you, I can't do this now."
She stands, lifting him up with her by virtue of the fact she has her hand fisted in the back of his shirt collar. "I need a bathroom break," she announces. "Dean's coming with. Make sure I don't get grabbed, huh Dean?"
Bobby is piling up rocks either side of the fire, laying the fish, now threaded on sticks, a few inches above the flames to cook. "Careful," he says. "Should be safe since it's still light and this isn't a dead zone, but stay frosty."
She leads the way into the trees, Dean at her heels. "Dead zone," she echoes Bobby. "What's that?"
"Where it hunts. Nothing alive, no birds or anything, no sounds, everything still, like the forest is dead," he says. "Its aura scares all living things away or something." His voice is sharp, and when she pulls up and turns around she can see his eyes are lasering out his annoyance right at her.
"Look, Kathleen, I can understand your concern but this is me and my brother, this is between us and we're dealing with it, so-"
"You're not dealing with it," she cuts in. "You're avoiding it. It'll cause problems… you heard what he said. He thinks you're a drunk, a pathet-"
She stops abruptly as he leans right in. "Kathleen, so help me," he snarls. "I am warning you, I am not in the mood for your nagging." His voice drips acid. "Do not make me any more pissed off than I am at this moment in time, because you will live to regret it."
Hudak reels back a step because it's so totally unexpected, his switch into something that just isn't him any more. She suddenly thinks of what Sam called him all those weeks ago: not-Dean, and she feels a chill run up her spine as it hits her that this, this, standing just inches from her with a knife in his boot and a gun shoved down the back of his jeans, is the arsonist, the grave robber, the vicious thug, the psychopath, the serial killer she read about in his FBI file after they left Hibbing and dismissed because she thought she knew better, because of the easy manner, the dazzling smile, the pretty face. This is Dean Winchester, who doesn't look too closely at his soul if he can help it.
And he's desperate for a drink.
And he knows she knows.
He leans in even closer. "Scared, Kathleen?" he breathes, just inches from her face. "You should be. Now back the fuck off. When the time comes, I'll deal with my brother. " But in the very next second he suddenly cocks his head, listens. "I don't hear anything," he murmurs.
Hudak backs away another step.
And then she's moving, grabbed, pulled back into the woods, so surprised she can barely draw breath to yell out her shock and she's hauled, hefted, tossed, bobbing upside down, bushes and branches slapping at her face, while she hollers and belts with her fists, with all she has, at the thing that has her. The ground is rocketing past her, the speed dizzying, it ran so fast it burned off its own feet and still it ran, and her head is spinning, her gut is roiling, her vision is graying.
Somewhere in the distance she can hear a voice crying her name but it's getting more and more distant, and it-devours-it-devours-it-devours.
Next
Sam finds himself watching Dean like a hawk as they get further and further in. He doesn't know whether he's on the alert for a total emotional collapse or a mach-4 meltdown, but his brother strides easily through the undergrowth, eyes front, mind on the job, not talking much at all bar the odd, cautionary watch your step, dude. Still Sam watches and waits. Which is probably why he's taken totally unawares by the fact that it isn't Dean who flips at all.
It's him.
Bobby sees it first, halts abruptly. "Would you look at that…" he says, in an odd tone that's astonishment liberally sprinkled with sadness.
It's a tree he's stopped to stare at, and for a minute Sam thinks, well, it's not as if there's any damn shortage is there? But Hudak is staring too, and Dean, and as Sam ranges up behind them he can see his brother turn away from it suddenly, see that he's sucking on his bottom lip, looks shell-shocked, that he glances away and back again with a sort of unwilling fascination.
Being as he's a head taller, Sam gets it level with his eyes: three sets of initials carefully carved into the bark: LB GB MB. And it's what it signifies that has his initial sharp intake of breath start whirling out of control to hurricane-force: it's the fact that it's commemorating something that never really was, something that was a vicious and cruel illusion spun from sick minds and used to corrupt the things Dean held closest to his heart, to terrorize his insensible brother into complete submission.
"That's just. That's just. Fucking. Bastard. How… how could…"
Sam knows he's starting to let go of the last vestiges of control, and someone's grabbing his arm, and it's Dean, and his brother is talking to him but the words are lost in a tumult of noise in Sam's head: building wrath. Dean's eyes are calm and there's so much understanding shining out of them, but Sam wants to scream at him, don't try to fucking understand that bastard, and he does.
"Don't try to fucking understand that bastard and what he did, Dean. There is no fucking understanding. He wasn't confused and messed up! He knew exactly what he was doing." Sam is yelling right into Dean's face and his brother recoils, only minutely, but Sam sees it and it only fuels his rage. "Christ. See what he did? You're a fucking drunk, a pathetic nervous wreck who's terrified of his own brother. Fuck."
Dean falls back a step or two, and Sam sees worry start niggling at his brother's features, sees his eyes start flicking nervously over to Bobby, who's coming up beside him, putting a hand on his shoulder, starting to ease Dean behind him, protect him from Sam's onslaught.
Sam keeps shouting, can't stop himself. "You never even really got out of here, did you, not really… there's a piece of you still here… still here with that bastard, with his claws stuck in, pulling you back all the time. Fight it! Fight him. Jesus…"
The initials in the tree trunk are still taunting Sam and he storms towards it, Hudak sidestepping adroitly so he doesn't knock her over, and he's pounding at the bark, scraping at it, screaming out noises he knows aren't even proper words now, just animalistic sounds of fury. He digs in with his nails, feels them split and tear, thinks he needs a fucking knife to do this properly, to git her done, and like magic there's one right in front of him, as if he said scalpel, nurse. He grabs it, slashes and rips at the bark until the letters are obliterated, before burying the blade savagely, finally, hilt-deep in the scarred wood, slamming it in with both hands as he bellows out a sort of primal scream.
And suddenly it stops, the crescendo. Sam feels his cheeks wet, his chest heaving, his shoulder aching, his fingertips throbbing, his nerve endings screaming. "He shouldn't have done that," he hears himself mumble though gritted teeth. "Not his to do."
He hears his brother right beside him, because of course it was Dean's hand with the knife, and Dean's voice is sandpaper-hoarse but so, so gentle, the voice of endless lullabies, and nursery rhymes, and bedtime stories, and hospital vigils, and drunk-dialed voicemails he never returned.
"He didn't carve it on there, Sam. I did."
They camp in a clearing conveniently close to the river, and the silence, the awkwardness is, well, awkward, Bobby thinks. After ten or so minutes of watching Dean and Sam fannying about trying to put up the tents while Hudak sits on a rock and chews her lip, he's had enough.
"Food," he barks. "It's about time we eat. Kathleen, any ideas? Keeping in mind that if you offer me another power bar, I'm liable to start shooting."
Hudak open-shuts her mouth at him for a moment before rooting in her pack for a small tin. "Fish. Stream's just through there… assuming it's safe to split up?"
"Should be, since it's daylight," Bobby confirms gruffly. He slants his eyes over at Dean, who seems miles away, going though the motions with mechanical, steady movements as he taps in tent pegs, studiously ignoring the glances Sam's throwing at him.
Hudak flaps her hand at him, goggle-eyed. "Are they okay?" she mutters surreptitiously.
Bobby rolls his eyes. "Damned if I know," he hisses. But: enough. "Dean!" he snaps. "Guard duty while Kathleen fishes."
Hudak baits her line, casts it into the stream, sits in tranquil stillness and teases the fish while Dean sits guard a few feet behind her, glancing back into the woods every so often, wary, alert.
He sees her watching him and then looking beyond him, back into the trees, and smiles thinly. "They don't usually hunt in the day," he reassures, but his eyes are still sharp, quick, observant, his calm still the surface calm of a coiled spring.
"Sam okay?" she ventures.
"He will be. Working it out is all."
Hudak is cautious. "He's got a lot to work through too."
"I can handle Sam."
"It's just that I think he-"
"I'm thinking too, Kathleen," Dean pulls her up. "All the time. I know he blames himself."
"Oh," she says, and she can't help the note of surprise. "Actually I thought he blamed me."
Dean pricks up his ears at that. "Why would he blame you?"
"Well, I did leave you to walk," she replies. "He threw that one at me when I was trying to twist his arm to take you to the hospital. Back then."
Chuckling, Dean retorts, "Yeah, there is that." He seems genuinely amused as he plays with the Bowie Sam used to savage the tree, but she can see his hands are shaking, and his tone goes somber. "No, it's… Sam took his eye off the ball. That's how they grabbed him in the first place. They grabbed him, they grabbed me. That's how he sees it."
Hudak decides she’ll fish metaphorically too. "Is that how you see it?"
Dean shrugs. "If you build it, they will come," he says dismissively. "He was by himself because I was hitting the head and he didn't wait for me. We were in the bar because I wanted a drink. We were in town because of Sam's research… how far back shall I go?"
A few minutes pass by in silence broken only by the rustling of the trees and distant birdsong. "If he blames himself is that why you don't talk to him about it?" Hudak asks him then. "You don't want him feeling worse, surely?"
Dean's face says it all: bleak, shadowed. "There are so many variables in this it isn't even worth thinking about, Kathleen," he says softly.
"But if you-"
"Look," he snaps, irritated now. "Don't. I can't do this with you, not on the hunt. It's one thing to do it in a parked car, but out here I'm trying to keep my head above it, and if I don't I'll be a liability."
Hudak watches the water again, then steals another glance at him. "Your hands are shaking."
"That's right."
"You need a drink."
"That's right."
"Did you bring any liquor with you?"
His voice is cold, hard. "Bobby's watching me like a hawk. And I'm not doing this with you either. Not the time or the place."
After a minute or two, Hudak realizes he never answered the question. Sly bastard, she thinks.
Bobby knows all he has to do is wait. If it were Dean it'd be different, and he shakes his head ruefully to himself as he ponders how the boy keeps his pain inside, pushes it down, crams it into the smallest space, handcuffs it to the wall, bricks it up there till it dies slowly from lack of attention while the kid ignores its - his - cries for help, till just the skeleton of what's bothering him remains. It doesn't salve his hurt though, Bobby muses, because while the flesh might have rotted off it, the bones remain, and while they take up less space they're hard and unyielding.
Sam is a different story, and Bobby wonders if it's all tied into the kid's sheer thirst for knowledge. Dean is singleminded, wants to know whatever specific thing he needs to know in order to do what needs to be done; he absorbs it all quietly, and nothing else matters. Sam wants to know anything and everything that's out there to be learned, all of the collateral information, the baggage that comes with that one initial fact he set out to investigate, and he always has… Why is the sky blue, Uncle Bobby? How does the telephone work? Why do dogs pant? How do birds fly? Why do bees buzz? How do submarines stay under the water? What's in toothpaste? How do planes stay up? Where does electricity come from? Why don't I have a mom? How does exorcism work? Where does my dad go for weeks on end? How do I kill this? Why is my brother so sad? How do I tell him I'm leaving?
Bobby knows he started out life simple, uncomplicated. He doesn't ponder too much about what set him on his current path, thinks that maybe he's bricked it up like Dean does. But he knows why he's still alive and in one piece, and he thinks on that often: on the mute boy whose silent grief and sheer need gave him a reason to pull himself back from the brink, and the baby who effectively taught Bobby all he knows because as he grew into a curious toddler, preschooler, tween and honking great sasquatch, Sam could never know enough and Bobby had to hit the books big time to answer the questions Dean couldn't.
Not that Bobby had answers for all of them. I don't know how you tell him you're leaving, Sam. And don't ask me to be a part of it.
So, just like he's been expecting for the last hour, Sam eventually broaches, "Bobby. Why do you think Dean carved their initials on that tree?"
Bobby is careful. "Guess it comes back to what your brother said about family, Sam. He thought they were it. And he had a brother, knew it in his subconscious."
Sam chews his lip.
"It bothers you," Bobby observes. "You feel jealous, like he switched horses mid-race or something. It's okay to feel that way, Sam. This didn't just happen to your brother. It happened to you too. And me. Not in the same way. But we're caught up in the fallout too."
Sam meets his gaze. "Do you think he would have shot me, back then when we found him? Before Kathleen winged him?"
"Looked that way at the time, boy," Bobby says ruefully.
"But I don't understand why he'd feel that loyalty to Bender," Sam mutters. "After what Bender did. Was doing. I don't understand why he'd stay."
Bobby considers it some more, because truth is he's ruminated over that very question more than once. "Don't forget Sam, he was doped up the wazoo," he says. "Other than that, well - Stockholm syndrome, I guess. Bender obviously didn't start out by raping your brother. Seems he was kind to him, shielded him from the brat at first. So I guess Dean did what babies do - form an emotional attachment to the nearest powerful adult to enable their own survival."
Sam grimaces. "Even to the extent that he stayed with them after Bender - hurt him."
"Your brother's a deeply loyal man, Sam," Bobby concedes. "Comes down to family. They were his family, and it all begins and ends with family for Dean. You know that. And it all got mixed up into Gabe. And Lee was Gabe's brother, not you."
"But I'm his family…"
"Dean's family," Bobby interjects, "Not Gabe's family, boy." He can see the doubt in Sam's eyes. "Kid, maybe you need to move on from this too," he says. "Seems to me as if you're pushing your brother to move on but you aren't moving with him. You need to try to separate Gabe and whatever he did or didn't do, from Dean."
Sam nods slowly. "I know if he'd been Dean and not Gabe he would have fought more-"
"Sam," Bobby cuts in, voice sharper. "Your brother fought. We saw how hard he fought. Don't ever talk yourself into thinking he didn't fight."
"I know. I know…" Sam throws ups his hands, helpless. "It's just. I just can't get it straight in my head. Why he stayed when Bender was hurting him like that."
Bobby sighs. "That's something I can't explain for you, Sam. Something you're going to have to approach with your brother. Diplomatically."
Dean is clucking his tongue off the roof of his mouth, and over the next ten minutes it graduates into a Timberlakean human boombox as he gets up and starts pacing up and down, wearing out a trench in the soil right behind Hudak.
"This is taking too long," he says abruptly.
"That's part of it, Dean," she tells him. "Luring them in. Lulling them into a false sense of security, see the shiny feathery thing, swim up closer to take a look, and maybe taste and-"
"This is taking too long."
"There's a Zen to it," she tries. "As we fish, we attain enlightenment through meditation, self-contemplation and intuition."
She almost jumps out of her skin when all of a sudden he's right down next to her, on his butt, hugging his knees, eyeballing her.
"You really believe that dreck?" he chides.
"Yeah, I do," Hudak admits. "It's the gentle stillness of solitude and soul-reflection."
Dean seems to be considering it, seems interested. "You - reflect - often?"
"I guess," she confirms. "You should try it."
He laughs, hollow, and his voice is whisper-thin when he replies. "I don't think reflection is going to enlighten me, Kathleen. I know all there is to know about me and it doesn't bear reflection, believe me. I don't look too closely at my soul if I can help it."
He gazes out over the water, and his eyes are shuttered. He seems lost and lonely in that moment, vulnerable despite the bravado, and after a moment of quiet, Hudak clears her throat. "A mantra," she offers.
Dean snaps to attention. "Where? Can we eat it?" And a brief bewildered glance. "Don't we need sea for those things?"
Smiling, Hudak says, "Not a manta ray. A mantra. Something you say to create a spiritual transformation within yourself. You need one."
"Huh?"
"I am a manifestation of divine consciousness," she pulls out of nowhere. "Something like that."
Blank-faced. "And I say again. Huh?"
"You know. Like in yoga. Ohm…"
Sudden gleam in his eye. "You do yoga?"
"Yeah," Hudak nods. "A class at the local Y."
"So," he says, and his tone is lighter, teasing or mocking, though she can't tell which. "You bendy enough to do that thing Madonna does, where you hook your right leg up around the back of your neck?"
Hudak decides she'll play it straight. "Yeah, believe it or not. I know I don't look it, but-"
"Can you show me that?" he cuts in. "Like, now?"
She studies him for a moment. "Well, I'd have to…"
The gleam in his eye sparkles even crazier now, danger, Kathleen, and she rolls her eyes. "Cut it out, Dean."
He grins widely, stretches out his legs, leans back, gazes at her in a way that's disturbing because it's so damned inviting.
"It's good if you have low self-esteem," she adds faintly.
"I'll bet," he says enthusiastically. "Fact, it'd do my self-esteem a world of good if you'd just-"
"A mantra. Idiot. I use the same one all the time."
His expression drifts back to the huh he wore earlier. "You have low self-esteem?"
"Well…" she eases out. "Yeah. I guess."
"I don't understand that," he says, and his tone is incredulous. "I mean. Look at you."
Hudak snorts as she pauses for a moment's reflection."Yeah, look at me. Wrong side of thirty-five, one failed marriage, no kids, and I live up the ass of nowhere. With my dog. And the most exciting thing that ever happened to me was helping haul a dying man through these woods."
Dean makes a noise somewhere between a grunt and a squeak. "Christ. That's. Well. Crap. That's… I don't believe that. That you think that."
She shrugs at him. "Well, them's the facts, Dean."
"Bullshit," he snaps. "You aren't leaving this conversation without thinking you're fuckin' awesome, Kathleen. I mean it. Like - Ripley. Or Thelma and Louise. Agent Scully. Sarah fuckin' Connor. Hell, yeah." He blows out in emphasis. "I mean. You shot me. What a fuckin' turn-on. Hell, yeah."
She waits a beat while his eyes shine. "I'm the best me I can possibly be," she says then.
"What? Whassat?"
"My mantra," she clarifies. "I'm the best me I can possibly be."
Dean considers it, his eyebrows drawing in and a line forming between them. "And is that working for you?"
There's a second where she thinks no, it damn well isn't and maybe it never really did. She puts it out of her head, chuckles. "Probably not as well as Sarah-fucking-Connor-hell-yeah is going to."
Dean grins, his face lighting up to sunny. "Alright. Now you're cooking with gas."
They sit a few more minutes, peaceful.
"This is taking too long," Dean says.
Hudak sighs. "Patience, grasshopper."
"Maybe there aren't any fish in there," he suggests. "Ever think of that?"
She waves a hand over into the distance. "These streams lead off Pelican Lake. Plenty of crappies in here. They're just taking their time."
Amusement bubbles up in his tone. "Crappies?"
Hudak knows what's coming. "Anyway, it's not about the fish, Dean," she reminds him primly. "It's about the fish-ing."
"Crappies?"
She hears the click behind her, ducks instinctively as Dean fires a couple of rounds into the water. Concussed fish rise lazily to the surface and float belly up.
She looks up, sees him blowing out a puff of air across the top of the gun barrel. "I'm making it about the fish, Kathleen," he says, and smirks. "Blowing the crap out of the crappies."
She huffs. "What about the noise? Won't it know we're here now?"
He snorts derisively. "It already knows we're here."
The sun is sinking lower in the sky, the woods growing quieter and subdued, and it roams noiselessly along the forest trails, a passing shadow constantly in motion among the trees.
It is ever-alert, its ears twitching at every sound, its eyes flitting to every movement, its nostrils quivering at every message carried on the air. And it senses something that fills it with a strange unrest, makes it ache with longing, and so it searches for the source, irresistibly drawn towards its scent, its call. It creeps closer and closer, watching for the signs, eager, and craving, and delighted. It hears the beating of his heart, and its own heart pounds with joy, and it hears the blood pumping in his veins, and it shivers with the thrill of anticipation.
Hudak pauses halfway out of the tent, raises a skeptical eyebrow as Dean uses a stick to inscribe intricate swirling patterns in the soft dirt that borders the clearing. He's on a down-cycle, it seems, less twitchy and aggressive than earlier, but still restless, tapping the fingers of his left hand on the ground as he sketches.
"Are you sure those work?" she ventures.
He glances up. "They're Anasazi symbols. The Ancient Ones. The Lenni-Lenape - that's Delaware tribes to you - went to war with any wendigo that entered their territory, and they would draw these symbols in a circular pattern as protection against it. They fought them all the way up here to Minnesota."
She raises an eybrow. "I've heard of the Anasazi. They were on the X-Files. They flew off to another planet or something."
He smiles fondly, and for a split second all the tension leaves him and his shoulders visibly relax, dropping a couple of inches. "I loved that show," he says. "They even got it right a lot of the time. That Scully. Fuckin' awesome thirtysomething woman." He winks, draws some more, senses that she's still not convinced. "Still not buying it, huh?"
Hudak walks over, looks down at the scrawl, critical. "It could be anything. Does it have powers? Or something? I mean, if the thing turned up and misread it, could it get through? Can they even read? Bobby said they used to be woodsmen and trappers. Well what if this one was dyslexic when it was a woodsman or a trapper? Or what if it never learned to read in the first place when it was a woodsman or a trapper?"
Bobby looks up from where he's expertly gutting the fish, sniggers.
Dean starts to say something, stops, ponders like it only just occurred to him. "Well. Uh. Actually, I don't know. Bobby?"
The old man shrugs. "Anyone's guess as to how intelligent these things are, what they retain from before. But they sure as hell remember how to hunt. And they're damn good mimics… they copy voices they've heard, lure their victims out into the woods that way."
Hudak shivers. "Jesus. That's creepy."
"Yes it is," Dean says emphatically. "And it means you stay inside the symbols after dark, no matter what happens, no matter what you hear. Even if you hear your friend. It isn't her. Got that?"
She nods, starts glancing off into the trees, wraps her arms around herself. "I feel like something's watching us."
Dean tracks her gaze, out into the gathering dusk. "There's always something watching," he says. "But these things, they usually hunt in the dark. And there'll be signs it's out there." He starts drawing in the dirt again. "Relax. We know how to kill it. And anyway, they didn't fly to another planet. They migrated south and became the Hopi."
She must blank at him, because he shakes his head. "The Anasazi," he says, and he sits back on his haunches, admires his work.
"What if a raccoon or something walks through that and disturbs it?" she pushes. "It could change the meaning, change it from go away to come on in, help yourself. Couldn't that happen?"
Exasperated now. "Kathleen, you think too much."
Sam calls over from her left. "Anyway, that's what this is for." He's shaking a can of spray paint, starts decorating the trees that circle them with the same symbols. "Insurance."
Hudak frowns. "I'm not sure that's allowed."
"Well, we used to always use sidewalk chalk for this kind of thing," Dean says. "But one time it rained, washed away the sigils, and Jeez, it wasn't pretty. Fuckin' leprechaun gave Sammy the whammy. Remember that, kiddo?"
Sam makes a vaguely agreeable and definitely regretful noise from the other side of the clearing.
"He was talking in limericks for days. Top-o-the-mornin-to-you-bejasus, and all that. Good week and a half before he could sleep without needing a toadstool on his pillow." He calls over to his brother again. "Isn't that right, Sammy?"
His tone is light, but something tells Hudak his flippancy is forced, and Sam's answering grin is weak.
She squats down beside Dean. "You need to talk to him," she says, urgently. "He seems off. After what happened. You know, with the tree."
He leans down hard on his stick and it snaps, nearly sending him face first into the dirt. "Jesus, woman. Give it a rest," he hisses, glances uneasily from her to Bobby. "I told you, I can't do this now."
She stands, lifting him up with her by virtue of the fact she has her hand fisted in the back of his shirt collar. "I need a bathroom break," she announces. "Dean's coming with. Make sure I don't get grabbed, huh Dean?"
Bobby is piling up rocks either side of the fire, laying the fish, now threaded on sticks, a few inches above the flames to cook. "Careful," he says. "Should be safe since it's still light and this isn't a dead zone, but stay frosty."
She leads the way into the trees, Dean at her heels. "Dead zone," she echoes Bobby. "What's that?"
"Where it hunts. Nothing alive, no birds or anything, no sounds, everything still, like the forest is dead," he says. "Its aura scares all living things away or something." His voice is sharp, and when she pulls up and turns around she can see his eyes are lasering out his annoyance right at her.
"Look, Kathleen, I can understand your concern but this is me and my brother, this is between us and we're dealing with it, so-"
"You're not dealing with it," she cuts in. "You're avoiding it. It'll cause problems… you heard what he said. He thinks you're a drunk, a pathet-"
She stops abruptly as he leans right in. "Kathleen, so help me," he snarls. "I am warning you, I am not in the mood for your nagging." His voice drips acid. "Do not make me any more pissed off than I am at this moment in time, because you will live to regret it."
Hudak reels back a step because it's so totally unexpected, his switch into something that just isn't him any more. She suddenly thinks of what Sam called him all those weeks ago: not-Dean, and she feels a chill run up her spine as it hits her that this, this, standing just inches from her with a knife in his boot and a gun shoved down the back of his jeans, is the arsonist, the grave robber, the vicious thug, the psychopath, the serial killer she read about in his FBI file after they left Hibbing and dismissed because she thought she knew better, because of the easy manner, the dazzling smile, the pretty face. This is Dean Winchester, who doesn't look too closely at his soul if he can help it.
And he's desperate for a drink.
And he knows she knows.
He leans in even closer. "Scared, Kathleen?" he breathes, just inches from her face. "You should be. Now back the fuck off. When the time comes, I'll deal with my brother. " But in the very next second he suddenly cocks his head, listens. "I don't hear anything," he murmurs.
Hudak backs away another step.
And then she's moving, grabbed, pulled back into the woods, so surprised she can barely draw breath to yell out her shock and she's hauled, hefted, tossed, bobbing upside down, bushes and branches slapping at her face, while she hollers and belts with her fists, with all she has, at the thing that has her. The ground is rocketing past her, the speed dizzying, it ran so fast it burned off its own feet and still it ran, and her head is spinning, her gut is roiling, her vision is graying.
Somewhere in the distance she can hear a voice crying her name but it's getting more and more distant, and it-devours-it-devours-it-devours.
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