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SPN, NC-17. Part 1. Part 2.
Not long after, while Sam was supposedly off researching the history of a haunted house, he broke down and called Bobby. The chill library basement had been empty for an hour, so he didn’t worry about being carted off to the looney bin for spouting insanity in public. He swore Bobby to secrecy, knowing how unlikely that was to work, and then explained the situation.
Bobby was silent for several long minutes.
“I never heard of anything like that,” he said at last. “I’ll look around best I can without talking to anyone else, but—”
“Yeah?” Sam asked, his fingers biting into the plastic of his phone, already knowing that he wasn’t going to like what was coming.
“Are you sure this is a problem? I know it’s not your way, son, but Dean ain’t never been too picky, if you know what I’m sayin’.”
Carefully, Sam put the phone on the table in front of him, to the side of the microfiche reader where he’d been sitting. His eyes stung from too long looking at badly scanned newsprint under poorly maintained fluorescent lighting, his fingers ached from being balled into fists, and his shoulders felt like bags of rocks.
This was the reasoning that Dean heard in his own head. In Bobby’s voice, in Dean’s own, probably in Dad’s and even Sam’s, because when had Dean ever let facts get in the way of a good fixation? Dean had convinced himself that he ought to feel lucky, and that there was something wrong with him for being less than perfectly thrilled that he got fucked three ways to Sunday every night.
“Sam? Sam?” Bobby’s voice from the little speaker was tinny and concerned, reminding him that, for all Bobby knew, something from the current hunt had just shown up and eaten Sam.
He unclenched his hands and picked up the phone. “I’m gonna let that one go, Bobby, because you haven’t seen Dean. It’s a problem.” He pressed ‘end’ and smiled in the empty room, feeling his chapped lips stretch and crack, because problem was funny, funny like calling the Black Death a health challenge.
In college, he’d taken a course on Slave Life in the Americas. It was easy to think that a person wouldn’t survive enslavement, degradation, forced labor, forced breeding, whipping, and all the other harms one set of humans had figured out how to inflict on another. And plenty of people did die. But not all. There were the lucky, if you called that lucky, and the adaptable. The survivors were not necessarily strong, though it helped.
Dean was adaptable.
Dean had adapted.
He trained like he was hoping to win a biathlon: target practice every time they found an empty field; crunches and pushups until Sam was exhausted just watching; the food on his plate everything that Dad had made them eat to build strength instead of the burgers and fries Dean loved; long runs with Sam. Dean hated running, hated that Sam had been able to outpace him since he’d hit six foot two. About five miles into a run, he got this grim look of I’m-gonna-get-through-this that was so hard to see that the only thing worse was the rage on his face when he thought Sam was deliberately slowing his own pace so that Dean could keep up.
It felt like watching Dean get devoured by army ants when Sam’s only weapon was a stick to poke them with.
But hey, Dean was hunting better than ever. If anything, the fact that he now stopped for a second outside any place where they’d encounter people, rolling his shoulders and taking a deep breath, had improved his interview skills. That moment of hesitation dampened down his usual—his previous—smarminess. Sam wasn’t entirely sure what strangers saw, but he thought it was a little-boy vulnerability, a sort of pleading for kindness.
And Dean being who he was and looking how he looked, strangers responded.
Adaptation.
****
They stopped to make silver shot out in a deserted field. Dean was in charge of melting the silver, because that task related to setting things on fire. When he poured the stream of molten metal down over the steel screen and into the tub, steam billowed up around him and Dean grunted; that was when Sam noticed that Dean wasn’t wearing any protective gear, other than gloves and goggles.
Interrupting the process would just increase the danger, so Sam screwed his fury down into himself and waited until Dean put the ladle down on the asbestos pad.
Then, before Dean could start prying the screen off the tub and examining the results, Sam grabbed him and pushed him back towards the car. “Hey!” Dean protested. Sam’s inspection found a black comma burnt through Dean’s shirt, just above his right elbow, and two holes like vampire bites over his left bicep.
“Take the fucking shirt off,” Sam ordered. Dean grimaced as the flannel rubbed against his skin under the pressure of Sam’s fingers.
The burns underneath were small but nasty, as Sam had known they’d be.
He’d spent the past week telling himself to keep quiet, telling himself that Dean would slow down of his own accord once the next hunt was finished.
Sam nodded to himself, then got the medical kit from the trunk.
“Sam,” Dean drawled, pulling off the goggles and grimacing in what he probably thought was an unconcerned smile.
Dean tried again a couple of times, saying Sam’s name in different inflections, while Sam forced Dean to sit on the hood, then applied antibiotic ointment and bandaged Dean’s arms.
Sam had to be careful with the bandages so that Dean retained a full range of motion, because Dean was going to jump right into the next fight he found.
He was almost finished; he just needed to wipe his forearm across his eyes to clear out the blurriness and sniff back the heaviness in his throat. Then he smoothed his hand over the taped-down gauze, rough against his fingertips. The white square nearly glowed against Dean’s pale, brown-freckled skin.
“Sam,” Dean said.
“Should I even bother?” he asked, not raising his eyes from Dean’s chest. “I mean, you don’t care that you’re not invincible, why should I?”
Dean was silent. Eventually Sam had to check, and found Dean staring down at him. Dean’s mouth worked, but no words came out. His face was pale under his heavy stubble, making the pink of his lips even more prominent.
Sam came out of his crouch and stepped back. Dean’s expression tightened. “I know I’m not invincible,” he ground out, each word sounding rough-hewn from rock.
“It hurts me when you get hurt,” Sam told him. That was it, the bottom of the barrel, the truth that could only cut Dean further but might just get him to pay attention.
Dean’s eyes darkened with some kind of fear. Sam had never wished more for the power to read minds. Then Dean firmed his jaw and jumped off the car, bending to retrieve his still-mostly-usable flannel shirt. “No, it doesn’t,” he said and stalked back over towards the tub, which was now gently steaming.
****
On what looked like a routine salt-and-burn just outside Cincinnati, they got caught in a kind of poltergeist showdown. Dean was a whirling dervish, moving as fast as the ghosts, as if he could guess where they were moving without seeing them, firing blast after blast into empty air. Sam commandeered an earthmover and just scraped the ground open, bursting the tops of a lot of graves, including some that were probably not resting uneasily until the Winchesters arrived. He was able to rig up a sort of sprayer system with a gas can and a length of hose, and the whole mess of corpses had gone up at once. Dean got out unscathed, and all Sam had was a bloody nose from hitting the edge of a gravestone.
The only problem was that the operation took so long that the cops arrived before they’d managed to escape. At least Dean had lost his shotgun in the fracas, so they were unarmed when they were apprehended.
Getting taken into custody was as fun as it ever was, in that it sucked donkey balls. Dean’s forethought had been useful: they’d both been carrying fake college IDs, and even if they looked a little overage for kids trying to pull off a stunt for a fraternity contest, the cops didn’t seem inclined to question the backstory. Instead, they seemed to think that treating Sam and Dean like potential hard-core criminals would teach them a valuable lesson. They’d be locked up at least a day, one of the cops said, until they could get in front of a judge and get bail.
Sam had a flash of terror when they were fingerprinted at the jail, but apparently their previous files had gone into some sort of archive when they’d been declared dead, and they were processed without any outcry.
And then it was time for the strip search. Sam tried not to be too obvious about his freakout, but somewhere between the time when he was told to open his mouth and the time when he was told to spread his cheeks he started shaking. One of the guards conducting the search found Sam’s apparent fright hilarious, and Dean’s unfriendly glare in response promised nothing good, so Sam ground his teeth and stood up straight. He’d throw up when they got out and he got a chance to be where Dean couldn’t see him.
Dean didn’t react to the search, not even when they had him squat and cough. Not even when the asshole guard told him that he had a cute butt. Face blank, like he’d just—checked out. Adapted himself away from the situation. He took the orange jail clothes that he was handed and got dressed, but without his usual grace.
A different, blessedly non-communicative officer took them to get a cell assignment, which was another thing Sam hadn’t anticipated. If Dean had to spend a night with anyone but Sam—
It felt like there was a rave going on in his chest, a thousand beats a minute. He concentrated harder than ever, trying to push his will into the intake officer and her computer: together, together, together.
“Tier 2, C10, both of you,” she said, dismissing them with a wave.
Sam felt his shoulders drop with relief.
“Hey,” Dean said, the first time he’d spoken since they’d hit the bright lights of the police station. “Your nose is bleeding again.”
Sam tilted his head up and pinched his nose between his finger and his thumb. After a second, Dean put his hand on Sam’s elbow, guiding him towards the next set of locked and guarded doors.
What with the time spent in processing at the police station and the transport from the police station to the jail, they’d arrived just in time for lunch. Sam tried not to think about the timing on that. If they hadn’t started after three am in order to work around Dean’s affliction, would the police even have shown up in time to catch them?
The cafeteria was the usual concrete-and-plastic nightmare. The bare floors were discolored with spots from accidents that had never really gotten cleaned up. The thick cinderblock walls had eighteen layers of paint, the top coat white and chipped away in places to expose last time’s mint green. The trays were brown, scratched and slightly spongy from years of use. The utensils were supersoft plastic and slightly smaller than knives and forks from the outside world, shorter even than Sam’s fingers and about as useful. The whole place smelled of old sweat and older grease.
Fortunately, if that was the right word, Sam was hungry enough that tasteless jail slop seemed reasonable.
Because this was jail, not prison, there was no telling what the various other residents had done, or allegedly done, though they weren’t in a terribly high-security facility. Sam just focused on the area around Dean, following him through the food line so that no one could come up behind him without going through Sam first.
The benches and tables were moderately crowded, but Sam found a space where they could sit across from each other. The guys nearest them edged away after Sam gave them a once-over.
Dean ate as if he were filling a gas tank, except that Dean was a lot more careful how he treated the Impala. He wasn’t hunched over his food or otherwise giving off really obvious victim vibes, which was good, and given their size and obvious teamwork, Sam figured that they were unlikely to get many challenges. He wanted nothing more than to reach out and put a reassuring hand on Dean’s arm, but even if Dean wouldn’t bite his head off that would most likely put them in more danger than keeping himself aloof. A little voice in his head wondered: what if Dean wouldn’t bite his head off? What if Dean was willing to accept comfort, at long last?
He poked at the food remaining on his plate. The green stuff hadn’t been bad, but he was willing to bet that even the rats would avoid the orange stuff as long as they could.
****
After lunch there was time in the yard. In this case the yard was a square in the middle of the facility, gray concrete walls stretching four stories up all around them and the cloudy white sky above them like the top of a box. Bleachers ringed the sides, except at the exits and along one side where there were a couple of netless basketball hoops.
There were no weights out. Sam guessed that, with this being a temporary facility, they didn’t do too much to keep the cons (or pre-cons) from being bored.
That meant that the inmates had to make their own fun. Sam and Dean ignored the groups clumping irregularly and the few loners and wordlessly headed for the spot that was the farthest away from the most people. It was like a reverse Traveling Salesman problem, he thought, or Traveling Hunter, but he didn’t grin because he didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to take offense.
As it turned out, he didn’t need to.
They’d only been sitting on the bottom row of the bleachers for a couple of minutes before a medium-large group started walking towards them. Sam checked out the guards at the entrance to the yard, who were very much not paying attention.
Sam counted eight in the group. It wasn’t bad odds if they didn’t get pried away from the bleachers, though a couple of the guys looked like bouncers. He felt Dean tensing up next to him.
Sam scanned the group. The leader, a bald guy with a nose like a hawk’s beak and a tattoo sitting over his collarbones like an elaborate necklace, was in the center of the group. Sam ID’d the two top lieutenants, one on the right and one on the left, though the guy closest to the leader on the left was the comic relief, a short wiry fellow who would have to have a smart mouth and a bad temper to maintain his place.
“These are our seats,” one of the lieutenants said, fake-friendly.
He heard Dean breathe beside him. There was really no way to avoid violence, he thought, so he stood, and stood and stood, working every inch of his height. One thug on the edges of the group took an involuntary step back, but one of the other enforcers was at least as tall as Sam and as wide across the shoulders as a shotgun was long.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as Dean edged a little bit away from him, preparing for what came next. “Do you mind?”
The little guy laughed. “Yeah,” said the lieutenant. “We mind. See, these are all our seats.” He waved his hand in a sloppy arc that encompassed most of the yard, though Sam was willing to bet that these guys didn’t run the black areas or the Hispanic areas, and part of him was annoyed at the man’s presumption. Just because they were new didn’t make them stupid. “But if your pretty boy here wants to pay the fine—” He raised his eyebrows.
It was all Sam could do not to roll his eyes. “Yeah, we’re gonna have to say no, thanks.”
And then his first punch took down the talkative lieutenant just as Dean’s flattened the other one, which Sam only saw out of the corner of his eye.
“‘Pretty boy’?” Dean asked, a smile in his voice. Sam kicked the guy in front of him in the nuts; the thuds he heard indicated that Dean was doing something similar. “Seriously, guys, get some new dialogue.”
Sam grabbed the leader and one of the backup thugs of about the same height and smashed their heads together, then ducked a blow from the refrigerator-sized inmate. He jumped over a tangle of limbs on the ground and had a chance to check on Dean, flushed and grinning.
They had a quick and silent conversation that, had it used words, would have featured the phrase ‘what the hell, why not.’ So Sam dropped to his knees and bent forward, while Dean barrelled into a roll right across Sam’s back that put Dean’s feet squarely in Refrigerator’s gut. The momentum was enough to stagger the guy back for long enough that Sam was able to stand and dart forward to punch him in the neck, one two three, then get back out of the way. Dean, meanwhile, had bounced off Refrigerator and jumped to his feet like he was spring-launched. He wasn’t wasting much time on the last man standing, just a knee to the balls and then one fist to the stomach and the other to the chin as his target collapsed like a map folding up.
Refrigerator blinked at Sam twice, then fell over onto the talkative lieutenant, who had been scrambling to stand.
The lieutenant who hadn’t talked and the little guy were getting back to their feet. Sam’s blood was pounding like a tidal wave inside him. He smiled at the men. The tangible, hittable men. The lieutenant stared at him for a second, and then bent to start dragging his semiconscious leader away.
The little guy reached behind his back and produced a shiv that looked like it had begun useful life as a toothbrush. Sam sighed. “Dude, put that thing away and we’ll show you some respect, okay?”
“Sam—” Dean whined, but he was only teasing.
Mr. Little had plenty of smile lines, but the look in his eyes was death. “Fuck you,” he snarled. Like Dean said, these guys needed new dialogue.
Sam shrugged and turned his back.
Red flag, bull. Sam waited, stepped and dropped, dodging the strike and using a roundhouse kick to knock Little’s legs out from under him. He was slightly surprised that Dean hadn’t intervened, but didn’t have time to worry about it. He grabbed the man’s feet as he stood up, dragging the body along the ground until it was dangling vertically. Sam tightened his grip on Little’s ankles and thrust down as if he were trying to set a fencepost.
Little’s head hit the ground with a satisfying thump. Sam pushed Little’s now-limp legs away, and the unconscious body slumped to the ground.
Sam brushed his hands together, cleaning off the dirt that had accumulated, and looked around at the nervous staring faces that had clustered around. He tilted his head, fought off a Dean-like smirk, and asked the world in general, “Any questions?”
There were none. After Sam nodded permission, a couple of inmates who hadn’t been involved in the initial confrontation dragged the remaining unconscious thugs away. Dean stood with his arms folded, scowling, and stayed that way even when Sam sat back down on the bleachers.
The guards were gossiping and looking over their way, but still showed no inclination to get involved. Sam imagined they weren’t getting paid enough to do so.
Five minutes later, he broke down. “What’s your problem?” he asked, shading his eyes with his hand as he stared up at Dean.
Dean tightened his mouth as if he wanted to try the silent treatment, but that lasted all of ten seconds. “Gosh, Sam, I don’t know,” he bit out. “Could it have something to do with what happened the last time you turned your back on a guy with a knife?”
Sam rocked back on the ribbed metal bench. Hadn’t seen that one coming. Which was, he had to admit, Dean’s point. So to speak. He clamped down on the utterly inappropriate smile that wanted to spread out on his face.
But hell, this fight had been coming for a damn sight longer than the one they’d just finished. “Well, look who’s back. The blessed Dean Winchester, martyr and patron saint of hypocrites.”
“Fuck you, Sam, I’m not the one begging some jailhouse rat to stick a blade in me!” Dean’s voice was low, but when Sam stood up to get a better position, everyone else in the yard stopped moving.
“No, you’d prefer to get killed on a hunt!” He stepped close, trying to keep from shouting.
“Oh, that’s rich,” Dean snapped back, his voice dripping with contempt. “Who’s the one who charged in front of a dire wolf last week, hunh? Who’s the one who dropped his fucking shotgun with that zombie and decided it’d be fun to take it apart with his bare hands? Before you go nominating me for the Reckless All-Stars, you take a good long look at yourself.”
Sam stared at him, full of too many things to say and no order to say them in.
Dean nodded to himself. “But this ain’t about that, is it? This is about—” He dropped his eyes from Sam’s and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “I’m handling it, Sam.”
“I’m not,” Sam said, and knew it for pure truth as soon as it came out of his mouth. “You have to let me do something.” Dean knew what he meant, of course: magic, probably black.
Dean’s hands twisted by his sides. “If you don’t have any new ideas, there’s no sense in going back over the same old shit.”
“Just give me two weeks with those books, Dean. I don’t—I hate to see you like this.”
“I’d be golden if you’d just shut the fuck up about it.” Dean sat down, his shoulders straining against the jail jumpsuit.
“You get attacked every night!” The words came out louder than Sam intended, and Dean flinched minutely.
“Evil’s been fucking me since I was four years old, so tell me what’s new,” Dean snapped.
Sam got that Dean would rather be hopeless than have his hopes crushed. But the only reason they weren’t already risking their lives on another hunt was the barbed wire surrounding the jailhouse. Adapting wasn’t working. “It’s not inevitable, Dean. We can do something to change it.”
Dean’s voice was low and furious, raw with humiliation. “I come.”
“What?”
“It’s sex, I come, all right?”
Did Dean think he didn’t know that? “That doesn’t mean you want it.”
Now Dean was the one inspecting Sam like he was from Venus. “I’m pretty sure it does,” Dean said.
“That’s just a physical reaction!” He couldn’t believe he was having to argue this. “If you’d choose not to do it, then you don’t want it.”
“If a chick makes your dick hard, that’s just a fact. Doesn’t matter if you think she’s a bitch from hell. All that means is, hellbitches get you hard.” Dean swiveled on the bench, facing Sam and waving his hands around as if he were still the all-knowing big brother explaining the natural order of the world. “It’s like, if you get cut, then you bleed. Wanting won’t do shit when what you need is stitches.”
Sam knew they were both speaking English, but that didn’t seem to be helping. He pushed his hair off his forehead, leaning towards Dean. “Okay, but bleeding doesn’t mean you want to bleed, right? It’s something that happens to your body.”
Dean ignored the fact that Sam had just totally flipped his analogy, caught up in his fervor to impart the Tao of Dean: “The point is, there are people out there who need saving and things that need killing, and we’re the ones to do it. So until you figure out a cheap and easy way to get my fan club to stop showing up, I don’t want to hear about this again.”
Sam shut his eyes and tried very hard to keep his face still. Eventually, the urge to scream and cry passed, and he didn’t. According to Dean, that meant he hadn’t wanted to, he realized, and the bitter smile on his face kept Dean silent for the rest of the time in the yard. The other inmates monitored them out of the corners of their eyes and didn’t make any sudden moves in their direction, which was just how Sam liked it.
****
In the close quarters of their cell, neither of them were inclined to take the fight further. There was nothing much to do other than discuss likely hunts, assuming that their luck held and they were allowed to post bail like ordinary, average grave desecrators. Dean was partial to a supposed siren infestation up in New Hampshire, while Sam was holding out for something warmer and more southern, maybe one of the hauntings in South Carolina they’d had on the list for a while.
The thing was, there were only a few reliable topics between them. Music degenerated too quickly into well-rehearsed insults. Past exploits bored Sam, and anyway they were largely off the table now that they didn’t talk about Dean’s sex life. Pop culture sometimes worked, though Dean’s horror movies and Sam’s fondness for action movies starring regular Joes didn’t overlap much. Mostly if they weren’t talking about the job, they talked about the past, growing up together and apart, but Sam just didn’t want to do that when they were behind bars, no matter how temporary the captivity.
Eventually they both fell silent, listening to waves of conversation and occasional disputes from the cells around. Sound carried, in here; Sam even caught the unmistakable sounds of someone getting his rocks off, up and to the left of their cell. He counted the bars and calculated the force it would take to break them. Then he gamed out three different ways to get out of the building, if it became necessary.
Just after eleven, right when the guards announced lights-out, Sam pulled the gray wool blankets off of their mattresses, old things as scratchy as horsehide, and shook them out. With the bunk pushed into the back corner, he stuck one end of each blanket under the top mattress, far enough in that the weight of the mattress would hold it in place, and tugged them until they covered both of the exposed sides of the bottom bunk, a makeshift canopy bed.
Dean sized up the contrivance, his face as still as a mannequin’s in the bad light bleeding in from the few bulbs still lit out on the tier. Then he nodded. “Thanks,” he said.
Sam’s heart seized up. The idea that Dean would thank him, be grateful for his assistance in managing this nightmare, made him want to puke.
When they got out, they weren’t going to New Hampshire or to South Carolina. They were going back to Bobby’s, and he was going to reread every book there until he found an answer. Maybe he’d been going about this the wrong way. Maybe instead of eliminating whatever was doing this, he could add a modified curse, some sort of repulsion thing. Make Dean untouchable by any entity, spirit or corporeal. At this point, he didn’t think Dean would mind.
Maybe when he opened himself to whatever was left of his powers, the solution would present itself, as obvious as a monster emerging out of the shadows that had concealed it. He’d given his word to Dean that he’d abandon his demonic heritage, but he’d break that vow in a hummingbird’s heartbeat if it meant fixing this.
Making plans kept him from pounding his fists to meat against the cinderblock walls.
Dean slipped into the bottom bunk before the attack started, so as not to be caught out in the open. Sam heard him shifting around and imagined him taking off his clothes. He’d been so fucking beautiful during the strip search, like one of Michelangelo’s subjects come to life, all clean muscle and smooth lines.
Did Dean wish to be marble instead of flesh? Sam wouldn’t blame him. And still, if the day came that Dean didn’t want to live like this any more, Sam knew he’d say anything, bind Dean with every compulsion he knew, to keep him alive and with Sam.
Sam knew the entities had arrived when the bedframe started to shake. The metal was all in one piece, so it didn’t make much noise, other than a low scraping of the feet against the concrete floor. Sam figured that made sense: you didn’t want your prison bunks to be made anything that an inmate might unscrew to use as a weapon. He couldn’t hear Dean at all, no matter how much he tried. His brain helpfully presented him with an image: Dean, his shoulders bunched as he gripped the sides of the mattress, shoving his face into his pillow so as not to make a sound.
On the tier below, someone was singing some kind of Irish folk song that wasn’t Danny Boy. Sam first tried to tune it in to the exclusion of everything else, and when that failed, he opened his mouth and started his own low-volume rendition of every song he remembered off of Nevermind. With luck, it would make sure no one heard any sounds that might escape from Dean.
He was pretty sure that Dean understood why he was doing it. No, Dean would understand; he had to believe that. Not that Dean would enjoy Sam being considerate of his pain any more than he’d want Sam to ignore it.
The attack was particularly bad that night, lasting for what seemed like three or four times the usual eternity. Sam didn’t have a watch, and he wasn’t usually this close to the action, so he couldn’t be objectively sure, but he was convinced that it went on for at least two hours. Long enough for a shift change, long enough for him to work through his own version of Document and start in on The Joshua Tree.
Midway through One Tree Hill, the bunk stopped trembling. Sam kept singing, just to give Dean a little time. Then he heard what might have been a sob, buried in a grey and beaten-down pillow. It didn’t repeat, and Sam finished the song and shut up.
He was just sitting above Dean like a human Maginot Line, totally ineffectual. Hugging his knees to his chest in a way he knew was ridiculous on a grown man, Sam thought it was a good thing that all this had gone down after they’d defeated Azazel’s plan. Because, right now—
He wanted the world to burn.
Next part.
Not long after, while Sam was supposedly off researching the history of a haunted house, he broke down and called Bobby. The chill library basement had been empty for an hour, so he didn’t worry about being carted off to the looney bin for spouting insanity in public. He swore Bobby to secrecy, knowing how unlikely that was to work, and then explained the situation.
Bobby was silent for several long minutes.
“I never heard of anything like that,” he said at last. “I’ll look around best I can without talking to anyone else, but—”
“Yeah?” Sam asked, his fingers biting into the plastic of his phone, already knowing that he wasn’t going to like what was coming.
“Are you sure this is a problem? I know it’s not your way, son, but Dean ain’t never been too picky, if you know what I’m sayin’.”
Carefully, Sam put the phone on the table in front of him, to the side of the microfiche reader where he’d been sitting. His eyes stung from too long looking at badly scanned newsprint under poorly maintained fluorescent lighting, his fingers ached from being balled into fists, and his shoulders felt like bags of rocks.
This was the reasoning that Dean heard in his own head. In Bobby’s voice, in Dean’s own, probably in Dad’s and even Sam’s, because when had Dean ever let facts get in the way of a good fixation? Dean had convinced himself that he ought to feel lucky, and that there was something wrong with him for being less than perfectly thrilled that he got fucked three ways to Sunday every night.
“Sam? Sam?” Bobby’s voice from the little speaker was tinny and concerned, reminding him that, for all Bobby knew, something from the current hunt had just shown up and eaten Sam.
He unclenched his hands and picked up the phone. “I’m gonna let that one go, Bobby, because you haven’t seen Dean. It’s a problem.” He pressed ‘end’ and smiled in the empty room, feeling his chapped lips stretch and crack, because problem was funny, funny like calling the Black Death a health challenge.
In college, he’d taken a course on Slave Life in the Americas. It was easy to think that a person wouldn’t survive enslavement, degradation, forced labor, forced breeding, whipping, and all the other harms one set of humans had figured out how to inflict on another. And plenty of people did die. But not all. There were the lucky, if you called that lucky, and the adaptable. The survivors were not necessarily strong, though it helped.
Dean was adaptable.
Dean had adapted.
He trained like he was hoping to win a biathlon: target practice every time they found an empty field; crunches and pushups until Sam was exhausted just watching; the food on his plate everything that Dad had made them eat to build strength instead of the burgers and fries Dean loved; long runs with Sam. Dean hated running, hated that Sam had been able to outpace him since he’d hit six foot two. About five miles into a run, he got this grim look of I’m-gonna-get-through-this that was so hard to see that the only thing worse was the rage on his face when he thought Sam was deliberately slowing his own pace so that Dean could keep up.
It felt like watching Dean get devoured by army ants when Sam’s only weapon was a stick to poke them with.
But hey, Dean was hunting better than ever. If anything, the fact that he now stopped for a second outside any place where they’d encounter people, rolling his shoulders and taking a deep breath, had improved his interview skills. That moment of hesitation dampened down his usual—his previous—smarminess. Sam wasn’t entirely sure what strangers saw, but he thought it was a little-boy vulnerability, a sort of pleading for kindness.
And Dean being who he was and looking how he looked, strangers responded.
Adaptation.
****
They stopped to make silver shot out in a deserted field. Dean was in charge of melting the silver, because that task related to setting things on fire. When he poured the stream of molten metal down over the steel screen and into the tub, steam billowed up around him and Dean grunted; that was when Sam noticed that Dean wasn’t wearing any protective gear, other than gloves and goggles.
Interrupting the process would just increase the danger, so Sam screwed his fury down into himself and waited until Dean put the ladle down on the asbestos pad.
Then, before Dean could start prying the screen off the tub and examining the results, Sam grabbed him and pushed him back towards the car. “Hey!” Dean protested. Sam’s inspection found a black comma burnt through Dean’s shirt, just above his right elbow, and two holes like vampire bites over his left bicep.
“Take the fucking shirt off,” Sam ordered. Dean grimaced as the flannel rubbed against his skin under the pressure of Sam’s fingers.
The burns underneath were small but nasty, as Sam had known they’d be.
He’d spent the past week telling himself to keep quiet, telling himself that Dean would slow down of his own accord once the next hunt was finished.
Sam nodded to himself, then got the medical kit from the trunk.
“Sam,” Dean drawled, pulling off the goggles and grimacing in what he probably thought was an unconcerned smile.
Dean tried again a couple of times, saying Sam’s name in different inflections, while Sam forced Dean to sit on the hood, then applied antibiotic ointment and bandaged Dean’s arms.
Sam had to be careful with the bandages so that Dean retained a full range of motion, because Dean was going to jump right into the next fight he found.
He was almost finished; he just needed to wipe his forearm across his eyes to clear out the blurriness and sniff back the heaviness in his throat. Then he smoothed his hand over the taped-down gauze, rough against his fingertips. The white square nearly glowed against Dean’s pale, brown-freckled skin.
“Sam,” Dean said.
“Should I even bother?” he asked, not raising his eyes from Dean’s chest. “I mean, you don’t care that you’re not invincible, why should I?”
Dean was silent. Eventually Sam had to check, and found Dean staring down at him. Dean’s mouth worked, but no words came out. His face was pale under his heavy stubble, making the pink of his lips even more prominent.
Sam came out of his crouch and stepped back. Dean’s expression tightened. “I know I’m not invincible,” he ground out, each word sounding rough-hewn from rock.
“It hurts me when you get hurt,” Sam told him. That was it, the bottom of the barrel, the truth that could only cut Dean further but might just get him to pay attention.
Dean’s eyes darkened with some kind of fear. Sam had never wished more for the power to read minds. Then Dean firmed his jaw and jumped off the car, bending to retrieve his still-mostly-usable flannel shirt. “No, it doesn’t,” he said and stalked back over towards the tub, which was now gently steaming.
****
On what looked like a routine salt-and-burn just outside Cincinnati, they got caught in a kind of poltergeist showdown. Dean was a whirling dervish, moving as fast as the ghosts, as if he could guess where they were moving without seeing them, firing blast after blast into empty air. Sam commandeered an earthmover and just scraped the ground open, bursting the tops of a lot of graves, including some that were probably not resting uneasily until the Winchesters arrived. He was able to rig up a sort of sprayer system with a gas can and a length of hose, and the whole mess of corpses had gone up at once. Dean got out unscathed, and all Sam had was a bloody nose from hitting the edge of a gravestone.
The only problem was that the operation took so long that the cops arrived before they’d managed to escape. At least Dean had lost his shotgun in the fracas, so they were unarmed when they were apprehended.
Getting taken into custody was as fun as it ever was, in that it sucked donkey balls. Dean’s forethought had been useful: they’d both been carrying fake college IDs, and even if they looked a little overage for kids trying to pull off a stunt for a fraternity contest, the cops didn’t seem inclined to question the backstory. Instead, they seemed to think that treating Sam and Dean like potential hard-core criminals would teach them a valuable lesson. They’d be locked up at least a day, one of the cops said, until they could get in front of a judge and get bail.
Sam had a flash of terror when they were fingerprinted at the jail, but apparently their previous files had gone into some sort of archive when they’d been declared dead, and they were processed without any outcry.
And then it was time for the strip search. Sam tried not to be too obvious about his freakout, but somewhere between the time when he was told to open his mouth and the time when he was told to spread his cheeks he started shaking. One of the guards conducting the search found Sam’s apparent fright hilarious, and Dean’s unfriendly glare in response promised nothing good, so Sam ground his teeth and stood up straight. He’d throw up when they got out and he got a chance to be where Dean couldn’t see him.
Dean didn’t react to the search, not even when they had him squat and cough. Not even when the asshole guard told him that he had a cute butt. Face blank, like he’d just—checked out. Adapted himself away from the situation. He took the orange jail clothes that he was handed and got dressed, but without his usual grace.
A different, blessedly non-communicative officer took them to get a cell assignment, which was another thing Sam hadn’t anticipated. If Dean had to spend a night with anyone but Sam—
It felt like there was a rave going on in his chest, a thousand beats a minute. He concentrated harder than ever, trying to push his will into the intake officer and her computer: together, together, together.
“Tier 2, C10, both of you,” she said, dismissing them with a wave.
Sam felt his shoulders drop with relief.
“Hey,” Dean said, the first time he’d spoken since they’d hit the bright lights of the police station. “Your nose is bleeding again.”
Sam tilted his head up and pinched his nose between his finger and his thumb. After a second, Dean put his hand on Sam’s elbow, guiding him towards the next set of locked and guarded doors.
What with the time spent in processing at the police station and the transport from the police station to the jail, they’d arrived just in time for lunch. Sam tried not to think about the timing on that. If they hadn’t started after three am in order to work around Dean’s affliction, would the police even have shown up in time to catch them?
The cafeteria was the usual concrete-and-plastic nightmare. The bare floors were discolored with spots from accidents that had never really gotten cleaned up. The thick cinderblock walls had eighteen layers of paint, the top coat white and chipped away in places to expose last time’s mint green. The trays were brown, scratched and slightly spongy from years of use. The utensils were supersoft plastic and slightly smaller than knives and forks from the outside world, shorter even than Sam’s fingers and about as useful. The whole place smelled of old sweat and older grease.
Fortunately, if that was the right word, Sam was hungry enough that tasteless jail slop seemed reasonable.
Because this was jail, not prison, there was no telling what the various other residents had done, or allegedly done, though they weren’t in a terribly high-security facility. Sam just focused on the area around Dean, following him through the food line so that no one could come up behind him without going through Sam first.
The benches and tables were moderately crowded, but Sam found a space where they could sit across from each other. The guys nearest them edged away after Sam gave them a once-over.
Dean ate as if he were filling a gas tank, except that Dean was a lot more careful how he treated the Impala. He wasn’t hunched over his food or otherwise giving off really obvious victim vibes, which was good, and given their size and obvious teamwork, Sam figured that they were unlikely to get many challenges. He wanted nothing more than to reach out and put a reassuring hand on Dean’s arm, but even if Dean wouldn’t bite his head off that would most likely put them in more danger than keeping himself aloof. A little voice in his head wondered: what if Dean wouldn’t bite his head off? What if Dean was willing to accept comfort, at long last?
He poked at the food remaining on his plate. The green stuff hadn’t been bad, but he was willing to bet that even the rats would avoid the orange stuff as long as they could.
****
After lunch there was time in the yard. In this case the yard was a square in the middle of the facility, gray concrete walls stretching four stories up all around them and the cloudy white sky above them like the top of a box. Bleachers ringed the sides, except at the exits and along one side where there were a couple of netless basketball hoops.
There were no weights out. Sam guessed that, with this being a temporary facility, they didn’t do too much to keep the cons (or pre-cons) from being bored.
That meant that the inmates had to make their own fun. Sam and Dean ignored the groups clumping irregularly and the few loners and wordlessly headed for the spot that was the farthest away from the most people. It was like a reverse Traveling Salesman problem, he thought, or Traveling Hunter, but he didn’t grin because he didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to take offense.
As it turned out, he didn’t need to.
They’d only been sitting on the bottom row of the bleachers for a couple of minutes before a medium-large group started walking towards them. Sam checked out the guards at the entrance to the yard, who were very much not paying attention.
Sam counted eight in the group. It wasn’t bad odds if they didn’t get pried away from the bleachers, though a couple of the guys looked like bouncers. He felt Dean tensing up next to him.
Sam scanned the group. The leader, a bald guy with a nose like a hawk’s beak and a tattoo sitting over his collarbones like an elaborate necklace, was in the center of the group. Sam ID’d the two top lieutenants, one on the right and one on the left, though the guy closest to the leader on the left was the comic relief, a short wiry fellow who would have to have a smart mouth and a bad temper to maintain his place.
“These are our seats,” one of the lieutenants said, fake-friendly.
He heard Dean breathe beside him. There was really no way to avoid violence, he thought, so he stood, and stood and stood, working every inch of his height. One thug on the edges of the group took an involuntary step back, but one of the other enforcers was at least as tall as Sam and as wide across the shoulders as a shotgun was long.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as Dean edged a little bit away from him, preparing for what came next. “Do you mind?”
The little guy laughed. “Yeah,” said the lieutenant. “We mind. See, these are all our seats.” He waved his hand in a sloppy arc that encompassed most of the yard, though Sam was willing to bet that these guys didn’t run the black areas or the Hispanic areas, and part of him was annoyed at the man’s presumption. Just because they were new didn’t make them stupid. “But if your pretty boy here wants to pay the fine—” He raised his eyebrows.
It was all Sam could do not to roll his eyes. “Yeah, we’re gonna have to say no, thanks.”
And then his first punch took down the talkative lieutenant just as Dean’s flattened the other one, which Sam only saw out of the corner of his eye.
“‘Pretty boy’?” Dean asked, a smile in his voice. Sam kicked the guy in front of him in the nuts; the thuds he heard indicated that Dean was doing something similar. “Seriously, guys, get some new dialogue.”
Sam grabbed the leader and one of the backup thugs of about the same height and smashed their heads together, then ducked a blow from the refrigerator-sized inmate. He jumped over a tangle of limbs on the ground and had a chance to check on Dean, flushed and grinning.
They had a quick and silent conversation that, had it used words, would have featured the phrase ‘what the hell, why not.’ So Sam dropped to his knees and bent forward, while Dean barrelled into a roll right across Sam’s back that put Dean’s feet squarely in Refrigerator’s gut. The momentum was enough to stagger the guy back for long enough that Sam was able to stand and dart forward to punch him in the neck, one two three, then get back out of the way. Dean, meanwhile, had bounced off Refrigerator and jumped to his feet like he was spring-launched. He wasn’t wasting much time on the last man standing, just a knee to the balls and then one fist to the stomach and the other to the chin as his target collapsed like a map folding up.
Refrigerator blinked at Sam twice, then fell over onto the talkative lieutenant, who had been scrambling to stand.
The lieutenant who hadn’t talked and the little guy were getting back to their feet. Sam’s blood was pounding like a tidal wave inside him. He smiled at the men. The tangible, hittable men. The lieutenant stared at him for a second, and then bent to start dragging his semiconscious leader away.
The little guy reached behind his back and produced a shiv that looked like it had begun useful life as a toothbrush. Sam sighed. “Dude, put that thing away and we’ll show you some respect, okay?”
“Sam—” Dean whined, but he was only teasing.
Mr. Little had plenty of smile lines, but the look in his eyes was death. “Fuck you,” he snarled. Like Dean said, these guys needed new dialogue.
Sam shrugged and turned his back.
Red flag, bull. Sam waited, stepped and dropped, dodging the strike and using a roundhouse kick to knock Little’s legs out from under him. He was slightly surprised that Dean hadn’t intervened, but didn’t have time to worry about it. He grabbed the man’s feet as he stood up, dragging the body along the ground until it was dangling vertically. Sam tightened his grip on Little’s ankles and thrust down as if he were trying to set a fencepost.
Little’s head hit the ground with a satisfying thump. Sam pushed Little’s now-limp legs away, and the unconscious body slumped to the ground.
Sam brushed his hands together, cleaning off the dirt that had accumulated, and looked around at the nervous staring faces that had clustered around. He tilted his head, fought off a Dean-like smirk, and asked the world in general, “Any questions?”
There were none. After Sam nodded permission, a couple of inmates who hadn’t been involved in the initial confrontation dragged the remaining unconscious thugs away. Dean stood with his arms folded, scowling, and stayed that way even when Sam sat back down on the bleachers.
The guards were gossiping and looking over their way, but still showed no inclination to get involved. Sam imagined they weren’t getting paid enough to do so.
Five minutes later, he broke down. “What’s your problem?” he asked, shading his eyes with his hand as he stared up at Dean.
Dean tightened his mouth as if he wanted to try the silent treatment, but that lasted all of ten seconds. “Gosh, Sam, I don’t know,” he bit out. “Could it have something to do with what happened the last time you turned your back on a guy with a knife?”
Sam rocked back on the ribbed metal bench. Hadn’t seen that one coming. Which was, he had to admit, Dean’s point. So to speak. He clamped down on the utterly inappropriate smile that wanted to spread out on his face.
But hell, this fight had been coming for a damn sight longer than the one they’d just finished. “Well, look who’s back. The blessed Dean Winchester, martyr and patron saint of hypocrites.”
“Fuck you, Sam, I’m not the one begging some jailhouse rat to stick a blade in me!” Dean’s voice was low, but when Sam stood up to get a better position, everyone else in the yard stopped moving.
“No, you’d prefer to get killed on a hunt!” He stepped close, trying to keep from shouting.
“Oh, that’s rich,” Dean snapped back, his voice dripping with contempt. “Who’s the one who charged in front of a dire wolf last week, hunh? Who’s the one who dropped his fucking shotgun with that zombie and decided it’d be fun to take it apart with his bare hands? Before you go nominating me for the Reckless All-Stars, you take a good long look at yourself.”
Sam stared at him, full of too many things to say and no order to say them in.
Dean nodded to himself. “But this ain’t about that, is it? This is about—” He dropped his eyes from Sam’s and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “I’m handling it, Sam.”
“I’m not,” Sam said, and knew it for pure truth as soon as it came out of his mouth. “You have to let me do something.” Dean knew what he meant, of course: magic, probably black.
Dean’s hands twisted by his sides. “If you don’t have any new ideas, there’s no sense in going back over the same old shit.”
“Just give me two weeks with those books, Dean. I don’t—I hate to see you like this.”
“I’d be golden if you’d just shut the fuck up about it.” Dean sat down, his shoulders straining against the jail jumpsuit.
“You get attacked every night!” The words came out louder than Sam intended, and Dean flinched minutely.
“Evil’s been fucking me since I was four years old, so tell me what’s new,” Dean snapped.
Sam got that Dean would rather be hopeless than have his hopes crushed. But the only reason they weren’t already risking their lives on another hunt was the barbed wire surrounding the jailhouse. Adapting wasn’t working. “It’s not inevitable, Dean. We can do something to change it.”
Dean’s voice was low and furious, raw with humiliation. “I come.”
“What?”
“It’s sex, I come, all right?”
Did Dean think he didn’t know that? “That doesn’t mean you want it.”
Now Dean was the one inspecting Sam like he was from Venus. “I’m pretty sure it does,” Dean said.
“That’s just a physical reaction!” He couldn’t believe he was having to argue this. “If you’d choose not to do it, then you don’t want it.”
“If a chick makes your dick hard, that’s just a fact. Doesn’t matter if you think she’s a bitch from hell. All that means is, hellbitches get you hard.” Dean swiveled on the bench, facing Sam and waving his hands around as if he were still the all-knowing big brother explaining the natural order of the world. “It’s like, if you get cut, then you bleed. Wanting won’t do shit when what you need is stitches.”
Sam knew they were both speaking English, but that didn’t seem to be helping. He pushed his hair off his forehead, leaning towards Dean. “Okay, but bleeding doesn’t mean you want to bleed, right? It’s something that happens to your body.”
Dean ignored the fact that Sam had just totally flipped his analogy, caught up in his fervor to impart the Tao of Dean: “The point is, there are people out there who need saving and things that need killing, and we’re the ones to do it. So until you figure out a cheap and easy way to get my fan club to stop showing up, I don’t want to hear about this again.”
Sam shut his eyes and tried very hard to keep his face still. Eventually, the urge to scream and cry passed, and he didn’t. According to Dean, that meant he hadn’t wanted to, he realized, and the bitter smile on his face kept Dean silent for the rest of the time in the yard. The other inmates monitored them out of the corners of their eyes and didn’t make any sudden moves in their direction, which was just how Sam liked it.
****
In the close quarters of their cell, neither of them were inclined to take the fight further. There was nothing much to do other than discuss likely hunts, assuming that their luck held and they were allowed to post bail like ordinary, average grave desecrators. Dean was partial to a supposed siren infestation up in New Hampshire, while Sam was holding out for something warmer and more southern, maybe one of the hauntings in South Carolina they’d had on the list for a while.
The thing was, there were only a few reliable topics between them. Music degenerated too quickly into well-rehearsed insults. Past exploits bored Sam, and anyway they were largely off the table now that they didn’t talk about Dean’s sex life. Pop culture sometimes worked, though Dean’s horror movies and Sam’s fondness for action movies starring regular Joes didn’t overlap much. Mostly if they weren’t talking about the job, they talked about the past, growing up together and apart, but Sam just didn’t want to do that when they were behind bars, no matter how temporary the captivity.
Eventually they both fell silent, listening to waves of conversation and occasional disputes from the cells around. Sound carried, in here; Sam even caught the unmistakable sounds of someone getting his rocks off, up and to the left of their cell. He counted the bars and calculated the force it would take to break them. Then he gamed out three different ways to get out of the building, if it became necessary.
Just after eleven, right when the guards announced lights-out, Sam pulled the gray wool blankets off of their mattresses, old things as scratchy as horsehide, and shook them out. With the bunk pushed into the back corner, he stuck one end of each blanket under the top mattress, far enough in that the weight of the mattress would hold it in place, and tugged them until they covered both of the exposed sides of the bottom bunk, a makeshift canopy bed.
Dean sized up the contrivance, his face as still as a mannequin’s in the bad light bleeding in from the few bulbs still lit out on the tier. Then he nodded. “Thanks,” he said.
Sam’s heart seized up. The idea that Dean would thank him, be grateful for his assistance in managing this nightmare, made him want to puke.
When they got out, they weren’t going to New Hampshire or to South Carolina. They were going back to Bobby’s, and he was going to reread every book there until he found an answer. Maybe he’d been going about this the wrong way. Maybe instead of eliminating whatever was doing this, he could add a modified curse, some sort of repulsion thing. Make Dean untouchable by any entity, spirit or corporeal. At this point, he didn’t think Dean would mind.
Maybe when he opened himself to whatever was left of his powers, the solution would present itself, as obvious as a monster emerging out of the shadows that had concealed it. He’d given his word to Dean that he’d abandon his demonic heritage, but he’d break that vow in a hummingbird’s heartbeat if it meant fixing this.
Making plans kept him from pounding his fists to meat against the cinderblock walls.
Dean slipped into the bottom bunk before the attack started, so as not to be caught out in the open. Sam heard him shifting around and imagined him taking off his clothes. He’d been so fucking beautiful during the strip search, like one of Michelangelo’s subjects come to life, all clean muscle and smooth lines.
Did Dean wish to be marble instead of flesh? Sam wouldn’t blame him. And still, if the day came that Dean didn’t want to live like this any more, Sam knew he’d say anything, bind Dean with every compulsion he knew, to keep him alive and with Sam.
Sam knew the entities had arrived when the bedframe started to shake. The metal was all in one piece, so it didn’t make much noise, other than a low scraping of the feet against the concrete floor. Sam figured that made sense: you didn’t want your prison bunks to be made anything that an inmate might unscrew to use as a weapon. He couldn’t hear Dean at all, no matter how much he tried. His brain helpfully presented him with an image: Dean, his shoulders bunched as he gripped the sides of the mattress, shoving his face into his pillow so as not to make a sound.
On the tier below, someone was singing some kind of Irish folk song that wasn’t Danny Boy. Sam first tried to tune it in to the exclusion of everything else, and when that failed, he opened his mouth and started his own low-volume rendition of every song he remembered off of Nevermind. With luck, it would make sure no one heard any sounds that might escape from Dean.
He was pretty sure that Dean understood why he was doing it. No, Dean would understand; he had to believe that. Not that Dean would enjoy Sam being considerate of his pain any more than he’d want Sam to ignore it.
The attack was particularly bad that night, lasting for what seemed like three or four times the usual eternity. Sam didn’t have a watch, and he wasn’t usually this close to the action, so he couldn’t be objectively sure, but he was convinced that it went on for at least two hours. Long enough for a shift change, long enough for him to work through his own version of Document and start in on The Joshua Tree.
Midway through One Tree Hill, the bunk stopped trembling. Sam kept singing, just to give Dean a little time. Then he heard what might have been a sob, buried in a grey and beaten-down pillow. It didn’t repeat, and Sam finished the song and shut up.
He was just sitting above Dean like a human Maginot Line, totally ineffectual. Hugging his knees to his chest in a way he knew was ridiculous on a grown man, Sam thought it was a good thing that all this had gone down after they’d defeated Azazel’s plan. Because, right now—
He wanted the world to burn.
Next part.
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He wanted the world to burn.
How much do I love your scary Sam?
Lots. A whole lot.
On to the finale!
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I like angry Sam.
It just hurts that Dean isn't angry too.
and you're mean for making it get worse:(
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