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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Two weeks later, Sam woke screaming from an actual, unprompted vision. Dean was there with an arm wrapped around his shoulder and a soft voice coaxing him back to reality. Sam knew it was stupid and weak to rely on someone else, but Dean was right there and he didn’t have a competing agenda. Sam curled into his chest and held on, soaking up his warmth until the worst of the aftershocks had faded.
Sam pulled back and blinked, seeing the blotch of blood on Dean’s T-shirt. “I ruined your shirt,” he said, sounding young and dazed even in his own ears.
“Why are you even talking?” Dean asked. The worry in his voice made Sam’s heart rattle in his chest. There had been something terrible done in the house in his vision, and he couldn’t avoid the feeling that Dean was at risk. But Dean was here, solid, wrapped around him.
“I’m just saying, you should take it off,” he tried. He tugged at the shirt, suddenly wanting Dean’s skin more than anything.
“You’re all—” Dean protested, but he raised his arms, and Sam could already feel his cock stirring through his sweats.
“Don’t worry,” Sam told him. “I’ll let you do all the work.”
In the morning, Sam took a look at the T-shirt before he threw it out. The blood was a carnation, a stiff tangle like a mess of tea leaves, dried red-brown. Divination had never been his strength, but when he looked at it, he had a strong impression of one word: family. Which just went to show that divination was about as useful as a Magic Eight-Ball.
The sketch he drew of his dream was no more helpful. Eventually he admitted his strong sense that the tree and the house behind it was connected to them, but Dean just pointed out that, if they were headed to a hunt there, then there was obviously a connection. They still didn’t know where they were going, other than that it was a relatively large single-family house.
Dean didn’t like it when he proposed to do a ritual to bring on a vision that would give them more specific information, controlling by magic what his own mind couldn’t rein in. “How’d you find out about that?” he asked, and he wasn’t suspicious, exactly, but Sam smiled as if he were embarrassed and thought fast.
“I knew you’d react like this, so I’ve been doing some research myself. There are lots of records of psychics—” Dean winced. “Look, not everything supernatural is evil.”
“Yeah, some of it’s just dangerous.” Dean pushed the sketch away from himself and stood, moving away from the table where they’d been sitting.
Sam worked on a glare of his own. He tried to go along with Dean whenever possible—that trust thing, plus it turned out that non-angry sex with Dean was better than angry sex with Dean, though honestly even the angry sex set a benchmark for quality. But his instinct told him that this vision was pointing him in the direction of Father’s larger plan, so Dean was going to have to listen. “I can do this, Dean. You’re the one always telling me what a good hunter I am. This is something I can bring to the hunt.”
Dean rubbed his hand across his mouth. “I knew you’d get a big head—” And then they both rolled their eyes and snickered like fourteen-year-olds, which led to Dean whacking Sam on the shoulder, which led to a wrestling match that destroyed a chair (wagon wheel back; better off dead) and a lamp (red fringe on the shade; ditto) and ended with them sprawled on the less nasty bed (the one under the sombrero arrangement that served as a wall decoration).
Sam blew a raspberry into Dean’s armpit. Dean, who was still panting, shoved weakly at Sam, and he rolled off of Dean and stared up at the ceiling. “So, the ritual,” he said, imagining that the shadows in the stucco above him formed pictures of Father and his siblings, their faces wreathed in flames.
Dean pulled at the cactus-print sheet underneath them, wiping off his stomach. “Don’t like it,” he said.
Sam turned, propping himself up on one arm, even though that put his weight down right on the wet spot. “Hey,” he said. “You’ll be right there to protect me.”
****
The ritual gave him a migraine and made his ears bleed, which was a first.
“The car, the trunk,” was the first coherent thing he managed to say. Dean continued to glare at him, a muscle jumping in his cheek. Sam reached up and touched it, Dean’s stubble sharp against his fingertips. “Help me look,” he said, softening it to an apology.
Dean refused to talk, but he let Sam lean on him all the way out to the parking lot, then propped Sam against the rear door while he popped the trunk.
Sam had a passing familiarity with the contents, but he wasn’t looking for a weapon. He opened the false bottom, ignoring the dangling dreamcatcher, shoving aside the shotguns despite Dean’s noise of distress, moving cases and boxes of ammo until he reached the bare metal of the bottom.
The beige shoebox was jammed up against the far end of the trunk, squashed at the edges from years of misuse. The lid was spindled and broken, sliding off the box even before Sam had extracted it. “Hey,” Dean protested, his voice thin with anxiety, as papers and photos threatened to cascade across the trunk. Sam slowed down and brought the whole thing out without losing any of the piles.
Back in the room, Dean alternated between hovering over Sam’s shoulder to look at each picture and scrap of paper and getting as far away from the box as possible. He made about twenty trips to the ice machine and the candy machines. Each time, he’d return and sit on the edge of the bed with his legs jiggling until he gave in and stalked back over to Sam.
Time had faded the ink on all the official records and made the photos stick together. Worried about how Dean would react if he ruined one, Sam pulled them apart as slowly as he dared.
Dean’s mother had been a beautiful woman, blonde with a mischievous smile. And Dean’s bastard father had been a darker version of Dean—slightly sadder eyes, lips not quite as lush, but still enough to stop a heart at twenty paces. They seemed happy in the pictures, up until the very last one where they were joined by a towheaded young boy and a blobby little infant, too unformed to look like anyone.
He put the pictures down, still at a loss to identify any connection to his vision, and rubbed at his forehead. He would have sworn—
Wait.
He picked up the final picture of the happy Winchester family and, instead of looking at their faces, examined the background. “Dean?” he asked. “Where was this photo taken?”
An hour later they were on the road to Kansas.
****
They had to stop halfway through because Dean was flipping out too badly. Sam blew him in the front seat, and that calmed him down for about half an hour. At least Dean’s agitation reminded Sam that he didn’t need to be following Dean’s lead all the time.
Work the case, he reminded Dean. And Dean didn’t really know what had happened when he’d been four years old, which meant that they needed to start from the basics. That led them to Mike Guenther, who told them about John Winchester’s predilection for fortune-tellers. And that got them to Missouri Moseley.
The psychic greeted Dean by name, which meant that Dean started out freaked, more so when she couldn’t do the same with Sam.
Sam had locked himself down egg-smooth, nothing left on him to sense, before they got within eight blocks of her. At least she didn’t spend too much time commenting on that. She was too busy looking Dean over and commisserating with him about Papa Winchester’s decision to go AWOL. “Your daddy loves you very much,” she cooed at him, then shot Sam a dirty glance suggesting that even without the benefit of her powers she knew that he’d silently called bullshit on that sentiment.
Missouri’s home remedies for poltergeists were, unsurprisingly, ineffective. If this was demon-related, then she was doing the spiritual equivalent of issuing a speeding ticket to a spree killer.
When Dean’s mother showed up, not behaving like any haunt ought to, Sam knew that matters had gone from confusing to downright dangerous.
She told Dean she was sorry, but she stopped in her tracks when she saw Sam. Sam was going to break her son apart and use him for kindling. Even if Sam didn’t know the details of Father’s plans he knew that much, and still Dean’s own mother just stared at him like he was some kind of savior. And then she burned herself up to save them. To save Sam.
Later, when they were lying together in the darkness, Dean admitted that he’d never heard of such a thing, one revenant able to defeat another. “She looked just like I remembered,” he said thickly, and Sam didn’t think he was talking about the flames. Sam did his best to hush Dean, pressing him back against the tired and sweaty sheets and kissing the salt from his cheeks.
Dean shook for a long time, trembling in the cage of Sam’s arms. All it meant was that Dean was weak, like most people were weak. Sam liked Dean, even though he knew it was a weakness of his own, and he didn’t want to be reminded of Dean’s vulnerabilities. That was the only reason he felt an answering heaviness in his own chest.
****
When they were on the road again the next morning, Dean admitted that Missouri had pulled him aside and warned him about Sam: “She said she couldn’t see my path, long as I was with you. That there was nothing around you but light. I said so what, and she said she’d never had that happen before. Said, be careful around him, you don’t know what he might do.”
Sam frowned, wondering if he needed to do anything about Missouri just yet. “Maybe it’s some psychic-on-psychic thing, because of all the multiplying paths feeding back into one another when both people can see possible futures. I don’t know how these powers work,” he finished, a little mournfully. The first sentence was essentially true, although Missouri’s real problem had been the veils Sam had thrown on himself. Otherwise she might have gotten feedback from him and known what he was.
Dean must have taken Sam’s pretense of uncertainty as a rebuke, because he reached out without taking his eyes from the road and cupped Sam’s shoulder with his hand, his grip warm and sure through layers of cotton. “Hey,” he said. “Nobody’s asking you to know it all. But I’m not worried. Between you and some lady who gave my dad a couple of cryptic hints about demons way back when, I know where the smart money is.”
Sam knew what Father would say: It’s Dean’s fault for not seeing what you truly are. You’re only behaving according to your nature.
He turned his face to the window and looked past his reflection.
****
They killed a kelpie with red-hot iron hooks. It was sweaty and worrisome. The iron was heavy even with a mental boost, the fire they used to lure the kelpie threw off sparks and smoke so that visibility was nil, and Sam was convinced he was going to move the wrong way and impale Dean.
All to save a couple of kids who’d probably grow up to be as greedy and sinful as the rest of them.
“Nice work,” Dean said when it was over.
“I’m not a kindergartender!” Sam snapped at him. “I don’t need a fucking gold star every time we do a job!”
Dean blinked at him, then turned away.
He felt a churning in his stomach, like there was a garbage disposal inside him grinding away. “Dean—”
“Nah, you’re right,” Dean said, still not facing him. “You know what you’re doin’.”
“Because of you,” he said. The thought of Dean stopping was even worse than the relentless pressure of his praise. It was stupid to be angry at Dean for believing in him; that was just who Dean was, saving innocents and assuming that everyone human was innocent. “Dean, I—sometimes I don’t like myself very much. So when you say something like that, it makes me feel—” He stumbled to a halt; Dean had swiveled back, and his expression was one of pure mortification. “If I stop talking, will you pretend I never started?”
“Works for me,” Dean told him.
Sam swallowed. “Think those hooks are cool enough to drag out of the water?”
“Let’s check.”
And they did, together.
****
“Coordinates?” Sam asked, not really believing his ears. “Your father sends you a message for the first time since we met, and it’s a couple of numbers?”
“It’s a job,” Dean said, as if that were the end of it.
Dean’s quiet manly endurance was gorgeous, yes, but Sam was too annoyed to let it go. Six months without a word, plus however long it had been before Sam showed up. Not that Father had done even as much to keep Sam up to date, but Father was (not to put too fine a point on it) evil. On purpose. “So that’s it? You’re just going to jump, like—”
Dean took a loud, ragged breath that shut Sam up quicker than a punch. “Least I know he’s alive. Least I know he still thinks I can do the job.”
Suddenly it was too hard to be looking at Dean from across the room. “Hey,” Sam said, and Dean allowed himself to be pulled into a hug. Sam pressed his face into the join of Dean’s neck and shoulder. Dean exhaled and slumped against Sam, letting Sam take his weight. “You don’t have to talk about it,” Sam said. “But I want to know what happened between you.”
Dean’s laugh had only pain in it. “One day he just—he ordered me not to follow him, and by the time I decided it didn’t matter how much he yelled at me, the trail was dead. That’s what I was doin’ when we met, you know—tracked him all the way to California, but he was long gone.”
“Do you think—maybe it has something to do with the demon, the yellow-eyed one.” Sam held his breath. Dean might know something without understanding its significance.
“I don’t know,” Dean admitted. “I spent my whole life training to fight that thing. I guess he just decided I wasn’t ever--”
Sam rubbed slow circles, widdershins, on Dean’s back. “Maybe he was trying to protect you.”
“He left me,” Dean said, then pressed his face into Sam’s shoulder, hard enough to hurt.
“I’m here,” Sam said, not really aware that he’d even spoken until the full-body shudder went through Dean. He said it again when the backs of his knees hit the bed, and again when Dean was stretched out beneath him, slow fat tears wetting the pillow to either side of Dean’s head.
“We don’t have to go,” he suggested afterwards, while Dean was still panting open-mouthed next to him.
“It’s a hunt,” Dean said, still a little stuffy. “Means people in trouble. And he might--” Sam was glad that Dean didn’t finish the sentence, but he knew that Dean still hoped they’d find his father.
Rockford, Illinois it was.
Sam was a little worried about how easily he’d given in. Dean was so used to taking the lead on hunts, and when Father showed up again it would surely be in the guise of a hunt; Sam needed Dean to accept his guidance. All Dean’s goodwill wouldn’t be enough if it wasn’t coupled with obedience.
****
Dr. Ellicott’s little rage-generation trick obviously worked pretty well on normals. Fortunately for Sam, learning to fight Andy off had left him prepared to shrug off most forms of psychic influence, though he had to admit that pure emotion was powerful. As it was, after he suppressed the impulse to go up there and kill Kat and Gavin to shut their whining mouths, he was pretty sure he had it under control.
Still, when Dean showed up, the temptation to use the situation was just too great (and maybe the residual emotion played a role). “I’m sick of you ordering me around,” he told Dean, threatening him with the shotgun. “This isn’t my life, this isn’t what I want. I don’t need you.” The words were bitter as burnt hair on his tongue, feeling more like lies than they should have, and the discomfort only made him angrier.
Dean didn’t flinch. “That’s just rock salt, dude, it’s not gonna kill me.”
Sam tossed the weapon aside. “I don’t want to kill you.” It was just like sparring, except that he was the one holding back now (just like he was always holding back on his powers, so it was really the same as ever) and he waited until Dean had gotten in some hits that would leave him visibly bruised before ‘snapping out of it’ and going with him to find and burn the good doctor’s bones.
“Good thing you fought him off,” Dean said speculatively after they’d seen the civilians out safely.
Fortunately he still had his get-out-of-jail-free card: “I felt him in my head, and I kind of—pushed back, I guess? I’m sorry I didn’t do it in time, those things I said--”
Dean twitched and shifted his body away from Sam. “Whatever. Listen, maybe we ought to be spending more time on these powers of yours. I mean, if you’re fighting off ghosts with nothing more than your freaky brains—”
“I don’t want to be doing this forever, that much is true. But it’s not about you, Dean.”
He almost regretted it when Dean’s face went dead for a second.
Dean rubbed his thumb over his bottom lip. “Let’s get out of here,” he said after a moment.
Later, wrapped in his steel security blanket, he had more to say. “Most hunters fear psychics,” he told Sam, his words heavy with warning. “Especially if they do more than tell you vague shit about the future. I’m not tryin’ to keep you from figuring this out. I just don’t wanna take you to anybody that might sell you out, decide you’re dangerous.”
Sam nodded. He didn’t want that either. “I’m fine,” he promised.
“You know that for sure?”
Sam wished he could tell Dean the whole truth about the powers. Not to hurt him, like Dr. Ellicott would have wanted, but to reassure him that everything was under control. But it wasn’t safe, not yet. “If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”
It wasn’t a lie, even if Dean didn’t know all the details.
****
Immediately after that, as if John Winchester had decided to start taunting his son, there was another message. Six names this time. It took Dean all of an hour to figure out that their only connection was the route they took through Indiana during the second week of April.
Someone was indulging a bit too much in that good old-time religion.
The tree-worshippers of Burkitsville weren’t thrilled when Sam managed to convince their current passing-through couple to let Dean fix their car and get them on the road. Neither of them expected the sheriff to make up a traffic violation out of whole cloth, and then even after they’d been pulled over they didn’t understand the magnitude of the town’s involvement in the sacrificial tradition. So neither of them resisted being handcuffed, and the last thing Sam heard after the sheriff slammed his head into the door of the squad car was Dean’s howl of rage.
When he woke, he was in a crappy jail. The good news was that it, along with the rest of the town, had been abandoned for the celebration of the ritual, so he didn’t even have to conceal his tracks.
He rescued Dean--that was going to be good teasing fodder for a while, at least—and the random local girl chosen to be his feminine counterpart. It wasn’t her fault, and she was too scared to make any sort of play for Dean, so he wasn’t mad.
The girl, who was fairly pissed at the betrayal by her adopted hometown, showed them the First Tree. They burnt it to the roots.
Dean thought that the collapse of the town’s fortunes would be punishment enough for the people who’d tried to kill him. He hadn’t seen himself tied down and struggling. Treated like a fucking meal, like he was worth nothing except as a sacrifice for someone else’s benefit.
Dean stopped them two towns over and checked them into Holly’s Motel and Restaurant. A holly leaf stood in for the ‘o’ in Holly, and somehow Dean had sensed that the whole place was decorated with a holly motif. Their room was sort of like a Christmas display in a furniture store, if the window dresser had gotten enormously overexcited. Especially after the tree worshippers, it was easy to imagine that something was looking at them through the leaves and berries of the wallpaper, but Dean just told him he was being paranoid.
After they’d settled in, he brushed his teeth and left Dean under a spell that would keep him asleep as long as no one approached him.
When he returned to Burkitsville, the girl was gone, but the rest of the townsfolk were mostly still congregated in the old orchard, moping or digging in the ashes to see if there was anything to save. That was convenient.
The sheriff saw him first. “Haven’t you done enough?” he asked in a voice as cracked as bark. He seemed older, flatter than he had a few hours ago.
Sam tilted his head. “I’m going to go with ‘no.’” He concentrated, raising his power. He was out of practice, and this was a good reminder that he needed to sneak off more often, even if Dean didn’t like it.
After the first black branch impaled the sheriff right between the eyes, the other worshippers started screaming. Then they ran.
Neither helped.
****
On the way back, he stopped at an all-night diner by the highway for coffee.
As soon as he ordered, a blonde girl with a pixie cut and a wicked smile slid into the seat across from him. “Hey there,” she said. “What’s a guy like you doing out on a night like this?”
He examined her with every sense. “Arba,” he said, and she jerked her chin once in acknowledgement. “Nice body.”
She pursed her lips. “Are you jealous that you can’t switch? Not that you have much to worry about, at least for the next ten years. Have you been working out?” The lasciviousness on her face was extreme even for her.
“If you have a message to deliver, spit it out. Otherwise—”
She splayed her elbows out on the table in front of her and propped her head up in her hands, cute as a button. “What, are you going to exorcise me right here? I don’t think so, little Sammy.”
“Arba,” he said, leaning forward and bracing his hands on the table edge, in case he needed to tip it over onto her, “not half an hour ago I killed four times as many people as are in this place. You’d be dessert.”
“Touchy,” she chided. “And here I was planning on giving you the heads-up about home sweet home.”
He waited. That was the thing with most demons, even the greater ones: they could plot and plan, but it was all but impossible for them to avoid gloating when they had a victim right in front of them. Sam thought the impatience had something to do with the Fall.
“Fine,” she said, just as his coffee came; she sat back in her seat and gestured the waitress away without looking. “You’ll be shocked to hear that it’s down to Ava and Jake. Ansem and Claudia are still alive, but they’re just waiting to see who comes out on top.”
“I should care because …?”
“Come on,” she said. “Ava and Jake are wild to know what you’re doing out here.” Now she’d started to build a little hex symbol out of sugar packets: a circle of white, slashes of pink and yellow shaping and directing the curse.
“You can tell them: I have no idea.” They couldn’t afford to believe him, of course.
“And this hunter, the pretty one. What’s he supposed to do?” Upon further consideration, Arba removed one yellow line of sugar substitute and started an arc of blue packets, reaching through the circle towards Sam.
Sam shrugged. The temptation was to disclaim any interest in Dean. But nobody bothered to explain that they didn’t care about a tool. “You should take this up with Father.”
“So you’re just taking his orders now? That’s not what I expect from you.”
He smiled, letting it widen slowly. “Like you said. Close to endgame. Pretty soon you’re going to have to pick sides too, Arba.” His hand darted out, grabbing her before she could finish the curse that would have killed every human in the diner, including him. He felt the bones of her stolen wrist grate together. She blew a kiss at him and brought her other hand up to sweep the table clear.
“As soon as somebody wins, I’ll pick a side,” she said when he released her. “The point is, Father’s not the only one watching. He might think you’re the second coming of Judas, but there are other players in the game. You might want to start thinking about how to impress us.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” he told her, already standing.
“Aren’t you going to drink your coffee?” she asked him, all wide eyes.
He tossed a few dollars on the table and didn’t bother responding. Emergency trigger on the spell or not, he didn’t like the thought of Dean alone, and this was not a helpful conversation.
Father always said that the Nephilim were a dead end, a failed experiment. Of course, his human children were also being used as mechanical rabbits to encourage the Nephilim to continue the race; that was just efficient. Arba was the strongest of them, and if she was involving herself, then they really were close to the final stages of Father’s plan.
He had the feeling that when the fuse burned down, he’d better make sure that Arba was in the blast radius.
****
Somehow, he’d assumed that Dean’s recklessness would keep Dean safe from everything he hunted, like some cosmic dare. He’d forgotten that the house always wins.
So now Sam was in this white corridor, stink of adhesive and blood underneath, light so bright that it punched holes into his brain, while a worried-looking man spoke to him like he was an idiot. “We’ve done all we can. We can try and keep him comfortable at this point. But, I’d give him a couple weeks, at most, maybe a month.”
He stared at the doctor, wondering whether there’d be a better answer if the man were pinned screaming to the far wall.
The doctor was saying something about miracles, and Sam nearly did smear him across the white tile, but he had to stay calm.
To his left, a machine bleeped and then went silent, followed by a babble of voices and the thrum of pounding feet. A bulb popped in the ceiling, and then another.
When he was sure he wasn’t accidentally going to destroy Dean’s heart monitor, he went to Dean’s room.
Dean was paper-pale, only a hint of color showing in the creases of his lips. The skin around his eyes was sunken, dark as his stubble. He turned his head when Sam entered. “Have you ever actually watched daytime TV?” he asked, in a voice that was tinfoil compared to his usual steel. “It’s terrible.”
“I talked to your doctor.”
Dean ignored him. “Every goddamn one of those talk-show hosts? Possessed. Before I check out, we should head to Chicago and exorcise Oprah on live TV, what do you think?”
“Dean.”
“Yeah.” After a moment, he fumbled at the remote, and the cheery sounds of betrayal and melodrama shut off. “Hey, you better take care of my car. Or I swear I’ll haunt your ass.”
Sam couldn’t decide if he wanted to punch Dean or kiss him. “That’s not funny.” His voice was distorted, like Dean’s face had been, reflected in the puddle in that basement. The basement where Sam had left him, so confident that Dean knew what he was doing. A fucking rawhead, a literally brainless monster.
Dean choked, just for a second, then recovered. “Oh, come on, it’s a little funny.” His eyes dropped to his hands, which were impossibly still on the bedcovers, one finger trapped in the pulse monitor and IV lines on the back of each hand. His ring and his bracelet were gone. “Look, Sammy, what can I say. It’s a dangerous gig. I drew the short straw. That’s it, end of story.”
“No.”
Dean blinked up at him, surprised. Sam wasn’t sure he’d ever sounded like that, like the whole world ought to shake underneath him. “I’ll be back,” he said, spinning around before Dean could say anything more. He hated to leave Dean, but some of what he was planning wouldn’t go down well with Dean or with the hospital staff.
****
He shouldn’t have wasted any time calling John Winchester. He probably sounded like a moron on the message, and the asshole most likely wouldn’t even believe that Sam really knew what was going on with Dean; he’d think it was a trap. Fuckhead.
The knock on the door made him start. He used his arm to sweep most of his paraphernalia off of the table and into his waiting duffel, then went to the door.
He jerked it open when he saw Dean on the other side. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I checked myself out.” Dean was clutching a little bag of his effects, looking like even that effort was enough to exhaust him.
“What, are you crazy?”
“Don’t wanna die in a hospital, Sammy. I figured you’d be tryin’ to think your way out of this,” he gestured at the laptop, where the browser was open to MedLine, “and I know there’s no stopping you. But I wanna be here.” He wavered on his feet, and Sam grabbed him. Together, they shuffled over to the chair that Sam had pushed against the wall when he needed more space for his incantations.
Dean didn’t seem to notice the state of the room, focusing only on Sam as he sat down. “Have you even slept? You look worse than me.”
Sam didn’t understand. It was still light out, and yet the stupid clock by the bed said it was two, when he distinctly remembered seeing that it had been past three-thirty at the hospital.
Then it hit him all at once, exhaustion and hunger and desperate, clawing fear. He sagged to his knees, putting his head in Dean’s lap. “I’ve been looking everywhere,” he said. Dean’s hand came down in his hair, heavy but still gentle, stroking almost reverently.
“It’s okay,” Dean said, and that was the last sound in the room for a long time, other than their breathing.
****
Sam couldn’t hate John Winchester entirely, not when all Sam’s own knowledge had failed and one of the contacts in Winchester’s journal managed to come through with the faith healer in Nebraska. Apparently this Joshua person liked Dean enough to respond to a perfect stranger’s panicked phone call; Sam was nothing but grateful.
Once Dean was healed, Sam was eager to get the fuck out of town. Now that he’d achieved some clarity about what he valued in life, he needed to figure out next steps. As long he didn’t know what plans Father was spinning, they couldn’t be safe.
It was unlikely, though possible, that all that Father required was Dean’s cooperation in some endeavor, in a corruption-of-pure-intent, force-your-worst-enemy-to-help-you way. That could be managed, perhaps with a blood oath from Father promising protection as the price of Dean’s participation. Father liked a bold negotiator.
The alternative—well, it would pretty much suck, because he wasn’t sure that all the demon lore he’d picked up would enable him to banish Father back to Hell on a semipermanent basis. If he kept his nerve, and if the hunters’ books were right, there were measures to be taken. It would be awfully useful to consult some of the more obscure texts, though, before he threw that kind of Hail Mary.
Aside from the larger issues that were reason enough to get back on the road, Sam wasn’t thrilled with Dean’s sudden connection to a dying blonde. Even if it was obviously just Dean working through his no-longer-imminent demise. Dean’s willingness to hand out his light and his smiles like they were nothing made Sam’s teeth itch. Worse was his indifference to Layla’s mother’s contempt. “She’s just scared,” Dean told him when Sam mentioned it as yet another reason not to worry about Layla. “She wants a miracle, and everybody’s allowed to want a miracle.”
Sam tried to load up the car, except that Dean now had the strength to stop him. Dean insisted he’d seen the Reaper, which made it a case, and nothing would do but that they investigate.
Even once they knew what was going on, Sam could have been convinced to allow Roy LeGrange—or, as it turned out, Sue-Ann—to continue playing God with his congregation. Sure, God Himself was slightly better, handing out tricks and treats at random as opposed to judging one person worthy to live in another’s stead. But the LeGranges had very good judgment when it came to Dean, so Sam would have been willing to overlook the matter if Dean hadn’t been so insistent.
Once they’d started investigating and Sue-Ann got her dark magic on, however, they had to finish it just to keep Dean safe.
The rage that went through him when he saw that altar with Dean’s picture on it, crossed out in blood, was so intense that he barely refrained from taking care of Sue-Ann himself after he’d broken her cross. It was only worry over Dean that let him leave her to the Reaper.
On the upside, though it didn’t make up for her vicious turn against Dean, the binding spell Sue-Ann had rediscovered was really quite powerful. Sam thought he might even be able to adapt it to other purposes.
And, possibly more important in the long run, Dean had no problems letting Sue-Ann get wasted by her own magic. Dean had never before mentioned killing humans, but it was good to know that he wasn’t squeamish about it. Sam was going to have to deal with Ava and Jake sooner or later, and he liked the thought of putting Dean somewhere out of sight, sniper rifle in hand.
Dean was depressed about Layla for a while, despite Sam’s best efforts to celebrate his renewed health. Sam didn’t bother trying to explain that he would have traded the whole town for Dean, because that was hopeless. Instead, he just reminded Dean that they hadn’t known about the Reaper. And then Dean really did make them stop in a couple of churches so that he could pray for Layla, even though he admitted that he thought it was useless. Sam considered the churches a small concession. He picked Catholic churches where possible, looking for the goriest Christs on crosses available.
While Dean knelt, Sam would walk up to the favored son and take a good look. This was the price of obedience.
He had no plans to pay it.
Part 5.
Part 2
Part 3
Two weeks later, Sam woke screaming from an actual, unprompted vision. Dean was there with an arm wrapped around his shoulder and a soft voice coaxing him back to reality. Sam knew it was stupid and weak to rely on someone else, but Dean was right there and he didn’t have a competing agenda. Sam curled into his chest and held on, soaking up his warmth until the worst of the aftershocks had faded.
Sam pulled back and blinked, seeing the blotch of blood on Dean’s T-shirt. “I ruined your shirt,” he said, sounding young and dazed even in his own ears.
“Why are you even talking?” Dean asked. The worry in his voice made Sam’s heart rattle in his chest. There had been something terrible done in the house in his vision, and he couldn’t avoid the feeling that Dean was at risk. But Dean was here, solid, wrapped around him.
“I’m just saying, you should take it off,” he tried. He tugged at the shirt, suddenly wanting Dean’s skin more than anything.
“You’re all—” Dean protested, but he raised his arms, and Sam could already feel his cock stirring through his sweats.
“Don’t worry,” Sam told him. “I’ll let you do all the work.”
In the morning, Sam took a look at the T-shirt before he threw it out. The blood was a carnation, a stiff tangle like a mess of tea leaves, dried red-brown. Divination had never been his strength, but when he looked at it, he had a strong impression of one word: family. Which just went to show that divination was about as useful as a Magic Eight-Ball.
The sketch he drew of his dream was no more helpful. Eventually he admitted his strong sense that the tree and the house behind it was connected to them, but Dean just pointed out that, if they were headed to a hunt there, then there was obviously a connection. They still didn’t know where they were going, other than that it was a relatively large single-family house.
Dean didn’t like it when he proposed to do a ritual to bring on a vision that would give them more specific information, controlling by magic what his own mind couldn’t rein in. “How’d you find out about that?” he asked, and he wasn’t suspicious, exactly, but Sam smiled as if he were embarrassed and thought fast.
“I knew you’d react like this, so I’ve been doing some research myself. There are lots of records of psychics—” Dean winced. “Look, not everything supernatural is evil.”
“Yeah, some of it’s just dangerous.” Dean pushed the sketch away from himself and stood, moving away from the table where they’d been sitting.
Sam worked on a glare of his own. He tried to go along with Dean whenever possible—that trust thing, plus it turned out that non-angry sex with Dean was better than angry sex with Dean, though honestly even the angry sex set a benchmark for quality. But his instinct told him that this vision was pointing him in the direction of Father’s larger plan, so Dean was going to have to listen. “I can do this, Dean. You’re the one always telling me what a good hunter I am. This is something I can bring to the hunt.”
Dean rubbed his hand across his mouth. “I knew you’d get a big head—” And then they both rolled their eyes and snickered like fourteen-year-olds, which led to Dean whacking Sam on the shoulder, which led to a wrestling match that destroyed a chair (wagon wheel back; better off dead) and a lamp (red fringe on the shade; ditto) and ended with them sprawled on the less nasty bed (the one under the sombrero arrangement that served as a wall decoration).
Sam blew a raspberry into Dean’s armpit. Dean, who was still panting, shoved weakly at Sam, and he rolled off of Dean and stared up at the ceiling. “So, the ritual,” he said, imagining that the shadows in the stucco above him formed pictures of Father and his siblings, their faces wreathed in flames.
Dean pulled at the cactus-print sheet underneath them, wiping off his stomach. “Don’t like it,” he said.
Sam turned, propping himself up on one arm, even though that put his weight down right on the wet spot. “Hey,” he said. “You’ll be right there to protect me.”
****
The ritual gave him a migraine and made his ears bleed, which was a first.
“The car, the trunk,” was the first coherent thing he managed to say. Dean continued to glare at him, a muscle jumping in his cheek. Sam reached up and touched it, Dean’s stubble sharp against his fingertips. “Help me look,” he said, softening it to an apology.
Dean refused to talk, but he let Sam lean on him all the way out to the parking lot, then propped Sam against the rear door while he popped the trunk.
Sam had a passing familiarity with the contents, but he wasn’t looking for a weapon. He opened the false bottom, ignoring the dangling dreamcatcher, shoving aside the shotguns despite Dean’s noise of distress, moving cases and boxes of ammo until he reached the bare metal of the bottom.
The beige shoebox was jammed up against the far end of the trunk, squashed at the edges from years of misuse. The lid was spindled and broken, sliding off the box even before Sam had extracted it. “Hey,” Dean protested, his voice thin with anxiety, as papers and photos threatened to cascade across the trunk. Sam slowed down and brought the whole thing out without losing any of the piles.
Back in the room, Dean alternated between hovering over Sam’s shoulder to look at each picture and scrap of paper and getting as far away from the box as possible. He made about twenty trips to the ice machine and the candy machines. Each time, he’d return and sit on the edge of the bed with his legs jiggling until he gave in and stalked back over to Sam.
Time had faded the ink on all the official records and made the photos stick together. Worried about how Dean would react if he ruined one, Sam pulled them apart as slowly as he dared.
Dean’s mother had been a beautiful woman, blonde with a mischievous smile. And Dean’s bastard father had been a darker version of Dean—slightly sadder eyes, lips not quite as lush, but still enough to stop a heart at twenty paces. They seemed happy in the pictures, up until the very last one where they were joined by a towheaded young boy and a blobby little infant, too unformed to look like anyone.
He put the pictures down, still at a loss to identify any connection to his vision, and rubbed at his forehead. He would have sworn—
Wait.
He picked up the final picture of the happy Winchester family and, instead of looking at their faces, examined the background. “Dean?” he asked. “Where was this photo taken?”
An hour later they were on the road to Kansas.
****
They had to stop halfway through because Dean was flipping out too badly. Sam blew him in the front seat, and that calmed him down for about half an hour. At least Dean’s agitation reminded Sam that he didn’t need to be following Dean’s lead all the time.
Work the case, he reminded Dean. And Dean didn’t really know what had happened when he’d been four years old, which meant that they needed to start from the basics. That led them to Mike Guenther, who told them about John Winchester’s predilection for fortune-tellers. And that got them to Missouri Moseley.
The psychic greeted Dean by name, which meant that Dean started out freaked, more so when she couldn’t do the same with Sam.
Sam had locked himself down egg-smooth, nothing left on him to sense, before they got within eight blocks of her. At least she didn’t spend too much time commenting on that. She was too busy looking Dean over and commisserating with him about Papa Winchester’s decision to go AWOL. “Your daddy loves you very much,” she cooed at him, then shot Sam a dirty glance suggesting that even without the benefit of her powers she knew that he’d silently called bullshit on that sentiment.
Missouri’s home remedies for poltergeists were, unsurprisingly, ineffective. If this was demon-related, then she was doing the spiritual equivalent of issuing a speeding ticket to a spree killer.
When Dean’s mother showed up, not behaving like any haunt ought to, Sam knew that matters had gone from confusing to downright dangerous.
She told Dean she was sorry, but she stopped in her tracks when she saw Sam. Sam was going to break her son apart and use him for kindling. Even if Sam didn’t know the details of Father’s plans he knew that much, and still Dean’s own mother just stared at him like he was some kind of savior. And then she burned herself up to save them. To save Sam.
Later, when they were lying together in the darkness, Dean admitted that he’d never heard of such a thing, one revenant able to defeat another. “She looked just like I remembered,” he said thickly, and Sam didn’t think he was talking about the flames. Sam did his best to hush Dean, pressing him back against the tired and sweaty sheets and kissing the salt from his cheeks.
Dean shook for a long time, trembling in the cage of Sam’s arms. All it meant was that Dean was weak, like most people were weak. Sam liked Dean, even though he knew it was a weakness of his own, and he didn’t want to be reminded of Dean’s vulnerabilities. That was the only reason he felt an answering heaviness in his own chest.
****
When they were on the road again the next morning, Dean admitted that Missouri had pulled him aside and warned him about Sam: “She said she couldn’t see my path, long as I was with you. That there was nothing around you but light. I said so what, and she said she’d never had that happen before. Said, be careful around him, you don’t know what he might do.”
Sam frowned, wondering if he needed to do anything about Missouri just yet. “Maybe it’s some psychic-on-psychic thing, because of all the multiplying paths feeding back into one another when both people can see possible futures. I don’t know how these powers work,” he finished, a little mournfully. The first sentence was essentially true, although Missouri’s real problem had been the veils Sam had thrown on himself. Otherwise she might have gotten feedback from him and known what he was.
Dean must have taken Sam’s pretense of uncertainty as a rebuke, because he reached out without taking his eyes from the road and cupped Sam’s shoulder with his hand, his grip warm and sure through layers of cotton. “Hey,” he said. “Nobody’s asking you to know it all. But I’m not worried. Between you and some lady who gave my dad a couple of cryptic hints about demons way back when, I know where the smart money is.”
Sam knew what Father would say: It’s Dean’s fault for not seeing what you truly are. You’re only behaving according to your nature.
He turned his face to the window and looked past his reflection.
****
They killed a kelpie with red-hot iron hooks. It was sweaty and worrisome. The iron was heavy even with a mental boost, the fire they used to lure the kelpie threw off sparks and smoke so that visibility was nil, and Sam was convinced he was going to move the wrong way and impale Dean.
All to save a couple of kids who’d probably grow up to be as greedy and sinful as the rest of them.
“Nice work,” Dean said when it was over.
“I’m not a kindergartender!” Sam snapped at him. “I don’t need a fucking gold star every time we do a job!”
Dean blinked at him, then turned away.
He felt a churning in his stomach, like there was a garbage disposal inside him grinding away. “Dean—”
“Nah, you’re right,” Dean said, still not facing him. “You know what you’re doin’.”
“Because of you,” he said. The thought of Dean stopping was even worse than the relentless pressure of his praise. It was stupid to be angry at Dean for believing in him; that was just who Dean was, saving innocents and assuming that everyone human was innocent. “Dean, I—sometimes I don’t like myself very much. So when you say something like that, it makes me feel—” He stumbled to a halt; Dean had swiveled back, and his expression was one of pure mortification. “If I stop talking, will you pretend I never started?”
“Works for me,” Dean told him.
Sam swallowed. “Think those hooks are cool enough to drag out of the water?”
“Let’s check.”
And they did, together.
****
“Coordinates?” Sam asked, not really believing his ears. “Your father sends you a message for the first time since we met, and it’s a couple of numbers?”
“It’s a job,” Dean said, as if that were the end of it.
Dean’s quiet manly endurance was gorgeous, yes, but Sam was too annoyed to let it go. Six months without a word, plus however long it had been before Sam showed up. Not that Father had done even as much to keep Sam up to date, but Father was (not to put too fine a point on it) evil. On purpose. “So that’s it? You’re just going to jump, like—”
Dean took a loud, ragged breath that shut Sam up quicker than a punch. “Least I know he’s alive. Least I know he still thinks I can do the job.”
Suddenly it was too hard to be looking at Dean from across the room. “Hey,” Sam said, and Dean allowed himself to be pulled into a hug. Sam pressed his face into the join of Dean’s neck and shoulder. Dean exhaled and slumped against Sam, letting Sam take his weight. “You don’t have to talk about it,” Sam said. “But I want to know what happened between you.”
Dean’s laugh had only pain in it. “One day he just—he ordered me not to follow him, and by the time I decided it didn’t matter how much he yelled at me, the trail was dead. That’s what I was doin’ when we met, you know—tracked him all the way to California, but he was long gone.”
“Do you think—maybe it has something to do with the demon, the yellow-eyed one.” Sam held his breath. Dean might know something without understanding its significance.
“I don’t know,” Dean admitted. “I spent my whole life training to fight that thing. I guess he just decided I wasn’t ever--”
Sam rubbed slow circles, widdershins, on Dean’s back. “Maybe he was trying to protect you.”
“He left me,” Dean said, then pressed his face into Sam’s shoulder, hard enough to hurt.
“I’m here,” Sam said, not really aware that he’d even spoken until the full-body shudder went through Dean. He said it again when the backs of his knees hit the bed, and again when Dean was stretched out beneath him, slow fat tears wetting the pillow to either side of Dean’s head.
“We don’t have to go,” he suggested afterwards, while Dean was still panting open-mouthed next to him.
“It’s a hunt,” Dean said, still a little stuffy. “Means people in trouble. And he might--” Sam was glad that Dean didn’t finish the sentence, but he knew that Dean still hoped they’d find his father.
Rockford, Illinois it was.
Sam was a little worried about how easily he’d given in. Dean was so used to taking the lead on hunts, and when Father showed up again it would surely be in the guise of a hunt; Sam needed Dean to accept his guidance. All Dean’s goodwill wouldn’t be enough if it wasn’t coupled with obedience.
****
Dr. Ellicott’s little rage-generation trick obviously worked pretty well on normals. Fortunately for Sam, learning to fight Andy off had left him prepared to shrug off most forms of psychic influence, though he had to admit that pure emotion was powerful. As it was, after he suppressed the impulse to go up there and kill Kat and Gavin to shut their whining mouths, he was pretty sure he had it under control.
Still, when Dean showed up, the temptation to use the situation was just too great (and maybe the residual emotion played a role). “I’m sick of you ordering me around,” he told Dean, threatening him with the shotgun. “This isn’t my life, this isn’t what I want. I don’t need you.” The words were bitter as burnt hair on his tongue, feeling more like lies than they should have, and the discomfort only made him angrier.
Dean didn’t flinch. “That’s just rock salt, dude, it’s not gonna kill me.”
Sam tossed the weapon aside. “I don’t want to kill you.” It was just like sparring, except that he was the one holding back now (just like he was always holding back on his powers, so it was really the same as ever) and he waited until Dean had gotten in some hits that would leave him visibly bruised before ‘snapping out of it’ and going with him to find and burn the good doctor’s bones.
“Good thing you fought him off,” Dean said speculatively after they’d seen the civilians out safely.
Fortunately he still had his get-out-of-jail-free card: “I felt him in my head, and I kind of—pushed back, I guess? I’m sorry I didn’t do it in time, those things I said--”
Dean twitched and shifted his body away from Sam. “Whatever. Listen, maybe we ought to be spending more time on these powers of yours. I mean, if you’re fighting off ghosts with nothing more than your freaky brains—”
“I don’t want to be doing this forever, that much is true. But it’s not about you, Dean.”
He almost regretted it when Dean’s face went dead for a second.
Dean rubbed his thumb over his bottom lip. “Let’s get out of here,” he said after a moment.
Later, wrapped in his steel security blanket, he had more to say. “Most hunters fear psychics,” he told Sam, his words heavy with warning. “Especially if they do more than tell you vague shit about the future. I’m not tryin’ to keep you from figuring this out. I just don’t wanna take you to anybody that might sell you out, decide you’re dangerous.”
Sam nodded. He didn’t want that either. “I’m fine,” he promised.
“You know that for sure?”
Sam wished he could tell Dean the whole truth about the powers. Not to hurt him, like Dr. Ellicott would have wanted, but to reassure him that everything was under control. But it wasn’t safe, not yet. “If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”
It wasn’t a lie, even if Dean didn’t know all the details.
****
Immediately after that, as if John Winchester had decided to start taunting his son, there was another message. Six names this time. It took Dean all of an hour to figure out that their only connection was the route they took through Indiana during the second week of April.
Someone was indulging a bit too much in that good old-time religion.
The tree-worshippers of Burkitsville weren’t thrilled when Sam managed to convince their current passing-through couple to let Dean fix their car and get them on the road. Neither of them expected the sheriff to make up a traffic violation out of whole cloth, and then even after they’d been pulled over they didn’t understand the magnitude of the town’s involvement in the sacrificial tradition. So neither of them resisted being handcuffed, and the last thing Sam heard after the sheriff slammed his head into the door of the squad car was Dean’s howl of rage.
When he woke, he was in a crappy jail. The good news was that it, along with the rest of the town, had been abandoned for the celebration of the ritual, so he didn’t even have to conceal his tracks.
He rescued Dean--that was going to be good teasing fodder for a while, at least—and the random local girl chosen to be his feminine counterpart. It wasn’t her fault, and she was too scared to make any sort of play for Dean, so he wasn’t mad.
The girl, who was fairly pissed at the betrayal by her adopted hometown, showed them the First Tree. They burnt it to the roots.
Dean thought that the collapse of the town’s fortunes would be punishment enough for the people who’d tried to kill him. He hadn’t seen himself tied down and struggling. Treated like a fucking meal, like he was worth nothing except as a sacrifice for someone else’s benefit.
Dean stopped them two towns over and checked them into Holly’s Motel and Restaurant. A holly leaf stood in for the ‘o’ in Holly, and somehow Dean had sensed that the whole place was decorated with a holly motif. Their room was sort of like a Christmas display in a furniture store, if the window dresser had gotten enormously overexcited. Especially after the tree worshippers, it was easy to imagine that something was looking at them through the leaves and berries of the wallpaper, but Dean just told him he was being paranoid.
After they’d settled in, he brushed his teeth and left Dean under a spell that would keep him asleep as long as no one approached him.
When he returned to Burkitsville, the girl was gone, but the rest of the townsfolk were mostly still congregated in the old orchard, moping or digging in the ashes to see if there was anything to save. That was convenient.
The sheriff saw him first. “Haven’t you done enough?” he asked in a voice as cracked as bark. He seemed older, flatter than he had a few hours ago.
Sam tilted his head. “I’m going to go with ‘no.’” He concentrated, raising his power. He was out of practice, and this was a good reminder that he needed to sneak off more often, even if Dean didn’t like it.
After the first black branch impaled the sheriff right between the eyes, the other worshippers started screaming. Then they ran.
Neither helped.
****
On the way back, he stopped at an all-night diner by the highway for coffee.
As soon as he ordered, a blonde girl with a pixie cut and a wicked smile slid into the seat across from him. “Hey there,” she said. “What’s a guy like you doing out on a night like this?”
He examined her with every sense. “Arba,” he said, and she jerked her chin once in acknowledgement. “Nice body.”
She pursed her lips. “Are you jealous that you can’t switch? Not that you have much to worry about, at least for the next ten years. Have you been working out?” The lasciviousness on her face was extreme even for her.
“If you have a message to deliver, spit it out. Otherwise—”
She splayed her elbows out on the table in front of her and propped her head up in her hands, cute as a button. “What, are you going to exorcise me right here? I don’t think so, little Sammy.”
“Arba,” he said, leaning forward and bracing his hands on the table edge, in case he needed to tip it over onto her, “not half an hour ago I killed four times as many people as are in this place. You’d be dessert.”
“Touchy,” she chided. “And here I was planning on giving you the heads-up about home sweet home.”
He waited. That was the thing with most demons, even the greater ones: they could plot and plan, but it was all but impossible for them to avoid gloating when they had a victim right in front of them. Sam thought the impatience had something to do with the Fall.
“Fine,” she said, just as his coffee came; she sat back in her seat and gestured the waitress away without looking. “You’ll be shocked to hear that it’s down to Ava and Jake. Ansem and Claudia are still alive, but they’re just waiting to see who comes out on top.”
“I should care because …?”
“Come on,” she said. “Ava and Jake are wild to know what you’re doing out here.” Now she’d started to build a little hex symbol out of sugar packets: a circle of white, slashes of pink and yellow shaping and directing the curse.
“You can tell them: I have no idea.” They couldn’t afford to believe him, of course.
“And this hunter, the pretty one. What’s he supposed to do?” Upon further consideration, Arba removed one yellow line of sugar substitute and started an arc of blue packets, reaching through the circle towards Sam.
Sam shrugged. The temptation was to disclaim any interest in Dean. But nobody bothered to explain that they didn’t care about a tool. “You should take this up with Father.”
“So you’re just taking his orders now? That’s not what I expect from you.”
He smiled, letting it widen slowly. “Like you said. Close to endgame. Pretty soon you’re going to have to pick sides too, Arba.” His hand darted out, grabbing her before she could finish the curse that would have killed every human in the diner, including him. He felt the bones of her stolen wrist grate together. She blew a kiss at him and brought her other hand up to sweep the table clear.
“As soon as somebody wins, I’ll pick a side,” she said when he released her. “The point is, Father’s not the only one watching. He might think you’re the second coming of Judas, but there are other players in the game. You might want to start thinking about how to impress us.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” he told her, already standing.
“Aren’t you going to drink your coffee?” she asked him, all wide eyes.
He tossed a few dollars on the table and didn’t bother responding. Emergency trigger on the spell or not, he didn’t like the thought of Dean alone, and this was not a helpful conversation.
Father always said that the Nephilim were a dead end, a failed experiment. Of course, his human children were also being used as mechanical rabbits to encourage the Nephilim to continue the race; that was just efficient. Arba was the strongest of them, and if she was involving herself, then they really were close to the final stages of Father’s plan.
He had the feeling that when the fuse burned down, he’d better make sure that Arba was in the blast radius.
****
Somehow, he’d assumed that Dean’s recklessness would keep Dean safe from everything he hunted, like some cosmic dare. He’d forgotten that the house always wins.
So now Sam was in this white corridor, stink of adhesive and blood underneath, light so bright that it punched holes into his brain, while a worried-looking man spoke to him like he was an idiot. “We’ve done all we can. We can try and keep him comfortable at this point. But, I’d give him a couple weeks, at most, maybe a month.”
He stared at the doctor, wondering whether there’d be a better answer if the man were pinned screaming to the far wall.
The doctor was saying something about miracles, and Sam nearly did smear him across the white tile, but he had to stay calm.
To his left, a machine bleeped and then went silent, followed by a babble of voices and the thrum of pounding feet. A bulb popped in the ceiling, and then another.
When he was sure he wasn’t accidentally going to destroy Dean’s heart monitor, he went to Dean’s room.
Dean was paper-pale, only a hint of color showing in the creases of his lips. The skin around his eyes was sunken, dark as his stubble. He turned his head when Sam entered. “Have you ever actually watched daytime TV?” he asked, in a voice that was tinfoil compared to his usual steel. “It’s terrible.”
“I talked to your doctor.”
Dean ignored him. “Every goddamn one of those talk-show hosts? Possessed. Before I check out, we should head to Chicago and exorcise Oprah on live TV, what do you think?”
“Dean.”
“Yeah.” After a moment, he fumbled at the remote, and the cheery sounds of betrayal and melodrama shut off. “Hey, you better take care of my car. Or I swear I’ll haunt your ass.”
Sam couldn’t decide if he wanted to punch Dean or kiss him. “That’s not funny.” His voice was distorted, like Dean’s face had been, reflected in the puddle in that basement. The basement where Sam had left him, so confident that Dean knew what he was doing. A fucking rawhead, a literally brainless monster.
Dean choked, just for a second, then recovered. “Oh, come on, it’s a little funny.” His eyes dropped to his hands, which were impossibly still on the bedcovers, one finger trapped in the pulse monitor and IV lines on the back of each hand. His ring and his bracelet were gone. “Look, Sammy, what can I say. It’s a dangerous gig. I drew the short straw. That’s it, end of story.”
“No.”
Dean blinked up at him, surprised. Sam wasn’t sure he’d ever sounded like that, like the whole world ought to shake underneath him. “I’ll be back,” he said, spinning around before Dean could say anything more. He hated to leave Dean, but some of what he was planning wouldn’t go down well with Dean or with the hospital staff.
****
He shouldn’t have wasted any time calling John Winchester. He probably sounded like a moron on the message, and the asshole most likely wouldn’t even believe that Sam really knew what was going on with Dean; he’d think it was a trap. Fuckhead.
The knock on the door made him start. He used his arm to sweep most of his paraphernalia off of the table and into his waiting duffel, then went to the door.
He jerked it open when he saw Dean on the other side. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I checked myself out.” Dean was clutching a little bag of his effects, looking like even that effort was enough to exhaust him.
“What, are you crazy?”
“Don’t wanna die in a hospital, Sammy. I figured you’d be tryin’ to think your way out of this,” he gestured at the laptop, where the browser was open to MedLine, “and I know there’s no stopping you. But I wanna be here.” He wavered on his feet, and Sam grabbed him. Together, they shuffled over to the chair that Sam had pushed against the wall when he needed more space for his incantations.
Dean didn’t seem to notice the state of the room, focusing only on Sam as he sat down. “Have you even slept? You look worse than me.”
Sam didn’t understand. It was still light out, and yet the stupid clock by the bed said it was two, when he distinctly remembered seeing that it had been past three-thirty at the hospital.
Then it hit him all at once, exhaustion and hunger and desperate, clawing fear. He sagged to his knees, putting his head in Dean’s lap. “I’ve been looking everywhere,” he said. Dean’s hand came down in his hair, heavy but still gentle, stroking almost reverently.
“It’s okay,” Dean said, and that was the last sound in the room for a long time, other than their breathing.
****
Sam couldn’t hate John Winchester entirely, not when all Sam’s own knowledge had failed and one of the contacts in Winchester’s journal managed to come through with the faith healer in Nebraska. Apparently this Joshua person liked Dean enough to respond to a perfect stranger’s panicked phone call; Sam was nothing but grateful.
Once Dean was healed, Sam was eager to get the fuck out of town. Now that he’d achieved some clarity about what he valued in life, he needed to figure out next steps. As long he didn’t know what plans Father was spinning, they couldn’t be safe.
It was unlikely, though possible, that all that Father required was Dean’s cooperation in some endeavor, in a corruption-of-pure-intent, force-your-worst-enemy-to-help-you way. That could be managed, perhaps with a blood oath from Father promising protection as the price of Dean’s participation. Father liked a bold negotiator.
The alternative—well, it would pretty much suck, because he wasn’t sure that all the demon lore he’d picked up would enable him to banish Father back to Hell on a semipermanent basis. If he kept his nerve, and if the hunters’ books were right, there were measures to be taken. It would be awfully useful to consult some of the more obscure texts, though, before he threw that kind of Hail Mary.
Aside from the larger issues that were reason enough to get back on the road, Sam wasn’t thrilled with Dean’s sudden connection to a dying blonde. Even if it was obviously just Dean working through his no-longer-imminent demise. Dean’s willingness to hand out his light and his smiles like they were nothing made Sam’s teeth itch. Worse was his indifference to Layla’s mother’s contempt. “She’s just scared,” Dean told him when Sam mentioned it as yet another reason not to worry about Layla. “She wants a miracle, and everybody’s allowed to want a miracle.”
Sam tried to load up the car, except that Dean now had the strength to stop him. Dean insisted he’d seen the Reaper, which made it a case, and nothing would do but that they investigate.
Even once they knew what was going on, Sam could have been convinced to allow Roy LeGrange—or, as it turned out, Sue-Ann—to continue playing God with his congregation. Sure, God Himself was slightly better, handing out tricks and treats at random as opposed to judging one person worthy to live in another’s stead. But the LeGranges had very good judgment when it came to Dean, so Sam would have been willing to overlook the matter if Dean hadn’t been so insistent.
Once they’d started investigating and Sue-Ann got her dark magic on, however, they had to finish it just to keep Dean safe.
The rage that went through him when he saw that altar with Dean’s picture on it, crossed out in blood, was so intense that he barely refrained from taking care of Sue-Ann himself after he’d broken her cross. It was only worry over Dean that let him leave her to the Reaper.
On the upside, though it didn’t make up for her vicious turn against Dean, the binding spell Sue-Ann had rediscovered was really quite powerful. Sam thought he might even be able to adapt it to other purposes.
And, possibly more important in the long run, Dean had no problems letting Sue-Ann get wasted by her own magic. Dean had never before mentioned killing humans, but it was good to know that he wasn’t squeamish about it. Sam was going to have to deal with Ava and Jake sooner or later, and he liked the thought of putting Dean somewhere out of sight, sniper rifle in hand.
Dean was depressed about Layla for a while, despite Sam’s best efforts to celebrate his renewed health. Sam didn’t bother trying to explain that he would have traded the whole town for Dean, because that was hopeless. Instead, he just reminded Dean that they hadn’t known about the Reaper. And then Dean really did make them stop in a couple of churches so that he could pray for Layla, even though he admitted that he thought it was useless. Sam considered the churches a small concession. He picked Catholic churches where possible, looking for the goriest Christs on crosses available.
While Dean knelt, Sam would walk up to the favored son and take a good look. This was the price of obedience.
He had no plans to pay it.
Part 5.
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Also, such a pretty icon. Sigh.
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While Dean knelt, Sam would walk up to the favored son and take a good look. This was the price of obedience.
He had no plans to pay it.
*shivers* Awesome.
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This line made me giggle. Just the thought of Sam thinking it wouldn't be as bad if his father was evil accidentally--okay, I take things oddly.
He concentrated, raising his power. He was out of practice, and this was a good reminder that he needed to sneak off more often, even if Dean didn’t like it.
After the first black branch impaled the sheriff right between the eyes, the other worshippers started screaming. Then they ran.
Neither helped.
The scarier and more evil your Sam gets, the better I like him. He's like Lex with terrifying powers. More terrifying powers.
I'm also enjoying his growing protectiveness of Dean, though I can't see this heading anywhere happy. Poor boy. Poor, hot, evil boy.
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I did promise "impure wish fulfillment."
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Beautiful line!
I love the ending too. I'm really enjoying this story. Wonderful writing! :)
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This explains my Smallville, Queer as Folk, and due South obsessions very nicely.
I keep wanting to hyperexamine your Sam so much, because he has these tantalizing bits of Lex after he got over being evil for evil's sake and returned to baseline vaguely amoral with a side of conscience. It's not that they're at all the same, but the mental methodology of darkness in characters that are at best not born sociopathic is pretty damn funny. It's not Evil Lite so much as Evil But Kinda Wondering If This Entire Conquer the World Thing Really Needs This Much Drama, or something.
Maybe I am overthinking it.
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heee. I like Sam's juggling of justifications.
The alternative—well, it would pretty much suck, because he wasn’t sure that all the demon lore he’d picked up would enable him to banish Father back to Hell on a semipermanent basis.
Oh, this is like the most romantic thing ever, in the context of this story. Sam manning up to Father for Dean? Because even the thought of Dean getting hurt is clearly unacceptable? How dense can you be, Sam? He's so very fucked. (It really is romantic when you think about it; banishing your evil father to Hell for your beloved's sake? Romantic and creepy.)
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While Dean knelt, Sam would walk up to the favored son and take a good look. This was the price of obedience.
He had no plans to pay it.
Excellent fineshing lines. Looking forward to the rest of the story for sure! Thanks for sharing :)
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:)
And also, love the little subtle changes of Dean's story. Excellent!
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