Here's my entry for Reversebang. Art by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
machidieles; art post at this link.
Shell Game
Sam/Dean
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: none beyond the premise; some violence.
Summary: Sam and Adam Winchester know when they’re being conned. Problem is, this new guy Dean Milligan seems to really be their half-brother. Adam is unamused, Sam is unfazed, and Dean is inappropriate.
Thanks togiandujakiss for beta.
Read it at the AO3.
“I’m his son,” the stranger said, and Sam and Adam gaped at him.
“We’re his sons,” Adam said, recovering more quickly.
“What?” The stranger looked, insultingly, skeptical. “Even if he missed a couple of birthdays, I think he would’ve told me if I had brothers.”
The waitress, who’d been hovering just out of reach waiting for their order, found someplace else to be. Sam sighed; he’d have taken a refill on his water, at least. “Trust me,” he said, “we are John Winchester’s sons,” and if his tone got him a dirty look from Adam, faithful even when Dad was ash, Adam would just have to deal. “John and Mary Winchester, married in 1979, first child Sam in 1983, second Adam in 1987.”
“John Winchester’s first child was born in 1979,” the guy said flatly. “That’d be me, Dean. So I guess he stayed with your mom instead of leaving her when she was about to have a baby and coming back every once in a while for a baseball game, hunh? How’d that work out for you?”
You have no idea, Sam wanted to say. You dodged a bullet made of blood. “Do you know what John … what our father did?”
“Wait!” Adam said, putting his hand on Sam’s arm, still acting like he was the one in charge, same as always despite age and Hell and everything else that meant he should be following Sam’s lead. “Don’t you think we ought to check this guy’s story out before we agree that he’s our long-lost brother? I mean, I like a good soap opera, but that’s a little sweeps week even for me.”
Sam didn’t think Dean was playing them. He just … didn’t seem like the type. And what would be the point? Sam and Adam didn’t limit their hunting to help out relatives. “Whoever his father is,” Sam pointed out, “his mom’s missing, and he called us for help. Maybe we should work on that first.”
Dean sneered a little at that, but he gave the details of his mother’s disappearance anyway.
After they managed to snag the waitress long enough to order a round, Dean excused himself to go to the bathroom, transparently to let Sam and Adam discuss matters.
“You think he’s really our brother?” Adam asked, fiddling with his beer. Honestly, Sam didn’t even know how he got served. Even his gift of gab and Sam’s talent for faking IDs didn’t seem like it should be sufficient, with a baby face like that.
Sam considered the question. “We can have a blood test, but, yeah, I guess … it makes a kind of sense. Dad never talked about his life before he met Mom, and you know as well as I do that he could’ve been off doing anything most of the time and told us it was a hunt. We didn’t know any better. Don’t you believe him?”
“Dude, he looks like me!” Adam complained, which Sam took as agreement. Adam was, in Sam’s opinion, overly optimistic: Adam was good-looking, but Dean took those lips and that bone structure and went to higher places.
“Well, Dad did have a type,” Sam said. The steady tick-tick in his head telling him just how long it had been since he’d seen Ruby was, for once, a welcome distraction. Dean Milligan required him to rewrite so many things he’d known for sure about his father. Yes, Dad had done the nasty with a barmaid or two, sometimes loudly enough to embarrass Sam and Adam in the room next door—but a whole family, another son, that was a whole different level of secret. Especially if it had involved sneaking off to see Dean and giving him the things Sam and Adam had never gotten for themselves. Baseball games—who actually went to baseball games? Even Sam had never managed to imagine his dad doing that when he thought about having a normal life.
Dean’s reaction to the Impala was not what Sam had expected, even though it served as further confirmation that this guy was who he said he was. He lectured Sam for fifteen minutes about proper maintenance, and then switched over to Adam when Sam didn’t show an appropriate level of shame or respect or whatever it was he was looking for. Finally Adam threw up his hands and told Dean that he was more than fucking welcome to do a tune-up, if it bothered him that much, while they went and worked on his mom’s disappearance.
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” Sam stepped back in. “We have experience with investigations, and maybe if you have something to do …” Objectively it was kind of dumb to leave a virtual stranger with their car, and the parts of its arsenal that weren’t presently stored on their persons, but the look in Dean’s eyes when he’d seen the Impala had been so much like Adam’s when their father had deigned to show up and drop some wisdom that Sam couldn’t help but want him to feel better. And if detailing the car was what did that, then Sam was going to call it a win-win.
Frankly, he was happy that Adam hadn’t suggested using Dean as bait for whatever might be out there. Even before Hell, Adam had been too willing to make sacrifices, like that poor girl Nancy in the Colorado jail.
Sam never wanted the civilians to suffer—the grinding pain of so much loss, always coming in too late for the first victims, stopping the problem never the same as making everything right, was the second worst thing about hunting, right behind not having any lives of their own. But knowing that Dean shared their blood ramped that up ten times. Sam didn’t want this to be a hunt. Someone in the family should get out without tragedy.
Sam examined the pictures on the walls and shelves of the Milligan house with intense interest. Dad wasn’t in any of the pictures, the earliest of which showed a mother who looked like she was only old enough to be a babysitter, clutching young Dean and glaring into the camera with a fuck-you expression Sam had to respect. Maybe Dad had ditched her and left her with the overwhelming burden of a tiny little person (not that Sam was overidentifying or anything), but she was going to get the job done. Over the years the expression lightened some, but Dean had that same set to his jaw: I know what I’m doing, it said, and don’t you forget it.
Finally, in what had to be Dean’s old room, Sam found an album with a single picture of Dad, pressed in between two pictures of Dean and his mom alone as if Dean had decided that his mom didn’t need to see it. From the shirt Dad was wearing and Dean’s apparent age—about twelve—Sam guessed that this was from one of the times Dad had dropped them off at Bobby’s and disappeared. Dean was smiling, grin so wide it barely fit on his face, and holding a big cone of cotton candy. His lips were already blue. The background looked like some kind of county fair.
Sam stuffed the picture back into the album before Adam could see it. True, Adam was adept at ignoring evidence of Dad’s less-than-perfect fatherhood, but even he might have trouble swallowing the idea that this other kid, this safer kid, had gotten to see a part of Dad denied them because they had to be badass hunters.
When they found Dean’s mother’s ghoul-eaten body, Sam felt even better about keeping him out of the search. Dean himself had probably only been saved because he was living two towns over, visiting occasionally.
****
Dean didn’t know what the fuck was going on. He thought he’d accepted Dad’s final abandonment years back. Maybe a part of him had hoped that Dad was dead instead of just disappeared. Except not really; that was the kid in him, wanting to yell “then why don’t you stay gone!” every time the old man dropped him off after one of his random visits.
He had brothers, grown men, hand-raised by Dad, though that meant raised to some crazy itinerant life that wasn’t any good and that left them twitchy as tweakers.
The ghouls they killed to prove to him that they weren’t crazy were real. Either that or he was having a nervous breakdown. Dean had never been much for worrying about his mental health; hell, he didn’t even care about his liver. Unbelievable as it sounded, he was going to accept their story until he got a better one. At least it explained some of Dad’s stranger gifts.
Adam seemed like a decent kid underneath the serial killer patina: young, dumb, and full of come. But every time he talked about their lives he was all about saving people from monsters, and Dean was hard pressed to imagine a more decent response to finding out that monsters were real.
Sam was more of a puzzle. Those fox eyes were so friendly paired with that big dimpled smile, but Dean had the feeling that Sam was the one who found it easier to look at him and imagine just where to stick in the knife for the quickest possible takedown. Smart, too—full ride to Stanford, that was something special, even if it hadn’t worked out for him because of the same demon who’d killed his mom. (Demons! Even the preachers on the Rush Limbaugh channel didn’t really believe in demons, other than Democrats. There was a whole secret world under the regular world, darker and bloodier and more real. Crazy as it was, Dean still felt like something that had always been out of alignment in him had been wrenched into place. He knew something worth knowing, for once.)
He’d always wanted a little brother or sister to take care of. He’d learned early on how to take care of himself, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Teaching himself to make mac and cheese just meant he could fill his stomach while Mom was working; it wasn’t a meal. He’d wanted a family, even though he’d known that Dad wouldn’t be part of it.
Brothers. Even in the middle of the worry and the shock, it felt like he’d solved a mystery.
Better off without me, Dad had said to Mom once when he hadn’t known Dean had been listening. How could you think that? she’d asked, and he hadn’t said anything in answer.
Dad was dead.
And then, so was Mom.
****
Dean didn’t insist on looking closely at his mother’s corpse. No one should have to see that, as Sam knew intimately.
“I need to see the rest,” he said, though, and Sam failed to talk him down from that. Civilians and bloody remains weren’t a good mix even in the absence of relatives, but Dean didn’t listen, and Adam didn’t back Sam up.
“Let him see,” Adam said, arms folded, challenging. Just because you’re miserable, Sam almost snapped at him—but who the fuck knew what was up with Adam, other than the angel, and those thoughts were distressing enough that Sam decided to drop it. Dean was their family, and Sam guessed he deserved some insight into the family business.
So Dean went through the dark crawlspaces, into the places the ghouls had done their killings. He looked around, and he threw up, and then he came back out into the light. “You should have spent longer killing them,” he said.
****
There was two weeks’ worth of garbage sitting in his shithole apartment, a bunch of dirty laundry, and a casserole he’d meant to bring Mom when he finally got in touch with her. He kept thinking about going to get it, and then remembering that she wasn’t going to pretend to love his cooking ever again.
It was like Dean’s brain had thrown a rod. The same fragmentary thoughts circled again and again. Mom. Dad. Monsters.
Was he supposed to call a funeral home? No, had to be the cops: she hadn’t gone in her sleep. What the fuck would he tell them? The only person he knew who could’ve answered questions like that for him was dead. Nobody in his cellphone was more than a drinking buddy, an easy mark, or a lay.
I have nothing, he thought.
I have brothers.
“I want in,” he said.
****
Sam should have expected Adam to take Dean’s side. Adam had only ever respected fighters. And, as distant as Adam was these days, the prospect of a new, better brother, one who didn’t see him as broken (even if he was) had to be attractive.
“If ghouls can figure out he’s a Winchester, so could anybody else,” Adam argued, looking through the extra guns for one that Dean could carry with reasonable ease.
“We can’t take him away from his life,” Sam hissed, even though Dean was standing close enough to the open trunk to hear, his arms crossed and his face so mulish it was easy to see the resemblance to Dad.
“What life?” Adam asked. He turned to Dean. “Let me guess,” he said, with that sharp intelligence that he too often hid, “you work five days a week, overtime if you can get it, and then you go out and get drunk and get laid. What are you doing to make the world a better place? What are you doing to save people?”
Dean stared at him like Adam had just cursed him out in Mandarin.
“That’s not his job!” Sam interjected, before Dean could work up his own response. “You can’t ask someone to give up normal just because of … genetics, or even because something bad happened. He doesn’t owe us anything more than anyone else we help.”
“Yeah, and everyone else we help is a victim,” Adam said.
Dean snorted, and they turned to look at him. “This is how you help people?” Dean demanded, and for some reason he was glaring at Sam. He was flushed, wild-eyed, miles away from the sleazy charmer they’d met in the bar. “You crash into their lives and say, sorry, monsters under the bed are real, have a great life?”
“Better than letting them die,” Adam snapped back, and how this got to be a three-way fight was unclear to Sam, though he should probably try to hang back and let Adam’s endless charm and winning personality drive Dean away. Dean could still get away from the Winchester heritage, even if he was on his own now. He was the kind of person they were supposed to protect, and apparently even Dad had agreed. But Adam wasn’t done: “If you want to hunt, you’re going to have to learn how to take care of yourself.”
Dean reached out, took the gun from Adam’s hand, ejected the clip, checked to make sure there wasn’t a round chambered, and handed it back. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure Dad had the gun part covered.”
Sam breathed out—none of them were very rational right now, and he was just glad Dean hadn’t done anything else with the gun. “Okay!” he said, because grief and testosterone were never a promising combination. “How about we take a break, just for now. Nobody needs to make any life-altering decisions tonight.”
Dean glanced at his mother’s house. “I can’t stay here,” he said raggedly. Not six hours ago, he’d seen his mother’s corpse in there. Sam nodded, and even Adam looked like he understood.
“Come on,” Adam said. “You and Sam can double-bunk at the motel.”
They were used to grief; they just weren’t used to sharing the car. Sam should’ve been as antsy as he was every time Castiel came around, intruding into a part of his life that should’ve been just him and Adam. But somehow Dean’s presence wasn’t irritating in that way. Maybe it was only the lack of threats to Sam’s life and eternal soul. Dean looked out the window at nothing in particular while Sam drove, and Sam checked on him in the rear-view mirror every few minutes. Dean didn’t say anything, but the tears rolling down his cheeks meant he didn’t have to.
****
Dean dodged Adam’s half-hearted swing and brought his arm up to block the next strike. Adam shoved forward, using his weight to throw them both off balance, which worked even though Dean was bigger because Dean wasn’t expecting it. Dean managed to kick Adam’s leg out and roll free of the resulting crash to the floor, scrambling into a crouch.
Adam was, out of nowhere, holding a knife. His eyes were unfocused, and Dean’s stomach dropped with the realization that Adam might not be remembering that this was a practice bout right now.
“Hey,” he said, trying to make it as reassuring as possible through the pounding of his heart, “time out, okay?” He raised his hands, palms up, and didn’t stand to his full height.
Adam tilted his head. Dean had the eerie sense that he was drawing dotted lines in his head, figuring out where Dean’s joints would carve the best. Given the horror story they’d told him over the past few weeks, handing out details like they were state secrets, Dean didn’t think that was an exaggeration.
Dean swallowed and waited, keeping his eyes on Adam’s face, the way he would with an unfamiliar dog. He’d occasionally suspected Adam’s stories about things he’d killed to have been edited for greater gore, but right now he had no doubts.
Slowly, Adam’s knife hand drifted down, and then very quickly Adam flushed and returned it. Turned out, the knife had been in a back sheath, which Dean was going to find cool much, much later when his heart rate had returned to normal. “I could use a beer,” Adam said.
“You and me both,” Dean said heartily, and that was the end of the day’s training session.
Much later, over the third or fourth beer (Dean was going to suggest switching to water any drink now), Adam admitted that he could get a little rough. “You gotta be ready to take some collateral damage,” he insisted, after a story about a hunt for a shtriga that had ended only after more children had died and Adam himself had nearly been taken, apparently because the shtriga recognized him as a previous near-victim.
“But how do you know when to hold out for a plan that isn’t going to get as many people killed?” Dean asked. He wasn’t an expert on things that went bump in the night like the Winchesters, but he’d seen a lot of his so-called friends growing up drift into crazy situations. If you weren’t careful you could convince yourself that, say, holding a bunch of meth for your boyfriend was simpler than saying no to him. If it was all just rushing at the nearest bad thing, then being a hunter seemed like a good way to talk yourself into getting killed.
Adam blinked at him uncomprehendingly. “Best way is always to hit it hard, hit it fast, and if it gets up hit it again.” He took another drink. “There was this guy once, Gordon Walker. All he cared about was killing monsters. Didn’t care a damn about saving people. Have to admit, I admired him. It was so simple for him. If he hadn’t’ve tried to kill Sam, I probably would’ve hooked up with him, let Sam go back to his safe little life.”
Dean frowned, though he couldn’t say why. “Adam?”
“What?” He sounded surly, already suspicious, and Dean wasn’t going to disappoint him.
“Why’d you make a deal for Sam’s life?”
Adam didn’t storm off or lunge at Dean, but he did wait a while before answering. “Dad did it for me. He saved my life, and then Sam died and I had nothing. There was no reason for me to be alive.”
That’s fucked up, Dean thought, but decided not to share that wisdom.
They drank some more. Then Adam told him how he was totally ready to fight to protect the seals, and how he didn’t have much choice anyway according to his angel, so he was going to suck it up like Winchesters always did. “Sam doesn’t think I can,” he confessed to his glass. “Ever since I came for him at Stanford—you know he asked if Dad was letting me hunt on my own, when I was coming on hunts from the time I was eight? Sam was twelve before he got to do that. But he still thinks I’m this helpless kid.”
Dude, you are a kid, Dean thought about saying. Also, Hell flashbacks? Pretty sure those aren’t recommended when you’re in the middle of a demon hunt. It was hard to imagine that Adam didn’t know that or would be helped by hearing it from someone else, though.
If having brothers meant this powerless feeling, wanting to fix things for them but incapable, then Dean needed to rethink the whole ‘I’ve found my missing piece’ thing.
“He’s worried about you because he cares,” Dean said instead.
“I guess so,” Adam acknowledged. “I just wish caring looked more like trusting.”
****
“Holy shit!” Dean enthused, bouncing around in the back seat enough that Sam thought about yelling at him to buckle the fuck up. “That was awesome!”
Adam chuckled in the passenger seat, even though he was bleeding in at least three places. “Gotta admit, the plan worked like a charm.”
“Like a charm that shoots people!” Sam pointed out. “We can’t get cocky just because we stopped one seal from breaking. There’s more where that came from, and Castiel doesn’t seem all that inclined to give us good intel on where to go next.”
Adam curled his lip but didn’t articulate any protest. It wasn’t as if Sam had the facts wrong there. Yes, they’d stuck a thumb in Lilith’s eye tonight, and Sam felt a warm glow from that, but they weren’t going to get away with sneaking into the basement and the top floor of a place and devil’s trapping demons from the outside all that often—or ever again, if Lilith’s minions showed any adaptability.
“Oh hey, Sammy,” Dean said, some of the energy leached from his voice. Before Sam could correct him on the name, he continued: “Do you have a towel handy? I think—”
What Dean thought—if Dean thought, on which Sam was reserving judgment—was lost when he passed out. And got blood all over the seat.
Clearly, there were some glitches to be worked out in this whole ‘adding another brother’ plan.
****
The way Sam told it to Dean, Mary Winchester had been a saint. His memories were all about hugs and macaroni and cheese and getting tucked in. If John had been around, Dean finally might have asked just how much better Mary had been in the sack than his mom—he’d expect to take a punch for that, but it would feel good to get off his chest. But John was dead, so the only way to learn any more about John’s wife was through his half-brothers.
When Dean was honest with himself, there was no way to expect a kid to know what about his mother had been so amazing that she’d stolen away his father from the woman he supposedly loved. Even if Mary had survived past their childhood, Sam and Adam couldn’t really have known what had happened between her and John. Dean hadn’t ever had a relationship longer than three nights himself, but he’d seen enough to understand that people were a fucking mystery.
The grief hit him every few days like a blown tire, usually when Adam was discussing some hapless victim of a ghost or vampire or other nightmare creature. Adam talked a lot about saving people, but they were always ‘people,’ faceless and nameless except when the names were useful to the hunt. He might be a great shot and a pretty good tactician, but Adam was about as sensitive as a brick wall. Sam, by contrast, seemed to have absorbed all the tact Adam had neglected, and he managed to change the subject every time Dean felt like he was going to punch Adam on behalf of the victims’ families.
“Thanks,” he said to Sam one night in Schenectady, when Sam had essentially picked Adam up and shoved him out the door to get food. One more word out of Adam about the case—the victims were working girls and he thought that deserved to be worked into every sentence he spoke—and Dean would’ve seen just how well his experience in bar brawls stacked up against Winchester paramilitary training.
Sam shrugged. “It’s kind of my fault he was never properly housetrained. I tried, but—”
“I don’t think that’s your fault,” Dean told him, making his shoulders relax by force of will and moving to sit at the small motel table.
Sam looked torn between defending John and agreeing. He sighed and joined Dean, facing him. His legs were so long that they overlapped Dean’s, one shoe brushing against Dean’s foot. Anybody else, Dean would have moved away from the touch, but it felt oddly right, so he stayed put. Sam leaned forward, sincere and tentative. “Our dad didn’t—I mean, did your mom ever tell him you’d been misbehaving and ask him to, I don’t know, talk to you man to man?”
This was the most direct Sam had ever been in asking for Dean’s stories about their father. Mostly he didn’t admit that he wanted to know the missing pieces, whereas Adam would actually ask, but then sulk afterwards.
“She never knew when he was coming by,” Dean said. “And she didn’t really trust him to do anything like that. One time, on my birthday, he said he’d be back in the summer, and she kind of flipped out. Told him he didn’t get to make promises.”
Sam snorted, then looked ashamed. “Sorry—I just, I told him pretty much the same thing, when he told Adam how he’d make up for missing Adam’s twelfth birthday.”
Dean nodded. He wasn’t going to blame Sam for Adam’s douchiness, but he did admire Sam for trying. It couldn’t have been easy, taking care of another kid, constantly on the road, wondering what dangerous creature was going to try to kill them next. All the things that John should have been worrying about instead of his son.
Maybe the same drive that had made John leave Dean’s mom had pushed him to raise Adam and Sam in the hunting life. The funny thing was, John had kept secret the only thing that Dean might have respected about him: that he did protect people, even if not his own family. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
Sam’s face screwed up, somewhere between amusement and dread. “Okay,” he said, but Dean could tell that he planned to lie if Dean asked anything uncomfortable.
“Did you ever forgive him?”
Sam took a minute to chew on that. His eyes were on his own hands, splayed on the table. Big hands, competent at anything Dean had seen him doing, from flashing ID like a real FBI agent to digging up graves. Sam looked up. His tip-tilted eyes were wide, like he was looking for answers too. “Most days? After Jess, and after Adam—I understood, a lot better. Once Adam made his deal, there was no way I could just go back to my life. Sometimes you need revenge.”
Revenge. Dean considered the concept. He didn’t get how dispelling ghosts and killing vampires had anything to do with revenge on a completely different demon, but then he hadn’t watched helplessly as his wife died. Hunting definitely counted as doing something—making a mark—and maybe that was close enough to revenge. Dean thought hunting would be awfully hard to enjoy, though, if it was always about punishing the supernatural.
Sam cleared his throat. “I, uh, just remembered. I need to run to the drugstore.”
Dean already knew that if he offered to do the errand instead, Sam would turn him down. And he knew that Sam wouldn’t come back carrying a bag, and that tonight Sam would curse and borrow Adam’s toothpaste again even though he always claimed it tasted disgusting.
Dean wondered, not for the first time, if Sam was an addict. He’d known a couple of guys like that, on a downward slide but not at bottom. They thought that if they snuck off and didn’t talk about it, no one would notice. Sam didn’t seem high, though, and he slept about as much as Dean thought was normal. Dean wanted to nag at him until he talked, but he didn’t want Sam to decide that he was a mistaken addition to the team.
“Don’t forget your toothpaste,” he said, instead of asking whether Sam was okay. He nudged Sam’s boot with his foot, trying to communicate that he was right there, if Sam needed him.
Sam smiled a little, but he left anyway, and came back long after dinner was cold.
****
Dean showed a lot more patience than Sam would have when Adam added about ten layers of completely unnecessary advice on the order of ‘watch Sam’s back’ to the mission parameters. In plain self-defense—he was about to start yelling at Adam that they were all well aware of the plan—Sam finally suggested that they get the show on the road.
It was another seal, this one about to be broken by a tribe of vampires who, Castiel said, believed that they could get themselves declared overlords of humans in the coming upheaval. Sam doubted that ordinary demons played well with vampires, but Lilith did have a vampiric connection in the mythology, so it was impossible to discount that dystopic idea completely. Fortunately, the Winchesters (and Dean) were on the case.
They moved through the silent house like cat burglars, managing to decapitate five vampires before one of them moved just as Sam was bringing down his machete. The resulting screams turned the attack into a full-on fight. Dean yelled Adam’s name—not terror, but warning—and Adam’s grunt reassured Sam that he was still functioning as Sam and Dean fought their way down the hall towards the door with the runes on it, which had to be where the pack was storing the book Castiel had told them to retrieve.
Dean had his back, panting and gleeful. For a newbie, he was shockingly good; Sam always knew exactly where he was even without looking, nothing like the Abbott and Costello routine that too often played out when Adam tried a trick he hadn’t warned Sam about. When two vamps jumped them at once, Sam leaned left and Dean leaned right and they took off the heads simultaneously. Sam had the distressing feeling that the manic grin on Dean’s face was matched by the one on his own. Even in the near darkness, Sam could see the whites of Dean’s eyes, wide with adrenaline.
Adam joined them, one side of his face all blood, as if he’d sliced a vampire open only inches away from his head. He gave the all clear sign to indicate that the rest of the house had been pacified.
A heavy form dropped from the ceiling—another vampire—and Adam was down, vulnerable. Dean reacted before Sam could, grabbing the vampire’s hair and pulling it away from Adam’s neck. A quick slice and the body collapsed back onto Adam, while Dean flung the head down the hallway. “Strike!” Dean crowed, even as Adam cursed and fumbled himself out from under the dead weight of the body.
“Shh!” Sam said to them both. The edges of the doorway were starting to glow.
Sam approached and dared to touch the knob; it wasn’t hot, and they probably didn’t have much time, so he grabbed it and yanked. No dice, and the door opened towards them, so kicking it down was also going to suck. He looked back, and Adam already had a fake credit card out. Sam spared a moment to be thankful for crappy interior doors, and then Adam popped the lock while Dean looked on with a frankly disturbing amount of admiration.
And then Adam ripped open the door, instead of plastering himself on the side to make a smaller target, and charged right in. Sam followed immediately after, Dean hard on his heels.
The light was coming from an honest-to-God cauldron, bubbling like something out of a high school production of Macbeth. Five vampires turned towards them, snarling.
Dean took a running jump and crashed feet-first into the cauldron, sending it tumbling. Sam had no time to spare to hope the contents weren’t poisonous; he was too busy killing vampires.
The whole thing was over in about thirty seconds. Adam, for all his heedlessness, wasn’t going to let himself be taken out by a mere vampire, and Sam had visited Ruby last night and was fully capable of dealing with all five on his own if he’d needed to. Even Dean managed to get a last one as he regained his feet, and the witches’ brew wasn’t eating away at the floor, so Sam was tentatively calling this one a win.
They retreated to the car with the book, since there was the warm glow of victory and then there was standing around like idiots waiting for more bad guys to show up. Adam and Dean were trash-talking each other about who’d kicked more ass. Watching them, Sam felt like the oldest brother. Dean was sliding into this life like it had been waiting for him all along. Just like Sam had been waiting.
No, he didn’t—he couldn’t want that for Dean. He’d made his choice: he was going to kill Lilith. And if that cost him his family, old or new, then that just counted as protecting them. Dean shouldn’t have to shine with joy at the end of a successful hunt.
“Hey,” Dean said, turning to Sam as Adam went to lock the book in the trunk. “What’s up, Debbie Downer?” The spray of blood that arced across his cheek was distracting. Sam knew it wasn’t demon blood. He knew vampire blood could do unknown damage. But that didn’t matter; he looked at those little dots, marring Dean’s freckles, and wanted to lick it off.
Okay, whoa. “Nothing,” he said, faster than he should’ve. “Just—let’s get this back to Castiel as soon as possible.” The anti-angel symbols had kept Castiel from joining them, but Sam was going to take his word that the book could be protected better from here on out.
But when Castiel came to them that night, he informed them that the angels had somehow let two more seals be broken while the humans were getting their part of the job done.
Sam had already suspected that it was going to be up to him to deal with Lilith. The angels didn’t have enough respect for humans, and they were showing themselves incompetent besides. He was doing the right thing—and if he had to keep secrets from Adam and Dean, well, he could use the distance anyway.
****
Winchesters were, Dean had decided, fucking weird. Which, look at their life: hard to say they hadn’t earned weird. Even their tattoos were weird. (They insisted that Dean wear a charm for the same anti-possession purpose, and Dean was happy to comply. He had no need to experience the supernatural from that side of the glass. Hell, he didn’t even like to ride shotgun in a car. Protecting his body from control by an evil being was worth a little jewelry.) Their weapons were just as strange—they had knives that had been tempered in blood, and stakes made from the wood of extinct trees, and those were only for the common baddies, according to Sam.
Sam sneaking off at all hours, though, and Adam with an angel literally on his shoulder, those were the crunchy bits at the top of the salad of bizarre. Neither of those seemed like they’d end well, especially once Adam admitted (half blitzed—Dean knew a few tricks of his own about how to get a man to talk) that he knew Sam was going to hang out with a demon, even if he wasn’t too clear on the whys.
Dean hadn’t met Ruby and wasn’t keen on changing that. Sam’s own description was light on the positive characteristics, other than keeping him alive while Adam was (weird!) in Hell for four months. And, from what Dean inferred, a mouth like a Hoover, but that was more an undercurrent than anything that got said aloud.
Castiel, on the other hand, popped up like a fifteen-year-old’s hard-on: often and inconveniently. Sam was clearly nervous around him, and also felt that he should be grateful given that the dude saved his brother from Hell (plus was an angel of the Lord: Dean himself had never seen much to make him think that God gave a soft fart what people did, but Sam seemed to think that counted for something in itself). Adam was freaked by Castiel’s presence, which showed that he was a human being after all and not a killing machine, and Adam was also kind of pleased to be chosen for something, which said an awful lot about his daddy issues that Dean of all people was not going to touch.
Castiel, for his part, stared at Dean as if Dean were a bomb with an unknown timer. “I have no objection to him as such,” was how he’d said it to Sam and Adam. “He is certainly no abomination, as Sam is. However, he is both unfamiliar with our situation and untrained. He is a liability.”
“Hey!” Dean had said, more upset on Sam’s behalf than his own. The angel was probably telling the truth about him, but calling Sam names just because he’d been fed blood as a baby, that was Old Testament sins-of-the-fathers shit, and it wasn’t fair.
Adam had intervened with some line about finding a prophet, but the issue was unresolved. Dean did his best to help out with the research, and he was getting better at the hand-to-hand, even though Sam could put him down without breaking a sweat.
Sometimes—usually when things were quiet, when Dean and Sam were sharing a breakfast of Egg McMuffins and coffee and Adam was doing whatever he did instead of eating and sleeping—Dean looked over the table at Sam and felt, crazily, that he was exactly where he needed to be. As fucked-up and tragic as Sam’s life had been, Dean couldn’t shake the idea that everything before this had brought them together, and that had to mean something.
Sam made Dean’s heart beat erratically just looking at him. Objectively, that could’ve been fear—Sam could probably bench-press a VW bug, and his eyes said he was just one bad day away from picking up an ax and going full Lizzy Borden—but he also wanted to pin Sam down and hear everything about him. It was like there was a downed electric cable between them, sparking erratically.
Other times, Dean thought Sam saw him as a babysitter for Adam, or vice versa. Never more so than on the mornings after Sam had snuck off and Adam had pretended to sleep through it. Sam would suggest some “training” that coincidentally would require Adam to concentrate on Dean, not quite managing to avoid condescending to both of them whenever Dean showed improvement in his ability to throw a knife or remember an exorcism. Adam kept his reactions close to his chest. Dean had the sense that he thought that complaining, or at least complaining to Dean, would be a betrayal of Sam. But every time Castiel popped up, he got even edgier. Their secrets were like some still-undiscovered sibling, another ghost in the car.
****
Sam was beginning to see the merit in adding Dean to their screwed-up family, even if he couldn’t understand why Dean wanted this life. When Adam wasn’t sulking or mooning over the angel, he was training Dean, which was probably the best thing for his self-esteem and also meant that he wasn’t constantly getting in Sam’s face about Sam’s search for Lilith. Sam didn’t blame Adam for having lost his taste for demons, but at the same time, the seals were breaking; someone needed to get the job done. And Dean wasn’t a bad extra body to have around for difficult hunts. Not that Sam had opinions about Dean’s body, of course. Just—he wasn’t having trouble learning the lore, that was all.
Nonetheless, Sam was initially dubious of Dean’s suggestion that they broaden their set of allies. “Somebody who’s not stuck in this by blood,” Dean said. Carefully focusing on the text in front of him, he continued, “Somebody who isn’t all up in your family issues.” Which, Sam had to admit, put Bobby out of the running, since Sam still treated him too much like Dad’s surrogate (after all, John Winchester would probably have put a shotgun in his own face if he could’ve).
“That’s a short list,” Adam said from his position by the window. Half in shadow, his face didn’t show how exhausted he was, but Sam could still see it in the slump of his shoulders.
“Hey, I had a short booty call list back home,” Dean argued, “but I got laid whenever I wanted.”
Sam couldn’t help glancing over at Adam to see if he’d share Sam’s eyeroll, but no luck. “Moving on,” Sam said, trying not to be irritated.
“Seriously?” Dean slammed his book closed—Sam winced on behalf of the cracking binding—and stood up. “We’re driving around the country with our thumbs up our asses, all we get from the angel is threats, and you don’t think we could use a few new ideas? Worst that happens, your friends got nothing.”
Well, there was that one time Gordon Walker tried to kill Sam and recruit Adam as his Boy Wonder, but even Sam had to admit that Walker wouldn’t ever have been on their list of trusted contacts. As long as they didn’t mention Ruby, there wasn’t too much risk. And Sam was so tired of having to make all the plans. Maybe he could let Dean take the lead, just this once.
“We could try the Harvelles,” Sam allowed. Dean smirked—Sam suspected that he wanted to say something about how they should listen to their big brother, but maybe he was just projecting—and celebrated his victory by demanding that he be allowed to drive the Impala. Since Adam was hungover and Sam wasn’t in the mood to puncture Dean’s enthusiasm, he got his time behind the wheel, and celebrated by refusing to listen to anything except for AC/DC on repeat.
Ellen’s new place was another bar, this time in a little Illinois town. Sam didn’t ask how she’d taken it over, but the place was clearly a long-time local favorite, and they had to wait a while for things to clear out enough to talk. Dean and Adam used the opportunity to do some quality drinking. Sam got a bottle just to be sociable, but he was waiting for a different kind of rush. His flask was nearly empty. He’d call Ruby afterwards.
When Dean went to the bathroom, by way of an extended conversation with Jo behind the bar, Sam leaned forward. “Still think this was a good idea?” he asked, hoping that Adam would show some enthusiasm, or, fuck, some passionate resistance. Anything that wasn’t angel-related or stop-hiding-shit from him would be a good sign.
“I think Jo has a crush,” Adam said, a little sourly.
Sam knew Adam’d had a bit of a crush of his own, once upon a time, before he’d gotten too busy chasing Sam’s possessed ass down, burying their father, and selling his soul. “I don’t think Jo could ever really respect a man who wasn’t a hunter,” Sam offered.
Adam slurped mournfully at his beer. “A, I’m pretty sure Dean thinks he is now. B, I’m also pretty sure that ‘respect’ is not what she wants to do to him.”
Sam shrugged; fair points. “Of course, it’d be kind of funny to see what Ellen would do to some older guy sniffing around her baby girl.”
“I think Dean’s into Ellen,” Adam said, sounding even more depressed, probably because if there was anyone who could pull that off it probably was Dean. Dad’s charisma and looks with none of the Winchester trauma: yeah, Sam thought, if he were Ellen he’d hit that until candy came out.
That was an inappropriate thought, Sam realized and put his beer down. “Okay,” he said, loud enough that Adam’s head jerked up, “I’m gonna hit the head.”
He’d text Ruby. Their motel was only half a mile away. He could meet her there, maybe get another room just for the hour.
Part 2
machidieles; art post at this link.Shell Game
Sam/Dean
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: none beyond the premise; some violence.
Summary: Sam and Adam Winchester know when they’re being conned. Problem is, this new guy Dean Milligan seems to really be their half-brother. Adam is unamused, Sam is unfazed, and Dean is inappropriate.
Thanks to
giandujakiss for beta.Read it at the AO3.
“I’m his son,” the stranger said, and Sam and Adam gaped at him.
“We’re his sons,” Adam said, recovering more quickly.
“What?” The stranger looked, insultingly, skeptical. “Even if he missed a couple of birthdays, I think he would’ve told me if I had brothers.”
The waitress, who’d been hovering just out of reach waiting for their order, found someplace else to be. Sam sighed; he’d have taken a refill on his water, at least. “Trust me,” he said, “we are John Winchester’s sons,” and if his tone got him a dirty look from Adam, faithful even when Dad was ash, Adam would just have to deal. “John and Mary Winchester, married in 1979, first child Sam in 1983, second Adam in 1987.”
“John Winchester’s first child was born in 1979,” the guy said flatly. “That’d be me, Dean. So I guess he stayed with your mom instead of leaving her when she was about to have a baby and coming back every once in a while for a baseball game, hunh? How’d that work out for you?”
You have no idea, Sam wanted to say. You dodged a bullet made of blood. “Do you know what John … what our father did?”
“Wait!” Adam said, putting his hand on Sam’s arm, still acting like he was the one in charge, same as always despite age and Hell and everything else that meant he should be following Sam’s lead. “Don’t you think we ought to check this guy’s story out before we agree that he’s our long-lost brother? I mean, I like a good soap opera, but that’s a little sweeps week even for me.”
Sam didn’t think Dean was playing them. He just … didn’t seem like the type. And what would be the point? Sam and Adam didn’t limit their hunting to help out relatives. “Whoever his father is,” Sam pointed out, “his mom’s missing, and he called us for help. Maybe we should work on that first.”
Dean sneered a little at that, but he gave the details of his mother’s disappearance anyway.
After they managed to snag the waitress long enough to order a round, Dean excused himself to go to the bathroom, transparently to let Sam and Adam discuss matters.
“You think he’s really our brother?” Adam asked, fiddling with his beer. Honestly, Sam didn’t even know how he got served. Even his gift of gab and Sam’s talent for faking IDs didn’t seem like it should be sufficient, with a baby face like that.
Sam considered the question. “We can have a blood test, but, yeah, I guess … it makes a kind of sense. Dad never talked about his life before he met Mom, and you know as well as I do that he could’ve been off doing anything most of the time and told us it was a hunt. We didn’t know any better. Don’t you believe him?”
“Dude, he looks like me!” Adam complained, which Sam took as agreement. Adam was, in Sam’s opinion, overly optimistic: Adam was good-looking, but Dean took those lips and that bone structure and went to higher places.
“Well, Dad did have a type,” Sam said. The steady tick-tick in his head telling him just how long it had been since he’d seen Ruby was, for once, a welcome distraction. Dean Milligan required him to rewrite so many things he’d known for sure about his father. Yes, Dad had done the nasty with a barmaid or two, sometimes loudly enough to embarrass Sam and Adam in the room next door—but a whole family, another son, that was a whole different level of secret. Especially if it had involved sneaking off to see Dean and giving him the things Sam and Adam had never gotten for themselves. Baseball games—who actually went to baseball games? Even Sam had never managed to imagine his dad doing that when he thought about having a normal life.
Dean’s reaction to the Impala was not what Sam had expected, even though it served as further confirmation that this guy was who he said he was. He lectured Sam for fifteen minutes about proper maintenance, and then switched over to Adam when Sam didn’t show an appropriate level of shame or respect or whatever it was he was looking for. Finally Adam threw up his hands and told Dean that he was more than fucking welcome to do a tune-up, if it bothered him that much, while they went and worked on his mom’s disappearance.
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” Sam stepped back in. “We have experience with investigations, and maybe if you have something to do …” Objectively it was kind of dumb to leave a virtual stranger with their car, and the parts of its arsenal that weren’t presently stored on their persons, but the look in Dean’s eyes when he’d seen the Impala had been so much like Adam’s when their father had deigned to show up and drop some wisdom that Sam couldn’t help but want him to feel better. And if detailing the car was what did that, then Sam was going to call it a win-win.
Frankly, he was happy that Adam hadn’t suggested using Dean as bait for whatever might be out there. Even before Hell, Adam had been too willing to make sacrifices, like that poor girl Nancy in the Colorado jail.
Sam never wanted the civilians to suffer—the grinding pain of so much loss, always coming in too late for the first victims, stopping the problem never the same as making everything right, was the second worst thing about hunting, right behind not having any lives of their own. But knowing that Dean shared their blood ramped that up ten times. Sam didn’t want this to be a hunt. Someone in the family should get out without tragedy.
Sam examined the pictures on the walls and shelves of the Milligan house with intense interest. Dad wasn’t in any of the pictures, the earliest of which showed a mother who looked like she was only old enough to be a babysitter, clutching young Dean and glaring into the camera with a fuck-you expression Sam had to respect. Maybe Dad had ditched her and left her with the overwhelming burden of a tiny little person (not that Sam was overidentifying or anything), but she was going to get the job done. Over the years the expression lightened some, but Dean had that same set to his jaw: I know what I’m doing, it said, and don’t you forget it.
Finally, in what had to be Dean’s old room, Sam found an album with a single picture of Dad, pressed in between two pictures of Dean and his mom alone as if Dean had decided that his mom didn’t need to see it. From the shirt Dad was wearing and Dean’s apparent age—about twelve—Sam guessed that this was from one of the times Dad had dropped them off at Bobby’s and disappeared. Dean was smiling, grin so wide it barely fit on his face, and holding a big cone of cotton candy. His lips were already blue. The background looked like some kind of county fair.
Sam stuffed the picture back into the album before Adam could see it. True, Adam was adept at ignoring evidence of Dad’s less-than-perfect fatherhood, but even he might have trouble swallowing the idea that this other kid, this safer kid, had gotten to see a part of Dad denied them because they had to be badass hunters.
When they found Dean’s mother’s ghoul-eaten body, Sam felt even better about keeping him out of the search. Dean himself had probably only been saved because he was living two towns over, visiting occasionally.
****
Dean didn’t know what the fuck was going on. He thought he’d accepted Dad’s final abandonment years back. Maybe a part of him had hoped that Dad was dead instead of just disappeared. Except not really; that was the kid in him, wanting to yell “then why don’t you stay gone!” every time the old man dropped him off after one of his random visits.
He had brothers, grown men, hand-raised by Dad, though that meant raised to some crazy itinerant life that wasn’t any good and that left them twitchy as tweakers.
The ghouls they killed to prove to him that they weren’t crazy were real. Either that or he was having a nervous breakdown. Dean had never been much for worrying about his mental health; hell, he didn’t even care about his liver. Unbelievable as it sounded, he was going to accept their story until he got a better one. At least it explained some of Dad’s stranger gifts.
Adam seemed like a decent kid underneath the serial killer patina: young, dumb, and full of come. But every time he talked about their lives he was all about saving people from monsters, and Dean was hard pressed to imagine a more decent response to finding out that monsters were real.
Sam was more of a puzzle. Those fox eyes were so friendly paired with that big dimpled smile, but Dean had the feeling that Sam was the one who found it easier to look at him and imagine just where to stick in the knife for the quickest possible takedown. Smart, too—full ride to Stanford, that was something special, even if it hadn’t worked out for him because of the same demon who’d killed his mom. (Demons! Even the preachers on the Rush Limbaugh channel didn’t really believe in demons, other than Democrats. There was a whole secret world under the regular world, darker and bloodier and more real. Crazy as it was, Dean still felt like something that had always been out of alignment in him had been wrenched into place. He knew something worth knowing, for once.)
He’d always wanted a little brother or sister to take care of. He’d learned early on how to take care of himself, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Teaching himself to make mac and cheese just meant he could fill his stomach while Mom was working; it wasn’t a meal. He’d wanted a family, even though he’d known that Dad wouldn’t be part of it.
Brothers. Even in the middle of the worry and the shock, it felt like he’d solved a mystery.
Better off without me, Dad had said to Mom once when he hadn’t known Dean had been listening. How could you think that? she’d asked, and he hadn’t said anything in answer.
Dad was dead.
And then, so was Mom.
****
Dean didn’t insist on looking closely at his mother’s corpse. No one should have to see that, as Sam knew intimately.
“I need to see the rest,” he said, though, and Sam failed to talk him down from that. Civilians and bloody remains weren’t a good mix even in the absence of relatives, but Dean didn’t listen, and Adam didn’t back Sam up.
“Let him see,” Adam said, arms folded, challenging. Just because you’re miserable, Sam almost snapped at him—but who the fuck knew what was up with Adam, other than the angel, and those thoughts were distressing enough that Sam decided to drop it. Dean was their family, and Sam guessed he deserved some insight into the family business.
So Dean went through the dark crawlspaces, into the places the ghouls had done their killings. He looked around, and he threw up, and then he came back out into the light. “You should have spent longer killing them,” he said.
****
There was two weeks’ worth of garbage sitting in his shithole apartment, a bunch of dirty laundry, and a casserole he’d meant to bring Mom when he finally got in touch with her. He kept thinking about going to get it, and then remembering that she wasn’t going to pretend to love his cooking ever again.
It was like Dean’s brain had thrown a rod. The same fragmentary thoughts circled again and again. Mom. Dad. Monsters.
Was he supposed to call a funeral home? No, had to be the cops: she hadn’t gone in her sleep. What the fuck would he tell them? The only person he knew who could’ve answered questions like that for him was dead. Nobody in his cellphone was more than a drinking buddy, an easy mark, or a lay.
I have nothing, he thought.
I have brothers.
“I want in,” he said.
****
Sam should have expected Adam to take Dean’s side. Adam had only ever respected fighters. And, as distant as Adam was these days, the prospect of a new, better brother, one who didn’t see him as broken (even if he was) had to be attractive.
“If ghouls can figure out he’s a Winchester, so could anybody else,” Adam argued, looking through the extra guns for one that Dean could carry with reasonable ease.
“We can’t take him away from his life,” Sam hissed, even though Dean was standing close enough to the open trunk to hear, his arms crossed and his face so mulish it was easy to see the resemblance to Dad.
“What life?” Adam asked. He turned to Dean. “Let me guess,” he said, with that sharp intelligence that he too often hid, “you work five days a week, overtime if you can get it, and then you go out and get drunk and get laid. What are you doing to make the world a better place? What are you doing to save people?”
Dean stared at him like Adam had just cursed him out in Mandarin.
“That’s not his job!” Sam interjected, before Dean could work up his own response. “You can’t ask someone to give up normal just because of … genetics, or even because something bad happened. He doesn’t owe us anything more than anyone else we help.”
“Yeah, and everyone else we help is a victim,” Adam said.
Dean snorted, and they turned to look at him. “This is how you help people?” Dean demanded, and for some reason he was glaring at Sam. He was flushed, wild-eyed, miles away from the sleazy charmer they’d met in the bar. “You crash into their lives and say, sorry, monsters under the bed are real, have a great life?”
“Better than letting them die,” Adam snapped back, and how this got to be a three-way fight was unclear to Sam, though he should probably try to hang back and let Adam’s endless charm and winning personality drive Dean away. Dean could still get away from the Winchester heritage, even if he was on his own now. He was the kind of person they were supposed to protect, and apparently even Dad had agreed. But Adam wasn’t done: “If you want to hunt, you’re going to have to learn how to take care of yourself.”
Dean reached out, took the gun from Adam’s hand, ejected the clip, checked to make sure there wasn’t a round chambered, and handed it back. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure Dad had the gun part covered.”
Sam breathed out—none of them were very rational right now, and he was just glad Dean hadn’t done anything else with the gun. “Okay!” he said, because grief and testosterone were never a promising combination. “How about we take a break, just for now. Nobody needs to make any life-altering decisions tonight.”
Dean glanced at his mother’s house. “I can’t stay here,” he said raggedly. Not six hours ago, he’d seen his mother’s corpse in there. Sam nodded, and even Adam looked like he understood.
“Come on,” Adam said. “You and Sam can double-bunk at the motel.”
They were used to grief; they just weren’t used to sharing the car. Sam should’ve been as antsy as he was every time Castiel came around, intruding into a part of his life that should’ve been just him and Adam. But somehow Dean’s presence wasn’t irritating in that way. Maybe it was only the lack of threats to Sam’s life and eternal soul. Dean looked out the window at nothing in particular while Sam drove, and Sam checked on him in the rear-view mirror every few minutes. Dean didn’t say anything, but the tears rolling down his cheeks meant he didn’t have to.
****
Dean dodged Adam’s half-hearted swing and brought his arm up to block the next strike. Adam shoved forward, using his weight to throw them both off balance, which worked even though Dean was bigger because Dean wasn’t expecting it. Dean managed to kick Adam’s leg out and roll free of the resulting crash to the floor, scrambling into a crouch.
Adam was, out of nowhere, holding a knife. His eyes were unfocused, and Dean’s stomach dropped with the realization that Adam might not be remembering that this was a practice bout right now.
“Hey,” he said, trying to make it as reassuring as possible through the pounding of his heart, “time out, okay?” He raised his hands, palms up, and didn’t stand to his full height.
Adam tilted his head. Dean had the eerie sense that he was drawing dotted lines in his head, figuring out where Dean’s joints would carve the best. Given the horror story they’d told him over the past few weeks, handing out details like they were state secrets, Dean didn’t think that was an exaggeration.
Dean swallowed and waited, keeping his eyes on Adam’s face, the way he would with an unfamiliar dog. He’d occasionally suspected Adam’s stories about things he’d killed to have been edited for greater gore, but right now he had no doubts.
Slowly, Adam’s knife hand drifted down, and then very quickly Adam flushed and returned it. Turned out, the knife had been in a back sheath, which Dean was going to find cool much, much later when his heart rate had returned to normal. “I could use a beer,” Adam said.
“You and me both,” Dean said heartily, and that was the end of the day’s training session.
Much later, over the third or fourth beer (Dean was going to suggest switching to water any drink now), Adam admitted that he could get a little rough. “You gotta be ready to take some collateral damage,” he insisted, after a story about a hunt for a shtriga that had ended only after more children had died and Adam himself had nearly been taken, apparently because the shtriga recognized him as a previous near-victim.
“But how do you know when to hold out for a plan that isn’t going to get as many people killed?” Dean asked. He wasn’t an expert on things that went bump in the night like the Winchesters, but he’d seen a lot of his so-called friends growing up drift into crazy situations. If you weren’t careful you could convince yourself that, say, holding a bunch of meth for your boyfriend was simpler than saying no to him. If it was all just rushing at the nearest bad thing, then being a hunter seemed like a good way to talk yourself into getting killed.
Adam blinked at him uncomprehendingly. “Best way is always to hit it hard, hit it fast, and if it gets up hit it again.” He took another drink. “There was this guy once, Gordon Walker. All he cared about was killing monsters. Didn’t care a damn about saving people. Have to admit, I admired him. It was so simple for him. If he hadn’t’ve tried to kill Sam, I probably would’ve hooked up with him, let Sam go back to his safe little life.”
Dean frowned, though he couldn’t say why. “Adam?”
“What?” He sounded surly, already suspicious, and Dean wasn’t going to disappoint him.
“Why’d you make a deal for Sam’s life?”
Adam didn’t storm off or lunge at Dean, but he did wait a while before answering. “Dad did it for me. He saved my life, and then Sam died and I had nothing. There was no reason for me to be alive.”
That’s fucked up, Dean thought, but decided not to share that wisdom.
They drank some more. Then Adam told him how he was totally ready to fight to protect the seals, and how he didn’t have much choice anyway according to his angel, so he was going to suck it up like Winchesters always did. “Sam doesn’t think I can,” he confessed to his glass. “Ever since I came for him at Stanford—you know he asked if Dad was letting me hunt on my own, when I was coming on hunts from the time I was eight? Sam was twelve before he got to do that. But he still thinks I’m this helpless kid.”
Dude, you are a kid, Dean thought about saying. Also, Hell flashbacks? Pretty sure those aren’t recommended when you’re in the middle of a demon hunt. It was hard to imagine that Adam didn’t know that or would be helped by hearing it from someone else, though.
If having brothers meant this powerless feeling, wanting to fix things for them but incapable, then Dean needed to rethink the whole ‘I’ve found my missing piece’ thing.
“He’s worried about you because he cares,” Dean said instead.
“I guess so,” Adam acknowledged. “I just wish caring looked more like trusting.”
****
“Holy shit!” Dean enthused, bouncing around in the back seat enough that Sam thought about yelling at him to buckle the fuck up. “That was awesome!”
Adam chuckled in the passenger seat, even though he was bleeding in at least three places. “Gotta admit, the plan worked like a charm.”
“Like a charm that shoots people!” Sam pointed out. “We can’t get cocky just because we stopped one seal from breaking. There’s more where that came from, and Castiel doesn’t seem all that inclined to give us good intel on where to go next.”
Adam curled his lip but didn’t articulate any protest. It wasn’t as if Sam had the facts wrong there. Yes, they’d stuck a thumb in Lilith’s eye tonight, and Sam felt a warm glow from that, but they weren’t going to get away with sneaking into the basement and the top floor of a place and devil’s trapping demons from the outside all that often—or ever again, if Lilith’s minions showed any adaptability.
“Oh hey, Sammy,” Dean said, some of the energy leached from his voice. Before Sam could correct him on the name, he continued: “Do you have a towel handy? I think—”
What Dean thought—if Dean thought, on which Sam was reserving judgment—was lost when he passed out. And got blood all over the seat.
Clearly, there were some glitches to be worked out in this whole ‘adding another brother’ plan.
****
The way Sam told it to Dean, Mary Winchester had been a saint. His memories were all about hugs and macaroni and cheese and getting tucked in. If John had been around, Dean finally might have asked just how much better Mary had been in the sack than his mom—he’d expect to take a punch for that, but it would feel good to get off his chest. But John was dead, so the only way to learn any more about John’s wife was through his half-brothers.
When Dean was honest with himself, there was no way to expect a kid to know what about his mother had been so amazing that she’d stolen away his father from the woman he supposedly loved. Even if Mary had survived past their childhood, Sam and Adam couldn’t really have known what had happened between her and John. Dean hadn’t ever had a relationship longer than three nights himself, but he’d seen enough to understand that people were a fucking mystery.
The grief hit him every few days like a blown tire, usually when Adam was discussing some hapless victim of a ghost or vampire or other nightmare creature. Adam talked a lot about saving people, but they were always ‘people,’ faceless and nameless except when the names were useful to the hunt. He might be a great shot and a pretty good tactician, but Adam was about as sensitive as a brick wall. Sam, by contrast, seemed to have absorbed all the tact Adam had neglected, and he managed to change the subject every time Dean felt like he was going to punch Adam on behalf of the victims’ families.
“Thanks,” he said to Sam one night in Schenectady, when Sam had essentially picked Adam up and shoved him out the door to get food. One more word out of Adam about the case—the victims were working girls and he thought that deserved to be worked into every sentence he spoke—and Dean would’ve seen just how well his experience in bar brawls stacked up against Winchester paramilitary training.
Sam shrugged. “It’s kind of my fault he was never properly housetrained. I tried, but—”
“I don’t think that’s your fault,” Dean told him, making his shoulders relax by force of will and moving to sit at the small motel table.
Sam looked torn between defending John and agreeing. He sighed and joined Dean, facing him. His legs were so long that they overlapped Dean’s, one shoe brushing against Dean’s foot. Anybody else, Dean would have moved away from the touch, but it felt oddly right, so he stayed put. Sam leaned forward, sincere and tentative. “Our dad didn’t—I mean, did your mom ever tell him you’d been misbehaving and ask him to, I don’t know, talk to you man to man?”
This was the most direct Sam had ever been in asking for Dean’s stories about their father. Mostly he didn’t admit that he wanted to know the missing pieces, whereas Adam would actually ask, but then sulk afterwards.
“She never knew when he was coming by,” Dean said. “And she didn’t really trust him to do anything like that. One time, on my birthday, he said he’d be back in the summer, and she kind of flipped out. Told him he didn’t get to make promises.”
Sam snorted, then looked ashamed. “Sorry—I just, I told him pretty much the same thing, when he told Adam how he’d make up for missing Adam’s twelfth birthday.”
Dean nodded. He wasn’t going to blame Sam for Adam’s douchiness, but he did admire Sam for trying. It couldn’t have been easy, taking care of another kid, constantly on the road, wondering what dangerous creature was going to try to kill them next. All the things that John should have been worrying about instead of his son.
Maybe the same drive that had made John leave Dean’s mom had pushed him to raise Adam and Sam in the hunting life. The funny thing was, John had kept secret the only thing that Dean might have respected about him: that he did protect people, even if not his own family. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
Sam’s face screwed up, somewhere between amusement and dread. “Okay,” he said, but Dean could tell that he planned to lie if Dean asked anything uncomfortable.
“Did you ever forgive him?”
Sam took a minute to chew on that. His eyes were on his own hands, splayed on the table. Big hands, competent at anything Dean had seen him doing, from flashing ID like a real FBI agent to digging up graves. Sam looked up. His tip-tilted eyes were wide, like he was looking for answers too. “Most days? After Jess, and after Adam—I understood, a lot better. Once Adam made his deal, there was no way I could just go back to my life. Sometimes you need revenge.”
Revenge. Dean considered the concept. He didn’t get how dispelling ghosts and killing vampires had anything to do with revenge on a completely different demon, but then he hadn’t watched helplessly as his wife died. Hunting definitely counted as doing something—making a mark—and maybe that was close enough to revenge. Dean thought hunting would be awfully hard to enjoy, though, if it was always about punishing the supernatural.
Sam cleared his throat. “I, uh, just remembered. I need to run to the drugstore.”
Dean already knew that if he offered to do the errand instead, Sam would turn him down. And he knew that Sam wouldn’t come back carrying a bag, and that tonight Sam would curse and borrow Adam’s toothpaste again even though he always claimed it tasted disgusting.
Dean wondered, not for the first time, if Sam was an addict. He’d known a couple of guys like that, on a downward slide but not at bottom. They thought that if they snuck off and didn’t talk about it, no one would notice. Sam didn’t seem high, though, and he slept about as much as Dean thought was normal. Dean wanted to nag at him until he talked, but he didn’t want Sam to decide that he was a mistaken addition to the team.
“Don’t forget your toothpaste,” he said, instead of asking whether Sam was okay. He nudged Sam’s boot with his foot, trying to communicate that he was right there, if Sam needed him.
Sam smiled a little, but he left anyway, and came back long after dinner was cold.
****
Dean showed a lot more patience than Sam would have when Adam added about ten layers of completely unnecessary advice on the order of ‘watch Sam’s back’ to the mission parameters. In plain self-defense—he was about to start yelling at Adam that they were all well aware of the plan—Sam finally suggested that they get the show on the road.
It was another seal, this one about to be broken by a tribe of vampires who, Castiel said, believed that they could get themselves declared overlords of humans in the coming upheaval. Sam doubted that ordinary demons played well with vampires, but Lilith did have a vampiric connection in the mythology, so it was impossible to discount that dystopic idea completely. Fortunately, the Winchesters (and Dean) were on the case.
They moved through the silent house like cat burglars, managing to decapitate five vampires before one of them moved just as Sam was bringing down his machete. The resulting screams turned the attack into a full-on fight. Dean yelled Adam’s name—not terror, but warning—and Adam’s grunt reassured Sam that he was still functioning as Sam and Dean fought their way down the hall towards the door with the runes on it, which had to be where the pack was storing the book Castiel had told them to retrieve.
Dean had his back, panting and gleeful. For a newbie, he was shockingly good; Sam always knew exactly where he was even without looking, nothing like the Abbott and Costello routine that too often played out when Adam tried a trick he hadn’t warned Sam about. When two vamps jumped them at once, Sam leaned left and Dean leaned right and they took off the heads simultaneously. Sam had the distressing feeling that the manic grin on Dean’s face was matched by the one on his own. Even in the near darkness, Sam could see the whites of Dean’s eyes, wide with adrenaline.
Adam joined them, one side of his face all blood, as if he’d sliced a vampire open only inches away from his head. He gave the all clear sign to indicate that the rest of the house had been pacified.
A heavy form dropped from the ceiling—another vampire—and Adam was down, vulnerable. Dean reacted before Sam could, grabbing the vampire’s hair and pulling it away from Adam’s neck. A quick slice and the body collapsed back onto Adam, while Dean flung the head down the hallway. “Strike!” Dean crowed, even as Adam cursed and fumbled himself out from under the dead weight of the body.
“Shh!” Sam said to them both. The edges of the doorway were starting to glow.
Sam approached and dared to touch the knob; it wasn’t hot, and they probably didn’t have much time, so he grabbed it and yanked. No dice, and the door opened towards them, so kicking it down was also going to suck. He looked back, and Adam already had a fake credit card out. Sam spared a moment to be thankful for crappy interior doors, and then Adam popped the lock while Dean looked on with a frankly disturbing amount of admiration.
And then Adam ripped open the door, instead of plastering himself on the side to make a smaller target, and charged right in. Sam followed immediately after, Dean hard on his heels.
The light was coming from an honest-to-God cauldron, bubbling like something out of a high school production of Macbeth. Five vampires turned towards them, snarling.
Dean took a running jump and crashed feet-first into the cauldron, sending it tumbling. Sam had no time to spare to hope the contents weren’t poisonous; he was too busy killing vampires.
The whole thing was over in about thirty seconds. Adam, for all his heedlessness, wasn’t going to let himself be taken out by a mere vampire, and Sam had visited Ruby last night and was fully capable of dealing with all five on his own if he’d needed to. Even Dean managed to get a last one as he regained his feet, and the witches’ brew wasn’t eating away at the floor, so Sam was tentatively calling this one a win.
They retreated to the car with the book, since there was the warm glow of victory and then there was standing around like idiots waiting for more bad guys to show up. Adam and Dean were trash-talking each other about who’d kicked more ass. Watching them, Sam felt like the oldest brother. Dean was sliding into this life like it had been waiting for him all along. Just like Sam had been waiting.
No, he didn’t—he couldn’t want that for Dean. He’d made his choice: he was going to kill Lilith. And if that cost him his family, old or new, then that just counted as protecting them. Dean shouldn’t have to shine with joy at the end of a successful hunt.
“Hey,” Dean said, turning to Sam as Adam went to lock the book in the trunk. “What’s up, Debbie Downer?” The spray of blood that arced across his cheek was distracting. Sam knew it wasn’t demon blood. He knew vampire blood could do unknown damage. But that didn’t matter; he looked at those little dots, marring Dean’s freckles, and wanted to lick it off.
Okay, whoa. “Nothing,” he said, faster than he should’ve. “Just—let’s get this back to Castiel as soon as possible.” The anti-angel symbols had kept Castiel from joining them, but Sam was going to take his word that the book could be protected better from here on out.
But when Castiel came to them that night, he informed them that the angels had somehow let two more seals be broken while the humans were getting their part of the job done.
Sam had already suspected that it was going to be up to him to deal with Lilith. The angels didn’t have enough respect for humans, and they were showing themselves incompetent besides. He was doing the right thing—and if he had to keep secrets from Adam and Dean, well, he could use the distance anyway.
****
Winchesters were, Dean had decided, fucking weird. Which, look at their life: hard to say they hadn’t earned weird. Even their tattoos were weird. (They insisted that Dean wear a charm for the same anti-possession purpose, and Dean was happy to comply. He had no need to experience the supernatural from that side of the glass. Hell, he didn’t even like to ride shotgun in a car. Protecting his body from control by an evil being was worth a little jewelry.) Their weapons were just as strange—they had knives that had been tempered in blood, and stakes made from the wood of extinct trees, and those were only for the common baddies, according to Sam.
Sam sneaking off at all hours, though, and Adam with an angel literally on his shoulder, those were the crunchy bits at the top of the salad of bizarre. Neither of those seemed like they’d end well, especially once Adam admitted (half blitzed—Dean knew a few tricks of his own about how to get a man to talk) that he knew Sam was going to hang out with a demon, even if he wasn’t too clear on the whys.
Dean hadn’t met Ruby and wasn’t keen on changing that. Sam’s own description was light on the positive characteristics, other than keeping him alive while Adam was (weird!) in Hell for four months. And, from what Dean inferred, a mouth like a Hoover, but that was more an undercurrent than anything that got said aloud.
Castiel, on the other hand, popped up like a fifteen-year-old’s hard-on: often and inconveniently. Sam was clearly nervous around him, and also felt that he should be grateful given that the dude saved his brother from Hell (plus was an angel of the Lord: Dean himself had never seen much to make him think that God gave a soft fart what people did, but Sam seemed to think that counted for something in itself). Adam was freaked by Castiel’s presence, which showed that he was a human being after all and not a killing machine, and Adam was also kind of pleased to be chosen for something, which said an awful lot about his daddy issues that Dean of all people was not going to touch.
Castiel, for his part, stared at Dean as if Dean were a bomb with an unknown timer. “I have no objection to him as such,” was how he’d said it to Sam and Adam. “He is certainly no abomination, as Sam is. However, he is both unfamiliar with our situation and untrained. He is a liability.”
“Hey!” Dean had said, more upset on Sam’s behalf than his own. The angel was probably telling the truth about him, but calling Sam names just because he’d been fed blood as a baby, that was Old Testament sins-of-the-fathers shit, and it wasn’t fair.
Adam had intervened with some line about finding a prophet, but the issue was unresolved. Dean did his best to help out with the research, and he was getting better at the hand-to-hand, even though Sam could put him down without breaking a sweat.
Sometimes—usually when things were quiet, when Dean and Sam were sharing a breakfast of Egg McMuffins and coffee and Adam was doing whatever he did instead of eating and sleeping—Dean looked over the table at Sam and felt, crazily, that he was exactly where he needed to be. As fucked-up and tragic as Sam’s life had been, Dean couldn’t shake the idea that everything before this had brought them together, and that had to mean something.
Sam made Dean’s heart beat erratically just looking at him. Objectively, that could’ve been fear—Sam could probably bench-press a VW bug, and his eyes said he was just one bad day away from picking up an ax and going full Lizzy Borden—but he also wanted to pin Sam down and hear everything about him. It was like there was a downed electric cable between them, sparking erratically.
Other times, Dean thought Sam saw him as a babysitter for Adam, or vice versa. Never more so than on the mornings after Sam had snuck off and Adam had pretended to sleep through it. Sam would suggest some “training” that coincidentally would require Adam to concentrate on Dean, not quite managing to avoid condescending to both of them whenever Dean showed improvement in his ability to throw a knife or remember an exorcism. Adam kept his reactions close to his chest. Dean had the sense that he thought that complaining, or at least complaining to Dean, would be a betrayal of Sam. But every time Castiel popped up, he got even edgier. Their secrets were like some still-undiscovered sibling, another ghost in the car.
****
Sam was beginning to see the merit in adding Dean to their screwed-up family, even if he couldn’t understand why Dean wanted this life. When Adam wasn’t sulking or mooning over the angel, he was training Dean, which was probably the best thing for his self-esteem and also meant that he wasn’t constantly getting in Sam’s face about Sam’s search for Lilith. Sam didn’t blame Adam for having lost his taste for demons, but at the same time, the seals were breaking; someone needed to get the job done. And Dean wasn’t a bad extra body to have around for difficult hunts. Not that Sam had opinions about Dean’s body, of course. Just—he wasn’t having trouble learning the lore, that was all.
Nonetheless, Sam was initially dubious of Dean’s suggestion that they broaden their set of allies. “Somebody who’s not stuck in this by blood,” Dean said. Carefully focusing on the text in front of him, he continued, “Somebody who isn’t all up in your family issues.” Which, Sam had to admit, put Bobby out of the running, since Sam still treated him too much like Dad’s surrogate (after all, John Winchester would probably have put a shotgun in his own face if he could’ve).
“That’s a short list,” Adam said from his position by the window. Half in shadow, his face didn’t show how exhausted he was, but Sam could still see it in the slump of his shoulders.
“Hey, I had a short booty call list back home,” Dean argued, “but I got laid whenever I wanted.”
Sam couldn’t help glancing over at Adam to see if he’d share Sam’s eyeroll, but no luck. “Moving on,” Sam said, trying not to be irritated.
“Seriously?” Dean slammed his book closed—Sam winced on behalf of the cracking binding—and stood up. “We’re driving around the country with our thumbs up our asses, all we get from the angel is threats, and you don’t think we could use a few new ideas? Worst that happens, your friends got nothing.”
Well, there was that one time Gordon Walker tried to kill Sam and recruit Adam as his Boy Wonder, but even Sam had to admit that Walker wouldn’t ever have been on their list of trusted contacts. As long as they didn’t mention Ruby, there wasn’t too much risk. And Sam was so tired of having to make all the plans. Maybe he could let Dean take the lead, just this once.
“We could try the Harvelles,” Sam allowed. Dean smirked—Sam suspected that he wanted to say something about how they should listen to their big brother, but maybe he was just projecting—and celebrated his victory by demanding that he be allowed to drive the Impala. Since Adam was hungover and Sam wasn’t in the mood to puncture Dean’s enthusiasm, he got his time behind the wheel, and celebrated by refusing to listen to anything except for AC/DC on repeat.
Ellen’s new place was another bar, this time in a little Illinois town. Sam didn’t ask how she’d taken it over, but the place was clearly a long-time local favorite, and they had to wait a while for things to clear out enough to talk. Dean and Adam used the opportunity to do some quality drinking. Sam got a bottle just to be sociable, but he was waiting for a different kind of rush. His flask was nearly empty. He’d call Ruby afterwards.
When Dean went to the bathroom, by way of an extended conversation with Jo behind the bar, Sam leaned forward. “Still think this was a good idea?” he asked, hoping that Adam would show some enthusiasm, or, fuck, some passionate resistance. Anything that wasn’t angel-related or stop-hiding-shit from him would be a good sign.
“I think Jo has a crush,” Adam said, a little sourly.
Sam knew Adam’d had a bit of a crush of his own, once upon a time, before he’d gotten too busy chasing Sam’s possessed ass down, burying their father, and selling his soul. “I don’t think Jo could ever really respect a man who wasn’t a hunter,” Sam offered.
Adam slurped mournfully at his beer. “A, I’m pretty sure Dean thinks he is now. B, I’m also pretty sure that ‘respect’ is not what she wants to do to him.”
Sam shrugged; fair points. “Of course, it’d be kind of funny to see what Ellen would do to some older guy sniffing around her baby girl.”
“I think Dean’s into Ellen,” Adam said, sounding even more depressed, probably because if there was anyone who could pull that off it probably was Dean. Dad’s charisma and looks with none of the Winchester trauma: yeah, Sam thought, if he were Ellen he’d hit that until candy came out.
That was an inappropriate thought, Sam realized and put his beer down. “Okay,” he said, loud enough that Adam’s head jerked up, “I’m gonna hit the head.”
He’d text Ruby. Their motel was only half a mile away. He could meet her there, maybe get another room just for the hour.
Part 2
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