"This is a bad one."
Dean slid the open file across the table at the diner to Sam, and picked up his burger. Sam looked up from his laptop screen and frowned. "I know. How are you even hungry right now?"
Dean shrugged, chewing, and talked around a mouthful of food. "I don't stop being hungry because we're working. If I did, I'd never eat."
Sam dropped his eyes for a second. It was something he'd been wanting to say to Dean since he'd been back from purgatory, that Dean never stopped. He never stopped looking for something to hunt or kill. It was like Dean had been switched on and didn't know how to stop, but any suggestion that it was too much from Sam would mean Sam wanted to quit altogether and leave hunting, leave Dean. Because Sam had quit. He'd left Dean alone out there.
There was never a right time, or a right way, to say it. So he just kept his mouth shut, and they kept up a pace that Sam suspected was killing them both.
Sam reached across the table and picked up the case file Dean had pushed toward him.
"Where did you get this?"
"This is the file from one of the patients at the psych ward – I'm sorry, inpatient facility," Dean corrected with a grin.
"It's not funny, Dean. What happened to these people seriously messed them up."
"I know it's not funny. Nothing we do is funny, it doesn't mean I can't still joke about it. Jesus, Sam. You used to have a sense of humor. Did you lose that too while I was gone?"
Sam pressed his lips together and didn't say anything while Dean puffed up like he'd just scored another point. Sam knew this game. Let him think he'd won, and he'd get bored and move on. True to form, after a moment, Dean brought his attention back to the case.
"The pattern, the brutality of it, the way they were tortured, I dunno man. There's something weird going on here. Like our kind of weird," Dean said, before taking another bite of his burger.
Sam removed the paperclip holding the pictures to the inside of the manila folder and looked through them, wincing at the images he saw. The girl didn't look like she should still be alive. Bound, gagged, beaten, bloodied…
Dean looked at him appraisingly. "You gonna lose the lunch you didn't have?"
He tapped the pictures back into a stack and set them down. "You don't think people could have done this?"
"Five different victims, each of them tortured in exactly the same way but left alive for some reason? People are sick, Sam, but the kind of sicko it would take to be a serial torturer of this magnitude isn't usually this… deliberate, and I hate to say it but the vics aren't usually left alive after something like this. It's saying 'demon' to me."
"You think we need to talk to this girl?"
"She's apparently the most coherent of the people that have been attacked. And that's not saying a lot."
Jillian Reynolds was twenty-five years old and a recent college graduate when her world ended.
She was found in a dark room three days after she'd been taken, unconscious and strapped to a table. The medical examiner reported that she had been sexually assaulted and sustained numerous internal injuries in addition to visible lacerations and bruises, but that the extent of the damage could not be fully assessed until she regained consciousness.
When she did wake up, she couldn't remember her own name. But she screamed about black eyes.
Her doctor advised the two investigators who came to question her about her ordeal that it was unlikely she would be able to offer any insight. Her moments of lucidity were rare, and even in those moments she seemed unable to verbalize the atrocities that had been done to her.
Sam had to ask, "Is it in her best interest to avoid talking about it?"
Dean glared at him, and Sam shot him a look.
"No," replied her doctor. "We find that it's best for trauma patients to confront their past rather than bury it, however in some cases a patient builds a wall that is simply too difficult to break down."
Sam frowned, obviously turning something over in his head, unsure what to say next.
"Thank you," Dean said, closing the gap of silence Sam had left. "I'm sure anything we can learn will be helpful."
He led them through a secure hallway, buzzing through a series of locked doors until they reached the small room where Jillian was kept and cared for. Through the window, they could see a young woman with tangled, brown hair sitting in the middle of her bed with her knees drawn up to her chest. This door was locked as well, and her doctor buzzed it open. Jillian startled at the noise and looked up, eyes wild.
"Good afternoon, Jillian," said her doctor. "These men are investigators on your case. They're here to help you."
He didn't wait for a response, clearly expecting that one would not be forthcoming, and he turned back to Dean and Sam. "I'll be just down the hall. When you're finished, you can press the call button and one of the nurses will escort you out."
Dean nodded.
Sam took in the close confines of the room. Small bed. Chair and desk. Sink and toilet. He heard the door click closed behind the doctor as he left, and he drew in a breath, trying to see the space around him as larger than it was. He pulled the chair over to the bed to sit across from the Jillian, who was eyeing him apprehensively.
"Hi, Jillian," he said with warmth in his voice. "I'm Sam."
Jillian buried her face against her knees and shook her head. "No. No no no no. Please."
Dean and Sam exchanged a look.
"Jillian, we—" Dean started.
"Black eyes. Black. No. Please. Please, stop! No. He said..." Jillian looked at Sam. Then she drew back and her eyes narrowed. "Sam," she said.
Sam smiled at her encouragingly. "That's right," he said. "It's all right. We know about the man with the black eyes, and I promise—"
"It's you. You're the one he wants back. His little bitch. Sam. Sam Winchester."
Sam stood up suddenly and nearly fell over the chair behind him as the walls of the room narrowed further, his lungs refusing to take in air. "Sam?" Dean said, his hand on Sam's arm, but Sam shook him off.
"I need—I just—I need a minute," Sam stammered, backing toward the door.
"You okay?" Dean asked.
He wasn't okay. But he nodded, pushing the call buzzer and unlocking the door to the room. He needed to be out. Out.
"You stay," he told Dean, motioning to Jillian. "You—I'll just—Right out here."
He focused on making his breathing slow and steady in the narrow hallway, drawing comfort from the solid feel of the smooth, cool tiled wall against his back to calm the nausea swelling over him. He closed his eyes, trying to push Lucifer's voice, his mocking smile, out of his head. No, it's over. He ran his thumb over the scar on his palm, feeling the bumpy, raised tissue that still grounded him when he needed it. Out.
"Sam."
He opened his eyes and saw Dean looking at him with concern. Sam quickly dropped his hands to his sides and clenched them into fists. "I'm fine," Sam replied to the unasked question. He swallowed hard, resolve finally building in him. "Dean? I don't think I can—"
"We'll nail this bastard, Sam. I mean it. Don't let it fuck with you. Clearly we were right, this has demon written all over it. That little stunt back there proves it."
"Dean, really. Listen…"
"Let's head over to the apartment building where she was found and see if there's anything to go on there. Then why don't you see if you can hack in to the security camera footage?"
Sam hesitated, wrestling with words just out of reach. Finally, he nodded. "Sure." It felt bitter and wrong but he swallowed it and followed Dean out through the locked passage, hoping that outside it would be easier to breathe.
Some part of him already knew what he would find in each of the case files. He didn't want to look. He didn't want to see the painstakingly drawn lines of the knife blade in the photos, the too-familiar knotting of the ropes. Couldn't bear to read the word torture or the word rape written in the reports. It was too much, too close.
He held Sam down with hands that were impossibly strong, hurt him in ways he couldn't have imagined.
His mind shrank back from the memories like putting his hand on a hot stove, and he quickly shoved them back into the darkest corners of his consciousness with practiced efficiency. He didn't want to think about that.
Cas had put his broken soul back together, scarred over the worst of what Lucifer had done to him, but he couldn't erase it. It would never be gone. And whatever demon was thrill-seeking now topside at the expense of these humans was calling Sam out, using his name, looking for Lucifer's bitch.
He didn't know why, and didn't want to know. He felt bad for the people involved, but at the same time he wished Dean wasn't so keen on hunting anything that moved since he'd come back from purgatory, because Sam wanted to run.
He wanted to run as far away from this case as they could get. He wished he could tell Dean how much it scared him that the nightmares tried so hard to bury could be so easily drawn to the surface. When he could go days without being triggered by flames and the smell of sulfur, he called it a success, he called himself healed, while deep down he knew it was a lie.
This case wasn't going to let him lie. It was going to throw Hell right in his face and break every defense.
He wanted to tell Dean how scared he was. But Dean wouldn't want to hear it. Dean had just spent a year not being scared, and what right did Sam have to make demands? Dean needed this hunt.
He dug his thumb into the palm of his hand and closed his palm into a fist around it, leaning his forehead down onto his two fists as if he could force the thoughts to stay down just by pressing on them. This was how Dean found him a few moments later.
"Hey, Sam. Napping on the job?"
Sam jerked his head up. "Find anything?" he asked by way of redirection.
"No, not really. I checked with a couple of folks back at the apartment building, and at the warehouse where the first victim was found, and nobody really saw anything. What did you find out about the injuries?"
Sam hesitated. "I—I don't know. They're…"
Dean folded his arms over his chest. Sam looked up at him and shrugged. "I don't know," he admitted.
Dean snatched the file off the table. "Did you even look at this?"
"Yes. Kind of."
"Sam, come on. I feel like I'm doing this by myself here. Are you even trying? Do you even want to gank this demon?"
Sam gritted his teeth. "Dean…"
"What, Sam?"
Sam shook his head angrily. "No, you know what?" He snapped the lid closed on his laptop and stood up. "You're right. I can't do this. I tried, but I can't. I'm sorry. I quit."
Dean's expression morphed from righteous indignation to confusion. "You quit? As in, you quit?"
"I quit. As in… I'm done. As in, I need to go." He exhaled and bit his lip, quickly ducking his head as he brushed past Dean to pack his stuff and leave, because now that he'd reached his decision he needed to get out before he changed his mind.
To be continued.