Part One
It started like this.
Sam had a vision that lasted for so long that Dean was about to say fuck it and call an ambulance, their general aversion to authority be damned. It left Sam weak and irritable for hours afterwards. "Lafayette," Sam said in a low, tired voice that sounded as if he had been eating charcoal. It was close enough to a growl to make all of the hair on the back of Dean's neck stand on end. Sam wasn't acting like a killer-wasn't even acting as if he was thinking about being a killer-but that didn't necessarily mean anything. Dad had said.
Yeah. Dad had said a lot of things. He had been wrong about some of them and right about a lot more, and that was the thing that kept Dean awake at night.
"Guesendheit," he said instead, reaching out to take Sam's pulse yet again, even if the only way that he knows how to tell good from bad is in beating versus not beating. Sam made an irritable face and slapped Dean's hand away. He sat up and rubbed his hand over his eyes as if they were hurting him. Sam looked at Dean as soon as he was done, really stared hard, that look that he got sometimes saying that he was nobody's fool and that he knew damned well that Dean has a lot more that he was not telling. That the only thing that was keeping Sam from pushing just as long and hard as he was capable of was the fact that he did not yet know where all of the landmines were. Not forever, though. Sammy was the single smartest person that Dean had ever known, and ever since he was very small it had been in Sam's nature to push until he made whatever problem that was standing before him give ground through sheer fatigue.
"I didn't sneeze," Sam said as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. He looked as if he was gathering himself for a few moments before he tried to stand. "Lafayette, Indiana. We have to go there."
"Why?" Dean asked automatically, even though he was pretty sure that he already knew the answer. All throughout the eerie fugue state that Sam had fallen into after he had stopped clutching at his head, his lips had been moving, he had been muttering in a voice so low that Dean had been forced to lean close in order to hear what Sam had to say. He had been talking about voices that told him to do things. That meant that Sam was either having a vision and someone in Indiana was getting the reverse Joan of Arc treatment, or…
'Fuck that noise,' Dean told himself savagely, like a child hoping that he could scare away the monsters in the dark by putting on a mask that made him look even bigger and scarier than they were. 'Dad can be wrong. It's happened before.' Yeah, but not nearly enough for Dean's liking in the situation that they found themselves in now.
"I saw a kid getting killed," Sam said. He stood finally, winced a little when his head did not like the movement. Sam let out a slow, pleased smile when his legs decided that they would take him, after all. Apparently there had been some confusion in the chain of command. "Kid like me. Powers."
"Oh." Dean was still sitting on the bed and watching as Sam paced back and forth across the confines of their small room in the process of throwing off the last of his vision hangover. The idea of letting Sam near any of those kids, knowing what he knew and what Sam still did not, was enough to make his stomach turn to glass. The good to evil ratio was not nearly what Dean would have liked it to be over on that side of the fence. "So you want to go, check it out?"
Sam broke off his pacing long enough to give Dean a look that could not have been any more incredulous if Dean had just announced that he liked banana earworms and that purple monkeys made the best dishwashers. "The kid died, Dean," he said before he started to get that look again, that 'oh shit, Sam's going to want to talk look', and suddenly Dean had an urge to hop to his feet and pace about himself.
"Okay," Dean said instead, and began throwing their clothes into the bags that they would then sling into the backseat of the Impala. He didn't raise his eyes to meet Sam's, as Sam was doing enough staring for the both of them. It was a hard prickle on the back of Dean's neck. "Just not sure that it's a job for us. You see this kid getting snacked on by your vampire babe, or signing anything in blood?"
"He died," Sam repeated, as if that ought to be enough. Probably it should have been; Dean wasn't sure that he was in a position to tell any longer. "He was killed by a knife, but that shouldn't matter. He has powers like mine, so the demon is going to be after him just like he's after me. That makes it our kind of job."
"Sure it does," Dean said, and curved his mouth into a reassuring, big-brother kind of smile. Sam wasn't six any longer, though, and he still looked troubled as he began to help Dean with their clothes. "I'm just looking out for you, Sammy."
"Thanks," Sam said without looking convinced. Dean started to wonder what would happen if, while Sam was sleeping in the passenger seat one night, he turned towards the Grand Canyon without saying anything, how far he could get before Sam woke up, and how big of a fit Sam would throw when he did.
---
Sam knew that they needed to head for Lafayette based upon a split-second glimpse of a newspaper stand on the sidewalk next to the kid's car. That was not much to go on, especially when it came to a job that had such a high probability of putting Sam in both mortal and immortal danger, but Dean couldn't do much more protesting. Sam kept giving him the fish eye whenever he thought that Dean was not looking as it was. The way that things were going, he was going to think that it was downright suspicious when Dean started to leave brochures of glossy foreign locales around their hotel rooms next week.
They left the Impala parked several blocks away based upon a feeling that Dean could not quite articulate, other than it involved knowing that Sam was different now in the way that Dean was different, in the way that makes the both of them not quite human, and maybe Dad was right in keeping them away from other hunters for most of their lives. If this kid was different in the way that Sam was different, then maybe the reason that he was going to be killed was because he was suffering from a lack of someone to act as a buffer between himself and overzealous hunters. If that was the case, then it was to their best interest not to advertise their presence.
Even Dean was willing to admit that it was something of a reach. He brought along a shotgun loaded with rock salt all the same, just in case, and a hunting knife long enough and wicked enough to fuck up anything unlucky enough to be corporeal and in his way.
It was winter, and it was cold, darkness falling across the buildings in long, finger-like shadows even though Dean could have sworn that it was barely noon the last time that he had blinked. He and Sam used the shadows as allies and watched as the light crowds of the business class began to stream home. It was not long before the street was empty, and yet there had been no sing of a man in his early twenties matching the description that Sam had given.
"Maybe he changed his mind," Dean said brightly as the two of them lingered in the shadows and waited. "Maybe he met a lady. Maybe he decided to grab a burger."
Sam cut Dean a look suggesting that he was only a few minutes away from reaching over and smacking him. He focused on the street instead, saying only, "He didn't. He'll be here." The next glance that Sam slid Dean's way was not annoyed. Dean would rather that it was, instead of more of that silent concern.
The silence stretched while the night grew colder, and the very last of the business people had soon disappeared homeward. Sam seemed content to wait for as long as it took for the kid to show up. It was Dean who was finding himself overcome with an uncharacteristic twitchiness, Dean who found himself shifting his weight from one foot to the other while he wondered if this vision was real or a demon-sent trap. The possibility that Dad had just been wrong, however remote, was for the first time in his life a prospect worth looking forward to.
When the sound of a solitary pair of footsteps could finally be heard walking down the sidewalk, Sam turned and gave Dean a wide, self-satisfied grin. "This is what I saw," he said as he thrust out to indicate the shadowy, deserted street, wisps of peculiar fog just starting to roll in. He sounded happy, for a vision that had told him this kid was going to die without intervention. Did he sound too happy? Dean could not tell, and he was getting worn down by this constant need to analyze and then analyze again every small thing that Sam said or did.
The object of this whole trip came into view at long last, walking with his head dipped low and his hands shoved deeply into the pockets of his jacket. He passed so close to Sam and Dean without noticing them that Dean could have reached out and touched him if he wished. It gave Dean a great deal of time to look him over. Pale skin that looked as if he was far more a product of ill health more than natural inclination, dark hair that fell forward across his forehead, the kind of coffee-dark eyes that always seemed to flash when the owner was either angry or amused, all being offset by a set of high and nearly graceful cheekbones. The kid would have been good-looking, if he was sleeping or eating right. It was obvious at the moment that he was doing neither.
Dean did not realize that he had turned his head to watch the kid go until Sam elbowed him sharply in the ribs. "You can get a room after we save him. Jesus," Sam snapped as he left their darkened hiding place and began trailing the kid, who neither turned his head or seemed to realize that anyone else was after him at all. Definitely not a hunter, then.
Dean stared after his brother for several seconds and was sure that his expression was mildly horrified. There were a great many things that Dean was entirely comfortable with Sam knowing about him. Every single object of Dean's sexual interest was, he was fairly certain, not one of them. Life became very boring very quickly if a man couldn't maintain a little mystery; now he knew why Sam had such a fit every time that Dean ribbed him for sweet-talking a pretty set of legs. He could not help but make a faint snorting sound as he doubled his stride and caught up with Sam after only a few steps.
"Now, now, Sammy," he said. "Think that I'm going to have to take a look at that hard drive of yours. You've been branching out past 'Slippery Spring Break Adventures.'" Dean grinned broadly as Sam turned far enough to give him an annoyed look and then chopped his hand hard for silence. The kid whose rescue would hopefully end the night was too far ahead of them to hear anything that they said even if had been a hunter and trained to notice such things, but this job had been Sam's baby from the beginning. Dean guessed that he could follow Sam's lead.
They waited until the kid drew close to his car roughly one hundred yards ahead before they split away from each other by mutual, unspoken decision and drifted into the darkness on opposite sides of the street from one another. Dean kept his finger alert on the trigger of the gun as he drew ever closer to the oblivious target. The street appeared empty in both directions, but that did not mean anything. Dean could not see Sam on the other side of the street, either, and yet he knew that he was there. Sam had seen the kid being stabbed in his vision, too, which meant one of two things: either a ghost that had somehow managed to avoid being tied to a single place, or a human. If the kid was special, then that ruled out some kind of ritual-crazed lunatic unless this poor bastard was one of the most unlucky people to ever walk the planet. So they had a hunter.
Suddenly, letting Sammy take off on this little jaunt seemed like a worse idea by the second. Dean hunched further back against the brick wall and scowled.
He saw the silhouette creeping down the street long before the kid did, even though the shadow he was casting was long beneath the street lights and he was not taking any pains to hide his approach. At less than two steps, Dean knew that he was looking at a hunter. It was written in the way that he moved. At two more paces, Dean even knew who he was.
"Son of a bitch," he spit, barely remembering that he needed to keep his voice low. Dean raised his head and looked off in Sam's general direction. He was sure that his expression of shock and disgust was mirrored on Sam's own face. The decision not to look the other way while Lenore chowed down on their good buddy Gordy was looking like a worse one by the moment.
Yeah, ethically wrong, all that jazz. Dean was in less of a mood to think about ethics and all of its should-haves and could-haves by the day. He took a deep breath and grit his teeth hard as he realized that channeling his anger for the job was not going to be an issue.
Gordon glided up behind the kid just as easily as moving silk, all loose-limbed predator's confidence, and the kid did not expect a thing until Gordon was practically on top of him. Finally the kid twigged to the fact that there was a reflection other than this own in the window of his car and spun around, those pale features losing their veil of distraction. He backed up against the car even though there was nowhere else to go.
Dean was not interested in seeing what would happen next. Without waiting to see what Sam was doing, he stepped free from the shadows and issues a sharp whistling sound from between his teeth. Gordon paused for only a second before he turned his head in the direction of Dean's approach, slowly and as if he had been expecting to see Dean there all along.
"Dean," he said, and tapped his knife against the trapped kid's chest in a gesture that looked nearly contemplative. The kid mostly only looked as if he was on the verge of passing out. "Guess this means that that brother of yours is around here somewhere." He scanned the darkness with knowing eyes.
Something inside of Dean turned brittle and cold. "Might be," he said, unshouldering the shotgun and watching as Gordon continued to tap and trace patterns against the kid's chest. He would have him gutted from his throat down to his navel before Dean could even think about taking the knife away. Bad plan, then. The kid was staring at Dean all full of bug-eyed, mute appeal, even though Dean had to give credit where credit was due and note that he was keeping it together not to beg or cry as a lot of people would have done in his situation. Dean could still barely look at him.
Gordon flashed a smile that was all teeth and no mirth before he tapped the knife against the kid's chest again, a little too hard this time. A red spot appeared on the kid's chest, and he gasped in pain. "Don't play stupid, Dean, we both know that it's not the real you," Gordon said. "Scotty here's wrong-tainted-in the same way that Sammy is, and they both have to be dealt with in the same way."
"I'm not wrong," the kid, Scotty, whatever, spoke for the first time, though he lacked a certain conviction. On anyone else and in any other circumstances Dean would have attributed that to nothing other than human fear, even if the kid was keeping himself together a lot better than most people would have done. Good buddy Scotty was most people about as much as Sammy was.
"Shut up, you filthy monster," Gordon whirled around and snarled at the kid, going from steady and nearly rational to feral in less time that it took for Dean to blink twice. The knife flashed; the kid yelped.
Scotty was probably not in the mood to appreciate this, but he was getting damned lucky that night. It did not take Dean two blinks worth of time to raise the shotgun up to his shoulder and fire. There was a great booming sound that echoed and reechoed around the buildings and nearly obliterated the sound of Gordon yelping and the kid yelping again. Rock salt hurt like a bitch. Dean would know.
Gordon staggered back from Scotty but did not let go of his knife, while the kid dropped like a stone. All that Dean could see in the dim light was a dark smear of blood. He did not have the time to pause and see how badly the kid was hurt or even if Dean's and Sam's mission was going to be futile, after all. Dean ejected the spent shells, dropped the gun, and went for his knife as Gordon continued to back away with his hand covering one side of his face. There was blood leaking around his fingers. Dean could not stop his mouth from curving upwards into a small and malicious smile.
"You son of a bitch," Gordon growled as he lunged at Dean. He nearly tripped over the fallen kid's splayed legs as he did so, as Scotty seemed to have fallen to the very bottom of his radar. That meant that Sam had fallen off of it altogether, which was a state of affairs that Dean liked just fine.
"Hey!" Sam barked from behind Gordon as Dean blocked a killing blow from Gordon's knife with his own. Gordon turned towards and received a solid punch to the mouth for his trouble. It knocked him back against Dean, who had to turn his knife quickly to the side so that he would not wind up stabbing Gordon with it and very likely killing him. That was not a line that Dean was willing to cross quite yet, though it scared him to think that when it came to protecting Sam it might be easier to lead him across that line than he would have thought possible. That fear came very close to being confirmed when Gordon reared back and threw his knife with a hunter's speed and precision at Sam's chest. Dean's first thought upon seeing that quicksilver flash of the blade through the air was 'I'll slit your fucking throat.' Sam deflected the blade with his forearm and sent it clattering down to the pavement before it could kill him, but not before Dean heard his short, pained intake of breath.
Dean's thoughts lose the shape of words altogether when he heard that sound. He seized Gordon's shoulder, whirled him around, and drove his fist into Gordon's nose, then into his abdomen. The sound that Gordon made on both counts was the most satisfying that Dean had ever heard. Had he even remembered that he was holding a knife at that point, he was afraid later that he might have used it.
Gordon made a growling noise and, grabbing Dean by the back of his neck, dragged him down so that he could bring his knee up hard into Dean's stomach. Dean felt all of the air leaving his lungs in a loud whoosh and barely managed to keep his balance at all as he staggered backwards. He went down to his knees in spite of himself when Gordon followed that up with a sharp chop to the back of his neck, sending swarms of black spots flying before his eyes. He could hear the sounds of a scuffle going on to his left even as he was struggling to get his breath back and rise to his feet again. Dean had only managed it halfway before Sam came back and dropped to his knees beside him. "You okay? I thought that he might have broken your neck at first."
"Yeah, yeah, I'm good." Dean swatted Sam's hands away and pulled an irritable face. "You?"
Sam grinned and held up his arm, where a long gap had been torn through the sleeve. When he rolled up his shirt, the plaster cast had a dent in it. "Stroke of luck, huh?"
"Sure was." Dean was not sure that his voice sounded all that sincere when most of his face still felt as if it had been submerged in ice. "Where's the bastard?"
"Bolted as soon as he had the chance." Sam rubbed at his arm. "We'll get him later."
"Later." Dean could hardly wait. He clapped Sam on the shoulder before he pushed himself painfully back up to his feet so that he could go and check on that point of this whole trip, Scotty himself. The kid had fallen to the ground from pain when the rock salt had peppered the side of his face, as it turned out, and not because Gordon had taken the opportunity to gut him like a fish. He had still had enough time to inflict a shallow wound, though, and Scotty was losing blood from it at a rate that Dean could already tell wasn't good. He was pushing himself into a sitting position against the side of the car when Dean reached him, touching at the blood on his face and chest and then staring at it as if he was not sure what it was.
"Here," Dean said gruffly as he leaned over the kid. He extended his hand downwards so that Scotty could take it. "Looks like you're about a pint low."
Scotty stared hard at Dean's hand before he shook his head. Dean looked at his face, pale in ways that blood loss alone could not account for, and thought that the kid would have run then and there if he had been able to stand. "Don't think that's a good idea."
Dean could feel the line being drawn down between his eyes. "Suit yourself, Scotty," he said, and took a step back, ignoring the concerned look that Sam was giving him as he did so. 'I'm not wrong.' Dean did not think that he was going to be able to throw that memory out of his head anytime soon, or stop giving the kid the fish-eye because of it.
"Scott," the kid said as he slowly, painfully pushed himself back to his feet, leaning on the car as he did so. He slipped once and would have fallen if Sam had not reached out and grabbed him quickly by the arm. The kid exhaled sharply when Sam did so, and Sam threw Dean a look. Whether that was because Dean had not moved such as a muscle when the kid had started to fall or because the kid had flinched so hard when Sam had touched him unexpectedly, Dean could not say. "Not Scotty."
"Fine. Scott." Dean scrutinized Scott hard, looking for those marks of darkness that he was supposed to be looking for in Sam, if not for the fact that Sam being his brother would probably blind him to all of those signs right up until the moment when Sam ripped out someone's throat. All that he saw from this supposedly new and objectively-viewed source, though, was a man in his very early twenties with the potential to be good-looking, examining the bloody slash in his chest and looking sicker by the minute. It was no small amount of blood that was spreading out across his shirt. "You have any idea why your buddy Gordo would be so interested in treating you like a nice salmon?"
"No." He was lying. "I was just leaving my therapist's office, and-" Scott froze, as if in his pain and distraction he had forgotten for a moment about the man who had nearly killed him. "Where is he?"
"Easy." Sam reached out and touched at the kid's shoulder as Scott looked again as if he was thinking of bolting. And once again, there was that flinch. Dean was cataloging them all. "He took off." Sam gave Dean a look as he said it, and Dean understood immediately. Gordon might be gone now, but he would be back unless he was dealt with. Gordon, after all, had not gotten what he wanted yet. Scott was still breathing.
Scott nodded, though he did not seem to be fully registering Sam's words. He was beginning to weave on his feet. Dean knew that it was probably time to stop talking and get this kid to a hospital before he bled out all over the pavement and it did not matter that they had interrupted Gordon, but he could not help himself. "You sure that you don't know why Gordon was after you there, Scott? Because I'm standing here thinking that you wouldn't make much of a poker player."
"Dean!" Sam hissed at him. He stared at Dean as if Dean had just suggested that Gordon had first noticed Scott due to Scott's unruly kitten-eating habits.
Scott ignored Sam and watched Dean instead, drawing his eyebrows together into a scowl that made him look older, old enough that Dean was no longer comfortable referring to him as a kid. "I didn't do anything wrong," he growled. It was almost believable. "I don't care what you-"
Dean was sure that Scott had quite the speech written up in his head, had his knees not then buckled suddenly and his eyes rolled back until they were showing nothing but eerie white. He wound up with an armful of the man as he tumbled forward. Dean grabbed at Scott's arm, for a few seconds encountering bared skin with his palm as he tried to keep Scott from falling down to the pavement. A shock almost like that of brushing up against a live wire while working on the Impala ran through Dean's arm before it subsided, and Dean nearly lost his grip. 'Yeah, kid,' he thought viciously as he adjusted his hold and threw Scott's arm across his shoulders, 'you didn't do a single thing to paint that target on your back.' He noticed that Sam was watching them both and said, "Come on. The longer we yap, the more he has to get pumped back into him." Rather than going all the way back to the Impala, Dean began fishing around in Scott's pockets for his keys. If they were saving his life, then he could get the bloodstains in his own car.
Sam took the keys when Dean handed them to him and unlocked the back door so that Dean could slide Scott inside, but he still did not stop giving Dean that look. That was Sammy's thinking face, his worrying face, and if Dean did not distract him soon then there was no way that he was going to be able to wiggle out from underneath it unscathed. "There something that you're not telling me, Dean?" he asked.
Dean made sure that Scott's feet were far enough inside the car so that Dean would not break his ankles when he slammed the door shut, hard enough to make the entire car shake. He straightened and flashed Sam a wide, reassuring smile. A big brother's smile. "Not a thing."
End Part One