Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Eric Kripke and the CW. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: This story was begun during S4, and as such, it does not take into account anything that happened after 416. It contains spoilers for all episodes to that point as well as descriptions of torture and grave-burning. It is complete and will be posted in its entirety.
Dean had always prided himself on being a detail man. Not Sammy's details, the ones gleaned from dusty books crammed in the furthest recesses of the library or nipped from the Jeopardy Daily Double on boring evenings when the hunts had either stalled or dried up altogether, leaving nothing but endless hours of channel surfing. Dean would have preferred puzzling out the illicit secrets of porno scramblevision, but sometimes not even a decent pair of knockers was worth enduring Sam's endless bouts of bitchface. Sammy needed his Alex Trebek like Dean needed Bambi Sue Eden and her double-Ds. And Sammy needed his details, of course, his scraps of Trivial Pursuit magic that would save them all when an unknown monster found its way out of the deep, dark forest to bare its lethal fangs in challenge. Dean couldn't blame him for that; how could he when he understood that need all too well? His magic was a little different, that was all. So Sam got his Jeopardy,and Dean settled for skin mags plucked from the racks of a thousand truck-stop gas 'n' gos.
Dean's details didn't come from books or from the mouths of smarmy TV game show hosts. Books were only as trustworthy as the people who'd written them, and in his experience, most people were full of shit. They didn't mean to be-at least not most of them. Most of them were decent people just scraping by, armed with nothing but starry eyes and a head full of homespun horseshit handed down from dear old Mom and Dad. They were full of shit because the bullshit kept them alive, insulated them from the horrors that lurked in the unlighted corners of the night. The bullshit kept them moving from one day to the next, from cradle to casket with a minimum of fuss. Bullshit made the world go around, and most folks were only too happy to do their part by passing it on to the next generation in neat little packages of paper and binder's glue.
As for the integrity of TV game show hosts, well, that spoke for itself, didn't it? He'd thought for years that old Alex Trebek was a golem, a mud man slapped together by Merv Griffin and shambling through the motions with the dull-eyed, mechanical efficiency of the undying. Muscles formed of mud and blood never wearied, after all. For his part, Bobby was convinced Bob Barker was an incubus, a horny old man leeching his eternal youth and vitality from the endless parade of pretty young things that volunteered to pimp his cheap showcases to wiry car salesmen from Butte and lonely, Twinkie-addicted housewives from Dubuque who dreamed of running away to Hawaii in a Mitsubishi Lancer and finding Fabio on the black-sand beaches.
Dean had been intrigued by the idea and had suggested a trip to L.A. to check out both Barker and the Nerd King, Trebek, but Bobby had been waist-deep in tracking a ghoul haven in Boston, and besides, he'd said between sips of beer, Hollywood was so full of freaks, dead, undead, and undetermined, that they'd be lucky to tell the normal crazies that inhabited Hollywood from the dangerous ones. Dad hadn't been any more enthusiastic; he'd just said that they had enough to worry about without wasting time on wild goose chases. Dean had known when he was beat, and he'd let the matter drop, but he'd never entirely surrendered the furtive, secret hope of finding himself in the Hollywood hills, killing zombies like Chuck Norris and charming the ladies with his James Dean swagger. David Lee Roth wasn't exaggerating about those California girls, and if Sammy was allowed to dream of being Perry Mason, then he was allowed to pretend he was Hugh Hefner. Only with fewer wrinkles and without the need for a handful of little blue pills.
Dean's details came from the real world, from the cold, hard truth of what he could see and hear and touch and taste. They came from the curve of a woman's lips as she smiled at him from across a smoky, pool-hall bar, and from the way a man said his name for the very first time. They came from the heft of an iron bar in his hands as he raised it to stave in the phantom skull of a woman in white, and from the grit of bone dust between those same fingers as he wrenched her bones from the damp, rotten earth in which she'd lain and doused them with lighter fluid. They came from the taste of beer on his tongue, bitter apples and warm piss in a finger-smudged stein, and from the smell of blood, hot and coppery, pennies and iron in his nose.
Being a detail man had saved his life more than a few times and kept him out of trouble ten times more than that. It had probably saved him from a paternity suit, and when he was eighteen, it had saved him from a case of the crabs when he'd seen a blood-bloated nit crawling languidly across his conquest's mons. Dean trusted his eyes, ears nose, and mouth to fill in the gaps left by his instincts, and he'd never once had to grope between the seats of the Impala in search of a detail that had slipped through the cracks to wedge itself against the gearbox. His details never got dog-eared or tattered or yellow with age and moldy with neglect, and they never needed to be returned to the steel belly of the nighttime book drop every three weeks under penalty of fines. They never wilted in the face of technological advances or scientific breakthroughs. They were as dependable as he was, and he could reach for them with his hands full of gun barrel and rock salt.
It was his attention to detail that had drawn him back to Sam in time to drag him from his burning bedroom and spirit him away from prying eyes and the smoldering wreckage of his great American dream. If he hadn't noticed that his watch had stopped, fingerless hands raised in(warning)surrender, he would've driven on, would've let the yawning gulf of years stretch between them while the blacktop collapsed behind him like an endless burning bridge. And Sam, stubborn in his love as he was in his belief in something better than John Winchester's narrow way, would've died with Jess, would've stretched out his hands in unconscious imitation of Dean's watch and died with his fingers turned to ash in her ribcage, a lover to the last.
His attention to detail hadn't saved Jess, of course, and he had no doubt that Sam would never forgive him that particular failure. It wasn't fair to blame him, any more than it was fair for Dean to think, I told you sowhile Sam stared at hotel room ceilings in white-faced silence and relived her death on the rough, knobbled, nicotine-stained stucco. But grief wasn't interested in fairness, only retribution, and when you got right down to it, love wasn't interested in forgiveness so much as survival. So Dean had consoled himself with the luck of his details, and Sam had flogged himself with the sudden failure of his.
Not that Dean's details were foolproof. If they had been, he would've seen it coming when Sam pulled up stakes and bolted for Stanford, leaving nothing behind but the plaintive echo of his "Kiss my ass," on the kitchen air. He wouldn't have spent the rest of that night curled sullenly in the front seat of the Impala, his fingers around the cool neck of a bottle of Jim Beam, and the next year determined to be every bit the man his father was just to spite Sam, who thought John Winchester was anything but good enough.
Hell, if they were foolproof, he would've realized that Ruby wasn't Ruby before he became puppy chow and wouldn't have ended up with the hand of God pressed to the flesh of his bicep like a brand.
Still, he trusted his attention to detail more often than not, and so, when a voice in the back of his mind began to whisper that something was amiss, he listened. A louder voice bellowed that of course something was amiss. How could it not be when he'd been raised from the dead by an agent of God schlepping through the world in the woebegone guise of a traveling salesman? The voice certainly had a point, but the other voice would not be denied, a wind chime sounding amid the furious tolling of bells.
Not right, it insisted. Not right.
Watch, Dean. Watch.
Not right. Be careful.
A small, frightened boy whispering dire warnings from the shelter of the closet while the bogeyman from which he hid reached out to curl its inky fingers around his trembling ankles and yank him into the world behind the wardrobe before he could even scream.
Dean watched, and listened. And eventually, he saw.
It was in the small things, the details, if you wanted to get cute or annoying about it. Dean figured he'd earned the right to be a bit of a smartass after four months in the ground, and as for being an annoying pain in the ass, well, Sam had been calling him that for years, along with more people than he cared to count. It was so small that he dismissed it at first, chalked it up to a souvenir of his days in the Hellbound Hilton or to the uncharted territory of resurrection by divine emissary. Maybe his eyes had gone funny, been singed by the flickering flames of hellfire, or maybe God's handyman hadn't been top of his class in human reconstruction. Maybe it wasn't his eyes at all; maybe it was his mind that had gone soft, blighted by the poisonous waters of the River Leithe. Maybe he'd accidentally cupped the sweet and terrible waters in his raw, tortured hands and had drunk it with his ruined, parched lips in a bid to quench his unending thirst; he'd drunk of those terrible waters in a moment of feverish desperation, perhaps, and now they'd begun their gentle work of undoing him, of smoothing him to nothingness with the cool efficiency of water lapping at the edges of the seashore. Maybe he was forgetting now, and these little things were the beginning of his end.
God knew there was so much he couldn't remember from his time down under, huge chunks of merciful blackness in which only hints of shadows danced. He supposed he should be grateful given what he couldremember. Sometimes, he'd be standing in front of the bathroom mirror or taking a leak in a filthy diner restroom and he'd hear himself scream even though his lips weren't moving. He'd stare at the cracked industrial tile above the urinal or below his haggard reflection while the piss dried to a painful trickle or the water splashed and splutted into the sink in a weak, incontinent stream, and he'd catch a glimpse of his face in the cracked, grimy tile or in the cloudy mirror glass. Not as it was, pale and perpetually bruised from too little sleep, but as it had been and still should be, bloody and battered and gouged by serrated claws and knouted lashes braided with sulphur and horsehair. He'd see that swollen, torn face with its bloody, bulging eyes and know that he was remembering. But those weren't memories he ever wanted to call home, and so he would beat them back by biting his knuckles until they bled or pinching the head of his limp prick until the pain bloomed in his balls and belly and brought the kinder darkness with it.
So when he awakened one morning to find that his jeans had migrated across the room and his wallet was perched delicately atop the dusty and beleaguered alarm clock, he blinked and ran his fingers through his hair and studied his wallet, which sat neatly atop the cracked casing. He looked at his jeans, which were folded on the ragged seat of the hotel room chair.
His jeans hadn't been on the chair the night before; he knew that because they were never farther away than the side of the bed in case necessity demanded a hasty exit. And his wallet most certainly hadn't been atop the alarm clock. It wouldn't do for the wallet to be anywhere but the side pocket of his jeans. There were too many identities tucked into its leather folds, too many names with his face. The manufactured lives in his wallet were enough to arouse the suspicions of even the densest college coed or most jaded hooker and bring the Feds to his door. The wallet stayed inside the jeans, and the jeans stayed beside the bed. The end.
Yet there they were in defiance of tradition.
His first instinct was to shrug and dismiss it as an aberration, more proof that his sojourn in the world's worst vacation Bible school had thrown him off his game. After enduring the worst punishment no human mind could ever fathom, maybe the threat of jail held no more terrors for him. Maybe this departure from the tried and true Winchester norm was his subconscious' way of saying it no longer gave a shit and would like to resign from this whole sorry affair, please and no goddamned thank you.
But the wide-eyed boy in the closet was whispering again, pale fingers curled around the doorframe in a white-knuckled grip, the thin crescents of his nails whiter than the paint that flaked beneath them.
Watch, Dean! Watch.And the darkness pooled around his ankles like oil.
He stared at the jeans, so neat and tidy on the chair, as though a maid had crept into the room to fold them as he slept. He briefly entertained the notion that housekeeping had done just that, but quickly dismissed it. Sam's jeans were still puddled beside his bed, and yellow burger wrappers still littered the rickety table and nightstand, as did the thin pages of three separate newspapers. Only his jeans were folded, and the longer he looked at them, the uneasier he became.
They were too perfect, too pat in their arrangement. It wasn't the casual fold of a confirmed bachelor or the novice, haphazard fold of a college girl taking her first stab at domesticity. It wasn't even the efficient fold of a Marine. It was the delicate, practiced fold of-
A mother's fold. Oh, dear God, a mother's fold. It's how Mom used to fold my clothes when she was putting away the laundry. She folded my pants and put them into drawers instead of hanging them up like Dad's because she was trying to save space.
That wasn't a train of thought he wanted to follow. The cherished, blurry images of Mary Winchester as a mother in her thirties, folding his pants and changing Sam's dirty diapers while he tugged gleefully on his toes had been supplanted by the exquisitely clear images of her as Mary Campbell, hunter and dream chaser, who'd sold her soul and her youngest son for ten years with John Winchester. Mary Winchester he remembered only in flashes, slivers of captured time that cut his heart and left loneliness and longing in the wounds. Mary Campbell he remembered in her agonizing entirety, an unrealized possibility dangling from the ends of an angel's fingers. Mary Winchester had left nothing behind but ash and regret; Mary Campbell had left the memory of her promise not to get out of bed on November 2, 1983, no matter what she heard, and of a kiss pressed freely to her dead father's lips while John cooled in her lap.
Mary Winchester had been perfect, an idol enshrined in the inviolate temple of his heart. Mary Campbell had been a liar. Mary Campbell had promised him she wouldn't get out of bed that November morning, but when the time had come, Mary Campbell had put on the skin of Mary Winchester and led her to her end on the ceiling of Sam's nursery. Mary Campbell had vowed that her sons would never taste of the hunter's gall, but Mary Winchester had ensured they would taste nothing else.
Then again, Mary Winchester had been a liar in her own right, though her lies had been white. Mary Winchester had leaned over his bed and told him that angels would watch over him. She had sealed that promise with a kiss, and then she had burned to death in hellfire with nothing but his father's name on her lips. What she had not told him was that an angel's vigilance was no guarantee of comfort and carried a price as high as a devil's bargain.
Liar, liar, mother on fire.
He looked at the creases in the fold and saw Mary Campbell gazing at him with a mixture of determination and pity. I'll never let my children grow up to be hunters.
He closed his eyes and swallowed the lump in his throat. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself staring at Sam's jeans, wadded in a careless jumble beside his bed.
If Mom was here, why didn't she fold Sam's pants, too?
Because Mary Campbell exists only for you, a little gift from Castiel,
answered a voice that bore a suspicious resemblance to the angel in question, and Dean wondered if the smug bastard wasn't hitching a ride on his shoulder despite his protestations of terminal disinterest.
"Thanks a heap," he muttered, and scratched his nape.
Not Mary, whispered the boy in the closet. He was hunkered in a knock-kneed crouch, eyes wide and deep-set inside his pinched face. Mary found her atonement in the nursery in Lawrence, watched over the new children who slept beneath her stain like she should've watched over you. She was the first sacrifice, and the second, the first link in this accursed chain of family. She spent her immortal soul to save you and your brother thirty-three years after she bartered your futures for her present security. Mary has flown away home, and she'll never come back.
"If not my mother, then who?" he asked the empty room, and Sam, buried beneath his coarse hotel sheets, shifted in his sleep. "Who, huh? 'Cause I gotta tell you, I'm getting real tired of all this disembodied voice crap and all these 'mysterious forces beyond my control' If this is another of God's little helpers, I think I'll pass, because frankly, the first one hasn't been that damn impressive."
Sam's head emerged from beneath the mound of brown sheets, and the thought rose unbidden in Dean's mind: I wonder if that's what it looked like when I clawed my way out of my grave.He tittered and fought a sudden rush of vertigo as his fingertips prickled with the memory of cool, dry dirt.
The dirt had been everywhere, had coated him in a fine, brown mist, and it had sloughed from him as he'd stumbled towards the gas station and civilization. More had fallen with every movement, and he'd thought, as he'd staggered and lurched on legs that had been suddenly alien, that he was dissolving again, that his resurrection was only temporary, a cosmic mistake that the gods had recognized at the last moment. He'd held his breath to still the dirt, to stop its fall and hold himself together, but it had kept falling, and he'd been sure that he was going to disappear and be scattered by the wind, nothing but dust and insufficient willpower. He'd trailed dirt into the gas station, and he was sure that it'd flown in his wake on the drive to Bobby's salvage yard, borne by the wind. Even the wind couldn't scour him clean. He'd found dirt for a week afterwards, beneath his nails and behind his ears and even in the crack of his ass. His clothes, too, the creases and the pockets and the cuffs of his jeans. He'd been Dean the little dust boy, and Bobby had bitched incessantly about the constant smears and blots of dust that he'd left on his furniture. Dean had been too bedazzled by his return to the Winchester Family Circus and Traveling Freakshow to point out that Che Singer had been furnished in Early Dust since he was a kid.
Sam was watching him now, brow furrowed in confusion beneath his mop of tousled brown hair. He was sitting up, and the(dirt)blanket pooled on his lap to expose his bare chest and arms. There were bruises and scratches on his chest and forearms and an odd, blue-black weal on the side of his neck. It took a moment for Dean to realize that the latter was a hickey. He wondered where it had come from, since Sam had gone to bed alone.
"Dean?" Sam leaned forward, a hank of sheets bunched in one hand as he prepared to throw them off.
Not Mary, the boy in the closet repeated. She's not dark enough. Watch, Dean! Watch.
Watch what?
The boy said nothing, but his bleak gaze shifted. He was no longer staring at Dean or stealing fretful glances over his bony shoulder in search of the boogeyman, who, unbeknownst to him, coiled ever more possessively around his bony, brittle ankles. He was gazing at Sam with eyes like muddy river water.
Watch, Dean. Watch.
Oh, Sammy,
he thought. When you throw those blankets off, will I find dirt on your legs?
"Dean? Dean!" Sam tossed off the blankets and swung his legs over the side of the bed, and Dean knew that if he didn't respond, Sam would be peering into his eyes and snapping his fingers in front of his face like a jive soul doctor dispensing stumpwater hoodoo remedies to a Motown beat.
"Sorry, Sammy," he said absently as he pretended not to be examining Sam's long legs. They were hairy and pasty, but they were also perfectly clean. Then, more brightly, "I was just admiring your new beauty mark there." He pointed at the hickey nestled in the crook of Sam's neck like a stolen kiss.
Sam froze in the act of scratching his bare midriff, and his cheeks reddened. "Oh." He stretched and turned his head, mouth open in a yawn. When it closed again, he said, "It's probably a bruise."
Dean snorted. "Bruise, my ass. I know a hickey when I see one. I've been giving and receiving them since you were still polishing your wood to the Pam Anderson centerfold."
Sam scowled. "I never liked Pam Anderson."
"Of course you did, Sammy. You're a man."
Sam rolled his eyes. "Dean, please. She looks like a blowup doll."
"You saying you've never been tempted to take one of those for a spin?"
"Whatever."
"I rest my case," Dean crowed jubilantly. "So who was she?"
"Who was who?" Sam rose from the bed and scratched the seat of his boxers.
"The hellcat you bagged last night."
Sam snorted. "One hickey, if that's what it is, which it's not, is a hellcat now?"
"Well, there're those scratches, too. You should tell her to bag the press-ons next time."
Sam blinked and dropped his sleep-gummy gaze to his bicep, which he prodded with the tip of his index finger. He inspected the red weals, lips pursed in concentration. "Huh."
"Huh?" Dean repeated. "Dude, if you're not impressed, then give me her number. I'll be glad to take her off your hands."
Sam sighed. "Dean, there was no girl, okay? No girl, no hickey, and no press-on nails."
"Right. So how'd you get those scratches?"
Sam shrugged, a brusque, inelegant bunching of his shoulders. "I probably got them on our last hunt."
"Our last hunt was ten days ago. You telling me that Mr. Resistant to a Demonic Zombie Curse can't heal a few scratches and a hickey in ten days?"
"Dean, they're just scratches, for fuck's sake. What the hell's gotten into you?"
Sam stopped abruptly. "Sorry, Dean."
Dean blinked, confused, and then he understood. "Relax, Sammy, Hell's not like Bloody Mary. It won't come if you say its name three times."
It doesn't have to come, countered a bitterly pragmatic voice inside his head that reminded him of his father. You brought it with you when you crawled out of the dirt and dragged yourself into the light. Maybe it came with the dirt that you carried with you all the way to Bobby's salvage yard, and now it's scattered to the four corners of Singer's house like gris gris dust, infested with imp shit and sloughed demon skin and the tattered remnants of a scream. It's certainly in your head, dusted over your collection of precious memories. Sam's first steps share headspace with your first glimpse of the bottomless abyss and the millions of eyeless, tongueless faces that sought blindly for even the blackest light. Your first kiss now lies forever entwined with the memory of all those souls with their arms outstretched, tongueless mouths open to catch your blood as it fell in a bid to quench their inexhaustible thirst.
Like it or not, son, Hell no longer awaits; it follows you wherever you go, an endless, blacktop carnival of hellbound souls, running to beat the Devil with his mark still cooling on their skin and simmering in their tainted blood.
Watch, Dean. Watch.
"Did you fold my pants last night?" Dean asked suddenly. His heart was thudding painfully inside his chest, a cold, sharp-knuckled fist, and he fought the urge to sink into his nest of stiff pillows and hide.
"Your pants? You're grilling me about an imaginary girl because your pants are folded?"
"And somehow ended up across the room, yeah," he added defensively. "I know better than to leave my pants across the room, Sam. When I went to bed, they were just like yours." He pointed to Sam's pants, which were still in a sad, disheveled lump beside his bed. "And I damn sure wouldn't leave my wallet on the night table." He jabbed an accusatory, triumphant finger at his wallet as though it were the piece de resistance atop an incontrovertible mountain of damning evidence.
Sam studied the wallet for a moment, and then turned his gaze to the neat, blue square of denim on the hotel chair. He cocked his head, and for a moment, Dean thought that Sam felt it, too, that inexplicable frisson of wrongness that had crawled into his belly and dried the spittle in his mouth, but then Sam shook his head in bewilderment.
"Let me get this straight, Dean. You think I had a girl in here and aren't telling you because your pants are folded and your wallet is on the nightstand?" Sam punctuated each clause with a quick, precise chop, as though he were bracketing them.
"Well..yeah." Put that way, it sounded ridiculous, a teenage girl seeing the specter of infidelity in every movement of her boyfriend's mouth and hearing it in every pleasantry exchanged between friends.
But it doesn't feel ridiculous, said the Castiel impersonator who had joined the cast of thousands inside his head. You've never had time for those idiots who shriek at every shadow and gibber in terror at every shitty ghost story tossed around the campfire by eight-year-olds and stoned frat boys, two groups with similar stages of emotional development. In fact, you've always held them in contempt, dismissed them as weak morons so desperate to inject excitement into their boring, comfortable, suburban lives that they'd invent horror where none existed. You have even less patience for those who invite disaster by toying with powers and creatures they know nothing about and then bleat in blind, ineffectual panic, pleading for someone like you and your family to save them from themselves. You consider them wastes of space, and if it weren't for the unforeseeable butterfly effects that would ripple in their absence and reshape the world, you'd be tempted to let them pay the piper.
You haven't spooked at the cheap, paper terrors of manufactured horror since you were five years old and hiding with your squalling baby brother on the backseat floorboards of the Impala, praying that the fire monster wouldn't gobble your father up, too. There was precious little time for the screaming memes when you were trying to protect Sam from every new monster your father found in his search for vengeance, and even if there had been time for a hearty yowl at the celluloid horrors that oozed from grainy, bleary television screens or percolated in the gutted recesses of your childhood mind, your father would never have permitted it. You learned toute suite not to scream about the bogeyman unless you meant it, and you had better know just which bogeyman it was, because if Daddy brought the wrong weapon, it might eat you both and eat Sammy as a chaser.
You haven't been a child since you were a child, and you've never succumbed to the vapors like a knock-kneed virgin at a bondage orgy. You can tell yourself that Sam is right all you want, that you're jumping at shadows and the ghosts of Hell's darkest halls, but you know better. It's more than just a hickey and a pair of folded pants on a hotel room chair. The world has undergone a seismic shift since you've been gone, one you feel deep in the bones and in the roots of your teeth.
The bitch of it is, you can't quite put your finger on what's changed. Everything looks the same, and yet.. It's off-kilter. Just a touch. Like looking through the side of a milk-stained glass. Things aren't quite where they should be. Oh, they're not off by much, just a touch, an inch to the right or a hair too high, but it's enough to make your stomach drop and your head swim. Your guts know a truth your eyes can't see, and it drives you crazy. Sometimes the sense of abnormal geometry is so strong that you have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from screaming and have to cram your fisted hands into your pockets to keep from stuffing your knuckles into your mouth. You've been tempted to ask Bobby if he feels it, too, or Sam, but you don't. Bobby because you know he doesn't; Sam because you're afraid he wouldn't tell you even if he did.
There's too much you don't understand in this world you should remember so well, the world to which you so desperately wanted to return. Sometimes at night, while Sam is sleeping or pretending to sleep, you lie awake and wonder if you ever left Hell. Maybe you're still there, bound by your own skin, bumbling through an illusion created by your remorseless taskmaster and destined for a fresh horror without name. Maybe Lilith's sitting on her throne and watching you play her terrible game, that obscene child's titter bubbling from her throat like boiling pitch. Maybe she put you here to watch Sam die, dissolved from the inside out by the corrupted blood that flows through his veins and reshaped in the image of Azazel's golden child, a dark god in the blood with yellow eyes and a messiah's angelic face. It's exactly the sadistic scenario that satanic little hellwhore would get off on, making you watch your greatest failure in living color and in real time from right in the goddamn middle of it.
Sometimes, when you can convince yourself that this is real and not the virtual world of a demonic Goldilocks, you wonder if I haven't made a mistake and dropped you into a parallel universe, pulled you through the warped glass of a funhouse mirror and into a twisted landscape of familiar faces speaking in unfamiliar tongues. Bobby is Bobby except when he isn't. He's as gruff as ever, but he seems older than you've ever remembered him. Before you died, you thought he was eternal, immutable as the bedrock of the earth, but since you've come back, you can't help but notice the new lines in the corners of his eyes or the grey that's settled over his hair like dust. Your death stole his immortality. Now he's just a tired old man running out of time and answers, and that scares you as much as the fear of going back to Hell to burn from the inside out with your bottomless sorrows and ceaseless, useless, unremarked guilt.
And Sam…
Dean closed his eyes in a bid to silence the voice, but it was no use. Castiel Lite was determined to have his say, to open his unseen mouth and let the truths spill from his lips like Divine judgment, an angel on the mount freed from the exhausting burden of mercy.
Sam is the not rightest thing in this topsy turvy world. He looks like Sam and talks like Sam, and the voice he speaks with is the voice you've known all your life, the one with which he promised to save you no matter the cost. The one that once cried out for you in the impermanent wilderness of the latest rented bedroom you shared, caught in the grips of terrors he was too young to name. But the language he speaks isn't the same. It's a cold and terrible glossilalia that hollows your belly and makes it flutter with unease, the ceaselessly wringing hands of a war wife who waits for an unsmiling Charon to knock on her door and greet her fretful scrutiny with an outstretched hand and an unspoken demand for tribute. It's not Sam's language, the language of empathy and compassion and unwavering, resolute hope. It's the tongue of dust and bones and ashes spread over unhallowed ground and forgotten by God and man. The grammar and syntax are as unfamiliar as the silver desert of the moon, and the words carry alien inflections and meanings that cut and grind against your new flesh. Sometimes the otherness makes you want to clap your hands over your ears, as though your mortal fingers could filter out the terrible strangeness.
You're the one who burned, but it's Sam who's been re-forged and tempered into something new, been made harder than he was. The idealist has been crushed by the grim-faced pragmatist, and there are nights when you look at him in the wavering, uneven light of passing headlights or the cold, dim lights of the latest motel room and wonder who he is. Some nights, when he's hunched over the laptop or poring over a police report he lifted from some hick precinct, he looks like your father, hollow-cheeked and pale and numb to everything but the hunt in front of him. The Sam you knew would've hated the comparison, would've chafed and bridled and insisted that you didn't know what the hell you were talking about, but this Sam might not mind the comparison. This Sam might take it as a compliment. He wouldn't smile, though. This Sam never smiles unless it's part of the disguise.
The Sam you knew was a little glass boy with no secrets to keep. He wore his heart on his sleeve and his hope in his eyes, and he was all about sharing and caring, Dr. Phil with a full head of hair. After your father bartered his soul for your life, that Sam hounded you to bare you soul and expose your broken heart for his inspection. That Sam believed in magic words like "closure" and "faith", and told you that he believed in God and prayed to the angels at night. That Sam thought all dogs went to heaven and that evil people got what was coming to them. That Sam believed in goodness and mercy with the innocence of a child, and he was your blessed hope.
But that Sam is long ago and far away. This Sam has more secrets than truths in his heart, and where his heart now lies, you can't say. It's far removed from his sleeve, and most of its strings have been singed by hellfire. More than a few are missing. This Sam doesn't give a shit about Dr. Phil and has no patience for sharing and caring or closure. This Sam's asked you about your voyage to Hell, but you can't shake the feeling he's asking for strategic reasons rather than personal ones. This Sam isn't interested in your terror and pain, but in the demons who wielded the lash and the tongs and who sank their diseased claws into your guts and bones and left their taint behind. It's reconnaissance that moves him now, not compassion.
This Sam believes in angels now because he must, but he is no longer certain of their goodness. In fact, he rather doubts it. Worse yet, this Sam has stopped looking for goodness and mercy. He finds it a childish illusion, an impossibility born of naivete and a pathological need for comfort. Goodness and mercy exist only in heaven, and he's not sure if heaven is real or another wistful figment of the human imagination. This Sam hopes for nothing now save the chance to save another life by whatever means necessary, and God help you, you're afraid of just what that means.
This Sam forsakes you in the night, leaves you to the mercy of your uneasy dreams and disappears into the shadows. You don't know who he walks with, but you know he doesn't walk alone, and you know it isn't with you. Sam has been your faithful shadow since the day he was born, and with the exception of his years at Stanford, you know every step he's every taken and the roads on which he took them. For the first time in his life, he's gone where you can't follow. You could've followed him down the yellow brick road to Stanford, but you were too loyal, and too hurt by his casual dismissal of every wound you'd ever suffered to keep his ungrateful ass safe and preserve his childhood innocence for a while longer, so you let him go; later, when the heat of the wound had cooled and dulled to a throbbing ache, you wished him well.
But where this Sam goes, you can't follow, and you're not sure you would if you could. You would've followed your Sam to the ends of the earth and jumped blindly into the abyss to pull him out again, but this Sam goes where angels fear to tread, and when he comes back, there's sulphur on the soles of his shoes. He smells of brimstone and damnation and of everything you died to keep away from him. He smells bitter, innocence corrupted. You thought a smell like that would turn your stomach, but it breaks your heart instead.
Your Sam was a Sam of new beginnings and life after this. This Sam speaks of nothing but the end. You would've died for your Sam, have died for him. Now you're afraid you'll die
because of him. Part of you wonders when you became such a coward, but most of you suspects it isn't you who's changed. Sometimes, you wonder if dead isn't better, after all.
But he couldn't say any of this to Sam, because right now, he looked like the Sam of old, tousled and fretful and peering at him with an expression of burgeoning concern from beneath untidy brown hair. He knew that if he didn't speak up, Sam was apt to decide he was losing his mind and drag him to Bobby's, where he and Singer would tiptoe around him and pore over moldering books on Hell while they kept him busy with such ball-busting tasks as mowing Bobby's weed-choked lawn and cleaning the same ten carburetors ten times.
Dean swallowed the sour unease on his tongue, cleared his throat, and rubbed his nape. "Yeah. Well. When you put it like that, it sounds really fucking stupid."
Sam snorted. "That's because it is, Dean." Put-upon and holier-than-thou, and Dean smothered the maddening desire to cuff him upside the head. "Now, can I take shower, or would you like to inspect if first to make sure I haven't hidden a stripper in there?"
"I thought library assistants were more your type, Sammy. I see you're broadening your horizons. If she says her name is Kandi, tell her I had nothing to do with that rash in '04."
Sam rolled his eyes and padded into the bathroom, and Dean watched him go with his lips pulled into a fragile, too-tight grin. He could feel his cheekbones pressed against the frozen flesh of his cheeks, sharp, fleshless fingers inside his mouth. Too thin, too thin, his mind yammered frantically. Any further and the skin would tear and slough like bits of charred paper.
He was still grinning stupidly when Sam shut the bathroom door. Pain blossomed and prickled in the palms of his hands, and when he looked down, he was surprised to find his fingers curled into bloodless, white-knuckled fists. He willed his them to relax, and they unfurled to reveal nails stippled with blood. His palms burned and tingled with the promise of blood, and the imprint of his fingernails reminded him of teeth, as though an unseen creature had crept up while he'd argued and stolen a piece of him when he wasn't looking. Not a big piece, mind. Just a nibble. Even monsters had small, dainty mouths. The thought filled him with helpless revulsion, and he closed his hands again to protect them from greedy, suckling mouths. An image arose in his mind of hands tipped with pearlescent claws that razed and harrowed unprotected flesh, but he banished it before it could coalesce.
"Get a fucking grip, soldier," he ordered himself, but his heart was triphammering inside his chest, and the command emerged as a strengthless, pitiful rasp. He opened and closed his hands in an effort to dispel their odd, dreamy weightlessness, and each flexion of his fingers plunged a miniscule darning needle into his wounded palms.
Do that long enough, and I can have my own goddamn stigmata. Wouldn't that be a trip? Me and my demonic brother on a cross-country road trip, Lucifer Junior and the Christ without a cause, rambling down the backroads with Led Zeppelin on the radio.He laughed, a strangled bleat in the dusty, yellow silence of the room, and tucked his head to his chest, the better to avoid the sight of those damn neatly folded pants.
Are you sure it's Sam you brought back? Not the voice of Castiel or his father or the crouching boy in the closet at the edge of the abyss, but of Azazel, the yellow-eyed demon who'd taken his mother in sacrifice and sown the demon seed in Sam. He saw him in all his Kansas farmer cornpone splendor, leering at him with that usurped mouth and blinking at him with his unnatural yellow eyes. Are you sure it's Sam in there washing his pits with the sorry sliver of hotel soap? Are you really, honest-to-God sure, there, Dean?
Stop him, or we will.
Castiel, issuing Divine law with his borrowed human mouth and gazing at him with a mixture of pity and terrible knowledge. Castiel, who in his heart was as hard and pitiless as any demon. Sam had always believed that angels were creatures of light and tenderness whose veins boasted the purest milk of compassion, but like so many of Sam's dreams, that notion had proven to be so much blind hope. Angels were stone and adamant behind the light of undimmed glory, assholes with the right credentials.
"Shut up, you lying son of a bitch," he snarled at Azazel. "Go back to roasting in Hell where you belong. I brought back Sam, and nobody else."
Azazel smiled. His yellow eyes were cold above his jovial, aw-shucks grin. If you're so sure of that, then why are you so afraid of a misplaced wallet and a folded pair of jeans?
"You're full of shit." He got out of bed and snatched the wallet from the night table, the cheap vinyl billfold clutched in his hand like a stone. He stalked to the chair beside the rickety table and yanked the jeans from the seat. The worn denim was warm in his sweaty hand, like human skin, and he bared his teeth in a reflexive moue of disgust. He swallowed with a dry click as the legs unfolded and shoved the wallet into a rear pocket, where it bulged like a tumor.
"Full of shit," he repeated dully, and held the jeans at arm's length between his thumb and forefinger.
Azazel's grin became a derisive smirk. That's mighty brave, Winchester, he said, and applauded slowly. John wasn't laying it on thick when he said his boys were fine warriors. Good boys, was how he put it, as I recall. When he wasn't crying and begging for mercy and a single drop of water, that is. I'm impressed. I thought it was all Winchester bravado. You and yours have a history of being spectacularly full of shit.
"I'll take that as a compliment," he muttered. The jeans dangled and swayed slowly from his fingertips, as though unseen legs kicked and pedaled on the air.
So how about putting them on?The smirk broadened to a vulpine leer.
"How about you go fuck yourself?" He dropped the pants. "Fuck you running, asshole." The pants lay at his feet in a crumpled heap, and the waistband yawned at him like a toothless, forlorn mouth. Just a pair of Wranglers that he'd picked up at a Goodwill and worn a thousand times. He'd worn them yesterday without a thought, and now the thought of wearing them inspired a swooning, nauseated dread.
Big, bad Dean Winchester, afraid of a pair of jeans,scoffed Azazel, and Dean imagined his yellow eyes gleaming with sadistic amusement.
His irrational fear infuriated him, and he kicked the defenseless pants, which clung to his socked foot in search of mercy. Another kick, and the waistband mouth retched. A pant leg curled around his ankle in mute supplication, and he shook it off with a revolted hiss.
"Son of a bitch."
He kicked until the screaming waistband mouth went slack, and then he stood over the lifeless pants, panting. He felt idiotic and half-mad, a hare run to ground by the long, thin shadows of the wolf, but he also felt a perverse sense of relief, as though he had crushed smoldering embers before they could ignite and swallow him with tongues of dancing flame. He reached down and pulled the wallet from the back pocket, and then he kicked the jeans under the nearest bed, a murderer erasing evidence of his dark misdeed. He was tempted to leave the wallet, too, but there had been precious slim pickings at the local juke joints, and they needed the money the assorted credit cards and fake identities could provide. He tossed the wallet onto his bed and rubbed his palm on his outer thigh, wincing at the sudden recollection of his self-imposed stigmata.
Watch, Dean. Watch.The boy in the closet stared at him with his pinched, chalky face, oblivious to the darkness that pooled around his ankles and slithered languidly across his thighs in an avid lover's caress, possessive and oddly intimate.
I'm not the one who needs watching, kid,he thought, but said, "Watch what?"
The boy sank even further into his crouch, and his pale, narrow hands dangled bonelessly between his thighs. His fingertips grazed the flesh there, as though to brush aside the relentlessly encroaching darkness, but the serpentine tendrils simply slipped over his lax fingers and tattooed his waxy skin with an ever-shifting latticework of whorls and lines. He said nothing, but turned his baleful gaze to the closed bathroom door.
"Sam? Is it Sam?" he demanded. "What about Sam? You better start talking, you little freak, or I'm going to wring your neck." He thought for a moment. "Course, that's not a real effective plan if you're already dead."
Just then, Sam emerged from the bathroom on a cloud of steam, wrapped in a dingy, threadbare towel the color of dust and rotten lace. It reminded Dean of a winding sheet, and his mouth went dry.
Am I supposed to watch out for Sam? Is something going to happen to him? I've already sold my soul for him. Don't think for one second that I won't do it again.
"Dean?" Sam surveyed him through the rapidly dissipating steam, hands on his hips. "Who are you talking to?" His gaze was sharp, searching, and Dean fought the urge to flinch. It was too bright, too damn knowing.
The boy in the closet shook his head and pressed a bony finger to bruised lips. Ssshh. Watch, Dean. Watch.
He was tempted to tell Sam anyway, to blurt it out for spite. He was tired of being led around by the nose by aloof angels with their own agendas and used by demons as a bleeding, screaming party favor, but the image of his jeans folded with a maternal crease loomed large in his mind and settled in his chest with the cold weight of portent, so he shook his head and said, "Nothing, Sammy."
Sam was clearly unconvinced. He narrowed his eyes. "Dean-,"
Dean held up his hands to forestall a barrage of armchair psychology. "Sam. Can't a guy just greet the day?"
"That's the second time you've talked to yourself," Sam pointed out shrewdly, and not for the first time, Dean cursed his tenacity and Ivy League smarts.
"I'm talkative."
"That'd be a first since you've-," Sam paused, and Dean could see him flipping through his mental thesaurus for the appropriate term. "-been back," he finished lamely.
Sorry, Sammy, Dean thought with bleak amusement. I don't think there's an Ann Landers column for this.
"Burning in Hell leaves you at a loss for words, Sam," he snapped. "It's kinda hard to talk when your vocal cords are popping like gristle in your throat from all the screaming. Not to mention all the smoke and fire. Hell, I'd think you'd be grateful that I was talking at all, given your obsessive hard-on for me to stop being so damn quiet."
Sam swallowed. Dean, I didn't mean-," His eyes were wide, guilt-stricken and pleading.
"I'm gonna load up the car," Dean said brusquely. "Why don't you finish primping and get us checked out?"
Sam took a deep breath and blew it out again. He ran his fingers through his still-wet hair, which had been temporarily tamed by the steady pulse of the water. It clung tightly to his scalp in a glossy skullcap, and Dean was suddenly struck by how young he looked. Sam was twelve again, all long arms and legs and gangly elbows and hairless chest. When Sam answered, Dean was shocked by how adult he sounded, how old.
"Yeah, all right," Sam said quietly, and his shoulders slumped in defeat.
Guilt came then, hot and stinging as the broken crescents pressed into the flesh of his palms, and he opened his mouth to apologize, but then he closed it again. He wasn't sure what to apologize for, and besides, there was nothing he could offer that Sam would understand. So he simply strode to his bed, picked up the wallet and bent to retrieve his duffel bag. Sam toweled off and dressed in silence, and when he left for the decrepit, flyblown lobby with a tarnished key in his hand, the boy in Dean's head nodded in solemn approval.
Watch, Dean. Watch.
Dean unzipped his duffel, snatched his shirt and flannel from the scrawny, wooden bedpost, and said nothing. Despite what he'd told Sam, he was all talked out. Even the smallest words were heavier than he could lift, and in a terrible paradox, they meant less than ever. They were so much air forced between his teeth, and the more he spoke, the more he felt like he was suffocating. It was easier to keep his mouth shut and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other.
The car was packed by the time Sam emerged from the manager's office with his hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans. Dean slid into the driver's seat and turned the ignition, and the Impala rumbled into deep-throated life around him. The car's steel frame was as warm and familiar as a cradle, and he sank into the seat and closed his eyes.
"No place like home," he muttered, and curled his fingers around the worn leather of the steering wheel. The car vibrated beneath his hands, brimming with bridled horsepower and eager to hit the open road, and he smiled. "Yeah, baby," he said, and patted her dash. "I hear that. Oh, yes, I do."
Sam, busy arranging his lanky frame in the passenger seat, snorted, but Dean saw some of the tension ebb from his shoulders. It might've been odd for him to be talking to the cheap motel room, but Sam had heard him talking to the Impala since he was five years old and playing fort in the backseat, warding off the monsters with fistfuls of Morton's table salt and a plastic cap gun their Aunt Judy had bought him at a grocery store. His conversations with this cherry Popular Mechanicspinup girl were a part of the soundtrack to Sam's life, on par with Dad's insistence that they clean their guns before they clean their teeth.
Speaking of which,Dean thought, and snapped on the radio. It crackled and hissed into life, and through the bursts of static came Robert Plant's defiant call to Valhalla and rock and roll infamy in "Immigrant Song". His fingers drummed along to the beat, and his head bobbed in time to the music. He drew in a breath with which to sing along, and then he remembered his strange premonition in the hotel room, Lucifer Junior and the Christ without a cause, traveling down lightless backroads with Zeppelin on the radio. The indrawn breath withered in his chest, and he reached out and turned the radio tuner with a snap of his wrist. The white needle of the tuner speared the numbers of a new station like the tine of a pitchfork, and from the guts of the radio came the fire-and-brimstone voice of a Bible-belt preacher in the ecstasy of universal damnation.
Dean snapped off the radio. "Too full of static," he offered feebly when Sam raised an eyebrow in mute inquiry. "If I want music, I've got the good stuff right here." He patted the shoebox of cassettes nestled neatly between the seats.
Sam said nothing, but continued to survey him in contemplative silence. Dean threw the Impala into reverse and backed out of the parking lot and onto the highway, a sun-blistered stretch of two-lane blacktop that stretched to nowhere and everywhere in either direction. The tires met the blacktop with the enthusiastic kiss of rubber on road, and then the motel was gone, receding to an insignificant blot in the rearview mirror.
"Where to, Sammy?" he asked with a voice that sounded too brittle and raw inside his mouth, too fraught with the effort of words that cut his mouth like shards of glass and filled it with the taste of blood and poison.
Sam's mouth twitched. For him, the words still flowed like milk and honey, and Dean knew he brimmed with questions and well-intended accusations, demands that Dean bare wounds that still pulsed and throbbed with lingering hurt. Finally, Sam opened the glove box and rummaged inside for the roadmap stuffed beside a Maglite and the Impala's registration. He unfolded it and smoothed it over his knees.
"I think there might be a headless horseman in New York," he said.
"Awesome. I've always wanted to see if old Ichabod was as squirrelly as Uncle Walt made him out to be in the movie."
He pushed the accelerator, and the car rocketed toward the horizon, the great-great-great grandson of the headless Hessian's bootblack steed. It was twenty miles before the image of his folded jeans left him, and another ten before he felt safe enough to turn on the radio and fiddle with the tuner. No Zeppelin then, just The Black Crowes telling the world that she talked to angels, and while the song made his skin prickle and crawl with a nameless unease, he left it on and prayed that whoever found his jeans had the sense to burn them.