**Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural but it owns my soul many times over at this point.
**Timeline: Season 4, in between "Heaven and Hell (4.10)" and "Family Remains (4.11)" - one of the jobs that the Winchesters did in the month in between the canon episodes.
Chapter One
Normal people wouldn't probably find a pub conducive to researching and writing, but for Lillian Thanes it was perfect. She'd started coming to the Green Flag as an undergraduate, and five years later she was still coming here most nights of the week as she slogged her way through a master's degree. It was one of the quieter pubs near her university. Small and offering only the most basic rail and menu, the Flag lacked what other college bars in the area had in abundance: attractiveness to loud, obnoxious crowds drawn out from the fraternity and sorority houses.
The fact that it was still in full operation was only described as "the luck of the Irish" by the very Irish owners as well as almost their entire bar staff. In reality the Donnelley family was rather well-off, having come a long way from their Famine-fleeing roots by rebuilding their lives on a farm far more prosperous than their meagre rocky acre in the west of Ireland. Curious to see if they could make a go of the pub, Gerry and Ellie Donnelley had bought it a year or two before Lily had started going there to study after a long day of classes. Their oldest son Liam managed the place, having a better head for business than for farming, and was able to turn a modest profit from what the rest of his family considered a sideline distraction. There were always people inside but aside from the usual drinking holidays the Flag was never at full capacity. That was why Lily had become part of the woodwork there, as familiar a face at the bar as those behind it.
The other reason Lily loved going there was the food – which she, as a longtime regular and friend of the staff, got at a significant discount. The fact that Liam used some of the family farm's bounty on the menu put the Flag's pub fare way above the average quality and way below the average price in the college town. The meals Lily ate there were better than her home-cooked fare and were surpassed only by the Sunday lunch she still shared with her parents and siblings every week. But Lily preferred the pub's easy, laid-back atmosphere to the dysfunctional tension of her childhood home.
This evening at the Flag had started like most, though a big difference was that there was hardly anyone else at the Flag besides herself and the evening bartender, Michael; in fact, there were only two occupied tables when she walked in, and one group had left since then. Michael was even flying solo in the pub, having sent the server home early. After a day of classes – two in which she was the student in the morning, and one in the afternoon that she taught once a week – around seven she'd locked up the small office that she shared with two other teaching assistants in the history department and headed three blocks off campus to the Flag. By the time she'd settled into her usual spot at the end of the bar, Michael had poured her a pint of Guinness for her to start on while she chose between her three usual pub meals. It was now eight and Lily had just finished the last of the lamb stew, and as she set the empty bowl aside her mind was already back on her research.
She'd earned her undergraduate degree as a double major honors student in history and literature, and her honors thesis explored the historical contexts of literature. Her master's thesis looked forwards instead of backwards, though: she was scrutinizing literary works with the eyes of modernity, challenging the status of so-called "classics" and their relevance to the current century by assessing how they measured up to current standards across the board of modern life. Lily was currently slogging through research for her chapter on the women in Shakespearean tragedies.
It was far better than the chapter where she'd explored the concepts and portrayals of familial units in Greek and Roman mythology, but Lily was feeling her academic stamina begin to wane. She was hardly a full year into her graduate studies yet she was already questioning why she'd gone into this in the first place right after earning her bachelor's degree.
Lily frowned at that thought and pushed it aside. Whatever kind of slump she was in right now, she was sure it was temporary. She loved learning and she loved what she was working on, and what was more important was that she'd committed herself to another degree. And all of that put together added up to the conclusion that she had to finish what she'd started.
Besides, at a time like this it would be nice to have her research and writing filling her mind more than it usually did. Lily wanted to be so totally preoccupied with her thesis that she couldn't think about the tragedy currently rocking the entire campus – the suicide two weeks earlier of one of the teaching assistants in the dramatic performance department of Fine Arts. And if that wasn't enough, ever since then the entire program had been bombarded with all kinds of problems.
Those other problems didn't really register on Lily's radar, though. Lily had known Adrian ever since being in a group project with him in an Elizabethan literature course in the first year of her undergraduate degree. He'd taken the class as an elective that complimented his degree in dramatic arts and they had remained friends long after the excuse of being study buddies had become a thing of the past. She still couldn't believe that he was gone – that he'd committed suicide, because he had never given any indication and she had never noticed anything…and Lily needed a distraction big enough to keep herself from focusing on the indignation and hurt she felt over having been one of Adrian's best friends and not knowing – not having been smart enough to know – what his life had truly been like.
Funnily enough, reading Shakespeare didn't cause her to go down the block of memory lane where Adrian resided. He'd been as enamored of the Bard as any fanboy could be, and Lily had always taken great amusement in teasing her friend about the bromance he had with the long-dead playwright. She was so engrossed in yet another reading of Macbeth – a week into this chapter and she'd already lost count of how many times she'd gone from Line 1 to Line 2113 – that she hardly noticed the two men walk into the mostly-empty pub.
Sam and Dean Winchester sat down at a table in the corner of the pub, tired as always from the long ordeal of driving from one version of Small Town, USA, to another. Lately they'd been at it non-stop, and Sam had suspected for about a week now that it had something to do with the confession Dean had made to him not so long ago about his time in Hell.
In the week and a half since then they'd done four jobs. It had all been small stuff and straightforward at that – the supernatural hunters' equivalent of skeet shooting while stalking deer – but still, they'd gone from one job to another without so much as a day's break in between. As concerned as Sam was starting to become, though, he knew better than to ask Dean about it. It wasn't quite yet the time for him to broach that particularly sensitive topic with his older brother.
Instead, Sam had decided to humor Dean for a while longer. "So, what are we doing here? You didn't exactly say where we were heading when we left that cemetery." In fact, the brothers had barely finished reburying the coffin whose contents they'd set ablaze before Dean was burning rubber to get them here.
Sam didn't even know how Dean had found the time to track down a new job, but that too wasn't something he wanted to ask about just yet. If Dean needed to run himself into the ground to deal with his issues, then so be it. Sam just hoped that he himself had the stamina to keep up at the demanding pace Dean was setting.
Dean plucked the bar's menu – one laminated page – from where it was propped up on the table between the condiments. "So about two weeks ago, a graduate student offed himself in his office. He was a teaching assistant in the undergraduate theatre program or something. Anyway, so he commits suicide, and right after the funeral weird things start happening in the department." Dean handed the menu across the table and settled back in his chair.
"Okay, so an easy hunt then," Sam surmised as he studied the menu. "Sounds like a textbook haunting to me."
"Ah, but that's where you're wrong," Dean replied, then he glanced over Sam's shoulder. Sam turned around to see the bartender heading over, then looked back at the menu one last time.
"Good evening, gents," the bartender said. "Can I start you off with something to drink?"
"I think we're actually ready to order," Dean told him.
"Great. What'll it be?"
After taking their order – steak and fries with a pint of lager for Dean and chicken pot pie accompanied by cider for Sam – the bartender left and disappeared into the kitchen, and Dean got right back into his explanation.
"The guy was cremated, so there are no remains left to dig up, salt, and burn," he continued in a low, hushed voice.
"So we find whatever object he's attached to and do the deed on that," Sam said. "Again, no biggie."
The bartender came back with their drinks and retreated. Dean observed his familiar, casual interaction with the brunette sitting at the end of the bar with vague interest, then shrugged it off and got back to the issue at hand as Sam took a sip of his cider.
"The guy's been dead for two weeks, Sammy," he reminded his brother. "The kind of stuff that's happening…man, it would take some major ghost power to swing it. Too much power for a spirit that's two weeks old, that's for sure."
Sam's brows knitted in a frown. "That's not normal."
"Exactly." Dean took a long swig of his lager then said, "So there's something making this guy's spirit more powerful than it should, which most definitely points towards something real and most likely still very much alive controlling it."
Sam set down his glass and rubbed his forehead. "Alright, then. Where do we start?"
When Lily finally looked up from her books, it was nine-thirty and another customer was standing at the bar, credit card in hand and waiting for Michael to get back from his bathroom break. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with tawny hair that he wore in what looked like an overgrown crew cut that complemented the tousled look to the rest of him: a few days' worth of stubble on his chiseled jaw, faded jeans and a rumpled green plaid shirt over a long-sleeved grey T-shirt, and well-worn heavy-duty boots.
He turned his head and looked at her and Lily felt her cheeks go hot. Was I staring too much?
"Odd place to study," the man remarked, nodding at her books and laptop.
"This place serves alcohol. The library doesn't," Lily replied.
His face creased momentarily into a thoughtful frown. "Good reason," he conceded.
"Well, like Hemingway said – 'write drunk, edit sober.'" Lily turned back to her books and ran her fingers over the numerous Post-Its sticking out of her copy of Macbeth.
"Is it midterms already?" the guy asked.
What the heck is Michael doing in there? Lily was a terribly private person and she felt like she was being put on the spot. "I'm a graduate student," she replied simply.
"In…drama?" he asked, his voice carrying an obvious hint of a little too much interest for Lily's comfort.
Lily drew in a breath and glanced sidelong at him. "Literature and history."
Thankfully Michael reappeared then and the man's attention was diverted from her to the action of settling up his tab. Lily glanced around the pub then, noting that the other customers who had been there before her were still there and halfway through another round, and that at a table in the farthest corner from the bar another man was getting up and putting on his jacket.
"Thanks," the guy at the bar said to Michael. "Have a good night." He looked at Lily as he pocketed his wallet. "You too," he added before turning around and walking to the door, where he was joined by the man Lily had observed putting on his jacket.
They left without a backwards glance – but then again, why would they? This was a college town, a stop on the road towards somewhere else for anyone whose life wasn't tied somehow to the institution on the hillsides above the houses and shops. They'd be gone in the morning, and Lily briefly wondered why she even cared before getting back to her books.
"We'll hit up the campus tomorrow and see what else we can dig up whatever the local police missed," Sam said as the brothers entered their motel room.
"We can probably split up," Dean suggested, dumping his duffel bag on the floor by the bed closest to the door and frowning at an odd, dingy spot just off-center on the duvet.
Gross… Dean stretched before tugging the duvet off the bed and rolling it up. No way am I sleeping on that. Even for him it was just a little much.
"We'd cover way more ground faster," he continued, "if one of us does the asking around while the other goes snooping. There've been a couple of places where the weird ghost crap's been happening, right? Maybe there'll be some clues there."
Sam nodded his assent, setting his laptop bag down on the round table in the kitchenette and looking around the room. He didn't really take notice of how motel rooms actually looked anymore, unless they were particularly tacky or skeevy; he was just committing to memory all the possible escape routes available to them here. "Sounds like a plan to me."
The next morning, the brothers flipped a quarter to determine who would be scouring the crime scene and who would be canvassing the drama students and faculty.
Shortly after Sam took off in the direction of the crime scene, Dean started his interviews. He was currently on his fourth – seemingly another dead-ender – and his patience was wearing thin.
"What else can I say, man?" the dreadlocked thespian said, shrugging the bony shoulders sticking out of his cut-off lumberjack shirt. "The guy just offed himself, ya know?"
"Yes, I understand that," Dean replied, "but was there anything – anything at all that could have indicated he had those tendencies?"
The thin shoulders went up and down again, and the dreadlocks quivered as he shook his head. "I dunno, man. We're all kinda…moody, I guess, and Adrian was just like the rest of us. It's an artist thing, ya know?" He raised his chin proudly, as if to indicate that Sam and Dean couldn't possibly understand the plight of truly artistic souls.
Dean sighed inwardly. "Sure. Okay, then. Well, do you know if there's anyone outside of the drama department that we could talk to about him? Friends, family, people like that?"
"Not really, man." The pierced nostrils flared as he cocked his ragged-looking head to one side in thought. "Well, there was this one chick, ya know? Over in the history department, I guess, man. I think she's a TA or something, man. Lily, I think? Yeah."
Finally – something useful. He had one more question and said, "Okay, great. Could you point us there?"
"I dunno, man. I'm not in history, ya know?"
Lily sat at her desk in the slightly-too-small office she shared with two other teaching assistants in the history department, her copy of Hamlet open before her and a pen between her teeth. Her five-subject notebook was open to a fresh page in the section she'd devoted to this play, the bright orange streak of highlighter at the top reminding her of what her train of thought for today should be: Hamlet's Psychology.
Unwilling to put up with the incessant gossip of her companions, Lily had plugged in almost immediately upon settling down two hours before. There was no other way to be remotely productive there during her office hours three days a week. With the amount of work she had to do she really couldn't afford to spend any spare moments on anything but her studies.
A tap on her shoulder made her jump in a mile out of her chair. She yanked her earbuds out and twisted her upper body around, her bright brown eyes wide and flashing. "Cassie!" she exclaimed in exasperation. "How many times have I told you to come around the front when I'm plugged in?"
Cassie shrugged apologetically, though the bland expression on her face made the gesture obviously half-hearted. "There's somebody here who wants to see you," she said, gesturing over her shoulder at the door.
Lily looked past Cassie and saw a familiar figure hovering at the threshold – the guy from the Flag the night before, though decidedly less scruffy-looking today than he had been the previous evening. He was dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and tie, with his face smooth and his hair neatly combed.
He looked better last night, Lily thought. She then shook herself mentally back to the real issue – something strange is happening here. He asked last night if I was in drama…he's got to be here about Adrian.
Lily tossed her earbuds onto the desk as she stood and turned around entirely.
"Hello," she said uncertainly, one eyebrow arched slightly as she regarded him. "Are you here for office hours, or…?"
"Oh, no. I'm not a student." He pulled a badge out of a pocket inside his black blazer and flashed it at her. She saw the bold "FBI" printed on it before he flicked it shut and could feel the heat of her colleagues' stares on her.
"Let's take this outside," Lily suggested pleasantly, gesturing for him to move out into the hall. She shut the door behind her and led him down to the department's reading room, which was thankfully empty.
"You approached me at the pub last night and asked if I was in the drama program, and now here you are again," she stated bluntly once the door was shut and they were sitting down across from each other at one of the room's small tables. "What's this about?"
Sam was stalking around one of the college's three theatres, the one where Adrian's thesis supervisor taught. It was the smallest of the three and located in one of the greener corners of campus. The building was actually an old church and the university, to help conserve the building, had bought up the acres it stood upon and converted the church and rectory into a theatre and offices for the classical drama program.
He was backstage now, on the same level as the stage just behind the rigs used to change background scenery. So far, he hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary – no sulfur, no symbols scratched in secret places, no hex bags tucked in dark corners. As far as he could tell, the place was clean. But Sam hadn't yet gone up into the rafters, and if the news and police and coroner's reports were anything to go by then that had to yield something. Even the most miniscule clue didn't really stand much of a chance of evading his keen gaze.
The guy had hanged himself from the rafters above center stage just a few feet behind the red curtain – gruesomely dramatic, in not only Sam's opinion but also that of everyone else who'd seen it before the coroner had gotten him down. Sam had seen death scenes a lot worse than a body dangling off the end of a rope, but it never failed to strike an emotional reaction – no matter how small – inside him. Loss of life, no matter what its circumstances, was something he and Dean were committed to minimizing. Wasn't that why they were still hunting?
Sam headed up to the rafters, his sharp eyes scanning his surroundings on his ascent. Still nothing yet, he thought with a slight frown. He didn't want to back to Dean empty-handed, though, and started making his rounds of the rafters.
"Adrian wasn't walking on sunshine all the time, but I never pegged him for being depressed and suicidal," Lily said mechanically. "I told that to the local police already though – surely you saw that in the file?"
"Of course I did," Dean replied smoothly, not even batting an eye at the question, "though I just like to be thorough with my own records."
Fair enough, I guess, Lily thought, but out loud she queried, "But why is the FBI on this case, anyway? Since when was suicide –"
"A federal issue?" Dean supplied, cutting her off. Lily, somewhat indignant at being interrupted, nodded with a barely-discernable frown beginning to knit between her eyebrows. "That's classified, Miss Thanes."
"Lily. Please, call me Lily." It was an automated request and she was back on the bone of the feds showing up to investigate Adrian's death two weeks after the local police had already supposedly wrapped it up. "Look, he was just…a small-town guy who moved to another small town to go to college. He liked it here enough to stay on for graduate studies and his department liked him enough to hire him on as a TA, give him a grant, and put on his own plays from time to time." She shrugged helplessly. "We were close friends – best friends, even, and I don't recall him ever getting caught up in anything…not even something that could be classified as 'petty.'"
Dean was scribbling on his notepad and keeping up with her character reference of the victim, but he paused when she briefly touched upon Adrian Dawes' history at the university. "Could you elaborate on what you said just now about his track record here?" he asked.
Lily looked at him, surprise visible on her face – a sweet one, no doubt about that, Dean thought now that he saw her in daylight – and she settled back in her chair, seemingly taken aback enough to need some time to collect her thoughts on the subject.
"From the beginning, if you can," Dean prompted.
Lily glanced out the window and when she spoke, her voice was very soft and had a note of fondness to it. "We met in first year," she began. "We had a literature class together – Elizabethan literature, which turned out to be pretty much just one long 'intro to Shakespeare' the way our prof taught it. Adrian was taking it to compliment his courses in classical drama. We stayed friends after the semester ended and we graduated together four years later. He was really…" She paused, searching for the right words to describe the Adrian she had known, not the one that he'd apparently been hiding from her. "…he was an amazing person, a good friend, and an even better actor. He was winning big roles almost right from the beginning."
"Define 'big,'" Dean requested.
"First- and second-year students never get speaking parts," Lily explained, "but he was scooping up first billing roles as soon as he started auditioning at the beginning of second year."
That's kind of interesting. Dean nodded in understanding. "So…he was a prodigy?"
"Something like that, yeah." Lily's face took on a wistful expression. "It was quite extraordinary, watching him perform. I knew him better than anyone – well, I thought I did – and I couldn't even tell where he stopped and, say, Hamlet started."
"Did he ever play in…oh, I don't know…Macbeth?"
Lily shook her head, causing her dark brown ponytail to swing back and forth behind her. "Adrian was always trying to get that one put on the playbill, but it hasn't been done here for a couple of decades now," she told him. "The last time they performed it, somebody died."
Dean raised an eyebrow and Lily continued, "I mean, I know there's the whole, 'Oh-em-gee, this play is cursed' thing around Macbeth, but this was apparently a full-blown disaster. They had an elaborate rig set up and it just…collapsed above the stage."
"What was this rig supposed to do exactly, and why was it so high up?"
"It was made to look like an earthen pathway, I think – like the kind you'd find in a cave? At the beginning of Act Four, Macbeth goes into a cavern to meet the Weird Sisters," Lily explained. "The director wanted to show Macbeth walking down into the cavern as the Weird Sisters cast a spell, and the set designer came up with this rig that could be lowered down from the rafters." She held her hands up, a small distance apart, and demonstrated the movement. "One end would be lowered down first, then the opposite end would go down a bit farther…and the rig could also turn slightly – not a full rotation, but enough so that it didn't look like he was going down a set of stairs as seen from the side."
Dean grimaced. "That sounds dangerous even without some rumored stage curse," he remarked.
"Yeah, well…it's drama, right?" Lily said wryly.
"So this rig just broke way up there above the stage?"
She nodded. "The actor playing Macbeth died, and the three playing the witches were all gravely injured. One was paralyzed, I think." She sighed sadly. "All on opening night, too."
"Jeez."
Sam's cellphone buzzed in his pocket and he retrieved it. The reception wasn't all that great up in the rafters but he could still hear Dean through the faint crackle of static.
"Found anything yet, Sammy?"
"Nope," Sam replied with a sigh. He was standing on the rear rafters, facing the empty seats from high above the stage over the tops of the red velvet curtains.
"Well, I just found out from a friend of Adrian's that a performance of Macbeth a few decades back went deadly wrong – literally," Dean informed him, "and that Adrian was always gunning for the school to perform it again."
Sam frowned into the phone. "Did he ever succeed in getting it on the playbill?"
"Nope. But his friend thinks that he wouldn't have ever given up on it as long as he was at this college," replied Dean. "Have you checked out his office yet?"
"I was just about to – but hey, what exactly happened the last time the play was on?"
Dean relayed the story as Lily had told it, and Sam groaned. "Dude, that's terrible."
"No kidding. Look, Sammy, I'll head across campus now and meet you outside his office, yeah?"
"Sounds good."
Dean was there about ten minutes later, during which time Sam had used his FBI badge to persuade the head of the drama department to open up Adrian's office. Sam was already inside when Dean arrived, but he hadn't yet touched anything – he was merely standing just inside the threshold when Dean showed up.
"Nothing out of the ordinary so far," Sam said, sensing Dean behind him. He sidestepped so Dean could enter unobstructed and shrugged his broad shoulders, his brow knitted tightly as he scanned the room yet again.
Dean also scanned the room through slightly narrowed eyes and then made his way over to the desk by the window. "So that stage accident that happened twenty years ago apparently happened during some incantation or spell-working scene," he told Sam as he looked over the various items strewn across the victim's desktop.
"Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble," Sam quoted.
"Yeah, that's the one." Lily had quoted the same lines – and then some – back in her own office in the history department. "She also mentioned that Adrian Dawes was something of a legend around here."
"Define 'legend' for me?"
"Super talented, well-liked, and getting speaking parts when nobody else in his year was even allowed to audition for them, apparently." He looked over his shoulder at Sam. "Do you think maybe he had some kind of deal going?"
Sam pursed his lips in thought as he glanced over the titles on the bookshelf across the small office. "Maybe, but it hasn't been ten years since then," he replied, "so it wouldn't have been a crossroads deal…plus, he hanged himself – he wasn't found holed up somewhere shredded to bits."
"Which leaves witchcraft, then," Dean sighed with a shudder. "Either he was casting spells himself or he found somebody to do it for him."
"Well, either way…"
"Yeah. If he was a totally normal human guy swinging some mojo while flying solo, then some demon on the other end probably decided it was time to rake in his soul," Dean said.
"And if it wasn't him casting the spells, then perhaps whoever was doing it decided they'd had enough," Sam continued.
"So, potential murder made to look like a suicide, and carried out by a witch who's got the juice to swing the universe in this guy's favor for years on end?" Dean blew a low whistle. "That doesn't sound messy and complicated at all."
Sam's frown deepened. "Did his friend happen to mention what his thesis was about?"
"Lily said it had to do with method acting – that whole 'become the character in your real life' deal or however it goes."
Sam turned around to face Dean. "And she said he was really bent on getting Macbeth onstage again, didn't she?"
"Practically obsessed with it, yeah." Dean tried the top drawer of the desk and found it locked. "Well, well – what are we hiding here?" He crouched down and removed his lock pick from his back pocket.
The simple desk lock was pathetically easy to open and Dean pulled the top drawer open. Nothing out of the ordinary – pens, paperclips, stapler, Post-It notes. The second drawer was full of chocolate bars and packages of cookies. "Guy sure had a sweet tooth," he remarked.
Sam crossed the room to stand by the desk as Dean opened the third drawer. Like most typical office desks the bottom drawer was the biggest, having been designed to hold a hanging-folder system. When Dean opened it though, there weren't any hanging folders inside.
Dean gave another low whistle. "Holy crap," he said in a hushed voice. He reached into the drawer cautiously and drew out a large wooden box. It was entirely inlaid with different kinds of wood to create an intricate pattern of Celtic knots and animal motifs.
"Any way to open it?" Sam asked as Dean handed it up.
"Check it," Dean responded, his attention already back to the remaining contents of the drawer.
In a few short moments the drawer's contents were laid out on a clear space in the middle of the desk: the box, which Sam had opened to reveal a small store of various spell components arranged on a removable tray that, when taken out, revealed a heavy pewter bowl and a mortar-and-pestle in the bottom compartment; a leather-bound spell book; a dark green cloth, folded into a tight square and bound with black braided cord; a bundle of slender tapers in various colors tied up with another black cord; and a large ceremonial knife in an embossed leather sheath.
"There's enough in here to point towards a heavy-hitter," Sam remarked.
"But why would a witch with that much juice settle for stardom in a middle-of-nowhere college theatre program?" Dean wondered.
"I don't think he was a full-on witch, Dean," Sam said. "I think he was a normal guy who got in way over his head. When again did Lily say he started standing out in his program?"
"The beginning of second year, I think." Dean shook his head sadly as something else Lily had mentioned came to the forefront of his mind. "She met him in first year in an Elizabethan literature class. She said he was taking it to get a more well-rounded education in drama."
Sam sighed. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" he asked.
"If you're thinking that this guy got it into his head to dick around with some spells in Macbeth to see if they worked, then yeah – I am." Dean snorted in disgust and exasperation. "Humans, dude – what the hell is wrong with us sometimes?"
