While watching Fahrenheit 9/11, and remembering the morning that I happened to be home from school sick, I cried. There were genuine tears watching that movie. If you've seen it, you know at which part and why. I remember exactly what my mother said when my sister came home from school and there was a teacher there. To make sure my sister had a parent to come home to. She said, "Oh my God, this is real." So since I write Supernatural fanfiction, I decided to write one about how the boys reacted because, how, really, could they have reacted? They handle evil on this show constantly. But as Dean once said, "Demons I get. People are crazy."

I briefly considered what I would call this fic. Then I just saved it as Evil.

Evil

It was a Tuesday.

Sam was eighteen. Dean was twenty-two. Sam had been a part of the fight against monsters for nine years, Dean for eighteen. Monsters that looked evil and monsters that disguised themselves as humans. And one day, when Sam happened to have called out from school sick, their father was out picking up a restock of ammunition from a contact, and Dean was cleaning weapons at the kitchen table…Dean didn't know what to do when Sam walked into the kitchen with wide, fearful eyes and said something that had nothing to do with the evil they usually fought.

"Dean."

Dean's eyes shot up from the gun he was cleaning at his brother's tight voice. "Sam? What's wrong?"

Sam's mouth worked slightly for a moment, tears glistening his eyes, before he spoke. "A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center."

Dean stared at Sam blankly for several seconds, as if unsure how to react, before he slowly stood up, brushing past him as he went into the living room, where the television was on. He stared at the TV, where panic was splayed across the screen. Sam stood a few feet away as Dean gradually lowered himself onto the old plaid couch, turning up the volume a few notches.

Dean doesn't really remember much of what was said on the news that day. But he remembers the lump in his throat that he couldn't swallow past. He remembers what he saw. He remembers the sharp breath from Sam that he then let out shakily when they aired a clip of people jumping to their deaths from the top floors of the building to escape the flames. He remembers the second plane crashing into it. And the report coming in that one had crashed into the Pentagon.

Lastly, he remembered Sam whispering, "Why?" and hardly even noticing that he'd spoke.

"I don't know, Sammy," he whispered in reply.

Sam looked over to his brother, tears in his eyes, and Dean only met his gaze for a second before he looked away. He couldn't stand way Sam looked at him, like he couldn't understand how people, human beings, could wage war like this when there was so much out there that was evil already. Desperate for Dean to give him an answer to a question that he barely understood.

Dean hadn't even noticed that tears had formed on his eyelids until he blinked and they fell. He quickly wiped them away, standing up. "I don't know," he repeated. He stopped at the threshold to the kitchen, looking back at his brother, who stared back at him. "That's what makes our job easy, Sammy," he said softly. "We've got plenty of ways to figure out what's evil and plenty of explanation of why. People, though…." Dean waved vaguely at the television screen. "I…I don't get people. I don't think I ever will."

Dean went back into the kitchen, falling back into his chair, listening to the TV faintly from the next room. He stared at his hands for a while, trying to figure out how, while hunters like him and his dad and his brother risked their lives to save people, how people could think that something as trivial as money or possessions were important enough to kill over.

Then he grabbed his favorite Glock and disassembled it. Then he reassembled it. And he did that for the next hour, the horror that was 9/11 echoing in from the living room.