2.
Sam comes to slowly, and for a moment he doesn't realize where he is. Maybe he's back in college, he's partied too hard last night, which would explain the dry stuffed-cotton taste in his mouth and the splitting ache that throbs through his temples to the rhythm of his heartbeat. Then he remembers. Sarah, vampires. A nest. Dean.
He's already sitting up. The concrete is cold and uncomfortably gritty beneath his jeans; his hands are tied behind a rusty floor-to-ceiling pipe. The back of his jacket is soaked. The pipe is perspiring, collecting moisture from the cold rain outside and sweating chilly beads of condensation. He guesses by the single bar of watery cloud-obscured moonlight filtering into the room (there's got to be window up there somewhere, but he can't see it) that it's past midnight. He's been unconscious for at least two hours.
"Dean?" he says hoarsely, and something shifts in response to the sound of his voice, a quiet, furtive sound like windblown leaves scraping across pavement. Sam swallows. He waits, but that's the only answer he gets.
He starts to work at the twine around his wrists. Whoever's tied him up has done a good job, but Sam is resourceful, and he squirms himself free in a matter of minutes, gritting his teeth as he scrapes his skin raw. He stands. The shadows around him sway for a moment, so he grips the pipe for support until things get steady again and then turns around to survey the rest of the room, suppressing a cold clench of apprehension.
Sarah Phelps is looking up at him with huge blue eyes, one of her pigtails undone. Her dress is caked with blood. She isn't wearing any shoes.
"Sarah," Sam says quietly, as gently as he can. The girl looks seriously traumatized. "Don't worry, I'm here to take you back to your parents."
She sniffs.
"Have you – have you seen the people who kidnapped you? Are they still here?" Despite himself, Sam allows a note of urgency to enter his voice; he's still casting around in the shadows, but most of the room is too dark to make out. It looks small, at least, and cluttered. A boiler room. They're probably in the basement, which would explain why the window – he can see it now, a tiny, grimy square of light – is set so high up on the wall.
Where the hell is Dean?
"No," Sarah replies, with that kind of thin, stuffy-nosed pitch that indicates she's been crying. "I'm thirsty. He went to get me a drink."
Sam hesitates, glances at her.
His eyes are beginning to adjust to the gloom, and he detects a round lump on the floor just beyond Sarah's huddled body, a pale smear surrounded by a darker tangle. He squints, it slowly swims into focus, and Sam isn't surprised to discover that it's a decapitated head. It belongs to a woman. She stares back at him blindly from beneath swollen, half-lowered eyelids, pupils as black and glassy as beetle wings.
Sarah notices where he's looking and volunteers, "She hasn't got her head anymore. There's only one left."
"Uh," Sam says, slightly taken aback. "Thanks." He kneels down to untie her hands, and she turns her head to watch him, her pigtail flipping over her shoulder.
"Or two," she adds, in a piping, unconcerned voice, and sinks her vampire teeth into his shoulder.
Later, Sam only feels regret when he's already brought his elbow down on Sarah's head hard enough to knock her out, and he's looking at her tiny supine form, her dirty dress, and realizes for the first time that she's barefoot. He can't bring himself to finish her off. Trying not to be sick, he steps around her and ventures deeper into the room, keeping his back to the light from the window so it won't mess with his vision.
He finds the Beretta on the ground a few feet away, and tucks it back into the seat of his pants.
When he sees something slumped over in the corner next to a water heater, he instantly knows that it's Dean and he practically dives the last few steps to his brother and grips the shoulder of that beat-up leather jacket Dean is always wearing and peers closely into his face, his eyebrows drawn together, his forehead wrinkling with earnest concern. "You have such a huge, wrinkly forehead," Dean had said to him once, before his high school prom, appraising him from across the room with that infuriating air of amused, swaggering superiority, and that's why Sam has taken to wearing such shaggy bangs ever since.
"Dean," he says, in a hoarse whisper. "Dean, come on, man, wake up. Wake up, Dean." He gives his brother's shoulder a little shake, but he doesn't jostle him too hard, because he looks really, seriously bad. Sam tries not to panic. Dean is pale to the point of scary; a livid bruise curves under one of his eyes, and half of his face is caked with blood, and Sam can't tell whether he's breathing – Christ, he starts to think, is Dean – is he –
"Sammy," Dean croaks, and the blood rushes back to Sam's head. A smile twitches across his lips, quick and absent, before he can stop it. That's the way Dean says his name when he's more worried about Sam than he is himself, when he's about to call Sam out for doing something retarded, and sure enough:
"A gun, Sam? Seriously?"
Sam snorts a hurried laugh and levers Dean away from the wall with his shoulder, trying to get at his brother's hands. Dean attempts to stifle the quiet noise he makes, but Sam hears it anyway and scrambles for a reply, knowing that he hates vulnerable silences.
"Swinging a machete around in a pitch black room isn't exactly my idea of fun," Sam says finally, working blindly at the knot around Dean's wrists. Jesus, he's cold. "I'd like to see you try it."
"Already have."
Oh, yeah.
"Worked out freakin' great," Dean qualifies, but his voice is too tense, gruff with pain, and Sam fumbles the last of the twine loose and sits back on his heels, trying to figure out the fastest way to get his brother out of there and to a hospital.
Dean isn't looking at him; the side of his forehead is hitched up against the dirty curve of the water heater as if the pressure's holding him together, but at least his eyes are partially open, bloodshot and weirdly unfocused. A muscle flickers in his cheek.
"Plus, I coated the bullets with dead man's blood," Sam says, and Dean presses his eyes closed again, relieved. Sam is unsettled by the depth of feeling in that gesture and decides not to comment. "Think you can stand?"
"Sam," Dean begins, but something distracts him and he lifts his head, stares past Sam into the darkness with that disgruntled look of disbelief he gets whenever he catches sight of the thing they're hunting and realizes that it's really ugly.
Sam takes the hint and turns around, leveling his gun. A man – a vampire – steps into the feeble beam of moonlight and glares, peeling his lips back from his second set of teeth like a shark. Sam shoots him. The vampire looks down at the bullet hole in his stained shirt, returns his attention to Sam. He gives him a withering stare that gradually transforms into a look of bewildered surprise, and then he collapses, clutching his stomach. It doesn't take him long to stop moving.
"So much easier than a machete," Sam says, glancing back at Dean, who's struggling to his feet. Sam lunges to help him, but his brother waves him off and Sam is almost glad, because when Dean gets to the point where he's hurt enough to accept Sam's help without protesting, it's serious.
"And so much wussier." Dean winces, leans on the water heater for a moment, and then gingerly takes a few steps and bends down to pick something up. He moves with the geriatric slowness of a man three times his age.
"Dude, guns aren't wussy. How can you even say that guns are wussy?"
Dean half-straightens, one hand resting heavily on his thigh. He wordlessly brandishes the machete. Sam looks down at the Beretta and is forced to concede his brother's point.
"Sarah?" Dean asks, stepping around the little girl's unconscious body. Sam shakes his head. Anyone else would have missed the look that passes across Dean's face – the hardening of his jaw, the way his eyes momentarily go cold and distant – but Sam knows that expression, and he isn't fooled when Dean gives a perfunctory, dismissive sniff and shrugs his coat more comfortably about his shoulders, a tough-guy gesture that Sam only sees him perform when he's trying to recover his dignity, or when he's steeling himself to do something he's really going to hate himself for afterwards.
"Maybe," Sam begins, and hesitates. Dean shoots him a look.
"Maybe what? She's a vampire, Sam. She's not a kid anymore. Christ, we're doing her a favor."
For once, Sam finds himself unable to argue. He forces himself not to look away when Dean raises the machete high and brings it down again, severing Sarah's head from her shoulders. Sam feels useless and too tall, an obstacle, as his brother skirts around him on his way to the next vampire. Rinse and repeat.
This time, it isn't so easy for Dean to lift himself back up. He has his face turned away, but Sam still sees, in profile, the pain that's twisting across his features like a grimace of loathing. After a second Dean grunts and almost doubles over, but Sam is there in an instant with a hand under his arm, holding him upright.
"Easy, Lassie," Dean grits out, letting Sam support him. Sam gets the uncomfortable feeling that Dean wants to push him off but doesn't have the energy as they shuffle awkwardly toward the stairs. Dean is solidly built, heavy, but Sam is a lot stronger than his gangly frame suggests, and they make it to the ground floor without incident. Dean remains silent the whole time, avoiding Sam's gaze.
A nameless feeling of disquiet has been rising in the pit of Sam's stomach ever since he found Dean passed out in the corner and he's doing his best to ignore it, because he doesn't want to explore what it means.
It reminds him of something: Dean dropping him off at the bus the day he left for college, helping him haul his duffels out of the Impala's backseat. Dean hides his feelings by acting like more of a douchebag than usual, Sam has always known this, but that day he didn't joke around any more than he normally did. He didn't make fun of Sam's hair, his height, his taste in music. Occasionally Sam had caught him opening his mouth, only to shut it again, at a loss, his eyebrows furrowed and his mouth set in a grim line.
When they'd parted, Dean had just thumped him on the shoulder and watched him climb onto the bus; then he'd turned away and the last Sam had seen of him out the window was his retreating back as he walked toward the Impala, his aggressive, confident gait, the battered brown of his leather jacket.
Sam doesn't know why (or shit, maybe he already does), but now, as then, it feels like the tense moments of forced normality before a goodbye.
Dean suddenly disentangles himself and pushes Sam away as they reach the door. Sam turns around, startled, but Dean has let his shoulder thump against the rotting frame and is leaning on it heavily, his gaze cast down toward the ground, and he won't meet Sam's eyes.
"Dean–"
"You're not stupid, Sammy," Dean says, producing the words with effort. They come out harsh. "Don't pretend to be stupid."
"I don't," Sam begins, but he cuts himself off, because he does know, he has ever since he untied Dean's wrists, he's just been telling himself otherwise, making himself believe otherwise. He revises his statement: "I can't. Dean, you know I can't do that—"
"I just wanted to make sure you got out safe, that's all," Dean says, and Sam can tell that he's clenching and unclenching his jaw, trying to form words that don't come easily to him. This is as close as he can get to admitting, I couldn't tell you. "I mean, seriously, this place was built in the 1800s. People didn't grow into freakin' giants like you back then. You could've clotheslined yourself on half the doors."
Sam takes a step forward, about to protest, but Dean shoots him such a weird bloodshot stare that he actually stumbles backward, his words dying on his tongue. Dean's mouth twists, wryly, and somehow it's the bleakest expression Sam's ever seen him give.
The twin beams of distant car headlights track across the complex, reflect from the windows in a brief, chasing flash of light. Dean grunts and looks away.
"I can't do this, man," he goes on roughly. "I can't—we can't stand here forever, pretending that everything's going to be goddamn fine, because it's… it's messed up, Sam. It's really messed up. You don't know how hard—" Dean shakes his head, and Sam realizes that his hands are trembling. "I can hear your heartbeat. I want to—"
"Christ!" Sam says, horrified. "I'm not going to kill you!"
For a second Sam thinks Dean might yell at him, but instead his voice comes out tense, quiet. "It's your job. Do it."
"But you're still… hell, Dean, you're still yourself. You're not a monster. Or—I don't know, if you are, you're still my brother. I can't."
Dean sends him a look of such concentrated, defensive misery that Sam automatically steps forward and puts his arms around him, tucks his chin against his brother's hair, and holds him tight. He doesn't let go when Dean tries to push him away, or when he feels him sink his fangs into his shoulder a moment later, a renewed splitting pain right where Sarah has already sunk hers.
Sam is holding the Beretta. He presses the barrel against his brother's ribs and shoots him.
Nothing happens for a second or two, but then Dean's grip slackens and Sam helps him to the ground, leans him up against the doorframe. Dean blinks, frowns, touches the bullet wound, which seems to bewilder him more than anything. Then he squints up at Sam. He's having trouble focusing.
"I bit you," he says, uncertainly, seeking confirmation.
"Yeah," Sam admits, and for some reason he laughs, a harsh, surprising sound through his tears. "I'm never gonna let you live it down, either."
"Jesus, Sammy, I bit you." Dean swipes at the blood smeared around his mouth with his sleeve, clumsy and uncoordinated. His eyelashes flutter. Sam hopes he isn't in too much pain. He doesn't seem to be, but with Dean, you never know for sure.
"And I shot you," Sam counters, bracing Dean's arm when his brother suddenly sags to the side. He feels a splinter of pain drive up through his injured shoulder, but it isn't that bad, he tells himself, it really isn't.
Dean's head lolls against Sam, but he's too obstinate to stop fighting the poison. His throat works. "Thanks," he finally manages to slur, and then he's a dead weight.
"It was the only way to get you home, you stubborn asshole," Sam says, because he knows Dean can't hear him anymore, and he stares at his brother's pale face for the better part of a minute before he finally rouses himself and wrestles Dean's limp body over his good shoulder. He doesn't know what he's going to do.
What the hell is he going to do?
The first thing he does is leaves the machete behind on the ground, gleaming with blood, abandoned in the empty doorway.