You're The Only Place That Feels Like Home
Chapter Four
I've Got The Scars To Prove
Something had changed about her, Sam thought as he stared down his younger sister.
His younger sister.
He had finally become comfortable using that phrase in his mind, surprised at how little getting used to it had taken. It felt so natural to call her his baby sister. Almost as natural as it was to call Dean his asshole older brother.
He had been staring at Mara a little over an hour, the sunlight from the new peering through the curtain. He wasn't worried about her seeing him, or feeling weird. She had stumbled to the refrigerator a few minutes ago to get her ninth beer. It was shocking to Sam how that little girl could hold so much alcohol in such a small period of time. He had thought about stopping her more than once, but she was more like Dean than he ever could have guessed, and he knew that she would fight him tooth and nail if he so much as laid a finger on her.
It was so amazing to Sam, how his two siblings had grown up so far apart from each other, and could still be so much alike. He was surprised enough to find that their personalities were similar; he could hardly believe it when he saw that they had the same body language. Little quirks that Sam had only ever seen unique to Dean. Like the way he ran his hands through his hair when he was upset, or the way that he swigged his beer, middle and forefinger crossed over the nozzle. Those were all things that Mara did. The thing that had really got him was the way she would chew on everything, Sam could remember extremely well Dean being Mara's age, gnawing on everything. His cell phones, pencils, even the own flesh on his fingers. Sam was only twelve, and had made the joke to call him a hamster. Six hours duct taped in a squat position to the leg of the kitchen table had taught him a valuable lesson. Teenage males wearing leather jackets and painfully worn out ACDC shirts did not like to be called the names of household rodents.
Watching Mara was depressing, but not nearly as depressing as watching his brother attempt to stay awake. His body would fall asleep, body drooping down only to jolt himself awake moments later. So he chose Mara.
He had figured in his mind, from dealing with many people in this state, with in about twenty more minutes, she would pass out, either from exhaustion or stress, or from too much alcohol. Finishing the last of her beer, she attempted to go to the fridge, not jumping when the empty bottle rolled onto the floor, smashing into a few dozen pieces. She opened up the new alcoholic drink she had retrieved from the fridge, with some difficulty. Once she got the top off, she drank from it heavily, taking the taste in all at once. Her eyes met Sam's, but only for a second.
It only took Sam that one second to see. To pinpoint exactly what had changed so drastically. It was her eyes. Something was missing. The green color wasn't nearly as vivid as it had been before. It was like a light had gone out. She didn't seem to have as great of an effect on him without that light. It was like something had been taken from her.
But something had been taken from her. Her brother her lifeline and only source of happiness. He had been stolen from her in the most painful of ways.
She passed out with visions of his face.
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Sam lifted up Mara from the counter, sweeping her into his arms. He yelled at Dean, who jolted awake to get off the couch. He laid her on her side, placing one foot on the ground, moving her left hand under her cheek.
"Why'd you do that?" Dean asked groggily.
Sam smiled. He had been to more than his fair share of collage frat parties when he was in collage. "So if she gets sick, she won't choke on her own vomit-"
"Well, there's a happy thought-"Dean said.
Sam's attention had been drawn to the coffee table, where his father's journal lay open. Dean had been attempting to find something of relation to Mara's brothers' death. "Did you find anything?" San asked. He got no reply. "Dean?" He asked as he turned around. He couldn't help but feel a smile spread across his face. On the couch behind him was his brother, asleep.
Her eyes flickered open, but only a second before snapping shut, sensitive to the light that had flooded into the room. She exhaled deeply, the smell of alcohol on her breath making her gag. She lifted her hand to her head, shielding the light from her eyes as she sat up. A pain in her head that was surmountable to what she imagined a patient would feel like, just coming out of brain surgery, without anesthetic.
Her surroundings were unfamiliar to her.
She blinked a few times, her vision focusing on a grungy hotel room with dingy orange carpet and a misty smell to it. She stood slowly, leaning her body weight onto the couch. She feared that her head might explode and there was a cold feeling in her stomach.
"Hey, look who's awake." Sam said. She turned her vision to him, a little too quickly as she felt a wave of dizziness come over her.
Mara looked at him blankly. She knew that she was experiencing on hell of a hangover. Suddenly, memories came back to her, flooding into her mind. Visions of her brother's body paralyzed her thoughts. She didn't know if it was the gruesome images, or the dozen or so beers from the night before, but the feeling that plagued her stomach intensified. "I think I'm gonna be sick-" She gasped as she ran to the bathroom.
"Damn it-"Dean said as he chased after her into the bathroom. He saw her hunched over the toilet, sweat glistening on her body.
Instead of looking flushed, her skin was a ghostly pale, paler than he had ever seen on someone who was living. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was shallow as if she was in deep concentration. Dean crouched down to her level, putting a hand on her sweat soaked back. He could see tears rolling down her face, ever so discrete against her milky skin.
There wasn't much he could say to ease her pain. There wasn't much that he knew how to do. He was never good with this sort of thing, comforting, and being empathetic. That was Sam's thing.
But he being there was enough. For Mara, at least. He held her golden brown hair back and out of her face as she emptied the contents of her stomach into the toilet.
She regained her strength some minutes late, no better and no worse then she had been before, and still exhausted, even though she had slept almost the whole day before. She walked slowly back to the small bedroom sofa that she had previously laid on, Dean trailing close behind, cautiously staring at her, watching her movements.
Mara collapsed her entire bodies weight onto the under stuffed chair. She inhaled deeply, trying to relax her body. Her muscles were unbelievably tense and her heart was racing like she had just finished a marathon. Her body was tired, but her mind was alert, listening though no one spoke.
Sam gave Dean a concerned look, though Dean shoved it off. He didn't want to deal with Sam's feelings of insecurity towards Mara. "Did you find anything?" Dean asked.
Sam looked at Dean like he was an idiot. "I don't think this is really the time, Dean-" Sam said, as he shuffled around some papers on his desk.
"Why not?" Dean said. "The kid's got to know sometime-" He looked at Sam, meeting with his eyes, pleading with him. He knew that she had to know now, about what they did for their living while she was still traumatized by her brother's death, or else she might not ever believe it.
Sam knew that his brother was right; he could sense it in the pit of his stomach, deep down inside him. It was cruel for them to go on expecting Mara to believe that they were just the average family, absent of a parent or two. The humanitarian in him wanted to deny the fact that she had to except the fact that she had lost one brother, but gained two. Two brothers that could parish during any job. "I think it's a medieval demon-"Sam sighed.
"Very interesting-"Dean said, as he stroked his chin, resembling the all too common face of the mystery caper, Sherlock Holmes. "And what caused you to come to this epiphany?"
Sam rolled his eyes at his brother. This was hardly the time to be making jokes. He heard Mara sit up in her chair, eyes pierced in fear. "A legend in Dad's journal-" Sam said meekly, a dull smile spreading across his face, looking more embarrassed than anything else.
Mara quickly looked to the door, the windows, anyplace to get away if she needed to. It was less than apparent that these men were not in their right mind. The person that had killed her brother was a monster. A sociopath and nothing more. It was a cruel joke to talk of medieval demons, to talk of anything but finding the monster that had killed her brother and doing to him what he had done to Derak. She felt a tear roll down her face, but she wiped it away quickly. She listened intently, masking her restlessness with that of sleep.
Dean smiled, as he looked on and saw Mara. There was no way that she was sleeping. He knew where she was. He had been there and more than once. His body had been tired, utterly exhausted but no matter how hard he tried, and sleep would not come. A full night's sleep would never come. "Do tell, Sammy-" Dean said looking intently at his brother.
"Sam-" the twenty two year old said sternly, but he went on with the story. Just like Dean knew he would. "I guess there was some kind of Demon, recording around the 1200's in Great Britain. There are even some recordings in the Scottish Isle's. The legend has been pretty mush disregarded by a lot of the historians today. I guess that they think that the demon was just a man, using his incredible strength to take advantage of the minds of the people in the villages that he terrorized. But the resemblances to Derak's murder are strikingly similar to these cases."
"It could just be a copycat-" Dean said.
Mara perked up in her sofa, moving from her sleeping position and peeking ehr head over the corner. "That's more like it-"
"I don't think that Missouri would send us all the way out to the middle of nowhere, Arizona if this was just a copycat, Dean-"
"Yeah, well-" Dean said. "Missouri can go to hell-"
Mara smirked, and so did Sam. "She's going to come all the way back from Kansas and kick your ass for saying that-" Sam said. "Because you know that she knows that you said that-"
"Whatever-" Dean muttered.
