Chapter 10
Interrogations
The problem when people have a little knowledge and a heightened sense of their own importance is that they tend to overestimate their grasp of the situation. These three think they are going to outplay the King of Hell, but they aren't going to get any help from Dean with that bullshit.
Dean shakes his head looking at the three military men standing in front of him in the interrogation room. He is dressed in prisoner clothes, bright orange scrubs essentially, and the officers in front of him represent Navy, Air Force, and Army given their cammo patterns, but their nametapes and other identifying markers have been removed from the uniforms.
What the fuck was I thinking? I thought I could go legit. Let Sam have his apple pie life. Shoulda known if it wasn't for bad luck, the Winchesters wouldn't have any at all. Dean is musing as he assesses the room's security measures, the looseness of his shackles, gets a glimpse of his brother in a room across the way. Poor Sammy. Not only did he get roped in on this with me, they cut off his hair.
"Mossberg! Pay attention." Barks out one of the men in front of him, but Dean hasn't been paying close enough attention to put a name on him. "Answer the fucking question."
Dean fixes the speaker with a cocky smirk. "Hey, you gonna treat me like an enemy combatant, you're gonna get name and rank from me."
With a glare, the three men storm out of the room and let the door close. They stand outside of the room with the glass walls arguing, but the sound proofing is so good that Dean cannot hear them. He watches the mute interplay between them, wishing they would move a bit. He likes to be able to keep an eye on his little brother. Sam seems to be shell shocked by their current captivity, by the fact that it was their own country's military holding them, and by being held in a mostly empty high security mental health facility.
After the first day, they had come and moved Sam out of the double room in this loony bin. Now Dean only gets to see glimpses of his brother, and he worries – worries about how Sam is doing mentally. He never got the whole story, but thinks that Sam must have had some kind of mental breakdown when he and Castiel were whammied into purgatory with the exploding Dick Roman. They haven't really talked about it – but Dean figures that must be what happened to make his brother not even look for him.
Plus, there's the whole Cas shifting the crazy from the wall breaking down in Sam's mind. With Castiel still MIA in Purgatory, or worse, Dean doesn't know how that's affecting his brother either. After that year of barely living through Purgatory and then Infantry training, Dean is suffering from boredom mostly this past four days. He is being contained in a small room – fed three times a day – but mostly nothing. No activity, no contact with people, no danger, no physical activity. It is only broken up by a once a day interrogation.
It's enough to drive him crazy – except he knows that's the point, so he refuses to give them the satisfaction of knowing that they are getting to him. He's amusing himself in his head trying to remember the lyrics of every song in order of the "Back in Black" CD, in order.
Dean's been through Hell, he's not going to let a little boredom wear him down.
. . . . . . .
Sam Winchester feels appalled at how fast and loose this military group seems to be with his civil rights. He knows it has been seven years since he was studying pre-law at Stanford, but it seems odd that things could have changed enough to make holding an American citizen without charges, without legal advice, and without a phone call could possibly be legal. Plus, they cut his hair off.
The interviewers ask him on a daily basis to help them help his country by summoning Crowley or an angel, but Sam remembers what Dean said - and he doesn't give them anything. Sam wishes they hadn't separated him and Dean. He had been hoping that maybe he could find some good in a bad situation and reconnect with his brother. Instead he has caught just a few glimpses of his brother shackled and surrounded by guards.
Today's interview though seems to be going differently than the past few days. They have items from the Impala's trunk spread out and labeled like evidence in a trial. They are holding up each item, asking him to identify it and its uses. Sam decides to see if he can get something in return for some harmless cooperation.
"I propose a trade. I'll tell you what you want to know about the tools and weapons from the car and you let me and Dean go outside together. We've been cooped up inside for days now." Sam can tell that the interrogators are pleased with what he said, but doesn't realize that that's because they see it as a crack in his earlier demeanor. If they can get him to cooperate some, they find out which buttons they can use to control him.
Sam tells them about rock salt and its uses in safety lines, shotgun shells, and in bothering demons. They seem amused when he tells them that it can also be spilled to occupy fairies. He explains hex bags and how they are made, and how to use them to either mark, bring down a curse, or to protect. Iron bars and iron filings are used to repel ghosts. Chalk is used to draw protection symbols, devil's traps, or summoning circles. Machete, well because with most monsters, separating the head from the body is a pretty good deterrent.
After thirty minutes of answering questions, Sam is led into a small enclosure outside the building and he's relieved when they bring Dean out a few minutes later.
"You've got fifteen minutes," the guard says before walking away.