Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed! Seemed like we nearly killed some of you with that cliffie last week! Hope you all survived until Sunday. Enjoy the chapter and please leave your thoughts if you've got the time!
Several things happen at once. Sam starts to his feet, sending Bill Harvelle's journal skittering onto the floor. Ellen pulls a handgun out of the holster on her belt and has it trained on Dad in a matter of seconds. And Dean, whose years of training should have him doing the exact same thing, gets as far as "Sam" and "gun" and finds himself across the room and shoving himself in front of his brother before he even realizes he's planning to move.
"Dad?!" Sam exclaims, and Dean can feel his brother's heart hammering against his back. "What the hell?!"
Dad doesn't answer, just takes a step closer, expression unreadable. Ellen takes a step of her own, finger on the trigger of her pistol.
"Put the gun down, John."
"Dean," Dad says finally, voice low and whisky-graveled. "Come here. Now."
It's an order, but every instinct Dean has is screaming at him not to move from this spot. He doesn't know what's going on here but there's something dangerous in his dad's eyes, there's a gun in the room, and Dean doesn't have a choice here. Dean has to protect Sam.
"No, sir," he says firmly.
Sam makes a move to get out from behind him, and Dean reaches back and digs his fingers tight into Sam's elbow.
"What's going on, Dad?" he asks in a low voice.
He watches as his father's eyes flick around the room, assessing the situation. It's the same look he gets on hunts, trying to get a handle on what his odds are, and Dean does not like where that train of thought it heading. Not at all.
Dad's eyes flicker over Ellen and then to Jo, who Dean's only now realizing he's abandoned on the other side of the room with nothing to defend herself but the little pigsticker she's got gripped in her bloodless fist.
"John, put the goddamn gun down right now!" Ellen explodes, at the same moment that Sam says:
"Christo!"
Dad doesn't flinch. His eyes don't go black. There's a long pause, and then he just slowly puts the safety back on his gun and lowers his arm to tuck it into the back of his waistband.
"Ellen," he says gruffly in greeting.
It takes a substantially longer time for Ellen to lower her gun, but she finally does, glaring at John, her face tense and angry.
"Don't 'Ellen' me, you son of a bitch. You're payin' for that door."
Dad grunts in reply. He pulls a flask out of his jacket and unscrews the cap, and for a second, Dean thinks he's going to take a swig. The man smells like he hasn't stopped drinking since he stormed out of the cabin last night, the reek of booze mixing sickeningly with the flowery scent of Ellen's potpourri.
Instead, Dean finds himself with a face-full of what he assumes to be holy water. He sputters, spitting out the salty liquid that's splashed in his mouth.
"I said 'Christo,'" Sam says tightly. "No one in this room is a fucking demon, okay?"
"This isn't Kiddy League anymore," Dad tells him. "They're not that easy to spot."
Sam huffs out an annoyed breath.
"Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas," he rattles off then sweeps his arms wide when nobody starts going all Emily Rose. "Now, you wanna tell us what the hell is going on?"
"You really think I'm the one who needs to explain myself?" Dad demands. "After the stunt you just pulled?"
"Dad, this isn't Sam's fault," Dean breaks in.
"That so?" Dad snaps, fixing Dean with a hard gaze that makes him feel all of three inches tall. "So it was your idea to run off in the middle of the night without getting me to sign off on it? That what you want me to believe?"
"Yes, sir," Dean tells him, tilting his chin up.
Sam finally shakes free of his hold.
"Come on, Dean," he says, stepping around and shouldering in front of Dean, crossing his arms. "It was my idea. Everyone in this room knows it was my idea."
"Not sure I know that," Ellen tosses out.
"You stay the hell out of this, Ellen," John snaps, and Ellen is every bit the woman Bobby said she was, because she does not give an inch in the face of John's glare, just sets her jaw, narrows her eyes, and lights into John for all he's worth.
"The hell I will," she spits. "I know you are not coming into my house, breaking down my front door, pulling a gun on my daughter, and then telling me to stand by and watch you tear into your boys before the holy water dries on my freshly vacuumed carpets. You might be stubborn as hell, John Winchester, and crazy to boot, but I know you are not that stupid."
"Ellen," John glares.
"No," she interrupts, not giving an inch. "You want to take this downstairs, have a drink, and then discuss this with your grown ass sons like an adult, you can, but if that gun comes out or I see you starting trouble in my bar, I swear by all that is good and holy, I will throw you out on your ass and lock the door behind you."
"Ellen," their dad objects again, defensive and angry and apparently outmatched, because this lady is having none of it, marching across her neat maroon carpets and getting in his face like it's an Olympic sport,
"She is my daughter, John," she hisses, jabbing a finger at Jo. "My. Daughter. And don't think I don't know you would have pumped her full of lead in a heartbeat, she so much as twitched."
"El—" he protests, and Dean doesn't imagine the way he softens, just a little, when his eyes dart to Jo, watching this all from her place across the room.
"Take a walk, John," Ellen interrupts, and no one in the room is making the mistake of thinking that's a request. "Have a drink. Boys'll be down in a minute."
There's an awkward silence in the apartment as John turns, steps over the ruin of the Harvelle's front door, and makes his way down the stairs, every step echoing back up to the apartment through the open frame.
"You really think he needs another drink?" Sam asks dryly when they hear the heavy, iron clank of the door at the bottom of the stairs slamming shut.
"Honey, we really gonna pretend that it matters at this point?" Ellen sighs, picking up her keys from where they lie abandoned on the carpet and shoving them into a pocket.
Sam doesn't want to admit it, but she's right. His dad's been putting his liver through its paces for the past twenty three years. It doesn't matter if John's had two drinks or twenty, he's gonna do what he wants and say what he wants, and it doesn't matter who's around or why he shouldn't. He'll drink when he wants, stop when he wants, pass out where he lands, and fuck anyone who tries to stop him.
Sam stopped trying a long time ago.
"You boys gonna be alright?" Ellen asks, giving her living room, now considerably less livable with the holy water puddles and busted door, a disparaging look.
Sam looks to Dean, who gives a heavy sigh and scoops Bill Harvelle's journal up with a shuttered look on his face.
"We'll be fine," he mutters, his eyes not leaving the battered book in his hands.
Sam wants to reach out to him, to get some contact, to try and reassure Dean that it's okay, that it's not his fault. He's just not sure if stepping in right now would make things better or worse.
"Alright," Ellen nods, apparently deciding that things can't possibly get any worse from here. "Josie, get your coat. We'll go out the back. Dean, washroom's down the hall. Be sure to lock up on your way out."
She ushers Jo over the empty threshold, pausing in the doorway.
"You boys take care now, and remember, I come back and find my bar burnt to the ground, I'm takin' it outta both your hides. Understand?"
"Yes, ma'am," they answer in unison.
"Good. We'll be back with lunch in two shakes. You go straighten things out with your daddy," she instructs, a small, encouraging smile on her face.
"Yes, ma'am," Sam nods.
He takes the journal from Dean and puts it on the least holy water-spattered patch of coffee table he can find as Ellen makes her way downstairs after Jo.
"You okay?" he asks softly after they've gone, wanting to touch, to comfort, to make Dean understand that it's not his fault, it's Sam's and their Dad is an asshole and none of this is right, none of it is.
But he knows Dean doesn't want to hear it, won't hear it, and he can't stomach the thought of getting pushed away, not after almost having a heart attack when their dad broke down that door, when he was staring down the barrel of that gun with no warning, no prep, no weapon, and suddenly, coldly certain that this was it. He was going to die.
And he wouldn't even know why, or who, or what it was that made their dad kill him.
But then Dean was there, sold and warm and not budging, not an inch, not from where he was dead set on shielding Sam, refusing logic and common sense and an order from Dad to protect his little brother.
To stand with Sam.
Sam knows this is big. So much bigger than taking off in the middle of the night after a lead. Knows from this sudden, unsteady feeling of the world shifting on its axis that things aren't the same, will never be the same, and he knows from Dean's still, tense silence, that he knows it, too.
On the strength of that, Sam won't press Dean, won't push him or pull too hard. He knows his brother, knows he'll need time to think, to work through this in his own head.
Sam can wait. He's with Dean, never not gonna be.
He's got all the time in the world.
"M'fine, Sammy," Dean mumbles eventually, scrubbing a hand over his face and wincing when it comes away soaked in holy water.
Dammit. Which way had Ellen said that the bathroom was again? No way he's gonna go pokin' around up here. Knowing this woman, he'd either fall into a stash of dead chickens and C4, or some Martha Stewart nightmare of a sewing room, and honestly, either way, he's not sure he'd ever be able to look Ellen Harvelle in the eye again.
But Dean doesn't have to worry about that for long, 'cause Sammy's got the sleeve of his jacket, rolling his eyes with a smirk and tugging him down the hall to the bathroom, pushing him in, handing him a towel, and trying not to fuss.
Dean appreciates Sam's restraint on the whole girly feelings talk thing, he really does, but even if Sam isn't brewing tea and making the puppy eyes and quoting Dr. Phil at him, Dean can feel him wanting to. Sam's palpable need to fuss and worry and share warm, cuddly emotions fills the air almost as persistently as Ellen's goddamn rose potpourri as Dean scrubs a soft, monogrammed cream towel over his face to get rid of the last evidence that his father thought, even for an instant, that Dean was possessed. That what he'd done was so off the book, so out of character, that the only explanation was that his son had been taken over, mind and body, by a swirl of thick, dark black smoke, a twisted evil that was walking around wearing his body like a cheap tux.
And okay, to be fair, Dean did take off with Sammy in the middle of the night and then defy a direct order, and yeah, that's different, but it's still him.
And he had reasons. Good ones.
Dad should know the difference, right? Shouldn't he?
And yeah, Sam's pulling himself back from making a big deal out of all of it, Dean can tell, but that still leaves him in the wake of seeing Dad pointing live rounds at Sammy's fucking head. Dean's got a shit-ton of things going on in his mind that he doesn't exactly feel like mucking through alone, so any minute Sam wants to turn up the gooey shit to eleven, that'd be great, 'cause Dean doesn't really know how to handle this and he really, really doesn't know how to bring it up without forfeiting his Man Card for good.
"You alright, Sammy?" he asks, looking up and meeting his brother's eyes in the mirror from where Sam is leaning on the doorframe.
It's as good a try as any.
"Yeah, Dean," Sam nods, straightening up. "I'm fine. Why?"
"I don't know, man," Dean shakes his head, stares down at Ellen Harvelle's pristine, porcelain sink, trying to process, to work through this shit. "Just… Holy water? Possession? All 'cause we took off for a few hours? That was so off the book we had to be possessed?"
Dean doesn't know if it's a question or an answer, an explanation or a theory or just plain, old fashioned guessing. He's not sure what he's trying to do, whose behavior he's trying to rationalize here, only that he needs answers, directions, something to make this all make sense.
"Dean, he's on a bender," Sam answers, steps forward, gets a hand on Dean's arm, and he wishes for a second that he wasn't wearing his jacket so he could feel the heat of Sam's palm, skin against skin, steady and warm and alive, just for a little, just to get him through this. "You know how he gets. So this time he's paranoid instead of angry. It's not a big thing."
Dean turns, leaning his hip against the sink, and sacrifices Sam's hand on his arm for facing his brother, for eye-to-eye and face-to-face, shoved in each other's orbit to fit in the postage stamp sized bathroom.
"Sammy, he drew on us. On you. That's a big thing."
"Yeah, well are you really surprised?" Sam laughs, but there's no humor in it. "I've gone and got you thinking, making your own decisions. He's probably just mad that I undid all those years of programming."
"Dude," Dean scoffs, wrinkling his nose, but Sam persists.
"Hey, I'm serious," Sam jokes, this time with a weak but genuine smile. "Your circuits fry, he's gotta send you back to the head office, wait for a replacement..."
"Nerd," Dean dismisses, trying to squash a smile.
"But hey, I think you'll like the Dark Side," Sammy grins. "Word is, we've got cookies."
"No pie?" Dean scoffs, straightening up and moving to leave the bathroom. "Lame."
"Hey," Sam catches his wrist as he moves to get by him, stops Dean when they're at their closest, crammed together in the Harvelle's tiny bathroom. Dean can feel the heat of him now, how warm and safe and here and alive his baby brother is, pulsing down through Sam's fingers, long and calloused and tangled around Dean's pulse, and it helps.
God, does it help.
"It's just Dad getting boozed up and paranoid. Nothing else," Sam murmurs, serious again.
"I know, Sammy. I know," Dean nods, ducking his head, swallowing his doubts, because he wants to believe that, he does, but it just doesn't add up, doesn't seem right, not really.
Dean can see that Sam doesn't buy it, either, not completely, but he doesn't press the issue, lets Dean spackle over his doubts with denial and bravado and habit and pretend they're not there, shifting and growing and eating away at everything he thought he knew, everything he believed in so hard for so long.
Dean's thankful that Sam doesn't insist they drag this out in the open, pick apart and examine every aspect of this little crisis in front of God and man. If he's gonna do this, gonna let this happen, it's gonna happen in private. Maybe even in secret. And if Sammy knows about it, has known about it, maybe even saw it for what it was before Dean realized it himself?
Well. His secret's safe with Sam.
Always has been.
"You ready to go down?" Sam asks after a long moment, and Dean shrugs, twitches his wrist out of Sam's grip.
"Guess we gotta face the music sometime, right, Sammy?" he offers, pasting on a thin, hollow imitation of his favorite devil-may-care grin and resettling his jacket on his shoulders.
"Dean…" Sam protests, because he doesn't have to pretend. Not for Sam, not ever, and he should know that. Sam hopes like hell that Dean knows that, realizes it, drops the act already.
Dean lets the grin fall, looks down for a minute, bumping his hand against Sam's almost accidentally-on-purpose, like he isn't sure if it would be welcome or not, like he isn't sure if it would help or hurt.
Sam snags his brother's hand in his, catching his palm and just holding on, to let Dean know Sam's with him, that it's okay.
"I coulda said no any time, Sammy," he says, looking up and meeting Sam's eyes, steady and sure and serious, before giving Sam's hand a squeeze and letting go. "Any time."
Sam knows that's a goddamn lie, and a halfhearted one at that. If Sam really wanted to go, wanted to run off in the night after a lead or a hunt or a goddamn butterfly, there's no way Dean would let him go alone.
Not again. Not after everything that's happened.
Because Sam is Sam, and he knows Dean better than anyone. Anyone in the whole world.
So he knows better than to call him on it, to drag the lie out into the open and pry it apart for the world to see. He lets it go, just straightens Ellen Harvelle's pressed, cream towels on the way out of the bathroom, shoulders the door back into place, and follows Dean down the staircase.
The walk down the stairs feels like a funeral march, a slow, steady progress to an early grave, because Dean knew what he was doing, and he knew what it would lead to, knew it would mean this walk, this talk, this heavy, aching, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
God, it's like getting sent to the woodshed, except the woodshed is a scarred oak counter with a bottle of Jack and his dad ready to light into him in any way he can for dropping the ball, fucking it up, letting him down again. Except Dean isn't even sorry this time, doesn't feel that cold, bitter sting of regret, of remorse. Goddammit, he'd do it all over again, he would. Because it's Sam and it's the case and there was no reason, no reason, not to go chase down this fucking lead, and look, it's got them a city, a name, maybe even an address with a little digging, so what the hell is wrong with that? What the hell did that hurt?
Why the hell did that end with Dean being the only thing standing between his baby brother and the barrel of his father's gun? Dad ordering him to step aside, to leave Sammy standing alone in the crosshairs.
Why?
It's dizzying, wrong and confusing, and he's not looking forward to the talk ahead, to this awful, weird, bad-dirty-wrong world of getting reamed out by Dad for something he doesn't regret at all, for a call he still thinks was the right one. The only solid thing in this strange new world is Sam, standing tall and defiant behind him, a steady shadow at his back, too close and just close enough, the heat of his body leeching forward, pushing to reach Dean through the leather and flannel, to press against him as he fumbles with the latch on the iron door at the base of the stairs.
"Dean, you sure you're okay?" Sam ventures quietly, probably because Dean's hands are steady as fuck when hunting down baddies, never shake an inch when he's got a gun in his grip and a monster in his sights, but are now having trouble with a five dollar knob from the Home Depot.
God, Sam at the barrel of Dad's gun, the same cold, hateful look in their father's eyes that Dean's seen a hundred times, a thousand times, right before he pumps a monster so full of lead it clinks when it hits the ground.
Sam cold and unmoving on Ellen Harvelle's maroon carpet, hazel eyes empty and unblinking, mouth slack, blood dripping sluggishly to stain the dark shag a sodden, shameful black.
Dean's baby brother stiff and lifeless with his hands crossed over his chest, just seconds before a hunter's wake turns him to black, burned skin and cracked, charred bone, just a memory of grins and dimples and laughing in the passenger seat, of summers stretched out, watching the stars swim by, of winters making s'mores in motel microwaves, marshmallow-covered fingers and sticky mouths, of lazy, achy post-hunt mornings, tired and tangled in the same bed, sleepily arguing over who has to leave soft pillows and warm blankets to bring back coffee and breakfast and pills.
All that, all that and more, gone forever, blasted out of existence with just a twitch of Dad's finger, 'cause Dad doesn't flinch and he doesn't miss and he never, ever pulls his gun without a reason, so why? Why Sammy and not Dean? Why wouldn't he tell them? Why wouldn't he believe them? Why wouldn't he take that goddamn gun off of Sam?
Dean can't suppress a shudder, can't shake the chill that runs through him, the awful, inescapable burn the thought leaves inside because Dad was serious, and Sam was right there, but why? Why?
"Sammy," Dean breathes, and he's not begging, he's not, but he's got to ask, has to hope that if he just tries. "There any chance in hell that if I asked you, you'd go upstairs, get some rest, read that damn journal or somethin' till Dad and I hash this out?"
"Dean," Sam grits out, stubborn and stupid, and Dean's isn't surprised. Can't be.
It'd be a cold day in hell that Sam backs down from an argument with Dad, and Dean knows that. Knows it the same way he knows that the world'll have goddamn ended before Sammy lets Dean walk into a fight with no one at his back.
"Didn't think so," Dean says with a deep sigh. "Had to ask, Sammy. Had to ask."
"Dean, you're kinda freakin' me out here," Sam admits.
Dean can't blame the kid, can't act like any of this is normal or comforting. Hell, he's probably letting his brother down by letting this rattle him at all. Sam's gone through enough, doesn't need more reasons to worry.
"Just didn't like seeing Dad pull a gun on you, that's all," Dean shakes his head, tries to shove that one deep, deep down where it'll only come back up in nightmares, in nightmares and daydreams and memories of things that can never, ever happen again.
Sam nods, glares at the door, mouth tight. Dean knows there's things he's not saying, because they'll either make things worse or send them straight to hell. Honestly, Dean's not sure either of those options would be a bad thing anymore, because he doesn't understand this, not this world where instead of being pissed at Dean for leaving, Dad's pissed at Sammy for having the idea to go. Where Dad doesn't care that they went, he cares why they went, who thought of it, whose fault, whose guilt, who should be on the other end of the gun barrel, except it seems like every answer is Sam, every shouting match, every argument ends with them facing off and it's so much worse, so many hundred thousand times worse than before because it's not just Sam versus Dad anymore.
It's not.
It stopped being that when Dad leveled live rounds at Sammy, when he had a weapon out and loaded before he even opened the door. When he sent that glare, that sneer, that look that used to be just for the filthy, murderous things they hunted at Dean's baby brother.
It's not Sam versus Dad. Not anymore.
Because Dean? Dean cannot, will not, be on any side of any argument that is okay with putting a bullet in his brother.
He just won't.
And if that means he not with Dad on this? Well…
That's just what it means then.
