Irreparable

It had been a week… a week since I'd last seen my youngest son. Every lead turned into a dead end, and Dean and I were both getting testy with the frustration of long hours, little to no sleep and constant dread. Walker was an added nuisance that we definitely did not need. Dean wasn't a stupid boy. Far from it, and it didn't take him long to see the danger in having Walker around without me needing to utter a word.

"What the hell Dad," he snapped the first day as soon as we were alone in our hotel room.

"I was desperate, Dean."

"That dude's hardcore," he said, careful to keep his voice low enough that it wouldn't carry past the thin walls. "Son of a bitch bragged about killin' his own sister like he deserves some sort of damn medal for it! If he finds out about Sammy-"

"I know that! I can't send him away now without raising anymore questions. Besides, I like having him where I can watch him." I knew I didn't have to tell Dean that sending Walker away wouldn't guarantee the he'd stop looking for Sammy or that he wouldn't be the first to find him. There was no doubt in my mind that Walker's priority wouldn't be on keeping Sam alive. "If he becomes a problem, I'll take care of him."

"You'll take care of him?" Dean frowned at me for a second before his eyes darkened in realization. "You mean you'll kill him."

"If I have to." I'd done worse to keep my boys safe. Dean dropped his gaze and nodded. When he looked at me again, there was so much trust in his eyes that it made me want to escape. Dean's complete and unconditional trust had always scared the shit out of me. What is he gonna do when he realizes that I'm only human. That I fuck up just like everybody else, sometime spectacularly. Like losing my grown ass kid when I was barely a hundred yards away. Why he didn't blame me for that… I just couldn't figure it out.

"Have you… have you done that before? Killed people who might hurt Sammy?"

It was my turn to look away. There were things that I never wanted my sons to know about me, things I'd done that I wasn't exactly proud of that I'd hoped would stay buried forever. "And you. I never wanted you to know what that was like…"

"I know, Dad. But I had to do it myself. They took something from me and I needed to get it back. It had to be me that ended them."

I nodded. "I just hope you can live with it now. It's a heavy burden."

Dean cleared his throat. "Yeah."

"Yeah. Well, let's get some shut eye. We'll be no good to Sam if we're half stupid with exhaustion. Just… if the time comes, leave Walker to me."

He didn't answer, just collapsed on his bed and closed his eyes. I didn't press the issue because I knew if I did we'd argue. Dean and I rarely argued, but the kid knew how to show that he wasn't the mindless soldier his brother sometimes painted him as when he wanted to. I sighed and sat on my own bed, pulling off my boots and tossing them at the door before cutting off the light.

"He's a sneaky bastard," Dean was saying, his voice barely loud enough to hear. "He'll probably try to take us out before going after Sammy. If he tries to hurt you, or Sam, and I see an opportunity, I'm taking it. Just like you will."

I tried to ignore the lump in my throat. What the hell had I gotten my boys into? "Agreed."

Dean had a nightmare that night. Woke up screaming and shaking and crying. I finally calmed him down enough to lie down again.

"I can still hear them. Screaming. God, Dad, they won't stop screaming." I could feel him trembling where he was pressed against my side. "I don't regret it… I just wish I could forget it, wish it could be easier."

"If it were easier you'd be evil, son. You're a good man. Taking human life should be hard."

He swallowed hard and nodded. "Do you think… do you think it was Yellow Eyes?"

I knew he'd changed the subject. "I suspect it was the demon he has working with him. But we'll get him back."

He didn't ask how. Dean never asked how. He just believed. It took about thirty minutes before he fell asleep again. He didn't have any more nightmares that night, but I knew that he'd have them again at some point. It wasn't fair. None of this was fair. I understood why he felt he had to take care of the bastards who'd raped him himself, but I still wished that I'd been the one to do it. Dean didn't deserve this burden, not with everything else he had to carry.

"Son of a bitch!

Sam had been missing for five days, and I'd been tracking the other demon, the one that was working with Azazel to keep me and the boys separate. It was the second day in a row that we got there too late. Witnesses had identified Sam the day before. Identified him as the man who'd killed four people. Just four ordinary people who were minding their own business outside of a nightclub. God only knew what else the demon had made him do. Right now we were in a house looking at the mutilated bodies of a family of four.

"Son of a bitch," I repeated, my voice shaking with rage. Unless I could find a way to predict where the demon was going to take Sammy next, we would just keep following him around to witness whatever carnage the evil motherfucker used my son for. I wondered if Sam watched what the demon did, or if he was so deeply buried in his own head that he had no clue. I hoped for the second, hoped he hadn't seen, hadn't had to watch. A shivered, imagining how helpless it would feel to be possessed, to be controlled and used the way Sammy was. This was why I didn't want Dean and Sam involved. Anybody else, I'd just kill. But this was Sammy. My baby boy.

"We'll get the sonovabitch, Dad."

I nodded, my jaw clenched so tight that my teeth ached. Yeah, we were going to get it. And Hell help it when we did. "We gotta get the hell outta here before the cops come."

We salted and burned the family, along with the house, in an attempt to erase any sign of Sammy. Besides, that family deserved peace after everything they'd been through.

On the eighth day, we were reasonably sure that we'd caught up to the demon dragging my kid all over the Midwest, leaving a trail of bodies in its wake. We split up in order to find him quicker, with standing orders not to approach him alone. After four hours of searching, I got a frantic call from Dean. Even if we hadn't been looking for a demon, a frantic call from Dean would have freaked me out. Dean was never frantic without a just cause. All he had a chance to tell me before the line went dead was that he'd found Sammy in some deserted bar. I called right back and got his voicemail. Cursing, I dialed Bobby.

"Did you find 'im?"

"No. Dean did. But his phone went dead before I could get more than the name of a bar out of him. Can you look it up for me?"

I don't know what to do with what I just walked in on. Dean's bent over the bar, pants pulled down to his knees, Sammy's bent over him, plastered to his back like a lover. The whole world feels like it's tilted the wrong way on its axes and the damn sun's gonna rise in the north. Before I can think of what to say, Sammy looks up at me and gives me his brightest dimpled smile, the one that had gotten rarer as he got older until I would have damn near sold my soul to see it by the time he reached sixteen. But the smile's a little off and that makes it all wrong like someone trying to impersonate Sammy smiling.

"Hey, look Dean. Daddy's here. Think he wants to watch?" His voice was almost conspiratorial, but pitched loud enough for me to hear from across the room, like a stage whisper. It was my boy's voice, but the cadence was off.

All of a sudden reality catches up to me in a rush. That's not Sam. I couldn't imagine a single thing, not even turning evil, that would ever make Sam purposely hurt Dean. And it only took a glance at Dean to confirm that Sam was hurting him. The tears in his eyes, the way he strained to draw in breath around the hand the thing in Sam's body had around his throat.

"Daddy…" Dean sounded about five years old… that had been about how old he was the last time he'd called me 'Daddy,' before he decided that he was a big boy and too old to use 'baby words.' The word tugged at my gut, threatening to make me loose the tattered focus I'd been clinging to since the day both my sons went missing as I raised my shot gun and aimed it at my youngest.

Sam smirked at me, and it was his smirk but it was every bit as wrong as everything else. Like it was a size too big or too small or something. "Oh, Daddy… what are you gonna do with that? Gonna sacrifice one son to save the other?"

"No," I said simply, my voice hoarse but otherwise steady. Without hesitation or even conscious thought, I squeezed the trigger. The rock salt hit Sam's chest with just enough force to push him away from Dean and knock him flat on his ass. I tried not to think about the fact that I'd just fucking shot my own goddamn son. Dean slid off the bar and curled in on himself on the floor.

The demon in Sam laughed. "Oh, look. I think I broke him. And I didn't even get a chance to sink into that tight little ass yet. Hmmm… you think it's still tight? After all he was gang banged. But that was a while ago."

I gritted my teeth and looked for a way to divert the bastard's attention from Dean. "You're overcompensating. Can't say I blame you. You are just a lapdog. That's really gotta sting, playing go fetch for Azazel."

"You don't know a damn thing about it." The demon got up and brushed off Sam's jeans. "Well, I guess I have to deal with you before I can get down to business with your golden boy. The only question is, do I kill you, or tie you up and let you watch first and then kill you? How about it, Daddy? Wanna watch me finish breaking your perfect little soldier?"

"Actually, I kind of like the third option. The one where I send your sorry ass back to hell."

The demon smirked and lifted up Sam's right arm, revealing a binding symbol branded into the flesh. Shit. "Sorry. There is no third option. Besides, I kind of like this body, you know? It's big and powerful. Not to mention, your boy? Hung like a fucking stallion. I always possess women, never really realized how much fun a big strapping red blooded male would be. Shoulda seen what I did to that little bitch Jo. Shoulda heard poor Sammy in my head, screaming himself hoarse when I let him surface enough to watch… to feel. That was fun. I really gotta say… this is livin'." I pursed my lips. There really was something… effeminate about the demon, a kind of odd grace in the way it moved Sam's body. The demon caressed Sam's chest like a woman caressing a lover, which was just fucking weird considering that it was using Sam's own hands to do it. I tried hard to ignore everything it was saying, though. Tried to ignore what it was saying about Jo, about what it had made Sammy do, what it wanted to make Sammy do now to Dean. "Especially when I got someone like Dean-o over there all bent over for me. Quivering and whimpering, like a little slut. Come on, tell the truth Daddy… you couldn't have spent all those hours with a pretty boy like Dean and not at least been tempted."

If the demon had been in anyone other than Sam, I would have killed the host just to shut the damn thing up. There were some things that you could do to a body that not even possession could survive. Like decapitation. I gritted my teeth. This was going to get ugly. Real ugly. "You gonna stand there and flap your gums all day? 'Cause, I really gotta say that the thing I hate most about you demonic bastards is the monologuing. It's just yap-yap-yap all the damn time."

The demon growled and charged me. Yeah, real ugly. And painful.

I was on the ground before I even registered that the damn thing had hit me. It would have hurt even if it was just Sammy. Dean was right when he called him a Sasquatch. Kid was huge, with solid muscular covering his long limbs. His hands were around my throat. "See how traumatized poor little Dean-o is? He's just gonna lay there while I chock the life right out of Daddy. Can you imagine all the beautiful pain that's gonna cause him later? When he remembers the sounds you made? That you were less than thirty feet from him and he didn't do a damn thing to help you?"

I fumbled in my pocket and came up with exactly what I was looking for. A syringe. I hoped that Bobby knew what the hell he was talking about, because this was my kid that I was about to pump enough tranquilizers into to drop a damn elephant. I didn't have time to be gentle, to remember what a baby Sam was when it came to getting any kind of shots. I jammed the needle into his midsection and depressed the plunger before the demon had the chance to react. The stuff acted fast. Within three seconds, I was being crushed under the dead weight of my son's body. Could the boy be any fucking heavier? It took me three tries to get him off me and several minutes to catch my breath enough to get up and draw the devil's trap and tie him to a chair in the middle of it.

I went to Dean, but he was still off somewhere in his head. It reminded me of the way he was after his mother died. He spent hours just staring at nothing, silent. He flinched away at first when I tried to pull up his pants.

"Hey, kiddo, it's okay. It's Dad. I'm not gonna hurt you. Just let me cover you up. Don't you want to be covered up?"

He made a small, broken noise. He let me pull up his pants, but I could feel the tension in his body, like he was bracing himself for something.

I went back to Sammy and pulled out my hunting knife. I had to take care of that binding symbol before I could exorcise the demon. He woke up almost as soon as the knife sliced into his arm. The demon began to scream and curse as I started the exorcism. Eventually, the Sam's head was thrown back and black smoke poured out. His head dropped to the side. He was passed out. I untied him and moved him where Dean couldn't see him.

An hour later and I had somehow moved the boys to a motel and got adjoining rooms. Dean was totally catatonic. He hadn't moved once on his own since I shot Sammy. Not unless you counted the rocking, which was really just starting to creep me right the hell out. Sammy was in the next room, just staring out the window and shaking, his chest bloody. So I had one son traumatized and rocking, and the other was traumatized and shaking. And did I mention that I had just shot my baby boy? Okay, so it was rock salt and he'd been possessed and hurting Dean at the time… but still… I fucking shot my kid. Hell yeah. This was a red letter day for the Winchesters. I needed to keep an eye on both of them, but they couldn't be in the same room right now because Dean… I wasn't sure if Dean could handle that. Hell, who was I trying to fool? It was going to be a long while before Dean could be in the same room with his own brother again. I tried to force myself to think, to figure this out. Bobby. I hadn't even called him back to tell him how everything went. Primarily because I still wasn't sure myself. My boys were both hurting and I felt completely useless to help them.

It took me a couple of tries to get my fingers to work my phone right. Bobby answered right away.

"John! Is Sam okay?"

And that's when I finally broke. Because I couldn't see how either of my boys would ever be okay again.

A/N: Sorry I keep taking so long with the updates. Life keeps getting in the way with all my many and varied projects, and then that little thing I need to do b/c I've kinda gotten attached to having a place to live and food eat called working. Sigh. Anyway, I hope this chapter was worth the wait.

Hey, riquitv! Hope you like this chapter.

I hope this chapter was worth your patience, Yammy.

It was satisfying for me to write, UnholyMuse, because I had really grown to hate them even more then I hate Azazel. At least he has an excuse for being an evil bastard. Anyway, there will be repercussions for Dean. Aren't there always? Poor guy's gonna have a lot to deal with. So tell me, how close was your guess?

Unfortunately, babyreaper, it's never that easy when you hunt things that love using your weaknesses against you.

Hey deangirl! Yeah, there are going to be repercussions. It would be unrealistic if there weren't. But yeah, those guys were definite scumbags.

I didn't mean to worry you redgriffen. Although I probably just justified your worry…

Dean's stronger than anyone gives him credit for, greendaypumpkin. I think it would be a mistake to ever bet against him.

It was intense to write, moira4eku. And it doesn't show any signs of letting up any time soon.

LOL, NongPradu! I don't think he's going to live with it as well as Dexter. But I don't think he's going to do a lot of crying over it either, though I imagine that screaming is going to haunt him for a while. You're right about the Sammy disappearances. I'm surprised that Dean never lojacked him. I never saw someone get lost so much! Hope your still on the edge of that seat… but don't fall off.

-Angie