All right! Next chapter. Significantly shorter than the previous one, I'm sorry to say...

Thanks to decemberdove and SamDreams for editing.

(Also - several people have been asking if there's some way they can download my stories. I'm not gonna ask why you guys want to do that [perverts], but I will tell you that I have an account on deviantART. Also I have one on Ao3, but because I like change about as much as a medieval German peasant probably did, I haven't figured out the layout yet. Which means there's nothing on there.)

"I'm gonna be honest – that looks like somebody just threw up in a bowl and sent it out here," Dean announced, lifting a mug of black coffee to his mouth.

Sam scowled at him over a spoonful of oatmeal, not appreciating the observation. Mostly because yeah, it did look uncomfortably like what he'd seen in the toilet every time he'd had the flu or been hungover, and he would have preferred not to have it pointed out. He steeled himself and took the bite anyway. Dean wasn't going to put him off of a breakfast that he'd dragged him out of bed two hours too early for.

"It's oatmeal," he said. "It looks fine."

"Looks like barf," Dean asserted. As he speared a sausage link, a girl who couldn't have been more than five or six shot him a look from where she was sitting across the aisle with her family. Sam offered her an apologetic smile after noticing that she had a bowl of oatmeal in front of her, too.

"D'you want me to start talking about what yours looks like?" Sam asked, using his now-empty spoon to gesture at the fried eggs, sausages, and hash browns on Dean's plate. They were all bleeding enough grease for just the sight of it to make Sam's left arm ache.

"I already know what it looks like," Dean replied, daintily nipping off the end of the sausage on his fork. Sam made an exaggerated face as he heard the casing snap. "Not barf."

"Cut it out – this looks nothing like barf," Sam said, digging into it again. He offered the spoonful up for Dean's inspection. "Look. There's raisins in it, and cranberries – "

"Hence the reason it looks like barf," Dean interrupted. Sam was momentarily impressed by his correct use of the word "hence," but shook it off when he popped the rest of the sausage into his mouth.

"At least my arteries are clear," Sam pointed out, eating the spoonful. It'd gone cold while he was showing it to Dean.

Dean snorted. "Oh, please. Get off your high horse, Sammy – there's enough sugar over there to put you on insulin packs for the rest of your life." He scooped up some eggs and spoke with a full mouth as he nodded in the general direction of Sam's mug. "And don't even get me started on your cup of creamer. How much coffee's in there? A drop?"

"I need the sugar," Sam defended himself before taking another bite of oatmeal. He made a big show of swallowing before he continued. "You got me up way too early – "

"Seven, you wuss. I got you up at seven."

" – after you'd kept me up all night," Sam finished, taking a sip of what was, admittedly, mostly non-dairy creamer.

"Now you're just making stuff up," Dean said. He stole a piece of Sam's toast to dunk in the yolks of his eggs, and Sam let him. It was sourdough. "I went to bed at exactly the same time that you did."

"Yeah, but you didn't go to sleep," Sam said. "You hugged me, you laid on top of me, I swear you got my hair in your mouth more than once the way that you were nuzzling me…" If things had been normal, Sam wouldn't have been able to complain about an extra-cuddly Dean. But as it was, he was surprised that the smothering affection hadn't woken his father up inside of his head. And he would rather have slept, after the exhausting, disappointing mess that yesterday had been. "And after you finally passed out, you were tossing and turning so much that I almost got up and slept on the floor."

At least Dean hadn't had his arms around him while he'd been doing his best impression of a fish out of water. Sam had gotten some sleep because they'd been separate.

He'd been expecting another snarky comeback, but instead, Dean just sighed and reached for his coffee again. "Yeah…that doesn't surprise me. I'm sorry. I didn't sleep too well."

Sam was about to dryly remark that he hadn't, either, but the mood had shifted subtly and it was obvious that they weren't playing around with each other anymore. So instead, he asked, "You're not still stressing out about this case, are you?"

Dean sighed for a second time, folding his arms across his chest and leaning back against the red and white vinyl of the booth. He frowned down at his half-eaten breakfast, and Sam scraped up the dregs of his oatmeal as he waited for him to talk, never taking his eyes off of him.

"I just feel like an idiot," Dean said eventually, shaking his head. "We wasted so much goddamn time here. Time that we could've spent looking for Dad."

Sam's stomach tightened at the mention of their father, and he was glad that he'd finished eating. As he pushed his empty bowl to the edge of the table and picked up his mug, he noticed that the girl across the aisle was still watching them. He sighed a little, because she looked pretty shocked by their conversation. Or maybe just the words they'd been using.

"Dean," Sam said. Dean had been mixing ketchup into his hash browns to create what looked like a pile of bloody brains (the appearance of which Sam really wished he wasn't familiar with), but he looked up when he heard his name. Sam tilted his head discreetly towards the girl. "Little pitchers."

Dean's green eyes flicked to the side, and he blushed faintly before shoveling some hash browns into his mouth. Sam nursed his not-really-coffee.

"You can't tell me that you're not pi – that you're not frustrated, too," Dean said after a couple of seconds. He was talking with his mouth full again, and Sam grimaced around the rim of his cup. "Almost a week – completely useless. All we did was bother a bunch of people and waste gas." He swallowed, and cleared his throat. "Oh, and let that crazy lady know that we, uh, have an unprofessional relationship."

"That last one's not really a big deal," Sam said. He wanted to see if Dean would agree with him or not.

"No, I know it's not." Dean stabbed another sausage. The tines of his fork scraped obnoxiously across the plate. "She could've figured out that we moved around a lot as kids and never had a permanent home and I'd feel the same way. I just hate that someone could read us that well. Especially someone like that."

"Why?" Sam asked, with a near-invisible smirk. "'Cause you think she's crazy?"

"Two packs a day and she thinks the da – the stupid plant gave her cancer," Dean said. Again with the head-shaking. "You can't tell me that that's not totally insane."

"Okay, you've got a point," Sam admitted. "But seriously. You need to stop beating yourself up over this. Yeah, we wasted time, but it's not the end of the world, and besides: how would you have known that this hunt wasn't worth it? We've never come across one of these mothman things before. We've never even heard of them."

Dean rubbed at his face as he swallowed a mouthful of sausage. "Still hate it."

"You think I don't?" Sam asked, arching an eyebrow. "I was the one who did all the research and still didn't know what it was. I'm the one who should feel like an idiot."

He was unsurprised when Dean grinned in a "hey-you're-right" kind of way, and let him have his moment of smugness. The grin faded after a second, anyway. Dean pulled out his wallet and began shelling bills onto the table. He must have remembered that Sam had bought dinner last night.

"C'mon, let's hit the road," he said, sliding out of the booth and getting to his feet. He waited for Sam. "I just wanna wash the taste of this hunt outta my mouth."

"Are you sure that we should take off so soon?" Sam asked. Dean eyed him as they walked to the door.

"You wanna go back and talk about test tube babies with Cynthia?" he asked.

"No," Sam replied. "I know that Bobby said that these things are harmless, but I'd feel weird if we didn't do a once-over of the plant while we're here. Just make sure that everything's back to normal."

Dean glanced at him, leaving the diner, and smirked.

"We're not gonna get in," he said, shaking his head as he unlocked the car. "You said so yourself. Last night, remember?"

"Yeah, but things will have calmed down some since yesterday," Sam answered. "Plus…" He opened the trunk, reaching for the box of fake IDs. "We're not actually reporters for some indie magazine." Dean had come around to the back of the Impala, hands in the pockets of the leather jacket that he was wearing, to watch Sam dig through the box. He accepted one of the laminated cards when Sam handed it to him. "We're federal nuclear safety inspectors who were working undercover as reporters, gathering local opinions, when the cooling pipe burst."

Dean studied the ID, then showed it to Sam with a raised eyebrow. "Hate to burst your bubble, Sammy, but this says that we're with the Health Department. I don't think that nuclear power plants fall under their jurisdiction."

"D'you really think that whoever lets us in is gonna spend more than five seconds looking at our badges?" Sam asked as he shoved the ID into the pocket of his jeans that held his wallet and closed the trunk. "There are gonna be a million of these guys all over the entire island. The security guards will be sick of looking at their badges. These look pretty close to the real thing…" He walked up to the passenger side door. "…and that's all that matters."

Dean was grinning when he joined Sam in the car and stabbed the keys into the ignition. Sam was relieved that the funk he'd been in earlier, over the uselessness of this case, seemed to have passed. The engine hummed to life, and he pulled out of the parking lot.

"There's my Sammy," he said, the approving note in his voice hard to miss. "Good to know that college didn't kill your devious side."

"It was college, Dean," Sam said by way of explanation.

They had checked out of their motel room before going to grab breakfast, so all they had to do was drive across the bridge and back onto the island. It was obvious that yesterday's malfunction was still sending ripples through the community, since almost everyone who hadn't had to go to work or school seemed to be standing outside in their yards or on the sidewalks, talking with folded arms and closed postures. Most of them were also casting suspicious glances at the workers who were pretty much everywhere: government types and people in plant uniforms both, conducting interviews, collecting samples, and generally making sure that everything was all right. Dean was spending more time watching them than the road, which would have worried Sam if he hadn't known exactly how good of a driver his brother was.

"Whole lotta activity," Dean observed. They were going slow because of all the cars parked on either side and the people who kept running out in front of them, too busy to bother looking both ways before crossing the street. "Who kicked the anthill?"

"This has gotta be the biggest nuclear incident since…well, since the last time Three Mile Island melted down," Sam replied. "Things like this just don't happen anymore. Not with all the safety regulations that they've been putting in since the sixties and seventies. It makes sense that the government – and the plant itself – is going over this place with a fine-toothed comb."

Dean grunted in understanding, and was silent after that until they were on the road that led directly to the plant. Then he squinted at a guy walking along the shoulder. "Hey. Does he have an EMF detector?"

"That's a Geiger counter," Sam said. "Not an EMF detector – we'd both be in some serious trouble if ghosts were radioactive." He thought about all the ghosts he'd been within arm's reach of over the years, even the weak ones that hadn't been able to hurt him, and imagined tumors blossoming all over his organs like peonies in a flower garden.

"So he's looking for radiation," Dean said, eyeing the guy suspiciously as they passed. He didn't notice.

"Yep," Sam said, not nearly as interested.

"I thought you said that no radiation had been released," Dean said. Maybe it had just been Sam's imagination, but he could swear that the car slowed down just a little.

"He's probably just confirming that," Sam answered. "And even if radiation had be released, chances are that it'd be contained within the plant. That's how they're built."

"So if there's any radiation at all on this island, we're gonna walk right into it," Dean concluded with a grimace.

"I'm sure that they'll give you a lead helmet if you ask for one," Sam told him, adjusting his jacket as the smokestacks of the plant loomed on the horizon. Dean shot him a grin, and he knew what was coming before he even opened his mouth.

"Not my brain that I'm worried about, Sammy," Dean declared, spinning the wheel and sending the Impala gliding into a very full parking lot. "Not the upstairs one, at least."

Sam snorted. He was about to ask if Dean planned to knock him up anytime soon, but before he could, a familiar voice broke into his head with a growled, Don't. He tensed, fingers sinking into the worn leather of his seat, but he'd braced himself for nothing. The voice was silent after that one word, and Sam relaxed incrementally as Dean searched for a parking space that would accommodate the Impala. Because he didn't say anything, just shot a glance at him every three seconds or so, Sam assumed that his older brother knew what was going on and was ready to step in and help if he needed to.

"You okay?" he asked quietly as they got out of the car. He'd finally found a spot, and Sam was feeling just fine by now. So he nodded.

"Yeah," he assured. "Yeah, of course I am. Don't worry."

"'Cause we can just…go, y'know," Dean told him, walking around the car. Sam followed. "If you don't really feel up to this. It's not like we absolutely have to check this place out, after all."

Sam sighed. "I know." He also knew that Dean had to be itching to take off, since the only reason they were here was to humor him. "But I'm okay, Dean. Let's just take a quick look around, and then we can go. It won't be more than fifteen minutes. I promise."

Dean gave him a skeptic look, then stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and led the way towards the building. "I'm holding you to that, just so you know."

Sam grinned. "Got it."

As they approached the plant, the security guard standing right outside the doors eyed the two of them suspiciously. He looked vaguely familiar, even from a distance, and once they got close enough to recognize him, Sam hissed through his teeth. Dean muttered, "Great."

"Non-workers and civilians aren't allowed inside right now," Clay said once the two of them were within earshot, his voice both firm and distasteful. "I don't care if you are reporters."

"So you're, uh, hired muscle," Dean replied, reaching into one of the inner pockets of his jacket. "That makes sense…and we're not reporters, genius. We're nuclear safety inspectors." He pulled out the badge that Sam had handed him earlier, brandishing it about an inch from Clay's face. "We were doing undercover interviews about the weird stuff that's been happening at the plant lately. Good thing we stuck around as long as we did, huh?"

Considering that Clay's very-unimpressed gaze was fixed on Dean, Sam doubted that he had seen how heavily he'd just winced. His plan had depended almost entirely upon whatever security guard they encountered just glancing at their IDs. But Clay was just the type to scrutinize every inch of the badges, and he'd made it very clear yesterday that he didn't like either of them, so he'd probably look as closely as he could just to spite them. And Dean's greeting definitely hadn't done them any favors.

But, much to Sam's surprise, Clay grunted in acknowledgement after only a few seconds, stepping back and irritably waving them towards the double doors that made up the main entrance to the building. As Dean slipped his badge back into his pocket, Sam saw that he'd been holding it so that his squared-off fingertips covered a few key components.

"Like we really need any more of you guys around here," Clay muttered, folding his arms across his broad chest.

"Well, trust me," Dean answered, walking past him with Sam in tow. "We don't really wanna be here, either."

Sam waited until they were safely inside the lobby, then asked, "Do you really have to try and get in a fight with that guy every time that we see him?"

"He's a dick," Dean pointed out. "He'd deserve it if somebody handed his ass to him."

Sam snorted, but didn't say anything else. He actually didn't know who would win in a fight between Dean and Clay, since Clay was bigger but Dean had to be more experienced. He didn't really want to find out, either.

A receptionist handed them radiation badges and called down a harried-looking worker to show them around. He took them through a maze of clean, well-lit hallways, and for some reason, Sam was eerily reminded of their impromptu tour of the abandoned military base in Lake City.

"I'd've thought that the power would be off," Dean commented.

"We only shut down the malfunctioning reactor," replied the worker. A laminated nametag, clipped to his uniform right below a radiation badge of his own, stated that his name was Bill Hedstrom. "One's still on. But you people are putting the screws on us to change that." He shot a baleful look at them over his shoulder. Sam was relieved when Dean didn't respond to the misguided accusation.

The building that housed the now-dormant reactor (and the cooling pipe that had burst) was a flurry of activity, even more so than the rest of the island. There were Geiger counters and radiation badges everywhere. They couldn't go ten feet without finding a federal worker and an employee of the plant arguing heatedly with each other. And there was a pool of water settled in even the shallowest dips of the floor.

"So, did the pipe burst – " Sam began, curious.

"In the reactor chamber," Bill said, finishing his question for him. "But some genius pulled the fire alarm and triggered the sprinklers. That's why there's water all over the place. And, as I'm sure you can imagine, we're having a hell of a time cleaning it up, with how crowded this place is."

"We'll try and get out of your hair as soon as we can," Sam said, knowing that he was only speaking honestly about Dean and himself. Bill snorted.

"Yeah, I bet," he said. "That's what you guys said last time, too. My dad worked here then, and he complained for years about how long it took for the government to clear out." He looked at them, and changed the subject. "What exactly do you two wanna see? Reactor chamber? Pump room?"

"Actually, we'd really like to see the abandoned reactor," Sam said, slipping his hands into the pockets of his jacket. The only reason they were here was to make sure that the mothman had moved on, and it seemed to have nested in the abandoned reactor.

Bill came to a full stop and turned around to stare at the two of them. He glanced at Dean, as if looking for sudden reassurance that Sam was just messing with him. Sam couldn't really see what Dean did, since they were standing right next to each other, but that assurance obviously didn't come. Bill shook his head.

"Nothing's happened over there for thirty years," he told them. "Why are you interested in that one? The problem's here."

Dean fielded this question. With a shrug, he said, "Hey, man, we don't question orders. Our boss told us to check out the abandoned reactor. Didn't bother to tell us why, but I guess that that's what we've gotta do."

Bill eyed him, then turned and led them down a side hall. "If you ask me, it sounds like your boss doesn't know a thing about how nuclear power works."

"You're preaching to the choir," Dean said. Sam held back a bark of laughter. Like Dean knew anything about the nuclear power industry.

They left the building, crunching their way across a swath of frost-covered grass. There were more than a few people milling around out there, and most of them seemed to be either reporters or residents of the surrounding area. The former were taking pictures and interviews, and the latter were ranting to whoever would listen and very obviously looking around for anything interesting. Bill cut a path through them like a farmer walking through a flock of aimless chickens, and Sam and Dean hurried in his wake.

"It was worse yesterday," he said. "I'll still be glad when it all dies down, though."

"I bet," Sam said.

The abandoned reactor was surrounded by a chain link fence and a crowd, though it was considerably smaller than the one at the reactor that had malfunctioned yesterday. Bill's uniform drew attention as he approached the fence's gate, manned by a single security guard, and a lot of that attention spilled off onto Sam and Dean. A few people – Sam couldn't tell if they were reporters or ordinary citizens – raised their cameras in order to snap pictures of them. Dean immediately put a hand up, obscuring his face.

"What the hell are you doing?" Sam asked, keeping his voice low enough that no one but Dean could hear him.

"What does it look like I'm doing?" Dean replied. "For all I know, my face could be hanging in every post office in the States. Digging up graves and breaking into condemned houses isn't exactly legal."

"Then why aren't you covering my face, too?" Sam asked, arching an eyebrow.

"You had different hair the last time you did any of that stuff," was Dean's reasoning. "Plus, you looked like you were ten then, and now you look at least twelve."

Sam scowled as Bill had the guard unlock the gate for them.

"So…can we go inside this thing?" Dean asked. Most of the people around them (or the ones with cameras, at least) had lost interest in the two of them, and so he'd dropped his hand from his face.

"I don't think so," Bill replied, waving them through the gate and then grimacing as a question was tossed from the crowd: "Was this reactor affected, too?" "We sealed the door, as far as I know. We didn't want any stupid teenagers sneaking in to get drunk and draw pentagrams on the walls."

Sam bit his tongue to hold back the lecture that automatically welled up in him whenever someone mentioned pentagrams distastefully or implied that they were symbols of Satan as he and Dean passed through the gate and Bill winced at the questions that were pouring out of the crowd now: "Is this reactor still a risk to us?" "Are we safe here?" "Why are you letting people in?"

"Jeez," Dean said, as they walked towards the building. "Give me a quiet, obscure case any day." He shot a look at Sam. "And you're the only reason that we're here right now, so if I end up on the front page of some newspaper…"

"Yeah, whatever, it's not that big of a deal," Sam said, a little distracted. He had debated whether or not to even go through the gate, but they hadn't really had a choice. If they couldn't go inside the building, he wasn't sure that there was even a point in them being here, since they couldn't search for the mothman in the place that it had most likely been living.

"The hell it isn't." Walking quickly, they darted around the side of the building, which cut them off from the worst of the crowd and the rising fear among its members. They hugged the wall, which kept them a great distance away from the fence and the few people milling around behind it. Most looked at them for at least a few seconds, but they had both learned a long time ago that people ignored you if you just acted like you knew what you were doing, so they lost interest in them pretty quickly. Once they reached the back of the building, there were no people at all. Just frosted trees.

"I'm not sure how much we can do here," Sam said, giving voice to his thoughts. "I mean, we can't even go inside the building."

"But that dust that Cynthia showed us," Dean said. "They found it outside the building, didn't they?"

"I don't see how dust is gonna help us," Sam admitted, shaking his head as they walked.

"It rained last night, around ten," Dean began. He had that rare, bright look on his face that meant that he'd figured something out before Sam did, and knew it. "So all of this probably froze around ten-thirty." He kicked at the grass. "The mothman comes out later at night. At least, it did in all the accounts that we listened to. And the dust must fall off its wings when it flies."

"Like a moth," Sam blurted. He felt like a moron as soon as it was out of his mouth.

But Dean smiled and nodded. "Like a moth," he agreed. "Or a butterfly." Sam didn't immediately understand the fond expression that flickered across his face, and it was gone before he could puzzle it out.

"So if we find dust on top of the ice, that means that it's still here," Sam said, catching on to Dean's reasoning. Finally. "It flew last night. And something else is going to happen."

Dean tapped his nose, and they kept walking. He spoke after a couple of minutes. "Even if it's still here, though, we need to leave. There's nothing we can do. We're hunters, not nuclear engineers, and as useful as a few extra limbs might be, I'd rather not get hit with a dose of radiation."

"We could warn the people who are nuclear engineers," Sam said. Dean just looked at him, and asked, "You don't watch a whole lot of horror movies, do you?"

Sam just laughed, humorlessly. He didn't watch horror movies for the same reason that he imagined a lot of soldiers didn't watch war movies: it was boring and even painful to watch something when you were living it on a daily basis.

They didn't find any wing-dust, which went a long way towards calming Sam down. They didn't even find any that was apparent under the frost, so the police or the janitors or the workers of the plant themselves must have swept most of it up. As they were inspecting a silvery lump that turned out to be a frozen toadstool, Sam looked up, blinked, and softly said, "Butterflies." A room full of them in the middle of summer.

Dean nodded again, smiled, and repeated, "Butterflies." Sam didn't think twice about stepping into his arms for a nuzzle that warmed him from head to toe, but he was glad that there was no one on this side of the building to see them.

They walked back, past the crowd and towards the gate. The panicked questions had died down, but Sam caught a flash of something else as the guard saw them and pulled out his keys: black. Solid black eyes, set obscenely into a human face. He stiffened, and Dean noticed.

"What's up?" he asked. They hadn't stopped walking.

"I…" Sam knew that if he told Dean he'd seen a demon, his brother would turn this place upside down and terrorize the townspeople until he either found the thing or became convinced that it had moved on. And, in face, Sam wasn't even sure that he had really seen a demon. The light was disorienting, diamond-bright and crisp. And the natural state in which someone like Sam spent most of his time was, of course, paranoia. Sam shook off the numbing fear. "I'm cold."

"Well, we'll get you in the car and turn the heat on," Dean announced. "And then we'll see if we can't find a case somewhere warmer."

"Sounds good," Sam said. He kept discreetly scanning the crowd for black eyes. He didn't find any, but he unconsciously walked as close as he could get to Dean anyway.