Author notes: Thank you so much to whereupon, onlythefireborn, and sylvia_locust for excellent feedback. All remaining errors and weirdness are our own.

Many, many, many thanks to quickreaver for providing art and working us into her packed schedule. Please check out the art in either the AO3 or LJ (freac_campDOTlivejournalDOTcom) posting of this chapter!

This chapter kicks off our END GAME plotline. You may not believe us, but we decided on the events in these final five chapters back in 2010/2011, when the world and future looked very different to us in America. Yes, most of the scenes are only being written in full now, and the events of this year certainly influence our choice of details, but we sketched out these final events seven years ago. It feels pretty damn surreal to be writing it now.


Chapter Thirty-Eight

Director Jonah Campbell had just wrapped up yet another budgetary meeting with bureaucratic pencil-pushers and military liaisons, and he was nearly out of the building when he was stopped by the sound of his name. His first name.

"Jonah!" The call came again.

The Director didn't recognize the voice. He turned, wary tension sliding into his spine. One hand drifted casually to where he would have had a gun, if he was allowed to carry one in the United States Capitol building.

When he saw the source of the call, the tension dialed down. "Mr. Waverly," he said, less a greeting, more an identification. There were members of Congress and ASC veterans who would have run from the expression on his face, which could not properly be called a smile.

Mr. Updike "Dick" Waverly—he sometimes joked that he was a man with no first names—smiled back and kept his distance. They knew each other, as much as any member of the press could know the ASC Director. Waverly suspected that if he tried the "Jonah" bullshit again, he'd probably end up violently mugged in a D.C. alley, or quietly asked to FREACS for semi-permanent questioning. Still, he'd made his point. "I have a scoop for you," he said.

The Director blinked. "That's not the way it usually works, is it?"

"Nope. Today's your lucky day." Waverly extended an unmarked DVD in a cheap plastic sleeve. "Or maybe your unlucky day. I suppose it all depends on your perspective."

Jonah Campbell eyed the disk the way another man might a domesticated snake. "And why would I trust any information from you, Mr. Waverly?"

"Because, Mr. Campbell, I like to watch you writhe."

"It's Director," the Director said. "You really shouldn't try to intimidate me, Mr. Waverly. It won't end well."

"Who's trying anything?" Waverly asked lightly. "Just stating a fact. As to why I'm giving this to you, let's just say I'm looking forward to you owing me a favor. Possibly a senatorial-sized favor."

Director Campbell took the DVD and ran one thumb over its white cover. "Don't worry, Mr. Waverly, I pay my debts."

That was definitely a threat.

Waverly grinned back at him. "I count on it, Director Campbell."

That night, alone in his bare-bones suite routinely swept for bugs, the Director slid the DVD into his entertainment system. His walls had good soundproofing, but he kept the volume on the TV low. He would have played the disc on his computer, but he didn't trust Updike Waverly not to have planted some kind of virus.

The first few minutes were black and grainy. The Director waited, idly running through plans on how to eliminate the small but persistent threat that Waverly represented. Then the picture came into focus, the audio picked up, and his thoughts shorted out abruptly as he realized what he was seeing.

The video was homemade, maybe by children playing with a cheap recorder. He watched as a boy and a girl in swimsuits chased each other with water pistols, shrieking and laughing, while another child's voice called to them from behind the camera.

A battered green pickup truck pulled askew onto the driveway in the background. He watched three men, clearly hunters to his practiced eye, emerge. To confirm the identification, the first one had an ASC ID in one hand, pairing it with an (illegal) sawed-off shotgun in the other.

The Director watched as the hunters planted themselves on the front lawn and began shouting toward the house. Watched as the children realized that something was wrong.

"Get your freak-loving asses out here!"

"Where's your mindfucking little bitch?"

Less than a minute in, the hunters opened fire on the accused psychic—a girl, maybe eight years old, blonde and pretty—while the other children screamed. The recorder fell, sending the world spinning on its axis, while the parents rushed out of the house, screaming the children's names.

The girl must not have been the real psychic, because as she lay motionless on the ground, another child screamed in raw anguish. The pickup lurched forward into the hunters as though lifted by a giant hand. Two men went down. The parents threw themselves between the last child standing and the remaining ASC hunter, but not in time.

The video ended on a close-up of two dead children and a lifeless hand reaching out to protect them. The camera lingered there for more than a minute, until an engine exploded in the background, and the image cut to black.

The Director stared at the screen for several minutes after it went dead. He took a deep, slow breath, held it, and let it out.

"Shit."

He ejected the disc and picked up his phone to call Alice.

Mall food courts weren't Sam and Dean's favorite joint, but you gotta go where the case takes you. This time, the case required checking whether a series of vandalism incidents making the rounds of department stores was supernatural trouble, or just a bunch of teenagers with a twisted sense of humor.

As they sat down at one of the few free tables, Sam gave Dean's tray a deeply skeptical look.

"These cheese curds are for us both," Dean said. "I can share."

"Did you really need to get one at every place that had them on the menu?"

"Dude, we're in Wisconsin. Cheeseville. 'Course we gotta sample them everywhere, see where they make 'em best. The difference between Sbarro and A&W may be the difference between a flavor celebration and flavor ruination."

"Of course," Sam echoed, smiling at him in a tolerant way that Dean felt sure was hiding a bigger version. "How could I forget?"

Dean rattled the baskets together. "Seriously, Sam, sometimes they don't make the fried ones with the good stuff, especially at a chain. They call them cheese curds, but they're basically glorified mozzarella sticks. You've got to go with the authentic cheddar ones. On the other hand, fried is the way to go. The fresh cheese curds around here are awesome, but I don't trust food that squeaks when you bite it."

He could've gone on for a while longer on the finer points of cheese curd tasting, but Sam's attention had focused somewhere over his right shoulder.

Dean took a quick look over his shoulder, but all he saw was tired parents, screaming kids, brightly-dressed fast-food workers, and a bank of large televisions against the wall, showing the evening news and a local college football game.

Dean glanced back to Sam, whose eyes were still locked on a point beyond him. "Case?" he asked.

Sam didn't even take his eyes off the TVs, just shook his head slightly.

Dean blinked. When Sam didn't say anything, he turned around in his chair, one hand reaching for another cheese curd.

If the TVs had any sound, it couldn't be heard over the clatter of the food court. Dean could see a news anchor speaking seriously, her brow furrowed. The chyron "ASC-INVOLVED SHOOTING, UNKNOWN NUMBER OF FATALITIES INCLUDES CHILDREN" took up the bottom third of the screen. The shot of the news anchor cut away to grainy footage that would have looked at home on America's Funniest Home Videos. At least until a truck pulled up and three heavily-armed men jumped out. The one in the front flashed an ASC badge before the video cut back to the newsroom.

Even the news anchor's professional mask had a few cracks. The closed captions beneath her included the words "extremely disturbing" and "children killed" and "no explanation". For a second, the screen showed a suited man mobbed by reporters just outside a black, government-issue SUV. Hair thinning, eyes cold and flat, he kept his lips compressed as he pushed through a crowd of microphones. With a shock, Dean recognized Jonah Campbell.

No one in the food court was paying attention. The high pitch of laughter, arguments, and chatter carried on, oblivious. It was suddenly near-intolerable to Dean.

His own ASC license felt like a brand burning through his wallet. He and Sam had been asking questions for the case. Nothing that would immediately mark them as hunters, or as ASC, but Dean could imagine eyes on them, the taste of their suspicion (real or imagined) in the back of his throat.

He spoke quietly. "Sam, can you tell what happened?"

"Hunters went to collect a suspected monster." Sam's tone was as flat as Director Campbell's eyes. "They killed everybody. Including ch-children. It's on video."

"Fuck," Dean breathed. They were showing the clip again: children, hunters, guns, blackness. Footage no one was supposed to see.

Abruptly, the din of the mall, the ruthless fluorescents, and the long distance between the Winchesters and the nearest exit was too much.

"Sam," Dean said. His fist was balled next to his tray, but he made an effort to keep his voice low and steady. "Let's get out of here."

"I need to see this." Sam didn't move his eyes from the screens.

"Yeah, we can watch it at the room. Come on, Sammy."

Sam glanced at him, and he understood. With a quick nod, his expression still closed, he stood with his tray. He deposited it at the garbage cans, took one last look at the screens, and turned to leave.

Dean followed, leaving his tray behind. As much as he'd wished for the ASC to go up in flames, he felt nothing but a pit in his stomach at the thought of the shitshow to come.

Like a train wreck played over and over again in excruciating slow motion, the endlessly looping "ASC Massacre" story ignited a national firestorm of coverage. Two things were certain: the footage of ASC hunters slaughtering a family was horrific, and it had opened a floodgate of public criticism for the first time in ASC history.

Politicians, pundits, and civilians clamored for an immediate independent investigation, unprecedented budget oversight for the ASC, and the transfer of FREACS control to another government branch for review. Others—a minority of voices, not as loud, but backed by money and power—declared that the freaks and freaklovers in the video had deserved everything they got, even if they looked like children.

The most remarkable response came from a new group of voices that quickly captured the public attention.

A vigil for the Norfleet family, whose Cleveland suburban home had been the scene of the now infamous bloodbath, was held a few days after the tapes broke. Despite a statement of ASC disapproval, the just-announced Congressional investigation, and the pundits' warnings against politicizing a sensational tape before all the facts were known, the extended family refused to cancel the memorial for their loved ones: Mr. John Norfleet, Mrs. Nora Norfleet, their son Daniel and daughters Emily and Megan, the last of whom was the accused psychic.

When the crowd of mourners overflowed the confines of the church and spilled into the streets of Chagrin Falls, lighting the town up with candles, national news picked up the story.

Sam and Dean watched the coverage of the vigil from their motel room. It was on every network.

"I've never heard— " Sam stopped. Dean looked at him. "This has never… happened before, has it? This part, I mean. With all these people?"

"Hell no." Dean's fingers ached from gripping his bottle of Jack too tight, and he flexed them. "The ASC bastards do what they want, and people don't talk about it. Ever. Freaks don't get funerals." He took another swallow. Sam was going to have to put him to bed, but Dean would make it up to him tomorrow. The whiskey was medicine for the churn in his gut that had nothing to do with dinner.

Growing up, he hadn't questioned all he'd seen inside that camp or heard elsewhere: all the kids like Sam who had been torn from their families or point-blank murdered. Monsters hadn't scared his father, so they didn't scare Dean either, but the Winchesters never hesitated to run from the ASC.

"What do you think's going to happen?" Sam asked, more quietly.

"Fucked if I know, Sammy." In Dean's experience the ASC always won, but he'd never seen this before. Never seen the ASC lose their ruthless control of the narrative. Never seen every channel give air time to the sobbing aunt, and the grandparents of the slaughtered children declaring that their loved ones had been innocent, no matter what the ASC said. And holy shit, they had a hell of a crowd. A sea of candle lights.

Over the next week, the Winchesters waited for the ASC to come out swinging, with outraged defenses, accusations, and pointed question about the kind of family that harbors freaks. Instead, the media's focus turned to new vigils and protests in other cities across the country, organized by others who had lost siblings, cousins, parents, and friends to the ASC.

The defiance caught like wildfire. Newspapers published local testimonies from those who'd lost loved ones years ago, sometimes more than a decade, and had never been able to speak of it before. Not all those lost had died in a storm of bullets; many were picked up by a black van as they returned home from school or errands, never to be seen again. Now, for the first time, people were demanding answers, asking why, and calling for proof they'd never received that their loved one had been a supernatural menace.

Dean still wasn't sure what in the universe had come off its wheels, but something was definitely out of whack. Freaks were the worst sort of family skeleton, and households with a confirmed freak as a relative were often shunned by their community until they left the area for a life where no one remembered the outcast. Their pictures were removed from photo albums and taken off the mantelpiece, and people tried hard to forget them. Publicly acknowledging their existence had been the ultimate taboo—until now.

The nonstop footage of the ASC massacre scraped Dean's nerves like worn-out brakes screaming down a mountain road. Every shot reminded him of what he could have lost before he ever realized what he might have, and it added another layer of guilt for all those who had lost the Sam in their life. He wanted to smash every screen showing the footage, or at least shut them off with prejudice. But he couldn't, because Sam had developed a fixation.

Sam read the papers obsessively, with the same intensity that he brought to researching a hunt. He stopped to watch the coverage every time he glimpsed it, and he turned on the news the moment they got back to their motel room.

Dean didn't like the look in Sam's eyes as he watched the talking heads debate the pros and cons of the "freaks" mowed down on film. Dean didn't recognize that look; he didn't know if it was fear, horror, or some godawful, returning combination of Sam's old fear, withdrawal, and numb acceptance of everything thrown at him.

Once, in their motel room eating Chick-fil-A before a hunt, Dean could barely force his sandwich down listening to the latest news hour.

"...another protest in D.C. this past weekend in support of shutting down the Facility for Research, Elimination, and Containment of Supernaturals, or, as it's commonly called, FREACS. Very little is known about its operation and personnel, and this lack of transparency has become a sticking point in debates over the last week, especially as more families have come forward with personal stories about alleged overreaches of authority."

The wooden-faced news anchor spoke before images of long crowds marching in front of the White House, Capitol Hill, and the ASC headquarters. Many protesters carried signs with slogans like "The ASC is the REAL Monsters' Nest" and "Victim Not Freak." Some even read "Family Not Freak."

The images cut away to a studio set with Anderson Cooper and an older man with a shiny bald head, captioned as the senior U.S. senator from Montana.

"Senator, you have been one of the strongest advocates of the ASC's authority and independent operation," Cooper said. "In the face of public outcry over the shocking footage we've all seen, how can you continue to support an organization that has clearly been less than forthcoming with its methods—and, many might say, unacceptably cavalier with human life?"

The senator was visibly sweating, even with the magic of the camera. "Anderson, thank you for having me on tonight. The fact remains that the ASC is the first line of defense against monsters from our worst nightmares. Frankly, you and I should give thanks every day that we don't have to worry about our loved ones slaughtered by freaks in brazen attacks. The peace of mind we take for granted is all due to the brave men and women of the ASC who constantly put their lives on the line to keep us safe."

"Senator," Anderson said coolly, "the Cleveland video shows three of those so-called brave men and women gunning down bystanders, including children, without provocation, warning, or sufficient justification offered by the ASC. How can you condone that?"

The senator tried to force an ingratiating smile. It made him look ill. "I don't condone. Those individuals clearly committed a horrific act of violence outside the bounds of ASC operating protocol. However, we can't dismiss a vital organization's decades of public service to our defense because of the actions of a few bad apples."

"Yet new accounts are coming in daily that suggest this sort of reckless violence is closer to standard practice. What do you say to that, Senator?"

"Chickenshit bastard," Dean growled, as the Senator fumbled through his reply, clearly searching for a balance between defending the ASC and covering his own ass. "How the fuck can he sit there and defend them when the proof is right in front of his goddamn face?"

"He's being blackmailed," Sam said, with offhand but complete certainty.

Dean looked at Sam, who had turned his head to watch attentively, his face showing nothing but professional, almost clinical interest. His french fries and half a sandwich lay forgotten on his plate.

"What?" Dean asked, unsure what he'd missed.

Sam tipped his chin toward the senator on TV. "He's being blackmailed. Other supporters, other…" he swallowed, "...individuals might not be, but he is."

As Dean took that in, Sam looked away, out the window, and took a slow, deliberate breath. Then he picked up his sandwich and took a bite before returning his attention to the interview.

"Now is not the time to weaken America's defenses against the supernatural threat!" the senator declared, forehead glistening beneath the hot studio lights. "That is exactly what these freaks are waiting for."

Dean decided that he didn't have it in him to ask how Sam knew about the blackmail. "You gonna eat your fries?"

Sam gave him a relieved look that Dean didn't like at all. "No," he said, pushing them over. "Not really hungry right now."

Sam had felt a strange dissociation the first time he saw the ASC massacre.

He couldn't feel shocked by the bloody horror of the footage (the psychic's death was cleaner and shorter than anything she would have received in FREACS). What gripped him instead were the reactions. Sam felt compelled to listen to each defense made of the ASC, and then—to his real shock—those who dared to challenge them.

Sam still found it hard to believe that civilians would have complex opinions about what hunters did in America's backyards. More astounding yet was the growing number of people who watched the video and saw not a group of hunters making a regrettable mistake in the pursuit of their difficult but honorable job, but something appalling and outrageous.

There were protesters. Entire families showing up on the streets, willing to go public on their stance against the ASC. All for the death of a freak and her family.

Sam did not have a family, not in any meaningful sense of the word, before his life in Freak Camp. He'd always been rock certain of that, even all those years ago when Dean had offered to help him find them.

He hadn't told Dean this, but Sam was pretty damn certain that if they ever dug up his biological family, or whoever it was that raised him before he was brought to Freak Camp, they would simultaneously find the one responsible for making the call to the ASC. Any "family reunion" with the people who had first seen a monster in him would be short and end bloody, knowing Dean. Sam had zero interest in testing that theory.

Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it had not gone down that way for many families, Sam had no curiosity about who had raised him, no yearning for parents who were likely long gone or had forgotten him. He had read hundreds of books with teary reunions of long-lost relatives. But, as Dean had told him early on when Sam asked if that was how families really worked: that was just a Lifetime movie, not reality.

It still stirred something inside him, something deep and nameless, to see how many people were coming forward now, spilling out their suffering and grief and anger toward the ASC.

A deep-set terror still rattled his bones some days. He had nightmares about how quickly the same strangers who smiled at him would turn on him with revulsion and horror, eager to end him with anything they had at hand, if they knew the truth.

Some of them still would, certainly. But perhaps not all of them.

"It's a tragedy," Sam said one day, in the middle of yet another news analysis of the political repercussions to the ASC massacre.

"Fucking tragedy," Dean muttered. "More like a horror show. Come on, let's watch something else."

Sam could have said many things to that. Mentioned that he was talking more to himself than Dean. That this was what still astonished him, day after day: people everywhere were treating a freak's death as a tragedy. But in the end, he looked at the dark circles around Dean's eyes and the tension in his jaw, and he saw the appeal in taking a break from it all.

"I have a better idea." Sam shut off the TV. Moving over to the bed, he cupped Dean's chin and kissed him. Tasting Dean's mouth, feeling him open and relax into the kiss, felt good, sweet, and real in a way the endless media coverage had not for days.

Dean liked that idea, too.

Later, wrapped in Dean's arms, Sam thought about Dean: the comforting weight of him. Who he was. He seemed to be taking this harder than Sam. The public debate about ASC brutality was making him jumpy around strangers, more watchful than usual. Reaching for the bottle more often.

Maybe they needed a break. Somewhere remote, without a TV. Sam would leave his laptop in the Impala, and it would just be them, Sam and Dean, for a while.

But before Sam could make the suggestion, a job with another vengeful spirit popped up on the outskirts of Chicago, and Sam did not have to give up his addiction to the news coverage just yet.

They were having dinner at a pub in the Windy City when the ASC finally held a press conference to address the unrest, which had risen to yet another unprecedented height of violence that week. Windows had been smashed at several ASC offices, and a Molotov cocktail had nearly burned down the ASC state headquarters in Florida. The arsonists had been caught and faced life sentences for domestic terrorism, but protesters were marching around the clock outside the jail.

The ASC spokeswoman, with shadows under her eyes that even her makeup couldn't totally conceal, took the podium, her smile tight.

"She'd almost be cute," Dean muttered to Sam. "If she wasn't a fucking Campbell."

Sam grimaced at him. "Doesn't that make her your cousin?"

"Like I said: if she wasn't a Campbell."

The news anchor interrupted them, refocusing Sam's attention. "Alice Campbell will be testifying in Congress this week to urge Representatives not to cut funding for the agency. We go now live to the press conference in D.C."

Alice Campbell's defense to reporters was nothing that Sam hadn't heard before. FREACS was the most essential institution for national security. It was unfathomable to consider releasing the monsters inside to wreak havoc on untold civilian lives. The very notion disgraced the memory of Nancy Reagan.

But because she was a Campbell, Alice could play another card.

"I know my aunt Mary Campbell would be appalled by the current situation," she said, voice icy with perfectly modulated outrage. "After all she sacrificed her life for—in the hope of an America where monsters have been wholly eradicated—she would be at the forefront now, demanding that the ASC stand up for the ideals it was founded on. The incident in Cleveland was a tragedy that should not be repeated, but there are greater horrors… greater horrors that the ASC faces every day."

Sam watched her, the face of the ASC in this moment, and marveled that she had even slightly acknowledged that the hunters who had mowed down that family might be wrong.

Dean grimaced at the sound of his mother's name and downed his beer.

Sam laid his hand subtly on Dean's back and called down the bar, "Hey Joe?" Just a few days in town, looking for their ghost, and they were already on a first-name basis with both the regular bartenders at the pub. "Could you put on ESPN?"

"Sure thing, Saul."

Neither he nor Dean cared about the teams playing, but they were unlikely to bring up the ASC press conference.

In the checkout line at a grocery store for a supply run, Sam saw the TIME cover in the magazine rack. Bold letters declared "Why FREACS Should Be Closed" before a photo of colossal iron doors set in unmarked concrete walls with coils of wire lining the top like a crown.

Sam picked it up and added it to their pile. Dean took it in with a glance, then looked away.

After Sam had been reading and re-reading the essays in the magazine for about a week, Dean finally said something.

"Doesn't that bother you?" he demanded, gesturing with his plastic fork at the issue where it lay on the motel table between them.

Sam frowned at him, puzzled. "What about it?"

Dean glared down at the magazine. "Staring at the doors of that hellhole."

Sam looked at the cover, then up at Dean. "Is that what it is?" As Dean stared at him incredulously, Sam began to laugh. "I only stood outside Freak Camp once, Dean, and I didn't look back."