Chapter title is from song by Billy Squier.

8

Too Daze Gone – Billy Squier

The motel carpet was olive green mixed with a shady puke yellow, and Dean stayed away from those spots, because—well, you never really knew. The TV was new, at least, and free cable was always a good thing when all he could do was stay in the room and stew.

Sam was tapping away on his laptop at the rickety round table by the window, still dressed in his Fed suit, when suddenly he shuddered.

"What have you got?" He clicked the TV off. Back in the old days, he would've gone with Sam to the hospital for the scoop, but the three-inch iron cuff on his wrist was a bit hard to explain. He shook it surreptitiously by his side to settle it down.

Sam turned the screen of the laptop towards him.

"Brain scans of the victims." Sam declared. "This is why I don't want to eat beef."

The brain scans on the screen looked like gray Swiss cheese. Very holey Swiss cheese. Sam had a few hang-ups besides clowns. That year in the '90s when he went off burgers was a royal pain in the ass. He'd read about mad cow disease and for the whole next year, refused to eat any real food on the basis that some bug would eat his big brain.

"Thing is, mad cow disease normally takes years to develop. These victims went from normal to this in days." There was real horror in Sam's voice. He gave the remains of their take-out meal the side-eye.

"I thought you said they couldn't find anything the victims had in common, foodwise."

"Yeah. That's the weird thing. One of the vics was a vegetarian."

Dean didn't really have to say anything. He'd suffered a whole year of frikkin' chicken chili for Sam's paranoia, and righteousness was sweet.

Sam glowered at him.

Something dusty from the past tugged at his memory.

"You got Dad's journal?"

Sam looked up in surprise. "Yeah, here."

He crossed the room to the table, keeping his cuffed arm behind him. Turning pages with his left hand was awkward. He sat down, looking at the familiar pages crowded with Dad's tiny scrawl. His hand stayed on an upturned page for a moment as memories flooded back of all the nights he'd watched John scribble his notes, brow furrowed in concentration and bent over a motel room table like this one. He felt Sam looking thoughtfully at the top of his head. Before Sam could say anything mope-y, he thumbed quickly through to the entry he remembered, and turned the journal back around towards Sam so Sam could read the entry for himself.

"Here. North Carolina, 1997. An outbreak of what was thought to be mad cow disease, but Dad didn't agree. He thought it was an Aunt Nancy."

Sam blanched and looked up. "People were eating Aunt Nancy?"

"No, dumbass. It wasn't the food. Aunt Nancy, or Anansi—here," He tapped on the block print image of a human sized spider clipped out of an old text and pasted onto the page, "—it's thought to be a spider or spider like creature that steals wisdom. Sounds brain-sucky to me."

"Wait. I thought I saw something at the edge of town." Sam's fingers flew over the keyboard. "Here. Aunt Nancy's Hair Salon."

"Oh, c'mon. That's way too easy. What kind of monster names a business after themselves?"

"It's worth checking out, isn't it?"

Hunting took them a bunch of places they wouldn't normally have gone, but Aunt Nancy's Hair Salon had to be in a category all its own. The place was…pink. Dean had "dated" enough to know that pink was a thing, and sometimes bedrooms were surprising places, décor-wise, but by then he usually had his mind on other things. Aunt Nancy took pink to new extremes. Kindly put, it looked like a bottle of Pepto had exploded, right down over the "Monthly Special" promo to dye your hair a neon shade of it. Bubble gum pink vinyl chairs lined both sides of the room, leading to a back room where a row of helmet-styled hair dryers sat over more pink chairs like a line of Barbie torture instruments. Dean ran one hand over his hair protectively, looking at the various Strawberry Shortcake dos depicted on the walls. He had to wonder, if this was the Anansi's lair, whether people got their hair done here before or after they got their brains Swiss-cheesed.

"Dean!" Sam's urgent whisper came from the back room. Sam was standing next to the row of hairdryers and peering up into one of the funky helmets.

Speaking of things that looked brain sucky…

A small electrical zap hit Sam on the nose.

Sam jerked up, bumping his head in the process. "Ow. What was that?"

Dean crossed the room and pulled Sam back. "Lemme see."

Leaning in, he peered up into the hairdryer just as Sam had done. Nothing sparked, and nothing seemed out of place. He tapped on the metal portion of the dome.

A flurry of scratching noises that sounded like little feet scampering came from inside the unit. He rocked the conical helmet slightly, frowning as the scratching grew more frantic.

"You hear that?"

Sam shook his head.

He tapped on the metal once more. The noise came again, scuttling away from where his finger was hitting the metal.

He gestured to Sam to go look for a tool so he could pry open the cover. He heard Sam rummaging around, then Sam put a nail file in his hand.

"Really?"

Sam shrugged helplessly. "When in Rome."

The cover came off with a pop. It was looser than he had thought it was going to be. As he lifted one corner, the scratching noises increased, this time moving towards the thin slit where he had cracked it open.

"Watch out!"

His warning was a second too late. A flood of teeny tiny spiders spilled out of the crack, streaming out of the dryer towards Sam, crawling up Sam's legs and towards Sam's head. Sam tried batting them off, but there were too many of them, and more kept coming out.

Dean jammed the cover back on the hairdryer to stop the flow, but it was like a cork had been popped. More spiders kept flooding out of the hair dryer, a veritable river of tiny black bodies with tiny hairy legs, dropping like paratroopers from the dryer's plastic rim onto the spider encrusted ground.

"Dean!"

He turned towards Sam's hoarse yell. The little buggers were swarming up Sam's neck, and when they settled on his head, tiny sparks came shooting out of their mouths onto his scalp. Sam went down to his knees, hands flailing in vain at the creatures crawling up his arms. His eyes looked glazed.

Dean dropped the dryer in his hands. He was by Sam's side in two steps, brushing the spiders off Sam's head with quick, efficient strokes. He gave Sam a shake.

"Sammy!"

Sam blinked like he was waking up.

"Dean?"

The flood of spiders kept coming, making a beeline for Sam's brainiac brain.

"There's too many!" He shouted. He gave Sam's shirt a final swipe. "You get out of here."

"What? No! I'm not leaving you alone in here."

Just then, Sam's eyes widened, staring at something behind him. Dean turned around to look.

The thing he had thought was some kind of funky hair artwork hanging from the ceiling started to unfold into hairy arms. Six hairy arms. The string attaching it to the ceiling started to lengthen as the giant hairy mass lowered itself to the floor. As it descended, two hairy legs uncurled and touched down on the ground, revealing a round body clad in a bright pink muumuu as the human-spider creature unwound itself to face them. White hair like spider silk was combed back from a smooth, ageless face, and the eyes set into that face were beady and black. Aunt Nancy beamed at them, a little drip of venom slipping down her fangs, eyeing Sam's gonzo brain with a leer.

Dean stepped between them.

"Sam, GO!"

Sam's face set stubbornly even as he frantically brushed the sparking, brain sucking spiders off his shoulders and out of his hair. Dammit. He couldn't watch out for Sam and fight Spider-woman at the same time. He grasped Sam by the lapels, hefted all six foot four of him easily and shook hard, dropping all the little spiders off into the crawling puddle swirling around them. He headed towards the door, calculated a trajectory and physically tossed Sam out. It was for Sam's own good.

He turned back towards Aunt Nancy. The little spiders went streaming to the corners of the room, searching for the exit. There were too many and Sam was still only a few feet outside.

Aunt Nancy chittered and made a motion towards the door. A stream of black dots flowed in that direction. Dean stomped furiously, but they eddied around his feet. A spitting noise that sounded like laughter came from the spider-woman's throat.

"We are legion. You cannot win."

Dean stopped. He turned slowly to face her.

"Oh yeah?"

He could see now. There were thousands of them, seething in the crawlspace above the ceilings, teeming in the space between the walls, skittering down the conduits along the electrical wires. Tiny little teeth and furry little legs, each one a nascent form of the larger one that faced him. He needed to get them all.

He didn't hear the clang of iron as his cuff fell to the floor. His smile was ice as Aunt Nancy stepped back with sudden realization, hissing violently at him in a panic and making screeching noises at her offspring. The spider stream heading to the door turned back, and made an ever-growing lake as they surrounded him. More spiders poured from the walls, crunching underneath his feet as he advanced.

He didn't have to think about what he needed to do. The hilt of the First Blade fit perfectly in his grip as he grabbed Aunt Nancy by one of her six hands and struck.

He should have been used to this by now, getting tossed through things by creatures with super strength, except this time, the 'creature' was Dean. It wasn't as if Dean was careful about it either, because he landed on his ass in a sea of shattered windows, sharp jagged edges poking through his jeans and his jacket. Sam moved gingerly, trying to avoid the larger pieces, rolling his sleeves down to protect his hand as he cautiously sat up.

The air felt funny. He took a deep whiff, trying to clear the grogginess out of his brain. There was the chemical and perfume smell that was the hair salon, but there was something laying over it—a prickle in his nose, uneasy, like charged air preceding a thunderstorm. He could feel his hair trying to stand on end, and he was turning around to see if they were near any high voltage power lines, when a blast of air and blinding light blew out the remaining glass storefront of Aunt Nancy's salon and knocked him flat on his back.

In a panic he rolled to protect his face then pushed himself off the ground, cutting his hands again. He scrambled to his feet, dusting off the worst of the glass carelessly against his jeans before he yanked the .38 out from behind him. His heart lodged in his throat as he faced the shattered storefront, now nothing but a ruin of warped metal frames. He squinted, trying to see into the gray darkness erratically illuminated by the dying flashes of the store's neon "Closed" sign.

Cautiously he edged towards the door.

"DEAN!" He hissed.

There was no answer.

He pushed what was left of the door open with his shoulder and stepped inside. His foot sank down through a layer of something yielding; like sand, only larger, and weirdly crunchy. He looked down, and abruptly yanked his foot up in revulsion. He froze there awkwardly one-footed, like a demented lawn flamingo, while his eyes translated the dark fuzziness on the ground into what it was: a carpet of dead spiders, thousands of them, tiny legs stiff and upturned in the air. He gulped as he looked down the room, filled end to end with petrified death, here and there thick with mounds where the spiders had sheeted off the ceiling. Far down towards the rear of the salon, back where Aunt Nancy had descended, stood Dean, ankle deep in dead arachnids, the First Blade gleaming wetly with blood in his right hand.

Sam held his breath.

Dean looked slowly towards him.

Dark eyes. The demon.

In front of the demon was a collapsed mass of severed hairy limbs. The torso had fallen a few feet away, one leg attached, as if with its final limb the creature was still trying to flee.

Sam huffed. He tried not to, he did. Dad always told him he breathed too loud. He needed to let the air out quietly, like Dean.

Control, Sammy. You can't let your emotions get the better of you in a hunt. You have to have control.

He huffed.

The demon's black eyes looked over him, looked into him, past the surface of his skin, burrowing deep and seeing something, something that made the First Blade quiver in Dean's grip.

Sam held his breath.

The demon focused on his nose.

They stood there, facing each other for an eternity. With a gasp, and because he was starting to see stars, Sam gave in and gulped air. The demon gasped with him, the rasping of air strangely abrasive in the silence.

What the hell?

Was it mocking him?

He let out his breath slowly, trying desperately for control.

The demon copied him.

Inhale. Exhale. Huff.

Night dark eyes continued to track the rise and fall of his chest with an eerie focus. With a start, Sam realized it was Dean. Dean, trying desperately to remember a human function the demon had no need of.

Sam let the air out of his lungs slowly, one long exhale, allowing the tension to ease out of his shoulders and carefully holstering the gun behind him. He breathed in, slowly and deeply like a yoga breath, ignoring the acrid smell of chemicals that burned down his airways. Dean copied him, breath for breath, watching him like he was a lifeline, until at last with a tremor Dean released the bloodied jawbone clutched tight in his hand, letting it fall with a muted clatter into the mass of carcasses around his feet, scattering the small black bodies in all directions.

As if everything had been taken out of him, Dean dropped down to his knees.

"Dean!"

Heedless of the gross crunching beneath his boots, Sam crossed the room and grabbed Dean by one arm, trying to steady him before Dean toppled over into the dead spider carpet, and flinched back in shock. Dean's skin was icy cold to the touch, dead, dead, dead man's skin under his palm, and Sam grit his teeth against his natural reaction, kept his hand and his stomach in their respective places, and knelt down, steadying Dean's weight against him. Dean started to shake, trembling from the cold, his teeth chattering hard enough to hear.

Sam slipped one arm around Dean's shivering shoulders.

"Hey. Hey. Hey. I got you. I've got you."

Dean's hand came up and gripped his arm tightly. He could hear Dean swallowing and swallowing, trying to keep down nausea. He grasped Dean more securely, trying to temper Dean's more violent shivers. Slowly, too slowly, tepid warmth returned to Dean's skin—as if by Dean's will—and he wasn't going to think about what all that meant. Not right now. The knees of his jeans were getting clammy, kneeling in squashed bug juice, and he really wanted to cough out the accumulated hairspray itching in his lungs, but he just stayed where he was and kept breathing, slowly and evenly, one arm wrapped firmly around his brother.

Finally the shakes stopped. Dean lifted his head, pulled away slightly and awkwardly cleared his throat.

"Sammy?"

"Yeah?"

"This is still no excuse not to get a haircut."

Startled, Sam huffed out a laugh.

"Sam?"

"Yeah?"

"Let's go home?"

"Yeah."

Dean eyed the cereal Sam clanked down in front of him dubiously, but obediently reached for the milk. As his sleeve pulled back, Sam saw the red welt around Dean's wrist, bits of peeling skin dotted with a myriad of pinprick scabs, painful like the worst sunburn topped off with road rash. He snagged Dean's arm, clamping down tight when Dean tried to pull away. It took him another half second to process the fact that the binding cuff was gone.

"Dean, what's that?" he asked more sharply than he intended.

"It's nothing." Dean kept trying to pull his arm back, but he winced as the motion rubbed the soft fabric of his sleeve along his injured wrist.

"Is that from the cuff?"

"It fell off."

"I don't care about the cuff." He pulled on Dean's sleeve, hissing sharply when he saw that the rest of Dean's wrist was just as bad everywhere the iron had rested against skin. "Why didn't you say something?"

"I." Dean started, then stopped. "It wasn't that bad."

He leveled Dean with a stare.

Dean's expression tightened. "It helped."

"The cuff? Dean, we had cuffs on Crowley the whole time—it never did that to him."

Dean scowled. "Maybe he fixed himself somehow. Maybe he's got extra mojo. How would I know?"

Sam narrowed his eyes at him. "Crowley was never able to get the cuffs off, either."

Dean's attention snapped to him. "Huh."

Not easily distracted, Sam went back to what he wanted to know. "How does the cuff help, Dean?"

Dean looked away, and focused on the rack of pans five feet behind his head. He could see Dean parsing language in his head, trying to see if he was going to be able to get around their 'no secrets' agreement.

"It helps keep the Mark in check." He finally supplied.

"The urge to kill?"

Dean gave a brief nod, turning his head a fraction more away. There was something about the way Dean was cautiously not looking at him. He flashed back to the night before, when the demon had stared directly at him, rummaging in his soul with those infinitely dark eyes, and the faint quiver in its arm.

"Me." He breathed out the word in a low rush. "It wants to kill me. That's why you kept the cuff on."

The chair clanked back as Dean stood up abruptly, pulling his arm out of his grasp. "Not just you, Sam."

"Then, what?"

"Everything. Everyone. All the gray things." The last words came out in a harsh whisper unlike Dean's normal speaking voice, a hiss of sound stringing the words together so alien Sam jumped back, hand going to the .38 automatically.

"Dean?"

He couldn't see Dean's eyes. Dean kept them directed at the floor. Dean's hands twitched at his sides.

Sam slipped a finger slipped over the trigger.

It was a long sixty seconds before Dean bent down, flipped the chair upright, and sat himself back down. With exact motions, he pulled the bowl of corn flakes towards himself, then reached for the milk again. He poured in two splashes, recapped the milk with excruciating focus, and picked up his spoon.

Sam let his hand fall away from the gun. He mirrored Dean's motions, filling his own cereal bowl halfway. He kept his eyes on the bowl, mechanically spooning tasteless food into his mouth. His hand trembled faintly as Dean's raw wrist came into his field of view, and he had to blink hard to get himself to swallow.