Chapter Six
Sweet verses that are no more still hang in the catacombs with the ghosts of lives once lived,
The shock of what Sam had just said purged all anger from Dean's system, turned the motel room to what it was on the other side of his black tinted lenses: just a normal, clean room with a few annoying problems. In his rage, as most of us do, Dean had blown the room's faults far out of proportion.
"That goes against everything, Sammy. We don't whack innocent people, that's not in our job description."
Sam was back to hunting for information on his computer, doing anything in his power not to face his brother. "We don't have a choice. This thing is killing people, has been since Trude was seven and maybe even before, and I don't see any sign of it stopping, do you? It went after your car, Dean, imagine what would have happened if we'd been in it."
The Winchester ghost busting team didn't kill people, innocent or guilty, and that was it. Blinded by this cold-hard fact, one written in blood since the moment the Winchester boys had started hunting all those years ago, Dean tried to talk Sam out of it. "How do you know it was this Johnny spirit? That was an old tree, the limb looked dead, how do you know it didn't just reach its time to snap off?"
"It made contact with you again, Dean. The first time Herb died, the second this demon dropped part of a tree on your car, what's going to happen the third time, the fourth? Do you know how many people have died, how many articles there are floating around the Internet about the killings? Minus Jo and Trude herself, her entire family is dead. Murdered right in front of her eyes by the demon's own hands, by his fingernails digging into them and gutting them like fish. She's a suspect, Dean, there are groups absolutely convinced Trude's doing this herself and they want her strapped down to a table and injected with death."
Sam finally looked up, but at the window behind Dean's left ear and not directly at him.
"We don't have any other option," he stated painfully. "I wish we did, I honestly do, but I don't see another one. There are only two doors here: either walk away and let this thing continue on its way or do something about it, stop it."
"But if there are people lobbying for her arrest, for a death sentence, she's going to die anyway – see you later, Johnny," Dean said with a motion of his hand, but nodded solemnly. "I know, I know: dignity. But… come on, Sammy, we can't do something like this. I won't do it! Kill one person so that this demon gets sent back to Hell, so that one other person can live. I don't see how that's worth it."
Sam let out such a deep sigh it shook his very foundation. "What do you propose we do, then? Drive off in your stupid Impala–"
Fire erupted from Dean's eyes, but Sam didn't even think about apologizing.
"–and let this demon kill Jo? What's going to happen after that, do you know? It might go after the whole town, the entire county and when it's done with that the rest of the state! There are so many other lives at risk with not doing anything, Dean, so many more including what might be the worst of all of them: the demon going after Trude when she reaches an expendable point. We can't sit back and do nothing. Dad wouldn't want us to drive off and put this problem behind us."
"Dad wouldn't want us to kill an innocent woman! God, Sammy, you of all people should know that. Say you were having premonitions of Jessica's death or kept seeing eerie little hints, would you have smothered her in her sleep weeks before she was set to light up like a fucking candle, when you weren't even positive it would happen like that? Would Dad have done that with Mom if he didn't know for sure it was written in stone that would happen to her?" Dean's face was red with passion. "I don't care what this fucking thing does, let it come after me for all I care, but we're not killing an innocent person. Do you understand me, Samuel? Do it yourself, poison her from ten states away, but I'm not having a single thing to do with this!"
Sam was off his bed by now – which was lumpy, but not nearly so much as Dean thought in his earlier prickled state – and erected himself to his full height. "Of course Dad would have done that for Mom, of course I would have done that for Jessica! If you loved anyone at all, Dean, if you had even a scrap of heart in your body you would have done it too!"
And then Dean, for being such a self-absorbed overly-confident blonde, said the cruelest thing he could ever have mustered. "And if it wasn't inked down in God's golden book that Jessica was suppose to die like that? You would have killed her for nothing, Sam. Absolutely nothing."
"But I could have saved her," that's what Sam really wanted to scream at the top of his lungs, but he knew that Dean would never understand. Their father, Sam knew, would have said the same thing, but because Dean had never loved someone like Dad had, like Sam had, it was a nothing thing to say. So, as siblings often do to save the smallest morsel of pride, Sam shot that insult. "You'll never understand, Dean. You can talk until you're blue in the face, but you can never understand what it's like to love someone like that, to say without the slightest bit of hesitation that you'd become the next Atlas if it meant saving the person you love from that kind of pain, from having to feel pain like that for a second time if you were given the chance."
Somewhere in the fabric of time, of space, and the construction of the debate it had become far more than that. It was like being a kid all over again, having fights with Sam and then all of a sudden realizing what the fight was really about, what made up its core. It had always been about Dean, about how he had never been just quite human, how someone had been asleep on the assembly line in the factory and in the end he was constructed with one horribly important piece missing, and that piece was humility.
Dean wasn't quite empathetic enough when Sam had been kicked from the baseball team, hadn't been supportive enough when he was stood up on his very first prom night, and so many other things that in reality Dean had more than anything wanted to be, but he just couldn't. He had had to grow up way too fast, had flown by too many Growing Up Check Points, Sign In Here For Lesson Testing spots that it simply couldn't happen. And now came the hardest blow of all, the punch that Dean had been waiting the whole of his life for but never anticipated it coming to him here, in a small town in southeastern Ohio while arguing about killing Trude McFarland.
"All right," Dean started, speaking so loudly the vibrations in his throat weren't only more pronounced than usual but stung like nothing else before it. "I get it and you've won. I'm the blasted Tin Man and I'm never going to be getting my heart – I'll be like so many of those crazy Red and White Sox fans and have to wait until after I've died to finally get that medal. I'm not a human being, I'm not living, but taking up space and wasting more soundly constructed people's air. I'm not good enough to be like you! Are you happy now? I said it, but that's not going to change the fact that I will not, cannot, off another human being who doesn't deserve it! Christ, Sammy, she has her whole life ahead of her and I'm not going to take that away from her and piss on it."
Sam picked up his laptop, tossed it to Dean and would have thanked his lucky stars for his brother being a good catch if he had not something more important to say. "Look at my notes, Dean, just look at them. More than one a year, some of them aren't even her blood relatives but her friends, the boys she was sweet on. Have you stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, she doesn't want to have her whole life ahead of her, after all she's had to see? I don't think she has a heart left, it's been broken so many times."
"That's so far beside the point the point is a filthy dot, not even."
"Is it?" Sam asked calmly.
Dean set the computer on his bed, sat down next to it and rubbed his temples with his elbows on his knees. "Can there be any other way? Can't she say some Hocus Pocus chant, dance around, and make it go away herself so that she doesn't have to die for Johnny to be vanquished?"
"That might not work."
"How do you know? How can you be so goddamn sure that the only way to take care of this is to kill her? There's a loophole somewhere, there's always a loophole, the trick is looking hard enough to find it."
Sam lowered himself back to the second bed with another structure rattling sigh. "I'm not sure. I'm not sure at all about this and that scares me beyond reason, but that ripcord could be like nothing we've ever seen before. It could be wound from the very fibers from Satan's robes and if that's the case the only way to be rid of Johnny, the only way to save Jo and Trude from a death akin to their parents' is to give Trude something quick, painless. We say what we need to say, spread what we need to spread, and put a little faith into it. We have to hope that once one end of the ripcord is destroyed the demon has but one way to go and with the things we'll read it can't ever come back. If it's been assigned to Trude since her birth, if she's its only lifeline, we have to sever it."
Pretending that Sam was wrong wasn't helping the situation and, though Dean was still deeply against taking the life of an innocent woman, he buried his face in his hands and said, "I wish there was a way to cut the cord without kicking her out of line and ripping up her concert tickets."
"So do I, but–"
The phone rang, giving both the boys a dreadful start; it was as if neither of them had ever heard a telephone ring before.
Dean was the one closest to the desk and, trying to laugh at himself for being so jumpy, walked over to the slanting piece of furniture and lifted the phone's receiver. "Hello, you've reached the Bates Motel, room number five. This is Norman speaking. Would you like a complimentary visit with mother?"
"Yes, you're by far the strangest grief counselor I've ever known," Trude replied, her tone flat and misguided.
Waving franticly at his brother to come to the phone and listen, Dean began to ooze subtle charm through the phone – it was an unconscious habit, did it with almost every woman he talked to over the phone. "I was the most handsome kid in my year, I can't help it if I'm hip."
"You must've gone to a very small school," Trude quipped stately. "Like me. I was the Valedictorian and there were only two of us, the other student having had been dropped on his head one too many times as a newborn."
Sam actually snickered, but that was before he was elbowed in the ribs by Dean. "I would've been beaten out by Jimmy Scrouse, but he was wearing a paper bag over his head that day: his hound bit off his nose, confused it for a hot dog."
Trude sputtered and coughed a few times, set something down in the background that sounded like a glass of something or other. "She's doing fine, Dean. Really beaten up, but apart from a damaged radiator, a scratched fender, and some other moderate repairs I think she'll make it through the night."
"Oh, thank God. I honestly don't know if I would've slept tonight if I hadn't heard that," Dean rushed out with a sigh of relief.
"She was lucky…." The line started to crackle and an equally spotty EVP jump out of the ear piece at them like a lion pouncing on a field mouse.
"She's… forever… always and… forever mine… will die… stay away."
Dean, wanting to slam the phone down with a "Can do, partner", pressed himself against Sam with the frightful idea that another connection was looming behind him about to smell the scent of his shampoo.
"Trude," Sam took over the phone. "Trude, we lost you there for a minute."
She had heard it, had picked up every word clear as a bell. "Who the hell are you guys? Why do you have all of those things in the Impala's trunk and…. Shit."
"Trude!" Dean yanked the phone from his brother's hands, dropped and fumbled with it for a second when it twirled out of his hands, and then pressed it to his ear. "Trude?"
"I'm very fond of my name, I'd appreciate you not wearing it out. Who the hell are you, Dean? If that's even your real name."
Dean nodded, but then realized that this phone wasn't one of those fancy video phones the trend followers in sci-fi movies use. "It's really my name and so is Sam's. Try not to freak out or anything, but… well, we're trying to help you, Trude. We're trying to help you and Jo."
"Help? You call making a very pissed off geist threaten to turn my sister inside out help?"
"He did what?" Sam asked, tugging the phone back between he and Dean. "Johnny did what, Trude?"
She paused, like she was about to ask where and when they had found out his name, but better judgment stacked against that act. "If you want to help, you'll stay away from Jo and I. Very far away. Don't worry about the car, I'll have someone drop it off for you when she's ready."
The connection was cut not by a mad demon, but by Trude herself. The dial tone droned in the brothers' ears as they stood there by the slanting desk wondering what they had just gotten themselves into because, as everyone knows, when someone tells one not to get into something one dives into that forbidden something with a running start and an elegant cannonball.