A heart once given to thee has grown brittle beside thine corpse; without thee life is not worth living,
It was ten years, it seemed to Sam, before Dean struggled to his feet, apparently meaning to wave the now useless shotgun around like a club. He was bias, like he had been when the shape-shifter slammed his shoulder against a sewer pipe, and that sent a wave of panic crashing down upon Sam.
Tossing his brother the gun he had been holding, Sam spun around on his heel and crouched down before Trude, making it a point to hear every last swish and rub of leather jacket movement that came from Dean's general direction – and it didn't sound so good; he was making panting noises as he tried to steady himself and move around, the kind of panting sounds formed from painful groans escaping through clenched teeth.
"Trude, you need to get up," Sam told her, shouting over the demon's inane gibberish. "He wants you to be afraid and you're letting him win, you're giving him what he wants. Do you really want that, Trude, to let that whack job win?"
The woman deserved an Oscar for her potato bug performance, she really did.
Sam looked to his brother – at Dean, desperate to not show the pain he was in, confront Satan incarnate again – and then put his attention back on Trude, grabbing both her forearms with each hand. "I know you're scared," he sympathized. "I know you've been scared since you were small, but you need to look at me. C'mon, Trude, just look at me for once second."
Dean was only faintly aware of what little Sammy might have been up to, all he was focusing on what keeping the filthy sleaze uninterested in whatever was going on with his lifeline so that Sam could have a little time to make the smallest amount of progress possible. So he was throwing more insults, random tools, nuts and bolts, anything and everything to keep Johnny's back turned away from Soft Top's right rear tire.
"Christ, Trude, stop acting like a child! Cowering like this is what got your Uncle Monty killed and it's going to do the same thing to Dean and your sister if you don't look at me!" Those words and how he said them frightened Sam, but not nearly as much as the thought of facing a day without his brother beside him. That page was bleak and it wasn't going to become a reality if he could help it.
To Dean his world was now comprised of Johnny and nothing more, nothing less. Those specter's eyes were the very gateway to the underworld, of that he was more than convinced. They bored through his flesh, right down to his soul and it hurt, physically hurt, like nothing he could ever describe. Johnny stopped his speaking in tongues to laugh – a booming, echoing thing that frosted Dean's heart.
"'God'," the geist began in a horrific mocking tone. "'God, You give my brother a life, friends and a woman to love him'–" demon made an obscene gesture with his hand and section of anatomy Dean had not ever thought of doing before, during, or after his childish tantrum "–'but You leave me with nothing. Why can't I ever be happy like him, why won't You let me be whole like Sam?"
Dean sneered, fired the revolver at the paranormal being (which did nothing though it hit the specter dead center in the chest) and spat. "That's not what I meant by 'love', you disgusting asshole fuck."
Sam put being touched by his brother's wish to the back of his mind: currently he had bigger fish to fry. Trude still wasn't cooperating, though her hands were limp by her ears and the whole rest of her body seemed to have joined those hands into the land of looseness.
"Stand up to it, Trude. Stop being such a coward and stand up to it! Do it for your sister, Trude, give Jo a fighting chance."
Nothing.
"Is this it, Trude? You're just going to huddle here and hide behind your knees, wait for this moment to be over so you can breathe again? Is this how you show your love for your sister, Trude? Is this how you tell Jo you love her? I have news for you, darling, this isn't love. You don't love Jo and you never have, have you? You're failing her, Trude, your failing Jo and your parents, your Uncle Monty and everyone else you've let die. You uncle would be so disappointed in you if he knew you were pressed up against that tire like the stinking coward you are, Trude, he'd be so crushed to know you don't love your own sister, that you'd let Jo die while you hid in a dark corner. What would he say, Trude, when he learned the beloved neice he gave his Impala to would watch her own sister be filleted and do nothing to help her? He'd be sick, Trude, sick to his stomach to learn that."
Finally, some headway. Trude dropped her hands from her face, wrapped them around her legs and looked up at Sam. "You don't understand, there's nothing I can do. I've tried so many times, I've tried fighting back but nothing I ever do will stop him."
"I don't care," Sam said sharply. "Excuses aren't good enough and neither is giving up. If you loved your sister at all you would be trying to help her, trying to bring Johnny down and not sitting there like a bump on a log."
"Don't you think I've run down the list already? Nothing helps, nothing. I don't know what you have in your mind for me to do, but chances are I've already done it and as you can see it hasn't done any good."
Sam was yelling, only because he was in hysterics and had no sense of consciousness about what he was doing. "That's my brother over there, Trude! You've got to try again, a million times if you have to, until you can't do it anymore, but you've got to do something!"
"He isn't your normal ghost, Sam. He's not anything like whatever you and Dean have taken care of before," Trude expounded meekly. "The more I protest, the more I try to fight him, the stronger he gets."
"Then I guess the time of being selfish is over!"
Trude knew exactly what he meant by that and whatever progress had been made was rapidly washed back into the sea with the tide. "That was above the crease of my list," she hissed through the tremors wracking her voice, and quickly went back to being the human bug.
"Trude? Goddammit, Sammy, why couldn't you have let the grief counselor handle that one?" But the last string of words was brutally castrated.
What Sam had dreaded, what he had been silently praying against, began to happen solely to spite him. The yarn ball was unraveling and he couldn't run fast enough to stop it, couldn't throw anything in its path to make its rolling cease.
Dean had made a gruff choking gurgle he hadn't meant to have let happen, especially not in the middle of his sentence. When Sam turned around what was left of his soul seemed to fall to his feet in a loud tinkle-crash-banging mess about him – Johnny had one large hand wrapped tightly around his brother's throat, was lifting him off the ground. The guns met the concrete floor with equally distressing thuds.
Full-Blown Hysteria, population one: Samuel Winchester. He got to his feet, utterly forgetting about Trude and her resistance to fight, and ran over to his brother, his last link to sanity, to life. He fought with both hands to free Dean from the specter's grasp. It was pointless, the thing wasn't a solid being, but Sam was boiling over with desperation by now, and nothing seemed impossible.
It would also have been idiotic to think that Dean's windpipe wasn't being crushed, that if this demon slime didn't release its grip within the next five seconds – four, three – Dean would by some miracle not fall to the garage floor in a lifeless heap. But Sam thought it anyway, thought it with so much of his heart the muscle seemed to ache and burst at the seams. It was even more dunce-like to not run over to Black Beauty's trunk and grab up a handsful of weapons, but when one's sibling is being choked to an inch of their life rational thinking flies on the same path as the lovely Icarus.
Dean was thrashing his legs, twisting and turning and torquing his body – a rather stupid thing to do when he was being cut deathly short of oxygen – but he wanted to live. He might have been insanely jealous of his younger brother and might not have ever considered himself a whole human being, but by God he wanted to live.
The geist raised his free hand, waved his fingers and smiled (Sam had tears streaming down his face now, was making strained screaming sounds in his worthless efforts of freeing his brother while that brother was oddly thankful in the enveloping blackness to hear the demon sing, to learn the words of that damned song).
"Oh, Trude Trude Trude," the demon sang cheerfully like some diseased in the mind Jewish child at Hanukkah playing the game during which the Dreidel Song is sung, "come see what I have done. And if you hurry to get there, you'll have lots of fun."
It was going to happen. Sam was going to lose his brother too and then he'd have to kill himself, there was just no way he could survive in the world without Dean. He thought about sex too often, had been injected with an overdose of testosterone and arrogance at birth, but he was still Sam's brother and the knobby jointed geek loved him for that, for every last thing Dean had ever done whether good or bad or just plain stupid. It was going to happen, the evil geist with a bone to pick was going to gut Dean alive with his fingernails and that would be the end of that. Their father would understand, would simply nod his head and say, "Sammy just couldn't live an hour without his brother there, he just loved him too much" and throw a white rose onto his coffin.
And that image was so clear in Sam's head that even though he had thought he couldn't cry any more, hadn't even been aware of his own risse to begin with, found the tears breaking through the dam at a more steady pace. Dean wasn't suppose to die, not like this and not ever, he was suppose to grow old with Sam and have to suffer through his little brother's incessant whining to drive Black Beauty for all of eternity. It was suppose to happen like that or some equally comical old men badgering portrait, but not like this. Not at all like this.
A "No!" came floating through the air, a shrill note in the House of Horrors that Sam was confused about making because his voice couldn't go that high and he couldn't remember having opened his mouth to speak.
Johnny cackled, turned to face his beating heart, and inadvertently loosened his grip ever so slightly on Dean's neck though the many a-proclaimed heartthrob's eyes rolled to the back of his head with legs now passive. Sam was reduced to a series of blubbering "Oh, God"s.
"We've been through this many times, dear Trude," the demon pointed out casually. "Your little protests have helped no one before."
"Strangers! They're absolute strangers!"
Dean was dropped to the ground, crumpled on his side much like a forsaken rag doll, and his brother knelt beside him. It was probably a bad thing to shake a man who had so recently been choked, to yell his name and pat his cheeks and shake his head to and fro, but try telling that to Sam.
"They're meddling in our affairs, Trude," Johnny stated simply, "especially this once." His foot passed through Dean's hand, but not without bringing a gagged and ragged scream from the man – but to Sam a broken left hand meant a God sent sign of life. "Stop your crying and get to your place, love."
So much for being ghost hunters, neither were currently in a right state to whack a few goolies. Dean was lying half-dead on the floor with a now shattered left hand and Sam was bawling like a newborn over the half-dead part of the equation – because half-dead also meant half-alive and half-alive meant a life void of even more agonizing lonliness and despair.