There's a quick reference to the plotline of Morningstar in here. Also, I was having some serious issues with uploading my documents earlier (I couldn't, at all) but, now everything seems to be all right. I'm telling you this just in case it happens again. On with the angst!
Chapter Eleven ; This Silence Isn't Fooling Anyone
An airy, harmonic song drilled its way into Sam's head, cut and sawed and hacked deep into the reaches of his very being. Though its manner of travel might have been rocky and harsh, its texture certainly wasn't; the sound was much like silk. It was an angel's touch against his skin, cool and beckoning – a siren drawing a sailor to the depths of the sea.
Darting eyes brought Sam back to the Meyers photograph, to a mad doctor who was as he should have been: a grainy product of ink and carbon. He was no longer pelting out an ominous message of a brother's death, but an image of a stolen moment in time.
Having evidence that the song scenting the air with the smell of a lovely summer's day in a graveyard wasn't coming at all from Meyers, Sam rolled his eyes further back into his head and waded out into the water. Calm waves kissed his legs, whispering tales of a long lost love, a poor red rose once vibrant but now wilted and the brown of eternal sleep. It was so beautiful, the song, so full of sorrow… how Sam's heart was breaking! A mourning soul out in the water, there, aglow in the moonlight, forever to sing its despair laced woes – maybe it would finally find peace if he came to it, if two lost beings were found instead of just the one (leaving the other to wander for all of eternity in this ethereal hell).
An outreaching hand led to nothing, only starlight entwined itself around his fingers, but the fallen angel kept weaving its tapestry of pain. Tears might sting, but those words sliced Sam deeply. He knew that agony, knew it well, and as the weeping song continued to rise upward to the heavens he felt that wrenching loss anew. He felt it so greatly that surely his heart must burst, explode from the desperation black as the sea's darkest depths and in effect give greater light to the stars.
But no aching heart did break, merely joined in with the sad, sad song as Sam traveled farther into the water. He could see something out there, seemingly just out of his reach, and it was a thing of beauty. A soul with hair of gold, surely the fallen creature of heaven singing that song of misery, the tables turned and now reaching out to him.
Above him, as in response to the anguished melody, a brilliant fire erupted in the night sky. It pulsed and twisted and writhed to the lyrics, a long line of blue hues in search of the lost love for whom the song was wrote.
Stupefied at a pain felt so great, from the smallest rock to the highest peak, Sam took his hand in the other's. He looked into the other broken lover's pained face, saw in its eyes a ceaseless—
"Sammy!"
Something struck the side of his face, something disgustingly soft and moist and cool.
Lurching to the left, a series of shudders running up and down his spine, Samuel Winchester was thrust back into the waking world. Looking warily down at his right shoe, at a glob of brown papery stuff trying to eat the white and red leather like it thought itself The Blob, Sam instinctively clawed at the right side of his face – there was a poison on it, a cold poison carried by that Mound of Ick at his feet, being absorbed into his bloodstream to end it all for him within the next three nanoseconds.
On top of trying to squirt its venom into its prey, the Mound of Ick struck Sam's shin. It hurt like a bitch, making him twist around violently in his chair and kick both of his legs. Sam wasn't thinking anymore, simply reacting, and the look on his brother's face confused the hell out of him even more than living out the rest of his life brainlessly reacting to the world.
It wasn't a kind of patronizing amusement etched into Dean's features, the movie star sitting up rigidly in his chair on the other side of the table, but…. This was a new one. The fast moving Rolodex in Sam's head, the one filled to the brim with emotional flash cards (all pictures of the eldest Winchester brother's face, all different expressions, all with a different caption on the other side ranging from perturbed to horny), but without a much needed slab of colored, glossy cardboard. It was lost beneath the seat cushions, that card, to be hit on by dust bunnies and Gorilla Glued to a linty lollipop.
The flash card Sam needed, the one which would tell him – "Hey, your buddy's kind of blank over here" – and the one residing in its house of lost pocket change chose the finest time to go missing. But by process of elimination it was clear that Dead was…. No, he couldn't be. Something went seriously wrong with that equation somewhere.
Dean Winchester worried? Worried, to the point of hundreds of thousands of plowed corn fields across his forehead?
"Goddammit, Sammy, I've only been trying to get your attention for the past ten minutes! Were you having a brain embolism or something over there?"
Click, whir, snap, develop: the new Dean Winchester Worried flash card. He must have started hearing his deathwatch, must have began feeling the icy hand of Death on his shoulder because he simply wasn't the kind of guy to get worried.
The emotion slowly being dismissed from his face, but the sheen in his eyes still there yowling, Dean relaxed a little in his chair. "I was trying to tell you about something I might have found, but you were starting to fade out on me. You've been sitting there staring at that picture with the weirdest look on your face, muttering some mumbo-jumbo kind of chant."
Sam hadn't been aware of speaking, but then again if he had completely detached from the world he wouldn't have been surprised to hear of him doing the Rumba with a coat tree. "Chant?" he repeated, sanity slowly starting to refill the pool of his mind.
Nodding gently, eyes wide, Dean looked like he was trying to persuade an elephant convinced of its pinkness that it most certainly wasn't, pink that is. "Yes, a chant. Something about not harming someone, that you won't let him touch him. Sammy, you're really starting to freak me out here. What's going on?"
As if he expected the Meyerses to start moving again, maybe even come climbing out of the photograph this time, Sam looked back to the open records book and the picture that finally looked as it should: old and worn. Jesus, he really was going insane and didn't need Dean's petty childhood games to help him along anymore.
"Why do you keep looking at the picture like that, Sammy?" Dean asked, his voice strained with concern.
Sam, desperate to think of a decent lie, blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. "The man came to me in one of his victims' houses, Dean, I think I'm allowed to look at his picture in any way I choose."
"You don't need to take that tone with me, Sammy," Dean replied dryly, the worry he was feeling starting to meld with annoyance. "Not after you went on your little astrotrip."
"I'm tired, okay? I must've just dozed off, people do that."
Dean shook his head, the set of his shoulders proof enough that he wasn't buying anything. "You're not like other people. I hate to tell you that, but it's the truth. When you start blacking out in the middle of the day, when you start talking to someone who most definitely isn't me – but if you were, I thank you for calling me a blonde of insurmountable beauty – and when you look at someone's picture with that weird look in your eye… I think it's high time we start being a little freaked out."
"Why do you always feel the need to do this, Dean? I've been sitting here for the past two hours looking through boring and irrelevant information and I zoned out. Don't you tell me that never happens to you while we're on the road, staring at nothing but barley fields for miles in all directions."
"Pardon me, sir, but I don't start acting like a fucking gypsy," Dean whispered harshly.
Sam narrowed his eyes, pressing his palms against his thighs. "I'm fine, Dean. Maybe a little tipsy still from my meeting with the proud Doctor, but fine."
"I don't know what your definition of tipsy is, Sammy, but what just happened now definitely wasn't mine. You're having full-blown episodes, kid. Of what I don't know, but they're episodes all right, and we need to take care of them before you snap and start having drool drip from your mouth and pool on your tee-shirt."
"Then why don't you send me off to the Meyerses' basement for some treatment? You know, trade places. Oh, wait, I'm sorry, you want to see if that rat bastard'll be good to his word! Tell me, Dean, what the hell is so important to you to let him cut off your dick and ram it down your throat all because you can't get your head out of the gutter?"
Sam had yelled that last part so loud it had stung his throat, grabbing the unwanted attention of a middle aged woman sitting at a table at the far side of the room. She was behind Dean, Sam easily making out the look on her face: she was downright aghast.
For a while Dean slumped back into his seat, sputtering like a goldfish out of its bowl and looking like one too. It was more than evident that he was angry, let alone embarrassed, but the way his jaw kept opening and closing, opening and closing, made Sam want to laugh in his face and make the situation ten times worse.
"What?" clearly wasn't the response Dean had wanted to say, wasn't the knock-him-on-his-ass come back he had been searching for to put Sam in his place. But it was what had come out between his erratic garage door of a mouth and since no one had invented a remote control to turn back and freeze the hands of time, "What?" was just going to have to do.
"Don't play coy with me, Deanie baby," Sam spat, waving a hand in the general direction of the Meyers photograph. "What do you want so badly? What can he give you that'll make you let him kill you?"
Dean made the universal facial expression, half head shake that symbolized without any need of words that, dude, he's plum flabbergasted.
"I believe what he'll say to you is, 'you'll finally be able to have what you've wished every night of your life to obtain'. Well, do you mind telling me what's so gotdang important to you? Don't forget our little agreement, that whole honesty thing."
Something flashed in Dean's eyes and it wasn't the sheen of worry that had been there some time before. It was either murderous rage – which Sam wouldn't hold him against, not in a few hours' time anyway – or the kind of emotional turmoil that would make him want to crawl under a rock and die. It was the latter and it fueled him down the road of what Sam had been so afraid of back at the motel room after they had gotten back from the Sanderses' home.
"I really hate it when you do this, Sam, when you twist everything around so that no one has to talk about you anymore." Dean's voice was rough, almost shaking.
"I wouldn't have to do that if I could just trust you."
The speed limit was now being broken, they were careening toward the cliff at break-neck speed in a twisted game of chicken.
"Trust. Uh-huh." Dean nodded slowly. "Trust, that word from a guy who tried to shoot his own brother in the head."
They each turned their cars at the last minute, neither one of them wanting to go over the edge of the cliff to their doom. But they went to the back up ending, twisting their steering wheels too sharply in the wrong direction. Nose met nose in a violent, fiery caress.
"We're still on this?" Sam asked shrilly. "God, maybe I should have taken those extra bullets from my back pocket, huh? The one my arm was being pulled to, the one Ellicott was screaming to get at. Maybe I should have reloaded that gun and shot you like he wanted me to, that way I wouldn't have had to see you being such a worthless coward."
The sad thing was, out of Sam's anger and frustration he had meant every word, and Dean knew it.
"Yeah, you should have."
Dean rose to his feet, looking everywhere but at his younger brother, and took his jacket from its hanging place of the back of the chair he had been sitting in. Shrugging into it, slamming shut the small book he had been looking through like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum, he cleared his throat once.
"You should have," he repeated.
Sam laughed sourly. "And just where do you think you're going?"
"Away from you. I'll be taking the car and since the vast majority of the money we have I earned, you might want to start thinking about taking up a job here to pay for cab fare."
So this island really was Sam's home (not at all in the way he had anticipated but), it just took a while for his gut to meet up with time.
Dean started to walk away, to the main doors of the record hall, when he stopped and shot his brother a quick chuckle. "Oh, one more thing. While you were orbiting around the moon, I found Meyers's address. It's on page 138, toward the end."
"I would have found it," Sam replied coolly.
"Good, so you won't have any problems working this one alone."
"Not a one."
Dean smiled, an ugly kind of sneer that distorted his features into one big, meaty lump. Behind it, though, just far enough into the shadows for Sam to be blind to was the vision of Dean's throbbing pain. And forebodingly, as he walked from the room with boot heels thumping, his kid brother finally noticed that the deathwatch had stopped ticking.
"This might sting a little, boy."
And was he ever right.