Disclaimer: I don't own anything, least of all The WB's Supernatural.
"What did he say? Sam, what did he say?" The phone call had naturally taken them both off guard. It had been six months since either had heard from their father despite multiple voice mails pleading with him to contact them. Now, out of no where, he calls and tells them to back off, stop looking for him, do their job. Dean took down all the names and locations he was given, ever the dutiful son, but no matter how determined he was to follow his father's orders, go to these places do his job, he still longed to know what was happening.
"You talked to him. You heard him," Sam shoots back angrily. "He wants us to leave him alone."
"Yeah, I got that part. What did he say before?" Sam continues to rummage through the dresser drawers, clothes flying haphazardly toward the bed. They're done here. The asylum, hopefully at least, is safe, aside from being condemned and in desperate need of demolition. No reason to stick around. Yet Dean hasn't moved from his bed, hasn't even considered packing up or showering before heading out. He won't go anywhere until he gets some answers. "Damn it, Sam!"
He turns wildly, swinging around to face his brother, a glare burning into Dean's face as he speaks to him. "He said he knows what killed mom and Jess. He said it was a demon. He said he thinks he might have found it."
"What?"
"That's what he said," he spits out before collapsing onto the corner of the bed, letting his head fall into the cradle of his hands.
Dean sits opposite him, still encased in the scratchy hotel sheets, mouth agape. A demon? A demon? Even Dad can't do that on his own, handle that, can he? And he's sure? He knows this is it, the thing that murdered her, them? How? 22 years and now he figures it out? A demon? His mind races, trying to figure out just what to say, just what to think. But ultimately the only thing that comes out is, "He gave us an order. We have work to do."
The next several hours the brothers spend in silence, driving to their first destination. Dean sits in the passenger seat reviewing everything he's found on the couples his father told him about, the town in Indiana where they supposedly disappeared. It's one of the few instances when he's willing to let Sam drive, and it's probably a good decision. There's no way Sam could concentrate on the task at hand, the job they're heading to. There's no way he could think about anything but the brief conversation with Dad. He goes over every detail in his head, the way he sounded, his voice cracking some when he mentioned Jess. He said he was close, he's closing in on it. It. What would a demon want with them, with their family? Maybe nothing, maybe it's just not important. Did the demon that possessed the pilot really want anything with him or the others on the plane? Just death, destruction. That's what their about, right? What else did he say? Stop looking for me, it's too dangerous. It's not even safe talking right now. Are they always listening, watching? How can they compete with that? And Tessa. Have you talked to your sister? No? Fine. Fine? What did that mean? He didn't say "tell her I called, tell her what I said." He didn't say not to either. He just went on to give them names and locations, jobs.
Well not everyone is as equipped to take orders as Dean. Not everyone can just go against their gut, refuse to head where they know they should be, just because someone tells them to. Sam certainly couldn't. So he stops the car.
"What are you doing?"
"What am I doing?" he asks, his hands still plastered to the wheel. "What are we doing, Dean? I mean, what the hell? We shouldn't be here. We should be going to find Dad."
"He doesn't want us to," he counters. "He gave an order."
"I don't care." Sam shifts in his seat and readies himself for the fight he knows is coming, the one that this time he won't lose. Dad always gives orders. Dean always follows those orders. But Sam swore a long time ago that he wasn't going to take orders anymore, not from anyone. Not from Dad, and certainly not from Dean.
"Sam," he starts, the anger beginning to burn in his cheeks. But he does not go on. The ringing of his cell phone cuts off the chiding that was about to be unleashed, and as if on cue the tension hangs, lingering but not controlling, like a game put on pause. "Hello?" he says into the receiver, short and terse. Sam can't make out who's on the other end, can't hear anything other than indiscernible mumbling.
"Tessa," he says, acknowledging the caller while also glaring at his younger brother. This isn't over, the look says. And he turns away, already engrossed in what she has to say. "Uh huh…yeah." Long pause on Dean's side, lots of mumbling on hers. "Yeah, Tess, listen…" Cut off. She goes on while he moves in his seat, clearly impatient. His head droops, mouth tightens as he forces himself to wait before trying to get a word in. But he is not a patient person. "Tessa, stop. I can't do this now." He looks up at Sam, who's still silently stewing. "I have to go. I'll have to call you back." She protests, but his mind is only on one thing right now, and he can't take her on as well. "I'll call you back," he says again before flipping the phone shut.
"What was that?" Sam asks, clearly not interested.
"Something about deals. Making deals and trading lives or souls or something. I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"She wasn't making sense. It happens. She gets some idea in her head and just goes with it, and…it doesn't matter. Start the car."
Sam takes a breath, turns and locks eyes with Dean, looks at him hard with an unwavering stare. "No."
He left once before already. He went against everyone's hopes, everyone's needs. He left and didn't look back. But how'd that turn out? Maybe Dean was right. Maybe he was just a selfish bastard. All he ever wanted growing up was to be normal, have a normal life with a normal family. But what did that really mean anyway? What was normal? Just before going away to Stanford he had decided, actually thought it all out and came to the definite conclusion that his life absolutely sucked. Poor, poor Sam. No one cared about him or about what he wanted, needed. His childhood was a pathetically scripted tragedy. This was how he felt, really and truly.
Then Dad went missing. Jessica was killed. Dean came back. And he was right back where he started. But this time he wasn't hoping for anything more. This time he wasn't thinking about how awful his existence was, tracking down evil things, things that go bump in the night. This time he didn't think he was a freak. He was aware. He knew things that other people didn't and it was his responsibility to use that knowledge. It was his responsibility to find and kill the thing that took his girlfriend's life. But it was also his responsibility to make sure that nothing like what happened to her, to him, ever happened to anyone else. That was what he finally realized. And all it took was disobeying his father's orders, abandoning his brother, and heading half way across the country alone, with nothing but his conscience, for him to learn it.
Yes, he had left before. But he won't be taking off again, not any time soon.
They'll find Dad. They won't stop searching. But in the meantime, they have a job to do. This is what he's thinking about now, sitting in front of his computer at one in the morning looking up info on an old house a couple blocks away. The place is one of the only surviving farms in the area, as most were sold, torn down, their lots paved over and plastered with strip malls and parking lots, coffee shops and motels like the one he was in now. But somehow this one house survived all that, probably because it been handed down from generation to generation, and no one wanted to sell it. And that was probably related to all the old family secrets it contained.
"Find anything?" Dean asks as he bursts into the room. He kicks the door shut and drops his keys on the table before offering Sam one of the coffees he had managed to so delicately balance. "Muffin?" he asks, waving the paper bag he had stashed in his other hand. Sam shakes his head no, taking off the top of the coffee cup and sipping carefully.
"So," Dean mutters, his mouth full of blueberry muffin. "Whatcha find?"
"Not a lot. Couple of mysterious disappearances, but no evidence of foul play."
"Yeah right."
"Just what the news articles say. They were a pretty powerful family back in the day, probably managed to keep their business to themselves. At least out of the media. But the locals should know something, don't you think?" he asks, turning around to see his brother still looming over his shoulder, coffee in one hand, crumbly muffin in the other. He nods in agreement, mouth too full to speak. "What are you doing?"
"What?" he says, crumbs falling from his lips.
"What is that? Blueberry?"
He swallows, a big gulp. "Yeah."
"That was mine."
"No it wasn't."
"Yeah it was," he says standing and grabbing the bag off the bedside table. He reaches in and pulls out another muffin, looks at it suspiciously and sniffs. "Banana nut," he declares, disgusted.
"You like banana nut."
"No, I like blueberry. You like banana nut."
"Well I like blueberry too."
"What am I supposed to eat now?"
"I think there are still some Cheetos in the glove box."
"Thanks a lot."
"Any time," he says, taking a seat where Sam was. "So this is it, huh?" He pages through the few articles, shaking his head. "You're useless."
"Jerk," he hears from behind him just as a muffin hits the back of his head.
"Hey, I was gonna eat that!"
The computer let's out a ding and they both look to the screen. "Dude," Dean says, leaning down to pick up the felled muffin, "you've got mail." Sam heads over and pushes his brother out of the way. "Tessa," he says, reading over his shoulder. "Now there's someone who knows how to research."
"Shut up. When was the last time she helped us out anyway?" When was the last time we even heard from her? Weeks ago. Four, to be exact, which really is a month. And it was the first time since this all began, since Sam started back, that he hadn't heard from his sister for that long. Usually if got to be a week, maybe two, with no leads, she would at least give a call or a quick email. Just checking in. How's it going? That was what he expected when he opened this email, a terse and pointless salutation to which he would respond with Fine. Where the hell have you been?
But instead what he found was two photos. They were familiar, ones he'd seen before, ones she probably had in a scrapbook or frame or something somewhere. She must have scanned them in to send. "Why's she sending us old pictures?"
"I don't know," he says, scrolling down to the bottom to see if there's any more, any writing, explanation. But there isn't. All there is are two old pictures. One is of her sitting on their dad's lap when she was no more than three or four. The other is a Polaroid snapshot of Sam playing hockey with a couple of other boys. It would have been hard to call those kids his friends since they never stuck around anywhere long enough, or behaved normal enough, for any of them to make any real friends. But he knew them. They played hockey together at least a couple of times a week at the lake nearby. Nearby the little house they rented in Minnesota for the winter that is. It was one of the only times they had stayed in the same place for almost an entire season. They had wondered why their father would choose one of the coldest places on the planet it seemed to spend winter, but as long as they got to spend it in a house, with separate rooms, a kitchen, and a yard, they didn't mind. And once the lake froze over they had something to do, not that any of them had ever been in skates before. But two local kids, the two in the photo, decided to make it their mission to teach Sam how to move on the ice. And Tessa too since she always managed to tag along. At 12 they were beginning to tire of each other and resisted spending too much time together. But really, what else was there to do? Sam wanted to learn how to play hockey, and Tessa wanted to hang out with Jeremy, the kid in the photo with the great big smile. The kid who just a week after that picture was taken, was dead.
But that was ten years ago. A family picture and a throw away snapshot from a decade ago. Why would she send those?
"That's the kid that drown," Dean says, more to himself than to Sam.
"Yeah."
"What's that about?"
He turns around and looks at Dean and they share a concerned stare. Their sister was odd, sometimes unpredictable. She'd immerse herself in various studies, become obsessed with them almost to the point of lunacy. But never beyond that almost point. Now she's forgone contact with them. She hasn't been working, or at least hasn't indicated to them that she had been. The last call they'd received was the one Dean cut her off during, the one where she'd spent the entire time jabbering on about deals made with devil or some such nonsense. And now old photos with no explanation.
"Maybe we should try calling her," Sam says hesitantly.
"You think?" He nods and Dean reaches into his pocket, retrieves the phone and dials. They wait. One ring. Two. Three. Four. No answer. Her voicemail picks up on the sixth ring and he leaves a message, just as her voice on the other end instructs him to do. "Hey, Tess, it's me. Where are you? Listen, we just got your email and – "
"Dean," Sam calls from his place in front of the computer. He indicates the screen on which is another email from their sister.
"Call me back," he says absently into the phone before snapping it shut and moving closer to the laptop. He reaches across Sam to the keyboard and pumps away on the down arrow, moving through the entire body of the email. "What the hell?" It goes on for what would be pages and pages, all the same words, one sentence over and over and over again.
IT WAS ME.