A/N: Thank you for the reviews (blush!) - every single one is appreciated. Thanks to JillyW for the encouragement and for kick starting the ending. There are a couple of events I've referred to that haven't happened in canon or fic; they are their own stories that I just haven't written yet.

Detention 2/5

Sam grimaced as he swallowed coffee stronger than he would normally have liked and tried to concentrate on reviewing the research he and Dean had done before trying to take Jacob Grey's spirit on.

Everything they'd found in the library simply confirmed the pattern Dean had spotted in local newspapers. It should have been a simple haunting; find, salt and burn the bones and be back to town for dinner. All they'd had to do was find the bones and without a grave to dig up, it was most likely that Jacob's bones were in the vicinity of the house.

A daylight visit hadn't turned anything up so they'd figured a nighttime visit might, when supernatural activity tended to be at it's most energetic.

Jacob Grey had been a master at the small school that had once been situated where a rambling house now stood. The house had been built in the 1920's over the remains of the school, which had fallen into disrepair, parts of the walls incorporated into the newer building. There was no record of any activity until the 1970's when the first suicide had occurred. Over the next thirty years there were several suicides, always men, although not every man that visited or lived there, and there didn't seem to be any commonality between those that died, with differing ages, backgrounds, circumstances, even different methods of suicide.

In the mid nineties there was the suspicion of a serial killer in the area when an intelligent police detective decided that the suicide rate for that one building was just too high, and among other things, compared the autopsies that had taken place. The detective had found it notable that some of the men had had some kind of altercation with a blunt instrument in the hours preceding their deaths. Different upper limbs and to differing extents, but several were postulated to have been inflicted by a heavy stick or baton.

The legends that surrounded Jacob himself were vague at best. There was no record of his death or when he left the school, although the school closed in 1882 after families withdrew their boys from the school following an unspecified scandal that was rumoured to have involved another master and the youngest son of a local businessman.

Jacob was known as the schoolmaster that the boys all loved to hate, and it was possibly this that spawned the legend that Jacob had never left, although again, there was no trace of his movements when the school closed.

There had to be something that they'd missed, something that would tell Sam how to get his brother back. He glanced at his watch and noted that the library would be open very shortly.

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Dean looked at the four swollen and bruised red welts, and reckoned that another four would take him up to the elbow. These weren't the stinging red stripes he'd gotten from teachers in high school who were a bit handy with a ruler, the kind that disappeared after five minutes so that the kids couldn't scream abuse. Here, he couldn't bend his fingers at all, and the thin skin over bone was split, decorating crimson over the angry red, blue and black bruising that was already mottling the skin from fingertips to mid forearm.

The ghost had let him be for a while, ostensibly so that Dean could think about his crimes, but Dean hoped it was because Sam was causing the ghost grief. He'd tried yelling for Sam, making noise for his brother to hear, but gave up after realising the slightly muffled sound quality meant that little or no noise would be heard outside the room.

Cautiously, and watching that cane which rested on the other desk, he reached towards the rope at his ankle. The instant his fingers touched the coarse twine, the cane slammed down on his forearm, moving from the desk in less than the blink of an eye.

"Are we ready to begin, boy?" the re-materialised ghost enquired civilly as Dean battled to swallow words and cries of pain, blinking to clear his vision of the lightning, stars and dark shadows that the pain smashed into it. His arm throbbed unmercifully now, threatening to rob him of concentration and self-control.

He took a deep breath and sat back, willing the pain to a distance where he could handle it. Distancing himself from pain was something he was good at, and he ruthlessly pushed it away. "Any time you want to bring it on, big guy," he said and then amended insolently. "I mean, yes sir."

The ghost did not look impressed. "I have always found lines to be an effective method of remedial education. Enough repetition is educational. More than enough can create belief. You may leave this room when you have completed one thousand lines."

"Is that it?" Dean said, not seeing the catch. "You want me to write lines and then I can leave? Sir."

"Yes. We will analyse your lines as we go, administer punishment where necessary, and may even change them appropriately."

"Huh." Dean now saw the catch. "I'm never going to get to one thousand, am I? Sir."

The ghost looked offended. "You will only fail if you want to fail, boy. Behave, be honest and accept, that's all you have to do to complete your detention."

"Right," Den smirked, thinking that this was all just bull. "So what do I get to write? Sir."

A neat script appeared at the top of the paper on Dean's desk.

"'I deserve to be punished'? No way, man! This whole gig is just shi-"

Crack! Dean stopped breathing as the cane slammed into his arm, the wave of agony paralysing his chest as his vision darkened and he listened to the blood rushing past his ears. Agony subsided to pain and as he gulped air, Dean thought bone might have cracked that time.

"Would you like to rethink your attitude, boy?" the ghost asked mildly.

Not really, Dean thought, I'd rather do something nasty with that cane. But self-preservation at this point was the only option he could consider. He had to keep going until Sam arrived and they could take this bitch down together, because if he didn't the ghost would keep hurting and killing people, and that just wasn't an option he wanted to consider. "I'll try better next time," he muttered, picking up the pencil. "Sir."

Petulantly, he stabbed the pencil at the parchment, petty satisfaction making him grin as the point snapped. He was about to point out that he broke his pencil when he noticed that another lay in the exact same spot as the first. He looked up at the ghost who looked back with a raised eyebrow and a smirk of his own. 'Bitch,' he mouthed silently, and scrawled the first line.

Crack!

"What!" Dean yelled in lieu of a scream, throwing the pencil across the room in pained frustration. "I didn't do anything," he gasped. "Sir," he remembered belatedly.

"I will not accept this ungodly mess as script," the ghost told him. "Take pride in your work."

The pencil was back on the desk, and when the pain had receded enough he started writing as neatly as his handwriting would allow.

Crack! No pain, just the desk after he'd completed ten lines.

"Why are you here?" the ghost asked, and Dean bit back the sarcastic comment he wanted to make. The cane was resting on the sheet of paper, and Dean curled his lip in disgust.

"Because I deserve to be," he muttered. "Apparently."

The ghost pushed his face close to Dean's. "Because you deserve to be what?"

"Punished," Dean spat out angrily, pushing his face back into the ghost's, a small surge of triumph pushing back the pain in his arm and the frustration that was growing.

The ghost stepped back, the cane came down again and Dean yelped. "Bitch!" The cane hit the desk, and dazedly, Dean realised that there was no more space to hit on his forearm and he grinned. "So what's next," he gasped. "The other arm? Can't write if you do that."

The ghost returned the smile, and Dean found his arm turned face up, cord whipping up to wrap around the base of his fingers to hold his hand open. And the cane came down across his fingers, white lightning spat across his eyeballs and the world went black.

He was only out for a few seconds, his brain short-circuited with the pain and he became quickly aware that something had definitely broken this time. He blinked back the water in his eyes and tried to calm his breathing.

"Respect," the ghost told him. "At all times. You may continue writing."

The next time the cane came down on the desk at twenty lines, the ghost asked the same question, and Dean replied in a voice full of venom, "Because I deserve to be punished. Sir."

"Good boy," the ghost looked genuinely satisfied. "Continue."

Every ten lines the cane came down and the same question was asked, the same answer given.

At one hundred lines he was humming Highway To Hell.

At one hundred and fifty he was thinking of all the petty things he'd done to earn a visit to the principle's office in school. Itching powder had to be up there, he smiled to himself, and superglue.

At two hundred his writing hand was cramping and he was planning on ways to make the ghost's banishment as protracted and painful as possible.

At two hundred and fifty, 'I deserve to be punished' was burned into his retinas and brain and at three hundred Dean thought that he might actually get through this.

At three hundred and fifty, he was starting to accept the words as truth as his brain focussed solely on his task.

Crack! The cane coming down didn't even cause him to flinch. "Four hundred lines, boy. That wasn't so difficult now was it?"

Dean shook out his cramped hand. "No, sir," he said with a half smirk, mind zoned out with just the five words floating there.

"Pay attention, boy!" The cane came down on the desk again, and Dean did flinch this time. "Why are you here?"

"Because I deserve to be punished," he said automatically.

"Yes. You do. Many people have had cause to punish you, haven't they?"

Dean winced as his thoughts skittered over memories he'd long since buried.

The cane hit the desk. "Haven't they?" the ghost repeated.

"If you say so. Sir." Dean slumped back as best he could, pulling on his damaged arm, but needing more to distance himself from the ghost and his words. The physical he could deal with, but he was absolutely not going to get into the psychological.

The ghost inclined his head slightly. "I can see that I'm going to have to lay things out for you," he said and paused to think. "Juvenile Detention, what is that?"

Dean blinked. "Detention for juveniles. Sir."

"Your thoughts run more to a prison, boy. For children?"

Dean shifted uncomfortably. The ghost apparently had access to his mind, and he really did not want some of those memories being dredged up.

"Yeah." There was a long silence as Dean refused to look at the ghost, but eventually he took a quick glance to see what was happening. The ghost held the cane ready above his arm, looking at him expectantly. "Sir," he ground out, eyes back to the desk.

"And what were you imprisoned for, boy?"

There were many permutations and combinations, but it all boiled down to one thing. "Stealing, sir."

"You stole from other people," the ghost said, "and were imprisoned twice for it."

"Yes, sir." Dean focussed on a small knot in the wood of the desk, disassociating himself from the conversation, and wishing the ghost would let him get back to writing lines. He swallowed hard as he struggled to push those memories back down where they belonged.

"And did you learn your lesson?"

"Oh, you can bet your ass I did. Sir." Dean's lips twitched at that. The second time around he learned the hard way that he never, ever wanted to go back to one of those places.

"And what did you learn?"

"Never to get caught. Sir." He smiled cheekily at the ghost and tensed as he fully expected the cane to come down on his arm.

"Then you learned nothing," the ghost said. "Thou shalt not steal. You deserve to be punished."

Dean stared at the ghost, daring him. "Been there, done that, got the scars." He paused a beat. "Sir."

"Say it."

"Wha-? Like hell!" The cane came down straight across the palm of his hand, but the pain of it was not nearly as great as the reflexive attempt to clench his bruised and broken fingers into a protective fist, which left him reeling and biting his own tongue until it bled, in his efforts not to cry out.

"Say what you have written."

"I deserve to be punished," Dean spat at him, "and so do you, you sadist son of a bi-!" The cane hit him with some force straight across the shoulders, leaving him gasping for breath.

"Thou shalt not steal!" the ghost cried angrily as the cane fell again.

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