Kevin's laugh echoes in Sam's room. It might be the first time someone's laughed in here; Sam isn't sure. "You're fluent in Latin, but you can't read music? Seriously?" Kevin tries to bite back another laugh, maybe to spare Sam's feelings, but Sam smiles at him—reassuring, because his laughter is a relief in this concrete home of memories.
"I've practiced Latin," Sam points out, undefensively, and he watches Kevin rather than the music notes.
Sam clasps the instrument loosely, attention not on the elegant, aged wood. But the cello feels nice in his grip, almost warm. Or, maybe he's warm because he's taken to wearing more layers as the temperature sinks and sinks till Sam's teeth chatter and his playing becomes even more abysmal.
"I guess you can't be good at everything right away," Kevin admits. "You'll get it, though. Soon, you won't need my help at all."
Nobody is fooling anybody about the transience of this arrangement, but Sam still clenches the bow in a violent grip. "For now, what's this note, Kevin?
And Kevin lays it out for him the same way he talks about a spell he's researched or found in the tablet, with an easy brilliance that might have attracted God to him in the first place. What did God look for in a Word Keeper anyway? Intellect? Persistence? Humanity? Was it a lottery system?
A lottery and a death sentence, with Grace rather than stones.
Kevin says, "I found you an easy song. I had to go search the bunker again, but I found it. It's probably a good place to start. You'll get it." And Sam smiles at the encouragement that's not gilded praise painted over fury.
Or, at least, it's not obvious.
When Sam plays it first, it comes out a shrieking mournful wail, a dirge no one wanted, but Kevin waits and waits, and Sam won't let him down again. Again and again, till it's something smooth rather than cutting, translucent and easy, and Kevin's smile is soft enough Sam wonders what memories it brings up for him.
Kevin doesn't tell him. Instead, he claps a hollow clap when Sam makes it through the song with only a few mistakes. Mistakes that aren't jarring enough that the lights flicker. But then Kevin is gone without a word, and Sam's alone with a cello and muted triumph.
His fingers curl around the screwdriver easily. Fixing the furnace in the bunker is more challenging than in the hotel what feels an age ago. At least Sam can avoid hammers.
He relaxes into the work, into the simplicity of demands that revolve around does-it-work-or-doesn't-it? If he fixes the heating system, they can crank up the temperature so they're a little less frosty, except for when Kevin actually appears. And his breath comes out even, sure, and maybe there's research to do, and a cello to play, and hunts to find—but not right now. He twists a screw into the console.
Sam tests the system, and hears an answering rumble in the bunker.
He grins down at his work, setting aside his tools. Feels warm and like he can try the cello again without ruining anything. When he stows the screwdriver away, the hammer stares Sam down, but he clings to his ease, a brittle fragile barrier, and he slams the drawer shut before the memories can take residence in the hotfearful twist of his stomach.
Join the mobile infantry and save the world , it begins, and Sam reaches into the KFC bucket, grease hot and comforting on his fingers. Thanksgiving Dinner. Dean had chosen the food, going with something familiar rather than ornate. Even for their guests, such as they are, and Sam keeps his questions down with honey and crumbs. Sam chose the activity, movie-watching. It was a safe bet considering the audience to their holiday ritual. He can feel the sear of Kevin's judgment, whiplike and vicious, even as Kevin hovers the bucket an inch above his lap so everyone can reach.
Linda had chosen the movie. Or, rather, Kevin had under the guise of his mother's choice. Nobody says anything about it. It isn't often actual ghosts haunt holidays.
Sam tears the skin off first, till the thigh is bared for him, steaming and smooth. The first Thanksgiving he recalls is when he was five, and he'd asked Dad why the bucket and not the stuffed turkey. Dad had scuffed a greasy hand over his pepper stubble, all slow and heavy, while Dean groaned that soft groan that meant Sam was an-NOY-ing. "If you're not hungry," Dad told the dingy carpet beneath Sam's feet, "give it to your brother."
Hungry Sammy had given his leg to his brother, but guiltily kept the butter biscuit.
Later, much later, his first actually real Thanksgiving would have stuffed turkey and gravy and potatoes and and and. All without buckets. The imprint of it in Heaven though—
Sam glances over the Tran family at his brother, who's ripping hunks of chicken off with his teeth, grease slick on the beginning of the bed, Sam, then Linda, then the bucket and Kevin, and finally Dean. Linda's mouth is pursed as she idly fingers her chicken leg, grease staining her fingertips. Sam and Dean keep talking about converting this extra room into a living space, but here they still are: computer on Linda's lap and all of them sitting at the foot of the bed.
His stomach drops out. When did the Trans last have Thanksgiving? (Hell, when did Sam and Dean celebrate anything last?) And he suddenly wishes they'd sprung for a turkey and a couch, or something. Anything. Because surely everyone knows this is going to be the last? Sam looks at Dean, wishes for turkey and instead hands his thigh to his brother.
As the bugs keep on coming, Sam glances over to see Linda reach for her son's hand, only to pass through partway. Her fingers meet against something solid enough, some thought of Kevin's, maybe, and she clenches white-knuckled around the memory of her son's hand.
The bucket of picked-clean carcasses wavers with his multi-tasking, but doesn't fall.
Kevin notices Sam looking, and he smiles that happytoobright smile, the painful one, and Sam wants to ruffle Kevin's hair, like it can make something better. Linda lays her head on her son's shoulder, and her forehead passes through an inch of it before Kevin catches her, eyes scrunched shut in concentration, smile evaporated.
Not long after, her breathing smoothes out softly. Sleep drags her under, round and soft, the first time he's seen her relaxed since she got her anti-possession tattoo that didn't protect her from anything. Over her head, Dean meets Sam's gaze, some shark smile on his brother's butter-wet lips. Sam smiles an almost-smile back—just another happy holiday with his brother, isn't it?
Between the brothers, Kevin's eyes are only for his mother.
His face pinches up ratlike, and he wraps both arms around her, protectively clinging, but Sam can see him start to blur out. And Kevin shakes his head as his form buckles.
Linda falls into the empty space her son formerly inhabited and crashes into the upturned bucket of bones. She gasps in surprise, jolting upright away from the bucket, and she laughs when she finally sees it for what it is, sounding brittle and uneasy. Sam forces a smile for her, while Dean hands her the last biscuit.
This isn't a simulation anymore.
Thanksgiving fades Kevin enough that Sam's left to his own fumbling with the cello. He leaves the door to his room open for a ghost, and sometimes, when he hits a particularly wailing register, Linda leans in Sam's doorway with her arms folded over her chest. She watches him play as he clutches at dignity, brilliant red under her scrutiny.
She doesn't have to say he's nowhere near as good as Kevin.
At the time of night where Sam's grip on his gun usually slackens with sleep, a crash not from Dean's room pulls him up gun first. He follows the echoing mishmash of shouts with his gun stowed safely in his waistband, to find Linda already creeping.
"How many apologies do you fucking want?" Dean's growl, as the coffeepot rings like a fire-bell. "Newsflash: you're not the first friend I've—"
Kevin cuts through Dean's defense like it's made of skin, leaving it dripping red. "I don't want your shitty apologies. Honestly, Hell'd be better than your self-flagellating pity fest."
"Careful what you wish for," Dean tells him, eyes nearly fever-bright. Maybe he can already see Kevin strung up, a slim flame roasting off that first blistering layer of skin, the salty-wet tears steaming off his face while Lucifer—no, no Crowley, while Crowley laughs.
Sam cradles Linda back, away from where her son advances on Dean; Kevin's got a prowl to his step Sam's never seen in the kid, but Kevin's been prey before, ripped up and spit out for the scavengers to pick apart, bit by bit. Maybe he's learned by imitation. Kevin stands before Dean like he's tall. "Come on, that supposed to scare me? You're losing it. We can all see it. But what's it matter, right?" Kevin laughs, a short pushed-out sound that silences the coffeepot. "As long as you can bury your head in the sand and pretend like things between you and Sam are great."
Blood flushes Dean's cheeks; his fingers twitch over a missing denied hilt. "You don't know shit," he growls out, all red and black. "You don't know shit about me 'n Sam."
"Want to hug, do some sharing and caring? What, since I'm family and all," the word spat out like frothyhot demon blood.
Dean presses large as life into Kevin's notspace. In Sam's hands, Linda surges forward as far as his cage will let her. You don't get between Godzilla and Mothra. You get the hell out of the way. "Kid," Dean quivers, all puffed up, "I'm warning you—"
"What are you going to do, bring a dangerous angel into my home, not tell me about it, and—hold on, it's all coming back to me." The row of neat coffee cups shatter to white and red shards. Sam yanks Linda further back as thin cuts drip blood down Dean's face, and Kevin ripples with the effort.
"Why don't you go hide in your closet, kid? Think you shoulda stayed in there, like every other time we needed you," Dean delivers it with that smug twist of his lip he only uses when he knows he's won.
Kevin breaks Dean's favorite pair of bowls before he flickers out with an outraged expression. He doesn't even get the last word. He just goes.
In the swollen silence that follows, Dean turns to Linda's bright glare trembling beneath Sam's hands. To be safe, Sam keeps holding her. But Dean walks out with that clipped step that reminds Sam of Dad. Dean's door is slammed shut, and it would take a hammer to follow him.
Linda struggles away from Sam, and Sam lets her go. "Kevin?" she calls.
But her son doesn't answer. And Sam doesn't stay to watch her look. He curls under his blankets, the metal of his gun cool beneath his fingertips where Linda was hot.
The next morning, Dean's eyes have that apologetic, needtohunt gleam. But they're green under the not-flickering fluorescents, and Linda's anger is a house of vengeful spirits, clawing at the walls of their bunker. The narrow look with flaring nostrils she gives Sam is better than the purple black imprint of his hands on her skin.
Her floral, short-sleeved shirt is aimed at him. The bruises fresh over less-fresh scars, and the old shiny burn where Crowley stripped her bare.
So Sam says, "Let's work." And Dean's keys are already dangling from his brother's fingertips.
Dean's music howls while they fly down the road. His grip so tight on the wheel that his veins puff out of his arm, blue and straining. Scars break up the expanse of his skin. When Sam was a kid he used to sit and count all of Dean's scars, giggling uneasily over his mouthful of numbers while Dean wore the tight accommodating smile he got sometimes when Dad was gone. Now it would be closer to trying to count stars. Plus, it isn't as if Dean would let him anymore. Sam's mouth contorts into a smile.
If Sam presses his knees to bruising against the glove box and cranes his head back, he can barely make out the distant glimmer of stars against the dripping ink sky.
Dean doesn't sing as Zeppelin comes on, teeth gritted as he drives with ferocious purpose. Doesn't sing, doesn't talk, and Sam knows how to read Dean's silences.
The music can't be loud enough to cover Dean's lack.
Just as Sam hands over their new fake card, his phone bursts to life. Fumbling for it, he checks on habit that Dean's still waiting for him in the Impala. His brother's there, hiding beneath his sunglasses. Linda's name glows on his screen, like it had all those months ago. What's left of Sam's stomach curls protectively into a tight knot. "Hello?" But he can't hear her at first over the crackling litany in the background.
"It's Kevin," she gasps, voice tinny. "He's—uncontrollable. I need help."
A desperate admission that costs her. Something crashes in the electrical storm. His grip on the phone is tight enough the plastic whines as Sam snatches back the credit card. "We're a few hours out. Find salt and a closet. Don't come out. No matter what he says."
The line goes dead. Sam runs to his brother without telling the manager anything. "We have to get back to the bunker." He sounds like Dad. "It's Kevin."
Dean's expression shutters blank over the beginning of a snarly grimace. They peel out of the parking lot fast enough to leave dark lines, fast enough Sam can smell the tires. He dials Linda again. It rings straight through to voicemail, so he calls Jody instead. "Sam?" surprise bright in her tone. "What do you need?"
In the background, Alex groans theatrically at his name, and Sam sinks down into his seat as far as his Sasquatch legs will let him. It was easier when he was fourteen; he'd slide down in the backseat as if the leather could gobble him up like a monster. Sometimes, it even seemed to work—Dad and Dean would act like they couldn't see or hear Sam for hundreds of miles at a time.
"There's a hunt. Dean and I were going to take care of it, but something came up. I'll send you the news reports and everything. We think it's a were, but-"
Jody stops him that easy way she always does. "I'll take care of it. Just shoot me that email, and call me on the flip-side. Got it?"
A frustrated disgusted shout: "You just got back! I thought you said you weren't going to hunt on your own again. You were gonna wait for Donna to—"
Jody tells him, "We'll talk later, Sam." Then she cuts the line.
Sometimes, it might be easier if the Impala really could devour what's left of Sam. He hangs onto his phone. Dean doesn't say anything, just cranks up the music, and doesn't sing. And the car shrieks down the road.
Dean invades the bunker with a Kevin-banishing fire-poker. To find it silent, with a snow dusting of torn papers and books. "Mrs. Tran?" Sam calls, shotgun ready. "Kevin?"
The papers crinkle as Sam steps over them, confetti small enough Linda won't be able to tape lovingly over the tears. Sam waits for his breath to freeze, but it stays heavy and wet. Dean keeps his grip on the poker, nodding his head toward Linda's room so Sam creeps where his brother directs. When he yanks the door open, her blankets have been ripped off the bed like band-aids, but it's neat otherwise. No blood. "Mrs. Tran?" he calls.
Her closet door swings open to reveal Linda behind a thick barricade of salt. She trembles with the canister in her hand. "Sam? Have you found him?"
"Are you hurt?" Sam lowers the gun.
"No. He didn't hurt me," she sets the salt aside then steps over her ring. There are dark circles under her eyes and age scoured into her face, but no bruises except the ones Sam left.
She blinks at her room like it might swallow her whole.
Sam puts a hand to her shoulder, feels her quake beneath his touch. "When did you last hear him?" asks Sam, his voice scared-animal soothing.
Linda permits his touch, takes a half-a-step closer before she recalls her strength. "A few hours ago. Or close enough. I lost track of time, hiding in there." She recoils at the sheen of his shotgun as she notices it. "You're not planning to shoot him, are you?"
"Not unless I have to," he tells her with his best consolation prize smile, while his grip on the gun goes white-knuckled and he removes his other hand from Linda.
Dean rushes into the room. "You two seen him?" Without asking after Mrs. Tran. He twirls the poker in his hand, slicing through warm air instead of through Kevin.
Maybe Dean'll get payback for the fight last night.
"No." Sam shakes his head, watching Dean's poker. "Mrs. Tran says she hasn't heard anything for a few hours."
Linda cuts in, "We have to find him."
"You need to get back in the closet. Now. He's dangerous, like a rabid dog. We warned you, and now here we are. You're damn lucky he didn't kill you." Dean stops swinging the weapon long enough to glare at her.
"I won't," Linda matches his gaze. "I need to speak with my son." But she keeps shaking.
It's unnerving to watch the person you love more than anything devolve into bursting madness.
Sam blows out all the air in his lungs, deflating like a caved-in carcass on the road. "He might be out of juice. It's possible he won't be able to talk."
Dean advances on Linda like he advanced on Kevin. "We need to burn that ring, Mrs. Tran. You gotta let him go. We all fucking played this game long enough, and it's over. It's gotta be over."
"I will speak with him." She reaches and lifts the poker off Dean with a quivering hand—Dean shakes as she takes it, but he doesn't beat her with it. Sam's impressed. "I have to."
Sam rests his hand again on her shoulder—she's unsteady beneath his touch. "All right, Mrs. Tran. We'll find him."
But the bunker is quiet except for Dean's heavy, not-getting-his-way tread and the ancient lamps humming merrily along. Linda clasps the poker with both her hands, her eyes sweeping over the wreckage of her son's tantrum. Somewhere in all this is the imprint of the toddler Kevin was not long enough ago. Finally, as the silence swells enough Sam's going to crawl out of the prison of his flesh, he asks, voice roughened, "What set him off?" What did you do, is what he means.
Linda stops mid-step. "My research. He wanted me to stop." Her face crumples up like a page of her notes.
Behind them, Dean scoffs, kicking at a snowdrift of shredded Mother's Love. All the "I Told You So" he seems to need, or that he thinks he'll get away with. Sam sighs, rubbing at his face like he can rub out the worry. "We'll find him," he placates again, burnt out and empty.
But she starts walking again. Which is really all Sam needed.
Their breath comes as freezing mist as they stare down the door to Sam's room. Sam brushes past Linda to creak open the door, and his shotgun enters the room first. "Kevin?" Linda calls.
The bow lays snapped in the middle of the unharmed room. Kevin is sitting before the capsized cello, but it appears undamaged for now, and Sam's breath seizes in his chest. So stupid to worry about a cello when Kevin could still kill any of Dean. Kevin thumbs over a string. "Sam?" Kevin tilts his head to see Sam, eyes heavy-set and red against his ghost pale face.
"Hey, Kevin," Sam says without releasing the reasoning with ghosts has gone so well for him historically. "Easy. You don't need to—"
"I wanted to. Break it, I mean. I wanted to so bad, like I had to. Sort of like when I had to steal my mom's car and the tablet. But then I broke the bow and I just. I just can't. I can't do this," he says. He plucks at another string, and the note haunts the room.
Linda surges forward before Dean can lay a hand on her. "Kevin?" she drops the poker like an amateur, and Dean lunges for it rather than her.
"Mom?" His eyes open up wide, then he looks back at the cello beneath his hands, "I'm sorry." Softly, barely a whisper.
"I know. I know you are, Kevin. We'll keep going. We'll be okay." Linda reaches for her son with trembling, wanting hands, but Kevin passes empty through her fingers, watching the unscathed cello.
"No, Mom. I can't. I just can't—I can't keep doing this. I can't be this. Dean was right. About me. He was right about me." A bitter pill, one Sam's swallowed enough times to know it never gets easier, the Dean-Was-Right-All-Along Pill. "Mom, I don't want to do this. I almost threw you into a bookcase. I was so mad. Like I could watch myself move, and I thought I was gonna break Sam's cello. Please, Mom. Please. Don't make me. Please don't make me, I can't. Please, Mom. I'm sorry—" almost like a kid who doesn't want to eat their brussel sprouts. But he finally turns his face to his mom, expression twisted and aching, and Sam can see his burnt out sockets beneath this echo of him, and Kevin shakes his head over and over and over.
Linda's drops her hands while her son bows over the cello Sam still can't play, and probably never will since his teacher is fading, slipping away under the fierce protection of his mother. "Kevin, I promised you I would fix this."
"You can't. I can't. You have to go home, Mom. It's time to go home." Kevin's fingers pass through the cello, fingertips trailing through the grain. "I'm sorry," he says, as if he could have spared her this, as if they haven't always been working their way here.
Dean holds out his hand for the ring, a kindness, to spare the killing blow from Linda, but Linda wraps both hands around the ring because she can't hold her son.
"I'll do it," she says, in place of I Love You. Or perhaps in place of an apology she won't give.
Kevin almost smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling, the great survivalist that lasted to age twenty, ready to go. Sam grins at Kevin, says nothing at all as Dean leaves to find salt and kerosene. Dean gets the honor of watching Kevin burn three times, like burrowing knives in his pulled taut skin.
Mother comes to sit before her son, separated by a cello chasm, and she presses her hands to the gleaming wood. She watches him intently, like he'll beg her to let him stay at any moment, always reaching for her expectations. But Kevin watches her with never-going-to-see-you-again eyes as his mother tears up. In front of her son, though, the tears don't fall.
Sam hangs back in the doorway, his fingers twitching on the trigger, and throat working around caught platitudes.
When Dean flows back into the room, he has a canister of salt. "We're gonna have to melt it down. I got a fire started. You know. When you're ready to go all Frodo on this shit."
Like normal, Dean ignores the cutting sharp look from Sam, while Linda traces fingers over a cello covered in Sam's smeary fingerprints. "Are you ready?" she whispers to her son.
Sharply, "Mom, just do it Please." The last word a rounded afterthought.
But Linda tightens her face and rises, all proud graceful veneer over losing her son again. As she comes to the door where Sam and his brother are, she twists to look back at her son, who is watching her go with wide-child eyes. "Kevin."
"It's okay," he tells her, with that toobright smile.
Sam mimics the smile as Linda gazes up at him. But she continues past him and follows Dean's steps to the bright crackling flames burning clean and cheerful. Dean dumps more salt in, while Linda clutches her ring at the slope of Mount Doom. She breathes wetly, but keeps her shoulders square. Sam isn't sure whose benefit it's for. "I'm sorry," Sam echoes her son.
Linda doesn't respond except to throw the ring into the flames that lick it to nothing.
Far away, the bunker is silent.