John spends the rest of the day walking through the house like a ghost. Abby trails behind him the entire way, nonchalantly picking up knickknacks and opening books in whatever room he's decided to explore this time.
He might be a little stunned still, but he's still thinking. He's looking for some of the weird things he remembers Dean doing as a kid, the marks and destructive behavior that he and Mary had tried so hard to understand.
Here there's scratches in the door jams, deliberate and geometric. Under his and Mary's bed are dozens of little shells, gold and green, see-through and delicate. Under Abby's, someone (Dean) has pounded nails around the whole area of it, a solid line of iron. How the hell Dean'd managed to do that without anyone hearing it is a mystery.
There's rosemary hanging in the bathroom and wood of the windowsills has started to warp around all the salt that's been ground into the grain.
Abby's got a rosary hanging like a mobile above her bed. John's not even sure she sees it anymore; she sure as hell would have ripped it off if she was thinking about it. As it is, she just stands in the doorway as he touches things in her room.
"Dean gave that to me," she says after a second.
"Stole it from the preacher," John says right back.
Just because he never admitted to knowing where it came from didn't mean he didn't actually know. He just hadn't seen the harm in him taking it. After all, if the boy had wanted to pray that much, who was he to stand in the way?
A few months after he's come back, Dean's even gone back to the habit of stashing bottles of water all over the damn house. While he's looking for them, really looking, John finds two under the couch, three hiding in the kitchen cabinets, one in the medicine cabinet above the downstairs bathroom sink. Two more are tucked in the closet of Abby's room and Dean's old room?
Veritable forest of weird shit in it.
On a hunch, John pulls back the rug that's been on Dean's floor for as long as he can remember. There's nothing under it though, and he doesn't know whether to breathe out a sigh or relief or one of frustration.
Abby comes to stand beside him. "He's always been sort of crazy," she mutters. "We used to talk gibberish over my bath at night, did you know that? I think I can even remember some of it."
"Your brother's been weird for a good long while," John responds absently. His eyes flit around the room, cataloguing the things that have found themselves a home since his boy came back. There's a surprising amount of things he just does not understand scattered on the surfaces of the room.
He lifts up a piece of paper with a sketchy drawing of a monster on it, all teeth and hollow pits for eyes, and flips it over. "Changeling," the paper says in messy caps, the A looking more like a star than an actual letter. It's not Dean's handwriting.
Which meant it was Sam's.
"Creepy," Abby murmurs at his back. John's inclined to agree.
Under that page are sheaves of other ones, just random sketches of increasingly vile looking monsters, even if the artist, for the most part, stunk at drawing. They never have more than one word on the back.
"Dad?" Abby says suddenly.
John's contemplating the strangely geometric drawing of a man, the word "wendigo" scrawled across the back so messily that he's not even sure that's what it says. He looks up from the drawing, tilting his face a little to keep an eye on it even as he looks at Abby. "Yeah, baby girl?"
"Do you think that... you think Dean and Sam are tellin' the truth?"
"Depends. I think they're bein' truthful about finding Mary. But they're both obviously lying their asses off about everything else and I don't trust that Sam boy as far as I could throw him."
Abby fidgets with her fingers, pinching her fingertips as she bites her lip. "The demon really hated Sam. And it was scared of him. And I know you don't believe me, Daddy," secret weapon right there, because Abby knows John's a sucker for her callin' him Daddy, "But when it was--when it was inside of me, it said that it was going to kill us first and save Sam's brother for last.
"That's Dean, isn't it?" She sounds small and defeated when she says it, like that just cost her whatever backbone was holdin' her up after that godawful thing was ripped out of her. John's heart aches.
John folds his arms around her small, shaking shoulders and pulls her into his chest. Her head tucks under his chin, her face hiding in the hollow of his throat.
"Easy, easy," he says. He's been waiting for this, for her to have that breakdown she's been heading towards ever since she made herself pull together so she could be vicious at Dean. She wouldn't have done it where Dean could see her because she's too damn proud to let her big brother see her vulnerable anymore.
She sighs wetly. "I'm scared, Daddy," she whispers. "I'm scared."
"Nothing to be scared of, Abby," he tells her.
That's a flat out lie. He usually doesn't advocate lying to his children, but when one of them's sobbing into his shirt and he doesn't have his wife to soften the blow? Hell yeah he's willing to make little white lies. He'll do his damnedest to make sure they don't turn into big black lies.
Abby hiccups a little into his shirt, hands pressed between them in a self-hug. She got that from Mary, though God knows why, since she's always had someone willin' to pick her up and cuddle away her booboos. Dean'd been her favorite go to for that for years.
He rests his cheek on top of her blonde head and sighs. His eyes drift around the room again, looking for something to ground himself, and they alight on the ceiling. For a second, he squints at it, not sure he's seeing what he thinks he's seeing, and then he takes a sudden, startled breath.
There's something on the ceiling. Something big. Painted in white, big as the whole damn ceiling is, and complicated. It's all gently curving lines and then stark, straight ones, script wondering the perimeter of the circle so that it looks like one eternal phrase, ended right where it began.
It's so complicated, in fact, that it takes John half a moment of staring at it to see what it is.
There's a devil's trap on the ceiling. A hell of a lot more to it than the simple one downstairs, but there all the same.
It's big enough to cover the entire damn bedroom and John hates himself for the relief that comes from knowing both Sam and Dean have been in and out of this room before.
Two days after Sam managed to give himself the migraine to end all migraines, he can finally inch his way out of bed without looking for the shotgun to end his misery. He slowly reaches out to pick up the glass of water on the bedside table and lets a relieved smile bloom when it doesn't cause anything but a mild twinge.
He can even turn his head to look at his brother, something that was impossible yesterday.
"What have we learned?" Dean asks.
His head's under the pillow and he's facedown, so it comes out sounding something like what Sam would imagine a bulldog attempting to talk would sound like. It's only years of interpreting his brother's speech that lets him make that out.
Sam finishes the glass of water and sets it gently back down. "No more visions," he tells Dean.
Dean's already asleep again.
Sam heaves himself to his feet; there's a few flashes of white that coalesce into what look like little, iridescent white worms crawling across his vision. Sam tilts his head to the side, because it doesn't hurt and he's not dizzy, but the white worms continue to invade his sight.
"Huh," he says. That's a little different.
Dean snuffles in his bed and manages to convey, "Shut up, Sam," without actually waking up.
Sam shifts a little, but that just seems to make his vision worse, so stands very still. After a few seconds, they start to go away, fading until he's just got one or two he's trying to track across his field of vision. It doesn't really work.
He waits until they disappear completely, and makes a beeline for the bathroom. He hasn't showered since the night before all the visions hit. He's feeling grungy and disgusting.
They've been parked in the motel that entire time, Dean quietly sitting on the bed next to him, checking for demonic omens and clicking away at the keyboard. Half the time, Sam was blearily sure that he was just looking at porn, but the other half of the time, he was working.
Or he was sacked out in a chair with the remote in his hand, TV on silent.
He knows Dean was working. He's just not sure he wasn't reading/watching porn at the same time.
"Same difference, bitch," Dean mutters when Sam's done in the shower and brings it up.
Sam sits on the edge of his own bed, toweling his hair dry, and just stares at the Dean-shaped lump on the bed.
After a couple seconds, it starts shifting. A couple more seconds, during which Sam's graduated from drying his hair to just leaving the towel draped over his head so he can stare harder, and Dean's hand appears from under the blanket, middle finger extended.
When Sam just keeps right on staring at him, Dean makes a cranky sound and lets his hand flop back onto the bed. "You've been out of it for days, Sam," he mutters into his bedding, "Do we really gotta do this now?"
"Yeah," Sam says. He doesn't say anything about wasted days; he wouldn't have been able to function yesterday morning and they both know it. Push came to shove, Dean would have laid down salt lines and taken off to hunt the demon down by himself.
Sam tries not to think about that.
"You know what I found while you were doing your sleeping beauty impression?" Dean pokes his head out from under his pillow and blinks. "Whole fat lot of nothing, that's what. If this thing's gettin' ready to strike, I've no goddamn clue where it's gonna be."
Dean runs one hand through his hair, making it stick up even more wildly that it already is, and sits up. "This? Officially blows, man." He squints in Sam's direction. "You got anything?"
"I'm not looking for her with my mind," Sam deadpans.
He knows that Dean knows he'll see her if she starts killing people. Sam doesn't really see a need to bring it up for no reason. He's kind of hoping that they find her any other way besides the information getting branded into his head. He'd really had enough of pain for right now.
"Pfft," Dean mutters. "Chicken wuss. What's a little headache among family, huh?"
"You want to wear puked on clothes?" Sam discovered he'd upchucked on fully two-thirds of their shared wardrobe when he went looking for some clean clothes to wear.
"Nah, I'll pass."
Dean stands up, wobbles on his feet a little because he's never been good with mornings when a demonic wake-up call wasn't involved in some way. "Dad wants us to go back home," he says, stretching. He scratches at his stomach before he starts to scrounge around for his shirt.
Sam can see it hanging off the foot of the bed, so he points it out and waits for Dean to pull it on before he asks, "So where are we going instead?"
"Oh, we'll be around," Dean says. He tosses a grin Sam's way, already pawing through the clean clothes on the table to find another shirt. "We'll just be somewhere Dad and my little hellspawn sister can see us."
"You shouldn't talk about Abigail like that," Sam says immediately. Especially not after she'd been possessed.
"Uh-huh. You've seen her, right? And how much she wants to load my hide up with buckshot?"
Sam pinches the bridge of his nose. He hopes that vague pressure in the back of his skull is not another vision waiting for the right second to strike. "That's because you're sort of a dick, Dean," he says before he really stops to think about it, "You left her with a note and then didn't even apologize for leaving."
"Well, hey, I'm glad you're on your high horse there, Sammy, since you'd've never done that," Dean says. There's an edge to his voice, and Sam admits to himself that he's confused as all hell until he backtracks and realizes what he'd been talking about.
Autopilot? Not his friend. Autopilot, in fact, tends to get him in a lot of trouble.
Dean sniffs a shirt, makes a face, wads it back up, and throws it on the table. "Oh, wait. I didn't even get a note the second time you tried to ditch me, did I?"
That's fair, Sam concedes. He drops his eyes away from Dean for a minute, fiddling with the blankets. "You gonna bring that up every time I piss you off?" he asks. It worked, he hated to admit. Nothing made him feel shittier faster than Dean looking at him like he'd tried to kill a baby.
Or leave him. Same difference, for his brother.
"Whatever," Dean says. Which was as good as a yes. Damnit.
They decide to leave town after they hit the laundry mat. It's a solid plan, Dean thinks, because not only are the shirts he's wearing smelling a little ripe, but everything else in the duffle has the crusted up, skank-ass remains of anything Sam's ever eaten. Including the stuff he'd wolfed down another life ago. That's just how much his brother had puked.
In revenge for Sam having upchucked on almost every single clean piece of clothing they own, Dean gives him the handful of change he finds in his pocket, digs out a twenty, and leaves him to do it by himself.
Hey, that's just poetic justice, alright? Nothing wrong with that.
Besides, Sammy bitching? Music to his ears.
Sam bitches while he separates out the whites, the colors, and the jeans, something that Dean never bothers with and Sam is completely anal about; Dean'd gotten chewed out a few weeks ago for letting something blue slip in with the whites even though the damn thing had only turned their underwear a more manly color.
His dork of a brother had taken a hard earned twenty (even if it might have been Sam's hard earned twenty), and picked up another package of briefs. Dean had shrugged at the time and claimed all the blue ones for his own, after a thorough washing. Hey, they may share most of their clothes, but Dean draws the line at underwear. No way is he putting on something that's had Sam's ass and balls in it.
End product is that Sam's got a small pile of whites on one washer consisting almost entirely of socks and underwear, one pile of jeans that stink to hell, and three piles of painstakingly sorted blues, greens, and reds.
He's never quite figured out why Sam spazzes about laundry, since he hadn't cared before he'd left in that other life and hadn't really cared that much after he'd come back either. It's just a Sam quirk from this time around.
"Dude," Sam says.
Dean looks up from the magazine he's been reading, ready to defend his reading choice if he has to. Cosmo had some freakin' hot chicks in it sometimes.
Sam's not paying any attention to him though. He's holding up a shirt in mild horror, looking at it like he's never seen it before. Dean squints at it right along with him, trying to place it. It's the hole in the hem that gives it away; Dean's hemmed the damn thing enough to know which shirt it is.
Dean knows for a fact Sam stole it two days ago, right after Dean'd worn it and decided it was clean enough for a second go around.
"What color is this?" Sam asks, voice hitting that lovely range that makes him sound like a six year old girl faced with icky boy cooties.
Dean squints at it a little bit, trying to remember what color it might have been originally. "Puce?" he guesses. He doesn't have the slightest clue what the hell color puce is, but it's a good enough word for it.
The shirt's kind of this unholy mix of green and purple. It's got this weird pink sheen going for it too, like a pixie had bled all over it and then peed on it for good measure. On the sleeve, Dean can see a splotch of orange.
Quite frankly, he doesn't know what the fuck happened to it to make it that color. It used to be a nice, sedate blue.
"Puce is purple-red, Dean," Sam mutters. Dean makes a huh face, thinking, hey, you learn something new everyday, and goes back to reading his magazine. Let Sam have his mini-freak-out in peace.
"This is..." Sam trails off. "It's. I don't think they've invented a name for this color, Dean."
There's an article in the magazine titled, "How to tell if your man is really into you." Dean skips it. That's obviously for women with inferior lovers. He? Is a god in bed.
When Sam just keeps mumbling to himself about colors, Dean sighs and turns the page until he finds a beer ad. "You are such a little girl, Sam," he says. "Just put it in your red pile and stop flipping the fuck out, man."
He's not looking, but Dean knows Sam's just pulled a bitchface of epic proportions on him. "It's not red!" he practically shouts.
Dean waves at the nice people slowly inching away from the crazy men in the laundry mat and hisses, "Then put it with the green shit! It's not that hard, Sam," out of the corner of his mouth. Christ. Drama queen.
Sam keeps right on holding the shirt up, except he starts talking directly to it instead of Dean, asking it what color it is. And which one of them got more crazy people looks? Life was not fair.
See, this is why Dean usually got stuck doing the laundry. Sam would flip out about something or other, how this sock was brown and not white, even if it had originally been white, and what pile would it go into? Sam'd deliberate about it so damn long, and so damn hard, that they'd be there for half the day just sorting their clothes because Sam always, always roped him into helping.
He'd almost swear that the fucker did it on purpose.
He resolutely opens his magazine back up and tries to get lost in the article illustrated with very, ahem, flexible women.
"Dean," Sam says a few minutes later.
Dean reluctantly looks up and then groans. Sam's pointing unerringly at a man outside, holding onto a newspaper while he walks leisurely towards the coffee shop across the street, and looking for all the world like he belongs there.
It's their mysterious human stalker. Again. Dean's getting real fucking tired of the guy.
"Duck," he advises Sam. Guy seems to have a hard-on to rival Texas for his geek brother.
He closes his magazine and dumps it onto his uncomfortable, ass-numbing little plastic chair. He's got to stretch before he goes anywhere, pop all of his joints back into place because that little torture device had almost locked them up but good, but then he's nudging Sam in the shoulder with his knee to get his attention again.
"I'll get rid of him," he says, "You? Stay with the laundry. I mean it, Sam," he warns when it looks like Sam's going to protest a little, even if he's crouched like a ginormous dork behind a washing machine. "I'm not replacing our clothes if they get stolen again. You'll have to hustle your ass to get more."
Sam mutters darkly under his breath, but stays put.
Dean walks out of the laundry mat with a swagger. Hey, anybody who gets him away from Sam's obsessive-compulsive, control freak meltdown over clothes is alright. For the most part. Even if they are a goddamn stalker who's been following them for states.
Guy rivals Henricksen.
He gets distracted for a few seconds wondering what Henricksen does in this world, with no Winchesters to accuse of every crime under the sun. Poor guy probably sits at home and cries himself to sleep at night, Dean decides with a smirk.
So far, their way of dealin' with this guy has included long, winding chases through city streets, getting in the Impala and taking off while he was pretending not to watch them, and hey, even hiding behind a trash can when none of the other options were available. Dean's thinkin' they might be in need of the direct approach.
Scare the shit out of him.
Dean likes that approach best anyway. He reaches out a hand to tap Stalking Man on one shoulder.
"Hey, man," he begins when Stalking Guy looks at him over his shades, "You mind telling me why you've been followin' us around? I'm hot shit, I know, but I gotta tell you, neither of us really swing your way."
The man swallows his mouthful of coffee and does his damned best to look confused. "I don't know what you're talking about," he says around the lid of his cup. He tries a little harder to look innocent while he's at it.
To Dean, it sort of looks like he's just bitten into a rotten piece of fruit, but, whatever. Not everyone is a master at lying like he is. Freakin' awesome at it, too.
"Yeah, see, that's not really gonna fly," Dean says right back. "I've seen you at least... what is it, eight times now? I know Sam ditched you a couple days ago."
"You're insane," Stalking Man mutters loudly. He looks around like the people in the coffee shop are gonna help him if he says it loud enough.
Dean snorts. If there's one thing he's learned about people, it's that they don't do anything if their own asses aren't on the line. He's more comfortable with most monsters than he is with people. "Nah, I'm not. Now, my brother over there? Sometimes, he's a little insane. He's sorting laundry for God's sake. What kind of man does that, huh?"
Stalking Man looks down into his coffee. "Your dad hired me," he finally says.
"Huh?" Dean asks him intelligently.
"Dean Winchester, right?" the man swirls his coffee, takes a gulp of it before he looks up at Dean with brown eyes. "I'm Richard Wilkins, private detective."
The way he says it sounds kind of like Dean'd always assumed Batman would introduce himself if he didn't have a pesky secret identity. He raises his eyebrows at the guy. "And you're following us because...?"
He's already got that feelin'. Dad hadn't liked Sam for a while, still didn't like Sam, never mind him saving Abby's ass or anything (with help, of course). Dean's just a little surprised that Mom didn't rip Dad a new one for even thinking of doing this.
"Not you," Wilkins says, "Sam. Or, rather, James Taylor."
That's the second time in about three days he's heard that name. Just like last time, it makes him clench his fists a little. Sam wasn't a fucking James Taylor. Sam was Sam Winchester, Sammy, pain in the ass little brother who never, ever did what was good for him and always had to have the last damn word. Not that abandoned kid nobody had loved.
He is, without a doubt, one day going to go on a rampage and knock the shit out of everyone Sam's ever interacted with as James Taylor. Just because. Doesn't need a specific reason, because most of it was shit, even if Sam doesn't really care all that much.
"You leave Sammy alone," Dean grinds out.
Wilkins gives him this kind of sorrowful, put upon look that's faker than Dean's usual, "I sympathize with your ghost trouble, even though you brought them on yourselves you motherfuckers," smile. Guy needs practice, Dean decides.
"Son," the man says and that, that right there? Makes Dean twitch almost enough that his hand starts going automatically for the butterfly he's got in his pocket, "You do know that your Sam's been lying to you almost from the get go, right? Your dad's worried about you."
Oh, look, same rhetoric even. Dean wonders just how gullible he looks, if both Dad and a total stranger think that Sam, skinny bean-pole Sam, has him wrapped around his finger. Which he sort of does, but, fuck it, it's not like Dean doesn't know it. Or like Sam was gonna try to use that to get anything out of him but the occasional milkshake.
Wilkins is looking at him like he's waiting for a mental breakdown. Dean holds onto his fraying temper with his fingernails. "Look, asshole, it's none of your freakin' business. At all. Seriously. Get lost."
"That's where you're wrong, kid. Your Dad hired me. And since he didn't show yesterday to take all the info, I figure that means he's not done with me yet."
Gonna kill you, Dean has time to think, before a huge hand is clamping down on the hand inching towards his pocket. He's suddenly standing in shadow. Sammy. Fucker. "I can kill him, right?" Dean asks.
Wilkins's eyes widen a little bit, coffee halfway to his mouth. He looks nervous, Dean notes, but he'd be nervous too if he suddenly had a couple of six foot plus guys looming over him. Well, he'd be nervous if he was a poncy little bitch with a bad combover and an attitude.
"No. No killing people," Sam says decisively. He tugs on Dean's wrist once before he lets go and turns away. "Come on before someone takes our clothes."
Dean narrows his eyes at the skeevy little detective man and is pleased when he hurriedly looks away. "You. Leave us alone."
The man swallows. He stands up, gives Dean a kind of shaky nod, and walks away. Dean watches him, eyes narrowed at his back, until he turns the corner. Then, he turns around and jogs to catch up with Sam, who's already back in the laundry mat, still sorting clothes with the kind of mind-boggling patience Dean only has when he's got to sharpen his knives.
"You totally sounded like some cowboy warning the bad guy off his girlfriend," Sam says softly when Dean pulls up even with him. He sounds totally amused about it all, the fucktard, like he thinks it's the funniest thing in the world that Dean had been threatening some middle-aged guy for snooping.
"Good thing you're a girl already, huh, Sammy?" Dean mutters back snidely. "Big bad private detective man has to save you from me." He doesn't mention that the guy thinks it's the other way around. He has his pride.
"Yeah, I kind of figured that's what he was," Sam says. He fishes around in the duffle still on one of the machines and finds a couple more pieces of clothes. "That's how Dad knew my name."
"Your fake name." Dean shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Some fatass is sitting in his chair, reading his Cosmo. Fucker. "Your fake, stupid name."
Sam just snorts a little, bending over to retrieve the pile of clothes he's got at his feet. They're the reds, Dean notices right away, and has to hold back a smirk when he sees the putrid whatever colored shirt sitting innocently on top of that pile. He'd totally called that. He was awesome to the max.
His brother reaches out to flip open the lid of one of the machines and fucking finally opens one of the washers to deposit an armload of clothes into it. Dean watches as he carefully feeds quarters into the machine and dumps in a capful of the cheap shit they'd picked up at the grocery store two buildings over.
That's another reason Sam's not allowed to do laundry by himself all that often. Dean has to reach over and stop the nimrod from adding another capful of soap. Sam never had learned that adding too much detergent just mean they'd have itchy, detergent full clothes. After the washing machine spewed bubbles.
"Dude," he says, "Less is more."
"That's not what you usually say," Sam mutters back. He reluctantly slams the lid on the washer closed and starts up the machine.
As soon as it starts going, Dean hops up and plops his ass on the lid. It rumbles under him and he drums his heels against the front of it; he can remember doing this with Dad and Sam when he was little, the both of them sitting on one machine and taking turns saying stuff while their voice vibrated all over the freakin' place. Dean tries it now, saying, "Poltergeist," just to hear his voice distend the word with warbles. Heh.
"You really are seven," Sam says.
He loads up the next three machines in quick succession, Dean keeping a hawk eye on the amount of detergent even while he tries out wendigo, changeling, shapeshifter, werewolf and, with a sidelong look at Sam, jinniyah.
Sam doesn't even twitch. He does, however, give him a nasty look before he boosts himself onto the machine next to Dean.
They're both quiet for a second, and then Sam says, "Bob the Demon," like it's the most natural thing in the world. The old washing machine, chugging and vibrating like a magic fingers bed, makes Sam sound like he's hiccup stuttering when he says it.
Dean cracks up. "I told you his name should be Bob," he hoots.
Sam smiles, dimples and everything, and ducks his head a little to hide it. Dean reaches over to ruffle his hair. Okay, so maybe Sam was a little more anal retentive control freak than he used to be. Still his little brother with his stupid sense of humor.
Dean slams his boots into the side of the machine and hums a little under his breath. Metallica comes out sounding more like one of Sam's jacked up "alternative" shit.
"We're gonna go find Mom after this, right?" Sam asks suddenly.
Dean swallows a little. Yeah, he'd maybe forgotten a little bit about that. Just a little. "Yeah, Sammy. We'll find her."
Both of them know it's not gonna be that freakin' simple. They've got no signs and no patterns to follow. They've got Dad and Gayle to skip out on and a stupid ass private detective that wants to stalk Sam. But sometimes, Sam's still so stupidly young, asking questions just to get reassurances, and Dean'll be damned if he doesn't answer that need.
Feels good to have someone who still looks up to him. Even if that someone is fully capable of kicking his ass with his freaky mind powers if he wanted to.
Not that Dean's ever gonna admit that. He leans over enough to bump his knee into Sam's bony kneecap, hard, and says, "Gotta have clean clothes first though, man. You smell like a toilet."
"That's you," Sam says.
Dean makes a big show of sniffing his clothes, lifting his arms to check. Yeah, he's smellin' a little ripe, but that's what happens when your bitch of a brother steals your clean clothes after upchucking on everything else. "Nah, that's a hundred percent Sam. No wonder you never get laid."
He has a sudden thought. And, no, thank you very much Sam, it is not lonely. He usually has lots of thoughts. This one's just a little weird.
He does not, in fact, know if Sam's ever been laid in this time place thing. Dean'd known pretty much down to the time Sam'd first gotten his sweaty mitts on a girl because Sam had come home smiling like a little girl and glowing. This time around? He doesn't really know.
That's kind of irking him. He sends Sam a suspicious look.
Sam pretends he doesn't see it and kicks his heels against his own machine, hard enough to get them dirty looks from lardass over there trying to figure out why he doesn't have girls falling all over him.
"I'm thinking Wyoming," Sam says. "For Mom."
"Why Wyoming?"
Sam shrugs a little. "Just a feeling."
Well, hell, they'd gone on less than "just a feeling" before. Especially if said feeling was coming from a powerful psychic who sometimes saw people die in his head.
"Alright," Dean says. "You get to tell Dad though."
When John doesn't hear from Dean, Mary, or hell, even Sam, within the next few days, he starts to get angry. Scratch that. He's been angry since his little girl looked at him with black eyes and sneered. What he does now is get downright pissed.
Dean's cell phone is off. John leaves him a nasty message, full of cuss words and the occasional plea for him to at least check in. He's having flashbacks to coming home with his son gone, and his wife's still missing, and he's going to kill something any minute now.
Unfortunately, the only thing in the house is Abby.
He's had to move her bed into his and Mary's room because she screams herself hoarse half the night. It takes less time for him to stumble over and gently shake her shoulder, rock her back to sleep, if she's in his room than it would having to run down the hall.
Besides, he'd stubbed his toes a grand total of twelve times that first night. He's not repeating that again.
He misses Mary.
John sits down on the edge of a kitchen chair, scrubs a hand over his face, and picks up the phone he's got on the table. He doesn't have a cell phone (newfangled business, is what he'd told Mary), but he's starting to wish he did. Would make it a hell of a lot easier to pace while he called.
He dials the numbers and waits.
The phone rings once.
"He's not gonna answer," Abby tells him. She's hovering in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself still; she's got self-hugging down to an art form right about now. "You know he's not going to. That's just how Dean is. He takes off and he doesn't leave any messages."
The phone rings a third time while he's looking at Abby out of the corner of his eye.
She sounds bitter. And pissed. She's his daughter, through and through. Dean's Mary's. Abby's always been his.
The fourth ring cuts off halfway through. John closes his eyes and rests the receiver against his temple. He's called enough to know by now that that doesn't mean jack shit. Dean's phone's as impatient as his boy is.
Right on cue, he hears, "This is Dean Winchester, leave a message after the beep. If you've got one of those problems, leave a real specific message." There's a weird emphasis on those, like it's some kind of secret code John hasn't been able to crack.
John hangs up the phone, gently, without leaving a message.
"Told you," Abby mutters.
John grunts out a response, resting his face in his palms. His wife, his son, his... whatever the hell Sam was to all of them. Missing without leaving so much as a note.
Abby takes the chair next to him and leans over so she can cross her arms on the table. She drops her head into them a second later, turning so that she's facing John still, and says, "What're we gonna do?"
The phone rings.
His head whips around to look at it, thinking, hoping, and damnit, maybe even praying a little bit. Abby's regarding it with wary, distrustful eyes, but John scoops it up in the pause between the first ring and the second.
"Dean?" he asks.
There's a puzzled silence on the other line. "Mr. Winchester?" a man's voice finally asks.
John deflates. "The detective guy. Wilty."
"Wilkins, Mr. Winchester," Wilkins corrects mildly. He sounds a little frazzled, a little not quite there, and John? John can sympathize. Though he really, really doubts this guy is also missing his wife and his kid like John is.
"I know your name," John says, even though he doesn't, "What do you want? Now's not a good time."
The man on the other end of the line swallows hard. There's a sound like someone's just wiped a cloth across their sweat, and then Wilkins comes back on the line, still dry swallowing. "Mr. Winchester," he says, "I would appreciate it if you came down here so I can go over this case with you."
"Not now," John growls at him.
He's aware of Abby watching him with bright green eyes. Suspicious brat, John notes fondly, and tunes back into his conversation.
"... and you see, I don't take on subjects that threaten me unless I'm being paid hazard," Wilkins finishes.
John blinks. "Sam threatened you?" he asks. He could see that. Kid was tall and still growing; he'd seen it and catalogued it a few days ago, when it looked like Sam might have started to gain a little on Dean's height. Skinny fuck, but scary too.
"Not Sam," Wilkins retorts, "Your kid. Possessive, scary kid."
"Dean?" John says incredulously. Abby narrows her eyes at him, leaning in to try to pick up the other side of the conversation. John leans a little farther away from her, tipping his chair back on its rear legs. He breathes a heavy sigh out through his nose.
"Dean's a good kid," he defends.
"I repeat: possessive and scary."
Which isn't much like Dean at all. Dean's all intensity and obsession, a bone-deep need to please paired with a devil may care smile.
Then he thinks about it. A bone deep need to please, he acknowledges, but he'd also stood toe to toe with John over the issue of Sam and he'd picked up, from somewhere, knowledge about how to trap and kill a demon. Before he was five years old.
Scary and possessive? Sounded about right.
"So, are you going to come by for that file?" Wilkins asks.
"Look," John says. He rubs a hand down his face again, feeling tired and pissed and tired, worried down to his bones, "My wife's missin'. I haven't seen my son since the day she went missing. Now's not a good time."
Wilkins is quiet on the other side of the line. Abby purses her lips and buries her face in her arms, blonde hair fanning around her head like silk.
"I just saw your kid an hour ago," he finally offers. He sounds uncomfortable, twitching in his seat. John's not too sure he's happy knowing that his son can threaten a man like that. "At the Corner Coin on 6th. They're staying at the Westminster."
That's more than John'd known two minutes ago. He's gonna give this man the kind of tip that comes with three extra zeros at the end. "The Westminster," he repeats, just to be sure, then, "Thanks, Wilkins."
"That's what you're payin' me for," the man says. "Just... make sure you don't mention my name, alright?"
John snorts and hangs up the phone.
"Get some stuff together," he tells Abby quietly, "I found your brother."
She lifts her head, watches him for a second, and then reluctantly stands up. She doesn't ask what they need. John's glad; he doesn't have the foggiest clue what they might need to take a demon out of his wife.
That's why he's going to find his son.