Sam's got the laundry dumped out on both the beds. He's not folding it because, regardless of what Dean likes to rant about, he's not freaking anal about clothes; they just go into two separate duffels.
Dean gets most of the t-shirts because he's always hot. Sam claims most of the long sleeves for himself. The flannels get divided up equally between both bags, and Sam leaves Dean's boxer-briefs sitting in a sad little pile on the bed.
No way is he touching those more than he has to.
"Dude," Dean says. He's got the entire knife collection strewn out of the small table under the window, just asking for trouble even if he's got the curtains closed. "You know that I'm just gonna grab shit outta whatever bag's closest, right?"
Sam pulls a face at his duffle. He knows it. He just likes having things he can call his own. It's a left over from, hey, growing up again and having even less shit this time around than he did last time.
If he tells Dean that, he'll start looking at the knife he's currently sharpening like he's ready to commit homicide. Maybe even start cooing at it under his breath, like Sam can't ihear him/i describe all the ways he wants to fillet Sam's former foster families.
It is, frankly, a little disturbing, so he doesn't mention that.
He shrugs. "If you kept your dirty hands off my clothes, it would work perfectly."
"You have no clothes, Sam," Dean mutters. He tests the edge of the knife on his forearm, shaving hair off, and flicks it closed. "The only thing you had when I found you was a pair of pants and, what was it, a knife?"
Sam lobs a sock at Dean's head. One of the ones that he still can't tell if it's supposed to be brown or not, but he kind of suspects not, since he couldn't find a match for it anywhere in the dirty clothes.
Dean lets it smack him in the face and drop down into his lap. He calmly picks it up with one hand and points his newest knife at Sam's face with the other. "Gimme another sock if you're gonna deliver them," he says.
His boot thunks against the table as he drops both knife and sock onto it.
Sam doesn't look long enough to see Dean pull his shoe off. Dean's socks? Got toxic. His brother didn't see the need to change them unless the monsters could smell him coming from downwind. Which was why he couldn't tell if some of their socks were naturally brown or not.
While Dean's occupied doing that, Sam sneaks the putrid, whatever color it is shirt into his duffle. Let Dean get stuck having to wear it in public one day.
Dean's still wagging his hand in the air for another sock when Sam jerks his head up and frowns. He makes a hand motion at Dean, shut up in their language, fucked up though it's been by eighteen years apart.
The knock on the door sounds just when Sam gets a fix on who's making the skin between his shoulder blades do that really weird crawl thing. Former demon possessed, he gets first. Then, familyDadgirlnotDeanfamily.
It feels like chewing on tinfoil.
"Fuck," Sam mutters.
Dean's got a resigned look on his face. "What're the odds that's not Dad?" he asks hopefully.
"Not good," Sam says. He rubs his face with one hand and looks at the door over the side of his palm. "You get to open it."
"Nuh-uh," Dean says right back. He's still got one shoe on and one shoe off, brownish sock hanging halfway off his foot as he tries to pull it on with one hand. "He's pissed at me, remember?"
Sam inches away from the door, hoping that Dean'll get up and get it if he manages to reach the bathroom. He can't answer the door if he's taking a leak, right? "Yeah, well, he hates me already."
"Don't even think about it," Dean says lowly. It sounds almost like a cough, but there's definite warning in his voice, and Sam really doesn't want to wake up with honey in his hair or shaved bald. Again.
He stops inching and pulls a face at Dean instead.
"So, answer the door, man. You've got nothing to lose." Dean smiles beatifically, fake as the sunrise painted in watercolor over their window. Dean'd cackled in delight when he'd seen the room and refused to budge afterwards; his brother? Has a thing for weird motels.
Sam crosses his arms and glowers. That is Dean logic. Dean logic makes regular people's heads hurt. "That's not--"
Dad's voice cuts Sam off. "I can hear you in there, boys." And he sounds pissed.
"Sammy'll get it in a second," Dean yells back through the closed door. He waves a hand at Sam, eyebrows tilted to that cocky angle just shy of what it has to be to make Sam want to sock him in the mouth.
"When this is over," Sam says softly as he closes in on the door, "I'm going to kill you."
Dean just laughs. "Bring it on, bitch."
Sam opens the door. Dad's not gonna go away and Sam doesn't want to get arrested for throttling his big brother. Even if the officer (and Dad, most likely) would declare it a "domestic dispute."
Dad's glaring at them when Sam finally gets the door open. It's a full on Dad glare; lowered eyebrows and tight, pinched mouth, staring dark eyes. Sam feels about two feet tall underneath it and has to fight the urge to go hide behind Dean. No matter how big he'd gotten, no matter how much he'd gotten a kick out of pissing Dad off, that look had always put the fear of God into him.
He turns his back on Dad and Abby, tactically inviting them in without having to talk to them, and tries to ignore the itching sensation that's crawling up his back at having someone that mad where he can't see them.
Besides, Dean's watching both Dad and Abby with hawk eyes, despite the fact that he's got his shoes on the table. Sam can see him tucking that knife into his boot even as he snags one of the shirts off the open duffle Sam's still got on Dean's bed and spreads it out over the knives on the table.
Yeah, Sam figures, that would have been a disaster to show their family. Dean's family. Whatever it was now. Dad's still his, even if he's not Mom and Dad's anymore.
"Hey Dad," Dean greets him casually. There's a beat of silence, just long enough that Sam can hear the potential snub Dean wants to inflict and discards in favor of the simpler, "Hey Gayle."
Dad looks at them both like they're a few inches up from scum on his list.
Abby just glares daggers at Dean for a second before turning to stare at him like he's the second coming. It reminds him of how the Yellow-Eyed Demon used to look at him, and that makes Sam really uncomfortable.
The demon remains, floating through his system and integrated in his blood, hum out a greeting to whatever residue demons leave in their hosts. Sam's mouth twitches, enough that Dean catches it and sends him a questioning lift of his eyebrows; Sam waves it away with a nod and a twitch of his hand. He knows it'll fade in a few months, when Abby completely replaces her blood supply, but in the meantime it's honestly creepy. And he knows creepy.
He wonders if she can feel it too, buzzing under her skin. He'd been possessed once before Azazel, but he hadn't met any demons after that until that last one months and months later. He's a little curious. In the morbid, slightly crazy way Dean accuses him of being with research.
"How'd you find us?" Sam finally asks when it looks like everyone's plan is just to stand there and stare.
Dad rounds on him again, still glaring. Sam has to physically stop himself from either cringing back or raising his chin and jutting his jaw; he'd never dealt well with Dad's anger. The other man finally grinds out, "Hired a detective. He found you."
Dean makes a dismayed noise through his nose. "Dude, I wagered Sammy that nobody would have been dumb enough to hire that turdling," he says. "Guess I was wrong." He stands up and purposefully moves in front of the table full of knives, crossing his arms as he leans back against it.
Sam shakes his head and hides a smile by ducking. They hadn't even had that conversation, but they hadn't needed to. The man had been a ridiculous excuse for a private detective.
"Shut up, Dean," Dad says.
His brother shuts his mouth immediately, automatically, and looks uncomfortable. There's a look on his face that Sam hasn't seen in something like twenty years and it makes him pissed is what it does. Sam finds himself leaning forward aggressively, about to sidle between the two of them and get into Dad's face about it. He'd spent a lifetime watching Dad do this to Dean. He's not gonna watch it again.
Dean finds his voice before he can do more than take a step or two. "Dude," he says. One hand comes up to press against Sam's chest, and, huh, seems like Sam'd made it more than a few steps if he's already by Dean's side.
He's not paying that much attention to it though, because Dad is still glaring at him and he's never backed down from a challenge this man's issued. Never.
The hand on his chest lifts a few inches and then smacks back down hard, right over his heart. "Chill, Sam," Dean says seriously. He lowers his voice, enough that Sam should be the only one able to hear it unless Dad or Abby have bat hearing, and continues, "Furniture's starting to shake."
It is, Sam finds when he takes his eyes off of Dad. The nearest bed is vibrating a little, not that noticeable, but, Sam sees with a sinking stomach that Abby's watching it. Her green eyes are wide, frightened, and Sam clamps down on his telekinesis before it can do its flying routine, like it usually does when he gets uncomfortable.
The almost-pain telekinesis always causes blurs into the sensation of half of his blood saying hi to something infesting hers. Sam twitches and drags his gaze away from her before he can let that give him a headache. He doesn't need another one so soon, thanks.
The bed stops shaking a minute later. Sam steps away from Dean's hand with a miniature shrug, designed to look put upon even as he leans most of his weight into it for a second. He hates that Dad can still get under his skin. The man'd been dead for two years, for God's sake, and Sam hadn't seen him for eighteen after that.
He's only known this version of Dad for less than six months and he's already sometimes ready to strangle the man.
Abby narrows her eyes at him when he looks up, but she doesn't say anything. She's gone white around her mouth, pinched too much, and her hands are tucked up under her armpits, but she keeps her mouth shut about what she saw and doesn't ask any questions.
Sam's glad. He clears his throat and takes another step away from Dad and Dean.
"Sorry," he mutters. Dean makes a non-committal sound back and crosses his arms again, his ass perched on the table. Sam hopes he's not sitting on the knives.
Dad crosses his arms right back at Dean. "You were going to skip out on me," he says, like the last two minutes have never happened.
Sam can't help but think about how much simpler life would be if one of his pain-in-the-ass powers turned out to be the power to make someone forget something. Then he thinks about someone like Ava with a power like that and shudders.
If Dean notices, he doesn't comment on it. "Yeah, we were. We're not takin' amateurs with us on a hunt, Dad. No dice."
"Hunt?" Abby asks. She looks tiny and frail in their motel room. Sam doesn't know why.
"Figure of speech," Dean shoots back easily, "What you've gotta remember is that me and Sam? Been doing this for years. You? Amateur. I'm not gonna have your blood on my hands, Dad. Take Gayle home, put salt on the windows, and stay there until we call you. Got it?"
"Don't you take that tone with me," Dad says. He narrows his eyes, leans forward aggressively. Sam curls his fingers into fists and looks anywhere but at Dad. "You're going after my wife, Dean. Your mother. You're not leaving me behind."
"What about Gayle?" Dean asks.
He's got that calculating look on his face, like he's trying to call your bluff. Sam knows from experience that bluff calling? Never really works on Dad. He's just as likely to kick your ass to the curb with twenty bucks and a backpack to your name.
"She doesn't want to be alone and I don't trust anyone to take care of her," Dad says. He still looks like he's ten seconds away from screaming his head off in frustration, so Sam decides its time to look away.
He looks at Abby instead. She's obviously not paying any attention to the conversation, because she's just missed a cue to glare at Dean without even glancing up. Sam hasn't known her that long, but he knows that about her.
Instead, she's drifting around their room, peeking into the messy bathroom and bending over to try to unobtrusively look under the beds. Sam doesn't know what she's looking for, but she makes a safer target for his eyes than Dad and Dean do.
The tingling/static buzz down his spine is almost worth it. Hi, he imagines his demon gunk saying, and hi back, dad, from what's leftover in Abby's blood.
He needs to get out more.
Dad and Dean are still arguing and getting louder. Sam doesn't really want to hear it, so he moves to the bed behind Dean and starts shoving stuff into the duffle. Random stuff, like Dean's other boot (on the floor, and Dean had shifted out of the way with a weird look to let him get at it).
He wanders over into the bathroom and picks up all their things. Toothbrushes, hair brush, hair gel, shaving cream, razors. The bathroom towels, because they can never have too many, and the complimentary shampoo the place is nice enough to offer.
Abby's watching him instead of the room when he comes back out and dumps it all into his duffle. Sam ignores her. When he's sure that he's got pretty much everything packed away, excluding the knifes Dean's still got covered on the table, he sits on the edge of his bed and thinks.
They've got to get from Kansas to Wyoming sometime soon; Sam's internal shit is gonna hit the fan warning light (Dean's name for it, not his) has been blinking steadily faster since he tentatively identified Wyoming as the center of it. They need to go, and they need to go soon.
"Fine," Sam says suddenly. He interrupts the heated argument developing between Dad and Dean.
Dean's head whips around to pin him with a half-incredulous, half-pissed stare. "Dude," he says, and in that Sam can hear "You ran from me for eighteen years," and "Your wish? kind of shitty right about now," and "I am so going to kill you, bitch."
Sam ignores him for a minute. "Can you guys give us a second? Car's out front, stick your gear in the tru--the backseat." No way they should have access to the modest collection of guns in the trunk. Not yet.
When they've gone, Abby still watching them suspiciously and Dad giving them a threatening look, that's when Sam turns back to look at Dean.
"Look, they're not safe at the house," Sam says.
He wills Dean to understand it, to get it. The Yellow-Eyed Demon had been able to be doused in holy water without smoking. Meg had broken Bobby's devil's trap before Dean and Bobby had managed to exorcise her. The Demon's offspring could be just as strong and Abby and Dad were the intended victims. No way in hell did either of them stand a chance if a demon managed to get into the house.
"Bobby?" Dean asks tightly.
"Don't know him," Sam returns. They don't. They haven't really had an occasion to get in touch with Bobby Singer. Dean's got Roadhouse connections this time around, a little of them at least, but by mutual agreement they've been staying away from the clusterfuck that was Gordon and the Roadhouse by default.
They've got nowhere to turn. Sam can see it reflected in Dean's eyes.
"Fuck," Dean says eloquently.
Then he goes outside to direct Dad and Abby on the correct way to store things in the Impala.
Dean is never, ever going to think about the ride to Wyoming again. Ever. He's made a pact with his brain that he's not going to even have nightmares about it, that's how stinkin' terrible it is.
Dad glowers from the backseat nearly the entire time, pissed that he's not in the front and that they're following Sammy's hunch instead of doing God knows what, or hell, for all Dean knows Dad's just pissed because he's driving too fast. The man doesn't say and Dean doesn't ask.
Gayle sits next to Dad for the entire ride. She makes up for his silence. She bitches about his music and the highway, the bumpy road and the lack of built in restrooms in the Impala's trunk. She puts freakin' Sammy to shame.
His traitor of a brother, on the other hand, goes to sleep as soon as the Impala hits her stride. She starts making that happy rumbling purr she only makes when Dean goes over seventy and Sam's out, sliding back and forth on his seat with the curves in the road. Once or twice he lands on Dean's shoulder; Dean lets him stay there for a few minutes, until his ginormous heavy head starts cutting off the circulation in his arm, and then he nudges him back over.
That part's not so bad, though he'll kill anything that tries to make him admit that.
That all changes the minute he hits the Wyoming border though. Sam sits up like Dean's just rammed a hot poker down his spine, eyes wide open and nothing but pupil. He makes a noise like a dying animal, all wheezing breath, and Dean's automatically flinching away from it, pulling the steering wheel his way to get away from the noise.
In the backseat, Abby lets out a scream, which is not helping at all. Dad swears, which is marginally better, and the next thing Dean knows Dad's halfway over the backseat and grabbing at the wheel. That helps even less, because Dean's automatic response to anyone grabbing at his steering wheel has become, after years of Sammy yelling at him to slow down in urban areas, to wrench the wheel further to the left and step on the gas.
Lucky for all of them, Sam shuts up almost immediately, curling in to protect his head, and Dean can think.
Dean jerks his baby back onto the road as soon as his muscles un-seize, apologizing to her the whole way.
When the car is more or less back in his lane (he's not going to worry about it too much, because, dude, deserted highway), he turns his attention to Dad first. Mostly because Dad's in the way of him getting to Sam, who he can see the gigantic feet and legs of, but nothing else.
After pushing and shoving Dad back into the back seat, he is once again able to see all of his geektastic, psychic little bitch of a brother. Who is curled around his skull like it's physically hurting him to be in Wyoming and wasn't this just fantastic.
One handed, Dean digs the bottle of pills out of his jacket. Again. He never goes anywhere without the suckers now.
"No," Sam says when Dean waves them in his general direction, "It's fine. I just wasn't expecting..." he trails off about exactly what it was he was expecting to find, but then rallies and says, "She's here."
"Kind of figured there, Lassie."
"What was that?" Gayle asks from the backseat. She's sipping some holy water she must have found back there; Dean's heartened to see that he's managed not to pick up any demonic passengers in between Kansas and here, but he's kind of pissed that she's drinking that when they'll need it later.
"You're gonna want to put that down, Gayle," he says instead of answering her question, "We've only got so much holy water without you drinkin' it all. We'll need it."
"Dean," Sam says reprovingly. Great.
His brother turns in his seat to face Gayle, trying to smile. It comes off looking more like the bastard child of a grin and a patented Sammy bitchface number nine, but Gayle melts into a little pile of incestuous girl at it. Friggin' weirdo.
"You know I have visions, right?" Sam asks.
It's a rhetorical question, but Gayle nods her head anyway. Dean rolls his eyes and stops looking in the rearview mirror. No way was he going to watch that schmoopy lovefest go on. No thanks.
"I can feel demons," Sam says next to his hear.
There's a general silence in the backseat. Dean clenches his hand on the steering wheel and things about tattooing the words "do not tell people about your scary shit psychic powers, Sam," on Sam's arms, face, chest, legs, hell, anywhere he can reach. Maybe if he does that, the words'll sink through his skin and manage to stick in his brain.
"You can... feel the de--demo--things?" Gayle asks in a small voice.
Dean can just about hear what she's thinking, but so can Sam and Sam's always been better at that whole reassuring thing. Unless it was Sam that needed reassuring. Then Dean totally took the Olympic gold in that event.
"You don't feel like anything to me." Sam lies through his teeth on that one, Dean's pretty sure. He'd seen him refusing to look at Gayle earlier in the day.
"I wasn't worried," Gayle says immediately.
Dean butts right in before Sam can start on his whole pacify the victim speech. "Where're we going?" he asks before Dad can. He flicks his eyes to the rearview mirror and tries not to wince; okay, so Dad's not gonna be asking questions anytime soon. He still looks like he's kind of shell-shocked from Sam's goddamn lack of secret keeping ability.
"I," Sam says. He squints his eyes, already narrowed with remembered pain, and says, "I think she's coming to us now, Dean. Let's find somewhere to hole up."
Time to go a-squatting then. He doesn't give Gayle or Dad a chance to really process what Sam's said, because he can see an old wood structure coming up on the right. It looks dilapidated, like something he and Sam would check out if they were horrendously bored on a stretch of uninhabited highway. Looks like something they could take a stand in, if push came to shove.
Dean pulls off the highway and onto the unpaved, unused grassy trail that might have been a road at one point or another. He's not real sure, but he grimaces right along with the Impala as rocks slam into her undercarriage. Somebody owes him for this.
Sam, if no one else. Sam, at least, could be guilted into giving the Impala a wax job. Even if he did it wrong and Dean'd have to sneak out in the middle of the night to fix the fuck-up his brother had done to his baby, it'd be worth it. For someone who'd, in another lifetime, scored a 174 on his LSATs (whatever the hell those were), Sam could just not understand the basic, all mighty directions of "wax on, wax off."
Bitch always left weird marks on his car when he waxed it.
He's sniggering to himself by the time he's close enough to the building to kill the car's engine. Sam gives him a strange look, full of, "oh my God, you're a moron," while Gayle mutters to herself in the back seat. Dad's quiet. Dean's glad. He doesn't really want to talk to either of them right now.
That's what Sam's for anyway.
"Home sweet home," Dean says as soon as he's parked. He pets the Impala's steering wheel a little, apologizing for her accommodations, and then opens his door. "Everybody out. We've got work to do."
"I call the salt," Sam says. Fucktard. He knows Dean hates drawing those devil's traps; it's one thing to draw the ones that only hold the low level demons, like the kind that had been inhabiting Gayle. It's another to have to sit there for freakin' hours drawing the most complicated shit Dean'd ever seen. And both him and Sam suck ass at drawing, which means he's got to draw the stupid thing in chalk or something equally erasable first to make sure he doesn't fuck the design up without a chance to fix it.
It's enough to drive a Hunter to drink.
Which is why Dean pulls out his privilege. "Salt's mine," he says. When Sam opens his mouth to protest, already reaching across the top of the car (damn kid has mismatched gorilla arms, for all that he's still missing a couple inches of height), Dean grins. "I'm older," he reminds Sam, and then, "And you left me, you fucker. You draw."
There's an ominous silence from the vicinity of the Impala's backseat. Dean cheerfully ignores it. Dad wanted the truth? Hell, he could have it. School of hard knocks style too, because no way in hell was Dean going to sit down and try to explain it.
"Dean," Sam whines.
"Suck it up, little brother," Dean retorts and goes around to the trunk to get the mega bag of salt they'd picked up... somewhere. Some specialty restaurant outlet store or something that hadn't wanted to sell them anything until Sam had turned on the lethal puppy eyes and asked again.
Dad's voice is loud and gruff when he says, "What the hell?"
Gayle sounds like she's biting a lemon when she responds with, "I told you he's one of us."
His little brother, on the other hand, just pulls an epic bitchface and ducks back into the car for a few seconds to rustle in the glove box for the box of colored chalk Dean'd bought as a gag gift a few times back. Nothing better than drawing a chick with huge knockers on a motel parking lot. In bright pink.
Sam, being the buzzkill he is, just picks the blue chalk. Kid has a thing for that color. And the purple crayons, but Dean wasn't going to bring that up again unless Sam was really asking for it.
And there's his bag of salt. He pulls it up with a grunt; hey, fifteen pounds of salt? Not that light. He dared anybody to try picking it up without making a sound. They'd have to be a damn demon to pull it off.
While he's back there, he also helps himself to the gun supply. The shotguns go under his arm when he puts the sack of salt on the lip of the car's trunk. He takes a handful of shells, rock salt ones, because he's not going to fucking shoot his mom with blessed bullets even if it'd save him a few bruises. The rock salts just in case the house is haunted like their luck's insisting it's gonna be.
Dad and Gayle finally clamber out of the backseat.
"You need to--"
"If the next word out of your mouth is explain, swear to God I'm gonna tape your mouth shut, Gayle," Dean says before she can get started. Sam's bitching is cute. Gayle's? Is totally not.
Instead of correcting his tone like Dad usually would, well usually being if Dean'd made it a practice to talk to Gayle like she was an eight year old who wouldn't stop touching the stove, Dad makes a noncommittal grunting noise and seems to shove it all back for later.
Dean hides a grin by picking up the sack of salt. That's his Dad. Shoot first, deal with your emotions second. Good old marine training.
Sam's already inside the building, muttering bitchily to himself while he sits in the middle of an emerging devil's trap. His brother works from the outside in, which is the strangest friggin' thing Dean's ever seen; Bobby works (worked?) from the inside out, the tiny animal symbols first and then the circle, then the Latin. Sam has to be difficult and start on the Latin, circling and curling around like a serpent.
Dean drops the salt on the ground with an audible thump. Sam doesn't even flinch or pause in what he's doing, just sends Dean a warning shove of air that feels like a hand getting ready to shove him even though there's nothing there.
But hey, it has the added effect of him getting another Gayle glare and a partial Dad one for good measure. He puts the shotguns on the ground too, but he does that a whole hell of a lot more gently than he had with the salt. He's never had a gun go off accidentally on him and he's never planning on it happening.
He moves out of the way, a little farther into the hall, to see just what they're dealing with. It's not a big house, just big enough to cause a clusterfuck if he manages to miss an opening they want closed. The demon's only gonna be able to get at them from one direction by the time he's done.
His sister crouches next to Sam and watches, ignoring the rest of them. That's fine by Dean, actually, since he really doesn't want her following him around and picking at his salt lines or staring at him with her wicked green eyes. How she'd managed to turn into a little twit is beyond him.
Dad steps over Sam's hand, looking for all the world like he'd paused and contemplating stepping straight on it while he was close enough to get away with it. Dean does not, in fact, realize that he's got the shotgun in a prime jabbing grip until after Dad's foot has safely cleared away from Sam's hand.
Sam's bones? Freakin' delicate. If they'd broken because of a little zombie love tap once upon a time, Dad could have snapped them like twigs by stepping on them. And then Dean would've been forced to brain him in the head and that would've done a number on his psyche.
"Hand me the green?" Sam asks in the tense silence. All three of them pause for a second, wondering who he's talking to, before Gayle reaches over to rifle through the box of chalk.
Sam looks up at Dean while she's distracted and Dad's stomping off further into the house. Chill, that look says, I've got it. And the green chalk, halfway across the hallway because Sam'd probably just thrown the chalk on the ground when he started drawing, rolls merrily to Sam's outstretched hand even while Gayle keeps pawing through the box.
Yeah, Dean forgets about that sometimes. If Dad had tried anything (and he's not saying that Dad would have, except he knows his Dad and John Winchester's not above being petty when he wants to be) Sam would have been able to stop him with the power of his mind. Not only was that freaky, it was fucked up. Awesome too.
"Oh, hey," Sam says, "I found it." He grins at Gayle, full on harmless, ha-ha, puppy mode. Dean'd seen Ellen fall for that look before, so he's not real surprised that Sam gets away without so much as a peep about wasting Gayle's precious time.
Bitch.
Sam starts in on the circle now that the Latin's finished, leaning back so that he can draw it in big, concentric arches to try and make it as neat as possible. Doesn't really work.
Dean tilts his head to the side to look at it. After a few seconds of silent contemplation, he offers, "It's more oval than round there, Sammy." Gayle glares at him, but Dean just grins. She looks almost exactly like Sam when she makes that face. He wants to tell her that, but he doesn't. Instead, he needles Sam some more. "Might want to fix that. Dunno what oval does."
"Bite me," Sam growls back. He does, however, rub his sleeve against the top and bottom of his oval to erase his lines and start over.
Dean figures his work there is done. He shuts the door, open all this time because he hadn't wanted to close it and accidentally brain someone in the head, and fishes his knife out of his pocket so he can poke a hole in the sack of salt. It's easier to pour from the bottom. Less waste that way, if he can plug the hole with his finger when he's done with it.
"You want this way blocked?" Dean asks. Stupid question, but Sam's drawing the devil's trap right there on the goddamn floor, so it's not like he knows what his brother's thinking.
"Yeah," Sam says. "We get it distracted with enough mojo going on, and we might be able to..." he trails off, biting his lip as he gives up on making perfect circles and starts in on the more intricate runes in the inner circle.
"What are you guys talking about?" Gayle butts in suddenly, rocking on her heels in a way that Dean finds distinctly disturbing. He's never seen anyone who's still able to crouch like that after they've hit puberty. It's creepy.
"Nothing you need to worry about," Dean tells her. He raises his eyebrows when she looks at him like she wants to use the chalk to flay him alive; Sam gives him a little reproachful shove, hands-free. Dean stumbles towards the far end of the hallway with an oath, giving Sam a nasty look. Sam winces like he's just given himself a headache. Serves him right.
He can take a hint. "I'm goin'," he tells Sam.
Sam nods down at his masterpiece and gives him another tiny little shove. Bastard. "I'll put one on the ceiling in the living room when I'm done here," he says.
Dean makes a noncommittal noise and leaves.
Behind him, he can hear Gayle say, "God, he's such an asshole." He wants to wash her mouth out with soap, which, weird, because he couldn't care less if Sammy curses. In fact, it just gives him a secret thrill, because his nerdy uptight little brother had just resorted to cursing to insult him.
Always awesome.
John follows Dean when his son comes out of the entrance way. Mostly because he almost snapped an eighteen year old kid's wrist back there and he doesn't want to tempt himself into actually doing it by staying around Sam. He's not going to be that man, no matter what the kid's been lying to him about.
The house they're in is falling apart. No if ands or buts about it, but Dean and Sam seem perfectly ready to stage an all out war in it. John's only seen one real exorcism (and his mind's trying as hard as it can to block out the memory of his daughter with a monster lookin' out of her eyes), but he's seen movies. They've got to have an inkling of truth in them somewhere, and that means this house is going to become ground zero for something horrific pretty soon.
If Sam wasn't as much of a liar as John thinks he is.
Dean barely looks at him when he walks by, doesn't tense when John falls into step with him, but when they get far enough away from the hall Abby's in, he stops for a minute.
"Don't you hurt Sam," he says, low and easy, and leans down to start pouring a line of salt against the dilapidated window frame.
John raises his eyebrows. "I wouldn't," he denies. He won't. He won't hurt an eighteen year old kid no matter how much he wants to shake him until the truth comes out. For that matter, Dean probably knows just as much if not more about what's going on and John's not gonna take a hand to his boy.
"Good," Dean says. He moves from that window to the next, big open airy thing with no glass in its panes, and pours a line of salt as thick as his arm. "You don't hurt Sam and we don't have a problem."
"Are you really brothers?" John asks instead of trying to articulate the sheer anger that suddenly blazed through him. He doesn't know why he's suddenly furious, but he is. Maybe because his kid just threatened him over a boy he can't have known more than a few months.
In the same way that he couldn't have known about all that demon stuff and how he shouldn't have called out for a Sammy when he was four.
"Is he... mine?" he continues. He doesn't see how, can't imagine being unfaithful to Mary, but he's got a demon backing him up and a sudden fascination with logging just how many of his relatives he can see in Sam's face.
Dean doesn't say anything for a couple of seconds. As soon as he finishes the line he'd started, he goes scrounging around in the room, toeing fallen apart furniture out of his way while he looks for something.
"Depends on your definition of yours," Dean finally says. He makes a small noise of satisfaction when a moldering chair yields a long, flat piece of wood; he props the wood in front of the glass-less window and calls it good. It looks like it'll cut down on wind, but not by much.
Not that John's worried about wind right now. "The hell do you mean by that?"
"I mean it's complicated, Dad." Dean picks up his salt again and goes to the stairway leading up to a second floor. "You think demons are bad? This is worse. It's not worth thinkin' about right now."
"To hell with that, Dean," John just about snarls. He catches Dean by the arm when he looks like he's just going to lean over and pour out another line (John doesn't even know what the lines of salt are for, the way Dean's acting it's like they're gonna be the holy grail of their quest to find Mary). "You talk to me now."
Dean's arm flexes in his hold, just enough that John can tell when his son decides it's not worth putting him on his ass for. When and where did his son figure out how to move like a soldier? He feels like he's losing his mind here, losing his son and his wife and his daughter, and gaining that strange, messed up boy out there in exchange for all of them.
Shitty rate, he thinks semi-lucidly.
"Look," Dean says. He pulls his arm out of John's grip, easy like, and sets the bag of salt on its side so that the huge pile that's been leaking out of it this whole time stops. "Sammy's mine. Ours. Whatever. We'll tell you all about it later, alright? Right now, we gotta concentrate or that demon out there's going to hand us our asses."
"Dean," John says when his son bends back down to smooth the pile of salt into place with his fingers. "I have to know. I can't. I need to know."
He doesn't know why, but he does. It's all he can think about, tearing through his skull, how how how. How did Dean know this Sam, how does John feel like he's tucked that boy into bed once upon a time, how could he be his, how could he not. He. Needs. To. Know.
"Sam's a Winchester," Dean says. He pushes the salt into place and stands up, doesn't look at John at all. "He was supposed to have been born on May 2nd, 1982," his lips twist, and he turns, strides away from John, "Mom had Gayle instead. You need anything else, you're gonna have to ask Sam. I'm a little fuzzy on the details."
John stands there, watching his son's retreating back, and remembering. May 2nd had been the night Dean woke up screaming, begging; it's branded into his memory as one of the worst things he can remember, right up there with people dying around him in Vietnam and the day he came home to find his wife and his daughter huddled up and crying over a letter on the fridge.
"Where's Sammy?" Dean had demanded, asked, pleaded, and later, whispered lovingly at Mary's pregnant belly.
Dean was right. He shouldn't have told him.
Abby gets talkative as soon as Dean takes off, snickering to himself. Sam has no idea what he's thinking about that he finds so funny, but he figures he's better off not knowing. He just wishes he'd taken Abby with him when he went.
She's not a bad kid. Girl. Woman. Whatever she was. Everyone seems like a kid to him sometimes, because he may look eighteen but he's closer to fifty. He's older than Dad. That makes him boggle sometimes, when he's not busy drawing devil's traps on the floor.
Anyway, Abby's not that bad. But when she crouches there next to him, babbling about how much Dean sucks and why would he think otherwise and why does he hang around that loser brother of hers and are they really related, because, if not, she'd totally be the better option for a significant other.
Sam tunes her out for the most part. He nods in the right places, looks up from his work to give her a sympathetic look when she turns to ranting about how Dean shouldn't have kept these things from her, but it's all automatic.
Until she starts stuttering. Then he listens.
"Do you really think you guys can get rid of the de-thing in Mom?" she asks. She's got her hair twirling nervously around her fingers, over and under, and she's chewing on her lower lip.
Sam lets the chalk come to a rest and gives her his full attention. "Yeah," he says easily, "I do."
He damn well better believe it. He hadn't given his brother up for eighteen years just so some second-rate demon with a grudge could take apart everything he'd wished for. No way in hell. And that wasn't even counting Dean, who would have been perfectly happy storming hell if that's where his family was.
"It'll be alright," Sam tells Abby, "Me and Dean know what we're doing."
Her mouth twists a little. That's a familiar face, Sam thinks with a wry nod towards the Dean in his head. Definitely a bitchface.
"Dean?" she finally says.
"Best hunter I know," Sam says back. He doesn't say anything else, because Abby wouldn't listen even if he did, but he wants to add, best big brother too, even though he's an absolute nimrod and got himself killed once before because of his big mouth.
"If you say so," Abby mutters. She sounds disbelieving and humoring, like she's just telling him what he wants to hear. As long as she's not going to get him or Dean or Dad or Mom killed because she can't let go of her grudge for two seconds, Sam's fine with that.
There's plenty of time later to bully Dean into mending fences with her, Sam thinks. He picks up his chalk again and gives her a reassuring smile before he goes back in to the minute detail in the center of his devil's trap.
He'd purposefully made it small enough that it'll only hold one person. No big trap that someone could stumble into if they're not looking carefully enough. Just one small enough that the demon would have enough room to stand and not much else.
Abby hands him a different colored piece of chalk. It doesn't really matter what color Sam uses, so he takes it from her and gives her the green one.
"You know," he says, because Dean's right, he really can't keep his mouth shut, "Dean's not that bad. Honestly," he says when he sees the look Abby shoots him, somewhere between distasteful and furious, "He's just... Dean."
"I think I know him better than you do," she snaps. She reaches out and grabs the chalk from him again, kind of petty and a little, "fine, if you'd rather talk about your feelings than use it, I'm gonna keep it," and in that second, she's so much like Dean that Sam has to blink.
"You've only known him for, what, less than a year?" Abby asks. She's seething now, a little, her face turning the same pale Dad goes when he's on his way to pissed. "He's my brother."
Mine too, Sam doesn't say. "Who are you mad at?" he asks instead, "Him or me?"
The kicker is that he knows she doesn't really know. She's pissed at Dean for leaving her and pissed at him that Dean thinks he's more important than she is and she does not understand the cardinal rule of Dean.
Abby doesn't answer for long enough that Sam leans over and gently pries her hand off the chalk he was using. They don't have enough time to just be sitting around. Sam's got to finish this trap and move on to the next one soon.
He can feel the demon coming on fast. And she's not alone. He'll have to warn Dean and Dad about that in a minute.
"It doesn't matter," Abby says when he's almost done. She sounds like she's putting on a brave front and Sam's reminded of just how young she is. He'd done his fair share of stupid things when he was eighteen, even if he refused to lump leaving for college into that share of stupid.
She turns her head away from him, letting her hair hide it from view and says, "Dean hates me anyway."
Sam wants to strangle her. He'd never, even on his bad days, ever thought that Dean hated him.
"That's stupid," he says.
He leans draws in one last line and leans back to look at the devil's trap, trying to measure it up to the one he's got floating around somewhere in his head. That line, he finally decides, is off enough to give it a weak point, and he reaches forward to fix it.
"It isn't," Abby insists while he's scrubbing with his sleeve. Her voice gets louder, loud enough to reverberate along the empty hallway their in. "He left me. He. He hates me, okay?"
"The only thing he hates is demons." Sam stops and thinks about it for a second. "And alternative music."
She's still not looking at him, but that's alright. Sam pushes himself to his feet, satisfied with his trap, and holds out a hand to help her up.
She ignores it. "If he didn't hate me, why'd he leave to go find you, huh?" she asks. Her hands clench on her knees. "You're our brother, I know you are, don't lie, so why're you more important to him than I am? It's not fair."
"A lot of things aren't fair, Abby," Sam says. He doesn't know how to tell her that, yeah, Dean's always going to chose him over her because it's been pounded into Dean's head that Sammy comes first since before he even went to school. That's not something you can unlearn in a lifetime. Two lifetimes. Whatever.
Abby sniffs and then hauls herself to her feet. She walks off without acknowledging him, but, that's alright. He just needs her to think about it a little. She needs to understand.
And to get it through her head that Dean? Giant soft squishy marshmallow. Squishy princess even. All she'd have to do would be to turn on the waterworks or pull puppy eyes and he'd be apologizing in a hundred and one silent ways. Granted, those ways sometimes manifested as him dunking your head in your soup or letting you drive the Impala, but, still. That was Dean.
Dean's nowhere in sight when he follows Abby to the next room, but Dad's leaning against one wall, watching him. Sam hunches his shoulders in self-consciously and goes to look for his brother. As uncomfortable as he'd been being alone with Dad back then, at least he'd known that he could give as good as he got.
Now? It's just weird staring at the man and knowing it wasn't the same person who'd handed him a gun when Sam'd been afraid of the dark.
"Hey," Sam calls.
"What?" Dean demands irritably from somewhere in the direction of where Sam would assume the kitchen had once been.
He walks that way, quickly, trying not to read too much into Dad's glare. Knowing him, he'd eavesdropped on that whole conversation, and hearing Dean call him "little brother" might have been a mistake or a weird endearment, but Sam hadn't refuted Abby's claim of siblinghood. So.
"Your sister really kind of hates you," Sam says by way of greeting.
"Heard you talking to her," Dean says back. He's pouring salt slowly in a thick line at the door that might or might not lead to the pantry. No use leaving open doorways."
"You should to talk to her later."
"Yeah, kind of got that, thanks Sammy," Dean mutters at him.
Sam shrugs. The windows are already lined in salt and the doorway back into the cramped, moldering living room's got a line of salt as thick as Sam's palm on it. "Where do you want the other trap?" he asks.
Dean nods back towards the living room. Sam stares at him like he's grown another head.
"I'm not going out there alone," he says. "Da-damnit, John's," that feels a little weird on his tongue, "Going to kill me if he heard me talking to Abby too. No. I'll finish the salt." He reaches out for it and gets a shoulder to his chin for his trouble.
"Suck it up," Dean says. He shoves a little, putting his back into it, and Sam curses the fact that right now Dean outweighs him by a good fifteen pounds. He'll put those and more on in the coming months, but still.
He slides back a couple of inches, towards the doorway. "Don't fuck up the salt," Dean says cheerfully, still pouring.
Sam flips him off and steps exaggeratedly over the line of salt Dean's poured. It's crooked, he decides moodily.
Dad's still standing by the window, glaring at the entire world, but now he's got Abby at his side and she's glaring too. It's quieter on her now, less pissed and more contemplative, but, still. They look like a matching set.
She looks a lot like Mom, Sam thinks.
There's nothing in the room for him to stand on and even he's not tall enough to be able to reach the ceiling without using something. He stands in the middle of the room and presses his lips together before he glances down at the floor. There's enough debris down there to hide a devil's trap if he really has to, but he likes them on the ceiling.
Aside from the whole tradition of it working for them (and Sam is enough of a hunter to admit that superstitious luck objects are alright by him), there's also the fact that most things don't look up when they enter a room. Not unless they've already been hit with this trick once before.
Meg's dead, though. Sam'd killed her himself. And there's no other demons that they've exorcised with a devil's trap, in this lifetime or the last universe. So.
"Dean," Sam calls.
Both Abby and Dad jump a little bit. Abby's holding his chalk, Sam sees, and he smiles at her for it. She turns a little pink in the cheeks and Dad glares a little harder, but Sam's not really paying attention to them. He's trying to remember if he'd seen what he needs in the car somewhere.
"Jesus, Sam, what?" Dean sounds gruff and halfway to pissed. Sam wonders what he and Dad had been talking about to get him there. "I realize I'm a better hunter than you, but can't you leave me alone for five freakin' seconds?"
Sam rolls his eyes. "Do we still have that stool in the back of the Impala?" he asks.
General silence from Dean for a few seconds. They'd stolen that stool a few weeks ago because it'd been haunted and they'd had to do a cleansing ritual on it. Dean had kept it for reasons known only to himself, but if they still had it...
"Yeah, it's in there. Somewhere."
"Great." Sam looks out the window, over Dad's still glaring shoulder, and squints. He can feel the demon closing in like a sinus headache; it's nothing but pressure building. By the time it gets close enough, it'll fell like he's jammed his hand into a socket of some kind, or tried to shove his head through a hole three sizes too small.
She's far enough away, though, that he's got enough time to get out to the car without running the risk of getting himself stuck in a supernatural storm without anyone for backup or anything to use as a weapon. Except himself. And he's usually the last resort because it knocks him on his ass and he hates not being able to watch Dean's back.
"You need help?" Dad asks gruffly when Sam gets back in with the stool.
It's covered in swamp thing goo still, from the last job, so for a second Sam thinks that the smell coming off of it is making him hallucinate. Then he takes in Dad's tense shoulders and the twist to his mouth that means he's saying something he doesn't really want to, and thinks again.
"Uh, sure," he says.
He stands there like an idiot for a few seconds.
"You could, ah, pass me the chalk?" he finally says.
Dad takes it from Abby and hands it over to him.