Part 2: "Little, Humongous White Lie"

"Dean," Sam said, as they were walking towards the same old coffee shop they'd been visiting for a week now. "What's this?" He held out the newspaper, he'd been reading, toward Dean.

It was all folded up so that he could read it while walking--what a dork. Dean looked down, squinted. It was the funny pages. He frowned, glancing over the page, trying to decide what Sam was referring to, as his heart jumped into his throat.

Sure enough, at the bottom of the rows of comics, was his debut. Well, "Julio Johnson's" debut. Dean tried not to hold his breath and pretended to look at the comic as if it was new. "Hah," he said, handing it back to Sam. "The tall one looks kinda like you. Weird."

'Oh, way to go, great job on playing dumb,' Dean thought with a sarcastic, mental cringe.

"Don't you think that looks an awful lot like the both of us?" Sam demanded. They'd reached the shop, and his brother hovered near an empty table.

Dean glanced around at the other customers, nervously. He made a point of sitting down, trying to give Sam a hint. Sam glared at him but sat down too. "Who would know about us?" he asked in a stage-whisper.

Dean shrugged. "It doesn't mean they know about us. Could just be a couple hunters...." He trailed off, knowing his explanation wasn't flying with Sam.

"Dean," Sam said, pointedly, poking the comic as he held it out to Dean. "Your charm."

Sure enough, Dean had drawn his own amulet on his double in every panel. Crap. He was so busted. "Okay, so we have a stalker," he tried again, but he could feel his ears heating up. 'Oh, great. Stupid conscience chooses now to make an appearance!'

"Do we know any 'Julio'?" Sam questioned, and Dean nearly let out a gusty sigh.

Instead, he managed to clear his throat and act sincere. "Uh, not th-that I know of." He'd thought it was clever, but he'd had a little trouble convincing the newspaper editor of it.

"Dean," Sam said, blue eyes narrowed. "You're stuttering. What are you nervous about?" Sam's mouth dropped open, and Dean tried not to squirm in his chair. "You're lying, aren't you?" Sam guessed.

Dean opened his mouth to lie again, when the waitress came and asked them what they would like to order. Sam and Dean rattled off the usual, and the waitress gave them a knowing smile and jotted something down before promising to return quickly.

"Who is 'Julio'?" Sam questioned, and Dean could have sagged from relief. Sam had misinterpreted his lie.

"Um," Dean began. 'Not a good start, dude. Keep it together.' He shrugged again, drawing from deep stores of nonchalance. "A guy Dad used to know. He wasn't a bad guy, but I can sort of see him doing something like this." Oh, that was a little close to home.

"Then why didn't you just say that in the first place?" Sam complained, in that pitchy tone that tended to get on Dean's nerves.

"Well, 'cause Julio's a little loco and dangerous," he lied again. It was true what they said about lies, they just kept getting bigger and bigger.

Sam frowned contemplatively, or maybe it was suspiciously. Dean wasn't sure. "That doesn't sound right, Dean. A crazy hunter, who's also sensitive enough to draw a cartoon? What, is this some sort of weird bating?"

'Sensitive?' Dean wondered, suddenly annoyed. "A guy doesn't have to be sensitive to draw a friggin' cartoon," he groused.

Sam's already narrow eyes got smaller. "Are you defending this man? What if he decides to give away more than our personalities--like in California, with the ghost-binding spell?"

"Ah, come on, Sammy," Dean returned, trying to make that sound implausible, "He may be crazy, but I doubt he'd take things that far."

"You seem to know this guy pretty well," Sammy said, sitting back in his chair as if he were onto Dean. "But you made it seem like he was a passing acquaintance."

"Er," Dean said, oh, so eloquently. 'Darn. If I flub up any more, Sammy's going to figure it out, for sure.' "I meant, just from the times I met him--he was pretty looney," he shrugged, "But he didn't seem like the kinda guy who'd betray other hunters."

Sam's fingers tapped the paper he'd laid on the table in front of him. His eyes were going all squinty again. Dean tried not to fidget. "So you're saying he's just doing this for the extra cash?"

He shrugged, feeling his face go cold from Sam's dead-on evaluation. "Yeah, probably. I'm sure he won't do anything to jeopardize other hunters."

Sam nodded, slowly, then began tearing out the little comic from that page of the paper. "What are you doing?" Dean questioned, a bit too sharply.

Sam looked up, giving him an aggravated glare. "I'm saving it, just in case."

He relaxed a little, but tried not to let Sam know it was such a big deal by joking, "You sure you don't just want to hang onto your immortalization?"

Sam glared at him. "At least I'm not short and fat."

Dean pretended to sulk.

- - -

A week later, they were in much the same situation: Running out of cash, and no credit cards yet. Dean snuck off to go draw another "Sammy and Deano" cartoon, choosing a more private spot than the library this time.

They'd just gotten through sending a ghost to the afterlife, and the house they'd banished it from was abandoned in all senses of the word, now. He'd have a table, or couch, to sit at or on, and no pesky kids interrupting his thought-process.

Strange thing was, though, when he started sketching, he couldn't seem to get the brat, who had helped him draw his last comic, out of his head. Him and his cute mom both....

So instead of drawing what he'd thought he was going to, he found himself sketching a character: Julio with a no-nonsense expression, and hands crossed over his thin chest. Dean found the smile on his face rather bitter tasting.

But he couldn't help it when he went on to draw the hot-comic-mom beside Julio's rendering. Dean stared at her for too long, realized he was that close to drooling, and flipped a couple pages over in frustration.

But when he started drawing again, he found the panels developing into an ironic story:

Sammy was in the background, fluffy hair barely visible behind a tower of books, and his overly long and stick-like legs of course. He was behind the clear doors of the library, and Deano was out in front flirting with Julio's mom.

'So what do you do for a living?' she wonders, smiling coyly as her son stares Deano down, arms crossed over his chest.

'Oh, me and my brother hunt ghosts,' Deano replies, like it's nothing.

Dean glared at the page, but when he started drawing again, it was like his hand was possessed. The next panel was much the same, except that the mom had gone all huge-eyed and repulsed, while Julio asks eagerly, 'Really? You hunt ghosts?!' And inside the library, Sammy is losing books from the top of his mountain.

Deano, annoyed by Julio's mom's reaction, snarks, 'Yeah, and without me around, they'd probably eat you.'

Julio's mom slaps Deano, and drags Julio away, saying, 'Come on, mijo. Don't ever talk to strangers.'

Julio grumbles, 'But you were, Mom.'

Sammy finally makes it out of the library, and Deano takes some of his books saying, 'Sheesh, Sammy, what would you do without me?'

Sammy retorts, 'Oh, and where were you just now?'

Dean frowned, scratched out the last panel and left it with the mom and her son walking off, and Deano looking disappointed to the point of crocodile tears. Meanwhile, Sammy had managed to escape the library and told Deano, 'Dude! Stop flirting with the smart-chicks and help me with these.'

Dean sighed and shut the sketch book. He would still have to work on it a bit more, redraw it to perfection then line it with pen. Erase the pencil marks, take it to the newspaper, deal with the editor thinking he didn't look like a "Julio."

He was mulling over that, when someone reached down and grabbed the sketch book right out of his hands. Startled, Dean looked up, calling out a discomfited, "Hey!" And froze.

It was Sam standing there, and Dean wished he'd never taught him how to sneak around so well. "What is this?" Sam questioned, beginning to flip through the first pages. His eyebrows shot up, and Dean's mouth worked futilely for a few seconds before he leapt up from the couch and made a grab for his sketch book.

"Give that back!" he yelled, feeling like a little kid who was being teased by a bully.

Sam gave him a look of pure... what? Incredulity? Amazement? Disbelief? Maybe all those things, and a little annoyance thrown in for good measure, as he held the book out of Dean's reach and pulled away a bit, so that he could continue perusing its contents.

"Dean... did you draw these?" Sam wondered, focus still on the sketch pad.

"Sam, I swear," Dean threatened, "If you don't give that back right now, I'm going to skewer you like a shishkebab and roast you over a camp fire."

Sam only blinked. "Dean, these are yours." He sounded astonished and accusing, at the same time. "You can draw."

"No freaking way, Sammy," Dean retorted, "Really? I had no idea. Let me take a look." He reached for the book again, and Sam gave him a perturbed look, pursing his lips, frowning, and held it away once more.

"And you draw well," he said, flipping another page. "Oh, there it is. Pretty good, I almost fell for the whole "crazy hunter" story earlier. Until you gave me that lame excuse before going out today."

What lame excuse? Dean wondered, irritably. 'Oh, yeah.' He'd told Sam he was going out for snacks. Of course, if he'd been gone for more than an hour... well, Sam would have been suspicious even if he hadn't followed Dean.

And how the heck had he followed him anyway? "Did you steal a car, Sam?" he demanded.

Sam shrugged a little. "I borrowed one."

"In broad daylight?" Dean exploded.

Sam made a face. "Dean, I really borrowed the car."

Dean let out a small sigh, then bristled at Sam's implication that he wasn't Dean and didn't think like him. "From who?" he asked, in frustration.

"The hotel manager. I told him I forgot to tell you something and needed to reach you before you got where you were going." Oh, that explained why he'd actually had time to really borrow the car.

Sam flipped another page and looked down at it, frowning. Dean shifted his weight, uncomfortably. Besides Sam looking at his work making him embarrassed as heck, comics were actually supposed to make people smile and laugh--not frown.

"It's not funny, is it?" he asked, feeling defeated all of a sudden.

Sam glanced up at him, shaking his head a little. His smile was rather wan. "No, it's funny. I'm just... Dean, I'm trying to wrap my mind around all this. You can draw--you can write a pretty darned good set-up. And..." he glanced down at the page again. "You pretend to be a jerk, don't you?"

Dean was so taken-aback that he actually paled and went cold and light-headed. He sat down quickly, looking up at Sam in shock. "Th-That's... stupid," he said, weakly, and Sam chuckled.

"That's all you have to say? That it's stupid?" He plunked down beside Dean. Dean glanced over, seeing that he had the page turned to the latest strip he'd drawn.

"It's not stupid, and don't try to brush it off 'cause I've always known, anyway," Sam continued, matter-of-factly. "I know you're smart, Dean. I know you aren't a buffoon. Hey, I even know you're creative. How else could you think up half the plans you do, work out things intuitively, figure out what the bad guy's gonna do next?"

Dean wanted to protest, but Sam shut him down by adding, "The thing I don't know is why you keep trying to hide it from everyone else. Why you play it down so much. Do you think you're stupid, Dean? 'Cause I really don't understand your freakish humility."

Dean sat there petrified for awhile, then he frowned and reached over carefully and reclaimed his sketch book. He closed it up, securely, and held it on his lap like a fragile tome. "I dunno... I guess I just don't think about that stuff the way you do, Sammy."

"In what way do you think about it?" Sam questioned, his voice more gentle than it had been so far.

Dean brushed his hand over the shiny cover of the sketch book. "Drawing is just... a skill. Something to use when we need a little extra cash. Dad asked me to draw a little comic strip back when I was taking those art classes in high school, and it brought in some money. He didn't gush about me being some great artist, and you shouldn't either."

Sam was silent for too long, and when Dean finally dared to look at him, he regretted it. His younger brother had that sullen, disgruntled look on his face, the one he'd always gotten whenever Dad was mentioned before they'd all met up again.

"Oh, come on, Sam," he snapped, "You can't be angry with him about this too. He's dead now, and you've got to get over this anger, d'you hear?"

"Dean, I can be angry, and I will be angry!" Sam retorted, shooting to his feet. Dean couldn't just let Sam tower over him like that, so he left the sketch pad on the couch and stood up too. "What sort of life could you be living now if only Dad had let it go?"

Dean flinched, suddenly realizing what that strange feeling had been as he watched Julio and his mother walking away. Regret. Envy. Paths never to be walked down. Sam's question echoed in his head. 'What sort of life...?' And when he realized he couldn't immediately come up with an answer, he clenched his jaw and started to walk away.

"Dean!" Sam was already moving to catch him, but Dean sped up his pace, practically running. He felt like a coward, but it was either that or punch his brother. And he felt like he'd been retaliating too much lately, already.

"Dean, wait!" Sam sounded a little out of breath, maybe even panicked, but Dean ignored him as he rushed down the hallway that led into the foyer and out the front door. He yanked the door open and slammed it behind him, and didn't stop even when he heard Sam's muffled swearing from the other side.