Something for the weekend! Had some time to polish, so here it is. Thanks to all of you who have reviewed... means a lot when people go to the effort. ;-) Hope you enjoy...

Warnings Foul language, blasphemy, S5 spoilers

Inside Man

Sam rolls his brother's limp body over, stares down at Dean's face. It's peaceful in repose, and something about it is different, it's that same feeling Sam got staring at Dean in the car outside the Seven-Eleven, trying to work out what had changed. And it suddenly hits him that the bluish-gray shadows under Dean's eyes, the bruises, the grazes, the split lip, are gone, and his brother's skin is its usual unblemished freckle-smattered self. "Healed," he breathes. He remembers what the old guy outside the store in Heber said, and applies a more critical eye, but decides he can't tell if Dean is glowing or not and wouldn't ever admit it anyway even if he was.

His anxiety noogies his head from the inside out, rubbing its knuckle hard against the bone as he drags his brother's limp deadweight up onto the back seat of the Impala and cuffs him to the door handle, before shooting him with enough methohexital to ensure he sleeps like a baby all the way to South Dakota. He floors it all the way to I-80, and just outside of Evanston, roughly eight hours before he's expecting his brother to come round, he glances into the rearview mirror to see Dean glowering back at him, mouth pulled thin with anger.

"When did you get in him?" Dean spits out venomously.

Sam skates across three lanes on two wheels, the car pirouetting and narrowly missing a semi-truck en-route as he hauls on the steering wheel, and he can see the trucker's mate gesturing wildly, see the whites of his eyes and hear him hollering abuse. He slams his boot down on the brakes and simultaneously goes for the knife that can kill anything, and a split second after he first registered his brother's glare he's got them parked haphazardly on the verge, his back pressed up against the window, the knife poised to strike, defensive, fuck, offensive, because his brother is dangerous enough when he's human to convince Sam the demon version will be a death-dealing monster. He was when he was down there, he thinks suddenly.

"When did you get in him?" Dean snarls again, and Sam notices abstractly that his brother is mirroring his own reaction, shrinking away from him and pressing himself as far as he can into the upholstery.

He breathes in deep and hard, ratchets it down a notch. "When did you get in him?" he croaks thickly.

"Don't fuck with me, buddy," Dean seethes. "Whatever you do, don't fuck with me, because you do not have the juice… I can smell you in there. When did you get in him?"

Sam thinks on his feet, starts jabbering it out fast and sure, "Vade, Satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae, hostis humanae salutis, humiliare sub potenti…"

And nothing is happening, no twitching, no belching smoke, and his brother is leaning forward slightly, quizzical, maybe even amused, and now he's speaking himself, firm and steady, "Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio, contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur…" And Dean gets progressively quieter, his voice falters and trails off, and now he looks puzzled. "Why isn't it working?" he snaps abruptly. "I can smell you in him. Why isn't it working?"

Sam goggles at him. "Well, mine's not working either," he says defensively, feels damned foolish as he does.

"You shouldn't be able to say the exorcism rite if you're a demon," his brother challenges.

Sam reaches up to his shirt collar, pulls it down. "I still have the tatt. I'm not possessed. And you shouldn't be able to say the rite of Saint Michael if you're a demon."

Dean heaves out a sigh, pulls his own tee down. "Ditto." He raises an eyebrow. "You think I'm a demon," he says. "I assume that's why I was cuffed?"

Sam scrunches his face up, relaxes slightly until what his brother just said registers. "What do you mean, was?" he ventures, and his hackles rise up again, along with the knife.

Dean snorts, holds up his hands in the darkness, wiggles his fingers. "Fuckin' amateur. You know the cuffs haven't been made that can hold me."

He belly-surfs gracefully over the back of the shotgun seat, arranges himself more comfortably, shoots Sam a sideways glance that tracks down to the blade. "Are you gonna put that thing away?"

Sam doesn't. "I cuffed both hands, Dean," he says meaningfully. "I lifted all your lockpicks too. And you shouldn't even be conscious right now."

And Dean leans forward slightly. "Holy water," he snaps, gesturing with a hand. "Come on. I know you got some. Give it here."

Sam roots out his flask, hands it over, watches as his brother downs a couple of gulps, wipes his mouth.

"I'm me," he announces, as he hands it back. "Your turn."

Sam considers, takes a swig. "You better not be a fucking siren," he breathes, as he stows the flask back in the door pocket. "And this doesn't change the fact that I cuffed both hands and shot you full of happy juice."

Dean rolls his eyes. "Oy." He rubs at his jaw for a minute, visibly relaxes, slumping back against the seat. "What the hell is going on with you, Sam?" he says finally. "You stink of sulfur."

It hits Sam in his gut as hard and relentlessly as his brother's fists ever have, sucks the wind out of him, has his chest squeezing tight with disappointment. "Going on with me?" he manages, and he tries to make himself think of something else, anything else but his taint, his sin, his weakness and his craving. "Dean, for crying out loud," he fumbles out. "You're – all over the place. You're forgetting things you've known for years, you know things you've never known… you told some old guy at the motel you were a hip surgeon, and I honestly think that if I hadn't been there you might have operated. You called me from the Seven-Eleven and I'm sure you didn't even know who I was… you negotiated seven hostages out of a hold up while you were on a beer run, and you mixed up Cas and Bobby. Jesus. You even thought we paid taxes."

Dean is staring owlishly at him, sucking his bottom lip in like he always does when he's thinking. "You still smell like the Pit," he declares suspiciously after a minute. "And I have no memory of any of that other stuff."

Sam runs a hand through his hair, gropes for words. "You never said you could smell sulfur on me before, Dean," he says softly. "And you said things, knew things… things you couldn't possibly know. About me. And Ruby." He takes a deep breath. "Are you shining at me?"

His brother gazes back at him for a split second before he barks out a semi-hysterical laugh that ends as abruptly as it started. "Are you serious?" he asks, seems genuinely aghast. "You're asking me if I can read minds? Move furniture?"

Sam shrugs. "I don't know Dean… but I know something isn't right with you." He taps his finger on the steering wheel, ponders, anything so he doesn't have to think that he might ever remind his brother of Hell. And the germ of an idea is out there waving at him, floating a few hundred yards off the coast of his mind, and he's throwing out a life ring and hauling it into shore. "Wait a minute," he murmurs. You said something… about how you know everything, or you know it all. Something like that." He frowns, seizes on it suddenly. "The car… the girl. You said she was giving off a weird vibe, that she was mouthing off about you being a know it all."

Dean shakes his head. "Car? Girl?"

"Yeah, the girl. In the car."

Blank expression.

"The breakdown, Dean," Sam says, exasperated. "Jammed starter motor, you got it going again. You said there was a teenage girl in the car bitching at her mom, and when you pulled her up over it she was really creepy… she said you thought you knew it all, but maybe you didn't know as much as you thought." His mind is racing ahead now, fitting it all together. "You know it all, but you're forgetting things too… that's got to be it, Dean, got to be…"

Dean makes a face. "Sorry, you lost me, man…"

Sam feels all the energy run out of him, feels it trickle down to the tips of his toes and spill out into a puddle in the footwell, and he flops his head back against the leather, closes his eyes. "Please Dean," he mutters wearily. "Please tell me you haven't forgotten what's going on. The big picture. What we're doing, trying to do. Trying to set right. We don't have time for you to forget."

It's quiet but for the sound of Dean's steady, even breaths, unhurried, unworried, even. "Oh, I know exactly what's going on," he says slowly. "I know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, too."

And Sam opens his eyes and tilts his head to look, doesn't know if he has ever heard his brother sound quite like he does, because Dean sounds dreamy and faraway, like he's tripping, but still there's a steeliness to his voice, and it's terrifying in its surety and conviction.

"I have a rendezvous with death," he murmurs. "On some scarred slope of battered hill…" He trails off, and he's staring ahead, and he doesn't blink.

Sam swallows hard, and something is tingling up and down his spine, something cold and terrifying, no, terrified, and when he speaks his mouth is so dry his voice catches in his throat. "It was conditional Dean," he husks out. "What you said back there in Van Nuys, it was conditional. You got a do-over. Remember? It's us, you and me. Team Free Will." He stops there, doesn't say anything about running, hiding, while Lucifer wastes the planet and everyone on it.

His brother seems to shake himself out of his trance, looks at him like he doesn't even know what he said, and grins his usual shit-eating grin. "Yeah," he says. "Of course I remember. Screw destiny."

Sam doesn't really know if the moment of tension or whatever it was, because he knows it was so much more, is broken or not. But he knows he can't shake the feeling of unease inside, can't pinpoint exactly what it means either. "That kid," he offers, and he thinks he might sound desperate. "It's got to be her, Dean. A curse. That's what it is. Maybe she's a witch."

Dean nods agreeably. "Curse. Got to be." He motions his head sharply at the back seat. "Get some sleep," he says. "We'll talk about it at Bobby's. Maybe it'll come back to me as I drive."

Sam mimics his brother's belly-surf in reverse, and his long body sticks halfway because he never did have Dean's catlike agility, limbs too long and gangling, and he ends up crumpling gracelessly down onto his head in the space between the front and back seats.

Dean rassum-frassums under his breath as he butt shuffles over into the driver's seat. "Witches, oy. All that sisters of the moon crap." He shudders dramatically. "Skeevy, fuckin' skeevy." And he looks back over his shoulder, suddenly cheery again. "Bobby can sort it. Or Cas. He'll trot out the mojo, get me fixed."

And Sam's heart sinks, and he can't find it in himself to remind Dean that Castiel is gone, and he suddenly remembers reading about some guy who lost his memory in a car crash and every time he woke up he'd forgotten his family died, and the doctors had to tell him again, each day, for the rest of his short life. He shudders at the prospect as he hauls himself up on to the seat.

The car lurches back onto the road. "You know, it might be useful," Dean throws back at him. "Knowing it all. In the circumstances."

"Not if the flipside is that you're forgetting a whole bunch of old stuff as fast as you're finding out the new stuff," Sam retorts. "Which seems to be the case." He pillows his jacket under his head, punches into it viciously. "You better not forget how to get there," he gripes.

Dean chuckles. Normal. "Or how to drive."

And just as Sam is settling down, he sees a flash of silver under the front seat, and he reaches out, snags it. The cuffs, or one of them anyway, and the steel chain attaching the bracelets has been rended, split, snapped. You broke the chain, he thinks. Heavy-duty steel chain links.

His brother shoots a quick glance back at him, winks. "Yeah, who'd have thunk? Metal fatigue, I guess."

Sam shoots bolt upright so swiftly his head spins. "Are you reading my fucking mind?" he demands hotly. "Level with me here, Dean."

He sees his brother's shoulders go rigid, and Dean's voice bristles with irritation. "What the fuck, Sam?" he snaps. "You said it out loud, said I broke them. And I answered you. Nothing more, nothing less."

Sam glares at the back of Dean's head, tries to backtrack to himself forming the words with his tongue and lips, speaking them, and he can't honestly remember if he did or not. He flops back down again, stares at the roof of the car for a few minutes. "Maybe it isn't a mind-reading curse," he ventures hopefully, because the thought Dean might be able to see inside his head is too awful to contemplate. "Knowing it all doesn't have to mean mind reading, does it? Dean?"

There's no reply but somehow he can sense it, a sudden, smoldering fury, and Dean is pulling off the road again, turning around slowly, and his eyes are incandescent. "So, Sammy," he says, in a voice tight with anger. "You want to tell me about how you screwed that bitch in the back of my car?"

Rage doesn't even come close as he slams out of the car and takes Bobby's porch steps in one bound before hammering on the door, and it sets off a fusillade of barking somewhere in the bowels of the house that sets his nerves on edge because fuckin' dogs, it's never been the same since Hell, fuck, since the woods and Bender's pitbull, and Bobby keeps those big Omen dogs that stare him out with dark, bottomless eyes that seem to know.

The sound of the old man hollering at the mutt to shut it, and the knowledge it'll be chained up out back five minutes after they arrive, barely soothes his jitters and the noise of his brother shuffling up the steps behind him sends his anxiety into the stratosphere.

And it makes no sense, his grief that his brother soiled himself with her, the disgust that he's up close and personal with something wrong, a stain, something dipped in the filth of the Pit, because he knows what Azazel did, knows his brother spent the best part of a year topping up the tank, knows about them. But it's like finding out for the first time, like the dirt and deception of her is still under Sam's nails, her grime absorbed into his brother's flesh so he can see it in Sam's pores, imagine it embedded into the loops, whorls and arches of his fingertips where they caressed her skin, and the sulfur stink of her is on Sam's breath and in his sweat, a miasma that surrounds him. Ruby, and she screeches along his senses in a way she never even did before he stared into her eyes, sank the knife into her guts, and saw her smoke, and flash, and die.

He can hear his brother shifting about behind him, from foot to foot, maybe, can hear the rustle of fabric, fancies Sam might be reaching out to poke him in the back, and he curls in on himself, brittle. "Don't touch me," he hisses. "You're unclean." He hears his brother suck in a breath, and he doesn't wait for a response, stalks in past Bobby the second the door opens. And the old man grabs his arm and swings him round, and Bobby is holding a silver blade. And when Dean looks down he's standing in a devil's trap, and Omen Dog isn't chained up at all, it's watching him from the next doorway along, panting calmly.

"You gotta be fuckin' kidding me," he barks, deliberately plants one boot over the painted border.

Bobby raises an eyebrow. "Precaution," he snaps back, and he produces a flask he has tucked in beside his thigh, offers it over.

"We did all this," Sam says quietly from behind him. "I even tried to exorcise him. He's not a demon, Bobby. I think it's a curse."

Dean snorts derisively in his brother's direction. "Maybe you should try using your evil hand."

Sam doesn't meet his eyes, and Bobby sits there, rock solid in his chair, immovable, and watches impassively as he swigs from the flask, tips the rest of it over his head for good measure. "Satisfied?" He slams the flask down into the old man's hand. "I can't be possessed," he says, bitterly. "I'm off-limits. Protected. I'm a special snowflake, didn't you know? God's champion."

Bobby eyes him for a minute. "Grumpy little bastard too," he finally says. "What the fuck climbed up your ass?"

Dean clutches at thin air with his fingers. "I have no fuckin' idea," he snaps. He jerks his head back behind him. "He thinks Sabrina the teenage witch laid some mojo on me on some back road up the ass of nowhere." And now the dog is growling at him, low under its breath, and it knows. "And chain your fuckin' dog, or I'll plug it."

Bobby bristles. "Watch your mouth, boy. You ain't too big for a clip round the ear and I'll be damned if I—"

And suddenly it's too much and he's dizzy, rubbing at his eyes. "Look," he says, soft now. "Please put the dog outside, Bobby. I can't – you know. The dog, it…" And Sam has his hand under his arm and he's shepherding him over to a chair, sitting him down, and he heaves out a sobbing sigh of relief as Bobby shoves the mutt out ahead of the chair.

Sam is kneeling next to him and his giant hand is on his knee. "Something's wrong Dean," he's saying earnestly. "This isn't you. But we'll fix it."

He stares back. "This isn't me," he repeats mechanically, and then he says it again because on some level he knows it's a clue and that all he has to do is work out what the mystery is and everything will be clear.

Sam glances away and over at the doorway as Bobby rolls back in, bottle slotted in between his thighs.

The old man hands it over and Dean unscrews the lid, gulps the liquor, and it's tasteless, doesn't scorch the back of his throat, there's no fire to it at all, and he stares at the label, grimaces. "You trying to tell me something, Bobby?"

"Such as?"

He smiles weakly. "I know you got better stuff than this. Not like you to try and get the piss water past me. I know I've been knocking it back some, but it's no reason to dilute the liquor."

And the old man stares back, purses his lips. "That ain't piss water, Dean," he announces dryly. "That's Wild Turkey. Eighty proof. Like it says on the label. Paintstripper."

Dean raises an eyebrow, smirks. "Yeah, right." He swallows another few gulps, because his throat is dry, and at least the liquor is wet. "Can't you get a sheepdog or something?" he blurts out abruptly. "One of those Lassie mutts? Or a lab? Something less, less – just less."

Bobby's eyes flicker with something that might be understanding but he doesn't reply. Dean glances up at his brother, who looks whey-faced and worn out, and he offers him the booze. Sam takes it, knocks back a mouthful, explodes in splutters and coughs and watering eyes, spraying whiskey everywhere.

"J-jesus… Christ…"

It prickles at him right out of the blue, and he makes a face. "I think we say that too much."

Sam is wiping his mouth in between huffing out air and trying to catch a breath, and he tents his brows, eyes wide and questioning.

Dean shrugs. "We say that too much," he repeats. "It's blasphemy."

"Blasphemy?" Bobby chimes in. "Well now I'm officially worried. What the hell are you talkin' about, boy?"

He's suitably solemn. "Blasphemy. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain."

Bobby stares at him, glances at his brother, looks back.

"It's one of the ten commandments," Dean says, and then, helpfully, "I know everything."

"I know it's one of the ten fuckin' commandments, idjit," Bobby snaps out. "I have read the bible." He stares balefully back, slants his eyes over at Sam. "What the hell happened?"

Sam shakes his head, throws up his hands. "Where do I start?" he says. "We were about twenty miles out of Heber after it all went down, and I saw a car stopped on the verge, breakdown. Dean popped the hood, got it going again, we left. But there was a kid in the car… teenage girl. I didn't see her, but Dean says he got a vibe from her, that she called him a know it all. And…" he scrunches up his face. "Hey presto. He knows it all. And he keeps saying he feels spaced out, like his head is all fuzzy inside."

Bobby shifts his focus back, frowns. "Did you take a blow to the head?"

Dean shrugs. "No clue, don't remember. But I do seem to know it all."

"It's weird," his brother chips in. "He knows things he doesn't know, never knew. About nuclear fission, hip replacements. He's spouting poetry. And he can speak German."

"Je peux parler français aussi," Dean says. "E italiano, e spagnolo." There's a brief, awed silence, and he shrugs. "I can speak French too. And Italian, and Spanish. I can speak every language there is."

Bobby cocks his head. "Enochian too, apparently," he says thoughtfully.

"There's more," Sam adds wearily. "After she said he knew it all, this kid said maybe he didn't know as much as he thought. And he knows all this new stuff like I said, but he's forgetting other stuff, stuff he's known for years… hunter lore, people. And then he's remembering it again, and, uh… sometimes he isn't reacting too well."

Sam's voice goes quiet and regretful, and Dean knows it's because of the silent drive, the air in the car so thick he could taste it on his tongue, the disgust he knows damn well oozed from him from the second he saw them, clear as day in his head, tangled limbs, sweat glistening, and her hands carding his brother's hair while she whispered her lies and duplicity in his ears, salving his grief by fanning his rage. Not Sam's fault, he says inside his head, and it's like he's having a conversation with himself, talking himself down. Not Sam's fault, and he rubs at his jaw, leans into his hand and shuts it out.

"Can you find out what it is?" his brother is saying to Bobby as he drifts back to the now. "Are we going to need to go back to Heber, track this kid down?"

Bobby wheels himself over to the table, pulls a book out of a pile. "Depends. Most forgetting spells are forget-me-not love spells or just garden variety forgive-and-forget spells," he says. "It's the knowing it all sub-clause that's tricky." He squints at the page, looks up. "You sure you're not just shining at us? Mind reading?"

Dean scowls. "No, I am not shining at you," he grouses. "And shining doesn't even mean mind reading. It means being able to see into the future. According to the master of horror." He eyes Bobby for a minute then, smirks all sly and knowing. "Shirley Futterman," he says.

Bobby goes rigid, looks up from the book. "Come again?"

He chuckles. "Funny, that's exactly what you said to her. Shirley Futterman. You were seventeen and she was twenty-one. It was behind the Wyo Theater in Laramie…"

The old man's mouth is hanging open now, and Dean can't resist a glance at his brother. Sam's mouth is a captivated O, his eyes huge with a mix of shock and thrilled fascination.

"In the Heat of the Night," he leers, and he winks at Sam. "That was the movie," he continues airily. "Appropriate, much? You and she did it four more times over the next two weeks, and Shirley loved that movie so much she had a special name for little Bobby, didn't she? She called him Mister Tibbs—"

"We get the picture," Bobby growls. The old man glares at him, pink under his beard. "What's your point?"

Dean stretches, reaches for another gulp of piss water. "My point is that you weren't thinking of that," he says. "So I wasn't mind reading."

Bobby chews his lip for a second. "What am I doing next Saturday?"

"Next Saturday?" he echoes the old man. "How the fuck should I know?"

Slow nod. Then, "Where's Shirley Futterman gonna be a year from now?"

Dean shrugs. "No clue. See? Not shining either."

Bobby scribbles a note in the margin of his book, glances at Sam. "Seems like maybe he knows it all about stuff that's already known," he ventures. "Known facts, people he knows and things they've done. So maybe it follows on that it's those things he's forgetting too."

Sam nods. "It seems to be intermittent. Like, he forgot who Cas was, but then on the drive here it seemed like he remembered again. And he forgot how to kill a wendigo—"

Dean holds up his hand. "With fire, or a silver bullet," he cuts in, and he taps the ring where it glints on his finger. "Or even with a silver ring if you're desperate."

His brother waves a hand at him. "See what I mean?"

Bobby taps his pencil on the desk. "It's coming and going."

Dean cuts in, thoughtful. "Maybe I'm not really forgetting," he offers. "Maybe I'm just non-prioritizing it. You know. Filing it away up there." He taps his temple. "Like out of sight out of mind. Only out of mind, out of mind."

"Speaking of which." And Bobby leans across and gives him a hard clip round the ear.

He yelps. "What the fuck was that for?"

"For Mister fuckin' Tibbs." The old man's brows are low, pulled together, a unibrow grimace of intense annoyance. "And because Sam here tells me you said yes."

He rubs hard at his head, snaps testily, "It was conditional," and then, "Ow! Bobby! What the fuck, man?" He reaches up to rub the other side, and the tip of his ear is smarting. He fires the evil eye at his brother. "Big mouth. Jesus Christ."

Sam raises an eyebrow, and the message in his eyes is clear, payback's a bitch, dude, and he knows he deserves it, that he's been like a bear with wasp up its butt since… when?

"I heard your condition got met, right then and there." Bobby takes off his cap and flicks it into the table. "Out of fuckin' mind sounds about right. And I see blasphemy is back on the menu."

He snorts, laughs out of left field. "I can't believe I said that," he confides. "Blasphemy… since when? I could hear myself saying the words, and it was like someone else was in my head speaking. Weird, man."

And suddenly Bobby's giving him that look now, mirroring Sam's suspicion back at the motel, and on the road. "I'm me, Bobby," he says quietly. "There's nothing subletting me."

Sam drums his fingertips on the tabletop, chips in. "He said his head was fuzzy," he repeats. "Whooshing like a seashell, or like something was whispering to him. Oh, and a couple of times he said he felt like we were being watched."

Dean shoots him an accusing look. "My nose is cold and wet, Sam," he snaps. "I'm wagging my tail. I'm fine." And to Bobby, "Zachariah had Sam bleeding out from his mouth, by the way. Buckets of it."

The old man doesn't take the bait. "Don't try and steer me, boy," he says balefully. "You killed Zachariah. And your blue-eyed boy said only an angel can kill an angel. Unless he lied to you about that as well?"

His irritation spikes suddenly, and he shoots up onto his feet, clenches his fists. "Aren't we past this?" he forces out through gritted teeth. "He didn't lie to me Bobby. He thought he was doing God's will, and he was just as much out of the loop as we were."

"He let your brother out," Bobby growls. "Let him out to get high on demon blood and gank Lilith, and—"

"That's exactly what you wanted to do, Bobby," Dean cuts in harshly. "And don't forget, you had your chance to stop Sam but you didn't. If Cas hadn't let him out Zachariah would have sent someone else to do it, and it still would have gone down just like it did because you'd still have let Sam walk."

Bobby fixes him with a hard, flat stare, doesn't reply. And Dean breathes himself down, plants his ass back on the chair. "If Cas had said no, Zachariah would have toasted him, and where the fuck would we be then?" he says. "He was going to warn me something was up, and he got ass-reamed for it, by his own kind. But he came through for me – for us – in the end. He had a choice, and he chose—" He stops abruptly, because Sam is looking down at his boots, and because his next word is me. He chose me, when my own brother didn't, he thinks. "He chose to do the right thing," he continues, carefully. "When Zachariah spilled that God wasn't running the show, Cas did the right thing. He doesn't lie to me. And it isn't his fault he can't…" He flicks his eyes down, at the old man's legs. "It isn't his fault," he says again. "He'd do it if he could."

Bobby considers him, tweaks his chin with his thumb and forefinger. "Point taken," he grudges out, and then he raises a dubious eyebrow. "But if you're saying he doesn't lie to you, then what exactly are you saying, Dean? Given what he said about angels killing angels?"

Dean looks back and forth from the old man to his brother and back again, palms his face. "Look. Can we just – can we stay on topic here?" he says. "This, whatever it is – it could be frying my brain cells. Like when O'Neill looked into that alien head-grabbing doohickey."

Bobby stares him down for a minute, relents. "So what do you remember about this weird kid?" he says finally.

He sighs out, rueful mixed with relief. "Not much… just some flashes. But yeah, there was a vibe from her. Like – static or something. Like I could feel her on my skin. She said I was a know it all. Something like that." He frowns, scrubs at his hair. "And there was something she was doing, if I could just remember. I think it was important."

Sam leans across, puts a hand on his arm. "Maybe we need to get some sleep," he suggests quietly. "It might help, with the fuzzy head. The whooshing."

He shakes his brother's hand off, aggressively if he's honest. "I'm fine, Sam, I'm not tired."

Sam glances at his wristwatch. "It's been twenty seven hours since we've slept properly, Dean. I'm exhausted and there's no way you aren't either. Maybe it's why—"

"I said I'm not tired, Sam," he snaps. "The fuzzy head has nothing to do with being tired. Alright? Now back the fuck off."

His brother's face closes down and he stiffens, and in the background Dean sees Bobby sneak his hand out, sees the old man deftly whip the liquor bottle up and out of his reach.

"I'm not drunk either," he protests.

Sam clears his throat, and he could swear his brother sounds nervous. "Well. Maybe it's tinnitus," he suggests. "You know. Ringing in your ears. From the noise when it all went down in Van Nuys."

Dean makes a face. "What noise?"

"The noise. After you said yes. Michael. Coming on down, I assume." Sam cocks his head. "It was earsplitting, Dean," he says, exasperated. "You have to have heard it."

"I didn't hear any noise," he replies. "I heard a voice. I think. Yeah… him coming, maybe. I suppose." He sees Sam's eyes widen. "Before I took it back," he adds hurriedly. "And Cas said true vessels can hear the angels speak, remember? Like Jimmy did. We know I'm a vessel. It doesn't mean anything other than that."

"Well what was he saying?" Bobby chips in.

"Actually I don't know," he says stupidly. "I wasn't really paying attention because of the light."

"The light?" Sam says slowly.

"Yeah, Zachariah," he says, and he whistles out his awe. "When he went up. His grace just exploded out of him, right there in front of me. Like a fuckin' rocket taking off, like Saturn Five. Not two inches away. It was pretty damn awesome."

Dean is nodding as he speaks, stops dead as he sees his brother's expression, and it's a confusing mixture of shock, horror, add a dash of totally bewildered. "What?" he says defensively. "What now, what did I—" And he's cut off by an abrupt tingling, a tickling sensation along his nerve endings, a sixth sense feeling, an odor, sulfur, burning, eau de Pit, and there's a simultaneous crescendo of barking and yelling from outside.

It's a drill they've practiced and perfected, as his brother launches himself at the light switch, plunges the room into darkness, heads up the hallway to the door, and he slinks to the window, pushing Bobby out of the line of fire as he goes. He pulls his Colt out of his waistband in one fluid movement, slams a hand up over his nose and mouth to stop himself from gagging at the smell. He recoils as a handful of gravel smatters against the glass, ducks back, dares to peer one eye beyond the window frame. It's quiet, no crickets even, and he can see Sam gesturing furiously from the darkness up near the front door.

"You ready?" Bobby asks, and as he nods the old man flicks a lever and floodlights flash on, illuminating the ground around the house for a good twenty yards out.

And there he is, standing out front and center, blinking in the brightness, dapper in his overcoat, puffing on a cigarette.

Dean shakes his head, murmurs, "What the hell?" And he stalks past Bobby, can hear the old man trundling along in pursuit and calling him, but he continues on up the hallway. "Knife," he snaps. "Have it ready." He motions his brother to one side, flings open the door.

"Before you start anything, I'm here with an offer," the man says, and he has his hands up, palms down, placating, but he's backing away. "I didn't come here for a barney."

Dean stands on the porch step, can hear his brother breathe out the name from beside him.

"Crowley."

TBC

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