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Part One
Dean looked naked in his hospital gown, sitting silently on the stretcher in the emergency ward. With his newly short hair and hunched shoulders, he looked closer to sixteen than twenty-three. Sam sat with him and tried not to stare. Dean, for all the problems and wonders that he was to the other Winchester men, was never quiet, never silent. Even when he was trying to keep something a secret, he’d hide it with pomp and noise, with distraction. Sam could hear Dad talking to the doctors outside, but couldn’t bring himself to pay attention to anything other than Dean.
When they’d first arrived, but after they’d seen the silent, unconscious Dean, the doctors and nurses explained, as best they could, what had happened. It was fairly simple and quite inexplicable. Earlier in the afternoon, a motorist, one Dana Jenkins, had seen Dean lying on the edge of the road, staring into nothing. When he pulled over to ask what was wrong, Dean hadn’t responded. Jenkins had then called for an ambulance. When they examined him, the doctors could find very little physically wrong with him. He had a couple of scrapes and bruises, but nothing serious. After a CAT scan, they thought it was probably a concussion from a fall, likely from the hiking trail on the top of the hill near the road where Jenkins had found him.
“Hey, man, you want to tell me what happened?” Sam leaned forward, resting his hand on his brother’s. “Where’s Tony?”
Dean looked up from his knees and gazed at Sam as though he hadn’t been sitting there for half an hour, babbling about nothing and watching Dean wake up and figure out where he was and what he was doing there.
“Hey,” Sam repeated, relieved that Dean was doing something, anything at all. “How are you doing?”
“Are- are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Sam said slowly. “I’m fine. Dad and I came up as soon as the hospital called.”
Dean nodded and wrapped one arm loosely around himself, shivering a bit in his flimsy hospital gown. “You’re not going out to Colrain any time soon, right? No Boy Scout hiking treks or anything?”
“No, but - “
“Dean,” Dad said from the doorway. “You alright, son?”
Dean nodded. “I think we need to talk about -”
“You’re talking,” the doctor observed brightly from behind Dad.
Dean looked at him sharply. “Yeah…. I just…”
Sam frowned. He wanted to offer his support to his brother, to tell Dean that he was here, to let him know that the doctors told them that confusion was normal, that it would be okay, for the next couple days. He knew Dean wouldn’t deal with it well, always wanted to be in control, to know what was happening.
The doctor moved past Dad and into the tiny ward room. He pulled a small light from his pocket and, standing in front of Dean, tested his pupils. “Can you tell us what happened?”
Sam watched Dean’s eyes flicker to meet Dad’s before he opened his mouth. “I -I don’t know. Tony and I were doing a long weekend camping thing. We don’t have Monday classes, you know? So we figured a morning hike would do us some good, get us good and awake before picking up camp and heading back. I was pretty tired. I don’t really sleep well in the great outdoors. So I decided to take a break, I don’t know, twenty minutes into the hike. I had a Powerbar and some water, caught my breath. I got up to hike again and tried to catch up with Tony; I could hear him arguing with someone in the woods. He must have gone off trail… I could hear him, but I couldn’t find him.” He frowned, his jaw tight and the frustration and anger apparent in his face. “I couldn’t find him.”
“Hey, hey,” Sam interrupted. “Tony does the whole get-back-to-nature thing a lot. I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably back at your camp right now, wondering where the hell you are.”
“Do you remember anything else?” the doctor asked, tucking the light back into his pocket.
Dean shook his head, but didn’t look at the doctor, instead keeping his eyes on Dad.
“Well, it looks like you had a concussion, probably from falling from the hiking trail to the side of the road.” The doctor looked at Dad. “Will he be going home with you tonight? He won’t be able to sleep for a couple of hours yet and I have a couple of forms…”
Dad nodded. “Sam, keep an eye on your brother and help him get his stuff together. I hope your room is habitable for another human being right now.”
*
Sam sat across the kitchen table from Dean, who was hunched over his architecture textbook with a half full bottle of water in front of him. School had been hell, even Alex and Kelly pestering him about his brother and his missing roommate. With one missing college student and one who'd been admitted to a stay at the hospital, Dean and Tony had been all over the evening news the previous night, though Dad had been good and kept the reporters away from them. Still, the teachers were treating him like a delicate flower and all of his friends wanted to know if Dean had offed Tony. Sam was tired of it and secretly hoped they’d have a freak late season blizzard so he wouldn’t have to go to school or basketball practice the next day. Sam pulled his copy of The Things They Carried out of his backpack and figured he would at least get a head start on his readings if he wasn’t talking to anyone.
“They found his body today. I saw it on the news.”
Sam dropped his book. “His body? Tony’s dead?”
“They found him in the woods, maybe ten miles from the trail where they found me.” Dean’s voice was dead and hollow and scaring Sam. “The news says they think somebody pushed me, that I didn’t fall and that they’re looking for Tony’s killer.”
Sam sat at the worn and scarred table and stared at the the top of Dean’s head. “Tony’s dead?” he repeated at last, feeling numb. He could easily remember Dean’s roommate, the last time Sam had gone down to visit, Tony helping Dean move in, Tony visiting at Columbus Day. He hadn’t always gotten along with Tony and his cocky, know-everything manner, but he’d been good and good for Dean. He’d been the one who finally encouraged Dean to get therapy and see someone and supported Dean through it, when Sam was still at home and just in high school. “Do you remember anything?”
“I told you, Sam,” Dean said, not looking up from the book, but not turning the page. “I don’t know what happened. I took a break and when I got up again, I couldn’t find him.”
“But you said you heard him arguing before you fell. You must have heard something.”
“Look, I don’t know!” Dean snapped, finally looking up at Sam. “I don’t fucking know what happened back there. He was arguing and - and -”
Sam immediately felt guilty for pushing his brother because Dean looked so broken and guilty, sitting there with his water and unread book. He knew that the camping trip had been Dean’s idea, or his therapist’s idea, and that Tony had only been there because he was familiar with both the area and Dean’s irrational fears of the things that went bump in the night. “I’m sorry. I’m just kind of wigged out.”
Dean slammed his textbook shut and stood up. “Do you know if Dad’s at the garage or teaching today?”
Sam blinked and tried to remember if Dad told him. “The garage, I think. Paul said something about being short handed this week.”
“Good.” Dean grabbed his coat. “I’ll be back before dinner.”
*
Sam skipped basketball practice again and came home early. The Impala was parked in the driveway next to his own third-hand Buick, so he guessed that Dean was home and avoiding the pain and media circus of returning to Westfield. Dean had been keeping weird hours since the news and photos of Tony’s death had hit the airwaves and internet, so Sam figured he might be sleeping. Dean’s bed had been empty when Sam had finally drifted off to sleep the previous night and it remained unrumpled when Sam awoke the next morning. Sam had been greeted by fresh, hot coffee and doughnuts in the kitchen when he ventured out, though, and Dean hadn't appeared too much worse for the wear.
Sam dropped his bag in the living room, doing his best to be quiet. He almost hoped that Dean was sleeping even though it was nearly four in the afternoon. Sam had seen the heavy dark circles under his brother’s eyes and the way he’d been watching the shadows. Day sleeping was better than no sleeping at all, even if it was symptomatic of other problems. When there was no sign of Dean anywhere in the house, Sam figured that maybe he’d gone for a run or one of his his friends had taken the afternoon to visit. In stocking feet, he walked through the kitchen, grabbed an apple, and slid down the narrow hall to his bedroom.
“Jesus fuck, man, don’t you knock?”
Sam froze in the doorway, the partially eaten apple forgotten in his right hand. “To get into my own room?”
“You didn’t have to be so fucking quiet,” Dean said sharply, not bothering to hide the large gun - a rifle, Sam thought - on his bed.
“What are you doing?”
Dean looked down at the pieces of weaponry on his lap and spread across the worn Red Sox bedspread. “I’m cleaning my gun.”
“Your gun?”
“No, I stole it, dumb ass. Yes, it’s my gun.” Dean picked up some of the pieces and began to reassemble it.
Sam frowned and stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. “Since when do you know how to use a gun?”
Dean frowned for a little while, looking older than his twenty three years, and finished with his gun. When he looked up his green eyes were flat and Sam remembered that Dad and Dean had been fighting again when he had left for school that morning. Dad wanted Dean to ‘stay safe’ and Dean had, once again, been fighting Dad for all that he was worth. “Dad taught me to shoot when I was six. Promised me that I’d get to show you, when you were old enough.”
“What?” Sam sat on the floor beside the bed, his legs curled under him, at eye level with the rifle and looking up at his big brother. “But Dad hates guns. He won’t have them in the house."
“Yeah, well.” Dean shrugged. “I bought this when I got my license, when I was eighteen.” He eyed Sam carefully. “You know, you could get yours now. Dad would never have to know.”
“But…”
“A gun’s good thing to have,” Dean explained slowly. “As long as you’re not an ass with it; then you’re a dead idiot.” He paused a long moment. “Come on, get up here. Let’s see you handle a rifle.” He grinned. “Get back to your roots.”
*
Sam found Kelly on their shared free period, hanging out in the hall outside Mr. Masterson’s Spanish class room. She had her calculus book in her lap and her calculator and some scrap paper on the floor next to her, so she should have theoretically been doing some work, but Sam could tell by the look on her face that she was too busy sketching in her notebook or writing some kind of shopping list to be paying attention to math.
“Hey.” Sam grinned and dropped to the ground next to her. “How’s the homework going?”
“Oh, fuck off,” Kelly told him, putting her book down. “I got most of it done last night.”
“Problem 53?”
“That’s crazy shit. I even called Joanna and she couldn’t do it. I think Mr. Devitis is making shit up at this point.” Kelly smiled. “Did you get your dad to help you with it?”
Sam shrugged. He didn’t really want to explain to her that Dad had been more intent on making sure that he knew where Sam and Dean were most of the time, or that they weren’t going off on their own, than making sure Sam’s homework was done and his grades were up to college standard. He was pretty good on his own and figured that if his grades lagged a bit, Stanford would chalk it up to run-of-the-mill senioritis. He stretched his legs out to their full length. “How was your weekend, barring crazy calculus problems?”
“I dunno, boring. Tara and I made a run into Fitchburg - Dad let me borrow his car - but you know what it’s like: nothing to do. I mean, I guess we could go smoke weed by the pond, but whatever. The mall isn’t that bad. And I think Coach would kill me if he caught me smoking even a cigarette.” Kelly laughed.
“Probably. If your dad didn’t get you first.”
Kelly smiled at him softly. “So you didn’t come over here just to talk to me. What’s up?”
“You’re my best friend who’s a girl and I can talk to you whenever I want,” Sam declared, bumping her shoulder with his.
“Come on, Sam, you haven’t just wanted to talk in, like, three weeks,” Kelly complained. “Ever since that stuff with your brother - and okay, maybe Alex and I were kind of shitty, but it’s not like it’s totally out there - and now you want to just sit down and talk about math and softball?”
Sam blushed a little and hung his head, wishing she weren’t telling so much of the truth. “Uh, yeah. I was wondering if we were still on for prom. I mean, I know I’m not exactly dating anyone and I don’t think you are and we said we’d go together, but that was last year and…”
“Um.” Kelly made her uncomfortable face, the one where her lips crumpled a little and she squinted like she was looking into direct sun on the field. “Yeah, my dad says I can’t.”
“Your dad doesn’t want you to go to prom?” Sam exclaimed. “But it’s like a right of passage or something. Your sister was on the prom committee for four years or something. Just because she got knocked up on prom night doesn’t mean you will.”
Kelly frowned like she always did when people talked about Ali. “It’s not that. I mean, he doesn’t care if I go to prom. Just not with you.”
“What? But your family likes me. Or, at least, your mom does. Or I thought she did.”
“Uncle Carl - you know my Uncle Carl, right? - he says he saw you and your brother over at the shooting range by Worcester on Friday.”
Judging by Kelly’s face, Sam realised that she really didn’t want to have this conversation. It was true, though. Dean had taken him to the range and then out to pizza on Friday night after school since Dad was working late again. Dean was a pretty good shot, although he claimed he’d needed a lot of work since getting his license, but Sam was still having trouble hitting anything near the target. Dean kept telling him he was getting better and not to be discouraged. “Yeah.”
“Well, my dad, he didn’t like that. You know, the idea of me being with you and you and guns.” Kelly shrugged sharply. “Mom agreed. I know you wouldn’t do anything, but… Anyway, even if we don’t go to prom together together, we can still, you know, meet up there or whatever. And they didn’t tell me not to spend time with you or anything, just that we couldn’t go to prom together. Don’t want me having shotgun-wielding babies.”
“Yeah,” Sam repeated, feeling uncomfortable. He pulled out his own calculus textbook and notebook. “You want to see if we can figure out 53 and show Devitis we’re not all a bunch of idiot jocks?”
*
“So where’d you get these?” Sam asked, sitting on the edge of the kitchen chair and staring across the book laden table at his brother.
“The books?” Dean asked, looking up from some notes he’d been taking.
“Yeah.” Sam flipped through one of the ones in front of him. “Hey, this one looks familiar… ‘Who can tell whether the Envy of the Devils at the Favour of God unto Men, may not provoke them to affect Retirement from the sight of populous and prosperous Regions, except so far as they reckon their Work of Tempting Mankind necessary to be carry’d on?’ Did we have to read that for school or something?”
“Which one are you reading?” Dean abandoned his book and paper and got up to look at Sam’s tome. “Oh, The Demonic Possession of Elizabeth Knapp? Naw, they don’t read that in school, not anymore. It’s one of Mather’s books. I think Dad and I used to read that to you as a bedtime story sometimes.”
Sam looked up from the book skeptically. “A bedtime story? This stuff is pretty freaky. You sure you weren’t trying to give me nightmares?”
Dean leaned his arm across Sam’s shoulders and ruffled his hair with his free hand. “Not really. You seemed to like it just fine and we didn’t always have other books, you know? I picked up kids’ books when I could, but sometimes they just got left behind. It’s how things were.”
Sam twisted to look up at Dean. “Left behind? Did we move around a lot? I know everybody says it was hard after Mom died, but wouldn’t it be even harder to move around with two little kids?”
“I don’t know, you weren’t that bad as a kid.” Sam watched as Dean’s face shuttered closed even as he grinned. “Now, I don’t know -”
“Shut it, man,” Sam said, shoving Dean’s arm away. “Can’t you be serious for five minutes?”
Dean took a step back. “Look, you haven’t told Dad about any of this, have you?”
“This?” Sam frowned; Dean was jumping from topic to topic almost too fast for Sam to follow these days.
“The guns, the books, the salt lines: you haven’t told him, have you?”
“No.” Sam was taken aback by his brother’s frank earnestness.
Dean sighed and sat down in the chair next to Sam’s. “Good. He would - he will kill me, when he finds out, if he finds out.”
“Yeah, I know,” Sam agreed, feeling the need to reassure him. “He’d freak about the guns, but…” Sam fingered the edge of the Mather book.
“But what?” Dean asked, sounding tense and worn.
Sam kept his eyes on the book. “You know how when Dad helped you move your stuff back from Westfield, I picked up the house like Dad asked? You know, like vacuumed and stuff?”
“Yeah.”
Sam stood up. “Come on. I want to show you something.” He walked out of the kitchen and through the living room to the back door. He knelt down and peeled back the welcome mat. “Normally I wouldn’t have moved this, but it was pretty dirty and I figured Dad would have killed me if I left it a mess.”
Dean stared at the markings on the floor. “So you didn’t put that there?”
Sam shook his head. “And I figured you would have told me if you did it. So unless someone’s been breaking into the house to put ceremonial magic pentagrams on our floor and hiding them under the rugs, you and Dad have been reading at least some of the same books.”
Dean knelt down next to his brother and traced the symbol with his forefinger. “You seem to be taking all of this pretty calmly.”
“Calmly?” Sam laughed. “Seriously? I’m ready to snap. I mean, I’m pretty used to this kind of thing from you. I figured it would happen.” He motioned toward Dean’s amulet. “It’s why I bought you that. But me? Reading all of these books and learning to fire a gun? And Dad? Dad? I mean he’s, like, the most grounded, hard headed… If he’s starting to do this now…”
“Not starting now,” Dean corrected. “Doing it again.”
“What?” Sam stared. “This has always been your deal, not his.”
“Where do you think I learned it? I wasn’t some five year old genius freak who decided that Goethe was better than Jeremiah Puddleduck. You don’t remember, you were too little, but Dad, he did this. More than this. He found the things that go bump in the night. Killed them.”
“What?”
“He -”
“I heard you!” Sam snapped. “You both actually believe that?”
“Yes, but -”
Sam didn’t let him finish answering, but instead took off out of the door at a full run. He knew, in the back of his mind, that it would scare Dean and Dad, running off on his own even in the early evening, but he couldn’t bring himself to care, not right now. It was one thing for Dean to be reading the weird religious texts and to make himself bizarre little amulets and bags. He knew everyone thought his brother was crazy, was a freak, but he was just Dean and that’s what he did. It was a little sad, but totally harmless that he was scared of his own shadow. But to believe that their dad… And for Dad to believe it… Sam ran and ran and ran until his lungs burned with cold fire.
Part Three
Dean looked naked in his hospital gown, sitting silently on the stretcher in the emergency ward. With his newly short hair and hunched shoulders, he looked closer to sixteen than twenty-three. Sam sat with him and tried not to stare. Dean, for all the problems and wonders that he was to the other Winchester men, was never quiet, never silent. Even when he was trying to keep something a secret, he’d hide it with pomp and noise, with distraction. Sam could hear Dad talking to the doctors outside, but couldn’t bring himself to pay attention to anything other than Dean.
When they’d first arrived, but after they’d seen the silent, unconscious Dean, the doctors and nurses explained, as best they could, what had happened. It was fairly simple and quite inexplicable. Earlier in the afternoon, a motorist, one Dana Jenkins, had seen Dean lying on the edge of the road, staring into nothing. When he pulled over to ask what was wrong, Dean hadn’t responded. Jenkins had then called for an ambulance. When they examined him, the doctors could find very little physically wrong with him. He had a couple of scrapes and bruises, but nothing serious. After a CAT scan, they thought it was probably a concussion from a fall, likely from the hiking trail on the top of the hill near the road where Jenkins had found him.
“Hey, man, you want to tell me what happened?” Sam leaned forward, resting his hand on his brother’s. “Where’s Tony?”
Dean looked up from his knees and gazed at Sam as though he hadn’t been sitting there for half an hour, babbling about nothing and watching Dean wake up and figure out where he was and what he was doing there.
“Hey,” Sam repeated, relieved that Dean was doing something, anything at all. “How are you doing?”
“Are- are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Sam said slowly. “I’m fine. Dad and I came up as soon as the hospital called.”
Dean nodded and wrapped one arm loosely around himself, shivering a bit in his flimsy hospital gown. “You’re not going out to Colrain any time soon, right? No Boy Scout hiking treks or anything?”
“No, but - “
“Dean,” Dad said from the doorway. “You alright, son?”
Dean nodded. “I think we need to talk about -”
“You’re talking,” the doctor observed brightly from behind Dad.
Dean looked at him sharply. “Yeah…. I just…”
Sam frowned. He wanted to offer his support to his brother, to tell Dean that he was here, to let him know that the doctors told them that confusion was normal, that it would be okay, for the next couple days. He knew Dean wouldn’t deal with it well, always wanted to be in control, to know what was happening.
The doctor moved past Dad and into the tiny ward room. He pulled a small light from his pocket and, standing in front of Dean, tested his pupils. “Can you tell us what happened?”
Sam watched Dean’s eyes flicker to meet Dad’s before he opened his mouth. “I -I don’t know. Tony and I were doing a long weekend camping thing. We don’t have Monday classes, you know? So we figured a morning hike would do us some good, get us good and awake before picking up camp and heading back. I was pretty tired. I don’t really sleep well in the great outdoors. So I decided to take a break, I don’t know, twenty minutes into the hike. I had a Powerbar and some water, caught my breath. I got up to hike again and tried to catch up with Tony; I could hear him arguing with someone in the woods. He must have gone off trail… I could hear him, but I couldn’t find him.” He frowned, his jaw tight and the frustration and anger apparent in his face. “I couldn’t find him.”
“Hey, hey,” Sam interrupted. “Tony does the whole get-back-to-nature thing a lot. I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably back at your camp right now, wondering where the hell you are.”
“Do you remember anything else?” the doctor asked, tucking the light back into his pocket.
Dean shook his head, but didn’t look at the doctor, instead keeping his eyes on Dad.
“Well, it looks like you had a concussion, probably from falling from the hiking trail to the side of the road.” The doctor looked at Dad. “Will he be going home with you tonight? He won’t be able to sleep for a couple of hours yet and I have a couple of forms…”
Dad nodded. “Sam, keep an eye on your brother and help him get his stuff together. I hope your room is habitable for another human being right now.”
*
Sam sat across the kitchen table from Dean, who was hunched over his architecture textbook with a half full bottle of water in front of him. School had been hell, even Alex and Kelly pestering him about his brother and his missing roommate. With one missing college student and one who'd been admitted to a stay at the hospital, Dean and Tony had been all over the evening news the previous night, though Dad had been good and kept the reporters away from them. Still, the teachers were treating him like a delicate flower and all of his friends wanted to know if Dean had offed Tony. Sam was tired of it and secretly hoped they’d have a freak late season blizzard so he wouldn’t have to go to school or basketball practice the next day. Sam pulled his copy of The Things They Carried out of his backpack and figured he would at least get a head start on his readings if he wasn’t talking to anyone.
“They found his body today. I saw it on the news.”
Sam dropped his book. “His body? Tony’s dead?”
“They found him in the woods, maybe ten miles from the trail where they found me.” Dean’s voice was dead and hollow and scaring Sam. “The news says they think somebody pushed me, that I didn’t fall and that they’re looking for Tony’s killer.”
Sam sat at the worn and scarred table and stared at the the top of Dean’s head. “Tony’s dead?” he repeated at last, feeling numb. He could easily remember Dean’s roommate, the last time Sam had gone down to visit, Tony helping Dean move in, Tony visiting at Columbus Day. He hadn’t always gotten along with Tony and his cocky, know-everything manner, but he’d been good and good for Dean. He’d been the one who finally encouraged Dean to get therapy and see someone and supported Dean through it, when Sam was still at home and just in high school. “Do you remember anything?”
“I told you, Sam,” Dean said, not looking up from the book, but not turning the page. “I don’t know what happened. I took a break and when I got up again, I couldn’t find him.”
“But you said you heard him arguing before you fell. You must have heard something.”
“Look, I don’t know!” Dean snapped, finally looking up at Sam. “I don’t fucking know what happened back there. He was arguing and - and -”
Sam immediately felt guilty for pushing his brother because Dean looked so broken and guilty, sitting there with his water and unread book. He knew that the camping trip had been Dean’s idea, or his therapist’s idea, and that Tony had only been there because he was familiar with both the area and Dean’s irrational fears of the things that went bump in the night. “I’m sorry. I’m just kind of wigged out.”
Dean slammed his textbook shut and stood up. “Do you know if Dad’s at the garage or teaching today?”
Sam blinked and tried to remember if Dad told him. “The garage, I think. Paul said something about being short handed this week.”
“Good.” Dean grabbed his coat. “I’ll be back before dinner.”
*
Sam skipped basketball practice again and came home early. The Impala was parked in the driveway next to his own third-hand Buick, so he guessed that Dean was home and avoiding the pain and media circus of returning to Westfield. Dean had been keeping weird hours since the news and photos of Tony’s death had hit the airwaves and internet, so Sam figured he might be sleeping. Dean’s bed had been empty when Sam had finally drifted off to sleep the previous night and it remained unrumpled when Sam awoke the next morning. Sam had been greeted by fresh, hot coffee and doughnuts in the kitchen when he ventured out, though, and Dean hadn't appeared too much worse for the wear.
Sam dropped his bag in the living room, doing his best to be quiet. He almost hoped that Dean was sleeping even though it was nearly four in the afternoon. Sam had seen the heavy dark circles under his brother’s eyes and the way he’d been watching the shadows. Day sleeping was better than no sleeping at all, even if it was symptomatic of other problems. When there was no sign of Dean anywhere in the house, Sam figured that maybe he’d gone for a run or one of his his friends had taken the afternoon to visit. In stocking feet, he walked through the kitchen, grabbed an apple, and slid down the narrow hall to his bedroom.
“Jesus fuck, man, don’t you knock?”
Sam froze in the doorway, the partially eaten apple forgotten in his right hand. “To get into my own room?”
“You didn’t have to be so fucking quiet,” Dean said sharply, not bothering to hide the large gun - a rifle, Sam thought - on his bed.
“What are you doing?”
Dean looked down at the pieces of weaponry on his lap and spread across the worn Red Sox bedspread. “I’m cleaning my gun.”
“Your gun?”
“No, I stole it, dumb ass. Yes, it’s my gun.” Dean picked up some of the pieces and began to reassemble it.
Sam frowned and stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. “Since when do you know how to use a gun?”
Dean frowned for a little while, looking older than his twenty three years, and finished with his gun. When he looked up his green eyes were flat and Sam remembered that Dad and Dean had been fighting again when he had left for school that morning. Dad wanted Dean to ‘stay safe’ and Dean had, once again, been fighting Dad for all that he was worth. “Dad taught me to shoot when I was six. Promised me that I’d get to show you, when you were old enough.”
“What?” Sam sat on the floor beside the bed, his legs curled under him, at eye level with the rifle and looking up at his big brother. “But Dad hates guns. He won’t have them in the house."
“Yeah, well.” Dean shrugged. “I bought this when I got my license, when I was eighteen.” He eyed Sam carefully. “You know, you could get yours now. Dad would never have to know.”
“But…”
“A gun’s good thing to have,” Dean explained slowly. “As long as you’re not an ass with it; then you’re a dead idiot.” He paused a long moment. “Come on, get up here. Let’s see you handle a rifle.” He grinned. “Get back to your roots.”
*
Sam found Kelly on their shared free period, hanging out in the hall outside Mr. Masterson’s Spanish class room. She had her calculus book in her lap and her calculator and some scrap paper on the floor next to her, so she should have theoretically been doing some work, but Sam could tell by the look on her face that she was too busy sketching in her notebook or writing some kind of shopping list to be paying attention to math.
“Hey.” Sam grinned and dropped to the ground next to her. “How’s the homework going?”
“Oh, fuck off,” Kelly told him, putting her book down. “I got most of it done last night.”
“Problem 53?”
“That’s crazy shit. I even called Joanna and she couldn’t do it. I think Mr. Devitis is making shit up at this point.” Kelly smiled. “Did you get your dad to help you with it?”
Sam shrugged. He didn’t really want to explain to her that Dad had been more intent on making sure that he knew where Sam and Dean were most of the time, or that they weren’t going off on their own, than making sure Sam’s homework was done and his grades were up to college standard. He was pretty good on his own and figured that if his grades lagged a bit, Stanford would chalk it up to run-of-the-mill senioritis. He stretched his legs out to their full length. “How was your weekend, barring crazy calculus problems?”
“I dunno, boring. Tara and I made a run into Fitchburg - Dad let me borrow his car - but you know what it’s like: nothing to do. I mean, I guess we could go smoke weed by the pond, but whatever. The mall isn’t that bad. And I think Coach would kill me if he caught me smoking even a cigarette.” Kelly laughed.
“Probably. If your dad didn’t get you first.”
Kelly smiled at him softly. “So you didn’t come over here just to talk to me. What’s up?”
“You’re my best friend who’s a girl and I can talk to you whenever I want,” Sam declared, bumping her shoulder with his.
“Come on, Sam, you haven’t just wanted to talk in, like, three weeks,” Kelly complained. “Ever since that stuff with your brother - and okay, maybe Alex and I were kind of shitty, but it’s not like it’s totally out there - and now you want to just sit down and talk about math and softball?”
Sam blushed a little and hung his head, wishing she weren’t telling so much of the truth. “Uh, yeah. I was wondering if we were still on for prom. I mean, I know I’m not exactly dating anyone and I don’t think you are and we said we’d go together, but that was last year and…”
“Um.” Kelly made her uncomfortable face, the one where her lips crumpled a little and she squinted like she was looking into direct sun on the field. “Yeah, my dad says I can’t.”
“Your dad doesn’t want you to go to prom?” Sam exclaimed. “But it’s like a right of passage or something. Your sister was on the prom committee for four years or something. Just because she got knocked up on prom night doesn’t mean you will.”
Kelly frowned like she always did when people talked about Ali. “It’s not that. I mean, he doesn’t care if I go to prom. Just not with you.”
“What? But your family likes me. Or, at least, your mom does. Or I thought she did.”
“Uncle Carl - you know my Uncle Carl, right? - he says he saw you and your brother over at the shooting range by Worcester on Friday.”
Judging by Kelly’s face, Sam realised that she really didn’t want to have this conversation. It was true, though. Dean had taken him to the range and then out to pizza on Friday night after school since Dad was working late again. Dean was a pretty good shot, although he claimed he’d needed a lot of work since getting his license, but Sam was still having trouble hitting anything near the target. Dean kept telling him he was getting better and not to be discouraged. “Yeah.”
“Well, my dad, he didn’t like that. You know, the idea of me being with you and you and guns.” Kelly shrugged sharply. “Mom agreed. I know you wouldn’t do anything, but… Anyway, even if we don’t go to prom together together, we can still, you know, meet up there or whatever. And they didn’t tell me not to spend time with you or anything, just that we couldn’t go to prom together. Don’t want me having shotgun-wielding babies.”
“Yeah,” Sam repeated, feeling uncomfortable. He pulled out his own calculus textbook and notebook. “You want to see if we can figure out 53 and show Devitis we’re not all a bunch of idiot jocks?”
*
“So where’d you get these?” Sam asked, sitting on the edge of the kitchen chair and staring across the book laden table at his brother.
“The books?” Dean asked, looking up from some notes he’d been taking.
“Yeah.” Sam flipped through one of the ones in front of him. “Hey, this one looks familiar… ‘Who can tell whether the Envy of the Devils at the Favour of God unto Men, may not provoke them to affect Retirement from the sight of populous and prosperous Regions, except so far as they reckon their Work of Tempting Mankind necessary to be carry’d on?’ Did we have to read that for school or something?”
“Which one are you reading?” Dean abandoned his book and paper and got up to look at Sam’s tome. “Oh, The Demonic Possession of Elizabeth Knapp? Naw, they don’t read that in school, not anymore. It’s one of Mather’s books. I think Dad and I used to read that to you as a bedtime story sometimes.”
Sam looked up from the book skeptically. “A bedtime story? This stuff is pretty freaky. You sure you weren’t trying to give me nightmares?”
Dean leaned his arm across Sam’s shoulders and ruffled his hair with his free hand. “Not really. You seemed to like it just fine and we didn’t always have other books, you know? I picked up kids’ books when I could, but sometimes they just got left behind. It’s how things were.”
Sam twisted to look up at Dean. “Left behind? Did we move around a lot? I know everybody says it was hard after Mom died, but wouldn’t it be even harder to move around with two little kids?”
“I don’t know, you weren’t that bad as a kid.” Sam watched as Dean’s face shuttered closed even as he grinned. “Now, I don’t know -”
“Shut it, man,” Sam said, shoving Dean’s arm away. “Can’t you be serious for five minutes?”
Dean took a step back. “Look, you haven’t told Dad about any of this, have you?”
“This?” Sam frowned; Dean was jumping from topic to topic almost too fast for Sam to follow these days.
“The guns, the books, the salt lines: you haven’t told him, have you?”
“No.” Sam was taken aback by his brother’s frank earnestness.
Dean sighed and sat down in the chair next to Sam’s. “Good. He would - he will kill me, when he finds out, if he finds out.”
“Yeah, I know,” Sam agreed, feeling the need to reassure him. “He’d freak about the guns, but…” Sam fingered the edge of the Mather book.
“But what?” Dean asked, sounding tense and worn.
Sam kept his eyes on the book. “You know how when Dad helped you move your stuff back from Westfield, I picked up the house like Dad asked? You know, like vacuumed and stuff?”
“Yeah.”
Sam stood up. “Come on. I want to show you something.” He walked out of the kitchen and through the living room to the back door. He knelt down and peeled back the welcome mat. “Normally I wouldn’t have moved this, but it was pretty dirty and I figured Dad would have killed me if I left it a mess.”
Dean stared at the markings on the floor. “So you didn’t put that there?”
Sam shook his head. “And I figured you would have told me if you did it. So unless someone’s been breaking into the house to put ceremonial magic pentagrams on our floor and hiding them under the rugs, you and Dad have been reading at least some of the same books.”
Dean knelt down next to his brother and traced the symbol with his forefinger. “You seem to be taking all of this pretty calmly.”
“Calmly?” Sam laughed. “Seriously? I’m ready to snap. I mean, I’m pretty used to this kind of thing from you. I figured it would happen.” He motioned toward Dean’s amulet. “It’s why I bought you that. But me? Reading all of these books and learning to fire a gun? And Dad? Dad? I mean he’s, like, the most grounded, hard headed… If he’s starting to do this now…”
“Not starting now,” Dean corrected. “Doing it again.”
“What?” Sam stared. “This has always been your deal, not his.”
“Where do you think I learned it? I wasn’t some five year old genius freak who decided that Goethe was better than Jeremiah Puddleduck. You don’t remember, you were too little, but Dad, he did this. More than this. He found the things that go bump in the night. Killed them.”
“What?”
“He -”
“I heard you!” Sam snapped. “You both actually believe that?”
“Yes, but -”
Sam didn’t let him finish answering, but instead took off out of the door at a full run. He knew, in the back of his mind, that it would scare Dean and Dad, running off on his own even in the early evening, but he couldn’t bring himself to care, not right now. It was one thing for Dean to be reading the weird religious texts and to make himself bizarre little amulets and bags. He knew everyone thought his brother was crazy, was a freak, but he was just Dean and that’s what he did. It was a little sad, but totally harmless that he was scared of his own shadow. But to believe that their dad… And for Dad to believe it… Sam ran and ran and ran until his lungs burned with cold fire.
Part Three
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