Chapter Text
“So you try again,” Brady consoled once he was done cringing at the score on Sam’s LSAT results.
Sam snorted and snatched the paper out of his hand. “I don’t think so.” He tucked them back into the envelope they’d come in and tossed them onto the pile of crap covering their kitchen counter. “It’s probably a sign, you know?”
Brady rolled his eyes and flopped back onto the sofa. “Yeah, bro, a sign that you did two exorcisms the week before you took the damn test.”
That was true enough. The one two nights before the LSAT hadn’t been so bad – a run out to a motel in Oakland where a pair of hunters had the demon basically gift wrapped for him. Sam recited Latin for a few hours and made it back before dawn, enough time to get a couple hours’ sleep but not enough to do any studying. It would have been fine if he wasn’t coming off the one two days before that: a hunter tried to show up at their damn apartment – Brady said it was okay in emergencies, but Sam refused to do exorcisms around him after what he went through their freshman year – and on the way to the backup location, the demon got free, nearly killed the two of them, and broke the host’s neck on purpose just as a final ‘fuck you.’
Sam had lost thirty-one demon victims since he started doing exorcisms. He remembered every one.
“Sure,” he agreed, dropping down next to Brady on the couch, “and even if I get into law school, I’m gonna keep doing exorcisms when I need to study, when I have assignments due, when I have internships, when I need to study for the bar. What, am I gonna walk into court with a bottle of holy water in my briefcase?” He slumped forward, elbows on his knees.
Brady nudged his knee. “Why’s it always gotta be you saving the world, huh? Why can’t someone else pick up the slack?”
It was nice of him to say, even if they both already knew the answer. “Because I’m good at it,” Sam sighed. “Because I might make a decent lawyer, but I’m really, really good at fighting demons.” He looked up at Brady, who had no argument on his face.
“Yeah.” Brady nodded. “Too bad they won’t pay you for it.”
Outside the window, someone screeched, followed by a group laughing. Sam leaned toward the window and saw a group on the sidewalk below, mostly in costume with one in a black robe holding a big plastic prop knife. He glanced back at Brady, who had gone still. “You okay?”
Brady waved a hand and looked away. “I’m fine, Sam. I can handle Halloween. We could even go out tonight, if you wanted.”
Sam smiled and shook his head. “I hate Halloween anyway – you know that.”
“Yeah, what about that chick that asked you out yesterday? Jessica?”
Across the room on the counter, Sam’s cell vibrated once. He rolled his eyes. “I can go out with her another night. Seriously, dude, we’re taking the night off.”
There was a voicemail on his phone, though it hadn’t rung and there was no incoming call recorded. Sam frowned and played it, bringing the phone to his ear.
Dad’s voice: “… Sam … starting… to happen… serious… I need to try… you… careful…” There was a text, too. Coordinates.
“Everything good?” Brady asked.
Sam shook his head. “I’m not sure.” He hit Dad’s number to call him back, and it went straight to voicemail. He listened to the voicemail again, more carefully, and this time he heard a faint buzz in the background. EMF. Sam got his laptop from his room. Brady didn’t interrupt while he worked, running the message through a scanning program that pulled a single voice from the background noise: a woman’s voice saying, “I can never go home.”
“That’s a ghost,” Sam said.
“A ghost called you?”
“No, my dad. This was in the background.” He tried Dad’s phone again, still off. Something was wrong. The coordinates pointed him toward Jericho, California, not too terribly far away. He was already doing the math in his head when he looked up at Brady, remembering.
Brady gave him a lopsided smile. “So much for a night off, huh?” he supposed.
“Sorry.” Sam winced. “This is really weird. My dad, he wouldn’t call like this unless it was important.”
“Well, you shouldn’t go by yourself,” Brady said, trying for brave even though Sam could hear the anxiety in his voice. He wanted, desperately, to be the kind of friend that could help Sam with this stuff. When they’d first met, Sam was with him in an ambulance, on the way from an exorcism to emergency surgery to figure out what the hell the demon riding him had done to his body. Brady, barely conscious, motioned Sam closer and whispered in his ear, “It wanted… you… it was… going to be your friend… supposed to watch you. They have… they have plans for you…”
Sam didn’t need Brady to be brave or an exorcist or a hunter or anything like that. He had three anti-possession tattoos and wore a bag of goofer dust around his neck, even when he slept. He was Sam’s best friend, and he was alive.
“No, you stay here,” Sam said, and when Brady looked like he was going to argue, he said, “I’ll call my brother, okay? I’ll ask him to meet me.”
Once he got a relieved nod of approval, Sam took his phone into his room, shut the door, and dialed.
“Harvelle’s Roadhouse, Jo speaking.”
“Hey, Jo, it’s Sam.”
“Sam!” Her voice was bright, and he could picture her smile. “How are you?”
“Alright, but I’ve got something kinda urgent – is Dean there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get him off the grill. Hang on.”
He waited through long minutes of background noise. The Roadhouse sounded busy, even muffled through what he assumed were the office walls. The clack of the phone moving.
“Sam?” Dean sounded somewhere between confused and concerned, which was about right. They talked often enough, saw each other on holidays most of the time. It wasn’t like Sam to call him on the bar’s phone like this.
“Hey, sorry for interrupting, but I think Dad might be in trouble.”
“Dad?” The word always sounded a little sour in Dean’s mouth. “What’s going on?”
Sam relayed the message, told him about the EMF and the coordinates.
“Looks like there’s been some disappearances out that way,” Dean said, probably using the office computer. “Sounds like a salt and burn. You really think a ghost got the jump on him?”
“Hey, it only takes one missed step,” Sam reminded him. “He hunts by himself, and he’s getting older. I just – I’ve got a bad feeling about it, alright? I want to check it out, make sure he’s okay.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line, Dean waiting for the part that he was going to argue.
“Would you meet me there?”
“Sam,” he sighed. “I’m not –”
“I know,” Sam cut in. “I know, I know you’re not a hunter. I’m not asking you to be. I just want an extra set of eyes on my back, alright? Brady doesn’t want me going by myself, and if this thing got the jump on Dad, then I kind of agree. Just this once? For me?”
Dean groaned. “You’re too old for the sad puppy act,” he said.
Sam grinned. “So that’s a yes?”
Sam called the morgue and the hospital on his way to Jericho – no dice – and got into town after sundown, the streets crawling with trick-or-treaters. He gave up on searching for Dad’s Impala before too long. Got a two-bed motel room with one of Brady’s credit cards, because he pushed it into Sam’s hand on his way out the door, insisting.
He pulled a black velvet pouch from his duffel bag and sat cross-legged in the middle of one of the beds. First from the bag came a circle of leather, compass points burned into its surface. Next, the dowsing pendulum, a heavy pointed quartz at the end of a silver chain. Sam held the end of the chain delicately between two fingers, took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
The last time he’d seen Dad was nearly two years ago. He’d heard through the grapevine that Sam was doing exorcisms while he was in school and swung through town on his way from Arizona to Oregon. Sam conjured the image he’d made then: head buzzed close to the scalp; a short beard with new grays in it since the last time he and Sam had shared air; a split lip and a fading bruise on his jaw; eyes bloodshot and cheeks thinner than they ought to be; that leather jacket he always wore. Sam conjured his voice, the drawl of it, the awkward hesitation as he said, “I’m real proud of you. What you’re doing here – well, I want you to know that. You’re making a hell of a reputation.”
Sam remembered being surprised by how little the pride meant to him, but he didn’t focus on that. He focused on Dad.
Between his fingers, he felt the chain twitch and pull. When he opened his eyes, the chain was lifted nearly horizontally toward the eastern wall of the room. He slowly stood on the bed, still holding the pendulum, and let it tug him toward the headboard until it was pressed right against the wall. Sam hesitated, then knocked on it.
No response.
He stowed the pendulum and compass, tucked a handgun down the back of his jeans, and slipped outside. The curtains of the next room over were closed, no lights on, and no one answered when he knocked on the door. He spared a thought for the lock pick in his bag before simply retrieving a cafe gift card from his wallet. Slipped it into the crack next to the doorknob, gave it a few jiggles, and let the door fall open.
Sam had never been on a hunt with his father before, but he recognized a hunter’s space immediately. The doors and windows were salted with cats-eye shells scattered for extra protection. The space looked like fear. Paranoia. Living with Brady, he recognized it right away. He’d left all his research materials, that leather jacket, a half-eaten burger on the table and starting to stink. Clippings from the case were taped up to one of the walls. Sam pulled the door closed behind him and flipped his phone open. Dialed.
“Hey, you find him?” Dean asked.
“Not quite,” Sam said, eyes still fixed on the wall of clippings. “I found his room. He hasn’t been in it in a couple days. He cleared out fast, and he was worried about something before he left. No sign from the hospitals or morgue either. Where are you?”
“Just passing through Salt Lake City. Figure I can make it to Nevada before I need to pull over and catch a few hours. Should get in around noon tomorrow.”
“Alright, well I’ve got his case files, at least. I’ll get up to speed between now and then.” He eyed the obituary of a woman named Constance Welch, who killed her children and herself. “Looks like he thought it was a woman in white.”
Dean huffed. “Do me a favor, Sam?”
“What’s that?”
“If you’re dragging my ass out there to play back-up, actually wait until I’m there to back you up, alright? Catch up on your reading, but don’t do anything until I get in.”
“I think I can handle asking a few questions around town,” Sam snorted.
“No. I’m serious. You go poking, you’re gonna hit something. You may be a hot shot with spinning heads and pea soup, but when’s the last time you tangled with a ghost, huh?”
“More recently than you.”
“Promise me?” It had been a long damn time since Dean had pulled any of the parental shit that drove Sam crazy as a kid. This wasn’t that, just honest concern.
“Yeah, I promise.”
Sam dreamed of fire that night. He’d been having the same dream on and off for weeks. It matched his imaginings of what Mom’s murder must have looked like, from what he’d been told, but the details shifted from dream to dream. Sometimes vague. Sometimes people he knew. Last night it was the girl that asked him out, Jessica, on the ceiling of Sam’s bedroom.
That night it was Ellen in the Roadhouse.
Two knocks on the motel door. Dean’s voice, “Hey, it’s me.”
Sam opened it and pulled his brother into a hug. Usually, they saw each other at the Fourth of July party at the Roadhouse, but this year he went to Brady’s parents’ cabin in Lake Tahoe instead, so it had been almost a year – since Dean’s birthday in January. He looked the same, more or less: short hair with too much gel, dressed like Nirvana was still touring.
“Come in. How was the rest of the drive?”
“Eh. Nevada sucks.” Dean fidgeted with the hoop in his ear, which he usually only did when they were talking about Dad. Sam hadn’t even mentioned him yet, and he hoped the piercing would survive the hunt if that’s how it was going to go. How’s the research?”
“Another body dropped last night,” Sam told him, and before Dean could harp on him, added, “I didn’t go out. Dad left his police scanner. Same pattern as the rest of them. Car found crashed, male driver vanished. It’s definitely a woman in white. Dad tracked down the body and everything, but he never burned it. I can’t figure out why.”
“Maybe that’s where it got the jump on him,” Dean offered. He moved into the room hesitantly, looking around at the warding Sam had put up. He gestured at a symbol drawn under the window. “What’s that one?”
Sam sat on the end of the bed. “Sanskrit. Works better than salt for demons.”
“And for ghosts?”
Rolling his eyes, Sam reasoned, “She’s only gone after guys in their cars on that highway. And women in white only go after cheaters. I’m not even dating anyone.”
Dean hummed. “And I guess I’m probably off the menu, too, huh?”
Sam made a considering noise. “I dunno what the policy is on that. You still dating what’s-his-face?” A guy that hung around the Roadhouse who rocked a mullet and partied too hard.
“I wouldn’t call it dating,” Dean hedged.
“Cause you’re fucking other people?” Sam guessed.
Dean gave him a bitchy look. Bingo.
They checked out the grave site while it was still light out, scouting the area for any sign of Dad. No dice. Just a headstone in a field. The grass didn’t even look trampled on.
“You clean out his room completely?” Dean asked as they hiked back to the car.
Sam shook his head. “Just grabbed the case notes and the scanner. Figured he’d still need the room if we found him beat up somewhere.”
Dean squinted back across the field toward the grave. “This is really weird, man. It’s not like him, ditching out on a case.”
“Not like him?” Sam said, skeptical. “When’s the last time you even talked to him?”
Shrugging a concession and tugging on his earring, Dean rounded the front of his pickup – it blended around here better than Sam’s hand-me-down Prius – and unlocked the doors. “I don’t need weekly phone calls to know that Dad’s never gonna stop putting the job first. It’s just who he is.”
They headed off back toward the motel. “You think you’re gonna find something in his room?”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “You never hunted with Dad – he has a system for how the room gets set up on a hunt. I know where to look – I wanna take a look at it myself.”
The mention of Dean hunting with Dad brought an immediate stab of guilt. Sam had learned a lot about cautiously navigating other people’s traumas. He weighed his words carefully before saying, “Hey, I know you didn’t want to come. I appreciate you doing it anyway. If this is dredging anything up for you, you can tell me about it, alright?”
Dean reached across the cab and gave Sam’s shoulder a squeeze without saying anything.
Even all these years later, he didn’t really talk about it – what happened on the hunt that made Dad give up custody of them both. Dean was vague about it when Sam was a kid: a shapeshifter posing as Dad hurt him. It wasn’t until he was in college that he filled in some details: the abuse was sexual, which Sam had suspected; Dean tried to kill himself after, which Sam hadn’t expected. He wasn’t sure which part had freaked Dad out so bad that he dumped Dean on Ellen Harvelle’s doorstep and told Pastor Jim to keep Sam indefinitely.
“Ellen blew a gasket when I told her,” Dean said. “You might need to do some groveling before you’re back in her good graces.”
Sam snorted. He hadn’t been in Ellen’s good graces since she caught him with his hand up Jo’s shirt when they were in high school. They’d both outgrown it, but Ellen would still spot the two of them talking during holidays and make the ‘I’m watching you’ sign behind Jo’s back. Dean swung between that sort of shovel talk and ‘joking’ about the two of them getting married and having babies in a tone a bit too wistful for comfort.
A text chimed on Sam’s phone as Dean parked them on the edge of the motel lot.
From: Brady
U good? What’s going on?
“Go ahead in,” Sam said, waving without looking up. “I’m gonna make a call. You can get into Dad’s room with a credit card.”
Dean huffed, “Great. That means you can get into our room with a credit card,” but he got out and headed toward the building.
Sam hit the call button.
Two rings. “Hey, everything alright?”
“Yeah, just figured it was easier to –”
Cops swarmed in on the motel all at once, converging on Dean halfway into the door of Dad’s room.
“Fuck,” he said, immediately sinking down below the level of the windows. “Actually, I think I’m gonna have to call you back.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure the cops liked Dean for the disappearances, though he couldn’t imagine why. Maybe just that he was from out of town, maybe that and the fact that he looked queer. Hell, maybe they’d liked Dad for it and just waited to see who went in his motel room next. Sam hadn’t thought to call the jails looking for him. If they didn’t track him down tonight, he figured, they could check the police blotter in the morning.
Sam had parked the Prius across the street from the police station, and was thinking through his list of options. He had a California State Trooper badge he could try to pull rank with, but in a local yokel situation like this, it was even odds that would make them hold on harder.
His phone buzzed on the seat, Jim’s name on the display.
“Hey, what’s up?” he said.
“Brady called.”
Sam groaned and sank in his seat. “Jeez,” he huffed. Jim, for all he was like a father to Sam, didn’t really fret over him. He’d stood by Sam’s side while he tangoed with his first demon at fifteen, and he’d always had stalwart faith in his abilities as an exorcist.
Having Jim’s number, though, enabled the worst of Brady’s anxious hovering.
“I’m in a bind, but I’m fine. My dad left me a weird message, sounded like he was in trouble, so now I’m on a salt and burn in Jericho, California with Dean.”
“Dean’s there?” From his surprise, Sam may as well have claimed to be on a hunt with Mariah Carey.
“He was,” Sam moped, staring out the window. “Now he’s in the local police department. I gotta figure out how to bust him out before he gets booked.” It wasn’t that Dean wouldn’t be able to handle himself in jail. Hell, he’d probably be running the place in a day. It would make getting him out harder, though.
“Jericho, huh? That’s got to be a pretty small town, right?”
“More cows than people, I think,” Sam agreed.
“And it’s a police department, not a county sheriff?”
Sam caught up with his thinking. “Can’t be more than a couple people in there,” he concluded, smiling. “Clear ‘em out, Dean can basically walk out.”
“Not that I’m suggesting you break any laws,” Jim said with mock paternalism.
Laughing, Sam told him, “Hey, I gotta hang up and make another call. Tell Brady to take a Xanax, would you?”
They couldn’t go back to the motel or probably show their faces anywhere in town, and they didn’t dare dig up Constance Welch until after dark. In the meantime, they hunkered down in the truck and combed through Dad’s journal.
“He left it for you, man,” Dean said, tapping the last page. In black marker, it read, SAM 35-111. Coordinates.
Sam lifted the book and turned it over in his hands. The years had worn the shine off their father’s image like sandpaper on glass, but the journal still felt like a holy relic of some sort. “I don’t even remember the last time I saw this thing,” Sam murmured. “He never went anywhere without it when we were kids. He never let me read it – did you?”
Dean leaned across the cab, eyes fixed on it with the same curious reverence Sam felt. “A couple times, just a page here or there when he was teaching me something.” He looked suddenly hesitant. Licked his lips. “Hey, can I…” He made an uncertain gesture toward it, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed.
Immediately, Sam passed it to him. It was as much Dean’s as it was his, as far as he was concerned.
The sun was starting to sink behind the trees, long shadows striped on the pages as Dean flipped through, searching for something. He stopped, his breath catching, then traced his finger down the middle seam where, Sam saw, a page had been torn out.
On the page before it, a newspaper clipping. A boy found dead in La Salle, Illinois, November 1994.
“That was the hunt he took you on,” Sam realized. “The last hunt before he took off.”
Dean nodded, jaw tight. “I just…” His thumb and forefinger pinched around his earring. “Wondered, you know.”
“If he took notes on it like everything else?” Sam suggested.
Abruptly, Dean pushed the book back at him. “I don’t need that book to tell me what he thought about it,” he decided. “He told me. Even if he never told me, he fucking told me. Jackass.” He sounded like Ellen when he said that, jackass.
Sam looked down at the journal, the torn page. The next entry wasn’t until February, a witch near Amarillo. He wondered what Dad had been doing that whole time, alone without them, without a hunt. Drinking, probably.
“What if something did happen to him?” Sam asked, not even sure if Dean would be sad if John died. “I never realized it when we were kids, but the kind of hunting he does – walking in blind and taking on whatever he finds – there aren’t a ton of hunters that do it. The ones that do don’t live long.”
“Most of them aren’t Dad,” Dean said, shaking his head in a sort of grudging admiration. “I mean, you know he’s not my favorite person, but I’ve met a fuck-ton of hunters. The kind of hunting he does, nobody else does that. Nobody else can. Whatever this is, the voicemail and the coordinates, I don’t think it’s him in trouble. It’s gotta be something else.”
Sam went back to the Prius on the way to the grave, in case they needed to get out of town quick after. He led the way, having gotten a better look at the maps, and Dean’s headlights gleamed in his rear view. He knew this was weird for Dean, hunting. Sam didn’t really do this type of job, not usually, but it felt oddly natural, like the karate kid spending his days doing chores and being shocked to find they had somehow left him with all the skills he needed to fight.
Just past the bridge, Dean’s headlights dropped from the mirror, and Sam looked back to see the truck stopped, a pale figure standing in front of it. He hit the brakes and pulled a U-turn. Just as he was headed back, the truck’s engine roared, and it plowed right through her.
Then it nearly swerved into him.
Sam swore and pulled another U, this time tailing Dean as the truck jerked erratically along the empty highway until it finally pulled into the driveway of the old Welch farmhouse.
Sam pulled up behind the truck and grabbed an iron pipe from under the driver’s seat. By the time he rounded Dean’s driver window, he could see the ghost of Constance Welch was on top of him, Dean’s face a mask of pain as he struggled. Sam smashed the pipe against the window, which shattered. Her head snapped up just as he brought the pipe down through it.
She vanished.
“Boy, am I –” Dean started to say just as she flickered back, curling her fingers into his chest again.
Sam struck her.
She flickered away.
“Oh, fuck this,” Dean growled. “This bitch is going home.”
Before Sam could ask what he meant, Dean grabbed the gear shift, and the truck barreled straight forward through the front window of the house.
Sam ran in after, climbing over broken siding and debris. The truck had gone into a still-furnished living room. The driver door creaked open, and Dean half fell out of it.
“Whoa, whoa.” Sam caught his arm. “You alright?”
Dean nodded, though he wobbled on his feet. “She said she didn’t want to come home. I figured…”
They looked up as water began streaming down the stairs. Constance Welch stood at the bottom, staring up in horror as the ghosts of two small children appeared. In chorus, they said, “You’ve come home to us, Mommy.” The child ghosts descended on her. She screamed. They vanished.
“You figured she couldn’t face her own kids,” Sam murmured.
“Yeah, well…” Dean grunted as he took a few steps on his own, looking over his truck. “Jesus. Two tires, the window, and…” He poked his head around the front. “Yikes. There’s the radiator.” He looked back at Sam. “We’re gonna have to ditch it. Give me a hand.”
Sam helped him clear a path behind it, saying, “You don’t think you could fix it up?”
Dean snorted. “Ellen bought this thing for me for five hundred bucks a decade ago. It’s a piece of shit. It was totaled the second you broke the window.”
“I’m sorry,” he offered, more because Dean had lost his car on a hunt Sam dragged him on than for breaking the window to save his life.
“I needed an excuse to find something new anyway.”
They drove the Prius east until they were both too tired to drive and found a motel in the middle of nowhere off I-80. Dean blinked sleepily across the parking lot into the sprawling expanse of nighttime desert scrub. “Man, I hate Nevada,” he yawned.
The room was simple, two queens, a bathroom that looked half clean. Sam dragged his dirty clothes off and collapsed onto the bed nearest the door. He watched through half-lidded eyes as his brother sat on the end of his bed to fight with his socks.
“God, when’s the last time we shared a motel room?” Sam asked, too sleepy to stop himself from uttering whatever thoughts bloomed in his head. “We used to live like this. Isn’t that weird?”
Dean hummed.
Sam started to drift off.
“You ever think,” Dean said, breaking the silence, “this was what he was planning for us? If it wasn’t for the shifter, if he didn’t give up custody, this would have been our fucking lives, man. Hunting. Living out of motels. Running credit card scams.”
It was somehow easy to picture. Dad would probably send them on hunts just like this – a voicemail, a set of coordinates – and they would go.
Sam asked, “Do you think we would have turned out different, if we got to finish growing up together?”
Dean pulled his shirt off. He had a big, complicated tattoo wrapped around his left bicep and shoulder, dipping low on his shoulder blade. It was an Aztec-style world tree with runes and spellwork symbols worked through it. As a joke, wrapped around the lower edge, he’d added calligraphic script that read omnus imundos faggotus. Sam hadn’t found it very funny, but now he at least thought he got why Dean thought it was.
Dean looked over his shoulder at him and snorted. “Nah. You were already a nerd.”
Grinning into his pillow, Sam squirmed into a better position. “I bombed the LSAT,” he confessed.
“Shit, what?” Dean pulled on a clean shirt and turned to face him. “When?”
“Got the results yesterday.” He frowned, picked his head up and looked at the clock on the nightstand. “Well, day before yesterday, I guess.”
“Sorry, man. Can you take it again?”
Sam shook his head. “I could. I’m not gonna. I’m glad I went to college, you know? I always wanted to, and I’m glad I did it. But I’m an exorcist. That’s what I do, and it doesn’t really jive with a traditional lifestyle, you know?” He huffed. “Maybe I should have gone to seminary school like Pastor Jim wanted. He makes that work, at least.”
“You could stop,” Dean said, careful like he wasn’t sure he should.
It made his chest ache, but Sam smiled through it. He sat up. “I’m gonna follow the coordinates Dad left,” he said. “I’ll drop you off at the Roadhouse first – I know you don’t want to do this shit. But I’m gonna keep going. I’m gonna find Dad.”
Dean grimaced and looked away. “Dude…” he sighed.
“What?”
“Just – the coordinates, the journal, this hunt. You’ve come a long damn way to be taking orders from him now. Maybe he’s in trouble. Maybe he’s just bossing you around.”
Sam shrugged. “Look, I get why you wanted out. I probably would have, too, if I’d started hunting with him instead of studying with Pastor Jim.”
He could just see it, the way he and Dad and he and Dean had started to butt heads before their whole family blew up. It would have gotten worse, he would have been pissed about the way they lived and the way Dad treated them and the way Dean took it. He would have pushed back against everything, and hunting was a big part of that everything.
Instead, he’d had quiet, patient tutelage that never pushed but never babied him.
“This is what I do, though, Dean,” he went on. “I’m good at it, and I care about it, and it’s important. I may not like what Dad’s hunting meant for us, but I get why he could never let it go. How can you just stop when you know you’re saving lives?”
Dean stared at him.
The clock ticked past 5am.
“You know, I used to try so hard to be like him,” Dean said. “Wear his clothes, listen to his music, talk like him, act like him…” He shook his head. “But you were always the one that was like him.”
Sam wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or an insult, coming from Dean.
Fire again. Ellen.
Late the next morning when they woke, Dean offered to hit a used car lot so Sam wouldn’t have to schlep him all the way to Nebraska, but Sam had nowhere to be. He called Brady, gave him a status update, and they let the miles stretch out ahead of and behind them.
“You can’t use a car like this for hunting,” Dean protested somewhere in Wyoming.
“Why not? It gets great mileage. Can you imagine what it costs Dad to keep gas in the Impala these days?”
Dean insisted, “You need something you can fix yourself on the go.”
“I can’t fix a toaster by myself,” Sam told him.
“God, you’re gonna die on the side of the road somewhere,” Dean groaned.
They got back to the Roadhouse half past midnight, and it was Wednesday, so Ellen had already poured last call, and the stragglers were on their way out. When she spotted the two of them at the front door, she threw down the rag in her hand and charged out past the bar to wrap Dean in one of those big mama bear hugs of hers.
“I’m fine,” Dean sighed. “It was one ghost. No sweat.”
Ellen pulled back and jabbed a finger past him. “This better not become a habit, Sam Winchester,” she warned. “Just because you chose this life doesn’t mean you get to drag your brother in every time your daddy goes on a bender, you hear me?”
Sam ducked his head, because he knew better than to argue with Ellen when she was like this, but he only said, “We didn’t find him. I’m just dropping Dean off – I’m gonna keep looking.”
She hesitated. “Well, I’ll send someone else with you,” she said, half turning away. “Mark just got off a hunt, you can go with Mark.”
“I don’t need Mark,” Sam protested. “I’ll be fine on my own.”
Ellen glanced between the two of them, gaze sharp. “Well, we’ll see about that,” she hedged. “Dean, go find your brother a bed. I gotta close up.”
They passed Jo, taking out the garbage, on their way out the back door. She looked at Sam and slid a finger across her throat. “You better sleep with a knife under your pillow. She’s pissed.”
Sam sighed, let Dean get ahead and out of earshot before he leaned in and joked, “You wanna make out a little, see if she gets so mad she loops back around to happy?”
Jo laughed and shoved him away. “Stick around for breakfast, yeah?”
“Maybe.”
He headed on to the guest rooms out back. Dean had unlocked the one next to his, which he had occupied permanently since he was fifteen. “You go get some sleep,” he said, waving Sam in. “I’m gonna go see if Ellen needs any help.”
Sam set his duffel bag on the bed and looked around the space. It was a stripped-down, impersonal mirror of Dean’s room. When he was still little enough, he shared Dean’s bed when he came for visits and liked to track the way the personal elements seeped out to cover every inch of the space. A poster. Clothes on the floor. A boombox. A collection of VHS tapes and CDs. He painted the walls green two years in. Back at Pastor Jim’s, Sam was on the same journey, learning what it was to have his own bedroom. Often, when he wasn’t sure what to do next, he copied Dean.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, fighting with the laces of his boots, when he looked up and saw a bright flash of light through the crack in the blinds.
Fire, he realized.
Ellen.