Work Text:
“Why don’t you take another little piece of my life?
Why don’t you twist it and turn it and cut it by the knife?”
(Queen, “Let Me Live”)
Sam’s bride is the prettiest girl in New Mexico. On their wedding day, she is hiding from him out of superstitious fear because her grandmother taught her when she was a little thing that a groom should not look at his bride on the day they’re to be married, before she is led to the altar. The wedding dress particularly is bad luck if he sees her in it before the ceremony. And because she believed the old woman, she’s hiding.
But Sam has no patience for superstitions. Salt, silver and iron will protect you; spitting over your shoulder won’t. The monster under the bed will rip you limb from limb but the blue moon is just an optical illusion brought on by smoke or dust pollution. Bad luck can come from a cursed object or from that one time your brother sold his soul to bring you back to life, thus disturbing the natural order and pissing off a lot of people. Well, maybe not people but let’s keep it that way for simplicity’s sake.
But a wedding dress and a beautiful woman wearing it? Nonsense. One hell of a witch would have to go around and curse all the wedding dresses on the planet, and it’s not as if God – Castiel? – or Death care about what a government official writes on a piece of paper with two people’s names.
Castiel?
Of course He cares, Lily would say. Oh Sam, how can you say that? All marriages are made in heaven and God oversees them all.
But that makes no sense, Sam would say. If we’re in heaven, we’re dead meat already – so why get married? But she would laugh and kiss his nose.
Captains, like priests, are given legal authority to conduct marriages. That is, so that if a ship is about to sink, the lovers onboard can get married, fuck and die honest people, free of sin.
You’re so morbid, Lily would say.
You’re such a little fucker, Dean would say.
Where’s Dean? Isn’t he coming to the wedding?
But Dean is not there and neither is Lily. No one can tell where the former is but the latter is currently hiding on the porch. She thinks that Sam – confined to the second floor of her parents’ house for the day – shouldn’t be able to see her if he comes to the window but she’s wrong. If he stretches his neck like this, from an uncomfortable angle he can see a corner of the porch and there, Lily in her wedding dress. She has fresh orange blossoms in her hair, and Castiel only knows where she got them or how she keeps them from wilting in the heat.
Who the hell is Castiel?
Hell? Where?
If marriages between the living are conducted in heaven in this fucked up metaphor or whatever it is of Lily’s, then where do they send the two of you afterwards? Is it to hell?
That makes no sense, Lily would say. She would make a stern face at him.
How could you think that? Castiel would say.
Run, Sammy, Dean would say. Run, run, run!
It’s too hot to go running.
His cellphone rings and Sam jumps a foot in the air. “Hello?”
“Hi, sweetie. Where are you?”
He looks out the window again, cranes his neck and smashes his nose against the glass to see Lily with a phone pressed to her ear. The dress – the goddamn dress – is white cotton with a straight skirt embroidered with flowers, the type that wouldn’t look good on anybody.
“Hey, baby,” he says.
“What are you thinking about?”
Sam is thinking about the curve of her breast, impossibly, incomprehensibly white in the New Mexico sun and so tempting in the clutches of the god-awful dress. Lily won’t fuck him before the wedding night and Sam is tired of his right hand. He tried the left one for a change once and wondered if it counted as cheating. He never knows with Lily, her Castiel and her superstitions.
Dean is so bent on training himself to be ambidextrous. Whenever he has free time, Sam trains to write with his left hand to develop fine muscle control. Knowing Dean, he probably jerks off with his left for practice.
“Sam? Where are you?”
“I’m thinking about you,” he says. I’m thinking about boobs and my brother’s masturbatory habits. What are you thinking about? “What are you thinking about?”
“You. The wedding. It’s going to be so beautiful, Sam. You’re going to love my dress.”
“I love it already,” he says. The thing is hideous, hanging off her bony shoulders, the hem of its skirt dangling just above her ankles. She looks like a skeleton wrapped in a table cloth. Jess wouldn’t be caught dead in such a thing. Jess? “I want to get it off you.”
She laughs. “Later, baby, later.”
“Yeah.” Sam flexes his right wrist and sighs. “Yeah, I know.”
Her voice drops into suspicious mode. “Hey, Sam.” He watches light and shadow play on her shoulder. How does she stay so white in this sun? Her parents probably keep her in the cellar like a mushroom, where it’s damp and cold. “Hey, Sam, you haven’t seen my dress, have you? Because you know it’s bad luck.”
“Cas forbid.”
“Who’s Cas?”
“My captain.” Sam closes his eyes and he can’t see her anymore, can’t see her radiant flesh, her precious dress or her tiny hand holding the phone. “Castiel is my lord and savior. If I don’t say it, he’s going to kill me. I need to play along until we can get his head straight for him.”
She is silent for a long time. Sam doesn’t open his eyes to look at her sitting on that porch. Behind his closed eyelids he can see Dean, and Dean is trying to talk to him.
“Sam,” she says. “Are you a Satan-worshipper?”
“I worship you in your pretty dress,” he says. “See you at the altar?”
“Okay. Where are you now?”
A sudden sense of dread comes like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head, and Sam opens his eyes. He looks around the room, looks out the window but Lily’s gone, walked away from her spot on the porch. Did she smell him? Did she pick up his trail?
“Honey? Where are you?”
“Why do you keep asking me that?” he says.
She is quiet, and Sam can’t hear her strangely uneven footsteps at all, doesn’t know if she’s still on the porch or if she’s creeping up the stairs. He hangs up.
It’s like waking up from deep sleep: Sam doesn’t know where he is, what day of the week it is or what he is supposed to be doing but he knows that something’s off. Something’s after him, and it’s probably Lily. Who is Lily? Why is he marrying her?
“Shit. Oh shit.” Sam is trapped in some house in New Mexico, dressed in a loathsome white suit.
He peels off the jacket while he’s searching the room for his gun, for his knife, for salt, for any kind of weapon at all. The room itself is ridiculous, with fluffy pillows piled high on a bed with curtains, antique decorations set here and there and family portraits hanging on the walls in elaborate gold-coated frames. The portraits are all of monsters. Sam swears, wants to punch one in the face because it’s staring at him, but he’s worried about making too much noise.
His gun turns up buried under the mountain of pillows but the clip is empty. Sam tucks it into the back of his pants anyway. He dials “D” on his phone and listens to the beeping as his heart picks up a crazy pace. He feels like the veins in his nose might explode from the pressure, and wouldn’t that be awesome. Lily would probably smell his blood.
Sam picks up a four-foot iron candlestick from the corner just as Dean answers his phone.
“Sammy?”
“Dean.” He drops his voice and whispers into the phone. Either someone is walking through the hallway or it’s noise interference from the phone line, from wherever Dean is. “I don’t know where I am.”
Dean barely gives him time to finish. “Dude, I’ve been looking everywhere. What’s outside, come on, you need to figure it out.”
Sam presses his phone against his shoulder because his other hand is occupied with the huge piece of iron. He pushes the curtains aside. Outside is a non-descript town that looks like a hundred others they’ve ever passed through.
“Southwest somewhere.” He spots a wedding invitation on the bedside table and grabs it. “Jesus. Elephant Butte, New Mexico. Get over here fast, I think she’s after me.”
“Who’s after you?”
But Sam has no time to answer because the door swings open, and there’s Lily in her wedding dress. The orange blossoms in her hair look more like tiny skulls from where he’s standing.
Sam drops the phone and lifts the candlestick in both hands.
“There you are,” she says, all sweetness. “What’re you going to do with that?”
“Isn’t it bad luck for me to see you in the wedding dress?”
She takes a step forward. Sam spreads his feet a little for stability.
“Shucks,” she says. “I guess it’s your unlucky day.”
She takes another little step, and Sam swings the candlestick around and smashes it into her temple. The impact knocks her off her feet and sends her stumbling into the wall. She doesn’t cry out, not once when Sam brings the iron bar down on her head again and again.
“Sam?” Dean’s tiny voice chirps from the phone forgotten on the carpet. “Sam, I’m coming, hang in there.”
When the thing has stopped moving, Sam picks up the phone again, wiping the blood off his hands on the wedding pants. Dean has already hung up. Sam looks inside the wardrobe and finds an array of both men’s and women’s clothes, old-fashioned like they belong to someone’s long-dead grandparents. Maybe the woman’s set used to be worn by Lily’s grandmother, the one who taught her to be superstitious. Sam picks out a pair of dark sweat pants and a faded black t-shirt that will probably have him sweating like a pig in the desert but won’t show blood stains. He also finds a baseball cap to protect his head.
Behind him, fabric rustles.
“Sam. Where are you going? The wedding’s in an hour.”
Slowly, Sam turns around and meets blood-shot eyes staring at him hungrily from under a ruined bridal hairdo. She tries to grab his leg when he runs past her and out of the room but misses, and her fingers slip uselessly off the sweat pants.
Sam runs down the stairs and out of the house, still carrying his candlestick. He has the presence of mind to grab a bottle of water on his way through the kitchen.
“Sam!” she yells after him. “But baby, where are you going? I love you!”
****
Dean hasn’t noticed the radio is playing Justin Timberlake, which says something about his mental state.
“I almost left.” He’s going faster than even he normally likes, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “I looked for three days, Sam, and I was about to leave the state on some shitty lead when you called. She didn’t come after you?”
“No. She wasn’t in any shape to be walking around the town in daylight.”
The car passes a lonely gas station on the freeway running through the desert, and its lights paint Dean’s face into weird hues, making it look like a ceremonial mask. The next moment, the station is retreating in the back window and Dean’s face is in the dark again. But even drowning in shadows, it looks pale to Sam.
“I fucking finger-combed Taos after you disappeared. I was about to leave New Mexico to keep looking for you.”
“Yeah.”
Dean rubs a hand over his already dry mouth and almost starts biting his nail but puts his hand back down on the steering wheel. After a moment, he shifts his arm to the open window. That’s something – he hasn’t stopped freaking out but he’s working on it.
“Taos. Do you know how many hippies that is in one place?”
“A lot.”
“Hordes of them.”
“Aw, poor baby. Did you get patchouli on you?”
The land is enormous, flat and empty around them, devoid of any artificial lights except for the Impala’s headlights. In the dark, a wrinkle between Dean’s eyebrows looks like a ravine. Sam is suddenly struck with a memory of the time when that one wrinkle was becoming permanent. He was noticing it more and more until he realized it wasn’t going away, ever. Dean was twenty one. There were thousands of reasons Sam wanted to leave home but now that he thinks about it, the stupid little wrinkle solidified his decision. How did he forget that?
“I’m bringing sexy back. The motherfuckers don’t know how to act…”
“Dude, what are you listening to?”
“Huh?” Dean frowns at the station dial and listens for about three seconds before a look of horrified realization spreads over his face and makes Sam laugh despite everything. Dean twists the dial through static and more static. “Jesus Christ. I didn’t put that on.” Finally, he picks up The Doors and leaves it on.
Sam hiccups the last of his laughter and dabs with his thumb at the corner of one eye. Dean shoots him a wry look but doesn’t say anything. In the windshield, Sam’s reflection is wearing a reddish smudge under his eye.
“Damn.” There’s still blood like rust around and under his fingernails. Sam sticks his hands out the window and pours tepid water from a bottle over them but only ends up with more bloody fingerprints everywhere.
“What was she anyway?” Dean asks.
“I don’t know.” Sam gives up on washing and throws the bottle back into the foot well. The wind feels good on his sunburned skin, so he leaves one hand sticking out the window, palm open against air pressure, and watches pink drops being ripped from his fingertips. “Destroying the brain didn’t kill her, and neither did iron.” Dean hums in acknowledgement. “I didn’t have anything else on me.”
“You would have if you didn’t leave everything back at the motel, the fucking magazines included.”
He snorts but there’s no malice to it. He’s speaking out of habit, and Sam doesn’t bother with any answer more than a pointed look. Now that the illusion has dissipated, he remembers waking up three nights ago for a bathroom trip and getting hit with a sudden urge to go outside and stand by the side of the freeway. He grabbed his Taurus on autopilot but didn’t have enough conscious control left to pick up a loaded clip as well. He didn’t call out to Dean. After that, his memory becomes hazy, only showing him brief snatches of days spent in the thing’s house in Elephant Butte. He remembers strawberries and cream fed into his mouth, and how he took them and smiled like an idiot.
Dean is biting his thumbnail. “So she wanted to marry you?”
“Yeah. Maybe she can only eat the men she’s married to, like a black widow.”
“A black widow,” Dean repeats to himself. “That’s a thought. Wait! Did you fuck her?”
He has a point: who knows what sort of poison and by what routes the thing could pass on. But Sam is suddenly aggravated about the ‘no premarital sex’ situation. Dean is going to be an ass and laugh at him, he realizes, as if there’s anything wrong with the decision or as if Sam had any say in it.
“No,” he says. “I didn’t.”
“How’d you fight her off?”
“No premarital. She was particular about that, so I guess I got lucky there.”
He watches the battle play out on Dean’s face. Sam tilts his chin up and turns to him, deliberate, like a dare, waiting for the comment and for his excuse to smack the laughter out of him.
Dean shoots him a look. “Hey, I wasn’t gonna, okay? So, how much do you remember?”
Sam relaxes and turns back to the window. There’s a faint light of perhaps another gas station up ahead, could be miles away but noticeable with nothing but the stars to outshine it. It’s a new moon – probably significant for the creature, and probably by this time of the night Sam would have been married and dead.
He watches dark silhouettes of boulders drifting by, scattered through the desert. They look like crouching carnivores. Sam breathes through his nose, steady and careful. It’s mandatory post-encounter paranoia – he knows it, has dealt with it for the most of his life.
“Sam?”
“Yeah. Sorry. I woke up and got hit with a call, so I walked out to the side of the highway, and then she pulled up in a silver BMW. I didn’t look at the plates.” He remembers the car – ridiculous, expensive and shiny – and how he thought that a beautiful piece of machinery like that fit the woman’s beauty. “I have no memory of the ride but I think I was in that house in Elephant Butte the whole time. I thought she was the love of my life and I worshiped her footsteps.”
Dean scratches his nose. “How poetic. What else?”
“The morning before the wedding I woke up in a funk. Then it all started to come back throughout the day. I don’t know, maybe some dream or some thought triggered it.”
“Not much,” Dean says.
“Not much.”
The radio station turns out to be Spanish-language. The DJ rattles off an excited tirade from which Sam can only pick up snatches of meaning, and then Iron Maiden comes on. Dean eyes the radio with a strangely soft shadow of a smile, like it brings up memories of some great romance, like he ever had anyone besides Sam to share songs with.
Iron Maiden, for fuck’s sake. Sam loves that one.
Dean turns up the dial while Sam sticks his head out the window a little to let the wind cool his skin and tug on his hair. He spent two hours walking along the highway before Dean got there, and now the skin on his nose, neck and arms feels a size too small.
“Hey, you gonna leave your head on a telephone pole,” Dean says. Their dad used to say it whenever they stuck body part out of the moving car.
“Nah. No poles here.” Sam closes his eyes. “There’s no one here, and no one’s going to know, ever.” He isn’t sure what he means to say by the last part but he is getting too sleepy to care. Dean doesn’t ask.
He apparently drifted off to sleep with his head resting on his bent elbow because the next thing Sam knows, the Impala has stopped and Dean just hit him on the shoulder.
“What? Where are we?”
“You only slept maybe five minutes.” Dean pulls the keys from the ignition and opens the car door. “Come on, there’s food and alcohol.”
It must be the rest stop he noticed up ahead, Sam decides. There’re a couple of gas pumps, a convenience store and a bar. Two trucks are sitting in the parking lot, along with another car that Dean left the Impala next to. Sam gets out and spends a minute stretching his stiff muscles while Dean pretends to rub some stain off the hood because he doesn’t want to leave his brother alone in the parking lot. Sam’s watch says it’s four am, and the world is pitch-black all around their little island of light. A late night stop in the middle of nowhere is so familiar it sets off a tingling at the base of Sam’s spine.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s go.”
Inside, Dean heads towards the bar while Sam takes his laptop to a booth in the far corner. By the time Dean comes back with beers, he has the local papers’ websites open. The other customers looked up when they came in but now everybody is back to their drinks, late night snacks and pool, which is just fine by Sam. The bartender is talking to somebody in the kitchen, probably passing on Dean’s order, and Sam suddenly realizes that he’s starving. He’s sure he ate something at some point during the three days but can’t remember past the strawberries and cream.
“So what, disappearances?” Dean sets their drinks down and takes his place across from Sam. “We should check both men and women, in case she can change shapes.”
Sam searches for his bottle by touch without looking away from the computer and Dean pushes it into his hand.
“Way ahead of you. But I don’t know, man, that’s not it.” Sam scrolls through the missing persons database, noting the names and places, automatically committing a few to memory in case he might need them later. “The number is not unusual for a town the size of Elephant Butte, and it’s mostly runaway teenagers.”
“Surrounding towns? Maybe she has a wider range.”
The smell of a burger sizzling on the grill in the kitchen reaches Sam’s nose and makes his stomach rumble. A vague memory creeps up on him that he was fasting all day because Lily’s mother was cooking for the wedding and he didn’t want to offend her with his lack of appetite.
“I’m gonna take a piss,” Dean says. “Keep looking.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
The surrounding towns’ statistics, Sam notes, don’t look very promising either. How many people are gone simply because they don’t want to be found? He used to have these fits of temporary insanity every once in a while at Stanford when he wanted to pick up his bag, walk out the door and never come back, never show up for classes again and not bother dropping them. Getting a fake ID is easier in some states than in others, thanks to sloppy laws, and he could build a whole new identity around that piece of plastic. Anonymity and the open road were tempting at times, especially during the first year, like a cliff’s edge is tempting. Sam kept his head straight, never took the plunge.
The burgers smell like they’re almost ready.
Behind him, Sam hears the bar’s door open and he turns around to look.
****
Ruby is like a desert saint, so beautiful her face should be painted on the ceiling of every church across New Mexico.
‘Saint’ doesn’t quite seem to fit. Is it the right word?
She has a wide mouth Sam loves and those dark, dark eyes – Should they be darker? – that shine with pure mischief when she looks at him. She has something on her mind, he can tell. Ruby reaches out to tickle behind his ear. The long strands of her chestnut hair and the tassels of her jacket slap across Sam’s face like something between a bite and a kiss, like a promise.
Dean would tell him not to trust Ruby and her promises. But oh, he wants to.
“Hey, Sam,” she says. “Night driving makes me horny.”
Sam thinks of horns for no good reason. “You’re driving,” he says.
“I could pull over.”
He throws back his head and laughs even though she didn’t say anything that funny, simply because he wants to keep his bubbly emotional high. He was feeling fantastic just a few minutes ago and now some distant worry like a worm is chewing away at his insides, and he doesn’t know where it came from. He feels like he stuck his head too far out of the car and left it on a telephone pole.
“Dad, what’s a dop-eh… dopel?.. doppelganger?” – “It’s a country, Sammy.”
“It’s not a country,” he says.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He gives her the sweetest smile so she wouldn’t worry. “Where are we going?”
“LA, of course. Aren’t you tired of this nowhere country?”
Nowhere, no-where, as in ‘nowhere to be found’.
She asked him a question and he’s forgotten what it was. “Yes,” he says. It seems to hit the mark because Ruby smiles at him and turns up the music. Sam catches sight of her fingers with nicotine stains like an old chain smoker might have. The unexpected glimpse of ugliness instantly makes him uncomfortable, and he looks away automatically.
Her car is a convertible yellow Mustang, bright and wild like she is. Ruby has the roof down, and the blast of her sound system can probably be heard for miles around. Sam wonders if Dean can hear it, then wonders why he thought that. Marilyn Manson screeches about the norm life on the radio.
“Look, Sam!” She lets go of the steering wheel and throws her arms wide like a bird of prey. The wind picks up the tassels and her hair and whips them around and she laughs while the car slides over to the other lane. Tendons stand out in her neck, sharp and clear.
Sam is feeling like he’s about to start shaking apart from unknown worry any second now. She’s expecting a reaction and he can’t disappoint her, though. “Wow,” he says. “Check your ass out.”
She puts her hands back on the wheel. “Phoenix is along the way. It’s not LA, of course, but maybe we can stop by a bar there. What do you think? Some tequila, some dancing, a motel room later?” She gives him a wicked smile. “I have this sturdy leather belt I’m keeping warm for you and a pair of handcuffs in the glove compartment – want to see?”
Sam gets an involuntary thump of thrill in his chest. He doesn’t give it away out of habit but it’s almost like Ruby can smell the interest on him because a sudden change comes over her. She draws up in her seat, her cheeks burn red and her eyes light up. Sam looks her in the face when she turns around, and somehow, her mouth seems wider. He gets a mental image of a snake’s disjointed jaws that can stretch enough to swallow an antelope whole.
An impala?
“Is that it?” Her voice is breathless with excitement. She stopped watching the road. “Oh Sam, oh god, is that it? The belt and the handcuffs, or one of those? Are you a masochist?”
The Mustang flies down the highway at seventy miles per hour and Ruby isn’t watching the road. She looks at him like Dean would look at a steak.
…Or a cheeseburger, one of those fiery things stuffed with chilies that they sell in roadhouses in New Mexico.
The memory comes back like a strike of a sledgehammer and gives him an instant headache.
“Watch the road,” Sam says. Don’t give her anything, don’t give her anything. “I’m not into that.”
The thing wearing the dead demon’s face turns back around. Sam forces himself to steady his breathing. He wriggles in his seat like he’s searching for a more comfortable position and feels the warmed up barrel of his Taurus pressed along the small of his back. He put a loaded clip in – he was too jumpy after Elephant Butte and wanted the gun as close as possible. The rounds are silver, which is comforting because he doesn’t think that the regular ones will work on her.
Sam looks behind them but the road is dark and empty. Dean should be following them, he couldn’t have been in the bathroom long enough for them to get a good head start.
Ruby keeps sneaking glances at him. “I know you’re interested, Sam,” she says.
“How so?”
“I can hear your pulse.”
“Well then.” Sam goes through his mental list of monsters and can’t narrow it down any more than he already has based on that information. There’s about fifteen he can think of, some of them with exotic methods of killing them. The thing is smirking exactly how Ruby used to. “I guess there’s no use for me to pretend then, is there? Why don’t you pull over?”
“Okay, cowboy.”
She gets the Mustang off the road and is crawling across the seat the moment it stops. It’s so familiar Sam is hit with the strongest sense of déjà vu. She leans in for a kiss and he leans back.
“Not yet,” Sam says. Her hands are iron claws clutching his shirtfront, bony where Ruby’s were delicate. “I want you on the hood of the car. It’s such a beautiful car.”
“Isn’t it?” But she draws back and puts her hand on her own door, pushing herself up to climb over. “How do you like my jacket?”
In the moment that her face is turned away, Sam draws the gun. She hears the sliding of the mechanism and turns around, and Sam puts the first five silver rounds into her head and another five into her heart.
In the night in the middle of nowhere, the gunshots are thunderous. And no one is going to know, ever.
Carefully, without lowering his gun or taking his eyes off the body, Sam opens the door and backs out of the car. Ruby lies motionless across the seat with her head resting on top of the driver’s door. A few trickles of blood make their way down the inner side of the door, collecting in the pocket and drowning folded maps there. The same Marilyn Manson song is running on a loop in her CD player: I don’t like the drugs, the drugs, the drugs…
Dust swirls in the headlights of the Mustang. Sam feels very, very exposed and very alone.
He slowly walks around the car and peers at what’s left of Ruby’s face. He waits. She doesn’t jump at him. Sam studies the bloody t-shirt on her chest. With the barrel of his gun, he moves her lip up to look at the teeth and doesn’t find anything more interesting than coffee stains.
Out of the corner of his eye he catches bobbing light back in the direction of the roadhouse like a tiny firefly. He takes an involuntary step towards it because it’s the Impala, it has to be. If it’s someone else, Sam is fucked, standing on the side of the road next to a bloody corpse, but he knows it’s the Impala.
The Mustang roars back to life. Sam jumps back with a curse but the thing that no longer quite has Ruby’s face only glances over her shoulder at him before taking off down the road.
Sam sits down on the ground and waits for Dean to get there.
****
“You’re like the cops in every action movie – always show up late.”
“I’m not in the mood, Sam.” The sky over the road is beginning to lighten. Dean drives northwest on 52, where the thing with Ruby’s face went, but there’s no use in trying to catch up, so he doesn’t hurry. They don’t know what she is or how to kill her.
Sam shrugs. He is loading new bullets into the clip, alternating silver with consecrated iron. “Thanks for coming to get me again.”
Dean makes an irritated face at him. “What was I gonna do, leave you to her?”
“What took you so long anyway?”
“I came back and you were gone. This motherfucker tells me he saw you go east, so I go east, all the way to that first gas station to find out that they didn’t see you there.” Dean lets out a small humorless laugh. “I would’ve shot the guy if I had the time to stop on the way back.”
“Good thing you didn’t.” Sam slides the clip back into the gun and puts it away. “She’s trying to solve it like a math problem.” Dean makes an encouraging sound and Sam sighs, trying to recapture the thought that was there just a few seconds ago. It’s been a very long day and a longer night. “She hit two polar extremes to establish limits, and this time she picked someone I knew. Now she can start narrowing it down until she gets so close to the solution that I won’t be able to snap out of it soon enough.”
Dean is quiet for a moment. Sam suspects he is equally exhausted. “What’s the solution?”
“Are you asking about my type?”
“I live with you. I know your type.” Dean waves one hand unintelligibly in the air. “ I mean, how far off was she with the two chicks?”
What Dean is asking is ‘Where would you rather be right now?’ Sam pokes at it from all angles – from his empty stomach, from his raging headache, from the sheen of sweat and the smell of blood on his skin. Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll don’t sound terribly interesting and neither do an altar and a couple of wedding bands. He remembers Lily’s white breasts and Ruby’s wild eyes and thinks, Fuck that. Right here is pretty awesome.
“I don’t know,” he says after a pause in which Dean was very pointedly not looking at him to give him privacy. “I don’t want to think about it either because that thing fished Ruby out my head, so who knows what else she can see?”
“Point.”
Sam nods and closes his eyes and leans his head against the window, and he feels at home.
Some unidentified thought is eating a small hole in his feeling of comfort.
****
Sam wakes up in the same bed he went to sleep in, which counts as victory. His shoulder is aching after a night of sleeping handcuffed to the bed frame but it’s not unbearable. He asked Dean to do it last night, to keep him in his bed.
Dean walks by, half-dressed, with a toothbrush in his mouth. In his sleepy haze, Sam sees him at that moment and feels a jolt in his chest that became familiar since that cheap Mystery Spot attraction in Florida, since he woke up in Bobby’s panic room with a needle in his vein and heard Dean’s voice through an open door. At this moment, Sam loves his brother to death and beyond and is willing to admit to it.
The next moment, the thought takes his breath away. Sam went to sleep worried and woke up paranoid.
“Hey,” Dean mumbles around his toothbrush.
He sits down on the bed and twists a key in the lock of Sam’s handcuffs. This close, Sam can smell the motel’s soap on his skin.
“Morning.” The lock clicks, and Sam sits up. He flexes his wrist and tries to work the kink out his shoulder – to buy a little time. There’s a thought in the back of his mind and it’s a bad one. “What’s the plan for today?” He catches the sight of the clock which shows four in the afternoon. “For what’s left of it, I mean.”
“Well. Lucky for you,” says Dean, dripping toothpaste on Sam’s bed covers. He gets up to spit into the sink. “I said, lucky for you, I put Bobby on the pattern search yesterday while chasing your ass, and he found something. So pack your panties – we have a few witnesses to question.”
“Never unpacked them.” Sam gets off the bed and walks to the bathroom to start brushing his teeth. Through the open door, he watches Dean bang around the room, checking weapons, making sure they aren’t leaving anything behind. It’s a habit – they didn’t unpack last night.
Dean would be such a perfect cover. Sam brushes his teeth and watches his brother – the flex of his muscles as he twists to look under the bed and the way he absent-mindedly scratches his nose which is beginning to peel from sunburn. Sam thinks he has loved Dean just a little bit too much his whole life, but that’s just the catch, isn’t it? Yesterday, on two separate occasions, he would have sworn his undying love for two different women.
Dean doesn’t look particularly beautiful, or radiant, or seductive. He looks like Sam’s brother, like the guy who has been a constant in Sam’s life since forever and ever amen. And yet Sam would drop everything for him. Is that even normal to feel that way about your brother? Sam tries to imagine what it would be like to kiss him, to take him to bed and the image brings a warm feeling. Has he always felt like this? How reliable are the memories?
Sam watches Dean and he can’t snap out of it.
****
“Marlene” is everywhere, her face and her dress having taken over the entire living room like a pestilent fungus. Over the mantelpiece, there’s a framed wedding photograph of her and the house’s owner. The faces are twice life-size in it, and Marlene’s smile is blinding. Smaller photos of Marlene, Marlene and more Marlene and barely ever the husband sit on every horizontal surface of the house in the same plain wooden frames that Sam thinks reflect the traces of the man’s individuality. Plain, sturdy, no nonsense – that was Jeremy Sigfreid’s life before Marlene came and ate it all up.
The wedding shot over the mantelpiece draws Sam’s eyes over and over again. Probably every guest can’t help but stare at it because the young bride looks like a mummy under a thick layer of makeup that can’t fully hide her pockmarked skin. Each poorly-covered scar is overemphasized by the photo.
“I still don’t know what happened,” says Jeremy as he pours their coffee. “The police said they’ll keep her on file but won’t look for her. There’re no suspicious circumstances, you see?” He looks up at Sam, misery written all over his face. Sam is suddenly grateful for his last minute insight when he told Dean to ditch the FBI cover and go as reporters. It would have been so cruel to give this guy false hope.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Dean poking around in the bathroom, reflected in the mirror over the sink. He lifts some pill bottles to his eyes, squints at the names and puts them down again. He catches Sam’s questioning look in the mirror and taps the center of his chest. Heart meds, Sam thinks, unsurprised. They’ve been in two victims’ houses already and found pill bottles as well. Sam looked up the names in the car: furosemide, metoprolol, atenolol, warfarin, diltiazem… It all comes back to various diseases of the heart.
Dean has moved to the living room. He kneels to drag some dusty photo album from under the couch and starts flipping pages.
“Do you understand?” Jeremy is telling him. “They think she left on her own. I was furious at first but now…” He shakes his head and offers Sam a cup. He makes amazing coffee – just right, strong and without excess. “I think maybe they’re right and I wasn’t good enough for her. It must have been something I said.”
“Jeremy.” The man looks up and Sam offers him a tiny smile. “Jeremy, forgive me for asking, but have you ever hit her? Did the two of you fight a lot?”
“No, no, Lord forbid! I would never lay a finger on her. And she was always right, so no, we never argued.”
“Never?”
“Never.” The man draws himself up, looking like some crusader defending his religion. “If we disagreed, it was because of my ignorance. She would explain her point to me, very calmly, and I couldn’t help but see that she was right. Have you ever had anything like that with anyone? Do you know what that’s like?”
Sam doesn’t think the question is really addressed to either of them, so he doesn’t bother with an answer. Jeremy seems to remember Dean’s existence and he walks back into the living room with the second cup of coffee.
“Thanks,” says Dean. He’s still sitting on the floor with the album opened on his knees.
Sam watches their interaction, watches Jeremy’s face and tries to catch a glimpse of something when he looks at Dean. If Sam’s suspicions are correct and the thing has taken Dean’s face, then maybe Jeremy who’s been sucked dry by her would be able to pick up some traces. But no. Jeremy gives Dean a blank stare like he’s looking at another stranger.
Dean clears his throat. “Listen, Jeremy, what about this album here?”
“What about it?” Jeremy blinks and stares at the photographs Dean is holding. From the kitchen doorway, Sam can’t discern the faintest trace of emotion on his face. “Marlene isn’t in this one.”
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah, I noticed. Is this your fiancée? I see the ring.” Sam walks a little closer so he’d be able to see. The photo shows a Hispanic woman standing next to Jeremy with her arm thrown over his shoulder.
“Former fiancée,” says Jeremy. There’s no regret in his voice, no anger and no shame. There’s absolutely nothing. “Carla. She was before Marlene.”
“Where is she now?”
Jeremy shrugs. “Santa Fe, last I’ve heard. She’s probably still there.”
“Why did you break up with her?” asks Sam.
“I met Marlene. Marlene is the love of my life.” His smile is full of longing. Jeremy rubs his neck, and it catches Sam’s attention that three of his fingers on the left hand are missing their upper phalanges. “I was living with Carla in Santa Fe and came here to sell this house. My parents left it to me. I met Marlene here and, well…”
Sam can’t help it – he looks at Dean and waits for signs. He doesn’t know if he’s waiting for a trace of a satisfied smirk, for licking of lips, anything. Dean meets his eyes, and Sam reads, Yeah, I’ve heard enough. You? It’s so normal and it gives Sam chills because he can’t tell for the life of him if Dean has always been like this, if he really knows all these expressions or if it’s just an illusion created by the thing.
The coffee turns to blood in his mouth and Sam suddenly wants to vomit. The man who might or might not be Dean looks worried.
“Thank you for your time.” Dean gets up, setting the album on the coffee table.
This is when a sudden surge of inspiration hits Sam and he goes with it unthinkingly, out of habit. “Just one more thing: what happened to your hand?”
Jeremy looks puzzled. He lifts his hand and stares at the shortened fingers as if he’s never noticed that anything was missing in the first place. “Oh,” he says. “It was just a little construction accident.”
One of the other two was missing an ear, Sam recalls. The other was moving around in a wheelchair since both of his legs were amputated below the knee.
They walk down the street to where the Impala is parked by the curb, and Sam tries to still his madly beating heart. He thinks of the empty husk of a man left in the house full of wedding pictures. “To fall in love” sounds the same in his head as “to fall into a hole”. Jeremy Sigfreid was a normal man with a fiancée, with various interests and hobbies. Then one day he fell in love like he would fall into the mouth of an enormous fairytale crocodile. Now only his legs are showing. Gulp – and now he’s gone.
Sam might be falling in love with his brother and only now noticing it. He also might be falling into a hole with a monster waiting at the bottom, wearing his brother’s face and making Sam think he has felt like this for a while.
“Sam.” Dean snaps his fingers in front of Sam’s face, drawing him out of a trance. “Dude, where are you? Let’s go grab some food.”
Where are you?
As the Impala pulls out of town, the streetlights come on all at once to compensate for the fading light. Dean heads north on 181, taking the same route as the night before through low hills dusted with sagebrush towards a small bar he noticed on the way into Truth or Consequences.
“Hey Sam, why do you think there’s Elephant Butte right next to Truth or Consequences?”
Sam shudders – from the wind picking up through the open window as the car accelerates, or from an uneasy thought that runs through his mind. How did you know I was thinking about the town? Can you hear everything?
“I have no idea.”
“I can totally see a camp of Bible freaks naming their settlement Truth or Consequences. If I was in that camp, I know I’d leave on principle and form my own settlement right next door and name it something like Elephant Ass. Or, you know, Butte.” Dean grins, happy with his mental scenario, and fiddles with the radio.
Sam checks his skin when they pass under a streetlamp. It’s beginning to peel from sunburn but it’s nothing like Marlene’s lunar landscape of a face. Dean has a couple of blackened fingernails where he closed a door on his hand a week ago. Is it enough?
“I’m pretty sure Truth or Consequences was renamed after a show,” Sam says.
“Whatever. Don’t burst my bubble.”
Last night, Bobby set out to look through the missing persons’ cases in the area. He didn’t find the victims but he found the monster. Over and over again, he tells Sam he saw the same case with different names and faces on it: a new wife, just weeks after the wedding, disappears into thin air and leaves a devastated husband behind. What stood out about those cases was that no other family besides the new husband ever surfaced. The disappearing woman, when checked, inevitably turned out to be an empty shell with a driver’s license and a social security number but no school, employment or residence records or, in fact, any other records indicating that she had ever walked the face of the earth. Bobby knew the signs: he engineered enough identities in his life.
Jeremy was the latest victim they could find, no different from the others. The three men they visited were normal, functional people before they suddenly decided to get married. None of the old friends or relatives were invited to the wedding.
Sam listened to the men’s stories and sometimes recognized their experiences as too similar to his own. Other times, he didn’t, and that was the only thing that stopped him from running out the front door.
Struck with a sudden idea, Sam pulls out his phone and dials Dean. The phone rings in his brother’s pocket.
Dean blinks at him. “What are you calling me for?”
So much for that idea. “Nah, sorry. I meant to call Bobby.”
He checks in with Bobby more for show than anything else while Dean is pulling into the bar’s parking lot.
****
“Here’s my problem,” says Dean after he’s halfway done with his chili burger. “It turned into Ruby for you. Why are you so special? Why is it not taking over anybody else’s identity?”
Sam has been through this scenario in his head already. Say it turns into your brother…
“Say it turns into my girlfriend,” he says. “I go to the police to report her missing but there’s the real one, so no one takes me seriously.” He swallows a lump in this throat and watches Dean frown, that wrinkle deepening between his eyebrows again. “Even though I go around telling everybody this isn’t my girlfriend.”
Dean nods. “Even though she really is.”
On the juke box, Freddy Mercury sings, “Why don’t you take another little piece of my heart?” Sam thinks of the lyrics and the medicine cabinets of the three victims and he hates whoever put the song on just a little bit. Maybe the music is a clue, too, maybe the thing asked somebody to play it on purpose.
“Sam? You’ve been kinda lost. Dude, look at me.” Sam turns away from the music box in the corner and looks Dean in the eye. “Where the hell are you? Is she trying to get to you again?”
“Why don’t you take another little piece of my soul?”
Somebody turn this fucking music off. Dean is waiting for his answer.
“Where am I?” Sam says. “Where am I, huh? Yeah, Dean, I think she’s trying to get to me again.”
Dean – the thing – frowns like it hears something in his tone, like it suspects something. There’s the wrinkle again, and Sam loves it. Sam studies the nose, the eyes, the lips and wants to rip it all off because they fill his heart with longing. He has always loved his brother just a little bit too much.
“Okay,” the thing says. “Okay, so what? I want to follow it but we don’t know how to kill it. Want to just grab it and try everything we know of?”
The nose, the eyes, the lips – they all form a perfectly familiar picture of Dean Winchester. “How about we cut it into pieces?” Sam says. “And then burn them. And then we bury them all over New Mexico.”
The thing – Dean? - chews its French fry slowly like it helps its thinking. And Sam can’t tell, god help him, he really can’t tell.
“Labor-intense but effective. How come you’re aware of it calling you?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Sam shrugs. “The first time, it took me three days to snap out of the illusion. The second time was only after an hour or so. Maybe it’s losing its juice.”
“Okay,” Dean says. He leaves a few bills next to his unfinished food and checks the gun under his jacket. “Okay, let’s go. Lead on.”
It would have to be perfect, Sam thinks as he pushes through the door, making sure that the thing is following him. He only has one chance because then it will slip its skin and be off again. Who knows where his Dean is? Who can guarantee that when Sam finds him again, it will actually be Dean and not this thing?
Sam rounds the corner. Dean could always kick his ass in training but then again, Sam is bigger.
Dean rounds the corner after him and walks straight into Sam’s fist.
****
Sam makes a fire among low hills in the desert, far from the road and far from human habitat. It’s an unremarkable empty spot on the map for miles and miles, with only a service road for the power lines passing nearby. The air is too dry and full of dust, and it makes him want to throw up.
Dean – or the thing wearing Dean’s face because Sam really can’t tell anymore – is lying on a blanket spread over the ground next to the bonfire so that he won’t be cold. Sam dips his finger into a flask of holy water and traces wet patterns along Dean’s lips and under his eyes where the skin is particularly soft. There’s no smoke, only smudged dirt.
He accidentally touches a blooming bruise on Dean’s cheek, and a shudder passes over Dean’s entire face. “Ow.”
“Sorry.”
“Ow, Sam, you little shit.” Dean winces and stirs on the ground, pulls at his wrists before he realizes they’re bound, and blinks at Sam. “What the fuck, man?”
Sam shrugs. “I thought you were it.”
“Oh, god dammit.” Dean throws his head back and stares at the sky like he’s asking the stars why he was cursed with such a dumbass of a brother. Sam can read it all over his face. “Well, don’t sit there – come on, some silver, some iron and let me go already. You so owe me for this one.”
“Silver and iron don’t do jack.” Sam sighs and gets up, dusting off his jeans. Dean’s eyes catch the firelight and look for a second like hell is raging inside his skull. “I broke her head with iron, pumped her full of silver and she still got up.” Sam tosses away the flask and throws his arms wide. “I don’t know how to test you!”
Dean pulls a little grimace he does sometimes when he forgets himself – a little thoughtful jerking of his nose and mouth like an animal twitching its whiskers. Sam has no idea what it’s called or if anyone ever gave it a name. “Memory test?” Dean says.
Why the hell not? “We have an agreement going, about Dad.”
Dean frowns for a minute trying to figure out what Sam is talking about, and then his face clears. “Oh yeah. If one of us starts turning into Dad, the other will beat some sense into him. That one?”
“That one.” Sam nods. “Except for how, if you were the thing and could download my brother’s memories, you’d offer the memory test because you knew you couldn’t fail it.”
“Okay, point. So what do you wanna do now?” Sam shrugs. Dean wriggles on the ground, trying to find a more comfortable position. “Hey, Sam, isn’t the thing supposed to be your true love, forever and ever amen and a bucket of pink sparkles?”
Sam thinks, Fuck my fucking life. “Yeah. And that’s why you’re still cuffed, even though I ran all the tests on you while you were out.” He kicks some sand into the fire just for something to do and squats next to Dean again. “The starship in Oregon passed all the tests, too, remember? I don’t know what else to do, Dean.”
Dean twists his neck to look up in his face and Sam meets his eyes for a second before looking away. He can feel his face starting to heat up and hopes it won’t show in the dark, against the sunburn.
“Wait,” Dean says. “Wait, Sam, what exactly are you saying to me right now?” He flops around until he can lift himself off the ground on one shoulder and stare at Sam’s face from a better angle. Sam eyes him sideways. “No, no way. Dude, are you confessing your love to me?”
“Dean, if you don’t shut your mouth, I swear to god I’m gonna break your jaw.”
“True love, forever and ever, like that?” Dean’s mouth hangs open a little bit. Sam wants to throttle him. He can see a familiar twitch pass through his brother’s face, that little tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“If you laugh,” he says, “if you dare laugh right now—“
But Dean does – of course he does. His shoulders begin to shake and he drops back down to the ground, and that’s when Sam pounces. Dean lets out a squawk when Sam lands on him, straddles his hips and shakes him by the front of his shirt, but that doesn’t stop his hysterics.
“Dean, shut the fuck up! Dean!”
Dean isn’t even trying to fight him. Sam shakes him again, hard enough for his teeth to clack, then pulls him up and presses their mouths together.
That at least shuts him up. Sam licks at his lips, kisses him into silence. Every thought, every trace of coherency is gone from his head. He loses himself in the moment and doesn’t think at all about how he’s going to get his brains kicked out because of course this would turn out to be Dean for real, of course…
It’s the strangest thing to be kissing his brother. And then Dean’s lips move and he is kissing Sam back – and that just gets weirder. Sam closes his eyes all the way so that he wouldn’t have to see anymore.
It goes on forever, until Sam’s head is beginning to spin from the overall weirdness of the situation. He tips his face a little to the side and opens his mouth and feels a wet slide of Dean’s tongue against his own. It’s not the strangest thing that ever happened to them but it’s close, and Sam never wants it to end. They part to breathe, never getting more than an inch apart. Dean huffs out a breath against Sam’s nose, reaches for his mouth again and gives it a shallow peck which Sam captures and deepens. It goes on and on like craziness stuck on a loop, until Sam’s muscles begin to protest against holding Dean up and until Dean’s body trembles from the strain of his position.
Carefully, Sam lowers his brother to the ground and doesn’t look at his face.
Dean clears his throat. “Take the cuffs off me?”
“Yeah.” Sam climbs off him and searches through his pocket for the keys. “Turn over.”
Dean does so. When his hands are free again, he sits up next to Sam and rubs his wrists. Neither one can look at the other but they keep stealing little glances.
Sam thinks of the line from Back to the Future: “When I kiss you, it’s like I’m kissing my brother.” Now he knows exactly what that feels like – weird and beyond awesome. Sam likes his weird laid on thick. So does Dean, if he knows anything at all about his brother.
Dean sighs. Sam can feel his shoulders move against his own. “Remember how those guys were about the creature? They worshiped her like a goddess.” Sam nods, knowing that Dean will see it on the periphery and will feel the movement. “You knocked me out, cuffed me and threatened to break my jaw. I think that officially rules out you being under some kind of love spell from me.”
Sam throws his head back and looks at the night sky and the huge stars above them. That means I am actually in love with you. How fucking embarrassing.
“So we’re back to square one,” Dean says. “How do we find her?”
“You want to look for that house?” Sam starts drawing patterns in the dust between his knees. “The one where I woke up? It had what looked like family portraits on the walls, unless I was hallucinating. Maybe she lives there.” The other people had their own places where she could go with them.
“Yeah, alright.” Dean stands up and offers Sam a hand. They catch each other’s eyes and hold it this time. Sam lets himself be pulled up. “You got the keys?”
They don’t say anything until they get back to the highway and Dean takes the road south, towards Elephant Butte.
“Sammy,” he says, barely loud enough to be heard over the music. “I’m sorry I laughed at you. You just surprised me, that’s all, and I laugh when I’m surprised. You know I do.”
“I know you do.”
“So yeah.”
“No big deal,” Sam says, and Dean nods without looking at him. Sam steals a glance and sees him lick his lips. “I knocked your ass down for nothing, so we’re even.”
Dean gives him a solemn nod and turns up the music as an indication that the conversation is over. He hasn’t noticed that it’s Justin Timberlake again, which means he’s much more distracted than he wants to appear. Sam sits back and waits for the explosion.
They pull into Elephant Butte well after midnight when the reservoir appears almost black in the distance. Sam remembers his route roughly – lightheaded and confused, creeping through the streets at dusk in someone else’s clothes, with an empty gun and a four foot iron candlestick that he didn’t dare leave behind. At least the memories are fresh. He runs them in reverse, directing Dean, and eventually they find themselves on a dusty street in the easternmost part of town.
“That’s it right there,” Sam says. “That house.”
Dean stops the car on the side of the street, turns off the lights and studies the house. It’s clearly empty, with a large “For Sale” sign sitting in the front yard, looking like it’s been there for a while. The windows on the front are boarded up and the paint is beginning to peel, which Sam doesn’t remember from before.
“It wasn’t like this when I was here,” he says. “But that’s it, I’m sure.”
“Makes me wonder why it’s still unsold. It’s practically on the water – should have been taken long time ago.”
“Bad rep around town?” Sam suggests.
“Probably.”
They get out of the car and circle around to the trunk. Dean grumbles about leaving the Impala in the open like this but there isn’t any place to park inconspicuously, so there’s nothing he can do. He passes an axe to Sam and fastens a machete to his own belt.
“Decapitation,” Sam starts while Dean is piling weapons into a duffel bag, “burning, stake through the heart, holy water, salt, what else? Silver and iron are out.”
Dean shrugs. “If she needs to be shot through the left eye with a thrice-blessed arrow carved from a baobab tree on the night of a full moon, then we improvise.”
Sam weighs the axe in his hand and picks up a flashlight.
The house is dark as a crypt with its boarded windows, and it smells of dust inside, like not even wild animals have lived here in ages. The smell is not of death but not of life either; it’s inanimate, never-been-alive kind of smell. Sam switches on his flashlight, and Dean follows him in a second. The living room is empty of furniture except for an elderly loveseat of indeterminate color in the corner covered by pages of newspaper. These newspapers are everywhere in the room, once neatly layered but pushed around, ripped and stepped on. Sam imagines that someone intended to paint the walls at some point and covered the floorboards but never really progressed beyond basic preparations. There’re a few drops of dried paint and some blue smudges on the western wall but that’s about as far as the renovation seems to have gone. All the outlets are pulled out, with their panels hanging out of the wall on tangled wires like something eviscerated.
Sam sees his own footprints in the dust on the floor, his tracks intercepted by smaller prints of a bare left foot and some kind of primitive prosthesis. He points those out to Dean who nods in acknowledgement before moving to inspect the kitchen.
Sam tries to remember if he has seen the thing’s feet and picks up a vague memory of listening to Lily’s footsteps on the porch and noticing that they sounded uneven. He didn’t pay much attention then.
Dean pokes his head out of the kitchen and waves a butcher knife. The blade looks like it’s rusted through, covered by dark flakes up to the handle. Sam purses his lips. It’s a modern knife, made of stainless steel: of course it’s not rust.
The insides of the house are so quiet Sam thinks he can hear the waters of the reservoir lapping at the banks.
Except for the backdoor to the porch and the front entrance, there’re no other doors on the ground floor. When Dean reappears from the kitchen, Sam nods towards the stairs and mouths, Up there. They climb the stairs together, Sam up front and Dean covering the rear.
Upstairs they find a bathroom with a dirty tub into which the shower rod with the curtain fell long time ago, probably ripped off the wall, judging by the scratches. For some reason, Sam expected the mirror to be smashed but it’s intact, though dusty. Taught by bitter experience, he briefly lifts the toilet cover to check inside before leaving the bathroom.
Dean is waiting for him in the hallway. He points at the two bedroom doors and lifts his eyebrows in question. Sam hesitates for a moment before nodding towards the left one. While he stands by the door, Dean quickly checks the right one, signals that it’s clear and comes to stand next to Sam.
The bedroom isn’t locked. Sam runs a mental check of his own body and notes that he’s calm – no shaking, no panic, no thumping of blood obstructing his hearing. He looks over at Dean who meets his eyes steadily, and he pushes the door open.
It’s not the same ridiculous antiques-filled room that he remembers waking up in. Instead of crystal vases full of fresh flowers, there’re twigs lying around, probably ripped off the bushes outside. The candlesticks are there but they’re rusted, not polished and glorious as Sam saw them at first. The carpet is moth-eaten and worn through to the point that the floorboards show in a couple of places.
Here, unlike downstairs, the air is thick with the smell of old blood and decomposition.
The bed is a pile of shredded, bloodied newspapers and the monster is sitting in the middle like in a nest. She’s straddling some guy’s chest, and from where he stands, Sam can’t tell if the guy is still in one piece or not.
“There!” Dean shoots as soon as she turns her head towards them, as soon as Sam’s flashlight catches her in the dark.
The shotgun booms like a cannon in the quiet of the night. It blows chunks out of her face and she falls backwards off her unconscious or dead victim. She screeches but gets up and back away towards the wall before Sam has time to circle around the nest with an axe. The air is suddenly filled with the sharp smell of blood, and blood trails after her along the floor. She presses herself with her back to the wall and bares her teeth at them, too many and of irregular shapes like those of a shark. In the flashlight’s beam Sam can see the chickenpox scars, the bony shoulders and the ropy tendons straining in her neck.
If it bleeds, you can kill it, John used to say.
Sam circles towards her on the right while Dean comes in from the left. The thing – It’s a patasola, Sam’s mind suddenly clicks – glances between the two of them and lunges for Dean too fast to be stopped. He shoots but misses and she’s upon him in an instant.
“No!” Sam sees her teeth flash next to Dean’s face but Dean throws up an arm at the last second to protect his neck. He screams when her jaws close on his forearm, and Sam swings his axe from a side and hits her in the ribs.
She’s light, probably no more than hundred and twenty pounds, and the force of the blow knocks her off Dean. She scrambles backwards, jaws snapping, and regroups for a jump. Sam brings the axe around from a side again and sinks it into her skull.
For a moment, everything freezes. Somewhere in the back of Sam’s mind, a clock is going, tickling off seconds. There, the neighbors are woken up by the gunshot. There, they’re still disoriented. There, they’re considering calling the police.
The monster gurgles, rolls her blood-shot eyes and looks down at the axe blade, half-embedded in the side of her face. Sam yanks out the weapon just as Dean gets up with a machete. His arm is shaking, Sam notes automatically. That’s probably why it takes him four strikes to get her head off. He kicks it towards Sam who moves it with his foot further away from the body.
“Nice,” Sam says. In the back of his mind, the clock’s hands are nearing the red zone. “Yeah, we should go.”
The severed head sinks its teeth into his boot. Sam yelps and almost falls backwards. He hears the teeth scrape against the steel plate in the boot’s toe, and the head whines like it gave her toothache. Dean swears when the body lurches at him and grabs for his knees. He kicks the legs from under it and it lands into the soaked newspaper nest.
There goes the dress, Sam thinks, hysterically. Now she’ll be really pissed.
“Grab it,” Dean tells him from where he’s wresting the headless body’s hand behind its back while it thrashes underneath him. “Grab it, Sam, let’s go!”
They carry the patasola out to the car like that, in parts, keeping the head away from the body. Sam holds the snapping, snarling head by its hair while Dean stashes the body into the trunk. The head howls in Sam’s hands when the trunk closes. He tosses it into a plastic bag from 7-11 with a couple of candy bars that was still sitting on the back seat. He sticks it into the foot well in the back.
The lights are on all over the neighborhood. They’re probably being watched, and Sam is glad that they put on fake license plates before coming out here.
Just a few blocks away, the sirens are wailing, getting closer.
“Get in, come on, Sam!”
Dean has already thrown a blanket over the front seat and started the engine. Sam wedges the head under the seat sideways and jumps in from the passenger’s side. Dean sinks the pedal into the floor.
Normally, given the circumstances, they wouldn’t stop until they were two states away. But the body banging around in the trunk, the head in the back and both the Winchesters covered in blood call for an earlier stop. Dean checks for traffic camera as he drives and when they’re out range, he takes the Impala off the main highway and onto a tiny service road snaking off into the desert. Sam picks the lock on the gate and closes it again behind them to hopefully throw off the chase and buy them a few hours.
Away from the main road, Dean switches off the headlights and slows down.
“Suburbs,” he says. “I hate the suburbs. Quiet like a cemetery.”
The head makes wordless snarling noises in the back like it lost the power of coherent speech. They can hear the body raging in the trunk.
“It’s a patasola,” Sam says. “Or a hybrid of some sort, I think. It had a wooden stump growing out of its leg bone – did you see?”
Dean shoots him a look but doesn’t dare to glance away from the dark road for longer. “They live in the woods,” he says. “And they eat the bodies; they don’t suck the life out of them and let them go.”
“That’s why I said ‘hybrid’. And remember the victims? The fingers, the ear and the legs?”
“Christ.”
Sam’s body is starting to come down from an adrenaline high: his muscles ache and feel watery, and his hands are starting to shake no matter how he tries to hold them still. He presses his palms between his knees and still feels the tremors going up his arms. Dean’s leg is twitching a little. Sam feels laughter bubbling in his chest for no good reason at all. He’s turning stupid, lightheaded, and he wants to do ridiculous things like maybe get his brother to stop the car, stretch him out on the seat and suck him off right here. Maybe he won’t even pull the monster head from underneath the seat. Desire sits sick and twisted in his stomach, making him hard in the blood-splattered jeans. Sam wraps his arms around his middle and leans forward to help contain it all, to hold it back. The thick metallic smell is keeping him sober but just barely.
He went to sleep the previous morning thinking that for a hunter, he was a pretty normal person. The thought makes him choke on laughter. His chest feels like it’s swelling, swelling with some feeling, and the monster in the back clacks its teeth in perfect unison with the rhythm of blood slamming into Sam’s heart valves – click-clack, click-clack. She wants it, he realizes, with all its twisted anger and all its borderline incestuous love. Sam imagines his heart speckled with little scars from shotgun pellets that Zachariah probably had to pluck out by hand, with healed holes from the Devil’s claws and with a tiny symbol burned into it by a naked lesser angel to indicate that it’s given away, forever and ever amen. What would anyone want with a heart like that?
Sam realizes that he’s laughing but Dean doesn’t ask. He has the same crazy light in his eyes.
****
Dawn catches them somewhere off the road, burying the last burnt pieces of the patasola in the dry soil and covering the grave with torn sagebrush. It’s a nameless tactic that keeps getting reinvented among hunters. John Winchester in his turn also thought of it. His sons adapted it and later named it “the wood chipper approach” after an incident described by Bobby. There’re too many monsters, too many supernatural things of different species walking the earth, and some require exotic rituals to put them down. That is, after you figure out what they are in the first place, partially relying on information written down by civilians who don’t believe in monsters. That’s all bullshit, John used to say. He was a thorough kind of man. Every monster has a limit to its regenerative ability: chop up the body into small enough pieces, burn them, drop half of them into the ocean and bury the rest across the state, and ninety nine out of a hundred corporeal monsters won’t get up again. Of course, there’re limitations to the wood chipper approach: the body has to hold still for long enough to be processed, and the whole thing is extremely messy and labor-intense. But it works.
Sam can barely lift his arms, and Dean is worse with the bandage covering the bite on his forearm. The good thing is that physical labor killed the horniness that was eating Sam alive. The bad thing is that it did nothing to unwind what feels like a tight spring in his stomach.
Dean spits on the grave and walks back to the car, all but dragging his shovel behind. Sam stands there for a minute, swaying on his feet, and then follows.
After he puts the shovels away, Dean walks around the car and sits down on the ground, resting his back against the door. He doesn’t say anything but moves his leg to make room for Sam to sit next to him. To the east, the sky is turning an embarrassing shade of flamingo pink as they watch.
“I think the whole desert’s in my eyes,” Sam says.
“Half. The other half’s in mine.”
When Sam turns his head, Dean’s nose is peeling. He didn’t bother to clean off the dead skin and it flakes off his cheeks and the bridge of his nose and makes his profile fuzzy and uneven. Dust has collected in tiny creases in his face, turning him into some caricature of an old man. Sam sighs and moves, despite the protest in his joints and muscles, to sit on top of his brother’s legs. Dean’s eyes shift from the horizon onto Sam’s face and stay there. Sam licks his thumb and rubs it on the side of Dean’s nose. It leaves a smudge.
There’s bottled water in the car but it’s too much of a trip. Sam pulls a flask of holy water from his back pocket that they’ve been using to sprinkle over the patasola’s many graves. He wets the edge of his sleeve and rubs it carefully over Dean’s other cheek. Old dead skin flakes off, revealing a new layer underneath, so amazingly soft and a little pink still. Dean hasn’t taken his eyes off Sam’s face.
Sam rubs the sleeve over his brother’s temple and marvels at how tiny droplets of water stay in the short hair there. He traces the outline of Dean’s ear, and that’s when Dean turns his face and presses a soft kiss to the inside of Sam’s wrist.
Dean looks like Harvey Dent with half of his face covered in grime, blood and flaking skin and the other, well, relatively clean.
“Two-Face,” Sam says.
Dean offers him a lopsided smile on the dirty side. Up close, the smell of him is unbelievable, though hardly better than Sam’s own – roadkill drenched in sweat and gasoline, and underneath it, crushed sage and cigarette smoke, which Sam secretly loves though he’ll never admit to it.
There’s little brother mentality involved. Dean never had anything that Sam didn’t want desperately for his own, be that a lollipop, a gun, car keys or Dean himself.
It’s unclear who reaches out first – maybe a tiny motion or a thought of a motion in Dean’s head triggered Sam, or the other way around, or maybe they were both struck simultaneously by a fit of stupidity that’s been a long ways coming. The kiss is unlike the last one, tired and lazy and from a better angle this time. The inside of Dean’s mouth tastes bitter and unexplainably familiar, like Sam can pick up fraternal DNA in his saliva. For a second he thinks that he knows that taste like his own – not from last night and not from a CPR ten years ago but that he has known it all along. Dean’s hand creeps around his side and finds its way underneath the shirt on Sam’s back, pulling him in by gentle pressure on his backbone. Sam shuffles closer on his knees.
Sam wonders vaguely if they’re going to regret this in the morning, then realizes it is the morning. Somehow, everything makes sense to him – he’s been given a green light by his own conscience that gave up on him and curled up to sleep.
It’s liberating. Sam pulls away and looks at his brother, feeling now that he can do anything, that since they have crossed this line, nothing is out of boundaries anymore. Dean meets his eyes without hesitation. Sam feels beyond bare in the desolate landscape, in the light of the rising sun and in Dean’s eyes, and he’s going to explode if he stays like this for a second longer.
“Hey,” he says, tugging on the hem of Dean’s shirt. “Hey, let me—“
Dean does – lifts his arms and leans away from the Impala’s door to let Sam pull the thin tee over his head. Sam wonders how much he is allowed. Would you let me? If I wanted to strip you down to your skin, take off every thread and clean off every smudge of dirt, so there would be nothing to cover you, not even a cloud in the sky to throw shadow over you, would you let me? He realizes with a jolt that yes, he is allowed, just like in the end, he has always been allowed to have that lollipop, the gun or the car keys.
“What do you want, Sammy?”
You and everything you’ve ever had. “Just to look for now. Okay? I just want to look.”
He’s expecting a joke but Dean only nods. “Okay. Don’t stop there but yeah, you can look.”
The pre-dawn light is strange and almost watery, washing Dean’s skin in blue and pink. Sam leans back and lets himself stare openly at the expanse of body he’s allowed to see, at the hard lines of bones pushing up in places, at the faint ripples of muscle on the stomach, at the nipples drawn tight in the cool air. Sam has worshipped this body since he first noticed it growing different from his own – taller and leaner and stronger. He has caught up since then but the awe never fully dissipated.
Dean rolls his eyes. “If you don’t move on, I’m gonna fall asleep. Here.” He unbuttons his jeans and pulls the zipper down – Sam feels like an electric current shoots through him at the sound of it – and pushes the pants down along with his boxers. “Here, perv on. Get my boots, would ya, since you’re sitting over there?”
Sam flushes at the word “perv” and leans forward briefly to give him a hard, closed-mouthed kiss like a warning. He wonders when the length of Dean’s legs became “over there” and thinks that he should probably move along before they both pass out. He’s in a weird state of extreme fatigue when the body stops noticing exhaustion but is reluctant to make a single move.
He doesn’t let himself look at Dean’s cock or thighs, wanting to save them for later. He twists around and unties Dean’s boots, helps him pull them off with the socks and lifts himself up just enough to get the jeans all the way off.
Sam closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again, he takes in the sight of his brother altogether, now entirely naked save for the bandage. He doesn’t remember when he has seen this last – it must have been years since he looked, since he didn’t avert his eyes and really let himself see. He starts with the small fold of skin at Dean’s waist this time and moves down along the thin trail of hair to his half-hard cock. Sam studies it now though he has seen it before, lifts it in his hand and hears a soft huff of breath from Dean. When he looks up briefly, Dean is watching his hand, and his eyes are hidden in the barred shadows of eyelashes.
Sam makes a show with his fingers, tracing along the vein on Dean’s dick and brushing the head with his thumb – he gets another gasp for that as the flesh fills with blood and grows harder in his hand.
Dean coughs a little. “Sam, I hate to break your little ogling session over there but this ground is really uncomfortable to sit on. Could you--?”
“Yeah.” Sam pulls off his shirt to use as a blanket and moves off Dean’s legs to let him settle.
“Wow,” Dean says. “Only— How many shirts do you still have on?”
“You always talk that much?”
Dean looks away, running a hand over his face briefly, and Sam recognizes it for what it is – an unconscious gesture of embarrassment, some aborted move to cover his eyes. The night is over and there’s too much light. “No, I can shut up.”
But Sam has no shame left – his conscience went to sleep without him. The dawn strips away everything and he still feels bare, more open than Dean even. All the layers have come off him. Where he would’ve made a face, where he would’ve laughed, where he would’ve covered up with sarcasm and finally stone cold silence, now there’s only Sam and his open adoration for his brother. He takes Dean’s cock in his hand and starts stroking again, adjusting to find the right angle and rhythm.
Dean tries to breathe steadily, soon fails, and the moment he gives up is clearly felt. Dean lets out a little snort and pulls Sam’s head down for a kiss, his fingers digging into the back of Sam’s neck with what seems like enough force to bruise. It’s like they’ve exchanged hostages: you strip naked in the desert and I will let you see that I want you, and then no one has any leverage against the other and both are free. It becomes better then. Sam moans into Dean’s mouth and Dean somehow manages to get Sam’s jeans open and half-way off from the uncomfortable angle. Sam hasn’t realized he is achingly hard and now he pushes into Dean’s palm, thinking that finally, finally—
They break the kiss when it becomes too difficult to breathe. Dean comes first with a choked sound that settles somewhere in the pit of Sam’s stomach like it means to stay there forever, and Sam knows immediately that even if down the line they decide to drop this, he won’t be able to forget. He has to bite Dean’s ear to remind him to move. With Dean’s teeth now scraping against his neck, Sam shuts his eyes and feels the tension in him build higher, higher, higher until it breaks.
They sit there for another minute when neither one can be bothered to move. The world is quiet for miles around, and Sam can hear the air rushing in and out of Dean’s lungs, in and out but slower. If he strains his hearing, he imagines he can distinguish the pieces of the patasola squirming underground and making the soil rustle around them.
“Holy shit, Sam,” Dean mumbles into his shoulder, “don’t move me for a week.”
Sam laughs and presses a kiss to Dean’s temple before crawling off to sit next to him against the side of the car. He briefly thinks about cleaning up but realizes that they’re both already covered in blood, dust and accelerant and waking up is going to be disgusting regardless.
The sun has almost made it from behind the mountains. Sam leans a little into Dean’s side and waits for the light to creep up to their toes. Then, he thinks, then I’ll move.