Entry tags:

a thin chain of next moments, fic: spn

A Thin Chain of Next Moments (1/4), Gen, PG-13, AU
Title: A Thin Chain of Next Moments (1/4)
Authors: batyatoon and dotfic
Rating: Gen, AU, PG-13
Warning: Character death
Word count: ~22,000 (total)
Characters/pairings: Sam, Dean, John, Bobby and others (both canon and our own), Sam/Ava, Dean/CRD, Dean/OFC, Jo/OMC
Disclaimer: Sadly, none of them belong to us except the OC's.

a/n: Follows canon up to Crossroad Blues. Puts season two canon in the blender, diverges completely from season three. It took us a while to write this; during the process we got Jossed and Kripked so many times our heads were spinning. Many thanks to our beta reader destina for her patience and her careful editing above and beyond the call of beta-dom. Title is from Bruce Springsteen.

Summary: Dean makes a deal, and lives a life.





The second kiss is like the first, and Dean tries not to notice that he enjoys the feel of her body pressed against his, how her tongue is both sweet and bitter, tasting of something charred.

Then she backs away with a half smile, out from under the water tower, and melts into the night.

Dean takes a few steps after her. It's involuntary, the urge to follow, hunt, and kill the demon, making him forget what he's just done.

A hoarse scream behind him brings him to a stop. He turns, pulling his gun before he recognizes the voice. His gun hand falls to hang limply at his side, the weapon forgotten, because his father is huddled up on the gravel at the crossroads and it's his father who's screaming.

"Dad?"

Naked, shivering and twitching, staring at nothing in blind panic, Dad doesn't seem to hear him. Dean kneels down and touches his shoulder and Dad flinches away with a cry.

"Dad --"

"It burns," his father rasps, "oh god, please, it burns --"

"Dad, it’s okay, you’re okay.." The night air is cool, and the gravel underfoot is downright cold, and his skin is pale and unmarked, but there’s heat radiating off him, enough to send up little wisps of sulfur-smelling steam. Dean shrugs out of his leather jacket and reaches to wrap it around Dad’s shaking shoulders, to return the jacket to its original owner.

The blow’s wild, flailing, and he never sees it coming. His father’s fist catches him high on the cheek and sends him staggering a few steps. He regains his balance, realizes he’s braced for a second punch that isn’t coming, and straightens up.

"Get away." It’s something between a snarl and a sob. "All you sons of bitches. Leave me alone ... ah, god, no." The snarl sinks away into a despairing whimper of fear, and he curls into a fetal huddle on the ground.

Dean stands where he is for several seconds, cold to the bones, unable to move. There’s a sick trembling in his stomach muscles, and his face stings where Dad hit him but he can already tell it’s not going to bruise, and this is wrong, this is wrong, he shouldn’t be able to see Dad like this, nobody should --

Get hold, he tells himself harshly. Get hold. Cover him up. Get him inside.

A deep breath, and another, and then he pulls out his cell phone to call Sam.

"I've got Dad, meet us at the motel," is all he says when his brother answers. He hangs up before Sam can ask a question, and starts back toward his father, carefully keeping his movements gentle, non-threatening.

"Let's go. Dad? Dad, let’s go. I’m gonna get you in the car, it's just over there." He keeps talking, fuck, he's not even sure what he's saying, just so long as words keep coming out of his mouth, something to get his father's attention focused and away from the terrors he still thinks he's facing. "It's me. It's Dean. You're home. It's going to be okay."

He hooks Dad's arm around his own shoulders. The gravel’s sharp; he can see it digging into his father’s exposed skin, bits of it clinging to the flesh as he tries to pull Dad to his feet, but the hair-fine scratches left by the gravel are the only marks on him. The only marks: Dad's arm seems to be fine and there's nothing on his thigh to show where the bullet went in.

He’s almost got him up when Dad kicks out at him with a wordless yell, tries to grapple his supporting arm. The attack’s feeble and uncoordinated, just a step above random flailing; Dean can block the blows easily, but not support him at the same time.

Weak, whispers the back of his mind distantly. Dad would laugh that attack to scorn, laugh and smack you on the back of the head for trying it -- not lightly, either. Dad wouldn’t ever use a fool move like that. (Because Dad's ten feet tall and can shoot a fly out of the air and isn’t afraid of anything.)

"Dad, it's me, calm down --" Dean tries again, jerks back as his father's arm lashes out. Dad’s cursing him in a thin choked whine, and here and there in the string of foul words he catches the word demons.

Shit. Even if he can get them into the car, how the hell's he supposed to drive with Dad fighting him the whole way? One panicked swipe from the passenger seat and they'll end up overturned in a ditch or wrapped around a telephone pole.

"God, Dad, I’m sorry," Dean mutters, and punches his father hard across the jaw.

---

The motel room door's open with light spilling out, framing Sam, who doesn't say a word, not one word, damn him, as he helps Dean carry their father inside.

The light’s too bright, making his gut spasm and his heart stutter like a trip-hammer. He clenches his jaw so tight it sends pain ricocheting up into his head, and he blinks hard against the blurring in his eyes. Fuck, he's not going to crumble now. Not now. He’s needed.

They get Dad clothed in jeans that belong to Dean and a flannel shirt that belongs to Sam because Dean's shirts would probably stop just above Dad's wrist bone and be a little short on him. Not that he's thinking about things like that, except as a way to not think about the unsteadiness in his stomach or the tight set of Sam’s shoulders or the guarded glances Sam keeps throwing him.

Dad's still out cold, which is probably a blessing. This is happening too fast. One minute, Dad's gone, the next he's back, only not how Dean meant it to be.

Sam still doesn't say a word, but the question’s there in his face when he looks up, and there’s no ignoring it anymore. Dean takes a deep breath and launches in -- starting just after the demon vanished, starting with Dad appearing at the crossroads.

It’s hard to talk about; not that he can’t find the words to describe Dad’s condition, or the way he was yelling, but that he can’t make the description and Dad fit together in his head. Dad's been in bad shape before over the years, coming home from hunt after hunt with the countless minor injuries that are a hunter’s stock in trade: slashes, bites, bruises, burns, a broken bone or two. But it’s never been like this, not even that time the ghoul clawed him and it got infected, not even that time he had the flu and was out of his head with fever for most of a day. Never this ... if it were anybody else, the word would be vulnerable.

"He thinks he's still there," Dean finishes, and watches the horror and pity drain the color from his brother's face. "He thinks he's still in Hell."

There's a faint smell of charred things in the room, the same scent Dean had noticed in the car on the way there. Even if fire hasn't returned along with his father, it seems to hover in the air around him. Fire's always been a familiar and favorite weapon, but Dean knows that if he ever went to Hell, the fire would be waiting there for him, too.

His thought snags painfully on that if, like a barbed hook.

"We should--" Sam's voice scratches. "We should sedate him. I can raid a clinic. In the meantime try to keep him hydrated and uh, knock him out again if you have to." He holds out his hand and Dean tosses him the keys to the Impala.

Closing his fingers around the keys, Sam meets Dean's eyes, but he doesn't say anything more.

---

They get two motel rooms, so one of them can get real rest while the other watches over Dad.

Dean dips in and out of sleep, never staying long. The times when he hears Dad screaming through the thin wall, he's out of bed, wrenching the door open, and there in the next room before he can even remember running outside. The other times, when the screams are inhis own nightmares, he claws awake sweaty with his own breath rasping in his ears.

Late in the second night, well past two, his cellphone goes off while Sam and Dad are asleep in the next room (at least, he hopes they're asleep). It's Missouri, and Dean has to hold the phone away from his ear until she's calmed down somewhat.

She had a dream, she says, and saw Dean sealing his own heart into a box.

Her voice unexpectedly softens when she asks him how long, and he says ten years.

"Oh, honey." It's nearly his undoing. Then Missouri's voice goes caustic again, and it's like a shot of bourbon. "Best of luck, Dean. You're going to need it."

---

It takes days before Dad's eyes focus, before he says their names, looks around the drab motel room, understands he's no longer in Hell.

It's a week before he can sleep for more than an hour without waking up screaming.

They stay in the motel because they have nowhere else to go, really, and they don't want to make Dad travel until he's stronger.

Dean brings clothes from the Salvation Army because they burned most of Dad's clothes after they burned his body. Dad can eat, sit up in bed, walk around. Sometimes he almost seems like John Winchester, except there are moments when his stare goes vacant, or he shudders and shuts his eyes. They have to be patient then, to gently speak and touch his shoulder, and eventually it stops. When he opens his eyes, his cheeks are wet. He looks from Sam to Dean like he's using their faces to tether him to earth.

---

Those first few days, they're still in crisis mode. Dad's body seems to be intact but his mind isn't, and it weakens him. It means putting off what Dean dreads. It's not just the moment when Sam will finally think to ask, although it's not like Sam hasn't figured it out already. But there's a difference between unspoken knowing and having the words actually out there.

In the end, it's not Sam who asks the question; it's Bobby, when he drives Dad's truck out to them later that week, one night of cold misting rain.

He hands the keys to Sam and stares past him to where Dean's standing by the open door of the motel room.

"You could come in. Say hi to him..." Sam begins.

"I could." But Bobby doesn't move; his gaze goes from the door to Sam's face to Dean's, and stops.

"Dean," he breathes finally, dread and anger mixed in his voice; Dean's stomach plunges at the sound of it. "Goddammit, Dean, what did you do?"

It's on the tip of his tongue to say what are you talking about?. But Sam's turned to stare at him, and it's far too late to deny anything.

"I got ten years," Dean says. He doesn't mean it come out so defensively, petulant, an excuse.

Then Sam goes past him, shoving Dean roughly even though there's plenty of room to pass, moving so fast Dean gets only a quick glimpse of Sam's face wet with furious tears before the door slams.

---

Dean tries to talk to Sam the next day. When he hands Sam his coffee in a paper mug, he gets a stare that makes his blood feel like ice.

"I did what I had to," Dean says, needing that look gone from Sam, that wounded look that goes hard when he looks right at Dean. Leaning against the hood of the Impala, he gropes for more words, but there aren't any that would be enough. He can't quite manage to form them anyway; his throat's dry.

Ten years. He imagines a decade of Sam looking at him as if there's a wall between them. Not as if they're strangers, Christ, never that, but as if Dean's already gone and Sam's never going to forgive him for going.

Sam doesn't join him; he instead puts his back against a pillar of the motel breezeway, looking off at the cars going by on the highway. "I know," he says.

"Look.." He puts his fingers against the hood, and it steadies him. He's still here, and ten years is a long time. Somehow he has to make Sam see that. "I saved Dad."

"Did you?" Sam's gaze snaps to him. "Have you looked at him lately?."

"He's gotten a lot better..."

"He zones out, Dean. He can’t remember where he is. Being in Hell, gosh, I guess that kind of fucks up a person's head!"

Sam's right.

No. No, he's not. He did what he had to do, and Dad's better off this way than he'd be in Hell. Even broken, he's still Dad and he's getting better.

"So, what, you don't want him around because we've got to take care of him?" Dean doesn't mean it to come out that way, accusatory and defensive all at once, and he sees the cruelty of it reflected back in the way Sam's shoulders hunch, pulling away.

"No, Dean. I'm just not sure that what you did was saving him."

Dean’s hands tighten on the edge of the car. He needs Sam to be okay with this. He has to be okay with this. "He’ll get better."

"Yeah, he probably will." Sam nods and takes a sip of coffee, his eyes looking off towards the horizon again.

"It'll take time."

"You don't have much of it."

"I have enough."

"No." Sam finishes his coffee in two swallows, then crumples up the cup. "No, you really don't."

"Ten years," Dean says. "That’s a long time."

Sam’s face twists into a bitter smile. "Long time. Think that’s what they figured? The guy whose life we saved back there? The ones we didn’t save?"

"Sammy --"

"Dean, how can you possibly think this is okay?"

The anger in Sam's voice is starting to make him angry in turn, and he tries to make himself stop that. "I don't think it's okay," he bites off. "But you don't have to--"

His brother turns to him – no, turns on him – and his eyes are dry, which is worse than if he'd been crying. "How do you think I should react, Dean? Ten years. Every single time I see you, that's what goes through my head. Ten years and that's it. I'm glad we have Dad back, I am, but man, I don't think I can handle this yet. I don't think I can handle looking at you and knowing you're going to die."

He pushes off the car, takes a step toward Sam. "So don’t look."

Sam’s jaw sets, taut with the effort of staying silent. He turns away, tosses the crushed cup into the trashbin with a vigorous flick of his arm. "I’m gonna go check on Dad," he says, his voice flat, and heads for the door.

Dean can’t sleep that night, and at quarter to three he gives up trying and slips out of the motel room with cellphone and car keys in his hand.

He drives for hours, and dawn finds him in the middle of nothing but fields and woods. A half dozen yards or so off the road is a pile of rotten wood that might have been a small shed once but it's impossible to tell now.

Dean sits with his fingers on the wheel, listening to the utter silence. No traffic goes by him.

He just sits.

Dad’s alive. And pretty soon Sam will be getting up and making Dad’s breakfast, and Dad may or may not be able to spoon the cereal into his mouth for himself, but he’s alive.

Dean restarts the engine, grabs a tape without looking and slots it into the deck. No point asking what's the game, it sings to him; no point asking who's to blame.

Ten years. There's work to do.

---

YEAR ONE

There's always work to do.

Dean tries to find local jobs, sometimes goes farther afield, never more than a few days away at a time. He and Sam settle into an endless loop of shift changes between caring for Dad and hunting. They don't hunt together even when Bobby relieves them and the wall of silence between him and Sam settles onto his shoulders as a dead weight. He tries to lose himself in the rituals and adrenaline and slam bang of hunting, almost convincing himself that it all feels the same as it did before, that the job and the road and the music are enough, as they've always been enough. If you're gonna die, die with your boots on / If you're gonna try, well, stick around / Gonna cry, just move along / If you're gonna die, you're gonna die...

A ravener in Wichita, a clutch of redcaps in Oakland; poltergeists and restless dead and inhabiting spirits from Boise to Baton Rouge. Dean studies the news over breakfast, keeps his ears open at late night bars, stops in every so often at Harvelle's Roadhouse when he's at a loss for a lead. There's always work to do.

His first visit to the roadhouse goes a little awkwardly, when Ellen tells him why Jo isn't there. "She said she wanted to be a hunter." She’s not quite looking at him, busy wiping down the bartop with a damp rag; her tone is more resigned than anything else. "I said not under my roof. She said fine, and left."

He bites back the words I'm sorry, can't help feeling he had a part in this.

"She's smart," Dean says. "She'll do all right."

She glances up at him. "I hope so."

It makes it that much harder not to tell her why Sam's not hunting with him, when she asks. He can’t summon up the give-a-damn to make up an elaborate lie, and there’s no way he’s going to bring up Dad, so he just says something vague about Sam being busy somewhere else.

He knows Ellen isn’t buying it when her eyebrows draw down and her hand on the bartop comes to a halt.

There's a short silence that for the life of him he can't break, not even by moving for the door.
"You take care of yourself, Dean Winchester," she finally says, looking right at him, and then turns back to her work. It's enough to let him start moving.

As he puts his hand against the door, Ellen clears her throat and says, "I'd have done the same in your place," very low, her eyes down on the cloth in her hand.

So she's heard, somehow. Maybe from Bobby. Dean watches her for a moment as she picks up several glasses with one hand, keeps wiping the bartop with the other.

She doesn't look up again.

---

The motel’s getting too expensive and Dad’s not well enough to travel much. Sam finds a little apartment with its own entrance, the second floor of a house where the owner is away a lot.

Two bedrooms. Sam claims the one that’s only about the size of a closet, and Dean sets up a cot in Dad’s room for the nights when he shouldn’t be left alone. The only other place to sleep is the futon in the living room, but that's fine with him, he's slept on worse. Furniture gradually starts to accumulate: bookshelves, a low table, a five-year-old television Sam finds at a garage sale. No rug, but blue curtains hang on the windows.

It's the first place Dean can remember living in, since those hazy memories of the house in Lawrence, that looks like permanent. And that word, when it comes to him, is more disquieting than it has any right to be.

They hardly see each other most days, and they don't speak much at all, beyond the basics. It becomes routine: Dean returns from a hunt, they exchange a few terse words, and later that day Sam leaves for a hunt of his own. Every shift change, Dean feels the hollow places inside him grow more hollow. But Dad's getting better, slowly. Dean clings to that, pretends not to notice how Sam barely looks at him.

He looks after Dad until Sam returns, and by that time he’s ready with his own next job.

Once when he comes back, there’s a scrape on Sam’s face that wasn’t there when he left and one of the spindly kitchen chairs is broken. The splinters still in Dad’s palms and the empty sedative vial tell him the rest of that story. Fear jabs at him; for weeks after that, Dean doesn't hunt at all.

Bobby comes by a time or three, usually without calling first, and tends to stay until whichever brother is out hunting comes back. Dad’s starting to talk again, and even smile sometimes, and Bobby’s presence seems to help. Dean cooks dinner even when Sam's there because he trusts his own cooking over his brother's. Forks scrape against plates and no one says much.

Afterwards, he washes the dishes while Sam dries. When the water's turned off, the silence between them grows more pronounced. It makes him want to grab Sam by the shoulders and shove him and yell -- at least they could fight the way they used to, easy and loud and natural.

---

Tennessee maybe a month or two later, and Dean’s caught out badly by a nixie and too far from the riverbank to keep his footing. He's lost the silver knife he brought to kill it, and the water's just closed over his head for the second time, when suddenly all the weedlike tendrils around his neck and arms spasm and then go limp.

He comes up spluttering, dragging the dead nixie's tendrils away from his throat with one hand and treading water furiously with the other. Jo’s standing on the riverbank with one hand planted on her hip and the other casually holding a crossbow. "Dean Winchester," she drawls. "What brings you here?"

Not missing a beat is a point of pride. "This thing," he says with a grin, holding up a trailing tendril that looks more than ever like some innocuous water weed. "'S been chowing down on local schoolkids. Thought I might see how it liked picking on something its own size."

She laughs, and lets the crossbow drop to swing on a strap over her shoulder as she bends to pick up one end of a fallen branch. It's a moment before he realizes that she's holding it out to him, to help him back to the bank, and he holds up a hand palm-out to ward it off. "No thanks, I'm good."

"You sure? Even with the nixie?"

"Yeah. Thanks." Which is not to say it isn't unwieldy, dragging the nixie's carcass with him through the muddy water and up the bank to dry land, but he manages it. Jo retrieves her silver-tipped arrow from the nixie, and makes a face at the already-corroding shaft. "You want to clean that quick," he tells her. "Nixie blood does a number on metals."

"So I see." She starts to say something else, hesitates, and then says it: "You want a hand burying it?"

You want a hand, not you want to give me a hand. As though he'd made the kill. It's a backhanded apology, or as close as he'll get to one, for interfering with his hunt.

"Sure," he says, more as an acceptance of the apology than because he really needs the help. "You know how to bury one of these?"

"Face down, at least three yards from the water, sprinkled with fresh ashes," Jo recites promptly. "Doesn't have to be too deep."

"Not bad." Dean studies her sidelong. "You’ve been doing your homework."

She shrugs -- and he knows she thinks he can't see how put on that indifference is, but he catches the way she presses her lips together, as if stifling a smile.

He walks her back to her car, a beat-up Ford that last saw better days in 1982.

"Where's Sam?" she asks, stowing her crossbow.

Dean thinks of several things he could say, lies he could think up, excuses. He finally settles on "Buried in research. You know how he gets with that."

Sliding into the driver's seat of her truck, Jo pauses with her fingers holding the key in the ignition. "Well, no, I wouldn't." She turns the engine on. "So. Guess I'll see you around?"

"Guess so," he says, and she drives off.

They run into each other every so often after that, between hunts, when he happens to be in the area. She's got a day job at a bar; it's not a hunter hangout, and that suits him just fine.

One of those nights, over drinks, he finally tells her why he's hunting alone.

He didn't plan on telling her, didn't plan on telling anyone, but it's two in the morning and he's had maybe one too many beers and his shoulder hurts like a mad bastard where the greentooth threw him into that tree and it's been almost three months since his brother last looked him in the face.

The whole story comes out. Trickles out, flat and stale, lifeless; there's almost no emotion left in it.

He doesn't look up until he's done talking, and when he does it's to see Jo staring at him flatly. "You're shitting me."

"You asked, I told you what happened -- "

"No, you have got to be goddamn shitting me. Your brother’s blaming you?" The disbelief is tinged with righteous indignation, verging on outrage.

"It’s not like that," Dean mutters, perversely defensive on Sam's behalf.

"He has no right to do that." Jo leans forward, her eyes meeting his directly, and slams the words down like a judgment. "No. Right. You saved your dad's life --"


"Gotta pay for it with mine in ten years."

"Ten years," she scoffs. "Dean, you guys are hunters. You could get killed anytime. Ten years from now, five years, two years, tomorrow for all you know. Who the hell says you'll still be alive in ten years?"

Dean can't stop the crooked grin that twists his mouth at that, and doesn't really try. He raises his half-empty beer bottle to her. "Way to cheer up a guy."

"No, I mean it," Jo insists. "You got your dad back alive out of Hell. And whether you survive the next ten years or not, he's alive now. You made the right call, Dean."

The twist of his mouth doesn't even pretend to be a grin this time. "Yeah, well," he says, tipping back the bottle so he won't have to look at her. "Glad someone thinks so."

Bitter or not, it's truer than he wants to admit: he is glad someone thinks so. You made the right call.

---

It’s so strange, being in the same place this long, returning to the same place after every job. Stranger to find himself getting used to it, the disciplined routine of the hunt interspersed with the more prosaic rhythm of buying inexpensive food, cooking meals, watching TV.

When Sam looks at him, the wall seems thinner than it did before. He cracks a grin while Dean's telling Bobby about his last hunt, which ended with Dean knee-deep in monster guts and mud.

Sam gets a job clerking at a law office. It pays for groceries, and for the rent on the little second-floor apartment. No more credit card scams, they're too risky; Dean spends more time hustling pool, pulls cons on wealthy business travelers, always when he's far from home..

Dean writes in his own journal in the evenings, refining the notes from his solo hunting. On the rare nights when they’re both home, Sam spends most of his time in his room with the door locked. He pauses outside it sometimes, never for long. The closed door's a reminder. This peace they've fallen into only goes so deep. He pushes down the panic that fights to get to the surface, the fear that this will go on for years.

Not that it matters, as long as Sam's safe, Dad's safe.

Dad watches a lot of sports, a lot of old movies, with little joy. His face has grown less hollow over the past six months, and his eyes track steadily again. The hallucinations have stopped, the nightmares are fewer, and when he talks he sounds almost normal.

His sole comment on Dean's newest scar, souvenir of an encounter with a gremlin, is a long silence followed by "Glad to see you're in one piece, son."

Other than that, he never talks about hunting.

He thinks his father is maybe in one piece by now, but it's hard to tell for sure. The way Dad moves, the way he talks or doesn't talk, it's more like a bunch of pieces glued back together. Present and whole, but with visible cracks.

Kind of like how Dean feels, these days.

---

They hardly ever had separate rooms as kids. When Sam first went off to college, it took Dean months to get used to falling asleep with no sound in the room but his own breathing.

It’s that memory as much as anything else that makes him glance toward Sam’s door when he comes out of the bathroom, wiping a smear of toothpaste off his cheek. Unusually, Sam’s door is half open, light spilling out.

On impulse, he steps over to rap his knuckles against the thin wood. Sam’s tired voice sounds from the other side of it: "Yeah."

He pushes the door open and there's his brother, seated at a battered desk crammed into half of the tiny space that isn’t taken up by the narrow bed, pool of light from the desk lamp throwing his shadow against the wall. There’s a cramped-looking little window on the far wall, half-open to the night. He thinks the walls might be blue, the paint chipped and in need of a fresh coat, but it's hard to tell because it only shows in patches behind the documents taped or thumbtacked everywhere, almost up to the ceiling.

Diagrams and rough sketches, pages torn out of books, newspaper clippings, hand-written pages of Latin, ancient Greek, other languages Dean would need a few minutes to identify. There are piles of books on the desk, piles stacked under the desk, under the bed. The visible patch of floor is covered with chalk markings, piece of chalk lying nearby.

"Sam..." Dean takes another step into the room, slow, his footsteps too loud. "What --" He swallows, he doesn't even want to ask it, probably already knows the answer, and isn’t sure how to accept it if he's right, or how to take it if he's wrong. "What is all this?"

"Research." Sam doesn't look up, turns over a book with pages like old parchment. "Demons. Robert Johnson. Hell."

The whole room, the whole fucking room. Only the bed's clear – no, there are books lying face down, open, even on that; Sam must do his relaxing in the living room with the mysteries and the television. If he does any relaxing at all, and Dean’s not sure of that.

It's tempting to make a joke, to say geek-boy or what, did you miss college that much? but any words he ever had are lost in the sea of paper, penciled notations, and ancient phrases covering the walls of Sam's room. Feels like he can barely breathe.

Sam still won't look at Dean. "Did you want something?"

Dean swallows in a dry throat, and shakes his head. "Nah. Sorry. I’ll, uh, I’ll just ..." and he backs out of the room without finishing the sentence.

Closing the door in his own face is pretty much redundant. The room’s too full of his curse to leave any space for him.

---

It's early December, one of those bleak snowless winter nights that starts at four-thirty in the afternoon and settles in like it's never going to leave, when Dad finally brings up the subject.

Dean's trying for the third time to make a decent sketch of the greentooth -- if this one doesn't work, he's giving up and just writing down the differences between the old woodcut and the real thing. Sam's in his room, reading or already asleep. Dad's watching TV, or at least sitting on the couch facing the TV, which is on but with the sound turned down to a barely audible mutter.

"Sam won't talk about how you got me out of Hell."

Dad's voice makes Dean start; the pencil scratches across the paper, ruining the line of the greentooth's jaw. He raises his head to see his father looking at him steadily, with the muted flickering colors of the television playing over his face.

"Or why you two aren’t speaking," Dad continues. "But I figure we all know." His voice is level, and for a dizzying moment in Dean's head it's five years ago and Dad's about to chew him out over his latest fuckup. Then his gaze slides away, his voice drops to a near-whisper, and the illusion of strength is gone. "How long do you have?"

Everybody keeps asking him that. But it’s Dad, and he’s maybe the only person in the world who’s got a right to ask. Dean shoves down the automatic surge of irritation, looking down at his sketch so he won't have to look at Dad. "Ten years."

Dad draws in a shaky breath and lets it out again, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his shoulders slumped and his head hanging between them. On the TV behind him, Clint Eastwood narrows his eyes and stares keenly into the middle distance. Dad keeps his eyes on the floor. "I didn't want this gift from you, Dean."

"Tough," says Dean, and clenches his teeth to keep from saying more, and to push down the ache in his chest that keeps threatening to expand and consume him.

Worse is the murmur of resentment he's tried to ignore for six months or so now, buried until Dad really started to get better.

"I went to Hell because I couldn't stand to watch you die." Dad's still hunched over; Dean can't see his face. "And now I'll have to anyway." There's a rasp in Dad's voice.

"It's ten years." Nine and change. Dean clenches his fingers into the arms of the chair.

Dad raises his head, and his exhausted smile is a terrible thing. "Ten years, that's nothing. Ten years, that's a match, flaring and going out. That's you in diapers one minute and holding a shotgun to your shoulder the next. It's Sam learning his letters one heartbeat and then he's on a bus, going off alone to California. Ten years and then you'll be gone--"

"Gone?" The resolve to say nothing else snaps. Dean gives a mirthless laugh and shoves away from the table. "You mean like you were, Dad? Because you made a bargain to save me and oh yea, dumping a shitload of new responsibility on me before you popped off. 'Sorry, son, have to die now, oh, and by the way you might have to kill your brother. Kay-thanks-bye.'" He's out of the chair, pacing towards the wall and turning back to look at his father.

Dad rubs a hand over his face, and Jesus Christ, he looks old. Dean doesn't remember there being so much gray in his father's hair before. "That's not what I said."

"The fuck it isn't!" Dean comes to a halt so fast he sways. "That's all you said -- if I can't save him I'll have to kill him, and you couldn't even tell me save him from what! And don't you dare tell me you don't have all the answers yet because that's bullshit."

"I don't."

"Then tell me what you know." Dean takes a step toward the couch, and it feels horribly wrong that he should be able to browbeat his father like this, but he can't make himself stop. "I've been trying to fight this thing blindfolded since you died. I can't do it anymore. So you tell me what you know, Dad." His voice thickens and tries to crack. "You tell me what I'm supposed to do."

For a moment Dad doesn't move. Then he takes a deep breath, picks up the remote control to turn the television off, and looks down, visibly steeling himself.

"Wait," Dean says, and hates the wary hope that rises in Dad’s eyes; his jaw clenches hard enough to make his teeth ache. "Sam needs to hear this too."

The hope’s gone, leaving only wariness. "You might want to hear it first."

"Not this time." He turns away from the couch.

"Dean, I don't think --"

Three quick strides take him to the doorway. "Sammy, get in here!" he shouts down the hall, and turns to take up a position on the other side of the living room, his back to the wall next to the silent TV.

The bedroom door opens and closes; footsteps sound in the hallway and Sam steps in, stopping just inside the room. Pointedly not looking at Dean. "What."

Dean folds his arms across his chest and leans against the wall. "Tell him," he says to Dad, and shuts his mouth.

That gets Sam to look at him, flatly wary. "Tell me what?"

"Dean --" That's all Dad says, possibly because he hears how trapped and angry he sounds.

Sam looks from Dean to Dad and back again, the wariness shading through unease and into alarm. "Tell me what, Dad?"

"Dean, leave the room," Dad says; his voice is hard, but there’s a fraying desperation behind it. And there’s only one reason he’d send Dean out right now, and that’s so he can lie to Sam without getting called on it.

Arms still folded, Dean doesn't move. "No sir."

Sam's voice is louder this time. "Dad.--"

Dad looks from Dean’s face to Sam’s, and finds no help in either. Slowly his shoulders bow as though under an unbearable weight; he closes his eyes, takes a breath, and begins to speak quietly.

About how the demon put his mark on Sam somehow, the night of the fire. How there's other kids with his mark on them, all over the place. How the demon's got a way of communicating with those kids, persuading them to do things. Turning them into something else.

That's what Sam has to be saved from. And if there's no other way ...

Dad doesn’t ever really come to the end of the story, just starts repeating himself. When he realizes he’s doing it he falls silent, and doesn't look at either of them; he watches his hands, rubbing them as though they ache. His fingers keep returning to the spot where his wedding ring used to rest.

The ring's been hanging on a chain around Sam's neck all these months, and Dad hasn't asked for it back.

Dean risks a glance at Sam, and swallows: his face is dead pale, sickened with shock.

"Okay," and the sound of his own voice jolts him, tight and too loud, shattering the silence. "We find the yellow-eyed son of a bitch and kill him, we don't have to worry about anything like that happening to Sam, right?"

Dad nods silently.

"All right," Dean bites off. "Fine. Problem solved."

"Problem solved?" Sam stares at him. "In what universe is that problem solved?"

"’Cause it means there’s another way out of it," Dean snaps back at him. "It means there’s something else we can do. That’s good news."

"Good news? Dean, what are you --?" Sam breaks off, his eyes widening, and then turns to look at Dad.

The silence registers, and Dad looks up slowly.

"You told him." There’s almost no expression in Sam’s voice; what’s in his face is a touch of wondering insight, that putting-it-all-together look. "In the hospital, before.... You told him all of this."

"Not all of it," Dean mutters. "Not by a long shot."

The look on Dad’s face is one of defeat, of something long dreaded finally coming home. "Sam..."

"You told Dean," and Sam’s voice is scaling upward into incredulous outrage, "that he might have to kill me."

For a second it looks as though Dad might say something else in defense, in justification; then his head bows again and he’s silent.

A long frozen moment passes, and then Sam turns on his heel and heads for the front door, grabbing his jacket from the coatrack. Dean starts after him, catches the door before it slams shut, and follows him without looking back.

He finds Sam pacing the sidewalk in front of the house.

"He's unbelievable." Every line of his body is tense with furious energy. "I can't believe he told you that. I can't believe he left you with that -- Dean, why didn't you tell me?" It's more a plea than an accusation, as he turns to face him.

"'Cause I didn't know half of it," Dean answers, leaning on the side of the Impala with his hands curled in his jacket pockets against the chill Sam doesn't seem to feel.

"You could've told me what you did know, instead of trying to carry it all yourself --"

"What, I was supposed to put that on you?" He snorts.

Sam stops in front of him, turns to face him squarely. "Don't you think I had a right to know?" he says, low and level.

"Damn straight you did," Dean says back, matching his tone. "That's just it. You had a right to know. Not to have a load of crap hints to worry about."

Sam looks away and doesn't say anything, but some of the tension goes out of his shoulders. "Let's go for a drive," he says.

Twenty minutes later they’re at a rest stop overlooking a valley, lights twinkling in the town below. There's a slight, chill wind, nothing unbearable. Dean transfers the beer bottle to his other hand, clenches and unclenches his fingers to warm them.

Sam takes another swallow of beer; he's wearing thin black wool gloves.

"I didn’t know," he says finally. "I wouldn’t have ... god." A nearly-silent huff of breath steams in the air like exhaled smoke. "I didn’t know you were carrying that all this time."

"It’s not gonna happen, Sammy." Flat, uncompromising. "We find the demon, we kill him, end of story."

A short silence falls.

Dean holds the beer bottle by the neck, tapping the base against his thigh. "Dad said you didn't tell him what I did."

"I didn't." Sam's voice is quiet. "I don't think Bobby did, either."

The sound he makes isn't quite a laugh. "Guess there wasn't really any chance he wouldn't figure it out, though."

"Not really." Sam's shoulders rise and fall in an uncomfortable shrug. "I don't know when he did figure it out. But the first couple times you were off hunting solo, he kept asking where you were, and I'd say away, and ... he'd stop asking, like that was an answer. I think --" His throat works, and he looks down. "I think he thought you were already gone."

Dean doesn't say anything for a moment. It's automatic, he does it a lot now, his mind ticks over: There’s time yet. Nine years.

"You've got nine years left," Sam says, and the back of Dean's neck prickles. "I'm going to get you out of this."

Dean looks off over the valley. He can smell wood smoke faint on the wind.

There's a clink as Sam throws out his beer bottle, and then they get back in the car to return to Dad.

Read part 2



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