Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Man, I’m starving. We should’ve pulled over at that restaurant”, Sam gripes.

“Told ya, Sammy, if a place puts pineapple on pizza, I don’t trust ‘em with my food.”

An eyeroll plus bitchface 22 combo. “You’ve never even tried it.”

“Don’t need to try it to know it’s sacrilege”, Dean replies. “Pineapple belongs in a fruit salad, not on real grub.”

“It actually tastes really good.”

“Dude, you think broccoli tastes really good - your opinion is invalid.”

The setting sun is hitting Dean right in the eyeballs, and he’s pretty hangry himself, so he floors it in the hopes of finding an establishment that serves something a normal human being would eat. If some local yahoo of a cop dares to give him grief about the speed limit, he might just pull a gun on him. 

“Oh you have got to be kidding me.”

The road ahead is cut off by a fallen tree, apparently the only one in the whole woods. What are the odds? 

“I don’t wanna say ‘I told you so’...”

“Then don’t”, Dean shoots his brother a grumpy look and takes a second to breathe. The last exit seems like ages ago. Coming to terms with going hungry for a while longer, he’s just about to start the car again, when movement catches his eye. 

“Creepy-ass birds”, he says, tilting his chin in the direction of the crows assembling in a gloomy avian army.

“Yeah”, Sam frowns. “We should get out of here.”

“Your Spidey-sense tingling?” Even as he makes the joke, there’s a weird sense of foreboding in his gut. Never a good sign. 

***

It’s already getting dark by the time they spot the lights of a small diner in the middle of a decrepit-looking town. “Yahtzee!”, Dean grins.

“I think they’re closed, dude”, Sam always has to ruin his vibe with reality. There really seems to be nobody in there.

“Oh c’mon!”, at the rate their bad luck is going, Dean’s half-dreading a flat tire soon. He makes a mental note to check his ass-crack for hex bags.

They keep driving. 

And driving.

Until they’re at the diner again.

“Sam.”

“Yup. Same one.” They share a concerned look. Dean knows he didn’t make any turns. 

He can feel Sam tensing up in the passenger seat, even as they cruise past it just to be sure. Paying more attention to the buildings this time gives him an uncomfortable sense of déjà-vu. 

It’s all too soon before they end up right where they started.

“Fuck.” What a shitty time to run into a new case. He gives Sam a look and they both head for the trunk: salt, holy water, silver, the works. No telling what they’re dealing with just yet, but there’s no time like the present to do some reconnaissance. The EMF meter crackles when Dean picks it up, but stops almost immediately. Weird. They pick a direction and start walking.

“It’s too quiet. Gives me the creeps”, Dean says, just to break up the silence. “Any theories yet?”

Sam grinds to a halt, and Dean waits for him to say something before he realizes it wasn’t the question that made him stop. Following his line of sight, that’s when he sees them: people with eerie smiles, just standing in the middle of the road. More of them, coming from the forest. “I’m guessing this ain’t a town hall meeting.”

Sam looks wary but he raises his voice anyway, “Hey! Could you tell us how to get back on the highway?”

The creepy smilers just continue their slow approach. Dean reassesses his initial assumption of ‘people’, and points his gun at them. “Stay right there.”

Not even a flinch. If anything, their smiles get broader. “You take another step, I will shoot you!”

They’re still advancing, no sign of hesitation, so Dean makes good on his threat and fires off a salt round at the first guy. He keeps walking cheerfully, teeth glinting in the moonlight. Shit.

Sam has the regular bullets, but it turns out they also do fuck all. Holy water is still on the table, but Dean would rather not get close enough to check. They’re vastly outnumbered and with no clue as to what these things are. He suddenly regrets leaving the flame thrower in the trunk. He’s not one to run away, but it’s time for a strategic retreat. They start to back away, the things matching them step for step; another group of them appears from the direction they had come from, cutting them off from the car. Dean fires again, futile as it might be, it still makes him feel a bit better.

“Get in here, you two!”

He whips his head towards the voice, a guy whose porch they backed into, frantically waving them in. “Now!” 

Just as they’re about to run, the closest thing opens its maw and swings long claws towards them. Dean grabs Sam’s arm and they barrel through the door, narrowly avoiding knocking their saviour over. The door is slammed shut with the feral sound of clawing on the other side.

For a moment they all catch their breaths, and Dean takes in the room - covers on the windows, old furniture, a rock with some kind of weird symbols by the door.

“What the holy garden fuck are those things outside?”, the most pressing question first.

Their host heaves a weary sigh. “You might wanna take a seat. I’m Boyd, by the way.”

***

They sit quietly as Boyd tells them everything he knows about the monsters, and the way things work in the town, only exchanging glances from time to time. 

“So, what you’re saying”, Sam summarizes, “is that nobody can leave this place; these things come out every night to tear people apart, and the only thing protecting you are those talismans?”

“I know all of this is a shock. The first night is rough for everyone.” Boyd seems like a really stand-up guy, one who’s had the misfortune of giving this talk many times. Dean can relate.

“Actually, Mister - “

“Boyd is fine.”

“Okay, Boyd, we’re not exactly new to supernatural shit. It’s kind of our job.” The mix of confusion and doubt on the man’s face is no surprise. “Look, I can’t say we’ve run into exactly this before, but we’ve hunted other monsters. And there’s always a way to beat them. It’s what my brother and I do.”

He can tell Boyd is humoring him when he says “Sure.” Probably doesn’t want to get his hopes up, or thinks they’re nutjobs. Possibly both. Sam has follow-up questions, because he’s thorough like that, but Dean is beat, so he excuses himself to crash on the sofa. Tomorrow will be a busy day.

***

He sleeps like he’d taken a brick to the head, and Mrs Liu makes one hell of a breakfast, so Dean’s spirits are up by the time the town gathers for their Choosing Ceremony. They’re each asked to choose if they will stay in the town, represented by a rock, or the Colony House, symbolized by a flower. He finds it unnecessary, since they’ll crack this case wide open and split, but hey - when in Rome. Sam has a thoughtful expression on, one that Dean has taken to calling “analysis mode”, so he can’t wait for the brainstorming session. They both choose rock (as if Dean would go with a flower), and take their things to a small house on the edge of town. Dean’s just thanking whatever deity is in charge of cars that Baby’s tires didn’t have to get slashed to make them stop - the townsfolk would have to worry about him more than the monsters if that had happened.

"We should make some sort of cage around the talisman, so it can't fall off the wall”, Sam says, considering the precarious position of their only viable defense. “I'll need wire, some nails, a hammer…” He turns to find Dean spray-painting the wall. “What are you doing?”

"Occam's razor, bitch."

Sam’s eyebrows go up. 

“What? I read”, Dean shrugs. “You’re overcomplicating it. Boyd said we’re safe if the talisman is on the wall, but not off it; and the walls alone aren't enough. That means”, he goes on, glancing at the talisman and back to his own symbols to continue drawing them, “what works is a barrier with protection sigils. They can’t fall off if they’re painted on the wall.”

“You think it'll work?”

“Can't hurt to try. We keep the talisman too, just in case. If it doesn’t work, we lose nothing, and if it does, we’re safe even without it!”

Sam nods in approval. “I’m still gonna make the cage. Better to overkill than to get caught with our pants down.”

“You mean your skirt, Samantha?”

“Shut up, jerk.”

***

"They said the livestock keeps coming from the woods. And there’s electricity - they have power lines. So unless the monsters ate all the tax collectors, someone would have come around to check the power bill and who's paying it." Sam’s fully in his element, his beer getting warm as he talks; Dean’s gonna give it five more minutes before he valiantly rescues the poor thing from a terrible fate. After a full day of interviews, he’s earned it.

"There could be some kind of spell preventing that. This place seems isolated on purpose. My money's on a witch. The monsters sound like ghouls though. Imitating people and eating innards? Classic ghoul."

Sam doesn’t seem convinced, "Ghouls usually eat the dead, and these things prefer live prey. Plus the claws and fangs are off. And I’ve never heard of ghouls skinning people for hours."

“Deavas?,” Dean offers. “Evil fucks with claws, and they could be summoned at dusk.”

“If you ignore the fact that they’re supposed to be invisible,” Sam points out.

Dean shrugs, taking a sip. "Whoever made them is one sick bastard."

"You think they were made?"

"You said it yourself: the lore doesn't have anything that matches this completely. So it reeks of some kind of experimental voodoo shit." 

Sam considers it. "Tabitha said she felt like she was being punished. If it is a witch doing this, it may be some twisted way of teaching people a lesson."

Some lesson. "Yeah, well, I look forward to teaching her something with my gun."

"Or him”, Sam interjects. “Could be a warlock."

"Whatever", Dean sighs. "Wish we could call Bobby." 

Sam hums in agreement. The EMF meter on the coffee table makes a static noise, then goes quiet again. They walk all over the room with it, but the sound doesn’t repeat itself, so eventually they give up. 

“What’s bothering me” Dean says after a while, “is where exactly here is. The deputy said everyone was in a different part of the country before they got stuck here. We should take another look at that map, see if there’s some kind of pattern.”

“Sure. There’s one thing we already know: everyone got here from somewhere in the US. No foreigners. If it were some kind of uncoordinated natural phenomenon, I don’t think it would care about borders.”

Dean nods. “More evidence for the witch pile.”

Unexpectedly, Sam doesn’t play devil’s advocate; instead, he’s frozen with the bottle halfway to his mouth. 

“What? Is there a fly in your beer?” There better not be; Dean might still steal it later.

“Oh my god, Dean, we’re idiots. We forgot to ask who was the first person here.” He grabs his phone before remembering it’s useless and heading for the door.

“Sam, wait! It’s dark out, remember?”

“Shit.” Sam throws himself back on the couch and knocks his Sasquatch legs against the coffee table, spilling the beer. Dean has a moment of silence for its untimely demise.

***

“Victor? Wasn’t that the creepy guy that the Matthews girl mentioned?”

Sam elbows him in a ‘be nice’ sort of gesture. “He was a kid when the whole town got massacred. I’m pretty sure something like that would make anyone a little weird.”

They make their way to Colony House, which as far as Dean’s concerned is basically a hippy sorority house, and meander around looking for the guy. Just as it seems they’ve come up with bupkis, Sam pulls on his sleeve and points towards the back of the building: on the edge of the woods, a lanky figure pacing back and forth in a measured step. 

“Hi, are you Victor?” Sam steps forward, leveling Dean with a look that says ‘let me handle this’. The guy seems squirrely, the way he shrinks back and shuffles his crumpled papers around, so Dean’s more than happy not to engage with him.

“Yeah”, he mutters and goes back to his counting. 

“What, uh, whatcha doing?”Sam tries to sound friendly so as not to scare him off.

“You wouldn’t get it.” A defeated tone, like he’d tried to explain it so many times and gave up.

Sam makes his best compassionate expression, all open and trustworthy, “I promise we’ll try to understand.”

Victor looks around, then gets closer and whispers, “I’m checking if the trees have moved.” 

O-kay. Dean tries to give Sam a look that says ‘crazy alert’ but his brother is focused on the witness. “And why is that?”, he asks in a way that’s pure curiosity without judgement.

“To see if the woods are getting closer, of course. They come from the woods.” 

It’s a mark of Sam’s professionalism that he takes the idea of moving forests in stride, like the plot of Macbeth is a regular thing people encounter, and continues the interview, “About that. You’ve been here the longest, haven’t you?”

Victor looks away, expression soured. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

Sam chews on his lip for a moment, then tries a different route. “Sorry, I’m Sam. This is my brother Dean. We’re new here.” And there’s that million dollar smile, the one that lights up Dean’s insides like a string of colored Christmas lights. “Is there anything you might tell us, that’s good to know? I’m sure you know all kinds of stuff.” He’s playing up the teacher’s pet schtick, which Dean knows comes naturally to him anyway, and it seems to be working - he doesn’t suppose ol’ Vic has a lot of people willing to listen to what he has to say.

Victor steps closer, all up in their personal space like an overly enthusiastic fragrance spritzer at Macy’s. “I can show you something”, he whispers conspiratorially before walking towards the trees.

***

“So, what we learned,” Sam thinks out loud once they’re back in their temporary home. “is that there are a bunch of hollow trees in the woods, that can randomly spit out things or people at a different location from the one where they entered. Like unpredictable wormholes.” He checks his notepad. “Farway trees, Victor said. But how does this fit in with the monsters?”

Dean tilts his head. “I dunno about the monsters, but the road… Everyone was driving in a different place when they came across the tree on the road. What if that was also one of the portal trees?"

"Farway trees. But would it work if they didn't go inside the tree? We don't know the range of these things."

Dean makes a ‘damned if I know’ face, before another thought hits him. “He wouldn’t talk about the important stuff. For all we know, he could be the witch.”

Sam shakes his head. “If there even is a witch. And I didn’t get that impression anyway. The way he cowered when we heard that barking?”

“Could’ve been an act.”

“Or it could have been PTSD. If he were the witch, why not just kill the hunters meddling in your business?”

“Beats me, man. Why would a witch do any of this? Some kind of sick entertainment, I guess.”

Sam runs his hands over his face. “We need to focus on what we know for sure, conjecture won’t get us anywhere.”

Dean nods. "Okay. We know this town wasn't built in a day. And the monsters must have just showed up at some point, they weren't always here. So a witch being behind it is the only thing that makes sense. Man, I hate witches."

"But where do the monsters go during the day? Through the farway trees?"

Dean thinks about it. "Maybe they only turn corporeal at nighttime. Like, if it's some sort of spell that only summons them when the sun sets."

"I don't know about that”, Sam says, “They always come out of the woods." A thought occurs to him. "There are some Native American legends about monsters sleeping in the hills - might be a lair there somewhere."

"Still think this is more ancient than the town?"

“Jade said he saw one of the monsters in the root cellar, which is on a small hill. So maybe they were sleeping until they were woken up."

"By a witch."

Sam makes a so-so motion with his hand. "I mean, when science has two theories, the truth is usually some combination of them." He ponders it. "What if the portals were originally meant to trap the monsters, rather than people?"

Dean can practically feel the lightbulb above his own head. "And the construction of the town messed with the warding? Holy shit."

Sam is pacing now, brain working a hundred miles an hour. "Boyd said he’d found the talismans in the woods. Whoever originally made them is apparently long gone. They might have been stashed because they weren't needed anymore, and the witch that made them didn't pass on her knowledge but still kept them just in case."

As much sense as that makes, there’s only one detail Dean wants to focus on. "We need to figure out what exactly broke the protection, so we can fix it."

Sam’s eyes go wide. "The EMF readings! And the devices here going haywire, of course!"

"You mean it was the electricity?"

"Not exactly”, Sam says, sitting back down. “FM frequencies - it's always the radios that act up." He grabs a piece of paper and draws an orb with a line across it. "Imagine this ball is the original spell’s perimeter, what was keeping the monsters in. This is the fault line, where the warding broke, allowing newcomers to come in, because the loop is no longer a perfect circle. Well, sphere." Dean nods, and Sam goes on, "Radio frequencies are everywhere these days, so the devices must be tuning into them randomly, and in those moments the warding is complete again for a moment. If - and that's a big if, not much of a window of opportunity, but possible -"

"Sam! Just get on with it."

"Right. If you could bring a radio to the edge, the fault line, and you get a signal, that could be a chance to run out of the loop."

Dean stares at him in awe. "Holy shit. I could kiss you right now."

Sam blushes. "It's just a theory."

"More than what we had so far,” Dean says, getting his jacket. “C'mon. We gotta try it out."

But his brother stays seated. "What about everyone else? We should tell them first, in case we get out and lose contact with them."

"And get their hopes up before we know for sure? No, we check if it works first. Then we go back for them."

"Dean."

"Sammy."

"It's Sam."

"I'm putting my foot down."

"Yeah, well, so am I."

They state each other down, arms crossed.

"Rock-paper-scissors?"

***

And so they find themselves on their way to Boyd, to tell him of a possible way out they didn’t even test yet. 

"Hang on, Sam."

"Dude, what? I won fair and square." 

Dean graciously doesn't comment on how he's been letting Sam win at rock-paper-scissors since he was 5. "Yeah, yeah, you did. But can't we ask Victor first? He's been here all his life, you don't think he might have tried something like that?"

Sam tilts his head. "Not a bad idea. But what about your theory that he's behind this?"

"Then he might give himself away and we take him out. Either way, we learn something."

Coming to an agreement, they change directions and trudge uphill instead. Their witness/potential witch isn't where they left him, so they make their way inside the house. There’s people milling around, minding their own business, but no sign of Victor.

"Who are you?" 

A brown-haired boy of about 7 or 8 looks at them inquisitively. His leg is bandaged up and a crutch lays next to his bed. 

"Hi", Dean smiles, crouching down to be eye-level with him. "I'm Dean, and this is my brother Sam. We're looking for someone."

"Is it the boy who lives out there?"

Dean looks up at Sam, equally confused. Nobody lives out there. 

"He comes by to wave at me sometimes", the kid continues. "Oh! I'm Ethan."

Sure, kids can have an overactive imagination. But it could also be another piece of the puzzle. "Ethan. Did you talk to him?"

"No. He never comes in here. And I can't go outside much." He looks sad at that. Must be lonely not having anyone his age to play with.

"What does he look like?," Dean asks, getting back on track. 

The kid, Ethan, shrugs. "A little like me. He's always wearing white and smiling." He fiddles with the toy in his hands. "Julie says I'm making it up because she can't see him."

"Can anyone else?"

Ethan's face lights up. "Yeah, my friend Victor. He said the boy chose us."

Well that's an alarm bell if Dean ever heard one. "And when did he first show up?"

Ethan doesn't answer, his eyes set on the window, so Dean repeats himself. 

"I don't think I should tell you", the kid says, expression troubled. 

"Is he telling you not to?," Sam interjects softly, and Dean feels like a moron. Of course, he must be seeing the boy now. "Hey, buddy." He waits until Ethan's attention is back on him. "We're just trying to help. Keep your family and everyone else safe. It's what we do."

"You're on a quest? Like knights?"

"Yeah, just like that. So we need to know: how long have you and Victor been seeing him?"

"Victor said he was about as old as me when the boy came."

***

"Okay, so it's a little more complicated than we thought. The boy in white can't be one of the monsters if he's showing up in daylight."

"And only selectively visible."

Damnit. Just when they thought they figured it out. 

"A ghost?"

"Possibly. But why doesn't everyone see him? Wish the EMF meter was usable." Sam runs his hands through his hair; it catches sunlight in a way that a more poetic person than Dean might call beautiful. He mentally smacks himself and directs his thoughts to more productive matters, "The question is: is he malevolent?"

"You think he's connected to the monsters?"

"Connected, definitely. But how? Was he a victim? Is he controlling them? Some secret third option?"

Sam blows out a frustrated breath. "Even if we knew all that, what are the odds of finding where the bones are buried? Could be anywhere in the woods."

Dean's low-key starting to hate this case. He never thought he'd wish for a library, but an actual source for research would do them a load of good right now. He's itching to do something instead of just guessing. 

"Look, man, we're wasting daylight. Let's go talk to Boyd, and we'll take it from there. Hey - there he is!"

The whole town's gathered apparently, the crowd just dispersing from the graveyard as they walk closer. 

"Sheriff! Sam here had an idea", Dean starts, but doesn't get very far.

"No offense, but now isn't the time." Boyd looks like he's at the end of his rope. "I just had to bury two more people, and I'll be burying a third one tomorrow. So, if you don't mind", he walks off, the Winchesters following.

"Hang on, what do you mean by that?" Sam asks, directing a concerned look at Dean. 

Boyd sighs heavily. "You see that metal box? It's for those whose actions or negligence cause someone else to die. Frank didn't nail the windows shut, so now his wife and little girl are dead." He closes his eyes for a moment, gathering himself. "And tonight I have to lock that poor man in there. Alone, without a talisman. So I'm not in the mood for any newcomer ideas. Trust me, whatever you're thinking, we've tried it."

Dean quirks an eyebrow. "Wanna bet?"

***

"What on god's green earth?"

They're standing by the Impala, surveying the arsenal in the trunk, and Sam looks almost as confused as Boyd. 

"Dean, I thought we were gonna -"

"And we will, there's plenty of time for you to get your geek on with frequencies or whatever", he ignores the pissy look his brother sends his way, "but first we gotta save a guy, and something in here has to work on those sons of bitches."

"You just drive around with enough weapons for a small army?"

Dean grins proudly. "Told ya, sheriff. It's the family business." Turning to Sam, he goes on, "We already ruled out regular bullets and salt rounds, so that leaves holy water, silver, bronze, dead man's blood, flamethrower" - his eyes glint at that - "decapitation, stake through the heart, exorcism, and whatever witchy herb you can think of. They'll be focused on the easy prey, so we can do some experimenting to see what sticks."

"Frank", Boyd interrupts. "That easy prey is called Frank."

"Right", Dean clears his throat. "Sorry. My point is, we're gonna do our job, and Frank's gonna be fine."

***

The tension in the air is palpable as the sun sets. Frank still refused to have a talisman with him, but agreed to let the Winchesters try out their weapons on the monsters. "If you figure out something that can help others, great. If not... Well, I'm ready to go." Sam was about to argue some more but gave up when Dean gave him a look. There's people you don't want to go on without.

With the last of the locals retreating to their houses, Sam hangs the talisman on the Impala's rear view mirror. Worst case scenario, they can always shut themselves in the car. He joins Dean where he’s leaning against the trunk.

“It’s weird. Those are definitely runes, but the monsters don’t seem like anything from Norse mythology. Maybe they don’t have to be for it to work, though. As soon as we’re out of here I’m gonna dig through Bobby library and - dude, are you even listening?”

Dean’s expression is something Sam can’t quite place, soft around the edges with a molten center, but before he can figure out what it means, it quickly shifts back into his usual cocky façade. “Yeah, yeah, save me the nerd stuff. You ready to kick some monster ass?”

Sam rolls his eyes and punches his shoulder. “Jerk.”

“Bitch”, Dean beams.

***

Turns out, silver bullets are wasted on the monsters, and reciting an exorcism is as effective as reading them a bedtime story. They walk right through goofer dust, as well as several simple protection spells that Sam could make on short notice. Splashing them with holy water is a bust, and although their heads don’t grow right back after decapitation, the bastards just keep walking. There’s also way more of them than is strictly comfortable, and while a few head for the box, the majority seems to prefer prey that fights back.

“That’s a nope for bronze!”, Sam shouts, backtracking and grabbing a stake.

“No luck with dead man’s blood either”, Dean adds, throwing away the empty syringe. His eyes land on the flamethrower. “Come to papa.”

He could swear the monsters are moving faster now, like a few kicks to the gut made them more alert. The two next to the box are ripping off metal plates, and that just won’t fly, not on Dean’s watch. Double or nothing, he thinks.

The fire is blinding in the darkness, so it’s a moment before he can check if it worked, but when the flames part, the two figures are charred and cowering. “Yes! Take that, fuckers!”

Finally holding an effective weapon, he wastes no time in giving the others a taste of napalm. Some of them rear back, wary of the light and heat, but there’s still too many advancing on them. Dean flambées the closest ones to Sam and turns back to the box to take care of more that came seemingly out of nowhere. Damn it, he knew he should have bought more than one flame thrower. How many of these uglies are there?

“Agh!”

The sound of Sam in pain hijacks his attention immediately. There’s a deep gash on his brother’s upper arm, but he’s alive, it’s okay. Dean pushes him towards the car, stepping forward to give the monsters an extra large helping of flame juice. They seem to be the sole focus of the hoard now, maybe because of the smell of blood. Well, Dean’s the one making this barbecue, and he’s got plenty of hot sauce for the bastards.

He jinxed it. That’s gotta be it, because the next thing he hears is the clink of claws on metal, and the flame thrower container is crushed and ripped out of his hand. “Shit, shit, Sam, get in the car!”

They almost collide as they jump in, scrambling to shut the doors and kicking at the monsters that try to follow. His legs are scratched up by the time they make it, and Sam’s are bound to be in no better state. But Dean’s more worried about his arm. “Lemme see that.”

“‘S fine”, Sam huffs, out of breath. “Just a flesh wound.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

In his peripheral vision, he can see the monsters that ran off making a comeback. One of them’s giggling creepily, and he regrets not scorching her first. Sam’s definitely gonna need stitches.

Dean reaches over in the back seat for the first aid kit they had the foresight to lay out. “This is gonna sting, but not as much as fire stings those fuckers, alright?”

Sam flashes him a smile before he grimaces at the burn of alcohol on his wound. “Well, we learned something.”

The Impala jolts violently.

“Hey! You did not just try to tip over my car!” Dean’s seeing red. When he gets his hands on the next flammable object, those monsters are gonna be crispy. 

They don’t seem deterred, unfortunately. The car shakes like a matchbox in the hands of an abstaining alcoholic. Shit. He grabs the talisman to keep it in place - the last thing they need is that thing falling off and the monsters breaking through Baby’s windows. She didn’t deserve that.

Dean’s not sure if super-strength should be added to the list of these monsters’ powers, or if they just discovered the magic of teamwork, but from one moment to the next the world tilts - his back hits the window, and Sam lands on him with an ‘oof’, crushing the oxygen out of his chest. The car’s at a 45 degree angle, back tires probably snagged on the edge of the metal box.

His gaze flits immediately to the talisman - still securely attached to the rear view mirror.

“I tied it into a knot,” Sam whispers.

Dean’s brother is a genius.

His heart is still pounding from the adrenaline and exertion and - nope, just those two, nothing else to see here. He can feel an answering thudding rhythm from Sam’s chest, always in sync; he breathes in as Sam breathes out, like waves, and time stills. 

He might have a concussion.

There are words on the tip of his tongue. He’s not even sure which ones, like his brain’s making decisions without him, but he never gets to find out because there’s a crash and a flash of light - someone’s yelling, and the moment has passed.

More crashing sounds, like glass breaking. Sam cranes his head up to see. “Holy shit. Boyd really is a one-man cavalry. He’s got Molotov cocktails!”

Dean would rather focus on the curve of Sam’s throat in the firelight, but he tells his lizard brain to shove it, and reboots his cognitive capacities. “Are they gone?”

“Sent ‘em running”, Sam grins and scrambles to pull himself up through the opposite door.

Dean takes a deep breath. Thunks his head back against the glass for good measure. He shouldn’t be letting distractions mess with the job. It's a bad combo, like sardines and strawberries.

***

By the time the sun is peaking over the horizon, Dean’s had time to finish Sam’s stitches, and exchange thanks with the sheriff. Hard to tell who’s more grateful - Boyd for the boys figuring out a way to fight the monsters, or the hunters for him immediately using what he saw to save their necks. 

The night wasn’t a complete win though: Frank didn’t make it. 

“Don’t blame yourselves”, Boyd tells them. “There were too many of them to fight off.”

Easier said than done. 

Chapter Text

They spend most of the next day hunting for a signal in various directions. But neither the radio in the Impala, nor the EMF meter make a peep; it’s almost like now that they’re trying, the place is deliberately thwarting them. It reminds Sam of Mystery Spot, so he’s more than ready to see it in the rear view mirror. Dean’s being quiet, the way he gets whenever they’re too late to save someone. It sits heavily between them. 

“We need more information”, Sam decides in the afternoon; they use what little daylight is left to ask around some more, but are left with even more unknowns than before. Where to start?, Sam thinks as they trudge back into their room. Before he can even say the thought out loud, the idea comes to him in the form of flickering lights. 

Dean’s operating on the same wavelength, pointing at the nearest lamp, “You think that’s the ghost?”

“Could be,” Sam concedes, but it doesn’t seem right. It takes him another moment to realize why. “This isn’t normal electricity, it doesn’t come from the grid. Several people have already figured out that the wires shouldn’t even work. So would ghost interference even affect magical light sources?”

Dean groans in frustration. “If we knew what makes it, we’d know what messes with it.”

Sam tries to look on the bright side, “Look, Jim and Jade said they’d try getting an antenna on a tree tomorrow - that should give us something else to work with. They might even manage to contact someone on the outside.”

“And what good would that do? We don’t even know where we are. It’s like Alice in freaking Wonderland.”

“There could be a way to track the signal... But then whoever comes will just get stuck too.” So much for the bright side.

Dean senses his oncoming bad mood and activates big brother protocols. “Oh, don’t get broody. Let’s start small: your bandage needs changing. And don’t even try to tell me you’ll do it yourself - sit your ass over here.”

Despite himself, Sam can feel a smile stretching his lips. For all his tough pretense, Dean can’t resist taking care of him. He works on his shirt buttons as his brother gets the first aid kit. 

Dean unwraps the bandage with practiced movements. “Alright, let’s see what - “ he cuts off, frowning. “Well, that’s weird.”

Sam looks down at his arm. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear the wound was weeks old. “Apparently we should add fast healing to the list of mysteries.”

Dean shrugs non-commitantly. “Hey, it’s a gift horse. I ain’t looking for teeth.”

Sam closes his eyes trying not to laugh. “I know you know how that saying goes.”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t put a gift horse under a microscope.”

With that, the battle against laughter is lost, and he won’t even put it on a milk carton.

***

Morning finds them walking across town, working through remaining ideas. What strikes Sam as strange is that according to Father Khatri, there isn’t a single copy of the Bible in town - which could be a coincidence, or a clue. Then again, holy water and exorcisms should have worked if the Bible was any kind of weapon. 

Dean, on the other hand, has his own theories. “Boyd said the monsters used to shriek, before they had talismans. Then they switched to whispering. Think they’re evolving?”

It’s an interesting thought. “They do seem to be intelligent. Figuring out ways to freak people out. Hell, maybe they feed on fear for all we know.” He pauses. “If we could trap one to study it, that could give us some insights.”

Dean huffs. “Next thing, you’ll want to write a paper on these things.”

“At least some of us can write”, Sam shoots back jokingly. 

“And others can put Nair in your shampoo.”

Sam doesn’t get a chance to threaten retaliation, because that’s when they spot Jade, looking thoroughly shaken. His usual arrogance is replaced by a look of utter bewilderment.

“Hey. You alright, man?”

“Fuck off”, the asshole still tries to be… well, an asshole. But it falls flat with how spooked he seems, shaking like the world’s most localized earthquake.

Dean’s having none of the attitude though, grabbing his arm as he tries to shove past. “What happened?”

“Get your hands off me! I’m gonna sue you, I’m gonna…”, he seems to remember his circumstances and resorts to just scowling as he tries to pry himself free. 

“C’mon, dude, sharing is caring. The sooner you tell us, the sooner you can run off to sulk.”

Sam would object to those questioning techniques, but apparently he underestimated how much his brother can weaponize being a nuisance. Seeing that he isn’t getting out of Dean’s iron grip, Jade starts ranting: “Fine, you really wanna know? The fucking tree started bleeding, like gallons of the stuff, and I look up - and there’s all these dead fucks hanging upside down! In pieces! And then some Civil War freak starts chasing me with a gun!”

He’s breathing heavily, clearly realizing how crazy it sounds out loud. “Will you let go already?!”

“Where?”

“The tree, the stupid tree with the antenna!”

Dean releases him, and he storms off, muttering something about Neanderthals.

Sam quirks an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have pegged him for a psychic.”

His brother looks equally sceptical. “Me neither. So either he’s losing it -”

“Or this place has telepathic abilities.”

They’re just working through the Civil War thing (Another ghost? Or an attempt to scare them off the antenna thing?), an indication that whatever is happening here started well before Victor’s time, when a commotion gets their attention. People are gathering at the barn, visibly upset, so they head over to see what it’s about.

“I can’t believe it. She seemed like such a nice girl”, someone is saying.

“What happened?”

“It’s Sara”, a woman replies, apparently itching to share the news. “They said she tried to kill the Matthews boy. And she slit her brother’s throat!”

They hear the sheriff trying to get some semblance of order, “Alright everyone, go home! If you’re not helping, quit gawking!”

Sam catches Dean’s eye. “Think something got in her head too?”

“I think I need a drink”, Dean says grimly.

***

What passes for a drink at the local bar is even lower than Dean’s questionable standards, but the bartender is pleasant to talk to at least. With the way things are going, he figures it’s high time they do something before the whole thing escalates further - people can be just as dangerous as monsters. Sam’s reluctant though. “I don’t think we know enough to go guns blazing again. Despite what you’d like to believe, Dean, violence isn’t always the answer.”

Dean snickers. “‘Course not. Violence is a question. ‘Yes’ is the answer.”

Sam rolls his eyes, but he can’t deny that the clock is ticking. Doing something risky might get them some answers at least.

They resolve to get Boyd involved. As ex-military, he’s their best shot at back up, so by sundown they’re on their way to the post office turned police station. 

“Hang on”, Dean pulls at Sam’s jacket when he realizes they aren’t the only ones coming to visit the sheriff. “What’s Father Khatri doing here?”

They wait until both men are inside, before picking the lock and sneaking in after them. There could be things they aren’t willing to share with newcomers, that could be crucial for solving this case.

***

They listen with bated breath as Boyd explains his plan to go exploring into the woods, and Father Khatri drops the bombshell about having Sara in the basement. Sam might have been right, if the voices she’s allegedly hearing are real. It’s dead quiet as the priest tells his long-winding story. Then there’s a rustle of paper, something being shown, and Sam crowds against Dean in front of him trying to get a look. What he gets instead is a whiff of Dean’s hair, the same cheap shampoo he’s been using since they were teenagers, and he gets distracted by a bout of nostalgia. Like all of a sudden he’s fourteen again, gawky and awkward, nothing like his cool big brother. He shakes his head minutely to snap out of it, which only results in Dean’s hair tickling his nose. Next thing he knows, he’s sneezing, and they’re found out.

Shit.

“Who’s there?” Boyd does not sound happy in the slightest.

To his credit, Dean bounces back like a cat falling from a roof. He steps out, dragging Sam with him, and continues like he’s been a part of the conversation all along. “Let me guess, there’s something on that paper that tells you they were watching you when you buried the bag.”

“I.. Yes.” Father Khatri doesn’t seem to know how to react, caught off guard by their presence and Dean’s flipping of the social script. Boyd has no such qualms. “What the hell gives you the right to break in and eavesdrop on us?”

Dean puts his hands up. “Look, sheriff, we’re all on the same side here. But we can’t help unless we have all the facts. And this here seems like a pretty big piece of the puzzle.”

“Sorry”, Sam mumbles. “But he’s right.”

Boyd sighs, looking skyward, probably summoning whatever patience he has left. “And what do you cowboys propose we do about it?”

“Well, for starters, we’ll need to know everything Sara said. Word for word, even the smallest detail could be important”, Sam says, getting his footing back. “Ideally, we should talk to her ourselves.”

“And we’re coming with you”, Dean adds. “No offense, but I can’t let civvies running off to face the monsters alone.”

“Who are you calling a civvie?”

“Oh I’m sorry, when was the last time you took out a vampire nest? Or a werewolf pack?”

“Dean.”

“Point is, you’ll be safer with us.”

Father Khatri at least looks like he’s considering it. “There is safety in numbers. But if you two are so good at fighting monsters, I’d rather one of you stays in town. Those people need protecting too.”

Dean looks ready to object to separating, when the conversation is abruptly halted by noise from outside. Honking, and the sound of someone slamming on the breaks. They all head towards the windows to see the people of Colony House running out of a van. “Shit”, Boyd curses before rushing for the doors. “What happened?”

“They tricked someone to let them into the house! Quick, get these people inside!”

The monsters are trailing after them, slow and leisurely, with their disgusting smiles. There’s a flurry of movement as everyone scrambles for the door, feet are stepped on, but eventually they all make it in one piece. With the additional company, their discussion is implicitly placed on hold until the next day.

***

“Sam, absolutely not!”

“Think about it, Dean. We haven’t had a chance to question everyone, especially from the Colony House, and there could be more clues here. So you work the case in town, I’ll go with them in the forest - “

“I said no.”

“ - and I’ll talk to Sara. If there’s anyone she can relate to, it’s me.” He gives his brother a meaningful look. For all the crap his psychic abilities brought him, they also gave him a unique insight into how it feels when things get inside your head uninvited. 

Dean still has a troubled expression. “What am I supposed to do? Twiddle my thumbs while you get yourself gored? Boyd can’t be sure that a talisman will work inside a tent!”

“I just think it might be a good idea to keep digging around town.”

Dean suddenly looks like someone poured cold water on him. “Hang on. Digging. That’s it!” And he runs off.

“Dude, what the hell?” Sam follows him into the basement.

“Remember the wires? They just go straight down. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it but shit just kept happening - anyway, we should dig to see where they come from!” He’s already got a shovel in his hands as he explains. 

“That’s… Actually a good idea.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Please, be more surprised.”

“You know I didn’t mean it like that,” Sam sobers.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m just busting your chops, relax. Tell ya what, you can dig, and I’ll go into the forest.” Typical Dean, always throwing himself headfirst into danger. Luckily, Sam knows just what to do.

“Rock-paper-scissors?”

***

It should be illegal. Throwing scissors for over two decades and then switching it up. Sam’s still salty about it as they make their way to the sheriff’s office. Dean smirks like a cat that got the cream, instead of a chance to risk his life.

“Door’s locked,” Sam frowns.

“And that’s stopped us before?”, Dean quips mischievously. 

Trouble is, the station turns out to be empty. They change course, heading for the church instead.

No dice there either.

“Son of a bitch! I can’t believe those idiots left us behind. Their combined IQ is lower than their shoe size!”

Sam can’t believe it either. They’ll almost certainly get themselves killed. 

But what is done is done, and unless they sprout search-dog noses, there’s no way to know exactly which path through the forest they took. He plops down on one of the musty chairs, and that’s when he sees it: an envelope labeled ‘for Sam and Dean’. There’s a few pages in there, notes of what Father Khatri learned from Sara. He looks back at Dean. “At least they left this.”

They go through the notes, adjusting their knowledge base.

“Sara said the voices were ‘just like us’. Maybe ghosts of past residents?”

Dean nods his assent. “It did sound like ghost possession, when they drew the picture with her hand. But here’s what’s bugging me: the voices told her that the two cars were coming. They also said that her brother would die if she didn’t kill Ethan. And he did. Though I don’t think she was expecting to accidentally gank him in the struggle.”

Sam chews on his lip. “Ghosts aren’t usually psychic. Damn it.” This case is resisting any explanation. He flips through the papers again, looking for something else to work with. “But how would killing people even help? If we assume that the boy in white is also trying to help, and Ethan can see him, it makes no sense to off the kid. And it makes even less sense for Tobey and Mr Liu…”

They’re quiet for a moment, just standing there in the decrepit church. Dean’s eyes are on the crucifix when he says, “What Khatri said, about standing on a bridge, when he heard ‘the voice of God’ “ - he makes exaggerated air-quotes - “telling him to keep driving. And then he ended up here.”

“You mean - “

“Could’ve been this place. Or monsters, whatever is doing the telepathy-ing.”

“That’s not a word, Dean.”

“It is now”, he grins.

Sam decides to pick his battles. “But that would mean it has a range well beyond here. And that it was somehow choosing the people that end up here.”

Dean nods. “We’ve been looking at it the wrong way, thinking that whoever ends up here is random. What if that’s the key to solving it: who these people are?”

***

Sam sleeps fitfully that night, waking up and drifting off again and again. He’s running through the forest, shouting for Dean, but he can’t find him anywhere. The trees keep closing in on him, blocking out the light until it’s pitch-black, until he feels claustrophobic with it. His hands reach out, but instead of bark they find cold stone. What is happening? All of a sudden, he hears Dean calling him from somewhere above, and then he’s climbing up, except the branches are steps, a long winding staircase. The walls are etched with numbers, random years from different centuries; it doesn’t make any sense. Then there’s a blinding light and a deafening siren sound that’s still ringing in his ears when he jolts upright.

The first thing he does is grab a pen and paper, trying to catch whatever he can before the dream slips away. Having finished writing, he runs a hand over his face. They need to solve this fast. He hadn’t seen Ruby in days before they even ended up here, too caught up in Dean really being back among the living. What little demon blood he still has in his flask is quickly running out. He hasn’t sensed any demons in town, but it’s not like he can tell Dean that they can rule out that option - all it means is that he has no way of refilling his supply. His pulse thumps in his neck, like something is trapped underneath his skin. 

By the time Dean wakes up, he’s got a whole stack of papers strewn all over the desk, not just the dream but everything else they know about this case.

“Dude, you’re turning into Victor.”

Sam doesn’t take offense. With how many anomalies there are around here, a bunch of notes seems like a good way to stay on top of it all. “Speaking of Victor. Last time I saw him he said the trees did move. Four inches apparently.”

Dean gives him a ‘it’s way too early for this shit’ look and reaches for his coffee mug. 

“Seriously, Dean. He might be onto something. Like maybe this place is actively fighting back if you try to push out. You know, like the sheriff and Father Khatri are doing.” If they’re still alive, he doesn’t say.

“So, what? We’re supposed to just roll over? Fat chance.”

“No, of course not. But it’s good to know what to look out for. I wish we knew where Victor was now…” They hadn’t heard anything about him since he disappeared through a farway tree, the night that Colony House was attacked. “Listen, I had this dream that could be important”, Sam starts, not entirely sure how to explain it.

“Like your visions? I thought that was over.” Dean tenses, clearly trying to keep the worry out of his voice, and failing like a college student who showed up to an exam without studying. Another reason why Sam can never let him know about the demon blood.

“Not really. I mean, yes, they are over - I meant that this didn’t really feel like that. It’s just that we know of several people by now who are seeing or hearing things, and if something is trying to communicate, we should listen.”

Dean smirks. “Yeah, I’m sure my dream about Shakira was full of clues for solving the case.”

Sam chucks a crumpled paper at him. “Man, concentrate. I mean, even if it was just my subconscious, it gave me an idea. See, there were all these years written on walls, and it got me thinking: what if people don’t just end up here from different places, but from different times?”

“I don’t know, Sam. Everyone seems acquainted with cars and electricity. Not exactly your medieval peasant thing.”

“Yeah, yeah, I didn’t mean that far into the past. But someone from 1995 and someone from 2000 wouldn’t be that different, right? And how do we know time doesn’t pass differently here?”

“Like in Hell?”, Dean asks dryly. “Trust me, I’d know the reek of the place from a mile away.”

Sam swallows, regretting stepping on that landmine. “Okay, scratch that idea. How about the symbol that Jade keeps seeing? It’s not a rune as far as I know. What if it’s like, the opposite of a talisman?”

“A monster symbol?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.” Dean slurps his coffee just to get on Sam’s nerves. Sam holds up admirably. 

“Well, they’re cool theories but until you have something for me to gank, I’ll be in the basement. You could grab a shovel too, you know.”

“Mhm, I’ll be down in a minute”, Sam replies distractedly, jotting down one last note: holy oil? Their supplies are low, but with the flame thrower out of the picture, they should try to improvise something else that burns for a while, just in case they have to be out after dark. 

He makes sure Dean is all the way down the stairs before sneaking a sip from the flask.

***

The hole in the basement is deep enough now that even Sam can’t see out of it, and there’s still no sign of finding the end of the wires. “You think they’ll just stop at some point? Like, cut off?”

“Well that would be anticlimactic.”

Dean drops the shovel, stretching with a groan. “Ugh, this is deeper than any grave we dug. My back’s killing me.”

“Yeah, same”, Sam says, cracking his neck. “Wanna trade backrubs?”

“Only if you do me first.”

Sam deliberately does not overthink that phrasing. Just Dean being Dean, shoehorning in immature jokes whenever he can. “Shower first. We don’t wanna track mud all over the place.”

“Okay, mom.”

Dean enjoys a massage the same way he enjoys a burger or pie: loudly, with appreciative moans. Sam would make a joke about him trying out for Casa Erotica, if he could trust his voice to deliver it in a normal tone. He’s more than happy to take his turn on his stomach, because his pants are getting uncomfortably tight. 

“Hey, check it out.”

Sam cranes his neck to see what Dean’s talking about, following his line of sight towards his own arm. Huh. The wound looks almost completely scarred over, which is weird on several levels, but he’s still none the wiser about what it means. Dean takes his mind off it soon enough with his magic fingers. It’s a problem for another day anyway.

***

The townsfolk build the wooden radio tower surprisingly fast - it’s amazing what you can achieve with motivation like that. Everyone gathers at the Colony House, watching Jade and the others set it up on the roof. The people inside get the order to screw the wires into the lightbulbs, and transmission starts. Dean winks at Sam and turns to leave; there’s more digging to be done in the basement. 

A strong wind seems to come out of nowhere - the whole time they’ve been here, weather has been nothing but perfectly sunny, a perpetual spring day. So the stormy clouds coming in at an alarming speed seem about as normal as a giraffe in a tuxedo.

Jim turns to him, “Can you take over? I need to take Ethan inside.” Sam nods and accepts the screwdriver for changing frequencies. The rain is barely held off by the makeshift umbrella they have, dripping precariously on the wiring. 

“Mayday, mayday, can anybody hear me? This is an SOS call. Mayday.” 

He’s repeated the message a few times now with no result, and with the weather getting worse, it’s starting to look like they’ll have to call it a day before everything gets destroyed by the storm.

“Hello? Is someone there?”

Sam’s pulse picks up speed. “Yes! We’re here. Okay, uh… Can you track our signal?”

“Hey, slow down, buddy,” the voice from the radio says, cool as a cucumber, like they didn’t just receive a call for help. “Is this Sam?”

“What?”

“Sam Winchester?” 

His stomach drops to the bottom of his feet; then it keeps going, down through the crust of the Earth and out into the other side of the fucking planet. On its way to Mars, maybe. 

The voice continues. “Your brother really shouldn’t be digging that hole, Sam.” 

It sounds almost taunting, an air of gleeful malice, and Sam can hear the smile in the words. He’s suddenly sure he isn’t talking to another human. His heart jumps up in his throat. Dean.

Running before he even registers it, he’s skidding through mud in a desperate attempt to make it to the basement before it’s too late.

***

Dean’s sweating, shoveling with achy muscles when he hits the bottom. That’s gotta be it: unboxing time, baby. He slams it a few times, and the concrete cracks. 

Except it keeps cracking, crumbling under his feet, and then he’s falling into the darkness.

Chapter Text

Dean lands hard on a cold, moist surface. Some kind of rock. The dust from above is swirling around him, more pieces crumbling every which way. He gets to his feet with a groan, and nearly jumps out of his skin at the sight of a lamp in the dark.

"He said that you would come,” Victor says, like it’s the most logical thing ever.

"What? Who?" Dean has no clue what he’s on about, looking up again at the crumbling basement floor. The electricity wires just end there, hanging in the air. What the hell?

"The Boy in White. He said I should wait for you. We have to go now, it's not safe here," Victor leans in and whispers: "This is where they sleep. You see? They make drawings, too." 

Dean looks to where he's pointing at the wall, and there's that goddamn symbol Jade was talking about. It's surrounded by humanoid stick figures, stylized birds and - runes? Why would they draw the thing that repels them? Then it clicks. Whoever made the monsters must have used runes to control them; those runes could be meaningful to them somehow. And what the hell was that huge red thing? If he didn't know better, he'd say someone was trying to draw the devil. 

"We have to go, now!" Victor says with more urgency, and Dean hurries to follow him as the place continues to crumble around them.

They walk through an underground cave system of some sort. It reminds Dean of those French tunnels - catacombs, that's what they're called. Of course, it makes all the sense now: those things are hurt by fire and only come out at night, so light must be bad for them too. Staying underground is the best way to get them through the day. He wonders if they dig burrows too. Suddenly, he grinds to a halt. Do they have super hearing? If they do, and they're under the town, they must hear conversations - is that why they seem to know everyone’s names?

He shakes his head and tries to get some real info. "You get here through that far away tree?"

"Farway,” Victor whispers, “And shhh. We can't risk waking them. I'll get us out of here."

Dean's not exactly comfortable trusting the guy, but he can always shoot him if he turns out to be a threat, so he trails after him. That is, until his foot knocks against something hard. "Ow."

"Shh."

"Yeah, yeah, I know", Dean whispers back, paying more attention to the random suitcase at his feet. New York 1964, it says. 

"C'mon," Victor urges him. 

They keep walking.

"Ugh, gross." There are rats eating a dead crow. How the hell did a crow even get down here? This place is a goddamn joyride.

"C’mon. While they're still asleep."

Dean would actually appreciate a chance to gank the fuckers while they're unawares. As soon as he's out, he's gonna get Sam and they can torch them all, easy-peasy. 

The pass more out-of-place objects: a bike, a wheelchair, a fucking bird cage of all things. The decor really ups the creepiness factor.

And holy shit - there it is. One of the creatures, getting its beauty sleep. Well, more like ugly sleep. That’s a face only a mother could love. It doesn't look all that human now, bulging veins all over its skin, and the face: it's like a corpse's, but covered in pox-like bumps, with sharp teeth sticking out. There are deep black circles around the eyes, and the nose is somehow deformed. Gruesome. Dean wonders if they transform into looking more human, or if it’s some kind of illusion they put on. He wonders about the electricity too. Does them sleeping here have something to do with it? Some kind of magical juicing up? 

Eventually he decides that he won’t get any smarter from looking at it. He feels like shit for just letting that fucker catch its Zs, but without any source of fire, he doesn’t have a choice.

"We moving or what?"

Victor's standing there frozen, staring at an old grandfather clock with an unsettling looking doll on top of it. Then he just runs off, dropping his flashlight, in what has to be the biggest overreaction since that Republican threw himself in front of his wife’s car to prevent her from voting Democrat.

"Damn it!", Dean curses under his breath, picks up the flashlight and follows.

His guide is sitting with his arms around his legs, apparently having himself a freak out. Oh great, Dean thinks. Impeccable timing.

"Hey man, which way?"

"I don't know," Victor cries, shaking all over. "I got scared. This isn't the way he told me to go."

"Okay, okay", Dean crouches, trying to calm him down. "Just breathe. We'll do it together, yeah? In and out, that's it. Deep breaths. In and out. One more time. Good."

The guy probably needs more time, but they don't have any, so this will have to do. "Up you go", he says, pulling him along. "You got this, just keep moving."

***

"Dean! Dean!" Sam is shouting before he's even inside, a terrible feeling twisting his gut. He hasn't been this scared for his brother since the night the hellhounds came. They're in way over their head with this fucking place, like everything he knows is suddenly useless.

His breath gets caught in his throat at the sight he finds: the ground floor caved in, like a giant hand grabbed it and pulled down. He runs down the stairs to the basement, calling Dean's name with rising panic. 

There's no answer. 

The hole they were digging is full of debris from the collapsed floor, broken boards sticking out at sharp angles. He hopes like hell Dean's not hurt, although the chances of that are slim.

"Dean?"

In the unnatural silence, there's nothing to do but to start digging through the wreckage.

***

Sam doesn't know how long he's been hauling broken wood out of the hole, but at some point his head has cleared enough to realize he should get help. If Dean's hurt, which he probably is, time is crucial. So he runs back outside, and - oh shit. There's a bus parked in front of the diner. Normally he'd spare a thought for all those people now stuck in their worst nightmare, but he can't think past getting his brother out. He runs up towards Colony House.

The place is a mess, people rushing in different directions and broken glass on every surface.

"Sam!" Donna calls, spotting him. "Where the hell did you run off to?" She reminds him of Bobby, the gruff attitude covering up a heart of gold.

"Sorry, it's Dean. He was digging in the basement, and the whole thing collapsed and", he pauses to catch his breath. "I need help getting him out. Also, a bus just came into town."

"What? On top of everything -" She takes a deep steadying inhale. "Shit. Okay, I'll get a few people and come down."

He gives her a weak but grateful smile. "What happened here?"

"Lightbulbs exploded just after you bolted. We got a few people bleeding." With that, she turns to find volunteers.

***

Sam and the bartender, Tom, make their way into the basement, with a few of the guys from the bus. Sam figures it's best he doesn't tell them anything about the town yet, so he focuses on digging. He's terrified of finding Dean bloody and motionless, keeps thinking about how he'd crack some awful joke about going out like this. Out of all the monsters they fought, a goddamn wooden beam is what gets him? Absolutely not. He refuses to entertain the thought further. His stomach feels like it’s trying to crawl its way out of his throat using knives pushed into his insides as handholds.

Pieces of the floor above them keep breaking off from time to time, and even the new guy points out that's weird. You have no idea how weird it gets, Sam thinks. It’s so unhinged that the door’s falling off.

They've almost cleared the pile when the cracking sound starts up louder than before, the wood above them crumbling suddenly as if squeezed by an invisible force.

"We have to go!" Tom yells, the others already running up the stairs.

"I'm not leaving!" There isn’t any room for rational thought: Dean is down there, and Sam has to get to him, he has to. And he's gone, he is actually so far gone even a dedicated team of rescuers couldn’t get him out of this swamp of stupidity he’s deliberately sinking into.

He's still pulling on the beams when the building shatters and collapses around them in an instant.

***

With no idea where to go now, Dean just picks a direction and starts walking, with a shaken up Victor in tow. How big is this lair? The odds of accidentalling himself into a way out aren’t great - he'd have better luck trying to catch a butterfly with tweezers.

After a while, they enter a wide space with several small caverns in the walls. The holes are deep enough that he can't tell how far they go, and they all have sticks against them, like makeshift bars. What the hell could be so bad that even monsters would lock it up? 

In the middle of the 'room' (and that's stretching the word) there's something like a shrine: rocks stacked on top of each other, resembling a thick arrow pointing up. As he's considering where to go, a ball rolls out of one of the caverns and knocks the shrine-rocks over. Victor looks even more upset at that, mumbling incoherently, and Dean's a bit worried himself. Hopefully the noise wasn't loud enough to wake the homeowners. 

He stalks towards the cavern that the ball came from, wondering if it leads to another farway tree. Shining a light, he gets jump scared by a Gollum-looking creature, grinning sinisterly. Then he blinks, and it's gone. "What the -"

"You shouldn't have done that. We have to go," Victor says. 

"Oh now you tell me?" Dean’s foot slips, and he looks down to see the ground is wet. "Where's the water coming from?"

"They're waking up."

Well, ain't life a plate full of shit.

The bodies around them begin to stir with cracking noises, like wood in a fireplace. One by one, the monsters open their eyes, an ugly orange shade on their expressionless faces. They’re moving even slower than usual, either from grogginess or because they think their prey has nowhere to go. Too bad for them Dean’s got enough stubbornness for a whole herd of mules.

He looks back to the ground - the water is trickling in from somewhere. He follows it back and spots a narrow tunnel going up. Not a moment too soon: the creepies are creeping towards them, still as ugly as when they were asleep. Damn, and he thought he was a mess before his morning coffee.

He pushes Victor towards the tunnel. "Go, go, go!" 

With one last look back, he follows suit.

It takes some more pushing on the way, but they manage to get through and out, somewhere in the forest. Daylight is already fading, so they don't have much time left. 

"Okay, which way now?"

Victor's still shaking like a leaf. "I don't know."

***

Sam's ears are ringing. His temple feels warm and wet, so he's probably bleeding too. Not ideal. There's a support beam across his chest, restricting his breaths to shallow gasps. He calls out, hoping the others made it outside. Tom calls back - turns out he's trapped too. Shit.

It's not long before he hears the rubble being moved above him. At least people are trying to get them out, assuming they don't do more damage with how unstable the whole thing is. He thinks about Dean, even further down, and has to close his eyes and breathe. This can't be happening, not when he just came back from Hell. Sam can't lose him again. It feels like hunger and thirst and being suffocated all at once.

He wants to scream.

***

"Guys, the sun is setting! We have to get the people from the bus inside!", Sam hears. 

"What about them? We can't just leave them down there."

"Okay, listen", he recognizes Donna's voice. "Sam, Tom, you listen too. We're gonna cover you up, and there's a good chance those things won't know you're there."

"What? Without a talisman?," someone asks. 

"It wouldn’t help them without intact walls. Look, I survived here before Boyd found the talismans. If you're hidden and quiet, you have a chance." Her voice softens. "I'm sorry, but there's no other way."

Sam swallows. "It's okay. I get it. Go inside before the sun sets."

There’s a pause; the decision is clearly hard on her. "You'll be okay, kid." 

Sam doesn't think he will. He might live through the night, but Dean? Who knows how injured he is, if he bled out already, and the odds of finding him alive come morning are next to nothing. His breath stutters and his vision blurs. Goddammit. He almost wishes the monsters would find him, because once he’s out he might eat a bullet anyway.

***

Dean rushes through the forest, half-dragging Victor alongside him. It’s getting harder to see, and the group of monsters trailing behind has helpfully made them aware that living beyond tonight is out of the question.

Suddenly, Victor hauls him in a different direction, “Here! I know where we are.”

Attack of the obvious, Dean thinks. He knows where they are too: in the goddamn forest, which is not where he wants to be. Before he gets a chance to gripe though, they run into a clearing where he makes out a large rectangular shape in the dark. A truck?

Victor opens the back door, revealing a space furnished with more musty old furniture. “We have to be quiet, there’s no talisman,” he says, closing the door behind them.

“Is this yours?”

“Yes.” He doesn’t explain further. Dean figures there’s more important stuff for him to be asking anyway, “You said something about a kid in white. Who is he?”

“He’s my friend. He was away for a long time, but now he’s back.” 

“He disappear before or after those freaks started tearing up people?”

Victor gives him the stink eye. “I don’t like to talk about that.”

Secretive fucker. Trying to get anything out of him is as pointless as a condom without sex.

Dean’s just trying to decide which of the surfaces looks the least moldy so he can sit down, when something knocks against the truck. Victor takes an unconscious step closer. The noise repeats, and then the doors are flying open.

***

“Hey Sam? You still alive, man?” Tom whispers.

Unfortunately, Sam thinks. “Yeah.”

“Good, that’s good. We’re gonna be fine. Everything will be fine,” Tom says, which is a lie, or at the very least a mutilation of the truth. But the pep talk is likely just as much for his own benefit, so Sam doesn’t contradict him. 

“Your brother - Dean, is it? Why was he even digging down there?”

Sam thinks about the shortest way to explain, considers lying, and eventually decides there’s no point in either. He’s about to open his mouth to change the subject, when he hears it.

A bone-chilling shriek and the sickening sound of flesh being torn into. Tom didn’t even have time to scream. Maybe his vocal chords are gone now. Sam grits his teeth trying to stay quiet. Dammit. He liked Tom.

***

“Boyd??”

The sheriff looks just as surprised to see Dean and Victor as they are to see him. For a moment they all just stand there, staring at each other, before Dean comes to his senses, “Get in quick, we got no talisman.”

Boyd reaches into his jacket and pulls out his own rune-inscribed stone. Dean’s never been so happy to see a rock. “Rock and roll, baby”, he grins.

The monsters choose that moment to come crawling out of the woodwork (literally), like a karmic punishment for his terrible pun. Heh. Pun-ishment. 

Boyd pulls on the door but it jams halfway, and all three of them just barely manage to force it closed in time. It’s not until the talisman finally hangs on a vertical surface that they can relax.

Dean’s not sure how Boyd’s even alive, but he sure is glad to see him. The explanation will have to wait apparently; Boyd isn’t talking yet. Could be because Victor’s there - he doesn’t strike Dean as the most stable guy, and Boyd must have quite a story to tell.

Sunrise cannot come soon enough.

***

The first thing Dean notices upon walking into town are the corpses: messily butchered, their ribcages ripped open and innards puréed. He wonders if the creatures even eat them, or if they just get their kicks from torture. His stomach twists as Hell flashes before his eyes.

Once he gets his breath back under control, he notices the second thing: these aren’t any of the people he’s seen here before. Weird. 

The answer presents itself in the form of a bus parked in front of the diner. But he doesn’t have time to think about it, because that’s when the third thing hits him like a Greyhound to Palo Alto: the house they were staying in is leveled to the ground.

“Sammy”, he croaks, dread creeping up.

"No no no no no", he mutters under his breath as he heads towards the wreckage. There's another corpse there, and he has a mini heart attack before he realizes it's the bartender. He didn't deserve to get mangled like that, but Dean can't breathe until he knows where Sam is. He feels like the weight of that entire destroyed building is pressing on his chest, heart thudding so hard and fast that he thinks he might crack a rib.

"He's not there," Donna says somewhere behind him. Dean whirls around, his voice too stuck to ask the next question.

She takes pity on him. "He's at the med center."

He's running before he even thinks about anything else, not even sure what he's running towards. She didn't say if Sam's alive. 

Dean has to see him. No matter in what state, he has to get to Sam.

He almost knocks Kristi over at the entrance and forces himself to stop. "Is he...?"

She gives him a tired smile. "He's pretty banged up, so I wouldn't let him out and about just yet -"

Dean doesn't hear the rest, rushing past her and inside.

"O-kay", Kristi shakes her head fondly as she heads somewhere where she can take a nap.

***

"Sammy?"

Sam's eyes fly open. He's not sure if that head wound is making him hallucinate, but right now he couldn't care less. Because there's Dean, crossing the room in long strides, and Sam gets up to meet him halfway, cracked ribs be damned. For the first and only time since a fish first crawled out of the ocean, he isn't thinking at all. Dean's here, alive, his face warm under Sam's palms, his own hands gripping Sam's shoulders like he'll disappear any second. Sam really isn't thinking, because he'd spent the whole night imagining having to live without his brother again, so he's not exactly in the driver's seat when his body decides to close the gap between their lips.

Dean kisses back.

He licks into his mouth like he wants to live there, like they should be occupying the same space, and what little brain power Sam has left is not just on board with the idea, but sailing off into the sunset with it. 

Dean's arms wrap around him, crushing him closer, and Sam lets out an involuntary whimper as the motion presses on his ribs. 

It's enough to break the spell.

Dean reels back like he just snapped out of a trance, his eyes almost comically wide. Before Sam can think of anything to say, he's backing away and then breaking into a sprint.

"Dean, wait!"

He tries to follow, but his ribcage chooses that moment to remind him it's damaged goods, and he doubles over with the flash of pain. By the time he catches enough breath to get upright again, there are soft footsteps in the hallway.

"Hey hey hey, you should not be vertical!", a blonde woman he doesn't know chastises him.

"I'm fine, I gotta go", Sam tries, though the look on her face isn't giving him much hope of getting away.

"Dude, Kristi will kill me if I let you walk out of here without her blessing. Back to bed. Shoo!"

***

Dean doesn't stop until he's slammed the bar door behind him. He leans against it and sinks down. What the hell is wrong with him? Out of all the stupid things he did, this takes not only the cake, but the whole wedding buffet.

He kissed Sam.

He actually did that. 

He must have come back from Hell wrong - more wrong than before - because he always swore to himself he'd die before he'd let that shit see daylight. 

Fuck.

A few minutes of panic, and he ruined everything. 

He's the biggest idiot that ever idioted.

Should've stayed dead, let Sam have a normal memory of his brother.

He’s supposed to protect Sammy, even from himself. Especially from himself. He was never supposed to want… This. Dean scrunches his eyes closed, fighting the impulse to just bang his head against the wall until his brains spill out. Why are you like this?, he asks himself, not for the first time. 

It's this place, it's gotta be messing with his head if he's letting his guard down this much. 

Even to his own mind, the excuse sounds flimsy.

He gets to his feet and grabs himself a bottle of that stomach acid that passes for booze here. What he needs is to not think about Sam. The empty bar reminds him of the fact that Tom is still out there, eviscerated on the lawn, and Dean stands corrected: he needs to not think, period. 

At least he's got an open tab.

He chugs his drink like there's diamonds at the bottom.

Chapter Text

The sun is a bitch. It crawled over right on the side of the window across Dean, just to stab him through the eyelids. He raises a hand to block it out, his back protesting the apparently prolonged session of sitting with his back against the bar counter. That's when he realizes the light wasn't the only thing that woke him up. There are two voices talking, and by the sound of it, their owners are sitting right on the other side of the counter. 

Great. He can't find a place to be alone anywhere.

He recognizes Jade as one of the people, the other one being an unknown woman. Dean would ask them to tone it down, if his throat wasn't too dry to make the effort. Then again, he's still buzzed enough that he might fall back asleep anyway.

"You know, I was working as a bus driver to pay off my student loans", she says. "I'd just made the last payment. And I thought, why not stay a few more weeks? Save up some money to treat myself. I deserve that." Her tone turns bitter. "Is this what I deserve?"

Jade sighs, pours another drink. "I had just sold my company before I got stuck here. Millions in the bank. I should be in Fiji or something."

There's more words being spoken, the clink of glasses against wood, but Dean's not really listening anymore. Something is nagging at him, like an annoying fly just out of reach. He sits there for a while, trying to mentally smack it, until eventually he realizes the other two have left. 

It must really suck, to think your life was gonna get so much better, only for it to go downhill like this. His brow furrows. The metaphorical fly is right at his fingertips. It's kind of a weird coincidence, the two of them. 

Not just the two of them, his mind supplies: Boyd was looking forward to a well-earned retirement before driving into this hell hole. Kristi was engaged. The Matthews were about to get a divorce, which isn't exactly good, but it is a big change... Now that he's looking, more examples just keep coming up: Kenny’s dad had just been diagnosed with dementia; Sara was moving back home, after what sounded like an abusive relationship. Khatri had just killed a man and was going to jump off a bridge... 

Holy shit. 

That's it. That's what everyone here has in common: major life events. (He spares a second to snicker and salute Major Life-Events.) Everyone who ended up here was at a turning point, before taking the final wrong turn. 

That's gotta be the key to figuring it all out.

He has to tell Sam.

***

Dean’s not really paying attention to his surroundings, hurrying along before something catches his attention. A white blob in his periphery that stands out. He halts and turns around slowly, a disturbing feeling washing over him completely out of left field. 

There are two kids just standing there, except he’s never seen them before: he definitely would have remembered that - paler than a nun's ass, emaciated, and eerily still. They’re dressed in rags, hair falling out, and faces smudged with dirt; it’s beyond any kind of neglect - they look dead, like a pair of ghoullings out and about. They stare at him creepily, but before he can think of anything to say or do, the spectres disappear just as suddenly as they appeared.

Dean shakes his head. Whatever was in that booze must have been vile.

He keeps speed-walking, past the Matthews’ house, where Ethan’s on the porch, putting together some kind of rock tower. It rings a bell, reminding Dean uncomfortably of the shrine thingamajig he saw down in the caves. He pauses.

"Hey, whatcha got there?" 

"I found it in the storage", Ethan says. "I think it's a puzzle." He adds the final stone piece on top, and there they are again - those weird ghoulish children, standing on the porch in broad daylight. Dean’s heebies are fucking jeebied.

“Anghkooey,” they whisper in synchrony, a nonsense word that does nothing to dispel the freaky aura around them.

"Do you... see them?” Dean asks, not trusting his senses.

"See who?" Ethan tilts his head questioningly. He’s got a confused little frown that tells Dean he must sound insane.

Dean looks away from him, back towards the creepy vision, just to see they're not there anymore. 

"Nevermind". 

He hesitantly ascribes it to liquor and stress, and keeps walking.

***

“Dean”, Sam breaths, hardly believing his brother is back without being dragged. He was fully prepared to have to corner him in order to get a conversation going.

“Look, let’s just shelf whatever that was earlier”, Dean bulldozes over his attempt to get a word in. “We need to talk about the case.”

Of course. Dean’s just going to avoid the topic as much as he can.

“So I was digging in the basement, right? And all of a sudden, the ground caved in, and I was in some kind of cave under the house. Then Victor shows up, tells me the boy in white told him to wait for me there.”

“The ghost?”

“Whatever he is. And - there were all these symbols on the walls - the one Jade said he kept seeing, and a bunch of runes too. Victor said the monsters drew them.”

“But why - “

“Weird, I know. Apparently they sleep underground during the day. Which means we know where and how to gank ‘em.”

“Holy shit.”

“That’s not all - they have a bunch of human stuff there, like a creepy version of Ariel’s cave.”

Sam’s eyebrows shoot up. “Maybe they used to be human themselves. It would explain the need to collect those objects.”

“Honestly, Sam, I don’t care if they used to be goldfish. The most important thing is that we get rid of them. So get moving.”

Sam grabs his jacket, wincing at the movement but managing to stay silent. “It still doesn’t explain everything.”

Dean quickly wipes the worried look off his face, as if Sam hadn’t noticed it already. “There’s another thing. Came to my mind at the bar - everybody who’s trapped here was in the middle of something important, like their lives were about to change a lot. Think you can figure out how it’s connected to them ending up here?” 

Sam chews on his lip as he walks. “It’s a start. But get this: the radio worked.”

“It did?”

Sam doesn’t seem as thrilled about it as he’d expect. “But whoever answered it, knew my name. They said you shouldn’t be digging.” 

Well that news is as pleasant as a catheter in the ear. The monsters also know everyone’s names. Dean mulls it over and keeps sneaking glances at Sam as they go, looking for signs that he’s more injured than he’s letting on.

“I’m almost certain it wasn’t a human being”, Sam says. “Whatever is controlling this place is bigger than just those creatures in the caves.”

Dean nods, “Okay, then we’ll talk to Boyd first. Get more intel on what the hell is going on.”

“Boyd? He’s alive?”

“Yeah. Just showed up where Victor and I were hiding. I didn’t manage to get anything out of him yet, but whatever he found out in the forest could be helpful.”

***

Boyd’s alone at the sheriff’s station when they arrive, which suits their purposes just fine. 

“We have news”, Dean says. “And I’m guessing you do too.”

They go first, hoping their information will be enough to get the sheriff to trust them with his own story. Boyd listens, his expression alternating between surprise and concern. “That’s uh, that’s a lot more than we knew so far”, he nods. “Not bad for a couple of new arrivals.”

“Told ya,” Dean smiles, “We should work together.”

Boyd seems to finally be on board with the idea. “You boys want a drink? Because I sure could use one.” He pours them all a shot of whiskey before running a hand over his face, stealing himself.

“The first thing we found was this tree with bottles hanging on the branches. I managed to get one down, and there was a piece of paper in it; but all it said was ‘1864’.”

The boys share a look. If that’s a year, this must have been going on for a while.

Boyd goes on. “Sara passed out, she was hearing voices again. She said…” He takes a deep breath. “The voice knew my nickname, back when I was in service. Only my son Ellis, and my late wife knew that.”

“You think -”

“I don’t know what to think, alright? It also said that we shouldn’t have come there, that there were worse things than the monsters in the forest, vague useless shit like that.” He takes a sip of his whiskey before continuing. “That night, our tent got dragged somewhere. The speed and the distance - it wasn’t anything a human could do. I don’t imagine those things that butcher people would do it, either.”

Dean crosses his arms. So they’re dealing with multiple kinds of monsters. Aces, that should be fun.

“When we got out in the morning, there were a bunch of cobwebs around. I heard - well, it doesn’t matter.”

Sam leans forward. “Trust me, it does. However crazy it sounds, you need to tell us.”

Boyd hesitates another moment. “I thought I heard Abby. My wife. But Khatri and Sara didn’t, so I must have imagined it.”

“Or something was imitating her. There are monsters who do that.”

The sheriff looks troubled at that. “Anyway, I went into the cobwebs, and I saw her - or what I thought was her - but then it shrieked and grabbed me; I shook it off and ran, and I must have stepped on a spider nest, because the next second they were crawling all over me. Two of the fuckers bit me.” He takes another big gulp. “We saw a lighthouse. A lighthouse in the middle of the forest! But before we could get to it, we got caught in a storm. It just came out of nowhere - there hasn’t been anything other than sunshine here for years.”

“Wait, ever? No seasons at all?”

“No. Victor’s been here for decades, and it’s always been like a nice summer day.”

Sam jots something down, but closes the notepad before Dean can get a look. 

Boyd keeps talking. “I couldn’t go on, those spider bites hurt like a motherfucker, so I told Khatri and Sara to leave me. But then she said something about being safe in the trees, and before I could ask more, she pushed me into one. And - it’s the damnedest thing - I ended up inside some kind of shaft, like a chimney or a well.” He shakes his head. “I don’t even know how that’s possible.”

“Farway trees”, Sam says. “They’re all over the forest, Victor showed us. They always take you to a different place.”

Boyd takes a moment to absorb that information. “Right. Why the hell not.” He finishes his drink and pours another one. “I thought I was done for: there was no way I could climb up. I yelled for help for ages, before someone above answered. He said he could help me if I helped him, and threw me a rope.” He frowns. “I don’t even know how. When I got up there, the old man was chained to the wall.”

“What?” Dean’s at the edge of his seat. “Where were you even?”

Boyd seems to be looking for the right words. “It looked like some kind of mediaeval dungeon. Torches and stone walls. There were skeletons in chains around, too. And this guy, he asked me to kill him. He said they would be back soon.”

“The monsters?”

“That’s what I thought. But he said those things that come out at night are just the tip of the spear. I couldn’t kill him, but I couldn’t just leave him there either - he was a marine. I’d only managed to get one of his hands free when -” Boyd takes another second to breathe, has more whiskey. “This goddamn music started playing out of nowhere. Martin - that was his name - said I had to get out before it stopped, and he said something about Abby - how the hell did he know about Abby?”

Dean wishes he had answers for him; instead, all he has are more questions. “Where was the music coming from?”

“There was this music box, just laying on the floor. I could swear it hadn’t been there a moment before. Then it stopped.” He shudders. “Martin, he uh, he scratched my arm and put his bloody hand on it. Said something weird like, ‘my blood is your blood now’. And then he died.”

Sam and Dean share a confused look. 

“He infected me with something, I’m sure of it”, Boyd says grimly. “There’s… there’s worms under my skin! I can’t always see them, but I feel them moving.” He looks thoroughly freaked out. “I went out there to get answers, and this is what I ended up with!”

“Wait, how did you get to the forest?” Dean prompts.

Boyd collects himself. “The dungeon or whatever it was, it just disappeared around me. All of a sudden I was standing in some ruins in the woods. I, I can’t explain it.”

Dean catches a glimpse of Sam writing ‘fae?’ in his notebook. The horizon behind him is darkening.

“Thanks for everything, sheriff”, he says. “First thing in the morning, Sam and I’ll head down to the caves to burn those bastards. And then we’ll deal with whatever this is, I promise.”

***

With ‘their’ house being in ruins, they make arrangements to stay at the Liu house for a while - Kenny’s mom insists they eat a proper meal, adding something in Chinese that Dean doesn’t need to understand to get the gist of it. She’s really starting to grow on him.

Once upstairs, Sam seems to have reached his limit of not talking about The Incident. 

“Dean”, he starts, in a tone that’s making Dean’s fight-or-flight response act up.

“I’m gonna take a shower”, Dean cuts him off, getting the bathroom door between them like a shield. He avoids the mirror and gets the water running while he strips. 

He’d rather eat a bowl of spiders than have this conversation now. Or better yet, ever. The fuck is he even supposed to say? ‘Hey Sam, I’ve been a freak about you since you had that growth spurt at 15, haha, we good though, right?’ It’s ridiculous. Not for the first time, he wonders if he really got out of hell, or if this is just the next level of the rack. 

Either way, he’s determined to ignore the subject and hope Sam ascribes the whole thing to temporary insanity. 

He steps under the stream and closes his eyes, pushing all those feelings back in the box where they belong. It's not denial, he’s just selective about the reality he accepts. Because reality is a composite of what you perceive and what you believe, and he was going to unperceive the fuck out of that thing that totally didn’t happen and it would just go *pop* out of existence like a little soap bubble, right?

Dean’s going to pull normalcy on and wear it the way he always used to. He has to make it true.

He stays in the shower until he’s as clean as humanly possible without involving bleach.

By the time Sam is done with his own shower, Dean’s doing a stellar job of pretending to be asleep.

***

They head into the woods the next morning, equipped with gasoline, lighters, and flashlights. They’ve barely made it a few yards past the treeline, when Sam clears his throat.

“So, uh. About yesterday…”

Dean grinds to a halt, spins around on him. “Sam”, he barks. “People are dying here. Can we just focus on the damn case?”

Sam says something in response, but Dean misses it completely because there they are again: those ghastly-looking kids in white rags, standing motionless a few feet away. 

“Anghkooey”, they say, like it’s supposed to mean something. “Anghkooey”, more insistent now, louder. Dean backs away a step. 

“Dean? What are you looking at?” Sam seems concerned now, searching the trees for an invisible threat. 

“I…” Dean internally debates the merits of sounding crazy or stupid, then decides he’d rather have that than get back to their previous topic. “Okay, so I’ve been seeing something. At first I thought it was just the booze, but I didn’t have a drop today, so maybe it does have something to do with this whole place.”

Sam hears him out, expression thoughtful, asking an occasional clarifying question. 

Then it dawns on Dean, like saying it out loud made the dots connect. “Actually, it wasn’t since yesterday. The night before, in the caves with Victor - there was one of those things - man, it looked kinda like Gollum.”

“From Lord of the Rings?”

“You know any other Gollums? Yes, that one!” Dean blows a breath out. “It showed up when I shone a light into a caged cavern, but then it was gone. I only saw it for a moment, but now that I think about it, it did look a lot like those weird-ass zombie-kids.”

Sam thinks about it, then throws his hands up. “Yeah, I got nothing.”

“I’m sure it’ll come to you. Now come on, let’s fry those fuckers.”

***

There’s something inherently unsettling about caves. Their constant darkness, the claustrophobia, the unknown creatures that could be lurking behind each stone - not to mention the occasional dripping sounds in the unnatural quiet that just keep you on edge. Point is, Dean’s not a big fan even in the best of circumstances. If caves were any good, people wouldn’t have invented houses.

They sneak through the narrow passageways, careful not to make too much noise, but there’s no avoiding it - every now and then, a pebble slides under their boots, or the gasoline tank snags on the wall with a ‘clunk’ sound. He keeps expecting to get jumped at any moment, but the longer they walk the more it disturbs him not to have seen any of the creatures.

By the time the mouth of the passageway opens up into that wide area, Dean’s sure something is wrong. “We didn’t see a single one, Sam. Yesterday the place was crawling with them.”

Sam’s gaze is stuck on the caverns with stick-bars. “Is this where you first saw the uh, Gollum-kid?”

“Yeah, I was right over there”, Dean walks in the indicated direction, when out of nowhere a strange sensation washes over him, like he's in an Escher painting, and just realized that the floor he's standing on is actually the ceiling. His back hits the rocks as he’s suddenly overcome with fear and pain, like every one of his nerves has been dipped in Tabasco sauce. His insides seem to have turned into like electric sandpaper. Is that a thing? It absolutely should not be a thing. It feels exactly like it sounds. 

That’s when he registers what his eyes are actually seeing - light from a hole above, outlining a tangle of tree roots in the shape of - no way. It’s that goddamn symbol again. 

“Anghkooey,” he hears, and he’s not surprised to see those kids again - except they aren’t standing, they’re laid out on slabs of rock all around him. He counts seven of them before the terror overwhelms him, coursing through his veins like a shot of whiskey on fire.

For a horrifying moment, it seems like the feeling will never end, and then just as suddenly, it’s light out.

***

"I’m fine," Dean blurts out, the words kicking past his teeth as he sits up. 

It takes him a second to re-orient, realizing they’re outside again. He must have been out for longer than it felt like. 

“Dean!” Sam’s face is a picture of relief, and he practically throws himself at Dean, hugging him close like two pages of a closed book. Dean takes a deep breath as he returns the embrace. It’s the first time they’ve touched since - that thing he’s not thinking about. He feels sick, and twisted like a strangler vine. How is he supposed to keep pretending? He's not anywhere in the same neighborhood as normal. Hell, normal and him don't even live on the same continent. He tells his brain to shut up: amazing how that never works.

Sam interrupts his trainwreck of thought as he pulls back. “You just collapsed and started seizing. I got you out but you wouldn’t wake up. Dean, it’s been hours!” He still looks shaken, drinking Dean in with his eyes like that’s the only thing preventing him from going comatose again.

“Hey, hey, I’m alright. Right here.” Dean pets his hair, trying to get him to calm down, and to ignore the way his own stomach is fluttering at the contact. 

Sam takes a few deep breaths. “What happened to you?”

The butterflies in Dean’s stomach are suddenly armed with flick-knives and knuckle dusters as he remembers. He turns away.

“Sammy, I’ve told you about Hell. Some of it, anyway.” He’s grateful that his brother doesn’t interrupt. “This was… Well, it didn’t hurt as much, but I was never that scared in my life. Or death.” He closes his eyes and regrets it immediately. Better to focus on a random shrub instead. “I saw Jade’s symbol, made of tree roots on the ceiling. And those kids I’ve been seeing, they were… On some kind of altars.” He forces himself to look back at Sam, as a horrible realization forms in his mind. “Sammy, I think they were sacrificed.”

Sam’s expression is predictably aghast. “For what? By whom?”

“I don’t know, I don’t… But that’s gotta be what they were trying to tell us. I feel like that’s the root of this whole thing.”

Sam thinks about it, eyebrows drawn together. “Let’s go talk to Jade again.”

“Okay, right after we burn the monsters.”

Sam shakes his head vehemently. “No, Dean, what if you black out again and don’t wake up before dark? We can’t risk it.”

Dean looks at his brother like he grew a second head. “Dude, our whole lives are risky. We’re gonna do our job.”

Before Sam can say anything in response, Kenny runs up to them, out of breath. He must have ran all the way from the town. “There you are! Boyd needs to talk to you, it’s important!”

***

As they walk back to town, Dean can’t help but notice Sam is still shaking. He shoves his hands in his pockets when he notices Dean’s attention though. Is he really that freaked out over Dean’s little vacation from consciousness?

“Hey, man, I’m fine. Promise”, Dean tries, but only gets a curt nod in response. Right. Back to awkward, I guess.

But as much as he’s kicking himself about that thing that did not happen yesterday, something about Sam’s demeanor still feels off. He can’t put his finger on it, and it’s making his fucking teeth itch.

Chapter Text

Boyd’s pacing his office when they arrive, seemingly even more troubled than the day before. “Finally! Did you manage to burn them all?”

Sam would love to give him an affirmative on that one, but as it is, “We hit a snag. They must have retreated deeper into the caves, but we’ll get them. What did you want to tell us?”

The sheriff barks out the ghost of a laugh that got murdered in a back alley somewhere. “Yeah, nothing seems to go smoothly here. We have a problem with the crops - Donna just told me everything is rotten. From one day to the next, our whole food supply is compromised. Does that sound normal to you?”

It doesn’t. In fact it sounds like something is actively working against them. Sam shakes his head, and Boyd continues. “Sara and Father Khatri are back, too - I thought you’d want to speak to them. I’d go with you, but I have a busload of newbies to manage. There’s one troublemaker that’s already giving me a headache.”

***

Apparently Sara and Khatri had ended up in the church basement after passing through a farway tree. Sam figures they didn’t get separated because she’d grabbed his sleeve. But the most interesting thing is that she seems to have gotten that tip from a certain boy in white - he just keeps popping up.

They find Jade surrounded by scattered notes, some drawings of that symbol, some filled with four-digit numbers. “Ugh, what do you two want?”, he barely looks up from his feverish work.

“Man, do you even know what time it is?” Dean asks, surveying the insane amount of papers Jade’s practically drowning in.

“No, I don’t. Go make a sun dial”, he replies grumpily. “I’ve tried every code and cipher I could think of - and nothing!” He throws his hands up in frustration.

Sam steps in to get a closer look. “What is all this stuff?”

Jade rolls his eyes. “Sure, you might as well be my rubber duck. See, all these numbers were in bottles on a tree. Some of them repeat, some are backwards, and it has to mean something, but I still haven’t cracked it!”

“The tree that Boyd found deep in the woods?”

Jade blinks. “What? No, this was nearby.” 

Is there more than one bottle tree? Sam feels like he should be figuring something out, if only he could concentrate better. Slivers of half-formed ideas ping-pong off the walls of his skull, but the only thing he can focus on is his need for demon blood.

Meanwhile, Dean’s got the patience of the titular fish in Piranha 3D, “Well, red-string bullshit aside, we came to ask you about this symbol.” He picks up one of the papers to point it out.

“I know as much as you do”, Jade snaps. “It just keeps showing up without telling me anything remotely useful!”

So that’s a bust. “Well, if you get any great ideas, you come to us first.”

Jade’s bitchface could almost rival Sam’s. “All my ideas are great. Not my fault the world wasn’t ready for some of them.”

***

“I’m going to take a walk. See you back at the house”, Sam tells Dean once they’re outside, and doesn’t wait for an answer. 

His flask is empty, and they’re no closer to getting out of here than they were on their first day. His brain cells are scattered like rats on the floor, thoughts chasing each other like demented hounds, and the shaking in his hands has only been getting worse. He has to get more. 

With cell phone service being non-existent here, the only thing left to try is summoning Ruby, and he can’t exactly do that with his brother breathing down his neck. Poor phrasing. Now he’s thinking about yesterday, the way Dean’s lips felt on his for one glorious moment, before everything came crashing down. Dean may be a master of denial, but sooner or later he’s bound to process it and blow up on Sam. He just wishes he would get a chance to tell him some stupid excuse before that happens.

He resolutely tells himself to quit overthinking it: one problem at a time. As soon as he’s far enough into the forest that there’s not much risk of interruption, he kneels down to draw the summoning sigil. Getting the candles and spell ingredients out of his pockets, he’s hit with a tidal wave of nausea. Just a little longer, she’ll be here in no time.

The Latin flows from his tongue flawlessly, but the candlelight doesn’t so much as flicker. 

Time drags on, slower than a snail in molasses, and Ruby doesn’t show up.

Sam frowns. He knows he did the ritual right. So either she’s ignoring him… Or he’s well and truly fucked.

***

It’s been two hours and forty-seven minutes exactly.

The moment Dean hears the sound of the door shutting, he’s there, ready to chew his brother out. “What the hell, Sam? It’s getting dark out! What took you so long?!” 

Sam moves slowly, shrugging out of his jacket with careful movements. "Christ, I told you I’d be back later, and wha’d’ya know? It’s later, and I’m back."

Dean’s pissed off reply gets stuck on his tongue as he takes a better look at him. The circles under Sam’s eyes look like bruises, and his skin is only a few pixels away from translucent. He didn’t look all that well this morning, but Dean’s sure it’s worse now. And he’s avoiding the question. A stray thought hits him upside the head and his heart skips a beat: Sam’s hiding something. All his life, there wasn’t a single thing he didn't know about the kid, and suddenly Sam’s keeping secrets from him. Dean should’ve known better than to think his stay in Hell would go without consequences. Or was it his most recent fuck up that left him out of the trust loop?

“Right”, he grits out, dropping the subject. “Well now it’s too late to go back to the caves. Guess we’ll do it tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah”, Sam nods, adding nothing else.

This isn’t so much holding a conversation as it is cradling its skeletal remains while knee-deep in grave dirt, wearing nothing but a clown nose.

Dean walks away, wondering how he managed to fuck everything up this badly. It leaves a bitter, metallic taste in the back of his mouth, and his heart feels like it's drowning in acid, thrashing helplessly against the confines of his ribcage.

***

The next day is no better: Sam’s guts feel like all of his internal organs have decided to play musical chairs. He drags himself to the med center only because he promised Kristi to get those ribs checked out again. She isn’t there, but the blonde from the other day is. She introduces herself as Marielle; it turns out she was one of the people on the bus, she’s a nurse, and more interestingly, Kristi’s fiancée. 

“Kind of a strange coincidence that you both ended up here, huh?” Sam says, wondering if it means something. Trying to focus feels like an exercise in futility.

In lieu of a response, Marielle gives him a long, inscrutable look. “What’s your poison?” she asks after a while.

Sam doesn’t get it. Or at least he hopes he doesn’t.

She leans closer not to be overheard. “I’ve been through withdrawal, I can tell. You seem to be handling it alright for now, but don’t you think your brother should know?”

All the air in Sam’s lungs squeezes out like toothpaste from a tube. 

“I don’t - I’m not an addict.”

She looks at him like he just told her he reads Terms & Conditions. “Riiight. You can put away that little slice of bullshit pie. Be real with me.”

Shit. 

“You can’t tell him. Please,” Sam employs his best puppy eyes.

She holds her hands up in a placating gesture. “Hey, it’s not my place to do it anyway. But you oughta talk to him.”

He shakes his head. As if it’s that easy. “He’ll never get it.”

“Maybe”, she shrugs. “But he cares about you an awful lot. Even the blind could see that. He’s gonna be there for you.” 

Sam wishes he could be sure of that.

***

Dean doesn’t like to sit around doing nothing. Sam said he wouldn’t be long, but after last night, who the hell knows. Sick of twiddling his thumbs, he decides that Jesus has had the wheel for long enough and so far, all the holy prick has done is drive them into a ditch, so he takes over (driving them into a ditch, that is). With all the sense of a blind old dog in rush-hour traffic, he heads for the caves.

The air is definitely colder now, wind whipping his face as he walks through the town. The weather change keeps bugging him. There are too many variables here to make sense of, and every time they figure something out, the answer creates even more questions; like a goddamn hydra growing extra heads upon decapitation. 

“Where’s your brother?” Boyd seems to have come out of nowhere, falling into step next to him. Dean nods his hello and keeps walking. “He’s busy. So I’ll just go and flambée our friends real quick.”

Boyd stops, staring at him in disbelief. “You really screwed on your brain backwards today, huh? Tell me that was a joke.”

He’d like to point out that he’s a grown-ass hunter and doesn’t need the disrespect, but he’s well aware of how dumb it is to do this without back up. “Look. Normally I wouldn’t go without him, but normal circumstances have been left behind in the dirt. You doing anything or are you coming with?”

“Of course I’m - ahhh,” Boyd doubles over, clutching his arm. “Goddamnit!”

Dean lays a hand on his shoulder, alarmed. “Boyd? What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine, I’m -,” he doesn’t finish the sentence as he falls down unconscious.

Dean can see the writing in the pudding: something here is doing everything in its power to stop him from getting where he’s going. But he can’t very well leave the sheriff lying in the street, so he curses and starts dragging him to the station.

***

By the time Boyd’s awake, Dean’s wasted over an hour, and he’s getting antsy.

“No offense, but I don’t think you should be my back up.”

Boyd chuckles humorlessly. “Yeah, me neither. It’s those damn worms. But you need to get Sam. I can’t lose any more people because of rash decisions - it’s bad enough half of that bus wouldn’t listen and got themselves massacred.”

Dean sighs. Even if he’s fine risking his own life, he wouldn’t want the sheriff to blame himself if he bites it. Sonuvabitch. “Fine, fine”, he concedes reluctantly. “I’ll do the responsible thing.” It feels weird as fuck to say it, but he guesses he shouldn’t tempt fate - bitch really has it in for him.

He comes home to find his brother buried down into the covers like the outside is poisonous. Without warning, anger wells up like blood from a wound. He’s had it with being kept out of the loop. 

"Oh for crap's sake, Sam. You have to tell me what’s going on with you. I’ve always had your back, didn’t I? When I didn’t wanna talk about Hell, you wouldn’t drop it, so I told you. Because I trust you. And what do I get for it? Jack, with a side of shit!" 

Sam blinks at him owlishly, processing the outburst. Then he sits up, the movement causing him visible discomfort. “Dean, I… I’m not so sure you want to know.”

“Yeah, I don't really jive with that trip. So we are gonna sit here until you decide to talk.” He plops down on the chair with a look of determination. 

***

It’s not that Sam is deliberately stalling. It’s just that he’s having a hard time finding the right words that won’t set Dean off. He’s not so optimistic as to think his brother will be all casual about what he did in those awful three months when he was alone. 

After a while he concludes that dragging it out even more will only worsen Dean’s mood, and decides to start from the beginning.

“Dean, that night the hellhounds came for you…” He swallows, the memory still razor-sharp in his mind. “I just felt so helpless. I had to watch you get ripped apart, and there was nothing I could do about it. Afterwards… I sat with you for hours. What was left, anyway.”

Dean’s expression has softened somewhat, but his arms stay crossed. 

“You don’t know what it was like for me with you gone. You only lasted a few days when I was dead before you went and made the demon deal. I had to live through months.”

He can see Dean’s hackles rising, so he hurries to add, “I tried to do the same almost immediately, to trade places with you, but no demon would take me up on it. So I became obsessed with getting revenge on Lilith. I don’t know how many demons I tortured and killed for information, it was all a blur. By the time Ruby found me, I was a mess. She promised me a way that I could be strong enough to take down Lilith, and I couldn’t say no to that.”

“You trusted that bitch again? After all that bullshit about how you could save me?”

Sam gets up, kneels down in front of him. “But that’s just it, Dean. I could have saved you, if I’d done that sooner. And with you gone, revenge was the only thing I lived for.”

Dean shakes his head. “Don’t say that. I wanted you to have a life.”

Sam chuckles bitterly. “It’s the truth. And I knew you wouldn’t like it, but you weren’t there anymore. So I had to. Please understand that, I had to.”

“Had to do what, Sam?” Dean’s expression is desperate, like he’s dreading the answer already.

Sam grits his teeth. It’s now or never. 

“You know my powers came from Azazel. And how. So in order to get stronger…” He takes a deep breath. “I had to drink more demon blood.”

Dean’s face is ashen. He stares blankly at Sam, unseeing, for what feels like an eternity.

“Dean?”

His brother’s brain seems to have decided that this is one straw too many, and departed his head, no doubt looking for greener pastures somewhere near his kidneys. 

“Say something, please.”

He doesn’t.

Sam gets to his feet, slowly, as Dean seems to have gone catatonic at his little truth bomb. The battered mess of a conversation hangs heavily between them. 

So with all the non-existent decorum he’s come to expect from himself recently, Sam gathers up his jacket and heads for the door. 

***

He walks without really seeing the road. Dean hates him now, he’s sure of it. Hope has packed its bags and departed for Australia. Even if he solves the case, his relationship with his brother is beyond repair.

Eventually he finds himself sitting in the grass on the hill near Colony House without much recollection of how he got there; everything is fuzzy and achy these days. He feels as unstable as a drunk racoon on roller-skates. 

It couldn’t have been more than a dozen minutes before he notices he has company: Donna’s sat nearby, with all the subtlety of a hearse idling on a curb outside of an old people’s home. He’s hardly in the mood to talk, but he figures his day can’t get much worse - the bar's so low it's a tavern in the underworld.

For a while they just sit in silence, and all it does is make Sam’s anxiety spike. What if something else terrible happened, and she’s thinking about how to break the news? He feels useless, less like a hunter and more like that scrawny kid stuck waiting back at the motel.

“You look as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs,” Donna says finally. “Now I know you’re not scared of those creatures, so what the hell got you all worked up?”

Sam lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “It’s, uh, Dean. Guess you could say we had a fight.”

“Ah,” she responds knowingly. “You know, he reminds me a lot of my sister. Stubborn as all hell.” She chuckles, but it’s tinged with a telling kind of sadness. "We all got our crosses. Difficult siblings can be one of ‘em."

Sam makes a face. “No, it was my fault. I screwed up big time.”

She shrugs like it’s nothing. “So let him cool off. He’ll come around.”

He huffs. This is so far beyond any forgivable mishap; he doesn’t even know how to convey it.

Unexpectedly, Donna smacks him upside the head. “Stop it, get some help. Before I forcefully help you.”

“What?” He’s so stumped he momentarily forgets all about his sour mood. “What does that even mean?”

“It means,” she says as she gets to her feet, “quit moping around. You two will work it out eventually, Sam. Blood is thicker than water.”

If only she chose a different saying.

***

It’s a while before Sam gathers up the courage to go back to the house. But there’s still a job to do, so he tries to be professional and makes his feet cooperate. 

Mrs Liu is at the stove, stirring a pot and humming when he comes in. “Hi, uh, have you seen Dean?”

“He out”, she says. “Sleep at bar.”

Right. Sam can’t exactly blame him for wanting some space, but it still stings. And with sundown nearing, it seems they won’t be going to the caves today either.

He helps to chop some vegetables, doing his best to distract himself. After he slices his own finger, adding protein that was not in the recipe, Mrs Liu shoos him away to set the table instead.

Kenny comes home soon after, closing the door with a tired exhale. “Man, people can be so fucking dumb.”

Sam looks up, quirking an eyebrow. “What happened?”

The young deputy drops into his chair, shaking his head. “It’s this guy from the bus, Randall. He just refuses to believe us about this place. I mean, he’s seen the bodies! He’s heard those things shrieking! And he still thinks that this is all staged. He’s just so uncooperative.”

Sam nods in understanding. “I hear you. But it is a difficult thing to adjust to.”

Kenny grunts. “Yeah. But it doesn’t change the fact that the guy’s a real asshole.”

***

Sam’s loading the washing machine, emptying out the pockets when he finds his lighter. They should really stop putting it off and go burn those cave creatures - everything will be easier once they don’t have to abide by sunlight. First thing in the morning, he tells himself. But even as he does, a worrying thought occurs to him: they hadn’t found any corpses after that first night (other than Frank’s). Could be that the monsters need to burn for longer to die, or it could be that the fire only weakens them. One way or another, they have to try. He makes a mental note to add holy oil into the mix. 

Suddenly, a crash from the living room hijacks his attention. He can hear Mrs Liu screaming, and Kenny yelling “Sam, run, they’re inside!”

Adrenaline kicks his brain into high gear. With the lighter still in his right hand, he grabs a can of deodorant with his left and runs towards the noise.

The monsters are coming from two sides, having broken through the door and a window, surrounding Kenny and his mom. Sam doesn’t waste time: he holds up the lighter towards the nearest one and sprays the deodorant over it. The aerosol ignites instantly, forming a fireball that has the creature shrieking and backing away. He aims at the other one, the intense flame once again hitting its target. 

“C’mon!”, he shouts, having cleared the way, and runs towards the back door with the Lius following closely behind.

With the remaining monsters hot on their heels, they hurry to the next house and bang on the door. The neighbours hesitate to open it for long enough that it’s a close call - they only just manage to shut it against the oncoming horde. 

“Jesus”, Kenny gasps. “How the hell did they get past the talisman?!” 

Sam would like to know that too.

Chapter Text

With dawn on the horizon, they all breathe a sigh of relief. It had been a tense night, the uncertainty of whether talismans were still protecting them keeping everyone awake. Sam’s impatient to get back to the Liu house and figure out what went wrong, because according to Kenny, their talisman was by the door, same as always, and all the windows were shut.

He steps through the torn down door, through the glass shards, and looks at the rune-inscribed rock. It’s in its usual place, but something strikes him as odd. He blinks a few times, eyes Sahara-dry from not sleeping, before he notices it - the etchings look fresh instead of weathered, and when he reaches out to touch, their edges are sharp. Someone made this one recently.

“Hey, Kenny?”, he calls out. “You didn’t try to duplicate the talisman, did you?”

The deputy steps inside, brow furrowed. “‘Course not. No one’s dumb enough to risk it.”

“Well apparently someone was”, Sam says, holding up the replica.

Walking out, his pulse does a pirouette as he spots Dean hurrying to meet him. “What happened? I saw the windows were busted.”

Sam shows him the fake talisman. “Looks like the real one was switched out for this. It’s brand new.”

***

Dean is beyond pissed off, he’s positively livid. He finally has something towards which to direct that destructive energy that’s been building since yesterday, and so help him fancy Moses, he’s going to do it. 

He ignores Sam’s meek attempts at getting him to calm down, and keeps marching until he’s bursting into the sheriff’s station. "What the honest fuck is wrong with your people?” 

"Dean..."

"Shut up, Sam." Turning back to Boyd, he fires off, "Why the hell are we bothering to keep everyone alive when they're working against us??"

"Hey, what is your problem?" Boyd pushes off his desk and gets up, gearing up to fight back.

"This!" Dean fumes, pointing at the rock. "This is my fucking problem, sheriff!"

"The talisman? What -"

"Take a closer look", he grits out.

Boyd does as he takes it in hand, running his fingers over the stone. He frowns. "This is new. I don't know if it would work."

"Oh, I can tell you: it doesn't!" Dean is seconds away from blowing a gasket, holding onto his diminishing chill by the very tips of his fingers. "Someone replaced the one in the Liu house with this useless piece of shit! My brother could’ve been killed!"

Boyd stares at them in shock. "That's... Never happened before. People here help each other."

"Yeah. I can see that”, Dean says, words dripping with sarcasm.

"I can't think of anyone who would do this. We've been in this together for years."

"Not all of you. The people from the bus just got here."

Boyd curses. "Randall. That paranoid fuck has been ranting about this being some kind of conspiracy."

Dean can feel that fire under his skin that only violence can clear out. Boyd is saying something about needing to talk to them, but he’s already turning on his heel and storming out.

***

He gets to Randall, grabs him by the lapels, and slams him against the wall. 

“You fucker,” Dean’s words are vitriol, and the accompanying look could melt plastic. He pulls out the fake talisman. "This your doing?? You almost got people killed!" 

The prick has the audacity to snort. “Oh come on! You know how crazy that sounds? The talismans are a bunch of bullshit, and I was gonna prove it."

Seeing no reason not to, Dean punches him. "You dumb son of a bitch."

It does nothing to knock some sense into him. “Hey, you can’t blame me. What proof is there that any of that is real?”

“What proof? Do you want the list alphabetised, you stupid fuck?” Dean’s eaten cheeseburgers more intelligent than this guy.

“So you’re just gonna believe whatever they tell you? They could all be in on it!”

"Oh shut up before I punch you again." He takes a deep breath, realizing the futility of trying to convince him. Arguing with an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon: no matter how good your moves are, the bird will just shit on the board and strut around like it won. “You better fall in line and do as you’re told from now on. Unless you wanna end up ripped to shreds like wrapping paper on Christmas.” With that final remark, he stalks off. 

He’s barely stepped a foot outside when the Anghkooey kids show up again, same old spiel. Dean’s had it with this day. “Jesus, alright. Not sure how to make it clear that I already got the message without hiring a sky-writer or a marching band.”

Sam catches up to him then, with Boyd in tow. Pulse coming back down into two digits, Dean mutters, “That moron and his room-temperature IQ. I should’ve drop-kicked the teeth out of his mouth.”

Boyd derails those plans though. “Hey! We have more urgent shit to discuss. What I was trying to tell you back there, is that we managed to kill one of those things last night!”

***

It’s still fuck o’clock in the morning, so you can’t blame Dean for taking a second to process the goddamn rollecoaster his life has turned into. After yesterday, driving around aimlessly in the Impala and drinking himself to sleep with crappy booze had been a smidge of normality that only accentuated how weird everything else is. He hasn’t yet decided what to feel about Sam drinking demon blood (Demon blood! Christ), and now this.

They follow the sheriff to the station where they can talk in private. Although it’s essentially good news, Boyd doesn’t seem too keen on telling everyone about it.

“So, what are we waiting for?” Dean asks, “If you know how to do it, why aren’t we on our way to take out the rest of them?”

Boyd grumbles, gesturing for them to sit down. “It’s not that simple. For one thing, I’m not sure how to do it again. But let me start from the beginning.”

Dean ignores the looks Sam keeps throwing his way with the frequency of dogs barking in New Jersey. He’s only got so much mental energy to spare, and the case is easier to process - which is saying a lot, given how complicated it is.

“Last night, a fight broke out at Colony House, and my son Ellis was stabbed”, Boyd starts off, his expression hard. “They took a big risk driving him to the med center - barely made it. But he needed a blood transfusion, and although I’m the same blood type, I couldn’t risk it with the worms.” He blows out a breath. “It was, uh, a tense situation. You can imagine how crazy I sounded to the others.”

Dean’s heard crazier shit, and he’d appreciate a decrease in blood-related plot-points, thank you very much.

“Anyway, that’s when it occurred to me. To transfer it to one of the monsters. I had no idea if it would work, but goddamnit I had to try.”

“You managed to infect it?” Sam’s eyes glint with hope, like a Christmas ornament in the candlelight. It’s distracting as fuck.

Boyd nods. “I cut my hand and the thing’s throat, pressed ‘em together, and said that shit about my blood being his blood now - for a moment nothing happened. But then it just fell down, all shrivelled up and ugly. Hasn’t gotten up since.”

“Christ on a bicycle.” Dean can’t believe it. Some random curse from a weird old guy is the one thing they know for sure kills these monsters? For the fuckteenth time, this case surprises him.

“So you can see how it’s not something we can repeat.” Boyd wrings his hands. “But Kristi wants to do an autopsy, see what that can tell us.”

***

The creature looks grotesque now that it’s dead, like whatever it was doing to seem human is gone. Dean’s seen that mug his first time in the caves, but everyone else is understandably thrown off by it. Kristi’s hands have the faintest tremor as she puts on her gloves, takes the scalpel and makes a Y-cut, opening up the corpse. Then she pauses, looking more confused than a frog in a desert. “It’s human.”

“What?”

“I mean, the organs, their positioning, everything is like ours. Except it’s all dry.”

Sam clears his throat. “There are a number of monsters with humanoid anatomy. A lot of the time, coroners can’t tell the difference.”

She blinks at him, taking that in, before shaking her head minutely. “Yeah, sure. That might as well be true.” 

Dean scratches his chin. “Well I’m no expert, but wha’d’ya say we crack open the brainpan? Maybe there’s something funky in there.”

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to cut through bone?” Kristi raises her eyebrows. “I don’t have the right tools for that. And before you say you’ll just bash its head in - that wouldn’t leave us a lot to analyze.”

Dean makes a ‘fair enough’ expression. 

“Damn it”, she curses. “I thought we could use its blood to kill the others, but there’s nothing liquid in here! How the hell?!”

The thing does look like its insides were mummified. 

“It’s not fair,” Kristi says, her eyes filling up. “Every step forward takes us two steps back.” She looks at the cadaver with helpless rage. “God damn you!” And then she’s punching at it like a Halloween-themed boxing bag, her hands hitting without any coordination at every syllable. “Fucking - fuck - stupid - fucking - bastard - fu-”

“Wait, Kristi, stop!” Sam grabs her arm, pointing at the desiccated mess on the table, where a yellow liquid has started spreading through the organs.

“Bile”, Kristi sniffles, stunned. “That’s bile.”

“Well, we can use that, can’t we?” Boyd speaks up. “It’s liquid.”

They all glance at each other, and since nobody seems to have a better idea, Kristi springs into motion to capture it in a vial before it soaks in.

“Bingo bango,” Dean grins, determined to view this as a win. “And people say nothing productive comes out of anger. Good job, doc.”

She gives him a sheepish half-smile as she plugs up the vial. “But the problem is getting close enough to try it out.”

“Not really”, Sam says, turning to Dean. “Remember witch-killing bullets?”

***

Coating the bullets with the creature’s bile, Sam suddenly realizes he’s not shaking anymore. There’s still some nausea, but it’s more likely to do with the foul odor than anything else. He wonders if the accelerated healing of this place extends to withdrawals too. It’s still cold comfort to him, since Dean hasn’t so much as acknowledged him outside of working the case. 

“You think this will work?”, the sheriff asks, watching the process.

Dean pats him on the shoulder. "That's what hunting is all about: finding a way out when it doesn't seem like there is one." 

Sam hopes that applies to them as well. God, he’s way too old to be this emo.

The door flies open, and a young man that Sam vaguely recognizes as one of the people from the bus comes in, panting. “Uh, Boyd? Something weird just happened, I thought you should know.” The front of his shirt is soaked in a way that doesn’t look like sweat. “I had a dream that I was in a bathtub, and some creepy-looking lady was trying to drown me.” He takes a few quick breaths. “Then I woke up, and I was coughing up water. What the hell?”

What the hell, indeed. 

“It’s okay, Elgin, sit down”, Boyd offers, “Just breathe and tell us everything. What did she look like?”

Elgin opens his mouth to answer, but he’s interrupted by a loud buzzing sound. It seems to be coming from the basement, where they left the creature’s corpse. With a look of alarm, Sam and Dean jump to their feet and rush down.

The sight they find when they open the door isn’t what they could have expected: there are large bugs crawling out of the body and swarming in the air above it. Sam’s brain is busy swearing in three different modern languages and two dead ones, but Dean’s sense of self-preservation makes a rare appearance, and he slams the door closed. 

“Dude,” he gulps.

Sam makes a beeline back upstairs, where the others are nervously waiting, his brother following suit. “Okay, so there are some kind of insects in the corpse. Probably cicadas, I didn’t get a good look.”

“Doesn’t matter what they are,” Dean says. “We gotta burn that thing, stat."

The door swings open again. “Boyd!” Kenny walks in, dishevelled. “This might sound insane, but I had this bizarre dream.” Sam doesn’t like where this is going. “I was in the kitchen with my mom, and suddenly there were bugs in the pot. One of them jumped up on my arm and burned me. And when I woke up -”, he holds up his arm, where there’s a big red blister.

"Now our fucking dreams can hurt us?!", Marielle asks, voice reaching a pitch that he thought only Ariana Grande and dog whistles were capable of.

Dean steps up, holding up his arms. “Okay, nobody panic. We gotta focus on what we can do, and that’s torching that fucker downstairs, alright?”

Sam inches the door open warily, and he’s stumped once again. “I don’t see them.”

“What?” Dean pushes past into the room. The bugs are gone. “How…? We closed the damn door!”

They turn at Kristi’s sharp inhale. “The air-vents. They must have gotten out through there.”

***

The sun is well-past its zenith by the time they’ve built a pyre. They soak the monster’s body in gasoline and watch it burn, mindful to stand upwind. At some point, Dean notices that Boyd’s gaze has wandered away, and he does seem to be doing too well. 

“What’s wrong?”

The sheriff shakes his head. “Other than everything, you mean? Well, I’ve been seeing things, and not while dreaming.”

Dean thinks back to the Anghkooey children. “What kind of things?”

Boyd hesitates a moment. “It’s that music box. It keeps appearing, and sometimes the ballerina on top of it is there, except as a real person. Once she tried to choke me.”

Not what Dean was expecting. 

Boyd misunderstands his silence. “Maybe I’m just losing it.”

“Hey, just ‘cause someone likes being covered with chocolate, that don't make 'em the Easter Bunny,” Dean quips. “Considering everything else that’s been going on, I think your thing is pretty par for the course.”

Boyd chuckles. “You remind me of an army buddy of mine. Always kept the morale up.” He pats Dean’s back. “It’s a good trait to have in tough situations.”

Dean shrugs non-committantly. "Sometimes the only way out or up is to build your own ladder."

***

With the fire dying down, a sense of expectation fills the air. Tonight they’ll try out the bullets, and with a bit of luck, have one less problem on their hands. Dean fully intends to kick those monster asses so hard they taste the dirt on his boots. So maybe he’s sublimating, sue him. It’s better than thinking about anything Sam-related and driving himself up the wall.

Of course it’s in that moment, when he’s finally worked himself up to some faint semblance of calm, that the day decides it’s not done being a shitshow.

“Help! Somebody help me!,” a guy is screaming, running towards them, his clothes bloody like he rolled around a butcher’s table. His eyes are wild and desperate as he heads towards Boyd.

“Reggie, Reggie, what happened?”

The guy - Reggie - looks like he’s having a breakdown. “It’s my wife - you have to come! Oh God, oh my God!”

Christ on a breadstick, Dean thinks, there’s more fires to put out around here than a 5-year-old’s birthday party where everyone has matches.

***

“She just went for a nap while I was making dinner, I don’t understand what happened”, Reggie rants as he leads them into the house. “There’s so much blood!” 

That’s an understatement. The woman’s body is torn open, similar to the monster’s victims, except it shouldn’t be possible in the daytime. Moreover, her cheek looks like something ripped through it from the inside.

“Reggie, we need you to tell us everything”, Boyd tries to calm down the inconsolable man. He hiccups and sniffles before getting the words out. “I, I came up to wake her, but she - she wouldn’t wake up! She was saying nonsense in her sleep, and then they -” he breaks off with a sob. “They just burst out of her!”

“What did?”

“A swarm of bugs! They ripped her apart and flew away!”

Boyd looks at Dean, equally disturbed. “What was she saying? Reggie? Hey, look at me, man. We need to know exactly what she said.”

“It was weird, something like ‘they touch, they steal, they break’,” he chokes out through tears. “ ‘No one here is free. Here they come, they come for three, unless you stop the melody’.”

Kenny curses. “I’ve heard that before. In my dream, just before I saw the bugs, the phone rang and a voice said exactly that.”

Dean runs a hand over his face. “Okay, we gotta warn everyone they can’t sleep tonight. Not until we figure out what the hell is going on.”

Boyd nods. “Best we separate: there’s only an hour of daylight left.”

Chapter Text

Sam makes it back to the house just as the last remnants of sunlight are dipping below the horizon. Dean glances up from where he’s untying his boot laces, and immediately breaks eye contact as if it burned him.

"You okay?," Sam risks asking. 

"Nothing I can't handle." (Translation: Shitty.)

After being awake for the entirety of last night, and facing the prospect of no shut-eye tonight either, Sam’s impulse control is about as good as the current world economy. So while he would love to give Dean his time and space, he’s got no patience for it at the moment. 

“How long are we not gonna talk about it?”

Dean’s eyes shift around the room, like he’ll find the answer on a nearby shelf. “ ‘Bout what?,” he says finally, the stubborn bastard. 

Sam just needs to know where he stands. If Dean really hates him now, he’ll try to deal with it, but the uncertainty is what’s killing him. “The demon blood, for starters.”

His brother snorts. “I mean, you were right before: I’m definitely not happy about it.” He paces back and forth, searching for words. “I’d ask you what the hell you were thinking, but you already answered that one.” Blowing out a breath, he pinches the bridge of his nose. “It’s fucked up, is what it is.” For a terrifying moment, Sam thinks this is it: this is when his brother disowns him, tells him he’s better off dead. 

The next words out of Dean’s mouth are the exact opposite, though, “But you’re still my brother. And hell, I make dumb decisions all the time, so who am I to judge? Considering everything else we’re dealing with, I can’t waste time giving you crap about it.”

Sam stares at him, not trusting his own ears. “I… You’re really just gonna let it slide?”

Dean steps right up to him then, like personal space is only a concept that lesser beings adhere to. “So what if you’ve got issues? I got subscriptions.” 

The air thickens, tenses up around whatever it is he isn’t saying. Sam’s breath catches somewhere between the back of his mouth and his collarbone. He looks at Dean’s perfect face, the way his pupils are blown out like spilled paint, and wonders how this is even real. 

Sensing the overthinking, Deans speaks up again. "Get over it, get busy living.”

The corner of Sam’s mouth quirks up. “Did you just quote Shawshank Redemption?” 

“Hey, it’s a good movie.”

Sam’s not sure what to say next; time stretches out, taffy-like. He feels like a compass needle, drawn in by the magnetic dust of Dean’s freckles. He brings their foreheads together, breathing the same air, letting his eyes slip shut. It’s not enough, but it has to be - Sam has to stop disappointing his brother. 

Except it’s Dean who tilts his head, pressing their lips together in a kiss as light and fleeting as the last lavender rays of evening over the hilltops. Sam's gotta be dreaming or something. He feels like bouncing his head off the nearest flat surface just to make sure.

He can’t let go, not now; when Dean moves back, he draws him back into a deep, desperate kiss laced with need and guilt and all those other beautifully fucked up things between them. It takes his breath away, metaphorically and literally. 

But it can’t last forever: eventually Dean’s angst acts up, and he wrenches himself free, shaking his head. There’s a gorgeous pink blush coloring his cheeks as he clears his throat. “That. That did not happen.” 

“Dean…”

“Sam. I said what I said.” His tone is a warning. He picks up his gun. “We should get going. Monsters to shoot and all that jazz.”

“Right”, Sam replies, figuring he’s pushed his luck enough for one day. And even with this whole mess of a case hanging above their heads like the sword of Damocles, he’s suddenly sure they’ll make it, seizing victory from loss, and if they end up with scars, that will only map their triumphs.

***

They walk out onto the porch, faintly illuminated by the lights from the house. Dean whistles like he calling a dog, “"Heeere fucker fucker fucker. Heeere fucker!" 

It’s a few minutes before they spot movement, several of the creatures creeping out from the trees, fake customer-service smiles in place.

“You think you can get rid of us?”, one of them asks.

Dean’s smirk is as cocky as ever. "You're small potatoes to me. And dude, I'm about to start mashing." He fires a flawless headshot, striking it right between the eyes.

The thing’s smile grows teeth. They watch in horror as the bullet falls right out, and the wound closes itself.

Fudgesticks. 

Sam looks back at Dean - his expression doesn't even live in the same solar system as the previous one.

They shoot a few more times, hoping it was just a poorly-coated bullet, but the monsters aren’t deterred. With a sense of disappointment and their backs against the door, they’re just about to retreat, when Sam grabs Dean’s sleeve. “Isn’t that Randall?”

The dumbass in question is walking in their direction, probably trying to prove the fakeness of the whole thing, when he stops dead in his tracks, arms flailing. It takes Sam a moment to realize it in the darkness, but then the motion clicks, “Shit, the bugs got to him.”

Dean hesitates, glancing to the monsters on their left and back to Randall on the right. “We really gonna risk it for that prick?”

“Dean.”

Meanwhile, Randall has tripped and fallen on his back. “Ah! Get away! Fuck! Get off of me!”

“Ugh, fine”, Dean mutters, and they bolt over there, grabbing him and rushing back to the house. One of the creatures is already blocking their path, but Sam puts all his strength into kicking it in the sternum and it staggers back, domino-ing the next one as they crash down. Dean, who’s unceremoniously dropped Randall inside in the meantime, pulls Sam through the door just in time to avoid the next onslaught.

Randall is convulsing on the floor, no sign of the bugs, but his eye balls are completely white and he’s screaming his lungs out. 

“The fuck do we do now?” Dean asks. 

“Get him on the couch”, Sam replies. “I just hope the bugs didn’t get inside already.”

***

Randall doesn’t wake up all night, nor the next morning. All he does is occasionally break into a screaming fit, remaining unresponsive. On the bright side, he doesn’t get filleted from the inside out either, so there’s that. They decide to have Sam stay with him while Dean goes to tell Boyd of the newest development in this horror circus.

The sheriff’s station is already busy despite the early hour. People are talking over each other while Boyd tries to de-escalate the situation. 

“Not to pile on the crap,” Dean raises his voice, getting their attention, “but we got a situation. Randall got attacked by those bugs last night, and now he’s in some kind of screaming coma.”

Jim goes pale. “The same thing happened to my daughter Julie.”

“And Mari,” Kristi adds weakly, her face marked with tear tracks.

“Also, the bullets didn’t work.” Man, Dean really hates being the bearer of bad news.

“What bullets?”

Boyd ignores Jim’s question and addresses Dean instead. “I had an idea. We take Sara to those ruins I told you about, see if she can get something useful. Because all of this started after I got back from there, and she has a connection to this place.”

“What about my daughter?” Jim insists.

Boyd’s expression is sympathetic but resolute. “We can’t help her or the others until we know what’s going on. For now, just keep an eye on her.”

***

When Dean returns, Randall is still out of it, like God during World War II, so it’s safe to assume he won’t be going anywhere. He gets Sam and meets Boyd at Father Khatri’s church, where Sara had been staying since their trip into the woods. He can’t imagine the townsfolk were too welcoming to her after she’d killed people at the voices’ behest.

The five of them walk through the trees in tense silence, until they reach the place. Even calling it ruins is generous: there’s just one stone arch still standing, what used to be an entrance, and a few pieces of walls visible in the vegetation. With a troubled expression, Sara walks through the arch, and immediately clutches her ears, crying out in pain.

“I can hear it!”

She falls to her knees and they rush to her side as she struggles to get the words out. “It’s… laughing at you”, she tells Boyd, shaking. “For bringing it to town.” A scream tears from her throat and her nose starts bleeding. “It wants us to suffer.” Her breathing is erratic, tears springing to her eyes. With a quivering voice, she continues, “They will die. They will die and then it will be unstoppable.” She whimpers, doubling over.

“Sara! Sara, hey, look at me!” Boyd gets her upright again, holding her shoulders. “How do we stop it?”

Sara’s eyes are wild and frightened, darting around before she answers. “The music box! It’s here, we have to destroy it. We have to -” She cuts off with an agonised scream, her nosebleed getting worse. 

“Okay, that’s enough!” Sam wraps his arms around her and gets her out of the ruins. She seems to be on the verge of collapse.

Letting Sara catch her breath against a tree, they spread out and start rifling through the leaves and the dirt. Coming up empty-handed, they have Father Khatri take Sara to the med center and return with shovels. But even after hours of digging, there’s nothing even remotely resembling a music box.

***

“Sonuvabitch!” 

With Sam trailing after him, Dean marches into the empty, dilapidated church and kicks a chair. Then another one. He needs something to shoot, something to punch, a real fight instead of this constant mind-fuck.

“We have to think about this. Going in blind got us nothing, so we should figure it out first,” his brother says.

“No, Sam, we don’t. We keep hopping from one theory to the next, thinking it’s gonna be the right one. But you know what? I’m starting to think the grass on the other side is greener because it's fertilized - with bullshit!” His blood is roaring through his veins, frustrated adrenaline useless without a proper target. 

“So, what? You wanna just go up against these things unprepared like it’s our first night here? Have we learned nothing?”

“Looks like it!” Dean shouts. “Tell me one thing that could actually get us out of here!”

Sam crosses his arms. “And how is you throwing a tantrum gonna help?”

Dean gets in his face. If Sam is trying to piss him off further, he’s doing a fine job. “Fuck you,” he grits out. “I’ve been holding it together for too damn long. I’d like to see how you’d do with an undead kindergarten following you around every day! And you haven’t exactly been making it easy on me either!”

Sam’s mouth is pressed into a thin line, nostrils flaring, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Forget it,” Dean turns away, with no intention of carrying on that line of conversation.

“Oh no you don’t,” Sam grabs his arm and spins him back around. “You got something to say, go ahead!”

His brother is trying to drive him crazy. That’s gotta be it. Why else would he acknowledge it? Like it isn’t bad enough they’ve already crossed a couple state lines worth of wrong, now they should also talk about it? 

“You know damn well what I mean, Sam,” he growls.

His back hits the wall faster than he can blink. Sam crowds against him, cutting off his cursing by shoving his tongue into his mouth. Sam’s tongue. In Dean’s mouth. His brain short-circuits, the way it often does these days. His hands seem to have gone on an autonomy strike too, because he sure as hell doesn’t remember telling them to bury themselves in Sam’s hair. 

After what seems like forever and simultaneously not long enough, Sam breaks the kiss. “You mean this? Hmm? This what you got a problem with, Dean?” 

That’s definitely Dean's heart in his throat. Possibly his lungs, too. That’s not a question, it’s a goddamn mine field; he certainly feels like he’s in the middle of one, with Sam’s breath hot on his wet lips. There’s nothing he can say that won’t damn him even more than he already is. Christ, what would Dad say?

It’s that last thought that terrifies him enough to push Sam off, and run out of there like hellhounds are on his heels.

***

The sun is low in the sky and Dean is still none the wiser about what his next move should be. His head is more jumbled than a pair of headphones carelessly shoved into a pocket.

“Hey, I was looking for you,” Boyd says, and Dean realizes he’d walked to the sheriff’s station without realizing it. 

“Not sure how I can help,” Dean mumbles, feeling useless.

“Actually, I might be able to help you. I’ve been thinking about what had happened in that dungeon, and remembered something: after Martin died and I was looking for a way out, my torch blew out. That was when it all disappeared and I was in the ruins.”

Dean’s eyes widen. “You mean we need the torch?”

“Yes,” Boyd answers, already walking, “I left it in the truck where I found you and Victor. If we hurry we can just make it before sundown.”

***

Dean already feels better now that he has a clear objective in mind: get the torch, destroy the music box, save people. Easy peasy. As smooth as an oiled up penguin on a teflon slip&slide.

Of course he should have known that’s not how his life works.

The moment they exit the truck, the sound of a gun cocking puts him on high alert. Slowly, he and Boyd put their hands up, turning to see who has them at gunpoint. 

Dean blinks in disbelief: it’s Reggie, of all people.

“This is all your fault, Boyd”, his voice shakes, and so does the hand holding the gun. “If you hadn’t gone into the woods, my wife would still be alive!”

“Easy now,” the sheriff tries to diffuse the tension. “I get that you’re hurting, but this isn’t solving anything.”

“You brought that thing back here,” Reggie cries. “All you do is get people killed!”

Boyd swallows, the accusation clearly hitting him hard, but he keeps his voice calm. “Reggie. Put the gun down. Let’s talk about this. You don’t really want to shoot me.”

But Reggie looks beyond being talked down. “No! You did this! You’re the reason she’s gone!” 

The sound of a gunshot echoes through the clearing, closely followed by a second one.

Dean is the only one left standing. 

He crouches down to Boyd, applying pressure to the wound on his side. “Damn it! I should’ve shot sooner. You okay?”

Boyd’s breathing harshly, but he nods. “We gotta hurry.”

“No no no,” Dean interrupts, “We need to get you to Kristi. I’ll deal with the music box after that.”

“It’s getting… Dark,” the sheriff says through gritted teeth.

“You let me worry about that.”

Chapter Text

With the torch in hand, Dean puts his ass into gear and runs to the ruins. He can only hope it’s really the missing ingredient, and not a mere coincidence. This better work, because daylight is disappearing faster than Dean’s dignity at a karaoke bar.

He lights the torch, and after a beat, the dungeon appears around him. The walls look centuries old, covered in grime and gloomy in the firelight. “Alright, where are you?”

As if answering his question, the eerie music starts up, notes as squeaky as rusty hinges on an old door. Following the sound, his eyes land on the music box, sitting innocuously in the corner. The moment he walks towards it, something in the room shifts.

“Dean.”

He turns to see his brother there, hand held out as if to stop him. “Wait. What if you’re wrong? What if destroying it makes everything worse?”

Dean shakes his head, “Sara said it.”

“And who told her? The evil thing that’s doing this. It wants the box destroyed. Dean, I'm begging you, let's stop and think this through."

Dean hesitates: that does make an uncomfortable kind of sense.

Sam takes a step towards him. “Boyd said once it’s like this place feeds on pain. But I think he’s wrong, I think what it feeds on is hope.”

Dean narrows his eyes at him. "So you're saying we should just give up?" 

Sam steps closer still, framing Dean's face with his hands. "We have each other,” he breathes. “Isn't that what matters most? Forget about everyone else." 

He’s pulling out the puppy eyes, goddamnit; Dean’s always been a sucker for the puppy eyes.

In the quiet, he can almost hear his own heartbeat - the way it stutters and skips when Sam leans in.

A shred of reason finds him at the last moment, and he jerks back. 

"You're not my brother," Dean says, voice Antarctica-cold. 

As if Sam would just give up on saving people. He can’t believe he almost let his own fucked up feelings trip him up like that.

Not waiting for the thing to respond, he spins back towards the box and smashes the torch against it - best to break and burn it just to be safe. The music cuts off in a distorted high-pitched whine, making the air quiver; for a moment, reality around him shimmers like a mirage, the image shaking before bursting.

Then he's standing alone in the ruins again.

***

Dean is hauling ass through the trees to get back to town. So far, there’s been no sign of the things that go bump in the night - if he were more of an optimist, he might think destroying the music box got rid of them too. But he ain’t that lucky.

Just then, a figure steps out from behind a tree: a brown-haired boy of about 10 stands there, the look in his eyes much older than his appearance.

“Geez, am I a magnet for ghost kids?” Dean gripes. “I guess you’re the infamous Boy in White.”

The kid doesn’t acknowledge that, instead gesturing for Dean to follow him.

Even as he does, he’s not about to miss this opportunity, “You wanna tell me what the hell is going on here? How do we stop it all?”

Silence goes on for long enough he thinks he won’t get an answer, but then the boy speaks, still walking ahead, “I tried before. People never listen.”

“Well, I am. All ears here, buddy.”

His ghostly companion comes to a stop, turning to face him. “The lighthouse isn’t real, you know.”

“Who in the what now?” Dean responds intelligently.

“It’s a light in the darkness, a metaphor for the salvation they were supposed to bring. And the hope of their salvation still, by those they beacon here.”

Well that’s even more confusing. “Who are they?”

The kid looks sad, eyes downcast. “Mother’s punishment doesn’t fit the crime. New people keep getting trapped here, and it’s not their fault.”

“Mother? You mean your mother?”

He’s not sure the boy is really listening - his eyes drift over to a nearby tree with a large hole in it. “She made one of these for me. It was a game of surprises, to see where I could get to. And if we ever had to run… But in the end it made no difference.” His gaze is distant, miles away.

Dean wants to ask more, but that’s when the monsters show up, their approach glacier-slow yet unavoidable. The Boy in White notices them too. 

“You must go,” he says, pointing at what Dean now realizes is a farway tree.

He peers inside: the hole is so deep he can’t see the bottom. Remembering Boyd falling into some kind of stone shaft, he hesitates. 

“You want me to jump down there? Dunno, I need my legs to run from my responsibilities and towards my impending doom. They're essential that way."

But the boy is gone, and the creatures are getting closer, smiling creepily as ever.

Dean raises his voice, “Just FYI, I wrecked your stupid music box. How do you like them apples?”

The thing’s smile falls for a moment - except it hasn’t actually made itself scarce, more like it retreated for reinforcements. 

“Bold of you to assume it’s ours. Even more bold to think you’ll live to tell about it.” It takes a step closer, teeth glinting in the moonlight. "I'm gonna tear out your windpipe and use it as a drinking straw."

Dean huffs. “As if.”

Not wasting another second, he jumps into the tree.

***

Sam’s been pacing the living room restlessly for what feels like forever and a day. He keeps telling himself that Dean’s just spending the night somewhere else after the thing at the church, but his nervous system doesn’t seem to be accepting that. Last time, Dean at least left a message about where he was. What if something happened to him?

His worry-wheel gets interrupted by Randall sitting up, panting, eyes finally normal again. “What the fuck? What the fuck?” He looks around, panicky. “What kind of drugs did you people slip me?”

Sam ignores the question; if Randall’s woken up, Julie and Marielle must also have. Which means the music box is destroyed. Did Dean do it? Where is he then? 

He stations himself next to the window and waits.

***

Dean lands on his feet, knees almost buckling with the force of impact. After a moment of re-orienting himself, he realizes he’s back in town, and breaks into a sprint.

Within minutes he reaches the house, the door already swinging open before him.

“Dean!” Sam has his arms around him the moment he’s inside, clinging like an overly friendly octopus.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m in one piece,” he extracts himself from the hug awkwardly, even if what he wants most is to stay like that forever.

“Oh so he gets to run around at night?” Randall’s awake, oh joy. “Funny how the rules change whenever it’s convenient. What’s really going on here?”

Dean shoots him a glare. “You’re welcome, asshole: I just saved your life. And in case it still hasn’t gotten through your thick skull, what’s going on here is something supernatural.”

Randall snorts. “Yeah right. That was one bad trip you had me on. What was it, LSD? Mushrooms? DMT?”

Dean’s on his last nerve with this fool. "My answer hasn't changed. Ask me again and the number of your teeth will."

Turning back to Sam, he goes on, “I saw the Boy in White, not that he told me anything very useful. But it sounds like it’s his mother doing this.”

“A witch?” Sam frowns.

“Probably. And I told you so.” He takes off his jacket, mulling it over. “We should check out those bottle trees Jade’s been obsessing over.”

Sam nods. “First thing in the morning.”

***

Come sunrise, they’re traipsing through the forest, with only a vague sense of what clues they might find. Jade hadn’t figured out the meaning behind those numbers, if there is any meaning at all. It could just be they were placed there by someone else who was stuck in this place, but since his talk with the Boy in White, Dean’s hinging his bets on trees being relevant somehow.

Sam pauses, and a moment later Dean hears it too - a violin playing in the distance. After the whole music box business, he could do without any more weird music, please and thank. 

They make their way towards the noise, hands on their guns, futile as they might be.

The bottle tree comes into view, colorful glass reflecting sunlight in a way that might be beautiful if it were anywhere else. And under the tree, playing the violin is Jade. 

Okay, no supernatural shit, Dean breaths a sigh of relief.

Too soon, as it turns out, because with the next note, a gust of wind picks up out of nowhere, circling the tree and coalescing into a vortex right next to it. The dry leaves swirl around, and when they fall, a figure is standing there. Her dress looks at least a century or two out of date, and there are a few gray strands in her up-do. There’s a faint shimmer around her that Dean’s come to associate with ghosts.

Jade must have noticed her too, because he stops playing and takes a startled step back. The spectre flickers and vanishes.

Dean heads towards him, “You don't listen very well, do you?" 

Recovering, Jade glances at him, smirking, "I listen extremely well, I simply choose to ignore." 

“I told you to come to us before doing anything stupid.” 

He puts his chin in his hand, as if thinking. "Hold on, lemme check my personality. Hmm, nope, turns out I would never do that in a million years." Cheeky bastard.

“How did you know to do that?” Sam steps in before Dean can put Jade in his place.

His expression is all smug pride. “I finally solved it: the numbers aren’t years, they’re notes. And as soon as I started arranging them, this melody popped into my head.”

“Oh yeah, totally normal stuff,” Dean huffs. “What made you think it was a good idea to play it?”

“Hey, I came out here, didn’t I?” Jade answers defensively. “So if something bad happened, nobody else would be affected.”

“Right, ‘cause you have so much experience with the blast radius of mysterious evil music.”

“Dean,” his brother interrupts. “I think he should keep playing.”

Did Sam get drunk and not tell him about it? “And how exactly is summoning whatever that was going to get us out of here?”

“I just think we could find out more if -”

Not waiting for them to stop bickering, Jade’s already playing again. 

It’s a strange kind of music, something both loving and heartbreaking about it. The melody fills the air like it’s squeezing out everything else and making the wind blow with its sheer vibration. 

She shows up again, standing motionless until the last drawn out note gradually fades. This time she doesn’t disappear, though. And if Dean’s not mistaken, there are unshed tears in her eyes.

They stare expectantly, unsure what happens next.

“It was a lullaby," she says eventually, voice cracking as if from disuse. “For my son. It’s been so long since I heard it.”

She looks at each of them appraisingly, head tilted in thought. “I suppose I owe you boys some answers.”

Chapter Text

“It all started such a long time ago,” the woman’s ghost says, looking out of place in the soft morning light. “One harsh winter, after the crops had failed. The town was starving: you could see the bones underneath people’s skin. Their hair started falling out, and despair crept into their hearts. I tried to help, but it was beyond what white magic could fix. The earth was tired, laid bare by those who just took and took without respite.”

“As weeks turned into months, the townsfolk became angrier. ‘You’re a witch’, they said, ‘there has to be something you can do’. They would not take no for an answer.” She sighs, closing her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, her expression is stony. “That night, they broke into my house, and took my boy captive. I would not tell them anything, so they searched through my belongings until they found it.” She shudders. “The Black Grimoire. I thought I could keep it out of the wrong hands, but I was a fool: I should have burned it.”

“I told them to get out, that they had what they came for. The blacksmith who was holding my son pushed him away with too much force. He -” She covers her mouth, breath stuttering. “He hit his head when he fell. He didn’t wake up.”

They touch, they steal, they break. Sam gasps as realization hits him. The witch continues her story.

“They summoned a pagan god, Anghkooey, who could grant them eternal summer, bountiful harvest, and exceptional health. But the abundance would come at a terrible cost. They had to sacrifice what was most precious: their children. It’s disgusting to even consider such a thing,” she spits, eyes aflame with hatred. “They say an eye for an eye makes the world blind, but sometimes it’s better not to see what you’re doing. I knew which ritual they’d do, and I knew how to make them regret it.”

“The altar was to be made of several stones: it was laughably easy to replace one of them, corrupting the spell into something even more sinister.” She tilts her chin up defiantly. “You may call it vengeance: I call it justice. For what they did… They tied up those children in the caves, like cattle, leaving them to starve. There’s always symmetry in magic, you see: they had to starve so their wretched parents wouldn’t. Then, when the little ones breathed their last breath, they watered the crops with their blood. And so the deal was sealed.”

“What they didn’t know is that they themselves would never reap those crops, nor feel the everlasting sunlight on their faces. The stone I replaced made sure of that. They turned just as monstrous on the outside as they were on the inside, punished for their vile and unnatural act. Unable to die or leave, slowly tortured for eternity.”

“But why do they kill people?” Sam can’t refrain from asking.

The witch eyes him. “Does it not occur to you? They cannot stand to see what they think is rightfully theirs be enjoyed by strangers; the eternal summer and fertile land just outside their grasp. So they rip apart their innards, feral with envy.”

Or maybe they got desperate enough to think eating human flesh could sate their unending hunger, Sam thinks, but another question occurs to him at the same time. “So why are the crops rotten now?”

She shrugs. “It’s poisoned soil, cursed by the innocent blood it was soaked with. It was only a matter of time before Nature rejected the dark magic that was forced onto it.”

The wheels in his head keep turning. “That symbol Jade was seeing. Dean saw it in the caves too.”

“Yeah, only made up of tree roots,” Dean adds.

The witch nods. “It’s what became the first bottle tree. I did not want this to be forgotten. I knew eventually someone smart and caring enough to discover it would come. And they did. They made the second tree, but could not get to the answer before they themselves were butchered.”

“Hang on, there’s something I don’t get”, Dean speaks up. “The Boy in White is your son, right? But he said you made one of the farway trees for him. What about the others?”

She takes a deep breath. “Every tree is alive, but to make magic stick to it, you need more life force. The first tree was where I buried my dear husband; I thought it was sweet for his spirit to nourish it and provide some joy to our son. As for the others… You know they just left them there, in the caves? Not even a proper burial for their own offspring. So I did that, planting a sapling on each grave.”

They process that for a moment, before Sam pipes up again, “What about the music box?”

“You could say it was a form of living anti-theft system, awakened by those wretches stealing the Grimoire. It’s spelled to mentally torment thieves.”

“The ruins,” it dawns on Sam, “That was where you lived. So when Boyd ended up there, it latched onto him?” She nods. “And I’m guessing the crows we saw coming into town were your familiars?”

“Their young, darling. Crows are lamentably short-lived.”

“Why do the talismans work?” Dean asks.

“I had originally used them for a different purpose, but since the same runes were involved in the ritual, it’s enough of a repellent; magic seeks balance in all things.”

“And the voices Sara initially heard? Was that you?”

“No,” she replies. “Many people died here, and many of them had unfinished business.”

“So they are ghosts?”

“With a very limited understanding of magic. To think that another child sacrifice could cancel out the first - it’s quite ridiculous, honestly. They gained some mild clairvoyance through residual magic and thought themselves wise enough to have all the answers.”

Residual magic - that could have been what made the human-mimicking spiders in the forest; without the witch to guide it, it must have infused everything in the vicinity. Figuring it’s his turn to ask questions, Sam interjects. “Why do people keep getting stuck here?”

“A spell is place-bound, it doesn’t distinguish between individuals. I only intended for the original sinners to suffer, but I suppose it can’t be helped.”

“Excuse you?” Jade chimes in. “So we’re all screwed because you’re holding a grudge? It’s been - what - 200 years? Get over it already.”

The witch’s gaze is cold and piercing. “If it were only up to me, the town would remain unfindable: that’s why your little lightning machines don’t work. I’m not the one drawing you here.”

“Then who’s doing it?”

Before she can answer, Dean does it for her. “The children. They need someone to finally let them rest, don’t they?”

“You are clever after all,” she smirks. “Yes. From what I can tell, everyone here has a similarity or two to their parents, which is how I suppose you’re chosen.”

“So how do we free them? How do we get out of here?”

Her expression closes off. “You don’t. Doing that would let the monsters rest too, and I’m not letting that happen.”

Sam tenses. She’d been cooperative so far, indulging their curiosity, but it seems they might have to take her on, after all. He mentally curses himself for not bringing any salt or iron.

Chancing a glance at Dean, his eyes land on something else instead: a boy dressed in all-white emerging from the trees.

“Mom,” he says softly. 

The witch’s determined expression falters, her lower lip quivering with emotion.

“It’s alright, mom. You can let go.” He walks towards her with a peaceful smile. “Tell them.”

With bated breath, they watch her struggle to decide. A single tear rolls down her cheek, and like an avalanche set in motion, more follow. 

“Please,” the Boy in White adds.

She scrunches her eyes closed, suppressing a sob, but when she opens them again, there’s something more calm in her gaze. “Very well. But it won’t be easy.”

Dean smirks. “Lady, we wouldn’t know easy if it bit us in the ass. Lay it on us.”

“You’ll have to summon Anghkooey to kill him. That will break the deal, releasing the dead and alive alike. The Grimoire is buried in the talisman hut - it was the one place I knew they couldn’t lay their filthy hands on it again.”

Sam nods, “And how do we kill him?”

“That I don’t know,” she says, taking her son’s hand, and they both fade away in a white glow.

***

“Fucking Bela,” Dean sighs, “If we still had the Colt, this would be a piece of cake.”

“Mhm,” Sam agrees, distracted with putting together spell ingredients for the summoning ritual. He looks like he’s hosting a really weird cooking show - not that Dean’s gonna risk saying that out loud.

“So, what do we know about ganking pagan gods?” he asks his beer, since Sam isn’t likely to contribute right now. “There’s a knife coated in the blood of something, but we don’t have any lore on this Anghkooey guy, so we could just end up pissing him off. What else? Evergreen stakes worked on that freaky Christmas couple, but that was probably just them. Maybe his own weapon? But how do we get it from him? If he even has one…”

“I read about one that could be killed by decapitation with an iron ax,” Sam mumbles, still not looking up from the table filled with herbs, bones, and other miscellanea. “No guarantee for that being universal, though.”

Dean blows out a frustrated breath. “Dandy. Just dandy.” He takes a swig and almost spits it out when an idea strikes him. “Shit, how did I forget? The scarecrow bastard! We got him by burning down his sacred tree!”

Sam’s head snaps up at that. “The first bottle tree! If the kids were in the caves underneath, it could be connected to the deity!”

“Good enough for me,” Dean concludes, finishing off his beer. “You got everything we need?”

“Yup, all here.”

“Alright, let’s get this show on the road!”

***

The smell of incense is thick in the air, afternoon soon dappling through the branches, and there’s a faint clinking of bottles hanging from the tree - the day seems too pleasant and mundane for what is about to happen. 

Dean went ahead and doused the tree in gasoline beforehand. He wishes they could just get on with it and burn it, but the witch was very clear that they need to summon Anghkooey for this to work. He tightens his grip on the lighter as Sam adds the final spell ingredient to the bowl.

Almost instantly, the sky fills with dark storm clouds, casting everything in a dim, gloomy shade. Thunder roars on the horizon, and a bolt of lightning strikes the ground before them. When the flash dissipates, there’s a decrepit-looking old man in a cloak standing in that exact spot, right between them and the tree. His long gray beard sways in the wind, and his eyes reflect the stormy sky perfectly.

Well, there’s one thing they know about the dude now: he’s sure got a flair for the dramatic.

Dean marches forward, intending to push him out of his way, when he’s flung into the air like he weighs nothing. He lands painfully hard, just in time to see the geezer do the same to Sam with a flick of his wrist. Before he’s even gotten back on his feet, the lighter flies out of his hand, pulled by an invisible force.

Fuck.

“Dean! Sam!” He turns towards the voice to see Boyd on the edge of the clearing - Jade must have told him about the witch.

Double fuck. In fact, forget doubling the fucks, just straight-up supersize ‘em. The last thing they need is for him to get caught in the crossfire. This isn’t so much a mess as it is a nuclear disaster.

“We got this covered!” Dean yells, trying to be heard over the deafening noise from the sky, even though he doesn’t have much hope of the sheriff listening. Rain starts pelting down mercilessly, ice-cold on his face.

Focusing back on what he can control, he throws himself bodily towards the glint of metal where the lighter landed. Lightning flashes again, and in an instant his nerves feel like wires stripped of their insulation, just hanging out raw and open, firing off sparks in places that don't make any sense at all. It’s like his insides are being hollowed out with a rusty spoon.

He hears Sam calling his name before crying out in pain. Dean’s lungs keep punching out any air that comes in, but he forces his eyes open, crawling towards his brother. The rain is morphing into hail, but all Dean can think about is that Sam isn’t moving.

“Sammy? Sam! Sammy, talk to me, hey!” He shakes him but gets no response. The ice pellets might as well be crashing inside his ribcage, with the sense of cold dread that has his heart in a jack-rabbiting pace. No no no, please no, anything but this. Sam is his, goddamnit, this son of a bitch doesn’t get to take him away.

A shadow falls over him, obscuring what little light the clouds were letting through. He looks up to the expressionless wrinkled face of the pagan god. Without thinking, he pulls his gun and empties the entire clip at the thing, helpless rage coursing through his veins. It doesn’t so much as flinch, staring unblinkingly before slowly raising its withered hand. 

Dean’s fingers clench where he’s still holding onto Sam’s shoulder, like he can protect him with sheer willpower.

Suddenly, the figure above him screeches, convulsing as smoke rises from the folds of its cloak. Dean gapes, watching it burst into flames and rapidly crumble to an unrecognizable pile of ashes. The rain stops.

Blinking the wetness from his eyes, his vision refocuses on the tree, crackling in a blaze of fire. And a few steps away, there’s Boyd, hurrying towards them. “Molotov cocktails, baby. They always work!”

Sam groans, squirming under his palm, and Dean could weep from joy. He won’t, because this isn’t a telenovela, but he could. Instead he grins at Boyd, feeling more like himself already, "Our knight in shining armor. Where’d you leave your horse, tell me now so I don’t step in horseshit.”

The sheriff chuckles heartily, helping him get Sam to his feet. “You alright, big guy?”

When Sam nods, he turns to Dean,  "And you, you good?" 

"Golden. Let’s roll.”

***

The morning air is cold and clean, rain-sharp when Dean breathes in. No monsters showed their ugly mugs last night, so by now, Boyd must be holding a town meeting to tell everyone they can finally go home. 

Finishing his coffee, he gets up from his perch on the porch and eyes the front door. He should go in, talk to Sam already. He wavers between excited nerves, terrified nerves, and excited terror. Another minute goes by, before he tells himself to quit pussyfooting around and just do it.

As he walks in, Sam looks up, the faint light glancing off his skin like a kiss, and his eyes - flecks of green, brown, and gold confettied into a wide circle of midnight. His hair falls around his face in artful disorder. He looks like a wet-dream on drugs dipped in chocolate and rolled in money. Dean wants that image tattooed onto his brain.

“Um…” he says, because he doesn’t have an intelligent bone in his body.

“I’ve finished packing,” Sam says. “So we can blow this joint whenever you’re ready.”

“Yeah, totally,” Dean clears his throat. “Listen, Sammy, about uh, us… I mean, the thing with the… You know.” Geez, he wasn’t this awkward even as a teenager.

Sam’s face speedruns through several microexpressions, before landing on affectionately exasperated. “Slap yourself.”

“Huh?”

Sam sighs. “I mean, for fuck’s sake, Dean, sometimes you act like you have the emotional range of a turnip.”

“Hey, being this emotionally constipated is a skill. A fucking useless skill, but still as skill.” 

He shuffles his feet, letting the flippancy fall by the wayside. “Look, I know I’m not exactly Tour de France when it comes to chick-flick moments… But I’m trying here, man.” He barely gets the words out, his heart suddenly lodged where his tongue used to be. Dean doesn’t like to think himself as weak, but there’s no denying that when it comes to Sam, he’s less steel and more aluminium foil.

If he starts swooning, he’ll have to put himself on testosterone supplements.

Sam leans back against the kitchen counter, seemingly content to let him stew as long as it takes. He’s lucky Dean’s got a soft spot the size of Texas for him, otherwise he’d be pretty ticked off.

“Of course you’re not gonna make it easy on me,” he says, and then adds absolutely nothing else as the language centre of his brain spontaneously declares a strike. But it turns out his subconscious has plans that it neglected to clue him into, because he finds himself crossing the room towards his brother, with no battle plan for when he gets there.

He says Sam’s name and it comes out like a prayer, like desire and devastation twisted round and shot through with devotion. He feels something flicker in his chest, possibly his vague sense of morality leaving for a more conducive climate. 

Stepping into Sam’s personal space, arousal lies across his skin like a thick fog. He thinks it should freak him out more, but the list of freak-worthy things in his increasingly macabre life is getting slightly ridiculous. Yeah, okay, so it's weird. But most things in his life are. At least this one is a nice kind of weird. 

Their faces are a mere inch apart when Sam puts his finger on Dean’s lips. For a heart-stopping moment, he wonders if he’s wrong, if everything that’s happened between them since they got here was some kind of fucked-up hallucination.

“Use your words,” Sam whispers, the corner of his mouth tilting up teasingly.

Dean lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, chuckling nervously.

“Back at the church, you asked me if I had a problem with…” He clears his throat again. Maybe he’s just getting a cold? “Well, I don’t. Unless you do, that is.”

Sam smiles indulgingly. “Alright. I’ll take it.” 

And then he’s kissing him, softly at first, then more passionately, keeping them flush against each other, torso to torso - nothing but a heartbeat between them.

Dean’s chest is all fluttery and light like his lungs are full of helium and keep wanting to float right up out of his body. 

It’s all kinds of fantastic.

Chapter Text

They drive into a small town with more churches than gas stations, a standard Bumfuck, Nowhere sort of deal. It’s nothing to write home about, but to Dean it’s pretty much the promised land, because it means they really got out of that hellhole. He declares it’s time to demolish enough bacon to make Babe an endangered species poster child, and ignores Sam’s performative eyeroll. For all intents and purposes, shit is okay.

By the time they make it to their perfectly ordinary motel room, he’s worked himself up to the confidence of an average cryptocurrency gym bro. The beer might have helped.

“I’m just saying, man,” his words slur slightly as he aims his best cocky grin at his brother, “I totally could have handled that Ang-boo-y guy on my own.”

"Oh get over yourself," Sam snorts, but his bitchface isn’t anywhere near full power. The faint dusting of pink on his cheeks could be from the cold or the booze, but one way or another, Dean finds it adorable. He’s completely and utterly hopeless.

"I'd rather get all over you," he says, making his voice dark and sweet as warm molasses. He reaches out to palm Sam’s cheek, and lets a couple of fingers slip into the mop of hair, thumb finding the machine-gun pulse under the thin skin behind his ear.

Sam leans into the touch like an affection-starved cat, eyes downcast, with an unconvincing mutter of "Stop making me blush, I only have so much blood in my system."

Dean waits until their eyes meet, and still finds himself surprised at the way Sam looks at him, all molten heat and violent want. The buzz in his blood surges into a full electric current, sputtery crackles kicking up sparks. And he should know a thing or two about being electrocuted.

Sam’s mouth hovers a breath away from his when he whispers, “Fuck, Dean. Want you so bad.” Their lips graze against each other with the words, and every time it makes Dean’s heart do somersaults in his chest. Every thought that he had stewing in his head melts and pours down his spine, and he's pulling off his shirt like the fucker's on fire.

Sam’s right there with him, undoing his buttons with more force than necessary, never taking his eyes off Dean. And the heat of his gaze... It's like being bathed in flames.

As soon as he’s gotten rid of every stupid piece of clothing, Dean does his best do-me eyes. “Well watcha waiting for?”, he rasps, voice even lower than usual, twenty different kinds of sin, and if he's going back to Hell anyway, then he may as well make an entrance.

Sam moves with the certainty of a predator going for the kill, plastering himself against Dean like a walking furnace, and a kiss hotter than a lava flow in hell. His hands can’t seem to decide where to settle, roaming the exposed skin, only occasionally stopping to dig his nails in.

Dean pulls him closer, pushing against his shoulderblades as he steps back, guiding them towards the bed. Sam takes the hint, adapting to non-verbal communication like it’s another hunt, and gets them horizontal. His lips travel lower, over Dean’s jaw and towards his neck, fusing with his pulse point like they’re welded together. 

“You got the stuff?” Dean would be embarrassed at how wrecked his voice sounds, if he weren’t so turned on.

Sam’s answering grin is all wolf, no puppy eyes in sight, as he reaches down into his duffel next to the bed to pull out the small plastic tube. The snick of the cap is almost drowned out by Dean’s heartbeat in his ears. Sam, perfect as he is, makes sure to swallow his gasp at the cool liquid - Dean would kiss him if they weren’t already at it.

It’s a little weird, okay - as much as he likes to brag about his sex life, Dean can’t say he’s been fingered before - so he distracts himself with more familiar territory and reaches down to stroke Sam. He’s rewarded with a groan straight out of a porno, making Sam bite on his own lip when he twists his wrist on the upstroke. 

“You like that?” he asks huskily, like the answer isn’t obvious.

Apparently Sam’s too far gone to get sarky about it though, “Yeah, fuck, you have no idea.” He drops his forehead down to Dean’s, their breath intermingling. “Wanted this for so long.”

“How -”, Dean cuts himself off as Sam adds a second finger, and now it’s his turn to groan. “How long?”

Sam lets out something between a sharp exhale and a breathless chuckle, slitting his fox-eyes open. “Was at least half of why I went to Stanford.”

It’s not often Dean’s dumbfounded enough to be speechless, so it takes him a minute to remaster the subtle skill of making sentences. “But you never…”

Sam gives him a look that fondly conveys he’s an idiot. “Same reason you didn’t. Never thought we could have this.” 

Dean’s saved from having to respond when Sam’s fingers crook, and itty-bitty fireworks go off behind his eyelids. “Holy fuck!”

Smirking, Sam keeps a steady rhythm massaging over the spot, so he’s only got himself to blame if he ends up with bruises on his back where Dean’s hands have taken residence, holding on for dear life; there’s just no way he could maintain the coordination for a hand job anymore. Not that Sam’s complaining - he busies himself sucking on Dean’s earlobe, which feels so illegally good he barely registers the stretch of a third finger joining the first two. He can’t remember ever being this close to coming without a hand on his dick. 

“Sam,” he pants, the effort of making coherent sentences ridiculous, “You might wanna get in there - ah - sometime today.”

“You sure?” 

And as sweet as that is, Dean’s got no patience for it at this point. “Just fuck me already,” he bites out. 

Sam does. Slowly, carefully pushing in until there’s no way to tell where one of them ends and the other begins. It hurts, but Dean loves it. He breathes through it, twining his fingers in Sam’s hair, feeling the incandescent heat between their bodies. 

“God, Dean,” Sam moans, shaking with the effort of keeping still. “Feel so good.” His lower lip is red with how hard he’s been biting it, and Dean is struck with the insane thought of licking up the blood from it when the skin breaks.

“Move,” he grits out, high strung and impossibly turned on. The first thrust takes his breath away, and he never felt more like breathing is overrated. They fall into a rhythm easily, the air between them too thick for words, souls aligning like twin pendulums. Dean’s nerve endings are so preoccupied with the sensation, it takes him a while to process the sounds he’s making; he really hopes the people in the room next door are enjoying this because they're damn well hearing it.

Sam’s chanting his name with every push of his hips, beads of sweat collecting on his brow, and Dean can’t help thinking he’s beautiful. Beautiful, perfect, his. “Sammy,” he gasps, drinking in the way Sam’s breath stutters at that. He says it again, just because he can, and is rewarded with a quickened pace, Sam’s thrusts turning more erratic.

“Yeah, give it to me,” Dean eggs him on, rushing towards the precipice himself. His chest feels so full of light and heat, like an atom got split in there, and he’s drunk on the smell of sex and Sam. Sam. Sammy.

“Mine,” Sam growls, and Dean doesn’t waste a second thinking before he’s panting “Yours” right back. Sam’s teeth find his shoulder just as he feels him come inside and - oh fuck yes - Dean’s coming untouched, clinging to Sam with the force of a supernova. 

He can’t tell how long he just lies there, basking in the afterglow like a lazy summer afternoon, head blissfully empty of thoughts; his soul’s gradually returning to his body after its little vacay to somewhere near the moon. Eventually though, Sam nuzzles under his chin, mumbling a “You good?”

Dean’s still too busy trying to get his eyes to unstick from where they'd rolled back in his head to answer properly, so he hopes his ’mmhm’ conveys the message sufficiently. Sam makes a move to disentangle himself, and that just won’t fly - Dean makes a grumpy noise and pulls him back down.

“Dean,” he can hear the smile in his brother’s voice. “We should get cleaned up.”

“Later,” he decides. “Cuddle me, bitch.”

“Jerk,” Sam says, but he complies.

So yeah, as far as Dean’s concerned, everything’s coming up roses. 

*** FIN ***