thecatevari (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thecatevari) wrote2007-11-30 02:16 am
thecatevari) wrote2007-11-30 02:16 am
And We Are Ashes: Chapter 8, Part 2
OMG, I could conceivably DO THIS! I mean, I've hit up against the ironclad realization that there is NO WAY I will finish the whole story within 100,000 words (because I'm LAME like that), but with some real EFFORT tomorrow, I WILL finish NaNo, and although I have every intention of finishing the overall story, finishing NaNo is really the important part to me. The part that proves the cancer didn't beat me this year.
46,208 / 50,000 words. 92% done!
Today's Word Count: 6,070...or something like that.
Current Total Word Count: 46,208
Estimated Total Word Count: ~125,000 *cries*
What's bad: I'm going to focus on the positive and say there IS no bad here! But ask me tomorrow how much the first ten minutes of Dead Man's Blood SUCK in terms of plot holes you could drive a network through. OMG.
What's good: First of all, the incredible support I've gotten from family and friends. It's a little too soon for me to be composing my speech to the Academy and all, but I really needed a little propping up in the past couple days and y'all have come through in spades. I feel very much that I haven't been holding up my end of friendship lately and that makes it all the more amazing and humbling that y'all have come through for me. Thank you.
What pleases me: Bobby Singer is…problematic.
That's the only word that comes to mind when she thinks about it. Correction: when she allows herself to think about it, and that isn't often.
Once—and only once—she let herself wonder what it would've been like, if she'd met Bobby first. If they would've liked each other a little bit before she met John and lost John and changed. She doesn't know.
Everything about her is now colored by John; what John gave her, what John made her, by a love John birthed in her that now seems almost like a fairy-tale she told the boys to make them be still and sleep. The thought of being someone else, someone who never had that gorgeous oasis of peace and time and love…
Her imagination has never been that good, to conjecture something so unfathomable.
Still, she and Bobby had slept together a few times. Before she realized he's sweet on her and never again after, because she's a cold-hearted bitch but she's not heartless and Bobby's been nothing but good to her and good for her and he deserves a lot better than an IOU she can't deliver on for a heart no longer in her possession.
Previous parts can be found here
Daniel Elkin's cabin is surprisingly large and surprisingly luxurious, a solidly built faux-log cabin six miles from its nearest neighbor. There are bars on the narrow windows but the weathered plank door doesn't look like much. Yellow police caution tape droops limply from the banisters and half of the x taped over the door has come unstuck, visible in the wan cone of the Impala's headlights.
"Driveway wouldn't take much of a track, even with the snow," Sam observes as they climb from the car and he flicks his flashlight on, playing it over the turnaround in front of the cabin. It hasn't been warm enough for the snow to start melting yet and the ground beneath the grayish scrim is like cement. "Hard to tell if someone's been here already."
"Other than who or whatever killed Elkins, you mean?" Mary's headache still hasn't gone away and she feels squint-eyed and irritable as she plays her own beam over Elkins' cabin. There's a double skylight in more or less the center of the house, where they'll catch the thin, clear mountain sunlight; now like hollow and blackened eyes where the glass or plastic that glazed them was broken out. It's hard to tell, but Mary thinks the lattices are broken inward.
"Do you think it was vampires?" Sam asks and then chuckles softly to himself. "Jesus. Vampires. How is this seriously my life?"
There's been a strange shift between them that Mary doesn't know how to quantify. On the one hand, he seems more relaxed around her, a stiffness that she'd barely been aware of going out of both of them, like both sides of a tug of war going lax simultaneously. At the same time, she doesn't really feel that he trusts her any more than he did before, a sensation as irritating as it is understandable. She's spent so much time keeping the truth from him, protecting him from the lengths she's willing to go to, shielding him from what's at stake. Distrust is expected. Distrust is natural. But at the same time, she has spent the last twenty-two years breaking herself—and Dean, if it comes down to it—in half for Sam.
She doesn't think that a little goddamn gratitude is too much to give, even if she wouldn't come out and ask for it.
Dean told me not to trust you, Sam had said. At the time, it had been the least of her worries. But she's felt it worming into her mind ever since, gnawing at her at odd moments. Like now.
The ache to have Dean with her, to know that he's safe, has turned dull though it doesn't bother her any less than it did when it was more a stabbing pain. Sam has been the pivot point of their lives for most of Dean’s life, but Dean is an idiot if he thinks that means she doesn't love him as much as she does Sam.
Which would be a more comforting thought if Dean didn't have a history of being just that idiot.
"Just born into the right family," she answers Sam lightly, closing her train of thought and the Impala's door in a single gesture.
Sam's grin is uneven, as if he can't decide whether to be amused or annoyed. They're both quiet after that as they watch both the woods and the darkened house for sign of anything other or more dangerous than a roaming raccoon.
The caution tape is the biggest obstacle to entering the house; the lock is broken, the knob turning easily in Sam's grip.
"What do we know about vampires?" Sam asks quietly, playing his flashlight around the open vestibule.
"They're essentially dead flesh," Mary answers with a mild shrug. "So they're strong. Really strong. They don't feel pain like we do." She scans the broken jamb, the wall surrounding the door. There's no runes carved or painted into the wood, no little altar to Papa Legba or the saints Christopher, Eustachius or Quentin. She supposes that there could be other precautions under the wood and plaster, but she doubts it. It's one of life's great ironies that vampire hunters—what precious few there are of them—tend to be the least superstitious, worried more about the brute force of their adversaries than other, more esoteric dangers.
They have the highest mortality rate, too.
Her foot grits in something and she looks down. "Salt."
Sam turns back, halfway into the next room. "Like he was trying to protect against something or like he spilled the driveway salt?"
The pattern—if there was one—has been scuffed to hell and gone by the police and paramedics and whoever else came tramping in through the front door. "There was sand out in the driveway, so I'm guessing he was worried about more than ice build up."
"Vampires?" Sam asks again, sounding vaguely unhappy at having to say the word.
Mary shrugs. "Vampire should be able to cross a salt line same as a human."
"Then Elkins' was worried about something else?"
"Apparently so." The furniture—what she can see of it—is sparse and rustic, of a type that says 'lifelong bachelor', a look that twenty years of hunting has taught her very well. None of it looks used very much and if not for the brutal cold and the wind blowing in through the broken skylights, Mary imagines it would smell dusty as well. She'd wager that Elkins' didn't spend very much time in the public areas of the house.
His study, however, is a different matter.
"Jesus, it looks like a cyclone hit it." Everywhere Sam shines his light it touches on new examples of mayhem and destruction, paper sprinkled around like confetti and all of it blotched and blotted with blood spatter. Elkins put up a hell of a fight."
"Yeah, not that it did him much good," Mary answers distantly, her own flashlight beam chancing across a long, dark oblong that looks vaguely familiar. She kicks aside debris and makes her way across to it, squatting down and tugging the gun box from the general mess. It's empty but the mold inside suggests an old fashioned revolver, long barreled and sleek. There are slots for bullets as well. The Colt.
"Fuck!" Mary slings the gun box across the room, where it hits the wall with a sound like a gunshot.
"The Colt?" Sam asks and Mary chokes down the impulse to snap at him. It's not his fault.
"It's gone," she says tautly instead. "Someone took it, either who or whatever killed Elkins' or someone who came afterward."
"Look what I found," Sam says, coming to her side. He holds out something small, mostly hidden by his blunt fingers. He drops it into her palm and she sees it's a tooth, one of the pearly shark-like retractable fangs of a vampire. She flinches and it falls, vanishing somewhere into the junk underfoot. "So I guess there were vampires here."
"Guess so." Mary scrubs her palm against her jeans reflexively, skin crawling unpleasantly. "Which may be a good thing."
"How so?"
"If it's vampires, they'll leave a physical track, something we can follow. They'll need to feed. We can catch up to them. Catch them." Her blood quickens a little at the thought of it, warming some of the chill from her bones. They haven't really hunted in so long, bogged down in one dead end after another. Chasing the vampires is a straight line, a clear line of sight, straightforward and unequivocal.
"Why would vampires take the Colt? Do you think they know what it is?" Sam looks around the room as if he expects vampires to come leaping out of the shadows. She's going to have to disabuse him of some notions relatively soon.
"They might have just taken it because they thought it was pretty." Mary flicks her flashlight beam toward the gaping mouth of the safe mounted on the far wall. "By the look of it, Elkins took the Colt out..."
"Which makes sense if he thought he was being attacked." Sam turns to look at her, tilting his head to the side. "How do you kill a vampire, anyway?"
Mary blows out her breath and spiders a restless hand across her hair. "The only thing I know that works is beheading," she admits. "Vampires are damn resilient. Like cockroaches."
Her contact with vampires has been very limited—by choice. Aunt Calliope had a vampire she used as a courier, offering protection from men like Elkins in return. Antiam, though Mary didn't think it was the name the vampire had been born with. As a child, she'd been terrified of him and though it later mostly (mostly) changed to disgust—vampires really only being a half-step above shapeshifters on the vermin scale—she's never quite gotten over that black-edged atavistic terror.
"And sunlight?"
Mary shakes her head. "No, not really. It hurts them, but no more than a really bad sunburn."
"Fire?"
"Fire hurts them too, but I've seen vampires—a vampire come back from burns that would've killed a human." A second shake, wisps of her own hair tickling her cheeks and nose. "No, beheading's really the only way to be sure." She catches Sam's eye, looking for any sense of hesitation. Reluctance she expects; Sam has a much softer heart than she does. But hesitation can get them both killed.
Sam looks unhappy about it, swallowing thickly, but he nods.
"They're not human anymore," she says, as gently as she can manage with her eyes throbbing like Lars Ulrich is whaling on her brain pan. "They look human, but that's it."
Sam nods a second time, more decisively. "I know."
She goes to where the Colt's box fell after she threw it and picks it up from the wreckage, tucking it under her arm. They will find the Colt.
Any other outcome is just unacceptable.
***
"Well. It's been a long time, Mrs. Winchester," Bobby says and Mary doesn't have to fake the smile in her voice—or on her face—when she answers back, "That it has, Mr. Singer."
Bobby Singer is…problematic.
That's the only word that comes to mind when she thinks about it. Correction: when she allows herself to think about it, and that isn't often.
Once—and only once—she let herself wonder what it would've been like, if she'd met Bobby first. If they would've liked each other a little bit before she met John and lost John and changed. She doesn't know.
Everything about her is now colored by John; what John gave her, what John made her, by a love John birthed in her that now seems almost like a fairy-tale she told the boys to make them be still and sleep. The thought of being someone else, someone who never had that gorgeous oasis of peace and time and love…
Her imagination has never been that good, to conjecture something so unfathomable.
Still, she and Bobby had slept together a few times. Before she realized he's sweet on her and never again after, because she's a cold-hearted bitch but she's not heartless and Bobby's been nothing but good to her and good for her and he deserves a lot better than an IOU she can't deliver on for a heart no longer in her possession.
It says something about what kind of man he is that he could stay friends with her all this time and in spite of that and so she tries not to abuse his kindness too often.
But for her boys, Mary's reminded nearly every day that there's precious little she won't do. And in the scheme of things she's had to ask of her friends and allies, this is really hardly a blip on the radar. It's only the fact that it's Bobby that lends it a weight it doesn't really need to have.
"I need a bit of help, Mr. Singer," she says quickly, trying to outrace that awkward and unfamiliar guilt. Across the bar, Sam is 'questioning' the bartender, a woman who's probably got a good ten years on him and nonetheless has clearly fallen under Sam's dazzling-when-he-wants-it-to-be charm.
"What can I do ya for?" Bobby asks, simple and easy as ever.
"Sam and I are tracking a vampire band near Manning, Colorado. They killed a hunter named Daniel Elkins and we're looking for a little payback."
It's not that she doesn't think she can trust Bobby. Outside of Sam and Dean, Bobby's got the closest thing she's got to implicit trust. But the Colt…that's something too important to talk about over the phone, even with someone that she almost-implicitly trusts. Better to play it close to the vest and see what shakes out.
"Seems I heard something like that on the grapevine," Bobby agrees slowly. "S'a shame; Elkins wasn't much in the game anymore—bum heart, I think—but he was keeping up on the research side." Bobby pauses, a moment of silence for a fellow hunter, and Mary tries not to itch with impatience. "So whaddya need?"
"We've lost the trail. Not even really sure what we're looking for," she admits, "other than vamps." She thinks about Elkins' cabin; the two skylights broken out and the scratches in the floor that showed Elkins' probably tried to barricade himself in the study before going for the gun. "At least three of them. Maybe more. We're shaking out the locals, but I don't want to let them get too far too fast and I figure they'll probably need to feed somewhere soon. Think you could do some digging?"
"Aw, hell. I thought you were gonna ask me something difficult," Bobby deadpans and Mary unbends enough to let herself snort. "Give me a bit; I'll see what I can find and call you right back."
"Thanks, Bobby," she says, heartfelt. "You're my hero."
Bobby growls, the catlike noise that masquerades as impatience. "Quit blowing smoke up my ass and go get to work, woman." He pauses and Mary knows it costs him a little something when he asks, "You need any back up?"
Mary glances up at Sam again. He's smiling, body casual as he leans on the bar. As she watches, the bartender says something that makes him laugh, the real, full-body one where he throws his head back and lets it boom up out of his chest.
She wishes she could've seen Sam like this more, happy and harmlessly flirtatious, schmoozing girls and playing pool and drinking with his brother…
Mary's tired. She knows this.
She's tired and she's strung out on this stupid headache and she's tired, which is the same and different, and she misses Dean. She misses their fucked up, cockeyed little family and, for as much comfort as it is to have Sam close and under her eye again, for the last few years its been just her and Dean limping in lockstep and she doesn't know when she's going to stop looking for him to be there next to her and she hopes she never does and never has to.
Just be okay, Dean, she thinks, as she thinks every day, half a prayer and half an order, sent out over the ether. She puts her elbows on the scarred, uneven table and her face in her hands, letting them support her head on her limp neck. Be fucking okay. Or I'll kill you myself.
"Mom?"
Mary's exhausted enough that it takes several moments for the fact to filter through the gray haze.
Like: The voice is coming from behind her.
Like: It's too deep-gravel hesitant to be Sam's voice.
Like: She's not yet so tired that she's started hallucinating, no matter what it feels like.
Mary twists in the chair so fast her back screams, a bitter shank of pain that convinces her, more than anything, that it's no dream when she looks up into Dean's crinkled, bloodshot eyes.
***
"Jesus, Dean, where the fuck have you been?" Sam demands as he slaps the white ceramic mug of coffee into his brother's hand. "Do you have any idea how worried we've been? You said…" It's late enough on a weekday that the bar's starting to empty out. Sam's conscious—above the black thundercloud of his worry, his relief and his brewing head of steam—that the juke is off and the ambient noise is thinning out. He lowers his voice, though the edge stays front and center in his tone. "You said you were with the demon, Dean."
Too late, it occurs to Sam that Dean might not have wanted their mother to know that. His gaze flicks between the two of them, uncertain, but Dean seems focused on his coffee more than anything Sam's got to say and the set of Mary's jaw doesn't harden or soften to tell him she's particularly surprised or upset by the information.
Instead she puts her hand over Sam's wrist and says—quietly, but with the same tone of warning, "Sam."
In the normal run of things, his mother using that tone on him is a straight route to the push button of his temper, redlining him faster than it takes a high end sports car to hit sixty miles per hour. But for whatever reason, this time it clears his head enough that he really takes a look at Dean, slouched low and round shouldered in the opposite chair, his hands locked around his mug like it's an anchor. As if it's the only thing holding Dean upright.
At this point, Sam hasn't seen Dean in close to four years, but between his own memories and the brittle darkness of their mom's eyes as she looks at Dean, he knows that his impression that Dean didn't used to be this beat down or this thin are dead on.
Sam opens his mouth to speak, realizes he's not sure what he wants to say anymore and settles for, "Are you all right?"
Dean's face twists, eyes rolling. It's an expression so perfectly Dean and so exactly what Sam remembers that it stabs in his chest like a shiv, puncturing some not-really conscious illusion that this isn't really Dean. "Should be asking you that, punk," Dean says, voice riding roughshod over the words. "Jesus Christ, Sammy…all you had to do was take care of you and Mom. I leave for thirty seconds and you both almost…"
"Dean," Mary interrupts, cutting over him in the exact same tone she used on Sam a moment before. "We don't have time to argue whose fault all of this is. If it comes to that, it's mine."
Despite himself, Sam's head swings like it's on hinges for him to stare at his mother. From the corner of his eye, he sees Dean mirror the movement, apparently as shocked as Sam to hear their mother essentially admit that she was wrong. About anything.
It's somehow more shocking to watch her brush her fingers over Dean's wrist and ask softly, "Are you okay?"
Dean turns the coffee in aimless circles between his fingertips, the ceramic scraping across the faux wood. Sam doesn't think Dean's actually taken a sip of it yet and something about that realization makes his stomach cramp worse and harder than before.
Dean's nod is jerky. "I'm fine."
Mary's fingers press harder against Dean's forearm for a split second before she pulls them away and hides whatever she's feeling behind the calm, businesslike façade that Sam's so much more familiar with. "You here for the Colt, too?"
Dean shrugs. "It found out that Elkins' had the Colt." Dean's tone is flat, reporting in. "But Elkins' was protected, so it made a deal with the head of the vampires. Luther. The woman in charge of the vamps is his, his second, Kate."
"Do you know where they're lairing?"
"Abandoned barn." Dean nods, hands still locked on his cup and his eyes unmoving from the oily-dark surface of the coffee within. He looks sick and if Sam didn't know better, just meeting Dean on the street, he'd guess Dean was a junkie, the same pale unhealthy look about him as if he's spun. "I know where it is."
"Good." Mary makes a gesture like she wants to touch Dean's shoulder; instead she turns it into an awkward little punch. "So besides Luther and Kate, how many are there?"
Dean dips his fingers in the coffee and starts to draw on the surface of the table.
***
Only Sam is waiting in the motel room when Dean comes out of the shower. Sam's standing there, arms crossed like he's been waiting for Dean to get done. Dean reckons he probably has. Sam's never been one to put off until tomorrow the fight he could have today. Dean's stomach clenches up but he covers it, bending over to towel his hair dry. "Where's Mom?"
"She said she had some stuff to pick up before we head out," Sam answers, sounding reluctant and piss-voiced about it. Then Sam sighs. "Dean—"
He's still in a towel and he suspects his hair will freeze to his skull two steps out the door, but even so, Dean thrusts his hand out, palm up at Sam. "You got any quarters? I'd kill for a Coke."
"Dean, quit it."
Dean blinks stupidly at Sam. Years of practice have made him good at it. "Stop what? Being thirsty? Geez, Sam, that's not a very humanitarian attitude. Wasn't all that time in California supposed to teach you how to hug trees and love your fellow man and stuff?" He wiggles his fingers in another demand for money, this one wordless. "C'mon. Cough up."
"Stop it, Dean." Dean recognizes the tone of Sam's voice, a little bit like Mom a little bit Juliet, when one or the other of them is putting the whammy on some poor sap. Dean doesn't think Sam's doing it on purpose, but he feels it brush over him like a stray wind. It doesn't affect him the way it would someone normal, but Dean would be lying if he said he didn't feel anything at all. "Do you know how worried I've been? Not knowing what's going on, or who I could trust, or if I was just flat out going crazy…"
"Well, you've always been kinda…" Dean tries to interject, only to be stopped by Sam's hurt and resentful glare. Dean sighs.
"What's going on?" Sam asks, sounding for all the world like the sad puppy-eyed kid that trailed behind Dean for half his life. "Jesus, Dean, just… What the hell is going on?"
"Same thing as always," Dean answers, unwrapping and tossing his towel to the side before going in quest of clean skivvies. "Trying to keep your dumb ass safe."
"No." Sam shakes his head, silly-floppy hair falling all down into his eyes. "No, I don't want that. I don't want…You don't have to do this."
"You think I don't know that?" Sam's waist size is a couple inches smaller than Dean's, a discrepancy that should make up for the other mismatches in size. "I know I didn't finish high school or go to an Ivy League college or anything, but I'm not stupid, Sammy. I know I don't have to do this." Dean legs it into the boxers, watching Sam's face twitch at the prospect of Dean borrowing his underwear. "Except in the way that I totally do have to do this because what the fuck am I gonna do? Watch the McCoys make you blow your brain out like that kid Max?"
"You saw that?" Sam's eyes widen, his voice softening into a quasi-whisper.
Dean shrugs like it doesn't matter. Like he didn't have nightmares about that bloody kitchen and the endless darkness of a gun's bore just that morning when he pulled his stolen over for a twenty minute catnap. "You think I want to see that happen to you?"
"No, of course not," Sam agrees tiredly, sinking down into one of the rickety dinette chairs and digging his fingers deeply into his hair. "But that goes both ways, Dean. You think I want you killing yourself over me?"
"Seems to me that's not up to you." Dean's mouth motors on without him while he goes back into the bathroom to get his pants. Dean's whole soul cringes from putting on his unclean jeans again, but there's only so much he can get away with borrowing from his annoyingly taller, slightly heavier younger brother.
"And you don't think that's a total double standard?"
Dean's eyebrows lift up. It's hard not to show it, but he feels a little giddy—okay, a lot giddy being around his mother and brother again; having this chance to just be with them for a little while longer. "Sure it is," he agrees easily. "Nobody ever said life was fair, Sammy boy. Sucks to be the youngest."
"This is such bullshit!" Sam throws his hands up and then slaps them back down on his knees, arms flexing with irritation.
"Sam. Look." Dean struggles to find the words—the right words—ones that will make sense to Sam. "What happened to your girl…"
"Jess," Sam supplies tautly.
Dean nods in acknowledgment. "Jess. Yeah. Okay. Jess dying the way she did…that was the McCoy's, man. They need to kill you to keep their power and they're not going to stop until you're dead. Or until the demon is, and there's no more power to be had. Those are our choices. Personally, I'm not going to let my brother go out like that and if the positions were reversed, I'd like to believe you'd have my back enough to not want me to die."
Sam rolls his eyes and makes an irritated noise in his throat that Dean chooses to interpret as agreement.
"You're never gonna have anything like the normal life you want so bad until we fix this with the McCoys." Dean spreads his hands. "You know that, Sam. You gotta know that."
Sam's eyes pinch down tight and in a voice just as stiff, Sam answers, "I'm so far out of normal by now I can't even see the light from it from here."
Sam's exaggerating, Dean knows he is. Of them all, Sam's the passer, the one who fits into mundane life like a goldfish in a whole flock or crew or whatever a bunch of fish all alike is called. And sure, Sam's feeling kind of put upon now, but when it's over, when he's safe, Dean knows plans have a way of changing.
Doesn't stop him from replying, "Yeah. Welcome to my world," though.
Sam bitchfaces and Dean thinks how good it is to be home.
Today's Word Count: 6,070...or something like that.
Current Total Word Count: 46,208
Estimated Total Word Count: ~125,000 *cries*
What's bad: I'm going to focus on the positive and say there IS no bad here! But ask me tomorrow how much the first ten minutes of Dead Man's Blood SUCK in terms of plot holes you could drive a network through. OMG.
What's good: First of all, the incredible support I've gotten from family and friends. It's a little too soon for me to be composing my speech to the Academy and all, but I really needed a little propping up in the past couple days and y'all have come through in spades. I feel very much that I haven't been holding up my end of friendship lately and that makes it all the more amazing and humbling that y'all have come through for me. Thank you.
What pleases me: Bobby Singer is…problematic.
That's the only word that comes to mind when she thinks about it. Correction: when she allows herself to think about it, and that isn't often.
Once—and only once—she let herself wonder what it would've been like, if she'd met Bobby first. If they would've liked each other a little bit before she met John and lost John and changed. She doesn't know.
Everything about her is now colored by John; what John gave her, what John made her, by a love John birthed in her that now seems almost like a fairy-tale she told the boys to make them be still and sleep. The thought of being someone else, someone who never had that gorgeous oasis of peace and time and love…
Her imagination has never been that good, to conjecture something so unfathomable.
Still, she and Bobby had slept together a few times. Before she realized he's sweet on her and never again after, because she's a cold-hearted bitch but she's not heartless and Bobby's been nothing but good to her and good for her and he deserves a lot better than an IOU she can't deliver on for a heart no longer in her possession.
Previous parts can be found here
Daniel Elkin's cabin is surprisingly large and surprisingly luxurious, a solidly built faux-log cabin six miles from its nearest neighbor. There are bars on the narrow windows but the weathered plank door doesn't look like much. Yellow police caution tape droops limply from the banisters and half of the x taped over the door has come unstuck, visible in the wan cone of the Impala's headlights.
"Driveway wouldn't take much of a track, even with the snow," Sam observes as they climb from the car and he flicks his flashlight on, playing it over the turnaround in front of the cabin. It hasn't been warm enough for the snow to start melting yet and the ground beneath the grayish scrim is like cement. "Hard to tell if someone's been here already."
"Other than who or whatever killed Elkins, you mean?" Mary's headache still hasn't gone away and she feels squint-eyed and irritable as she plays her own beam over Elkins' cabin. There's a double skylight in more or less the center of the house, where they'll catch the thin, clear mountain sunlight; now like hollow and blackened eyes where the glass or plastic that glazed them was broken out. It's hard to tell, but Mary thinks the lattices are broken inward.
"Do you think it was vampires?" Sam asks and then chuckles softly to himself. "Jesus. Vampires. How is this seriously my life?"
There's been a strange shift between them that Mary doesn't know how to quantify. On the one hand, he seems more relaxed around her, a stiffness that she'd barely been aware of going out of both of them, like both sides of a tug of war going lax simultaneously. At the same time, she doesn't really feel that he trusts her any more than he did before, a sensation as irritating as it is understandable. She's spent so much time keeping the truth from him, protecting him from the lengths she's willing to go to, shielding him from what's at stake. Distrust is expected. Distrust is natural. But at the same time, she has spent the last twenty-two years breaking herself—and Dean, if it comes down to it—in half for Sam.
She doesn't think that a little goddamn gratitude is too much to give, even if she wouldn't come out and ask for it.
Dean told me not to trust you, Sam had said. At the time, it had been the least of her worries. But she's felt it worming into her mind ever since, gnawing at her at odd moments. Like now.
The ache to have Dean with her, to know that he's safe, has turned dull though it doesn't bother her any less than it did when it was more a stabbing pain. Sam has been the pivot point of their lives for most of Dean’s life, but Dean is an idiot if he thinks that means she doesn't love him as much as she does Sam.
Which would be a more comforting thought if Dean didn't have a history of being just that idiot.
"Just born into the right family," she answers Sam lightly, closing her train of thought and the Impala's door in a single gesture.
Sam's grin is uneven, as if he can't decide whether to be amused or annoyed. They're both quiet after that as they watch both the woods and the darkened house for sign of anything other or more dangerous than a roaming raccoon.
The caution tape is the biggest obstacle to entering the house; the lock is broken, the knob turning easily in Sam's grip.
"What do we know about vampires?" Sam asks quietly, playing his flashlight around the open vestibule.
"They're essentially dead flesh," Mary answers with a mild shrug. "So they're strong. Really strong. They don't feel pain like we do." She scans the broken jamb, the wall surrounding the door. There's no runes carved or painted into the wood, no little altar to Papa Legba or the saints Christopher, Eustachius or Quentin. She supposes that there could be other precautions under the wood and plaster, but she doubts it. It's one of life's great ironies that vampire hunters—what precious few there are of them—tend to be the least superstitious, worried more about the brute force of their adversaries than other, more esoteric dangers.
They have the highest mortality rate, too.
Her foot grits in something and she looks down. "Salt."
Sam turns back, halfway into the next room. "Like he was trying to protect against something or like he spilled the driveway salt?"
The pattern—if there was one—has been scuffed to hell and gone by the police and paramedics and whoever else came tramping in through the front door. "There was sand out in the driveway, so I'm guessing he was worried about more than ice build up."
"Vampires?" Sam asks again, sounding vaguely unhappy at having to say the word.
Mary shrugs. "Vampire should be able to cross a salt line same as a human."
"Then Elkins' was worried about something else?"
"Apparently so." The furniture—what she can see of it—is sparse and rustic, of a type that says 'lifelong bachelor', a look that twenty years of hunting has taught her very well. None of it looks used very much and if not for the brutal cold and the wind blowing in through the broken skylights, Mary imagines it would smell dusty as well. She'd wager that Elkins' didn't spend very much time in the public areas of the house.
His study, however, is a different matter.
"Jesus, it looks like a cyclone hit it." Everywhere Sam shines his light it touches on new examples of mayhem and destruction, paper sprinkled around like confetti and all of it blotched and blotted with blood spatter. Elkins put up a hell of a fight."
"Yeah, not that it did him much good," Mary answers distantly, her own flashlight beam chancing across a long, dark oblong that looks vaguely familiar. She kicks aside debris and makes her way across to it, squatting down and tugging the gun box from the general mess. It's empty but the mold inside suggests an old fashioned revolver, long barreled and sleek. There are slots for bullets as well. The Colt.
"Fuck!" Mary slings the gun box across the room, where it hits the wall with a sound like a gunshot.
"The Colt?" Sam asks and Mary chokes down the impulse to snap at him. It's not his fault.
"It's gone," she says tautly instead. "Someone took it, either who or whatever killed Elkins' or someone who came afterward."
"Look what I found," Sam says, coming to her side. He holds out something small, mostly hidden by his blunt fingers. He drops it into her palm and she sees it's a tooth, one of the pearly shark-like retractable fangs of a vampire. She flinches and it falls, vanishing somewhere into the junk underfoot. "So I guess there were vampires here."
"Guess so." Mary scrubs her palm against her jeans reflexively, skin crawling unpleasantly. "Which may be a good thing."
"How so?"
"If it's vampires, they'll leave a physical track, something we can follow. They'll need to feed. We can catch up to them. Catch them." Her blood quickens a little at the thought of it, warming some of the chill from her bones. They haven't really hunted in so long, bogged down in one dead end after another. Chasing the vampires is a straight line, a clear line of sight, straightforward and unequivocal.
"Why would vampires take the Colt? Do you think they know what it is?" Sam looks around the room as if he expects vampires to come leaping out of the shadows. She's going to have to disabuse him of some notions relatively soon.
"They might have just taken it because they thought it was pretty." Mary flicks her flashlight beam toward the gaping mouth of the safe mounted on the far wall. "By the look of it, Elkins took the Colt out..."
"Which makes sense if he thought he was being attacked." Sam turns to look at her, tilting his head to the side. "How do you kill a vampire, anyway?"
Mary blows out her breath and spiders a restless hand across her hair. "The only thing I know that works is beheading," she admits. "Vampires are damn resilient. Like cockroaches."
Her contact with vampires has been very limited—by choice. Aunt Calliope had a vampire she used as a courier, offering protection from men like Elkins in return. Antiam, though Mary didn't think it was the name the vampire had been born with. As a child, she'd been terrified of him and though it later mostly (mostly) changed to disgust—vampires really only being a half-step above shapeshifters on the vermin scale—she's never quite gotten over that black-edged atavistic terror.
"And sunlight?"
Mary shakes her head. "No, not really. It hurts them, but no more than a really bad sunburn."
"Fire?"
"Fire hurts them too, but I've seen vampires—a vampire come back from burns that would've killed a human." A second shake, wisps of her own hair tickling her cheeks and nose. "No, beheading's really the only way to be sure." She catches Sam's eye, looking for any sense of hesitation. Reluctance she expects; Sam has a much softer heart than she does. But hesitation can get them both killed.
Sam looks unhappy about it, swallowing thickly, but he nods.
"They're not human anymore," she says, as gently as she can manage with her eyes throbbing like Lars Ulrich is whaling on her brain pan. "They look human, but that's it."
Sam nods a second time, more decisively. "I know."
She goes to where the Colt's box fell after she threw it and picks it up from the wreckage, tucking it under her arm. They will find the Colt.
Any other outcome is just unacceptable.
"Well. It's been a long time, Mrs. Winchester," Bobby says and Mary doesn't have to fake the smile in her voice—or on her face—when she answers back, "That it has, Mr. Singer."
Bobby Singer is…problematic.
That's the only word that comes to mind when she thinks about it. Correction: when she allows herself to think about it, and that isn't often.
Once—and only once—she let herself wonder what it would've been like, if she'd met Bobby first. If they would've liked each other a little bit before she met John and lost John and changed. She doesn't know.
Everything about her is now colored by John; what John gave her, what John made her, by a love John birthed in her that now seems almost like a fairy-tale she told the boys to make them be still and sleep. The thought of being someone else, someone who never had that gorgeous oasis of peace and time and love…
Her imagination has never been that good, to conjecture something so unfathomable.
Still, she and Bobby had slept together a few times. Before she realized he's sweet on her and never again after, because she's a cold-hearted bitch but she's not heartless and Bobby's been nothing but good to her and good for her and he deserves a lot better than an IOU she can't deliver on for a heart no longer in her possession.
It says something about what kind of man he is that he could stay friends with her all this time and in spite of that and so she tries not to abuse his kindness too often.
But for her boys, Mary's reminded nearly every day that there's precious little she won't do. And in the scheme of things she's had to ask of her friends and allies, this is really hardly a blip on the radar. It's only the fact that it's Bobby that lends it a weight it doesn't really need to have.
"I need a bit of help, Mr. Singer," she says quickly, trying to outrace that awkward and unfamiliar guilt. Across the bar, Sam is 'questioning' the bartender, a woman who's probably got a good ten years on him and nonetheless has clearly fallen under Sam's dazzling-when-he-wants-it-to-be charm.
"What can I do ya for?" Bobby asks, simple and easy as ever.
"Sam and I are tracking a vampire band near Manning, Colorado. They killed a hunter named Daniel Elkins and we're looking for a little payback."
It's not that she doesn't think she can trust Bobby. Outside of Sam and Dean, Bobby's got the closest thing she's got to implicit trust. But the Colt…that's something too important to talk about over the phone, even with someone that she almost-implicitly trusts. Better to play it close to the vest and see what shakes out.
"Seems I heard something like that on the grapevine," Bobby agrees slowly. "S'a shame; Elkins wasn't much in the game anymore—bum heart, I think—but he was keeping up on the research side." Bobby pauses, a moment of silence for a fellow hunter, and Mary tries not to itch with impatience. "So whaddya need?"
"We've lost the trail. Not even really sure what we're looking for," she admits, "other than vamps." She thinks about Elkins' cabin; the two skylights broken out and the scratches in the floor that showed Elkins' probably tried to barricade himself in the study before going for the gun. "At least three of them. Maybe more. We're shaking out the locals, but I don't want to let them get too far too fast and I figure they'll probably need to feed somewhere soon. Think you could do some digging?"
"Aw, hell. I thought you were gonna ask me something difficult," Bobby deadpans and Mary unbends enough to let herself snort. "Give me a bit; I'll see what I can find and call you right back."
"Thanks, Bobby," she says, heartfelt. "You're my hero."
Bobby growls, the catlike noise that masquerades as impatience. "Quit blowing smoke up my ass and go get to work, woman." He pauses and Mary knows it costs him a little something when he asks, "You need any back up?"
Mary glances up at Sam again. He's smiling, body casual as he leans on the bar. As she watches, the bartender says something that makes him laugh, the real, full-body one where he throws his head back and lets it boom up out of his chest.
She wishes she could've seen Sam like this more, happy and harmlessly flirtatious, schmoozing girls and playing pool and drinking with his brother…
Mary's tired. She knows this.
She's tired and she's strung out on this stupid headache and she's tired, which is the same and different, and she misses Dean. She misses their fucked up, cockeyed little family and, for as much comfort as it is to have Sam close and under her eye again, for the last few years its been just her and Dean limping in lockstep and she doesn't know when she's going to stop looking for him to be there next to her and she hopes she never does and never has to.
Just be okay, Dean, she thinks, as she thinks every day, half a prayer and half an order, sent out over the ether. She puts her elbows on the scarred, uneven table and her face in her hands, letting them support her head on her limp neck. Be fucking okay. Or I'll kill you myself.
"Mom?"
Mary's exhausted enough that it takes several moments for the fact to filter through the gray haze.
Like: The voice is coming from behind her.
Like: It's too deep-gravel hesitant to be Sam's voice.
Like: She's not yet so tired that she's started hallucinating, no matter what it feels like.
Mary twists in the chair so fast her back screams, a bitter shank of pain that convinces her, more than anything, that it's no dream when she looks up into Dean's crinkled, bloodshot eyes.
"Jesus, Dean, where the fuck have you been?" Sam demands as he slaps the white ceramic mug of coffee into his brother's hand. "Do you have any idea how worried we've been? You said…" It's late enough on a weekday that the bar's starting to empty out. Sam's conscious—above the black thundercloud of his worry, his relief and his brewing head of steam—that the juke is off and the ambient noise is thinning out. He lowers his voice, though the edge stays front and center in his tone. "You said you were with the demon, Dean."
Too late, it occurs to Sam that Dean might not have wanted their mother to know that. His gaze flicks between the two of them, uncertain, but Dean seems focused on his coffee more than anything Sam's got to say and the set of Mary's jaw doesn't harden or soften to tell him she's particularly surprised or upset by the information.
Instead she puts her hand over Sam's wrist and says—quietly, but with the same tone of warning, "Sam."
In the normal run of things, his mother using that tone on him is a straight route to the push button of his temper, redlining him faster than it takes a high end sports car to hit sixty miles per hour. But for whatever reason, this time it clears his head enough that he really takes a look at Dean, slouched low and round shouldered in the opposite chair, his hands locked around his mug like it's an anchor. As if it's the only thing holding Dean upright.
At this point, Sam hasn't seen Dean in close to four years, but between his own memories and the brittle darkness of their mom's eyes as she looks at Dean, he knows that his impression that Dean didn't used to be this beat down or this thin are dead on.
Sam opens his mouth to speak, realizes he's not sure what he wants to say anymore and settles for, "Are you all right?"
Dean's face twists, eyes rolling. It's an expression so perfectly Dean and so exactly what Sam remembers that it stabs in his chest like a shiv, puncturing some not-really conscious illusion that this isn't really Dean. "Should be asking you that, punk," Dean says, voice riding roughshod over the words. "Jesus Christ, Sammy…all you had to do was take care of you and Mom. I leave for thirty seconds and you both almost…"
"Dean," Mary interrupts, cutting over him in the exact same tone she used on Sam a moment before. "We don't have time to argue whose fault all of this is. If it comes to that, it's mine."
Despite himself, Sam's head swings like it's on hinges for him to stare at his mother. From the corner of his eye, he sees Dean mirror the movement, apparently as shocked as Sam to hear their mother essentially admit that she was wrong. About anything.
It's somehow more shocking to watch her brush her fingers over Dean's wrist and ask softly, "Are you okay?"
Dean turns the coffee in aimless circles between his fingertips, the ceramic scraping across the faux wood. Sam doesn't think Dean's actually taken a sip of it yet and something about that realization makes his stomach cramp worse and harder than before.
Dean's nod is jerky. "I'm fine."
Mary's fingers press harder against Dean's forearm for a split second before she pulls them away and hides whatever she's feeling behind the calm, businesslike façade that Sam's so much more familiar with. "You here for the Colt, too?"
Dean shrugs. "It found out that Elkins' had the Colt." Dean's tone is flat, reporting in. "But Elkins' was protected, so it made a deal with the head of the vampires. Luther. The woman in charge of the vamps is his, his second, Kate."
"Do you know where they're lairing?"
"Abandoned barn." Dean nods, hands still locked on his cup and his eyes unmoving from the oily-dark surface of the coffee within. He looks sick and if Sam didn't know better, just meeting Dean on the street, he'd guess Dean was a junkie, the same pale unhealthy look about him as if he's spun. "I know where it is."
"Good." Mary makes a gesture like she wants to touch Dean's shoulder; instead she turns it into an awkward little punch. "So besides Luther and Kate, how many are there?"
Dean dips his fingers in the coffee and starts to draw on the surface of the table.
Only Sam is waiting in the motel room when Dean comes out of the shower. Sam's standing there, arms crossed like he's been waiting for Dean to get done. Dean reckons he probably has. Sam's never been one to put off until tomorrow the fight he could have today. Dean's stomach clenches up but he covers it, bending over to towel his hair dry. "Where's Mom?"
"She said she had some stuff to pick up before we head out," Sam answers, sounding reluctant and piss-voiced about it. Then Sam sighs. "Dean—"
He's still in a towel and he suspects his hair will freeze to his skull two steps out the door, but even so, Dean thrusts his hand out, palm up at Sam. "You got any quarters? I'd kill for a Coke."
"Dean, quit it."
Dean blinks stupidly at Sam. Years of practice have made him good at it. "Stop what? Being thirsty? Geez, Sam, that's not a very humanitarian attitude. Wasn't all that time in California supposed to teach you how to hug trees and love your fellow man and stuff?" He wiggles his fingers in another demand for money, this one wordless. "C'mon. Cough up."
"Stop it, Dean." Dean recognizes the tone of Sam's voice, a little bit like Mom a little bit Juliet, when one or the other of them is putting the whammy on some poor sap. Dean doesn't think Sam's doing it on purpose, but he feels it brush over him like a stray wind. It doesn't affect him the way it would someone normal, but Dean would be lying if he said he didn't feel anything at all. "Do you know how worried I've been? Not knowing what's going on, or who I could trust, or if I was just flat out going crazy…"
"Well, you've always been kinda…" Dean tries to interject, only to be stopped by Sam's hurt and resentful glare. Dean sighs.
"What's going on?" Sam asks, sounding for all the world like the sad puppy-eyed kid that trailed behind Dean for half his life. "Jesus, Dean, just… What the hell is going on?"
"Same thing as always," Dean answers, unwrapping and tossing his towel to the side before going in quest of clean skivvies. "Trying to keep your dumb ass safe."
"No." Sam shakes his head, silly-floppy hair falling all down into his eyes. "No, I don't want that. I don't want…You don't have to do this."
"You think I don't know that?" Sam's waist size is a couple inches smaller than Dean's, a discrepancy that should make up for the other mismatches in size. "I know I didn't finish high school or go to an Ivy League college or anything, but I'm not stupid, Sammy. I know I don't have to do this." Dean legs it into the boxers, watching Sam's face twitch at the prospect of Dean borrowing his underwear. "Except in the way that I totally do have to do this because what the fuck am I gonna do? Watch the McCoys make you blow your brain out like that kid Max?"
"You saw that?" Sam's eyes widen, his voice softening into a quasi-whisper.
Dean shrugs like it doesn't matter. Like he didn't have nightmares about that bloody kitchen and the endless darkness of a gun's bore just that morning when he pulled his stolen over for a twenty minute catnap. "You think I want to see that happen to you?"
"No, of course not," Sam agrees tiredly, sinking down into one of the rickety dinette chairs and digging his fingers deeply into his hair. "But that goes both ways, Dean. You think I want you killing yourself over me?"
"Seems to me that's not up to you." Dean's mouth motors on without him while he goes back into the bathroom to get his pants. Dean's whole soul cringes from putting on his unclean jeans again, but there's only so much he can get away with borrowing from his annoyingly taller, slightly heavier younger brother.
"And you don't think that's a total double standard?"
Dean's eyebrows lift up. It's hard not to show it, but he feels a little giddy—okay, a lot giddy being around his mother and brother again; having this chance to just be with them for a little while longer. "Sure it is," he agrees easily. "Nobody ever said life was fair, Sammy boy. Sucks to be the youngest."
"This is such bullshit!" Sam throws his hands up and then slaps them back down on his knees, arms flexing with irritation.
"Sam. Look." Dean struggles to find the words—the right words—ones that will make sense to Sam. "What happened to your girl…"
"Jess," Sam supplies tautly.
Dean nods in acknowledgment. "Jess. Yeah. Okay. Jess dying the way she did…that was the McCoy's, man. They need to kill you to keep their power and they're not going to stop until you're dead. Or until the demon is, and there's no more power to be had. Those are our choices. Personally, I'm not going to let my brother go out like that and if the positions were reversed, I'd like to believe you'd have my back enough to not want me to die."
Sam rolls his eyes and makes an irritated noise in his throat that Dean chooses to interpret as agreement.
"You're never gonna have anything like the normal life you want so bad until we fix this with the McCoys." Dean spreads his hands. "You know that, Sam. You gotta know that."
Sam's eyes pinch down tight and in a voice just as stiff, Sam answers, "I'm so far out of normal by now I can't even see the light from it from here."
Sam's exaggerating, Dean knows he is. Of them all, Sam's the passer, the one who fits into mundane life like a goldfish in a whole flock or crew or whatever a bunch of fish all alike is called. And sure, Sam's feeling kind of put upon now, but when it's over, when he's safe, Dean knows plans have a way of changing.
Doesn't stop him from replying, "Yeah. Welcome to my world," though.
Sam bitchfaces and Dean thinks how good it is to be home.