Rating/Pairing: Slash, NC-17, Sam/Dean
Warnings: Explicit incest, explicit violence, cursing, horror, and references to religion.
Summary: Protecting Sam means more than getting him on the right side of the door.
Notes: Set a week after Hunger of Old Mouths. Innumerable thanks to draft viewers rayrayfaulks, nu_breed, missyjack, layne67, thandie, juicephine, and leighm. They put up with an ever changing posting schedule, their encouragement kept me writing and gave me energy, and their feedback has made this a much better story than it otherwise would have been. Special thanks to rayrayfaulks for her beta services, and milenaa for graciously offering to host this on her webspace. All remaining errors are mine.

§

So there is at most on earth, in the stormiest times, one man in a thousand who can be called wicked, and even then he is not so all the time. There is thus infinitely less evil on earth than is said and believed. No doubt there is still too much.

Francois Voltaire, Miracles and Idolatry.

§

It’s cloudy overhead. With nothing but miles of horizon to look at, the rain clouds seem to almost touch the ground, sky meeting earth. It’s not that late in the day and the sun is up but there’s not a hint of the azure blue skies or bright colored fields that are characteristic of this part of west Texas. The cloud cover leeches all the color out of the surroundings, leaving nothing but outlines. It’s only like this over a specific and contained area, atmosphere charged with the dense static that comes with a storm, but the impending rain isn’t falling. Hasn’t fallen for days now.

The wind picks up when Dean steps out of the car, the gravel driveway crunching underfoot, a brief gust that raises the hair on the nape of his neck then dies down to nothing.

The homestead in the distance, surrounded by several square miles of wheat fields, is geographically somewhere in the middle of this storm that won’t break. Small and compact, the building looks deserted but new. One story, long windows running the length of the north facing wall framed in wood panes and a faux adobe exterior.

Even from a distance, Dean can make out the bright yellow of police tape stretched across the front door, the only color in all the gray around him. He does a quick survey of the horizon, searching for any signs of life, supernatural or otherwise. When he finds none, he turns to Sam, sees him rummaging around in the trunk.

“Crops or house first?”

“Crops,” Sam says, handing Dean the shotgun then tucking his own gun into the back of his jeans.

The crops weren’t flattened in some sort of mysterious pattern or any recognizable sign, but in a rather messy and uneven circle that radiates from the house for two hundred yards in all directions. They walk the perimeter of the circle, along the curve where the fresh stalks meet flattened ones. The demarcation is blurry and random, no distinct line that says evil can only reach this far. The flattened stalks crunch underfoot.

Sam pulls out the EMF and Dean bends down, kneeling to take a handful of soil. It isn’t muddy like he’d expect if it had been trampled either by humans or animals. It’s bone dry and sifts through his fingers like dust. The stalks of wheat aren’t flattened, Dean discovers upon closer examination, but have simply shrivelled up and dried. They snap in his hands like twigs.

Maybe they could get this dry if left out in the sun for a very long time, but the farmer tending this land had died not two days ago, nowhere near long enough for fertile earth to just disintegrate. Especially when considering the cloud cover that’s been hanging around.

Dean looks up at Sam and raises an eyebrow. “Could be the land.”

Sam shakes his head. “No Indian burial grounds or massacres. Not near this property. I looked it up.”

The EMF starts up with low sub-note that quickly rises in pitch, an aural echo of the blood red glow lighting it up.

Whatever had been here had left behind its mark.

“You know, Roswell isn’t far,” Dean says, getting to his feet with a smirk. “Maybe something hitched a ride.”

Sam turns the EMF off and tucks it in his jacket, unsmiling. “Yeah. ET’s trying to find his way home and massacred a farmer on the way.”

Ash had phoned them a day ago, telling them about the strange weather patterns in Texas, the farmer who’d died and the failing crops. Signs similar enough to the demon for both Sam and Dean to be edgy, although Ash had assured them otherwise.

“Just something that acts like it,” Ash had said when he'd called Dean’s cell. “But not it, doesn’t fit the pattern. I only picked it up because I have this software running, scanning news casts and weather updates…”

The rest was unimportant and Dean had promptly gone about forgetting it.

They’d been on the other side of the state not twenty four hours ago, and now they’re here.

Could be something or nothing, but these things are rarely nothing and Dean knows that from experience. They’re two days late on the scene so whatever had been here is probably long gone by now, but it’s not a risk worth taking.

He sees the tense line of Sam’s shoulders and puts himself between the house and his brother.

They make their way across dead ground with weapons raised and ready. The police tape rips easily from the peeling paint on the doorway, and getting inside is easy because the door is unlocked.

One story house, wooden floorboards and walls; living area, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. It’s a small space to clear and they do a preliminary sweep in twenty seconds, Sam only tucking his gun away when he sees Dean lower the shotgun.

The furniture looks new, and would probably be in good condition if it weren’t completely trashed. Broken chairs and splintered tables, shattered glass everywhere. There had been a fight, a violent one. There’s no sulfur scent but the EMF starts whining again when Sam pulls it out.

Everything in the house has been touched, and the thing that did it has left hotspots of itself all over the place.

In the bathroom, they find the worst of the activity. The EMF squeals so high that Sam turns it back off, and they both survey the old blood painted on the tiling, on the walls and floor, folding over into the bathtub. Thin washes of death and violence coloring everything in sight, under the transparent residues of something else that had been here and had its fun.

A peaceful death, this was not. Dean has half a mind to hunt down the body and do a salt and burn – if ever a spirit needed an excuse to hang around and pursue revenge, this would be it. But looking at the mess in the bathroom, he can’t even be sure how much of a body there is left.

He steps across to the tub, leaning over the rim to peer inside at the mess. Bits of something brick-red and thin, dried and stringy.

“Is that … is that flesh?”

Sam grimaces and leaves the room, heads outside for the car. Dean hangs back for a couple of minutes, does a final sweep of the house in case they missed anything, and hears Sam talking on his phone outside.

By the time Dean walks out to join him, Sam has the map spread out on the hood of the car.

“That was Ash,” Sam supplies at Dean's questioning look. He’s got a black sharpie in hand, a cross already marked out over the spot where they’re currently standing. “It’s happened again, unusual weather patterns just like this. Here,” Sam adds, marking another black x. “Two hundred miles west of where we are. In New Mexico.”

Dean flips the map around to get a better look. “When did this happen?”

“Weather started turning this morning.”

Sam’s voice is thin, tense, and Dean doesn’t need to look up to know what face he’s wearing.

“Two hundred miles of nothing but flat road between here and there,” Dean says, folding the map up. “If I floor it we can be there by sundown.”

§

Dean’s never found mirrors good for anything much.

He knows who he is and what he does. It’s not an identity crisis that has Dean not caring to see his mirror image except when shaving or occasionally appreciating one’s own god given gifts. It’s just that Dean’s always seen himself reflected in the eyes of his family, and that means no more or less than exactly that. Maybe natural, then, that part of his reflection had died along with John. Who he was to his father no longer exists because his father no longer exists, except as a bittersweet memory.

There’s more to it than that, and there’s more to Dean than bright mirror-shards, but that much is true at least; he’s spent years, decades, polishing up a smooth veneer. He’s always thought he shined the most when reflected off Sam, even during the Stanford era -- in some ways, especially then -- and that’s just fine with him. Who else, if not Sam?

It’s been a week since they’d left Louisiana, and something integral in how they work has changed.

Dean tries not to think about it too much because he can’t actually remember a whole lot of the time he hadn’t quite been within himself, and that just doesn’t sit well with him.

They’d gone over the job in an east Texas bar a couple of days ago, filling in the blanks of each others stories like it was any other job. It had been Sam who’d done most of the talking, relaying the details with practiced efficiency. The Winchester version of post-hunt debriefing, executed like their father had taught them.

Sam couldn’t explain what had happened in Broussard’s cabin any better than Dean could, even if he did remember parts of it better. If his brother was embarrassed by any of it, it didn’t show, apart from a slight ducking of his head at the retelling, bangs falling into bright eyes.

Dean doesn’t resent any of it. He’d meant what he’d said; they’re both alive and as long as there were no catches, he could move on just fine. His body is healthy and functional despite scars and wounds, and it had reacted as it should. They’d done what had needed to be done, and he trusts Sam enough to know that it had been necessary. The necessity had not been of their own making and therefore any guilt or shame is not theirs either. Which Sam seems to understand and accept.

Maybe not that surprising then, that there had been little awkwardness between them.

What gets to Dean most is wondering what must have shown on his face in the moment before the act. A silent message that Dean hadn’t meant to convey, or even knew he had … but he’d seen the recognition of it in Sam’s eyes.

The unspoken intimacy was less substantial perhaps than having Sam’s hand on his dick, but potentially spelled something far greater than just the act itself.

What Dean had done in the hours between waking up half naked on the kitchen floor and Sam doing the same in Broussard’s bed didn’t bear telling. He’d waited. Irritated, impatient and more scared than he’ll admit to himself, but all he’d done was wait. If Sam has since noticed the half empty bag of herbs that had been tucked into a corner of the Impala’s trunk, then he doesn’t mention it and there’s no reason for Dean to do so either. It’s as far as Dean’s research needs to go.

He hasn’t become aware of anything he hadn’t known before. There’s little that he wouldn’t do if Sam asked. There’s more he wouldn’t do for himself.

Sam, in typical Sam-type fashion, had found books. He’s at it again now, slouched in the passenger seat and reading by torchlight because the sunlight is fading, heedless of the speed limits that Dean’s breaking.

“There’s the physical,” Sam says, curling in his thumb and following up the count with two more fingers, “… the astral, and the ether. That’s three bodies.”

“And all three of yours need a hair cut,” Dean says, eyes fixed on the road ahead, hands steady on the wheel. “Badly.”

Sam ignores him. Which is fine. Dean doesn’t actually want him to cut his hair anyway. Do as you’re told had only ever been an order designed to enforce safety, and although neither Dean nor their Dad had allowed their own hair to grow past an inch long, the idea of Sam resorting to a buzz cut feels like failure of some sort.

“Freakin’ yeti hair,” Dean says.

“I don’t know what was bound to what, though. Or how it was even possible. I think it was a combination of stuff,” Sam murmurs, not looking away from the book open in his lap. Something about esoteric thinking. Geek.

How Sam can sit curled up like this in the car for days on end without complaint, Dean’s never quite been able to understand. His brother always could kind of morph to occupy whatever amount of space is available, and contain himself in it. A trait learned early in his teen years when constant living with two other men in the confines of a car or a small motel room meant distance had to be earned in other ways.

It rubs Dean up the wrong way now as much as it had then.

“You don’t feel any different?” Sam says, lifting his head to look at Dean. If Sam hadn’t been asking the same thing in the same way for days now, the softly voiced question would be unnerving.

“You mean do I want to feed you grapes and call you ‘master’? No, Sam.”

Sam sighs. Dean hears the book close a moment later and looks over to see the furrowed brow and pensive expression.

“Hey. Dude. Try it again.”

“No, Dean.”

“Aw, come on, man -”

“I’m not gonna try and read you, you shit,” Sam says, tone exasperated, but Dean hears the laughter hidden in the undertone. “That’s not how it works. God only knows what I’d pick up, anyway.”

The brief burst of static from the police scanner wipes the grin from Sam’s face, and Dean feels his own smile fade. He watches Sam spin the dial to finetune the frequency and they come in at the end of the grainy radio-flat voice of a woman detailing a 187, at a route marker that’s not thirty miles from where they are.

Dean hears the soft exhale of breath followed by Sam’s whispered fuck, and he reaches out to flick the scanner off.

“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Sam says quietly. “It could be anywhere, and it moves fast. Probably not following the road either. We can’t chase it on foot. So how do we find it without waiting for Ash to phone us a third time?”

Dean points a hand at the glove compartment. “Either it’s stopping every two hundred miles or every two days. If it keeps going west, what’s it heading for?”

Sam pulls the map out, tracks a path with his flashlight and marks in a third black x. “It’s a town,” he says with soft surprise. “The biggest one for miles around. Shit.”

“Okay,” Dean says, nodding. “Okay, so we get there first. Do some recon, get some kind of trap set up.”

“Wait for it to come to us?” Sam shakes his head. “Then what? We don’t even know what it is yet.”

“So we’ll figure it out,” Dean says, shrugging. “Be a team player, Sam. You got a better plan, I’d love to hear it.”

Nothing but silence, and Dean waits a beat before looking over to find Sam staring at him.

“I wasn’t -” Sam starts to say, perplexed, before he cuts himself off and looks away.

Shot down and shut out.

Dean’s fingers flex around the wheel.

“Either we figure this thing out for ourselves,” Sam says softly, looking straight ahead, “or something else will do it for us.”

He’s not talking about the job.

Dean says nothing. Anything hiding in the woodwork is going to surface on its own sooner or later.

They’ll wait it out.

§

The stone literally crumbles apart.

Rose had brought a fair few other people with her into the swamps. Not out of anything resembling fear, though she’d be stupid not to be wary, but a slab of rock the size and weight that Dean had described would be too heavy to move by herself.

They had come prepared, not with guns, but with pouches of something resembling dirt that her mother had poured out of a terracotta urn kept away from the light. Tied to twine and hung around their necks, it would provide at least a temporary barrier to things that may still be lurking around. After all, the conjurer had a nasty reputation while he’d been alive. He may not be weaving his magic with breath anymore, but death sometimes aggravates the earth instead of settling it.

When she sees the body, irritation flares for just a moment before being tamped down. Dean hadn’t mentioned the man wouldn’t even be covered. Louisiana heat does unpleasant things to a decaying body left open to the air. But ‘lie of omission’ is an apt summary of Dean’s personality as a whole, and she’d never been able to stay mad at him for long. Has a heart too eager, that boy.

Yards of muslin soaked in oil and sage is wrapped around the entire slab before anyone touches it, but they do no more than try to lift it before the whole thing cracks into uneven chunks of stone. Easier to bury, Rose supposes, and therefore not really a roadblock in itself.

Doesn’t make much sense though, considering she’d been told nothing could break it.

Whatever had been here once is now gone. Rose has inherited enough of her people’s blood to see when the air is tainted with darkness, and the air around Broussard’s house is as clear and free as any she’s ever seen. Clear-er, in fact, and she’s not sure what that means or why it is because she can guess at least a little of what must have happened here.

They work fast, dusting the larger chunks of altar stone with brick dust before wrapping each individually in the muslin. They’ll be hauled out to more neutral ground and buried in the pattern of a protective symbol and Rose can’t do any more than that. She wouldn’t ask anything further of the men helping her with the task. The community of people who know what she knows -- who know what her mother can do with her old hands and a few carefully murmured words -- is small and close knit. They’re here to help clear out any evil left lingering in their territory.

The body, they’ll burn. Civic duty.

§

Sam startles awake, eyes flying open to see the ceiling slanted in sunlight.

Echoes of the quickly fading dream pound just under his skin, in time with his heart, loud in his ears. Sam can’t remember any of it, can only feel the tautness of every muscle in his body, feels the sheen of perspiration on his neck and face and knows it wasn't anything good. He takes a breath, and then another one, and by then the last vestiges of it are already gone, out of reach. All he has to show for it is sweaty palms and the tangle of sheets twisted around his legs.

That and the stone-heavy weight of something settling low in his gut, the same feeling as when his eyes first saw their Dad lying on the hospital floor but the rest of him hadn’t caught up yet.

It’s early in the day, judging by the weakness of the light filtering through the curtains. In the other bed not three feet away, Dean is still heavily asleep, lying on his stomach, arms tucked under his pillow. Sam watches the rise and fall of his back for a moment to make sure he’s actually asleep and not pretending. Dean can fall asleep at the drop of a hat, but the slightest disturbance in sound or air has him coming to full consciousness just as fast.

Not so today. By the time Sam’s pulled on jeans and a t-shirt, Dean’s done nothing but tuck his head down further under the covers.

Sam resists the urge to card his fingers through what’s showing of Dean’s hair. He remembers feeling the same sense of wondrous endearment when he was a kid and would wake first to see both his brother and father fast asleep, resting peacefully in the little protective circle of their family, Sam always safe in the middle.

Outside, the early morning air has a chill to it that chases away the last lingering cobwebs of an already forgotten dream.

Sam had been right; it is a big town, more of a city, but they can’t see or hear it from here. They had come in from the east and ended up in a motel that's sitting somewhere on the western outskirts, banked by the Rio Grande. There’s a diner across from them that’s really more of an all purpose bar, and a long road that eventually leads back into the city if you follow it. Everything is surrounded by dense scrubland, but apart from that there’s not much else out here.

Except for the church.

They had driven in late last night, so Sam had only seen what the darkness would show him and everything looks different now in the daylight. But he remembers roughly where it had been, and it can’t be more than a fifteen minute walk down the dusty road. Dean’s not going to wake up for a while anyway, then they can grab a cholesterol-heavy breakfast and go into town together, try and scavenge up some information on what they’re dealing with.

Autopsy reports would have to be stolen, or maybe police reports. Perhaps both. Normally Dean’s thing, but Milwaukee is still fresh in Sam’s mind so Dean will have to sit this one out and wait in the car. The bitching on this one will go on for days, Sam knows.

The church seems small and looks old enough for the adobe exterior to be original, genuine. Walls made of yellow-clay, the wooden doors stand open to show rows of pews leading to the altar.

It seems sacrilegious somehow, stepping over the threshold, significant. Knowing what Sam knows, doing what he does. Same thing that any number of hunters out there do and all for a good cause, fighting the good fight.

Still, there’s hesitation. It’s not hard to feel tainted, walking amongst evil as Sam’s done since the day he first learned how to walk.

The ceilings are high inside, giving the illusion of a space larger than it is. There’s the mustiness of clay in the cool air, an earthy and clean scent that Sam breathes in deeply. Small circles of stained glass are set into the side walls, delicate pieces of colored glass, exquisitely detailed.

The wood of the bench seats is hard under Sam’s fingers, solid and cold.

Dean doesn’t understand. Sam doesn’t expect him to. Dean’s too busy being angry at a God he doesn’t believe exists.

Dean had once said I wish you could have that kind of innocence and Sam knows he’d been given whatever small amount his brother could hoard. He’ll always wish that just once he’d been given the chance to do the same.

In the quiet air inside the church, there’s a stillness that Sam feels soak down to his bones. Absorbed as he is in the atmosphere surrounding him, the morning sun cutting in through the windows, Sam doesn’t even realize at first that he’s no longer alone.

There’s a door he hadn’t noticed before, set into the far wall, standing open now. The man who’d opened it is watching him, and Sam can’t say how long he’d been standing there. Never even heard him come in. Dean would kick his ass for that.

“Hi,” Sam says, rising to his feet out of ingrained respect.

No one says anything for a moment, and something like tension rises in the air, making Sam straighten his shoulders.

“Sorry, Father,” he says, tone even. “I didn’t mean to intrude. The door was open.”

That earns him a grin, white teeth flashing briefly.

“That doors always open,” the man says, “but I ain’t the church. Just help them out now and then.”

Deep baritone, hint of the Midwest in the vowels. Sam feels something in his chest ache for a moment because first glance shows him dark eyes and dark hair, the scruff of a beard. The similarities to John end there, though. The man that steps toward him is taller, stockier in build with a barrel chest and a lantern jaw. Hair more curly than straight, skin more olive than tan. A handful of years older than John would have been too, judging by the generous gray at his temples.

He nods his greeting, but doesn’t offer Sam his hand, just watches him with quiet eyes. The mouth tilts at one corner, voice deep when he says, “You looking for the priest?”

Sam takes a second glance, seeing what he hadn’t before; frayed jeans and flannel shirt, worn boots. No collar. The strong musculature and sheer bigness of the man coupled with the low voice should be intimidating -- Sam has to look up a little to meet his eyes -- but it’s all tempered with a reserved stillness that reminds Sam strangely of Jim Murphy.

“No,” Sam says, feeling like he’s been asked something else entirely. “No, just passing by. Thought I’d come in and have a look. It’s a beautiful church.”

“It is.” The mouth curves into a smile and now the hand comes out. "Vic.”

The grip is warm and sure. “Sam.”

Sam shakes hands with a stranger, looks into his eyes, and feels unsettled to the core. The remnant after-images of his dream come back to him, but not with any kind of clarity, so vague that they’re just impressions of an abstract idea.

“Father Thomas will be out in a moment,” Vic says, tone easy. “If you’d like to wait.”

“I’d better get going,” Sam says. “I have someone waiting.”

He nods his goodbye and half expects to be prevented from leaving, but simply gets a nod in return.

Leaving the church seems much harder than entering it had been. Sam does both the same way, looking for answers to questions he doesn’t even know yet.

§

By the time they finish breakfast, the sun is already out in full force, blazing away in the bright blue sky.

Although they’re staying so far out west, it doesn't take long to drive into the center of town. It really doesn't matter where they stay because they don’t really know what it is they’re looking for, and can’t begin to guess at its behaviors or where it might be showing up. If it shows up at all.

Downtown is about six square blocks of malls and office buildings, a handful of high rises scattered throughout. They drive straight through, taking in what they’d missed the night before, noting the police stations and the hospital. They watch the scenery change slowly from suburbs to cityscape with no real difference between the two, not here.

A large enough town to sustain most of its own economy, small enough to be isolated. Most of the business district seems to be centered on the east side, leaving the western quarter free for more domesticity. In between the two, serving as a transitionary area is what Dean mockingly refers to as ‘hippie-haven’, an eclectic mix of boutique art galleries and craft stores, a plethora of ethnic dining, some cheap and some not but generously scattered with Mexican either way. Sam remembers getting a similar vibe when they’d passed through Santa Fe with their Dad what seems like a lifetime ago now.

Jess would have loved it here; she’d liked art galleries and craft stores. She liked making things with her hands and had once carved Sam a wooden frame to hold a photo of his parents. It had taken him two years to agree to use it and now both the frame and photo have long since burnt to ash.

They park the Impala three blocks away from the police station, out of sight of any passing squad cars. They’re arguing before they even get out of the car.

“Couldn’t we get this off the web?” Dean says as he closes his door. “Call Ash. He’s meant to be some kind of computer genius. Needs a hair cut worse than you do, but still.”

They’re parked in a narrow alleyway, bordered by fire escapes on either side. The apartment buildings are tall, but the sun is so bright by now that just the small slice of it that makes it down to the concrete illuminates the entire area, bouncing off the metal lids of stray garbage cans. Sam smells warm sun and exhaust fumes, the fragrant smells of the Thai restaurant around the corner.

“Ash can’t get to these files,” Sam tells him, pulling on the sports coat and breathing in the city air. The coat doesn’t match his tie or the rest of his clothes, but he’s not going for the slick officer look that works best on civilians. Besides, they don’t have time to find a shop and hire a suit. Off beat detective will have to do it this time. “Neither can I, not from outside their network. They’ve been marked as extra secure or something. They think it’s a serial killer.”

“And they don’t want copycats,” Dean says. “I get that. So explain to me why I’m not coming with you.”

Sam adjusts his tie, and reaches for the tin box that holds their store of fake identification. “Is there one we haven’t used yet? How about this -- Robert Duncan?”

There are only so many things he can keep his hands busy with before Dean’s silence finally demands that he look up.

“Dean.”

Dean shakes his head. “It may have been my face on the news but they’ve got you flagged too,” he says, adding without a trace of humor, “You’re my Bonnie, didn’t you hear?”

Sam stares, brow furrowed. “What?”

Dean doesn’t answer.

“Look, I’ve still got the better shot here,” Sam says, rising tone betraying his frustration. “Two of us in there would just draw more attention.”

Dean’s expression makes it clear that it’s An Issue. Sam can’t figure out why. Despite the insults that often pepper Dean’s particular brand of humor, they both know Sam’s more than capable of handling himself. Dean himself has more than once pushed him into the middle of things and then took off, just to get a few laughs.

His brother is angrier than he should be. For someone who says exactly what he means, Dean hasn’t been saying shit lately and Sam realizes that maybe something is going on right in front of him that he has no idea about. He thinks of Dean’s voice repeating their Dad’s words, of demon viruses and more questions being raised than he could ever hope of answering.

He thinks about the dream he keeps having and can never remember.

“It’s a police station, Dean,” he says finally, voice low. “I can handle people just fine.

One problem at a time, and at the top of the list right now is the hunt.

“Fine,” Dean says, looking away before Sam gets more than a glimpse of something unreadable in his eyes. “Fine. Fifteen minutes, in and out.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Sam agrees softly.

§

After all that, it turns out to be an anticlimactic sort of expedition.

There’s a new kid on the force, assigned to desk work, just starting out on this first or second day on the job. Almost achingly young, he’s eager and a little scared of Sam’s imposing height and flashing badge, and although the kid doesn’t have the right permissions to access classified material, Sam manages to wrangle himself a computer hooked up to the system from the inside, and a quiet ten minutes to himself in an empty office.

He doesn’t read any of the reports on screen, just sends them through to the printer and snags them on his way out. The close ups of the autopsy photos are kind hard to ignore though, even if you’re trying not to look.

He couldn’t have been inside the building more than ten minutes but Sam walks out to grey skies and overcast weather, a gentle breeze lifting the hair at his nape when he pauses on the pavement outside. There’s not even a hint of the blue sky visible anymore, no warmth from the sun.

When he gets back to the car, Dean has his face tilted up to the clouds, surveying the sky. Sam hands the files over without a word.

“Ash phoned again,” Dean tells him flatly, giving him a significant look.

“Let me guess,” Sam says.

All things considered, at least they got the location right.

§

By the time they duck into the nearest diner, the wind has picked up, blowing trash into the gutters, and a heavy greyness has settled over the town. Dean’s willing to bet there’ll be thunder soon, if they wait long enough.

Steaming cup of black coffee in hand, he stares at the page Sam’s showing him and raises an eyebrow. “Seriously? Suspected strangulation, dismemberment, massive blood loss, and this is what you think did it?”

Sam doesn’t back down. “What did you say was missing again?” he prompts.

Dean glances down at the autopsy reports spread out on the table in front of him. Gary Jones and Jeff Fletcher, two middle aged men, both farmers and both dead and nothing else in common except for that. Most of their remains had been recovered. Some parts weren’t.

“Eyes, nose, fingers,” Dean reads, then adds after a pause, “and their dicks.”

Sam nods, like that’s normal. “I’m telling you, Dean. I remember reading a Portuguese myth that said mermaids eat their victims. Exactly like that; eyes, nose, tips of their fingers. Genitals,” he adds, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

“Okay then,” Dean says, leaning back. “Mermaids did it. Sure.”

“What else is capable of controlling the weather and eats its victims? Male victims,” Sam stresses, nudging the book towards Dean again. “Mists, rain, floods -- anything to do with water, these things can manipulate. It’s how they caused shipwrecks. They can suck moisture right out of the air, or ground.”

Dean pauses, and then takes the book from Sam’s hand, flipping though the pages. “It would explain the dead crops.”

“The gathering clouds, the wind picking up,” Sam adds, shrugging. “Nothing else makes sense. It’s two for two.”

“Cops probably think the killer’s keeping himself some trophies,” Dean mutters. “Christ. This is so not the Disney version.”

Sam gives him a look.

“Shut up,” Dean says. “You loved that movie when you were a kid. And Ariel was hot.”

Sam hides his grin behind his own coffee. “Okay. Sure.”

Dean doesn’t even realize he’s staring until Sam puts the cup down, smile fading.

“What?” Sam asks quietly when the silence goes on too long.

You should laugh more often. It’s good to see you smile.

A woman walks past their booth with her two children, yelling loud and carefree, distracting.

Dean clears his throat.

“I thought mermaids were all about salt water,” he says, looking back to the book. “What the hell is it doing in New Mexico? Must want something real bad, for it to trek through deserts and mountain ranges to get here.”

He scans the paragraphs on disarming techniques while he’s talking. The sign of the cross and anything metal will repel them, and food offerings or lit candles will placate them but there’s nothing on how to kill them. A salt and burn will probably do it, but that’s only once they’ve held it still enough to put a bullet through its heart. If it has a heart. Decapitation, maybe. They have some pretty heavy duty weaponry in the trunk if the guns won’t do it by themselves. Dean suspects the hardest thing will be holding it still long enough to take its head off.

“I don’t think it came by itself,” Sam says, leaning back in his seat to watch Dean turn the pages. “That first guy? The one whose house we went to, Jeff Fletcher. Says in there -” Sam adds, waving vaguely at the police files, “- that he’d just come back from a fishing trip with his buddies, off the coast somewhere.”

“You’re thinking he found it and brought it back with him,” Dean says, pushing the book back towards Sam. It’s leather bound and dusty, something Sam pulled from one of the footwells in the back seat of the car. "Something this malevolent?"

Sam shrugs. "They're capable of emotion, and attachment. It's just ... they're just as likely to kill a man as they are to love him."

Dean snorts. "That’s some kind of romance." He pauses there and rummages through the papers on Sam’s side of the table, finds the tourist map they’ve been marking with black x’s. “It’s been heading west for a reason, right?” he says, tracing the line of winding blue that represents the Rio Grande. “We’re right next to the river. It’s heading for the river.”

“It’s trying to get back home,” Sam says, and Dean hears the surprise in his tone.

“Plenty of people to snack on between here and the Pacific,” Dean says, folding the map and throwing in on the table. “If it gets to the river, there’s no telling how fast it can move. We’ll have to stop it before it gets there. I don’t want to be following a trail of corpses to the ocean.”

Sam’s eyes lift to meet his. “They’re half human, you know."

“Which means they’re half not,” Dean says when it becomes clear that’s all he’s getting. He sits back in his seat, studying Sam’s expression. “We’ve been through this, Sam. Several times over. It’s killing people and that counts.”

It’s simple, but not. The rest goes unsaid, because giving voice to it all would somehow bring to light the possibility of it happening at all. Dean doesn’t say you wouldn’t, you couldn’t, not on my watch because he’ll do all he can to make sure that it doesn’t happen but Sam won’t trust it, or him. Sam had started looking for answers elsewhere a long time ago, but it still stings.

“So what are we looking for?” Dean asks, trying to herd Sam’s focus back onto practicalities. “Bountiful breasts and a clamshell bikini?”

For a moment, nothing happens and no one says anything. It’s no different, really, from the past week. There had been that kaleidoscopic chaos of brothers brought out of their bodies, and then ... nothing.

“Sam -”

“You have to tell me,” Sam says finally, and something about his tone has Dean narrowing his eyes, “… if I start spilling over, or bleeding into you. Anything out of the ordinary, Dean, anything wrong -- you let me know.”

Dean just watches him for a moment and then says, tone too careful, “What could possibly be wrong?”

Something shifts in the hazel of Sam’s eyes, something like steel and resolve, and Dean doesn’t like it or what it could mean. Nothing good ever comes from Sam being obstinate, because nothing can change his mind once it’s made up, and Dean doesn’t even know what the hell it is they’re talking about anymore.

“They shapeshift,” Sam tells him, and Dean blinks, trying to follow the turn in conversation. “It’s how they walk on land; they grow legs. They can look human or turn into animals, horses usually. Could be any freaking thing we come across.”

Dean tightens his jaw and doesn’t say don’t try and protect me from what you think is dangerous; that’s my job. “So we don’t separate. Keep in the same line of sight, and we’ll be fine.”

It’s the only way Dean’s internal compass works. All roads lead back to Sam.

§

The further west they drive the darker the sky gets with heavy clouds of grey-black rolling close to the ground. A strange kind of twilight descends over the town, headless of the time of day. It’s a sign that they’re heading in the right direction.

West of the city center, suburbia starts giving way to what looks like a development area, wide open spaces of leveled soil and earth waiting for their allotment of identical stucco homes. Lego-block houses standing at the ready like wooden skeletons. After a while, they start to see less population of any kind, the land parsing out its homes with less generosity, several minutes of driving needed before they see the next residence.

A little further and they hit the river running north to south, the Rio Grande flowing ocean-ward with water brought down from the San Juan Mountains, water that’s seen and passed Albuquerque hundreds of miles away.

The EMF Sam’s holding starts singing after ten minutes of driving south along the road that runs parallel to the river, and Dean slows the car down then, turns it around and retraces their route until they isolate the area where the signal is strongest.

There are no houses in sight at the place where they stop. They get out in front of a small clearing, at the edge of the wooded area that lines this part of the river.

Sam takes a few steps further out into the clearing, Dean keeping watch near the car, and they both watch the EMF jump off its mark.

“Something’s here all right,” Sam says, turning the EMF off and throwing it into the trunk.

Dean has to try hard not to roll his eyes as he scrolls through the playlist on Sam’s phone. “Man, do you even have one decent song? You know, one with real acoustics instead of this electronic shit?”

“It’s all electronic shit these days,” Sam mutters, snatching his phone out of Dean’s hands.

Hunting something that can shapeshift is dangerous in itself. Hunting without the ability to hear their target coming, or each other, is stupidly dangerous but they have little choice.

Sam had said the myth of a mermaid's song having the same pull as sirens is just a rumor, but up until this morning the whole concept of mermaids was nothing more than a myth. How strong they are physically, Dean has no idea, but the stories all point to strong supernatural powers so he’s not going to take the risk of zombie-ing out to hypnotism and leaving Sam to fend for himself.

Using their phones is a quick-fix solution, but it’ll have to do. They’ve done stupid shit before and gotten away with it.

Dean turns to scan the border of the clearing where the willow trees stand, providing sparse and scattered foliage. Beyond that, the taller cottonwoods and tamarisk start talking over, and somewhere past those is the Rio Grande, although Dean can’t hear it from this distance. He’d caught glimpses of it during their drive here, and it had looked wide but shallow. Decades ago, it would have been a rushing torrent of water. Powerful.

When he turns back, Sam’s already pulling out weapons from the trunk. No shotgun because they’re hunting something corporeal so rock salt won’t dissipate it, but Dean takes his Glock and rounds of silver bullets and sees Sam doing the same. After a moments pause, Sam reaches into the trunk again and pulls out their hunting knife, wicked twelve inches plated in a silver metal alloy. It technically doesn’t belong to either one of them but has unofficially been Sam’s since he was twelve and John had first taught him how to hold it properly.

Dean watches him palm it, watches the rising wind lift the curls in Sam’s hair -- and experiences the same waking vertigo he’d had as a kid where even after waking from a nightmare it seemed like the one person you know and love seemed to get further and further away without ever moving.

He closes the trunk with a dull thud. “Stay in sight.”

Sam just nods, clips the knife to his belt.

If the mermaid -- mermaid, huh -- is here, then it’s already gotten to the river and it may be long gone by now, but Dean doesn’t think so. It needs to feed to survive or it’s killing just for the fun of it; either way, it’s set up a pattern, and Dean suspects it won’t move on until it’s found another victim.

They approach the tree line on foot, stopping there to clip the headphones into their phones.

“Can you hear me?” Dean asks once he has Metallica going, volume as loud as he can bear it. Sam shakes his head, and Dean sees his mouth moving without hearing any of the words.

They enter the woodlands side by side, putting no more than six feet between them and keeping to a more or less straight trajectory, heading directly for the river bank. Dean feels the thick ground cover crunch underfoot, dried twigs and leaves that snap against his boots, but he doesn’t hear it. Ten minutes of careful walking later, the trees start to thin out again and Dean catches his first proper glimpse of the Rio Grande.

The forest floor, gently sloping down until then, suddenly drops into a harsh incline leading down to the river bank. Dean’s feet slide out from underneath him in the sloping mud and he feels Sam grab a handful of the back of his jacket and haul him back upright.

Something shimmers in and out of view in the corner of Dean’s eye, and he whips around to catch sight of it.

The river is broad and flat, banked on both sides by rocks and low scrubs. Coming out on this side of the woodlands seems to have brought on full night, the clouds here much darker and thicker, spreading black that fills the sky, the wind stronger. Every now and then, a little bit of stray light is caught by the waters surface and reflected back, random bits of brightness. That may be what Dean had seen but he doesn’t think so. He turns his body towards Sam and keeps his eyes on the river, gesturing with two fingers to where he thinks it had been.

Sam nods, fingers flexing around his own gun, and they scramble down the sharp incline, getting muddy before they hit the drier groundcover of the bank. They stand there for a moment, side by side, each surveying their view of the territory for anything unusual.

It’s kind of surreal, having his own hunting-soundtrack. Hetfield keeps up a constant aural assault in Dean’s ears, the sound at complete odds with the stillness around him. It’s somehow reflected within; Dean’s never been so aware of how the air brushes against his skin, furls through his hair. The other bank is lined with a tree line similar to the one they’ve just left, and the same wind that’s touching Dean is ruffling through the leaves there. There’s a surge then, of air and pressure, and everything in sight bends. In that kind of movement, it’s easier to look for something standing still rather than what’s moving and Dean turns to find it, eyes naturally drawn towards its location.

Something is crouching, watching them, light gleaming off the whites of its eyes. It’s sitting in the copse of trees they’ve just left, off to Dean’s right. He turns, bringing the gun up and firing already, sees Sam move in his periphery to do the same. It’s gone in the next moment, in a blur of inky black air, but Dean’s already running full tilt for it. He catches a glimpse of Sam’s blue t-shirt, knows his brother is right with him, so he doesn’t slow down as he reaches the steep incline leading back up into the trees.

What meets him when he scrambles up the incline is the business end of a cross-bow, silver arrow glinting dully in the dimness.

Dean digs his heels in and comes to a halt, feels Sam stumble into him from behind, and sees the obvious surprise in the man’s eyes in front of him.

Worn boots, frayed jeans and a flannel shirt; but Dean bypasses all that to take in the comfortable hold the man has on his weapon, the steady grip. The smooth wood of well loved rosary beads hang from the guy’s jeans pocket, and Dean thinks hunter, lowers his gun slightly and sees the crossbow do likewise.

Sam reaches from behind him and lowers Dean’s gun all the way, shaking his head at the look Dean throws him.

Whatever. It’ll do for now.

There isn’t much time to think before a rumbling shiver races through the earth under Dean’s feet. Not enough to throw him off balance, but enough to get his attention. The three of them turn to their surroundings and this time Sam sees it first. Dean sees him pivot and swing his gun up, points his own gun in the same direction before he even has a sight on the thing. He doesn’t really get a clear view of it even now, just catches glimpses of the same sunken eyes from before, and rows of gleaming teeth, sharp and pointed. A predator’s mouth that’s opening into a scream.

Dean had never before thought you could feel sound but there’s something in the air that makes his skin prickle, like a physical presence that’s stopping just short of touching him. That’s as far as it goes, though. The headphones are doing their job. Dean doesn’t hear a thing.

The man with the crossbow stiffens visibly and then a moment later is going to his knees in the dirt, weapon dropped and hands coming up to cover his ears.

Another blur of black air and the creature is taking off, Sam immediately on its tail and determined not to lose it. Dean swears under his breath, yells we’ll be back over his shoulder without ever looking back or even hearing himself, just as determined not to lose his brother. The little shit.

Stay in sight. How simple could that be?

The next few minutes are a blur in the darkness. Dean has to sprint at full speed just to keep Sam in sight, following the broad back covered in blue weaving in and out of the trees in front of him. Somewhere ahead of Sam, he catches an occasional glimpse of something big moving on four legs, limbs and body angled close to the ground. Sam fires at it a couple of times, but either it’s moving too fast to hit, or Sam can’t get a steady lock on it because of how fast they’re moving themselves. Dean’s a better shot, just slightly, but with the erratic way Sam’s dodging around the trees, he’d just as likely take his brother out.

Besides, he’s been counting and knows Sam is almost out of bullets, knows he’ll need his own when Sam’s busy reloading.

Whatever slams into him from behind does so with enough force to send Dean flying to the ground, hands skidding in the dirt. The gun drops and skitters away on the forest floor, coming to a stop near an upturned tree root. It’s out of arms reach, Dean knows, but he turns over anyway, ready to tackle the thing with bare hands.

There’s nothing there.

Dean stares at the trees, wary, and slides over to reach for his gun. The thing they’re chasing is fast, but not so quick that Dean wouldn’t have even caught sight of it running away.

When he stands and looks ahead again, Sam’s nowhere to be seen.

§

The thing Sam is chasing disappears out of view.

He stumbles to a halt and stands there, panting, staring into the darkness.

It takes him longer than it should to notice that Dean’s not with him anymore. And even then it’s only a fleeting thought, briefly touching his mind before floating away again, insubstantial. The thing that Sam is most aware of is his heartbeat, pounding loud and insistent against his ribcage, trying to get free, get loose. Its rhythm is at complete odds with the music in his ears, so it makes perfect sense when Sam twists a hand into the cord of his headphones and tugs them free.

The air is quiet, but there are still sounds. The soft rustling of the wind, the dull burbling of moving water … and underneath that, there are other sounds too, silent subnotes and low undertones. Nothing clearly audible but there none the less, Sam knows, can feel it against his skin and under it.

Something surges to life in Sam's veins, thrashes through blood and bone, and Sam takes a reflexive step back, overcome by wild déjà vu. It's the same state he's been waking up in for days now, a sudden resurgence of the lingering dream he keeps forgetting. Except this isn’t a dream. Sam is wide awake and for one terrifying moment he feels himself starting to slip.

Dimly, he can sense things moving out there, unseen and silent, crawling low to the ground and moving towards him. The closer they get, the worse it becomes.

“Sam!”

Dream or reality, there’s always one sure thing that holds Sam firm, breaks him free.

Dean sounds equal parts frantic and furious.

Sam blinks and takes a breath, tightens the slack grip he has on his gun and goes to find his brother.

§

They meet up back in the clearing, the three of them, and Vic watches the two men fall into stride next to each other, watches them move in sync. He knows that they are who they are. They are not shapeshifters, not some other creature pretending a human’s form. He sees it in the air around them.

Nor are they entirely who they are meant to be. Vic sees that too. There is a vacuum there, space left empty and open. Unfilled.

Sam looks up at him then, catches his eye and Vic sees the night air around him tremble and throb, a compressed heartbeat.

Family. Brothers, they tell him, and he finds out that they both have equally strong grips. He's heard the name Winchester before.

“We’re pretty sure it’s taken off,” Sam tells him. “Probably headed south, down river.”

The damp cloth Vic is pressing to his ears comes away spotted with red, but the wound had bled no more than a few drops. Listening to the sound the creature had made was worse than any injury the noise could cause. Discordant frequencies pitched too high and too deep at the same time, a combination of tones that don’t belong together and were never meant to be inflicted on human ears.

“If you boys need help -” Vic starts to say.

“We’ve got it covered,” Dean says evenly, gaze steady.

Sam shifts on his feet.

“All right,” Vic says, tone just as even. “I’ll leave it to you young guns, then.”

Not hostility in Dean eyes, but it's not welcome either. He nods his goodbye and walks away, but Sam lingers a moment.

“Is it bad?” Sam asks, gesturing at the stained cloth in Vic’s hand.

Vic’s mouth quirks. “I’ll live.”

They both turn as the revving of the Impala’s engine fills the clearing, chasing away the silence with its guttural roar. Headlights turn on, blinding them with the glare.

For a second Vic thinks that’s it, but then Sam turns back to him and says quietly, “What did it sound like?”

His face is too heavily shadowed in the harsh lights for Vic to make out the expression, but he studies him for a moment anyway. “Just sound,” Vic admits. “Unpleasant. Not exactly the chime of cathedral bells. But it was nothing but sound. Why do you ask, Sam?”

Throb and pulse, and containment of a kind Vic has never seen, not even in the gifted. A stasis of such instability can only be maintained for so long, and often develops hair-trigger sensitivity. If it hasn’t already.

He wonders if the kid knows.

“No reason,” Sam says softly, and he’s looking back at the car now.

The wind has been steadily dying until then, but a gentle gust bends the leaves and grass. Not air exactly; it’s a rippling of atmosphere that fades when the brothers drive away, tail lights disappearing around the bend.

§

They pull up in front of their motel room in silence. Probably best that way. If Dean opens his mouth now, he’s liable to say a fair few things that later on he’ll wish he hadn’t. Sitting beside him, Sam is gazing out the windshield, brow drawn tight and looking at nothing in particular.

“So,” Dean says finally. “You two know each other?”

That gets a reaction. Sam’s gaze flickers in his direction, but he doesn’t look at him directly. “We met at the church,” he says, then opens his door and gets out.

Dean stays where he is for a moment, and breathes through his nose. It occurs to him as he gets out of the car that he’s kind of at a loss as to what to say, how to react. That’s new. Where Sam is concerned, there had never been any confusion as to what his motivation had been; keep Sam safe. Keep him one step behind, keep him out of view of anything that might be looking. That had become impossible once Sam had shot past him in height, but it had never really worked like that anyway. Things saw Sam, weather he hid from them or looked straight back. And Sam never hid. He hadn’t been taught to hide.

Unfair then, perhaps, for Dean to ask that of him now.

Still.

“You gonna share?” Dean says as he slams his door closed and rounds the front of the car.

Sam cuts his eyes over to watch him approach, but doesn’t move from where he’s leaning against the doorway. “What.”

“The genius plan,” Dean says with a shrug, voice low and tight. “Whatever it was that made you think leaving my ass the fuck behind was a good idea.”

Something shifts in Sam’s eyes, but Dean only gets a glimmer before Sam looks away. “Open the door, Dean,” he says softly.

“Because I thought we already had a plan,” Dean says, talking over him. “We don’t split up.”

Sam straightens, pulls away from the wall. “You were right behind me.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, feeling one hand fist at his side. “Until I wasn’t. You never even looked back, Sam. And don’t even get me started about the headphones.”

“You took yours out too.”

“To find you! Why’d you take them out? Seeing what it did to the Padre back there not enough?”

“He’s not a priest,” Sam says, quiet and loaded. “Open the damn door.”

Sometimes, things come to a head between them. It’s inevitable, living how they live and they haven’t had a break in ages, confined to only each other’s company with no rest. Dean feels all the unsaid things between them hang heavy in the air, a rolling wave that could very likely explode into genuine violence.

He remembers the last time he’d hit Sam, their Dad’s name thrown about one too many times. Remembers the way Sam had just taken it and then turned back to him, like there was nowhere else to turn.

Dean recognizes the frustration as his own making and backs off, unlocks the door and steps in, waiting for Sam to follow.

“You always wait until I’m inside to lay the salt.

Sam’s tone is now more wary than it is angry, but Dean’s too frustrated to try and figure it out.

“How else do you want me to do it?” he snaps.

Sam’s studying him, like he’s realized something about Dean or himself, or both. “Why do you do that?” he says carefully. “Why do you wait until I’m inside? Dean, I haven’t crossed a salt line in days now. Not since …”

Dean knows since what.

They’ve stayed at three, maybe four, motels since they’ve left Louisiana and Dean’s been laying out salt every night and sweeping it aside every morning, careful not to leave a trail behind them. Usually the salt only came out in the middle of the bad hunts, but lately it’s become a more frequent occurrence. Too many unknown players out there on a shadowy field and Dean just figured it’s better to be safe than sorry. If he’d been more diligent about doing it himself, then he hadn’t paid it much attention. It had made sense considering both him and Sam had been burst open and touched by something that wanted feeding.

In hindsight, common sense forms an obvious pattern, one that Dean hadn’t even been aware of.

“Lay one down now.”

Dean looks up, still trying to figure out what it is he knows exactly, and how he’s come about knowing it. “What?”

Sam stands stock still on the other side of the doorway, jaw locked and eyes hard. “Salt,” he says from between his teeth, “the door.”

Dean stares. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Sam works his jaw, nostrils flaring, looking even more obstinate than Dean had thought possible. He doesn’t speak, but braces his feet like he’s getting ready to take a punch and Dean wonders if maybe that’s not the best way to go after all. Words never seem to help any.

“You’re a moron,” he says, then grabs the can of salt he’d left sitting inside the door. He pours it out, a thick line that goes an inch past each side of the doorframe, then caps it off and straightens up.

Sam stands there, toes-to-salt, and stares down at the line of white like it’s going to rear up and bite him.

“Happy, sparky?” Dean says.

Nothing.

“You wanna play mind-meld with the sodium, you can stand there all night, Sam. I’m going to bed.”

They’re just words though, because Dean doesn’t move. Sam doesn’t move either. He doesn’t even look up, just stands there with his head bowed and hands clenched at his sides.

Something cold spills over the back of Dean’s neck, slithers down his spine.

“Sam, you don’t get in here right now, I will kick your ass three ways from Sunday, I swear.”

When Sam finally looks up, the panic is running wild and chaotic in his eyes. “I can’t,” he says, voice small, and Dean knows he’s not lying. “Dean. I can’t.”

They stare at each other from either side of the threshold. Dean doesn’t even realize he’s reaching out until Sam steps back out of reach, leaving him grasping at empty air. He looks at Dean with something akin to betrayal warring with the fear in his eyes, but Dean doesn’t have time to figure it out before Sam just turns and walks out of view.

“Hey!”

Sweeping his foot through the salt line as Dean steps past it is something he doesn’t even give second thought to. Sam’s not gone two steps before Dean’s grabbed the back of his jacket, hauling him to a stop. He doesn’t expect Sam to spin around as fast as he does, and he stumbles, unprepared for Sam to step right up to him.

“Are you insane?” Sam roars, hands pushing at his shoulders, shoving him back. “Get back in there, Dean!”

Dean’s managed to keep a hold of Sam’s jacket, twisting it half off and around him, and he uses the handhold now to give Sam a vicious shake.

“Listen to me,” he says, tone low and urgent, “We’ve been on the road together for days now. Sam, we’ve slept in the same room every night. Nothing has happened. Nothing will happen. Not in the next five minutes, and not tonight, okay? Sam, Sam-” he lets go of the jacket when Sam tries to pull away, grabs him by the arms instead, “-whatever this is, it’s like a technicality, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything. You haven’t hurt me. You won’t hurt me. You could never, Sam, come on.”

“You knew,” Sam growls out, wounded, jerking himself free of Dean’s hold. This time Dean lets him go because Sam’s rooted to the spot and hissing in his face, not running away. “This whole time, you knew. How could you know, Dean? How could you not tell me?”

“I didn’t know!”

No one has come out to complain about the noise yet, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. They’re surrounded by motel rooms, and by now it's late at night. Angry and tense, Sam’s shifting from foot to foot, restless enough that any kind of distraction will snap his resolve and make him leave. Dean needs him to focus and to stay here.

Taking a step away from his brother goes against every instinct hard wired into his body, but Dean does it and gives Sam space and the option of choosing.

“If you take off on your own,” Dean says, “you’ll make us both more vulnerable to whatever the hell is fucking around with us. Think it through. Stay. We’ll figure it out together.

§

When they had left Louisiana, Dean hadn’t given a second thought to the whole mess except to make sure the evidence was taken care of by someone he’d trusted. Wishful thinking on his part, maybe, to imagine they’d walked away without wounds less visible then the burns on their arms. It’s not in Dean’s nature to dwell. It had happened, and he’d walked away whole and alive with Sam next to him. If obedience to Sam was part of that deal on some level, well, he hadn’t been lying when he’d said that’s fine with him too.

He should likely be more concerned about that than he is.

It hadn’t occurred to him to think what it might have cost Sam, not in terms other than of being forced into startling intimacy with his brother.

He should have paid attention to those damn books Sam was reading.

“You wanna try it again?” Dean asks, not moving from his place on the bed.

Sam's been pacing, restless and unable to stay still, but he pauses now at the other end of the room and turns to lean back against the wall, glancing at Dean briefly before looking away. “It won’t make any difference,” he says. “I could stand there all night and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

Dean glances at the door, closed now but with the salt scattered and broken. No longer a boundary. “What if I tried shoving you over?”

Dean's not expecting a smile, but even a show of anger or frustration would be better than the response he does get.

“I'd worry less about making jokes and more about keeping your gun close,” Sam says, with a quiet resolve that conveys desperation more clearly than shouting ever could. A front of stillness and silence is as big a sign of turmoil as noise could ever be when it's coming from Sam. Dean is the one who loses it loud and messily. Sam implodes, leading up to it with a silent tenacity that often goes unnoticed until it's too late.

Dean's noticed it now. He's been learning to pay attention. If it can be helped, the rule is that only one of them gets to teeter on the edge at a time. When they don't stick to that, things tend to go downhill fast. It's what holds Dean from snapping back just yet.

“It's salt, Sam,” he says evenly. “I'm not gonna put a bullet in you because you can't cross some goddamn salt. It could mean any number of things.”

Sam cuts his eyes over to him without moving his head. “Name one.”

Dean cocks his head, considering. “We must have been scrambled somehow,” he says with a half shrug. “Like our signals got mixed up. We’re just not … identifiable. That’s all.”

It’s all ‘we’ and ‘our’ and Sam doesn’t point out that Dean can walk both ways through the door fine.

“It’s rock salt, Dean,” he says. “It doesn’t identify shit. Evil things can’t cross it; it’s that simple.”

The huff of air Dean gives barely counts as a laugh. “Now you want to make things simple? For years I’ve heard nothing but how there’s more than just black and white. All that gray area you keep going on about, murky waters and shit, what happened to that?”

It’s so the wrong thing to say.

“So I’m murky waters now?” Sam says, eyes and tone sparking sudden challenge.

Jesus but it's enough to make Dean's head spin. He scrubs a hand over his face to keep from snarking back. “In Louisiana you walked in and out of our room fine. This only goes back that far.”

“It goes back further than that,” Sam shoots back. “Dad told you what he told you for a reason.

“You can stop throwing that in my face any time now,” Dean snaps, aware of how fast his hackles rise and not surprised by it. “We don't know what he meant.”

Sam raises his eyebrows, incredulous. “Don't we? Because I'd say it's pretty damn clear. The people like me, we’re all being round up like cattle and there’s got to be a reason for that too. Maybe there’s something about us that’s corruptible.” Sam pauses, leans forward with arms open. “What if this is it? We’ve been messing around with this crap our entire lives. Something was always bound to get a little too close, stain a little too deep. Maybe Louisiana was one step too far.”

“Too far for what, Sam?” Dean says, tone hard with a warning that clearly says you better not answer.

“Every time I bring it up, you brush it off like it could never happen,” Sam says softly. “What if it does, Dean. What would it take?”

“That's enough,” Dean says, rising to his feet.

“No, really,” Sam says, eyes narrowed. “Would I just have to hurt someone or kill them? One person? Two?”

Dean is across the room before he knows it, but he's not planning on getting in Sam's face; button-pushing aside, his brother is truly upset about something that Dean doesn't quite have a handle on yet.

“I'm sick of this bullshit, you know that?” Dean growls, voice dropping to a register he rarely ever uses on Sam. He stops several feet away and jabs an accusatory finger in Sam's direction without making contact. “You think you're the only one who's fighting here? I've been doing this longer than you, Sam, and I've stuck it through the whole way. It's hard, I get that. So tell me you're tired. Or that you're scared. Goddamnit, tell me you want to quit! But don't keep asking me to pretend like I don't know you. Because I do, and there isn't any part of you that's even capable of giving up or giving in, not even after you're out of fight. Which you'll never be."

Sam hasn't tensed at what could be perceived as hostility, doesn't bristle or back away from it, because they know each other better than that. Instead he fixes his gaze somewhere on the middle of Dean's chest and says, soft and hoarse, “How can you know that?”

“Because I know,” Dean says immediately. “And because I'm not tired. Maybe one day it won't be this hard, but if we have to keep watch for every fucking thing that comes knocking for the rest of our lives, then that's okay too. Because I'm not tired.”

They fall silent for a moment then. Dean hadn't noticed it while talking but he's shaken enough that he doesn't want to step away from Sam even a little, so he just stands there and waits.

“You're not pitching a fit over nothing,” Dean says eventually. “What else is this about?”

Sam sighs and shifts. “Nothing. I just want some answers. It’d be nice to know something for once.”

Dean's fairly sure he's being given both truth and lie with that.

Sam's tone is soft, but it’s not manipulation -- it's frustration layered over stubbornness and both have been rubbed thin lately. Dean knows he isn’t being asked to display anything heartfelt or involved because he knows Sam has stopped expecting that of him.

Failure of a different kind, that. Saving Sam is one thing, but if it means stripping him of everything that makes him Sam then that’s not really winning, and the battle is already half lost. Protecting his brother from the darkness means more than getting him on the right side of the door, Dean’s starting to realize. Insulation of a different kind needs to be offered. He’s just not sure what or how.

Owning the truth is harder than protecting it, but Sam's already lost so many of the good things in his life he deserves that Dean at least try.

“You wanna know what’s different?” Dean says, keeping his voice low. “I wasn’t lying to you. I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel anything. It’s like -” I’m all alone. “- you’re right beside me, right? And I can see you and hear you just fine. But it’s like you’re not here.”

Common words strung together in a disjointed sentence and none of it makes sense. Dean trails off there, glances up to see Sam watching him, and sees the questions painted in Sam’s eyes. The ones he won’t ask because he’s waiting for Dean to give him more.

Dean thinks You’re a two dimensional picture and I can’t see my reflection anymore but doesn’t say any of it because that would be tantamount to admitting he needs it.

He spreads his hands instead. “I can’t explain it any better than that.”

The muscle over Sam’s throat tenses for a moment, then he says, “But I am here.”

Dean nods. “I know.”

“And I’m still me,” Sam says. “Right?”

Dean levels a gaze at him. “Christo.”

Sam snorts, but doesn’t react in any other way. “You know that’s not what I meant. And it doesn’t really prove anything.”

“Neither does the salt,” Dean says, then adds after a pause, “Look, I don't know what it was like for you. What you saw, or – I mean don't get me wrong, I appreciate being alive and all. Just don't mire yourself in it, though.”

Sam is staring at him.

“Are you staring because I know what ‘mire’ means?” Dean asks, tone wary.

“You really don’t remember, do you?” Sam says, soft and wry. He’s watching Dean’s face carefully, searching for something. Dean wants to look away, confronted with a Sam who’s suddenly seeing him in a way that would seem like a threat or invasion coming from anybody else. Sam isn’t anybody else and Dean doesn’t turn away from it, although he doesn’t understand it either.

“Dean -” Sam says, hesitating, the same time that the sonic boom goes off in the room.

There’s no accompanying light or physical force, not that Dean can identify without inventing a whole new world for it. It’s muffled impact, like water turned hard, slamming into him with enough weight to send him flying across the room and into the far wall, and then melting over him in soft pulsing waves. The residue of it feels like it’s coating the entire room and everything in it, warm and thick like honey over Dean’s mouth and ears and eyes. He wipes a hand over his face, trying to clear it off so he can breath better but there’s nothing there and his hand comes away clean but damp with moisture.

It was nothing more than water and air, compressed down and then released.

Dean looks up and sees the furniture flung about the room, the glass of the bedside lamps broken over the carpet, chairs and table tipped over.

He gets up on shaky legs, wipes blood from his forehead. “Sam?”

An arm fishes up from behind one of the beds and Sam blinks up at Dean with dazed eyes, and then freezes. “The door.”

Turning around, Dean see the door standing blown wide open ... and sees the salt still lying scattered everywhere. Serving as neither boundary or protection.

Water and air, and it takes Dean too long to realize that the thing had followed them back to the motel. He’s not taken two steps when the second air-bomb goes off and Dean goes flying. This time he cracks his skull against the wall hard enough that he doesn’t get back up.

§

It's the repeated opening and shutting of the door that brings Dean to consciousness again.

He's still in their motel room and Sam isn't.

There isn't enough time to be shaken. It's not something Dean can afford.

The mystery isn't guessing what it had been, so much as where it had gone. The force that had knocked Dean clear into the wall is familiar on second thought only because he recognizes it from the river earlier that night. What had brought him down from behind while chasing Sam though the woodlands hadn't been anything other than elemental force, but Dean hadn't known it at the time.

He thinks of Bobby first, and Ellen second, not sure how either would be of any help. Calling Sam's cell earns him a sharp trill that comes from within the room itself and he follows the sound to his brother's jacket lying in a corner.

Dean feels bile rise when he finds himself praying that it starts on Sam's fingers or nose before the other parts, like that would somehow be better. He siphons off some of the rising panic by kicking a hole in the dry wall and yelling in inarticulate rage.

He had broken the salt line against Sam's order and then left it like that, determined to make a point.

The head-wind outside is what keeps banging the door open and closed, and it's strong enough that Dean has to brace himself when he steps outside. Past midnight now, and there's thunder and electricity layered throughout air that's swollen heavy with moisture.

The EMF doesn't detect anything, not in their room and not outside, giving no indication as to what direction they could have gone. The creature is covering its tracks. The fact that it's even capable of doing so is not as frightening as the fact that it's intelligent enough for the foresight.

What they were hunting moves fast, Dean knows that. It's hit the river now, so it may be able to move even faster; Dean can't be sure. If it could carry someone Sam's size, then it's either big or strong, or both. If it's still here somewhere, and the insane weather would it indicate that it is, then that still only narrows the search down to the miles and miles of riverbank that borders this town.

Too much space to cover, not enough time to do it in. Not alone.

§

Victor Manuel Rivero had turned ten the day that his parents died.

It was his birthday but what Vic will remember most in the years to come is not the smell of fresh baked rolls in his Mama’s kitchen, or the comforting chatter of the maids as they make their way to the cowshed. It won’t be the familiar sight of Papa’s work boots waiting in their usual place by the kitchen door, or the thrilling promise of the cake and presents to come later in the day. What Vic will remember most is the blood red color of the Spanish earth outside, freshly turned Aragon fields glowing in the light of the newly risen sun.

The memory is blurred, either by his own subconscious or as a result of the fever that followed, Vic still doesn’t know. He was told later that none of the farm hands had survived either. No one knew why he’d been left alive, and to this day Vic wonders if he had hid, like a coward or a child, and simply gone unnoticed. He hopes that's not how it happened; that would imply he'd survived by luck or chance, instead of by fate as planned out by some higher design.

Forty years later, he still has his doubts.

A senseless act of violence, a tragedy, his new parents had told him. They’d found him sitting on the side of the main road, the only road that went in and out of town, miles from his home. They thought he’d walked there, but Vic has no memory of that either, nor the week that followed that would see him in bed, sweating out a fever that the doctor couldn’t explain and the Priest said was God’s will.

The Priest had stayed long after the doctor had given up hope and left.

“There is a plan, son,” Father Martin said, an air-hazed memory. “Trust in it.”

Whatever that plan had been, Vic had re-emerged into the land of the living a lot worse for wear, but whole nevertheless. Virtually no memory of the preceding week, but with vague impressions of having seen his Mama by his bedside at night, taking his hand and holding it in her own. Which was impossible, of course. His Mama was dead.

“Just a dream,” his new Mother told him, smiling with a sad look in her eyes. “It’ll pass.”

And it did; Vic saw her less and less until the day he got better and then he didn’t see her ever again. New dreams replaced the old ones, though, and these came when he was awake, in school or down at the local market, or when he was helping out in the kitchen. Not like his usual dreams when he was sleeping, either, but more like what he saw in his imagination when reading books about princes and evil witches. People looked wrong, sometimes. He didn’t know how to explain it better than that.

“She’s a witch,” he’d whisper about the lady who’d come to sell them oil for the lamps, hiding behind his mother’s skirts. His mother never listened, only laughed and told him to go and play outside.

The oil seller would smile at him then, and that looked wrong too somehow, her head sitting strangely on her shoulders and the air darker around her. Vic would go away just so he didn’t have to see it, or be seen by it.

Father Martin believed him, though. Vic told him about what he saw one Sunday at mass, and the Father didn’t laugh or call him a liar. He listened carefully, then said, “You were very sick for a while, Victor. Sometimes a fever like that changes a person. Let’s them see things that most of us can’t. It’s a gift.”

Vic believed him because the air was always nice around Father Martin, clear and warm like daylight or the scent of fresh baked bread.

It wouldn’t be until months later that two children from the village went missing, and it wouldn’t be until months after that the remains were found in the basement of the oil seller’s house. What she’d killed them for, no one knew, and they’d all assumed she’d simply gone mad.

Father Martin had come by their house that weekend, talked to Vic's parents about sending him away to school, a place run by priests from his seminary. It would be far away, but a good education, better than what his parents could afford to give him in their small town; a chance for a better life.

There were things the Catholic Church would deny the existence of in public, but train a select number of people in nonetheless because fact was fact, and evil, Victor learned, really did exist. And not as some intangible, unseen thing. He could see it, in the very air that people breathed. The hearts and blood of the damned were so apparent that sometimes it burned Victor’s eyes with shadows he could still see days later. The memory of the first exorcism he’d witnessed had branded itself onto his minds eye -- to him, the possessed didn’t look human at all. He wouldn’t see a little boy, but rather the thing that possessed the body, grinning at him with torn and rotting flesh and resembling a demon in the truest sense of the word.

A gift, it may be. But it didn't often feel that way.

Vic had felt Sam long before he’d ever seen him. It’s like that with some people, and doesn’t mean anything bad or good in itself. Has more to do with power of a kind that most people can’t understand, because they don’t see it or have it.

Coincidence that they had met at all -- or perhaps that higher design Vic still fights to believe in.

“Aren't you getting a bit old for this, Victor?”

Thomas Irving is about half Vic's age, and yet somehow still manages to make him want to duck his face in something like shame for getting hurt on a hunt. An ingrained response, perhaps, to those that wear the collar. The Priest's hands are careful and strong as he tilts Vic's head towards the light to better inspect the damage. It's dim inside the church, lit only by candlelight. Vic inhales air touched with sage and frankincense, breathes it in deeply, soothed by the scents of his childhood.

He's disconcerted by a fair few number of things tonight.

“Speak for yourself, Padre,” he rumbles, then winces when he gets a smart tap to the side of his head.

“You'll live,” Thomas tells him, then watches him with concerned eyes when Vic stands and reaches for his jacket. “If those men are who you say they are, then they can handle it just fine. No need for you to go rushing straight back out there. Stay the night, Vic. There's a cot out back that has your name on it.”

The wind howls at the windows, rattling the stained glass in its panes and creeping in through the cracks under the door to make the candlelight flicker. The gale has been building in force steadily, and so has Vic's unease. The drive back to the church had taken him right by the motel down the road, and Vic had seen the great black hulk of the Impala still parked outside it; he had waited in the clearing a little while after they'd left, hesitant to leave himself.

The paths that the creature had taken were barely visible in the darkness, but they had been there for Vic to see. Nothing-colored light refracting off atmosphere that had been pushed aside to make space for something not quite natural forcing its way through the world. Things that don't belong in this place, on this plane of existence, often created a disturbance in the air. Either bring with them a surplus of energy, or create a deficiency of it. Over time, the anomalies in density of space and clarity of light would smoothen out, become less obvious. But while they exist in definition, they're visible to Vic like a sheet of white paper in the darkness. The details are blurred, but he sees it more with his minds eye than in any way that involves optic nerves.

“I'm not sure it's gone,” Vic says, clapping Thomas on the shoulder. “Send the troops if I don't make it back by daybreak,” he adds with a grin, reassuring, because he knows Thomas Irving concerns himself too much with things that are supposedly in God's hands. The Priest will most likely not sleep that night, holding vigil of a kind that soothes Vic in a way that nothing else ever really could.

He runs into Dean on the church steps outside, takes in the pale face and the tense line of broad shoulders, and finds himself looking to the Impala for his brother. Knowing even before he looks, somehow, that Sam isn't there.

“I need your help,” Dean says, voice rough and urgent.

Higher design could often be an elusive and shaky thing.

§

It's the sound of thunder that wakes Sam up initially, but full consciousness comes slower, in tenuous fits and bursts.

The dream takes longer to fade this time, clinging like cobwebs while Sam struggles his way out of sticky sleep. He remembers more of it but it's no more than fleeting glimpses. Heartbeat snapshots of images and sounds; bone yards and stripped flesh, rivers running rancid with blood offered in unnatural sacrifice.

Sam finally opens his eyes to a concrete wall and the damp smell of mildew, muscles tensed and heart beating in the thickened rhythm of his nightmare.

A flash of brightness, and he realizes it's lightning from the wailing storm outside, visible through the only window in this room he's in, a tiny pane of glass set high in the wall that shows pitch black night.

Concrete is pressed cold and rough to his cheek and all along his front, leeching in through the thin material of his shirt and jeans, soaking into his skin and bones and deeper. Sam shifts, tries to lift his head but just that slight movement has waves of nausea rolling through his gut, making him want to gag, so he gives it up for now. Rests his forehead against the floor and breathes deep through his nose, riding it out until the urge to hurl isn't quite so overwhelming.

It takes more effort than it should to roll onto his side; with his wrists tied behind him and ankles bound together, Sam doesn't have much leverage. Trying to get free is fruitless, sends sharp pain shooting up his arms and just leaves him exhausted. Sam sees why when he glances down at his feet; it's some sort of metal wire, thin and dull, that's wrapped around his ankles over the jeans, and he feels more of it under his fingers when he flexes them, trying to get the feeling back. Every time Sam pulls at the binds, it bites into sinew and muscle, tearing the bare skin around his wrists. No hope of fraying through that.

He lifts his head and inspects his surroundings instead.

It's a basement. Grimy with dirt, but looking relatively new and unused, nothing more than a workbench scattered with tools and a filing cabinet lined up against one wall, right next to stairs that presumably lead up to the main house. An exposed bulb hangs from wire wrapped around a support beam in the ceiling, letting off a dull yellow glow. Everything looks half finished, like someone started renovating here once and never got around to finishing it.

Another streak of lightning, low rumbling thunder accompanied by a flare of brightness that reveals the basement and all its contents.

Sam sees it then. It's sitting on the floor in the furthest corner, half shadowed in the gloom. Whites of its eyes standing out brighter than anything else in the dim surroundings.

It's the closest thing to a mummified corpse that Sam has ever come across.

Ribcage standing out in hideous relief, knees and elbows the thickest part of its emaciated limbs. It's little more than skin over bones, tissue stretched thin and withered, discolored and stained yellow-brown. Eyes sunken back into the sockets, too large in the hollow face. No breasts, but Sam thinks it's the female of the species. No tail either, but it's what they've been hunting. The only thing of beauty is its hair, yards of black silk tumbling and weaving about its form as if submerged underwater, with no acknowledgment to gravity or physics.

“My home,” it says, speaking in a lilting voice, mellifluous, “... is beautiful.”

There's an aching delicacy in its tone, an alluring aural resonance that's at complete odds with the wreckage of its physical form. Harmony and power coming out of a feral mouth, working itself under Sam's skin. He tries not to compare what he's hearing to Vic telling him that it was just sound, unpleasant, because the sound he's hearing is beautiful and understandable, when it should be neither. There are only so many reasons why the communication is successful.

Like speaking to like.

Sam feels unease of a whole new kind prickle along his spine, some kind of realization settling heavy in his belly; an idea, indefinable, intangible, starts to bloom. A lot of reasons to start panicking now, but he breathes and steadies himself then shifts to get a better view of the thing in the corner, sees it sitting quietly.

It's watching him right back with eyes that have depth and intelligence and expression.

So very far from anything remotely human, yet so similar in other ways that it has the hair rising all over Sam's body. Hybrids are always such a bitch to deal with, ethics and morals aside. Sam doesn't forget that it's a cannibal or that it's killed and eaten human flesh before with apparently no remorse. But all entities do what they do for a reason, and supernatural beings more often than not stick to their own sort of logic better than people do.

There's a deeper yearning behind its actions. There's got to be.

Sam swallows hard against a dry throat and says, hoarsely, “You want to go home?”

For a moment there's nothing but the sound of the howling wind outside, punctuated occasionally by crackling thunder. The thing is breathing like it's not getting enough air, although it probably wants nothing but moisture, and Sam hears the breath rattling around in its throat and lungs like the clank of old bones.

A pause ... and then it ventures out of the corner, moving towards him on all fours.

Sam finds himself tensing without meaning to; it's big. Amazonian in proportions, even slinking so low to the ground. Easy to miss while it was curled up in the corner, and impossible to see in the chase through the woods. Sam guesses it would be at least a head taller than him, if it were to stand on hind legs.

Bone sharp claws click in staccato rhythm against the concrete. Black silk hair twists and moves in serpentine coils to fill the air that the mermaid moves through, occupying the spaces it leaves behind.

So not the Disney version, Dean.

Sam watches it approach, wary. He's still whole, body still intact. Fingers are numb from the wire around his wrists, but they're still there. That's got to mean something. He just has to figure out what so that he can keep it that way ... long enough for Dean to do what Dean will invariably always do.

It reaches out to touch his hip, and Sam jerks.

Dry, cracked lips part to show clustered rows of small sharp teeth; a shark's mouth, bared in a grin.

Bargaining with predators is a stupid thing to do, Sam realizes when the thing just lurches at him. It's nothing but a blur of shining eyes and teeth, so much black silk filling the air around him that Sam can barely see anything else, vision obscured. Half blinded, he tightens the muscles in his abdomen, getting ready to bring both feet up to slam somewhere into its sternum, maybe break some ribs. If it has ribs. The movement is cut short when a hand twists into his hair from behind and jerks hard, slamming the back of Sam's skull into the ground.

“Shhh, boy.”

Another voice, same honey-gold tones vibrating with rich resonance, comes from above him. Sam opens dazed eyes, trying not to give in to the wave of renewed nausea, and stares through starbursts of pain and impact to see the face of a second creature now looking down at him. Similar to the first, same face and features, and same power, most likely.

A sister, Sam thinks hazily, followed closely by, sirens come in twos or threes. Fuck.

“We know who you are,” it sighs tenderly, soothing, and Sam sucks in a sharp inhale at the hand that settles over his throat, pinning him down, holding him still as the first one settles itself over his legs, an iron heavy weight that seems far stronger than just the creature's mass alone. Sam tenses at the cool hands that settle on his waistband, pushing up to get under his shirt, seeking out skin. Almost without thinking, he tightens the muscles in his thighs and lifts his hips, twisting to try and throw it off him, but it's entirely too big, too solid, and doesn't budge.

All it earns him is an even harder press of the hand covering his throat, with both the heel of its palm and the tips of claws, ice cold points of sharpness that dig into his skin. Hard enough to block his airway, and it's not long before he starts seeing starbust patterns again. As favorable as losing consciousness might seem right now, he's fairly sure it would be the fastest way to lose bits and pieces of himself too. Fingers stroke though his hair, gently pulling it away from his face as Sam gasps and chokes, struggling for air but not trying to get free, not anymore. Yards and yards of black silk float and coil in the air above him, twice as much of it now, blocking whatever paltry light the one globe in the room may be giving off.

The hand on his belly pushes up at the same time as the one on his throat eases off. A reward for his good behavior, and the message clear; the pressure is still there on his throat, still uncomfortable but letting up enough for Sam to suck in great heaving breaths of cool air, taking it in so fast he almost makes himself pass out.

Cool air washes over him as the shirt is shoved up and then left there, the chill touching the skin of his belly and chest, icy enough to raise gooseflesh and pebble his nipples – which draws attention of a kind that makes Sam's throat go dry with a fear he can't quite hold back anymore.

Clawed fingers drag over rose brown nubs, catching on the sensitive skin and Sam's breath hitches.

“Throbbing and throbbing, little boy. So rich and plenty.” The thing closes its eyes and leans down, inhales Sam's scent, breathing him in at his breastbone. Right over his heart where it's strong and warm. “Your blood is singing,” it whispers, a secret of some kind, a mystery. “Can't be hidden, not from me.”

Drag of sharp-tipped talons over his skin, from chest to stomach then over his sides, dipping low over the lean curve of Sam's hip. Fine lines rise in its wake, white at first before they pink up, not blood but scored skin, swollen and angry. Sam breathes hard through his nose, involuntarily contracting the muscles of his diaphragm, knowing the extra hairsbreadth of distance it affords him won't make any difference.

The claws are sharp and strong, and when they gouge deeper to finally draw blood, Sam can't help but flinch and hiss, twisting to get away before the press over his throat tightens in warning. Again, he forces himself to lie still, feels the trickle of warmth spread over his ribs and down his side, trembling from the effort to not move, feels the muscles in his shoulders and back get tight and knot with tension. Sweat breaks out over his chest and forehead, beads on his upper lip. Bile rises hot and acrid in his throat when the creature bends its head and laps at his skin, touching tongue to blood and licking it up. Tasting him.

It makes a low sound, something like a moan, like pleasure. Whatever it's feeling has the claws tightening their hold in his skin, and Sam whimpers, finally, unable to to stay quiet any longer when he's restricted from doing anything else.

The choked sound has the creature smiling against his skin in some kind of realization, and how Sam knows that without looking he has no idea.

“You've locked the doors,” it says, quiet, contemplative. “Never mind.”

The glint of light reflecting in the corner of his eye has Sam freezing, holding himself still until he can make it out. Confusion then, when he sees that it's not silver, not a blade or a gun, but glass instead. A familiar bottle with a metal screw-top; Sam's own bottle of holy water.

If his bottle is here, then it's possible his backpack is too – which holds both blade and gun.

The thought is lost in more confusion, and surprise, when the bottle is opened and clawed fingers are dipped inside without a hiss or cry of any kind of pain. Holy water doesn't work on everything that's evil, Sam knows, but to illicit no reaction at all means the things that are toying with him are even older then he'd initially thought.

Blindsided, and grateful for the temporary reprieve from being sliced open, Sam doesn't register at first that the curved fingers are descending, touching light fingertips to his skin.

It doesn't connect. Sam feels dampness as cool mangled fingers, claws retracted, trace wet trails down the center of his chest, coming to rest on the hard planes of his stomach. He shivers from the gentle caress and the lines of air-chilled moisture it leaves behind, twitching away instinctively when a swollen scratch or gouge is brushed over, pressed at.

Instinct becomes more when the hiss and sizzle makes itself more apparent. Sam is whimpering, shuddering, before he ever feels the pain or even registers his own reaction. Pulling at his bindings without realizing it, twisting and straining from the burn of sensation smeared across his skin. A reaction he's watched plenty of times in the faces of the demon-possessed and half breeds, and other countless hell-spawn. Watched, and never once wondered what it must feel like.

“There,” the mermaid coos at him. “There you are.”

Confusion battles with fear, meshing into a knot of conflict that leaves him gasping and staring wide eyed at the creatures bent over him, watching him with a hunger of some kind. Desire maybe, if not necessarily lust.

Something rises within him, coming up to the surface, something great and big and occupying everything, every space Sam has inside him. It ripples just under the surface, tip of the iceberg. Sam doesn't want to know it, doesn't want to realize whatever it is because it's the same thing from his nightmares, from the woods. Only it's here, now, and it brings with it a sense of irreversible permanency, the kind that changes everything, for all time. Like the marble gravestones of angels, or the burning pyres of fathers. Wrongwrongwrong.

“No,” Sam says, a growl and a whisper both, only he knows now, and it's too late to unknow.

The hand moves off his throat to twist fingers into his hair instead, pulling it away from his forehead. The grip tightens sharply, bringing burning moisture to Sam's eyes as his head is forced back, exposing throat and jugular. Sacrificial arrangement.

“You are not a god,” one tells him gently while the other raises the bottle again, holds it hovering over the flat of his chest. “But you have one in you. Give him back to us.”

Sam pants for breath, close to hyperventilating, pulling at his wrists and the hand in his hair as he watches the bottle tip. He starts to speak, to protest, but then the water hits him, splashing over chest and stomach, running in rivulets down his sides. Soaking into wounds and scratches. Mixing with his blood.

Everything freezes for one thin moment of time ... and then it all surges, heaving from underneath, from within. Stretches him out from the inside until Sam is nothing but a thin membrane of tissue, easy to tear or rip. Easy to discard like the glove he is. His back lifts away from the ground, arms and legs taut and trembling.

Sam opens his mouth and hears himself scream.

A roar of a thousand centuries and all the lost souls in the world, thundering through his veins, translated as best it can by human lungs and vocal chords. It leaves him numb and blind, senseless. There's nothing left of Sam except for the material he's made out of – the thing that drives it all, his intangible self, drowns in the tidal wave of something else that's decided to take over. Something hungry. Something familiar, and the cold realization in his belly, the half remembered dreams, it all snap-clicks into place.

The sentient had never died. Whatever Dean and him had done, it had only been escape, not victory. But the invasion from below had gone unnoticed, in the chaos when Sam had been unlocked and frantic, reaching for Dean with everything in him with such single minded focus.

The recognition of it now makes him want to laugh in relief and roar with rage, but leaves him unable to do anything but sob and heave, wrenching at binds and captors alike to get free, to try and curl in on himself, to protect anything that's left that might still be his.

But he's pinned down and stretched out, unable to move, and still the water comes. Splash and sizzle of ice and fire, burning acid running over the flat of his chest, down his sides and belly. It feels like it's melting down through to the bone, bubbling at his skin, curling it up in strips. It can't have been more than a second since the water first touched him, but Sam already feels time extending out into infinite eternities.

He might very likely be going insane, and the sentient knows it, its roar deafening.

If Sam thought he could kick it out by letting it free then he'd let down all his strongholds, right now. If he thought it would just possess him, even that is fixable and he'd let the sentient fight both their way out of this, out of this basement and these binds. Dean would hunt him down and expel it from his body, problem solved ... but it doesn't want escape, or anything as superficial as occupation. It wants to soak into his marrow and run its course through his veins, changing everything about him with a permanence more absolute than time. It's an infection of blood and bone, no longer whole as it once must have been, nor even a whole impression of what it had been when bound to the stone altar. Now it is piecemealed and scattered throughout him.

Sam can feel it stroking over parts of himself he hadn't even known were there, bringing to shivering awareness nerves that he'd never known existed. Thriving tastes and textures of power and ability, uncovered just enough to make Sam feral, driving him to a manic and unhinged high. Just enough to induce a delirium with no boundaries, limitless, before snatching it back again from beneath his feet, a vicious withdrawal that has Sam shrinking back within himself, cowering and small.

It happens again, and then again. The holy water has stopped falling now but the ebb and flow continues within, an orchestrated manipulation of the highest order, a defilement and rape of sacred and base things that all humans are gifted with, but rarely ever come face to face with. Not like this. Not while they continue breathing, not on this side of the veil.

It's toying with his soul.

Sam sags back to the ground, trembling, small spasms of shock and intensity still running through him, making him twitch. His breathing is fast and shallow, but he can't calm himself down enough to slow down, to take a deeper breath. The sounds he's making are frightening, a low keening from the back of his throat, like an animal in pain.

The button on his jeans is flicked open, the zipper pulled down, and Sam tenses anew, forces himself back to awareness.

Cold fingers slide in against his skin to grip both boxers and jeans, tugging both down over his hips to expose groin and thighs to the chilly air, ass coming into contact with the icy concrete underneath him. Claws rake at his skin as the hands strips him, drag over hipbones and the outside of his thighs. The intent is not to draw blood this time, but it does, opens shallow gouges in his flesh. Sam chokes off a cry and twists, wrenching at his binds hard enough to feel muscle give in his shoulder, feels wire cut into his wrists, blood slicking up his skin and sliding down to drip from his fingertips.

The thing inside is still pulsing, push and pull of nerve endings, twisting up his insides to the rhythm of Sam's heart. It's a distantly familiar feeling, having no control over himself, not over any part of his body or mind. He's almost taken over by madness, a restlessness so extreme that it's pain, skittering wildly just under his skin, making him itch and writhe and want to tear off his own skin in strips.

Mangled hands run up his legs, touching his thighs and skating over the hair there. The touch sends Sam spinning into vertigo and he tries to kick out, flailing for purchase, trying to reel himself in.

“Shhh.” A hand moves to cover his throat again, and Sam chokes for air, opens his eyes to the sea of black floating above him, the fierce gaze watching him.

The mermaid's chest is heaving, rise and fall of shallow breath, mouth parted slightly to show a glint of teeth.

It's excited, Sam realizes, and is unable to hide a shudder of revulsion.

He jerks when cold fingers dip between his legs, fondle him.

“Your oceans are nothing but thimblefulls of the seas in my home, in my world. But there is no sweet-meat there,” it murmurs, gently cradling the soft weight of Sam's cock and balls in one withered hand, palming him enough to raise awareness there but not to get hard. It's not aiming to share whatever arousal it's feeling. “No flesh made of bone or blood. Only lost souls, wanting to cross. Waiting forever for the gatekeeper who's left them.”

“Don't,” Sam says, a harsh whisper, then flinches, hissing when one sharp talon scores at the thin skin of his dick. Trailing points of sharpness up and down his length, pressing lightly enough but registering as sharp bursts of sensation. Sam shudders, trembling from pain and fear and the dark thing still screaming inside his veins. The pressure on his throat keeps him from taking a proper breath, and he's struggling for air too, feels sweat bead again over his chest and face, rolling down his temples to soak into his hair.

It rises to a deafening crescendo when the mermaid bends its dark head over him. Its mouth is lowered to his groin, held hovering over his flaccid dick.

Sam whimpers when it touches tongue to genitals, lapping at him, tasting the light spotting of blood on skin too delicate, too thin, for the attention. Wet and cold, pressing flat to the length of his cock then sucking, mewling softly and grazing against him with the sharp points of its teeth. Not breaking the skin, but a feather light caress that has Sam shivering all over, feverish from the onslaught hitting him from both inside and out.

The mermaid eases off him with an elated sigh, ecstasy of some sort, and picks up the bottle again, holds it hovering over his groin, and Sam wonders if being conscious is such a great thing after all.

“Don't, please,” he whispers, dread churning in his belly. Dread and the other thing that's sensed its escape.

“The gatekeepers are gods in our world,” the creature tells him gently, grazing talons through the thick hair at his groin. “We need them more than you. Let him out.”

Sam's making those noises again, low moans of protest, twisting on the ground but held firm with nowhere to go. The bottle tips and the water splashes over him, over his cock and balls, soaking into scratches and dark hair, running over his hips and between his legs.

This time he doesn't even hear himself scream. There's a white-out of some kind, a suspended moment in time when everything blanks out. Beneath the surface of it all, the madness thrashes to life again.

Surrender would stop it, Sam knows. He can feel oblivion just within reach, can taste it sweet on his tongue, if only he gave in and let it. Insanity could be peaceful because it would be better than being held in this in-between state of never finding release or resolution. Of being pulled with nowhere to go.

Then, a touch of a familiar thread, a goal that never stopped being.

Dean has once said it still wants me, and that much is still true, Sam realizes. The blackness heaves just underneath the surface of his mind, making it clear that Dean is the first one it would go after, wearing Sam's face and smile.

Does he blind you, Sammy?

Sam thinks of his brother's voice telling him there is no part of you that's even capable of giving up or giving in, and some kind of switch flips over. He both shuts down and lets loose at the same time, separates himself from the sentient, and for one brief moment goes back to owning himself.

Desperation once led him to move a cupboard blocking a closet door with nothing more than his mind, and it does the same now. Sam registers no more than a flicker of a thought, but it has enough force of intent behind it to work.

The crooning thing that's bent over him, still holding the bottle, doesn't even have time to scream. One moment it's straddling Sam's legs, and the next it's plastered in a paste on the far wall, no longer recognizable as anything that ever had form or function.

One down, one to go, Sam thinks blearily as he listens to the wailing sorrow of the sister left behind. But he's tired, and everything hurts, and opening his eyes is too damn hard so the next time Sam blinks, he leaves them closed.

§

Dean stands back in the clearing and feels the wind blow, unable to hear the roar of it in the trees or the rumble of thunder because the earphones are back in. He can feel it though, a shiver and tremble of air that's too thick and heavy to be natural, air that shudders every time the lighting streaks in silver veins across the night sky.

The EMF is picking up squat, but Dean had expected that much. He's scared by it, but not surprised. Just has to figure out another way to track it is all, because everything leaves a trail behind. You just have to know what to look for. The things is though, that Dean has no idea what to look for.

Panic is a funny thing once it sets in and it's still there now, a current running underneath everything else but he's able to at least tamp down on it. Enough to keep functioning.

Vic takes a step back then, still standing yards away from Dean, further out in the clearing. He'd been doing nothing but stare into the trees for long wasted minutes, but the man's shoulders seem to ease a little now and Vic turns to look south, down the road. Then he takes a breath and turns, starts making his way back to the Impala and his own banged up truck idling side by side on the road, reaching up to pull off the headphones – Sam's headphones. And it's Sam's phone Vic is using too, courtesy of a Dean who refuses to get sentimental about shit that doesn't matter because Sam will get it back when they find him.

And they will find him.

“It's gone south,” Vic says once he waves a hand for Dean to turn his music off too. “You were right about that much.”

Dean's tightens his hold on his gun, and his eyes narrow. “How do you know?”

Vic turns away from the road to study Dean instead, impassive and steady in the face of such obvious mistrust. Despite the fact that Dean doesn't have any tactile reason to be suspicious. But there's been cause lately to be as wary of other hunters as they are of the things that they hunt.

He could keep a lid on it, though, at least a little.

“Look-” he starts to say when Vic holds up a hand, stopping him.

“It went south,” Vic says. “I don't have time to explain how I know, or to prove to you that I do. Is that working for you?” he asks, nodding at the EMF in Dean's hand.

Dean tightens his jaw.

“It went south,” Vic repeats, voice deep and sure. He pauses there, then says, “But something doesn't fit. It's ... messy.”

Dean tries really hard not to snap. Sam seemed to like this guy, or at least seemed to trust him. Dean can feel himself wanting to, but it's more about not having any other choice right now.

Something in Vic's expression clears slightly. “Is it possible there's more than one of these ...”

“Mermaid,” Dean supplies bluntly. “Maybe. Didn't see.”

The lines around Vic's mouth tighten but Dean doesn't think it's in response to either his words or his tone. “There might be more than one,” Vic says, thick brows drawn together and looking out at the clearing again. “Keep an eye out.”

“We'd just be wasting time, if you're wrong,” Dean says, sounding harsher than he'd intended. The panic is rising again, thrumming and overwhelming. He wants Sam back so badly he's willing and ready to tear down half the woodlands and burn the rest.

“I'm not looking to be wrong,” Vic says sharply. “And I ain't taking this lightly. You need to get that.”

Dean hesitates, glances again at the dead EMF in his hands. He could trudge up and down the riverbank all night long and knows the chances of finding Sam that way are slim to none. He'd done his own kind of recon while Vic did his. The creature didn't leave any kind of trail behind. Nothing physical at any rate, no obvious disturbances in the soil. There were broken twigs and areas of flattened grass but they weren't isolated and the pattern wasn't distinct. Anything that might have helped had long since been blown away or neutralized by static electricity and ozone, and the insane wind.

Dean gets in the car and follows Vic's tail lights out of the clearing.

Fifteen minutes later they're pulling over on the side of the road, next to the very same development area that Dean had driven through that morning with Sam. He watches Vic approach and rolls down the drivers side window.

“Somewhere on this street,” Vic says with the same troubled focus he'd shown back in the clearing. “Just can't tell which house.”

Dean watches him put the headphones in and walk back to his truck, start hauling out weapons of his own.

“You've gotta be shitting me,” Dean mutters, a glitter sharp edge to the words. He twists to look down the street they're sitting on. That he's dangerously close to something like hysteria is not lost on him. The only way it's going to help him is with the extra adrenalin rushing through his veins, which is partly a good thing. Sharpens the senses, heightens his awareness. Softens the consequences for himself too, though, and that's not so great.

He lines up the clip for his Glock, gets a bullet ready in the chamber, and starts his music up again.

It's a long street and were it fully developed it would take hours to clear. As it is, only three houses out of the constructed structures are developed enough to hide or contain anything. Most of the others are nothing but the bare wooden framework laid out like templates, waiting for drywall and tiles to fill in the gaps. The three that are further along in their development are spread out, each one isolated from the other, surrounded by mostly empty land.

They check the first house together. Vic's hands are steady, look strong around his shotgun, and he moves his weight well, light and fast. Impressive for such a big man. It's solidifying to an extent, a small piece of reassurance for Dean to know the man is capable when there's not much else to be reassured by.

The first house is still mostly an empty shell inside, the one floor giving them no trouble to clear.

On the freshly turfed earth of the second house lies something, a small bundle of material that's unidentifiable in the dark at such a distance. When Dean gets closer, he makes it out as Sam's backpack, and there's just no stopping then.

He's already running but throws a glance over his shoulder to search for Vic's large frame, spots him on the other side of the street with his back turned; Dean takes a breath, getting ready to shout out to him before he remembers the headphones. He bends down to scoop up a large stone without ever dropping speed, then stops just long enough to turn and hurl it across the road, hoping it hits target but not waiting to check before he's sprinting again. With the headphones in Vic would never hear it, never know unless the stone caught him dead on, but even if it hadn't, this house is next on their list. The difference it would make is the few extra seconds it would take for Vic to realize on his own that Dean's not there. It's an acceptable risk.

This house is one story too, so it rules out a second floor and it doesn't have an attic, but it's got a strange floor plan, some kind of u-shape that Dean clears before Vic gets there. He should wait, the part of his mind that's still sane telling him that two hunters are better than one, but there's an open door outside the kitchen with stairs leading down and there's nowhere else Sam could be. Dean couldn't wait if his life depended on it; Sam's does, and the two are pretty much the same thing.

It's dim inside, lit only by a faint bulb. Cold and damp and only half furbished, wiring still exposed. The tiles and paint and other aesthetics of it are probably still to come, like much of the rest of the house. There's not much light to go by, but there's not a whole lot in the basement to see.

He catches sight of Sam lying on the ground with his shirt rucked up and his jeans tugged down, and there's blood too but Dean can't tell how much or where it comes from. Right now he can't do much about any of that because whatever they'd been chasing for the last two days is sitting down there next to Sam, hulking form bent over his brother's prone form and head tilted up to the ceiling, mouth open in a howl of something that looks like grief or loss. Mermaid or not, it's feeling something, and that much is clear even without hearing it.

At any other time Dean might have cared to learn about it a little first, but he's already leveling shot after successive shot into it so fast that his clip is empty before he takes his next breath.The large form jerks and spasms with every bullet that enters it, and maybe he's slowed it down some, but it's not enough to kill it. The corpse-like head swivels around to face him, mouth opening again in a scream of what now looks like rage and fury, and that's just fine with Dean. He's got something like acid and fire burning through his own veins right now and taking it out on something that deserves it would be gratifying as all hell.

He's halfway through reloading when the thing rushes at him in an insane blur of black hair and shining teeth, slamming into him hard enough to send them both crashing down the stairs. Hard edged concrete slams into Dean's shoulders and back on the way down, sending sharp bursts of pain flaring behind his eyes, but he manages to get his hands on its face as they land on the basement floor, keeping jaw and snarling teeth away from his own neck.

He's on his back and his vision is obscured by the hellish hair around him, but Dean knows the feel of soft eyeballs under his thumbs when he feels it. Digging in takes more force than he'd thought but is just as satisfying as he'd expected it to be. The balls come out whole and firm, slick with a fluid that smears Dean's hands as he gouges in deeper.

This time, the scream is earth shattering, mind shattering, and too late Dean realizes he'd lost the headphones in the fall. The gun too.

Every muscle and nerve ending he has goes into shock, a violent paralysis that leaves him incapacitated. Coherent thought is driven out his mind, replaced with sound waves that are pitched at such insane frequencies that it feels like they're liquefying his insides, twisting up everything he has in him.

The mermaid might not be able to see anymore, but it still has claws and teeth, and both take a swing at him. Adrenalin breaks Dean free long enough to arch his head away by instinct, managing to miss the blow. Drawing back his own hand takes effort, the sound of its scream still trying to drive him insane, but he gets a brief reprieve when his fist connects with the ridge of it's cheek. Dean feels brittle bone crunch under his hand, and there's a micro-second of silence as it rears back under the force, but its mouth is already opening again. Sooner or later it'll get in a killing blow, through either song or talons.

The shotgun blast, when it comes, is loud and sudden and blows a chunk out of the side of its chest.

Viscera splatters over Dean's shirt, and the mermaid abruptly stops trying to take his head off, slumping down over Dean's chest in a wet messy weight. It's as good as dead but not quite there yet, the dry rattling breath still exhaling in desperate gasps against Dean's neck. Dean tries to catch his own breath, and then tries to heave it off him, but the solidity is too heavy to move. Which just isn't natural and doesn't makes sense considering how emaciated it looks, but then Vic's face comes into view from over its shoulder, shotgun still in hand, and together they manage to roll it off him.

The second shot is just as loud as the first and sounds messier but Dean never sees it, already turning, reaching for Sam. Pain, sharp and hot, radiates out from Dean's shoulders and back as he kneels on the ground and come morning his entire back will most likely be covered in bruises, but nothing feels broken.

“Sam. Sammy.”

Sam's skin is sheened with sweat and smeared with blood, and he's cold and clammy to touch but Dean sees the flat of his chest rise and fall, and finally takes a breath of his own. Sam flinches away from Dean's hands, whimpering softly and trying to curl away. His eyes are squeezed shut, brow furrowed deeply, and Dean pushes sweaty hair out of Sam's face, trying to get a better look, trying to calm them both the fuck down.

His nose is still there, but he won't open his eyes. Dean gets his hands on Sam's face, thumbs resting on the rise of bone over his cheek, tilting carefully.

“Hey,” Dean says, voice low but urgent. “Sam, it's done. It's done. Open your eyes, man. Look at me.”

Another whimper and a spasm runs through Sam's body, has him shaking from head to toe. Dean follows the movement down, seeing blood but not as much of it as he'd feared. Thin scratches are cross-hatched all over Sam's skin, over exposed chest and stomach. Most aren't deep enough to bleed but have raised long lines of reddened flesh. Deeper gouges are carved in a curve over Sam's ribs, slashed into the thin skin over both hips, four parallel lines at each site that Dean knows are the work of claws. Bleeding, but nothing that's looks like it's nicked an artery, and the blood is already thickened, congealed around the wounds.

He doesn't hesitate to look between Sam's legs, sees his brother's dick and balls still there and still intact, although there are thin scratches there too, the delicate skin looking scored and angry.

When Dean looks back up at Sam's face, glazed hazel eyes are watching him back.

“Dean ...”

Confused, scared, but there nonetheless and Dean feels some of the panic siphon off, his heart finally slowing it's manic rhythm. Everything else accounted for, there's only the fingers left to go.

“I'm here, Sam. Ease over for me, kiddo. Just a little, c'mon.”

He gets his hands underneath Sam's shoulder and hip, touching only where he can't see gashes or blood but Sam trembles anyway, shuddering when Dean rolls him onto his side. He's met with more blood then, slicked over Sam's hands and the small of his back, but Dean's determined not to lose it until he sees how bad it is. Seems like too much to ask for, but he smears it away as best he can and quickly has all ten fingers accounted for.

All the bits and pieces there and whole, and Dean can't help close his eyes in relief. Dimly, he registers the sickening wet sound of a machete falling as Vic takes the mermaids head off.

“There's more than one.”

Sam's voice is rough and too thin, but it's him and it's a coherent sentence, and both those things count. Dean keeps one hand on Sam's shoulder and probes at the binds with the other, wincing in sympathy when Sam flinches.

“Shh. Sorry, Sam,” Dean murmurs, thumb rubbing in soothing circles over his brother's shoulder. The bindings are tied off tightly, not something Dean can unknot himself. He looks up, having completley forgotten there was another person in the room and sees Vic watching them with troubled eyes, machete held slack in one hand and headphones pulled off. The mess of the now dead mermaid lies in a heap of wet limbs and tangled hair on the ground nearby.

“It's wire,” Dean says roughly. He jerks his chin at the workbench. “I need cutters. Anything sharp.”

Sam tenses when the wire is cut, chokes back a hiss as the tension is temporarily tightened. Dean peels it away carefully from torn skin and tissue while Vic works at freeing Sam's feet, ankles padded by Sam's jeans and in much better condition then the rest of him.

It could have been a lot worse.

“How many more, Sam,” Vic asks, his deep voice slightly unsteady at the edges. Dean shoots him a look, sees the pale hue under olive skin and tense line of his mouth and suddenly likes the guy a hundred time more for caring. Also, with Sam warm and whole under his hands, Dean finally has the luxury of extending niceties. The man had been true to his word, in the end. Saw things in a way Dean didn't quite understand and therefore would never fully trust because Sam's the only one who can pull that crap and get away with it, but still. He'd helped.

“There's two,” Sam says, sounding more like himself but the words tremble. “But I got one.”

Dean goes still.

Vic doesn't pause in his movements, steadily working to free the wire around Sam's legs, but he must sense Dean watching him because he looks up then, and tilts his head at the far wall.

Smeared into a paste on the concrete wall is a fetid mess of red brown pulp that shows cracked edges of white bone, dripping blood and lymphatic fluid and other matter Dean doesn't even want to think about. It's something he only registers now that's he's no longer operating on instinct and adrenalin alone.

Confusion doesn't play a part in putting it together. There's a bottle lying on the floor that Dean recognizes and hopes desperately that Vic doesn't. The man's face is blank, giving nothing away, while Dean tries not to think at all. Playing connect the dots in your head is only fun when the final picture doesn't have your baby brother tied up naked and doused in holy water until something in him broke. Sam couldn't break because it was like one of those laws of physics that made the world work. Like gravity, inevitable and constant. Sam couldn't break.

An idea starts to bloom cold in Dean's belly.

He bends and gets his shoulder under Sam's arm. “Let's get you out of here, yeah?”

Sam nods but he's still shaking, muscles seizing up in small fits and bursts. It's familiar, but Dean steadfastly ignores how he knows that. No one has the energy or inclination for embarrassment; Vic supports Sam's weight while Dean pulls up the jeans and boxers. He's careful of the gouges and swollen flesh, but Sam's breath hitches anyway and he makes a choked noise at the pressure, fingers tightening where he's gripping Dean's shoulder.

If the mermaid wasn't already beheaded, Dean would love nothing more than to take Vic's machete and work it over himself. He has half a thought to do it anyway, but he has to get Sam up the stairs and outside, and once there the cool air does a lot to bring back focus. With no supernatural will holding it back anymore, the rain has finally started to fall, light and soft at first but steadily getting heavier. Dean gets damp with it as he gets Sam settled into the passenger seat of the Impala.

Another two trips, and he's helped Vic load the body chunks of the mermaid into the back of the hunter's truck.

“I'll drag it out somewhere,” Vic says, closing up the tailgate. “Set it on fire. Just in case.” He nods at the Impala, at Sam slumped inside. “There's a hospital in town. St. Catherine's. Follow the signs.”

Dean nods, grateful and letting it show, and watches as Vic goes back into the house. Probably clearing out anything that could be traced back to them. He wonders what Vic would want to do about the horror of a mess on the wall, then thinks about what it must have taken for Sam to unleash that kind of fury.

Dean crouches down in the dirt beside the open car door, and squeezes Sam's knee. “You need a hospital?”

Sam eyes are half closed, head tilted back against the seat rest while small tremors continue to run their course through his body, making him tremble and shake. He opens his eyes now and looks down at Dean, huffing softly. “Not one called St. Catherine's.”

It isn't necessary to point out that apparently Sam can walk in and out of churches fine; he's just driving a point home. Dean's not sure what part of the whole mess is showing on his face, but something in it makes Sam's gaze soften. “Just cuts and bruises, Dean. Maybe a concussion. Never needed a hospital for that before.”

He looks at Dean as he says it, giving an answer to a question that isn't being voiced.

Neither of them ever get macho or stupid about physical injuries. A damaged body can't move with speed or strength, and therefore can't hunt. If Sam needed more medical attention than anything their kit or Dean's hands can provide, then he'd say so. It's something Dean can trust, use as a point of reference, because everything else refuses to make sense right now. He doesn't understand how Sam can be so calm because the idea has now solidified into a stone heavy weight in his gut. He'd always known, Dean realizes, and so had Sam, but each had let truth slip unnoticed beneath awareness, hidden from themselves and each other. For each other.

Dean drops his eyes then, still conscious of being watched and unable to process anything like logic. He knows Sam is waiting to be asked more questions. Dean just doesn't want to hear the answers.

“Dean.”

“Shut up, Sam,” Dean says quietly.

Sam flinches, starts trembling again. Dean tightens his hold but Sam pulls his knee away.

“Don't touch me,” Sam says, hoarse and soft. “It ... likes it when you touch me.”

Dean lets his hand fall, and can't even bring himself to pretend he doesn't understand. He plans, instead, for practicalities. Sam needs to get patched up, and Dean needs a shower to get the mermaids gore off him; they both need clean clothes, a quiet place to gather themselves. Then Dean will pull out every expelling ritual and exorcism they have, and if none of them work, they'll go back to Louisiana. Anything done can be undone – and if not necessarily reversed, then at least changed. Sam had proven that the first time.

“What happened to the altar?” Sam asks quietly, interrupting Dean's train of thought.

The rain is falling harder now and Dean is starting to get more than just damp but he can't bring himself to move, feeling shaky with reality and the inevitable adrenalin crash. He isn't sure his legs will hold him up if he stands, and Sam doesn't need to see that.

“Buried,” Dean says, still crouching. “And broken. Rose said they'd managed to shatter it easy with a couple of sledgehammers. It's just dust in the swamps now.”

“Shattered,” Sam repeats. “Into dust. Because ... I'm it's altar now.”

Dean's voice is low and quiet when he speaks.“Then kick it out, Sam.”

Sam shakes his head. “I'm your altar too,” he says softly. “But it's not getting to you.”

“And that's meant to reassure me,” Dean says, words made harsh with worry.

“It's meant to be justifiable,” Sam says, but he's cut short when another tremor runs through his long frame.

It gives Dean enough anger to propel himself to his feet and stride away, removing the immediate temptation to reach out and soothe. Or strangle. He scrubs a hand over his face, and then through his hair, wiping away the dampness of rain, sees it fall in straight lines through the tunneled glare of the Impala's headlights. The sky is starting to grow lighter now, the clouds finally dispersing to show a twilight gray that means the sun is just behind the horizon and getting ready to rise. The wind has completely died down.

Vic comes back out of the house then, and raises an eyebrow when he sees them still there.

“Trouble?” he asks, dark eyes appraising.

Dean shakes his head. “We're heading off. Thanks. For everything.”

“You know, the church isn't far. The Father is a trained medic ...” Vic trails off at the look Dean gives him. “A dry place to patch up then, have a hot shower. Up to you, but it's close, and I'm offering.”

Dean looks back over his shoulder, sees Sam give an imperceptible nod, and sighs.

§

The living quarters are small but neat, and look self contained, attached to the church's eastern wall where Sam had first seen Vic come from. Thomas Irving had greeted them with a nod and troubled eyes, then left them to their own devices in what looks like a bedroom. Probably gone to check Vic over, which Sam can't imagine going over too well.

Sam hurts all over but as long as he doesn't move abruptly, it doesn't really register. The cotton of his t-shirt is sticking to him, clinging to congealing blood, but the boxer briefs have actually helped keep the pressure where it's needed, stopped his jeans from abrading the open wounds further. Probably why Dean had kept them on him.

He's tired, but it only remotely registers. He can feel Dean watching him as he pulls out a clean pair of jeans and a new t-shirt from his duffel.

“You want me to-” Dean starts to say when Sam grabs the first aid kit as well.

“I got it.”

There's another door that leads to a small bathroom, and Sam doesn't wait for Dean to respond before closing and locking the door.

Everything is sharp and brightly edged, a transitionary state that Sam knows is the last of the shock wearing off. Adrenalin had run its course and served its purpose, but it's left behind a different kind of awareness that affords him a certain clarity of mind. Things need to be dealt with, plans formed and executed. Fixed, one way or the other. There would be time and room to deal with any fallout later.

Self preservation. Dean-preservation.

Sam slides out of his shirt and jeans, feeling blood start seeping anew as the material sticks and peels away at the congealed wounds. The only blood that comes away with the boxers are from the gouges raked over his thighs and hips, everything between feeling swollen and heavy but not damaged when Sam checks with careful fingers, feeling his face flush even though there's no one else there to see. He doesn't bother with a shower. He has just enough energy to peroxide the larger claw marks, clenching his teeth to keep from hissing because Dean would hear otherwise and would want to be in here, touching him, checking Sam over himself.

Bandaging the gashes curved low over his hips is easy enough, but he has more trouble with the slashes on his ribs, the angle awkward and uncomfortable to reach. His wrists are almost as bad, but Sam does those with the same ruthless efficiency as the rest. Swab and gauze held down with messily placed tape. It would hold for now. The peroxide stings at first and then burns hotter, but Sam prefers it to the saline. There's a kind of earthy satisfaction to be had from pain that's completely natural and normal.

The holy water had felt like it would scar him for life, permanently, horrifically. It hadn't left even the slightest mark.

It's easier to do all that than it is to look in the mirror.

Sam's reminded of his reflection in the antique store they'd used to lure bloody Mary. Except what he's seeing now isn't himself. The shade drawn over his face isn't his own guilt – along with grimy skin and streaks of dried sweat and tears, his reflection shows him darker eyes and deeper shadows, something layered and ill-fitting with the expression he's wearing. Something that makes him want to flinch. Not his own demons though, not this time.

Knowing what he does now means Sam understands what he's seeing.

Hemmed in by unnamable walls, the sentient had been forced into impotence by the very cage it chose to occupy. Sam's under no illusions of control. He's just more aware of his own compartments and how they're used, has a better idea of where intangible boundaries lie and how they keep things isolated from each other. He still has no idea how he's orchestrated himself into his current state, serving as some sort of dual-layered dam, but it's not hard to guess where the motivation had come from.

Every part of Sam that matters hadn't wanted to open the lock box that held Dean to him, together and safe. Had feared that too closely examining a deal done would reneg it, would prove it too good to be true.

He'd kept it in and kept Dean out and acted as some kind of bolt between the two, keeping them from spinning into each other. Sam can feel himself being worn thin from the friction, can sense the being inside being forced to occupy only the thinnest sliver of space under his skin, a living sheet that's forbidden from either bleeding inward or lashing out. He doesn't know how to maintain that for any period of time.

The trembling has eased off, and Sam's thankful for Dean's sake. He remembers being the observer and knows exactly how it feels to watch.

Dean is still there when Sam opens the door, sitting on the floor so he doesn't get whatever gore is soaked into his clothes over the bedspread.

“All yours,” Sam says and walks out of the room before Dean can stop him. He finds Vic sitting out front on the church steps, in clean clothes – another flannel and different jeans – a cigarette dangling from between thick fingers.

Sam shakes his head when he's offered one and eases himself down on the steps beside him, trying not to pull at any of the slashes. “That stuff will kill you.”

Vic doesn't smile, just takes another drag and turns his face to blow the smoke away from Sam's direction.

Silence passes between them for a moment, and Sam takes the opportunity to breathe deep without restriction, no pressure on his throat anymore except for the swelling bruises forming there. He smells warm sun and wet earth, everything damp and new, and touched with the strong clean scent of tobacco. The rain has stopped falling, leaving puddled ditches in the dirt road, reflecting the weak light of the early morning sun.

It's been exactly one day since Sam had last been here on these steps; it feels like lifetimes.

“You can see it, can't you,” Sam says eventually. “You knew, right from the start.”

Vic takes a deep breath then stubs out his cigarette on the stairs between them, says quietly, “What I saw then was confusion.”

Sam watches him intently. “And now?”

Vic doesn't meet his eyes, but rubs a hand over his jaw, rasping against the grain of his beard. “What would you do, Sam,” he says, low and calm, “if you knew someone with power was going to hurt people. If you could see it before it happened.”

Sam remembers with clarity the memories of Max Miller and Anson Williams. Influence -- in the form of physical violence or nothing more than a whispered word -- could turn fate at any corner.

“You know about this stuff, right?” Sam asks after a long moments thought. “About ... theology. Astral bodies. Spiritual ties. A person's soul.”

Vic finally turns to look at him, and Sam's not surprised to see the conflicted emotion in the dark eyes.

“I know a lot about it,” Vic says.

§

Dean comes out to an empty bedroom, hair and skin still damp from the shower. He hadn't been in the bathroom for long, and Sam's stuff is still there, but his brother is nowhere to be seen. He finds Vic and the priest sitting in the church pews, talking quietly, and doesn't even try for pleasantries.

“Where is he.”

If the two men had so much as even glanced at each other in unspoken communication, Dean would have blown a gasket. As it is, Vic just tilts his head at the front door. “Took a walk down to the river. Wanted the fresh air.”

Bullshit. Grade A bullshit.

Dean just glares and strides out without ever looking back.

Driving as much as they have been up and down the banks of the river, Dean knows it isn't far to walk from the church, but he takes the car anyway, operating on an instinct to get to Sam as fast as he can. Multicolored thoughts and insane ideas spin a mile a minute inside his own mind, the blur turning into a white nothingness that doesn't let Dean capture any one thought and examine it properly. He's not even sure what he's afraid of. To think that Sam has turned is inconceivable. To think that Sam would take it into his own hands to ensure that he doesn't is terrifying.

Anger born out of fear and relief floods him when he spots the grassy picnic area, and Sam's familiar form, sitting on a weathered picnic table and looking out ahead at the river.

Relief aside, Dean remembers to take his gun with him when he throws the car into park and gets out. Like he ever would, or even could, use it.

He hesitates then.

Sam's still Sam – Dean can tell with a weird sort of energy and awareness – only Sam's not brooding. Even from a distance, Dean can tell. He'd been dreading that most, the possibility of coming face to face with the same desolation that had almost drowned his brother in Palo Alto and threatened to take him under for months after. It had taken Dean twenty two years to finally understand that the his brother and father were made of more similar base materials than any of them had suspected. Dean knows he's different to them both in some fundamental way, but whether by nature or nurture, or force of circumstances, he doesn't know.

The thing is, though, that Sam is different too now. Dean's heard people say that losing a parent is one of the last rites into adulthood. Dean had gone through it first at four, and they had both done it again just months ago -- he sees the change of the second loss in Sam more clearly than he does in himself. His girlfriend's death had brought Sam pain and grief, and so had their Dad's, but the desperate despair of the first did not make a repeat appearance, except where Dean's wellbeing was concerned. Sam's been watching Dean spin in place, letting him lash out at anything and everything, and Dean had never noticed in the blur that his brother had become guardian and protector and a man.

The inevitable change had taken place so slowly Dean hadn't noticed it, and now it's so apparent he doesn't know how he could have missed it.

Sam looks over at him then, probably trying to figure out what's taking him so long to walk over, and Dean makes his decision. Waiting until they get back to Louisiana is stupid. Time and distance would just present opportunities for Sam to do something stupid. They'll do the ritual here and muddle through it on their own somehow.

Not finding the small pouch of herbs at first doesn't mean anything because things shifted in the trunk all the time. It takes moving all the big ticket weapons out of the way and still not finding it before Dean's convinced that it's really gone.

“Son of a bitch,” Deans whispers roughly, anger coming back to the forefront with sudden realization. He slams the trunk closed and then shoves back, kicking up a wash of dirt.

“You're a fucking hypocrite, you know that?” Dean snarls, eating up the distance between them in long angry strides. “Don't jump to the front of the line, Dean. Yeah, right. Fuck you.”

“Jesus,” Sam says mildly, watching him approach. “Did I forget your birthday?”

Dean spots the dull gleam of a gun sitting on the table beside Sam, but strangely isn't worried. He stops feet away and glares. “Cute. You think I can't get more?”

Sam studies him, and Dean can tell the exact moment when it registers. “I tossed the bag a week ago in Texas. I'm surprised you didn't notice.”

Dean takes a breath and thinks Sam's really hurt, don't punch Sam. “Why?”

“Same reason you kept it,” Sam says simply, shrugging. “To keep my brother from getting hurt.”

It's amazing how fast the anger just deflates. Dean stands with his hands held loose at his sides and unwinds by degrees.

Sam glances up at him again. “I know what it is.” He pauses, tilting his head. “I'm pretty sure I know what it is. Or what is used to be, at any rate. It's a demigod. A gatekeeper.”

“A gatekeeper,” Dean repeats, not without doubt but ready to hear the rest.

Sam nods and doesn't move when Dean eases himself down on the bench beside him, trusting him not to touch. The river ahead is a shimmering expanse of clear water, bright and bubbling in the early morning sun. The rain has left the earth and grass damp, moisture beading on the wood of the picnic bench.

“Where does the gate go, Sam?”

Sam makes a face of annoyance. “Don't do that. I'm not five, and I'm not crazy.”

“Says you,” Dean mutters, and Sam shoots him an irritated look but Dean sees the corner of his mouth twitch.

The humor fades fast though, and in daylight Dean sees all the bruises and marks he'd missed the night before. Hand shaped smudges pressed in lurid colors across Sam's throat and collar bone. It makes him feel a little sick, and he has to remind himself that Sam had exacted his own vengeance on the thing that did it.

“There are dozens of myths about limbo, and purgatory,” Sam says, either not noticing Dean watching him or not caring. “About hell. There could be one circle or many. Some people think they're all the same thing. No one knows, really. No one we could ask anyway. The mermaids, they kept talking about lost souls wanting to cross. About a gatekeeper, like it's some kind of god, or ferryman. Once, it may have been. But suppose it got tired of it, sick of shunting dead nothings back and forth for all eternity. It can't escape because it's not real, not corporeal, right? So it binds itself to something solid, something in our world.”

Sam's voice is steady and calm but he's fidgeting, fingers of one hand playing with the leather band on the other, careful of the abraded skin there. Dean has to stop himself from reaching out and holding him still.

“Solid as rock?” Dean says, the idea slowly dawning. “Like the altar.”

Sam nods without looking at him. “Then suppose that it got tired of the stone. Found a chance to escape and took it.”

“There's a fuckload of supposition going on here,” Dean says, but his tone says he's not disputing it.

Sam nods. “Yeah. But I know I'm right. Trust me.” He pauses there, clasps his hands between his knees. “What we did in that cabin, it fucked stuff up. Broke the rules, or bent them at least. There was a window there, one we created, and it took it. And now it won't leave.”

“So we'll get more herbs,” Dean says, keeping his voice level. “Go back to Louisiana and redo the ritual. We'll ... unfuck it. We will, Sam, I promise.”

Sam shakes his head. “Doesn't matter that I tossed the herbs because that ritual doesn't hold anymore. And what would we bind it to anyway? The altar is broken. And even if it wasn't, it wouldn't make any difference. We can't push it into any kind of object and we can't send it back to where it came from because it won't leave. It's not going to go from a warm body back into something it can't move around in or talk with. Or smear things into a paste with. It's struck jackpot here,” Sam says wryly. “I'm untapped black gold to this thing.”

“Okay, but-” I found you first. I've had you longer. “-I'm in on this deal too, right? It's not just you and it, Sam. I remember, I was there too.”

Sam nods and takes a shaky breath. “Here's the thing. It's only a god in the place that it comes from. It has some power here, but it's not made for this world. If we can force it to manifest itself, become corporeal, I don't think killing it would be a problem. Guns, knives, holy water; anything would probably do it. It just has to be ... separated from me. Be forced into materializing.”

There's something there Dean doesn't like, he knows it. He's just not sure what yet.

“People who have out of body experiences do so because of some kind of shock or trauma,” Sam says, clearly picking his words with care. “Near death experiences force a person to separate from themselves. Pull the astral and the ether from their physical bodies.”

“Like astral projection,” Dean provides. He's too busy wishing again that he'd paid attention to those books Sam was reading, and still hasn't quite put it together.

Sam shrugs. “With practice, sure, why not? I guess it's possible with nothing but will.”

Then it clicks, and Dean freezes. Sam sees the no already forming, and is shaking his head.

“Near death, Dean,” Sam says firmly. “Not dead.”

“This did not just come to you,” Dean says flatly, targeting that rather than what Sam's daring to ask him.

Sam watches him back steadily, not trying to hide anything. “Vic won't tell anyone.”

“He's a hunter, Sam!” Dean hisses. “I don't understand what you thought he would do. Just let you go?”

Sam looks away then and stares at a fixed stop in the distance, not giving Dean the eye contact needed for the anger to build on itself and escalate out of control. Bastard.

“I don't know how you've missed it, but he's done exactly that,” Sam says calmly. “And he knew already. You know that. He's not all that normal himself, Dean. He won't tell.”

Dean stares in disbelief. Without Vic's help, Sam would likely still be lying in that basement and losing more than just body parts. And Dean's grateful, but gratitude doesn't trump common sense; Vic isn't family, or even someone close enough to trust. Even Bobby is only told about half the shit they get up to, although he probably knows more than he lets on.

Sam's faith in this guy is inexplicable, but if it's based on instinct then Dean can't argue with it.

He tries anyway.

“We don't have enough things chasing your ass that you wanna go put yourself on another radar?”

Sam huffs out a quiet laugh. “We're on more radars than we know of, or can even count. One more isn't going to hurt. And,” he adds, tilting his head, considering, “I dunno, maybe we can use him. More contacts. More info on what's going on. That's never been a bad thing.”

Dean doesn't answer.

“I’m a ticking time bomb,” Sam says quietly. Determined. Dean can hear that in the undertone. “I’m just waiting to go off. For now it’s sealed up, but how long before it finds a crack and gets loose? What do you think it’ll do with me then … with the things I can do?”

It’s not impossible to imagine. They have no comprehension of the extent of Sam’s abilities -- can’t even begin to understand what they might be. The not knowing was okay, but only as long as nothing else figured it out either.

“Maybe I can control myself,” Sam says, “I can try to learn how. And even then, there’s no guarantee it'll work. That’s two rounds of telekinesis now, the second one extremely violent -”

“You were fighting back, Sam” Dean interrupts sharply, not able to let him go on because he hears what Sam’s not saying. “That thing is better off dead and you know it.”

Sam shakes his head, but doesn’t look at him. “I’m not saying it wasn’t justifiable. I’m saying look at what I’m capable of. The sentient won’t try and contain any of it, Dean, and you know that. It knows things about me that I’m not even close to figuring out. It knows how to use me. You want to wait it out, give it that chance?” Sam tilts his head at the gun lying on the bench between them. “That won’t be any easier to use later than it is now. Don’t wait until I’m not me anymore.”

Dean glances down at the gun, gleaming dully in the rising sun, and can’t look away.

“It's like an infection, Dean,” Sam says quietly. “It's changing my blood. I can feel it.”

“You want me to drown you,” Dean says. His voice should be shakier than it is, but he recognizes the blank shock in his own words. The sound of the river seems so much more obvious now, much louder than when they had first sat down, noise of running water drowning out everything else.

Sam finally looks at him then and his expression catches Dean off guard, stops him from drowning in the insanity of it all.

“Just a little?” Sam offers, mouth tugging wryly at one corner. “Just enough to kick both me and it out.”

“Then what,” Dean snaps, ignoring the way his hands want to tremble. “It manifests itself and you’re dead?”

“No,” Sam says, holding his gaze. “Then you bring me back.”

§

Low bushes and scrubs cover the fertile ground of the river bed almost right up to the waters edge, where damp soil and flat rocks take over. Sam kneels at the very edge, knees sinking into the wet mud and water lapping at his thighs, soaking through his jeans and weighing them down. The claw marks over his hips burn and stretch uncomfortably.

Dean kneels behind him, knees braced outside Sam’s, and touches him with tentative hands.

“Don’t chicken out on me now," Sam says, and feels warm breath ghost over the back of his neck when Dean snorts. The humor may fall flat, but it’s still comforting because it’s familiar, the way all rituals are.

“If you don’t come when I call, I'll kill you myself. Again.”

Sam’s turn to laugh, except it sounds a little hysterical, even to his own ears. “Promise?”

Dean’s hand on the back of his neck squeezes, strong and reassuring. Familiar.

The dark hungry thing surges under Sam's skin, wanting and feral.

“Sam,” Dean says, “There’s got to be another way. Just -”

Sam ignores how his heart is pounding and leans out and plants his hands further out in water, where it runs deeper. He doesn’t wait for Dean to push him under because he'd just be waiting all day.

The river is cold but not icy, not enough to make his eyes ache when Sam opens them underwater. The water runs in swirling eddies around his face and throat, stroking his skin like fingers. It combs through his hair and brings it streaming down across his face and Sam blinks, trying to clear his vision.

The water itself is clear, filled with light. It may not be this clean closer to towns or cities, but in this strip of unused wilderness the river runs clear as crystal. The rising sun gleams amber off the stones lying on the bottom of the riverbed, bouncing off rock surfaces rubbed mirror smooth by years of flowing water. The light refracts and splinters into bright honey shards, a moving kaleidoscope under the surface. With sound gone, sight suddenly takes on a mysterious and greater meaning.

Sam can hold his breath for an impressive amount of time. Strong lungs trained to full capacity by years of coaching from Dean and their Dad both.

When the shadow first creeps in, Sam thinks it’s from clouds moving overhead, perhaps blocking out the sun. It comes from his right, moving against the current to coat itself over the bottom of the riverbed like an oil spill, but without the characteristic rainbow film of splintered spectrum.

Only some of the black dancing in front of his eyes is a sign of going too long without air.

Sam involuntarily lets out the last of the air left in his lungs, a few gentle bubbles floating up in the absolute silence to break the waters surface.

Black tendrils are now inking their way through the little eddies of water, spreading across the shiny pebbles … and inexorably getting closer to Sam. He wonders if Dean can see it from above the waters surface, then realizes that what he’s seeing is an expansion of something not quite on the visual plane; it exists in that slip of space just behind it. Some kind of veil, out of the infinite many, has been drawn back. Sam’s only taken a half-step sideways and he’s landed in an altogether different place.

The cool wash of something that fills his mouth leaves Sam confused at first. It takes him a moment to understand that while distracted the pressure in his lungs and throat had become too much to physically bear. He’d taken a breath without meaning to and taken in a lungful of water instead.

Dean’s hand on the back of his neck tightens.

It had been stupid to think he wouldn’t struggle.

Rising panic makes the urge to fight back overwhelming. Sam doesn’t want to try and breathe underwater but his body wants to cough up the water he did take in and to do that he needs more air. He ends up swallowing more mouthfuls of the stuff than he’d ever thought possible. He’s pushing back without ever realizing it, too occupied with not losing his mind.

If he were calmer, perhaps he’d register that Dean’s hands on him are trembling despite their firm hold.

Sam’s hand slips. The arm he’d been bracing himself on gives way underneath him and what comes after is a blur.

The water is now a churning mass of black all around him and Sam can’t see two inches in front of his face. He scrabbles for a hold to try and catch himself, fingers blindly finding purchase just in time to prevent from cracking his jaw on the rocks that line the riverbed. It’s not a secure hold and he slips several times more before he can finally brace himself again, but even that is partial to his tenuous grip on self control. Instinct ages old has him locking his elbows and trying to shove back, to get free, rough movements that just serve to throw him off balance again.

At some point, he’s pretty sure he starts thrashing. But instead of resulting in more chaos, his submission into total panic seems to calm the water around him. The next time Sam braces and pushes up, his head breaks clear of the waters surface.

He comes up coughing and spluttering and falls back onto the bank, hitching himself away from the water with shaky muscles, slipping in the mud. Air never tasted so good.

It’s the same river, but it’s now lit in shades of gray and silver, a surreal twilight that illuminates all the things normally hidden in shadows, all the corners and damp underneath surface of things. The terrain that Sam is surrounded by is still the same as before, with the familiar copse of trees to his left and the uniquely shaped boulder behind him -- he hasn’t moved then. There is no chance that he’d somehow come further downstream.

The first thing Sam notices is that there is no smell here. Not of the damp soil, or the grass or water.

Distance seems to be disproportionate; anything Sam looks at directly comes into razor sharp clarity while the surrounding area in his peripheral goes blurred and recedes into the background. It’s not cool or warm, light or dark, and there is no wind. The river isn’t running anymore, the water not really moving anywhere. Instead, it laps quietly at the bank like a still lake.

Dean isn’t here, but Sam isn’t alone.

It’s watching him from the other bank, looking nothing like what he’d seen in Broussard’s cabin.

Flesh made of something white and indistinct, moisture gleaming off shiny pale tissue that looks too new and slightly puffy, resembling unrisen dough. It has only the barest resemblance to a human form, skull too big and limbs to thin, standing up on two legs but hunched over like it could move faster on four. A bare misshapen lump for a head, blank and faceless, no hair anywhere. No eyes, nose or lips … but it opens itself a mouth, breaking through clinging white strings of goo to form a hollow. It breathes then, and what passes for its lungs exhale waste air that drifts clear across the river, the scent of decaying flesh and burning hair making Sam want to gag.

Sam’s fairly sure it has no skin and what he’s seeing is all that it consists of. No tendons or bones to expose, no blood. It’s crouching on slightly bent knees, and he notices that its knees and elbows bend the wrong way, some kind of insect-like skeletal structure reminiscent of a praying mantis.

He suspects the mouth is for his benefit. Or maybe not. It hasn't been tethered to him for long -- new territory for something that’s been around for millennia. It was probably like being reborn.

“Careful you don’t spread yourself too thin,” it says. “Humans don’t shatter between the worlds as well as we do.”

Its voice is the sound of tearing skin and human vocal chords ripping, and Sam’s whole body goes on edge as the noise works itself into his muscles, wrapping around his tendons and sinew like little hooks and pulling him taut.

“You were prettier last time we met,” Sam says, getting to his feet without ever looking away. It said we, not I, and that might mean any number of things, but Sam takes note of it.

“You didn’t see me last time, Samuel.” It practices speech like as if for the first time, clicking against its palate with wet, sickening sounds. “You chose not to.”

“I don’t like stowaways in my psyche,” Sam says, a snarl in the undertone.

It grins, faceless and toothless, the gaping maw of a mouth stretching into the parody of humor. “Is that where you think we are?”

“That’s where we were.” Sam gestures vaguely with one hand. “This is outside us both.”

“You want to get rid of me that badly?” it asks, and Sam thinks it sounds genuinely curious. “You would ask your own brother to drown you. He is no priest, Sam. This does not hold as baptismus fluminis, and none of your sins will be washed away.”

“I’ll settle for just getting rid of you,” Sam says, voice low, then realizes he feels as calm as he sounds. He’s no longer out of breath, and doesn’t even feel wet anymore, although his clothes haven’t had anywhere near enough time to dry.

He feels oddly grounded, in the most basic of ways. Having kept the sentient locked up had meant he’d done the same with himself, and he’d been suffering that disconnect without knowing it. He’d had years of practice in closing off against others but never needed to do it within himself. He’d done it all unknowingly, and hadn’t realized the difference until now. A truth that Dean had felt but not understood, frustrated with the disconnect without knowing why. Something that Vic had recognized better as a stranger.

Unlocking himself to get here had been a lot less calculated than the reverse, and a whole lot messier. In the panic of drowning, all kinds of bolts had been thrown open on things he’d never even known existed, things he’d only ever had the barest idea of before, and only then in his dreams. He feels all of it now, takes in energy on some kind of subatomic level from the ground that’s not really under his feet, sucking it in from the air that he’s not actually breathing, because nothing in this place actually exists.

Underneath it all, he feels Dean already calling for him. It gives Sam a quiet surety that has the sentient hissing in response.

“You don’t know what to do with yourself,” it snarls, coiling lower to the ground. “Letting to waste the special places in your mind, the secret places. Let me show them to you.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Sam says. “I’ll figure it out for myself.”

“There are worse types of rape than that of a mermaid on your body,” it hisses. “I could take by force what you are unwilling to give, now that the dam has broken. Take you whole, and put your hands wherever I want -- wherever you won’t.” It pauses. “How is your brother doing?”

It shouldn't be so shocking, that it chooses something so tenuous to exploit. It would make sense that it has a greater understanding of all the hidden things that Sam himself had only just come to realize. It does, after all, thrive in the darkness.

Sam doesn’t reply at first; his mind goes blank with rage and before he can react he feels something moving at his feet. Looking down, Sam sees the roots that have sprung up from the riverbank soil and are now twining themselves around his ankles and creeping up his calves, anchoring him down. Wriggling things emerge too, white maggot offspring of the thing that’s talking to him. It’s suffocation of a different kind to the one Sam had just experienced with water in his lungs, and this time it’s the sentient who’s smothering him.

Sam knows that if he’s sucked into the ground here, he’ll never again open his eyes back in the place where Dean’s at.

The thing coils low to the ground, and then it must move because the next moment it’s standing on the same bank as Sam. Sam never saw it happen, so silent and immediate like a light flickering out, but it’s here now, prowling around him.

“I only want something to love, Sam. Or eat. You should know that Dean is the same. You think your brother doesn’t want to consume you as much as I do him? He wants to take you into himself. How does that make him any better?”

“He has my permission,” Sam says, simple and unthinking. And he still wouldn't do it.

Truth holds immense power in nothing but itself, and can really be so blindingly simple sometimes. Sam feels a gathering compression within, like the charged air before a storm breaks, an unseen and electric thing. He doesn’t move, just urges the roots to retract back into the ground they came from, watching them disappear before looking up at the faceless demon breathing death all over him.

It happens too easily then. A horsewhip of force that lashes out almost without Sam’s bidding, controlled and contained, it sends the creature flying back to land in the river, displacing water that acts more viscous, more solid, than it should.

Sam wonders what kind of toll he might have to pay for using so much undefined energy, but doesn’t have the time to dwell on it; the roots are back, stronger, thicker and pulling him under. He looks up at the white glistening thing now crouched low and walking towards him, feet barely touching the waters surface. The mouth opens again and this time it roars. The noise comes from all directions, echoes the agony of a thousand eaten souls, tones and shades of pain that Sam could never have imagined existed. The sound is carried over great distances, sent up from dark caverns to filter through craggy rocks and worm-infested soil. They are the cries of the insane, the unending pain of creatures stuck in a limbo that holds no hope of either death or life.

The sound manages to drive all coherent thought from his mind. Purgatory or hell, or maybe the gate between the two. Maybe somewhere else entirely. Sam doesn't know where he's standing and it doesn't really matter. His recurring nightmare has become real.

“How certain are you -” the sentient jeers, adding to the cacophony of noise with its own shredded voice as it steps up onto the bank, “- that you’ll even find your way back?”

Sam’s skin itches, crawls, and he has to try hard not to gouge furrows into his own flesh just to make it stop. Dirty things with too many legs skitter along the surface of his mind, around the edges of himself, and he grinds his teeth to keep from screaming.

“I have someone coming for me,” Sam says … and then realizes that the memory of Dean is fading. As if he never even was. It’s terror of a whole new unnamable kind.

Sam tries to tune out the noise and instead lets himself remember his brother’s beauty, the unexplainable whowhatwhy that makes Dean as luminescent as he is, the bright spot in every memory Sam has. No matter how angry or scared, there had never gone a day where Sam hadn’t felt the glow of his brother’s selfless love.

There’s balance in the remembering, and the roots let go of him, but it takes more effort this time.

Sam pulls his feet from the earths hold and straightens his shoulders, gathering himself together like so many loose ends.

The thing stretches its mouth, an ugly and torn expression of amusement. And it begins again.

§

There is no thought process.

The whole thing happens so fast, but every second of it drags on for what seems like an eternity, each tense shift of Sam’s muscles under Dean’s hands, straining to get free.

Dean only thinks not yet, not yet, just a little more, the chant enveloping his mind in somewhat of a comatose state to buffer it from panic and action. He doesn’t know what cue he’s waiting for, if there’ll be a sign that means let your brother breathe now.

The sign does come, and Dean recognizes it. How he knows it for what he is, he has no idea. It holds a dull familiarity to the memory of floating uncontained in Broussard’s cabin. A snap-click of a being opened and scattered, inaudible and painless. Frightening. This time it’s Dean who’s unlocked and Sam the one who’s lost, roles reversed. He’s only aware of having pulled Sam out of the water because he’s looking at Sam’s face, shaking hands pushing away sodden hair to see closed eyes and pale skin. Some part of him realizes he's leaning over his brother on the muddy bank, and Dean fights every instinct in him to start chest compressions.

Saying Sam’s name would earn him no response, and trying to breathe air into his lungs would just waste precious energy needed elsewhere.

It’s not a vague thing, what needs to be done. It’s concrete and solid. Sam doesn’t need to be given a reason or purpose to live; Dean knows that because he’s seen his own reflection in his brother’s eyes, seen the things that lie under that warm hazel gaze and recognized it for what it was. That devotion went both ways, and had never been short of absolute.

No, it’s Dean’s exposure that Sam needs now, for him to bare things that don’t die when you shoot them, things that don’t burn to ash in fire. All the unsaid, nameless fears that don’t really harm you, except in the way that they do and then devastatingly so. Dean doesn’t have herbs or a brand or anything else to help him, except for his courage and the fact that Sam trusts him, with his life and soul and everything else. And all those things, Dean’s been protecting for far longer than the last couple of weeks. Sam needs an anchor and Dean had been born knowing how to be that.

He takes a breath, and then another for Sam who can’t breathe, and forcibly calms himself down … and then starts letting down every single barrier he’d every constructed, one by one. Flaying himself open surprisingly doesn’t hurt, but nerves get exposed and leave everything that makes him who he is unprotected. It comes easier than he’d thought, if he’d thought it would work at all. All he’s aware of is Sam, as an infant and child and man; all those, and all the instances between, everything Sam is and was and is yet to be, summed up to form a whole too complete to fit into its housing.

All he's aware of is Sam, and that's nothing new.

Seeing his brother with his eyes closed is, though, and it’s not Sam as he appears everyday, long limbs and a lopsided smile. It’s doors in a maze, locked down in consecutive order; Sam is nothing if not organized. It kind of makes the job of breaking in easier rather than harder. Dean suspects the point wasn’t really to keep intruders out, anyway. If distance was required, Sam had always preferred pulling back rather than pushing others away. He’d just been doing what came naturally, protecting what he loves most.

Dean’s never liked locked doors. He crashes through them like a bull in a china shop.

§

Standing on the opposite bank a little further downstream, Vic slides a magazine of silver bullets into his gun, movements practiced and efficient. There’s a slight ridge on this side of the river, so he’s standing high enough up that he needs to look down slightly to see them.

It’s beautiful out here, at sunrise, but none of the colors Vic is seeing come from the trees or sky or earth.

In Aragon, Vic sometimes used to go up to the church on his days off, on Sunday mornings when weddings were scheduled. They’d be held early in the day to leave time for the celebrations to follow, for the people to swarm en masse out into the street for a communal feast, drinking and laughing well after the sun set behind the hills. Kinship was never stronger than on days like that, and it was infectious, enlivening.

He’d sit in a quiet alcove of the church by himself, a comforting and familiar place that he’d made his own. He’d watch the bride and groom entwine their hands, watch the delicate and intricate meshing of them, their hearts and souls, in the colors they’d create. Peacock blues and emerald greens, shot through with gold and glimmering in the sunlight, weaving into the very air. It was like a finely tuned quartet, fine strains of perfect melody and harmony coming together, sanctified and holy.

This is nothing like that. This is a cataclysm of light and fury, silent and blinding. Dark and terrible and beautiful. Soul-meat being torn two ways.

My brother loves me, Sam had said, standing on the church steps and looking Vic in the eyes.

Vic had never doubted it. He can’t look away.

The message in Sam’s words hadn’t been hidden. He wasn’t questioning Dean’s loyalty or abilities, just stating the depth of feeling his brother is capable of … and the limits that places on his actions.

It's hard for Vic, and he'd only met Sam yesterday. He recognizes a noble spirit when he sees one, and these men are two of a pair. If this goes wrong, then Vic will do what he must because it's what should be done – but it would become yet another nightmare, another one of those stumbling blocks that made it harder to trust in belief itself.

He raises the gun, finger resting lightly on the trigger. And waits.

There comes a flash then, something subsonic and infinite. A planar expansion of light and air that implodes into visibility, molten and glimmering, curves and arcs of intangible material that deserve not understanding, but reverence. Something that has always been there and always will be but is never seen, except by people like Vic. And even then, never like this.

It is, for the smallest possible increment of time, an overlapping of several planes compacted down to fill the space of just one. A complex and concentrated knot of atmosphere, tightly knitted and contained, drawing together the essence of worlds and then releasing it in a supernova, silent and immediate. Particles had severed their bonds and were thrown together in vacuum. Ties are broken and reformed, and things find their own way back to their natural state, drawn to what they love and what nurtures them in return.

It ends almost before it even begins, leaving nothing but a bright memory-flare on the inside of Vic's eyes. When he looks ahead again, never realizing he'd turned away, it's gone, over.

It should not have been possible, but Vic suspects the Winchesters have broken a fair few number of supposed truths. Devotion, Vic understands. Faith is more a matter of choices than it is inevitability. Possibilities are endless when one has free will.

Vic watches the two men exert theirs with such ferocity that demigods are torn from the dark places they thrive in and thrust into the air and sun and scalding light of day.

§

The thing that brings Dean back to himself is the feel of Sam vomiting up body-warmed river water all over his hands. It's wet and fetid, and real, although Dean's not too sure about that at first. Then Sam coughs, a thick desperate sound Dean's heard his brother make before that means air that should be circulating in lungs isn't. It propels Dean into motion, obeying an instinctual response and easing Sam over onto his side, letting him cough it all up.

The gun is still by Dean's side, lying exactly where he'd placed it. He reaches for it with one hand, the other still tight on Sam's shoulder. Dean tries not to reel.

He's not certain what it was he'd seen or done ... but he remembers it this time. He remembers all of it. Not as something solid with defined edges, but as indescribable concepts of an inherent idea. Nothing that light or sound could convey, nor emotions. For one all consuming moment of time, infinite and thin, Dean had held everything that made up Sam in cupped hands. Like so much dense light, weightles and immense. There had been an urge to mark him. To tear into his brother just a little, fray the edges and leave an unseensignature of himself that Sam would never know was there.

Dean hadn't dared, overwhelming as the desire might have been. He'd handed it all back to its rightful owner, intact. Not his to take, even if the owner was willing to give.

Under his hands, he feels a much more solid Sam cough and choke and take in great heaving breaths.

“Other bank,” Sam gasps, fingers clenching weakly in the dirt beneath him.

Orders, Dean can follow, but he does it without leaving Sam's side. Looking up, he sees the twisted thing crawling through the mud on the opposite bank, thin limbs and white skin. Dean had never seen the sentient in Broussard's cabin, but he recognizes it now from the intangible place he'd just been in. Pale and slick, it looks smaller here than in the other place, like it's withering in the sun. It's faceless head is tilted up to the sky, hissing quietly and swaying slightly, uncertain. Probably never before felt real warmth on its skin.

Dean's aim is steady because it has to be. He fires at it with unwavering aim and a compartmentalized calm. The bullets take solid chunks out of it's white flesh, sends a high keen of despair and agony drifting into the air. It goes down with the first bullet, and doesn't move after the second.

In the end, it's that simple.

Dean hears more gun shots than he knows he's firing himself, but it doesn't register except as a vague and removed thought.

This is the thing that had buried its way under Sam's flesh, the splinter of darkness left behind when Sam had saved him, when Sam had risked everything to save him. It had been lying there under Sam's skin, piercing him on the inside where all Sam's greatness lies, tainting his brother all this time, and Dean hadn't even known. Sam hadn't even known. Sam had been carrying it around with him, living with it, hurting because of it, and it had all been for Dean.

Dean lets the gun fall to the ground, and falls back. The river runs quietly, smoothly, the burbling of water and the gentle breeze ruffling through the trees the only sound anywhere. That and Sam's slowing breath, the ragged edges to his exhales smoothing out, getting more even. Alive and whole.

“Dean.”

Dean doesn't move, not even at the light warmth of Sam's hand on his shoulder.

“Hey. It's okay.” Sam's voice is low and quiet, close by Dean's ear. The hand moves to grip Dean at his neck, fingers squeezing the muscles there, before pulling him in hard and close.

Dean wonders if he can touch him now, then realizes that he's already grabbed fistfuls of the back of Sam's shirt, and is holding on tight.

“We're okay,” Sam says, sounding sure and strong, and Dean starts to believe him.

Over Sam's shoulder, Dean catches the glint of sunlight on gunmetal, and sees Vic watching them from high up on the other bank.

§

Sam is tired, but not weary. It's a sensation of loose-limbed fluidity, like the second or third glass of a cheap red wine soaking into his veins, heat and langour moving through him in lethargic waves. For too long he'd held himself rigid, bolted down and inflexible. Those muscles are just starting to loosen up again. It feels good, but it leaves him aching. Like some sort of resolution still needs to be found.

“Sam?”

The word is said quietly, in Dean's deep and familiar voice. Sam looks up at him from his place on the bed, Dean still standing halfway across the room with his feet braced and hands held loosely at his sides. At a complete loss of what to do, Sam realizes.

“I'm fine,” Sam says, transfixed by the sight of the gold hairs dusting Dean's muscled arms, glinting in the sunlight streaming in through the window.

He is fine. He shouldn't be. A person can only go for so long without air and oxygen before their blood becomes poison and their hearts and minds shut down. Sam's clothes are sopping wet, and he's pretty sure he'd re-opened wounds that had just started to heal ... but he's fine.

They're in a new room at a new motel. Sam doesn't ask what happened to the old one. He'd been more concered about the wide-eyed look Dean had gotten by the river, something wild and dangerously close to unhinging in his brother. It's faded now, but Sam can take guess at what had caused it, and he's pretty damn certain he'd be right.

“You could have shredded me,” Sam says eventually, and watches Dean stiffen. “Ripped me up and stuffed me in your pockets, carried me around like that. I know you wanted to.” He pauses. “Do you still want to?”

Dean glares at him, but it's defensive, not aggression. “Not exactly like that,” he says, fierce.

Something similar, then.

Sam understands the defiance. They’re fighting the same battle but standing on opposite sides. And Sam knows exactly how selfish he can get despite Dean not seeing it that way, or perhaps not choosing to. He would place his bets on Dean any day of the week.

“There are more ways than one to want a person,” Sam says. It’s meant as reassurance.

Dean barks out a laugh, then eases down to sit in one of the small motel chairs. “Pick one,” he says tightly, spanning his hands. “They’re all pretty left field when the person is your goddamn brother.”

This obviously isn't something that's going to go away, or else they wouldn't be having this conversation. Dean's just arrived at the place Sam's been standing at for a while now, waiting for Dean to catch up and catch on.

“Would you rather we were so far apart that we’re strangers?” Sam says roughly. “That didn’t work even when I was at Stanford. Come on. Boundaries for us have only ever meant salt lines and holy water. And even those won’t keep you from me, apparently.”

“I’m not going to apologize for not killing you when you ask,” Dean says, protective fury flaring in the gentlest eyes Sam’s ever known.

“Everything we do, it's all for other people,” Sam says without a trace of resentment. “Why can't we just have this one thing?”

“Jesus.” Dean looks at him in disbelief for a moment before looking away. “There are reasons, Sam.”

Sam nods, ceding the point. “Do any of them matter?”

Dean’s anger blooms, sudden and silent, and probably misplaced.

“Fuck you,” Dean grinds out, looking ready to whale on something until it’s bloody but refusing to move an inch. Seeing such fury contained in such stillness does nothing but set Sam on edge, but he tamps down on the urge to brace himself because Dean would sense that. “Draw the lines wherever you want, is that it? For months now you’ve been nothing but shit scared of being tainted. What path are you thinking this is going to lead us down?”

Sam's brow furrows. “You don’t believe in God.”

“You do!” Dean yells, jabbing an angry finger at the carpet between them. “If you’re still looking for salvation of some kind, this isn’t the way to go about finding it, I can tell you that much.”

“Don’t say salvation when you mean escape,” Sam snaps, the words coming out sharper than he’d intended. “You’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’m not leaving."

Dean lets his hand drop to his side and studies him for a long moment, the muscle at his jaw and temple tensing visibly.

“Maybe you should,” Dean says finally. No inflection or tone to it.

Sam’s standing towering over Dean in a second. He catches the startled expression at the sudden proximity before Dean looks away to the side. Dean doesn’t flinch when Sam cups the back of his head but Sam hears him stop breathing when he leans down.

“Anything you want or need, you should have,” Sam whispers carefully, mouth pressed to Dean’s temple and feeling the tension radiating off him in waves. “It goes both ways, Dean -- I’m just as tangled up in you. You’re all I’ve ever known and taking that away won’t do anything but ruin me. It’s the only thing that could.”

He tightens his fingers against Dean’s skull, gives him a rough kind of shake, then stands up and leaves the room before Dean has enough time to gather himself and kick his ass.

§

The drive back to the river doesn't take long, and the water is still sparkling in the sun when Dean gets there. It's still early in the day, the sky an insanely bright azure-blue, not a cloud to be seen. Likewise the thin-limbed corpse of a bullet-riddled demigod.

Dean doesn't spend much time looking for the remains. He won't find them because they're not there. He hadn't wanted Sam to have to touch it, but neither does he now, apparently.

The drive to the church seems more familiar than it should, considering Dean's only ever taken the route twice. He steps inside and listens to the quietness, breathes in the earthy air and maybe understands why Sam would like it here. The stained glass throws colored shadows onto the pews, and Dean watches the shapes move across the back of his hand when he touches the solid wood.

Vic must have heard him enter, because he comes out to meet him, through the door that Dean now knows leads to the living quarters.

“It's nothing but ash. I made sure of it.”

Dean nods, and takes his hand off the wooden bench. “Thanks,” he says conversationally, walking over to him. “We could have handled it ... but thanks.” Then he draws back an arm and lets fly.

Dean doesn't hold back and it's a solid punch, connecting with the blade of Vic's cheek hard enough to make him stagger but not go down. The man is big and solid, built like a brick wall. Dean doesn't think to step back or protect himself from retaliation, unthinking, or perhaps simply uncaring.

“You would have killed him,” Dean snarls, low and seething, “if it hadn't worked.”

A rosy stain blooms on olive skin, and Vic touches it with his fingers, lifting his eyes to meet Dean's.

“Try lying to me,” Dean hisses.

“If it hadn't worked, he'd have died anyway,” Vic says evenly. “Just ... in smaller pieces. Slowly, bit by bit.” He pauses there, then adds, “You know that he asked me to. And you know why.”

“Would you have done it if he hadn't asked you?” Dean snaps.

“Would you have done it if he had?” Vic shoots back.

Dean doesn't reply, just glares and breathes, the tension in his neck and shoulders translating to a coiled fist, waiting to be released again.

To his credit, Vic doesn't try for reconciliation. Instead, he straightens his shoulders and says, eyes glinting, “The first one you get for free because he's your brother, and you're right; I would have taken the shot. Throw a second, and I start swinging back.”

“You even think about tailing us,” Dean says, “- if I even so much as feel like you're getting close, or hear that you're spreading word, I will not hesitate to deal with you. I'm not as selfless as Sam when it comes to his survival. Think about what he can do, and then believe me when I say he's the soft touch.”

Vic eyes him for a moment, appraising, then he turns and starts walking away, calling back over his shoulder. “Wait here.”

Without knowing why, Dean does. He straightens, ready and wary, when Vic reappears through the door, but all he gets handed to him are Sam's cell and headphones. And a slip of paper with a cell number on it.

Dean takes the cell and headphones. “The fuck is that?”

“For the record, I was praying it would work,” Vic says, quiet and thick, and Dean's realizes he's not surprised at the emotion in the man's voice.“And it did work. Sam is clear of that thing, and anything related to it. There ain't no catches this time. But he's opened doors.”

“Has he,” Dean says flatly.

“Can't tell you how or what,” Vic continues, ignoring by Dean's attitude, “but it'll show itself in time. And he may want answers. Or help.”

Dean stares at disbelief ... even while he knows that he has no training to provide Sam with the kind of direction or advice he may need. Their Dad had never prepared them for anything like this, and most of the people who knew about this stuff didn't know shit about what to do with it. Even through his anger, Dean knows that dumping Vic into the same category as people like Gordon Walker is unjust and unfounded.

He leaves the church without saying another word ... but he takes the piece of paper with him.

§

The air in their motel room has the warm humidity that speaks of a recent shower. Dean sees the open bathroom door, then sees the towels on Sam's bed, and freezes. The spotting of blood isn't excessive, just sparse patches of bright red on the damp terry cloth. Not enough for Sam to die from it, but that doesn't stop the fearful thud of Dean's heart or his rush to get to the bathroom.

Sam must have been telling him the truth though, because he looks just fine. Fine, but naked, his clothes lying in a pile on the tiled floor. The claw marks must have been hard to reach with wet material getting in the way.

Sam lifts his eyes to meet Dean's gaze in the mirror. Apparently, he's more than fine, if the dark heat Dean sees there is anything to go by. There's an answering ache, sweet and tight in Dean's belly, and he looks again, takes in the sight of Sam's long lean body, the shifting muscles of his back and tight curve of his ass.

“Bandages came loose,” Sam says quietly, holding up a box of butterfly strips. “Figured I'd do this properly.”

He's done a shitty job of it, Dean sees when Sam turns around. The cuts over his hips look half decent, but the slashes over his ribs are patched up messily, awkwardly placed tape that says Sam couldn't reach or bend that way without hurting himself more.

“Could've waited,” Dean says gruffly, stepping closer and snagging the box. Being that close to so much warmth does unnameable things to Dean's insides. He ignores his hard-on when he sinks to his knees, but it's harder to ignore Sam's.

Sam's skin is sleek and soft but the muscle underneath is hard, and it ripples when Dean touches him, laying the butterfly bandages first over the claw marks on his ribs, then moving lower to his hips. Sam's already ripped off most of the bandages covering the gashes there and Dean peels off the rest that have shifted then starts lining up the new strips in a neat row, first pressing the edges of torn skin together to close the wound.

Sam hisses softly at that, tensing underneath Dean's hands, but it's an involuntary reaction. The wounds aren't that bad, and certainly aren't the worst that Sam's ever had. Stitches won't be necessary, but taking it easy for a while sounded like a good idea – which brings home the long hours that Sam had been away from him, and the things that were done to him. Tied up and held down, hurt from both inside and out ...

Dean pauses at the touch of a gentle hand on his head.

Not the first time he's seen or touched Sam like this; they've been more naked together than this before, and they've only ever laid stitches in each other's skin with nothing less than complete devotion. If it had been hidden at the time, it had certainly never gone unknown. That level of tenderness only translated to gruffness because it went to so damn deep, and had never felt any different than if the care and concern were coming from John. Sam had been the most likely out of all three of them to ever let it show outwardly, and even then only at the times when he was strongest and least injured.

This is different. The heated rise of Sam's dick under his arm as he works is very very different. Dean's own dick seems to have a direct line of connection to the fingers Sam's carding through his hair, the pulse of each gentle fingerprint translating to the throb and thickening of love and lust and need.

He wants to take those fingers into his mouth and suck on them, and has no idea when he'd started thinking that way about anybody's hands, much less Sam's.

“Jesus,” Dean whispers when Sam hips hitch forward minutely, an uncontrollable jerk against Dean's forearm. He rests his forehead on the bare skin of Sam's hip and breathes deep, careful of the bandages he'd just taped down. Sam's hand strokes lower, coming to rest on the the back of his neck.

“I'm not asking you to change,” Sam says, low and breathless. The hard planes of his belly tremble and quiver under the press of Dean's palm. “I want you to just-”

“What?” Dean rasps hoarsely, eyes closed tightly and not moving. “Just take what I want?”

Sam's thumb strokes over his nape, soothing, and Dean shivers, heat blooming in his groin.

“It wouldn't be giving in,” Sam says. “It's making a choice.”

“A choice.” Dean pulls away and rises to his feet. Sam's hand drops away, cold space washing over the skin he'd been warming, and Dean misses the touch already. “When did you make yours, Sam? After we both got your hand on my dick, or after the mermaids got theirs on yours?”

It's more a protest built on base instincts than it is refusal, instincts that say protect, nurture. No way Sam came through that shit without it fucking with his head, but it didn't taint his logic or sanity, Dean can tell. If there's going to be any backfire, it would be muffled, fed quietly into the darkness of night when Sam's defences were less solid. They would deal with that if and when it came, together, as they'd done every other time the shit had hit the fan.

At the moment, Sam is calm and here, studying Dean with bright eyes running with something hotter just underneath the surface, something that's probably always been there in one form or another. Right now, it's translating itself into the rise and fall of Sam's bare chest, in his silent but shallow breaths and the flush spreading over his skin; in the way his dick lifts visibily when Dean lets his gaze go there.

The muscle over Sam's throat tenses as he swallows, and Dean feels his own hands clench at his sides.

“Before,” Sam says, husky. “Before everything. Before I even knew. Dean ...”

Sam's tone has the perfect pitch of respect and adoration to make it impossible for Dean to dismiss him. An ounce more of either, and it would seem like the kind of cajoling that Dean could easily ignore. He wonders if this is how it must have felt for Sam with the sentient, to be overtaken from the inside out, unable to stop it or even slow it down. If it was, then it's a miracle that Sam had ever found the strength to kick that fucking thing out of him.

The thing is though, that their contract was one written an eternity ago when Sam was first born; the one made in blood a week ago, if ever broken, can’t null and void what’s existed for the twenty three years prior. Although Sam seems to think that it can. Sam seems to think that what happened in Louisiana is the only way for them to survive together and whole in a world where so many things are trying to tear them apart – and it occurs to him that Sam thinks Dean is one of those things.

Dean suddenly understands exactly why Sam had loved Jessica as much as he had. She had let him. More than that, she had acknowledged him.

Dean has spent his entire life sweeping Sam aside, keeping him behind. One step further from even the vaguest of threats, and one step further also from Dean. Dean had stood guard, but had done it looking out at the world. He'd faced the darkness, and turned his back on the one thing that was his to nurture.

Maybe not so different from their father after all, then.

He had seen himself, by the river. He'd turned towards Sam in that other place of nothingness, more naked than exposed skin could have allowed, and seen his reflection burn bright and luminescent. In Sam's eyes, he was – for lack of a better word – beautiful.

It shames him at the same time as it invokes something discomfortingly like gratitude in the divine, because it means that Dean's not too late to do what he should have been doing all along. It means Sam has survived and flourished despite Dean's negligence, instead of being ruined by it ... although his choice to view Dean with such reverence is questionable.

If Dean believed in miracles, he'd say it is one that Sam is still capabable of faith and hope. Fate had done its part, apparently, in safeguarding Sam so far, but it's a fickle thing and has nothing of the strength of Dean's own hands.

Those same hands reach for Sam now as Dean grips him at neck and shoulder, and pulls him in hard.

God, Sam's mouth is fucking soft.

He opens it willingly to Dean, desperate and hungry, clutching at Dean's hips and holding on tight like he's afraid to let go. Tongues meet and slide, and Sam pushes into it, making a low throaty sound that he feeds right into Dean's mouth. The sound is like impending resolution, like rain waiting to fall; it's nakedness, and an ache so deep that Dean wants nothing but soothe it, over and again.

Nothing that's happened between them so far was about denial or withdrawal. Sam had just been waiting. That negligence has gone on long enough.

Dean gentles his grip, rubbing down Sam's arm to his elbow then back up again, easing off his brother's mouth and pulling back to look at him, but not moving away. Sam looks at him, wide eyed and breathless, mouth and cheeks flushed with a stain of arousal that spills down over his throat and chest. Dean moves a hand to Sam's face, strokes over the swell of his lower lip with his thumb and presses in. Watches as Sam shivers, eyes going three shades darker with heat.

Dean groans, low and helpess, when Sam takes his thumb in deeper and bites, gently.

Dean replaces his thumb with his mouth, and this time the kiss isn't so gentle. Sam thrusts roughly against him, seeking friction and Dean's dick, moaning when he finds it. The sound and sensation register as rolling waves of heat through Dean's body, thickening his blood and settling as a solid ache in his balls. It's what he wants more than anything in the world right now, to rock and grind against Sam, to drive them both wild and feral, and come standing up in the bathroom. And then do it all over again in bed.

But orgasm isn't the only goal, and Dean wants to ride the tight coiling pleasure for as long as he can make it last, wants to go insane with it and have it do the same to Sam, so that in the end there's nothing but them. Nothing but them.

Dean makes himself step away, and Sam lets him, mouth open and breathless. His eyes are intent on Dean's face, searching for something that he apparently finds.

“Bedroom,” Sam says, soft and hoarse, licking his lips and nudging Dean backwards. He reaches out to strip Dean's shirt off him, and this time, Dean helps. They fall onto Dean's bed, and he goes down first, bracing against Sam's chest as he follows. Softening his brother's fall, now and always.

“Easy. Take it easy,” Dean says, lifting his head to brush open lips over the bruises on Sam's throat, a reminder.

Sam allows the concern for a little while, but is soon pulling away, bending down to run his own lips and mouth over Dean's throat, dragging the flat of his tongue over the rasp of stubble before he gets to the smoother skin of his chest. Sam's mouth is hot, much hotter than the air in the room, and the path he takes leaves gooseflesh rising in his wake. Dean's nipples bud and rise under the gentle pinch of Sam's fingers, swelling hot and thick so that just the touch of Sam's tongue to them has Dean arching his back and gasping. He'd never even known he'd liked that, but his hips jerk up, dick hard and wanting something, anything, to rub against.

Sam pushes him back down, broad palm curling over Dean's hip to keep him still as he kisses his way down, using gentle teeth to bite a path down Dean's chest, soothing the sting with his tongue. He noses at Dean's navel, blowing moist air over the sensitive skin of his belly, and Dean shivers all over, trembling and aching and hard.

Coherent thought evaporates completely when Sam goes lower and starts mouthing at Dean through his boxers. Dean's reduced to scrabbling at the sheets because he doesn't want to risk clutching at Sam and digging into bruises or cuts. It's the only thing to do in the world right then, to splay his legs wide and bring them back and up, giving Sam room and space to move, to do whatever the hell Sam wants to do to him. Dean pants at the dry kitten-licks along his length, then almost loses it when Sam tongues at the exposed head of his cock, swollen hot and peeking up from underneath the waistband.

Too late, he registers the wash of cool air against his dick and balls, and looks down to see Sam pulling the boxers down and off, and lowering his mouth again.

Oh jesus.

“Hey,” Dean rasps, reaching down to thread trembling fingers through the tangle of Sam's hair, holding him still because nothing more than a strong gust of wind will have him creaming himself right now. Sam looks up at him from under his lashes, rocking slightly and panting. Rubbing himself off on the bed covers. What that does to Dean can't even bear explanation.

Sam's mouth quirks, like he's knows, and he reaches up for Dean's hand and pulls it away, pressing it flat to the bed and holding it there.

“Let me know if I'm here now,” Sam says with a soft growl that goes straight to Dean's dick, and then bends his head again.

Dean feels hot wet silk slide down over him, and he slams his own head back into the pillow, mouth falling open in sensation and hips thrusting up roughly into Sam's willing mouth, helpless to stop himself and not even wanting to. He arches up, body held taut and trembling as he pulls at the hold Sam has on his wrist, not really trying to get away but needing the anchor against the molten heat and spiralling pleasure. His body gives in way too soon, gutting him from the inside out, and Dean clenches his teeth on a low moan, rocking and shaking, orgasm drawing out even further at Sam's low hum of pleasure as he swallows around Dean's softening cock.

“Fuck, Sam,” Dean rasps, hoarse, twitching away from the attention. He closes a hand around Sam's arm and tugs, pulling him back up the bed. Dean tastes himself in Sam's mouth, and he licks at the heat he finds there, taking Sam's whimpers from him before they're fully born. Sam's still hard, hasn't come yet, and he presses his erection to Deans hip and slides against the groove there. Dean eases him up and over, getting Sam settled on his back before stretching out beside him, propped up on one arm.

Dean had never thought of any man as being beautiful, much less his brother. But there's no denying the appeal of dark tousled hair against white sheets, eyes that glimmer in the sunlight, and the miles of smooth honey skin stretched over strong limbs and sleek muscle. Sam's cock is flushed and hard, lying heavily on his belly and glistening at the tip. The view is ruined only by the cross-hatching of thin red welts and the bandages that Dean himself had laid, covering wounds that Dean had not been able to prevent. Sam twitches when Dean traces the edges of one with his fingertips, but he doesn't pull away, perhaps sensing the motive behind the motion.

“Do you have any idea,” Dean says, “what it felt like to hold you under like that.”

“You brought me back,” Sam says, watching him with understanding and concern. Desire, as well, which has maybe lost some of its urgency but none of the heat. Dean works to bring it back to the forefront, ignoring the ache in his throat when he bends down to map out his own path across Sam's skin. He sweeps a hand along Sam's side, mouthing carefully along the scratches over chest and stomach, feeling the hard muscles quiver underneath his tongue.

There's just the faintest taste of copper. Not blood. Just the idea of vulnerabillity, and Dean swallows it down, presses his face to Sam's neck and holds his lips over the warmth of a pulsing vein. Sam's hand on his face urges him pull back and meet his gaze.

“You can be whoever you want to be,” Sam whispers, eyes dark, arousal and something deeper making him shake in Dean's arms. He touches trembling fingers to Dean's mouth, tracing the shape of it. “You can let yourself be that. You can trust me with that.”

There's nothing Dean can say to that. Not a damn thing. So he doesn't speak, but closes his eyes against the burn and reaches up to cradle Sam's hand, nipping at Sam's fingers before bending to brush careful lips over the raw skin at the wrist, stopping when he feels Sam's fingers twich.

“Show me,” Dean says, low and heated, and pulls both their hands down between Sam's legs. Dean twines their fingers together and curls them around his brother's heavy length, squeezing once then easing up, not letting go but allowing Sam to set the grip and pace.

Sam trembles, breath hitching as he works himself, looking up at Dean through slitted eyes. The first few strokes go slowly, awkward, and it takes Dean a moment to understand why; the light touch is abrading the scratches scored into the skin of Sam's dick. Not painful enough to stop, or even register as anything more than discomfort, because Sam is still hard and leaking. But Dean pauses anyway, ready to stop, or at least get something to make it easier.

Sam must sense his hesitancy because he knots a hand into into the leather cord around Dean's neck, tugging him down and demanding continuance, completion, with his mouth. Dean lets him get away with it for a while, then tightens his grip around Sam's hand and forces a rough stroke, swallowing the whimper that it invokes.

He wants to do more, to touch more, to get deeper, but they're both tired and Sam is all but falling apart from the need to come and the utter exhaustion of everything he's been through. They'll have plenty of time for exploration later.

“Let me see it.” Dean presses his lips to the skin below Sam's ear, whispers against the sweat-slicked skin there. “Let it go, Sam. C'mon.”

Sam makes a choked sound, something frustrated and desperate, as he pulls and strokes and works himself into a frenzy. Dean squeezes around Sam's fingers once more, then takes his hand lower, cupping the soft weight of Sam's balls and kneading gently.

Sam comes gasping Dean's name, writhing and arching on the bed, one hand on his dick and the other twisting into the sheets. Dean takes over when Sam's fingers go lax, milking him through the aftermath and drawing out the pleasure, making him tremble and shake. He presses his forhead to Sam's shoulder, half hard again but too tired to do anything about it. Just listens to Sam's breath slowly even out, get deeper, and presses a kiss to Sam's shoulder then does the same to Sam's mouth when Sam tugs him up. He can't get enough of that taste.

“I can see you,” Sam murmurs against his mouth, still trembling slightly. Dean doesn't need to see Sam's eyes to know what he means. He knows it has nothing to do with visiblity of flesh.

“I know,” Dean says, without fear.

Sam could talk about all the hypothetical planes they could be bonded on for as long as he wants. Dean's tasted his brother on all three, has had it offered to him freely. The faith that it comes with makes something in Dean's chest tighten and ache, but it's not emptiness. It's solid understanding, and a truth that's nothing like a burden and every bit a gift.

§

Much later, Dean stirs in his sleep, hand automatically reaching out for contact that he doesn't find. The sheets are still warm though, and when Dean opens his eyes he sees Sam easing out of bed. Sam's movements are maybe a little stiff, but not abrupt enough for Dean to worry about injuries that he might have missed earlier.

He doesn't realize he's checking out Sam's ass until Sam catches him doing it.

“Didn't even know you liked men,” Dean mutters, stupidly feeling his face flush.

Sam's mouth quirks at first, then breaks into a grin and then a full bellied laugh that feeds Dean's soul. His brother's joy is deep and pure, and all the dark things scatter and run from it.

Dean will cherish what's his, and the entire world will benefit.

§

Author's notes: The Portuguese myth Sam mentions about mermaids eating the genitals, fingers, eyes and nose of their victims is actually established mythology. So is the paragraph that Dean reads about disarming techniques. The rest was purely the product of my imagination. Likewise the idea of the sentient; it is loosley based on the Sumerian legend of Lahmu, the gatekeeper of a mythological underworld that's theoretically located under the Well of Souls in Jerusalem ... but I took great liberties with that too. *g*
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