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FIC: Gimme Shelter (1/1)
Title: Gimme Shelter (1/1)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nilchance
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Characters herein are used without permission. No infringement intended, no profit made, no lawsuit preferred.
Summary: AU. Gen. If Mike Gunther had called Child Protective Services.
A/N: Beta services provided by the wonderfuleponin10. That said, any remaining mistakes are all me.
The dogs growled low when John came around. It was the kind of sign that would've turned Bobby against the man, if John hadn't saved his life once or twice, if Bobby hadn't met John before the world broke him hard.
Bobby raised his head from the book in his lap. He waited for a moment for John's shadow to pass, for John to slip away from the porch and disappear into the rust and clutter of the lot. It'd been that way for a thousand other nights that John came around looking for a place to sleep, and it'd likely go that way for a thousand more.
John lingered stubbornly by the door. The pitch of Carter's rumble rose in warning. Bobby put his book down and got up, wincing as his knees creaked. "All right, now, easy," he murmured. "Go lay down, old son."
The old son in question stayed at Bobby's side like a shadow. A good herd dog, Carter. Bobby would be sorry when he passed, and would miss him more than he'd miss the man at the door. It wasn't a comment on John, exactly. John was just a perpetual stranger, a dead man too pissed to lay down. He'd died years ago, slow, the poison of losing his boys and of prison eating him away until there wasn't much left of him but anger.
Resting his hand on Carter's graying head, Bobby undid the locks and opened the door.
John leaned against the frame. He smelled like brimstone, smoke and sour sweat. There was no sign of blood, though Bobby looked for it. He looked rougher than usual, leaves in his hair and his beard grown thick. His face was lean and hungry.
John whistled at the dog and held his hand down to be sniffed. When Carter subsided with a grudging noise, John smiled his scary damn smile. There was blood wedged dark under his fingernails.
"Coffee?" Bobby asked.
With a shake of his head, John reached under his jacket. He pulled out his journal, a battered old thing held together by leather and a prayer. "Got a job for you," he said shortly. "Pennsylvania. Might be a poltergeist. Looks like that thing out of Waverly."
"You can't take it?"
John didn't glance up. "It's a state thing. Asylum."
"Far enough from Kansas."
An irritated edge slipped into John's voice at having to explain himself. Man had spent too much time alone in the field. "There's kids."
"Ah." So it was one of those. Bobby felt his attention slide to the band around John's finger, the silver worn dull and too big on his narrow killing hands. He sighed. "John."
John put out his hand, a bit of newspaper folded up between his fingers. He didn't look at Bobby, his eyes in constant restless motion, tracking every twitch and stray sound. "Take it or don't. I've got somewhere else to be."
Of course. It was always someone else to save, another demon to track, another quarry to corner and kill. It didn't help. Every time the man came around, Bobby could see John slipping deeper, and he didn't have any handholds to offer. So Bobby took the paper.
Hands empty now, John flexed his fingers and glanced warily at Bobby's face.
"Stay, you idiot," Bobby murmured, not unkindly. "Have a drink. Get some damned sleep. You look like hell."
John shook his head, twitchy, and backed up a step. "Mother of two in Arizona."
"There's always gonna be a hunt somewhere. Can't save them all."
John's mouth curved, humorless.
*****
It took Bobby two days to get to the site, between lousy roads and research. That was the thing about the scrap business: his time was his own, and anybody who got pissy about him not being around could either wait or find another yard. He'd survive with a few less customers. Demons weren't the only thing to hunt out in the country. He had venison jerky, whiskey, books and bottled water enough to last him through a nuclear apocalypse.
Assuming he survived. Bobby called that an optimistic streak.
Long story short, he pulled up in front of the haunt late on Wednesday. He stayed there for a minute, resting his elbows on the steering wheel, eyeing up the place with a sour feeling in his gut.
Sawyer School for Wayward Boys was a hunter's nightmare. They'd built the place out of the ashes of an asylum fire. The patients had died like rats, trapped behind locked doors, strapped in and drugged. The owners barely bothered to pitch the bodies into a mass grave before they laid the new foundation down and opened their doors again.
Underground, the spirits festered.
The building hunched, looking slumped and beaten. There were bars on the yellowed windows. The porch was warped. There were fences up, high, barbed at the top. The sign above the gate said they locked the boys in after dusk. The forest grew up dense around the country roads leading here. It was high enough in the hills that a foot of snow meant they were stranded.
Two deaths so far. Both kids. Both apparent suicides, pulled off in a secluded room with belts the kids weren't supposed to have, with attendants watching the whole time. The attendants swore that they'd seen the boys on their feet, smiling, until they went to open the doors and let them out.
Yeah. Something was hunting in a cage. The boys were easy targets, prey that nobody would help or believe. There was no fuss raised about suicides in a nuthouse. The place stayed open, and the kids would keep dying, because they had nowhere to run.
The principal called, and not for security. The cable on the ward had gone out. He thought it might be upsetting the boys. Dumb bastard.
Even sitting out front in his own truck with the A/C running, the air felt thick in Bobby's mouth. He opened the door and climbed out, gravel crunching under his boots. When he glanced up at the windows again, a shadow ducked out of the way, just shy of fast enough.
Bobby felt his mouth curve on a wry smile. Looking up at the window, he deliberately tipped his hat back so they could see his face. When the shadow didn't peek up again, he walked to the front door. The security guard met him there, and it was a while before Bobby smiled again.
He'd expected the job to be an in-and-out operation, matter of fact. Sprinkle some holy water, maybe get down to the foundation and salt the earth before tossing a match. In any case, he wanted to be out before dark.
Obviously, he underestimated bureaucracy at work.
They called Sawyer a school. In reality, it was more like prison or boot camp. Bobby had done his share of time in both, when he was a younger and stupider man. He recognized the barren stucco and beige tile, the steel and bullet-proof glass routine of it all. He was photographed twice, his identification checked by several scowling guards, and he signed until his hand was stiff to swear that he was indeed Colin Harper, of Harper Cable and Electric.
Finally, he was at the end of the labyrinth of offices and locked doors. The head of security (Jules, said his badge, on a chain that'd be handy for some ambitious kid to choke him with) handed Bobby's ID back to him and shoved both hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels like he thought he was in a damn Clint Eastwood movie.
"Ground rules," Jules said tersely. "Listen or I'm not responsible for what they do to you in there."
Bobby's worn patience gave out with a snap. Bobby drawled, "Yeah, I bet those twelve year olds are real terrifying."
Jules drew up straighter. "All right, smartass. These kids aren't here because they sang out of tune in the choir. They're a danger to themselves and others. You're gonna need to lay wire through the hall where we keep the violent ones."
Bobby looked at the man, hard-eyed and all puffed up like a little dog gone mean, and thought: you don't know violent. What he said was, "Suppose I'll manage."
Jules's mouth went hard. He looked away, talking in a monotone as he unlocked the doors. "Don't meet their eyes. Don't put your hands behind your back. Keep three feet of space between you and them. If they get too close, call code green and we'll take them down. If you see something in their hands, I don't care if it's a fucking ballpoint pen. Call code blue, weapons code, and we'll come in to get you out. Don't talk to them. Don't walk too close to the walls. Don't let them get a hold of your toolbelt. Don't-"
As the door droned a warning and opened, Bobby let the rules fall into the background of his hearing. He looked, instead.
There were boys clustered in the hallway, crouched against the walls. They were close enough that if they wanted, they could run for the doors. They wouldn't make it anywhere, but they could try and fight. If they were as crazy as these folks thought, it wouldn't matter if they made it or not.
The kids just looked at him, hollow-eyed and listless. The air had that same bitter thickness. Bobby tasted smoke, and felt the faint prickle of being watched. It was the kind of feeling that ate the hope out of a man.
As they walked, the guard flanking Bobby tight, he kept his eyes peeled. He was rewarded, if he could call it that, by the telltale signs: spots in the hallway that were icy cold, flickering lights, the distant scratch and patter of clawed feet in the roof above them. Every breath felt heavier in his chest, a dizzying sense of being smothered. There was a grim triumph in that.
The dead recognized Bobby as a hunter, and they weren't happy to have their playground taken away.
The sudden crash of sound from down the hall jarred Bobby hard. Bobby put his arm out on instinct, blocking Jules's body as he reached inside his coat for the flask of holy water.
"Son of a bitch!" Jules barked, and knocked Bobby's arm away. He grabbed for his belt, drawing what Bobby had taken for a close-com radio, and shoved Bobby out of the way. Then he started jogging towards the end of the hall, where there was a flurry of sound and fury.
The kids flanking the hall began to slip away, finding other places to be. Some remained, staring slack-mouthed towards the commotion.
"Code green," Jules bellowed, "get him down! Get him-"
Another crash. A guard went down on his ass, sliding across the tiles, blood spilling from his broken nose. Two more came from behind Bobby, pushing him towards the wall in their rush to get to the fight.
Over the bellow and command of too many voices, there rose a tearing animal sound. Bobby had heard it before, when something paced outside the yard that Carter couldn't see to attack. It was there to remind a man that no matter how well the dog was trained, the wolf beat in its heart and blood. The wildness was there, pacing, waiting, hungry.
It wasn't a sound for human throats. Still, there it was again, drawing the hair up on the back of Bobby's neck, making the guards pause. Five armed men, full-grown, and they hesitated.
That was opening enough.
Quick as hell, a boy darted between two guards. Jules swore, jabbing the box forward as it spat sparks and crackled. The boy ducked out of his reach and tore ass down the hall. The crazy little bastard was trying to get out. Guards all around him, three locked doors between him and freedom, no chance in hell, and yet...
The boy skidded towards Bobby, looking hunted. Bobby met those eyes (green eyes; familiarity came, like an itch Bobby couldn't reach) and stepped deliberately out of the way.
Twenty feet from the door, a man built like a linebacker plowed into the boy from the side. The blow took the boy down hard. The boy howled again, rage and pain, fighting to get away. The guard pinned him, held him, as Jules came thundering down. Even as they closed in, the boy was clawing at the floor and biting any hand that got too close. Bobby skirted the edges of the chaos, reached out, plucked away a security card and moved back out of range. Nothing much he could do for the boy now.
They hauled the kid up, restrained him as he yowled and thrashed and spat. Bobby saw the flash of a needle sinking home in the meat of the boy's skinny thigh. The plunger went down. The boy subsided by degrees, gasping raggedly, long wounded noises coming from deep inside. He was quieting as Jules reached in and deliberately pressed the taser against his back. Triggered it once. Triggered it again, because Jules seemed to like the screaming.
In the corners, the shadows dipped and fed. Bobby's nails bit into the flesh of his palms.
Finally, the boy hung slack between the guards. His eyes were locked somewhere above them, focus slipping, but he twitched as Jules bent and gripped him by the chin.
"We got to do this every day?" Jules drawled. "I'm getting a bit tired of it."
The boy's throat worked visibly as he swallowed. He shook his head, the motion slow with the drugs but no less desperate than his howling.
Jules made a scornful noise. "Don't put you in the quiet rooms? Maybe you ought to think about that next time you start trouble."
Attention flicking down to Jules's face, the boy stared at him. His glare promised violence even as it lost focus, the drugs pulling him down.
Stepping back, Jules looked at one of the attendants. "Call Deb. Tell her Dean's coming for another visit. The tranqs ought to buy her a few hours of peace."
As they dragged the boy out, not letting him touch the floor, Jules came back. Straightening his tag, he jerked his head after the pack and said, "You see now?"
"Yeah," Bobby said. "I see now."
Jules nodded and started walking again. Bobby followed, stepping over the blood on the floor. "That one," Jules said, "shouldn't even be on my damn ward. Autistic. Doesn't like being touched, doesn't talk. Just sits by himself and watches things. Doors, mostly. Sometimes windows and ceilings. He figures out the system, and he tries to make a break for it when he sees an opening."
Bobby made a vague assenting noise. Let Jules take it as support. "What's he here for?"
Jules's mouth hardened. "Boy's been in the foster care system. Nobody keeps him longer than six months. His last placement, he had a little girl with him. Two years old. Parents wake up to her screaming, and they come in to find him over her bed with a knife. He'd been pushing her in a swing that afternoon. Hurt her real bad. You got kids?"
"Never got around to it."
"I've got two. Light of my life." Jules pulled up short at the end of the hall, where an access panel stood slightly open. "If you had daughters, Mr. Harper, you wouldn't look at me like I was filth. You'd thank God every day that monsters like that weren't out in the world with your little girls."
Said the man who would scream and piss himself if he saw the kind of monsters Bobby knew.
Bobby slid the security card he'd palmed into the pocket of his jeans, and drawled, "Bet your daughters'd be real proud of you. Mind letting me do my work?"
Jules's mouth curled up, silently, and he left Bobby alone.
*****
Prison, like war, was tedium broken by moments of stark fucking chaos. Once the source of that chaos was locked away, the ward subsided into eerie quiet. There was a brief flare up of activity with dinner, an argument over whether Stan had hidden the salt shakers again. Then there came the arrival of medication. The boys lined up, fearful quiet, and took their sedatives. Most of them didn't even look his way, their faces worn dull with fatigue.
Haunt was another word for feeding ground. The angry dead needed fuel to keep up their fury, or they'd gutter out and be stripped down to an echo on a recording, a cold breeze in a sealed room. It was simple biology, if you could call anything simple with the dead. If they were offered an easy food source, a steady diet of fear and pain, they'd feed. If they were fed, they'd keep coming around. More of their kind would be drawn to the scent.
These kids were being eaten alive. The guards, too, but at least they got to go home at the end of their shifts. Still, there was only so much ambient bad mojo, even in a prison or a psych ward. There was only so much fear somebody could take before their circuits fried, before it either twisted into fury or blunted out into numbness. So the scavengers had to pick a new game. Make the prey scared all over again.
Two boys dead. Funny how none of the adults said a word about it. The kids knew, though. There was knowledge sharp in the way they hung together, the way they looked over at the closed door of the quiet rooms. They knew, the way that kids always did, that the monster in the closet was just waiting for the lights to turn off.
Bobby worked, prying up circuits and sliding in protective charms, carving sigils in the hidden guts of the building. He screwed around, mumbling to himself for effect, until the kids were herded up into their stalls. The lights stayed on, spilling into the open mouths of doorways.
Finally, he sealed the panel with a bag of herbs behind it, and put away his tools. There was thick silence behind the doors to the quiet rooms, where the rabid pup had been swallowed up. There was no easy way of reaching the quiet rooms with a guard standing by, and no sense in trying yet. Hopefully it wouldn't come to using the boy as bait, waiting for the ghosts to come and try to strangle him.
When he went past the night guard, safe behind his shatterproof glass, Bobby said, "There's a line out in your basement. I'll need to go down there and repair some wiring."
The night guard shrugged, tossed a ring of keys across the desk, and went back to his magazine.
Nice security there. Not that it bothered Bobby much, since it was a mistake in his favor.
He took the stairs down. In the hollow echo of the stairwell, he could hear the distant, high-pitched wail of a child. Deeper in the echoes, where it could be taken for the rustle of leaves against the windows, something whispered a warning. The wailing got louder, louder, the farther down the steps Bobby went, drowning out the whispering, drowning out everything but the urge to clap his hands over his ears and swear. It was inhuman loud, a bestial howl rising under the childish shriek of pain, setting Bobby's bones to rattling as he came to the bottom step.
Once, back when he started down this road, back when the sight of Beatrix's blood spattering the walls and the ruin of her body in their marriage bed was raw in his mind, he'd have thought that someone had to hear that noise. Somebody had to be coming down to check.
Funny, what people could turn a blind eye to. Funny, what people didn't hear.
Bobby yanked on gloves to touch the doorknob, but the metal was still brutally cold beneath his fingertips as he unlocked the door. It hurt to breathe in that cold, like the ghosts sliding pale fingers down his throat and into his lungs, so he held it as he stepped into the basement. The furnace burned, spilling hellish light into the noise, but it didn't do a damned thing against the cold.
The Latin crossed his lips. He couldn't even hear it in his own head, like the words were swallowed up. It was useless, no standing against-
He closed around the foreign flicker of despair and isolated it. Drowned it with the chant of Latin, reaching into his jacket and closing his gloved fingers around the beads of the rosary. The despair recoiled from him, back into the chaos, but the fury in the middle of the room didn't quiet. Fuck, there were a lot of them here. Small wonder there hadn't been more deaths.
A shadow darted across the far wall, between two boilers, gone. Something skittered across the cement floor, and the noise rose so sharply that it faded to a high whine in Bobby's protesting ears. He could feel wet spilling down the side of his neck. Pissed, he chanted louder, throwing his anger and pain into the rhythm of the exorcism.
It wasn't going to be enough. Nothing short of a priest and an excavation to get the bodies out would quiet these sons of bitches, if it hadn't outright twisted into a demonic haunt. Goddamn John anyway, him and his fucking senseless "I don't work with kids" rules, he ought to be here-
Another flash of motion. Bobby saw clearer this time, the metal flash of a salt shaker tossing out a spray into the middle of this storm. Salt against this kind of haunt was like tossing a handful of sand at a tsunami. Goddamn wannabe hunters had just enough information to be dangerous to the ones who knew what they were doing.
And then there was a blur of motion, a small body pitched across the basement at neck-breaking whiplash speed. Bobby's hands jerked up like he could catch him, and then the kid hit the wall hard enough to kill a man. The kid (the rabid pup from earlier, Jesus Christ, what was he doing out of the quiet rooms? How did he even get out?) didn't crumple, pinned by the throat to the wall. His legs slid down, his feet not touching the floor. His mouth worked, his gasps for air drowned out by the roar.
Something in that chaos laughed as it squeezed. Bobby moved, but it was like pushing against hurricane wind.
The kid twisted, his foot going out, banging into the metal grate of the furnace. His feet were only in slippers and it had to hurt, but he hooked his foot in the metal and yanked the door wide open. The power pulled him an inch off the wall, slammed him back, his head bouncing sharply off the concrete. There was blood smeared behind his head. The kid squirmed his hand free, and glass caught the firelight as he pitched something into the open maw of the furnace.
Bobby had spent too many days hunched in the garage outside Jim's, too much time carefully working with wire and glass and fertilizer to rig up homemade bombs, not to know one when he saw it. The kid had built a steam-bomb, water in the bottle and a wad of cotton and a salt shaker wedged in the mouth. Just add heat.
Then again, the 'water' could be anything from kerosene to vodka. If the kid could get out of the quiet room, odds were he could get something to light the whole building on fire.
Yeah. Kids learned the damnedest things in juvie.
Teeth flashed feral in the kid's skinny face, and recognition punched Bobby in the gut.
Christ. Here. Of course he was here, because that was Winchester luck for you.
Throwing his weight into open air, Bobby bashed his way forward into the storm. It hit him back, bruising-vicious, stealing his air and his heat, trying to push him out of its way. Bobby pushed back, rosary swinging in front of him, until his hands closed around the kid's shoulders. He pressed the rosary into the angry band of red spreading across the kid's throat. Even over the furnace, he smelled the sweet-sick scent of burning skin.
The ghost let go. Bobby grabbed the kid, hauled him up into his arms and barreled his ass towards the door. There was blood on his upper lip by the time he made it there, the kid's nails biting hard through the thick flannel of Bobby's jacket. Somewhere in the chaos, a woman screamed for her child.
The door opened under Bobby's hand. He shoved the kid through and fell on him, kicking the door shut as the world lit up behind them.
The explosion sounded like a bottle rocket compared to the noise of the haunt, but the impact dented the door out like a goddamn car plowed into it. The building shuddered once and was still. What should've been silence was the muffled wail of Bobby's eardrums protesting, bleeding.
Beneath him, the kid started fighting. Bobby pushed himself upright, went to check the boy for injury, and got bitten for his trouble. Resisting the urge to cuff him like a too-rough puppy, Bobby went up on his knees and looked the boy over. The whine in his ears faded to a distant sort of hearing, muffled as if from underwater. There was yelling upstairs, and fire licking out at the basement. Fine. It'd give the guards something better to do than chase them.
Blood trickled in a thin line from the kid's nose. He looked shocky, pale as hell against the stark bruises on his throat. One pupil was bigger than the other. He stared at the bent-up door, and John's hate showed in his crooked grin and in the firelight casting shadows on his face.
Dean Winchester.
"C'mon," Bobby said. "You're coming with me."
Dean looked at him, hard, and winced through shaking his head no.
All right, so he should've expected that. Glancing at the stairs, Bobby tried, "I know your daddy. We don't have time-"
Dean's face was the picture of skeptical disgust.
"Son, you'd best get off your ass or I'm gonna have to come back for- oh, for Christ's sake, Dean!" Frustrated, Bobby shoved the rosary back in his jacket and got up. "I know John Winchester, I've known him for years. I'm gonna take you to him."
Disbelief warred with hope on Dean's face. He darted a look up the stairs, wavered, and then grabbed Bobby's jacket. Dean yanked, hauling Bobby past the dented door and further down the basement hallway. Dean veered once, again, took them under the stairs, and finally came up on a fire exit with a chain wrapped around its bar. Pointing at it, he gestured fiercely.
Nudging Dean back, Bobby steadied himself on the wall and kicked the door. The chain bent on the second kick, and gave on the fourth. Might've gone easier if the world didn't spin every time Bobby leaned too far back. He turned back to push Dean ahead of him, but Dean had already darted through and into the open air.
"Hey!" Bobby barked. When Dean looked back, startled, Bobby pointed at the white bulk of his truck under the school's awning. "There, under the tarp for now."
Dean hesitated again, the wise wariness that could still get a man killed, then tore towards the truck. Hoisting himself up by the rim, he squirmed his way under the tarp. There was a small red handprint left in his wake, lurid against the white truck. Somewhere, an alarm was sounding.
Yeah. Now they went looking. Lucky for these assholes that Bobby was the one who found Dean. If John had come...
Bobby climbed in the driver's seat, turned the key in the ignition and drove like hell. Sawyer burned behind them, shadows rising in the smoke.
***
"Come out from under there."
Nothing moved in the darkness under the tarp. Far as Bobby could figure, Dean had wedged himself back between the gas cans and the rusted engine Bobby had salvaged on the drive here. Bobby could hear breathing, rabbit quick, muffled like Dean was trying to keep quiet.
Leaning against the truck bed, Bobby sighed. He'd hung a gris-gris from the rearview mirror to prevent the truck from being trailed, but a hell of a lot of police cars and fire trucks had whipped past them in the last few hours. He hadn't trusted the hoodoo enough to stop anywhere until most of the gas stations had closed. Out here, where most everything was deserted and folks went to bed around 6, nobody had been around to watch Bobby park in a rickety old service station and wash the blood off the side of his truck.
"You can't stay in there," Bobby warned. "I need to check that head injury. Your daddy'll kill me if I bring you back all dinged up."
Dean's shoe scraped softly against the truck bed. There was a snuffling noise, like he couldn't breathe around the bloody nose. It was cold as hell out here, likely colder if you were shoved up against cold metal.
John's son or not, Dean was just a kid. Barely, what, 12 now? Bleeding and choked and probably scared as hell? He'd have to be, to climb in a stranger's truck with just his daddy's name to go on.
"C'mon now," Bobby said, easing his voice down to the tone for hurt herd dogs and skittish puppies. "It's warmer in the truck. I've got some food up there. Lots of space."
Slowly, Dean leaned out from behind the engine block. The stubborn line of his jaw didn't work real well with the shivering.
Backing up deliberately, Bobby held the tarp out of the way and waited.
Boy obviously got his daddy's temperament, because by the time Dean decided to crawl out, Bobby was just about ready to drop the tarp and give up on him. Dean's hand snapped up to catch the tarp, and he glowered up at Bobby from beneath that mop of filthy hair. It was all fine and good for the attendants to let it grow out, but Bobby was taking hedge-clippers to the boy when they got back to his yard.
Bobby held out a hand to help the boy down. Dean shied away from it, eyes too wide, so Bobby let his hand drop back to his side. When Dean was wobbling on his own two feet again, Bobby strapped the tarp down. He asked, pitching his voice quiet, "Tilt your head up."
Dean tilted, baring his teeth against the milky light of the station's sign. Bobby looked him over, held his fingers up. "Track these for me."
Dean tracked, a little bleary-eyed but basically okay.
"Sick to your stomach?"
Head shake 'no'.
"Dizzy?"
Dean wobbled his hand: 'so-so'. Then he shrugged.
"You know what state you're in?"
Dean blinked at him for a heartbeat, then nodded.
After a long few minutes passed, Bobby snorted. "You really don't talk much, do you?"
Dean's expression said plainly: not to you. Then he reached over and drew 'SD' in the dust on the truck's bumper.
"Okay, then. You think you're gonna be all right?"
Dean shrugged and glanced away, scuffing his foot in the tire tracks. He needed shoes. The thin clothes they'd issued him wouldn't last him. Bobby didn't know any kids, and didn't have anything to offer this one.
Damn John anyway. Damn this hunt, and damn John's nightmares, and damn Bobby for being fool enough to take the kid with him. He should've fobbed this off on Jim, or Caleb. Hell, Ellen, even. At least she had that little girl, and those maternal instincts or whatever. She'd know what to do with Dean.
Bobby grunted, then grabbed a crowbar and went to bash open the vending machine. There was bottled water within, and caffeinated garbage that would do in place of coffee for now. Bobby tossed a few bottles to Dean. "You got to piss? We won't be stopping much."
Dean looked sourly at him, but shook his head.
"All right. Climb on in, then." Awkward, Bobby watched the boy go back to the trunk. After a minute, he called gruffly, "There's a jacket in there if you want it."
The door slamming shut was his only answer.
It was a long silent ride back across state lines. The headlights cut clear through the night, as Bobby counted off hours by songs: Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Clint Black. Dean stayed curled up against the door, white-knuckled hands gripping the seatbelt tight. When Dean's head started to dip forward, Bobby only had to clear his throat before Dean was jerking upright again. The cab of the truck smelled like sage, sweat and blood.
It was nearly dawn when they reached the yard, long pale fingers of light reaching over the husks of dead cars. Somewhere Carter barked, chest-deep and fearsome. Dean watched it all through wide eyes, tensing up tighter the farther they got into the yard, the further away from the road.
Bobby finally settled the truck to a stop in front of his house. "All right, now. Let's call your-"
Dean flung the door open and was out before Bobby could move. By the time he got his own door open, cursing, Dean had already darted between two rusted-out heaps and was gone into the yard.
"Aw, son of a bitch." Pulling his cap off, Bobby scratched his forehead and scowled after Dean. Dumb damn puppy. Hope he'd had his shots, running in a yard like that with thin shoes on. Cupping his hands around his mouth, Bobby called, "You get your ass back here, Dean Winchester!"
Carter trotted over, his weight leaning briefly against Bobby's leg. He rumbled a question.
"Nah," Bobby said. "Best if you didn't."
Carter growled softly and sat down in the dust. Bobby rubbed the shred of Carter's left ear, and yelled, "There'll be dinner on the porch! Better not wait too long or Carter'll eat it!"
His echo answered him.
"Goddamn," Bobby muttered, "I'm glad I didn't have kids."
Somewhere, Beatrix was laughing.
*****
"John, your kid's at my place. Come get him."
The answering service cut him off at the beep. Jim hadn't seen John for months. Ellen hadn't seen him for longer. Caleb thought John might be in Wyoming. Joshua figured the Yukon. In any case, there was no reaching him on a hunt.
Only thing to do was wait.
*****
September was unseasonably warm in Lawrence. Missouri had her windows open to let in the last of the afternoon sunlight. Someone else's kids were playing outside, the creak of an old swing set mingling with their high laughter. It was iced tea weather, too warm for coffee, but John's fingers felt nerveless with cold as he twisted the wedding band around his finger.
Missouri looked at him over her coffee table, not bothering to fill up his silence with sympathy. She was a psychic, not a shrink; he wouldn't come here if she was the type to try to put a bandaid over a gut wound. Her fingers swept idly over the rosewood table, where she had laid out the tarot cards and pendulums, shells and runes. Throw after throw, the answer came up the same.
Finally, John ran both hands through his hair and let them drop. "So that's it, then."
Missouri crooked an eyebrow. "Now, I didn't just give you a pair of death certificates. I only told you-"
"You can't see Dean."
"I can't see you half the time. Happens, with the stubborn ones." Gentling, she reached out and laid her hand over John's. "Your boys'll turn up, likely when you least expect them. If you can give them time, protect them... there's a great darkness bearing down on your family, John. It's already touched you, did everything it could to knock you out of the way. It killed Mary. It'll kill you or Dean, if you let it."
John twitched her hand away. "And Sam?"
"Sam is..." Missouri pursed her mouth, searching for a word. "It wouldn't kill Sam."
No. It would do something worse.
John looked down at his empty hands.
Eight years ago, men armed with court orders and anonymous reports came and took his boys from him. They searched his house, found the newspaper clippings and the journal and the guns. They seized it all while John tried to tell Dean not to fight, not to be scared, because John was going to come and get him soon. Just protect Sammy, and John would come.
Dean hadn't even made it to the car before one of the men took Sammy away. Dean bit the man's hand, right down to the bone. He'd tucked around Sam and dropped to the driveway and howled, scared out of his mind, wanting John to come and fix it.
The men shut the door. They had questions. John didn't hear them, didn't hear anything until the car had pulled away and he was alone.
Months slid by. John turned throat until his body ached, mouthed what they wanted to hear, submitted to therapy and anger management and grief counseling and pills. He let those doctors pry at his head, ask him about his brothers and his platoon and Mary, and did he have any mistresses? Did he hit his kids because his old man smacked him around?
They asked him about bruises they'd found on Dean, and their disapproving silence told him what they wanted to hear before they gave him his boys back. There was no room here for accidents or rolling into crib bars to protect Sam from Dean's own nightmares.
John wondered if anyone let Dean crawl in with Sam. He asked, but no one told him anything. When he found out they thought Dean was autistic, it was because somebody left Dean's file sitting around.
John did everything they asked. When they let him go, on good behavior and probation, he asked for this boys back.
"Mr. Winchester, if Sam's adoptive parents choose to contact you in time-"
"Dean is being taken care of. At this time we feel he's too emotionally fragile to risk-"
"They're not safe."
"Now, John, we discussed that."
"Goddamn it, it'll come back for them-"
"We're very sorry."
So John let them shuffle him out their door, and he gave up on trying to get his kids back the legal way.
A year passed. Hunting, planning, drinking too much because he had no reason not to. John didn't remember long stretches of time, lost in black night and white noise, flickering lights and the hum of the road. The cops caught him on the sidewalk outside of Sam's new home, when he tried to bolt inside the flames.
The house burned. Sam's new life burned. John held his son for a matter of seconds. Sam was red-faced and inconsolable, smudged with ash and staring up like he could still see his new mother burning. He took hitching gasps in John's arms, grasping at him with both chubby hands, still trying to hold tight as one cop took Sam away and the other put John in handcuffs.
It was only reflex for Sam to hold on to John, not any kind of recognition, but the memory held John through three years in prison.
Attempted kidnapping and arson. Three years of new scars and old ghosts living where men were caged. Fast as he could, John earned himself a reputation for being crazy as fuck and twice as mean. He spent his time in solitary when he could. In that dark silence, he connected the pieces of the pattern, and he waited until he forgot the light.
When John was released, Bobby was waiting outside with the Impala and a bottle of tequila. Nobody knew where John's kids had gone. John poured himself the last shot he ever drank and went back to rebuild his journal, his hunt, his family.
Eight years now. Eight years of dead ends, burnt-out houses and dead mothers in Sam's wake, of finding and losing and leaving and waking up every damned morning to remember that Mary was dead and his children were gone. He fell asleep to dreams of a better life than he could offer them, and nightmares of small, unmarked graves by the roadside. He turned down cases involving other people's children because he would look at their faces and wonder what had happened to his own. He had his leads, and he followed them with a tunnel vision that got narrower every year.
And now this.
His boys needed a hunter, not a father. If nothing else, he could keep them safe by killing the demon.
That had to be enough.
"Thank you," John said distantly. He got up.
Missouri frowned up at him. "Don't do something stupid now, John," she warned. "I told you it'd come in time."
More time.
Sam was 8 now, and wouldn't remember John or his mother. Dean was 12, maybe still locked up somewhere. John didn't know. And she was asking for more fucking time.
"You want something to take with you?" Missouri asked quietly. "You look half-starved."
"I'll be all right."
"Mm," she said skeptically. "You call me in a few weeks. Might be the tides change."
As the breeze ruffled Missouri's curtains, John saw one of the kids leap out of the swing. His father caught him, grunted and spun him around. His son shrieked and held on tight, laughing.
John mumbled his thanks again and took his leave. The father held his son a little tighter as John passed by, suddenly wary. John didn't look him in the eyes, just got in his car and put her in drive.
The sun bled down, and the road behind him was swallowed up in shadow.
*****
The knock on her door came just as Missouri finished putting out graham crackers and milk. She straightened and tried not to sound so damned tired as she called, "All clear, honey. My last appointment just headed out."
The door opened, and Sam dropped his backpack by the door. He looked grubby and his shoes were wet, like he'd taken the long way home again. "When's dinner?"
"Sooner if you help me, boy." Missouri plucked a stray leaf from Sam's hair and smoothed the tangled mess of it back as best she could. Sam had his father's hair, dark and thick and unruly as hell. "Eat your snack and then I'm putting you to work."
Sam made a face, but climbed up on the kitchen stool anyway. There was no sign now of the pale, haunted boy she brought home eight months ago, who flinched when the heater turned on and screamed through more nights than not. After six months had passed and Missouri was still alive rather than leaving Sam alone again, Sam had eased into a wary domesticity. He'd shot up half a foot already, and from the padding he was putting on, he was about to hit another growth spurt. Boy's shoes barely fit as it was.
Missouri pulled out the ground beef for dinner. She should've done it earlier, but John had turned up on her doorstep and scared the hell out of her. Every time he came around, she thought he had to know; that he'd tracked Sam down and was here like the wrath of God. That day was coming, all right, but it wouldn't be today.
John suffered. Sam feared nightmares he couldn't even name. She wanted to give John his boy, Sam his home, and be done with this.
But God, the visions...
"Missouri?"
Missouri met Sam's quizzical look. "Nothing, sweetheart. Just tired. You're quiet tonight."
"Yeah. Um." Sam nudged the crumbs around his plate, poked at it restlessly and sighed. "The house feels weird," he said, with the pained note that said he knew she wasn't going to leave that alone.
Sam had his schooling and his homework. At night, though, he had this. Missouri tried to take the training slow, but Sam's visions sharpened by leaps and bounds. It shouldn't have surprised her that he sensed his father.
Missouri grabbed the bowl of green beans off her counter and put it between them. "Stop fidgeting. What feels different?"
"I don't know."
"Sam."
Sam huffed out a breath. "I don't like talking about this."
"That's rough luck. If you don't own it-"
"It owns me. I know, I know. It's weird."
"We're both weird here, honey. Now fess up."
"It feels like..." Sam's nose scrunched up as he searched for the words. There were no words, like trying to explain colors in the language of the blind.
"Just give me three," Missouri murmured.
"Aww-!"
"Hush. Think of it like a pop quiz."
"I don't like those even when they're normal." Squirming, Sam broke a few beans in half, and then blurted, "Dark."
Missouri stilled.
'Dark'. It was the word Sam used to describe his nightmares, and the presence that had been in his room the night his mothers burned. It was the only word Sam used for the thing that hunted him. When Missouri pressed him for more, Sam would shut down completely.
Now he was using the same word to describe his father.
"Okay," she said finally. "And?"
Sam chewed at his lower lip, thinking. "Knife."
Missouri raised her eyebrows.
"Cold. Sharp. Heavy." Sam shrugged. "Knife."
"Kitchen knife?"
"No." Sam looked up with a terrible distance in his eyes. Missouri didn't want to know what words came to mind when Sam met that look in the mirror. "Hunting knife. Hungry. There's blood on the edge. It's all dinged up, but it'll hold."
So. There was the demon. There was the knife; that might or might not be Dean or John or their whole battered, angry family.
With an ease she didn't feel, Missouri gathered up a handful of beans and began snapping them. "Anything else?"
Sam stared at the scarred table, brow creased, troubled. Then he said, too quietly, "Home. Missouri, who was here?"
"Nobody you know." Missouri laid her hand over Sam's and squeezed, trying to smile.
The phone began to ring.
Grateful for the reprieve, Missouri got up and answered. Her free hand went to comb through Sam's hair, soothing herself if not Sam. She wasn't meant to be anyone's mother. She only mothered Sam because she was least likely to die on him, not because she had any right. That didn't keep her from being damned sorry.
"Missouri's. Business hours are up. Call me back in the morning and we'll-"
"Cut the crap," Bobby's gruff voice cut her off. "Is John there?"
Cold settled around Missouri's gut. Sam turned around to look sharply at her. "No," Missouri said carefully. "Why?"
Bobby answered.
The phone slipped through Missouri's nerveless fingers. She leaned hard against the wall, watching the phone swing on its cord.
"Missouri?" Sam asked, alarmed. He came off the stool, his hands on her arms. "Hey, what's the matter?"
Dean. Dean was alive. They'd found him.
Oh hell, John.
"Missouri?" Sam said again, softer, uncertain. He touched her face. "... Mom?"
Missouri closed her eyes and sighed. "Pick up the phone, baby. It's for you."
Author:
nilchanceRating: PG
Disclaimer: Characters herein are used without permission. No infringement intended, no profit made, no lawsuit preferred.
Summary: AU. Gen. If Mike Gunther had called Child Protective Services.
A/N: Beta services provided by the wonderful
eponin10. That said, any remaining mistakes are all me. The dogs growled low when John came around. It was the kind of sign that would've turned Bobby against the man, if John hadn't saved his life once or twice, if Bobby hadn't met John before the world broke him hard.
Bobby raised his head from the book in his lap. He waited for a moment for John's shadow to pass, for John to slip away from the porch and disappear into the rust and clutter of the lot. It'd been that way for a thousand other nights that John came around looking for a place to sleep, and it'd likely go that way for a thousand more.
John lingered stubbornly by the door. The pitch of Carter's rumble rose in warning. Bobby put his book down and got up, wincing as his knees creaked. "All right, now, easy," he murmured. "Go lay down, old son."
The old son in question stayed at Bobby's side like a shadow. A good herd dog, Carter. Bobby would be sorry when he passed, and would miss him more than he'd miss the man at the door. It wasn't a comment on John, exactly. John was just a perpetual stranger, a dead man too pissed to lay down. He'd died years ago, slow, the poison of losing his boys and of prison eating him away until there wasn't much left of him but anger.
Resting his hand on Carter's graying head, Bobby undid the locks and opened the door.
John leaned against the frame. He smelled like brimstone, smoke and sour sweat. There was no sign of blood, though Bobby looked for it. He looked rougher than usual, leaves in his hair and his beard grown thick. His face was lean and hungry.
John whistled at the dog and held his hand down to be sniffed. When Carter subsided with a grudging noise, John smiled his scary damn smile. There was blood wedged dark under his fingernails.
"Coffee?" Bobby asked.
With a shake of his head, John reached under his jacket. He pulled out his journal, a battered old thing held together by leather and a prayer. "Got a job for you," he said shortly. "Pennsylvania. Might be a poltergeist. Looks like that thing out of Waverly."
"You can't take it?"
John didn't glance up. "It's a state thing. Asylum."
"Far enough from Kansas."
An irritated edge slipped into John's voice at having to explain himself. Man had spent too much time alone in the field. "There's kids."
"Ah." So it was one of those. Bobby felt his attention slide to the band around John's finger, the silver worn dull and too big on his narrow killing hands. He sighed. "John."
John put out his hand, a bit of newspaper folded up between his fingers. He didn't look at Bobby, his eyes in constant restless motion, tracking every twitch and stray sound. "Take it or don't. I've got somewhere else to be."
Of course. It was always someone else to save, another demon to track, another quarry to corner and kill. It didn't help. Every time the man came around, Bobby could see John slipping deeper, and he didn't have any handholds to offer. So Bobby took the paper.
Hands empty now, John flexed his fingers and glanced warily at Bobby's face.
"Stay, you idiot," Bobby murmured, not unkindly. "Have a drink. Get some damned sleep. You look like hell."
John shook his head, twitchy, and backed up a step. "Mother of two in Arizona."
"There's always gonna be a hunt somewhere. Can't save them all."
John's mouth curved, humorless.
*****
It took Bobby two days to get to the site, between lousy roads and research. That was the thing about the scrap business: his time was his own, and anybody who got pissy about him not being around could either wait or find another yard. He'd survive with a few less customers. Demons weren't the only thing to hunt out in the country. He had venison jerky, whiskey, books and bottled water enough to last him through a nuclear apocalypse.
Assuming he survived. Bobby called that an optimistic streak.
Long story short, he pulled up in front of the haunt late on Wednesday. He stayed there for a minute, resting his elbows on the steering wheel, eyeing up the place with a sour feeling in his gut.
Sawyer School for Wayward Boys was a hunter's nightmare. They'd built the place out of the ashes of an asylum fire. The patients had died like rats, trapped behind locked doors, strapped in and drugged. The owners barely bothered to pitch the bodies into a mass grave before they laid the new foundation down and opened their doors again.
Underground, the spirits festered.
The building hunched, looking slumped and beaten. There were bars on the yellowed windows. The porch was warped. There were fences up, high, barbed at the top. The sign above the gate said they locked the boys in after dusk. The forest grew up dense around the country roads leading here. It was high enough in the hills that a foot of snow meant they were stranded.
Two deaths so far. Both kids. Both apparent suicides, pulled off in a secluded room with belts the kids weren't supposed to have, with attendants watching the whole time. The attendants swore that they'd seen the boys on their feet, smiling, until they went to open the doors and let them out.
Yeah. Something was hunting in a cage. The boys were easy targets, prey that nobody would help or believe. There was no fuss raised about suicides in a nuthouse. The place stayed open, and the kids would keep dying, because they had nowhere to run.
The principal called, and not for security. The cable on the ward had gone out. He thought it might be upsetting the boys. Dumb bastard.
Even sitting out front in his own truck with the A/C running, the air felt thick in Bobby's mouth. He opened the door and climbed out, gravel crunching under his boots. When he glanced up at the windows again, a shadow ducked out of the way, just shy of fast enough.
Bobby felt his mouth curve on a wry smile. Looking up at the window, he deliberately tipped his hat back so they could see his face. When the shadow didn't peek up again, he walked to the front door. The security guard met him there, and it was a while before Bobby smiled again.
He'd expected the job to be an in-and-out operation, matter of fact. Sprinkle some holy water, maybe get down to the foundation and salt the earth before tossing a match. In any case, he wanted to be out before dark.
Obviously, he underestimated bureaucracy at work.
They called Sawyer a school. In reality, it was more like prison or boot camp. Bobby had done his share of time in both, when he was a younger and stupider man. He recognized the barren stucco and beige tile, the steel and bullet-proof glass routine of it all. He was photographed twice, his identification checked by several scowling guards, and he signed until his hand was stiff to swear that he was indeed Colin Harper, of Harper Cable and Electric.
Finally, he was at the end of the labyrinth of offices and locked doors. The head of security (Jules, said his badge, on a chain that'd be handy for some ambitious kid to choke him with) handed Bobby's ID back to him and shoved both hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels like he thought he was in a damn Clint Eastwood movie.
"Ground rules," Jules said tersely. "Listen or I'm not responsible for what they do to you in there."
Bobby's worn patience gave out with a snap. Bobby drawled, "Yeah, I bet those twelve year olds are real terrifying."
Jules drew up straighter. "All right, smartass. These kids aren't here because they sang out of tune in the choir. They're a danger to themselves and others. You're gonna need to lay wire through the hall where we keep the violent ones."
Bobby looked at the man, hard-eyed and all puffed up like a little dog gone mean, and thought: you don't know violent. What he said was, "Suppose I'll manage."
Jules's mouth went hard. He looked away, talking in a monotone as he unlocked the doors. "Don't meet their eyes. Don't put your hands behind your back. Keep three feet of space between you and them. If they get too close, call code green and we'll take them down. If you see something in their hands, I don't care if it's a fucking ballpoint pen. Call code blue, weapons code, and we'll come in to get you out. Don't talk to them. Don't walk too close to the walls. Don't let them get a hold of your toolbelt. Don't-"
As the door droned a warning and opened, Bobby let the rules fall into the background of his hearing. He looked, instead.
There were boys clustered in the hallway, crouched against the walls. They were close enough that if they wanted, they could run for the doors. They wouldn't make it anywhere, but they could try and fight. If they were as crazy as these folks thought, it wouldn't matter if they made it or not.
The kids just looked at him, hollow-eyed and listless. The air had that same bitter thickness. Bobby tasted smoke, and felt the faint prickle of being watched. It was the kind of feeling that ate the hope out of a man.
As they walked, the guard flanking Bobby tight, he kept his eyes peeled. He was rewarded, if he could call it that, by the telltale signs: spots in the hallway that were icy cold, flickering lights, the distant scratch and patter of clawed feet in the roof above them. Every breath felt heavier in his chest, a dizzying sense of being smothered. There was a grim triumph in that.
The dead recognized Bobby as a hunter, and they weren't happy to have their playground taken away.
The sudden crash of sound from down the hall jarred Bobby hard. Bobby put his arm out on instinct, blocking Jules's body as he reached inside his coat for the flask of holy water.
"Son of a bitch!" Jules barked, and knocked Bobby's arm away. He grabbed for his belt, drawing what Bobby had taken for a close-com radio, and shoved Bobby out of the way. Then he started jogging towards the end of the hall, where there was a flurry of sound and fury.
The kids flanking the hall began to slip away, finding other places to be. Some remained, staring slack-mouthed towards the commotion.
"Code green," Jules bellowed, "get him down! Get him-"
Another crash. A guard went down on his ass, sliding across the tiles, blood spilling from his broken nose. Two more came from behind Bobby, pushing him towards the wall in their rush to get to the fight.
Over the bellow and command of too many voices, there rose a tearing animal sound. Bobby had heard it before, when something paced outside the yard that Carter couldn't see to attack. It was there to remind a man that no matter how well the dog was trained, the wolf beat in its heart and blood. The wildness was there, pacing, waiting, hungry.
It wasn't a sound for human throats. Still, there it was again, drawing the hair up on the back of Bobby's neck, making the guards pause. Five armed men, full-grown, and they hesitated.
That was opening enough.
Quick as hell, a boy darted between two guards. Jules swore, jabbing the box forward as it spat sparks and crackled. The boy ducked out of his reach and tore ass down the hall. The crazy little bastard was trying to get out. Guards all around him, three locked doors between him and freedom, no chance in hell, and yet...
The boy skidded towards Bobby, looking hunted. Bobby met those eyes (green eyes; familiarity came, like an itch Bobby couldn't reach) and stepped deliberately out of the way.
Twenty feet from the door, a man built like a linebacker plowed into the boy from the side. The blow took the boy down hard. The boy howled again, rage and pain, fighting to get away. The guard pinned him, held him, as Jules came thundering down. Even as they closed in, the boy was clawing at the floor and biting any hand that got too close. Bobby skirted the edges of the chaos, reached out, plucked away a security card and moved back out of range. Nothing much he could do for the boy now.
They hauled the kid up, restrained him as he yowled and thrashed and spat. Bobby saw the flash of a needle sinking home in the meat of the boy's skinny thigh. The plunger went down. The boy subsided by degrees, gasping raggedly, long wounded noises coming from deep inside. He was quieting as Jules reached in and deliberately pressed the taser against his back. Triggered it once. Triggered it again, because Jules seemed to like the screaming.
In the corners, the shadows dipped and fed. Bobby's nails bit into the flesh of his palms.
Finally, the boy hung slack between the guards. His eyes were locked somewhere above them, focus slipping, but he twitched as Jules bent and gripped him by the chin.
"We got to do this every day?" Jules drawled. "I'm getting a bit tired of it."
The boy's throat worked visibly as he swallowed. He shook his head, the motion slow with the drugs but no less desperate than his howling.
Jules made a scornful noise. "Don't put you in the quiet rooms? Maybe you ought to think about that next time you start trouble."
Attention flicking down to Jules's face, the boy stared at him. His glare promised violence even as it lost focus, the drugs pulling him down.
Stepping back, Jules looked at one of the attendants. "Call Deb. Tell her Dean's coming for another visit. The tranqs ought to buy her a few hours of peace."
As they dragged the boy out, not letting him touch the floor, Jules came back. Straightening his tag, he jerked his head after the pack and said, "You see now?"
"Yeah," Bobby said. "I see now."
Jules nodded and started walking again. Bobby followed, stepping over the blood on the floor. "That one," Jules said, "shouldn't even be on my damn ward. Autistic. Doesn't like being touched, doesn't talk. Just sits by himself and watches things. Doors, mostly. Sometimes windows and ceilings. He figures out the system, and he tries to make a break for it when he sees an opening."
Bobby made a vague assenting noise. Let Jules take it as support. "What's he here for?"
Jules's mouth hardened. "Boy's been in the foster care system. Nobody keeps him longer than six months. His last placement, he had a little girl with him. Two years old. Parents wake up to her screaming, and they come in to find him over her bed with a knife. He'd been pushing her in a swing that afternoon. Hurt her real bad. You got kids?"
"Never got around to it."
"I've got two. Light of my life." Jules pulled up short at the end of the hall, where an access panel stood slightly open. "If you had daughters, Mr. Harper, you wouldn't look at me like I was filth. You'd thank God every day that monsters like that weren't out in the world with your little girls."
Said the man who would scream and piss himself if he saw the kind of monsters Bobby knew.
Bobby slid the security card he'd palmed into the pocket of his jeans, and drawled, "Bet your daughters'd be real proud of you. Mind letting me do my work?"
Jules's mouth curled up, silently, and he left Bobby alone.
*****
Prison, like war, was tedium broken by moments of stark fucking chaos. Once the source of that chaos was locked away, the ward subsided into eerie quiet. There was a brief flare up of activity with dinner, an argument over whether Stan had hidden the salt shakers again. Then there came the arrival of medication. The boys lined up, fearful quiet, and took their sedatives. Most of them didn't even look his way, their faces worn dull with fatigue.
Haunt was another word for feeding ground. The angry dead needed fuel to keep up their fury, or they'd gutter out and be stripped down to an echo on a recording, a cold breeze in a sealed room. It was simple biology, if you could call anything simple with the dead. If they were offered an easy food source, a steady diet of fear and pain, they'd feed. If they were fed, they'd keep coming around. More of their kind would be drawn to the scent.
These kids were being eaten alive. The guards, too, but at least they got to go home at the end of their shifts. Still, there was only so much ambient bad mojo, even in a prison or a psych ward. There was only so much fear somebody could take before their circuits fried, before it either twisted into fury or blunted out into numbness. So the scavengers had to pick a new game. Make the prey scared all over again.
Two boys dead. Funny how none of the adults said a word about it. The kids knew, though. There was knowledge sharp in the way they hung together, the way they looked over at the closed door of the quiet rooms. They knew, the way that kids always did, that the monster in the closet was just waiting for the lights to turn off.
Bobby worked, prying up circuits and sliding in protective charms, carving sigils in the hidden guts of the building. He screwed around, mumbling to himself for effect, until the kids were herded up into their stalls. The lights stayed on, spilling into the open mouths of doorways.
Finally, he sealed the panel with a bag of herbs behind it, and put away his tools. There was thick silence behind the doors to the quiet rooms, where the rabid pup had been swallowed up. There was no easy way of reaching the quiet rooms with a guard standing by, and no sense in trying yet. Hopefully it wouldn't come to using the boy as bait, waiting for the ghosts to come and try to strangle him.
When he went past the night guard, safe behind his shatterproof glass, Bobby said, "There's a line out in your basement. I'll need to go down there and repair some wiring."
The night guard shrugged, tossed a ring of keys across the desk, and went back to his magazine.
Nice security there. Not that it bothered Bobby much, since it was a mistake in his favor.
He took the stairs down. In the hollow echo of the stairwell, he could hear the distant, high-pitched wail of a child. Deeper in the echoes, where it could be taken for the rustle of leaves against the windows, something whispered a warning. The wailing got louder, louder, the farther down the steps Bobby went, drowning out the whispering, drowning out everything but the urge to clap his hands over his ears and swear. It was inhuman loud, a bestial howl rising under the childish shriek of pain, setting Bobby's bones to rattling as he came to the bottom step.
Once, back when he started down this road, back when the sight of Beatrix's blood spattering the walls and the ruin of her body in their marriage bed was raw in his mind, he'd have thought that someone had to hear that noise. Somebody had to be coming down to check.
Funny, what people could turn a blind eye to. Funny, what people didn't hear.
Bobby yanked on gloves to touch the doorknob, but the metal was still brutally cold beneath his fingertips as he unlocked the door. It hurt to breathe in that cold, like the ghosts sliding pale fingers down his throat and into his lungs, so he held it as he stepped into the basement. The furnace burned, spilling hellish light into the noise, but it didn't do a damned thing against the cold.
The Latin crossed his lips. He couldn't even hear it in his own head, like the words were swallowed up. It was useless, no standing against-
He closed around the foreign flicker of despair and isolated it. Drowned it with the chant of Latin, reaching into his jacket and closing his gloved fingers around the beads of the rosary. The despair recoiled from him, back into the chaos, but the fury in the middle of the room didn't quiet. Fuck, there were a lot of them here. Small wonder there hadn't been more deaths.
A shadow darted across the far wall, between two boilers, gone. Something skittered across the cement floor, and the noise rose so sharply that it faded to a high whine in Bobby's protesting ears. He could feel wet spilling down the side of his neck. Pissed, he chanted louder, throwing his anger and pain into the rhythm of the exorcism.
It wasn't going to be enough. Nothing short of a priest and an excavation to get the bodies out would quiet these sons of bitches, if it hadn't outright twisted into a demonic haunt. Goddamn John anyway, him and his fucking senseless "I don't work with kids" rules, he ought to be here-
Another flash of motion. Bobby saw clearer this time, the metal flash of a salt shaker tossing out a spray into the middle of this storm. Salt against this kind of haunt was like tossing a handful of sand at a tsunami. Goddamn wannabe hunters had just enough information to be dangerous to the ones who knew what they were doing.
And then there was a blur of motion, a small body pitched across the basement at neck-breaking whiplash speed. Bobby's hands jerked up like he could catch him, and then the kid hit the wall hard enough to kill a man. The kid (the rabid pup from earlier, Jesus Christ, what was he doing out of the quiet rooms? How did he even get out?) didn't crumple, pinned by the throat to the wall. His legs slid down, his feet not touching the floor. His mouth worked, his gasps for air drowned out by the roar.
Something in that chaos laughed as it squeezed. Bobby moved, but it was like pushing against hurricane wind.
The kid twisted, his foot going out, banging into the metal grate of the furnace. His feet were only in slippers and it had to hurt, but he hooked his foot in the metal and yanked the door wide open. The power pulled him an inch off the wall, slammed him back, his head bouncing sharply off the concrete. There was blood smeared behind his head. The kid squirmed his hand free, and glass caught the firelight as he pitched something into the open maw of the furnace.
Bobby had spent too many days hunched in the garage outside Jim's, too much time carefully working with wire and glass and fertilizer to rig up homemade bombs, not to know one when he saw it. The kid had built a steam-bomb, water in the bottle and a wad of cotton and a salt shaker wedged in the mouth. Just add heat.
Then again, the 'water' could be anything from kerosene to vodka. If the kid could get out of the quiet room, odds were he could get something to light the whole building on fire.
Yeah. Kids learned the damnedest things in juvie.
Teeth flashed feral in the kid's skinny face, and recognition punched Bobby in the gut.
Christ. Here. Of course he was here, because that was Winchester luck for you.
Throwing his weight into open air, Bobby bashed his way forward into the storm. It hit him back, bruising-vicious, stealing his air and his heat, trying to push him out of its way. Bobby pushed back, rosary swinging in front of him, until his hands closed around the kid's shoulders. He pressed the rosary into the angry band of red spreading across the kid's throat. Even over the furnace, he smelled the sweet-sick scent of burning skin.
The ghost let go. Bobby grabbed the kid, hauled him up into his arms and barreled his ass towards the door. There was blood on his upper lip by the time he made it there, the kid's nails biting hard through the thick flannel of Bobby's jacket. Somewhere in the chaos, a woman screamed for her child.
The door opened under Bobby's hand. He shoved the kid through and fell on him, kicking the door shut as the world lit up behind them.
The explosion sounded like a bottle rocket compared to the noise of the haunt, but the impact dented the door out like a goddamn car plowed into it. The building shuddered once and was still. What should've been silence was the muffled wail of Bobby's eardrums protesting, bleeding.
Beneath him, the kid started fighting. Bobby pushed himself upright, went to check the boy for injury, and got bitten for his trouble. Resisting the urge to cuff him like a too-rough puppy, Bobby went up on his knees and looked the boy over. The whine in his ears faded to a distant sort of hearing, muffled as if from underwater. There was yelling upstairs, and fire licking out at the basement. Fine. It'd give the guards something better to do than chase them.
Blood trickled in a thin line from the kid's nose. He looked shocky, pale as hell against the stark bruises on his throat. One pupil was bigger than the other. He stared at the bent-up door, and John's hate showed in his crooked grin and in the firelight casting shadows on his face.
Dean Winchester.
"C'mon," Bobby said. "You're coming with me."
Dean looked at him, hard, and winced through shaking his head no.
All right, so he should've expected that. Glancing at the stairs, Bobby tried, "I know your daddy. We don't have time-"
Dean's face was the picture of skeptical disgust.
"Son, you'd best get off your ass or I'm gonna have to come back for- oh, for Christ's sake, Dean!" Frustrated, Bobby shoved the rosary back in his jacket and got up. "I know John Winchester, I've known him for years. I'm gonna take you to him."
Disbelief warred with hope on Dean's face. He darted a look up the stairs, wavered, and then grabbed Bobby's jacket. Dean yanked, hauling Bobby past the dented door and further down the basement hallway. Dean veered once, again, took them under the stairs, and finally came up on a fire exit with a chain wrapped around its bar. Pointing at it, he gestured fiercely.
Nudging Dean back, Bobby steadied himself on the wall and kicked the door. The chain bent on the second kick, and gave on the fourth. Might've gone easier if the world didn't spin every time Bobby leaned too far back. He turned back to push Dean ahead of him, but Dean had already darted through and into the open air.
"Hey!" Bobby barked. When Dean looked back, startled, Bobby pointed at the white bulk of his truck under the school's awning. "There, under the tarp for now."
Dean hesitated again, the wise wariness that could still get a man killed, then tore towards the truck. Hoisting himself up by the rim, he squirmed his way under the tarp. There was a small red handprint left in his wake, lurid against the white truck. Somewhere, an alarm was sounding.
Yeah. Now they went looking. Lucky for these assholes that Bobby was the one who found Dean. If John had come...
Bobby climbed in the driver's seat, turned the key in the ignition and drove like hell. Sawyer burned behind them, shadows rising in the smoke.
***
"Come out from under there."
Nothing moved in the darkness under the tarp. Far as Bobby could figure, Dean had wedged himself back between the gas cans and the rusted engine Bobby had salvaged on the drive here. Bobby could hear breathing, rabbit quick, muffled like Dean was trying to keep quiet.
Leaning against the truck bed, Bobby sighed. He'd hung a gris-gris from the rearview mirror to prevent the truck from being trailed, but a hell of a lot of police cars and fire trucks had whipped past them in the last few hours. He hadn't trusted the hoodoo enough to stop anywhere until most of the gas stations had closed. Out here, where most everything was deserted and folks went to bed around 6, nobody had been around to watch Bobby park in a rickety old service station and wash the blood off the side of his truck.
"You can't stay in there," Bobby warned. "I need to check that head injury. Your daddy'll kill me if I bring you back all dinged up."
Dean's shoe scraped softly against the truck bed. There was a snuffling noise, like he couldn't breathe around the bloody nose. It was cold as hell out here, likely colder if you were shoved up against cold metal.
John's son or not, Dean was just a kid. Barely, what, 12 now? Bleeding and choked and probably scared as hell? He'd have to be, to climb in a stranger's truck with just his daddy's name to go on.
"C'mon now," Bobby said, easing his voice down to the tone for hurt herd dogs and skittish puppies. "It's warmer in the truck. I've got some food up there. Lots of space."
Slowly, Dean leaned out from behind the engine block. The stubborn line of his jaw didn't work real well with the shivering.
Backing up deliberately, Bobby held the tarp out of the way and waited.
Boy obviously got his daddy's temperament, because by the time Dean decided to crawl out, Bobby was just about ready to drop the tarp and give up on him. Dean's hand snapped up to catch the tarp, and he glowered up at Bobby from beneath that mop of filthy hair. It was all fine and good for the attendants to let it grow out, but Bobby was taking hedge-clippers to the boy when they got back to his yard.
Bobby held out a hand to help the boy down. Dean shied away from it, eyes too wide, so Bobby let his hand drop back to his side. When Dean was wobbling on his own two feet again, Bobby strapped the tarp down. He asked, pitching his voice quiet, "Tilt your head up."
Dean tilted, baring his teeth against the milky light of the station's sign. Bobby looked him over, held his fingers up. "Track these for me."
Dean tracked, a little bleary-eyed but basically okay.
"Sick to your stomach?"
Head shake 'no'.
"Dizzy?"
Dean wobbled his hand: 'so-so'. Then he shrugged.
"You know what state you're in?"
Dean blinked at him for a heartbeat, then nodded.
After a long few minutes passed, Bobby snorted. "You really don't talk much, do you?"
Dean's expression said plainly: not to you. Then he reached over and drew 'SD' in the dust on the truck's bumper.
"Okay, then. You think you're gonna be all right?"
Dean shrugged and glanced away, scuffing his foot in the tire tracks. He needed shoes. The thin clothes they'd issued him wouldn't last him. Bobby didn't know any kids, and didn't have anything to offer this one.
Damn John anyway. Damn this hunt, and damn John's nightmares, and damn Bobby for being fool enough to take the kid with him. He should've fobbed this off on Jim, or Caleb. Hell, Ellen, even. At least she had that little girl, and those maternal instincts or whatever. She'd know what to do with Dean.
Bobby grunted, then grabbed a crowbar and went to bash open the vending machine. There was bottled water within, and caffeinated garbage that would do in place of coffee for now. Bobby tossed a few bottles to Dean. "You got to piss? We won't be stopping much."
Dean looked sourly at him, but shook his head.
"All right. Climb on in, then." Awkward, Bobby watched the boy go back to the trunk. After a minute, he called gruffly, "There's a jacket in there if you want it."
The door slamming shut was his only answer.
It was a long silent ride back across state lines. The headlights cut clear through the night, as Bobby counted off hours by songs: Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Clint Black. Dean stayed curled up against the door, white-knuckled hands gripping the seatbelt tight. When Dean's head started to dip forward, Bobby only had to clear his throat before Dean was jerking upright again. The cab of the truck smelled like sage, sweat and blood.
It was nearly dawn when they reached the yard, long pale fingers of light reaching over the husks of dead cars. Somewhere Carter barked, chest-deep and fearsome. Dean watched it all through wide eyes, tensing up tighter the farther they got into the yard, the further away from the road.
Bobby finally settled the truck to a stop in front of his house. "All right, now. Let's call your-"
Dean flung the door open and was out before Bobby could move. By the time he got his own door open, cursing, Dean had already darted between two rusted-out heaps and was gone into the yard.
"Aw, son of a bitch." Pulling his cap off, Bobby scratched his forehead and scowled after Dean. Dumb damn puppy. Hope he'd had his shots, running in a yard like that with thin shoes on. Cupping his hands around his mouth, Bobby called, "You get your ass back here, Dean Winchester!"
Carter trotted over, his weight leaning briefly against Bobby's leg. He rumbled a question.
"Nah," Bobby said. "Best if you didn't."
Carter growled softly and sat down in the dust. Bobby rubbed the shred of Carter's left ear, and yelled, "There'll be dinner on the porch! Better not wait too long or Carter'll eat it!"
His echo answered him.
"Goddamn," Bobby muttered, "I'm glad I didn't have kids."
Somewhere, Beatrix was laughing.
*****
"John, your kid's at my place. Come get him."
The answering service cut him off at the beep. Jim hadn't seen John for months. Ellen hadn't seen him for longer. Caleb thought John might be in Wyoming. Joshua figured the Yukon. In any case, there was no reaching him on a hunt.
Only thing to do was wait.
*****
September was unseasonably warm in Lawrence. Missouri had her windows open to let in the last of the afternoon sunlight. Someone else's kids were playing outside, the creak of an old swing set mingling with their high laughter. It was iced tea weather, too warm for coffee, but John's fingers felt nerveless with cold as he twisted the wedding band around his finger.
Missouri looked at him over her coffee table, not bothering to fill up his silence with sympathy. She was a psychic, not a shrink; he wouldn't come here if she was the type to try to put a bandaid over a gut wound. Her fingers swept idly over the rosewood table, where she had laid out the tarot cards and pendulums, shells and runes. Throw after throw, the answer came up the same.
Finally, John ran both hands through his hair and let them drop. "So that's it, then."
Missouri crooked an eyebrow. "Now, I didn't just give you a pair of death certificates. I only told you-"
"You can't see Dean."
"I can't see you half the time. Happens, with the stubborn ones." Gentling, she reached out and laid her hand over John's. "Your boys'll turn up, likely when you least expect them. If you can give them time, protect them... there's a great darkness bearing down on your family, John. It's already touched you, did everything it could to knock you out of the way. It killed Mary. It'll kill you or Dean, if you let it."
John twitched her hand away. "And Sam?"
"Sam is..." Missouri pursed her mouth, searching for a word. "It wouldn't kill Sam."
No. It would do something worse.
John looked down at his empty hands.
Eight years ago, men armed with court orders and anonymous reports came and took his boys from him. They searched his house, found the newspaper clippings and the journal and the guns. They seized it all while John tried to tell Dean not to fight, not to be scared, because John was going to come and get him soon. Just protect Sammy, and John would come.
Dean hadn't even made it to the car before one of the men took Sammy away. Dean bit the man's hand, right down to the bone. He'd tucked around Sam and dropped to the driveway and howled, scared out of his mind, wanting John to come and fix it.
The men shut the door. They had questions. John didn't hear them, didn't hear anything until the car had pulled away and he was alone.
Months slid by. John turned throat until his body ached, mouthed what they wanted to hear, submitted to therapy and anger management and grief counseling and pills. He let those doctors pry at his head, ask him about his brothers and his platoon and Mary, and did he have any mistresses? Did he hit his kids because his old man smacked him around?
They asked him about bruises they'd found on Dean, and their disapproving silence told him what they wanted to hear before they gave him his boys back. There was no room here for accidents or rolling into crib bars to protect Sam from Dean's own nightmares.
John wondered if anyone let Dean crawl in with Sam. He asked, but no one told him anything. When he found out they thought Dean was autistic, it was because somebody left Dean's file sitting around.
John did everything they asked. When they let him go, on good behavior and probation, he asked for this boys back.
"Mr. Winchester, if Sam's adoptive parents choose to contact you in time-"
"Dean is being taken care of. At this time we feel he's too emotionally fragile to risk-"
"They're not safe."
"Now, John, we discussed that."
"Goddamn it, it'll come back for them-"
"We're very sorry."
So John let them shuffle him out their door, and he gave up on trying to get his kids back the legal way.
A year passed. Hunting, planning, drinking too much because he had no reason not to. John didn't remember long stretches of time, lost in black night and white noise, flickering lights and the hum of the road. The cops caught him on the sidewalk outside of Sam's new home, when he tried to bolt inside the flames.
The house burned. Sam's new life burned. John held his son for a matter of seconds. Sam was red-faced and inconsolable, smudged with ash and staring up like he could still see his new mother burning. He took hitching gasps in John's arms, grasping at him with both chubby hands, still trying to hold tight as one cop took Sam away and the other put John in handcuffs.
It was only reflex for Sam to hold on to John, not any kind of recognition, but the memory held John through three years in prison.
Attempted kidnapping and arson. Three years of new scars and old ghosts living where men were caged. Fast as he could, John earned himself a reputation for being crazy as fuck and twice as mean. He spent his time in solitary when he could. In that dark silence, he connected the pieces of the pattern, and he waited until he forgot the light.
When John was released, Bobby was waiting outside with the Impala and a bottle of tequila. Nobody knew where John's kids had gone. John poured himself the last shot he ever drank and went back to rebuild his journal, his hunt, his family.
Eight years now. Eight years of dead ends, burnt-out houses and dead mothers in Sam's wake, of finding and losing and leaving and waking up every damned morning to remember that Mary was dead and his children were gone. He fell asleep to dreams of a better life than he could offer them, and nightmares of small, unmarked graves by the roadside. He turned down cases involving other people's children because he would look at their faces and wonder what had happened to his own. He had his leads, and he followed them with a tunnel vision that got narrower every year.
And now this.
His boys needed a hunter, not a father. If nothing else, he could keep them safe by killing the demon.
That had to be enough.
"Thank you," John said distantly. He got up.
Missouri frowned up at him. "Don't do something stupid now, John," she warned. "I told you it'd come in time."
More time.
Sam was 8 now, and wouldn't remember John or his mother. Dean was 12, maybe still locked up somewhere. John didn't know. And she was asking for more fucking time.
"You want something to take with you?" Missouri asked quietly. "You look half-starved."
"I'll be all right."
"Mm," she said skeptically. "You call me in a few weeks. Might be the tides change."
As the breeze ruffled Missouri's curtains, John saw one of the kids leap out of the swing. His father caught him, grunted and spun him around. His son shrieked and held on tight, laughing.
John mumbled his thanks again and took his leave. The father held his son a little tighter as John passed by, suddenly wary. John didn't look him in the eyes, just got in his car and put her in drive.
The sun bled down, and the road behind him was swallowed up in shadow.
*****
The knock on her door came just as Missouri finished putting out graham crackers and milk. She straightened and tried not to sound so damned tired as she called, "All clear, honey. My last appointment just headed out."
The door opened, and Sam dropped his backpack by the door. He looked grubby and his shoes were wet, like he'd taken the long way home again. "When's dinner?"
"Sooner if you help me, boy." Missouri plucked a stray leaf from Sam's hair and smoothed the tangled mess of it back as best she could. Sam had his father's hair, dark and thick and unruly as hell. "Eat your snack and then I'm putting you to work."
Sam made a face, but climbed up on the kitchen stool anyway. There was no sign now of the pale, haunted boy she brought home eight months ago, who flinched when the heater turned on and screamed through more nights than not. After six months had passed and Missouri was still alive rather than leaving Sam alone again, Sam had eased into a wary domesticity. He'd shot up half a foot already, and from the padding he was putting on, he was about to hit another growth spurt. Boy's shoes barely fit as it was.
Missouri pulled out the ground beef for dinner. She should've done it earlier, but John had turned up on her doorstep and scared the hell out of her. Every time he came around, she thought he had to know; that he'd tracked Sam down and was here like the wrath of God. That day was coming, all right, but it wouldn't be today.
John suffered. Sam feared nightmares he couldn't even name. She wanted to give John his boy, Sam his home, and be done with this.
But God, the visions...
"Missouri?"
Missouri met Sam's quizzical look. "Nothing, sweetheart. Just tired. You're quiet tonight."
"Yeah. Um." Sam nudged the crumbs around his plate, poked at it restlessly and sighed. "The house feels weird," he said, with the pained note that said he knew she wasn't going to leave that alone.
Sam had his schooling and his homework. At night, though, he had this. Missouri tried to take the training slow, but Sam's visions sharpened by leaps and bounds. It shouldn't have surprised her that he sensed his father.
Missouri grabbed the bowl of green beans off her counter and put it between them. "Stop fidgeting. What feels different?"
"I don't know."
"Sam."
Sam huffed out a breath. "I don't like talking about this."
"That's rough luck. If you don't own it-"
"It owns me. I know, I know. It's weird."
"We're both weird here, honey. Now fess up."
"It feels like..." Sam's nose scrunched up as he searched for the words. There were no words, like trying to explain colors in the language of the blind.
"Just give me three," Missouri murmured.
"Aww-!"
"Hush. Think of it like a pop quiz."
"I don't like those even when they're normal." Squirming, Sam broke a few beans in half, and then blurted, "Dark."
Missouri stilled.
'Dark'. It was the word Sam used to describe his nightmares, and the presence that had been in his room the night his mothers burned. It was the only word Sam used for the thing that hunted him. When Missouri pressed him for more, Sam would shut down completely.
Now he was using the same word to describe his father.
"Okay," she said finally. "And?"
Sam chewed at his lower lip, thinking. "Knife."
Missouri raised her eyebrows.
"Cold. Sharp. Heavy." Sam shrugged. "Knife."
"Kitchen knife?"
"No." Sam looked up with a terrible distance in his eyes. Missouri didn't want to know what words came to mind when Sam met that look in the mirror. "Hunting knife. Hungry. There's blood on the edge. It's all dinged up, but it'll hold."
So. There was the demon. There was the knife; that might or might not be Dean or John or their whole battered, angry family.
With an ease she didn't feel, Missouri gathered up a handful of beans and began snapping them. "Anything else?"
Sam stared at the scarred table, brow creased, troubled. Then he said, too quietly, "Home. Missouri, who was here?"
"Nobody you know." Missouri laid her hand over Sam's and squeezed, trying to smile.
The phone began to ring.
Grateful for the reprieve, Missouri got up and answered. Her free hand went to comb through Sam's hair, soothing herself if not Sam. She wasn't meant to be anyone's mother. She only mothered Sam because she was least likely to die on him, not because she had any right. That didn't keep her from being damned sorry.
"Missouri's. Business hours are up. Call me back in the morning and we'll-"
"Cut the crap," Bobby's gruff voice cut her off. "Is John there?"
Cold settled around Missouri's gut. Sam turned around to look sharply at her. "No," Missouri said carefully. "Why?"
Bobby answered.
The phone slipped through Missouri's nerveless fingers. She leaned hard against the wall, watching the phone swing on its cord.
"Missouri?" Sam asked, alarmed. He came off the stool, his hands on her arms. "Hey, what's the matter?"
Dean. Dean was alive. They'd found him.
Oh hell, John.
"Missouri?" Sam said again, softer, uncertain. He touched her face. "... Mom?"
Missouri closed her eyes and sighed. "Pick up the phone, baby. It's for you."
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