Never Tell a Joke Without a Punchline
by MaygraDean/Sam (implied). Mild R for imagery. Vague future fic.
The characters and situations portrayed here are not mine, they belong to the CW. This is a fan authored work and no profit is being made. Please do not link to this story without appropriate warnings. Please do not archive this story without my permission.
(2,334 words) "We ended up at the grand hotel. It was empty cold and bare"
++++
The weirdest thing about the world as it is now are the demons. They hang around the edges of the barriers like smoke, bodiless but still menacing, testing the edges of the wards and the lines. They'll possess anything that comes near when they do this -- drifting and condensing to fit inside anything; even the rabbits that nibble the grasses at the edge of the fence or the crows and buzzards that gather where the bodies hang.
Bobby likes to sit on the porch and pick them off with shotgun loaded with buckshot and cotton and small gel capsules filled with holy water. The holy water won't kill the demons and Dean keeps trying to work out ways to sketch a devil's trap big enough to cover the entire compound, but demon-possessed birds don't fly over, and the rabbits are a little too Monty-Pythonesque for Dean to take seriously.
The birds don't bother Sam. The rabbits though, make him go a little green around the mouth.
Bobby tried cooking the rabbits once but their carcasses were tainted, not to mention that they were likely to break a tooth on the buckshot peppering their flesh.
Dean finally asked Bobby to stop when he found Sam gathering up the furry bodies and burning them. Bobby thought maybe they could find use for the skins, but Dean felt sick at the thought even though he didn't say why. Maybe the same reason Sam got a little sick at the thought of the helpless -- even animals -- being possessed.
Dean doesn't remember it really but he can still see it and feel it. There's a strip of paler skin on his belly, ragged around the edges, hairless. It's not so much a scar as marker where one should be.
There's a dream that comes when he thinks about it, regardless of whether he's awake or asleep. Of Sam's skin being peeled back, of blood and screaming. The mark itches sometimes, the skin prickles and flakes.
He's checked every inch of Sam but he can't find where the skin was peeled back. Sometimes he wonders if it hadn't all been stripped from Sam and new skin laid over the raw muscle and tissue. But the old scars are still there and the new ones are still rough under his fingertips. Sam never stops him, almost like he can remember too, but doesn't remember what he remembers.
Sometimes Bobby manages to actually bring them real rabbits, usually from the traps that get laid out. Dean doesn't mind eating them, but he can't watch them be skinned.
The kids like to lay the traps for them -- its as useful a skill as knowing how to clean, load, and use a gun, to make bullets, and the kids have been handling guns since they were old enough to actually hold one.
Three of the twelve are Bobby's grandkids through his daughter. She's quiet, kind of pretty in that raised-in-the-country and worked-hard-all-her-life way. Bobby hadn't seen her in years when she showed up and Dean and Sam hadn't even known she existed. She'd been in Kansas City -- college first, then a husband and kids. She's an artist, but mostly she was a wife and mother, until her husband showed up with black eyes and a vicious leer and tried to take her oldest son apart from the inside. She may have left the life she'd been born to but she hadn't forgotten everything. She was her father's daughter.
The kids all have inked on patterns and protections. She does them for Sam and Dean too, for anyone who wants them. She's not a tattoo artist, the marks fade.
Dean thought she and Sam would have a lot in common.
It didn't take him long to realize Katherine was just one more reminder of everything Sam ever wanted but was never meant to have.
She watches Dean with owlish eyes and tick in her cheek. She keeps up the big house, does the laundry, homeschools the kids. Sam and Dean both make it a point to look for sketch pads and inks, pencils and books on how to make the supplies she needs when they can no longer scavenge for them or what they do find is too old and dried out to be of use.
Her touch on his skin when she draws is light and firm, steady, not ticklish. She has a more difficult time with Sam, trying to create unbroken lines over scarred skin.
She looks at Dean sometimes with a mix of hunger and resignation. There's not many men who come through that she looks at all -- she's not looking for a partner, but maybe for some comfort.
Dean had wanted to offer her that much, had tried.
They'd shared a bed and not much more because Sam had been hit with visions that woke up the whole house. They'd been on the road before dawn, Katherine sketching fast and sure, supplies packed and loaded into the car while Dean held Sam's hands, like his touch could ease the fever making Sam's skin sweat and the inks run.
She'd done the same to Dean's back and chest, but she'd stopped in the middle of an intricate design and blinked.
The inks had shifted on his skin, rearranged themselves without her touching -- mirroring Sam's design.
That's when the tick started.
She doesn't mind him close. Doesn't mind him playing with the kids. She doesn't stare at he and Sam like they are tainted or dangerous.
They scare her just the same.
Dean thinks she might be sleeping with their father when they are gone, but he doesn't know and he doesn't ask, and truth to be told, he doesn't care. There's little enough comfort in the world now and he doesn't begrudge anyone who seeks it where they can.
His own comfort is as close as it's ever been and he'll defy anyone who begrudges him that.
He and Sam share the room at the top of the stairs. Their father and Bobby have the rooms downstairs. Katherine and her kids have another upstairs and the other kids, with or without parents, share the rooms in between. The vampires watch the house and grounds at night, other hunters take the trailers or the barn. Sometimes there's enough people they have to set up tents, or ask the town to put them up.
The sheets on their bed are cotton and flannel. The blankets are quilts Bobby had, that they've found, patchworks patterned over old wool army blankets. The bedframe itself is iron, and only a double. There's not room for a second bed and barely room for both of them.
They'd stripped the room of anything chemically manufactured. Plastics mostly, an old naughahyde chair. Polyester bedding, clothing, all of it, is like acid on Sam's skin. Wrought metals, woven cotton or fiber fabrics he can bear. Sam had to give up his sneakers and his boots, can't use most pens or even a toothbrush. Dean has to squeeze the toothpaste for him and even that had taken them hunting through shelves and shelves of a half dozen abandoned pharmacies to find something that wouldn't leave blisters on his mouth.
It was just one more adjustment.
Dean's always taken care of Sam, and maybe he should resent the fact that he does so more now than he did even when Sam was a child.
He can't though.
He won't.
Sam had literally followed him to hell and back.
Less of a gate than a path, less of a door than an opportunity.
Less of a choice than an inevitability.
"We're already fucked," Dean had said.
If the hold on death could be broken by sacrifice, then maybe the dying could be stopped by the same.
"So, once we're in, how do we get back?"
Dean had shouldered him, passed him both guns and hoisted up a ten gallon canister of holy water. "Click your heels together three times, and say 'there's no place like home'?"
"I think I left my ruby slippers in the car."
"Then I guess we'll just have ask the wizard, Dorothy."
He remembers Sam then, teeth bared and grinning, looming like a giant at the very gates, both of them bloodied but still standing.
"We should knock," Dean said.
Sam had rung the bell with rounds of blessed shot and an incantation of Latin that sounded suspiciously like "Smoke on the Mountain"
Sam only smiles occasionally now, but when he does, it's like he's been saving them up.
The thing was, Hell or whatever, had been perfectly ready to invade earth, the immortal versus the mortal, the profane pitted against the sacred.
Their offensive line was pretty damn impressive. Their defensive line?
Not so much.
Maybe Sam had expected the Angels of God to help them.
What he got were a bunch of volunteer fireman, the police department, the local VFW, and a handful of pissed off and very determined mothers.
Angels, all, as far as Dean is concerned.
Not easy. Not what he can remember.
What he can't remember, he thinks he'd rather not.
+++++
He finds his father sitting on the steps when dawn comes, most mornings. Underneath his clothes, John looks like Dean thinks Sam should -- like he's been flayed alive and his skin reattached in pieces. Less like Frankenstein or a patchwork doll, than someone with a weird skin condition -- melanin bereft patches, laced in and against skin tones that would look more at home in Kenya or some southside Atlanta neighborhood than the even tones of the caucasian male John used to be. Dean doesn't think about where the patches of skin came from. In his face, in his eyes, his father is who he remembers.
Nobody gets out of hell unscathed.
Dean's got parts of Sam riding under his skin. They don't show much on the outside, but he can feel them nonetheless. He's not sure what he gave up to get them all back. It may have been his soul, but if so, he doesn't miss it.
What Sam gave up is a little too obvious at times. Sam's got something riding under his skin too. Less demon than desire, less hate than hope, maybe. There's a gate somewhere sealed with Sam's blood, held closed by a promise they have yet to keep. He wonders what Sam left behind the gates, but he knows when it calls to him, to them.
Most days it's what they brought back with them that gives them the most trouble.
When he finds John on the steps, he knows there's already coffee brewed. Maybe fresh bread waiting. He thinks John is guarding them from something, but he isn't sure what.
Maybe their own ghosts.
Dean gets coffee, brings his father a cup. "I'm up. I'll watch him. You should go back to bed." John accepts the cup and smiles. Gets up, squeezes Dean's shoulder, and shuffles back toward his room.
John is still their father but Dean's not sure how much his sons they still are. His father's said nothing about the sleeping arrangements, rarely comes upstairs but when he does, he knocks on their door before entering.
They've all already been to hell. There's not much fear of sin any longer.
Sam sleeps on his stomach with the blankets pulled up almost over his head. Deans sets the coffee on the bedside table and eases them back, threading his fingers through Sam's hair so his brother will know it's him, even in sleep. The scars haven't faded much, smudged here and there with discolored smeared ink. They both need a good scrubbing bath and Dean adds it to the list of things they need to do before they head out again. The scars travel the length of Sam's back from shoulder to ass, furrows that cut deep into flesh and muscle, had scored ribs and spine alike. A zebra-stripe of vivid purple-red, like there's blood under the surface struggling to seep out. Two sets of four, wider and deeper at the top than at the bottom, where they curve across Sam's hips.
Despite the bloody look to them there's hardly any warmth in them, cool to the touch even when the rest of Sam's skin burns fever hot.
He thinks the demons ripped Sam's heart out, except under his hand he can feel it still beating. Feels his own thud heavily in his chest, the rush of blood to his ears, feels the prickles up his spine. There's nothing coming but memories, no threat but remembering too much. Sam jerks awake under the weight of Dean's fear and the edge of red teasing the corners of his eyes fades back again when Sam twists around, locking eyes with him.
Sam's eyes used to be hazel, hovering between the green Dean shared with his mother and the brown John gave them. Most of the time they still are, but sometimes they shift to a dark blue, like midnight, like a still, dark, lake reflecting sky.
Sometimes they are as black as demon's eyes, no white at all.
He knows Bobby thinks Sam is possessed at least some of the time and Dean doesn't necessarily disagree.
He just doesn't think it's a demon possessing his brother.
And even if it was? He wouldn't care.
Sam blinks at him sleepily and the moment is broken when he flops back down. He shifts slightly when Dean sits and puts his back to the headboard and reaches for his coffee. Sam slings an arm across Dean's lap and goes back to sleep. Dean stares out the window and watches the sun rise.
Crows wing across the lightening sky and he counts them until the sky is so black with them he can't see individual birds any longer.
When he hears Bobby firing shot after shot into the murder, he closes his eyes.
Beneath his hand, Sam's skin starts to grow warm.
-end- *Smoke on the Water ~Deep Purple, 1974 Never Tell a Joke Without a Punchline by Maygra
Dean/Sam (implied). Mild R for imagery. Vague future fic.
The characters and situations portrayed here are not mine, they belong to the CW. This is a fan authored work and no profit is being made. Please do not link to this story without appropriate warnings. Please do not archive this story without my permission.
(2,334 words)
++++ The weirdest thing about the world as it is now are the demons. They hang around the edges of the barriers like smoke, bodiless but still menacing, testing the edges of the wards and the lines. They'll possess anything that comes near when they do this -- drifting and condensing to fit inside anything; even the rabbits that nibble the grasses at the edge of the fence or the crows and buzzards that gather where the bodies hang.
Bobby likes to sit on the porch and pick them off with shotgun loaded with buckshot and cotton and small gel capsules filled with holy water. The holy water won't kill the demons and Dean keeps trying to work out ways to sketch a devil's trap big enough to cover the entire compound, but demon-possessed birds don't fly over, and the rabbits are a little too Monty-Pythonesque for Dean to take seriously.
The birds don't bother Sam. The rabbits though, make him go a little green around the mouth.
Bobby tried cooking the rabbits once but their carcasses were tainted, not to mention that they were likely to break a tooth on the buckshot peppering their flesh.
Dean finally asked Bobby to stop when he found Sam gathering up the furry bodies and burning them. Bobby thought maybe they could find use for the skins, but Dean felt sick at the thought even though he didn't say why. Maybe the same reason Sam got a little sick at the thought of the helpless -- even animals -- being possessed.
Dean doesn't remember it really but he can still see it and feel it. There's a strip of paler skin on his belly, ragged around the edges, hairless. It's not so much a scar as marker where one should be.
There's a dream that comes when he thinks about it, regardless of whether he's awake or asleep. Of Sam's skin being peeled back, of blood and screaming. The mark itches sometimes, the skin prickles and flakes.
He's checked every inch of Sam but he can't find where the skin was peeled back. Sometimes he wonders if it hadn't all been stripped from Sam and new skin laid over the raw muscle and tissue. But the old scars are still there and the new ones are still rough under his fingertips. Sam never stops him, almost like he can remember too, but doesn't remember what he remembers.
Sometimes Bobby manages to actually bring them real rabbits, usually from the traps that get laid out. Dean doesn't mind eating them, but he can't watch them be skinned.
The kids like to lay the traps for them -- its as useful a skill as knowing how to clean, load, and use a gun, to make bullets, and the kids have been handling guns since they were old enough to actually hold one.
Three of the twelve are Bobby's grandkids through his daughter. She's quiet, kind of pretty in that raised-in-the-country and worked-hard-all-her-life way. Bobby hadn't seen her in years when she showed up and Dean and Sam hadn't even known she existed. She'd been in Kansas City -- college first, then a husband and kids. She's an artist, but mostly she was a wife and mother, until her husband showed up with black eyes and a vicious leer and tried to take her oldest son apart from the inside. She may have left the life she'd been born to but she hadn't forgotten everything. She was her father's daughter.
The kids all have inked on patterns and protections. She does them for Sam and Dean too, for anyone who wants them. She's not a tattoo artist, the marks fade.
Dean thought she and Sam would have a lot in common.
It didn't take him long to realize Katherine was just one more reminder of everything Sam ever wanted but was never meant to have.
She watches Dean with owlish eyes and tick in her cheek. She keeps up the big house, does the laundry, homeschools the kids. Sam and Dean both make it a point to look for sketch pads and inks, pencils and books on how to make the supplies she needs when they can no longer scavenge for them or what they do find is too old and dried out to be of use.
Her touch on his skin when she draws is light and firm, steady, not ticklish. She has a more difficult time with Sam, trying to create unbroken lines over scarred skin.
She looks at Dean sometimes with a mix of hunger and resignation. There's not many men who come through that she looks at all -- she's not looking for a partner, but maybe for some comfort.
Dean had wanted to offer her that much, had tried.
They'd shared a bed and not much more because Sam had been hit with visions that woke up the whole house. They'd been on the road before dawn, Katherine sketching fast and sure, supplies packed and loaded into the car while Dean held Sam's hands, like his touch could ease the fever making Sam's skin sweat and the inks run.
She'd done the same to Dean's back and chest, but she'd stopped in the middle of an intricate design and blinked.
The inks had shifted on his skin, rearranged themselves without her touching -- mirroring Sam's design.
That's when the tick started.
She doesn't mind him close. Doesn't mind him playing with the kids. She doesn't stare at he and Sam like they are tainted or dangerous.
They scare her just the same.
Dean thinks she might be sleeping with their father when they are gone, but he doesn't know and he doesn't ask, and truth to be told, he doesn't care. There's little enough comfort in the world now and he doesn't begrudge anyone who seeks it where they can.
His own comfort is as close as it's ever been and he'll defy anyone who begrudges him that.
He and Sam share the room at the top of the stairs. Their father and Bobby have the rooms downstairs. Katherine and her kids have another upstairs and the other kids, with or without parents, share the rooms in between. The vampires watch the house and grounds at night, other hunters take the trailers or the barn. Sometimes there's enough people they have to set up tents, or ask the town to put them up.
The sheets on their bed are cotton and flannel. The blankets are quilts Bobby had, that they've found, patchworks patterned over old wool army blankets. The bedframe itself is iron, and only a double. There's not room for a second bed and barely room for both of them.
They'd stripped the room of anything chemically manufactured. Plastics mostly, an old naughahyde chair. Polyester bedding, clothing, all of it, is like acid on Sam's skin. Wrought metals, woven cotton or fiber fabrics he can bear. Sam had to give up his sneakers and his boots, can't use most pens or even a toothbrush. Dean has to squeeze the toothpaste for him and even that had taken them hunting through shelves and shelves of a half dozen abandoned pharmacies to find something that wouldn't leave blisters on his mouth.
It was just one more adjustment.
Dean's always taken care of Sam, and maybe he should resent the fact that he does so more now than he did even when Sam was a child.
He can't though.
He won't.
Sam had literally followed him to hell and back.
Less of a gate than a path, less of a door than an opportunity.
Less of a choice than an inevitability.
"We're already fucked," Dean had said.
If the hold on death could be broken by sacrifice, then maybe the dying could be stopped by the same.
"So, once we're in, how do we get back?"
Dean had shouldered him, passed him both guns and hoisted up a ten gallon canister of holy water. "Click your heels together three times, and say 'there's no place like home'?"
"I think I left my ruby slippers in the car."
"Then I guess we'll just have ask the wizard, Dorothy."
He remembers Sam then, teeth bared and grinning, looming like a giant at the very gates, both of them bloodied but still standing.
"We should knock," Dean said.
Sam had rung the bell with rounds of blessed shot and an incantation of Latin that sounded suspiciously like "Smoke on the Mountain"
Sam only smiles occasionally now, but when he does, it's like he's been saving them up.
The thing was, Hell or whatever, had been perfectly ready to invade earth, the immortal versus the mortal, the profane pitted against the sacred.
Their offensive line was pretty damn impressive. Their defensive line?
Not so much.
Maybe Sam had expected the Angels of God to help them.
What he got were a bunch of volunteer fireman, the police department, the local VFW, and a handful of pissed off and very determined mothers.
Angels, all, as far as Dean is concerned.
Not easy. Not what he can remember.
What he can't remember, he thinks he'd rather not.
+++++
He finds his father sitting on the steps when dawn comes, most mornings. Underneath his clothes, John looks like Dean thinks Sam should -- like he's been flayed alive and his skin reattached in pieces. Less like Frankenstein or a patchwork doll, than someone with a weird skin condition -- melanin bereft patches, laced in and against skin tones that would look more at home in Kenya or some southside Atlanta neighborhood than the even tones of the caucasian male John used to be. Dean doesn't think about where the patches of skin came from. In his face, in his eyes, his father is who he remembers.
Nobody gets out of hell unscathed.
Dean's got parts of Sam riding under his skin. They don't show much on the outside, but he can feel them nonetheless. He's not sure what he gave up to get them all back. It may have been his soul, but if so, he doesn't miss it.
What Sam gave up is a little too obvious at times. Sam's got something riding under his skin too. Less demon than desire, less hate than hope, maybe. There's a gate somewhere sealed with Sam's blood, held closed by a promise they have yet to keep. He wonders what Sam left behind the gates, but he knows when it calls to him, to them.
Most days it's what they brought back with them that gives them the most trouble.
When he finds John on the steps, he knows there's already coffee brewed. Maybe fresh bread waiting. He thinks John is guarding them from something, but he isn't sure what.
Maybe their own ghosts.
Dean gets coffee, brings his father a cup. "I'm up. I'll watch him. You should go back to bed." John accepts the cup and smiles. Gets up, squeezes Dean's shoulder, and shuffles back toward his room.
John is still their father but Dean's not sure how much his sons they still are. His father's said nothing about the sleeping arrangements, rarely comes upstairs but when he does, he knocks on their door before entering.
They've all already been to hell. There's not much fear of sin any longer.
Sam sleeps on his stomach with the blankets pulled up almost over his head. Deans sets the coffee on the bedside table and eases them back, threading his fingers through Sam's hair so his brother will know it's him, even in sleep. The scars haven't faded much, smudged here and there with discolored smeared ink. They both need a good scrubbing bath and Dean adds it to the list of things they need to do before they head out again. The scars travel the length of Sam's back from shoulder to ass, furrows that cut deep into flesh and muscle, had scored ribs and spine alike. A zebra-stripe of vivid purple-red, like there's blood under the surface struggling to seep out. Two sets of four, wider and deeper at the top than at the bottom, where they curve across Sam's hips.
Despite the bloody look to them there's hardly any warmth in them, cool to the touch even when the rest of Sam's skin burns fever hot.
He thinks the demons ripped Sam's heart out, except under his hand he can feel it still beating. Feels his own thud heavily in his chest, the rush of blood to his ears, feels the prickles up his spine. There's nothing coming but memories, no threat but remembering too much. Sam jerks awake under the weight of Dean's fear and the edge of red teasing the corners of his eyes fades back again when Sam twists around, locking eyes with him.
Sam's eyes used to be hazel, hovering between the green Dean shared with his mother and the brown John gave them. Most of the time they still are, but sometimes they shift to a dark blue, like midnight, like a still, dark, lake reflecting sky.
Sometimes they are as black as demon's eyes, no white at all.
He knows Bobby thinks Sam is possessed at least some of the time and Dean doesn't necessarily disagree.
He just doesn't think it's a demon possessing his brother.
And even if it was? He wouldn't care.
Sam blinks at him sleepily and the moment is broken when he flops back down. He shifts slightly when Dean sits and puts his back to the headboard and reaches for his coffee. Sam slings an arm across Dean's lap and goes back to sleep. Dean stares out the window and watches the sun rise.
Crows wing across the lightening sky and he counts them until the sky is so black with them he can't see individual birds any longer.
When he hears Bobby firing shot after shot into the murder, he closes his eyes.
Beneath his hand, Sam's skin starts to grow warm.
-end- *Smoke on the Water ~Deep Purple, 1974 Never Tell a Joke Without a Punchline by Maygra
Dean/Sam (implied). Mild R for imagery. Vague future fic.
The characters and situations portrayed here are not mine, they belong to the CW. This is a fan authored work and no profit is being made. Please do not link to this story without appropriate warnings. Please do not archive this story without my permission.
(2,334 words)
++++ The weirdest thing about the world as it is now are the demons. They hang around the edges of the barriers like smoke, bodiless but still menacing, testing the edges of the wards and the lines. They'll possess anything that comes near when they do this -- drifting and condensing to fit inside anything; even the rabbits that nibble the grasses at the edge of the fence or the crows and buzzards that gather where the bodies hang.
Bobby likes to sit on the porch and pick them off with shotgun loaded with buckshot and cotton and small gel capsules filled with holy water. The holy water won't kill the demons and Dean keeps trying to work out ways to sketch a devil's trap big enough to cover the entire compound, but demon-possessed birds don't fly over, and the rabbits are a little too Monty-Pythonesque for Dean to take seriously.
The birds don't bother Sam. The rabbits though, make him go a little green around the mouth.
Bobby tried cooking the rabbits once but their carcasses were tainted, not to mention that they were likely to break a tooth on the buckshot peppering their flesh.
Dean finally asked Bobby to stop when he found Sam gathering up the furry bodies and burning them. Bobby thought maybe they could find use for the skins, but Dean felt sick at the thought even though he didn't say why. Maybe the same reason Sam got a little sick at the thought of the helpless -- even animals -- being possessed.
Dean doesn't remember it really but he can still see it and feel it. There's a strip of paler skin on his belly, ragged around the edges, hairless. It's not so much a scar as marker where one should be.
There's a dream that comes when he thinks about it, regardless of whether he's awake or asleep. Of Sam's skin being peeled back, of blood and screaming. The mark itches sometimes, the skin prickles and flakes.
He's checked every inch of Sam but he can't find where the skin was peeled back. Sometimes he wonders if it hadn't all been stripped from Sam and new skin laid over the raw muscle and tissue. But the old scars are still there and the new ones are still rough under his fingertips. Sam never stops him, almost like he can remember too, but doesn't remember what he remembers.
Sometimes Bobby manages to actually bring them real rabbits, usually from the traps that get laid out. Dean doesn't mind eating them, but he can't watch them be skinned.
The kids like to lay the traps for them -- its as useful a skill as knowing how to clean, load, and use a gun, to make bullets, and the kids have been handling guns since they were old enough to actually hold one.
Three of the twelve are Bobby's grandkids through his daughter. She's quiet, kind of pretty in that raised-in-the-country and worked-hard-all-her-life way. Bobby hadn't seen her in years when she showed up and Dean and Sam hadn't even known she existed. She'd been in Kansas City -- college first, then a husband and kids. She's an artist, but mostly she was a wife and mother, until her husband showed up with black eyes and a vicious leer and tried to take her oldest son apart from the inside. She may have left the life she'd been born to but she hadn't forgotten everything. She was her father's daughter.
The kids all have inked on patterns and protections. She does them for Sam and Dean too, for anyone who wants them. She's not a tattoo artist, the marks fade.
Dean thought she and Sam would have a lot in common.
It didn't take him long to realize Katherine was just one more reminder of everything Sam ever wanted but was never meant to have.
She watches Dean with owlish eyes and tick in her cheek. She keeps up the big house, does the laundry, homeschools the kids. Sam and Dean both make it a point to look for sketch pads and inks, pencils and books on how to make the supplies she needs when they can no longer scavenge for them or what they do find is too old and dried out to be of use.
Her touch on his skin when she draws is light and firm, steady, not ticklish. She has a more difficult time with Sam, trying to create unbroken lines over scarred skin.
She looks at Dean sometimes with a mix of hunger and resignation. There's not many men who come through that she looks at all -- she's not looking for a partner, but maybe for some comfort.
Dean had wanted to offer her that much, had tried.
They'd shared a bed and not much more because Sam had been hit with visions that woke up the whole house. They'd been on the road before dawn, Katherine sketching fast and sure, supplies packed and loaded into the car while Dean held Sam's hands, like his touch could ease the fever making Sam's skin sweat and the inks run.
She'd done the same to Dean's back and chest, but she'd stopped in the middle of an intricate design and blinked.
The inks had shifted on his skin, rearranged themselves without her touching -- mirroring Sam's design.
That's when the tick started.
She doesn't mind him close. Doesn't mind him playing with the kids. She doesn't stare at he and Sam like they are tainted or dangerous.
They scare her just the same.
Dean thinks she might be sleeping with their father when they are gone, but he doesn't know and he doesn't ask, and truth to be told, he doesn't care. There's little enough comfort in the world now and he doesn't begrudge anyone who seeks it where they can.
His own comfort is as close as it's ever been and he'll defy anyone who begrudges him that.
He and Sam share the room at the top of the stairs. Their father and Bobby have the rooms downstairs. Katherine and her kids have another upstairs and the other kids, with or without parents, share the rooms in between. The vampires watch the house and grounds at night, other hunters take the trailers or the barn. Sometimes there's enough people they have to set up tents, or ask the town to put them up.
The sheets on their bed are cotton and flannel. The blankets are quilts Bobby had, that they've found, patchworks patterned over old wool army blankets. The bedframe itself is iron, and only a double. There's not room for a second bed and barely room for both of them.
They'd stripped the room of anything chemically manufactured. Plastics mostly, an old naughahyde chair. Polyester bedding, clothing, all of it, is like acid on Sam's skin. Wrought metals, woven cotton or fiber fabrics he can bear. Sam had to give up his sneakers and his boots, can't use most pens or even a toothbrush. Dean has to squeeze the toothpaste for him and even that had taken them hunting through shelves and shelves of a half dozen abandoned pharmacies to find something that wouldn't leave blisters on his mouth.
It was just one more adjustment.
Dean's always taken care of Sam, and maybe he should resent the fact that he does so more now than he did even when Sam was a child.
He can't though.
He won't.
Sam had literally followed him to hell and back.
Less of a gate than a path, less of a door than an opportunity.
Less of a choice than an inevitability.
"We're already fucked," Dean had said.
If the hold on death could be broken by sacrifice, then maybe the dying could be stopped by the same.
"So, once we're in, how do we get back?"
Dean had shouldered him, passed him both guns and hoisted up a ten gallon canister of holy water. "Click your heels together three times, and say 'there's no place like home'?"
"I think I left my ruby slippers in the car."
"Then I guess we'll just have ask the wizard, Dorothy."
He remembers Sam then, teeth bared and grinning, looming like a giant at the very gates, both of them bloodied but still standing.
"We should knock," Dean said.
Sam had rung the bell with rounds of blessed shot and an incantation of Latin that sounded suspiciously like "Smoke on the Mountain"
Sam only smiles occasionally now, but when he does, it's like he's been saving them up.
The thing was, Hell or whatever, had been perfectly ready to invade earth, the immortal versus the mortal, the profane pitted against the sacred.
Their offensive line was pretty damn impressive. Their defensive line?
Not so much.
Maybe Sam had expected the Angels of God to help them.
What he got were a bunch of volunteer fireman, the police department, the local VFW, and a handful of pissed off and very determined mothers.
Angels, all, as far as Dean is concerned.
Not easy. Not what he can remember.
What he can't remember, he thinks he'd rather not.
+++++
He finds his father sitting on the steps when dawn comes, most mornings. Underneath his clothes, John looks like Dean thinks Sam should -- like he's been flayed alive and his skin reattached in pieces. Less like Frankenstein or a patchwork doll, than someone with a weird skin condition -- melanin bereft patches, laced in and against skin tones that would look more at home in Kenya or some southside Atlanta neighborhood than the even tones of the caucasian male John used to be. Dean doesn't think about where the patches of skin came from. In his face, in his eyes, his father is who he remembers.
Nobody gets out of hell unscathed.
Dean's got parts of Sam riding under his skin. They don't show much on the outside, but he can feel them nonetheless. He's not sure what he gave up to get them all back. It may have been his soul, but if so, he doesn't miss it.
What Sam gave up is a little too obvious at times. Sam's got something riding under his skin too. Less demon than desire, less hate than hope, maybe. There's a gate somewhere sealed with Sam's blood, held closed by a promise they have yet to keep. He wonders what Sam left behind the gates, but he knows when it calls to him, to them.
Most days it's what they brought back with them that gives them the most trouble.
When he finds John on the steps, he knows there's already coffee brewed. Maybe fresh bread waiting. He thinks John is guarding them from something, but he isn't sure what.
Maybe their own ghosts.
Dean gets coffee, brings his father a cup. "I'm up. I'll watch him. You should go back to bed." John accepts the cup and smiles. Gets up, squeezes Dean's shoulder, and shuffles back toward his room.
John is still their father but Dean's not sure how much his sons they still are. His father's said nothing about the sleeping arrangements, rarely comes upstairs but when he does, he knocks on their door before entering.
They've all already been to hell. There's not much fear of sin any longer.
Sam sleeps on his stomach with the blankets pulled up almost over his head. Deans sets the coffee on the bedside table and eases them back, threading his fingers through Sam's hair so his brother will know it's him, even in sleep. The scars haven't faded much, smudged here and there with discolored smeared ink. They both need a good scrubbing bath and Dean adds it to the list of things they need to do before they head out again. The scars travel the length of Sam's back from shoulder to ass, furrows that cut deep into flesh and muscle, had scored ribs and spine alike. A zebra-stripe of vivid purple-red, like there's blood under the surface struggling to seep out. Two sets of four, wider and deeper at the top than at the bottom, where they curve across Sam's hips.
Despite the bloody look to them there's hardly any warmth in them, cool to the touch even when the rest of Sam's skin burns fever hot.
He thinks the demons ripped Sam's heart out, except under his hand he can feel it still beating. Feels his own thud heavily in his chest, the rush of blood to his ears, feels the prickles up his spine. There's nothing coming but memories, no threat but remembering too much. Sam jerks awake under the weight of Dean's fear and the edge of red teasing the corners of his eyes fades back again when Sam twists around, locking eyes with him.
Sam's eyes used to be hazel, hovering between the green Dean shared with his mother and the brown John gave them. Most of the time they still are, but sometimes they shift to a dark blue, like midnight, like a still, dark, lake reflecting sky.
Sometimes they are as black as demon's eyes, no white at all.
He knows Bobby thinks Sam is possessed at least some of the time and Dean doesn't necessarily disagree.
He just doesn't think it's a demon possessing his brother.
And even if it was? He wouldn't care.
Sam blinks at him sleepily and the moment is broken when he flops back down. He shifts slightly when Dean sits and puts his back to the headboard and reaches for his coffee. Sam slings an arm across Dean's lap and goes back to sleep. Dean stares out the window and watches the sun rise.
Crows wing across the lightening sky and he counts them until the sky is so black with them he can't see individual birds any longer.
When he hears Bobby firing shot after shot into the murder, he closes his eyes.
Beneath his hand, Sam's skin starts to grow warm.
+++++
-end- *Smoke on the Water ~Deep Purple, 1974
Part III - Never Promise Me A Rose Garden
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