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cjmarloweHad a great day. Went to the CNE, returned home with sunburn and fudge. Now I just need to sit and veg for a while. So it's a good thing I finished working on this story yesterday. :)
Wish You Were Here
Dean's back from hell, Sam's still in limbo and Jo needs something more. Everyone's got issues.
Supernatural. 13,100 words. NC-17. Dean/Jo, Dean/Jo/Sam. Post 3.16.
Sam isn't sure how they're suddenly crossing into Nebraska when last thing he remembers they were heading Oklahoma way, planning to ride into Hadry just in time for supper. He yawns, stretches till he runs out of leg room, then reaches for the timeworn map they keep between the seats, stained and marked up and torn along the creases.
"Change of plans?" he says around another yawn, watching as a highway sign streaks past, too close to read the numbers.
"Something like that," says Dean, and taps his fingers against the steering wheel in time with Phil Rudd.
He's got a mark on the side of his neck, bruised and scratched and just starting to fade, and Sam wonders if it's from the waitress in Salt Lake City, the receptionist in Bedingfield, the legal clerk in Leaf Rapids. Two months since Dean came back to him and as far as Sam can tell all he's done is fought and fucked his way across the Midwest, state after state, leaving Sam to watch and wonder if the Dean he risked everything for ever really came back.
Maybe Dean's already done Oklahoma; it's getting hard to keep track.
"So what's in Nebraska?"
From what Sam can see out the passenger-side window there's not a lot besides weak fall sunshine and clumpy, dying roadside grass.
"I got a call about a job while you were busy snoring over there, Sleeping Beauty," Dean says like it's nothing. "Something's setting things on fire in Kernsville."
"Teenagers?" suggests Sam, tracing his finger along the map until he finds it, a faint speck nestled up close to the border. That's what it was the last time, and the time before that, and probably the time before that, too.
He watches Dean out of the corner of his eye and doesn't let the faint spark of hope ignite into anything else.
"Maybe," says Dean, the word slow and dubious, and maybe he actually wants this to be a hunt. Maybe Sam's not the only one who's itching to get back into it. But then he adds, "I was here with Dad once; there's one hell of a roadhouse outside town," and all that's left to wonder is whether this one's a fight or this one's a fuck.
What do you think's going to happen if you don't keep this up? Sam wants to ask him, but he thinks he already knows that answer and part of him just doesn't want to have to hear it.
"Should probably check it out anyway," he says, folding the map and putting it back where he found it. It's never stopped feeling wrong that they're not stopping to hunt - really, there's only been the in-and-out job in Kenosha, and that was all Sam - and he feels like he's not just the only one who wants it anymore, but the only one who even notices.
"Never know," says Dean, whistling as the song comes to an end, popping the tape out without even looking. "Grab me something, Sammy. Your choice."
"Since when?" says Sam. For a couple of moments he actually expects an answer, then quickly rummages through the tapes before Dean changes his mind. They're still Dean's cassettes, so they're still Dean's music, but there's a measure of satisfaction in it when Sam pops in And Justice For All and remembers an overnighter between Dallas and Charlotte when it played through enough times for Sam to memorize the lyrics. That's something that's all his.
"How much further?" he asks as he leans against the door.
"Dunno," says Dean, tapping the steering wheel again. "Maybe an hour?"
"Wake me up when we get there," says Sam and closes his eyes. Where Dean goes these days, Sam follows.
:::
It's called the Woodpecker Inn, only part of the neon sign's burnt out. Sam knows the moment he sees it that even if it hadn't been the only motel on this stretch of road - and it is, the rest of the highway outside town dotted with beds of dying flowers and farm supply dealerships - Dean would've pulled in just for that.
Sam gets out and stretches his legs the moment Dean stops in front of the front office, pressing his hands against hot black metal and popping vertebrae one by one. Dean tosses his keys in the air, catches them with a snap of his wrist, and heads inside to get them a room.
They don't stay long, only long enough to throw their bags on the floor of room fourteen, to secure the door and window, then Dean's hustling them back out to the car again. Not for drinks, though, so at least there's that. They find a mom and pop diner right there on the main drag into town, fading sign and vinyl booths and all, and Dean's flirting with the waitress before Sam can even get his ass in the seat.
He manages to pick up an unsecured wireless signal, probably from the walk-up across the street, and looks up a local article on the fires. It still reeks of mischief to him, just small-scale fires leaving behind some rough mark that looks more like a scribble than anything esoteric Sam's ever seen. If it weren't for the fact that Dean took the call he probably wouldn't be pursuing it at all.
He doesn't like the ones with fire. Never has.
"So where do you want to start?"
"With the apple pie," says Dean, his eyes still on the waitress, "and I bet she makes a mean milkshake."
"With the case, Dean?"
"Right," he says, stretching out long with his fingers laced behind his head. "Aren't you the eager beaver? Well, you can go ahead and plot all the sightings, if you're that anxious to get started."
"Dean, this is your hunt," says Sam. "You're the one who found it. Don't you think you might want to take an interest?"
"I am taking an interest, Sammy," he says. "I'm taking an interest in dinner. Can't very well hunt on an empty stomach, can I?"
But as Sam pulls out the local map they got from the motel office and starts plotting the sightings with thick black marks, Dean's eyes rarely leave the paper, and it kindles that spark inside him Sam's been trying not to poke at.
"Doesn't look like much of a pattern to me," he says when he's done, capping the marker after plotting the last one and wrapping himself bodily around the map as the waitress serves up their coffee so they don't look like the creepy ghost hunters they are.
"Well, they're not exactly drawing the Mona Lisa on the town, but that looks like a definite cluster," says Dean, four packets of sugar in his coffee and spraying the edge of the map with granules.
"Yeah, a town-shaped cluster," says Sam. "I don't think this is telling us anything."
"Never really expected it to," says Dean, stirring and sipping. "How long you think pie takes anyway?"
"Why are we here, Dean?" says Sam, folding up the map and sticking it in his front pocket, closing his laptop and pushing it aside.
"Because this is what we do, Sam."
Sam wonders if they're both really thinking of the same thing when Dean says 'this'.
:::
Sam gets why they've really come to Kernsville as soon as they finally step inside the 'kickass roadhouse', and he doesn't let Dean pretend it's a coincidence.
"You could've warned me," he hisses in his ear, trying to put a passable smile on his face.
"If I'd warned you, you never would've set foot outside the 'Pecker Inn," Dean hisses back, and steps up to the bar to greet Jo Harvelle.
Who promptly slaps him in the face.
"Not that I don't appreciate the foreplay," he says, "but don't you think we should get the hellos out the way first?"
"God damn you, Dean Winchester," she says, leaning forward with both hands on the bar, knuckles white with the pressure. "You think you can just come waltzing in here after everything without so much as a phone call?"
"I wouldn't call that a waltz," he says. "More of a saunter, with a little swagger there at the end." She glares at him until he relents. "Your mother called me," he says. "What have you gotten yourself into, Jo?"
"Goddammit," she says, throwing her towel on the bar. "Bobby Singer needs to learn to keep his damn mouth shut. Tony, I'm taking my break!"
She leads Dean into the stockroom behind the bar, Sam slipping behind like his shadow, and for a minute she looks like she doesn't know whether to kiss Dean or deck him. Sam could've told her he probably would've enjoyed both.
It would be Jo. It isn't enough that Sam's been off his game for weeks now. No, it has to be Jo, who Sam isn't even sure he can look in the eye. Jo, who'll let herself get sucked right into the black hole of Dean without batting an eye, who Sam can't warn because her trust in him was stripped away a long time ago.
"I don't know what the hell she thinks she's doing, getting involved, but I can handle this on my own," Jo says finally. "Besides, from what I hear you boys aren't really up for riding to anyone's rescue."
"Honey, we're always up for riding to the rescue," says Dean. Without any more warning than that he reaches out, grabs hold of her left wrist, pushes her sleeve up to her elbow. She makes a token effort to pull it away again but the fresh white bandages are already on display.
Something's setting things on fire in Kernsville and it's not teenagers.
"I never told Bobby about that, so I sure as hell know he never told my mother."
"Lucky guess," says Dean when he lets her go. "Don't worry, I’m not going to tell her either. So how about you fill us in on this hunt?"
The blackmail, Sam thinks, is implied.
"I can handle it," she says, shoving her sleeve back down to her wrist, "just like I handled the other three in the area, so you two can just go back to doing whatever it is you do now. I didn't ask anyone to come."
"Yeah, actually, I think we're done with what we were doing," says Dean, which is sure as hell news to Sam. "You really think I want another call from your mother telling me you've been incinerated by some pissed off spirit because we thought we'd have a better time in Texas? I think I'd be safer back in hell."
Jo inhales sharply but Sam's used to it now, lets the comment pass. It's better when he says it than when he tries to keep it in.
Sam's not even a part of this conversation, just a not-so-innocent bystander, hanging back by the doorway and poised for a quick exit as soon as Jo's gaze finally falls on him. But it never does, which he's pretty sure is anything but an accident.
"I get off shift at two," she says, coming to a belated, abrupt decision. "You can come back then and I'll show you what I've got on this thing. If you're gonna stay around town I can't stop you, but don't get in my way."
"Actually I thought I might stick around for a few drinks, see the sights," says Dean, finally showing her the empty, cocky grin that Sam's so familiar with these days.
"And what sights might those be?" she says, posing in the doorway, waiting.
"Only the best ones," he says, and she leads them back out into the bar again, slips in behind it and lets Dean claim one of the stools.
Sam doesn't say anything to either of them, orders his beer from someone else and stays in the shadows with one hand in his pocket until he's buzzed enough not to feel the pangs of regret quite so sharply anymore. He doesn't remember all of it but he knows damn well what happened between him and Jo, and he's pretty sure it's the kind of thing that can't be forgiven and forgotten.
There's something different about coming someplace where Dean knows someone, where they collide head on with Life Before, and Sam wishes to hell he knew what it meant.
He leaves before two, slipping out when no one's watching. Dean'll know where he went, and Jo doesn't need to.
:::
In some ways it's like it used to be before Dean's deal came due. But there's a desperation to it now, like Dean doesn't just want to find someone to spend the night with, he's afraid of what'll happen if he doesn't. Sam knows anger when he sees it, and he knows comfort when he sees it, and now he knows what it looks like when the two get all tangled up.
Sam's been through his own hell, but it wasn't Hell, capital H, and he can only speculate what it's really like. Dean's never told him, and Sam's always shied away from asking, like the question itself will do as much damage as the place. It doesn't take a genius to know it's bad, you just have to see the haunted expression Dean gets when he thinks Sam isn't looking. When he thinks no one is.
He waits up, but three in the morning passes with no Dean and Sam's eyes are closing in spite of him. Assuming he comes home at all - and Dean almost always does - then five a.m. will bring another nightmare and Sam needs to be ready for it.
Dean's not afraid of the unknown anymore, he's afraid of the known, and Sam doesn't know what the hell he can do about that.
:::
They meet at noon in the diner Sam found, faded decor but fresh food and fast service, and no one curious enough about their business to stick around long enough to hear it. Jo's already given Dean the bare bones of the case so Sam's playing catch-up as quickly and quietly as he can. The names of the witnesses. The times of the fires. He feels like he's eavesdropping, hardly even wants to make notes in case he's called on his intrusion.
"So you didn't talk about this last night," says Dean, reaching for her bandaged arm. Jo snatches it away. "You know we need to know."
"It's the same as all the others. I'm fine."
"Yeah? Tell it to your mother."
"Don't you dare," says Jo, and she knows they need to know but it's pretty clear she's not all that happy talking about it.
The thing is, Sam gets why Ellen called, in the abstract way that he understands how normal parents react when their children are in danger, but what he doesn't get is why she called them, called Dean. He would've thought, after everything, the Winchesters would be pretty low on her list of white knights.
"I was out three nights ago," Jo says, tugging her sleeve up bit by bit. "I wanted my own photos of the marks, looking for something everyone else didn't think to look at, maybe find some kind of pattern." Dean nods. So does Sam, but she's not looking at Sam. "I was on Lakeshore and it just...." She shrugs; the rest is clear on her arm when she uncovers it for them.
"Did you feel anything unusual?"
"You mean besides searing pain?"
"Searing pain isn't unusual when something sets you on fire." Dean should be looking at her arm but he's not, he's watching Jo's face. "Anything else?"
"I thought I felt someone's hand around my wrist," she admits after a moment, "but it was gone too quickly, might've just been my bag catching on it or something."
The mark looks more like scattered matchsticks than any kind of symbol, swollen red lines crossing here and there on the pale skin of her forearm and not triggering any memory, anything at all, in Sam's brain. He wants to get a closer look but doesn't dare.
"Do you have a picture of yours, too?" he asks finally, fixing his eyes on the table instead of her. Jo slides a flash drive over in his direction, only her hand venturing into his range of vision.
"You'll probably get more use out of this than Dean will," she says. She's right about that, but probably for the wrong reasons.
"So we're all thinking spirit?" says Dean.
"That's my working theory," says Jo. "No one's seen an apparition but I can't find lore on anything else that would fit without some other kind of activity too."
"This seems like a pretty classic revenge scenario to me," says Dean. "Some pissed off spirit of a murder victim wants to lash back at their murderer, only they don't know where to start. We've all seen it before."
"Any leads on the symbol?" Sam asks, sliding the flash drive across the table from one hand to the other.
"Nada," says Jo. "Zip. I can't find a mention of it anywhere. I even got Bobby on it but he hasn't called back with anything yet. Seems like he had time to make some other calls, though."
"Do we have anything at all?" says Dean, and Jo bristles.
"I've even checked the god damn museum and art gallery, just in case it was some sort of local thing, but all they've got in there is glazed pottery and folk art saw blades," she says. "And get this: there've been no known murders in the past fifty years."
"None?" says Dean.
"None."
"That right there's a little weird, don't you think?"
Sam shrugs, answering when Jo just glares at Dean. "Could just be it's a small town," he offers. "What about more than fifty years ago?"
"You have to go into the archives to get any further back," she tells him while looking at Dean. "I'm still following up on unexplained deaths and disappearances."
"Or it could be something else entirely."
Yeah, it could be some pyromaniac pixies with dubious artistic taste, but Sam doesn't think that's all too likely. They're on the right track with the spirit notion, he's got a gut feeling about it. He's also got a gut feeling that they're not going to get too much else done at the diner this afternoon.
"I'm going to hit the archives, then," he says, and Jo quickly draws him some sketchy directions on a napkin. Their eyes never meet, not once. "I'll catch up with you two later?"
"You know where to find me," says Dean, and waves him off.
:::
When Sam comes back to the room Dean's stretched out alone on the bed with his face buried in the pillow, but the shower's running and Sam recognizes the t-shirt Jo was wearing when he last saw her.
He digs his toothbrush and shampoo out of his duffel bag and when Jo comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel he doesn't do anything more than nod at her as he slips inside. Just because she's not a stranger doesn't mean Sam should treat her any differently than anyone else Dean's brought back to the motel in the past two months.
Sam wonders if she knows she's the latest in a long line, stretching from South Dakota and zigzagging all over the Midwest. He wonders if she knows she could very well be the last. He wonders if Dean knows it either.
When Sam comes back out again twenty minutes later, she's already gone.
:::
"You let him get away with an awful lot, don't you?" says Jo, wandering over to his end of the bar, and for a moment Sam's not even sure she's speaking to him. But there she is, and there he is, and nobody else is near enough to be the object of her attention.
"Dean's Dean," he says after a minute, his gaze skirting away from her eyes. "He's just doing what he does."
He doesn't think he's letting Dean get away with anything so much as burying his own anger down so deep that he doesn't have any other reactions left. But at least he's self-aware enough to know it.
"I know you're lying to me," she says, so mildly it almost isn't an accusation except in the way it so clearly is. "Don't know why, but--"
"Don't know what else to say." And even if he knew how to say it, he's not sure he would.
Dean's been living like someone's going to take it away again at any moment and he wants to suck up every bit of life he can, save it all in his head for those long, dark days in hell. And Sam doesn't know how to tell anyone he knows exactly what Dean's doing and why, not even Dean.
He doesn't think Dean gets why it's making him so god damn miserable, either.
"Your brother needs someone to light a fire under his ass."
"Yeah, I think fire's the last thing Dean needs anymore," says Sam, staring at his drink. "We shouldn't have come. You talked to Bobby, he could've come if you needed him."
"Bobby was never going to come and we all know it," says Jo. "Bobby knows I could've done the job on my own."
"Then why?" says Sam. "Why get involved? Why'd he even tell your mother?"
"I was hoping you could tell me that," says Jo, shaking her head. Maybe it's the only reason she's talking to him at all, because her only other option is Dean and she's starting to see just how far that doesn't get her. "That man knows damn well that every time my mother hears I'm on a case she tries to get someone else to take it. She thinks I don't know, but she does."
"I'm sure she knows you don't want--"
"You know what? My mother doesn't know what I want. Your brother doesn't know what I want. And you sure as hell don't know what I want."
"She's your mother. She worries," says Sam, veering from the more dangerous path. "That's what mothers do, isn't it?"
"They also admit when their children are adults and can make their own damn decisions," says Jo, slapping the cloth against the bar, "instead of this pretending I'm on my own where she gets every hunter she knows keeping tabs on me like I'm still a little girl."
"I'm not sure letting their kids grow up is really in a mother's job description," says Sam, scratching his fingernail into the soft wood. But then, he wouldn't know.
"Damn it, Sam, will you look at me?"
He's been looking at her, out of the corner of his eye, in reflections, looking at her hands or hips or hair or breasts. But now he looks up and meets her eyes and tries not to look as guilty as he feels.
"It's not just my mother. None of you ever stopped thinking of me as a kid," she says, meeting him gaze for gaze. He flinches, but then so does she. "I know it wasn't you."
And he knows they're not talking about the case anymore.
The thing is, Sam's been able to push it all away, focus on things that were a lot more pressing and just not dwell on what went down between him and Jo in the bar that night. He'd done worse things that week, and buried those deep down too. But Jo hasn't had that luxury, or maybe she just didn't take advantage of it.
"You're telling me you can look at me and not remember?"
"No," she says with an uncomfortable honesty. "But I'm working on that. Would probably be going better if you were too."
"Winchesters don't work on their issues," he mutters as he pushes back from the bar. "I'm going to go see if Dean needs anything."
Jo reaches to grab his wrist, and even though she doesn't actually make contact he reacts like she has. "He doesn't," she says. "Sam, he doesn't need anything you can give him right now."
"Now who's checking up on who?" he says, snatching his wrist to himself. "Dean will always need what I can give him."
"Dean needs you to stop coddling him," says Jo, backing up a step herself, reaching for a bar rag and idly wiping down the old wood over the fresh scratches.
"I'm not--"
"Like hell you're not," she says. "He thinks you think he's going to break."
He sure as hell doesn't think Dean told her that, but maybe Dean talks too much after someone sucks his brains out through his dick. Or maybe Jo's just talking about things she doesn't know anything about.
"Well maybe he is," says Sam. "In case you hadn't noticed, my brother's kind of fucked up these days."
"Whatever he is right now, you had a part in making it," says Jo, "so if you don't like it, maybe you'd better figure out what to do about it."
Sam thinks he liked it better when they weren't talking, and doesn't look at her again as he turns around and leaves the bar.
:::
Sam doesn't look, he sees, and he thinks there's some kind of important, fundamental difference there. He doesn't plan to see them, he doesn't look in the window for the express purpose of finding them in a compromising position, he just looks in the window of the motel room, blinds open, and there they are.
It's not the same thing.
What he sees, is Dean on his knees, Jo's back against the wall and one knee hooked over his shoulder. He doesn't need to see Dean's tongue to know where it is, what it's doing to her. It doesn't take much imagination to picture it sliding over her, into her, to imagine his teeth grazing her clit, imagine him sucking it between his lips. He can even time it all to the expressions on her face, the clenching of her fists, the hitches in her breath that leave her chest heaving.
Sam can't stop watching, not now, not until Jo's fisting Dean's hair with one hand and the wall sconce behind her with the other and crying out like Dean's tongue's found something previously undiscovered within her. The way Dean's been piling on the experience, maybe it has.
Sam leaves before he sees his brother get off too, which doesn't stop him from wondering whether Dean's going to take her up against the wall, throw her on the bed, let her slip down to the floor and go down on him.
He doesn't want to know that much, doesn't want to take it that far. There's a line, one of many, and Sam's not prepared to cross that one.
Five hours later Sam's shaking Dean out of another nightmare, the latest of dozens, and it's like the rest of the evening never even happened.
:::
Sam doesn't like this town. Everything's either too dry or too wet, wooden buildings standing like so much tinder along the main streets and then withering away on the waterfront where the little lake itself looks like it's swollen with infection, dirty foam at the docks and dead plants floating on the surface. He doesn't like it because everything's just a little wrong and Sam doesn't know how to fix it, and he's stuck in this town while everything around him seems to be finally building to something, something he's not sure he's going to like.
Dean and Jo are... he doesn't even know. They might be working the case, checking out the missing persons like they said they would. They might be fucking in the bathroom of the sheriff's station.
And Sam is walking the aging waterfront with a half-assed map in one hand and a coffee in the other, wondering how it all came to this place, this time.
It was never supposed to be like this. Dean was supposed to come back from hell and everything was supposed to be the way it was before, before Sam was killed, before Dad died, before Sam changed. Dean was never supposed to go to hell at all.
He almost wishes they'd gone to Oklahoma after all, that he was sipping tequila in some shadowy corner of some shadowy bar waiting for Dean to finish up in the back alley so he can head to the motel with him. He doesn't like it, but it's something he understands. As much as they're on a case right now, Sam doesn't understand what the hell is going on.
But at least there is a case, and if he can't figure out what's going on in his brother's head then at least he's got this. The waterfront's a bust, Sam hasn't found anything of interest at all, but across the lake amid the trees he thinks he spies some houses, maybe cottages, that weren't on any map of the town he's looked at. Maybe it's nothing, but maybe it isn't, and at least with this he has something to show for his afternoon.
When he ambles back to the diner, sun low in the sky and stomach rumbling, the car's already outside and Dean and Jo are laughing over some private joke in the window. Sam almost doesn't go inside, but he's got nowhere else to go.
"We've got four disappearances," says Dean, shoving the files in Sam's direction as soon as he sits down, "and don't ask what Jo had to go through to get them."
"Wasn't planning to," says Sam curtly. "What are those places across the lake?"
"Old summer homes," says Jo immediately, so apparently Sam hasn't discovered something new at all. "Most of them are abandoned now; the lake's not all that scenic anymore. They've even let the trees grow up alongside the highway so they don't have to see the old places when they pass by. People around here just want to remember what they used to have, not what's actually there now. Not that I can really blame them. One of these days I swear someone's going to go in and, owners be damned, they'll just raze them to the ground."
"Any fires?" says Dean, raising an eyebrow at her.
"Two," she says, but she's already shaking her head. "I already looked into it; there were no fatalities in either one. Not even any injuries. The places were just dried up and ready to go at the slightest spark. Probably kids, a dropped cigarette."
"Worth checking out anyway?"
"Didn't I just say I already did?"
"No, you said you looked into it, you didn't say you looked at them," says Sam, but that's just semantics.
"Quit it, geek boy," says Dean, punching him on the shoulder. "If you want to go marching around the lake to poke around in the ruins, be my guest. But it sounds like it'll be a waste of time."
"You think everything's a waste of time these days," Sam snaps, and thinks he sees an approving look from Jo out of the corner of his eye. He doesn't even know why he was looking for it.
"Maybe because it is," says Dean, then gets up and stalks into the bathroom, and Sam's contrite enough to let him.
:::
Dean's chatting up the girl in the real estate office, ostensibly to find out more about those old summer homes though, having seen her, Sam knows better, so he's resigned to downing his beer alone while he waits.
"We need to talk about what happened."
Jo has to be drunk, there's no way this would be happening if she wasn't drunk. But Sam looks in her eyes and knows that they're both stone cold sober.
"We don't have to do this," he says.
"And here your brother always said you were the touchy feely one."
"Not anymore," says Sam. "Dean's the one touching and feeling everything he can get his hands on."
Sam would feel bad about that if it seemed like the comment had any effect on her at all.
"What the hell happened to him, Sam?"
"I don't know."
"I think you're the only one besides Dean who does."
"No really, Jo, I don't know. He just came back like this. He's never said one word about what happened."
"Well, I guess I know something about that," she mutters, and Sam's pretty sure he's meant to pick up on exactly what she's talking about. He's pretty sure he's meant to ask.
"And we can keep on not talking about it," he says. "I'd be pretty okay with that."
"I was attacked by a demon, Sam," she says, opening badly-healing wounds with just a few words. "A demon. And I'd be a shit hunter if I couldn't deal with that and move on. Might as well pack it in and go home and play with Barbie and Ken if I can't separate the demon from the man."
Sam wonders, though, if that's not something she's actually done yet. If that is, in fact, what she's in the middle of trying to do, right here and right now.
"I don't remember most of it."
She twists her lips. "Probably better that way."
"Did I...?" He gestures helplessly and hopes the implication is clear, because he doesn't want to say the words. Isn't sure if he can. He knows she ended up tied up, and remembers some of the ugly things that came out of his mouth, but everything before that is a big blank.
"No!" she says. "No. Jesus. No."
He can't be sure she's telling him the truth but it feels true, or maybe he just desperately wants it to be.
"It would have, but it didn't," she adds, making the difference fierce. "You didn't do anything."
"It's not fair I don't remember. To you. It's not fair to you."
Maybe if Sam actually remembered, though, then he could actually get past it. And that doesn't actually have much to do with being fair to Jo at all.
"The job's never been about fair," she says.
Jo talks about the job now like she knows it, not like before when her idea of hunting came from the tall tales of dozens of roadhouse patrons, each trying to outdo the last. She talks about it like she's lived it.
"You were never like this... before."
"You're giving yourself a lot of credit if you think you did this to me, Sam," she says. "I've been going on hunts for nearly two years since you last saw me, and I didn't need either of you to come riding to my rescue at any of them."
"Yeah, well, maybe you're not the one who needed rescuing," says Sam. But she needs something, she's getting something out of this, and Sam hopes that something's what she thinks it is.
:::
Jo's left her bra on the floor, halfway under the bed, and Sam's never understood how someone could leave something like that behind without noticing. Not unless they were in one hell of a hurry.
"Dean?" he says, waiting for some signal that Jo's the only one who's fled.
"Can't a guy clean up in peace," Dean calls from the other side of the bathroom door. "Jesus, Sammy."
"What'd you do, chase her off?" says Sam, picking up the bra and dropping it on Dean's bed like a shameful souvenir.
"I've been trying to get into her pants for years and you think I'm going to chase her off now?" says Dean. He's showered when he comes out of the bathroom, but his hair's a mess and his clothes are rumpled and mismatched.
"Yeah, but this isn't..." says Sam, except he doesn't know what it isn't any more than he knows what it is. "What are you doing?"
"Stay out of it, Sam," says Dean, and Sam flinches even though he knows what Dean's trying to do.
Dean doesn't get that staying out of it is the least safe thing Sam thinks he can do.
And Sam's allowed to be resentful that Jo can come in and enjoy the best parts of Dean and Sam's the one still there afterwards to clean up his messes, to shake him out of his nightmares, to feed him breakfast and make sure that Dean's still really with him every damn morning. And he gets to be resentful that he's put a lot of things on hold and there Dean is, getting every damn thing he wants, even if what he wants isn't what he needs.
"You really want me to stay out of it?"
Dean grabs clean underwear and slams the bathroom door, and that's the only answer Sam gets.
:::
If they ever want to go legit, Sam figures they can get work as private investigators in a heartbeat. Of the four missing persons, they find three of them within two days. All it takes is a Google search to find Mike Barlow, missing fifteen years ago and now working as a lawyer in Los Angeles, with a photo up on the internet and everything. Everything in the Barlow file had pointed to him being a runaway anyway; looks like the were right. Sam has to get into some police databases to find Maggie Gerard and Deanna Semenchuk - Deanna under an alias so that one takes the longest - but even that wasn't too hard. Maggie died three years ago outside Chicago and Deanna - or Lacy, as she apparently likes to be called - is serving time in Kentucky.
That leaves Jennifer Wilcox, and Sam just has a feeling that they're right about this. Ever since Dean did his time in hell, Sam's learned that his feelings about these things are pretty damn good.
Dean's gone off doing whatever it is Dean does when he goes off on his own - Sam doesn't want to think about it too hard, and not because he wants to spare Jo's feelings if Dean's banging the real estate bunny he's been spending an awful lot of time with - so Sam passes off his intel to Jo and lets her run with the Jennifer Wilcox angle. She's got the in in this town, she's made the connections, so she's the best choice to find out anything they can't from the police report, which is usually everything.
And Sam, Sam's got another gut feeling, this time about those houses across the lake - though that's less a gut feeling and more process of elimination - and screw Dean's real estate connection (though in all likelihood Dean's been taking care of that himself), Sam just wants to grab a flashlight and some boots and head over to take a closer look.
Sam just wants to do something he knows.
Part Two
Wish You Were Here
Dean's back from hell, Sam's still in limbo and Jo needs something more. Everyone's got issues.
Supernatural. 13,100 words. NC-17. Dean/Jo, Dean/Jo/Sam. Post 3.16.
Sam isn't sure how they're suddenly crossing into Nebraska when last thing he remembers they were heading Oklahoma way, planning to ride into Hadry just in time for supper. He yawns, stretches till he runs out of leg room, then reaches for the timeworn map they keep between the seats, stained and marked up and torn along the creases.
"Change of plans?" he says around another yawn, watching as a highway sign streaks past, too close to read the numbers.
"Something like that," says Dean, and taps his fingers against the steering wheel in time with Phil Rudd.
He's got a mark on the side of his neck, bruised and scratched and just starting to fade, and Sam wonders if it's from the waitress in Salt Lake City, the receptionist in Bedingfield, the legal clerk in Leaf Rapids. Two months since Dean came back to him and as far as Sam can tell all he's done is fought and fucked his way across the Midwest, state after state, leaving Sam to watch and wonder if the Dean he risked everything for ever really came back.
Maybe Dean's already done Oklahoma; it's getting hard to keep track.
"So what's in Nebraska?"
From what Sam can see out the passenger-side window there's not a lot besides weak fall sunshine and clumpy, dying roadside grass.
"I got a call about a job while you were busy snoring over there, Sleeping Beauty," Dean says like it's nothing. "Something's setting things on fire in Kernsville."
"Teenagers?" suggests Sam, tracing his finger along the map until he finds it, a faint speck nestled up close to the border. That's what it was the last time, and the time before that, and probably the time before that, too.
He watches Dean out of the corner of his eye and doesn't let the faint spark of hope ignite into anything else.
"Maybe," says Dean, the word slow and dubious, and maybe he actually wants this to be a hunt. Maybe Sam's not the only one who's itching to get back into it. But then he adds, "I was here with Dad once; there's one hell of a roadhouse outside town," and all that's left to wonder is whether this one's a fight or this one's a fuck.
What do you think's going to happen if you don't keep this up? Sam wants to ask him, but he thinks he already knows that answer and part of him just doesn't want to have to hear it.
"Should probably check it out anyway," he says, folding the map and putting it back where he found it. It's never stopped feeling wrong that they're not stopping to hunt - really, there's only been the in-and-out job in Kenosha, and that was all Sam - and he feels like he's not just the only one who wants it anymore, but the only one who even notices.
"Never know," says Dean, whistling as the song comes to an end, popping the tape out without even looking. "Grab me something, Sammy. Your choice."
"Since when?" says Sam. For a couple of moments he actually expects an answer, then quickly rummages through the tapes before Dean changes his mind. They're still Dean's cassettes, so they're still Dean's music, but there's a measure of satisfaction in it when Sam pops in And Justice For All and remembers an overnighter between Dallas and Charlotte when it played through enough times for Sam to memorize the lyrics. That's something that's all his.
"How much further?" he asks as he leans against the door.
"Dunno," says Dean, tapping the steering wheel again. "Maybe an hour?"
"Wake me up when we get there," says Sam and closes his eyes. Where Dean goes these days, Sam follows.
:::
It's called the Woodpecker Inn, only part of the neon sign's burnt out. Sam knows the moment he sees it that even if it hadn't been the only motel on this stretch of road - and it is, the rest of the highway outside town dotted with beds of dying flowers and farm supply dealerships - Dean would've pulled in just for that.
Sam gets out and stretches his legs the moment Dean stops in front of the front office, pressing his hands against hot black metal and popping vertebrae one by one. Dean tosses his keys in the air, catches them with a snap of his wrist, and heads inside to get them a room.
They don't stay long, only long enough to throw their bags on the floor of room fourteen, to secure the door and window, then Dean's hustling them back out to the car again. Not for drinks, though, so at least there's that. They find a mom and pop diner right there on the main drag into town, fading sign and vinyl booths and all, and Dean's flirting with the waitress before Sam can even get his ass in the seat.
He manages to pick up an unsecured wireless signal, probably from the walk-up across the street, and looks up a local article on the fires. It still reeks of mischief to him, just small-scale fires leaving behind some rough mark that looks more like a scribble than anything esoteric Sam's ever seen. If it weren't for the fact that Dean took the call he probably wouldn't be pursuing it at all.
He doesn't like the ones with fire. Never has.
"So where do you want to start?"
"With the apple pie," says Dean, his eyes still on the waitress, "and I bet she makes a mean milkshake."
"With the case, Dean?"
"Right," he says, stretching out long with his fingers laced behind his head. "Aren't you the eager beaver? Well, you can go ahead and plot all the sightings, if you're that anxious to get started."
"Dean, this is your hunt," says Sam. "You're the one who found it. Don't you think you might want to take an interest?"
"I am taking an interest, Sammy," he says. "I'm taking an interest in dinner. Can't very well hunt on an empty stomach, can I?"
But as Sam pulls out the local map they got from the motel office and starts plotting the sightings with thick black marks, Dean's eyes rarely leave the paper, and it kindles that spark inside him Sam's been trying not to poke at.
"Doesn't look like much of a pattern to me," he says when he's done, capping the marker after plotting the last one and wrapping himself bodily around the map as the waitress serves up their coffee so they don't look like the creepy ghost hunters they are.
"Well, they're not exactly drawing the Mona Lisa on the town, but that looks like a definite cluster," says Dean, four packets of sugar in his coffee and spraying the edge of the map with granules.
"Yeah, a town-shaped cluster," says Sam. "I don't think this is telling us anything."
"Never really expected it to," says Dean, stirring and sipping. "How long you think pie takes anyway?"
"Why are we here, Dean?" says Sam, folding up the map and sticking it in his front pocket, closing his laptop and pushing it aside.
"Because this is what we do, Sam."
Sam wonders if they're both really thinking of the same thing when Dean says 'this'.
:::
Sam gets why they've really come to Kernsville as soon as they finally step inside the 'kickass roadhouse', and he doesn't let Dean pretend it's a coincidence.
"You could've warned me," he hisses in his ear, trying to put a passable smile on his face.
"If I'd warned you, you never would've set foot outside the 'Pecker Inn," Dean hisses back, and steps up to the bar to greet Jo Harvelle.
Who promptly slaps him in the face.
"Not that I don't appreciate the foreplay," he says, "but don't you think we should get the hellos out the way first?"
"God damn you, Dean Winchester," she says, leaning forward with both hands on the bar, knuckles white with the pressure. "You think you can just come waltzing in here after everything without so much as a phone call?"
"I wouldn't call that a waltz," he says. "More of a saunter, with a little swagger there at the end." She glares at him until he relents. "Your mother called me," he says. "What have you gotten yourself into, Jo?"
"Goddammit," she says, throwing her towel on the bar. "Bobby Singer needs to learn to keep his damn mouth shut. Tony, I'm taking my break!"
She leads Dean into the stockroom behind the bar, Sam slipping behind like his shadow, and for a minute she looks like she doesn't know whether to kiss Dean or deck him. Sam could've told her he probably would've enjoyed both.
It would be Jo. It isn't enough that Sam's been off his game for weeks now. No, it has to be Jo, who Sam isn't even sure he can look in the eye. Jo, who'll let herself get sucked right into the black hole of Dean without batting an eye, who Sam can't warn because her trust in him was stripped away a long time ago.
"I don't know what the hell she thinks she's doing, getting involved, but I can handle this on my own," Jo says finally. "Besides, from what I hear you boys aren't really up for riding to anyone's rescue."
"Honey, we're always up for riding to the rescue," says Dean. Without any more warning than that he reaches out, grabs hold of her left wrist, pushes her sleeve up to her elbow. She makes a token effort to pull it away again but the fresh white bandages are already on display.
Something's setting things on fire in Kernsville and it's not teenagers.
"I never told Bobby about that, so I sure as hell know he never told my mother."
"Lucky guess," says Dean when he lets her go. "Don't worry, I’m not going to tell her either. So how about you fill us in on this hunt?"
The blackmail, Sam thinks, is implied.
"I can handle it," she says, shoving her sleeve back down to her wrist, "just like I handled the other three in the area, so you two can just go back to doing whatever it is you do now. I didn't ask anyone to come."
"Yeah, actually, I think we're done with what we were doing," says Dean, which is sure as hell news to Sam. "You really think I want another call from your mother telling me you've been incinerated by some pissed off spirit because we thought we'd have a better time in Texas? I think I'd be safer back in hell."
Jo inhales sharply but Sam's used to it now, lets the comment pass. It's better when he says it than when he tries to keep it in.
Sam's not even a part of this conversation, just a not-so-innocent bystander, hanging back by the doorway and poised for a quick exit as soon as Jo's gaze finally falls on him. But it never does, which he's pretty sure is anything but an accident.
"I get off shift at two," she says, coming to a belated, abrupt decision. "You can come back then and I'll show you what I've got on this thing. If you're gonna stay around town I can't stop you, but don't get in my way."
"Actually I thought I might stick around for a few drinks, see the sights," says Dean, finally showing her the empty, cocky grin that Sam's so familiar with these days.
"And what sights might those be?" she says, posing in the doorway, waiting.
"Only the best ones," he says, and she leads them back out into the bar again, slips in behind it and lets Dean claim one of the stools.
Sam doesn't say anything to either of them, orders his beer from someone else and stays in the shadows with one hand in his pocket until he's buzzed enough not to feel the pangs of regret quite so sharply anymore. He doesn't remember all of it but he knows damn well what happened between him and Jo, and he's pretty sure it's the kind of thing that can't be forgiven and forgotten.
There's something different about coming someplace where Dean knows someone, where they collide head on with Life Before, and Sam wishes to hell he knew what it meant.
He leaves before two, slipping out when no one's watching. Dean'll know where he went, and Jo doesn't need to.
:::
In some ways it's like it used to be before Dean's deal came due. But there's a desperation to it now, like Dean doesn't just want to find someone to spend the night with, he's afraid of what'll happen if he doesn't. Sam knows anger when he sees it, and he knows comfort when he sees it, and now he knows what it looks like when the two get all tangled up.
Sam's been through his own hell, but it wasn't Hell, capital H, and he can only speculate what it's really like. Dean's never told him, and Sam's always shied away from asking, like the question itself will do as much damage as the place. It doesn't take a genius to know it's bad, you just have to see the haunted expression Dean gets when he thinks Sam isn't looking. When he thinks no one is.
He waits up, but three in the morning passes with no Dean and Sam's eyes are closing in spite of him. Assuming he comes home at all - and Dean almost always does - then five a.m. will bring another nightmare and Sam needs to be ready for it.
Dean's not afraid of the unknown anymore, he's afraid of the known, and Sam doesn't know what the hell he can do about that.
:::
They meet at noon in the diner Sam found, faded decor but fresh food and fast service, and no one curious enough about their business to stick around long enough to hear it. Jo's already given Dean the bare bones of the case so Sam's playing catch-up as quickly and quietly as he can. The names of the witnesses. The times of the fires. He feels like he's eavesdropping, hardly even wants to make notes in case he's called on his intrusion.
"So you didn't talk about this last night," says Dean, reaching for her bandaged arm. Jo snatches it away. "You know we need to know."
"It's the same as all the others. I'm fine."
"Yeah? Tell it to your mother."
"Don't you dare," says Jo, and she knows they need to know but it's pretty clear she's not all that happy talking about it.
The thing is, Sam gets why Ellen called, in the abstract way that he understands how normal parents react when their children are in danger, but what he doesn't get is why she called them, called Dean. He would've thought, after everything, the Winchesters would be pretty low on her list of white knights.
"I was out three nights ago," Jo says, tugging her sleeve up bit by bit. "I wanted my own photos of the marks, looking for something everyone else didn't think to look at, maybe find some kind of pattern." Dean nods. So does Sam, but she's not looking at Sam. "I was on Lakeshore and it just...." She shrugs; the rest is clear on her arm when she uncovers it for them.
"Did you feel anything unusual?"
"You mean besides searing pain?"
"Searing pain isn't unusual when something sets you on fire." Dean should be looking at her arm but he's not, he's watching Jo's face. "Anything else?"
"I thought I felt someone's hand around my wrist," she admits after a moment, "but it was gone too quickly, might've just been my bag catching on it or something."
The mark looks more like scattered matchsticks than any kind of symbol, swollen red lines crossing here and there on the pale skin of her forearm and not triggering any memory, anything at all, in Sam's brain. He wants to get a closer look but doesn't dare.
"Do you have a picture of yours, too?" he asks finally, fixing his eyes on the table instead of her. Jo slides a flash drive over in his direction, only her hand venturing into his range of vision.
"You'll probably get more use out of this than Dean will," she says. She's right about that, but probably for the wrong reasons.
"So we're all thinking spirit?" says Dean.
"That's my working theory," says Jo. "No one's seen an apparition but I can't find lore on anything else that would fit without some other kind of activity too."
"This seems like a pretty classic revenge scenario to me," says Dean. "Some pissed off spirit of a murder victim wants to lash back at their murderer, only they don't know where to start. We've all seen it before."
"Any leads on the symbol?" Sam asks, sliding the flash drive across the table from one hand to the other.
"Nada," says Jo. "Zip. I can't find a mention of it anywhere. I even got Bobby on it but he hasn't called back with anything yet. Seems like he had time to make some other calls, though."
"Do we have anything at all?" says Dean, and Jo bristles.
"I've even checked the god damn museum and art gallery, just in case it was some sort of local thing, but all they've got in there is glazed pottery and folk art saw blades," she says. "And get this: there've been no known murders in the past fifty years."
"None?" says Dean.
"None."
"That right there's a little weird, don't you think?"
Sam shrugs, answering when Jo just glares at Dean. "Could just be it's a small town," he offers. "What about more than fifty years ago?"
"You have to go into the archives to get any further back," she tells him while looking at Dean. "I'm still following up on unexplained deaths and disappearances."
"Or it could be something else entirely."
Yeah, it could be some pyromaniac pixies with dubious artistic taste, but Sam doesn't think that's all too likely. They're on the right track with the spirit notion, he's got a gut feeling about it. He's also got a gut feeling that they're not going to get too much else done at the diner this afternoon.
"I'm going to hit the archives, then," he says, and Jo quickly draws him some sketchy directions on a napkin. Their eyes never meet, not once. "I'll catch up with you two later?"
"You know where to find me," says Dean, and waves him off.
:::
When Sam comes back to the room Dean's stretched out alone on the bed with his face buried in the pillow, but the shower's running and Sam recognizes the t-shirt Jo was wearing when he last saw her.
He digs his toothbrush and shampoo out of his duffel bag and when Jo comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel he doesn't do anything more than nod at her as he slips inside. Just because she's not a stranger doesn't mean Sam should treat her any differently than anyone else Dean's brought back to the motel in the past two months.
Sam wonders if she knows she's the latest in a long line, stretching from South Dakota and zigzagging all over the Midwest. He wonders if she knows she could very well be the last. He wonders if Dean knows it either.
When Sam comes back out again twenty minutes later, she's already gone.
:::
"You let him get away with an awful lot, don't you?" says Jo, wandering over to his end of the bar, and for a moment Sam's not even sure she's speaking to him. But there she is, and there he is, and nobody else is near enough to be the object of her attention.
"Dean's Dean," he says after a minute, his gaze skirting away from her eyes. "He's just doing what he does."
He doesn't think he's letting Dean get away with anything so much as burying his own anger down so deep that he doesn't have any other reactions left. But at least he's self-aware enough to know it.
"I know you're lying to me," she says, so mildly it almost isn't an accusation except in the way it so clearly is. "Don't know why, but--"
"Don't know what else to say." And even if he knew how to say it, he's not sure he would.
Dean's been living like someone's going to take it away again at any moment and he wants to suck up every bit of life he can, save it all in his head for those long, dark days in hell. And Sam doesn't know how to tell anyone he knows exactly what Dean's doing and why, not even Dean.
He doesn't think Dean gets why it's making him so god damn miserable, either.
"Your brother needs someone to light a fire under his ass."
"Yeah, I think fire's the last thing Dean needs anymore," says Sam, staring at his drink. "We shouldn't have come. You talked to Bobby, he could've come if you needed him."
"Bobby was never going to come and we all know it," says Jo. "Bobby knows I could've done the job on my own."
"Then why?" says Sam. "Why get involved? Why'd he even tell your mother?"
"I was hoping you could tell me that," says Jo, shaking her head. Maybe it's the only reason she's talking to him at all, because her only other option is Dean and she's starting to see just how far that doesn't get her. "That man knows damn well that every time my mother hears I'm on a case she tries to get someone else to take it. She thinks I don't know, but she does."
"I'm sure she knows you don't want--"
"You know what? My mother doesn't know what I want. Your brother doesn't know what I want. And you sure as hell don't know what I want."
"She's your mother. She worries," says Sam, veering from the more dangerous path. "That's what mothers do, isn't it?"
"They also admit when their children are adults and can make their own damn decisions," says Jo, slapping the cloth against the bar, "instead of this pretending I'm on my own where she gets every hunter she knows keeping tabs on me like I'm still a little girl."
"I'm not sure letting their kids grow up is really in a mother's job description," says Sam, scratching his fingernail into the soft wood. But then, he wouldn't know.
"Damn it, Sam, will you look at me?"
He's been looking at her, out of the corner of his eye, in reflections, looking at her hands or hips or hair or breasts. But now he looks up and meets her eyes and tries not to look as guilty as he feels.
"It's not just my mother. None of you ever stopped thinking of me as a kid," she says, meeting him gaze for gaze. He flinches, but then so does she. "I know it wasn't you."
And he knows they're not talking about the case anymore.
The thing is, Sam's been able to push it all away, focus on things that were a lot more pressing and just not dwell on what went down between him and Jo in the bar that night. He'd done worse things that week, and buried those deep down too. But Jo hasn't had that luxury, or maybe she just didn't take advantage of it.
"You're telling me you can look at me and not remember?"
"No," she says with an uncomfortable honesty. "But I'm working on that. Would probably be going better if you were too."
"Winchesters don't work on their issues," he mutters as he pushes back from the bar. "I'm going to go see if Dean needs anything."
Jo reaches to grab his wrist, and even though she doesn't actually make contact he reacts like she has. "He doesn't," she says. "Sam, he doesn't need anything you can give him right now."
"Now who's checking up on who?" he says, snatching his wrist to himself. "Dean will always need what I can give him."
"Dean needs you to stop coddling him," says Jo, backing up a step herself, reaching for a bar rag and idly wiping down the old wood over the fresh scratches.
"I'm not--"
"Like hell you're not," she says. "He thinks you think he's going to break."
He sure as hell doesn't think Dean told her that, but maybe Dean talks too much after someone sucks his brains out through his dick. Or maybe Jo's just talking about things she doesn't know anything about.
"Well maybe he is," says Sam. "In case you hadn't noticed, my brother's kind of fucked up these days."
"Whatever he is right now, you had a part in making it," says Jo, "so if you don't like it, maybe you'd better figure out what to do about it."
Sam thinks he liked it better when they weren't talking, and doesn't look at her again as he turns around and leaves the bar.
:::
Sam doesn't look, he sees, and he thinks there's some kind of important, fundamental difference there. He doesn't plan to see them, he doesn't look in the window for the express purpose of finding them in a compromising position, he just looks in the window of the motel room, blinds open, and there they are.
It's not the same thing.
What he sees, is Dean on his knees, Jo's back against the wall and one knee hooked over his shoulder. He doesn't need to see Dean's tongue to know where it is, what it's doing to her. It doesn't take much imagination to picture it sliding over her, into her, to imagine his teeth grazing her clit, imagine him sucking it between his lips. He can even time it all to the expressions on her face, the clenching of her fists, the hitches in her breath that leave her chest heaving.
Sam can't stop watching, not now, not until Jo's fisting Dean's hair with one hand and the wall sconce behind her with the other and crying out like Dean's tongue's found something previously undiscovered within her. The way Dean's been piling on the experience, maybe it has.
Sam leaves before he sees his brother get off too, which doesn't stop him from wondering whether Dean's going to take her up against the wall, throw her on the bed, let her slip down to the floor and go down on him.
He doesn't want to know that much, doesn't want to take it that far. There's a line, one of many, and Sam's not prepared to cross that one.
Five hours later Sam's shaking Dean out of another nightmare, the latest of dozens, and it's like the rest of the evening never even happened.
:::
Sam doesn't like this town. Everything's either too dry or too wet, wooden buildings standing like so much tinder along the main streets and then withering away on the waterfront where the little lake itself looks like it's swollen with infection, dirty foam at the docks and dead plants floating on the surface. He doesn't like it because everything's just a little wrong and Sam doesn't know how to fix it, and he's stuck in this town while everything around him seems to be finally building to something, something he's not sure he's going to like.
Dean and Jo are... he doesn't even know. They might be working the case, checking out the missing persons like they said they would. They might be fucking in the bathroom of the sheriff's station.
And Sam is walking the aging waterfront with a half-assed map in one hand and a coffee in the other, wondering how it all came to this place, this time.
It was never supposed to be like this. Dean was supposed to come back from hell and everything was supposed to be the way it was before, before Sam was killed, before Dad died, before Sam changed. Dean was never supposed to go to hell at all.
He almost wishes they'd gone to Oklahoma after all, that he was sipping tequila in some shadowy corner of some shadowy bar waiting for Dean to finish up in the back alley so he can head to the motel with him. He doesn't like it, but it's something he understands. As much as they're on a case right now, Sam doesn't understand what the hell is going on.
But at least there is a case, and if he can't figure out what's going on in his brother's head then at least he's got this. The waterfront's a bust, Sam hasn't found anything of interest at all, but across the lake amid the trees he thinks he spies some houses, maybe cottages, that weren't on any map of the town he's looked at. Maybe it's nothing, but maybe it isn't, and at least with this he has something to show for his afternoon.
When he ambles back to the diner, sun low in the sky and stomach rumbling, the car's already outside and Dean and Jo are laughing over some private joke in the window. Sam almost doesn't go inside, but he's got nowhere else to go.
"We've got four disappearances," says Dean, shoving the files in Sam's direction as soon as he sits down, "and don't ask what Jo had to go through to get them."
"Wasn't planning to," says Sam curtly. "What are those places across the lake?"
"Old summer homes," says Jo immediately, so apparently Sam hasn't discovered something new at all. "Most of them are abandoned now; the lake's not all that scenic anymore. They've even let the trees grow up alongside the highway so they don't have to see the old places when they pass by. People around here just want to remember what they used to have, not what's actually there now. Not that I can really blame them. One of these days I swear someone's going to go in and, owners be damned, they'll just raze them to the ground."
"Any fires?" says Dean, raising an eyebrow at her.
"Two," she says, but she's already shaking her head. "I already looked into it; there were no fatalities in either one. Not even any injuries. The places were just dried up and ready to go at the slightest spark. Probably kids, a dropped cigarette."
"Worth checking out anyway?"
"Didn't I just say I already did?"
"No, you said you looked into it, you didn't say you looked at them," says Sam, but that's just semantics.
"Quit it, geek boy," says Dean, punching him on the shoulder. "If you want to go marching around the lake to poke around in the ruins, be my guest. But it sounds like it'll be a waste of time."
"You think everything's a waste of time these days," Sam snaps, and thinks he sees an approving look from Jo out of the corner of his eye. He doesn't even know why he was looking for it.
"Maybe because it is," says Dean, then gets up and stalks into the bathroom, and Sam's contrite enough to let him.
:::
Dean's chatting up the girl in the real estate office, ostensibly to find out more about those old summer homes though, having seen her, Sam knows better, so he's resigned to downing his beer alone while he waits.
"We need to talk about what happened."
Jo has to be drunk, there's no way this would be happening if she wasn't drunk. But Sam looks in her eyes and knows that they're both stone cold sober.
"We don't have to do this," he says.
"And here your brother always said you were the touchy feely one."
"Not anymore," says Sam. "Dean's the one touching and feeling everything he can get his hands on."
Sam would feel bad about that if it seemed like the comment had any effect on her at all.
"What the hell happened to him, Sam?"
"I don't know."
"I think you're the only one besides Dean who does."
"No really, Jo, I don't know. He just came back like this. He's never said one word about what happened."
"Well, I guess I know something about that," she mutters, and Sam's pretty sure he's meant to pick up on exactly what she's talking about. He's pretty sure he's meant to ask.
"And we can keep on not talking about it," he says. "I'd be pretty okay with that."
"I was attacked by a demon, Sam," she says, opening badly-healing wounds with just a few words. "A demon. And I'd be a shit hunter if I couldn't deal with that and move on. Might as well pack it in and go home and play with Barbie and Ken if I can't separate the demon from the man."
Sam wonders, though, if that's not something she's actually done yet. If that is, in fact, what she's in the middle of trying to do, right here and right now.
"I don't remember most of it."
She twists her lips. "Probably better that way."
"Did I...?" He gestures helplessly and hopes the implication is clear, because he doesn't want to say the words. Isn't sure if he can. He knows she ended up tied up, and remembers some of the ugly things that came out of his mouth, but everything before that is a big blank.
"No!" she says. "No. Jesus. No."
He can't be sure she's telling him the truth but it feels true, or maybe he just desperately wants it to be.
"It would have, but it didn't," she adds, making the difference fierce. "You didn't do anything."
"It's not fair I don't remember. To you. It's not fair to you."
Maybe if Sam actually remembered, though, then he could actually get past it. And that doesn't actually have much to do with being fair to Jo at all.
"The job's never been about fair," she says.
Jo talks about the job now like she knows it, not like before when her idea of hunting came from the tall tales of dozens of roadhouse patrons, each trying to outdo the last. She talks about it like she's lived it.
"You were never like this... before."
"You're giving yourself a lot of credit if you think you did this to me, Sam," she says. "I've been going on hunts for nearly two years since you last saw me, and I didn't need either of you to come riding to my rescue at any of them."
"Yeah, well, maybe you're not the one who needed rescuing," says Sam. But she needs something, she's getting something out of this, and Sam hopes that something's what she thinks it is.
:::
Jo's left her bra on the floor, halfway under the bed, and Sam's never understood how someone could leave something like that behind without noticing. Not unless they were in one hell of a hurry.
"Dean?" he says, waiting for some signal that Jo's the only one who's fled.
"Can't a guy clean up in peace," Dean calls from the other side of the bathroom door. "Jesus, Sammy."
"What'd you do, chase her off?" says Sam, picking up the bra and dropping it on Dean's bed like a shameful souvenir.
"I've been trying to get into her pants for years and you think I'm going to chase her off now?" says Dean. He's showered when he comes out of the bathroom, but his hair's a mess and his clothes are rumpled and mismatched.
"Yeah, but this isn't..." says Sam, except he doesn't know what it isn't any more than he knows what it is. "What are you doing?"
"Stay out of it, Sam," says Dean, and Sam flinches even though he knows what Dean's trying to do.
Dean doesn't get that staying out of it is the least safe thing Sam thinks he can do.
And Sam's allowed to be resentful that Jo can come in and enjoy the best parts of Dean and Sam's the one still there afterwards to clean up his messes, to shake him out of his nightmares, to feed him breakfast and make sure that Dean's still really with him every damn morning. And he gets to be resentful that he's put a lot of things on hold and there Dean is, getting every damn thing he wants, even if what he wants isn't what he needs.
"You really want me to stay out of it?"
Dean grabs clean underwear and slams the bathroom door, and that's the only answer Sam gets.
:::
If they ever want to go legit, Sam figures they can get work as private investigators in a heartbeat. Of the four missing persons, they find three of them within two days. All it takes is a Google search to find Mike Barlow, missing fifteen years ago and now working as a lawyer in Los Angeles, with a photo up on the internet and everything. Everything in the Barlow file had pointed to him being a runaway anyway; looks like the were right. Sam has to get into some police databases to find Maggie Gerard and Deanna Semenchuk - Deanna under an alias so that one takes the longest - but even that wasn't too hard. Maggie died three years ago outside Chicago and Deanna - or Lacy, as she apparently likes to be called - is serving time in Kentucky.
That leaves Jennifer Wilcox, and Sam just has a feeling that they're right about this. Ever since Dean did his time in hell, Sam's learned that his feelings about these things are pretty damn good.
Dean's gone off doing whatever it is Dean does when he goes off on his own - Sam doesn't want to think about it too hard, and not because he wants to spare Jo's feelings if Dean's banging the real estate bunny he's been spending an awful lot of time with - so Sam passes off his intel to Jo and lets her run with the Jennifer Wilcox angle. She's got the in in this town, she's made the connections, so she's the best choice to find out anything they can't from the police report, which is usually everything.
And Sam, Sam's got another gut feeling, this time about those houses across the lake - though that's less a gut feeling and more process of elimination - and screw Dean's real estate connection (though in all likelihood Dean's been taking care of that himself), Sam just wants to grab a flashlight and some boots and head over to take a closer look.
Sam just wants to do something he knows.
Part Two
