Primal- Seeing is believing, Part 2

[adrenalineshots]

“Took you long enough.”

Sam was going for a complicated mix of pissed off and casual, but the fact was that, after calling an aggravating number of times to Dean’s cell and getting nothing but his voice mail over and over again, Sam’s stomach had turned into an acid pit. After what had happened the previous night and given Dean’s propensity for trouble, Sam knew that he had every right to be worried sick.

He just didn’t want to give Dean the pleasure.

“Got a flat tire,” Dean said, throwing his jacket at one of the empty chairs. He bent down, tossing their cooler open before picking up a beer. “Found anything?”

Sam made a living out of noticing details that other people might have otherwise miss. It was as much a part of who he was as was the color of his hair. The fact that there was no grease stains on Dean’s clothes or hands jumped to his attention as easy as someone had pointed a flashlight at them.

Dean loved his car too much to not get as dirty as a five year old finger-painting when he was fixing up the Impala.

“Just that the victims had the most boring, normal lives ever,” Sam replied. “Did you have to take off your shirt to change that tire?”

Dean paused, lips closed around the bottle’s opening. He gave his brother a sideways look that expressed just how weird he found Sam to be.

“It’s inside out,” Sam explained.

There was a moment of panic and frustration that passed too quickly through Dean’s eyes for Sam to notice if he’d hadn’t been looking for it in the first place.

Dean was hiding something about where he’d spend the day. And the fact that Dean was trying so hard to hide it from him only made Sam more curious.

“What are you now, the laundry police?” Dean threw at him defensively.

Sam rolled his eyes. “Whatever... what about you, find anything?”

Dean’s shoulders seem to sag in relief as Sam dropped the matter and changed the subject, another alarm sign that made him sure that he needed to find out what Dean was up to.

Dean shrugged; he picked up a slice of the pizza Sam had brought them for dinner. Hours ago. “The Faerydae’s place was empty, might get luckier tomorrow. And apart from a freaky accident last year, there was nothing extraordinary about Martha’s life.”

Sam’s interest perked up at Dean’s words. It was too much of a coincidence. “Accident?”

“Yeah,” Dean said around a mouth full of cold pizza. “Bus filled with people and some car. Martha survived, but the woman driving the car wasn’t as lucky. Why?”

“Mrs. Hoffmann and Glenn’s roommate also mentioned an accident last year,” Sam said as he made his way to his computer.

“Lots of people were in car accidents last year. That’s just life.”

Sam gave him a look even as he started typing in the search engine. They both knew that there was no such thing as weird coincidences in their line of work. What were the odds of three of their victims being in the same traffic accident?

“Fine... do your thing,” Dean said, pulling off his boots. “I’m gonna hit the shower.”

With I-10 driving right through the city, the number of car accidents that popped up in Sam’s initial search was a little bit daunting. He filtered out those by number of mortal victims, remembering what Eduardo, Martha and Mrs. Hoffmann had said.

In the end, only one of the results involved a bus. Sam clicked on the news’ link.

From the gruesome pictures alone it was easy to guess that anyone inside the car that had collided frontally with the bus hadn’t had a single chance of surviving. Skimming through the text, Sam easily recognized the names of the victims of the case that had brought him and Dean to town. Hoffmann was there, the same as Glenn, and Martha. The only one missing was the first victim, Brian Faerydae.

The name of the only mortal victim of that crash, although not belonging to the list of people killed recently, still rang familiar to Sam. Ellen Zimm.

Why was that name familiar?

Sam looked around the room, searching for his notes on the case. Just as his landed on the stack of papers to his right, the lights went out. All the lights, including the screen of his fully charged computer.

“T’fuck?!” Dean’s voice came muffled over the sound of the shower’s running water. “Stop messing with the damn lights, will’ya?”

Sam’s mind was racing. There was something in the room with them, something that had managed to pass through all the sigils and barriers they had put on place.

Sam grabbed the nearest weapon and raced to his brother. He bumped with a wet and solid mass around the area of the bathroom’s door.

“Jesus, fuck! Watch it there,” Dean complained, hands thrown out to find where Sam had landed after their painful collision. Instead of clothes, Dean’s fingers brushed against the cold metal of the gun in Sam’s hand.

Sam could feel the second Dean’s body tensed as he too realized that there was something amiss. Wordlessly, Sam tried handing Dean the gun he’d picked up. He had a knife in his boot. It wasn’t much but it was definitely better than nothing.

Standing shoulder to shoulder, Sam felt Dean pressing the weapon back at him at the same time he remembered. Dean needed no extra weapon.

Whatever was in the room with them seemed in no hurry to make the first move. Sam felt watched, the fine hairs at the back of his neck standing at attention, muscles coiled and ready to spring to action. They were sitting ducks inside that dark place. “We need to get to the door.”

Sam took a step forward, knowing that Dean would be right by his side. Another step. Sam’s hand brushed by the table, situating himself. Eight feet to the door, left side. By his side, Sam could hear Dean cursing as he stubbed his foot against one of the beds.

Just as Sam was about to course correct and pull Dean closer to lead him away from the beds, a faint gush of warm wind hit him in the face. “Did you feel that?” Sam asked, face turning to look at Dean even though his brother was nothing more than a shadow at that point.

And yet, somehow, Sam knew that there was panic in Dean’s eyes even before he heard the warning.

“Sam, look out!”

The wind smacked into Sam like an invisible fist, pushing and punching and stealing his breath until Sam banged against the wall.

Everything went white for a few seconds and then Sam was sliding down the wall, his legs barren of any strength. All around him the wind was howling, pins and needles moving faster than sound stinging his skin.

Sam blinked, his hands barely moving to cover his face from the onslaught. He knew he had to get up and help Dean, he knew he had to move and do something, but his body was rebelling against him, conspiring to render him useless.

In the middle of all the darkness and starbursts of white that Sam was pretty sure were a sign he might’ve knocked his head a little too hard, he saw blue.

Neon strong, bright blue, moving randomly in the middle of the air, casting weird lines and dots of after glows in the dark. Squinting, Sam could almost discern a pattern underneath the glow, a design. The dots came and went, bright and laser like one second, gone the next, like Morse code gone wild. The lines, however, were always there, forming an elaborate picture that would not stand still long enough for him to put a name to the shape.

Dean grunted in pain and it suddenly clicked. It was the tattoo. The blue glow was coming from Dean’s tattoo. Which meant that the blue dots right above it were coming from... Dean’s eyes?

Sam was having a hard time focusing or making sense of what was up and down, but there was no way he would sit by and let his brother stand alone against the invisible force trying to kill them. Groping around on the floor, his fingers brushed against cold metal. His gun.

The blue lines were actually helpful. All Sam had to do was aim to the empty space in front of the light show.

Sam fired.

For a split second, there was a flash of light inside the dark room as the gun discharged. It was all too fast, too bright and brief to see anything and yet... Sam could swear that Dean was fighting empty air.

He fired a second and third time, more to catch glimpses of what was going on rather than because of its effectiveness. The gun, loaded with salt rounds, was proving itself useless.

Sam’s brain was in a whirlpool of frantic ideas surging as fast as they were discarded as useless. The thing attacking them was invisible, it was standing between them and the door and they had no idea how to fight it. Even Dean’s magic sword, that had managed to have an effect on pretty much every type of monster Dean had used it against so far, wasn’t having much result now.

“Stand still, you mother fucker,” Dean grunted, the tiredness in his voice alarming Sam. Whatever Dean was doing to keep it at bay, it wouldn’t work for much longer. They needed to figure out what the thing was and beat it or find a way to get the hell out of that room.

Using the wall as a support, Sam gingerly got to his feet. Standing up made the wind feel all the more corrosive, eating away at his skin like he was in the middle of a sand storm. He patted his pockets, desperate for anything that might turn their situation around. His fingers touched something large and filled with liquid. His flask of holy water.

They weren’t dealing with a demon; that much Sam knew. He had been the one laying out the salt lines and the various sigils to ward them against angels and demons as soon as they claimed the room as theirs. It had become as intrinsic to their routine as brushing their teeth in the morning.

There was a change in the heavy air inside the room and, even without being able to see much, Sam knew that the battle had turned. Seconds after he arrived to that conclusion, a solid body collided with his, bone gritting on bone and stealing the breath from his lungs.

“Dean? Dean, you okay?”

From the lack of movement from the body lying practically on his lap, Sam already knew that there was going to be no answer. Without Dean’s mysterious sword to keep the thing at bay, they were screwed. This was it. This was when the Winchesters bought the farm.

Not for the first time, Sam cursed the fact that the damn sword only worked for Dean and that, with his brother currently unconscious -God, Sam hoped he was just unconscious and not something worse- they had nothing to fend themselves.

The wind picked up, physically pushing Sam and Dean against the wall. A vision of their bodies being found in the morning like the other victims, eyeless and with their mouths sowed shut wasn’t as disturbing to Sam as the idea that they would both end up in the autopsy room of that weird Dr. Zimm-

Ellen Zimm, Dr. Zimm. In a place like that, there was next to zero chance that the two of them weren’t related.

The connection, literally when it was too late and too useless, almost sent Sam into giggles. He pulled Dean closer, instead, afraid that the intrusive wind would pull him away and he would lose track of his brother in the darkness. If they were about to die, at least they would be together.

Dean’s body pressed the holy water flash against Sam’s ribs and he pulled out. In his mind, he knew that the thing was going to be useless against whatever it was that was seconds away from ending their life, but then again, what did he had to lose?

Although he could not see their attacker, Sam could certainly feel its presence inside the room. It was something heavy and powerful, filling the whirling wind with static. Sam waited until he was sure that the thing was close enough and tossed the entire content of the flash in the general direction of his gut feeling of ‘evil’.

If he’d ever got to win the lottery, Sam figured the feeling wouldn’t come as close as the elation he felt when the holy water landed with a hiss and an inhuman howl. The wind skipped and stopped altogether before all the lights came back on.

Sam blinked, the sudden, bright light sending daggers of pain to his brain. He could hardly believe what had just happened. In fact, he had no idea what had just happened.

The room around them was a mess, the two of them at the center of a hurricane.

“Dean?”

Now that he could actually take a look at his brother and find out what was wrong, Sam’s finger flew to the pulse point in his brother’s neck. The skin under his fingertips was warm and slick with sweat, but Sam needed the steady beat of a heart to put his worry at rest.

He knew that he should get up and move Dean to one of the beds; he knew that he should, somehow, secure the room in case the entity came back; he even knew that the fact that the coroner and the mortal victim of the accident that linked all the victims was important and needed to be addressed.

At the moment, however, the only thing that Sam’s addled brain could process was Dean’ steady heart beat under his fingertips and the solid wall behind his back. Sam hugged Dean closer to him and let the darkness pull him under again.

:o:

Dean woke up sweating. Sam had always been a furnace, heat irradiating from his skin like a damn fireplace; Dean knew that because they’d shared a bed on more occasions than he was comfortable with.

What he didn’t know and -honestly- was kind of scared to find out, was why the hell he was currently draped over Sam’s lap like some fucking huggy bear. Buck-naked.

First Castiel and now Sam. No sense of personal space whatsoever, the both of them. “I have to be the only fuck in the world who this crap keeps happening,” Dean mumbled as he pried free of Sam’s grip on his arms and scurried away.

There was sand all over the floor, peppering the soles of his feet as he took a couple of steps.

As Dean took in the destruction in the room, the events of the previous night came rushing back. That damn whirling piece of shit that seemed to dissipate in silvery smoke every time he had tried to strike at it had beaten the crap out of the both of them.

Suddenly, his annoyance at Sam’s lack of respect for his personal space was gone, replaced by deep worry.

Kneeling back down, Dean’s hands roamed over the back of Sam’s head. Flacks of dried blood covered his fingertips. “Shit, Sam!”

Sam’s eyes moved under their lids at the sound of his name and Dean moved closer, grabbing his brother’s face. “That’s it, Sammy. Quit being such a lazy ass and wake up.”

Obedient in a way he refused to be when he was fully conscious, Sam obliged his command. “Dean?”

“How’re you feeling? Anything hurt?” Dean quickly asked, sitting back down. His legs were shaking and his muscles felt to have the same consistency as over-cooked pasta. “Besides the ostrich egg at the back of your head?”

As usual, Sam went from zero to full-charged in the blink of an eye. “Shit! Dean... are you okay? What the hell happened? Did it come back? Shit! I’m sorry man... I couldn-“

Dean got up, hiding a wince as he reached for some clothes. If Sam’s brain was working that fast, firing questions left and right like it was ducks’ hunting season, than it had certainly not turned into mush. “I’m fine,” he started, ignoring the way he could feel every muscle in his body complaining about the workout they’d gotten the previous night. “And seeing as we’re both still breathing and, you know, with eyes still attached to our faces, I’m guessing the freak gave up. Hell, I’m pretty sure it gave up, because I sure don’t remember winning,” he finished with a tired sigh. In fact, the last thing he could remember was having a sharp argument with the wall and losing.

“I threw holy water at it,” Sam blurted out.

Dean stopped midway through getting dressed. Holy water? “Why?”

Sam was struggling to push himself up and Dean moved to land a hand. Sam waived him off. “Salt wasn’t working and it was the only other thing I had on me,” he offered sheepishly, exchanging parking his bottom on the floor for parking it on a chair. He wasn’t feeling still quite right for vertical. “Maybe I got the protection sigils wrong... maybe it is some kind of demon?”

Dean shook his head. The weather report could get the weather wrong; the frigging English dictionary could get a word wrong; but Sam never got the protection sigils wrong. “It wasn’t a demon. It wasn’t possessing some poor bastard and there was no black smoke either. Whatever it was, it was made of this crap,” he pointed out, crouching down to grab a handful of sand from the floor and letting it slide between his fingers. “It was like fighting the damn mummy.”

Dean paused, giving room for Sam to start running off with at least ten different theories about what had attacked them last night, a handful of creatures that they might be dealing with or at least one good idea on what the fuck was going on. The silence, however, was weird.

Looking up from lacing his boots, Dean found his brother looking at him like he was a strange plant in an animal exhibition. “What? Shirt inside out again?” Dean asked even as he checked for himself.

“You saw what it looked like?”

It sounded simple, but somehow it felt like a trick question. Dean fought the urge to deny everything. Instead he nodded, regretting it immediately as he saw Sam’s eyes narrow. “I mean, it was dark and all, so there’s really no telling, but-“

“The thing was invisible, Dean,” Sam blurted out. “Even with the gunpowder flash of the gun, I couldn’t see its shape or form. In fact, the only thing I could see was your tattoo and your frigging eyes, glowing in the dark.”

Dean stopped breathing. “What?”

“You heard me,” Sam went on, closing the distance between them. “Last night, when you were fighting the invisible being that you can apparently see, your eyes were glowing blue, with a matching tattoo.”

“That’s... that’s not possible,” Dean said, standing his ground. It couldn’t be possible. The tattoo had never done that and his eyes... “You hit your head pretty hard, Sam,” he reminded both himself and his brother. The mind plays tricks when the brain gets bounced around. “I’m pretty sure you were seeing things that weren’t there. That couldn’t be there.”

Sam deflated, sitting back on the chair and rubbing the spot at the back of his head. “But you could see it, couldn’t you?”

Dean nodded, his eyes focused on the floor. Truth was he was as clueless about what it all meant as Sam was. “I had no idea, Sam,” he confessed. “I honestly thought you were seeing the same thing as me.”

Sam closed his eyes. Dean could read the size of his brother’s headache by the lines around his eyes. “Okay... okay,” Sam whispered, running his fingers through his disheveled hair. “One shit at a time... we need to pay a visit to Dr. Zimm.”

Dean’s brow furrowed. What did the coroner have to do with any of this? “Was there a new victim?” he asked confused, thinking that Sam might’ve forgotten to mention it earlier.

“Not a new one,” Sam said, the ghost of a smile playing over his lips. “An old one.”

:o:

It was a thin connection. Dean had pointed that out as soon as Sam explained his theory. It was, however, their only thread to follow.

“So, the coroner’s wife was the only one who bought the farm,” Dean asked, trying to get all the facts straight in his head. Not an easy feat when his thoughts kept being sidetracked to the stuff Sam claimed he’d seen the previous night. “And every single one of our victims was in that bus accident last year?”

Sam started to nod, winced and settled for a mumbled ‘yeah’. “Well, Faerydae wasn’t there. He is the only one who doesn’t fit.”

Dean twisted his nose. It felt like they were pulling strings out of thin air. “And who was to blame for the crash? What did the police report say?”

Sam fumbled with the papers in his lap, cursing when half slid from his legs to land on the floor of the Impala. He made one half-hearted attempt to reach down and get them but gave up on the complicated gymnastics the action would involve. “I don’t think that really matters, Dean,” he ended up saying. “None of the victims were actually driving the bus, whether the fault lay with the bus driver or not. I think this is more about the survivors rather than who’s to blame for the one who died.”

Dean nodded, testing the idea in his head. People did really stupid things for those they loved. He would never forget the amount of grief and pain that Sue Ann La Grange, the preacher’s wife, had caused when she decided that it was actually a good idea to keep a reaper as pet and have it do her biding. In the end, she had ended up lying in the bed she’d made, but not before a lot of good people died at her hands.

If the coroner had somehow managed to find some obscure entity to seek out some misguided revenge in his name...

Dean unclenched his fingers from around the wheel and parked the Impala in front of the Zimms’ house. The doc had better have a very good explanation for what was going on.

The man’s car was parked at the curb in front of the house but no one was answering the door.

“Screw this,” Dean mumbled, fishing his lock picks from his pocket. “Cover for me.”

Good thing about having a giant for a brother? Even facing a main street as they were, if Sam stood in front of Dean, no one would even guess that there was a second person behind him, breaking and entering.

“We’re in.”

The house looked abandoned. It was obvious that someone lived there because the boots by the door had fresh dirt on them and the mail had been picked up, but there was a lack of care in every surface and wall that made it hard to believe that someone actually called that derelict a home.

There was a smell of mold in the air, mixed with unwashed body and some unidentified aroma that both Winchesters had long learned to associate with death.

Sam exchanged a look with his brother, both of them reaching for their guns.

“Dr. Zimm?” Dean called out, even though he knew no one would reply.

They moved forward, feeling like intruders on some lost mausoleum. Explorers uncovering the great pyramids. Dean was pretty sure that, like them, they were going to find nothing but dead people inside.

Dirty, empty glasses lay scattered across a number of pieces of furniture, halos of wet stains long dried underneath them attesting to their ancientness like some sort of carbon dating.

There were stacks of papers and books leaning against both walls of the tight corridor that led to the other side of the house, precarious towers that made for an obstacle course Sam and Dean could barely pass.

They found what was left of Dr. Zimm in the bedroom at the end of the corridor.

There was an anemic string of sunlight coming from between the drawn curtains, but it was enough for them to see that they had lost their only lead in the case. More than a day ago, from the looks of his corpse.

Dr. Zimm, like the others, was lying on his bed, dead. “Irony... ain’t it a bitch?” Dean whispered, taking in the sowed mouth and the missing eyes. “Just when we wanted him to spill the beans...”

Sam closed in to place two fingers under the man’s jaw. There was really no point, not when decay had clearly already set in, but given that he had been so certain that the coroner was the guilty part, Sam felt like he owed the man that much.

Dropping his hand, Sam looked closer at the body. Zimm looked... at peace. Given the way he had died, peacefulness was the last thing Sam would have expected to find in the man’s expression, and yet, there it was.

There was also sand all over the bed. “Dean, look,” Sam called out. “More sand.”

Dean pulled the curtains apart, flooding the room in light. “Well... that’s new.”

Sam looked at his brother, following his gaze to the wall above the bed. There, in big black letters that seemed burned into the plaster, were the words DRöM SöTT.

“That’s...” Sam started, pausing with his mouth opened and pulling out his phone. “I have no idea what that is.”

“Yeah... kind of like this whole case,” Dean vented.

He looked around the untidy room. Everything that was out of place -the piles of clothes, the turned over picture frames, the tilted paintings- seemed to have been like that for a very long time. Whatever had happened in that room, it hadn’t been the same kind of assault that he and Sam had suffered in their motel room the previous night. There were no signs of struggle here, no indication that such a violent act had been committed.

The only place that seemed to be cleaner and actually untouched by the general unkemptness of the whole house, was the white vanity table at the corner of the bedroom, facing the window. On it, there was a selection of beauty creams, makeup and jewel boxes that Dean was pretty sure didn’t belonged to the defunct Dr. Zimm.

In the middle of the mirror, looking back at him, was the smiling face of a woman in her forties. Mrs. Zimm. “It’s like a fucking shrine,” Dean whispered, unable to not feel a little disturbed by the arrangement.

Behind him, reflected on the shiny surface of the mirror, Dean could see Sam, sad face contemplating the vanity table’s contents, the last piece of his wife that Dr. Zimm had managed to hold on to, probably left untouched since the day she’d died. “People do crazy things for the ones they love,” he said. “Specially the ones that are taken away from them.”

Dean shook his head. It wasn’t like either of them could stand on much of a high horse about doing crazy shit over loved ones -they kind of held the record on that one- but there was crazy and there was crazy. “Come on,” he said, suddenly itchy to get out of that place. “Lets find out if the doc here chewed on more than he could handle and got chewed back.”

:o:

“Dröm sött,” Sam whispered, trying out the words against his tongue, as if looking for a flavor. “None of the other victims’ reports mentioned any writing on the wall.”

“Those the weird words on the doc’s bedroom?” Dean asked. Somehow, they sounded more ominous when written than coming out from Sam’s mouth. “What is that, anyway? Klingon? Elvish?”

Sam snorted. “Lets rule out real languages before we move on to geek ones, okay?”

“Whatever,” Dean said with a practiced shrug that made him look like he actually cared that his suggestions had been put aside.

“I need some decent net connection,” Sam confessed, closing his computer. The rather impressive databank that he had managed to put together on his computer had nothing on those words or any combination similar to them. He needed to widen his search.

Dean nodded. He pulled over at the first motel offering free WiFi. “Check us in and see if you can make heads or tails of the creepy poetry.”

Sam looked at the motel’s neon sign. ‘THE LUCKY STAR’. Well, with two busted lights as it was, it read more like ‘THE UCKY TAR’, which Sam found to fit it perfectly. Different from the one they had left trashed earlier that morning and yet, still managing to look exactly the same. “And you?” he asked, picking up his stuff and getting out. From the way he had kept the motor running, it was clear that Dean had no intention to follow him inside.

Dean looked at the street, avoiding Sam’s eyes to look at the non-existing traffic. “Gotta deal with some shit,” he offered. “Be back later with some food, okay?”

Sam gritted his teeth, even as he kept the smile on and nodded to the back of a speeding away Impala. For someone who spent half his life lying through his teeth, Dean was pretty bad at it. But if that was the way his brother wanted to do it, then two could play the game.

Grabbing his backup phone, Sam dialed in the client assistance number for the phone he’d purposefully left in the Impala. “Hello? Yes, I was wondering if you could help me? I lost my phone and I really could use your help tracking its GPS signal... yeah, sure, my social is...”

:o:

Sam’s not even sorry for the car he steals. The thing is a rust bucket that coughs out black smoke out its ass every two miles and if, when he’s done with it, Sam rolls it down a hill and watches it crash and burn, someone will probably thank him for that. Possibly the car itself.

It does take him from point A to point Dean, which fortunately isn’t very far or Sam would probably end up having to steal a second car.

The Impala is parked outside a private lane, old houses lining from one side and the next. The whole neighborhood speaks of old money, ancient roots and Sam’s at a loss as to just whom it is Dean might know there.

Dean was just sitting in the car. Given the time it took for Sam to get a location on the cell phone he had conveniently forgotten in the glove compartment and finding a car to drive him there, Dean must had been sitting in the same spot for quite some time.

Sam nibbled at his lip. It felt wrong to be spying on his own brother like that and Sam was well aware that he was the last person that could complain to Dean about keeping secrets from your family, but...

Not two nights before, Sam was patching him up for a frigging bullet wound that Dean refused to tell him how he got; and then there had been the whole freaky thing with the blue lights in the room, something that Sam was ready to discard as an hallucination from his concussed brain if it weren’t for the fact that he couldn’t let it go; and to crown all the weird with a big cherry of whatthefuck!? there was the fact that Dean now could, apparently, see invisible beings.

Sam was concerned. Hell! He was downright frantic about the way Dean was behaving and if the only way to find out what was going on with his brother was to spy on him, then that was exactly what Sam was going to do. Even if he hated himself about doing it.

Seemingly having come to a decision of his own, Dean stepped out of the car and walked with determined steps to one of the houses.

Sam waited until he was out of sight before following him in. Tension mounting within, he struggled to keep his breathing even, heart hammering against his chest. Sam knew his brother’s moods and body language and from the way Dean was moving, Sam was pretty sure that he was about to get very nasty on whoever lived in that house.

So, when a woman came to the door and greeted Dean with a smile as she moved aside to allowing him in, Sam felt a little bit betrayed. Betrayal tinged with quickly mounting anger-based frustration.

He’d been worrying himself sick and Dean had taken time off their case to make a booty call?

Fuming, Sam made his way back to the piece of shit car he had driven there. For a split moment, he considered just taking the Impala and let his brother walk back to the motel, worrying himself sick that the Impala had been stolen. That would serve him right.

Ultimately, though, the last thing Sam wanted was for Dean to ever find out that he had followed him there. So, he made his way back to the motel, checked them in and sat himself in front of the computer, looking for a translation for the message left behind by their mysterious creep. If Dean never found out, the whole situation would never be so utterly humiliating for Sam. Probably.

:o:

Dean sat in the Impala, knuckles white from the grip he was keeping on the steering wheel. He had managed to avoid the matter with Sam, distracted first with Sam’s injury and later with the only lead they had in their case.

After leaving the Zimms’ house, clueless on what to do next and with too much time to think as he drove, there was no way Dean could keep it at bay any longer.

He had been fine and almost normal before accepting the weird-assed cleansing ritual thing that Madame Lapin had convinced him to take. And afterwards, he was seeing stuff that he was not supposed to see, stuff that was invisible to Sam and his eyes, apparently, was frigging glowing -glowing!- in the dark! Fuck! The math wasn’t that hard to figure.

Now, he was here, sitting outside her house, convincing himself why it was a bad thing to wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze until something snapped.

Taking a deep breath, Dean consciously let go of the steering wheel one finger at a time. Talk first, shoot later. He could do that.

There was no assistant to answer the door this time around. Lapin herself opened the door, all smiles and niceties, like they were old friends.

Dean counted to ten in his head, in Latin to make it extra grittier. “We need to talk,” he spat, not waiting for her invitation to get inside.

The second she closed the door behind him, Dean’s fingers were around her neck, despite everything he had told himself not to do. “What the fuck did you do to me?” he said through clenched teeth.

Lapin blinked, looking at him with a degree of amusement that was not helping Dean’s anger management issue. Her fingers covered his across her neck, the movement more sensual and intimate than the situation called for.

Her skin was cold, seeming to leech out any heat that he radiated. When her fingers pulled at his, loosening his hold on her neck, Dean didn’t resist.

“Tell me,” he hissed, pulling his hands away, satisfied that they’d left an impression behind, finger shaped bruises on her neck. “Tell me what you did to me and how the fuck we’re gonna change it back!!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Dean could see Lapin’s assistant now, peeking out from one of the rooms, looking like he was one step away from calling the police.

Lapin waved him away, as undisturbed by Dean’s shouting as she had been with his fingers around her neck.

“I didn’t do anything to you, Dean, mon chéri, ” she finally said, her eyes meeting his, unflinching, bearing nothing but sincerity. “That much I can guarantee you. Now, if you tell me what happened, I might be able to help you figure out what the problem is, oui?”

Dean ran his fingers through his short hair. His head was sweaty and he felt sticky all over. On edge. “That’s bullshit! I came here yesterday looking for some answers and when I leave, I’m...”

Lapin moved closer, head tilting to the side, trying to catch his eyes. “You... you what? Tell me what’s wrong, Dean.”

“I’m seeing things,” he whispered, his voice suited for confessional at a church. He felt like was confessing something important. Admitting that he was a freak. “I’m seeing things that no one else can see.”

In her silence, Dean wondered if this was how crazy people felt. Admitting to something so massively huge and waiting for someone else to validate that for them, to absolve them, pat them in the shoulder and say ‘that’s okay... everyone has imaginary friends’.

“I know you have no reason to trust me,” Lapin said, finally breaking the silence. “But believe me when I say that when you left this house yesterday, you carried out with you only what you had carried within, only lessened. The cleansing bath was only ever meant to clear you mind and give you a better view of-“

Dean snorted, a deranged and abrasive noise that sounded wrong in every aspect of its ugliness. “Oh, I definitely got a fucking better view, didn’t I?”

Lapin sighed, for once sounding like the ancient being that she truly was. “You’re not listening, mon chéri,” she said sternly. “You need to stop asking what changed since yesterday to make you see what no one’s supposed to see and start asking yourself what can you see that no one else can.”

“That’s a complete load of cra-“

Dean stopped, giving himself time to do something other than simple reaction and denial. She could actually be on to something.

When he had been hanging between life and death, Dean had been able to see Grim Reapers, his Grim Reaper to be exact, a being that was invisible to all else. And when he’d been on his last hours before getting on the Hell train, he had been able to see all sorts of demonic beings, including the invisible Hellhound that had been dispatched to bite his head off.

But those had all been temporary, really fucked up situations. They had come and gone and Dean had remained the same messed up human being he had ever been.

There was, however, one type of being that Dean had been able to see. That, for all he knew, he would be able to see for the rest of his life because he had been a guest -prisoner- at their realm.

“Fucking fairies!”

:o:

It took Sam a whole of ten seconds to get a translation on the words written above Zimm’s bed. After he had spent two hours going through every obscure dead language he could think of.

Turned out ‘dröm sött’ was Norwegian for ‘sweet dreams’.

Ten seconds after that, Sam knew what they were fighting and was kicking himself for not having seen the signs before. The sand had been a pretty frigging clue, after all.

The Sandman.

Of course, there was absolutely no information on what the Sandman actually was or how to kill it. All Sam could find were some old, North European folklore legends and a couple of children’s tales.

One of the folklore stories he dug up, however, had kind of explained the missing eyes. Apparently, the Sandman had a reputation for more than fabricating dreams and filling people’s eyes with grit; it actually liked stealing people’s eyes.

The sowed mouths were still a mystery.

According to some, Sam read, the Sandman was some type of fairy. To others, a witch.

Sam leaned back into his chair, feeling the soreness of being in the same position for too long. He wrinkled his nose. Neither fairy or witch seemed to fit in what he and Dean had found out thus far, nor did it fit what had happened when they were attacked.

For one, witches were still humans and the thing that had attacked them was incorporeal, or at least invisible to most people. And fairies...

It had taken a great deal of misery and pain for him to get his memories back, but Sam was thankful for them now. He remembered how frustrated that leprechaun had been with his fairy-compulsion to count every single grain of salt that Sam had spilled in front of him. If fairies had attacked them in that room, with all the salt lines that he had laid on every window and door, they would’ve spent the entire night counting grains instead of beating the crap out of them.

Besides, since when were fairies or witches affected by holy water? It just didn’t make any sense.

Of course, on the other hand, if Sandman was in fact a fairy, that would explain why Dean had been able to see it while Sam had not. Dean, after all, had been the one snatched right from under Sam’s soulless fingers and taken… some place that they had never heard of and from where Sam would have never been able to retrieve his brother if Dean hadn’t been able to rescue himself.

Sam got up and paced the length of the room. It would make his life so much easier if the explanation for Dean’s actions the previous night was as simple as that. Sandman was a fairy and Dean had been able to see it because, of the two of them, he was the only one who could. Neat, wrapped-up-in-a-nice-red-bow explanation.

The opposite of that was, of course, facing the possibility that Sandman was something else entirely and that Dean had been able to see it because Dean was… different.

It wasn’t such a deviation from reality -well, their reality, at least- for it to be completely out of consideration. After all, his brother did have a tattoo that could turn into a deadly sword at the speed of Dean’s thought. Was it really so insane to think that he could also see monsters that were usually hidden from normal sight?

Sam shook his head. No, the real question here was whether Dean was absolutely clueless about his abilities or if Dean was actually aware of them and was just playing Sam for a fool. Again.

After all, it took them almost being killed for Sam to even find out that Dean had left Purgatory with a new toy. It wasn’t every day that they clashed with invisible monsters, so, how hard would it really be for Dean to hide something like this from him?

Whether or not Dean was playing him, Sam couldn’t help but wonder what all of these changes -if that was in fact the case, and that was the mother of all ugly-assed ifs- meant for Dean’s future. How far from the ordinary could you get and still call yourself human?

Sam ran a trembling hand over his hair. That particular question had haunted him for a long period of his life. All of his life, it would seem on some days. The darker days, the days when he would look into the mirror and feel that the answer to that question was ‘this far’. The days he feared he was a monster.

Dean had convinced him otherwise, had shown him that he was still human, that he was still his brother. Sam had no idea if he had it in to do the same for Dean.

Shaking himself out from such a line of thought, Sam turned his brain towards the matter at hand. Which flavor of monster was Sandman… animal, vegetable or mineral?

Sinking back into his uncomfortable chair, Sam ignored the computer and pulled out the stack of papers he had managed to gather so far. Dean gave him shit about the volumes of prints and paper files that Sam always seemed to cultivate during their cases, but the truth was Sam did it for his brother. Dean was a tactile kind of guy and sometimes -okay, most of the times- he would figure something out in those stacks of papers that Sam had missed in his computer files.

Sam aligned all of their four -now five- victims in a row on top of one of the beds and just stared at them, wishing that they could talk to him and tell him what had killed them. As five gruesome corpses stared back at him, Sam did realize something. They were still missing an important part of their puzzle.

He had talked to Mrs. Hoffmann and Mathew Glenn’s roommate and Dean had seen Martha Figgs’ sister, but they were still missing information the most important victim of all, the one that didn’t fit. Brian Faerydae.

Dean had mentioned something that there had been no one home when he had tried the Faerydaes’ but given Dean’s recent penchant for lying, Sam had to consider that he might’ve not even come close to that house.

Looking at the clock, Sam thought about waiting for Dean to come back and the two of them visiting the Faerydaes together. He quickly dismissed that idea.

Whatever Dean was doing with that woman -and no, Sam wasn’t even going to start down that road- it was clearly more important than the case they were working.

Two stolen cars in one day. That was a new low, even for Sam.



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