if whiskey don't kill me
Heh, well, okay. Feeling a little self-conscious about this one, for reasons that will probably become obvious. Forging ahead, however! Nowhere else to go, I've found.
It's a pre-series AU, and a real horror story. If you care not for spoilers, be fairly warned.
Sam/Dean, rated R, 10240 words.
Buy You a Mockingbird
By Candle Beck
The coffee at the hospital always tastes like fucking death.
Leganda makes a face down at the styrofoam cup, bitter at the back of her mouth, and goes into the staff room where the cops are waiting.
It's Tivez and McInerney, the first a grade-A asshole and the other his grinning moron of a partner, and a highway trooper Leganda doesn't recognize, his rust-colored hair stiff as brush bristles.
"You got one?" Leganda asks the room at large. She sets down her coffee on the table and flicks open the file she was given back at the office. "Sixteen year old John Doe, single vehicle car crash out on the 10?"
The cops exchange cop-looks, narrow and blunt. The trooper gets up from his chair, offers his hand to Leganda.
"You're from CPS? I'm Officer Jack Cawson, I called in the wreck."
"Yeah, hi, Alice Leganda. The kid?" She kinda waves at his hand, implying the general impression of a shake without actually touching him. Most of her attention is on John Doe's abbreviated medical chart, the paper-clipped color photograph showing a wild-eyed sneering boy with blood dried wine-dark under his nose and a huge knot on his forehead half-hidden by a snarled mess of hair. There are soft restraints around his arms and legs holding him to the bed.
Tivez, vague patronizing aura shimmering on his thin black mustache, says, "Mild concussion, broken wrist, assorted cuts and bruises. Nothing too serious."
"This says there was another man driving the car."
"Yeah, they got him up in the ICU. He's in a lot worse shape, waiting to go into surgery."
"John Doe's dad," McInerney supplies. "According to the kid."
"Neither of them had any identification on them?" Leganda asks, making a note on the kid's chart.
"There were sixteen different counterfeit IDs in the glove compartment," Cawson says. "All different names. Pictures show John Doe and the dad and another guy."
"Con artists?"
"Possibly. We're still putting the pieces together."
"All right." Leganda caps her pen emphatically. She looks up at Tivez and McInerney sipping their coffees, chipped-stone cop faces, and Cawson standing awkwardly with one thumb hooked in his heavy belt. Leganda blows out a breath, makes a twirly hurry-up gesture with her hand. "What else?"
Cawson glances at the two cops, fresh out of the academy and showing it in every hesitant move he makes. Legada waits, impatient, tapping the pen on the chart.
"He was handcuffed to the dash," Cawson says.
Leganda blinks. "What?"
"That's how he broke his wrist. His dad was driving when they crashed into the tree, and he, he. He had the kid cuffed to the dash."
Leganda processes that. She looks down at the picture of John Doe, bruised and furious, his broad shoulders sitting uncertainly atop his lanky frame, straining against the soft padded straps. "And what, you figure he must have had a good reason? I gotta tell you, I'm not wild about keeping an injured minor restrained."
"Kid's been trying to make a run for it ever since he regained consciousness," Tivez says, sitting back with his legs sprawled obscenely open in that jackass way. "Almost broke Pete's jaw the last time, so yeah, we strapped the little shit down."
"Good for you," Leganda says with a bright phony smile, despising Tivez more than a little. She slaps the file shut. "All right, get me in there."
*
"You wanna tell me your name?" Leganda asks the kid, pulling a chair up to his bedside.
The kid glares straight ahead at the television bolted to the mint-colored wall, which is showing some garish talk show thankfully muted. He's skinny and too tall, like he's been recently stretched on a rack, made more awkward by the restraints pinning his elbows above the fresh cast on his left hand and wrist. His right hand is in a white-knuckled fist on his leg.
"C'mon kid, give me something to work with here. You don't want me calling you John Doe, right? It's dehumanizing."
His eyes flick over to Leganda for a second, mouth knotted up small, then back to the television. He doesn't answer, but Leganda didn't really expected him to. She exhales.
"Okay, whatever you want, Johnny," she says, and the kid flinches. She watches him, waits. Almost thirty seconds pass.
"Take off these straps if you care about it so much," the kid says eventually in a whispery little rasp, his voice gone from screaming.
Leganda sits back, giving him a no-bullshit look. "Cops who were in here earlier said you were taking swings at them."
A swallow that looks painful moves the kid's throat. "I didn't mean to. I, I won't anymore."
"All right, I'll make you a deal. A compromise."
The kid is immediately suspicious, that hunted shrewd look that the real fucked-up kids get, trying to figure out which cruel angle each adult is attempting to play. His good arm jerks against the strap, biceps flexing. "What?"
"You tell me your name--just your first name. And I'll take the straps off your arms. Not your legs, just your arms. That sound fair?"
Long considering moment, the kid's muddy eyes scanning and he's smart, Leganda recognizes, probably working out the most believable lie.
"Sam," the kid says.
Leganda nods, writes the assumed alias down on his file in between quotation marks. She stands to undo the buckles on the restraints, weaving them out from around the kid's arms while he tenses and clenches his jaw below her.
"I'm Ms. Leganda, I'm with Child Protective Services. Do you know what that is?"
So-called Sam's lip curls up, and he tosses her a contemptuous look, give me a fuckin' break. Leganda half-smiles.
"You've had some experience with my department before, huh?"
No answer to that. Sam itches at the place on his arm where the cast meets skin, hissing with the relief. His hair falls in front of his eyes as he ducks his head, something in the revealed slant of his neck making him look incredibly young for a second.
"Well, let's start with the basics, shall we? You and your dad live here in town?"
Sam shrugs, fidgets. "We move around a lot."
"Uh-huh. And what's your dad do that keeps you moving around so much?"
"Construction," Sam says, really obviously lying. "Gotta go where the job is, you know."
"Uh-huh. You got any other family nearby we should call? Your mom?"
"My mom's dead," Sam says.
"Sorry to hear that. Anyone else?"
"No, there's--no."
A wicking unevenness in the kid's voice, and Leganda just stares, waiting him out. Sam's fingers twiddle at the sleeve of his scrub top, his face professionally blank but he's giving himself away in every tiny gesture he makes, scared skittish coltish thing that he is.
"Is, my dad, is he-" and Sam doesn't seem to know what he actually wants to ask, trailing off with a flash of frustrated rage darting through his eyes, his lips sealing up into a thread.
"About to go into surgery, last I heard. We won't know much until that's done."
Sam nods. His good hand is shaking, cheeks all hollow. He's skinnier than he should be, tall as he is, those big shoulders waiting for him.
"Where were you guys going when the car crashed?" Leganda asks. She watches his face, sees the next lie write itself out.
"We were going to the bowling alley," Sam says.
Leganda lifts her eyebrows, nonplussed. "The bowling alley. You don't say."
Sam pastes an empty smile on his face, fairly disturbing on his battered boyish features. "I love to bowl."
"Right."
She goes back to watching and waiting. Sam attempts to stare her down and his attempt is pretty good for a kid his age, but eventually he falters, looking away as his good hand fists in the stiff hospital sheets.
"Look, can you just--can you get me some water or something?" Sam asks, worsening the rasp of his voice to sound particularly pathetic.
Leganda looks around for a pitcher but there's not one in the room. She gives Sam a considering look.
"Make you another deal," she says. "I'll get you some water if you promise to tell me at least one thing that's not a lie when I get back."
Sam's mouth does a sullen sneering thing, his eyes glittering fiercely. "Fine."
"All right, sit tight."
Going back out into the hallway, Leganda cocks her chin and smirks at Cawson, who's slouched in a chair across from the door and almost injures himself attempting to straighten up and look like a grown-up person as he catches her eye. His wide-brimmed trooper hat falls off his knee and rolls itself to a stop like a coin on the floor. Leganda says, "Be right back."
There's a nurse in purple scrubs standing behind the admit desk, and Leganda is in the middle of asking him where she can get a pitcher when Sam bursts out of the room, barefoot and gawky in his hospital gown, reeling. He skids to a stop in front of Cawson and they stare at each other blankly for a moment before Sam whirls and sprints for the far end of the hallway, where a glowing neon EXIT sign shows the way.
"Cawson!" Leganda yells, jolting the trooper into action. He takes off after the kid, his belt clanking loudly. "Fuck," Leganda spits as she rushes after them, because he's not going to catch Sam, Jackie Joyner-Kersee couldn't catch Sam, his flying bare feet. If they lose this kid they'll never see him again, not until he turns up beaten bloody in an alley somewhere, frozen solid in a stranger's tool shed, choked to death and left crumpled on the side of the road. Leganda knows exactly how badly these things tend to go. It's a horrible crushed-up thing in her throat, something she needs to fix.
And then, something of a miracle. A white-coated doctor, big guy with a square grayish head, steps out of the last patient room, registering at once the fleeing teen and the huffing state trooper behind him, and hunches like a football player, one arm hooking out to catch Sam around the waist and bring him slinging to a stop.
"No!" Sam screams, crazy animal sounds as he wrenches viciously against the doctor and they both fall backwards into the exit door, slamming into the bar and swinging it open, the briefest shock of clean daylight visible, bluest sky, and then the doctor hauls Sam back inside and Cawson is there to secure him and the door thunks shut, casting Sam's twisted agonized face in only fake light again.
*
Sam won't stop cursing and snarling and fighting once they get him strapped down again, snapping the locks onto the restraints this time. He's red, gasping, his neck corded with the effort, and Leganda doesn't know what's in the shot the nurse gives him, something pretty close to Valium by the way Sam goes slowly and heavily limp against the bed, his eyelids falling to half-mast and sticking there. He breathes shallowly through his mouth, staring at Leganda with this expression of blurry helpless betrayal. Leganda looks back at him, not especially affected.
"Not bad for someone who was in a car wreck two hours ago," Leganda tells him. "I don't think you should be running around with that giant knot on your head, though."
Sam doesn't say anything. He's vibrating, like there isn't room enough inside him, like he's about to split at the seams.
"You were gonna get me in serious trouble, too," Leganda says, trying to draw him out. "I thought there was an unspoken assumption with that deal that if I unstrapped you, you wouldn't try to make a break for it."
Sam's lips move ahead of his voice, like he's sounding things out before he feels comfortable saying them aloud. "You gotta let me go."
"Why's that, Sam?"
His eyes move, seeking inspiration in the medical detritus, the empty second bed. Desperation laces through his shredded voice. "I gotta. Gotta get back."
"Back to where, Sam?"
Shaking his head, Sam's mouth turns down, his good arm flexing against the restraints. The bump on his forehead is still darkening, bad moon rising. Leganda watches him for a moment, and says, "All right," and gets up, leaves the room. She hears Sam make a scraping confused sound at her back.
Leganda visits the ladies' and then the vending machines, and then gets Sam that cup of water.
Sam has his eyes closed when Leganda comes back in the room, but he's clearly still conscious, banked energy shuddering in his arms, the too-sharp line of his jaw. His eyes open to slits at Leganda clearing her throat, and then back to half-mast as he registers the water she offers, the Twix poking temptingly out of the pocket of her suit jacket. Sam tips his chin, his bottom lip trembling for a second before he masters himself, jerks his head a little bit, meaning, come on then.
Leganda carefully sets the cup against the kid's mouth, tilts it slowly up as he drains it in one pull. They don't spill a drop.
Leganda puts the cup aside on the tray, sits back in the chair. Sam looks vaguely ashamed now, being tended to like an infant, and still really pissed-off, fury crackling in his eyes.
"So who was it you were trying to get back to?" Leganda asks.
Familiar sneer, it's plainly the kid's default. "Maybe I just don't like being tied to a goddamn bed."
"Understandable. That doesn't look like much fun at all." She pauses, then says, "Who's waiting for you, Sam?"
Sam flinches. He looks away, hand kneading the sheets. Little twitches on his face, scratching a story together. This kid lies like he breathes; Leganda has seen it a bunch of times before.
"Look," Sam says, wrecked voice dropped down conspiratorially. "You wanna help me, right?"
Leganda nods, keeps watching him.
"If I, I told you where to go, or where to send those cops, would you just, would you just do it and not, don't ask me why yet, could you just do that?"
A cold tail of dread curls in Leganda's stomach. She inclines her head slightly. "Where?"
"You can't ask why," Sam says, and he's pleading. "You just gotta send them, you gotta tell them to hurry."
"I'll send them," Leganda promises. "Where?"
"Old Mill Road," and Sam's voice cracks right down the middle, furious tears standing bright in his eyes. "Down by the river, all the way down where the road runs out."
There are a few summer cabins where he's talking about, but it's months too late in the year for anyone to be out there. Sam and his dad must be squatters, which surprises Leganda not at all.
"What are they supposed to be looking for?" Leganda asks. Sam's mouth goes shivering tense, instant refusal leaping into his face, and Leganda leans forward, hardens her voice. "They have to know what they're looking for, Sam. If you want them to find it, they have to at least know-"
"My brother," Sam blurts out, and it's like a cue, a trigger as the tears in his eyes spill over. His shoulders jerk; he wants to dash them angrily away, but of course he's still strapped down. His face contorts, all different kinds of pain. "You gotta find my brother Dean, you gotta tell them to go right now," and Sam is choking, disintegrating right in front of her, all the pent-up rage and fear breaking the drugged borders of his mind, overrunning him.
Leganda tips toward him instinctively, hand lifting in a gesture meaning, calm down, we'll fix it, but Sam yanks his head back and forth and bares his teeth and says like it's killing him, "You gotta get him out of there, please," and all Leganda can say is, "Okay, yes."
*
Tivez grumbles, "What the fuck," and tries to bluster his way out of being sent on a "fuckin' wild goose chase" out on Old Mill Road, but Leganda isn't very interested in his shit.
"Just get out there, would you? They've probably been squatting in one of the summer cabins, start there."
"We don't take our fuckin' orders from you, lady," Tivez tries to say, McInerney a pasty looming shadow at his side.
"No, you take them from my friend Teresa Hockstetter," Leganda says sharply, naming the mayor. "You know, the woman who adopted her son through my department last year? Whose side do you think she'll take if I have to call her up and explain this mess to her?"
Tivez shoots her a poisonous look, but he's just had his balls handed to him and everyone saw it, his partner staring determinedly at the floor. Tivez snatches up his jacket and stomps out of there, McInerney at his heels. Leganda blows out a breath, her father in her head telling her, not all cops are pigs, but you be sure to watch out for the ones who are.
She lingers in the side room for a minute, gathering herself. A flash, a picture of Sam's tortured face, that cold twisting dreadful thing in her gut getting worse.
Leganda checks in on Sam's father's surgery with the nurse at the admit desk, checks in with Cawson who is on his feet opposite the room now, his hand resting preemptively on the butt of his weapon, and then fills up another cup of water and heads back in.
Sam presses against his restraints the instant he sees her. Dull glittering marble eyes fighting off the sedative; anyone else would probably be six miles underground by now.
"Are they going? Did you tell them?"
"Yeah, I told them. You want some more water?"
Sam shakes his head jerkily. "No, I want, I want to get the fuck out of here, I want-"
"Can't do it," Leganda tells him, setting the water aside for the moment. "You're just gonna have to hang in there."
"Fuck," Sam hisses, as if that's going to have any effect. He wrenches and jams against the restraint, his legs straining up, his shoulders yanking.
"Hey, hey." Leganda reaches out a hand to calm him, and Sam actually growls, low thick snarl from the back of his throat, sharp click of his teeth coming together as he bites at the air. "Settle down--hey! Settle down."
It's another ten or fifteen seconds of futile struggle before Sam goes abruptly limp, panting. A weird high keening noise breaks from him, then breaks off. His eyes are shut into tight seams.
Leganda watches him and sees decades of unearned age in his face, the dug-in creases at the corners of his mouth. It's always difficult to see. He hasn't even grown into his own body yet.
"All right now," Leganda says in a soft tone, though she never has been much for the motherly style. "Just keep breathing, Sam. Keep breathing. All right."
She waits until he's calmer before telling him, "Your dad is doing well upstairs. It'll be hours still, but it's going fine so far."
Sam's lip curls bitterly. "Fantastic."
Here we go, Leganda thinks, and figures they might as well get right into it. "Why did he handcuff you to the dashboard?"
Sam jerks slightly. "I. I did that, I was just screwing around-"
"C'mon, Sam." Leganda does nothing to hide her incredulity. "You want me to help you and your brother, you're gonna have to start telling the truth."
A protracted moment, and then as if it's got to be wrung out of him, Sam manages, "I. Can't."
"You can. I promise you. Whatever your dad's done, you don't have to protect him anymore."
Sam makes an awful cracking laugh-like sound, turning his face away, shaking his head. "You don't know," he whispers.
"So tell me, " Leganda implores. "I need you to tell me so I can help you, help Dean."
She says the name deliberately, seeing how it hits him like a finely-sharpened dart, the downward breaks of his eyebrows as he looks at her with shuddering desperation all over his face.
"He's insane," Sam says, sudden and too loud, his eyes widening as if he's shocked to hear it himself. "My, my dad, he's crazy, he went crazy."
"How? What did he do?" Leganda asks immediately, before he can retreat back into obstinacy and falsehood.
Sam kinda sobs, squeezing his eyes shut for a second. "He thought Dean was a. A monster. Like, a, an actual monster, a sh-shapeshifter," and Sam stutters over the soft shape of the word, slurry and imprecise.
The coil of dread in Leganda's stomach has begun glowing as hot and neon-bright as the filament of a light bulb.
"Has your father had paranoid episodes like this before?"
Sam shakes his head, but then says, "Yes, sometimes he--it happens sometimes." His arms tense and relax against the restraints. "He thinks that ghosts are real, and demons and werewolves and, and everything, all the crazy stuff."
"Has he ever been treated for schizophrenia or anything like that? Any medications?"
"No, he wouldn't ever--he would never let a doctor diagnose him."
"Does he become violent during these episodes?"
Sam coughs, weak little sound, looking pained. His good hand is still bunching the sheets, never all the way at rest. "Sometimes."
So strange: it looks so very much like Sam is still lying.
If it's not true, Leganda can't see any way that this story benefits the kid or his dad. She focuses on the immediate. "What did he do to your brother?"
A flash of raw memory capsizes Sam's face. He bangs his head back against the bed and breathes out loud through his mouth. "He. He thought it wasn't Dean."
"Yeah?"
"I don't know exactly what he did exactly. He locked me in the bathroom and then the truck, I, I couldn't get out, I couldn't see."
Sam's voice just gives out right there, hoarse rasp dropping away like the volume knob being sharply turned down. He tucks his chin against his chest and has difficulty catching his breath for a moment, this constant state of mindless panic taking a damagingly physical toll on him.
"What do you think he did to Dean?" Leganda asks softly.
Sam's eyes jerk up and crack into hers. Misery beyond reckoning broken open on his face, he says in a hollow nothing tone that she'll never forget: "Something real bad."
*
(fill in the blanks)
Here is what you do remember, the stuff you can't ever tell anyone because no, it's not gonna be like that. Some things have to stay in the family.
Dean on his knees and oh how you love the picture of Dean on his knees, Dean's pushy hands rucking up your shirt, Dean's rough cheek on your stomach and how you laugh and squirm and he is grinning, yes. He is grinning and he hasn't shaved in a few days because he likes how it makes him look, little bit of Indiana Jones stubble and never get carded buying booze again, and you feel the beautifully raspy scratch of it, feel your skin pinking up and you are looking down at your brother on his knees. Looking down at his sweet happy grin, just gonna do a little something for you here, Sammy, just hold tight, and meanwhile his hand is tugging your jeans open and slipping inside and making you gasp in the middle of your snickering, making your fingers slide clumsily through his spiky hair and his name stutter off your tongue.
Dean on his knees, and you staring down at him because what have you ever seen in this life that could match up to Dean pulling his lower lip between his teeth so it shines, Dean tipping forward and opening his mouth and closing his eyes, that look of pure relief spreading across his features as he takes your cock in and you, oh god wicked you, thrilled beyond belief, trembling and staggered and insanely in love with your brother, that singular white-hot earth-stomping love that can only take root in the rich black soil of a sixteen year old heart.
Wicked wicked you.
And here you are, cupping Dean's head in both your hands, feeling the flex and give of the back of his neck, the smooth devastating rhythm, his lips catching and dragging so wet and hot and god, god, you have his head in your hands; your palms fit to the curve of his skull like the two of you were carved out of the same piece of marble.
Then: your father.
The door like a gunshot, and then the roar, huge and overwhelming and not even words, a rabid lion bursting suddenly in the room and you whip your head over so fast something pings painfully in your neck, echoed in the flaying sting of Dean's mouth as he pulls off your dick. Your father, a torrent of shock and fury and ragged grief on his face--grief, visceral reminder of that one time when you were in first grade and came home to find your dad drunk and weeping at two in the afternoon, Dean knelt on the motel beside him with his small hands on John's big shoulders, saying it's okay dad please it's gonna be okay, and hollering at you to get out, get out Sammy go! when he saw you standing there--and oh christ oh no.
John rips you away from Dean. Dean holds up his hands, terror as clear as anything in his eyes, and John backhands him hard, knocks him onto his hands and knees.
You fly at him--of course you do. You crash into John's back and you are trying to say, stop, don't, but your mouth doesn't work or your throat, something. Your dad has never hit either one of you, not once. The reality of it stuns you, makes you stupid and weak, and John is easily able to hold you off, clamping your arms down at your sides and frog-marching you to the half-bathroom.
That's not your brother.
Over and over again, your father is telling you:
That's not your brother.
And you: No, NO! You slam off the doorjamb, struggling, and John grunts, shoves you into the bathroom hard enough that you stumble back and almost lose your balance. One quick glimpse of John's aghast expression, the shadowed breaking thing in his eyes, and then he slams the door shut just ahead of your frantic lunge, the click of the lock like a hammer cocked back.
You. Wicked you. You are hysterical, throwing yourself at the door and bruising the hell out of your shoulder. You can hear your father out there, thundering at Dean:
What are you? WHAT ARE YOU? WHERE IS MY SON?
And Dean, oh jesus no: It's me Dad I'm sorry please, then the meaty packing sound of blows landing, and Dean crying out, thick with pain, and you are screaming and screaming and screaming.
Some hellish minutes later. You are crumpled against the door of the bathroom, faint with fear and exhaustion. You think you are panting but actually it's more like sobs; your face is hot and slick with tears. John wrenches the door open and you fall blindly towards him, crashing against the solid wall of his chest and his arms coming up around you, holding you.
It's all right Sam it's gonna be okay, and his voice is cracking all over the place as you start to struggle again, rasping, Dean Dean let me see him, but John doesn't listen to you. He bulls you out of the house and you fight him every step of the way, twisting and craning and trying to see your brother. There are bloodstains on the carpet now, not a lot but enough, christ, enough. One of the chairs has been knocked over and one of its legs snapped, dangling.
What did you do, and then louder because John won't answer and won't let you go, forcing you towards the truck and, WHAT DID YOU DO, as your father yanks open the car door and muscles you inside and you kick out at him but he just takes it, gasping out a hard oof and grappling with you, the handcuffs rattling, digging into the soft underside of your arm. He manages to get you cuffed to the dash and then tears himself away from the truck, out of your radius. He teeters for a second, and his hands are shaking, and he looks like he can barely stay on his feet.
Dad you gotta stop this, it's just Dean, it was me, please you gotta stop.
You, jerking against the cuff and wanting to dislocate your thumb, chew off your hand, anything, anything that means you'll be able to move, and you pleading at him, It's not what you think Dad, he's not anything, it, it's just us, and you will tell him everything, all the sick twisted things you have done with your brother, the sick twisting way he makes you feel, the way you are wicked and irredeemable and beloved under his hands, how you would not fix this deformity if you could, and you can't, you won't. You will tell him how you and Dean have been battered and sorely used by life, and how that's okay because you belong to each other and neither of you has ever given a damn if your things are secondhand.
John's hands are shaking. His stricken dark eyes, the slash of his mouth wretched and repulsed in the thicket of his beard. He looks at you and it looks like it's killing him.
It's okay, Sam, is what your father tells you, this astonishing lie that he tells you. It's okay, we're gonna find Dean and it's gonna be fine.
And you, back to just you and your voice which has been torn to rags, your chest which hurts just trying to draw enough breath for the scream, still screaming, No Dad don't!
Your dad staggers back towards the house. He has the weight of planets on his back, making him stoop. You are screaming. He doesn't even look back.
Five minutes. Ten? Several decades, relatively speaking. You experience every nightmare. Every indelible atrocity. You see them all.
When your father returns to the truck, he smells like gasoline.
And you go kinda insane at that point.
Several miles down the road, and you don't remember surging past the gate of his thrust-out arm, grabbing the steering wheel and yanking it hard toward you. Whatever thought process there is behind that--stop, get Dean, make him stop--you've lost the thread. It's unconnected now, you are. You don't remember being flung into the door as the truck yaws violently to the side, nor the fracture of your handcuffed wrist like a length of fresh green wood snapped over someone's knee. You don't even really remember the tree, rising up as a final defense. Instead you remember anticipating the crash with copper-bright adrenaline in your mouth, hope and terror all wound together and strangling each other as prophetic fire engulfs your mind and you yearn forward; you peel your lips back from your teeth and keep your eyes wide open.
*
Sam is asleep now.
He fought it, twitching himself awake dozens of times, keeping his muscles bulky and hard braced against the restraints, but eventually the force of the day and the head injury and the painkillers conspire to drag him down. It's not until his fist uncurls that Leganda really believes he's down. The expression on Sam's face hasn't notably changed, still ravaged and tense.
Leganda leaves him sleeping, goes back to the admit desk to borrow the phone and call her boss, get the paperwork started for the state to take temporary custody of Sam Doe. Then she calls police dispatch to get patched through to Tivez and McInerney's patrol car.
McInerney answers, "Yeah copy."
"It's Leganda. You guys make it out there yet?"
"Yeah, we just checked out the first house-" and then there is a rustling scuffle before Tivez's voice picks up, too loud, "-there ain't shit out here, this is a waste of goddamn time."
"Goddamn it, Sergeant," Leganda says sharply, something snapping in her because she has fucking had it with this fucking guy. "If you could shut your mouth and use your brain for just five minutes, I'd really appreciate it."
"You can't talk to me like that, you fucking b-" and yes, Leganda knows where he's going with that, already rolling her eyes and steeling herself for the cut when McInerney's voice rises out of the background static, cutting his partner off:
"Hey what's that? Joey, look, is that smoke?"
Leganda's heart drops into her stomach. "Get over there," she orders.
"Shut up," Tivez says, distracted, and then there is a burst of harsh static and the line abruptly disconnects.
"Fucker," Leganda mutters, clutching her phone tight in her hand. She could kill that guy with a hammer, a stirringly intense urge towards blood that is unusual, because Leganda is typically as cold about this business as anyone could be considering the brackish undergrowth of human cruelty she's obliged to hack through on a daily basis, the sucking mud of pity that can hardly be avoided under the onslaught of all those little kid faces discolored and misshapen from abuse, those big bruising fingerprints curling around their arms like reeds. The best thing a person can do for any of their sorry number is the job, just do the job. Get them out of whatever new hell has been invented specially. Get them fed, and patched up, and tucked in a clean twin bed somewhere. Get them back in school, in heated bright-lit rooms with other kids for most of the day, make sure somebody there knows about their allergies and medical conditions and triggers and what nickname they prefer. Find the sturdier branches of their family tree, and nail supports in place for the ones that are breaking under the weight. Properly managing the logistical stuff takes as much time as any single person can give. Sympathy, compassion, the milk of human fucking kindness--that's all become fairly theoretical for Leganda these past few years. She's found it to be superfluous. Inefficient.
Nothing has changed with this case, nothing too foundational. It's just the odd details. Something about Sam being strapped to the bed the whole time, the surreal dystopian picture of it like they're in some shady off-the-books government clinic for dissidents and undesirables, for the kids who fight back.
Leganda sets aside whatever bad associations might be forming. She goes down to the cafeteria where nurses and doctors have segregated themselves from each other, and over in one corner there is a stolid-looking man in his fifties, wearing a slumping bluish suit, shiny bald head under the unforgiving fluorescents, and he's crying quietly into his hands. There is a paper plate with a half-finished square of carrot cake pushed away from him. Everybody generally pretends they can't see him, that tacitly willful blindness that people adopt sometimes when another's pain is on such blatant display. Leganda wonders which part of that man's family is dying upstairs, a wife most likely, maybe a child. There's something about the half-finished slice of cake, the thick orange icing carrot untouched and painstakingly eaten-around, like maybe the man is used to saving it for someone else.
Leganda gets a cup of coffee. She sits down behind table of nurses in cheery pastel colors, chattering together in a fluent mix of Spanish and English. It's been a long morning already, feels like days.
Counting off the minutes, Leganda gives Tivez and McInerney ten to get their shit together, and then heads back upstairs to check in with dispatch again. The call has come in, the alarm raised: first responders to the end of Old Mill Road. There is a fire of unknown origin in progress. Leganda closes her eyes for a second, imagining that she can hear the sirens racing towards the scene, the cozy summer cabin by the river where a boy lies beaten unconscious on the floor as the walls burn and the room chokes with smoke.
Then she tells the dispatcher to send another unit of cops to the hospital. When Dean's father comes out from under the anesthesia, the first two things she wants him to see are gleaming silver badges, and wholly capable hands resting on civil weapons.
*
Officer Cawson is still standing opposite Sam's room when Leganda gets back. His hand lifts automatically, reaching halfway for the brim of the trooper hat he's not wearing before he realizes and arrests the motion, little self-conscious smile. There is a rash of acne on his chin, and Leganda isn't sure if it's just her pushing forty, but Cawson looks barely old enough to drink.
Leganda asks him, "Holding up all right?" which is mildly surprising because she can't say why she should care.
"Yes ma'am," the trooper answers. He hooks a thumb in his belt, assuming the standard cop pose.
"He's down for the count right now, if you want to go get some coffee or anything."
"Thank you, ma'am, but I'll be all right."
"Okay then."
It's not until Leganda is back in the room that it occurs to her, maybe Cawson's not standing guard over Sam, but instead over her, the soft-hearted and -headed social worker who undid the kid's restraints in the first place. It stings, but not seriously; obviously she never should have done it, obviously she isn't going to do it again, so let him overreact if he wants.
Sam sleeps on, restive and discontent with the mulish expression that might as well be a new set of scars, something that immovable and obvious. Leganda sits in her chair, tired though it is not yet noon (what a morning for all of them). The Twix bar that's still in the pocket of her suit jacket crinkles and pokes, so she takes it out, turning it over in her hands a few times before putting it on the tray next to Sam's bed.
She bought the Twix intending to share it with Sam, give him five minutes of something sweet before whatever calamity comes next. Little things like that can really help kids. But with Sam's arms locked down, it's no good.
*
The ambulance delivers Sam's brother within the half hour.
Leganda is called out of the room by Cawson, who watched the rattling white cloud of the stretcher rush by at the end of the hall, one limp soot-black hand hanging over the side. Dean is hurried into a trauma room, doctors and nurses crowded in there with him. Leganda can hear one of the doctors shouting orders through the door, the urgency in his tone clearer than the words; she catches a fleeting glimpse of Dean between the hubbub of the medical team at work, a face that looks charred, oxygen mask tight over his mouth and nose, hair gone gray and brittle though he is just a kid himself, Leganda can tell by the smoothness of his forehead, the neat shields of his closed eyelids just waiting to take the weight of coins.
Probably only three or four years older than Sam, Leganda thinks as she goes back down the hallway, not wanting to see it happen, if it is going to happen. She doesn't need that kind of memory in her head.
She can't sit still next to Sam, can't concentrate on updating the notes in his file. She's been jotting down quick scribbles all morning, and now they're like signposts marking out the main roads of the shitty life Sam has been dealt: his possibly schizophrenic and assuredly violent father, his non-existent home, his gravely endangered brother. The picture it paints is encompassing black velvet, sucking away all the light.
Leganda goes back down to the cafeteria, though she has been trying to cut back on how much coffee she drinks every day; today has been a worse day than most. And it shows no signs of improving: there are Tivez and McInerney paying for coffees of their own from the cart wheeled next to the vending machines. Leganda's eyes become slits, and she heads right for them.
"What did you see out there?" she asks without preamble.
Tivez looks surprised and annoyed to see her. "Jesus, don't you have anything better to do than bug my ass?"
"It's my case too, Sergeant," she reminds him forcefully. "Believe me when I tell you that you're gonna want to tell me what I need to know."
Behind the coffee cart, the little man with white eyebrows and round silver-framed glasses watches the animosity crackle between them, car-wreck fascination on his face.
Scowling, Tivez says like each word costs him blood, "The cabin was on fire. The roof was just starting to catch, then the engine got there and the ambulance. The jakes got the kid out in about four minutes, but it didn't look like he was gonna survive the trip back. That about enough fuckin' information for you?"
It's about all of the asshole's presence that Leganda can stomach after already so much suffered today, so she nods curtly and turns to the coffee man to place her order. She hears Tivez's audible sneer, a blurry flash in her peripheral vision, some rude gesture if McInerney's dutiful snuffled laugh is anything to go by. Leganda doesn't respond, glaring at the man behind the cart and making him shrink a little bit, face remaining stony because he probably sees all kinds, working where he does, with every extreme of the human experience on open display.
She takes her coffee back upstairs because Tivez is loudly holding court and McInerney is grinning his idiot's grin. For maybe two seconds, she glances in the window of the trauma room, where Sam's brother still has soot over most of him; his face has been haphazardly wiped clean, pale scrubbed streaks on his cheeks, his forehead a dark plain. There is a tube down his throat now. There is a gray machine doing his breathing for him.
*
The second Leganda steps into the room, Sam demands of her:
"Did they find him?"
Startled and jumping slightly in her flats, Leganda recovers, comes over to Sam's bedside.
"Yeah," she tells him.
An odd look, almost like a seizure clutching Sam's features together, makes his eyes go scrunched and jittery with panic, and he sits up as much as he can, braced on his fist against the bed.
"Where is he? I wanna see him."
"You can't." A new spasm across Sam's expression, and Leganda tempers it, "Not yet. The doctors are still treating him."
"What, what did they--how bad is it?"
Leganda doesn't want to answer that, doesn't want to hear the reviled echo of Tivez telling her, didn't look like he'd survive the trip, nor think about the heartless beeping machine currently serving as Dean's lungs.
"It's too soon to say," she says.
Her evasion does little good. Sam's eyes go wide, fresh horror rushing in. "What did he do? Was there a, a-" He cuts himself off like he can't even say it, but Leganda thinks that Sam has a pretty good idea what happened after his father drove them away from the cabin on Old Mill Road.
Leganda thinks of the facts like a report that she can read, something impartially black and white. She looks Sam in the eye because that's really the least you can do for kids in these situations, at least look them in the eyes when you give them the bad news.
"There was a fire at the location you indicated. Obviously there'll be an investigation, but I think we're all assuming arson with pretty good odds. Some kind of delay to give him time to get a little ways away before the alarm was raised, I'd guess. Probably broke off a piece of candle and stood it in a puddle of gasoline."
Sam closes his eyes, looking gray. He answers dully, "Yeah, that sounds like something he'd do. Oh god."
"Hey," Leganda starts to say, leaning forward. Sam's head wrenches to the side, features contorting.
"You gotta let me see him," Sam says, and his voice cracks like he's exactly as old as he is. "Like, as soon as anybody can. You gotta get me in there, okay?"
"I'll. I'll definitely try," Leganda says, feeling helpless and not wanting to lie to the kid but to say that he's a flight risk is understating things considerably; she's been working on strategy to get them to take just one of his restraints off, never mind the other three.
Sam's eyes flash, desperate. "Look, you can wheel me in there locked to the goddamn bed, I don't care, you just gotta make sure you get me in to see him."
"Okay, just settle down for a second," because Sam is pressing against the restraints again, wasting energy he plainly does not have to spare. "You have to be calm if you ever expect them to take the straps off."
"What are they doing to him?" Sam asks, pleads. "How bad is it, please."
Leganda shakes her head and swallows hard, looking down at her hand clenched on her leg, familiar clean bare hand with perfect nails, neatly contrasted against the beige of her suit pants. Just for a second, just to steady herself a little. She brings her eyes back up to meet Sam's.
"Smoke inhalation, and--pretty bad, yeah. They've got him on a ventilator right now."
That's a hard moment for Sam right there; it strikes him visibly, a hatchet to the chest, face paling like he just lost most of his blood in one blow.
"Jesus," Sam breathes out. Leganda nods, half-heartedly wanting to say I'm sorry but she recognizes it for the futile platitude it is, bites it back.
"I'll keep you updated," Leganda says. "And I really will try to get you in there. As soon as I can, okay?"
"Yeah. Yeah."
"Just. Try to get some rest, okay?"
A vague sneer passes across Sam's face, faint curl of his lip. "Don't really see that happening."
"You should try." Every minute Sam stays conscious is taking a year off his life, or anyway that's what it looks like from here. "We're going to have to talk about what's gonna happen next."
"What? When?"
Leganda shakes her head, her lips thinning. "Your dad is going to pay for this, Sam. I'm going to make sure of it."
Sam tenses with momentary refusal, and then it drops abruptly out of him, a whoosh of air out of his lungs. "It's not--he just got. Confused."
Pretty surprising, hearing Sam say that, seeing the weird twist of his mouth. Leganda studies him for a few moments. "You said he thought Dean was, what? A shapeshifter, right? That's not something a person in their right mind gets confused about."
Sam breathes shallowly for a little while, struggling with some silent inward war. God only knows what's going on in Sam's head right now. Leganda can't imagine what kind of rootless horror show of a life he and his brother have suffered through this far; what it's done to them to have a father who could do this, pour out the gasoline on the same floor where his son lies bleeding, spark the match with the candle held in his other hand, the man who could even conceive of doing such a thing--it's an abomination in the very old sense of the word: away from man, therefore inhuman. Brain gone bad.
"But your dad will be able to get help now," Leganda tells him in a serious tone, like they're piecing together some secret plan. "They'll get a couple of really good psychiatrists in here, get him properly diagnosed. He's going to--he'll stand trial for this, and he's going to be convicted, but the sentence might be a psychiatric hospital and that's not--I mean, it could be worse. And you'll have somewhere to stay, of course, people looking out for you, you don't need to worry about that. You and your brother. And then maybe, you know. Things might not turn out as, as awful as they seem right now."
Sam shakes his head and it's like he's got a barrier of invisible cotton muffling his every move, putting that muddy fogginess back in his eyes. There's a machine feeding measured doses of some morphine derivative into the back of Sam's hand, probably to blame for a lot of the stuff that's come out of Sam's mouth so far.
"That's assuming he even gets through the surgery," Sam says, sounding choked. "And that, that's assuming that Dean is okay because I don't, if Dean isn't okay I don't fucking care what happens to my dad, you understand, he can rot in jail forever and that would be fine with me, I, I, I wouldn't even call him," and Sam's voice just kind of disintegrates at the end, having found his breaking point at last and hyperventilating a little. There are tears on his face again, retracing the tracks already left behind because Sam never got to wipe them away.
"All right, Sam, okay," Leganda says, tipping forward and putting her hand on the hard-flexed muscle of Sam's arm, thinking that the tension can't be good for his broken wrist. The pulse at the inside of his elbow is absolutely racing, panic back under his skin like a recurrent fever. "You're okay. Keep breathing, remember? Just keep breathing."
Sam does his best.
*
About an hour passes. The sun shifts across the sky and blazes through the vertical blinds on the window of Sam's room. Approximately fifty percent of the stuff in the room is reflective, Leganda discovers, as she is blinded at every turn, every twitch, by the white glare off the machines and bed rails and instruments and the vehemently waxed floor. Sam mostly keeps his eyes closed, though Leganda can tell that he is not actually asleep by the tight anxious pattern of his breathing.
Then: Cawson in the doorway, his fingers working along the brim of his trooper hat held down at his belt.
"Ms. Leganda, can you come out here for a second?" Cawson says. He's staring directly at her, his eyes never for an instant flicking to Sam, who has opened his own and sat up as best as he can to follow the new development.
"Yeah." Leganda gets Sam's attention with a sharp move of her chin. "I'll be right back," she tells him. Sam nods jerkily. He looks like he's chewing on the inside of his cheek, anything to stay quiet and calm.
Out in the hallway, Cawson is lightyears more at ease, and he tells Leganda summarily that the doctor working on Sam's brother has an update for her. Leganda touches her hands to the sprayed-stiff shape of her hair briefly, just as a sort of settling gesture. Something about the way Cawson is threading the brim of his hat through his fingers (somehow funereal, bowed-head moments of mournful silence) makes the frozen coil wind through Leganda's stomach again.
The doctor has traces of a Southie accent, but he's clearly spent years covering it up; it only comes through at the corners. He's got a solid black sweep of hair and a squarish face currently etched and grave, and there's that bad news feeling, that sinking stone.
"It doesn't look good," he says immediately, allowing for no suspense. "Do you have a name on him?"
"Dean," Leganda answers. "Pretty sure that's his real one, too."
The doctor nods. His gaze stays professionally level. "He wasn't breathing when the paramedics got to him, hadn't been for a number of minutes. They were able to re-establish a pulse, but there's soot in his lungs and no activity on the brain scans. He's unable to breathe on his own, and we don't anticipate that he'll wake up."
"Oh," Leganda says.
"Yeah. Would you like me to be the one who tells the, what's the brother's name?"
"It's. Sam. And, no, I'll tell him." Somehow, she'll tell him. She'll have to look him right in the eye. "Are there any other injuries?"
The doctor shakes his head. "Nothing serious. He took a beating, but most of the damage was superficial. The rope burns, of course, but they've been cleaned and bandaged."
"The--?"
The doctor's mouth knits together, his eyes looking like burnished steel. "They didn't tell you?"
"No, I hadn't--I haven't heard the whole report yet."
"They found the kid tied up, feet and hands. Like beating him unconscious and setting the house on fire wasn't going to do the job just as well." The doctor pulls his hand across the lower half of his face. "Some people in this world, I don't even know."
"Yeah," Leganda manages.
"So." He just leaves it there, inclines his head and sighs in a way that serves as a goodbye, and goes back down the hall with the soles of his shoes squeaking.
Leganda finds and falls into one of those ubiquitous hospital waiting chairs, ripped canvas seat and hard bare metal arms. She gives herself about two minutes with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, staring down at the floor as if there is some code in the faint green speckles across the tile. Just holding it together, mentally preparing for the next part because it will be even worse than this part now. Next she has to go tell Sam about it.
The trouble with this job--there are many troubles with this job. A kid is assigned a number and assigned to a case worker. It could be any size kid, any color, though most of them have the same kind of eyes, haunted and wary and poisoned with bitterness. Blood-chilling things seem to happen most often to those who can least defend themselves, the half-grown and perpetually terrorized, the five year olds numbly accustomed to wearing bruises, because there are humans on the planet who don't deserve the name, because there always have been, because history reads just like this, over and over again. It's honestly laughable that anybody thinks they can measurably affect the force of that tide, and yet here she is.
Leganda sits up a little, blowing out a breath and wrapping her hands around the cool bend of the chair arms. She pulls her attention away from the big picture, refocuses back on this kid, the only kid who matters right now.
*
There's this cracking mask on Sam's face. He shakes his head.
"No, but he's alive, right?"
Leganda pushes her tongue up against the back of her teeth, tangibly feels the downward pull on her eyebrows. When she shifts the sunlight hits a scalpel and then directly into her eyes. She shifts back.
"Only technically, Sam," she says in the same even toneless way. "He's on life support."
Sam shakes his head; he's been shaking his head continuously for a little while now. The corners of his mouth have gone white. "He still has a fucking pulse, right?"
"Yeah, but Sam-"
"No, no, you don't know." Sweet christ, the look on Sam's face, clawed across by madness and refused grief. "Dean's not like other guys, he's real tough, and he, he can survive a lot, he has already."
"I know he has." Leganda--it's not so easy as not knowing what to say, it's how to make Sam believe it, exponentially worse. "But this time, I think this time it was something no one could have survived."
"No," Sam says, one hard block of a word that he's trying to use as a shield. His eyes are enormous and glossy and ablaze. "You're wrong. You don't know shit about my brother."
"There was no oxygen to his brain for a significant amount of time, Sam, I'm sorry-"
"Shut up," and Sam's voice is splintering, it's in pieces. "He's got a pulse, he's gonna be fine. You, you'll see, he'll fuckin' show you, he's gonna get me out of here and then we're gonna, you'll see."
"Sam, hey." Leganda leans forward to put a hand on his shoulder because he is straining forward against the restraints again and there are already bruises forming on his arms. Sam jerks his head to the side and his wild desperate eyes roll whitely away.
"You don't know shit," Sam says and starts to weep. "He's gonna get us out of here, you don't know shit about us-"
-and then he is crying too hard to go on, and when Leganda lays a helpless hand against the side of his head, Sam turns into it with a broken sob, burning wet eyes against the inside of Leganda's arm, damping the sleeve of her jacket. Leganda just lets him, pressing back so Sam has something to brace himself against.
It's violent, it's like he's being savagely beaten in some silent invisible way. Sam's whole body is a furious spring coiled tight, and he's forgotten his own injuries, wrenching his broken wrist and crying out loud, twisting his head away from Leganda's hand. Leganda touches his shoulder because what else is she supposed to do, what can she?
"What are you doing?" the nurse demands as she strides sternly into the room. Leganda pulls back quick and turns, breath stopped, feeling absurdly like she's been caught red-handed, her own eyes prickling with tears.
"He's hurting himself, what did you do," the nurse mutters in a tone that does not expect a response. She pushes past Leganda, preparing a syringe and making impersonal hushing sounds as she leans over Sam and pushes something into his IV that makes him go foggy and slack. Sam fights it (he fights everything), and he says no a few more times, and it keeps not having any effect. His gaze hooks briefly on Leganda's as the nurse moves away, a look of such pleading despair that Leganda thinks it's actually a blessing when he loses consciousness.
The nurse says, "We've all got our jobs to do here, and I'll thank you not to make mine any harder than it needs to be."
Leganda says, "Yeah," staring at Sam going slowly limp on the bed. Then she has to get out of there.
Halfway down the hall, sitting in a chair next to an empty gurney is Sergeant Peter McInerney. He straightens up when he spots Leganda, but doesn't stand. His eyes are milky blue, his wheat-colored buzz-cut so brutally short his scalp shines underneath.
"What are you still doing here?" Leganda asks, surprised by the harsh tone she hears in her own voice.
McInerney shrugs. He's different when his partner Tivez isn't around, less a mindless following thug and more just a guy who doesn't talk much. McInerney looks tired now. Worn right down.
"I was checkin' in on the, the kid's dad up there," McInerney says with an unspecific thumb jerked towards the ceiling.
"How's he doing?"
"Still alive."
"Well, good for him," Leganda says, and looks down, feeling like she's giving too much away.
"What. What's gonna happen to that kid?" McInerney asks.
Leganda shakes her head because she doesn't want to get into it; it's exhausting just thinking about it, the group home where Sam will have to stay until they can find a foster home willing to take on a sixteen year old riddled with dysfunction and nightmares, the too-small bunk beds and overcrowded bathrooms waiting in Sam's future, browning tile coming up at the corners and water stains on the ceiling, Goodwill clothes that don't really fit, apartment complex swimming pools all empty and filled with leaves, graffiti everywhere. Each individual image rolls around sickly in her stomach like hard-polished stones.
"He'll be in state's custody. Hopefully we'll be able find another family member willing to take him in."
"You think you will?" McInerney asks. "Find some more family for him, I mean?"
Leganda looks back at Sam's room, the extreme angle and smeary reflection of the sun across the waxy rectangular window stuck in the door. "No, I don't."
"Jesus. Is he-" and McInerney pauses, visibly considers before going on to ask, "You told him about his brother right? How'd he take it?"
"How do you think, Sergeant?" Leganda lets the slightest sneer break through. She's absently aware that she's shaking, one hand buried protectively in her jacket pocket so that McInerney won't see.
"I, I don't know," McInerney says, stumbling and uncertain.
"He woke up this morning with a dad and a brother, and now he, he doesn't . . ." Leganda trails off, swallows hard. "When he woke up this morning, he had a family."
McInerney nods, grayish at his edges, solemn. There's something about brittle cast on his face that makes it seem like he really does understand.
"I never understand how people can do these things to each other," McInerney says in a low tone, something that sounds discordantly like shame.
Leganda shakes her head again. "Because some people aren't, really," she says, and her throat aches under the sorrowful truth of it. "Because there are monsters in this world."
THE END
Endnotes: I had CCH Pounder cast in my head for the part of Leganda, so's you know. Specifically, that one super-awesome X-Files episode she was in, although her badassery has spanned many years and things.
Title inspiration, and no, I don't really know why I find it so sad and vaguely creepy.
The idea for this story was gifted to me by someone whose name I don't know, which is of course the point of the whole thing. Anon commenting is enabled as always.