Side B, part two

[chiiyo86]

Part one



Dean liked to think that he wasn’t still mad at his mother; it was just that they didn’t talk. It was a thing that happened. You grew up, you got your own purpose, and sometimes it was something different from what your parents wanted for you and you drifted apart. That was just life. But if he was perfectly honest with himself - and he tried to be as little as possible - he could feel that little ball of anger buried inside him, smoldering like embers under ashes. Not so much because she wouldn’t let him hunt, which was what Sam thought it was all about; no, it was the rest, the unspoken parts of their past, the half-truths. The yellow-eyed man. He was real, and Dean couldn’t forgive his mother for trying to pass him off as a childish nightmare.

So why was he giving the same half-truths to Sam? Well, the kid had made it clear he didn’t want to have anything to do with hunting, at least as little as possible when you’re born to a hunter family.

“Dean.”

The whisper was followed with a pointy elbow to his ribs, and Dean had to keep himself from wincing. Vivian glanced at him sideway, her face pinched with disapproval. Dean wanted to try his best shit-eating grin on her, see how far he could push before she blew up. Only, they were in public and working a job, and as much as he hated to admit it, she was right to call him out on daydreaming.

He straightened in his seat, a soft blue Ottoman that was too low for him to sit comfortably, forcing him to almost have his knees up to his chest. They were sitting in one of the Margaret Amini Hall’s common rooms, and a few of the residents were sitting opposite them, huddled against each other on a comfy-looking couch.

“What kind of newspaper are you working for?” one of them asked, her brow furrowed with just a touch of suspicion. She was a small, round girl with shiny black hair and brown skin, and from the way she had taken charge of the conversation as soon as Dean and Vivian had arrived, she was obviously some kind of informal leader here. That meant she was the one they had to convince of their good faith and the others would probably take their cue from her.

“We’re freelance writers,” Dean answered smoothly. “We usually submit our articles to a bunch of local newspapers. We’re interested in Rachel’s story because we would like to underline how much stress students are put under.” Now he was talking out of his ass - he had gone to college, technically for almost two semesters, but he was almost always skipping class in favor of hunting so he couldn’t claim to be an expert on college life. Him bailing out had been the last straw for his mom.

“What we want you to understand, is that we mean no disrespect to Rachel’s memory,” Vivian said in a softly modulated voice that Dean didn’t recognize; he almost did a double take, wondering if his partner had been switched with a stranger without him realizing it. “We’re not trying to piggyback onto your friend’s death and make profit out of it. We’re just trying to get your version of the story out there. If the article does get written and approved by a newspaper, we’ll be writing under your control. We won’t say anything in it that you don’t approve of.”

The girls looked at each other, but Vivian’s words seemed to have worked magic because Dean could already see that they were relaxing. The girl who had acted as in charge so far said, “I’m Amy. What do you want to know?”

Maybe the girls felt better talking to Vivian because she was a woman, but whatever it was Dean decided to let her conduct the interview. As soon as he felt that the focus wasn’t on him anymore, he stood up and started walking around, studying the room with a thoughtful air. In its center, where they were sitting, couches and chairs formed a square, with a round table in the middle. The color pattern was soft and soothing, all grays, greens, and blues, sky colors. This part of the room had a very high ceiling, shaped like the roof, and was cut off from the rest by a series of pillars. There was a piano, some bookshelves, and multiple framed pictures that Dean studied while keeping an ear out for the conversation.

“Was Rachel depressed?” Vivian was asking.

“I didn’t know her that well,” Amy said, “so maybe I’m not the best person to judge. No one saw it coming, though, not even her closest friends.”

“She never would’ve tried to kill herself!” one of the other girls piped up.

Vivian asked her why she was convinced of this, and Dean listened to the answer, but the girl - a roommate - didn’t have much else to support her claim other than the fact that Rachel was ‘such a joyful person,’ and ‘always had a smile on her face.’ As if only gloomy people ever killed themselves. Dean focused on the pictures lined up on top of the piano: smiling girls holding an empty frame, girls in various sport competitions, other pictures obviously taken at a party. Only girls were photographed, probably residents, save for the occasional male figure in the background. Dean snickered at the guy in one of the pictures awkwardly standing at the periphery of a group of girls, obviously taken in the act of ogling them, frozen with his shoulders slumped and his hands buried in his pockets for posterity to see.

“Did Rachel have trouble sleeping?” Dean heard Vivian ask, and this made him pay attention again. “Bad dreams, nightmares?”

“Not that I knew of… Girls?”

None of the other girls had heard anything about Rachel having nightmares. Dean felt the sting of disappointment, but he still got his EMF reader out of his pocket, angling his body so that no one could see what he was doing. The device remained stubbornly dark and silent.

“We didn’t learn anything we didn’t know,” Dean complained to Vivian as they left the hall. They walked past KK Amini Hall and Dean couldn’t help but look at the window to see if he could get a glimpse of his brother. “The girls don’t know anything. There’s no EMF in there. Are you sure you got your facts straight about the yellow-eyed man?”

“I’m sure I remember my guy talking about it,” Vivian snapped, but she looked troubled. Her account of meeting a student from KU who’d talked about someone dreaming of a yellow-eyed man was murky at best, and Vivian didn’t strike Dean as someone who let herself drink to the point of blacking out parts of a conversation.

“Rachel’s death could be completely unrelated. It could be something else - a haunting.”

“You said there was no EMF.”

“Not in the common room - but this isn’t where Rachel died. And a lot of ghosts get sleepy during daytime.”

She looked at him, thoughtful. “We need to go back and have a look at her room. What about her roommates? Not just the girl who shared her room, but the other residents - I doubt they will let us check her room, so we need to do that when there’s no one to interrupt us.”

She didn’t sound like she thought he’d said something stupid, but like she was inviting him to her thinking process, waiting for him to bounce back and come up with ideas. Dean felt a weird rush of warm pride at that. He’d never had a partner before so the feeling took him by surprise: it was nice to be treated like he was at least semi-competent at his job, and not a pale substitute for Mary Winchester, born Campbell, hunter of long-time fame.

“I guess I could…” Someone bumped into his shoulder and Dean let out a surprised yelp. “Hey! Look where you’re going, pal.”

The offender, a scrawny kid with curly hair looking about Sam’s age, raised his hands and said, “Sorry, man.”

“Okay.” Don’t bully the college kids. “It’s fine.”

He turned back to Vivian, but the incident had made him uncomfortably aware that they were talking in the open. “I can maybe ask Sam - that’s my kid brother, he lives in the Men’s Hall next to Margaret Amini - if he can work something. But we should…”

“Take it somewhere private, yes.”

Sam wouldn’t mind, would he? Dean wasn’t asking him to take part in the hunt. But… yeah, this was probably more involvement than he wanted to have. On the other hand, this was happening right next to him, which meant it had become personal. The cognitive dissonance Sam usually lived with couldn’t impede that.

Something was nagging at Dean, though, something he couldn’t put his finger on. The unsettled feeling lasted all day, but he never managed to pinpoint its source.

---

Sam poured himself another glass of punch and sighed. The music pounded in a tribal rhythm, and people around him laughed and danced and drank, no one caring that almost half of the crowd was under twenty-one. It brought back memories of how his brother used to get openly shitfaced as a teenager to piss off their mom; in reaction, Sam hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol before his twenty-first birthday.

“Hey, Sam!” someone yelled right into his ear.

Sam managed to control his startled reaction pretty well, he thought. “Yeah?”

“Pretty great idea you got here!”

His roommates had been a little surprised that he’d be the one to suggest a party with the girls from Margaret Amini. He liked to party as much as the next college guy, but he was usually just following along. The tricky part had been to make sure the girls would all be there, and no one would stay behind at the house, but fortunately it was Friday and midterms were still a few weeks away. It had worked out in the end.

“Are you sweet on one of the Maggie chicks or something?”

Sam barely contained an eye roll, raised his cup, and said, “Enjoy the party, dude!” before working his way into the crowd, which was now swaying back and forth to some whiny love song. He wasn’t up for his roommates’ teasing; his insides had been curling with low-grade anxiety since the beginning of the party. Were Dean and his partner done yet? What if one of the girls wanted to go home early, or had forgotten something in her room? What if there really was a ghost in there and it had killed Rachel?

The music changed again for something more energetic and Sam got elbowed in the process, spilling some of his drink on his shirt.

“Shit.”

He heard someone laugh and say, “sorry!” and he waved the apology off, retreating to the periphery of the room to look for a napkin he could use. He reached one of the tables they’d lined against the walls: it was littered with empty cups and bottles, bowls and chips crumbs, but he found a wrinkled napkin that looked clean enough and started to dab at the stain. He was focused on his task, fussing at his shirt in a way that Dean would surely make fun of, but when there was a lull in the music he heard a soft sniff coming from somewhere on his right. He looked up and there, huddled in one of the armchairs they had pushed in the corners, was a red-haired girl who was wiping her cheeks with her hand.

For a few seconds, Sam was torn between leaving her alone and going to her to try and comfort her. Then he recognized her - she was Rachel’s roommate, the one who had been with her when she died - and he was torn again between getting involved or staying as far away as he could from this hunt.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

The girl had seen him coming and did her best to dry her face and look like she hadn’t been crying. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“I’m sorry, it was a stupid question.”

This time she smiled. “It’s okay. No one knows what to say. I’m getting used to it.”

“I’m Sam, by the way.” He leaned against one of the pillars that separated the back of the room from the rest of it, keeping enough distance between them that she didn’t feel crowded. “This party was my idea. I don’t know if it’s the best I’ve had.”

“Oh, no, it’s- don’t mind me. It’s a great idea. The girls needed the distraction, it was getting stifling in the house. I just felt down for a moment. And, um, I’m Vicky.”

“Hi, Vicky.” He let a beat pass. “You don’t have to justify yourself, you know. It’s only been a few weeks. No one can blame you for…. She was your friend. I’m sorry, maybe you don’t want to talk about it.”

Vicky shrugged with one shoulder rather than give him another variation on ‘it’s okay.’ For a moment she remained silent, looking down at her lap. Sam thought she really was going to stop talking about it, even though he wanted her to talk, and he felt terrible about the whole situation. How did his mom and Dean handle this?

“Of course I’m sad,” she said suddenly, so low that Sam could barely hear her over the music. “But it’s not just that. Everyone says they get it, it’s normal for me to be sad, I should take my time to grieve, but no one wants to…. No, forget it.”

“What?”

“Forget it. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying.” She let out a strangled chuckle that sounded horribly like she was going to cry again.

“What is it?” Sam took one step towards her and spoke softly, both to keep her talking and to avoid being overhead. He felt like he was getting to the heart of the matter and his mouth was dry with the fear he would say the wrong thing and ruin it. “Is it about what you said to the paper?”

Her head whipped up. “You read about it?”

“Yeah, sorry. I skimmed through the article.”

“I know how it sounds. All the girls would rather pretend I never said anything. But then they also don’t believe Rachel killed herself. I think some of them….”

“Do you believe Rachel killed herself?”

“Yes. No. I mean.” She wrung her hands, bending her wrists to an awkward angle that had to hurt. “I saw her do it. No one pushed her. I was there. But….”

Sam’s head was starting to hurt mildly, maybe because of the music, but he did his best to push that feeling aside and resisted the urge to rub his temple. “What happened?” He feared he’d gone too far, sounded too intent, so he added hurriedly: “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But… you know, some things are easier to tell people who aren’t close to you. And I kind… I kinda get it. My dad also died in strange way and… well, I generally don’t talk about it.”

“What happened to your dad?”

Sam winced a little at the question, but he’d been the one to bring it up. “He died in a fire. That started in my nursery. But they could never really figure out how the fire had started, or why my father was burned to ashes but I didn’t get hurt at all.” He left out the ‘pinned-on-the-ceiling’ part because that was a little too freaky, as well as Dean’s tales of a yellow-eyed man because... well, Dean had only been four at the time.

“That sounds… yeah. Rachel…” Vicky swallowed. “We were talking. Nothing deep, it was like - class, assignments, parents, boys. The usual. I wasn’t even really looking at her, because I was doing my homework at the same time and not paying too much attention to the conversation. She stopped talking suddenly, just… right in the middle of a sentence. Then I heard her push her chair back, like she was getting up, and that’s when I looked. Her face was… like nothing I’ve ever seen. She just walked straight to the window, opened it, and jumped. I was-”

She shut her mouth so fast that Sam thought he heard her teeth click. She stood up like a shot and Sam had a movement of recoil, but not enough to avoid her slapping him so hard he bit his tongue and tasted blood.

“Leave me alone!” she yelled, her face twisted with fury. Not even a second later her eyes opened wide and she started trembling. Without another word, she spun around and dived into the crowd.

Sam stood there a moment, a hand to his throbbing cheek, too stunned to move.

“What did you do to her?” a girl called out, a diminutive brunette who looked furious enough to gouge his eyes out.

“Nothing!” Sam squeaked, waving his hands in denial. “We were just talking and she just….” Cut herself off. Suddenly stood up.

The girl cast him a deeply doubtful look, but after a moment of hesitation she went after Vicky. Sam waited until he stopped being the center of attention and the crowd filled the empty space Vicky had created by blowing up. He fished his phone from his pocket and speed-dialed his brother. “Dean,” he hissed into the phone. “Get your butt over here. Immediately.”

---

It probably didn’t say good things about her that Mary, after all those years, still got a complex out of visiting Karen Singer’s house. She’d gotten the last leg of driving through South Dakota; her back hurt and her eyes burned, and the vision of Karen’s manicured lawns, the colorful flowers bordering her driveway, the bright blue paint of her house with the windows trimmed with white, the perfection of it all twisted something inside Mary. Twelve-year-old jealousy, stupid and petty. God, look at the flowerpots suspended under the porch, symmetrically arranged so they were framing the windows, Jesus fucking Christ.

She could feel Bill glancing at her curiously, then around her so he could look at the house. He and Karen knew each other, but not very well as far as Mary was aware. They both had their fingers on the loose hunting community’s pulse, so it was natural that they’d be in contact, but even though Bill often directed his hunter patrons here, he obviously had never actually seen the house.

“Nice place,” he commented with a slow whistle. “Suburban perfection.”

“Yeah,” Mary said, pushing the door on her side. “Wait until you have a look at the interior.”

Karen welcomed them with exclamations of delight and hugs for them both. Her looks were as perfect as her house: blond curls that looked almost sculpted and a prim yellow dress. Mary’s hair was tied up in a messy bun to keep it off her face while she drove, and she felt wrinkled and sticky from the journey. But her resentment melted in Karen’s arms and warm greeting - no one could really hate Karen for long.

“How’s Sam?” Karen asked as she led them to her living room.

She retreated to her kitchen to make them coffee, but the wall separating the two rooms had an opening cut-out in it, so Mary knew she could still hear her answer.

“He’s doing very good. It won’t be long before he graduates, and then he’s looking to a Master of Journalism.”

“He always did so well in school.” Mary heard the sshhh of the coffee-maker coming from the kitchen. “Bill, do you take sugar in your coffee?”

Bill took his coffee bitter and black as tar. Karen made a quip about hunters and their punishing drinks. Mary looked at the pictures in the living room, framed in black on a white wall: pictures of Karen’s parents, of various hunters that had taken refuge here over the years. Mary noticed that the one picture of her with the boys when they were small had disappeared, to be replaced by a more recent picture of Sam and Mary at Sam’s high school graduation. Above the chimney mantel, in its rightful privileged position, was a picture of Karen’s wedding with her late husband. One of the reasons why Mary could never resent Karen too much was that she and Karen had so much in common.

Karen came back to the living room with two cups of coffee. “Dean was here a few weeks ago.”

Mary accepted her cup with a murmured thanks and blew the steam away. Hunters generally came to Karen when they needed some R&R, especially when they were injured. Karen’s place was free, discreet, and had better accommodation than most motels out there.

“He was?”

Karen made another run to her kitchen to get them cookies. When she came back, she said, “He wasn’t badly hurt, just a few bruises and scratches. Nothing he couldn’t have handled on his own.” Satisfied that her guests didn’t need anything else, she sat down in one of her leather-covered armchairs; Mary noticed that she had tied a white apron around her waist. “Honestly, I think he just wanted some company. And… I think he wanted it to get back to you.”

Karen’s expression was carefully contained, devoid of any judgment but also of any sympathy, because she knew Mary wouldn’t welcome it. Even though they’d had a similar conversation not so long before, Bill looked uncomfortable, holding awkwardly the tiny porcelain cup in his large hands.

“Thanks for the news,” Mary said, leaning forward to pick a cookie from the plate.

Karen smiled, recognizing her cue. “So to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

“Bill and I are onto something. Something big. Have you heard hunters talk about a yellow-eyed man?”

Karen pursed her lips in thought. “Wait a minute,” she said, lifting a finger.

She came back a few minutes later with a black leather-bound notebook and started to leaf through the pages. Karen meticulously wrote down everything hunters told her, and Mary knew she had boxes of similar notebooks. “Ah, here it is. This hunter came here a few months ago - a young man named Matthew Cohn, I don’t think you know him - and told me the story of a hunt he’d done: a telekinetic boy, Max Miller, killed his father and uncle because they abused him. He later killed himself before Matthew could do anything about it. Matthew told me the boy had confessed to having dreams of a yellow-eyed man.”

Mary and Bill looked at each other. “How did Cohn come across this hunt? Strange death in the papers or…?”

“No, I think I remember…” Karen squinted at the page; she probably needed glasses, but claimed she never had the time to go to the doctor. “No - he said a young woman came to him claiming she had a vision of the first death. Matthew didn’t believe her until Jim Miller died trapped in his garage from carbon monoxide poisoning. Just the way the girl had described it.”

“What’s the girl’s name?” Mary asked.

“Ava Wilson.”

Mary’s fingers tightened around the handle of her cup. She knew by heart all the names of the kids whose parents had burned in 1983. “She’s one of them,” she murmured at Bill’s intention.

“I thought the kids who died in Arizona had never crossed paths,” Bill answered in the same tone.

“Could be that the pattern’s changing. Or that they met before and kept it quiet, which would make sense, if some of them have… visions. I mean, not really the kind of things you want everyone to know about you.” Visions. Telekinesis. Mary tried to remember if Sam had ever done anything unusual. With his family’s background in hunting, would he be more or less likely to come to her if something like that happened to him?

Karen had followed their exchange in silence, with her eyes going back and forth between Mary and Bill, and it was only once they’d lapsed into silence that she said, “May I know what this is about?”

Coming here, asking Karen for information, Mary had known it would come down to this at one point, and she trusted Karen. Still, she found the words hard to muster. “Have you ever heard of a yellow-eyed demon?”

Karen became perfectly still, from her fingers to her unblinking eyes. Her husband’s possession being the event that had opened her eyes to the hunting world, she’d become very knowledgeable about demons over the years. “Yellow eyes, you say? I can’t say that I have. Low-level black eyes, and red eyes for crossroads demons, yes, but yellow? Not that I recall. Are you sure it’s a demon?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m sure.”

“Then it has to be a pretty powerful demon. One that doesn’t come out to the surface very often. This is… very troubling. It could mean that the barrier between Hell and our realm is weakening.”

Mary nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of too.”

“What does it have to do with Max Miller and Ava Wilson?”

Mary told her. She told her everything about John’s death, about the kids and the fires, about the ones who’d killed each other in Jerome, Arizona. She even told her about Sam and her fears for him. Only one other person, Bill, knew as much as Mary, and she hadn’t told him the whole story in one go. It was hard and painful, but also liberating in a way, like getting a good cry out before you can go back to normal.

Karen was looking at her with a cool expression. “The man with the yellow eyes. This is the story Dean always told when he was a kid.”

“I know.”

“You always said it wasn’t true, that it was just a dream.”

“I know, Karen. Please. Don’t tell me that I screwed up because I know it all too well.”

A few months after his dad’s death, Dean had suddenly gone from mute to obsessed with the yellow-eyed man. She remembered him as he’d been then, little blond head and solemn eyes, telling her and whoever was listening about the man who had killed his father, a man with eyes that glowed like golden coins in a treasure chest. Her darling four-year old, who had witnessed his father’s murder.

“I thought - I. He was so young. If I could convince him it wasn’t real, I could keep him off the revenge path.”

The man with the yellow eyes. She remembered the stab of shock she’d felt the first time she heard her son’s description, how it coincided with her own hazy memories of that night when her parents had died. John, laying still and heavy in her arms; and a man with yellow eyes kissing her, the smell of sulfur on his breath making her want to gag. The knowledge that she’d done something to bring this down on her family. Who had she really wanted to protect? Dean, or herself? In the end, all she’d done was make him cling to his father’s memory: Dean wore his father’s jacket, drove his car, listened to his music. And he did his mother’s crappy, thankless job, which would consume his soul and send him to an early grave. What a bang-up job, Mary.

“I was wrong,” she pronounced very clearly, each word ringing like crystal notes. “I know that now. But what matters is that the yellow-eyed demon doesn’t get Sam, or any of those kids. Whatever he wants with them, it can’t be good. Bill and I were planning to go talk to the kids, but I’m wondering now if it’s the right thing to do. If those kids have…” she hesitated, unwilling to say the words for fear of making them true, “if they have some kind of psychic powers and a connection to the demon, it’s all too possible that talking to them will tip it off.”

Karen smoothed a hand over her wrinkle-less apron. “I can get a few hunters to investigate quietly, tell us what those kids have been up to lately. Do you have their names?”

“Yes,” Mary said. The list was in her bag but she didn’t need to get it out. “We can strike Max Miller off the list. You already know about Ava Wilson. Other names are Jake Talley and Scott Carey. That we know of; it’s possible that others are involved.”

“You can add Ansem Beckett to that list,” Bill said; he’d been so silent up to now that it almost startled Mary to hear him speak.

“Who’s Ansem Beckett? I don’t know about this one.”

“Oh, Ash recently added him to the list. He doesn’t fit the pattern exactly, because he didn’t lose a parent to a fire - at least, not until recently.”

“What makes Ash think there’s a connection then?”

“There was a fire in his nursery when he was six-month old, but his mother didn’t die - she got him out of the house in time. Unfortunately, he had a twin brother, Andy, who didn’t make it out.”

“You said his mother didn’t die until recently,” Karen said.

“Yes, a few months ago the mother, Holly, she, um - well, she set herself on fire.”

“She - what?” Mary said, imagining the scene in spite of herself. “On purpose?”

“That's what the witnesses said: she was at a gas station, and instead of filling up her car she doused herself in gasoline and lit up a match. Vrroumph.” Bill mimed the fire with his hands.

None of them said anything for a moment, digesting the information. Karen was the one to break the silence. “On that cheerful note,” she said. “I know a few hunters I can call immediately. Are you staying here tonight? I just made the bed in the blue room.”

Bill leered a little bit at the mention of the room, but stopped when Mary swatted his arm.

“We’ll stay,” she told Karen. “If you have another free room, that is.”

---

“Are you sure it isn’t anything you said that pushed that girl over the edge?” Dean asked skeptically around a mouthful of his sandwich.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Sam said in a clipped tone. “And close your mouth, you’re disgusting. This was exactly like what she said happened to Rachel: she was talking, acting normal, and then she interrupted herself - right in the middle of a sentence - to slap me and scream at me. This was… it was like she was under control or something.”

Dean looked at Vivian, searching her for a clue about her thoughts on the subject. They were having lunch at a restaurant outside of KU, the Café De La Place. The name had made Dean fear the worst - random French had to be the tidemark for pretentiousness - but the atmosphere was more casual than he’d thought it would be, with round tables and slat-back chairs, and the sun spilling cheerfully from the huge bay windows. The menu was mostly salads, though, and Dean had fallen back on the only sandwich he could find in it. Vivian hadn’t said anything in a while, playing with more than eating the black olives in her Greek salad.

“What do you think, Viv’?”

She looked up at him with a glare that sent the ‘never call me that again’ message loud and clear. Sammy barely concealed his smirk. “I’m not sure what to think,” she said evenly. “It does sound like something was controlling Rachel and her roommate. Controlling, or possessing her.”

“What did you find when you went to their room?” Sam asked.

“Not much,” Dean said with a sigh, putting his sandwich down on his plate. “Nothing looked out of place, and there was some EMF but not enough to be conclusive. Ghosts are usually more active at night, but it wasn’t the case here.”

“And ghosts are usually bound to one place, right?” Sam said, his inner geekness winning against his disinterest in all things hunt-related. “But whatever it is has acted in at least two different places now.”

Dean caught Vivian looking covertly at his brother with an undecipherable expression, and although she hadn’t said anything he wondered if she was bothered by the presence of a non-hunter at the table, discussing the case. He hoped this wasn’t going to be a problem, because he secretly enjoyed the fact that Sam was getting more involved in this hunt, and he didn’t want her to ruin it

“It’s true that ghosts are usually bound to one place,” he said. “But exceptions aren’t unheard of. If enough of the person’s, uh, DNA is spread around different places, it can be enough for the ghost to hop from one to another.”

“You mean like… chopped body parts or something?” Sam’s nose wrinkled in disgust. “Gross.”

“Doesn’t have to be body parts, but yeah, that’s the idea. It could explain why there wasn’t much EMF in Rachel’s room, if the ghost was busy slapping you around with Vicky’s body.”

“If it’s even a ghost,” Vivian said. “What if it was something else? Like, a demon?”

Dean felt the word sink into his gut. “Demons are rare as fuck, though.”

“Doesn’t mean it can’t be one.”

No, it didn’t. Dean wasn’t about to admit that he didn’t feel ready at all to tackle a fucking demon from Hell.

“We can still look into the buildings’ history,” Sam hazarded, probably picking up on Dean’s discomfort with a little brother’s spidey sense. “None of them are very old - K.K. Amini opened in 1992 and Margaret in 2000, so it shouldn’t be too much work. I can do it - it’d be less suspicious for me to be seen working at the library.”

They split as soon as they were done with lunch, all of them going back to the campus - Sam to look into the library’s archives, Dean and Vivian to try and find Rachel’s roommate Vicky - but separately to avoid being seen together. It was going to be hard enough to hide from Sam’s roommates, who would be able to identify him as Sam’s brother.

They were walking back to Dean’s car when Vivian suddenly stopped, going from on the move to statue-like stillness in a split second.

“What…?”

Vivian raised an imperious finger. “Ssshh!”

Dean smacked his lips together and mimed zipping his mouth shut. The joke was lost on Vivian, whose eyes, nervous and alert, flitted from the cars in the street, to the people walking past them, the buildings on their side and across the street. Dean tried to look for and listen for whatever had tripped her, but he could only hear normal street noises: cars buzzing by, footsteps beating on the sidewalk, snippets of conversation floating to them.

Without warning, Vivian grabbed her gun from inside her jacket.

“What the fuck!”

Hands up to her face, gun pointed to the sky, Vivian made her way around the corner into a back alley. Dean followed her after a frantic look around, checking if anyone had seen her weapon and was about to call the cops on them.

The alley smelled faintly of piss and garbage; it was closed at the end by a wooden fence, and there was absolutely nothing noteworthy going on here. Feeling like he’d shut up long enough, Dean was about to tell Vivian to quit it with the G.I. Joe act, when she dropped her arms and seamlessly put away her gun, swift like a magician doing a trick.

“It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?”

She didn’t say anything, looking deep in thought, and Dean stifled a frustrated sigh. “Do you think we were followed or something?” And who would follow them? Couldn’t be their ghost, it wasn’t the way ghosts worked. Unless of course they had it all wrong and today’s monster of the week was something completely different.

Vivian furrowed her brows until they made one V-shaped line. “Do you remember yesterday? When we came out of Margaret Amini after the interview?”

“Yeah?”

“You bumped into a student. He gave off a strange vibe, didn’t he?”

Now it was Dean’s turn to furrow his brow. “Maybe,” he said, straining to remember. He’d felt that odd warning tingle at the back of his mind all of yesterday, but for the life of him he couldn’t say where it came from.

“I don’t know, it’s that feeling… It’s reminding me of something.” Then all wrinkles smoothed from Vivian’s face. “I lost it.”

“Lost it? Lost what? Call me stupid, but I feel like I’m running uphill trying to follow this conversation.”

“I don’t know!” She turned around and briskly walked away, back to the street, and once again Dean had to jog after her.

“Hey!”

She stopped and waited for him, but he felt it was probably only because she had remembered he was the one with the car. “I felt something,” she said, “like we were being followed or watched - and it jogged my memory, but I lost the thread and now I can’t tell you what it was about. What I can tell you is that something weird’s going on - I don’t think it’s just a normal haunting.” Her tone was brusque, and she looked annoyed at having to explain herself. Dean figured it was probably the closest he would get to seeing her sheepish.

“Okay,” he said. “Wasn’t so hard, was it? Words, everyone should learn how to use them.” Oh, Sammy would have a field day with this. “Since you’re in a caring and sharing mood, Viv’-”

“Yes, Dean-o?”

“When’re you going to tell me what the hell you want from me?”

They’d stopped in the middle of the sidewalk way, forcing the flow of passersby to part around them like the water of a river around a small island. “What do you mean?” Vivian said, lifting up her chin.

Dean used his eyebrows to tell her how unimpressed he was. “Come on. I may be pretty, but I ain’t stupid. I don’t think you brought me this case and are helping me with it out of the goodness of your heart, or because you liiiiike me so much.” He grinned mockingly. “So spill it: what do you want?”

Vivian crossed her arms over her chest and pressed her lips until they were colorless. “Why haven’t you told Sam about the yellow-eyed man?”

Dean ground his teeth at the avoidance, and let out a chuff of breath. “Because Sam doesn’t believe in the yellow-eyed man. Telling him about it would be a good way to ensure he doesn’t take this case seriously at all. Now it’s your turn.”

“Right. What I want is for you to use your connection at Harvelle’s to find something for me. A gun.”

“A gun? They say you can get one opening a bank account in Michigan. Didn’t you hear?”

“It’s an old gun made by Samuel Colt - it’s said it can kill anything. I’m sure a hunter has it, but- The thing is, I’m not welcome at Harvelle’s anymore. Bill didn’t seem to appreciate me kicking his patrons around.”

Dean threw his head back and laughed. He could just picture the scene. “I would’ve paid to see that. So a gun that can kill anything, huh?” It sounded like fairy tale bullshit to him, but he didn’t want to give her incentive to start kicking him around. “What do you need to kill so badly?”

He could see her hesitate, weighing how much she needed him against her reluctance to share something of herself. “The vampire who killed my brother.”

“Huh. I thought vampires were extinct. Also, you don’t need a gun to kill a vampire. You just need to relieve the fucker of his head.”

“They’re not extinct, they just got better at hiding themselves. And this one is… tricky. Hard to approach.” The way she said it, it sounded like she’d given it more than a few tries. “If I could get this gun, I would be sure to kill him.”

“Why me? No other sucker lounging around at the Roadhouse?”

She smiled, showing too much teeth. “When I heard that college boy talking about the yellow-eyed man, I thought it was fitting. You’re getting revenge for your father, and I’m getting revenge for my brother.”

Yeah. It was o-so-poetic, a bloody tale fit for a hunter. “Revenge,” he said, feeling his throat tighten around the word. “Now served all day.”

---
As Sam had predicted, looking into Margaret Amini Hall’s history didn’t take too much time, and K.K. Amini didn’t take much longer. The women’s hall had been built with the money of a KU graduate, Margaret Wenski Amini, and K.K. was named after her husband, who had graduated with her in ‘46. Architecturally speaking, the two halls were twin images of each other: both were red-brick buildings with a white triangular front and white-trimmed windows.

Both buildings’ histories were as clean as sheets coming out of the washing machine. Sam was methodical in his research; this was something most of his professors had commented on. He didn’t stop when he couldn’t find anyone having died in the twin halls: he also checked any account of accidents or students going missing. He went as far as looking into deaths or disappearance of residents even outside of the buildings themselves, because it was always possible that one of them had died somewhere else but had left enough of themselves in the halls to start haunting them. But there was nothing in Margaret Amini until Rachel’s death, and in K.K. he only found about a few accidents that hadn’t gone beyond broken bones.

“Can’t be a ghost, then,” Sam murmured, tapping the tip of his pencil on his notebook. “Unless it latched on to one of the residents?”

Why was he even wracking his mind over this hunt? Let Dean do the job he’d chosen for himself. Their mother had been raised in that world, but for Dean it had been a conscious, deliberate choice that had cost him his relationship with Mom - he’d wanted to leave the light and step into the shadow. Sam didn’t think he was that brave, or that insane.

And yet here he was, taking notes, bullet point lists and arrows everywhere, side notes in the margin and all. He was as focused on this case as he ever was when he researched something for school. Maybe it was because Vicky’s face didn’t leave him: the broken look on her face as she struggled with her grief and her incomprehension, but also the sudden mad fury when she’d slapped him out of the blue. And that feeling he’d had right before she did it, that weird pressure behind his forehead, almost like….

A chair next to him squeaked as it scraped against the floor, a book was dropped on the table, and Sam was startled out of his focus. He glanced sideways to whoever it was, slightly annoyed. He’d been vaguely aware before of other students coming and going, whispering to each other, coughing, turning pages, but this intruder was louder than the rest and way closer to his personal space.

“Hey,” said the guy in question, greeting Sam with a wide smile like they were long time friends. Sam examined him: pretty short - though to Sam most people were -, curly hair, a hooked nose, and nervous eyes that shone just a little too brightly. Sam couldn’t remember having ever seen him before, and yet, he felt a curious feeling of familiarity, like maybe the guy reminded him of someone he knew.

“Sam, right?” the guy went on, and all kinds of alarm signals beeped in Sam’s mind. “What are you working on?”

“Nothing,” Sam said, closing his notebook and dropping it inside his bag on the floor. “Homework. Do we know each other? Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.”

“No, we don’t. I mean, I’ve seen you around but we’ve never actually talked before. I know all about you, though.” There was a tremor of excitement in the guy’s voice that made unease creep along Sam’s spine. “About you and your brother. What’s his name again? Dean?”

Sam’s whole body tensed at his brother’s name, his fists clenching on his lap. He could feel the weight of his cell phone in his jeans pocket and wished he could reach it and covertly send Dean a text to warn him.

“How do you know that name?” Sam said through his teeth. “Who the hell are you?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Ansem.”

Sam feverishly sifted through his memories, but the name didn’t ring a bell at all. “How do you know about us?”

Ansem leaned closer, dragging his chair with him. No one around them seemed to pay them any mind, everyone engrossed in their work or in hushed conversations with their friends. One of Sam’s own friends walked by and waved his fingers at him. He was gone to the other side of the room, hidden behind rows of bookshelves, before Sam could even think to call for him so he wasn’t alone anymore with Ansem.

Ansem must have caught Sam’s panicked look because he chuckled and patted him on the shoulder. Sam shoved at his hand, but Ansem just chuckled again and said, “You don’t need to be afraid of me, Sam. Not you. We’re just having a friendly conversation.”

Sam relaxed the fingers of his right hand, and they hurt a little from how tightly he’d closed his fist, but he ignored the feeling and grabbed the lapel of Ansem’s jacket to draw him into his space. He’d worried about Dean before, had laid around in bed at night and let the thought of his brother maybe dying in a ditch somewhere nag at him; never, though, had he felt such protectiveness spark inside him.

“Okay,” he said, almost nose to nose with Ansem. “So in all friendliness, tell me how the fuck you know my brother’s name.”

He saw Ansem flinch almost imperceptibly and felt a dark feeling of satisfaction stir inside him. “Dude, relax, I’ll tell you. Just… let me go.” Sam didn’t move an inch. “Okay, okay. It was the yellow-eyed man.”

“What?” In surprise, Sam opened his fingers and Ansem pulled away, fussing over the wrinkles on his jacket. “What did you say?”

Behind them a girl burst out laughing, triggering a concert of annoyed ‘sssshhh’s around her.

“The man with the yellow eyes.” Ansem’s eyes roved over Sam’s face, searching, and whatever he saw there made him smile smugly. “You don’t know anything, do you? You don’t know him. Well, Sam, he knows you.”

Dean claimed a man with yellow eyes had killed their father. He’d made him a boogeyman all throughout Sam’s childhood, until their mother put a stop to it - back when Dean was fifteen or sixteen, and that was when the fights had started. Sam had always thought it was something his brother had made up to scare him.

“Ask Dean why he came here. Why he really came here. I’m doing you a favor, Sam. I’m not the one you should be mad at.”

Upon these words Ansem stood up, and left with a friendly nod at Sam. If he’d been rattled at one point by Sam’s behavior, he’d gotten over it, and it didn’t show in the way he strolled toward the exit. Sam stayed in his seat for a long moment after he was gone, stomach churning, his whole body chilled to the bone. Then he shook himself, gathered his stuff in a hurry and almost ran out of the library.

He walked across campus, instinctively heading in the direction of his hall even though he had class in less than half an hour. He felt shaky, a million thoughts dashing uncontrolled through his mind, and he didn’t think he’d be able to focus on anything until he talked to his brother, so he snaked a hand into his pocket to get to his phone. The phone started ringing right at that moment and Sam knew, with that flash of sibling sixth sense that hit now and then, that it was his brother calling.

“Dean,” he said to the phone without preamble, “I need to talk to you.”

“Did you find anything about-”

“No,” Sam snapped. He wasn’t sure yet if he should get mad because - well, he didn’t know Ansem from Adam and the guy seemed shady as hell, so of course Sam didn’t trust him but… Sam could feel in his gut that Ansem was right; Dean hadn’t been straight with him, and it pissed him off. “I didn’t find anything noteworthy on the halls, but I still need to talk to you. Now. And don’t bring Vivian with you.”

“What? What’s the matter, Sammy? Did something happen? Hey, are you alright? Did-”

Not in the mood for Dean’s big brother routine, Sam cut him off, “Not on the phone. I need to talk to you about the yellow-eyed man.”

He’d meant for the words to be a bomb, and the silence he got in return made his blood turn cold. He’d been right, then. Dean had been lying to him.

“Meet me at…” He thought about it for a moment - they still needed to avoid being seen together on campus, and Sam knew Dean would refuse to go to his old haunts and risk seeing people from his teenage years. “Meet me at the corner of Stonehenge Drive and Overland.”

Then he hung up, unwilling to give his brother the chance to protest. He took a deep breath and kept it trapped inside his lungs, taking a moment to center himself as he looked around. There was a cluster of trees and Sam could only get a glimpse of the crenelated top of the stone building hidden behind them. A group of Japanese students walked past him, chatting excitedly over something one of them had on his phone. To get to the next bus stop, he’d need to follow down the road and take a left.

Sam released the breath he’d been holding and started walking. The bus trip up to his meeting point with Dean would give him time to sort out his thoughts. If Dean had come hunting for the yellow-eyed man - if the yellow-eyed man really did exist and had killed their father - then what did it mean for Rachel Landon? Was her death related, or was it a coincidence? And what was that Ansem dude’s role in all this?

Well, Sam, he knows you.

Sam swallowed back his feeling of foreboding. That was something he couldn’t think about, because every time his mind approached the memory of what Ansem had said about him, the way he’d acted as though they had some sort of privileged bond, his mind shrunk away in horror.

He rode the bus in a state of daze. He usually liked to observe his surroundings, look at people and watch the way they talked, the way they moved, and try to imagine the kind of people they were, and public transportation was the best kind of place for people-watching. But when he got off the bus after a twenty-five-minute journey, he couldn’t have said a thing about the people who’d been in there with him.

At the crossroads of Stonehenge Drive and Overland was a small roundabout covered in unkempt grass. There was nothing of interest there, only patches of grass and fields, with a few farms in the distance. The weather had turned uncomfortably cool and damp, so Sam zipped up his jacket and buried his hands in his pockets. He saw Dean’s car, an old Chevy Impala their father had bought right before he proposed to their mother, come from afar like a black stormy cloud. Dean had always loved that car, claimed he’d been conceived in it. He had worked hard on convincing their mother not to sell it when she bought a new one, but to give it to him instead as a birthday present. Sam still remembered how weirdly peaceful those months had been.

The car pulled over, and Dean got out with a squeak of the car door. He looked stony-faced, with an expression of locked stubbornness that Sam recognized from back when he was still living at home: it meant he firmly believed in his own rightfulness, and wasn’t ready to be told otherwise.

“So, what is it?” Dean said bluntly as soon as he was close enough to speak.

Sam told him about Ansem’s visit at the library. He saw his brother tense at the part where the guy knew their names: “He has curly hair, you said?” Dean’s brow furrowed and his eyes dulled as he looked inward, deep in thought. “Damn, I don’t know why this is ringing a bell. Never mind, what else did he say?”

“That he knew all this because the yellow-eyed man told him.” He watched out for Dean’s reaction, but since he had warned him in advance, his brother managed to control it pretty well. “He said to ask you why you really came here. So, tell me, Dean: what is this really about?”

Dean looked at him for a long moment, blinds shutting down behind dull eyes. It was an expression that both freaked Sam out and infuriated him. “If I had told you about the yellow-eyed man,” Dean said, “would you have even listened to me? You never believed me.”

Sam couldn’t deny this without lying through his teeth. “I’m listening now.”

Dean pinned him with his eyes for a little longer, then heaved a weary sigh and rubbed a hand over his hair. “There’s not much to say. Vivian came to me saying that she’d had a talk with a drunk student from KU talking about a yellow-eyed man. She couldn’t tell me much about the guy in question or about what he said in details. First freaky occurrence in a long line of freaky.”

“How well do you know her? How did she know about the yellow-eyed man anyway?”

“What do you think, smartass? Because I told her. And yeah, I was drunk, but she wasn’t and… Really, I can’t say that I know her, but she looks just the type to like being in control, see what I mean? That she couldn’t remember that guy, that’s not normal. Anyway, after that conversation she checked the news and saw the article about Rachel’s death and thought it was a strange coincidence. She thought I might be interested in doing some digging.”

Sam remained silent for a moment, digesting the information. He’d been angry with his brother, but now…. he wasn’t sure what to say; anger was a blunt, uncomplicated emotion and now he missed it. He felt an ache he couldn’t name, low in his stomach, like he’d swallowed something pointy and it was now poking at his insides.

“What are you going to do if you find that yellow-eyed man?”

Dean snorted, upper lip curling like Sam had said something amusing. “What do you think? Kill him, of course. You know, I’ve always called him the yellow-eyed man, but there’s no way that thing is an actual man.”

“Are you going to call Mom?”

All traces of a smile vanished from Dean’s face. “Why would I do that?”

“Don’t play dumb.” There it was, the refreshing burn of anger coming to his rescue. “If this thing killed Dad, then Mom’s been hunting it for almost-”

“Mom has always said,” Dean’s voice rose up to cover Sam, “that the yellow-eyed man didn’t exist!”

“Oh, come on-”

“She always said- She made me believe- You-” Dean was now pointing his finger harshly to punctuate his words. “She made you believe I was crazy!”

“She was just worried about you!” Sam’s shouting momentarily shut his brother up, so Sam gulped hurriedly a much needed breath and continued, “You act like all she’s ever tried to do is ruin your life or something, but what she wants is only for you to be safe!”

“Safe? Knowing what’s out there?” Dean stepped back and turned away, a muscle jumping on his cheek. Like he couldn’t stand looking at Sam anymore. “Man, I don’t know how you do it. How you can live your normal college life when you know what’s hiding in the dark.”

Sam felt the blow as keenly as if Dean had punched him. He recoiled a bit, gritting his teeth. “And so what, huh? Yeah, I know there are ghosts. I know there are monsters. This isn’t gonna stop me from living my life.”

Dean spun around to face Sam. “And you feel nothing? No responsibility for-”

“Are we responsible for everything? You know there are human monsters too, right? You know there are natural catastrophes. You know people are dying from hunger-”

‘What’s your point?”

“Do you feel responsible for them too? What’re you doing to help them?”

“That’s not the same thing!”

“How is that not-”

“Because everyone knows about the stuff you mentioned. Not everyone knows about the things we know.”

Sam clapped his mouth shut, his chest heaving with leftover anger, uncertain how to answer that. “Okay,” he said, combing a hand through his hair and working on getting his breathing under control. “Okay. You win. I’m a selfish bastard.”

“Damn it, Sam.” Dean seemed to deflate, his shoulders sagging like under a sudden weight, and he swiped a hand over his mouth. “That’s not what I meant.”

The fuck did you mean, then? Sam took a deep breath in, feeling oddly shaky and exhausted. “Are you going to call Mom or not? Or maybe I should do it. If the thing that killed Dad really is around…”

Dean gave him a hard look, then shook his head with a rueful chuckle. “Jesus. You’re like a fucking bloodhound, are you?” His eyes drifted away. “I was ready to call the whole thing a bust, at least when it comes to the yellow-eyed man, but now with what this Ansem guy said… Okay.”

“Okay?”

Dean shrugged, looking at the tips of his boots. “I’m not calling Mom. But you do whatever you want.” His sentence was barely finished and he was already walking to his car. He stopped with his hand in his pocket, fumbling for his key. “Need a ride back?”

Sam shook his head and hair flopped in his eyes. “Nah, I’m good. I’ll take the bus.” He realized he wasn’t even sure when the next scheduled bus was. “Or I’ll walk. It’s fine.”

“You sure?”

Sam waved for him to go, plastering a reassuring smile on his face. Dean scrunched his face doubtfully, but eventually he shrugged and got into his car. The Impala left with a deep rumble, tailed by a cloud of smoke all the way.

Part three