SPN FIC - The Genuine Article (Part 2 of 2)
This right here? Is my FIVE HUNDREDTH Supernatural story.
In honor of the occasion, I invited my most faithful commenter, irismay42, to set up the whats and wherefores. She asked for the boys and John, post-AVSC -- a John who's run afoul of something fugly, leaving his boys to figure out (a) that something's not right, and (b) how to fix the problem. Here you go, my dear! Many thanks for your friendship and devotion! I hope you enjoy what the Muse and I have cooked up.
Part One is here.
CHARACTERS: Dean (age 13), Sam (almost-9), and John
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 7962 words altogether; this part is 4286 words
"Is he feeding the birds?" Sam fussed.
THE GENUINE ARTICLE
By Carol Davis
Sam held onto Dean's gaze for a moment, then turned and jogged off down the sidewalk, calling, "Mister? Hey, Mister!"
Whoever (or whatever) the guy was, he had a pretty high level of patience, because he did nothing to remove himself from Sam's buzzing presence. He simply kept walking along as Sam danced around him, babbling, "Do you like birds? Do you know a lot about birds? I had to do this project in school - not this year, last year - and study four kinds of birds. One large one, one small one, one common one and one unusual one. I found out about turkey buzzards. Do you know anything about turkey buzzards? They're pretty cool."
Dean came within a few yards of them, then slowed his pace so he could hang back, near enough to listen but far enough away to allow Sam to hang onto the man's undivided attention - if the guy was actually paying any attention to him at all - while he tried to come up with a plan.
It'd been a while since Sam had been able to babble on like that to Dad without getting "Put a sock in that, would you?" as a response.
Or… hell. Since Sam had wanted to babble on like that. To Dad, or anyone.
Focus.
Dad would never get into a situation like this. No weapons.
Dean had his pocket knife, sure, but that was of limited use. Some packets of salt lifted from the diner; a thin silver chain they'd found at a yard sale. There was more back at the apartment, a lot more (guns, much larger knives, an iron crowbar, a bag of rock salt) - but the apartment seemed a thousand miles away.
He and Sam had just been out shopping for comics. That was all. An hour away from the apartment, shopping at Main Street News. He could have carried an assortment of the serious weapons in his backpack, but come ON - was he supposed to shoot something in the middle of town? Was there supposed to be something to shoot in the middle of town? They'd been here for six solid weeks, and there hadn't been a single weird incident. No sign of anything funky going on here.
"Did you know that the female bald eagle has a wingspan of up to ninety inches?" Sam said. "That's almost eight feet."
"Impressive," the man said.
"So… what do you like best about birds?"
The man stopped walking. Stood looking around, scanning his surroundings, then the sky. After a minute he smiled wistfully at Sam and said quietly, "Freedom."
Then he said, "Look, son - I don't have anything worth stealing."
That rocked Sam back half a step. "I - what?"
"I have a few dollars in my pocket. If you're intent on having that, I'll give it to you. But there's nothing else. This watch" - the man displayed his wrist - "isn't gold. If you've got a Fagin out there, expecting you to come back with a sackful of glorious booty, you've picked the wrong mark. I hate to think that that's what happening here, but I'm well aware of how the world works. And that a lecture on how you're headed down the wrong path in life would likely have little effect. So why don't we call it a day, here? Why don't you boys go on your way, and I'll go mine? No harm done. It's a nice day - let's leave it that way."
Sam had goggled at him through all of that. A glimpse of himself in the big window of the real estate office he was standing in front of told Dean that he himself was wearing pretty much the same expression.
Can't let him go, he thought furiously.
"Our dad's missing," Sam blurted.
The man frowned at that.
"For a while now," Sam said. "We don't know where he went. That's why we asked you about the car. That's his car, a big black Chevy, a '67. We've been asking everybody if they've seen it, a big black car, and nobody has, so -"
Sam burst into tears.
"Wait, now," the man said. "Don't do that. Have you talked to the police?"
Sam shook his head, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Lost for a way to deal with this sudden turn of events, the man turned to Dean and asked, "Is this true?"
"Umm," Dean said. "Yeah."
"How long has your father been missing?"
Almost nine years, Dean thought. "I don't know," he said. "He - he was supposed to pick us up at school, and he didn't show up. We looked all around town, and nobody's seen him. Nobody knows where he is."
"Maybe he was held up at work."
There was a genuine kindness in the man's eyes, an honest concern; his suspicion that he was about to be robbed of what little was in his pockets had completely vanished.
Pockets, Dean thought.
He's wearing Dad's clothes.
He's got all of Dad's stuff.
"It's okay, Sammy," Dean said, scuttling over to Sam and wrapping a protective arm around Sam's shoulders. As if they'd worked this all out ahead of time, Sam responded right away, trembling, literally shaking in his shoes. "He's really cold," Dean said to the man, because the shaking worked really well, almost better than anything he could have hoped for. "I told him he should've put on some warmer clothes before we came out to look for Dad, but he wouldn't listen to me. He never listens to me."
Now, if Sam was listening to him and knew how to play this, without overplaying it…
He had to hold back a sigh of relief when Sam huddled against him, still trembling. Shivering. Obviously chilled.
"Here, now," the man said, and shrugged out of his jacket.
Dad's jacket.
He draped the coat around Sam's shoulders, dropping down into a crouch to tuck it securely around Sam's small body.
That was all the opportunity Dean needed.
He was only thirteen, half the size of the man he intended to take down - but he'd done plenty of sparring with adults, with Dad, with Uncle Bobby, with other hunters. Find the weakness, Dad always said, and the man's loose crouch was exactly that; it made him ridiculously easy to take by surprise, to topple onto the sidewalk, face down, one arm twisted painfully behind his back, legs twined with Dean's so he couldn't easy shift up onto his knees and gain leverage.
This man was no fighter. Not a trained hunter. Not a trained anything, judging from the feeble, uncoordinated way he struggled.
Tackling the man this way was risky; if he'd had the extra strength most supernatural creatures possessed, he could have flipped Dean off of him without much effort. Could have slammed Dean into the brick wall of the nearest building, breaking bones, knocking Dean out cold.
He could have run off with Sam.
But if he'd that in mind, he probably would have done it long before now.
The man did squirm, and pant, and did his best to roll onto his back, but Dean was fast and agile, all limbs and stubborn determination. "Where's our dad?" he growled into the man's ear. "What did you do with him? Where's our dad?"
Sam, a few steps away (and out of the man's reach), was yanking weapons out of the seams and hidden compartments of Dad's jacket. The items were all small, allowing them to escape immediate notice, but potent: a vial of holy water, a slim silver knife, several long iron nails, a Baggie full of rock salt, a tiny Derringer pistol.
They didn't have much time to do this. Six weeks of living here had shown Dean that at this particular time of day, the streets in this part of town were pretty much deserted; the kids who'd gotten out of school were at home, or playing outdoors in their own neighborhoods, and the few people who worked in this area were still inside their offices or shops. There were few cars on the street, but if one happened to come by, or if someone looked out a window and spotted two boys struggling with a man they had pinned to the ground, this situation wasn't likely to end well. The man would escape, and the Winchester boys would be hauled off to the police station, where they'd remain until someone showed up to claim them.
Social Services, for instance.
"You tell me RIGHT NOW," Dean all but shouted. "We want our DAD!"
The man went completely limp underneath him.
Someone else might have thought the man had fainted, or had completely run out of strength. Someone else might have thought this was a good time to relax a little, to figure they had the upper hand, that things were going really well.
Dean seized a handful of the man's hair and smacked his head against the sidewalk.
The man didn't move.
"Is he unconscious?" Sam asked.
Instead of waiting for an answer, he fumbled with the weapons he was holding, singled out the silver knife, and dropped to his knees alongside the man. "Shifter," he muttered, more to himself than to Dean. "If he's a shifter, then you use silver, right?"
"What're you gonna -"
Sam glared at his brother.
"We're not on the moon, Sam," Dean hissed. "You can't stab people on a public street. You wanna end up in Juvie?"
He hadn't even finished saying it when Sam sank the knife into the meat of the man's upper arm.
The man jerked once, then lay still.
"Jesus!" Dean yelped. "Sammy, don't -"
Sam yanked the knife free, aiming to stab the man again. When Dean grabbed the knife out of his hand, Sam shoved him away and began unloading his arsenal on their unmoving captive: flinging holy water and salt at the man's head, then seizing the man's hair in both hands and thumping his head against the cold pavement.
The man started to come to at that point, twitching and jerking underneath Dean, moaning something that sounded like, "Annie, ohhhh, Annie…"
That set Sam off as if someone had punched him. He let go of everything he was holding (including the tiny pistol), tossed away Dad's jacket and used his now-empty hands to grab a double fistful of Dean, hauled his brother off the man, then took Dean's place astride the man's back. He was purple-faced with fury, pummeling the man's back and head as he shrieked, "WHERE'S MY DAD? You son of a bitch, WHERE'S MY DAD????"
Beneath him, the man began to groan in agony. "Annie," he keened. "Ohhh, Annie…"
"You BASTARD!" Sam screamed. "You SON OF A BITCH!"
He kept pounding. Slapping. The more he did it, the more the man seemed to come back to life, struggling to break free. It was no damn wonder, Dean thought, because Sam was flailing the shit out of him.
"ANNIE!" the man wailed.
And something happened.
To the astonishment of both Sam and Dean, a cloud of what looked like smoke, or steam, burst from the man's body, accompanied by a crackle of sparks and the distinct smell of an electrical short. Ozone, Dean thought, it's ozone, but he was unable to carry the idea any further than that, because a little more than arm's reach away, the cloud began to rearrange itself, transforming itself into a recognizably human figure.
"All wrong," the figure mourned. "It was all wrong."
It was a man, about Dad's height but very slender, with thinning blond hair, wearing an old-fashioned suit and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. He wasn't all there; he was almost transparent, and pale, like somebody's cheap attempt at a Star Trek hologram.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Dean and Sam were still gaping at him when the body Sam had been pummeling began to stir and groan.
He began to mutter, and it wasn't about birds.
"I'm sorry," the strange figure said again.
And vanished.
"Was that -" Sam stammered. "Was -"
The body underneath him flipped him off onto the sidewalk, turned itself quickly into a sit, then up to its feet.
His feet.
Dad's feet.
"What the GODDAMN -" he said, and it was recognizably Dad. Not just Dad's body, Dad's voice; it was Dad, and he was understandably pissed as he began to probe his arm and the back of his neck, narrowed eyes taking stock of the collection of weapons scattered across the sidewalk. The boys had seen smoke pour out of him a minute ago, and there was more of it now - though, thankfully, it wasn't directed at them. At least, not all of it.
He watched Dean and Sam scramble to pick up the discarded weapons, frowning as he collected them from the boys and stashed them in the pockets of his jeans. When Sam proffered his jacket, he let Sam stand there holding it.
"What happened?" he demanded, though it was somewhat less heated than Dean expected.
"Spirit," Dean said.
Dad strangled something deep in his throat and palmed the back of his neck. "Anybody get hurt?" he said after a minute.
"No, sir. Just… Umm. You?"
Shaking his head, Dad took the jacket from Sam and struggled into it, grimacing at the after-effects of Sam's assault. He looked the boys over carefully (what he was looking for, Dean wasn't sure; signs of injury, maybe, in spite of Dean's statement that they were all right) then moved on to examining their surroundings.
"You call anybody?" he asked.
"Didn't have time," Dean said. "We found you in the park, and followed you over here. Didn't want to lose you. It. Him."
"Did you have a plan?"
"Sure," Dean said.
Dad raised an eyebrow.
"Sam got it out of you. Salt. Holy water. He let you - him - have it with everything he had."
Dean meant that to be a compliment, to reinforce Sam's victory over the spirit, though the results had been more an accident than anything else. Plan? he thought. That'd been a hell of a plan, chasing the guy down the street and pelting him with salt and holy water. He and Sam liked to call each other a team (when Sam wasn't off being furious about something), but they had a lot of work ahead of them if they intended to get anywhere as a hunting team, and it was clear from looking at Sam that Sam wasn't playing the victory theme from Rocky inside his head.
"He kept saying 'Annie'," Sam volunteered, in a tone that suggested I'm sorry, Dad, I'm really sorry for kicking the shit out of you. "He was feeding the birds."
Oddly, that seemed to come as no surprise to Dad. He looked around again, and shifted his weight a little, as if he'd had a beer too many, but the wobble passed quickly. After that, he looked a little tired. Or… sad, maybe.
"Got any idea where the car is?" he asked.
Dean shook his head.
"Well, that just puts the friggin' icing on it, doesn't it?"
"I guess," Dean replied.
The spirit's name was Harlan Anderson, Dad said as they walked back toward the apartment. He was the entity Dad had been tracking down these past few weeks, the one he'd aimed to put to rest tonight, after full dark had arrived. Anderson had been a teacher, happily married to a woman named Annie, until a night in the winter of 1947. He'd gone out to help celebrate the promotion of a longtime friend, had stayed out a bit too late, and found himself unable to negotiate the icy roads between the roadside tavern where the party had taken place and his home on the outskirts of Breighton Corners. He was killed when his car rolled into a deep culvert alongside the road, leaving the grief-stricken Annie to raise their two children by herself.
He'd been seen - or felt, in one way or another - a number of times over the years, in a variety of places: his home, the school, the tavern, the stretch of road where he'd died. Each manifestation had been brief, and no one had been harmed, up until a few months ago.
"How come it changed then?" Dean asked.
"Annie died," Dad told him. "Seems like he'd been keeping an eye on her all that time, and when she was gone -"
"They weren't together?" Sam said. "After she died?"
Dad shook his head. "Apparently not."
Left completely alone, Anderson had finally been unable to remain a benign presence. Whether it was by choice, or not, he began to lash out: objects were hurled around the room at both his former home and the school. Drivers lost control of their cars. A potential buyer touring Anderson's house with the Realtor slipped and fell down a flight of stairs.
"He wasn't mad," Sam said. "Not here."
"Feeding the birds, you said," Dad mused.
"Yeah."
"They met here in town. He and his wife. Could be they met while they were feeding the birds."
"Is he around now?" Sam asked. "Do you, like… feel him?"
Again, Dad shook his head.
He seemed quietly subdued, Dean observed. Not angry, as he might well have been after being possessed by a ghost, and after being thrashed by both his sons. Just as well nobody had contacted Uncle Bobby, or Caleb, or the other hunters. Pastor Jim might have kept his own counsel (as he liked to say), but the others would more than likely bust Dad's balls over this, for going out on his own to deep-fry a dead guy and ending up getting possessed instead - if they ever found out about it. Sure, anybody could end up getting possessed - but this was John Winchester they were talking about.
And he'd gotten possessed by a dead schoolteacher.
"Something funny?" Dad asked.
"No, sir," Dean replied. "Just - kind of weird."
"Weird?"
"You were feeding the birds," Dean said.
With the help of a guy from the local garage who was willing to scout the area for a missing '67 Chevy Impala without informing the police, they located the car abandoned at the side of the road about ten miles outside of town. Miracle the thieves just left it there unharmed, the guy announced - sweet set of wheels like that. After Dad paid him twenty bucks for his trouble, he went on his way, happy as a dimwitted dog, whistling and thumping the steering wheel in time to "Achy Breaky Heart" as it poured out of his entirely crappy car radio.
The three Winchesters stood looking at the Impala for a good long time.
"A dead guy drove your car," Sam pointed out.
"Looks like," Dad replied.
It was, Dean figured, purely an act of God that Harlan Anderson hadn't decided to recreate his big goodbye by rolling the Impala into a ditch.
That would have been six different kinds of horrendous.
The sun was pretty much down by that point, full dark not far off. Dad would drive them back into town, Dean figured; would drop him and Sam off at the apartment, maybe grab a quick bite to eat, then head back to Breighton Corners so he could barbeque what was left of Harlan Anderson. It didn't seem like a good idea, Dad heading out alone once again, but there wasn't enough time to summon anybody to help out - and Dean was pretty sure Dad would rather not enlist reinforcements for this particular job. Not after what had happened so far.
But instead of pointing the Impala back toward town, Dad pulled a U-turn and headed west.
Toward Breighton Corners.
"Bag of snacks there in the back," he pointed out, nodding toward the back seat. "Grab something to eat. Gotta be on our game."
It wasn't until they'd almost reached the cemetery that Dad confessed that he'd been aware Anderson was around; he'd walked through areas of biting cold, felt crackles of static electricity in the air, saw lightbulbs flicker and flash. A dog meandering near the old school had crouched low to the ground, hackles raised, snarling at something that wasn't visible.
Dad had been well-armed, well-prepared for dealing with something intending to attack him. What he hadn't anticipated was Anderson hopping aboard, for what felt like being hit by a wall of refrigerated air… and then, lights out.
"What if it happens again?" Sam asked worriedly from the back seat.
"Got backup this time," Dad replied.
Anderson's grave was well back from the road, past a rise in the ground that would help conceal what the Winchesters were doing from anyone who might happen to drive by. Each toting a duffel of supplies, flashlights in hand, they hiked through rows of old headstones, all three of them alert for anything that might feel wrong, that might signal Anderson's return. When they finally reached their destination, Dad opened one of the duffels and passed Dean a sawed-off and a heavy sack of rock salt. To Sam, he offered an iron crowbar and instructions to swing it like a baseball bat at anything that tried to materialize. Then he shrugged out of his jacket, laid it on the ground, and set to work with a shovel. Nothing more than a wince or two indicated that he'd been stabbed in the arm. What had happened that afternoon had energized him, Dean figured - or maybe he simply was determined to get the whole thing over with. Put it all behind him.
A little before nine, the tip of the shovel crunched into the lid of Harlan Anderson's casket. Dad cleared the lid off quickly and broke the hinges with a couple of crisp strokes. When he flipped the lid aside, a cloud of putrid air billowed up out of the grave.
Dean glanced over at his brother, curious.
"Bite me," Sam said, though there wasn't much conviction in it. Even in the dim spill from the flashlights he was noticeably pale.
At least he hadn't tossed his cookies.
Sam forced himself to look; walked himself forward as if he was piloting somebody else's body, much as Harlan Anderson had done with Dad for most of the afternoon. With a solid grip on the crowbar he approached the grave and peered inside as Dad climbed out, still clearly wary of being blindsided by roving spirits looking for a warm body to inhabit.
What Sam expected to see, Dean had no idea. Maybe he was recalling every horror movie they'd ever watched. Thought there'd be some slimy mass of guts inside the casket.
Maybe he thought Harlan Anderson was going to sit up and say hi.
Rather than provoke his brother, Dean used his pocket knife to slit open the sack of rock salt, leaned in and poured the salt in long stripes onto the corpse. By the time he was finished, Dad had the can of lighter fluid in hand, lid off, and added another layer of stink to the gravesite by dousing the coffin and its contents with the oily liquid.
Sam blinked in surprise when Dad held out his lighter.
"Feel like doing the honors?" Dad offered.
Sam stood looking at the lighter, crowbar braced across his chest. "It doesn't feel like an honor," he said after a moment. "He… kind of seemed like a nice guy. You know? He was just feeding the birds. He said what he liked best about them was their freedom."
Dad nodded at that. Spent a moment gazing into the grave.
"Set him free, then, Sam," he said quietly.
Sam didn't really need to lay down the crowbar in order to work the lighter, but he did it anyway, slowly, carefully, as if he was worried about breaking something. Typical of the little geek, Dean thought: overthinking everything. If he and Sam were ever going to be a team, busting their way through the hunting world (Starsky and Hutch, he thought; we'll be like Starsky and Hutch, two cool guys in a cool car), then Sam was going to have to get up to speed with this stuff. He was gonna need to work fast, because you never knew what would happen next.
You just couldn't give things that much opportunity to go all pear-shaped.
Finally, Sam flicked the little wheel on the lighter. The golden light bathed his face for a moment, and he blinked a couple of times. Looked like maybe he was saying something inside his head. Giving old bird-loving Harlan Anderson some kind of polite send-off.
He dropped the lighter into the grave as if it had suddenly become too hot (or too cold) to hang on to.
As they stood watching the fire, Dad reached out and reeled Sam gently in. Held him close enough to warm him, and lightly ruffled his hair, in much the same way Harlan Anderson had done it that afternoon. Dean half expected Sam to resist, but Sam leaned in and let his father embrace him, curling an arm around Dad's waist, his face half buried in Dad's jacket.
Dean thought back to Christmas, to Sam saying in bewilderment, Dad said the monster under my bed wasn't real.
Trying, that one last time, to hang on to what was, really, long gone.
He made a point of walking alongside Sam as they headed back to the car. "You busted your cherry," he told Sam, and held out a hand, offering a high-five if Sam was interested.
Sam, predictably, wasn't.
His attention was on Dad, striding rapidly toward the Impala, a good twenty feet ahead of them.
"You freaked out, dude," Dean said. "You went totally freaking ballistic."
"Yeah," Sam said. "I know."
* * * * *
In honor of the occasion, I invited my most faithful commenter, irismay42, to set up the whats and wherefores. She asked for the boys and John, post-AVSC -- a John who's run afoul of something fugly, leaving his boys to figure out (a) that something's not right, and (b) how to fix the problem. Here you go, my dear! Many thanks for your friendship and devotion! I hope you enjoy what the Muse and I have cooked up.
Part One is here.
CHARACTERS: Dean (age 13), Sam (almost-9), and John
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 7962 words altogether; this part is 4286 words
"Is he feeding the birds?" Sam fussed.
THE GENUINE ARTICLE
By Carol Davis
Sam held onto Dean's gaze for a moment, then turned and jogged off down the sidewalk, calling, "Mister? Hey, Mister!"
Whoever (or whatever) the guy was, he had a pretty high level of patience, because he did nothing to remove himself from Sam's buzzing presence. He simply kept walking along as Sam danced around him, babbling, "Do you like birds? Do you know a lot about birds? I had to do this project in school - not this year, last year - and study four kinds of birds. One large one, one small one, one common one and one unusual one. I found out about turkey buzzards. Do you know anything about turkey buzzards? They're pretty cool."
Dean came within a few yards of them, then slowed his pace so he could hang back, near enough to listen but far enough away to allow Sam to hang onto the man's undivided attention - if the guy was actually paying any attention to him at all - while he tried to come up with a plan.
It'd been a while since Sam had been able to babble on like that to Dad without getting "Put a sock in that, would you?" as a response.
Or… hell. Since Sam had wanted to babble on like that. To Dad, or anyone.
Focus.
Dad would never get into a situation like this. No weapons.
Dean had his pocket knife, sure, but that was of limited use. Some packets of salt lifted from the diner; a thin silver chain they'd found at a yard sale. There was more back at the apartment, a lot more (guns, much larger knives, an iron crowbar, a bag of rock salt) - but the apartment seemed a thousand miles away.
He and Sam had just been out shopping for comics. That was all. An hour away from the apartment, shopping at Main Street News. He could have carried an assortment of the serious weapons in his backpack, but come ON - was he supposed to shoot something in the middle of town? Was there supposed to be something to shoot in the middle of town? They'd been here for six solid weeks, and there hadn't been a single weird incident. No sign of anything funky going on here.
"Did you know that the female bald eagle has a wingspan of up to ninety inches?" Sam said. "That's almost eight feet."
"Impressive," the man said.
"So… what do you like best about birds?"
The man stopped walking. Stood looking around, scanning his surroundings, then the sky. After a minute he smiled wistfully at Sam and said quietly, "Freedom."
Then he said, "Look, son - I don't have anything worth stealing."
That rocked Sam back half a step. "I - what?"
"I have a few dollars in my pocket. If you're intent on having that, I'll give it to you. But there's nothing else. This watch" - the man displayed his wrist - "isn't gold. If you've got a Fagin out there, expecting you to come back with a sackful of glorious booty, you've picked the wrong mark. I hate to think that that's what happening here, but I'm well aware of how the world works. And that a lecture on how you're headed down the wrong path in life would likely have little effect. So why don't we call it a day, here? Why don't you boys go on your way, and I'll go mine? No harm done. It's a nice day - let's leave it that way."
Sam had goggled at him through all of that. A glimpse of himself in the big window of the real estate office he was standing in front of told Dean that he himself was wearing pretty much the same expression.
Can't let him go, he thought furiously.
"Our dad's missing," Sam blurted.
The man frowned at that.
"For a while now," Sam said. "We don't know where he went. That's why we asked you about the car. That's his car, a big black Chevy, a '67. We've been asking everybody if they've seen it, a big black car, and nobody has, so -"
Sam burst into tears.
"Wait, now," the man said. "Don't do that. Have you talked to the police?"
Sam shook his head, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Lost for a way to deal with this sudden turn of events, the man turned to Dean and asked, "Is this true?"
"Umm," Dean said. "Yeah."
"How long has your father been missing?"
Almost nine years, Dean thought. "I don't know," he said. "He - he was supposed to pick us up at school, and he didn't show up. We looked all around town, and nobody's seen him. Nobody knows where he is."
"Maybe he was held up at work."
There was a genuine kindness in the man's eyes, an honest concern; his suspicion that he was about to be robbed of what little was in his pockets had completely vanished.
Pockets, Dean thought.
He's wearing Dad's clothes.
He's got all of Dad's stuff.
"It's okay, Sammy," Dean said, scuttling over to Sam and wrapping a protective arm around Sam's shoulders. As if they'd worked this all out ahead of time, Sam responded right away, trembling, literally shaking in his shoes. "He's really cold," Dean said to the man, because the shaking worked really well, almost better than anything he could have hoped for. "I told him he should've put on some warmer clothes before we came out to look for Dad, but he wouldn't listen to me. He never listens to me."
Now, if Sam was listening to him and knew how to play this, without overplaying it…
He had to hold back a sigh of relief when Sam huddled against him, still trembling. Shivering. Obviously chilled.
"Here, now," the man said, and shrugged out of his jacket.
Dad's jacket.
He draped the coat around Sam's shoulders, dropping down into a crouch to tuck it securely around Sam's small body.
That was all the opportunity Dean needed.
He was only thirteen, half the size of the man he intended to take down - but he'd done plenty of sparring with adults, with Dad, with Uncle Bobby, with other hunters. Find the weakness, Dad always said, and the man's loose crouch was exactly that; it made him ridiculously easy to take by surprise, to topple onto the sidewalk, face down, one arm twisted painfully behind his back, legs twined with Dean's so he couldn't easy shift up onto his knees and gain leverage.
This man was no fighter. Not a trained hunter. Not a trained anything, judging from the feeble, uncoordinated way he struggled.
Tackling the man this way was risky; if he'd had the extra strength most supernatural creatures possessed, he could have flipped Dean off of him without much effort. Could have slammed Dean into the brick wall of the nearest building, breaking bones, knocking Dean out cold.
He could have run off with Sam.
But if he'd that in mind, he probably would have done it long before now.
The man did squirm, and pant, and did his best to roll onto his back, but Dean was fast and agile, all limbs and stubborn determination. "Where's our dad?" he growled into the man's ear. "What did you do with him? Where's our dad?"
Sam, a few steps away (and out of the man's reach), was yanking weapons out of the seams and hidden compartments of Dad's jacket. The items were all small, allowing them to escape immediate notice, but potent: a vial of holy water, a slim silver knife, several long iron nails, a Baggie full of rock salt, a tiny Derringer pistol.
They didn't have much time to do this. Six weeks of living here had shown Dean that at this particular time of day, the streets in this part of town were pretty much deserted; the kids who'd gotten out of school were at home, or playing outdoors in their own neighborhoods, and the few people who worked in this area were still inside their offices or shops. There were few cars on the street, but if one happened to come by, or if someone looked out a window and spotted two boys struggling with a man they had pinned to the ground, this situation wasn't likely to end well. The man would escape, and the Winchester boys would be hauled off to the police station, where they'd remain until someone showed up to claim them.
Social Services, for instance.
"You tell me RIGHT NOW," Dean all but shouted. "We want our DAD!"
The man went completely limp underneath him.
Someone else might have thought the man had fainted, or had completely run out of strength. Someone else might have thought this was a good time to relax a little, to figure they had the upper hand, that things were going really well.
Dean seized a handful of the man's hair and smacked his head against the sidewalk.
The man didn't move.
"Is he unconscious?" Sam asked.
Instead of waiting for an answer, he fumbled with the weapons he was holding, singled out the silver knife, and dropped to his knees alongside the man. "Shifter," he muttered, more to himself than to Dean. "If he's a shifter, then you use silver, right?"
"What're you gonna -"
Sam glared at his brother.
"We're not on the moon, Sam," Dean hissed. "You can't stab people on a public street. You wanna end up in Juvie?"
He hadn't even finished saying it when Sam sank the knife into the meat of the man's upper arm.
The man jerked once, then lay still.
"Jesus!" Dean yelped. "Sammy, don't -"
Sam yanked the knife free, aiming to stab the man again. When Dean grabbed the knife out of his hand, Sam shoved him away and began unloading his arsenal on their unmoving captive: flinging holy water and salt at the man's head, then seizing the man's hair in both hands and thumping his head against the cold pavement.
The man started to come to at that point, twitching and jerking underneath Dean, moaning something that sounded like, "Annie, ohhhh, Annie…"
That set Sam off as if someone had punched him. He let go of everything he was holding (including the tiny pistol), tossed away Dad's jacket and used his now-empty hands to grab a double fistful of Dean, hauled his brother off the man, then took Dean's place astride the man's back. He was purple-faced with fury, pummeling the man's back and head as he shrieked, "WHERE'S MY DAD? You son of a bitch, WHERE'S MY DAD????"
Beneath him, the man began to groan in agony. "Annie," he keened. "Ohhh, Annie…"
"You BASTARD!" Sam screamed. "You SON OF A BITCH!"
He kept pounding. Slapping. The more he did it, the more the man seemed to come back to life, struggling to break free. It was no damn wonder, Dean thought, because Sam was flailing the shit out of him.
"ANNIE!" the man wailed.
And something happened.
To the astonishment of both Sam and Dean, a cloud of what looked like smoke, or steam, burst from the man's body, accompanied by a crackle of sparks and the distinct smell of an electrical short. Ozone, Dean thought, it's ozone, but he was unable to carry the idea any further than that, because a little more than arm's reach away, the cloud began to rearrange itself, transforming itself into a recognizably human figure.
"All wrong," the figure mourned. "It was all wrong."
It was a man, about Dad's height but very slender, with thinning blond hair, wearing an old-fashioned suit and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. He wasn't all there; he was almost transparent, and pale, like somebody's cheap attempt at a Star Trek hologram.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Dean and Sam were still gaping at him when the body Sam had been pummeling began to stir and groan.
He began to mutter, and it wasn't about birds.
"I'm sorry," the strange figure said again.
And vanished.
"Was that -" Sam stammered. "Was -"
The body underneath him flipped him off onto the sidewalk, turned itself quickly into a sit, then up to its feet.
His feet.
Dad's feet.
"What the GODDAMN -" he said, and it was recognizably Dad. Not just Dad's body, Dad's voice; it was Dad, and he was understandably pissed as he began to probe his arm and the back of his neck, narrowed eyes taking stock of the collection of weapons scattered across the sidewalk. The boys had seen smoke pour out of him a minute ago, and there was more of it now - though, thankfully, it wasn't directed at them. At least, not all of it.
He watched Dean and Sam scramble to pick up the discarded weapons, frowning as he collected them from the boys and stashed them in the pockets of his jeans. When Sam proffered his jacket, he let Sam stand there holding it.
"What happened?" he demanded, though it was somewhat less heated than Dean expected.
"Spirit," Dean said.
Dad strangled something deep in his throat and palmed the back of his neck. "Anybody get hurt?" he said after a minute.
"No, sir. Just… Umm. You?"
Shaking his head, Dad took the jacket from Sam and struggled into it, grimacing at the after-effects of Sam's assault. He looked the boys over carefully (what he was looking for, Dean wasn't sure; signs of injury, maybe, in spite of Dean's statement that they were all right) then moved on to examining their surroundings.
"You call anybody?" he asked.
"Didn't have time," Dean said. "We found you in the park, and followed you over here. Didn't want to lose you. It. Him."
"Did you have a plan?"
"Sure," Dean said.
Dad raised an eyebrow.
"Sam got it out of you. Salt. Holy water. He let you - him - have it with everything he had."
Dean meant that to be a compliment, to reinforce Sam's victory over the spirit, though the results had been more an accident than anything else. Plan? he thought. That'd been a hell of a plan, chasing the guy down the street and pelting him with salt and holy water. He and Sam liked to call each other a team (when Sam wasn't off being furious about something), but they had a lot of work ahead of them if they intended to get anywhere as a hunting team, and it was clear from looking at Sam that Sam wasn't playing the victory theme from Rocky inside his head.
"He kept saying 'Annie'," Sam volunteered, in a tone that suggested I'm sorry, Dad, I'm really sorry for kicking the shit out of you. "He was feeding the birds."
Oddly, that seemed to come as no surprise to Dad. He looked around again, and shifted his weight a little, as if he'd had a beer too many, but the wobble passed quickly. After that, he looked a little tired. Or… sad, maybe.
"Got any idea where the car is?" he asked.
Dean shook his head.
"Well, that just puts the friggin' icing on it, doesn't it?"
"I guess," Dean replied.
The spirit's name was Harlan Anderson, Dad said as they walked back toward the apartment. He was the entity Dad had been tracking down these past few weeks, the one he'd aimed to put to rest tonight, after full dark had arrived. Anderson had been a teacher, happily married to a woman named Annie, until a night in the winter of 1947. He'd gone out to help celebrate the promotion of a longtime friend, had stayed out a bit too late, and found himself unable to negotiate the icy roads between the roadside tavern where the party had taken place and his home on the outskirts of Breighton Corners. He was killed when his car rolled into a deep culvert alongside the road, leaving the grief-stricken Annie to raise their two children by herself.
He'd been seen - or felt, in one way or another - a number of times over the years, in a variety of places: his home, the school, the tavern, the stretch of road where he'd died. Each manifestation had been brief, and no one had been harmed, up until a few months ago.
"How come it changed then?" Dean asked.
"Annie died," Dad told him. "Seems like he'd been keeping an eye on her all that time, and when she was gone -"
"They weren't together?" Sam said. "After she died?"
Dad shook his head. "Apparently not."
Left completely alone, Anderson had finally been unable to remain a benign presence. Whether it was by choice, or not, he began to lash out: objects were hurled around the room at both his former home and the school. Drivers lost control of their cars. A potential buyer touring Anderson's house with the Realtor slipped and fell down a flight of stairs.
"He wasn't mad," Sam said. "Not here."
"Feeding the birds, you said," Dad mused.
"Yeah."
"They met here in town. He and his wife. Could be they met while they were feeding the birds."
"Is he around now?" Sam asked. "Do you, like… feel him?"
Again, Dad shook his head.
He seemed quietly subdued, Dean observed. Not angry, as he might well have been after being possessed by a ghost, and after being thrashed by both his sons. Just as well nobody had contacted Uncle Bobby, or Caleb, or the other hunters. Pastor Jim might have kept his own counsel (as he liked to say), but the others would more than likely bust Dad's balls over this, for going out on his own to deep-fry a dead guy and ending up getting possessed instead - if they ever found out about it. Sure, anybody could end up getting possessed - but this was John Winchester they were talking about.
And he'd gotten possessed by a dead schoolteacher.
"Something funny?" Dad asked.
"No, sir," Dean replied. "Just - kind of weird."
"Weird?"
"You were feeding the birds," Dean said.
With the help of a guy from the local garage who was willing to scout the area for a missing '67 Chevy Impala without informing the police, they located the car abandoned at the side of the road about ten miles outside of town. Miracle the thieves just left it there unharmed, the guy announced - sweet set of wheels like that. After Dad paid him twenty bucks for his trouble, he went on his way, happy as a dimwitted dog, whistling and thumping the steering wheel in time to "Achy Breaky Heart" as it poured out of his entirely crappy car radio.
The three Winchesters stood looking at the Impala for a good long time.
"A dead guy drove your car," Sam pointed out.
"Looks like," Dad replied.
It was, Dean figured, purely an act of God that Harlan Anderson hadn't decided to recreate his big goodbye by rolling the Impala into a ditch.
That would have been six different kinds of horrendous.
The sun was pretty much down by that point, full dark not far off. Dad would drive them back into town, Dean figured; would drop him and Sam off at the apartment, maybe grab a quick bite to eat, then head back to Breighton Corners so he could barbeque what was left of Harlan Anderson. It didn't seem like a good idea, Dad heading out alone once again, but there wasn't enough time to summon anybody to help out - and Dean was pretty sure Dad would rather not enlist reinforcements for this particular job. Not after what had happened so far.
But instead of pointing the Impala back toward town, Dad pulled a U-turn and headed west.
Toward Breighton Corners.
"Bag of snacks there in the back," he pointed out, nodding toward the back seat. "Grab something to eat. Gotta be on our game."
It wasn't until they'd almost reached the cemetery that Dad confessed that he'd been aware Anderson was around; he'd walked through areas of biting cold, felt crackles of static electricity in the air, saw lightbulbs flicker and flash. A dog meandering near the old school had crouched low to the ground, hackles raised, snarling at something that wasn't visible.
Dad had been well-armed, well-prepared for dealing with something intending to attack him. What he hadn't anticipated was Anderson hopping aboard, for what felt like being hit by a wall of refrigerated air… and then, lights out.
"What if it happens again?" Sam asked worriedly from the back seat.
"Got backup this time," Dad replied.
Anderson's grave was well back from the road, past a rise in the ground that would help conceal what the Winchesters were doing from anyone who might happen to drive by. Each toting a duffel of supplies, flashlights in hand, they hiked through rows of old headstones, all three of them alert for anything that might feel wrong, that might signal Anderson's return. When they finally reached their destination, Dad opened one of the duffels and passed Dean a sawed-off and a heavy sack of rock salt. To Sam, he offered an iron crowbar and instructions to swing it like a baseball bat at anything that tried to materialize. Then he shrugged out of his jacket, laid it on the ground, and set to work with a shovel. Nothing more than a wince or two indicated that he'd been stabbed in the arm. What had happened that afternoon had energized him, Dean figured - or maybe he simply was determined to get the whole thing over with. Put it all behind him.
A little before nine, the tip of the shovel crunched into the lid of Harlan Anderson's casket. Dad cleared the lid off quickly and broke the hinges with a couple of crisp strokes. When he flipped the lid aside, a cloud of putrid air billowed up out of the grave.
Dean glanced over at his brother, curious.
"Bite me," Sam said, though there wasn't much conviction in it. Even in the dim spill from the flashlights he was noticeably pale.
At least he hadn't tossed his cookies.
Sam forced himself to look; walked himself forward as if he was piloting somebody else's body, much as Harlan Anderson had done with Dad for most of the afternoon. With a solid grip on the crowbar he approached the grave and peered inside as Dad climbed out, still clearly wary of being blindsided by roving spirits looking for a warm body to inhabit.
What Sam expected to see, Dean had no idea. Maybe he was recalling every horror movie they'd ever watched. Thought there'd be some slimy mass of guts inside the casket.
Maybe he thought Harlan Anderson was going to sit up and say hi.
Rather than provoke his brother, Dean used his pocket knife to slit open the sack of rock salt, leaned in and poured the salt in long stripes onto the corpse. By the time he was finished, Dad had the can of lighter fluid in hand, lid off, and added another layer of stink to the gravesite by dousing the coffin and its contents with the oily liquid.
Sam blinked in surprise when Dad held out his lighter.
"Feel like doing the honors?" Dad offered.
Sam stood looking at the lighter, crowbar braced across his chest. "It doesn't feel like an honor," he said after a moment. "He… kind of seemed like a nice guy. You know? He was just feeding the birds. He said what he liked best about them was their freedom."
Dad nodded at that. Spent a moment gazing into the grave.
"Set him free, then, Sam," he said quietly.
Sam didn't really need to lay down the crowbar in order to work the lighter, but he did it anyway, slowly, carefully, as if he was worried about breaking something. Typical of the little geek, Dean thought: overthinking everything. If he and Sam were ever going to be a team, busting their way through the hunting world (Starsky and Hutch, he thought; we'll be like Starsky and Hutch, two cool guys in a cool car), then Sam was going to have to get up to speed with this stuff. He was gonna need to work fast, because you never knew what would happen next.
You just couldn't give things that much opportunity to go all pear-shaped.
Finally, Sam flicked the little wheel on the lighter. The golden light bathed his face for a moment, and he blinked a couple of times. Looked like maybe he was saying something inside his head. Giving old bird-loving Harlan Anderson some kind of polite send-off.
He dropped the lighter into the grave as if it had suddenly become too hot (or too cold) to hang on to.
As they stood watching the fire, Dad reached out and reeled Sam gently in. Held him close enough to warm him, and lightly ruffled his hair, in much the same way Harlan Anderson had done it that afternoon. Dean half expected Sam to resist, but Sam leaned in and let his father embrace him, curling an arm around Dad's waist, his face half buried in Dad's jacket.
Dean thought back to Christmas, to Sam saying in bewilderment, Dad said the monster under my bed wasn't real.
Trying, that one last time, to hang on to what was, really, long gone.
He made a point of walking alongside Sam as they headed back to the car. "You busted your cherry," he told Sam, and held out a hand, offering a high-five if Sam was interested.
Sam, predictably, wasn't.
His attention was on Dad, striding rapidly toward the Impala, a good twenty feet ahead of them.
"You freaked out, dude," Dean said. "You went totally freaking ballistic."
"Yeah," Sam said. "I know."
* * * * *