SPN fic: Stop Hitting Yourself 2/3

[rokhal]

Title: Stop Hitting Yourself
Chapter: 2/3, Research And/Or Homework
Characters: John, Dean, and Sammy Winchester; Sam Grisham
Pairing: none
Rating: T
Length: 6k
Warnings: Teen angst
Disclaimer: Fanfic! It's a fanfic!



The stranger's name was Grisham. Surprisingly enough, after they'd walked back to the motel in South Bend and driven back to the apartment in Buffalo Fork, Wyoming, Dad had called Grisham and met with him while Sam was at school. Sam heard about it from Dean. They were working together to finish the hunt.

Supernaturally smart though they were, the birds were still flesh and blood, and they still needed a roost during the day. Dad and Dean spent nights out of the apartment more often than not, leaving Sam to bus home and fix himself a mess of chicken breast and boiled vegetables in silence. Sam found out about the end of the hunt after the fact: Dean and Dad had trooped in the door just before Sam sat down to his dinner, Dean grinning, Dad cracking a smug smile over Dean's shoulder, and recounted how they'd slowly infused butane into an abandoned grain silo and set off a massive fuel-air explosion, taking out the entire flock in a column of flame visible for miles in every direction. Grisham's idea. Dean had a new god.

Sam was just washing up after a dinner of frozen peas and ground beef when Dad and Dean swept into the apartment. "Get in the car, we're eating out," Dad announced, swiping his journal off the top of the refrigerator. Sam jumped and grabbed his school notebook. Even on a full stomach, no Winchester turned down free food.

They piled into the car and Dad drove a little ways across town to a bar and grill. A pretty decent bar and grill. Everything looked clean. The neon and beer signs in the windows were tacky, but cheerful, and the lights were dim for mood, not because half the bulbs were burnt out. The parking lot was full of late-model Japanese sedans. The walls had shelves and display frames for bits and bobs of memorabilia, like an Applebees but with a twist of Hard Rock Cafe.

Dad never splurged like this. Sam wondered what the occasion was.

They filed into the restaurant part, Sam sandwiched between Dad and Dean like usual, and Dad announced them to the host-there was a host!-as Grisham, party of four.

"It says here, party of three," said the host, checking the reservation list-they had a reservation!

"Now it's four," Dad told him.

The host smiled nervously and stepped back, scribbled a note in the margin, and led them to a corner boot where Grisham sat. Sam hadn't actually seen him since the ill-fated first assault on the Big Birds. In a civilized setting, without the stink of gun smoke and fear and without the football helmet, Sam saw he was fairly well-groomed for a hunter-clean-shaven, recently bathed and laundered, shirt cuffs free of blood-stains-hard to manage on the road. Grisham seemed to have taken a note from Pulp Fiction and married John Travolta's hair to Samuel L. Jackson's sideburns. It was kind of awesome. Sam figured as Hunters went, Grisham might be one of the saner ones.

Dean threw back his shoulders like Dad's training exercises had turned him into an actual Marine, and gave Grisham a restrained nod. The restraint was for the hero worship. Sam had a sudden flash of Wayne and Garth kow-towing to Alyce Cooper in Wayne's World 2.

Dad shook Grisham's hand and sat next to him on the booth. Sam and Dean piled in opposite. "Grisham, meet my son Sammy," Dad announced. "Sammy, Sam Grisham."

Sam's mouth spasmed as though he'd been force-fed a lemon. Grisham made a similar flicker of distaste, or maybe surprise. Sam was pretty sure he hadn't been included in the "party of three," and he imagined few professionals appreciated the unexpected addition of a kid just cutting his teeth on the job.

Sam folded himself into his corner of the booth and flipped open his notebook. Sixteen years of extended car rides and unannounced extracurricular field trips had trained him to write an English Lit essay any time, any place. His topic was Alfred Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," a poem commemorating a cavalry charge that had accomplished nothing but killing most of the cavalrymen, executed under bad orders. The poem moved him nearly to physical violence. Sam would settle, instead, for verbal violence-double-tap, decapitate, disembowel, dismember, burn, until all the careful craftsmanship, rosy nationalist ideology, and pretty visions of honor and duty had been weighed, dissected, and reduced to so much ash.

If Sam ever got drafted, he'd probably kill himself.

Dad and Grisham had spread some clippings and Xeroxes across the table and Dean sat at attention, alert for orders as he scanned the research across from him upside-down.

"You find any deaths between sunrise and sunset?" Dad asked.

Grisham shook his head. "That's no guarantee for a daylight approach, though."

"Till we tap out the news and records, nobody sets foot on the place," Dad replied. "This thing covers a lot of territory, and nobody's seen it, far as we know."

Sam shut them out and paged to the text of the poem, copied into the notebook by hand that afternoon.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Killing something, whether it was a hyper-intelligent fanged forest beast or classic poetry, could be as dangerous for the careless as it was straight-forward for the prepared. Everything had a weakness; some weaknesses were just less obvious than others.

Literature had to be confronted first with a show of respect and understanding. Tennyson was a master of verse-craft. Sam sketched out a paragraph commending the way the dactyls of the stanzas mimicked the rhythm of hoof-beats and added tension and impetus to the piece, enhancing the drama when read aloud. Creative works that-Sam reached for a delicate term for propaganda-aspire to hold a place of authority in the cultural consciousness-need universal appeal. They must be easy to love. They need charisma, and "Light Brigade" had it.

Dean elbowed Sam. The waitress had arrived with an extra menu. Sam scanned the entrees, looking at Dad for guidance. Dad gave a small nod with a tilt toward Grisham, which Sam took to mean, "Go nuts, it's his dollar."

There were the usual All-American bar and grill classics-ribs and steak and hamburgers-but also vegetables. Salads. Sam couldn't even imagine what a sixteen-dollar salad might have in it, but he was going to find out.

When the waitress came back, Dad and Dean each got a burger, and Sam and Grisham ordered the same salad. There was an awkward moment when they almost had a staring contest over who should change their order, but Dad distracted Grisham by shoving everyone's water glasses out of the way so he could unfold a map of Wyoming. They traced roads with colored pencils until the food came.

You couldn't hunt until you knew the territory-how to get to the target-and the target's pattern of activity-where it came and went. It was a rare hunt that didn't force Dad and Dean to work out the whole history of an area long before they had any clue how to kill the monster when they found it. That search for context started with a map and a timeline.

Tennyson had written "Charge of the Light Brigade" during the Crimean War, trying to make sense of a news report of a disaster of leadership that had cost hundreds of British lives. It was human nature to make sense of the senseless and find purpose in tragedy; Tennyson, and the British public that had embraced the poem, simply could not accept that the cavalrymen's deaths had been for nothing. They'd found solace in a story of devotion and submission that reinforced Britain's support of its overseas military and the chain of command that was its backbone.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

In the face of disasters like this, the public needed some kind of compensatory dogma to keep dangerous thoughts at bay. Commanders made mistakes-that was fact-but the chain of command was all that separated a modern military from the Visigoths. If an officer gave a command and a soldier said no, well. Cats falling from the sky, panicked retreats, logistical breakdowns, pillaging, and dishonor. Only a master like Tennyson could make unquestioning obedience in the face of uninformed orders palatable to the civilian audience, let alone honorable, and Tennyson had come through for Britain. He had sold a message that was critical to the prosecution of an overseas war.

But whose business was the war?

Where was the nobility in a soldier putting not just his life, but also his soul-because many traditions called murder a mortal sin, and killing was a sure way to wound anyone's soul-in the hands of whichever commander chance had given him to obey? What was honorable in giving up his responsibility for his own actions, in surrendering his own agency as a human being? What precisely was honor made of, if human societies could just decide that killing people from other societies en masse was honorable?

What were duty and devotion in a world at war? Machines were dutiful. Dogs were devoted. Human beings were supposed to be more than that, and to sell out whatever higher purpose humanity might have for some social construct called "honor". . . it made Sam sick.

The food arrived. Dean tucked in, while Dad, Sam, and Grisham shoved their work a little aside and ate absently. Sam flipped a few pages ahead in his notebook and summarized his objections to honoring the Light Brigade's Noble Six-Hundred in bullet form, to be rephrased more diplomatically later.

The salad dressing tasted like strawberries and pepper. The lettuce was dark and fine, with interesting ruffly edges. There were tiny strips of rare steak in it. Sam was pretty sure Dean would be ragging on him about it for the whole meal if Grisham hadn't had one, too.

Grisham had passed Dean a manila folder of smudged Xeroxes. Dean, uncharacteristically focused, was nearly as absorbed in the information as he was in his cheeseburger. Ever since Dean had dropped out of high school he'd been his usual Dad-idolizing, gung-ho hunter, big-damn-hero self, cubed. Around another hunter-Pastor Jim, Uncle Bobby, and now Sam Grisham, apparently-he was even worse, like it wasn't just his own credibility on the line, but Dad's, too. He'd always watched Dad's back before his own.

Sam could admit to himself that his and Dad's world would probably collapse without Dean, but the corollary was that any time Dean wanted, he could bring their life on the hunt to a crashing halt. But Dean didn't. Dean didn't . . . want.

"Nice work," Grisham told Dean when he passed the folder back skimmed, underlined, and summarized. Dean's eyes lit up and he sort of preened without moving a muscle.

Grisham narrowed his eyes and jerked his chin at the wall décor, the framed concert posters, vintage band shirts, amplifiers, bent cymbals, and dented guitar cases. Some of the logos were from bands Sam had never heard of, and others from Lynrd Skynrd, George Thoroughgood, and Aerosmith. "I hear this place got the theme from one of the employees who used to be a roadie," Grisham remarked, watching Dean's eyes as they went bright and wide. "The bartender, I think?" There was a question in his tone, but Sam didn't get the sense Grisham was at all uncertain. "I hear he's good for a few stories."

"The bartender roadied for Skynrd?" Dean shot back, just to be clear. He glanced rapidly between Dad and Grisham. "Permission to visit the bar, sir?"

Dean sometimes treated the "sir" thing as a respectful joke, but Sam had never found it funny.

"Your card good?" Dad asked. Dean nodded. "Two drinks. I'll come get you."

Dean stood and hovered at the end of the booth. "Sammy, you got your card? Let's go."

Sam took a tight grip on his notebook, braced himself against his corner, and dug in. "I'm doing homework," he protested. He didn't want to perch on a barstool getting spilled beer on his essay draft while listening to stories about rock stars puking on themselves and watching women Grisham's age fawn all over his brother.

Sam had goals. To meet his goals, Sam had to do the homework. It was a statistical fact.

Dean swaggered off to the bar, tossing Sam a "Later, loser," and Dad and Grisham stacked their empty plates on Dean's abandoned place to make room for the map.

"Leach mining," Dad muttered, poring over a yellowed newspaper. "What's involved in that?"

Grisham shrugged with his lips. "Pouring a solvent in a hole in the ground and pumping it back out from another one," he explained.

"So a smaller footprint than the excavations," Dad mused.

"Smaller holes, more groundwater contamination."

"Wyoming has groundwater?"

Sam tuned them out and plotted the overthrow of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The essay was going to turn into a deconstruction of nationalism and military service as a whole if he wasn't careful, and that wouldn't do the job. For all he knew, Mr. Schwartz's son had been in the Gulf War. Come in too fast too hard, and Sam would get smacked down, but a softer, circuitous approach could wear down most reasonable people's defenses.

Comprehension and commendation, then critique. Sam remembered what hero worship felt like. He could give the devil its due: fulfill the assignment by demonstrating that he understood and appreciated the poem for its merits, then turn and pick it apart at the seams in a second thesis.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Sam allowed that Tennyson respected the evil and savagery of war, for all that he'd never fought in one, though the poetic language didn't really capture the tunnel-vision of real danger. Fear made the world go sharp like strobe-light, and shoved the mind down one of two tracks: instinct or training. There was no room for comparisons to Hell or personifying box canyons in the heat of the moment, only rote behavior and panic. Poetic imagery tended to grow the other way around: years later, the surviving cavalrymen might have pictured Hell as a temperate valley rimmed by hidden cannons and thick with the smell of powder-smoke and blood, echoing with thunder and the screams of men and horses.

Sam chewed on his pen as he wondered how much personal experience was safe to include in this thing. Make it too believable, and there could be trouble.

"If you're done with that, you can do a witness sheet," Dad interrupted, pushing a stack of clippings across the table to him.

"I'm working," Sam protested. He set his pen back to his paper and willed something useful to come out.

"You've been staring into space for the past five minutes," Dad said. "Do the witness sheet."

"I was thinking!" Sam's voice cracked. Grisham smirked, and Sam reddened.

"Do it and don't argue," Dad growled, leaning toward him. Dad twitched his head toward the peaceful family seated around a table nearby, a mom and a dad and a well-behaved brother and sister about Sam's age. Unless the cops were involved, Dad had far less objection to making an embarrassing public scene than Sam did. Sam subsided and stiffly picked up the clippings.

The news clippings were about university and EPA-sponsored research expeditions to the grounds of a defunct uranium mine, in which one or more of the visitors had died. Law enforcement didn't like it when papers included enough details for vigilantes like Dad to launch their own investigations, but all the papers did by leaving out names was make things take longer. Give Sam the name and department of the supervising professor and the number of grad students on the research team, and Sam would note it down on the witness sheet so Dad could find out the rest by knocking on doors and asking questions.

Sam had been doing witness sheets since he was ten; it was the kind of chore a ten-year-old could reliably do. No staring off into space involved here. The best way to ease the pain was to grit his teeth and plow through the tedium as fast as possible. He took his notes: names, departments, organizations, dates. It was automatic. He couldn't write too fast, though, or Dad wouldn't be able to read his handwriting and he'd have to do the whole thing over.

"Permission to visit the bar, sir?" Sam demanded as soon as he'd finished. Dad shot him a flat look. Sam glared right back, clutching his notebook. The booth was hemming him in.

"He could check into the oral history," Grisham cut in, digging around in the bag that sat next to him.

"No, he's done some good work," Dad said.

It was a witness sheet. Sam couldn't imagine a way to screw it up.

"Permission granted."

Sam scrambled out of the booth. Dad caught him by the elbow before he could disappear. "You got that new ID from Marcus?"

"Yessir," Sam replied. He'd known this wasn't a school field trip.

"One drink," Dad ordered, squeezing his arm.

Sam stiffened. "All due respect, sir," he hissed, "if I'm using poker money and a fake ID, what the heck difference does it make how much I drink?"

"You will respect yourself," Dad growled, "and you will respect my orders, or you will stay here where I can watch you. I'll expect four miles out of you tomorrow morning before school."

Sam clenched his notebook in his fist. His blood was pounding in his ears. He was trapped.

Grisham smiled at him, oozing schadenfreude. "How hard do you think it'd be to find out how much you drink, anyway?"

Dad relaxed and patted Sam's arm, rising from the booth to take over Sam's seat. He and Grisham shoved the rest of their research over the whole table. "Tell you what, son, you can drink all you want as long as you get those four miles done in the morning."

Sam swallowed. "Understood."

He was across the restaurant and into the bar area by the time he realized he'd left his pen behind.

There was no way he was going back for it. He'd just have to amuse himself until Dad and Dean finally got bored and drove him home.

Dean, perched at the bar, was listening rapt to a weathered, tattooed barkeep spinning out some long-practiced, well-loved anecdote for the little crowd on the bar-stools, never pausing as he worked. As though he had eyes in the back of his head, Dean twisted in his seat and grinned at Sam, waving him over. Sam shrugged back at him and headed for the pool table.

The table was clean and polished, but not very even. A few grade-school kids were shooting balls back and forth at random. Sam occupied one end and did some strike drills to work on his control, but with balls rushing around and two thirds of the table in use, he couldn't concentrate or practice his back-spin.

He put his cue back and dragged himself and his useless notebook over to the bar-stool Dean had saved for him. His ID passed inspection with barely a raised eyebrow; Sam was damn tall for fifteen, and Marcus was a guru of identity fraud.

Dean bumped his shoulder and Sam sighed deeply. "What he's having," Sam requested, pointing to Dean's beer. The barkeep spun and filled him a glass of lager from the tap, and Sam and Dean nursed their beers as they listened to the story of that time the crew had to hunt through every hole-in-the-wall in Denver to capture Skynrd's drummer and drag him back to the venue in time for the show.

Dean was in hog heaven. Sam shuffled through his notebook and consoled himself that his evening could have gone a lot worse.

Five days later, Dad, Dean, and Grisham were still working up the Wyoming hunt, and Sam had his usual A on his Tennyson essay. Mr. Schwartz had appreciated the "metacritical dialectic," which Sam thought was kind of a smartass thing to write on a tenth grade paper, no matter how brilliant the student. Mr. Schwartz was not, and would never be, reviewing avante garde literature for the New Yorker.

Grisham's car was in the lot below when Sam clumped up the stairs, and there were pieces of the new Wyoming hunt tacked up all over the living room wall. Dean was clipping an obituary from a stack of newspapers with a knife, Dad was gazing at the crude timeline, and Grisham was taking notes from a big beige book that looked like it never ought to have left the library: marriage records, Sam saw, glancing over his shoulder as he scurried toward the bedroom for some well-earned privacy.

As he detoured for the kitchen to snag a bagel for dinner, Grisham coughed from the table, and Dad's hand landed on his shoulder and spun him toward the stove and the pot of cooling spaghetti with meat sauce. Sam slumped. "Dish yourself up and take a seat," Dad commanded, "Then take a look at this Hippie manifesto and tell me what you find."

Grisham flicked a page of marriage records, swop-snap. "I've already been over that; he won't find anything new," he predicted.

Dad frowned. "My boy needs the experience, Sam. I'm not turning down a fresh pair of eyes."

Sammy-dammit, Sam-could list a dozen or two times Dad had refused his offer of a fresh pair of eyes, but he wasn't about to mouth off in front of another adult, not when Dad was-wonder of wonders-defending him. He took the little paperback book, noting a vanity publisher's label on the back cover, and slopped some drying noodles and the remainder of the sauce into Dean's oversized coffee mug. The three mismatched bowls they had were already dirty in the sink.

Grisham stared unabashed at him as he took a seat at the table, marking his clothes, his hair, his attitude, the way he pinned the book open without cracking the binding, the way he gulped down spaghetti after twirling it into neat little spools. "What?" Sam mouthed at him, and Grisham startled and looked back down at his notes.

The Hippie Manifesto-Dad was politically incorrect at the best of times, and some of it always rubbed off no matter how Sam watched himself-was "Biological, Environmental, and Social Impacts of Uranium Mining in Natrona County, Wyoming" and contained enough scientific jargon, left-handed spin, and barely restrained vitriol to make Sam's head whirl giddily. He dug one of his spiral notebooks out of his backpack and used the back page for notes, jotting down the characters of the sordid drama as he came to them. The villain of the story was Richard Shear and Shear Mineral Industries, who had raped-the author had used "arsenide ore tailings" and "raped from the living rock" in the same paragraph-a few acres of Rocky Mountain foothills, carrying on in spite of constant protests, ever-tightening Federal regulations, and Shear's own death of metastatic meningiosarcoma in 1974. Twenty-six property owners had been bought out or evicted, either by Shear Industries for access to their land or by the EPA when their land was deemed too hazardous for human habitation.

A piece of newspaper hit Sam in the head, a little roll like a cigarette, and Sam glared at Dean. Dean, on the floor with the antique newspapers, mimed toking a joint with one hand and made a Peace sign with the other. Sam rolled his eyes and reached for the dummy joint to pitch it back. It was gone.

Grisham had snagged the joint. Sam stared as he turned it over in his fingers, smiling faintly, and tucked it away in his coat pocket.

Other than Richard Shear going violently insane and dropping dead from the most bizarre cancer ever and the family refusing to put him in a textbook afterward, the history of the mine was riddled with shady activity and irrational rage. There was an old bachelor who lived downstream of the mine whom the author spoke of with fearful awe, like some magnificent lion defending his domain instead of a Kazinski wannabe threatening mine administrators, environmentalists, and EPA inspectors alike with an ass-full of buckshot. Employee turnover at the mine was high, and there'd been several industrial accidents-like the father of four crushed to death by a bucket of ore. Richard Shear's mistress had shot herself in the head in Shear's on-site office, just before the evening shift change and in full view of two thirds of the employees through the brightly lit picture window. Before succumbing to brain cancer, Shear had tried to slit his wrists with a box cutter in that same office.

It was too much to hope that all these people had diaries. Sam was leaning toward Shear or the stubborn homesteader, himself. "What's the victim profile?" he asked.

Dad, bent over a crude, bloodstained map of the mine, looked up. "Dean?"

"Meddling, trespassing kids," Dean supplied. He was folding some more paper as he studied a back-page article. "Hikers, spelunkers, climbers, surveyors, grad students. It's like a Bermuda Triangle-people tromp around in there all the time monitoring the radiation and looking for privacy; some of 'em die a hideous Rube Goldberg accidental death." Dean cut a new clipping. "Mean sonofabitch, too."

"What are you thinking, Sammy?" Dad asked.

Sam's guts twisted, like they never did before a pop quiz in a class. Dad could take the fun out of learning like no-one else on the planet. He wouldn't listen quietly to a few key points and pat Sam on the head for something clever or reasonable, no, he'd have half the case worked out already and as soon as Sam revealed his nascent theories, he'd list off all the facts he hadn't shared and explain why Sam was wrong. There was no way to win. Sam would always wind up looking like a rookie.

Sam held back a glare and glanced quickly between Dad, Dean, and Grisham-Dad demanding, Dean hopeful, Grisham . . . snide and contemptuous. Great. Sam looked down at his notes again for strength. "Possible spirits might be . . . Marcia Rourke, jealous suicide; Donald Barker, accident; Jim McKennagh; found dead with his head bashed in; Richard Shear, he was obsessed with the mine and got his blood all over the office, then died crazy; Bill Ford, he wasn't dead when the book was published, but I'd bet he died in his cabin and rotted there."

Sam swallowed and licked dry lips. Dad had been silent, and the silence was worse than the lectures, because at least when he yelled Sam had some idea what he was thinking.

Dad nodded, his poker face on. "Good start. Any other theories?"

Shit, Sam mouthed, bending back over the book. Other theories. That meant Dad was thinking something completely different; he hadn't pushed for details on any possible spirits, because he wanted something bigger. Sam pleaded at Dean with his eyes, but Dean was deliberately focused on his newsprint. Dad was still waiting; Grisham was still staring with slitted eyes like Sam was a vaccum cleaner salesman or a malingerer with a painfully fake cough. Sam combed his fingers through his hair, willing something, anything, to come to mind. "The mine, the mineral company had a lot of bad luck, pretty much from the beginning. So maybe it's, um . . . maybe something was already there, like, um, like a nature spirit, maybe something linked to . . . aspens?" Sam watched Dad from under his bangs. "There was a lot of deforestation. Or it could be a water spirit; the water was heavily contaminated by the leach operation after they abandoned the pit."

"What do you think about the more recent deaths?" Dad asked.

Sam let out a slow breath through his nose. "It's, um . . . if it's a nature spirit, it saw what happened with the mine, and now it's . . . scared. It's taking a proactive approach."

Dad smiled. Just a sliver, before he turned back to his map.

"Well?" Sam asked. "Did I get it right?"

Grisham tugged a page of note paper out of the middle of a pile on the table and spun it to face Sam without making eye contact. 3 sq mi (wide for spirit), it read. Ford, Bill. Shear, Richard. Rourke, Marcia. McKennagh, Jim: poss vengeful. Suicide, murder: poss poltergeist. Preexisting bad luck, possible curse (Plains, Euro-American witchcraft). Burial ground? Poss naiad, nymph. Poss god: Iktomi, other rock deity, forest deity. Sam deflated.

"No such thing as right, Sammy," Dad corrected him, already absorbed again in his maps. "Just whatever keeps you alive and gets the job done."

Sam sighed and looked up from Grisham's notes. Grisham was no longer studying him, but his face was tight as though he'd eaten something moldy.

Grisham was reading Sam's Tennyson essay. Sam saw the top of it peeping out behind the table, not even concealed. Heat flared in Sam's chest and tingled in his palms. He checked his backpack-it was unzipped, moved a foot from his chair, the papers neatly parted around the place where the essay had been. A muscle ticked in Grisham's cheek as he turned a page in his massive hands, and Sam, feeling violated, restrained himself from snatching it back. "Mr. Grisham," he hissed instead.

Grisham ignored him. He ignored him! Sam steeled himself-it didn't matter that the guy could snap him in half over his knee, he was still an adult, and adults were supposed to respect simple rules like "look at people when they're talking to you," and "don't snoop through someone else's belongings while they're in the room." "Mr. Grisham," Sam tried again, louder.

Grisham reached the end of a paragraph before he looked up, slowly. His lip was curling back a bit from his teeth, and his eyes were dark and sharp.

Sam felt sweat prickle all across his back. He checked the couch, where Dad was cross-checking maps, and the floor, where Dean was profiling victims. "Can I have that back, please," Sam forced out. "Sir."

His politeness made no dent in Grisham's contempt; the big man all-out sneered at him before glancing at Dad and Dean himself, flipping to the last page, and slowly passing the essay across the table to Sam, reading as he went.

Its pages rattled as Sam returned it to his backpack. When a second wad of paper struck his face, he jumped. "Dammit, Dean!"

"Language!" Dad barked.

Dean was grinning. Sam grabbed the bit of paper and examined it: a sort of cone with a twisted, pleated base and a trumpet's flare-a flower. Devil's Herb. What the heck.

Flower power, Dean mouthed at him from the floor.

Grisham snorted in laughter, watching Dean fondly with the side of his eyes. It was creepy.

Sam rested his head on his hands and bent again over the book.

When Sam returned to the apartment from school the next day-he'd had to finish his math homework under his desk during first period American History, since he'd spent the whole last night reading up on the sordid politics of 1960's uranium mining-he stopped short.

The front room stunk of sage.

If Sam enjoyed anything about Hunting, it was botany: he knew the ritual and medicinal uses of over three hundred and fifty trees and herbs and how to recognize them. Burning sage was the ritual equivalent of closing all your Windows while installing new software. It helped keep complicated, dangerous processes from spinning out of control.

Sam also knew how to recognize a hex bag-he'd been warned about them from so early an age that the first time he'd seen a baggie of pot, he'd run to find Dean, panicked that there was a witch at his middle school, and had since learned the difference. Hex bags were wrapped in something opaque, like human leather. They contained things like precious metals, teeth, poisonous plants, and carved fetishes. Before they were wrapped up, someone had to chant over them, just like Dean was doing right now, leaning over four piles of gewgaws and herbs on circles of buckskin, as Grisham looked on.

"Are you teaching Dean witchcraft?" Sam demanded, his voice cracking. Dean whipped a hand up, showing Sam the back of it-stuff it, Sammy, big boys are working here-and closed out the chant with something about an eclipse and a shroud. His pronunciation was appalling. Sam doubted he even knew all he was talking about.

Grisham lit something in an ash-tray that sparked and sent up fumes of gunsmoke and frankincense, and Dean tied up each bundle with three widdershins winds of a rough cord.

When the room was safe, Sam continued, "Does Dad know about this?"

"Relax, Sammy," said Dean, tossing a hex bag from hand to hand like a hacky-sack.

Sam scowled. He wanted Grisham gone and he wanted his name back.

"He knows," Grisham dismissed him. As Dean stood and made a move to pack away some of the piles of dried leaves and seeds that dotted the kitchen floor, Grisham waved him away and grabbed a nearby broom and dust pan. "Why don't you take a load off, teach your brother something cool? You did great today."

Dean beamed. "Thanks, man. Sammy, siddown. Storytime."

Sam grudgingly perched on the corner of the couch, and Dean launched in at a speed usually reserved for lectures on music history and picking up girls. "So Dad and Grisham figure the whole mine's cursed, unholy ground-not like, Klaatu Barata Nicto, skeletons fisting you in the throat cursed, just like, Country Music cursed. Everything that comes on the place turns to crap cursed."

"Or, 'the soil is radioactive, the economy's tanked, and I'm a womanizing ass' cursed," Sam interrupted.

"You saw the statistics, kid," Grisham rebuked from the kitchen.

"King Midas in Reverse cursed," Dean continued, grinning. "So we're gonna cast this, uh, anti-curse. All-purpose cleansing ritual, 'cause we got no clue what's actually out there. The hex bags represent the four directions and the four elements, so that's gonna get the Four Winds to crash the curse party whatever witch invited the forces of darkness around for, and send 'em packing with their Care Bear Stare."

Sam raised an eyebrow at Grisham, who nodded. "That's it in a nutshell," he confirmed, his eyes flicking to Dean before he looked down and grinned behind his hair at the dustpan of occult herbs.

"The four elements," Sam repeated, rolling a hex bag between his hands-he supposed it wasn't technically a hex bag, but didn't know what else to call it. Fetish? That just sounded gross outside an anthropology book. "So, those are what, air, water, earth, and fire?"

"Fire, air, earth, and rock," Dean corrected, handing Sam another hex bag that felt like it was full of gravel. "Sioux elements. Air is hard enough to put in a hex bag, turns out, but fire was supposed to be impossible."

Sam leaned forward, intrigued.

"Can't exactly seal it up in a bag," Dean explained. "Unless you got asbestos and an oxygen supply or something."

"This is fire?" Sam clarified, probing the little bundle of soft leather and grit. "Fire pow-Fire's power?"

Dean smirked wickedly. "You just gotta find something close enough to fire, happening really slowly. In this case . . . radioactivity!"

Sam dropped the hex bag with a crunch.

"Don't be a pussy," said Dean, retrieving the bag with his bare hands.

"What-no-don't touch that!" Sam snapped, hearing himself whine. He grabbed for the bag. Dean jumped away, hand in the air, and Sam lunged after him with his new reach. Dean crouched and closed in, hooking his sturdy leg under Sam's spindly one and toppling him to the hard floor. "Dean! Drop it!" Sam rolled and popped up, hair in his eyes. Dean was bent over laughing at him, and Sam decided to help the suffocation process along by punching him in the stomach.

"Hey!" Grisham barked.

Dean folded, and Sam swiped the hex bag and bank-shot it past Grisham's scowling face into the kitchen sink. Maybe the eighth-inch of stainless steel would be some protection-or maybe that was just lead.

"Jeez, you little bitch," Dean wheezed.

Grisham had set down the dustpan and was curling and uncurling his long fingers around the broom handle, the tendons of his hand rippling menacingly. Sam sidestepped until he was standing behind Dean.

"Don't freaking try to kill yourself!" Sam growled at Dean, jamming himself back into his corner of the ancient couch.

"It's barely radioactive, anyway," Dean panted as he settled himself on the opposite end. "It's just ore from the mine, not enriched uranium slugs or anything."

"You're a jerk," Sam grunted, and hooked his backpack with the toe of this shoe. "Don't talk to me, I'm doing school."

"How 'bout I just talk at you?"

Sam's lips tightened and he yanked his algebra book up onto the couch, unwilling to closet himself in the bedroom, not when Grisham was in the kitchen staring him down, waiting for him to flinch.

Note: Future Sam has major issues. I never decided how or why he's in the past, but I get the feeling his Dean is dead. Or worse, there's always worse, especially in Season 5.
Sammy's thoughts on military service are the thoughts of a disgruntled fifteen-year-old boy, not a sophisticated ideological position.
The Big Birds are a class of cryptid that people have actually believed in recently. I assume they'd be vulnerable to massive fireballs.
The Sioux medicine bags and elements of their cosmological system were derived from this lesson from an actual medicine man.

Next chapter!