Secondhand Ghost - 1/1
Title: Secondhand Ghost
Rating: R, Gen
Characters: Sammy, Dean, John, OMCs.
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general angst. Sorry about the holes!
Word Count: 9,743
A/N: Door 2 in my SPN Advent Calendar
Pre-series coda to 3.08 A Very Supernatural Christmas (i.e. the flashbacks)
Thanks to secret-seer for buffing the bones in my banner. Apart from the banner the majority of the graphics have been adapted from photos, pamphlets, & newspaper headlines etc about the Vietnam War.
Warning: Deathfic
Settings: NB, DC, NJ, & MD. Dec 1991-1992
Summary: Sammy will always remember the first time he killed someone. And the second…
Everyone has secrets…
December, 1991 - Broken Bow, NB
It wasn’t fair. Everyone was keeping secrets. Dad. Dean. And probably Uncle Bobby and Pastor Jim too, if Sam knew anything, he knew that.
It just wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t like he wasn’t old enough. He was eight, after all. Had been for more than half a year. Which meant he was really almost nine if you thought about it carefully.
Sammy could almost understand Dad keeping secrets. He was a grown-up. They always did things like that for no reason that Sam could see.
But Dean? Dean kept secrets too.
Sammy thought it was the same secret. Maybe just the one secret. A big one. But Sammy didn’t think it was the good kind of secret. Not like not telling anyone in the diner what you wished for when you blew out the candle on your slice of birthday pie because then it wouldn’t come true.
This felt like when he thought about Mom, and he got all twisted up inside, and was mad at her for dying, and mad at his family because they knew her and he didn’t. Mad because nobody ever told him nothing. Just Dad telling him what to do, like he was a soldier like Dad used to be in the old days. And Dean telling him, ‘To shut up and to listen to Dad.’
Sammy thought the secret might be about their Mom. Dad and Dean were always so angry when he asked. Maybe, Oh God… maybe Mom wasn’t dead. Maybe she’d left them. Run away. Left them all. Left Sammy because she didn’t want him. Maybe he’d been bad when he was litt…
No. Don’t think about that!
Thinking about it made Sammy want to punch something. Usually it was the wall of whatever crappy motel they were staying in at the time. Right now there was a hole next to his bed, under the closed window that wasn’t doing a good job of keeping the heavy smell of the feed lot out. The hole wasn’t all Sammy’s. Someone else had started it. Sammy just improved it with his foot, because sometimes kicking was even better than punching. Dean taught him that.
Sometimes Sammy wanted to hit something else. Mostly that something was Dad. Sometimes it was Dean.
Dean knew about Mom.
Dean knew, and Sammy was going to make him tell.
But what if the secret was about Dad?
Sammy didn’t really think Dad was a travelling salesman. He wanted that to be true. Because then? Then he could say that at school, even if it was boring and not something he wanted Dad to come and talk about on Career Day. Sammy didn’t talk about his family at school. That was one of Dad’s rules. Other kids had rules. Rules about clothes, and eating, and bedtime, and not taking candy from strangers.
Dad’s rules were different. Dad had rules about always going into a place to check it out before he said it was safe for them to come in. His rules said, ‘Don’t tell anyone anything.’ Don’t get noticed. Don’t get caught. Don’t ask why. Just… Don’t.
Dad even had rules about salt. Dad was strange.
Dad’s rules also said, ‘Don’t touch the weapons in the trunk.’ Sammy wasn’t allowed to touch any of the weapons unless Dad or Dean was there. Hardly any of the other kids he’d ever gone to school with had rules about weapons, and Sammy had gone to lots of schools, and met lots more kids than anyone else he knew-except for Dean. Those that did? Sammy didn’t think their Dads had a car full of guns and knives.
Dad wasn’t a spy. Which would have been really cool. Spies had guns. Like Dad. Spies knew everything. Like Dad. But spies worked for the government, and they got paid, and had people to help them, and…
Dad didn’t get paid. If Dad got paid he wouldn’t look so upset sometimes when he couldn’t afford what Sammy asked for in the shops. Sammy learned not to ask.
Dad didn’t have people to help him. He just had Dean and Sammy.
Dad wasn’t a spy.
Sammy hadn’t seen Dad on any NRA posters either like that old guy that used to be in movies. And he wasn’t selling guns. Sometimes he bought weapons, but he never sold them. Sammy never ever saw him sell anything, despite what Dean said. Sammy had been watching for ages now, and he never saw that.
And what Sammy saw? Didn’t make sense. Sammy used to lie awake at night and keep moving the pieces of this particular puzzle around in his head. Sammy didn’t like the bits that fitted.
This hurt more than Mom. ‘Cos Sammy was old enough to know that all those weapons? They probably meant something bad. That Dad was bad. Like maybe a bank robber or something like that. It would explain why they kept moving to new places and Dad kept planning things, writing things down that he wouldn’t show Sammy. And he kept going out late at night, and sometimes he left them places for days. Then they always had to leave in a hurry. Sometimes they left without paying. And Dad used different names at motels all the time; Sammy had heard him.
Sammy watched TV. Dean loved cop shows the best, and Sammy loved cartoons, but they always watched together even when Dean whinged about kids’ stuff. On Dean’s shows they always caught the bad guy right at the end. Sam didn’t want them to catch Dad. He wasn’t going to help the cops catch him. He wasn’t ever going to tell. Sammy just wished he knew when the end was so he could get ready to fight. Sammy didn’t care if the cops were the good guys, Dean and Dad came first.
Dean knew about Dad.
Dean knew, and Sammy was going to make him tell.
One day Sammy found the biggest piece of the puzzle.
Sammy thinks he’s old enough to know the truth. He’s read Dad’s journal. It sounded like TV, but it hurt enough to feel like the truth.
Sammy’s old enough.
Dean knows.
Dean knows, and Sammy was going to make him tell.
Dean knew.
Dean knew, and Sammy made him tell.
Dad wasn’t a spy.
Dad was a super-hero.
Monsters were real.
And maybe Dean was right, that they did have ‘the coolest Dad in the world.’
But now Sammy knew? Now he was really scared.
Monsters? Monsters killed Mom? And Dad was a hero?
This Christmas Sammy didn’t want a hero. He just wanted a Dad.
June, 1992 - Washington, DC
‘You know he does this.’
‘I know, Dean. Every year it’s the same. But this year, why did he have to do it right before my game?’
‘You know he meant to be there. For all of us to be there.’
‘He could have gone on his own! He’s always taking off and leaving us with someone if he has a hunt. What makes this any different?’
‘Dunno, Sammy. He always does this alone.’
‘He brings us all the way to Washington every time, but he never takes us there.’
‘Sammy, you know Dad always has his reasons.’
‘Hah! What reasons? There isn’t even any danger. He can’t use that as an excuse. He’s not here hunting things. He’s not here to kill.’
‘Just because there’s not a hunt it doesn’t mean it’s safe, Sammy. You know that now.’
Yeah, I know.
There was a world of things Sammy knew now. In the past six months he’d learned that it wasn’t a nice world. People got hurt. People got killed. Monsters killed. Monsters got killed. People killed. Dad…
‘Why the fuck couldn’t he just pick a date, any date, and go then? Make it the same time every year. He could make a plan, then we’d know, and we’d be able to make a plan too. Plan our damn lives around it! Why can’t he wait and go on the fucking anniversary? Everyone else in the world goes then. It’s on TV!’
‘A. Don’t say fuck. Dad’d be pissed. He didn’t teach you to swear. B…’
‘No. You taught me, Dean. And Dad taught you.’
‘Fucker.’
Sammy made a kissy face at his older brother who never liked it when Sammy was right. ‘B?’
‘B, what?’
‘Duh! “A. Don’t say fuck. B.” Did you forget your alphabet again, Dean?’
‘Shut up, bitch! Dad plans. You know that. He plans everything but this.’
‘So, this is your plan, Dean? Take off while Dad’s gone?’
‘We’re not “taking off,” Sammy. We’re doing a reconnaissance of unknown terrain.’
‘It’s not unknown, Dean. We’ve been coming here every year since I can remember.’
‘Longer.’
‘Longer? That’s a long time.’
‘Tell me about it. Washington’s as boring as fuck. Nothing but politicians and tourists.’
‘And museums!’ Sammy said hopefully.
‘Wow! That was subtle, Sammy. This year? No museums!’
‘But…’
Dean held up his hand. ‘No, Sammy. Forget trying to make everything into a school trip, you nerd. We’re not going to the Smithsonian. I think I can live without seeing another plane hanging from a ceiling. We’re going to do something even more educational.’
Sammy couldn’t help bouncing up and down in his sneakers. Just a bit. He loved school. He couldn’t wait to find out what Dean had planned.
Fuck.
It wasn’t like DC was perfect. And Sammy couldn’t remember the last time they’d stayed somewhere even half-decent. Their motel in Southeast was cheap, and smelt even worse. Damn Dad for having a thing for always wanting to stay near the Barracks.
This place? Outclassed the area around their motel in spades. Or maybe it was underclassed? Sammy decided to look that up when he got to the next public library. He didn’t like not knowing things. Even the bad things.
This place? Was full of bad things.
Sammy really wanted to be back at their not so bad smelling motel right the fuck now.
‘Dean?’
‘Ssshh, Sammy. Tracking practice remember?’ Dean said in a quiet voice. ‘You never know what’s out there.’
‘Always be prepared for the unexpected. Expect the worst.’ Sammy parroted back, doing his own best not to give their location away with a carrying whisper to anyone that might be out there.
Anything that might be out there. Watching them. Tracking them.
Since Christmas, Sammy had learned not to trust anyone or anything. He’d seen monsters now. Monsters had seen him.
Now Sammy saw monsters everywhere.
Dad might be weird and crazy, but he did know everything. And Sammy wanted to learn it all. He had to make sure that nothing got Dean or Dad. He couldn’t lose them, like they’d lost Mom.
He had to learn.
Sammy had to learn how to act, and how fast, an…
‘Sammy! Behind me! Now!’
Shit. Where… who… wh…?
A large shambling figure was lunging towards them out of the darkness. Heading straight for Dean.
Dean. Who was standing in front of Sammy with his… Oh fuck! He had his gun out like he was going to use it, and was yelling, ‘Stay back!’
And Sammy couldn’t work out if he was yelling at it, or him.
It. That thing was going to hurt Dean!
Sammy wasn’t going to let the monsters take Dean.
‘Nooooo, Sammy!’
Sammy thought fights were supposed to be longer. Maybe this did take longer. He couldn’t remember much. He thought he ran forward and grabbed it. Or maybe it grabbed Dean first? All he remembered was yelling, and flashes of his knife, and blood. Too much blood.
Sammy thought luck must have been with him, because he was short and the monster was nearly as tall as Dad, but he’d got it somehow, and it was lying there on the ground in the middle of the empty warehouse bleeding, and Sammy was trying to drag a screaming Dean back from all that blood.
And the monster was screaming, and…
It wasn’t a monster.
Monsters don’t lie there choking on their own blood, gasping out, ‘trying to help… bad place for kids… caref…’
Monsters don’t. People do.
He’d hurt someone. A person. Not a monster.
‘De…an?’
‘It’s going to be okay, Sammy. I’ve got him.’ Dean had torn himself away and was kneeling down in all that blood putting pressure on the wound. HARD like Dad had taught them.
‘Bad people here,’ the man finally got out. ‘Shouldn’t be here… Get hurt…’
‘We’re okay. We’re not hurt.’
Dean tried to keep reassuring the confused man as the blood kept flowing whatever Dean did, and Sammy couldn’t stop sobbing, ‘I’m sorry!’
‘…’re little brother?’ the man slurred.
‘Yeah,’ Dean answered, freckles stark against his suddenly white skin. ‘That’s Sammy.’
‘…ooks scared. You too.’
‘Don’t talk! We’ll get an ambulan…’
‘Not for kids... Shouldn’t… …rought him… Got to … look after broth…’
‘Sammy! Go find a phone box, and cal… Fuck! Don’t die, mister! Don’t…’
‘Dean. I… I killed him! What are we going to do?’
‘Sammy! You need to take a breath and calm down. Right now, okay?’
Sammy hiccuped through his tears. ‘kay, Dean.’
‘I’m going to fix this. You don’t have to worry.’ Dean was absentmindedly straightening the dead man’s battered khaki clothing.
‘What are we going to tell the police? What about … Dad?’
‘We can’t go the police, Sammy. He’s dead. We killed a guy. We can’t say we were down here and accidentally knifed him to death. We’re kids, we won’t go to jail, but they’ll find the next best thing and lock us away for years. They’ll take us away from Dad! Do you understand that, Sammy?’
Yeah. That he understood. No Dad. And no Dean too. Sammy wasn’t naïve enough anymore to think they’d keep two killers together, even if they were brothers.
He’d done this. He’d been scared, and a man was dead.
‘What?’
‘We have to get out of here. We don’t have the time to try and find a way to move him. Even with both of us we couldn’t shift him far, and there’s nowhere here to hide the body that it wouldn’t be found almost as soon. We’re going to have to leave him.’ Dean was busy wiping off Sammy’s knife and tucking it away in his own belt.
Sammy was glad. He never wanted to touch that knife again. But Dean was right. They couldn’t leave it behind. They had to take it and go now, but…
‘Dean! What are you…?’ Dean was dragging the man’s jacket and shirt off awkwardly, not touching his cooling skin.
‘Fingerprints. Yours and mine from the struggle, and more from when I tried to stop the bleeding. We have to leave as little evidence as poss…’
Sammy stiffened as he saw what had caught his brother’s attention. Dog tags. Just like Dad. Oh God, oh God, oh God.
‘Don’t freeze up on me now, Sammy.’
Sammy nodded numbly as he watched Dean begin use the clothes to scrub through their bloody footprints around the man’s body. Dad.
‘Hoof up!’ Dean was in his face, tugging his right leg up.
What? Oh. Dean had his water bottle out and was rinsing the blood from his sneakers before doing his own.
‘Less chance of them tracking us. Though he looks like a bum, so they’re probably not going to waste too much time searching for his killers.’
Sammy opened his mouth to protest at Dean’s callousness, bum or not, the man had thought he was helping them, getting them out of trouble. He stopped himself before he could speak. Dean was… He’d put that look on his brother’s face. Sammy didn’t think he’d ever seen Dean really scared before. Scared of the same thing Sammy was. Scared they were going to lose each other.
Biting his lip, Sammy forced himself to sound calm. ‘We good to go, Dean?’
Dean glanced across at him in shock as he tucked the man’s blood-soaked clothes away in his backpack. He nodded once, proudly.
‘Yeah, Sammy. We’re good.’
‘You both good?’ Dad asked when he got back that afternoon, clutching their burgers, chilli fries, Coke, and his own jumbo mug of coffee.
Sammy felt sick, even before he watched his father hand over the separate bag of Dean’s must-have-5 tubs of mayonnaise to drown everything in.
‘Sammy?’
Dad knows. He has to know something’s wrong. He always knows.
‘Dad. I…’
‘He’s going to lie, and tell you he’s been good, Dad. But the truth is? He didn’t stop whining till I took him to the museum again. I don’t see why he has to go every damn year! He might as well wear a tiara and call himself Princess Samsonian.’ Dean was giving Sammy a giant “Fuck you!” gesture behind Dad’s back with a straw that he’d somehow attached to the middle finger of his right hand. He also had two fries hanging out of his nostrils.
‘Dean!’
‘Yes, Dad?’
‘Stop annoying your little brother, and don’t fuck with your food.’ Dad always knew.
‘Yes, Dad,’ Dean said, beaming innocently.
Their father was on to Dean, and took away two of his mayonnaise tubs in a well-thought out act of justice.
Dean honestly did look upset about that loss.
Sammy didn’t know how Dean managed to do it. He looked guilty of so much, and so little at the same time. There was a red herring stinking up the room and its name was Dean Winchester.
‘You have a good day, Sammy?’
Dad was always like this after the Wall. So forcibly cheerful it was scary. Even before he learnt the truth Sammy knew Dad was faking this. Pretending nothing was wrong.
Like they were.
‘You and Dean learn anything new?’
Sammy started choking on the fry he’d been pretending to eat, until Dean thumped him helpfully on the back. Hard. Like he didn’t know exactly what his brother meant.
‘Yeah, Dad,’ he coughed. ‘We learned … lots,’ he finished.
‘Guess you’ll be looking forward to coming back here again next year.’ Dad was off again, trying to convince all of them that this was nothing but a little seasonal road-trip. A break between hunts.
Back. Again?
‘Sure, Dad!’ Dean said, calm as anything, as he stepped off Sammy’s foot.
‘That’s my bo…,’ Dad started to say with false cheerfulness, only to be interrupted by Sammy rushing past him to throw up in the toilet.
‘Dean! Did you spit on your brother’s fries again?’
‘Dean?’
‘No, Sammy. We’re not talking about it. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happened.’
‘But…’
‘I made it go away, Sammy. Everything’s going to be okay.’
November - Tom’s River, NJ
…thing’s in there…
‘Sammy?’ Dean was patting him on the back of his neck, the way he always did. Trying to calm him down. It wasn’t working. It had only ever helped the first few times. Sammy didn’t tell Dean that though.
‘You’ve got to stop doing this.’
‘Sorry,’ Sammy muttered. He was on the floor again. He always ended up on the floor unless Dean got to him first. Fuck.
‘Nightmares? You’ve been waking up screaming for months now, Dad’l…’
‘Dad’ll what?’ Their father asked from the doorway.
‘Be pissed?’ Dean suggested, shrugging his own apology at his brother. It was always best to try and distract Dad as fast and as brattily as possible.
‘Too late,’ their father grumped. He bent down and picked Sammy up as if he was a freakin’ kid.
‘Daaaaad!’ Sammy screeched as he was plunked unceremoniously down on his bed.
‘Stop squawking,’ Dad said gruffly, hands gentle on his head.
‘Sammy?’
‘Sorry, Dad.’
‘Another bad dream?’ Dad did look a little pissed, but mostly tired.
Sammy was tired too. Seemed like he never got any sleep. Not since…
‘Keep telling him not to eat all the fucking cheese,’ Dean insisted.
‘I did not!’ Sammy yelled back, grateful for the thought. ‘It was only two slices. You had five!’ Might as well work the lie as long as possible.
‘Mmm,’ Dad sounded doubtful. Trouble was he knew Dean and Sammy. ‘As none of us have the time or energy to keep getting up every time Sammy eats too much Jack, or…’ he looked at them firmly.
‘Whatever’s going on? Sort it.’
Something was there.
‘What do you want me to do, Sammy?’
Something was always there.
‘Can you…?’
‘Dean!’
‘It’s okay, Sammy.’ Dean dashed over to the closet and opened it. ‘See? Nothing there.’
God. I’m such a baby. Dean’s right. I am a wuss.
Got to stay awake.
‘Dean!’
Something…
‘Out with it.’ Dad had gone past pissed two weeks ago.
‘Closet,’ Sammy whispered, like the fucking baby he was.
‘What about it? You know I’ve told Dean not t…’
Sam wriggled uncomfortably. ‘Not that!’
‘What then?’
‘Something in there.’ Sam had to say it twice before he got loud enough for his father to hear.
‘Something in your closet?’ Dad repeated incredulously.
Sammy nodded and curled up into a smaller ball on the chair in front of the television. Dean kept still squished comfortingly in next to him, staring Dad down. Dean wasn’t calling him a baby this time. Not in front of Dad.
‘Aaa…’
‘Monster?’ Dad sighed. ‘Oh, Sammy. Just because I hunt things, doesn’t mean there’s something in your closet. Don’t I do a sweep every time I come home? Doesn’t Dean when you get back from school?’
‘Yeah…’
‘We’ve got salt lines everywhere, but you still think there’s something there? That’s what’s been waking you up all these months? Making you so scared you’re screaming loud enough to wake your brother up?’
‘Yes.’ Stupid. Stupid. But he couldn’t stop seeing him.
‘Right. This ends. Now.’ Dad walked over to his bag and pulled out a .45, checked it, pulled out a spare packet of ammunition and handed both objects to Sammy.
Huh? But he’d already done his shooting practice this week.
‘This,’ Dad patted the gun in Sammy’s hand. ‘Is yours now. ‘bout time I gave you your own one anyway. Your brother’s had his for years.’
Dean smirked.
‘You got that. You know how to use it. Anything comes out of that closet? You shoot it, okay?’
‘Okay,’ Sammy agreed shakily.
‘Good gun, Sammy.’ Dean was looking at the .45 admiringly. ‘Almost as good as my baby.’
Sammy rolled his eyes. Dean treated his gun almost as well as fawned over Dad’s car. Sammy figured when Dean was older he’d just have to build himself a robot to date. He certainly wasn’t going to be happy loving anything unless it was partly mechanical.
‘But, Sammy? Isn’t going to do a bit of good against nothing.’
Sammy knew that. He knew there wasn’t anything really there. He just kept seeing that man’s face. Sometimes he thought Dean saw him too. But Dean never woke up screaming about it.
‘You two boys good?’
‘Yeah, Dad,’ they chorused.
‘Shotgun’s by the door. Got your guns ready, and loaded?’
‘Yes sir!’
‘I’ll be back in the morning. You boys stay inside, and safe, you hear?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Dean!!!!!!!!!!!’
‘Sammy, it’s… FUCK!!!!!’
‘That was something.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘That was something in our closet, Sammy!’
Yeah. Sammy had noticed that right about the time he started screaming and trying to grab his gun.
‘Do you think I scared it, Sammy?’
‘We both saw it, right?’
Uh huh.
‘What’s Dad going to say?’ Sammy asked, chewing his lip worriedly, as he stared at the bullet holes inside their closet.
‘He’s going to be mad that I missed,’ Dean said. Dean looked madder than Dad ever had. Part of that might be because he’d also shot his favourite thrift store denim jacket.
‘We could get a patch to put over it,’ Sammy offered.
‘Nah! It’ll just make me look really cool,’ Dean said confidently, as he hung the jacket back up with tender care. ‘The chicks will love it.’
Sammy didn’t bother saying what he though of Dean’s “chicks.” ‘So, what about Dad? How are we…? Dean, we can’t not tell him now!’ Sammy waved helplessly at the closet. ‘Even if he doesn’t notice all the bullet holes, he’s going to smell the burnt powder if he comes back early, isn't he?’
‘About that,’ Dean said brightly, pulling a packet of matches out of his pocket.
‘Dean. That doesn’t work when you fart, how’s it going to work on this?’
‘You don’t know everything, Mr Know-It-All!’
‘Dean? You been playing with matches again? Because if you’ve not been salting and burning something I’ve just killed, I’m going to want to know the reason why.’
Sometimes Dad was really unfair.
And sometimes Sammy really did know it all.
‘Boys? You want to tell me why you tried to kill the closet?’
‘It was my idea, Dad.’
‘It always is, Dean.’
‘Oh. Well.’ Dean deflated a bit before he began waving his hands spookily around in the air. ‘I thought if I shot Sam’s “ghost” the next time it came knocking, he’d see there wasn’t anything to worry about.’
Their father looked between them, then thudded his head in baffled exhaustion against the closet door a few times. ‘So you shot the closet… sorry, “ghost” and now everything’s okay?’
Sam nodded vigorously after a nudge from Dean. ‘Yeah. I feel good now, Dad. No more nightmares, I bet.’
They didn’t need to discuss it. One look at their father’s face when he came back injured from his latest hunt had shown them that Dad didn’t need anything else to worry about.
This problem? Was all theirs.
Dad sighed. ‘Next ghost, Sammy? You shoot it. And don’t miss. Dean’s spread is all over the place. Did the closet keep ducking and weaving on you, Dean?’
‘Sammy?’
‘Yeah, Dean?’
‘It’s in there again, isn’t it?’
‘I think so.’
Dean tightened his arms more firmly around him. ‘I’ve got salt in front of the closet door now. It’s locked, and there’s a chair there. And we’ve both got our guns, right?’
‘Yeah?’
‘So, it’s not coming out tonight.’
‘Uh huh. But, Dean? How does it keep getting in there? We ward everywhere we go.’
‘I don’t know, Sammy. But I’m going to find out, and then I’m going to kill it good. I just need to find something better than bullets.’
Dean looked a little odd sitting there, huddled around him on the bed, wearing his denim jacket over his pyjamas, but Sammy knew that no matter what, Dean was going to make this go away too.
December
‘It keeps coming back!’ Dean hissed. ‘Why? We’re kids. Can’t it find someone its own size to haunt?’
Dean had a point, but he was also really, really, loud. ‘I’m sitting right beside you, Dean.’ Well, almost on top and clinging to his older brother like a monkey, but it didn’t seem really, really, brave to say that.
‘Oh. But it…’
‘I heard you the first time.’
‘Just as long as it can’t hear me.’
‘Why? Afraid he’s going to overhear your big plan?’
Dean snorted. That was never a good sign, or a good… ugh.
Sammy threw a box of tissues at him.
‘Dean? We do have a big plan, don’t we?’
‘Dean?’
‘I’m thinking.’
‘Do you want to do it faster before that thing decides we’d make a good midnight snack?’
‘Sammy?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t give it any ideas, okay?’
Oh.
‘Okay. Got it!’
‘The plan?’
‘Yup!’
‘Going to tell me?’
‘Yeah. We open the door…’
‘That’s the plan? I’ve been having nightmares for months, and we find out there’s something in my closet, and you want to OPEN THE DOOR and let it out?’ Sammy’s voice might have got a bit squeaky right at the end. But Dean did that to him sometimes.
‘No, Sammy. I mean, yes… aaaggggghhhhhh! First we open the door…’
‘Oh my God! That’s so clever!’ Sammy squealed, channelling his inner chick on Dean’s behalf.
‘Shut up, bitch.’ Dean growled, but Sammy just ignored him. They were both doing their best to make this into a game, but he knew Dean was just as scared as he was.
‘Right? Got the plan, Sammy?’
‘Got it.’
‘Sss…am…my?’
‘Ye…e…s, Dean?’
‘Does it … he … look a little familiar to you?’
Oh shit.
Safe on the other side of seven (just as well Dad always bought the important things in bulk) meticulously drawn semi-circles of salt enclosing the closet, Sammy stared inside.
Oh God. It was…
They’d only caught brief glimpses before as the figure had flickered in and out in the relative darkness of the closet. But it was the same face that he saw every time he’d tried to go to sleep since June.
It was same man. The man he’d killed. The man he murdered.
‘Dean?’
Dean kept his eyes, and his (admittedly useless but somewhat comforting to the both of them) gun trained on his target. ‘Yeah, Sammy?’
‘I don’t think he wants to help us this time, do you?’
‘Guess we know why he’s haunting us then. Damn it!’ Dean swore. ‘I was hoping it was just that Dad got dicked on the house rental.’
‘According to Dad’s notes, they either want to do something they didn’t get to do while they were alive-resolution,’ Dean quoted aloud. ‘Or they’re just crazy and want revenge on someone.’
Sammy took another look at his ghost. It didn’t look like it wanted resolution. It looked like it wanted to hit something. Sammy made himself look closer. More like kill something. Someone. Someone in particular.
Sammy guessed that was him. Maybe Dean too-afterwards. But mostly him. Sammy hoped he was wrong, but unfortunately he’d always been a good guesser. Right about now Sammy would have preferred to be dumb, and anywhere other than New Jersey. Although…
‘Dean? You know more about this stuff than I do, but, are ghosts supposed to be this mobile?’
‘I think it’s you, Sammy. You’re just that special,’ Dean joked morbidly. ‘Or he’s just that pissed at you.’
Sammy stared at the ghost. It was definitely that pissed. That was another way it reminded him of Dad.
‘Maybe we could reason with it?’ Sammy said desperately.
‘We killed it, Sammy. I don’t think it wants to sit down and discuss its feelings and forgive you during a group hug.’
Sammy wished Dean didn’t watch quite so much Oprah and Dr Phil.
‘All right, I rang Uncle Bobby and he made me write down a list.’
‘Uncl…?’
‘Relax, Sammy. I just told him it was one of Dad’s stupid scenario things that he set us for homework.’
‘And he agreed to help us answer our homework, and cheat Dad?’
‘Well, he’s still mad at Dad for what happened the last time.’
Sammy winced. None of them had thought they were going to get out of South Dakota without a few holes in them after that little friendly argument.
‘So, step one?’
‘Said first we need to get it to talk.’
‘You sure this is going to work?’
‘Almost guaranteed to work.’
Sammy relaxed a bit. Uncle Bobby knew even more than Dad.
‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘On two.’
Dean poked the end of the broom towards the closet door. ‘One… Two!’
‘Hey!’
Hey?
‘Yeah, fucker! I’m talking to you!’
Admittedly Sammy had been a bit sheltered from the family business until last Christmas, but he was sure someone would have mentioned Uncle Bobby’s habit of swearing at ghosts. Although, considering what he’d yelled at Dad in March, maybe it was a habit.
Then again, Dean might have got a little over-excited as usual.
‘You gonna curse me to death, boy? Oh, too late.’
Fuck.
Uncle Bobby really was that awesome. It worked. Huh.
‘You gonna kill me with that little pig-sticker of yours, boy?’ The ghost had almost entirely stopped flickering, and looked almost alive standing there on the far side of the salt line.
He looked exactly like the last time Sammy saw him; right down to the dog tags peeking out of the shirt Dean had ripped off him there at the end of it all. Sammy couldn’t work out why they hadn’t recognised him weeks ago.
‘Might have worked the first time, but ain’t gonna work on me now!’
Sammy’s attention, and his knife, snapped back towards the ghost. Dean’s hadn’t wavered at all.
‘That your daddy’s K-bar?’
Don’t answer. Leave the talking to Dean. Whatever he says? Don’t answer. That was the plan. Dean gets him mad, and finds out as much as possible. Sammy was the backup.
‘He teach you how to use it? Teach you boys how to really fight? Or not? He good for anything at all?’
Sammy tried not to tighten his grip at the sneer. Tried to stay loose, just like Dad had taught him.
‘You don’t know nothing about our Dad!’ Dean yelled. ‘Shut up, asshole!’
Yeah. Dean was good at this part. As the ghost yelled back that he was a Sergeant and no little pipsqueak son of a goddamn Marine was going to call him names, Sammy decided he was going to be the best backup ever and not get between Dean and anyone in a fight ever again. No matter what.
‘Got his name,’ Dean said with shaky satisfaction after Sammy had finally decided to end the argument prematurely and slammed the door in the ghost’s angry dead face with the broom handle.
‘Yeah,’ Sammy tried to grin back. He put down the broom and drew a neat tick next to point two on Uncle Bobby’s list. If he kept thinking about it as a simple list of things to do-a shopping list-it didn’t feel so scary, and like he wanted to run screaming to Dad and ask him to just kill this monster and take them far away from here. But he didn’t feel like that because he had Dean, and the list.
‘Good tick, Sammy,’ Dean said, taking the pen out of his hand.
Sammy looked down at the hole he’d somehow torn in the paper. ‘I can make another one!’
‘No, this one’s fine.’
Dean sounded mad again. Maybe he needed to…
‘What’s next?’
‘Look up, and see if we can find out if … where he was buried,’ Sammy answered in a rush, glad that was an easy one. Easy. If only he could stop thinking about them leaving the … body there, and running.
‘Hey, you’re good at this research shit, aren’t you?’ Dean sounded reluctantly impressed.
Sammy blushed. It wasn’t an important skill. Not like the things Dad said were important. Weapons, tracking, exorcisms, all that hard stuff (though Pastor Jim always said he was better at Latin than Dean.) But he was good at this. Sitting in a library, looking things up in books and newspapers. In print, on microfilm, or online. This he’d always been good at, even before he knew there was another use for it besides getting good marks at school. This he could do better than Dean, and maybe even better than Dad.
This? Meant he could help, and not always feel he wasn’t good enough.
‘School’s good for something,’ Sammy said.
‘Geek.’ Insults from Dean strangely never sounded the same as when the other kids taunted him at school. If it could help his brother, Sammy was content to be a geek forever.
‘So, nerd breath. You find out anything?’
Okay, some insults still made him want to toss his pencil case and a few of his textbooks-the heavier ones-at his brother.
‘Yeah. You got his name, and we … knew where, and when.’ And who did it, his mind finished silently. ‘It wasn’t that hard,’ he said in surprise. When you stopped pretending nothing ever happened, and made yourself go back and look at the truth.
Dean punched him softly on the shoulder. ‘Good work, Sammy.’
‘We need to talk to that reporter. I know you don’t want to-Hell, I don’t want to-but you know he has to have more information than got into that newspaper article.’
Sammy didn’t bother responding to Dean. He’d already argued his case for doing all their research at a distance. Unfortunately not everything was online, and some stuff that was he couldn’t get access to. Sammy vowed to take lots of computing classes when he got to high school. There had to be ways to get through all those password layers. What he really needed was a hacker as a pen pal instead of Petey Sawyer, Buffalo’s self-proclaimed under 11 chess champion.
‘Relax. He’s not going to see a bloody M written on your forehead, you know.’
Sammy flinched because he didn’t know that for sure. He’d killed someone. That had to leave a mark somewhere, didn’t it? He certainly had spent a long time looking for one in the mirror these past months. Maybe it took time before it was fully visible?
‘Sammy? Hey? I was just joking,’ Dean said roughly. ‘sides if you’ve got one, I do too, okay?’
That shouldn’t have made Sammy feel slightly better, but it did. Knowing it wasn’t just him stuck in this nightmare put him one step closer to the old Sammy. The one before Washington.
‘Yeah. I know we have to go see him. It’s not like we can front up to the desk at the Morgue, or the Police Headquarters, and flash a badge like Dad and then just walk in, get what we want and get out.’ Being a kid sucked sometimes.
Dean pouted, probably because he’d really wanted an excuse to make his first fake ID.
For the first time, Sammy was glad that Dad’s latest hunt had brought, and kept, them so frighteningly close to a city neither he nor Dean ever wanted to see again. Their father’s month-long pursuit of something he said was twisting the legend of the Jersey Devil for its own even more gruesome purposes had made the next step in Uncle Bobby’s list much easier than they ever could have hoped for.
Ditching school was also easy. Sammy shouldn’t have been surprised. Dean was, after all, an expert at it. According to Dean, you could forget wasting your time forging your parent’s signature on a sick note. Making an appearance was the key to a successful escape. As long as at least one teacher, and whichever half of your class was still awake, had seen you on the grounds (preferably doing something outrageously memorable like walking blindfolded across the top of the monkey bars, then repeating it backwards for added effect) you were golden. People’s memories had a magical way of filling in the blanks. You were supposed to be there, they had seen you, so what if some of those images filtered in from other days? This was a little known bonus created by the dull repetition of school that Dean liked to take advantage of on a regular basis. So, naturally Sammy was the only one feeling guilty as they both left immediately after first period.
Dean was also an expert at hotwiring cars, and he was quite prepared to demonstrate how he could better his time under what he called battlefield conditions. Luckily for Sam, New Jersey had an efficient public transport system, and it was actually faster to use it than steal a car. This was another of those times when Dean hated Sammy being right.
Sammy was, strangely enough, the best one at lying to people when he put his mind to it. That didn’t mean that he had neglected to prepare a careful series of believable reasons for the brothers’ “school trip” to Maryland. However, it turned out that preparation wasn’t everything in some situations. Nobody actually gave a damn, or even looked twice at two unaccompanied minors out and about during school hours.
Dean laughed himself silly when Sammy got upset about not getting a chance to use any of his cover stories. Dean was a great big jerk.
Washington, DC
‘School assignment?’ Kwensha Mohbal looked doubtful. ‘About me?’
Sammy’s ‘History!’ beat out Dean’s ‘English!’ by one second.
‘Huh?’ Now the reporter was clearly confused.
‘The assignment,’ Sammy said with a meaningful stare at his brother, ‘was for history. The Vietnam War. A “Vets - where are they now?” piece.’
‘My assignment for English was to write an essay … uh … in English on the war. Uh… from the point of view of one particular vet. For the school newspaper.’ Dean was sweating when he finished stumbling through his attempt to rescue his cover story from drowning.
‘Oh, so not about me?’ The disappointment was plain on his face. Sammy kicked Dean’s ankle because they shouldn’t have got away with that stuff-up. Dad would have torn them to shreds for not having every bit of their lies word-perfect. Thank goodness for vanity.
‘Well, mine would be about you finding out about the vet,’ Dean struggled to redeem himself.
‘Really?’ The reporter was beaming a scarily white smile. Obviously he loved everything about his career, especially making the news himself, even if it was only for a school newspaper.
Sammy didn’t want to see his face when he found out that he hadn’t made the headlines.
‘It was just so…’
‘Senseless?’ Sammy prompted tonelessly.
‘Yes! Exactly,’ Mr Mohbal continued. ‘Savage and senseless, that’s what I called it-You really did read my piece, didn’t you? -and that’s what it was. That poor man beaten up and knifed to death. He was a hero, you know. Did two tours in ‘Nam, gets back, and this is what happens. He ends up on the streets living on handouts from people who wouldn’t know how to defend this county if they had to. He was sick you know; pneumonia, the autopsy said. Strange for summer, but it comes with the territory. Doesn’t matter what the season something’ll get you out there. And something did.’ He shook his head, and shivered. ‘Murdered in cold blood. This is a crazy world. You don’t ever get used to seeing it.’
As the reporter continued on about what was wrong with the world today, Sammy sat beside a still and silent Dean, letting his pen automatically take “notes” for his assignment. It hadn’t been in cold blood-stupid expression-not that that made a difference to the end result. Cold or hot, he was still dead.
Sammy hadn’t planned to kill Sergeant Connolly. Kill anyone. Sammy had been scared and the man had just been there … coming at them … didn’t even look human in the shadows … coming at them … there hadn’t been time … no time to look … to check … and Dean had the gun … and what if it wasn’t enough? … He kept seeing monsters … Dreaming about Dad fighting monsters … dreaming about Mom … it was coming at them … coming at Dean … the monster was going to get Dean … and then he was there on the other end of Sammy’s knife … and there was blood … so much blood … and it was done.
And Sammy’s blood hadn’t been cold, it had been hot and scared and he didn’t know what to do. What to do but save Dean…
And he’d killed a man. You couldn’t fix that. Dean had tried. But you couldn’t ever make that go away.
And it hadn’t.
It had come back.
He’d come back. For Sammy.
Sammy was cold now.
‘Are you okay, kid?’
No. He wasn’t ever going to be okay again.
‘Sammy?’
‘I’m okay, Dean.’
The lie slipped out, and Sammy couldn’t remember when he’d started lying to his big brother. Lying. Real lies. More than, ‘No, I don’t know who ate the last of the Lucky Charms.’ ‘Where your Knight Rider t-shirt is.’ ‘How Penny Faber found out you were down by the bike shed with…’
He was lying to Dean, and Dean knew it. And that wasn’t okay, but Dean didn’t look like he cared. At least not about the lie. Just about Sammy.
And Sammy needed to make that look on Dean’s face go away.
‘I know where.’
Best words ever. It meant they knew where to go. Where to find him. Where to dig. Where to end it.
‘I know where.’
Best words ever. Except they weren’t.
Sammy was scared. He’d been scared most of his life, even with Dean and Dad to take care of him. He’d been scared of the little things-always being the new kid; being short and a nerd; not ever being cool; getting laughed at for wearing secondhand clothes; not having friends; not being a good enough shot; that Dad would never be proud of him; that he mightn’t ever be just like Dean; that he didn’t fit; scared that he was scared-the normal things that all kids worried about. He’d been scared of the big things too-Mom, Dad, and all those questions he had fighting inside his head.
Last Christmas? That was when he got really scared. And he had lots more questions, and every time he got an answer, he found more questions, and the scary? It got bigger, and it would have swallowed him up, but Dean somehow kept chasing it away.
This June? That was when it got real bad. So bad they didn’t-couldn’t-talk about it afterwards. Not between themselves. Not to Dad. He couldn’t talk to his teachers. He was too scared to even walk past the counselor’s office at school in case he gave in, went in, told; told everything.
Sammy didn’t think kids were supposed to be this scared. And it was his fault. He hadn’t meant to, but he’d done a bad thing.
What was even worse? Sammy knew he’d do it again. Not killing the Vet. ‘cos he knew now that he hadn’t been a monster. Hadn’t been going to hurt them. Hurt Dean. That was a mistake. So, him? He wouldn’t kill again.
But, something else? Anything else? Came at Dean or Dad? Sammy knew what he’d do. What they’d do for him. He’d stop them.
But he was still scared.
Sammy didn’t want to have to stop anybody-anything-ever again.
‘Would have been easier if he hadn’t claimed the body,’ Dean swore. ‘Left it in the Morgue. In a drawer. Nice and neat. Roll out, roll in,’ he gestured in his best Karate Kid fashion. No dirt, no mess, no … digging.’
‘We’re not doing the digging,’ Sammy pointed out reasonably.
‘But I would have. Could have,’ came the protest. Dean was leaning on an extra shovel that was almost bigger than him. He, like Sammy, had his sleeves unnecessarily rolled up for action, and his jacket was laid carefully over an adjoining headstone, well out of the way of any wayward clods of dirt.
‘Just as well you found a … sucker,’ Sammy let his voice drop to a whisper so that the said sucker wouldn’t overhear the comment. But judging from the drunken singing coming from within the re-opened gravesite, the sucker wouldn’t have realized it was an insult.
Apparently already drunken college students who’d do anything when dared and bribed with the promise of a bottle of Jack (that Dean had deftly stolen from the local liquor store while appearing to be chasing his brother for “drawing pictures all over his maths homework”-yeah, right! Bastard,) thought sea shanties were appropriate for the solemn occasion.
‘Way-hey, and up she rises,’ certainly seemed to be working as a motivator and Sammy had been surprised how quick a job the burly jock was making of it. Sammy just wished he could have kept skipping over ‘Throw him in the back of the paddy wagon earl-eye in the morning.' That line was a reminder that neither he nor Dean needed in the middle of their illegal activities.
Getting rid of their drunken wanna-be-sailor had been more difficult than talking him into a little grave desecration on a Friday evening.
All those looks over his shoulder while he dug? Hadn’t been to check where he was tossing the dirt. He’d been trying to spot the TV cameras. He was drunk, but not enough not to still want his five minutes on the student’s underground broadcast. It had taken Dean a while to convince him that hidden cameras were called that for a reason, before he tottered happily (but with increasing stiffness) off towards his college, new buddy Jack tucked under one arm.
Sammy decided then and there that he didn’t want to see the inside (or outside) of any more graves ever again.
Sgt. Charles Patrick Connolly, (USAF Rtd) had been a big man. Sammy had expected the skeleton to be equally impressive. Except it wasn’t just a skeleton.
‘I think I’m going to puke,’ Sammy choked as he backed away fast from the now shattered top of the coffin. Turns out six months in a coffin isn’t nearly long enough to turn a body into a neat medical specimen.
‘Take yo…ur … time,’ Dean coughed thoughtfully. He was looking a little green too. He might have had more exposure to bodies over the years than Sam, but he didn’t look like he needed to see various stubborn tendons and ligaments hanging on to the world as grimly as the Sergeant’s spirit was.
By the time they’d dumped several pounds (Dean wanted to be very, very sure about this) of salt onto the remains, both of them felt only slightly better. Sammy hoped he’d get used to this over time, but he had his doubts.
‘You want to toss me the lighter?’ Dean asked rhetorically.
‘No. I think I have to do it,’ Sammy replied. He didn’t want to do it, but he thought he owed it to his victim to have the guts to finish the job.
‘Got to say, I’m surprised Charlie didn’t choose to attend his second going away party.’
‘Dean!’ His brother had a knack for phrasing things in the worst way possible. It hadn’t been a party. It hadn’t even been a wake (though their drunken sailor’s carousing might have given any passing ghosts that impression.)
‘What?’ Dean was looking too perky for what they’d just been through.
‘We just salted and burned a man’s body!’ Sammy exclaimed.
‘Only bits of it,’ his brother muttered.
Truth aside-ewww! Dean was treating this like a job instead of a nightmare.
‘Sammy?’ Dean was peering at him in the torchlight. ‘It’s over, buddy. I know it was gross, but we did it. He can’t hurt you any more.’
Sammy hoped Sergeant Connolly hadn’t felt those flames, because, regardless of what Dean had said, it was Sammy who’d done all the hurting.
‘Sammy?’
Fuck. Dean was still worried. Sammy didn’t need anyone else hurting. Ever.
‘s okay, Dean.’ Sammy did his best to sound fine, but his voice came out as more of a pathetic whimper. ‘I’m kind of glad he didn’t drop by either.’
Dean shrugged. ‘Maybe he just had a thing about closets.’
Dean had the uncanny ability to make Sammy laugh, even when he thought he couldn’t.
Tom’s River, NJ
‘You just had to say that about closets, didn’t you, Dean?’ Sammy hissed at his brother.
‘Not my fault it turned out to be true,’ Dean gasped as he ducked the chair that came flying his way. ‘Fuck! For a dead guy he’s got a really good aim.’
‘We dug him up. We salted him. I burned him! We did everything on Uncle Bobby’s list.’ Sammy was now hunched behind the relative safety of the dresser they’d angled out from the wall. ‘Dean? Did you forget to write something down? Something important?’
‘No… Mad fucker!’ he shouted as the ghost started working his way through the rest of the loose objects in the room. ‘Burn the body. Burn their possessions. He was a bum, so if he had anything important he’d have had it on him.’
Anything important.
‘Dean? You remember seeing his dog tags in the coffin?’ Sam asked faintly.
‘Dog tags? Dog… fuck!’
‘Uh huh.’
‘They released the body to the reporter when no relatives came forward to claim it. He’s the one that got up the appeal to pay for the burial. He’s the one…’
‘Who was so mad about a hero being murdered.’
‘Who might have felt strongly enough to keep the dog tags as a memento of a fallen hero,’ Dean finished triumphantly.
‘Uh, Dean. What are we going to do with the Sergeant until we get those dog tags?’ Sammy asked reasonably. He thought he was being very calm considering A GHOST WAS THROWING THINGS AT THEM! Sammy hoped the Sergeant wasn’t quite up to dressers yet.
‘Um… Keep him talking?’ Dean suggested as the dresser began to wobble.
‘Dark outside, and in here, boys. Your Daddy never teach you to leave a light on?’
Right. Talking. Good idea, Dean. Personally, Sammy thought the only reason the Sergeant was back to snarking at them, was because he’d run out of light furniture to destroy. Just as well Dad wasn’t due back from his latest excursion tracking Jersey Devil Mk.2 for a few days. He definitely wasn’t going to get his security deposit back on the house. Dad was going to be taking it out of Sammy and Dean’s hides in the form of press-ups and chores for years.
‘Scared of the dark, asshole?’
Talking, Dean. Talking.
‘Why don’t you come back tomorrow morning then?’
‘You want me to come back in the sunshine? ‘Cos I can.’
Yeah. Sammy would really prefer the sunshine. Of course, if he had a choice he preferred no ghost at all.
‘That reporter bloke tell you that about me? Tell you the truth?’
‘Yes,’ Sammy answered, figuring he could be the calm one out of the threesome. Shame they were penned up behind the dresser though. Dean could have stolen a car, driven to the reporter’s house, stolen the dog tags, taken a detour to get pizza, and have been halfway back by now; he was just that good.
‘You want the truth? You ask me, little boy. Don’t go askin’ nobody else. Got the source right here. Don’t believe no secondhand intel. What you want to know, boy?’
Sammy wasn’t sure he wanted to know anything, but Dean was gesturing for him to keep on going while he re-loaded his gun. Clearly Dean was intending on putting a lot more bullet holes in the walls before the night was over. They weren’t going to hurt the ghost, but each shot made the boys feel a little better for a second, right up until the ghost flickered back into the argument again.
The ghost took Sammy’s silence for agreement. ‘Want to know if I was a hero? Want to know if I was scared over there?’
No. Sammy didn’t want to know that. He didn’t want to know anything about the War. Dad had been there. Sammy didn’t want to know if Dad had been scared. From the look of Dean, he really didn’t want to know that either.
‘Hell, yeah. Been scared ever since. Coming home ain’t made a bit of difference to that.’
Sammy didn’t think ghosts could get scared. Especially ones that could throw furniture around.
‘Adrenaline,’ Dean mouthed, who always knew what Sammy was thinking.
Adrenaline?
Dean was nodding. It was hard to read his lips in the dark, but Sammy swore the next words were, ‘Ghost mojo.’
Sometimes Dean needed a good slap-joking at a time like this. It made Sammy so… Oh. Huh. Sammy gave up on the slap idea, and wished he had time to hug his big brother instead. That little distraction had lessened the fear. Between the two of them they could cope with this.
If the ghost didn’t decide to take the house apart tile by tile first.
‘Land of the brave, and the free? You want to know what happened when Johnny came marching home? Weren’t no flags and flowers, boys. Weren’t no parades for me. Got me protest signs. Got spat in the face and more, by kids who didn’t know nothing ‘bout what I saw-what I did… Kids not much older than you two.’ He paused.
‘Kids as young as we were when we went in country. Kids who knew nothing about us. You know anything, boys?’ The ghost glared into their souls. ‘Didn’t think so.’
‘We’re…’ Sorry, was what he intended to say.
‘Sorry?’ came the sarcastic query. ‘That the only two things you boys know how to do? How to kill someone, and then say you’re sorry?’
That wasn’t a question anyone should ever have to answer.
‘Those kids who marched with their signs? They thought they knew about killing. They thought they knew what was right and wrong. They didn’t. You don’t get to judge right and wrong till you’ve been there.’
‘You been there now, boys? You going to judge me?’
Sammy shook his head in unison with his brother.
‘You go ask your Daddy about the war. See if he’ll tell you. He a soldier like me? He won’t tell you what he saw. What he did. You look in his eyes some time. You’ll know. You come back to me later and ask me again…’
Landover, MD
Two days later, while they stood side by side soberly watching a set of dog tags melt in a hospital furnace, all Sammy could think of was the last words that Sgt. Charles Patrick Connolly-soldier, victim, ghost, hero-had said to them the night before.
‘War didn’t make me brave.
Death can’t set me free, boys.
They died.’
Sammy will always remember the first time he killed someone. And the second…
Sequel: Bleeding the Fourth (Advent Calendar - Door 4) - Now posted!
Forthcoming:
Companion piece: UltraMarine (John’s visit to the Wall) - Coming 2010.
For further Christmas stories and graphics see my: SPN Advent Calendar
Rating: R, Gen
Characters: Sammy, Dean, John, OMCs.
Disclaimer: The characters are sadly not mine. I’m just sticking pins into Winchester dolls for the purposes of general angst. Sorry about the holes!
Word Count: 9,743
A/N: Door 2 in my SPN Advent Calendar
Pre-series coda to 3.08 A Very Supernatural Christmas (i.e. the flashbacks)
Thanks to secret-seer for buffing the bones in my banner. Apart from the banner the majority of the graphics have been adapted from photos, pamphlets, & newspaper headlines etc about the Vietnam War.
Warning: Deathfic
Settings: NB, DC, NJ, & MD. Dec 1991-1992
Summary: Sammy will always remember the first time he killed someone. And the second…
Everyone has secrets…
December, 1991 - Broken Bow, NB
It wasn’t fair. Everyone was keeping secrets. Dad. Dean. And probably Uncle Bobby and Pastor Jim too, if Sam knew anything, he knew that.
It just wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t like he wasn’t old enough. He was eight, after all. Had been for more than half a year. Which meant he was really almost nine if you thought about it carefully.
Sammy could almost understand Dad keeping secrets. He was a grown-up. They always did things like that for no reason that Sam could see.
But Dean? Dean kept secrets too.
Sammy thought it was the same secret. Maybe just the one secret. A big one. But Sammy didn’t think it was the good kind of secret. Not like not telling anyone in the diner what you wished for when you blew out the candle on your slice of birthday pie because then it wouldn’t come true.
This felt like when he thought about Mom, and he got all twisted up inside, and was mad at her for dying, and mad at his family because they knew her and he didn’t. Mad because nobody ever told him nothing. Just Dad telling him what to do, like he was a soldier like Dad used to be in the old days. And Dean telling him, ‘To shut up and to listen to Dad.’
Sammy thought the secret might be about their Mom. Dad and Dean were always so angry when he asked. Maybe, Oh God… maybe Mom wasn’t dead. Maybe she’d left them. Run away. Left them all. Left Sammy because she didn’t want him. Maybe he’d been bad when he was litt…
No. Don’t think about that!
Thinking about it made Sammy want to punch something. Usually it was the wall of whatever crappy motel they were staying in at the time. Right now there was a hole next to his bed, under the closed window that wasn’t doing a good job of keeping the heavy smell of the feed lot out. The hole wasn’t all Sammy’s. Someone else had started it. Sammy just improved it with his foot, because sometimes kicking was even better than punching. Dean taught him that.
Sometimes Sammy wanted to hit something else. Mostly that something was Dad. Sometimes it was Dean.
Dean knew about Mom.
Dean knew, and Sammy was going to make him tell.
But what if the secret was about Dad?
Sammy didn’t really think Dad was a travelling salesman. He wanted that to be true. Because then? Then he could say that at school, even if it was boring and not something he wanted Dad to come and talk about on Career Day. Sammy didn’t talk about his family at school. That was one of Dad’s rules. Other kids had rules. Rules about clothes, and eating, and bedtime, and not taking candy from strangers.
Dad’s rules were different. Dad had rules about always going into a place to check it out before he said it was safe for them to come in. His rules said, ‘Don’t tell anyone anything.’ Don’t get noticed. Don’t get caught. Don’t ask why. Just… Don’t.
Dad even had rules about salt. Dad was strange.
Dad’s rules also said, ‘Don’t touch the weapons in the trunk.’ Sammy wasn’t allowed to touch any of the weapons unless Dad or Dean was there. Hardly any of the other kids he’d ever gone to school with had rules about weapons, and Sammy had gone to lots of schools, and met lots more kids than anyone else he knew-except for Dean. Those that did? Sammy didn’t think their Dads had a car full of guns and knives.
Dad wasn’t a spy. Which would have been really cool. Spies had guns. Like Dad. Spies knew everything. Like Dad. But spies worked for the government, and they got paid, and had people to help them, and…
Dad didn’t get paid. If Dad got paid he wouldn’t look so upset sometimes when he couldn’t afford what Sammy asked for in the shops. Sammy learned not to ask.
Dad didn’t have people to help him. He just had Dean and Sammy.
Dad wasn’t a spy.
Sammy hadn’t seen Dad on any NRA posters either like that old guy that used to be in movies. And he wasn’t selling guns. Sometimes he bought weapons, but he never sold them. Sammy never ever saw him sell anything, despite what Dean said. Sammy had been watching for ages now, and he never saw that.
And what Sammy saw? Didn’t make sense. Sammy used to lie awake at night and keep moving the pieces of this particular puzzle around in his head. Sammy didn’t like the bits that fitted.
This hurt more than Mom. ‘Cos Sammy was old enough to know that all those weapons? They probably meant something bad. That Dad was bad. Like maybe a bank robber or something like that. It would explain why they kept moving to new places and Dad kept planning things, writing things down that he wouldn’t show Sammy. And he kept going out late at night, and sometimes he left them places for days. Then they always had to leave in a hurry. Sometimes they left without paying. And Dad used different names at motels all the time; Sammy had heard him.
Sammy watched TV. Dean loved cop shows the best, and Sammy loved cartoons, but they always watched together even when Dean whinged about kids’ stuff. On Dean’s shows they always caught the bad guy right at the end. Sam didn’t want them to catch Dad. He wasn’t going to help the cops catch him. He wasn’t ever going to tell. Sammy just wished he knew when the end was so he could get ready to fight. Sammy didn’t care if the cops were the good guys, Dean and Dad came first.
Dean knew about Dad.
Dean knew, and Sammy was going to make him tell.
One day Sammy found the biggest piece of the puzzle.
Sammy thinks he’s old enough to know the truth. He’s read Dad’s journal. It sounded like TV, but it hurt enough to feel like the truth.
Sammy’s old enough.
Dean knows.
Dean knows, and Sammy was going to make him tell.
Dean knew.
Dean knew, and Sammy made him tell.
Dad wasn’t a spy.
Dad was a super-hero.
Monsters were real.
And maybe Dean was right, that they did have ‘the coolest Dad in the world.’
But now Sammy knew? Now he was really scared.
Monsters? Monsters killed Mom? And Dad was a hero?
This Christmas Sammy didn’t want a hero. He just wanted a Dad.
June, 1992 - Washington, DC
‘You know he does this.’
‘I know, Dean. Every year it’s the same. But this year, why did he have to do it right before my game?’
‘You know he meant to be there. For all of us to be there.’
‘He could have gone on his own! He’s always taking off and leaving us with someone if he has a hunt. What makes this any different?’
‘Dunno, Sammy. He always does this alone.’
‘He brings us all the way to Washington every time, but he never takes us there.’
‘Sammy, you know Dad always has his reasons.’
‘Hah! What reasons? There isn’t even any danger. He can’t use that as an excuse. He’s not here hunting things. He’s not here to kill.’
‘Just because there’s not a hunt it doesn’t mean it’s safe, Sammy. You know that now.’
Yeah, I know.
There was a world of things Sammy knew now. In the past six months he’d learned that it wasn’t a nice world. People got hurt. People got killed. Monsters killed. Monsters got killed. People killed. Dad…
‘Why the fuck couldn’t he just pick a date, any date, and go then? Make it the same time every year. He could make a plan, then we’d know, and we’d be able to make a plan too. Plan our damn lives around it! Why can’t he wait and go on the fucking anniversary? Everyone else in the world goes then. It’s on TV!’
‘A. Don’t say fuck. Dad’d be pissed. He didn’t teach you to swear. B…’
‘No. You taught me, Dean. And Dad taught you.’
‘Fucker.’
Sammy made a kissy face at his older brother who never liked it when Sammy was right. ‘B?’
‘B, what?’
‘Duh! “A. Don’t say fuck. B.” Did you forget your alphabet again, Dean?’
‘Shut up, bitch! Dad plans. You know that. He plans everything but this.’
‘So, this is your plan, Dean? Take off while Dad’s gone?’
‘We’re not “taking off,” Sammy. We’re doing a reconnaissance of unknown terrain.’
‘It’s not unknown, Dean. We’ve been coming here every year since I can remember.’
‘Longer.’
‘Longer? That’s a long time.’
‘Tell me about it. Washington’s as boring as fuck. Nothing but politicians and tourists.’
‘And museums!’ Sammy said hopefully.
‘Wow! That was subtle, Sammy. This year? No museums!’
‘But…’
Dean held up his hand. ‘No, Sammy. Forget trying to make everything into a school trip, you nerd. We’re not going to the Smithsonian. I think I can live without seeing another plane hanging from a ceiling. We’re going to do something even more educational.’
Sammy couldn’t help bouncing up and down in his sneakers. Just a bit. He loved school. He couldn’t wait to find out what Dean had planned.
Fuck.
It wasn’t like DC was perfect. And Sammy couldn’t remember the last time they’d stayed somewhere even half-decent. Their motel in Southeast was cheap, and smelt even worse. Damn Dad for having a thing for always wanting to stay near the Barracks.
This place? Outclassed the area around their motel in spades. Or maybe it was underclassed? Sammy decided to look that up when he got to the next public library. He didn’t like not knowing things. Even the bad things.
This place? Was full of bad things.
Sammy really wanted to be back at their not so bad smelling motel right the fuck now.
‘Dean?’
‘Ssshh, Sammy. Tracking practice remember?’ Dean said in a quiet voice. ‘You never know what’s out there.’
‘Always be prepared for the unexpected. Expect the worst.’ Sammy parroted back, doing his own best not to give their location away with a carrying whisper to anyone that might be out there.
Anything that might be out there. Watching them. Tracking them.
Since Christmas, Sammy had learned not to trust anyone or anything. He’d seen monsters now. Monsters had seen him.
Now Sammy saw monsters everywhere.
Dad might be weird and crazy, but he did know everything. And Sammy wanted to learn it all. He had to make sure that nothing got Dean or Dad. He couldn’t lose them, like they’d lost Mom.
He had to learn.
Sammy had to learn how to act, and how fast, an…
‘Sammy! Behind me! Now!’
Shit. Where… who… wh…?
A large shambling figure was lunging towards them out of the darkness. Heading straight for Dean.
Dean. Who was standing in front of Sammy with his… Oh fuck! He had his gun out like he was going to use it, and was yelling, ‘Stay back!’
And Sammy couldn’t work out if he was yelling at it, or him.
It. That thing was going to hurt Dean!
Sammy wasn’t going to let the monsters take Dean.
‘Nooooo, Sammy!’
Sammy thought fights were supposed to be longer. Maybe this did take longer. He couldn’t remember much. He thought he ran forward and grabbed it. Or maybe it grabbed Dean first? All he remembered was yelling, and flashes of his knife, and blood. Too much blood.
Sammy thought luck must have been with him, because he was short and the monster was nearly as tall as Dad, but he’d got it somehow, and it was lying there on the ground in the middle of the empty warehouse bleeding, and Sammy was trying to drag a screaming Dean back from all that blood.
And the monster was screaming, and…
It wasn’t a monster.
Monsters don’t lie there choking on their own blood, gasping out, ‘trying to help… bad place for kids… caref…’
Monsters don’t. People do.
He’d hurt someone. A person. Not a monster.
‘De…an?’
‘It’s going to be okay, Sammy. I’ve got him.’ Dean had torn himself away and was kneeling down in all that blood putting pressure on the wound. HARD like Dad had taught them.
‘Bad people here,’ the man finally got out. ‘Shouldn’t be here… Get hurt…’
‘We’re okay. We’re not hurt.’
Dean tried to keep reassuring the confused man as the blood kept flowing whatever Dean did, and Sammy couldn’t stop sobbing, ‘I’m sorry!’
‘…’re little brother?’ the man slurred.
‘Yeah,’ Dean answered, freckles stark against his suddenly white skin. ‘That’s Sammy.’
‘…ooks scared. You too.’
‘Don’t talk! We’ll get an ambulan…’
‘Not for kids... Shouldn’t… …rought him… Got to … look after broth…’
‘Sammy! Go find a phone box, and cal… Fuck! Don’t die, mister! Don’t…’
‘Dean. I… I killed him! What are we going to do?’
‘Sammy! You need to take a breath and calm down. Right now, okay?’
Sammy hiccuped through his tears. ‘kay, Dean.’
‘I’m going to fix this. You don’t have to worry.’ Dean was absentmindedly straightening the dead man’s battered khaki clothing.
‘What are we going to tell the police? What about … Dad?’
‘We can’t go the police, Sammy. He’s dead. We killed a guy. We can’t say we were down here and accidentally knifed him to death. We’re kids, we won’t go to jail, but they’ll find the next best thing and lock us away for years. They’ll take us away from Dad! Do you understand that, Sammy?’
Yeah. That he understood. No Dad. And no Dean too. Sammy wasn’t naïve enough anymore to think they’d keep two killers together, even if they were brothers.
He’d done this. He’d been scared, and a man was dead.
‘What?’
‘We have to get out of here. We don’t have the time to try and find a way to move him. Even with both of us we couldn’t shift him far, and there’s nowhere here to hide the body that it wouldn’t be found almost as soon. We’re going to have to leave him.’ Dean was busy wiping off Sammy’s knife and tucking it away in his own belt.
Sammy was glad. He never wanted to touch that knife again. But Dean was right. They couldn’t leave it behind. They had to take it and go now, but…
‘Dean! What are you…?’ Dean was dragging the man’s jacket and shirt off awkwardly, not touching his cooling skin.
‘Fingerprints. Yours and mine from the struggle, and more from when I tried to stop the bleeding. We have to leave as little evidence as poss…’
Sammy stiffened as he saw what had caught his brother’s attention. Dog tags. Just like Dad. Oh God, oh God, oh God.
‘Don’t freeze up on me now, Sammy.’
Sammy nodded numbly as he watched Dean begin use the clothes to scrub through their bloody footprints around the man’s body. Dad.
‘Hoof up!’ Dean was in his face, tugging his right leg up.
What? Oh. Dean had his water bottle out and was rinsing the blood from his sneakers before doing his own.
‘Less chance of them tracking us. Though he looks like a bum, so they’re probably not going to waste too much time searching for his killers.’
Sammy opened his mouth to protest at Dean’s callousness, bum or not, the man had thought he was helping them, getting them out of trouble. He stopped himself before he could speak. Dean was… He’d put that look on his brother’s face. Sammy didn’t think he’d ever seen Dean really scared before. Scared of the same thing Sammy was. Scared they were going to lose each other.
Biting his lip, Sammy forced himself to sound calm. ‘We good to go, Dean?’
Dean glanced across at him in shock as he tucked the man’s blood-soaked clothes away in his backpack. He nodded once, proudly.
‘Yeah, Sammy. We’re good.’
‘You both good?’ Dad asked when he got back that afternoon, clutching their burgers, chilli fries, Coke, and his own jumbo mug of coffee.
Sammy felt sick, even before he watched his father hand over the separate bag of Dean’s must-have-5 tubs of mayonnaise to drown everything in.
‘Sammy?’
Dad knows. He has to know something’s wrong. He always knows.
‘Dad. I…’
‘He’s going to lie, and tell you he’s been good, Dad. But the truth is? He didn’t stop whining till I took him to the museum again. I don’t see why he has to go every damn year! He might as well wear a tiara and call himself Princess Samsonian.’ Dean was giving Sammy a giant “Fuck you!” gesture behind Dad’s back with a straw that he’d somehow attached to the middle finger of his right hand. He also had two fries hanging out of his nostrils.
‘Dean!’
‘Yes, Dad?’
‘Stop annoying your little brother, and don’t fuck with your food.’ Dad always knew.
‘Yes, Dad,’ Dean said, beaming innocently.
Their father was on to Dean, and took away two of his mayonnaise tubs in a well-thought out act of justice.
Dean honestly did look upset about that loss.
Sammy didn’t know how Dean managed to do it. He looked guilty of so much, and so little at the same time. There was a red herring stinking up the room and its name was Dean Winchester.
‘You have a good day, Sammy?’
Dad was always like this after the Wall. So forcibly cheerful it was scary. Even before he learnt the truth Sammy knew Dad was faking this. Pretending nothing was wrong.
Like they were.
‘You and Dean learn anything new?’
Sammy started choking on the fry he’d been pretending to eat, until Dean thumped him helpfully on the back. Hard. Like he didn’t know exactly what his brother meant.
‘Yeah, Dad,’ he coughed. ‘We learned … lots,’ he finished.
‘Guess you’ll be looking forward to coming back here again next year.’ Dad was off again, trying to convince all of them that this was nothing but a little seasonal road-trip. A break between hunts.
Back. Again?
‘Sure, Dad!’ Dean said, calm as anything, as he stepped off Sammy’s foot.
‘That’s my bo…,’ Dad started to say with false cheerfulness, only to be interrupted by Sammy rushing past him to throw up in the toilet.
‘Dean! Did you spit on your brother’s fries again?’
‘Dean?’
‘No, Sammy. We’re not talking about it. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happened.’
‘But…’
‘I made it go away, Sammy. Everything’s going to be okay.’
November - Tom’s River, NJ
…thing’s in there…
‘Sammy?’ Dean was patting him on the back of his neck, the way he always did. Trying to calm him down. It wasn’t working. It had only ever helped the first few times. Sammy didn’t tell Dean that though.
‘You’ve got to stop doing this.’
‘Sorry,’ Sammy muttered. He was on the floor again. He always ended up on the floor unless Dean got to him first. Fuck.
‘Nightmares? You’ve been waking up screaming for months now, Dad’l…’
‘Dad’ll what?’ Their father asked from the doorway.
‘Be pissed?’ Dean suggested, shrugging his own apology at his brother. It was always best to try and distract Dad as fast and as brattily as possible.
‘Too late,’ their father grumped. He bent down and picked Sammy up as if he was a freakin’ kid.
‘Daaaaad!’ Sammy screeched as he was plunked unceremoniously down on his bed.
‘Stop squawking,’ Dad said gruffly, hands gentle on his head.
‘Sammy?’
‘Sorry, Dad.’
‘Another bad dream?’ Dad did look a little pissed, but mostly tired.
Sammy was tired too. Seemed like he never got any sleep. Not since…
‘Keep telling him not to eat all the fucking cheese,’ Dean insisted.
‘I did not!’ Sammy yelled back, grateful for the thought. ‘It was only two slices. You had five!’ Might as well work the lie as long as possible.
‘Mmm,’ Dad sounded doubtful. Trouble was he knew Dean and Sammy. ‘As none of us have the time or energy to keep getting up every time Sammy eats too much Jack, or…’ he looked at them firmly.
‘Whatever’s going on? Sort it.’
Something was there.
‘What do you want me to do, Sammy?’
Something was always there.
‘Can you…?’
‘Dean!’
‘It’s okay, Sammy.’ Dean dashed over to the closet and opened it. ‘See? Nothing there.’
God. I’m such a baby. Dean’s right. I am a wuss.
Got to stay awake.
‘Dean!’
Something…
‘Out with it.’ Dad had gone past pissed two weeks ago.
‘Closet,’ Sammy whispered, like the fucking baby he was.
‘What about it? You know I’ve told Dean not t…’
Sam wriggled uncomfortably. ‘Not that!’
‘What then?’
‘Something in there.’ Sam had to say it twice before he got loud enough for his father to hear.
‘Something in your closet?’ Dad repeated incredulously.
Sammy nodded and curled up into a smaller ball on the chair in front of the television. Dean kept still squished comfortingly in next to him, staring Dad down. Dean wasn’t calling him a baby this time. Not in front of Dad.
‘Aaa…’
‘Monster?’ Dad sighed. ‘Oh, Sammy. Just because I hunt things, doesn’t mean there’s something in your closet. Don’t I do a sweep every time I come home? Doesn’t Dean when you get back from school?’
‘Yeah…’
‘We’ve got salt lines everywhere, but you still think there’s something there? That’s what’s been waking you up all these months? Making you so scared you’re screaming loud enough to wake your brother up?’
‘Yes.’ Stupid. Stupid. But he couldn’t stop seeing him.
‘Right. This ends. Now.’ Dad walked over to his bag and pulled out a .45, checked it, pulled out a spare packet of ammunition and handed both objects to Sammy.
Huh? But he’d already done his shooting practice this week.
‘This,’ Dad patted the gun in Sammy’s hand. ‘Is yours now. ‘bout time I gave you your own one anyway. Your brother’s had his for years.’
Dean smirked.
‘You got that. You know how to use it. Anything comes out of that closet? You shoot it, okay?’
‘Okay,’ Sammy agreed shakily.
‘Good gun, Sammy.’ Dean was looking at the .45 admiringly. ‘Almost as good as my baby.’
Sammy rolled his eyes. Dean treated his gun almost as well as fawned over Dad’s car. Sammy figured when Dean was older he’d just have to build himself a robot to date. He certainly wasn’t going to be happy loving anything unless it was partly mechanical.
‘But, Sammy? Isn’t going to do a bit of good against nothing.’
Sammy knew that. He knew there wasn’t anything really there. He just kept seeing that man’s face. Sometimes he thought Dean saw him too. But Dean never woke up screaming about it.
‘You two boys good?’
‘Yeah, Dad,’ they chorused.
‘Shotgun’s by the door. Got your guns ready, and loaded?’
‘Yes sir!’
‘I’ll be back in the morning. You boys stay inside, and safe, you hear?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Dean!!!!!!!!!!!’
‘Sammy, it’s… FUCK!!!!!’
‘That was something.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘That was something in our closet, Sammy!’
Yeah. Sammy had noticed that right about the time he started screaming and trying to grab his gun.
‘Do you think I scared it, Sammy?’
‘We both saw it, right?’
Uh huh.
‘What’s Dad going to say?’ Sammy asked, chewing his lip worriedly, as he stared at the bullet holes inside their closet.
‘He’s going to be mad that I missed,’ Dean said. Dean looked madder than Dad ever had. Part of that might be because he’d also shot his favourite thrift store denim jacket.
‘We could get a patch to put over it,’ Sammy offered.
‘Nah! It’ll just make me look really cool,’ Dean said confidently, as he hung the jacket back up with tender care. ‘The chicks will love it.’
Sammy didn’t bother saying what he though of Dean’s “chicks.” ‘So, what about Dad? How are we…? Dean, we can’t not tell him now!’ Sammy waved helplessly at the closet. ‘Even if he doesn’t notice all the bullet holes, he’s going to smell the burnt powder if he comes back early, isn't he?’
‘About that,’ Dean said brightly, pulling a packet of matches out of his pocket.
‘Dean. That doesn’t work when you fart, how’s it going to work on this?’
‘You don’t know everything, Mr Know-It-All!’
‘Dean? You been playing with matches again? Because if you’ve not been salting and burning something I’ve just killed, I’m going to want to know the reason why.’
Sometimes Dad was really unfair.
And sometimes Sammy really did know it all.
‘Boys? You want to tell me why you tried to kill the closet?’
‘It was my idea, Dad.’
‘It always is, Dean.’
‘Oh. Well.’ Dean deflated a bit before he began waving his hands spookily around in the air. ‘I thought if I shot Sam’s “ghost” the next time it came knocking, he’d see there wasn’t anything to worry about.’
Their father looked between them, then thudded his head in baffled exhaustion against the closet door a few times. ‘So you shot the closet… sorry, “ghost” and now everything’s okay?’
Sam nodded vigorously after a nudge from Dean. ‘Yeah. I feel good now, Dad. No more nightmares, I bet.’
They didn’t need to discuss it. One look at their father’s face when he came back injured from his latest hunt had shown them that Dad didn’t need anything else to worry about.
This problem? Was all theirs.
Dad sighed. ‘Next ghost, Sammy? You shoot it. And don’t miss. Dean’s spread is all over the place. Did the closet keep ducking and weaving on you, Dean?’
‘Sammy?’
‘Yeah, Dean?’
‘It’s in there again, isn’t it?’
‘I think so.’
Dean tightened his arms more firmly around him. ‘I’ve got salt in front of the closet door now. It’s locked, and there’s a chair there. And we’ve both got our guns, right?’
‘Yeah?’
‘So, it’s not coming out tonight.’
‘Uh huh. But, Dean? How does it keep getting in there? We ward everywhere we go.’
‘I don’t know, Sammy. But I’m going to find out, and then I’m going to kill it good. I just need to find something better than bullets.’
Dean looked a little odd sitting there, huddled around him on the bed, wearing his denim jacket over his pyjamas, but Sammy knew that no matter what, Dean was going to make this go away too.
December
‘It keeps coming back!’ Dean hissed. ‘Why? We’re kids. Can’t it find someone its own size to haunt?’
Dean had a point, but he was also really, really, loud. ‘I’m sitting right beside you, Dean.’ Well, almost on top and clinging to his older brother like a monkey, but it didn’t seem really, really, brave to say that.
‘Oh. But it…’
‘I heard you the first time.’
‘Just as long as it can’t hear me.’
‘Why? Afraid he’s going to overhear your big plan?’
Dean snorted. That was never a good sign, or a good… ugh.
Sammy threw a box of tissues at him.
‘Dean? We do have a big plan, don’t we?’
‘Dean?’
‘I’m thinking.’
‘Do you want to do it faster before that thing decides we’d make a good midnight snack?’
‘Sammy?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t give it any ideas, okay?’
Oh.
‘Okay. Got it!’
‘The plan?’
‘Yup!’
‘Going to tell me?’
‘Yeah. We open the door…’
‘That’s the plan? I’ve been having nightmares for months, and we find out there’s something in my closet, and you want to OPEN THE DOOR and let it out?’ Sammy’s voice might have got a bit squeaky right at the end. But Dean did that to him sometimes.
‘No, Sammy. I mean, yes… aaaggggghhhhhh! First we open the door…’
‘Oh my God! That’s so clever!’ Sammy squealed, channelling his inner chick on Dean’s behalf.
‘Shut up, bitch.’ Dean growled, but Sammy just ignored him. They were both doing their best to make this into a game, but he knew Dean was just as scared as he was.
‘Right? Got the plan, Sammy?’
‘Got it.’
‘Sss…am…my?’
‘Ye…e…s, Dean?’
‘Does it … he … look a little familiar to you?’
Oh shit.
Safe on the other side of seven (just as well Dad always bought the important things in bulk) meticulously drawn semi-circles of salt enclosing the closet, Sammy stared inside.
Oh God. It was…
They’d only caught brief glimpses before as the figure had flickered in and out in the relative darkness of the closet. But it was the same face that he saw every time he’d tried to go to sleep since June.
It was same man. The man he’d killed. The man he murdered.
‘Dean?’
Dean kept his eyes, and his (admittedly useless but somewhat comforting to the both of them) gun trained on his target. ‘Yeah, Sammy?’
‘I don’t think he wants to help us this time, do you?’
‘Guess we know why he’s haunting us then. Damn it!’ Dean swore. ‘I was hoping it was just that Dad got dicked on the house rental.’
‘According to Dad’s notes, they either want to do something they didn’t get to do while they were alive-resolution,’ Dean quoted aloud. ‘Or they’re just crazy and want revenge on someone.’
Sammy took another look at his ghost. It didn’t look like it wanted resolution. It looked like it wanted to hit something. Sammy made himself look closer. More like kill something. Someone. Someone in particular.
Sammy guessed that was him. Maybe Dean too-afterwards. But mostly him. Sammy hoped he was wrong, but unfortunately he’d always been a good guesser. Right about now Sammy would have preferred to be dumb, and anywhere other than New Jersey. Although…
‘Dean? You know more about this stuff than I do, but, are ghosts supposed to be this mobile?’
‘I think it’s you, Sammy. You’re just that special,’ Dean joked morbidly. ‘Or he’s just that pissed at you.’
Sammy stared at the ghost. It was definitely that pissed. That was another way it reminded him of Dad.
‘Maybe we could reason with it?’ Sammy said desperately.
‘We killed it, Sammy. I don’t think it wants to sit down and discuss its feelings and forgive you during a group hug.’
Sammy wished Dean didn’t watch quite so much Oprah and Dr Phil.
‘All right, I rang Uncle Bobby and he made me write down a list.’
‘Uncl…?’
‘Relax, Sammy. I just told him it was one of Dad’s stupid scenario things that he set us for homework.’
‘And he agreed to help us answer our homework, and cheat Dad?’
‘Well, he’s still mad at Dad for what happened the last time.’
Sammy winced. None of them had thought they were going to get out of South Dakota without a few holes in them after that little friendly argument.
‘So, step one?’
‘Said first we need to get it to talk.’
‘You sure this is going to work?’
‘Almost guaranteed to work.’
Sammy relaxed a bit. Uncle Bobby knew even more than Dad.
‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘On two.’
Dean poked the end of the broom towards the closet door. ‘One… Two!’
‘Hey!’
Hey?
‘Yeah, fucker! I’m talking to you!’
Admittedly Sammy had been a bit sheltered from the family business until last Christmas, but he was sure someone would have mentioned Uncle Bobby’s habit of swearing at ghosts. Although, considering what he’d yelled at Dad in March, maybe it was a habit.
Then again, Dean might have got a little over-excited as usual.
‘You gonna curse me to death, boy? Oh, too late.’
Fuck.
Uncle Bobby really was that awesome. It worked. Huh.
‘You gonna kill me with that little pig-sticker of yours, boy?’ The ghost had almost entirely stopped flickering, and looked almost alive standing there on the far side of the salt line.
He looked exactly like the last time Sammy saw him; right down to the dog tags peeking out of the shirt Dean had ripped off him there at the end of it all. Sammy couldn’t work out why they hadn’t recognised him weeks ago.
‘Might have worked the first time, but ain’t gonna work on me now!’
Sammy’s attention, and his knife, snapped back towards the ghost. Dean’s hadn’t wavered at all.
‘That your daddy’s K-bar?’
Don’t answer. Leave the talking to Dean. Whatever he says? Don’t answer. That was the plan. Dean gets him mad, and finds out as much as possible. Sammy was the backup.
‘He teach you how to use it? Teach you boys how to really fight? Or not? He good for anything at all?’
Sammy tried not to tighten his grip at the sneer. Tried to stay loose, just like Dad had taught him.
‘You don’t know nothing about our Dad!’ Dean yelled. ‘Shut up, asshole!’
Yeah. Dean was good at this part. As the ghost yelled back that he was a Sergeant and no little pipsqueak son of a goddamn Marine was going to call him names, Sammy decided he was going to be the best backup ever and not get between Dean and anyone in a fight ever again. No matter what.
‘Got his name,’ Dean said with shaky satisfaction after Sammy had finally decided to end the argument prematurely and slammed the door in the ghost’s angry dead face with the broom handle.
‘Yeah,’ Sammy tried to grin back. He put down the broom and drew a neat tick next to point two on Uncle Bobby’s list. If he kept thinking about it as a simple list of things to do-a shopping list-it didn’t feel so scary, and like he wanted to run screaming to Dad and ask him to just kill this monster and take them far away from here. But he didn’t feel like that because he had Dean, and the list.
‘Good tick, Sammy,’ Dean said, taking the pen out of his hand.
Sammy looked down at the hole he’d somehow torn in the paper. ‘I can make another one!’
‘No, this one’s fine.’
Dean sounded mad again. Maybe he needed to…
‘What’s next?’
‘Look up, and see if we can find out if … where he was buried,’ Sammy answered in a rush, glad that was an easy one. Easy. If only he could stop thinking about them leaving the … body there, and running.
‘Hey, you’re good at this research shit, aren’t you?’ Dean sounded reluctantly impressed.
Sammy blushed. It wasn’t an important skill. Not like the things Dad said were important. Weapons, tracking, exorcisms, all that hard stuff (though Pastor Jim always said he was better at Latin than Dean.) But he was good at this. Sitting in a library, looking things up in books and newspapers. In print, on microfilm, or online. This he’d always been good at, even before he knew there was another use for it besides getting good marks at school. This he could do better than Dean, and maybe even better than Dad.
This? Meant he could help, and not always feel he wasn’t good enough.
‘School’s good for something,’ Sammy said.
‘Geek.’ Insults from Dean strangely never sounded the same as when the other kids taunted him at school. If it could help his brother, Sammy was content to be a geek forever.
‘So, nerd breath. You find out anything?’
Okay, some insults still made him want to toss his pencil case and a few of his textbooks-the heavier ones-at his brother.
‘Yeah. You got his name, and we … knew where, and when.’ And who did it, his mind finished silently. ‘It wasn’t that hard,’ he said in surprise. When you stopped pretending nothing ever happened, and made yourself go back and look at the truth.
Dean punched him softly on the shoulder. ‘Good work, Sammy.’
‘We need to talk to that reporter. I know you don’t want to-Hell, I don’t want to-but you know he has to have more information than got into that newspaper article.’
Sammy didn’t bother responding to Dean. He’d already argued his case for doing all their research at a distance. Unfortunately not everything was online, and some stuff that was he couldn’t get access to. Sammy vowed to take lots of computing classes when he got to high school. There had to be ways to get through all those password layers. What he really needed was a hacker as a pen pal instead of Petey Sawyer, Buffalo’s self-proclaimed under 11 chess champion.
‘Relax. He’s not going to see a bloody M written on your forehead, you know.’
Sammy flinched because he didn’t know that for sure. He’d killed someone. That had to leave a mark somewhere, didn’t it? He certainly had spent a long time looking for one in the mirror these past months. Maybe it took time before it was fully visible?
‘Sammy? Hey? I was just joking,’ Dean said roughly. ‘sides if you’ve got one, I do too, okay?’
That shouldn’t have made Sammy feel slightly better, but it did. Knowing it wasn’t just him stuck in this nightmare put him one step closer to the old Sammy. The one before Washington.
‘Yeah. I know we have to go see him. It’s not like we can front up to the desk at the Morgue, or the Police Headquarters, and flash a badge like Dad and then just walk in, get what we want and get out.’ Being a kid sucked sometimes.
Dean pouted, probably because he’d really wanted an excuse to make his first fake ID.
For the first time, Sammy was glad that Dad’s latest hunt had brought, and kept, them so frighteningly close to a city neither he nor Dean ever wanted to see again. Their father’s month-long pursuit of something he said was twisting the legend of the Jersey Devil for its own even more gruesome purposes had made the next step in Uncle Bobby’s list much easier than they ever could have hoped for.
Ditching school was also easy. Sammy shouldn’t have been surprised. Dean was, after all, an expert at it. According to Dean, you could forget wasting your time forging your parent’s signature on a sick note. Making an appearance was the key to a successful escape. As long as at least one teacher, and whichever half of your class was still awake, had seen you on the grounds (preferably doing something outrageously memorable like walking blindfolded across the top of the monkey bars, then repeating it backwards for added effect) you were golden. People’s memories had a magical way of filling in the blanks. You were supposed to be there, they had seen you, so what if some of those images filtered in from other days? This was a little known bonus created by the dull repetition of school that Dean liked to take advantage of on a regular basis. So, naturally Sammy was the only one feeling guilty as they both left immediately after first period.
Dean was also an expert at hotwiring cars, and he was quite prepared to demonstrate how he could better his time under what he called battlefield conditions. Luckily for Sam, New Jersey had an efficient public transport system, and it was actually faster to use it than steal a car. This was another of those times when Dean hated Sammy being right.
Sammy was, strangely enough, the best one at lying to people when he put his mind to it. That didn’t mean that he had neglected to prepare a careful series of believable reasons for the brothers’ “school trip” to Maryland. However, it turned out that preparation wasn’t everything in some situations. Nobody actually gave a damn, or even looked twice at two unaccompanied minors out and about during school hours.
Dean laughed himself silly when Sammy got upset about not getting a chance to use any of his cover stories. Dean was a great big jerk.
Washington, DC
‘School assignment?’ Kwensha Mohbal looked doubtful. ‘About me?’
Sammy’s ‘History!’ beat out Dean’s ‘English!’ by one second.
‘Huh?’ Now the reporter was clearly confused.
‘The assignment,’ Sammy said with a meaningful stare at his brother, ‘was for history. The Vietnam War. A “Vets - where are they now?” piece.’
‘My assignment for English was to write an essay … uh … in English on the war. Uh… from the point of view of one particular vet. For the school newspaper.’ Dean was sweating when he finished stumbling through his attempt to rescue his cover story from drowning.
‘Oh, so not about me?’ The disappointment was plain on his face. Sammy kicked Dean’s ankle because they shouldn’t have got away with that stuff-up. Dad would have torn them to shreds for not having every bit of their lies word-perfect. Thank goodness for vanity.
‘Well, mine would be about you finding out about the vet,’ Dean struggled to redeem himself.
‘Really?’ The reporter was beaming a scarily white smile. Obviously he loved everything about his career, especially making the news himself, even if it was only for a school newspaper.
Sammy didn’t want to see his face when he found out that he hadn’t made the headlines.
‘It was just so…’
‘Senseless?’ Sammy prompted tonelessly.
‘Yes! Exactly,’ Mr Mohbal continued. ‘Savage and senseless, that’s what I called it-You really did read my piece, didn’t you? -and that’s what it was. That poor man beaten up and knifed to death. He was a hero, you know. Did two tours in ‘Nam, gets back, and this is what happens. He ends up on the streets living on handouts from people who wouldn’t know how to defend this county if they had to. He was sick you know; pneumonia, the autopsy said. Strange for summer, but it comes with the territory. Doesn’t matter what the season something’ll get you out there. And something did.’ He shook his head, and shivered. ‘Murdered in cold blood. This is a crazy world. You don’t ever get used to seeing it.’
As the reporter continued on about what was wrong with the world today, Sammy sat beside a still and silent Dean, letting his pen automatically take “notes” for his assignment. It hadn’t been in cold blood-stupid expression-not that that made a difference to the end result. Cold or hot, he was still dead.
Sammy hadn’t planned to kill Sergeant Connolly. Kill anyone. Sammy had been scared and the man had just been there … coming at them … didn’t even look human in the shadows … coming at them … there hadn’t been time … no time to look … to check … and Dean had the gun … and what if it wasn’t enough? … He kept seeing monsters … Dreaming about Dad fighting monsters … dreaming about Mom … it was coming at them … coming at Dean … the monster was going to get Dean … and then he was there on the other end of Sammy’s knife … and there was blood … so much blood … and it was done.
And Sammy’s blood hadn’t been cold, it had been hot and scared and he didn’t know what to do. What to do but save Dean…
And he’d killed a man. You couldn’t fix that. Dean had tried. But you couldn’t ever make that go away.
And it hadn’t.
It had come back.
He’d come back. For Sammy.
Sammy was cold now.
‘Are you okay, kid?’
No. He wasn’t ever going to be okay again.
‘Sammy?’
‘I’m okay, Dean.’
The lie slipped out, and Sammy couldn’t remember when he’d started lying to his big brother. Lying. Real lies. More than, ‘No, I don’t know who ate the last of the Lucky Charms.’ ‘Where your Knight Rider t-shirt is.’ ‘How Penny Faber found out you were down by the bike shed with…’
He was lying to Dean, and Dean knew it. And that wasn’t okay, but Dean didn’t look like he cared. At least not about the lie. Just about Sammy.
And Sammy needed to make that look on Dean’s face go away.
‘I know where.’
Best words ever. It meant they knew where to go. Where to find him. Where to dig. Where to end it.
‘I know where.’
Best words ever. Except they weren’t.
Sammy was scared. He’d been scared most of his life, even with Dean and Dad to take care of him. He’d been scared of the little things-always being the new kid; being short and a nerd; not ever being cool; getting laughed at for wearing secondhand clothes; not having friends; not being a good enough shot; that Dad would never be proud of him; that he mightn’t ever be just like Dean; that he didn’t fit; scared that he was scared-the normal things that all kids worried about. He’d been scared of the big things too-Mom, Dad, and all those questions he had fighting inside his head.
Last Christmas? That was when he got really scared. And he had lots more questions, and every time he got an answer, he found more questions, and the scary? It got bigger, and it would have swallowed him up, but Dean somehow kept chasing it away.
This June? That was when it got real bad. So bad they didn’t-couldn’t-talk about it afterwards. Not between themselves. Not to Dad. He couldn’t talk to his teachers. He was too scared to even walk past the counselor’s office at school in case he gave in, went in, told; told everything.
Sammy didn’t think kids were supposed to be this scared. And it was his fault. He hadn’t meant to, but he’d done a bad thing.
What was even worse? Sammy knew he’d do it again. Not killing the Vet. ‘cos he knew now that he hadn’t been a monster. Hadn’t been going to hurt them. Hurt Dean. That was a mistake. So, him? He wouldn’t kill again.
But, something else? Anything else? Came at Dean or Dad? Sammy knew what he’d do. What they’d do for him. He’d stop them.
But he was still scared.
Sammy didn’t want to have to stop anybody-anything-ever again.
‘Would have been easier if he hadn’t claimed the body,’ Dean swore. ‘Left it in the Morgue. In a drawer. Nice and neat. Roll out, roll in,’ he gestured in his best Karate Kid fashion. No dirt, no mess, no … digging.’
‘We’re not doing the digging,’ Sammy pointed out reasonably.
‘But I would have. Could have,’ came the protest. Dean was leaning on an extra shovel that was almost bigger than him. He, like Sammy, had his sleeves unnecessarily rolled up for action, and his jacket was laid carefully over an adjoining headstone, well out of the way of any wayward clods of dirt.
‘Just as well you found a … sucker,’ Sammy let his voice drop to a whisper so that the said sucker wouldn’t overhear the comment. But judging from the drunken singing coming from within the re-opened gravesite, the sucker wouldn’t have realized it was an insult.
Apparently already drunken college students who’d do anything when dared and bribed with the promise of a bottle of Jack (that Dean had deftly stolen from the local liquor store while appearing to be chasing his brother for “drawing pictures all over his maths homework”-yeah, right! Bastard,) thought sea shanties were appropriate for the solemn occasion.
‘Way-hey, and up she rises,’ certainly seemed to be working as a motivator and Sammy had been surprised how quick a job the burly jock was making of it. Sammy just wished he could have kept skipping over ‘Throw him in the back of the paddy wagon earl-eye in the morning.' That line was a reminder that neither he nor Dean needed in the middle of their illegal activities.
Getting rid of their drunken wanna-be-sailor had been more difficult than talking him into a little grave desecration on a Friday evening.
All those looks over his shoulder while he dug? Hadn’t been to check where he was tossing the dirt. He’d been trying to spot the TV cameras. He was drunk, but not enough not to still want his five minutes on the student’s underground broadcast. It had taken Dean a while to convince him that hidden cameras were called that for a reason, before he tottered happily (but with increasing stiffness) off towards his college, new buddy Jack tucked under one arm.
Sammy decided then and there that he didn’t want to see the inside (or outside) of any more graves ever again.
Sgt. Charles Patrick Connolly, (USAF Rtd) had been a big man. Sammy had expected the skeleton to be equally impressive. Except it wasn’t just a skeleton.
‘I think I’m going to puke,’ Sammy choked as he backed away fast from the now shattered top of the coffin. Turns out six months in a coffin isn’t nearly long enough to turn a body into a neat medical specimen.
‘Take yo…ur … time,’ Dean coughed thoughtfully. He was looking a little green too. He might have had more exposure to bodies over the years than Sam, but he didn’t look like he needed to see various stubborn tendons and ligaments hanging on to the world as grimly as the Sergeant’s spirit was.
By the time they’d dumped several pounds (Dean wanted to be very, very sure about this) of salt onto the remains, both of them felt only slightly better. Sammy hoped he’d get used to this over time, but he had his doubts.
‘You want to toss me the lighter?’ Dean asked rhetorically.
‘No. I think I have to do it,’ Sammy replied. He didn’t want to do it, but he thought he owed it to his victim to have the guts to finish the job.
‘Got to say, I’m surprised Charlie didn’t choose to attend his second going away party.’
‘Dean!’ His brother had a knack for phrasing things in the worst way possible. It hadn’t been a party. It hadn’t even been a wake (though their drunken sailor’s carousing might have given any passing ghosts that impression.)
‘What?’ Dean was looking too perky for what they’d just been through.
‘We just salted and burned a man’s body!’ Sammy exclaimed.
‘Only bits of it,’ his brother muttered.
Truth aside-ewww! Dean was treating this like a job instead of a nightmare.
‘Sammy?’ Dean was peering at him in the torchlight. ‘It’s over, buddy. I know it was gross, but we did it. He can’t hurt you any more.’
Sammy hoped Sergeant Connolly hadn’t felt those flames, because, regardless of what Dean had said, it was Sammy who’d done all the hurting.
‘Sammy?’
Fuck. Dean was still worried. Sammy didn’t need anyone else hurting. Ever.
‘s okay, Dean.’ Sammy did his best to sound fine, but his voice came out as more of a pathetic whimper. ‘I’m kind of glad he didn’t drop by either.’
Dean shrugged. ‘Maybe he just had a thing about closets.’
Dean had the uncanny ability to make Sammy laugh, even when he thought he couldn’t.
Tom’s River, NJ
‘You just had to say that about closets, didn’t you, Dean?’ Sammy hissed at his brother.
‘Not my fault it turned out to be true,’ Dean gasped as he ducked the chair that came flying his way. ‘Fuck! For a dead guy he’s got a really good aim.’
‘We dug him up. We salted him. I burned him! We did everything on Uncle Bobby’s list.’ Sammy was now hunched behind the relative safety of the dresser they’d angled out from the wall. ‘Dean? Did you forget to write something down? Something important?’
‘No… Mad fucker!’ he shouted as the ghost started working his way through the rest of the loose objects in the room. ‘Burn the body. Burn their possessions. He was a bum, so if he had anything important he’d have had it on him.’
Anything important.
‘Dean? You remember seeing his dog tags in the coffin?’ Sam asked faintly.
‘Dog tags? Dog… fuck!’
‘Uh huh.’
‘They released the body to the reporter when no relatives came forward to claim it. He’s the one that got up the appeal to pay for the burial. He’s the one…’
‘Who was so mad about a hero being murdered.’
‘Who might have felt strongly enough to keep the dog tags as a memento of a fallen hero,’ Dean finished triumphantly.
‘Uh, Dean. What are we going to do with the Sergeant until we get those dog tags?’ Sammy asked reasonably. He thought he was being very calm considering A GHOST WAS THROWING THINGS AT THEM! Sammy hoped the Sergeant wasn’t quite up to dressers yet.
‘Um… Keep him talking?’ Dean suggested as the dresser began to wobble.
‘Dark outside, and in here, boys. Your Daddy never teach you to leave a light on?’
Right. Talking. Good idea, Dean. Personally, Sammy thought the only reason the Sergeant was back to snarking at them, was because he’d run out of light furniture to destroy. Just as well Dad wasn’t due back from his latest excursion tracking Jersey Devil Mk.2 for a few days. He definitely wasn’t going to get his security deposit back on the house. Dad was going to be taking it out of Sammy and Dean’s hides in the form of press-ups and chores for years.
‘Scared of the dark, asshole?’
Talking, Dean. Talking.
‘Why don’t you come back tomorrow morning then?’
‘You want me to come back in the sunshine? ‘Cos I can.’
Yeah. Sammy would really prefer the sunshine. Of course, if he had a choice he preferred no ghost at all.
‘That reporter bloke tell you that about me? Tell you the truth?’
‘Yes,’ Sammy answered, figuring he could be the calm one out of the threesome. Shame they were penned up behind the dresser though. Dean could have stolen a car, driven to the reporter’s house, stolen the dog tags, taken a detour to get pizza, and have been halfway back by now; he was just that good.
‘You want the truth? You ask me, little boy. Don’t go askin’ nobody else. Got the source right here. Don’t believe no secondhand intel. What you want to know, boy?’
Sammy wasn’t sure he wanted to know anything, but Dean was gesturing for him to keep on going while he re-loaded his gun. Clearly Dean was intending on putting a lot more bullet holes in the walls before the night was over. They weren’t going to hurt the ghost, but each shot made the boys feel a little better for a second, right up until the ghost flickered back into the argument again.
The ghost took Sammy’s silence for agreement. ‘Want to know if I was a hero? Want to know if I was scared over there?’
No. Sammy didn’t want to know that. He didn’t want to know anything about the War. Dad had been there. Sammy didn’t want to know if Dad had been scared. From the look of Dean, he really didn’t want to know that either.
‘Hell, yeah. Been scared ever since. Coming home ain’t made a bit of difference to that.’
Sammy didn’t think ghosts could get scared. Especially ones that could throw furniture around.
‘Adrenaline,’ Dean mouthed, who always knew what Sammy was thinking.
Adrenaline?
Dean was nodding. It was hard to read his lips in the dark, but Sammy swore the next words were, ‘Ghost mojo.’
Sometimes Dean needed a good slap-joking at a time like this. It made Sammy so… Oh. Huh. Sammy gave up on the slap idea, and wished he had time to hug his big brother instead. That little distraction had lessened the fear. Between the two of them they could cope with this.
If the ghost didn’t decide to take the house apart tile by tile first.
‘Land of the brave, and the free? You want to know what happened when Johnny came marching home? Weren’t no flags and flowers, boys. Weren’t no parades for me. Got me protest signs. Got spat in the face and more, by kids who didn’t know nothing ‘bout what I saw-what I did… Kids not much older than you two.’ He paused.
‘Kids as young as we were when we went in country. Kids who knew nothing about us. You know anything, boys?’ The ghost glared into their souls. ‘Didn’t think so.’
‘We’re…’ Sorry, was what he intended to say.
‘Sorry?’ came the sarcastic query. ‘That the only two things you boys know how to do? How to kill someone, and then say you’re sorry?’
That wasn’t a question anyone should ever have to answer.
‘Those kids who marched with their signs? They thought they knew about killing. They thought they knew what was right and wrong. They didn’t. You don’t get to judge right and wrong till you’ve been there.’
‘You been there now, boys? You going to judge me?’
Sammy shook his head in unison with his brother.
‘You go ask your Daddy about the war. See if he’ll tell you. He a soldier like me? He won’t tell you what he saw. What he did. You look in his eyes some time. You’ll know. You come back to me later and ask me again…’
Landover, MD
Two days later, while they stood side by side soberly watching a set of dog tags melt in a hospital furnace, all Sammy could think of was the last words that Sgt. Charles Patrick Connolly-soldier, victim, ghost, hero-had said to them the night before.
‘War didn’t make me brave.
Death can’t set me free, boys.
They died.’
Sammy will always remember the first time he killed someone. And the second…
Sequel: Bleeding the Fourth (Advent Calendar - Door 4) - Now posted!
Forthcoming:
Companion piece: UltraMarine (John’s visit to the Wall) - Coming 2010.
For further Christmas stories and graphics see my: SPN Advent Calendar