A mari usque ad mare - Part 8 (9/14)
A mari usque ad mare - Part 8 (9/14)
2,634/28,777 of R rated Gen (with an edge of subtext) crack!fic in which Dean revisits his past in unexpected ways. (Gratuitous Impala fondling)
Prologue | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Epilogue
Part 8
Dilution
Dean’s expression on finding the Impala in the garage was unfortunately revealing enough that Sam was going to be making fun of him for the rest of their lives. Right then Dean didn’t give a shit what Sam thought.
‘Baby, you’re looking good,’ he purred, trying not to plaster himself to her paintwork too noticeably. ‘Dad’s been treating you right.’ He blithely ignored the fact that whether you counted it in car or human years, the Chevy wasn’t even a teenager yet.
Sam just sighed and went back to the house to throw a few more things into their bags. If he took his time about it, Dean didn’t notice a bit.
♒
In the time it took them to drive from Kansas to Michigan, Dean and Sam had precisely five arguments.
In the middle of their parent’s driveway they held a long, calm, and completely rational conversation about who would drive.
In St. Louis Dean took a brief detour into a thrift store and clomped out much later wearing a skimpy duck-egg blue sun-frock with a pair of cowboy boots. Sam seemed to have some difficulty concentrating on Dean’s point that jeans were too confining for the baby, and this way D.J. got a little more fresh air.
Ten miles down the road Dean pulled into a gas station despite an almost full tank. He raided Sam’s bag before locking himself in the women’s rest room for the next thirty-four minutes. When he came out he had tiny pieces of toilet paper stuck to nicks all over his legs, Through the whole painfully awkward process he’d had to keep reminding himself that stubble was never a good look on a woman. Sam didn’t say anything afterwards; he was too busy stuffing his fist into his mouth.
When their funds ran low in Bloomington Dean discovered how to use of all of his mother’s natural assets to best advantage to con three very bemused men out of a large chunk of their wages over a pool table. An annoyed Sam called him an unmitigated flirt before he started working his way through a long list of Dean’s other sins. He also knocked out the fifth man who tried to buy Dean an alcoholic drink. The others had sensibly made quick exits when John Winchester glowered down at them. Apparently there were limits to Sam’s tolerance.
Grand Rapids was mainly notable for a restrained intellectual debate that covered such far-ranging topics as the effects of caffeine and alcohol on a developing foetus; Dean’s talent, or lack thereof, as a Susi Quatro wanna-be; militant feminism, with special reference to the pros and cons of bra-burning (or what Dean preferred to call “setting your girls free.”)
Dean won the first two rounds, the third was stuffily declared invalid by Sam, and a strange reversal of fortune saw him lose the last two. He pouted the rest of the way to Sisomso, but by then he was wearing a divine red lipstick he’d found at the very bottom of his mother’s purse and he knew he looked totally awesome, so it couldn’t possibly count as a tantrum.
♒
‘Fucking dead shit town, Sammy,’ Dean said as he drove into Sisomso for what had better be the second and last time in his life.
‘Language, Mary.’ Sam said.
Hmpf. It was still a … crappy town. More so now, than then … in the future. Damn but this still fu… messed with Dean’s brain.
As he drove them towards the motel they’d stayed in before … the last time, Dean noted all the changes a few decades had made. Like Lawrence, the differences were more noticeable in smaller towns than the cities they’d driven through along the way. In the Seventies Sisomso had hardly any of the trappings of modern life that he was used to seeing wherever they travelled. No chain stores, mini-marts, or cheap fuel-efficient foreign imports that didn’t deserve to share the road with his car, a lot less advertising, and more pay phones. Dean briefly wondered what happened to all those phone booths when they became obsolete. Maybe they shipped them to England and painted them red for tourists to photograph; that made some sense. Either that, or they were all warehoused in the Arizona desert next to a squadron of C-47s.
Standing looking across a rank gully at the empty field where their motel should be, Dean just wanted to be home. For a moment he couldn’t work out if that meant Lawrence or the future. ‘Sam …’
‘I know,’ Sam said from behind him. He was working his hands through the taut muscles and tendons of Dean’s shoulders trying to alleviate some of the accumulated tension and worry. ‘We’ll be okay, whatever happens.’ Together.
That was too much emotion for Dean to handle even while he was a woman. ‘Come on, I need to find somewhere to drain the lizard, then we have to end this thing,’ Dean said.
John Winchester’s wince was pure Sam.
♒
‘I’m pregnant, not a girl,’ Dean snarled. Uh. ‘Not disabled. I meant, not disabled.’ Fuck.
They were right back where they started from - and that thought was creating much too perky a soundtrack in Dean’s head for the current situation - covertly staking out good old Harvey while simultaneously having a low-voiced row over Dean’s refusal to hand over their mother’s gun.
‘Dean, even as a girl, you aren’t remotely PC,’ Sam said with a snort, making another futile grab for the weapon.
Dean shrieked and regrettably giggled, as it turned out his mother was ticklish in exactly the same places he was. Genetics was a bitch. ‘Nuh uh. You’ve already got your own weapon, stop being greedy, Sammy.’
Dean was concentrating so hard on not getting his long hair snagged in Sam’s shirt buttons while he tried to flip him over into the back seat and out of the way that he didn’t even notice the nosey neighbour peering in the car window at them. Luckily, Sam’s ability to multi-task under extreme conditions was useful, if irritating, but then he didn’t have the disadvantage of being hampered by distracting surges of hormones. By the time the woman had stalked back to her house muttering in outrage at the unseemly goings on in her street, Dean was still getting his breath back.
‘Get off me you shameless hussy,’ Dean hissed.
‘Don’t you wish,’ Sam replied serenely, as he picked Dean up and deposited him with unexpected gentleness in the passengerseat. ‘You always park us front and centre, Dean. Subtlety isn’t your strong point. You can’t complain if someone takes an interest, I just gave her something else to think about other than the idea of burglars.’
‘Small town, Sammy. This, she’s more likely to report to the police,’ Dean finally managed to get out. Sam had … and in public too.
‘We’re married, Dean. Remember? The most Mom and Dad would be likely to get is a flashlight in the face and a stern “take it home,”’ Sam assured him.
Oh. For a few minutes Dean had forgotten that they weren’t, to all outward appearances, brothers.
♒
Appearances didn’t seem to matter when you were holding a gun to somebody’s head.
Graham Harvey was petrified, and even thirty years younger he still didn’t look capable of all of the deaths he’d caused.
‘Been a long time hasn’t it, Graham?’ Dean purred, stroking the muzzle along Harvey’s cheek. ‘Did you miss us?’
Harvey just shook in his restraints.
‘Ease off, Dean,’ Sam said absently as he continued to turn Harvey’s living room upside down in his search for evidence.
‘Why? I think he deserves a little pain and suffering before I kill him. What do you think, Graham? Come on you’re the Mayor, surely you must have an opinion?’ Dean smiled sweetly at Harvey, which only increased his struggles against the ropes.
‘He’s not Mayor yet, don’t confuse him,’ Sam said, wandering back across the room holding a wooden frame. ‘Guess who’s vain enough to put a picture of themselves and their victims on their mantelpiece?’
‘No!’ Dean shook his head sadly at his hostage. ‘Seriously, dude, that’s just stupid.’
He looked at the photograph Sam was holding out. ‘She looks familiar.’
‘Marianne Grossman. She and her boyfriend Alan were Graham’s first victims last year,’ Sam said.
‘No, not her, the other woman,’ Dean said with a frown as he studied the smiling foursome. ‘I know her from somewhere.’
He crouched down beside the chair. ‘Where do I know her from? Still not talking?’ He yanked the gag roughly out of Graham’s mouth. ‘Come on, you can talk to us, we’re very old friends. Let me start you off. 30th July, 1977? Blue moon?’
Dean’s voice oozed honey as he leaned in closer to the suddenly frozen man. ‘That’s right. We know all about your little purification rituals. We know everything. What I don’t know is who this hottie standing holding hands with you is. Quite a difference in your ages, Graham. What is she? Twenty years younger? You know that almost never works out.’ Oh yeah. That was the right button to push.
‘Bitch!’ Graham spat out.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t recommend you say that to my brother,’ Sam advised to the amazement of their hostage. ‘Mother … I mean, wife. Fuck! Never mind, just answer the question before he gets really upset.’
‘Julie,’ Graham finally said, after Dean jabbed the gun encouragingly into the soft flesh of his stomach.
‘You’re kidding me? Sister Julie?’
‘She’s … she was my fiancé,’ Harvey said, too frightened now not to answer.
‘Hah! What did I tell you, Sam? I told you the nuns had something to do with it!’ Dean was content to have got one part of the puzzle right. ‘That’s it isn’t it? Is that what started your whole twisted killing game? You went to the springs together and it all went wrong; she rejected you didn’t she? What did she see that made her change her mind? Did she have a revelation of what you were going to become?’
Dean sat back on his heels; confident he’d made all the connections. ‘She left you and joined a convent rather than be with you. That had to hurt, didn’t it, Graham?’
‘Hurt enough for him to start writing those letters to the paper,’ Sam chimed in.
Yeah. ‘But you managed to keep it together for a bit longer. Then your old friends told you they were going to visit the springs the next blue moon, and you couldn’t bear the thought that they’d come back together, like you hadn’t. So you rigged up some sort of spell to make sure no one ever left those springs happy again.’
The expression on Graham’s face said it all. Despite the fear, he looked smug about what he’d done. He seemed to have forgotten he was tied up, spewing out curses, and predicting they’d receive the eternal damnation that was every sinner’s reward.
‘Get in line,’ Dean said wearily.
♒
After three hours it was obvious that there was nothing more they could pump out of Harvey. Between his maddened ravings and the documents Sam had collected they knew why, and how he’d done it. An ancient Roman curse tablet handed down through a family as a curiosity until it came to Graham Harvey, whose knowledge of the fundamental power of the springs was coupled with the level of malevolence necessary to pervert that force, using his own blood, as well as other elements to seal its currents to the sister energy of the blue moon. The backwash just had more strength than even Harvey had planned for.
‘He can’t break it, Dean.’
‘Won’t,’ Dean said stubbornly, weapon still fixed on his target, but back to keeping a cautious distance away. He didn’t need a repetition of before.
‘Can’t. The spell doesn’t have enough energy in reverse, even if he was willing.’ Sam was sitting, head in his hands, surrounded by a flood of papers. ‘And more importantly, we don’t have a moon to use, not until 1980.’
‘The date of his second set of victims,’ Dean said quietly. ‘Would have made more sense if we’d been flung back to the date of another blue moon. Why the hell did we end up in 1978 of all times?’
Sam opened his hands helplessly. ‘We’ve been through this so often, Dean. I still don’t know. Something interfered with the curse, and I don’t think it was me killing him that did it any more. Something else happened out at those springs, and it had the power to send us through time.’
‘I thought we were getting the chance to make it all right,’ Dean insisted bitterly. ‘I almost got religion. Instead it’s all so much worse. We can’t wait two years, Sam. I’m having a baby! I’m having me. Trust me, the world’s not up to having two Dean Winchesters in it. Something will give.’
Sam was in complete agreement with that statement. ‘We need to find an equivalent, positive force. I don’t think we’re going to find that around here.’
‘In which case we don’t need Graham any more do we?’ Dean asked with a cool smile.
‘No,’ Sam answered cautiously, clearly not comfortable with the idea of killing Graham Harvey twice in the one lifetime.
‘Good,’ Dean said. He waved the fingers of his free left hand chirpily across the room at his prospective victim. ‘Be right with you, Graham.’
‘No!’
‘No? What do you mean “no”, Sam? We’re too late for his first two victims, but if we kill him now, we save the rest.’
‘No, we can’t kill him now. If we do it might never have happened.’
‘Exactimundo, Sammy, and those people never died. And we never came to this cess-pool.’
‘But we’re here now, Dean. And we’ll still be stuck here because it already happened.’
Dean groaned. ‘You’re going to say the P word again aren’t you? I’d prefer it if you didn’t say that around the baby, he’s not into quantum physics just yet.
‘He can’t hear me, Dean,’ Sam said patiently.
‘Well, if he could, he’d say it’s time to ice Graham,’ Dean insisted.
‘Oh God, you probably would,’ Sam sighed. ‘Can we not turn you into a killer until after you’re born, please?’
‘Wuss,’ Dean muttered, patting his stomach again calmingly before getting up to walk towards Graham, gun in hand.
‘Dean!’
‘I don’t care, Sam!’ Dean turned back to yell. ‘He’s a monster, and he deserves to die. There’s nothing more important than saving all those people. We have to stop him.’
‘At the cost of your life, Dean?’
‘Everything’s got a price, Sammy. We’ve been paying all our lives. We’re supposed to save people.’ I have to. ‘One life isn’t worth more than another.’
‘I don’t care about the greater good,’ Sam said, holding Dean in place with his eyes.
‘I have to, Sam. Otherwise …’ it’s all for nothing.
‘If you kill him now, it’s more than us being stuck here. Mom and Dad die too.’
Dean shut that harrowing thought in one corner of his mind along with the disquieting possibility that there already were two Deans conscious in the world.
Dean was wrong about Sam’s knife. It was only his penultimate weapon; he had one more, which he also wielded to save his brother.
‘When they go, I go too, Dean. No parents; no little brother, no me. You’ll be alone, and I’ll never have existed. I’ll be dead, Dean.’
In that moment Dean turned away from killing, for Sam, in full knowledge of how many deaths would be a consequence of that choice. In the end it was a surprisingly easy decision.
♒
Part 9
2,634/28,777 of R rated Gen (with an edge of subtext) crack!fic in which Dean revisits his past in unexpected ways. (Gratuitous Impala fondling)
Prologue | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Epilogue
Part 8
Dilution
Dean’s expression on finding the Impala in the garage was unfortunately revealing enough that Sam was going to be making fun of him for the rest of their lives. Right then Dean didn’t give a shit what Sam thought.
‘Baby, you’re looking good,’ he purred, trying not to plaster himself to her paintwork too noticeably. ‘Dad’s been treating you right.’ He blithely ignored the fact that whether you counted it in car or human years, the Chevy wasn’t even a teenager yet.
Sam just sighed and went back to the house to throw a few more things into their bags. If he took his time about it, Dean didn’t notice a bit.
♒
In the time it took them to drive from Kansas to Michigan, Dean and Sam had precisely five arguments.
In the middle of their parent’s driveway they held a long, calm, and completely rational conversation about who would drive.
In St. Louis Dean took a brief detour into a thrift store and clomped out much later wearing a skimpy duck-egg blue sun-frock with a pair of cowboy boots. Sam seemed to have some difficulty concentrating on Dean’s point that jeans were too confining for the baby, and this way D.J. got a little more fresh air.
Ten miles down the road Dean pulled into a gas station despite an almost full tank. He raided Sam’s bag before locking himself in the women’s rest room for the next thirty-four minutes. When he came out he had tiny pieces of toilet paper stuck to nicks all over his legs, Through the whole painfully awkward process he’d had to keep reminding himself that stubble was never a good look on a woman. Sam didn’t say anything afterwards; he was too busy stuffing his fist into his mouth.
When their funds ran low in Bloomington Dean discovered how to use of all of his mother’s natural assets to best advantage to con three very bemused men out of a large chunk of their wages over a pool table. An annoyed Sam called him an unmitigated flirt before he started working his way through a long list of Dean’s other sins. He also knocked out the fifth man who tried to buy Dean an alcoholic drink. The others had sensibly made quick exits when John Winchester glowered down at them. Apparently there were limits to Sam’s tolerance.
Grand Rapids was mainly notable for a restrained intellectual debate that covered such far-ranging topics as the effects of caffeine and alcohol on a developing foetus; Dean’s talent, or lack thereof, as a Susi Quatro wanna-be; militant feminism, with special reference to the pros and cons of bra-burning (or what Dean preferred to call “setting your girls free.”)
Dean won the first two rounds, the third was stuffily declared invalid by Sam, and a strange reversal of fortune saw him lose the last two. He pouted the rest of the way to Sisomso, but by then he was wearing a divine red lipstick he’d found at the very bottom of his mother’s purse and he knew he looked totally awesome, so it couldn’t possibly count as a tantrum.
♒
‘Fucking dead shit town, Sammy,’ Dean said as he drove into Sisomso for what had better be the second and last time in his life.
‘Language, Mary.’ Sam said.
Hmpf. It was still a … crappy town. More so now, than then … in the future. Damn but this still fu… messed with Dean’s brain.
As he drove them towards the motel they’d stayed in before … the last time, Dean noted all the changes a few decades had made. Like Lawrence, the differences were more noticeable in smaller towns than the cities they’d driven through along the way. In the Seventies Sisomso had hardly any of the trappings of modern life that he was used to seeing wherever they travelled. No chain stores, mini-marts, or cheap fuel-efficient foreign imports that didn’t deserve to share the road with his car, a lot less advertising, and more pay phones. Dean briefly wondered what happened to all those phone booths when they became obsolete. Maybe they shipped them to England and painted them red for tourists to photograph; that made some sense. Either that, or they were all warehoused in the Arizona desert next to a squadron of C-47s.
Standing looking across a rank gully at the empty field where their motel should be, Dean just wanted to be home. For a moment he couldn’t work out if that meant Lawrence or the future. ‘Sam …’
‘I know,’ Sam said from behind him. He was working his hands through the taut muscles and tendons of Dean’s shoulders trying to alleviate some of the accumulated tension and worry. ‘We’ll be okay, whatever happens.’ Together.
That was too much emotion for Dean to handle even while he was a woman. ‘Come on, I need to find somewhere to drain the lizard, then we have to end this thing,’ Dean said.
John Winchester’s wince was pure Sam.
♒
‘I’m pregnant, not a girl,’ Dean snarled. Uh. ‘Not disabled. I meant, not disabled.’ Fuck.
They were right back where they started from - and that thought was creating much too perky a soundtrack in Dean’s head for the current situation - covertly staking out good old Harvey while simultaneously having a low-voiced row over Dean’s refusal to hand over their mother’s gun.
‘Dean, even as a girl, you aren’t remotely PC,’ Sam said with a snort, making another futile grab for the weapon.
Dean shrieked and regrettably giggled, as it turned out his mother was ticklish in exactly the same places he was. Genetics was a bitch. ‘Nuh uh. You’ve already got your own weapon, stop being greedy, Sammy.’
Dean was concentrating so hard on not getting his long hair snagged in Sam’s shirt buttons while he tried to flip him over into the back seat and out of the way that he didn’t even notice the nosey neighbour peering in the car window at them. Luckily, Sam’s ability to multi-task under extreme conditions was useful, if irritating, but then he didn’t have the disadvantage of being hampered by distracting surges of hormones. By the time the woman had stalked back to her house muttering in outrage at the unseemly goings on in her street, Dean was still getting his breath back.
‘Get off me you shameless hussy,’ Dean hissed.
‘Don’t you wish,’ Sam replied serenely, as he picked Dean up and deposited him with unexpected gentleness in the passengerseat. ‘You always park us front and centre, Dean. Subtlety isn’t your strong point. You can’t complain if someone takes an interest, I just gave her something else to think about other than the idea of burglars.’
‘Small town, Sammy. This, she’s more likely to report to the police,’ Dean finally managed to get out. Sam had … and in public too.
‘We’re married, Dean. Remember? The most Mom and Dad would be likely to get is a flashlight in the face and a stern “take it home,”’ Sam assured him.
Oh. For a few minutes Dean had forgotten that they weren’t, to all outward appearances, brothers.
♒
Appearances didn’t seem to matter when you were holding a gun to somebody’s head.
Graham Harvey was petrified, and even thirty years younger he still didn’t look capable of all of the deaths he’d caused.
‘Been a long time hasn’t it, Graham?’ Dean purred, stroking the muzzle along Harvey’s cheek. ‘Did you miss us?’
Harvey just shook in his restraints.
‘Ease off, Dean,’ Sam said absently as he continued to turn Harvey’s living room upside down in his search for evidence.
‘Why? I think he deserves a little pain and suffering before I kill him. What do you think, Graham? Come on you’re the Mayor, surely you must have an opinion?’ Dean smiled sweetly at Harvey, which only increased his struggles against the ropes.
‘He’s not Mayor yet, don’t confuse him,’ Sam said, wandering back across the room holding a wooden frame. ‘Guess who’s vain enough to put a picture of themselves and their victims on their mantelpiece?’
‘No!’ Dean shook his head sadly at his hostage. ‘Seriously, dude, that’s just stupid.’
He looked at the photograph Sam was holding out. ‘She looks familiar.’
‘Marianne Grossman. She and her boyfriend Alan were Graham’s first victims last year,’ Sam said.
‘No, not her, the other woman,’ Dean said with a frown as he studied the smiling foursome. ‘I know her from somewhere.’
He crouched down beside the chair. ‘Where do I know her from? Still not talking?’ He yanked the gag roughly out of Graham’s mouth. ‘Come on, you can talk to us, we’re very old friends. Let me start you off. 30th July, 1977? Blue moon?’
Dean’s voice oozed honey as he leaned in closer to the suddenly frozen man. ‘That’s right. We know all about your little purification rituals. We know everything. What I don’t know is who this hottie standing holding hands with you is. Quite a difference in your ages, Graham. What is she? Twenty years younger? You know that almost never works out.’ Oh yeah. That was the right button to push.
‘Bitch!’ Graham spat out.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t recommend you say that to my brother,’ Sam advised to the amazement of their hostage. ‘Mother … I mean, wife. Fuck! Never mind, just answer the question before he gets really upset.’
‘Julie,’ Graham finally said, after Dean jabbed the gun encouragingly into the soft flesh of his stomach.
‘You’re kidding me? Sister Julie?’
‘She’s … she was my fiancé,’ Harvey said, too frightened now not to answer.
‘Hah! What did I tell you, Sam? I told you the nuns had something to do with it!’ Dean was content to have got one part of the puzzle right. ‘That’s it isn’t it? Is that what started your whole twisted killing game? You went to the springs together and it all went wrong; she rejected you didn’t she? What did she see that made her change her mind? Did she have a revelation of what you were going to become?’
Dean sat back on his heels; confident he’d made all the connections. ‘She left you and joined a convent rather than be with you. That had to hurt, didn’t it, Graham?’
‘Hurt enough for him to start writing those letters to the paper,’ Sam chimed in.
Yeah. ‘But you managed to keep it together for a bit longer. Then your old friends told you they were going to visit the springs the next blue moon, and you couldn’t bear the thought that they’d come back together, like you hadn’t. So you rigged up some sort of spell to make sure no one ever left those springs happy again.’
The expression on Graham’s face said it all. Despite the fear, he looked smug about what he’d done. He seemed to have forgotten he was tied up, spewing out curses, and predicting they’d receive the eternal damnation that was every sinner’s reward.
‘Get in line,’ Dean said wearily.
♒
After three hours it was obvious that there was nothing more they could pump out of Harvey. Between his maddened ravings and the documents Sam had collected they knew why, and how he’d done it. An ancient Roman curse tablet handed down through a family as a curiosity until it came to Graham Harvey, whose knowledge of the fundamental power of the springs was coupled with the level of malevolence necessary to pervert that force, using his own blood, as well as other elements to seal its currents to the sister energy of the blue moon. The backwash just had more strength than even Harvey had planned for.
‘He can’t break it, Dean.’
‘Won’t,’ Dean said stubbornly, weapon still fixed on his target, but back to keeping a cautious distance away. He didn’t need a repetition of before.
‘Can’t. The spell doesn’t have enough energy in reverse, even if he was willing.’ Sam was sitting, head in his hands, surrounded by a flood of papers. ‘And more importantly, we don’t have a moon to use, not until 1980.’
‘The date of his second set of victims,’ Dean said quietly. ‘Would have made more sense if we’d been flung back to the date of another blue moon. Why the hell did we end up in 1978 of all times?’
Sam opened his hands helplessly. ‘We’ve been through this so often, Dean. I still don’t know. Something interfered with the curse, and I don’t think it was me killing him that did it any more. Something else happened out at those springs, and it had the power to send us through time.’
‘I thought we were getting the chance to make it all right,’ Dean insisted bitterly. ‘I almost got religion. Instead it’s all so much worse. We can’t wait two years, Sam. I’m having a baby! I’m having me. Trust me, the world’s not up to having two Dean Winchesters in it. Something will give.’
Sam was in complete agreement with that statement. ‘We need to find an equivalent, positive force. I don’t think we’re going to find that around here.’
‘In which case we don’t need Graham any more do we?’ Dean asked with a cool smile.
‘No,’ Sam answered cautiously, clearly not comfortable with the idea of killing Graham Harvey twice in the one lifetime.
‘Good,’ Dean said. He waved the fingers of his free left hand chirpily across the room at his prospective victim. ‘Be right with you, Graham.’
‘No!’
‘No? What do you mean “no”, Sam? We’re too late for his first two victims, but if we kill him now, we save the rest.’
‘No, we can’t kill him now. If we do it might never have happened.’
‘Exactimundo, Sammy, and those people never died. And we never came to this cess-pool.’
‘But we’re here now, Dean. And we’ll still be stuck here because it already happened.’
Dean groaned. ‘You’re going to say the P word again aren’t you? I’d prefer it if you didn’t say that around the baby, he’s not into quantum physics just yet.
‘He can’t hear me, Dean,’ Sam said patiently.
‘Well, if he could, he’d say it’s time to ice Graham,’ Dean insisted.
‘Oh God, you probably would,’ Sam sighed. ‘Can we not turn you into a killer until after you’re born, please?’
‘Wuss,’ Dean muttered, patting his stomach again calmingly before getting up to walk towards Graham, gun in hand.
‘Dean!’
‘I don’t care, Sam!’ Dean turned back to yell. ‘He’s a monster, and he deserves to die. There’s nothing more important than saving all those people. We have to stop him.’
‘At the cost of your life, Dean?’
‘Everything’s got a price, Sammy. We’ve been paying all our lives. We’re supposed to save people.’ I have to. ‘One life isn’t worth more than another.’
‘I don’t care about the greater good,’ Sam said, holding Dean in place with his eyes.
‘I have to, Sam. Otherwise …’ it’s all for nothing.
‘If you kill him now, it’s more than us being stuck here. Mom and Dad die too.’
Dean shut that harrowing thought in one corner of his mind along with the disquieting possibility that there already were two Deans conscious in the world.
Dean was wrong about Sam’s knife. It was only his penultimate weapon; he had one more, which he also wielded to save his brother.
‘When they go, I go too, Dean. No parents; no little brother, no me. You’ll be alone, and I’ll never have existed. I’ll be dead, Dean.’
In that moment Dean turned away from killing, for Sam, in full knowledge of how many deaths would be a consequence of that choice. In the end it was a surprisingly easy decision.
♒
Part 9