(no subject)

[whereupon]

Part One
Part Two

--

The motel room still smells like yesterday's dinner, but this time, Sam hardly even notices. "I want to talk to him," he says. "I want to know why he did it."

Sitting at the room's small table, between Sam and the door, though maybe that's only coincidental, Dean says, "What the hell does that matter? He did it 'cause he's fucked up. That's all we gotta know."

"Maybe not," Sam says. "I just wanna talk to him, okay? It'll just take a minute. I just need to know if he saw it, too."

"Saw what?" Dean says. "The ghost?"

It takes more strength than he'd expected to meet Dean's eyes when he answers. "Yes."

Dean stares at him for a moment longer, and then he looks away; when he speaks, his voice is patient, and measured, and not a little sad. "It was somebody saying something on the internet, Sam. Maybe they wanted it to be true, or maybe they got off on the idea that somebody like us would see it and come looking."

"That doesn't mean it's not related," Sam says. "That doesn't mean the ghost isn't connected, that he didn't see something that--"

"That made him decide to murder a little girl? You'd'a been one hell of a defense lawyer, Sammy, if that's what you're saying." He pauses. "Look, okay, I get it, I get that you want to make sure. That's, that's good, man. But you're not exactly nondescript, and if you go barging into a police station with a fake ID, demanding to talk to their murder suspect, somebody's gonna get suspicious. You know that."

"They've never been suspicious before," Sam says. "We've always convinced them."

"That was before we were on the eleven o'clock news!"

"You," Sam says. "You were on the eleven o'clock news. I was stuck in the vault with the hostages."

"Because nobody's gonna remember my accomplice, right," Dean says. "They said, oh, that Dean guy's the dangerous one, his gigantic brother who's wanted in like two less states than he is was probably there by accident, Murphy's Law or some shit. He's harmless! Let's let him talk to our murder suspect and then invite him home to meet our daughters."

Sam meets his gaze; he doesn't look away. Sam swallows. "You're a real asshole sometimes, you know that."

"Excuse me for not wanting you to spend the rest of your life in Supermax," Dean says. "Also, tell me when you come up with something new, okay? You already used that one today, and it wasn't even good to begin with."

"It's still true," Sam says.

"Whatever." Dean rests his elbows on the table, slouching forward, as though at something like ease now that the matter's been resolved. "I want my damn coffee."

"So go back and get it."

"I'm not going back there," Dean says. "The waitress is gonna ask if my weirdo brother has these Incredible Hulk moments all the time, and what am I gonna say to that?"

"Uh, no?" Sam suggests.

"Plus they'd probably try to make me pay for the stuff you smashed, not to mention breakfast. Which I didn't even get to eat."

"It was one cup, Dean. Not 'stuff.' And you could have stayed and eaten."

"What, and let you wander back here by yourself? That'd've looked real good. 'Sure, I'm just gonna let him go die of blood loss while I eat my damn waffles.'"

"It was a scratch," Sam says, his voice sharpening incredulously even as he knows exactly what Dean's trying to do. What he's doing, because it's not like it isn't working.

"Yeah, but I'm never gonna let you live it down." Dean smirks. "You know that, right?"

"Go get your coffee, man," Sam says. "Now."

"Funny thing, you're still not the boss of me," Dean says, but he gets to his feet. "If you're not here when I get back, or if I find out that you went somewhere and came back before I did--"

"I won't," Sam says. "Scout's honor, I swear, and everything." Dean narrows his eyes. "Dean, you're not the boss of me, either, but I'm only gonna do research on my laptop, okay? I'm not gonna leave the room."

"You'd better not," Dean says, pocketing the Impala's keys. He glares at Sam one last time before leaving; Sam stares at the door for three full minutes, waiting for him to burst back in in an attempt to catch Sam in the act of something. When he doesn't, Sam shrugs to himself, only mildly disappointed, and reaches for his laptop.

He's gotten good at background checks during the past year and a half, and by the time Dean returns with two paper cups of coffee, he's managed to crack the relevant databases. "I got that half-caf vanilla shit you like so much," Dean says, depositing one cup next to Sam's laptop on the table. "I swear to god, you only say you like it 'cause you like to make me order it."

Sam ignores him in favor of popping off the lid of the cup to make sure that the coffee's something close to the right color, that he's not going to get a mouthful of the worst combination of flavored syrups Dean could come up with. Satisfied, he takes a sip as Dean settles into the chair across from him.

"Email?" Dean asks, glancing at the laptop, and Sam can hear the airquotes.

"Not exactly. I've been looking into Denise's background, since you said maybe she's the one who posted the story about the ghost."

"I said it was a possibility, not that she actually did it, but okay, keep going." Dean pauses. "Do you even know her last name?"

Sam bites his lip, trying not to make it sound like a confession when he says, "I do now."

"That's . . . seriously creepy of you. You'd make one hell of a stalker."

"I'll try to take that as a compliment," Sam says, and Dean shrugs. "Okay, so she doesn't appear to own a computer, but that doesn't mean she couldn't have posted it from somebody else's computer or an internet café or something."

"So basically you found nothing," Dean says. "Sorry, dude. It was worth a try."

"Not exactly nothing," Sam says. "The year before she saw the ghost, she was hospitalized following an attempted suicide."

Dean raises his eyebrows. "And . . .?"

"And maybe that's something. Maybe that's why she saw the ghost, why it appeared to her and not to us. It's definitely worth checking out."

"So your reasoning here is that because she's crazy, we should totally believe her."

"She's not crazy," Sam says. "She was depressed." Just like you after Dad, he wants to say, but that would only make things worse.

"Whatever." Dean knuckles at his eyes, leans forward. "Look, man, I'm gonna say this and don't freak out, okay? You're on edge. Hell, we're both on edge, but you're not sleeping, you're seeing things, and the thing at the restaurant-- you need to take a breath, Sam."

"What I need is to find the ghost and put it to rest before it hurts somebody else. You know, which is why we're here?"

"By hacking into somebody's medical records and making up some story about what you find? Yesterday you said you'd give up if the ghost didn't show, and now you're, what, making excuses for it?"

"So you do think I'm crazy." He's absurdly proud of how little emotion seeps into his voice. It hurts to breathe, as though his ribs have constricted at the revelation. He wonders if Dean thinks that he wants to be here, in this bitter weather beneath a sky the color of a bruise, nowhere to run with water on all sides, and exhausted as hell; if Dean thinks this is his idea of a good time.

"I think you want this to be something it isn't. I told you that. That's all."

"Yeah, and that's what I told you when we went to Mom and Dad's graves, and I was wrong."

Dean holds his hands up, palms open. "And you said yourself how unlikely that was. I wish like hell there was somebody we could end for this, Sam, I don't like this any more than you do, but somebody's gotta say this. We're not gonna find anything here, and you're gonna run yourself into the ground in the process."

Sam swallows, and licks his lips, and waits for the space of three seconds until he can trust himself to remain calm. "I'm not gonna give up on this, Dean. Even if the ghost didn't cause the guy to--there's a ghost here. Even you said that. And right now, we're the only ones who can stop it."

"You and Dad really had a lot in common, you know that? I watched him do this, too." Dean's voice is quiet, and tired, and somehow that's scarier than anything. His teeth press sharp and white against his upper lip as he shakes his head; it could be a smirk, almost, but Sam thinks it's more likely that he's trying to keep himself from saying something they both might regret. "I'm not gonna watch you do it now."

The door closes behind him, not a slam at all but a soft click of the latch, before Sam can say anything to call him back; in the silence that follows, Sam's glad for that, because a small part of himself isn't sure that he would have tried.

--

When Sam finishes his coffee, he starts in on the one Dean left behind, hardly even noticing the switch from sweet to black and bitter. He's sure that there's something he's missing, something that will explain the ghost's identity, will explain its presence on the island and any connection it might have to the murdered girl.

The murdered girl. He catches himself, corrects Lacey Brady; just because she's dead doesn't mean that she doesn't have a name, but how quickly he'd accepted that idea, how easily he'd been willing to make whatever sacrifices of identity possible in order to buy himself some distance. Dean would have been glad to hear it, if he were here, but to Sam it's a chilling thought; how small of a step is it from the distancing of one person's identity to actively gaining satisfaction from the pain of others? They're merely different degrees, different manifestations, of dehumanization, after all.

He goes to take a sip of coffee, as though that could wash away the thought, and realizes that the cup is empty; he's surprised, when he looks at the clock displayed in the corner of his laptop screen, to see that almost three hours have passed since Dean left.

Almost three hours, and he has nothing to show for it but the beginning of a headache from staring at the screen for too long. He pushes back in the uncomfortable dinette chair and rubs his eyes, and then he gets up, stretching as he goes to the window and lifts the curtain. The sky's darkened since the last time he saw it; the blue is now tinged with grey. It's too dark to be the color of the sky in his dream, but it makes him uncomfortable all the same, like déjà vu or the knowledge that there's something he's forgotten, and he lets the curtain fall closed.

Dean should have been back by now. It's almost time for him to begin complaining that he's hungry, or at least asking if Sam is. Sam looks at the cell phone on the table next to his laptop; he could call Dean, could at least find out where he is. And if he does, Dean will want to know what he's found, and he'll have to admit that he's found nothing, and it will be version he's-lost-count of the argument that drove Dean out in the first place.

Besides, Dean would probably take it as an apology if Sam called first, and while Sam's sorry that Dean's pissed off or whatever, he's not sorry that he wants to put an end to the ghost.

Of course, if he's not going to call Dean and he's exhausted all possible avenues of research, there's not much left for him to do.

He rubs his eyes again and looks wearily at his bed; the pillows are bunched from his leaning against them while trying to eat dinner the night before, and he knows that the blankets are scratchy and won't be nearly as comfortable as he's imagining they'd be.

But it's as though the mere thought of taking a break, of being able to sleep for even just a little while, has doubled the weight of the exhaustion he's mostly managed to ignore for the past few weeks, and, he tells himself as he hobbles to his bed, moving as he imagines he might if he were to live to be seventy, it would make Dean happy, if he knew.

Maybe Dean will come back any minute and find him asleep, and that will take some of the edge off, convince Dean that things aren't as bad as he's making them out to be. Because they're not, Sam tells himself. Dean just worries, as he's always done, as he's always been told to do, as he's always believed is his duty.

He settles onto his bed, and because he tells himself he's only going to sleep for an hour or so, he doesn't crawl beneath the blankets. Instead he reaches for the pistol at the small of his back and slips it beneath the pillows, and turns so that he's facing the door.

He falls asleep with his hand on the cool metal of the gun; in the moments before, already hazy on the edge of sleep, he doesn't bother to try to convince himself the gesture is born of anything rational, out of anything other than fear.

--

Waking, he lies still, hesitant even to open his eyes lest he give himself away, until he knows what woke him. The answer comes a second later, in the drumming of rain on the roof. Feeling slightly foolish, he sits up, sliding his hand from beneath the pillow. After a moment's hesitation, he slides the gun into his waistband once more. It's low-grade fear, he tells himself, background noise. Nerves. Paranoia borne of too much adrenaline, too many late nights, hypervigilance.

Whatever it is, he's glad Dean's not here to see the way his hands shake when he pushes his hair back out of his face, and then he blinks.

His phone has registered no missed calls, no messages. He splashes water across his face, dries his hands on the threadbare towel and tries not to think about the hollows darkened around his eyes; it seems like they might have been there for as long as he can remember. It's only the season that makes him look so pale, he tells himself, only the weather, but as he stands there before the mirror, he knows exactly where he's seen this before, and he wonders how much worse it was for their father, having to balance it along with raising two children, protecting them from as much as he dared.

Sam has the feeling that he'd know, if he thought about it, and that maybe he doesn't want to.

In the main room, he sinks into one of the chairs, feeling the way his spine fails to conform to the strict lines of its back, all of the edges that press at sharp angles in all the wrong places. He dials, and waits for Dean to pick up; when the phone doesn't even ring, he glances at the screen. Zero bars, no reception; he pushes the button to end the call and resists the urge to throw the phone across the room.

On a hope, he gets up, crosses to the window and looks out into the parking lot. The Impala isn't there; Dean isn't sulking inside of it, waiting for Sam to give in first. Sam bites his lip. It's only early evening, he tells himself. Just because the rain has blackened the sky, making it look much later than it truly is, doesn't mean that Dean's been gone for any longer than is shown by the glowing numerals of the clock on the nightstand.

Dean's twenty-eight years old, after all, and probably dangerously armed. He can certainly take care of himself, Sam knows, and he'd be pissed if Sam thought that he couldn't.

But if there's no reception, Dean could have called to apologize -- or for help -- and Sam wouldn't have known. It's not like Dean could be anywhere; Sam doubts that he was angry enough to take the ferry back over to the mainland, but that still leaves a hell of a lot of island.

And the ocean.

Sam suppresses a shiver and reaches for his jacket. It feels thin and insubstantial, against the noise of the downpour, but that doesn't matter. The worst that will happen is he'll get cold and wet and when he finds Dean, Dean will laugh at him for freaking out, and then they'll drive back to the motel and wait out the storm.

It's a much nicer thought than the idea that the worst will be if he doesn't find Dean at all, if he finds the Impala abandoned somewhere, maybe along the coast, but he's not going to think about that; he won't let himself.

He checks his pocket, making sure he has a key to get back into the room. He doesn't need to check the gun; he knows that it's loaded.

He takes a breath, wishing it didn't feel so much like the first one before walking into something terrible, and steps out into the parking lot. Rainwater sluices down the back of his jacket immediately and he hunches his shoulders, drawing up the collar; he shoves his hands into his pockets and ducks his head.

It's going to be a long walk.

By the time he gets to Harry's Place, he's soaked; his teeth chatter as he pulls open the front door, and the gust of warm air, scented with spilled beer and too many bodies into a small space, is almost enough to cause him to stumble. He catches himself, adjusts his pace, and heads for the bar. On the jukebox, Mick Jagger is singing about dead flowers, and with the background noise of the bar patrons, it's enough to drown out the storm. He could stay here for hours, where it's warm and safe, and wait for Dean to find him; he's lost count of how many times he's found Dean in a bar like this, in some decade-forgotten town hardly warranting notation on a map, and how many times Dean's told him to stop worrying and relax for a minute, sit down and have a beer and make the most of the moment, live a little.

Maybe Dean would even be proud of him. If Dean weren't freezing and miserable in a ditch somewhere, or dead, or--

Which he's not, Sam tells himself. If he's not here, he's probably in some other bar, or in some girl's bedroom, not paying attention to the storm at all, and definitely not thinking about the ghost.

"What can I get for you, buddy?" the bartender asks, leaning forward to hear Sam's response.

"I'm looking for somebody," he says, pitching his voice so that it will carry beneath the ebb and flow of background conversations. "I think maybe he was in here today. He's shorter than me, uh, real short hair, wearing a leather jacket?"

"The other grad student?" somebody asks at Sam's elbow, familiar voice, and he glances down to see Denise.

"Yeah," he says. "I can't get hold of him. My cell phone's got no reception."

"That happens a lot during storms like this," Denise says. "Yeah, he was in here. Harry here threw him out maybe, what, half an hour ago?" The bartender, presumably the eponymous Harry, nods.

"He was looking for trouble," Harry says. "He tried to start a fight. Succeeded, too, and nearly got his ass kicked in the process."

Sam feels himself flinch, and swallows. "Any idea where he might have gone?"

"Sorry, kid," Harry says. "Last I saw, he was trying to catch his breath in the parking lot."

"And you just left him there?" Sam says, something strange and cold in his voice that he hardly recognizes. This time it's Denise who flinches, and he tells himself he can feel guilty about that later.

Harry raises his hands in what might be a placating gesture, but could just as easily a gesture disavowing any responsibility for Dean. "Hey, he started something in my bar. He's lucky I pulled Matt and the guys off'a him before they did any permanent damage. He walked outta here on his own steam, I just went with him to tell him not to come back."

"Great," Sam says, and he thinks it's probably unfair of him to blame Harry for everything; after all, he knows exactly what Dean's capable of. He knows all of Dean's self-destructive tendencies, all of his stupid little suicidal habits, and he's the one who let Dean go off on his own. Fuck. "Thank you. You've been very helpful." Words out of habit, and then it occurs to him that he's not meant to be interviewing witnesses to anything other than Dean's last appearance here. He bares his teeth; it's meant to be a smile, but judging from the look on Harry's face, it's not even close.

He doesn't have to push his way back out to the street; people get out of his way. Back outside, though he is aware on a distant level that it is still raining, he does not feel the rain, nor the sodden chill that had wracked him the entire way here.

Dean took the Impala when he left the motel, and most likely he drove it directly here. If Sam is lucky, he'll still be in it, parked somewhere close by, taking refuge from the storm, maybe waiting to stop bleeding.

It takes a few minutes, the search made more difficult by the obscuring rain, but Sam finds the Impala parked a block away, lights off, engine cold. The doors are locked, and Dean is not inside. Sam swallows, fishes his wallet out of his pocket and palms the key Dean gave him for his birthday, though the Impala had still been a wreck; he'd handed it over with a look that Sam had found frightening, as though Dean were handing over the thing that mattered most to him in the world, all that he had left, as though he didn't expect to be needing it much longer.

Sam's never had to use the key before; Dean's always tossed him his own keyring, when he lets Sam drive. Sam tells himself that there's a first time for everything, that this does not mean anything at all, and opens the driver's side door; he has to adjust the seat before he can even get in.

He hadn't really expected Dean to have left a note, but some clue to his brother's whereabouts would have been nice. He recalls what Dean had said about having him microchipped and wonders if they do two-for-one deals; belatedly he recognizes the thought as hysterical and pushes it away. He shoves the key into the ignition and waits for the heater to come on. Starting the engine triggers the tape deck, which was apparently cut off in the middle of the opening to "No Quarter"; Sam ejects the tape almost without thinking.

He doesn't need to hear you know they won't be home tonight right now. He's got plenty of omens already.

He rests his forearms on the steering wheel, wishing to hell that the rain would stop for just a second to let him think. The only other places Dean had been on the island involved either research or food, neither of which seemed likely destinations if he'd just been on the losing side of a bar fight and didn't trust himself to drive.

That isn't quite true. Sam shifts the car into drive, nearly rear-ending the Taurus parked in front of him. Tillman Road had been research, kind of, and if Dean were feeling reckless and wrecked and maybe like he has nothing left, there's no better place for him to try to prove something than the place where Sam had insisted the ghost would return.

--

Sam's fairly certain he breaks at least three speed limits on the way to Tillman Road, but there's no one else on the road, and it wouldn't have mattered if there had been. He cannot help but remember the worst parts of Denise's story, over and over again, and as he does, his foot rests heavily on the accelerator. He tells himself that he won't help anything if he wrecks the car on the side of the road and has to limp to Dean with a broken leg, or worse; he refutes himself easily by arguing that nothing will matter if he drives like an old lady, the way Dean claims that he does, and arrives in one piece only to find that he's too late and Dean's -- gone.

He doesn't want to think about the possibilities that word might contain. Nor does he want to think about Dean walking alone out here, with nothing at his back that might offer protection, no place to take cover from anything that might be stalking this lonely oceanside road.

The Impala's tires spin out on the side of the road, and he's out of the car almost before it's stopped moving, the keys jammed into his pocket. If he'd never once known the tearing force of a bullet, he might have described the rain as bulleting down; instead he does not think of it, his gaze focused on the incline upon which he'd fallen, and the black sweep of the ocean beyond. If the lighthouse is lit tonight, the storm has swallowed its beam entirely; the depth of the night might well be the depth of sorrow or grief, for how bottomless it is.

But there is movement, at the edge of the sea; there is hope, and an answer to the prayer Sam has been breathing only half-consciously since he'd gotten into the car. "Dean," he says, and has to try again, lifting his voice over the storm. "Dean!"

If Dean hears him -- if the figure at the ocean's edge is indeed Dean, and it has to be, for who else would be out here on a night like this? -- he does not acknowledge Sam; he doesn't even turn around, as though he's seeing something out on the sea, a message in the waves or a ghost ship tossed upon them, visible only to him. Sam scrambles down the hill, his boots slipping in the mud, trusting himself to gravity and God as he runs, half-flinging himself to the wind, and as he nears the bottom, he sees the ghost.

She stands between him and Dean, Dean who hasn't even turned around, who does not yet know the danger at his back. She faces Sam, and Sam, looking into her eyes, thinks I swear to God, she was not human. She smiles, and he's not sure what he'll do if she speaks, but he doesn't have to find out; she does not speak. She only raises one finger to her lips, as though to hush him, to warn him not to scream for his brother, and the glint of her eyes seems almost conspiratorial, as though she's working him into her plan, whatever she's going to do to Dean.

His gun is in his hand almost before he realizes what he's doing. He aims, and fires; she disappears.

She will not be gone for long.

Dean hasn't yet turned around, despite the gunshot, and Sam's heart is pounding louder than the rain as he approaches his brother, wondering if perhaps he was too late at all. He touches Dean's shoulder before he can convince himself not to, before he can think about what he should expect, and he almost doesn't manage to avoid the punch Dean throws, wild and targetless and desperate. Whatever Dean's seeing, it's not Sam. "Dean," Sam says, gripping his shoulder tightly, not daring to look away from his brother's face, even as he knows the ghost could appear right behind him. "Dean!"

"Sammy," Dean says, his eyes focusing on Sam at last; the wind steals the word, but Sam hears it anyway. "What the fuck?"

"I could ask you the same question," Sam says. If Dean were standing any closer to the sea, it would be lapping around the soles of his boots. "And I'm gonna, once we get outta here. C'mon, she's gonna be back any minute."

Dean blinks as though unsure what Sam's talking about, but he lets Sam drag him away from the ocean's edge; once they near the hill, he shrugs out of Sam's grasp, elbowing Sam away as they climb back up to the road.

If the ghost reappears, it's when Sam's not looking, and that thought is somehow more frightening than her reappearance before them would have been. Sam waits until Dean's in the car with the door closed behind him before opening his own door, and once he's inside, he locks the doors around them. It won't keep the ghost out, he knows, but there's a kind of foolish animal comfort in it anyway.

"What the fuck happened?" Sam says, his voice cracking with chill and relief and dread all at once; he turns at last to Dean, who's slouched up against the shotgun side door, as far away from Sam as he can get without crawling into the backseat.

"Nothing," Dean says. "I was just going for a walk, 's all." There's a slight slur to his words; he's either hypothermic or drunk, maybe both; away from the brine and the scouring scent of the rain, Sam smells liquor, smoky and sour.

"After getting your ass kicked at the bar?" Sam says, and Dean's lip curls. "You thought, what, you'd take it out on the ghost? Didn't you hear me calling you?"

"I'm not gonna let you kill yourself over this," Dean says, which isn't an answer to anything that Sam asked, but is an answer all the same.

"So, what, you're gonna kill yourself instead?" It comes out almost light, stripped of all caustic fear and blame, and Sam thinks someday he might appreciate that.

Dean shrugs, looking away. "If you're gonna drive, drive. Otherwise get the fuck outta my seat."

Sam stares at him; he does not look back, his gaze on what would have been the ocean, if the ocean weren't obscured by rain. Sam wonders what, if anything, he is looking for, and whether it is the storm that he sees.

Sam starts the car. Whether it's because some things aren't his to know, or because he doesn't want to be burdened with the answer, it doesn't matter. The result is the same: he does not ask.

--

Dean shoves Sam away again, when Sam tries to help him from the car. It's not until they're inside the motel room with the lights on that Sam gets a good look at Dean's face, at the bruise reddening beneath his left eye and the blood smeared across his chin, spattered across his collar, from his split lip. His knuckles look swollen, but they're probably permanently bruised anyway; it goes with this way of life. There's never time to heal more than is absolutely necessary. "Jesus, Dean," he says.

Dean lowers himself gingerly onto his own bed and Sam wonders if his ribs are bruised, how literally Harry had meant pulled Matt and the guys off'a him. Dean is never an easy target, unless he wants to be. "Give it a rest, okay? I got a fuckin' headache the size of Texas."

"You're lucky if that's all you got," Sam says. He tells himself that it won't help anything if he shouts, that Dean will only shout back, refusing to listen to reason. "You coulda been killed."

"So I got sloppy," Dean says. "You showed up, whatever, I'm fine. We're fine. We've had a lot worse days than this, let it go."

"You're probably hypothermic," Sam says. "Are you still drunk?"

"Fuck off," Dean says, easing down onto the pillows. His hands are shaking enough that it's perceptible even from this distance, but Sam doubts that his own are much better. "Just lemme sleep for a little while, Sam. You can do your interrogation shit when I wake up. Make a list of questions or something, you can be the bad cop."

Sam swallows. "In River Grove," he says," you said you were tired, you were ready to die there with me."

"What, like that was a surprise?" Dean says, closing his eyes. "C'mon, man, you always knew we were gonna go out together. Make a hell of a last stand, y'know. Butch Cassidy." He stops talking and his breathing evens out; he's asleep. The smudges beneath his eyes are a match to Sam's own.

Sam stares at him until he's sure that Dean's going to keep breathing, at least for now, for tonight, and then he shrugs out of his jacket. He thinks about waking Dean and trying to make him change into dry clothes, or at least take off his boots, but he's fairly certain Dean would try to hit him again if he did. He settles for turning the heater as high as it will go and draping the comforter from his own bed over his brother.

It's not like he's going to be sleeping tonight, anyway.

He allows himself the luxury of a quick hot shower, once he's sure Dean's out deep enough that Sam doesn't have to worry about him waking up and taking off while Sam's not around; even so, Sam takes the keys to the Impala with him. Afterward, he settles onto the cold white sheets of his own bed, allowing himself a moment to breathe, now that he's ensured that things are as right as they have been lately, as right as he can make them; that they are in no immediate danger. It would be easier if he could hate Dean for this, for making him worry about his brother in addition to everything else.

In addition to himself, mostly.

Dean has to be invulnerable and inhuman and strong enough for the both of them; he has to be everything that Sam is not, he has to be brave so that Sam can be scared, and sane so that Sam can go crazy sometimes. It's a perfectly logical idea, when you're four or six or ten years old and your brother is all you know of heroism, all you know of what makes sense in the world. At twenty-three, when you know what maintaining that illusion has cost him, and continues to cost him, continuing to believe it is at once cruel and the only thing you can do, because he's built his entire world upon it. He believes in it, too, and it'll kill him, that he isn't. That he can't be. That no one, ever, could be.

It nearly killed him tonight.

Sam wants to hate him for that, for breaking now instead of waiting until next week or next month or next year, because that would make this easier, but it would be a lie. He can do this for Dean tonight, and tomorrow, and as long as he has to, because Dean would do the same for him without even thinking about it -- Dean has done it for him, did it for him all those nights, all those weeks after Jessica -- and it's not like Sam's made the past few weeks easy for him, even though he knows what the weight of what he made Dean promise is doing to his brother.

He wonders if he'd make Dean make that promise again, if he had the chance.

After a few minutes, longer than he'd told himself he could take, he gets up to retrieve his laptop from where it's humming quietly on the table; on his way back to the bed, he starts a pot of coffee brewing.

He has work to do.

--

He must have fallen asleep at some point, because he blinks and his neck hurts and suddenly the light coming in around the curtains is light; his laptop is next to him on the bed and there's a cup of -- very cold, he discovers -- coffee on the nightstand. Dean's bed is empty, the comforter from Sam's slipping off of the mattress and pooling onto the floor, but the bathroom door is closed and the shower is running.

He rubs at his eyes, which feel gritty and sore, and reaches for his laptop. It's nonresponsive, and the screen is black; the battery must have run out sometime after he fell asleep. That doesn't matter; he has the information that he needs.

He's dressed by the time Dean opens the bathroom door; their eyes meet and Dean flushes, looks like he wants to slam the door closed and wait until Sam gives up and leaves so that he can make a clean escape.

"Nice bruise," Sam says.

"You want one of your own?" Dean says, straightening his shoulders and stepping out into the main room. The movement looks painful, though perhaps only because Sam's spent years memorizing the way Dean moves when he's hurt, and when he isn't. "'Cause I'd be glad to help."

"There's coffee, if you want," Sam says.

"Like you gotta ask," Dean says, heading directly for the machine. "Sammy, you're a saint, I swear. Or at least a monk." He pauses with the cup halfway to his mouth. "You look like hell, though. Were you, uh. Were you up all night?"

"Not all night," Sam says, which he has to know since Sam was asleep when he woke up. Sam wonders if that's Dean's way of telling him that he doesn't remember much of the night before, or at least wants to pretend as much, and decides to let it go. "Just most of it. I was doing some research."

"Yeah?" Dean says. "You find anything?"

"Yeah, actually," Sam says. "I think I found our ghost."

"No shit," Dean says. "How?"

"When she, um, appeared last night, I saw a couple of things Denise left out of her story," Sam says. "Her clothing, for one. It looked like she died maybe a hundred-fifty, hundred-twenty five years ago."

"You paid attention to her clothes?" Dean says. "That's pretty ga--" Sam raises an eyebrow and he stops, twitching one shoulder in a gesture that Sam thinks means go on.

"And since I had something to go on as far as what she's looking for in victims, I, um. That helped."

"Spit it out, Sam," Dean says. His tone is mild, but his eyes make it a challenge, a dare.

Sam takes a deep breath. If Dean can do this, so can he. "I looked for women who'd drowned during approximately that timeframe, filtered out the ones who were the wrong age, based on what I could tell when I saw her, and there were only a few left. Only one of them was a suspected suicide."

"Suspected?"

"They wouldn't have said it so bluntly," Sam says. "Respect for the family."

Dean takes a sip of coffee, swallows. "You got a name?"

"Better than that," Sam says. "I got a burial plot and everything."

"So it's not connected to the, to the guy," Dean says.

Sam looks at him, meeting his eyes. "I guess not."

"Sucks," Dean says. "Woulda been nice to burn something for that."

"Yeah," Sam says. It's as close to an apology as he's going to get, and as close to an apology as he's going to make. "Tell me about it."

--

The graveyard's old enough that it's mostly abandoned; on the edge of town, there is no one but the crows perched high in the trees to watch them as they dig up the bones of Elisabeth Seville.

It's hard work; the ground is frozen and it takes much longer than it would have otherwise for them to break through it. Sam's sweating despite the temperature by the time they do; by the time Dean drops the lit match into her coffin, Sam's eyes are stinging. He tells himself that the latter is a result of the former; it's not implausible.

As the smoke eddies up towards the heavens, the only grey in a sky that's dawned vast and white and maybe impermeable, he says a silent apology to Lacey Brady for not being able to save her.

"You're not God, Sam. You don't gotta stop every bad thing from happening. You can't," Dean says, like he knows what Sam's thinking, Dean who maybe doesn't even believe in God. He's leaning on his shovel on the other side of the grave, and he makes the pose look casual, as though he's not putting most of his weight onto the shovel, like he wouldn't stagger if someone were to take it away. Sam knows anyway, because he does the same thing.

If they keep telling each other they'll be okay, that they're brave enough and strong enough for this, maybe they'll be able to convince each other, at least.

"I know," Sam says. He doesn't add, but that doesn't make it any better.

"That's not what Dad meant for you to do," Dean adds instead. "That's not what he would have wanted."

Sam looks at him, nods and then licks his lips. "You know he didn't want you to do that, either."

Dean's shoulders stiffen visibly, but he shrugs. "Yeah."

"What you said about how he shouldn't have made you make that promise?" Sam says. "I shouldn't have, either. I'm sorry."

"Whatever," Dean says. "Not like it wasn't anything I wouldn't be doing anyway, huh?" He swallows, raises an eyebrow. "So can we go now, or did you wanna cry over her grave or something? Maybe say a few words?"

"Fuck you," Sam says. There's still no heat to it, but he doesn't think Dean will mind.

"That's real classy." Dean shoulders his shovel, reaches for the can of kerosene. "Bet that's why you never get invited to the good salt and burns."

"I don't know, the ones that end with you getting tossed into things are okay," Sam says. "Mostly for the look on your face."

They pile their shovels into the Impala's trunk; as Dean starts the engine, Sam looks back only once. He can no longer see the smoke.

--

They take the next ferry back to the mainland. This time, there's enough room for them to wait on the hard wooden benches of the covered shelter. The rain begins as the ferry pushes away from the dock, and it drums lightly on the roof of the shelter, streaking the smudged plexiglass windows. Sam keeps his gaze fixed on his knees, and tells himself to pretend that the watery light is coming through the windows of the Impala, that they are not adrift at all; he blinks awake a moment before Dean touches his shoulder. Dean checks the gesture, shoving his hands into his pockets, and says, "C'mon, we're de-boating."

Sam yawns. "Disembarking," he corrects.

"Shut up, Gilligan," Dean says. Later, as the Impala edges back onto asphalt, the windshield wipers slapping back and forth, he says, "Are you hungry? We could find a diner, get some real food. Not Denny's, though, their coffee's shit. If there's wifi, you wanna see if you can find us a job somewhere they get actual sunlight? There's gotta be something undead in, like, Florida or something. You could use the color, maybe you'd look less like one a' the things we hunt."

Sam rolls his eyes and slumps down in his seat; it's not like Dean's actually waiting for an answer, though it was nice of him to phrase it like there was actually a question or a suggestion somewhere in there. He tilts his head back and waits for Dean to wind up his monologue and turn on the music, instead.

Nothing has gotten better, nothing has changed, but something has been confirmed, as though it were ever something that needed confirmation.

Whatever happens next, they're in it together.

It's enough to let him breathe easy, for now, and for the first time in a very long time.

--

A week later, he steps out of the motel room in West Texas onto hot blacktop, closing the door on Dean's shouted demand that he not forget the extra onions this time (bitch). The sun is setting, turning the light heavy and golden and rich; he takes a deep breath, savoring the last moments of day before the sun sinks behind the horizon, spilling across the sky all the colors of a phoenix blaze.

At the edge of the parking lot, the tall neon motel sign begins to flicker.

--

end