![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anactoriaTitle: Take Me To The Bridge
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters: Dean, Sam, Cas, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Animal cruelty.
Word count: 23,000
Summary: It’s supposed to be a routine hunt. A few farm animals mutilated, a few towns over. It sounds like the work of some two-bit demon—just another day at the office for two experienced hunters and an angel.
But this case is closer to home than it seems. Before long, Dean is in the clutches of a dangerous spirit, and Sam and Cas must try to end an ancient family feud before the whole town—and Dean—gets caught in the crossfire.
“What just happened?”
Sam’s voice comes out hoarse. He feels half-deaf, like in the aftermath of an explosion. Cas stands over Spalls’ unconscious body, looking down at it like he expects it to sit up and offer him an explanation.
After a moment, Cas looks up, and his expression hardens, eyes turning dark and determined.
Sam gets it. This was already personal, but now it’s a different kind of personal.
He fumbles for his cellphone, brings up Dean’s number, and presses Call. There isn’t much chance he’ll pick up, but it’s worth a try. Maybe he’ll hear the ringtone: if Dean is still anywhere nearby, it might give them a clue.
It doesn’t. Dean’s voicemail message kicks in just in time for him to look over and see Cas frowning, stooping to pick something off of Spalls’ chest.
A white feather. It phosphoresces faintly in the darkness. Silver. He holds it out to Sam.
Sam heads over there. He takes it, holds it up to inspect—then hears a groan somewhere near his feet.
He crouches and presses two fingers to the pulse point on Spalls’ neck. It takes him a couple seconds, but he finds it. Faint and sluggish, but there. Spalls’ breathing is shallow. No visible injuries, but he looks like he needs a doctor, stat.
“Okay,” Sam says. “I’m gonna have to get this guy to a hospital.”
Cas nods. “I’ll search the area.”
“Meet me back at the motel. Half an hour.” Sam ducks under Spalls’ arm and straightens up, just about managing to get the guy upright. He’s all dead weight. Moving unconscious people is a way bigger pain in the ass when there’s only one of you. “Actually,” he begins, “do you think you could—”
Cas is already gone. Sam sighs and heaves Spalls toward the car.
----
He drops Spalls outside of the E.R. Honestly, Sam feels bad for the guy. He’s probably just lost his job, at least one of his friends now thinks he’s crazy, and he might well have a police record in his near future. And then there’s the horses. Sam had Bones for long enough to know that animals can feel as much like family as anybody else.
Easiest kind to have, sometimes. They don’t judge your life choices, don’t snipe about you not caring as much as they do, don’t toss you out on your ass because you don’t want to be their Mini-Me. They recognize that you both speak different languages and don’t try to fight about it anyway.
Sam pulls away from the kerb as soon as he hears a shout from the direction of the hospital, and puts his foot down.
Civilian casualty dealt with. Now he’s got more important things to worry about.
Back at the motel room, he curses under his breath as he waits for his laptop to boot up, or for Cas to show up with any news. Everything feels so slow.
It’s always this way when Dean’s in trouble. It’s like some part of Sam’s brain knows that he isn’t up to the job; that he isn’t really a protector; that someplace deep down, he’s still the boy who turns everything he touches to ash. That’s been true more than once. He’s tried drowning the knowledge under revenge, tried running away from it, and none of it worked. It always comes back to this feeling, like those nightmares where he knows something terrible is about to happen and he has to stop it, but his limbs are weighted down with lead and moving is like swimming through molasses so he can’t even scream or thrash about in panic.
This is real, and so Sam swallows down his dread. Tells himself this will be one of the times when he is up to the job. He’s only just gotten used to Dean not being in danger. No way is he losing his brother again.
He reaches into his pocket while he waits, and pulls out the white feather Cas found in the clearing.
Under the motel room lights, it doesn’t glow anymore. There’s still something unearthly about it, though. The way colors seem to shift within it. The way it holds the light.
Sam runs a finger along the edge of the feather. Cautiously, like some part of his brain expects it to be sharp. It’s soft, though, like it’s been plucked from the wing of some giant bird.
These creatures aren’t angels. So what does it mean?
He runs over the scene in the woods again. The woman. She had a bird sitting on her shoulder.
Sam tries to piece it together in his mind, running through his mental inventory for stories that fit. Egyptian, maybe? They’ve run into pissed-off old gods before now. But Sam didn’t recognize the woman, or either of her brothers, from any pantheon he knows about. Odin’s sometimes depicted with ravens, but Sam’s pretty sure he’d know if they were tangling with him again.
Then there’s the whole thing where birds act as guides to the land of the dead. Shows up in all kinds of mythology.
Sam pushes that one aside, not ready to think about it just yet. Spalls was still alive when whatever was possessing him checked out. That means that, wherever Dean is, he’s alive, too. He has to be.
“Sam.”
Sam blinks and turns around in his chair. It’s Cas, standing in the middle of the motel room, a defeated hunch to his shoulders.
“So,” Sam says. “Nothing, huh?”
“Nothing.” Cas sighs and sinks down onto the edge of the nearest bed, looking at his hands. For all that he’s mojo-ed up again, it’s a human gesture. A weary one. He sits there for a moment, brow creased in thought, before looking up and meeting Sam’s eyes. “I’m worried about him,” he confesses, then.
Sam manages a short, mirthless laugh. “Well, yeah. I’d say that’s reasonable.”
Cas gives an impatient little headshake. “That’s not what I’m talking about.” He pauses. “Though the current situation is… concerning. I meant—more generally.”
“Yeah.” Sam sighs and scrubs a hand across his eyes. “Yeah, I know. It’s like—I don’t know, man. Like the whole thing with the Mark and the being-a-demon and then the actually deciding he wanted to live—it’s like none of that happened.”
Cas looks at him gravely. “Do you think he’d be this hard on himself if it hadn’t?”
He’s right, of course. Dean’s whole self-loathing I’m-good-for-nothing-but-killing-monsters schtick was bound to kick back in as soon as he had a moment to think without imminent death or imminent demonhood hanging over his head. It figures that he’d weigh up all the crap he did as a demon, all the crap that happened under the influence of the Mark, and decide that it outweighs all the good he’s ever done. That he doesn’t deserve a life after all.
Not even the shitty one they already have, if his determination to run half-cocked after Spalls was anything to go by.
“I don’t know, man.” Sam puts his head in his hands. “I thought he’d finally started to figure it out, you know? That if we do this, maybe we should do it because we want to. Not because it’s what our dad taught us and we don’t know how to do anything else anymore.”
“And you, Sam?” He lifts his head and finds Cas looking at him with earnest curiosity, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “What do you want?”
Sam’s saved from having to answer by a ding from his laptop. He pulls it toward him, feeling his stomach flip when he sees the name on the screen.
“It’s from the professor,” he explains, in reply to Cas’s questioning look. “Maybe she’s found something.”
----
From: BirchJ2@swansea.ac.uk
To: sw7152839@gmail.com
Dear Sam,
Just received your email. Since you’re a friend of Bobby Singer’s, I assume we’re on the same page (also, it’s 1:30 in the morning over here), so I’ll get down to business.
I haven’t *seen* anything like the artefact you photographed before, but I have heard of it. I’ll get to that later; what’s more important is the text on the figurine. You’re right in thinking it’s Old Welsh; here’s my best attempt at a translation. I’m afraid some of the text is too scuffed to read.
Here bound;
The monster, the hero
Whose sister broke her heart from sorrow
Whose brother is buried at London
Who saved our [illegible] from Matholwch
Who died in repentance
Who returned to wreak havoc
Who cannot die again
Here bound from the light and from the world
From the songs of birds and the running of the horses
From the love of [illegible]
From staining the good earth with blood
It scans rather better in the original, as I’m sure you can imagine. Anyway, the figurine and the inscription make it fairly clear what we’re dealing with here. I’ll forgive you for not being familiar with the lore—honestly, I don’t get many calls about it—but it’s the story of Branwen, Daughter of Llyr, from the Mabinogion. Here’s an online translation: http://www.mabinogi.net/branwen.htm (‘Bendigeidfran’, just so you know, translates as ‘Brân the blessed’. He’s sometimes just called ‘Brân’ in other sources.)
Sam clicks through before reading the rest of the email.
Bendigeidfran, son of Llyr , the story begins, was the crowned King of this Island, and exalted with the crown of London. One afternoon he was at Harlech in Ardudwy, a court of his. Seated on the rock of Harlech above the ocean were Bendigeidfran with his brother Manawydan son of Llyr; his two half brothers from his mother's side (Nisien and Efnisien); and such noblemen about them as was befitting around a king. His two maternal half-brothers were the sons of Euroswydd by his mother Penarddun daughter of Beli son of Mynogan. One of these young men was a good young man: he would make peace between two hosts, even when they were at their most incensed - that was Nisien. The other one would provoke conflict between two brothers, even while they were at their most amicable.
Well, that’s a whole lot of brothers. Sam skims a little. The King of Ireland comes to court to say hello, asks for the hand of their sister Branwen in marriage. They get hitched—no mention of the two half-brothers being invited to the wedding. It’s the next part that makes Sam sit up in his chair.
Efnisien, the brother who likes to start fights, finds out that his sister has been married off without anybody telling him.
Then one day, the story goes on, there was Efnisien - that quarrelsome man we spoke of above, coming across the billets of the horses of Matholwch. He asked to whom the horses be-longed.
'These are the horses of Matholwch king of Ireland' they said.
'What are they doing here?' he demanded.
'The king of Ireland is here, and he has slept with your sister Branwen. These are his horses.'
'So this is what they have done with a girl as good as her, my own sister - giving her away without my consent! They could not have insulted me more!'
With that he started striking up at the horses. He sliced their ears back to their heads, and their tails to their backs - and wherever he could get a grip on their eyelids, he would cut these back to the bone. And the horses were mutilated thus, to the extent that no further use could be got from the horses.
The grotesque horse figurine sits on the desk, turned a sickly bluish color in the light from the screen. Sam picks it up, holding it gingerly between his fingers. There’s a crack through the script near the end of the binding spell. That must be from when he dropped it.
Its ears and tail are missing, too. He’d assumed they’d gotten snapped off—a long time ago, probably, for the stumps to have worn so smooth—but now he sees that they were never there. Its eyes and mouth are stained with faded red.
Doesn’t leave much question who the binding spell is talking about.
Sam reads over the rest of the story. Branwen has a son with her new husband—but the King, offended by Efnisien’s stunt, turns on her. He starts treating Branwen like a scullery maid, not a queen. Then worse: he locks her away and has her beaten.
She’s resourceful, though. She tames a bird, luring it to her window with crumbs from the kitchen and a lot of patience, and trains it to talk. When she’s certain it knows what to say, she sends it over the sea to her brothers.
They get the message, and the whole family sails for Ireland with an army. There’s a whole lot of subterfuge and politics, and then Efnisien does something way more stomach-churning than animal cruelty: he throws his infant nephew into the fire.
After that, everything erupts into battle. It only ends when Efnisien sacrifices himself, putting an end to the war that he started.
There’s no mention of where he’s buried, of what happened to his bones.
But he’s here right now. Not in Ireland. If this is Efnisien’s angry spirit they’re dealing with, then he isn’t tied to a gravesite.
“What do you have?” Cas is squinting at the back of the laptop like he might be able to x-ray vision his way through it.
“Here.” Sam hands it over. “Looks like the Professor found our guy. Sounds like a real piece of work. I’m just not sure what his tether is.”
He picks up the horse figurine for another look while Cas reads. A little gingerly, like touching it might burn his fingertips or set off some chain reaction. It’s smooth to the touch, room temperature. The inscription is scored into the wood, the grooves worn smooth under his hands. It actually feels lighter than it looks–like it’s hollow, almost. Whatever power there was in this thing, it’s long gone.
Anyway, this can’t be the object Efnisien is tied to. He was bound to it, which means he was already running around doing his blood-soaked thing when whoever did the binding managed to catch him. He got away from the bunker without any problems, as far as Sam can tell, and he’s been on the run ever since. Plus, his brothers and sister showed up when he called them. There weren’t any magical objects involved. It’s like they can all move freely.
Which means Option Number One for getting rid of an angry spirit is off the table. They’ve got nothing to burn.
Sam sighs and sets down the figurine. It looks back at him out of angry, scarlet-rimmed eyes.
He frowns at it. Sounds out the words of the inscription, though they don’t make any sense to him. If there were some way they could recreate the spell…
“Sam,” Cas says. “Who’s John Evans?”
Sam blinks back at him. “Who?”
“The postscript. Here.” Cas hands back the laptop, and Sam remembers he didn’t read the whole of the professor’s email. He scrolls down to the bottom.
PS. There’s one other thing that struck me about the inscription on your statuette. I’m no graphologist, but the handwriting looks very familiar. Of course, the dialect on the figurine is much older, but it seems similar to that of an eighteenth-century manuscript I’ve been working on; the journal of a Welshman called John Evans who travelled to the New World and went to work for the Spanish. There’s a short passage from 1793 where he talks about encountering a ‘spirit.’ Of course, in those days, use of the phrase was a bit woollier: ‘spirit’ could mean anything from an angel to one of the Tylwyth Teg. Still, it’s an interesting coincidence…
Sam grabs his phone. “What time is it in the UK right now?”
Cas blinks at him. “How does that answer my question?”
“Never mind.” There’s a contact number in the email signature—different than the one on the website. Could be the professor’s home number. Sam punches it in and hits Call.
There’s a couple seconds silence, and then the phone rings. And rings.
We’re not available now. Please leave a message after the tone.
Sam sighs, hangs up, and calls again.
Ring. Ring.
“Hello?”
He has to hold back a laugh of relief. “Hello,” he says, once he’s sure he can trust his voice to work. “Is that, uh, Professor Birch?”
“Yes.” The voice still sounds half-asleep, but not exactly surprised. “Is this—Mr Winchester?”
“Sam. Please.” He hesitates. “Listen, uh, I’m really sorry to wake you at—whatever time in the morning it is with you. But we have a situation over here, and I really think that diary you mentioned might help. Do you have—a scan, or a transcript of it, or anything at all like that?”
“I’ll go one better.” She still sounds tired, but Sam can hear the smile in her voice. “I was working on my translation when I got your email, actually. I’ll send you what I have.”
“Thank you. Really. You don’t know—just, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” says Professor Birch. “And—Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“Good luck.” Sam isn’t sure if it’s supposed to be an encouragement or a warning.
He thinks of Dean’s face, of eyes lit up with silvery light, and he shivers.
----
It’s dark, and Dean can’t get out.
He can almost see the world. Almost hear it, almost smell it. The wet earth under the trees; the sickly moon; the cold night air biting through his shirt. He knows all of those things are there, but he’s wrapped in a darkness that clings to his mind like cobwebs and he can’t reach them.
Funny. He’s been demonized, vamped, killed in a dozen new and exciting ways, but he’s never actually gotten possessed before.
It isn’t like he imagined. Chained to a comet, his ass. It’s like being locked away in a crappy little panic room, knowing there are monsters running around inside your home trashing the place, and not being able to get out even though you’re beating your fists bloody on the door. He wants to yell but can’t, struggling against the darkness, trying to reach all those things he can almost see.
Then, worse, even the almosts are gone. It’s just black.
Dean doesn’t know how long it lasts.
He just knows that when he comes back to himself, he isn’t trapped in that dark web anymore. He blinks his eyes to be sure, straining them to figure out where he is. There isn’t much light, but he can make out the wet sheen of the rock wall; a faint suggestion of light far off to his right. It’s cold, and he can hear something dripping.
Is there a cave system around here anywhere? Or maybe he’s in an old sewer tunnel?
He’s lying on his back on the wet floor, so he damn well hopes not.
Dean checks himself out, like you do when you come around from unconsciousness and aren’t sure if you’ve been injured. Wiggles his fingers and toes, moves his limbs gingerly before he curls up into a sitting position.
He’s aching like he just went twelve rounds with Tyson, but nothing’s broken, and his head doesn’t hurt, so probably no concussion. Always a plus.
Dean lets himself breathe out. He knows he doesn’t have time to sit around—he needs to get out of here, get back to Sammy and Cas—but he gives himself a couple seconds to feel the relief. He cracks his knuckles just to know that his body is back under his own command. Watches a drop of moisture run down the tunnel wall, because at least it’s his eyes that are seeing it, no outside interference.
There’s a bigger question, though; one that takes over from relief the second he’s had time to feel it and opens up a pit of worry in his stomach. The thing that took him brought him here for a reason. Said it was gonna kick his ass for interfering in the affairs of—whoever these glowing douchebags are. Now, that sounds like something big is going down.
Big question number two is, where are Glowing Douchebag’s brothers and sister? If one of them can possess people, stands to reason that the others can, too. When Dean got taken, Sam was still there. Cas, too—but he wasn’t quick enough to stop Dean from being grabbed.
The others aren’t here, but that doesn’t mean they’re not in trouble.
Dean gets to his feet. Takes a step toward the light. And then—
Then he can’t.
Dread clutches at his insides as the dark begins to close over his vision again. He tries to wrench himself out of it, but his limbs refuse to obey him. He looks down at his hands and finds them glowing faintly in the dark tunnel, silver light leaking out from under his fingernails.
Not so fast.
Dean doesn’t hear the voice so much as feel it, a vibration inside his skull.
There was another voice he used to hear like that, not so long ago. One that seemed to come from deep within his self and from somewhere totally alien, both at the same time. There was always this kind of under-layer to it—like there were sounds in there just outside the realm of hearing, on a frequency almost out of range. Sounds that Dean found himself straining to hear, even though he really didn’t want to.
There’s something of that in this voice, too. Dean doesn’t feel it burning in his skull like the voice of the Mark did, but when it stops, he imagines he hears the screams of animals ringing in his ears.
He swallows hard. “What are you?” he grits out. Then feels kind of surprised at the fact his voice works. Though it’s not like there’s anybody to hear him down here, wherever here is.
A moment of silence. No voice inside his head, but the darkness still pulses in his field of vision. The thing isn’t letting him go.
A brother, the voice says, then. I am a brother.
“Not what I meant, and you know it.”
Oh. The voice turns sly, knowing. You want to know why I’m still here. Why I walk the earth when I am so long dead. Why I have not passed on to the realm of—Dean doesn’t catch the next word; it isn’t English, he doesn’t think—with my brothers and sister.
Still here, long dead, hasn’t ‘passed on’. “You’re a spirit.”
That’s what you call us now. The voice is slow, thoughtful. We are souls, of a kind. Our mother was human, anyway. But we don’t belong to Heaven, nor Hell, nor wholly to the realm of man. Not to anything from your cosmology. Angels, demons—we’re older than that.
There’s a streak of contempt in the voice, one that sets Dean’s teeth on edge. “Yeah, sure,” he says. “I get it. You’re a unique snowflake, just like all your brothers.”
And my sister, the voice insists, and Dean actually feels something surge through him. Anger; longing; white-hot and quicksilver. Not his own. It’s a little like an amphetamine rush—heady but false, because you know the energy is artificial.
Like the Mark, and not like it, because Dean never could convince himself that none of that was him.
He swallows. “Sure,” he says. He blinks when he realizes he’s holding his hands out. A placating gesture; one he uses when he needs to regroup and he’s playing peacemaker for a few minutes. Maybe Glowing Douchebag—Glowing Prehistoric Ghost Douchebag?—lost control for a second there when he lost his temper. “And your sister. I’m sure she’s awesome.”
She was mine, the voice says, tight with bitterness, and Dean’s fists clench of their own accord. She was mine, and she left, and now she’ll never forgive me.
“Okay,” Dean says. He feels a twinge of relief at the suggestion that maybe Glowing Douchebag’s siblings aren’t a part of whatever he’s got going on here. If they aren’t on his side, then maybe they won’t go after Sam and Cas.
Maybe they’ll come after Glowing Douchebag, and if that happens, Dean’s gonna be right in the crossfire, but what the hell. He’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.
“Look,” he tries. “I’m gonna sit back down, okay? Why don’t you, uh, tell me what went down? With your sister, I mean.”
He racks his brain, trying to picture the woman in the group of weird-ass glowy spirits. He didn’t exactly get much time to commit them to memory. She had long hair, and she was wearing some Game of Thrones-style cloak thing. There was a bird perched on her shoulder. Looked like a crow, only it was white as snow.
Dean can’t remember her face, though. He can’t remember her face, and that disturbs him more than it should. Then he figures out that maybe it isn’t him who’s disturbed by it.
Branwen, the voice in his head says, after a long pause. It means ‘white raven’, in the old tongue. It suited her. She was so beautiful. So rare.
The note of pride that creeps into the voice is unmistakable. “Let me guess,” Dean says. “She was the baby of the family?”
A laugh echoes inside his skull. Yes. For a moment, the voice softens. We were always together. The others never had time. Branwen was the only person who ever looked happy to see me.
“Sounds like you two had something special.” Dean means for it to be sarcastic, but it comes out more thoughtful than that.
He doesn’t want to get it, but he does. Back when they were kids, before Sam got old enough to start planning for Stanford and normality and getting the hell out of Dodge—well, Dean remembers how that felt.
The teachers at whatever school they were attending that month would take one look at Dean and decide he was trouble. The other kids wouldn’t bother him, because he could throw a punch and talk shit with the best of them, and maybe some of them would even think he was kind of cool—but he never made friends. You couldn’t invite friends back to a crappy motel room, offer them boxed mac ‘n’ cheese and marshmallow fluff for dinner, and shrug when they asked where your parents were. So Dean kept his distance, and the other kids did the same.
But at the end of the day, when it was just the two of them? Sam would run to meet him at the school gates, and it felt like coming home, even though they didn’t have one. They were the only people in the school—in the state, hell, in the world—who got it.
We did, Glowing Douchebag says, breaking in on Dean’s thoughts. We had a world of our own. We roamed the mountains together. We were free.
“Sounds peachy.” Dean pauses. “That’s the thing, though, ain’t it? Even if you managed to talk her into joining up with whatever the hell you’re trying to pull here? This isn’t your world anymore. It’s changed.”
It won’t matter, Glowing Douchebag insists. If she is with me, then we will be home.
“C’mon. Everybody knows you can’t go home again.” Dean determinedly doesn’t picture the mess in the bunker, after his last spell of Mark-induced crazy. Doesn’t think about the nights he wakes up smelling kerosene and blood.
We are not everybody, Glowing Douchebag says. He sounds indignant. That’s a good thing. If he’s arguing with Dean, he isn’t thinking about summoning his siblings again, or swapping out animal cruelty for actual murder, or whatever the hell else he’s got going on here.
So, “Yeah yeah,” Dean says. “You’re real special. That’s why you’re running around slashing the ears off of horses instead of ruling Mordor or wherever the hell you come from.”
There’s a pause.
We are the children of gods! Glowing Douchebag snaps. But his anger doesn’t hold, the conviction draining out of his tone as he goes on: The world was ours. But my family rejected me. My brothers only ever spoke to me to scold, to ask why I couldn’t be more like Nisien.
Dean blinks. “Like ninja-who now?”
Nisien. My twin brother. They used to say he could step onto the field of battle and talk two armies into sitting down and breaking bread. But I never knew how to make peace.
“What, and Mr. Perfect Brother Guy didn’t help you out?”
He tried. The gods know he tried. He could never understand. He always looked so… disappointed. Then he stopped trying, just like the rest of them. Glowing Douchebag’s voice hardens. By the end, it was only when I brought down chaos on their heads that they ever looked my way. Small wonder that I learned to seek out war.
Dean gives an involuntary snort. Yeah, he knows what it’s like to seek out war. And he knows what it’s like not to want it, and he knows it doesn’t sound like this. It isn’t my fault, they never loved me enough, cry me a goddamn river.
The Mark might’ve been in the driver’s seat more often than Dean was, by the end, but he never forgot that he asked for the damn thing in the first place. Everything he did was on him, under the influence or not. His choice; his cross to bear.
He’s pretty sure he said that, once.
He scowls. “Yeah, poor you,” he says. “Never heard a murdering asshole try to pull that one before.”
There’s a pause, and when Glowing Douchebag speaks again, there’s something softer about his voice. Regretful, almost.
I would stop, he says. If it didn’t mean being without them.
“You’ve been without them for a couple millennia, give or take,” Dean points out. “What the hell difference does it make?”
They will have to stop me, Glowing Douchebag says. This time, they will have to stop me. They’ll have to come and face me. She will have to face me.
Well, that sounds way too close to ‘evil masterplan’ for comfort. Fucking A.
“Stop you from doing what?” Dean asks.
Silence. Well, it was worth a shot.
He sighs, and tries another tack. “You ever think that maybe your family are a bunch of dicks?” he asks. “If they wouldn’t help you go straight? Hell, if they wouldn’t even try to forgive you?”
The words ring hollow, even in his own ears. Especially in his own ears.
There’s a reason that when he closes his eyes at night, Sam’s face is the last thing he sees. Not bloodied and dead-eyed, the way it used to be in his nightmares before he lost the Mark—but the way it looked in those last few seconds before the spell took hold. The horror in Sam’s eyes. The way he’d looked at Dean like he wasn’t really Dean anymore. Cas on the floor behind him, sprawled gracelessly where Dean knocked him on his ass, real fear written on his face.
They saw what he really is, and there’s no making that go away. Now, every time Sam broaches the subject of changing things, it feels like he’s taking a step closer to the door.
Same thing when Cas tells them, It’s quiet out there, and Dean can’t help wondering if that means he’s getting ready to haul ass back upstairs and beg the rest of the angels to let him come home. When he sneaks out of the bunker after dark to sit cross-legged in the grass and pray or meditate or commune with the stars or whatever it is he does. Dean can never convince himself Cas will still be around come morning.
What the hell is Dean’s life, without them by his side? Just getting older, drunker and more hopeless until even Crowley stops taking his calls, and a werewolf or a road accident or his own shot-to-hell liver sends him to an early grave.
Keeps him up nights, sometimes. So they saved his ass from the Mark—but what the hell for?
He doesn’t say any of that out loud. After a moment, Glowing Douchebag’s voice sounds again.
They’re my family, he says. I’m the only one here who may speak ill of them.
Dean laughs, short and bitter. “Yeah, man,” he says. “Yeah, that’s what I’d say, too.”
----
Sam looks up from Professor Birch’s notes, eyes hurting from the hours he’s spent staring at the computer screen. He’s gone over the diary entry a dozen times, had Cas take a look, too, but there doesn’t seem to be any way around it. They can’t bind Efnisien without a vessel—as in, a figurine like the creepy mutilated horse thing from the bunker. One that isn’t broken.
He sighs and shoves hair out of his eyes. Reaches for his coffee and finds it stone cold.
Cas looks across at him. “What do you have?”
“Whole lot of nothing.” Sam slumps, lets his head fall into his hands, and finds it too heavy to lift again. “This guy Evans managed to bind Efnisien to this.” He pokes the horse figurine. “But we can’t reuse it now that it’s broken. And there’s no info on how you make a new one.” His shoulders sag. “Never thought I’d say it, but I actually wish Rowena was still taking my calls right now.”
Cas makes a brief moue of disgust. Turns back to the horse figurine, frowning. “I read the story,” he says. “Efnisien redeemed himself, at least at the end.”
“Yeah, and then when the rest of the family didn’t hail him as a hero, he snapped right back into psycho mode.” Sam looks down at his hands. “And anyway—sure, he redeemed himself, but he had to die to get there. We can’t let that happen this time around. Not while he still has Dean.”
Cas gives a grave nod. “We don’t know that he can ‘die’ again anyway. He may not be the kind of angry spirit you’re used to, but he is already dead.”
“And we got nothing to burn.” It sounds hopeless.
After a moment, a thought occurs to Sam.
That case with the college kids, a couple months back, before the shit hit the fan with Dean. The one with Andrew Silver’s ghost riding around on the wi-fi. They didn’t need bones to burn, in the end—just the voice of the one person who could get through to him.
But that just brings up its own set of problems. How do you persuade a guy who’s famous for being able to sow conflict wherever he goes to abandon whatever screwed-up revenge mission he’s on and leave this world behind? What was it the story said about him? The other one would provoke conflict between two brothers, even while they were at their most amicable.
Huh.
Brothers. The other one.
Sam taps on the touchpad of the laptop. The screen blinks back to life, bringing up Professor Birch’s translation. The extract from Evans’ diary.
Last Wednesday the 23rd January Mr. PARRY and I had the Misfortune of encountering a Spirit, much like the Mountain Ghost describ’d by the Rev. JONES in his Treatise. This Spirit had caused great Mischief in & around BEULAH, & we set out to subdue it using the proper Method as described by Mr. PARRY. Our first attempt proved unsuccessful, & we were forced to retreat, Mr. PARRY sustaining an injury to his Shoulder.
We returned Yesterday, with a Summoning & Binding Incantation supplied to me on the Occasion of my Departure by my Friend Mr. MORGANNWG. Our Success in binding the Spirit being assured, Mr. PARRY pass’d on the Object in which it is bound to his Associate, a Member of a Certain Society who has promiss’d to secure the Object. I leave Tomorrow for…
Sam lets his gaze drift to the bottom of the page, where the professor has added a note. The incantation, translated and written out phonetically in the original words. Looks like she figured it might be useful even before Sam got in touch.
They can’t use it to bind Efnisien again, but according to the diary, the first part of it is for summoning.
Maybe they can use it to get hold of someone who can talk Efnisien round. The other brother—the one who could get two armies to sit down and sing kumbaya.
“Sam?” Cas is looking at him. “Have you found something?”
Sam pictures Dean’s face again, his eyes lit up with unearthly silver.
He looks up and nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. We’ve got a plan.”
Chapter 4
Author:
anactoriaCharacters: Dean, Sam, Cas, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Animal cruelty.
Word count: 23,000
Summary: It’s supposed to be a routine hunt. A few farm animals mutilated, a few towns over. It sounds like the work of some two-bit demon—just another day at the office for two experienced hunters and an angel.
But this case is closer to home than it seems. Before long, Dean is in the clutches of a dangerous spirit, and Sam and Cas must try to end an ancient family feud before the whole town—and Dean—gets caught in the crossfire.
“What just happened?”
Sam’s voice comes out hoarse. He feels half-deaf, like in the aftermath of an explosion. Cas stands over Spalls’ unconscious body, looking down at it like he expects it to sit up and offer him an explanation.
After a moment, Cas looks up, and his expression hardens, eyes turning dark and determined.
Sam gets it. This was already personal, but now it’s a different kind of personal.
He fumbles for his cellphone, brings up Dean’s number, and presses Call. There isn’t much chance he’ll pick up, but it’s worth a try. Maybe he’ll hear the ringtone: if Dean is still anywhere nearby, it might give them a clue.
It doesn’t. Dean’s voicemail message kicks in just in time for him to look over and see Cas frowning, stooping to pick something off of Spalls’ chest.
A white feather. It phosphoresces faintly in the darkness. Silver. He holds it out to Sam.
Sam heads over there. He takes it, holds it up to inspect—then hears a groan somewhere near his feet.
He crouches and presses two fingers to the pulse point on Spalls’ neck. It takes him a couple seconds, but he finds it. Faint and sluggish, but there. Spalls’ breathing is shallow. No visible injuries, but he looks like he needs a doctor, stat.
“Okay,” Sam says. “I’m gonna have to get this guy to a hospital.”
Cas nods. “I’ll search the area.”
“Meet me back at the motel. Half an hour.” Sam ducks under Spalls’ arm and straightens up, just about managing to get the guy upright. He’s all dead weight. Moving unconscious people is a way bigger pain in the ass when there’s only one of you. “Actually,” he begins, “do you think you could—”
Cas is already gone. Sam sighs and heaves Spalls toward the car.
He drops Spalls outside of the E.R. Honestly, Sam feels bad for the guy. He’s probably just lost his job, at least one of his friends now thinks he’s crazy, and he might well have a police record in his near future. And then there’s the horses. Sam had Bones for long enough to know that animals can feel as much like family as anybody else.
Easiest kind to have, sometimes. They don’t judge your life choices, don’t snipe about you not caring as much as they do, don’t toss you out on your ass because you don’t want to be their Mini-Me. They recognize that you both speak different languages and don’t try to fight about it anyway.
Sam pulls away from the kerb as soon as he hears a shout from the direction of the hospital, and puts his foot down.
Civilian casualty dealt with. Now he’s got more important things to worry about.
Back at the motel room, he curses under his breath as he waits for his laptop to boot up, or for Cas to show up with any news. Everything feels so slow.
It’s always this way when Dean’s in trouble. It’s like some part of Sam’s brain knows that he isn’t up to the job; that he isn’t really a protector; that someplace deep down, he’s still the boy who turns everything he touches to ash. That’s been true more than once. He’s tried drowning the knowledge under revenge, tried running away from it, and none of it worked. It always comes back to this feeling, like those nightmares where he knows something terrible is about to happen and he has to stop it, but his limbs are weighted down with lead and moving is like swimming through molasses so he can’t even scream or thrash about in panic.
This is real, and so Sam swallows down his dread. Tells himself this will be one of the times when he is up to the job. He’s only just gotten used to Dean not being in danger. No way is he losing his brother again.
He reaches into his pocket while he waits, and pulls out the white feather Cas found in the clearing.
Under the motel room lights, it doesn’t glow anymore. There’s still something unearthly about it, though. The way colors seem to shift within it. The way it holds the light.
Sam runs a finger along the edge of the feather. Cautiously, like some part of his brain expects it to be sharp. It’s soft, though, like it’s been plucked from the wing of some giant bird.
These creatures aren’t angels. So what does it mean?
He runs over the scene in the woods again. The woman. She had a bird sitting on her shoulder.
Sam tries to piece it together in his mind, running through his mental inventory for stories that fit. Egyptian, maybe? They’ve run into pissed-off old gods before now. But Sam didn’t recognize the woman, or either of her brothers, from any pantheon he knows about. Odin’s sometimes depicted with ravens, but Sam’s pretty sure he’d know if they were tangling with him again.
Then there’s the whole thing where birds act as guides to the land of the dead. Shows up in all kinds of mythology.
Sam pushes that one aside, not ready to think about it just yet. Spalls was still alive when whatever was possessing him checked out. That means that, wherever Dean is, he’s alive, too. He has to be.
“Sam.”
Sam blinks and turns around in his chair. It’s Cas, standing in the middle of the motel room, a defeated hunch to his shoulders.
“So,” Sam says. “Nothing, huh?”
“Nothing.” Cas sighs and sinks down onto the edge of the nearest bed, looking at his hands. For all that he’s mojo-ed up again, it’s a human gesture. A weary one. He sits there for a moment, brow creased in thought, before looking up and meeting Sam’s eyes. “I’m worried about him,” he confesses, then.
Sam manages a short, mirthless laugh. “Well, yeah. I’d say that’s reasonable.”
Cas gives an impatient little headshake. “That’s not what I’m talking about.” He pauses. “Though the current situation is… concerning. I meant—more generally.”
“Yeah.” Sam sighs and scrubs a hand across his eyes. “Yeah, I know. It’s like—I don’t know, man. Like the whole thing with the Mark and the being-a-demon and then the actually deciding he wanted to live—it’s like none of that happened.”
Cas looks at him gravely. “Do you think he’d be this hard on himself if it hadn’t?”
He’s right, of course. Dean’s whole self-loathing I’m-good-for-nothing-but-killing-monsters schtick was bound to kick back in as soon as he had a moment to think without imminent death or imminent demonhood hanging over his head. It figures that he’d weigh up all the crap he did as a demon, all the crap that happened under the influence of the Mark, and decide that it outweighs all the good he’s ever done. That he doesn’t deserve a life after all.
Not even the shitty one they already have, if his determination to run half-cocked after Spalls was anything to go by.
“I don’t know, man.” Sam puts his head in his hands. “I thought he’d finally started to figure it out, you know? That if we do this, maybe we should do it because we want to. Not because it’s what our dad taught us and we don’t know how to do anything else anymore.”
“And you, Sam?” He lifts his head and finds Cas looking at him with earnest curiosity, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “What do you want?”
Sam’s saved from having to answer by a ding from his laptop. He pulls it toward him, feeling his stomach flip when he sees the name on the screen.
“It’s from the professor,” he explains, in reply to Cas’s questioning look. “Maybe she’s found something.”
From: BirchJ2@swansea.ac.uk
To: sw7152839@gmail.com
Dear Sam,
Just received your email. Since you’re a friend of Bobby Singer’s, I assume we’re on the same page (also, it’s 1:30 in the morning over here), so I’ll get down to business.
I haven’t *seen* anything like the artefact you photographed before, but I have heard of it. I’ll get to that later; what’s more important is the text on the figurine. You’re right in thinking it’s Old Welsh; here’s my best attempt at a translation. I’m afraid some of the text is too scuffed to read.
Here bound;
The monster, the hero
Whose sister broke her heart from sorrow
Whose brother is buried at London
Who saved our [illegible] from Matholwch
Who died in repentance
Who returned to wreak havoc
Who cannot die again
Here bound from the light and from the world
From the songs of birds and the running of the horses
From the love of [illegible]
From staining the good earth with blood
It scans rather better in the original, as I’m sure you can imagine. Anyway, the figurine and the inscription make it fairly clear what we’re dealing with here. I’ll forgive you for not being familiar with the lore—honestly, I don’t get many calls about it—but it’s the story of Branwen, Daughter of Llyr, from the Mabinogion. Here’s an online translation: http://www.mabinogi.net/branwen.htm (‘Bendigeidfran’, just so you know, translates as ‘Brân the blessed’. He’s sometimes just called ‘Brân’ in other sources.)
Sam clicks through before reading the rest of the email.
Bendigeidfran, son of Llyr , the story begins, was the crowned King of this Island, and exalted with the crown of London. One afternoon he was at Harlech in Ardudwy, a court of his. Seated on the rock of Harlech above the ocean were Bendigeidfran with his brother Manawydan son of Llyr; his two half brothers from his mother's side (Nisien and Efnisien); and such noblemen about them as was befitting around a king. His two maternal half-brothers were the sons of Euroswydd by his mother Penarddun daughter of Beli son of Mynogan. One of these young men was a good young man: he would make peace between two hosts, even when they were at their most incensed - that was Nisien. The other one would provoke conflict between two brothers, even while they were at their most amicable.
Well, that’s a whole lot of brothers. Sam skims a little. The King of Ireland comes to court to say hello, asks for the hand of their sister Branwen in marriage. They get hitched—no mention of the two half-brothers being invited to the wedding. It’s the next part that makes Sam sit up in his chair.
Efnisien, the brother who likes to start fights, finds out that his sister has been married off without anybody telling him.
Then one day, the story goes on, there was Efnisien - that quarrelsome man we spoke of above, coming across the billets of the horses of Matholwch. He asked to whom the horses be-longed.
'These are the horses of Matholwch king of Ireland' they said.
'What are they doing here?' he demanded.
'The king of Ireland is here, and he has slept with your sister Branwen. These are his horses.'
'So this is what they have done with a girl as good as her, my own sister - giving her away without my consent! They could not have insulted me more!'
With that he started striking up at the horses. He sliced their ears back to their heads, and their tails to their backs - and wherever he could get a grip on their eyelids, he would cut these back to the bone. And the horses were mutilated thus, to the extent that no further use could be got from the horses.
The grotesque horse figurine sits on the desk, turned a sickly bluish color in the light from the screen. Sam picks it up, holding it gingerly between his fingers. There’s a crack through the script near the end of the binding spell. That must be from when he dropped it.
Its ears and tail are missing, too. He’d assumed they’d gotten snapped off—a long time ago, probably, for the stumps to have worn so smooth—but now he sees that they were never there. Its eyes and mouth are stained with faded red.
Doesn’t leave much question who the binding spell is talking about.
Sam reads over the rest of the story. Branwen has a son with her new husband—but the King, offended by Efnisien’s stunt, turns on her. He starts treating Branwen like a scullery maid, not a queen. Then worse: he locks her away and has her beaten.
She’s resourceful, though. She tames a bird, luring it to her window with crumbs from the kitchen and a lot of patience, and trains it to talk. When she’s certain it knows what to say, she sends it over the sea to her brothers.
They get the message, and the whole family sails for Ireland with an army. There’s a whole lot of subterfuge and politics, and then Efnisien does something way more stomach-churning than animal cruelty: he throws his infant nephew into the fire.
After that, everything erupts into battle. It only ends when Efnisien sacrifices himself, putting an end to the war that he started.
There’s no mention of where he’s buried, of what happened to his bones.
But he’s here right now. Not in Ireland. If this is Efnisien’s angry spirit they’re dealing with, then he isn’t tied to a gravesite.
“What do you have?” Cas is squinting at the back of the laptop like he might be able to x-ray vision his way through it.
“Here.” Sam hands it over. “Looks like the Professor found our guy. Sounds like a real piece of work. I’m just not sure what his tether is.”
He picks up the horse figurine for another look while Cas reads. A little gingerly, like touching it might burn his fingertips or set off some chain reaction. It’s smooth to the touch, room temperature. The inscription is scored into the wood, the grooves worn smooth under his hands. It actually feels lighter than it looks–like it’s hollow, almost. Whatever power there was in this thing, it’s long gone.
Anyway, this can’t be the object Efnisien is tied to. He was bound to it, which means he was already running around doing his blood-soaked thing when whoever did the binding managed to catch him. He got away from the bunker without any problems, as far as Sam can tell, and he’s been on the run ever since. Plus, his brothers and sister showed up when he called them. There weren’t any magical objects involved. It’s like they can all move freely.
Which means Option Number One for getting rid of an angry spirit is off the table. They’ve got nothing to burn.
Sam sighs and sets down the figurine. It looks back at him out of angry, scarlet-rimmed eyes.
He frowns at it. Sounds out the words of the inscription, though they don’t make any sense to him. If there were some way they could recreate the spell…
“Sam,” Cas says. “Who’s John Evans?”
Sam blinks back at him. “Who?”
“The postscript. Here.” Cas hands back the laptop, and Sam remembers he didn’t read the whole of the professor’s email. He scrolls down to the bottom.
PS. There’s one other thing that struck me about the inscription on your statuette. I’m no graphologist, but the handwriting looks very familiar. Of course, the dialect on the figurine is much older, but it seems similar to that of an eighteenth-century manuscript I’ve been working on; the journal of a Welshman called John Evans who travelled to the New World and went to work for the Spanish. There’s a short passage from 1793 where he talks about encountering a ‘spirit.’ Of course, in those days, use of the phrase was a bit woollier: ‘spirit’ could mean anything from an angel to one of the Tylwyth Teg. Still, it’s an interesting coincidence…
Sam grabs his phone. “What time is it in the UK right now?”
Cas blinks at him. “How does that answer my question?”
“Never mind.” There’s a contact number in the email signature—different than the one on the website. Could be the professor’s home number. Sam punches it in and hits Call.
There’s a couple seconds silence, and then the phone rings. And rings.
We’re not available now. Please leave a message after the tone.
Sam sighs, hangs up, and calls again.
Ring. Ring.
“Hello?”
He has to hold back a laugh of relief. “Hello,” he says, once he’s sure he can trust his voice to work. “Is that, uh, Professor Birch?”
“Yes.” The voice still sounds half-asleep, but not exactly surprised. “Is this—Mr Winchester?”
“Sam. Please.” He hesitates. “Listen, uh, I’m really sorry to wake you at—whatever time in the morning it is with you. But we have a situation over here, and I really think that diary you mentioned might help. Do you have—a scan, or a transcript of it, or anything at all like that?”
“I’ll go one better.” She still sounds tired, but Sam can hear the smile in her voice. “I was working on my translation when I got your email, actually. I’ll send you what I have.”
“Thank you. Really. You don’t know—just, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” says Professor Birch. “And—Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“Good luck.” Sam isn’t sure if it’s supposed to be an encouragement or a warning.
He thinks of Dean’s face, of eyes lit up with silvery light, and he shivers.
It’s dark, and Dean can’t get out.
He can almost see the world. Almost hear it, almost smell it. The wet earth under the trees; the sickly moon; the cold night air biting through his shirt. He knows all of those things are there, but he’s wrapped in a darkness that clings to his mind like cobwebs and he can’t reach them.
Funny. He’s been demonized, vamped, killed in a dozen new and exciting ways, but he’s never actually gotten possessed before.
It isn’t like he imagined. Chained to a comet, his ass. It’s like being locked away in a crappy little panic room, knowing there are monsters running around inside your home trashing the place, and not being able to get out even though you’re beating your fists bloody on the door. He wants to yell but can’t, struggling against the darkness, trying to reach all those things he can almost see.
Then, worse, even the almosts are gone. It’s just black.
Dean doesn’t know how long it lasts.
He just knows that when he comes back to himself, he isn’t trapped in that dark web anymore. He blinks his eyes to be sure, straining them to figure out where he is. There isn’t much light, but he can make out the wet sheen of the rock wall; a faint suggestion of light far off to his right. It’s cold, and he can hear something dripping.
Is there a cave system around here anywhere? Or maybe he’s in an old sewer tunnel?
He’s lying on his back on the wet floor, so he damn well hopes not.
Dean checks himself out, like you do when you come around from unconsciousness and aren’t sure if you’ve been injured. Wiggles his fingers and toes, moves his limbs gingerly before he curls up into a sitting position.
He’s aching like he just went twelve rounds with Tyson, but nothing’s broken, and his head doesn’t hurt, so probably no concussion. Always a plus.
Dean lets himself breathe out. He knows he doesn’t have time to sit around—he needs to get out of here, get back to Sammy and Cas—but he gives himself a couple seconds to feel the relief. He cracks his knuckles just to know that his body is back under his own command. Watches a drop of moisture run down the tunnel wall, because at least it’s his eyes that are seeing it, no outside interference.
There’s a bigger question, though; one that takes over from relief the second he’s had time to feel it and opens up a pit of worry in his stomach. The thing that took him brought him here for a reason. Said it was gonna kick his ass for interfering in the affairs of—whoever these glowing douchebags are. Now, that sounds like something big is going down.
Big question number two is, where are Glowing Douchebag’s brothers and sister? If one of them can possess people, stands to reason that the others can, too. When Dean got taken, Sam was still there. Cas, too—but he wasn’t quick enough to stop Dean from being grabbed.
The others aren’t here, but that doesn’t mean they’re not in trouble.
Dean gets to his feet. Takes a step toward the light. And then—
Then he can’t.
Dread clutches at his insides as the dark begins to close over his vision again. He tries to wrench himself out of it, but his limbs refuse to obey him. He looks down at his hands and finds them glowing faintly in the dark tunnel, silver light leaking out from under his fingernails.
Not so fast.
Dean doesn’t hear the voice so much as feel it, a vibration inside his skull.
There was another voice he used to hear like that, not so long ago. One that seemed to come from deep within his self and from somewhere totally alien, both at the same time. There was always this kind of under-layer to it—like there were sounds in there just outside the realm of hearing, on a frequency almost out of range. Sounds that Dean found himself straining to hear, even though he really didn’t want to.
There’s something of that in this voice, too. Dean doesn’t feel it burning in his skull like the voice of the Mark did, but when it stops, he imagines he hears the screams of animals ringing in his ears.
He swallows hard. “What are you?” he grits out. Then feels kind of surprised at the fact his voice works. Though it’s not like there’s anybody to hear him down here, wherever here is.
A moment of silence. No voice inside his head, but the darkness still pulses in his field of vision. The thing isn’t letting him go.
A brother, the voice says, then. I am a brother.
“Not what I meant, and you know it.”
Oh. The voice turns sly, knowing. You want to know why I’m still here. Why I walk the earth when I am so long dead. Why I have not passed on to the realm of—Dean doesn’t catch the next word; it isn’t English, he doesn’t think—with my brothers and sister.
Still here, long dead, hasn’t ‘passed on’. “You’re a spirit.”
That’s what you call us now. The voice is slow, thoughtful. We are souls, of a kind. Our mother was human, anyway. But we don’t belong to Heaven, nor Hell, nor wholly to the realm of man. Not to anything from your cosmology. Angels, demons—we’re older than that.
There’s a streak of contempt in the voice, one that sets Dean’s teeth on edge. “Yeah, sure,” he says. “I get it. You’re a unique snowflake, just like all your brothers.”
And my sister, the voice insists, and Dean actually feels something surge through him. Anger; longing; white-hot and quicksilver. Not his own. It’s a little like an amphetamine rush—heady but false, because you know the energy is artificial.
Like the Mark, and not like it, because Dean never could convince himself that none of that was him.
He swallows. “Sure,” he says. He blinks when he realizes he’s holding his hands out. A placating gesture; one he uses when he needs to regroup and he’s playing peacemaker for a few minutes. Maybe Glowing Douchebag—Glowing Prehistoric Ghost Douchebag?—lost control for a second there when he lost his temper. “And your sister. I’m sure she’s awesome.”
She was mine, the voice says, tight with bitterness, and Dean’s fists clench of their own accord. She was mine, and she left, and now she’ll never forgive me.
“Okay,” Dean says. He feels a twinge of relief at the suggestion that maybe Glowing Douchebag’s siblings aren’t a part of whatever he’s got going on here. If they aren’t on his side, then maybe they won’t go after Sam and Cas.
Maybe they’ll come after Glowing Douchebag, and if that happens, Dean’s gonna be right in the crossfire, but what the hell. He’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.
“Look,” he tries. “I’m gonna sit back down, okay? Why don’t you, uh, tell me what went down? With your sister, I mean.”
He racks his brain, trying to picture the woman in the group of weird-ass glowy spirits. He didn’t exactly get much time to commit them to memory. She had long hair, and she was wearing some Game of Thrones-style cloak thing. There was a bird perched on her shoulder. Looked like a crow, only it was white as snow.
Dean can’t remember her face, though. He can’t remember her face, and that disturbs him more than it should. Then he figures out that maybe it isn’t him who’s disturbed by it.
Branwen, the voice in his head says, after a long pause. It means ‘white raven’, in the old tongue. It suited her. She was so beautiful. So rare.
The note of pride that creeps into the voice is unmistakable. “Let me guess,” Dean says. “She was the baby of the family?”
A laugh echoes inside his skull. Yes. For a moment, the voice softens. We were always together. The others never had time. Branwen was the only person who ever looked happy to see me.
“Sounds like you two had something special.” Dean means for it to be sarcastic, but it comes out more thoughtful than that.
He doesn’t want to get it, but he does. Back when they were kids, before Sam got old enough to start planning for Stanford and normality and getting the hell out of Dodge—well, Dean remembers how that felt.
The teachers at whatever school they were attending that month would take one look at Dean and decide he was trouble. The other kids wouldn’t bother him, because he could throw a punch and talk shit with the best of them, and maybe some of them would even think he was kind of cool—but he never made friends. You couldn’t invite friends back to a crappy motel room, offer them boxed mac ‘n’ cheese and marshmallow fluff for dinner, and shrug when they asked where your parents were. So Dean kept his distance, and the other kids did the same.
But at the end of the day, when it was just the two of them? Sam would run to meet him at the school gates, and it felt like coming home, even though they didn’t have one. They were the only people in the school—in the state, hell, in the world—who got it.
We did, Glowing Douchebag says, breaking in on Dean’s thoughts. We had a world of our own. We roamed the mountains together. We were free.
“Sounds peachy.” Dean pauses. “That’s the thing, though, ain’t it? Even if you managed to talk her into joining up with whatever the hell you’re trying to pull here? This isn’t your world anymore. It’s changed.”
It won’t matter, Glowing Douchebag insists. If she is with me, then we will be home.
“C’mon. Everybody knows you can’t go home again.” Dean determinedly doesn’t picture the mess in the bunker, after his last spell of Mark-induced crazy. Doesn’t think about the nights he wakes up smelling kerosene and blood.
We are not everybody, Glowing Douchebag says. He sounds indignant. That’s a good thing. If he’s arguing with Dean, he isn’t thinking about summoning his siblings again, or swapping out animal cruelty for actual murder, or whatever the hell else he’s got going on here.
So, “Yeah yeah,” Dean says. “You’re real special. That’s why you’re running around slashing the ears off of horses instead of ruling Mordor or wherever the hell you come from.”
There’s a pause.
We are the children of gods! Glowing Douchebag snaps. But his anger doesn’t hold, the conviction draining out of his tone as he goes on: The world was ours. But my family rejected me. My brothers only ever spoke to me to scold, to ask why I couldn’t be more like Nisien.
Dean blinks. “Like ninja-who now?”
Nisien. My twin brother. They used to say he could step onto the field of battle and talk two armies into sitting down and breaking bread. But I never knew how to make peace.
“What, and Mr. Perfect Brother Guy didn’t help you out?”
He tried. The gods know he tried. He could never understand. He always looked so… disappointed. Then he stopped trying, just like the rest of them. Glowing Douchebag’s voice hardens. By the end, it was only when I brought down chaos on their heads that they ever looked my way. Small wonder that I learned to seek out war.
Dean gives an involuntary snort. Yeah, he knows what it’s like to seek out war. And he knows what it’s like not to want it, and he knows it doesn’t sound like this. It isn’t my fault, they never loved me enough, cry me a goddamn river.
The Mark might’ve been in the driver’s seat more often than Dean was, by the end, but he never forgot that he asked for the damn thing in the first place. Everything he did was on him, under the influence or not. His choice; his cross to bear.
He’s pretty sure he said that, once.
He scowls. “Yeah, poor you,” he says. “Never heard a murdering asshole try to pull that one before.”
There’s a pause, and when Glowing Douchebag speaks again, there’s something softer about his voice. Regretful, almost.
I would stop, he says. If it didn’t mean being without them.
“You’ve been without them for a couple millennia, give or take,” Dean points out. “What the hell difference does it make?”
They will have to stop me, Glowing Douchebag says. This time, they will have to stop me. They’ll have to come and face me. She will have to face me.
Well, that sounds way too close to ‘evil masterplan’ for comfort. Fucking A.
“Stop you from doing what?” Dean asks.
Silence. Well, it was worth a shot.
He sighs, and tries another tack. “You ever think that maybe your family are a bunch of dicks?” he asks. “If they wouldn’t help you go straight? Hell, if they wouldn’t even try to forgive you?”
The words ring hollow, even in his own ears. Especially in his own ears.
There’s a reason that when he closes his eyes at night, Sam’s face is the last thing he sees. Not bloodied and dead-eyed, the way it used to be in his nightmares before he lost the Mark—but the way it looked in those last few seconds before the spell took hold. The horror in Sam’s eyes. The way he’d looked at Dean like he wasn’t really Dean anymore. Cas on the floor behind him, sprawled gracelessly where Dean knocked him on his ass, real fear written on his face.
They saw what he really is, and there’s no making that go away. Now, every time Sam broaches the subject of changing things, it feels like he’s taking a step closer to the door.
Same thing when Cas tells them, It’s quiet out there, and Dean can’t help wondering if that means he’s getting ready to haul ass back upstairs and beg the rest of the angels to let him come home. When he sneaks out of the bunker after dark to sit cross-legged in the grass and pray or meditate or commune with the stars or whatever it is he does. Dean can never convince himself Cas will still be around come morning.
What the hell is Dean’s life, without them by his side? Just getting older, drunker and more hopeless until even Crowley stops taking his calls, and a werewolf or a road accident or his own shot-to-hell liver sends him to an early grave.
Keeps him up nights, sometimes. So they saved his ass from the Mark—but what the hell for?
He doesn’t say any of that out loud. After a moment, Glowing Douchebag’s voice sounds again.
They’re my family, he says. I’m the only one here who may speak ill of them.
Dean laughs, short and bitter. “Yeah, man,” he says. “Yeah, that’s what I’d say, too.”
Sam looks up from Professor Birch’s notes, eyes hurting from the hours he’s spent staring at the computer screen. He’s gone over the diary entry a dozen times, had Cas take a look, too, but there doesn’t seem to be any way around it. They can’t bind Efnisien without a vessel—as in, a figurine like the creepy mutilated horse thing from the bunker. One that isn’t broken.
He sighs and shoves hair out of his eyes. Reaches for his coffee and finds it stone cold.
Cas looks across at him. “What do you have?”
“Whole lot of nothing.” Sam slumps, lets his head fall into his hands, and finds it too heavy to lift again. “This guy Evans managed to bind Efnisien to this.” He pokes the horse figurine. “But we can’t reuse it now that it’s broken. And there’s no info on how you make a new one.” His shoulders sag. “Never thought I’d say it, but I actually wish Rowena was still taking my calls right now.”
Cas makes a brief moue of disgust. Turns back to the horse figurine, frowning. “I read the story,” he says. “Efnisien redeemed himself, at least at the end.”
“Yeah, and then when the rest of the family didn’t hail him as a hero, he snapped right back into psycho mode.” Sam looks down at his hands. “And anyway—sure, he redeemed himself, but he had to die to get there. We can’t let that happen this time around. Not while he still has Dean.”
Cas gives a grave nod. “We don’t know that he can ‘die’ again anyway. He may not be the kind of angry spirit you’re used to, but he is already dead.”
“And we got nothing to burn.” It sounds hopeless.
After a moment, a thought occurs to Sam.
That case with the college kids, a couple months back, before the shit hit the fan with Dean. The one with Andrew Silver’s ghost riding around on the wi-fi. They didn’t need bones to burn, in the end—just the voice of the one person who could get through to him.
But that just brings up its own set of problems. How do you persuade a guy who’s famous for being able to sow conflict wherever he goes to abandon whatever screwed-up revenge mission he’s on and leave this world behind? What was it the story said about him? The other one would provoke conflict between two brothers, even while they were at their most amicable.
Huh.
Brothers. The other one.
Sam taps on the touchpad of the laptop. The screen blinks back to life, bringing up Professor Birch’s translation. The extract from Evans’ diary.
Last Wednesday the 23rd January Mr. PARRY and I had the Misfortune of encountering a Spirit, much like the Mountain Ghost describ’d by the Rev. JONES in his Treatise. This Spirit had caused great Mischief in & around BEULAH, & we set out to subdue it using the proper Method as described by Mr. PARRY. Our first attempt proved unsuccessful, & we were forced to retreat, Mr. PARRY sustaining an injury to his Shoulder.
We returned Yesterday, with a Summoning & Binding Incantation supplied to me on the Occasion of my Departure by my Friend Mr. MORGANNWG. Our Success in binding the Spirit being assured, Mr. PARRY pass’d on the Object in which it is bound to his Associate, a Member of a Certain Society who has promiss’d to secure the Object. I leave Tomorrow for…
Sam lets his gaze drift to the bottom of the page, where the professor has added a note. The incantation, translated and written out phonetically in the original words. Looks like she figured it might be useful even before Sam got in touch.
They can’t use it to bind Efnisien again, but according to the diary, the first part of it is for summoning.
Maybe they can use it to get hold of someone who can talk Efnisien round. The other brother—the one who could get two armies to sit down and sing kumbaya.
“Sam?” Cas is looking at him. “Have you found something?”
Sam pictures Dean’s face again, his eyes lit up with unearthly silver.
He looks up and nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. We’ve got a plan.”
