Archive of Our Own

It's still dark when Sam's eyes snap open. He looks at the clock on the nightstand, though he doesn't need to. Four-thirty on the nose. The dream is more reliable than any alarm clock Sam's ever owned.

Winchester Reveille: Lights blazing, orders ringing out, two small boys snapping out Yessir! as they scramble to do Dad's bidding, even before they're fully awake. The dream captures it in every detail -- or maybe his memories of the mornings they broke camp have changed to fit the dream.

Since Dad isn't looming over him and yelling to get his ass out of bed, he lies there a moment, listening to the soft, even sound of Jess's breathing. How did I get to be so lucky?

After a moment, Sam slips out of bed and pads downstairs in bare feet. The coffeemaker is rasping its last as he reaches the kitchen, and Sam pours himself a cup for now, and fills his stainless steel travel mug.

"Pour me some too, will you?" Jess asks from the doorway.

Sam looks toward her. She reminds him of those sleepy-eyed boys from his dream.

"You should go back to bed," he says. But he pours her coffee because he knows how this will go.

"I'll make you some breakfast first."

"I'll get something on the road, Jess. You should sleep. Once Pip is up, you won't have a chance." He splashes half and half into her coffee and hands it over as if he's not even making this argument.

"You are not eating some greasy spoon crap for breakfast. Go shower. It'll be ready when you're done."

Sam steps forward, sliding his hands under her robe, skimming them over her hips and pulling her close. "Love you, Jess," he says into her hair.

Jess lifts her face up toward him for a kiss. "Love you too. So tell me again why you're doing this by yourself?"

"The people I have to talk to -- it's generally kind of a rough crowd." If you can call a collection of loners a crowd. "I'd rather keep you and Pip clear until I'm sure who we're dealing with."

"Are you sure you want to go near them?"

"If anyone's got answers, it's most likely them," he says. "I can handle them." Kissing her temple, he releases her and climbs the stairs to shower.

After he emerges, dressed in jeans and a crisp, white shirt, he looks in on Mattie. She's sound asleep, with her thumb jammed in her mouth. Nothing wakes her short of a sonic boom, so he gently tugs her wrist and the thumb disengages with a soft pop. Sam touches her hair, finer and paler than cornsilk. "Love you, Pipsqueak," he whispers. "I'll see you soon. Angels are watching over you."

***

Rush hour's starting up as Sam reaches the city limits, but the lanes of bumper-to-bumper headlights are all on the inbound side. Today he doesn't need traffic and weather, so instead of the morning drive-time "zoo," he's jacked in his iPod. He drives one-handed juggling his travel mug and one of the chocolate chip cookies from the Zip-loc Sam had tucked in his overnight bag.

"You know these are why I married you," he'd said when she packed them into the plastic bag.

She'd paused by his chair, combing her fingernails through his hair. "Of course I do. It was all part of my nefarious plan."

It had taken an effort of will not to push back his departure for an hour or two to take Jess upstairs and say a proper goodbye. But the knowledge that he wanted to be four states away by this time tomorrow prompted him to get up, put his plate and cup in the dishwasher, and sling his bag in the car.

He'd expected this trip to kick up some ghosts of memory, but it mostly reminds him of how things are different. Dad had stayed off the interstates for the most part, sticking to the blue highways that linked small towns to one another. Sam had never had the front seat view, not unless Dean was stretched out in the back, bleeding, and on those occasions Sam's eyes weren't on the road.

Dean, bleeding.

Maybe this trip will bring him answers about Dean, too, and more about Dad. He's had nothing but imagination to fill in the missing places these last seven years, but imagination is detailed enough. Maybe the truth about how they died will be less horrific than the images Sam's brain has supplied.

***

It's a couple hours past closing time when Sam finally finds himself outside the roadhouse. The parking lot is empty and the lights are out except for one shining down on the signboard out front that reads

NIGHTHAWK BAR
BEST DAMN JUKEBOX IN THE M DWEST

Unable to suppress a grin, Sam imagines Dean swaggering in to test that claim. Better be plenty of Led Zep and Van Halen, both Winter boys, some Muddy Waters and some Bonnie Raitt from back when she sang raunchy blues instead of the sappy shit.

Sam turns into the gravel parking lot only long enough to turn around and head for the Holiday Inn he'd spotted. A hunter's bar is not a place where he wants to look like he's snooping, no matter how curious he is. From a quick glance as he turns his Volvo around, it looks exactly like what it is -- a roughhewn roadhouse with zero pretensions (except maybe about the jukebox; he'll have to check that tomorrow in memory of Dean).

As he waits at the exit for a car to pass by, he feels a prickle at the back of his neck as if he's being watched. Sam flicks a look in the rear view, seeing -- or imagining he sees -- a slight movement in a darkened window.

Twin white lights in the road change to red pinpoints, and Sam pulls out in their wake.

***

When he's settled in at the Holiday Inn, Sam sends a quick text to Jess to let her know he's arrived safely and is about to catch a few hours of sleep. Briefly he considers checking for messages and emails from the office, but the king bed exerts a greater attraction.

It takes a while to switch off his brain. With the blackout curtains pulled, the room is pitch black except for the faint glow of the LED clock. Sam stares into the inky darkness above him, praying.

He's made it this far; surely that must be an answer to prayer. After Dad and Dean, he had no contacts from his old life, just a few vague memories and first names. The one he'd been able to track down was Pastor Jim -- or his church, at least. Sam had been dismayed to discover that Pastor Jim has been dead a few years -- right around the same time Dad died. The minister who passed this news along sounded vaguely disapproving, but he offered a phone number, which had led to up the information about a man named Rick who ran a roadhouse frequented by hunters. Rick, he was told, had a vast amount of knowledge about demons, weres and unquiet spirits, and could often find out what he didn't know.

The last thing Sam had ever wanted to do was walk back into that world, with the broken, obsessive people it attracted. But to keep Mattie safe, he'd walk into hell itself.

***

It could be any working class tavern, really, judging by the parking lot. There's nothing about the dusty or mud-splattered vehicles that calls them out as the property of hunters. Yet to Sam's practiced eyes the tells are there. Trucks with gun racks and heavy tool lockers, gas guzzling beaters with the acceleration of a jackrabbit and enough trunk space to hold an arsenal.

Sam wonders just how much firepower is sitting in those trunks and lockers. He's pretty damn sure without looking that his is the only car equipped with a child seat in the back.

He heads inside the tavern, pausing inside the doorway to let his eyes adjust. As he figured, he's being scrutinized by the bar's patrons, his clothes, his bearing and his movements studied. He'd dressed down for this, putting on the tee and jeans he wears for washing the car or doing yard work. They aren't threadbare -- Sam has worn too many hand-me-downs and thrift store castoffs in his day to wear tattered jeans and tees. He approaches the bar and eases himself onto a creaky stool, ordering what's on tap. He waits until the beer is sitting in front of him, condensation beginning to bead on the glass, before he says, "Is Rick around, by any chance?"

The barkeep, whose face is seamed and his hair the color of dull steel, looks at him impassively. "He's tied up right now."

"You expecting him before long?"

"Hard to say. Hang around long enough, and he'll be available."

Nodding, Sam pushes a bill across the bar and picks up his glass to go inspect the juke.

It's pretty much as advertised, at least by Dean Winchester standards. There's the Led Zep and Van Halen songs he'd have expected, along with Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way," Clapton's version of "Key to the HIghway," Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy," some tunes by Heart and by Living Colour.

Sam tends to be reluctant to fire up the jukebox in any unfamiliar bar when it's been silent, much less a hunter's bar. He'd never known Dean to let that stop him, though, so Sam feeds some dollars into the slot in his honor.

He instantly wishes he hadn't.

The long drive had already put him in a strange mood, stirring up memories of Dad and Dean. It's been over ten years since Sam last saw them, since the fight with Dad that had gone from screaming match to physical fight, with Dean trying to peel them off each other. Dean had taken an elbow to the face -- Sam's elbow, of course. Sprawled on the kitchen floor in that craphole apartment, he'd hissed in pain, glaring up at Sam with a combination of hurt, anger and betrayal that had nothing to do with the blow. "Sorry," Sam had stammered, sounding more pissed than penitent, then he'd taken up his bags and walked to the bus station alone.

Dad's been dead for eight years, Sam's only notice a cryptic postcard with a date and Dad's initials. And Dean -- well, he doesn't know. He'd dropped off the map maybe a year later, and the hunter who'd told him about this place had known nothing of Dean. Sam hopes that at least the two of them are at rest, that someone had been around to give Dean the hunter's funeral that he knows Dean surely gave Dad.

Sam doesn't regret breaking away. He wouldn't have Jess if he hadn't, or Pip, whom he loves so fiercely it makes his heart ache. He wouldn't have work that engages him, friends and colleagues he can be himself around without hiding too much.

The fact that Dad had been so dead set against Sam reaching for any of these things proved how obsessive and fucked up he'd become. Sam would've thought Dean would have wished him well, at least, but he'd drunk the Kool-Aid a long time before Sam left. He'd always been the good soldier Sam couldn't be.

Shoving his chair back with a screech of wood on scuffed wood floor, Sam reaches for his cellphone and heads for somewhere farther from the jukebox. He finds a hallway with a payphone, restrooms, and a door at the far end that says "Office."

Leaning against a wall, he thumbs the speed dial for home. Jess picks up on the second ring, greeting him with, "Hey, darling."

Before he can answer he hears Mattie piping up close by, echoing, "Hey, darling!"

Jess and Sam share a laugh, but Sam finds his eyes stinging at the same time. "Hey, sweetheart."

There's obviously a note in his voice, prompting Jess to ask, "Is everything okay?"

"This has kicked up more memories than I expected," he tells her. She knows more about his early life and his fucked-up family than he'd ever thought he would tell. "But I'm fine. I just needed to hear your voice."

"Did you find what you went for?"

"Not yet. I'm waiting to talk to a guy."

The door at the far end of the hallway swings inward, and a girl emerges, leaning a folding massage table against the wall and leaning back into the door to murmur something to a shadowed figure inside.

"Gotta go," Sam says. "I love you." He catches a quick flash of movement, a man's hand pinching the girl's ass.

The girl laughs softly just before the door closes on her, but the scene makes Sam angry. It's not bad enough she has to sell herself to this asshole -- Rick, he'd bet -- but she has to pretend it's okay with her to have him maul her afterward. She slings a laundry bag over her shoulder and picks up the portable table.

Slipping his phone in his pocket, Sam says, "Can I help carry anything?"

The girl smiles. "I'm fine, but you could catch the door for me."

He hurries to comply, and as she moves along the badly lit hallway toward the door, he sees she's not quite what he'd expected for an outcall happy-ending "massage" girl. Little makeup, a ponytail that can't be anything other than its natural color, a sandy blonde. She's wearing a tank top and some kind of yoga pants.

As she passes him, Sam draws breath to ask if she'd like help getting her equipment in the car, but her movements are so efficient it's clear she doesn't need any assistance. He stands in the sunlight a moment, watching her load the car and drive out, glad to be away from the smell of beer and the weird tension of a barroom full of mostly solitary hunters. But he came here for a purpose, and the sooner he accomplishes what he came for, the sooner he can get back to Jess and Mattie.

His second entrance is a near-rerun of the first -- eyes adapting to the dim barroom light, other patrons giving him the once over. Their scrutiny is briefer this time before they turn away in boredom. Even the near silence has dropped over the bar again, with the end of Sam's jukebox selections. Again he looks toward the bar to see if Rick has made an appearance, but it's just the barkeep. Sam repeats his approach and request for a beer. "Any idea when Rick might be untied?"

The guy gives him a look.

"You said he was tied up. Do I need to come back with the wicked witch's broomstick or something?" This isn't Sam's usual style, but this whole journey has thrown him off balance, and there's something about this Rick that, even unseen, he doesn't like.

"He'll be out here when he feels like it." He turns away to change the channel on the silent TV above the bar, muttering, "Goddamn yuppies."

As he picks up his beer and looks for a table, he realizes all the empty ones are in the center of the room; everyone else in the place has his back to a wall. Sam laughs out loud, which earns him a few sour looks. He plants himself at a table in the exact center of the room, facing the doorway to the hall, which gives him a view of the front door and the bar with only slight movements in either direction.

His phone chirps a text alert, and he checks the message. ILU babe from Jess. He texts her back and has just thumbed the send button when he's startled by someone standing over him.

"Heard you were looking for me."

"Rick?" Sam rises, extending his hand, then freezing in mid-gesture.

The other man ignores his offered hand, staring back with a shocked expression that must mirror Sam's own.

Sam has had it drilled into his head practically since he could talk -- you never -- never -- blow another man's cover identity. But even with that training, it takes every scrap of will he has to bite down on the one word that rises up in his head.

Dean.

***

Dean recovers first. "My office," he says curtly, then turns to lead Sam there.

Sam has barely had time to register actual details before he hurries to follow. Dean. The same, but not the same. Longer hair, somewhat messy. A scar. He has more of an opportunity to spot the differences in Dean's movements, particularly his bowlegged gait. They've made it to the office before Sam realizes it's something about the set of his shoulders and the swing of his arms.

Sam tries to read Dean's silence, but he's ten years out of practice, and the physical tells have subtly altered. Stepping aside as he reaches the door, Dean gestures him into the office.

Sam doesn't know what he expected, but it wasn't a library with old books, a scarred wooden desk and a seemingly new Aeron chair. Behind him, Dean bumps the door closed and says, "Sam. How did you find me?"

"I didn't. I mean, I wasn't looking -- I didn't know to look. I thought you were dead."

Moving around the desk, Dean regards Sam for a long moment as he settles himself into the Aeron chair. Sam takes him in too, the scar that slants across his lips and stops just before the rise of his chin. The lack of warmth in his green eyes. "Not too many people stumble on this place," he says, then belatedly gestures Sam into the chair facing him.

"I was looking for Rick. I take it you're Rick?"

"At least till the Feds come around asking. How about a drink, Sammy?"

There's so much in Sam's head that he wants to say, to ask, but it's all tangled in a huge snarl, and the only thing that emerges is, "It's Sam." Regretting it instantly, he watches Dean's deliberate movements as he pulls a bottle of Jack out of his desk drawer, like some low-rent private eye in a movie. Dean slaps it on the desktop, then a pair of glasses, and as he's twisting open the bottle with one hand, Sam realizes that Dean has conducted this whole operation with his left hand only.

A sudden memory washes over Sam, of Dean helping him practice printing on that fat-lined, first-grade paper. Dean's right hand covering Sam's as he painstakingly formed the letters. Dean helping him hold a gun properly.

Dean's right-handed.

Sam manages to keep this observation to himself, if only barely. "I don't know where to start," he admits.

Shoving one of the glasses across the desk, Dean leans back in his chair, then takes up his own. "How about a toast? Here's to getting free."

After a moment's hesitation, Sam raises his glass and sips.

"How'd that work out for you, Sammy? How's life?"

"It's um, it's good. Better than good. I have a wife, Jess. A little girl, she's four. Mattie Marie." This is usually the moment where he pulls out his wallet and shows pictures, but nothing about Dean's manner seems to welcome that. "The Marie's after Mom."

"How'd college work out for you? What are you doing these days?"

"I went into law. I'm working at a firm in Philadelphia. We do a lot of estate work."

"Estate work," Dean repeats. "Dead people's things. Ever run into anything interesting?"

His interest is more avid at this than at the news that his only brother has a child.

"Nothing like you're thinking. But yeah, it's interesting." Looking around the room, Sam says, "You've got a couple colleges worth of books right here."

Thumping down his empty glass, Dean pours himself another drink. "I inherited Bobby's library. You remember Bobby Singer."

Chewing his lip, Sam rummages through his memory, but comes up blank. He shakes his head.

"We stayed there a couple of times as kids. Cars piled up outside, books stacked everywhere inside."

"The junkyard," Sam says. "Yeah, I remember. Like a maze of dead cars, and he had this dog. It was like a kid's paradise." A Winchester kid, anyway.

The corner of Dean's mouth curls upward. "Yeah. And Bobby was like that crazy-ass dog. Came off scary as shit sometimes, but deep down was a pushover for us kids."

A memory surfaces, and Sam imitates the warning growl he hears in his head: "Boy--"

Dean laughs then, and the sound blows the lid off a dusty lockbox of memories.

"Yeah, he called me that whenever he was pissed off, to the day he died."

"What happened?" This is not really what he wants to know. At least, it's far down the list below How did Dad die? and What happened to your arm?

Dean's manner frosts over again. "Demon got him. About three years ago."

Draining his glass, Sam lets the silence linger for a moment, then asks softly, "What about Dad?"

The scar tissue seems to bunch as Dean's lip curls. "What about Dad?"

Sam is taken aback at the sudden hostility. "I was hoping you'd tell me how he died."

"Now you're interested?"

"What does that mean?"

"Means you could have returned just one of the calls I made when it happened."

Sam blinks. "You called?"

"Yeah, I called," Dean snarls. "At the time I was under the impression you gave a shit."

"I swear, Dean, I never--" He shoves a hand through his hair. "I got the postcard, that's the first I knew anything."

"Bullshit. I left you messages. On your voice mail: Hi, this is Sam. I'm busy having my awesomely normal life right now, so leave your name and number and a brief message explaining why I should give a rat's ass, and maybe I'll call you back, if nothing better comes up. Wait for the beep."

The blood rises in his face. "Dean, stop. That's not how it was."

"No? How the fuck was it? Why don't you tell me, Sam?"

"I don't know, but I -- shit."

"What?" It's more a challenge than a prompt. C'mon and dazzle me with your bullshit.

The truth isn't going to win him any points. "I was in Spain. I did a semester there. The night before we were supposed to leave, I was robbed on my way home from a party. They took everything -- my money, my phone, every bit of ID -- then they threw me down an embankment. I didn't get out of the hospital for a week. By the time I got everything sorted out -- I never got the messages. I didn't know, until I got the postcard."

Eying him, Dean toys with his glass, rotating it on the desktop with his left hand, while his right rests in his lap. Sam suspects Dean's spending as much time processing the information that he spent a semester in Spain as he is the main point. Just relating this story, Sam has added to the wall that divides him and Dean. Dean, who was never offered a chance to go to college, or travel to Spain, or have any kind of life other than the one their dad shaped him for.

Sam has a fairly good idea what's going through Dean's head. There used to be some trust fund kids in his group of friends at Stanford, and hearing their casual references to experiences and places he'd never know had made him feel like an outsider. Even the thoughtless way they'd decide to divide a check by the number of people at the table, leaving Sam to spend $25 to cover his part when he'd nursed a watery beer and a bowl of soup -- he'd felt they were even less likely ever to understand him than he was to get them. The last thing he'd want is for Dean to feel that way because of him.

"I didn't know you'd called," he repeats helplessly.

Dean shrugs one shoulder, but hefts the bottle with a raised eyebrow, and Sam leans forward to offer his glass.

"So, Dad," Sam prompts.

"You know he was chasing the sonofabitch that killed Mom."

"I always heard it was a 'thing.'"

"Yeah, well, we found out it was a demon."

He takes a healthy swallow. "It got him too?"

Dean pours another for himself, almost filling the glass. "It got him. Then I got it." The look that crosses his face is unreadable -- it's not grim satisfaction or even a pure sense of loss. There's something going on.

"What happened?"

Setting his drink down and wiping his hand across his mouth, Dean scowls. "Go back to your nice, safe life, Sam. Trust me, you do not want to know."

Sam thumps his glass down on the desk. "I didn't want to cut myself off from you and Dad, or be shielded from your lives. I just wanted a choice to live my own. Dad's the one who made it either-or. Jesus, Dean. He's been dead for years. Can't you be your own man, even now?"

Sam's sorry the second he says it, but that doesn't mean anything.

Dean bats his glass off the desktop, sending it shattering against the wooden floor. "Get out."

"Fuck, Dean, I didn't mean--"

Reaching into the still open drawer where he liquor had been, Dean produces his Colt M1911, aiming it directly at Sam's chest. "Out. We're done here."

Sam makes his careful retreat to the office door. "I'm at the Holiday Inn," he says as he's halfway out the door. "Under my own name."

Dean's expression is dark and stone-hard, and Sam lets himself out.

***

Before he even exits the parking lot, Sam switches on the Bluetooth and speed dials Jess.

"How did it go?" she asks.

"Pretty badly. He pulled a gun on me."

A hiss of breath from Jess's end. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah. No. Jess, this guy Rick -- it was my brother."

"Dean? He's alive? He pulled a gun on you?"

Sam laughs, but it catches somewhere in his chest. "Well, I always did know how to piss him off." Pulling into the Holiday Inn parking lot, he shuts off the engine but makes no move to get out of the car. Pip's car seat catches his eye in the rearview, and Sam finds his eyes welling.

"What happened? Where the hell has he been all this time? Why haven't you heard from him?"

It's so tangled up in his head that he isn't even sure how to tell it in any intelligible way.

"I know," Jess says before he can even try to begin. "I should pick one complicated topic at a time. How about 'What the hell is wrong with him that he pulled a gun on you?'" Fierce Jess. God, he loves her so much.

"I might've said something about him trying to be his own man, instead of parroting Dad's opinions."

"Ouch," Jess comments. "Not that I know him, but--"

"Yeah. Not the smartest thing to say."

"Not exactly gun-worthy, though." Wryly, she adds, "In most families."

"It was kind of a tough conversation before that. I was asking how Dad died, and he was a condescending prick, and things went downhill from there." He watches a family pull up at the main door and start unloading bags and kids, and notices this lot is full of cars like his. Family cars, late-model rentals. So unlike the lot at the Nighthawk.

"What right does he have? He's had eight years to give you the details. If he's mad because you asked, he's an A-S-S-H-O-L-E."

Sam can't suppress a smile at this signal that Mattie is awake and in the room. "Pip just looked up, didn't she?" He can almost see her avid little face, knowing something's being kept from her.

"Totally. We're going to have to find some other stealth mode." She tells Mattie to pick up her toys and get ready for her nap, then says, "Come home, sweetie. We're your family."

"I know. And I miss you both. But you know I'm too stubborn to let him write me off."

"Yeah," she says softly. "I kinda know that."

"And he won't actually shoot me. Besides, I still need the answers I came here for. I'll give him a few hours to cool down, and try him again tonight."

"Be careful."

"I will. Let me talk to Mattie."

He hears the sound of the phone passed hand to hand.

"Hey, Pip!"

"Hi Daddy! I can spell!"

"You can?"

"A - S - S- H ... H ... A ... B ..."

Sam hears the phone move from hand to hand again, and Pip's squeal of protest.

"Love you!" Jess says on a laugh.

"I love you too, babe." And then she's gone.

***

After a moment in the car, looking at the pictures in his wallet that he didn't show Dean, Sam heads into the hotel, orders room service and leaves it untouched on the desk

There are so many thoughts buzzing through his head, it's impossible to focus on one. Dean's spectacularly uninformative account of Dad's death: Demon got him. Then I got it.

Demons? When the hell had demons been part of the job? Mostly Sam remembers vengeful spirits, with the occasional change of pace like werewolves. Demons are -- at least he guesses -- a whole new level of evil. If they killed both Dad and Bobby Singer, they have to be.

And Dean wasn't saying, but something got him, too. Why else would he be content to run a hunters' bar, dispensing advice? The answer has to be connected to the strange dead weight of his right arm. It clearly isn't that he's satisfied now that the thing that murdered Mom is dead. He wouldn't be surrounding himself with hunters if that were true. He wouldn't have carried on hunting with Bobby Singer for several years after Dad's death. Sam wonders what injured him so badly he can't hunt anymore -- can't even pour himself a fucking drink with his right hand. Sam isn't crazy enough to think Dean would have asked for help, but he wishes Dean hadn't dismissed the possibility of notifying him.

He hasn't thought of the mugging in Madrid in a long time, except in gratitude that it had pushed him and Jess together. They weren't much more than acquaintances at the time, but Jess had declined to return to the States with the others, insisting on staying by his side until he was out of the hospital and able to travel home. Sam would never regret that, but ...

Eight fucking years. The robbers had stolen not just his money and phone and some snippets of short-term memory of the night he was mugged. They'd taken eight years that he might have had some relationship with his brother. Sam has no idea if it would have been a close connection -- Dean had been so hurt by Sam's rejection of his and Dad's life, and he'd been well-trained in the ways of obsessive nursing of grudges. But there would have been something.

It's after 9 pm when Sam sets his untouched dinner outside his door for housekeeping to take, sends a quick text to Jess, then makes his way back to the roadhouse.

***

Tonight the parking lot lights are blazing, lit up more like a car dealership than a honky-tonk gravel lot. Makes sense, Sam guesses, if most of the things these hunters fight are creatures that lurk in shadow. It occurs to him to wonder if this place is known to the supernatural things out there, or hidden from them. Most of the things he remembers his dad and Dean hunting -- or helped them hunt -- weren't that intelligent, or were too single-minded to seem that way, or were bound to the place they haunted. The news that that demons are out there, and that they're smart enough to kill John Winchester and Bobby Singer -- and cripple his brother -- is a game-changer, though.

The thing is, Sam has known since he was small what's out there in the dark, but he's been as heedless about it as any of the people his dad used to help. He's had ten years of pretending that the worst thing that could lurk in the dark is a pack of thieves waiting for a conveniently drunk and stupid student.

At least, until the last month or two.

As he approaches the Nighthawk, he can hear the throb of the jukebox. He's not exactly greeted by a roar of conversation, but it's not the almost unsettling quiet of earlier in the day. Some patrons do take note of his entrance, but the general bar sounds make it seem less hostile.

Dean's not behind the bar, so Sam looks around the room for him. To his complete surprise, there's a lesbian couple dancing -- well, slowly grinding hips -- to Bad Company's "Ready for Love." Hunters are a rough enough crowd that Dad always kept them away from all but a small number, and there's nothing about this gathering that suggests they'd be cool with the non-heteronormative. Yet here's a tallish girl with blonde hair dyed to a crisp draped around one with long brown hair obscuring a faded plaid shirt with the arms cut out, hanging out over peg-leg jeans and rundown boots.

The brown-haired girl swings the blonde around, and Sam realizes his massive mistake as brown-hair registers his scrutiny. "What the fuck are you looking at?"

Sam knows without a doubt that saying A skinny, rat-faced guy with the most amazing mullet I've seen would not be the best idea ever. "Sorry. Thought you were someone I know." Hastily he makes his way to the bar and orders a draft. Once he's convinced he can do so without getting into a fistfight, Sam turns and surveys the room, sipping his beer.

"Oh hey," says a female voice beside him, and Sam turns to see the sandy-haired masseuse from earlier today. She's traded in her yoga pants for jeans and let her hair down, but otherwise looks pretty much the same. "If you're looking for an appointment with Dr. Badass, looks like he's off-duty for the night."

Doctor Badass? Dean's calling himself Doctor Badass these days? "Doctor --"

"Ash," she says, jerking her head toward the guy with the mullet halfway down his back.

"People consult with him?" Sam asks, incredulous.

"Oh sure. He's scary-smart. Went to MIT."

Sam blinks. "Oh. Uh, no, I didn't come to see him. I came to talk to, uh, Rick."

"He's busy right now, but I think you're up next. I'll tell him. Feel like giving me a name?"

"Sam. Thanks."

"Sure thing." Giving him a smile, she takes up the two beers the bartender delivers and heads for a table, where Dean is sitting with a pair of men, serious as he gestures at some papers scattered on the scarred tabletop. She settles into an empty chair next to him and says something softly, which prompts Dean to flick a glance up toward Sam.

Sam can't read his expression as Dean turns back to his conversation. Nursing his beer, he waits.

***

Sam can't shake the strangeness of watching his brother be this other person. Not just the Rick Patrick thing, or the guy who owns a hunters' bar, but this grown man, someone other hunters come to for advice.

The last time Sam had seen him, he'd been Dad's sidekick, snapping to whenever Dad barked out an order. He'd been that cocky young guy with an easy manner with women, flirtatious in a way that Sam had half envied, with a hint of a leer that completely mortified him. (Like that ass-pinch Sam had witnessed earlier in the day.) He'd been Sam's big brother, for stretches of time seeming more like his father than Dad did. He was often the first to notice when Sam was tired or hungry or fevered -- the one who knew when to tell him to stop whining and get a move on, and when to insist on getting him some rest or food or medicine.

But this Dean -- he's an authority. Something Sam's certain he'd never expected to be, but he wears it easily, without even seeming to notice. There's gray in the hair and beard of one of the hunters he's talking with, but the man listens to Dean with deference.

It reminds him so much of Dad.

After a time, the men gather up their notes and maps and rise, in turn offering Dean a hand to shake -- each one extending his left hand to give Dean a less awkward grip. As they move away from the table, Dean turns toward the sandy-haired girl and exchanges a few words, then leans in for a kiss. It's both casual and intimate, and Sam realizes there's a relationship here that he completely misunderstood on first sight. She says something to him, and some tension eases from his face and shoulders. He looks over toward Sam, then gestures him over.

"I'd swear you grew several inches since the last time I saw you."

"It's the Magic Fingers."

"Dude. TMI."

Sam's face flames. "I didn't mean -- I was making a -- you last saw me a few hours ago."

But Dean is laughing, and after a moment, Sam does too. Dean pushes a chair out with his foot. "Sit your ass down, Sammy." As Sam takes the offered chair, Dean says, "This is Cheyenne. Chy, this is Sam. He's a distant relation."

Sam isn't sure whether to consider this a slap in the face, or a pretty huge honor -- after all, this may be his first appearance in Rick Patrick's invented history. "Nice to meet you," Sam says.

"Good to meet you, too, Sam." She has a strong handshake for a woman, but then, he supposes massage work would have that benefit. "Are you in the family business?"

For a moment Sam's mind races to catch up with a civilian-friendly cover story, then he realizes that for once "family business" means exactly what it does to the Winchesters. "No. I did some hunting when I was younger, but I got out." He winces internally, thinking that must have sounded rude or superior or ... something.

Neither Cheyenne or Dean seems to take note of his phrasing. She asks, "Where'd you come here from?"

'Philadelphia."

"I did a job there a few years back," Dean says. "Evil spirit doesn't even begin to cover it. H.H. Holmes."

"Wow," Sam says, shaking his head. "That must've been some job." Sam remembers hearing about him even before The Devil in the White City. Dad had talked about him, during a job in Chicago. Sam can't recall the details of the job itself, but he remembers the story about Holmes and his elaborate death house.

"I can think of pissed-off spirits I liked better."

It's time to stop dancing around this, even if he has to say it with a witness. "Speaking of pissed off, I came back to apologize. What I said --"

Dean's mouth twitches. "I guess I put you on the defensive. Forget it." Which, in Winchester, is an apology. "What do you say we have a beer out here, then we can go back to my office and get down to the brass tacks or the nitty-gritty or whatever it is you brought."

"You boys catch up without me," Cheyenne says. "I've got a full schedule tomorrow, plus that training session at the hospital."

Dean makes a regretful-sounding grunt, but leans in to receive the kiss she's aiming his way. It turns from a peck to something heated and tender that makes Sam miss Jess fiercely.

When they separate, Cheyenne offers Sam another handshake. "It was good meeting you. I hope I get a chance to see you again while you're here."

Sam hopes so too. She's a window into his brother that he's never had.

***

Cheyenne detours just long enough to send the bartender over with their beers, then they're left alone for the friendly two-brothers-having-beers preamble to business.

Only substitute "awkward" for "friendly."

"What does Cheyenne do?" The hospital part had thrown him off his assumptions.

"Physical therapy."

"That's how you met her?"

There's a pause, and that's just what this conversation needed, more awkward. Then Dean says, "Yeah."

Sam decides to go for information rather than comfort levels. "What happened to your arm?" If Dean says "Demon got it," Sam may have to deck him.

"Run-in with a rugaru. He ripped me up pretty good Tore away almost the whole nerve that runs to that arm, along with a fair bit of meat off my back."

Sam frowns. "Rugaru? That's not one I know."

"You're lucky. Rugaru's your basic transformed human, except once they make the change, they never revert back. They've got a pretty insatiable taste for the other other white meat, the long pig."

It takes a moment for that to register, but when it does, so does a fair bit of meat off my back. "Jesus, De--" He bites down hard on the name, and lowers his voice, though it's already nearly lost in the sound of the jukebox. "It was eating you?"

"Didn't get that much more than a dainty nibble. I got my gun into my left hand and nailed the sonofabitch."

"Thank god for all those drills Dad -- your dad made you do."

"Doesn't take much drilling when your target's two inches away, Sammy."

Sam can't suppress a shudder at the thought.

"It was touch and go for a while," Dean admits. "Between the blood loss and infection. But I'm pretty lucky, considering." He flashes the cocky grin Sam remembers from ten years ago, and the scar somehow makes it even more effective. "I make a killing hustling pool, though not here."

"Pool? But I thought --" Sam can't think of a graceful way out of this sentence, so he just lets it die away.

Dean's already demonstrating anyway. Using his left hand, he plops the dead arm onto the table top, positioning his hand to guide an imaginary pool cue. He waggles the thumb and forefinger of that hand. "I've got movement in these, but that's all."

Given this context, the ass-pinch Sam witnessed earlier has a whole new meaning. Not a sign of disrespect, but a weirdly life-affirming gesture, shared between the two people who'd worked hard for every inch of progress.

Sam tears his gaze away from Dean's arm and hand to his face. "I wish I'd known. I should have been there for you."

Dean smirks. "Be glad you weren't. I'm a suck-ass patient. I wasn't the most fun guy to be around."

"Fun's not the point. We're family. Kind of fucked-up family, sure, but we're still family."

Waving his good hand dismissively, Dean says, "Speaking of family, is there something wrong with you? Don't you have pictures of your wife and kid?"

***

Instead of flashing their photos at Dean, Sam removes them from their clear plastic sleeves and hands them over.

"What, you don't trust me with your wallet?" Dean snipes.

Sam thinks he's joking, but just in case.... "It's more that I trust you with their pictures. That's Jessica."

Holding it carefully by the edges, Dean takes in Jess's picture, a candid snapshot Sam cut down to wallet size. "Damn, Sammy, this girl is way out of your league."

"This picture doesn't even do her justice, but it's the best one I have," Sam says. "I think you'd like her a lot."

After a moment, Dean shuffles it behind Mattie's picture, a shot of her looking like hell on wheels on her trike. Dean chuckles at the sight, and Sam expects another smartass comment, maybe about her being lucky she took after her mom instead of her dad. But Dean's grin fades, leaving him looking at the photo with a kind of longing Sam's never seen in him.

"That's your niece," Sam says softly. "Mattie Marie. Most of the time we call her Pip. Short for Pipsqueak."

Dean looks up at him. "Pipsqueak. I used to call you that. Before you turned into a sasquatch."

It's not a chill that passes over Sam, but something like a breath whispering across the back of his neck. He had totally forgotten this, but now he remembers it clearly.

Dean gestures with the picture. "She looks like a pistol."

Grinning, Sam says, "Yeah. Just tonight I found out she can almost spell 'asshole.'"

"Hah! I'm gonna have to meet this kid. Jesus Christ, can you imagine Dad as a grandpa?"

The knot that rises in Sam's throat is sudden and solid as a stone.

Passing the photos back to him, Dean says, "Why don't we go back to my office, conduct some business?"

As Sam follows him across the barroom he pushes back the wave of emotion, again watching Dean's gait. This time he can see the dead weight of Dean's arm, how it throws off the rhythm of his walk. There's a inflexibility to his back that's more than a twenty-hours-in-the-Impala stiffness.

There are things out there that are so fucking fierce that they can overwhelm Sam's brother and nearly eat him alive. Without wanting to, he imagines that moment, the stink of some twisted thing that used to be human, the bright pain of your flesh being torn from your frame, the hot gush of blood.

He's distanced himself so completely from these realities -- which are darker and more violent than he knew, even when he was still hunting -- had all these years to get past Dad's death and Dean's supposed one. Now it comes hurtling back, nearly crushing him.

These things are out there, and if they can hurt Dean, it's beyond imagination what they can do to Jess and Pip.

Arriving at his office door, Dean unlocks it with a deftness Sam wouldn't have expected. "Park yourself. Want some Jack?" Turning, he takes in Sam's expression and pours a stiff belt, handing it over wordlessly.

Sam gratefully accepts. "It's funny," he says. "I've wished Dad -- hell, and Mom -- were still around to meet my family, but I've never actually imagined it." Somehow it feels safer to talk about that first stab of emotion than the rush of feeling he'd had in response to Dean's physical state. "Though I don't know if Dad would have wanted to."

"Of course he would've," Dean snaps. He pours a couple of fingers for himself and settles back in his chair. "Jesus, Sam, the main reason he was so pissed off when you left was he wanted to keep you safe, keep us all together."

That's Dean to the core. Defending the old man no matter what. "How exactly does 'If you leave don't ever come back?' fit in with that?"

"It was a bluff. The nuclear option -- he didn't think you'd call him on it."

"And since I did, he decided following through was the only response? I'd have to stop and think about it for a while to count up the different ways that's totally fucked up."

"He was around," Dean says softly.

"What?"

"He swung through Palo Alto now and again, to make sure you were okay."

"He did what?"

"We checked up now and then. Just a quick drive-by once in a while."

Sam has a sudden urge to slam his fist into something -- the desk, a wall, anything but Dean. Hell, he wants most of all to dig up his father and punch him, but he knows he's just ash.

"Till you disappeared, and he died."

***

"Disappeared?" Sam sputters. "I was in Spain for a semester."

"We didn't know that."

Sam looks away, feeling his jaw muscles tighten. "If I'd had the slightest idea that either of you gave a shit, you would have known where I was that semester."

Dean's face darkens in a way that reminds Sam of the conflict between them just before he'd left for Stanford. "If you'd have stayed we'd have known where you were. You'd have been there when Dad died. Maybe --"

Finding himself on his feet, Sam slams his glass down on the desktop. "You don't want to finish that sentence."

Dean mirrors his actions. "You want a piece of me? You wanna go?"

The phrase piece of me reminds Sam of the violent injury that made Dean's right arm useless. "Don't be ridiculous, Dean."

Which is exactly the wrong thing to say. "You think I can't still kick your ass?"

"Dean. Stop. God, what happened? You used to be the peacemaker between me and Dad."

Dean eases off the belligerent stance just a fraction. "Yeah, well, maybe Dad had the right idea."

In that moment, Sam finds himself just about ready to take a swing at his brother, paralyzed arm or not. Taking a deep breath and letting it out, he says, "I'm stepping out for a smoke."

He doesn't smoke, but it's a lot shorter than saying I'm going out for a minute so I don't beat you bloody and senseless.

"Forget it," Dean says. "Let's just get down to business. You came because you wanted something, right?"

The subtext of that question sets him off. "Don't be an asshole. I didn't want anything from you. I came to see Rick, because for all I knew you were dead."

The air in this room seems saturated with electricity, needing only one word to spark into something all-consuming, disastrous. It looks like Dean recognizes it as clearly as Sam does, because he holds his tongue too, until the anger in his eyes changes slowly into something weary and sad and old.

"Sam," he finally says, and there's almost a plea in name, one that Dean will never unbend enough to put into words.

Sam takes another measured breath. "Yeah, Dean."

"You want to tell me about it? Or do you need that smoke first?"

"No," Sam says after a long moment. "I'm good. I've been trying to quit."

As Dean settles back into his Aeron chair, Sam resumes his own seat. His legs quiver slightly, the way they did after a too-close call back in his hunting days.

Dean reaches for a pencil and a scratch pad. His professional mask sliding into place, he says, "Tell me what's been going on."

Dean is a professional, Sam reminds himself. There's no one he'd trust more, except for their dad. "I'm worried about my daughter," he says at last.

***

"Is something after your girl?"

"Something's after kids. It looks like some kind of epidemic, but there's something that feels supernatural about it to me."

"I trusted your instincts ten years ago; I'd go with 'em now." Dean starts taking notes with his left hand, printing in small block letters, but as fast as most people write with their dominant hand.

Fascinated, Sam finds himself watching closely.

"How many kids?"

"As far as I know ... eight ... maybe nine so far. A few kids from Mattie's preschool, a handful more from our building -- we live in a high-rise condo. Used to be a hotel. This thing has been running through families before it moves on to other victims. Only the kids, one sibling at a time." God knows Sam's been in enough old cemeteries that he knows natural diseases can fell a whole generation of kids He'd always been fascinated by the old sections with a sad little line of tiny marble lambs telling a silent story of family tragedy. But this feels off.

Dean's pen skips across his paper. "Old hotel -- how old?"

"Built in 1928. It was pretty much the hotel for the rich and famous, so there's a lot of history." Though Dean doesn't look up from his note-taking, but Sam spots his twitch of expression at this. "There have been deaths," Sam goes on. "A few were suicides."

Now Dean does look toward Sam. "But you don't think this is a vengeful spirit."

"Well, I don't know. I haven't run into any cold spots, or heard anything about hauntings. One of the suicides, though -- I found out it was a woman who'd written some children's books."

"That might have some potential. Have you taken a look at her books?"

Shaking his head, Sam says, "I haven't been able to run down her name, and I didn't want to waste too much time, in case it's a false lead."

"Not with a bunch of dead kids, I get that."

"None of them has died. At least not yet. But they're all in a coma, and it doesn't look good."

Dean flips to a fresh page. "Symptoms?"

"Fever, listlessness. Looks like some kind of flu or pneumonia. A couple of the parents have mentioned the kids' windows were wide open, even though they had some sort of protective guard that should only let them raise a couple of inches."

"The ones in your building -- what floors do they live on?"

"Two on the fifth, two on the seventeenth, one on the twentieth, but she's got a sister."

"Definitely supernatural, then. But it doesn't sound like a vengeful spirit."

"The only possibility along those lines would be children's book lady. She was a jumper. But why wouldn't she just throw them out the windows?"

Dean rubs at his forehead. "Unless maybe she had a kid that died of pneumonia or something, and that's why she offed herself."

"I hadn't thought of that."

Taking up the pen again, Dean says, "Well, it's the less-likely scenario, though we can follow up on it. But to me it sounds like something is feeding off these kids, sucking their life force out of them."

"So what happens to the kids? They stay in comas?" Sam doesn't really believe this, but he doesn't want to be the one to say it out loud.

"No, Sammy. They fail and then they die." Abruptly Dean rises from his chair, the motion made slightly awkward by the dead weight of his right arm. "C'mere and take these books." He heads right for a section of his library, crouching to read spines. In quick succession, he hands four old texts up to Sam, then balances himself by grabbing the edge of a shelf as he rises. Settling back in his chair, Dean bends to open the bottom drawer of his desk.

"None for me, thanks," Sam says as he sets down the stack of books, lifting off the top one to leaf through himself.

But it's not a bottle that Dean produces from the drawer, but a leather bound notebook, soft and darkened with the oils of the hands that have touched it.

"Look familiar?" asks Dean.

It sure as hell does. It's Dad's hunting journal.

***

"That's Dad's," Sam blurts. He remembers watching his dad hunched over it, writing, sketching, taping in newspaper clippings. His fingers twitch with the desire to hold the worn leather, to flip through the pages that record the outline of Dad's and Dean's lives for the years after Sam went to Stanford.

"Yeah. I think I know what this thing is, and we ran into one a long time ago. I'll see what I can find in here, you look through those. You're looking for anything on shtrigas."

"What's that?"

"I don't know a lot about it. I think it's some kind of witch."

"Spelled like it sounds?" Sam asks.

"I dunno. You're the scholar. If you run into any spelling that looks likely, follow up." Dean cocks the journal onto the dead arm resting on his lap, starts flipping through pages, and Sam swallows his irritation, turning back to the beginning of his book.

"Dad used to research the things he hunted pretty thoroughly," Sam comments as he skims the pages. "Wouldn't he have shared that intel?" He always had, once Sam and Dean got old enough to hunt with him. Despite Sam's constant conflict with Dad, he'd always gotten off on the idea of research -- teasing information out of books, people, his surroundings. All through school and at his job, he's been known as the guy who'll find that arcane bit of information that snaps everything into focus.

Dean's hackles rise. "Yeah, he did. But this was long before I was hunting with him. We were kids."

As Sam pages through his book, he hears Dean swiftly turning the worn leaves of the leather-bound notebook. It occurs to him that Dean probably knows these pages by sight, one quick look confirming what he already knew. Again Sam wishes fiercely for a chance to read the notebook himself.

A moment later Sam hears the soft whump of the journal being closed, and Dean's almost inaudible Sonofabitch.

"What's wrong?"

"It's not in there. I didn't remember ever seeing it, but I was hoping -- you know how you only really see what you're looking for."

"Yeah. So we don't know how Dad killed this thing."

Dean's expression grows grimmer, but he says nothing.

"Okay," Sam says. "I think I need to get on the road back home. You can be researching while I drive, and maybe we'll have an answer by the time I'm home."

Sam shoves the stack of books toward Dean, the top one opened to the last page he'd searched.

"No," Dean says.

"What d'you mean, no?"

"I mean, I'm not staying here. I'm going with you, because I want to get this sonofabitch."

"Dean, you --" He stops abruptly, suspecting he's on the very thinnest of ice.

"We'll drive back together," Dean says. "Whoever's not at the wheel can do the research. I know you can read in a car without losing your lunch. Thing is, we'll have to take my car, since it's been customized for me."

Sam begins to protest but jams the brakes on before he gets farther than What does-- before he cracks the code. Not customized. Adapted.

"I can bring you back here when that thing is dead, or we can have Ash drive your car out, and I'll bring him back. I don't think either of us wants the Ash solution, though. He's a maniac."

"Why doesn't Ash do the research, then we can both drive. Cheyenne told me people consult with him, too."

Face darkening, Dean says, "Because books is not what he does. He can program a demonic activity early warning system or build a computer out of empty PBR cans and alligator clips, but he doesn't do arcane lore. You wanna suggest another plan, or leave that to someone who actually knows what he's talking about?"

"You're right," Sam concedes. "Sorry. We'll do it your way."

"All right. Go back to your motel and gather up your shit. Come back in an hour and we'll hit the road. You can leave your car in my garage."

It's not a plan he loves, but if Dean thinks they need to get after this thing immediately, Sam's not going to argue. He gets to his feet. "I'll be here. One thing -- can we bring Dad's diary along? I'd really like to have a look at it."

Dean gives him a lopsided shrug. "Sure, why not."

***

It takes little time for Sam to collect his things and check out of the Holiday Inn. The hour is late enough that he texts Jess instead of calling, but she calls back immediately. "Hey, babe," she says, "you're leaving now?"

"In about fifteen minutes. My brother is a man of action." It feels disloyal to be poking fun at Dean when he's taking Sam's concerns seriously enough to drive halfway across the country. But he doesn't want to scare Jess -- not when he's this far away.

"Does he know something about what's been going on?"

"He thinks so. We're doing some more research on the road."

There's a pause on Jess's end that goes on so long he thinks she might've fallen asleep. "Wow," she finally says.

"What?"

"I'm finally going to meet the famous big brother. I thought that was impossible."

"I haven't really even had time to think about that," Sam says.

"Is he as nuts about homemade cookies as you are?"

Though this brings a smile, it also raises a knot in his chest. Jess. How did I get so lucky? "Pie's more his thing. I think cherry was his favorite, but any kind made him happy." He doesn't even know if it's still a rare treat for Dean, now that he's settled in one spot. But Sam still has a weakness for Jess's chocolate chip cookies, so he suspects the same would be true of Dean and pie.

"I'll make one. I can't guarantee homemade crust, but --"

"He'll love it," Sam declares with conviction. "He'll love you. And I already do."

***

When he arrives back at the Nighthawk, Sam drives around back as Dean had instructed. In the stark security lighting, he sees a hulking black shape that he can't quite believe is real. It's so wide and long it's practically a parade float. The trunk is raised and Dean's there behind it, tossing a duffel in. He nods a greeting as Sam exits the Volvo.

"Holy shit," Sam says reverently. "That's Dad's old car?"

"Now don't be calling my girl 'old'. That's just rude. Gimme your bag." Dean slings it beside his own, then closes the trunk.

Sam slowly circles the car. "It -- she -- looks just like I remember."

"I had to make a few changes, but it's just on the inside that you can see 'em. Go on and get your car in the garage, and let's get on the road."

Sam hurries to comply, then settles in next to Dean in the Impala. The engine roars to life, just as deep and rumbling as he remembers. Swept up in memories, it takes him a moment to register the differences. The suicide knob on the steering wheel, with a small panel of buttons at its base. Some controls rearranged to the left side of the dashboard.

Taking the wrist of his dead arm in his left hand, Dean arranges it in his lap, then looks over to Sam. "Ready to rock and roll?"

"Sure."

Dean puts the car in gear and aims it onto the dark highway.

***

In the sheltering dark, Sam watches Dean drive with his good hand, signaling turns with a button on the steering wheel, making the turns with the knob. He makes the occasional reach off the wheel to fiddle with the car stereo, holding the wheel steady at the bottom with his right hand's working finger and thumb.

"Pretty sweet setup you have with the controls all right there at hand," Sam says. "That must have set you back some." A colleague at his firm uses a wheelchair and has a car adapted for his needs, and it cost more than a lot of new cars.

"Would have," Dean says, "except Ash made this for me. This panel here, with the secondary controls --" Dean turns on the hazard lights, which no other drivers are around to see, then flips them off again -- "he made it out of the remote that came with the stereo system."

"No shit." The thought of the scrawny mullet-wearing guy being this kind of brilliant still amazes him.

"Seriously, who the hell needs a remote with a car stereo. If there's any rule of the road more simple than calling shotgun, it's driver picks the music, riders shut their cakehole."

Sam laughs. He suspects that even if someone else picks the music, it's all Dean's music anyway, just like the jukebox. "Looks nice. No alligator clips."

"Of course not. Nobody craps up my baby, even for the sake of accessibility."

It's odd to hear this word from Dean's mouth, a plain admission of disability. Well, it's not like he can hide it for long, Sam tells himself. The hunter who'd sent him to seek out the roadhouse had described Rick as an "ex-hunter with a crippled-up arm." He'd forgotten that description in his shock at encountering Dean.

"How long ago did you run across this rugaru?" Sam asks.

"Three years."

"Do you miss hunting?" The question surprises Sam, seeming to come from some unfiltered part of his brain.

Dean shoots him a sideways, what do you think, dumbass? look. "Hell, yeah. Do you ever?"

That unfiltered bit still apparently has control, overriding his hell no. "I miss the problem solving, the way the old stories mean something, how it all clicks. I get some of that with the law, y'know, but it's not as life and death."

"Just death," Dean says. "That's estate work, death and taxes, yeah?

"Well, we certainly affect the circumstances of people's lives. The heirs, or people served by charities that receive bequests. But any lifesaving we do is strictly at a remove." He feels that distance in the words he's just used: circumstances, served, bequests. It's like there's a wall between Sam and anyone he might help -- it might be glass, but it's thick and impenetrable in a way. "Speaking of the research and the lifesaving, I guess I should get to it."

"There's a map light to your left there."

Sam fumbles it on and takes the top book from the pile on the car seat between them, and he gets to it.

Toward the end of the second book, Sam blurts, "Found something. You were right, a shtriga is a kind of witch. They're Albanian, but there are legends dating back to ancient Rome. They feed off spiritus vitae."

"Life force," Dean says. "Okay, so these kids in a coma, they're slowly being drained dry?"

"Seems like it. These things can feed off anyone, by the way. They prefer kids, though."

"Stronger life force, you think?"

"Seems likely." Sam reads a bit further. "Well, that's not good."

"What?"

"This says shtrigas are invulnerable to all weapons devised by God and man."

"No, that's not true. It's vulnerable when it feeds. If you catch it while it's eating, you can blast it with consecrated wrought irons, buckshots or rounds, I think."

"How do you know that?"

"Dad told me. I remember." Dean's jaw sets into a grim line as he cranks up the music. "Keep going. We need to find out as much as we can about this fucking thing so we can end it."

***

As Sam sets aside the third book and takes up the fourth, Dean says, "Want to switch places for a while? It'd be pretty much your first time since I taught you to drive."

Since I taught you to drive. Not Since Dad... They had tried that exactly once, and the explosive argument that had caused was almost too much for Dean's skill at handling the two of them. Again it occurs to him, as it does when he's drinking and bullshitting with colleagues, what a weird set of family memories he has.

On some level Sam has noticed the little signals that tell him Dean's offer is more of a request: the quiet rattle of a pill bottle, the shifting of his position, accompanied by a barely-audible grunt. He wonders how long it's been since Dean has undertaken a cross-country drive like this.

"Sure," Sam says. "Though I'll need to grab some coffee."

There's an oasis up ahead, so Dean takes the offramp. He heads for the gas station first, unfolding himself from the car and tucking his impaired hand into his jacket pocket. Sam steps out of the car as well, stretching out the kinks from the ride.

Watching Dean bend to unscrew the gas cap, Sam steps toward the pump and says, "Like a hand with that?"

Dean turns and gives him a cold stare. "Nice one," he says, shouldering Sam aside and snatching up the gas nozzle. He hits the grade selector button with his elbow and returns to the back of the Impala.

"Jesus, Dean, I'm sorry. Of all the things to say --" Like a hand? What the hell was wrong with him?

Crouched by the bumper, Dean glares for another moment before a grin overtakes him. "Oh man. You are still so easy. Fish in a barrel, dude."

Sam releases an explosive sigh, too relieved to be irritated. "You suck," he says, but his own grin matches Dean's. It's a shock, then, when the sound of Dean's self-satisfied chuckle makes his throat tighten. This is how it used to be.

"I'll go use the head," he says, automatically slipping into Dadspeak. "I'll grab us some coffees on the way out. Anything else?"

"Couple Snickers, I guess."

It takes no time at all to get used to the Impala -- the primary controls all work with the normal controls as well as the adaptive ones. Though it's supposedly his turn to pick the music, Sam leaves the Led Zeppelin compilation in the CD player, though he cranks down the volume as Dean falls asleep over the last of the books they've brought. After they've been on the road for a couple more hours, Sam rubs at his gritty eyes, trying hard to keep his focus.

"Dean," he says softly, but gets no answer.

Sam drives another 20 miles to the next outpost of civilization, and calls Dean's name again. Dean, wedged against the passenger door, shifts with another soft grunt. "Yeah?"

"I've got to grab a couple hours of sleep. There's a hotel up ahead."

"There's a place right here. What's wrong with this?"

"The 'Lucky 40 -- hourly rates'? Are you kidding me?"

"So, we'll only be there a couple of hours."

"I want to sleep, Dean, not play 'guess the stain'."

As Sam passes the motel in question, Dean says, "Did you hear the one about the Baptist preacher whose car breaks down? He walks to the nearest motel and asks for a room, but when he gets a look at the place, he says to the clerk, 'Make sure I get a room where the porn is disabled.' The clerk gives him a look and says, 'What kind of place do you think this is? We only show regular porn, you pervert.'"

Sam can't stifle a laugh, but he passes another dodgy looking motel and pulls in at the nearest chain motel. Dean stays in the car, half drowsing, as Sam pushes his credit card across the desk.

Despite his exhaustion, Sam takes a quick shower to rid himself of the road grime he feels he's collected. Dean is fast asleep by the time he emerges, and Sam's out just moments later.

He wakes barely two hours later to a call from Jess. There's early morning light leaking into the room as he greets her with "Hey, babe."

"Sam," she says, and the quality of her voice makes him snap instantly awake.

"What is it?"

"It's Mattie. I'm getting ready to take her to the pediatrician. She woke up sick, and she has a fever."

***

By the time Sam puts away his cellphone, Dean is already awake and grabbing up his clothes. "Mattie?" Dean asks once Sam's finished the call.

"Yeah," he answers, his voice cracking slightly on the word.

"Give me a few, and we'll be on our way. She's gonna be all right." Taking his clothes into the bathroom, he closes the door behind him.

Sam wonders when Dean got to be modest enough not to drop his drawers and change in front of Sam or, back in the day, Dad. It takes him a moment to think about the dead arm and the struggles that must involve in even a simple operation like pulling on a pair of jeans and buttoning a shirt. Or maybe it's the kind of scarring that must come from being torn and eaten while twisting and clawing and fighting for your life.

Somehow it's easier to think about past horrors and Dean's survival, but Sam curses himself for letting his thoughts drift away from Mattie and the terror of uncertainty, even for a moment.

He tugs on his own fresh set of clothes and runs his hands through his hair, so that by the time Dean comes out of the bathroom he only needs to use toilet and toothbrush before he's ready to go.

When he emerges, Dean has left the room, taking both their bags and leaving behind a couple of crumpled bills for housekeeping. Sam checks out over the interactive menu on the room TV and heads for the Impala. Dean's there, leaning against the car, kneading his neck and right shoulder with his left hand. Stopping as he sees Sam making his way down the sidewalk, he calls out, "Thought I'd get us packed up and ready."

"Thanks. Drive-through breakfast?"

"You go ahead. I'll grab something later."

Once again Sam curses inwardly for displaying his thoughtlessness for Dean. "I could take the first shift if you want. I didn't really put in my share of the driving time last night."

Shaking his head, Dean says, "I'm more interested in seeing what that last book says. Why don't you take research duty, and we'll switch and hit a drive-through once you're done with the fragile texts."

"Good plan," Sam says, and folds himself into the shotgun seat.

Forty-five minutes into his research, Sam looks up, rubbing his eyes and rolling his neck.

"Find anything?" Dean asks.

"Not yet." He can't bear to say no, but there's less than half of this last text left to browse.

"Seems strange," Dean says.

"What?"

"You reading in the front seat. I remember you in the back, ninety percent of the time with your head in some book."

"Yeah, I know. I was thinking about that a while ago."

"You still read a lot?"

"Not the way I used to. Now that I have a family I don't have as much free time." He realizes just how wrong that sounds the instant it comes out of his mouth. Hurrying on, he adds, "I read a lot to Mattie. So it's not so much War and Peace as Everybody Poops -- at least that was the major deal a couple of years ago. She's big on Olivia now."

Dean makes a small humming noise of polite interest, but says nothing more. Suppressing a sigh, Sam dives back into the old book. He's not sure how many miles roll by before he says, "I've got something. Dammit."

"What?"

"Shtrigas take on a human disguise when they're not feeding. It's gonna be that much harder to find."

"What kind of human disguise?"

"Could be anything. Usually something innocuous. Often a feeble old woman, which is may be where the witches-as-crones legend got started."

Sam turns the page. "Jesus, that thing is ugly in its natural form."

"You can say that again," Dean says fervently, but his eyes are on the road ahead.

"Dean?"

"Dad said," he adds, but Sam gets a weird feeling there's something he's not saying.

Since he goes on not saying it, Sam browses through the rest of the final book. He finds nothing more than he's already found. "That's the last of this one. So what's our next step? Is there anything we can do before we get home?"

"Think about the people who'd have access of some kind to the various kids who've been hit with this. Some nice old lady in the building, or one of the preschool teachers. If you've got something to write on, make a list."

Sam scrawls a few names in his pocket Week-at-a-Glance. "I'll ask Jess if she can think of anyone else when she calls back."

"Ready to grab some breakfast at the next fast food joint?"

What he'd really like to do is grab Dad's journal and look for all those missing years, but he thinks of Dean digging the pads of his fingers into the muscles at his neck and shoulders, before they'd even settled into the Impala. "Breakfast sounds good," he says.

***

Once they've made their breakfast run and are back on the road, Sam settles into a tense quiet. They still have about ten hours on the road, and if someone had offered Sam the chance to have a day with the brother he thought was dead, with no escape and nothing to do but talk, he would have imagined --

Not this.

There are so many things he wants to say, wants to know. But all he can think of right now is Mattie. I brought this down on her.

"What?"

He realizes he's said this last thought under his breath. Though his impulse is to say "nothing," and fall back into silence, he forces himself to engage. "This is my fault, Dean. I got ten years of a normal life, then it all comes crashing after me, but it's not me who pays the biggest price."

"Bullshit, Sammy. If your life taught you one thing, it should be that bad shit happens to normal people all the time. It didn't come hunting for Sam Winchester and family. This thing has probably been out there for centuries, feeding off kids. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"It's easy to say that, but --"

"Believe me, when something is coming for you, you'll know it. They don't fuck around laying a false trail by taking other people. They just come straight for you, and they fuck you so hard you barely know what hit you -- if you live to know something hit you at all."

Sam flicks a glance toward Dean, then turns his attention back to the road as rows and rows of soybean fields flash by. "What?"

"Nothing."

"No," Sam says. "You can't pull that. I nearly did that to you, but I didn't."

"You made a choice, Sammy. You decided you were going to try to unknow everything you knew about the dark shit that's out there. You had a choice between normal and aware, and you went eyes-open into the choice for eyes closed. So don't get pissed off when I decide to honor that. You can't have it both ways."

Part of him wants to argue, to tell Dean to stop patronizing him. But another part knows that Dean's right. He left their world behind for a reason. Once his father saw that world, it was the only world he could see, and he made Dean in his image. Sam doesn't want that for himself, or his wife and daughter. If he's got to fight something supernatural, it's so Jess and Mattie can have a life free of evil, not so they can go chasing it until it finally swallows them.

"Yeah. I guess," he finally says. "Is there anything you want to listen to?"

"Hey, it's your choice," Dean says. "Them's the rules."

"My music's back in your garage. Just pick something."

Dean chooses Junior Wells, and they ride in silence for a while, until Jess's ringtone startles Sam and he fumbles his cell out of his pocket. "How is she, baby?"

"Her doctor's busy at the hospital, so they sent us to urgent care over there." Tension and fear thread a note through her voice that Sam's rarely heard. "We finally got in. They're admitting her."

***

"How is she?" Sam asks. Which seems like a stupid question, considering Jess has just said Mattie's being admitted, but it's so hard to be so distant from what's going on.

Jess gets it. "She's been in and out for a half hour or so. Teary." Which means, in their household, that she's not she's not actually weeping, but it's right there at the surface, threatening to spill. "She's been asking for you."

This absolutely kills him. He has never been away from Pip that he hasn't said goodnight to her over the phone, and even those nights are rare enough. His kid is in the hospital, and she wants him, but he's not there. "Tell her I'll be there as soon as I can, babe."

"How far away are you?"

"Maybe nine hours. I'm sorry this is all on you, Jess. We'll be there as fast as we can."

"Just drive safe, okay?"

"We are. And hey, if Pip's awake at some point, call me and I'll talk to her a little while."

"Kay. Doctor's coming, I'll talk to you later. I love you." She's gone before he can even say I love you in return.

The road blurs briefly as Sam slips his phone back in his pocket. Tightening his jaw against the emotion, he pulls in a couple of deep breaths. "So dad fought one of these things before."

"Yeah. In Wisconsin. You were ... maybe six or seven."

"I don't remember hearing about it, so it must be before I found out Dad wasn't a traveling salesman."

"Yeah."

"You're one helluva storyteller."

"Dad didn't get the thing, all right?"

Startled, Sam glances over at Dean, who's looking out of the passenger window.

"He missed his chance. For all we know, the thing that's been hurting kids in your neighborhood is the same fucking thing we faced then."

We. That's a curious way of putting it. Dean would have been eleven or twelve; Dad would not have taken him hunting. "How'd he miss getting it?"

"Jesus, Sam. I don't know. It was a long time ago."

"You sound pretty mad over something that's such ancient history."

"Just let it lie, for Christ's sake."

Glancing at him again, Sam sees that he's kneading his shoulder again, left arm crossed over his body. He should let it lie, but it's not how he's built. "Still Dad's defender, after all this time."

Dean's head jerks toward him. "What the hell would you know about it?"

Sam can't suppress a laugh. "Shit, Dean, I had seventeen years of Winchester family dynamics. You think I don't know a little something about how you two were, how all three of us were?"

"Dad doesn't fucking need defending. After all he did."

Whenever the phrase "all he did" comes up in Sam's head regarding their dad, it's not usually stuff that's in the plus column. "Like what?"

"Dammit, Sam, he did the best he could."

Sam sometimes wonders if all parents do the best they can, even those who do unspeakable things to their children. That's really the scary thing. And it's something he knows better than to speak out loud.

Dean doesn't give him the opening, even if Sam wanted it. "He kept this family together, even when he could barely hold himself together."

"What, dragging us all over the lower 48, leaving us on our own for days at a time in shitty motels and rental houses, dumping us off at Pastor Jim's for weeks?"

"That's still how you see everything. Nothing's ever enough. Dad could have dumped us with some distant relative when he started hunting, and we'd never have seen him again. We needed him, and he made sure we not only knew him, but lived with him. He kept us together for seventeen years, Sammy, and there wasn't a goddamn monster out there that could pull us apart. You're the one who punched a hole in this family."

This view of his family and his own place in it has never occurred to Sam. Suddenly this fucking land yacht of a car is too small for him, as crowded as it is with his memories and Dean's anger. He spots a sign for a rest stop two miles ahead, and says to Dean, "I'm making a stop."

"Whatever you want, Sam," Dean says in a tone that indicates it's just the latest unreasonable demand in a lifetime of them.

This is fucking impossible. Eight, nine more hours of this is going to kill one or both of them.

***

When Sam stops the Impala amid the sea of silver cars built within this century, it looks like the hulking relic that it is. He shuts off the motor but leaves the keys for Dean as he exits without a word and marches up the slope to the squat brick building.

He wasn't ready for this.

Sam has no idea how long it would have taken to be ready for the end of ten years of estrangement, and all the memories and knee-jerk reactions to come flooding in. After all those years of peace with Jess -- they argue sometimes, but it's never this wounding -- now his instincts for fighting have come roaring back.

This is a thing normal people with normal childhoods experience too; he knows that. Jess talks about it sometimes when they go to visit her family, how she drops into roles she'd shed long ago. Her folks are great, and her relationship with them is relatively uncomplicated -- by her own account, not just by Winchester standards. But she still becomes a different person when she crosses their doorstep. It's cute and a little spooky to see.

Now he's getting firsthand experience with that phenomenon, but it's brutal. He hadn't even had time to brace for it. Sam had made this trip to consult with a stranger, a guy who knew things that hunters would need to know. And then it's his dead brother standing over him. And not even the brother he remembers.

Dean's been possessed by the ghost of their dad.

The thought wrings a laugh from him, but it sounds more like a strangled cough. Sam washes his hands, then bends over the sink, splashing water on his face. Looking around for a towel dispenser, he finds only an electric dryer, one that blows so hard it makes the skin ripple across the backs of his hands. He pulls the hem of his t-shirt up to towel off his face and eyes himself in the shatterproof mirror, which reflects about as well as the stainless steel refrigerator at home.

Here's the thing: He knows what the problem is, why he's reacting in the most nonproductive way possible. But he has no idea how to stop himself from doing it. If Jess is bound to old patterns against her will, what chance does Sam have?

When he emerges from the men's room, he finds Dean feeding a dollar bill into the candy machine. It's crumpled and worn, and the machine keeps spitting it back. "Sonofabitch," Dean mutters.

"I think I've got some new ones," Sam says, reaching for his wallet. He makes a move to feed the dollar into the machine himself, but Dean snatches it from his hand and does it himself.

Sam tells himself to watch for the impulse to do things for Dean and stifle it whenever possible. Of course Dean would hate that.

Dean bends to retrieve the candy bar from the machine, the dead weight of his arm swinging forward. Does it throw off his balance? Sam wonders. Does it hurt? If he'd wear it in a sling--

As if.

As he straightens, Dean extends the crumpled dollar to Sam, and he knows better than to wave it off.

Winchester pride. As much a curse as a gift.

Sam tucks the bill into his wallet. "Listen, I'm sorry. Jess always says she turns into her childhood self whenever she's around her folks, and I guess that's universal. I didn't come all this way to fight about Dad."

Dean snorts. "You didn't come all this way for me, actually. You came for some random guy with answers."

He can't believe how much that stings. "I thought you were dead." It sounds like the beginning of another argument. He softens his tone. "If I'd known you were alive, you're still the guy I would have come to for help. That's as real a part of my childhood as being --" A memory strikes him and he finds his mouth quirking up -- "'an argumentative little bitch.'"

Dean laughs at this, and thumps Sam on the arm. "Forget it," he says, offering what Sam suspects is as much apology as forgiveness. "I'm going to the head, then let's get back on the road."

***

Sam waits outside, perched on the fender of the Impala and drinking one of the Cokes he'd gotten from the machine. He is desperate for two things: his daughter to be well again, and to find a way to climb or tear down this barrier between him and Dean. He feels he has as little influence over the second as he does the first.

They used to get along. Hell, Dean once spoiled him rotten, and Sam worshipped him. Once, when he was small and real sick, he'd called Dean "Dad."

He feels so lost right now, in a place so dark and tangled he doesn't even know where to take the first step to find a way back to Dean.

As he heads downhill toward the Impala, Dean's talking on his cell phone, and the warm intimacy of his voice makes him think it must be Cheyenne. Disconnecting the call before he gets close enough to make out words, Dean puts away the phone and fishes out his keys.

Offering the other Coke, Sam says, "Want some caffeine and sugar?"

"Sure, if you're okay with driving a while longer."

Again, Sam had acted thoughtlessly, without taking his brother's new circumstances into account. "Sure, I'm good."

Unlocking the passenger door, Dean then hands the keys over to Sam, who has to hook them with his pinky finger. Sam watches as he cradles his right arm then folds himself into the passenger seat. He seems to have it down to a science. He leans into the gap, reaching across his body to get a grip on the door handle. "Hop to it, Sammy," he calls out before he tugs the door closed.

Rounding the front of the car, Sam opens the driver's door with a deep creak, which he'd swear was the same sound it made ten years ago. He hands the unopened Coke across to Dean, wedges his own between his legs and puts the Impala in gear.

***

After the silence between them has stretched on for a while, Sam pushes out a rush of words. "Of all the things I never thought I'd do in my life, getting to drive the Impala is way up there." Dad had given him just the one lesson, and after the ensuing shouting match, it had been up to Dean. Once he'd been declared fit to drive, he'd never once been offered the keys. "I can't believe you still have it, and it's still running so great."

Sam hadn't calculated these to be the words that would erase some of the awkwardness between them; they'd been sincere. But their effect is near-miraculous.

Dean smiles. "She's something, isn't she? If ever you could say a car had heart...." He looks vaguely embarrassed then, and lets that trail off.

"You and Dad had to put a fair amount of work into her to keep her going this long."

"Good maintenance, mostly. Occasional bodywork or engine repairs. Last time I had a hunting-related repair was down in Texas. Lachusa clawed the shit out of the paint down the driver's side." Dean chuckles. "Good old boy I met down there helped me get it looking like new, he wasn't a hunter, but he knew about demons. His wife killed one in LA. Ran it down with a fucking bus. Damn, those people had some stories. Their daughter and son-in-law are hunters, or something like it, out in LA."

It still all comes down to hunting, in the end.

"She doesn't get out like this much, not anymore."

"You miss this part too, don't you? Don't you like being grounded somewhere, having a home?"

"It's good, yeah." Sam hears the I guess that Dean doesn't tack on. "I don't think I'd have settled otherwise, though. Can't miss what you never had."

"Yes you can," Sam blurts. "Besides, you had four years. I don't know how much you remember, but you do remember."

Sam's cell rings and he fumbles it from his pocket. "Jess?"

"Hey, she's awake for the moment," Jess says without preamble. He hears her tell Mattie, "Pip, it's Daddy on the phone."

"Hi Sweetie," Sam says, but the response is mostly a fussy slur with a few words. "I know you're feeling lousy, but you'll be better soon. And I'm on my way home. I'll see you real soon."

"Bring me?" she says in a snuffly whine.

Sam smiles, tears stinging his own eyes. She's aware enough to remember her Daddy's Away refrain. "Pip honey, you can't believe what Daddy's going to bring you."

Jess takes the phone and they make their goodbyes. As he puts the phone away, the road shifts in a wash of tears. "I'm taking the next exit," he tells Dean. "I'm ready to switch."

***

Once they've merged back onto the highway, Dean shoots Sam a few sidelong glances. After the third, he says, "You all right?"

"Yeah. I don't know." He tastes a coppery tang and realizes he's biting the inside of his lip.

"What? She's awake, isn't she?"

"Sort of. In and out." Sam gazes out of the window for a few moments, a hand shielding his face from Dean. "She said, 'Bring me.' It's a ritual, whenever I travel. I guess that's a good sign."

"She'll be okay," Dean says, almost fiercely. "She's a Winchester."

Sam manages to dredge up a small smile. "Yeah."

After another short pause, Dean says, "Can you imagine us asking Dad to bring home something from one of his business trips?"

Sam tenses, wondering if that's some kind of knock on Sam's style of fathering.

Before he can respond, Dean goes on, "Here, Sammy! I brought you a rawhead tooth for your collection. You can have it as soon as I dig it out of my ass."

"To tell you the truth," Sam says, "I can't even imagine asking him to come home alive."

Flicking the turn signal, Dean pulls into the hammer lane around a car that's easily doing ten over the limit. "You make him sound like some kind of monster."

"I know. Sorry. I guess my memories of Dad are skewed by the fights we had when I got older. By that last big one. I think it colored everything."

That seems to pacify Dean, and after a moment's pause he says, "Let's play a road trip game."

Which is possibly the bizarrest thing Sam's heard in a while -- the Winchesters did not play road trip games once Sam got old enough to read in the car. The closest they came was the occasional unannounced game of Slugbug, which was an excuse for Dean to punch Sam in the arm. "Uh ... okay."

"Name five good memories from when we were kids."

Sam would rather have a vicious punch in the arm. He's about to say so when he remembers Dean's own arm, the one that would do the punching, is useless. Heaving a sigh, he considers. "Remember that weekend we spent at Pastor Jim's? I was about --"

"No Pastor Jim memories," Dean says shortly. "I know he was your favorite substitute dad and all, but we're talking real family memories."

"Jesus, Dean. I can't do this right now." Gazing out the passenger window, he tries to will away the knot in his throat. A few miles pass before he says, softly. "It's not true. About Pastor Jim."

"What?"

Sam shifts just enough to look at the road ahead, but not at Dean. "Pastor Jim wasn't my substitute dad. He was great, and --" I wouldn't be who I am today without him is not something Dean will want to hear, since who Sam is constitutes one of Dean's major issues with him. "He's not the one who dressed me and fed me and signed permission slips."

"Changed your diapers, mopped up your puke --"

As a deflection, it doesn't work so well. Sam turns his gaze on Dean. "Yeah, Dean, you did all that too. Talked me down from nightmares, wrestled medicine down me when I was sick. Even the times Dad was there, he hung back, deferred to you."

"That's because of you," Dean says, his voice soft and distant. "You asked for me." There's a long stretch of quiet while interchanges with signs for gas stations and fast food joints flash by. "Remember that time you called me 'Dad'? You probably don't."

"I was just thinking about it a while ago, actually. Have you ever thought of having kids?"

"Once or twice," Dean says, with a studied casualness.

"I was so scared when Jess was pregnant," Sam says. "I wanted Pip so much it hurt, but I was terrified I'd have no idea what I was doing, that she couldn't count on me to be there when there were tears and nightmares and puke. But I'm finding my way, because I remember how it's done. I learned that from you, Dean. Dad wasn't a monster, and he had his moments, but I learned the regular, day to day stuff from you."

There are few times in his life when he remembers Dean speechless, without a smartass comeback, but this definitely goes to the top of the list.

***

When Dean finally recovers himself, he says, "At the risk of sounding dadlike, why don't you cop some Zs for a little while? I've probably got about another hour in me. Sleep while you can."

Though it has the whiff of deflection about it, there's also that once-familiar feeling of Dean watching out for him. Though when he was younger, it was usually, "Get in bed before I kick your ass." Of course, it generally took threats to get Sam's face out of a book or pull him away from a project.

This time, though, Sam shrugs. "I'll try. I'm gonna stretch out in back."

"Don't stretch too far, or you're gonna have to hang your feet out the window."

Dean pulls to the shoulder long enough for Sam to clear a few things off the back seat and lie down. Though Sam expects to his racing mind to keep him awake, complete exhaustion -- or maybe the memory of all the years he spent sacking out back here -- overtakes him.

It seems like just a few seconds have passed when he wakes to Dean tugging on his ankle. "Hey. Sleeping Beauty. Your turn to drive. Want to hit the head, grab some road food?"

Scrambling up, Sam wipes at the moist corners of his mouth, waiting for mockery.

Dean just grins. "Sleep is like sex. It's not really good unless messy fluids are involved."

It teases a laugh out of Sam, and he wonders at this flash of what things used to be like. Except not exactly -- he can't imagine the Dean of before would ever have let on that his body could only handle another hour behind the wheel. Because Dad would never have admitted it, unless he was bleeding out.

They return to the car with their food, Dean with a shake and a sack of fries in his good hand. "I'm gonna go straight for the back seat," he tells Sam. "I could stand a little sleep myself, after I eat."

Opening the back door, Sam says, "Let me catch that for you, Miss Daisy."

"Oh, fuck you," Dean says without heat, and it feels like one of the best signs Sam's had so far.

After his and Dean's paper bags are crumpled on the floorboards, Dean says, "I'm stretching out for a while. Don't let me sleep for more than an hour, or I'll be all kinds of fucked up."

Once Dean settles in, Sam considers how this catastrophic injury has changed his brother, softened the bravado that used to surface even when it was plainly stupid. It's given him a home, what seems to be a stable relationship, a life without constant threat. Sam has to remember that Dean is not him, that Dean hasn't always longed for these in the fierce way Sam's always wanted them. But he's grateful, even though Dean may not be. Now that he's found his brother again, he may get to have him around for a long time, and Dean's limitations and necessary honesty about them may help bridge the gap of years and hurt and anger.

He hopes so almost as fervently as he prays for the life of his daughter.

***

An hour after their last stop, Sam takes another off-ramp to pull into a fast-food parking lot. As he opens the rear door to wake Dean in the same manner he'd used on Sam, he pauses, frozen by the slice of scar tissue he can see where Dean's shirt is hiked up an inch or so.

These aren't claw marks, gunshot or knife scars. The small glimpse of ruined skin makes it clear it's a mass of scar tissue, a lunar landscape born of unimaginable pain.

Dean would hate being stared at, he knows. Pulling his gaze away, he puts a hand to Dean's ankle, shaking gently. "Hey. Dean."

"Yeah, yeah." He hoists himself up on his left elbow, which is tucked beneath him. "Give me a hand?"

Sam makes a move to help, but hesitates.

"That's not a snake up my sleeve, Sammy. You can grab it."

Tentatively, he reaches for Dean's arm. It shouldn't be a surprise that the muscles have wasted, even with the long sleeved shirts Dean favors. Sam squelches his startled reaction and helps Dean lever himself out of the Impala's back seat.

Grinning, Dean says, "Remember that time you broke your leg? You were what, thirteen?"

Heat rises in Sam's cheeks as he rolls his eyes. "I remember." They'd cut the cast off after a couple of months, and he'd puked at the sight of his withered leg. "It wasn't just the leg. It was that fucking saw. The sound of it, plus the whole idea of a saw right against my leg." He gestures toward the McDonalds. "Want to grab anything to eat, some coffee, go for the head?"

"You're not gonna puke on my arm, are you?"

"Dude. I have a four-year-old and a dog. I've dealt with baby shit and dog shit, both varieties of puke, puke with crayons in it -- I'm not saying whose -- skunk spray, fishing army men out of the toilet -- my personal vomit threshold is way off the charts. Last chance -- pit stop: yes? no?"

"Sure." As they head toward the building, Dean says, "Your daughter plays with army men?"

"Mattie is a free spirit, wild and untamed," Sam responds without thinking. It's a running joke between him and Jess, and repeating it makes him miss both Jess and Pip so fiercely that it hurts his chest.

"Sounds like she's a Winchester, too." Dean gives him a long sideways glance as they cross the parking lot. "I know you haven't always thought that's a good thing, but it is. It means she's tough. It means she'll help us fight this bastard as much as we're going to help her fight it. You'll see."

Not trusting himself to speak, Sam nods.

"Besides, we're on the home stretch. Another three hours and we'll be there."

***

Leaving the keys in Sam's possession, Dean settles himself into the shotgun seat. Sam watches the process, hiding his curiosity under the cover of retying his shoelaces, each foot in turn cocked up on the Impala's running board.

Dean actually has this down to a routine. He sets the McDonalds bag on the floorboard, folds himself into the front seat, reaches for his right arm and places it on his thigh. The shake goes into the V of his legs, then he nestles the supersized fries box into the grip of his working thumb and forefinger. Suddenly he looks no different from any other guy after a fast food run.

Dean's adapted. Sam may be getting used to the debilitating injury that changed Dean and his life so radically, but Dean's been working his way through it. He asks for help only when he needs it, in a matter-of-fact way.

"What's the matter, princess?" Dean says around a mouthful of fries. "You got a pea in your shoe?"

Sam folds himself in behind the wheel. "Nah, I peed back at McDonalds."

That produces a honk of laughter and a backhanded swat on Sam's arm. "Good one, Sammy."

Halfway through the fries, Dean asks, "So how did you and Jess meet?"

Sam wedges his own shake between his legs. "I tell people I fell head-over-heels for her in Spain."

"What, I'm not people?"

"I just figured I'd used up my bad joke quota for the last ten minutes. We were in Spain at the same time, so we saw each other when we socialized with big groups of Stanford students, but since she was in the art program, we didn't see each other outside of that. Then I got robbed and pitched off a cliff."

"You said it was an embankment." A sidelong glance at Dean reveals his sharpened gaze.

Oh yeah, he did. "...It was more of a cliff. So I was missing when it came time to go back to the States. She refused to leave until I was found, and then until I was out of the hospital. I guess she was all over the embassy, the hospitals, the police. She's blond and fierce and fluent in Spanish, so I wasn't a John Doe for very long."

"Blond?"

"They're not that common in Spain. They get attention. She worked it to my benefit, believe me. She stayed with me at the hospital and made all the arrangements to get us both home. So that's how we got to know each other better."

"She sounds pretty awesome."

"You don't know the half of it." Sam draws in a breath. This is probably the point where he should say it. "She knows."

He shoots a sidelong glance at Dean. The scar on his lip bunches and unbunches as Dean draws a fry into his mouth and works at it until it disappears, all without using a hand.

"About us, I mean," Sam continues. "What we did. Not everything, not the worst stuff we saw. But in the hospital, I was drifting in and out, and I guess I did a lot of talking to you and Dad. I thought I'd been hurt on a hunt. Once my head cleared, I tried to pass it off as the pain meds, but she was too sharp to buy it. Eventually I told her some things."

"Wow. And she didn't run screaming in the opposite direction?"

"Amazingly, no."

"Wow," Dean says again. "I tried that once. Someone I got serious about. It was 'Don't let the screen door hit you in the ass, you lying freak.'"

Sam winces. That's what he'd always expected when he'd entertained the ludicrous idea of telling any woman the truth about himself, but it hurts to know Dean had gotten that very slap in the face. "But Cheyenne, she knows."

"Yeah. She's glad I'm out of the hunting end of it. She's seen with her own eyes the sort of shit that can happen."

"Are you two serious?"

"Don't know yet. I might be leaning that way." Dean heads off more of that discussion with the loud death rattle of his straw at the bottom of the shake and the crumpling of paper bags. He pops the glove box. "Let's find some new tunes."

***

The closer they get to Philly, the more tense and irritable Sam gets. Dean goes with the flow; just like Sam, he's adept at reading the familial temperature and avoiding a sharp upward spike. Not that he has to worry about Sam cuffing him upside the head and threatening to leave him on the roadside. (Dad knew the classic "Don't make me turn this car around" didn't have a hope in hell of being believed by his sons.)

Sam hasn't asked about Dad, about how he died. He wonders if Dean is judging him for that even now, but he can't spare the energy. Dad's dead. Nothing Sam asks or doesn't ask will make a damn bit of difference.

After a while Dean leans against the passenger door, submitting to the sleep he hasn't had in maybe a day or two.

When he reaches the outskirts of the city, Sam fumbles his phone from his pocket and calls Jess. "Hey, sweetheart. How's Pip?"

"She's almost completely out of it. The doctors say it's a coma, though she fusses sometimes, and responds to some of the doctor's questions."
Her voice is starting to quaver. "Oh Sam. When are you going to be here?"

"We're almost there. I called to see if you want me to stop by home first. Is there anything she was asking for when she was awake? Or something you think might give her something to hang onto? Mr. Bun? Anything you need?"

"A change of clothes for me would be great. She has her bunny, but some of her favorite books would be good. Maybe if we read to her --" She cuts herself off, but he can tell by her breathing that her tears have overflowed.

"The books are a great idea. I'll grab some. How about her blankie?"

Jess laughs shakily. "I think I need the blankie. Yes please."

"You've got it. I love you, Jess. Be strong; I'll be there soon."

As Sam's putting his cell away, Dean's scratchy voice says, "Blankie? Mr. Bun?"

"Wait till you have kids. You'll find yourself saying a lot worse. Our last anniversary, we went out to dinner, and when she came out of the bedroom all dolled up for the night and ready to leave, I said, 'Did you go potty?' Pretty mortifying. Especially when Jess said, 'If you ever want to have sex with me again in this lifetime, you won't ever say that in adult conversation again.'"

Dean grins. "Did that break the habit?"

"Immediately."

"Awesome. I like her."

It suddenly occurs to him that this is a new family story that he's shared with all that's left of his first family. The surge of feelings that rises up in him is so complex and achy and hopeful that Sam can't begin to sort them out.

Maybe this is all part of some plan. That the thing stalking the neighborhood's kids will bring more than fear and illness. Sam has his brother for the first time in a decade, and within half an hour, he'll be bringing him into the fold of his new family. It seems almost like a miracle.

But at the same time, he and Dean have a battle to fight. This thing that has gone after Mattie is something even his father couldn't kill.

The thought shadows everything as Sam drives over rain-slicked streets into the heart of Philadelphia.

***

The creak and pop of the Impala's door as he closes it seems to give voice to the stiffness in Sam's back as he stretches and waits for Dean to emerge.

"So this is it," he says unnecessarily.

Dean looks the building up and down. "A bold choice, Sammy. Looks like enough history there to host a few hauntings, at least."

"You could probably say the same about most of the city."

Once they've passed the doorman, Sam notices Dean looking around him, taking in every detail of the old hotel lobby. He recognizes the hunter's gaze. Sam wonders, though, if he's imagining the rest -- the gawking of the scholarship student confronted with the wealth his friends take for granted. Wariness, mixed with a little awe. The knowledge you're in a world where it matters which fork you pick up, where the slightest misstep can give you away.

Sam doesn't want Dean to have that feeling about his home -- about him. But any acknowledgment of it -- hey, man, you're quiet all of a sudden , how many times had Sam heard that? -- will call it into being, or make it worse.

"Elevator's this way," he says instead. Inside, there's a flyer posted on the wall about the cancellation of day care until further notice. Someone has penned hash marks on the paper, enumerating each case, Sam assumes. The number looks about right. "They think it's some kind of flu." Sam's voice sounds thick and strange to him.

"When we put this thing down, they can go on thinking it." There's something in his tone that reminds him of Dad, gruff but reassuring (a flashback to the distant time when his dad's voice could prompt anything but irritation or righteous anger).

The reassuring part doesn't work. "This was something even Dad couldn't put down," Sam bursts out.

There's a flicker of something unreadable across Dean's face, gone almost as soon as it appears. "We'll get the fucker," Dean says.

Sam leads Dean to his apartment and switches on the lights. Usually at this hour the lights are already blazing and Pip is steaming toward him, alerted by the sound of his key. It feels dead and empty to him, though Dean is taking in the space, clearly surprised at the size and configuration of what used to be a string of hotel rooms. "Jess did all this," Sam says as he leads the way to Mattie's room. "She's an architect, I don't remember if I told you that."

"No."

"She was with one of the big firms in the city, working on mall atriums, that kind of thing, when she designed our space. She got a lot of interest from this, so she quit the firm and works from home on coop conversions like this." Sam points out a closed door. "That's her office. Mattie's room is right next door."

As they approach, there's a chuffing noise from inside, then the slow click of toenails as the dog rises to greet them.

"Hey, Patsy." Sam bends to scratch behind her ears. "Hi, girl. You miss Pip, don't you?"

She snuffles at Dean's ankles, and he bends to let her sniff at his hand.

"Have a look around," Sam tells Dean. "I'll be just a minute getting Jess's stuff and changing my own clothes."

"These old windows open?"

"Painted shut."

He heads into his and Jess's bedroom, dialing the dog sitter as he's looking through her closet. It's a few minutes before Sam returns with a canvas bag slung over his shoulder, Patsy at his heels.

"Not anymore, it's not," Dean says, as if had never left the room. "Look at this."

A few paint chips have drifted onto the windowsill.

"What could get in through the bars?" Every window in the place had been childproofed.

"Dude, what could get in on the nineteenth floor?"

"I guess."

Dean steps onto a wooden chair, then onto the windowsill, pressing his palm against the upper pane, attempting to slide it downward. "Give me a hand here."

Sam follows his lead, and the two of them manage to open the window about a foot and a half.

"Check this out," Dean says. "Some kind of claw marks up here. I remember the hands on this thing. Claws almost as long as its fingers."

"You saw it? In its true state, I mean?"

"Yeah. I saw it." Together they push the window closed, and Dean grabs one of the rungs on the window grate and gets himself down. "Grab Mattie's stuff while I get changed. Sooner we nail this bastard, the better."

***

After gathering a few books, Sam finds himself staring at Goodnight, Moon, wondering whether Pip would get comfort from it, or another reminder that she's in an alien place.

Maybe someone should write a version for kids in the hospital, he thinks stupidly. Goodnight ventilator that keeps me alive.

A sob tears through him so suddenly he can't even think to try to suppress it. He has better success with the second, calling on long years with John Winchester telling him if he's not bleeding, knock off the damn crying. The third he chokes off entirely.

He sets Goodnight, Moon back on Mattie's little bookshelf, and adds The Runaway Bunny to his pile instead.

"You ready to roll?" Dean says from the doorway.

"Yeah." Sam turns toward him and stops dead.

Dean has totally transformed himself, wearing a dark suit and tie (how does he manage a tie with one working hand?), dress shoes instead of boots. Sam curses himself for his own clothing choices -- though he'd confined himself to a white shirt with open collar, freshly pressed jeans straight from the dry cleaners and a pair of black leather shoes, he'd still managed to widen the chasm between them.

"Hey, you don't have to dress up for --"

Sam knows it's a mistake before the rest of the sentence comes out.

"I'm working a case here, Sam." The dumbass is implicit, but Sam would feel a lot better if he'd said it. The lack of playful abuse means this is a misstep that can't be waved off with good natured snark.

"I'm sorry," Sam says. "I just can't think. Being in Pip's room, knowing that she's --" Winchester-style, he bites off the end of that sentence and the emotion.

"Why don't we get going, then?" Dean's voice has softened slightly. At a slight nod from Sam, he turns and leads the way down the hall.

When Dean stops in his tracks, Sam immediately knows why. He hadn't thought about Dean encountering the painting.

"What's this?"

"It's us. You, me, Dad. And Mom. You remember that old snapshot --" Mom cradling Sam in her arms, Dad with his arm around her and a hand on Dean's shoulder.

"Yeah."

Sam can't read his tone. "Jess commissioned this from a painter she works with. It was my Christmas present, two years back."

Jess's intent had been to take the faded Instamatic print and bring it to life, but the artist had recognized its iconic status for Sam, reading its importance in the creases marring the image. Alyssan had painted the photo as a photo, transforming it into a sepia print with white scalloped borders, creases faithfully reproduced. The vivid colors Jess had anticipated were confined to a block of color wash, predominantly sunny yellow with smears of blues and greens, behind the image of the photo.

When she'd presented it to him, Jess had been disappointed, apprehensive. But Sam had loved it from the instant he saw it, because Alyssan had captured not just the family but the importance of the portrait as Sam's talisman.

"Wow," Dean says.

"If we ever had a fire --" and he cringes the second he says it, but it's too late to correct himself -- "this is the only possession I'd need to save." Almost true; there's an envelope of photos too, but Sam doesn't mention these.

Dean turns from the painting to study Sam, and Sam can see the realization wash over his brother that he's bound by family too, if in a different way from Dean.

Sam decides to be the one to say it this time. "Let's get to it."

***

Dean drops him off at the main entrance. "I'll park, then I'll do some poking around. I'll find you when I'm done."

"Thanks. Good luck." Sam sets off for the pediatrics floor, which he hasn't set foot inside since Mattie got her tonsils out, over a year ago. Unlike last time (or at least his memory of last time), the ward creeps him out. The nurses' scrubs with cartoon characters printed all over them, the clowns painted on every wall in sight. Whoever's in charge of interior decorating in every kids' ward, it seems, has totally forgotten their own childhood terror of clowns -- Sam's convinced that's a universal trait of kids.

Stopping by the nurse's station, Sam asks the one behind the desk (Dora the Explorer) for his daughter's room. She points him in the right direction with a professional cheer, but Sam sees a flash of the pity it masks. Pip's one of those kids: ill with nothing anyone can explain, declining for no apparent reason.

Shoving the thought aside, Sam hurries down the hall toward his family. He hears the low murmur of Jess's voice even before he sees her. She's perched on the side of Mattie's bed, smoothing Pip's hair and talking about the trip to Disney World they have planned for the winter after Pip's sixth birthday.

"Hey, babe." It's an effort to squeeze the words past the tightness in his throat, and the expression on Jess's face, full of relief and fear and hope guttering like a candle's flame, chokes off anything further he might have said.

"Sweetie, look who's here," she says to Pip. "Daddy's back."

Moving to Jess's side, he slips his arm around her as he strokes Mattie's hair. "Hi, Pipsqueak. I sure missed you."

Her eyes slit open just a fraction at the sound of his voice, and Sam turns to Jess. "Hey, she's --"

The tight shake of Jess's head stops him. "She's been doing that. Responding to voices. But the doctor says she's still in a coma. There's, um ..." She takes in a stuttering breath. "There's a range. Of awareness."

"Jess --" He smoothes her hair, as he did Mattie's.

Steeling herself, she pushes on. "The other kids started out in the higher range, like her. Then they sink."

Sam pulls her tight into his arms, and she sways against him.

"Nobody knows why," she whispers, and dissolves into tears.

"Shhh, Jessie," Sam murmurs into her hair. He reaches toward Mattie, strokes two fingers lightly down her cheek. "It'll be all right, baby," he says to them both. "I promise."

The door opens and Sam looks up, thinking it's early yet for Dean. He loosens his arms, letting Jess slip out of his embrace. "Oh hey, doc." It's Pip's pediatrician, who's been treating her since she was born.

Jess wipes at her eyes and manages a wavering smile. "Dr. Hydecker, hello."

***

Sam hasn't had as much direct contact with Dr. Hydecker as Jess has, but he knows Jess trusts and likes him, and the times Sam has met him he's felt the same. There's a kindness in his eyes that Sam somehow associates with someone much older than Hydecker is. TV doctors, probably.

"You made it back from your business trip," the doctor says to Sam. "It must have been a frustrating time to be away."

Sam nods. "How's she doing?"

"We're going to have a look and see right now." We turns out to be Dr. Hydecker and the nurse who has slipped in unnoticed. She wears a shirt with dozens and dozens of Scooby Doos on it.

Sam and Jess step back from the bedside to let the doctor and nurse examine Mattie. Dr. Hydecker speaks softly to Pip as he bends over her, just as if she were awake. It's one of the things Jess has always liked about him, that he doesn't treat Pip as a non-talking appendage of her mother.

As the nurse wraps a blood pressure cuff around Mattie's slender arm, the doctor looks toward Jess. "Have you noticed anything since I last saw you and Mattie? Anything different?"

"No," Jess says. "She opened her eyes a little when my husband came in and spoke to her.

Minute frown lines appear between the doctor's brows. "How long ago was that?"

"Just a few minutes ago," Sam says, apprehension rising. "Why?"

"Come on over and try again, would you?"

Shoving aside his terror, Sam forces a smile as he leans over her. "Hey, Pip. I brought your blankie and your favorite books. I bet you've been missing them." He starts to reach out to touch her face, but the doctor holds up a hand to still the movement. "I brought you a present, too. I bet you're gonna like it a lot."

This time there's no response, not even a crescent moon of white below the fringe of her lashes.

At a nod of dismissal from the doc, Sam steps back and lets him finish the examination. He slips his arm back around Jess. Her fingers pluck nervously at his shirt as they watch Dr. Hydecker and the nurse.

Finally the doctor turns back to them, the kindness in his eyes shadowed by something more grave. "I'm afraid Mattie's growing less responsive," he tells them. "She's stopped reacting to voices, and her response to physical stimuli has become more rudimentary. She's gone down a couple of notches on the Glasgow Coma Scale."

"Just like the others," Jess whispers.

"I'm afraid so. But -- the CDC's sent an investigator to look into this disease. He just arrived a short while ago, and he's already started working. We're hoping he'll unlock this thing before it spreads any further."

Sam hopes so too. Though Dean hadn't showed him the credentials he'd scrounged from the Impala's glove box, he has a strong suspicion he's the CDC's man. That encourages him more than an actual medical investigator would.

After scrawling some notes on Mattie's chart, Dr. Hydecker takes his leave. Nurse Scooby Doo lingers a moment to readjust Mattie's covers and the IV lines.

"He's been here the last three days, with barely any sleep at all," she tells Jess and Sam. "Honestly, I don't know where he gets the energy." At last she finishes fussing over Mattie and leaves.

"Speaking of sleep," Sam says, "how about you? I can sit here and read to her while you get some rest."

Jess shakes her head vehemently. "Not a chance. i'll change real quick because I've been dying to do that, but I'm not tired."

Sam sits at Mattie's bedside and starts to read, and before long Jess returns and settles herself on his knee, curled up against him to follow along as he reads the text.

It's not much longer before she's asleep, her body warm and heavy against him.

***

After a couple of pages, Sam lets Mattie's book slip from his hand and snugs his free arm around Jess too. The rest of the story he knows by heart -- even the point where sometimes he veers off the text. And the cow and the pig got married and lived --

This always, without fail, prompted a vehement (if sleepy), Noooo, Daddy! Tell it right!

When he reaches the point in the story where he makes his plot substitution, he falters. Deep inside, he holds a crazy hope that Pip's love of her stories and her 4-year-old love for order in certain areas of her small universe would drag her out of this unnatural sleep.

But if it didn't, Sam knows it would break him. His throat closes around the words that would bring the story to its rightful conclusion. Tightening his arms around Jess and turning his face into her shoulder, he loosens the grip he's had on his emotions. When tears become sobs, Jess stirs, making a small noise in her throat, then shifting her own arms around Sam.

"Baby," she murmurs into his hair, and that makes whatever control he had slip entirely.

It's funny. Twenty-two years ago, the exact same word from Dean, delivered in mocking tones, would dry up Sam's tears instantly. Now -- he feels like there's two decades of dammed-up sorrow and terror and ache demanding to be let out.

Jess murmurs into his hair, rocking him so slightly it's barely a motion at all.

A light knock on the door, then a draft as the door opens a few inches. Jess turns toward the door, whispering, "Could you please come back in five minutes?" There's a slight pause, then Jess repeats, "Please," this time with a little more steel in her voice.

The door drifts closed, but it's already served to put a damper on Sam's emotions. He pulls himself together, palming away his tears. "I'm sorry, Jess."

"You needed that." She leans in for a kiss before she rises to her feet and takes Sam's hand as he follows. "That idiot at the door. Staring at you like he's gawking at a car wreck."

"Who was it?"

"I'm not sure. Chaplain or something. He'll be back in a couple of minutes. Maybe you want to splash some water on your face, take a minute."

Sam nods and follows her suggestion. When he emerges, the same light tap sounds at the door, and Sam calls out softly to enter.

It's Dean in his dark suit.

"Jess thought you were a chaplain," Sam informs him, which prompts the snort he'd figured it would. Some things don't change much. "Jess, this is my brother. Dean."

"You're Dean?" Before he can respond, Jess hurls herself at him, throwing her arms around him. "Oh god, I'm so glad to meet you. I never thought I'd have the chance."

***

The look Dean shoots Sam is almost comically startled. After a brief hesitation, he brings up his good arm to give Jess a quick squeeze. "Uh, good to meet you too."

Stepping back, Jess lays her hands on Dean's shoulders. "Let me get a look at you."

Dean looks like he'd rather be standing in a police lineup -- or more accurately, he looks like he is, but Jess doesn't seem to notice.

"You never said how handsome he is," Jess says.

"I'd be a little bit disturbed if he had," Dean says, flicking an uncomfortable look toward Sam.

"Besides," Sam says, "last time I saw him, he was walleyed and pigeon-toed and had one front tooth that stuck straight out."

"Funny," Dean says.

"That's not what the pictures show," Jess says, causing Sam to flinch. "Though they don't show much."

"Pictures?" Last time we had pictures taken was that summer at Pastor Jim's, wasn't it?"

"Yeah," Sam says, at the same moment Jess says, "No."

Dean drills Sam with a look. "What?"

"Come over and see your niece," Sam suggests, reaching for Dean's good arm. At her bedside, he says, "This is Pip." His hand moves instantly to stroke her baby-fine hair, as it always does.

"Heya, Pip," Dean says softly. "How about waking up for your old Uncle Rick? We've got some hell to raise and bad habits to learn." Dean looks up at Sam and Jess. "It's gotta be Rick from now on. Dean Winchester died three years ago, as far as the world's concerned. I'd like to keep it that way. Rick Patrick most of the time, but around here it's Hawkins. I'm the guy from the CDC."

"You're what?" Jess blurts.

"I'm investigating this outbreak, as far as they know. And for real. I've been talking to the staff and the families. I actually have some questions for you, too."

This is a way faster introduction to Winchester life than the average person can assimilate, but Jess struggles to take it all in.

"Trust me, Jess," Dean says. "I did this for years."

Sam sees a flash of that same trustworthy John Winchester charm in him, if anything even more powerful than Dad's, and it staggers him for a moment.

"All right," she says. "Rick."

Dean nods. "Dr. Rick Hawkins, until we're out of here."

"'Kay."

"I do have some questions for you," Dean repeats. "I have a pretty solid idea what's causing this, but I need to pin down what it's pretending to be. I'm looking for things you might have in common with the other families."

Dean perches on the wide windowsill, neatly drawing his bad arm onto his knee, using it to steady the small notebook he produces from his suit pocket. The motion's so smooth it might take someone a while to realize the arm doesn't move on its own. "I need to know everyone you can think of who has some presence in Mattie's life."

***

Watching Dean's questioning of Jess -- no, participating in his questioning of Jess and Sam -- he sees yet another facet of Dean he'd never seen before. He'd never even seen Dad do this, not the fake-official version. At eighteen, he'd been too young and rawboned to pass as anything remotely official, and the times Dean had been wrangled into a suit he'd been introduced as a trainee.

Even as he considers the answers to Dean's questions, Sam marvels at the skill and quiet compassion mingled in his manner. When did Dean learn how to be this way? When Sam left for Stanford, Dean had been a cocky, brash, just-point-me-at-the-problem-and-pull-the-trigger action figure in the flesh.

For the first time, perhaps, he really sees Dean, without any of the filters he'd been looking through. Without the comparisons to Dad, or the shock at his physical state -- hell, the shock of him being alive. Without the bullshit worries about what Dean is thinking about Sam's watch or his home or his life.

He sees him with complete clarity. A man -- a good man, with quiet confidence in what he does.

Dean's voice breaks into his thoughts. "You with me, Sam?"

"What?"

"You're losing focus. You need a minute?"

Sam clears his throat. "No, I'm good. Sorry. What about Sally? She's a crossing guard at the middle school. Mattie insists on walking to preschool that way because she loves her so much. All the kids are nuts about her."

"Oh god," Jess says. "I hate this. Turning our suspicion on all the people we like and trust."

"I know," Dean says. "It sucks. But one of those people is using your trust to prey on your kids. They're the ones at fault here, not you."

Jess lets out a breath, nodding.

"What can you tell me about Sally?"

"She's an older lady," Jess says. "Widowed, I think. She's from the islands, I think. Trinidad or Barbados. It's like ... like she brought all that sunshine up here, embodied in her. I haven't had a sucky day yet that walking past her hasn't improved, and it's true for the kids, you can see it. She is not secretly some kind of monster."

Dean gentles his voice. "These things survive for centuries, from what I can tell. They do it by seeming harmless. Much as we hate to, I think we should put her on the list to check out. She has access to a whole lot of kids, however briefly. You're the first to mention her, but I bet all these kids have had some passing contact with her at least."

Jess chews her lip in a way Sam knows means she's angry and upset, but resigned.

"If Sally's legit," Sam offers, "she'd understand. She'd want us to do this, because she'd want it to stop."

"And if she's not --" Dean lets that hang in the air.

"Yeah, okay," Jess says, and she rises to comfort Mattie, stroking her hair. To comfort herself.

The significance of this isn't lost on Sam. He's brought this into her life, the knowledge of dark things that slither just below the surface of what's "real."

Troubled, he gazes after her for a moment, then looks back to Dean. There's a grim sympathy in his green eyes.

"Let's get ourselves a plan," Dean says softly.

***

"Are we sure this thing is gonna hunt tonight?" Sam asks. He's got Dean's binoculars trained on the third-story windows of Sally's apartment building under cover of night, while Dean's watching the front door.

"No. There isn't all that much lore on these things, just that they do what they do. It's been every night so far, though."

"Like Jess said, it's fucked up to be torn between finding out Sally's the shtriga or learning the real one struck some other kid down while we're here watching her."

"Yeah, i know. It's the way it is sometimes. But if it does strike some other kid, there's the hope that it'll pick one with siblings, so we have a place to lie in wait rather than doing this for three more nights."

"How's that gonna work? 'Hey, Mrs. Jones, we'd like to hide in your child's closet with shotguns while she sleeps?'"

"We'll worry about-- someone's coming."

Sam drops the hand with the binocs into his lap, slouching in the back seat but still keeping his eyes on the lighted windows above.

"Shit," Dean mutters. "Not her." This statement is quickly affirmed by the rise of raucous male voices approaching the car. "Aanddd we've been made."

Sam shifts, but at the sound Dean orders, "Don't --"

Sam lies still, counting his breaths as the voices fade.

Finally Dean says. "Okay. They think they've made us as Five-0. They're content with a little eye-fucking, but we'll have to keep an eye out for them."

Sally's windows go dark a few minutes later. Sam puts away the binoculars but keeps watch. Nothing he'd seen before the lights went out looked even remotely unusual. He wants to believe their time here is wasted. The idea that another light would be extinguished -- that Sally, who touches hundreds of lives every day that she's outside in front of that school, would turn out to be something that needed hunting -- made Sam feel sick.

"So this thing," Sam says after a long stretch of silence. "It must have gone underground after Dad tried to nail it, right? Otherwise--"

"Yeah, Dad was watching out for stories like that, and I have too. If something had tripped my radar, I'd have sent someone I know and trust to look into it. If you hadn't come to me, that probably wouldn't have happened until at least a couple of kids were dead."

Sam hunches into his coat. The temperature has dropped, but there's no turning on the Impala's heater for a few moments without alerting the whole damn neighborhood. "Chilly," he says.

"Yeah," Dean answers. "There was a bodega around the corner, if you feel like grabbing us a couple coffees."

"In a while." Sam thinks there's a higher chance Sally, if she's the shtriga, will come out shortly after she's turned off her lights. "What happened last time? How'd it get away from Dad?"

There's a grim weight to the silence that follows this question. After a long moment, Dean says, "It wasn't Dad who let it get away. It was me."

"What? You were a kid, Dean. If this was before I knew what Dad did, you weren't old enough to be hunting."

Heaving a weary breath, Dean says, "No, but I was old enough to take care of my brother. I fucked that up, and it nearly got you."

"What?" he says again, feeling stupid. "I never had a shtriga after me."

"You did. You were asleep when it attacked you, so if you remembered anything, it would probably have been a bad dream. Dad shot at it. Made it run, but he didn't kill it."

Sam tries to remember anything of this sort, and comes up blank. "So how did this have anything to do with you?"

"Dad was tracking this thing. He left us, and I was supposed to watch you." Sam hears the rough sound of Dean's hand rubbing at his stubble. "I got bored and pissed off, and went to play video games in the motel game room. Weren't many motels that had something like that, so I couldn't resist. It was just gonna be ten minutes."

Sam laughs quietly, a soft puff of air. "I know how 'just ten minutes' is to a kid."

"Yeah. I lost track, and when I got back, that thing was feeding on you. If it hadn't been for Dad coming when he did --"

"Well, he did," Sam says flatly. It's unbearable to think his brother has carried such guilt for so long.

"If I'd been there--"

"If you'd been there, it wouldn't have fed, but it wouldn't have died, either. You said they have to be killed while feeding. You would have blasted away at that thing long before it came near me, I know that."

"Maybe," he says, and Sam knows that he's not going to be satisfied with any answer that absolves him. Dean's always been hard on himself when it comes to Sam's care and feeding and protection.

Some fucked-up legacy their Dad left.

***

As Dean falls into silence, Sam slouches back, watching the blank, dark windows above. He thinks about this strange, contradictory mixture of rules and expectations that Dad and Dean had for him. For the first eight years of his life, Sam was entirely shielded from the darker realities of his dad's life. His dad's job required him to travel all the time -- and sometimes got him bloodied and bruised or worse. Sam didn't learn about the darkness until he got tired of having his questions sidestepped and read Dad's journal.

This was his father's policy, faithfully carried out by Dean until it was clear that lies would no longer work. So there was this attempt to give him normal -- a very warped normal, for sure. Yet when he rebelled against the boot camp that followed his awakening, when he insisted on going to Stanford, all hell broke loose. Once introduced to this dark reality, he was not allowed to leave it.

Like the Mafia, he thinks, and has to stifle a snort.

"What?" Dean says from the front seat.

"It's almost too long to go into. I was thinking about Dad. How hard he tried to give me normal -- to keep all this supernatural stuff from me, I mean. Then once I knew the truth, there was no going back. The old 'If you set foot out of this house, don't ever come back' line in the sand. I had to tear myself in half to leave, Dean. I lost ten years with you, and Dad's last years, and god knows whatever else because he made it come down to this world or his."

Dean makes a dismissive noise. "There isn't a 'this world.' It's all a fake, a movie set. The real world is my world -- I thought this shtriga thing had proved that to you."

"So there's no middle ground, that's what you and Dad believe. What do you want me to do now, chuck my family and my job and drive around with a trunkful of guns -- at least until I get fucked-up permanently and then I crawl back home to see if they want me?"

He sucks in his breath as soon as he realizes. Fucked-up permanently. "Shit, Dean. I didn't mean that how it sounded."

"That's how it is," Dean says flatly. "My arm is fucked up. Permanently. And no, I don't want you to ditch your life and become a hunter. I just --" He shakes his head in frustration.

"Why the fuck is this an argument?" Sam demands. "I just said I wished I had the last ten years with you, and that time with Dad. Why is this a fight?"

"Because like always, you're blaming it on Dad. If he hadn't been pissed off, you'd never have stomped away and stopped being in contact with us."

Sam's jaw drops. "How is this not his fault? He told me if I left I should never come back. Jesus. Did I miss the Pope declaring him a saint sometime back? Shit, there goes her light."

Grabbing for the binoculars, he watches Sally throw off the covers and shuffle out of the room. The light goes on behind a small frosted window, and it's no more than a minute before it's off again, and a couple of minutes later, the bedroom light goes off too.

"Dean, I just -- I wish I'd had those years. Can we just leave it there?"

"Guess so."

"About Dad," Sam says after a long moment. "I want to know -- how did he die?"

***

"I told you what happened to Dad," Dean says. His tone is still angry. This probably wasn't the best time to ask, but Sam can't imagine this conversation happening in the light of day. "A demon got him."

"Yeah. You said that."

"Then let that be enough. You want normal? People with normal lives don't go asking for every fucking detail of something that's unspeakable. Normal people don't do that."

"It's all I have." He doesn't need Dean's sharp burst of laughter to tell him how ridiculous that sounds. Dean has been on the grand tour of all the things Sam does have. "I'm talking about Dad. Of everything I missed, because neither of us would bend."

"You're telling me you wish you'd been there to see it?"

"God, Dean."

"Or maybe you think you could have stopped it." There's a cold implacability to his voice that chills him.

Stop pushing. Sam sighs. "I don't know. Maybe there would have been a moment where we could have --" Forgiven each other.

"Exchanged warm fuzzies? Promised to send birthday cards next year? Nice fantasy, Sam. That's not what you would have had. His last minutes -- hell, days? He had a demon in him. That demon, the one he'd been chasing all those years. The one who killed Mom. That thing was inside him, while Dad was awake and aware, watching everything it did with and to his body. It had access to everything Dad knew and remembered, and it used it, twisted it. Your last few minutes with Dad would have been that thing getting in your head, ruining everything it could touch, poisoning every thought. Saying shit to throw you off your game, give it the upper hand. Shit that, win or lose, would stay in your soul for as long as you had left, whether it was seconds or years. That's what you're wishing for, Sammy."

Sam's chest feels tight, airless, and he has to remind himself to breathe. "How did it kill him?" His question is almost lost in the diesel roar of a city bus rumbling past.

Dean sighs. "The answer to that is so fucking tangled and ugly, Sam. Just let it go."

"I can't."

Shaking his head, Dean says, "You always were a bulldog. If you wanted something you had to have it or tear it apart trying. Let it drop this time."

The weariness in Dean's voice makes Sam ache, but letting this go isn't an option. "Dean, I can't."

"Dad had this Colt. It was made by Samuel Colt himself, and it could kill demons. Dad got it to kill this yellow-eyed demon, the one that got Mom."

Sam can hear the convulsive workings of Dean's throat as he swallows.

"For just a few seconds, Dad managed to get control over himself, push the demon back. It was still inside him, but he yanked the wheel away for just that moment." Dean's eyes glitter in the half-light from the street lamp outside. "Strong sonofabitch, that was Dad."

"Then what?"

There's a pause, unbearably long. "He ordered me to shoot him with the Colt."

"You didn't do that," Sam whispers.

"Of course I did." His voice is sandpaper on stone, tired and ragged yet hard. "You know how things were with Dad and me."

***

Sam finds himself incapable of speech. Of all the things he'd imagined, from the time he got Dean's postcard with the news of Dad's death, he'd never thought of a scenario like this.

"I told you to let it go," Dean says, and he sounds almost as if he's just heard the news himself.

Staring at the dark windows above, Sam forgets what he's watching for -- that he's watching at all. "How could --" His throat feels wrecked, burned by lye and scarred over.

"How could I do that?" Dean finishes.

Sam shakes his head. "How could he ask?"

Dean laughs, but the sound of it is raw. "Since when did John Winchester ask his sons anything?"

"Jesus."

"I didn't think I could do it. But I could see him losing his grip, a flash of yellow eyes, and then it was Dad again. There were tears pouring down his face, Sammy, and he said, 'Don't let my life count for nothing.' I pulled the trigger. I shot him right through the heart. I think I was hoping for one of those movie moments, with the last words or a meaningful look, some shit like that, something to let me know I did the right thing. All I got was that goddamn demon's screams. Dad had hung on as long as he could, as long as he needed to, and as soon as he knew I was following his last orders, he let go."

It's not until the lights go on in the windows upstairs that Sam realizes his eyes are filled with tears, his face is wet with them. "She's up again." Rubbing at his eyes, he takes up the binoculars.

"It's four-thirty. Might be she's up for the day. Be daylight in another couple of hours, then she's in the clear."

Then we're back where we started.

Except, in one important way, they're not.

"I'm sorry, Dean. Sorry that he put you through that kind of cruelty."

There's a long silence in the car, picked up and emphasized by the quiet streets outside. "It saved lives," Dean finally said. "I know that."

"But what was the cost to your life?" Sam wonders if the question has any meaning to Dean. The way Dad raised him, it was all about sacrificing himself to the greater good. The scars on his body -- the ones Sam made himself with needle and thread from the time he was twelve, the huge, knotted one Sam's only half glimpsed -- these attest to the costs, large and small, that Dean was expected to pay.

"There's a damn good chance I'd be dead if I hadn't pulled the trigger anyway. Or some demon would be wearing me to the prom. The world would be a worse place, because that demon was a powerful fucker, and he was a planner. I found out more about him after I ganked him."

Hearing Dean speak of demons makes Sam's skin prickle. This is another dividing line between them. Up to the time he left for Stanford, it was all ghosts, werewolves, wendigos. Solitary beasts that acted on instinct or spirits reenacting some long-warped need for revenge.

Demons that have an agenda, that are capable of long-range planning -- this is an entirely new thought.

"Once I hunted with Dad long enough," Dean says, "I saw that he had a reason for every order he gave. I rarely had time to question it, I just had to trust."

Sam gets the subtext here; that he didn't stick around long enough to learn the same lesson. "That's making one pretty huge assumption, in my book. Dad's decision to drag us into that life to begin with. You were my daughter's age, Dean. The idea of taking her and making her into a soldier -- no matter what catastrophe might lead to that crossroads -- it's unthinkable. And you being a boy didn't make it right, either."

"You're sitting in a pretty sweet spot to judge my life."

"It's not you I'm judging."

"You're just heaping shit on the man who shaped my life. Well, you can't do that without smearing shit on my life. Fine, man. As soon as I save your little girl, I'll be on my way so she won't have to be exposed to me."

Lowering his binoculars, Sam glares at his brother. "Dean, you stupid fuckhead. I want you in her life. I want you in mine. Stop being a big fucking fuckwit."

***

Sam's outburst sucks the air out of the car for a long moment, until Dean finally says, "You learn all those big words in college, Sammy?"

Sam lets himself give in to a laugh, and a second or two later, Dean joins in, and it feels good to pretend they're in accord, at least. Sighing, he picks up the binoculars and finds Sally in her kitchen, fussing with a tea kettle. "Dean, I never wanted to drop out of contact forever, I mean that. If Dad hadn't made it into an all-or-nothing, stay-or-never-come-back thing, this would have gone so differently."

"Or if you'd been as fucking stubborn as you always were, and did what you damn well pleased," Dean says. "Forgive me if I assumed you didn't damn well please to keep in touch, since that was the first time in your fucking life you did just what Dad said. You couldn't get away fast enough, or stay away long enough."

"Dean--" He abruptly bites off the self-justification that rises to his lips and says instead, "I'm sorry, Dean. It's the worst mistake I've made in my life. I hope we can start over and make it happen now."

"So what's Traffic Lady doing up there?"

Sam's disappointed, but he remembers how Dean is. He gets to things in his own time, especially feelings. "Drinking tea. Reading. Might be a Bible, I'm not sure. Black cover, pretty worn."

Dean grunts, declining to state the obvious. Silence stretches out between them, but there's no trace of resentment lingering in the air. Sam hopes he's working through the conversation, finding his way through the argument to the sincerity of Sam's wish for them to be reconciled. To find Dean now after these long years of thinking him dead and then to lose him again -- it would be like losing Jess, or Pip.

Twilight eventually settles over the street, making Sally's window boxes of pale purple flowers seem to glow like some newly invented color. Pots of the same flower flank the main door to the apartment building, and Sam sees Sally's hand in this, her pride in her home. Even more than before, he's convinced that their vigilance has been wasted -- although not their night.

"Ten minutes before sunrise," Dean says after a while, weariness suffusing his voice. "She's in the clear. How about we grab some coffees down at the bodega and go."

"You sound wrecked, Dean. Why don't you come back to my place and get a few hours of sleep instead."

"What about you?"

"I'll try and get an hour, maybe. Then I'll go by the hospital, see how Pip's doing."

Hissing as he reaches for the ignition, Dean starts up the Impala. "C'mon, then. Up front."

Sam hurries to get himself settled in the shotgun seat, then says, "This surveillance shit is brutal on the body. You want to see about getting a massage sometime today? Jess uses someone who's really good, I can try to get her to the apartment."

"Is she hot?"

Unable to suppress a grin, Sam says, "You're incorrigible."

"Don't tell Cheyenne, she thinks I'm highly corrigible. Yeah, actually, I think that would be a good plan."

The traffic has been picking up for a while now, but it's still light enough to make it a relatively quick drive home. When they enter the apartment, Sam sees Dean's eyes flick toward the painting of their family.

"I can just crash on the couch," Dean says.

Sam shakes his head. "That thing is the destroyer of spines. We've got a guest room."

"Okay." He follows Sam into the space that's Sam's part-time office, watches him slide some panels closed on the built-in desk and pull down the built-in Murphy bed from the opposite wall.

"Always wanted one of these things," Sam says. "Jess indulged me."

"It's pretty fucking cool," Dean says. "I don't suppose it's got Magic Fingers."

"Sadly, no." He flips down a small panel that becomes a side table. "The cabinets at either side are for anything you want to store. There's a little toiletries kit for you to use on the shelf right here. Your bathroom's right across the hall. It's all yours. If I'm gone when you wake up, feel free to eat anything you want in the kitchen. I'll call Jess's masseuse and write down the time she'll be coming by." Sam hesitates, then adds: "This room is yours, anytime you want to visit. Cheyenne's too, if you want to bring her."

Dean nods. "Thanks, Sammy."

"I'm right down at the end of the hall if you need anything. Like I said, I'll try to get an hour or so, then I'll check in with Jess and probably head to the hospital."

He leaves Dean to settle in, stumbling back to the master bedroom. Instead of peeling off his clothes and dropping onto the bed, he opens a drawer and pulls out a drugstore packet of photo prints. Sitting on the bed, he opens the envelope and flips through the pictures. They're not very good shots, all taken on the sly ten years ago. In his last weeks before he announced he was going to Stanford, he'd skulked around with a disposable camera, snapping quick shots when his dad and brother weren't watching.

Dad, writing in his journal on a rest stop picnic bench. Dean, leaning under the hood of the Impala. The two of them walking into a mini-mart, Dad's hand on Dean's shoulder. Almost all of them are underlit or saturated, slightly skewed, marked with lens flare or otherwise imperfect, but they're the most precious belongings he had for a very long time.

Quietly, he barefoots it down the hall, pausing outside Dean's door to listen. If he hasn't changed since Sam left for Stanford, he was asleep the moment he hit the pillow.

He cracks the door open and peers in. Deep, rhythmic breaths are all that greets him. Slipping inside, he leaves the envelope on the table at Dean's side and turns to make his way to his own bed.

***

"Hey, babe."

Looking up from Pip, Jess tries to give him a smile and it strikes Sam anew what an evil fucking thing they're facing. Something that's sucking the life and light right out of Jess, as well as Mattie. Jess is always incandescent -- sometimes it almost feels like looking directly at the sun. He'd first noticed it when she'd been sitting next to his own hospital bed, back in Spain. Before that, he'd been aware of her -- pretty, blonde, nice but once he'd seen that light, he was in love.

If this fucking thing kills that --

She comes to him and he enfolds her in a hug, pushing that thought away.

"How is she?"

"No better, no worse. Dr. Hydecker's been making his rounds, so he should be in soon."

"We're going to get this thing," he whispers into her hair. "She's going to get better."

After another moment, he releases Jess and moves to Mattie's bedside. "Hey, Pip. Daddy's here." He kisses her forehead and coos little endearments and silly bits of non-news over her as his thumb traces soft circles over the back of her small hand. "Mr. Bun's here," he tells her, "but he's a little lonely because he misses talking to you." He moves the stuffed bunny farther up the bed. "He's right here, next to your elbow, for when you wake up."

"So it's not Sally," Jess says. Sam had called before he'd gone to bed with that piece of news.

"I'm sure it's not, but we won't have absolute confirmation unless some other child woke up sick this morning." He pulls her into his arms again. Sam's glad it's not Sally, but that leaves three other potentials on the list, and possibly three nights of surveillance while other kids get cut down. It frustrates and enrages him.

"How's De-- um, Rick?" Jess asks.

"Still sleeping, when I left. This trip and spending the night the way we did, they were pretty hard on him. Not that he'd say so, in so many words. Still, I'm betting he'll be up way earlier than he should be."

At the sound of a a polite cough from the doorway, they look up to see an exhausted-looking Dr. Hydecker. "Sorry to intrude," he says with a wan smile.

"No worries," Sam assures him. "How are you holding up?"

The doctor raises a shoulder in a weary shrug. "As well as can be expected. Another kid came in early this morning. She's in pretty bad shape already."

Jess makes a small, anguished noise.

"That's terrible," says Sam. "Any other kids in the family?"

"Yeah, an older brother. The parents want to send him out of the city, but with the incubation period on this bug, I'm certain he's already got it." He rouses himself, realizing he's probably revealed too much that should remain confidential. "Well, let's check up on Miss Mattie, shall we?"

***

Sam touches Jess's elbow. "I'm going to step out a minute and call my brother."

"Stay. Please. If there's news --"

Her breath hitches, and Sam wraps his arms around her. "It's okay, babe," he murmurs. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."

They watch, clutching one another, as Dr. Hydecker hovers over Mattie, listening to her heart and lungs, checking for signs that she's slipped further into the coma. As he does, he talks softly to her, about the pretty day outside, which Sam hadn't even noticed, and her bunny. Stroking her hair, he straightens and looks toward Jess and Sam.

"There's a bit of a wheeze beginning as she breathes. I don't want to be alarming, but I really don't like the sound of it. We'll get her set up with some oxygen right away, and I'll make sure the respiratory therapist comes by to work with her."

"She's worse," Jess says, almost breathless herself, clutching Sam harder.

"We've caught it in an early stage," the doctor replies. "We'll get her breathing more comfortably in a short while."

"What about the other kids who have this?"

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Winchester. I can't really discuss other patients. This is a disease we haven't seen before, so we're feeling our way around a bit. But we're aggressively treating each symptom as it comes up."

Jess nods, her body so tense in Sam's arms it seems she'll snap.

"We're hoping the man from the CDC will track down what this is and how to take care of it. We're all doing the best we can." Dr. Hydecker puts a hand on Jess's arm, and she tries to raise a smile. "I'll send the nurse in, and she'll get that oxygen set up right away. Stay hopeful. Our Mattie's a strong little girl."

That statement seems to add some steel to Jess, too. When the Spongebob-clad nurse comes in to set up Mattie's oxygen, Jess tells Sam to make his call to Dean. Slipping out into the hallway just as a code is called over the loudspeaker, Sam sidesteps to the edge of the hallway as a team with a crash cart barrels full-tilt toward him. By the time he gets the phone from his pocket, his hands are shaking.

"Hey. It's Sam. We've got another sick kid. She's got a brother."

All traces of sleepiness vanish from Dean's voice. "Got it. I'll be there as soon as I'm dressed and shaved. How's Mattie?"

"Worse. They're putting her on oxygen."

"Ventilator?"

"No." Relief floods him with the reminder that it could be worse. "She's breathing on her own. But Rick --" Stumbling over the name, he wonders how he's ever going to get used to it. "We may have our first casualty."

Dean mutters a rich assortment of curses. "Be there ASAP. We'll get this motherfucker, Sam. I promise you."

***

Jess gives Sam her place in the convertible chair where she spent the night. Despite the fluorescent lights bleaching the darkness behind his closed eyes, he finally manages to sleep. He dreams fitfully of a dark shape looming over him, gunshots, loud voices. He jolts awake with nothing more than a slight, sharp intake of breath. Moving to him, Jess cards her fingers through his hair, murmuring softly, until he drops off again.

After that it's a twitchy, light sleep, punctuated by noises from the ward. A nurse comes in to check on Mattie, remarking to Jess, "Dads sure can get their sleep in, can't they?"

"He was out all night," Jess says, a touch defensively. Then clearly realizing how that sounds, she edits herself. "Up all night. He let me have the chair so I could get some sleep." There's no response to that, Sam notes, and he slits an eye open to see which cartoon-character nurse has such a low opinion of fathers. Loud Hawaiian print with big flowers and ... Eeyore. It figures. Feeling drugged, he's pulled back in to crappy sleep. When he does drop down into deeper sleep, it's menaced by the looming presence again. Black-cloaked, cold, like standing in front of an opened freezer door. It wants something from him, and he doesn't know what that is, but he's compelled to release his hold on it. Sam feels like a wineskin gushing forth its contents, losing form as he's emptied out.

"Jesus!" he yelps as he sits bolt upright, tipping the chair and sprawling onto the floor beside it.

"Sam!" In a heartbeat, Jess is kneeling beside him. "Are you all right?"

"I dreamed about it," he says, panting. "I saw it. Oh, Jess."

"It was just a dream," she says, smoothing his hair out of his eyes.

"I saw it once before, but I blocked it out. Dad said it was a dream. It wanted to drain me dry."

"Sam," she says more forcefully. "You're still in the dream. Come out now, wake up."

"It wasn't. That thing, it made me open ... I couldn't hang on." Sam stares at his opened hand, seeing small, plump fingers. "I didn't want to hang on."

"Sam! You're scaring me, stop."

He remembers now, Dad clutching him so close he could barely move, breathing in the mingled scent of leather, tobacco and sweat. "You're okay, buddy, you're safe," Dad's rough voice had said over and over. "It was just a dream." But he'd heard the barely-suppressed panic in Dad's voice, seen Dean's too-pale face across the room, and he hadn't felt safe.

Safety is just a lie.

There's a brisk tapping at the door, which then pushes open a few inches. "Mr. and Mrs. --" As Dean takes in Sam still sprawled by the overturned chair, he lets his notebook fly to the floor and rushes to Sam's side. "Sammy!"

"He had a dream," Jess says, "and he can't quite shake it off."

Dean pulls him close with is one good arm, clutching him much as Dad had. "Sam. Sam."

"I saw it in the dream, Dean. I remember it."

***

Dean clutches him even tighter, and for just a moment he Sam lets himself lean into it. This is also something he remembers from his old life. Not just Dean comforting him after a nightmare, but the unspoken promise that if it came back, Dean would kick its ass.

"I'm all right," Sam says, but he's giving himself the large benefit of a doubt. He takes in a huge breath, lets it out. "I'm all right. We'd better get up. You won't look much like CDC if Nurse Eeyore finds us on the floor like this." Steadied by Jess, Sam climbs to his feet, then extends a hand to grasp Dean's.

"Was it a dream?" Dean asks.

"More a memory. I mean, it wasn't here. I saw myself. When I was little. And a thing in a black cloak. Then you and Dad."

Jess scowls. "You've actually seen this before?"

"I hadn't remembered it at all. Dean told me. Rick. Sorry. He told me while we were watching Sally's place. It had me, but they scared it away." He turns to Dean, his words almost a snarl. "This thing. It is not gonna get my baby."

"Damn right it's not," Dean affirms. "I got the name of the little girl that turned up ill sick this morning. We can form a plan. If you know the family, you might have information that'll help." As Sam rights the chair he overturned, Dean bends to retrieve his pen and notepad. When he comes up he's all business, and Sam finds it easy to believe he is the CDC investigator he's been claiming to be. Dean settles himself on the chair, balancing the notepad on his knee. "Okay, the girl who was brought in this morning was a ..." Dean's lips purse slightly in distaste. "Bella. Bella Templeton. Mother's name is Amelia. No father, she was adopted from Korea."

Jess nods. "We know her. They live in our building, and Amelia's a good friend of mine."

Giving her a sour look, Dean says, "Friends do not let friends name their babies after girls who mack on sparkly vampires."

"Oh god," Jess says. "She must be out of her mind. Her au pair just quit, too, so she's on her own."

"Her what?"

"Nanny," Sam says.

"What about this nanny?" Dean asks. "Any chance she could be the one we're looking for? Does she have contact with kids in a play group or anything?"

"No, she went back to Ireland to marry some guy," Sam says. "It was kind of sudden, an Internet romance, I think."

Jess adds, "Sam drove her to the airport, so unless she's incredibly clever, she's out of the country."

"So it sounds like Amelia knows and trusts you as much as she does Jess," Dean remarks. "That could be useful. She's agreed to give me access to her apartment to look for possible sources of Bella's illness." A smirk rises to his lips. "You tell people 'Just like on House' and it's amazing what they'll let you do. So I can get in, but I need to have the kid there too, to bring the shtriga back and get it feeding so I can kill it. Sammy, what if you offered to babysit the brother at their place tonight? Do you think she'd accept?"

"I'm pretty sure she would," he says.

"All right, then. We've got a plan. I'll take a look around today to get the logistics down, and tonight we catch that thing in the act and blow its fucking head off."

***

While Dean explores Amelia's apartment and has his massage, Sam goes to the office under the guise of touching base with his assistant and delegating his work. His main purpose is conducting some research in historical databases that occasionally come in handy for his work. He accepts the concern of his colleagues as quickly and tactfully as he can and shuts himself in his office.

Hunched over his computer, he looks for mysterious outbreaks of diseases striking young children, starting with the case that Dad had been working, back when Sam had been the shtriga's prey. Fort Douglas, Wisconsin. He moves backward and forward from that time, looking for patterns, for any scrap of information that might give him and Dean the upper hand tonight.

When his phone rings, Sam reaches for it, rubbing his forehead. He suddenly becomes aware that his assistant brought him a sandwich and iced tea at some point, completely unnoticed.

"Yeah," Sam says.

"You sound like shit, Sammy. What have you found?"

"A lot of dead kids," he says wearily. "Why don't you tell me yours first?" He takes a swallow of his tea, watered down with long-melted ice.

"Checked out Amelia's apartment. Holy crap, dude, if I thought your --" Dean quickly catches himself. "Man she must have an assload of money."

"Well, that is why they call it filthy lucre. Yeah, her family were into pharmaceuticals back when heroin was a brand name. She's sort of the renegade artist of the family. They think it's like a garret."

"Pretty sweet garret. Anyway, the setup is great. There's even a nanny-cam in place, all we have to do is tap into that and monitor the room. There's a playroom outside, where we've got a great space to set up and wait."

"I know. Jess created that play suite for Amelia's kids." It's been in a couple of magazines, but he saves that information for some other time.

"What's with the crazy-ass color scheme? Is she color blind?"

Sam laughs, but it sounds a little rusty. "No, Amelia asked for that. It's the kid's room in Goodnight, Moon."

"I'll take your word for it." Of course Dean wouldn't know the classic kids' books. Sam had been raised on comic books slipped under Dean's shirt when store clerks had been distracted. "So what have you come up with?"

"It spent a lot of time in Wisconsin, hunting on a cycle of about every fifteen or twenty years. Then when Dad nearly got it, it moved to new hunting grounds, a different state each time. That must have disrupted its cycle, because it hunted again five years later in Albany, New York, and now here."

"How far back does this thing go?"

"I haven't found anything yet that's any earlier than the turn of the 20th century. That was in a town called --" Sam's fingers fly across the keyboard to retrieve the name and look deeper. "Black River Falls, the 1890's. It went on for -- Shit." Sam stands abruptly, knocking his tea to the carpet. "Jesus, Dean."

"What?"

"There's a picture. Some doctors standing around a kid's bed." A wave of vertigo hits him, exhaustion and fear and rage.

"Well, out with it, Sammy."

"One of the doctors is Hydecker. The date on this is 1893."

There's a gust of a breath from Dean's end. "You sure it's him?"

"Damn sure. That fucking thing has been my kid's doctor for the last four years." Sam snaps his phone shut and hits the door at a run.

***

Sam rushes out of the office, dodging well-wishers with considerably less grace than he had on the way in.

By the time he makes it to the hospital, Dean is pacing outside the main entrance. The moment Dean sees Sam, he alters his path, his stride as purposeful as Sam's.

"Sam."

"That sonofabitch." He attempts to evade his brother, but Dean grabs him by the arm.

"Sam, listen. You can't go after him here."

"These people trust him, Dean. Just like Jess and I did."

"I get that." As Sam keeps sidestepping him, Dean keeps moving to place himself in Sam's path. "But you won't accomplish anything by going off halfcocked."

"He's up there, touching those kids, sucking up their energy, draining them even more. My kid." He shoves Dean aside, throwing him off balance. The dead weight of Dean's arm swings out and back, staggering him backward. Before Sam can move forward and help, Dean's forearm slams against the edge of the automatic doors and he falls directly on the outstretched arm, jamming it. His inarticulate shout of pain spears through Sam as he kneels by Dean's side.

"Shit shit shit, I'm sorry, Dean."

Reaching up with his good hand, Dean bunches his fist into the front of Sam's shirt and pulls him down, inches from Dean's face. "You can't hurt it unless it's feeding, in its true form. You go up there now, and all you'll do is warn that thing off. It'll go underground for another five years, and these kids upstairs are lost."

"Yeah, okay."

"You two," says a hard voice behind them. A security guard marches toward them, and Sam has a pretty good idea he'd tower over them both, even once they've regained their feet. "Do you need some help leaving the hospital grounds? Immediately?"

"No sir," Sam says. "We were just going." Getting to his feet, he grasps Dean's good arm above the elbow, and Dean does the same, letting Sam steady him as he rises. "Your other arm okay?"

"Yeah, it's fine." The paper-white pallor of Dean's face says otherwise, and Sam feels like shit. "You ready to go? Stick with the plan?"

Aware of the guard closing in on them, Sam says, "I guess so, yeah."

"Don't guess," Dean says in a low growl, sounding so much like Dad it brings Sam up short. "Be fucking sure." His grip on Sam's arm is painfully tight, but in an odd way it's comforting.

"What part of 'immediately' is giving you boys trouble?" the guard asks, a hand on his nightstick. Sam wasn't wrong about his height, and he fills out his uniform pretty damn solidly.

"We're going," Sam repeats. He propels Dean along with him as he walks toward the Impala. The guard swaggers behind them, practically on their heels.

"Fuckin' square-badge."

"Dean."

Dean slaps the keys into Sam's palm and veers toward the passenger side. As Sam eases the car out of its space and shifts into drive, the guard thumps his stick into the rear quarter-panel.

"Sonofabitch!" Dean twists in the seat to offer a one-fingered salute to the rent-a-cop, hissing in pain as he jostles his bad arm. "We kill this motherfucker tonight," he says, and for a second Sam thinks he means the guard, until Dean adds, "It's coming back for Bella's brother, and we will kill it."

***

Dean doesn't say anything, but as he leads Sam on a walkthrough of Amelia's apartment, Sam sees him cradling his bad arm. The word sorry hovers at the tip of Sam's tongue, but he knows it would just annoy Dean, because it has every time he's blurted it out since they left the hospital.

"This thing, it must sense some kind of energy from the occupants of a room," Dean says, opening the playroom door. "There aren't scratches outside any windows but Bella's, and Mattie's. Helluva lot of windows in here." That had been part of Jess's plan when she'd designed it -- to provide a cheerful space, and also to lighten up the intense colors of the walls. "We want to be damn sure it doesn't know we're in here. Fortunately, there's this crazy-ass closet." Dean opens its double doors.

Though it's got some storage space, it's more a playhouse than a closet. An ornate, oversized wooden armoire with a scene of Narnia painted on the back wall. "It's Narnia. You know -- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?"

"Whatever, dude. We can set up in there and wait, and the shtriga shouldn't sense us or see the light from the monitor setup. We have to wait until we see it feeding, then we go in and nail that bastard."

Sam nods, moving a giant stuffed octopus out of the path from the playhouse to Jaysen's room. "So you're sure these iron rounds will work?"

"It's consecrated iron. And yeah, I'm sure."

"How are we going to explain random bullet holes in her kid's bedroom to Amelia?"

Giving Sam a look that says he's probably the stupidest civilian he's ever met, Dean says, "We don't miss." After a moment, he says, "When was the last time you fired a gun, Sammy?"

"Last time Dad made me take target practice."

Dean heaves a long-suffering sigh. "You're a walking miracle, you know that? To be alive at your age --"

"Can it, all right?" Sam says. "So okay, we don't leave bullet holes. How about the traumatized two-year-old who's had people shoot something to death in his bedroom?"

"Benadryl, dude."

"You want me to drug my wife's friend's child?"

Dean shrugs his good shoulder. "Then let him stay up and watch. You're a lawyer. I'm sure you'll come up with a convincing explanation."

"You suck, you know that?" Sam mutters, but Dean only grins.

***

When Sam checked in with Amelia for instructions and a note to give him permission to pick Jaysen up from daycare, she assures Sam the boy could sleep through a nuclear blast.

We'll find out, he thinks. After a couple of hours of babysitting duty, he fervently hopes so. Though Jaysen has played happily with Sam, Mattie and Bella in the past, now that his mom is nowhere in sight -- and hasn't been all day -- Sam is just a towering not-mom, which means he might as well be a stranger. Jaysen's whiny and contrary and on the edge of sobs at any given moment -- essentially, he's two. Fortunately, Sam has lived through two.

Dean's down the hall at Sam and Jess's place, preparing their weapons, testing the link to the nanny cam that he's set up. Sam hopes the bastard is enjoying the multiple readings of Goodnight, Moon that Sam is forced to provide. From reading number three onward, Sam drops into the "beddie-bye" voice that Mattie won't let him get away with -- a monotonous singsong designed to bore a kid to sleep.

This kid has superpowers of wakefulness, even though he doesn't protest that Sam should "read it right!" as Mattie would. Sam's considering the Benadryl when he hears the first soft snore out of Jaysen. He keeps reading until he's sure Jaysen's completely out, then he tiptoes out, resisting the urge to pour himself a stiff drink from Amelia's well-stocked bar.

A few moments later, Dean is knocking softly at the door, bearing a large duffel.

"You came for the easy part, huh?" Sam inquires, and this earns a soft snort from Dean.

Working swiftly and quietly, they set up the closet with chairs, weapons, the laptop tapped into the nanny cam. Sam nudges the pocket doors to Jaysen's room slightly ajar so they won't have to fumble for the shallow indentation of its handle.

When they've settled back in the Narnia closet to wait, Dean looks over at Sam and asks, "Are you ready for this?"

"Yeah." Sam hears the tension in his own voice. "It just occurred to me. This is the first hunt I've ever been on without Dad."

"I'm an old pro at this," Dean assures him. "I've got your back."

It's almost three a.m. before anything happens, and Sam is feeling almost unbearably tense. He hears Dean's soft hiss of breath before he sees it on the monitor. Impossibly long claws scrabbling at the glass. There's something ghostly about the way the thing gets the windows open and fits itself above the childproof grating (wrought-iron vines, again designed by Jess). Reacting to Sam's twitch of impatience, Dean bars his way with his good arm. "Wait," he whispers. "It has to be feeding."

Sam's blood runs cold as he watches it settle on Jaysen's bed. Too much like the dream that brought back all those memories.

Dean drops his arm, whispering, "Now!"

***

As they'd planned, Sam takes the lead, shoving the pocket doors wide open and dropping to a crouch as Dean fires his handgun. Sam grabs the shotgun they'd placed at the doorway and shoots at the shtriga as well. While Dean's chest shot had staggered it back, the shotgun blast sends it down, shrieking a horrific death scream.

Jaysen starts to whimper, one hand over an ear. Working the plan, Sam lays down his weapon to gather up the boy before he can wake up fully. "Hey, buddy," he croons. "Did you have a bad dream?"

Whining an affirmative, Jaysen winds an arm around Sam's neck, grabbing a fistful of his hair in the other hand.

"Let's go sleep in big sis's bed. You miss Bella, don't you? You can go right back to sleep while I chase the dream-monsters away."

By the time Sam crosses the playroom and enters Bella's room, he's carrying the dead weight of a sleeping two-year-old, Jaysen's little fingers relaxing their grip on his hair. Quickly he settles the boy in his sister's bed, then hurries back to Jaysen's room to help Dean deal with the shtriga's corpse.

A corpse is not Dean's problem. The shtriga is very much alive, leaning over Dean, who's sprawled on the floor next to a clown head nightlight. Sam can't tell whether Dean's face is bloody or it's just a shadow thrown by the nightlight, but that's not what matters. The shtriga has its bony hand wrapped around Dean's jaw, forcing his mouth open to release his life essence to the creature. Dean's eyes have rolled back in his head, but a thin thread of silvery mist still trails to the mouth of the shtriga.

"Dean!"

Turning, the shtriga flings up an arm and Sam flies across the room to crash into a wall, one of the solid plastered walls original to the building. Pain flares in Sam's shoulder, and he's not sure if it's broken or dislocated. As the monster turns back to Dean, Sam gropes for the handgun he'd tucked in his waistband.

Fuck. This thing must need a head shot to kill it. The chest shots should have done the job. Dad had always taught them to aim for the chest, the surer kill, though he'd made them practice head shots, too. It's a smaller target, and Sam can't bring up his other hand to steady his aim.

There's no time to hesitate, not a second to lose. The shtriga is forcing Dean's mouth open wider again, ready to drain the last bit of life from him. Sam aims his pistol, closing his non-dominant eye to be sure of his shot, then squeezes the trigger.

The shtriga goes down, sprawling across Dean. As quickly as he can, Sam moves to it, pushing it off Dean with his foot. A delicate column of silvery mist rises from its mouth, one tendril drifting back toward Dean's parted lips, the rest rising to the window the shtriga had used to enter Jaysen's bedroom.

Kneeling beside Dean, Sam calls his name. It takes three repetitions before Dean's eyelids start to flutter. "Sonofabitch," he mutters.

"Dean, are you okay?"

"Totally not expecting that." Blinking, Dean tries to focus on Sam, but he's not all the way back yet. "You sure it's --"

Sam puts another four rounds into the shtriga's face. "Now I am. Apparently those things need a head shot."

"Impossible to get commercial work without one," Dean croaks. He reaches out a hand to Sam, who helps him sit up.

"You okay? Did you get everything back that the shtriga took?"

"Yeah," Dean says. "I'm just -- damn. We've gotta take that thing somewhere and burn it."

"What 'we'? I'm babysitting, dude." At Dean's groan, he says, "I've got a tarp. Can we stash that thing somewhere until tomorrow night?"

"Like where?"

"How about the trunk --"

"-- of my baby?"

"It's more than big enough."

Dean eyes him dourly. "You suck."

Helping, Dean to his feet, Sam doesn't let go until he's pulled him into a brotherly hug. "Man. I thought --"

"Don't go all girly on me, Sam."

Sam releases Dean, but this time it's Dean who hangs on. "Thanks, Sammy. I owe you one."

***

When Sam returns with the tarp, he finds Dean sitting on the floor of Narnia, paging through Goodnight, Moon. All trace of the weapons are gone, except for the duffel Dean carried them in.

"Is there any way we can do this without looking like a couple of murderers hauling a body out of the building in the dead of night?" Sam asks.

Rising, Dean says, "We could wait and haul it out in the middle of the day."

"It's not the worst idea in the world. I saw a huge TV box down in the recycling area. We can unflatten it and take it out that way."

"No way a television box is gonna fit in my trunk."

Unable to suppress a grin, Sam says, "I've got it. We bungee the thing in there, then leave the car on the street for five minutes. Problem solved."

Dean laughs. "That would be fuckin' cool, wouldn't it? Some asshole steals a big-screen TV, and when he gets it home, he's got a dead shtriga instead. What's he gonna do, call the cops?" Taking the tarp from Sam, he starts toward the boy's room.

Struck by a thought, Sam stumbles in mid-stride. "Will it -- does it look like Dr. Hydecker?"

"Sammy, after you got done with it, it doesn't look like anything." Dean sees this isn't exactly calming Sam's nerves. "No, it looks like a shtriga. That's its true form, no reason it would revert to the human disguise."

The mess isn't as bad as Sam had expected. The cloak's hood contained the grosser bits of spray, the tight weave of the fabric soaking up most of the blood. There's a corner of carpet and wallpaper that needs some cleaning up, which Dean attends to with paper towels and carpet cleaner while Sam wrestles with the corpse and the tarp. "Too bad about that kid waking in the night and puking his toenails up, huh?" Dean remarks casually. "Good thing having your own kid taught you how to mop things up before the stains set in."

"Nice," Sam notes. "Just make sure there's no blood flecks left, or I'll have some explaining to do."

"You know, I liked hunting better when I didn't have to stick around to clean shit up," Dean says.

"Just toss everything onto the tarp when you're done. I'm going back down to the recycling area to get that box."

By the time they're done, it's an hour later, but the playroom and Jaysen's bedroom are completely clean, and the shtriga's just a damp spot on the rug as far as Amelia will ever know. The thing is, as Dean snarks, "a mystery wrapped in a tarp stuffed in a TV box," waiting in Sam's foyer to be taken out in the evening to one of the remoter areas of Fairmount Park.

"Man, I'd totally do the stolen TV handoff," Dean says as they settle the box near Sam's doorway, "if this fucking thing didn't need to be salted and burned. That would be hilarious."

Kneading his back, Sam tries to imagine how Dean's damaged body must feel. "Guess I'm back to babysitting. You get some sleep, I'll see you a little later."

He lets himself into Amelia's apartment, checks on her sleeping boy, then stretches out on the sofa to get a little sleep himself. It's probably not a half hour later that Jaysen begins to stir, coming out to demand cereal.

Sam's watching the kid eat, too tired to even realize he can make something for himself, when his phone rings.

"Sam," Jess breathes. "Oh my god, Sam. It's Mattie. She's awake."

***

Planting a hand on the kitchen counter to steady himself, Sam closes his eyes, breathing a silent prayer of thanks. "She's okay?" He's so shaky from relief that he doesn't even sound like himself.

"She's sleepy and grumpy and hungry," Jess says. "The full three-dwarf morning."

Tears prickle Sam's eyes at their longtime joke. "So about like usual."

"Dr. Hydecker hasn't been in to see her yet, but I'm hoping he'll let her come home."

The doctor's name -- fuck that, the thing's alias -- makes a chill whisper across Sam's neck. "Jess, about Dr. Hydecker -- find Pip a new doctor. Ask the nurses for a recommendation, and get her on that doctor's patient list. We need to do that today."

"Why, did something happen to him? Did that thing--"

Something happened all right. He's in a cardboard box in our apartment foyer. Sam has to stifle a nervous giggle. God, he needs some sleep.

Her breath catches. "Sam. Don't tell -- he was that thing? That striee --"

"Shtriga. Yeah, babe. But 'that thing' will do. It's mostly what I've been calling it."

"Oh god. Oh god, Sam. It's been in Pip's life since she was born."

Sam runs a hand over his neck, then pours Jaysen another bowl of cereal when he gets fussy. "I know." Earaches, fevers, one of Jess's earrings shoved up her nose -- the whole parade. Every checkup, Hydecker would shine his light up her nostrils and say he was looking for more diamonds. They got such a kick out of it; they genuinely liked the guy.

"Why didn't he do something before?" Jess asks.

"Apparently these things have some kind of feeding cycle. Every fifteen, twenty years, I don't know."

"And in between -- " Sam knows she's thinking of his kindness, his playfulness, the way he never talked down to the kids or their parents. "Did he care about them at all? Or were they just cattle to --"

"I don't know, honey." And he honestly doesn't know which answer would make this whole thing feel worse.

"Is he dead?" she asks savagely.

"Yeah," he says softly.

"Good."

In the background he hears a high-pitched vocalization, Mattie's wordless demand that signals an imminent switch to intensely verbal demands or tears.

"Want to talk to Daddy?" Jess asks.

He can't make out her answer, but it doesn't matter because in a heartbeat, that whine is coming directly into his ear.

"Hey, Pip. How're you doing, Sunshine?"

"Want omie." Oatmeal.

"Well, I don't know what they've got for breakfast there, but we'll make you some oatmeal as soon as you're home. Okay?"

"Home now."

God, he loves this fierce little girl of his. "We have to wait for the doctor to say you can go. Daddy'll be there soon. I'm taking care of Jaysen, but as soon as he can go to day care, I'll come and see you, and we'll all go home together."

"Go now."

He hears the sounds of the cell being pried from grabby little fingers, and a wail of misery when Jess succeeds. "I'm with her," she says. "Go now. I'd better talk to a nurse and get a doctor here so we can get her released."

"I'll be there as soon as I get Jaysen to day care. I love you, Jess."

"Love you, babe." Settling his phone back in his pocket, Sam says, "Okay, Jaysen, let's get you cleaned up and dressed, and we'll take you to day care."

Not until Jaysen pats his little hands on Sam's cheeks, brow furrowed, does Sam realize there are tears on his face.

***

Risking the loss of a hand in the closing doors, Sam muscles his way onto an elevator and punches the button for Mattie's floor. He heaves a sigh, immediately notices the air in the car is a little rank, and after a moment comes to the realization that it's probably him.

He offers an apologetic smile to the people standing closest to him, which does not appear to ingratiate him to them. There's a warped reflection of him in the steel elevator doors, giving him a glimpse of the sketchy giant who shoved his way into their midst. How long has he worn these clothes? He isn't sure anymore.

"My daughter," he says. "She had that pneumonia thing."

That shifts their expressions to something friendlier, and when a couple of nurses get off on the floor below Mattie's, one touches his elbow lightly as she moves past him.

When Sam gets to Pip's room, he finds her cuddled in bed with Jess, the two of them watching the room's TV. "Hey, Pipsqueak," he says. Though he'd gone for a light tone, his voice is raw with emotion.

"Daddy!" She reaches for him with one arm, her fingers splayed like a starfish.

"Can I --"

Jess nods. "She's all unwired."

He pulls Mattie into his arms, burying his face in her fine, silky hair. She's lost at least a couple of dwarfs, or traded them in for Happy. She smells a little sour herself, like fever sweat.

"Heya, baby. How are you feeling?"

"Let's go home!" Now that she's feeling better and a little less cranky, she sounds less like a toddler and more like herself.

"Honey, we can't go home until we're allowed to. It's kind of like school that way."

She squirms, swings her heels, bouncing them against Sam's butt.

"I want ice cream."

"What happened to omie?"

Jess rolls her eyes. "Omie is so ten minutes ago. Get with the program, Dad."

"How about omie-flavored ice cream?" Sam teases. "With raisins."

"Oh, don't get her wanting something that doesn't exist," Jess says.

"Chock-lit," Mattie demands.

"See?" Sam says. "She knows what she likes and sticks with it."

"Mama now." She starfishes her hand over Sam's shoulder.

"See?" Sam says again. He lowers her into Jess's arms, but she reaches her little hand toward Sam.

"And Daddy."

His throat tightening, Sam reaches to smooth her hair. "Honey, Daddy's too big to fit in there. This bed isn't near as big as ours at home." Their Sunday routine consists of hours in bed with the papers and laptops, with Mattie playing at the foot of the king mattress or climbing over him and Jess or burrowing between them. When he thinks how close they came to losing that --

"Sit here, Daddy." Scowling, Mattie bounces her hand off the narrow strip of mattress beside her.

Jess grins, but there are tears shimmering in her eyes too. "Someone's gotten her bossy back." She scoots toward the bed rail to make room.

Surrendering to Mattie's demand and Jess's invitation, Sam toes off his shoes and climbs onto the bed next to them, pulling up the bed rail on his side to hold them all in.

"Much better," Jess murmurs as Mattie sprawls across the both of them and squirms onto her back, singing loudly to the ceiling.

Uno, dos, one two tres quatro
Mattie told Daddy about a thing she saw --

"This is on you, Winchester," Jess growls, but her hand fumbles for his and entwines their fingers. "Hey, how's your brother?"

"He was sleeping when I swung by the apartment. I'll bet he's pretty wrung out. The drive and the stakeout would've been hard enough, but the shtriga got him just before I killed it. It almost sucked the life out of him."

"Oh Sam. You must have been terrified."

"There wasn't much time. It'll probably hit me later."

But what hits him later is exhaustion, when Mattie has stopped squirming and singing to the acoustic tiles. Nestled there with Jess and with his furnace of a four-year-old sprawled in a sweat-inducing heap on top of him, he falls asleep.

The next thing he knows, Mattie is swatting his leg insistently, calling to him. Sam rouses himself, blearily focusing on her pointing finger.

"Picture, Daddy."

Blinking, Sam follows the rigid line of her arm and finger, then he smiles. "Who is that, Pip?"

She looks back toward him, certain but uncertain. "Picture."

"Yep. Who is that?"

Mattie looks back toward the door. "That's Daddy's Dean."

***

The look on Dean's face at Mattie's announcement is priceless, but at the same time, it's heartbreaking.

"How does she know me?" he asks once his command of language skills returns.

"Did you look at the pictures I left by your bed?" Sam asks.

"Yeah, but -- where did you get those? I'd never seen 'em."

"I took them, man. Just before I left. Mattie's seen them hundreds of times."

Dean's lips part, but nothing comes forth but a sudden fit of throat-clearing.

"Say hello, Mattie," Jess urges.

"Hello, Mattie!" she crows, and falls back against Sam's legs, laughing at her own wit.

Unable to suppress a grin, Dean says, "You're a funny little girl, are you?"

"Yes!" She lunges toward the end of the bed, reaching toward Dean with her up! gesture.

Sam grabs her ankle before she can climb Dean like a tree.

"No, sweetie," Jess says. "Come back here with Daddy and me."

"I don't mind," Dean declares.

"It's not that," Sam says. "It's just that gesture means she wants you to pick her up."

Bending down to Mattie's level, Dean says, "Hey, Squeak. I'm gonna let you in on a little secret, okay?"

Mattie squirms enthusiastically. "'Kay!"

"Your Uncle Dean only has one arm that works. The other one got hurt, and I can't use it. So there are some things I can't do, and other things, I have to take a little time and figure out how."

Eyes going wide and solemn, Mattie asks, "Did you fall off your bike? Daddy fell off his and broked his hand."

Smirking, Dean addresses Sam. "Klutz."

"Hey. I was doored by a Hummer."

"It was kinda like that," Dean tells Mattie. "Only the doctors couldn't fix it all the way. So how 'bout if I sit in this chair and you climb up on my lap? Would that work out for you?"

"Yeah!"

"I'll get you down, Pip," Sam says before she has a chance to go sailing off the edge of the bed. He swings her up into his own arms, giving her a kiss on her forehead, then eases her carefully onto Dean's lap, in the crook of his left arm.

"How's that, Squeak?"

"It's Pip!"

"That's your Mom and Dad name. Squeak is your Uncle Dean name."

Watching Dean settle in with Mattie, asking her questions and following her conversational pinball, Sam finds a knot growing in his throat. He'd never thought this would happen: his daughter and his brother -- long dead, Sam had thought -- taking to each other on first sight.

Dean looks up at him. "So I guess the Rick ID is blown to -- oh now, don't you start."

Sam palms the moisture from one of his eyes. "The air in here is dry, that's all. And I know all kinds of lawyers. We'll see what we can arrange."

"'Dry air.' Kind of pitiful, Sammy."

"What's your excuse, then?"

"For what? You're seeing things through those big girly tears."

Sam thinks about firing off a standard comeback from years ago, but he's content to settle back next to Jess and feel the warmth of her arms around him, to watch his old family and the new knit themselves together.

And to let one more big girly tear slide down his face and into Jess's hair.