You are not allowed to laugh.
NEEDLE & THREAD

Sammy hadn’t said a word since we’d got in the car. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to have some deep, touchy feely heart-to-heart with him, I just needed something to concentrate on. I was this close to actually switching on the radio and suffering Aretha Franklin, which said something.

Like you’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

I clicked my fingers in front of Sam’s face to see if I could bug him into a response. He continued staring out of the window like the dark asphalt night was the most absorbing thing he’d even seen.

Maybe if I followed the yellow brick road I’d find a map of Sammy’s head in the wizard’s big black bag.

Then again, he’d turned out to be a fake. I’d probably have better luck if I asked the green chick running the al fresco opium diner if she knew what to do. I had a feeling that if I spent all my time eating poppies I’d understand my little brother better.

I returned my hand to the wheel, grunting as the movement jarred my shoulder. Nose, chin, ribs were bruised, not broken. But the bullet wound, hell, that sucked.

To be honest, it was getting old. Demon comes, demon hurts, demon leaves.

Usually, demon leaves.

These days I was never sure when it was here and when it was elsewhere, causing famine and suffering and the death of the first born. It was getting to the point where I was considering carrying around a cooler of holy water and accidentally pouring it all over everyone I met. Or maybe I could just pretend I had some psyche issues and shout ‘Christo!’ loudly at regular time intervals.

The Demon in Dad had come as a bit of a shock. Of all the people in the world I’d never have thought of as likely to get head-jacked, Dad was pretty much top of the list. Maybe just after God. Maybe just before.

I had to hand it to old yellow-eyes, it was inspired. Fuck with Daddy, kill two birds with one stone. Or just, fuck with the heads of the two birds enough so they drive themselves and their Daddy into a ten-ton truck.

Demon one, Dean nil.

I got it.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sam look over at me, brows knotted in that ridiculous kicked puppy look of his, before turning away and biting his thumb.

Screw Aretha, what I really needed was some Nugent. Loud enough to drown out Sam’s sorrow and my nervous system and the rest of the world and its plans. Loud enough to fill my head with some hick in a bar singing about his chick’s strangle hold and to fend off this feeling of oncoming, inevitable fate. Nugent, really fucking loud.

Screw Aretha, screw the silence, and screw the pounding headache that wouldn’t let me do either.



II.
The second time it happened, I was surprised. And not just that Sam’d managed to get a girl.

It was funny, the way our innocent Sam always seemed to fall in with the wrong crowd. Funny in the same way as a war veteran who survives the battles and the bullets and the murder and then chokes to death on his complimentary peanuts on the plane home is funny.

I guess that made it pretty fucking miserable.

He’d been pissed that Meg’d turned out to be the Demon’s kid. He thought he’d finally met someone who understood where he was with the whole family thing, who he could talk to about me and Dad and his mom up there on the ceiling without her actually becoming a part of it. Not for the first time I wished he’d met someone who really was who they said they were, who really cared about what they said they did and didn’t turn around and spit in your face when you were down and bleeding and broken on the floor. Innocence lost was the one part of the job that I’d never reconciled myself to.

Don’t get me wrong, an older, wiser, more jaded Sam had his perks. Sometimes he went overboard and knocked the ‘please’ off his, sorry for the inconvenience but I’m going to have to ask you to leave now exorcism ritual. That really showed the legions of Hell where to hang their coats.

I certainly hadn’t had any ties to her. All Sammy’d done was peep at her from the street outside her house, which for him was probably as good as a band of gold but didn’t mean a thing for anyone else. Still, Meg was our first human, aside from those sick hillbillies, and it felt wrong.

So, it was getting old.

Demon rocks up, breaks a few bones, heads, hearts. For the third time.

I get shot by my brother, for the second.

These days nothing happened for the first.



III.
Sammy wasn’t speaking to me. Not if he could help it. And for once, not because I’d insulted his hair.

I knew I looked like hell. Sammy had said as much, and I knew as much, because hey, I felt a thousands times worse than what the mirror told. All I wanted to do was go to sleep, but if Sammy was gonna sit up all night like the emo bitch he was, I couldn’t exactly pass out on him.

It was up to me to fix things, then.

So we were hella screwed.

‘Hey, Sammy,’ I began. Lamely.

He coughed, reaching for his coffee. I could tell this was going to be painful.

‘You finished that cup a half hour ago. OD’ing on caffeine’s a sad way to go, even for you.’

The words jarred even as they tumbled past my teeth, and I winced.

He sighed.

‘Dean, I...’

He trailed off and looked away from me. The silence passed, and I fought down the urge to sock him one. I’d already done that once today, and damned if I was getting as unoriginal as the Demon.

But I’m really not a patient man.

‘Jesus, Dean, you look awful.’

‘You say the sweetest things.’

A strained chuckle fought its way out of his throat, balanced only by the look of sheer misery in the twitch of his lips.

It faded when he looked down to fidget with his pen. His desperation flashed off its shiny metal clip, riding on a sunbeam.

‘If it comes back, I can’t control myself.' A pause, when his tongue flicked out to trace his lips. 'I hurt Jo. I hurt everyone around me. Man, I killed that hunter, and…’ his voice hitched and the rush of words petered off into the hum of the laptop’s battery. ‘I’m dangerous, Dean, and I shot you. I could have killed you!’

I looked at him blankly. If that was the kind of anticlimactic stating of the obvious that got you a full ride to Yale, lawyer-hood and hot college chicks, hey, maybe I ought to apply. Sammy, the disturbingly sensitive telekinetipath that some bitch of a demon spends his days obsessing about suddenly comes over all vulnerable to demonic possession. A six-foot-four-inch Winchester, trained by Dad himself to fillet whatever comes too near and with the ability to move closets with his mind goes dark-side and he tells me he’s dangerous. I have to watch out for him, or he could kill me.

Well, duh.

‘Dean?’

I zoned back into the world in time to catch an anxious Sam clicking his fingers in front of my face.

I pushed the hand away with a frown.

‘Don’t give me that bull. I know you. The person who killed Wandell wasn’t you, just like the guy who got off torturing pretty girls back in St. Louis wasn’t me. You’re not responsible for what that thing made you do back there, Sammy, you’ve got to realise that.’

‘How do you know, Dean? How do you know? We both know I've got some series destiny issues that we have no idea about, who knows if it wasn't really me doing it all? Maybe I meant to hurt those people, and the demon just let me do it. Not knowing when it’s really me, or who I’m going to hurt next, it's screwed up, man! Demon or no, it was my body. It was my hands. It was me.’

His eyes limped across the carpet for a moment, and he looked a little like a drowning man. So I dived in.

I only remembered I couldn't swim as I hit the water.

‘I know it must be hard, not knowing what’s going to happen.’ I could practically feel the pain in my toes as I stumbled along, trying to comfort and console. I looked down at my feet, half expecting to see blood soaking through the ends of my socks. 'But you gotta hang on. We'll get through this, you know, you can't let yourself go just 'cause some demon chick got ahold of you by the cajones. I understand it sucks, but - '

A derisive snort cut short the pep talk.

I looked up. It wasn’t often I tried to make Sam feel better and he usually responded pretty quick, so what I wasn’t expecting was to see his brows creased and his sharp feral teeth coaxing blood from his lip. That meant he was holding back something he knew he shouldn’t say when he knew that I should hear it, and was classic pissed-off Sam.

'Jesus, Dean, that wasn't what I meant.' His voice had that strained laughter to it, the kind that comes free with your special-offer anger and your six-pack of despair. 'For God's sake. I wasn't. That wasn't what I meant at all!'

Running a hand through his hair, he hesitated for the slightest of moments. Then with a growl he grabbed the jacket on the chair next to him and was out the door in two stupidly long strides, banging it shut behind him.

So, on a scale of one to shitsville? My grief counselling was a definite eleven.

I considered going out after him but something warned me that he needed space. Maybe the inner prepubescent schoolgirl in Sam was starting to get to me (or it could have been the way he stalked out and slammed the door), but I had the feeling that if I went chasing after him we wouldn’t end up braiding each other’s hair.

So I’d give him time.

The fact that I didn't think the ache in my body would let me catch him had nothing to do with it at all.

Sammy came back late into the night, to a darkened room with two beds and a broken T.V. and a laptop lamp and a brother hiding in its shadows. I pretended to be asleep as he lay down and pretended too.

If there really is something up there - which, as Sam will tell you, has yet to be established - then I have a suggestion for you. Go crazy and give us a stroke of good luck, just this once, and see what happens. I don’t believe the Winchester karma’s so bad that we don’t deserve some good fortune once in a while.

Not my dad, damned to an eternity of fire and brimstone.

Not my brother, destined to be some mandroid soldier in a demon’s puppet war.

Not my family, ripped to shreds, inside and out.



IV.
I really missed the old days.

Chasing Dad, before he died. Chasing Dad in the Impala, before he died and it got KO’d by Bobby’s truck. Chasing Dad in the Impala with my brother, before he died and it got KO’d and Sammy found something I couldn’t protect him from just to make a point.

Credit-card scams and bikini inspectors. Hustling pool and picking up waitresses. Saving people, hunting things, the family business...

Fuck it. Even that fabric-softener teddy bear.

I was only thinking of the good stuff, I knew. I remembered lollipops and candy canes in a world I understood where a family worked together like the well-oiled machine it always meant to be since the night the firemen came. And I had to laugh at myself. It was like remembering when you were four and you dropped your ice cream on the floor, and you went running to your momma crying like it was the end of the world and not just the end of your double-chocolate dessert.

Except I couldn’t remember running to my momma. And it wasn’t an ice cream I’d dropped, it was one of Caleb’s flash bombs.

I hadn’t been able to see for two hours.

I woke up to a dark room stained orange by streetlamps outside. My skin prickled, and I wondered just how raw Sam’s laptop had to be to pump this much electricity into the air.

The small, rational part of me warned that the room couldn’t be as hot as it felt. The other part of me asked why the walls had transformed into waves of rolling black and green that rippled unsettlingly across my vision. And in between trying to justify why I felt like I was lying inside the world’s biggest Jell-O mould, rationality answered, infection.

The miserable icing on the bad karma cake.

My stomach churned, and lying in bed felt more like lying on frozen iron filings. I was cold and the room was hot and the sheets beneath me were sharp and uncomfortable.

Frowning into the gloom, I tested my shoulder to see how bad it was.

Which turned out to be one of my less brilliant ideas.

A few minutes later I curled back from the basin, folding in on myself as I sagged against the wall. The pain in my shoulder was dying away now, being slowly but surely usurped by a chilly nausea in the pit of my stomach.

It hadn’t always been this bad.

Had it?

I remembered the thrill of the hunt, before I really understood what it meant to stalk and kill and chalk one more tally up against my name in the netherworld’s most wanted. Before I worried about what was waiting on the other side of the coffin lid and not just the other side of the door. Before I realised why Dad kept reminding me to check on Sammy, and why I deserved whatever I got if I didn’t.

I remembered a dad who wasn’t always away, who didn’t always go out smelling of gun oil and come back covered in blood. I remembered looking after Sammy and Sammy looking after me, if he’d had too many late nights studying or I’d just had too many. Our line of work had its cons, sure, but it had its pros too. We saw the world. Learned new skills. Met some interesting people. Killed some interesting things.

It hadn’t always been this bad, but the lines around Sammy’s too-young mouth argued it had, it had, it always fucking had.

I gripped at my shoulder with an unstable hand and tried not to look down. I wasn’t a hundred per cent to begin with, and M&M’s looked a whole lot better when they weren’t floating half-digested in a toilet.

Ice cream and mothers, or flash bombs and monsters. It just depended on the way you looked at it.

Salt, burn, move on out.

I tried not to look at all.



V.
I don’t know how long I was out for. The next thing I knew was a hand under my neck, cradling me into a warmth the coldness of linoleum had long made me forget. A second hand touched my arm, probing with a gentleness that could never belong to a monster, no matter how much it cared about its hair.

It called my name, from a long way away.

Light fingers pulled opened my eye a crack, and I winced into the too-white bathroom.

Sammy’s voice sounded again, distant and indistinct. The warmth shifted underneath me as he slipped an arm behind my back, and I cursed myself for not leaping up and telling him to stop being the overprotective soccer mom he always was.

He was still apologizing for the crap the world threw at him.

I was still fumbling around in the dark, trying to find the switch.

In the distant land of coloured lights and senselessness, I wondered if Aretha wouldn't mind pitching in and praying that being Winchesters would be enough. I wanted to tell Sam that it was, I wanted it so bad that it burned my bones and shocked my nerves and churned me up inside. I wanted to say what was right for him to hear, to dredge the words up that would make it all right again, even though they were so lost on me that I didn't even know if they were actually there or just some sugar-coated ideal that a desperate man imagined, the glimpse of an oasis in the distant desert sands.

The best I could manage was a coughing fit that left me shaking all over, barely able to hear the quiet words mumbled into my ear.

Through glued lids I pictured Sammy kneeling next to me with swabs and antiseptic and fear and patching me up. And it was wrong, oh so wrong - Dean's the driver, Sammy's shotgun, the alliteration's there for a reason.

I shouldn't have been the one on the floor because he's the one who'd just been posessed and killed a man and I'm just someone who happened to get in the way. But it fits the pattern, the broken inverse pyramid of a family that's been upended to top-heavy and unstable, balancing the weight of the world on a tiny pointed base that can't possibly stand much longer.

A laugh bubbled up from somewhere at the image of the human Winchester triangle lolling on its head, and it’s then that I realised I was really losing it. So I swallowed down something hot and bitter in my throat and tried to focus on the voice overhead that was shaking only slightly, and the quiet cold tinkle of glass.