Chapter Text
They were in yet another diner, somewhere in Missouri they were just passing through. One of those towns where they stopped, ate, and never bothered to remember the name or anything else about it. Every single one of these diners looked the same, faded and threadbare and just clinging on to life in towns too small for it to be worth it for the corporate chains to come in and finish them off. Their core menu was the same, and every one claimed to have the best pie in the state. They had the same mixture of waitresses: younger women trying to pay their way through college, and women about the same age as the first group’s mothers who had worked there since high school. Interchangeable across the country aside from a few regional specialities and the same as they were thirty years ago, little crystallized places in time scattered across America.
Dean was giving a cheeseburger the love and attention he felt that it fully deserved, as he always did, while Sam was picking at his fries as he frowned at his laptop. He thought he might have something here, and was pulling the threads of his thoughts together before he started to share them with Dean.
“Are you eating those?”
Sam’s head snapped up to see Dean looking at him across the table hopefully, gesturing towards his neglected fries. Sam shook his head, and Dean pounced on them gleefully. He smiled at his brother, more endeared than annoyed by the casual food stealing, and he tried to ignore the familiar warm sensation in the pit of his stomach at the joy on Dean’s face from the simple pleasure of food.
He decided to end that train of thought with work. Nothing like a grisly murder to take your mind off that kind of thing, after all.
“Dude, look at this. I think I’ve got a case. Suzy Collins, she’s a realtor in Rifle, Colorado. Just yesterday she beat her co-worker to death out of nowhere.”
Dean paused with a fry halfway to his lips. “We’re the Winchesters, and there’s a case in a town called Rifle? Little on the nose there, don’t you think?”
Sam smiled wryly; Dean had a point. “Yeah, I know. But she was under a hundred pounds, and Ralph Davidson, the guy she beat to death? Competed in strongman as a hobby.”
He turned his laptop toward Dean to show him a photo of the victim. “He was six foot six and weighed about three hundred pounds.” He flicked to another window on his laptop, and another set of photos in another local news article. “And the week before, this guy, Michael Blythe, killed his business partner in the same house. The coroner said it looked like he’d been hit by a semi.”
Dean raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, that’s a case alright. We’ll finish up here, then head off.”
Sam watched as Dean took another huge bite of his burger, and once again tried not to feel too fond at the look of contentment on his brother’s face. Those feelings were creeping in too often, and they were dangerous.
—
Once they’d arrived in Rifle, they found the local Cinderella motel - still very cheap and pretty disreputable, but not actually somewhere that charged by the hour. This particular one was decked out in shades of muddy browns and moldy greens, dark and depressing, but at least missing the tacky ‘70s porno look of most of the places they stayed in. As soon as they arrived in their room, they started changing into their fake FBI suit disguises. Sam had arranged an appointment with the local police over the phone as they traveled, and they had about thirty minutes before they had to be there.
“What’s the cop’s name?”
Sam turned to look at Dean, and wished he hadn’t, because Dean was already fully changed, much faster than Sam had expected him to be.
There were days Sam deeply regretted that he’d ever thought of the suits, because it turned out that Dean looked good in them in a way that Sam liked a little too much. The first time, he’d joked that his brother looked like a kid going to a school dance, but that was a flimsy cover-up of how he really felt. He sometimes found himself distracted on cases at the worst possible moment by the thoughts that it triggered in him, picturing himself pulling Dean in and up by his tie to kiss him, deep and hard, then unbutton his shirt with the other hand, letting his hand run down Dean’s chest, drawing moans from him which Sam would feel against his own lips as he played with a nipple.
“Dude, are you there?”
Damn. He was doing it again. Snapping back to the room and hoping his embarrassment wasn’t too obvious, Sam pulled himself together.
“Uh, yeah. Sorry. Um, it’s Detective Ashley Jones.”
This is why those thoughts were dangerous, and his emotions getting too out of control when it came to Dean. The truth was, Sam had a crush on Dean, and had done since he was about thirteen and had started to actually know what a crush was. He knew it was sick, and that normal people didn’t have those kinds of feelings or thoughts about their siblings, but he just wasn’t able to stop himself.
He’d hoped, when he went off to college, that distance and space would have killed the crush off. Getting out of their claustrophobic situation, and learning to be emotionally close to other people, he thought would have been enough to end it and make his heart realize that it was misguided. He’d dated a little, then met Jess and fallen for her. He’d made friends, and tried to teach himself to be normal.
He’d failed. The whole time he’d been there he’d been lying to himself, as well as everyone around him. When Dean had said he was a freak, not long after they’d started traveling together again, he’d smiled to himself, because Dean had no idea how much of a freak Sam actually was. The time apart had made no difference whatsoever; he still wanted his brother in a way that terrified him.
And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Dean was his brother. He could never know about this, because he’d be rightfully disgusted, and Sam losing his focus whenever he found Dean particularly attractive was a fast track to Dean putting the pieces together. Or Sam losing concentration during a hunt and Dean getting seriously injured, which was even worse.
He needed to put this aside, and accept it could never happen. He needed to keep his secret locked away in the darkest part of his heart, and hope that over time that the feelings would eventually wither away.
“You spaced out on me there, man. Hurry up and put the rest of your monkey suit on and we’ll get going.”
“Yeah, sorry.” Sam muttered, and turned away as he reached for his tie.
He really needed to pull it together.
—
They were sitting beside the desk of Detective Ashley Jones, a competent woman with short, dark hair and a no-nonsense demeanor in what Sam would guess to be her mid to late forties who he suspected he really wouldn’t want to cross, in the small, chaotic office of the station in Rifle. This was another building of browns and greens, everything worn and tired. Another place that time had left behind.
Sam flipped through the case notes and coroner’s report while Dean glanced over his shoulder. He carefully kept Dean’s face out of his line of vision, so he could keep his focus.
“Broken ribs, broken neck, crushed orbital bones, multiple cerebral hematomas… detective, have you ever seen anything like this before?” Sam asked, in the most professional voice he had.
She shook her head. “I gotta be honest with you, agents, I’ve only ever seen injuries this bad in car wrecks, or extremely high falls. And she didn’t even have a weapon. She did this with her bare hands. To be honest, we’re actually glad you guys have shown up. We’re at a total loss on this one. None of us have a clue how she could have done it.”
“And how about this one? Jason Sterling?” Dean held up the file in his hand. “It seems very similar. Even happened in the same building.”
Detective Jones made a gesture of exasperation with her hands. “Yes, exactly the same as far as we can tell, but we can’t see any connection other than coincidence.”
“And what were the victims and suspects doing in the house at the time?” Sam said. This was their rhythm, one then the other, working as a team that rarely needed to discuss their tack. It was unusual for one of them to ask a question that surprised the other, so effective as a single unit now.
“Sterling and Blythe were business partners. They’d bought it and were about to start carrying out renovations. It had been empty for years, that place. After Sterling died, apparently their families decided to just get rid of it. That’s why Collins and Davidson were there. They were taking a few photos and working out a price for the place so they could put it on the market.”
They thanked the detective for her time, and Sam handed over his business card, and then they headed out of the station.
As they walked back in the direction of the car, Sam started to think aloud. “So, what do you think? Reopening the place stirred up something in the house?”
“Mmm, could be. Sitting empty like that for years, anything could have been creeping around. Or maybe that realtor chick is secretly a ninety pound She-Hulk and you wouldn’t like her when she’s angry.”
Sam huffed out a laugh. “Does that sound likely to you?”
Dean shrugged. “Yeah, no, not really. So what do you wanna do next?”
Sam glanced at his copy of the case files. “Looks like Michael Blythe’s next of kin is a brother who lives nearby. How about we split up and I go speak to him? You take the car to the realtor’s office and see what you can find out about those two.”
“Yeah, sounds good. Meet up at the motel after?”
He nodded, and Dean headed on to the car, while Sam crossed the road and took a left. At least if they separated, he would be able to concentrate more easily on the case.
—
Sam knocked at the door of the home of David Blythe, a modest house in a blue collar area, some of the gray paint peeling off the siding but otherwise decently maintained, typical of these mining towns. A couple of small bikes in the patchy grass of the front yard hinted at children living here. It was an unremarkable family home, of the sort Sam visited with unwelcome questions on a weekly basis.
When he answered the door, David turned out to be another typical baffled relative, confused by how their loved one could have possibly done what the evidence, and in this case they, said they had. When Sam had introduced himself under the Agent Page alias, he’d been unsure why he was being asked to go over everything yet again, but Sam was adept at getting past that these days, and before long, he was in the Blythe’s sitting room with a cup of coffee, sitting on the sofa opposite David.
A brown sofa, he noted, with dark green carpet and curtains. What was it with that color scheme in this town, some sort of weird local bylaw? No. More likely a symptom of the neglect and stagnation of a town that had been forgotten.
The man, graying prematurely in his mid-30s, and with the build of someone who was strong through manual labor rather than gym training, was unshaven, with dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes looked rumpled and old. His brother’s arrest had clearly hit him hard, and Sam felt a wave of sympathy towards him. He always did for these people they encountered, who were just trying to lead their normal, safe lives, and got swept up into events they couldn’t possibly understand, desperately trying to glue together the pieces when they only had half of them.
“Can you tell me a little about your brother? Did he have a temper?”
David laughed, a brittle, bitter edge to it, and rubbed his hand over his eyes as he shook his head. “God, no, the opposite. He was one of the most laid-back people you could meet. I can’t imagine him doing something like this, even though he says he did.”
Sam nodded, sympathetic but professional, keeping in character as much as he could. “Is there any reason why he would have wanted to hurt Mr. Sterling? They were business partners. Had there been any tension?”
“No, nothing.” David hesitated for a moment. “Look, Michael was gay, and he was in love with Jason. He told me one night after a few too many beers. Jason was married though, so he’d never have told him. Knew he hadn’t a chance. He’d never have hurt him though, I know that much. He accepted that he couldn’t have anything with Jason, you know?”
He nodded again, nothing fake about his sympathy now as he felt something catch in his chest. He knew all too well how that felt.
They talked a little bit longer, but nothing David said seemed to be relevant, so eventually he handed over his business card for the second time that day, asked him to call if he thought of anything, then headed out the door. He set a course to the motel, getting about halfway there before his phone buzzed in his inside pocket.
“Hello?” As always, he answered cautiously, no name or anything identifying, just in case. He’d never broken the habit, no matter how weird everyone at college had found it. Years of paranoia were hard to shake off, and now he was back out on cases he was glad he’d kept it.
“Dude, it’s me.” Dean’s familiar voice, followed by the by now equally familiar rush of affection tinged with shame. “I’m just leaving the realtor’s office now.”
“And was Suzy a tiny powerhouse?”
“Nope, apparently she could barely lift a box of copier paper. And they had no idea why she’d do it. She’d been carrying a torch for years and never could tell him. Whole thing makes no sense.”
The burning guilt was smothered by an icy fear at that. Sam chewed the inside of his lip, a bad habit when he was thinking he couldn’t make himself quit.
“Huh. That’s interesting. The brother just told me that Blythe was in love with Sterling and kept it from him. Could be our connection.”
He waited a few seconds, but Dean didn’t respond. “You still there, Dean?”
“Yeah.” Dean’s voice sounded a little off - worried, maybe? He couldn’t quite tell through the phone, and he couldn’t think of a reason why Dean would be particularly concerned about this. “That’s something alright.”
He could think of a reason he should worry, however. He tried to ignore it for the time being, and focused on the case.
“I think we need to dig into the history of the house. We’re missing something.”
“You thinking possession?” The odd edge Sam couldn’t identify was still there.
“Mmm, could be. Meet you back in the motel room?”
“Yeah, be there in a few.”
Dean disconnected the call and Sam, unsettled, picked up his pace. If secret crushes were the connection, then Sam could be vulnerable to whatever was going on here.
We better get to the bottom of his one, and soon he thought to himself grimly. Otherwise, we could have a problem.
—
Once they were back in their dirt-colored motel room, Sam getting there a few minutes before Dean, they changed out of their suits into their practical, everyday clothes. Sam pushed back the little pangs of guilty longing sparked by the glances he got of Dean’s perfectly-muscled back when he took off the white dress shirt with a familiar contented sigh. Dean may accept the usefulness of their Fed disguise, but he’d never feel comfortable in the clothes, and was always happy to get back to his usual worn-soft military surplus gear and cheap Walmart t-shirts.
Sam turned away, already changed, and picked up his laptop to start researching the background of the house. He first started by identifying the local press - the Rifle Citizen Telegram was the only newspaper, apparently - and discovering that their website sucked, and the search function didn’t work properly at all.
Time to do it the hard way. He started trawling backwards through the website, finding any stories about murders or weird deaths he could, then eliminating them one by one as he dug into the details.
It was slow work, going through years of articles on a not-great connection, and painstaking, making sure that he didn’t miss one, or not read a detail properly. It was the sort of thing he secretly loved, however, sifting through the information, analyzing it, and casting aside what wasn’t needed. There was something peaceful about it, once he’d got into his rhythm, focusing on the words on the screen, scanning for the specific facts he needed to assess whether a story was relevant to the case or not, and making a note of what he needed when he found it. Satisfying, once you’d sifted out the little piece of information that could make everything click together.
Behind him, he could hear Dean going through his ritual of weapons maintenance, the familiar smells of gunpowder and oil giving him a feeling of comfort that no pretty scented candle ever could. Familiarity, for him, was mineral oil and the clicking of a gun being skilfully checked and cleaned by his brother. Reading through murder cases while Dean made sure their arsenal was up to snuff was a strange kind of homeliness, but it was theirs.
The years ticked by on the screen as Sam methodically made his way through the records, until finally the street name he was looking for caught his eye. He snapped into full attention, sure he’d found what he was looking for. The little thrill of satisfaction when he uncovered something important, whether it was an essay for college or to crack open a case, never got old.
Neither did getting to share the newly excavated facts with Dean, and seeing his eyes light up, then his brow furrow with thought as he followed the same line of reasoning Sam already had.
He turned towards Dean. “Think I’ve found something.”
Dean had finished up with the gun maintenance by now, and was sitting up in bed half-watching something on the television, but as soon as Sam spoke, he turned his full attention to his brother.
“So, get this. Ten years ago, this guy, Neill Adams, was shot dead in that house by a Jane Wilson. She’d been beaten so badly she died in hospital three days later, so it was self-defense.”
Dean nodded. “Huh. Sounds like it’s what we’re looking for. Anything on what went down?”
Sam shook his head. “Not a lot of detail in this, and there wasn’t a trial because they both died. Adams had a brother though, he might be able to fill in the blanks.”
“Hopefully we can get in touch with him. We should swing by the sheriff’s office tomorrow morning and see what files they still have too.”
“Uh huh.” Sam murmured absently, as he ran a search for Ray Adams’s current address, clicking and scrolling through his usual hacked databases. “Hah, got him! He still lives locally, so we can pay him a visit tomorrow. Not sure there’s much else we can do tonight though.”
Sam closed his laptop and lay down on his bed, propping himself up a little to make it appear he was watching the terrible made-for-TV movie currently on the screen.
He was, to put it mildly, worried. Both incidents now had a connection, and it was one that put Dean at risk. It would be right to warn him that he could be in danger from Sam during this case, but how would he even do that? Whatever he said would amount to a confession of his feelings, which would probably stop the risk of whatever was going on affecting them, but how could their relationship ever survive that?
Sam decided that they’d just have to try and get to the bottom of this and deal with it as quickly as they possibly could. With luck, he wouldn’t be affected by what was happening, and Dean would not find out his secret.
The two of them spent the rest of the night mostly in silence. This was unusual for Dean, who normally loved to talk constantly about whatever was on TV, and his current thoughts about it; Sam guessed that his stress was bleeding out and into the room and affecting Dean’s mood.
He hated feeling so tense that it was making Dean act weirdly. The sooner they got this case wrapped up, the better.
—
The next morning was just as strange and tense as the evening before, with Sam carefully not looking at Dean, some irrational part of his brain convinced that would make him more susceptible to whatever was going on if he thought about how much he wanted Dean. As if he could push his feelings deep down, and whatever was happening wouldn’t be able to pick up on it and he’d be safe from its effects.
Stupid, he knew logically. He couldn’t shake the peculiar feeling, however, and Dean was still unusually quiet, so it was an awkward morning. They first visited the sheriff's office, managing to talk them into handing over the records of an old, apparently unrelated case with a spiel about ‘being thorough’, and Sam flipped through the folder while Dean drove.
He was glad to have something to focus on, and something to discuss to break the silence between them. They were usually much more comfortable being quiet together, with years of long drives making it a normal part of life, but there was an edge to it right now that Sam knew was caused by his own fear.
Scanning through the pages, he briefed Dean on the manila folder’s contents. “Okay, so there’s not much here other than the first responder’s report from the scene and the autopsy reports. Adams was shot in the chest, died at the scene. Wilson had been beaten around the head and torso, cause of death was determined to be traumatic brain injury due to blunt force trauma. Her blood was all over him, it was pretty cut and dry.”
“Well, it lines up pretty well with what’s been happening. Sounds like a vengeful spirit to me.” Dean’s eyes were fixed squarely on the road, and while Sam was grateful from a ‘not wanting to die in a fiery car wreck’ point of view, it wasn’t like Dean.
“Yeah, sounds like. Just need to find out how to stop it. With the house it happened in being the focus, it might not be a simple salt and burn. Feels like an item.”
Dean nodded, still not looking over at him. “Hopefully his brother can give us some idea of what it is.”
He seemed stilted, and oddly formal. It wasn’t his brother’s normal way of speaking at all. This case was making everything feel wrong between them, knocking them out of their usual rhythm and flow, like grit between their gears. He couldn’t wait for it to be over.
They lapsed back into the uncomfortable silence until they arrived at Ray Adams’s house, then they snapped into their professional personas - this morning, they were journalists, writing an article on little known cases across the country. Between them, they convinced Ray, a balding man in his mid 50s, to let them into his house, which aside from the lack of children’s bikes looked almost identical to the Perry home, and talk to them about his brother.
They were sitting on another faded brown sofa, cradling mugs of bad coffee as Ray carried an old shoebox, lightly covered in dust, into the room. A small amount raised from the lid as he opened it, giving Sam the unnerving feeling of them disturbing things better left buried.
“I haven’t looked at this in years.” Ray was apologetically saying, as he set the now-opened box onto the coffee table and sat on the armchair opposite them. “After what he did… I just couldn’t.”
Sam gave his most sympathetic nod. “This must be hard for you to remember. Can you tell us a little bit about your brother? What kind of a man was he?”
Ray handed Dean a pile of old photographs, and they started to flip through them; the two brothers together, Neill with his arm around a dog as a teen, an adult Neill holding a beer… there was something important in these, and Sam couldn’t quite put his finger on it yet. He scanned them carefully, trying to take in every detail.
The older man sighed. “He was difficult, to be honest with you. Always had a temper on him that was getting him into trouble. Never thought he’d have done what he did though.”
The expression on his face, of remembering something with a complex mix of soft nostalgia and bitter sorrow, was one Sam had to see on people far too often. Having to come to people’s homes and dredge up the worst memories of their lives was the worst part of the job. More difficult than the injuries, the constant travel, the grimy motel rooms. Those were consequences that he and Dean bore through choice, whereas these people had these painful conversations forced on them through deception. Necessary, but he hated to do it.
Dean picked up the questioning. “What was his relationship with Jane? A girlfriend maybe?”
Ray shook his head. “No, though Neill wished she was. She wasn’t interested in him. He was going over that night to ask her out. I told him she’d turn him down, but he wouldn’t listen.”
He exchanged a look with Dean; this sounded important. Sam turned back to Ray. “Do you think that had something to do with what happened?
Ray looked down at his hands, a pained mixture of sadness and guilt on his face. “Yeah. I think she told him she wasn’t into him, and he lost it. Poor girl, she didn’t deserve any of it.”
Sam glanced back at the photos, trying to place what was bugging him, and then he had it. The necklace. In all these photos, Neill was wearing a gold chain with a crucifix pendant, but there had been no mention of it in the inventory of his personal effects in the police files.
“Ray, can I ask about this necklace Neill was wearing?”
He looked at Sam in surprise. “He got that as a confirmation present from our grandmother. Never took it off.”
“Mmm. And did you get it back after he passed?”
Ray still looked confused, and Sam couldn’t blame him. “No, the police must have lost it. Under the circumstances we didn’t really want it back that much.”
He could feel Dean looking at him again, and he felt that little flutter of excited satisfaction once again. After a few more questions to both cement their cover and establish that Neill had been cremated, they thanked Ray for his time and headed out.
“You think it’s the necklace, then?” Dean asked as they got into the car.
Sam swung into his seat, sat down and shut the door, and waited for Dean to do the same before replying. “Yeah, must have got pulled off in the struggle and still be in the house somewhere.”
Dean bit his lip nervously. “Looks like we’ll be heading over there tonight then. At least we know what we’re looking for now.”
“Yeah.” Sam looked out the car window and tried to push down the twisting fear in his stomach.
At least worrying about this is stopping you from checking Dean out so much he thought to himself dryly.
—
They’d prepared for that night’s hunt with the strange, tense silence still clinging to them and filling the room, suffocating any conversation. Sam couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so on edge around Dean when they hadn’t actually fought about something. It was disconcerting, and he was amazed Dean hadn’t started asking him what was up. Dean was still uncharacteristically quiet, and didn’t try to break the silence or lighten the mood with one of his terrible jokes, which didn’t help reduce the uneasiness either.
At least Dad’s military-style training meant that they could do this in their sleep, with no need to communicate in order to pack what they needed. Salt shells for the shotgun, iron crowbars, flashlights, knives, lockpicks, all checked and rechecked and in their exact place.
They were as ready as they could be when they pulled up outside the house around midnight. The neighborhood was as deserted as they’d hoped, with not even a late dog walker to be seen, and the heavy cloud covered the moon completely. It was ideal conditions for their purposes. As quietly as they could, they pulled out their bags and made sure their flashlight and shotguns were in their hands.
“The attack happened in the kitchen, so we should start there.” Sam said in his lowest voice as they walked up the pathway to the front door, which still had a few strips of police tape across, the usual vivid yellow muted in the low light.
Dean nodded, then peeled off the tape and stooped to unpick the lock, expertly and almost silently working the mechanism open in just a few moments. The door creaked as it opened, but not loudly enough to attract any attention. They slipped inside, Dean first, where they were instantly enveloped by the familiar scent of a decaying house, alongside the unmistakable reek of days-old blood.
Sam closed the door behind them and they each snapped their flashlights on, sweeping the room in front of them for any other intruders, but it was thankfully empty. They’d encountered squatters desperate enough to ignore the stench of rotting blood while on hunts before and persuading them to leave was never easy. A thick coating of dust combined with the almost complete darkness made the room almost monotone, aside from the footprints on the floor in various stages of being swallowed up again, and a few dark stains over by the left doorway.
This needs to go quickly Sam thought desperately to himself. Now they were actually here, he could see what a huge risk he was taking with Dean’s safety. He should never have come here.
But it was too late. All he could do now was see this through and hope they got lucky. He took a deep breath to try and get rid of some of the tension coiled in his stomach, and immediately regretted it as the foul odors of the house made him cough slightly, earning him an annoyed look from Dean at the unnecessary noise.
“Sorry. Kitchen’s to the left.” His voice sounded odd, strained and clipped with stress.
“Huh. Explains why those stains are there, then.”
It did. Once they were in the kitchen, that was when Sam was most at risk, it seemed. Dean headed into the kitchen before him, shining his flashlight into every corner of the room. Sam braced himself mentally, then stepped in behind him, copying the same well-practiced movements as he scanned for a tiny flash of gold. The beam from their flashlights cut through the darkness in long, grayish strips, illuminating thousands of small particles of dust slowly drifting in tiny air currents.
He glanced at the kitchen table, which contained no sign of the necklace, but did have some moldering newspapers with a date of 1996. He turned away from the useless papers, moving to look underneath the broken chairs.
And then he felt it.
The room temperature dropped, and suddenly he couldn’t move a muscle. He tried to open his mouth to shout a warning to Dean, but he couldn’t even manage that. He was helpless, completely unable to control his body. He’d been possessed by a spirit before, but that time had been very different. That ghost had taken the anger that he already carried and stoked it up, used the emotions he already had for its own purposes. This one, however, was just using his body, and Sam was just being taken along for the ride.
Dean stopped dead, staring at a crack between the floorboards, then reached down. As he did so, Sam, to his horror, felt his hand reaching for the knife in his belt.
“Hey, Sammy, I think I-“
Sick to his stomach, Sam watched helplessly as his hand swung round and the knife sunk into Dean’s thigh. The noise of the blade slicing through flesh right to the hilt seemed shockingly loud in the quiet night, the sickening, sucking sound of the blade being withdrawn that followed even more so.
Dean grunted in pain - anyone else would have screamed, that knife wound was deep, Sam knew - and whirled around, knocking the knife out of Sam’s hand. A spray of blood followed, dripping wetly onto the bare floorboards and congealing in the layers of dust.
Sam looked at the confused shock on Dean’s face, then saw the moment of understanding as he put the pieces together, and Sam thought with a numb misery oh god, he knows now.
But there were more urgent concerns.
He felt his hands grab at something, then come away with a plank of old wood, which he then swung at Dean’s head, the crack against his skull obscenely loud in the nighttime silence. Sam was a big, strong guy, but the ghost possessing him had increased his physical power to inhuman levels, and the blow was far harder than he could ever manage on his own. He could only look on from inside his hijacked body, wanting to scream to his brother but unable to utter a sound, as Dean fell to the side, blood immediately dripping to the floor, landed face down on the decaying floorboards, then rolled onto his back to look up at Sam. Dean’s eyes were wide with shock in the darkness, his skin pale, the bloody bruise already dark and sticky on his forehead. Sam swung again, striking at Dean’s side, once, twice, then on the third time the rotten wood snapped under the force; his body cast the remnants aside, then swung a kick with his steel toecapped boots at the same spot.
Sam watched in horror. He could feel Dean’s body under his foot, hear the meaty thuds of his boot against flesh, the reality of his body being used to hurt his brother unfolding in front of him, but he had about as much influence on proceedings than he would if he were watching on a TV screen. His foot swung back again, and again, and then he stared as his hands gripped Dean, pulled him up by the arm and hair, and fling him into the broken-down kitchen cabinets, which splintered under the force.
Then he saw Dean reaching out with his lighter in one hand and something small and golden in the other.
Before he could be used to hurt Dean again, the flame sliced through the darkness and touched against the metal, and Sam felt the agony of flames all through his body, like the blood in his veins had turned into something molten. A scream rang in his head, and he couldn’t tell if it was his body making the noise, or something the ghost was creating within him, and then it was gone. He slumped to the floor, shaking in shock and pain.
Dean. He was injured. Sam needed to help him. He took a deep breath, took control of his body again, flexing the knuckles of his right hand as a confirmation, then crawled over towards Dean.
“Dean, are you okay? Talk to me, dude.”
Dean had rolled out of the broken pieces of kitchen, holding his ribs and groaning. At least he’s conscious Sam thought to himself, almost lightheaded with relief.
And then, with a sudden, icy terror, he remembered. Dean knew just how fucked up his little brother was now.
This was it. He was going to lose Dean forever.