Finding Linda Tran, for mako_lies (part 2)
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spn_summergen(part two)
He felt comfortable, safe, in the Bunker. The protections were built into the foundations of the building, older and stronger than the sigils they’d used on the houseboat, capable of hiding their existence as well as keeping Evil out. Within its walls, Crowley and his demons couldn’t touch him.
Until the Winchesters invited him in.
Paul came and went.
He felt surprised when Dean said they were family, and affection. Dean never did anything halfway—always jumped in with both feet, whether that meant finding a way to destroy the Leviathan or save his brother—so maybe it shouldn’t have. The guy had tracked him down, done what he could to keep the monsters away, invited him into their home.
Tried to kill his mother.
Paul came and went.
Sam was easy to like, easy to be around. He remembered, in ways Dean didn’t, or couldn’t, that Kevin was a teenager. He was always willing to pick up a book to help with the research, always willing to send Kevin to bed, or for food, or just to breathe, when it felt like too much. He let Kevin feel like it was okay to fail, like he’d be there to catch him if he did and wouldn’t think less of him.
Then he failed to close the Gates of Hell.
Paul came and went.
Kevin felt a little guilty about that one, being mad at Sam for not dying. He didn’t want Sam to die. He just hadn’t wanted to die, either.
Besides, he was pretty sure Sam choking at the one-yard line had more to do with Dean not being able to let him go than with Sam not be willing.
Dean was easier to be mad at, anyway. He was the one who’d promised Kevin he was out. He was the one who promised, after they closed the Gates of Hell, it would be over. He was the one who let Kevin believe it.
But how do you really, honestly, blame someone for not being able to give up their only family?
Paul came and went.
He never would have given up his mom if there had been any way to hold on to her, if he had known he wouldn’t be able to get her back.
Paul knocked.
Kevin pulled the door open, leaned against it. He felt tired and raw, and he still hadn’t managed more than the briefest flicker of the bunker. For all he knew, he’d imagined those.
“You look terrible,” the counselor observed, face creased in concern.
Not un-like the way Sam had looked at him, on the houseboat, when he’d told the Winchesters he’d figured out how to close the Gates of Hell. Kevin huffed. “I’m fine.”
“It takes time, Kevin.”
“Everything takes time.” Irritably, he pushed away from the door, further into his hell. He’d been just a high school kid, before all this. He’d studied hard, and volunteered, and just wanted to go to a good college and become the first Asian-American President of the United States of America. What could he have possibly done to deserve this? To be stuck here, talking to only a select few, just like in the Bunker, just like on the houseboat, just like with Crowley and the Leviathan and the Angels.
“We’ll find her, Kevin,” Paul said, gentle and certain and shades of Sam and Dean all over again.
Kevin glowered at him from the relative safety of the map-that-wasn’t-there. “It’s been weeks.”
“Communicating, even just within the Veil, is difficult.”
“Everything is difficult.” Turning, Kevin focused all the anger and frustration, all the mixed up emotions churning through him, and pressed his hands down flat on the top of the map. He saw nothing, but something was there to take his weight, to press back.
After a long moment, when Paul hadn’t said anything, he turned back.
He didn’t much care for the expression on the counselor’s face, shrewd and assessing, like he’d seen something Kevin hadn’t wanted him to, knew something he didn’t. Kevin tensed against it.
“Are you sure. . . .” His eyes narrowed, then he shook his head. “I want you to consider something, Kevin. Come here.” He dropped so he was crouched in the doorway, looking up. Trying to seem less threatening, Kevin knew, and that wasn’t exactly reassuring.
Knowing he could close the door in the guy’s face helped a little.
Moving slowly, Kevin did as Paul asked. He knew—thought he knew—was pretty sure—that the counselor didn’t want to hurt him. The thing was, he also knew Sam hadn’t wanted to hurt him, and Dean hadn’t wanted to hurt him. And, okay, yeah, he was already dead and there weren’t any demons or angels hanging around in the veil to screw with him. That he knew of.
But that didn’t really make him feel any better at that exact moment.
When Kevin was just outside arm’s reach, Paul patted the ground. “Sit down.”
Kevin did.
“You’re a very strong young man, Kevin,” Paul said. “Very caring, loyal. And a lot of bad things have happened to you. I don’t know the details, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But I feel like you’re still trying fight, through them, or past them, and you haven’t quite figured out that what you really need to do is just let go.”
Kevin blinked at him as Paul lifted his hands. “Do you think you could do that? Let go?”
“No.” Kevin took a deep breath. “I can’t. Not until I find my mother. If she’s dead, it’s because of me.”
“If she’s dead,” Paul repeated, quirking an eyebrow. “You’re not sure?”
“I—Crowley told me she was.”
But Paul had that shrewd look again. “And did he also tell you she wasn’t?”
Kevin clenched his jaw and didn’t answer. Demons lied. How many times had Dean told him that?
But Paul nodded. “Maybe that’s it, then.”
“Maybe what’s it?”
“What you can’t let go.” He spread his hands. “Hope. Hope that she’s alive. Fear that she’s not. Either one will hurt, so you stay here.” His hands waved, took in the empty space of Kevin’s prison. “The one place you know is safe.”
“The place where I died,” Kevin reminded him.
“The place where people love you.”
*
Kevin stared blindly at white walls. He remembered long days in asylum, giving himself nosebleeds and headaches to translate a hunk of rock he didn’t want anything to do with. He remembered listening to taunting words, working with a demon he wanted to rip limb from limb, because the angels had to go back to Heaven. He remembered safety being ripped out from under him, after Dean told him to trust him. He wanted to tell Paul he didn’t know what he was talking about. He wanted to tell him that the Winchesters had never cared about anyone but each other.
He knew better, though.
He took a deep breath. “Suppose you’re right,” he said. “What do I do?”
“Decide,” Paul said, like it was easy. “Do you believe she’s still alive?”
*
The thing was, Kevin didn’t always like Dean. He saw black and white where Kevin saw shades of gray; he made jokes about the macabre; he pushed and bullied and name-called, and most of the time Kevin could find the affection in it, but sometimes it grated. Sometimes Dean was rude and abrasive, and so goddamned focused on the bottom line that he forgot there were other actual people involved and Kevin wanted to take a bat to his head.
For all his flaws, though, the one thing Kevin had always admired was how completely he loved his family. If he’d ever had any doubt that Dean would do anything for his brother, the fiasco with closing the Gates of Hell had laid them to rest. He knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Dean would never have taken a demon’s word for it, not if their positions had been reversed, if Crowley had told Dean Sam was dead.
*
Kevin tried meditating. Again.
*
Paul knocked on the door. When Kevin answered it, the counselor pulled him outside. He winced at the immediate increase in sound, squinting against sunlight that wasn’t there. If Paul noticed the reaction, he didn’t say anything, just:
“We may have found something. Listen.”
It was like listening to a badly tuned radio, the station fading in and out and overlaid by static. He frowned, trying to make out words, and heard: “Kev. . . .hat you?”
“We’re here, Jorge,” Paul said, before Kevin could get his brain together enough to answer. “Tell us what you know.”
“Didn’t . . . much. Was ma . . . eye rounds, you –ow? Saw these . . . guys. Thought . . . weird, you know? I mean, what . . . want with . . . Asian woman?”
“What did they do?” Paul prompted.
“Walkef her down . . . van. I think . . . knocked her out.”
“Do you remember anything else? Maybe something that struck you as weird?”
“. . . think about it. The . . . dude . . . two cell –ones. He was looking . . . one, calling . . . weird, you know?”
“Thank you, Jorge.” Paul pulled back, and Kevin only realized after the warmth and weight were gone that he’d been tucked into the older man’s side, pulled in tight with an arm over his shoulder. “I know it’s not much,” Paul said.
“No, it’s—” More than he’d had before. If he’d understood correctly, someone had seen Crowley with two phones, and his mom still alive. It was a reason beyond blind faith to hope. “It’s great. It sounds like that’s when Crowley grabbed her. He told me he killed her and took her phone, but if he had her phone and she was still alive. . . .”
When have you ever known me to let anyone off easy?
“He wouldn’t have had a reason to kill her.”
Paul clapped a hand on his shoulder. Kevin resolutely did not think that Crowley wouldn’t have needed a reason.
*
He shouldn’t have, maybe, but Kevin felt proud whenever he outlasted Sam on research. It didn’t happen too often, since the guys were away for days at a time while on a case, and Kevin didn’t count the day after—Dean usually slept until noon, those days, and the fact that Sam drug himself out of bed to help or just keep him company meant more than winning at a game Sam didn’t even know they were playing. And there wasn’t any point to it when the only real research was translating the Tablet. But when it was equal opportunity research and Sam hit the wall first?
Yeah. Suck on that, guys.
*
Paul thought the walls of his fake, invisible Bunker were psychosomatic representations of his brain’s desire to protect itself from further trauma, a projected defense mechanism that was not only keeping the other spirits from reaching him, but was also keeping him from breaking through the veil to the real world.
Kevin really did not want to hear that after a long day of getting absolutely nowhere.
“Look.” Paul spread his hands, gesturing Kevin to wait. “I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m not saying that’s what it is. But you said the walls weren’t there before, and that you thought you’d pierced the veil twice before they showed up but haven’t been able to do it since. Right?”
He nodded.
“So something changed, and the walls are a tangible representation of that. They’re also a common means of keeping something out, or something else in, and it wouldn’t be the first time someone had built walls to keep from getting hurt. Literally or metaphysically.”
Turning the words over in his head, Kevin felt tension easing out of his shoulders, which backed Paul out of his braced stance. He probably should have felt bad about putting the counselor on edge, but without the frustration, he just felt tired. He rubbed at his eyes.
“Yeah, that makes sense.” He just didn’t know what to do about it. It wasn’t like he’d been actively involved in the wall building. “Do you have any idea how I’m supposed to get rid of them, then?”
Paul shrugged, but he met Kevin’s gaze squarely. “Face your fear.”
“Right.”
“Take heart, Kevin,” Paul offered with a small smile. “The Lord never gives us more than we can bear.”
His lips twisted in something that might have been a smile. “Pretty sure that doesn’t count after you’re dead.”
*
The problem, because there always had to be a problem, was that Kevin didn’t know what fear he was supposed to be facing. That’d he’d get hurt again? That his mother was really dead and a shell of herself, caught in an endless, meaningless loop? That Sam and Dean wouldn’t be able to help? Wouldn’t want to? That he’d be stuck with the noise and the pain and the accumulated horror forever?
*
Paul showed up, same as usual, grinning. “You up for a field trip, kid?”
Kevin followed him out to a patch of white that looked the same as every other patched, laid down beside him and stared up at more white. When Sam and Dean finally got around to fixing Heaven, he’d be just as happy to never see white again.
“Me and my wife used to do this,” Paul mused. “We’d go out in the back yard, or off to her Uncle’s farm and lie back in the grass, look up at the stars.”
“Do you see stars?”
“Naw, just clouds.”
Kevin glanced at him, then from his shit-eating grin to the white sky. “Clouds. Right.” Maybe, if he squinted and looked at it sideways.
“Did you ever do anything like this?”
“There wasn’t time after I found out I was a Prophet. I was too busy translating, trying to find something that would help us save the world; and when I wasn’t, it was too dangerous for me to be outside. Before that—” Before that, if he wasn’t at school, he was studying for school, or doing an extra-curricular, or volunteering. “—it wasn’t really important. I guess I always figured I’d have time later.”
“We all fall into that trap,” Paul said. “Sometimes, some of us are lucky enough to see it before it’s too late.” Kevin felt it, more than heard it, when Paul turned his head to look at him. “How’re you doing?”
The screams were still there. He could hear them rising higher, falling lower, the misery and anger and loss an almost tangible thing. It rang in his ears, created a low throb at the back of his head, like he’d tipped his chair back and smacked it against the wall. “I’m okay.”
“Good.”
Paul left a small eternity later. Kevin left to visit Ethan.
*
When Kevin found the kid, he was chasing a golden retriever toward the tree in his front yard, laughing. Then the dog rounded the tree, Ethan slipped, and Kevin slowed. Because deciding his best bet at figuring things out was to talk to the kid was a hell of a lot different than actually facing that kid and asking questions.
Ethan climbed to his feet before Kevin could change his mind. An action that, in itself, wasn’t a problem, but when the dog rounded the tree and planted its feet in front of the kid, Ethan shrieked happily and turned tail. Right toward Kevin.
“Kevin!” the kid yelled, suddenly more intent on the Prophet than the dog. “You came back!”
And now on top of feeling awkward, Kevin felt like a heel. “Hey, buddy,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Good.” The kid kept walking until he was barely a foot away and dropped his head back between his shoulder blades to see Kevin’s face. Kevin buried his hands in his pockets to keep from pushing Ethan back a step. “Chance got out of the backyard, so he’s playing with me.” The dog barked.
“Ah—” His gaze darted to the dog, surprised to see Chance sitting about four feet away, staring straight at him. “Wouldn’t it be better to play in the backyard?”
“But Chance likes the front yard best!”
“Right.”
“Do you wanna play with us?”
Kevin had to fight the immediate and strong urge to back away. “I, uh—” have to go was on the tip of his tongue. He could always ask Paul or Alexis, or one of the others he’d interacted with. It didn’t have to be this kid—now.
Just, looking into those large, liquid brown eyes, Kevin couldn’t quite get the words out. “I’d like to,” he said, then gave in and used his hands on Ethan’s shoulders to get some distance while he knelt. “But I have something really important I need to do first, and I need to ask you a few questions. Is that okay?”
Ethan’s head had drooped by the time Kevin finished, and he bit his bottom lip as he looked up through his bangs. “I guess.”
“Ok,” Kevin said. “Ok.” And wished he had a better plan. “Do you, um. Do you know where you are?”
Chance whined and crept closer, close enough for Ethan to reach out and bury his fingers in the dog’s fur. He looked at his house. “Mommy says I’ve gone up to Heaven.”
“You will.” He squeezed the tiny shoulders reassuringly. The Gates of Hell weren’t closed, after all, so the only tickets not being collected led upstairs. He wet his lips. “Ethan, can you tell me how you see your mom and dad and—Chance?”
The good news, because Kevin was due some and he wasn’t above taking it where he could get it, was that the question wiped some of the sad longing from Ethan’s face. His brow crinkled in confusion. “But I’ve always seen them.”
“Even after you couldn’t breathe?”
Ethan nodded.
“But just at home?” he prodded.
Again, Ethan nodded. “Where else would I see them?”
Nowhere, Kevin had to admit, if Ethan was as young as he thought. He might not have started school yet, wouldn’t ever go away to college, might not have ever had a sleepover or gone to a theme park. He’d never get married.
Kevin swallowed hard. “What about when your mom and dad are at work?”
“I play with Chance.” The kid smiled, gave his dog a hug. “We play lots, and when I get tired, I take a nap.”
“A nap?” Kevin hadn’t thought periods of unconsciousness were possible for spirits. They didn’t have a body to crave it or a brain that needed time to process stored information. Spirits had no physical parts to wear out.
“Uh-huh,” Ethan said. “It’s like floating on clouds, and I dream about happy things, like when I got Chance for my birthday, or when Daddy would read me a bedtime story. Or when Auntie Marie came to visit and took me out for ice cream. And then when I wake up, I go find Mommy.”
Tension raced through his—not body, his essence. The details were different, but the floating, the happy memories—those sounded familiar. “And you wake up in your house?”
“Uh-huh,” he agreed happily. “In my bed.”
Because that was where he was used to waking up, Kevin wondered, or because that was where he went to sleep. It probably didn’t matter, but—as far as Kevin knew—he hadn’t slept since he died, in a bed or not.
Kevin smiled for the kid. “That’s good, Ethan. I just have one more question, okay?”
“Okay.”
“It may sound a little weird.” The kid stood up straighter, eyes open wider to show he was paying attention. “Okay. How do you fall asleep?”
Ethan frowned. “Mommy used to tell me stories to help me sleep, but she doesn’t anymore. So I lay down in my bed and close my eyes and tell a story and stay very, very still, like Mommy told me to, and think non-thoughts. Mommy said you can’t fall asleep while you’re thinking, but sometimes that’s hard, so she said I should put them in bubbles, when I can’t make them go away, and then blow them up to the ceiling. So I do, and I go to sleep.”
“Your mom’s a smart lady.” Kevin smiled. “Thank you, Ethan.”
“Do you wanna play now?”
*
Wanting to sleep didn’t make it any easier to go to sleep. He hadn’t felt the need to sleep since he got here, or maybe it was that he’d simply trained himself away from the impulse so long he couldn’t recognize the feeling anymore, and knowing he needed to sleep to move forward in his search for his mother wasn’t helping.
Kevin remembered watching Dean slouch in an old armchair, prop his head up on a table, and just—stop, asleep in seconds; remembered Sam rolling his eyes before turning back to his research.
“How’d he do that?” he’d asked.
“Soldier’s trick,” Sam’d said, without looking up.
Sam, he remembered, took longer, settling and resettling, breathing slow and measured until his brain shut off enough to let him drop off.
Kevin felt a little like he’d been left in an observation room and told not to think about pink elephants.
He huffed, pulled his hands up to pillow his face. Kept his eyes closed. Breathed.
His hip bones pressed uncomfortably against the floor, hard little points of pressure-pain. He ignored it several long seconds, determined to sleep on his stomach, like he had as long as he could remember, then gave up and flopped over onto his back.
The floor hurt his elbows, so he folded his hands beneath his head. That made him feel exposed, though, so he brought them down and crossed his arms over his chest. That made him feel defensive and, oddly, trapped.
“You squirm worse than my daughter did back when she was four,” Paul told him. He sounded way too amused for a grown man who was watching another grown man sleep.
“Shut up.” Without opening his eyes, he eased his hands down until they were folded over his stomach. Cats presented their belly when threatened so they could turn a greater number of weapons against their attacker, using their hind feet as well as their front.
Kevin thought he’d make a good cat, except they spent most of their time asleep.
His foot jiggled, and he pulled it up, planted it firmly on the floor, moved the other foot to match. “What if this doesn’t work?”
“It won’t so long as you’re talking,” Paul answered.
“No. What if I fall asleep and nothing happens? What if I just wake up?” He had nothing but a five, maybe six-year old’s word that this was how he got back to the real world. Maybe it was different for everybody. Maybe his get back button was broken.
Paul didn’t answer.
“I mean, what if I never make it back? Or what if I dream I’m in the Bunker, talking to Sam and Dean, only I’m never really there? What if I wake up and think I did and nothing ever happens? What if I do make it, and they don’t want to go look for her? I mean the Angels fell, man, and I know they’re gonna try to fix it, but what if they can’t? We’d already hit dead end after dead end. What if they can’t fix it but they keep trying and because they keep trying they won’t go look for my mom?”
“Kevin,” Paul said, a shut up and listen to me that caught Kevin just as he was opening his mouth to go on. “It’s going to work. You’re going to go to sleep and get past this block and everything’s going to be fine. But if it didn’t, we’d keep looking.
“And your mother would be fine,” he went on, “for as long as you needed her to be, because mothers are stronger than we give them credit for, most times. You’re going to find her, Kevin.”
“Sam and Dean will find her,” Kevin corrected, after a moment. After all, he was dead.
“Sam and Dean will find her,” Paul agreed.
They might not want to, though. He’d have to figure out a way to convince them. Maybe blackmail—emotional blackmail. He was pretty sure they owed him for letting him get killed.
“Go to sleep, Kevin.”
*
Channing volunteered at the homeless shelter with him, every Monday, Thursday, and Friday, for two years. She wore headbands to keep her hair out of her eyes. And every time, she lightly punched his left shoulder.
*
Love taps, he thought, and could just see Dean rolling his eyes. “All right, lover boy, go and get your love taps and let’s get outta here.”
*
Dean sat at the kitchen table, a fifth of whiskey and a glass waiting beside the laptop. Kevin supposed he should be glad the guy was using a glass. But the early hour, the fatigue in his face, the tired droop of his shoulders even when he was using his elbows to brace against the table leeched most of that good feeling away. This couldn’t be the real world, could it?
“Dean?” he asked. “What’s going on?” He tried to push the laptop closed, but his hand passed straight through it. Dean didn’t so much as blink. He just rubbed his eyes, then braced his head in his palm, stared blankly at the search running on the screen. “Where’s Sam?”
Dean reached for his glass and didn’t answer. Which—not totally a surprise, since Kevin apparently couldn’t interact with his surroundings, not even enough to make the laptop screen flicker.
He stepped back, looking around for—something; inspiration, maybe, but the kitchen looked the same as it always had: bare, spare, and utilitarian. It didn’t even have proper cabinets, which would have driven his mother crazy.
“Wait here,” he told Dean. The older man kept staring at the laptop. “Good,” Kevin murmured, even though it wasn’t, and headed off down the hall, ignoring the uneasy feeling in his gut that didn’t want him to leave Dean alone. It wasn’t like he could have done anything if Dean suddenly went postal.
It wasn’t like he really thought Dean would go postal.
He was still relieved to run into Sam, though. “There you are. There’s something wrong with Dean, man.”
He wouldn’t have known it based on the way Sam reacted when he entered the kitchen. Sure, he asked if Dean slept, but he never broke stride, never hesitated, just continued going around the kitchen, collecting stuff for coffee, milk for cereal. He commented on the hunt Dean found the same way: with polite, if distant, curiosity. And, worse, Dean seemed to expect it, even returned it.
This time when Kevin looked around, it was for some sign that he’d entered a parallel dimension.
“You sure you’re okay, Dean?” Sam asked, stopping Dean on his way out the door.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Dean demanded. His eyes were dark, but his expression was closed. Kevin glanced between them, hoping Sam would—he didn’t know what, but something. Anything that would dissipate the Twilight Zone feeling that these people he’d known for two years were strangers.
“’Cause—I don’t know,” Sam said, and if Kevin could see the lie, Dean definitely could. And maybe Sam knew that, because he straightened his shoulders and determinedly met Dean’s gaze. “This isn’t about what I said the other day, is it?”
Kevin couldn’t imagine anything either one of them could have said to cause this, but he still looked to Dean for the answer—saw the flash of hurt and anger before the older hunter pulled a mask of indifference over it, and said, “Oh, about that we’re not supposed to be brothers?” in the exact tone Chloe had used when he’d broken up with her freshman year, trying to sound angry when she was hurt and knew he knew it, and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing it. And Kevin didn’t know how to process that.
Sam and Dean, not brothers?
“What the hell?” Kevin demanded, but he wasn’t in the Bunker anymore.
*
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Kevin told Paul, agitated. He didn’t have a pen to tap, or a desk to tap it against, or any paper to write on or ball up and throw, so he pushed that energy into his feet and paced. “I mean, how do you just stop being brothers? Do you just wake up one morning and decide you didn’t have the same parents? Like blood is something you can change. Or growing up—suddenly, you did that alone? And it’s not like they’re normal brothers, either, who turned eighteen and moved to different states and maybe call at Christmas. They, like, live in each other’s pockets, like they’re twins or something. Only not really twins. Dean’s—what?—four years older?”
“So something changed.” Paul’s voice drew his gaze down. He knew Paul was sitting on the floor, some part of his brain had known, but he hadn’t been thinking about it. Sam and Dean were good for not thinking about a lot of things. So long as he was thinking about them, he wasn’t thinking about how he couldn’t help his mom. “Something big.”
The Gates of Hell had been big. They’d been going to close the Gates, then they didn’t, then—Dean had been acting weird. “The Angels fell,” he murmured, which was a big change, but not, he knew, the beginning.
“Go on,” Paul encouraged.
“We were going to close the Gates of Hell,” he told him. “To do it, someone had to complete three trials, three tasks, and say a bit of Enochian. Sam was the one who—who opted in. Only we’re not talking physical gates you can walk up to and slam, we’re talking about a spell, about magic, so there’s a physical component to it, but also—”
“The working of the spell,” Paul finished.
“Right. Naomi said if Sam finished the third trial, he would die. But I think—” And why hadn’t he gotten Dean to talk about this, beyond the little bit he’d sort of overheard from his conversations with Sam?—“I think he might have been going to die anyway, that he’d gone too far with the spell and there was no way to just stop. Not without consequences. Serious consequences.” He met Paul’s gaze, saw the counselor recognize the pit in his stomach.
Because he’d been killed by an Angel, Kevin realized, an Angel who’d been possessing Sam, and he knew he’d known that, had already figured it out, but he hadn’t really processed it. He still didn’t know how to process with it.
“So Sam was dying,” Paul reminded him gently. “He was dying, and then he wasn’t. What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Neither Winchester advocated possession, not even—maybe especially—the angelic kind, but the raised hand, the bright light, the burning—all of it fit. And angels could heal the dying. “Dean must’ve found an Angel and convinced Sam to say yes.”
But he couldn’t imagine how.
“Convinced him?” Paul prodded. “Or tricked him?”
I always trust you, Kevin had said, just before he’d died. And I always end up screwed.
“He might have tricked him,” Kevin admitted. “If he had to. If he couldn’t get Sam to say yes, or knew he wouldn’t.” Dean would do anything to save his brother.
“Kevin?” Paul prompted.
He took a deep breath, stopped moving. If Dean had tricked him, Sam wouldn’t have known there was an angel using his body. “The Angel killed me.”
“The one possessing Sam?”
Kevin nodded.
Paul didn’t move. Kevin didn’t breathe, trying to hear him. He remembered Sam sitting behind him in that church, saying, “I’m thinking you were one of the pieces I should have picked up.” He remembered Dean’s anger that he hadn’t, that Kevin had needed help and Sam hadn’t been there.
Then Dean hadn’t been there to stop it when Kevin got killed. How much more would he hate himself than he’d tried to hate Sam?
But it had been Sam who’d said they couldn’t be brothers.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he told Paul. “They’re closer than anyone I’ve ever met. Even me and my mom.”
“The bigger the love,” Paul told him, “the bigger the pain when it’s betrayed.”
*
Alexis showed up shortly after Paul left. “Well, look at you,” she drawled with a grin, standing hipshot just outside the door. “Walking and talking and everything.”
Kevin frowned. “What do you want, Alexis?”
Her eyebrows jumped to her hairline, and Kevin fought the urge to wince. “Is that anyway to great the girl doing you a favor?”
“Sorry.”
“You look rough, kid.” She made a show of looking him over, head to toe, and it was only the real concern creasing her eyes and his mom’s manners that limited his response to an eye roll.
He stepped back to let her in on instinct. “Rough night,” he said. “Do you wanna come in?”
Her eyes jumped back and forth, like she was looking at something over his shoulder. “No,” she said, her gaze still focused past him. He twisted around to see what she was looking at, but all he saw was featureless white. “No, I just wanted to let you know we found a spirit who thinks he might have seen your mom near Topeka. I don’t think she’s there, but we haven’t figured out yet if he kept heading northwest, or if he turned south. But we’re still looking.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“No.” Her mouth softened with regret. “He’s not taking the transition well. You wouldn’t get anything out of it.”
“But you did,” he challenged.
She smiled, bright and cocky. “I’m just that good, hon.”
“Why is that?”
“Keep working on your little problem,” she ordered instead of answering, twirling her finger in a motion that either took in his crotch or the invisible Bunker. “I’ll keep looking for your mother.”
*
Kevin didn’t want to go to sleep.
*
See, Sam and Dean weren’t really into the big declarations of undying love, no guy was. But something sweet and artery-clogging would find its way to the kitchen after Dean had a hard day. And Sam would come back from a bathroom break or a food run to find ibuprofen and a glass of water by the laptop after he’d been squinting at the computer screen and rubbing his temples. They’d tell corny jokes to make each other laugh, or toss around in-jokes, or bring up something from their past with a word.
It was the kind of relationship Kevin had always been stuck on the outside looking in at, wishing he had.
*
Sitting around waiting had gotten old before Kevin bit it, and that was with Tablets from God and a library full of supernatural weirdness to wade through. Here, Kevin didn’t even have a paperclip. Or a clock, so he had no idea how much time had passed before he said screw it and walked out the door.
He headed west, because every good western had the hero ride off into the sunset. Around his feet, the white swirled up to his knees, obscuring his feet except for brief glimpses when he moved. Radiation fog, his mind supplied. He wondered if that meant it was night in the real world, or if the fog was a representation of his own inner turmoil.
Frowning at the thought, he almost ran headlong into the first people he’d seen since he set out. “O-oh,” he started. “Hello.” There were four of them: a man taller than him, in tails and a top hat, with a beard; a blond man, also in tails, with a dark, pencil-thin moustache over his lip; and two women in brightly-colored satin evening dresses. None of them reacted. “Um, have you seen my mother? Linda Tran? She’s about this tall, has short hair. . . .”
No one twitched. Kevin shifted a little, trying to get into the Abe-lookalike’s sightline, then twisted around to see what they were staring at. He couldn’t see anything, but—maybe it looked a little darker, and—he squinted—was that a light?
It put him more in mind of a train than the warm, fuzzy kind TV was always saying to walk into. Kevin didn’t know what would happen if you got hit by a train in limbo, but he wasn’t going to wait around to find out. “Right,” he told them. “Maybe later. I’m gonna just—”
They still didn’t react, and Kevin slipped past them with the unsettled feeling he’d just narrowly missed death. Which didn’t make any sense.
“They’re actors,” someone said close to his ear, and Kevin reared back.
“What?”
The guy who grinned at him from about his chin was missing three teeth and would probably be Kevin’s height, if he stood up straight. “The manikin impersonators over there.” He jerked his head back the way Kevin had come. “They were doing Abe Lincoln in Illinois or some shit like that. Small time, off Broadway. Had a bit of bus trouble. Then, BAM! Hit by a train. Poor suckers.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The guy reared back. “Why’re you sorry? You wasn’t driving that train, were you?”
“No.”
“Then, fuck ‘em. Not your problem.”
“Right,” Kevin agreed, figuring that was his safest option. “But maybe you could help me? I’m looking for my mother. Her name’s Linda Tran. She’s—”
The guy shook his head. “Ain’t seen no chinks.”
“I’m not Chinese,” he said. “And that’s rude.”
“So?” the guy demanded. “We’re all dead, ain’t we?”
“Right.” Kevin smiled tightly. “Well, thanks for your time.”
“Watch out for them manikins!” the guy called after him, then laughed.
*
Kevin was sitting cross-legged in the middle of his invisible Bunker when Paul pushed the door open, head braced in his hands and staring down at what he liked to imagine was the map, only focused on the United States and with every Crowley sighting from the last six months lit up. Of course, what he was actually looking at was plain-Jane white, but this was his death. He could pretend.
“Did you get any sleep?” the counselor asked.
“Yeah,” he croaked, surprised at how gravely his voice sounded. He supposed talking to more than two dozen people took its toll, even here. He swallowed, cleared his throat. “The Bunker was empty. I still can’t effect anything.”
“It takes time,” Paul soothed, folding down so he mirrored Kevin’s pose.
“How long did it take you?”
“I’ve never tried.” Off Kevin’s surprised look, he smiled. “It’s just been me and my baby girl for a couple years, now,” he said. “And she’s long had her own house, her own life, a family. She’d stop by on weekends, catch up, but I wasn’t really a part of her life for months before I died. Swooping in, moving things around, letting her know I was there—that would’ve just upset her, made things more difficult for her. It would’ve made me feel better, maybe, but I’m already dead, and she needs to focus on her own family.”
Family, for as long Kevin could remember, had always been him and his mom. He couldn’t imagine growing up and moving away from her, starting a family that didn’t include her. Couldn’t imagine not wanting to know if she wasn’t gone.
But Kevin’s life hadn’t exactly been normal, even before he woke up a Prophet. And he could understand not wanting to know the supernatural existed.
He pulled up a wry smile for Paul. “So, what? Are you here to put me to bed?”
*
The Bunker was still empty. Kevin prowled the hallways without making a sound on the tile, without stirring any of the dust dragged in by careless feet. The lights burned steadily.
Kevin stood in the Library and stared at where he had died, and tried to figure out if he felt more real, or less.
*
As soon as Kevin woke up, he left the invisi-Bunker and started walking.
*
Kevin had been excited when he’d beamed into his mother’s house. Before he’d learned that the agent with his mother was Leviathan. Before the Angels had died. Before his last chance at normal had gone up in smoke.
He’d beamed in between the Angels and seen his mother, seen that she was all right, and she’d seen him, and she’d been happy and relieved, and Kevin had been so glad to be able to give her that, to be able to wipe the worry and the fear from her face.
He’d thought, just for that minute, that everything would be okay. He’d translate the Tablet, the Angels would keep him safe, and he’d be able to go on with life as usual—go to college, get married, become President. Everything had been going to be okay. Just for that minute.
*
Paul met him at the door to the invisi-Bunker, leaning against the jamb before Kevin could slip past. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he accused genially.
“No, I haven’t.” Stepping back, Kevin pulled the door further open and slipped out the other side. Paul came around as he went past, moving with him. Tension crawled up Kevin’s back, into his shoulders. He didn’t do confrontation well, never had. Before Crowley, he’d never really wanted to. He didn’t really want to now, he just—
“I had a teenage daughter,” the counselor informed him, still keeping pace. “I know what someone avoiding me looks like.”
And, suddenly, Kevin didn’t want to try to outrun this. He stopped and turned, and Paul stopped with him. “You’re not going to talk me out of this.”
Paul’s eyebrows went up expectantly. “Perhaps if I knew what this was. . . .?”
“You’re not going to talk me out of looking for my mother,” he snapped. “I’ve let other people dictate what I do for too long, and I’ve already wasted enough time sitting on my ass not looking for her when she might be out there, just waiting, or in pain, or maybe dying, wondering where I am. Well, I’m not doing it anymore. I’m not.”
Kevin was breathing heavily when he finished, his hands curled into fists, and he tried to slow his breath even as he glared at Paul, daring him to contradict him, to say it was too dangerous, or his mom wouldn’t want him risking himself, or whatever other argument he might find to prove his point.
But the counselor just nodded slowly. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not going to talk you out of this.” Kevin barely had time to register the words, to let the tension drain out of him, before Paul was clapping a hand on his shoulder. “But you’re not alone, either. I’ll be here when you get back. Good luck.”
He stepped back with a smile, sliding his hands into his back pockets. Kevin nodded. “Thanks,” he said, once he thought he could do it without embarrassing himself. “Your daughter had a pretty awesome dad.”
He started walking.
He couldn’t help but smile when Paul yelled after him: “Remember, the Lord never gives us more than we can bear!”
*
Kevin sat in his chair in the Library. It wasn’t really his chair, because they operated on first-come-first-serve and accessibility as much as preference; and he wasn’t really sitting in it, but saying he was sitting in it stopped him from giving himself a headache trying to work out how he passed through the back without slipping through the seat.
He flicked idly at the lamp, trying to turn it off, but the switch was apparently as insubstantial to his spirit as the seatback. Sam sat across from him, dutifully recording whatever information they’d learned on the hunt, first in hard-copy for the Men of Letters records, then into the database he’d created on the laptop.
“You’re an idiot,” he told the bent head. “I die and you both feel guilty and—what?—you decide to take it out on each other?”
Sam didn’t stop or look up. The pen looped steadily. Kevin flicked the switch again.
With a sigh, he pushed up—through the chair and table, this time—and stalked toward the kitchen, which was where he was pretty sure he’d find Dean. After all, that was where he’d seen the open whiskey bottle.
“Have you tried talking to him?” he demanded, shoving at the laptop--his laptop, which in a fair world would have been it slammed closed as intended— to get Dean’s attention. It didn’t, of course—his hand went through it, and Dean raised the glass, sucking air through his teeth after he swallowed, never taking his eyes off the screen.
Once upon a time, Sam would have been sitting across from him and making bitchy faces and joking about porn.
Kevin made a face. “This is dumb, Dean. You and Sam are all you guys have. And, no offense, man, but this life really sucks on your own.”
Not that saying so made a difference.
Irritated—at not being able to talk to them, not being able to move things, not finding anymore news about his mother (though Alexis swore they were getting close, and how would she know?)—Kevin slapped the table, hard.
And made contact.
Surprised, Kevin sat back, staring at the table like it might spontaneously get up and tap dance. But, more importantly, Dean was staring at it, too, sitting up straighter to see over the laptop, eyes tracking back and forth and then higher to try to find anything moving around the kitchen.
“Did you hear that?” he demanded, pushing forward. But instead of bracing himself against the tabletop, his hands slid through it. Dean’s gaze slipped over and past him without catching. “Dean?”
“Huh,” the hunter said, like something only mildly interesting and inexplicable had happened, then rubbed his temple and took a drink. His gaze went back to the computer screen.
“What? You’re not going to investigate? What if I was a—a—a demon, huh? What, then? Dean?”
But he wasn’t in the Bunker kitchen anymore, watching Dean drink his pain away, he was back in the veil, staring at endless white. He slammed his hand against his thigh because there was nothing else available. “Goddammit!”
“Language, Mr. Tran,” Paul chided, sounding so exactly like his ninth grade history teacher that Kevin sputtered.
“I was so close this time,” he told him. “I was able to hit the table. Dean heard it.”
Paul’s eyebrows went up, but all he said was, “And?”
“And I’m back here.” He could picture the dimensions of the invisi-Bunker if he tried, place facsimiles of walls if he wanted to, but—God—he didn’t want to. He wanted to be done.
“You should rest, Kevin. Just rest,” Paul insisted, when Kevin opened his mouth to argue. “Not sleep. Pushing through the Veil takes energy. You need to regain your strength.”
Kevin chewed off the automatic, sarcastic I’ll sleep when I’m dead that flashed to mind—mostly because he was dead, and he didn’t need to be handing Paul any leverage. Because he could already picture the man’s pointedly raised eyebrows, the dry “Exactly.” Instead, he said, “I’ll feel better resting when I’ve found my mother.”
“But you don’t know how long that will take, Kevin. It’s already been months. You have to face the fact that this search is going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and plan accordingly.”
“What?” Kevin blinked, stuck back at the beginning. Months? It couldn’t have been months, could it? He knew time passed differently in Heaven and Hell, and he hadn’t exactly been able to track the passage of time but—“Months?”
Paul clasped his shoulders, mouth a sympathetic grimace. “Get some rest,” he repeated.
Kevin stared after him numbly, slowly sinking down to sit on the floor.
*
Continued in Part 3
He felt comfortable, safe, in the Bunker. The protections were built into the foundations of the building, older and stronger than the sigils they’d used on the houseboat, capable of hiding their existence as well as keeping Evil out. Within its walls, Crowley and his demons couldn’t touch him.
Until the Winchesters invited him in.
Paul came and went.
He felt surprised when Dean said they were family, and affection. Dean never did anything halfway—always jumped in with both feet, whether that meant finding a way to destroy the Leviathan or save his brother—so maybe it shouldn’t have. The guy had tracked him down, done what he could to keep the monsters away, invited him into their home.
Tried to kill his mother.
Paul came and went.
Sam was easy to like, easy to be around. He remembered, in ways Dean didn’t, or couldn’t, that Kevin was a teenager. He was always willing to pick up a book to help with the research, always willing to send Kevin to bed, or for food, or just to breathe, when it felt like too much. He let Kevin feel like it was okay to fail, like he’d be there to catch him if he did and wouldn’t think less of him.
Then he failed to close the Gates of Hell.
Paul came and went.
Kevin felt a little guilty about that one, being mad at Sam for not dying. He didn’t want Sam to die. He just hadn’t wanted to die, either.
Besides, he was pretty sure Sam choking at the one-yard line had more to do with Dean not being able to let him go than with Sam not be willing.
Dean was easier to be mad at, anyway. He was the one who’d promised Kevin he was out. He was the one who promised, after they closed the Gates of Hell, it would be over. He was the one who let Kevin believe it.
But how do you really, honestly, blame someone for not being able to give up their only family?
Paul came and went.
He never would have given up his mom if there had been any way to hold on to her, if he had known he wouldn’t be able to get her back.
Paul knocked.
Kevin pulled the door open, leaned against it. He felt tired and raw, and he still hadn’t managed more than the briefest flicker of the bunker. For all he knew, he’d imagined those.
“You look terrible,” the counselor observed, face creased in concern.
Not un-like the way Sam had looked at him, on the houseboat, when he’d told the Winchesters he’d figured out how to close the Gates of Hell. Kevin huffed. “I’m fine.”
“It takes time, Kevin.”
“Everything takes time.” Irritably, he pushed away from the door, further into his hell. He’d been just a high school kid, before all this. He’d studied hard, and volunteered, and just wanted to go to a good college and become the first Asian-American President of the United States of America. What could he have possibly done to deserve this? To be stuck here, talking to only a select few, just like in the Bunker, just like on the houseboat, just like with Crowley and the Leviathan and the Angels.
“We’ll find her, Kevin,” Paul said, gentle and certain and shades of Sam and Dean all over again.
Kevin glowered at him from the relative safety of the map-that-wasn’t-there. “It’s been weeks.”
“Communicating, even just within the Veil, is difficult.”
“Everything is difficult.” Turning, Kevin focused all the anger and frustration, all the mixed up emotions churning through him, and pressed his hands down flat on the top of the map. He saw nothing, but something was there to take his weight, to press back.
After a long moment, when Paul hadn’t said anything, he turned back.
He didn’t much care for the expression on the counselor’s face, shrewd and assessing, like he’d seen something Kevin hadn’t wanted him to, knew something he didn’t. Kevin tensed against it.
“Are you sure. . . .” His eyes narrowed, then he shook his head. “I want you to consider something, Kevin. Come here.” He dropped so he was crouched in the doorway, looking up. Trying to seem less threatening, Kevin knew, and that wasn’t exactly reassuring.
Knowing he could close the door in the guy’s face helped a little.
Moving slowly, Kevin did as Paul asked. He knew—thought he knew—was pretty sure—that the counselor didn’t want to hurt him. The thing was, he also knew Sam hadn’t wanted to hurt him, and Dean hadn’t wanted to hurt him. And, okay, yeah, he was already dead and there weren’t any demons or angels hanging around in the veil to screw with him. That he knew of.
But that didn’t really make him feel any better at that exact moment.
When Kevin was just outside arm’s reach, Paul patted the ground. “Sit down.”
Kevin did.
“You’re a very strong young man, Kevin,” Paul said. “Very caring, loyal. And a lot of bad things have happened to you. I don’t know the details, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But I feel like you’re still trying fight, through them, or past them, and you haven’t quite figured out that what you really need to do is just let go.”
Kevin blinked at him as Paul lifted his hands. “Do you think you could do that? Let go?”
“No.” Kevin took a deep breath. “I can’t. Not until I find my mother. If she’s dead, it’s because of me.”
“If she’s dead,” Paul repeated, quirking an eyebrow. “You’re not sure?”
“I—Crowley told me she was.”
But Paul had that shrewd look again. “And did he also tell you she wasn’t?”
Kevin clenched his jaw and didn’t answer. Demons lied. How many times had Dean told him that?
But Paul nodded. “Maybe that’s it, then.”
“Maybe what’s it?”
“What you can’t let go.” He spread his hands. “Hope. Hope that she’s alive. Fear that she’s not. Either one will hurt, so you stay here.” His hands waved, took in the empty space of Kevin’s prison. “The one place you know is safe.”
“The place where I died,” Kevin reminded him.
“The place where people love you.”
*
Kevin stared blindly at white walls. He remembered long days in asylum, giving himself nosebleeds and headaches to translate a hunk of rock he didn’t want anything to do with. He remembered listening to taunting words, working with a demon he wanted to rip limb from limb, because the angels had to go back to Heaven. He remembered safety being ripped out from under him, after Dean told him to trust him. He wanted to tell Paul he didn’t know what he was talking about. He wanted to tell him that the Winchesters had never cared about anyone but each other.
He knew better, though.
He took a deep breath. “Suppose you’re right,” he said. “What do I do?”
“Decide,” Paul said, like it was easy. “Do you believe she’s still alive?”
*
The thing was, Kevin didn’t always like Dean. He saw black and white where Kevin saw shades of gray; he made jokes about the macabre; he pushed and bullied and name-called, and most of the time Kevin could find the affection in it, but sometimes it grated. Sometimes Dean was rude and abrasive, and so goddamned focused on the bottom line that he forgot there were other actual people involved and Kevin wanted to take a bat to his head.
For all his flaws, though, the one thing Kevin had always admired was how completely he loved his family. If he’d ever had any doubt that Dean would do anything for his brother, the fiasco with closing the Gates of Hell had laid them to rest. He knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Dean would never have taken a demon’s word for it, not if their positions had been reversed, if Crowley had told Dean Sam was dead.
*
Kevin tried meditating. Again.
*
Paul knocked on the door. When Kevin answered it, the counselor pulled him outside. He winced at the immediate increase in sound, squinting against sunlight that wasn’t there. If Paul noticed the reaction, he didn’t say anything, just:
“We may have found something. Listen.”
It was like listening to a badly tuned radio, the station fading in and out and overlaid by static. He frowned, trying to make out words, and heard: “Kev. . . .hat you?”
“We’re here, Jorge,” Paul said, before Kevin could get his brain together enough to answer. “Tell us what you know.”
“Didn’t . . . much. Was ma . . . eye rounds, you –ow? Saw these . . . guys. Thought . . . weird, you know? I mean, what . . . want with . . . Asian woman?”
“What did they do?” Paul prompted.
“Walkef her down . . . van. I think . . . knocked her out.”
“Do you remember anything else? Maybe something that struck you as weird?”
“. . . think about it. The . . . dude . . . two cell –ones. He was looking . . . one, calling . . . weird, you know?”
“Thank you, Jorge.” Paul pulled back, and Kevin only realized after the warmth and weight were gone that he’d been tucked into the older man’s side, pulled in tight with an arm over his shoulder. “I know it’s not much,” Paul said.
“No, it’s—” More than he’d had before. If he’d understood correctly, someone had seen Crowley with two phones, and his mom still alive. It was a reason beyond blind faith to hope. “It’s great. It sounds like that’s when Crowley grabbed her. He told me he killed her and took her phone, but if he had her phone and she was still alive. . . .”
When have you ever known me to let anyone off easy?
“He wouldn’t have had a reason to kill her.”
Paul clapped a hand on his shoulder. Kevin resolutely did not think that Crowley wouldn’t have needed a reason.
*
He shouldn’t have, maybe, but Kevin felt proud whenever he outlasted Sam on research. It didn’t happen too often, since the guys were away for days at a time while on a case, and Kevin didn’t count the day after—Dean usually slept until noon, those days, and the fact that Sam drug himself out of bed to help or just keep him company meant more than winning at a game Sam didn’t even know they were playing. And there wasn’t any point to it when the only real research was translating the Tablet. But when it was equal opportunity research and Sam hit the wall first?
Yeah. Suck on that, guys.
*
Paul thought the walls of his fake, invisible Bunker were psychosomatic representations of his brain’s desire to protect itself from further trauma, a projected defense mechanism that was not only keeping the other spirits from reaching him, but was also keeping him from breaking through the veil to the real world.
Kevin really did not want to hear that after a long day of getting absolutely nowhere.
“Look.” Paul spread his hands, gesturing Kevin to wait. “I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m not saying that’s what it is. But you said the walls weren’t there before, and that you thought you’d pierced the veil twice before they showed up but haven’t been able to do it since. Right?”
He nodded.
“So something changed, and the walls are a tangible representation of that. They’re also a common means of keeping something out, or something else in, and it wouldn’t be the first time someone had built walls to keep from getting hurt. Literally or metaphysically.”
Turning the words over in his head, Kevin felt tension easing out of his shoulders, which backed Paul out of his braced stance. He probably should have felt bad about putting the counselor on edge, but without the frustration, he just felt tired. He rubbed at his eyes.
“Yeah, that makes sense.” He just didn’t know what to do about it. It wasn’t like he’d been actively involved in the wall building. “Do you have any idea how I’m supposed to get rid of them, then?”
Paul shrugged, but he met Kevin’s gaze squarely. “Face your fear.”
“Right.”
“Take heart, Kevin,” Paul offered with a small smile. “The Lord never gives us more than we can bear.”
His lips twisted in something that might have been a smile. “Pretty sure that doesn’t count after you’re dead.”
*
The problem, because there always had to be a problem, was that Kevin didn’t know what fear he was supposed to be facing. That’d he’d get hurt again? That his mother was really dead and a shell of herself, caught in an endless, meaningless loop? That Sam and Dean wouldn’t be able to help? Wouldn’t want to? That he’d be stuck with the noise and the pain and the accumulated horror forever?
*
Paul showed up, same as usual, grinning. “You up for a field trip, kid?”
Kevin followed him out to a patch of white that looked the same as every other patched, laid down beside him and stared up at more white. When Sam and Dean finally got around to fixing Heaven, he’d be just as happy to never see white again.
“Me and my wife used to do this,” Paul mused. “We’d go out in the back yard, or off to her Uncle’s farm and lie back in the grass, look up at the stars.”
“Do you see stars?”
“Naw, just clouds.”
Kevin glanced at him, then from his shit-eating grin to the white sky. “Clouds. Right.” Maybe, if he squinted and looked at it sideways.
“Did you ever do anything like this?”
“There wasn’t time after I found out I was a Prophet. I was too busy translating, trying to find something that would help us save the world; and when I wasn’t, it was too dangerous for me to be outside. Before that—” Before that, if he wasn’t at school, he was studying for school, or doing an extra-curricular, or volunteering. “—it wasn’t really important. I guess I always figured I’d have time later.”
“We all fall into that trap,” Paul said. “Sometimes, some of us are lucky enough to see it before it’s too late.” Kevin felt it, more than heard it, when Paul turned his head to look at him. “How’re you doing?”
The screams were still there. He could hear them rising higher, falling lower, the misery and anger and loss an almost tangible thing. It rang in his ears, created a low throb at the back of his head, like he’d tipped his chair back and smacked it against the wall. “I’m okay.”
“Good.”
Paul left a small eternity later. Kevin left to visit Ethan.
*
When Kevin found the kid, he was chasing a golden retriever toward the tree in his front yard, laughing. Then the dog rounded the tree, Ethan slipped, and Kevin slowed. Because deciding his best bet at figuring things out was to talk to the kid was a hell of a lot different than actually facing that kid and asking questions.
Ethan climbed to his feet before Kevin could change his mind. An action that, in itself, wasn’t a problem, but when the dog rounded the tree and planted its feet in front of the kid, Ethan shrieked happily and turned tail. Right toward Kevin.
“Kevin!” the kid yelled, suddenly more intent on the Prophet than the dog. “You came back!”
And now on top of feeling awkward, Kevin felt like a heel. “Hey, buddy,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Good.” The kid kept walking until he was barely a foot away and dropped his head back between his shoulder blades to see Kevin’s face. Kevin buried his hands in his pockets to keep from pushing Ethan back a step. “Chance got out of the backyard, so he’s playing with me.” The dog barked.
“Ah—” His gaze darted to the dog, surprised to see Chance sitting about four feet away, staring straight at him. “Wouldn’t it be better to play in the backyard?”
“But Chance likes the front yard best!”
“Right.”
“Do you wanna play with us?”
Kevin had to fight the immediate and strong urge to back away. “I, uh—” have to go was on the tip of his tongue. He could always ask Paul or Alexis, or one of the others he’d interacted with. It didn’t have to be this kid—now.
Just, looking into those large, liquid brown eyes, Kevin couldn’t quite get the words out. “I’d like to,” he said, then gave in and used his hands on Ethan’s shoulders to get some distance while he knelt. “But I have something really important I need to do first, and I need to ask you a few questions. Is that okay?”
Ethan’s head had drooped by the time Kevin finished, and he bit his bottom lip as he looked up through his bangs. “I guess.”
“Ok,” Kevin said. “Ok.” And wished he had a better plan. “Do you, um. Do you know where you are?”
Chance whined and crept closer, close enough for Ethan to reach out and bury his fingers in the dog’s fur. He looked at his house. “Mommy says I’ve gone up to Heaven.”
“You will.” He squeezed the tiny shoulders reassuringly. The Gates of Hell weren’t closed, after all, so the only tickets not being collected led upstairs. He wet his lips. “Ethan, can you tell me how you see your mom and dad and—Chance?”
The good news, because Kevin was due some and he wasn’t above taking it where he could get it, was that the question wiped some of the sad longing from Ethan’s face. His brow crinkled in confusion. “But I’ve always seen them.”
“Even after you couldn’t breathe?”
Ethan nodded.
“But just at home?” he prodded.
Again, Ethan nodded. “Where else would I see them?”
Nowhere, Kevin had to admit, if Ethan was as young as he thought. He might not have started school yet, wouldn’t ever go away to college, might not have ever had a sleepover or gone to a theme park. He’d never get married.
Kevin swallowed hard. “What about when your mom and dad are at work?”
“I play with Chance.” The kid smiled, gave his dog a hug. “We play lots, and when I get tired, I take a nap.”
“A nap?” Kevin hadn’t thought periods of unconsciousness were possible for spirits. They didn’t have a body to crave it or a brain that needed time to process stored information. Spirits had no physical parts to wear out.
“Uh-huh,” Ethan said. “It’s like floating on clouds, and I dream about happy things, like when I got Chance for my birthday, or when Daddy would read me a bedtime story. Or when Auntie Marie came to visit and took me out for ice cream. And then when I wake up, I go find Mommy.”
Tension raced through his—not body, his essence. The details were different, but the floating, the happy memories—those sounded familiar. “And you wake up in your house?”
“Uh-huh,” he agreed happily. “In my bed.”
Because that was where he was used to waking up, Kevin wondered, or because that was where he went to sleep. It probably didn’t matter, but—as far as Kevin knew—he hadn’t slept since he died, in a bed or not.
Kevin smiled for the kid. “That’s good, Ethan. I just have one more question, okay?”
“Okay.”
“It may sound a little weird.” The kid stood up straighter, eyes open wider to show he was paying attention. “Okay. How do you fall asleep?”
Ethan frowned. “Mommy used to tell me stories to help me sleep, but she doesn’t anymore. So I lay down in my bed and close my eyes and tell a story and stay very, very still, like Mommy told me to, and think non-thoughts. Mommy said you can’t fall asleep while you’re thinking, but sometimes that’s hard, so she said I should put them in bubbles, when I can’t make them go away, and then blow them up to the ceiling. So I do, and I go to sleep.”
“Your mom’s a smart lady.” Kevin smiled. “Thank you, Ethan.”
“Do you wanna play now?”
*
Wanting to sleep didn’t make it any easier to go to sleep. He hadn’t felt the need to sleep since he got here, or maybe it was that he’d simply trained himself away from the impulse so long he couldn’t recognize the feeling anymore, and knowing he needed to sleep to move forward in his search for his mother wasn’t helping.
Kevin remembered watching Dean slouch in an old armchair, prop his head up on a table, and just—stop, asleep in seconds; remembered Sam rolling his eyes before turning back to his research.
“How’d he do that?” he’d asked.
“Soldier’s trick,” Sam’d said, without looking up.
Sam, he remembered, took longer, settling and resettling, breathing slow and measured until his brain shut off enough to let him drop off.
Kevin felt a little like he’d been left in an observation room and told not to think about pink elephants.
He huffed, pulled his hands up to pillow his face. Kept his eyes closed. Breathed.
His hip bones pressed uncomfortably against the floor, hard little points of pressure-pain. He ignored it several long seconds, determined to sleep on his stomach, like he had as long as he could remember, then gave up and flopped over onto his back.
The floor hurt his elbows, so he folded his hands beneath his head. That made him feel exposed, though, so he brought them down and crossed his arms over his chest. That made him feel defensive and, oddly, trapped.
“You squirm worse than my daughter did back when she was four,” Paul told him. He sounded way too amused for a grown man who was watching another grown man sleep.
“Shut up.” Without opening his eyes, he eased his hands down until they were folded over his stomach. Cats presented their belly when threatened so they could turn a greater number of weapons against their attacker, using their hind feet as well as their front.
Kevin thought he’d make a good cat, except they spent most of their time asleep.
His foot jiggled, and he pulled it up, planted it firmly on the floor, moved the other foot to match. “What if this doesn’t work?”
“It won’t so long as you’re talking,” Paul answered.
“No. What if I fall asleep and nothing happens? What if I just wake up?” He had nothing but a five, maybe six-year old’s word that this was how he got back to the real world. Maybe it was different for everybody. Maybe his get back button was broken.
Paul didn’t answer.
“I mean, what if I never make it back? Or what if I dream I’m in the Bunker, talking to Sam and Dean, only I’m never really there? What if I wake up and think I did and nothing ever happens? What if I do make it, and they don’t want to go look for her? I mean the Angels fell, man, and I know they’re gonna try to fix it, but what if they can’t? We’d already hit dead end after dead end. What if they can’t fix it but they keep trying and because they keep trying they won’t go look for my mom?”
“Kevin,” Paul said, a shut up and listen to me that caught Kevin just as he was opening his mouth to go on. “It’s going to work. You’re going to go to sleep and get past this block and everything’s going to be fine. But if it didn’t, we’d keep looking.
“And your mother would be fine,” he went on, “for as long as you needed her to be, because mothers are stronger than we give them credit for, most times. You’re going to find her, Kevin.”
“Sam and Dean will find her,” Kevin corrected, after a moment. After all, he was dead.
“Sam and Dean will find her,” Paul agreed.
They might not want to, though. He’d have to figure out a way to convince them. Maybe blackmail—emotional blackmail. He was pretty sure they owed him for letting him get killed.
“Go to sleep, Kevin.”
*
Channing volunteered at the homeless shelter with him, every Monday, Thursday, and Friday, for two years. She wore headbands to keep her hair out of her eyes. And every time, she lightly punched his left shoulder.
*
Love taps, he thought, and could just see Dean rolling his eyes. “All right, lover boy, go and get your love taps and let’s get outta here.”
*
Dean sat at the kitchen table, a fifth of whiskey and a glass waiting beside the laptop. Kevin supposed he should be glad the guy was using a glass. But the early hour, the fatigue in his face, the tired droop of his shoulders even when he was using his elbows to brace against the table leeched most of that good feeling away. This couldn’t be the real world, could it?
“Dean?” he asked. “What’s going on?” He tried to push the laptop closed, but his hand passed straight through it. Dean didn’t so much as blink. He just rubbed his eyes, then braced his head in his palm, stared blankly at the search running on the screen. “Where’s Sam?”
Dean reached for his glass and didn’t answer. Which—not totally a surprise, since Kevin apparently couldn’t interact with his surroundings, not even enough to make the laptop screen flicker.
He stepped back, looking around for—something; inspiration, maybe, but the kitchen looked the same as it always had: bare, spare, and utilitarian. It didn’t even have proper cabinets, which would have driven his mother crazy.
“Wait here,” he told Dean. The older man kept staring at the laptop. “Good,” Kevin murmured, even though it wasn’t, and headed off down the hall, ignoring the uneasy feeling in his gut that didn’t want him to leave Dean alone. It wasn’t like he could have done anything if Dean suddenly went postal.
It wasn’t like he really thought Dean would go postal.
He was still relieved to run into Sam, though. “There you are. There’s something wrong with Dean, man.”
He wouldn’t have known it based on the way Sam reacted when he entered the kitchen. Sure, he asked if Dean slept, but he never broke stride, never hesitated, just continued going around the kitchen, collecting stuff for coffee, milk for cereal. He commented on the hunt Dean found the same way: with polite, if distant, curiosity. And, worse, Dean seemed to expect it, even returned it.
This time when Kevin looked around, it was for some sign that he’d entered a parallel dimension.
“You sure you’re okay, Dean?” Sam asked, stopping Dean on his way out the door.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Dean demanded. His eyes were dark, but his expression was closed. Kevin glanced between them, hoping Sam would—he didn’t know what, but something. Anything that would dissipate the Twilight Zone feeling that these people he’d known for two years were strangers.
“’Cause—I don’t know,” Sam said, and if Kevin could see the lie, Dean definitely could. And maybe Sam knew that, because he straightened his shoulders and determinedly met Dean’s gaze. “This isn’t about what I said the other day, is it?”
Kevin couldn’t imagine anything either one of them could have said to cause this, but he still looked to Dean for the answer—saw the flash of hurt and anger before the older hunter pulled a mask of indifference over it, and said, “Oh, about that we’re not supposed to be brothers?” in the exact tone Chloe had used when he’d broken up with her freshman year, trying to sound angry when she was hurt and knew he knew it, and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing it. And Kevin didn’t know how to process that.
Sam and Dean, not brothers?
“What the hell?” Kevin demanded, but he wasn’t in the Bunker anymore.
*
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Kevin told Paul, agitated. He didn’t have a pen to tap, or a desk to tap it against, or any paper to write on or ball up and throw, so he pushed that energy into his feet and paced. “I mean, how do you just stop being brothers? Do you just wake up one morning and decide you didn’t have the same parents? Like blood is something you can change. Or growing up—suddenly, you did that alone? And it’s not like they’re normal brothers, either, who turned eighteen and moved to different states and maybe call at Christmas. They, like, live in each other’s pockets, like they’re twins or something. Only not really twins. Dean’s—what?—four years older?”
“So something changed.” Paul’s voice drew his gaze down. He knew Paul was sitting on the floor, some part of his brain had known, but he hadn’t been thinking about it. Sam and Dean were good for not thinking about a lot of things. So long as he was thinking about them, he wasn’t thinking about how he couldn’t help his mom. “Something big.”
The Gates of Hell had been big. They’d been going to close the Gates, then they didn’t, then—Dean had been acting weird. “The Angels fell,” he murmured, which was a big change, but not, he knew, the beginning.
“Go on,” Paul encouraged.
“We were going to close the Gates of Hell,” he told him. “To do it, someone had to complete three trials, three tasks, and say a bit of Enochian. Sam was the one who—who opted in. Only we’re not talking physical gates you can walk up to and slam, we’re talking about a spell, about magic, so there’s a physical component to it, but also—”
“The working of the spell,” Paul finished.
“Right. Naomi said if Sam finished the third trial, he would die. But I think—” And why hadn’t he gotten Dean to talk about this, beyond the little bit he’d sort of overheard from his conversations with Sam?—“I think he might have been going to die anyway, that he’d gone too far with the spell and there was no way to just stop. Not without consequences. Serious consequences.” He met Paul’s gaze, saw the counselor recognize the pit in his stomach.
Because he’d been killed by an Angel, Kevin realized, an Angel who’d been possessing Sam, and he knew he’d known that, had already figured it out, but he hadn’t really processed it. He still didn’t know how to process with it.
“So Sam was dying,” Paul reminded him gently. “He was dying, and then he wasn’t. What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Neither Winchester advocated possession, not even—maybe especially—the angelic kind, but the raised hand, the bright light, the burning—all of it fit. And angels could heal the dying. “Dean must’ve found an Angel and convinced Sam to say yes.”
But he couldn’t imagine how.
“Convinced him?” Paul prodded. “Or tricked him?”
I always trust you, Kevin had said, just before he’d died. And I always end up screwed.
“He might have tricked him,” Kevin admitted. “If he had to. If he couldn’t get Sam to say yes, or knew he wouldn’t.” Dean would do anything to save his brother.
“Kevin?” Paul prompted.
He took a deep breath, stopped moving. If Dean had tricked him, Sam wouldn’t have known there was an angel using his body. “The Angel killed me.”
“The one possessing Sam?”
Kevin nodded.
Paul didn’t move. Kevin didn’t breathe, trying to hear him. He remembered Sam sitting behind him in that church, saying, “I’m thinking you were one of the pieces I should have picked up.” He remembered Dean’s anger that he hadn’t, that Kevin had needed help and Sam hadn’t been there.
Then Dean hadn’t been there to stop it when Kevin got killed. How much more would he hate himself than he’d tried to hate Sam?
But it had been Sam who’d said they couldn’t be brothers.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he told Paul. “They’re closer than anyone I’ve ever met. Even me and my mom.”
“The bigger the love,” Paul told him, “the bigger the pain when it’s betrayed.”
*
Alexis showed up shortly after Paul left. “Well, look at you,” she drawled with a grin, standing hipshot just outside the door. “Walking and talking and everything.”
Kevin frowned. “What do you want, Alexis?”
Her eyebrows jumped to her hairline, and Kevin fought the urge to wince. “Is that anyway to great the girl doing you a favor?”
“Sorry.”
“You look rough, kid.” She made a show of looking him over, head to toe, and it was only the real concern creasing her eyes and his mom’s manners that limited his response to an eye roll.
He stepped back to let her in on instinct. “Rough night,” he said. “Do you wanna come in?”
Her eyes jumped back and forth, like she was looking at something over his shoulder. “No,” she said, her gaze still focused past him. He twisted around to see what she was looking at, but all he saw was featureless white. “No, I just wanted to let you know we found a spirit who thinks he might have seen your mom near Topeka. I don’t think she’s there, but we haven’t figured out yet if he kept heading northwest, or if he turned south. But we’re still looking.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“No.” Her mouth softened with regret. “He’s not taking the transition well. You wouldn’t get anything out of it.”
“But you did,” he challenged.
She smiled, bright and cocky. “I’m just that good, hon.”
“Why is that?”
“Keep working on your little problem,” she ordered instead of answering, twirling her finger in a motion that either took in his crotch or the invisible Bunker. “I’ll keep looking for your mother.”
*
Kevin didn’t want to go to sleep.
*
See, Sam and Dean weren’t really into the big declarations of undying love, no guy was. But something sweet and artery-clogging would find its way to the kitchen after Dean had a hard day. And Sam would come back from a bathroom break or a food run to find ibuprofen and a glass of water by the laptop after he’d been squinting at the computer screen and rubbing his temples. They’d tell corny jokes to make each other laugh, or toss around in-jokes, or bring up something from their past with a word.
It was the kind of relationship Kevin had always been stuck on the outside looking in at, wishing he had.
*
Sitting around waiting had gotten old before Kevin bit it, and that was with Tablets from God and a library full of supernatural weirdness to wade through. Here, Kevin didn’t even have a paperclip. Or a clock, so he had no idea how much time had passed before he said screw it and walked out the door.
He headed west, because every good western had the hero ride off into the sunset. Around his feet, the white swirled up to his knees, obscuring his feet except for brief glimpses when he moved. Radiation fog, his mind supplied. He wondered if that meant it was night in the real world, or if the fog was a representation of his own inner turmoil.
Frowning at the thought, he almost ran headlong into the first people he’d seen since he set out. “O-oh,” he started. “Hello.” There were four of them: a man taller than him, in tails and a top hat, with a beard; a blond man, also in tails, with a dark, pencil-thin moustache over his lip; and two women in brightly-colored satin evening dresses. None of them reacted. “Um, have you seen my mother? Linda Tran? She’s about this tall, has short hair. . . .”
No one twitched. Kevin shifted a little, trying to get into the Abe-lookalike’s sightline, then twisted around to see what they were staring at. He couldn’t see anything, but—maybe it looked a little darker, and—he squinted—was that a light?
It put him more in mind of a train than the warm, fuzzy kind TV was always saying to walk into. Kevin didn’t know what would happen if you got hit by a train in limbo, but he wasn’t going to wait around to find out. “Right,” he told them. “Maybe later. I’m gonna just—”
They still didn’t react, and Kevin slipped past them with the unsettled feeling he’d just narrowly missed death. Which didn’t make any sense.
“They’re actors,” someone said close to his ear, and Kevin reared back.
“What?”
The guy who grinned at him from about his chin was missing three teeth and would probably be Kevin’s height, if he stood up straight. “The manikin impersonators over there.” He jerked his head back the way Kevin had come. “They were doing Abe Lincoln in Illinois or some shit like that. Small time, off Broadway. Had a bit of bus trouble. Then, BAM! Hit by a train. Poor suckers.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The guy reared back. “Why’re you sorry? You wasn’t driving that train, were you?”
“No.”
“Then, fuck ‘em. Not your problem.”
“Right,” Kevin agreed, figuring that was his safest option. “But maybe you could help me? I’m looking for my mother. Her name’s Linda Tran. She’s—”
The guy shook his head. “Ain’t seen no chinks.”
“I’m not Chinese,” he said. “And that’s rude.”
“So?” the guy demanded. “We’re all dead, ain’t we?”
“Right.” Kevin smiled tightly. “Well, thanks for your time.”
“Watch out for them manikins!” the guy called after him, then laughed.
*
Kevin was sitting cross-legged in the middle of his invisible Bunker when Paul pushed the door open, head braced in his hands and staring down at what he liked to imagine was the map, only focused on the United States and with every Crowley sighting from the last six months lit up. Of course, what he was actually looking at was plain-Jane white, but this was his death. He could pretend.
“Did you get any sleep?” the counselor asked.
“Yeah,” he croaked, surprised at how gravely his voice sounded. He supposed talking to more than two dozen people took its toll, even here. He swallowed, cleared his throat. “The Bunker was empty. I still can’t effect anything.”
“It takes time,” Paul soothed, folding down so he mirrored Kevin’s pose.
“How long did it take you?”
“I’ve never tried.” Off Kevin’s surprised look, he smiled. “It’s just been me and my baby girl for a couple years, now,” he said. “And she’s long had her own house, her own life, a family. She’d stop by on weekends, catch up, but I wasn’t really a part of her life for months before I died. Swooping in, moving things around, letting her know I was there—that would’ve just upset her, made things more difficult for her. It would’ve made me feel better, maybe, but I’m already dead, and she needs to focus on her own family.”
Family, for as long Kevin could remember, had always been him and his mom. He couldn’t imagine growing up and moving away from her, starting a family that didn’t include her. Couldn’t imagine not wanting to know if she wasn’t gone.
But Kevin’s life hadn’t exactly been normal, even before he woke up a Prophet. And he could understand not wanting to know the supernatural existed.
He pulled up a wry smile for Paul. “So, what? Are you here to put me to bed?”
*
The Bunker was still empty. Kevin prowled the hallways without making a sound on the tile, without stirring any of the dust dragged in by careless feet. The lights burned steadily.
Kevin stood in the Library and stared at where he had died, and tried to figure out if he felt more real, or less.
*
As soon as Kevin woke up, he left the invisi-Bunker and started walking.
*
Kevin had been excited when he’d beamed into his mother’s house. Before he’d learned that the agent with his mother was Leviathan. Before the Angels had died. Before his last chance at normal had gone up in smoke.
He’d beamed in between the Angels and seen his mother, seen that she was all right, and she’d seen him, and she’d been happy and relieved, and Kevin had been so glad to be able to give her that, to be able to wipe the worry and the fear from her face.
He’d thought, just for that minute, that everything would be okay. He’d translate the Tablet, the Angels would keep him safe, and he’d be able to go on with life as usual—go to college, get married, become President. Everything had been going to be okay. Just for that minute.
*
Paul met him at the door to the invisi-Bunker, leaning against the jamb before Kevin could slip past. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he accused genially.
“No, I haven’t.” Stepping back, Kevin pulled the door further open and slipped out the other side. Paul came around as he went past, moving with him. Tension crawled up Kevin’s back, into his shoulders. He didn’t do confrontation well, never had. Before Crowley, he’d never really wanted to. He didn’t really want to now, he just—
“I had a teenage daughter,” the counselor informed him, still keeping pace. “I know what someone avoiding me looks like.”
And, suddenly, Kevin didn’t want to try to outrun this. He stopped and turned, and Paul stopped with him. “You’re not going to talk me out of this.”
Paul’s eyebrows went up expectantly. “Perhaps if I knew what this was. . . .?”
“You’re not going to talk me out of looking for my mother,” he snapped. “I’ve let other people dictate what I do for too long, and I’ve already wasted enough time sitting on my ass not looking for her when she might be out there, just waiting, or in pain, or maybe dying, wondering where I am. Well, I’m not doing it anymore. I’m not.”
Kevin was breathing heavily when he finished, his hands curled into fists, and he tried to slow his breath even as he glared at Paul, daring him to contradict him, to say it was too dangerous, or his mom wouldn’t want him risking himself, or whatever other argument he might find to prove his point.
But the counselor just nodded slowly. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not going to talk you out of this.” Kevin barely had time to register the words, to let the tension drain out of him, before Paul was clapping a hand on his shoulder. “But you’re not alone, either. I’ll be here when you get back. Good luck.”
He stepped back with a smile, sliding his hands into his back pockets. Kevin nodded. “Thanks,” he said, once he thought he could do it without embarrassing himself. “Your daughter had a pretty awesome dad.”
He started walking.
He couldn’t help but smile when Paul yelled after him: “Remember, the Lord never gives us more than we can bear!”
*
Kevin sat in his chair in the Library. It wasn’t really his chair, because they operated on first-come-first-serve and accessibility as much as preference; and he wasn’t really sitting in it, but saying he was sitting in it stopped him from giving himself a headache trying to work out how he passed through the back without slipping through the seat.
He flicked idly at the lamp, trying to turn it off, but the switch was apparently as insubstantial to his spirit as the seatback. Sam sat across from him, dutifully recording whatever information they’d learned on the hunt, first in hard-copy for the Men of Letters records, then into the database he’d created on the laptop.
“You’re an idiot,” he told the bent head. “I die and you both feel guilty and—what?—you decide to take it out on each other?”
Sam didn’t stop or look up. The pen looped steadily. Kevin flicked the switch again.
With a sigh, he pushed up—through the chair and table, this time—and stalked toward the kitchen, which was where he was pretty sure he’d find Dean. After all, that was where he’d seen the open whiskey bottle.
“Have you tried talking to him?” he demanded, shoving at the laptop--his laptop, which in a fair world would have been it slammed closed as intended— to get Dean’s attention. It didn’t, of course—his hand went through it, and Dean raised the glass, sucking air through his teeth after he swallowed, never taking his eyes off the screen.
Once upon a time, Sam would have been sitting across from him and making bitchy faces and joking about porn.
Kevin made a face. “This is dumb, Dean. You and Sam are all you guys have. And, no offense, man, but this life really sucks on your own.”
Not that saying so made a difference.
Irritated—at not being able to talk to them, not being able to move things, not finding anymore news about his mother (though Alexis swore they were getting close, and how would she know?)—Kevin slapped the table, hard.
And made contact.
Surprised, Kevin sat back, staring at the table like it might spontaneously get up and tap dance. But, more importantly, Dean was staring at it, too, sitting up straighter to see over the laptop, eyes tracking back and forth and then higher to try to find anything moving around the kitchen.
“Did you hear that?” he demanded, pushing forward. But instead of bracing himself against the tabletop, his hands slid through it. Dean’s gaze slipped over and past him without catching. “Dean?”
“Huh,” the hunter said, like something only mildly interesting and inexplicable had happened, then rubbed his temple and took a drink. His gaze went back to the computer screen.
“What? You’re not going to investigate? What if I was a—a—a demon, huh? What, then? Dean?”
But he wasn’t in the Bunker kitchen anymore, watching Dean drink his pain away, he was back in the veil, staring at endless white. He slammed his hand against his thigh because there was nothing else available. “Goddammit!”
“Language, Mr. Tran,” Paul chided, sounding so exactly like his ninth grade history teacher that Kevin sputtered.
“I was so close this time,” he told him. “I was able to hit the table. Dean heard it.”
Paul’s eyebrows went up, but all he said was, “And?”
“And I’m back here.” He could picture the dimensions of the invisi-Bunker if he tried, place facsimiles of walls if he wanted to, but—God—he didn’t want to. He wanted to be done.
“You should rest, Kevin. Just rest,” Paul insisted, when Kevin opened his mouth to argue. “Not sleep. Pushing through the Veil takes energy. You need to regain your strength.”
Kevin chewed off the automatic, sarcastic I’ll sleep when I’m dead that flashed to mind—mostly because he was dead, and he didn’t need to be handing Paul any leverage. Because he could already picture the man’s pointedly raised eyebrows, the dry “Exactly.” Instead, he said, “I’ll feel better resting when I’ve found my mother.”
“But you don’t know how long that will take, Kevin. It’s already been months. You have to face the fact that this search is going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and plan accordingly.”
“What?” Kevin blinked, stuck back at the beginning. Months? It couldn’t have been months, could it? He knew time passed differently in Heaven and Hell, and he hadn’t exactly been able to track the passage of time but—“Months?”
Paul clasped his shoulders, mouth a sympathetic grimace. “Get some rest,” he repeated.
Kevin stared after him numbly, slowly sinking down to sit on the floor.
*
Continued in Part 3
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