This World Has Lost Its Wonder, for amberdreams (part 1)

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Title: This World Has Lost Its Wonder
Recipient: amberdreams
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 9300
Warnings: violence, strong language, angst-like-whoa, horror, non linear narrative
Author's Notes: I used a couple of prompts- the Richard Siken one, which I thought was beautiful, and the prompt about Dean and reapers. I hope you like this. Thanks, K, for the quick beta!

Summary: Sam and Dean are on a bloody, meandering road-trip post the Darkness. In a murderous world, the only way to get by is murder--and the only way it's going to end is in blood.

1.

The Impala’s tires sing on the road and the night smells of melting tar and blood and violent summer—strange, but not stranger than the storms they’re running from, the freak hurricanes, the lingering dark clouds that loom over towns and pour ashen rain.

Dean can hardly hear Johnny Cash over the roar of the wind. Tonight it’s a great lowing that orchestrates the sound-scape of this wild night-time suburbia, all percussive whisperings and the screaming contrabass of container trucks. The trucks are the only traffic that passes them by, full of oil and phenol and chlorine, trucks that sometimes becomes the subject of Dean’s fantasies involving bellowing, poisonous roadside accidents. Even younger, he made sure the Impala shied from them, from that bilious fireball possibility.

Not tonight, though.

Tonight’s an empty road and a starless sky, sizzling July asphalt that could be anywhere: Alabama, Georgia, down south. It doesn’t even matter anymore. They’ve been talking about the ocean, him and Sam, a reprieve from the merciless July sun and kerosene-scented motel-rooms. But the job’s gotten a lot busier since the Darkness came sauntering in to the party. All their ocean dreams seem nothing more than two people striking out in search of El Dorado, or something equally useless and fanciful. Dean feels like his hands are always red. Days and latitudes have all started to blur together. He doesn’t look at mirrors anymore, or windows, because he’s afraid he’ll see ghosts everywhere.

Sam and Dean have been running careless and aimless, thrumming along back roads and highways, taking down anything whose head has gone rampant, pulled along by adrenaline and whatever freak sense of vigilantism the situation demands. Sometimes, Dean thinks that’s why they’re still alive at the end of everything. This accursed ability to adapt to anything. The road when they lose their home, their hobbit-hole when the road becomes too much.

But, Sam had mumbled, over tin-can dinners and back-to-back mercy killings this last week, the bunker has become an indulgence of sorts. From peckish little visits, they’ve rounded all the way to starvation. There’s no time. There are too many killers. The world’s gone mad. Lose attention for just a second and you’ll have someone playing violin in your guts with a Bowie knife.

That might just be the way one of them ends.

“Just fucking stay awake, Sam, please.”

“I am.”

Dean snaps. “Well, you don’t look it.”

Sam had been pretending to read a book, flashlight dancing across ancient text, but now he’s lit one of the Tall Man’s cigarettes and he’s looking at it again, the glowing ember tip. Flecks of ash float away from it in the wind through the windows. There’s something in the slightest that’s unnatural about it, a wrongness that Dean can’t put his finger on. But that’s how the world is now, anyway: everything gone just a little awry. Not for the first time Dean wishes— that the Darkness had a shape, was a thing, that it could be killed in one fell blow. Then, whatever it took to deliver that blow, he and Sam could become that. They’ve always been weapons more than people. He and Sam could be anything to defeat this thing, but it’s less a thing and more a disease, and how do they weed out a disease?

The tape in the Impala’s deck scritches as it gets caught, the music spitting in tiny shrapnel shards, and Sam finds another cassette, punches it in.

“That’s great,” Dean mutters, when Bon Jovi starts to croon. “That’s perfect. Just golden.”

Sam tells him to shut up and take the next exit. And then he starts blinking too long again, gone pale with blood-loss and pain. Dean can’t concentrate on the road, can’t look anywhere but at Sam, because please, he thinks, please keep your eyes open, goddammit. Dawn is still far away. Right now all they’ve got is dark—darkness and Darkness. So please, hold on, Sammy. The panic is in Dean’s throat. His thoughts splinter. His blood feels clogged with ice.

“Pass me those M&Ms.”

Sam starts rummaging. Sam’s hands are bloody and shaking and he keeps zoning out, listing sideways.

“Sam.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m doing it.”

“And don’t hoard the red ones, Captain OCD.”

Sam opens his mouth to say something, but then there’s a thud from the trunk. Dean’s so surprised that he nearly drives the Impala into the breakdown lane, sends a spray of gravel all about. Sam starts laughing at that, mirthlessly, ends up doubled over in the seat with blood on his lips. He says something about Lazarus, a joke, shadows of cornstalks whipping past the windows crosshatching his face. Dean’s head is full of airplanes though, roaring and rushing, and he doesn’t really hear.

Dean looks at the road unrolling beneath them, clenches his hands on the steering wheel that’s starting to feel, suddenly, like a weapon in his hands, weapon against fate, if only he knew how to use it, which direction to turn.

“We need to get rid of him.”

“Yes. But not here, Sam.”

Another thud. Into the silence that follows, Dean says, “We’ll find a place with running water and I’ll fix you up, you hear?”

“I know you will, Dean.”

Only it’s not as easy as it used to be.

The last two months have been nothing more than smudges to him and Sam. Just a long string of Doppler-blur towns and interchangeable motel rooms, the car zipping through the glittering pinball shrines of America’s interstate tollbooths. Always dragged along by the glitzy promises of flimsiest leads, hearsays that pan out to mean nothing, demon-sightings that turn out to be little more than wishful thinking. The Darkness is too big, too old, too much of a thing for them to beat. So, extended road-trip, monster-hunting-trip, or suicide-trip—whatever this is—everything comes and goes and goes again. Dean’s starting to feel like Dante’s seven rings of Hell were only really terrifying due to circularity, and therefore, infinite repetition.

Dean’s seen all of this before. This foggy road, this rain, these same mile markers. An RJ with a gravelly voice will tell Dean he’s in Missouri better than any co-ordinates; the dinosaur park full of papier-mâché monsters and even more slugs is his indication that he’s driven too far West. When Sam starts complaining about the music is when Dean must stop for the night, no matter their reason for burning their tires getting wherever they were in the first place. That’s when he knows he’s driven them too long, too far.

Sometimes he forgets after all this time that they are still only human.

Sam’s quiet today, though. Sam’s listening to the music. Sam’s bleeding out into the seat well on the passenger side from multiple wounds too pointless for Dean to patch up.

But he keeps saying it anyway: “Let’s find a gas-station restroom at least.”

There’s nothing but dust and gasoline-smell and reflective mile-markers for as far as Dean can see. He focuses on the beams of the headlamps, the twin points of encouragement that they’re moving forward, moving forward. Towards, maybe, places where propane tanks haven’t blown up and gas-stations haven’t been looted. All those pipes with running water twisted outward, left to bleed dry—he wishes they’ve left those behind.

The streetlights go out. The road stays dark. The sky’s cobbled with stars, and in the horizon, Dean can just make out the blue shapes of mountains.

“I’m cold.” Sam says, quietly.

2.

The first time they tried to kill someone after the Darkness was unleashed was in Shreveport. It felt wrong, Sam said later, like they were just murderers, like they were no more than what the FBI had once thought them to be.

Dean had laughed at him for that, because Dean was still mad about the Book, and off-tilt after losing the Mark. A whole other Dean was still running rampant through his head, swinging at his brain stem like an army out for blood. But honestly, Dean wouldn’t have known how Sam felt. It wasn’t Dean who put the bullet in the girl’s head.

A hot, sweltering night and they’d just pulled up by a dusty truck-stop. Dinosaur trucks came and went; the sound of their wheels a sirloin-sizzle. Dean opened up their beers and Sam kept punching stuff into his phone with no luck. They couldn’t find Rowena, Crowley, or Cas. Their short drive to Lebanon hadn’t helped, except to reveal distressed e-mails from other hunters across the country. Most of them said variants of the same thing: dealing with sudden violence in town; otherwise normal people going Fullmetal Jacket.

Let’s check it out, Sam had said, and so they set sail—road-trip again, the familiar green glow of the Impala’s dashboard the only sane thing they saw. Or at least, the only sane thing Dean saw.

Back then, Dean could still feet the hot burn of Death’s sickle on his palm. It still felt unreal, what he’d done, but what wouldn’t he do for Sammy in the end? One way or the other, that’s what it always came to. He had to keep checking for Sam in the shotgun seat, because his mind kept skipping track and screaming that he’d killed Sam. After all, that had been the idea; that had been the deal that Dean himself had made.

Sam talked to this girl at the Shreveport truck stop while Dean snacked on corn chips and drank his beer. She was wearing a cap that said Lone Star and a green T-shirt, and babbled a lot, seemed to be a genius of some sort. Sam made notes, said polite things like my brother and I are trying to figure out what this is. He smiled a lot. Dean wondered at that, the weightless way in which Sam could smile, as if it was easy for him to draw a curtain between him and their ravaged Winchester stage design. They didn’t get the girl’s name at first, only that she was headed out on the I-49 and wanted a ride. Running from the stories on the news about various incidents involving the Darkness.

Those first days, almost everybody ran.

Patrice sat in the backseat, making small talk with Sam—Dean didn’t know what they spoke of because his head was buzzing with a swarm of insects, visions and visions of blood and terror, full to the brim with red thoughts. It worried him, because shouldn’t losing the Mark be as easy as Sam thought it would be? A binary, as though Dean has just shucked a coat off and became something else altogether. What was this lust for gore, for violence, for bloody punches thrown in the dust? It wanted to fill his insides; his mouth, his belly, until he thought it might creep up the sides of even his own body.

Patrice talked about ghosts after a while. She’d lived in New Orleans for a while, and her adventures were lit with a baroque splendor that Dean didn’t think the French Quarter actually possessed. Her voice spun in and out of his consciousness with the jagged quality of a bad cassette. Dean craved gumbo, Sam kept asking questions, and when they stopped at a gas-station, Patrice bought them a rainbow array of M&Ms as thanks, dropping them onto Sam’s lap before heading into the restroom.

“I’m seeing reapers.” Dean said, watching Sam push the red chocolates to one side and all the others towards Dean.

“What?”

“Reapers, Sam.” Dean said, louder. “Everywhere. They’re just standing around like they don’t know what the fuck they should do now.”

Predictably, Sam looked around. “Ever since—”

“Yep.”

“Can they see you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s find out somehow.”

“What, do I just saunter up and say hey, I killed your boss, wassup?”

Sam shrugged. “Unless you wanna walk right up to them and see if they react.”

Dean snorted. “You’re very helpful.”

There was one standing under the Texaco sign. A suit, looking straight at Dean, ageless eyes gaping in terror and wonderment. That wasn’t a common look on reapers. Dean supposed that they had all been mind-fucked by Death dying. There was an oxymoron. Or whatever the hell the literary term for mind-fuck was.

“Bad times to be a reaper, huh?” Sam said, thoughtfully.“First the Veil, now this.”

“They just stand and stare, man. It’s creep-tastic.”

In the end, they did nothing. When Patrice came back, she was different. She was gone. They didn’t know until they were on the road, cruising at 80, the night streaming all around them and most of Dean’s attention on locating the constellations. The radio was tuned to some news station, but it kept intercepting crosstalk from a gospel station doing choir songs. The road was mostly empty. Patrice was telling Sam about fossils and the Burgess Shale, words falling like more pretty names for stars. Patrice wanted to see the ocean too; she talked about it, and this was mostly the only part of that evening with her that Dean will later remember with clarity. Her fantasy of a seaside frame, with boats and shining lights—lights on the water that tapered to blackness, and then wave after wave after wave.

And then she stopped talking. And then, all of a sudden, she was trying to kill Sam.

It was about as berserk and violent as if everything that made her human, everything that would have held her back, had disappeared and left behind an animal soul. She launched herself over the bench seat, snapping and biting, a sort of cold intelligence swimming behind her eyes, and the car spun out of control. Breakdown-lane gravel spattered over the windshield, sprayed in through the windows. Dean felt the front bumper slam against a fence, and gave the wheel an almighty turn before the car could overturn from the force. It somehow threw Patrice out of the car, the back door left swinging wide-open.

Sam leaned back to pull it closed. “Go, Dean! Drive.”

She was going to follow them. Dean knew, because that was mostly how the Darkness worked. That was mostly the game it wanted to play. It liked the chase. It didn’t like to be outsmarted by mere humans.

They drove for a couple of days. Where are we going? Away. Why are we going? Because what else will we do, anyway? The road was infinite, a black tongue of history. Faced with something from before all written record, this is all they know.

They thought they’d lost Patrice, left her amongst the other wild, Darkness-besotted runaways in Louisiana. If they worried about every monster that could ever come after them because they didn’t entirely finish a job, they’d already be interned in early graves. Sam and Dean logged one more untraceable hunter in the Ozarks—and then they were in Missouri, under an overcast sky, as aimless as the Mississippi meandering sluggishly through the lower basin.

Patrice came knocking one night, an axe in hand, and Sam put her down like a rabid dog. (The tiny fragments of time he later swears he doesn’t remember: throwing her into a wall, her axe whizzing two inches away from his neck, slicing his palm open on the blade when he stops the axe from burying itself in Dean’s neck, breaking her neck. But breaking necks didn’t kill people anymore.) Three shots at close range and a cremation later, in a cramped restroom that smelled of yellow soap and piss, Dean used paper-towels to clean up the blood as much as he could. He put it down to the fucked-up state of affairs that the gas-station clerk didn’t even jerk away from their bloody appearance.

The water in the restroom came in sporadic, meager spurts and Sam kept saying I need a drink (jerky and confused and guilty, I need a drink so let’s go Dean) ‘Dean’ like a quiet lump caught in his throat, but Dean kept yanking him back and finding more spatter-spots—shut up now, shut up, they won’t let us in a bar if I don’t get your hairline—and when they finally got back to the Impala, Dean could see Patrice in the glass, in every window. Trapped and grotesque, a silvering that could just as easily be a distortion of the glass, but wasn’t.

And he knows it sounds funny (it sounded funny to Sammy too), ghosts trapped in glass, but their faces are awful and sometimes they make a sound, a sort of chink, quieter than an insect wing, and Dean thinks it’s the saddest sound in the world, sadder even than silence, and wonders if that little thing will be his undoing.

3.

Of course, they have more ghosts now.

A whole army of ghosts, stuck in reflective surfaces. There’s the girl whose throat Sam cut in Alabama, because she was holding a gun to Dean’s head. There are a couple of hunters they took down by request. There’s the man that nearly got them both, an incident involving trailers and vats full of lye, whose body they hid in a swamp. That lye they stole, because it wasn’t easy to hunt up wood in a world increasingly empty of people and populated by murderers. It was Dean’s idea. Heated up to boiling temperatures, the lye slowly dissolved flesh and bone. And as long as mortal remains didn’t exist, at least these new creatures of Darkness didn’t come after them like some evolved, GPS-enabled version of reanimated zombies.

“Is it because there is no Death anymore?” Sam asked, one day when Dean had his eyes closed against the world because it was raining. Sam was driving, and Dean could hear the slush of the tires against water, the sound of it splattering on the windshield. He pictured, in his head, raindrops swallowing each other on the glass, the faces that he would see in each drop in infinite regression. “Are the reapers not reaping anyone?”

“I think it’s because there’s no one willing to take Death’s place anymore.”

Sam looked at him sharply at that. “You mean, put on the ring, and take up the scythe— that kind of thing.”

“Yeah, Sam. I don’t think Death ever called a lawyer and picked a successor in case of untimely demise.”

“If we go by fairytale logic,” said Sam, “It could be you. You wore his ring once. And now you’ve killed him. Added plus—you like junk food too.”

“Sure, Sam.”

“I’m not kidding. I really think—”

But Dean didn’t know what Sam really thought, because Dean turned up the volume on the radio at that point. He believed in fairytale logic too, whatever the hell that was, this proposition that the most obvious answer is probably the right one. And fuck if Dean didn’t know that all the reapers staring at him despondently didn’t just want him to ask for it. Ask to be Death. Get rid of these souls clouding up his windows. Send the reapers to actually kill people when they’d bled out or had broken necks. The universe really seemed to be built on an infrastructure of simple rules: if Dean used the scythe to kill Death, then that scythe and ring and therefore the crown of the pale rider probably belonged to him.

It just wasn’t easy to conceive actually doing.

Dean squinted at the windshield again. Ghosts in the glass. “I’m thinking Death used some pretty heavy-duty car shampoo.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Do you think they’d react to chemicals?”

Predictably, Sam ignored that. “Dean—”

“I tried it once, Sam. It didn’t work out for me.”

“But I’m not saying you should,” Sam said. “You just assumed I wanted you to. I don’t want you to.”

That was different. “Huh?”

“I don’t want you to be anything. I don’t want you to become anything. I just—need you to be you. And if you can’t be you, at least fake it, so I can tell you it’s not you when you do something crazy. It’s getting harder to tell, between us.” Sam laughed, humorlessly. “Do you see? Things are falling apart, Dean.”

Things were falling apart. The red thoughts that crept into Dean’s head came more commonly now, filling his head with a buzz that was not unlike airplanes. He didn’t dare do violence on anything, for fear it couldn’t be contained once let free. Sam didn’t seem to be similarly affected—he wasn’t particularly violent nor spoke about slowly going Jack-batshit-Torrance inside his head, but Dean couldn’t be sure. Sam-logic would probably suggest that he keep quiet about any such thing, anyway. Even though Dean had (for once) told Sam point-blank that losing the Mark seemed to have done fuck-all about the bloodlust.

In the night-time lights, the Impala’s windshield was a riot of aniline yellow, phenol blue, glimmering arcs of red that no one stopped for anymore. It looked surprisingly normal for a rainy day, these roads— you could never tell the world had changed by a cursory glance. But that was the thing about the Darkness, anyway, that shapelessness. That lack of corporeality—that was what made it such a fucking pain to do anything about.

But he thinks Sam’s not really talking about the Darkness, after all, is he? Sam’s talking about Dean, and how his ideas of Dean have swum quietly but casually away from any visible shore. And now Dean’s lost at sea, he’s saying, and Sam’s not sure which sea it is. Where does he start looking for? Why doesn’t he know? Sam’s behaving in the classic way: talking all around his worry, poking it with a stick, but not really going near it.

“Promise me you won’t do it if you don’t want to.”

“You think I want to be the one thing that absolutely everyone in the world wants to run away from?”

Honestly, Dean didn’t really think he had much choice. Sooner or later, he was going to cave, he was going to walk up to a reaper and demand to know the next step. That was who Dean was. Hell, that was who Sam was, but Sam was telling him to fuck the patterns of history, wasn’t he? Sam just wanted them to fall apart for once, instead of trying to fix something. At least if they fell apart, they could just focus on fixing that.

Sam was, also, not meeting his glance. “I don’t want to see you taking on another curse for the greater good, Dean. We’ve done enough.”

“This is not the same as the Mark of Cain, Sam.”

“I don’t see how it’s different.”

“It’s leagues different. I mean, it’s a whole other ball-game. Hate to break it to you, Sammy, but people need to die. That’s not negotiable.”

Sam slid him a skeptical glance. Underneath that, he was actually starting to look fucking terrified. “You said, the last time—this wasn’t for you. It could destroy you, man. Don’t do it out of stupid nobility or whatever.”

Dean grimaced. He didn’t do things out of stupid nobility. Most of his choices were governed by whatever clusterfuck they’d rammed up against at the moment.

But Sam was a stubborn bastard sometimes. “Dean. You have to promise.”

“Give it a rest, Sam.”

“Dean—” Sam wheedled.

“Okay. Okay, Aunt Abby, I promise.”

He heard Sam let out a breath, and then the whisk of wipers on the windshield over the patter of rain.

Then, on the next inhale, Sam said, “I don’t think people can die anymore, Dean. I think we need to burn them, or they just don’t die.”

“I know.”

“That’s terrible. In this world, that’s terrible.”

“I fucking know that, Sam.”

Once upon a time, Dean stood in a room with a scythe about to cut his brother’s head off, and thought nothing could get worse than this. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. There was oblivion in that choice, for both him and Sam. There was forgiveness. There was, still, goodness. Right now—this moment? Takes the frigging cake.

As if reading Dean’s mind, Sam said, “You did the right thing.”

“When?”

“When you chose to kill Death. You did the right thing. It was you, Dean, not the Mark. You didn’t let it make the choice for you.”

Dean hadn’t been so sure about that one. He still isn’t. But, he’d thought, that was how they were different. Sam always kept saying it wasn’t you, it wasn’t you. In his head the buckets were separate, the list of sins clearly demarcated for Dean and not-Dean. Sam’s disassociation of the soul with the body was exceptional, a feat, a carefully constructed philosophy all his own. Sam’s figured out that the things that look like Sam need not be him, learned to mark it in percentages, and now he’s got a whole system laid out.

Dean only always said it was you; it was you—couldn’t deal with anything that wasn’t entirely Sam, couldn’t forgive him for Ruby, for Meg, for Kevin. He couldn’t help it, couldn’t differentiate in ways that mattered enough. He’d wondered if Sam knew— if he’d always guessed— if that was how he’d learned to be different.

4.

“Maybe we should go to Vegas,” Sam mumbles now, and Dean nods. He keeps driving. Sam’s face and mouth are sticky with blood, and his eyes are muddy. He’s shivering, holding himself tight, his face flushed with feverish delirium. “I mean—it seems like a good time. Less people. Like you always say, we can clean out the tables.”

“Great idea.”

When Sam grins, his dimples show. “You don’t sound very excited.”

“Jesus, Sammy.”

“Hey, Dean?”

“What?”

“Just remember that you don’t have to be anything, dude.” Sam says, disconsolate. “You just have to be my brother.”

“That’s probably just what I suck at the most, huh?”

Please don’t fall asleep, Dean thinks, please, Sam. All night it’s just been the same litany: don’t you fall asleep on me, goddammit. Come on, Sam. Sammy. Please. The dawn is still creeping up on them, slowly. Dean doesn’t know what to do anymore, so he drives farther south. The Tall Man keeps fighting in the trunk. The car smells of gasoline and sweat and blood and there’s grit in Dean’s eyes, and tears, and he can barely see. In the faint reflections on the windows, he thinks the shadow-ghosts are laughing; a tumultuous, terrible mirth.

When the road smoothes out, Dean finds tissues in the glove box, uses it to wipe the blood off Sam’s lips. His breaths are beginning to rattle in his chest, small moans of pain escaping him every time the car bounces over a rough patch.

“Where are we going?” Sam asks, in a quiet wheeze, trying to squint outside through the fog that’s crumbling away from the Impala’s headlights like scraps of burned paper. “Dean?”

“Ssshh, Sammy.” Dean cuts the wheel, off I-10 and towards Biloxi Back Bay. The smaller highway is dark as pitch, no streetlights, looks like the maw of a beast about to swallow them. He listens to Sam’s erratic gasps of breath, to the unpredictable, weakening thuds from the trunk. He watches the sky slowly lighten, from black to blue to the grotesque yellow-tinged blue of a bruise.

He keeps his eyes fixed on the road and ignores the reflections. They make their insect-wing noise the whole time, a constant drone, like beetles or something else that’s chitinous, and after a while, that’s all Dean hears, an earworm that never lets go.

5.

They chased down the Tall Man in Mississippi because they’d heard rumors of him, hearsay from hitchhikers and people they’d had to kill, a man who was stringing up entire lengths of electrical wires with birds.

The ways the Darkness got into people were strange. Some murdered: carefully crafted, painstaking killings. They set their eyes on targets, and followed them until death. They went rabid, soulless, their eyes bleached entirely white. Others committed suicide. In parts of the country, there had been reports of black wolves, slinking through the streets of Brooklyn, rising through the asphalt in Chicago. There was speculation that they ate a few people.

“Do you know, we call it Qliphoth,” said the Tall Man, who had brown skin and eyes black as raisins, and strung up both birds and people on electrical wires. “The shadows left behind after Creation, the opposite of good. The shells from which God himself was born. They surround the celestial, never free to overpower, but always waiting for the chance.”   

Which was close enough, actually, thought Dean. And inherently better than Sam’s do you think the Darkness inside you is exactly like being soulless theory. The Tall Man had a shitty roadside store that sold cigarettes, motor oil and pornography, the last of which Dean tried to look interested in while Sam pretended to be sick in the restroom. The floor of the shop was incredibly clean. There was a tinny country band on terrible speakers blasting from the ceiling, a fly-covered AC unit from the Mesozoic era, and the Tall Man’s eager storytelling face blinking curiously at Dean, trying to figure out which of the magazines Dean will go for.

“Hurry up, Sam, for God’s sake!” Dean called out, game still on, pulling a white stool and sitting down in front of the AC. The cool air felt good on his sweaty back. Outside, the sun was high in the sky and the air was hot and muggy. The Impala gleamed in front of the store, arcs of light rippling across her hood. Behind her, fields of cotton and sorghum rippled in the wind, a great swooshing sound and smell that spread all about in wide radii. Squint hard and Dean could also make out a barn somewhere in the distance, a broken down truck, silvered grain silos stacked one above the other.

The Tall Man popped a Tums tablet in his mouth. “Where you boys from?”

“Kansas,” said Dean, with the dopiest smile he could manage. “We were working in a salvage yard.”

“Is that where that sweet ride came from?”

“No, sir. She used to belong to our dad,” said Dean. “Say, what’s this Qliphoth thing, anyway?”

The Tall Man moved to a refrigerator humming in the corner of the shop and took out a beer. “Empty shells. As long as a soul is in a human body, evil cannot enter it. But a Qliphoth is an empty thing, an absence of divinity, a vacuum. It cannot be anything but evil.”

Dean smiled and took the beer offered, but did not drink it. There was a new pink parka sitting on a broken stool in one corner of the room, a jewel-cased phone peeking out of its pocket. There was a green Saturn parked at the back, hidden under tarpaulin, with at least a family’s worth of duffels, knapsacks and backpacks inside it. Pour some Luminol or BlueStar on the impeccably clean floor, and Dean was pretty sure they’d find the ghosts of bloodstains lighting up all over the place.

So Dean pretended to peer over a funny set of dentures sitting on the shelves, and lit up a cigarette that filled his mouth with vile smoke. He put the poisoned beer down on a stool and racked up porn magazines under his arm. He feigned staring at an Authentic South Indian Beauty in July’s double-spread glossy, and when the Tall Man sneaked up on him with a baseball bat, he knew Sam had sneaked up behind him. He heard the Tall Man drop, knocking the beer down on his way, felt the liquid splatter over his boots.

“He’s got a fresh corpse waiting down in the cellar. Girl about eighteen. Couple of sketches on this pad,” Sam said, pushing a sketchpad towards Dean. One sketch showed a man on a chair, his body grotesquely contorted, scribbled black smoke piercing into his insides. The other showed the same man standing up this time, wielding a sickle in an offensive position. The rest of the book were birds—anatomy, disfigured anatomy, a flipbook of blood and murder.

Sam was looking down at the Tall Man’s inert body, several shades of conflict layering his expression. “It’s harder when they’re not anything really supernatural, aren’t they?”

“Cops ain’t going to do this, Sammy,” Dean said, looking at the grimy window of Tall Man’s store. A couple of fingers gasped in the glass, a ghost-image of a face like in a foggy photograph. “Get his feet.”

Out there in the midst of the sorghum stalks, the Tall Man woke up and raved, screamed, and Sam nearly dropped the deadly amphetamines he’d cocktailed up in a syringe. The Tall Man kicked up mud and loam and dragged his hands through the stalks, grinning terrible teeth and screeching bloody murder. Dean leaned down to hold him down, tightened his grip on the Tall Man’s arms, and above them the sky slowly darkened and the stars all wheeled. Sam hovered, indecisive, because this was the first one they’d chased and killed; everyone else so far had been a direct threat to them at the moment of their death.

“Sam!” shouted Dean, because the Tall Man was spitting mud now, snapping his teeth, his eyes gone entirely white. “Sam, do it!”

And then the Tall Man’s jaw opened impossibly wide, and he kept screaming, and black water began to trickle out, spread on the fertile soil. The Tall Man began to shout in some other language then, a rough, dead tongue that didn’t match any language he knew. Dean felt a strong surge of something in his chest, a violence that could rend him apart, and in that moment he drew his knife and plunged it so deep in the Tall Man’s neck that it punched out the other side. A splash of strawberry blood fountained out, looked something like a cheap drama trick.

And Dean felt acutely in that moment, felt every inch of the road they’ve traveled, every hour of the day he’d clamped down on his fear and fury, and it all felt like such a joke that he laughed, was laughing—here was a corpse in a field of sorghum, and here was a reaper turning his face away, and here was a cruel little detail that haunted him. Mirrors and glass and terrible reflections, projections running riot, a blur of ghosts like films jumping out of sprockets. He reached for the knife again, but felt Sam drag him away before he could. Sam was shouting in his ear, and nothing he said made any sense. What the fuck are you doing, Sam? Let me go. Take your goddamn hands off me! The Tall Man was crumpled on the ground, and it shouldn’t take more than one more twist of the knife to really kill him, not just puncture him for shits and giggles. But Sam wasn’t letting him go, was he? Dean tried, he tried to get away. But Sam was holding him hostage, prisoner, and Dean wasn’t sure why—what was he gaining, what was his objective?

In the end, it was muscle memory. It was thousands of times of sparring and Dean knowing how to get Sam off him and how Sam had never really fought to truly hurt him since Purgatory. They pitched and rolled and Dean got an elbow in Sam’s side, a foot to trip him up, and when Sam compensated to keep his balance, Dean pulled himself away from him. Took a few steps towards where the Tall Man still lay, waiting for a wetter murder.

He wasn’t laughing anymore, though. All of the mirth had gone out of the situation. Everything Sam had said while they’d scuffled came back in pieces: this is not who we are and you’re a good man and Dean like some secret, unrepeatable thing that only he knew how to say.

“Dean—”

Dean was panting. The air suddenly seemed so heavy. He tasted iron on his tongue. “We’re taking him with us.”

“What?” Sam splutters. “Dean, no.”

Sam was relieved, though. Dean could see it in his face. Sam was relieved as though he’d avoided a bullet. He looked at Dean, and there was a kind of desperation which felt like a poor, washed-out repeat of last year, of every time Sam thought he caught a glimpse of some facet of Dean that he equated to something that could never go demonic. That hopeless look meant that Dean could talk him into dumb things.

“I wanna know how this works.”

Sam blinked. He looked like the land was teetering away from him. “What?”

“We’ll put him in the trunk. He’s the first one who’s done anything strange because of the Darkness. I wanna know how that works, and I wanna know how many times he can come back to life.”

Sam was starting to look dreadfully unhappy. “That’s dangerous. Remember Patrice and the others? Remember how dangerous—”

Dean scowled. “We’re not back-road killers, Sammy. We’re hunters. We’re Men of Letters. We fucking figure out a solution. We’re not arguing on this.”

“I don’t like it.” Sam had said—his words cut by a far-off shriek, a sign of human presence, possibly murderous. When they traded glances, his eyes were troubled, and he looked away for a minute with an expression that Dean couldn’t decipher—he half believed Sam had taken to praying again— Father, Son and Holy Ghost; Jesus, Joseph and Mary; please deliver us. What did he expect, angels knocking on his head? Hello, hello, a flash in the sky, and a Godly messenger to save them? There was nothing down here but a lack of death, a long-winding highway, rivers of blood, and flesh melting under heated lye.

“Tough luck.” Dean said, shrugging.

“Fuck you, Dean,” Sam said, but without heat. He repeated it again; fuck you, and then something that sounded quietly like this is crazy. But he was behaving like a handy-dandy paper puppet, fluttering at the edges, and he seemed mostly just tired of Dean, fraying just a little bit, willing to go along.

Dean looked down at the Tall Man, tired of Sam too, tired of his worry and his new hovering, this role-reversal that he never asked for.

“Let’s do some research.”

Continue to Part Two