Fic: The Rapid Spin of the Wheel
Aug. 19th, 2009 05:30 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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spn_summergenTitle: The Rapid Spin of the Wheel
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
smilla02
Recipient:egoteprovoco
Rating: R for violence and bloody imagery
Warnings: violence, death of canon characters – spoilers for Jump The Sharks.
Author's Notes: This wasn’t the story I wanted to write for you. But it ambushed me one day and demanded to be written – I hope you like it. Many thanks to the lovely C. For her sharp beta.
Summary: Adam screams and bleeds and prays. And his vision's clouded by the tears and his nose's clogged with snot and he can't breathe.
For a long time, there’s pain, cuts with a blade so sharp it burns when it rips his forearms and sides where the skin's tender and fragile. It's a horror so deep he can't make any sense of it. He feels the life bleed out of his veins, the blood first warm then cool against his sweaty skin. He looks straight into the horrendous face of the creature above him, at its mouth smudged with his blood, an electric need in its reddish eyes.
He feels himself slipping away and then dying.
*
Adam climbs down from the bus at a quarter to eleven, grabs his backpack and walks back home. He waves at Jackie when he passes by the diner, raises thumb and pinky to his ear and mouths later while she smiles, worried, and nods back, starts wiping the tables clean even as Adam's walking away.
Spring teases the air with a warm sun and some of the dread from the previous night fades away while he soaks up the familiar quiet of his town. It can’t be as bad as the police and Mr. Deers made to be on the phone, not when everything else is as normal and lazy as it is.
When he's at his door, he sees Mrs. Abbinati watering her roses, her gown so red and yellow and green with stamped flowers she nearly disappears amidst her plants. He waves and smiles, says, "Good morning, Mrs. Abbinati."
She waves back, "Hi, dear." And then, "hope your mom's all right." Adam swallows and nods his thank you. She likes him better now that he doesn't run over garden and trash her plants, but she's always liked his mom more.
He uses his key to get inside, feels the cold in the house like a solid wall. He steps in the foyer and a shiver runs down his back when the backpack falls on the ground with a thump that echoes. The house's far too silent, no radio in the background, or the clangs of pottery in the kitchen. It exudes a sense a sense of neglect and Adam's heart spikes up in fear.
It feels too real – her absence. Tangible in a way that voices over the phone couldn't convey.
"Mom," he shouts, his boots pounding on the stairs, and it's stupid but there's a back-lit form inside the bedroom door, and Adam thinks it was all a damn mistake, has an apology on his lips for having shouted. He never says it, though, can't. Feels nothing else but the pain at the base of his skull, sharp and blinding.
*
It's his mom who ties him up, and when he pleads with her to stop, please, she smiles an ugly, twisted smile that morphs her face into something hideous and raw. She puts a rag in his mouth that smells of vomit and then she starts cutting his clothes off and the skin underneath along with them. Shallow cuts at first that burn and sting and then deeper ones, enough for her to push her forefinger inside and use it as a hook, ripping through muscles and sinews in small morsels she chews on with a hum of pleasure. Something’s moving around his legs. He feels the rips of denim and then the wet ones of skin. And then more pain.
Adam screams and bleeds and prays, and his vision's clouded by the tears and his nose's clogged with snot and he can't breathe.
She doesn't talk, lips stained red with his blood, mouth stuffed full with his flesh. She doesn't stop.
*
Adam wakes up near the riverbank. Water that laps gently at his boots. The lights from the town are at his left and behind him, the graveyard is a dark shape of bare crosses and mourning statues against the sky.
He knows where he is, used to come out here to play with Jackie and Junior when he was a kid. Their bikes left tracks in the earth and raised clouds of red dust behind them like the tail of a comet. There's a tree a few feet ahead where they used to climb and hide and tell each other their dreams in hushed tones.
Junior used to say, "I want to be a cop like my father." But Jackie promptly corrected him. "Your dad's not a cop. He's a De-pu-ty Sheriff."
And then Jackie would say, "I'm going away from this stupid town and be rich and famous." But when Adam asked how she only shrugged and raised her head, hostile and moody, fell silent and sad until Junior poked her in the side to make her voice shriek with crystalline laughs.
Adam was always the last one, though. "I'll travel the world in my father's car," he would say hands raised to shape its form, "all black steel and a powerful engine." But his father had stopped dropping by, had stopped calling, and Adam had gone into pre-med to be more like his mother.
They’d been thirteen, and perched on that tree they could see all the world as far as the horizon.
His house is at the edge of town, over the last bend of the river, where the street lights are blinking off now that the sky's whitening. It's weirdly hard to walk, the air dense like glue, Adam's stomach flattening against his backbone like a sail against the wind. With each step he feels a longing to turn around, walk back toward the graveyard where his body's hidden inside a crypt, half-eaten and bloodied dry. But he keeps walking.
*
Adam knows he’s dead; he also knows he’s a ghost.
Being a ghost is boring.
He spends his first day on the little back verandah watching the cars whiz by on the Interstate. He'd sit on the rocking chair if he knew how to do it, but when he tried earlier, he went straight through, ass on the ground, so he stands.
His mother's left dirty plates in the sink where flies are buzzing and circling around and around in never-ending motion. He wonders why they never tire, why they keep going. Why nobody’s come to ask where the hell Adam is.
He sees no living soul all day long, but he hears the signs of their life: water groaning in the pipes, a shout somewhere down the street, music drifting with the breeze along with voices, the words broken, unintelligible. The day's bright and the sun must’ve been warm. In the afternoon it goes down inside clouds orange and red.
He doesn't know what he's doing here. If this is what dying is about then life is just a joke. He was expecting something else, something bigger than standing alone in an empty house.
Maybe he's supposed to do something to pass on, but there's no light that he can see and his house is the only place he can think of being.
It’s past midnight when the front door groans open. Adam walks through two walls to see her – his mother – entering, hair perfectly tied in a bun, straight and neat as ever, clothes tightly pressed and pristine and a large smile as she says, we're home, sweetie.
And then Adam sees himself, like in a mirror but not. That thing that looks like him is the right size, and the hair too is the exact color of his own, but the eyes are too spaced up and bulgy like they're ready to fall out, and the mouth's too large and takes up half of its elongated face, the teeth pointy and blackened when it smiles back and flops onto the couch in the same way Adam does.
Even as Adam looks, those weird features are shifting with a sickening noise of bones setting and shaping around the jaw and temples. The mouth shrinks to a normal size, and there's extra skin everywhere falling in large folds under its chin and cheeks, around the eyes.
His mother frames that impostor's head in her hands, turns it left and right, and her face has the same intense expression she had when she was checking if Adam had washed his face and brushed teeth.
When she's done, she says, Good job, brother.
*
She's not his mother. She's not her, she's not her.
She is not even human, perhaps – like that other thing sprawled on the couch who’s wearing Adam’s form like an elaborate mask.
She speaks like his mother and moves like his mother as she – it, maybe, it is better - goes around the house straightening things to their proper place the way she usually does. It's wrong somehow, weirdly out of place even as she starts cleaning the kitchen, a frown marring the perfect skin of her forehead, nose wrinkled in disgust at the smell. It reminds Adam so much of her he wants to weep.
Adam follows her upstairs, to the bedroom. The bed's perfectly made and there's nothing out of order but the picture on the nightstand that is now laying on the ground, the glass broken. He sees her pick it up and putting it gently back in its place. She stares at it for a long moment and then she goes away. Adam doesn't follow this time. He stares at his father in the picture, the easy bend of his smile, those eyes full of secret and things he wouldn't say no matter how many times Adam asked.
His mother’s smiling at him from the photo, crinkles around her eyes and no shadow of sadness in them. It would come later, the sadness, when John left after playing happy family for two or three days out of the hundreds he spent in his other life, his real one. Adam had hated him often for it even as his mother shook her head and ruffled his hair, told him that sometimes happinesss had to be taken in small sips.
He closes his eyes and imagines breathing the scent of his mother's perfume he knows permeates her room, but his nostrils are clogged with the smell of blood and the acrid scent of raw meat.
"Your mother didn't kill you, Adam."
He turns to the voice, his eyes snapping open to see a woman sitting in the chair. If Adam still had a beating heart, it would be in his throat now, but he hasn't one anymore and his fear has a different texture, a cold so intense it makes the air compress.
The woman has black hair, straight and neatly separated on her forehead.
"I know," he answers, because he’s always been smart and he’s figured that out already. "Who are you?" he asks.
"My name's Tessa," she says with a bow of her head and a smile, "and you really need to come with me now."
*
Tessa brings Adam back to the crypt within a blink, shows him his mother's remains – a lump of bones with stripes of flesh hanging from them. Some hair, blond and silky in the low light where the blood isn't flaking off and staining it.
She says, "Ghouls like human meat and that's what the creature living in your house are."
She stretches her arm toward Adam, hand open, palm turned upward, and again tells him he needs to go with her.
Adam shakes his head and wills himself back home, back to his mom's bedroom. It works, for some mysterious reason, it does. When he's there, he flops onto the bed, sinks inside it a bit, caught between blankets and sheets and the spongy texture of the mattress like the ghost he is.
Then he cries.
*
Tessa asks always the same question and doesn't have any answer herself. Adam tells her to go away and she goes, doesn’t show her pretty, sad face for two days.
The ghoul that looks like his mother went away that first night and now there's only the other one, answering the door and eating the food his neighborhood brings – casseroles covered with aluminum foil and Tupperware bowls with colorful tops.
Jackie comes, too, eyes tearful and big. Adam moves from his spot in the corner, hedges himself between the ghoul and her body and tries to wipe the tears from her face with his thumb. His finger goes straight through and he lets his arm fall at his sides.
"Junior’s dad’s missing, too."
The ghoul’s fake surprise would have fooled even Adam. It stands and starts pacing, hands rubbing the hair back from its forehead.
"God, Jackie. What the hell’s going on?"
Jackie shakes her head, lips pursed and face streaked with fresh tears. When Adam sits, she hugs him tight, says something too low for Adam to hear and he seethes at another thing that’s being robbed from him right under his nose.
He wishes he could break everything, kick the chairs and rip the wallpaper from the walls and burn the house down to a small mound of ash so it can’t be violated like this – and most of all, and with a need that clouds his vision, he wants the ghouls dead. Both of them. He wants to see them ripped apart limb by limb, longs to see the flesh be torned off their bones the same way they’ve torn it from his mother’s body and his.
The need's so strong it's like he's breathing it with each inhale of air.
"How?" he asks Tessa when she comes back.
"Ghouls are like zombies. You can kill them by severing their head."
Adam is surprised that she’s given him even that much. "Okay," he says.
"No, Adam, it’s not okay. You can’t kill them," she says. "You’re dead."
She sounds neither smug nor cruel, but Adam hates her all the same.
"You’re just a ghost, Adam," she continues. "You’re not alive and you won’t be no matter how much you want it."
"Why not?" he asks, looks at the ghoul as it turns on his TV and dirties his carpet and his couch with soiled shoes.
"I won’t come with you so you better let me go. I’m not coming."
He shouts the last sentence, and the pile of bills stacked on the table beside the front door flutters to the ground. Adam stares at them.
*
Adam’s seen the movies – maybe they got that right, at least, and he can learn to move things.
The ghoul goes out at night and Adam has a good idea of what it does. He can’t let himself think of that mouth – his own – full of raw, human flesh but the thought fills him with enough rage that when he kicks the door it rocks gently under the blow.
The entire night, he practices on the back door, willing it open. He tries and he tries and when the sun comes up, he’s so tired he can barely stand and the door’s still shut, mocking him with its stillness.
"You can learn to move things, Adam," Tessa says, "but you’ll need time. And by then you won’t be Adam anymore."
"What do you mean?" Adam asks from where he’s sitting on the floor. He looks at his own hand. He can’t be sure but it looks transparent, less solid.
"People aren’t suppposed to stay here when they die. You’ll become angry and unstable, and then you won’t be so different than the ghouls that killed you and your mother."
"If this is your problem, then you can go away right now," he says. "I’m already angry."
"No, you’re not that angry. But you will be if you don’t come with me."
Adam stands, looks outside. Through the window he can see the ghoul walking up to the house, easy and familiar like it belongs here.
"There’s nothing here for you, Adam."
She’s close now, and Adam swears he can feel the pull of her – an unbearable need to go with her, to let himself go.
The front door opens. The ghoul’s talking to someone but Adam can’t hear from the kitchen.
"No," Adam says. "They’re still alive." He looks at Tessa, can see that she’s angry but the ghoul’s coming in the kitchen and Adam doesn’t care.
I’m his son, the ghoul tells whoever he’s talking to over the phone and there’s a wicked smile on his face even as his voice is mournful and broken.
Adam hears a male voice, faint over the speaker, but his eyes are on the ghoul as he gives the address of the diner Jackie works at and says yes, I can be there, before hanging up.
*
When he was twelve, his mother sat him on a chair in the kitchen, a glass of cold milk sweating on the table and fresh cookies, warm and half-burned. She had never been a good cook, but Adam liked the smell of the kitchen after she’d baked a batch of cookies, all sweet sugar and melted butter.
"Your father’s name’s John Winchester," she said.
Adam felt his eyes widening, repeated the name under his breath to taste it.
"Is he a criminal?" he asked and his mom laughed.
"No, honey," she said. "At least I don’t think he is."
She drank her coffee before talking again. "We had a brief fling twelve years ago. He was... I treated him, at the hospital, and then we-- Anyway, he was gone three days later and I never saw him again."
Adam picked one of the less burned cookies and took a bite. They were good; they usually were despite their ugly aspect.
"I can barely remember him, you know?" his mother said.
Adam known what to say, so he’d nodded. And then his mother had grabbed his hand and looked at him straight in the eyes like she did when she wanted Adam to listen hard.
"I never regretted it, Adam, okay? Never."
Adam nodded again, understanding in a way he couldn’t voice. He stood and let himself be hugged.
A week passed before he mustered up the courage to ask her and even then he waited for his mom to be busy.
"I want to know him," he said to her back.
She turned, spatula in hand, hair curled over her sweaty forehead and she was angry, didn’t even ask who Adam was talking about.
"No," she said.
And the she said no the thirty odd times he asked over the day because Adam had always been persistent and went after what he wanted – and knowing John Winchester was what he wanted.
On September 21st, his mother sat him at kitchen table again, no cookies and no milk this time, told him his father was coming for dinner that night.
Adam said thank you and hugged her. She hugged back so hard Adam feared she was going to break him in half.
*
His father stopped visiting more than two years ago. There was a phone call around November that made his mother’s eyes sad. Adam hadn’t asked what he said, hadn’t wanted to know, knew it had to be bad.
After a while, his mother told him that John wouldn’t come anymore. The following spring, Adam applied to pre-med, let go of the last of his childish dreams without regrets.
*
The ghoul walks to the diner like Adam would have done. It’s scary how many things it seems to know about Adam and he wonders if perhaps the shift into Adam had been deeper than faking his features and body – if the ghoul has stolen something more. His thoughts and memories, his dreams and all his deepest secrets. If that’s why nobody can tell the difference.
It’s weird walking unseen in plain sight, drives home the reality of being dead in a way Adam can’t bullshit around anymore, especially when he goes through the people walking on the street like they’re made of smoke. The day’s gloom, windy – the last fuck you from winter. At the diner, the ghoul stops to looks inside, and Adam looks too. Jackie’s not at the tables and for this Adam’s grateful.
The diner’s nearly empty, only a couple tables occupied. In the far corner, close to the restroom, there are two guys Adam’s never seen before sitting side by side.
The ghoul goes inside, looks around and one of the guys at the table straighttens, nudges the other with an elbow.
Adam? he calls.
The ghoul nods, walks straight to the table and sits.
When the ghouls starts telling about Adam’s mother, Adam wants to punch him straight in the face, but he’s curious, too. Wonders why it’s called these guys and what they have to do with John Winchester.
Tessa arrives when Jamie brings them breakfast. The ghoul digs in with gusto.
"The cavalry’s come," she says, but she doesn’t sound happy and Adam has no patience anymore for her cryptic words.
"What do you mean?"
She only sighs, looks resigned as she points at the table. "You’ll see."
Adam’s lost part of the conversation but he turns in time to hear one of the guys shouting, accusing the ghoul of lying.
Adam lets out a whoop, which of course no one can hear.
"Does he know what that thing is?" Adam asks Tessa, finds her staring, eyes dark and intense, at the guy who did the yelling.
Who the hell are you to call me a liar, the ghoul says.
Because we are John Winchester sons, the guy says, with such venom in his voice Adam flinches.
*
Adam fantasized about what kind of life John had, but a family somewhere far from Adam, maybe with a perfect wife and this two perfect sons, wasn’t what he imagined.
He’s back at the house, hiding in the basement, had run away after the two guys had shared their names – Dean and Sam Winchester. Both tall, self-assured and yes, they reminded him of John a little bit, the same guarded expression that inflamed Adam’s fantasy with stories of spies and secrets and dangerous jobs.
The car, parked behind the corner, all black and powerful and as big as he remembers it, was the last straw.
"Why are they here?" he asks Tessa.
She’s followed him from the diner down to the basement and she’s standing in the middle of the room, back straight and arms loose at her sides. She’s too pretty to be a reaper. Adam always imagined a black cape covering a bony face. Adam knew jackshit.
"You heard them, Adam. They’re your brothers."
"Are the ghouls going to kill them, too?"
Tessa sighs. "Your brothers are not--" she stops, bites her lips. "They know how to deal with the ghouls."
"Do you know them? How?"
"Yes," she says. "I know them. They’re hunters, like your father was. They helped me many times."
"What do they hunt?" he asks, but he knows – doesn’t know how he does but maybe it’s this ghost business, this non-life revealed to him along with those creature made of nightmares.
There’s noise upstairs, now – heavy steps that can’t be made by the sneakers the ghoul’s wearing. Adam wonders what the ghoul said to convince them to follow it home, remembers the ghoul has the truth at its side – Adam’s truth.
"Do they hunt ghouls?" he asks.
"Among other things, yes."
"So they’ll kill them. Good."
Tessa nods. "Will you come with me, now?"
Adam doesn’t answer at first.
"They didn’t know about me," he says finally, and of everything that’s happened in the last four days, this single fact is the one he finds the most unfair. "They didn’t look happy."
*
Adam paces. Up from the stairs to the couch and back.
Tessa went away sometime before sunset with a promise to come back.
It’s not like Adam is dying to see her again, though. He laughs at the stupidity of his own joke, feels betrayed and useless and unconsequential in whatever game life’s decided to play with him. Has he ever had a single choice that was completely his own? He didn’t decide to be born, and he didn’t decide to die, and in between everybody else but Adam had a say in his life, determining it with their big secrets.
He wishes she stayed. At least, she’s company.
At night, the ghoul comes back with his brothers and Adam wills himself to go to the kitchen. He’s feeling so tired, like everything he’s ever known is unravelling, showing a side hidden and dangerous.
The taller one – Sam – has hurt his leg and he’s sitting at the table, the towel wrapped around the wound already stained red.
Adam bends in front of him, inches from his face, hopes to see something familiar in his face, a glimps of recognition. Their eyes are maybe the same color, even though Adam can’t be sure in the dim light of the kitchen. His other brother, Dean, is wearing a suit now, cheap and black and stained at the knees with reddish dirt like he’s been kneeling in the ground. He’s even more angry than before if that’s even possible, but at whom Adam can’t tell the way he scowls at the ghoul and Sam both.
Adam wonders about a short temper, a propensity for violence under that pretty-faced surface and a measured stillness too controlled to be natural. He didn’t known John Winchester well enough, has no signposts to make comparisons, not really, but there were times when he watched his father and found the same readiness in the loose frame of his body, the same awareness in his eyes Adam’s now seeing in his son.
Dean’s wearing the same kind of jacket, too.
Dean and Sam look at each other and Adam sees an argument brewing in the ready tension of their bodies. Dean sends the ghoul upstair, and starts pacing, stops like there’s a sudden barrier when he spots the pictures hanging on the walls, the few they’d snapped at the lake the odds times John had taken him and his mother to fish.
Sam stays seated, looks at Dean with a frown of his own, hand still wrapped around his bleeding ankle.
Dean, he says.
Dean twirls around, no emotion on his face. What, Sam? You want to use him as a bait, fine, don’t try to convince me it’s all right. And then he stops, gaze assessing and direct like he’s conveying so much more with that look alone.
Sam holds it, chin held high. Dean shakes his head, then says, He could die.
He wants to help, Sam says, dismissive, angry himself now but Adam can see how different Sam’s rage is from Dean’s, colder and rational. Sam says, everybody dies.
Something explodes in Adam’s chest then, a renewed sorrow for having been deprived of this too, these half-brothers who can’t agree to protect him or use him as bait, who are worried about him, each in their own way.
Adam can’t decide who he is angrier at, the ghouls or John Winchester – who between them has taken the most away from him.
*
It’s painful to see Sam bond with the ghoul the way Adam should have. The pride in Sam’s eyes when the ghoul shots and hits the can dead center is at the same time warming and painful. Adam wouldn’t have done as good as the ghoul– he’s not familiar with firearms; doesn’t like them, actually. He wonders if Sam would have been as proud.
He goes to Dean who’s sitting on the truck of a fallen tree, a sawed off shotgun across his lap.
"He’s not me," Adam says. "Do you sense it?" But Dean can’t hear, obviously. Adam doesn’t know why he even tries.
Dean keeps staring, his expression closed off, but for his sad eyes.
Adam sits as close as he can. If he weren’t a ghost their legs would have touched.
*
Dean doesn’t talk with the ghoul more than it’s necessary, leaves the talking to Sam who’s sitting in front of it at the kitchen table. Thick books lie open between them, full of pictures of monsters Adam thought were just fantasies created to scare the children. Tales to tell around a fire, a girl pressed against his side.
But he’s a ghost now, and he’s been killed by creatures that eat fresh meat. It makes sense that there are other monsters out there.
*
He finds Tessa back in the basement.
"Did you know my father?" he asks.
"I met him once, yes."
"Did you, you know -- he’s dead, right?" It stings that he’s not even sure of that.
Tessa nods. "No, I didn’t reap his soul, if that’s what you’re asking."
"How’d he die?"
"I’m sorry, Adam. I can’t tell you everything."
"You don’t want to, you mean."
Tessa smiles. "Oh, you Winchesters, all of you the same. I don’t even know why I care so much."
Adam snorts. "Care about what? I’m dead, aren’t I? What the hell is there to care about?"
She puts her palm against his chest. "He would have protected you, Adam. If he could have. If he were alive."
"He could have told me about what’s out there like he told his sons. He could have taught me how to defend my mother. Myself."
"No, Adam. It isn’t that simple."
He’s not even angry anymore, wonders if perhaps this is what it means to let it go – what it means to die for real, not this nothingness he’s stuck in.
"Yeah, whatever," he says but his voice gets lost in the shouts coming from above.
*
He finds Sam already tied legs and arms to the table. He’s unconscious, head lolling to the side like he’s already dead. Dean is nowhere to be seen and he must be dead, there’s no other explanation for his absence.
"You said they would kill the ghouls," he says, but Tessa shakes her head in that infuriating, calm way of hers.
"No, Adam. I didn’t say any such thing."
"Then do something, please. They’re going to kill him."
The ghouls are circling the table and Sam like he’s a rich buffet. They shake him awake. Sam groans, confused, but only for a moment. Adam sees him chasing the fear down, sees him testing the ropes, defiant and unafraid but for the way his eyes darken.
It was so hard getting you alone, Sammy, says the ghoul with his mother’s voice. We thought your brother would never leave.
It looks crazy, now, any resemblance to her lost under the madness in her eyes, the hunger.
Sam cries in pain when they cut him and the ghouls make slurping noises as they drink his blood.
Adam steps away and stops, then sinks to the ground, hands covering his eyes so he doesn’t see Sam’s blood dropping on the floor to form a puddle. In the darkness he can hear the plink-plink of it – a sickening sound, loud like a clock at night.
"Please," he says. Like an answer, he hears Dean’s shout, the booming discharge of his shotgun that follows it like an echo.
Adam opens his eyes to see one of the ghouls’ head spray into a thousand pieces against the window. He shouts when the other one attacks Dean from behind – but it’s Sam’s warning that Dean hears.
The fight’s short, vicious, Dean’s eyes terrible as he overcomes the ghoul and uses a bat to snap the ghoul’s head from the rest of his body, over and over until Adam has to look away.
*
Adam had thought he’d feel better to see the ghouls dead, but he doesn’t. There’s no relief or joy, no satisfaction in having been avenged.
He stares at the ghoul that looked like him as Dean goes to help Sam. There’s a small pool of blood where the head should be, a mass of broken bones and flesh and brain matter wet with blood. The violence is thick in the air and Adam wonders at what kind of life John Winchester led, what kind of life his sons are carrying on like a legacy and a burden.
Dean’s helping Sam to stand and they leave as swiftly as they can and Adam’s alone again.
Tessa sits on the floor. Adam thinks this time he’ll go with her when she asks. There’s nothing left for him here.
"What will they do now?" he asks.
Tessa puts a arm around his shoulders, it’s solid and cool – soothing.
"I’ll show you," she says.
Adam closes his eyes and opens them to the deeper darkness of the woods. They are in a small clearing, across it. Maybe fifty feet away, Dean and Sam stand, something that reminds Adam of a pyre in front of them. There’s a body above it, the form discernible even through the thick canvas tied around it.
"That’s your body," Tessa says.
Adam had imagined as much. "What are they doing?"
"They’re burning it."
"Why? "
"So you won’t linger around. So you can pass on."
"Is it painful?"
"I don’t know, Adam. I’ve never been a ghost. But you don’t have to wait to see."
He nods, says, "Okay." Glances a last time at his brothers. So far away he can’t hear what they’re saying, but they look sad, shoulders hunched over.
"Do you think they would have liked me? You know, if... if we’d met."
Tessa smiles. "I think they would have."
Dean lights a match, the flame orange and yellow and bright in the gloomy woods. He throws it on the pyre.
Adam takes Tessa’s hand and doesn’t feel the flames.
- fin
Author:
smilla02Recipient:
egoteprovocoRating: R for violence and bloody imagery
Warnings: violence, death of canon characters – spoilers for Jump The Sharks.
Author's Notes: This wasn’t the story I wanted to write for you. But it ambushed me one day and demanded to be written – I hope you like it. Many thanks to the lovely C. For her sharp beta.
Summary: Adam screams and bleeds and prays. And his vision's clouded by the tears and his nose's clogged with snot and he can't breathe.
For a long time, there’s pain, cuts with a blade so sharp it burns when it rips his forearms and sides where the skin's tender and fragile. It's a horror so deep he can't make any sense of it. He feels the life bleed out of his veins, the blood first warm then cool against his sweaty skin. He looks straight into the horrendous face of the creature above him, at its mouth smudged with his blood, an electric need in its reddish eyes.
He feels himself slipping away and then dying.
*
Adam climbs down from the bus at a quarter to eleven, grabs his backpack and walks back home. He waves at Jackie when he passes by the diner, raises thumb and pinky to his ear and mouths later while she smiles, worried, and nods back, starts wiping the tables clean even as Adam's walking away.
Spring teases the air with a warm sun and some of the dread from the previous night fades away while he soaks up the familiar quiet of his town. It can’t be as bad as the police and Mr. Deers made to be on the phone, not when everything else is as normal and lazy as it is.
When he's at his door, he sees Mrs. Abbinati watering her roses, her gown so red and yellow and green with stamped flowers she nearly disappears amidst her plants. He waves and smiles, says, "Good morning, Mrs. Abbinati."
She waves back, "Hi, dear." And then, "hope your mom's all right." Adam swallows and nods his thank you. She likes him better now that he doesn't run over garden and trash her plants, but she's always liked his mom more.
He uses his key to get inside, feels the cold in the house like a solid wall. He steps in the foyer and a shiver runs down his back when the backpack falls on the ground with a thump that echoes. The house's far too silent, no radio in the background, or the clangs of pottery in the kitchen. It exudes a sense a sense of neglect and Adam's heart spikes up in fear.
It feels too real – her absence. Tangible in a way that voices over the phone couldn't convey.
"Mom," he shouts, his boots pounding on the stairs, and it's stupid but there's a back-lit form inside the bedroom door, and Adam thinks it was all a damn mistake, has an apology on his lips for having shouted. He never says it, though, can't. Feels nothing else but the pain at the base of his skull, sharp and blinding.
*
It's his mom who ties him up, and when he pleads with her to stop, please, she smiles an ugly, twisted smile that morphs her face into something hideous and raw. She puts a rag in his mouth that smells of vomit and then she starts cutting his clothes off and the skin underneath along with them. Shallow cuts at first that burn and sting and then deeper ones, enough for her to push her forefinger inside and use it as a hook, ripping through muscles and sinews in small morsels she chews on with a hum of pleasure. Something’s moving around his legs. He feels the rips of denim and then the wet ones of skin. And then more pain.
Adam screams and bleeds and prays, and his vision's clouded by the tears and his nose's clogged with snot and he can't breathe.
She doesn't talk, lips stained red with his blood, mouth stuffed full with his flesh. She doesn't stop.
*
Adam wakes up near the riverbank. Water that laps gently at his boots. The lights from the town are at his left and behind him, the graveyard is a dark shape of bare crosses and mourning statues against the sky.
He knows where he is, used to come out here to play with Jackie and Junior when he was a kid. Their bikes left tracks in the earth and raised clouds of red dust behind them like the tail of a comet. There's a tree a few feet ahead where they used to climb and hide and tell each other their dreams in hushed tones.
Junior used to say, "I want to be a cop like my father." But Jackie promptly corrected him. "Your dad's not a cop. He's a De-pu-ty Sheriff."
And then Jackie would say, "I'm going away from this stupid town and be rich and famous." But when Adam asked how she only shrugged and raised her head, hostile and moody, fell silent and sad until Junior poked her in the side to make her voice shriek with crystalline laughs.
Adam was always the last one, though. "I'll travel the world in my father's car," he would say hands raised to shape its form, "all black steel and a powerful engine." But his father had stopped dropping by, had stopped calling, and Adam had gone into pre-med to be more like his mother.
They’d been thirteen, and perched on that tree they could see all the world as far as the horizon.
His house is at the edge of town, over the last bend of the river, where the street lights are blinking off now that the sky's whitening. It's weirdly hard to walk, the air dense like glue, Adam's stomach flattening against his backbone like a sail against the wind. With each step he feels a longing to turn around, walk back toward the graveyard where his body's hidden inside a crypt, half-eaten and bloodied dry. But he keeps walking.
*
Adam knows he’s dead; he also knows he’s a ghost.
Being a ghost is boring.
He spends his first day on the little back verandah watching the cars whiz by on the Interstate. He'd sit on the rocking chair if he knew how to do it, but when he tried earlier, he went straight through, ass on the ground, so he stands.
His mother's left dirty plates in the sink where flies are buzzing and circling around and around in never-ending motion. He wonders why they never tire, why they keep going. Why nobody’s come to ask where the hell Adam is.
He sees no living soul all day long, but he hears the signs of their life: water groaning in the pipes, a shout somewhere down the street, music drifting with the breeze along with voices, the words broken, unintelligible. The day's bright and the sun must’ve been warm. In the afternoon it goes down inside clouds orange and red.
He doesn't know what he's doing here. If this is what dying is about then life is just a joke. He was expecting something else, something bigger than standing alone in an empty house.
Maybe he's supposed to do something to pass on, but there's no light that he can see and his house is the only place he can think of being.
It’s past midnight when the front door groans open. Adam walks through two walls to see her – his mother – entering, hair perfectly tied in a bun, straight and neat as ever, clothes tightly pressed and pristine and a large smile as she says, we're home, sweetie.
And then Adam sees himself, like in a mirror but not. That thing that looks like him is the right size, and the hair too is the exact color of his own, but the eyes are too spaced up and bulgy like they're ready to fall out, and the mouth's too large and takes up half of its elongated face, the teeth pointy and blackened when it smiles back and flops onto the couch in the same way Adam does.
Even as Adam looks, those weird features are shifting with a sickening noise of bones setting and shaping around the jaw and temples. The mouth shrinks to a normal size, and there's extra skin everywhere falling in large folds under its chin and cheeks, around the eyes.
His mother frames that impostor's head in her hands, turns it left and right, and her face has the same intense expression she had when she was checking if Adam had washed his face and brushed teeth.
When she's done, she says, Good job, brother.
*
She's not his mother. She's not her, she's not her.
She is not even human, perhaps – like that other thing sprawled on the couch who’s wearing Adam’s form like an elaborate mask.
She speaks like his mother and moves like his mother as she – it, maybe, it is better - goes around the house straightening things to their proper place the way she usually does. It's wrong somehow, weirdly out of place even as she starts cleaning the kitchen, a frown marring the perfect skin of her forehead, nose wrinkled in disgust at the smell. It reminds Adam so much of her he wants to weep.
Adam follows her upstairs, to the bedroom. The bed's perfectly made and there's nothing out of order but the picture on the nightstand that is now laying on the ground, the glass broken. He sees her pick it up and putting it gently back in its place. She stares at it for a long moment and then she goes away. Adam doesn't follow this time. He stares at his father in the picture, the easy bend of his smile, those eyes full of secret and things he wouldn't say no matter how many times Adam asked.
His mother’s smiling at him from the photo, crinkles around her eyes and no shadow of sadness in them. It would come later, the sadness, when John left after playing happy family for two or three days out of the hundreds he spent in his other life, his real one. Adam had hated him often for it even as his mother shook her head and ruffled his hair, told him that sometimes happinesss had to be taken in small sips.
He closes his eyes and imagines breathing the scent of his mother's perfume he knows permeates her room, but his nostrils are clogged with the smell of blood and the acrid scent of raw meat.
"Your mother didn't kill you, Adam."
He turns to the voice, his eyes snapping open to see a woman sitting in the chair. If Adam still had a beating heart, it would be in his throat now, but he hasn't one anymore and his fear has a different texture, a cold so intense it makes the air compress.
The woman has black hair, straight and neatly separated on her forehead.
"I know," he answers, because he’s always been smart and he’s figured that out already. "Who are you?" he asks.
"My name's Tessa," she says with a bow of her head and a smile, "and you really need to come with me now."
*
Tessa brings Adam back to the crypt within a blink, shows him his mother's remains – a lump of bones with stripes of flesh hanging from them. Some hair, blond and silky in the low light where the blood isn't flaking off and staining it.
She says, "Ghouls like human meat and that's what the creature living in your house are."
She stretches her arm toward Adam, hand open, palm turned upward, and again tells him he needs to go with her.
Adam shakes his head and wills himself back home, back to his mom's bedroom. It works, for some mysterious reason, it does. When he's there, he flops onto the bed, sinks inside it a bit, caught between blankets and sheets and the spongy texture of the mattress like the ghost he is.
Then he cries.
*
Tessa asks always the same question and doesn't have any answer herself. Adam tells her to go away and she goes, doesn’t show her pretty, sad face for two days.
The ghoul that looks like his mother went away that first night and now there's only the other one, answering the door and eating the food his neighborhood brings – casseroles covered with aluminum foil and Tupperware bowls with colorful tops.
Jackie comes, too, eyes tearful and big. Adam moves from his spot in the corner, hedges himself between the ghoul and her body and tries to wipe the tears from her face with his thumb. His finger goes straight through and he lets his arm fall at his sides.
"Junior’s dad’s missing, too."
The ghoul’s fake surprise would have fooled even Adam. It stands and starts pacing, hands rubbing the hair back from its forehead.
"God, Jackie. What the hell’s going on?"
Jackie shakes her head, lips pursed and face streaked with fresh tears. When Adam sits, she hugs him tight, says something too low for Adam to hear and he seethes at another thing that’s being robbed from him right under his nose.
He wishes he could break everything, kick the chairs and rip the wallpaper from the walls and burn the house down to a small mound of ash so it can’t be violated like this – and most of all, and with a need that clouds his vision, he wants the ghouls dead. Both of them. He wants to see them ripped apart limb by limb, longs to see the flesh be torned off their bones the same way they’ve torn it from his mother’s body and his.
The need's so strong it's like he's breathing it with each inhale of air.
"How?" he asks Tessa when she comes back.
"Ghouls are like zombies. You can kill them by severing their head."
Adam is surprised that she’s given him even that much. "Okay," he says.
"No, Adam, it’s not okay. You can’t kill them," she says. "You’re dead."
She sounds neither smug nor cruel, but Adam hates her all the same.
"You’re just a ghost, Adam," she continues. "You’re not alive and you won’t be no matter how much you want it."
"Why not?" he asks, looks at the ghoul as it turns on his TV and dirties his carpet and his couch with soiled shoes.
"I won’t come with you so you better let me go. I’m not coming."
He shouts the last sentence, and the pile of bills stacked on the table beside the front door flutters to the ground. Adam stares at them.
*
Adam’s seen the movies – maybe they got that right, at least, and he can learn to move things.
The ghoul goes out at night and Adam has a good idea of what it does. He can’t let himself think of that mouth – his own – full of raw, human flesh but the thought fills him with enough rage that when he kicks the door it rocks gently under the blow.
The entire night, he practices on the back door, willing it open. He tries and he tries and when the sun comes up, he’s so tired he can barely stand and the door’s still shut, mocking him with its stillness.
"You can learn to move things, Adam," Tessa says, "but you’ll need time. And by then you won’t be Adam anymore."
"What do you mean?" Adam asks from where he’s sitting on the floor. He looks at his own hand. He can’t be sure but it looks transparent, less solid.
"People aren’t suppposed to stay here when they die. You’ll become angry and unstable, and then you won’t be so different than the ghouls that killed you and your mother."
"If this is your problem, then you can go away right now," he says. "I’m already angry."
"No, you’re not that angry. But you will be if you don’t come with me."
Adam stands, looks outside. Through the window he can see the ghoul walking up to the house, easy and familiar like it belongs here.
"There’s nothing here for you, Adam."
She’s close now, and Adam swears he can feel the pull of her – an unbearable need to go with her, to let himself go.
The front door opens. The ghoul’s talking to someone but Adam can’t hear from the kitchen.
"No," Adam says. "They’re still alive." He looks at Tessa, can see that she’s angry but the ghoul’s coming in the kitchen and Adam doesn’t care.
I’m his son, the ghoul tells whoever he’s talking to over the phone and there’s a wicked smile on his face even as his voice is mournful and broken.
Adam hears a male voice, faint over the speaker, but his eyes are on the ghoul as he gives the address of the diner Jackie works at and says yes, I can be there, before hanging up.
*
When he was twelve, his mother sat him on a chair in the kitchen, a glass of cold milk sweating on the table and fresh cookies, warm and half-burned. She had never been a good cook, but Adam liked the smell of the kitchen after she’d baked a batch of cookies, all sweet sugar and melted butter.
"Your father’s name’s John Winchester," she said.
Adam felt his eyes widening, repeated the name under his breath to taste it.
"Is he a criminal?" he asked and his mom laughed.
"No, honey," she said. "At least I don’t think he is."
She drank her coffee before talking again. "We had a brief fling twelve years ago. He was... I treated him, at the hospital, and then we-- Anyway, he was gone three days later and I never saw him again."
Adam picked one of the less burned cookies and took a bite. They were good; they usually were despite their ugly aspect.
"I can barely remember him, you know?" his mother said.
Adam known what to say, so he’d nodded. And then his mother had grabbed his hand and looked at him straight in the eyes like she did when she wanted Adam to listen hard.
"I never regretted it, Adam, okay? Never."
Adam nodded again, understanding in a way he couldn’t voice. He stood and let himself be hugged.
A week passed before he mustered up the courage to ask her and even then he waited for his mom to be busy.
"I want to know him," he said to her back.
She turned, spatula in hand, hair curled over her sweaty forehead and she was angry, didn’t even ask who Adam was talking about.
"No," she said.
And the she said no the thirty odd times he asked over the day because Adam had always been persistent and went after what he wanted – and knowing John Winchester was what he wanted.
On September 21st, his mother sat him at kitchen table again, no cookies and no milk this time, told him his father was coming for dinner that night.
Adam said thank you and hugged her. She hugged back so hard Adam feared she was going to break him in half.
*
His father stopped visiting more than two years ago. There was a phone call around November that made his mother’s eyes sad. Adam hadn’t asked what he said, hadn’t wanted to know, knew it had to be bad.
After a while, his mother told him that John wouldn’t come anymore. The following spring, Adam applied to pre-med, let go of the last of his childish dreams without regrets.
*
The ghoul walks to the diner like Adam would have done. It’s scary how many things it seems to know about Adam and he wonders if perhaps the shift into Adam had been deeper than faking his features and body – if the ghoul has stolen something more. His thoughts and memories, his dreams and all his deepest secrets. If that’s why nobody can tell the difference.
It’s weird walking unseen in plain sight, drives home the reality of being dead in a way Adam can’t bullshit around anymore, especially when he goes through the people walking on the street like they’re made of smoke. The day’s gloom, windy – the last fuck you from winter. At the diner, the ghoul stops to looks inside, and Adam looks too. Jackie’s not at the tables and for this Adam’s grateful.
The diner’s nearly empty, only a couple tables occupied. In the far corner, close to the restroom, there are two guys Adam’s never seen before sitting side by side.
The ghoul goes inside, looks around and one of the guys at the table straighttens, nudges the other with an elbow.
Adam? he calls.
The ghoul nods, walks straight to the table and sits.
When the ghouls starts telling about Adam’s mother, Adam wants to punch him straight in the face, but he’s curious, too. Wonders why it’s called these guys and what they have to do with John Winchester.
Tessa arrives when Jamie brings them breakfast. The ghoul digs in with gusto.
"The cavalry’s come," she says, but she doesn’t sound happy and Adam has no patience anymore for her cryptic words.
"What do you mean?"
She only sighs, looks resigned as she points at the table. "You’ll see."
Adam’s lost part of the conversation but he turns in time to hear one of the guys shouting, accusing the ghoul of lying.
Adam lets out a whoop, which of course no one can hear.
"Does he know what that thing is?" Adam asks Tessa, finds her staring, eyes dark and intense, at the guy who did the yelling.
Who the hell are you to call me a liar, the ghoul says.
Because we are John Winchester sons, the guy says, with such venom in his voice Adam flinches.
*
Adam fantasized about what kind of life John had, but a family somewhere far from Adam, maybe with a perfect wife and this two perfect sons, wasn’t what he imagined.
He’s back at the house, hiding in the basement, had run away after the two guys had shared their names – Dean and Sam Winchester. Both tall, self-assured and yes, they reminded him of John a little bit, the same guarded expression that inflamed Adam’s fantasy with stories of spies and secrets and dangerous jobs.
The car, parked behind the corner, all black and powerful and as big as he remembers it, was the last straw.
"Why are they here?" he asks Tessa.
She’s followed him from the diner down to the basement and she’s standing in the middle of the room, back straight and arms loose at her sides. She’s too pretty to be a reaper. Adam always imagined a black cape covering a bony face. Adam knew jackshit.
"You heard them, Adam. They’re your brothers."
"Are the ghouls going to kill them, too?"
Tessa sighs. "Your brothers are not--" she stops, bites her lips. "They know how to deal with the ghouls."
"Do you know them? How?"
"Yes," she says. "I know them. They’re hunters, like your father was. They helped me many times."
"What do they hunt?" he asks, but he knows – doesn’t know how he does but maybe it’s this ghost business, this non-life revealed to him along with those creature made of nightmares.
There’s noise upstairs, now – heavy steps that can’t be made by the sneakers the ghoul’s wearing. Adam wonders what the ghoul said to convince them to follow it home, remembers the ghoul has the truth at its side – Adam’s truth.
"Do they hunt ghouls?" he asks.
"Among other things, yes."
"So they’ll kill them. Good."
Tessa nods. "Will you come with me, now?"
Adam doesn’t answer at first.
"They didn’t know about me," he says finally, and of everything that’s happened in the last four days, this single fact is the one he finds the most unfair. "They didn’t look happy."
*
Adam paces. Up from the stairs to the couch and back.
Tessa went away sometime before sunset with a promise to come back.
It’s not like Adam is dying to see her again, though. He laughs at the stupidity of his own joke, feels betrayed and useless and unconsequential in whatever game life’s decided to play with him. Has he ever had a single choice that was completely his own? He didn’t decide to be born, and he didn’t decide to die, and in between everybody else but Adam had a say in his life, determining it with their big secrets.
He wishes she stayed. At least, she’s company.
At night, the ghoul comes back with his brothers and Adam wills himself to go to the kitchen. He’s feeling so tired, like everything he’s ever known is unravelling, showing a side hidden and dangerous.
The taller one – Sam – has hurt his leg and he’s sitting at the table, the towel wrapped around the wound already stained red.
Adam bends in front of him, inches from his face, hopes to see something familiar in his face, a glimps of recognition. Their eyes are maybe the same color, even though Adam can’t be sure in the dim light of the kitchen. His other brother, Dean, is wearing a suit now, cheap and black and stained at the knees with reddish dirt like he’s been kneeling in the ground. He’s even more angry than before if that’s even possible, but at whom Adam can’t tell the way he scowls at the ghoul and Sam both.
Adam wonders about a short temper, a propensity for violence under that pretty-faced surface and a measured stillness too controlled to be natural. He didn’t known John Winchester well enough, has no signposts to make comparisons, not really, but there were times when he watched his father and found the same readiness in the loose frame of his body, the same awareness in his eyes Adam’s now seeing in his son.
Dean’s wearing the same kind of jacket, too.
Dean and Sam look at each other and Adam sees an argument brewing in the ready tension of their bodies. Dean sends the ghoul upstair, and starts pacing, stops like there’s a sudden barrier when he spots the pictures hanging on the walls, the few they’d snapped at the lake the odds times John had taken him and his mother to fish.
Sam stays seated, looks at Dean with a frown of his own, hand still wrapped around his bleeding ankle.
Dean, he says.
Dean twirls around, no emotion on his face. What, Sam? You want to use him as a bait, fine, don’t try to convince me it’s all right. And then he stops, gaze assessing and direct like he’s conveying so much more with that look alone.
Sam holds it, chin held high. Dean shakes his head, then says, He could die.
He wants to help, Sam says, dismissive, angry himself now but Adam can see how different Sam’s rage is from Dean’s, colder and rational. Sam says, everybody dies.
Something explodes in Adam’s chest then, a renewed sorrow for having been deprived of this too, these half-brothers who can’t agree to protect him or use him as bait, who are worried about him, each in their own way.
Adam can’t decide who he is angrier at, the ghouls or John Winchester – who between them has taken the most away from him.
*
It’s painful to see Sam bond with the ghoul the way Adam should have. The pride in Sam’s eyes when the ghoul shots and hits the can dead center is at the same time warming and painful. Adam wouldn’t have done as good as the ghoul– he’s not familiar with firearms; doesn’t like them, actually. He wonders if Sam would have been as proud.
He goes to Dean who’s sitting on the truck of a fallen tree, a sawed off shotgun across his lap.
"He’s not me," Adam says. "Do you sense it?" But Dean can’t hear, obviously. Adam doesn’t know why he even tries.
Dean keeps staring, his expression closed off, but for his sad eyes.
Adam sits as close as he can. If he weren’t a ghost their legs would have touched.
*
Dean doesn’t talk with the ghoul more than it’s necessary, leaves the talking to Sam who’s sitting in front of it at the kitchen table. Thick books lie open between them, full of pictures of monsters Adam thought were just fantasies created to scare the children. Tales to tell around a fire, a girl pressed against his side.
But he’s a ghost now, and he’s been killed by creatures that eat fresh meat. It makes sense that there are other monsters out there.
*
He finds Tessa back in the basement.
"Did you know my father?" he asks.
"I met him once, yes."
"Did you, you know -- he’s dead, right?" It stings that he’s not even sure of that.
Tessa nods. "No, I didn’t reap his soul, if that’s what you’re asking."
"How’d he die?"
"I’m sorry, Adam. I can’t tell you everything."
"You don’t want to, you mean."
Tessa smiles. "Oh, you Winchesters, all of you the same. I don’t even know why I care so much."
Adam snorts. "Care about what? I’m dead, aren’t I? What the hell is there to care about?"
She puts her palm against his chest. "He would have protected you, Adam. If he could have. If he were alive."
"He could have told me about what’s out there like he told his sons. He could have taught me how to defend my mother. Myself."
"No, Adam. It isn’t that simple."
He’s not even angry anymore, wonders if perhaps this is what it means to let it go – what it means to die for real, not this nothingness he’s stuck in.
"Yeah, whatever," he says but his voice gets lost in the shouts coming from above.
*
He finds Sam already tied legs and arms to the table. He’s unconscious, head lolling to the side like he’s already dead. Dean is nowhere to be seen and he must be dead, there’s no other explanation for his absence.
"You said they would kill the ghouls," he says, but Tessa shakes her head in that infuriating, calm way of hers.
"No, Adam. I didn’t say any such thing."
"Then do something, please. They’re going to kill him."
The ghouls are circling the table and Sam like he’s a rich buffet. They shake him awake. Sam groans, confused, but only for a moment. Adam sees him chasing the fear down, sees him testing the ropes, defiant and unafraid but for the way his eyes darken.
It was so hard getting you alone, Sammy, says the ghoul with his mother’s voice. We thought your brother would never leave.
It looks crazy, now, any resemblance to her lost under the madness in her eyes, the hunger.
Sam cries in pain when they cut him and the ghouls make slurping noises as they drink his blood.
Adam steps away and stops, then sinks to the ground, hands covering his eyes so he doesn’t see Sam’s blood dropping on the floor to form a puddle. In the darkness he can hear the plink-plink of it – a sickening sound, loud like a clock at night.
"Please," he says. Like an answer, he hears Dean’s shout, the booming discharge of his shotgun that follows it like an echo.
Adam opens his eyes to see one of the ghouls’ head spray into a thousand pieces against the window. He shouts when the other one attacks Dean from behind – but it’s Sam’s warning that Dean hears.
The fight’s short, vicious, Dean’s eyes terrible as he overcomes the ghoul and uses a bat to snap the ghoul’s head from the rest of his body, over and over until Adam has to look away.
*
Adam had thought he’d feel better to see the ghouls dead, but he doesn’t. There’s no relief or joy, no satisfaction in having been avenged.
He stares at the ghoul that looked like him as Dean goes to help Sam. There’s a small pool of blood where the head should be, a mass of broken bones and flesh and brain matter wet with blood. The violence is thick in the air and Adam wonders at what kind of life John Winchester led, what kind of life his sons are carrying on like a legacy and a burden.
Dean’s helping Sam to stand and they leave as swiftly as they can and Adam’s alone again.
Tessa sits on the floor. Adam thinks this time he’ll go with her when she asks. There’s nothing left for him here.
"What will they do now?" he asks.
Tessa puts a arm around his shoulders, it’s solid and cool – soothing.
"I’ll show you," she says.
Adam closes his eyes and opens them to the deeper darkness of the woods. They are in a small clearing, across it. Maybe fifty feet away, Dean and Sam stand, something that reminds Adam of a pyre in front of them. There’s a body above it, the form discernible even through the thick canvas tied around it.
"That’s your body," Tessa says.
Adam had imagined as much. "What are they doing?"
"They’re burning it."
"Why? "
"So you won’t linger around. So you can pass on."
"Is it painful?"
"I don’t know, Adam. I’ve never been a ghost. But you don’t have to wait to see."
He nods, says, "Okay." Glances a last time at his brothers. So far away he can’t hear what they’re saying, but they look sad, shoulders hunched over.
"Do you think they would have liked me? You know, if... if we’d met."
Tessa smiles. "I think they would have."
Dean lights a match, the flame orange and yellow and bright in the gloomy woods. He throws it on the pyre.
Adam takes Tessa’s hand and doesn’t feel the flames.
- fin
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