Fic: St. Peter's Bones

Title: St. Peter's Bones
Author: Lyn
Rating: NC-17
Notes/Warnings: Not exactly a sequel to In Jerusalem Next Year but it takes the assumptions that fic made and rolls from there.

St. Peter's Bones


The guy wasn’t the usual succubus fare: tall, tamed Jew-fro, a little on the skinny side. Maybe kind of a tool, but Dean wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers. Succubi usually liked them movie star handsome with an accessorizing ego if they wanted a challenge, or pudgy and poorly socialized if they were in a fix for the antiseptic burn of desperation.

“Do you have a cigarette?” he asked suddenly. It was the first thing he had said since Dean dragged him out of his house.

Dean looked up from his watch. The unspoken rule was five minutes or more and he went in after Dad, orders or not. It had been one and a half. “No, man. Sorry.”

“Oh,” the guy said. “Just, you had a lighter in there. So I thought, you know.”

“Lighter’s more of a working accessory,” Dean said. “I don’t smoke. Cigs… those things’ll kill you.”

“Yeah,” the guy (Dan? Dave? He looked like a Dave.) said, the joke floating harmlessly over his head like the little flakes of ash still in the air. “I quit, actually, a few years ago. Just… was that Sarah in there? That - that thing?”

“Succubi have been known to shapeshift sometimes,” Dean said. It was the only comfort he had to give. “It might have killed your Sarah, taken her place. There would have been magic mumbo-jumbo, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.”

“But they never found a body,” Dave said, unable to stop staring at his house, the flickering lights on the second floor that were the last remnants of a sheltered life. “The others, they found all their bodies.”

Dean shrugged. “Like I said, mumbo-jumbo. It’s not your fault.”

Dave pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes squeezed shut. He turned to Dean, still bleeding from the scrape on his cheek, his face waxy with exhaustion. “That’s your partner in there, right? You just left him with it?”

“You want to pit a red-blooded twenty-three year old guy against a succubus? She’d have put a whammy on me before I had time to check out her rack. The best thing I could have done was get you out the door. In a fight I’d just be a liability.”

“But your partner isn’t, what? Susceptible?”

“Not really,” Dean said. Three minutes fifteen seconds. “Not for a while, anyway.”

Dad came out at the four minute mark exactly, favoring one side. He gave Dave (or whatever) a locket and a few bland words of sympathy. Dave just nodded, wide-eyed as the shock began to penetrate, and Dean and John drove away casual as neighbors just as the police were rolling in.

A few miles out of town, Dean finally asked, “Do you think she meant it?”

John kept his hands at ten and two, his eyes on the road. He sighed like asphalt rumbling. “Nothing wants to die, Dean.”

“I meant before that, about being left alone. She didn’t kill that guy. They lived together for eight months. She didn’t even feed on him - I’ve never heard of them doing that.” Dean drummed his fingers against the gearshift. “She could have been serious about starting over.”

Dad looked through the side window like he always did when his thoughts deserved the respect of organization before he said, “She was sucking the souls out of six men in order to keep from feeding on one. Intentions don’t matter. These things can’t change their natures.”

It was what Dean had been expecting, as fair and hard-edged as any truth he knew. Dean eventually dozed as the adrenaline wore off and his father put the state line behind them. He woke up when John pulled up to a motel in Nebraska, fumbling for the medical tape in the glove compartment and cursing so quietly Dean just heard a constant low mumble like rain against the windshield.

**

The thing was, you couldn’t ever mistake this for the way it used to be, back when Dad’s plans were the fulcrum of their days and the three of them more or less balanced out. For instance, Dean and Sam were in the one solitary Starbucks clinging to the outskirts of a nameless Illinois town. Dad would watch a Packers game with Satan before he paid five bucks for coffee, and his phantom disapproval didn’t begin to fill the hole of his absence.

Dean negotiated the moral dilemma by buying one cup of plain non-sissy coffee for the two of them to split. He also ordered a slice of cheesecake and dropped it wordlessly on the table because it was one of the few things that, if left unattended for long enough, Sam would remember to eat.

Right now Sam was just toying with his fork, staring off into the distance with a focused, furrowed look Dean had grown to associate with leaving him and his spiritual plane behind. “See anything interesting, Ms. Warwick?”

“That’s going to start being funny any day now,” Sam said absently. He gestured to a couple waiting for their mochacinos. “Just, those people. I don’t think they’re very happy.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “So what, now you’re a mood ring?”

“It’s not aura reading or anything.” Sam makes frustrated kneading motions with his hands, conducting a symphony out of the vagueness. “More like they kind of give off… angles or something, little barbs. It’s hard to explain.”

Once the initial weirdness, the otherness of it, wore off, Sam had been treating this thing almost in the abstract, like it was an interesting thought-experiment or hobby. It bothered Dean, how this appealed to the academic in his brother. “Yeah, that reminds me, there’s this mystical new psychic phenomenon people are finally getting wind of called ‘body language.’ Maybe you should start a seminar.”

“It’s more than that,” Sam protested. But he didn’t elaborate, just scowled down at his cake. Dean finished skimming the local paper. Sometimes he was tempted to cut out all the articles they left in their wake about mysterious fires and grave lootings. Maybe scrapbook them - cheap lace edging on the side, ‘Our First Demon’ written in loopy cursive on the front. He shared the thought with Sam, but he was still sulking over the body language crack. So Dean swiped a copy of the New Yorker off the table and gave it to Sam back in the motel room.

Sam did that thing where he bit down around his smile, trying not to encourage Dean. “You shouldn’t steal from Starbucks,” he said, already flipping through the pages. He glanced up at Dean over them. “It’s free-trade coffee.”

“One day the yuppies will come together and crown you their queen,” Dean said. Sam flipped him off and smoothed the cover of the magazine with a respect that was frankly unsettling. Dean took advantage of the shitty motel’s wireless to hunt up a new gig while Sam went to shave in the bathroom. “Guy in Oregon swears he saw the Northern lights. Some bullshit in Springfield about cows… Huh, this makes, what, the third? Yeah, third weird death in someplace called Duxbury, Massachusetts.”

The sandpaper scrape of the razor stopped. “Did you say Duxbury?”

Dean checked again. “Yeah, in Massachusetts. Why, you know it?”

Sam wandered out of the bathroom, rubbing shaving cream off his face, looking so off-center Dean didn’t bother pointing out that he hadn’t finished shaving. He read the article over Dean’s shoulder. Dean could feel the pulse of Sam’s breath against his ear, smell the warm green of him.

Sam sat on the edge of Dean’s bed, bunching a handtowel up in his hands and staring at it like he intended to bind a wound. He cleared his throat a little. “Jessica’s parents live there.”

Dean thought motherloving cock-ramming fuck.

Dean said, “Huh.”

Dean added, when Sam seemed reluctant to join the conversation, “It looks like a real case, Sammy.”

“Sam,” Sam said on autopilot, but it got him to look up from his towel. “Let me read it, okay?”

Dean showered while Sam researched, jerking off loud enough maybe Sam could hear it over the water.

**

They went through a bad patch a month after Sam left. Dad sunk into one of his periods when he drank nearly anything that came with a label, and maybe some of Sam’s rebellion siphoned off to Dean because there was no way he was going to nurse him through it. Instead he went out – bars, clubs, anyplace that didn’t charge cover – and drank, but not stupidly, and fucked the first girl he stumbled over. Dean had a sketchy, instant spark with a certain kind of woman; not a huge segment of the population but enough that he never bothered to work for a smile or buy a drink. He started taking advantage of it in earnest; stacked or tall or redheaded or goth, Dean stopped giving a shit about details and fucked them in bathrooms, alleyways, their inevitable studio apartments. Always fast, sometimes a little desperate if they had a particular smile, but he all he needed was a pair of breasts and a curved waist before he stumbled home to pick up Dad’s empties.

It turned out he didn’t even require a chick necessarily, when a couple fed him jack and cokes all night and took him home. They were obviously slumming it and Dean was obviously so lost in his apathy he didn’t do anything but kiss back when the guy reached for him first. Dean rode him while he fucked his girlfriend. The sex wasn’t bad, but he spent the whole time thinking, with a drunken warped-glass clarity, how much it must suck to stare at the middle distance between the compromise and what you really wanted.

He didn’t even shower before they gave him a ride back to the motel, oddly proud of his dishevelment, like the afterbite of semen in his mouth was a badge. Not that it mattered, since John was most of the way to passed out when he opened the door, the bottle of Olde English dangling out of his hand.

“Christ,” Dean muttered, came over to save the carpet from smelling like hobo. Dad must not have been as far gone as he looked, because his eyes opened in an underwater way when Dean took the bottle from him and put it on the nightstand.

“Dean?” John said, struggling up from his slouch.

“Yeah,” Dean said, putting a hand on John’s shoulder, helping him. “It’s me.”

Dad looked somewhere in the vicinity of Dean’s chest, blinking even though Dean hadn’t turned on the light. “You came back.”

He said it pretty calmly, no hint of desperation or relief. But it still twisted up parts of Dean where calluses hadn’t formed. And it hit him, savagely and casually, that there were things he was never not going to feel.

“What, are you kidding me?” Dean said, getting his father a glass of water. “You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”

It was a chicken-or-the-egg progression after that, but Dad stopped drinking so much and Dean kept him company most nights. But when he did go out, it was with slightly different eyes, like he learned to see a new color on the spectrum. Guys’ tells were basically like girls’, more of a deliberate slouch sometimes or a leg kicked out almost close enough to touch.

He thought about it when Sam stretched in the car with his hands curled behind his back, flickered a glance at Dean from underneath his eyelashes, grinned so it crawled across his face like a searchlight.

**

Sam was still asleep when Dean left the minimart with a Twinkie and three Swiss Cake rolls. It looked peaceful enough; a dreamless sleeping Sam had a smooth mouth and tilted cat eyes, head resting heavily against the window. Dean shut the door as quietly as possible, but Sam woke up with a start when the engine turned over. “Where are we?”

“Outside Cleveland.” Dean tossed him the Twinkie. “Breakfast. We got about eight hours before Boston.”

Sam crinkled the plastic. “They didn’t have a granola bar in there?”

“This and other mysteries the world will never know.”

Back on the highway they talked about the case, the only straight path down the minefield of their conversations. “So classic animal attack wound patterns made with a human mouth and fingernails. Possession?”

“Maybe,” Dean said, cutting off an SUV just on principle. “Could be it just looked human, but too much blood left in the corpses for a kappa or something. Personally, I’m thinking shapeshifter.”

“Dean,” Sam said, patient and pedantic. “It doesn’t make sense for an anthropomorphic shapeshifter to attack when it’s in human form.”

“It would if the animal form wasn’t so handy for killing a person.”

Sam made his snorting noise. “So, what? We’re dealing with a shapeshifting turtle?”

“No, you retard,” said Dean. “Look at what we’ve got. Small town in Massachusetts, right next to the shore. Filled with fishermen, casual boaters, jetskiiers, whatever. North Atlantic. Come on, think about it.”

Sam stared blankly out the windshield, and Dean counted down quietly three two one until it hit. “That’s not what selkies do. They create storms, sink ships. Why would one be on land in the first place?”

Dean shrugged. “Are we driving to New England for my health?”

Sam shook his head ruefully, although Dean couldn’t tell if he had actual objections. Sam was pissy like it was his default programming, but so far he had been more vacant than cranky on this particular stretch of road.

“I’m more interested in three of the victims coming from the same family,” Sam said, flipping through the print-outs. “Something has a grudge.”

This was one of Dean’s favorite times, when the only real certainty in front of them was the nebulous lull of a destination. The Impala ate up the heat-shimmer infinity of the highway and purred under his hands, wrapping him and Sam in a private universe of fast food and AC/DC that never felt like limbo and no one else could touch.

It took Dean two hours of watching Sam rest his knuckles between the part of his lips and staring out the window like the muddy blur of the shoulder was sagebrush, like being wistful or pensive was actually appropriate here, for him to say. “You ever meet Jessica’s parents before?”

Sam turned to look at him with the abruptness of a hunting dog, blinking in surprise. Dean had made a point not to talk about Jessica. For the most part, Sam’s grief, the long mummification of it, seemed to be genuinely for the girl and not the life she represented, and Dean respected that enough to leave her memory alone. Dean respected that enough to do a lot of things.

“A couple times,” Sam said carefully. “They’re nice.”

You ever call them Mom and Dad? “So you know the town then.”

“A little,” Sam said, and Dean wanted to break his brother’s neck under the sheer amount of things he wasn’t telling him.

But twenty miles later, when Sam said, suddenly, “It’s a nice place. Jess and I were going to move there when we finished our degrees.” Dean thought maybe he had the right idea with the censorship, if the truth felt like this.

**

Duxbury was the kind of place Sam would think of as a nice town: all white clapboard houses and intentionally quaint stores, the harbor pixilated with sailboats bobbing like birds or bits of paper on glassblown blue water. It was very Eastern seaboard as envisioned by suburbanites, the working community of industrial fishermen slowly being blotted out by Boston commuters who vacationed in Rhode Island one summer and wanted to live the dream.

Dean had never really been a fan of New England. The Atlantic was too cold and the kind of endless that had nothing to do with possibility. Now the Dakota badlands, West Texas, that was Dean’s country, where the sky took up a hundred and eighty degrees of the scenery so the only important landmark was the horizon. You had to stand your ground in a land like that or it would stare you down, dwindle you to nothing.

Sam complained that the plain states made him feel small. He liked the boundaries of the coast and never seemed to understand how close it put him to the edge.

Right now they were parked ten blocks from the harbor in front of a house sunken and smaller than the ones they saw driving into town while Dean flipped through the fake IDs. Sam looked grim. He had looked grim for the last thirty miles on I-95, he looked grim when they saw the picturesque little sign welcoming them to Duxbury, he looked grim the twenty minutes they were lost trying to find Leonard Kennedy’s address. Dean slapped the appropriate card hard against Sam’s chest. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand it was the kind of stoicism you had to keep talking yourself into. You played the hand you were dealt, and sometimes cheating was a part of grace if it was for a good cause, but you did what you could and got by. There endeth the fucking lesson.

Sam shouldered him when they got out of the car and Dean shoved him back. Sam gave him an incredulous look, part bewildered part scornful, before they squared themselves towards the door and Dean knocked.

The guy who answered was mid-thirties, barrel-framed and tubby on top of that with one of those too-wide British faces with all the features uncomfortably crowded in the middle. He wore a baseball hat indoors, which was never a good sign. “Yeah?”

“Leonard Kennedy?”

“Yeah.”

“My name is Agent Smith. This is my partner, Agent Jones. We’re from Animal Control.” Even with the ID, Kennedy didn’t straighten up or look attentive enough to be impressed. This was easier with Dad, when he could justify his age by playing the rookie cop. People with something to hide responded a lot better to Dad’s grizzled, bone-weary intensity than two punk kids in dirty jeans. Now the trick was all in the sales pitch. “We were assigned as part of the detail to the investigation.”

Leonard Kennedy flinched involuntarily, conditioned by what now must be over a month of gray and grueling police procedure, equal parts bureaucratic tedium and constant suspicion. Dean had seen a thousand variations on the reaction, and this is almost a minuet of guilt. No wonder the cops were all over this guy’s grill.

“A person killed my mother,” Leonard said, stiffly enough to formalize his anger. “And my sister and her kid. Not a fucking bear. The last thing I need is one more worthless agency poking around-”

“Mr. Kennedy, please,” Sam said, calm and sincere. “We just want to help.”

One of Sam’s main problems in life was that most people just didn’t have the heart to say no to him. Kennedy didn’t either; he said, “Christ,” like it was already a waste of his time and stepped out on the porch with them, folding his arms over his chest. “So what do you want to know?”

Dean made a show of looking down at his notepad. “You’re a fisherman, is that correct?”

“When there’s fish left to catch.”

“And when you’re out there,” Sam said. “Have you ever seen anything you would describe as unusual?”

“Unusual’s a pretty big word, kid,” Kennedy said. His eyes kept darting to where he had left the door open but the screen closed. “Look, my pop’s not doing so good since they found Nina. I gotta get back-”

“Lenny, please,” Dean said smoothly. “We just want a few more minutes of your time.”

“Yeah, and I just want some justice for my family but you sons of bitches aren’t gonna-”

“Who is that?” Sam asked quietly.


There was a woman behind the door in a pink sweatshirt, baggy jeans. She had her face pressed to the screen, her hand curled up in a fist by her head, staring at the three of them with the eyes as dark and round and unreadable as a well. Her hair was loose and uncombed like a child’s, and she had a smattering of fine Irish freckles on an otherwise powder white face.

“What are you doing here?” Lenny snarled. He went over, pounded on the aluminum of the door, recoiled more than she did at the rattle. “Who let you out? Get back upstairs now! Now!”

They just looked at each other for a moment. Lenny, nearly pawing like a bull, his face contorted into a pathetic caricature of rage. If the woman even blinked, Dean didn’t see it. She just considered Lenny with a gaze that could wedge open a ribcage and count advantages among the cracks. She turned away and shuffled up the stairs, but Dean was pretty sure that in whatever this was, she had made the better move.

“Cleaning lady,” Lenny explained, sinking a little into the screen, to which he stayed glued until they could hear the door slam.

“She has webbed fingers,” Dean observed conversationally.

“Guess she’s Mexican or whatever.” Lenny turned to them looking drained, like he had actually been poured through a sieve. “Look, I’ve gotta be out on the water in forty-five minutes. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.”

Sam glanced at Dean, making sure Lenny saw it. “Well, then thank you for your time, Mr. Kennedy. We’ll be in touch.”

Dean heard the screen shut behind them, banging a few times against the frame. It must have been warped.

“You know,” he said to Sam back in the car. “I’ve always wondered, is it hard for you? Being wrong all the time? Would you describe the experience as soul-crushing?”

“So it’s a selkie,” Sam said, buckling his seatbelt. “We still don’t know what she’s doing here.”

“Whatever the reason, I don’t think it’s very happy about it. That dude was too scared to piss.”

“We should probably go after him when she’s not around. He looked like he was about ready to crack. We could give him the nudge he needs.”

“Follow him to work then?”

Sam shifted in his seat, drew little swirls in the dust on the dashboard. “Actually…” he started, in a voice that only existed to break promises, and even though Dean had seen this coming from a mile away he had forgotten how distance made things look smaller and more harmless than they actually were.

**

Somewhere in the jumble in their lives, Sam had kept a pair of khakis and a polo shirt clean and relatively ironed. That reverberated like a gong, that Sam still traveled with his interview clothes.

Duxbury had tourist aspirations, and the cheapest motel they could find still had an ocean view. Dean studiously ignored it while he looked up selkies on the internet. He ignored Sam too as his brother showered and shaved and tried to do something with his hair, which in Dean’s opinion was the Lindbergh baby of lost causes. Sam cleaned up okay he guessed, but Dean had seen him with the chicken pox, covered in ichor, popping a dislocated shoulder back in, gargling with Hawaiian Punch. Those kinds of moments always superimposed themselves over any attempt at polish. Sam would look good in a suit though, all his angles smoothed over by tailor-sharp lines, holding one of those shiny-slick leather briefcases. There was no denying that.

“Found anything?” Sam said with a bright interest that didn’t come anywhere close to normal.

“Yeah,” said Dean, studying the wavering reflection of his own jaw in the laptop screen. “Like immediately. Practically every website about selkies talks about this folktale of a fisherman finding one and stealing its skin to force it to be his wife since it couldn’t go back to the ocean.”

Sam shifted on his feet, tried to look like he wasn’t checking his watch. “Huh. Then why haven’t we ever heard about it before?”

“Guess most of them don’t fight back.” Dean banged the laptop closed and started rummaging through his stuff for a more waterproof pair of boots.

Sam watched him from the corner of the room, a bullshit helplessness written into the curve of his mouth. “This was the only time Jess’ parents said they could meet with me – I could barely get them to talk to me at all. It’ll take twenty minutes, half an hour tops.”

“And then you’ll call and meet up with me when you’re done,” Dean said flatly, yanking at his laces.

“Look, Dean. I’m-”

“Don’t, Sam.” Dean met his eyes from the patchy tweed chair, feeling old in a way that distanced him from his anger even as it brought it into focus. A sniper rifle fury. “This is something you feel you have to do, I get it. And maybe you feel a little bad about it, but don’t give me crap about being sorry when you’re not.”

It was calculated to make Sam blow up, but he didn’t even have the decency to storm out, go away. He just looked bruised, said in church voice. “It’s not like that.” Sam walked over to Dean and crouched down in front of him, all knees and impenetrably earnest intentions.

Dean swallowed through a dry, constricted throat. “Then what’s it like?”

Sam looked down, his mouth twisting uncertainly. And just like that Dean wanted the heat of it wrapped it around his dick the way he wanted it when he was nineteen, twenty: sharp and immediate and sure.

Nostalgia was never a force in their lives and their childhoods were remembered by the case and the city, but there was one story Dad told. Mom read books about sibling rivalry, explained to Dean that even when his little brother came his parents would love him as much as ever, gave him a GI Joe when Sam was born and called it a present from the baby. But for the first few months, Dean didn’t show enough interest in his brother to be resentful, absorbed in more pressing business during the long, grassy days of his little boy life. Then Sam got colic and cried, as Dad put it, for eighty-four straight hours. And Dean, watching his mother walking Sammy around the room, bouncing him with a shush shush shush, declared with great indignation, “Mom, you are hurting my baby.”

Sam was Dean’s baby when he was fussy, when Dean was feeling affectionate. The term was eventually abandoned for a thousand other nicknames and insults Sam earned growing up. By the time Sam was sixteen, seventeen, Dean remembered the telling of it more clearly than the event, but he still sometimes muttered, “mine” into the back of Sam’s neck where he wouldn’t be able to hear it, whispered it in the hollow of his throat before he licked the sweat away.

Dean wanted to tell Sam that it didn’t matter who he chose - not in the end, not really. It didn’t even matter if Dean forgave him for choosing.

But he had a job to do, a role to play, so he told Sam and his hope-chest of bereavement, “It’s getting late. You should get going.”

Sam looked at his watch like he had just woken up, said something like, “Yeah, right.” all alarmed and fuzzy. And maybe Dean wished he hadn’t turned around at the last minute to say, “I’ll see you later,” or maybe he was glad, but either way the room seemed larger now that Sam had left it.

**

Leonard Kennedy was sulking. Leonard Kennedy had been sulking steadily ever since he saw Dean standing on the pier next to his trawler with a cup of coffee and a cheerful, “Afternoon, Lenny.” But it took worse than bad manners to shake off Dean, and the two of them were a good fifteen minutes out, Dean already wincing from the salt-bite of the wind.

Lenny worked on one of the big commercial vessels, Dean knew for a fact, so he was either playing hooky or taking advantage of some sort of mourner’s leave. Dean didn’t ask for clarification or press him about the lie or really say anything much at all except a few comments on the weather.

“So what do you catch around here?” Dean leaned against the railing at the bow of the boat, calling loud enough to be heard over the motor. His lips felt like he ate too many potato chips. “Tuna?”

Lenny was doing something complicated with a very thick rope. “Shouldn’t someone who works for Animal Control know that sort of thing?”

Dean’s phone was weighing down his jacket from the inside pocket, jabbing into his ribs. He drank his coffee. “I’m in the large mammal division.”

Lenny just grunted. Dean was cold and bored and figured it was good enough for a segue. “You know, bears, that kind of thing. Whales. Humpbacks. They’re pretty common in these parts. You ever see them?”

“In the spring,” said Lenny, pushing the throttle. The boat began to skip over the breakers rather than plow through them and Dean had to steady himself on the rail.

“What about seals? They ever make it out here?”

If Lenny weren’t a prick, Dean might have felt bad about putting that hunted look on his face, that old-man hunch to his shoulders. “Sometimes a pod’ll get lost on its way to Nantucket. Look, Mr. Smith, what the fuck is this? If you’ve got something to say to me, just go ahead and say it.”

“Okay,” Dean said. “I think you somehow found a seal that shed its coat and turned into a beautiful woman. And since you grew up hearing your grandma’s stories, you stole her skin and hid it where you knew she couldn’t find it so she would have no choice but to stay with you forever. But none of the seal ladies Nana ever told you about got angry like this one did. She killed your mother and your sister and your niece, to get you to spill the beans about where her pelt is, maybe out of revenge a little too. And now, Lenny, you’ve still got her stashed in your house because what else are you gonna do with her, and you are scared shitless, just shitless, about what she’ll do next.” He smiled pleasantly. “But hell, I’m just making conversation.”

In retrospect, the timing was probably Dean’s fault, since he left Leonard with his mouth slightly open, limp and defenseless in the ruins of his secret. But Dean doubted Lenny would have reacted any better whenever the selkie chose to come creeping up the stairs to the hull and throw herself on him in a hissing cloud of nails and teeth.

She wasn’t trying to kill him, Dean could tell that much, just get him on his back. Her webbed fingers were wrapped around his neck, banging his head on the floor when she had the advantage. Leonard’s limbs flailed wildly, like an upturned crab, his face already a mottled red. “Christ fuck,” he gritted out, pulling at her hair, her hands.

“Where is it?” Her voice was fuzzy, vowels clumsy with a deaf person’s unfamiliarity with speech. “Where is it?”

Dean had a knife and his 9mm, but they were grappling too much and too closely for him to get a clear angle with either. He threw his coffee on her.

She reared back with a weird, short yelp, shaking herself off frantically. She staggered a few steps, turned towards him. The strategy she had shown with Lenny evaporated and she became what she was: a wild thing reacting simply and instinctively, as she lunged at Dean and sent them both tumbling overboard.

The cold hit like a slap, crumpled his lungs, and the most important thing was not to breathe, don’t breathe, not now. The second was the selkie, still scratching and kicking up a colony of air bubbles, get her off, push her away. The third was to get up – up up - because his whole body was burning and he might not need air yet but his system was shocked into demanding it.

He surfaced long enough to gasp, “You crazy bi-” before she dragged him down again. But it was enough to clear his head, and after assessing the situation, things weren’t actually all that bad. As a human the selkie maybe weighed a hundred and thirty pounds and she fought like a kindergartner, biting and flailing with more pique than intent. Dean took a page from Lenny’s book, grabbed a hank of her hair, floating like seaweed around them both, and yanked. She jerked back, giving him room to elbow her in the solar plexus, his arm hampered but steadied by the water, and she let go, sinking into the murk.

Dean scrambled towards the melting halo of the sun. He wanted to breathe like he was taking a hit of something once his head broke the surface, but the cold was still wrapped around his chest and the most it would let pass was a boney rattle. He looked around the waves for Lenny’s trawler, a buoy, shit, anything - because if it was just him and the breakers it would have been kinder to have let the selkie finish him off.

But a halfway turn around was Lenny’s trawler, idling in the water with Lenny peering out over the side, calling, “Holy shit! Are you okay?” And Dean wanted to laugh because it was beautiful, beautiful.

Five minutes later Dean was curled knees to chest on the deck, shivering under a flannel blanket and grunting because hell yes was he going to take Leonard up on his offer to replace Dean’s cell phone. He coughed a few times, his mouth feeling stretched and raw. “You think she can survive out there?”

Lenny shrugged helplessly. “She knows how to swim. She taught herself. It was the first thing she did when I brought her home. She’d come out here every day for hours and when she came back her lips would be blue and her hands would bleed, but she’d still go again and again.”

Dean tried to scrub some salt out of his eye. “Man, what were you thinking?”

“You think I wanted this?” Leonard chuckled hoarsely, sick with humor. And Dean had seen this before too, what happened to a man after he trapped himself in a box with a nightmare. “You think keeping it from her was my idea of fun, watching my mother die? I had to, she’ll kill me once she gets it, she told me so-”

“Okay, okay, just shut up for a minute,” Dean said. “Let me think.”

**

He remembered Jessica in sketchbook lines, as barely more than a symbol, but Dean thought he saw traces of her in her mother. The angle of her nose, the same general shape albeit padded by the years. Soccermom-short dark hair - he had known Jess couldn’t have been a natural blond. Mostly it just the way she answered the door, how it mirrored his first and last meeting with her daughter, the lift to her mouth and tilt of her head telegraphing polite disdain.

“Hi,” Dean said brightly. He adjusted the flannel on his shoulders, wringing out his sleeve. “I’m Dean Winchester. Is my brother still here?”

She paused, her hand still on the doorframe. “Sam,” she said, calmly, but like his name was a handhold on normal. “I’ll go get him.”

“It’s cool,” Dean muttered as the door closed. “You don’t have to invite me in or anything.”

She came out on the porch a few minutes later, trailed by what must be her husband and Sam. Sam’s face sort of melted into elegant, elongated horror when he saw Dean, like the masks from Scream but funnier. And wasn’t this shades of high school, when Dean would drop Sam off halfway through history class, picking flecks of drying blood off his jeans. Dean held his hand up in a wave. “Hey, bro.”

“I, uh…” Sam turned to the Moores, all helpless apology. “Will you excuse us please?” Dean always forgot to brace himself for how Sam knew this language, how seamlessly he could insert himself into the comfortable mundanity of these people’s lives.

“Of course, Sam,” said the dad, not unkindly but with no real sympathy either.

The mother put a hand on his shoulder. “Take care of yourself, Sam.” Dean felt his jaw set watching Sam’s reaction to that, and knew there was too much finality in her tone for his brother to have found what he was looking for here.

They walked down the cobblestone path shoulder to shoulder, Sam thrumming with tension. He hissed, “The hell is this? What happened?”

“Got into a little tussle with Andre.” Dean opened the driver’s side door to the Impala, called to Leonard, huddled in the backseat, “Everything okay back there?”

“Hi,” Sam said to Leonard. He paused in buckling his seatbelt, turning to Dean. “Andre?”

“The seal. Come on, Andre? Remember, from that movie? We saw it on TV when we were kids.” In the rearview mirror he could see Sam rolling his eyes commiseratingly at Leonard, and Dean turned the ignition key over abruptly. “Whatever. We’re wasting time.”

**

It lacked irony, a certain poetic neatness, but even Sam had to concede that there was probably no way a mystical seal creature was going to track down her pelt if it were fifteen miles out of town in a storage locker rented under an assumed name. Dean could feel his brother’s stare like an itch between his shoulder blades as he grabbed weapons out of the trunk, passed over the rock salt cartridges for the .45. He gave it to Sam, shoved the automatic down the back of his pants.

Sam’s fingers lingered on the gun and he stared at Dean with his jaw set tight, one of Dad’s expressions. “She was being kept prisoner.”

“She killed three people with her bare hands,” Dean said. And after a moment Sam took the rifle like Dean knew he would. Because Sam could be a girl about certain things and he was probably still pissed off about the Moores, but the truths they lived by were in his blood too. “Besides, not a spirit. Rock salt wouldn’t do any good.”

Leonard came out of the main office, his hand shaking around the key. “It’s locker B-42.”

Dean gestured forward. “Lead the way.”

Lenny’s eyes were darting from side to side. He was all cowering submission now, which Dean disliked a lot more than his belligerence. “So you’ll take care of her, right? I don’t have to be there?”

Behind him, Sam snorted.

“It’s why we're getting the skin, Lenny,” Dean said patiently. “You can just wait in the car if you want. Sam and I will come get you when we’re done. Ah, here we go,” Dean stopped, turned to them with a smile. “B-42.”

It was lighter and thinner than he was expecting, smaller than a human. It almost slipped through his fingers at first, the texture almost entirely unlike silk. It was nearly translucent, embryonic, glinting in the afternoon light the way the ocean did once you were passed the breakers.

“It’s spotted,” Sam said softly. “She’s a harbor seal.”

Dean looked at him, wanted to ask where he learned that. But then Leonard made a noise, a little frightened croak, and they turned around in tandem.

And shit, he should have been paying better attention, but she was good, trailing them like that. Especially since she must have stopped off at Leonard’s house, to be holding one of his kitchen knives.

Later though, he would think that maybe it wasn’t some sort of residual hunting instinct. Maybe it was hereditary and inevitable, the way that birds knew north from south, the way every living thing had some rudimentary concept of home.

The knife was lax in her hand now, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Sam taking advantage of that, readying the shotgun. She ignored him or didn’t understand what it meant, staring at her skin like it hurt but would hurt more to look away.

“Please,” she said. It took him off-guard – he could sense it taking Sam off-guard too – how tremulous, how polite she was. “Please give it to me.”

Lenny must have felt the current change. He sputtered, looking between Dean and Sam and the girl incredulously. “You – you can’t! You know you can’t! She’ll kill me, you know it, she’ll cut me up with that knife and kill me-”

“Please,” she said again, like a bird call.

“If we give it to you,” Sam said, rifle still trained on her, his voice forced steady. “Are you going to kill him?”

She glanced at Leonard with something like surprise, a puzzled little frown. Dean thought she might have actually forgotten he was there. And it occurred to him that on a fundamental level, she simply did not care about Leonard. Their battle wasn’t a vendetta on her part the way it was for him. He was simply an obstacle, an object in cross-alignment. She might not even know his name.

“Yes,” she said, in a vague, disinterested way. “I have to. It hurts too much.”

“You could change your mind,” Dean said. “No harm, no foul. We give you the skin, and you can just walk away.”

She stared at him with eyes like lacquer, so dark and reflective they created the illusion of depth. He saw her waver on her feet slightly, slim and pale and in every way exotic, and for the first time Dean could see how someone would want a creature like this, would be willing to make unknown compromises to keep it.

“You don’t know,” she said. And her sadness was something he had never heard before - fathoms deep, every syllable drenched. “You don’t know what it’s like to forget how to swim.”

“Just go,” Dean pleaded.

But she lunged.

The shot reverberated through his chest. The acrid gun smoke smell was so overpowering that in a reflexive way Dean thought he might have fired it. But it was Sam, putting down the rifle and looking critically at where the selkie had staggered and fallen. He turned to Dean, breathing hard, something stubborn and alive written in his expression.

Dean walked the few steps over to her, toed her slightly with his foot. She was prone but breathing – buckshot wasn’t enough for an immediate kill – wheezing in little rattles. The knife clattering to the ground by her side. He reached for the Glock. Maybe she was looking at him with understanding, gentle acceptance, but she wasn’t human enough to read and her forgiveness wasn’t his concern.

Aiming between the eyes was the quickest, the kindest, the most practical. He wondered if she would change back somehow in death, but she stayed human, twisted and bleeding out.

“Whoo boy,” said Leonard, gasping, amazed. Then he laughed from his belly, punchy with relief. “Christ! It’s over! Oh thank god, it’s finally over. I have to say, thank you guys. Seriously, I mean it, thank yo-”

Dean heard the crack before he felt the impact of bone on his knuckes. He shook out his fist while Lenny reeled back, a hand over his eye. “The fuck, you asshole-”

“Shut up,” Dean said. This was partly chemical – endorphins, adrenaline, the same rush that used to make him swear in front of Dad and shove Sam around. It was partly that something in his chest has flickered on, or maybe out, left him extinguished and constricted and bleeding in place of the woman who had now stopped. “You see this skin?”

Lenny nodded, confused and a little horrified.

“You take it,” Dean said. “You take it and you take her body and you bury them together. Properly, at sea. And if you don’t I swear I will know, and I will hunt you down and make you wish you did. All right?”

Lenny was nodding again, rapid and desperate, but Dean had already turned around. Sam was just standing there, like the million times Dean had turned around to find Sam there, solid and waiting and knowing Dean right down to the bone even if he could never understand.

**

By the time they got back to the motel, Dean’s clothes had dried stiff and his back ached in a way that meant three weeks of bruises but nothing sprained. He claimed first shower by virtue of nearly knocking Sam over to get there, and stood under the spray until the water went cold, the crappy showerhead not nearly enough to pound the noise out of his brain.

Sam had changed into his ratty sweatpants, stripped off his overshirt by the time he got out. He was flipping through the channels of the snowy little TV, but turned it off when he saw Dean dripping on the carpet. Dean couldn’t figure out what the look on his face meant, just that it was difficult, inward, how Sam always looked before he put down the load of whatever he was thinking about.

“Come on,” he said, unfolding from the bed and opening the nightstand drawer. “I’ll tape up your knuckles.”

Dean tugged on a relatively clean pair of boxers. “I can do it.”

“You could if it was your left hand,” Sam said. “But it’s not.”

There had been a point, Dean wasn’t sure exactly when but even before Sam walked out on them, when the power had shifted, subtle and smothering as sand. He wouldn’t call them equals, but there used to be a time he could ignore Sam, dismiss him without explanation or consequence. But even as Sam had gotten gangly and sullen and ridiculous, he became someone who could fill up a room, a polarizing force. Before Sam did it Dean didn’t know that growing up was both everyday and extraordinary, that it demanded respect. So he rolled his eyes and blew out a breath like a three-year-old and held out his hand, looking in the opposite directions.

“Thank you,” Sam said, acidly but amused. Dean hissed between his teeth at the sting of peroxide, and Sam paused, holding Dean’s hand with a bird’s egg kind of touch. “Did you mean it back there?”

Shit, he had known this was coming. “Mean what?”

“What you said to the selkie,” Sam said. “About just letting her go.”

Dean shrugged. “Negotiations are a delicate process.”

Sam shook his head but didn’t say anything. This was something they both knew, when not to press the issue. And the flipside of that, the punishment for it, was Dean knew, with sinking certainty, when Sam really wanted to talk.

“So how’d seeing Jess’ parents go?”

Sam paused in getting out the butterfly tape, with a little awkward sound and a smile like punctuation. “I don’t know… You coming over looking like an extra from Titanic…”

“Hey. I-”

“Was kind of appropriate,” Sam said, and it was not an apology, but Dean would take it. “They asked where I went after the memorial service. What I’m doing now. There wasn’t a whole lot I could say, really. I…” Sam ran a hand through his hair with another meaningless smile. “I don’t really know why I went there.”

Dean knew. He had seen Sam carrying around the reason for months now, tied up inside him as detailed and vibrant and sacred as a Celtic knot. Sam had been searching for answers; his revenge was essential but secondary. What he needed was absolution or penance, the heavy glove of validated guilt. But the Moores were too full of their own grief to shoulder his.

And Dean was lost, just lost under the avalanche of that. Because there were things he could say about welcoming the pain instead of fighting it, letting it in your skin as fortification instead of infection. But he had tried before and it had come out muffled and buried, clichéd and useless, and Sam was still above him, sliding.

Dean said, “It won’t always be like this.”

Sam laughed a bitter trickle of a sound. “That’s the thing, I… shit. Dean… I don’t…”

Belatedly, Dean realized Sam was still holding his hand. “You don’t what, Sam?”

Sam looked away, then back at Dean, face drawn, something in his eyes Dean wouldn’t let himself identify. And then in dream time, with dream logic, he brought Dean’s hand to his mouth and licked Dean’s split knuckle, a little cat dab of his tongue on the open wound.

There were moments, and this was one, so jaggedly unpredictable they created their own artificial inevitability. Dean drew a shaky breath, a pulse in his throat pounding more painfully than his back. Said, “Sam…” Sam just did it again, a little less gently. Dean’s voice was still wobbly but more forceful when he tried again. “Sam. Don’t. I mean. If you’re not…”

Sam smirked, and it was so pedestrian, so authoritatively Sammy that despite it all maybe this could be okay. “Jesus, Dean. You pick now to start getting girly?”

It got a laugh out of Dean for the shock value really, because it was more than either of them had said about any of this before. But the room changed, the current slowed as the tension leavened, and Dean gave, sinking into it like a hot tub.

“You are such a fucking brat,” he said with real wonder. He drew the hand Sam was holding below the elastic of his brother’s sweats. Sam let out a breath and went for Dean’s neck, like always, with hard little bites. And suddenly, there they were.

Dean fell back on the bed, drew Sam with him, the twinges in his back just making it better, more real. He felt a cognitive dissonance; the heat of Sam’s cock in his hand blurring with the wet marshy sounds of Sam’s mouth on his collarbone to form something sticky, primal and perfect. Sam went slow, forcing Dean’s rhythm into something new and measured. He craned his head up to look at the ceiling, syrupy with this.

Dean’s raw knuckles kept scratching against Sam’s pubic hair, and it made him hiss. Sam pulled his hand out, pinned it above their heads and kissed Dean, tasting like salt. Dean groaned into his mouth and yanked on Sam’s shirt, suddenly needing to see him. Sam was beautiful. He had just showed up for breakfast one day, fourteen and long-legged and beautiful, and Dean had never quite gotten over that.

Sam sat up so he was straddling Dean’s thigh, shucking off his shirt with a dorky amount of enthusiasm. “Dean,” he said, big-eyed and desperate, and Christ, Dean is going to lose this one. Sam put his hands on Dean’s hip, rubbing little circles. “I want to - is that okay?”

He had done this before, but not this side of the equation very often and never with Sam. He looked at the ceiling again, off-white and stucco like every ceiling he’d ever had the occasion to study. Dean could feel the rush of heat in his face, could see echoes of it on Sam’s. “There’s that lotion crap in the bathroom.”

Sam nearly left skid marks on his way to the bathroom. Dean debated taking off his boxers, but ended up not having the time before Sam came back with a bottle that now looked absurdly small and some of Dean’s condoms. He stepped out of his sweats and Dean reached for him before he could even think it through, cupping Sam’s face and pulling him down. They curled together in a jumble of legs, Sam touching him blindly - his chest, his shoulders, his dick - taking off his boxers and bruising him with kisses.

Sam rolled Dean onto his stomach and Dean went without resistance, not sure if it was all right, but not caring much either. And then Dean heard the sticky sounds of Sam rolling on the condom, and he had to brace himself on one elbow, bow his back into a curve in order to jack himself off. Sam bit him along the spine in reproach and tried to fuck him with one slick finger, making Dean say, “Shit!” Sam always lost finesse when he was excited and his hands were cold.

Sam bit him again, closer to the shoulder, creating a divisional line between the sides of a scar. He rested his cheek there while Dean relaxed, as he slipped in another finger, and Dean could feel it getting hotter, could feel his body loosening, curving in response.

Sam’s hands clung to Dean’s waist and his buried his face in the side of Dean’s neck like when he used to get scared of the dark before he switched his fingers for his dick. Dean said, “Shit.” again, felt it grind out of him. He kept swearing as Sam started to move. It got faster and softer when Sam’s breath rasped in his ear, when Dean felt sweat beading on his forehead, when he got used to the stretch and the nature of the burn changed. It lost the ‘t’, gained a sleepy, slushy cadence, turned into shhshhshh.

Sam’s rhythm got faster and Dean moved with him. It wasn’t easy or smooth, friction didn’t allow for that, but Dean had to reach for his own cock again and Sam let him this time. Dean came with a grunt, with Sam bowed around him and shaking, following him with a few sharp, short thrusts and a willingness Dean spent years thinking they no longer shared.

**

Jessica’s memorial service was held on one of those cellophane California days when the blue of the sky made everything look two-dimensional. It was some sort of outdoor tent ceremony on the Stanford campus, and even the minister had worn sunglasses. There were flowers everywhere, yellow and purple ones he couldn’t name that added to the glare and the oppressively sweet smell of the crowd. Sam had on a suit and Dean had miraculously found a pair of slacks somewhere. They were itchy.

They had been sat the front row with Jess’ parents and closer friends, who all gave Dean little sidelong looks discrediting his vaguely VIP status. Sam, though, was just staring blankly past the preacher whom he obviously wasn’t listening to, and Dean was proud, in a tiny, selfish way, that he was the only person there who could really tell how much Sam was hurting.

They didn’t stay for the reception afterwards because, as Sam had said, they had work to do. And Dean had thought, glancing over at his brother in the passenger seat on the way to the hotel, that Sam – who was more Dad’s son than either of them would ever see – was done. It was carved into the slope of Sam’s shoulders, the lines between his eyes. Jessica had been it for Sam and he was burned out now. Scorched through.

Sam was slumped over him now. Dean could feel the tectonic rise and fall of his chest, the skittering beat of his heart. He ignored the wet spot for a moment, reached behind him to burrow a hand into Sam’s hair. Dean’s mind was perfectly blank and he liked it that way for the moment because tomorrow they would find a Starbucks and a new case and the road waiting for them like a faithful pet. So Sam’s weight wasn’t too much for Dean, not right now.