Chapter Text
They had just finished the Wendigo job and were somewhere in Nebraska, near the Iowa boarder – Sam wasn’t quite sure where they had finally stopped. The motel looked like any other; white sheets and comforters covered the beds and the walls were a sickly yellow.
Sam sat at the miniature dining room table, searching Dad’s journal, trying to find any indication of where he might be at that moment. He needed to find him. Dad would have answers, he would know why Jess had been murdered the same way as his mother all those years ago. He had to. That’s why Dad had left, wasn’t it? To figure out what was going on.
‘Dean?’ Sam called, eyes falling on a page in the diary. ‘I think we need to go to Salem.’
‘Witches?’ Dean called from the bathroom. The door was always left open when he showered. Sam tried to ignore that. Why would Dean keep doing that, if not to say that it was all right for him to come in, too. But that was out of the question. They were older, different. They had grown away from that. Hadn’t they?
‘I don’t think so,’ Sam said. He went and leaned on the doorframe separating the bathroom and the main room. Dean liked the shower hot and the open door barely kept the steam at bay. That was one thing Sam didn’t miss about their showers; he preferred it lukewarm, and took a lot less time than Dean – well, he would have if it hadn’t been for Dean.
‘I’m not really sure,’ Sam went on. ‘Witches or ghosts, or both. But Dad didn’t seem to know, either.’
Dean stuck his head out, shampoo lathered in his hair. He did that, kept the lather in as he let the water rush over his body. Maybe that was what kept his hair so shiny. ‘How do you get witches and ghosts confused?’ he asked, cocking an eyebrow.
‘There were witches involved,’ Sam said. ‘Sometime around the Witch Trials, but I think they’re just ghosts now.’
‘Can witches be ghosts?’ Dean said, with a shudder. ‘That’s a scary thought.’
‘Dad couldn’t figure it out,’ Sam said. ‘We should go, do the job right.’
‘I thought you wanted to find him,’ Dean asked, tucking his head back behind the curtain.
Sam heard the flow of the shower muffle and figured Dean had finally decided to rinse out the shampoo. He closed his eyes – the mental image of the water pouring down on his brother filled his head. Quickly he opened them up again, lest he get too distracted.
‘I do want to find Dad, but we don’t know where he is,’ Sam said. ‘Who knows, maybe he’s in New England and we’ll catch up with him. I just need to keep busy.’
‘All right Sammy,’ Dean said. ‘We’ll go, sort out this ghost witch thing.’
‘Stop calling me that,’ Sam said, concentrating hard on not listening to the sounds of the shower.
‘Aw, but you get so cute when you’re annoyed,’ Dean replied.
Sam sighed. The little flirtations were getting to be annoying too. He wasn’t sure if his brother was just accustomed to speaking to him like that, or if he really meant it. ‘And hurry up in the shower. There’ll be nothing left of you soon.’ Sam went back to the table and started looking up what he could find on the House of the Seven Gables.
Dean took another ten minutes in the shower. ‘Sammy?’ Dean shouted.
‘What is it, Dean?’ Sam asked, his eyes shooting to the doorway, but his brother wasn’t in frame.
‘I forgot a towel,’ Dean said.
‘I promise not to look while you get one,’ Sam said, teasingly.
‘It’s cold,’ Dean complained. ‘Come on.’
Sam got up and went into the bathroom. The towels were hanging up on the opposite wall from the shower. Dean really had forgotten a towel. He grabbed one and turned back to his brother, who was smiling from behind the shower curtain.
‘Thanks, Sammy,’ Dean said, reaching out.
Sam just rolled his eyes as his brother let the curtain drop away from him and wrapped the towel around his waist. Dean stepped out and swatted Sam on the cheek. ‘Didn’t know I needed an audience to dry myself off.’
‘What?’ Sam said, snapping out of his daze. ‘Oh, right.’ He left the room, making sure to pull the door closed behind him. He didn’t snap it shut, however.
As he sat back down at the table, he could see a sliver of his brother’s side, not anything special, but just those quick glances of his thigh made Sam’s heart beat faster. He quickly turned to his laptop screen and concentrated on the words.
Sam was so determined not to pay attention to the outside world that he didn’t even notice when Dean leaned over his shoulder, their cheeks barely an inch away, and started reading the computer screen.
‘Hawthorne?’ Dean asked. Sam jumped and Dean cocked an eyebrow. ‘Scare you?’
‘I just – I didn’t realize you were right there,’ Sam said, leaning over to better be able to look at his brother. His eyebrows were raised and he had a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face. He let his breath out slowly.
‘I’ve been here for five minutes reading over your shoulder,’ Dean said simply. ‘So?’
‘Well,’ Sam said, setting back into his chair. Dean rested his arms on Sam’s shoulders and let his mouth fall gently in his hair. They hadn’t been that close in a very long time. Was this Dean trying to go back? They couldn’t. Sam didn’t know why he was resisting so much, it just seemed … different. Dean was all he had back then, he was everything. It seemed only natural that they would be together. But now … now that he had gone into the real world, met Jess, had an actual relationship, it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. On the other hand, Dean was again the only thing Sam had.
‘Hawthorne’s ancestors were big with the prosecution of witches, and it’s said that one of the witches cursed the family,’ Sam said, ignoring the pumping in his heart. ‘Now Hawthorne’s house was moved to the grounds in 1958 and it’s said that his and his son, Julian’s, ghosts haunt the grounds.’
‘So they’re still hanging around because they’re cursed?’ Dean asked.
‘Seems like it. There’s been a string of disappearances in the area, more than there has any right to be,’ Sam said. ‘I’ve always wanted to see a famous ghost,’ he added, a shadow of a smile on his lips.
‘Hawthorne’s famous?’ Dean asked. ‘What’s he famous for?’
Sam turned, forcing Dean’s arms to fall. He almost lost his balance, falling into Sam, but grabbed onto the back of the chair to steady himself. ‘You don’t know who Nathaniel Hawthorne is?’
Dean shrugged. ‘Should I?’
‘Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the Scarlet Letter,’ Sam said, as if that was supposed to mean something to Dean. He knew his brother, knew that he wouldn’t know what that was, but still, it always surprised him how little Dean cared about culture.
‘Doesn’t ring a bell,’ Dean said. ‘Let’s go then.’ He left the motel room.