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The TV set in the corner of the room flickers and is prone to bad weather. Even when it’s sunny on the other side of the bars. Or when it rains. No matter what’s showing, the television with the knobs always snows.
He’s been quiet since Tuesday. Too long, he knows. Just a few days more and they’ll make him talk. They’ll force him to. Or else.
They call it therapy, he hears them. He knows what that means. And he knows what they want him to think it means.
Later, in line at the window, when he glances over at Carl next to him, Carl is wearing a mask. Large and shiny, like a giant fly; black, dirty with age. It won’t hurt anything just to touch it, won’t hurt anything. Carl’s eyes are dead and he hasn’t seen anything in years. Mr. Carl won’t know.
He tries, but when he blinks again, the mask is gone. White eyed Carl is rubbing his wrists together and telling the guys in fascinating detail what happened when he wet the sheets last night.
“Hanniger.”
Nurse Ashworth looks suspiciously irritated. Like she may have said his name more than once.
He tosses the cup back and chugs down the happy vitamins for the day. The staff acts like they’re nothing more than children’s chewables. He recognizes what they really do. He also knows the staff is ignorant to the tiny fact that he’s been in the business of purging for so long he’s practically a professional.
Won’t be long now before he sees the rainbow of pills show themselves once more.
Ashworth smiles at him when he lifts his tongue. Smiles like he’s a dog that waited until it was let outside, carpets free of urine.
He smiles back.
If that bendy straw over there was made of pointed metal, he’d really like to or else her. Right in the eye.
His smile is bigger.
That night, he dreams of bug eyed masks, of heavy breathing. He hears the wayward screams, bloodcurdling in his fog of sleep, loud to his own ears. Dreams that he’s screaming the loudest. That night, it comes back to him.
The orderly doesn’t need his uniform anyway. Not anymore. It’s almost seven years to the day since they took him when Tom manages to find a way to slip free.
-
Dean hadn’t wanted to go in the first place, said it wasn’t their sort of thing.
Sam wouldn’t take no for an answer. Sam never does anymore.
They’ve interviewed every key witness they could find, Sam relentless in his quest for answers. This had to be their kind of case, it had to be. Because something had drawn him to the area.
“Let the cops deal with this one, Sammy,” Dean growls into his bottle, fed up with the run around and cranky from driving all day. Sam sat mute in the passenger seat and Googled mining incident in 1980s over and over again on his phone until he got something.
“Sammy,” Sam echoes, smarmy. The name doesn’t even fit him but for unknown reasons, his brother tends to prefer it. Probably makes him feel like seven is still Sam’s age and not his height in feet.
Dean gives a weak eyeroll and proceeds to take up interest in the game on TV. “They’ve all given the same answer. Same details. Narrows it down to one thing – some whackjob with a pickaxe and a taste for blood. That’s it. Not our scene.”
He says it like it’s final but his eyes are wary, he already knows Sam will argue.
“Or,” Sam says, mindful of suspicious ears. “A shapeshifter.”
“Right. A skin junkie who stays in the same form for thirty years and hides his face with a gasmask so he can't be identified,” he mumbles under his breath. “Because that definitely sounds like their M.O.”
Like they’ve never encountered anything that can possess a body, can pose for human, can fool the lower IQs of hunters like Sam’s ridiculous bloodline. His time in Hell should have sharpened him, not dulled him down to a butterknife.
Then again, he could just be trying to aggravate Sam. He’s been a jackass for no reason lately.
“They don’t have—“ Sam starts to say, stops. He isn’t getting anywhere and he realizes why.
When Dean gets up from his stool and lifts a brow, Sam turns his back. He doesn’t watch Dean walk away, doesn’t watch him drive off in the direction of the motel. He doesn’t need Dean. Works better without him. Faster, stronger, lacks the lesser, peskier qualities of his older brother. Like morality. This is what he wants. Sam can go this alone.
There’s an empty spot where the Impala was when Sam sets off for the next bar packed with locals. Luckily, it’s only down the road.
-
It turns out that for once, Dean was right. It isn’t their kind of thing. But it’s Sam’s kind of thing. Even if he doesn’t know it just yet.
-
Nobody in this place likes him.
The elderly man is still shouting at him, still trying to claw his way to another suckerpunch. He almost wishes the men holding Gramps back would let him go. He’d be ready for him this time.
Tom sneers, clutching his jaw. “Cocksucker, huh? Now now. That’s not a very nice thing to say, is it?”
He’s going to say more. He’s going to do more.
Not right now. Not tonight. Tonight, he has things to take care of. Places to go, things to do, people to see.
Somebody, somewhere says “Dean”, but he hears it through a funnel. Like they’re far away. Far away and trying to get closer. Looking for someone, finding someone.
“Dean!” the voice says, deep and suddenly right next to him. And a sick grip tightens around his arm. He turns with his fist raised, tired of people in the joint putting their hands on him but he stops when he finds he has to look up. Way up.
“What the fuck are you doi—“ the guy with the sideburns says before removing his hand in the same instance. Tom is a little disappointed in that. “Oh.”
“I thought you were someone else.” Like an apology, but not quite.
“They always do,” Tom smiles. It’s different than the one he gives Nurse Ashworth.
Everyone around the bar is watching them, waiting for the next great incident to talk about in the diner tomorrow. He looks at the guy who’s still studying his face, looks at the guy’s mouth, his lips. He looks like a hybrid – the body of a man and the face of a boy. Tom could give everyone in the joint something they’d really be talking about tomorrow.
He moves to touch an arm, flannel shirt rolled up to the elbow, and likes the feel of his skin. He hasn’t felt skin in so long. Not somebody else’s. Well. Not like this anyway.
Sideburns doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t do or say a thing and Tom sees the meaning behind the inaction. Sees it in the stiffness.
Places to go, things to see, people to do.
Somebody in this place likes him.
-
“While I’m pretty sure that was highly unnecessary, I gotta say,” Sam thinks over his next words carefully as he reaches behind the counter and grabs a room key. “You’re beginning to remind me less and less of that friend of mine.”
Tom laughs and it’s high in his throat. “Compliment, no matter what you say.”
“Oh, it is,” Sam nods, watching in a daze as the pretty, pretty man with the green eyes and pink lips who looks everything like his brother stomps out the door, a trickle of blood as his breadcrumbs.
Sam follows the trail.
He only looks back to make sure the manager is still dead. Satisfied that her throat will never be the same again, he turns the lights off and flicks another switch, pleased when the NO VACANCIES sign hums to life.
The Thunderbird Motel is far from where his brother lays sleeping and that’s exactly the way Sam wants it.
-
Tom is fun in all of the ways that Dean isn’t.
He doesn’t care if Sam doesn’t go to sleep; Tom doesn’t sleep either. He blows Sam in the shower twice, warm water turning pink as soon as Tom steps in. He sighs happily when Sam bites his inner thigh enough to have it glaring and mottled in seconds, blood rushing to the surface in a thick bruise. His tastes so much better than Ruby’s, purer.
He doesn’t get angry when Sam holds him down by the throat and ruts against his ass like a dog, just locks his ankles across Sam’s back and bows his spine, his wheezing gasps like a song in the air as they slide together.
Tom doesn’t tell Sam that he can’t sleep with hookers. The same night, he hand delivers one to Sam himself, already nice and immobilized and with her tongue cut out.
Sam thanks him for the gesture but it’s not what he’s looking for. Tells Tom he already has it.
But when Tom calls him Sammy and he doesn’t correct him, he thinks that if he could, he’d feel really guilty about it. But he doesn’t.
-
His phone is blinking at seizure inducing speed all night but he never picks it up. Doesn’t look that way once. Lets it sleep on the bedside table when they put on their sodden clothes and leave the room to go shopping for new ones.
It’s 3 a.m., the witching hour, and neither of them has money on hand.
-
Tom doesn’t tell his new friend where they’re going. Doesn’t even know for certain himself until he finds an old payphone with a weathered phone book dangling from a chain.
Sammy will have new clothes.
-
Sam comes downstairs in a fresh shirt, slightly small but he’s had worse. It’s flannel, so at least he has that going for him. The old wood creaks and groans beneath his weight and the banister has splintered with use. It’s ugly and painful and it’s perfect.
Tom’s sitting in the middle of the floor with his arms wrapped around his legs, knees to his chest and he’s swaying on the rug back and forth, humming tiny music and little chuckles. His eyes crinkle in the corners. It looks even more familiar to Sam.
“Now who’s the cocksucker. Now who’s the cocksucker,” Tom giggles.
Sam surveys the room. It’s heavy with red and smells sweet. Tangy. A floor lamp is knocked over and there’s a spray of droplets on the back of the old couch.
There’s an old man sprawled out in odd angles on the rocking chair, grey pants dark with black and red between his legs, a steady drip drip drip splashing onto the hardwood floor. His eyes are large and glassy, the rest of his existence already expired. There’s a severed penis in his mouth and Sam can’t look away.
Doesn’t even want to.
“I’ve never seen castration with a pickaxe before,” he breathes, voice awed.
Tom looks at him and stops rocking.
“It’s ours now, Sammy, we can have the whole thing.”
Sam listens to his words but hears the wrong meaning.
“What is?”
“The house,” Tom says with a little grin.
-
He hasn’t even gotten the bedroom door open all the way before Tom is on him, savage and wild and tearing his new shirt right off his body. He’d be pissed if he could think, would be pissed if Tom wasn’t already hard and pressing against him and so fucking hot it made his vision blur from the intensity.
Just like Dean. Just like Dean. Not like Dean. Not Dean.
Sam hasn’t the time nor the patience for niceties and he pushes Tom to the ground in one hard shove, undoing his own pants as he shadows him all the way down. His pants are splayed open and he’s bracketing Tom’s head between his arms, caging him in and pressing his crotch down hard enough to hurt.
Tom either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care because he fights with Sam’s pants until they’re bunched down under his ass and slides his hands into the back of his underwear, nails digging in just enough to make Sam whimper from somewhere deep in his lungs.
“Saaaaam,” Tom breathes, drawing it out on a moan, a glint in his eye.
That’s the thing about Tom. Everything is done with that twinkle.
The floor is nothing but filth and grime upstairs and it focuses Sam on the reality of what they’re doing, the reality of light freckles underneath the press of his mouth, the reality of full lips and the tasting of what lays past them, the reality of fucking Tom into the floor like he’ll never get to fuck the other one.
When Tom is naked beneath him, writhing and panting and yelling for Sam to do it harder, kill him with it, make him wear it, it’s only then that it dawns on him that he forgot all about the condom. And that he doesn’t even mind.
Thinks he prefers it.
Tom’s still bloody hands are pressing against his cheeks, dragging him down for another frantic kiss, sloppy and wet and beautiful. He’s shouting Sam’s name now, laughing it, like he’s still testing it out around his tongue and when he comes, he gets crazy with it, jerking and spasming like he’s dying, hot and sticky between their stomachs. He runs a finger through the mess and plunks up a strand of fluid, licks at it idly and whispers “Harry, Harry…”
An old clock ticks further down the hallway and Sam is flying apart, teeth clenched, about to orgasm his way to an early death all while grandpa’s body is still warm.
Sam’s drowning in his own sweat, tasting someone else’s spit, wearing some tiny lady’s blood underneath his fingernails because it wouldn’t wash away, wouldn’t leave him alone and he’s thinking about the smell of sweet pie…
Sam fucks into him harder the whole time, slamming in so rudely that Tom gets slid around the floor a few inches at every thrust, Sam’s knees stinging from the burn but he fucks and fucks and fucks until he’s emptying inside of the rambling man and buries his face into the crook of his neck, pretending he doesn’t hear an old Metallica song in the static frequencies at the back of his mind.
They leave before the rigor even sets in.
-
“Where the hell have you been!?” Dean lays into him the second he walks back into the room.
Sam flicks him a glare, stance threatening. “Out.”
“Yeah, I can smell that,” he says, not bothering to hide his disgust, surveying the damage of his baby brother. “I’d ask what bitch you fucked this time but—“
“A pretty one,” Sam tells him, cold. He strips down and doesn’t care that he’s wearing the life of an entire neighborhood, stains rotten and crusted deep after two days. Doesn’t care that he’s naked in front of Dean like this. Doesn’t care that his brother is staring at him like he’s lost his mind. Doesn’t care that maybe he has.
“A real pretty one…”
-
Sam is uncharacteristically quiet on the ride out of the city limits. He sits in his seat and stares out the window and thinks that Harmony isn’t a bad little town; decides that someday soon, maybe he’ll vacation up. He does have his own place there now.
Two hours in, he sees a tall man in head to toe crisp white with dark blonde hair and stupid legs walking in the grass, laughing up at the sky. Craning his neck as they pass, Sam’s eyes strain harder and the man fades like a mirage.
“Kill the shifter?” Dean asks, looking straight out the windshield.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the tension in his brother’s face. The too casualness in his voice. This is his way of saying he’s sorry.
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Killed it.”
Dean smiles. Pops an old cassette tape in and thrums his fingers against the wheel. Sam stares at his profile and thinks about the soft crinkles near his eye.
-
The day after Death soulfists him back to life, he wakes up and Dean comes to see him in the darkness. It’s musty and metallic and smells like an old redneck. That’s how he knows he’s home. The panic room.
He holds Sam’s face, checks for outer damage, asks him what all he remembers. Sam blinks, tries to think.
“Not too hard,” Dean tells him, but doesn’t offer more.
The last thing he sees when he closes his eyes is a grassy field, an old boneyard, jumping into a gaping hole with Michael and silently saying goodbye to Dean one last time. His brother looks at him for a moment, suspicious of his silence. “Anything?”
Sam is going to say no, because there’s nothing, nothing, but then Dean leans forward, wraps him into one of his suffocating brotherly hugs, the kind that says he’s close to crying and close to cracking Sam’s ribs and something small and impossible comes back to him; those arms, or ones like them, holding him in a very different way.
And Sammy remembers one thing, at least.