Hiding Behind The God Given Face, Part 1

[sweetprince]

Title: Hiding Behind The God Given Face
Disclaimer: I am claiming no ownership of the Winchesters.
Summary: Sam gets possessed by the spirit of a girl who had a crush on Dean back during his high school days. Unfortunately, she won't leave Sam's body unless Dean kisses her.
Pairing: Wincest
Chapters: 1/2
Genre: first time
Rating: NC-17
Acknowledgements: This story started as a whacky idea between immoralilly and myself. We were trying to come up with a way that wincest could actually be portrayed in the show. Somehow this smacked me upside the head and became a little less than whacky. And er...probably a little less than portrayble on the show too.



Baby it’s a Wild World
I’ll always remember you as a child

The family that John Winchester raised doesn’t have the time—or the inclination—to regret and retrace their steps. So they don’t. Dean and Sam have never been back to visit any of the places they have lived other than Lawrence. Towns were like notches on John’s bedpost: once taken by storm, they were discarded.

Sam had wished desperately over the years that they could go back to some of the places they had stayed. But jobs didn’t take them back to where they had already been. Sometimes Sam thought it was pretty intentional planning on his father’s part. The towns were places on a map, little marks that Sam made with a permanent marker on the laminated fold-out of the Contiguous United States (up until the day he left on a greyhound bus damned determined never to return) Dean bought him. They were closed books, sitting dusty on the shelf: still there, stories still running, but shut away from their minds.

They’re coasting along, dealing with mostly easy jobs—low-grade poltergeists and magical beasties of all varieties. It’s been working, but it’s boring. Sam likes researching and investigating, and Dean likes it when it’s actually a bit of a pursuit. But things are quiet these days, and it feels a little like blasphemy to wish that they were worse.

One day, when things feel like they’re at their bitter mellow best, they’re staring at a job in Cumberland, Maryland. And Dean swore he’d never go back. They lived there for Dean’s junior and senior years of high school, enough time to make a name for himself on the Allegany High football team. Enough time for Sam to have two good friends, Eli and Neal, who played on his soccer team. Enough time for Dean to have gotten blown in pretty much every single dingy restroom at the High School.

He’d gotten his diploma though, and John was done with it. They’d skipped through so many towns that summer that he’d have to pull out Sam’s map to remember all the placed they’d been.

Dean wants to ignore it—the summons home that it is. He would be freakin’ ecstatic to ignore it. When he’d left that town, a little bit of him had chipped off. The two and a half years in Cumberland were the best years he’d ever had with Sammy. The years before his little brother fought for his own burgeoning interests, rather than acquiescing.

Dean knows there is something fundamentally wrong with defining some of the best years of his life as the ones where Sam hadn’t worked up the courage to stop compromising his personality. He feels guilty for a lot of things around that time. But Dean and Sam are written in that town. From the creek where Sam broke his arm for the third time (left ulna again) to the movie theater Dean drove Sam out to so he could go on his first date. Somewhere in the park there’s an oak tree with Sam and Dean’s names carved into it. Forever. Until there ain’t any more breath in their lungs. He can remember the late July evening Sam did it too, whittling away and then placing his palm over the finished product.

“Brothers,” he’d said to Dean, who was lying in the grass daydreaming about fucking Suzie Wilder from behind, and Dean had looked up. “Isn’t anything that’s ever gonna change that.”

He carried those moments with him through the best of times and tried desperately to bury them through the worst. Going home is a lot like asking for forgiveness.

“Hey, you with me?” Sam asks, fork standing straight up, speared through a piece of cantaloupe.

“Yeah.” Dean breathes in and looks back at him. “Yeah, just thinking.”

Sam nods, he’s got that look in his eye like he knows everything going though Dean’s head. He looks down at the newspaper clippings they’d received and breaks the connection. Dean takes another breath.

The clippings are laid out next to his fruit salad. Sam’d been trying to divine something from the articles’ words—four girls over the last four years, all young, from all over town. Three were dead in the last seven months alone. Dean doesn’t see any rhyme or reason to it. No connection between the victims. The work of a serial killer, the papers postulated. But he’s seen the pictures from the autopsy report: the carved skin of the girls, wounds still bleeding like their hearts were pumping. He’s not had much experience with the killers of the human variety, but he knows those girls weren’t done by one of them.

What bothers him is that he doesn’t know who sent the job in their direction, who put them onto the scent. All the information was in a thick manila envelope along with the cell-phone bills they actually paid and the car insurance ads in the PO box they stopped every few months or so to check.

Dean’s suspicious by nature. There it is, right in front of him. Someone from Cumberland who wishes to remain unknown knows more than he would like them to about him and his brother. But he won’t be passing it off to someone else, not when he sees the pale waxy skin of those dead girls etched with ancient Hebrew like they were social studies art projects. Not when he’d been waiting for so long for something interesting to come their way. Hell, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

“Figure something out?” Dean asks, just this side of sullen, swirling his spoon in the thick blue mug of diner coffee.

Sam shrugs. “We’ve got to go there, is all.”

Dean sighs and looks out the window. “I knew that.”

Sam laughs, moves to lighten the mood. “When I was on the internet I looked up Miss Mackler, she’s still teaching at the high school.”

Dean blushes and throws his napkin at Sam. Dean remembers Miss Mackler. Oh does he ever. She was tiny and blonde and taught British Lit, and it was quite possible that the only time Dean actually did his assigned reading was in her class. Dean didn’t have to say a word to Sam about her, but even at fourteen the perceptive little bastard had cottoned on. He had never let Dean forget it. Sam was still at the middle school, Washington, or he’d understand. There was just something about her, even the way she gave out vocab words and chastised Dean to raise his hand was hot.

“What about that old fart, Bowen?”

“The one who got you suspended?” Sam asked, biting into his fruit with a fresh-sounding crunch.

“I didn’t deserve that suspension!” Dean protested.

Sam rolled his eyes. “Yeah, he’s still there. Still teaching religious studies and advanced Latin. Maybe we should ask him about this stuff!”

“Oh, hell no!” Dean says with an exaggerated shudder. “There was something totally off about that guy! I swear he was eating kids or something!”

Sam snorts, but smiles at him.

Dean finishes off his coffee, pushes his plate aside and goes to pay at the register—stoic in the way that Dad trained him. Sam is left to gather all their stuff together and stuff it in his bag. He knows Dean is a little bit rocked about this one. He saw the way his eyes listed off into the distance like he was remembering. Dean hates to look back, Sam doesn’t need to be reminded. But he knows, just as Dean does, it’s time for the prodigal sons to return. They’ve just finished the latest job here in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Maryland’s a good 2000 miles out and not over easy roads. They have at least two days of hard driving ahead of them.

Sam looks the directions up on google, but he knows Dean won’t need them. The same way that Sam can analyze political trends with a row of numbers and a chi-squared test is how Dean can get them across the country without a wrong turn or a misspent mile. It’s just something he knows.

They drive five-hundred of those miles without a break, Dean listening to Judas Priest while Sam tries not to scream. Sam found a four cassette set of air guitar classics for him the last time they stopped at a Target. Now he’s really starting to regret it. From the way Dean bitches about his music, you’d think he was asking to play Alanis Morrisette (and fuck you, Sam does not know all the words to “Ironic” like Dean says, it’s definitely “Head Over Heels”).

He shakes his head when Dean elaborately drums on the steering wheel, mostly a half beat off. Dean’s music career ended pretty solidly with recorder back in fourth grade and Sam’s not sure that’s a bad thing. He analyzes the photos from the coroner’s office more closely and scribbles in a steno notebook while Dean continues his percussion on the wheel. Dean very nearly swerves when Sam sits bolt upright out of his slump and shouts, “God!”

“Christ, Sam!” Dean snaps, annoyed at his own jumpy reaction more than anything else. Sam cracks a smile. “What is it?”

“I’ve figured out what the carvings on these girls are from,” he pages through a few more notes and then looks at Dean. “It’s from the Tanakh, one of the twelve minor prophets, the book of Joel.”

“Dude, since when can you read Hebrew?” Dean asks.

Sam scoffs and waves around another book. “I can’t, I was just checking the letters against this thing, and the first passage I came to checked out.”

Dean looks over at Sam quickly before he turns back to the road. These things have been happening to Sam lately. He pulls out a book and it opens to the exact page he’s looking for, the first thing his finger lands on turns out to be some gem of information. Dean’s starting to think it’s more than a little lucky, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want to have that conversation or think about the way Sam is changing, growing strange and apart.

“Okay, whatever.” Dean shakes his head. “What does it say?”

“It’s all pretty creepy.” Sam clears his throat and assumes his reading voice, all deep and slow cadence, ‘“Then afterwards I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit. I will show portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke.”’

“Whoa,” Dean sneaks a look at the photos. “Seems like this thing is taking it a bit literally! ‘Pour out my spirit on all flesh’ and all that.”

“Well, whatever,” Sam says, shuffling all of the papers and books that he had his lap into the back seat. “At least we know it’s not a demon.”

Dean shrugs. “Perverting the word of God seems pretty demonic.”

When he looks back at Sam, his brother has fallen asleep, lashes a sooty dark curtain against his cheek bones and lips parted. He’s guarding himself like he’s prepared for nightmares and Dean sighs and settles in for the ride.

*

They arrive in Cumberland in the early afternoon. Dean can’t quite help it. He pulls up to Penny’s Diner for lunch, just because it’s out on Winchester. Sam hated it back then, because the waitresses made him uncomfortable, and it was the local hang out for the high school kids. Dean remembers dragging his brother along for malts and cheese fries when Dad said he couldn’t go out without Sam. His friends hadn’t minded his younger brother, because he’d a sassy mouth by age eight, and he spent the majority of the time ignoring them and doing his French 1B homework.

The diner hasn’t changed a bit, same buzzing 24-hours sign lighting up the window. He wonders if any of the waitresses he knew are still working there. God knows he’s got some unfinished business with Mindy. Another little secret he unsuccessfully hid from Sam. But then he couldn’t really hide being dragged off to the back room by his shirt collar just when her shift ended.

Sam raises one eyebrow the minute his eyes find the word Penny’s written above the door and shoots Dean a look. Dean glares back and Sam decides to let it go. He wonders occasionally what Dean would’ve been like if they stayed in one place—if he would’ve been a regular at a place like this and a fixture at the pool table over in Brewski’s sports bar—not that he wasn’t when they actually were living here. Dean made good use of his collection of fake IDs at Brewski’s, cleaning out at the pool table and going home with older girls. He can remember a few fights between Dean and Dad over the proper use of their ID library.

It’s funny to think of a time when Dean champed at the bit, when he was a normal teenage boy who didn’t blithely fall in line. It was such a hiccup in Dean’s behavior, or maybe not. Maybe when they left that awful summer Dean shut down a little, became an adult with the first press of the gas pedal on the interstate. Dean was young without youth.

Sam sighs and looks out into the sunshine, bright blue sky like a bowl washed clean of clouds. Sam had wanted so hard to turn around the day left, to freak out and start pulling the boxes out of the car. He’d found the crumpled senior issue of the school newspaper next to Dean’s bed when he’d packed the last of their stuff up. All the things that they’d accumulated in their two years of inertia disappearing into boxes. He’d resolved himself never to let his options and aspirations be taken away from him, the way Dad had robbed Dean of his.

Maybe they shouldn’t have done it—come here? God knows, they aren’t the only ones who’ve been around the block a few times. They could have passed it off. Sam’s not sure Cumberland’s a box that’s ready to be opened. There’s a lot left unsaid, and Sam knows Dean will pick bitter fight after fight to avoid having to come right out and say it.

He looks back over at his brother as he cracks his back, sore from the car ride. Dean’s fighting a smile that his face can’t quite contain and Sam thinks maybe Dean is owning up to something, facing down the fact that he missed this place. Maybe feeling a little a sad for missing it change.

They’re recognized by their dad’s favorite server once they step through the door. He always left a 20% tip. Joanne is from Georgia and fifty if she is a day, but still slim with candy-colored dyed red hair. She spots them as she’s filling the register up with change. She looks up and knows who they are instantly. “Well would you believe it, looks like some Winchester boys went and done growed up.”

Dean laughs and Sam ducks his head.

“Been how many years since I saw y’all in here after every game?” Dean counts back in his head, as she smiles wide and leads them to a booth by the window. Sammy has to fold himself into the booth and Joanne looks on in wonder. “Good Lord, Sam, you did get tall.”

Sam hates that. Do people think he doesn’t notice?

She asks if they need menus and Dean nods for old time’s sake. Sam’s going to crawl through it the best he can, trying to find something with fruit or vegetables for a few minutes before he gives in and orders a burger. Dean knows him.

A few of the other waitresses remember them and they stop and say hello. They don’t ask after John, and Sam has to wonder if maybe they’re a little bit psychic. Turns out Mindy’s gone, went out to see the world, and bogged down a few states over, last they heard from her.

Sam knows Dean feels regretful, but he also knows there were at least five other girls he was going with in their two years out here. He wonders what it’s going to be like when they run into them. Sam has an idea. He’s settling himself in for a long hard laugh.

They leave with a Styrofoam take-out box filled with blackberry pie coated liberally in powdered sugar. Dean isn’t going to let Sam have a bite of it.

There’s a Super 8 motel off route 68 and they head for that. Dean carefully skirts their old neighborhood, the dingy little three-bedroom they’d gotten for cheap because the electricity was spotty. It only took about two hours of marking the house up with a broken stick of blue sidewalk chalk and Sam trying out various spells to get rid of the ghost infestation. The house was still drafty and creaky and cold though. Sam had spent many a night huddled back to back with Dean for warmth on his brother’s bed.

Dean doesn’t want to admit it, but he needs a nap. Within seconds, Sam is set up on the internet looking up the implications of the writings on the girls’ skin. Dean is still bitching about the fact that they’re on the third floor rather than the first just because Sam insisted on non-smoking.

Sam considers tossing a book at him, starting a wrestling match that would exercise off some tension. He’s finding dead ends. There isn’t anything in Dad’s journal. He doesn’t like this. The past couple jobs of minimal fact checking and witness-trolling have pampered him soft.

Sam has even cracked open the ecclesiastical texts left to him by Pastor Jim. His brother lies on his stomach on the bed closest to the door, paging through Highway to Hell: the Life and Times of Bon Scott. The sunlight spilling through the window illuminates the tips of his hair and turns his lashes into lines of light. He doesn’t look like Sam’s brother like that. He looks other, he looks like more. He turns away, considers asking Dean for help and disturbing that sharply rendered tableau. He’d help Sam, or he’d try anyway, but they both know he’d only get in the way. Dean hasn’t the patience for this. He’s too frenetic, too edgy.

Sam chucks the book at the wall instead and lets out a frustrated huff. Dean looks up from his biography, puts it aside. Rock Star stories always make him depressed. He’s not sure why.

“There’s nothing,” Sam tells him in explanation. “We’re just going to have to go to the crime scenes, see if they’ll tell us anything.”

*

It takes some sneaking to get into the first victim’s house. It’s in the upscale part of town, near Constitution park, an old Victorian with rambling gardens. She was young, 32, some high flying lawyer with the local firm. There was already a new family in the house. Police report said she was found in the master suite two weeks after she died, blood still crimson on the carpet like she’d been killed only seconds before.

There’s a group of kids playing in the back yard, freeze tag or something. A beleaguered nanny watches them from the back porch, swallowing down lemonade like it’s going out of style. Dean wonders if she spiked it. They climb a trellis to an open window on the second floor and find the room with only a little trouble. It kind of amazes Dean that these people have no clue that two strange men found their way into the house in broad daylight.

They tread carefully nevertheless.

Sam is even more frustrated when the scan of the bedroom is clean. Blood shows up everywhere under the black light, but there are no messages written on the walls, no cryptic bible verses. They weren’t expecting sulfur and so it came as no surprise when they didn’t find any, but nothing comes up with EMF either. Sam runs a hand through his hair. He hates it when he can’t figure something out.

“Jesus, Sam,” Dean says, desperately going through the walk-in closet for some kind of clue. “It looks like a typical crime scene.”

Sam throws up his hands. He doesn’t have any ideas either. They leave through the side door with no one the wiser.

None of the other crime scenes yield any other answers. Sam’s clearly eating at himself with frustration. It’s 10 PM before they give up. Dean drives them downtown, eyeing the lights and old architecture. A lot of the shops are new, but the buildings are the same. The number of art galleries seems to have increased exponentially. Sam wonders aloud if Cumberland became fashionable in the years they were away and Dean shoots him a look.

He pulls up at a 7/11, going in to indulge himself in a Cherry Coke big gulp. He gets a Vitamin Water for Sam. It takes a second to get his change, the cashier has some serious butter fingers and he’s eying a girl in short denim shorts bending over a case of Smirnoff Ice. Dean snorts and shoots her a glance. That girl’s way out of the poor guy’s league. He dumps the change in the tip jar anyway, at least that’s something.

Sam is standing outside the car looking up at the sky when Dean comes out.

“Hey, what’s up?” he sets his brother’s drink on the hood of the car and leans against her.

Sam turns at the sound of his voice, eyes alighting on the Vitamin Water. “I always wanted to try one of these, especially the pink one.” His voice comes out more rapid, more sing-song, and if Dean hadn’t already been getting weird vibes from the Vitamin Water comment, the sound of Sam’s voice would totally have set him off. Sam guzzles these things down. He prefers them over actual sleep.

He backs up, reaches for his gun, and is met with cold fear when he realizes he isn’t carrying. Sam had got on him about the Shall Issue laws in this state. Told him the gun control was strict. Said it wasn’t going to look good if any cop looked at Dean’s guns and realized they had all been bought in different states with different names. Sam hadn’t even wanted to know what the jail sentence was for transporting firearms across state lines, but he’d had a good idea that it wasn’t light, if he remembered his Supreme Court cases correctly.

“What have you done with my brother?” Dean asks, his voice cold and tight, nails digging into the waxy layer on his Big Gulp cup.

Sam’s eyebrows furrow. “Dean, what are you talking about?” He reaches across the hood for the Vitamin Water.

He laughs humorlessly. “Believe me, asshole, I know my brother and you aren’t him.”

Sam lets out a huff, eyes rolling upwards, and hands coming to rest on his hips. It’s the most feminine thing Dean’s ever seen. “I should have known I wouldn’t be able to get you going for very long.”

Dean’s eyes narrow. “What have you done with my brother?”

“Nothing,” she says lightly, she twists the top on the vitamin water and takes a delicate sip before continuing. “I’m just borrowing him for a little bit.”

Dean growls. “Well times up, give him back!”

She rolls her eyes again, and gets into the car like it ain’t no thing. “Dean, you aren’t going to exorcise me, I’m not some demon to be cast out, and right now, I need your brother’s body more than he does.”

Dean wants to throw something.

He mutters to himself as he gets in the car and slams the door. “How do you always do this to me, Sammy? Do you like being possessed by girls or something?”

She hears him, cocking Sam’s head. “This has happened before?”

Dean shoots her a dark look. “Once.”

“Well, okay Mr. Grumpy Pants, we won’t talk about that then.”

Dean stares at her in mute shock for a second. She just called him Mr. Grumpy Pants. Mr. Grumpy Pants just came out of Sam’s mouth. If this wasn’t so dire, and Sam wasn’t, you know, possessed, again, he’d probably be laughing his ass off or vomiting.

Dean Winchester is not giving up on getting his brother back from Ms. Crazy Body-Snatcher Bitch. He has a sudden idea and reaches across to the glove compartment. He knows at least one throwing knife has been stowed in there for safe-keeping. She seems to sense what he’s planning before he’s even halfway across the seat though. Sam’s arm comes up, his fingers tightening around Dean’s wrist.

“Don’t, Dean,” she whispers. “I promise not to hurt you or your brother, but I’m not going anywhere until I’m ready to leave.”

Dean wrenches his arm away and drops his head to the steering wheel. “I seriously don’t need this right now.”

She makes a disgusted noise, the one thing that she and Sam have in common, and leans back into the seat. “Well I didn’t need to be dead, and honestly, I think my situation’s worse.”

“Couldn’t you have possessed someone else?” Dean asks petulantly as he pulls out of the parking lot. He sees no other option than to go back to the motel, at least he can keep an eye on her.

“No, I could not have possessed anyone else,” she shoots back, crossing Sam’s arms over his chest. With his knees drawn together and his chin raised like a defiant little spit-fire, Sam looks completely ridiculous.

“Sam’s just prime possession material then?” Dean asks when he stops at a light.

She shrugs. “Not particularly, that wasn’t really the point.”

“So what was the point?”

She doesn’t answer. Dean can’t think of any way to press the issue. He gets back on route 68 to drive the last few miles to the hotel. The girl in Sam’s body cranes his neck around to look in the backseat. Bags of salt, lighter fluid, books on demonology, latin dictionaries, and somewhat improbably, a large canister of Fortnum & Mason Darjeeling tea.

“So you’re like Van Helsing or something?” She sits back upright.

Dean ignores the comparison and keeps his eyes on the road. “That obvious, huh?”

She shrugs. “I’m a ghost, it’s pretty obvious to me.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a ghost like you before.” He shoots her a short glance. She’s looking out the window, teeth digging into her lip. It’s Sammy’s ‘deep contemplation’ face.

“Oh, the things I could say in reply to that! Well, whatever, I’m not trying to rip people up in new and creative ways.” She shifts around in her seat. “I faint at the sight of blood.”

That’s just great. He doesn’t have his brother, he has a fainting ghost thing, and he still has a case involving weird dying girls. Weird bleeding dying girls and he’s not sure he knows how to do this alone anymore.

A car ahead of them, a junky old Cadillac, is going exactly the speed limit and who does that? Dean swerves into the opposing traffic’s lane to pass the Caddy. Sam shrieks and grabs onto the dashboard.

“Gosh darn it, Dean, you haven’t changed a bit!”

Dean looks over at her. “You know me?”

She laughs like he’s stupid. “Duh, still aren’t using those brains are we?”

It comes to him like an epiphany. Maggie Cole, fifth period history, senior year, glasses, perfectly pristine clothes, and a royal pain in the ass. She slammed everything he ever had to say in that class, made fun of him for being on the football team, and continually implied that he didn’t have two brain-cells to rub together.

“Of course it would be you to possess my brother!” He pulls into the motel with a screech of the breaks. He apologizes to his baby in his head.

“Yeah, well,” she snarks back, ducking extremely low like she’s going to hit her head on the door and gets out of the car. He nearly cries when he hears the door slam protesting on its hinges. “Couldn’t get the dumb Winchester.”

“Oh please.” Dean walks into the motel lobby ahead of her. He throws a glance back at her over his shoulder. “You were totally in love with me back in high school, don’t try to deny it.”

The way Sam’s cheeks light up, Dean knows he’s scored a hit. He flashes a smile at the desk clerk who looks like she’s ready to go clubbing after her shift is over. The girl smiles back, and then runs her eyes over Sam. Too bad Sam’s possessed by a psychotic feminazi and can’t appreciate it. Oh hey wait, that isn’t any different than usual. The desk clerk notices Sam’s obliviousness and then turns back to Dean.

“You got everything you need?” she asks, voice laden with meaning. Dean chuckles inwardly.

“I’m good, thanks,” he replies with a wink. They move off to the elevators. Maggie is hacking and coughing, her face twisted into a disgusted expression. Dean remembers this part.

“It’s not like I wouldn’t have gone with you,” Dean says, shooting her a pointed look. “It’s just the ‘tude was a serious dick softener.”

They step into the elevator and she’s silent, staring at the panel of numbers, hip cocked and eyebrows drawn tight. Not even Sam’s own bitchy glare compares to that expression.

“Look, are you sure you can’t possess somebody else?” he asks her one last time, when they step out on their floor.

She looks ready to slap him. “No!”

Dean unlocks the door to their room and gestures her in ahead of him. “We’d get a whole lot farther if you just tell me why you need to possess my brother.”

She sighs and falls back on Dean’s bed, careful to keep Sam’s shoes off the comforter. “It’s my unfinished business,” she tells him like that’s all there is to it. He crosses both arms and leans back against the cheap plywood bureau, expression dark.

She sighs again and the blush is back on Sam’s face in full-force. Meg was so much better at this imitating Sam stuff. She had the way he moved down perfectly, but Maggie isn’t trying to be anybody but herself in Sam’s body. She sprawls like a girl, legs kept perfectly together, hips angled in.

The room is quiet for long moments before she finally speaks up, “I never got to kiss anyone before I died.”

Dean practically falls off the bureau in surprise. As it is, he gives himself a pretty good raspberry on the small of his back. “What? Are you kidding?”

She rolls over so that Sam’s back is to him and huddles inward on herself.

Dean comes away from the wall. “What kind of unfinished business is that?” He’s only one decibel level away from shouting.

“I know, okay!” she shouts back. “I know what it looks like!”

“Dude, can’t you just let your unfinished be getting over the fact that you never got kissed?”

She bolts up in bed. “Hello? I’ve been dead for ten years! Don’t you think I’ve tried that?”

“I can’t kiss you!” Dean shoots back. “You possessed my brother! If you wanted me to make out with you, you would’ve had better luck with the girl at the desk!”

When Dean looks back at Maggie her shoulders are shaking in silent sobs and suddenly he feels very very bad. He’s a total sucker for crying girls, not to mention crying brothers. Maggie has managed to roll it all into one, and Dean is the worst person in the world.

He sits down next to Sam on the bed and lays a tentative hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, but try to think of it from my angle, okay?”

Tears are still running out of Sam’s eyes, but she nods like she understands.

“So you died just after we left, huh?” Dean asks, lying back on the bed next to her. She rolls to face the ceiling and nods again.

“Three months after graduation,” she says in a monotone. Dean thinks it can’t be the most happy memory. If he remembers correctly she was going to Wellesley or Vassar or some girly liberal arts school where she probably would’ve been in feminazi heaven.

He drops his voice, trying to use Sam’s comforting tone, he hopes he doesn’t fall too short of the mark. “What happened?”

She tenses up next to him. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Dean sighs. “So this is my bed, and that one’s yours, so maybe you could—”

“Aw, Dean, don’t want to snuggle with me?” she asks, dripping sarcasm. Dean sighs, and the bitch attitude is back. He was almost starting to miss it. Haha. No.

He’s not going to give her any bait with a reply on that one. He’s glad when she gets up and moves to the other bed. She kicks off Sam’s shoes and then climbs into bed, jeans and all. Dean guesses that’s a hint that they’re going to pick this up in the morning.

Well whatever, he’s not going to change his routine just because Maggie’s in the room. He shrugs out of his jeans and slips out of his shirt, there’s a knife under his pillow and now he can sleep.

He wakes himself up at three in the morning. Maggie is sleeping peacefully in the other bed, chest rising and falling. Dean can already tell she sleeps more solid than Sam does. He reaches over the edge of the bed and pulls out the book of exorcisms Sam copied down for him.

He finds an earmarked page and starts reading, “ ‘Crux sancta sit mihi lux. Non draco sit mihi dux. Vade retro satana. Nunquam suade mihi vana. Sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas.’”

He watches with furrowed brows as nothing happens. Maggie rolls over, eyes flashing open and Dean curses. She makes a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “That’s the wrong one, dumbass!”

Dean throws the book aside and rolls back over to sleep. Looks like the bitch ain’t going anywhere.


*

The next day when Dean wakes up again, Maggie is lobbing Sam’s clothes around the room. It’s quite possibly the most frightening thing he’s ever seen.

“What are you doing?” He cries, sitting up on his elbows, wiping sleep out of his eyes.

“Awful, awful, awful,” she shouts, tossing a hoodie aside. “Your brother has the best body I have ever seen, better than yours,” she looks pointedly at Dean’s bare chest. “And he insists upon wearing this baggy California surfer boy wear! Blech!”

Dean is outraged. “My body is fine, thank you!”

She smirks at him, she’s discarded Sam’s shirt from yesterday, but she’s still in the loose jeans that are practically falling off Sam’s slim hips. “Yours is fine, Dean. Just Sam’s is better.”

Dean rolls over and slams a pillow over his head. “Arg, I hate you!”

She laughs, deep and low, and whoa, Sam should totally laugh like that. Girls would be dropping their panties all over the place. He’s glad that Sam wasn’t possessed by a giggler. He might have had to shoot her and then no more baby brother. That would have been truly tragic.

“Oh man, I have to pee!” she cries suddenly. “I didn’t even think about that!”

Dean groans under his pillow. “It’s not hard, just point and shoot.”

A pair of jeans smack down over his mid-section, but he hears her stomping off into the bathroom. He has about five seconds of quiet.

“Oh my god!” she screeches. Dean rolls out of bed and is on his feet in seconds.

“What?” he calls back, knife in a loose grip. “What is it?”

“Heh.” Dean can hear the embarrassment in her voice. “You know, I think I’ve got it.”

Dean snorts, looks like she caught sight of the equipment. If she’s never even kissed a boy, he highly doubts she’s gotten an eyeful of dick before. Dean climbs back into bed and pulls the pillow over my head.

“I’m sleeping for another two hours!” he yells, muffled by the cloth of the pillow. “Don’t do anything stupid with my brother.”

Maggie doesn’t respond with any harsh witticisms so he finds it safe enough to succumb to sleep. When he wakes up some hours later, the light filtering through the blinds tells him he’s slept way more than two hours. He rolls over and looks at the alarm clock on the night stand between the two beds.

12:49.

Jesus. It’s been a long time since he slept that late. Sam never lets him. He throws back the covers and rolls out of bed. Maggie is nowhere in sight, but she’d neatly folded the clothes she’d been hurling around. It bothers him a little that she isn’t there. Okay, a lot, actually. It isn’t just some random person she’d run off with, it was his brother. He supposes if anybody was going to possess his little brother he’d want it to be Maggi. At least Maggie is a persnickety bitch. It could have been Ashley Adams. One of his foot ball buddies had dated her and then gotten her pregnant because she’d used mail-order diaphragms.

Seriously.

He sighs and cracks his neck. He could freak out and go after her, but he’d checked out the window and his baby was still there, gleaming black in the sun. Maggie can’t have gone far. She isn’t the type of girl to hitchhike. He settles on taking a shower.

Maggie had taped a note up to the mirror at the exact level of his face. He rips it off with a frustrated noise in the back of his throat.

Had to take care of some things.
I won’t be gone long.
There’s food in the fridge.
-Maggie

She doesn’t dot her I’s with hearts or anything, but it’s clearly a girl’s handwriting. Sam’s is neat to a fault, almost pretty even, but no one could mistake the soft rounding edges of this hand for anything other than a woman’s. He wonders what exactly she has to take care of, and then figures he probably doesn’t want to know. Maggie had her little posse of girls back in high school, not a single guy went close, and they were all a little unclear if the group understood the definition of fun.

He crumples up the note and chucks it into the waste basket before stepping into the tub.

The shower head has the pounding almost too hard spray that Dean loves, water wrenching all the tension out of him. He resists the urge to lean against the shower wall and just let it wash over him. Ever since Sam had shown him that thing on motel showers—bleh. Maggie returns when he’s toweling off in the bathroom.

He steps out into the room and nearly kills himself tripping over a pile of shopping bags. Maggie has once again left the room, but she left behind an entire shopping mall on their floor. He certainly hopes she’s not going to stuff Sam into some frilly dress by Forever 21.

He pulls his clothes on in harsh jerky movements, feeling like he’s about to hyperventilate. Clothes! Everywhere. This was always the thing that got him about Cassie. She’d go on shopping binges and attempt to drag him along and by the end he’d be seriously convinced he had asthma.

He’s just got the Styrofoam take-out box out of the fridge because food always calms him down, when Maggie steps back into the room. He turns around and promptly drops the box in shock.

“What are you—” he cuts himself off feebly. “What the fuck are you wearing?”

She looks down at herself. “This?”

“A suit! You are wearing a pansy-ass suit!”

She doesn’t respond with the rancor and the annoyance that she’s known for. In fact she laughs. “You can’t tell me that Sam doesn’t look good in it.”

“I—” No he really can’t. Sam’s legs go on for miles in fashionably-cut dark fabric, and the blazer only highlights the trimness of his waist and the breadth of his shoulders. The entire ensemble is black, from the dress shoes to the tie, and she’d even gone and gotten Sam’s hair trimmed. He thinks he hates Sam a little in that outfit. Too far from the working men they were raised as. “Are you unclear as to what we do for a living?”

She furrows Sam’s brows. “I saw a suit in his bag, asshole.”

Dean picks up the take-out carton. “Yes, one! It was enough.”

She scoffs and bends to gather the shopping bags that Dean had trampled over. “That tie was criminal! You don’t get a body like Sam’s and then waste it!”

He takes a bite of the turkey-club she’d left for him. “How did you pay for it, huh?”

She chucks him under the chin and tells him in a voice laden with sarcasm, “I’ve been dead for a long time, sugar, I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve.”

Dean lets out a gust of air and then stuffs another piece of sandwich into his mouth. She makes a disgusted face and moves off. “Can we go back to you calling me asshole and idiot? Sugar coming out of my brother’s mouth via you is possibly the most disturbing thing I’ve ever come across.”

She rolls her eyes at him and begins taking stuff out of the bags. She’s gotten Sam at least three new pairs of jeans, countless shirts, and a new jacket, not to mention this suit business.

Dean sighs. “We’ve got some work to do for a case today, you look way too slick to be trusted!”

She crosses her arms and stares at him for a long moment. “Fine, but this suit is Boss, so tell your brother to keep it in a garment bag, and no more relaxed fit jeans for him, okay? Your brother is really tall, he should totally be rocking the straight-legged jeans!”

Dean wants to bang his head against the wall. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Fine! I’ll write it down.” She shrugs out of the suit jacket and lays it gingerly over the back of a chair. The tie and dress-shirt follow, and God, what had Maggie spent the last ten years of being dead doing? Striptease? He knows that Sam will just about die of shame at the idea of Maggie pushing those pants down his strong thighs to reveal boxer-briefs.

She looks up when he snorts. “You know, trying to get me hot for my own brother isn’t going to get me to kiss you!”

She’s pegged him with a heavy black dress-shoe before he can even blink. So apparently Maggie has figured out how to use Sam’s aim. He’s lucky it missed his collarbone or he’s pretty sure it would have cracked.

“Ow! Christ, woman, no need for violence!”

She’s yanking up a pair of the straight-legged jeans and scowling at him. “Just shut up! It’s not like it’s so hard—all you have to do is kiss me, and I can move on! Why are you always such an asshole?”

She runs tense fingers through Sam’s hair and it’s so like his brother that for a moment Dean is almost fooled into believing he’s back.

“I don’t think you understand, you are asking me to stick my tongue in my brother’s mouth,” he snarls, still rubbing at his chest.

She’s folding clothes, viciously, hard jerky movements, that betray the extent of her anger. “I can’t go and possess anybody else.”

Dean throws up his hands. “Why not?”

“Because I can’t,” she grates out, teeth grit and eyes flaring. “I suppose I could find someone else to kiss me.”

Dean’s mouth drops. “Oh, no you don’t! Not in Sammy’s body!”

She raises her eyebrows and puts her hands on her hips. Dean sits down on the bed with a defeated sigh.

*

They’re in the car, both coming to the same silent resolution not to talk about it. It’s so odd to see Sam in clothes that fit without eight thousand layers on.

“Does your brother just run cold or something?” she’d asked when she’d looked at the pile of shirts and jackets that Sam usually wore.

Dean had laughed. “Nah, he’s just really self-conscious.”

Her eyes had looked like they were going to fall out of her head.

Now Maggie’s scrolling through Sam’s iPod eyeing the selection. There is no way that any of it is going to end up on his stereo. He made this resolution many years ago, and he intends to keep it that way. They’re arguing about music in five seconds. The only thing she’ll moderately tolerate is Queen, but then she has to sing a long, and it’s awful. Maybe Maggie could carry a tune, but Sam sure as hell cannot.

“Jesus Christ, Dean, could you be a good host, and let me pick the music?” she cries, whacking him on the arm when they’re at a stop light. He’d just vetoed Queen and put in Foghat.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he asks her. “I didn’t invite you to possess my brother, you just freakin’ did it! Under the circumstances I think I get to do whatever the hell I want!”

She ejects the tape from the tape deck and starts pulling out the long red-brown cellophane strip before chucking it out the window. Dean watches as a car in the right turn lane crunches down over it.

“My brother actually bought me that,” he tells her, mouth open with shock at her audacity. He’s had it since he was fourteen.

She has the good grace to look a little chagrinned.

“Could you like—calm the fuck down or something?” he begs her. “I’m not going to kiss you, but it’s not like you have to be a raging bitch either!”

“All I want is to move on!” she shouts at him. Dean’s fingers clamp on the steering wheel and his jaw goes tight. The way Maggie sighs he knows he’s won this battle.

Dean changes the subject, “Listen, ordinarily, Sam would do this stuff, but since you took him out of commission…”

“What do you want me to do?” she huffs, arms crossed.

“Just some research,” Dean replies. “I don’t really have the patience for it.”

She makes a face. “It figures.”

He purses his lips. “Can we not do that?”

“What?” she looks at him, arches a brow, Sam’s lips molding into a frown.

“Insult my intelligence every five words?” He pulled into the parking lot of a local Irish pub. Sam used to love the chicken tenders here. “It’s really unnecessary.”

She sighs, grabs some of the books from the back seat and gets out. She shrugs all of Dean’s explanations off and tells him she’ll figure it out on her own with a snap. He lets out a breath and tells himself to let it go. As long as she does it, that’s all that matters.

Sam’s long shadow spreads across the asphalt, claiming the space for himself. Dean smiles as Maggie walks Sam’s shadow right through Dean’s shadow’s stomach. Not Sam, at all. His little brother had thought it unimaginably rude to step on people’s shadows when he was little.

Maggie looks over at Dean, catching the fond expression on his face, and pauses. They stare at each other for a second before she breathes out a sigh and pushes past him into the pub. Dean stands out in the parking lot for a moment longer.

When he follows her inside, she’s already got a booth and several of Sam’s books on biblical etymology spread out over the table. She’s looking down at the scrawled translation of the Book of Joel that Sam had written out. Her brows are furrowed deep enough that it’ll probably leave permanent lines. Dean still hasn’t shown her the pictures of the dead girls, there sitting back in the hotel room.

“Dean, I don’t understand what any of this means!” She’s frustrated already, finger marking her place in New Advent. “ ‘Law of Harmony’ and liturgy and rhetoric discourse—they’re analyzing it for form rather than content.”

Dean holds up his hands. I got nothing, it says. She breathes out a sharp breath and slams back a gulp of water. The waitress walks up, clearly only just out of high school. She smiles at Dean shyly, asking them what they want.

Dean brusquely orders a French dip and an iced tea. When he looks over at Maggie, she’s arching Sam’s eyebrow back up into his hairline again. She is remarkably adept at that. Dean shoots her a ‘what?’ look and she shakes Sam’s head and orders meatloaf and potato skins. Dean smiles. Sam will only rarely eat potato skins, but Dean loves them.

“I can’t believe you didn’t hit on that poor girl until she was dizzy with it!” Maggie jabs at him with Sam’s foot.

Dean makes a face. “You’re kidding right? That girl’s barely out of diapers.”

She crosses her arms. “Oh don’t go pretending to have morals now!”

“I swear to Christ, it’s your God given talent to needle everybody in the immediate vicinity!”

She looks momentarily stunned, her mouth gaping open. Dean shakes his head and drinks a sip from his water.

“So,” she ventures, voice awash in contrition, “why is the word lord always in capital letters?”

Dean looks over at her as she pushes Sam’s notebook at him. He shrugs. “It usually is in biblical verse, I don’t know. I was never all that interested, Pastor Jim spent a lot more time with Sam than with me.”

“Who’s Pastor Jim?” she asks, her chin on her fist. It almost looks coy. Dean is sure she isn’t even aware of how girly and stupid she’s making Sam look all the time.

Dean clears his throat. “He took care of us a lot when Sam and I were younger. He died a few years ago.”

She shifts her gaze back and forth, twisting the cap of Sam’s pen nervously. “I’m sorry, I just—I wondered if Sam was doing it on purpose or something.”

Dean shrugs his shoulders. “Why?”

She pushes the book back at Dean and points the pen at the page. He drags the book closer to himself, eyeing the page curiously. Sam had circled random words in the cryptic paragraph in bright red pen, but there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it, no sense. It almost looked like he’d taken it into his head to edit the grammar and syntax of the venerable old Bible verse.

Dean groans and looks back up at her. “Could you maybe unpossess him, so that I could ask?”

The young waitress plunks their food down just as Maggie’s annoyed ‘no!’ comes out of Sam’s mouth. The girl startles and blushes.

Maggie turns to her, smiling sheepishly. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I didn’t mean you.”

Dean drops his head to the table in resignation. Everybody in the entire world is going to think his brother is a complete flaming homo.

“Maybe he is,” Maggie says and steals one of his fries.

Dean looks up, he hadn’t realized he’d said it aloud. “Is not!”

Maggie, champion eye-roller that she is, shoots him a look and takes another sip of water. “Whatever, maybe you should just interview the victim’s relatives.”

Dean bites into his burger and takes a minute to savor it before answering, “I would have, if you hadn’t come and snatched Sammy’s body!”

“You can’t even be trusted to interview people by yourself?” she shot back.

“Can so!” he replies mulishly. “It’s just that I gotta watch you, Ms. Crazy-spend-thousands-of-dollars-on-a-wardrobe-Sam-will-never-wear.”

“Well I’m not magically going to come up with the answers from this, I have no idea what’s going on, so you’ll just have to suck it up and take me with you.” She stabs her lettuce with her fork. “Or you could make out with me,” she adds, eyes hard.

“Jesus, a little quieter, please!” Dean looks around the room, hoping no one has heard Sam’s echoing voice.

Maggie looks so incredibly disgusted with him, he feels a little ashamed. They finish off their meal in silence. When Dean goes up to the register, he waits for the gay comments, but none seemed forthcoming. The slip of a girl rings him up and has trouble meeting his eyes without blushing. Dean sighs and pockets his change.

Dean decides he’ll take Maggie with him tomorrow to go question people, otherwise they’ll never get anywhere. Maggie looks at him like he’s pure evil. He supposes he can understand why she’d be upset. She probably doesn’t want to still be here, and he knows he could do something about that, but she really is asking a lot. Sam is his blood, and she might move on, but he’ll have to live with it.

*

The third victim, Alicia Cohen, had a sister who worked in a record store off of Broadway. Her parents had been completely uncooperative to questioning. They were Jewish and were determined that whatever had happened to their daughter was the result of a hate crime. Maggie didn’t have Sam’s usual glib soothing tongue, and it was a near disaster. So they decided to try the younger sister next.

Tory Cohen is a tiny fairy of a girl, nothing like her sister who was only visiting for a short while before going back to her internship in DC when she was killed. Tory wears a black tinker bell dress, caked on make-up, a full stack of rings marching up both lobes, and a scowl. Dean knows she’s going to be one girl who absolutely will not give a fuck about his face. Unfortunately, Maggie abandons him for the nu-rave electro-pop section. Dean could vomit.

Dean walks over to Tory, who is staring him down behind the register, and flips open his badge. “John Preston, FBI.”

Tory glares at him for a few seconds before nodding. “What do you want?”

“Me and my partner are here to ask you a few questions about your sister,” Dean replies simply, trying his hardest not to look fazed or confrontational by her bad attitude.

“That your partner?” she points over Dean’s shoulder. Dean turns around to see Maggie singing along to Madonna. God, could she make his life any more difficult?

“I don’t wanna hear, I don’t wanna know, please don’t say your sorry, I’ve heard it all before—” Maggie twirls along to the music, holding a ton of CDs in her hands. Dean wants to cry. Way to go, Maggie, blow their cover in the first five seconds.

Maggie finds another album to capture her attention and goes back to merely bobbing her head. Dean watches a tiny elfin blond teen staring at Sam in obvious awe and appreciation. Dean sighs. His brother is attractive, and the way Maggie’s ramping up his assets with the better-cut clothing and the gayness by just acting like herself means he’s going to be beating off every fairy in a five mile radius. He can’t even make fun of Sam for it, because he’ll get all drawn and pissed off and start diatribing in favor of gay rights.

Tory looks amused. “I didn’t know they accepted openly gay people into the FBI.”

Dean realizes he’s got some fragile admiration from her and he’s quick to jump on it. “Yeah, well, that’s Partridge for you, couldn’t keep him…er…out.”

Tory nods and sighs. “What do you want to know?”

*

“I can’t believe you!” Dean hisses under his breath as they leave the shop.

“Hey, it wasn’t the singing that made her a useless witness!” Maggie hisses back, struggling, even with Sam’s long legs, to keep up with Dean, who is gunning it toward the nearest deli.

“Sam doesn’t like dick!” Dean grinds out, yanking open the glass door.

Maggie rolls her eyes. “So just kiss me already, asshole!”

“I don’t like dick!” Dean nearly shouts, stomping up to the counter to order a sandwich. Maggie growls.

“I’m not asking you to enjoy it, I’m asking you to allow me to move on!” She grinds to a halt and glances around her, looking at the restaurant patrons who have all stopped eating to stare at the two men. She realizes suddenly just how bad it must have sounded. Dean’s shoulders are up around his ears and he’s completely ignoring her in favor of ordering a roast beef sandwich on Dutch crunch.

Maggie wants to spout off some lines about practicing for a play or something equally ridiculous to take the pressure off of them. An entire family is staring at them in open-mouthed horror. Dean probably won’t play along. She sighs and turns around and walks out of the shop, running straight into that blond kid from the record store.

The kid trips and falls to the pavement, books and papers falling out of his messenger bag and littering the sidewalk. Maggie curses and is down on the ground picking papers up in seconds.

“Can’t trust you to do anything,” Dean tells her, biting into his sandwich. Maggie makes a noise and picks up one last paper before getting to her feet. The kid is babbling apologies and Maggie is ignoring him, peering at the paper closely.

“I’m so sorry,” the kid says and runs a hand down Sam’s arm. Maggie is too engrossed to notice.

“Sam,” Dean starts, “hand the kid his paper back.”

Maggie looks at him over the top of the sheet and then sighs and hands it over. She drags Dean off before the boy can apologize anymore.

“What the hell, Maggie?” he shouts, trying to shake her off. He’s still angry.

“Dean, I think I know what Sam was doing!” she whispers furiously.

Part 2