To Buy Your Innocence

He stands there in the doorway, just outside the living room, and you can feel him. He is the hurricane's eye, but you don't look. You stay where you are on the couch, hands palm up and empty in your lap, and stare at the flickering face of the TV screen. Don't move.

"Dean," he says, quiet and firm. When had he grown an adult voice? An objective one. Maybe the same time he made all these decisions. Maybe that's what he needed it for; sell some innocence to buy another type. "I need a ride."

You don't say anything. Not what about what I need Sam, huh? Not what about what Dad needs? You just sit there, on the middle cushion of the couch, unseeing eyes glued to the jeering square of light in front of you, sensations buried somewhere you cannot reach them.

"You can't change the way I feel," he said, that voice, hands white knuckled on the strap of his duffel, jaw clenched tight. You see it from the corner of your eye, in the flash of a passing car, his eyes gleaming in the night, pointed straight ahead.

You don't say anything. Your levels of failure crash down around your ears, and the weight of it pushes your foot to the floor.

For him.

There's a note when you get back.

Took the harpies in Maine.

You look up the restless spirit in Wisconsin – case notes are in the car.

Check in every three days.

He took the one as far away from Palo Alto as he could get; you've got the one in the middle. He's living life as he hunts, getting out of the area after the climax so there's no one left to finger. So there's no one left to blame but those left behind.

The note is white against your skin, the black slashes of his writing cutting the page in three separate lines. You stare at it for a minute, shrug and grab your jacket back off the chair.

There's nothing left here anymore.

There are girls, countless. There are hunts and victims and monsters; bodies to burn and salt to fling, music to listen to. There's a car to drive and knives to sharpen. There's a voice on the end of a phone line that grunts coordinates and clicks out. There are bullets to buy and witnesses to charm. There are motels to sleep in.

The girls are faceless. The hunts are harder, victims die, the monsters seem faster, bigger; the bodies make you ill and the salt container is empty because that was his job, the music has stupid lyrics that segue into your thoughts. The car is too quiet and the knives were never really your thing. The voice is too sharp, too short, almost unfamiliar. You buy too many bullets for one person, and the witnesses clam up with out a puppy dog smile. There's always an empty bed next to yours.

Two months later whiskey's still a heated burn that fills the space of your stomach, wood is still splintered beneath your empty palms, and bartenders still smile at you sweet and warm and obvious, no secrets. Nothing's changed. You're carrying on.

There are two guys a little further down the bar, just inside each other's space and easy with it, laughing, faces lit up. Brothers, you think, studying them, eyes searching as the taller one ruffles the other's hair, and the shorter punches him in the shoulder in reply, grinning. Brothers, you think, and toss back the sour taste in your mouth, alcohol twining your brain into knots of half deadened consciousness. You slam the shot glass back down on the bar, throw down a couple of bills and leave.

The air outside isn't cold enough to clear your head.

Things crop up in papers that make you laugh – a water skiing budgerigar in Britain, a comic strip, dumb police conclusions on a case; you turn to the spot next to you to share, but it's unfilled, and you turn back again, numb.

It catches you in these moments, before you manage to beat it back – it gets easier every time to amputate yourself. But when you look for back up there's no bird's nest of brown, when you get injured there's no reassuring white smile, when you get frustrated there's no stick thin body that stretches over your head to bring back down to the ground. When you're cleaning your tools there's no rough voice to ask if you're doing it right, when you stumble there's no wide hand on your arm to pull you up, when you buy food your don't have to remember three separate orders. It makes you falter, makes you stutter for a second.

You lost two people when one left.

Preseries. Dean pov. Sam. John.

Song Inspired By: Adia by Sarah McLachlan.