SPN/BDS: Walking a Line (1/2).
Title: Walking a Line.
Author: Jess.
Rating: R.
Fandom: Supernatural/The Boondock Saints.
Pairing(s): Connor/Murphy.
Notes: I don’t know what to say about this fic. What I thought would be maybe a little over 10, 000 words turned out closer to 15, 000. I’m really proud of this one, and a lot of that is because I actually finished it.
Summary: Sam’s dead. Dean falls.

---

Dean remembers.

The finer points of his memory are missing, the details faded out, like blackout curtains have been drawn in his head, to protect him from what he might see.

He’s still left with a strong black and white image of Sam’s body, dead before it hit the ground. Sam had fairly glowed against the dark paving stones on the alleyway floor, his skin pale from blood loss. That wasn’t the last time he’d seen Sam, there had been hospitals rooms and the ambulance, but it’s the last image of Sam that’s clear in his mind.

He acknowledges that forgetting so many details might be unhealthy, but he’s not in a hurry for the forgetting to stop. He helps it along with a lot of beer, and when that’s not quick enough, bourbon.

He remembers he and Sam were trailing something that took fingers as trophies, or food, or something. They’d followed the trail through a few states before they’d finally seen a van burn rubber out of Boston, leaving a dead prostitute in its wake, her middle finger missing.

Dean remembers arguing over wether this was Their Kind of Job anymore, Sam saying that sometimes even demons drove trucks. He remembers that as the last time he’d laughed, because they were here and Dad was somewhere out there, chasing after the demon that’s last attempt on them had come to absolutely nothing in the end. Except the car. He missed his car.

They crossed borders and slept in the car. He thought they had lost the van. He and Sam had stopped for some real rest in a flat, almost-city, with dry grass and tourist trap written all over it. But as they pulled up to the curb, Dean’s eyes widened and Sam recognized the plates.

Then Dean remembers chasing the man from the van down a dark back alleyway, Sam following. He remembers the man turning, dark curly hair, and dark eyes, holding a gun. Human. He remembers turning even as he heard the man fire his shot, seeing him look past Dean. Seeing Sam fall, turning back and firing his own gun at the man. Giving chase.

He remembers coming back for Sam, only Sam had no pulse and wouldn’t come back no matter how much Dean breathed for him or how hard he beat Sam’s heart. How much Dean thought it should have been me, take me instead.

There was blood. It was a chest wound, a wheezing sound coming from the hole even as blood bubbled out through Dean’s fingers, and Sam’s hand, where there was more blood and torn pieces so ruined Dean couldn’t confirm his first guess of a missing finger. Maybe it was a stray bullet. He’d only been gone a minute.

He doesn’t remember calling the ambulance anymore, but he knows he did.

He remembers calling his dad, but he has absolutely no idea what he said. He does remember his dad saying he wouldn’t be coming to see Sam’s body, because he was getting closer to the trail again. He remembers Dad telling him to make sure Sam was cremated. Dean doesn’t remember thinking at that moment that he’d just lost something else almost as important as Sam right then. Dad’s voice was broken and hollow and it fell over Dean like a wave of freezing water, spilling over him, no room for anything else in his mind but grief for Sam.

He stops himself, because what comes next really hurts.

Dean remembers, because he can’t, won’t ever, ever forget having his brother cremated and holding the ashes in his hands. A solid, curving jar of ashes that meant Sam was really, truly gone.

---

Dean takes another shot of bourbon. The bar around him is slowing down for the night, patrons weaving their way loudly around his table towards the door. The bar’s called The Olde something-or-other, but inside it looks nothing but gimmicky, cheap and smoke stained.

Lights in the emptied parts of the bar begin winking out, a bar maid flicking switches every time an area empties, obviously itching to get home.

Two in the morning is a reasonable closing time, Dean thinks, trying to bring the clock above the bar into focus by squinting. He slumps forward, nearly resting his forehead on his arms. It’s hard enough holding up his head right now, he’ll get his legs working when he absolutely has to go.

Except that seems like pretty much now, because the big guys in the all black bouncer uniforms are making their lumbering way over. Dean glances at them, then back at his bourbon, thinking of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park and the cups of water. He thinks Sam would.

Have.

Ah, fuck.

Dean’s head sways, always the opposite direction to the room’s own impossible movement, and the spinning is worse when he attempts to wave the bouncers away towards the last couple of groups of people beyond him, giving himself some time to get it together.

Big bouncer and his equally large friend stop at Dean’s table anyway.

“Closing time. Get up.” The guy speaking is bald on his head, but sports a well groomed beard.

“Go’n do them guys first, I’m finishing my drink.” Dean clinks the ice around in his glass. There’s no bourbon left in it, and he’s got his feet under him now, but he’s not really feeling like taking orders.

Dean wipes his face on the sleeve of his jacket, leaving a damp trail on the leather. He assumes he’d have noticed if he was crying, dismissing his stinging eyes as smoke irritation.

The non-bearded bouncer says something which Dean misses entirely, though he notes the guy’s mouth moving. Dean smirks at him, all obnoxious fake whatever-you-say-man, sips melted ice from his glass, and doesn’t move.

Apparently that was not the answer non-bearded bouncer was looking for, and Dean ends up on his ass, nose bleeding. He doesn’t get a second to think before his arm is wrenched behind his back in a badly executed police hold. He could normally break the hold but the punch has made his head feel even worse and added to the spinning.

Dean spits insults in English, Latin and several languages he’s only ever bothered to remember the key phrases in (swearing, hunting related bits-- the swearing because Sammy had loved that shit, when Dean taught him to say everything they weren’t allowed to in English). He’s not sure he forms coherent sentences, but he’s sure as fuck sounding pissed off as he’s hauled towards the doors.

He clumsily tries to kick backwards, to hopefully catch the bouncer in the shins, and he’s actually a little shocked when his boot heel connects hard, and drags down the guy’s leg. The bouncer doesn’t let go immediately, but a second later Dean hears a thud-crunch that makes him duck, makes him realise his arm is free, and the bouncer that was holding him is lying at his feet.

A dark-haired guy wearing a black shirt, blue jeans and a crucifix smiles at Dean, apparently his rescuer. The guy has amused, dangerous eyes. He gestures to the door. Dean turns to find that the last couple of guys in the bar besides him have decided to lend a helping hand.

Dean hears what sounds like Latin, “te futueo et caballum tuum*”, and glass smashing as he skids out onto the pavement with the dark-haired guy at his elbow.

---

Their names are Connor and Murphy, they’re Irish, they speak Latin better than Dean and he has absolutely no idea why they helped him.

Currently they’re having the great pleasure of listening to Dean empty his stomach of burning bourbon and acid all over the road. Dean hears them discussing something, likely him, in what sounds like Russian, what the fuck.

And yeah, Dean thinks, what the fuck ever, they’ll be rid of him as soon as he finishes leaving his internal organs on the street and finds his car.

Dean’s eyes water, his face burns and he hopes he hasn’t actually burst a blood vessel puking-- it feels that way by the time he’s able to get his face out of the gutter.

He shoves his hand in the wrong pocket three times before he gets his keys, accidentally wipes something slimy on his face, trying to get the stinging in his eyes to stop, gags again. Dean thinks about how far he can be away from this place by dawn and it doesn’t seem like far enough when he thinks of the bloodstained street just like this one, maybe not that far away from here. Sam’s blood all over the ground, and all over Dean’s hands.

Connor and Murphy are looking at him now. They’re wearing the same jeans, black t-shirt outfit, standing with their shoulders together, a united front. Like twins or something. Dean shakes his head a little to clear it. It just hurts instead, like his brain is a little loose inside his skull.

“So, you looking to drive home?” the light one, Connor, asks.

“Nah,” Dean lies with a smile. “Thanks for the help back there. See ya.” Dean steps very slowly and steadily off the gutter. The car was that way. Probably. He’d find it.

He just really has to get out of the city right now.

“Dean!” Murphy calls.

Dean doesn’t so much remember giving them his name, but he knows theirs so that makes sense, he guesses.

“Yeah?” Dean turns around in the middle of the road to face them.

“Y’really shouldn’t be driving,” Murphy says, swaying a little drunkenly himself.

“I really appreciate your concern,” Dean says. He winks, thinks, whatever, because he just has to leave now. Right now. When he turns around again he finally spots the piece of shit Ford truck down the road a little, heads for it.

The gutter on the other side of the wide street disagrees with him on how high it really is, and he clips the top with his boot toe on it. The last thing he sees is a blur of sky and a couple of faces hovering over him, voices muffled under increasing amounts of cotton in his ears.

Then there’s nothing.

---

He dreams of Sam, living and smiling. Waking up from that hurts a thousand times worse than his hangover (any hangover). He puked a lot of what he'd drunk last night, but there are some poisons that you can't get rid of, even if they're killing you.

He wakes up remembering wanting to run away and figures out what he’s going to do before he even opens his eyes. He’s not sure that his urge to run last night was purely selfish, and that wasn’t just his love of the road and how being on the move had always felt like home. He thinks maybe he wanted to get away from this place, drive away from the awful realisation that he was going to kill the man who had killed Sam.

Not the demon, monster or spirit.

The man.

It’s less a flash of lightning than a resigned feeling, like something he’s seen coming for miles has finally bumped into him.

Dean rolls over, not too fast, trying to save his head. Also so he doesn’t drop off the back seat of the truck… except it occurs to him that what he’s laying on does not feel like the truck’s back seat at all. He opens his eyes to a high ceiling, flaking white paint and a pleasantly dim light. Takes a deep breath, regrets it at the smell of himself, and gets his shit together before he worries about where he is and why he can’t remember getting here.

So. Dean shuts his mind up, dreams and where-am-I questions and murder and all, takes a breath and shuts them up. Thinks like he’s just taken an order from Dad, where everything gets calm and still as an iced over lake. It’s like a kind of forced meditation, an artificial, learned calm he’s found he can call on.

He rolls over and looks around to see if anything comes back to him. He’s lying on an old single mattress. Bare wooden floorboards cover the three feet of dusty space between his mattress edge and the side of another identical one.

The thin mattress across from his is squashed to the floor by the two men asleep on it, bare to the waist where the cover falls. The dark-haired man’s shoulder and arm have fallen off onto the floor, and the lighter-haired man’s arm rests across the other one’s stomach, mouth open and wet on the first guy’s chest. The sleep of the passed out cold, Dean thinks. He remembers waking up in positions similar, where it’s only comfortable until morning when you realise that arm/necks/legs don’t bend that way.

Okay, Dean thinks. So I’m bunking with a couple of attractive, apparently naked, gay guys, and I don’t remember what happened last night. Not bad.

Really, it could be much worse. He doesn’t think about the time with Sam and the succubus and the head trauma and the yelling from Dad afterwards that that was worse than getting hit in the head in the first place, because to think about that, he’d have to think about Sam.

Dean stands up. This is really more like that time with “Travis,” whose name turned out to be Michael, and who punched Dean with no regard for his hangover, for getting it wrong.

Maybe still a bit drunk, Dean thinks as he stumbles standing up. His head spins a little, and he slaps his hand against the wall for support, his bare feet freezing on the cold floorboards.

“G’morning. You look shite.”

Dean jumps about a foot and turns around.

Dark hair, Irish accent. Barfight. Bingo, yahtzee, what the fuck ever-- he remembers now. And that was a lot of bourbon.

“Morning, Murphy,” Dean says, reasonably sure that’s Murphy and Connor is the one just stirring awake.

“Get the fuck offa me, Murph,” Connor says, and rolls off Murphy.

“’Get the fuck offa me, Murph’,” Murphy mocks, “you were the one on me, ya fuck,” and he takes the pillow that Connor had spurned for his stomach and smothers Connor playfully.

Both men get up to avoid the other’s flailing hands, and they aren’t naked, but wearing matching cotton boxers low on their hips.

“Smoke?” Connor offers Dean, and Dean shakes his head.

“Aye, I’ll have one,” Murphy says. He steals the cigarette from Connor’s hands, then pulls out a chair from the table in the kitchen, pushing it in Dean’s direction. Connor grumbles slightly, but lights Murphy’s smoke for him.

Dean’s stomach flips. His chair scrapes as he stands, pushing is back harshly.

Dean’s mouth was dry and cottony, but begins to water ominously. On top of which his bladder is about to burst, along with his head. The morning cheer is getting to him. The familiarity between Connor and Murphy, their easy synchronicity grab him with razor sharp teeth and shakes him.

“Bathroom, guys?” Dean asks, and walks quickly over the mattresses to the first door he sees, shoving it open a bit.

He recoils and slams the door like he’s just walked in on someone in the shower. Only, instead of a naked, embarrassed person, he’s just walked in on a room with a table full of weapons that rivalled the stash in his shitty new-old Ford truck’s locked tool boxes.

“So…,” Dean starts, turning around very slowly, hand feeling the back of his jeans for the gun that’s no longer there.

Connor walks forward, glances down at Dean’s hands, the one still behind his back.

“You looking for this?” Murphy says.

Dean puts both his hands in front of him.

Dean glances over Connor shoulder to Murphy, who is holding Dean’s M9 Beretta pistol, pointed at the floor. Beyond Murphy is the door. Next to the door are two large crosses, hanging on a hook each, swinging slightly from the breeze under the door.

“Holy shit,” Dean says. “You guys are The Saints from Boston?” Dean’s next thought is to remember the TV saying they were brothers, and he feels all the hair stand up on his arms.

---

“So from last night’s scene with the bouncers we’ve taken it on faith that you’re not with the mob who runs that bar,” Connor says. “What I’m wondering is why you didn’t use this fine piece of metal when they tried to bust your face open.” Connor taps the gun, flat on the table under his hand.

They’re not going to kill Dean. Except maybe if Murphy offers him another beer, because Dean’s empty stomach is rebelling against the first one already, sloshing around ominously.

“Man, I don’t think I could even find that bar again. First place I found that sold alcohol, I pulled in. And I didn’t use the gun because I don’t kill people.” Truth is, though Dean wouldn’t have used it anyway-- he had forgotten he had it on him. It had been Sam’s, a birthday present from Dad, via an old buddy in the Marines, it had ended up Dean’s when Sam left for Stanford. Sam had claimed it back until Dean fished it out of the back of Sam’s jeans, before the ambulance came, while Sam lay cold and bleeding on the concrete.

Connor and Murphy glance at each other.

“You’ve got bad luck, in that case.”

Dean kind of wants to laugh, only not at all. “Seems that way, doesn’t it? You think the bouncers will hold a grudge?”

“I think you’d better think twice before hanging around there again, for the next week at least.” Connor says darkly.

That doesn’t answer Dean’s question, but it does tell him a lot.

“Say no more, huh?” Dean says, with a small smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “So, I’ll be going, then. Thanks for the beer.” Dean hopes that that’ll be it and this can just go down as another strange thing that comes with being a Winchester. News says the Saints never killed anyone without deeming them “evil” first, but that doesn’t really comfort Dean.

“You seemed in some kind of hurry last night,” Murphy says. He spins his empty beer bottle on the table.

“I was blind last night,” Dean says. It’s not an answer.

Connor picks the gun up off the table. There’s a beat in time where Dean’s heart plummets out of his chest. Connor just hands him the gun, butt first. He wonders if it’s relief he tastes like ashes and puke on his tongue.

“Can we trust you, Dean?” Murphy says, and both men fix him with thousand yard stares that send the hairs on his arms up again.

“Yeah,” Dean says quietly, “I’ve already forgotten I was here.”

“We won’t see you back at the bar this week, then,” Connor says.

“I’m not in a hurry to relive puking up my guts and passing out in the gutter,” Dean says, “I can’t always rely on the kindness of strangers.” Dean turns his head, with his hand on the doorknob, and bats his lashes with a smirk.

Murphy tosses him his keys, laughing, suddenly, and Connor’s smiling too, just like they’d neither of them had so much as a sinful thought in their lives.

Dean opens the door, stepping out into the bright sunlight that screams life-goes-on right into Dean’s ear with the chirping of birds and passing chatter from cars.

Dean takes his sunglasses out of the pocket of his jacket and puts them on.

Now he just has to find his way back to where his truck was parked.

---

It’s midday when he gets to the truck.

For a truck Dean picked up in a junkyard, the Ford looks pretty decent. The engine’s in need of some serious loving care, and a good kicking every little while, but it crashes along okay. Dean climbs into its shady heat, breathing in the fading scent of Sam, faint under the smell of his own sweat.

Dean’s hands shake when they hold Sam’s gun. It might be adrenaline from Connor and Murphy looking at him as they decided whether he was a good man or whatever, the look that boiled down to two known killers holding Dean’s life in their hands. Dean thought it might have also been the image of Connor and Murphy, asleep curled together like they were one person, breathing together.

But Dean thinks of the man that killed Sam outrunning him, only this time, in his mind’s eye, he shoot the man’s legs out and catches up and there’s so much more blood and screaming after that. Broken bones and cries Dean listened to, unmoved in his imagination, drawing out the inevitable, making the man suffer. Dean’s hands shake harder when he doesn’t want to spit in revulsion at his own urge for revenge. All he wants was to get his shaking hands wet with the blood of the man who took Sammy from him.

Dean rings his Dad at one p.m.. John growls hello on the second ring, and Dean floods with relief, because the only time John answers so quickly is when he’s worried. He doesn’t call to check up even now, in the last week Dean has almost been surprised not to hear from John. Almost.

“Dean,” John says.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Are you all right?” John asks.

There’s a long pause where neither of them says anything, Dean not knowing how he could answer that, and assuming John realised the question is so ridiculously wrong right now Dean could almost laugh. With his father’s voice in his ear, tension and adrenaline roll slowly out of Dean, and he feels his tiredness for the first time in a week. The Pavlovian effect of his father’s voice irritates Dean like it never has before. Dean bites his tongue on an angry question about what John was doing that was so fucking important he’s left Dean alone.

And then he remembers the Demon and the mission, which he hasn’t thought about for an entire alcohol-soaked week. The image of John driving at night, through sleep deprivation and hail and borders comes to him.

“No. I’m not okay, Dad. Are you?” Dean says. The growling anger in his voice surprises him. He’s not asking about Sam.

He thinks that maybe for the first time he gets his father and it’s more than he ever really wanted to know.

He glares at the dark blood-splattered place in his mind where the thought of avenging Sam is more important than anything at all, including his own life, and sees the selfishness in that mirrored in his father. Dean doesn’t like what he sees. He hates it and he hates it in himself, the fire that denies him Dad and denied his father the funeral of his youngest son.

“I love you Dad,” Dean says. It feels final. He’s not surprised to notice himself crying, because it hurts. A lot of things hurt right now, and Sam’s not here to help. No one is.

He throws his phone so hard at the windscreen it bounces off in pieces.

If this is how his father has felt for over twenty years, Dean wonders how he hasn’t broken apart, shattered under the sheer weight of it all.

---

Like any hunt, having the trail as hot as possible when you hit it can only be a good thing. Sam died a week ago. It’s lukewarm at best. If the guy that killed Sam followed the pattern he set when they’d been following him, he’ll be out of town already.

Dean has to try.

Dean’s advantage is that he doesn’t need to research what he was after. There’s no painstaking process of eliminating possible demons, monsters and spirits, then finding out how to exorcise or kill whatever the thing turns out to be. Dean had seen the man’s eyes, seen the humanity there. The list of things that could kill a man was far longer than the list that can kill, say, a werewolf.

Once Dean starts thinking about it, he wonders how any of them had survived this long at all.

He disassembles and puts back together Sam’s Beretta, loads it, slaps the clip in hard. The snap of it is loud and sudden in the truck cab. Dean likes the sound. The empty air takes it, invisible and irrevocable, paralleling Dean’s plans.

Starting from the hottest point in the trail means going back to the alley where Sam was killed.

In the light of day he realises how close the truck is parked to the bar he’d been at last night. A few glances around and he realises how close the bar was to the alleyway. He wonders if subconsciously he’d known he was going to do this last night.

---

Dean steps over the broken police tape into the alleyway. He’s thankful again for the police quickly swallowing the “robbery gone wrong” story Dean spat out at the hospital, the first thing to get through his shock-numb brain. The police officer questioned him only superficially-- Dean supposes his grief was convincing enough to remove any suspicion from him. The case will still be open, Dean’s vague descriptions of the “thief” who shot Sam in the botched robbery not helping, but the alley is deserted, the police having taken whatever they need.

A few steps down there are some trashcans, and beyond that lies the bloodstained concrete he doesn’t want to look at. His eyes scan the ground as he walks, and he traces the edges of the blood, his gaze deliberately unfocused. His stomach flips when he finally forces himself to look. He has to. He can’t afford to miss anything.

There’s nothing but some tiny, flaking, dried brown stains that could really be anything at all on the dirty alley floor. It must have been hosed. Dean’s sure there was more blood.

Dean snaps his eyes away. He blows out a hard breath, unaware he’s been holding it.

Nothing.

Dean hadn’t made it past the end of the alley before he’d come back for Sam. He closes his eyes for a second, remembering more. The guy ran, his dark curly hair bouncing, down and out the end of the alley, turning right.

Dean follows the memory.

He comes out the end of the alleyway. Glances left, nothing stands out, nothing immediately to the right either.

It’s a thin one way street, the far side lined with an old rusting sheet metal fence. The backs of the two story buildings that make the alley walls make up the other side of the street. There are a few cars parked up on the curb, tilted trying to save room but still nearly blocking the street completely.

Dean walks the wrong way down the street. There are back doors to the businesses on the street, most of them closed and quiet. Cigarette butts litter most doorways, Dean easily pictures employees out smoking on breaks. Nothing out of place.

The end of street is visible from where Dean stands, but there might be another alley that turns off or something. Anything. Dean suddenly thinks of the coven of white witches in Texas he and his Dad helped out with their demon stalker problems, and wonders if they’d do him a return favour. The problems with that idea start with how he hasn’t got anything of the killer to give them to scry with. All the more reason to keep going here. The guy might have dropped something. Anything. A hair. His name, address and favourite hang outs all typed up neatly.

Dean realises he has almost walked right into the dead end fence, and boots a stray beer bottle so hard it flies into the metal, making a resounding bang as it disappears through a loose sheet of tin.

Dean stops himself from humming under his breath, pleased for a moment, but he’s made enough noise already. He ducks through the metal into… another one-way backstreet exactly like the one he was just in. The street is littered with bottles overflowing from a dumpster, and a few trash cans full of cans and bottles site along a wall. Must be a bar or restaurant’s back door. Behind the dumpster there’s a van parked. Dean’s heart speeds up.

Same colour, model, make… and the same licence plate. Dean’s heart thumps painfully hard.

The back door of the building is wide open. Dean’s hand is automatically at his back, touching the butt of his gun as he peers around the van into the dark doorway.

“Too easy,” Dean mutters out loud. He immediately wishes he could take it back. It’s something like saying “it couldn’t possibly get any worse”.

There’s a voice in his head that says walking straight in that door with no idea what he’ll find is an immensely stupid idea. The voice sounds like Sam. Dean quashes it ruthlessly. Sam isn’t here. So fuck it, the worst that could happen already had.

Then Dean hears a single gunshot, coming from somewhere on the second floor of the building, and he’s running inside through the dark hallway and up wooden stairs.

---

The door at the top of the stairs is standing wide open into a brightly lit room. Dean notices the light streaming through the ceiling-high windows first, the contrast of the cold sunlight against the rest of the room is sickly fascinating for a moment.

Dean stands in the doorway, silently watching Connor and Murphy move like they’re choreographed, intimately aware of each other’s next move, and the moves of the last remaining living men in the room. The brothers work silently amid the carnage, their only noise what the silencers on their guns don’t mask. Savage grace in the line of an arm to the trigger finger, pulled back slowly, a bullet from each man’s gun, fired at the same time, ending the other men in the room.

A long wooden desk has a man in a suit slumped over it, no visible blood. A few arm chairs facing the desk make for a cobbled together office setting, a few men sitting slumped in them, some lying on the floor, weapons strewn around, one man still grasping his gun in his dead hand. The last to die slides down a wall, leaving blood behind him, and some trailing down his chin.

Grace in the lines a hand draws, signing the cross. Pennies placed on the eyes of the dead.

There’s a noise that starts Connor and Murphy both from their respective ministrations.

A man gurgles up blood, and tries to stand, gun in hand. Murphy shoves him lightly, avoiding the swing of his gun arm. The man’s eyes are glazed and empty. Connor throws Murphy a pillow from a chair. There’s more grace in Murphy’s kneeling, head bent without prayer, to place the pillow on the dying man’s head, smothering his rolling eyes and gurgling mouth and further muffling the shot to the head with his silenced gun.

Dean’s fascinated eyes watch the life being taken by Murphy without as much pity as he would have expected, instead there’s a part of him that takes it all in for reference. He could do that to the guy who killed Sam. There’s more nausea at the blood than he expected, considering some of the things he’s seen monsters do with human bodies. It occurs to him that one of the men in this room might even be the guy that killed Sam, if the van that was parked out the back of the building led him right. Dean’s stomach drops.

He’s snapped out of his thoughts by the gun barrel blocking his vision of Murphy kneeling over the body. Dean’s gun is out and pointing back at Connor, faster than he can think, on auto pilot.

“I thought we communicated fairly fuckin’ well this morning,” Connor says.

And Dean finally clicks, wants to kick himself, because he’s walked into the back door of the bar he wasn’t supposed to be visiting this week.

He mutters his own idiocy under his breath before he looks up into Connor’s dangerously calm eyes. Dean lets his gun swing down on the trigger guard, lets it drop.

“… I did tell you I couldn’t find my way back to this bar if I tried.” Dean feels the side of his mouth lift in a humourless smile. It’s true. He hadn’t been trying.

“You’ve got about thirty seconds to think of something to say that makes more sense than that or we’re assuming your sorry arse is one of theirs,” Connor says. Murphy’s torso appears in front of Dean’s eyes, and Dean wishes he was at the top of the stairs to be level with them both.

“Won’t take me thirty seconds.”

Silence and a gun so close his eyes blur looking at the silencer. Perfectly steady. Dean’s bullshit smile comes out to shine.

---

Dean tells them about the van he’s been tracking, the murders and the missing fingers, and a five second explanation that he’d thought he’d been hunting a creature of the supernatural kind and not a human being. Until recently. The supernatural part was bound to get the lion’s share of follow-up questions (or laughs), if the few other time’s he’d tried honesty with people could be trusted.

He doesn’t mention Sam at all.

“We—I hunt. Spirits, monsters, demons, normally. Evil,” Dean finishes. “It’s what I do. I didn’t even know what building this was until I was in here after the shots.”

He waits for the laughs, and he gets them, but they’re not the same laughs. There’s no nervousness, no pause where they realise he’s not laughing with them. Just a short laugh from them both, then silence where Murphy and Connor look at each other. (This was nothing like telling Cassie, Dean suddenly thinks).

Silent communication Dean remembers so well over, Connor says. “Well I guess we’re almost in the same business then.”

Murphy says, “Sounds like it.”

“Your man in this room, Dean?” Connor says. Dean look briefly at the bodies, hesitating for a second before nudging the pillow off the last man to die’s ruined face. He doesn’t know how he can be so completely sure from the glimpses of the man he saw, but he is.

“No,” Dean says. He’s not sure if the feeling rolling his stomach is disappointment.

“There was one that ran out when we came. Didn’t bother to stop him, just another mob rat that’ll be heading right where we want him shortly. He was maybe the one you’re looking for.” Connor says.

Dean swears.

The van, the fucking van, he thinks over and over again until he skids out down the stairs and out the door to find the back street empty.

Connor and Murphy follow him. Murphy raises and eyebrow. Dean realises he’s just suddenly bolted from the men holding loaded and ready guns on him. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s going to do now.

“Liquor,” Murphy says.

“What?” Dean says, confused.

“What we’re going to do.”

Dean hadn’t realised he’d said that out loud.

“I’ve got no cash,” is all Dean can think of to say.

Connor and Murphy laugh.

“For the worst fucking luck I’ve heard of this week, you get all the free shots you can take, courtesy of the Olde Freeburg St Bar, and the unfortunately deceased owner and drug dealing fuckbag, Mr. Kenny Stout.”

Dean can’t argue with that. Silencing his screaming mind sounds better than anything right now. On top of the offer of free booze, he needs them now, to find out where the killer ran to.

The sirens are audible flying past Connor and Murphy’s apartment, ten minutes after they’ve cleaned out half the bar, leaving nothing but glove-covered finger smudges and dead mobsters for the police to find.

---

The follow up questions go:

“So you exorcise demons?” Murphy says.

“Less exorcise, more kill, and not just demons,” Dean says. “Other things—“

“Evil.” Connor says. What should be a question sounds like a statement.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “I have to say, you guys have taken this a lot better than most people I tell,” Dean’s tone of voice won’t settle that into a compliment, no matter how hard he tries. “People usually have evidence in the form of something trying to kill them to back up my story, and even then, most times there’s the hysterics and the slapping and so on.”

“Simply fuckin’ put, you kill evil, right?”

“Yeah,” Dean says again, going with the flow. He takes a shot of Wild Turkey from a tumbler. There’s no ice. He finds the warm swallow sickening and soothing at once.

“So evil exists, Dean. We’ve seen it. We see it every day in the streets and on the news. Rape, murder, drugs, fucking copious amounts of lesser evils,” Connor says. “Light exists, dark exists. God exists, evil exists, so demon’s exist. It’s not motherfucking rocket science.”

There’s a pause in which Dean can think of nothing to say, so he drains his glass and fills it again.

“What does that make you guys then? Should I call you Jake and Elwood?” Man, Dean cracks himself up sometimes. He thumps the sticky tables until he gets his breath back, wheezing. “You know, on a mission from God?”

“Balance,” Murphy says, smiling. “Us and you.”

“Balance,” Dean says, tasting the word. Connor and Murphy nod like there’s nothing else to say, so Dean leaves it at that.

Evil men exist. Human’s can, and do, do things as bad as, and in context worse-- with their capacity for choice-- than any supernatural force.

Why shouldn’t good men stop them? Balance. Dean likes it.

With that thought Dean raises his glass all three glasses slopping room temperature wetness on fingers, dripping on the table, as they clink together. Dean suddenly feels a closeness to Connor and Murphy, that spreads with the burst of bourbon warmth in his chest, and it feel like something his Dad had talked about a lot, when he had bourbon in him too. War bonds. It feels like it, torn as some of those bonds are.

He downs the entire glass in two swallows and lets it cauterize the ragged ends inside where Sam’s presence used to be.

---

Dean leaps past pleasant buzz, and falls smack bam into absolutely shattered so fast his head spins. A lot.

“We’re like pounds and dollars, us and you Dean,” Murphy says.

“What? Seriously, what? Are you speaking Russian again?” Dean says, raising his eyebrows and gesturing with his glass.

“No, really, we stand for the same thing, but we work a little differently.”

“That’s fucking terrible,” Dean says. He keeps a straight face for about half a second, until Connor looks at Dean and mimes shooting himself in the head, trying to keep from laughing himself.

“Nasdrovya,**” Murphy says, clinking his glass against Dean’s. “Russian. Sounds like Polish. But it’s not.”

Murphy has been trying to teach Dean “cheers” in every language he knows, and a few he doesn’t know anything but the choice bits of. Dean doesn’t really remember any of them so far, but there’s been a lot of them, and every one’s accompanied by a drink, so he’s not really surprised his memory is having trouble. For the last five drinks it’s been hilarious, Murphy making his thinking face, and Connor paying Murphy out every time he pronounces something slightly off, even if it’s only because Murphy’s slurring his words now.

“What about ‘salud’?” Connor asks.

Murphy scowls. “Ah, shut the fuck up man, I was getting to that. You’re wasting them not having your drink poured, idiot.” There’s no heat in it at all, and Connor laughs.

“Salud, salud, salud, salud!” Connor chants, “I’ll fuckin’ waste it if I want.”

Murphy is conspicuously silent. When Dean looks up, he can just tell Murphy is about to do something to Connor-- it’s a brotherly instinct-- Dean can just tell Connor gets up and walks to the threadbare, two-seater couch as if he’s oblivious to his brother’s plotting, but he exchanges a sideways wink with Dean.

Murphy goes to tackle Connor to off his seat, but Dean smiles widely and sticks his foot out. Murphy doesn’t even see it coming, stumbling into the couch arm and falling forward to land half on Connor, head in his lap.

There’s a moment where Murphy turns a little, blinks drunkenly up at Connor, his expression so confused it pulls another laugh from Dean. Time drags on and Murphy positions himself more comfortably, feet half off and over the end of the couch, but his head never leaves Connor’s lap.

Connor strokes Murphy’s hair a few times, tugging fingers through it, a simple petting that seems to come so naturally. Dean watches, feeling the silence in the room like it’s a fourth person, staring at the back of his head. Dean’s gut flips, heat curls down his abdomen. It makes his dick twitch, and Dean thinks in a drunken calm voice that’s like the eye of the storm, that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from them if he tried. He thinks of them fucking, Connor and Murphy, seriously wonders if they are. Thinks of big hands, and touch so familiar it’s like losing a limb not to have it there, a touch that knows all weaknesses and strengths.

Connor pushes Murphy off his lap, and Murphy lands with an ‘oof’ on the floor.

“You cunt,” Murphy says, pointing at Connor. He opens his mouth, shuts it, shakes his head. “You cunt,” he repeats more slowly, and apparently that’s the entirety of his point. It sounds more like “ya coont” when Murphy says it, and it’s like the word turns into a term of endearment and a chastisement all at once.

Dean shakes his head, but he doesn’t laugh again.

Dean realises he’s standing now, hovering in the open double doorway between the kitchen and the lounge. He slides down the kitchen wall, faces them through the doorway. Not sure he can move, even if he wanted to get to the mattress or somewhere more comfortable than the floor.

“Saw you guys on the news, you know,” Dean says, to break the silence again. He’s told them, but it’s something to get the noise flowing again in the room, shutting his head up. “While back. Those sketches were really, really shit.”

“Yeah,” Connor says, “Friends in high places.”

Dean thinks about it. “I suppose it was lucky.”

“No luck about it,” Murphy says. “Kept our faces off the TV for a long time.”

“Well,” Connor says, “until some dumbfuck sold the security tapes of Yakavetta’s trial.”

“Fuckin’ fiasco,” Murphy says to the roof, still on his back on the floor. “We were practically fucking clear, and then bam, had to drop off the face of the earth for a while there.”

And Dean remembers something, listening to them talk, thinking of what he’d heard about them on the news. The sketches.

“What happened to the other guy with you?” Dean says. It’s out of his mouth while his brain is still processing. The vague image of an older man, bearded, scary and… kinda like Connor and Murphy. Right age to be their—

“Our Da,” Murphy says.

He’s dead, is Dean’s first thought. His heart pumps sympathy, and circulates a strange jealousy around his chest, a thought that they have each other at least, that he wants to take back as soon as it comes. Connor and Murphy glance at each other, sharing a silent language Dean knows so well.

“We’ve split up for a while,” Connor finally says, his eyes dark with some past hurt, and anger. But he’s not dead-- Dean believes them. “It was easier this way, after the tapes came out. They didn’t have anything on us but the grainy surveillance pictures and sketches, but they had him. Record, pictures, name, date of fucking birth.

Don’t even know where he--” Connor stops.

“Easier to find as three than two,” Murphy says. He still stares at the ceiling, but shrugs his shoulders on the floor. “We’ll find him again when it’s cool enough.”

“Be even harder to find one than two,” Dean says. Then just shakes his head and looks at the floor. He looks up to Connor and Murphy exchanging a look that says what Dean was thinking it might. Wasn’t even worth a reply, and they all knew it.

“You got a family, Dean?” Murphy asks. One of Murphy’s hands is busy untying Connor’s boot laces. Connor notices and kicks at Murphy’s hand, and they both move back to the kitchen, sitting on the chairs, not quite so tall Dean has to strain his neck to look at them from the floor, but close.

Dean laughs, but it doesn’t come out right. “Mom, Dad and baby brother,” Dean says, and his eyes sting. “Mom’s dead.”

“Ours too,” Connor says.

“Fire,” Dean says. “I was four.”

“Don’t know how exactly,” Connor says. “Was last year.”

“Where’s your brother now?” Murphy asks with a look on his face that makes Dean’s heart tear and burn like a pulled muscle.

There’s a silent moment.

“Dean, if you hunt demons, why do you want to kill this guy so fucking bad? You know he’s a human being,” Murphy says. “We could just—“

“I’m going to bed,” Dean says. He stands so abruptly his head spins, and he catches himself on the wall. His voice rings overloud in his ears. He winces. “I’m… gonna go to bed,” Dean says again, consciously lowering his voice. It’s all he can do, unable to think of anything to say he wants to, or can say without it hurting even more. He doesn’t think his mumbled “I don’t want to talk about it,” is understandable or loud enough to hear, and Dean’s glad because it’s such bullshit.

It’s all such utter motherfucking bullshit and Dean feels like such a fucking idiot, and he doesn’t know what to do about anything because the world’s been turned upside down for a week and everything is all wrong without Sam here. Despite Connor and Murphy in the next room Dean is so alone now in a world that’s like a shaken snow globe left turned upside down, so everything settles crazily, confusing and wrong.

Dean goes to bed on the mattress across from Connor and Murphy’s. He resists the urge to punch the wall by literally falling onto bed. The mattress isn’t so thick it spares his knees the hard floor. His alcohol-numbed body is a blessing and a curse. The pressure he’s feeling inside pushes at him. The hate burns his mind. He has to find the guy who killed Sam. Now he’s got help, maybe, and he’s thankful for that when he forces his mind to think about it. Connor and Murphy don’t come in while he’s still awake, and he’s thankful for that too. Dean pushes his fingernails into his palms to stop himself crying out in pain, trying the physical in an effort to overrule the emotional. The pain override instinct in the brain directs the human body to feel only the worst wound when there’s more than one. Blood seeps out of his clenched hands, and Dean feels nothing from them at all.

---

Part two.